Mission Implausible is now something you can watch.

Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts or click on the link to our channel.

In our show notes, I'm John Cipher.

And I'm Jerry O'Shea.

We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world, and part.

Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.

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.

Could they be true or are we being manipulated?

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 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, Really glad to be here.

I'm excited to do this.

It's gonna be fun, is it.

Yeah, you haven't heard my question yet.

Let's dispense with them.

We're gonna have fun here.

Let's get right down to the really nitty gritty that I want to talk about.

Okay, you're a bigfoot expert, bigfoot erotica.

Will are we going right into that one?

So with sort of buds with Denver Riggleman, who was a Republican congressman, and 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.

So what is up with bigfoot erotica?

Is it real?

It?

Israel?

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 bonus interview with her, which actually I'm re releasing 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.

See like some handsome eight foot guy who liked was like a bonus ripper.

Give 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.

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?

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 going to tank your career like that.

So what happened was I found out that my grandfather's cousin, and I found this out after he had passed away.

He was a tenured professor of physical anthropology, 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 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 who are like Bigfoot lives in my basement and talks to me and we have breakfast every morning.

And then there are peopleeople who were more like my cousin, who was like, it is a biologic creature, like any other creature, it has to have a breeding population, it has to obey all the laws 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 you will, and his big footsteps, and went down this path and explored this for a year and a half.

What is the biggest surprises that came out to you, 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 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 we've had stories of Bigfoot 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 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 and we just don't know for sure.

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 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, the Anderthals went extinct for whatever reason.

So it could be.

Some mythological ativistic remembrance of a ten thousand year conflict with another human species.

I'm just guessing, I know, but yeah.

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.

So I grew up in a rural area right upstate New York Mountains.

A lot of bigfoot up there, beers.

We don't have bigfoot up there, not in the northern were just Canadians.

He's like, when you when you got Canadians, you're going to find beer cans around right?

Oh yeah, true, And so what about bigfoot poop?

But I'm just saying, then.

I aspologize for Jerry's questions.

Or you could call it scan 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, I want to be the guy who is at the front line of that.

So he'd 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.

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.

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 aliens brought him 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 like the idea that the world is still 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 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.

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.

In fact, there's a suppose there's someone who claims to be a CI officer.

I don't know whether she was or wasn't it.

Tracy Shamdler Walder.

Who was talking about we know Tracy Walder, do we Yeah, f C I too, Yes, she talks about Bigfoot.

A history major at University of Southern California, Tracy wanted to be a teacher, but a job there on campus changed everything.

It was a table that said CIA and that they were looking for English in history majors, and so I dropped my resume.

Often they called.

Yes and the rest is history.

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 farrists were like, no, they knew it was Bigfoot fur, but they substituted.

They just they're lying to you.

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.

Yeah, it's interesting that i'd forgotten about that fb I 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.

In any case, this is conspiracy in general.

I think people don't trust the government, and I think, what revolution.

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.

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 growth for 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 find like where that had originated from.

I think it was just an idea that people held.

There's another one that the Smithsonian is the fact that they don't have bigfoot skeletons means that they're hiding bigfoot skeletons.

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.

They might not even know it.

Jane Goodall just died.

She was a big foot I now is my understanding.

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, the yett, the Ciari in Australia, there's the Chinese wild man, and and on and on and on, and you know, I've 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.

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.

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.

Yeah, that's not what a sasquatch poop looks like.

There's no way they're waiting that.

Wait a minute, what does it look like.

I think they're bigger.

Yeah.

It's just a guest though, isn't it.

Yeah?

True?

Good point could be like rabbits, who's got birds in the background.

I live in Hawaii as it's like forest out back.

Hawaii is the only state where Bigfoot has not been found because Bigfoot can't swim that far.

Oh, but we do have We have the 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.

So we have a sasquatch light here in Hawaii.

But little foot, yeah, little food.

I want to test Laura and Rachel.

I want you to both answer at the same time.

Do you believe in Bigfoot?

Yes?

Or no?

No?

No?

Oh?

Are you hesitated?

Rachel?

Can I qualify?

Though?

Yes?

I like the idea of Bigfoot, and if someone comes with Bigfoot evidence, I'm all for it.

So what do locals think, Rachel?

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 people in town.

But it's something that people like to believe in.

Right, Bigfoot is good for the economy.

Ah, bigfoots probably on your high school football team, though, right, so is Bigfoot in the YETI are they the same thing as a cryptid?

No, they're both cryptids, but they are not the same thing.

The yetti 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, the YETI is a very different creature.

And I don't want you conflating them.

So they can't mate, right like you know, horses and donkeys that kind of thing.

They probably could, but then the the offspringer sterile.

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.

I think there's a mixture.

I mean, I think you see that with sort of any phenomen there's people who are true believers and there's people who just want in on the fun.

But most of the people that I spoke with really had a true belief and had an experience and had seen something 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.

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 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 it was came out of the 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 in that area, and he's and I started a wonder So yeah, I think people do experience something that just rocks their belief system.

In wild things.

You podcast about aliens, which is a yes, an.

Alien guys, they're all, oh, we are good.

Yeah, 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.

The secret beds that will that come from alien technology.

That alien technology that CIA has we reversed engineered, we can grow back limbs, and he's like, it can't cure my bald spot for the kind of thing.

But 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.

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 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.

So you did Bigfoot, you did aliens, and then you did stuff related to nuclear.

Everyone's like nuclear, that's weird.

So the Bigfoot one was the obvious.

Waitit, wait a minute, nuclear is the weird one.

Aliens and Bigfoot are fine, but.

Yeah, nuclear 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 Pentagon's 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, which they probably have been running in some capacity or another since they were doing Project Blue Book 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 Mua Mua.

It means scout basically messenger coming from Afar.

And I think most people, 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 Loweb, he was like, we have to consider the possibility that might be artificial, that it might be made by extraterrestrials.

And he wrote that in a scientific paper and he published it, and it's actually, you have to consider the possibility.

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.

Well, if you have a substeck, you have to get people to it 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 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 trying to figure out what can we do on the positive side with nuclear power, And in 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 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 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 Zaporiginia nuclear plant in Ukraine, and you're like, I don't know for if we as humans are otherwise.

I remember as a guy that was Eric Schlosser, who wrote a book called Command to Control about all of the near misses and accidents in 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 Yeah, the broken arrow stuff.

You're just like, we're a little sloppy.

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.

I will say that the Navy has actually done a very admirable job in the now almost eighty years of maintaining a 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.

He was quite mean.

Yeah, he does not sound like the best, 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 That is to some degree, what nuclear needs.

If you're going to play with things that are that dangerous, you need to be as close to perfect as you can be.

Yeah.

There was one instance where the Indians were test firing a nuclear capable missile and they realized they had it pointed the wrong way.

This is God forbid like North Korea, and like this is that people are people.

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 of this.

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.

Statistically, We're going to wipe ourselves out.

We're going to the bottleneck theory right there we go.

Yeah, but yeah, another civilization doesn't do it, that means that there's a possibility we won't either.

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 I get the appeal, but it feels a little bit religious in a way.

Yeah, that's exactly why would they I go for a run and I see a little ant heap off to the side.

I don't stop and go I'm gonna like do sexual savior on these ants.

I'm going to figure out who their ant queen is so that I can talk to them.

It's really like, it's not a whole lot of interest in me.

I'm just gonna yeah.

And here's the other thing.

Humans have only have not been around that long three hundred thousand years out of a four point six billion year history.

And 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.

I can't remember where I heard this from.

It's like the reverse technology thing that CIA or Deep.

STATEE oh, yeah, I heard about this a lot.

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 reverse engineer it?

Right?

Totally?

They're so smart they won't even know what it is.

What do you mean a group of Neanderthals if we got a hold of a laptop, so we I don't know.

I just hit the button right.

Yeah I can't.

Yeah, I can't figure out how half the things in my house work, like the toaster.

Maybe, but I don't know if I could reverse engineer it.

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.

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 or which I'd bought for just three pounds ninety four, there were four hundred different bits made out of you know, one hundred plus different materials.

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.

We take it.

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.

I want to circle back to your grandfather's cousins skeleton, right.

Okay, yeah, so what's the deal?

Okay, so we also have to talk a little bit about Grover, who was 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 Music and they said, yes we'll take your bones, and yes we will take the bones of your three Irish wolfhounds, which I have to clarify it.

The dogs had died long before Grober and he just had the bones sent 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 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 Grober's shoulder and it's licking his face.

And they recreated that photo and it is so cool.

Oh, it's kind of a bare bones exhibit.

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?

I treat it the same way I treated it in the podcast.

I was like, 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 necessarily grounded in science or fact.

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 find has found a body or a big piece of a body, or DNA evidence that backs it up, I will be right on the sidelines cheering those people 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 tofive, not destroying our democracy.

Yeah, no, the issue with Bigfoot.

The issue with Bigfoot 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.

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 think a lots of people who like Bigfoot also like being outside, like going hiking and camping.

So Florida, I asked, what are you doing next?

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 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 making.

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.

You got to give us a little teaser.

What is it.

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 they also do a lot of research up there on Rocky Mountain, spot, a fever, lime, all those kinds of things.

So I got to go up there and go into the Tick clab and see the kind of stuff that they're doing.

And they're creepy.

They're creepy little creatures.

So lurd we don't do this with all the guests, just the ones that we like.

So you get to ask you get to ask one question of each of us.

Are 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?

I do kind of want to know about MK 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 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, it would allow for something similar.

So do they still do those kinds.

Of mind control?

Have you been Have you watched any political rallies lately?

Yew When we were inside, I never remember ever talking about 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 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 inside i 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.

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 BRAINEDWAK concerned about that, 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 CII 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 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, 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 MKA Ultra, but it's mk ultra too, and I think it's something to worry about.

Is technology changes.

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.

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 and you know, the Finns and the Estonians and Latins, Lithuanians and the polls checks some people, they're better at dealing with disinformation.

And all this is they lived under it.

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 inside our own at this point.

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.

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 matter?

And nothing happened to them, nothing should It was.

More than tens of thousands.

Yeah, yeah, no.

I remember hearing about that and I was like, why didn't they come to me money?

Ye?

Yeah.

That.

Actually, there's a really interesting book I read fairly recently called Oh I'm blanking on.

The name of the author is Leah Stilly.

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 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.

But our business scams ain't okay when they yeah, the first story saying you need to give me money.

It feels like it needs to be relegislated based on what's happening.

But those are conspiracies, not conspiracy theories.

Right right.

Oh, here's my other question.

Here's my other question.

Was Mitt 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?

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 counter ESPIONA stuff on Russia stuff.

I think of Russia as 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 make anything anybody wants.

The economy is the size of Portugal.

It creates problems.

It's not winning the old christ 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 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, 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.

Unpredictability.

Yeah, and China will happily step into the void we leave behind.

And they are and a lot of places where we're Laura, it's so great to have you on.

Thanks, we're talking to us.

It's exciting.

You've picked these fun things to explore, and you realize good storytellers whatever they find could 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.

Thank you for having me.

I told you it would be fun and.

It was, Yes, it was.

Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern.

The associate producer is Rachel Harner.

Mission Implausible.

It is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.