November 2, 2025 • 38 mins
Investigator Laura Krantz (the Wild Things podcast) knows about everything Bigfoot, including Bigfoot erotica, the CIA's supposed relationship with the cryptid, and how Bigfoot can be a gateway drug to other conspiracy theories.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. We have over
sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,
serving in high risk areas all around the world, and part.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is Laura Krantz. She is one of those people who
seem to be able to do anything. She's a journalist,
an investigator, and really a storyteller. Her podcast, Wild Thing,
which we will talk about some today, was named one
of the best fifty podcasts in recent years. Is also
(00:44):
the inspiration for a series of grade school books. And
Laura's worked as an editor and producer at NPR in
Washington and also in Los Angeles. So good to have
you with us.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Really glad to be here. I'm excited to do this.
It's going to be fun, is it.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, you haven't heard my question yet. Let's dispense with
a We're gonna have fun here.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Let's get right down to the really nitty gritty that
I want to talk about. Okay, you're a bigfoot expert,
bigfoot erotica.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Well are we going right into that one?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
So we sort of buds with Denver Riggleman, who was
a Republican congressman. Now he was accused that our buddy
Denver was accused of pushing bigfoot erotica because he wrote
a book that starts out with cryptid yetti or bigfoot
Genitalia and goes all into this.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
So what is up with bigfoot erotica?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Is it real?
Speaker 4 (01:35):
It is reel. I actually spoke with a woman who
was an author of bigfoot erotica for a long time.
She lives in Parker, Colorado, so just south of Denver.
Her pen name is Virginia Wade, and she has a
whole series of bigfoot erotica books, which I have read
some of them. They're very dirty, really. I did a
(01:57):
bonus interview with her, which actually I'm really seen the
bonus episodes for wild Thing, and I'm in the process
of doing that and that's going to be coming out
next week. People are really into it. She made like
ten twenty thousand dollars a month writing this.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
See like some handsome eight foot guy who liked was
like a bonus Rippert give.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Me Now, I wouldn't go with handsome. I would go
with slobbering beasts who like kidnaps you takes you off
into the woods and then I'm not sure if it's
like a Stockholm syndrome or if you like, actually do
fall in love with Bigfoot. You're very busy when you're
hanging out with Bigfoot.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Well, I know you've did You've done some podcast work
on aliens and nuclear issues. But if we're starting with Bigfoot,
can I ask how did you choose to look at
Bigfoot and Sasquatch and those things?
Speaker 4 (02:40):
So that is the big question here, And I get
that one a lot because people are like, you've seem normal,
what are you doing? Especially when I was still working
for NPR and I mentioned I was doing this night,
a couple of colleagues being like, really, you're gonna tank
your career like that. So what happened was I found
out that my grandfather's cousin and I found this out
after he'd away. He was a tenured professor of physical anthropology,
(03:04):
so the science of anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington,
and he was also the country's pre eminent academic expert
on Bigfoot. And I was just like, what, how can
you be a scientist and believe in Bigfoot? Because I
had grown up thinking that Bigfoot was Harry and the
Henderson's a campfire myth, like just not anything anyone took
(03:25):
really seriously. But to find out that there's this scientist
who's my relative, who was actually gathering evidence and trying
to come up with a plausible hypothesis for the existence
of Bigfoot just blew my mind. And so I decided, Okay,
I'm going to suspend all disbelief here and I'm going
to look into this. You know, there's a whole wide
range of people who look for Bigfoot. There are people
(03:45):
who are like Bigfoot lives in my basement and talks
to me and we have breakfast every morning. And then
there are people who were more like my cousin, who
was like, it is a biologic creature, like any other creature,
has to have a breeding population, it has to obey
all the law of physics and biology that the rest
of us have to obey. And he looked for evidence
based on that. So I followed in his footsteps, if
(04:07):
you will, his big footsteps, and went down this path
and explored this for a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
What is the biggest surprises that came out to you?
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Like from that the thing that blew my mind, I
think the most. There were a couple. One was there
were a lot of people who, similar to my own experience,
had like very science, had scientific backgrounds. They were people
you would trust. They were people who worked for National
Park Service or fishing, game or fish and wildlife, like
people who were out in the woods and experienced a
lot of animals and knew their surroundings and knew the
(04:37):
ecosystems they were in, and then they would have this
experience and they were just like, I don't know how
else to explain it. I don't want it to be
bigfoot necessarily, but that's the only thing that I can
grab hold of that makes sense to me. And a
lot of them really were kind of embarrassed by it
or fighting it in some ways, which I thought was interesting.
And then the other thing that struck me is that
(04:58):
we've had stories of foot for hundreds, if not thousands
of years. There's always been these kinds of stories about
these big, oversized creatures outside the line of the campfire,
and you wonder where did those originate, where did they
come from? And there is a lot of anthropological evidence
of all these other species that coexisted when humans were
(05:19):
first around. There were at least seven or eight that
were walking the earth at the same time Homo sapiens were,
and you'd wonder maybe something like Bigfoot was around back then.
And then the stories have been passed down over generations
because if you think about what it takes to become
a fossil and then be discovered and uncovered at the
right moment and analyzed properly, maybe something like this existed
(05:39):
and we just don't know for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
We certainly do know that Neanderthal and modern humans inhabited
Europe at the same time in parts of the Middle East,
and we don't know that they did interbreed. We know
that through genes at least in a few cases, but
we don't know what the relationship was. In fact, I
think within ten thousand years of our species showing up
in Europe, thals when extinct.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
For whatever reason. So it could be some mythological ativistic remembrance.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Of a ten thousand year conflict with another human species.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
I'm just guessing, I know, but yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
And I think that's what a lot of this is,
its guesswork. We're making assumptions based on the evidence we
have at hand, and we don't have a lot of
evidence from ten thousand years ago or even further back.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
So I grew up in a rural area right upstate
New York Mountains.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Were a lot of bigfoot up there, beers.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
We don't have bigfoot up there, not in the northern
were just Canadians. He's like, when you fit, when you
got Canadians, you're going to find beer cans around right?
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Oh yeah, true?
Speaker 3 (06:36):
And so what about bigfoot poop? But I'm just saying,
then I.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Apologize for Jerry's questions.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Or you could call it scan.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Okay, Oh yeah. And it's funny. There's one scientist I
spoke to, a guy named Todd Disstel who used to
be a molecular primatologist at NYU. He has now moved
to Amherst. I'm not sure where he is now. He's
gone to a different university, but he was one of
these scientists. It's like, look, I'm ninety nine point nine
percent sure that Bigfoot does not exist, but if it does,
(07:06):
I want to be the guy who is at the
front line of that. So he encouraged people who were
scientifically minded to send him samples and provided they followed
certain protocols and things like that. He's like, you wouldn't
believe the amount of bear shit that I get on
my desk.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
He asked for it. Well, you know, as conspiracies come
and go, there's some that like seem to stay around forever,
and this one does. What is your view on that?
Is it just because actually, as far as conspiracies go,
this is actually less crazy than many.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
And I think that's a big part of it is
it's like it's, like I said, there's gradiations of this
where you've got people who were like Bigfoot it was
beamed down here by aliens on another planet to save
us to I don't know what bigfoots supposed to be doing.
If the alien's front of me here, I just feel
a little bad. It's like a he's been sent to
a black site. You guys would know about that, right.
I think that the biggest appeal of Bigfoot is people
(07:58):
like the idea that the world is ill wild enough
and unexplored enough and untamed enough that something like Bigfoot
could exist because if everything has been paved over and
pruned and mapped and like Google satellited and like we
know where everything is, what's the fun, where's the discovery,
where's the excitement and the adventure? You know, it's the
same appeal that like these stories from the eighteen hundreds
(08:20):
of explorers going out, And yeah, there were a lot
of horrible things they did, but I think that idea
of like what's out there in the world, what don't
we know, is very thrilling for people, and I think
that is part of the appeal of Bigfoot.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
So just doing a bit of research on this prior
to coming on, I was shocked at the amount of
synergy mixing of conspiracy theories between CIA and Bigfoot.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
In fact, there's a suppose there's someone who claims to
be a CI officer.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I don't know whether she was or wasn't it Tracy
Shandler Walder who was talking about.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Oh we know Tracy Walder, do we yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
FCI too, Yes, she and she talks about Bigfoot.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
A history major ed Diversity of Southern California Tracy wanted
to be a teacher, but a job there on campus
changed everything.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
It was a table that said CIA and that they
were looking for English in History majors, and so I
dropped my resume.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Often they called yeah, and the rest is history.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, but she talks about how I guess really truly,
the FBI did test fur that was supposedly from Bigfoot.
They found out it was dear fur. But the conspiracy
farists were like, no, they knew it was bigfoot fur,
but they substituted.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
They just they're lying to you.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And then there was there was also footage you can
look up online of Bigfoot. It's infrared, but he's running
between the trees of Bigfoot being photographed by a CIA helicopter,
which I'm telling you we don't have in the US.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Yeah, it's interesting that i'd forgotten about that FBI testing,
but I actually the Washington Post interviewed me for that
because I had spoken with some of the people who'd
been involved in collecting that for a guy named Peter
Burn who died several years ago, who was, like I
believe they called he was one of the four Horsemen
of Sasquatchery. My cousin Grover being one of the others.
(10:08):
In any case, this is conspiracy in general. I think
people don't trust the government, and I think.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
What you take this conspiracy and you give it to
the deep state, and when they say it's not true,
it's like that proves it's true.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
It's true exactly. There's an element of that, but it's just,
you know, the stories that I heard were that the
Forest Service was covering it up because the Big Tree
or Big Lumber, whatever you want to call them, didn't
want Bigfoot to be discovered because then it would be
another spotted owl situation, and for listeners who might be
too young to remember the spotted owl. This is in
the nineteen nineties when they were trying to protect old
(10:43):
growth forward forest in Washington State, and it was the
habitat of a very small, endangered species known as the
spotted owl. So what they don't want is like someone
to discover Bigfoot all of a sudden, all this forest
land is off limits and Big Lumber can't get in
there and chop down all the trees like they were
planning on. So that was one of the conspiracies that
I heard a couple of times. But I couldn't really
(11:04):
find like where that had originated from. I think it
was just an idea that people held.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
There's another one that the Smithsonian is the fact that
they don't have bigfoot skeletons means that they're hiding bigfoot skeletons.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
So the fact that sure, I mean, have you been
to their archives? Like it is a little like that
scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc
you go into this giant warehouse and you're like, how
the hell does anyone find anything in here? They could
have a bigfoot skeleton, but.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
They might not even know it. Jane Goodall just died.
She was a big foot. Now is my understanding?
Speaker 6 (11:35):
I would I'm romantic. I would like bigfoot to exist.
I've met people who swear they've seen bigfoot, and I
think the interesting thing is every single continent there is
an equivalent of bigfoot or subsquatch. There's the Yetti, there's
the Yuri in Australia, there's the Chinese wild man, and
and on and on and on, and you know, I've
(11:58):
had stories from people who you have to believe them.
So there's something. I don't know what it is. I've
always open minded.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
I think her feeling was that something like Bigfoot might
have existed, and she was just coming at it from
a very like open minded attitude.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
A couple of times you brought up Washington State. Our
producer Rachel is from Forks, Washington, and I think they
have a sasquatch store. There is that, correct, Rachel? They
have like candies that are meant to be little squatch
sasquatch poops and stuff.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Yeah, that's not what a sasquatch poop looks like. There's
no way they're waiting that.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Wait a minute, what does it look like.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
I think they're bigger.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's just a guess though, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yeah? True?
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Good point could be like rabbits, who's got birds in
the background.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
I live in Hawaii. Is it's like forest out back.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Hawaii is the only state where Bigfoot has not been
found because Bigfoot can't swim that far.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Oh, but we do have We have some men o huna,
which are mythical. They're not big, but they're little people,
many sasquatches that live up in the mountains and they
come down out of the mountains and they do naughty
things like they let your pigs out, or they burn
your shed down.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So we have a sasquatch light here in Hawaii.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
But little foot, yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Little food.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I want to test Laura and Rachel. I want you
to both answer at the same time. Do you believe
in Bigfoot?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yes? Or no? No?
Speaker 1 (13:33):
No?
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Ah?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Are you hesitated? Rachel?
Speaker 4 (13:35):
Can I qualify? Though?
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (13:37):
I like the idea of Bigfoot, and if someone comes
with Bigfoot evidence, I'm all for it.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
So what do locals think, Rachel?
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I mean, I think that's probably why I hesitated, honestly,
is because I don't think it's necessarily a belief that's
held by that many people in town.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
But it's something that people like to believe in. Right.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Bigfoot is good for the economy.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Ah, Bigfoot probably on your high school football team, though, right?
So is Bigfoot and the yet Are they the same
thing as a cryptid?
Speaker 4 (14:02):
No, they're both cryptids, but they are not the same thing.
The YETI is smaller in the Himalaya and white. I
was actually very strongly corrected on this because I tried
to interview the guy who owned Great Divide Brewery, which
is here in Colorado, and I thought it was a
Bigfoot in their logo. And it turns out it is
a YETI, and he was very clear that he's like
(14:23):
the YETI is a very different creature. And I don't
want you conflating them so.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
They can't mate, right like you know, horses and donkeys
that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
They probably could, but then the Offspringer sterile.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
So, Laura, you've interviewed people, what have you learned from
the people who tell the stories that they've had encounters.
Do do the people actually believe these things or do
you think some of them just want the attention or
is there a mixture of those things.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
I think there's a mixture. I mean, I think you
see that with sort of any phenomenon. There's people who
are true believers and there's people who just want in
on the fund. But most of the people that I
spoke with really had a true belief and had an
experience and had seen something or or gone through something
out in the woods that they really couldn't explain. And
I wasn't there. I can't say what happened or didn't happen,
(15:08):
And I have no doubt that whatever did happen was
odd and really through them, especially the people who'd been
wildlife biologists or had scientific training in these ecosystems, Like
there was one guy I spoke with, a guy named
John mayan Zinski. He's based out of Wyoming, but he
was working in the wind River Range in Wyoming sometime
in the seventies, and he tells this crazy story about
(15:29):
you know, he's out there, he's doing a survey of
bighorn sheep. He spent a lot of time in this
area and one night he is in his tent and
he sees this shadow of a hand coming over the tent.
And this is after something had been harassing him for
several hours, and he was like, it was not a bear.
It was not a bear, paw. It looked like a
human hand and then whatever. He came out of the
(15:51):
tent like trying to figure out what it was, and
it ran off into the trees, and then it proceeded
to throw pine cones at him, and he just was like,
I know, it wasn't a bear. There was nobody else
around as far as I knew, because he was out
in the middle of nowhere. Bigfoot was not the first
thing that came to my mind, but there were all
these other people who were talking about this phenomenon, especially
(16:11):
in that area, and he and I started a wonder
So yeah, I think people do experience something that just
rocks their belief system and wild things.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
You podcast about aliens, which.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Is a yes, an aliens guys, they're all, oh, we
are good.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
CIA is because completely a part of this, and in fact,
there was I can't speak to. President Trump recently retweeted
something about med beds, which is.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
The secret beds that will that come from alien technology.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
The alien technology that CIA has we reversed engineered, we
can grow back limbs, and I was like, it can't
cure my bald spot for the kind of thing. But
so when you investigated Bigfoot and you've investigated the UFO
conspiracy theories, did you see any similarities do you see
other than CIA is at the root of both of these.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
But obviously the Deep States there is some overlap. There
are definitely people who are like, you know, I, like
I said, aliens brought Bigfoot to Earth. There were actually
more of those people than I would have expected. And
then you know a lot of the people, in fact,
most of the people who think that Bigfoot is out
there also think that there is some sort of alien
life out there, although a large number of them are
(17:21):
more on the the tip that it's like alien life
way out there, not necessarily alien life that's come down
and visited Earth, which I tend to agree with. I
think there is probably life out there somewhere, whether we're
going to shake hands and have coffee with it at
anytime in the next I don't know, two million years.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
So you did Bigfoot, you did aliens, and then you
did stuff related to nuclear.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Everyone's like nuclear, that's weird. So the Bigfoot one was
the obvious.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Wait, wait a minute, nuclear is the weird one. Aliens
in Bigfoot are fine.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
But yeah, Bigfoot was the obvious one because of the
family connection. And then as I was wrapping up the
research on the Bigfoot season, all this stuff was happening
on the front page of the New York Times with
the Pentagons Secret Program, a tip that they'd been running,
essentially the idea that the Department of Defense had this
secret UFO program that they had been running for years,
(18:09):
which they probably have been running in some capacity or
others since they were doing Project Bluebook back in like
the fifties and sixties. But that was all happening, And
then there was also this interstellar object that came through
our solar system very very briefly at the end of
twenty seventeen, it was called a muamua. It means scout
basically messenger coming from Afar. And I think most people,
(18:33):
most astronomers, were like, this is just debris having been
blown out of another solar system and like coming through
ours and then it'll head back out somewhere. But the
guy who was running the astronomy department at Harvard, a
guy named Abbi Loeb, he was like, we have to
consider the possibility that it might be artificial, that it
might be made by extraterrestrials. And he wrote that in
(18:56):
a scientific paper and he published it, and it's actually,
you have to consider the possible. He didn't say it
was that. He has since gone on to say that
it was that, which gets to your point about people
who double down on theories because it's giving them a
lot of attention.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Well, if you have a substeck, you have to get
people to it.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Right rightly anyway. And I was like, here's another scientist
who's saying something that's controversial. Because you had scientists back
in the seventies and eighties when SETI the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence that sort of that branch of science was formed,
and they were just going laughed out of the room.
But now a lot of the things that they're talking
about have become mainstream. And similarly, what he was saying
(19:33):
seemed a little bit crazy, but there's some scientific value
to it. So that's how I got into the alien one.
Nuclear was again a personal one because I grew up
in Idaho Falls, Idaho, which is right near the Idaho
National Laboratory, which used to be the National Reactor Testing
Station back in the forties after we dropped the bomb,
and we were trying to figure out what can we
do on the positive side with nuclear power, And in
(19:55):
nineteen sixty one, one of the many test reactors that
were out there blew up and it killed three men.
It is still considered the deadliest nuclear reactor accident in
American history. Nobody talks about it. Nobody talked about it
in my town. My dad was there in high school
when this happened, and I didn't hear about it till
years later. And there was like all these rumors about
a love triangle and a murder suicide, and all the
(20:18):
blame is pinned on these guys who were killed because
they're not there to defend themselves. But there was also
all this other shady stuff going on, where like the
reactor wasn't being maintained, the army wasn't doing its job.
There were problems with this reactor and had been for
years that were not being dealt with. So it was
just an interesting look at that particular story in the
context of as we are trying to rebuild our nuclear
(20:41):
fleet and in fact make it larger in order to
satisfy all of our energy demands, are we any more
responsible than we were in the nineteen sixties? And part
of me is like, I'm not so sure. You watch
the Russians try and blow up the Zaporishnia nuclear plant
in Ukraine, and you're like, I don't know for if
we as humans are better.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
I remember a guy that was Eric Schlosser who wrote
a book called Command to Control about all of the
near misses and accidents and schools related to nuclear weapons.
He writes about a big accident of nuclear silo on Arkansas.
I remember in the book they're talking about planes accidentally
dropping nuclear yah the broken arrow stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
You're just like, we're a little sloppy.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
And Jerry and I worked in Bureaucracy's good stuff going on,
smart people, but people make mistakes and things happen, and
if you're talking about nuclear power, nuclear weapons, there's going
to be mistakes, and that's a scary thing to think about.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
I will say that the Navy has actually done a
very admirable job in the now almost eighty years of
maintaining the nuclear fleet. They have not had a lot
of accidents, if any, and that's partly due to the
systems that were put in place by Admiral Rickover.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
He was quite mean.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah, he does not sound like the best boss, except
for the fact that he was like, oh, this is
slightly off. Take the whole thing apart, start over and
build it. And your dad is to some degree what
nuclear needs. If you're going to play with things that
are that dangerous, you need to be as like close
to perfect as you can be. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
There was one instance where the Indians were test firing
a nuclear capable missile and they realized had it pointed
the wrong way, this is God forbid, Like North Korea,
and like this is that people are people.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
When I actually start to think about human nature and
our tendency to want to cut corners, or do things faster,
or make a lot of money. Yeah, exactly, and maybe
maybe AI can do We want AI doing this part,
I want doing that party.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
There is a theory though that if we find if
eventually intelligent life shows up here on Earth, that augurs
well for the human race because they believes that because
there's another theory that says that once you get the
means of destroying your planet, eventually over thousands of years,
you're going to use it.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Statistically, we're going to wipe ourselves out.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
We're going to get the bottleneck theory.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Right there we go.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, but yeah, another civilization doesn't do it, that means
that there's a possibility we won't either.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Yeah. I tend to look a little askance at the
idea that the aliens are going to come here to
save us, Like it feels like just I mean, I
get the appeal, but it feels a little bit religious
in a way.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, that's exactly why would think.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I go for a run and I see a little
ant heap off to the side, I don't stop and go.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
I'm going to like do sexual savior on these ants.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
I'm going to figure out who their ant queen is,
so that I can talk to them.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
It's we're like, it's not a whole lot of interest
in me. I'm just going to do Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
And here's the other thing. Humans only have not been
around that long three hundred thousand years out of a
four point six billion year history. Who's to say that aliens,
who would probably be more advanced because their solar systems
and their galaxies are older than ours, didn't already come by.
We're like, whoa, look at that molten pile of garbage,
and then you know, one star only because I can't
give it zero, and then never came back again.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I can't remember where I heard this from.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Ituse like the reverse technology thing that CIA or Deep statee.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
Oh, yeah, I heard about this a lot.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
But on one thing I heard on this was if
a group of Neanderthals were to get a hold of
your laptop, do you think they could verse engineer it?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Right?
Speaker 4 (24:01):
Totally?
Speaker 3 (24:02):
They're so smart they won't even know what it is.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
What do you mean a group of Neanderthals if we
got a hold of a laptop, so we go, I
don't know it, just hit the button right?
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I can't. Yeah, I can't figure out how half the
things in my house. Work like the toaster, maybe, but
I know if I could reverse engineer it.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Did you see? There was that guy, I think he
did a ted talk about exactly that he said. I
decided I was going to remake the toaster right from
the beginning. I was going to go. You know, there's
a cold Balt in there. I was going to go
get cold balt and if the plastic I had to
go in.
Speaker 7 (24:31):
So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric
taster from scratch, and working on the idea that the
cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest reverse engineer.
I went and bought the cheapest taster I could find,
took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover
that inside this object, which I'd bought for just three
(24:52):
pounds ninety four, there were four hundred different bits made
out of you know, one hundred plus different materials.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Which shows just how complex it is and how many
different things have to come together to make the things
that we have, and it's just almost impossible.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
We take it.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Yeah, but and we take so much of it for granted.
You don't stop to think about it. You just pop
it in there and it works and it's magic, it's science,
but it just happens.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I want to circle back to your grandfather's cousins skeleton, right.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
Okay, yeah, so what's the deal?
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Okay, so we also have to talk a little bit
about Grover, who was that. This is my grandfather's cousin,
Grover Krantz, same last name. So anyway, after that, he
wanted his bones sent to the Smithsonian, and he'd already
made a deal because he knew a lot of the
anthropologists and the curators who worked at the museum, and
they said, yes, we'll take your bones, and yes we
will take the bones of your three Irish wolf founds,
which I have to clarify it. The dogs had died
(25:58):
long before Grover and he just had the bones to them. Anyway,
they put them in storage. They said, we'll take your bones.
There's no chance they're going to end up on display.
But then the museum, the National Museum of Natural History,
decided to do an exhibit on forensic anthropology and they
wanted to show what you could learn from bones, and
(26:19):
the final piece of that exhibit, they decided to take
Grover's skeleton and the skeleton of his favorite dog Clyde
and recreate a photo that had been taken in Grover's backyard,
probably sometime in the seventies. And it's Grover standing leaning
back a little bit and the dog up on its
hind legs and it's a huge dog and it's got
both of its paws on Grover's shoulder and it's licking
(26:40):
his face. And they recreated that photo and it is
so cool.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Oh, it's kind of a bare bones exhibit.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
So when you talk to children about Bigfoot, Huh, how
do you do that? You don't do it like Santa
Claus or the tooth Fairy? No, No, how do you
present Bigfoot?
Speaker 4 (26:57):
I treated the same way I treated it in the podcast. Look,
this is something that people have a question about, and
this is something that people want to know more about.
And so what do we do when we have a question.
We try to find answers, and we try and go
about that systematically, and we try to find evidence. And
does this evidence make sense and does it match up
with the scientific process or is this something that doesn't
quite You know, it's a fun idea, but it's not
(27:20):
necessarily grounded in science or facts. You asked earlier, if
I believed in Bigfoot. I say no, But I like
the idea of Bigfoot, and I understand why people believe,
and I understand why people have this question. And if
someone comes out and his fine has found a body
or a big piece of a body or DNA evidence
that backs it up, I will be right on the
(27:40):
sidelines cheering those people.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
On Bigfoot is as a harmless conspiracy theory. Unlike a
lot of conspiracy theories, it doesn't hurt anybody. It's fun,
you can have fun with it. It's not global p defied.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Not destroying our democracy. Y.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
No, the issue with Bigfoot. The issue with Bigfoot, it
might be that it's a gateway drug. I think a
lot of people start with Bigfoot and then keep going.
There's a really great I'm forgetting her name, but she
created like a pyramid, like a hierarchical pyramid of like conspiracies,
and level one is like Bigfoot, fairly harmless. But then
level two you start getting into some really dark stuff.
(28:17):
And by the time you've hit level three, like you're
really going down this rabbit hole. And these are things.
I think she created this to help people understand, like
my friend believes in Bigfoot, should I be worried, and
she's like Bigfoot in and of itself. No, but if
you start moving from Bigfoot down into the next level,
then maybe start to be a little bit more worried.
But Bigfoot, I think, by itself, is relatively harmless. I
(28:39):
think a lot of the people who like Bigfoot also
like being outside, like going hiking and camping.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
So Florida, I asked, what are you doing next?
Speaker 4 (28:47):
Ooh, good question. It's hard for me to pick one
that I liked most, because I really did enjoy all
of these projects from different perspective. I think Bigfoot is
probably my favorite because it was the first one and
it has that family connection. And I probably spent more
time on this project than I did on any of
the others, just because I was learning how to do
the process. But all of them are interesting, and there's
so much good science and so many smart people. And
(29:09):
then in terms of what I'm doing next, I'm working
on somebody else's podcast right now. Because the podcasting world
is not the most lucrative, despite what the people will
tell you. You're not making a lot of money on podcasts,
especially not on the kinds that I do, which are
these sort of long narrative series.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Or not making anything.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
Yeah, yeah, maybe erotica is the way forward for you both.
There probably is. So I'm working on someone else's podcast,
and then I'm trying to write a science fiction novel.
I've never written fiction, even though everybody thinks I have
with the bigfoot stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
You got to give us a little teaser. What is it?
Speaker 4 (29:45):
It's about tics, That's all I'm going to tell you.
I actually went to the TICK lab in Hamilton, Montana.
There's a biohazard or a biosafety level four lab up there.
They don't let me. They wouldn't let me into that one.
I don't know why. It's not like i'd steal the ebola.
But we also do a lot of research up there
on rocky mountains, spot a fever, lime, all those kinds
of things. So I got to go up there and
go into the TIC clab and see the kind of
(30:06):
stuff that they're doing. And they're creepy. They're creepy little creatures.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
So lur. We don't do this with all the guests,
just the ones that we like.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
So you get to ask You get to ask one
question of each of us, or just one question. Oh okay,
see on the Store two or three or four? Yeah,
truth or dare What do you want to know about CIA?
Speaker 4 (30:25):
I do kind of want to know about m K
Ultra And I know you guys are talking about doing
that in a different episode, but like how extensive was that?
And are those kinds of projects still around? Because here's
and this is a legitimate question from the standpoint of like,
you know, we don't know everything. There is a lot
of gray area out there. There's some science that we
thought was settled that has since gone on to be questioned,
Like just look at how physics has changed in the
(30:46):
past three hundred years. So I'm wondering, like, while I
don't necessarily believe in mind control, like there are things
that can be done or that we might be getting
more technologically advanced that would allow for something similar. So
do they still do those on mind control?
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Have you been have you watched any political rallies lately?
Speaker 1 (31:05):
When we were inside, I never remember ever talking about
it or digging up stuff. What I know now is
actually from reading books about it, and essentially, you know,
what I've learned is that it really was something of
its time. It was at that time when we were
really afraid world War three could break out. We thought
that the Russians had some version of mind control. There
was a number of Americans that had, like in the
(31:28):
Korean War, that had come back and they had become
communists and they had changed to and all these kind
of things, and I think there was some effort, probably
sensibly to say what is this explore it? And in CIA,
the director I think was interested in it and got
this scientist in a little area to do it. But
it was actually not seen as serious by the operator people,
and it was a very secret and tightly held thing
(31:50):
inside CIA. And there's a lot of CIA people who
are very much against it. But are there things like
that now? I mean, there are questions that need some
sort of answer. They don't necessarily exist in the intelligence
sphere or at CIA. You know, you studied aliens. It
was the military. It was more probably involved in those
kind of things. So there are government programs probably like that.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, So I don't think the old the Manchurian candidate,
where I show you a card and I control you.
They looked into that in the nineteen fifties because American
prisoners were coming back from North Korean captorship, being captives
and they were clearly Brainwath.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Concerned about that.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, right, right, right, So it was researched on it,
and a lot of it was, like as John says,
it was bad science. None of it worked to begin with,
there was no oversight, and it's one of the shames
that CIA was ever involved with this back in the
fifties and sixties. But I think more to your point today,
I think AI, not individually, but is changing sort of
(32:48):
demographic views on things. And I think certainly authoritarian regimes
are trying to figure out ways to control information flows
to get people to believe things that's quite simply aren't true.
I mean, you know, Putin has apparently most of Russia
or the vast majority of Russians believe that Ukraine started it, right,
that it wasn't Russia that marched in, or if it did,
(33:10):
it had every reason to. People are thinking about how
to change people's perceptions and take away their ability to
make educated decisions based on free flow of information. It's
not mk ultra, but it's MK ultra too, and I
think it's something to worry about.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Is technology changes.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
So likewise, then does the CIA also work on counter
programming so to speak? Like how do you get people
so that they don't fall for that kind of stuff?
And I'm thinking both domestically and foreign.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
What's interesting at least we think about what the Russians
have tried to do with subversion of disinformation and all
of these things. I think the countries that live closer
to Russia and understand the Russian mindset are better at
this than you know, the Finns and the Estonians and Latins,
Lithuanians and the Poles, checks and people. They're better at
dealing with disinformation.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
Because they lived under it.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah. You see in Moldova, the Russian spent an incredible
amount of money and effort to try to make sure
that a Western oriented president was not elected, and they
just did anyway, despite this huge, massive effort by the
Russians that get false information into the system and so amazing.
I think we can learn actually a lot from those
type of places, more than some sort of scientific thing
(34:22):
inside our own at this point.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
But it's tricky inside the US because of our First Amendment, right. So,
there was not too long ago there were a number
of very influential US podcasters who threw a cutout, a
very bad cutout. It was very easy to look see through.
We're taking like tens of thousands of dollars a month
from Russia and putting out talking points that Russia is pushing.
(34:46):
And then when they were caught it came out they said,
it's my First Amendment rights. I believe it anyway, So
what does it mattering. Nothing happened to them, nothing should It.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Was more than tens of thousands.
Speaker 4 (34:56):
Yeah, yeah, no, I remember hearing about that and make money.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
That.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
Actually, there's a really interesting book I read fairly recently
called I'm Blanking On. The name of the author is
Leah Sattelli. She's a friend of mine, and she writes
about conspiracy theories. But she talked about this Supreme Court
case that happened in regards to a cult. And this
case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court,
and the plaintiffs are arguing that this cult had taken
advantage of all of these people. And what the Supreme
(35:24):
Court eventually ends up deciding is that if the people
truly believed, then they weren't being taken advantage of, and
the defendants were they were within their First Amendment rights.
And so you basically had this First Amendment case that
says that abusive cults are okay if people believe.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
But our business scams an't okay. When they get the
first story saying you need to give me money.
Speaker 4 (35:48):
It feels like it needs to be relegislated based on
what's happening.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
But those are conspiracies, not conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Right right, Oh, here's my other question. Here's my other question.
Was Mint Romney right when he said that Russia was
the biggest threat back in twenty fourteen and everyone like
laughed him out of the room or twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I guess what I talked to groups and students, and
it's often one of the questions is and I served
in Russia. I worked on Russian issues. I worked with
the FBI and kind of Spana stuff on Russia stuff.
I think of Russia is a serious threat to Europe
and to US and something we need to pay attention to.
But I also think in the bigger sphere in the
twenty first century, Russia is a loser. They really don't
(36:27):
make anything anybody wants. The economy is the size of Portugal.
It creates problems. It's not winning the cult grist, so
it needs to overthrow the system. It needs to create chaos,
so it either gets attention or it keeps its sphere.
Whereas China wants to own the twenty first century. They
don't want to upset the commercial and business markets because
they want to own them and run them. So I
think China is a much larger challenge moving forward, a
(36:50):
much bigger issue for the United States moving forward. Russia
is a problem, it's a threat. Is it the biggest threat?
I don't think so. I think the biggest threat most
places in the world would say is the United States.
The United States has been a place that in many
places of the world, freedom loving people would look up
to is the place to go to, and it helped
with stability, It helped with keeping markets open around the world,
(37:12):
free trade. Now, the fact that we're changing this way
and no one knows where it's going in terms of stability,
in terms of markets, in terms of security, I think
it's the biggest sort of thing that's out there that
could cause real problems. And everyone in the world has
to pay attention to what's happening because I'm here on predictability.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
Yeah, And China will happily step into the void we
leave behind.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
And they are and a lot of places where we're right. Laura.
It's so great to have you on. Thank you for
talking to us. It's exciting. You've picked these fun things
to explore, and you realize good storytellers, whatever they find
and if they do it right, it can be really enjoying.
You can learn other stuff from doing it. So thank
you for what you're doing, and thanks for coming on
with us.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
Thank you for having me. I told you it would
be fun and it was.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Yes, it was.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. We have over
sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,
serving in high risk areas all around the world, and part.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is Laura Krantz. She is one of those people who
seem to be able to do anything. She's a journalist,
an investigator, and really a storyteller. Her podcast, Wild Thing,
which we will talk about some today, was named one
of the best fifty podcasts in recent years. Is also
(00:44):
the inspiration for a series of grade school books. And
Laura's worked as an editor and producer at NPR in
Washington and also in Los Angeles. So good to have
you with us.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Really glad to be here. I'm excited to do this.
It's going to be fun, is it.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, you haven't heard my question yet. Let's dispense with
a We're gonna have fun here.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Let's get right down to the really nitty gritty that
I want to talk about. Okay, you're a bigfoot expert,
bigfoot erotica.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Well are we going right into that one?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
So we sort of buds with Denver Riggleman, who was
a Republican congressman. Now he was accused that our buddy
Denver was accused of pushing bigfoot erotica because he wrote
a book that starts out with cryptid yetti or bigfoot
Genitalia and goes all into this.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
So what is up with bigfoot erotica?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Is it real?
Speaker 4 (01:35):
It is reel. I actually spoke with a woman who
was an author of bigfoot erotica for a long time.
She lives in Parker, Colorado, so just south of Denver.
Her pen name is Virginia Wade, and she has a
whole series of bigfoot erotica books, which I have read
some of them. They're very dirty, really. I did a
(01:57):
bonus interview with her, which actually I'm really seen the
bonus episodes for wild Thing, and I'm in the process
of doing that and that's going to be coming out
next week. People are really into it. She made like
ten twenty thousand dollars a month writing this.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
See like some handsome eight foot guy who liked was
like a bonus Rippert give.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Me Now, I wouldn't go with handsome. I would go
with slobbering beasts who like kidnaps you takes you off
into the woods and then I'm not sure if it's
like a Stockholm syndrome or if you like, actually do
fall in love with Bigfoot. You're very busy when you're
hanging out with Bigfoot.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Well, I know you've did You've done some podcast work
on aliens and nuclear issues. But if we're starting with Bigfoot,
can I ask how did you choose to look at
Bigfoot and Sasquatch and those things?
Speaker 4 (02:40):
So that is the big question here, And I get
that one a lot because people are like, you've seem normal,
what are you doing? Especially when I was still working
for NPR and I mentioned I was doing this night,
a couple of colleagues being like, really, you're gonna tank
your career like that. So what happened was I found
out that my grandfather's cousin and I found this out
after he'd away. He was a tenured professor of physical anthropology,
(03:04):
so the science of anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington,
and he was also the country's pre eminent academic expert
on Bigfoot. And I was just like, what, how can
you be a scientist and believe in Bigfoot? Because I
had grown up thinking that Bigfoot was Harry and the
Henderson's a campfire myth, like just not anything anyone took
(03:25):
really seriously. But to find out that there's this scientist
who's my relative, who was actually gathering evidence and trying
to come up with a plausible hypothesis for the existence
of Bigfoot just blew my mind. And so I decided, Okay,
I'm going to suspend all disbelief here and I'm going
to look into this. You know, there's a whole wide
range of people who look for Bigfoot. There are people
(03:45):
who are like Bigfoot lives in my basement and talks
to me and we have breakfast every morning. And then
there are people who were more like my cousin, who
was like, it is a biologic creature, like any other creature,
has to have a breeding population, it has to obey
all the law of physics and biology that the rest
of us have to obey. And he looked for evidence
based on that. So I followed in his footsteps, if
(04:07):
you will, his big footsteps, and went down this path
and explored this for a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
What is the biggest surprises that came out to you?
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Like from that the thing that blew my mind, I
think the most. There were a couple. One was there
were a lot of people who, similar to my own experience,
had like very science, had scientific backgrounds. They were people
you would trust. They were people who worked for National
Park Service or fishing, game or fish and wildlife, like
people who were out in the woods and experienced a
lot of animals and knew their surroundings and knew the
(04:37):
ecosystems they were in, and then they would have this
experience and they were just like, I don't know how
else to explain it. I don't want it to be
bigfoot necessarily, but that's the only thing that I can
grab hold of that makes sense to me. And a
lot of them really were kind of embarrassed by it
or fighting it in some ways, which I thought was interesting.
And then the other thing that struck me is that
(04:58):
we've had stories of foot for hundreds, if not thousands
of years. There's always been these kinds of stories about
these big, oversized creatures outside the line of the campfire,
and you wonder where did those originate, where did they
come from? And there is a lot of anthropological evidence
of all these other species that coexisted when humans were
(05:19):
first around. There were at least seven or eight that
were walking the earth at the same time Homo sapiens were,
and you'd wonder maybe something like Bigfoot was around back then.
And then the stories have been passed down over generations
because if you think about what it takes to become
a fossil and then be discovered and uncovered at the
right moment and analyzed properly, maybe something like this existed
(05:39):
and we just don't know for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
We certainly do know that Neanderthal and modern humans inhabited
Europe at the same time in parts of the Middle East,
and we don't know that they did interbreed. We know
that through genes at least in a few cases, but
we don't know what the relationship was. In fact, I
think within ten thousand years of our species showing up
in Europe, thals when extinct.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
For whatever reason. So it could be some mythological ativistic remembrance.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Of a ten thousand year conflict with another human species.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
I'm just guessing, I know, but yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
And I think that's what a lot of this is,
its guesswork. We're making assumptions based on the evidence we
have at hand, and we don't have a lot of
evidence from ten thousand years ago or even further back.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
So I grew up in a rural area right upstate
New York Mountains.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Were a lot of bigfoot up there, beers.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
We don't have bigfoot up there, not in the northern
were just Canadians. He's like, when you fit, when you
got Canadians, you're going to find beer cans around right?
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Oh yeah, true?
Speaker 3 (06:36):
And so what about bigfoot poop? But I'm just saying,
then I.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Apologize for Jerry's questions.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Or you could call it scan.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Okay, Oh yeah. And it's funny. There's one scientist I
spoke to, a guy named Todd Disstel who used to
be a molecular primatologist at NYU. He has now moved
to Amherst. I'm not sure where he is now. He's
gone to a different university, but he was one of
these scientists. It's like, look, I'm ninety nine point nine
percent sure that Bigfoot does not exist, but if it does,
(07:06):
I want to be the guy who is at the
front line of that. So he encouraged people who were
scientifically minded to send him samples and provided they followed
certain protocols and things like that. He's like, you wouldn't
believe the amount of bear shit that I get on
my desk.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
He asked for it. Well, you know, as conspiracies come
and go, there's some that like seem to stay around forever,
and this one does. What is your view on that?
Is it just because actually, as far as conspiracies go,
this is actually less crazy than many.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
And I think that's a big part of it is
it's like it's, like I said, there's gradiations of this
where you've got people who were like Bigfoot it was
beamed down here by aliens on another planet to save
us to I don't know what bigfoots supposed to be doing.
If the alien's front of me here, I just feel
a little bad. It's like a he's been sent to
a black site. You guys would know about that, right.
I think that the biggest appeal of Bigfoot is people
(07:58):
like the idea that the world is ill wild enough
and unexplored enough and untamed enough that something like Bigfoot
could exist because if everything has been paved over and
pruned and mapped and like Google satellited and like we
know where everything is, what's the fun, where's the discovery,
where's the excitement and the adventure? You know, it's the
same appeal that like these stories from the eighteen hundreds
(08:20):
of explorers going out, And yeah, there were a lot
of horrible things they did, but I think that idea
of like what's out there in the world, what don't
we know, is very thrilling for people, and I think
that is part of the appeal of Bigfoot.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
So just doing a bit of research on this prior
to coming on, I was shocked at the amount of
synergy mixing of conspiracy theories between CIA and Bigfoot.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
In fact, there's a suppose there's someone who claims to
be a CI officer.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I don't know whether she was or wasn't it Tracy
Shandler Walder who was talking about.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Oh we know Tracy Walder, do we yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
FCI too, Yes, she and she talks about Bigfoot.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
A history major ed Diversity of Southern California Tracy wanted
to be a teacher, but a job there on campus
changed everything.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
It was a table that said CIA and that they
were looking for English in History majors, and so I
dropped my resume.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Often they called yeah, and the rest is history.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, but she talks about how I guess really truly,
the FBI did test fur that was supposedly from Bigfoot.
They found out it was dear fur. But the conspiracy
farists were like, no, they knew it was bigfoot fur,
but they substituted.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
They just they're lying to you.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And then there was there was also footage you can
look up online of Bigfoot. It's infrared, but he's running
between the trees of Bigfoot being photographed by a CIA helicopter,
which I'm telling you we don't have in the US.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Yeah, it's interesting that i'd forgotten about that FBI testing,
but I actually the Washington Post interviewed me for that
because I had spoken with some of the people who'd
been involved in collecting that for a guy named Peter
Burn who died several years ago, who was, like I
believe they called he was one of the four Horsemen
of Sasquatchery. My cousin Grover being one of the others.
(10:08):
In any case, this is conspiracy in general. I think
people don't trust the government, and I think.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
What you take this conspiracy and you give it to
the deep state, and when they say it's not true,
it's like that proves it's true.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
It's true exactly. There's an element of that, but it's just,
you know, the stories that I heard were that the
Forest Service was covering it up because the Big Tree
or Big Lumber, whatever you want to call them, didn't
want Bigfoot to be discovered because then it would be
another spotted owl situation, and for listeners who might be
too young to remember the spotted owl. This is in
the nineteen nineties when they were trying to protect old
(10:43):
growth forward forest in Washington State, and it was the
habitat of a very small, endangered species known as the
spotted owl. So what they don't want is like someone
to discover Bigfoot all of a sudden, all this forest
land is off limits and Big Lumber can't get in
there and chop down all the trees like they were
planning on. So that was one of the conspiracies that
I heard a couple of times. But I couldn't really
(11:04):
find like where that had originated from. I think it
was just an idea that people held.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
There's another one that the Smithsonian is the fact that
they don't have bigfoot skeletons means that they're hiding bigfoot skeletons.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
So the fact that sure, I mean, have you been
to their archives? Like it is a little like that
scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc
you go into this giant warehouse and you're like, how
the hell does anyone find anything in here? They could
have a bigfoot skeleton, but.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
They might not even know it. Jane Goodall just died.
She was a big foot. Now is my understanding?
Speaker 6 (11:35):
I would I'm romantic. I would like bigfoot to exist.
I've met people who swear they've seen bigfoot, and I
think the interesting thing is every single continent there is
an equivalent of bigfoot or subsquatch. There's the Yetti, there's
the Yuri in Australia, there's the Chinese wild man, and
and on and on and on, and you know, I've
(11:58):
had stories from people who you have to believe them.
So there's something. I don't know what it is. I've
always open minded.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
I think her feeling was that something like Bigfoot might
have existed, and she was just coming at it from
a very like open minded attitude.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
A couple of times you brought up Washington State. Our
producer Rachel is from Forks, Washington, and I think they
have a sasquatch store. There is that, correct, Rachel? They
have like candies that are meant to be little squatch
sasquatch poops and stuff.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Yeah, that's not what a sasquatch poop looks like. There's
no way they're waiting that.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Wait a minute, what does it look like.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
I think they're bigger.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's just a guess though, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yeah? True?
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Good point could be like rabbits, who's got birds in
the background.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
I live in Hawaii. Is it's like forest out back.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Hawaii is the only state where Bigfoot has not been
found because Bigfoot can't swim that far.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Oh, but we do have We have some men o huna,
which are mythical. They're not big, but they're little people,
many sasquatches that live up in the mountains and they
come down out of the mountains and they do naughty
things like they let your pigs out, or they burn
your shed down.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So we have a sasquatch light here in Hawaii.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
But little foot, yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Little food.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I want to test Laura and Rachel. I want you
to both answer at the same time. Do you believe
in Bigfoot?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yes? Or no? No?
Speaker 1 (13:33):
No?
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Ah?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Are you hesitated? Rachel?
Speaker 4 (13:35):
Can I qualify? Though?
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (13:37):
I like the idea of Bigfoot, and if someone comes
with Bigfoot evidence, I'm all for it.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
So what do locals think, Rachel?
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I mean, I think that's probably why I hesitated, honestly,
is because I don't think it's necessarily a belief that's
held by that many people in town.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
But it's something that people like to believe in. Right.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Bigfoot is good for the economy.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Ah, Bigfoot probably on your high school football team, though, right?
So is Bigfoot and the yet Are they the same
thing as a cryptid?
Speaker 4 (14:02):
No, they're both cryptids, but they are not the same thing.
The YETI is smaller in the Himalaya and white. I
was actually very strongly corrected on this because I tried
to interview the guy who owned Great Divide Brewery, which
is here in Colorado, and I thought it was a
Bigfoot in their logo. And it turns out it is
a YETI, and he was very clear that he's like
(14:23):
the YETI is a very different creature. And I don't
want you conflating them so.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
They can't mate, right like you know, horses and donkeys
that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
They probably could, but then the Offspringer sterile.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
So, Laura, you've interviewed people, what have you learned from
the people who tell the stories that they've had encounters.
Do do the people actually believe these things or do
you think some of them just want the attention or
is there a mixture of those things.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
I think there's a mixture. I mean, I think you
see that with sort of any phenomenon. There's people who
are true believers and there's people who just want in
on the fund. But most of the people that I
spoke with really had a true belief and had an
experience and had seen something or or gone through something
out in the woods that they really couldn't explain. And
I wasn't there. I can't say what happened or didn't happen,
(15:08):
And I have no doubt that whatever did happen was
odd and really through them, especially the people who'd been
wildlife biologists or had scientific training in these ecosystems, Like
there was one guy I spoke with, a guy named
John mayan Zinski. He's based out of Wyoming, but he
was working in the wind River Range in Wyoming sometime
in the seventies, and he tells this crazy story about
(15:29):
you know, he's out there, he's doing a survey of
bighorn sheep. He spent a lot of time in this
area and one night he is in his tent and
he sees this shadow of a hand coming over the tent.
And this is after something had been harassing him for
several hours, and he was like, it was not a bear.
It was not a bear, paw. It looked like a
human hand and then whatever. He came out of the
(15:51):
tent like trying to figure out what it was, and
it ran off into the trees, and then it proceeded
to throw pine cones at him, and he just was like,
I know, it wasn't a bear. There was nobody else
around as far as I knew, because he was out
in the middle of nowhere. Bigfoot was not the first
thing that came to my mind, but there were all
these other people who were talking about this phenomenon, especially
(16:11):
in that area, and he and I started a wonder
So yeah, I think people do experience something that just
rocks their belief system and wild things.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
You podcast about aliens, which.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Is a yes, an aliens guys, they're all, oh, we
are good.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
CIA is because completely a part of this, and in fact,
there was I can't speak to. President Trump recently retweeted
something about med beds, which is.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
The secret beds that will that come from alien technology.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
The alien technology that CIA has we reversed engineered, we
can grow back limbs, and I was like, it can't
cure my bald spot for the kind of thing. But
so when you investigated Bigfoot and you've investigated the UFO
conspiracy theories, did you see any similarities do you see
other than CIA is at the root of both of these.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
But obviously the Deep States there is some overlap. There
are definitely people who are like, you know, I, like
I said, aliens brought Bigfoot to Earth. There were actually
more of those people than I would have expected. And
then you know a lot of the people, in fact,
most of the people who think that Bigfoot is out
there also think that there is some sort of alien
life out there, although a large number of them are
(17:21):
more on the the tip that it's like alien life
way out there, not necessarily alien life that's come down
and visited Earth, which I tend to agree with. I
think there is probably life out there somewhere, whether we're
going to shake hands and have coffee with it at
anytime in the next I don't know, two million years.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
So you did Bigfoot, you did aliens, and then you
did stuff related to nuclear.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Everyone's like nuclear, that's weird. So the Bigfoot one was
the obvious.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Wait, wait a minute, nuclear is the weird one. Aliens
in Bigfoot are fine.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
But yeah, Bigfoot was the obvious one because of the
family connection. And then as I was wrapping up the
research on the Bigfoot season, all this stuff was happening
on the front page of the New York Times with
the Pentagons Secret Program, a tip that they'd been running,
essentially the idea that the Department of Defense had this
secret UFO program that they had been running for years,
(18:09):
which they probably have been running in some capacity or
others since they were doing Project Bluebook back in like
the fifties and sixties. But that was all happening, And
then there was also this interstellar object that came through
our solar system very very briefly at the end of
twenty seventeen, it was called a muamua. It means scout
basically messenger coming from Afar. And I think most people,
(18:33):
most astronomers, were like, this is just debris having been
blown out of another solar system and like coming through
ours and then it'll head back out somewhere. But the
guy who was running the astronomy department at Harvard, a
guy named Abbi Loeb, he was like, we have to
consider the possibility that it might be artificial, that it
might be made by extraterrestrials. And he wrote that in
(18:56):
a scientific paper and he published it, and it's actually,
you have to consider the possible. He didn't say it
was that. He has since gone on to say that
it was that, which gets to your point about people
who double down on theories because it's giving them a
lot of attention.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Well, if you have a substeck, you have to get
people to it.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Right rightly anyway. And I was like, here's another scientist
who's saying something that's controversial. Because you had scientists back
in the seventies and eighties when SETI the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence that sort of that branch of science was formed,
and they were just going laughed out of the room.
But now a lot of the things that they're talking
about have become mainstream. And similarly, what he was saying
(19:33):
seemed a little bit crazy, but there's some scientific value
to it. So that's how I got into the alien one.
Nuclear was again a personal one because I grew up
in Idaho Falls, Idaho, which is right near the Idaho
National Laboratory, which used to be the National Reactor Testing
Station back in the forties after we dropped the bomb,
and we were trying to figure out what can we
do on the positive side with nuclear power, And in
(19:55):
nineteen sixty one, one of the many test reactors that
were out there blew up and it killed three men.
It is still considered the deadliest nuclear reactor accident in
American history. Nobody talks about it. Nobody talked about it
in my town. My dad was there in high school
when this happened, and I didn't hear about it till
years later. And there was like all these rumors about
a love triangle and a murder suicide, and all the
(20:18):
blame is pinned on these guys who were killed because
they're not there to defend themselves. But there was also
all this other shady stuff going on, where like the
reactor wasn't being maintained, the army wasn't doing its job.
There were problems with this reactor and had been for
years that were not being dealt with. So it was
just an interesting look at that particular story in the
context of as we are trying to rebuild our nuclear
(20:41):
fleet and in fact make it larger in order to
satisfy all of our energy demands, are we any more
responsible than we were in the nineteen sixties? And part
of me is like, I'm not so sure. You watch
the Russians try and blow up the Zaporishnia nuclear plant
in Ukraine, and you're like, I don't know for if
we as humans are better.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
I remember a guy that was Eric Schlosser who wrote
a book called Command to Control about all of the
near misses and accidents and schools related to nuclear weapons.
He writes about a big accident of nuclear silo on Arkansas.
I remember in the book they're talking about planes accidentally
dropping nuclear yah the broken arrow stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
You're just like, we're a little sloppy.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
And Jerry and I worked in Bureaucracy's good stuff going on,
smart people, but people make mistakes and things happen, and
if you're talking about nuclear power, nuclear weapons, there's going
to be mistakes, and that's a scary thing to think about.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
I will say that the Navy has actually done a
very admirable job in the now almost eighty years of
maintaining the nuclear fleet. They have not had a lot
of accidents, if any, and that's partly due to the
systems that were put in place by Admiral Rickover.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
He was quite mean.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah, he does not sound like the best boss, except
for the fact that he was like, oh, this is
slightly off. Take the whole thing apart, start over and
build it. And your dad is to some degree what
nuclear needs. If you're going to play with things that
are that dangerous, you need to be as like close
to perfect as you can be. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
There was one instance where the Indians were test firing
a nuclear capable missile and they realized had it pointed
the wrong way, this is God forbid, Like North Korea,
and like this is that people are people.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
When I actually start to think about human nature and
our tendency to want to cut corners, or do things faster,
or make a lot of money. Yeah, exactly, and maybe
maybe AI can do We want AI doing this part,
I want doing that party.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
There is a theory though that if we find if
eventually intelligent life shows up here on Earth, that augurs
well for the human race because they believes that because
there's another theory that says that once you get the
means of destroying your planet, eventually over thousands of years,
you're going to use it.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Statistically, we're going to wipe ourselves out.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
We're going to get the bottleneck theory.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Right there we go.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, but yeah, another civilization doesn't do it, that means
that there's a possibility we won't either.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Yeah. I tend to look a little askance at the
idea that the aliens are going to come here to
save us, Like it feels like just I mean, I
get the appeal, but it feels a little bit religious
in a way.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, that's exactly why would think.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I go for a run and I see a little
ant heap off to the side, I don't stop and go.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
I'm going to like do sexual savior on these ants.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
I'm going to figure out who their ant queen is,
so that I can talk to them.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
It's we're like, it's not a whole lot of interest
in me. I'm just going to do Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
And here's the other thing. Humans only have not been
around that long three hundred thousand years out of a
four point six billion year history. Who's to say that aliens,
who would probably be more advanced because their solar systems
and their galaxies are older than ours, didn't already come by.
We're like, whoa, look at that molten pile of garbage,
and then you know, one star only because I can't
give it zero, and then never came back again.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I can't remember where I heard this from.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Ituse like the reverse technology thing that CIA or Deep statee.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
Oh, yeah, I heard about this a lot.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
But on one thing I heard on this was if
a group of Neanderthals were to get a hold of
your laptop, do you think they could verse engineer it?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Right?
Speaker 4 (24:01):
Totally?
Speaker 3 (24:02):
They're so smart they won't even know what it is.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
What do you mean a group of Neanderthals if we
got a hold of a laptop, so we go, I
don't know it, just hit the button right?
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I can't. Yeah, I can't figure out how half the
things in my house. Work like the toaster, maybe, but
I know if I could reverse engineer it.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Did you see? There was that guy, I think he
did a ted talk about exactly that he said. I
decided I was going to remake the toaster right from
the beginning. I was going to go. You know, there's
a cold Balt in there. I was going to go
get cold balt and if the plastic I had to
go in.
Speaker 7 (24:31):
So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric
taster from scratch, and working on the idea that the
cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest reverse engineer.
I went and bought the cheapest taster I could find,
took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover
that inside this object, which I'd bought for just three
(24:52):
pounds ninety four, there were four hundred different bits made
out of you know, one hundred plus different materials.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Which shows just how complex it is and how many
different things have to come together to make the things
that we have, and it's just almost impossible.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
We take it.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Yeah, but and we take so much of it for granted.
You don't stop to think about it. You just pop
it in there and it works and it's magic, it's science,
but it just happens.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I want to circle back to your grandfather's cousins skeleton, right.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
Okay, yeah, so what's the deal?
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Okay, so we also have to talk a little bit
about Grover, who was that. This is my grandfather's cousin,
Grover Krantz, same last name. So anyway, after that, he
wanted his bones sent to the Smithsonian, and he'd already
made a deal because he knew a lot of the
anthropologists and the curators who worked at the museum, and
they said, yes, we'll take your bones, and yes we
will take the bones of your three Irish wolf founds,
which I have to clarify it. The dogs had died
(25:58):
long before Grover and he just had the bones to them. Anyway,
they put them in storage. They said, we'll take your bones.
There's no chance they're going to end up on display.
But then the museum, the National Museum of Natural History,
decided to do an exhibit on forensic anthropology and they
wanted to show what you could learn from bones, and
(26:19):
the final piece of that exhibit, they decided to take
Grover's skeleton and the skeleton of his favorite dog Clyde
and recreate a photo that had been taken in Grover's backyard,
probably sometime in the seventies. And it's Grover standing leaning
back a little bit and the dog up on its
hind legs and it's a huge dog and it's got
both of its paws on Grover's shoulder and it's licking
(26:40):
his face. And they recreated that photo and it is
so cool.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Oh, it's kind of a bare bones exhibit.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
So when you talk to children about Bigfoot, Huh, how
do you do that? You don't do it like Santa
Claus or the tooth Fairy? No, No, how do you
present Bigfoot?
Speaker 4 (26:57):
I treated the same way I treated it in the podcast. Look,
this is something that people have a question about, and
this is something that people want to know more about.
And so what do we do when we have a question.
We try to find answers, and we try and go
about that systematically, and we try to find evidence. And
does this evidence make sense and does it match up
with the scientific process or is this something that doesn't
quite You know, it's a fun idea, but it's not
(27:20):
necessarily grounded in science or facts. You asked earlier, if
I believed in Bigfoot. I say no, But I like
the idea of Bigfoot, and I understand why people believe,
and I understand why people have this question. And if
someone comes out and his fine has found a body
or a big piece of a body or DNA evidence
that backs it up, I will be right on the
(27:40):
sidelines cheering those people.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
On Bigfoot is as a harmless conspiracy theory. Unlike a
lot of conspiracy theories, it doesn't hurt anybody. It's fun,
you can have fun with it. It's not global p defied.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Not destroying our democracy. Y.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
No, the issue with Bigfoot. The issue with Bigfoot, it
might be that it's a gateway drug. I think a
lot of people start with Bigfoot and then keep going.
There's a really great I'm forgetting her name, but she
created like a pyramid, like a hierarchical pyramid of like conspiracies,
and level one is like Bigfoot, fairly harmless. But then
level two you start getting into some really dark stuff.
(28:17):
And by the time you've hit level three, like you're
really going down this rabbit hole. And these are things.
I think she created this to help people understand, like
my friend believes in Bigfoot, should I be worried, and
she's like Bigfoot in and of itself. No, but if
you start moving from Bigfoot down into the next level,
then maybe start to be a little bit more worried.
But Bigfoot, I think, by itself, is relatively harmless. I
(28:39):
think a lot of the people who like Bigfoot also
like being outside, like going hiking and camping.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
So Florida, I asked, what are you doing next?
Speaker 4 (28:47):
Ooh, good question. It's hard for me to pick one
that I liked most, because I really did enjoy all
of these projects from different perspective. I think Bigfoot is
probably my favorite because it was the first one and
it has that family connection. And I probably spent more
time on this project than I did on any of
the others, just because I was learning how to do
the process. But all of them are interesting, and there's
so much good science and so many smart people. And
(29:09):
then in terms of what I'm doing next, I'm working
on somebody else's podcast right now. Because the podcasting world
is not the most lucrative, despite what the people will
tell you. You're not making a lot of money on podcasts,
especially not on the kinds that I do, which are
these sort of long narrative series.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Or not making anything.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
Yeah, yeah, maybe erotica is the way forward for you both.
There probably is. So I'm working on someone else's podcast,
and then I'm trying to write a science fiction novel.
I've never written fiction, even though everybody thinks I have
with the bigfoot stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
You got to give us a little teaser. What is it?
Speaker 4 (29:45):
It's about tics, That's all I'm going to tell you.
I actually went to the TICK lab in Hamilton, Montana.
There's a biohazard or a biosafety level four lab up there.
They don't let me. They wouldn't let me into that one.
I don't know why. It's not like i'd steal the ebola.
But we also do a lot of research up there
on rocky mountains, spot a fever, lime, all those kinds
of things. So I got to go up there and
go into the TIC clab and see the kind of
(30:06):
stuff that they're doing. And they're creepy. They're creepy little creatures.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
So lur. We don't do this with all the guests,
just the ones that we like.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
So you get to ask You get to ask one
question of each of us, or just one question. Oh okay,
see on the Store two or three or four? Yeah,
truth or dare What do you want to know about CIA?
Speaker 4 (30:25):
I do kind of want to know about m K
Ultra And I know you guys are talking about doing
that in a different episode, but like how extensive was that?
And are those kinds of projects still around? Because here's
and this is a legitimate question from the standpoint of like,
you know, we don't know everything. There is a lot
of gray area out there. There's some science that we
thought was settled that has since gone on to be questioned,
Like just look at how physics has changed in the
(30:46):
past three hundred years. So I'm wondering, like, while I
don't necessarily believe in mind control, like there are things
that can be done or that we might be getting
more technologically advanced that would allow for something similar. So
do they still do those on mind control?
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Have you been have you watched any political rallies lately?
Speaker 1 (31:05):
When we were inside, I never remember ever talking about
it or digging up stuff. What I know now is
actually from reading books about it, and essentially, you know,
what I've learned is that it really was something of
its time. It was at that time when we were
really afraid world War three could break out. We thought
that the Russians had some version of mind control. There
was a number of Americans that had, like in the
(31:28):
Korean War, that had come back and they had become
communists and they had changed to and all these kind
of things, and I think there was some effort, probably
sensibly to say what is this explore it? And in CIA,
the director I think was interested in it and got
this scientist in a little area to do it. But
it was actually not seen as serious by the operator people,
and it was a very secret and tightly held thing
(31:50):
inside CIA. And there's a lot of CIA people who
are very much against it. But are there things like
that now? I mean, there are questions that need some
sort of answer. They don't necessarily exist in the intelligence
sphere or at CIA. You know, you studied aliens. It
was the military. It was more probably involved in those
kind of things. So there are government programs probably like that.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, So I don't think the old the Manchurian candidate,
where I show you a card and I control you.
They looked into that in the nineteen fifties because American
prisoners were coming back from North Korean captorship, being captives
and they were clearly Brainwath.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Concerned about that.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, right, right, right, So it was researched on it,
and a lot of it was, like as John says,
it was bad science. None of it worked to begin with,
there was no oversight, and it's one of the shames
that CIA was ever involved with this back in the
fifties and sixties. But I think more to your point today,
I think AI, not individually, but is changing sort of
(32:48):
demographic views on things. And I think certainly authoritarian regimes
are trying to figure out ways to control information flows
to get people to believe things that's quite simply aren't true.
I mean, you know, Putin has apparently most of Russia
or the vast majority of Russians believe that Ukraine started it, right,
that it wasn't Russia that marched in, or if it did,
(33:10):
it had every reason to. People are thinking about how
to change people's perceptions and take away their ability to
make educated decisions based on free flow of information. It's
not mk ultra, but it's MK ultra too, and I
think it's something to worry about.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Is technology changes.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
So likewise, then does the CIA also work on counter
programming so to speak? Like how do you get people
so that they don't fall for that kind of stuff?
And I'm thinking both domestically and foreign.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
What's interesting at least we think about what the Russians
have tried to do with subversion of disinformation and all
of these things. I think the countries that live closer
to Russia and understand the Russian mindset are better at
this than you know, the Finns and the Estonians and Latins,
Lithuanians and the Poles, checks and people. They're better at
dealing with disinformation.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
Because they lived under it.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah. You see in Moldova, the Russian spent an incredible
amount of money and effort to try to make sure
that a Western oriented president was not elected, and they
just did anyway, despite this huge, massive effort by the
Russians that get false information into the system and so amazing.
I think we can learn actually a lot from those
type of places, more than some sort of scientific thing
(34:22):
inside our own at this point.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
But it's tricky inside the US because of our First Amendment, right. So,
there was not too long ago there were a number
of very influential US podcasters who threw a cutout, a
very bad cutout. It was very easy to look see through.
We're taking like tens of thousands of dollars a month
from Russia and putting out talking points that Russia is pushing.
(34:46):
And then when they were caught it came out they said,
it's my First Amendment rights. I believe it anyway, So
what does it mattering. Nothing happened to them, nothing should It.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Was more than tens of thousands.
Speaker 4 (34:56):
Yeah, yeah, no, I remember hearing about that and make money.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
That.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
Actually, there's a really interesting book I read fairly recently
called I'm Blanking On. The name of the author is
Leah Sattelli. She's a friend of mine, and she writes
about conspiracy theories. But she talked about this Supreme Court
case that happened in regards to a cult. And this
case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court,
and the plaintiffs are arguing that this cult had taken
advantage of all of these people. And what the Supreme
(35:24):
Court eventually ends up deciding is that if the people
truly believed, then they weren't being taken advantage of, and
the defendants were they were within their First Amendment rights.
And so you basically had this First Amendment case that
says that abusive cults are okay if people believe.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
But our business scams an't okay. When they get the
first story saying you need to give me money.
Speaker 4 (35:48):
It feels like it needs to be relegislated based on
what's happening.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
But those are conspiracies, not conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Right right, Oh, here's my other question. Here's my other question.
Was Mint Romney right when he said that Russia was
the biggest threat back in twenty fourteen and everyone like
laughed him out of the room or twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I guess what I talked to groups and students, and
it's often one of the questions is and I served
in Russia. I worked on Russian issues. I worked with
the FBI and kind of Spana stuff on Russia stuff.
I think of Russia is a serious threat to Europe
and to US and something we need to pay attention to.
But I also think in the bigger sphere in the
twenty first century, Russia is a loser. They really don't
(36:27):
make anything anybody wants. The economy is the size of Portugal.
It creates problems. It's not winning the cult grist, so
it needs to overthrow the system. It needs to create chaos,
so it either gets attention or it keeps its sphere.
Whereas China wants to own the twenty first century. They
don't want to upset the commercial and business markets because
they want to own them and run them. So I
think China is a much larger challenge moving forward, a
(36:50):
much bigger issue for the United States moving forward. Russia
is a problem, it's a threat. Is it the biggest threat?
I don't think so. I think the biggest threat most
places in the world would say is the United States.
The United States has been a place that in many
places of the world, freedom loving people would look up
to is the place to go to, and it helped
with stability, It helped with keeping markets open around the world,
(37:12):
free trade. Now, the fact that we're changing this way
and no one knows where it's going in terms of stability,
in terms of markets, in terms of security, I think
it's the biggest sort of thing that's out there that
could cause real problems. And everyone in the world has
to pay attention to what's happening because I'm here on predictability.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
Yeah, And China will happily step into the void we
leave behind.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
And they are and a lot of places where we're right. Laura.
It's so great to have you on. Thank you for
talking to us. It's exciting. You've picked these fun things
to explore, and you realize good storytellers, whatever they find
and if they do it right, it can be really enjoying.
You can learn other stuff from doing it. So thank
you for what you're doing, and thanks for coming on
with us.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
Thank you for having me. I told you it would
be fun and it was.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Yes, it was.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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