Episode #63
This Dum Week 2026-09-06
The episode opens under a cloud of technical difficulties — Alex's audio drops out repeatedly during the cold open — before RollerGator plows into a dense, tabloid-heavy grab-bag of news: a KTLA segment on California's "serial butt sniffer" Calise Crowder and the legal loophole (sniffing isn't a felony) that keeps releasing him, a Wisconsin father cited for tripping a 9-year-old at his son's football game, and a duct-taped, zip-tied airline passenger restrained by fellow travelers on a diverted American Airlines flight. From there the show pivots into darker territory with a Warren County, Ohio bestiality-and-child-abuse case built on "morally depraved" text messages, and a bizarre Philadelphia investigation into an abandoned house full of chemicals, ammunition, fake DEA credentials, and an ID belonging to a missing woman. A comedic detour into buying the literal for-sale town of Campo, California gives way to the show's recurring case trackers: a small procedural update on detained Israeli cybersecurity official Tom Aleksandrovich, and a much longer one on singer D4VD (David Burke), whose defense team abruptly withdrew from his murder case in favor of a public defender, sparking a long RollerGator-versus-Alex debate over whether he's hiding assets or is simply too unsophisticated a criminal for that kind of maneuver. A sequel to last week's Twitter-trademark story follows, with X winning a court order blocking "Twitter.Now" from using the Twitter name (while losing its claim to "tweet" and the bird logo), which spins into Alex's own war story about renaming his startup Balena after a trademark fight with an existing company called Resin. The back half is anchored by two heavyweight segments. First, Wheel of Fortune announcer Jim Thornton is fired after a fellow passenger photographed him — logged into the anonymizing Tor browser under the alias "NicholasB77" — actively participating in an online pedophilia-themed chatroom mid-flight, joking that the illicit chat text would look like "random lines" to onlookers even as his attorney claims he was doing suicide-prevention outreach. Second, a two-part "Meet the Flockers" segment opens with a wave of state-level "deflocking": Florida suspends license-plate-reader cameras statewide within 72 hours of a gubernatorial directive, Texas Governor Abbott cuts state funding for Flock, Dallas loses over 300 grant-funded cameras, and Axon reportedly fields requests to redesign its own cameras so they don't resemble (and inherit the backlash against) Flock's. The hosts flag a wave of "pro-Flock" accounts — including Curtis Yarvin and Marc Andreessen-adjacent Silicon Valley circles — accusing critics of being paid propagandists, prompting RollerGator to publicly declare himself "for sale" to either side. The segment's second half plays out an extended, symmetric interview with Institute for Justice attorney Michael Seufer, who lays out the Fourth Amendment case against automated license-plate readers in Norfolk, Virginia and San Jose, California, leaning heavily on the brand-new Supreme Court ruling in Chhetri v. United States as a potential turning point in ALPR litigation. The closing stretch pairs a real-world security scandal with two "Traces of AI Dystopia" segments. Krebs on Security's report on "Nexus," a dark-web service selling scans of more than 153 million US and Canadian driver's licenses apparently leaked from identity-verification vendor IDScan.net, prompts the FBI to open an investigation and gives the hosts a chance to revisit their long-standing warning that centralized ID-verification databases inevitably leak. A live, on-air demo of a public reverse facial-image search tool follows, along with RollerGator's personal "flood the zone" OPSEC philosophy. The AI dystopia segments then cover a viral video of a mother describing how Meta AI assembled a location and identity profile of her children from years of unrelated Facebook posts, and Effort News's AI-assisted tracing of "Swiss philanthropy" funding flows between AI-safety donors and religious NGOs, capped by a rambling UK caller comparing transatlantic camera-vigilante movements before the show signs off with a preview of a math-and-AI-focused episode to come. Detailed Outline Cold Open: Technical Difficulties and the Serial Butt Sniffer (00:00:00 - 00:11:22) Main Topic: Audio Dropouts Give Way to a Tabloid Crime Headline The show opens with repeated audio dropouts — Alex's connection cuts in and out multiple times, with a running joke about whether he has access to OpenAI's "Astra" coding model before RollerGator manages to start the show solo RollerGator reads a KTLA report on Calise Crowder, 39, California's "serial butt sniffer," rearrested in Glendale after repeatedly being caught on camera "hunkering down" near women in discount stores and following them to sniff at their backsides; attorney Dimitri Gorin explains that without actual touching, the conduct is a misdemeanor, not a felony, so Crowder keeps cycling in and out of custody RollerGator riffs that Crowder's heightened olfactory sense might make him a "medical marvel" capable of detecting cancer or diabetes by smell, joking about a "Dr. House, M.D., Butt Sniffer" spinoff, before turning serious to note that before modern law enforcement, this kind of behavior "would have been handled by... the townspeople making their feelings known... in pretty unambiguous ways" Key Quote: "If there's an actual touching, that's a felony, but just sniffing somebody, it really doesn't rise to a felony. As the law stands now, it is very hard to file a felony offense based on this conduct." — Dimitri Gorin, attorney and legal expert, quoted in the KTLA report Key Quote: "This man's olfactory senses must be doing something particularly interesting inside of his brain... perhaps he's a medical marvel and able to heal people... We could have a serialized medical procedural based off of him." — RollerGator Notable Detail: RollerGator frames the story as a rare case where "the law has a difficulty keeping up with" a type of conduct that's been technically possible throughout human history but was never anticipated as a repeat pattern requiring specific criminal statutes. Trivial Human Comedy: A Tripping Football Dad and a Duct-Taped Airline Passenger (00:11:22 - 00:15:19) Main Topic: Two Mundane Stories the Hosts Frame as Nostalgic Relief A Wisconsin father is cited after video shows him sticking his leg out to trip a 9-year-old opposing player during his son's middle school football game; RollerGator jokes that when "the robots come and try to kill us all," people will look back on stories this trivial "with great nostalgia" On an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Newark, passengers physically restrain an unruly man with duct tape and zip ties supplied by a flight attendant after he becomes disruptive and allegedly bites a passenger; the flight diverts to Baltimore, the man faces state charges, and the FBI is investigating RollerGator frames the duct-tape restraint as "mob justice at work," debating with Alex whether the passengers' motives were vengeance or purely practical safety measures Key Quote: "So a father tripping someone so his kid can have an advantage... is a very serious offense, but it is so very human and trivial in the grand scheme of things that when the robots come and try to kill us all, or we're in a panopticon surveillance state, we'll look back on these specific types of issues with great nostalgia." — RollerGator Key Quote: "And he also tried to bite me, so the situation was getting more intense." — a passenger interviewed by ABC News about restraining the unruly flier Notable Detail: American Airlines confirmed to ABC News that "restraint cuffs and tape are included in the flight attendant service kit" as standard equipment for exactly this kind of situation. "Prison Is Rough": A Warren County Bestiality-and-Child-Abuse Case and a Philadelphia Chemical-Drum Mystery (00:15:19 - 00:25:39) Main Topic: A Disturbing Ohio Court Case and an Unexplained Philadelphia Stash Erica Groh, a Warren County, Ohio woman, pleads guilty to four counts of sexual conduct with an animal after a cyber tip about child sexual abuse material led investigators to her boyfriend, former reality-TV swinger Tony McAllister, and then to videos of the couple with two dogs; she opts for a bench trial on far more serious charges involving the drugging and sexual assault of a 5-year-old child, which she denies, with her defense arguing the graphic text messages described McAllister's "fantasy" rather than real events RollerGator notes he collects these "female sexual deviancy" stories roughly once every two months (versus a denser run of similar stories involving female teachers a while back), framing it as informal trend-tracking, and jokes with his recurring "prison is rough" pun before the segment In Philadelphia, police executing a search warrant on an abandoned home tied to Eugene Horst — arrested near Independence Mall with fake DEA credentials and guns with erased serial numbers — find a 55-gallon drum connected to water lines, chemicals, ammunition, more fake law enforcement IDs, and an ID card bearing a woman's photo but a name matching someone reported missing years earlier; the FBI is called in and no explanation has been confirmed Key Quote: "Because of our history with breastfeeding and stuff like that, I have felt pressure to kind of meet some of his fantasies." — Erica Groh, quoted from her police interview in the WLWT News 5 report Key Quote: "There's a 55-gallon drum, there's connections to it going to water lines. We just don't know what he's doing, if he's producing something, if he's making something, if he's irrigating something, we don't know." — Newsmax crime correspondent Jason Matera, reporting on the Philadelphia case Key Quote: "Once you learn that your partner has these types of fantasies, you should probably start backing away slowly." — RollerGator Notable Detail: RollerGator explicitly tells the audience he's disclosing the roughly two-month cadence of these stories so that listeners will recognize if the frequency ever spikes noticeably in the future. Buying the Ghost Town of Campo and a Tom Aleksandrovich Case Update (00:25:39 - 00:37:19) Main Topic: A Town for Sale Sparks a Robot-Hellscape Riff Before a Recurring Legal Case Gets Its Update The entire town of Campo, California — a 15-acre, 35-building former Army base an hour outside San Diego, complete with a post office, church, VFW post, and Border Patrol facility — is listed for $6 million; RollerGator and Alex riff about crowdfunding its purchase to turn it into an "automated robot hellscape" (robotic police, fire, and postal services) with a single human "reporter" living there and Flock-camera footage funding it as a reality show, joking it's "luxury space communism" RollerGator gives a recurring update on Tom Aleksandrovich, the senior Israeli cybersecurity official arrested in 2025 for allegedly attempting to meet a decoy posing as a 15-year-old girl: the federal appellate court denied the defense's petition to dismiss the indictment (which had argued prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence from the grand jury), and the next status conference was pushed to November 25th, meaning any trial is now unlikely before early 2027 — confirming Aleksandrovich will not set foot in the US in 2026 RollerGator admits he used ChatGPT to help organize his summary notes on the case ("Gator slop in, AI slop out") and flags one detail — that Aleksandrovich searched whether a 15-year-old could attend a Cirque du Soleil show — for a personal fact-check, since he isn't certain if the search was that specific or simply about the show's general age policy Key Quote: "If we can't secure the seed funding, we can AI generate the series anyway." — RollerGator, on the hypothetical Campo reality show Key Quote: "I handed it the material and asked it to summarize." / "Gator slop in, AI slop out." — RollerGator and Alex, on using ChatGPT to organize the Aleksandrovich case recap Notable Detail: The appellate court's opinion denying the defense's petition was issued just two days after a scheduled status-check meeting where no update was yet available — a two-day gap RollerGator notes might otherwise have moved the case toward trial slightly sooner. D4VD's Public Defender Switch: A Hidden-Assets Debate (00:37:19 - 00:57:19) Main Topic: A Millionaire Musician's Surprise Move to a Public Defender Sparks a Theory Battle Singer D4VD (David Anthony Burke), charged with first-degree murder after 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez's remains were found in his Tesla's front trunk, abruptly drops his private defense team — Blair Burke, Marilyn Benarski, and Regina Peter — in favor of a Los Angeles County public defender after being deemed to qualify for appointed counsel, despite reportedly being worth millions from his 2022 breakout hit "Romantic Homicide" The reveal happens mid-arraignment, catching courtroom reporters off guard; DA Nathan Hochman confirms a decision on the death penalty (for which the case is eligible under special-circumstance allegations) is still pending, and reveals the original defense team never submitted a mitigation packet that could have influenced that decision RollerGator theorizes Burke moved assets into an offshore trust or similar vehicle ahead of his arrest to appear indigent for the purpose of securing a public defender; Alex counters that this is "too organized of a thought for the criminal of the scale of D4VD," accusing RollerGator of "typical mind" projection, and suggests instead that Burke's paid representation may have been conditional on record-label money that dried up once he was formally charged (e.g., morality clauses) Key Quote: "This morning, the court granted our request to withdraw his counsel and appoint the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office... after it was determined David qualified for appointed counsel." — statement from Burke's former attorneys, obtained by LA Magazine Key Quote: "I'm sure the public defender will give him a zealous representation." — LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman Key Quote: "I suspect that is a little bit too organized of a thought for the criminal of the scale of D4VD, and I suspect things are far dumber than your— you're probably projecting your own intelligence on him." — Alex Key Quote: "It's called typical mind palace, where you use your own brain to simulate other brains, but it turns out other brains are not like your brain." — Alex Notable Detail: DA Hochman's disclosure that Burke's original, paid legal team never filed a mitigation packet — a step that could bear on the death-penalty decision — deepens the mystery of why the team and Burke abruptly split, since neither side has explained the reason on the record. Twitter.Now Loses Round Two: Musk's Court Win and a Rebranding War Story (00:57:19 - 01:15:42) Main Topic: X Keeps the Twitter Name but Loses "Tweet" and the Bird Logo, Sparking a Personal Rebrand Story Following up on last week's story, Judge Colm Connolly grants X a preliminary injunction blocking Operation Bluebird's "Twitter.Now" app from using the Twitter name, ruling X is likely to prove it never fully abandoned the trademark because its own Apple App Store listing still reads "Welcome to X, formerly known as Twitter" in the same font size as the rest of the description In the same ruling, Connolly finds X likely did abandon its rights to the word "tweet" and the bird logo, citing Musk's own public statements about cutting the Twitter sign down "with blowtorches" as evidence of intent never to resume using those marks, and rejecting X's evidence (12 undated legacy webpages, a stray vendor email, a claim that 200,000 users still had the old app installed) as unpersuasive; Operation Bluebird responds by rebranding itself from Twitter.app to tweet.app RollerGator connects the sloppy trademark cleanup to Musk's decision to fire nearly the entire Twitter staff, arguing a skeleton engineering crew fixes only what's directly in front of it rather than auditing the whole site for legacy branding The story prompts Alex to tell a personal war story: his startup, now called Balena, was originally named "Resin" until an existing company making a Java app server of the same name threatened legal action; the resulting company-wide rebrand — changing code, documentation, legal entity names, email addresses, and even t-shirts — cost the team roughly six months and left him unsurprised that X missed a handful of legacy Twitter-branded webpages during its own rebrand Key Quote: "Welcome to X, formerly known as Twitter." — quoted from X's own App Store listing, cited by Judge Connolly as evidence X still trades on the Twitter name Key Quote: "Musk's public claims that soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually all the birds, and we're cutting the Twitter logo off of the building with blowtorches, provided compelling evidence that X Corp harbors an intent not to resume use of the tweet mark and bird logo." — from Judge Connolly's ruling, read aloud Key Quote: "It's like paying for a signature by a tribute band or something... you're not the real thing, man." — Alex, on Operation Bluebird's rebranding strategy Key Quote: "Once you know what you're gonna do, doing it is ridiculous... I swear to god, we lost a good six months." — Alex, recounting his startup's forced rename from Resin to Balena Notable Detail: Alex says the trademark dispute over "Resin" happened because an existing Java app server company with the same name had a lawyer on its board, making the threat credible enough that his team chose to rebrand rather than spend "years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in court." Wheel of Fortune's Jim Thornton Fired Over an In-Flight Pedophilia Chatroom (01:16:06 - 01:34:01) Main Topic: A Tor Browser, a Suicide-Hotline Cover Story, and a Panicked Google Search Longtime Wheel of Fortune announcer Jim Thornton, 61, is fired by Sony after being suspended over an incident on a May 14th American Airlines flight, where a fellow passenger photographed him actively participating in an online chatroom under the username "NicholasB77," using the anonymizing Tor browser; his attorney, Allison Hart, claims Thornton was doing suicide-prevention outreach and was misdirected to the wrong URL — mistaking the illicit forum lifeline.chat for the legitimate 988lifeline.org TMZ's published chat screenshots undercut that explanation: Thornton is seen commenting that a nearby Golden Corral had "cute boys and a hot little girl" and joking about an "all you can eat boyfet," making masturbation jokes about being "in the sky" on the flight, and reassuring another user in the chatroom that the screen just looks like "a random sequence of lines" to anyone glancing over — leading Alex to correctly guess, before it's confirmed, that Thornton was using Tor to anonymize his connection After a flight attendant orders him to close his laptop, Thornton is seen in a follow-up photo typing a panicked query into Google/ChatGPT asking whether his activity could be traced back to him The hosts debate whether the passenger who exposed him engaged in inappropriate "snooping" to read his screen clearly enough to understand what was happening, ultimately concluding that whatever the ethics of the discovery, Thornton's own chat messages show he understood and even got a thrill from the risk he was taking Key Quote: "It's actually crazy doing Lifeline from the sky." ... "Wait, you're on a plane, right? What if someone sees?" "Yes, exactly. What if someone sees a random sequence of lines on a screen? I love it. I hide the part that says lifeline, so it's just a few lines." — from Thornton's chat log, published by TMZ and read aloud Key Quote: "Saunters into the bathroom for a quick wank on the 737. I wonder if you were really horny how fast you coul
