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We are supported by NASCAR. OK, here we go, the great American race is this weekend. I have no idea what I'm talking about. It is only the biggest race in all of motorsports, probably the biggest race on the planet. 40 of the best drivers in the world will head down to Daytona International Speedway for the historic Daytona 500 this Sunday on Fox Monaca.

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This is literally a bucket list event for me to go down today to have fun.

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I love everything about motorsports. I like to use I like four wheels, but the Daytona 500 is literally the Mecca of all races. I love NASCAR. These drivers will put everything on the line to be named a Daytona 500 champ. A Daytona 500 win will change their lives forever. I cannot wait. You've got to go watch this race on Sunday. There will be more wrecks than you can imagine, and it always ends with an epic finish. So be sure to tune in to the Daytona 500 this Sunday at two thirty PM Eastern on Fox.

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Again, it's the Daytona 500 this Sunday at two thirty PM Eastern on Fox.

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Hi, I'm David Feria. This year will mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which means if you're older than about 20, you'll have some kind of memory of the day that changed the world forever.

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Four planes hijacked by a terrorist group led to the deaths of nearly 3000 people in the years since, thousands more have died. 9/11 would be used as an excuse to invade Iraq. The war on terror saw hundreds of thousands more people die.

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The ripples would be felt all over the planet. You wouldn't be putting your toothpaste in a little plastic bag and taking off your shoes and bounce to go flying if it weren't for 9/11 back.

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And we could all fly. Of course. Remember that. One, 9/11 also did, though, was Internet conspiracy theory culture into overdrive, not since the JFK assassination had so many Americans and people all around the world believe the official story they were being told was a big fat lie. But before we talk about that, this is what happened on 9/11.

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This just in. You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center. And we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the world.

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That plane was flying at 11 and at around quarter to nine on September 11, 2001, it crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I've never seen it looks like a movie I just wanted to play was immediately headed directly into the World Trade Center.

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The world's media by now is broadcasting live. And as presenters are trying to make sense of what's going on, around 15 minutes later, another plane hits the other tower.

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And I remember. Oh, my God. That looks like a second play half an hour after that, a third plane hits the Pentagon, but it's what happens just before 10:00 a.m. that's etched into my own mind as the south tower collapses.

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Explosion now raining. As that's happening, a fourth plane crashes in a field in Pennsylvania, but the world doesn't know that yet. And just before ten thirty am, the north tower goes down tower, the top portion of which is collapsing.

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Much later that day, a final building, tower seven collapses hit by debris earlier in the day as the North Tower went down. The official line al Qaeda carried out the attacks, but there's an entire spectrum of belief that says otherwise, and that's what we'll be discussing and debunking today, 9/11 conspiracy theories. And we have a guess that would probably rather not be talking about any of this. A man called Dylan Avery. He directed the most viral documentary of all time called Loose Change.

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It was the film that made some of the most extreme conspiracy theories part of our pop culture. 20 years on, Dylan wishes he'd never put his name on that film. It haunts him. And I'm curious to know why. So Bitcoin bucko, this is the 9/11 episode. We've got a heavy topic today, haven't we? Full disclosure, this one, I'm afraid, is going to be, I would imagine, a little more somber. One thing I thought could be interesting would be if we all shared exactly where we're at.

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And I'm curious because, Monica, you're so much younger than me.

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Yeah, I think that's part of why I was excited is for my generation and I think a lot of our listeners are around my age. It was such a watershed moment and we haven't had very many of those of that magnitude in my lifetime. So, yeah, I was in ninth grade. I was in my language arts class. It was like the beginning of the class. So I think there was like morning announcements or something. We were already watching the closed caption or whatever in our school, and then they told us to turn on the news.

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And so we immediately did and no one really knew what was going on. And then we saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. And there was just so much cognitive dissonance of like, wait, what is this show? Is it like no one could really wrap their head around it? And then everyone was sort of just walking around in a fog all day and all the teachers are crying, you know, it's just like, oh, my God, what is happening?

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And there was a kid in my class. His dad worked at the Pentagon. And so someone came in to get him and take him out and lie to him and tell. And I think he maybe got shocked him on the phone. He was fine. That was just. Yeah, crazy.

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I think it was just something that none of us had ever seen before, which is why it turned into such a hot topic for conspiracy theorists, because we just never seen a building collapse like that. And it looked weird and it looked unnatural and it just something seemed off because we'd never seen this thing before. Yeah.

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It almost introduced new physics to our brain. I had not thought that a building could come down in that manner. That's not what I'd seen in a movie. Like everything about it was novel and crazy and did not fit with everything I had known prior to that day.

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And definitely there was this period of time where everyone thought it was an accident with the first one. But even I think for us with the second, it was like we were. But then it became clear that it wasn't. But there was still this moment of like, wait, did something go wrong with air traffic control? Like, what's happening?

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Yeah, well, I imagine the longer you've lived without seeing something like that, the more cemented into reality of what's possible you'd be. And I can almost imagine it being some kind of a scale where it would be the most shocking to someone 60 or whatever. But if you six, I don't know, I guess you'd be falling still under. This is stuff that happens on planet Earth.

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Also, if you're older, though, you've experienced JFK, you've experienced things that were still huge moments for society.

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I had not experienced anything like that and still haven't since.

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For me, I'm. How old am I? I'm thirty. Oh God. Thirty seven or thirty. I'm thirty eight. But I was working as a bank teller.

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I just left school so I was eighteen and I just remember watching it and know not watching it live. I had to wait till the news at the end of the day. So I just heard from customers discussing it during the day and it was like we're all very confused about it because we had to work and we didn't have TVs inside the bank. So it was a really strange thing for me. And I feel like the only comparable thing in my lifetime has been this pandemic of something so different to the norm.

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I think 9/11 and the pandemic for me, the two things I've experienced that just seem like they're out of films and almost don't seem real.

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Yeah. So by the time it got to you, how quickly did you think, well, this has to be terrorism? Yeah, that was not on my radar at all.

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Yeah, yeah. No, no. Same it was like something's gone horrible with a flight and that somehow something's gone wrong and it's crashed into the building. Definitely didn't jump to terrorism. That just wasn't something that I think there was in anyone's mind. Really.

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Yeah. So I don't know what that says about me, but I immediately thought this is terrorism. Yeah.

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Maybe it's just your lived experience as well. You've just got more to go on.

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And I very much remember when they set the bomb off under the World Trade Center. So, like, I was old enough that I followed that news cycle and that probably had been two years before something you might have missed that.

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Well, I did. So I think I immediately thought, like, well, here we go again. They've tried a different thing, but I was on the West Coast, so it was very early for us when it happened.

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I want to say it happened around nine thirty ish, around eleven ish my time, although I thought it was like nine thirty East Coast time. I don't see this is it's so hard to remember details post event like this.

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No, it's really strange. You know, it's twenty years now almost. You remember seeing the images but it's hard to remember like where you saw them. Exactly for the first. Time because you've seen them so many times since. Exactly, my phone started ringing at what I remember and could be wrong was around six thirty and I thought I was just annoyed. And then my answer machine went on old fashioned answer machine, where you could hear the person recording the message out loud.

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And it was my friend Tim Love said he's like, Oh my God, turn on the TV of the airplane.

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Just flew into the World Trade Center like hysterical. I was on with my other friend Scottie and a couple of other friends. So Brian, I got up and we started watching and then we immediately went to their house and watched everything together. I don't know, we needed some solidarity or something. I don't know.

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But so it's a weird mix for me that day because I also remember sharing that whole memorable event with like four people I really love. And we were all doing it together. So it's very weird to say, but I'm afraid to say it. I enjoyed that weird time we had together on that day.

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Yeah, you're in it with some of your closest friends and people you love.

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I totally get that trying to comprehend it together collectively.

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I wish I'd been in that situation. I mean, in New Zealand, I felt so isolated from the culture of America and all that sort of gotten was like American action films and things shoved down my throat. So it was just such a weird thing context wise to comprehend it.

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You know, just watching the news over here, the most heartbreaking thing for me about that thing other than the obvious loss of life, was for the weeks and months after there was a moment or I think for the first time ever where the whole world was mourning for the US, you could feel that the whole world felt our pain. And it was a very unique feeling because growing up here, you know, a lot of people hate us and rightly so quite often.

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But what saddens me the most about the whole thing now, 20 years later, is that we have this moment where there was an opportunity where everyone felt for us and we could have capitalized in some profound way that would have been really positive for the rest of the course of history.

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And I went to New Zealand in twenty three, just two years after around the two year anniversary, and I drove and someone had written on a Vidocq USA and the S was a swastika.

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Oh. And I was like, oh man, how heartbreaking our response. And at that point we're going into Iraq and just the whole thing like what a missed opportunity of solidarity and love and compassion is kind of how I felt about it. Yeah.

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I mean, it was all channelled into invading another country, you know, and I think that's probably when you're in New Zealand, that's where our heads were probably at. I mean, that's a horrible thing to graffiti up there. But you're right, I could have been this moment for the world to come together and to stay together in that way. Yeah. Yeah. There hasn't been an event like this where there's so much footage and so much to digest.

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And I think that's why someone like Dylan Avery is so interesting because he had so much material to work with in every conspiracy theorist, had so much footage to work with, they could just pore over it for years. And that's why we're still talking about the conspiracy theories around it.

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I was also in the dark. I didn't know there were any conspiracy theories around it until much, much later. And even still, I just know so little about this.

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Yeah, well, there's a whole spectrum as well, because I think it's important to note, because if someone says they're a conspiracy theorist, there's a whole lot of different ways that can express itself and it can go from like the really tight end where it was used as an excuse to invade another country through to like a little bit more conspiratorial that some people knew in the government that this was going to happen and didn't do anything about it right through to the more extreme end that were controlled demolitions.

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The planes were holograms, there were no planes, and it's just a whole spectrum. So I think when you're talking with people about this as well, it's important to kind of figure out where on that scale they are.

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Yeah. When it first happens, I'm interested how many people had a conspiracy theory immediately because as it became leverage to form the Patriot Act to invade Iraq, you know, all these outcomes at that point, I can at least see the logic right now. You have motive that's helpful. But prior to those things happening, the big reach of power from the executive branch and the invasion of Iraq, were they really ubiquitous or popular? The thing that made it really popular and made the term 9/11 truth is that came circa twenty five when things with loose change went really big and we all started talking about it, I think right from the get go.

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That was definitely conspiratorial thinking because as you say, you've lived through a lot of crazy and you think of people that have lived through the Warren Report and the JFK assassination, there's not exactly a lot of trust from a lot of people about the official story that you're being told. So conspiracies were starting to come out right from the get go, as they always do. But it wasn't until loose change that film was made that just went bonkers on. Well, that's the thing, YouTube wasn't even around, went bonkers on Google video, so this is a time before YouTube.

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Wow. But it was yeah, it was that documentary that made truth or ism like a big thing and it took it to the mainstream. Phrases like jet fuel fires can't melt, steel beams, that kind of thing. That's where it all came from.

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OK, so I just want to do admit until today, I didn't know about loose change you Monaca.

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I didn't I'm not even loose change entirely. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

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I didn't even know about loose change.

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I am fascinated by it, I guess because I work in documentary and it was the first documentary that went truly viral on the Internet and all. It was Dylan Avery. He was a guy trying to get into film school. He was twenty one years old and he was suspicious and had to read a lot of the conspiracy dialogue going on around 9/11. And it's basically a found footage documentary that takes some of the most compelling conspiracy theories and puts them all in one place.

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Ideas like they were controlled demolitions. You know, Tower seven couldn't have come down without something else going on, potentially. No plane hit the Pentagon. It was a missile or something else. So he made this thing. He didn't expect it to go crazy, but he put it on Google video and he ended up getting about ten million views. So it went real big, real quick.

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And there were many versions of loose change that happened. This like a first edition, second edition. At one point, Alex Jones came on board, who's now, as we know, an incredibly unhinged conspiracy theorist. He was a producer of one of the loose changes. So Dylan Avery is in this really weird position now where Esquire just wrote a piece about him about a month ago, essentially blaming Dylan Avery for every conspiracy theory that came after because he made this whole truth movement so big.

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So essentially said that there'd be no massive movement around Kuhnen if it wasn't for everyone getting rid pilled from loose change.

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So he's the gateway conspiracy. Yeah.

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So he's in a really I might actually play the first bit of the conversation I had with them where he just kind of shows how regretful he was about making the film, because it's kind of fascinating to me. He's made one of the most popular documentaries of all time and he wishes he didn't for context at ten dollars a ticket that make it one hundred million dollar movie.

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And I think the record for a documentary is Michael Moore's one of his movies that just hit one hundred million.

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Yeah, yeah. It's huge, this thing. Yeah. Look, I'm sorry I made the 911 thing and it blew up, but like, I'm not really who you think I am. Come on, please give me a little bit of a break. I was a fired up youngster that had things to say and didn't really give a shit.

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Like I'm just working on this in my spare time in my basement apartment in D.C. when I'm not waiting tables at Red Lobster, this angsty kid who didn't really have anything to lose and didn't really think it was going to be that big of a deal. It's like I'm going to make this movie and like I just thought of it as practice. So, you know, I'm a changed man. I'm older. I don't want to die and be only the guy that made the 9/11 film.

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I at least want to have the opportunity to show that I had other things in me. And if 15 years of purgatory is what it took to get there, then great. I would love nothing more than to just direct movies, narrative feature films for a living. I would love nothing more. That's why I made a documentary about police brutality. I made a documentary about CBD oil. I edited it and co-produced a documentary about a wacky entrepreneur in New Jersey, because I just hope that I don't have to live in my own shadow of loose change.

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Mm hmm.

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So that's the guy that you have popularized a lot of the conspiracy theories around 9/11 that we'll talk about. And that's that's his mindset that he's at now, which I just find it really unique. You know, he made this huge thing. He doesn't want to talk about it.

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Yeah, it's a weird mix. Like, I wish his delivery was a little different. And Granat, I can extend to him that he's been dealing with this for twenty one years. So maybe his first 12 years were sounded really sincere. So it didn't sound very regretful and sincere is more that he's inconvenienced by it. So that part was a little like I don't know, but thank God I didn't know how to make something at twenty one because I'm sure I'd be apologizing for the rest of my life.

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So at the same time I recognize. Yeah. Holy shit man, if your life is gone after twenty one and you didn't kill someone in a liquor store robbery, I feel like that's maybe not just totally that's the danger of being a conspiracy theorist and getting into the space.

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Those ideas can spread and we've all seen what happens when they do. But what conspiracy theories of you guys heard about 9/11? Are there any that have jumped out at you in particular?

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I haven't heard any. Oh, I'm sure we should go through some because there's some crazy ones out there.

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Yeah, I want to hear I guess I'm aware that some people were suspicious that that was some ploy by Bush to go kill Saddam Hussein, who had threatened to kill his father. And then I know that there's something built on the fact that the Saudis were able to fly home in the no fly span. I know there's some kind of thing there. I'm not positive what that is, but I think that fueled some stuff.

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The biggest one that came out is that the planes were essentially remote controlled and that the towers couldn't have fallen in that way just from a plane crashing into them. So this is like the first big theory that I want to talk about.

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OK, a popular conspiracy theory is that the collapse of both the north and south towers are a controlled demolition, the kind of demolition you'd see in a no longer profitable Vegas casino hotel.

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This claim is usually made with side by side videos of one of the Twin Towers next to a worn out hotel. The frontier collapse you're listening to now. Truth is, will freeze frame the 911 video to show bursts of dust they declare to be squibs or explosive charges. This is generally accompanied by basic appeals to logic, saying that it's impossible the building fell so perfectly into its own footprint without the aid of carefully timed explosives. It's a claim that's adopted by probably a majority of 9/11 truthers, huh?

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That's the argument for it. Does it stack up in your minds? Why?

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Why? But why? Again, why? Like, why wouldn't they let all the people out before they did? What is the point?

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I guess the point being he had to unite America in anger so that when it was raised that we were going to go invade another country, the whole country would get behind.

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So it was just to create this huge event that the majority of Americans would be just absolutely fuming about, which is what happened.

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And then you can easily get into the who's really running the world. So we've since spent three trillion dollars over in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the bulk of that money went to some huge corporations that sell munitions. Halliburton, who builds the bases so easily, you can go who's profiting from this war? Somebody made three trillion dollars and it wasn't the soldiers.

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The thing I think that makes the controlled demolition so convincing and it's something that I wondered about 15 years ago when I saw this change. You mentioned this earlier, Monica. When you watch that tower collapse, we'd never seen anything like that before. And it just seemed wrong, like you see a plane go in and then just seeing it collapse not immediately, but after the fact. It seems suspicious, right?

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Yeah, I totally thought it is insane. It fell that way because I know how technical the controlled demolitions are to bring it down perfectly straight. So it did seem like either that's crazy that that happened or they're wasting way too much time in these demolition things.

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They should just fucking blow up one floor of it and all fall down perfectly. But yeah, it seems like one side would collapse before another and the thing would topple. That is, I think, what logic tells you. Yeah.

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And the thing about the controlled demolition thing that I think people don't think about is just how hard it is to set up a controlled demolition. I think before this happened, the biggest tower to get destroyed by controlled demolition was in Detroit. It was about 30 floors. It took like a team of twenty people seven months to plant the explosives and get everything sorted. And so trying to explain how that happened and an incredibly busy couple of towers is I mean, it's impossible and you have to do some real mental gymnastics to get there.

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Yeah. What a great, great point. The other thing is the noise from the towers collapsing. Like every controlled demolition that happens, you hear like really specific loud bangs like you heard in that casino demolition earlier on and 9/11.

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You don't hear any of those as the towers come down and they don't start demolitions on the 16th floor either.

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I think a lot of people also struggle to think if this white is above this floor and it hasn't collapsed already, why is it suddenly collapsing now? Like, surely what's under it should stop what's on top of it falling any further back when you've got a force that's moving, that is a lot more powerful. So as each floor topples, there's more and more white acting on what's below it. And so that's why you get that bom bom bom bom bom.

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Follow the structure completely. Yeah, completely.

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But it comes back to that thing of like I can see why they're conspiracy theories around it, because it just looks incredibly odd.

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It look really convenient, like, wow. I mean, I'm expecting that thing to take out five other buildings on the way down and man, it didn't. Yeah. So yeah, it looked really convenient.

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It was a really unusual situation. That's what's happened. And I mean, the other big thing is it's pretty incredible that twenty years later, no one that was vital to the conspiracy of planting explosives in there has come out and said anything exactly has gotten drunk at a bar and bragged their friend.

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There's literally no one like it hasn't happened yet, which is pretty incredible. It would have taken hundreds or thousands.

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But it is funny because even as I'm saying it, I can step back enough to go like, why do you think it would topple over? I've never seen that either. I've never seen a fucking 80 story building fall sideways.

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No, totally. How often are we looking at that? Yeah, I don't know. Another big argument.

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The conspiracy theorists get really hung up on us saying that jet fuel can't melt steel beams. You hear this all the time and that is a fact, but it weakens them. And there was some incredible heat going on in there. So the whole steel beam argument doesn't hold up the.

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Stay tuned for more if you dare.

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We are supported by Top Gear America. That's your show to do Top Gear America, which is an all new series streaming exclusively on the Motor Trend app. We had a two episode premiere on January 29th.

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It stars Rob Corddry, Jethro Bovingdon and myself. I love this show.

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I'm about to return to it to do season two and I cannot wait. What do we do on Top Gear America?

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Well, we take an irreverent hands on look at the auto industry each week and we have challenges that are absurd and comedic. And then we learn a ton about the cars in the process. Now, whether it's searching for a perfect driver's rodwin, Lisa Lete Supercars or heading out an epic road trip in a trio of clunkers were on a mission to drive the wheels off. Whatever we can get our hands on. Join us and our motorized mischief, celebrating all the things we love about cars and arguing about the things we don't.

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Episode four comes out with Rob Jethro and myself taking a Porsche, a Bentley in a Lamborghini SUV to Colorado to see if they're worth it in the snow. I got to tell you, this is my favorite episode because it goes completely wrong within one second of this challenge and we bury everything that we get behind the wheel of start your free trial.

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In loose change, was he an advocate for this conspiracy theory or was he just kind of laying it out there? Because are we doing what he did? That's my worry.

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He was doing a thing that a lot of conspiracy theorists do, which is putting it out there, linking one thing to another thing to another thing sort of going, hey, this linked suspicious. But when you actually pull those links apart, they don't hold up like in loose change. When he's talking about how a plane couldn't have hit the Pentagon because the hole was too small. The image that's being shown isn't of the outer wall where the plane went through as from the inside, where obviously is not going to be as much of a impact.

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So it's putting things on the table that seem like big revelations and linking them together and just asking questions when that's really misleading. And yeah, it is a propaganda film. It was clearly making a statement that this is what you're not being told and this is the real story. Look at all this information and see what the truth is.

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But so often. Right, all they do is present a question, you know, how could it have fallen like this? To me, it creates way more questions.

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To your point, who strung this building up with the explosives? They had to use tons and tons of explosives. They to go up and down elevators. There's security there. There's, as you say, hundreds of people would be involved. There would have to be a control center with I mean, you go through it and you immediately go like, well, that couldn't really happen. Do they say it was these guys?

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A big part of the argument is about compartmentalizing everything, the idea that different people would given little jobs to do with setting the explosives, but none of them would talk to each other, so no one knew it was going to happen. And that's why no one knows. Of course, the fact is, once that happened, of course, they would have gone, oh, that would be a job I was sent to do was probably something to do with this.

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Yeah, that hasn't happened. So that's often how a conspiracy theorist will explain it. Like everyone is given specific jobs to do that. Didn't look like they were engaging in some sort of awful plot. But when it all came together, that's what happened, which is, as I say, it's ridiculous. Yeah.

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Did they give them all names like Reservoir Dogs, like Mister Pink, Mister White, Mister Blue?

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I'm sure in a lot of the narratives that probably would have. And I mean, I should also note that loose change originally was conceived by Dylan Avery as being like a Hollywood thriller. He wanted to make a Hollywood thriller about how what we're being told was a lie when it was sort of revealed to him that it was going to cost a hell of a lot of money to make an action film. That's when he pivoted into a documentary. So I think that's why the documentary is so riveting.

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And, you know, David Lynch has watched this thing and commented on how riveting it is. This got attention from all sorts of people. And I think that's because it is a thrilling story. Talking about this stuff is really exciting. Yeah.

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And as a documentarian, is it a well-made documentary? I mean, considering all he had was some footage for what he made for two thousand dollars, it was pretty incredible and how riveting it was. What's really unique about it is that loose change is updated or was updated every year or so. So there's like ten or eleven different versions of loose change and different people come on board different voice overs. They change the order of things. They change the beginning.

[00:31:27]

So that's the other thing is that it's really organic force that just like it eventually burnt out. But it was really popular for a really long time because of that. While he only directed the first one, he's been involved in all of them. He's always directed. There's just been different voiceover artists that have come in. And, you know, Charlie Sheen was primed to come and do a voiceover. At one point, Alex Jones got on board and produced.

[00:31:49]

So it's just been this constantly evolving film that, as I say, like it really solidified the 9/11 conspiracy theories in pop culture, like it wouldn't have happened without loose change.

[00:32:00]

And another big theory I thought we could talk about was Tower seven coming down and building seven, because this is an interesting one. So this is what happened there. Did you know a third tower fell on 9/11 is a common 9/11 truth in advertising slogan and then they literally put it on billboards.

[00:32:18]

The collapse of Tower seven is often seen as a very obvious smoking gun for truth. It's as unlike the Twin Towers. It wasn't hit by an aircraft and didn't suffer the sort of catastrophic external damage that the Twin Towers did.

[00:32:34]

Now, some claim that Flight 93 was meant to collide with Tower seven. And after the plane went wrong, the planners of the attack opted to detonate explosives anyway in order to hide evidence, possibly hide evidence of the planning, the attack of some other massive crimes.

[00:32:51]

They'll often show video of the WTC seven tower collapsing in a way that looks very similar to traditional demolitions, as in from the bottom up rather than the top down like we saw with the Twin Towers. There are the main bit of evidence, this interview where World Trade Center.

[00:33:08]

Owner Larry Silverstein claims he told fire department commanders to pull it, a term conspiracy theorists claim is a reference to detonating the demolition charges.

[00:33:19]

I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. I just want to say to us, is it that they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse?

[00:33:30]

And on top of that, this Kallangur, I remember it happening and it did. We had me out. The BBC announcing the buildings collapsed during a live cross on BBC News 20 minutes before it actually happened.

[00:33:46]

More on the latest building collapse in New York. You might have heard a few moments ago, I was talking about the Salomon Brothers building collapsing.

[00:33:54]

Seems pretty dodgy. OK, what do you make of that? That's weird.

[00:33:59]

We've got a news announcer announcing it and live across from the scene, announcing it collapsing before its collapse. You can see the building just fine behind her. And then you've got the owner of the World Trade Center saying, pull it and then it collapses. What do you make of that?

[00:34:16]

What is he saying? Pull it to my guess is he's like, stop trying to save it. Everyone get away from the building. Let's accept it's all going down. Don't lose any more firefighters lives trying to save this building. That would be my assumption.

[00:34:31]

That's exactly it. He's saying pull it away, then pull my firefighters out of there.

[00:34:38]

We all need to back down. This is a lost cause. So I said pull it.

[00:34:42]

It's like retreat. Yeah, it's like retreat.

[00:34:44]

And of course, again, it's like that policy making links between things. A lot of people jumped on board and went, oh, he said, pull it. He meant like that must be a term for letting the explosives happen, pull the building down.

[00:34:56]

Also, this guy is going to go in an interview and say, I said, pull it. What the fuck? Anything was proof it didn't mean. He's meant blow it up is the fact that he immediately set it on a news camera.

[00:35:08]

Yeah, seems very dodgy. So that was the other one. But how do you explain away a news reporter saying in advance from a script that Tower seven was going to come down and had come down before it happened?

[00:35:21]

I mean, I have to imagine it's just an unfortunate error they made. Yeah, I can see where that's juicy as hell. But just so I'm clear on the order, as they were reporting on the BBC, they already knew the planes had flown in. It's not like someone's building came down before Imbrie. Right.

[00:35:38]

She's talking about building seven. So some debris had hit it, but it was still standing still, standing clearly behind her and her and the host back in the studio, both saying that it's already come down. But you are pretty much right, Dex. Basically, it was just era in the NEWSROOM, so obviously already knew those planes that hit towers had come down already building seven still standing. And there were press releases going out from the fire department about the fact that seven was under duress and it was probably going to collapse.

[00:36:16]

So that idea was out there. And when you're a reporter in the field standing there, despite you being right there and the tower being right behind you, sometimes like you're almost like less up to the play than you are with someone back in the studio. Like, you're just down in chaos trying to do like live cross up the live cross and trying to, like, know what's going on. And that reporter basically just messed up and got it wrong and had a shooting that had already come down, set it live on air.

[00:36:41]

Very embarrassing for her and for the presenter back in the studio. But it was just human error. They knew it was under duress, thought it was probably going to collapse at some point. And they just got a bit ahead of the game on that.

[00:36:53]

Also say that all these news channels are incentivized to be the first person telling you something. So I can also see someone like this is coming down like by the time we go live with I don't know.

[00:37:02]

Yeah, totally. But I remember at the time being really convinced by that and thinking that is so dicey. And it's the thing is that when you're given the context in a conspiracy theory that she must have been reading a script, it's very easy to kind of go along with that without stepping back and going, oh, you probably just mess it up.

[00:37:20]

Let's go further. So why was a script given to her to say that the building came down? If I'm blowing up the building, there is no need for me to write a script, to tell a reporter to say the building came down because it's going to come down and she'll report that it came down.

[00:37:33]

I don't need to write a script. That's a lie. It's all taken care of itself. If I knock down all three buildings, I don't need to involve anyone else in how to report it.

[00:37:44]

You're absolutely right. It's so basic, isn't it? Yeah. Who wrote it? Who gave it to her.

[00:37:49]

But it's so much juicier when you're like, oh, the powers that be must have told every newsroom what was going to happen and they were just going to broadcast this propaganda and they accidentally broadcast it early, which is you're right. That naturally just reported. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen. And the theory as well about building seven coming down is that United 93 was meant to be the plane that crashed into that building. And so obviously the conspirators that already rigged that building with explosives to help it come down, the plane hadn't crash.

[00:38:18]

So they had to, like, cover up the evidence, which is why they let those explosives off anyway.

[00:38:23]

Do we know what Flight 93 was supposed to hit? Is that known?

[00:38:27]

No, it's not. It just something went wrong and it went down in a field. Yeah.

[00:38:31]

I cannot imagine that they would use the plane to bring down Building seven. To be honest with you, it doesn't represent anything. It was so much smaller. The trophy was those two towers. I have to imagine that thing was supposed to hit the financial center, the White House. There's no way that they dedicated one of the planes to building seven yet.

[00:38:51]

And the thing is as well is that Tower seven had been burning for a long time, about seven hours. Light debris from the North Tower had hit it. Massive fires going on there for a long time, weakening the structure. So, yeah, that thing was going to come down anyway. Yeah.

[00:39:08]

Was Flight 93 going towards New York? I thought for some reason it was not.

[00:39:15]

It was right. It was heading east over Pennsylvania. I think I think it was I think that was the flight path. Yeah. And you know, I don't know if you guys have seen United 93, the film. It's a really well-made film and it speculates what happened on board and why it went down. But that's the other weird thing about 9/11 is that so much pop culture has come out of it. And I know. How do you feel about watching, I guess, narrative or dramatic features based around something like that just missing?

[00:39:42]

It's in bad taste, or do you think it's just exploring this important thing that's happened?

[00:39:47]

Well, I'd be really curious to know how much of Flight 93 was based in reality. I have no idea. I don't know what percentage. But isn't it that the theory of that one is like passengers got involved and they actually fight back and then that's how it happened? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:40:00]

It's not madness that's been scripted into that. It's all based on what could have happened.

[00:40:06]

OK, it doesn't bother me. I don't know. I think it's good for people to explore all the different things that could have happened.

[00:40:13]

I think just for your own sanity, you want an answer and we're never going to get the real answers. So it's kind of healthy maybe to just speculate. I don't know.

[00:40:24]

I mean, the thing that becomes unhealthy, like some of the speculation gets particularly batshit insane.

[00:40:30]

Yeah, that's true. It's the same thing that well, it's just a positive conspiracy theory, really. Yeah.

[00:40:35]

There's a conspiracy theory around 9/11 that says that the planes were holograms. So they were projections somehow. Of course, impossible. I mean, if you've seen holograms, but generally you need the sun to be not out blazing. Yeah. And also, yeah, a lot of people saw. In the air at the time and this footage and that kind of thing, oh no, that's the other thing, not just holograms is another theory that says, like all the footage you see of planes has been inserted afterwards and it's just a CGI representation.

[00:41:05]

And I remember like Titanic's just come out. So everyone's tripping out about how good CGI is.

[00:41:11]

And so I thought, like, oh, yeah, maybe all this new stuff is just CG. So that's another theory that did the rounds at the time. It gets pretty nutty. Wow.

[00:41:19]

So Ted Olson, you might be the most famous lawyer in America. He got rid of DACA and he's traditionally a Republican. He also did Citizens United, which is, of course, on the other end of the spectrum. Very, very interesting guy. Very, very smart. His wife died. She was on the plane that got flown into the Pentagon. So you have one of the most reputable human beings on planet Earth saying, no, my wife has died on this plane and she, in her own right, was famous and she's gone.

[00:41:48]

So, yeah, I don't know how you account for all these passengers that we know died.

[00:41:52]

Yeah, that's that's not in the building. Right. I'm saying they can't die in a holographic plane. To my knowledge, no, absolutely not.

[00:42:00]

I mean, that's where some of these things get pretty offensive as well because people did die and there's evidence of this and people are grieving. So when you suddenly say that the planes weren't real, it's pretty offensive. Territory is terribly human coming up with this stuff, you know.

[00:42:15]

Yeah, well, I assume the people who believe this are extreme right wing people, but that doesn't really make sense because I would think they would actually want it to be terrorists.

[00:42:30]

Nine 9/11 is kind of polarizing. What I think is people from both sides of the spectrum that just were deeply suspicious of the story they were being fed.

[00:42:39]

And I think the ones that stuck around and still believe in a lot of these conspiracy theories, you'll probably find that probably in the more right leaning kind of Kuhnen camp, a lot of the 9/11 truth is like Dylan Avery have kind of like stepped back and gone, that we're not on board with this anymore. Now we know what we know.

[00:42:57]

Well, I think I brought this up in one of our very first talks with you. This isn't my idea. I got it from Dan Carlin. Herein lies the comfort of conspiracy theories, because what's really scary to all Americans is that you might be on an airplane that gets hijacked and flown into a building and that that is a possibility on planet Earth and as well that you could be sitting in your office and a plane could fly into your building. That is so scary and unpredictable that it is more comforting to think, well, know that didn't happen and can't happen.

[00:43:30]

What has to happen is this very coordinated geopolitical state doing this.

[00:43:36]

But what's hilarious is that is what happened. It was a very coordinated act. They just not connected to us, but it was a coordinated act. What's more comforting about a group over there coordinated versus our own government court, it's the same.

[00:43:50]

In fact, it's more scary to think your own government would do that to you, I think.

[00:43:55]

Well, what they don't want to believe is that people with no state backing like Lee Harvey Oswald, that he could just be a deranged dipshit that ruins the course of history or that Archduke Ferdinand could be killed by these three idiots. And then World War One happens and then World War two happens and so on and so forth. The notion that any one of us seven billion could be coocoo and fuck up the whole world is very scary. For some reason, people find more comfort in that.

[00:44:23]

No, people can't do that. We don't live in that dangerous. It would take a whole government to do this. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:44:30]

And I think you saw that reaction happening, obviously, with Lee Harvey Oswald and also with the shooter in Vegas as well.

[00:44:36]

Like that was just such a scary concept for people that it's easy to try and explain it away with like a bigger plan than it just being alone, that no one wants that because then you have seven billion potential threats to your life versus one crazy Illuminati or something.

[00:44:52]

You're right. That fear does spread whenever you're in a tall building, maybe not all the time, but it does play on your mind. And like here in New Zealand, we've got like a very tiny tower compared to what you have called the Sky Tower, and someone got a light aircraft and went kind of rogue and was flying around there. And the discussion everywhere was like, oh, my goodness, he's going to fly into the sky tower. He didn't.

[00:45:16]

But that discussion and that fear wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for 9/11. So it has yeah. It's it's a terrifying thought. And that's why it's been endlessly discussed, I think. Also, just to add one more reason to defend them, I don't know why, but if it is a conspiracy, it can be fought right. So if there's a bad guy, if there's a cohort of bad guys in some system, it can be fought.

[00:45:44]

If it's just people are crazy. This group of al-Qaida members that had been previously living in the fucking desert in Afghanistan somehow put together this plan with no state aid. How do we how do we fight that? Who do we attack to prevent that?

[00:46:03]

Yeah, absolutely. And it's easy to conceptualize and talk about conspiracy theories that all exist in America using those resources and like loose change being put together with all of the found footage than it is to get into the politics of another country and the machinations of that which is much more unknowable, I think. Yeah, the last out the theory that I quite like that I wanted to go through was the many nuke theory. And I wanted to get your guys take on that.

[00:46:30]

Many nukes. A small segment of conspiracy theorists believe the Twin Towers were brought down by a small nuclear weapon or weapons in the basement of each building. Even reporters made nuclear bomb references because that's what it looked like, atom bomb or something.

[00:46:47]

Believers make a lot of claims to support this hypothesis. There were apparently gigantic craters in the granite bedrock that could only be explained by nukes.

[00:46:58]

There were high levels of various radioactive elements detected in the environment called ground zero. So they point to that and the debris pile was impossibly small given the building size. So it must have been many nukes.

[00:47:16]

What do you make of that one that is by far? Well, I don't know what's less plausible, hologram airplanes or a mini nuke, but that's definitely up there.

[00:47:26]

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely some bullshit. I mean, pretty much everything that's claimed about many nukes is just objectively wrong. And the other thing is many nukes. The idea is that they would and they did under the building. We would expect the whole building to fall into like a big hole that was made by the nuclear weapon. But, you know, we watched those towers fall and it was from the top down cratering down. So many nukes to me is one of the most batshit insane ones that really bugs me.

[00:47:54]

Yeah. Controlled demolitions. I can kind of understand where you get that idea from looking at it. But many nukes inside this territory, as you say, with holograms where it's just like, what are you talking about? And as a society, we should be so much smarter than this. Why are we even discussing this?

[00:48:10]

OK, I have a lot of thoughts on many nukes. One, there was a huge mushroom cloud, which was crazy. I think any one of us would have connected. The only time we've ever seen that kind of mushroom cloud is with a nuclear weapon. So I can see immediately where in some people's mind there was already some association with that and what they would have thought of as a nuclear mushroom cloud, because they did look similar and it was gigantic.

[00:48:32]

If you see those pictures from New Jersey, it's wild. But my understanding of nuclear weapons and I could be wrong. But you can't get tinier than what fat boy and little man were. You're splitting one atom. You can't split an even smaller atom. I think the smallest explosion you could expect to get from a nuclear weapon would be what we saw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So all of lower Manhattan would have been completely gone if we split an atom on the 60 something floor of the Twin Towers.

[00:49:02]

Yet you're so right. And that mushroom cloud from the dust and all the forces that were coming down from that building collapsing again. And so we're just not used to seeing that from a building collapse because we haven't seen a building collapse like this before. So it's just that sort of that fallacy let you just jump into automatically, which is entirely false.

[00:49:21]

And if there were many nukes, we would have seen them deployed with regularity in Afghanistan. In Iraq, we would be using mini nukes if we had a mini nuke that you could use in the manner that they just suggested was used that would replace bunker busters. And we don't we don't have that. We can't do many nukes. We can either go all in or not. That's kind of the down side of nuclear options, is there? There are an all in proposition then the truth, the movement.

[00:49:49]

There's so much rupturing of opinions in the movement as well. And the many people hate the controlled demolition people. There's so much breakdown in the community as well from all these different ideas, which is just quite fun to watch from the outside as well. A lot of arguing.

[00:50:05]

I think also it's hard for people to comprehend that something brand new like this was brand new plane flying in at that high of a building. And everyone wants to equate it to something before it's like well before when Vegas when you do this. But it's like, no, actually, this is new. And also it happens now with covid, too, of like, oh, well before in the 1918 pandemic or and this.

[00:50:35]

And it's like, no, no. But this is actually new. So you can do some equating, but it stops at a certain point and you have to just recognize like oh shit, this is something new.

[00:50:46]

And it is scary to be involved in something completely new because you don't know where it ends.

[00:50:52]

That's the greatest point. I love that point because you're right, every part of this puzzle is grasping at control, understanding abatement of fear. So, yeah, you go I want to be able to relate it to this thing because that way at least I knew this reality existed. Like, we all know it, just like that time that building went down. The other thing that I lived through that was just as memorable was the space shuttle Challenger exploding when we were all watching that in fifth grade.

[00:51:18]

And again, I'm sure someone said that shouldn't explode like that. That's the one we saw explode like there wasn't another space shuttle to compare it to, nor has ever a building of that size had two jumbo jets fly into it. So don't even try to compare it to anything else. But it is comforting. And I guess that's where I can find sympathy. I imagine most people involved in all of this are responding to the deep fear that that event created in all of us.

[00:51:44]

And I'm sad for them that they have explored avenues in search of beating that fear that are so crazy. But I can sympathize with the desire to take control or understanding of something that's beyond understanding and is out of our control. You're right.

[00:52:02]

We do love looking for patterns. And when we see an entirely new thing, we like to make sense of it. And in doing that, you sort of look at things. You've seen that look like that before. So, yeah, massive plumes of chaos coming up, but looking like. Mushroom cloud could be a nuclear weapon, you know, we've seen controlled demolitions and, you know, that building coming down, it looks a bit like that.

[00:52:22]

So it must be that we're just always trying to create links to make things make sense.

[00:52:26]

Yeah. Oh, this still fits in the reality. I've already been through this once before.

[00:52:30]

OK, I'll live through this one because I've already had this similar experience and one thing as well.

[00:52:35]

And I just want to hand this over to Dylan Avery again, because he constantly does get blamed for creating modern conspiracy thinking. And it's nice to hear him talking about where conspiracies are now, because part of me was a little bit scared that he might buy into some of that stuff. But hearing him talk on what he actually thinks, it's kind of encouraging to hear.

[00:52:58]

Have you had moments with people have acted like in good faith and then they suddenly come at you at some point with at the end of the interview, with their big moment of unloading the article that eventually got published in Esquire, but it was for Wired originally.

[00:53:12]

The author was John McDermott. But from his initial email, I could tell like what he was trying to do and basically was trying to blame me for Sandy Hook flatterers. Q And on all that stuff and like I told him, like straight up, I'm like, dude, if this article is going to come out and your whole thing is to say that loose change created modern conspiracy culture and everything that's going on right now is the fault of a film that I made 15 years ago.

[00:53:34]

I don't want to participate. And then the article came out and I was right. A lot of people lose sight of the fact that it's been 15 years. All of us are different people than we were 15 years ago. The world is much different than it was 15 years ago. The Internet is definitely a much different place. And I just don't think it's fair to take all of the problems that are going on in the culture wars, quote, conspiracies and to just lump it all in with like, well, there's this film that came out that was really popular.

[00:53:59]

So it's because of that film being so popular that now conspiracy theories are all the rage. It's like I don't think it's that simple. It's not like 9/11 invented the conspiracy theory, like they've been around long before that JFK, Oklahoma City, Columbine and like Oliver Stone made JFK. And no one brings Oliver Stone on for interviews. And like up next is conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone.

[00:54:22]

You can hear his frustration and his voice as well. And the next part of our cover that I think we should listen to actually is just how he feels about the conspiracy theories of today. He hates it. All the other conspiracy theories that have gone mainstream since then, like Sandy Hook and especially recently the election being stolen, covid not being real. And like I've gone toe to toe with a lot of people on covid where I'm like, look, this is a global fucking pandemic.

[00:54:49]

Like every country in the world is dealing with this. Like you're not going to convince me that this is like some massive new world order scheme. And so I think that diametric path that I've seen past the 9/11 truth movement, most of the people that I still consider myself very close friends with, we're all on the same page. We don't buy into any of this stuff that's been going on since then, like Sandy Hook, Boston bombing flatterers, Kuhnen, all that stuff.

[00:55:14]

Nobody's bought into it. On the other end of that, you have people who have doubled down and who do now think that covid is a hoax and do now think that the election was stolen. And just do not even get me started on Alex Jones. It's crazy to me to see Alex basically go from our crazy uncle in the movement, basically, who is always going to say wild and controversial things and part of us that kind of loves him for it, too.

[00:55:39]

Now, being directly involved in a violent raid on the capital, like helped bankroll it. Crazy pants, just absolute crazy parents. Like if you had told me however long ago. Oh, yeah. At some point Donald Trump is going to be president and Alex Jones is going to be best buddies with him. And he's going to fund a rally that's going to wind up leading to the death of five, six people in a riot where people are literally trying to storm the capital and possibly murder elected officials.

[00:56:07]

Holy shit. Like, just holy shit. So, again, you want to talk about, like, extreme ends of the spectrum. Like you have people like me who have basically kind of checked out and like we don't really talk about 9/11 anymore. And then you have the other end where people have just gone completely off the fucking deep end. And now here we are with Kuhnen, where we literally have elected officials wearing face masks that say censored and promoting Kuhnen stuff and promoting the harassment of Sandy Hook families.

[00:56:34]

Just bonkers, man, just absolutely bonkers. And like I would like to make it very clear if for some reason there's anyone out there listening to things any of that is my fault. I don't agree with any of this at all. I think it's worth mentioning that, like I know 9/11 family members, I know people that were there, like in that regard, it's at least a little bit different than harassing Sandy Hook family members and saying that their son or their daughter never died in the shooting.

[00:57:00]

Like it's a very different world.

[00:57:04]

See it? It's a lot to unpack. But, you know, if you'd told me that he'd be talking like this back in twenty fifteen, when I was watching loose change, I wouldn't have pictured it like he really. Has grown up and just taken things in a different way. Well, probably when he made loose change was like, oh, this is kind of fascinating. Like how interesting, what a cool kind of thought experiment for a day not knowing, like, oh, these things have changed everything.

[00:57:33]

So I had the same opinion as you just said, Monica, when I thought he just directed the first one. But then when I found out he's been a part of 11 of them, I get a little less sympathetic. Yeah, that one's hard to overlook.

[00:57:47]

That's the really odd thing with him, is that he didn't tap out as these things spread and he kept on board until quite recently before he sort of moved back from the whole thing. So it is it's a real catch. Twenty two. And I think that's a valid point.

[00:58:04]

I would liken it to like you're in elementary school, you start a rumor about somebody and then you find out this rumor really took off. So first you're like, oh my God, I can't believe it. Really. That thing did that. Then to go, I'm going to create a new one next year in a new one next year. Like I can understand, I can be sympathetic to the first time. You're like, oh, shit. I didn't realize the power of my words.

[00:58:22]

I didn't realize the power of this movie I made. But once you see 10 million people watched it, you know, you're very aware of your power at that point. Who knows? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know the guy. I'm very relieved, like you're saying, David, that he doesn't believe in all these other things and that maybe as a godfather of the movement, maybe some people will listen to them. And also, I'm reminded of the lawyer for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein eating with Jeffrey Epstein lunch and Jeffrey Epstein talking about he was so disgusted by someone else's sexual predation.

[00:58:56]

So the part of me is like there's a little bit of that going on, too.

[00:58:59]

Yeah, I talked to him a little bit as I exchanged a few emails. And I think he sits in that part of the conspiracy theory camp where he thinks the authorities knew in advance that things were going to happen and didn't do anything about it. I think that's where he sits. So he may well backed off from some of those more extreme views. He definitely still has certain conspiratorial thoughts about 9/11. But I don't know. It's just I find it refreshing to talk to a someone who's been involved in conspiracy theories, who just doesn't buy into everything.

[00:59:27]

I mean, that's what I find so depressing.

[00:59:29]

Yeah, I like that. I do, too. You know, he's got limits and I really I really like that he's thought a lot about it. Yeah.

[00:59:36]

You know, there's that thing where people buy into one and they buy into all and that stuff I find just so sad.

[00:59:42]

Stay tuned for more if you dare. We are supported by CarMax. I love how much automotive stuff we really do. It's all happening. CarMax is the way car buying should be. Monica now, you know, I love cars, but I don't like to buy cars or I really know it's a pain in the neck.

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That's just a fact. Yeah, it's true. People live in food deserts. They say, yeah.

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Now, I had some butcher bucks that I threw on during the Super Bowl. It wowed the guests. It did.

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Well, there's probably more to be proud of him for for sure here, because I think in the Alex Jones case, he had the first experience and then he's like, I'm going to profit on this forever. I'm going to enjoy and perpetuate this. And this person had the opportunity. I'm sure it crossed his mind. Well, fuck, I could make a kuhnen now. I could make this I know how to do this. It must have been tempting for him to do it with every new conspiracy theory.

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And he clearly did. And so I applaud that.

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No, and totally. And his work has moved more into police brutality. He is actually doing narrative stuff now and he's got a trailer for Asteroid, this film, and it actually looks really fun and really good. So his dream of making a narrative is actually happened, which is good. Which is awesome. Yeah, I think that's really incredible. But what he said about Alex Jones also stood out to me because it's hard to remember that Alex Jones was just like a wacky guy, like kind of fun.

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And he wasn't this hate filled creature that exists today, like how people change is. It can be pretty incredible to watch.

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Well, Alex Jones seems to be his own YouTube algorithm where you got to offer something a little bit crazier each time to get someone to click through. And I think he's just aware of that.

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Yeah, I'm not 100 percent. He really is. But I hope that kind of taught you a little bit about some of the theories out there.

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It did, because I think it's important to be able to have these discussions with people and kind of have some answers for, like, why, you know, essentially give you some simple tools to like debunk some of these theories that people still have. And because it's the 20th anniversary, I think some of them will probably come back again as well.

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Yeah. Oh, you're absolutely right. As people search, I'm sure things pop up that have been dormant as they just go down the rabbit hole of that day and remembering it.

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I do have one quick question. The people who believe that some government people knew, they do know that there was some CIA report or FBI report where they were very explicitly warning about Osama bin Laden, saying you really need to be watching him, he's planning something else.

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And that that hadn't been taken seriously. Is that what it's based on?

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Yeah, it's kind of in that sort of land as well. And there was also a whole other world of conspiracy culture around who knew and what they knew. And did they act in the right way from intelligence reports. There was a school a day or so before the towers fell and one of the students there said, oh, those towers aren't going to be there tomorrow. And a teacher heard this. And, you know, and so that ended up being part of an FBI investigation.

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And essentially it was a kid talking smack, just a whole load of bullshit, kid being a kid.

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So things like that spread very quickly right through to some very suspicious trades going on the stock market before the planes hit.

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But from my perspective, was definitely used as an excuse to invade another country. And I have no doubt that more could have been done to prevent something like this happening, because there was intel on bin Laden, there was intel on a whole lot of things. And obviously it wasn't acted on in the correct way.

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Yeah, when I've heard that, I don't doubt for a second someone was very aware that a threat was eminent and I'm sure even emails had been written. I don't deny that. I just go more to, you know, the volume of what is being discovered at all times by the most sophisticated intelligence agency ever to exist is momentous. It's too much. There's no way that they could take every single threat that's coming across the transom is eminent and then act on it.

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Or we would be acting all the time. I mean, there's just so many. So that's how I explain. Yeah, I don't doubt that someone said this is going to happen. It's just I'm sure they said 20 other things had been said that week. Two that didn't happen. One hundred percent.

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And there are just a lot of coincidences in life, like there was a spinoff series from the X Files called The Lone Gunman. And I think that pilot episode was a plot about terrorists flying into the World Trade Center that never went to air because it was just after the fact. It wasn't a great idea, but coincidences happen. Yeah, I don't think nobody in the United States in any kind of position of power, wanted three thousand people to die.

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That wasn't a plan. That wasn't something that was ever utilized in that way. So, again, these theories get pretty offensive at that very core. And that sort of comes back to I have to bring this up.

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I hate to do it because I'm so against conspiracy theories. But to your point, sometimes these things are real, which pisses me off the most. I'm currently having a lot of frustration with covid. There's more and more articles coming out that perhaps did originate in the lab because we only have a left and a right here that was seen as xenophobic, that couldn't be explored. It's now finally being explored. It's shit like that that gives rise to these conspiracy theories.

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And I'll just add in Russia. Vladimir Putin was being groomed to become the president. He was not winning any popularity contests. All of a sudden, a few buildings blew up around Moscow. It was attributed to the Ukraine. They invaded. He was the face of that and he got elected. Well, then they found that the armaments that blew up the buildings were Russian. And it's quite obvious that they did raise these buildings to get Putin in power.

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So it's like, sadly, that twisted shit happens, but you have to look at the whole context, Russia has a corrupt environment. It's not like, oh, wow, that's brand new. That happens all the time in Russia. So you have to look at the context as well.

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I totally agree. But I guess what all I'm saying is that since such sinister shit happens, unfortunately, it does make it somewhat plausible, I guess, in people's minds.

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Yeah, absolutely sinister shit does happen and conspiracy theories can turn out to be real. I think the thing that's frustrating about some of the covid stuff is that originally, you know, anything in context with the right information and enough time, your ideas about things can change. But I think the knee jerk reaction that A must have been made in a lab in China or it must have come out through Makkah, it was based in like some really racist original thinking.

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And that's different to disseminating the information after the fact and actually seeing what happened, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think some of those knee jerk reactions can be a lot more problematic when things first happen.

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Yeah, I run everything through my moral pedestal. I sit on with left and right being such a problem that you had two options. Either China created this in a weapons lab and unleashed it in fucking China is the devil or no possible way China had anything to do with it because that xenophobia.

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So that's my frustration. Nowhere will the truth ever be on either.

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And it's difficult to talk about the stuff because you just know there's someone that's going to clip something we've said out of context and say, hey, so-and-so said this, and that's what we're all stepping around as well.

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So I think we've done pretty well here. But it's really tricky. They're really tricky conversations to have.

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They are. And I couldn't feel safer with you being the steward of them. I agree.

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Yeah, this was all. Thank you for putting so much effort. Thanks. Yeah, it's really awesome, David. It's so exciting. It's nice to get other guests on and someone like Dylan Avery. I'm very obsessed with him and what he did because he just made the most viral documentary of all time and started the truth movement.

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And now he's in a position where he's like, I don't really want to talk about that. Like, I love how weird some of this stuff gets as well.

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So, you know, yeah, weirdly, if we put on a continuum Alex Jones and then the guy who created Pepe the Frog, this guy is like dead in the middle.

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Totally, totally. Totally. Yeah. The poor Pepe the frog always feel Fermat fury. He's like a whore. And it's the man whose creation has taken over.

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Just weaponize is sweet. Little cute frog. Well, David, we love you. When are you coming to L.A.? When are we doing this in person?

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I'm going to come over in April so maybe we can talk like an oldie, like a JFK. Maybe we can go into something new. I'm going to talk to some kuhnen believers that have now fallen off the wagon and realized that they were just caught up in a whole lot of trash. So we'll see what way we go.

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I'd love to talk to this gal. They just kicked out what they kicked her off committees. Isn't their senator right now a female senator said you laser beams or.

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Oh, let's not talk about her name. Yeah, I'm very weird stuff going on in the Senate at the moment. My goodness. On stuff. We're not done with it yet. It hasn't died yet. Hopefully it will at some point, hopefully.

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Wow. All right. Good luck with your shooting over there. Thank you.

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And good luck walking around freely and not even knowing that there's been going on. I'm always amazed.

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You both always look really happy and relaxed and not stress. So I hope you are both OK. I know it's a lot.

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Well, I got to say, we are the most blessed people I know because we have a pot of like ten people that are tested a few times a week and we are not lonely. In fact, we've probably had more community in this year than we've had in previous years. And we're just crazy, lucky, very good. And we'd like to make you a part of that pod, David.

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We'll see how it goes. We'll figure it out if we get there. All right. See you guys. I love you, boy.