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[Assistant] I mean that is exhausting. I am glad that I cannot communicate with these spirits good or evil because it does seem like a big responsibility that I just don't want right now.


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[Assistant] Did they ask him about like the coronavirus? Like does he have any insight on when this thing might open up a little bit?


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[Assistant] And then like spike a Lego of Schefter's head or something like that.


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[Assistant] Do you think that they contacted Verizon after maybe some potential bandwidth issues to start the mock draft and said funnel all of the wifi to these places?


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[Assistant] Probably. He has been in the past years.


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[Assistant] Well, it also prevents the zzzzz during the night if you hear it from like your bedside table or something like that. Why put the, uh, the moon on?


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[Assistant] They were both, so I just saw a tweet that, uh, when that happened, Favre was 35 and Aaron is now 35.


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[Assistant] He did it. His athleticism saved him. His one foot slipped. He found a way, I think, to get his right foot to get enough push just to get him away from


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[Assistant] Uh, yeah, my, the only question I have is why in the world does he have a hat on? Why not? He's jumping off a 30 foot cliff.


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[Assistant] It's gotta be a slow backflip and that's the hard thing is going slow with it and being patient so you don't over, over rotate and smack your face or smack your back. That's right. It's like swan tom bomb, but backwards.


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[Assistant] They have like parkour gyms now where you can take your kids to do like, oh an hour of training in parkour.


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[Assistant] I mean, how many people have fallen that now, like especially with social media and that this is a thing now. Where are those videos?


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[Assistant] Well, like you mentioned, like, I think at this point you kinda just have to accept it. Like, there's nothing that can be done. I saw a lot of people were saying like, Packers fans are the only ones that can change. It's like, no one can change this. Like, it is what it is. He, if, if, hopefully he'll be able to finish his career out with the Packers, but,


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[Assistant] Yeah, and like you said, and kind of the narrative that's coming out, I think he might have his best year of his career this year. I think so too. Who's he throwing it to? Guys like me.


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[Assistant] Are they going to go real behind the scenes? Cause I mean, that's what people want, especially with Tom Brady. Like they want to be able to relate to Tom Brady and not see him as this.


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[Assistant] No, no, some people thought it was like, it was a long kiss. I thought it was fine, I don't care. But maybe he, maybe, I'm just hoping that doesn't make him less apt to give more access this time.


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[Assistant] What his real home life looks like, what he, what it looks like when he's working out. We know you're a sucker for workout videos, so if a guy puts a, an Instagram video out, lifting weights, doing bicep curls, and doing a couple box jumps, you're gonna crown him as the next national or, or Super Bowl champ, like that's just how it goes.


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[Assistant] You know what though? You guys have done this a few times. You turn me. I'm on. I'm, I'm with you. I get it. Like I, I get it. Yeaah. Let's go. I'm only, I'm only on Ben. Hey Jay Hoff!


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[Assistant] Who's in the Hall of Fame game? Stellar's, Cowboys, Ultimate Hall of Fame game, best of all time.


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[Assistant] Uh, played in the Hall of Fame game, if it was to be played in. We actually brought in Michael Pallardi, who put out some great film, Bombs and Balls. He went to the Carolina Panthers and everything. He was so damn good. He was gonna put in that Hall of Fame game, and he was a guy who hadn't had a chance yet, to really put out some good film.


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[Assistant] So this Hall of Fame game was going to be massive for him because probably a lot of punting and everything like that. And I got hurt. He got in there and I watched him in practice like the day before. Murdering footballs. And I was like, holy.


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[Assistant] Shit. I know this general manager doesn't love me already. Now that I'm hurt, they wouldn't cut me. Would they? Would they potentially cut me? Maybe they would. And then my next thought was, well.


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[Assistant] We would compete against each other and although he is hitting bombs, I feel pretty good about myself as well. So that was the whole thing. But then I thought to myself in the middle, how does this guy not have a fucking job in the NFL somewhere? Like as I was watching him, I'm like, how is this guy not in the NFL? This is unbelievable. So that Hall of Fame game was going to be a chance for him.


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[Assistant] To potentially live out his entire dreams, he'd been in like four or five teams, had not really gotten good film. So you're right, it is a good opportunity for people, but since it is an opportunity for people,


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[Assistant] I mean, they're probably not gonna be as good as the people who, you know, have, uh, made the team before. And that is just something that-


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[Assistant] No, remember that was the one where they spray painted the field and then they put a tarp on top of it. Oh, that was the Packers. Yeaah, and they, uhm, they, what's that called, broiled the field. So they actually broiled the field with the sun. They only cooked the top of it.


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[Assistant] It was a shit show. But the thing was you were already at camp for a week or whatever, right? So you already took a lot of the downside of the Hall of Fame game if you were a player.


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[Assistant] You're 100% wrong, actually. Why don't we, don't play. And I walked out, I take the first bus, even though I wasn't playing, I wanted to get over there. You walk through a school to get to the locker room. It's a very interesting...


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[Assistant] I mean, it's a, it's an interesting setup. It's a high school field. Yeah. And you walk through the high school and you walk through like a science class out the back door and then you walk down a hill and then you get in your locker room. It's very, and the locker rooms obviously undersized, especially for the entire roster being there. Cause it's the first week at training camp. No cuts have happened.


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[Assistant] It was very interesting, but as soon as I got there, one of the trainers was like, Patty! And I was like, what's going on?


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[Assistant] And Aaron was there and we had, I think Vin and Terry, uh, walked over to Aaron and then GMs were out there and all of these people and they were just looking at the, the paint and I just walked right over to where they were talking. I was like, Oh, I want to see what's going on here. And I looked and it was just a big glob of paint just stuck together in the middle of the field. And you saw, I forget who it was, but


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[Assistant] Somebody I saw like gave an actual hand thing, it was like, yeaah, we can't play football here, right? And then I think Aaron gave like, uh,


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[Assistant] And then all the conversation just started echoing, right? Echoing through the trainers, through


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[Assistant] Anybody that was there before the game, media started hearing about it, then the entire locker room, and they didn't make the official decision until right before I guess full warmups were about to happen, and that massive dude, what was his name? The, the, the guy, the head of the Hall of Fame. Oh. Ed something? Dave something?


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[Assistant] He's a massive man. He comes into the locker room and gives us like impassioned speech about how it's not good enough for an NFL player to play on. The field is not good enough. We, he gave his whole speech about how we at the Hall of Fame


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[Assistant] Respect and love the level of football that the NFL, like it was a great speech.


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[Assistant] And there wasn't a lot of people paying attention or whatever. And we thought we were just going to get the hell out of there. And they're like, no, no, we're going to do something though for the fans that come here. And they did like a walkout thing. We stood on the field away from each other. I mean, it was, it was very interesting, but that was the first time I ever, uh, shook Mr. Rogers' hand. I said, uh, sir.


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[Assistant] Big fan of the way you do life or something like that. And he said, thanks, you too. And then I walked away. And I think that was potentially the moment that kindled into our best friendship.


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[Assistant] Who killed George Floyd has been arrested in Minneapolis. The Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner, John Harrington,


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[Assistant] And I know at the beginning of the show, we both said, we're not going to talk about, this is a pretty pivotal moment in this entire thing that's happened in Minneapolis, Minnesota, because there was other people getting arrested, and the person that did the whole thing, that started the whole thing, that did the criminal act, wasn't arrested yet. So that led everybody to ask, what the fuck is going on? Now they have arrested him, which is the right move. Send him to jail forever, AJ.


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[Assistant] Scumbag of an individual. Hate that we shared a race with that man. I hate that he was a Caucasian man. I hate that he was even part- because whenever shit like that happens, everybody's like, well, this is- and I'm like, man, I feel like the whites that I know, okay, the Caucasian people that I know, have, I think,


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[Assistant] Like, and that's, I think that is something that we all think. So that whenever a scumbag does something like that, I feel like sometimes the reaction is like, well,


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[Assistant] That's the way it is. It's like, man, I feel like we're better than that at this point. Both sides. I feel like our relationships have tried to build up as much at this point. And every time something that fucking stupid happens, it ruins it again. And you and I, in locker rooms, in football locker rooms, that is a place where you're talking about a melting pot of people.


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[Assistant] You're talking, uh, city backgrounds, people from different countries in there, all coming together for one goal, and it is a beautiful fucking thing. And I hope that the world gets to experience what a locker room is like.


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[Assistant] I just hope that the world can experience that, and every time something like that happens, it feels like we take a step backwards and hold it.


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[Assistant] And it's like, you get to learn about what guys have been through. You know, you get to learn about what guys have been through whenever they're growing up, what their, what their life, their, their childhoods was like and stuff like, I think that is such something that should happen in this world. I feel like if we learned more about people.


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[Assistant] I think it would help everybody. The issue is you don't see enough of that dialogue aside from on sports channels by the way. On sports channels,


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[Assistant] You normally see very, very good conversations, positive conversations, uh, I mean granted there's always a give and take and negative, but you rarely see opposite races speaking in a positive fashion other than trying to push a political agenda other than sports shows. And I think the more we learn about each other, and I think, I hope that


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[Assistant] People are learning a lot about each other now and the reaction that we've all had against this officer and against this entire act.


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[Assistant] I hope the more we learn about each other, the more we can come together. And I think that's what a locker room is. I think you learn about each other, I think you work with each other, and it just automatically becomes like, hey, you know what, we got a lot more, uh,


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[Assistant] We got a lot of shit in fucking common, don't we? This is kind of an interesting little scenario here, and I think that is something that the whole world, I hope, gets to experience at some point.


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[Assistant] Joseph Adai was one of my biggest mentors when I came into the NFL, okay. We shared vitamins together on plenty of nights. Clint's session as well. And just, those, let alone our college team, which had


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[Assistant] Uh, down south Florida in Latin. We have kids from the hills of West Virginia on that team. You know, it was just like that college experience. I wish everybody could have like I wish everybody could have on that team. There's guys that I think we have a couple very serious.


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[Assistant] Charges that have come from players in that locker room after leaving college and things of that nature. We have guys that have gone back to the streets and sold drugs coming into college that sold drugs out at college. I think the ability of learning about that and getting to know the human as opposed to the act


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[Assistant] Was something that was very big for me in college. Like that was, cause I, we grew up, we grew up nowhere near a rich town. Right? We are not, but we are a white trash group of people. Right? Like that is, we are a lower middle class white group.


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[Assistant] Uh, white community. And then whenever, not granted, there are obviously African America, but it's predominantly a white


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[Assistant] Lower middle class. So then whenever I go to college, I get dropped in that locker room.


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[Assistant] And you experience and talk to the people that have grew up in Compton or in these other places. It's just like, okay, it's, it's nice to kind of.


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[Assistant] Where, uh, unarmed African Americans have been targeted and, and it happens, or too many cases, you just go back, you go New York, you go Ferguson, you go, uh, now you're going Minnesota, down in Florida, I mean, there's, there's stories of this happening way too often. But I think this one could potentially be the one where everybody's like,


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[Assistant] Fucking done with it. And I hope so. I hope so. But all it takes is one asshole.


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[Assistant] Two assholes, three assholes to fucking ruin a lot of work, I feel like, and a lot of progress that a lot of people have tried to make.


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[Assistant] But there's nowhere near that's reality. That can't happen. There's scumbags in every single profession. Now, granted, too many of these situations have occurred, and I assume a lot more that aren't being filmed are currently happening as well. People say they're not getting worse, they're just getting filmed now is the statement or whatever.


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[Assistant] But boy, if we could somehow as a society get to a point where it's like,


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[Assistant] We don't have those, that would be fucking fantastic without those particular scumbags.


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[Assistant] I mean honestly screw up everything. Screw up everything. The whole world. Obviously tragically lost a man's life for a reason that is, will never be able to be explained. Like that's why it happened.


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[Assistant] And then also now, look at this, you got the fucking entire city up in flames. You got relationships between cities and their citizens all over the country, because that guy and that group


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[Assistant] Or just bad people. It's frustrating. I didn't want to talk about it because it is something that is very...


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[Assistant] You know, we're supposed to be a distraction for people and all that shit. But I honestly, it's...


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[Assistant] I hate it because I've been a part of something as has AJ and anybody that's been in a locker room has been a part of something where everybody can set aside their fucking differences and be like, alright, here we go.


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[Assistant] I don't know, it's tough. I'm happy and glad I had that experience though. I was lucky, I was very fortunate to experience that. I think Orlovsky typed up something today, uh, that explained that he came from a predominantly white town around white people and then in the locker room he got a chance to learn stories and hear that stuff.


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[Assistant] I wish, how do you get everybody to experience that AJ? I'm just not sure.


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[Assistant] And the military, by the way, same thing, right? In the military, you got every people from all different walks coming together for one cause. And it's much more serious than what we had going on. Well, hit me definitely him as well with chances of injury and stuff like that. But death obviously is a whole different ballgame. But those moments.


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[Assistant] Is that Winslow? Yeaah. I wish though. I wish people could experience that. That was so cool. To get, and then like on a plane trip or something. Just sitting next, like.


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[Assistant] Learning about Robert Mathis and talking to Robert Mathis, you know, who's from, uh, the hood in Atlanta. And then he goes to a, uh, historically black college or your HBCU and, and just everything. It's just like a person from Plum, the East Hills of Pittsburgh, probably doesn't interact with somebody from Compton or Atlanta.


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[Assistant] Or South Florida, or whatever hood, wherever, by the way. Cause there's, there's, there's hoods everywhere.


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[Assistant] Getting a chance to have that interaction is just like.


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[Assistant] And it's fucking priceless to be honest with you, especially whenever you go forward in understanding people and not rushing to judgement on stuff. Like for instance, when somebody gets robbed and there's a gun and the police report is like, it's terrible, it's like,


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[Assistant] Well, what if they got ripped off $70,000 at a card game, like, yea, obviously shouldn't pull a gun ever, but what if they got completely fucked over in this whole, like there's this, you have that ability to kind of see from the other side, because it humanizes everything, it's like,


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[Assistant] Well, and you too, bub. I think that's a real thing. I don't think enough people talk about locker rooms. It's just, it's a fucking cool place.


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[Assistant] My dad dapping up with my teammates. Such a magical moment. Such a magical moment. You know what I mean? Like that is so cool. It's cool.


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[Assistant] Because you got people in there who have been millionaires their whole life in the NFL locker room.


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[Assistant] And then you've got people who are literally seeing their first dollars of their entire life and things like that. And then everybody's coming together for one thing. It's just, you start to realize like, oh, everybody has, uh, this feeling that all they want is respect.


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[Assistant] It's all anybody wants. Doesn't matter where you're from, all you want is respect and I hope we become a place that respects everybody even though it feels as if there will always be ignorant idiots who fuck.


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[Assistant] Well there's all kind of facilities now built for like the American Ninja Warrior type stuff, parkour, like it's all, it's a big industry right now.


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[Assistant] Wait, like that old MTV show, Singled Out, where you gotta hit the right spot and it has a piston that shoots you out? You remember that?


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[Assistant] See what that was what Chris Hardwick and Jenny McCarthy I think hosted they'd be on a beach doing like these obstacle course things but they had the I always wanted to see it where you gotta run and place your foot the right spot and it would shoot you up like over top some water or whatever and if you didn't hit it in the right spot it would it would be like it would just it would dump you in the water


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[Assistant] It's spring loaded with a piston or something, bam, it would just shoot you whatever direction.


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[Assistant] Is Phil doing this because PMI could also be Phil Maynes, Inc.


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[Assistant] What's that noise? It's like a slip inside trampoline. What's it called, Zito?


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[Assistant] I can see how they get you, Pat. Like I, I see the blue thing and it looks awesome, but you see that guy in mid like flip and you're like, okay, that's me.


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[Assistant] He was making professional athletes look like freshman, JV-like athletes on a football field on a regular basis. He was taking chances that quarterbacks don't normally take because of his freak athleticism. 20 yards down the field instead of sliding, hitting a circle button.


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[Assistant] Oh no, he took off. I like that. That's like those videos you see of professional athletes when they're, uh, playing basketball maybe with their kids and they swat their shit 20, 30 yards. I like that. I like whenever professional athletes show either regular athletes or other people why they're professional athletes. Like we used to go, uh, LA fitness during the lockout.


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[Assistant] Yeah. I would say just, uh, I'd say Marvin Harrison because he never took practice off. And that's what we kind of learn.


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[Assistant] You practice how you play. It went from Marv to Reggie to, you know, to myself. And so I just kind of learned how to be a pro in that manner, but Marvin Harrison would eat honey buns, donuts.


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[Assistant] It was, he was just hard to figure out, but it was, he was a very cool OG and it was like, man, how are you able to eat buffalo wings right before the game?


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[Assistant] Carwell, Carwell took a whole lot of heat over that one, but that was over his head, so.


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[Assistant] I've been talking about this forever. I guess then when a day or two had leaked out that it was going to be in Abu Dhabi and Dana has confirmed that and said.


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[Assistant] All of the precautions that are in place. There's a 10 square mile area where it's only going to be for fighters and trainers and stuff.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I guess I think Dana signed some kind of deal with them to put however many fights on this island. I think they, they've added that Dana said there will be an octagon on the beach, I guess, probably for people to train and maybe for them to get some good looking photography. Is this a picture of the island?


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[Assistant] There'll be a 10 square mile area of that island, it sounds like, that's gonna be kinda quarantined from the rest of the people.


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[Assistant] It's a, it's like a spooky picture. It reminded me of the video. Was the guy's name Jihadi John who sawed a few people's heads off?


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[Assistant] ISIS guy, he looked like he was standing behind him in the full ninja gear, it was scary.


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[Assistant] That's what I'm, I think this is great. It's setting up like what space travel may be like. And I know Richard Branson, Elon Musk, they want to send just regular old people into space. Now, can't really say regular people when you're probably going to have to pay 400k for one ticket to go up into orbit for 30 minutes and come back down.


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[Assistant] Well, you'd be on the list. Yea, you wouldn't have to pay it until you actually went to space, I would imagine.


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[Assistant] No big deal. You need to get that job. You need to get that voiceover gig.


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[Assistant] I dunno. Look good, feel good, feel good, play good.


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[Assistant] Boston sports fans when they see Tom Brady in the Tampa Bay Bucks uniform.


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[Assistant] Does it feel like all of a sudden your long time girlfriend went and got with like your best buddy and all of a sudden you show up and she's at the dance with this dude?


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[Assistant] No one's bigger than the team, but I'm kinda bigger than this team. I am.


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[Assistant] Alright, I've done this in New England for 20 years, been super successful.


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[Assistant] Sometimes a change of scenery is needed, and I just want to see if I can get this done somewhere else. New challenge. Maybe that is. Maybe it got bored. Maybe it was Belichick. Belichick has obviously a gigantic huge new challenge that probably invigorated it, like makes him feel like, okay, I have a whole new.


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[Assistant] Pat, do you think that Howard Stern interview would have happened if he was still on the New England Patriots? No chance in hell.


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[Assistant] Do you think the Patri- Okay, so if Tom goes, let's say he was still in the Patriots and he went and he did the exact same kind of interview with Howard Stern, which he was very open and honest, more than we've ever really seen Tom publicly talk about.


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[Assistant] Would the Patriots, do you think he would legit get a call from Bill Belichick or something by K-Tom? Too much.


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[Assistant] I just don't know how each confessional that he does in that docuseries, it gets deeper somehow.


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[Assistant] Trying to set up the live show and everything. I'm like, okay, this guy, this is his talent here. His live shows, I guess, are just remarkable. I've never been, but watching them train for it and him, he gave a speech to his team and things like that. I'm like, okay, now we're watching a...


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[Assistant] I could not get through it just because of those fucking confessionals. I was like, oh my God, how do you live in this? It was everything was like the most dramatic.


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[Assistant] Mode, every single line was like the more dramatic than the one before that. And I was like, okay, I get it. This is how you roll. And I respect that a lot about, but it's just, I can't do it course. I, I cannot do it. But then you, you realize why Chris Gaines happened because you know, every single dramatic turn.


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[Assistant] For the love of everything that they were filming the behind the scenes of Garth Brooks trying to create Chris Gaines. Just with those confessional shots about if you rebirth yourself as an emo child, how will you look at the world?


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[Assistant] I think Chris Angel is trying to look like Chris Gaines, yes, but Garth Brooks.


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[Assistant] Incredible performer. He's a very, he gave like millions of dollars to local children's hospital here. He does a lot of with Garth's friends or whatever Garth Brooks, his friends foundation. Everybody in the NFL has a link to not me, but everybody in our locker room went and did dinner with him or something like that. But I,


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[Assistant] Watching that docuseries was difficult because of how profound every single word was and it was like, it was just getting deeper and deeper and deeper and I'm like, this is not for me, dog. I am way too shallow of a human to be.


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[Assistant] He was literally sitting on an island at the time while he was saying that. And I think that might have been a part of the show where I was like, I can't fucking do it anymore. I'm sorry, Garth. I'll go to a show.


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[Assistant] I will watch you perform your ass off because everybody says you're a great showman and watching you break down the show for sure, but I cannot take another deep dive into Chris Gaines' brain, which I think is where we're headed every time guards start speaking around that fire pit.


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[Assistant] The NFL, we have to talk about this. NFL.com ranked the divisions in the NFL strictly by the quarterbacks that will play in that division and wait until you see this lineup. AJ, have you looked into this yet? Yes, I have.


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[Assistant] It's unbelievable. Go ahead and put it up there, Foxy. At number one, they have the NFC South. We could have all predicted that. These quarterbacks are in no particular order. They are just the quarterbacks from the thing. NFC South number one, Matt Ryan, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, Teddy Bridgewater. We all understood that they were going to be number one. Number two.


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[Assistant] Keep it up there. Number two, Kyler Murray, Jared Goff, Jimmy Garoppolo, Russell Wilson. Couldn't imagine them being fucking wrong at number two. They are. There's no way that's the number two overall thing. You have to think, how come the AFC West


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[Assistant] Who knows who's going to be the quarterback for the Bears? They're stud quarterbacks. They're at five somehow. I mean all these rankings that come out, I feel like they're trolling us just to fuck with us so we have something to talk about and I'm thankful for that. But I think they got probably six out of the eight wrong.


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[Assistant] I think number one's right. The NFC South, Matt Ryan, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, Teddy Bridgewater. That just feels like that's right.


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[Assistant] Uh, but there's a couple other ones where I'm like, there has to be a little mix and match and we got going on. The AFC East isn't even last. The NFC East is last. I mean, it's a...


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[Assistant] People like watching us judge the people that are judging people does great on the YouTube, but looking at that list this morning almost made my head fucking pop. I was so confused by who writes who


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[Assistant] Somebody's hired by the NFL. They're employed, they are employed by the NFL to talk about the NFL, put that list together. And does that make me like kind of scared for the future of the NFL? Maybe, maybe this person ends up commissioner. You don't know, work from the bottom all the way to the top. We could have a stooge up there. I think the two North and the two West maybe should switch spots there. Yeah, I think the AFC North has some studs.


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[Assistant] I'm not going to put anybody at two or anything like that or three, but I just know that there's some people that should be a lot fucking lower and the NFC North should be a lot higher. At least the NFC East should not be that low. The NFC East shouldn't be that high. I mean, there's a lot to dissect here. It's almost like they said, Hey,


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[Assistant] He's followed me. But anyways, yeaah, I don't know. I have no idea about that. If he went to LA, would that change anything? If he went to the LA Chargers, would that be anything? If he stayed in New England, would that change anything?


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[Assistant] So I, Drew Locke had good seven games, but Patrick Mahomes is carrying the AFC West to number three, so maybe you're right. Wherever Tom Brady goes, they, in this person's eye, would carry them up higher in the ranking, but I just...


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[Assistant] I mean, this is all just a bunch, you know what? It's all a bunch of trash to me if you look at this ranking system here. Throw it out. Throw it out.


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[Assistant] But I mean, I don't know how I over, I didn't overlook them at first. Maybe it was their underwhelming restart after the COVID situation that got me a little bit down on them.


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[Assistant] Yeah, they did. I mean, and they, hey, credit to St. Kilar. No, this is, it means nothing. I got no ill will towards you. But my guy with Trent Cotchen, the, the captain of my squad, I just, I felt, I felt the pull. I needed to, to jump on board with them. And, and it also helps that they've been dominating your team for a while. All right.


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[Assistant] Well, hopefully the Richmond Tiger fans will embrace my fandom of the squad and the guys know that I'm pulling for. They know you're not. Hey, no, nothing personal here. This is strictly business. This is strictly where I feel like my Richmond Tigers are going. I feel like they are on a steady path upward and I'm not sure if St. Kilda is on that same trajectory.


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[Assistant] Cause I had a moment where I took mushrooms actually, it was in college, I had a real moment of...


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[Assistant] I don't wanna say clarity, but I was like, listen, I'm gonna stop fucking around, I'm gonna make it to the NFL. It was after my junior year, I had missed those kicks, I had 27 death threats. My roommates and I were, you know, my roommates were like the people that really helped me survive through that entire thing because I was gonna...


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[Assistant] I don't know if I was gonna kill myself, but I was gonna disappear. Like I was, I got in my car and I drove to Maryland the next day, went over to Snowshoe, and I was just gonna keep on, I was gonna go like just, I was just gonna disappear.


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[Assistant] I had some money loans out. I was like, I'm, I'm, I've let down so many people. I don't want to do it. So I come back to get some clothes and read the guy that was with us this weekend, redheaded guy. I don't want to say he like slapped me, but he like gave me like this conversation was like, yo, you don't think you, we had to lead at halftime. You don't think I miss, I got a penalty. You'd be very afraid. Like,


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[Assistant] We get in there, no big deal, pull the Visine, sleep with it in between your legs so it gets your body temperature, pull it out, dump it into a cup, boom, shut it, hear it to the person, you're off running. Coach Stu, cause he was so tight to all the players, he knew that's what we were doing, right? So Coach Stu knew that was our move. Wait, would you put the...


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[Assistant] You find like the, uh, the Mormon or the super good person on the team. There was a couple that we could go to.


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[Assistant] And said, Hey, need this. Like you're not pregnant, right? No, obviously can't have that happen, but just peeing this thing. And then you put the Visine bottle, you put it down in your tights in between your thighs, and then you would just sleep there. You'd sleep with it. So it gets your body temperature. And then whenever they ask you to go in there, it'd be at your back, right? They'd be standing behind you. You'd go in there, you'd pull it out.


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[Assistant] You tighten it and go, here you go, thank you so much. They test it for warmth to see if it passes or not. You're good, you're off and running.


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[Assistant] So Coach Stu was like our guy, right? So Coach Stu knew that about all of us. Like he, he had overheard us talking and telling these stories. Your head coach knew this? Well, he was the tight ends and special teams coach before he was the head coach, right? So he was like, he was cool with all of us. So then he becomes a head coach after Rich Rod goes to Michigan after though that game against Pitt and.


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[Assistant] All that stuff, and then coach Drew, the interim head coach, wins if he has to bowl. Then that spring, he becomes, you know, our head coach.


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[Assistant] And he gave us like one of the first meetings, he like let everybody know like, hey, there's a little bit different policy now when it comes to the drug testing, by the way, because there were some people on the team that I think stood in one on team anymore. They were on scholarship and an easy way to get people obviously off scholarship is they fail a test or do something like that.


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[Assistant] There were some guys I think that Rich Rod, that Bill thought Rich Rod was just keeping around, should not be keeping around.


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[Assistant] So that first drug test he gave, I think they tested 12 people, and I think 12 failed.


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[Assistant] Right, so all 12 failed, and they were cut, so like, that next morning our conversation was like, hey, Bill Stewart's not fucking around when he was talking about, one guy did the trick, they said, uh, the pea's not warm enough, gonna need it again. Goes back upstairs, gets some more, puts it in the microwave, even goes in there, they're like, ah, sorry, not warm enough, gonna have to do it again. Like, they, the, the, the testers,


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[Assistant] We're told the game by coach too, right? Like they were like, no, not good enough. Gonna have to do it. So change everything. So we obviously try to get around that somehow.


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[Assistant] And we found mushrooms. Okay. So mushrooms, unless coach Stu was going to do a spinal tap, was not going to find out about mushrooms. Right. And at that point I decided I was not going to drink anymore. So really like my only.


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[Assistant] Thing here was either I, Spice wasn't even around then, or I did mushrooms, and I enjoyed them, but I had a, uh, I had one night I remembered vividly, my roommates and I, cause we were at a tighter spot than we had ever been after that moment where people were, I mean legitimately


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[Assistant] Telling me they were going to kill me and my family and it was just, it was rough for me. I never felt that way. Normally people like me. So like whenever that was happening, it was a whole new thing. Needed it to happen to become the person I am, but it was rough. I'll never forget in the, in the, uh, in the kitchen.


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[Assistant] It was like the end of the night where winding down from the trip.


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[Assistant] And I had like an epiphany moment where I was like, you know what, I'm gonna stop fucking around. I'm gonna actually focus on...


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[Assistant] I wake up around 11 or noon and I legitimately felt like a whole new person.


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[Assistant] Like I felt like a whole new person. I was like a little bit more driven and I don't know why. Maybe it was just like I finally made the decision to do so, but then you could see everything for me just kind of turn up. Like I got a lot better, right? I still miss kicks or whatever, but everything just got a lot better because I'd made that decision. Like, okay, I'm going to stop with the bullshit. I am going to actually focus here on trying to make a living. And then I even.


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[Assistant] Comedy and like all that stuff was talked about in that kitchen whenever we were having a good time coming off the end of a mushroom trip. And I asked...


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[Assistant] I asked Chris Heron, I was like, was there ever a moment where you were like, you know what, if I didn't do all this.


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[Assistant] I'd be the greatest basketball player on earth. Like if I, if I, like, did you ever have that thought? And he was like, no, his thought was that he needed it to play. Like that was his thought. And for me, that was a...


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[Assistant] Instead of something that would distract you from being your best, he viewed it as something he needed, which is just insanity. Cause I think


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[Assistant] Like a lot of other people who have seen him now, he looks damn good by the way, he looks like an actor, he's handsome, he's infi- I would have liked to see him play-


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[Assistant] Clear headed, ready to go. And he said that thought never even crossed his mind. And that was wild to me.


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[Assistant] Two years. Two years he got hurt and then he ended up playing overseas. But his rookie year with Denver, he said he played his best because the OGs of that team, and he listed off a bunch of them, they like


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[Assistant] They knew he had obviously addiction, they like took care of him, he said. He said, I was the 12th man on the bench and they took care of me. He said, that was the best year of my life or whatever. And then when he gets traded back to Boston, that's, I mean, that's an hour away from everybody he knows.


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[Assistant] I was very thankful I did not end up at the Steelers, because boy, if I was a Pittsburgh Steeler, those first couple years, it would have been my fault. It would have been my fault for sure.


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[Assistant] So Kevin, back so soon. Back too soon.


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[Assistant] From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobauro. This is a daily.


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[Assistant] A powerful earthquake has killed thousands of people in Turkey and Syria, and left dozens of cities in ruins. Today.


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[Assistant] Sabrina Tavernisi speaks to witnesses on the ground.


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[Assistant] Ben Hubbard, you have been reporting on all this from Istanbul, where you are based for the times. Tell us about exactly when and where these earthquakes


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[Assistant] So then walk us through that serious damage that these two earthquakes have inflicted.


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[Assistant] And I should say it's late Monday evening where you are, it's early afternoon here in the US on the East Coast, so things may change, but at this point, what do we know? And I wonder if we can start with Turkey and the impact there.


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[Assistant] How many cities and towns in Turkey have been affected and what kind of square footage or mileage has been affected?


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[Assistant] Ben, just pulling back a moment, what should we understand about this moment in Turkey to put these earthquakes and all that damage you just described into a larger context?


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[Assistant] Well, Ben, you're starting to do what I would like to do now, which is to turn to...


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[Assistant] What this earthquake has looked like in syria which as you said has been in the middle of this deadly civil war so before we turn to that. Larger context in syria.


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[Assistant] Let's first understand what the damage has looked like from these two earthquakes in the country so far.


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[Assistant] So what does the recovery look like for both of these countries, Ben? Because as you're hinting at, these are...


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[Assistant] Two very different places with two very different governments that have two very different relationships with the rest of the world, including countries like the U.S.


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[Assistant] So through no fault of their own, the people...


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[Assistant] In the parts of Syria that need the most help are.


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[Assistant] Quite likely not to get it or get it very quickly because of the war.


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[Assistant] So then I'm curious as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in both of these countries.


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[Assistant] How you're thinking about this natural disaster.


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[Assistant] And the way fate brought it to these two countries.


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[Assistant] On Monday, a top American commander said that the military had failed to detect previous Chinese spy balloons that had entered US airspace before last week, an intelligence failure that he said must be fixed.


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[Assistant] The admission from the leader of the North American Aerospace Command, Glenn Van Hurk, highlights America's vulnerability to Chinese incursions, which have occurred at least five times in recent years.


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[Assistant] Russian forces attacked dozens of Ukrainian positions across the war's eastern front on Monday.


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[Assistant] Russia appears determined to break through Ukraine's defensive lines before the one-year anniversary of its invasion on February 24th.


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[Assistant] Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Carlos Prieto, Mujzadeh, Diana Nguyen, and Claire Tenesgetter.


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[Assistant] It was edited by Lisa Chow and MJ Davis Lin, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.


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[Assistant] Our theme music is by Jim Brunger and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. Special thanks to Robert Wirth and Abdelaziz Ageni.


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[Assistant] And I cover the future of work, uhm, kind of what happens in and around the office, which is a space where we often spend more time than we end up spending with our own families.


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[Assistant] And that's true all across cities around the country, whether it's Midtown Manhattan, The Loop in Chicago, Downtown Atlanta, or the city that we decided to focus on for this story, Downtown San Francisco.


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[Assistant] Well, every city has been in a similar position in terms of struggling to get people to come back to the office. You've had, for example, the mayor of New York telling people not to sit around in their pajamas all day.


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[Assistant] This is all measurable. We have data on how full office buildings are across the country.


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[Assistant] And Connor and I saw this while we were walking around downtown San Francisco doing our reporting. We saw some boarded up storefronts, some storefronts that looked like they had basically been abandoned and left untouched since 2020.


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[Assistant] Maria is a lifelong San Francisco resident. She's raising her four kids there and she's been supporting her family by managing restaurant locations.


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[Assistant] So specialties was a fan favorite among San Francisco office workers that sold sandwiches, salads, and also they were famous for their giant cookies.


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[Assistant] So her career was growing alongside the downtown.


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[Assistant] Right. In fact, the cycle is working so well.


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[Assistant] That this San Francisco economic model becomes kind of a dream example for cities all around the country.


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[Assistant] Basically, the conventional wisdom becomes everyone should be more like San Francisco.


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[Assistant] And there's ideas like if you want to have a bustling downtown like San Francisco has, there should be more coffee shops, more of those fancy pour-over places, more speakeasies. Basically, get workers to kind of want to be downtown. And then you'll also have this whole economic cycle that supports


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[Assistant] More workers who are filling all their service needs.


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[Assistant] So as millions of workers are sent home in March 2020, San Francisco is pretty much like every other downtown. It empties out completely. But what happens next in San Francisco is unique.


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[Assistant] Because while a lot of other cities and a lot of other industries are holding their breath and setting return to office dates,


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[Assistant] Tech companies were some of the quickest to just jump right to let's stay remote forever.


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[Assistant] You don't really need a cubicle or someone sitting next to you to write code.


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[Assistant] So a lot of workers are told, you know what, you're never going to have to come back.


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[Assistant] So even as other cities and other industries were starting to crawl back, San Francisco and those big tech offices were just sitting completely empty.


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[Assistant] So at the beginning of the pandemic, Maria, like a lot of other workers, saw what happened when that chain broke down.


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[Assistant] And the entire industry that she's built her career and livelihood on looks like it's collapsing.


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[Assistant] So Mixed is a kind of high-end, buzzy salad chain. And around that time, Mixed is realizing that it needs to start expanding its locations outside of downtown San Francisco.


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[Assistant] And Maria has a lot of great experience in managing a busy cafe. So they pick her to go head up this new location that they're starting in Mill Valley, which is a really expensive suburb in Marin County with


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[Assistant] $2 million starter homes and a lot of tech workers who are working from home and then sometimes popping out in the middle of the day to get a salad for lunch.


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[Assistant] And Maria's life at the Mixed and Mill Valley looks pretty different than what she had in downtown San Francisco. Certainly different than what she had when she was working at the specialties downtown.


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[Assistant] Now she's commuting out to one of the most expensive exclusive areas in the country. Is it anyone who works there living close to it?


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[Assistant] So nobody who works with Maria can afford to live there.


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[Assistant] So while all of these tech workers are working from home and saving all this time on their commute, Maria and the people who work for her end up having to add a lot more time into their day.


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[Assistant] Right. When the chain breaks, the tech workers get to sit inside their homes saving money and time because they're not commuting downtown. For workers like Maria,


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[Assistant] All of a sudden their days get a lot more complicated, a lot more time consuming and more expensive because they have to go far from where they can afford homes to keep coming into contact with those tech workers.


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[Assistant] While many landlords are pulling out the welcome mat for the new wealthy techies, longtime residents are being priced out of their own neighborhoods.


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[Assistant] Critics say San Francisco's gentrification is affecting the city's character.


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[Assistant] Do you get the sense that they've been working from home and their pens are? Yeaah. They've been on Zoom all day and they're like, you're the first normal person.


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[Assistant] Alex Azar, who was then the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said that we were now in a public health emergency.


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[Assistant] And that was an acknowledgement that the virus was spreading in the country.


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[Assistant] And a public health emergency, which is something that the government does every once in a while when there is one.


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[Assistant] Allows the government to do a lot of different things to cope with this special situation.


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[Assistant] And since January 2020, this public health emergency has been renewed every 90 days. But now the Biden administration is saying that that emergency is over and that all of those special things that we did will end on May 11th.


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[Assistant] For the average person, what it did most importantly is it gave us access to free tests, free treatments, free vaccines. It allowed states, hospitals, nursing homes, various parts of the federal government to deal with COVID.


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[Assistant] Outside of the usual framework, it also gave them extra money.


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[Assistant] And Medicare and other group health plans were covering out of network as if it were in network.


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[Assistant] Meaning you could go to any doctor and be treated. And you would be treated.


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[Assistant] And the federal government barred states from kicking anybody off of Medicaid for the rest of the pandemic.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it gave a lot of extra money and people power and made it possible for


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[Assistant] It's not all going away, but yes, some of it is going away as of May 11th. Annapurva, what does that mean?


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[Assistant] It means three big things really. Well the first thing is that the healthcare system is now going to treat COVID like it's any other disease, like it's diabetes.


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[Assistant] It's incredibly complicated and it will make your head hurt to figure out what you qualify for and what you don't. And a lot depends on what kind of insurance you have, like it does for everything else.


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[Assistant] If you have private insurance, you may not even notice a difference.


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[Assistant] So if you want a test, if you want a PCR test for COVID, you have to go to the doctor and have them prescribe the test. You can still go to the store and get an antigen test, but you just won't get those aid free tests a month like we were getting.


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[Assistant] If you want a drug, the doctor has to prescribe it for you and your insurance company has to cover it.


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[Assistant] If you have Medicare, you may still be able to get free tests and free treatments, but only if they're ordered by a physician and you may still have out of pocket costs. If you have Medicaid,


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[Assistant] The test will only be free till the second half of 2024.


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[Assistant] And Medicaid may even cover drugs like Paxlovid that are under emergency use authorization, but that will depend on your state.


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[Assistant] But if you're uninsured, you're not going to be able to get the vaccines, tests and treatments for free the way that you used to. You may still be able to get some of them through community clinics and there are programs to help uninsured children get what they need. But if you don't have insurance, you might very well end up paying a lot of money out of pocket for all of this.


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[Assistant] It means a lot fewer people will get tested, even fewer than now.


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[Assistant] It means a lot more people will probably get sick because they won't get treated.


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[Assistant] It means the hospitals may be more full with people who are low income, who've been the hardest hit by the pandemic and will continue to be.


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[Assistant] And a lot more people will be in that category now because remember the federal government allowed states to get extra money in exchange for not booting people off Medicaid?


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[Assistant] Well, in December, Congress decided that that should end in April. And so starting in April, the states are going to start kicking people off of Medicaid and all those people will lose insurance. And that means a lot of people who are getting all of these things, tests and treatments and vaccines through Medicaid, will now lose them.


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[Assistant] At the moment there are about 80 to 90 million people on these total and there's one estimate that says 15 million may lose it. Wow, that's a lot of people.


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[Assistant] That is a lot of people. I mean, we already have about 30 million people in this country who don't have insurance. And when people start getting kicked off Medicaid, they will add to those numbers.


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[Assistant] The second biggest effect is that pharma companies are now going to charge a lot of money for vaccines and for treatments.


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[Assistant] Pfizer and Moderna have both said that they'll charge somewhere between $80 and $130 for a vaccine dose. The government was paying $30 per dose and we were getting it for free.


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[Assistant] My conversations with people who are involved say that the government did not get all that it could for its money.


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[Assistant] And they built in some things that made it very difficult for them to compel companies to do anything.


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[Assistant] That means the companies are now free to charge whatever they want and they are free to develop anything new that they want.


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[Assistant] They're not saying that. What they're actually saying is that vaccines are really important and they're making sure that every insurance, every kind of insurance will have to cover vaccines. So if you have insurance, you won't really notice a difference.


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[Assistant] What is changing is that these manufacturers can now set the price for where they want it, sort of like they do for everything else. And then your insurance company is gonna have to negotiate with them to figure out how they'll cover it. Okay, so what's the third big effect?


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[Assistant] The third big effect is something called Title 42, which is a policy implemented by the Trump administration way back in March 2020, and it allowed border patrol officers to send back migrants who were crossing the border from Mexico.


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[Assistant] Send them back to Mexico and it was a public health order because the thinking was new people coming into the country increases COVID risk.


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[Assistant] It's one of the ways in which we could sort of contain the epidemic. Remember in March 2020 things were pretty bad, so we were trying everything. But what the Biden administration is saying now is, if there is no public health emergency,


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[Assistant] Right, and so what that means is that more people may now come to the border and seek to come into the United States because that rule is no longer in place.


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[Assistant] Well, why is because it's an acknowledgement that we are not in a public health emergency anymore. Why now? The answer to that has a lot to do with politics.


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[Assistant] Well, this public health emergency was set to expire in April anyway.


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[Assistant] As you know, Republicans have been saying now for many, many, many months that the pandemic is over.


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[Assistant] And this bill was meant to end the public health emergency the second it was signed into law.


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[Assistant] Now that was probably never gonna happen because the Senate wouldn't have passed it, but this was their way of saying we think the pandemic is over. But what it would have meant is that


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[Assistant] Everything that the public health emergency put into place would have ended immediately the second this became law.


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[Assistant] The Biden administration has always said they would give at least 60 days warning for everything to unwind because they put so many complicated things into place.


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[Assistant] The system needs time to undo all of those things. And so this was the Biden administration's way of saying


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[Assistant] We agree with you, the pandemic is over, but we're going to do this on our terms.


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[Assistant] Well, there's no real public health metric that these things can be based on, but the administration has been saying for quite a long time now that we are not in the same state of crisis that we were in.


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[Assistant] And the numbers do show that, you know, we did not have anywhere near the kind of deaths or even hospitalizations that we saw the previous two winters and we weren't taking precautions this year.


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[Assistant] So this is really an acknowledgement of something that the administration and a lot of experts have been saying for quite a while, which is, this is a new phase. But that said, I do want to note that we are still seeing somewhere around 500 deaths a day.


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[Assistant] I mean, these are not trivial numbers. They, you know, they feel like a lot less because they are a lot less than the previous years, but this is still a pretty high level of damage that COVID is able to inflict.


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[Assistant] Even if most people feel like this is done, the virus is not done with us.


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[Assistant] How you feel about the pandemic and what you do really depends on your risk level and your risk tolerance.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you are over 65, if you're immunocompromised, if you're pregnant, if you have a baby under one and you want to protect that baby,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The virus is still very much a threat and those people should still continue to mask everywhere they can to get their vaccine doses on time and to protect themselves every way they can.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For everybody else, really, it's a matter of personal choice now because the government is saying, we're no longer thinking this is an emergency. You make the decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It seems that way from this winter. You know, only about 16% of the population got the bivalent booster and yet this winter we didn't see anywhere near the kind of deaths we saw the last two winters. Even this winter, the people who are in the hospitals are older adults who are most at risk from any respiratory disease.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Having said that, the FDA has said they would like to go to a system where everybody would get an annual shot, kinda like we do for the flu.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's not the flu. I mean, it's an endemic virus like the flu in the sense that we're going to live with this forever, but we don't know it anywhere near as well as we know the flu. Flu is a very old friend, an old enemy. And COVID is still such a mystery to us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's way more contagious, it's way more deadly, and we really have no idea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About its seasonality. We know, for example, that okay, every winter we'll probably see a wave of some size, but we don't know when else in the year it might come. We don't know how big it'll be. We don't know how often it'll change, which new variant will come our way. There's just so many unanswered things about this virus that are not the case for flu.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I really hesitate to draw conclusions about what this virus is doing because it has thrown so many surprises at us. It could still come up with a new variant that gets around the vaccines. We may all still need to go get another booster. We may need new drugs. It's, we are not fully out of the woods.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's the hope, that we will understand when this virus comes around. You know, it hasn't been long enough. We've only been in this for three years, and the previous two years we didn't see other respiratory viruses. This year we had RSV, we had flu, we had COVID, and we don't know how those viruses really play with each other yet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How they will affect each other's seasonality. So we need at least another year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Couple more years to see what this virus does at different parts of the year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] San Francisco was never in the cards. The GPS was always set to Denver. We just thought we were headed to San Francisco.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Give me this fucking kid. What are you gonna do? I'm gonna kill him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm gonna chop him in 15, 20 different fucking pieces, spread his body all over Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. That's exactly what the fuck I'll do. And I'm gonna tell you another thing. I don't give a fuck who he's with. The minute I find him, or see him,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm gonna kill him, and I'm gonna kill whoever the fuck he's with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Paul was more of a racketeer. He was into different businesses all over the place. Plus he was the boss of the family, and he became the boss of bosses.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had originally came from the Colombo family. He knew that I did a piece of work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But now he found out that I understood business and unions and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had told him I just had gotten partners with this guy for, uh, Joe Madonia from Ace Partitions. It was a drywall company. It was totally non-union. And I would go in and get jobs, but I'd always have trouble with unions. The Carpenters Union.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he told Tato, my captain, take him to go see Chin. They have people who are controlling the competition unions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Taro did that. He took me to a club, I met Chin.


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[Assistant] I believe he was a high ranking captain or something like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He actually took me and Tato over to somebody who was there, don't remember his name, and introduced him. He was the consul here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His other brother, Carmine Giganti, was a made guy. He had an army around him. And I understood he was extremely powerful. He wasn't the boss. But you can consider him like a street boss.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Told him my problem with the Carpenters Union. He told me there's a guy, Fat Vinny DiNapoli.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's not a friend of ours, meaning he's not a made guy, but he controls the Carpenters Union, especially in the Bronx.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We were doing all this rehab and HUD work and stuff like that. He said, let me talk with Fat Vinny and, uh, I don't think you'll have a problem anymore. And we left. A couple of days later,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got a message that a guy named Vidhi Dhanapali, fat Vidhi, wanted to see me. And I went to meet him in the Bronx.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He took me on the side and he said, Sammy, I spoke with Mario. Mario gave me messages about you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I could cover you in advance, not when there's a problem. Before there's a problem, you'll never have a problem. So I thought that was great. And it made me closer to Paul. I actually thought he was the best thing since sliced bread.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was very fair, he was very open and sociable. I liked him a lot. I became a made member under him. So, I recognized him as the boss, the father of the family, my father.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's many, many incidents that I was doing jobs and before you know it, he was starting to use me to talk to this union guy or that union guy. And the more I got that heavily involved in the business, my street smarts and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I did in my prior life as a kid growing up in and out of construction in different trades, I started to understand it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And my reputation was growing and I started using that as well. I was pushing. I was pushing on unions. We controlled the Teamsters union in New York.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The teamsters was the people when there's a construction site, the gate that goes around the entire building.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The guy who stands in front and opens the gate so all the trucks, the cement trucks and everybody goes in is a Teamster Foreman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I was starting to meet teams, deformants, delegates, and people. John Cody was an Irish guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was directly with Paul Castellano. And he controlled that union.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I was becoming very, very powerful and I started opening up one company after the other. I understood business in a different way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I understood it as a street guy growing up as a working guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I started learning different things from Paul Castellano. He was brilliant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And don't bully people, don't do that. There's different ways of doing it. And I learned.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tommy Bolani, I got to know him well. He was his driver. He became a captain right away. Rough type of guy. A real bully type of guy, actually.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I knew him before they had a club, Crescitos, in Staten Island. Him and his brother Joey Bellotti. And as a kid I went to that way before I got made. So I knew them from there. And, uh, I knew they were pretty powerful guys. And I got along with them pretty well. Knowing them before. Starting to know them now. But, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Paul getting back to Paul. When Christmas came.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not because of the size of the house or how beautiful it was, the people that were there. My wife wasn't used to, uh, mafia. She really didn't have a major understanding of it. She had an uncle.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who was a made guy, but she hardly knew him, Bayon Joe. He was made in, uh, by the Bonanno people. And, uh, but he was in prison most of her life. So she really didn't know him well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, and seeing all these guys, I mean, I kept my business very private.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She knew my friends, they were street thugs with me, but this was a different type of level. And uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we got home she asked me, why did he invite you to this party?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said, listen Deb, I wash his car every once in a while, okay? So he likes the idea, I make it nice and clean. I didn't want to talk to her about it. So she started laughing, joking, and that's what I do. I just pushed it off. That's the kind of relationship I was starting to have with him. I went to many, many sit downs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He sent me to a sit down when they had the concrete club and he sent me there. Again, I was never a captain at that point. And he sent me to this meeting and, uh, there was all bosses in there. Fat Tony was in there. Tony Ducks was in there. Jerry Lang was there to represent the Colombo family.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uh, they all talked to me about the Concrete Club. And uh, they were great. Fat Tony especially made jokes of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're a young guy, you're a good looking guy, why don't you go out with the broads, what are you doing with us, us old farts and whatever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tony Ducks also said, listen Sammy, I see you nervous a little bit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We know that Paul sent you here. So when we're talking and when we look at you right now, you're a boss. You're Paul. To us. Say, speak your mind. Don't be nervous. It was a great meeting. I didn't do a lot of talking. I didn't voice what I really wanted to voice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Had different unions. Use their power to control.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the jobs over $2 million concrete jobs in the, in New York.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You want my honest opinion? Of course. We're all gonna go to jail.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These people here, they have people working in their buildings who know the cost of the job. The job is going to be inflated for people they use all the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of these people, probably no politicians or FBI or whoever, we're all gonna go to jail.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're right. You're right. You're right, Sammy. That's exactly how I think. Then why don't we pull out, Paul? Why don't we just not do it? He said, he goes in Austria, there'll all be partners in this thing, except for us. We're alienate ourself and our power. And then the unions that we control,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go along with the flow. I don't like it, but I have to go along with the flow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said, Paul, I'm not afraid. I'm not worried about going to jail or anything like that. That's not what I meant. No, no, I know. But I need you. You got a good head on your shoulders. I need you for a lot of things in the construction industry and industry too. You'll have two qualities.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You give things a lot of thought. Just like you're giving me with this. That's a tremendous thought.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'd have somebody in there, they'd come back, yeah this is great, we're gonna make millions of dollars, let's do it. That didn't hit you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I need you for different things. It's not because I don't, I'm taking you off that because I need you for other things. So this is what I had going on with him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's so many meetings. He sat down with, uh, uh, Purdue. The guy, the chicken Purdue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had problems with unions and stuff like that, and he wanted Paul's help. He made Tommy DiMolatti drive him and was there all the time, and he took me to that meeting. I really don't even know why, but he took me to that meeting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Purdue told him he had union problems, he wanted Paul's help. And I heard Paul say to him, What the fuck, did you just call me a gangster? Purdue, the guy looked like he was panic-stricken. No, I didn't, I didn't say that. No, I know you didn't say it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what makes you think I can control your union problems? Why would you come to me? Years ago, I tried to do business with you. But you wouldn't do business with me. Because I was a gangster. But now that you have troubles, it's not beneath you to come to me. Take a fucking walk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Watching him talk like that, watching him conduct himself like that was amazing. I had great respect for him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Topmatch did a lot of work with me, by my side all the time. And, uh, we owned tallies, bar together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He went into a bar on Utrecht Avenue, the Greenland.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Green Lantern was owned by a wise guy, made guy who passed away. He was in the Genovese family. His wife took over the bar and continued running it. Her husband's friends


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Made guys in the Genevieve family. Took care of her. Took care of the place.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, did what they're supposed to do. It goes a notion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uh, slapped her around. Broke up the joint a little bit. Took the money out of the register.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The bar was about a mile away from Talley's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She was hysterical crying, she ran to tallies to talk to Steinmeier, and she was telling him the story. What happened?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She knew the guy's name. And Sammy told her, don't worry. Go to your friends. Go to your husband's friends. Tell them what happened.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The guy came in. She started crying. That's him. That's him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stanley immediately confronted him and abused the shit out of him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was a couple of people in the bar. There was a guy in the bar. And there was this girl. She was an Asian girl. Simon was going out with her. He was dating her. She was there. As well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The guy left the place. He rattled the guy. And the guy left.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He told a woman, don't worry about it. I told you. Talk to your people. Your husband's friends. They'll take care of this problem. And whatever you need,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You need me to come tomorrow, help you straighten the bar out. This guy wrecked half the bar, breaking glasses, bottles, everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stymie sat at the end of the bar, talking to Betty. Her name was Betty. Matter of fact, we used to call her Betty Boca.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It came through the front door very quietly. There was two doors. Steinbeck didn't hear him come in the front door. There was another door. Steinbeck got up from the bar to play something in the jukebox that Betty wanted to hear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The door flew open and he started shooting. The first shot caused, caused stymie in the side of the head.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I went to sleep early and I got a call. Huck, call me up. Another guy in my crow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He said Sammy. I said, what the fuck happened? It's Sammy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hung up the phone, got dressed and ran down to, from Staten Island to Brooklyn, where the bar was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Huck says to him, he's dead. They had a sheet over him when they took him out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How do you know that? I spoke with Betty. Betty was here when it happened. There was another young guy from the neighborhood.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said you saw it? Yes. You know who did this? Yes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you talk to the police? They questioned me. Did you tell them? No. Don't tell them nothing. And don't tell them you talked to me about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said I wanna go into the morgue. I'm a family member. They didn't wanna let me in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The first one blew half of his face away. That hit him in the head.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I left. His wife was outside. They must have called her to identify the body. Her name was Karen. I grabbed her, I hugged her. She was crying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said, I identified him already. Don't go in. It's him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'll see them in the funeral parlor. They'll fix them up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'll go to the funeral parlor. I'll talk to the people. Don't look at him now. It's him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I went home. There was nothing more I could do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I went to court, I came out of court, and I went to Tato.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His girlfriend told him. There was a guy in there. I got people questioning the guy too. He knows the guy. It's the same guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Genovese people got in touch with me. That woman's husband's friends. Who were made guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were fuming about what he did to that woman in the bar.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they told me, Sammy, we'll give you the lead. What he did to you is worse than what he did to this woman. We will go after him, but we're behind you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Obviously I wanted to get even. Somebody had to pay for Steinmeier's death. This guy. Who did it. Paul had a meeting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I understand that Steinme abused him severely.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In other words, if we curse at somebody, we abuse somebody, they have the right to kill us. Is that what you're saying? Hold up. Hold up, Frankie. Relax. Frankie wasn't relaxed at all. He knew stymie. He knew how close we were. And he exploded. And he wasn't calming down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He says, I'm gonna ask a question. Sammy, I already know your answer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My question is, he's with another family, he's with the Colombo family.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If the Columbus are in the way, are we willing to go to fucking war over this? I know your answer, Sammy. I'm asking the rest of this people in this room. Frankie DiCicco was the first one to answer. Yes. Yes, we're willing to go to war. I'm willing to go to war over this. They gotta give us this fucking kit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tato didn't hesitate or didn't blink. Yes. I'm willing to go to war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It got to Jimmy Brown, and Jimmy Brown said, uh, Paul, whatever you want, like a little cunt that he is. Frankie said, that's not what the fuck he asked you. Are you willing to go to war? Not what he says. He's asking you what you think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Walt says, alright, everybody calm down. Jimmy, I didn't ask you. I asked you just what Frankie told you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He looked at everybody, I, he must have been shitting in his fucking pants. Yes. I'm willing to go to war. Okay, then it's unanimous. I'll set up a meeting with, there's an acting boss with the Colombo family. Andrew Marsh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Carmine Persico's cousin. He was a full blown captain, and now he was...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He says, Sammy, you're going to go to the meeting. I don't want you to talk. I know you're extremely motivated, extremely mad. You may say the wrong things. I'm going to send Frankie to Chico down with you. Let him do the talking. We'll tell him what we want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that Stymie actually provoked it by abusing him. Frankie DiCicco said, moments before he killed Stymie, who was not only like Sammy's brother,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's a proposed member in our family. He was about to become a friend of ours. He did work with us, for us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He said we have him hidden in a home with legitimate people. They're not street people, they're legitimate people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He said, let me recoup that money. Yours is to me personally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said, listen, if it's 90,000 that you're worried about, you're worried about money.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm gonna chop him in 15, 20 different fucking pieces, spread his body all over Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The court struck down a federal law that banned gambling on sports games in most of the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, and I like to write about weird things that no one asks me to write about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For today's Sunday Read, I'm going to be sharing a story that I wrote for the magazine about my visit to an anechoic chamber, one of the quietest places on earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Last time one of my stories was on the Sunday read, it was about my attempt to experience a fun, glamorous vacation riding around in a tricked out camper van. It did not go well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood, under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the decades since, the legend has been propagated and sometimes further embellished with details about room-induced hallucinations and outlets from Smithsonian Magazine, the official journal of the Smithsonian Institution, to UberFacts, an online trivia font with 13.6 million Twitter followers, no connection to the ride-sharing app, and a tenuous one to Facts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Earlier this year, members of the public began, apparently spontaneously and via TikTok and YouTube, convincing one another that the room was created as an invitation to compete. That spending a few hours alone inside it entitled a person to a cash prize.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Orfield Labs was bombarded with phone calls and emails from people demanding a shot at winning money. There was no contest.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the mystique of the too quiet room, if construed by outsiders, has perhaps been bolstered by the company's website, which advertises an experience called the Orrfield Challenge, whereby for $600 an hour, a person can attempt to set a new record for time spent in the chamber.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The person inside an anechoic chamber will not hear nothing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Environments we think of as ultra-quiet are typically quite a bit louder than the floor of the human hearing threshold, which is around 0 decibels. A library reading room, for instance, might clock in at 40 decibels.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] An anechoic chamber does not sharpen hearing. It removes the noise that otherwise drowns out the soft ceaseless sounds of a body, enabling them to be perceived with novel clarity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Much of the lore about the chamber's propensity for mind annihilation centers on the concept of blood sounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Owing either to blood, sound, insanity, or cost, the record duration in the Orrfield Chamber was, until very recently, just two hours.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wanted to set a new world record for something, even if it was a world record that, for legal reasons, I could not describe as being in any way affiliated with or sanctioned by the famous Guinness inventory of world records, on which more later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even more than that, I wanted to hear the Forbidden Blood song.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I emailed Orfield Labs to book a three hour attempt and a few days later boarded a plane to Minnesota.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Orfield Laboratories is laid out like a rabbit worm. A largely windowless hodgepodge of isolated rooms and passageways of unpredictable sizes and shapes, arranged along a meandering path of blind curves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In its musical heyday, when the building was known as Sound 80, these included Bob Dylan and Prince.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stephen J. Orfield describes his facility as a multi-sensory design research operation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He bought the building in 1990, in part to enlarge his company's physical capacity for product research and development, in part because he had recently undergone heart surgery and hoped a big project would take his mind off his health.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the time, the anechoic chamber was sitting inside a storage locker.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Multiple multinational technology corporations had expressed interest in acquiring the chamber, Orfield said, but were unwilling or unable to remove it from Sunbeam premises with the haste the company demanded.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Figuring it a good investment, he paid members of the University of Chicago football team to disassemble the chamber and load it onto three semi trucks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 1994, Orfield reassembled the chamber, just steps from the room where the disco hit Flunkytown was recorded, and put it to use for his product design clients.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Before the legend of the anechoic chamber ran amok through sectors of the internet where crazy but true, though occasionally false, facts flourish, Orfield offered public tours on Friday afternoons to anyone who donated $20 to a local food pantry.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Few of the sounds of daily life travel straight from their source into our ears.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Outdoors, sound waves have fewer opportunities to bounce back at us. And back at us. And back at us. Like pinballs traveling through a machine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They can issue into the air and keep traveling away until they dissipate entirely.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were devising a system of enormous speakers so powerful that the cacophony of man and machine sounds they broadcast would convince combatants that thousands of American soldiers were present in a location they were not. But the thing the speakers were designed to do,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Made them inconvenient to test in America, where many Americans lived at the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, scientists at Harvard University's electroacoustic laboratory began testing nearly 1,000 shapes and structures to see which absorbed the most sound.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In photos, stalactite wedges jut from its 38 foot ceiling. Stalagmite wedges protrude from its floor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wedges cover every surface of every wall. Their knife edge is arrayed in a hypnotic pattern of alternating horizontal and vertical slices to trap sound at all angles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Orfield's chamber follows the same design principles, albeit at a fraction of the size.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is a 6-sided box with walls of 4-inch insulated steel suspended by springs inside a larger 5-sided box also with walls of steel. It's self-contained within the larger laboratory with walls of 12-inch concrete.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The chamber itself is behind a hinged steel block that, when closed, resembles the door of an industrial refrigerator.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when open, the door to an industrial refrigerator that has been affixed to a Cubist sculpture of Fozzie Bear.


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[Assistant] Rigid brown fiberglass wedges press in upon it from all sides.


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[Assistant] The wedges poking up from the ground are visible beneath a walkable mesh floor of aircraft cable.


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[Assistant] The day of my record attempt, Orfield crossed the room's threshold and his voice immediately sounded far away as the wedges absorbed his sound waves. After I followed him inside, the sound became intimate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's an aural illusion. In a normal room, the only way for us to hear speech directly from someone's mouth, with no reverberation, is for him or her to talk right into our ear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Faced with the prospect of staring at a 12 by 10 foot room for three hours, with no adornments except a chair and hundreds of hanging fiberglass pyramids, I opted for total darkness.


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[Assistant] Sometimes people like to lay down or sit on the floor, so I leave a nice padded blanket in here, Roll said, handing me a blue blanket, which I spread across the floor.


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[Assistant] To start, I laid on my stomach. A position I felt was relaxed enough for my body to acclimatize to the lack of stimulation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I resolved to lie on my back and pray the tear of being fired would be enough to keep me awake in the dark for three hours, despite the clinical diagnosis of narcolepsy that makes it virtually impossible for me to stay awake in even moderately cozy, semi-dark conditions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had the distinct feeling of my ear canals filling with an inrushing silence that was somehow thicker than the quiet I had first noticed in the chamber.


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[Assistant] I groped around for the notepad and pen I brought and recorded the observations that started to roll in. Grey ponytail. Thick silence. But was I recording them? It was impossible to tell in the unrelenting dark. What if the free hotel pen didn't work?