The JFK Assassination Part 2 with Mackenzie Joy Brennan

But seriously, who really killed JFK? For part two of the JFK Assassination series, law correspondent Mackenzie Joy Brennan takes Sarah through the conspiracy theories that have surrounded the tragedy to see how the combination of too much information and too little information helped solidify a general feeling that things were not as they seemed. Together, they go over the Warren Commission report, the Zapruder Film, and the story of the “magic bullet,” and look at how Oliver Stone’s movie JFK changed our collective memory of what happened that day and who was really to blame. Digressions include the Sharpie art on burned CDs, the series premiere of Monk, and the unfortunate nostalgia for George W. Bush. More Mackenzie Joy Brennan:http://www.mkzjoybrennan.comEdited + produced by Miranda Zickler:http://www.linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonster Fact checking by Julie KliegmanMore You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, well, good night, Mr. X. That was a great game of Connect Four.

• 0:14Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we discuss the one conspiracy theory to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. Did I make that joke last time? I don't know. Maybe I did. It's still good.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I don't think you went that far with it.

• 0:30Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I think you mentioned that this is the mother of all conspiracies, but I don't think you one ringed it.

• 0:35Sarah Marshall?

  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, you know, what we were able to figure out at the time, given, you know, the forensics that people were able to conduct, which seemed to have been oddly minimal for reasons that we got into, some of them very Kennedy-type reasons.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07Sarah Marshall?

  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 those kind of bigger questions of how could such a thing happen?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  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 that put a bow on it.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  And so I'm wondering how much that, like, combined release of information from early on

• 2:13Speaker 01

  And no resolution impacted the way that people processed it?

• 2:17Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. 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 on 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.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  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 too filled information.

• 2:58Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And also, the people feeling that the government was hiding things from them.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:02Sarah Marshall?

  Which it obviously was. Right. Just, you know, maybe not these exact things.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:16Sarah Marshall?

  And to be really, really sneaky, which the FBI and the CIA, again, absolutely were, like, doing some quite evil things during this exact time period.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  The agencies really were, were at their zenith. Well, no, not zenith, because.

• 3:33Sarah Marshall?

  Evil zenith.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  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 the lurid

• 4:17Speaker 01

  rumors and speculation that had spread after the assassination.

• 4:21Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, Jerry.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  It's like, oh.

• 4:23Sarah Marshall?

  You and me both, pal. We're like, now that we have facts, everyone can move on. And it's like, hmm, no.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  That it were. Yeah. Like, we had not seen anything yet at that point.

• 4:34Sarah Marshall?

  Ba ba ba ba baby.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  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 H.L. 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

• 5:29Speaker 01

  was there.

• 5:30Sarah Marshall?

  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

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:42Sarah Marshall?

  a tragedy, to kind of establish a relationship to it, and will 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 urge. Also, 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.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  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 folks who Maybe did not have family members in the generation to have been through this. I think you see it a lot with nine 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.

• 6:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  But in this case, I don't think that's what was happening. So H. L. 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.

• 7:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  What the scale of this was.

• 7:35Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and also, I mean, is it accurate to say that like in multiple witness accounts of pretty much any crime that sort of unfolds in a, 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.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. Trauma has such direct and probably known even better now or studied better now than at the time, but still.

• 8:02Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, you know, we, the satanic panic spurred a lot of progress, honestly.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:15Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:25Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and also if you're questioning correctly, you know, I think it feels like one of the issues with memory is how easily it can be contaminated.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:32Sarah Marshall?

  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

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Hinting.

• 8:44Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  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 is in. So yeah, it's super fallible. And to that point, there's another person who is seen in a really far away crowd picture. I can send it to you if you want.

• 9:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, please do.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  So this is the case of Bill Love Lady.

• 9:16Sarah Marshall?

  Bill Love Lady.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I know, right? Such a fun name.

• 9:19Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, that sounds like a novel by Gore Vidal or something. Myra Breckenridge and Bill Love Lady.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Like a Gothic novel also.

• 9:28Sarah Marshall?

  That too. There's so much possibility to Bill Love Lady.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  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 well 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.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I sure would.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Right? Like, so no interviews, no more pictures, nothing.

• 10:46Sarah Marshall?

  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 eighties. 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 heyday of the American Elvis sighting, is that Elvis had apparently gotten a job as an extra in Home Alone, and was loitering behind John Candy and Catherine O'Hara in an airport scene. And it's just like, so,

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:25Sarah Marshall?

  What is Elvis thinking in this scenario? Because if you can't give me a theory of what Elvis is thinking about, like,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Why is he there?

• 11:35Sarah Marshall?

  Explain.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  He's gonna blow it all up for this, for this bit part.

• 11:39Sarah Marshall?

  To what end?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Sarah Marshall?

  To what end?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Wait, what is that from?

• 11:44Sarah Marshall?

  That's Maya Rudolph as Diane Warwick.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Thank you. So, yeah, Bill Lovelady is just a guy who didn't want his photo taken by people after.

• 11:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And a lot of people look like other people. Like, that's truly like a big thing I counter in my head a lot of conspiracy theories with, that like, it's like, there just aren't that many

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Faces.

• 12:07Sarah Marshall?

  features that humans can have, honestly.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Especially within like, age group, racial composition. So like, a white guy of that age group and build.

• 12:18Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Haircut, clothes, like, there's very limited options. Limited fashion options for pale white men in 1963 in Dallas, it's fair to say.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  And minimal now, as things go. We're broadening the options, but.

• 12:35Sarah Marshall?

  Very slowly.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but no one's gonna read all that.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:59Sarah Marshall?

  And then is there like a theory that there's like multiple Oswalds and the, you know, the government has like a bunch of different Oswalds dispersed through the crowd like

• 13:10Speaker 01

  You know, that would be good.

• 13:12Sarah Marshall?

  Multiple Louies at a ball in France.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Or like the, uh, the Biden body double nonsense you hear now.

• 13:20Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh, I don't know that one, but this, uh, we'll 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.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Well, that's frankly a through line because Reagan also had his, his little brain nap.

• 13:59Sarah Marshall?

  His little brain naps. Yeah. When President Reagan's brain was resting.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Resting. Yeah. In the game of jelly beans.

• 14:08Sarah Marshall?

  And not to defend Reagan, but you know, at least he could ride a fricking horse.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Is that where our standards are now?

• 14:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Cause that's how I'm feeling about GW Bush, like longing for the halcyon days.

• 14:19Sarah Marshall?

  I know.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Of somebody swatting shoes away.

• 14:22Sarah Marshall?

  The nostalgia is so odd. Yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I hate it.

• 14:25Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't endorse it.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:27Sarah Marshall?

  But I do feel it.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  It's very complicated.

• 14:31Sarah Marshall?

  The greatest trick the Bush has ever pulled was pretending to be from Texas.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Were they not from Texas?

• 14:37Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:56Sarah Marshall?

  But the whole like a Connecticut Yankee in oil country thing was very clever of them.

• 15:04Sarah Marshall?

  But that's also like the presidency is all about theater. And the, 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 did kind of expect to have information withheld from us, maybe.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe that's part of it. And that's like, there's a, an odd security.

• 15:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And maybe you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause 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.

• 15:41Sarah Marshall?

  That would be nice. Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Obviously, that's not the prevailing conservative thought.

• 15:46Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I, 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.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:59Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. So we have the false Oswald, which I enjoy.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. And then speaking of access to presidents, interesting segue, another one that I had heard referenced myself is that this 1961 Lincoln Continental that they were driving, it's a convertible, right? But it, it does have an option of adding this bubble top to the top. And so people, I believe they even mention it.

• 16:26Sarah Marshall?

  Split top bubble top car.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they talk about it in the, uh, 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 Pope Mobile.

• 16:48Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, and also like, this is the assassination that I think teaches people to be afraid of being shot at.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Right. To make a Pope Mobile.

• 16:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. So he wouldn't have that fear because he's the reason for the fear.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:02Sarah Marshall?

  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 is, is so frequently the answer here as opposed to there being a plot. And then of course, like there are plots and like, you know, look at it. Into that, but like a lot of plots are carried out in broad daylight.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Without code.

• 17:23Sarah Marshall?

  And yeah, and don't require that much secrecy because no one cares about their victims all that much. Girls.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:37Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:47Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  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?

• 18:01Sarah Marshall?

  Right. That's like, the whole point. That's the reason they're there.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Right. So that one does very little for me.

• 18:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  I'm sure you've heard about connections between Jack Ruby and Oswald. Is that something you're familiar with?

• 18:14Sarah Marshall?

  Not really. Yeah, let's, let's get into it.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:34Sarah Marshall?

  I can't, I really love that so much.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:54Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like this is like a Jason Alexander role.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like a sweaty boy in over his head. But either way, and still, to this day, there is no evidence nor concrete claim of any prior relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. So there really was nothing to investigate further or disprove.

• 19:12Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like this, I want to call this the Carrie Elwes 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 Hannibal World, so it's pretty exciting. It's Ashley Judd versus the serial killers. Love it. I would watch Ashley Judd do anything.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  We love when men have hobbies, though.

• 19:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Male friendships are important.

• 19:42Sarah Marshall?

  You're right. Serial killer is one of the few hobbies offered to men.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Allowed to.

• 19:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And we give them so many ideas. But so Carrie Elwes 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 like the killer is, you're like, well, Carrie Elwes has had nothing to do. So either his role got cut way down after it tested poorly, or he's the killer.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Like process of elimination. Yeah.

• 20:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I feel like there's a thing, you know, where like stories do teach us a lot of great stuff, but they also teach us to have certain expectations.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:22Sarah Marshall?

  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 like, within the cast that we know about is the answer as opposed to like, you know, there's characters that we aren't aware of, or like, it's because 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 Carrie Elwes problem.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  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 because there's the Chekhov's gun problem.

• 20:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which is similar to the Carrie Elwes problem.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Basically, like as narrative consumers who are raised on fiction, to be given these things that are nonfiction, but presented as narratives.

• 21:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. If Carrie Elwes is in the opening credits, he must do something.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  He must be fired by the end. Yeah.

• 21:19Sarah Marshall?

  If we have questions, like why, 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 needed 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, 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 They are.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:51Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  I feel like maybe Jim Garrison watched an episode of Law and Order somehow before the Clay Shaw case.

• 22:07Sarah Marshall?

  Or he like was on a plane with Dick Wolf and Dick Wolf emerged like, I know what I'm doing now.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Proto Law and Order, because that's exactly what happened in the Clay Shaw case that we'll get to.

• 22:17Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  But I don't know. I also think a great point that Vincent Bulyosse 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.

• 22:30Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, man.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  That really belies any government involvement, government money, big money angle.

• 22:36Sarah Marshall?

  Wait, tell me, I want you to drag their apartments. Tell me everything.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Let me see. I, you know, I saw the photos and I don't know that I would have described them with such vitriol as Bulyosse did, but let me see.

• 22:50Sarah Marshall?

  Well, these men had houses that magically cleaned themselves every day as far as they knew.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Right? So Oswald was like renting a room from some nice, unassuming older lady.

• 23:01Sarah Marshall?

  They always are.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  They're 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-war era is introducing the gun. So do you know anything about the gun that was used or rumors surrounding it?

• 23:30Sarah Marshall?

  No. Well, I mean, it's like vaguely familiar, but I couldn't 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.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  So I'm going to call this like the witch gun.

• 23:44Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Theory slash fodder.

• 23:47Sarah Marshall?

  Sorry, for a second I thought you meant a witch gun, like

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Witch gun.

• 23:50Sarah Marshall?

  Cackling witch gun. That's the whole other topic.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  That's even more fun. In fact, if we want to come up with an additional rumor.

• 23:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. How did, how did Oswald pull it off if he was just some loner? He had a witch gun.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Fucking witches. So this starts, you get sheriff video footage taken about 46 minutes after the shooting. So they 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 canvass the depository within an hour, and they get prints from Lee Harvey Oswald.

• 24:25Sarah Marshall?

  It's a hard crime scene to flee when I think about it.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  And yet he managed to get to the movie theater.

• 24:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  It shows the finding of three spent cartridge casings on the floor, which that, 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.

• 24:57Sarah Marshall?

  And it's like different freak gun, right? It's like, kind of like a fingerprint.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm not a big ballistics person, but that 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 I and II. And within this particular gun, which is called a Mannlicher Carcano.

• 25:26Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  It's an Italian rifle. There's like spiral ridges, for accuracy, kind of like throwing a football with a spin on it.

• 25:34Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. That's a good metaphor. This is some great ballistics describing.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  I try, man. I I'm sure I'm gonna get comments about like, actually, well, this is not how guns work, and I'm sorry.

• 25:46Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Right. So that feature which marked the casings is an uncommon feature of the Mannlicher 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 Klein's catalog in Chicago to a known alias for Lee Harvey Teabag.

• 26:19Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Right? Have you met people? They're very sloppy.

• 26:34Sarah Marshall?

  Have you met men? Look at his house.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Especially murdering men. Like, he's a 24-year-old jackass.

• 26:40Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I know I talk about this all the time, but like, people talk about Ted Bundy being a genius killer and like,

• 26:46Speaker 01

  He's not. He's just-

• 26:48Sarah Marshall?

  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, you gotta 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.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  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, because nine times out of 10, nobody pulls a thread, except that here, you killed the president, so the thread was gonna be pulled.

• 27:27Sarah Marshall?

  Right, exactly. And also, like, not to be too simplistic, but like, or too El Woods, if that's such a thing, but-

• 27:34Speaker 01

  You can never be too El Woods.

• 27:36Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly. Really smart people don't murder women for fun. They just don't.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:42Sarah Marshall?

  They have model trains.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  And same here. Like, this guy was either gonna write a really subpar book, or kill the president.

• 27:52Sarah Marshall?

  It was either this or found Scientology. It's hard to know which would have been worse.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Which is worse? Hard to say.

• 27:59Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. I mean, at least people aren't being, like, indentured because of the Kennedy assassination,

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:05Sarah Marshall?

  as far as I know.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Scoreboard. I don't know.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:24Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, there you go. Yeah, he's only, look, he's like 24, right? Of course, you know, that's a lot of money back now.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, that to me, closes the case.

• 28:34Sarah Marshall?

  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 Kennedys. 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-

• 28:54Sarah Marshall?

  Sad to think of like anyone's dad dying because someone got a $13 gun out of a catalog.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And didn't have any friends.

• 29:02Sarah Marshall?

  Not that it would be better if it was more expensive, but yeah, because it's like, just, just learn chess.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Nobody made him feel special. So he was really mad, got a $13 gun with a $7 scope. 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 man, like a car can know 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,

• 29:48Speaker 01

  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 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've been a Mauser.

• 30:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  But the reporter didn't qualify that this was like under duress.

• 30:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And again, I mean, just from like 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 the, 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 just 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 them here. It's like, well, someone said this for a second before it could be corrected. It's like, well.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  And I think there. 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 news purveyor now, qualified information with like, this was an officer guessing.

• 31:19Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. And also like the fallout doesn't really touch the person that perpetuated this rumor in the beginning.

• 31:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Like the fallout hits more the Warren Commission, which whatever they can handle it, but more in a like principle sense. 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.

• 32:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  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 Mauser gets to enjoy the fruits of their labor. So that fast turnaround really fucks us all.

• 32:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And the confusion would like the public's need to know with our right to have more information than exists yet, you know?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's all capitalized. So like, there is a financial incentive to have the next big thing.

• 32:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And of course, then it's like you're as a news source competing at the time with other news sources to like,

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:03Sarah Marshall?

  at least create the appearance of having more or newer information. Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Like special access. So that, yeah, that was such an illustrative piece of info.

• 33:14Sarah Marshall?

  Well, we really screwed ourselves.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And we sure have fixed it now, haven't we? That's great.

• 33:22Sarah Marshall?

  Wah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  So we're, we're gonna 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 will note here that all the lurid rumors were not laid to rest despite Gerald Ford's No. best predictions.

• 33:41Sarah Marshall?

  Good for him for thinking that.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  He tried.

• 33:44Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, and now you're gonna move on, right? We were like, no.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Why don't you go fall off a ladder on SNL? I don't know, man.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:00Sarah Marshall?

  I think so. Yeah. Cause I, this is where we get into Oliver Stone's JFK, which feels like it's kind of a milestone movie for people and that it's fun to question the government, even if when you zoom out, you're like, oh, 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 and the City, Valley of the Twenty Something Guys, where Carrie goes home with, I think Timothy Olyphant, and it's, he's in his twenties, speaking of guys in their twenties apartments, and it's like sexy and hot and amazing, and she's like so thrilled.

• 34:43Sarah Marshall?

  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 that's like the equivalent of like watching JFK versus looking up those theories on Wikipedia the next morning.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  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. It's so hard to watch once you know the information because it's so star studded. It's a lot of fun.

• 35:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. It's incredible Laurie Metcalf, you know, material. Well, you should watch it for the Laurie Metcalf alone.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And she's not even the top biller 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 ish year gap there, but JFK, the movie really is what publicized the trial.

• 36:00Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And even more so now. Yeah.

• 36:32Sarah Marshall?

  Well, so basically JFK is about Kevin Costner playing Jim Garrison, who is the district attorney of New Orleans. Is that right?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:43Sarah Marshall?

  And who I figures out a way to kind of try the Kennedy assassination within his own jurisdiction in an odd way.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. What a nice coincidence for him that it all landed on his doorstep.

• 36:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that worked out great. And it's got like the classic wife in these movies character played by Sissy Spacek, who's like, the kids have been waiting up for you while you're researching this Kennedy assassination conspiracy. She doesn't talk like that, but you know.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  She kinda does.

• 37:14Sarah Marshall?

  I have one southern accent I can do and it's because Dixie Carter, you know, it's I have limited range.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  I think that's fine. You just have to add like molasses to your mouth to do a New Orleans version because it always feels very belabored. Um, do you want to know what he called that wife in real life?

• 37:30Sarah Marshall?

  What?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  He called her egg.

• 37:32Sarah Marshall?

  No, why would he say that to Anna?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Anne Veal.

• 37:38Sarah Marshall?

  Cause she's the belle of the ball.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, not pictured.

• 37:41Sarah Marshall?

  Just like a bell.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  We're having yams. Um, he called her egg because she was such an egghead. Isn't that sweet?

• 37:50Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  No, it's not. So we love Jim Garrison. He seems like a nice guy.

• 37:58Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, he's played by Kevin Costner at his peak. It's like celebrity washed.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Do you want to run down some of the cast of this movie? Because I feel like

• 38:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  It's wild.

• 38:07Sarah Marshall?

  Look, let me, let me, I'm just gonna pull, let's get a list here. Okay. So we have. Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw, who this trial is about in the end. Kevin Bacon, Lori Metcalf, Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald, Michael Rooker, Sissy Spacek as Egg, Joe Pesci as David Ferry, doing great wig work.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 38:30Sarah Marshall?

  Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, 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.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Who we talked about. He's always good. He's good in everything.

• 38:50Sarah Marshall?

  Vincent D'Onofrio, Lolita Davidovich, John Larriquette.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  John Larriquette.

• 38:55Sarah Marshall?

  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 are so many movies. I think about this a lot with While 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.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I hate her.

• 39:16Sarah Marshall?

  But if you learn about it in the context of a Sandra Bullock movie, you're like, she couldn't hurt a fly. Or at least I am. It's very influential to the show.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Or like, I support her rights and wrongs.

• 39:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the show is really just kind of an attempt to replicate the experience of While You Were Sleeping.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:33Sarah Marshall?

  For women who got in over their head and be like, well, when you think about it.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  We love her.

• 39:40Sarah Marshall?

  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 is that, like, wealth of characters and really fun actors to watch, John Candy among them, that makes it such an 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.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:13Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't care, but I care about.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Which it was a real photo. It's a real photo that we could have looked at.

• 40:28Sarah Marshall?

  It's a black and white photo.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:31Sarah Marshall?

  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,

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Midlife crisis.

• 40:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, he's a, he's a guy in midlife and he reads the Warren Report when it comes out and kind of, and like in his capacity, just as a civilian, basically, he's like, I don't like this.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Feels wrong. Yeah.

• 40:51Sarah Marshall?

  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, and more recently now, I could not describe to you. And I would love for you to give us that.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Oh, God, give me the heavy lifting. Um.

• 41:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 41:08Sarah Marshall?

  Come to my house and move my furniture. I'll give you a piece of pizza.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  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, like Leopold and Loeb, in fact, he said, it was a homosexual thrill killing.

• 41:33Sarah Marshall?

  Come on.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Whatever the hell that means.

• 41:36Sarah Marshall?

  You can't blame everything on homosexual thrill killing.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  He's really riled up about the gay men that either are identified in this story or he has identified.

• 41:48Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. And is it that, is Clay Shaw basically involved also in like pimping male escorts? Is that fair to say?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  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. You know, one dies, I think shortly after the assassination in like early 1964 of a heart attack, and that's Guy Bannister, the Ed Asner character. He's an ex FBI man. That is confirmed. That is a true fact. He was working as a P I. 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.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Now, in the interviews to explain away 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, because they got in this conflict, that he knows a guy who knows Lee Harvey Oswald. So they're probably involved.

• 43:12Sarah Marshall?

  Which again, is like a very classic being in trouble with the police thing. It seems to me we're like, hey, I know this other thing. You want to be nicer to me because I know something?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and these are like very basic power dynamics.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, this is like the biggest crime of the last year. And so, hell yeah, I'm going to implicate him if I want to. So that's what we have. And then that was promptly referred to the FBI during the Warren Commission process by DA Garrison. Martin was interviewed by the FBI, so they actually looked into it.

• 43:51Sarah Marshall?

  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, Kim Garrison.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know, like.

• 44:03Sarah Marshall?

  I'm a little bit sorry. I'm sorry.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:21Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's a good point as well.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Plus the homosexual thrill killing from there. I don't know.

• 44:25Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, and you know, not to make broad, sweeping pronouncements, but from what I can tell, homosexual thrill killings seem extremely rare. And in the 50s, we were ready to think there were millions of them, I think, or the 60s.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  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

• 45:05Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  so and so might have corruptly and secretly hypnotized someone and there's, that's why there's no paper trail because it's hypnosis.

• 45:14Sarah Marshall?

  Which is a very Bangurian candidate influenced theory, I think, and view of hypnosis in a way.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 45:46Sarah Marshall?

  Now what?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Garrison in 1966, he's really wanting to pursue this. So he re-interviews Martin and they get some more story out of it.

• 45:55Sarah Marshall?

  And so, and yeah, and the fact that he wants to keep digging is interesting, too.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  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 psychoneurosis that interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree.

• 46:17Sarah Marshall?

  But when I picture him, I see Kevin Costner. So I trust him.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Who must not be debilitatingly neurotic.

• 46:24Sarah Marshall?

  No, impossible. He's an actor.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Despite calling his 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.

• 46:50Sarah Marshall?

  God damn it.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:07Sarah Marshall?

  He just crammed a gusher up his nose.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, maybe. One of those blood capsules. You just smash it into the bits. Um, yeah.

• 47:16Sarah Marshall?

  God. Yeah, that is, 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.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, that's one of the, 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 gleaned that all six people involved. So, you know, Martin, Bannister, Oswald, everybody, they're all gay.

• 48:02Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, okay. Yeah. Cause the gays can't consort with the non gays.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  No, no. And if they're consorting, it's probably a cabal.

• 48:11Sarah Marshall?

  That doesn't just mean the president is also gay.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, they were jealous, he said, of the president because he was so hot. And that inspired them to kill.

• 48:23Sarah Marshall?

  Jim, I mildly trusted you for two hours once, a couple of times.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  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 pentathal.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  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 eschewed the use of this. Because it's like any nervous system depressant, 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.

• 49:46Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  So it's inadmissible, and it has been since the 60s.

• 49:50Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  And here you obviously had, like, he clearly wants him to say there's a connection to Lee Harvey Oswald.

• 50:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And then, conveniently, he's given this drug and he mentions it.

• 50:16Sarah Marshall?

  So it's really, it's a lot of like, garden variety wrongful confession type stuff, which I wouldn't have expected.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  And not even from the agent himself, like, just from some other 25-year-old who was at the party.

• 50:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  It was one of the fastest not guilty verdicts in New Orleans history.

• 50:32Sarah Marshall?

  Ah.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Less than an hour. Some people say less than 30 minutes it took.

• 50:40Sarah Marshall?

  So what is Clay Shaw being accused of?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Oh, conspiracy to assassinate the president.

• 50:46Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. And he's leading, and he's leading a gay cabal because he's jealous of the hot, hot president.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Well, that, I think he tweaked the theory. And so the eventual conspiracy was one that involves the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and LBJ, abstractly.

• 51:04Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that seems more complicated. Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, Roger Ebert was right quite often.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:39Sarah Marshall?

  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 pawn to execute the president in order to something, something Cold War?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  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 Qui Bono, 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?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:53Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:06Sarah Marshall?

  And so your theory has to get bigger and bigger until you're kind of pointing the finger at the entire government.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:12Sarah Marshall?

  And it's not because your theory is so compelling, but it's because you have to compensate for so much contradiction.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  And especially if you're peddling 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.

• 53:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  There's just one more good quote from a frontline review in 1992. Somebody was very upset. John Leo, who wrote this review, said that a writer undertakes many unpleasant tasks, but fewer are more repugnant than sitting helplessly in the dark, suffering a three-hour rant from Oliver Stone.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  It's essentially several hours of shameless propaganda, and the dishonesty of the movie is breathtaking. So it was controversial.

• 54:17Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  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 frame of 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 did he? He did Platoon, right?

• 55:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which I watched with my dad when I was far too young.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing with dad movies, right?

• 55:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I know. They're always like, you're 11, you're ready for

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Good culture.

• 55:22Sarah Marshall?

  Alien Three.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I saw The Godfather at like 10, and I'm like, I don't know what's happening here.

• 55:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  So I mean, that's my guess. And then Seinfeld opened up, frankly, a whole new audience to it, like free advertising in that episode of Seinfeld, which I love.

• 55:40Sarah Marshall?

  I do, too.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  But it also brought some comedy to the movie. I don't know. What do you think?

• 55:46Sarah Marshall?

  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 you. 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.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  But I'm keeping up.

• 56:21Sarah Marshall?

  I think so. And I think it's like the thrill of being led in on like the conspiracy theory experience and 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.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Sarah Marshall?

  Cause I think that like conspiracy theories are pleasurable a lot in many ways. And that's part of what draws people to them.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:09Sarah Marshall?

  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 is, you know, being on the inside of something, you know? Like if Donald Sutherland told me about anything like kind of fast.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 57:22Sarah Marshall?

  I'd be like, yeah, oh, sure. Yeah, I believe you. Thank you, Donald Sutherland.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  His character, by the way, is fully fabricated. That Mr. X character, that's when they just.

• 57:33Sarah Marshall?

  What? You're telling me there's no Mr. X?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  I know.

• 57:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's cause Kevin Costner's imaginary friend, it's actually a giant bunny named Harvey.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  This is why he probably had to leave the military, because he was seeing Mr. X everywhere.

• 57:46Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, well, good night, Mr. X. That was a great game in Connect Four.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  And Egg is like, there's no one there.

• 57:54Sarah Marshall?

  So that's K F K, which is a fun movie. But again, it only a movie.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  It sure is. He's actually in it. Jim Garrison plays Chief Justice Earl Warren for a couple of minutes.

• 58:05Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm sure he had a lovely time.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sure he was so tickled and. He died like a year after. So it was like, I can die happy now.

• 58:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  My conspiracy has been realized. The homosexuals have not won. I can go to my grave.

• 58:21Sarah Marshall?

  This movie has stopped the tide of homosexuals. Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Oh, thank God.

• 58:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And it is like, just the, 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.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  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 because he's in law enforcement. And like, this archetype to me is so much more recognizable now than I think it would have been

• 59:19Speaker 01

  in 1991 as a fallible character. You know what I mean?

• 59:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, right. Because we, we have had the chance to develop pattern recognition.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Sarah Marshall?

  Because of all of the news.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Because of that good old 24 hour news cycle. There are some silver linings, I guess.

• 59:37Sarah Marshall?

  Which was just crawling out of a rhinoceros's butt at the time, like Ace Ventura.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Pretty much.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  So there are a couple of other post-war and things that are worth mentioning. And one is what we have already foreshadowed a couple of times, and that's the Zapruder film release.

• 59:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Tell us all about that. Who, who is Zapruder maybe to start?

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  I think we touched on this briefly last time, but he'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.

• 1:00:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  He is a dressmaker. Abraham Zapruder 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

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:08Sarah Marshall?

  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 was a bonus episode and like, we talked about the Patterson Gimlin film.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, same footage type.

• 1:01:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that the that idea of 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.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:01:42Sarah Marshall?

  Right? Or it's just the kind of movie you could make at that point.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:59Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:02:10Sarah Marshall?

  There like the, do you ever see the, um, the episode of, I think I've got a secret and it was a 50s panel game show where they had this 96 year old man who had been a child who was at Ford's theater.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:02:22Sarah Marshall?

  Was assassinated.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:02:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But that would be the level of connection that you could have to something. You'd be like, well, I heard this guy describe it one time.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, boy.

• 1:02:32Sarah Marshall?

  So we all could, the, the ability to feel personally traumatized by something through media, I feel like is suddenly entering the picture.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  It was a fresh concept. Well, yeah, I mean, I think.

• 1:02:42Sarah Marshall?

  A fresh and exciting one.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we mentioned, just like how Vietnam was the first televised war relatively shortly thereafter.

• 1:02:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  All of these things that we are so.

• 1:02:52Sarah Marshall?

  Thanks, Johnson, at all.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Right? Like weirdly desensitized, but not desensitized to, on a certain level, um, or things that feel normal now were so distinctive at the time.

• 1:03:07Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Like grandpas downstairs for a week. Yeah.

• 1:03:29Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Or I 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.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Sarah Marshall?

  Um, 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 felt so scary.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  It literally went into the TV.

• 1:03:51Sarah Marshall?

  That and the clown.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  One is good and one is questionable. I, I think dying at home would be nice to be more common because that's a side note, but point being, I wonder if that.

• 1:04:15Sarah Marshall?

  It is, but you know, my dad died at home, which like practically nobody pulls off these days, it seems. Like

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  Mine did too.

• 1:04:21Sarah Marshall?

  So many times I've been like, hey, he died at home. I feel better about that. Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:33Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. You wouldn't want his ghost to be.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  In a hospital.

• 1:04:36Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I mean, ghosts can be wherever they want, I think. But yeah, no, he would be so annoyed by that.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  I hope they have free range, but I don't know.

• 1:04:43Sarah Marshall?

  It's, it really depends. According to the Amityville Horror, they can't travel between Long Island and Manhattan, which has to create problems.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  And I do trust, I trust the veracity of the Warrens.

• 1:04:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  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 one of us to say, I saw something special.

• 1:05:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And without consenting to see it.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:23Sarah Marshall?

  And also that, you know, and so this premiered on Geraldo in 1975.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Yes, 75.

• 1:05:30Sarah Marshall?

  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 watch it over and over again like we can now and like,

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  That's like the eyewitness phenomenon compounded, right? Because if you want to think that you.

• 1:06:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you're still witness to the TV.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you had some distinctive thing to offer about what you saw, you're going off of memory of a memory.

• 1:06:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And because we build community when we're,

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Sarah Marshall?

  you know, we witness these things. And so, yeah, that we're trying to do the same thing with the images we see on screen. I saw like someone refer in a TikTok comment today to like,

• 1:06:27Sarah Marshall?

  When the screens had fur, you know, which is like when you kind of can feel the static.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Sarah Marshall?

  And I was like, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. The fur'd screen.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  And I could totally picture somebody who didn't experience that, not knowing what we're talking about.

• 1:06:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but TV screens, like you run your hand over them.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  It's the static.

• 1:06:47Sarah Marshall?

  And there's, yeah, there's just a little field of fluffy static. It's great.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  It's kind of like, have you seen, um, I think it's like a recycled Tumblr post of somebody really puzzling over why millennials talk about burning CDs? Like, did we have to actually burn them? And then someone was gatekeeping the actual. They did come out warm. But for the uninitiated, no, we did not burn them literally. It was just.

• 1:07:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you, 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 in Sharpie and give it to someone who you had a crush on. It was incredible.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  The more you love them, the more you drew on it.

• 1:07:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:01Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:13Sarah Marshall?

  Wow, they're like, ah, this, look, let's, let's not add too much to our plate here.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess, but it was basically just on public opinion.

• 1:08:24Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, interesting.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:53Sarah Marshall?

  What?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Just like hanging out.

• 1:08:55Sarah Marshall?

  Why? But why, you guys? Do you think that they believed the evidence was compelling? Like, what was, what was that about?

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:12Sarah Marshall?

  Come on, you guys. You can't read a child just one more story. We know this.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Or give a mouse a cookie. So why here?

• 1:09:21Sarah Marshall?

  If you give the American people a second shooter.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  This is totally opposed to your trust in the American people, though, so.

• 1:09:29Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, but here's, I was just thinking as you were 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 sudden buddy at this point in time.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Make my doctor's appointments.

• 1:09:50Sarah Marshall?

  Wouldn't that be incredible?

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Sarah Marshall?

  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 to, you know, not for everybody and not in every way, but it feel like I, I see that. I believe that is like a pretty big dynamic in 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 just be 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

• 1:10:39Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  You're not all better.

• 1:10:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, 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.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Sarah Marshall?

  Which is insane, because you're the person who was wronged. Why should you have to heal? Why can't someone else do it for you?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Sarah Marshall?

  A lot of my beliefs come back to the idea that it would be very comforting if someone could do it for me.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:11:16Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And someone who you can trust implicitly, which is the hardest part of all that.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?

• 1:11:45Sarah Marshall?

  But it feels like that we have this second report where, like, as Americans in 1975, having just gone through the 60s, you know, where like, the FBI is like, you know, conspiring to try and drive MLK to suicide, you know? Or is that the CIA?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  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 as new second shooter proof.

• 1:13:03Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Well, that's pretty good.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Sarah Marshall?

  And is there just like a lot of echo, you know, in that kind of a landscape?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:23Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like the first episode of Monk was kind of about this.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yeah. The when they shoot the politician. Yes.

• 1:13:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the premiere event.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Sarah Marshall?

  Opening episode of Monk. Yeah.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  You're totally right. And it's in a bowl. Like, it's, yeah. Wow.

• 1:13:40Sarah Marshall?

  That was who we needed.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  He's still around. Maybe he can help us.

• 1:13:44Sarah Marshall?

  Someone turns up at Tony Shalhoub's house at nine in the morning, like, please.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Help us. You're the only one. You're the only one who can save us. God.

• 1:13:53Sarah Marshall?

  Your only hope.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Sarah Marshall?

  Peter Falk is not around, so it's up to you.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. We, we do awful things to old people when we want their stuff. It's, 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 18 hours a day, which is why we all have podcasts now. But yeah, it's, I would love to see like Columbo at the Trump White House, you know?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus. That would be so comforting.

• 1:14:35Sarah Marshall?

  Just, you know, exclaiming about how fancy all that, all the, all, all, all this.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Too gaudy.

• 1:14:40Sarah Marshall?

  It's a gold ballroom.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Monk would need so many hand wipes, too.

• 1:14:44Sarah Marshall?

  No, Mike would not be able to. I want all the, all the handshaking for a start.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Oh, disgusting.

• 1:14:49Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  Drink the same amount of water that AI would use to create the scenario. So yeah, that that's our post-war and rumor fodder fuel.

• 1:15:12Sarah Marshall?

  All right. And yeah, and 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.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Sarah Marshall?

  To 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.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like the more worthy compromise would have been, don't reexamine this one thing that you arguably got mostly right the first time you did it.

• 1:15:54Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  But like, maybe actually apologize for the things you did do that harmed people in the same period.

• 1:16:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it was the FBI, by the way.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Trying to kill MLK?

• 1:16:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  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. 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?

• 1:16:48Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like I, yeah, I'm not as JFK literate perhaps as.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Not the worst thing.

• 1:16:52Sarah Marshall?

  I should be, but yeah, then there that we've, I think we've gone over maybe the stuff that I've heard about, which is, you know, the second shooters we've been talking about, right? This idea that we got summed up in JFK, that like the bullet could, you know, traveled 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.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Or which one? Yeah.

• 1:17:18Sarah Marshall?

  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 gotta 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.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Not sold. Yeah.

• 1:17:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Well, maybe a good place to start is recapping some of the early autopsy mistakes that I think were just so compounded upon.

• 1:17:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let's get into that.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  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 ME should perform an 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 Kennedys, really wants to take him back to DC. Instead, it almost comes to blows.

• 1:18:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  They 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.

• 1:18:28Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  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 entourage 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

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  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 in a 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.

• 1:19:29Sarah Marshall?

  And that's just because of the fact of, you know. Having an autopsy.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  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 get in the way.

• 1:19:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And it is like, it's such a strange thing, you know, for anybody, not just in this case. Where like your body, you know, in many ways is you, like is the person who has just died. And it's also now almost all the evidence he will ever be able to use.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this basically means that his autopsy report was finished without the body itself. Because they had to get him to the Capitol.

• 1:20:17Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  And it also was not finished with the revelation that there was a bullet in his jacket on the stretcher.

• 1:20:25Sarah Marshall?

  The autopsy had like TKs in it. They were like, we're just, it's almost done. It's getting, it's 90% done.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Can you imagine this poor military pathologist, just like?

• 1:20:35Sarah Marshall?

  No, I cannot. I imagine him as 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.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Jesus, like the worst 12 hours of my life.

• 1:20:48Sarah Marshall?

  Just sweating. This is my John Candy character. Yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  And probably a lot less amiable. I don't know. So 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.

• 1:21:15Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And they couldn't see the exit wound because it was covered by a tracheotomy.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  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 the 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 amount of time with the same weapon. So that is compelling enough to me.

• 1:21:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  That brings us to the magic bullet. This is the big one.

• 1:21:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Are you ready for this?

• 1:21:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, please tell us. I'm, I'm ready to go back and to the left and back and to the left again, I assume.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Will 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.

• 1:22:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, I understand it mostly from, from Seinfeld, honestly, where we have the magic loogie 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 knoll or the gravelly road. I 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 loogie.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Oh, 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 bullet's 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.

• 1:23:21Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, that's very cute.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Isn't that funny?

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  So there's also like a common drawing that conspiracy theorists use that has Governor Connally seated directly in front of JFK, because that's a lot of the source of this issue, such as it is, is like, the same bullet that hit JFK also hit Governor Connally. And if he was sitting right in front of him, it would have to bend its path.

• 1:23:46Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, left and to the front.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Hmm, maybe Connolly did it.

• 1:23:59Sarah Marshall?

  But this is the kind of thing where it's like, yeah, you have a theory that hinges on misunderstanding information or on, you know,

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Or incomplete information.

• 1:24:08Sarah Marshall?

  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, not really.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:32Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  By just looking at a photo.

• 1:24:34Sarah Marshall?

  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, which I mean, we have a lot of examples of this. It's kind of how doomsday cults work, where like when the doomsday doesn't come, it often makes people dig in deeper.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  They just edit it.

• 1:24:52Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Or I guess, 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, um, 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.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  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 that 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.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Then it goes through the back of Connolly's chest, comes out, chatters a bone in his wrist and then embeds in his thigh.

• 1:25:48Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  So it hits a couple of 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 we'll get to with the ballistic testing. And I think that's super fun to look at if we're ready to go there.

• 1:26:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Okay. Basically, they said it was too pristine that if something hit seven wounds worth of flesh.

• 1:26:21Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  It would be destroyed.

• 1:26:23Sarah Marshall?

  And again, it's like, I would really want to know how many bullets who have been through this.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, come on.

• 1:26:30Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Because I think there is an anecdotal image that you see even brought out in the JFK movie, if memory serves, of another bullet that hit something else and it was more destroyed. It's like, okay, but was it the same type of bullet? Was it this full metal jacket and soft center? Did it hit the same types of materials?

• 1:27:09Sarah Marshall?

  Was it as old? Had it been stored in the same conditions even?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:38Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, facts.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:27:40Sarah Marshall?

  Hate them.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  So great. Yeah. So then we test, how did this happen? So this NOVA documentary, it's this father-son duo. I believe their last name was Hague or Hag. And this had not been previously done, not for any of like the many books and studies done on the Kennedy assassination, which is wild. They do two more tests with muscle and tissue simulants out of ballistic soap and ballistic gelatin. Do we want to explain what those are?

• 1:28:09Sarah Marshall?

  I would love that. Yeah. Cause I'm not familiar with those. I, I think my knowledge stops at the point when I think like in the, like the infancy of ballistics testing, we were using dead pigs and presumably this is like farther down the road than that.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  A little bit. So ballistic soap apparently is, is basically the same texture as like Neutrogena soap, that amber colored.

• 1:28:31Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32Sarah Marshall?

  They never mention that in the ads.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  We can do this at home, but don't. It's I guess the same texture as flesh.

• 1:28:41Sarah Marshall?

  Changes my feelings about Neutrogena a little bit.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Positive or negative?

• 1:28:45Sarah Marshall?

  Positive.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  But you're not sure.

• 1:28:51Sarah Marshall?

  I'm going to think on this.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:29:11Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  So this is a really fun part. They try it with two people's worth of ballistic muscle and tissue simulants. 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.

• 1:29:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. And does that maybe save him from worse injuries?

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  It actually shatters his wrist because it means that the full side of the bullet hits his wrist.

• 1:30:02Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I just, I.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  Bullets are so scary.

• 1:30:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's my thought.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  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 Connolly'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.

• 1:30:41Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Yeah. And which is 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?

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  And 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's squeezed out at the the tip in the back. So that, to me, fully explains magic bullet. I don't know.

• 1:31:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I mean, I buy it. I don't need more than that. Because I guess I feel like unless I'm someone who has experience with this, like, all the time, like, people getting shot in a row in 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, and the forces governing our world than we maybe do have.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:23Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  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 hit seven surfaces?

• 1:32:44Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  And that's kind of it. It's not.

• 1:32:46Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, yeah.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you do the test and it starts to yaw and so the damage is hot dog ways. Yeah, I buy that.

• 1:32:54Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. 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 a limp flag. They thought ahead, they prepared.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  No flaccid flags.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  So we, I think we've put the magic bullet to bed. I'm sold on that one.

• 1:33:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's all tucked in. It's got like a sleep, some white noises playing. It's good.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  It's oozing lead from its tip as a good bullet should.

• 1:33:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I don't know why everyone underestimated you. Bullets can do terrible things and you sure did.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Raise your bullets to think they can do anything, even seven wounds.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Sorry, this is how I cope. I don't know.

• 1:33:34Sarah Marshall?

  Raise your bullets to have poor self-esteem, I guess. Raise your bullets to say, oh, I'll just stay in bed today.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34:48Sarah Marshall?

  Like Jack McCoy, we need a new thing to fixate on.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:34:53Sarah Marshall?

  So if we actually listen to facts that debunk a location, we have to sub in a new one, maybe.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the, 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

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  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, of where it is.

• 1:36:02Sarah Marshall?

  So you just really can't find anything to cling on to, maybe?

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:36:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, I want to see that. We can put a link to that.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:47Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Which again is like, is highly believable, but again, it's nice to have proof.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. You 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.

• 1:37:03Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Like that Hollywood bowl, if you will.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Different tomber of different materials, like the asphalt has something different than building.

• 1:37:12Sarah Marshall?

  And I know what 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 that like, if something is confusing based on our immediate data, we can get more.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:54Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Right. I know. Like they're impotent with everything else, but they also worked together and with Cuba.

• 1:38:10Sarah Marshall?

  But when they want to ruin our lives, they're incredible. Yeah. Which again, is like, there is a lot of efficiency to life ruining, but it's not because people are colluding usually, or 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.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:51Sarah Marshall?

  That's not how I think it would look. It's like, well,

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that's true of the magic bullet.

• 1:38:55Sarah Marshall?

  You don't know. Yeah.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:39:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, I, I, 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.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, how boring if your brain and your existing knowledge and your initial sensory perceptions is your only source of information. 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, they do get even more specific on,

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  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 gracinal. 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.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  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. You know, 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

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  to like how dinosaurs look in fossils.

• 1:41:41Sarah Marshall?

  How they're kind of like rearing backwards?

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:43Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  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 will know, and it's called decerebrate posturing. And that occurs in all sorts of scenarios when somebody's nerves fire in this same way. And the way that they describe decerebrate posture is your legs extend straight out and get rigid, your head and neck arch back, and your body kind of pulls towards the

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  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 decerebrate posture, and you see that happen in the video. So that's not the force of the shot.

• 1:42:42Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  I think I agree with you, and I wonder if that's part of maybe some of the 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.

• 1:43:16Sarah Marshall?

  Look, as a country we'd never been able to see. This much death and destruction, you know, no, no human being had, you know, the, the kind of age of media that's dying and the fact that we're, 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? We're like-

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  I've been consuming that too.

• 1:44:02Sarah Marshall?

  It's all very upsetting.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Everyone should buy Sarah Hartsworn's new book about her experience as a plus size contestant on ANTM.

• 1:44:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and you know, and I, and it talks about, you know, the episode with Shandy, which was sold to everybody as a cheating story and of course was a sexual assault story. And-

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  And they filmed her through it.

• 1:44:25Sarah Marshall?

  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 I, you know, certainly 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-

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:44:46Sarah Marshall?

  It's a bit much for you, you to be blaming the audience you're traumatizing for the things that you chose to traumatize them with. But that's like the great American tradition of media.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  I, I think a big question there also, even if it were true, and I, 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.

• 1:45:24Sarah Marshall?

  Oh yeah. And that like, the point of the show is to make pretty girls suffer. You know, that was like, we know that was the pitch.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:45:43Sarah Marshall?

  I agree. Yeah. Cause I think if you're watching something-

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Like, the power is with the network and with Tyra.

• 1:45:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And maybe not all Tyra herself, but what she represents and the people she's working with.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:46:12Sarah Marshall?

  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 was like, I'm on your side, but I'm also very sadistic. So have fun with that. But yeah, I guess 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. It's a bit much, you know, it will always be a bit much, I hope, for us. And I also think that, that there's kind of this like essential innocence that these theories,

• 1:46:54Sarah Marshall?

  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 could ever really happen, right? And it's like, oh no, it sure did.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:47:29Sarah Marshall?

  Oliver Stone is like Paul Verhoeven. He's like too good at being a filmmaker. So his movies are full of like the stupidest ideas imaginable, but it likes, you kind of feel smart while you're watching it.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  And it's that same idea of, you know, it pairs with reality television a little bit of, is this fact or 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, where the, the fiction line is.

• 1:47:59Sarah Marshall?

  And, and the movie really is kind of pointing a finger at the US government.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Sarah Marshall?

  And three, right back at Oliver Stone.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  And right, like immediately post Reagan, that came out, not immediately, but like pretty quickly thereafter.

• 1:48:11Sarah Marshall?

  You know, and then we had an inter Bush.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he counts as Reagan because

• 1:48:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  That's where he originated.

• 1:48:17Sarah Marshall?

  He's kind of a, a, a soft Reagan hangover.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't get us too far from Reagan. But like that government mistrust, I think, was sown so calculatingly by Reagan and Thatcher. And then you have something like this coming on the heels of it.

• 1:48:34Sarah Marshall?

  That's interesting.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  You know, it's got a, 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?

• 1:48:51Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my gosh, yeah.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:49:23Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, good.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  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 expressed 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, there was nobody on that list.

• 1:50:03Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  But the FBI did have files on Lee 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.

• 1:50:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  If they had, they would have had Lee Harvey Oswald's name ahead of time.

• 1:50:29Sarah Marshall?

  How did that feel to you to to find out after all this time?

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  It feels so definitive.

• 1:50:35Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:51:11Sarah Marshall?

  Never stopped a buck in his life.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  His literal information, but they didn't do that. So oops.

• 1:51:28Sarah Marshall?

  Well, isn't this also like one of, I don't know, part of the kind of whole nine 11 truth or conspiracy is like, the government had information. You know, warning them of a possible terrorist attack and didn't follow up on it. So they knew.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  It's exactly that.

• 1:51:41Sarah Marshall?

  They just, you know, got sloppy, like always, you know?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:51:57Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, it feels like the missing puzzle piece where you're like, oh, my gosh, of course there there it is. That's the old mill.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. You know, or it's like, yeah, of course, we fumbled that because and also like, you know, and 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.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:52:21Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You do have these breaks in insecurity or instances of human error, no matter what. I think that this was not a particularly tight ship. Um, for so many of the reasons we've talked about, but even if it was, you know, 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,

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, 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 apolitical folks, or people without a really strong understanding of the government, tend to assume that there is some greater protective capacity that exists.

• 1:53:15Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  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, oh geez, even the top of the country can fumble it to a fatal degree.

• 1:53:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which is like, and at a certain point, that feels like a belief in a deity.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 1:53:45Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. But to feel like somebody like Sky Daddy is looking out, um, that's, yeah, that's soothing.

• 1:54:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And we'd rather have evil Sky Daddy than no Sky Daddy.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:54:37Sarah Marshall?

  No, but you can, you can fool yourself for a while.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  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 is a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK. But, and this is just as important, I think.

• 1:55:10Sarah Marshall?

  I'm excited for the but.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  There's no agreement at all on who and why. So.

• 1:55:16Sarah Marshall?

  Come on, you guys, get it together.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  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 mafia RFK angle. But that kind of requires Ruby to be involved because otherwise there's no Teamster connection.

• 1:55:35Sarah Marshall?

  And this is that RFK is going after the the mafia too much and his capacity as Attorney General.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that like, it was some retaliatory thing that they decided to enact on the more difficult person to target.

• 1:55:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which again, and I have the same question about that as I do, interestingly, about Astroworld, which is that if I want to kill someone as a satanic sacrifice, or, you know, to stop a crackdown on organized crime, why would I do it in front of as many witnesses as I can possibly find?

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:56:23Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yes, I just, 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, the 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.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, more secretly too, like.

• 1:56:52Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Their whole MO was was pretty different.

• 1:56:54Sarah Marshall?

  And also the person they're actually going after as opposed to, you know, his brother who's the president, anyway.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  And I kind of feel the same way with the CIA involvement theory. Um, 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, justiciable 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 gotta take even confessions with a heavy grain of

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  salt because think of how many people have said something like, I want to kill the president.

• 1:57:48Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, it's been known to be said.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:03Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. It's propensity.

• 1:58:11Sarah Marshall?

  But what's the incentive for them to, to kill the president of all people as opposed to just, you know, trying to drive college students insane or whatever else they're up to?

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  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 citizen 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-

• 1:58:50Sarah Marshall?

  They had carte lunch, to quote Philly Boy Roy.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:59:05Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, they kind of, you know, it seems like they have a pretty sweet deal at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's just like, if you can't give me- A motive in like a sentence or less than like, I don't know, that feels like the most important part.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:59:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But again, you know, famously take on powerless people as often as possible because they like to punch down.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, they weren't really investigating on the administration, it's military members or smaller countries. Yeah. 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 a 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. True Hilo involvement, they were spying on France, but there really wasn't anything new about JFK.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00:40Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, good. That's nice.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00:54Sarah Marshall?

  Again, is exactly their type of thing, you know, to your point.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  Thank you. Like, great job. You, and it also smacks of the Epstein file release that Bondi gave those binders without any tangible information because we know they have been holding on to 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.

• 2:01:24Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, tell us about that. Kennedy curse, real or not so real?

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  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 seems, 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, if you have 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.

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  And then from the beginning of the JFK generation, his older brother, who's being polished to be the golden child politician, Joe Junior, he died.

• 2:02:26Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:47Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you add to that the fact that in a lot of Irish Catholic families, the mode of coping was repressing 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 Kick also died, I believe, in a plane crash.

• 2:03:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the eldest sister of that. Yeah, the 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.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe she was later. But Joe Junior was World War II. Yeah.

• 2:03:49Sarah Marshall?

  Because I was telling my friend about the doing a Kennedy rundown. 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.

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's kind of like the, um, or, 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 he the 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, uh, the backups on, on the national stage instead.

• 2:04:34Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause it does get darker than, um, in the next generation.

• 2:04:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  You have William Kennedy Smith, who I guess was more grandson generation, but he was charged with rape.

• 2:04:58Sarah Marshall?

  Because a trial we should talk about sometime, because this is like at a point when, yeah, media and, 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.

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. What a nightmare of a time to have to be doing something like that.

• 2:05:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But yeah, we start to see the Kennedy curse inflicted on adjacent women around this time, it seems like.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Cause then you have, um, Chappaquiddick with Ted Kennedy, which really, it didn't seem to affect his career in the Senate, which is a little bananas. Um, or is it? I don't know. Like, look at where we are now.

• 2:05:39Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, but there, there, but there was a period where it at least was surprising to keep your career going.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:46Sarah Marshall?

  Despite crashing a car with a young woman in it and then leaving her to drown.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:06:01Sarah Marshall?

  Classic career, not ending move, but, um,

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:05Sarah Marshall?

  But bruising a little bit. Yeah.

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  And certainly now it, it smears his, well, smear always has a connotation of falsely done, but like it colors his memory, certainly.

• 2:06:16Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  But then you have Michael Kennedy, who first was in the headlines for probable statutory rape of their babysitter, Marissa Veraki. And that, I think I told you about this when I was listening to a podcast about the Skakel murders, which are adjacent, but they talked about like a vodka sauna being a Kennedy family tradition.

• 2:06:41Sarah Marshall?

  Come on.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:06:49Sarah Marshall?

  Like you just, you can't trust rich people. And also, that's really just like a very club mad version of the like disordered teenage girl thing of.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Like the tampon.

• 2:07:00Sarah Marshall?

  The tampon, exactly. I'm so glad I wasn't gonna be the only person who knew about that.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:06Sarah Marshall?

  Hadn't tried it, but look, it's, when you're in high school, you have these things in your back pocket because your parents hear about them 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 it.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  Really, nobody I've met has done that, but I guess the Kennedys are doing a version of it on family vacations together.

• 2:07:28Sarah Marshall?

  So. Yeah.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  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've died now, but she was. So good on her for making something better than anyone in the family did. And then David Kennedy OD'd. And then there was the Skakel murders, which there's a bit of a question as to whether

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  the RFK family member did it? Or if that was a false conviction?

• 2:08:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  But still, there's enough creepy stuff from that story that's true.

• 2:08:27Sarah Marshall?

  Something to, to look at if you wish to, yeah. And that, and you know, regardless of ultimately what happened resulted in the, the death of what, a 14 or 15 year Old girl Martha Moxley.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  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 Skekels, uh, yikes.

• 2:08:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. And it is, I don't know. And now, and now we of course have the, the Kennedy curse most visible in the form of RFK, the man who makes Keurig brewers jealous. And, um,

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  God, boy, howdy.

• 2:09:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and, uh,

• 2:09:19Sarah Marshall?

  We all know, we're all here, but it's just exhausting.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  It sure is.

• 2:09:26Sarah Marshall?

  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 government could figure out how to do that in a Fire Fest kind of a way. But it's, uh,

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  Saving us is their incompetence, um, their 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.

• 2:10:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and just this, I don't know, the, the, um, 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, um, it's cheaper to let your citizens die.

• 2:10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44Sarah Marshall?

  And we know how deeply everyone Running this country currently is motivated by money and there doesn't have to be a more complicated motive than that. That, you know, greed and ego and whatever, whatever other psychological profiles we have running amok. 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,

• 2:11:27Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know if the Kennedy dynasty has succeeded on either account, honestly, at this point.

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  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 if 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.

• 2:11:56Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Caroline Kennedy, I think, has, has done a wonderful job of quietly supporting important causes.

• 2:12:11Sarah Marshall?

  Mariah Schreiber, married Schwarzenegger, another curse.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  That's a weird move. Um, but yeah, I don't love that.

• 2:12:19Sarah Marshall?

  How's Chris Pratt for a son-in-law? More curse.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  That's punishment enough. Yeah. Um, but maybe fitting.

• 2:12:26Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know what she's done, but she doesn't deserve that, probably.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  But then you got to think, like, if you married Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's not that weird if your child picks Chris Pratt. You know what I mean?

• 2:12:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. God.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  That's not super out of pocket. But yeah, RFK Jr. Then is pretty much on the outs with his whole family from what, obviously what we see as laypeople.

• 2:12:48Sarah Marshall?

  He just has Cheryl in the ostrich now.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:13:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  I don't know. I feel pity sometimes.

• 2:13:03Sarah Marshall?

  Cheryl, you can still turn this around, I think.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 2:13:07Sarah Marshall?

  Thousands would disagree with me, but.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Well, then Tig Notaro split with her. I guess they had a podcast, but from what Tig Notaro has said, Cheryl has been really nasty about it.

• 2:13:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Behind the scenes. So you love to see a powerful shitty person who's also shitty in their personal life. I guess it's not

• 2:13:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  super weird, but damn.

• 2:13:29Sarah Marshall?

  I think maybe the lesson is just that, like, don't get too powerful and don't take it too seriously.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  And keep the no people around, like, because we're seeing the yes men syndrome.

• 2:13:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's the really big one. Yes.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  I, there was a great piece in the Atlantic about, well, the article is the new Rasputin's, which I think is

• 2:13:48Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, good.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Perfect and apt, except I'd say that RFK Jr. Has less of the rumored charisma that Rasputin had.

• 2:13:56Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You see pictures of Rasputin, you're like, this guy had to have been

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  He's got to have something.

• 2:14:00Sarah Marshall?

  Really persuasive.

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Sarah Marshall?

  Or he smelled amazing or something. Yeah.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  That can't be the case in that time period.

• 2:14:07Sarah Marshall?

  Wasn't the face card. Yeah.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  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, "When 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.

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  And like, these are things that we all know because we see the correlation, but

• 2:14:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  the connection makes so much more sense put that way.

• 2:15:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and that, you know, that if the goal of power is just to maintain power.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Sarah Marshall?

  And amass more power and to sort of create whatever arguments you need to in 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.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:24Sarah Marshall?

  You know, maybe not literally, but like in.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  I think that's why they like him.

• 2:15:28Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And that we're in a, you know, we're, we're living in a, America's season in the prosperity gospel as really a, 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 he started out with, at least. And, and it's, 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 QVC, 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

• 2:16:09Sarah Marshall?

  a problem. Like, maybe it feels good to be included in the profit-driven arm of democracy that way. I don't know. Cause it's, it's one of the only things we respect, maybe.

• 2:16:21Speaker 01

  Or it fits with the Sky Daddy sort of worldview slash 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 a Country Daddy. Controlling everything, like then you must vote, then you must stay informed. And that's, that's a big responsibility.

• 2:16:50Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And then it becomes your job. Yeah.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Sarah Marshall?

  And like, not to get too religious necessarily, but we are talking about a 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.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:17:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:17:32Sarah Marshall?

  Is alleged to have said.

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Living by those principles would be great. Like if all these people who are thumping on the book were actually living that way, that would be lovely. But instead, they'd rather fall behind a eugenicist, which weirdly, eugenics and divine right, they really are two very similar concepts, huh?

• 2:17:54Sarah Marshall?

  Huh. Yeah.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  I'm special because I'm special.

• 2:17:57Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:18:13Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  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. Cause I think there's, 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.

• 2:18:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. We all hate the DMV. We all hate all this paperwork.

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:50Sarah Marshall?

  There's someone out there who likes the paperwork and good for them.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 2:19:11Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  And you think of things like the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I always use that as 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 sown. And then I was just listening to this, this guy who wrote

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  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 is prudent because the ideal is a government that protects us and that we participate in.

• 2:20:15Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:26Sarah Marshall?

  Which generally isn't true either, interestingly, right?

• 2:20:29Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:20:29Sarah Marshall?

  Like, I think a lot of the people who identify as the victors historically need the very things that government could provide them with.

• 2:20:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:20:37Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:20:54Sarah Marshall?

  And that doesn't inconvenience me, which is a more reasonable thing to desire, you know, because I think that, yeah.

• 2:20:59Speaker 01

  That's also a big difference. Like, you need even more trust in who you're voting for if that is your goal.

• 2:21:04Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:21:19Sarah Marshall?

  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 interests 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.

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  really benefiting from stay at home policies and profiteering opportunistic uses of like, we're gonna 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.

• 2:23:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  And that's a bridge too far. And so like,

• 2:23:46Sarah Marshall?

  That was a fun one.

• 2:23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the distinction that she adds to the definition of like, the government in 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 apolitical people tend to be the first ones to evolve, 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.

• 2:24:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I think it's, you, you look at history and you're like, well, there's plenty of government cabals. You know, we talked about MKUltra 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 too 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.

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:06Sarah Marshall?

  And doing so in a way that is kind of, that 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.

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:22Sarah Marshall?

  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 couldn't personally get to the moon, maybe other people could.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  And with COVID, it's like, either it is mild and we shouldn't be worried about it, or it's a bioweapon.

• 2:26:20Sarah Marshall?

  Perpetrated by the Democrats.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  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. The 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.

• 2:26:46Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I agree with that.

• 2:27:22Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:27:39Speaker 01

  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 it, 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.

• 2:28:14Sarah Marshall?

  It's really just, it's, you know, just something that you thought of in your very own head.

• 2:28:19Speaker 01

  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 Blakely, and he was counsel to the House Committee on Assassination, 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.

• 2:28:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah, I believe that. And I mean, I don't know, there's kind of, there's something nice to me in, 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?

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:13Sarah Marshall?

  Even conspiracy theories can be used to try and get more of a real understanding of the world. I just, I won't stand by as my best friend research is slandered like this. She will rise again.

• 2:29:26Speaker 01

  Someday, we might not be alive to see it, but someday she'll be back.

• 2:29:30Sarah Marshall?

  You know, it's just, it's fun to learn things.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 2:29:34Sarah Marshall?

  What if we market it as fun? Has anyone tried that yet?

• 2:29:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:29:45Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:29:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's sick.

• 2:29:55Sarah Marshall?

  If you can.

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.