The Max Headroom Pirate TV Incident Part 1

Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. HGTV has taken over the iconic Bachelor Mansion. If they thought picking a soulmate was hard, just wait till they have to pick the right shade of eggshell. Bachelor Mansion Takeover, all new, Monday at 8 on HGTV. Astonishing Legends Network. Listen to the Astonishing Jump Drawer exclusively at Patreon.com slash Astonishing Legends. I've lost all track of what day of the week it is. We're still talking about movies. I'm sorry. The Earth is going to be fine. They call it the elephant's foot. Michelle said you're hanging on by a thread, so you might as well take that vodka shot. If Prince had crawled out of his grave, I don't think you could have gotten into the live show. If you want to roam the Earth in that, have at it. That's weird. You didn't end the stream. I'm ending it now. I don't know why we don't go away at the end of that. We should. I think we're supposed to. Maybe I'm supposed to make us go away at a time. No, now we're going. Bye, everybody. Good night. Astonishing Legends. We'd like to thank Factor, Smalls, Mint Mobile, our contributors at Patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. For most these days, broadcast television is a thing of the past. Now we're all subscribed to a multitude of streaming services, and we often struggle to remember which platform is home to our favorite show. But before it was called content, it was called programming. When TV was first introduced to the world, broadcasters only worried about filling a few hours a night. But like a gas, media expanded to occupy all of the available airwaves it could get to. And when that wasn't enough, more channels were created to provide more and more media for more and more consumers, watching television at all hours of the day and night. When it began, television traveled the airwaves, invisible signals that anyone could watch with nothing more than an antenna attached to a TV in their homes. All they had to do was be within range of the transmitters sending it out. But when something is so, well, open source, it's also open to being hijacked, or, to use a more colorful term, pirated. And believe it or not, this happened a lot. Dozens of times worldwide from 1941 all the way through last year. Tonight, we're focused on one particular series of broadcast piracy that lasted just barely over two minutes in total. But now, 38 years later, it is still regularly discussed on nearly every platform. This happened on November 22, 1987, in Chicago, when the airwaves of two stations were hijacked in a single night. During the second Pirate broadcast, viewers were subjected to a barrage of bizarre imagery and garbled but comprehensible commentary by a figure wearing a Max Headroom mask. You all remember Max Headroom, right? Whispers of rebellion and surreal imagery filled screens across the city, including the main character being spanked on his naked butt with a flyswatter. Some laughed, others were confused, and still others infuriated. Most were left in shock. Theories emerged. Who orchestrated this operation? Did they want to make a statement? Was it a prank gone too far? Or was it something more sinister? As the dust settled, speculations ram-rampant. Some have pointed fingers at rogue television employees. Others suggest a calculated move by hackers eager to show off. Armchair web detectives put forth detailed theories about misfit partiers orchestrating it all for fun, in a punk act of defiance. Maybe they were accidentally more successful than they ever dreamed of being. We'll probably never know. Because to this day, no one has ever been arrested or admitted to doing it. And why would they if they face up to $100,000 in fines or even a year in jail? The technical skill required to pull off such an intrusion was considerable. This wasn't a simple hack. It required intimate knowledge of broadcast systems and equipment that wasn't readily available to the public. In part one of this two-part series, we'll take our first look at the astonishing legend of the Max Headroom incident. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is an unknown person pirating into WTTV's Signal in Chicago on November 22, 1987. You can drive crazy. Because it's a freaking nerd. Jesus. Join us tonight for part one of a two-part deep dive into the most startling pirate TV hack in American history. And we're back. Actually, I like that one. That's very Chicago. Well, that's just, you know, everybody does the heavy Chicago accent. That's just Chris Farley from the SNL sketch. Who else was in that? Well, George Wendt was in a bunch of them. You know, Norm from Cheers. Robert Smigel was in them. He created the Ambiguously Gay duo for SNL. And Triumph, the insult comic dog. He's a genius. He does a lot of that kind of stuff. But, yeah, DeBears was a hilarious sketch. It was a super fan show, I think. They talk about Chuck Swirsky in that, who's going to come up tonight. Because the whole premise of it is it's like it's Chuck's brother, Bill Swirsky, I think. Who even knows if that's a real person. But, yeah. The last name. Just, it's a real rich mouth sound. Swirsky. Yes. Swirsky. Really, it fits well with that. Look, I have a ton of friends from the Chicago area, but none of them had that heavy of an accent. A few, though. You can tell, though. You can tell, though. You know, Paula Pell, Forrest, who you know well, when she was back on our show back in 2014 for the Devil in the Diner episode, when she was at Saturday Night Live, she and writer Lori Nassau wrote a hilarious sketch called Pat and Patty's Backpack Shack. We got so many backpacks, you're going to have a heart attack. It's one of those ones that really sticks with you. I think a lot of people have forgotten it. Look it up. It's on YouTube. We'll have a link to it in the show. If I remember correctly, I think it was Maya Rudolph, Horatio Sands, and Jimmy Fallon. Just did an amazing job with it. But Chicago accents. Well, was that supposed to be a Chicago accent? Yeah. Yeah. Did I do it bad? No, no. I think you did the character very well. I just didn't know. I just haven't seen the sketch in many, many years. So I couldn't tell. Yes. We digress. We have some very brief housekeeping to get through, folks. For those of you following other shows on the Astonishing Legends Network, we wanted to let you know that the Midnight Library has just released the first episode of season 12. So look for that wherever you get your podcasts. Yes, indeed. And Scared All the Time is now a biweekly show just like Astonishing Legends. And it's growing like wildfire. So if you haven't checked it out yet, find and subscribe to Scared All the Time or visit ScaredAllTheTimePodcast.com to check it out. Those guys are hilarious, and we're not just saying it because they're good friends of ours. That's part of it, though. But yeah, they never seem to run out of topics or things to be scared of. Yes. It's a great show. And also, check out Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf wherever you get your podcasts. Or learn more about them and the Astonishing Dead Letter office at AstonishingLegendsNetwork.com. Okay, well, I can't wait to get to this series. So where do we start? How do we unpack this thing? Well, I'm going to start with a brief disclaimer. If you haven't figured it out already from the media you've already heard, tonight's episode deals with adult concepts and sensitive topics relating to what was broadcast during the Max Headroom Pirate TV incident. Listener discretion is strongly advised. The content may not be suitable for all audiences, and we encourage listeners to exercise caution when listening. There's some spanking happening, and the B word gets dropped. Boy, that is a real time dilation mark. It is so tame by today's standards. Yes, yes, it is. Because society apparently has devolved into a crude and crass and just a state where anything goes. It's all self-expression, and it's all good and fine. So, you know, there are some crude sophomoric humor type things that go on in this broadcast that we'll mention, but nothing too untoward by today's standards. But if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, we'll give you a warning. And this is it. That was it. I'm not going to warn people before every single thing. Oh, yeah. By the way, the very next section is going to have some of that. Oh, there's not. No, there's not a whole lot of it. That's what I'm saying. No, no, it's really. It's just the B word and spanking a naked butt with a fly swatter. That's all. See, but we already warned, so we can say that as much as we can. That's true. Just when we get to it, there's one other element you haven't mentioned yet, and we will talk about that before we get to that because it is. Okay. But like I said, if you watch it, you may not even pick up on it. So we're going to try to unpack all the visual elements of this thing. If there's any clues, Easter eggs, that kind of thing, maybe there are, maybe there aren't. But yeah, there's just some elements that are just, let's just say crude, sophomoric humor type things. Crude, rude, and socially immortalizing. Yeah. In the mood. Okay. All right. Well, let's dive into it. So we just gave you a bunch of warnings. Now we're actually going to play the audio from the video. And this is where it's like, oh, we're just in an audio format here. We are working on future video formats of the show. We don't have that available right this minute. So it's just a difficult thing. Well, just feel lucky you're not having to see the butt. Yeah. Honestly. But if you do want to watch it, if you want to stop what you're doing right now, if you're listening on your phone or on your computer or on a device that has a screen on it, which a lot of them do now, we made a shortened URL so you can get right to the actual video. That is tinyurl.com slash pirate max. So T-I-N-Y-U-R-L.com slash pirate max. P-I-R-A-T-E-M-A-X. If you want to go and feast your eyes on the imagery that goes with this audio, there is a lot of analog audio distortion in this, which I think makes it cooler and more creepy when you're listening to it. And so you will hear, listening to the full file here, which we're going to dissect a little bit after we play it, you will hear sections where you can't really tell what's going on. If you go and you watch the picture, believe me, you'll figure it out. It's like showing a chart on radio. And I just now thought of this. We watched this a ton of times now. Yeah. I just thought this probably loses a lot. And that's just the audio description, but you'll get the idea. No, the idea is that there's something about the visuals that I think are the element that creep people out the most. It's really not so much about the message. It's the medium. And I'll talk about Marshall McLuhan later on. The medium is the message. And the message to me is that this could be done and it was done. And the visual aspect of it is really maybe 60, 70% of the creep factor. But the audio does make it really creepy. And you want to know, okay, now that you busted in, what have you got to say? Folks, you may hear a little bit of clear audio at the beginning of this. That's because this is an interruption of a PBS broadcast of Doctor Who in Chicago. The first interruption was on the live news for WGN, also Chicago. This one was most likely intended for that as well, but WGN managed to block that. We'll explain that later. So when they came back on the air, they only managed to get onto PBS with this, but people were taping it. Probably because it was Doctor Who. I'm sure a lot of people were taping it. Back at that time, we didn't have DVRs. We couldn't just choose when we wanted to watch something. You would have to take your VCR and program it or set it to record when you left the house to go to dinner and come back. And then it would record that. You have to be on the right channel too. And it would record that show you wanted to see. So a lot of folks did tape this. And that's how it got captured. And considering that it went out live, if people hadn't been taping it, we wouldn't have it. We wouldn't have a record of it. Which the interesting thing to me too is that WTTV wasn't recording their own broadcast. And I don't know if there was an engineering reason that that wasn't happening. Why, when they got to investigating this, they had to rely on citizens sending in VHSs? Because that's what happened with the feds when they started digging into this. Yeah, no, there are reasons for that. It's something that I've come across that you would think there'd be more of. In doing research now, going way back when I first started the show, I, of course, depending on the topic or story, would start to research it. And if it was a local happening, obviously the local news is going to cover it. And I would say in the 70s and up to the 80s, you know, video cameras, portable ones, especially were not as prevalent. They would still be shooting 16 millimeter VNF stock, which is video news footage or that type of color reversal film, which was quick and easy to process, cheap to shoot. And they would say, the old saying was film at 11. So something that happened during the day. We're going to talk about it at six, but you don't get to see it until we get the film processed at 11. Exactly. So it took time to process the film. And in the early, early days, if anybody studied the film and TV, you would know that it was even real complicated logistics in that they would fly sometimes the film back to, you know, the local area where the news is being broadcast if it was shot abroad and get it turned around in time to be projected and air. So, but specifically with video, what I noticed in doing some research and like, oh, there's got to be a news story on this somewhere. So I would contact a local station. Well, of course, a lot of those at the time, there were still some independents. A lot of them that were owned by conglomerates. In this case, WGN was owned by the Chicago Tribune. You see that in different regions, like small media conglomerates, but the Chicago Tribune and that kind of conglomerate, they're owned a lot of different stations and even across the country. And so what you notice though, is that you would think they have archives. Well, I would call to check on something and then say, well, we didn't keep tape on that. Really? Yeah. Because they purged them all. And then when Disney took over a lot of local stations, even in LA, KCAL 9, they did a huge purge, I think in the early 2000s of a lot of their videotape. And some of it was digitized, but a lot was not. And then there is a service, I forget the name of it. You can go to where they have kept that, but it's kind of expensive to order a copy. So it's like, yeah, we can, we have that broadcast. It's going to be $200. Like, yeah, we're not that interested. But yeah, so a lot of that was, is not around. And you were lucky, as Scott was saying, that was a huge breakthrough. And it's not just a tangent, folks. This is part of the story is the fact that now in this era in 1987 was a technological breakthrough in the fact that average people now had access more and more so to video cameras and their own VCRs. And before that, what Scott would tell you is like, a few, the old timers will say in the States, of course, but if you wanted to watch a program, you had to sit in front of the TV at that time to watch it. And so in this case, though, a lot of people were taping this with their VCRs. And Scott will tell you, remember VCR plus Scott, there was a code and TV guide that made a lot simpler. You just punch in the code and the VCR would automatically find, I think. Find the channel and the time. Yeah, and there was a TV tuner built into a lot of these VCRs that would go to the right station, to the right channel, get that and start the VCR at that time if your clock was set and not just blinking 12 all the time. Yes, if you had VCR plus. Right. And so that was a later addition, but you could just manually punch, play and record and start recording and then watch your shows whenever you wanted. That was a huge breakthrough, huge turning point for the home video consumer. And so that's also part of the story here in that now we have average citizens having a lot more control over something that was only controlled by media corporations, your big TV stations, ABC, CBS, NBC. And what was playing at that time was a rerun. Now our Who fans out there will know this episode here called Horror of Fang Rock. And so there was a fair number of people who had tuned in and this was airing on WTTW, the PBS station there in the Chicago area. As we said, the first interruption was WGN, but this one came later. We'll get into the specifics of that here in a minute. So now you're going to hear the entirety of the audio portion of this broadcast. Again, if you want to see it, go to tinyurl.com slash PirateMax. That'll take you to the YouTube link that shows the original interruption during Doctor Who. But we're going to dissect it a little bit on the other side of it here. But first, we're going to play it for you. It's only about a minute and a half or two minutes, I think, for the whole clip. So, Sarah, if you would, roll that. You should talk often with the old ones of your tribe. That is the only way to learn. I'll get you a hot drink, man. Why are you taking some dry clothes now? Because it was a freaking nerd, Jordan Chex, wasn't it? Freaking love, Jesus. I thought that was so weird. Hey, among the greatest world newspaper nerds. Where are the other ones? As far as I can tell, a massive electric shock, he died instantly. Okay, so that's one of the weirdest things. I truly believe that it probably inspired a ton of horror films and probably sound designers and audio people and even visual folks in the years that came after that. When they went to make films, you were like, what can we do that's really uncanny? Because this is a lot of uncanny valley vibes that you get from looking at it, which is part of the nature of Max's design and all of that. We'll talk about the history of Max Headroom as a character in part two. But this is after that. This is after Max was embedded and it's a parody of Max using this weird mask that this person got. Yeah, there's a lot of elements going on here and people, you might think nowadays, again, to allude to my earlier comments about how things have changed and our standards and acceptances have changed over the decades. First and foremost, this is a disruption of what should not be disrupted. Now, our attentions are so fractured by video clips and people, you know, you can watch something for two minutes or not or pause it or turn it off or go look at another reel short or clip. And then, like I said, a TV came on, you watch the program, there were commercials in it, and that was it. And that's what people were used to. And that's what people expected. And when you disrupted that expectation, it was disturbing. There's a very disturbing element to that. And so, what you'll see in a lot of comments from people that were interviewed at the time, what they thought about it in the local Chicago area, they went from, you know, mild amusement. The comment I read the most from people, they were both bewildered and intrigued. They were both disturbed and fascinated by this because, again, how did this happen? That's not supposed to happen. We don't usually see that kind of thing. And like I said, that's not controlled by regular people. So what's going on here? How is somebody able to do this? What do they have to say? And then when you get this little video message, it's so disjointed and weird and childish, just lowbrow kind of humor. I think you would expect a more sophisticated message for the type of sophisticated amount of hacking that would have to go on to be able to hijack the airwaves. Again, this is not meant for everybody. There are FCC rules in place to prevent this kind of thing and stiff penalties and fines and even jail time for anybody to do that. There are very strong rules. You can't just jump on and do whatever you want over public airwaves. So I think the first thing is that people were watching this. Well, again, the first time that happened on WGN and the nine o'clock hour as the station was delivering the sports report, something popped on, but it was just a visual. Yeah. So the first time you saw the video, you saw the character with the Max Headroom mask. He was in front of a slab of corrugated metal that was swiveling, which would kind of mimic. It's like a low res way to mimic a geometric background that the real Max Headroom had. And the masked person was rocking back and forth erratically and nodding at the camera, maybe laughing or attempting to speak. But the only discernible sound during that was a loud grating buzzing noise or a staticky and garbled buzzing sound. And after only 28 to 30 seconds, the engineers at WGN, who were initially kind of freaked out about this, managed to get control back of their broadcast tower by quickly changing the frequency of the signal that linked the broadcast studio to the station's transmitter on top of the John Hancock Center. And so when it came back, it had interrupted sports anchor Dan Rohn, and he addressed it with a touch of humor. And he said, well, if you're wondering what happened, so am I. And he joked that the computer running the news took off and went wild. He then resumed his report on the Chicago Bears game, which is what he'd been talking about, and it got cut off. And the technicians at the studio and people in the Chicago area were like, what was that? They had no idea what was going on. It's almost spookier at that point that it didn't have any words in it. So if that had been the only thing, that would be even weirder. You think so? Well, you don't have no message at all other than a guy in a Max Headroom mask acting crazy. Perhaps easier to accept other than people were annoyed. Because listen, this happened during the 9 o'clock news for WGN-TV. Yeah, so Dan Rohn, and I read some comments from local people. They used to refer to him as Dan Groen. But apologies to Mr. Rohn. But that's not us. Again, he's trying to deliver this report. People want to know what happened during the Bears game that day. Yeah. And then suddenly you get this joker coming on. But this does happen because at a TV station, if you've been fortunate to go take a look at one. And when I was growing up, my dad was involved in advertising. And so to air the commercials that he was producing for his clients, he took me to the TV station a lot. So I got to see behind the scenes. And it was kind of fascinating because in the control panel, it's a huge Death Star, like the Grass Valley switcher, the video switcher that they showed to operate the death laser there. Let me just clarify that, what Forrest is talking about there. I thought you would. On the Death Star, in the original Star Wars movie, when the Death Star blew up Alderaan, that was a Grass Valley group, a GVG video switcher, which was the analog way that you got to choose between cameras and do wipes or different sources as you're broadcasting live. So that little T-bar thing that the Stormtrooper with the weird black helmet does, the asymmetrical helmet, when he does that, it goes, and then he blows up Alderaan. That was a video switcher. There you go. Thank you for that. I thought you would jump in there without having to ask. No, I got to let people know what's going on. A lot of people know that now. The magic, just the older the internet gets, the magic, and the more clickbait videos that are getting cloned, the magic is disappearing from everything. That's right. Now we're doing it. So now we're telling it. That was a video switcher that blew up Alderaan. The relevant part of my anecdote here is that what was fascinating to me, and my dad pointed out, is that in the control panel, people don't see how the TV sausage is made usually. And what you could see, he said, now, son, take a look. That monitor is showing the live feed coming in from NBC New York, and how that signal travels is through repeaters. Well, how does that signal? Well, if you live out in the hinterlands, you might have pretty poor TV reception over the air, OTA. And it might be a little fuzzier. There might be some static. And so the signal is weak. Signal strength plays a factor in the story as well. And so what you would see is that signal coming in directly from the source, from the factory, from NBC, and it would pipe in. And then you could see basically what would happen is that, of course, then local commercials are inserted during the commercial breaks. And sometimes you'll see this as a mistake. Like I said, I'm pointing out here that it's not a perfect science. A lot of it nowadays is computer control. Back then, a lot of it was also manual. And so you would see the signal come in, and then you'll see bars and tones. You'll see the color bars there. You might see some Chiron, some type graphics that'll say a live feed, NBC4, come in. And if they don't switch it, sometimes it pops up on air. So sometimes there are mistakes. But then you would see the local commercials play for your area that are specific to your region there. And then you would see the monitor that showed the signal that was going out to people's TVs in your local neighborhood area. And so you would see the raw feed. You would see what gets applied. And then you got to see the end product that was being beamed out to actually to people's TVs. Right. So you could check what you were putting downstream of the master broadcast. And here's the key is that at WGN, of course, it's a major station. And they had technicians and TV engineers on hand who saw this little blip come up and were able to correct it by switching the frequency and getting that off the air. Now, to Scott's point, now you saw this image come on. I'm sure people have a lot of stories locally where they are where there was a mistake. I remember one where actually some pornography went out over the air accidentally. Yeah. Because somebody in the control room late at night when not many people were working there was probably watching something they shouldn't have been hit the wrong switch. And that went out over the air. I actually have the information on that. Oh, you do? If it's the one I think you're referring to. Well, my point being is that that would not have come through in the national feed, the national signal coming through. That was a local thing that got inserted later into that over the air broadcast. And so at this time, you just saw this visual again of at the time, everybody kind of knew who Max Headroom was, a pop icon character. It was kind of goofy. So he had already had some notoriety. And so he kind of comes on. It's like, well, that could be anything. To Mr. Rohn's point, that could be somebody goofing around in the back of the station on a camera. It wasn't meant to go out or maybe they did it. But, of course, you would be fired immediately if they caught you. It was kind of a laughable moment. It was very short. That was the other thing. It didn't go on. So it was like a bit of a blip, lasted about 15 seconds. And then, of course, Dan Rohn restarted his report on the Bears game for the day. Right. And just kind of laughed it off. And they made a joke about it. I think one of the co-anchors says, I think you like that so much. I think you did on a purpose. Yeah, I'm sure I did. And then sometime later, another rival station had made a joke about it. So it was kind of funny at this time. But that was the first thing. And again, that was about 9, 14 p.m. Right. And it seemed to be, if it was a joke, it got out there. But apparently not to the full effect of the pranksters. And it's short enough that people probably were like, did that happen? Because that's when something shocking like that happens and you actually watch it. You're like, am I losing my mind? Did the crazy guy just pop up in the middle of the newscast? It's like, oh, yeah, they referred to it. So it must have happened. But we don't have any proof of it. But then two hours later, around 11, 15, it happens again. But this time, not on WGN. Right. On WTTV, the PBS station. But the WTTV transmitters are on the same building. We'll talk more about the technicality of this later. So that makes sense. But there's also some reason to believe that once WGN changed the frequency, that Max, whoever he is, was unable to adapt to the new WGN frequency. And as a result, had to switch over to WTTV, which was broadcasting the Doctor Who stuff. And this was PBS again. And you'll see here, as we start to dissect this message a little bit, that the messaging from Max doesn't really apply to Doctor Who. At first, you think it could, but actually, it probably connects back to the WGN newsroom again. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar. Which is wild considering how delicious it is. Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers, just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. Hello, hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit ibm.com slash smart talks. I'm doing it right. And now, back to the show. There was something that I thought was obviously directed at the program and a clue to who these people might be and what the message is or who the joke is being played on. When he says, he comes on the air, breaks into the program there and says, that does it. He's a fricking nerd. And I think it might be towards the character that is on the Doctor Who program. See, I disagree with this. Right. So we'll elaborate, but we'll just say that it's a response to this program and that what was known or somebody might interpret this as, okay, he knows that there's a bunch of nerds who watch Doctor Who at 11 o'clock at night on a Sunday. And he's kind of tired of it. He's saying he's a freaking nerd. Or is he commenting on himself? So that's how the program starts off is like, okay, I've had enough of this nerd fair. That guy's a nerd. There are a few references to nerddom in here. That's just one of the two at least. And then you have to wonder, the person doing this is most likely a computer slash TV engineering nerd. Because this is, again, a sophisticated hack. You just can't go buy this stuff at Radio Shack, which was still around at the time. That's right. And I think one is still open, so I'm with it. But yes, right after he says that. So right, he goes, that does it. He's a freaking nerd. And then he laughs. And then he goes, yeah, I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky. And so that's why I think the nerd he's referring to is Chuck Swirsky. I think that when they recorded this, it was not live. And we can explain why in a minute. But I think when they recorded this, they had intended this piece to go on to WGN as well. And then when WGN changed frequencies, they had to move it over to WTTV. And so the nerd in question, although it fits perfectly for Doctor Who, it's like Doctor Who slam against the audience. I think he's still trying to malign the newsroom at WGN. He goes, I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky, freaking liberal. Right. And then after this, he bends down. He goes, oh, Jesus. Then he moans and says, here we go. Yeah. And you can't really tell what's happening. There's a little bit of an implication that he might be sitting on a toilet or something. Then he holds up a Pepsi can and says, catch the wave, like a question, and throws the can off camera. Then he starts singing, your love is fading. In theory, people think that as, you know, there's a famous song by Lou Pride, which came out in 1970. They think that that is what he's singing. I, the first thing I thought of was the song by the Temptations, which came out in 1966, I think. I can't remember. I looked it up, but now I can't remember. You know, your love is fading. I shouldn't sing. I'm horrible at it. I get the idea. That was the first one I thought of, but there are folks that are like, no, it's Lou Pride. But either way, Sarah, can you just play that bit again from where he says, that does it to the end of your love is fading. So now everyone listen for this. That does it. He's a fricking nerd. Yeah, I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky, fricking liberal. And then here we go in the whole Coke, Pepsi thing, which we'll talk about in a second. If you'll just play that, Sarah, through to your love is fading. A lot of this analysis is very, very expertly explained in a documentary on YouTube called The Max Headroom Hijacking Incident, full documentary by The Bizarre, which is a channel, B-I-Z-A-R-R-E, normal spelling. The Bizarre bills itself as an original documentary anthology series exploring strange yet true events and the impact they have on the world around us. This was produced by the Reyna brothers, R-E-Y-N-A, Matthew and Andrew. They're credited as the sole writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, and creators of The Bizarre. And these are very cool, well put together YouTube documentaries. It's really well done. You know, a lot of times you click on something like this and it's just so amateurish and you're disappointed in it like you are with our show probably. But this one is put together fairly well. It seems like these guys haven't created anything in a while. So everybody, let's go over there and check them out. Subscribe to them. Maybe they can get back to work. They have some announcements about things coming up that seem like they're eight months to a year old now. But I wanted to give them credit because their analysis of the dialogue in the video is pretty enlightening. Okay, I want to say something else about the song, man. And this is what's interesting to me because I think it's the Reyna brothers and probably other people on the internet, especially a lot of the people who are like, Chicago owns this whole hack. We own everybody in this pirate thing. All of the references are Chicago references because when Max for, we'll just call him Max and air quotes is like, your love is fading or whatever. The first thing that I heard, not just from the Reyna brothers, but other people online was that it's this Lou Pride song. And when I heard it, of course, I wasn't familiar with the Lou Pride song. Lou Pride, by the way, he was born in 1946 in Chicago. He was an American soul and blues singer. A lot of people know who he is, but he wasn't as big as some of the other artists out there. But he did get a lot of recognition in the rhythm and blues genre. Your Love is Fading, his song, was released in 1979. It's one of his biggest songs. It showcases his style and everything. It's a signature song for him, but it's a cool track and it's actually hard to find. I couldn't find it on Spotify. I actually had found it on YouTube video. And you can find the 45 on Discogs if you collect vinyl like I do. One of my favorite things in the world to do. So I was interested in this song. But the first thing I thought about was I Know I'm Losing You by The Temptations, which starts out with, your love is fading. You know, I'm a horrible singer. I apologize. And we can't play the audio. We'll get sued. That's true. We might get sued anyway, just for your rendition. Just look it up. But like that song came out in 1966. It actually came out 13 years before the Lou Pride song, but it was a huge hit. It was on the album called Psychedelic Shack, but it's Motown. It's out of Detroit. So like there's a part of me that's wondering, like, I don't know which, because all he says is your love is fading. So we don't know which one he's singing for sure. And I don't think you can tell. I mean, my key is often horrible and I'm tone deaf, obviously. You can't tell which one I'm singing either. I don't know that you could definitively say that Max is singing the Chicago version. I'd be interested to hear from some musicians, like when they hear what they think. In fact, maybe I'll send it to Tom Maxwell, our friend who came on for the Bloodfall episodes that used to be with the Squirrel Nut Zippers. I bet he'll know right away because I'm not a musician. But maybe not. It's so garbled and it's hard to hear what's going on anyway. In the songs, they kind of have the same message. I mean, obviously those words are the same, but I don't know. They feel a little different to me, you know. And also, I can't figure out if it refers to a message that our perpetrator or artist, depending on how you look at it, is whether he's saying, oh, is it fading for me? Am I getting on your nerves kind of like Bono's dumb thing of, am I bourguing you, you know, kind of thing? Or is it a comment on WGN? You know, it's just kind of, oh, WGN is selling out and commercialization and whatever. Because at that time, Max Headroom was doing commercials for Coca-Cola. That character had blown up and gotten really big. Again, we'll talk about that in a second. So I don't know. And I don't know if you even have an opinion on it, Forrest. And I'm probably overthinking it. But I just wanted to comment on that. Because for me, when I watch the broadcast signal interruption, which is the boring, nerdy name for it, when I watch it and I heard him say, your love is fading, I mean, I immediately went to the Temptation song in my head. But I didn't know the Lou Pride song. And maybe if I lived in Chicago and was more of a crate digger, like looking for old or obscure records, which I do have a few weird ones, but they mostly relate to the paranormal. If I knew more about that and I had a better musical education, I would have known the Lou Pride one. And Tom's probably going to make fun of me for not knowing it. So I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that? And maybe it's irrelevant. Maybe it doesn't really matter. Well, everybody wants to add their own opinion, which also talks about media creation and conglomerates and the man making mass media and it coming out kind of crappy and silly, which is also like that Mac the Knife, the McDonald's commercial that was on that gets- Yeah, that got interrupted. That gets interrupted. So what Forrest is talking about here is the first interruption, the WGN one, the shorter one, which there was no discernible audio on, it interrupts a commercial that McDonald's had. And it's a crescent moon, a guy in a crescent moon costume singing Mac the Knife and playing a grand piano in this ridiculous nightclub, big, fancy kind of set. And he's a nightclub singer, but he has a crescent moon for a head. And I think the idea was that- Yeah. And it's big, folks. This is like a three-foot crescent moon from tip to tip. It's like, I don't even know how that guy was not bumping the piano while he was wearing that. Was it a guy in a- Before CGI. Was it a guy in a mask? It had to be. There was- I guess it wasn't animated. Yeah, it wasn't animated. And you couldn't do that with computers. Well, there you go. Another, pointing to another episode or instance of some uncanny valley that's disturbing masks in general. Also, the Reina brothers in the documentary point that out, is that masks just in general are disturbing by their very nature, and they're meant to hide. In this case, it's like, it's a strange thing that should not be alive, and it's singing about McDonald's being open late. So that was, I believe, the ad campaign was that now McDonald's is late. You can have a Big Mac late into the night. Right. Back the night. That's right. That's right. But the original point is, reeling it back or trying to, is that you can overanalyze this thing. And I think that's what's happening. But what people are trying to do with this is nail down, look, obviously, it's somebody from the Chicago area. So that's the first thing we know. Because the big question is, who is this guy? Does anybody here know him? If he is a Chicago local, somebody's got to know this person with a set of skills because they're going to brag about it. Also, there's a lot of references to nerds. This is a very close-knit community, especially around that time of hackers, of phone freakers. Yeah. We're going to talk about freakers in part two, folks. It's like with any small group like that. They get together. They chat with each other. They know each other, even if they're competitive. I want to interject something there. I'm so glad you brought that up just real quick. And I'm sure it'll come up in part two when we're talking about technique and who these folks might have been and everything. It's interesting because Max refers to nerds and people being nerds all through this thing and is very clearly himself a super nerd. Like, and would have to be to pull this off technically. But also, it's like a nerd calling other people's nerds. It reminds me, actually, of Judah Friedlander in the movie about Harvey P. Carr with Paul Giamatti. It's called American Splendor. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It's excellent. But in that movie, he's like, I am a nerd. I am a nerd and I'm proud of being a nerd. And that's like definitely a little bit of what's going on here. I mean, what this guy did is really punk and cool. But it's also like, this guy's a nerd. Well. And he's talking about other nerds. It's not the super cool guy. It's not the jock or the bro being like, hey, nerd. It's like, it's one of us. It's a nerd. Call another nerds nerds. And it may be for them as, there's two audiences here. I think the people that would appreciate this, well, maybe three of people in the middle. So you have the people that would appreciate this and cheer this on like, yeah, they did it, you know? And did we know that guy? And who's doing this? And then there's the people that were really offended and annoyed. You invaded them and their television viewing. And then there's the people in the middle that, like, I think a lot of folks perhaps were both at once impressed and annoyed and maybe scared and frightened a little and bewildered. And so you have all this mix of emotions. That's most of the comments that I read on this. Like, people were freaked out by this, but they're also intrigued. As I said at the beginning of the show, it's like, there's a combination of like, this kind of gives me the creeps, but what is this? It's like a car crash. Yeah. You can't look away. I'm going to slow down and take a look at this. You might not get out of the car, but you're definitely slowing down. You're not just flying by it. You could say in the early 80s, I mean, Revenge of the Nerds, the movie came out in 1984. So nerd culture was in full swing even before that. But now- Yeah. And nerds were high profile at this point. Because, you know, Bill Gates was coming up and- Yeah, you're 10 years later, you know, and so there's always been those kind of folks around. But like I said, they're coming into prominence now, and their power is showing that they have power over media, computers, the budding internet, all these things that would end up controlling all of us and where it's at now. And so here you have a celebration of all these things. And I think, you know, getting, once again, back to your original point about the Lou Pride song, and does it matter? Well, I like the idea, though, that Lou Pride is a local Chicago reference and known figure. And so that just also cements that this is really for a Chicago audience. I don't think the perpetrators, this is not a national broadcast. They knew it wasn't going out nationwide, right? It's not during this- Yeah, but which of those two songs is more of an earworm at the time? Which one is going to be more front of mind if you're improvising in this, like, sort of weird, panicky scenario? I think you just hit the nail, a partial nail on the partial head here about a panicky thing, because I sense a lot of nervousness. Like I said, if you just got thrown up on stage, and it's like, do a bit, and you're kind of nervous about it, and you're just throwing stuff out. This is what the person knows. So like I said, I think there's some vague, loose ideas about what to say once they got on camera, or making the tape. They're set pieces. They maybe had their set pieces, but not their moment-to-moment. Right. It may be something that the person hummed all the time. And again, that might be an identifier, but again, after all these years, no one's put that together. It's like, oh, that guy used to say that all the time. It's like, you love his fate. You know how people, like, they'll have a catchphrase. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar. Which is wild considering how delicious it is. Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers, just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing. Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. Hi, I'm Lizzie. And when I'm not out hiking in the Oregon wilderness, hoping to see Sasquatch, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Now, let's get back to the show. By the way, I wanted to point out today, as we were doing research and working, I looked at the first one again that only lasted, I can't remember what, 37 seconds or something. The one that hacked into WGN that had no audio. If you look closely, it seems pretty clear to me that he's trying to talk behind the mask. I feel like there's jaw movement. And so I think that confirms that that wasn't just a creepy, I'm going to break in and not say anything. I think their audio was not working. And that's what led them to come back at 11.15, two hours later on the next channel, because WGN kicked them off. But I do think that it was a misfire, the first one, basically. Yeah, it's not so much perhaps a love letter or hate mail to Chicago, but kind of a mix of just what was on the person's mind and just local things. Stream of consciousness. Yeah, a little bit of that. And they're a product of that area. And like I was saying earlier, Chicago is such a rich environment for so much stuff, you know, tradition, history. Culturally. Yeah, culturally, right. It's a major metropolis. And so there's a lot going on. And so there's a lot of references. And just like I said, it is a bit of stream of consciousness. That's kind of the idea I'm getting here in that there's a lot of clues to look for, but none of them really ultimately led to any identification, except perhaps years later. That's part two stuff. We're not going to get ahead of ourselves. The next thing I wanted to talk about, which came right after this moment, was right after hearing him say, your love is fading, he starts humming the theme to a TV show called Clutch Cargo. Sarah, would you please, that's our editor, folks, if you didn't know that, been with us for almost since the beginning. Would you please play that part of the signal interruption where he starts humming the theme to Clutch Cargo, and then he says, I can still see the X, or what we think is, I can still see the X. Right, so that in theory, and it's a theory, is a reference to the very last episode of a short-lived animated series that ran in Chicago, among other places, called Clutch Cargo, which we're going to talk a lot about here in a second. Here's the actual theme to that. Clutch Cargo with his pal, Spinner and Paddlefoot, in another exciting adventure, the Big X. Oh no. Hey guys, Sarah popping in, so that was the clip individually, and these are the two layered on top of each other, just so you can hear them together, for fun. Okay, bye. Exciting adventure, the Big X. So I believe it was the Rainer Brothers from the Bizarre channel on YouTube, from that excellent documentary we talked about, like over an hour long, that thought that reference was to Clutch Cargo, and specifically, as we said, an episode called The Big X. That was the very last episode of the show that ever aired, and even though that show was syndicated, which meant it played in other markets, it had gone off the air, at least in Chicago, like 10 years earlier, according to them anyway. So they and others think it's another Chicago reference, but by the same token, as you said, WGN was in multiple markets. They own lots of TV stations. My wife, who's very interested in this story, was like, I used to see Clutch Cargo. She never lived anywhere near Chicago, and that would have been way after this. And also, I've heard of it. I never had watched it, but I did watch WGN from North Carolina, frequently. Oh, really? It was one of the first channels in the cable packages in North Carolina. Okay, so that was another revolution, too, cable television, which for me occurred, we got it early, so that would have been 79, 80, when I was in junior high. And I think one of the first round of communities in the country to get cable TV, and we got Turner Broadcasting, and that was a revolution. Yes, we had that, too. Everybody will say, from this specific age, that you had four channels, or three. So you had your ABC, NBC, CBS. Fox wasn't until much later, and that was cool. It's like, oh, there's a fourth thing to watch. And so when you got cable TV, it opened up a whole world. There was HBO, but that only came on, I think, at 6 p.m. and ended at midnight. And just quickly, in layman's terms, I just want to tell people this. Prior to this, what happened was you had to be somewhere where you could receive the signal from the antenna. The invention of cable TV, in that case, what it was, was this one big antenna, and then they took cables from it and sent the signals way far and out to everybody so that everyone could share the same antenna as opposed to everyone having to only be able to get what they could get in their home with their own antenna. That was what CableVision was because the video came over the cable from the antenna to your house. Yeah, you first started off with an electromechanical tuner box on your set top there, which is a separate box. And I think it had a dial on it with 55 channels, and that was revolutionary, that you still had to click the channel, the dial there, to get your station, but it was 55 now. Yeah, and then Springsteen even did a song in 1992 called 57 Channels and Nothing On. Can you imagine only having 57 things to get your programming from at this point? Yeah, now, and now there's 500 channels and it's still nothing on. Yeah. But getting back to Clutch Cargo, so again, it gave me a really weird, odd feeling watching this, and I watched all 20 minutes of this, the five-part series here. So what Clutch Cargo was, it's an animated TV series. The cartoonist that created it was Clark Haas, and that started broadcasting on March 9, 1959. There was very short segments here, and I think what the idea was that a station could just show five minutes, each was like a chapter, so it's like only five-minute episodes, and they would show those each day, and then the station, I think on the weekends, could play the whole thing, so it'd be a 20-minute run with commercials, of course. But each chapter, you could say, kind of had a cliffhanger, like, stay tuned next time. And then you would see, it would pick up and it would say, like, last time this happened. And it was not very sophisticated, but it's very weird for a couple of reasons. It doesn't look like the other animation, and that was because it was done very cheaply, but it had fairly interesting storylines. But it was also regional, so this is another thing. Like, nobody else in the country, if you didn't get, we certainly didn't. I'd heard of the name, but only when I was an adult. And there were other cartoons I'd known about as a kid. Was it Grape Ape and the Magilla Gorilla? Like, what are those? We didn't get those. They did not air in my area. But we had our own shows. And so Clutch Cargo, what makes it weird and kind of... I would make a connection to the Max Headroom video here in that what was Uncanny Valley about Clutch Cargo is that it used a newly patented technique called synchrovox, which was to take basically live filming of somebody's mouth, of an actor's mouth, the VO actor, the voice actor's mouth, and paste that over the cartoon character. But as I was telling Scott, what's odd about it I didn't really notice is that you may not notice looking at it because the resolution of the film part of the mouth is so low. It looks like it might be animation, but it's actually somebody's face. And it was a cheap way... It's a very soft mat, too, around the lips. Like, so you're like, wait, is that a real mat? I can't even tell if it's... It is a real... And then you're like, whoa, it's freaking me out. Yeah. So here's why that's... You still see it today, okay? So you've seen internet shorts and clips here on Instagram. Somebody's done it with their... Became famous doing it with their thumb and pasting in human eyes and a mouth over the thumb, and now you'll see it done over an orange or other fruits and vegetables with comedic timing, and it's still going on today. That was started, I think, it was the first widely known usage of that kind of technology. It's more difficult and expensive to animate a cartoon character's mouth in sync with the dialogue that's being uttered. And so it's a cheap and easy way to animate this thing, but there's just a weird feeling about clutch cargo. Like, it's just strange. And so one episode that he's talking about is called The Big X, and here's what's just not a little coincidence. It's about a large unknown object being spotted by a telescope that's hurtling towards the moon. And Scott, just a couple of days ago, sent me an update about... We were talking about this on a junk tour about the asteroid that was supposed to hit Earth, has now got a 4%, roughly, chance of hitting the moon. Yeah, it's chances of hitting the moon are going up. Right. So that kind of connects with clutch cargo here in this about X, which the person, the Max Headroom guy, makes a reference to in that, I can still see the X. So obviously, part of that nerddom of adults watching kids' cartoons, just about that time, either sixth grade or going into junior high here, seventh, eighth, ninth grade, what came on in the mornings was Space Battleship Yamato. So it's an early anime-style Japanese series, but the serialized part of it was fun to watch, and then you would see that eating your cereal in the morning, and then you could talk about it at school when you got there and what happened in the show. Oh, and the other thing, Forrest, I know you said you had already watched it. I watched through that whole episode today of The Big X, and I can still see the X. That line, I was listening specifically for it, does not happen in that episode. It's not a direct quote. It's not a fun, like, oh, they say this. It's not pivotal. I thought it was going to be some pivotal quote at the highlight, the denouement of the episode, you know, in Act 3 or whatever. It's not in there, but the whole episode centers around a thing, kind of a big ball meteorite thing, about to collide with the moon, like we talked about. And they keep referring to it as The Big X, which to me, from a writing standpoint, is weird because it's a big ball, but whatever. But they never say that line. So maybe it's a reference to a different episode. That's what some people think. Well, oh, it's a leap to say it has to do with that last one. Some folks say that. But I'll tell you this for us. My wife, Emily, who loves this weird legend, as I said earlier, she thought maybe he chose that episode because metaphorically, it was about intercepting the signal of WGN. Like maybe because that whole episode centers around an intercept. So, you know, I don't know. I'm not against that idea. But I mean, what do you think? I'm not sure if it was that planned out or meant as an Easter egg or that metaphorical, perhaps. It was just maybe also just another mention of Geek World in Chicago at that time. Now, did you mention Clutch Cargo was in syndication, but 10 years earlier in the Chicago market? The Wikipedia page said it was syndicated, South Pacific Television, NZBC TV, not sure where that is. RTE TV, sounds familiar. And Network One, and that's Malaysia. RTE, you could probably put other people's words on it. Oh, that's Irish. That's why that's familiar. NZBC is New Zealand. So this show was running around the world from a syndication standpoint. But I know that I saw it or I heard of it, at least, in North Carolina. I would have been North Carolina way after this, though. It was released in 1959 and 1960. And even I am not that old. I was born way after that. So as I said before, heard of the name. But the point here is, why does this matter? Well, I just do wonder if that was another reference to nerd culture in Chicago around that time. And if it wasn't airing, was it being passed around on VHS tapes? Because as we were saying before, that was also a thing coming in where you could buy real cheaply wrapped in cellophane, like just old shows, like all the schoolhouse rock VHS. Lots of people were copying stuff and sharing stuff back then. Yeah. And so was that a nod to that kind of culture? Again, and nobody's ever really spoken up. They've all been quite tight-lipped. But was that just a shared thing amongst them and a nod to their fellow computer hacker nerd types? Or was it just a random, like I said, off-the-cuff kind of, you're just kind of goofing around. You're a little nervous. So you're just spouting out references to things. But if we are on the track of trying to find out who did this, is this another clue or just something random? And when you just have a bunch of random stuff, as we've looked at in other mysteries, you can put in mistakes. It's like with the Zodiac case. You may want somebody to figure out your code, but if you make too many mistakes, it's impossible to crack your code. Right. It's like now you don't have a pattern that's trustworthy to follow here. And so it could be just a random bunch of stuff. And so what we'll talk about later is that there was a real FBI and FCC investigation because they want to catch this thing. The reason being is that you don't want this to start turning into something more, not only offensive, but subversive. But in this case, yeah, I think it was just a thrown out line just to say like, hey, if you also watch Clutch Cargo, you know what I'm talking about. By the way, later folks, Quentin Tarantino put a segment of Clutch Cargo in Pulp Fiction. It's in the beginning of this, of the watch scene, the infamous watch scene with Christopher Walken. Oh, with the kids watching TV. Yeah. The little boy is watching Clutch Cargo. He's watching an episode called The Arctic Bird Giant. So just another little weird piece of trivia there. A few days ago when I was watching this through the whole thing, all five episodes in this one series of a storyline that it also, the theme song and the visuals and just the whole cartoon in general gave me a weird, creepy feeling. Well, yeah, it's Uncanny Valley like we were talking about because the style of the animation for one thing, but the very low fidelity, the low production value. The music is actually really good. It's by a Grammy-winning composer named Paul Horn. So it had that going for it. Everything else was least amount of effort and possible. But like one of the brags about it was how cheap it was to produce. There's a quote actually where they were saying with SynchroVox that we talked about that Haas, who was the animator, said, we are not making animated cartoons. We are photographing motorized movement. And the biggest trick of all, combining it with live action. Footage that Disney does for $250,000, we do for $18,000. So necessity is the mother of invention. And they made 52 episodes. So they had, as they say, a good little run. And they're also part of two of the most famous kind of cult underground things in the world. This hijacking, this Max Headroom thing, and Pulp Fiction. You're definitely making a mark if you're catching the attention of the world in that way, I guess. Well, yeah. I think it's another case of inside pop culture reference that only the few know. And so it now makes you part of a group if you understand this. This is another part of the reason of this hacking here is that it was meant to be applauded by a select few. And if you didn't get it, it's like anything. Well, it's like rock and roll in the 50s. If you didn't get it, you were square, man. And it's not for you. This is, we don't care. And it's like the lingo of every generation. If you don't get it, well, too bad. It's not for you. It's for us. It's like a prank. It's like, it's applauded by the people who thought it was funny and are in on the joke and reviled by the establishment because they don't get it. And you're just, you're breaking the rules. But there's something about, yeah, just, I don't know. The music, yes, it's good. But on the other hand, it's haunting and spooky in a way. Yeah. The visuals and also the character voices. It didn't have the same heartwarming feeling. And a lot about what we're blathering on and on about here is that our talking about this, the episodes we're doing here now are also a nostalgic, I wouldn't say love letter to the 80s and 90s. But it is meant for people that live through it. And so what you're seeing now that we know as Gen Xers of that era is that people are finding things that were cool about it. I mean, just look at Stranger Things, obviously, you know, dudes. Yeah. And we know because we lived through it, the things that they got right and the things that are kind of approximations. Yeah. They're aping a lot of stuff that came. It's very derivative creatively. And I mean, I loved it and I really enjoyed it as a series. They weren't breaking a lot of new ground so much as remaking ground that had been trod upon very effectively by Steven Spielberg and other folks in the 80s specifically. Right. So we're experiencing, you and I here, a bunch of, at least I did, going through all this stuff, a bunch of nostalgia. Not always in the good sense, like in this case of this video, the hijack, the Max Headroom video, Clutch Cardo. They gave me an odd feeling. Yeah. There's something off about it. Not in the same way, like, you know, I grew up watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and all the- See, I never always thought that was creepy. Really? Yeah. I didn't like that. Why? I don't know. Same thing you're describing. But, you know, you and I are a few years apart. That's true. That's true. It almost corresponds to like what we were experiencing at the same ages, you know, like it's- Well, talk about an inside thing. All those Jay Ward-produced cartoons, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Franz Dudley-Durite, Commander McBrague, we've referenced quite a bit about people going on and about outlandish tales of their adventures. To me, that was familiar. But I started to understand as, even as a kid, like, I think there's some adult jokes going on here that I don't quite get. Yeah. There's even one about the bird, about 24 blackbirds baked in a pie, and there's one missing, and then they come back to Boris, who's the bad guy here playing the king, and they present him with a pie that's got the extra bird in it. And basically, he apologized and says, well, I'm always happy to give you the bird. And as a kid, it's like, yeah, there's a joke in there somewhere. And so being on the inside of that, and again, that's also part of nerd culture, is appreciating these kind of things that may even seem silly and should seem silly to regular adults, but you've latched onto it as being worthy. It's like train spotting. Right. It's a silly pastime, unless you're into it. And then if you know somebody else who's also into it, now it's a shared thing that all you two really know about. But the clutch cargo thing, it's like whistling that. I do think that that's part of whatever group of folks, their social circle, that was an element of that. And it was kind of a nod to that, but also just something kind of off the cuff because it was very well known to the perpetrator. Here's another thing we have to touch on this. Like, I feel like, and it's funny because if there's folks who've listened to us in the past, you know, we're primarily a paranormal show. We talk about historical mysteries. We touch on all kinds of different things. Anything that we feel technically is an astonishing legend, which this certainly is. But over the course of the years, we've had some experiences with electronic voice phenomena, EVPs, and we've talked about what do you think you're hearing if it's not fully intelligible, which this audio almost falls into that because it's so bad. And it's, I think it's purposely distorted. But to me, in that segment that Sarah last played from the hack, I think he's very clearly saying, I can still see the X. I do believe that. But there are a lot of folks that think it is, I stole CBS. Sarah, just play that one line again. As we've said in the past about unintelligible audio, the best way to evaluate an EVP is to go in blind. If you ask somebody else what they think they hear, you don't tell them what you think you hear because it really can change for you. It's the whole like blue dress, white dress thing or anything that's on the fence like that. Once you get it in your mind that it's a certain way, that's what it is. But the thing about I stole CBS that sort of makes sense. And again, if this is an attack on WGN for whatever reason, is that WGN was originally a CBS station. It was built as a CBS station and it changed hands several times. And by the time WGN got it, it had been on an independent platform that was failing, I think. And so you can look at the history of WGN and see all this stuff. But that could be an insult of like, WGN on top of everything else, you're so crappy. You didn't build anything. All you did was take this over and hijack it yourself. You know, I stole CBS. So I don't know. But to me, it doesn't sound like what he's saying there. Yeah. No, I would say it's a reference. You don't agree either. No, it's a reference to the cartoon. It's just that it's like, hey, I remember that cartoon. Do you remember too? Yeah, because the theme for the cartoon. Yeah. Yeah, no. And in the cartoon, this giant unknown object hurtling towards Earth, it's averted, but actually it's brought back to Earth to be studied as an artifact here. But I think it's just something goofy for the perpetrator to say, like, I still see it, even though it was captured. Right. There's something out there. But not to read into it too much. Again, I think there's a lot of over-analyzation. Yeah, I'm going after this way harder than I did The Great Gatsby in school when they were like, what does the light on the pier mean? I was like, I'm way more interested in analyzing this. By the way, that's one of my favorite books and stories of all time. I'm not putting it down. But I don't know why I feel compelled to really dig down on every aspect of this, because I guess it's so interesting to me. It's a gateway to so many other concepts and ideas that not only started to form and originate and gel in the early 80s, transitioning from the 70s and going into the 90s when it's starting to really solidify, I think, as concepts, and then into the early 2000s. And where we are now, just look at where we are now. Where AI is now, what the heck is happening? Like, who's steering the ship now? Where are we headed? It's unknown territory, it seems like. And that's scary. But in this time, it seemed a lot more rosy, even though obviously bad things are happening in every generation. And people will say to me, boy, it's a terrible time right now. It's like, look, it's always, every decade's been terrible. I mean, there's been awful things in every decade. And you get nostalgic about the time you grew up in. If you had a fairly decent childhood, which was fairly happy, then you can look back and say, like, all these wonderful things we lived through. But like, yeah, but you weren't suffering, like some other people in different areas and around the world. And the threat of nuclear war that Scott and I sometimes talk about from the 80s. And that's what we grew up with. It's just always the same. It rhymes, but there are different things in each era. So what we have here is now just a very brief clip, 90 seconds, that is representative of so many other things going on in an era that people love to reimagine. I talked about earlier about being nostalgic. It's kind of like, and the Duffer Brothers and the Stranger Things, we like to look back and it seems kind of cool. And oh, cassette tapes, those are fun. And listening to The Cure. And when you look back on it, it's like 70s fashion now. When you grew up with 70s fashion, there was a lot of the grit that you don't see now. It's polished up. It's shined up. As soon as it becomes, quote unquote, Coachella fashion, it's out. For me, that's over. It's done. Okay, that's it. You just hang it up. And so when you grew up in it, not only is it, you don't know anything different because you're in it and that's just the style of the day, but it was a lot more gritty. And like I said, it's like seeing ancient palaces or architecture or furnishings, props in big budget movies about what it used to be. And then you see the actual artifacts that we were talking about earlier in a museum. It's like, that's not that fancy. I mean, it's Will Cranston for the time, but they don't have machines like we do now to make all this stuff. It's not that slick and polished and it's a lot more rustic. And that's what every era is when you grow up. And it's like, that's what you know. And so the 80s, it's a fond re-imagining, but not accurate. And so what we have here is again, in 90 seconds, you have an encapsulation of a snapshot of that time that is foreshadowing things to come. And what Scott was talking about at the beginning of the show here is computer-generated images taking over. And I'll just say this now, is that now you could have a all-intelligent Skynet, Max Headroom-type character taking over everything and just being so goofy we can't track him but is in charge of everything. Yeah, it's like that movie where it's like, don't let him escape out onto the actual internet. We'll never get him back. So then we're back to that old trope. You see in the movies, another one that comes to mind, Virtuosity. Remember that one? Oh, God. Yeah. Did I see? I think I did see that. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. That came out in 1995. But I'll just read the brief tagline here from IMDb. When a virtual reality simulation created by using the personalities of multiple serial killers manages to escape into the real world, an ex-cop is tasked with stopping its reign of terror. Why would you even do that? Yeah. But here's the problem that we have AI scraping, quote unquote, some of the worst stuff from the internet. And it doesn't understand why it's bad or not accepted. It's like genocide is fine, right? You talk about it a lot, you humans. Here's a new multi-volume set of the anarchist cookbook. Yeah. You can have that potential. And that's the frightening reality. That's a possibility, perhaps. I hope not. But that's what we're facing nowadays is how to control this thing. Yeah. And going back to Mr. Max Headroom here is that some of the, you can't control. So the themes are the same happening in real life and real time. Yeah. You have something that is, has taken over and it's uncontrollable for at least 90 seconds. Yeah. Depending on the controlling mechanism. Now it's a, it's a bigger station. Of course, they had more means and people on hand to prevent that kind of thing. Because like I said, sometimes accidents happen. Stuff goes out of the, over the air that's unintentional and it's often very embarrassing. But this is also kind of an embarrassing thing that you couldn't control. You have, instead of an AI though, you have a, like at least three people goofing around and thank goodness it wasn't too subversive or damaging of a message. But that's kind of the, the trope here or the idea is that you have now something that's escaped and it's breaking into things it shouldn't have. And it has control and effect over the masses. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar, which is wild considering how delicious it is. Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers, just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So, if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. By the way, we'll talk a little bit more about the real Max Headroom in part two, but it was a TV show developed for British television. And in season two, episode one of season two, Max Headroom, the character, performs an act of broadcast piracy. So, that is undoubtedly the part of the inspiration for this. There's just no way that's a coincidence. Yeah, absolutely. Even if it wasn't, I would stress that point and force it upon people, like Max Headroom was forced upon the lovely viewers in Chicago. Again, this is broader themes, and I know people aren't going to get this. Like, why are you going on about this? Well, again, well, that's the thing. When we take something small and we can see that it branches out into bigger ideas, ideas are the thing. And to reference, getting back to the character V in V for Vendetta, it was very eloquent and more fully expressed than Mr. Headroom here. But just something that he says in his speech here, which also kind of fits with this. Again, if it were more of a subversive, violent message, and of course, later it was labeled as an act of hate. How often do we hear that today by various sides and factions? What V says, though, in his message that was pirated, there are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. I don't know what truth it is about being spanked with a flyswatter, but the truth is that the little man sometimes breaks into the big man's show. So, while there may not be an eloquent message here as delivered by V and Hugo Weaving, which is just the voice is terrific in that, but it was very well written, I think, expressed a lot of big ideas. And the big ideas with this pirate radio thing is that it stands in place for a lot of other larger ideas and trends that were happening. Not only is it a testament to that time and place and how things were happening and pop culture and nerd culture and nerdcore and all these terms that have now morphed into something and how we view them has evolved and is not so innocent anymore because now it's gotten political and people have been applying that where something that seems to be just kind of fun, nerdy guys playing around in their mom's basement with a lot of electronics is that now people are blaming the elements of control that they don't like on this type of person and that type of culture. But that's the world we live in now. But it is a clear and definitive case, an example of the medium is the message. And who said that? Well, we've alluded to him or I have many times before. That was famously said by Marshall McLuhan, who was a Canadian philosopher. He was, I think, one of the giants and foremost thinkers in the area of media theory and as he's sometimes known as the father of media studies. So what does that mean? Well, we've talked about that before or I've alluded to it and rightfully so it has probably fallen to deaf ears where it should remain. But in keeping with this theme of computers getting smarter, what does that mean? Well, just ask AI to summarize that. And what AI comes up with is the medium is the message is a concept by Marshall McLuhan that suggests the medium through which information is communicated has a significant impact on how the message is perceived, often more so than the content itself. This means that the characteristics of the medium shape our understanding and experience of the message it carries. All right. So if you're using AI right now, here's the next thing I want to know. How does AI feel about being the medium in that scenario? So I asked GPT 4.0 Mini. Its response was, AI as a medium can be seen as a transformative tool for communication and information dissemination. It shapes how we interact with data, influences our decision-making processes, and alters our understanding of various subjects. The characteristics of AI, such as its ability to process vast amounts of information quickly, provide personalized responses, and learn from interactions, impact the way messages are in the way of the world. No, I want to know how it feels about it specifically as it relates to Marshall's expression. Well, it's getting to that. It's also long- Does it? Is it? Because it sounds to me like all it's doing is talking about itself. It's dancing around itself. Well, that's what it does. In this context, as it goes on, AI can enhance accessibility to information, facilitate new forms of creativity, and enable more interactive experiences. However, it also raises questions about bias, misinformation, and the implications of relying on automated systems for communication. Overall, AI as a medium reflects McLuhan's idea that the medium itself plays a crucial role in shaping the message. So, I think as I see it, what McLuhan's idea was that the use of AI, you have to take that into factor, not just what it spits out. Because, again, a lot of times when we see AI being used as actual website copy, it's repetitive. It sounds like, as I call it, brochure copy. Like, it just sounds like the same platitudes and same sayings, and that's where it's at now. And it's really two sentences of information spread out to like three pages. Yeah, it's like a grade school kid trying to pad a report, double spacing the lines and saying kind of the same things over and over again in lieu of actual research. But these are all interesting concepts here, except that, to me, the fact that you're using AI now to shape all that, that's the message in how should it affect us. And that's the questions it raises, is that what's the message here? Well, the message is we should question all this. We should be in control of this. We should be concerned. We should use it, but cautiously. We should proceed into the future, but there has to be some control. Otherwise, it could devolve into something like, imagine AI coming up with a crude max headroom type character, and that is now determining political policy. Well, now that you've said it, somebody is typing that prompt, even as this plays on their podcast player. And by the way, send it to us, because I want to see it. I think when regards to television, because again, he was from the earlier era, is saying that just the fact that you're seeing shows and programs on television is different. Now, think about this, of course, you had silent movies in the 20s, talkies later in the later decade, and then black and white, it was always black and white for a while. And then you had color, and then it got more advanced, and then you had cinemascope, and then you had all these technological advances. But that's film. And so a lot of people don't realize that, yeah, before television, how did a lot of people get their news? Well, around the country, you had newspapers, yeah, but a lot of people got their news of what was happening around the world through newsreels that they saw at the theater that ran before the movie. So you'd watch a newsreel, and people in tiny towns across America didn't have much knowledge or understanding of the outside world. This is not Europe, of course, and people still don't. You're in your own custom-made echo chamber that the algorithm is just reinforcing endlessly for you. That's the point, is that it's reinforcing endlessly because, as Neil deGrasse Tyson says about confirmation bias, what's more biased than a search engine that gives you the answer that you were probably seeking in the first place, along with the point of view based on your previous searches? It's feeding you back what you want to hear. So obviously, what Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about was also about paranormal subjects and things that are pseudoscience. But basically, how do we know what the truth is? And he's talking about using good research tools and scientific methods to get at things that are not just confirmation bias. And when you get back something you didn't want to hear, that's uncomfortable. And we are a society that's addicted to comfort. So, again, looping this back in, what was Mac's headroom? It was uncomfortable. For most of the people watching, it was uncomfortable. They didn't know what this was. How long does it go on? Am I ever going to get regular TV again? Is this a new reality? Who is this bozo? Why isn't anybody stopping this guy? And for those that like that kind of rebellion, it was applauded. But it all comes back, I think, to what we're talking about here is theory and not just media theory, but the ideas, the philosophy, the concept. Because, again, the silly little prank, as seen by many, stands for so much more that is also more important and stuff we're dealing with now. Who's in control of the narrative? And when it's not the mainstream narrative, is it to be believed? Is it to be paid attention to? So then you're starting to dip into media theory. And I think here's the other thing that makes it hard to analyze when you're talking about the message. And then I'm talking about the delivered message, not the philosophical media theory studies message here. In that, what is this person saying? So now you got our attention, albeit it's not exactly when you wanted to at an earlier, more primetime viewing, you know, 9 o'clock hour. Now it's 11, smaller audience, smaller station. It's the PBS station. But you're able to get away with it because there were no engineers on duty at that hour. That's right. At the station to catch that and do something about it. So that's why it went on for a minute and a half. And before they very smartly got off, before the phone call could be traced, got off the airwaves. Which, by the way, implies, again, implicit engineering knowledge. Yes. Knowing how long you can have your signal going out before it gets triangulated. Right. And they could find out where you are because you have to also broadcast this. And so you're trying to make sense of this. Now that you have our attention, what do you want to say? And, you know, you're not making any sense. That's also very frustrating along with unnerving. Yes. So we believe, and we're going to talk about how we think this is the case here, that it was pre-recorded, pre-edited, which was also not a very easy thing for people at home to do, to make clean edits. Right. Without there being an edit moray, we'll talk a little bit about video engineering. Yeah, I have a statement about that in our outline here coming up. But that's a good point I hadn't thought about. And I'm so glad you said it just now. When you have two VCRs hooked together back in the day, folks are, I want to think that most people know. But VCR stands for video cassette recorder. And, you know, it's like a tape deck for your TV. They're not around anymore. So I'm sure there's people listening to our show younger, may have never seen one. And they used VHS tape, which a lot of people think stands for video home system. But that was a rebrand of it because originally VHS stood for vertical helical scanning, which was how the heads met the tape. We're not going to get too nerdy about this. No, I'm just, I'm stopping there. No, no, but, you know. It's an important clue because. But you can't make edits on that without getting like little color bars or a glitch or whatever. And the edit that comes up in the video, which, of course, you can't see when you were just listening, is very, to your point, very clean, which takes professional gear. And the Reina brothers point that out, which was a good catch on their part and kind of formulated my thinking on this about how was this done. In that, if you've ever tried to do that, whether you did it by hitting the pause button while you're recording and then starting it up again, you'll get a little wavy kind of line. And that, in the business, that's called an edit moray. And that you'll see a little disruption of the scanning. And again, the heads on the tape, because the head on a VCR, basically anybody who has a tape recorder knows that there's like a little metal bit in there that's kind of rounded off. That's what picks up the signal, the recorded magnetic. It's magnetic. Right, so the magnetic particles that are adhered to the videotape or audio tape, any kind of tape like that, media tape, the signal's laid down magnetically, electronically. And as we know, on a cassette recorder or audio tape recorder, that head is stationary and it's the tape that moves across that, which picks up the signal and plays it back. On a VCR, that's a round drum, as they call it, or it looks like a hockey puck and it's spinning. And there's a little tiny head on that and that picks up the signal that's on the tape, the videotape. And when you hit pause and you unpause it again to record another portion of a program that's airing or something that's live or something you're recording with your camera, you'll see it. It's not very clean. So you'll see a little disruption in the visual. There's a lot of mechanical business that has to happen inside the deck. And there's just no way to get that clean or fast at that time without extra equipment. Now, later VCRs in the mid to late 1990s were able to make clean edits. So when you hit pause and you hit it again, you wouldn't see that kind of disruption. Same thing on the old camcorders. When you hit pause or you started or you're trying to record from one camcorder to another, you would see, again, that disruption in the visual image. It'd be like a little wavy line or a little disruption here. You don't see that here. So obviously they have some higher grade editing decks, some video editing decks or some higher level prosumer, as they would say, level equipment, which shows some knowledge, technical skill, and a little bit of money depending on where they got this thing from because these things weren't cheap. And they weren't cheap back then either. Or inside access. Or inside access. So they had access to an editing suite, possibly at a TV station. So was this an inside job? Right, so to your point here, when they're playing it, when he says that does it, he's a freaking nerd. Yes, that was probably meant to be played during the sports segment. However, again, that came on during Dan Rohn's sports segment. Right. Not Chuck Swirsky. So was the time delayed? Now you have a little bit of information on that, right, about the 9 o'clock slot? Well, you know, my first thought, man, was that maybe the second intrusion was supposed to interrupt an 11 p.m. newscast during that sports segment. But cursory research seems to indicate that WGN didn't have an 11 p.m. news show at that time. So I've come around to thinking this was still a segment meant for the initial WGN interruption that happened at 9.15 p.m. Keep in mind, by the way, this one's running on WTTV, the PBS station. It's not on WGN anymore. So my thought is, again, the reference to Chuck Swirsky is because they originally meant for that interruption to be a single event and to happen during the time that Swirsky might have been on the air because he was sometimes a temporary fill-in sportscaster on WGN. And so he could have been on that air that night. He was a regular on WGN radio at that point, but not the TV news. So it's hard to say. I mean, it definitely seems kind of pointed at Chuck Swirsky. Maybe they were planning to run it on a night that they knew he was going to be on the air, but their plans got changed or they just didn't care because he wasn't on that night. The three guys that were on the air, he wasn't one of them. So that begs the question, were they even doing it on the night they originally intended to? Did they care if he was on the air? Was it just another broad swipe at WGN in general by going after a big personality there? You know, I don't know. What do you think, man? Well, listen, especially in towns that have a lot of passion, Chicago, New York, et cetera. It's like with any sportscaster, a lot of people love them. A lot of people do not love them. And so my point being is that there's a few out there. Vin Scully comes to mind of just beloved by everybody. I don't think he ever upset anyone, but there's probably people who don't like his announcing. But Marv Alpert, Joe Buck is a controversial figure. Also, like a lot of people like him. A lot of people don't like him. And same thing here with Dan Rohn and Chuck Swirsky. Will Ferrell doing Harry Carey. Harry Carey. Again, yeah. So, you know, Bob Euchre. There's some people that, right, that are kind of, I don't know, I call it the bully effect at school. Some people just like to pick on them. And some people just don't like their reporting. And so this guy obviously had something to say about Swirsky. But what does that mean? Is it just to come on because this is a revenge thing? Is this some kind of a prank? And your point here about what is the message? Who is it directed towards? It starts to kind of get unraveled and scattered to a degree where people start to not be able to follow it, which also causes some consternation. It's like, okay, it's an angry sports fan. We're going to talk about the Captain Midnight incident as well where that was a disgruntled employee who didn't like HBO's prices. Now, that's a very direct message. And it was typed out that way. It was a much more simple message that went out over the airwaves illegally. But in this case, it's like, okay, Swirsky, what's going on here? Pepsi. And it's just – By the way, I'm glad you said that. I was going to address that. That was a reference as the – again, the Reiner brothers had talked about. A reference to the marketing. Again, you won't – like you don't remember VCRs. You might not remember that Coke tried to make a new Coke, which if you listen to our show, you're going to know because Forrest brings it up all the time as one of the biggest marketing blunders ever. Well, that's between us usually. And the point is – We've said it on the air. It's right up there with when M&Ms didn't want E.T. the alien to be eating their candy. And then Reese's Pieces got put on the map because they were like, we don't want that weird thing eating M&Ms. So the new Coke, they reformulated all that, tried to appeal to the younger generation. And their thing was catch the wave. But the punk upside down part of this that Max was doing and when he says catch the wave, he holds up a Pepsi can. And he says catch the wave, which is the Coke slogan, and then throws it off. He's just like, it's more irreverence for everything, marketing, commercialism maybe. Or maybe it's just a guy who's like stoned or drunk out of his mind and just doing ridiculous stream of consciousness bits. I don't know. That's what it comes off to me is that then do you wonder, is this planned out? Is this written down? Is there a script? Did he know what he was going to do? Because there's some aspect of it when I first saw it years ago was that it did not seem planned or scripted at all. Very little. Like, yeah, there's a few props that he brings on. But it was basically somebody who was riffing who was not a comedian, per se. So, again, people have tried that. If you've ever tried stand-up night at your local club thing and you can pull it off, you'll find it's very, very difficult. And it takes some skill. It's a performance. And this is not so much a performance. It's almost like they're surprised that they're on. Now, here's the different part of it. It's like that aspect changes when you realize that it probably was prerecorded. Because think about this. If it was live and that there were a location, as God mentioned, we're going to talk about how this is done. But you could be triangulated and your location could be found out. So, the other clue here is that it was probably mobile. Whatever broadcasting equipment that they had that overpowered the signal, you probably had to have line of sight with the broadcasting towers. It's like being a sniper. You need a high-powered transmitter pointed at your targets. Right. So, the John Hancock building and, you know, very tall building. But you had to be in a line of sight to be able to see this to pull this off. Well, you don't want to be all caught up doing a little performance piece live while this is happening and have to scoop all that up and run off. Yeah. Not to mention, if you're inside and that's up on the roof of whatever building, you're going to have to run cables. It's going to take even longer to set it up and take it down. But we also know, because of that edit, that it wasn't live. More than likely, unless they had literally two people set up at the same time and they did a live cut to another person in front of another rotating thing for this fly swatting on the butt moment, you know. Right. It's more likely that it was, as they say on SNL, a pre-tape. Right. What was live about it was the broadcasting of it. But that it was pre-taped, and it could have been that night, could have been months before that. We don't really know. It would just be much easier to do, easier to pull off, and safer to get away from if, like I said, things went sound. Right. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar. Which is wild considering how delicious it is. Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers. Just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So, if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. Hi, this is Julie from Whitehall, Pennsylvania. And when I'm not writing stories about ghosts, I'm listening to stories about ghosts. Here on Astonishing Legends. Now, let's get back to the show. The other aspect we're going to talk about is that it's such a trope in movies and TV and every form of media, taking over of an established authoritarian air transmission system. And we'll talk about all the movies, but... Shawshank. I always think about Shawshank, you know, when Andy locks himself in the warden's office and takes over the PA system to play an opera. That is a great point where it is, yeah, you're not supposed to be doing this. And it stirs people up, which they don't... The man don't want. Like I said, that's not a dangerous message. But the result in that particular film is dangerous because they don't want dissent. They don't want disorder. They want to keep things orderly. They want to have control. And when they lose control... They don't want you indoctrinating. Right. And so this is a very mild case of some disobedience, civil disobedience in a way, not like the instance in V for Vendetta, when now you have a very dangerous message against a very authoritarian regime. And they really don't want that because now this guy is a very physical threat using bombs and violence to get the point across. And that's a physical takeover of the TV station. If you've seen the movie, he doesn't use any electronic equipment. He just barges his way in and takes control physically before they can stop him. But also a prerecorded message that he has them play because, again, that's the easier thing to do. So in this case, it's probably mobile. They probably taped it in some kind of warehouse, it looks like, a garage, something that is fairly secured out of the way that they had access to. It doesn't appear to be like an apartment situation. It just has an industrial feel to it. And it's really hard to tell from the sound. Now, that's the other aspect of this. Is this distortion or is this some form of just lo-fi audio because it is being hijacked? Or are they using voice modulators to disguise their voices? It seems like they're doing something on purpose probably to protect themselves. One thing that I was going to say that I thought was interesting and maybe also points to someone who understands the potential danger of being prosecuted by the Federal Communications Commission is that even though they hijacked the signal, in all the times they could have dropped – and they did some stuff. They dropped trow and they smacked some booty, but all the times they could have dropped the F-bomb, instead of the F-bomb, they said fricking, F-R-I-C-K. And so maybe they're a little bit worried because the F-bomb gets you in a lot of trouble on live TV. Maybe that would have just added on to it unless this was just some – it's hard for me to imagine – puritanical person who didn't want to say the F-word. I don't think that's the case. So I thought, to me, like when it's like, he's a fricking nerd, fricking – and it's like, okay, maybe it's just Chicago street slang. It's Chicago, but also part of the 80s canon of the lexicon there, along with awesome, the terms that were popular then. And yes, Gen Z. Wicked, Boston, wicked. I know you have your own – right, you have your own dictionary. It's a wicked Camaro. Yeah. Well, look, it's mid, no camp, whatever. There's a whole dictionary now. No, we're not supposed to say that. My son gets mad now. Does he? Well, see, there you go. Now, does he get – It's all dead already. Right. So that's the thing. People want control of their language and time because it's representative of their era. And when your son has kids, he'll be the out-of-touch nerd and the old fogey who's just really not with it and doesn't understand any of the lingo. And maybe that'll just be neurotransmitter talk. I don't know. Like by the time he's an adult. Yeah, it'll be like those two – you've seen that Instagram with the two AIs talking to each other. And then they figure out they're both AI and they switch over to a machine language. Yeah, that's also kind of scary. That's what it's going to be for – yeah. Well, that's another – this is another precursor of this message here in that Max Headroom represents – it's supposed to be representative in a creative fashion of technology taking over, hijacking our airwaves that we are supposed to be in control of. And so obviously these people can't do that or they're not doing it yet because the technology isn't there. But the idea is that you're not in control anymore. The man is not always in control. What does that mean? Are we still safe? Is there a message? Now, there have been obviously earlier hijackings of the airwaves and those are with – well, one in England. And it's a more global message of outsiders and it's more cinematic and theatrical. And in this case, it's none of that, but it is a loss of control. And so that's why people were upset. It's like, hey, I was watching that. You ever have somebody turn the channel while you're trying to watch a show? It's annoying. And, you know, but it's probably somebody in your family with a remote control where the dog stepped on it. So the idea though here is that you have a little bit of loss of control and then you have a message that is – it's not horribly drastic or violent or – it could have been a lot, lot worse. It's pretty harmless. It's a bit vulgar. But like I said, it's not really hurting anybody. You know, you keep putting this down. I'm just going to have to step in here. Go ahead. There were parts of it that I thought were pretty funny, honestly. Oh, no. It's kind of – you just keep like, it's vulgar, it's sophomores. Sophomore. No, I'm talking about this guy could never do stand-up. And I was like, there were some good – there was some funny moments in this thing. Well, don't get me wrong here. Listen, I think as a performance piece as a bit, there's a lot going for it in that regard. Like I said, it's not a 90-second stand-up routine, of course, or even like an Annie Kaufman kind of thing. But it could be kind of Kaufman-esque in its approach and just the rawness of it and the amateurish aspect of it. And I think if you try to do that, you probably wouldn't pull it off as well as these amateurs did. And so to your point, though, as far as being funny, I think the idea is funny, like I said, but it is meant to annoy. Well, it's an attack. It's an attack on WGN, I think, specifically. It is part of that, but also society in general. And also to me, it's like, look, look what we can do. We figured this out. You think you're so smart? Well, you're not because we figured out how to hack in. You can't control us. We got on. And there's nothing you could do about it. And in this case, it's like, well, okay, what's your message? Well, it's just going to be semantics here and some pointed local barbs about local culture here. But also, it's a real look or take on 80s culture. And there's a lot of references, which is also kind of weird for me to watch this in that there was a lot of nostalgia about this. And brought back some memories, not horrible ones, but just like, you just had a weird feeling. It's just a very strange feeling because it's also occurring at a time where we're about to enter a new technological age of sorts. It's been going on for a while. But like I said, what was revolutionary about this is that the age of home video recording and camcorders and people taking control of that aspect, which was only left to professionals previously, unless you had a Super 8 camera. And then it wasn't. That's kind of like radio until podcasting came along. Exactly. You know, ham radio was a lot. No more professionals. No, that is another, you're absolutely right. That is another revolutionary moment. And that's top publishing. Yeah. It is. From the word, the picture, the audio, everything can all be done from your computer. The problem is that to stand out, you have to be good. Yeah. But here it's like, if you can't be good, just be everywhere, be invasive. And that's part of the message. But getting back to that message. Okay. So then he's continuing on. Right. And so I think this is kind of the same thing with clutch cargo in that it's like adults getting into SpongeBob. It's kind of a fun thing. They're interesting storylines. They're humorous. There's sometimes a lot of adult humor that's woven in. So obviously that points again to nerddom. And as we know, nerds will one day rule the world. Yeah. Because they have control over the message and the airwaves and now everything being electronic. Whoever controls that or can manipulate that will have a lot of power. And this is also a display of power from the plebs, from the peons, and that we didn't need to buy a TV station. We got a bunch of parts. And the idea was that they were able to, actually the investigating officer from the FCC and the FBI thought that they may have gotten some used equipment that they were able to cobble together with the know-how. Yeah. To be able to provide a signal that was overpowering the one that was actually sent to the TV station. Yeah. And we'll talk about that. I'm pretty sure that they had said that they think that they might have used microwaves, which would have overridden the system that they were using prior to that. That they had more power and were more efficient. So that made it a little bit easier to do it. But again, that would show a certain level of sophistication for the broadcasters. Right. So it's a lot of, as Scott would say, inside baseball here in that there's a lot of references that are of the Chicago area specifically. What's clear is that this person is most likely a Chicago native, grew up there, and is making references to his audience now, his hijacked audience, about stuff that only they would know. So it's a message also directed specifically to the people of Chicago. Well, in the next section of this, you hear him saying, it's like, and there's the version of this online that has titles over it that were best guest titles created by somebody some time ago. And there's a point here where he says, it sounds like he's saying, my files or my piles, if you're, get back to the bathroom toilet humor here. Followed by, oh, I just made a giant masterpiece for the greatest world newspaper nerds. Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece for all of the greatest world newspaper nerds. So the interesting thing here, again, this was pointed out by the Rayner Brothers. I didn't know this. I didn't know what WGN stood for, but apparently that stands for world's greatest newspaper. And so he says, I made a giant masterpiece for the greatest world newspaper nerds, which seems like another dig at WGN. Right. WGN as getting back at the man, the media conglomerate that owns both the Chicago Tribune and the station, the television station, WGN. And again, reminding our listeners, this is running on WTTV, though, on PBS. It's not running on WGN. And this is an obtuse reference for me making a reference back to Shawshank again. But did you call me obtuse? But anyway, in this reference, this is another thing that leads one to believe that this second bit was originally intended to run on WGN rather than on PBS. And we'll explain how that happened. That could be in connection, again, with the bathroom humor joke that he made to seem to be straining a bit in a BM fashion and says, oh, my piles. Which, again, people think says my files, but that's an older term as well, piles for hemorrhoids. Exactly. And so he's kind of like, you know, feigning some pain and discomfort with that and then said, oh, I just made a giant masterpiece. So that's a more excretory comment there about knowing that this is going to be talked about in the newspapers and the media because they know that they've broken through. Or they were planning to when they made the video and that they were hoping that this gets out. It did. And it was talked about quite a bit. Yeah. And so the next section, he holds up this giant glove, like almost like a Mickey Mouse glove, except it's four or five fingers. And he's got it on his hand, and then he puts it on for just like a second, and then he takes it back off. He says, my brother is wearing the other one. It's dirty. Then he yanks the glove off of his left hand and says something like I'm pulling my fine off or I'm pulling mine off. You can't tell. Not sure what that is a reference to. I haven't seen anybody saying that they have an idea what that is connected back to. But it seems very specific. And to what you said earlier about, you know, because there's some question here. Is this person just, are they a good improviser? And they're just improvising with found objects in whatever place that they shot this. Or did they bring all these props with a specific reason? Because they got, it's a little bit of Rocky Horror style. They got a newspaper. They've got this glove. They got the Pepsi can. And all the references lined up for that stuff. And then it proceeds to the part we'll talk about here in a second with the spanking and the fly swatting, which seemed pretty planned out. But again, that's where the edit is. May have stopped and said, okay, what can I do next? So there's a good, you know, and we all know folks like this. There's people that are just natural improvisers that maybe aren't cut out to be professional performers. But they're still in a room. They are able to just make anything work on short notice. Is that the kind of personality here? Or as you were saying earlier, we were speculating about, was the whole thing planned? Well, obviously, you're right. They brought some props with them they intended to use. Now, like I said, I don't think it was a very well-planned out kind of thing. I think it was a very loose idea of let's get the camera going first and then do something. And if you're wondering what the significance is about that, it may be tied to who they think may have pulled this off. And let's say their mental capacity at the time. Because that's important. Is like, is this kind of coherent or is this person just like this? Maybe that's not just their style of humor, but they are this scattered in the way that they conduct themselves and how their thought processes work. But the other one that you haven't talked to, and here comes the warning, folks. It's not, it's a slight adult content mentioned here. But somewhere in the earlier portion of this, now, because I'm mentioning this because he says I'm pulling my fine off, perhaps. Yeah. Is that he gives the bird to the camera and with the middle finger and on the middle finger is an appliance, shall we say, that is of an adult toy nature that is shaped like a giant finger. And that's all I'll say about that. Well, I don't think I saw that. Oh. I don't think I read about that appliance. Well, it's hard to notice, but it just seems like he has a giant fat middle finger. And then it's been, yeah. So that is reported other places that. There's some speculation that it's something else. Yeah. So it's kind of, I think that's even in the wiki entry that it is an adult toy that he has on his finger. Oh, I must have. And so he pulls that off, but then he comes to say, after messing with the glove, which looks like it's kind of the thickness of, like Scott said, of a welder's glove, but it looks knit. He's just got a few things here. He's got a, I got a Pepsi can. Or is he doing a character? He could be doing a character. He could be doing a character, right. But that's not something laying around. The rubber finger has been brought to the filming location for a purpose because it was known that it was going to be used. You're right. That's not something that probably was laying around wherever they did. Good God, I hope not. But the idea, though, is that it's also part of the statement is that I could just give you my regular natural finger, but let's use the prompt finger for more emphasis. And again, it's a bit naughty. It's not as shocking as if it were, let's say, a more realistic or exaggerated adult item. All right. So in light of this, I take back everything I said about the use of fricking. Fricking was definitely, I think that was just a Chicago street slang at the time. Because if you're using, as you said, the giant rubber finger, you have thrown caution to the wind in terms of getting caught and doing time for this. Well, yeah. To your point, that alone, I'm with it. You're just adding to the ticket pile here of talking about piles to what he was going to be charged with if caught. And I don't think that they ever planned because, again, it wasn't so outrageous. They're not threatening that there's a bomb anywhere. They're not threatening violence. It's a real, it's just kind of a, you know, amateurish, crazy, goofy prank. But the idea here is, to your point, is that it wasn't over the top. Like I said, they could have used much more graphic items and they chose not to. They didn't really swear. The use of fricking was a pretty common 80s expression when you didn't want to say the full F-bomb word. So, and it's still around, but like I said, it's a very 80s and regionally specific thing. I guess I could talk about this now. The female figure person that seems to be doing the spanking with the fly swatter is also appearing to wear a mask, but they also just seem to be wearing a costume. The speculation there, and this is from a couple different sources, was that it was either a French maid costume or possibly like an Oktoberfest beer-serving waitress costume. Well, getting back to the Reina Brothers documentary, I think it's very well done. I enjoyed watching that quite a bit. But the idea that they had proposed is that, well, and most people will know this if you're in the area or know of it, Chicago, there's a lot of German and Polish immigrant ancestry. And so you get a lot of the traditions. Well, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, remember that? Yeah. Abe Froman, the Chicago sausage king. Yeah, the sausage king of Chicago. Right. And also we talked about this a little bit when we did our series on Resurrection Mary too. Exactly. So what they were proposing is that it's not actually a French maid's outfit. It may look more like a German traditional dress, I think called a dirndl. Okay. It's got a funky spell of D-I-R-N-D-L, and you'll know what it looks like. Yeah, yeah. It's like the Oktoberfest waitress garden. Yeah, the beer maiden. The beer garden, yes. Yeah, yeah. And so, but it's a traditional dress that originated with German-speaking areas like Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and so people will recognize it. And so it looks a little bit more like that, again, tying back to the real Chicago flavor of this, a taste of Chicago. Right. And that would make maybe a little bit more sense. Not that there's any meaning in that. Which is, by the way, that's the name of Joe Mantegna's wonderful pizza restaurant in North Hollywood. Been there many times. Yeah. Not sure it's still open, but yeah, you've really felt like you were getting a genuine taste of Chicago. And that's what you're getting here too with this pirate clip. But what the Reina brothers point to is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Remember the parade that actually Ferris Bueller hacks because he pops up on the float unexpectedly where he's not supposed to be and sings a donka shame. And also John Hughes hacked that parade in real life because it was a real parade. They didn't have a shooting permit for it in the scene where Ferris gets up and sings Twist and Shout by the Beatles or whatever. So I guess that was an unpermitted shoot there, that part. I think all the dancing and stuff they orchestrated later. But when he got on the float, I believe that that was like a guerrilla shoot for that scene. So you get the real traditional German flavor there, I think, that Chicago has. But what makes Chicago great as well is that it's just very rich in all these traditions, Italian, German, Polish, like I said, and just all kind of blending together because of Chicago's history as being one of the main – well, it's the second city. That tradition, we're pleased to report, found its way in to a pirate hack on television, one of the weirdest ones of all time. At least there's a little Chicago love in there. Oh, yeah. And I don't think that – I think that just comes with the guys that did it. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm not sure that that was a planned message. Yeah. But I think people think it's a French-made outfit because of the naughtiness of what's happening. You know what I'm saying? Right, right, right. People associate that part. Well, and they both have that kind of fringy lace. They have a similar thing with the – they have ruffles that stick out, those outfits, like a French-made one, and I've heard. And then the dirndl, which I've seen plenty of. Well, I never really noticed it until I – like I said, I started seeing commentary about this and people trying to analyze the video clip. Yeah. And what type of – it didn't really occur to me that it was anything like that. No, it didn't occur to – I was like, how did they even pick up on that? You really have to be – like people have examined this thing like the Zapruder film. It's unbelievable. Right. And backing up just a little bit, pun intended, what's happened here is there has been a hard cut, a clean edit, after he pulls the glove off and it comes back. And that's when he is bent over, Max is, to the left. And he's holding the mask up to the camera very pointedly, even though his head is out of frame. And it's showing that he's got the mask off. And that's when this woman is behind him, smacking him gently. With a fly swatter, right. With a fly swatter, yeah. And there's 11 smacks. Wow. I counted them because I was like, I wonder if there's a message here. Don't think so. And he's fake moaning the whole time, like it hurts. Or I think – A lot weird. I'm going to go with that. Right. Well, I think the idea here – and I think you can also, because the audio is so garbled, that either says, don't do it or do it. Like he's either aiding it on or kind of playfully telling her to stop. But they know that they're in – they're doing something illegal and naughty and that they will probably come after them. And then also it starts out with him saying, bend over, b***h. Or does she say it? He's playing the part. And he says that. And he's like, bend over. I'm like, he's playing his own oppressor verbally. Right, right. He's doing that. It's like he's doing back and forth and dialogue there. So he's like, bend over, like – and it's like, this is what I get, you know. And maybe the message is there as Max Headroom, as this strange computerized commercialization character that has come along in more of Max Headroom here in tonight's episode. We'll explain a little bit more about his origins. But maybe he's saying, I deserve this. Or as a representation of WGN's commercialization or something, I don't know. But yeah, he's like, look what happens to me. I've been a naughty boy kind of thing. It's a mocking, almost like, come and get me. It's a taunting. And so what he does, again, if you haven't watched the video and you're just listening to this before you do, he turns to his left, camera left. And he's now pulled off his mask or he's got another one. And he holds that up. And so it's kind of – that's also another weird thing because it's so garbled visually and audio-wise that you don't know what's really happening. But he's holding the mask up, kind of shielding his body now. An empty mask that's, like, kind of – Yeah, the tongue is out on it or something. Or it's, like I said, it's a different mask. So you still can't see him because he's shielding his identity. He's put that in front of the camera and his side. And now his pants are down. And that's – the other thing is that the German beer garden maiden is also wearing some kind of face covering, some kind of a mask. And you can't really tell who that is either. It does have a snuff film quality to it as well. That's right. I was talking about your earlier point about this being creepy is that that's why it's used so much as it's such a trope and a meme and an old chestnut. There is something kind of disturbing about that as, like, found footage as well, except this is being forced on you. It looks like a ransom video is what the idea is. And we're all being taken hostage. That's kind of beyond your will. You just want to get back to – That's really well put. You just want to get back to Doctor Who and you got to put up with this. Here, again, it's a taunting – now we're coming to the close of it. Do you think that – I was going to ask you – that they maybe had more or there's other parts of this video that we did not get to see that was not planned? I think they knew that they risked getting caught if they went much longer. And I think when they pre-produced this before that night when they transmitted it, they set it to a length that helped them feel like they were going to get away with it. Right. Right. That's what I think. It was too sophisticated not to recognize what it would take to bust them at it. And so to that point, as Forrest said, like after the fly swatting and the smacking or whatever, it goes to black. And then over a period of three or four or five seconds, it's back to Doctor Who and we will never see this version of Max Headroom or any of his accomplices ever again. Well, folks, there is so much more to this story, so much more. And like we said tonight, things we're going to drill down on in part two are who was Max Headroom, the inspiration for this, and why pick him? Believe it or not, I actually worked with the co-creators of Max many times in the late 90s. Oh, really? Well, we'll find out all about that and wonder about how these guys could have pulled this hack off and could you do it today? Well, yeah, it's still happening and has happened dozens of other times going back to 1941 and up until last year even. So we'll cover some of those in part two. We're also going to look at the investigation by the FCC into the crime because, yes, it really is a crime, silly as it may be. And must be squashed. And all of the theories on who might have done this. The internet has had a lot of time to weigh in on this and study it. And as often happens, some of the theories seem to line up perfectly until they don't. That's going to wrap up episode 308 of Astonishing Legends. We'll be back with part two in two weeks on April 26th. Look for new episodes of The Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin, for lending his voice to our shows. Can I give permission to Astonishing Legends? Hi, I'm Lizzie. This is James Franklin. J-U-L-I-E. Descended from Benjamin Franklin's brother, James Franklin. Frank E, D as in David, O, N as in Nancy. And I give my permission to Astonishing Legends to use my voice however they see fit. Galaxy widening in perpetuity. Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Carestia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design, and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com or interact with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Discord, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of both the main show and the Dead Letter office, as well as additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Door. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright, Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar. Which is wild considering how delicious it is. Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers. Just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So, if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. With its abundant natural beauty, charming towns, and friendly people, South Carolina offers the kind of discoveries that stay with you long after you've left. Like the realization you're good at something you never before tried. Or your first oyster roast. And a taste you didn't expect to love. And other times, it just hits. Like the view on a windswept Appalachian mountaintop. So, come find the undiscovered you in South Carolina. Visit discoversouthcarolina.com. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing. Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff. Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. For delicious meals, you could go out to eat or spend hours in the kitchen. Or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal. Yeah, you heard me. Marie Callender's classic chicken parmigiana bowl is delicious with scratch-made marinara sauce, creamy mozzarella cheese, and no preservatives. It's high in protein with 30 grams per serving. Marie Callender's. What having it all tastes like. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. Plant-based ingredients grown in the ground, thoughtfully sourced, and built to keep you satisfied. Their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, and only 5 grams of sugar. Which is wild considering how delicious it is. Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers. Just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So, if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jay Gambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing. Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff. Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. For delicious meals, you could go out to eat, or spend hours in the kitchen. Or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal. Yeah, you heard me. Marie Callender's Classic Chicken Parmigiana Bowl is delicious, with scratch-made marinara sauce, creamy mozzarella cheese, and no preservatives. It's high in protein, with 30 grams per serving. Marie Callender's. What having it all tastes like. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We all get distracted when we drive, whether it's from our phones, or kids in the backseat bickering. But how we handle these distractions can be a matter of life or death. Before you get on the road for your next road trip, please put your phones on silent and take a mental note to focus on driving. Paid for by NHTSA. This message is brought to you by Cologuard. If you recorded songs off the radio for a mixtape, it might be time to scream for colon cancer. The Cologuard test is non-invasive, requires no special prep or time off, and you start screening right from your home. It's just three simple steps. Set up, sample, and ship. If you're 45 or older and at average risk, ask your doctor about the Cologuard test. Available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription at Cologuard.com slash podcast. For delicious meals, you could go out to eat. Or spend hours in the kitchen. Or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal. Yeah, you heard me. Marie Callender's Classic Chicken Parmigiana Bowl is delicious. With scratch-made marinara sauce, creamy mozzarella cheese, and no preservatives. It's high in protein, with 30 grams per serving. Marie Callender's what having it all tastes like.