You're listening to the downbeat on ninety seven to one the freak. All right, thirty minutes away from the scuttle Butt, we have a rare death via animal hadn't happened in ninety four years. What animal is it? I'll tell you. Plus wild update on that story told you about in Mesquite yesterday, Real wild update on that and more. Nine o'clock, WI have a guest in studio. It's Jeff skin Wade. Don't tell you, Jeff skin Wade.
There's a good damn reason. It's a huge week for our very own Danny baylis Amson, Jeff skin Wade and Frayone wants the party this weekend. A couple occasions to party this weekend with us. So we're gonna hear it, right, Yeah, yeah, we're going. We're gonna world premiere Danny's new song. Yes, a real one, real song. Yeah, a real, actual song. That's how it coming up at nine o'clock. So here's the story here. Over the weekend, a man was killed. His
name Alexi Navalny. I keep trying to throw an ess into his last name or whatever. Alexei Navalni from Russia. And he started out like a activist blogger as where he really got a huge following online, very savvy using the social media channels and very much using the Internet. And his cause, for lack of a better term, was against anything Putin and Putin's administration and what
they're about. In fact, they call it the opposition, and I I do kind of think I followed the news pretty closely, but man, when this happened over the weekend, I kept seeing his name and going okay, but I couldn't tell you that I remembered anything about him. And then Danny texted us on Saturday night or Friday night, I don't remember either, So whenever the wee can, Danny texted us and said, I've got to watch
this documentary, a documentary on HBO. I was halfway through it, a little over halfway, and after watching this scene that took about I don't know, five to ten minutes with my blood pressure just soaring, chills and my mouth just wide open, going you can't be serious, I grabbed my phone and I texted you two guys, and I was like, oh my god, the Navalny documentary on HBO. That just dropped. I've never seen anything like this. There's a couple holy asque moments, and there's one real big
one. Yeah, I just think this kind of thing. You hear it, you're like, all right, whatever Russian political person, something happened. It just feels so far, so distant and so confusing to all of us that it's easy to dismiss. But his death a few days ago put it on the front page of everything, and it makes you dig a little bit in the fact that this documentary exists. I mean, look, we're not the smartest people. We need something in an hour and a half. That's
a documentary that really kind of explains. It makes you care. But once you watch that or read about this guy and get to know this guy, you care. And maybe if you hear the segment, you'll care. And it's not just a weird Russian name. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we've known and heard stories for years about opposition figures in Russia being assassinated,
people being poisoned. That seems to be kind of their calling card when it comes to eliminating people that are generating a following that can lead to an uprising and a threat in what is supposed to be a fair election process over there. To Putin's power. His regime, which you know, Navalny, you know, had this massive following like Kevin and you. Mikey said, a lot of this was kind of garnered via the Internet and via social media.
He was a very ahead of the game when it comes to using those platforms to get his message out. And it was a real threat. And the administration was afraid of this because they don't want to give up their power. I mean, that's just like any political regimes, any political offices. They their sole purpose is not to do good, to do good by their constituents. It's to maintain power. And they will do whatever by any means necessary.
And I think even ones that go into it with more of a from an altruistic nature, they're flipped pretty quickly and they realize that, look, this is hopeless. The best thing I can do is just keep a job and be able to retire one day and maybe write a book about this and go on speaking engagements. They're essentially just its self preservation is about securing a secure financial security for the rest of your life. Putin doesn't want to give
this up, and he's got the power. He as the means to be able to eliminate people that threaten his occupancy there and navalney it was you know, Okay, so we'll get to the poisoning and what kind of led to this documentary being made. And by the way, this documentary won an Oscar I believe last year is the twenty twenty three Oscar winner for documentary. Yeah, and it's just like now, it's like one of the top ten trending
most watched things on HBO. And it's rainy. Even in the beginning of the documentary too, like he is they've got him at a bar, and he kind of makes a joke of, well, I don't want to just answer your questions if you're only doing this to make this for after I get killed. Yeah, Like he's like he knows the risk of you know, what he's doing, and it's just it's just weird to hear him say that. Like it's in the first five minutes of the documentary, he's joking around
about, well, don't just make this for when I die. Yeah, he's very self aware that his life is in balance. Yeah, pretty much at any given moment, considering his geographical location in the reach of the people that want him silenced and just to literally go away for good. So in August of twenty twenty, Navalni was on a flight from Topsk Tomsk to Moscow. He became very very ill on the flight and they inso much that he There is cell phone footage of people that are on this flight. I believe
it's a commercial flight. He gets really, really sick. You have cell phoned footage of not actually seeing him, but you hear this man in peril. He is moaning. It is his death rattle. And he admits that the moaning that was what he was doing on that plane because he was in pain. It wasn't so much from the pain. It was basically literally his death rattle. He felt like, I'm about to die. This is my last The last verbal expression that I can give was this moaning, knowing if
that he was going to die. The plane ends up executing an emergency landing, which in effects saved his life. So he gets taken to a hospital. There is so much he ends up surviving. He's on a ventilator. He's in a coma for a while. He ends up coming out of it, and they end up trying to get his family wants him out of Russia, get him out of Russia get him to a European hospital. They end
up finally getting Putin to release him for whatever reason. He gets on a plane, a private plane, and has flown to Germany, I believe, where he recovers in hospital and they figure out, yeah, that we have undisputable evidence that you were poisoned by Putin's calling card of assassination, which is a poison called nova chok. And I think we learned a little bit about
what that does. But after a certain amount of time, after the person is dead, it becomes untraceable, which will lead us to his heart. That's why they're trying to keep him in this rush in hospitals say no, we're giving him the best treat and we can't release him. They want this stuff to leave his body. They wanted to leave his body or finish the
job in there. Yeah, but apparently, you know, the German doctors had enough skill and technology to be able to detect traces of this this novachok, and they found out that it was you know, in his underwear, on a bottle of a cup of tea that he might have had that morning because he had nothing to eat that day. He had ingested nothing other than one cup of tea, but apparently there was enough of this novachok to get on his clothing that it poisoned him to the point of taking him to near
death. So we move on from that, and at this point I think it's one of the documentaries kind of being made, was when he was in Germany, Yeah, debating whether he should go back to Russia. He wants to go back to Russia. He wants to continue this fight of screaming Putin is corrupt. Yeah, Russia is corrupt. We can fix this. And
there's demonstrations, a ton of support. And also, just to illustrate, this dude's not some creepy Russia. There's a good looking dude, beautiful wife, two gorgeous kids, the daughter of which goes to Stanford and speaks speaks perfectly, with a great accents, with a great American accent. You know that different than you or I or whatever you know. And I think it's easy to just picture, oh, some Russian dude, some Putin whatever.
He looks like Alexander scars Guard a little bit, a little bit little army hammer, you know. Okay, yeah, but a good, cool looking dude, and he gets his health, he gets his his life back, and then he's like, I'm gonna return to Russia to continue my work, and knowing that this is probably not a great idea, but the before he goes to Russia, you want to go to the investigation. Let's let's talk
about the investigation and maybe you you. So he ends up teaming up with this kind of like this guy that's really good at analyzing and collecting and kind of hacking into retrieve data. Right, So he finds this laboratory and these phone numbers that went to and from this laboratory. This laboratory creates this poison nova check. So they find the numbers, they attach names to that they essentially identify a Russian hit squad. It gets poisoned from this facility, and
the facility is, oh no, we're trying. It's for uh energy drinks or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly right, yeah, like drink. Find the names like these six possible candidates, and then they track his his ni's flight records when he went on this flight, and then they show like three of these guys who had the poison on a flight right behind him, following him. And this happened not once, but I think three times. So This is them proving yes they were, because at this point they can't
improve that he was poisoned by Russian government. So then they find it. So they're like, all right, they know they followed him, they know they poisoned it, but they still can't prove it. So they try. They're like, screw it. The story is about to go public. We have all the information. Let's the day before it goes public, let's try calling these people, like calling the people who likely poisoned him, not even really disguising your voice, but just trying to get some information out of them.
So they call like one of the hit men. They're like, any good morning. This is I work in Antonov's office, and we're following up on the the Texas. Why did this go wrong? We need we need accountability on why this mission failed, and we're kind of doing a inventory a follow up and this is very important and boy Navalny is just so quick one and hey do it early in the morning while these guys are just waking up. Hopefully they're like, uh, yeah, no, we tried, we
did the poison thing. But these hitman type guys, they're like, uh no, hang up, they don't they don't do it. They don't fall for it, like screw, Let's try this one other guy. So they call it scientists, not one of like the hit men, who might be better schooled on this. So they call this scientist and do the same bit, and the scientist is groggy and asleep, and he basically says, yeah, no, we did everything you said. We followed the plan. We
can't believe it. I don't know why it didn't want to work. And he's like, tell me again, where you put the poison. He's like, well, he was in the hotel, he did his laundry, so we put the poison in his under where Yeah, and then he put the under her on. The poison then seeps into his body. And meanwhile, while this phone call is being made, it's all on video. They're filming this. I think it was a joint effort with CNN to do this kind
of mini documentary on this investigation, which he teamed up. It was the guy French. I couldn't tell is a Belgian French camera guy or well the guy that the data miner, the one that put all of this evidence together. Oh oh that guy, yeah, he was friend. Yeah, don't know anyway, So this guy is just an independent data nerd self admitted.
Now Putin says he's CIA, which whatever, Okay, this guy's this hardcore data nerd that spent has spent in his life in excess of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for information, and he's really good at what he does. I always got like two phones and a laptop. So he's sitting there while Navalney Navalney is executing these I guess you will call him prank phone calls,
but it's he's mining as well. He's trying to get information. He's trying to get these people that were that were pinpointed and involved in the assassination to cop to it. And and the French guy's assistant is there too, and I believe she's Russian, so they're all working together. And when the dude is on the phone and admits to this, he goes, yes, we tried what and it's I'm sorry, it's not in English, it's in Russian and subtitles, so I can't pull the audio for it. It'd be useless
to us. They're like, oh my god, like their minds are blowing. It's saying everything. He's saying everything and how they try to poison me. They're like, why didn't it work? And this is Evona, the guy who was poisoned, Yeah, playing someone else. Why didn't it work? He's like they turned the plane around, like if he's yeah, if the plane continued, he would have died on the plane. But they turned the plane around fast enough. They got him to the hospital and you know,
gave him whatever he needed to live. And then they hang up the phone and they're just like, she told us everything. Jay, I have the audio of that, if you can pull me up here real quick. So this is the audio. They actually kind of pivot between speaking Russi and English, and this was Navolney's and his team's reaction the second they hung up the phone. No, we got yes, yes, oh my, here's nothing muscle. He's a chemists. Yes, I built the whole story story.
This unbelievable. Poor guy, Poor I think you will be president. Seriously after this, we will definitely kill me. So they wanted to call the chemist back and let off him asylum to defect because they're going to kill you the second this comes out, because you blew it, because they're about to drop. Let's they assimilate all of this information. They have this phone
call, all of this stuff on tape. Within days, their plan is to drop this to the world, to drop this in information, all the results of their investigation, the tapes, the video, everything, so the world can see that this is a direct tie and ordered to putin, ordered by Putin, putin poison my largest most vocal opponent, poison him and kill him. Locked it, Yeah, it's locked crazy And it was whild seeing them to talk about, well, the humanitarian things to do is calling back.
That was nuts because it's like people, you know, you know, it's clear, and it's like, would that have happened if the cameras were not on? I don't know, but you get the vibe that they're good people and you start like buying into that. Those nuts. But then at the end, if you heard that at the very end, you know,
because he's the guy that is helping with the investigation. Sorry, he's like, oh, you're going to be president after this, you will be president after all of this, And then navalny at the very end, if you could hear that, maybe it wasn't clear. He goes, they're going to kill me. They're going to kill me. So then he has to decide, all right, I'm gonna go home, I'm going to rush, I'm healthy again, I'm flying back from Germany to Moscow. Because he's emboldened now
he has this information. He feels this is protection to him. They tried once. There's no way in hell they're going to do this again. Many or he knew. He knew in the back of his mind what they were going to do. But they're on board with him. All the cameras they're showing him and to humanize him even more. Him and his wife were watching Rick and Morty on the flight from Germany to Moscow, and there's press on the plane. They know it's gonna happen. There's thousands of people at the
Moscow airport waiting to welcome him back. And they were about get to Moscow and they start diverting and doing a loop because Putin's telling him, don't go there, don't go there. And I think they went to an alternate mondd.
They went to a different airport because the one that they were their destination airport was overrun by supporters of Navalny who were being arrested in droves on the ground right by for supporting him or saying his name, and the second he lands, he gets to his passport thing and the Russian police show up and say, come with us. And that's pretty much centrally essentrally killing him. So what they did that he has trials they see they say he's a terrorist.
You know, he's trying to destroy Mother Russia. They're working with the CIA, because he's working with the CIA to attack Mother Russia and Great Putin, who would never do anything except what's good for Russia. And they put him in a prison in Moscow, and then a few weeks later they transfer him twelve hundred miles north. He disappeared into the Arctic Circle. How long did it take for him to travel there by bus? It took him twenty
days, over twenty days to drive him twelve hundred miles. That's what got me thinking this morning, how big Russia is. Twelve hundred miles from here is into Canada, it's into Hondura south, it's to the Bahamas to the east. It's all the way to San Diego that far on a bus and
these ain't Highway South Florida. Yeah, yeah, past that, past that, all the way to the Bahamas. Twenty days on a bus to the Arctic Circle to a prison called the Polar Wolf, which might be the worst prison in the worst country for prisons, the furthest you can get, they say, cell communication right when he got there sort of mysteriously stopped. No
one could even use cell phones there. Some high level Russian was at the prison like a week before, just to make sure it was terrible enough for him, because he dared rally the people against putin the polar Wolf colony. And I have a million stories we don't have time for all of them about things that go on there. But they essentially kill you slowly. They torture
you. They put you in a cell smaller than this table, and they give you a cell mate who's hacking, coughing, and has a respiratory infection. His job is to cough on you. That's your job for the day is to get this guy sick. And then they inject you with mysterious medication that's not even helping you. It's frankly hurting you more than it could possibly be helping. They put him in solitary confinement for two hundred and eighty three
days of his time there. Ten foot by seven foot cell They actually forced to listen to a pro putin pop song at five am every day, full blast. They wouldn't let him sleep. They wake him up through the eight
different times. Yeap, wake him up all the time. And at this prison they make you line up outside with almost no clothes on at minus forty degrees, by the way, and if you they make you stand there for half an hour, and if you so much as ball your hands to warm your hands, they spray all of you with a hose in the middle of the Arctic circle in the spring, by the way, they do it with it gets warmer, and they put mosquitoes and biting flies all over you.
They said that. They said they seal him in a fetal position in an iron box where you can hardly breathe, and you urinate on yourself. They threaten to rape you while they're bullying and beating you like every day. This is what happens at this prison. And that's where this guy went who was watching Rick and Morty not too long before and was a daughter at Stanford. And then just four days ago the news came out that Navalney went on a
walk at his prison. We don't know what happened. He wasn't feeling well that morning, he got a walk, he got sick, it felt unwell, and he lost consciousness and he died like four days ago. Cause of death, real quick death syndrome. Yeah, that's what they're claiming, real quick. Right. The documentary ends, he's in handcuffs waving goodbye to his
family. January twenty twenty one. Okay, so you're sitting there watching that, and if you watch the documentary before this week happened and you saw it, you still don't know whatever happened to that guy. We watched it after knowing what happened to him, and I was just thinking about that moment of him waving goodbye, and then we know what happens now his wife this week, if you'll see, his wife is spoken out and no blaving it on
Putin and she's probably going to get attacked. Now at some point, probably everyone knows it's Putin. I mean, President Biden came out and said, fine, more sanctions because of the Navalny murder, were about out of sanctions, And that's a whole different conversation about what the next couple of years might look like for Putin America and responses. But they're not really like you might. Like you said earlier, they're not releasing the body for another two weeks
to do chemical investigations on the body. In other words, they're waiting for this this drug, this Novachok to disappear, to leave his body. This was the final thing that was said on the documentary and he was asked this question, and this was his answer. I got this, JJ Alex say, if you are arrested and thrown in prison or the unthinka, what happens when you're killed? What message do you leave behind to the Russian people? My message for the situation that I am killed is very simple, not give
up. And then he answers it in Russian and gives a far more eloquent answer. Yeah yeah, but he yeah. He wants people to fight, and the people want to fight, but if they go out and fight, they get arrested. In Mike similar, damn, like four hundred people polar Fate this weekend. You know who went out and protest or whatever. Four
hundred people detained. Absolutely crazy. It's a totalian, totalianarian, totalierian regime that exists in our very eyes, in real time, and there's absolutely nothing that any country is willing to do about it to a level of maybe what we did in World War Two because they're afraid that they will wipe you off of the face of the planet and destroy the Earth. And that's an incredible amount of power. That is an incredible amount of fear in the hands of
a bond villain. Yeah who Yeah, literally might have like my heart stops launch button, you know. Yeah, Like I wouldn't put that past him anyway. Navalni is the name of the documentary. It's on HBO Max. Watch it. It makes you a little bit smarter about something that I didn't know enough about and it's fascinating. And then if you wonder why that name continues to pop up because incredible week of his death and the reactions to it
worldwide, Well Definite Zone. We'll be following and tracking for you too over the next couple weeks. Well's on the butt. Oh my god. The first death by this since nineteen thirty happened to a thirty four year old man in Colorado and it involves an animal. Next to ninety seven won the freek