Stuff You Should Know - The Max Headroom Incident

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

In 1987, a very strange broadcast intrusion occurred in the city of Chicago. For just a couple of minutes, the odd TV character Max Headroom appeared onscreen in the middle of an episode of Dr. Who. He spoke in garbled tones, brandished a marital aid, and was spanked on the rear with a fly swatter by a person dressed in Annie Oakley garb. If this sounds weird, it is. It's the Max Headroom Incident. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Salt Lake City, Utah, and Phoenix, Arizona. We're coming to see you. Yes, we are, so come see us. Why don't ya? Yeah, we put out the call to Salt Lake City

and said, should we come there? And tickets are going gangbusters. You guys really responded. Yeah, we thought you were just like, this is all just a joke, but no, it's turning out quite well. We're gonna be there October 23rd at the Grand Theater in Salt Lake City.

And then the next night will be in Phoenix at the Van Buren. And we can't wait to see you guys, so please come out and see us. And if you want tickets, you can go to sysklive.com for those, and Chuck, and. Yes, to our friends down under. Melbourne, boy, we are super psyched

because you love us and you sold us out very quickly. So we have added a second show that I believe is actually an earlier show, isn't that right? Yeah, it's a 530 show, I believe, at Melbourne is the one that we added, and it's gonna be cool. It's gonna be like a sweet little matinee.

Yeah, we call that happy hour in our country. Yeah, that's right. So make sure you guys bring a slab each. That's right, and Perth and Brisbane, step it up. Yeah, that's right. So if you wanna come see us, go to sysklive, whether you're in the US, whether you're in Australia, whether you're in New Zealand, it doesn't matter.

You can go to the same site and hang out with us, and there you go. See you guys soon. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. [♪ upbeat music playing What do you think? Pretty good? It's pretty good.

And this is Stuff You Should Know. Josh Headroom. Thank you. Yeah, you've been, I saw you over there with your earbuds today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right now, I would say if you are somewhere where you can pause and go to a online video carrier of your choosing and type in Max Headroom Incident, spend the next minute and 22 seconds watching it. We'll wait. And we'll wait. We'll just insert a minute and 22 seconds of silence here. How about this? Let's take a break.

Oh, okay. And then we'll come back and then we'll talk about exactly what happened during that minute and 22 seconds. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by

step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Okay, we're back. Did you watch it? Are you talking to me? No. Oh, okay. I was looking at you. I'm guessing that people, people did watch it.

A few people did. Smart ones did. Cause this is really tough to describe and we're going to try, but it's something you really have to see yourself. Even here, it's genuinely disturbing sitting in an office years later watching it. And I can imagine if I was at home, I would have probably been a little freaked out. You found it disturbing? Yeah.

I found it hilarious in like a really juvenile way. Yeah. It creeps me out. It was like watching David Byrne on acid at a talking head show. That's what I think of when I saw that. You know? All right. I'm going to go back in here.

Okay. So you got Max Headroom. Well, actually a dude wearing a rubber mask, a rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom. Yes. And this, this is just genius to me. So you mentioned earlier about how the Max Headroom had like these kind of grid lines behind them at all times and they kind of moved and adjusted and they were different colors to do, to, to simulate that.

These guys had like a piece of corrugated metal, shiny metal. And I guess they had it attached somehow to something that rocked it back and forth. And they kind of, somebody was clearly rocking it back and forth here, there, erratically. And it really does a good job of, it gets the point across. That it looked like the Max Headroom TV show. Yeah. The background. And the character.

Yes. Yeah. But again, I would say that this person was very, very clearly on acid. Well, I think what disturbs me, I need to make it clear. It is definitely funny and stupid. But what disturbs me is the sound of the voice, which is all garbled. It's really like on YouTube, it has subtitles, thankfully, because it's hard to make out. And a lot of times it just says, can't, you know, understand what he's saying or whatever.

And the garbled quality and just the random weirdness that's going on. It's not like, it was creepier to me than if V for Vendetta dude had to come on, Guy Fox had to come on and said, you know, we are coming into your thing to tell you this about this. Right. This was just so weird and all over the place, it was creepy to me. Yeah. Yeah.

I see what you mean. Like you're watching somebody. It's nonsensical. Somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah. I felt like watching somebody lose their mind. Right. Okay.

Yeah. Totally get that. And here's what the guy did that would make you feel like he lost his mind. This is the weird thing to me. It's very targeted toward WGN. Right? Yeah. Almost so much so that some people would say, this was clearly somebody who had a grudge

against WGN. Yeah. He makes fun of the Bulls sportscaster, the guy who worked for WGN at the time. He makes reference to how he just made a masterpiece for the greatest world's newspaper nerds, which was a messed up version of WGN's call letters staying for world's greatest newspaper. He wields a rubber penis. Yeah. That's one.

Although it was great. In almost every article it was referred to as a marital aid. Did you see that? No, but I actually guessed it on Strickland's tech stuff like four years ago and we covered this and I called it a marital aid. Did you? Mm-hmm. Okay.

So there you go. I wanted to keep it clean. Sure. Well, it's a family. I realized that saying the word penis is okay. Well, it's clinical. I mean, we did a puberty episode, surely we have the chops to say penis, but marital aid is hilarious, especially in this context, like this crazy dude on acid wearing a max

headroom mask has a marital aid. No, he doesn't. That's not what that is in that context. Yeah. And that's a new t-shirt, by the way. What? We have the chops to say penis. There you go.

So that's a band name. Let's go ahead and use some of the, let's go ahead and say some of the direct quotes. Yes, let's. So he comes on and he goes, he's a freaking nerd. I think I'm better than Chuck Swarovski, freaking liberal. That's a really good impression of this. And Chuck Swarovski was the... The Bulls guy.

Yeah. The sports announcer. And this is a time too when like the Bulls were, this is the Jordan Pippin era still. I mean, well, still at the beginning of it. Was it 87? I thought it was like in the middle of it. Was it the beginning? Pretty early-ish, let's say.

I wish these days that I would have been more cognizant and like more into basketball than like I am now. See, that's when I was the most into it was bird, Jordan, magic. I would have liked to watch some of those games. Yeah, that was good stuff. Cause that's when the Hawks were good back then. Yeah. Back then.

Dominique. Hey, shout out to Kent Baysmore. You know, he listens to this show. No way. Yeah, he's a fan. How'd you find that out? Twitter? Yeah.

That's great. I know. I know. How do you not love Bays? He's awesome. Man, he's bright red right now. That's so cool. All right.

So Chuck Swersky is freaking liberal. He's wielding the rubber penis. The marital aid. The marital aid. He drops that. Then he picks up a new Coke. Well, you can't really tell if it's a new Coke. No, it's a Pepsi.

Oh, was it? Uh-huh. Okay. I couldn't really tell. He picks up a can and, but he says, catch the wave, which is the new Coke slogan. Right. Then he starts humming. It's so random.

Then he starts humming the theme song to the 60s show Clutch Cargo, which is weird in and of itself. Sure. That's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths, it was just a like a human mouth moving. That's disturbing. Yeah. That was, if you've seen Pulp Fiction, it was the scene where Bruce Willis was a kid

and Christopher Walken comes in with the wristwatch scene that Clutch Cargo was playing on TV when he's watching it. Right. But it is weird looking. So you would say, why did he do the Clutch Cargo theme? Well, again, this is a WGN thing. And apparently that's where you saw it as a kid, yeah, in Chicago. Okay.

So he says, also, your love is fading. I still see the X, which apparently is something from the last episode of Clutch Cargo. Yeah. That was the big X or something. And then he says, what you're talking about earlier, I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds. But he should have said, world's greatest newspaper nerds. WGN.

Right. Which you might find confusing as I did too, but apparently the Chicago Tribune Company owns WGN TV. So they call themselves world's greatest newspaper TV. Right. WGN. It's all coming together. Ipso facto.

There you go. Then finally, toward the end, the camera cuts to a different angle. This one has the dude bent over with his bare butt hanging out. His face is now offscreen, but he's holding the mask still out like his head is in it, but it's not. Right. There is a person, I say woman, but I don't know, but a person in an anti- Oakley dress. Is that what it was?

I didn't get that. Yeah. It looked like a prairie bonnet ensemble, but the bonnet kind of hides the face so you don't know if it's a man or a woman. And they are spanking the bare butt with a fly swatter. Right. And he's worried about them coming to get him. They're coming to get me.

And then he says, come get me and uses a bad word. B word. The B word. And then it goes back to Dr. Who. Yeah. Just like it came in, it went out and it's gone. Can you imagine seeing that live? And while the people who saw it live, the next thing they would have heard was the doctor

saying something like, oh, he died of an electric shock, must have died instantly. And then everybody's just sitting there like their mouths hanging open. Well, it was Dr. Who too. So it was probably a bunch of Chicago nerds watching PBS. So all right, my imitation was okay, but let's just play at least like a couple of lines from the real thing. Yeah. All right, so you did a pretty good impression.

I think everyone can agree now, right? It's so strange. So this was an enormous thing, right? Like people were watching this and were aghast, aghawg. Some people probably thought it was funny, WGN reporting on it all over the place the next couple of days. Yeah, the newspapers had picked it up. Yeah.

There's this one, there's a compilation of WGN broadcasts, or it might even be more than just WGN of people in the street being interviewed. What do you think about this? One guy's like, it's kind of like hooligans throwing a brick through your window, you know, to get your attention. There was a little kid who was like, very, very funny. The star of the news, though, was this one Doctor Who fan, this lady who was not at all amused by this.

And I just want to play her little segment, okay? Yeah. Get annoyed, some viewers. I don't know. I just thought it would be just a slight mess up, but that in the middle of the tape, it's going to be, you're going to have to tape over it. I just think that's the funniest thing out of the whole thing. Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV, he was so angry.

Yeah, I didn't see that guy. I saw that in the Pasternak article. So funny. Yeah, he was mad. So there was a lot of mixed reaction, but the voice from on high that came from the FCC, who you said were called in pretty quickly, they were like, this is no laughing matter. You might think it's funny, it's not very funny. Okay, it's kind of funny, but not really.

And you can get a hundred thousand dollar fine in a year in jail for this kind of thing. So stop doing it. But at this point, by this point, it was actually a federal offense. It was a felony. A felony offense. Wait, what was that? Dazed and confused. Oh, okay.

Tamped around with the mailbox as a felony offense. I was like, wait a minute. I know that from somewhere. So the FCC gets involved, and this is really interesting in this article. The FBI got involved too. The FBI was involved, Chicago PD, like they were looking into it. Really, man, it has become obvious to me that I say the word apparently a lot. Really?

A lot. I was listening to an episode, QA'ing an episode, and I was like, stop saying apparently Josh. Yeah, I've started to, after 10 years, I've started to notice some things about my own self. It's like a tick. I try to just avoid it. I try to too, and normally I can, but man, it just came welling up into my awareness. Well, apparently.

Apparently. Apparently, I'm going to have to get over it. At any rate, there were a lot of different agencies working on this, but the trail went cold pretty quick. You remember how you said that the WGN engineers started looking around the station? I think what they were looking for was this. Somebody physically patching in to the transmission network, the cables. Wearing a mask.

Yeah, either playing a videotape, which it seems pretty obvious. It was pre-taped. Yeah. It was pre-taped, or doing something like in a studio, but they would have to physically patch into WGN's transmission network. Yeah, it's like when a car doesn't work, and I open the hood thinking, I'm going to see a squirrel gnawing on a cable that's in two pieces now and frayed at the ends. Right.

The squirrel wearing a max headroom mask and being on acid with a marital aid. Yes. At first, the FCC and the FBI and anybody who was in the know basically said, this was a very sophisticated attack. It would have required some very expensive equipment, a lot of electricity. There's not a lot of ways that they could have done this. Later on in the Pasternak article, and this is one of the ways Pasternak contributed to this whole thing, he talked to one of the FCC investigators, and this guy basically did

away with that whole viewpoint that had lasted for almost 30 years. That it had to have been somebody with $100,000 piece of equipment and $10,000 worth of electricity over the minute and a half. He was saying, no, you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this new for $10,000 at the time, or you could have probably bought it for use for just a fraction of that, and it would have taken very little electricity. It would have just taken some know-how and good positioning really. Yeah.

Basically, it could have been done with the size of a direct TV dish today, and all they would have had to do was get in a high enough location in between, literally, because they're beaming waves, they're beaming microwaves through the air. All they had to do was get in between the original studio and that initial tower on top of the, I think it was a John Hancock building. For WGN, yeah. Yeah, and have a stronger signal. Right.

Even just a slightly stronger signal. So you remember how WGN has their studio transmission shooting up to the John Hancock building, and then that transmitter shoots it out to everybody else in Chicago. What I think you're saying is, if somebody was on the roof of another nearby building, and they just shoot a transmission, their own Max Headroom transmission, at a stronger weight, or no, a stronger amplitude, that's what it is, of the same frequency, you just overpower it, cancels out what WGN's doing, and instead it transmits your Max Headroom thing.

And they would be closer to that broadcast tower, right, ostensibly. Yes. So that would mean that it required far less electricity than you would think, or that they originally thought, and far less equipment, too. They also had a pretty good idea of where these people would have had to have done it, because after they got shut out of WGN, they turned their attention to WTTW, the PBS station, and they hijacked their signal, while WTTW shot their studio link to the Sears Tower. So this would have been somebody who was on a roof somewhere that had a clear view of

the John Hancock building and the Sears Tower, and could transmit to either one of them. But that's basically what they think happened. Yeah, and the guy you were talking about, Dr. Michael Marcus, who at the time was the assistant bureau chief in the FCC's Field Operations Bureau, he was a lead investigator, and he said that the guy in Chicago that was sort of in charge wasn't super like, he was just sort of used to traditional FCC investigations. He wasn't wanting to go knocking on doors and as to like investigate some kind of weird, kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes.

Who may or may not have a marital aid in his apartment. Just smack him on the head with it. And then they also, you know, nobody was being hurt, no one got hurt. In the end, it was almost a victimless crime. So they didn't throw a ton of resources at it. They were kind of like, listen, we're not gonna, if you want to go investigate this, that's great, you should, but we're not gonna assign a team of 12 people to try and crack this case of a bunch of nerds who did a weird thing for a minute and 20 seconds.

And I think the longer it went on and there was no more of these intrusions from these guys, the fewer and fewer resources they had to work with and it just kind of fell to the wayside. Well, what's interesting is, in the beginning they said it would take somebody with a very expensive piece of equipment, a lot of electricity and a lot of know-how. And today, the only one of those that's remaining is a lot of know-how. There wouldn't have been a lot of people running around Chicago who would have known how to do something like this.

So it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources, that no one has ever been really implicated in this one. Yeah, I don't think we said, they still don't know who did this. It's an unsolved mystery. Like Dennis Farina and Robert Stack love this one. The FBI, for their take, started concentrating on the actual video. They had the technology at the time, which is kind of funny now to think about it. But they're the only ones who had the technology at the time to actually make enhanced frames

of this videotape and print out pictures, enhance them, and they were kind of focused on this upper right-hand quadrant, as they say, where the Annie Oakley was spanking with a fly swatter, I don't know why they're so into that. But they said, we're trying to get clues on the actual location of the people who made the tape, not necessarily where they broadcast it from, but where did they shoot this thing to begin with? Right. There was very little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal, and that could

have been literally anywhere, because it's a really tight shot. It really is, yeah. And there was very little evidence given in the video. Yeah. I mean, we were looking at industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in an apartment living room. I mean, it wasn't like the door was attached to anything, it was freely spinning back and forth.

It didn't make sense. Not the best lead, right? No. So, over time, and again, this is weird too. It's not so weird that the FCC or the FBI didn't find who did this if they weren't really looking very hard. What's really weird is that no one has been like, it was these guys. I was there, I know these dudes, it was these guys.

Statute limitations is done, like who cares? Yeah, after 1993, these guys would have gotten off scot-free, because the statute of limitations for this one was five years, right? I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me. Right. I'm soy bomb. No one's done that, right? Yeah.

There was some very early forum, like message board stuff, took the form of a bulletin board services, I think, BBSs, really early geek culture, like Matthew Broderick dialing something with his phone and then putting it on that weird little Commodore 64 thing, the modem, yeah, to transmit the dial tone over the telephone system. So, that's the level of technology that these people were dealing with, but they were communicating with each other over this proto-internet, these bulletin board systems. And two days after this, a guy named the Chameleon posted basically what you and I said about how all it took was these guys to go up on a tall building and overwhelm the WGN and the

WTTW studio links, and so facto, I'm a big fan of that, by the way, this intrusion was successful, right? Yeah. Two days, not two years, not a year ago, two days after it, somebody was on there explaining how it went down, so somebody knew this, right? But only two theories have really ever come to light as to who it was, one, you can basically just throw right out, and the other one, it turns out to have been a dead end. Yeah, the first one that you were talking about that doesn't really hold water was a,

and this was a rumor online for a while, it was a musician named Eric Fournier, or Fournier. Fournier? Fournier. Fournier in preschool, I think, in Fournier, yeah. That's how it was spelled? Mm-hmm. F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R. Actually, I don't know how it was spelled, I couldn't spell back then.

So this guy was in a band, and he did this weird, super creepy YouTube series called Shay St. John, S-H-A-Y-E. Did you watch it? Oh yeah. Love it. Yeah, just I knew that you would love it. Love it. This is right up your alley.

Yeah. But this is genuinely unsettling too. I'm with you on that. So it kind of fit in that he was doing these weird things. He had this band, they were in Bloomington, Indiana, not too far from Chicago. The Blood Farmers. Yeah, the band was the Blood Farmers, and they did these weird music videos, and they thought this is the kind of guy that would have done that, and the thinking was that

he went to go broadcast one of their weird music videos as a broadcast intrusion, but chickened out at the last minute because they would have been found, and then ended up just improv-ing. That part makes a little sense, because it definitely seems improved. It does, but it was also videotaped, remember? So that means he would have had two videotapes with him. What do you mean? So if he was going to play the music video, and said, I'm not going to do that, he would

have had to have brought this other videotape and played that as a backup. The other thing is apparently, see, I just said apparently again, Alex Pasternett. Pasternett from Motherboard contacted some of Fernier's friends, because Fernier died in 2010, but his friends were like, absolutely not. Even some of the Blood Farmers were like, it wasn't him. I know what you're saying, and yeah, he did the whole Shea St. John thing, but this was not him. It was not quite there.

He didn't know what he was doing with any broadcast stuff, or video editing, or anything like that. Yeah, so this other one to me seems pretty promising. So we flash forward to, when did this actually happen? Was this like, by the time Reddit to come around, wasn't it on Reddit? Yeah, I think it was about 25 years after, so it would have been in 2007. Yeah, so there's this guy from- Oh no, 2012, 13, sorry. There was this guy from Chicago named Bowie Pogue, P-O-A-G.

I didn't have any friends with that last name, when I was a kid. And he was one of the kids hanging around those BBSs in the 80s in Chicago. From the sounds of it, he was on the younger side. He was 13, and even as a 13-year-old geek, was very much intimidated by the older geeks in that crowd. And so it wasn't boisterous. He was sort of like, hey, I'm kind of hanging out here and not saying much, and don't notice me.

I just want to ingratiate myself. But you guys can get me drunk for laughs, if you want. And at a party in 1987, he described him as a small, peculiar man that he thought was about in his 30s, and he had an older brother. They lived in Chicago. So Pogue is describing these two guys who were in the same scene with him. Correct. Right.

Yeah. And they lived with his girlfriend, about 10 miles from downtown Chicago. And they had the know-how. They were super into computers early on. He said he went to their apartment, and it looked like a computer hoarder, mess of wires and computers and equipment. Like Neo's apartment. Yeah.

Why not? Or what was the other one he was in before the Matrix? Johnny Pneumonic. Yes. Bill and Ted? Yeah. Johnny Pneumonic. That's cyberpunk.

Yes. Yes, it is. All right. You could probably make the case that the Matrix is as well. All right. Sure. So he described him as a stocky guy with tinted lens glasses in his early 30s, an odd dude. His brother, he said he described as just kind of normal.

But he said that he didn't make the connection at the time, but at a party on November about the same day, midday, on November 22nd, he was at a gathering of these dudes at the brother's apartment, and he heard them say something about doing something big. Later that night, they went to Pizza Hut, and he's like, what are you guys talking about? Here's the big thing. And they said, hey, don't ask questions, but just watch Channel 11 tonight. On that same day, and I don't know how he didn't put it together. That's the one thing that really strikes me as fishy.

But he said that years later, now when he looks at it, he's like, even with that mask on, I see the body, I see what's going on, I hear that, and it's that guy to me. But 25 years later, he was there that day. They told him to watch that night, and he didn't put it together for 25 years. That to me is the one fishy thing. Well, and he has been called out as fishy. Sure. I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy.

Yeah. So the guy, the mother pastor neck, reached out and he said, can you still get in touch with these guys all these years later? He said he sent them messages via Facebook. I don't even know if they saw him. They didn't get back. Then in a last-ditch effort, he sent them a certified mail to, he found out where they lived, never heard anything back, and he was like, hey, it's clear that these guys don't

want to be talked to. Right. So you want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. If you're thinking to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. You know, life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. So that's where it stands right now. Like nobody knows who is behind it still to this day, which is, it is crazy. And as a result, this max headroom hack has taken its place in like the pantheon of geek culture and of hacker culture. And rightfully so, you know, this is legendary in its own way. That's right. Uh, you got anything else?

I got nothing else on this one. Cool man. Well, if you want to know more about max headroom, you should start by checking out this amazing motherboard article by Alex Pasternak. And since I said amazing, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with the, the almond brothers eat a peach from emojis. I don't know if this is true, but it's fun.

Okay. I wanted to talk about when Josh talked about the almond brother span factoid because I think it's actually a cool factoid. Dwayne Alman was once asked by a reporter what he was going to do for the war effort in Vietnam. And his response was, I'm going to eat a peach for peace. Dwayne died not long after that album and eat a peach was released posthumously. So he contends Jesse Godette, but that is where the album title came from.

And the eat a peach was not eat a butt. He or she, I guess, just it could go either way. Yeah. As always, keep up the good work. I'm currently brewing beer and listening. Tell me where to mail some bottles. Okay. Or come pick them up in Salt Lake City.

All right. We'll do both. Sounds like a challenge. Right. They're too heavy. That's right. I can't pick them up. Thanks a lot, Jesse.

Appreciate that. Even though I still think I'm right. If you want to contend that something one of us said was incorrect, we love that stuff. You can tweet to us at joshumclark, syskpodcast, or moviecrush. You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know, or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. From the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.