Brad's Cactus Shack – Détails, épisodes et analyse

On this week’s Brad’s Cactus Shack, we’re going to phone phreak like it’s 1995 so that we can illegally dial in to some sexy 1-900 numbers for actual real-life psychics and phone sex workers. Get ready to have your minds blown by the uncanny accuracy of psychics who use mind rays to lock in on your brain frequencies over the phone so that they can give you winning lotto numbers.

What this show is really about, though, is the two completely different methods we used to call into 1-900 numbers for free back in 2009, both which involved opening up phone boxes that us regular citizens aren’t supposed to be opening up. Special thanks to positiveandmultiple on Reddit, who first suggested that I talk about some old phreaking adventures on my show. Sorry it took me 3 years to get around to it, positiveandmultiple!

Big thanks to MC Lars for the opening song about me. MC Lars is a rapper, just like a lot of other people are, and he does live shows that you should go to and heckle him from the crowd, asking him to do the Brad Carter song. And another big thanks to Andy Anderson who recorded the sexy jobs commercial for me at the very end of the show. Andy Anderson is a professional DJ at prankcast.com, and a part-time retired sheriff for the city of Phoenix. Listen to his shows, but also say hi to him when you spot him in Phoenix hauling the bad guys away. Finally, thanks to Posy, who not only makes all of the background music you hear in this episode, but he also does the coolest YouTube videos about light and other technologies.

I tend to just assume that people know what I’m talking about when I do a show like this and I casually mention things like beige boxing as if that’s something everyone knows about in 2025. But they do not. “Beige boxing” is an old form of phreaking where you bring your own phone to a telephone box on the outside of a home or building, or one of those giant green boxes on the side of the road, and hook your phone to the wires inside so you can make free calls from phone lines that don’t belong to you. There, now you know and it will be less confusing to listen to this episode. As I was editing, I dropped in new bits of audio to clear up other things I didn’t explain well enough. Hopefully it helps.

I think when I talked about how call forwarding works with the 72# code, I was remembering how remote call forwarding used to work, where you would access the service remotely to forward your calls. By just dialing 72# from your home, you would hear the stuttering dial tone, then dial the number you wanted to forward, and then the dialed number would ring so you can let whoever it is know that you’ve just forwarded your calls to them. There was no confirmation message for that, so I apologize to Jennifer Martino who runs thisisarecording.com for yelling at you for not having those recordings. Jennifer is the girl you hear mid-show saying the funniest lines ever to a psychic as we constantly sabotage her psychic reading call. I miss you Jennifer, please come back and I’ll never pimp slap you again.

Here’s a link to my 2010 blog post about Kevin from 7-Eleven. I kept this post set to “private” for many years because I didn’t want Kevin stumbling across it and losing his mind when he confirmed that it was me. I wonder if that ever crossed his mind when his fax line failed so badly that he had to call the phone company and the cops to figure out what the problem was. And I wonder if when the home office tried to fax things to Kevin’s store, did they get charged for the calls to 1-900 psychics? Or did he completely forget about me like I did about him until I saw his full name on Jessica’s Facebook page.

I’m surprised the police in that town didn’t automatically suspect me of doing that. Back in 1996, that police department arrested me for making thousands of dollars in illegal phone calls that apparently was the weirdest thing they’d ever had to deal with. They actually thought I was tapping into the phone box of a local power company to make these free calls and staked out the telco box waiting for me to show up and plug my phone into it, but I was doing it all remotely from my house which I had to explain to them after they arrested me.

The video that I refer to use making of horrible things to do to 7-Eleven employees kept getting taken down from my YouTube accounts, so I finally gave up trying to keep it up anywhere. You can still watch it, though, by downloading the 2025 Phone Losers of America Media Pack, and then looking for the video file named Causing Problems at 7-eleven.mp4. I don’t blame people for reporting it, since one of the things we do on the video is take a box of condoms off a shelf, poke a hole through the entire box with a safety pin, and then put them back on the shelf. Hilarious, right? Don’t worry, after turning the camera off I crushed the box of condoms in my hand and tossed it into their trash can. So none of you can blame your unwanted 2000-era pregnancies on me.

A long time ago I spent about a year harassing a radio DJ named MJ from the MJ Morning Show just to try and stir up drama on his show. I guess MJ still remembers this event too because he spent around 15 minutes talking about it on his show recently. In this episode of Brad’s Cactus Shack I will spaz out over every little thing MJ says about me in this completely slanderous video he posted.

• Thank you Gus Gallucci for posting the video on MJ on our Reddit
• Here’s the video that I’m playing
• Here’s PLA Radio episode 14 – Wacky Morning DJ
• Read the chapter of the Phone Losers of America book that made MJ so happy
• After you read the book for free, you’ll probably want to buy a physical copy of it
• Listen to the MJ Morning Show

After recording all of this, I told a friend about it and he watched the video. He’s the one who got most of the backstory back in my MJ harassing days. He said even before I asked, when he heard MJ talk about my “it’s coming to your door” threat, he didn’t think that was something I would say even back then.

In this show we get to know residents of Celina, Ohio on a very personal level with some hard-hitting questions.

• Here’s a video of some destruction from Celina’s tornado, then a guy filming his television like a hobo
• Stealth camping in Celina
• More tornado footage
• Holy crap, Dollar General was actually destroyed
• Look at this guy acting like Wal-Mart should sell cold food after the power’s been out all night
• Here’s one of those drive-thru convenience stores. I don’t know if that one’s in Celina, though. Here’s a Streetview of one in Celina I used to go to.

This episode of Brad’s Cactus Shack activates my old man story mode so I can tell stories about old men. Then I play some old 90’s Dino audio that can barely be heard, but it’s okay because I tell you small parts of what he probably said, then drone on and on about OCI for a bit. We wrap it up with voicemails from an ex-employer of mine that I remembered being funnier back when I recorded them. The opening bit is from old Q106.5 broadcasts, background music is Walk Of Life by Dire Straights, and the ending music is I Am Very Happy Right Now by Bonecage.

Cody NoName sent me a link to a conspiracy video that I really want to watch, but I’m too afraid to watch it by myself because conspiracy videos are scary, so I’m bringing you guys along to watch it with me. This is a conspiracy theory about the Skunkworks situation and what those underground tunnels really mean.
Don’t worry, there’s nothing in the video that you actually need to see. It’s mostly video of text that Evvonne is reading with the very important parts highlighted in yellow highlight pen, because that’s an important thing to do with you’re talking about conspiracies.

Here’s a link to Evvonne’s Skunkworks video

Subscribe to her channel and support her on Patreon

Here’s the FOX 5 article about Skunkworks

Here’s another article with a bit more information. This one claims that Skunkworks met the other guy as an adult, so I’m not sure where Evvonne saw that they were childhood friends. Maybe I was confused about what she said and it was actually a childhood friend of Askia Khafra who was talking about the incident.

Here’s the June 29th, 2010 episode of The Phone Show where Skunkworks calls in to ask for vocal chords

Here’s the June 22nd, 2010 episode of The Phone Show which was played near the end of this show. There’s a little more to it, but it seemed boring so I stopped playing it.

Haha, JUST as I was about to hit the publish button for this episode, I got a call from Maryland! It was a lady from the dumpster company that I called last night, saying she noticed they missed a call from me. I explained that I saw her number in a conspiracy video and was just calling to see if it was a real number. She was probably actually a CIA agent just checking up on me.

Mike sent me my arrest report from 1993, which details my crimes against the 7-Eleven I worked for, so this entire episode is me reading the report. Music is Take The Monkey And Run by Steve Miller, and Dizz Knee Land by Dada.

On Wednesday night I sat in my moderately comfortable chair and took calls from viewers for about an hour, who all seemed to think it’s funny to make prank calls to me. This is a serious show, people, and if the prank calls don’t stop I will end it.
The song in this one is called Rocking Chair by Dean Friedman. It’s a song about sitting in your rocking chair and broadcasting while people call you. The background music during the live part is With You by I Fight Dragons.

This episode gets back to the business of clearing out my hard drive and playing a few of the interesting things I find along the way. You’ll hear some transfer files I made to more effectively trick phone company employees, some stuff I’m pretty sure came from my good pal Legend, a weird method of getting free calls and hiding your caller ID, and a broken Phone Show drop.
The ending song is Chiron Beta Prime by Jonathan Coulton. If you want to see that exciting ANSI video that stopped me from doing a show last week, here it is.

Today’s Cactus Shack episode is an hour-long call in show where I sit in my comfy recliner and take calls on the pay phone and we basically just scream at each other a lot. Enjoy!

Listen to Neon every single Sunday night because she never misses a week
Here’s a Jack Nicolson soundboard prank to KFC
You can’t trust those Australians – FoTC says so
Those guys at Telephreak.org are a bunch of hobos who can’t keep their website up, so here’s a link to their Twitter
Listen to the Do You Know Who Jason Segel Is podcast – I’ve listened to 2 episodes now and it’s fun stuff
The Bone Zone podcast
Jack Helliquinn does a bunch of creepy-ass videos on YouTubez
Join the Hijinks Discord and watch Home Alone 3 this weekend
Here’s the link to the video of this show
The ending music is Carol Brown by Flight of the Conchords – it was the next video that played after I looked up their Australian video
For some reason, the background music I was using last night (by Emergency Pizza Party) reminded me of this old Disney song from 50 years ago. That’s the intro music I used.

I found more phone company recordings scattered around various drives, buried several sub-directories deep. Hopefully these aren’t calls that I played on the first episode. We also listen to some so-called chaos that I caused at a mall in the mid-2000’s, and we revisit my old neighbor Warren and his super exciting lifestyle.
On that part where I couldn’t understand what she was saying – she said she was haulin’ balls. Who says stuff like that? I’m surprised they didn’t all communicate via CB radios instead of borrowing my phone.

I found a few old posts that reference Warren, but nothing specific about the blender timer. And haha, in that picture I can see that I had it set to go off FOUR TIMES A DAY. The timer automatically randomized the start/end times by about 15 minutes. I should have set up a sensor on the wall to count how many times it was banged in that 2 weeks.

I found a few old blog posts that reference Warren. Here’s where my car stereo gets stolen. There’s this one about contemplating moving. My first bike theft. Here’s where I badmouth Warren to the landlord. My breakdown of Warren-related living costs. Still bitching about Warren here. Here’s a picture of my broken car window and missing radio. Looking back on all this stuff really makes me love living at the Situation Room. Not that my stereo didn’t get stolen from here too about 5 years ago, but it was a normal random theft and not something that my neighbors did. Or did they….