Hyperfixed - Captive Audience

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Alice was browsing the stock audio in Adobe premiere, when she found dozens of audio marked "prison." Were they actually recorded in prison? By actual prisoners? And if so, was it voluntary? We investigate.Reminder! There are only two weeks until Hyperfixed live in Brooklyn! Buy tickets HEREHyperfixed is completely independent and can only exist with the support of our listeners. Please consider becoming a premium Hyperfixed member. You'll get bonus episodes, discounts on merch and live shows, and much more. You can join by following THIS LINKLINKS:Watch Weeds on TUBIMax Cerda's Non-Profit, BUILDLatino Reentry Integration Services Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Have you ever had a nagging feeling that you're right about something, but you haven't actually done the research? Are weather apps getting less accurate? While on No Such Thing, three best friends and journalists settle our dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. Don't blame me. I'm not the weather company. Hello. You can search for no such thing with Manny, Noah, and Devin on your iHeart app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everyone. This is Alex, just reminding you that Hyperfixed only continues to exist because of people like you. And if you'd like to see us thrive and take on new reporting projects, we would love it if you would consider supporting the show by becoming a premium member at either Hyperfixedpod.com slash join or directly on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

We have bonus episodes that are not just extended interviews. There are entire stories that you will never hear on the main feed. You can join our Discord. And you can get discounts on merch and tickets for our live show. Speaking of the live show, it is in Brooklyn on September 11th, just a couple weeks from now, and we would love it if you could join us. Tickets are at Tickets.hipets.hepidspod.com and in our show notes. Thanks so much. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't,

I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, captive audience. Okay, I thought this was just like an intake interview about what's going on with the thing. It is. I'm going to record it just to get sort of like... Yeah, to get your facts straight. To get the honest stuff. First things first, I made the whole thing out. For attention. That's awfully sneaky. Just to get on podcasts.

I know. I have something to promote. And then they get there and it's like, it's me. I'm promoting myself. This delightful human is Alice Wedderland. She's a comedian and an actor and a podcaster. And because she doesn't make enough money doing any of that stuff, Alice also makes her own promotional videos, which is what she was doing when she stumbled upon this weird thing she reached out to us about. Here's what happened. Okay. So I do a thing called Space the Game Show, which is a live and live streamed game show, which is all about astronomy.

and space. Space the game show happens monthly, and every month, Alice gets someone to film it so that when it's over, she can comb through the footage and edit the best moments into social media clips that people at home can enjoy. But at this one show recently, Alice made a little mistake. We didn't mic the audience, so all the audience sounds are super quiet, and there's like a moment of the audience going, ooh, that was really funny. And you could hear it in the room, but in the tape, it's just like, ooh. Like, it was a little, to quiet, you know, so our reaction on stage didn't totally make sense. So I was like, maybe I can grab an ooh from a crowd sound from Adobe Premiere, which is the video editing

software I use. So Alice pops into Adobe Premiere, which has this extensive library of sounds, and she starts searching for something to replicate the ooh sound that the crowd made in the room. And when she types crowd ooh into the search field, she gets a list of all these different flavors of crowd oo sounds. There's a small crowd ooh, and a large crowd ooh, and an outdoor crowd ooh. And as she's scrolling through this list, looking for a theater crowd ooh, her eye catches on a strange label, prison crowd ooh. So I was like, huh, I've never seen that before on any of the royalty-free audio

platforms I've ever used. To Alice, this seems odd. and oddly specific. And like, what in the world would you be using this for? But instead of just shrugging it off, in the grand tradition of hyperfixed, Alice dives deeper. She runs another search to find out just how many of these prison sounds there are. And when she types the word prison into the search field,

she discovers that there are over a hundred. Prison inmates react four. Prison cell block eight. Prison cell block four. Prison kitchen. Now, the important thing to know is that just because these are labeled as prison sounds, doesn't mean that they actually are prison sounds. Oftentimes, something with a label like office crowd

will actually be a studio recording of specialized voice actors called Loopers who are brought in to replicate the ambient murmurs of an office space. And as an actress, Alice knows this. But when she clicks on a sound labeled Prison Crowd Laughter, an alarm goes off in her head. It doesn't sound like real laughter. And it also doesn't sound like the kind of laughter you get from professional voice actors in a studio. To Alice, this sounds like non-professional voice actors in an actual prison or otherwise put.

Somebody is getting prisoners to make these noises. Alice played me a bunch of the prison sounds she found in Adobe. And I have to say, they do sound like prison, or at least what I think prison sounds like. And maybe that's because the version of prison that exists in my head is actually just the version of prison I've seen in movies. And maybe that's actually what these recordings were made for. But the thought that these may be recordings of real incarcerated people being goaded to laugh on command for the sake of a sound library, that thought has been very troubling for Alice. You know, this is the kind of thing that seems like people would just not be compensated. I mean, no one's compensated in entertainment as it is.

So why would they not go to this captive population to pump them for the resource of their humanity, their vocal exclamations? And who knows? You know, they could be sitting there all day. Like, laugh, laugh. And it does feel, like, it's dystopian already that people are incarcerated. But it feels like it's extra dystopian. I mean, I can see ways in which, you know, they're like, hey, we'll give you guys five bucks to stand around for an hour and fake laugh. Like, that's, you know, I would do that.

But also, I can see ways in which this is probably really exploitative, where these are people who are literally captive and they're just like, well, this is what you're doing today. Like, what are they going to do? Say no, you know? Yeah. So we have these mysterious prison recordings, or at least they're labeled prison and sound like they were made in a prison. what is it that you want us to find out about them? What are your questions? Okay, okay.

So first I want to know who made these recordings and what were they made for? Like, what was the context? And if it turns out that they're really recordings of incarcerated people, I want to know whether or not they were compensated for their work, how they felt about the experience of doing it. it if they, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I just want to know, like, was this an okay thing? So do you have any theories about how this might have happened?

Like, what do you theorize is the situation that caused this? I mean, I think it's probably the man. Yeah, okay. Alice, thank you so much for giving us this question. I definitely want to figure out what's going on. Yeah, I'm interested to see what you find. Coming out of my conversation with Alice, I had a pretty good idea of how we were going to approach this one.

But the road ahead seemed tedious. I knew that Adobe didn't make these sounds because that's just not one of the things they make. So it seemed like we were going to have to write them a letter asking if they would pretty please tell us who made these recordings, and then when they ignored that message, we'd have to find another way in and hope that the other way in would eventually lead us

to the name of the person who made the recordings. I knew we'd get there eventually, but I also knew that we were probably going to spend a lot of time screaming into the void. And then someone on the team, arguably the least tech-savvy member of the team, said something that changed the course of our inquiry. I said, isn't there some kind of back-channel metadata way to figure out who made these audio files? And that's when I remembered. There is some kind of back-channel metadata way to figure out who made these audio files. And the reason I know that is because of a guy named John McAfee. If you don't know John McAfee by his first name, you almost certainly know him by his last.

McAfee Antivirus was the first commercially available antivirus software for computers, and John McAfee was the guy who created it. But the reason we're talking about him is not because he created this software. We're talking about him because of what he did after that. In 2012, McAfee was named as a person of interest in a murder investigation. And instead of allowing himself to be questioned, McAfee went on the run. For three weeks, everybody was looking for this guy.

Nobody knew where he was. And the thing that was especially crazy about this was that McAfee was not exactly keeping a low profile. The whole time he's gone. He's blogging. He's in constant contact with reporters. And eventually he gets so confident in his ability to evade police that he decides to give an in-person interview

at his secret hiding place. McAfee invites this team of reporters to meet him at this luxury resort, Guatemala. They fly out, they interview him, they publish an article about his life on the lamb, and shockingly, none of this is what ultimately gets embusted. What gets him busted is the photo that they publish along with the article, because buried in this photo is a whole bunch of information called XIF or XIF data. So when you take a photo using a digital camera or smartphone, there's certain pieces of technical information that automatically get saved into the photo itself.

This is the XIF data. It includes things like camera settings, the date, the time, and often it includes the exact GPS location of where the photo was taken. The thing is that because this data is hidden, a lot of people don't realize it's there. So when this photo of McAfee gets posted online, along with this snarky article about a top secret meeting and a top secret location, this one guy on Twitter takes it as a personal challenge.

He opens up a special type of website called an exit viewer, which allows you to retrieve all the metadata that's hidden in an image. And within minutes, he has a map that shows the exact spot where McAfee's been hiding. After that, McAfee gets arrested, he's deported to the United States. Eventually, he's cleared as a suspect. And for most people, I think those are the most lasting headlines from this event. But for me, the highlight of the story was the exit viewer. Because until this, I had no idea there was so much information hiding in our files.

or that there was a tool that could extract it for free online. It felt like real internet detective shit. And I remember that for at least a few years after this thing, I would invent different reasons to use it. But I think the reason I hadn't really thought about using it in this case is because I'd only ever used it on image files. I knew that it could be used for audio files, but I had no idea what kind of metadata would be available.

Because unlike image files, audio files don't automatically save a lot of information about their creation. So when I ran Alice's audio files through the exit viewer, I wasn't expecting a lot. But what came back to me was an absolute gold mine. The exif viewer yielded pages and pages of information about these files. And as I'm flipping through these pages, the most striking piece of information is that all of Alice's prison sounds came from the same source. Hi, my name is Mark Mianini, and I'm a sound designer.

That simply means that I am responsible for everything that you hear in a movie except for the music. It is my job to make sure the dialogue is perfectly intelligible and clear, that all the sounds that we're missing during the filming on Saturday location are there and in place. And it's my job to design the sound of things that you've never seen or heard before if it's a science fiction or fantasy film. I know we have some very pressing questions for this guy, but before we get to that, I need you to know that Mark is not just a sound designer. He's widely considered to be one of the best sound designers in the world. He's won two Academy Awards, and he's been nominated for four others, and if you scroll through his IMDB,

you'll see that he's worked on some of the best-sounding movies of the last 40 years, including Star Trek 4, the Fifth Element, and Mad Max Fury Road. What you won't see on his IMDB page, or at least what we didn't see, were any recognizable prison movies. So going into this conversation, we genuinely had no idea what these prison recordings had been made for. But the thing we quickly learned about Mark

is that even when he's not on a movie project, he's always collecting sounds. You know, look, most great musicians don't not play their guitar or piano if they're not being paid to make an album. No, it's in your blood to make music. It's in my blood to make sound. And so I think about sound every day.

and I look forward to doing it every day. As far as Mark's concerned, sound is the preeminent art form of the 20th century. And like the Mona Lisa or the statue of David, Mark wants his sounds to live forever. Which is part of the reason why, in 2017, he and fellow sound designer Richard Anderson packaged up thousands of recordings from their bespoke personal libraries and released them to the world, including these prison recordings that Alice found in the Adobe Stock Library. Now, at this point in our interview, Mark knows we're going to be asking him about one of these library sounds, but he doesn't know which one we're going to ask about. So after a long and lovely conversation, which you'll be able to hear in an upcoming bonus episode, we were ready to play the clip.

Give me just a second. Okay. Here we go. And this is it. Yeah, I remember this. Oh, my God. You're in trouble. Why did you say I'm in trouble?

There's so many stories around this. Mark told us that these recordings were made for a Nick Nolte movie called Weeds, which tells the true story of an inmate at San Quentin who found passion and redemption in the prison's theater program. The movie came out in 1987 and quickly fell into obscurity, which is why we didn't recognize that there was a prison title on Mark's IMDB page. But the reason that Mark instantly recognized these 40-year-old recordings is because they were made under very unique circumstances.

I recorded at Stateville Maximum Security Penitentiary in Stateville, Illinois. Because this movie was based on a real story and focuses on the real life conditions of incarcerated men, the film's producers wanted to capture the real textures and sounds of prison, which are very hard to replicate. The environment of a prison, which is a raucous place 24-7, It never shuts up. It's a cacophonous din that no human being should ever be subjected to. But we had to reproduce not just penitentiary sounds, but the actual penitentiary sounds.

So we got permission to go to the prison and record the ambiances and specific sounds like laughter in a theater. Now, surely the production could have hired a group of professional actors to come into the prison and laugh on cue. But that's not what happened, because the Stateville Penitentiary, which had been home to such infamous criminals as Richard Speck and Leopold and Loeb, was also home to a group of incarcerated theater actors

that called themselves the con artistes. Stateville Prison, as part of their rehabilitation program, has a very robust and successful theater arts program, and they have an actual live theater in the prison And so they gave me, hold on to yourself, 100 lifers. Put us in a theater. I stood on a stage, and I walked 100 prisoners through audience reactions like light, prisoner, laughs, and titters in reaction to Nick saying X. Not all of the men were involved in the theater arts program, but Mark says that they all performed exceptionally well.

and they were also given the opportunity to be in the movie as extras. For 10 days, the production of weeds took over part of the prison, and 250 prisoners were cast to play themselves in the movie. They staged a play and a murder and an all-out prison riot, which Mark then had to re-stage just to capture the sound. At the lunch break, we just sat and had a sandwich, and one of the prisoners came up to me as one of the COs stiffened, And he looked me in the eye and he said,

You ain't no effing Francis Ford Coppola. Wow. He was right. For Mark, this whole thing was an unbelievably memorable experience. But obviously, we contacted him to ask a very specific question. And we had to know. Did it ever seem like these guys were being forced to participate? Did it seem like they were having fun?

or was it possibly some combination of the two? No, no, I think they were excited to do, and they felt like they were making a movie. I think the tedium of maximum security penitentiary is unfathomable. This was like a dream, I think, for some of these people. And in fact, after the first day, we wrapped up and most of them disappeared,

and one of them lingered, and he wanted to talk, and he told me how much fun he had. And I think this is a testament to them as actors and the success of the people who are teaching in that theater arts department because all I simply said is, okay, here's what I need from y'all. Do whatever feels natural and it's going to be great.

And you'd think that the minute I said action, everybody would take the cue and they'd all make a little giggle or a laugh at the same time. But they had this innate sense of timing that was quite unexpected. And that is an unedited cue. I just said, action, and you heard,

ah, ha, ha, ha, ha. And it was beautifully laid out as if I had physically edited those into those little individual spots. It was natural. Wow. Okay. No prisoners were harmed in the making of this motion picture. Mark, thank you so much.

I really appreciate your time. Talking to Mark about this whole thing was certainly a comfort to us, but we weren't sure it was going to be enough to satisfy Alice's concerns. Because as sensitive as Mark was to the experience of these guys he was working with, he couldn't tell us what it felt like from their perspective. Or even if these guys had been paid for their work. So if we really wanted to land this one, we were going to have to find one of the incarcerated men who worked on this movie.

At that time, I was N1-2470. That was my prison number. That's after the break. Welcome back to the show. Before the break, we met up with my friend Alice, who'd found these strange stock recordings and hadn't been able to stop thinking about them since. The recordings were labeled as prison laughter,

and they certainly sounded like laughter that was recorded in a prison. And that made Alice wonder if someone had rounded up a group of incarcerated men and made them laugh on command. And technically speaking, that is what happened. The recordings that are what happened. found were made at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois and feature the voices of a hundred incarcerated men. But according to Mark Mangini, the legendary sound designer who made these recordings,

the scene at the prison was nowhere near as dystopian as Alice imagined. As far as he could tell, this had been a great experience for everyone involved, and we didn't have any reason to doubt him. But if we really wanted to lay Alice's concerns to rest, we knew we needed the story from someone on the other side of this experience. So we set out to find one of the movies incarcerated actors. And that's how we ended up talking to Max Serta. At that time, I was N1-2470. I was a convict.

That was my prison number. Nowadays, Max lives in Chicago. He works with At-risk youth and runs a nonprofit focused on helping people navigate the process of re-entry after prison. But back in 1987, Max wasn't sure that he would ever be free. You know, when I got incarcerated when I was 16, I never enrolled in a high school. I was a broken kid. I was a lost kid.

I was a scared kid. I never thought I was going to get out. So, you know, it had to become a guerrilla in there. For Max, life in prison was defined by emotional extremes. On the one hand, he felt like he was constantly in danger, constantly fighting for his life. And on the other, he felt profoundly and mind-numbingly bored. Every day was the same and every day was bad. And then one day, administration announced that a film crew would be coming to the prison.

And for a short time, Max's life felt different. I was excited, man. You know what I mean? That don't happen. People incarcerated pick to be part of a movie. And, yeah, the homies and everybody, we was laughing about us. You know, I say, I hope I don't got no war in something. Max wasn't a member of the prison theater program,

and he didn't really care for drama. But just having the opportunity to do something different was reason enough to sign up. So when the film crew arrived, Max auditioned for a part. He figured it was a long shot because the word on the yard was that something like 600 guys had signed up for just 250 spots. And then one of the captain says,

hey, man, they're impressed with you. Man, they're going to call you. I say, yeah, that's some bullshit. They're going to call me. But they showed up there. Not only did Max get picked to be an extra, they gave him a speaking part, too. During one of the riot scenes,

Max's character is looking for a way to escape. He's running through the tunnels under the prison, and when he reaches a locked gate, he grabs a sledgehammer. And I said something to the effect, I'll bust this motherfucker open. He swings the sledgehammer high above his head and brings it crashing down on the gate.

But instead of breaking through the lock, this prop sledgehammer, which was made of, foam rubber just crumbled in his hands. The director yelled cut and everyone burst out laughing. Max said it was the most funny he'd had since getting locked up. And it doesn't seem like he was alone in that feeling. In researching this story, we found an article from the Chicago Tribune written by a reporter who'd actually embedded with the film crew back in the 80s. And when they spoke to the incarcerated extras, it seemed like every one of them was overwhelmed by what a

positive experience it was. Not just because they were getting to run around at some their cells, but because they felt like the cast and crew were actually treating them with dignity. At least, most of them were. But Nick Nolte, he didn't want no part of us. He didn't want to take a picture with us. Really? Wow. Yeah, he acted so different. It was wild.

But we didn't care. But everybody else, all the other actors, outside actors that came through, man, beautiful, beautiful people, trying to be empathetic to who we were and why we were there. and they even sat in a child hall with us, you know. It was cool. It was pretty cool. I'm so glad to hear that it was a good experience for you. The bringing people from the outside at any given day in prison

reminds people that we're not from here. We're from out there, man. And sometimes getting people from the outside world to come inside behind the wall and talk to you about this or that or filming a movie. It brings back a little. of the reality that even though we're here, we're doing our time,

but we're not from here. And we're from out there. This is the real world. And you get a taste of little liberation for that moment. Over the next 10 years, Mack spent a lot of time trying to heal himself.

He learned to read and write. He started signing up for different prison programs. And when he finally got released from prison, his sister and daughter talked him into watching the movie that had come out of all of this. Weeds.

But Max wasn't super into it. I thought it was kind of boring, man, until it got to the right seat. Until it got to the right seat, man. For one thing, his scene hadn't made it into the final cut, which was definitely a bummer. But as he reflects on it now, there was one element of the movie that really stood out to Max, the sound. It felt real, man. There's just some things you just kind of fake, man. The noise.

You know, they had that down. It's a constant concert of noises, voices, desperateness, yells, casual conversations, whoever recorded the audio did it good because that's how it sounds like every day and night, man. After talking to Max, we felt ready to go back to Alice with our answer to her question. We had confirmed Mark Mangini's account.

The experience had been voluntary. And at least for Max, it was one of the few bright spots from his time in prison. As for compensation, Max told us that he was paid about $700 for his speaking role, which he used to pay for his son's baptism. And according to the Chicago Tribune story, all of the other incarcerated extras were compensated as well. The men who didn't have speaking rolls were reportedly paid $20 a day, which may sound like a shockingly small amount of money.

But records indicate that during this moment in the 1980s, non-union extras in Hollywood were being paid just $35 a day. So the discrepancy wasn't really that big. All of this felt like very good news. But when we reconnected with Alice, she said this. Is it weird that I'm a little disappointed? What are you disappointed about? Alex, come on, you know.

You wanted me to go kickbutton take names. She wanted me to go set something right? No, I wanted to be Aaron Brockovich. We would have been Aaron Brockovich. Yeah, that's true, because she really did do the work. You would have more been the client in the story. Yeah, I know. That's true. Way to hold me to account.

I'm sorry, we ruined your Aaron Brockovich moment. Oh, that's okay. That's all right. You'll have another one. We'll see. This episode of Hyperfix was produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amor Yeats, and Kat Shookneck. Our engineer is Tony Williams. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me.

Tonight, August 27th, the day this episode comes out, Alice Wedderland will be hosting Space the Game Show, the comedy game show that kicked off this whole investigation live. The show is at 8 p.m. You can attend in-person at the DSP Studios in Los Angeles or watch the live stream. We'll have all the details in the show notes. One more reminder, Hyperfix is doing a live show in New York

on September 11th, 2026th at Rulet Intermedium in Brooklyn. You can buy tickets at Tickets.hyperfixpod.com. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover Audio with Vision at Radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon.