The False Alarm That Almost Started a Nuclear War. Plus: the Tupac Trial, With Joel Anderson.
2026-10-01 10:00:00 • 1:17:31
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This episode is brought to you by Major League Baseball.
The MLB postseason is arrived.
There's no time like October. October starts with hope.
And then drama, either happiness or some pain.
Now, the game's decided who gets to keep it.
It comes down to one series, one game, one pitch, one month.
Sign a question of if history will be made, but when?
Don't miss the moment.
Tune into the MLB postseason.
Learn more at MLB.com.
Slash postseason.
Slate 1979
And your writing partner is losing faith in the script.
You are Lawrence Lasker, screenwriter, NEPObaby, former freelance journalist,
hunting for that first big sale.
And you're really not sure this movie is it.
Will anyone buy a story about a kid, a teenager, hoodwinking the US military?
The idea started with Stephen Hawking.
You watched a documentary about him and couldn't stop thinking about it.
A man who might work out how the universe fits together but will lose the ability to tell anyone.
So you sketched out some ideas.
The protagonist is a scientist and a wheelchair.
Your writing partner has a different take.
And probably a more bankable one.
What if the scientist wasn't an elderly man in wheelchair but was actually a brilliant teenager?
And his family can't figure out how to relate to him?
You merge the ideas and call the script the Viginous.
Your research takes you to a futurist in the Bay Area.
He tells you about the bright young hackers using phone modems to play games on computers.
How they break into systems.
Morad, the high tech command center in Colorado that watches for Soviet missiles.
What if this genius kid hacks into Norad?
But no, that's too crazy. Too unbelievable.
So you pick up the TV remote.
Walter Cronkite is on telling you about a false alarm at Norad that led military leaders to briefly believe they were under nuclear attack.
It happened on the morning of November 9th.
Warning consoles at Norad, the Pentagon and strategic air command all lit up with the same picture.
1400 Soviet missiles on the way.
Fighter jets are scrambled.
The plane built to carry the president through a nuclear war took off.
What happened?
The technician had loaded the wrong tape.
A training tape into the system by mistake.
And suddenly your idea is pressient instead of crazy.
Three and a half years from now the movie will come out.
War games, starting Matthew Broderick.
The fifth biggest movie of 1983.
The president screens an opening weekend at Camp David.
The following week he walks into his national security meeting.
Walks his team through the plot and asks,
Hey, can this actually happen?
The problem is much worse than you think.
He tells the president.
This is wait a second.
More close calls.
Welcome to wait a second.
I'm Jason Concepcion.
As always that's the parker.
What's up?
Today we're delighted to welcome back.
Ringers own Joel Anderson to the program.
Joel, how are you?
What's up, man?
Oh, that's all right.
You know, I don't know exactly, but I'm trying.
Raise the roof.
There you go.
You got it.
That's right.
What's up, fellas?
I'll tell you what's up.
Terror is up.
We're delighted to have you.
Here for the first episode of our month of terror.
Now technically speaking, we kind of like dipped a toe in the terror last episode with Lizzy
Borden, murder houses.
Any sort of axe murder definitely feels like it belongs in this.
It's it's it's it's hitting the thing.
We definitely just got.
Got started a little early with the month of terror, but now we are here.
In the true month of terror.
We'll culminate in a mailbag in which we answer your question.
So be sure to reach out to us at way to second pod at proton.m.y.
Get as weird as you want.
Please.
As fucked up as you want to an extent.
But just.
Yeah.
Just like that.
Let's get wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
And Joel, it's delightful to have you with us today.
We're talking about war and almost war.
Of course, we are in.
The nuclear age.
We've existed existed here for 80 years or so.
I don't know.
Joel, if you saw the news that earlier this month's CNN reported that the US military nearly attacked
the Chinese ship because of an AI chatbot hallucination once we're told CNN that it,
quote, almost started a war.
Did you see this news?
I did see that.
I did see that.
Um, I mean, I'm not surprised because anything could happen now.
Yeah.
Right.
Like we live in a war with truly, I mean, again, I mean, nuclear war is bad, but we all just lived through a pandemic a few years ago.
You know what I mean?
So anything could happen.
It's crazy to, um, of course, we are all aging.
That said, when I look at pictures of myself from like spring 2019.
Oh, man.
Like, man, who is that guy with fresh, unlined face?
What a bushy tail on that.
All the major and flag like just somebody was talking about life before September 11th, too, in this country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like just going to the airport and, you know, seeing your, your person off at the gate, you know, does something like that?
A simple joy like that.
Like going and eating with them.
Yeah.
In the airport before they got to go.
Yeah.
Going to go through the airport with I get in frisk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was, you know, it was a different, less dangerous time.
Now, Joel, where do you stand on AI assisted warfare?
Because some would not, not myself.
I would not argue this.
But I could see a very slick pro AI person saying, well,
friendly fire and targeting mistakes have happened all throughout the history of warfare.
Mm-hmm.
We're never going to get it to zero.
But how is it worse if an AI accidentally targets, say, like, a girl school, or if a real life person accidentally bombs a girl school?
How, you know, isn't, aren't we making progress if the incidents of mistake and targeting go down while accepting that there will be these kind of mishaps?
Your, what would your response to that be?
I mean, you know, I think so, for instance, like self-driving cars, for instance, and people make the same argument that, you know, there's already plenty of car accidents.
Right.
And if you do this car, the odds are going to be lower.
And if it does happen, I mean, that would be unfortunate, but whatever.
And I can almost sort of understand that a little bit more than AI and war because I feel like people, again, we're going to talk about all these instances of, you know, close, you know, close calls and, you know, all these warnings that have happened.
But I just kind of feel like people need to be attached to these decisions.
Like, I feel like somebody needs to be responsible if you're going to wipe out people, right?
And I don't, maybe that doesn't make a lot of sense, but I would rather be able to attach that to a person in administration, an office as opposed to an upsy related to a, to a computer chip, right?
Doesn't that make, that's, that's not a beautiful way of explaining it, but I just kind of feel like that's what I would prefer.
No, I think that makes perfect sense when it comes down to the most cataclysmic decisions, like that can be made, whether to kill people, I think a person, or a selection of people should be responsible for that decision ultimately and not a chip.
I mean, we're seeing now all these recent stories about AI hacking this and that, the Australian Department of Health, all these other things.
Make the CEOs liable for the mistakes of their AI, and I think we'll see that stuff get cleared up pretty quick.
You know, it can't just be, I don't know, the widget did it.
It'll happen again. We don't know how it happened.
You think that's going to be like the pharmaceutical shit, though, or like the sacrilege get off and stuff?
I think it's going to be a big fight to make that happen.
Let's talk about War, though, here in Terremont.
Let me take you back to May, 1981.
Cold War tensions are high.
Betty Davis eyes by Kim Karnes, number one on the Billboard charts.
On the Bible, Banger.
That's an incredible, husky voice of Kim Karnes.
Love it.
Sounds like, you know, three packs of cigarettes and a whiskey, which is what you want.
You want it.
Morning train also by Shini Easton.
We're up there.
Right.
Right.
The Lost Ark, not yet open.
Dallas was an enormous television show.
Prime time soap operas.
That was a big thing in this era.
Falcon crest.
Falcon crest.
Falcon crest.
Yeah.
I was going to say Falcon crest.
That was one that, yeah.
That feels like we need to go back.
I mean, I miss it.
I think that we need those.
So Cold War tensions are high at this time.
Throughout the summer of 79, the Afghan Communist President had been begging Moscow for troops because there was a growing, largely Islamist rebellion.
That the US was secretly supporting with cash, medicine and propaganda.
Jimmy Carter.
He gets a lot of shit for being soft and putting solar panels on the roof of the White House, but he was the hard ass as well.
Don't let anybody.
Jim could get into some shit.
If you're going to get in the office, man, you got to be willing to kill people.
Yeah.
That's just.
What?
Now, instead of the military support that the president of Fizula, Amin, wanted, the Soviets just invaded because it was going sideways faster than they were expecting.
They went in.
Soviet Special Forces killed the president and they installed a new one in response.
President Carter, who, as we said, likes to get wet, secretly directed US intelligence to give the Afghan rebels guns and training.
Don't let anybody fool you about Jimmy Carter and the peanut farmer shit.
Then like the almond brothers like he liked to get into it.
And on January 20th declared that the US would not take part in the Olympic summer games, then be taking place in Moscow and we ended up not going.
A lot of Olympians still very sore about that.
The feeling, however, in America was, you know, the Iranian hostage crisis was still ongoing was that Carter was weak.
He was ineffective.
Change was needed.
Crisis, crisis of confidence, beaches of disaster.
It's a disaster.
Nobody likes to hear like, hey, we, you know, we got to, we all got to pitch in.
Nobody wants to hear that.
No.
So they were like, let's go with Ronald Reagan, New Day in America, former star of Hollywood, silver screen.
Seems like a good old guy.
Let's get him in there.
He had a reputation of hating socialists, communists, unions, except for the actual.
The kid though once I mean,
I'm going to control advocate that.
That didn't fit with the thing, but that was because that was because of the black panthers.
Sure.
Black people owning guns in Los Angeles and Southern California was a little bit of a trip wire.
You went down with that.
So the new administration, we're on Reagan.
We said no time in confronting the Soviets at his first news conference as Secretary State.
Al Hague accused the Soviet Union of quote, an unprecedented risk-taking mode and training international terrorist groups, basically blaming Russia for the PLO and black September and all these other terrorist groups that it was the 70s was a bad time for terrorism.
Let's acknowledge that.
Now Reagan had come in determined to slash and burn government expenditures, except for defense.
Yeah, you got to bump that up.
He bumped it way up.
He wanted to do 300 billion, which was enormous.
He settled for 220 billion, which his story in Luke Cannon called the largest peace-time military budget in world history.
At the time, we're probably well past that.
I need to look into that, but we're probably past that.
The very same month he authorized the US Navy to start just getting into it in Soviet maritime waters.
Not in the waters, but in like the approaches to their waters.
Take a dip at the mouth.
Yeah, at the mouth of the waters.
So doing exercises and whatever it is you do, just get into it over.
Get a sweat, go in. Let's just see what's going on.
Yeah, just want to see it waving from the shore over there.
Now the Soviets viewed these changes with anxiety.
You know, then as now, I think you could say the Russians have a certain there's a certain like paranoia to their leadership.
They had been for some time kind of developing this growing sense, this growing fear that like the US really wanted to like start World War III and win it.
They wanted that they were feeling that the US was determined to be the first strike.
Yes.
The US was going to strike first.
They had started to develop this theory and by 1980 it really had had took on a life of its own Yuri and drop off who was at that point determined in the KGB made a secret speech in 1980 when Carter was still president basically saying like, you know, we've got to.
We've got to take into account that like a nuclear war might actually happen like it might be real and then 81 he told these Germany security minister that the Americans were really trying to do it.
They are quote striving for military superiority in order to check us and to clear checkmate against us without starting a war maybe I'm wrong.
He says so he starts a year later this program called Ryan, which is an acronym in Russia for nuclear attack.
Brezhnev who was the Soviet leader of the time and was like 85 million years old.
If you ever see the guy.
Actively skin was falling off his body.
My mother said I looked like him when I was a baby.
You look like Brezhnev.
Yeah, she did.
She has a big portrait of me over our fireplace.
Wait, as a baby you look like Brezhnev.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Apparently I was an ugly baby.
No, but you know, my brother had, he's kind of a chubby baby so he had a lot of folds.
And I think that made him, it did give him a certain elderly kind of mean.
Oh, no, there are always babies where you're like, yeah, this might be a Benjamin button sort of situation.
I think I grew out of it.
Yeah, I think.
No, you're hot, you're hot as hell, Joel.
You look great.
So, Andrew Poff starts this program called Ryan and throughout the 80s, the KGB, the Soviet military,
who have always kind of like never really cooperated.
You know, they don't, the Soviet leadership, Russian leadership now, they don't like when different military and intelligence sectors cooperate because that's really threatening.
But this time they did cooperate along with the GRU in order to like create a system that marshalled human intelligence spies and technological advances in order to detect what they believed was coming,
which is a nuclear first strike from the US potentially at some point in the future.
And then so when Brezhnev, again, who is approximately like 80 million years old died in 82 Andrew Poff and drop off the men who built Ryan.
And then they came the premiere and this leads us to the issue.
So on February 17, 1983, KGB headquarters in Moscow sent its London station to telegram titled permanent operational assignment to uncover NATO preparations for a nuclear missile attack basically saying, hey, we're going like balls to the wall to try and figure out like where the civil defense shelters are, where the government leaders would go in case of war.
Are they ordering like a lot of food at MI6, you know, like we need to be how much how much blood is in the blood banks?
Yeah, are they are they stocking up on blood like we need to watch all these signs and basically said listen, NATO has like a two system alert stage was like orange and scarlet.
And they believed that they would go to the stage one orange under like an era of secrecy, they would pretend if there wasn't a tech coming, it would come in the form.
The early stages as like an exercise like NATO is just like out here just running around in the woods pretending, but really like we're getting compared to do it.
In 83 Ronald Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando.
So it's like a fun point that the Soviet leaders are a quote the focus of evil in the modern world.
And then 15 days later announced what would essentially become the Star Wars program the SDI program which you might remember.
Like or you might have seen early like computer graphics of like satellite zapping ICBMs as they come out of the earth's atmosphere.
This was like Reagan's plan was like oh, we get satellites with laser beams.
You know, we can like take out the 80s lasers were like we could take them up.
And the Soviets were like actually concerned that we could do it.
And they were concerned because they thought okay, well if they can take out our missiles like in the pod or as they are being launched, then that means the Americans are getting ready to like nucus.
They see an advantage and maybe they're going to take advantage of it.
We need to be watching for any kind of twitch by the Americans because this could be like a test of our defenses.
So then September 1st, 1983 a Korean Airlines flight 007 civilian passenger jet straights into Soviet airspace for a couple minutes and a Soviet fighter jet shoots a town killing all 269 people board including a member of Congress.
I didn't remember that part. Yeah.
And so Reagan was vacationing in Santa Barbara, a beautiful beach vacation up there in Santa Barbara him and Nancy.
I get it. Lovely town. He originally said he wasn't going to cut his vacation tour, but then he did.
Yeah. When it became clear how serious this was. He made a speech a couple days later.
There is something funny about like the timeline. How different the timeline of this is.
Yeah.
Of this was compared to what it would be now. Oh my God. Like where now it's you're hearing from probably the president like that night or something instantaneous.
And then it's like a couple couple three days later. Well, let's get our let's get our bearings.
If it was today, the president would have some room in whatever ranch he was at where he could go on TV. Right?
Well, I mean, I don't even that. I mean, he would be back in the sea. Within, you know, totally within a couple of hours.
It wouldn't even be, you know, he'd be doing his thing from the Oval Office. Yeah. Totally.
So he'd just a nation. He called this shoot a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten here throughout the world.
And a few days after that proclaimed Sunday September 11th, the National Day of Morning, it's kind of been overshadowed, I think, by more recent events.
I'm pretty pressure by him, though. You know, he really put it on the birthday too.
Is it really? Yeah. His birthday September 11th crazy. That's a that's a that's a rough draw. Sort of after the fact.
You know, I mean, he's seen to kind of come to grips with it. He's like, okay, with you. Yeah. You know, everybody recognizes my birthday.
So yeah.
So he's a way to look at it. Proclaim September 11th, the National Day of Morning for the people from, quote, 13 different countries who were killed. Why not make it September 13th?
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. That one's a weird one from me for Ron. Anyway, the Soviets now are like under pressure.
They feel like they've kind of been set up by this entire thing. They go into a defensive crouch, double down on their statements. They basically say after Reagan's first address that, you know, it was a good shoot.
And this passenger airliner was used by American special services for their dirty aims. End quote.
They're they're they were claiming that it's like it's flying without navigation lights, you know, high to night type of thing. They they're what what's the other thing?
There's no way a pilot could basically like how was bad bad visibility is going on to. Yeah.
And basically being like we couldn't know it was a civilian aircraft. It seemed like it was on a weird mission. They were probing our airspace. Reagan had made in his speech said like, oh, there's no way the Soviets could have mistaken this and, you know, and so the Soviets basically called him an igneoramus.
And Reagan had also said that no one would ever will now ever know why exactly this plane went off course, but surely it was innocent. And the Soviets called that cynical.
And they said that the plane's deviation from course was not a technical error. It was an intelligence op. They claimed.
I mean, is it thought then they really thought that I guess in the whole scheme of things sacrificing 270 people compared to hundreds of thousands millions is not I mean, because that's what they're saying is that if we do have a history of flying stuff, you know, over their country and into their airspace and, you know, you two jets in the 60s flying at very high altitude is not it's not like.
It's not crazy, although this is clearly like criminal behavior. The thing I couldn't figure out is are by claiming that are they saying that there was no like that that 269 people did not die and that it was okay.
They're saying that it was a civilian airliner that unbeknownst to the passengers was also secretly being used.
And that part of a secret mission. Yeah, so Soviet defenses and and to measure their response time, etc.
Why wouldn't you just have fewer people that? Okay.
So September, sorry, big plane, right? Yeah, this is 747 269 is a lot. That's a lot of people. A lot of people in the jet.
September 8 in Madrid, Soviet foreign minister, Andre Grimiko is also like 5 million years old. All these guys at this time were so fucking old.
Met with George Schultz who had taken over for Hayda Secretary of State and basically according to Schultz and who knows. But according to Schultz, Grimiko was like losing it.
Like he was on the verge of like losing his composure. He was like saying there's no way we're going to pay financial compensation, accused the US of like gross instig, gross instigation.
And again, reiterated that this was an American intelligence plane that had deliberately flown into Soviet airspace. And they've honestly never abandoned that position.
That's their position. I believe to this day or at least till the 90s when Boris Yeltsin released the Soviet Union. Anyway, all of this could easily have been cleared up to a certain extent.
Anyway, by the flight recorders, you know, the black boxes.
And the US Navy alongside, you know, South Korean military were looking for these deep in the ocean, trolley ocean from for weeks and months cost like 20 million dollars.
This entire search they never found any significant wreckage and that's because the Soviets had already gotten the boxes like sometime in October. And the boxes confirmed the pilots had no idea what was good like they had it was a mistake navigational there.
But they were still at this time doubling down on their story and there are even there have been communications that have been unearthed from the KGB chief at the time to premiere andropath that were basically saying, hey, we're going to continue to search and look like we're searching just so nobody thinks it's weird that we're not looking for the black boxes.
It's just crazy. I mean, the thing is is that you know, I mean, that's a lot of people, man, 260. I mean, it's a lot.
That is a tremendous amount and it just shows you how cynical all of this is. Yeah, nobody. There's no reason for anybody. It's amazing that any treaties ever happened because there's no reason to ever trust anybody.
Yes, so on top of this, these existing tensions, the right to treat these are miracles.
I mean, treaties, well, the thing is like, I remember my high school girlfriend once told me she was like going to college or where did you know going on a college trip to visit a college and I was like feeling weird about it.
And she was like, well, you know, there's only two outcomes either we get married or we break up. And I was like, okay, right. And it's the same thing with treaties.
I mean, look, and really, I mean, we operated in a world which they were like some smaller ones, but like the big global and composing ones didn't really happen until it was sort of a new thing.
Yeah, after World War II, right? That is like, we should cooperate together. It never happens again.
And it certainly seems like, you know, all of them are meant to be broken at a certain point.
We're going through that little bit of that. We're going through it now. So on top of all this stuff that's happening 25 days after the shoot down all these other tensions at
Supercoff 15, which is a secret early warning bunker southwest of Moscow, the Russian early warning satellite system reported that the US had launched a missile and then a second missile and then three more missiles, five intercontinental ballistic missiles heading towards Russia.
The duty officer at the time Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov looked at this. Now you only have a few minutes really like in the total chain his orders were past this information up the chain and they will make up the chain. They will make the decision, which they only have like maybe 20 minutes to make some sort of decision.
And it's not to stop the missiles at this time. It's just like retaliate or not. He's supposed to immediately pass this up the chain and then he, you know, his hands are he's done.
And he says like that if he had done that, that nobody would have battered and I would yeah, that's what he should have done. However, he looked at anyone. Okay, you know, like, if the US is going to launch a nuclear first strike, they're not going to do with five missiles, right?
Although now, right now knowing that if you're the US wouldn't you do it without missiles so they wouldn't know that you were doing it with.
Sure, it was so few missiles.
That's not checker. Anyway, he decided that, you know what, I am going to report it, but I'm going to report it by saying, hey, I'm getting a false alert.
And I don't know what this is, but it's clearly a false alert because why would the US launch only five missiles? It did turn out to be sunlight off a clouds.
Did we say also that the system was newly installed?
Yeah, it's brand new.
This is a new system part of that Ryan protocol that Andrew Poffed said in motion.
And they accepted that his, his, the people he reported to went, okay, false alarm.
Just like ground-based radar is weren't showing anything either.
Yeah, but there is a world in which the right people or the wrong people get that message.
And we want we came pretty close.
And this story was, you know, secret until the 90s when a retired general of Soviet missile defense wrote a memoir and basically described what happened.
I mean, we're reading through this packet for this, for this episode.
You just think all the time, like mecha Przenyski's dad was involved in this and 80s, right?
And it's like the rationality and caution of these few individual actors have really just protected everybody from getting incinerated at these.
A few times in the history of the world, right?
It's crazy.
And Petrov wasn't even supposed to, he's not typically supposed to be on watch.
He's just like some, what's his title, a processing signal processing engineer.
He's not even supposed to be there.
And it's crazy that at these moments, so the thing you're talking about is in 1980, this Nord-Ad screens, if you've seen war games, you've seen images that are based on what Nord-Ad looks like, it's where, you know, basically we coordinate all of our air defenses out of, it's under this mountain.
And Nord-Ad screens showed that Soviet submarines had launched missiles, 1000 ICBMs.
And the bomber crews had started up, the plane that is supposed to pick up the president in case of nuclear war took off, I guess, to go get him.
And National Security Advisor, Zybigny Brzynski, because dad got a phone call at 3am, like, hey, there's a thousand ICBMs in the air.
You know, like, what do you want to do? And again, he had like a very short window to be like retaliate or not.
He gave it a few minutes, and it turned out to be false. And he would say later that he thought about waking up his wife, but didn't because he figured we, if it was real, they'd all be dead.
Yeah, it was literally like, I'm going to let her sleep. I'm going to let her be in peace as she goes.
Can you just, I mean, imagine having that on your head, like, for just even a few minutes is unbelievable.
Absolutely insane. So, uh, Shaustod Lieutenant Petrov, who, who's cool head, kept us from nuclear war in, in 1983, but things continued.
Of course, we didn't know that this had happened. So right on the tail of this event in November of 83. And, uh, this is when Brezhnev dies, Andrew Poff takes over,
Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warren's up where we belong on the radio. Michael Jackson released Thriller at the end of this month. So, oh shit.
Oh shit. Oh shit. You know, the Soviets are nervous about us. Not only because of our immense technological and military might, because, but because like, we're just kind of killing it culturally at this period.
Returning to Jedi. Michael Jackson, like, you come on. We're killing it.
83 Magic Johnson Larry Bird. I mean, what's going, you know, like, just come on. Oh shit. Well, like, you know, like, when you're Andrew Poff, the NBA finals are no longer on tip to lay. They are live.
Yeah. Like this.
Like these, these Nike, this Nike stuff's looking pretty cool. You guys know, yeah.
We are, we are keeping tabs on a, of a young player at the university in North Carolina. My name is Michael Jordan. We are concerned about him. We have no one that can match him.
I would have you have, have you heard that they're thinking of moving a franchise from Kansas City to Sacramento. So you're going to be aligned there.
The power bases all underwisp. Yeah.
So, I don't know. It's fine. Listen. It's a month of terror. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I inflicted on people. So there you go.
So November 83, NATO launches Able Archer, which is a command post exercise, simulating the Alliance, having to release nukes as part of a larger series of exercises called Autumn Forge.
And this isn't, it wasn't the type of exercise where it's like there's troops on the march and there's tanks. This was just the leadership. So it's the processes by which the leadership would basically say, hey, we need to launch nukes.
Okay. And they would go up the chain. So the script imagined a Soviet invasion of Western Europe preceded by, you know, months of gray zone kind of terrorist attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Central Europe is like a flat plain. No natural barriers, really, some rivers, but NATO doctrine was based on the idea that, hey, we can't really stop the Russians like if they mess up and start rolling like West, like, it would be the job of NATO continental forces to basically try and slow them down so that the US military proper could arrive in force and try to push them back.
And to that end, it was thought that low yield tactical nuclear weapons, not the, not the, you know, not the stuff like of Hiroshima, you know, where there's like ton of radiation, big boom, but like smaller boom, but still really big, but smaller than that, less devastating baby boom that they called them suitcase nukes.
suitcase nukes. And you know, we, and we'd be dropping them, you know, on our allies basically, you know, Germany, hey, Germany, sorry about that, Czechoslovakia, you know, other country, not, not an ally, but you know what I mean, sorry about this, but we may have to use nukes on your territory to stem the Russian tide. And that was the plan, right.
And so NATO commanders, which it basically practicing this like, hey, here come the Russians, we need nukes, can we have nukes, yes, you can have nukes, here's the code for the nukes, we launched the news.
This was an annually occurring exercise, but of course, like because of all the tensions that were going on, the Russians were already nervous. And on top of that, there was a new communication protocol for sending the nuclear request, new cryptology, new radio frequencies.
They were loading dummy warheads onto the aircraft and taxing the aircraft out to the runway to like get their response times all dialed in.
They use the real alert levels. They actually moved the the DEF CON alert level in accordance with this. So like what are the Soviets?
They can't, it's new radio traffic that they haven't cracked the codes yet.
Well, it's also NATO and the US, none of these countries understand just how paranoid.
Yes, where there is Russia is and where they are almost, they've convinced themselves that the first strike is going to just look like an exercise.
It would not know and this is like a developing area of study now actually like it's a live question how close we came.
There's military historians that are looking at this issue. So, you know, the Soviets are seeing the Americans change their codes.
The Soviets are seeing the Americans change their radio frequencies. There's long periods of silence.
They're seeing warheads being loaded onto airplanes. They're seeing, you know, the DEF CON level change.
And all of this on the heels of they just shot down a jet with a member of the house on it and...
Reagan's talking crazy.
And they're starting to kind of, you know, shit a little bit.
And this is exactly what they had been planning for, you know, like that the US would attack under the guise of maneuvers and training and all of that stuff.
So, it is not until years later when a KGB defector basically says, and it comes to the US and informs the people debriefing him that Moscow, quote, incorrectly informed its KGB and GRU stations that the US forces were mobilizing in Europe.
And he informed us that air bases in Eastern Indian Poland were put on alert that they were warned like this could be a real attack.
The bombers were put on a rolling 30 minute alert. In other words, at any time of day, you could pick up the phone and be like, get in the air in 30 minutes later, the bombers would be going.
And it does seem like at least once Squadron may have loaded nukes.
That's just, I mean, fucking crazy, man.
I mean, have you ever, I'm assuming everybody here has been in a fight before?
Yes.
Okay. Have you ever punched first?
Like, I mean, have you been in a fight before?
I punched first once.
I have not punched first.
I've never punched first, but I'll take a brief story.
Once I was in Chicago for NABJ, I went across the, from the convention to go to Harold's chicken, got some chicken with a group of people and walking out with the, it was like three girls in me.
And this all of a sudden, this really aggressive, clearly mentally ill man starts following us and talking to you. He's like right behind us, like very, and he gets like so close.
Like you can like feel him, you know, like, you know, like, or the, you know, Drenel and starts dumping a little bit.
Yeah, I had a, I remember I had a big bottle of mystic, an empty bottle of mystic and I was like, yeah.
Am I going to have to hit this guy with the right thing?
Right, you know, right.
And that's kind of like what Russia was like.
They're just like, I don't know, man.
You know, this guy is just screaming, but I saw it again.
I didn't do it.
And I've never punched anybody first, but that takes a lot of restraint to not be that guy.
Right.
And you got to call people's bluffing.
Now just it's just shocking.
All this is basically what that is.
So as I said, this is kind of like an area of debate right now.
Like did we come close to, you know, some academics will say it's kind of overblown.
We didn't really get that close.
Others will point out like, I don't know, like one squadron loaded nukes.
Like, same kind of serious.
So, but all of which is to say 1983 while, you know, Michael Jackson is breaking all kinds of recording records.
Red leather jackets, just like shine.
We were like on the other side of the iron curtain.
They were eyeing us like Joel in a NABJ thinking, we might have to go.
They got a bottle of mystic in their hands.
They're walking with three lovely ladies.
And they might have to do some.
And it is like sobering.
You know, when you think about all the ways that signals can be misinterpreted.
See, that's the thing that worries me about today, Joel.
You need consistency in order to try to signal to the other side.
Clearly what your intentions are, what you intend to do, what you're ready to do.
You don't want to do is be kind of like whipsawing back and forth.
Because that just creates the pockets by which misunderstandings can occur.
Things like accidentally storming a Chinese ship.
Or, you know, or like misinterpreting light reflecting off of clouds can happen.
And that's the thing that worries me about our current state of affairs.
Don't you think we don't particularly in positions of influence in real like the ability of people that can make the military actionable, right?
They can do things.
This is for like, there's not a lot of lieutenant colonel Petrofs and charge that anymore, right?
Like, they've been cleared out like intentionally so like they've hollowed out all of the infrastructure that is designed to have the Petrofs there to be like, I don't know, man.
I think that this is all bullshit.
You know, let's just see.
And some people that they're installing like a department of war guy, it's like, he's a holy war.
He can't wait to get hit outside of Harold's chicken.
You know what I mean?
Like, he can't wait.
He can't wait to use that mystic bottle.
You know what's interesting is it's precisely because of guys like Petrof.
That the Russians put in that it's called the perimeter system.
We call it the dead hand and they weren't sure that they could trust their guys and then missile silos to either report that a missile launch had happened accurately or to actually turn the keys and launch this again like war games they weren't sure they would do it.
So they created this automatic system called dead hand, which would launch nukes, even if the entire like Soviet leadership was like wiped out in military leadership.
And it was put in place in 85 basically because of like these events like, oh, whatever guys don't launch.
So they were like actually kind of like.
Thank God we didn't launch, but like why didn't our guys launch?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, man, I did think the thing that was sort of worrisome and reading about this and even this is on the American side.
It's like when these screw ups have happened like nobody's willing to own their shit.
They're just like, well, you know, that just kind of that's just a 46 cent ship that did that.
That's not, you know, we can't be held responsible for that.
And they talk about how people were reluctant to learn from their mistakes.
And it just feels like, yeah, I guess along the way over the last 40 years, nobody ever really decided to, you know,
decide to own their shit.
You know what I mean?
Well, it's been wonderful to dip into war on this month of terror with you, Joel.
We wanted to talk about a recent arc when you wrote on the slaying of two pops your core.
Yeah.
Oh, you're not calm.
Why else?
Let's kick off our doom scroll with that.
Joel.
Okay.
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So we got a verdict in the two-pock case, but as you say in your piece, like story,
far from over seems like.
KVD convicted a first-degree murder for his role in the drive-by shooting in 96 that kills Pock.
Prosecutors never said that KVD pulled the trigger for years.
KVD's public-like-lined, his late nephew Orlando Anderson fired the shots.
He said this to police.
He said this on podcasts.
He has said this in his book.
He has said this to anyone with a mic and some people that don't have one.
He's facing life in prison, sentenced to set for October 13th.
Dwayne KVD Davis.
He faces life in prison.
He's still insisting that he's innocent.
Said he's going to win the appeal.
Obviously the verdict has re-ignited a lot of old feuds and conspiracy theories.
Two-packs of strange fathers, Blame and death row and the government.
Shug Knights saying, diddy's got something to do with it.
Obviously, diddy has denied any role in this.
Which, you know, definitely got to believe him on that.
He seems like an upstanding guy.
Get right.
There's no publicly known evidence against diddy.
Besides Davis' statement.
What I think is interesting about your piece, Joel, is it basically lays out who could be convicted.
But it, much like this case, it reflects the fact that we still can't lay the responsibility
of pulling the trigger on anyone.
Tell us about this piece.
Yeah, well, so I think the thing that really struck me was I knew that I was going to have to write something about two-packs
because right around the time of the verdict.
And because I did a podcast on two-packs into Biggie Mertes in 2019.
People call.
Yeah, slow burn.
And people call me from time to time because I'm one of the few two-packs and biggie experts left in the world somehow.
And so I was preparing myself with the thing that really shaped my thinking about this was getting a call from a member of two-packs family.
And, you know, I'm assuming I'm going to get the same thing that they put in the statement.
Right?
There's years of relief.
We're happy that somebody's been held responsible.
And I say, you know, I'm sure, you know, something along the lines, I'm sure you must feel a lot of closure here.
And the person I'm not going to identify them by gender if I can't help this.
They said, well, that's a bizarre interpretation of things.
And I'm just like, what?
Yeah.
And they're like, well, if you watched the trial, they said, did you watch the trial?
I said, yeah, I mean, I watched a little bit.
I didn't watch it, you know, minute by minute, like I did the OJ Simpson trial, but I did watch this.
And they said, well, if you watch that, he fee, D said that there was somebody else that's responsible for this.
Right?
That there's somebody else.
Everybody's been using this person's name in courtroom.
And, you know, that seems to be the next step here.
We're not going to get any peace on this, right?
Because as long as that's out there, it'll never be over.
And I was like, wow, you know, with me, why everybody else is thinking this closes a chapter.
Yeah, right.
You know, really grizzly men.
And the people that are actually affected, the people that are close, none of this is dulled their anger or like you frustration with the authorities in the way that this investigation was handled.
So that's why I decided to write about it, the idea that like for some people, this is just going to keep going on and on and on.
And one of the guys I talked to that I'll start off with the top of the story is gotten ridgy right.
His former Compton cop.
And he was ahead of security for death row.
And, you know, like he's been at the center of a lot of the conspiracy theories that well, he sent two pocket into Vegas without a second security guard because he wanted him to get killed and death row wanted him dead because two pocket was going to leave death row and he'd already fired their attorney and everything.
You know, I, you know, I feel good about what happened here.
The conspiracy theories are going about this without me.
And ever since that day, he's posted new videos about this shit.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Fighting with people and people are still accusing them of the same stuff, including two pucks, biological dad.
So it's just like, yeah, man, like it's particularly if you made money.
If you got any notoriety or importance from this, how could you just let that go?
Yeah.
Right.
So Joel, there are two, it seems to me two competing theories.
Yes.
The first theory is that just DVD has been shouting about this that Sean PD comes paid him like a million dollars to do it.
And this was part of the larger East Coast West Coast feud that had been ongoing.
Yes.
The second theory, which you just laid out is, um,
Shug Knight wanting to keep a hold of two pucks, uh, masters and his, his recordings and understanding that two pucks was about to leave initiated this.
I, I should add that like, I don't know, Shug Knight's various statements seem to play with the idea that he might be involved.
Like he seems to be enjoying like breadcrumbing.
Maybe I did do it or, but do you have any has, has your research into this?
Moved you one way or the other?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I don't know how responsible it is to say this.
I mean, might as well let go.
You know, it's your opinion.
I mean, it's that the, I don't believe that Sean did he comes fired the gun, right?
Uh, at two pockets and Shug, but it makes sense.
And it is reasonable that he might have hired he feed one of the Southside Compton Crimson to do it.
And here's the reason why.
So you go back, you know, to the early 90s when key feed is just a crib who's been a federal prison, but he's moving a lot of weight.
I'm like drugs.
I'm sorry.
I'm talking like Rick Ross.
No, I can't even say what I'm working on.
Yeah, listen.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was saying.
But so he, he makes connections with the guy named Von Zip, who is one of, uh, puffy's associates from Harlem.
And he starts, they start moving drugs together, like part of this larger trafficking organization.
And key feed gets close to puffy.
And so, uh, is all this shit is popping up with the West Coast East Coast thing.
Puffy still wants to make money on the West Coast.
I mean, you got to, you got a tour of California, like you eventually, you got to do it.
And so to do that, he had to hire creeps.
Right.
That was part of the security force because all these bloods, a mad at puffy and bad boy records his record label.
Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick
And so Puffy is trying to get, you know, make his money
on the West Coast and is two pot gets out of prison,
amps up all these threats, you know,
I mean, hit him up, man.
I mean, he's a foe foe, make sure all your kids won't grow.
You know what I'm saying?
Pretty grabbing stuff.
I mean, you know, I mean, so kind of like we've been talking
about somebody's making threats to you.
Like how long do you wait?
Do you wait for somebody to come for you
or do you take the size of action?
So what Keefe D's suggestion is that Puffy wanted him
to kill, shoot and puck.
And I find that to be a compelling argument.
And the Puffy says, I didn't have anything to do
with this guy.
I don't, you know, I don't even know what he's talking about.
Look, bro, if you are a fan of Usher, Usher's first video
release is a song called Can You Get With It?
OK?
Produced by Devon Tayes Wing of Jody.
See, there's a video for it.
And in the video, Usher, like 14 years old,
is laying on this low rider and is going down the highway, right?
That low rider belonged to Keefe D.
You know, so there are clearly connections
between these guys.
And sure, Keefe D had some personal motive to kill them,
because they beat up his nephew.
But also, like it makes sense that Puffy would have wanted
some help.
And eventually, we like, I don't want to be killed.
I want to be proactive here.
And so, look, I think that probably
is most likely what went on here.
And you talk to the lead investigator in this
and a lot of the techers.
And they're like, yeah, it's reasonable with Puffy wanted.
It's understandable.
They said I had felt for him because he was scared.
And he had to do something about it, right?
And so, I don't know.
But, yeah, so that's where I lean.
I don't think the should death row thing makes a lot of sense.
I mean, why would you have somebody
shoot at a car that you're in?
Yeah, that's the thing.
That's the thing is like, there's no,
you can't, there's not a lot of shots
that you can guarantee that they're going to get that done
without getting you shot.
And should actually get shot into shooting, by the way.
You got Grace Bob Bullitt.
So, yeah, man, I find the most likely, the one,
the theory that the authorities stumbled up on in 2009,
that to be the most likely outcome.
Do you think there's any realistic path to charge,
did he with anything at any point?
Like, is that, will we ever see anything else happen
in this case?
I mean, short of finding a receipt
or like a check for a million dollars to KVD.
No, because I mean, look, I mean, there's no proof
that those dudes really knew each other.
Nothing that would hold up in court, right?
Sure.
And so, there's that, but also it's just like,
I don't know, man, Puffy has a lot of money.
There's a lot of ways.
Like, you know, the lead witness against you,
the main guy accusing you of this is a guy
who went into his own defensive from self
and to murder trial by saying I'm a liar.
Yeah.
All I do is lie, I made all this shit up.
And so that's not a really strong case
against somebody who's gonna throw their attorneys
at this case that, you know, Puffy would.
So I don't think, if that, if people are hoping
that he's going to face justice from that,
I don't think it's gonna happen.
Joel, it's been 30 years basically since this happened.
Yeah.
Why did it take so long?
And to what extent did
the kind of like larger corruption problems
that the LAPD had at the time?
The rampart scandal, the allegations that
there was at least one LAPD officer involved
in the biggie shooting, has always been out there.
How, how much do those things play into
why this has been slow locked for 30 years?
Well, I mean, so in 2007, 2008, LAPD tried to get
to the bottom of this.
They had this, you know, test force
with the guy named Greg Cating,
who's usually the guy that you see quoted
around this stuff, because he wrote the book
and was made into a documentary that lays up
this whole thing.
And so back then they were like, let's try
to solve this biggie murder, okay?
And that's what led them to key PD
who led them to the two-pock murder.
But you gotta think about it, man.
And all that time, a lot of people have died.
There was also an ethos of not talking to cops.
I remember I talked to Kathy Scott.
She worked for the Las Vegas Center.
She was the first reporter at the scene of the shoot,
the two-pock shooting.
And she talked about how the police treated all these guys.
Like people that had been shot at, victims,
people that were concerned about two-pock
and they were hassling them, putting them, you know,
trying to handcuff them,
sit them on the curb, all this other stuff.
And she was like, how did they expect them
to want to cooperate with police
under those circumstances?
Like they made them seem like they were
the perpetrators of all that.
And again, you may have some sympathy
for the police under those circumstances,
because there's just been this chaotic shooting
on the Vegas strip.
But because of that, because there's already this ethos
of not talking to cops that pervades gang culture
and because of the cops' treatment of it.
And because, you know, frankly,
because the same reporter Kathy Scott said, look,
why would Vegas, when they're trying to pitch themselves
as a more family-friendly city?
Why would they want to have a trial
talking about how some rappers and gang members
shot at each other?
Like that was her.
She said that somebody in the police department
had said that to her.
So that didn't give them a lot of incentive
to do it until 2008 when gray cating
and this task force gets involved.
And, you know, he gets the confession out of KVD
and KVD signs an agreement with them
with the understanding that would he believe
to be the understanding that he could never be prosecuted?
Right?
But gray cating goes out, sells his book,
does this documentary and KVD is like, God damn, bro,
you put my shit out here.
Like people know that I'm working with the cops,
I'm a snitch.
And all the people already mad at me
for thinking I had some doing killing two-pot.
And so what KVD says to himself is like, you know,
he's getting older than he has colon cancer.
He needs money.
He's like, they're gonna accuse me of this.
I need to be able to make money off of it then.
And so that's what he didn't care.
Talkin' and care.
Talkin' and care.
Talkin' and care.
And then finally, around, you know,
the early part of this decade,
he moves to Henderson Nevada,
which is an invigiarist addiction of the shooting.
He's doing all this talking, man.
And eventually the prosecutor and the cops people
would tell him, hey, this guy is,
he's admitted into the murder right here.
And so at this point, new prosecutor,
new chief of police,
there's all these other people with an incentive
to solve this case.
And you got a guy right here.
It seems like a really easy case.
This guy said he did it.
He was there.
He's a nephew of the guy.
It all makes sense.
And so that's what happened.
KVD thought that he could just keep talking about this
and that he was protected by an agreement
that really did not guarantee
that he would never be prosecuted.
That was his misunderstanding.
And so he got himself in trouble,
trying to make money, which is, again, understandable.
Some of these people have particularly sympathetic,
but it's understandable why they acted
the way that they did.
What's next on the room?
So it's a crazy, crazy story.
Thanks for talking to some of those.
That's so interesting.
Oh, yeah, of course.
So I'm not sure if you saw this, Joel.
There was a former American Idol contestant
was convicted of murder on Tuesday.
Oh, right.
Like today, when we're recording this,
it happened about an hour ago.
Um, he killed his wife, which is obviously
off all this guys a piece of shitty sucks.
Mm.
The trial did give us a nice wild moment last week
when some songs that he wrote with the help of AI
Oh, man.
That he wrote for his mistress
were played in open court.
So this is a dude named Caleb Flynn,
killed his wife.
She was shot to death earlier this year.
He tried to say that intruder came into the house and.
Yeah.
Oh, man, that never, I mean, that what just does guys get divorced.
What are like, just go get divorced.
What are we doing?
Where's I mean, I get it.
It's tough.
Yeah, not saying it's great, but is that not the argument?
What's the home boy, you know, the Paralympian
who shot his girlfriend?
The story of the story.
That's the story.
That's the same thing he said.
Somebody broke in and you know, anyway.
I didn't get it.
I didn't get it.
So they played, the prosecutors played two songs for the jury.
OK.
In the text messages read in court, Flynn says
that he wrote the lyrics and the melody himself
and then runs that through an AI music tool.
Let's please listen to a little bit of one of these songs.
The thing that I want to note is that this is a murder trial.
And despite that, the songs are so cringe.
The cringe level is so powerful, Joel,
that people are like marshaling all of their willpower
to not laugh in open court listening to these songs.
We'll play them.
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
Look at that song going back there, buddy.
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
MUSIC
I mean, it was, do you think that it was that or was it when, so he and his mistress were
texting upwards of 3,000 times a day, Joel?
I mean, man, you know, love is crazy, bro.
Yeah.
3,000 texts might not be a lot, you know, it's a good point.
They were reading them.
I mean, open court and I just, you know, that, that and the songs must have been unbelievable.
Okay, what's next?
I mean, it's an incredible scene.
Wait, real quick.
Does anybody, does anybody talk about how much he looks like Toby from the office yet?
He does look like a, does.
Like an irradiated Toby from the office.
The lost stuff, Linda Sun.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, a little bit more of a sloping forehead, which, you know, whatever.
Yeah, definitely, definitely more height to the, to the cranium.
Right.
Not a squashed face, but sort of like the life has been drained.
There was, you know, as his hairline, and you can look at pictures of him when he was on American Idol.
And his hairline has really been fighting a rearguard action in, in receding.
And it has receded, you know, acres and acres back down and has not yet disappeared down.
And it's like, that is the height of this man's forehead.
People don't do that anymore.
Like people don't do the world be free.
You know, that's, we've moved.
I thought we had all looped, but again, he doesn't live by society is rules clearly.
Again, guys, get a divorce.
This is not going to work.
Yeah, bad ideas.
Hey, don't kill your wife.
All right.
So there's, but there's some interesting allegations have been made against Bob Eiger,
Joel.
Eiger resigns abruptly in February of 2020.
If you'll remember, that was just a little bit before something pretty well happened.
I mean, it was already kind of happening by this time.
Yeah, yeah.
He resigns in February 2020.
He returns in 2022.
The new hero placed in Bob Chapac has got a conspiracy about this is new memoir.
Blames Eiger for the ouster saying that Eiger sabotaged him behind the scenes, but the
more interesting thing is the book includes this passage quote, I have been told by several
high ranking people both in government and private business that in their opinions, the
real reason he left the company so abruptly was his anticipation of the arrival of COVID.
He gives no evidence for this.
Obviously, Disney declined to comment, but the timing is suspicious.
So the theory, I guess, has been out there a little while.
And I was like, I have been posting about this.
I was like, you know, obviously Bob Chapac has a tremendous extra grind and a tremendous
amount of sour grapes with lots of Bob Eiger.
You know, but like if you say that Bob Eiger had early warning of COVID, like, I'm interested
I want to know more.
And then somebody sent me this business insider article, note it from 2019, that noted
that 2019 had the highest amount of CEO exits.
Apparently, it ever recorded 850 plus through July.
Again, this is months before it was even an inkling that COVID was a thing certainly here
in the in the States.
So I don't know color, color me interested.
Some have pointed out that Eiger might be, you know, uniquely attuned to the attendance
at the parks going down and that setting off some alarm bells.
I mean, it's here is the CNBC article.
And it's key points were quote, a staggering 1,640 CEOs left their posts in 2019.
The highest year on record since they being tracking in 2002.
I should note that some of these are like, you know, the Boeing CEO who their company
killed a bunch of people with the plane.
So some of these were like, yeah, I get it.
But still over 1,600 is a lot.
And I don't know, I'm interested.
I'm interested in learning more.
Don't you think so?
I mean, who knows those people better than a guy who ended up being the CEO of Disney?
Yeah.
You know, he knows them.
He's probably on the same day.
We just hear about like the Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey text group and all this stuff and
how they talk to each other.
I mean, I'm willing to believe anything now.
You know, what's more interesting to me too.
So this is that he did this last week, a couple days ago, less than a week.
No statement from Mr. Eiger.
Refuting this.
And certainly no warnings of a lawsuit or any kind of slander proceedings in a court of
law.
I don't know.
Interesting.
Maybe that develops from here on out.
But it certainly seems like the allegation is going on challenge.
Maybe he's worried about the Lakers lack of depth now.
And he said, otherwise I could find.
I don't know.
What's next?
All right, Joel.
Last Tuesday, September 22nd, there's a hacking and extortion group that's called shiny
hunters that claim that it had broken into the FBI through the FBI's recruiting website,
FBI jobs.gov.
They say they stole data on nearly every FBI employee and applicant.
The group didn't want money.
What they wanted was the FBI to retract a May public warning that described shiny hunters
as a group that threatens victims families and swatts people.
Swatts people.
Swatting if you don't know what that is.
When someone has called the cops and said some wild shit about what's going down it,
your address, Swatteam shows up bus in your door or bad time.
Reuters reviewed this 5,000 record sample.
They found names, home addresses, social security numbers, job assignments.
This is including staff in China and Russia.
It's really bad.
It's seriously very, very bad.
There's also just like people that are in these surveillance roles, right?
They later reviewed files that appeared to be staff, psychiatric and medical records.
It's really bad.
5 to 7 terabytes of personnel data from the FBI.
Wow.
The FBI says it's investigating it.
They're calling it a cyber incident involving FBI jobs.gov.
MS now is reporting, I guess, that the bureau told employees internally that it has declared
this a cybersecurity incident.
The job site's still offline.
Excuse me, two to three terabytes, which has not been independently verified, but it certainly
seems like it happened.
Judging from the FBI's response, I guess they just arrested one of the leaders of shiny
hunters today, somewhere in Europe.
It certainly seems like if you work for the FBI, your business is just out there right
now.
The shiny hunters hold 404 media next gov that it would not publish the data.
Well, I mean, we'll see.
Why couldn't somebody better have gotten this information?
That's like, what's somebody that could use that information for good?
Totally.
We need to leverage that.
Somebody get to work on that.
Somebody beef up the FBI's cybersecurity.
What's going on?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Shit about shit, but to be able to go through like, cover your tracks.
Yeah, they're not good.
I mean, we have a terrible understaffed intelligence federal government.
I mean, anything, if any of this shit happens, it's on you guys.
You guys want it this?
Yes, yes.
All right.
Last thing.
And this is really weird.
Milwaukee really, really weird sound happened in Milwaukee, often on for about two hours
the other night.
Some people think that this sound was something saying the words bad boy.
When I listen to this, I don't hear the boy.
I don't hear bad boy.
I could talk myself into hearing bad.
I definitely don't hear the boy.
This happens on the night of September 21st, people that live miles apart on Milwaukee's
south side, they all heard the same noise.
Like I said, some people are saying that it was saying bad boy.
Other people are saying that it's like some sort of like electronic screech or something.
One resident was saying it's like a robot alien screech.
Another dude's like called it an alien drone robot cyborg weird sound.
It definitely sounds like a transformer.
Yes, sounds.
But let's play it Justin.
What an actual f***.
Did you hear that bizarre noise on Monday night on Milwaukee's south side?
It's really baffling residents.
Some tell me they thought it was just a recording of someone saying bad boy over and over again.
Others liking it to something extra terrestrial.
It doesn't sound like a siren.
It's not a train.
It's not a tornado.
Nothing like that.
I'm just like, and I don't believe in aliens like that.
But also, it's like anything's possible, right?
Joel, any series on the bad boy robot?
You know what really messed me up here.
I've never been to Milwaukee before.
I just did a little quick Google search.
I was like, what is the south side of Milwaukee like?
Right.
Because I thought I'm thinking, you know, it's like the south side, a lot of places.
Yeah.
It's like anything can happen.
You know, there's some sort of mouth functioning equipment.
They don't care if a lot of noise is flukking with those black people on the side of town.
But as it turns out, that's actually the north side of Milwaukee.
So I actually don't have a really good theory about what that could be.
I mean, I mean, sometimes you know, have you ever lived in an area where they have like the tornado siren?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have what I mean, yes, Tyler.
I mean, it's yeah, that is that is absolutely not a tornado siren.
No, it's not.
It's not.
So I don't.
I mean, man, maybe it was a aliens dog.
You know what I'm saying?
The office of emergency management told one of the local stations, WISN, that its system is not designed to broadcast audio.
So they're like, the source was not us.
Apparently, Milwaukee police are claiming that nobody contacted them about the noise, which I kind of find hard to believe.
That's crazy.
Come on, man.
No one has identified the sound.
One of my favorite little things that we didn't get to hear in that Joel that you might like is the dude that we saw that was talking that was we're in the beanie.
Yeah, yeah.
So at the end of one of these little reports, he says, quote, I wish I could have sampled it.
I make music.
So I'm like, let me sample it.
I'll turn that into a raw beat.
Did it creep you out?
No, I wish I could have sampled it.
I make music.
So I'm like, oh, let me sample.
I'll turn that into a raw beat, though.
What?
I mean, man, it's WISN stopping in now.
Yeah.
That's going to be the recording.
Go do it.
I'll just say is part of our month of terror.
If any of our listeners in the Milwaukee area have recordings of this sound, that at least depicted saying something closer to bad boy, because I can't really can't hear it.
I want to hear the bad boy.
I don't understand at all.
I want to hear the bad boy.
Please send it to us at Wait a second pod at proton.me.
Joel, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Can I give you my last theory on this?
Yes, no, please.
OK.
When I lived in Palo Alto one night in front of my house, like three o'clock in the morning.
And I look out of the front.
I hear this joke.
And I'm like, what the fuck is this?
I've never heard anything like this before in my life, dude.
And I go and I look out the window.
And they're literally like six coyotes in my front yard, fouling in your front yard.
And I fucking, like it looked like something like a movie.
And I was like, I got to be hallucinating this.
And I caught my wife and she was like, oh shit, it really was, I was like, oh my god.
So maybe it was like 600 coyotes.
Yeah.
That's honestly just as likely as any of the other things.
Certainly.
I don't know.
Joel, thank you so much.
Great to see you, buddy.
Oh, my hey, man.
Anytime.
An eight year old snatched from her bedroom comes back 20 years later to take down her
kidnapper.
A mother goes on an international man hunt to track down her daughter's killer.
A young woman leaves clues behind, outsmarting her kidnapper.
This is unseen.
Police told through the eyes of survivors that prove that even in the darkest places,
there's light and justice to be found.
Follow unseen for more on Spotify.