April 14, 2017 • 48 mins
Manhattan is home to some of the world's most iconic buildings -- but it's also home to something more mysterious: A looming, windowless skyscraper in the heart of Tribeca. The press doesn't have much to say about it, and neither does the telecom that owns the building. So what exactly is going on inside? Tune in as Ben, Matt and Noel explore bizarre buildings and the future of surveillance in this episode, recorded live in Brooklyn during NYCPodfest.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and you can turn back now
or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
(00:23):
Welcome back to the show. Everyone. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you.
We are in Brooklyn, which means this is stuff they
don't want you to know. Live. So we found our
way to Brooklyn through a bit of a nightmarish travel scenario.
We live in Atlanta and there's a big giant travel
(00:44):
hub there in the form of Jackson Hartsfield International Airport.
And you may know that there have been some weather
concerns that have caused just this like domino effect of
flight cancelation. So we spent about eighteen hours in the
airport and we we posted it. We we've explored. That
place is from t g I Fridays to Gordon Biersch,
and we made some friends along the way and then
(01:05):
finally got here about three am. We were a little
punchy in our hotel looks a lot like a David
Lynch movie. It's called the Hotel. And when we walked
into that place, completely sleep deprived and weird, it was.
It was a thing. It was an experience. It's not ironic.
The entire hotel is lit with blue lights. Uh. And
(01:25):
that t G A. Friday's was also lit apparently at
ten am. It was super lit. It was crazy. We
heard from a friend. A lot of people are stranded there. Still.
We hope we make it back. Yeah. But so Atlanta
is known for the airport. It's also known for really
bad traffic. Yeah. Yeah, so we actually are coming from
a city that it is in the midst of an
(01:46):
emerging conspiracy theory. You may have heard in the news recently.
There's an interstate they're called i AD five. It's sort
of one of the arteries of the heart of the city,
and part of it collapsed just a few days ago. Yeah.
It's one of the only two ways that you could
get it into Atlanta, and it's just dead. Yeah. So
(02:06):
everybody's using all these back roads. But the big conspiracy
is how could something like that happen? How? I mean
the government line right is, Uh, there was some dudes
smoking some drugs down there, and obviously quite vigorously because
they seem to have managed to set fire to a
giant stockpile of PVC that was being stored underneath the
overpast by the Georgia Department of Transportation. Well, to be fair,
(02:29):
I don't think any of us have done hard drugs
under a bridge, but we did meet after speak for yourself. Okay,
whoa learning so much about you guys, But yeah, I
mean on my way to the airport. In fact, my
uber driver was like, yeah, that definitely didn't happen. There's
no way. He's like, it was the government. It was
the government. And I'll tell you why it was the government,
(02:49):
because we in Atlanta, you guys are blessed here with
a fantastic public transit system and gets you here there
and yawn, wonderful. No, well, okay, comparatively comparatively magical. In Atlanta,
ours is like in the shape of a T and
it'll get you to like like two neighborhoods in the
whole city and then you know it's it's driving the
(03:10):
rest of the way. But the theory is as at
least as far as the superdriver was concerned, that the
government blew up the bridge to increase ridership on Marta.
If you know what I like about that plan is
how straightforward it is. It's no frills. That is a
no frills conspiracy. I mean, you know, it's this ruby
you got. You can remember that board game mouse Trap,
(03:30):
you guys, it's like on the level of mouse Trap.
That was the game that I like, I never actually
understood the rules of or how you want. I just
kind of like to mess around with it and do
the thing. Yeah, but I don't know if anybody's actually
played mouse Trap all the way through? Where are you? Yeah?
I didn't think so. No, no one does it. But
this got us thinking about infrastructure and how important it
(03:52):
is and how often it's ignored. And we know that
infrastructure is a problem in the US overall. And when
we think about cities, what we realize is cities are
like a massive agglomeration of concrete, metal and asphalt, but
there almost like a living organism. You know. We've got water,
(04:12):
we have electricity, we have sewage systems, communication networks and
ways to pass all of that to people and two businesses.
And the thing is, let's be honest, everybody wants to
benefit from these structures. We like power, we like clean water,
but not many people want it in their neighborhood. Nimby, Nimby, Yeah, yeah,
(04:36):
I'm the resident acronym junkie of of of our crew,
and we're gonna have a lot more fun acronyms for
you as the show progressive. But the first one is
Nimby not in my backyard. So the infrastructure of cities
keeps them alive. But this sprawling system of systems within
systems isn't always the nicest thing to look at. The
equipment it's it's dangerous, could potentially be considered an eyesore.
(04:58):
You know, you don't want it right out the open,
so you know, people can blow it up by smoking
drugs um and you know, so this is why we
generally build subways instead of super ways or l trains.
I guess Chicago has that and Marta does too. But
in general, you know, you want them away from the public,
like the way they treated uh, the way they treated
children in the Victorian era. You know, just put them
(05:21):
away and then a firm handshake and exchange of surnames
at the age of eighteen. So in some cases it's
necessary to place these things in opportune places in neighborhoods,
right next to where other human beings are trying to exist. Yeah,
and this stuff is peppered throughout major cities, and especially
here in New York, there are buildings that are not
(05:43):
what they see, their facades, their fake buildings, and they're
meant to hide these eye sores from the general public
and from everybody who is not in the know. And recently, uh,
Noel and I went on an expedition with Matt's support
here in New York, and we went across the boroughs
and we tracked down buildings that in some cases didn't
(06:06):
want to be found. To tell me about the first one, yeah,
so the first one, you do. The first one then,
and that was that was your Okay, the first one.
Every I feel like I'm doing stand up now you've
probably heard this one. So the first one is the
Brownstone in Brooklyn. And normally it would look like if
you're just casually passing by, you know, your uber drivers
telling you some conspiracy about the Inner State, and you're like, oh,
(06:28):
there's another sparsely decorated brownstone. I can't afford to live there,
right and uh, and then if you linger, if your
gaze lingers, you notice that it doesn't really have a
door knob, it doesn't really have windows that you can
see into up close. It's a matted black because you see,
(06:50):
this brownstone does not contain a living room or a kitchen,
or a nuclear family with two point five kids, or
you know, like what is the point five? It's like,
don't it's a kid on the way. I've always wondered
that anyone talk to us after all, Right, well, we'll
do fractions. If anybody is good at sociology, please explain
(07:11):
that to us later. The see the city. The Transit
Authority specifically owns this building. And if you can get
through that weird no door knob door, where you will
find will be a set of stairs and an emergency
passageway between the Bowling Green and Borough Hall stations. It
collects it connects to the train tunnels underneath, because that's
(07:32):
where so many transit lines converge and fan out, just
right there in the middle of other people just living.
And that's not the only one that's pretty nocuous one.
Can I do my favorite? Yeah? Yeah, I think this
one's really cool, just for historical reasons. Um. It is
the Strucker Memorial Laboratory, which is on Roosevelt Island, which
I didn't realize but has a fascinating bizarre history unto itself. Um.
(07:55):
It was. It used to be known as Welfare Island
because it was home to many of the city's hospital
institutional buildings and actually the country's first municipal insane asylum,
which was built in the in the nineteenth century. UM.
And we found numerous accounts that suggested this place and
many other places on the island are haunted. You can
I do there we go, There we go. Yeah, it
(08:22):
was pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty convincing. And so actually
I found out a lot of this stuff from the
Bowery Boys who are performing in this festival and the
coming days. I kind of can't remember when their show is,
but they're excellent, and they have an episode all about
the strange horrors of Roosevelt Island. To check that out.
What's what is? What's the deal with Stricker Island? Strucker Labs?
It's not Strucker Island. Oh yeah, it sounds like a
(08:43):
that that what is it? The movie with Leonardo DiCaprio
Shutter Island, Shutters Getting Confused built in eight two, um,
and it's it's a fascinating place, as you all know.
Funny story on that expedition when we when we went
to the southern tip of Roosevelt Island and we had
to walk quite a ways with film equipment and stuff,
(09:04):
and we were turned away at the gate because Kanye
West was holding a secret fashion show. Always does that,
man and I and I was like, I was like,
you know, at that time, I didn't know what his
clothing line looked like. It sort of looks like Star
Wars costumes of people that like they that live in
the desert. Yeah, it's like that's pretty I feel like
(09:25):
somebody wearing one of those costumes may have set fire
to the entirely entirely possible. So not all of these
fake buildings are created equally though, because you may be
familiar in Greenwich, there's this, uh there's this subway event
that also has a memorial on it, but it's not
(09:46):
very well convincing. No. No, it's like this massive concrete
rectangle on its end and this just hung on one
corner of it is this like phony brick facade with
window holes cut out, but the windows just go back
through to the concrete. The already seeing everywhere else. So
it's like, did you just give up? Like yeah, it
(10:08):
was like four thirty five on a Friday, and they said,
all right, people are just gonna be driving by the
last one, the biggest one, the one that I hope
you get a chance to see, is in mont Haven.
It is a con ed station that looks exactly like
a block large condo building and and pretty nice condos
(10:30):
to a lot of people found out about this by
trying to ask how much the rent was there. They
would go up and get busted. We we almost didn't
get there, but luckily, and we promised not to disclose
his name, we ran into a guy who worked for
con D was unhappy with his boss is wanted us
out of his hair and just told us where to go.
(10:52):
And I will say, you know, Matt, no, it looks
like a nice building. But again you see that, you
see the hints right, No door knobs, no uh, no interior,
just a Matt Black wounded by a very intimidating chain
link fence a top kind of a fancy looking brick wall.
But that's and then like surveillance cameras, yeah, which probably
(11:15):
made people think, whoa, these are really nice condos. You know,
it's called a gated community right right. And the one
thing they did have with security a very we weren't
there for maybe more than five minutes, and a very
very polite man. I knew he was polite because he
walked out and his posture was kind of shlubby, and
he was holding a coffee that was clearly from like
(11:35):
his house or something, and he walked in and said,
you know, you guys, you can't film here. I would
hate for something to happen. It was. It was a
It was a very classy threat. It was a very
polite and classy threat. But you can go up there
and check it out, because what it actually is is
a substation, a power substation. And if that is out
(11:57):
in the open and it's not hidden behind some sort
of plausible facade, then property values will go down. And
this kind of stuff is, you know, I think it
open secret for people who live in the neighborhoods. You know.
But we know these things are in some way necessary
because secrecy is a crucial part of so many situations
(12:20):
in our environments, and New York has a lot of secrets.
It doesn't just hide subway exits, doesn't just hide ventilation
shafts or or power plants, as much much larger secrets figuratively, specifically,
and physically in Manhattan, just across the river on that
island that they call Manhattan, deep inside the triangle below
(12:44):
Canal Street. Bring it trying to make this super spooky. No, no,
let's do some like sound design. Okay, there is a
most curious concrete building that has several names, thirty three
Thomas Street, the A, T and T Longlines Building. Oh sorry,
(13:06):
that wasn't a good one, was that? Wait? There are
a couple other names. What was the there's one name
like you got the Eye of Sorrow. That's that was
my joke. Yeah, well you missed its fine now because seriously,
it looks like it looks like it's like like a
castle turret and you can just picture the two tips
of the top just having that I stretching across, just
(13:27):
peering across the skyline of the city, judging your every move. Yeah. Maybe, yeah.
So what this building actually is. Technically, it's called a
carrier hotel, right, and a carrier hotel is also you know,
the fancy name is the co Location Center. So it's
a building where all this data communications information goes to
(13:49):
one place to be stored. And the thing is, it's
common for numerous service providers to share the hotels. So
if you see Verizon in a ten T with their
fake beef and some sort of commercial, don't be fooled.
They're snuggling up together in the building hotel, in the
Carrier hotel. Don't talk about what happens there. Nobody talks
(14:09):
about it. They're like the Vegas of media communication. I
should have thought that joke out better. Okay, So thirty
three Thomas Street was designed back in nineteen seventy four
by an architectural firm called John Carl Vernickey and associates.
Because you know most of them are probably associates and
that German accent is wonderful? Did I actually did? Okay, Well,
(14:32):
don't tell me because it's like you know, when Elmer
Fud walks off a cliff, I can't look down. I
just gotta keep going, all right. Uh So, the uh
the thing is though, that he got a really weird
design request. They wanted him to build a twentieth century fortress.
Even the architectural the architectural drawings had project X on them,
(14:56):
which I personally find like kind of cartoonist no chemical acts.
And the Powerpuff Girls they're like Acne and Willie Wily
Weapon X one day I will get to work on
a Project X and it will be the best day
of my life. I mean, we could change the name
of the show anything. I think they're already Project texas well.
(15:16):
We might have to choose a different letter. But the
craziest thing is they said, we want you to build
a building that can withstand an atomic blast and the
resulting fall out. So a lot of people don't know
what it looks like on the inside, but we can
describe what it looks like on the outside. First. Yeah,
so it's five hundred and fifty feet tall. It has
(15:36):
no windows and instead has exterior walls of pre cast
concrete panels that are clad with these nice little pink
colored granite and um. Yeah, and so the building is
completely dark, meaning that at night it becomes an enormous
shadow in the sky. Yeah, it's gotta it's good. You know,
we're so used to very bright and uh window rich skyscrapers,
(16:01):
and this one is imposing. It's got kind of it's
got some like scary mood lighting going on, and it
looks brutal because it's brutal. Is so brutal, Yeah, brutalist architecture.
Who said that? Who knows that, good job, thank you.
It's just like, looking at it, it is kind of oppressive,
you know, like a lot of those buildings just feel
like they're crushing you with the weight and intensity of
(16:22):
their design. There's not necessarily hugging your eyes. You know.
We do know that it has three blow ground levels,
including a cable vault, but we don't know how many
people work there. Here's where we have some weird guesses.
All right, So the original designs don't specify you know,
(16:43):
a number of employees. But what they do specify is
that people should be able to live there for quote
a fortnight fortnight's time. That's just weird that they put
that in there, you know, I mean, no, it would
make sense of it was the thirties, but it was
like V. Four who says fourth? I feel like, if
you can include it in any kind of official document,
you know what, Yeah, we should say fortnight more often
(17:06):
night's time. See, that's great. So they said it had
to be capable of sustaining people with food, water, and
lego facilities. What do we like talking racquetball? Maybe maybe yeah,
maybe a pool or like a bully. Now they have
a tari in the seventies. I don't know, no, I
(17:28):
think so they'd have to have a lot of its hearts, right,
because this is a lot of people, and it had
to be self sufficient in an emergency. In the case
of an atomic attack, this building had to continue running.
Whatever spooky, can I curse on this one? Can we
beep it out? Whatever? Don't do it, Whatever kind of
spooky is going on in that building, that spooky had
(17:51):
to be able to do it for a fortnight. When
civilization collapsed, they had two hundred fifty thousand gallons of
fuel just hanging out the bottom. Yeah. So the whole
point is this is the Cold War essentially, at least
part of it. And if this is your communications hub
and a bomb goes off, you know, just on the
other side of the island or somewhere pretty close, this
(18:12):
thing has to stay there so you could tell everybody
what's going on, or you know, at least contact the
relevant authorities, right right, And there's uh, do you guys
remember that movie The Panic Room? Somebody remember that? Did
I make that up? Jodie Foster vehicle from Okay, Well
I didn't, I didn't see it, but it counts this thing.
(18:32):
So inside this building. There's a secure room that's called
the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or check this out and
skiff and bomb the acronym you gotta, you gotta. There's
so many acronyms, and it records calls and Internet data
from around the world, and it's sort of a black box.
(18:55):
Things go in, they go somewhere else, they eventually come out,
but we don't know what happens within there. We do know, however,
that it has monitored communications and collected communications from the
United Nations, the World Monetary Fund, a thirty eight countries,
at least, including the ones that the US is ostensibly
friends with, like France, Japan, Germany. Yeah, so here here's
(19:20):
the thing. We know that someone is listening, but who
is it and why are they doing it? That's the
big question. And we'll tell you right after a quick
word from our sponsor. We're live. We're back the question,
(19:44):
who is listening? Why are there listening? Spoiler alert? Uh,
the US government is listening and they're listening to everyone.
I know. I don't think that's that big of a spoiler.
I mean, but we've gotten danged for like spoiling lost,
like I accidentally spoiled the last episode of Law, a
show from ten years ago fifteen. At this point far
back does it go, like, is the statute of limitations
(20:06):
spoilers is nine years five five? This definitely was beyond
because I was like, is it a spoiler to say
that Abraham Lincoln gets shot? Like? Is there somebody who
does what? Sorry, mattl So we do know. We do
know that they're monitoring and commercial, official and private communications,
(20:28):
and they're aggregating and they're analyzing the state of and uh,
there's a program that's known as Fairview, where all sorts
of communications are siphoned, duplicated and recorded. Yeah, this is
a program that was started in They're all kinds of
different disclosures that have happened about this. You can look
up a two thousand and six report from a guy
(20:50):
named Mark Klein. I would say google it if you can.
It's an entire, several page document where he goes into
being in San Francisco and having all of these wires.
They go into a secret room and he doesn't know
what's going on, but the n s A people sure
like that room. And you guys know how government writing is.
It's super dry. The coolest thing about this stuff. Is
(21:11):
they all whatever? They use a code name. It's in
all caps, like mk ultra. You've heard of that, even
if it's not an acronym. Because you see this Fairview
in all caps, I'm like, is that some sort of
convoluted absurd acronym. No, but it's in all caps, and
I find that confusing. I don't like him. Uh, but
we could give it a shot. The Federal Association and
(21:31):
freestyling here, Uh, Federal Association Integrating rear word valley integrate. No, Yeah,
you're right. That's a tough one. So we know about
this stuff because of some leaks and a great piece
published in November of sixteen and the intercept it was
(21:54):
able to link the Fairview program to a physical location, Matt,
can you guess which one it was? Oh? Let me
see someone someone about. Was it the building we've been
talking about the whole Yeah, yeah, spoiler, Yeah, it was
the building the whole time. A secret government program called
Titan Point with an E because it's classy. It's a
very classy program. Uh. It's linked to none other than
(22:19):
thirty three Thomas Rey. And they found it by analyzing
secret travel guides, which like a Mischlin thing like I
thought it was like a Harry Potter thing. Apparently it's real. Man,
that's crazy secret travel guides. Yeah, it's a travel guy
that just has protocols for any agent or a person
who's working with the Fairview program. How you rent a car,
like what you don't talk about? What you can talk about?
(22:41):
And how if you, you know, break down on the
side of the road. Here are all the things you
have to do. Oh, what you have to do if
you have to stop and take a potty break, which
to me is the most endearing part. And yeah, we'll
never know what those guys do in the bathroom. So
that came out weird. Now I got it. I got
what you're putting down. Thank you, thank you. So one
(23:01):
of these secret travel guides revealed the Titan Points in
New York City, and they talked about a partner that
owned the building, a partner called Lithium and Lithium who
oversees the building visits at this mysterious windowless skyscraper is
apparently the n Essays code name for a T and T. Oh,
(23:22):
we probably weren't supposed to know that. I don't I
don't know if they care that we know that you
know at this point, but yeah, but now we all
know it. So what this, what this means, what this
all all these details mean is that right now as
we are hanging out here in the Bell House and
thanks for thanks for having us, uh them, we are
(23:42):
only thirty five minutes away. We did the math, we
did the taxi tax We did the taxi math, only
thirty five minutes away from one of the most prominent
listening stations in this hemisphere. And the information we received
about this building, including Snowden leaks, is probably already outdated
because things move quickly. So we know that a two
(24:06):
thousand fifteen change in the law prevented the n essay
from directly directly yeah h collecting bulk telephone information. This
does not extend to online activity or your Facebook friends,
to which we don't know exactly what this location can do. Now, Yeah,
(24:30):
we do know that it isn't connected to the like
the civilian Internet, because what happens is there these interception
nodes all across the country and so you know, um
Null here or Matt here, will we'll have a conversation online.
They're texting each other and spoiling lost or whatever, and
(24:50):
then that will get collected at this point, and then
it will be duplicated and transferred onto a separate private
network and it will be piped to a place like
tight Point and then probably stored in Utah and one
of the data centers. Because that's just helpful to have that.
How they do that's just you know, it's just good
to have stuff. I guess in case you need it,
we got we have it. Yeah. So the point is,
(25:11):
um this this is known as an air gap, which
makes this building very very difficult to compromise right through
some sort of electronic means. However, and I don't know
if any of you are on a date tonight and
you want to get like weird with it while you're
waiting for the next show, you can just right over
there and check it out, and you can be like, hey,
look at our creepy romance. Let's tick a picture in
(25:33):
front of this building. Although per our fake building experience,
I would not be surprised if you were very quickly
intercepted by some form of security personnel and asked kindly
to They'd be wearing an a T and T suit.
It would look very unassuming, and they would ask you
if you wanted some service and it might taste you. Yeah,
we'll just whill, just like snap the picture and go.
You don't want to hang it out for spoiler alert you,
(25:55):
they probably won't let you in. And the question is
you know we're talking to about this. I don't know
about you, Matt. Does this creep you out? Yes? Yeah,
if it creeps you out the way it creeps out
and NOL, perhaps you would be interested in joining the
upcoming exorcism of the n s A take the creep
up a notch. Yeah, yeah, we're out. There's an exorcism
(26:20):
here in New York at thirty three Tomas Street that's
happy in April fifteen for some reason. Yeah, oh yeah,
So there's magazine out of the bronch no queens. The
Quiet American is going to perform a rite of exorcism
on the building at thirty three Tomas Street, code name
Titan Point. And this is from their site, but I'm
gonna quote it verbatim because it's just so good in
(26:41):
the interests of metaphysically purging the edifice of the data
it hoards and invoking a less maniacal version of citizen
government relations on April t PM, a cadre of priests, supplicants,
and a volunteer choir. Right, you gotta will exercise the
malevolent energy coursing through are the so called Long Lines
(27:01):
building at thirty three Thomas Street. This sacred day falls
approximately one day before the Rising of Christ and three
days before tax Day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also I like
the idea of it. Oh perfect, do it. That's the date.
That's the date. Don't just don't. Don't half ascid. What
(27:21):
are we gonna do after the padfast? Nobody's here from
the quite American? Right, Well, they're quiet Americans, Dude, they're not.
They're gonna like maybe So I like the idea of
a cadre. Can we be a cadre? I think you
need more than three you guys want to be in
our cadre? Can we have a cadre? Cadre? Yes? Who?
I can't believe that they do? Contra filled with power?
(27:44):
We just cadre up? What are they planning to do? Yes? Yes,
So here's specifically what they want to do, just real quick,
so you get an idea before you get there, you know.
All right, So they're gonna begin with a prayer for
the building's physical materials and invoke the gods uh that
this quote architectural fiasco has insulted, there will lay a
perimeter of salt around the building to quote render ineffective
(28:08):
the sinister frequencies it broadcasts. Now that's gonna be harder
than it sounds. I'm not like a salt doctor, but
I don't think it does that. Like, how much money
are you going to spend on salt? Yeah? So then
they'll make sacrifices to the building, like thousands of pages
of personal data, bouquets of flowers, and of course an
ostriches just one, just one? Um? So is that does
(28:29):
that mean like that people are printing out their Facebook
feeds and setting them ablaze. Yes, I'm kind of into
that because I mean I put more into my Facebook
feed than I do like almost anything else that I do,
which is sad, but I kind of would like to
doe like Instagram. I mean, I printed out your Facebook
feed and burned it before what what I guys, I
don't have cable. Okay, I'm just trying to do stuff
(28:53):
I didn't really, I would never bu you're my Space
is still up? Not that I still Oh everybody probably
has a lingering MySpace somewhere, so after they make these sacrifices,
their ideas that this will release the banal facts of
our lives back into their proper home, the ether, and
expel the demons of fear and suspicion from within the temple.
(29:16):
This sounds like they're joking, right, Like this is a
very tongue in cheat Discordian satirical Yeah, it kind of
is like a billionaires for Bush kind of thing, you know.
And it's not the first time something like this has
been done. In the sixties, Kenneth Anger, who was like
a weirdo experimental filmmaker uh led an exorcism of the
Pentagon where and he and his folks encircled it and
(29:41):
tried to levitate it and claimed to have succeeded in
levitating it an inch or Yeah, big building. We haven't
proved anything about this. We want to have we want
to find notes. So if there are any internal Pentagon
documents about the building floating, please let us know if
you just happen to have those when you showed up here.
This has all the makings of a sinister political thriller, right,
(30:02):
But it doesn't stop there. You see this obsessive listening
is not restricted to spooky monolithic buildings with cartoonishly uh
cartoonishly ominous code names. And we're going to talk about
that right after we have another sponsor break. So we're back,
(30:30):
and here's where it gets crazy. There really are extraordinary
conspiracies that are hidden all around us, in our neighborhoods,
in our homes, in our pockets as well. Recently leaked
documents confirmed what the Fringe was saying for years now.
Your own television, cell phone, and electronic assistant can be
remotely activated almost the microwave, Like Kelly Ann Conway was saying,
(30:54):
is that you know we were talking about this. I
think it depends on the microwave. It's like a smart microwave.
It also did spends on what you're cooking. Um, you
you have to have really discerning taste to kind of
go under the radar. Yeah, Well, do people have Internet
connected microwaves? I don't know, but they certainly should be
on the table. That should be on the table. We
should get one at the office. Yes, should be on
the table. So recently, Wiki leaks release some stuff describing
(31:18):
what it calls secret spine and hacking tools developed by
the CIA and British intelligence and one hack which was
code named And this is for you, dr who fans
Weeping Angel the worst, right, this is a real thing.
Who writes these? I want to have the code name job.
So so Weeping Angel is a fake off mode where
your TV is just Josh and with you and it's
(31:40):
actually on. And these smart TVs have cameras and they
can hear you. Microphones do because you can talk to
your remote and telling stuff and all that. Yeah, this
program specifically applies to Samsung televisions, where they will appear
to be off but runs spywear luckily only before everybody
goes home, and like Rex, all the televisions in your
(32:02):
neighborhood anyway, though, No, don't do it. I mean no,
not not somebody else's don't do that. That's probably a
bad crime unless it is. Unless it is a tell,
it's only tell. This only applies to Samsung televisions from
two thousand twelve two thousand thirteen with some outdated firmware,
in which case, you know, I don't know what your
television life is like, but maybe you want a new
(32:23):
one anyway. Does this mean that like Samsung colluded with
the n s A and was like, hey, let's work,
let's hang, let's do this. Very interesting point, No, very
interesting question, because Samsung does have a warning in their
terms of agreements, and I'm sure we all read those right.
Uh So, Samsung says customers should be aware that if
(32:44):
your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information used
to like words when you speak yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
or like I don't know, poetry slam. So okay, I'm
gonna be very anyway, that information will be among the
data contained and captured and transmitted to a third party
through your use of voice recognition. Just the third party?
A third party? How is that helpful? Samsung? That's I mean,
(33:06):
a third party could be anybody. I like third party.
I like that they are calling it a party, you know.
That makes it sound way more fun than it is.
So any of you guys have a home assistant, not
like a like a robot butler, like one of those. Yeah, Alexa,
you got Alexa? Okay? Anybody have a home Google Home? Anybody? Yeah?
Anybody have Siri on your iPhone while you're in this
(33:27):
room with us right now? No? Well yes, yes, all
of you who are the best? So there were there
were a lot of videos we've seen circulating online. Right.
A couple went viral where somebody is asking Alexa what
(33:49):
they do with audio data and the c I a right,
and Alexa doesn't outride answer at the time. And there
are people who believe this indicates that Alexa has being
purposely evasive rather than understanding that, you know, uh Ai
has limits. Because we're kind of if we're like, oh, Alexa,
you're not gonna trick me. I see what's going on,
(34:10):
we're sort of ascribing human emotions and motivations to something
that is we're anthropomorphised. I drew a face on mine.
I'm kidding. I don't have money. But the people who
really do believe that this kind of thing is going
down though, they get out the board, they start connecting
things up. So this is how it goes. Amazon the
(34:31):
company is owned by a certain Jeff Bezos. That's the
video part where it says, here's where it starts. Uh
Then he also owns the Washington Post, and because he
has a contract working with the CIA, Alexa very could
very well could be recording all of us anyone who
uses it and sending it directly to the old CIA. Yeah, Okay, yeah,
(34:55):
I see where that where that maps out. But it's
true that for a long time Alexa did keep mum
if you asked if you were being recorded. But again,
is that an indication of a conspiracy or were the
programmers just not bothering to build a specific response. Was
it like a non player character in a video game
where you can only ask certain questions and they can
(35:16):
only say certain things like that one in sky Rim
that always took an arrow to the knee repeatedly. Yeah,
that same same issue, the same thing. Or maybe Alexa's
misinterpreting these questions, like maybe when you say are you
connected to the CIA, it's looking for a WiFi, my
(35:38):
external hard drive, c I A one through whatever I have,
But Alexa knows what the CIA is. If you ask Alexa, well,
the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entrigue which I which
I you know, I appreciate um Alexa though has recently
been updated. She's she's a whole new woman now. So
if you if you ask the CIA question, she'll say, no,
(36:02):
I worked for Ammazon. Yeah, but she doesn't say why yeah, yeah,
oh wait. And that's that's also a point with Sirie, right,
because it sounds like we're picking on Alexa. But Siri
also gives non answers things that sound evasive, like if
you ask if she's recording you, she'll say, I can't
answer that. I can't answer that. Daveh God, No, Siri
(36:27):
thinks my name is Dave. So Siri thinks my name
is Princess because my eight year old told her so,
and I just never bothered to change it because she's
smarter than me. So Google's personal assistant answers. If you ask, Hey, Google,
are you connected to the CIA? It says, oh, oh wait,
(36:47):
hold on what, Yeah, I got you the voice? Oh
where is it? Hey Google? Oh yeah, yeah, it says,
I have to admit I'm not sure that's the word
store nuts. What kind of shady relationship is that? And
I've been in some weird ones. Uh. The question of
connection again, that seems to be the issue. If the
(37:09):
information collected by Google is indeed being like sent out
to an intelligence agency, then each individual device is not
you know, likely connected directly to an n S A
server and would make more sense for the data to
be collected and split off. And that's the case with
a T and T S info at Titan points yeah,
so if you're using it and it's going through one
(37:30):
of these big carrier hotels, it doesn't matter if Amazon
or Google or Apple is working with the CIA, and
the statistics show that consumers are supporting this, if intelligence
agencies are in fact, if these conspiracy theories are true
and there is a massive sweeping collection of data, then
(37:51):
people are people seem to be on board. According to
the Voice report from Voice Labs, Amazon Echo, and Google
Home smart speakers are going to sell more than twenty
four million units through the end of Yeah, that means
they're gonna be a total of thirty three million or
so in just in living rooms and I guess bathrooms.
I don't know, where do you put a assistant besides
(38:13):
the living room your room? Yeah, huh. So here's the kicker.
Even Amazon, Google and Apple aren't sending this that collected
directly to you know, Uncle Sam and the CIA and stuff. Uh,
they'll still be able to collect it later or the
private company will be able to keep it as long
(38:36):
as it once. I mean, who reads the terms and agreements.
But there's a silver lining here, maybe, yeah, it's it's
it's sort of a creepy s lover lining. But have
you guys seen that movie? Was it x Makina So
what it was called? Yeah? Anyway, so the sort of
like sinister Elon Musk esque figure in that film who
created the AI the film is about, did a thing
(38:56):
where he kind of did a back room creepy deal
with the government where he turned every cell phone. No,
it wasn't with the government. It was with these giant
Conglomo telecom companies turned every cell phone in the world
into a listening device that then fed his neural network
that he was using to create his artificial intelligence. So
by virtue of like hearing all of these various human interactions,
(39:17):
it could create a more realistic, empathetic copy of a
human intelligence in theory. So that was just a movie. Yeah, yeah,
that was just a movie. But it's really happening. It's
not that far from the possibilities we're talking about neural networks,
right and machine consciousness or AI. We know that chatbots
(39:38):
based on human interactions with actual you know people have
been built before. There was the famous one on Twitter
that got super weird. Yeah, weird is one word for it.
It was Yeah, it's called tay tweets. Microsoft built it
within twenty four hours of going public just based on
conversations with people on Twitter. It was like it went bonkers.
(40:02):
I think I'm willing to curse on the stage, but
I don't think I'm gonna read that stuff for beatim. Well,
and then the whole idea is that it only knows
what it's being sent, right, right, Yeah, So if you're
teaching an AI, every single online interaction that has ever
occurred since two thousand three, Um, I mean, we're probably
(40:25):
getting close to something that's gonna be intelligent. Well, don't
like what it hates us? What if it wants to
extinguish our entire Yeah, that's the other thing, you guys.
I don't want to embarrass anybody other than myself. But
when I think about the conversations I've had online and
(40:46):
the stuff that I've said, my drunken Facebook likes alone
are teaching artificial intelligence terrible, terrible things. We're really good
at turning silver linings around pretty quick. So let's let's
go down that that path for a second. What if
this information that's being stored in these hubs, you know,
like your Facebook likes and stuff, what if, like, given
(41:06):
a more drastic shift in government, than we're seeing right now.
I don't know what that's gonna look like, terrifying. What if,
you know, stuff gets really weird and all of a
sudden it becomes illegal to have, you know, liked Bernie
Sanders on Facebook, and it becomes like an executable offense,
and all that stuff is stored in perpetuity in these hubs,
and then all of a sudden, like the government can
(41:26):
go back and figure it out and put you on
a list now, and then it's a problem. It's alarmistic.
You just have to get re educated. It wouldn't be
that bad. Isn't that far off the market? I don't know. Well,
that's the problem with the old argument that, uh, well
if you got if you've got nothing to high, we
were you free pol Well, well you will you be
such a wood like a rocky voice. I don't know.
I just in my head it's some guy named Derek.
(41:49):
Derek seems cool. Derek seems a little bit aggro, but
I think he's, you know, he's you've got to be
coming around for yeah, because if the situation changes and
the things that were once you know, protected by a
freedom of speech or freedom of thought are no longer protected,
then it applies retroactively in many ways. This is similar
(42:10):
to like if you add a tattoo, and tattoos were legal,
and now all of a sudden, somebody is a massive
dick about it, and tattoos aren't aren't legal, and then
you're culpable for that. Ultimately, one of the arguments would
be that the only way we can control the flow
of our personal information is to avoid using these devices entirely.
But guys, I object to that. I think it's unrealistic
(42:33):
and I think it's time that we consider more and
more often the way this stuff leaks. So we've all
heard about second hand smoking, right, there's second hand privacy
as well. So if I ever go that extra two
percent into the realm of full lunatic and I'm like
off the grid, I'm like, no Facebook, Matt, no Instagram,
(42:55):
Knoll and everybody take my computers. Just from hanging out
with these guys if they have phones, I'm still showing up.
Oh come on, man, It's like when I used to
play a Pokemon for that week. Um, and we're like
at a bar hanging out and I'm like, dude, hold still,
there's a jigglely puff on your ear and I'm trying
to get it, and then Ben's like, no, you know,
(43:18):
it happens. I get it, though, Man, I get it.
But at the same time, I want to be able
to catch a Jiggli Puff at the bar. So it's cool.
I'm okay with all this stuff, and a lot of
us are, and like, I know that it's an issue,
you know for many of us, and some people, you know,
they put tape over their phone camera. But I'm kind
of I know, I know, but I'm kind of of
the mind, you know, where it's like, I'm it's worth
(43:40):
it to me to make the trade off to be
able to use Facebook, to be able to catch a
Jiggli puff. It like, I'm not that interesting. What are
they gonna do with my stuff? Well? Okay, but then
when you look at the big picture, that's where it
starts mattering. And maybe I'm I'm a little shortsighted in
that respect. I've got your back, man, I a school me. Okay,
uh all right. So the thing is that you will
(44:02):
hear often that we are facing as a society and
extinction of privacy. That is not the case because what
we consider privacy historically is a very recent phenomenon, and
what is actually happening, I would argue, is that we
see an accelerating inequality of privacy. Privacy is becoming one
of the most important currencies of the modern age, and
(44:25):
it's getting tougher and tougher to access it. So what happens,
you know, we what happens if the beliefs you expound
ten years ago suddenly come back to haunt you like ghosts.
You know what what happens if we live in a
world where microwaves and toasters and televisions are listening to
(44:46):
every word we say, which is God? I feel sorry
for those guys. It's gonna be disappointing. You know. We
always joke around that we have an n s A
intern named Steve. I think Steve, Yeah, we don't mean
to you know, if somebody's it's money from the n
s A is listening to us, it's probably definitely Yeah.
It's probably like a freshman who's doing an internship thing
(45:08):
and he's and he's just like, oh God, please stop
with the jokes. You're not funny, guys, are as funny
as you think you are. It happens there there's something
else here that we should talk about. Which is the
recent legislation that was I think signed by uh, signed
by what do you what do you call a little
(45:29):
twenty four okay, signed by signed by Trump? Uh No, no,
not uh forty five? Little I would now I'm not
I'm goingly good at taxi math. Okay, okay, alright, so
tax about the site there there's uh, there's legislation that
(45:50):
will pass that's that's threatening to allow private companies whomever
they are, to not only sell your data without your consent,
you know, to advertisers, to insurance companies in a way
that might impact your your insurance situation. Uh, they also
are making money off of it. And here's the thing.
(46:12):
Here's like as a cheap skate, you don't even get
a cut. Yeah, you don't even get like and this
is one of the most lucrative things you can do
now with a company is collect data and then sell it,
which brings us to the most important acronym of the
evening VPN. Yes, what is that? It's a proxy boxy? Yes? Yes, okay,
(46:38):
So what's important? Do you use one? I mean, you
use one of the slut and paid ones? Yeah, but
I'm exchanging them for free too. And it allows you
to reroute your internet traffic, your you know I P
address in a way where you can't be tracked in
the same way that people that don't use them are
able to be tracked. One more, one more set of
an obstacle, and it's increasingly difficult to be anonymous online
(46:59):
like cartoonishly so, but you can do what you can
and that's all you can do. Boy, that came out
pretty okay. Well, we're live, but but the point is here.
What if we brought all of this back around the
point on purpose? The point is simple. Whether or not
(47:21):
these alarmists conspiracy theories are true, whether or not it's
malarkey or the real deal of fried bologny sandwich or
the god's honest truth. No matter what any of us
might think about it, the fact remains that there was
a window List skyscraper a half hour away from here,
(47:42):
and it's watching you. That's a That's that's the part
we had ridden. Now. I guess I wanna say thank
you guys so much for sticking around, really appreciative, and
thank you to the Bell House. Thank you to Jeremy
and a J for the a podfest and having us over.
Thank you to John for doing security. He's awesome. OK,
(48:04):
gays awesome. Thanks to the majority report that was fantastic,
and most supportingly, to you guys for supporting podcast. Thank you.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and you can turn back now
or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
(00:23):
Welcome back to the show. Everyone. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you.
We are in Brooklyn, which means this is stuff they
don't want you to know. Live. So we found our
way to Brooklyn through a bit of a nightmarish travel scenario.
We live in Atlanta and there's a big giant travel
(00:44):
hub there in the form of Jackson Hartsfield International Airport.
And you may know that there have been some weather
concerns that have caused just this like domino effect of
flight cancelation. So we spent about eighteen hours in the
airport and we we posted it. We we've explored. That
place is from t g I Fridays to Gordon Biersch,
and we made some friends along the way and then
(01:05):
finally got here about three am. We were a little
punchy in our hotel looks a lot like a David
Lynch movie. It's called the Hotel. And when we walked
into that place, completely sleep deprived and weird, it was.
It was a thing. It was an experience. It's not ironic.
The entire hotel is lit with blue lights. Uh. And
(01:25):
that t G A. Friday's was also lit apparently at
ten am. It was super lit. It was crazy. We
heard from a friend. A lot of people are stranded there. Still.
We hope we make it back. Yeah. But so Atlanta
is known for the airport. It's also known for really
bad traffic. Yeah. Yeah, so we actually are coming from
a city that it is in the midst of an
(01:46):
emerging conspiracy theory. You may have heard in the news recently.
There's an interstate they're called i AD five. It's sort
of one of the arteries of the heart of the city,
and part of it collapsed just a few days ago. Yeah.
It's one of the only two ways that you could
get it into Atlanta, and it's just dead. Yeah. So
(02:06):
everybody's using all these back roads. But the big conspiracy
is how could something like that happen? How? I mean
the government line right is, Uh, there was some dudes
smoking some drugs down there, and obviously quite vigorously because
they seem to have managed to set fire to a
giant stockpile of PVC that was being stored underneath the
overpast by the Georgia Department of Transportation. Well, to be fair,
(02:29):
I don't think any of us have done hard drugs
under a bridge, but we did meet after speak for yourself. Okay,
whoa learning so much about you guys, But yeah, I
mean on my way to the airport. In fact, my
uber driver was like, yeah, that definitely didn't happen. There's
no way. He's like, it was the government. It was
the government. And I'll tell you why it was the government,
(02:49):
because we in Atlanta, you guys are blessed here with
a fantastic public transit system and gets you here there
and yawn, wonderful. No, well, okay, comparatively comparatively magical. In Atlanta,
ours is like in the shape of a T and
it'll get you to like like two neighborhoods in the
whole city and then you know it's it's driving the
(03:10):
rest of the way. But the theory is as at
least as far as the superdriver was concerned, that the
government blew up the bridge to increase ridership on Marta.
If you know what I like about that plan is
how straightforward it is. It's no frills. That is a
no frills conspiracy. I mean, you know, it's this ruby
you got. You can remember that board game mouse Trap,
(03:30):
you guys, it's like on the level of mouse Trap.
That was the game that I like, I never actually
understood the rules of or how you want. I just
kind of like to mess around with it and do
the thing. Yeah, but I don't know if anybody's actually
played mouse Trap all the way through? Where are you? Yeah?
I didn't think so. No, no one does it. But
this got us thinking about infrastructure and how important it
(03:52):
is and how often it's ignored. And we know that
infrastructure is a problem in the US overall. And when
we think about cities, what we realize is cities are
like a massive agglomeration of concrete, metal and asphalt, but
there almost like a living organism. You know. We've got water,
(04:12):
we have electricity, we have sewage systems, communication networks and
ways to pass all of that to people and two businesses.
And the thing is, let's be honest, everybody wants to
benefit from these structures. We like power, we like clean water,
but not many people want it in their neighborhood. Nimby, Nimby, Yeah, yeah,
(04:36):
I'm the resident acronym junkie of of of our crew,
and we're gonna have a lot more fun acronyms for
you as the show progressive. But the first one is
Nimby not in my backyard. So the infrastructure of cities
keeps them alive. But this sprawling system of systems within
systems isn't always the nicest thing to look at. The
equipment it's it's dangerous, could potentially be considered an eyesore.
(04:58):
You know, you don't want it right out the open,
so you know, people can blow it up by smoking
drugs um and you know, so this is why we
generally build subways instead of super ways or l trains.
I guess Chicago has that and Marta does too. But
in general, you know, you want them away from the public,
like the way they treated uh, the way they treated
children in the Victorian era. You know, just put them
(05:21):
away and then a firm handshake and exchange of surnames
at the age of eighteen. So in some cases it's
necessary to place these things in opportune places in neighborhoods,
right next to where other human beings are trying to exist. Yeah,
and this stuff is peppered throughout major cities, and especially
here in New York, there are buildings that are not
(05:43):
what they see, their facades, their fake buildings, and they're
meant to hide these eye sores from the general public
and from everybody who is not in the know. And recently, uh,
Noel and I went on an expedition with Matt's support
here in New York, and we went across the boroughs
and we tracked down buildings that in some cases didn't
(06:06):
want to be found. To tell me about the first one, yeah,
so the first one, you do. The first one then,
and that was that was your Okay, the first one.
Every I feel like I'm doing stand up now you've
probably heard this one. So the first one is the
Brownstone in Brooklyn. And normally it would look like if
you're just casually passing by, you know, your uber drivers
telling you some conspiracy about the Inner State, and you're like, oh,
(06:28):
there's another sparsely decorated brownstone. I can't afford to live there,
right and uh, and then if you linger, if your
gaze lingers, you notice that it doesn't really have a
door knob, it doesn't really have windows that you can
see into up close. It's a matted black because you see,
(06:50):
this brownstone does not contain a living room or a kitchen,
or a nuclear family with two point five kids, or
you know, like what is the point five? It's like,
don't it's a kid on the way. I've always wondered
that anyone talk to us after all, Right, well, we'll
do fractions. If anybody is good at sociology, please explain
(07:11):
that to us later. The see the city. The Transit
Authority specifically owns this building. And if you can get
through that weird no door knob door, where you will
find will be a set of stairs and an emergency
passageway between the Bowling Green and Borough Hall stations. It
collects it connects to the train tunnels underneath, because that's
(07:32):
where so many transit lines converge and fan out, just
right there in the middle of other people just living.
And that's not the only one that's pretty nocuous one.
Can I do my favorite? Yeah? Yeah, I think this
one's really cool, just for historical reasons. Um. It is
the Strucker Memorial Laboratory, which is on Roosevelt Island, which
I didn't realize but has a fascinating bizarre history unto itself. Um.
(07:55):
It was. It used to be known as Welfare Island
because it was home to many of the city's hospital
institutional buildings and actually the country's first municipal insane asylum,
which was built in the in the nineteenth century. UM.
And we found numerous accounts that suggested this place and
many other places on the island are haunted. You can
I do there we go, There we go. Yeah, it
(08:22):
was pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty convincing. And so actually
I found out a lot of this stuff from the
Bowery Boys who are performing in this festival and the
coming days. I kind of can't remember when their show is,
but they're excellent, and they have an episode all about
the strange horrors of Roosevelt Island. To check that out.
What's what is? What's the deal with Stricker Island? Strucker Labs?
It's not Strucker Island. Oh yeah, it sounds like a
(08:43):
that that what is it? The movie with Leonardo DiCaprio
Shutter Island, Shutters Getting Confused built in eight two, um,
and it's it's a fascinating place, as you all know.
Funny story on that expedition when we when we went
to the southern tip of Roosevelt Island and we had
to walk quite a ways with film equipment and stuff,
(09:04):
and we were turned away at the gate because Kanye
West was holding a secret fashion show. Always does that,
man and I and I was like, I was like,
you know, at that time, I didn't know what his
clothing line looked like. It sort of looks like Star
Wars costumes of people that like they that live in
the desert. Yeah, it's like that's pretty I feel like
(09:25):
somebody wearing one of those costumes may have set fire
to the entirely entirely possible. So not all of these
fake buildings are created equally though, because you may be
familiar in Greenwich, there's this, uh there's this subway event
that also has a memorial on it, but it's not
(09:46):
very well convincing. No. No, it's like this massive concrete
rectangle on its end and this just hung on one
corner of it is this like phony brick facade with
window holes cut out, but the windows just go back
through to the concrete. The already seeing everywhere else. So
it's like, did you just give up? Like yeah, it
(10:08):
was like four thirty five on a Friday, and they said,
all right, people are just gonna be driving by the
last one, the biggest one, the one that I hope
you get a chance to see, is in mont Haven.
It is a con ed station that looks exactly like
a block large condo building and and pretty nice condos
(10:30):
to a lot of people found out about this by
trying to ask how much the rent was there. They
would go up and get busted. We we almost didn't
get there, but luckily, and we promised not to disclose
his name, we ran into a guy who worked for
con D was unhappy with his boss is wanted us
out of his hair and just told us where to go.
(10:52):
And I will say, you know, Matt, no, it looks
like a nice building. But again you see that, you
see the hints right, No door knobs, no uh, no interior,
just a Matt Black wounded by a very intimidating chain
link fence a top kind of a fancy looking brick wall.
But that's and then like surveillance cameras, yeah, which probably
(11:15):
made people think, whoa, these are really nice condos. You know,
it's called a gated community right right. And the one
thing they did have with security a very we weren't
there for maybe more than five minutes, and a very
very polite man. I knew he was polite because he
walked out and his posture was kind of shlubby, and
he was holding a coffee that was clearly from like
(11:35):
his house or something, and he walked in and said,
you know, you guys, you can't film here. I would
hate for something to happen. It was. It was a
It was a very classy threat. It was a very
polite and classy threat. But you can go up there
and check it out, because what it actually is is
a substation, a power substation. And if that is out
(11:57):
in the open and it's not hidden behind some sort
of plausible facade, then property values will go down. And
this kind of stuff is, you know, I think it
open secret for people who live in the neighborhoods. You know.
But we know these things are in some way necessary
because secrecy is a crucial part of so many situations
(12:20):
in our environments, and New York has a lot of secrets.
It doesn't just hide subway exits, doesn't just hide ventilation
shafts or or power plants, as much much larger secrets figuratively, specifically,
and physically in Manhattan, just across the river on that
island that they call Manhattan, deep inside the triangle below
(12:44):
Canal Street. Bring it trying to make this super spooky. No, no,
let's do some like sound design. Okay, there is a
most curious concrete building that has several names, thirty three
Thomas Street, the A, T and T Longlines Building. Oh sorry,
(13:06):
that wasn't a good one, was that? Wait? There are
a couple other names. What was the there's one name
like you got the Eye of Sorrow. That's that was
my joke. Yeah, well you missed its fine now because seriously,
it looks like it looks like it's like like a
castle turret and you can just picture the two tips
of the top just having that I stretching across, just
(13:27):
peering across the skyline of the city, judging your every move. Yeah. Maybe, yeah.
So what this building actually is. Technically, it's called a
carrier hotel, right, and a carrier hotel is also you know,
the fancy name is the co Location Center. So it's
a building where all this data communications information goes to
(13:49):
one place to be stored. And the thing is, it's
common for numerous service providers to share the hotels. So
if you see Verizon in a ten T with their
fake beef and some sort of commercial, don't be fooled.
They're snuggling up together in the building hotel, in the
Carrier hotel. Don't talk about what happens there. Nobody talks
(14:09):
about it. They're like the Vegas of media communication. I
should have thought that joke out better. Okay, So thirty
three Thomas Street was designed back in nineteen seventy four
by an architectural firm called John Carl Vernickey and associates.
Because you know most of them are probably associates and
that German accent is wonderful? Did I actually did? Okay, Well,
(14:32):
don't tell me because it's like you know, when Elmer
Fud walks off a cliff, I can't look down. I
just gotta keep going, all right. Uh So, the uh
the thing is though, that he got a really weird
design request. They wanted him to build a twentieth century fortress.
Even the architectural the architectural drawings had project X on them,
(14:56):
which I personally find like kind of cartoonist no chemical acts.
And the Powerpuff Girls they're like Acne and Willie Wily
Weapon X one day I will get to work on
a Project X and it will be the best day
of my life. I mean, we could change the name
of the show anything. I think they're already Project texas well.
(15:16):
We might have to choose a different letter. But the
craziest thing is they said, we want you to build
a building that can withstand an atomic blast and the
resulting fall out. So a lot of people don't know
what it looks like on the inside, but we can
describe what it looks like on the outside. First. Yeah,
so it's five hundred and fifty feet tall. It has
(15:36):
no windows and instead has exterior walls of pre cast
concrete panels that are clad with these nice little pink
colored granite and um. Yeah, and so the building is
completely dark, meaning that at night it becomes an enormous
shadow in the sky. Yeah, it's gotta it's good. You know,
we're so used to very bright and uh window rich skyscrapers,
(16:01):
and this one is imposing. It's got kind of it's
got some like scary mood lighting going on, and it
looks brutal because it's brutal. Is so brutal, Yeah, brutalist architecture.
Who said that? Who knows that, good job, thank you.
It's just like, looking at it, it is kind of oppressive,
you know, like a lot of those buildings just feel
like they're crushing you with the weight and intensity of
(16:22):
their design. There's not necessarily hugging your eyes. You know.
We do know that it has three blow ground levels,
including a cable vault, but we don't know how many
people work there. Here's where we have some weird guesses.
All right, So the original designs don't specify you know,
(16:43):
a number of employees. But what they do specify is
that people should be able to live there for quote
a fortnight fortnight's time. That's just weird that they put
that in there, you know, I mean, no, it would
make sense of it was the thirties, but it was
like V. Four who says fourth? I feel like, if
you can include it in any kind of official document,
you know what, Yeah, we should say fortnight more often
(17:06):
night's time. See, that's great. So they said it had
to be capable of sustaining people with food, water, and
lego facilities. What do we like talking racquetball? Maybe maybe yeah,
maybe a pool or like a bully. Now they have
a tari in the seventies. I don't know, no, I
(17:28):
think so they'd have to have a lot of its hearts, right,
because this is a lot of people, and it had
to be self sufficient in an emergency. In the case
of an atomic attack, this building had to continue running.
Whatever spooky, can I curse on this one? Can we
beep it out? Whatever? Don't do it, Whatever kind of
spooky is going on in that building, that spooky had
(17:51):
to be able to do it for a fortnight. When
civilization collapsed, they had two hundred fifty thousand gallons of
fuel just hanging out the bottom. Yeah. So the whole
point is this is the Cold War essentially, at least
part of it. And if this is your communications hub
and a bomb goes off, you know, just on the
other side of the island or somewhere pretty close, this
(18:12):
thing has to stay there so you could tell everybody
what's going on, or you know, at least contact the
relevant authorities, right right, And there's uh, do you guys
remember that movie The Panic Room? Somebody remember that? Did
I make that up? Jodie Foster vehicle from Okay, Well
I didn't, I didn't see it, but it counts this thing.
(18:32):
So inside this building. There's a secure room that's called
the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or check this out and
skiff and bomb the acronym you gotta, you gotta. There's
so many acronyms, and it records calls and Internet data
from around the world, and it's sort of a black box.
(18:55):
Things go in, they go somewhere else, they eventually come out,
but we don't know what happens within there. We do know, however,
that it has monitored communications and collected communications from the
United Nations, the World Monetary Fund, a thirty eight countries,
at least, including the ones that the US is ostensibly
friends with, like France, Japan, Germany. Yeah, so here here's
(19:20):
the thing. We know that someone is listening, but who
is it and why are they doing it? That's the
big question. And we'll tell you right after a quick
word from our sponsor. We're live. We're back the question,
(19:44):
who is listening? Why are there listening? Spoiler alert? Uh,
the US government is listening and they're listening to everyone.
I know. I don't think that's that big of a spoiler.
I mean, but we've gotten danged for like spoiling lost,
like I accidentally spoiled the last episode of Law, a
show from ten years ago fifteen. At this point far
back does it go, like, is the statute of limitations
(20:06):
spoilers is nine years five five? This definitely was beyond
because I was like, is it a spoiler to say
that Abraham Lincoln gets shot? Like? Is there somebody who
does what? Sorry, mattl So we do know. We do
know that they're monitoring and commercial, official and private communications,
(20:28):
and they're aggregating and they're analyzing the state of and uh,
there's a program that's known as Fairview, where all sorts
of communications are siphoned, duplicated and recorded. Yeah, this is
a program that was started in They're all kinds of
different disclosures that have happened about this. You can look
up a two thousand and six report from a guy
(20:50):
named Mark Klein. I would say google it if you can.
It's an entire, several page document where he goes into
being in San Francisco and having all of these wires.
They go into a secret room and he doesn't know
what's going on, but the n s A people sure
like that room. And you guys know how government writing is.
It's super dry. The coolest thing about this stuff. Is
(21:11):
they all whatever? They use a code name. It's in
all caps, like mk ultra. You've heard of that, even
if it's not an acronym. Because you see this Fairview
in all caps, I'm like, is that some sort of
convoluted absurd acronym. No, but it's in all caps, and
I find that confusing. I don't like him. Uh, but
we could give it a shot. The Federal Association and
(21:31):
freestyling here, Uh, Federal Association Integrating rear word valley integrate. No, Yeah,
you're right. That's a tough one. So we know about
this stuff because of some leaks and a great piece
published in November of sixteen and the intercept it was
(21:54):
able to link the Fairview program to a physical location, Matt,
can you guess which one it was? Oh? Let me
see someone someone about. Was it the building we've been
talking about the whole Yeah, yeah, spoiler, Yeah, it was
the building the whole time. A secret government program called
Titan Point with an E because it's classy. It's a
very classy program. Uh. It's linked to none other than
(22:19):
thirty three Thomas Rey. And they found it by analyzing
secret travel guides, which like a Mischlin thing like I
thought it was like a Harry Potter thing. Apparently it's real. Man,
that's crazy secret travel guides. Yeah, it's a travel guy
that just has protocols for any agent or a person
who's working with the Fairview program. How you rent a car,
like what you don't talk about? What you can talk about?
(22:41):
And how if you, you know, break down on the
side of the road. Here are all the things you
have to do. Oh, what you have to do if
you have to stop and take a potty break, which
to me is the most endearing part. And yeah, we'll
never know what those guys do in the bathroom. So
that came out weird. Now I got it. I got
what you're putting down. Thank you, thank you. So one
(23:01):
of these secret travel guides revealed the Titan Points in
New York City, and they talked about a partner that
owned the building, a partner called Lithium and Lithium who
oversees the building visits at this mysterious windowless skyscraper is
apparently the n Essays code name for a T and T. Oh,
(23:22):
we probably weren't supposed to know that. I don't I
don't know if they care that we know that you
know at this point, but yeah, but now we all
know it. So what this, what this means, what this
all all these details mean is that right now as
we are hanging out here in the Bell House and
thanks for thanks for having us, uh them, we are
(23:42):
only thirty five minutes away. We did the math, we
did the taxi tax We did the taxi math, only
thirty five minutes away from one of the most prominent
listening stations in this hemisphere. And the information we received
about this building, including Snowden leaks, is probably already outdated
because things move quickly. So we know that a two
(24:06):
thousand fifteen change in the law prevented the n essay
from directly directly yeah h collecting bulk telephone information. This
does not extend to online activity or your Facebook friends,
to which we don't know exactly what this location can do. Now, Yeah,
(24:30):
we do know that it isn't connected to the like
the civilian Internet, because what happens is there these interception
nodes all across the country and so you know, um
Null here or Matt here, will we'll have a conversation online.
They're texting each other and spoiling lost or whatever, and
(24:50):
then that will get collected at this point, and then
it will be duplicated and transferred onto a separate private
network and it will be piped to a place like
tight Point and then probably stored in Utah and one
of the data centers. Because that's just helpful to have that.
How they do that's just you know, it's just good
to have stuff. I guess in case you need it,
we got we have it. Yeah. So the point is,
(25:11):
um this this is known as an air gap, which
makes this building very very difficult to compromise right through
some sort of electronic means. However, and I don't know
if any of you are on a date tonight and
you want to get like weird with it while you're
waiting for the next show, you can just right over
there and check it out, and you can be like, hey,
look at our creepy romance. Let's tick a picture in
(25:33):
front of this building. Although per our fake building experience,
I would not be surprised if you were very quickly
intercepted by some form of security personnel and asked kindly
to They'd be wearing an a T and T suit.
It would look very unassuming, and they would ask you
if you wanted some service and it might taste you. Yeah,
we'll just whill, just like snap the picture and go.
You don't want to hang it out for spoiler alert you,
(25:55):
they probably won't let you in. And the question is
you know we're talking to about this. I don't know
about you, Matt. Does this creep you out? Yes? Yeah,
if it creeps you out the way it creeps out
and NOL, perhaps you would be interested in joining the
upcoming exorcism of the n s A take the creep
up a notch. Yeah, yeah, we're out. There's an exorcism
(26:20):
here in New York at thirty three Tomas Street that's
happy in April fifteen for some reason. Yeah, oh yeah,
So there's magazine out of the bronch no queens. The
Quiet American is going to perform a rite of exorcism
on the building at thirty three Tomas Street, code name
Titan Point. And this is from their site, but I'm
gonna quote it verbatim because it's just so good in
(26:41):
the interests of metaphysically purging the edifice of the data
it hoards and invoking a less maniacal version of citizen
government relations on April t PM, a cadre of priests, supplicants,
and a volunteer choir. Right, you gotta will exercise the
malevolent energy coursing through are the so called Long Lines
(27:01):
building at thirty three Thomas Street. This sacred day falls
approximately one day before the Rising of Christ and three
days before tax Day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also I like
the idea of it. Oh perfect, do it. That's the date.
That's the date. Don't just don't. Don't half ascid. What
(27:21):
are we gonna do after the padfast? Nobody's here from
the quite American? Right, Well, they're quiet Americans, Dude, they're not.
They're gonna like maybe So I like the idea of
a cadre. Can we be a cadre? I think you
need more than three you guys want to be in
our cadre? Can we have a cadre? Cadre? Yes? Who?
I can't believe that they do? Contra filled with power?
(27:44):
We just cadre up? What are they planning to do? Yes? Yes,
So here's specifically what they want to do, just real quick,
so you get an idea before you get there, you know.
All right, So they're gonna begin with a prayer for
the building's physical materials and invoke the gods uh that
this quote architectural fiasco has insulted, there will lay a
perimeter of salt around the building to quote render ineffective
(28:08):
the sinister frequencies it broadcasts. Now that's gonna be harder
than it sounds. I'm not like a salt doctor, but
I don't think it does that. Like, how much money
are you going to spend on salt? Yeah? So then
they'll make sacrifices to the building, like thousands of pages
of personal data, bouquets of flowers, and of course an
ostriches just one, just one? Um? So is that does
(28:29):
that mean like that people are printing out their Facebook
feeds and setting them ablaze. Yes, I'm kind of into
that because I mean I put more into my Facebook
feed than I do like almost anything else that I do,
which is sad, but I kind of would like to
doe like Instagram. I mean, I printed out your Facebook
feed and burned it before what what I guys, I
don't have cable. Okay, I'm just trying to do stuff
(28:53):
I didn't really, I would never bu you're my Space
is still up? Not that I still Oh everybody probably
has a lingering MySpace somewhere, so after they make these sacrifices,
their ideas that this will release the banal facts of
our lives back into their proper home, the ether, and
expel the demons of fear and suspicion from within the temple.
(29:16):
This sounds like they're joking, right, Like this is a
very tongue in cheat Discordian satirical Yeah, it kind of
is like a billionaires for Bush kind of thing, you know.
And it's not the first time something like this has
been done. In the sixties, Kenneth Anger, who was like
a weirdo experimental filmmaker uh led an exorcism of the
Pentagon where and he and his folks encircled it and
(29:41):
tried to levitate it and claimed to have succeeded in
levitating it an inch or Yeah, big building. We haven't
proved anything about this. We want to have we want
to find notes. So if there are any internal Pentagon
documents about the building floating, please let us know if
you just happen to have those when you showed up here.
This has all the makings of a sinister political thriller, right,
(30:02):
But it doesn't stop there. You see this obsessive listening
is not restricted to spooky monolithic buildings with cartoonishly uh
cartoonishly ominous code names. And we're going to talk about
that right after we have another sponsor break. So we're back,
(30:30):
and here's where it gets crazy. There really are extraordinary
conspiracies that are hidden all around us, in our neighborhoods,
in our homes, in our pockets as well. Recently leaked
documents confirmed what the Fringe was saying for years now.
Your own television, cell phone, and electronic assistant can be
remotely activated almost the microwave, Like Kelly Ann Conway was saying,
(30:54):
is that you know we were talking about this. I
think it depends on the microwave. It's like a smart microwave.
It also did spends on what you're cooking. Um, you
you have to have really discerning taste to kind of
go under the radar. Yeah, Well, do people have Internet
connected microwaves? I don't know, but they certainly should be
on the table. That should be on the table. We
should get one at the office. Yes, should be on
the table. So recently, Wiki leaks release some stuff describing
(31:18):
what it calls secret spine and hacking tools developed by
the CIA and British intelligence and one hack which was
code named And this is for you, dr who fans
Weeping Angel the worst, right, this is a real thing.
Who writes these? I want to have the code name job.
So so Weeping Angel is a fake off mode where
your TV is just Josh and with you and it's
(31:40):
actually on. And these smart TVs have cameras and they
can hear you. Microphones do because you can talk to
your remote and telling stuff and all that. Yeah, this
program specifically applies to Samsung televisions, where they will appear
to be off but runs spywear luckily only before everybody
goes home, and like Rex, all the televisions in your
(32:02):
neighborhood anyway, though, No, don't do it. I mean no,
not not somebody else's don't do that. That's probably a
bad crime unless it is. Unless it is a tell,
it's only tell. This only applies to Samsung televisions from
two thousand twelve two thousand thirteen with some outdated firmware,
in which case, you know, I don't know what your
television life is like, but maybe you want a new
(32:23):
one anyway. Does this mean that like Samsung colluded with
the n s A and was like, hey, let's work,
let's hang, let's do this. Very interesting point, No, very
interesting question, because Samsung does have a warning in their
terms of agreements, and I'm sure we all read those right.
Uh So, Samsung says customers should be aware that if
(32:44):
your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information used
to like words when you speak yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
or like I don't know, poetry slam. So okay, I'm
gonna be very anyway, that information will be among the
data contained and captured and transmitted to a third party
through your use of voice recognition. Just the third party?
A third party? How is that helpful? Samsung? That's I mean,
(33:06):
a third party could be anybody. I like third party.
I like that they are calling it a party, you know.
That makes it sound way more fun than it is.
So any of you guys have a home assistant, not
like a like a robot butler, like one of those. Yeah, Alexa,
you got Alexa? Okay? Anybody have a home Google Home? Anybody? Yeah?
Anybody have Siri on your iPhone while you're in this
(33:27):
room with us right now? No? Well yes, yes, all
of you who are the best? So there were there
were a lot of videos we've seen circulating online. Right.
A couple went viral where somebody is asking Alexa what
(33:49):
they do with audio data and the c I a right,
and Alexa doesn't outride answer at the time. And there
are people who believe this indicates that Alexa has being
purposely evasive rather than understanding that, you know, uh Ai
has limits. Because we're kind of if we're like, oh, Alexa,
you're not gonna trick me. I see what's going on,
(34:10):
we're sort of ascribing human emotions and motivations to something
that is we're anthropomorphised. I drew a face on mine.
I'm kidding. I don't have money. But the people who
really do believe that this kind of thing is going
down though, they get out the board, they start connecting
things up. So this is how it goes. Amazon the
(34:31):
company is owned by a certain Jeff Bezos. That's the
video part where it says, here's where it starts. Uh
Then he also owns the Washington Post, and because he
has a contract working with the CIA, Alexa very could
very well could be recording all of us anyone who
uses it and sending it directly to the old CIA. Yeah, Okay, yeah,
(34:55):
I see where that where that maps out. But it's
true that for a long time Alexa did keep mum
if you asked if you were being recorded. But again,
is that an indication of a conspiracy or were the
programmers just not bothering to build a specific response. Was
it like a non player character in a video game
where you can only ask certain questions and they can
(35:16):
only say certain things like that one in sky Rim
that always took an arrow to the knee repeatedly. Yeah,
that same same issue, the same thing. Or maybe Alexa's
misinterpreting these questions, like maybe when you say are you
connected to the CIA, it's looking for a WiFi, my
(35:38):
external hard drive, c I A one through whatever I have,
But Alexa knows what the CIA is. If you ask Alexa, well,
the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entrigue which I which
I you know, I appreciate um Alexa though has recently
been updated. She's she's a whole new woman now. So
if you if you ask the CIA question, she'll say, no,
(36:02):
I worked for Ammazon. Yeah, but she doesn't say why yeah, yeah,
oh wait. And that's that's also a point with Sirie, right,
because it sounds like we're picking on Alexa. But Siri
also gives non answers things that sound evasive, like if
you ask if she's recording you, she'll say, I can't
answer that. I can't answer that. Daveh God, No, Siri
(36:27):
thinks my name is Dave. So Siri thinks my name
is Princess because my eight year old told her so,
and I just never bothered to change it because she's
smarter than me. So Google's personal assistant answers. If you ask, Hey, Google,
are you connected to the CIA? It says, oh, oh wait,
(36:47):
hold on what, Yeah, I got you the voice? Oh
where is it? Hey Google? Oh yeah, yeah, it says,
I have to admit I'm not sure that's the word
store nuts. What kind of shady relationship is that? And
I've been in some weird ones. Uh. The question of
connection again, that seems to be the issue. If the
(37:09):
information collected by Google is indeed being like sent out
to an intelligence agency, then each individual device is not
you know, likely connected directly to an n S A
server and would make more sense for the data to
be collected and split off. And that's the case with
a T and T S info at Titan points yeah,
so if you're using it and it's going through one
(37:30):
of these big carrier hotels, it doesn't matter if Amazon
or Google or Apple is working with the CIA, and
the statistics show that consumers are supporting this, if intelligence
agencies are in fact, if these conspiracy theories are true
and there is a massive sweeping collection of data, then
(37:51):
people are people seem to be on board. According to
the Voice report from Voice Labs, Amazon Echo, and Google
Home smart speakers are going to sell more than twenty
four million units through the end of Yeah, that means
they're gonna be a total of thirty three million or
so in just in living rooms and I guess bathrooms.
I don't know, where do you put a assistant besides
(38:13):
the living room your room? Yeah, huh. So here's the kicker.
Even Amazon, Google and Apple aren't sending this that collected
directly to you know, Uncle Sam and the CIA and stuff. Uh,
they'll still be able to collect it later or the
private company will be able to keep it as long
(38:36):
as it once. I mean, who reads the terms and agreements.
But there's a silver lining here, maybe, yeah, it's it's
it's sort of a creepy s lover lining. But have
you guys seen that movie? Was it x Makina So
what it was called? Yeah? Anyway, so the sort of
like sinister Elon Musk esque figure in that film who
created the AI the film is about, did a thing
(38:56):
where he kind of did a back room creepy deal
with the government where he turned every cell phone. No,
it wasn't with the government. It was with these giant
Conglomo telecom companies turned every cell phone in the world
into a listening device that then fed his neural network
that he was using to create his artificial intelligence. So
by virtue of like hearing all of these various human interactions,
(39:17):
it could create a more realistic, empathetic copy of a
human intelligence in theory. So that was just a movie. Yeah, yeah,
that was just a movie. But it's really happening. It's
not that far from the possibilities we're talking about neural networks,
right and machine consciousness or AI. We know that chatbots
(39:38):
based on human interactions with actual you know people have
been built before. There was the famous one on Twitter
that got super weird. Yeah, weird is one word for it.
It was Yeah, it's called tay tweets. Microsoft built it
within twenty four hours of going public just based on
conversations with people on Twitter. It was like it went bonkers.
(40:02):
I think I'm willing to curse on the stage, but
I don't think I'm gonna read that stuff for beatim. Well,
and then the whole idea is that it only knows
what it's being sent, right, right, Yeah, So if you're
teaching an AI, every single online interaction that has ever
occurred since two thousand three, Um, I mean, we're probably
(40:25):
getting close to something that's gonna be intelligent. Well, don't
like what it hates us? What if it wants to
extinguish our entire Yeah, that's the other thing, you guys.
I don't want to embarrass anybody other than myself. But
when I think about the conversations I've had online and
(40:46):
the stuff that I've said, my drunken Facebook likes alone
are teaching artificial intelligence terrible, terrible things. We're really good
at turning silver linings around pretty quick. So let's let's
go down that that path for a second. What if
this information that's being stored in these hubs, you know,
like your Facebook likes and stuff, what if, like, given
(41:06):
a more drastic shift in government, than we're seeing right now.
I don't know what that's gonna look like, terrifying. What if,
you know, stuff gets really weird and all of a
sudden it becomes illegal to have, you know, liked Bernie
Sanders on Facebook, and it becomes like an executable offense,
and all that stuff is stored in perpetuity in these hubs,
and then all of a sudden, like the government can
(41:26):
go back and figure it out and put you on
a list now, and then it's a problem. It's alarmistic.
You just have to get re educated. It wouldn't be
that bad. Isn't that far off the market? I don't know. Well,
that's the problem with the old argument that, uh, well
if you got if you've got nothing to high, we
were you free pol Well, well you will you be
such a wood like a rocky voice. I don't know.
I just in my head it's some guy named Derek.
(41:49):
Derek seems cool. Derek seems a little bit aggro, but
I think he's, you know, he's you've got to be
coming around for yeah, because if the situation changes and
the things that were once you know, protected by a
freedom of speech or freedom of thought are no longer protected,
then it applies retroactively in many ways. This is similar
(42:10):
to like if you add a tattoo, and tattoos were legal,
and now all of a sudden, somebody is a massive
dick about it, and tattoos aren't aren't legal, and then
you're culpable for that. Ultimately, one of the arguments would
be that the only way we can control the flow
of our personal information is to avoid using these devices entirely.
But guys, I object to that. I think it's unrealistic
(42:33):
and I think it's time that we consider more and
more often the way this stuff leaks. So we've all
heard about second hand smoking, right, there's second hand privacy
as well. So if I ever go that extra two
percent into the realm of full lunatic and I'm like
off the grid, I'm like, no Facebook, Matt, no Instagram,
(42:55):
Knoll and everybody take my computers. Just from hanging out
with these guys if they have phones, I'm still showing up.
Oh come on, man, It's like when I used to
play a Pokemon for that week. Um, and we're like
at a bar hanging out and I'm like, dude, hold still,
there's a jigglely puff on your ear and I'm trying
to get it, and then Ben's like, no, you know,
(43:18):
it happens. I get it, though, Man, I get it.
But at the same time, I want to be able
to catch a Jiggli Puff at the bar. So it's cool.
I'm okay with all this stuff, and a lot of
us are, and like, I know that it's an issue,
you know for many of us, and some people, you know,
they put tape over their phone camera. But I'm kind
of I know, I know, but I'm kind of of
the mind, you know, where it's like, I'm it's worth
(43:40):
it to me to make the trade off to be
able to use Facebook, to be able to catch a
Jiggli puff. It like, I'm not that interesting. What are
they gonna do with my stuff? Well? Okay, but then
when you look at the big picture, that's where it
starts mattering. And maybe I'm I'm a little shortsighted in
that respect. I've got your back, man, I a school me. Okay,
uh all right. So the thing is that you will
(44:02):
hear often that we are facing as a society and
extinction of privacy. That is not the case because what
we consider privacy historically is a very recent phenomenon, and
what is actually happening, I would argue, is that we
see an accelerating inequality of privacy. Privacy is becoming one
of the most important currencies of the modern age, and
(44:25):
it's getting tougher and tougher to access it. So what happens,
you know, we what happens if the beliefs you expound
ten years ago suddenly come back to haunt you like ghosts.
You know what what happens if we live in a
world where microwaves and toasters and televisions are listening to
(44:46):
every word we say, which is God? I feel sorry
for those guys. It's gonna be disappointing. You know. We
always joke around that we have an n s A
intern named Steve. I think Steve, Yeah, we don't mean
to you know, if somebody's it's money from the n
s A is listening to us, it's probably definitely Yeah.
It's probably like a freshman who's doing an internship thing
(45:08):
and he's and he's just like, oh God, please stop
with the jokes. You're not funny, guys, are as funny
as you think you are. It happens there there's something
else here that we should talk about. Which is the
recent legislation that was I think signed by uh, signed
by what do you what do you call a little
(45:29):
twenty four okay, signed by signed by Trump? Uh No, no,
not uh forty five? Little I would now I'm not
I'm goingly good at taxi math. Okay, okay, alright, so
tax about the site there there's uh, there's legislation that
(45:50):
will pass that's that's threatening to allow private companies whomever
they are, to not only sell your data without your consent,
you know, to advertisers, to insurance companies in a way
that might impact your your insurance situation. Uh, they also
are making money off of it. And here's the thing.
(46:12):
Here's like as a cheap skate, you don't even get
a cut. Yeah, you don't even get like and this
is one of the most lucrative things you can do
now with a company is collect data and then sell it,
which brings us to the most important acronym of the
evening VPN. Yes, what is that? It's a proxy boxy? Yes? Yes, okay,
(46:38):
So what's important? Do you use one? I mean, you
use one of the slut and paid ones? Yeah, but
I'm exchanging them for free too. And it allows you
to reroute your internet traffic, your you know I P
address in a way where you can't be tracked in
the same way that people that don't use them are
able to be tracked. One more, one more set of
an obstacle, and it's increasingly difficult to be anonymous online
(46:59):
like cartoonishly so, but you can do what you can
and that's all you can do. Boy, that came out
pretty okay. Well, we're live, but but the point is here.
What if we brought all of this back around the
point on purpose? The point is simple. Whether or not
(47:21):
these alarmists conspiracy theories are true, whether or not it's
malarkey or the real deal of fried bologny sandwich or
the god's honest truth. No matter what any of us
might think about it, the fact remains that there was
a window List skyscraper a half hour away from here,
(47:42):
and it's watching you. That's a That's that's the part
we had ridden. Now. I guess I wanna say thank
you guys so much for sticking around, really appreciative, and
thank you to the Bell House. Thank you to Jeremy
and a J for the a podfest and having us over.
Thank you to John for doing security. He's awesome. OK,
(48:04):
gays awesome. Thanks to the majority report that was fantastic,
and most supportingly, to you guys for supporting podcast. Thank you.
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