On Skepticism: Michael Shermer & Jeremy Rys on DarkHorse
Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He writes a weekly Substack column. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the ...
I have the great pleasure of sitting this morning with Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Jeremy Riss, return guest on the Dark Horse Podcast, who has a degree in physics, he runs the Alien Scientist channel, and he is an expert in next-generation science and technology.
Welcome to both of you.
Thanks for having us.
So we are gathered together to talk about belief and skepticism and to navigate the difficulty of figuring out what it is we should believe rationally.
In a moment as confusing as this current one.
And I know all three of us have, I believe, a great deal of alignment about wanting to believe only those things that are analytically well supported by evidence.
But that has caused us to reach very different conclusions on some important issues of the day.
So, I don't want this to be viewed as a debate.
I'm not sure how productive debate is.
I think it would be wise if we viewed this as a friendly discussion to the death.
But anyway, gentlemen, let's start out in an area that has a great deal of interest at the current moment and that has got all three of our attention, the issue of what were once called UFOs that are now called UAPs.
Michael, do you want to set us in motion on that topic?
Yeah, sure.
Start with the name, UAPs.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
Now it's morphed again into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon.
This is what Steve Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill.
When the word becomes pejorative, the words change.
UFOs have always been associated with kind of fringe elements of science or Pseudoscience and, you know, people being abducted by aliens and aliens mutilating cattle and all this kind of stuff that's made most scientists avoid the subject entirely.
So UAP is, I guess, a welcome change because it is an interesting question.
But what's the question?
So here I divide between two different questions.
Are they out there?
Have they come here?
That they be an alien.
Like, for example, often when I express my skepticism that UAPs represent extraterrestrial intelligences, people will say, so you're saying we're all alone in the universe?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
That's a different question.
I support the SETI program, I support the Galileo Project, I'm on the Galileo Project team.
You know, I think it's very probable that we're not alone.
In the cosmos, hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars.
Each of these stars has planets.
And on and on, you crunch the numbers in the Drake Equation, you get a number that's very unlikely to be zero or one.
We're the only ones.
But that's a different question from, have they come here?
You know, it's a pretty vast, empty, it's mostly just empty space between the stars.
Chances of them finding us?
Much less being bipedal primates that look a lot like us and have human concerns that, you know, these are just very unlikely.
But I would be willing to change my mind and say, yeah, okay, we have been visited if the evidence was proportional to that claim.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan famously made famous in Cosmos.
It wasn't his line initially, but that is to say, Everybody agrees on both sides of the discussion that the discovery that we are not alone would be one of the biggest discoveries in the history of science, history of all of humanity.
It would be spectacular.
I would love to know that that's true.
I don't want to believe in things that have to be believed in to be true.
I want it to actually be true.
And so how good is the evidence for this extraordinary claim?
And it is not extraordinary.
It's not even very ordinary.
It's mostly anecdotal.
A few grainy videos and blurry photographs and things like that.
And, you know, it does not convince me that I can drop my skepticism, reject the null hypothesis, as it were, that we're not being visited and say that we are being visited because the evidence is so overwhelming.
I just don't see that yet.
Let's say that the evidence were to cross that threshold, what would that have to look like for you to reach a different conclusion?
Well, my latest analogy for that is the Chinese spy balloon.
You know, when that story first broke in April, I thought, eh, maybe, you know, the pictures weren't all that clear and the news reporting was...
It was also not clear.
But within hours, it's like we had better videos and photographs.
And then within a few days, we had jets that were scrambled to take close-up photographs of it and video of it.
It was unmistakably clear.
There it was.
And then the pilot shot it down.
There it is in the ocean.
And at that point, no one's asking about the credentials of the pilot who shot it down.
So a lot of the congressional hearings about the UAPs, everybody talks about the credentials of the eyewitnesses.
"Oh, he's a general, he's a captain, he's the mayor of the town, he's the governor." None of that's relevant if you have evidence.
Who cares what the credentials of the pilot that shot down the Chinese spy balloon?
It doesn't matter.
The spy balloon is real.
The President of the United States issued a statement, the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, all the news media covered it.
Yeah, well, argument from authority.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't, I haven't seen the Chinese spy balloon with my own eyes.
It didn't come over Southern California here.
But I trust enough of the authorities to assume it's real.
That was not a fake.
All right, fair enough.
The fact that it has been completely blown to bits and not recovered, I'm also not surprised with, given the territory that it was shot down over, like Icefield.
the fact that it was a spy balloon shot with a Sidewinder missile.
So, yeah, it's again, I don't have a problem with that.
I don't think that that's the best evidence either.
I've looked into a lot of the UFO stuff myself and it's, you know, what are your opinions on some of the top people out there in this field right now?
A lot of them have turned out to be grifters and people who push fake stories for profit, it seems.
It seems like a business of sorts to be able to publish fake information.
And then profit off the dissemination of that as everyone goes crazy, sharing that and spreading it.
And I guess the military sort of doesn't have a problem with those sort of people because they're essentially great counterintelligence assets to them.
Well, you have the head of the FAA recently chiming in, I think the head of NASA has chimed in on this and said, oh, I haven't seen anything like this, so therefore these things can't be real or they don't exist.
But they would have said the same thing in the 1980s about the B-2 flying around and all the sightings that people were seeing of the spy craft that were not yet disclosed back then.
So I think it's much more likely that what we're seeing are next generation technologies.
Including some things that might not even be physical.
Some people have compared it to a cat chasing a laser around and saying, wow, it defies the laws of physics.
I can't catch it.
You know, it's going so fast and whipping around, when in reality you can play three-dimensional games with lasers by just crossing two of them in space.
It ionizes the air where the two lasers cross, and they were demonstrating this in Japan in 2011.
Making full-on graphics in the air using laser-induced plasmas.
So we are already in heated agreement on this UAP issue.
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I believe I am not exaggerating to say that all three of us believe we are very likely not alone in the universe, would be very excited to discover that we were being visited, but find ourselves deeply skeptical of the evidence that we have been shown, which so far is best explained by terrestrial phenomena and
Portrayal rather than aliens visiting us and doing things that are beyond such an explanation.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I picture Marco Rubio finally getting permission to go into one of these warehouses where the, you know, the spaceships are being kept.
And it's like the next generation of the stealth bomber or fighter or something like that.
He's like, oh, this is what we're working on?
Yeah.
Well, I can't tell the public about that.
No, no, of course you can't.
And then he comes out and says, nothing to see here, folks.
Oh, no, he's lying.
He's covering up the aliens.
Yeah, it's something to do along those lines.
I would say invisibility technology has been a hotly studied topic out at Area 51.
Project Rainbow was started there in the 1950s to specifically investigate invisibility technology.
We're now in generations of metamaterials since the 1980s and 90s when the term was first coined.
So, what we have in terms of invisibility technology, and then you have to think about something else out there that's thousands of years more advanced than us.
I like to compare it to a Star Trek episode called Who Watches the Watchers?
Where basically the Star Trek is they're observing this Bronze Age civilization and they're using invisibility cloak from their observation platform and then one day the power thing goes down and these things, these beings, they're hiding, their hidden rock facade goes away and they're exposed and they try to go down and tell the Bronze Age civilization, you know, that, hey, we're just scientists and trying to study you.
And they don't understand.
They're like, you guys are gods.
And nope, you came from the heavens and the stars.
And then like, you know, so it just starts this whole religion and mythology with the people in the Star Trek episode as they interact with them more and they realize that we're just doing more damage.
If I had a nickel for every time that happened to me, man.
Yeah, go ahead.
But it is interesting.
I guess one response to that is before we invoke that, those kind of explanations, that it's our technology, or Russian or Chinese or something like that.
A lot of these videos, I think, have more mundane explanations.
They're just balloons, or it's the way the camera mounted on the bottom of the plane was rotating, and the floor effects, and those sorts of things, I think, can explain at least some of the video effects.
As you know, Mick West has been all over this.
And there's a video going around of Scott Kelly, the astronaut and pilot, at one of these NASA hearings, where they're talking about UAPs.
And he gets up and gives his little speech, and he says, Because people say, well, these pilots are trained.
They know what to look for.
They can assess size and distance.
He goes, let me tell you about pilots and our ability to assess things.
He goes, when I was up in the, no, it was his brother, I think, who was in the space shuttle, and they were about to close the cargo bay doors, and one of the other astronauts said, wait, there's something floating around in the cargo bay.
We better get that thing.
It's an instrument or a tool or something we left in there.
before we close it we better go get it and then they they're looking at the thing and they realize that's the space station 80 miles away yeah it's just like what and he talks about pilots he said i was up in the plane and my co-pilot goes oh my god there's a uap what we better go check it out so they whip around and go back and it's a bart simpson balloon and he had a bunch of stories like Pilots want to rendezvous with another pilot and it turns out it's a buoy on the ocean.
Distances are hard to measure.
It's hard to know what's going on.
Illusions are common.
There are lots of ways that people could see something that isn't what it appears to be, and that problem gets exponentially worse if something is interested in misleading us at the level of our perceptions, which is unfortunately a real possibility.
For various reasons.
I mean, including one reason that you might want to mislead us is to get people to tune this topic out, ultimately.
To create a lot of excitement about UAPs that aren't UAPs so that people get over it because there is something to know.
So, you know, it becomes a hall of mirrors when one is trying to properly evaluate the evidence in this realm.
Which then raises the next question.
I mean, we do all roughly agree on this one.
Where we may differ is, what is it, in light of the pollution of the information environment and the many different ways that terrestrial phenomena could be mistaken for extraterrestrial phenomena, what is it that each of us would accept as evidence that we actually were being visited?
Well, okay, so just one response to that is like, I can imagine someone in DARPA or the CIA sitting back there going, haha, they think it's the aliens again.
This is great!
This is such a great misdirection from what we want them to know, because we don't want the Russians and Chinese to know we have this technology.
They're reporting aliens and UFOs, and their perception on it is through a different set of goggles.
It's through colored glasses.
Now, because of that, it's great.
Yeah, I can see that.
The other idea that the hypothesis that they're Russian or Chinese technology, and somehow the Russians or Chinese have developed, like, anti-gravity propulsion systems or, you know, these kinds of technologies that are, like, decades or centuries ahead of what we have.
That's not possible.
That's just not how it works.
You know, we steal their secrets, they steal our secrets.
You know, history of technology and science is very cumulative.
You know, no one gets very far ahead of anybody else ever.
You know, even some examples I use, like the Manhattan Project, the most secret project ever.
You know, the Russians stole our secrets and had a bomb within two or three years. - Well, if there isn't aliens, if they're not hiding aliens, 'cause that was, according to the witnesses, classified two levels higher than the Manhattan Project.
Oh, well, okay.
But also, what else would be true?
If the Russians had this super technology, wouldn't we see it in Ukraine?
And we don't see anything like that.
In fact, it's pretty primitive what they're doing there.
It almost seems like they're clearing out their old war inventory for something new.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
Well, actually, that may well be part of the explanation for our involvement as well, is that we have a lot of weapons that sit in warehouses, and from a business perspective, clearing those warehouses means a bull market for new weapons.
I have been led to understand that that is a motivating factor by people inside the industry, so that frightens me.
And it could be that something parallel is going on on the Russian side.
You mean like the military-industrial complex?
Precisely.
Yeah, it really looks like there is something to that.
RFK Jr.
has been talking about that, but that goes back to Eisenhower.
I think that's true.
So, let me just say, from my perspective, there is maybe only one slam-dunk answer to the question of what I would accept as evidence that we were being visited.
And it's the one that is conspicuously absent from the discussion almost entirely, which is the biology.
Yeah.
If you were to show an actual alien pilot to a competent team of biologists and they were allowed to ask natural questions to run experiments that they believed worthy of running, a competent team of biologists Could very easily rule out the two possibilities that would have to be ruled out.
One of them being that what is in front of them is not in fact biological, and the other is that what is in front of them is biological but not Earth-based.
If they ruled out the Earth-based and the non-biological, we would be left with a creature whose complexity was too great to be faked, and whose nature was most easily explained by an extraterrestrial origin.
Which is, I think, why we're not talking about it.
Steven Greer and the Atacama skeleton, remember?
But it turned out to be just a mummified little fetus or something.
By the way, David Grouch has been talking about non-human biologics.
Yeah, I think we should address that term.
I took a picture of one.
Wow.
That looks like a bird of paradise, Michael.
It's a non-human biologic.
No, no, no.
Maybe we could help David Grush with his terminology a little bit here, because yeah, non-human biologics is such a broad term.
What would we call this, if you had three words to describe what you just described to us as your prime example of undeniable proof that we're not alone?
I would say presumptively extraterrestrial biology.
Biology that is most easily explained by a separate tree of life, period, the end.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Would that be not DNA?
It had some other self-replicating molecular structure?
Well, let's put it this way.
I'm okay even if it has DNA, but I'm going to become very suspicious if the DNA code is the same one that terrestrial biology has.
I would be interested in seeing a radically different DNA code coupled with You know, if it's built of cells, which is likely, coupled with a cellular profile that is radically distinct, probably it would have organelles.
Those organelles would probably not be either chloroplasts or mitochondria.
So anyway, DNA is a possibility.
What about gene drives?
A different DNA code would be a slam dunk.
What if we went back to, say, pre-Cambrian green-blue algae and found a gene drive in Ginkgo Balboa, one of these ancient species?
Would you think that a gene inserted information inside the DNA?
Well, yeah, I think as long as we're opening up the, you know, I keep a list in my own mind of things that would tell me that the fundamentals of what I believe are wrong.
If I found, for example, A Bible verse from any terrestrial Bible inscribed in the information molecules inside of a creature that I could be confident was a natural creature and not something that had been tinkered and had this Bible verse installed, I would have to rethink my epistemology.
I just simply would, right?
Do you know Paul Davies' proposal for a second genesis on Earth?
This is his proposal.
It didn't have to be DNA.
It could have been some other self-replicating molecule system.
And if we found that on Earth, it'd be a second genesis.
So in a way, it's looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, but terrestrial intelligence as a second start.
It would be billions of years old.
No one's found this, but that would be a reasonable test.
So I think this is, at some level, this is the heart of the matter that we are going to end up focusing on here, which is there are many possibilities and the ability to exclude possibilities is fundamental to clear thought, but the ease with which one dismisses a true possibility because it is initially unlikely or because the evidence that
That supports it does not meet the intuitive threshold of being extraordinary enough.
Whatever the case may be, it's very easy to throw out a correct explanation because at the moment you check in on it, it's not supported by the right stuff.
So, really, you know, all three of us are going to embrace the idea that skepticism is fundamental.
But the idea that skepticism of what?
Sometimes you need to be skeptical of the published literature.
We've just seen that with COVID and that's a very uncomfortable place to find yourself because once you realize that the published literature can't be trusted, now you're in a world of potentially very low quality evidence, you know, which is not a good place to try to make sense of the world.
Yeah, I was just talking to Avi Loeb since I'm on the Galileo Project, and he has a big profile in the New York Times Magazine about him that just came out this week.
And he said they interviewed him for hours and hours and hours, and then after that, the fact-checkers called him and, you know, like, did you say this?
Here's your exact quote.
This is what we're going to use.
He says they still got half of the story wrong.
And he said, then I got to thinking, then I actually said, well, what if it's a story about what's happening in Ukraine?
And, you know, how would I know what's happening in Ukraine?
I trust the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or whatever.
What if it's as bad as they can't even get the story about Avi Loeb, right?
It is.
It is.
Trust me, I don't mind.
Amnesia.
I have to tell you, when you read about events that happen in the paper and they're completely different than if you knew what actually happened in real life and were connected to anyone in there and do your own investigation, you often find different things than other people find.
And that's true about everything.
I refer to Heidegger's philosophy of what he said in Disclosure.
With every disclosure, there's concealment, and with every concealment, there's also disclosure.
It's like this back-and-forth thing.
As you look through one lens, you're putting on blinders to other angles sometimes.
I don't know.
We had a discussion about some of this, the Roswell thing.
Maybe we could dig into Roswell for a second.
Let me make one comment, Jeremy, about something you said about kind of DARPA research.
Back to Brett's question of what it would take.
Not just biologics, but if there were technology that was something like an anti-gravitational propulsion system, and the guys at DARPA look at this thing and go, oh my god, no one on Earth ever thought of this physics and engineering or whatever.
How would you know that the guys at DARPA said that, rather than the guys at DARPA?
Well, if they actually said it.
Well, no, this I don't get.
There's a layer of weakness.
that surrounds claims.
So my trajectory through logic space has left me very suspicious of things that are entirely based on pixels We've gotten very good at arranging pixels so they can do some very compelling things.
And frankly, and you alluded to this up top, Michael, the credentials of the people doing the claiming.
The fact is, these are human beings.
These are human beings who respond to incentives.
Some human beings are shameless.
Once a human being is frightened, even one who is capable of shame may say things that they would not otherwise contemplate.
So, you know, the problem is if DARPA is the place that they would be likely to discover some transcendent new technological opportunity like anti-gravity, I don't know what to make if the DARPA guys say, yeah, this is anti-gravity and it has to be extraterrestrial because we've never thought of this stuff.
How do I know that they're not covering something that they did think of?
Yeah, but then now you get to a much harder problem.
Why should we believe anything the government or corporations ever tell us about anything?
Unfortunately, Michael, this is the question.
I don't want it to be the question.
I want us to have an institutional layer that purges us of things that mislead us into self-harm.
We obviously don't have that.
We just went through three years of non-stop self-harm as a result of authorities who not only assured us that they knew what they were talking about, but shamed us if we asked the most basic questions.
So, yeah, I'm not happy to live in a world where we can't trust these things, but I believe that's the world we live in.
Nine out of 10 doctors smoke camels.
So, uh, so, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's that threshold is what is propaganda with people like.
Yeah, I know.
The problem with people like RFK Jr.
is that some of the stuff he says is true, like Big Pharma captured the regulatory state and sold a lie about opioids, that they're not addictive.
That's true.
They did do that.
How did they do that?
They just bought off the politicians and the regulators.
Yep.
Really?
Unbelievable.
It's like big tobacco.
Well, the problem is that the more you dig into the extraordinary things that RFK Jr.
says that can't possibly be true, the more you find that actually what he says is at least based on a rational evaluation of a chain of evidence that people are largely unaware of.
He makes so many claims.
I mean, Paul Offit's been posting a lot of of RFK Jr.'s claims.
And then he talks about this study that was done in 1967.
Here's the actual study.
Here's the quotes from it.
Here's the findings.
And this is why RFK Jr.'s wrong about this particular thing here.
Go.
And then, you know, it's like he invites him.
Yeah, but Paul Paul Offit just tried to distract us into believing that the problems with the mRNA vaccines had to do with the choice of spike protein as the antigenic target. - Sure.
I don't know why he did that.
I do know that he is not insulated from perverse incentives surrounding vaccines.
In fact, it appears that he has a conflict of interest.
He did address the conflict of interest thing.
He's made no money because he works for that company, whatever organization he works for.
But he doesn't get any of that.
No, no, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know where his conflicts of interest begin and end.
What I do know is that the portrayal, which to me is absurd, that the spike protein is the source of all the harm.
I think the spike protein is the source of some harm, but the idea that the spike protein is the fundamental problem with the mRNA vaccines would rescue that platform from a much more fundamental problem, which will accompany any vaccine you attempt to create on it.
The fact that there is no targeting of those mRNAs so that they can land in any cell means that every time you attempt to vaccinate somebody with that technology, you are inviting an autoimmune attack on the tissue that happens to pick up the lipid nanoparticle.
So To me, Paul Offit is no authority I'm ready to trust, because where I can check his work, it appears to proceed from a conflict of interest, not from a rational evaluation of the evidence of where the harm comes from.
I don't know, Brett.
I mean, everything you just rattled off, I have no idea what you're even talking about.
It's way out of my field.
I'd be happy to explain it.
It's very simple, actually.
But there are tons of people that this is what they do.
They study vaccines and public health and so on.
How do they not know this?
But that's the question, Michael.
I mean, and honestly, this is the reason for us to meet, and it's probably the reason for us to move away from UAPs, where we agree and it evidences the fact that we all share the same values with respect to getting this stuff right and exerting skepticism correctly.
But how did so many people get the mRNA vaccine platform wrong?
I can't answer that question, but I can tell you that they did.
How do you know they did?
For the following reason.
If you look at the description of how the vaccine is supposed to work, the description given by those who designed the vaccine itself, It leads you directly to the question of, won't the cells that transcribe this mRNA message, won't they inherently be attacked by T-cells whose function is to destroy virally infected cells?
In other words, what causes cells in the human body to be attacked by T-cells is the evidence that they have been captured by a virus, and that evidence comes in the following form.
They are displaying antigens that you yourself make and they are displaying foreign antigens that you do not make.
Any cell that does that is presumed by the immune system to be virally infected and it is attacked by the immune system because killing it off is how the body overcomes viral disease.
If the vaccine, the so-called vaccine, stayed in your deltoid when they injected it, then the answer is, well, the cells that will be attacked by your immune system are in your arm and you can afford to lose them.
Once we knew that the vaccine circulated around the body, it should be clear to anyone who understands how immunity develops that this is going to cause an autoimmune disorder in any tissue that transcribes it.
And if that tissue happens to be your heart, it's going to be a devastating problem.
So, how Paul Offit doesn't know that?
I think Paul Offit has to know that.
How did the other people who signed off on this not know it?
I don't know.
He's not here.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
It's like, you know, you float this hypothesis, Jeremy and I, this is not what we do, so I don't even know how to, you know, how is it possible?
Not just Paul Offit, you know, it's like thousands of scientists would have to be either just delusional or bought off or... Perfect.
Perfect.
So here's what we've got.
You can't evaluate what I said, nor should you be able to.
You're not a biologist.
Here's what you can know, though.
I have just staked my reputation on a claim about how the immune system works and how the vaccine, as described by those who designed it, should work.
If I'm wrong, you, Michael Shermer, are sitting here, and there should be a flood of biologists ready to explain what I've got wrong.
And when that flood of biologists doesn't show up, you should ask yourself the question, why is that?
If Paul Offit is right and Brett Weinstein is wrong, why is nobody pointing out the reason?
Well, did you invite them on your show to talk about it?
It doesn't matter.
You can invite them.
I'll invite them.
Show me who knows the answer to the question.
And I'll be happy to talk about it.
Maybe I'll host an episode of the Michael Schirmer Show with you and whoever.
I would love that.
If you want to bring Paul Offit on?
Who's the guy that Rogan wanted to have back on?
Peter Hotez?
Peter Hotez, yeah, maybe somebody like him.
You know, it's, it's, yeah, okay.
Okay, but nonetheless, let's separate this from the question.
Was Rogan a lab engineer or was it a natural origin?
I'm curious.
See, to me, that's a completely open, I'll agree with Brett on this, that, you know, that should have been always on the table as a reasonable hypothesis.
Why not?
It was never a conspiracy theory that the Chinese intended to kill people with this virus.
It was that they fucked up in human error and it leaked out of a lab.
That seems entirely, always seemed to me entirely plausible.
Why did that get shut down?
Why did that get shut down?
And now that we have the evidence of the emails, in which we see that the very people who told us that it was preposterous to imagine it could have come from the lab, privately believed that was more likely than not.
Right?
That tells you something about the degree to which cover-up might be playing a role in our narrative.
And you have to say... So, again, I don't want to stick on COVID here.
My point is not about COVID.
My point is about what you do in a badly polluted information environment.
Either I just said something preposterous about immunity and vaccines that reveals my ignorance, or I didn't.
It seems to me it should be pretty easy for us to figure out which thing just happened.
And to the extent that what you're going to discover is that what I said is perfectly reasonable, and any expert in immunology ought to know that, if you discover that, that probably ought to make you think, wait, what else is hiding in plain sight?
Because that certainly is.
Another observation I made, I watched the whole three hours of Rogan's podcast with RFK Jr., and you know, he starts off with the, you know, you can't really trust scientific authorities, they get it wrong, and just all the things similar to what you said.
And then they got talking about climate change.
And then RFK Jr.
was like, oh, you know, you got to trust the science, the consensus is in, you know, the scientists get it right, and they're right about this one, and it's going to be a catastrophe, and we're going to sue these oil companies for ruining our futures.
Like, wait a minute, I thought you just said you can't trust the scientific authorities and that there's no such thing as scientific consensus.
So even he's not consistent about his skepticism.
Well, I mean, look, None of us are perfectly consistent, and I don't even think it's conceivable that you could be.
That's the whole reason to have this discussion, is even if we, at a values level, and believe me, I think if RFK Jr.
were sitting here with the three of us, you would find that values-wise, he's perfectly aligned.
The point is, the trajectory he has taken through history has left him skeptical of different things than you, or me, or Jeremy.
And that is the question.
How do those of us who agree that proper scientific skepticism is the way to analytical clarity, how do we figure out how to talk to each other about which things are in our blind spots?
I certainly want to know.
There's no question about that.
Yeah, right.
Well, again, back to the Paul Offit example, you know, where he would cite something that R. F. K. Jr.
said about this study concluding X, and then he presents the study.
He goes, here it is.
Here's the excerpts from it.
Here's the data, and so on, and it shows the opposite of that.
Why did you say that?
And he, you know, at the end of his little columns, it's a substack column, you know, R. F. K.
Jr., why are you saying that?
Here is why you're wrong.
Please respond.
And then, of course, you get no response.
I have never had that experience with Robert Kennedy Jr., and I know him pretty well, and I have pushed him a number of times.
You do?
I don't know, yeah, okay.
No, I do know him, and... Well, maybe, yeah, well, so, why does he not respond?
Does he not like Offit, or is there some bad blood there, or something?
I don't really know why.
I don't know.
I'm not going to speak for him, but I would say my guess would be, from having delved in areas where Bobby Kennedy and I see things alike, that the information environment inside the published literature is so thoroughly compromised that the art is in figuring out which studies were correctly done, which is not simple.
It requires an awful lot of legwork.
Yeah, so yeah, okay.
So since the replication crisis started around 2010, you know, half of all psych experiments probably should have never been published, but a lot of medical experiments probably should have never been published.
And some of them are so complex that it's hard to even honestly try to replicate them, because even the people reporting them maybe left out a few of the steps that they did, or the file drawer problem, or they did a little p-hacking that was acceptable at the time, and so on.
So yeah, okay, so even the checkable empirical questions you're bringing up should be answerable.
Maybe even that's hard.
It's hard.
Separate from the political question, you know, should, you know, mass mandates or vaccine mandates, you know, that's a political question, not a scientific one.
But some of the stuff you said should be, we should be able to find out yes or no.
The stuff about the protein spikes or whatever that was.
It's either true or not, right?
Yeah, what I said is either true or not.
And I'm looking for the credible voice who can explain why it isn't true, because I know that it is true.
Let's put it this way.
There is highly advanced immunobiology that is beyond my expertise.
This isn't at that level.
This is pretty basic.
And it should be very easy for somebody to show where I've got it wrong.
It's not the first time I've talked about it, and I'm not the only person who's talked about it either.
So don't people write you and go, Brett, Brett, Brett, here's the reason why you're wrong, and here's the citation, or something like this?
I have literally never seen a credible response to this claim.
I've seen attacks on the character.
I'm going to find out.
Let me also say this to you, Mike.
We're going to move topics here in a second, but let me say this to you also.
As with everything, if I am wrong about this, Boy, that's not going to be a fun moment for me, but I would much rather get to the next moment where I start being right about things again than double down on an idea I'm incorrect about.
That is where I'm at.
So if I'm wrong about this, I'm going to have to see the evidence that I'm wrong, but I will shift my position.
Okay.
That's just the way it is.
All right.
I don't want to stick too heavily over UAPs and where we disagree.
I think that topic has done a good job of demonstrating that we are aligned in our objectives and, in that case, land with our skepticism pointed in the same direction, that there's something about the current UAP story that is not compelling us, that the most likely explanation is extraterrestrial.
I also don't think what I want to do is hiding it either.
I just want to clarify that.
I think if they do have it, it's inside of a container organization where it's untouchable by FOIA because the FOIA requests seem to have gone nowhere so far in finding it.
So, I don't know, if you go back to the military-industrial complex and the Manhattan Project, you'll find a lot of organizations where they hid components of the Manhattan Project, which are still around today and even manage all of our national laboratories.
So, they're in a perfect position currently to basically have a One up on all the science that's discovered at our national labs, and also have access to a file like this that's untouchable by even the Pentagon or FOIA requests.
If it does exist, it's not inside the government, it's inside a private military industrial complex contractor where it's untouchable by FOIA.
I don't think it's very likely that Marco Rubio or any of these guys will have access to that unless they really dig hard.
Yeah, see, that's the thing that bothers me.
How can we answer the question, then, if we can't trust anybody?
You can't get even somebody as high up and influential as Marco Rubio to get to the answer of the question.
And you've seen these videos of, like, Clinton and Hillary and Obama on these comedian late-night talk shows, where they ask them, you know, can you tell us what happened in Roswell?
I'm gonna look into this!
And then, you know, nothing ever comes of it.
You know, maybe they do.
Maybe there's things the President doesn't know, that Congress doesn't know.
And when I was researching my conspiracy book, you know, I read all the stuff about the CIA.
And, you know, the CIA, they did a lot of pretty nefarious things over the decades.
And, you know, almost nothing would surprise me.
You know, this, like, Project Blue Book.
Or no, sorry, not Project Blue Book.
Project Paperclip.
Sorry, I misspoke.
Project Paperclip is where we got all these Nazi scientists, chemists, biologists, and physicists to come on our side before the Russians got them.
You know, you sort of see the politics behind that.
But, you know, and I just visited the Auschwitz exhibition at the Reagan Museum, so they sort of show all this stuff.
And then the pictures of these Nazis that worked at Auschwitz.
Some of them ended up coming to America and living in Ohio, working at some company, you know, developing biological weapons or chemical weapons.
It's like, this is astonishing.
At the same time, we have these other guys that did the same thing at the Nuremberg trial in the dock and executed for war crimes.
You know, so not, you know, governments are not always not to be trusted.
They do lie.
They do cover stuff up.
You know, Project MKUltra, you know, dosing U.S.
citizens with mind-altering drugs without their consent or knowledge.
It's like, you know, the COINTELPRO program of spying on the civil rights activists, including MLK Jr., and, you know, taping his sex in a hotel room to blackmail him.
I mean, this is illegal.
This is astonishing.
Trying to induce him to commit suicide?
Yeah, yeah, unbelievable.
So I get it, when people go, you can't trust the government, you can't trust the CIA, yeah, I see why.
So then who should we believe, and when, and what criteria?
Alright, so here's what I'm hoping you gentlemen will help me with.
Now let's move to a topic where I know that we have fierce disagreements.
It's also a topic that is back on people's minds for obvious reasons, but the Kennedy assassinations.
Do you guys want to, before we get into a discussion of how to think about these things, do you guys each want to state where you fall out on the question of the John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy assassinations?
Okay.
You want to go first, Jeremy, or should I?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, both of those have been brought to attention.
We mentioned RFK Jr., and he's expressed his concerns and skepticism over his father's assassination and also his uncle's.
I know I've spent a lot of time in the early days of the internet researching JFK and have gone back to it a few times over the years, and I just went back to it recently this weekend and found a whole new channel called America's Untold Stories with this Very interesting new channel and it's just so much more information's come out of the research into the Kennedy assassination.
I think it's almost undeniable at this point that Oswald was a CIA asset, had ties to both the FBI and the CIA prior to being set up in Dallas at the Texas School Book Depository Building, which was, of course, owned by the guy who started the Civil Air Patrol,
which got Oswald into the CIA through David Ferry and a number of other individuals who were also connected with Civil Air Patrol, which got Oswald into the CIA through David Ferry and a number of other individuals who were also connected with Civil Air Patrol, like Roscoe White, who went to Atsugi with Oswald and then ended
So the corruption in Dallas Police, the mayor having his, you know, Cabell having his brother being one of the CIA guys that JFK kicked out alongside Allen Dulles, who was later put in charge of the Warren Commission investigation into his assassination. who was later put in charge of the Warren Commission It's pretty clear that they gave the foxes the keys to the hen house and put the murderers in charge of the investigation into who committed the crime.
So that's my position.
So is it fair to summarize your position as Oswald was involved Yes, absolutely.
He was involved.
To what extent, I don't know.
There was more than one shooter.
I don't believe the magic bullet theory.
I think more than multiple shooters are the best explanation for all the bullet holes, the eyewitness reports, multiple suspicious deaths of witnesses, including ones that were supposed to testify in the House Select Committee on Assassinations ten years later when they tried to open a reinvestigation into this
This conspiracy with the CIA and just numerous people ended up whacked before they could testify before that committee.
I think it's just, it's overwhelming when you dig into it now, especially, you know, 50 years, 60 years later where we are now with the amount of research that's been done thanks to the Internet and collaboration of researchers.
Yeah, I definitely think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
I don't think there's any evidence.
There's not a convergence of evidence toward any other one particular person.
You'll often hear something like, well, the CIA was involved.
Yeah, exactly who?
I mean, if there were enough evidence to put somebody into at least a grand jury investigation, would they therefore vote to take it to trial?
And there's never been enough evidence to name anybody else to do even that.
And people have attempted to do this, you know, famously Jim Garrison.
And, you know, the whole Oliver Stone JFK film is based on Garrison's investigation of Ferry and so forth.
And, you know, he and the jury came back like in an hour and said, no, there's nothing here.
This man is free.
And, you know, these has been tried in absentia, as it were.
Yeah.
Clay Shaw, you know, the BBC hosted a sort of a faux trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which Vincent Bogliosi played the prosecuting attorney, the guy that prosecuted Manson.
And Jerry Spence, the famous defense attorney, defended Oswald.
And the, you know, it was not a real trial, of course.
Oswald's dead.
But, you know, as close as they could get, and the jury came back in an hour and said, nope, Oswald is guilty.
He acted alone.
There was no evidence for anybody else.
And so on.
So there's a lot of this that's, so let's just think about this, how to think about The way I think about it is a convergence of evidence to one particular hypothesis being true, and a lack of convergence of evidence to any other hypothesis.
There's lots of anomalies, and this is what we call anomaly hunting.
Any event that's big and massive, it's easy to find lots of anomalies.
9-11, there's just dozens and dozens of just weird things that happened that day.
And the 9-11 truthers, they parade these things out, but there's no convergence of evidence that like, who in the Bush administration would have done this?
How would they have done this?
Exactly how, where did they do this and when?
And you know, and there's just nothing there for that.
And I think it's like that with the JFK thing.
I mean, like a lot of the anomalies, you know, how did Oswald, just one point, like how did Oswald get the, job at the book depository building that just happened to be on the parade route.
Well, Gerald Posner chased that down and showed that he got the job before the parade route had even been determined where he was going to go.
That was just randomness.
And there's a lot of those things that turn out to be random or just lies, like Oliver Stone has his character in the film.
And the Mayor of Dallas.
One last point, and then I'll shut up.
Oliver Stone has his character, I think it was Jack Lemmon's character, say, Oswald shot Maggie's drawers when he was in the Army.
He couldn't hit the side of a barn door.
In fact, Posner tracked down his riflery scores.
He had the second highest score possible.
And if you go to Dealey Plaza, which I've been to twice, you look out the The book depository building.
There's two X's in the road.
The throat shot and the head shot.
They are close.
I mean, they're like right there.
It would be hard to miss, in fact, and he was a good shot.
Anyway, so I'll let that go.
So, do you think that Oswald is the one that shot General Walker?
In April of 63.
Oh yeah, totally.
So why did he miss the shot from 60 feet away?
He's sitting still from 60 feet away.
Walker was in the house.
The bullet was deflected by the window frame, as I understand it.
Yeah, but it seems like such an easy shot.
You had all that time to line it up.
And he was a nut, by the way.
If you look at Oswald's history, he's a nut.
Why would the CIA hire a nut job like Oswald?
Well, they deal with... Wouldn't they hire a professional assassin?
Somebody who knows what they're doing?
Oh, it depends.
Doesn't it depend on what his role was?
If his role was to take the fall, if the idea was lone gun nut is going to be the explanation for what would amount... Let's put it this way, Michael.
One of two things happened in Dealey Plaza.
Either it was An assassination, pure and simple, or it was a coup.
Right?
Well, those aren't two different things.
An assassination can be part of a coup.
Yeah.
Say that again, Jeremy?
Is that false psychotomy, though?
It has to be this thing or the other, one or the other.
I'm not saying that these are two categories that have to be.
I'm saying in this case, given what we know, either the person who committed the murder went on to die shortly thereafter and therefore did not gain any power from doing so, or the Murder of John F. Kennedy resulted in a shift of power in the direction of people who were in some way meant to gain power from the event.
But Johnson, I mean, he's a Democrat, you know, and he's a liberal.
You know, Kennedy wasn't about to de-escalate Vietnam.
His own brother said, no, we weren't about to pull out our, not troops, but, you know, police action, whatever they called it.
That, you know, that wasn't going to happen.
Wow.
The helicopter, there's a question about...
But see, these are just plausible just-so stories for a motivation for the assassination.
But that's not evidence to convict somebody that they actually did that.
They could have done it.
Kennedy said, you know, I want to break the CIA into a thousand pieces, famous quote, after the Bay of Pigs when they lied to him.
He understandably was pissed off.
And, of course, presidents shoot their mouth off, as we know, about all sorts of things.
That doesn't mean... What about all the guys from the CIA who organized the Bay of Pigs, like David Attlee Phillips and Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis?
These guys hated Kennedy, and they were talking about, you know, whacking him down in Florida and New Orleans and stuff the week before.
Think about all the people that hate Trump, but no one assassinated Trump.
Well, they had a plot in Chicago.
What kind of evidence is that, Michael?
That's not evidence.
This is hindsight bias.
Once Kennedy is shot, then you go back in time and go, OK, let's see who hated him.
Well, lots of people hate Trump.
And if somebody assassinated Trump, you go, OK, now we're going to go back and find the people that Really hate him.
Let me just make, since you mentioned the magic bullet, so in my chapter, here's my book, Conspiracy, in the chapter on JFK, I actually have the magic, so here's the magic bullet theory in which Kennedy and Connolly are lined up perfectly and the bullet has to make a right turn, a left turn.
That is not how they were seated.
This is how they were actually seated.
The limousine had a jump seat that was lower and off kilter to where Kennedy was from Connolly.
So they were actually perfectly lined up with the bullet coming from back In the book depository.
Straight through the two of them.
Right through the next shot.
The first shot missed.
The second shot was the next shot.
The third shot was the head shot.
85% of all earwitnesses said three shots.
They heard three shots.
And then here you can see one last point on this.
There's the so-called pristine bullet, which was not pristine.
It was bent.
It was, you know, dented that way.
Now, this is gonna be hard to see and hear, but if you look at Zabruder Film 313, you can find this online, and there's high-resolution versions of it cleaned up, and they show it in super slow motion.
It's a pretty gruesome scene.
But the brain matter goes up and forward, like the shot came from behind, not back and to the left like in the JFK film.
You know, back and to the left, back and to the left.
That isn't what happened.
The brain matter goes forward and up.
Up and forward.
You can see some of it splatter at the impact point where I think the bullet hit for the front of the head, but I see the head go back and to the left after the bullet.
But the initial brain matter goes forward, up and forward.
You can see it in the photo.
It's hard to see in that black and white photo, but if you look at the color version on YouTube, you can see that.
Yeah.
People put arrows to show where the brain matter is going.
I think that there's a whole conspiracy there to change the wounds.
They flew him out of Dallas, which by law, if you die in Dallas, your autopsy has to be performed right in the state, in the county that you die in.
But they specifically moved him to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Where they lose his brain.
Multiple things happen to his corpse.
There's very poor documentation.
All the Parkland hospitals that describe the wounds on JFK, having seen him in the trauma room one, their stories are completely inconsistent with all that evidence.
And then the body that gets to Bethesda, May not actually be JFK's, according to some of these researchers who have found out that J.D.
Tippett, the police officer who Oswald supposedly shot on his way from the school book depository to the theater, J.D.
Tippett was this Dallas police officer who looked just like JFK.
They used to get teased out by the other officers that they used to call him Jack.
And there's a belief that he was used as the body double because the way that he was apparently shot, you know, at point-blank range, right from, in the exact way that JFK's head wounds were.
So if they switched the body, they could have, you know, shown the coronary that, you know, he was shot that way.
Well, there was an eyewitness.
There was an eyewitness that saw Oswald shoot Tippett.
But there was an eyewitness that saw Oswald shoot Tippett.
There's another eyewitness that said there were two people there, and the description of the people that ran away did not match Oswald's description.
Sorry, Brett, go ahead.
So, I want to just point out the weakness in your position, Michael, and it's not that this inherently makes you wrong, but it's something I think you have to acknowledge.
The problem with conspiracy is that it upends Occam's Razor.
When there is a conspiracy, what we have is inherently an attempt to make some set of facts align to point to an explanation that is not true.
That is the nature of a conspiracy.
Right.
And so what you are pointing to, Michael, is a set of facts that admittedly points to an explanation that we've all been told is true and some of us disbelieve.
It's not surprising that you would be able to put together that chain of evidence.
The question is, is that chain of evidence actually more robust than an alternative analysis that looks at all of these pieces and attempts, in other words, Occam's razor is a property of the universe.
It ought to be true when you have all of the evidence.
We never have all of the evidence.
And so what we are left with is a question of what is the correct frame?
What is the sum total of facts that we are actually trying to account for?
And that's the reason that people who, you know, like all of us believe in Occam's razor, but we end up at different conclusions.
The question is, what set of facts did we hold ourselves responsible for reconciling?
And what set of facts did we feel entitled to exclude?
And I think there's something buried in your point about anomalies, because you're absolutely right that in any sort of complex, especially a chaotic environment like an assassination, there are going to be coincidences, anomalies that mean nothing.
Those things are going to exist.
But there is also some threshold, some number of anomalies that is too many to be accounted for by the circumstances.
And so we have to both be good at not leaping to conclusions because we see one or two anomalies, but at the point that there are too many anomalies, failing to jump is an equally severe problem.
Yeah, okay, that's a fair point.
Part of the problem, though, is because if it's a big event, people are very interested in chasing down all those anomalies.
If it was the mayor of Dallas that was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, would we be having this conversation?
Would anybody care?
Would there be any books, movies?
No, no one would care.
All those anomalies would not even appear on the radar because no one would be looking for them.
But, you know, like, so I talk about one of these.
Do you know who Louis Steven Vitt is?
W-I-T-T, Louis Vitt, a.k.a.
the Umbrella Man.
So, out there on the grass, on a clear, sunny day with no forecast of rain, is a guy with an umbrella.
What was this guy doing there?
Oh my god, maybe this umbrella was an actual weapon, and so I actually have a picture of this umbrella that could be used as a gun.
It's a real CIA invention, by the way.
Yeah, it's a real invention.
Yeah, for sure.
So finally, like a decade later, he finally comes out into the clear and actually Earl Morris did a short film for the New York Times on the Umbrella Man and told this whole story.
And his story was that the umbrella was a sign of protest against Kennedy because Kennedy's father, Joseph, was kind of friendly toward the Nazis, was, you know, friendly toward appeasing the Nazis.
And when Neville Chamberlain gets off the plane after meeting with Herr Hitler, who promised he wouldn't take any more territory, and he's got his umbrella and he's got the piece of paper, you know, look, Hitler's sign, he promised.
And so the umbrella became a protest against the Kennedy family for being appeasers and he felt, this Louis Witt, that JFK himself was an appeaser and therefore he was against him and he was out there protesting.
So all of that, none of that would have happened again.
I heard this theory that...
That it was David Morales and that he was there to tell Kennedy that they were going to kill him for not supplying air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and that was the CIA's way of letting Kennedy know.
I know.
I see.
I've heard that one too.
Hold on.
I think the umbrella is the perfect demonstration of both your point, Michael, and my point here.
As far as I know, the umbrella is a red herring in conspiracy land.
It does turn out to have a mundane explanation, although in trying to sort out what may have taken place that day, seeing a person anomalously holding an umbrella, I mean, it is an anomaly.
It's just an anomaly that points to a protest rather than a reaction to the weather.
So it's meaningless.
Now, maybe it's not meaningless, but as far as I know, the most parsimonious explanation for that one is that it's not an important factor, right?
But it is hardly...
Say that again?
Do you know who Abraham Bolden was?
No.
No, go ahead.
So Abraham Bolden was the first black Secret Service security guard and he was in Chicago.
That's right, right.
With basically exposed this whole plot in Chicago that was supposedly happened a week before or shortly before the Dallas assassination that there was a Chicago JFK plot to kill Kennedy and he was jailed and put in and put in prison and prevented from testifying about this.
And it's just one of those, another interesting anomalies, but that's a pretty big one on my radar as far as, you know, was there a plot within, you know, at least somewhere within the government,
the mob mainly, the mob connections between Chicago and the mob mainly, the mob connections between Chicago and Dallas that are talked about in some of the investigations with, you know, Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, who hated the RFK and the Kennedys.
And, you know, these guys wanted the Kennedys out, and they wanted to get back into Cuba because, you know, Castro came in and kicked out all the casinos.
He outlawed gambling there.
It's like losing the city of Las Vegas for them.
They're like, there's tons of money that we're not making anymore.
They were on the side of the CIA and working with a lot of these factors.
And then you get into the oil men that hated Kennedy for the oil depletion allowance.
Harold Byrd and Clint Murchison supposedly had this meeting where they were talking about a bunch of anti-Kennedy people there.
So, there's all these avenues that seems like, oh, this just shouldn't be investigated and looked into, and it's too big of a conspiracy, and now you're involving Ruth Payne, who brought the Oswalds from New Orleans to Dallas and gave them a home.
Supposedly, she was this real nice lady who just wanted to help people, but there's no evidence of her helping anyone but the Oswalds move to Dallas and get jobs there.
And then it turns out her sister worked for the CIA and all these other connections that came out later with Ruth Payne documents came out later that got out of the archives and stuff.
And then there's still like 5,000 documents or something that the government won't release related to the JFK assassination for 70 years later.
So what does that tell you?
Possibly.
On that one, I'm pretty sure I know it's probably something embarrassing that the CIA was up to with some foreign country that is now one of our allies, you know, because they did do a lot of that kind of stuff.
Right.
So it's hard to imagine, though, Mike, it's hard to imagine this many years later, even if this was something embarrassing against an important ally, the people involved are overwhelmingly dead already.
So the point is a mea culpa in which the American public could finally rest easy that no coup took place in 1963 would be worth it.
And yet it doesn't happen.
Well, we're done.
Almost all the documents have been released, like 1%.
Well, sure, but the only way to get those of us who see the number of anomalies as too high to be credibly explained by Oswald acting alone is complete transparency, and if you're like, well, we'll release 98% of the document, it would be the 2% you didn't release that would be the key.
Release them all, I say, release them all.
I'm completely in agreement with you there.
Now, so what we're talking about here, bigger picture, signal detection problem.
There are conspiracies, they do happen.
Foreign leaders have been assassinated.
We just saw We just saw Putin assassinate Prigozhin, very likely.
And it's kind of counter to my, I've been tweeting since the book came out, you know, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or chance.
And then I reversed it.
In the case of Putin, never attribute to chance what can be explained by malice because of his history, right?
So the question is, how many elements would have to come together for the conspiracy to be pulled off?
And so one of the criteria I use present in the book is we don't know for sure.
You're right.
I mean, no one has all the information.
The anomalies do matter.
And the more they pile up, the more interesting the story gets.
But in fact, too many of those anomalies actually points to something probably more mundane, in as much as we know how real conspiracies work It's hard to get people to be at the right place at the right time to be competent to keep their mouth shut.
And to not chicken out, not change their mind, not squeal, not, you know, pillow talk with a lover and say, oh, you know what?
I was there at 9-11.
I was part of it.
Or I know my best friend was, you know, nothing, you know, that kind of thing happens all the time.
Watergate is a classic example.
You know, the leader of the free world can't even have his top G-men pull off a break-in.
I mean, you know, G. Gordon Liddy himself says, you know, these people are just incompetent.
They can't keep their mouths shut.
There's an idea that those guys were set up to put Nixon on the hot plate, too, because they were involved in it.
Because those Watergate burglars, it was Sturgis, it was Howard Hunt, it was guys that were accused of being connected to the JFK assassination.
I know Frank Sturgis has been accused of being one of the three tramps that were arrested in Dealey Plaza.
Yeah.
Oh, they arrested these guys and then never booked them, never took their names, and then just let them go.
Someone went and let them go from the police station and then destroyed all the records of them getting arrested.
But the news photographer took their pictures, so there was that record at least.
And that was pretty curious.
I do find the connections, the apparent connections between the JFK assassination and Watergate to be another anomaly that causes me to worry that something more than Oswald acting alone happened in Dealey Plaza.
But I want to go after this where Nixon was talking about the whole Bay of Pigs thing.
Right.
But I want to drill down on this issue you raise because I hear it all the time, Michael, about the question of how hard it is to get people to stay quiet.
And there are two points that I think need to be made in response.
It is hard but not impossible to get people to stay quiet.
Things like the Manhattan Project reveal that you can have a very large project with very high levels of secrecy.
I don't even think that's the crucial failure in that point.
The crucial failure is it's much easier to get people to stay quiet if you're willing to kill people who don't stay quiet.
Well, Putin does that.
Well, sure, but I guess the point is, logically speaking, analytically, I think, yeah, I think you have to say, yeah, under ordinary circumstances, a large conspiracy would tend to out itself because somebody would talk and it would emerge.
On the other hand, we do have a pattern of conspicuous failure to thrive of witnesses in the JFK assassination case.
that once you have...
A perfect example would be Antonio Vesciana.
If you've ever heard of Antonio Vesciana, he was talking to Bill O'Reilly, and then he got shot at three times.
And then the next time they tried to interview him, he's like, not talking, not going to talk about this at all.
I don't know about that story.
Okay, so here's a counterexample.
So, you know, with WikiLeaks, we have millions of classified documents leaked against the government's wishes.
Nothing in there about JFK, fake moon landing, 9-11, inside job.
You would expect there must be some paper trail of who paid who, what would be leaked out, but there was nothing.
No, I think Jeremy's point from earlier is the salient one, which is that to the extent that you are dealing with competent conspirators, that organizing, you know, the way terrorists use cells in order to keep from being destroyed by a mole,
So that cells are insulated from each other so that one cell doesn't reveal another, that that would be a rational way of compartmentalizing information so that the revelation of one conspiracy didn't reveal all the others.
And, you know, in the case of an assassination, you're dealing with people who are willing to kill.
So are they more willing to kill presidents than they are witnesses?
That doesn't make any sense.
So anyway, I'm not arguing The shooters don't even know they're the shooters or what they're doing.
They're given wrong information and told wrong.
They don't even know who's got the bullets.
Yeah, a lot of times that's true.
They are siloed.
Like the Manhattan Project.
Not very many people knew everything that was going on.
So all I would say, again, my interest here is not in the JFK assassination, it's not in COVID, it's not in UAPs.
It's in grappling with the question of how one rationally deals with a set of circumstances that can be explained by a narrative with which we are presented, and can be explained by collusion that would frame that narrative so that it would be saleable.
In the case, I believe in the case of collusion where killing is one of the allegations, one has to back off their skepticism on the basis that somebody would have talked.
Because if the pattern was that people who talked got offed, and people who realized that they shouldn't talk remained alive, you would get the false appearance that nobody was talking.
Sure, you get an Omer-to-rule, like in the Mafia, certainly.
Okay, two points.
One, as a very pious man dies and goes to heaven, and God says, Son, you've been a very pious man.
I will grant you one wish.
I'll answer any question you want.
And he goes, I want to know who really shot JFK.
And God says, Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone with his Carcano rifle.
And the guy goes, this goes even higher than I thought.
That's a good joke.
I like it.
Serious point.
Here's how I address that issue, Brad, is that I use kind of a Bayesian reasoning approach.
Starting with Cromwell's rule, Oliver Cromwell famously said, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, you might be mistaken.
Never assign a zero or a one to any hypothesis.
Always somewhere between one and 99, say.
So yes, any of these things are possible.
So in terms of conspiracies, the way I think about it is, You know, the more people that would have to be involved, the more elements that would have to come together at just the right time, without incompetence or mistakes or chance or randomness interfering with the whole, how many steps have to, you know, come together at just the right place, the less likely the theory is to be true.
It's not, it could be, it could be everybody kept their mouth shut, it could be all 27 people were at the right place at the right time, you know, they moved the brain, they planted the bullet, They doctored the autopsy, they used the body double, and then they had the Ruth Payne and she got Oswald the job.
At some point though, there's just so many elements, I would say my probability is low.
I think you've got the logic wrong by your own standard.
You tell me if I've got this incorrect.
What you just said, what you just said, the more things that have to come together just so, the less likely it is to be the explanation.
I believe that that forces you to embrace the idea that the moon landing was faked.
Because the number of things that had to come together to put people on the moon is much greater than the number of things that had to come together to make it look like we put people on the moon, right?
I don't know, you'd have to... It's easier for Stanley Kubrick to fake that in the studio, though, for sure.
Totally.
2001 was a good movie.
That was some compelling space stuff.
Collimated light, that's the biggest problem there.
I have a whole chapter in my book on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War.
That was probably the deadliest conspiracy in history.
And it really was a conspiracy.
You know, this group of Serbian nationalists, you know, were not happy about Austrian politics.
and so forth, and Franz Ferdinand's the heir apparent, he's gonna come to Sarajevo for this ceremony, and blah, blah, blah, he's in a convertible, and they plotted to kill him, and they had like seven different guys, and they each had to go to a different house to get the weapon, different weapons, they're gonna position them on the parade route, and none of it went according they're gonna position them on the parade route, and none of it And they still managed to assassinate him, just by chance, you know,
The guy pulls the pin on the hand grenade and he tosses it at just the right time when the convertible car is coming by, but slightly missed, bounce off the trunk of the car that he was supposed to hit, goes under the car behind him, that car explodes and the people are injured.
And the car dashes off and then they go to, he gives a speech in which he kind of upbraids the public for treating him so badly, and then they go back to the hospital to check on the people that were injured, and they go back on the parade route, backwards on the parade route, and then the car makes a wrong turn on this Palisades Road where the assassin was still sitting there,
And the car had no reverse, so the driver puts it in neutral and kind of backs up slowly, and there is Princep, one of the assassins, standing right there with his gun, and there's Franz Ferdinand sitting right there in front of him, bam, bam, dead.
And, you know, totally unexpected, totally random, and I use this as an example, that's how these things usually go.
Not a well-oiled machine, but just, you know, randomness.
Yeah, but what happened in Dallas doesn't look to me like a well-oiled machine.
It looks to me like a story that's very like the one you just told.
The failure of caskets to match, the bullet showing up on the stretcher.
This looks like something where... Look, I don't know what it looks like, but I will say, if it was a conspiracy, And the people conspiring understood how complex what they were trying to pull off was.
They would have had some sort of, how do we take care of loose ends that emerge in the middle of this chaotic event?
How do we take care of things we didn't anticipate?
This is what that would look like, and it would look imperfect, and it would cause people like me, and I think Jeremy, to look at the evidence and say, actually, yes, we see the picture that you see, but if we look at a broader swath of the evidence, what it actually looks like is that that picture is being deliberately created inside a much richer story.
And I would add to that that where you stop analyzing evidence is crucial.
And in the case of the JFK assassination, I think the two most important pieces of evidence are the Lee Harvey Oswald assassination and the Bobby Kennedy assassination.
That if this was a coup in which Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, Then you would have to have those two loose ends tied up because Lee Harry Oswald was in a position to reveal that something larger happened that day.
Yes.
And Bobby Kennedy was in a position to pick up where John F. Kennedy left off.
Well, in the interview, Oswald screams out, I'm just a patsy, right?
So he probably would have talked.
The loose ends that you have to cover up, too, like how did Oswald get from the school book depository building to where he shot J.D. Tippett in that amount of time?
So the time thing is another issue that investigators have struggled with establishing.
And they've had to delay the shooting by 19 minutes to give Oswald enough time to even get there to do the shooting.
And then the whole issue of the evidence that he shot Walker, it comes out eight days after.
Ruth Payne gives a book that was supposedly from Oswald's possession, gives it to the Secret Service.
And inside that, they find the letter that he wrote to Marina, supposedly the night he went to go shoot Walker.
Now, the cops and the FBI had already, you know, been through his entire bookcase and searched it thoroughly, but then this note shows up.
You have things like this that look like planted evidence, literally a chain of the CIA putting these pieces together to give you this one-sided picture of what happened.
And, yeah, you can't use Occam's razor on something like that because you have a powerful agency actively working to fort those efforts every step of the way.
Well, here I'd recommend Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, about Lee Harvey Oswald and his whole history and tracks all those things you just mentioned.
And then the definitive book, what is it, History Restored, I think it is.
This is, shoot, I just had mentioned him before.
Hang on for a second.
I like John Newman's book, Oswald.
Oh, Vincent Bogliossi's book, yeah.
It's 1,600 pages.
He deals with hundreds of these anomalies.
But there's people like you that say, what about this anomaly?
What about this?
There's hundreds of these anomalies when you look closely.
So, Jeremy, you recommended a book, but I didn't hear what it was.
Oh, that's a book called Oswald and the CIA by John Newman.
Mac Wallace is another interesting guy to investigate in the JFK saga.
He was apparently LBJ's assassin.
And a member of Skull and Bones, next to George H.W.
Bush, who was linked to the assassination through George D'Amore and S.H.I.E.L.D.
You know, I'm surprised that Michael's not already, you know, real familiar with a lot of these topics, researching the JFK assassination.
George D'Amore and S.H.I.E.L.D.
was a big name.
He, of course, you know, shot himself in the back of the head before he could finish testifying.
to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and wrote a letter to George H.W.
Bush, had Bush's name in his directory of contacts and wrote a letter to him shortly before he died.
And then it's interesting that Bush gets put in charge of the CIA in 74, just in time for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, that they want to put someone who's outside the agency to clean it up and get to the bottom of this JFK stuff, so they put Bush in charge.
And it turns out, you know, that Bush's...
His oil company was called Zapata Oil, and he ran this oil company that he got from his father.
They had the first offshore oil rigs in the Caribbean Sea, and they were used as staging platforms for the Bay of Pigs operation, which was codenamed Operation Zapata, which is Bush's company.
You know, Bush tied into this group of, you know, CIA anti-Castro Cubans that, you know, hated Kennedy.
And then all these people were in Dallas.
Bush was in Dallas.
Nixon was in Dallas.
And Ford, you know, three future presidents all there at the same time.
And then Ford was, of course, you know, on the—I think he was head of either the House Select Committee or one of these investigations where— Well, Ford was on the Warren Commission.
The Warren Commission, yeah.
He was on the Warren Commission.
So, you know, he's rewarded for, you know, his— And it was called the Warren Commission because of Earl Warren, the Supreme Court justice.
I mean, you think they're all in on this?
I don't think that Warren was specifically— I think that Dulles definitely staged that whole thing and controlled and pulled a lot of the strings so that, you know, Earl Warren was blind to it.
The same way that I think that, you know, other commissions and investigations have been run into some of these official events.
You look at the, yeah, they appoint people in charge who, It may not be the actual ringleaders of a conspiracy, but they're definitely willing to go along with the narrative on a lot of things, often.
So, I don't know.
Earl Warren is definitely a suspect, but the Warren Commission, I definitely think that it was a biased and unproductive investigation as far as identifying potential suspects, other potential suspects.
Man, that's a lot of dot connecting there.
Well, but Michael... CIA, and Bush, and Ford, and on and on.
All of them?
I mean, really?
No, I don't think you heard... The dots on the map... I know, I know.
I don't think you heard Jeremy Grant.
The dots on the map.
I know.
I know.
Too many dots.
Too many dots.
It depends.
It sounds to me, Michael, like you are assuming that the fact of those dots being on the map necessarily leads to the assumption that they were all in on it.
And I don't hear that assumption being made.
I think the point is those things are anomalies.
You know, could it be a coincidence that George H.W.
Bush was in Dallas?
Of course.
Could it be a coincidence in light of the fact that he seems to be the only adult American who doesn't remember where he was?
That's a weird fact.
In his memoirs, he was meeting with a guy named Al Ulmer.
In Barbara Bush's memoir, she admits that that week they were meeting with a guy named Al Ulmer.
And Al Ulmer was actually an expert in coup d'etats.
So why was this closet CIA agent meeting with an expert in coup d'etats the week before he goes to Dallas?
It's just a lot of coincidences.
I mean, coup d'etat, President Johnson, he just extended whatever Kennedy was doing, Civil Rights Acts and so on, all the policies he instituted.
They were just pretty much a continuation, and then after Johnson is Nixon.
I mean, what coup d'etat?
What government do we have?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait Earlier, you cite the fact that Kennedy said he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.
Well, he just was complaining.
They lied to me, those men.
Well, no, no, but you are now extrapolating beyond what we know.
To the extent that what took place after Kennedy's assassination was that nobody broke the CIA into a thousand pieces, it is possible One rational explanation is that the CIA, in an act of self-preservation, assassinated a president and caused that piece of the agenda to change.
That's one possibility.
I'm not saying that story happened.
I'm not saying there's evidence for it.
But I'm saying it is not preposterous that the desired policy change did occur and that we are now witness to it because the CIA still exists.
Right.
But presidents say stuff like this all the time.
RFK Jr. said if he gets elected president, he's going to close all 900 military bases around the world.
No, he's not.
This is not going to happen.
Right.
The military industrial conflict, not going to let this happen.
In the same way that Obama said, you know, if I get elected, I'm going to close Gitmo and we're going to pull the troops out.
And then so here's my concession to a conspiracy theory.
When you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, OK, here's what's actually going on in the world.
Oh, we can't I can't pull the troops out.
No, of course you can't do that.
I can't close Gitmo.
No, you can't close Gitmo.
This is why.
Oh, all right.
But I told everybody I would.
Yeah, don't worry about that.
I mean, I think that's just kind of real politics, right?
It's just kind of the dirty business of how things actually operating.
Of course.
Now, did you guys want to discuss MKUltra?
Did I get that?
Yes.
Have you ever heard of a guy named Dr. William J. Bryan before?
Yes, I must have come across that name in the book on MKUltra.
I don't think I know the name.
Because you mentioned you read the book on MKUltra, but you didn't find the meat and potatoes there.
And I'm surprised because William J. Bryan He was a very interesting guy.
He pioneered a lot of the work on hypnosis.
Brian is allegedly the doctor that programmed Sirhan Sirhan.
In fact, he bragged about being responsible for that at one point in his life, that he had been the MKUltra doctor that had hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan.
to fire at RFK.
RFK must die.
So, this is interesting that the CIA was doing some very risque things with mind control.
And then I guess somehow these overlapping connections, somehow this guy ends up, I don't know if it's William J. Bryan, but one of these guys ends up being the psychologist who gives Jack Ruby but one of these guys ends up being the psychologist who gives Jack Ruby It's an MKUltra doctor.
It's interesting how they have their doctors, they have people in the police department even.
Apparently, according to a lot of the investigations that were done, there was a mole in the Los Angeles police force, this guy Pina.
And Manuel Pina was basically a CIA agent, and he was in charge of the investigation into RFK's murder for the LAPD.
And they're the ones that lost that panel with the extra bullet holes that were in the log by the FBI.
So there's extra bullet holes, extra gunshots.
You got the guy who followed and walked RFK into the kitchen who's testified.
about him, you know, he's come out and he was actually at Sirhan Sirhan's parole hearing, trying to get him freed because he doesn't believe that Sirhan Sirhan fired the shot that actually killed RFK.
He thinks that it was the security guard, a thing, Eugene Caesar, who had followed him into the pantry and that, you know, it was the investigators did a whole investigation of him and they concluded that there was enough evidence to try them.
So hold on, Michael, though.
Again, if there was a conspiracy to kill RFK, then you have to build into that model that it would include enough
Firepower to use the wrong analogy to disrupt a proper investigation which would then result in difficult to explain anomalies like a door frame that appears to contain the evidence that there were more bullets than Sirhan had in his gun That doorframe disappearing mysteriously under the control of the LAPD.
I mean, just think for a moment, how hard is it to lose a doorframe?
I can imagine misfiling it, but I can't imagine, oh my god, the doorframe is gone and it doesn't occur to somebody that there's an extra doorframe leaning up somewhere, right?
It's hard to imagine.
And so you would expect an anomaly like that, because if there is a doorframe, That indicates that there are more bullets than there were.
I believe Sirhan Sirhan's gun contained eight chambers.
If there was a doorframe that suggested more than eight bullets were fired, then that would in and of itself establish that there must be some other shooter that is being sought.
So it would have to disappear, and that would result in a persistent anomaly that 50 plus years later we would still be talking about, right?
So I guess the point is, Michael, I hear you repeatedly saying, but there was an investigation and here's the logical path that that investigation concluded is the most parsimonious explanation for the assassination.
And the allegation that there may have been collusion beyond that assumes an explanation like the one you present and then says, but that if we zoom out and we look at a larger collection of evidence, actually it's not the most parsimonious explanation anymore.
So it's built in.
Maybe.
You know, gentlemen, I mean, again, you're just, it's the hindsight bias and you're just going, okay.
I mean, it's like if Trump got shot, people would be going, okay, all right, who could We better check out Stormy Daniels and Cohen and all the people that that hated him and would have wanted him dead and so on.
But that hasn't happened.
So we don't care about whatever they're doing.
So in hindsight, we look back and go, OK, something's weird.
Something's off here.
Maybe.
And, you know, the proportionality bias, we want.
Big, important people that die to have big, important causes of their death.
You know, the Nazi Holocaust.
The Holocaust.
Worst thing that ever happened.
The Nazis.
Worst political regime in history.
There's a balance there.
You know, Princess Diana.
Cause of death.
You know, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt.
Yeah, but princesses can't die the way, you know, regular people died.
There must have been, you know, the M.K.
or, sorry, the M.I.6 or the, you know, the royal family or the Arabs.
You know, somebody had to be behind this.
Same thing with JFK, RFK, MLK also.
Conspiracy theories about his assassination.
Anybody that's big and important like that.
9-11.
You're telling me 19 guys with box cutters pulled off 9-11?
Impossible.
Had to be operatives inside the Bush administration, and then you go down that rabbit hole.
So wait, let's go to the MLK one, because I think actually it's quite telling.
In the MLK case, you have, again, a mainstream narrative, an investigation that concludes a mainstream narrative, but you also, and I'm going to be quickly out of my depth here, maybe one or the other of you knows the information that I don't, but in a civil trial, It was actually established, not beyond reasonable doubt, but by a preponderance of the evidence, that there was governmental involvement in the assassination of RFK.
I mean, not RFK, MLK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what that tells you, what that tells you is, it tells you where we are in logical space.
That there is a tension between, in this case it's a question of thresholds of evidence.
The evidence gets above the threshold of a preponderance, but not to the level of satisfying an investigation that leans more towards beyond a reasonable doubt.
Right?
Just as we were with OJ.
So, that tells you in logical space that this is a question of thresholds of evidence.
And I would argue that in all of these cases, thresholds of evidence and burdens of proof are really the key things that one has to track in order to analytically be consistent and to follow the evidence where it leads.
Right, so Bayesian reasoning, preponderance of evidence is 50% plus a feather, just above it.
And the reason the criminal court system has a higher standard of evidence is because of Blackwell's ratio, 10 to 1.
Better 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted.
Therefore, we're going to have a much higher standard beyond a reasonable doubt and so on.
And again, if you put one of these people on trial, you know, MLK had hundreds of death threats, I don't know, every year, month or whatever.
I mean, just lots of people wanted him dead.
Even the FBI wrote to him and told him to commit suicide, right?
Yes, exactly.
Right, exactly.
To clarify that term.
To clarify that for the audience, I'm not sure they heard you, Jeremy.
The FBI wrote to MLK and attempted to induce him to kill himself on the basis that he would be embarrassed by evidence they would reveal of his infidelity, I believe, if he did not comply.
I mean, one of the reasons we know so much about MLK's life is because the FBI taped his life.
They taped all his phone calls for years, so we know who said what to when, when they orchestrated this march or that protest.
We know the details, thanks to the FBI.
And yeah, it's astonishing.
So, you know, I'll grant you that.
You know, the COINTELPRO, it wasn't just MLK.
I mean, they infiltrated the Native American civil rights groups and feminist groups and so on.
There are stories about there were more FBI agents at these protest meetings than there were protesters.
And the joke was, you could tell because they had the hippie clothes, but they were wearing wingtips.
Something like that.
I don't know if that's actually true.
But yeah, so of course, they could have done it.
I mean, the FBI could have been involved in the assassination of MLK.
I mean, certainly Hoover hated him and truly believed, apparently, that not just MLK, but most of these civil rights leaders were a real threat to American democracy and peace and stability and so on.
So, okay, but you know, again, the question is what to conclude from these things, but you've raised Cointelpro, you've raised MKUltra.
In the case of MKUltra, I believe there are connections not only to Sirhan Sirhan, but to Ted Kaczynski.
And maybe even, am I right that Manson is also?
Yeah, there's a book, there's a book, I forget the name, I just read it two years ago, so I forget the name, but about the connection between Manson and the MK Ultra program and Ted Kozinski as well.
But it was disappointing at the end, he never got a smoking gun, it's a journalist.
Okay.
He tracked the story for like 30 years.
He thought, I'm really gonna get this, and he really dove deep into it.
At the end, I just couldn't get the smoking gun.
Okay, so no smoking gun.
But at the very least, it is conspicuous that you have three notorious murderers who appear to have a connection to a CIA program of mind control involving hallucinogens.
Yeah, well, one of the curious things is how Manson got his followers to actually commit the murders.
He wasn't even there.
And so the theory is that he used mind control techniques and drugs, you know, and sex and power and so on, to get these women and Tex Watson to commit the murders.
That's the theory.
Not implausible.
I mean, you know, it is weird he was able to do that.
But cult leaders are able to get followers to do all kinds of crazy things.
Okay.
You know, witness Jonestown or the Heaven's Gate or any of these people.
How about, again, my point here isn't about Manson or Kaczynski or Sirhan Sirhan or JFK, MLK.
How about Mark David Chapman?
It's about how Mark David Chapman shoots John Lennon and then starts reading The Catcher in the Rye.
Just, you know, there's no logic to it.
Almost like he's participating in the construction of a narrative.
But let's put it this way.
I think one of the things that is very frustrating if one tries to be analytically consistent and rigorous in this space is that we get dismissed on the basis that that is a conspiracy theory and therefore it is wrong.
MKULTRA is a conspiracy, obviously involving a CIA which wishes to use mind control.
Does it end at the point that the program is revealed and formally put to bed?
I don't know, but... No, unfortunately in that case, most of the records were destroyed.
Oh, what a shame.
This came out in the Frank Olson case.
You know, Frank Olson was the CIA operative who killed himself or was pushed or something weird in a New York high-rise after he was dosed with LSD, and the government under the Ford administration paid the family, I think, $750,000 to just basically, let's say, go away and let's put an end to the story.
Yeah, it's weird.
So can't we agree that the You know, the folks who do not deserve a place in the conversation are the people who reflexively dismiss something because it is a so-called conspiracy theory.
Oh, for sure.
One of the things I try to do in my book is to get rid of that pejorative.
To call something a conspiracy theory means it's bullshit.
No, there are conspiracies.
All over the place, all the time, they happen, and everybody knows that.
So having a theory that one of them might be going on is completely legitimate.
Of course.
Not only that, but we know there is debate over the meaning of The memo, but the CIA introduces this term as a mechanism for getting rid of hypotheses about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
That's true.
Yes.
And so the fact that it became a pejorative isn't even organic in itself.
So, so anyway, look, I think this is being this is super productive.
We've gotten to a place Where we recognize that in all of these cases so far there is at least something to be rationally discussed.
There is no side that is so preposterous that it is dismissible out of hand.
In each case there is a frustrating lack of a clear evidentiary boundary that tells us one way or the other which What is most parsimonious.
And that rational people can have such a discussion and can reach different conclusions.
That's big progress as far as I'm concerned.
Ditto.
I think so too.
So the question then becomes how can we drill down and get an answer?
Maybe we can't always get an answer.
That's certainly always on the table.
But like to your previous point about vaccines, you know, somebody surely knows the answer to this question.
Okay, let's talk to that person.
And so if we can't talk about it, then where are we?
Nowhere.
We have to talk about it.
Agreed.
So I wonder if we ought not push our luck and go even farther in the direction of ideas that are not discussed in polite company.
Uh-oh.
I'm pretty much not cancelable, so go ahead.
Are we going to get cancelled?
There are certain topics I feel like if we bring them up we might get shut down or cancelled.
I am pre-cancelled.
I am pre-cancelled.
Pre-cancelled?
It's a pre-cancelling!
I have been cancelled and resurrected.
So anyway, I think we are beyond cancellation.
Well, I wondered if we might not talk a little bit, you raised it several times already, Michael, about the 9/11 question.
Yeah.
And how one is to think about it.
I admit that I find this a frustrating topic.
Because again, I see a pattern of anomalies that refuse to dissipate on inspection.
I know that some anomalies should be expected.
I think the number of anomalies is too high, which doesn't tell me anything about what did or didn't take place.
But why is it high?
It's because this is the biggest thing that's happened since the JFK assassination in our country.
That's why.
Everybody is examining every little minute detail.
To me, it's a distraction.
The theory that it was an inside job by the Bush administration is a distraction from the real conspiracy theories.
Like, who funded the Saudi operatives?
Why do we have this relationship with the Saudi government?
And, you know, how is it that those family members were able to leave the country the next day?
You know, those are the kinds of things that if there's an inside anything, it's But some of the anomalies aren't little things that got unearthed because people are looking very carefully at every detail.
Like what?
Well, you know, it's a cliché at this point, but the way Building 7 falls, That doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, it does.
I think so.
And you know who also knows?
The insurance companies that had to pay off.
They investigated this.
If they could have shown something behind it all, they wouldn't have had to pay.
No, again, I think you have to.
The insurance companies that insured the buildings and the tenants on 9-11, do you know who that was?
It was AIG.
So AIG was convicted in 2008 of running reinsurance scams, where they basically were reselling the bad insurance policies so that other insurance companies would take the hit.
So, they never investigated what happened on 9-11 with the insurance and the World Trade Center, but the insurance companies that actually held those policies didn't pay out.
Someone else took the hit, and they were never investigated for that.
So, that right there is a huge red flag.
You know who Cornelius Vanderstar was?
He's the guy that founded AIG.
There's a whole book about them called The Secret Insurance Men, and how the CIA used AIG to know what factories to bomb, to know where the money was flowing in a lot of these countries.
It was a great source of intelligence, the insurance.
Here's a picture from my book of a piece of American Airlines flight that hit the Pentagon.
Yeah.
So we know that the planes hit the Pentagon.
We see the videos, unless the videos are supposedly fake, but here's a piece in color.
You can see it's the American Airlines logo.
Oh yeah, I've seen the picture.
Right there on the lawn in the Pentagon.
So how did the planes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center buildings?
Who made that happen, if it wasn't the hijackers?
And how did they do that?
Where's the passengers?
There was a drill for a plane hitting the Pentagon called MASCAL, the Mass Casualty Drill.
It was an exercise for a plane hitting the Pentagon.
And the person in charge of that for the Pentagon was a guy named Charles Burlingame, who ended up being the pilot on Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon that day.
Now, that flight, there should have been, I think, like 300 passengers, 400 passengers that fit.
There were only 180 passengers on the flight and only 200 people in that wing of the Pentagon that were killed, because the wing of the Pentagon that they struck had recently been refurbished and had undergone a $258 million contract.
in that specific wing of the Pentagon.
So, a lot of the offices were moved out, and surprisingly, none of the workers were there when the attack happened.
So, none of the AMEC employees actually died in the Pentagon attack.
But there are a lot of interesting anomalies there.
For example, the people that did die in the Pentagon, the offices that were left in that area and not moved out, were a lot of Pentagon accounting offices and financial accounting offices.
And people have like, you know, drawn suspicion about, you know, Rumsfeld the day before saying that there was missing trillions and that, you know, the people who were tracking that money down got targeted the next day.
Whereas terrorists would likely have targeted the north wing of the Pentagon where the command center is and not, you know, the recently refurbished wing.
So that was it.
That's an interesting anomaly right there.
Okay, this is all interesting.
Let me ask you some just easy, big questions.
So we saw the planes hit the World Trade Center buildings, and we saw the exact floors that they hit at an angle, and that the buildings collapsed from that point down.
How would the inside job operators know ahead of time which floors exactly to plant the explosive devices, because that's where the planes are going to hit?
Well, actually, the first plane on 9-11 crashed into the 93rd floor of the North Tower, which is right where L. Paul Bremer's offices were.
Now, Paul Bremer was the head of Marsh & McLennan Companies, right?
And he was also the director of counterterrorism for Harvard.
I don't care who's on the floor.
How did they know to hit floor 93, and how could they even aim it that perfect, at an angle?
Well, if you're on the floor... It's not obvious to me that... Sorry, if I put it... It's not obvious to me... Sorry, go ahead.
Go ahead, Jeremy.
Well, I'm just saying that... Sorry, there's a delay on your thing, Jeremy.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Well, he said he's not concerned with, you know, who worked in that zone, but he wants to know who could have done this.
Well, you should be concerned with who worked in those buildings and the security in those buildings and who managed the security in those buildings.
Have you ever investigated that?
You seem curious about it.
Well, okay, so here's my point.
Because I've seen your video.
The planes hit those buildings.
How, how would, oh, you see my, uh, The Truthers, where they all signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Okay, this was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but, but the larger question would be, you could see the buildings collapsing.
If they planted explosive devices in there, how would they know exactly which floors to put the, the explosive devices before the planes, you know, days, weeks before the planes even took off?
So it's not obvious to me that that's a question that needs an answer.
Yeah, it is the question that needs an answer.
So there may be an answer.
It's not obvious to me that you need one because I know the answer.
Look, I'm not, I'm no expert in demolition, but You could imagine that there were explosives on all the floors, and that the triggering was arranged after the empirical fact of the airplane.
But I do want Jeremy to answer that question, but I also want to point out, I said it didn't make sense to me Hold on, we're going to come back to that.
But I said it didn't make sense to me how Building 7 fell, and you said, of course it made sense, and then immediately changed the subject.
Oh, sorry.
So anyway, I want Jeremy to answer your question, and then I want to come back to my question.
Okay.
Okay, Jeremy.
So, you remember in 1993 there was a bombing of the World Trade Center?
And the FBI investigated that.
Well, they had to make some repairs to that bombed-out section of the parking garage and that whole corner of the building where it had all the stuff taken out.
Now, the company that was hired to do that was a company called Tridata Corporation.
Now, Tridata Corporation is a subsidiary of another company called Systems Planning Corporation International, which was run by the third in control of the Pentagon that day, a guy named Dov Zakheim.
And Tridata Corporation would have been given in 1993 access to all the World Trade Center's blueprints and all the engineering diagrams to be able to conduct those repairs to the damaged leg of the World Trade Center that was damaged during the 93 bombing.
So, presumably, they would have had access to all of that through their connections, because they're the ones who did the investigation of that and the engineering repairs to the World Trade Center.
And it's also interesting that that company, Systems Planning Corporation International, they developed this AWACS flight termination control technology, which was able to It's able to do autopilot, GPS augmented autopilot commands for aircraft.
It's an early autopilot controller, but they could basically install this on the planes and fly them completely through remote command, remote automation, or a pre-programmed series of waypoints.
So what happened to the pilots and all the passengers?
Well, it's, if you can't control the plane, how are you going to eat?
And you can't make cell phone calls.
I don't know.
They did make cell phone calls.
We, the family members got cell phone calls from them.
Yeah, those cell phone calls were interesting.
Who made those calls if they couldn't make those?
You think they're fake?
They had voice records.
Well, I've got to tell you, Michael, that those cell phone calls have never made much sense to me.
But family members talked to their loved ones just before they died.
Who were they talking to?
Aren't we right back where we were with UAPs, where none of us here are convinced by things that are easily accounted for by readily available I haven't said anything about the Bush administration.
All I have said is that the phone calls don't make sense to me.
- Did they make fake phone calls? - I don't think, no.
First of all, I haven't said anything about the Bush administration.
All I have said is that the phone calls don't make sense to me.
The making of phone calls in 2001 from a plane, calls that did not frustratingly drop almost instantly, does not add up.
- Well, that's the theory, but that's been tested and they can make those.
They could have made some of those calls.
In any case, who were the family members talking to?
Are these just fake voices?
No, no, but see, I was much happier with this conversation a few minutes ago because, Michael, you are now trying to get me or Jeremy to answer questions rather than to recognize that there is a pattern of evidence that doesn't completely add up.
Well, but these are important questions.
No, they're not.
They're not important.
They're not important questions.
I mean, a family member talks to her husband and he's, you know, we're hijacked and we're going to die.
Oh my God, I love you.
And then boom, gone.
No, Michael.
Okay, who was she talking to?
I'm not telling you.
My position is I don't know what happened on 9-11.
Okay.
I don't know if it was a conspiracy or not.
However, I do know that the numbers of things that I can see that don't add up is too large to be easily dismissed.
And so, I am not capable of answering these questions because I don't have privileged information about what took place.
But, I will tell you this.
If there was some sort of a conspiracy to create the impression of The mainstream narrative on 9-11, then the idea that a component of it involving person X that I don't know, talking to person Y that I don't know, in some way I don't understand, is not outside of the scale.
If we're talking about buildings that behave in ways that don't make sense, then the idea of phone calls that don't quite add up is small potatoes.
You know, Osama Bin Laden said he did it.
He's proud of it.
He said he'd try again, and he did.
Again, you're trying to get me to answer questions when my point is the number of anomalies here is high.
But again, you're trying to get me to answer questions when my point is the number of anomalies here is high.
Okay, I have a quick question for Jeremy.
Back to the blueprints.
Back to the blueprints.
So are you suggesting that operatives broke into through the drywall and got into where the support beams are in the two World Trade Center buildings, and no one noticed them doing this?
So are you suggesting that operatives broke into through the drywall and got into where the support beams are in the two World Trade Center buildings, and no one noticed them doing this?
Elevator shafts.
Elevator shafts.
Lots of people noticed.
Lots of people noticed.
Scott Forbes reported power downs.
William Rodriguez, the head janitor, reported workers in the building making loud noises in the elevator shafts.
There was an ACE elevator renovation of the elevator shafts that took place before 9-11.
It was reported in Elevator Weekly magazine, I believe.
I have the article somewhere I could send it to you.
There's a magazine called Elevator Weekly?
I'm a lifelong subscriber to Elevator Weekly.
Just out of curiosity, if there wasn't Al-Qaeda, who do you think was behind it?
Well, the first pronouncement of the official story, as you know, we're saying, you know, where did the official story first come from?
So, the first person to tell us that it was Osama bin Laden on television that day was a guy named Paul Bremer on MSNBC that morning.
Now, Paul missed work.
He showed up late on a flight and wasn't able to get to work in the World Trade Center, where I mentioned he worked on the 93rd floor, was his office right where the first plane struck on 9-11.
Paul Bremer went on to become the Iraq occupation governor, so he basically led the whole invasion of Iraq.
He was never investigated for any ties to terrorism.
Of course, he lost a lot of co-workers in that building.
Noam Chomsky got very defensive when I accused him of being a potential conspirator, if there was one.
But he draws a lot of red flags for me because he's connected.
Yeah, I had asked Noam Chomsky about this, because Noam's a big disbeliever in 9-11 stuff, so I asked him, you know, and his response was, well, who did it?
Who's responsible then?
Who on the inside, you know, could have done it?
And when I said Bremer, he said, oh, that's the most ridiculous thing.
It would have been the worst decision he could have ever made in his entire career.
How could you possibly think that, you know, he could have been involved and whatnot?
But it's interesting that Bremer's involved in It goes back to this continuity of government group that Cheney and Rumsfeld were both involved in, and this continuity of government group's job was to basically sit in these think tanks with all the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all the military advisors and dream up 9-11.
Their job was to dream up doomsday scenarios, like what's the worst possible thing that could happen to the U.S.?
Multiple bombs going off, what?
And then how's the U.S.
going to react?
And that was their job for several decades.
There was an Atlantic article all about this, the Continuity of Government program.
So, if you think about who would have had the intelligence access within the inside to think this through and plan this out and see, well, how is the government going to react to every single step of this anomalous tragedy that's unfolding?
Those would have been the guys who would have had access to that.
Through the continuity of government program and in Bremmer's, you know proximity to that group, you know again He was a young staffer in the Ford and Nixon administrations alongside Cheney, you know comes from that, you know deep state background And then, you know some reason winds up working for Marsha MacLennan at the in the World Trade Center is right before 9-11 also working for this Harvard counterterrorism group and
You know, so he's involved in, you know, terrorism, counterterrorism kind of activities, simultaneous to his position there.
And it falls into place kind of interesting because, you know, he's there at March McLennan, CEO, and he's there next to a guy named Jeffrey Greenberg, whose father is Maurice Greenberg of AIG, who I mentioned before as being, you know, the sort of secret insurance men who were seven years after 9-11 were convicted of running reinsurance scams where they basically resold all the policies they knew were going to fail to other insurance companies.
so that they would take the hit on purpose.
So you have this sort of nexus of very interesting people.
And it turns out, if you read on Rumsfeld's resume, he worked in buildings.
He worked for both of Cheney and Rumsfeld prior to joining the Bush administration, worked for Solomon Smith Barney on the Foreign Policy Advisory Board.
SSB, Solomon Smith Barney Bank, was World Trade Center 7's top tenant.
They occupied about 85% of that building, which is just an interesting anomaly.
When Rumsfeld was asked if he'd ever heard of Building 7, he said, I'd never heard of it.
I was too busy with the Pentagon.
But it turns out that he probably held meetings inside that building prior to 9-11 through his work on the Foreign Policy Advisory Board.
And those are interesting connections that, of course, World Trade Center 7's not even mentioned in the 9-11 Commission Report.
They didn't investigate it at all.
I can't do it.
I've forgotten.
But there's a long list of interesting things that were in Building 7.
Right.
The Achievement Exchange Commission was the most interesting one.
Apparently, the Enron investigation was being run out of Building 7 into the whole Enron scandal.
The whole Enron had run, of course, finance Bush's run to the White House in early 2000, and were later investigated.
Ken Lay was indicted, and I think, I don't know, the whole bunch of stuff ended up going down with Enron, but they never got to the full bottom of the whole thing, and their ties to the Bush administration, and I think all that was kind of snuffed.
What do you mean?
Those guys were convicted, sent to prison.
What do you mean there was no follow-up on that?
I don't know.
I think that there was much deeper ties with what was going on with Enron and how they managed Bush's run to the White House and all that in the years before.
Let me make a few general comments.
Hold on.
Am I correct that the CIA had a piece of Building 7 in which the desk responsible for Investigating Osama bin Laden was housed?
No, I've never heard that.
I've heard that they had the Securities and Exchange Commission were in that office.
They had the El Dorado Task Force office in Building 6, which was an interagency money laundering watchdog group that reported that their vaults were actually broken into and raided before the towers came down, like early that morning.
So there's this interesting anomaly there that maybe that money laundering watchdog group was targeted.
I've also heard of a guy named Richard Andrew Grove, who was working for a company called SilverStream International in the World Trade Center, and found evidence of some of this Fortune 500 accounting software having, you know, faulty faulty drive file in it.
He talks about it in some of his interviews and stuff.
But he was told to bring all his evidence of this to a meeting on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9-11.
And fortunately, he was late.
But it's just he thinks that basically the people who were responsible for this, that he had stumbled across some kind of accounting thing in their software.
And when they had tried to basically get him to bring all his evidence to this meeting where he would have met his fate.
Interesting anomalies with that kind of stuff.
Then the security companies. - Nice.
Okay, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Michael wanted to make a comment.
And I'm going to have to run here in a few minutes.
Let me just make a few general comments about this.
So, you know, in 9-11, truth or circles, there's two things called my hop and lie hop.
My hop is made it happen on purpose.
Lie hop is let it happen on purpose.
The debate is did Bush know it was going to happen and let it happen because this, you know, for whatever his motive, or did he actually make it happen on purpose?
Okay.
So I coined a new term called cowhop, capitalized on what happened on purpose.
And my analogy with Pearl Harbor, for example, sometimes 9-11 is called the new Pearl Harbor, is there were conspiracy theories after Pearl Harbor that Roosevelt either knew it was going to happen and let it happen, or he actually orchestrated some of it and made it happen on purpose.
But in fact, the way politicians really work is they capitalize on what happened.
So, you know, Roosevelt famously wanted to get the United States into the war.
Churchill was begging him to get involved.
in the war, and he just couldn't.
He couldn't get the support of Congress.
The American First movement was very strong.
The general public was not behind it after the tobacco of World War I and our involvement there.
So, but once Pearl Harbor happened, then everybody was behind it.
So he capitalized on what happened on purpose.
And there's memos, you know, like the famous August 9th, 2001 memo from Condoleezza Rice, you know, Osama bin Laden to attack United States How could the Bush administration not respond to that just a month before?
In fact, there were thousands of pieces of intel that, you know, Al-Qaeda was doing this, they were doing that, attacking our bases here, they're gonna do, you know, attack over there, they're gonna do a bombing, suicide.
Same thing with Pearl Harbor, you know, Roosevelt had thousands of pieces of intel about the Japanese are gonna do this, the Japanese are gonna do that.
There was so much intel, they couldn't sort through what to make of it all.
After the fact, you go back and go, oh, look, there's that piece of intel right there on Roosevelt's desk that they were going to attack in Hawaii.
It was Hawaii.
He knew it was going to happen.
No.
In hindsight, yes.
So Bush, famously W, wanted to finish the job of his father in Iraq.
So, you know, obviously there was no reason to do that until 9-11, and then it's like, ah, now's my chance.
So then all this stuff you have about, you know, the whole Bush administration, that then falls into place on the capitalized on what happened.
Hey, good, you know, Halliburton and Cheney.
And Rumsfeld and the whole gang, of course, yes, they did capitalize on what happened.
They profited from it.
It was a needless war.
And all of that is true without having the conspiracy in the first place.
It's a different kind of conspiracy.
Sure, sure, sure.
Look, I think it's unquestionable that they capitalized.
Yeah.
Whether there is anything beyond that.
But it sounds to me like you've got to go, and I do not want to let the Building 7 question go, because it's the one I cannot see past.
Okay, I'll just give you a few, and I'll address a few more of these anomalies.
I've got a few minutes.
I have to take my dog to the vet.
Well, so first of all, Building 7 burned all day.
And so it was, usually the pictures you see are of the back side, where it doesn't look like there's much damage.
On the other side, you know, it was totally destroyed from all the debris that hit it and burned all day and so on.
And the fire crews were there, they were monitoring it, watching it.
And finally they said, pull it, you know, the head of the, owner of the building, pull it.
He just meant pull the fire team out of there before it collapses, then it collapses.
Anyway, I never thought that was so unusual.
But let me just hit a few more of these other anomalies.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, no, no, no.
You did not address my point.
I didn't say I don't know why it fell down.
I said I can't explain why it fell down the way that it did.
It looks to... Look, if you Google on YouTube... Let's make this simple.
If you Google on YouTube, you know, demolished buildings and the way that they look like they fall.
That's what it does.
Neither the World Trade Center buildings nor Building 7, particularly the World Trade Center buildings, you know, they don't look like a standard control demolition.
It doesn't mean that it doesn't look like a conceivable one, but it doesn't look like a standard control demolition at all.
Building 7 is different.
And here's the thought experiment I would put to you.
The reason that this particular piece of the puzzle will not let me go is that if I grant you, hey, it burned all day, it burned way hotter than we know.
Maybe there was something stored in it that caused it to burn in a way that would actually bring down a steel frame building like that, and nobody has admitted that it was stored there.
Let's grant all that.
The way it falls is something gives way first and it partially falls or it slumps over or it twists or something like that.
It doesn't just suddenly descend in the way that it's captured on video from multiple angles do it.
Right?
That, to me, is the problem.
That even if I say I can accept that it fell as a result of the unusual amount of damage that happened that day, and the amount of fire that was unknown, and fires burning at a temperature that doesn't make sense to me, but has some rational explanation that isn't the result of collusion, I still cannot, in my mind, get to the point where it falls in the pristine way that I watch it fall in those videos.
Okay, I don't want to read to you four pages from my book, but, you know, we consulted a guy named Blanchard who runs a company called ProTech, Brent Blanchard, and his company is called ProTech Documentation Services, a company that documents the work of building demolition contractors.
Anyway, so he destroys buildings for a living, right?
So he gave us all the, here's the claims of the truthers, here's his explanation for it.
For building, World Trade Center Building 7, yeah, he talks about it burning all day and so on.
What about the That it was intentionally pulled down by explosives.
The building owner himself was quoted as saying he decided to pull it.
This guy's answer to that is, building owners do not have the authority over emergency personnel at a disaster scene.
Demolition experts have never heard pull it used to refer to an explosive demolition.
Demolition explosive experts anticipated the collapse of World Trade Center 7 and they also witnessed it from a few hundred feet away.
No one heard any detonations.
I think that's a lie, because there are videos of demolition experts using the term, pull it.
Also, it seems more likely to me he would have said the term, pull them, rather than pull it, if you're referring to the fire team.
The team of people in there.
It's just kind of confusing, yeah.
I don't think that Larry had the authority to make that call, and the fact that he would say that is sort of out of place, and an anomaly in and of itself.
Regardless of that, it's outside the scope of evidence that maybe something did in fact happen, because I remember your article for Scientific American, you wrote, there was no melted steel, and you repeat that claim in very big letters, very many times on there.
There were a number of FEMA firefighters, a number of people, even the architect for the World Trade Center, Leslie Robertson, who visited the site very early on, saying that there were streams of liquid metal trickling like you were in a foundry.
Very descriptive words and terminology, which imply that steel was melted.
Then you have things like Appendix C of the FEMA report, where you have a Firewise science professor, Dr. Jonathan Barnett, who did the only known study that was done of metallurgical analysis of any steel from the towers.
Directly in that report, he says that they found chemical sulfide eutectics, which basically is something you add to steel which lowers the melting point of the steel.
Also, they found evidence that looks like corrosion and melting of the steel, and he recommended further investigation to find out what caused that.
A couple of skeptics like Dr. Greenier have suggested that the gypsum drywall caused the sulfidation of the steel that created that sulfide eutectic.
We performed some experiments where we burned all kinds of stuff on some I-beams with a bunch of gypsum board and tried to get the gypsum to infuse and produce these same kind of eutectics.
We were not able to do that in any of our experiments.
So, it's just, it seems like there's a lot of scientific obfuscation on the behalf of, you know, forensic investigators who kept a lot of people out of the site, limited access to the site.
You know, Kurt Sonnenfeld, the FEMA photographer, testifying that they took most of his photographs and wouldn't allow any of this stuff to be published, and that the photographs contain almost certain evidence that explosives were used.
to bring down the towers.
So you have like this chain of evidence which has been almost destroyed and then polluted after the fact with people saying, oh, just things that aren't true, that pull it's not a demolition term.
It most certainly is, I assure you this. - Well, I could go on about World Trade Center Building 7 At 47 stories high and built of red granite masonry, WT7 differed significantly from World Trade Center Buildings 1 and 2.
When those two buildings collapsed, their falling debris caused significant damage to the World Trade Center Building 7, which included extensive fires that burned all day.
Right, but Michael.
Yeah, yeah.
I want some clarity on this.
You're an educated man.
The Madrid Tower that burned all day.
You're an educated man.
I'm not asking you to be an expert in something you're not expert in.
If you run the experiment in your mind, if you cause fires inside of Building 7 to burn all day in a way that structurally compromises it so that it ends up collapsing, are you telling me that the collapse you envision looks like the one you saw in those videos are you telling me that the collapse you envision looks like the one you saw in Like every pillar was cut at the same moment.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is what all the demolition experts say.
In fact, the NIST report refused to discuss how it fell.
It stopped its analysis at exactly the moment it begins to fall.
You know, again, the insurance companies, they are motivated to find something I mean, there's the stuff about the put trades in stocks in the airlines.
There was stuff about the cell phone call.
I mean, I just have pages and pages on this, on the cell phone calls and so on.
I mean, these are all anomalies with explanations.
No, I want to get this before we have to end this conversation.
One thing that is true is there is a lot of collusion in the world that we discover later on that becomes incontrovertible.
And then there's the question of before these stories are understood, how we are to think about the evidence.
And one thing that is always true, Michael, is that There is always an explanation for each piece of evidence.
Some of those explanations sound robust, some of them sound incredibly feeble, but the fact that there's an answer for every question doesn't mean anything because of course there would have to be.
Right.
The answer to the question of were there more weapons than one at the Bobby Kennedy assassination at the Ambassador Hotel is there was only one weapon.
Well, if there was only one weapon, why were there more bullet holes than that weapon could hold?
Well, we don't know that because somebody lost a doorframe.
That's the answer to the question.
How did Sirhan Sirhan's gun get behind and from the back, you know, to fire that fatal shot, you know, that killed RFK?
Well, the people that were standing there, including Rafer Johnson, said he did it.
You know, they saw him pull the gun and shoot him.
There's no question that he shot at...
This has been fun, but I really, I gotta, I gotta go.
We could go on for hours more.
We can do part two.
I'd be excited for that.
for that.
There are podcasters who do part two.
Some things to research there.
I hopefully, you know, it's an, it's an endless rabbit hole to go down.
Uh, you know, My book covers dozens of conspiracy theories, any one of which you could spend a lifetime doing nothing but that, like JFK.
Alright, well, I think that this was terrifically productive, even if it doesn't end with us having resolved all of these questions.
I think they can't be ultimately resolved.
Well, I hope they one day can.
For one thing, many of us need to live in a world in which we know how to think about these things.
But anyway, thank you both for joining me.
Michael, do you want to show your book and tell people?
Oh, well, the book is, yeah, sure, Conspiracy.
There it is.
And you can actually connect the dots and not only spell conspiracy, you can spell CIA and Soros.
So it's all there.
You have connected the dots for us.
Thank you, and Jeremy, where can people find you?
My channel is The Alien Scientist on YouTube.
I also have altpropulsion.com and alienscientist.com.
I don't keep up with that website as much, but feel free to reach out to me, and I'm always available for debates, live chats, or discussions and stuff like that.
I enjoy discussing all these topics and researching them, learning new facts.
Wonderful.
All right.
Well, may skepticism and parsimony be with you both.
