The JFK Assassination Part 2 with Mackenzie Joy Brennan

He's like, "Well, good night, Mr. X. That was a great game I connect for." Welcome to your rung about the podcast where we discussed the one conspiracy theory to rule them all and in the darkness by them. Did I make that joke last time? I don't know. Maybe I did. It's still good. I don't think you went that far. With it. I think you mentioned that this is the mother of all conspiracies, but I don't think you one-ringed it. Yeah, we're committing now, especially after what we learned last time. And with me is Mackenzie Joy Brennan. I suppose last time we learned about the details of the Kennedy assassination to start with a foundation of truth or what we were able to figure out at the time given the forensics that people were able to conduct, which seemed to have been oddly minimal for reasons that we got into some of the very Kennedy type reasons. Yeah. And now we're going to talk about, I guess, what grew in that vacuum where people didn't have as much detail as they expected they should have or where there was, I don't know, where people had to fill in the kind of bigger questions of how could such a thing happen? Yeah. I'm excited for us to get to the end and talk about why we think people were so eager to jump to different conclusions. One thing that occurred to me since the last time we talked is, you know, in regular criminal investigations, while people's interest is developing, there's a holdback of all the details from the investigation, either to protect the case or to ensure that the case is solved without outside interference. And this, because of the public interest, was so the opposite. And the interest stayed sustained even after the Warren Commission, because there was no verdict or anything that put a bow on it. And so I'm wondering how much that, like, combined release of information from early on and no resolution impacted the way that people processed it. And then I guess we have the fact that like, we have a perpetrator who also was shot and killed very shortly after. And we kind of ended that story. But yeah, I feel like again, there's something, there's like a lot at play here, but one of the things seems to be the, the lack of detail in crucial places and people needing to fill that in, is a guess I have. Yes, I think that both the lack of detail and the amount of detail about maybe avenues that were closed or not pursued, you know, the government agent rumor comes to mind that like a combination of unfilled information and two-filled information. Right. And also the people feeling that the government was hiding things from them. Yes. Which it obviously was. Right. Just, you know, maybe not these exact things. And it really goes to show you how damaging it is for a government to be withholding and up to these nefarious dealings, because then nobody believes you. And to be really, really sneaky, which is the FBI and the CIA again, absolutely were like doing some quite evil things during this exact time period. The agencies really were, were at their zenith. Well, no, not zenith, because evil zenith. I think right now we're giving them a run for their money. But I will preface this whole episode with the whole don't blame on conspiracy. What could be due to incompetence idea, which is often true, especially of the federal government. So I figured since we got through the Warren report last time, we'll get to a tiny list, a primer list of some of the rumors that were already circulating as that report came out. And that's especially funny because in that life magazine deep dive that Gerald Ford wrote, having been on the commission and recapping all the results, he says that the report lays to rest to the lurid rumors and speculation that had spread after the assassination. Ah, Jerry. It's like, oh, you and me both, pal. We're like, now that we have facts, everyone can move on. And it's like, hmm, no, yeah, like we had not seen anything yet at that point. But I found some bits compelling. I don't even think it's worth spending too much time on this list of rumors because they deepened with time. Yeah. So the first nature of rumor I'll say is like eyewitness based confusion. So I think anything that maybe came out in those initial reports and left some information out of initial reports totally understandably. But then ended up with some different conclusion than people wanted. In the Warren report, there was some tension that happened there. So one of the witnesses is HL Brennan, no relation. And he saw Lee Harvey Oswald stick a rifle out of the window at the depository on the sixth floor where he was supposed to be. But there's some question about whether he could have seen him where he was at the time that he was there. Well, you do have the issue. I imagine that like there is this phenomenon, which I'm sure you've I imagine noticed with this story where people want to get close to a tragedy to kind of establish a relationship to it. And well, sometimes I think truly through no fault of our own generally exaggerate our proximity to something or how much we might have seen. Just because it feels like a way of expressing how much we were affected by it, you know, or that we want to be more helpful than we can necessarily be, which is like a very pro-social or general. So like a lot of people give like very accurate accounts like down to surprising detail of what they've seen. But the fact that we struggle with it doesn't mean that we're being untruthful on purpose. Yeah. And I mean, that certainly came out I would say more so with time and an easy parallel that we've made with other aspects of this case for your folks who maybe did not have family members in the generation to have been through this. I think you see it a lot with 9/11. There's this desire to want to have stories that put you close to that event to share how it affected you. And I think you're right that that is pro-social, but it also there's a fine line that's difficult to cross to attention seeking when it's a criminal case. And that's always challenging to draw. But in this case, I don't think that's what was happening. So HL Brennan, the reason that people didn't trust his account, I guess, was that his initial description of Lee Harvey Oswald was hasty. He did it from 120 feet away, but he later identified him in a lineup. So in the beginning, it was a question about why it was so inconsistent early on. Brennan said to the Warren Commission that he had a lot of early fear that there was a major plot in progress. And so he didn't want to be totally candid with police. And that feels plausible to me because we didn't know what the scale of this was. Well, and also to, I mean, is it accurate to say that like in multiple witness accounts of pretty much any crime that sort of unfolds in a brief period that there's generally going to be kind of conflicting accounts just because again, it's like a very tricky thing to recall, especially if you're scared. Absolutely. Yeah, trauma has such direct and probably known even better now or studied better now than at the time, but still. Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, you know, we, the satanic panic spurred a lot of progress, honestly. I mean, that's great. Yeah. We're still not perfect. It's obviously like we still use witness testimony and that's fine and good beats nothing. But trauma really impacts the memory, sometimes sleeping on something helps, sometimes sleeping on something if you've heard other accounts doesn't help. Well, and also if you're questioning correctly, you know, saying it feels like one of the issues with memories, how easily it can be contaminated. Yes. And how one of the factors in wrongful conviction, it seems like sometimes is like, you know, having the police want you to identify a certain person in like a lineup or a photo lineup and kind of like hinting without ever being explicit, kind of like steering you in that direction. And you're like, yeah, yeah, it was that guy now that I think about it. Yeah, like it does not even have to be an overt suggestion. It can just be like a finger on the page or the setting that somebody's in. So yeah, it's super fallible. And to that point, there's another person who is seen in a really far away crowd pictured. I can send it to you if you want. Yeah, please do. So this is the case of Bill Love Lady. Bill Love Lady. I know, right? Such a fun name. Ah, that sounds like a novel by Coravidol or something. My rebrechenrage and Bill Love Lady. Like a Gothic novel also. That too. There's so much possibility to Bill Love Lady. Yeah. So he was another employee of the depository. So he's in this photo in a crowd picture that gets super blown up. It's of the parade route. And somebody says or presumably a fair amount of people say that this looks a lot like Lee Harvey Oswald because apparently they know his face will enough and they can identify it in this minor detail. And going from there, they ask how could he be in this doorway when he was on the sixth floor moments before? Because this is taken the moment after the shooting. So it's like he can't be in two places at once. How is he here? But of course, it's Bill Love Lady and you can see I just sent the picture. The detail in it is so minimal that like you can see that phenomenon you're talking about of people wanting to have something to add or some new insight. And this was not helped by the fact that is also understandable, like both things can be true. That Love Lady was really leery of public media and he went into seclusion after the assassination. Yeah, I sure would. Right. So no interviews, no more pictures, nothing. Yeah. And it's like, he looks like Kevin Costner as well. You know, what does it mean? Do you know, the conspiracy theory that, you know, because the Elvis sighting thing, I think, actually really emerged and took off in the late 80s. Like there's an episode of American hysteria about this. And of course, one of the theories that kind of came up around that time is that, or maybe later, but like, you know, this is the the heyday of the American Elvis sighting is that Elvis had apparently gotten a job as an extra and home alone and was the loitering behind John Candy and Catherine O'Hara in an airport scene. And it's just like, so wow, what is Elvis thinking in the scenario? Because if you can't give me a theory of what Elvis is thinking about, like, what is there explain? He's going to blow it all up for this, for this bit part. To what end? Yeah, to what end? Wait, what is that from? That's my Rudolph as DN Warwick. Thank you. So yeah, Bill Loveleedy is just a guy who didn't want his photo taken by people after. Yeah. And a lot of people look like other people. Like that's truly like a big thing I I counter in my head. A lot of conspiracy theories with that, like, it's like, they're just aren't that many faces features that humans can have, honestly, especially within like age group racial composition. So like a white guy of that age group and build. Right. Haircut, clothes, like there's very limited options, limited fashion options for pale white men in 1963 and Dallas. It's fair to say. And minimal now as things go. We're broadening the options, but very slowly. Yeah. So those were some of the eyewitness confusions early on. But I think it also like planted a seed of some things not adding up about the timing or the people from the beginning, even though he also was interviewed by the commission. And he independently confirmed his exact location and so did his boss. Yeah, but no one's going to read all that. And then it's like a theory that there's like multiple Oswalds and the, you know, the government has like a bunch of different Oswalds disperse through the crowd like that. That would be good. Multiple Louise at a ball and France. Yeah, right? Or like the Biden body double nonsense you're here now. Oh, I don't know that one, but this will work our way forward. Yeah. I mean, now we have a president who's like actively decompensating and dying and no one is mentioning it. And so it's like we're back in the 1960s or before when like Eisenhower was basically incapacitated. And Nixon really should have been given executive power, but wasn't or just, you know, where he had like Wilson pretty incapacitated and the American public not being informed. It's like, yeah, we've gone back to before the 60s. Well, that's frankly a through line, because Reagan also had his, his little brain nap. His little brain naps. When President Reagan's brain was resting. Yeah. And not to defend Reagan, but you know, at least he could write a fricking horse. Is that where our standards are now? Yeah. Because that's how I'm feeling about GW Bush, like longing for the Halcyon days. I know. Somebody swatting shoes away. The nostalgia is so odd. Yeah. I hate it. And I don't endorse it. But I do. But I feel it. It's very complicated. The greatest trick the Bush has ever pulled was pretending to be from Texas. Were they not from Texas? Well, the Bushes are from Connecticut originally. And so George W Bush is like, you know, pretty Texan. But I feel like there's a lot of Texas culture being like, my family's been here for five generations. And then there's someone whose family's been there for 18,000 generations. And you're trying to detain them obviously. Yeah. But the whole like a Connecticut Yankee in oil country was very clever of them. But that's also like the presidency is all about theater. And the kind of access that Americans have has always been interesting. Because there's a, I don't know, if you look at this period in American history, we do kind of expect to have information withheld from us. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe that's part of it. And that's like there's an odd security. Yeah. And maybe you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Yeah. Because you have to have an informed electorate to be able to critically think about information that they have access to. And I know that that always becomes an argument not to release information. I think it should be an argument for education. But that would be nice. Yeah. Obviously that's not the prevailing conservative thought. I mean, I have a lot of faith in the American people and that gets me in trouble pretty consistently. And yet it would be more heartbreaking to give it up than to continue to have it. Right. Okay. So we have the false Oswald, which I enjoy. Well, yeah. And then speaking of access to President's interesting segue, another one that I had heard referenced myself is that this 1961 Lincoln Continental that they were driving is a convertible, right? But it does have an option of adding this bubble top to the top. And so people, I believe they even mention it. What top bubble top car? Yeah. And they talk about it. Yeah. The JFK movie, they say, like, why did they remove that at the last minute? Well, they removed it at the last minute because it was only good for keeping rain out. And it was a sunny day. It's a plastic bubble top. It's not bulletproof. It wouldn't have stopped anything anyways. This is not the potemobile. Right. Well, and also like, this is the assassination that I think teaches people to be afraid of being shot at. Right. To make a potemobile. Yeah. So he wouldn't have that fear because he's the reason for the fear. Yeah. I can also imagine a scenario where like they removed it because it like got a crack in it or something like human fallibility. I feel like it's so frequently. The answer here is opposed to there being a plot. And then of course, like, there are plots. I'm like, you know, we'll get into that. But like a lot of plots are carried out in broad daylight. Without code. Mm-hmm. And yeah, and don't require that much secrecy because no one cares about their victims all that much. Girls. Yeah. Because like you're saying, you know, they've been getting away with it for so long that why would they bother to bury their tracks because it doesn't matter. Right. In this case, the bubble top was literally in the trunk. Like, it's there. They could have broken it out. But again, plastic doesn't stop bullets. But it feels like the kind of thing where they would have chosen aesthetics at that point. And like, not unwisely because no one had shot at them. And also like, isn't it nice to see the pretty first lady and the hot president? Isn't it nice to see them without a cover? Right. That's like the whole point. That's the reason they're there. Right. So that one does very little for me. Yeah. I'm sure you've heard about connections between Jack Ruby and Oswald. Is that something you're familiar with? Not really. Yeah. Let's let's get into it. Well, I don't really know the basis for that rumor. It's another one that the commission tracked to its origin just to see. And as you recall, the commission described him as a sad and strange little man, Jack Ruby. I really love that so much. They really did not pull any punches. And it's the saddest kind of pity because they really pity him. They talk about how interrogating him was so touch and go because he was terribly tense. And his buttons were done wrong. And he wore sandals to his government deposition. I feel like this is like a Jason Alexander role. Yeah, just like a sweaty boy in over his head. But either way, and still to this day, there's no evidence nor concrete claim of any prior relationship with Lee Harvey as well. So there really was nothing to investigate further or disprove. And I feel like this, I want to call this the carry-always problem because in Kiss the Girls, spoilers for Kiss the Girls, you guys. It's a fun movie. It's a movie about multiple serial killers. And they're like collaborating. And this is a pre-handable world. So it's pretty exciting. It's actually Judd versus the serial killers. Love it. I would watch actually Judd do anything. We love and men have hobbies, though. Yeah. They're friendships are important. Your right serial killer is one of the few hobbies offered to men allowed to. Yeah. And we give them so many ideas. But so carry-always is a character. And he's like listed in the opening credits. But he like doesn't, he doesn't do very much for most of the movie. And so when you're trying to figure out who the killer is. You're like, well, Kerry always has had nothing to do. So either his role got cut way down after it tested poorly or he's the killer. - Like process of elimination, yeah. - Yeah, and I feel like there's a thing, where stories do teach us a lot of great stuff, but they also teach us to have certain expectations and to want to find the same kind of pattern recognition in real life that we can find in fiction. And so when there's limited characters and open questions, I feel like we want to believe that within the cast that we know about is the answer as opposed to there's characters that we aren't aware of or the satisfying answer that we seek isn't even there. So it's like, well, this Jack Ruby guy, it can't be random. It's a Kerry always problem. - Right, exactly. It's kind of, I think you and I have talked about this with True Crime in general and how it gets so messy with real people being involved 'cause there's the check-offs gun problem. - Yeah, which is similar to the Kerry always problem. - Yeah, basically, like as narrative consumers who are raised on fiction to be given these things that are nonfiction, but presented as narratives. - Yeah, if Kerry always is in the opening credits, he must do something. - He must be fired by the end, yeah. - If we have questions, like why would Jack Ruby kill a stranger in public for no real reason, except civic mindedness? And then, and also like some guy who is so full of information that we need to get out of him. Like, what if the next guy has information? Like this is a thing they do in law and order, which I love and also really teaches us to be tough on crime where they find someone who's guilty of something or at least appears to be, and of course it's law and order so they are, but they can't prosecute them for whatever reason. And so they find a different person to prosecute so that we can have a fun episode to watch. - I feel like maybe Jim Garrison watched an episode of law and order somehow before the Clay Shaw case. - Or he like was on a plane with Dick Wolf and he Dick Wolf emerged, like I know what I'm doing now. - Proto law and order, because that's exactly what happened in the Clay Shaw case that we'll get to. - Wow. - But I don't know, I also think a great point that Vincent Buleosi makes is that the squalid living conditions of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, if you look up the apartments that they were living in. - Oh man. - That really belies any government involvement, government money, big money angle. - Wait, tell me, I want you to drive their apartments. Tell me everything. - Let me see, you know, I saw the photos and I don't know that I would have described them with such vitriol as Buleosi did, but let me see. - Well, these men had houses that magically cleaned themselves every day as far as they knew. - Right. - So Oswald was like renting a room from some nice unassuming older lady. - They always are. - There are no great shakes. It's nothing to write home about. And I do think that's a valid point. Where's all this big government or mafia or communist money? Like where is the paper trail? Then I think the last rumor that I want to get to before we get to the real like cultural fallout of the post-warren era is introducing the gun. So do you know anything about the gun that was used or rumors surrounding it? - No, well, I mean, it's like. - Bigly familiar, but I can tell you specifics. And I assume it's like a rifle because I think we learned that in full metal jacket, but please tell me everything. - So I'm gonna call this like the witch gun. - No. - Theory slash fodder. - Sorry, for a second, I thought you meant a witch gun. Like a cackling witch gun. That's the whole other topic. - That's even more fun. In fact, if we want to come up with an additional rumor. - Yeah. - How did Oswald pull it off if he was just some loner? He had a witch gun. - Look at witches. - So this starts you get sheriff video footage taken about 46 minutes after the shooting. So they're pretty on top of it. Despite the fact that all these investigations have holes and people who are ill-equipped to undertake them, they do canvas the depository within an hour and they get prints from Lee Harvey Oswald. - It's a hard crime scene to flee when I think about it. - And yet you manage to get to the movie theater. - Yeah. - It shows the finding of three spent cartridge casings on the floor, which to me is also pretty compelling. And here's where you get to some of the ballistics. We'll get to more of that in the second round because there's new fun testing. And I do mean fun because it's not. It's removed enough from the horrors. So firing a gun marks the casings with identifiable scratches and that matched them to the gun. - And it's like different for each gun, right? It's like kind of like a fingerprint. - Yeah, so I'm not a big ballistics person, but that is my understanding. And the bullets were pointed. It is a full metal jacket indeed. And it's like around a soft shell. So it's like a hard, external casing and then there's a soft shell inside. And it's like, it's basically military ammunition that was used in World War One and Two. And within this particular gun, which is called a manlicker carcano. - Oh. - It's an Italian rifle. There's like spiral ridges for accuracy, kind of like throwing a football with a spin on it. - Oh wow, that's a good metaphor. This is some great ballistics describing. - I try, man. I'm sure I'm gonna get comments about like, actually. Well, this is not how guns work and I'm sorry. - You know, I kind of enjoy having a little bit of a lack of knowledge about guns at this point in time. I gotta say. - Right. So that feature which marked the casings is an uncommon feature of the manlicker carcano. So that in and of itself is pretty identifying. The gun itself, it's this Italian World War II bolt action rifle. And it was found at the depository and the serial number on that gun showed that it was mail ordered from this client's catalog in Chicago to a known alias for Lee Harvey T. Bag. - Yeah. I can imagine, of course, people being like, how could he? He couldn't have really been so sloppy. It's a false flag. And to that, my response is, couldn't he? - Right. - Have you met people? They're very sloppy. - Have you met men look at his house? - Especially murdering men. Like he's a 24 year old jackass. - Right. I know I talk about this all the time, but like people talk about Ted Bundy being a genius killer. And like he's not, he's just, he was not. Like he, you know, he was filing receipts for the gas he bought when he was cruising around Colorado finding women to murder. You know, he was like saving his own evidence. It's not, he got to start thinking about how, perhaps, it's the police doing a bad job more than anything that allows criminals to get away with it for so long, not them having superior intelligence. - Yeah. And to your point about conspiracies and powerful people in general, like they don't have to use code. They don't have to cover their tracks. 'Cause nine times out of 10, nobody pulls a thread, except that here you killed the president, so the thread was gonna be pulled. - Right, exactly. And also like, not to be too simplistic, but like, or to L Woods, if that's such a thing. - You can never be to L Woods. - Exactly. Really smart people don't murder women for fun. They just don't. - Right. - They have model trains. - Same here. Like this guy was either gonna write a really subpar book or kill the president. - I think this or found Scientology. It's hard to know which would have been worse. - Ooh, which is worse, hard to say. - I don't know. I mean, at least people aren't being like indentured because of the Kennedy assassination, as far as I know. - Scoreboard. I don't know. (laughing) - But like, one of the arguments made about this gun is that it is rare to use it for homicides. There are lighter and like greater capacity options in the same catalog, but it was $13. - Oh, there you go. - Yeah, it's like 24, right? Of course, yeah, and that's a lot of money back now. - Yeah. So that to me closes the case. - Yeah. It is so depressing to think of, and like, I've never, you know, my family has never like had a thing for the Kennedy's. I know a lot of people do. I feel pretty neutral on it. But like, they were like a nice cute young family with little kids. And like, it's just so sad to think of like, anyone's dad dying because someone got a $13 gun out of a catalog. - And didn't have any friends. - Not that it would be better if it was more expensive, but yeah, 'cause it's like just, just learn chess. - Nobody made him feel special. So if he was really mad, got a $13 gun with a $7 go. (sighs) The rumor that comes out of this early on is one of my favorite illustrators in the whole case because it's so, I think all of us will relate to how well this exemplifies like the 24-hour news cycle and how it twists facts. So it's this Manlaker Carcano that is eventually identified pretty early on, right? And once that information is released, there's this big compare contrast with early reporting that came from one source that the police had identified it as a Mauser, which was a German gun. So they tracked this down to the source and what actually happened was there was a reporter on a deadline in Dallas and they're hanging around the scene. They press it. an officer who's just standing nearby. He's not got any special knowledge or doing anything that relates him to the crime. They press this guy for specifics on the weapon. And so they're asking, asking, asking, finally, the officer says, it might have been a mauser. Yep. But the reporter didn't qualify that this was like underdressed. Right. And again, I mean, just from my hanging out on newspapers.com, it's, I'm often reminded of the fact that like in the immediate aftermath of an event like in breaking like that, it's called breaking news because they're breaking it as you're reading it. And it's inevitable that stuff is going to be incorrect. And that's, that doesn't even mean that people aren't doing their jobs right. It's because that there's, there's conflicting witness reports as we've been talking about often initially. And it takes a minute for things to get sorted out. And this feels, this does feel like a very classic case of like where a lot of conspiracy theories, when they're grasping for straws, they can grasp some here. It's like, well, someone said this for a second before it could be corrected. It's like, well, and I think there are a couple dirty hands here because the one thing that I'd counter to what you said is like, it would be a lot better if reporters and anybody serving as a, a news purveyor now qualified information with like, this was an officer guessing. Yeah. And the news and the newspapers like refusal to not write in that kind of voice of God style. Like this is maybe what came back to bite them in the ass is kind of punishment for that for acting too omniscient is that we believed them. Yeah. Maybe. And also like, the fallout doesn't really touch the person that perpetuated this rumor in the beginning. Yeah. Like the fallout hits more the Warren commission which whatever they can handle it. But more in a like principle sense that when the Rob Reiner killing happened, there was a story, a little video on social media and I try to like, call my feeds, but you can only do so much. Yeah. It was this gal talking about some information from TMZ. I don't think the information ended up being correct, but I forget what it was. But I remember her saying, now TMZ, they don't just say something like this without knowledge. They have lawyers. And I'm sitting there like saying out loud, that's not true. And this fact isn't true. Like lawyers just show in court that you know, you didn't have malice about a public figure. That doesn't mean that they're telling the truth about every piece of info they get. But like she, that gal will never have any repercussions before her. The person who said this was a mouser gets to enjoy the fruits of their labor. So that fast turnaround really fucks us all. Yeah. And the confusion would like the publics need to know with our right to have more information that exists yet, you know. Yeah. And it's all capitalized. So like there is a financial incentive to have the next big thing. Right. And of course, then it's like you're as a news source competing at the time with other news sources to like, yes, at least greatly appearance of having more or newer information. Yeah. Like special access. So that, yeah, that was such an illustrative piece of info. Well, we really screwed ourselves. And we sure have fixed it now. Haven't we? That's great. So we're going to get more into the ballistics and forensic misunderstandings with the second wave of fodder in a little bit. But this is kind of the end of part one. And we note here that all the lurid rumors were not laid to rest despite drilled forwards. No. Best predictions. Good for him for thinking that. He tried. He's like, and now you're going to move on, right? We're like, no. Why don't you go fell off a letter on us and I don't know, man. This gets us to the fun stuff. We can move to Clay Shaw now, which is I think what both of us are champing at the bit to arrive at. I think so. Yeah. Because this is where we get into Oliver Stone's JFK, which feels like it's kind of a milestone movie for people. And then it's fun to question the government, even if when you zoom out, you're like, this movie actually made this seem like a lot more persuasive than it appears to be in the cold light of day. I like JFK is the equivalent of like the episode of Sex in the City Valley of the 20 Something Guys, where Carrie goes home with, I think Timothy Oliphon. And he's in his 20s speaking of guys in their 20s apartments. And it's like sexy and hot and amazing. And she's like so thrilled. And then she wakes up. And it's like messy and filthy and gross. And in the cold light of day, she's like, what have I done? And but that's like the equivalent of like watching JFK versus looking up those theories on Wikipedia the next morning. Oh, and I will say like having, so I watched it a number of years ago. And then I watched it the other day because you and I talked about watching it. And it was so much harder to watch now. Yeah. It's so hard to watch once you know the information because it's so star-studded. It's a lot of fun. Yes. It's incredible Laurie Metcalf, you know, material. You could watch it for the Laurie Metcalf alone. And she's not even the top billar by a long shot. You got Ed Asner as Guy Bannister. I mean, we'll get to who's who I guess. But I want you to introduce the movie. We're kind of splitting it into two temporal parts because there are other things I want to talk about in this phase. But Clay Shaw trial happened in 1967. And then the movie that really was based on that trial and the book about it more than anything else. Like that was the primary source for JFK. The movie came out in 91. So like you have a 30 year gap there. But JFK, the movie really is what publicized the trial. Yeah. And it feels like it, you know, there's like that sort of nostalgia cycle that I think has gotten a bit faster lately, but that it was like if you're like a, you know, a teenager or young adult in the early 90s, you really don't have any living memory of this. So it was kind of the introduction people got. And then it's us observing that thing that happens in history where the balance shifts and people start knowing something primarily through fiction rather than through lived memory, like in terms of population numbers, which is also really interesting. And even more so now. Yeah. Well, so basically JFK is about Kevin Costner playing Jim Garrison, who is the district attorney of New Orleans. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And who I figures out a way to kind of try the Kennedy assassination within his own jurisdiction in an odd way. Yeah, what a nice coincidence for him that it all landed on his doorstep. Yeah, that worked out great. And it's got like the classic wife in these movies, characters played by Sissy Spasak, who's like, the kids have been waiting up for you while the reserction, this Kennedy assassination conspiracy, she doesn't talk like that, but you know, she kind of does. I have one Southern accent I can do and it's just Dixie Carter, you know, it's I have limited rings. I think that's fine. You just have to add like molasses to your mouth to do a New Orleans version, because they don't feel very belabored. Do you want to know what he called that wife in real life? What? He called her egg. No, why would he say that to Anna? And egg. Cause she's the bell of the ball. She's not just like a bell. We're having yams. He called her egg because she was such an egghead. Isn't that sweet? No. No, it's not. So we love Jim Garrison. He seems like a nice guy. I mean, he's played by Kevin Costner at his peak. It's like celebrity washed. Do you want to run down some of the cast of this movie? Because I feel like, yeah, it's wild. Like, let me, let me, I'm just going to pull. Let's get a list here. Okay. So we have Tommy Lee Jones' Clay Shaw, who this trial is about in the end. Kevin Bacon, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Oldman is Lee Harvey Oswald, Michael Rucker, Sissy Spasek as egg. Joe Pesci is David Ferry doing great wig work. Oh my God. Jack Lemon, Walter Mathau, Donald Sutherland. It's a really amazing collection of people, mostly men. But you know, it's an Oliver Stone movie. It's for sure what we expect. Wayne Knight. Importantly. Yes. Yeah. Who we talked about. He's always good. He's good in everything. Vincent D'Anafria, Lolita Davidovic, John Lericcat. John Lericcat. It just goes on. Yeah. So you're just like, and I do think there's like an element where we just trust celebrities. And like, there's so many movies. I think about this a lot with why you were sleeping where like, if the plot elements of that movie, if we encountered them first on TMZ, we'd be like, that woman's insane. Let's execute her. I hate her. But if you learn about it in the context of a Sandra Bullock movie, you're like, she couldn't hurt a fly. At least I am. It's very influential to the show. Or like, I support her rights and wrongs. Yeah. The show is really just kind of an attempt to replicate the experience of why you were sleeping. Okay. For women who got in over their head and be like, well, when you think about it, we love her. But so basically it's, I mean, it's like, it's a very long movie. It's beautifully shot. The script is like, well done in my opinion. Like, you have great characters bouncing off each other. Like, and it probably, it probably is that like wealth of characters and really fun actors to watch. John Candy among them. That makes it section enjoyable. experience because then it doesn't have to lean so hard on like the substance of the theories driving it because you're kind of like, well, the character, like Lori Metcalf is like super excited about the idea that this photo might be edited. And I don't care. But I care about how excited she is about it. Yeah, and you notice in that scene, they cut to the photo for about one and a half seconds. Like, yeah, which it was a real photo. It's a real photo that we could have looked at. It's a black and white photo. Yeah. And so it feels like, I mean, basically, Jim Garrison is just like a guy and he's a district attorney. So he's like-- With life crisis. Yeah, he's a guy in midlife. And he reads the Warren report when it comes out and kind of in his capacity just as a civilian, basically, he's like, I don't like this. Feels wrong, yeah. And starts investigating and questioning people and puts together a theory that despite me having seen this movie quite a few times over the years and more recently now, I could not describe to you. And I would love for you to give us that. Oh, god. Give me the heavy lifting. Yeah. So come to my house and move my furniture. I'll give you a piece of pizza. Well, I think the reason is that Jim Garrison's first and primary theory about this case would not have sold as well, even in 1991, as whatever the hell they were doing. And it was that likely a pulled-in-lob, in fact, he said, it was a homosexual thrill killing. Come on. Whatever the hell that means. You can't blame everything on homosexual thrill killing. He's really riled up about the gay men that either are identified in this story or he has identified. OK. And is Clay Shaw basically involved also in, like, pimping male escorts? Is that fair to say? So Clay Shaw's involvement in that this is a real, like, chain of connections. Because enough time goes by that, like, two people die and not under suspicious circumstances. One dies, I think, shortly after the assassination in, like, early 1964 of a heart attack. And that's Guy Bannister, the Ed Azner character. He's an ex-FBI man. That is confirmed. That is a true fact. He was working as a PI in New Orleans. He got in a fight where he pistol whipped his assistant, Martin. And that ended up getting back to the police. And that was the first involvement of this story with the cops in New Orleans. Now, in the interviews to explain a way whatever pistol whipping happened, or potentially, I read it as, like, get back at his boss, Martin tells the cops that his boss, the FBI guy, Bannister, knows this guy named David Ferry. And David Ferry served in the New Orleans civil air patrol with Lee Harvey Oswald. That's about it that we have. He tells on his boss, 'cause they got in this conflict, that he knows a guy who knows Lee Harvey Oswald. So they're probably involved. Which, again, is, like, a very classic being in trouble with the police. It seems we were like, hey, I know this other thing. You want to be nicer to me, 'cause I know something? Yeah, or, like, I'm pissed off at this guy, so I'm going to tell you all the dirt I have on him and maybe amplify it a little bit. Yeah, and these are, like, very basic power dynamics. Yeah, and, of course, this is, like, the biggest crime of the last year. And so, hell, yeah, I'm gonna implicate him if I want to. So that's what we have. And then that was promptly referred to the FBI during the War and Commission process by DA Garrison. Martin was interviewed by the FBI, so they actually looked into it. Okay, so he does have, like, a criminal, like, a connection to it through a criminal case, early on, and I'm being a little bit unfair to him. Yeah, I'm sorry, Jim Garrison. Well, I don't know, like-- I'm a little bit sorry, I'm sorry. Like, to have some guys that come into your office mention this, do you know how many times somebody mentions disliking the president or thinking the president is involved in some conspiracy when they're trying to get off the hook in a criminal context? Like, that could connect anybody to anything. Well, it's a good point as well. Plus, the homosexual thrill killing from there, I don't know. Well, yeah, and, you know, not to make broad sweeping pronouncements, but from what I can tell, homosexual thrill killing is seeming extremely rare. And in the '50s, we were ready to think there were millions of them, I think, or the '60s. And, right, that's what this captures to me, because he also, when the FBI interviews Martin, he says, I bet that Ferry might have hypnotized Oswald into doing something, and that was such a common refrain, that hypnosis thing of-- because you heard with RFK, his assassination, too, there was a lot of like, yeah, we're hypnotizing people into killing and-- Oh, boy. So-and-so might have corruptly and secretly hypnotized someone, and that's why there's no paper trail, because it's hypnosis. Which is a very majorian candidate-influenced theory, I think, and view of hypnosis in a way. It's very of the time the FBI considered Martin unreliable and wasn't able to find any connecting information to this story, but they interviewed about 20 other people in connection with this allegation. So they did follow it through, and then you get even further attenuated. So Guy Bannister, the FBI guy, he dies of a heart attack right after. So fuck, we lost our main guy. Now what? Garrison, in 1966, he's really wanting to pursue this, so he re-interviews Martin, and they get some more story out of it. And so, yeah, and the fact that he wants to keep digging is interesting, too. Yeah. By the way, Jim Garrison was let go from the Army, and in the assessment that is left out of the JFK movie, an Army doctor concluded that Garrison had a severe and disabling psychonorosis that interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a market degree. But when I picture him, I see Kevin Carter, so I trust him. Who must not be debilitatingly neurotic? No, impossible. He's an actor. Just my coin is wife egg. So like on this new interview with Martin, who now is getting his 15 minutes, I guess, there's this cabal that starts to materialize, and that connects them to David Ferry, more concretely. But David Ferry, who was going to be the chief suspect, he dies of a brain aneurysm. Goddammit. Yeah. And that apparently, you know, Garrison thought was a cover-up. As somebody who's had a very close family member die of a brain aneurysm, it's so obvious on an autopsy like, there's bleeding into the brain. It's very hard to fake that. What if he is crammed a gusher up his nose? Oh, yeah, maybe. One of those blood capsules. You just smash it into the bits. Yeah, maybe. Oh, God. Yeah, but that's, yeah. That's really, if you believe that an aneurysm was some kind of a cover-up, then like you're probably prepared to believe a lot of stuff that I would personally have trouble with as well. Yeah, like that's one of the more difficult things to fake in an autopsy, because it's such a clear cause. I don't know, but so he now has put together that Jack Ruby, there are these rumors about Jack Ruby being gay, and David Ferry is pretty certainly gay. So now you have two gay guys who are involved. No, Jack Ruby does not appear again in this narrative, but because we have two gay guys, then Garrison Gleens that all six people involved. So, you know, Martin, Bannister, Oswald, everybody, they're all gay. Oh, okay. Yeah, 'cause the gays can't consort with the non-gays. No, no. And if they're consorting, it's probably a cabal. That doesn't just mean the president is also gay. Well, you know, they were jealous. He said of the president, 'cause he was so hot. No. And that inspired them to kill. Kim. Kim, I mildly trusted you for two hours once a couple times. So he turns his focus to Clay Shaw, who the eventual trial is against Clay Shaw. The key witness against Clay Shaw, it's a lot to keep track of all these names. I have like a chart. Is this 25-year-old guy named Perry Russo? And the way that we connect Perry Russo is that he tells the police that he was at a party with Clay Shaw. And Clay Shaw mentioned the killing of Kennedy with Lee Harvey Oswald. But the first mention of this party and Lee Harvey Oswald is not included in multiple early versions of Russo's testimony. But then Garrison gives him sodium pentathol. OK. Yeah. And that's one of those. It was called for a time truth serum, although in-- by 1954, Narcoanalytics and criminal law kind of issued the use of this, because it's like any nervous system depressing, you know, think of alcohol. So the way that the American Journal of Psychiatry described it is like it may allow somebody to give new information. It also could cause somebody to deliberately withhold information, persist in giving untruthful information, or falsely confess to things that they haven't done. So it's inadmissible, and it has been since the '60s. So it's kind of like-- it's not maybe as different as we would like it to be from just giving someone a bottle of rum. Totally. And imagine like all the different outcomes that you could get from somebody being drunk when they're examined by someone who really wants them to say a certain thing. - Yeah. - And here you obviously, like he clearly wants him to say there's a connection to Lee Harvey Oswald. - Yeah. - And then, conveniently, he's given this drug, and he mentions it. So it's really, it's a lot of like garden variety, wrongful confession type stuff, which I wouldn't have expected. - And not even from the agent himself, like just from some other 25 year old who is at the party. - Yeah. - So one of the fastest, not guilty verdicts in New Orleans history. - Ah, yeah. (laughing) - Less than an hour, some people say less than 30 minutes. - It took. - So what is Clay Shaw being accused of? - Oh, conspiracy to assassinate the president. - Okay. - And he's leading, and he's leading a gay cabal because he's jealous of the hot, hot president. - Well, that, I think he tweaked the theory. And so the eventual conspiracy was one that involved the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and LBJ, abstractly. - Well, that seems more complicated. - Yeah. - So right, like, I don't know. When you're watching it, especially without a whole lot of knowledge of the facts, they really mix fact and fiction. In fact, Roger Ebert reviewed the movie and said that it was a film about the feelings of Americans surrounding the event. - Not the facts. - So Roger Ebert was right quite often. - Yeah, but again, it doesn't qualify it as that. It just puts it out there as something, like a version of a real thing that happened without any qualifiers that we made up a lot of this. - Yeah, so is it ultimately just everybody's fault or sort of like a general government plot that doesn't point the finger at any particular agency or anything, but the idea is that Clay Shaw is being used as like a government pond to execute the president in order to something, something Cold War. - I'm frankly not even super clear on what the nature of the conspiracy was because there are also mentions of anti-castro Cubans, and then there are also some mentions of pro-castro Cubans and gun running to them. To me, it's not a coherent theory that I could even articulate, especially with all these moving parts that actively have interests opposed to one another. Or at best, kind of like we were talking about Quibono, what do all of these individuals and entities get? So you have six private citizens who are not connected to the government, and you have almost six causes or agencies institutionally involved, like who, how? I don't really know how you connect all of those except that it allows you to unite all the people who think there's a conspiracy because it's abstract enough to pull them in. - Right. Which does remind me of the satanic panic because if you start off with a theory that doesn't really make sense, then the more details emerge, the more you have to compensate for. - Yeah. - And so your theory has to get bigger and bigger until you're kind of pointing the finger at the entire government. - Yeah. - And it's not because your theory is so compelling, but it's because you have to compensate for so much contradiction. And especially if you're pedaling this to people who are not informed about the way that the investigation has gone and thus can rule certain things out on their own. I mean, this movie was nominated for Best Director and Best Picture. Like it was hugely popular with folks outside of the governmental sphere. And it's 1991 to your point. Like we have some removal from the events. This is how a lot of folks were acquainted with the facts of the investigation, but they're wrong. - Yeah. - There's just one more good quote from a front line review in 1992. Somebody was very upset, John Leo, who wrote this review, said that a writer undertakes many unpleasant tasks but fewer, more repugnant than sitting helplessly in the dark, suffering a three hour rant from Oliver Stone. (laughing) It's essentially several hours of shameless propaganda and the dishonesty of the movie is breathtaking. So it was controversial. - Yeah, and I remember some of that, but it's like, again, it's really, it doesn't have the reputation for insanity that I think it deserves. And I mean, why do you think that Americans responded so strongly to it and that it's remained? Like it's also it's not like something that people stopped watching. Like people still watch JFK. - Your point is something that I felt also in researching reviews. And I was glad to find this one from 1992, but it also seems like the controversy surrounding it is inversely related to the time that passes because kind of like we were saying, like the more time that passes, the more likely somebody is to have seen this than have any other connection or from a reference to the facts of this story. I mean, you put all these faces in a movie and Oliver Stone has a record of directing great movies. What if he did Platoon, right? - Yeah, which I watched with my dad when I was far too young. - Yeah, that's the thing what's at movies, right? - Yeah, I know. They're always like, you're 11, you're ready for. - Good culture. - Alien 3. (laughing) - Yeah, I saw the Godfather at like 10 and I'm like, I don't know what's happening here. - Yeah. - So I mean, that's my guess. And then Seinfeld opened up, frankly, a whole new audience to it, like free advertising and that episode of Seinfeld, which I love. - I do too. - But it also brought some comedy to the movie. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, I don't know that like A, it's a good movie on the level of filmmaking, like Oliver Stone at this time in his career. Like, was really firing on all cylinders. It's enjoyable to watch. It's edited really well. Like, it feels persuasive. You feel like you're smart when you're watching it. I think it's a movie that flatters here. You feel like you're really intelligent. And of course, you're really just being taken in by something that doesn't make that much sense when you actually think about it at all. - But do you think maybe that's part of it? Of feeling a little bit stupid while you're feeling smart? Like, he knows better than I do. - Yeah. - But I'm keeping up. - I think so. And I think it's like the thrill of being let in on like the conspiracy theory experience in like maybe a more recreational way that you can then just like move on from. But for three hours, you can be like a truther. - Yeah. I think that it conspiracy theories are pleasurable a lot in many ways. And that's part of what draws people to them. - I think it does hit on all those things that we talked about before. Similar to being the first one to break any story that it gives you an edge. It gives you something special to offer to the story without necessarily having to do the work. And not that this is like a conscious or ill-intentioned process. But you watch a movie like this and you feel like you have the inside track and you can help others to understand it abstractly. - Yeah. And that's a great feeling. And that's the same feeling that I think brings people into MLMs and so many other things. It's being on the inside of something. And like if Donald Sutherland told me about anything like kind of fast. - Oh my God. - I'd be like, "Yeah, sure, yeah, I believe you. Thank you, Donald Sutherland." - His character, by the way, is fully fabricated. That Mr. X character, that's when they just, what? Yeah, you're telling me there's no Mr. X? - I know. - That's because Kevin Costner is a imaginary friend. It's actually a giant bunny named Harvey. - This is why he probably had to leave the military 'cause he was seeing Mr. X everywhere. - He's like, "Well, good night, Mr. X. That was a great game, a Connect Four." - An egg is like, "There's no one there." (laughing) - So that's Kay of Kay, which is a fun movie. But again, it only a movie. - It sure is. He's actually in it. Jim Garrison plays Chief Justice Earl Warren for a couple of minutes. - I'm sure he had a lovely time. - Oh, I'm sure he was so tickled. And he died like a year after. So it was like, "I can die happy now." - Yeah. - "My conspiracy has been realized that homosexuals have not won." (laughing) "I can go to my grave." - This movie has stopped the tide of homosexuals. - Oh, thank God. - Yeah, and it is like just the sense of like, one man taking his own discomfort. And turning that into a theory of everything. It's like, "Yeah, we're really living in that world, aren't we? What an innovator." - I think that watching it now audiences might have more of a recognition kind of in the same way that I think they would recognize the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald phenomenon more in this era of mass shooters. I think more of us would recognize than they would have in 1991. This like weird midlife crisis small town, well not small town, but not a federal prosecutor who's feeling frustrated that there's nothing to put a bow on his career. And so he runs with false confessions 'cause he's in law enforcement. And like this archetype to me is so much more recognizable now than I think it would have been in 1991 as a fallible character, you know what I mean? - Yeah, right, because we have had the chance to develop pattern recognition. - Yeah, yeah. - Because of all of the news. - Yeah. 'Cause of that good old 24 hour news cycle. There are some silver linings, I guess. - Which was just crawling out of a rhinoceros' butt at the time, my case ventured around. - Thank you pretty much. - So there are a couple other post-war and things that are worth mentioning. And one is what we have already foreshadowed a couple times and that's the Zepprooter film release. - Yeah, tell us all about that. Who is the pruder maybe to start? I think we touched on this briefly last time, but it's just this unassuming, this sounds way more pejorative. I sound like I'm describing Jack Ruby. I mean more like he's not involved in any government agency. He is a dressmaker, Abraham's a pruder, has this eight millimeter shooting home video camera. It makes pretty good footage for, you know, home video at the time, but it's grainy. It's in part blocked by a sign in terms of tracking the actual motorcade, but it's about 30 frames from the first shot to what we think is the fatal shot. And there are a lot of assumptions about what happens behind the sign, but the ultimate thing that people take away from seeing it in motion where they had just stills from the report is that it looks like Kennedy is moving back into the left to quote Kevin Costner when he's hit by that final shot, and we'll get to that with some of the forensics in a bit. Nice. Yeah, and also I'm sure there are people who find it a coincidence that this film exists because it is kind of astonishing on a cosmic level that it does exist. And it is like, I did an episode last year with Lulu Miller on Bigfoot. I think it wasn't going to set the episode in like we talked about the Patterson Gimlin film. Yeah, same footage type. Yeah, that idea like shaky footage without sound captured by someone who can't believe what they're seeing, which like honestly the Patterson Gimlin film of Bigfoot feels a little bit inspired by this if anything. Maybe, right? Or it's just the kind of movie you could make at that point. I mean, think of those of us who grew up with that footage, it feels like, and it's probably the other way around, but it feels like a found footage horror movie. It's like, I can't believe I'm watching this. This is so authentic because of the nature of the film. Yeah. And it's footage. It's like from a distance and it is grainy, but like you are seeing a president be assassinated, which again, like before this, he had to be there. Like the, do you ever see the the episode of I think I've got a secret in his a 50s panel game show where they had this 96 year old man who had been a child who was at Ford's theater. Oh my god. Lincoln was assassinated. Wow. Yeah. But that would be the level of connection that you could have to something be like, well, I heard this guy describe it one time. Yeah, that's boy. So we all cut the the ability to feel personally traumatized by something through media. I feel like is suddenly entering the picture. It was a fresh concept. Well, yeah, I mean, I think fresh and exciting one. Yeah. Like we mentioned just like how Vietnam was the first televised war relatively shortly thereafter. Yeah. All of these things that we are so. Thanks, Johnson, at all. Right. Like weirdly desensitized, but not desensitized to on a certain level. Or things that feel normal now were so distinctive at the time. Right. Well, and then there's this fascinating thing where as you know that it was very normal, I think even just a hundred years ago to have seen quite a few dead people as you were growing up because you would have funerals, you know, you would have a wake in the parlor or something like that. You would see, you know, you would you would see dead people like grandpa's downstairs for a week. Yeah. Right. Or guess that there would be accidents, you know, that I and you know, there still are. But that we did not have the technological capacity to whisk people away. Yeah. And make their their death a kind of secret. So it feels like it left the home and it went into the TV. And that's why Poltergeist. It literally went into the TV. That in the clown. Yeah. I mean, there's probably a confluence of healthcare moving death out of the home and thus it becoming less familiar and also mortality rates changing. So yeah, one is good and one is questionable. I think dying at home would be nice to be more common because it's a side note. But point being, I wonder if that it is, but you know, my dad died at home, which like practically nobody pulls off these days, it seems like and did too so many times. I've been like, hey, he died at home. I feel better about that. Yeah. Like that's such a comfortable place to go. And frankly, for me, it's like, that's fine that his ghost is here. I like that. Oh yeah. You wouldn't want his ghost to be in a hospital. That's what can be wherever they want, I think. But yeah, no, he would be so annoyed by that. I hope they have free range, but I don't know. It really depends. According to the Amityville horror, they can't travel between Lang Island and Manhattan, which has to create problems. And I do trust, I trust the veracity of the war. But I wonder if the fact that it's such a new phenomenon made people more prone to seeing something in the footage that nobody else saw. Like we now know if we're consuming, say, I mentioned the Charlie Kirk video because I saw it and it was so disquieting, but I also know so many people saw it. So for any of one of us to say, I saw something special. And without consenting to see it. No. And also that, you know, and so this premiered on Geraldo in 1975. Yes, 75. And it goes without saying, but it's worth remarking on anyway, for anyone who's not thinking about it, that like you couldn't walk it over and over again, like we can now and like study what you thought you saw. You saw it like once on TV. People didn't even have VCRs at this point in time. And that was it. And then again, like even with media, you had to operate off of what you thought you remembered because you didn't get second chances the way we do today, or 45th chances. That's like the eyewitness phenomenon compounded, right? Because if you want to think that you're going to witness to the TV. Yeah. Like you had some distinctive thing to offer about what you saw. You're going off of memory of a memory. Yeah. And because we build community when we're you know, we witness these things. And so yeah, we're trying to do the same thing with the image as we see on screen. I saw like someone refer in a tick-tock comment today to like when the screens had fur. Like the fuzzy kind of can feel the static. Yeah. And I was like, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. The furred screen. And I could totally picture somebody who didn't experience that not knowing what we're talking about. Yeah. But TV screens, like you run your hand over them. It's the static. Yeah. There's just a little feel. The fluffy static. It's great. It's kind of like, have you seen, I think it's like a recycled tumbler post of somebody really puzzling over why millennials talk about burning CDs? Like, did we have to actually burn them? And then someone was gay came out. Well, we came out for the uninitiated. No, we did not burn them literally. It was just. Yeah. You put them in your CD-ROM drive and then the computer could put songs onto a blank CD and then you would draw all over the top part and Sharpie and give it to someone who you had a correction. It was incredible. The more you love them, the more you drew on it. Yes. Exactly. I know you also have talked about like losing the monoculture and how there used to be such a monoculture at that time. And so when you talk about community building from watching this one thing, that's what everybody had to talk about. Right. So of course, all of this got drummed up. And then in 1976, there was the second governmental body to investigate the assassination. So you can picture how much this had reached a fever pitch in a short period of time after the release. Right. That they had to have this House Select Committee on assassinations, which I think is really funny because it didn't include RFK's assassination. It was just looking into JFK and MLK. Wow. They're like, ah, that's sweet. Look, let's, let's not add too much to our plate here. Yeah, I guess. But it was basically just on public opinion. Okay. Interesting. And they reached largely the same conclusions. So they concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots. The first one missed. The second one was the so-called magic bullet that we'll get to. And the third one killed JFK. But they, in what feels to me like a weird compromise that accomplishes nothing, they said, Lee Harvey Oswald fired those three shots, including the kill shot. But there was a second gunman somewhere. What? Just like hanging out. Why? But why you guys? Do you think that they believe the evidence was compelling? Like, what was, what was that about? So I think a, they were trying to appease people who clearly were not satisfied by the first Warren report. So they had to do something differently. Come on, you guys. You can't read a child just one more story. We know this or give a mouse a cookie. So why here? If you give the American people a second shooter, this is totally opposed to your trust in the American people though. So well, okay. But here's, I was just thinking as you're saying that I feel like it's possible to make the argument. And like the like we, with the language we use, have suggested this already. Like, I'm not totally inventing this. But when we talk about like the nanny state, right? Which we don't want for some reason, even though all I want is to be wheeled around in a pram by a sudden buddy at this point in time. Make my doctor's appointments. Wouldn't that be incredible? Yeah. Yeah. But you know, this idea of like the citizen as a child, and the government or, you know, the ruler as parent, which I think there is some degree of reality too, you know, not for everybody and not in every way, but it feels like I see that. I believe that is like a pretty big dynamic and the way power works in our lives. And it feels like one of the things that we crave and one of the reasons that we're living in the world we are is for that parental figure to validate our feelings, you know? And we just feel like, I understand you don't trust me because I've done so many horrible things to your ancestors and to people like you and also maybe to you personally because just look at me. And of course, you can't ever get that kind of confession from the government. And even if you do, as we know from when this happens in our own personal lives, like when you get someone to admit that they abused you, you're not all better. Yeah. Exactly. And even if it's like, like people do deserve and need that, but like it doesn't heal you, which is very annoying because it should. And somehow that's work that you have to do, which is insane because you're the person who is wronged. Why should you have to heal? Why can't someone else do it for you? Yeah. A lot of my beliefs come back to the idea that it would be very comforting if someone could do it for me. We do. And yet, it must not be possible because if someone could do it, then I would have found someone and made them do it by now. God, I wish. That's how I feel about guardianship, which I used to work in guardianship law. And I was like, man, all these people are really fighting for their freedom, but I want somebody to make my doctor's appointments, apply for insurance, feed me. Yeah. And someone who you can trust implicitly, which is the hardest part of all that. Well, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? But it feels like that we have the second report where like as Americans in 1975, having just gone through the 60s, you know, we're like the FBI is like, you know, conspiring to try and drive MLK to suicide, you know, or is that the CIA? All of the above. I mean, but like it's arguably a more fraught time or it certainly reached a more fraught moment than it was in 1963, because you think of 1968 being before now, certainly the pinnacle of domestic unrest. And so if there was mistrust in 1963, there certainly was. Or at least there was in very recent memory when this, this second select committee convenes, they do have one piece of evidence, which is audio from a police motorcycle that was shortly thereafter debunked by a ballistic acoustics examination by the National Academy of Sciences that said it didn't support there being a second shooter. And we'll get to, I think I briefly mentioned last time that acoustics in an urban environment, especially one that amounts to a bowl made of different buildings of different consistencies, really tricky. And that was the only piece of evidence that they really pointed to as new second shooter proof. Okay. Well, that's pretty good. Yeah. And that's there just like a lot of echo, you know, in that kind of a landscape. Yeah. And echo that isn't standard, like you have buildings of different densities, heights, moving pieces of matter that are also messing with the acoustics. Like the first episode of monk was kind of about, oh my god, yeah, the, when they shoot the politician. Yes. Yeah. The premiere event. Yeah. Opening episode of monk. Yeah. You're totally right. And it's in a bowl like it's. Yeah. Wow. That was who we needed. He's still around. Maybe he can help us. Someone turns up at Tony Shaloub's house at nine in the morning, like, please. Please. You're the only one who can save us. God. You're only hope. Yeah. Peter Falk is not around. So it's up to you. And you know what? Peter Falk is actually the source of a lot of guardianship regulations in New York because apparently there were some estate abuses. Yeah. Yeah. We do awful things to old people when we want their stuff. I feel like I don't know. I don't, I can't really tell anyone to talk about something more because there's so much to be talking about that we apparently all should be talking for eight, eight hours a day because we're out. Why we all have podcasts now. But yeah, it's, I would love to see like Colombo at the Trump White House. You know. Oh, Jesus. Oh. That'll be so comforting. Just six, you know, exclaiming about how fancy all that, all the, all the, all the, all the. To God. All room. Monk would need so many hand wipes too. No. Mike would not be able to. I want all the, all the handshaking for a start. Oh, disgusting. If you're inspired by these prompts, don't ask AI to do it for you. Drink a big glass of water and write it yourself and then do a play in your yard. Thank you. Drink the same amount of water that AI would use to create the scenario. So, yeah, that, that's our post-warren rumor fodder fuel. All right. And yeah, I guess the thing of them being like, well, I guess there could be a second shooter that does feel like, you know, a compromise where it's like what people maybe, I don't know. I don't think anything could have stopped it. But maybe what people needed more was for the government, what, like for the, whoever's writing this report to be like, you know, the federal government has really done some scary things. Yeah. You all over the past 12 years and yet we didn't do this. But instead, it's kind of like, yeah, it does feel like if the idea was to compromise with that, then that goal does not seem to have succeeded. Yeah. I feel like the more worthy compromise would have been, don't re-examine this one thing that you arguably got mostly right the first time you did it. Right. But like, maybe actually apologize for the things you did do that harmed people in this same period. Yeah. And FBI, by the way, trying to kill MLK. Yes. So then we get to our second wave rumor fodder as I like to call it second wave. I kind of designated as such because a lot of it is more fruitfully disproven by forensic testing and not necessarily because it didn't exist at the time, right? So there's a lot of stuff, especially about the ballistics and second shooter acoustics because the question was always out there and some evidence was always out there. But I find the recent testing to be more compelling. So what are some rumors that you are aware of that are intermixed in this conspiracy? Are you aware of any that stand out? I feel like I'm not as KFK literate, perhaps, is because I should be. But yeah, then we've gone over maybe the stuff that I've heard about, because the second shooter is we've been talking about, right, this idea that we got summed up in JFK that like the bullet could, you know, travel in such a direction that it could not possibly have been fired by just one person from one angle, the idea that it's like some government agency is somehow behind it, although it's hard to say why or who or which one. Yeah. Aside from that, I really, yeah, I don't know, because I've just like, I've never found it super compelling. And I also got to say like, I don't think I'm super smart or anything like there's a lot of things that I do not understand. But with this one, I've just never been tempted. Not sold. Yeah. Well, maybe a good place to start is recapping some of the early autopsy mistakes that I think were just so compounded upon. Yeah. Let's get into that. We have Dr. Earl Rose is the medical examiner in Dallas County. And he is supposed to, and they mentioned this in JFK, the movie, they say he's illegally taken from Dallas. And like we mentioned last time, like, it's a, like a separation of powers kind of issue because Dallas law says that the county Emmy should perform a autopsy, but also this is the president. So you have federal law kind of clashing with that. The Secret Service acting on demands of the Kennedy's really wants to take him back to DC instead. It almost comes to blows. No, boy. We take him on Air Force One, the coffin doesn't fit. So they have to chop off the handles to shove him into the plane. Wow. Just messy. But they get him to DC. And the question of an autopsy is again raised because, like we mentioned before, a forensic autopsy is really critical in bullet murders, especially before we had all this modern testing. So the Kennedy and Dr. Oz doesn't really get the difference from forensic pathologists and regular autopsy technicians, and since he's a Navy man, they take him to Bethesda. That's fine. It's a random hospital pathologist, he's a military guy and they'll follow orders. In Dallas, they had given him a tracheotomy for a breathing tube and that masked an exit wound in the throat. So in the autopsy report, we have one bullet entrance wound in the back without an exit wound, but no bullet inside. So that's the first problem. They also weren't shown the clothing in DC as they would have been required to an forensic autopsy, but that was left on the stretcher in Dallas. And that also would have shown blood on his collar that showed that something exited there. And that's just because of the fact of, you know, having an autopsy hundreds of miles away from where the crime took place and why we don't typically do that maybe because it's nice to have the evidence all where you need it. And also, like, we don't usually do things on such a time crunch, especially then, except that they wanted him to lie in state and God forbid anything getting away. Yeah. And it is like, it's such a strange thing, you know, for anybody, you know, just in this case where like your body You know in many ways is you like is the person who is just died and it's also now almost all the evidence He will ever be able to use. Yeah, so this basically means that his autopsy report was finished without the body Itself because they had to get him to the capital Wow, and it also was not finished with the Revelation that there was a bullet in his jacket on the stretcher. Yeah, autopsy had like TKs in it They're like we're just almost done. It's getting it's 90% done. Can you imagine this poor military Pathologist just like no, I cannot I imagine him is just a very unfortunate man. He's got a ham sandwich in his pocket You know, he tries to get a piece of tape and accidentally wings himself in the forehead Jesus like the worst 12 hours of my life sweat and this is my John candy character. Yeah, and probably a lot less Amiable, I don't know. Yeah, he basically finishes on assumptions because they also take the photos away for discretionary reasons So this is the first grain of real forensic conspiracy because this report concludes that there are two bullets because they didn't have that Third one that was left on the stretcher. Right, and they couldn't see the exit wound because it was covered by a tracheonomy Yes, so now we have like early conflicting evidence, and that's also going to feed the magic bullet nonsense there's also some fuel about the number of shots and Zapruder frames that they use in the report. I think that's a little dry So I'll just say that like They were able and many experts over the years have been able to replicate the number of shots in the amounted time with the same weapon So that is compelling enough to me. Yeah, that brings us to the magic bullet. This is the big one. Oh boy. Are you ready for this? Yeah, please tell us all I'm I'm ready to go back and to the left and back and left again. I assume Well, you explain what the magic bullet problem is because this is kind of a tongue-in-cheek name that is given to a bullet that presumably can't do this Yeah, well, I understand it mostly from from Seinfeld, obviously, where we have the magic luge with Keith Hernandez But the idea being that like if you are to believe that the bullets were only fired from the book depository that they like took a path That was physically impossible based on where they were supposed to have been fired from and therefore there had to have been a Second shooter on the grassy-null or the the gravely road and guess this idea that like if you examine the trajectory of what's happening on this film that you can prove it to yourself with your own eyes Which is very compelling, I think to people in terms of theories within a bigger conspiracy theory and of course you polish it off with the phrase now that is one magic luki Is it ever I just sent you a couple of photos that help illustrate this in the Warren Commission and this is why modern forensics are so helpful They literally had to figure out the bullets path with like metal rods so the top left photo is them sitting in the car holding these like long metal dowels trying to figure out where the bullet. Okay, that's very cute. Isn't that funny? So there's also like a common drawing that conspiracy theorists use that has governor Connolly seated directly in front of JFK because that's a lot of Disource of this issue such as it is is like The same bullet that hit JFK also hit governor Connolly and if he was sitting right in front of him it would have to bend its path Okay, yeah, then you look at the actual photo of how they're seated It's pretty obvious that Connolly is seated to the left and in the front of Kennedy. Oh It's left and to the front. Maybe Connolly did it. But this is the kind of thing where it's like yeah, you have a theory that hangs is on Misunderstanding information or on, you know, incomplete information incorrect assumptions. Yeah, exactly. It's like you know where it's like well if someone's in front of someone in a car then they're like Exactly lined up with them every time and it's like well that really both pieces of this make so much sense to me It makes so much sense how you would assume that the drawing of directly in front of somebody else that that would be what you assume But then it's also so easy to disprove that piece right by just looking at a photo Yeah, and I guess this whole thing is like an early test case in a way of like how people Who are committed to a theory respond to contradictory information? We have a lot of examples of this that's kind of how doomsday cults work where like when the doomsday doesn't come it often makes people dig in deeper they just added it right or it's Yeah, find a new a new theory that explains it and in this case it's like yeah, we can really see at work here in all this the way people will If you know if they've got that sunk cost fallacy in place maybe We'll figure out how to just lay another theory on top of the original theory to compensate for whatever holes someone might appear to poke in it Yeah, and part of what went into the conspiracy itself I just sent you another photo of the bullet itself Because this also plays into it. There's the fact there are seven wounds altogether Which is the way that they put it to To amplify how much damage they presume this bullet should have it's like seven wounds. Well, okay It hit JFK in the back goes out his tracheotomy spot essentially Then it goes through the back of Connelly's chest comes out chatter is a bone in his wrist and then embeds in his thigh Yeah, so it hits a couple things Only like two of them being bone But you look at the bullet because they did recover this bullet and it's pretty Undamaged at least if you look at it from the side, but if you look at it head on You can see some squeezing and so that will get to with the ballistic testing and I think that's super Fun to look at if we're ready to go there. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Basically. They said it was too pristine that if something Hit seven wounds worth of flesh. Right. It would be Destroied and again, it's like I would really want to know how many Bullets who have been through this. Yeah, come on basic, you know Who have had this kind of a trip? How many of those have you seen and what kind you know? What's your baseline? Because again the establishment of the baseline of what you would expect to see based on some Statistically meaningful number of examples like that's what we want in any field because I think There is an anecdotal image that you see even brought out in the the JFK movie of memory serves of another bullet that hit Something else and it was more destroyed. It's like, okay, but it was it the same type of bullet was it this full metal jacket and Soft center. Did it hit the same types of materials? Was it as old had it been stored in the same conditions even? Yeah, exactly and I think that's why this testing is so so helpful because they literally mimic The number of surfaces and what they were made of and they do multiple tests of Okay, first it's flesh then it's fabric then it's bone then it's yada yada and they actually Prove that this is how a bullet behaves multiple times So that's what they they do in this Nova documentary. Oh fact, I love it. I'm so great Yeah, so then we test how did this happen? So this Nova documentary. It's this father-son duo I believe the last name was Hague or Hague and this had not been previously done Not for any who've like the many books and studies done on the Kennedy assassination, which is wild They do two more tests with muscle and tissue Simulance out of ballistic soap and ballistic gelatin. Do we want to explain what those are? I would love that. Yeah, because I'm not familiar with those I think my knowledge stops at the point when I think like in the like the infancy of Holistics testing we were using dead pigs and presumably this is like yeah farther down the road than that So ballistic soap apparently is is basically the same texture as like Neutrogena soap that amber colored nice Yeah, they never mention that in the ads. We can do this at home, but don't It's I guess the same texture as flesh changes my feelings about Neutrogena a little bit positive or negative positive But you're not sure I'm gonna think on this. So what that one does is it freezes the whole the trajectory of the path in The shape of the path and then the ballistic gelatin Mm-hmm is also a same texture to go through to flesh and and muscle But that cavity opens and then collapses. So you got some variation. Okay, so this is a really fun part They try it with two people's worth of ballistic muscle and tissue Simulance and You get this phenomenon over and over that the bullet starts to tumble it gets this yaw to the path So when it hits the Kennedy Simulant it has a straight path. It's going straight on Front is front back is back hits him goes through straight Once it exits Kennedy though every time it starts to yaw and it starts to kind of tip on its axis when it's spinning Meaning that when it hits Connolly it's hitting him long ways. Oh Yeah, wow and does that maybe save him from worse injuries? It actually shatters his wrist because it means that the full side of the bullet But it hits his wrist. You know, I just, I look like, well it's so scary. Yeah, that's my thought, yeah, pretty much that. But it also explains why, as you see in that photo, it's undamaged from the, if you look at it long ways, but if you look at the tip, it's made oblong in the way that you were talking about because it's hitting from the side. And when they examined Connelly's wrist, there were actually bits of that soft lead squeezed out into his wrist. So that really is consistent with the inner bit under the, the full metal jacket, having squeezed out. Wow. Yeah. And we're just so horrifying. And also is the kind of thing that the average person or even the average expert in ballistics, without having done testing on this specific scenario, just would not anticipate, you know, there's no way to either verify or debunk without doing that. They have a witness panel, what they call a witness panel that kind of stamps the position of the bullet when it stops, like a ghost image of where it hit. And it also shows each time that it is in a yawing sideways position when it exits JFK. So that really corresponds with the bullet that was eventually recovered from the stretcher. It's an unmatched tip, but if you look at it long ways, like hot dog position, it, it's squeezed out at the tip in the back. So that to me fully explains magic bullet. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I buy it. I don't need more than that because I just, I feel like, unless I'm someone who has experience with this like all the time, like people getting shot in a row and a moving vehicle from far away, I'm not going to assume that I know what should happen, you know, but I understand that it gives us a sense that we have a better grasp on just the laws of physics and so on in the forces governing our world than we maybe do have. Yeah, maybe that's part of it assuming that this is so cut and dried because we all have skin. We all have seen fast things. But frankly, like, if you look at Garrison and I'd say he's like the best personified version, we're all constantly shooting two people right one in front of the other. We all know what that's like. Am I right, ladies? Hey, but like the version of the magic bullet argument that I have heard frequently is not anything comparably scientific. It's just like, you're telling me that hits seven surfaces, right? And that's kind of it. And it's like, yeah, yeah, if you do the test and it starts to yaw and so the damage is hot dog ways, yeah, I buy that. And also the flag wasn't flying on the moon, not because they faked it and there was wind but because they didn't want to limp flag. They thought ahead. They prepared a flaccid flags. So we, I think we've put the magic bullet to bed. I'm sold on that one. Yeah, it's all tucked in. It's got like a sleep, the less of white noises playing, it's good. It's oozing lead from its tip as a good bullet should. Yeah, I don't know why everyone underestimated you. Bullets can do terrible things and you sure did. Raise your bullets to think they can do anything, even seven wounds. Sorry, this is how I cope. I don't know. Raise your bullets to have poor self esteem, I guess. Raise your bullets to say, uh, how I can stay in bed today. Honestly, that's probably better. The second one that we have is the location and second shooter nonsense. And one thing that I noticed that was really interesting was in the life magazine version. So this is like early in the process, 1964, but after the report, there's a lot of debunking of this premise of a second shooter being on an overpass. And that's something that I don't really hear anymore and I wonder if it's because it was so comprehensively debunked by the fact they have so many witnesses, like the police were patrolling that overpass, there were some railway men, everybody was interviewed. And the grassy knoll is kind of close to the overpass, so I really suspect that once that was so definitively disproven, people were like, okay, so maybe it wasn't the overpass. But I bet it was the grassy knoll. And if that's the case, that to me proves how piecemeal these theories have become, that it's just like, all right, fine, that one doesn't work, but I bet something was off. Like Jack McCoy, we need a new thing to fixate on. Exactly. So if we actually listen to facts at debunk location, we have to sub in a new one, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing with both of those locations that they are in the right front. So if you're looking at that footage and it looks like he goes back into the left, that's a primo spot to place your second shooter theory is somewhere in the right front. Now the life magazine and Warren report assessment talked about how this overpass was sealed off. It was monitored, yada yada. You can look up the witnesses that were deposed and it was easily disproved. The one interesting thing that came from that is how inconsistent the witness accounts were. And they don't all say that it sounds like it comes from the grassy knoll area by any means, but some people say it sounded like it was either the depository or the overpass. And then somebody says it was definitely the depository and then somebody says it was definitely the overpass. So it's very clear that there are really messed up acoustics going on because there's no consistent account regardless of where it is. So you guess really can't find anything to cling on to maybe? Yeah. And you also can't find anything to not cling on to if that makes sense. Like there's always going to be conflicting accounts of the acoustics here. Right. The Nova documentary, I feel like this is one that's especially better to hear and see rather than hear a description of, but they use this like bullet travel photography and sound wave photography. So it's kind of hard to describe it, but they do like these echo reflections. Oh, wow. Yeah, I want to see that. We can put a link to that. Yeah, essentially what it does is it shows how you hear two sounds from one shot. And I guess that's all a really complicated way of proving that there is an echo in this location. Right. Which again, it's like is highly believable, but again, it's nice to have proof. Yeah, you've got a lot of hard surfaces, which are really good for conducting echoes. You have, again, they describe it like a bowl. So there's no place where you're not going to get an echo. Right. Like that Hollywood bowl, if you will. Yeah. Different, Tomber of different materials like the asphalt has something different than building. And I know it's like, I get that I think it is scary to hear that like you can't always trust your immediate perceptions, but you can trust forensic testing that is done afterward and I find that extremely empowering, but like if something is confusing based on our immediate data, we can get more. And maybe what it is is that like some folks, and I think I've reached this point, I think you've reached this point, are comfortable and have come to terms with the fact that they don't know what they perceive necessarily. Yeah. I'm comfortable with the fact that I can't always trust my senses, but I'm also comfortable that we can critically analyze facts through reliable testing, and that can be my consistent metric. I like that. I find that a lot more soothing than the idea that the entire government teamed up somehow, but only the one time because they famously can't get along to do anything that helps us. Right. I know. Like they're impudent with everything else, but they also worked together and with Cuba. But when they want to ruin our lives, they're incredible. Yeah. And it's like, there is a lot of efficiency to life ruining, but it's not because people are colluding usually because people are executing a very, very secret plan. Usually when people are conspiring to do something horrible, they don't have to try that hard to keep it a secret. And we have a lot of examples of that in our lives right now. Right. Exactly. But that's what I mean, I think I said towards the beginning that part of what is convincing about this review of evidence to me is that there's so much scientific explanation on one side. And the conspiracy side is basically, you know, the depth of their argument is, that doesn't make sense. That's not how I think it would look. It's like, well, yeah. Maybe that's true. The magic bullet. Maybe they don't know. Yeah. Saying like, are you telling me that bullet hit seven things? I don't think so. And then this one back into the left. Are you telling me he got shot and from the back into the left and he's going back into the left? I don't think so. But that's it. Yeah. It's great to have not everything make sense to you. It shouldn't all make sense to you, you know, the fact that we have the ability to learn more than we knew before is one of the greatest things about being a human being, I think. And we should enjoy it. Yeah. How boring if your brain and your existing knowledge and your initial sensory perceptions is your only source of information. Yeah. Like, there's so much more out there. And I think this is so interesting because I didn't know these things. But also, as it's being described, it makes total sense that, yes, there is a bullet moving faster than sound pressing through the very soft comparatively matter of your brain within a confined space. That's going to push out very quickly. And the lift force, they also mention of the Carcano bullet. It kind of takes a curved path upwards. So they do get even more specific on if anybody's interested in picking this apart and watching what they do. It's a great documentary. Plus always subscribing to your local PBS station is a great thing to do. But the point is that we have a really consistent pattern that matches his skull shatter pattern. And they also did find that bullet, the pieces of it in his brain and in the car. And those are more consistent with it moving forward from the back than from the position of the grassy knoll. And then we get to the last thing which is the movement of his body specifically. And this is the most interesting part that I don't know if you can explain even like without the knowledge. So this pressure wave in the brain that we're talking about from the bullet passing through it. That also kind of explains the backwards force on his body because it stimulates the nerves. Your spinal cord enters at the bottom of your brain at the brainstem. And that connects to your entire system of nerves. So when there's this pressure wave in his brain, it stimulates his nerves and the back muscles on everybody are stronger than our abdominal muscles. So when every nerve in the body is stimulated and all your muscles tense, your back is stronger than your front. So you pull and you tighten backwards. It's similar to like how dinosaurs look in fossils. How they're kind of like rearing backwards. Oh my gosh. I know, right? And I remember learning that that's because like as they died and decomposed and whatnot that their spinal cord like dried and shortened and pulled everything in the same way. So there's actually a name for this in emergency medicine that my mom and cousin knew and I think a lot of people in the medical field know. And it's called deserabrit posturing. And that occurs in all sorts of scenarios when somebody's nerves fire in the same way. And the way that they describe deserabrit posture is your legs extend straight out and get rigid, your head and neck arch back. And your body kind of pulls towards the back. So that's what happened to his body. You know, his brain was damaged. It affected his nervous system. And then he went into a deserabrit posture and you see that happen in the video. So that's not the force of the shot. That's very sad. The whole thing. I think that like when you learn the details of it, you get closer to the sadness. And I kind of I kind of think that one of the uses of conspiracy theories is to distract from the sad parts of things because you're like there's no time to be sad. We're on the hunt for who really did this. And it's like what if it's just what if we know and we have to get to the part where we're sad now? I think I agree with you and I wonder if that's part of maybe some of this psychological impulse behind wanting there to be another step to the investigation of like, I can't sit with this. So let's keep moving. Look, as a country, we'd never been able to see this much death and destruction. You know, no human being had, you know, the kind of age of media that's done in the fact that we're at the beginning of America's involvement in the war in Vietnam and that we're going to be seeing it for the next 10 years. I don't know. This is sort of it feels like we're at the beginning of this process of being changed by what we're we're asked to witness bizarrely. But I feel like we're all we all know where this is going. I'm going to reference the new documentary on America's next top model where it feels like the kind of right where I've been consuming that too. It's all very upsetting. Everyone should buy Sarah Hartzhorn's new book about her experience as a plus night's contestant on Antium. Yeah. Well, and you know, and I and it talks about, you know, the episode with Shandy which was called to everybody as a cheating story. And of course, was a sexual assault story. And they filter through it. Yeah. Yeah. And the sort of this way that media, especially of that type, likes to blame the audience for what they're doing. And you know, it comes up in this as well where they're like, well, you wanted this. And it's like, I don't think your audience of 15-year-old girls told you to do that. And no, it's a bit much for you to be blaming the audience here traumatizing for the things that you chose to traumatize them with. But that's like the great American tradition of media. I think a big question there also, even if it were true. And I don't want to minimize your point because as I was watching it with a friend of mine who we used to love watching the show. But we both talked about, you know, I never hated this about myself until I saw people being called, you know, ugly or overweight or whatever for looking better than I did, you know, in a Western beauty sense better. Oh yeah. And that like the point of the show is to make pretty girl suffer, you know? That was like, we know that was the pitch. Absolutely. But then also you have to ask, like, who bears the responsibility of being the guardrail? Is it the watchers or is it the creator? And I think it's the creator. I agree. Yeah, because I think if you're watching something, like the power is with the network and with Tyra. Yeah. And maybe not all Tyra herself, but what she represents and the people she's working with. I think the thing is we know the industry sucks. So their bad behavior doesn't surprise us. And like we expect more from a woman of color because she had been through this type of discrimination. So it's like she's getting damned by the higher standard she's held to. And like she was kind of selling herself as a bit of a matriarch figure. But it was like, and I think that's part of why it felt so gross is because it was like, she's like, I'm on your side, but I'm also very sadistic. Yeah. Have fun with that. But yeah, just to say that like it feels like Americans sort of being shown the Kennedy assassination in a way like up close in a way that we hadn't witnessed this kind of violence before really. And then having to figure out what to do with that. I don't know. I get that it was a bit much. And it's a bit much, you know, it will always be a bit much, I hope, for us. And I also think that there's kind of this like essential innocence that these theories like for as much trouble as they've caused and for as annoying as I find sort of this attitude of being allergic to the truth. Like, I don't know, I do feel fondness for this, what it feels like reveal, it reveals as the sense of like, but nothing this, this senseless and sad can ever really happen, right? And it's like, oh no, it sure did. Yeah, I think, I think we also have to hold the JFK movie to account because I really think that's where another generation that could have at that point been introduced to things like forensic testing. Oliver Stone is like Paul Verhoeven. He's like too good at being a film maker, so his movies are full of like the stupidest ideas imaginable, but it likes, you kind of feel smart while you're watching it. And it's that same idea of, you know, it pairs with reality television a little bit of, is this factor? Is it fiction? And if you're pairing the two, you got to be really careful about making it clear with something of this caliber importance. Yeah. Where the fiction line is. And the movie really is kind of pointing a finger at the US government. Yeah. And three, right back at Oliver Stone. And right, like immediately post Reagan, that came out not immediately, but like pretty quickly thereafter. Yeah. And then we had an inter-bush. Yeah, but he counts as Reagan, because that's where he originated. He's kind of a soft Reagan hangover. Yeah. He didn't get us too far from Reagan, but like that government mistrust, I think, was sewn so calculatingly by Reagan and Thatcher. And then you have something like this coming on the heels of it. That's interesting. You know, it's got to, yeah, the fodder is right there. But do we want to talk about speaking of government blame because it is blame. But again, less conspiracy, more stupidity. Should we get to the actual cause of how this was allowed to happen? Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So this is another one that I hadn't heard how clear the missteps and the errors were that caused this. You know, I heard grassy knoll 75 times, but I'd never heard what actually allowed Lee Harvey to do this. So there is a mandatory channel between the secret service and the FBI before an event like this that allows them to communicate that in this case never existed. It was never established. Oh, good. Yeah, it was never maintained. So per the Warren commission, at the time, the secret service had a really archaic record system. And it only tracked people who had already made express threats against the president. So that, you know, this is always tricky to categorize people in the other way. But like it didn't keep track of violent people. It didn't keep track of extremists. It didn't keep track of groups that had made threats and then individuals who are members of that group. So think of like how few people would have actually come out and said in the Dallas area that I want to do this, there was nobody on that list. Right. But the FBI did have files on the Harvey Oswald because of his membership in these broader groups. But the FBI didn't have that channel with the Secret Service for this particular event, so they had no input from the FBI. So that's that. That's it. Yeah. If they had, they would have had the Harvey Oswald's name ahead of time. How did that feel to you to find out after all this time? It feels so definitive. And it fits so much with I think what a lot of us have learned about government bureaucracy. You know, I said at the beginning that I worked for the government. I also left the government because the bureaucracy was just mind numbing and it's the too many cooks problem that you have so many people with power and competence and sometimes that's an issue. It's why the founders thought we should have a single executive because eventually you need the buck to stop with somebody. Now the person it is right now is terrifying, but like never stopped a buck in his life. Yeah. And then of course you get into taxes funding that yada yada, but like, oh my gosh, there was a communication channel that nobody ever set up. And if they had, they would have had this guy's name like is literal information, but they didn't do that. So whoops. What is in this also like one of, I don't know, part of the kind of whole 9/11 truth or conspiracy is like the government had information, you know, winning them of a possible terrorist attack and didn't follow up on it. So they knew. And it's like, no, they just, you know, got sloppy like always, you know? Yeah. And like the fact that that is implausible to people is wild for the very reason that you're pointing out, you know, it happened again, X number of years later. So I don't know how do you feel about that? I mean, it feels like the missing puzzle piece where you're like, oh my gosh, of course, there it is. That's the old mill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or it's like, yeah. Of course, we fumbled that because it and also like, you know, not to be like, I of course would run perfect security for a sitting president because even if you're running an incredibly tight ship, these kinds of things, I think can happen. Yeah. I think so. Right. You do have these breaks and insecurity or instances of human error, no matter what. I think that this was not a particularly tight ship for so many of the reasons we've talked about. But even if it was, you know, a human error accounts for so much. I mean, again, it's like if you believe in these, in a conspiracy theory where everyone is sort of working in perfect lockstep and not making any mistakes, then like, why do I keep leaving my coffee in the bathroom and not being able to find it until hours later? You know, I mean, we know we're imperfect. I think there's that and this will connect to our end discussion on conspiracies in general. But I really find that a lot of folks, especially a political folks or are people without a really strong understanding of the government tend to assume that there is some greater protective capacity that exists. I think that probably is soothing to think that somebody is like does have the ability to prevent this from happening and thus the very fact that it happened is proof that somebody is conspiring like that is soothing because then it means that the only way that something bad can happen is if somebody intentionally wants it to versus like, ah, geez, even the top of the country can fumble it to a fatal degree. Yeah. Which is like, at a certain point, that feels like a belief in a deity. It is. Yeah. Or like, you know, if I end up, you know, pinned under a boulder, I know that it will cross my mind of like, God, you can't allow this, right? This is a bit much. Help me, God. And God will be like, oh, I either don't exist or don't like to intervene in things really. Or I might give you an idea, but I certainly won't lift that rock off of you. Yeah. To feel like somebody like sky daddy is looking out, um, this, yeah, that's soothing. Yeah. And we'd rather have evil sky daddy than no sky daddy. Exactly. Exactly. And I think you can even see that with what people want from their president. Like, do people want a dictator who, even if they're bad, at least has all control, which of course, we know being a dictator doesn't make you infallible by any means. So like, even those people make really stupid choices, but you can, you can fool yourself for a while. But you can tell, yeah, and you can certainly tell the people, but that's better than having to take a hand in your own defense kind of by voting and staying informed and all that good stuff. But, um, so I figured we could wrap up the JFK specific theories with the fact that they're like per a very recent poll, like within the last 10 years, most Americans do believe that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK, but, and this is just as important, I think. I'm excited for the butt. There's no agreement at all on who and why. So come on, you guys got it together. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, like, there's no way we could ever cover all the permutations of theories. And I'm sure we haven't hit them all, but there's like the anti-Mofia RFK angle. But that kind of requires Ruby to be involved because otherwise there's no teamster connection. And this is that RFK is going after the, the Mafia to my action. His capacity is attorney general. Yeah. That like, it was some retaliatory thing that they decided to enact on the more difficult person to target. Yeah. Which again, and I have the same question about that as I do interestingly about astral world, because that if I want to kill someone as a satanic sacrifice or, you know, to stop a crack down on organized crime, why would I do it in front of as many witnesses as I can possibly find? Yeah. And of the two, you think like there's the president and then there's RFK. Who's the easier one to kill, probably not the one with secret service protection. And then it's also unclear to me what incentive the FBI would have to cover all this up. Well. Yes. I don't even think I'm that sensible of a person. It's just that the conspiracy theories don't appeal to me. And I'll cling to that in order to compensate for, you know, my, my flights of fancy elsewhere. But okay. Yeah. That organized crime thing. It's again, it's like, don't you think they would be better at killing someone if that's kind of like a big, you know, big part of the job? I don't know. Yeah. More secretly too. Like, exactly. All M.O. was, was pretty different and also the person they're actually going after is opposed to, you know, his brother, who's the president anyway. And I kind of feel the same way with the CIA involvement theory. Again, we have no positive evidence that really holds water because what I think we all have to remind ourselves of when examining these things is that really all the theories are based on motive and violent propensity. And then from there, you kind of imagine a scenario. And it's not a really testable, justishable theory with the information that we have to create all of these conspiracy theories. And you think of, for example, like when an investigation gets to this scale and notoriety of whoever would have done it, like, you got to take even confessions with a heavy grain of salt. Because think of how many people have said something like, I want to kill the president. I mean, it's been known to be said. Yeah. That's a far cry from actual evidence of a conspiracy. So like even the evidence that they lean on is not the type of evidence that connects Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, right. It feels like the evidence against the CIA is basically like, well, just look at them. And it's like, yeah, that's fair. Yes. Exactly. It's propensity. But what's the incentive for them to kill the president of all people as opposed to just, you know, trying to drive colleagues students insane or whatever they're up to? Yeah. I mean, the agency wasn't allowed full confidentiality in the investigation, a, and then you also think with what we've learned about what the CIA was doing at that time, again, more through their goals than what they actually achieved in many cases. Like they were trying to learn to create citizens' soldiers. They failed, but they wanted to do this. They had a lot of freedom is the bottom line. Like under that administration, I understand, you know, with the Bay of Pigs, and there's a lot of-- Do they had carte lunch to quote Philly Boy Roy? Yeah. Like, even with the conflicts that they had gotten into, like this administration gave them a fair amount of freedom. And do we know that they wouldn't be posed to lose it under LBJ? Well, yeah. That's a good point. I mean, they kind of, you know, how it seems like they have a pretty sweet deal at the moment. Yeah. Just like, if you can't give me a motive and like a sentence or less, then like, I don't know, that feels like the most important part. Something beyond these are shadowy groups known to do violent things, which seems to be the basis for all of the theories, which is that's a place to start an investigation. Yeah. But again, you know, famously take on powerless people as often as possible, because they like to punch down. Yeah. Exactly. Like, they weren't really investigating on the administration. It's military members or smaller countries yet. And this maybe connects us to the new release of documents, which I want to say happened last year under President Trump, which-- Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of JFK himself, has called the false reinvestigation, like he's come right out and said that it was pointless. And there really was not any new information. We got some additional details of like other CIA operations, like the Poison Sugar idea to kill Castro, Trujillo involvement. They were spying on France, but there really wasn't anything new about JFK. The only thing that they added to like personnel details, and this also fits with the administration that released it, is they exposed a whole bunch of social security info and birth dates of still living military members. Oh good, that's nice. Yeah, like they just unsealed a whole bunch of documents, and some of those people are still alive, so they just made identity theft more likely for military members and government employees. Again, it's exactly their type of thing, you know, to your point. Thank you. Great job. It also smacks of the Epstein file release that Bondi gave those binders without any tangible information, because we know they have been holding onto that pretty tightly, but it looks like we're doing something, so let's do the little dance. The only last thing I have with the Kennedys is like the idea of the Kennedy curse. Oh yeah, well yeah, tell me, tell us about that. Kennedy curse, real or not so real. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting, right? Like it's a family that for all its power and control has been hit with what seems like a disproportionate amount of tragedy, and I say scenes, and as I'm saying it, like also being from an Irish Catholic family, you do have a lot of death from both addiction and just sheer volume. Like a few of seven kids in my mom's family, you're gonna be more likely to lose one than if you had just one. I don't know, it feels like a numbers game potentially. But most recently, Tatiana Schlossberg, who also was a granddaughter of JFK, died of some super rare untreatable cancer, and she was in her 30s, I think, and then from the beginning of the JFK generation, his older brother, who's being polished to be the golden child politician, Joe Jr., he died. Yeah. You have this big family where it feels like, I don't know, to me, if there's a curse, it's the dysfunction that is inevitable. Maybe when your job is to perform the idea of a family, not just on a normal dysfunctional family level, like at church, but like on the national stage. Yeah. And the potential for I think addiction and mental health issues and just dysfunctional family dynamics to further entrench and multiply, because you're not allowed to ask for help. Yeah, like you add to that the fact that in a lot of Irish Catholic families, the mode of coping was repression and that maybe if there was some sort of venting of these feelings, it could have been easier, but you add national scale and repressive norms, nobody's ever getting better. So you quietly take substances or take risks, but then you also have, I should mention that Kathleen Kik also died, I believe in a plane to crash, the eldest sister of that JFK generation. And this is World War II related, right, because you have this like, you know, this deep vein of tragedy running through America and the Kennedys too. Yeah, I believe she was later, but junior was World War II. Yeah, because I was telling my a friend about the doing a Kennedy run down and I was like, well, John F. Kennedy is not a junior because he wasn't meant to be the heir. They had like a whole heir set up and then he died, and they were like, well, you'll do. Yeah. And it's kind of like the, or I guess the other direction, but the Bush family that GW Bush was not supposed to be the one who ascended to the throne for less tragic reasons was either one selected, but like that these political dynasties have the one that they polish up for performance, but then often the world gets in the way. And they got to put the backup son on the national stage instead. Your Roman Roy's, if you will, yeah, but the, so the Kennedys. Yeah, I'm like, not to say it's a self-inflicted curse, but you can see there's some clues as to where this is coming from, you know. Yeah, because it does get darker than in the next generation. Yeah. You have William Kennedysmith, who I guess was more grandson generation, but he was charged with rape. Because a trial we should talk about sometime, because this is like an appointment, yeah, media, and sexual assault trials is, well, not that we figured it out now, but we really didn't know what we were doing at the time, I think. We were just trying to think of something to do. Yeah. Yeah, what a nightmare of a time to have to be doing something like that. Yeah. But yeah, we start to see the Kennedy curse inflicted on adjacent women around this time. It seems like. Yes, exactly, because then you have chapequitic with Ted Kennedy, which really, it didn't seem to affect his career in the Senate, which is a little bananas. Or is it? I don't know. Like, look at where we are now. I mean, but there, but there was a period where it at least was surprising to keep your career going. Yeah. Despite crashing a car with a young woman in it and then leaving her to drown. Yep. And then lying about it to save your own ass, and maybe you could have helped if you even had called law enforcement when it first happened. Classic career, not ending move, but, um, right, but bruising a little bit. Yeah. And certainly now it smears his, well, smeared always has a connotation of falsely done, but like it colors his memory, certainly. But then you have Michael Kennedy, who first was in the headlines for probable statutory rape of their babysitter, Marissa Verrocki. And that I think I told you about this when I was listening to a podcast about the scatle murders, which are adjacent, but they talked about like a vodka sauna being a Kennedy family tradition. Come on. Where they all sit around hot rocks and they pour a bottle of vodka on the rocks. So they all absorb vodka through their skin. Like you can't trust rich people. And also that's really just like a very clubbed version of the like disordered teenage girl thing of like the tampon. The tampon. Exactly. I'm so glad I wasn't going to be the only person about that. Yeah. And tried it. But look, no, when you're in high school, you have these things in your back pocket because your parents hear about them and on PR and say Sarah, are you and your friends doing that? And you're like, well, not to this point. But now that you've told me about really nobody I've met has done that. But I guess the Kennedys are doing a version of it on family vacations together. So yeah. But then that guy, the statutory rapist, possible statutory rapist, it's unclear if their relationship started when she was 14 and started working for them or he said it was when she turned 16, which was the age of consent, how convenient he waited. Very nice. He died, though, in a ski accident. So cleaned itself up. Then another Joe Kennedy paralyzed a woman in his car. Her name was Pam Kelly. She's now a disability advocate or she might have died now, but she was. So good on her for making something better than anyone in the family did. And then David Kennedy, oh, did. And then there was the scapegold murders, which there's a bit of a question as to whether the RFK family member did it. Or if that was a false conviction. Yeah. But still, there's enough creepy stuff from that story. That's true. Something to look at if you wish to. Yeah. And you know, the regardless of ultimately what happened results had in the death of what a 14 or 15 year old girl, Martha Moxley. Yeah. And his, his alibi, if you will, and if you believe it, was that he was not murdering her, but he climbed up in a tree and was masturbating looking through her window. So that part is by his own word, true. So even if you take it in the light most favoring the scapegolds, yikes. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, I don't know. And now we, of course, have the, the Kennedy curse most visible in the form of RFK, the man who makes Kuregg, uh, Brewer's jealous. And, um, God, boy, yeah. And, uh, we all know, we're all here, but it's just exhausting. Sure is. And it's not that I don't think that he could have made it as far as he has as a regular insane person, because I think he's, um, saying the kinds of things that fit with the whole general anti-science vibe we have going on here, for sure. And, you know, and also, you know, creating like not, I'm making fun of the guy because he's very funny to me. But like, the fear that we are going to start, you know, putting neurodivergent people in internment camps is like I don't think that's an overblown one you know like I doubt that we that the guy government could figure out how to do that in a firefest kind of a way, but it's saving us is their incompetence. They're gross incompetence compared to say this administration that we were talking about, like they couldn't even get it together to that level of incompetence. Yeah, and just the sort, I don't know, the way this administration has fought so hard to repeal the progress that this country has made in terms of disability rights. It's clear that it's part of, it's clear, it's clear to me that this is part of a bigger and much scarier agenda and one that I do fear because it's cheaper to let your citizens die. Yeah. And we know how deeply everyone running this country currently is motivated by money and there doesn't have to be a more complicated mode of than that. That, you know, greed and ego and whatever other psychological profiles we have running a muck, but it's also you look at somebody like RFK Jr and you're like, I know that you ended up as the person you are partly because of your name and that you got this far because of it in my opinion and also maybe you could have had a chance to be more normal without it. And I just, you know, the purpose of a dynasty is to transfer power and to aggregate power. It's not really to produce healthy people. And I, yeah, I don't know if the Kennedy dynasty has succeeded on either account honestly at this point. Well, I think there's, there's a relativism, especially when you look at the likes of RFK Jr. that's worth mentioning because most of not all of the remaining Kennedy family that comes from the JFK line and much of it from his own line, the RFK line has spoken out against him. So it's like there are certainly degrees of dysfunction. Yeah, not to paint everyone with too broad of a brush because there are some candidates that you never hear about because they're reading a library book or something. Yeah, like Caroline Kennedy, I think, has done a wonderful job of quietly supporting important causes. Very shriver. Married shorts and egg are another curse. That's a weird move. But yeah, I don't love that. How's Chris Pratt for a son-in-law? More curse. That punishment enough. Yeah, but maybe fitting. I don't know what she's done, but she doesn't deserve that probably. But then you got to think like if you married Arnold shorts and egg are it's not that weird if your child picks Chris Pratt, you know what I mean? Yeah. God. That's not super out of pocket. But yeah, RFK junior then is pretty much on the outs with his whole family from what obviously what we see as lay people. I guess has Cheryl in the ostrich now. Disgusting. And she's also burning all her bridges even though he's sleeping with people, which is just embarrassing for her, but also kind of sad for her. Yeah, I don't know. I feel pity sometimes. Cheryl, you can still turn this around, I think. Maybe thousands would disagree with me, but well, then Tignitaro split with her. I guess they had a podcast, but from what Tignitaro has said, Cheryl has been really nasty about it behind the scenes. So you love to see a powerful shitty person who's also shitty in their personal life. I guess it's super weird, but damn, maybe the last sentence is that like, don't get too powerful and don't take it too seriously. And keep the no people around like because we're seeing the Yes Men syndrome. Yeah, that's the really big one. Yes. I, there is a great piece in the Atlantic about what the article is the new Rasputins, which I think is. Oh, good. Perfect. And apt, except I'd say that RFK junior has less of the rumored charisma that Rasputin had. Right. You see pictures of Rasputin. You're like, this guy had to have been. He's got to have something really persuasive. Yeah. He smelled amazing or something. Yeah. That can't be the case in that time period. Wasn't the face card. Yeah. But I mean, they talk about how something that I think all of us know to be the case, but like, they distill it into a reason that makes a lot of sense, but they talk about the anti-science mysticism and how it enables autocracy. And the quote that really stood out to me is one conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted. The evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too. And I was like, damn, that is so true. Like we're once we move away from truth and science and testing and experts in the field being the reliable parties. Of course, we don't have a reliable way of measuring guilt or elections. And like, these are things that we all know because we see the correlation, but the connection makes so much more sense. Put that way. Yeah. Well, I'm that, you know, that if the goal of power is because to maintain power and amass more power and to sort of create whatever arguments you need to turn order to make that happen, then like, I think you kind of, I don't know, I think we can see this in what we're living through right now, that like the logic maybe inevitably gets pushed toward rulership by divine right, you know, maybe not literally, but like in I think that's why they like him. Right. And that we're in a, you know, we're living in America's season in the prosperity gospel as really a pretty dominant religious discourse. And the prosperity gospel would suggest that the right person to be in control of all of our lives is somebody who's well, not made money technically, but managed to not lose all of the money that started out with at least. And it's like, I feel like so many people are trying to sort of express in a way that will affect people's thinking like, don't you see that the presidency is being used very cynically as like QPC basically and to make money on like crappy products that make no sense? And I think that maybe like for some people that isn't a problem, like maybe it feels good to be included in the prophet driven arm of democracy that way. I don't know because it's one of the only things we respect maybe. Or it fits with the sky daddy sort of worldview/political view of I have to assume that somebody has the power and can do something with the power because the alternative and any alternative that vests me like once we get to politics, you really do have a responsibility if there isn't a sky daddy and the country daddy controlling everything, like then you must vote, then you must stay informed. And that's, that's a big responsibility. Right. And then it becomes your job. Yeah. Yeah. And like not to get too religious necessarily, but we are talking about bunch of Catholics. It's like, religion can be the biggest cop out to doing good works, right? Because I think for a lot of people it can become like, well, God will do it. And it's like, don't make God do everything. You do it. If you think something is godly, then you give it a shot. Right. And the treatment of fallibility in how the institution of Catholicism and a lot of Christian religions have become is like, you can kind of just apologize at any point. And then you're all good. Yeah. So that can be a pretty carte blanche excuse to not live by say what Jesus wrote in the Bible or not wrote, but like is a leg to have said. Yeah. Living by those principles would be great. Like if all these people who are thumpin' on the book were actually living that way, that would be lovely. But yeah. Instead they'd rather fall behind a eugenicist, which weirdly eugenics and divine right, they really are two very similar concepts, huh? Huh. Yeah. I'm special because I'm special. Yes, it's all it's all gotten quite creepy. And I mean, of course, you know, our education makes us familiar with divine right, you know, through British and European monarchy historically, which is also inevitably, you know, a wing of white supremacy. Exactly. Because that was how power worked when you could take over a country by force and take all their stuff. I mean, people still do that. But you have to be a little bit more sophisticated about it. Well, and I'm glad you brought that up because I think we would be remiss not to shout out the other originators of this mistrust in the government because I think there's a subplot here of both sides almost idealizing small government. And it's easy to understand where that comes from even on the left when the executive is what it is right now. Yeah. We all hate the DMV. We all hate all this paperwork. Yeah. There's someone out there who likes the paperwork and good for them. And we see how scary a bad executive can be. But when Mamdani was sworn in, and I'm getting this through Robert Reich. So I'd trust him to report it well. But he said something like we have to get away from the idea of small government being the goal because government is necessary as a protective mechanism. And you think of things like the Americans with disabilities act. And I always use that as kind of the poster child of why regulation is necessary in that kind of refuting libertarianism way of thinking that companies and individuals, even with the best intentions, which is assuming a lot, they need something to hold them to what disabled people actually need. And obviously it's not perfect. And its application is flawed. But you need a government to do that to look out for the people. And that's what it should be. But with Reagan and Thatcher, you saw that government mistrust, so actively sewn. And then I was just listening to this guy who wrote a book on Ruby Ridge. And he was talking about the origin of that branch of anti government conspiracy. theorist mindset being so knit with white supremacy. So like remembering those origins when we idealize small government, I think, is prudent because the ideal is a government that protects us and that we participate in. Yeah, and this idea of maybe that sort of the basic flavor of American libertarianism is like, as an able-bodied white man, I have everything I need. Which I don't need, generally, isn't true either interestingly. I think a lot of the people who identify as the victories historically need the very things that government could provide them with. Absolutely. If everybody stopped voting against them all the time. But I kind of wonder if what people, because of course there's the issue of taxation. But I think there's also maybe in addition to that, sometimes when people say they want small government, what they mean is I want government, I don't have to see or think about all the time. Sure. And it doesn't inconvenience me. Which is a more reasonable thing to desire, you know, because I think that yeah, that's also a big difference. Like you need even more trust in who you're voting for if that is your goal. I choose to believe that people mean that some of the time. I don't know. I mean, and the point, I guess, ultimately to me, is that a healthy society is one that will afford protections to people even if they try to reject them or don't understand them. And I know that everyone's so worried about the nanny state. But like, that's what I want more than anything. Like I want a government that is able to know more than I do about a lot of the issues affecting my life and that I can trust to behave in, you know, the best interest of its citizens. And I think the feeling of betrayal people experience when they understand that's not happening. I don't know. I can see how that can manifest in wanting to throw the whole thing out. And I can see how that shows up in creating conspiracy theories. I think I just, I don't believe in another way out. So I have to stick it out with this one. Yeah. And I think even when, when people do get disillusioned with the nanny state not performing to their, to what they had hoped, is that with the conspiracy theorist bunch, they kind of get stuck in still thinking that the capacity to have this enormous power exists, but they're just not going to participate in it, which is weird internal logic. But like, it seems that there are two different branches of nanny state. There's the, what I kind of would be okay with the term aside of like protecting disabled people, knowing, say, let's use the FDA as an example, they know better what the ingredients that are safe are than I do, because I am not an expert in that. And I don't care if I want to get a beer with you. I want you to know this better than I do. That's a nanny I want. But then the pejorative version is like a level of power that people seem to assume the government already has if these conspiracy theories are true, which is like they can pull these strings and they are hypnotizing us. And in the book that I'm reading right now, the Naomi Klein book, doppelganger, she talks about defining conspiracy theories. And the context that she was talking about, I thought was really helpful that in COVID, we saw all of these tech companies and Amazon, et cetera, really benefiting from state home policies and profiteering opportunistic uses of like we're going to try our new technology, et cetera, et cetera. That's true. But then you had the next branch of people who took that reality and said, well, this must mean that Amazon and their ilk caused COVID. Yeah. And that's a bridge too far. And so like that was a fun one. Yeah. So the distinction that she adds to the definition of like the government and some cabal is involved in in some nefarious plan is that the accusations are also false and unproven. And I think you even mentioned making money being the motive. And it's why the Naomi Klein book says a political people tend to be the first ones to fall victim to these conspiracies because they don't tend to have a firm grasp on the mechanisms of capitalism. And when you understand that that's the motivator, no more no less, everything makes a lot more sense. Yeah. And I think it's you look at history and you're like, well, there's plenty of government cabals, you know, we talked about MK Ultra and that's like pretty much that, right? It's it's like a semi-secret bad thing that a bunch of people are involved in doing together. But but what we can see sort of throughout American history at least is that when you do have something that kind of fits the criteria of the kind of plot you imagine in a conspiracy theory, it's often I think being perpetrated by people who are working somewhat to entirely out in the open whose victims are disempowered within society and therefore who there's a very low chance of anyone trying to protect. Yeah. And doing so in a way that is kind of the people are at least somewhat aware of and that just doesn't really seem like a problem enough to anyone in power to to really stop it, you know, and that's scarier, you know, that is scarier. Yeah. But it's also nice to be able to accept information that you didn't think of all by yourself and to believe that even if you can personally get to the moon, maybe other people could. And also the evidence based piece because that that bit of the definition that the Naomi Klein book presented on on what's a capital C capital T conspiracy theory really helps me distinguish the things that are based on very little from the things that are scary and dark and large scale and from people who have more control than we do but are real. And she pointed out some examples like how Nazi propaganda was fundamentally contradictory. And that's often true in conspiracies. Nazi propaganda presented Jews as both greedy, which would fit with capitalistic goals and communist, which is not really greedy. And with COVID, it's like either it is mild and we shouldn't be worried about it or it's a bio weapon perpetrated by the Democrats. Yeah. So the contradictions and the falsehoods are what really flag a conspiracy theory. And then obviously time helps it evolve too because that's when we get more facts. JFK thing has been investigated so deeply over so many years. So the likelihood of things that we don't have any evidence for being true is much lower. I mean, the nice thing too is that like if you're trying to sort of theorize how something hypothetical might have gone, you do have the real world to use as a baseline, you know, and you can look at how other criminal conspiracies do work or how what tends to happen when people are trying to pull off a plot together or keep a secret and just sort of you can learn these patterns of human behavior and you can't necessarily predict what's going to happen. But I think that, I don't know, I'm never going to feel that more information isn't the best possible route to take. Yeah, I think I agree with that. It's nice to be, it's nice to be on the side of learning and finding things out when the people who are trying so hard to hurt you and those you love are against learning things because that maybe allows for a bit of an advantage. One would think, one would really think. I mean, to your point about patterns, so many of the conspiracy theories started to remind me of like the Knox prosecutors theory in the Amanda Knox case where instead of working with facts and this is kind of the recognizing patterns piece that you just have, I can think of a version of the story and we don't have enough facts to disprove it. And so if I can imagine this and nothing actively disproves it, then that is a strong theory. It's like, that's really not a strong theory. It's really just, it's, you know, just something that you thought of in your very own head. Yeah, like congrats on writing a story, maybe take it in that direction and become creative. So this comes from the Nova documentary and they interviewed G. Robert Blakey and he was counsel to the House Committee on Assassinations, so the 1977 group that investigated the assassination and he said that what someone thinks happened to JFK says more about them than it does about what happened to JFK. And that's from the man who investigated it himself and I think we could apply that to a lot of conspiracy theories too. Yeah, yeah, I believe that. And I mean, I don't know, there's kind of, there's something nice to me and in that statement for many reasons. And one is that it turns even an avenue for misinformation into a way to get more real information about, you know, if only just the person who's saying it to you, you know, yeah, yeah, even conspiracy theories can be used to try and get more of a real understanding of the world. I just, I, I won't stand by as my best friend research has just landed like this. She will rise again someday. We might not be alive to see it, but someday she'll be back. You know, it's, it's fun to learn things. I think so. What if we market it as fun? Has anyone tried that yet? We're probably preaching to the choir because I feel like if they're listening to your show, they're on our side and they're hand wringing with us. That's true. Well, just, okay, go out, go out and learn something but, but make it look fun while you do it. Yeah, do it on a skateboard. Well, that's sick. If you can. Hell yeah. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)