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Bears CB2: 📉 Will Terrell Smith be back after his torn patella tendon? 📈 How Zah Frasier look? Remember freak measurable: 6’3 33” arms 4.36 40 10’6” broad. 📈Tyrique Stevenson contract year. 📈 Malik Muhammad freak athlete. 29 starts at texas. Who wins the job? #DaBears

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I watched every SEC Football Media Day press conference so you don’t have to. Here’s the best answer from every head coach: -- LSU Coach Lane Kiffin on why personal growth often comes from subtracting, not constantly adding: “If you really want to keep growing, a lot of people add things as they go versus subtracting things that are issues.” “Once you remove something from your life, you start to realize how many other people are addicted to it or need it.” “To be free of that has been interesting because you don’t compare.” “Social media… makes you compare your job, the city you live in, your vacation, your kids, your clothes, your car, your significant other.” “When you don’t see that all day, you’re free of that comparison.” “It’s been a way of being more present.” — Georgia Coach Kirby Smart explains how leaders should operate when their industry is changing rapidly: “What wins football games has not changed. Each coach has to decide within their own program what they want to major in.” You’ve got to be able to wear multiple hats. But you’ve got to choose which hats you want to wear the best.” “I’m not afraid to change what we need to change to be successful. I don’t have an ego that says you have to do it my way. I want to hear how you want to do it, and let’s find the best way.” — Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables on the player who asked for more money before he had earned a role, and how he responded: “Why don’t you worry about playing first before we worry about incentives?” — Kentucky Coach Will Stein on why he believes Kentucky can overcome its history and win at a championship level: “I think because of me, to be honest.” “I know what it takes. I’ve seen it at the highest levels. You’ve just got to believe. You’ve just got to put the ball down and play.” “The best determination of whether what you’re doing is working is putting the ball down and playing football.” “There are going to be bumps in the road. I’m prepared for tough moments and tough times. I already do self-talk with myself: ‘How can I stay neutral when stuff’s bad?’” “You’ve got to go attack. You can’t sit back and wait.That’s one thing I refuse to do at Kentucky—wait.” — Missouri Coach Eli Drinkwitz explains what Ahmad Hardy’s recovery taught him about the real purpose of coaching: “There was that moment where he realized he was mortal. I’ve been very proud of the way he’s approached his recovery and his rehab. His number one responsibility is to be a father, and then after that, to continue to be a great teammate.” “That’s exactly what coaching is all about. It’s about taking young men on a journey from 18 to maturity—and it’s a lifelong process.” “Regardless of how much the business changes or is disrupted, it’s still about helping players achieve their dreams.” “When Ahmad scores his first touchdown this year, I’ll be thinking about that journey from hospital bed to end zone.” — South Carolina Coach Shane Beamer takes complete ownership of South Carolina’s disappointing season and explains how adversity revealed the strength of the program’s culture: “There was no ceiling on the football program at South Carolina, and nothing has changed. We fell woefully short, and that’s on me. We don’t seek comfort from how close we were.” — Vanderbilt Coach Clark Lea on Vanderbilt’s disastrous 2023 season and explains how it became the turning point that eventually led to a 10-win season: “That’s called getting your ass kicked.” “It may have been the most important thing that’s ever happened to me as a head coach and to the program.” “The vision never left us.” “In 15 years, when I look back on this moment, what am I learning right now—not what am I feeling right now?” — Tennessee Coach Josh Heupel explains how to develop an inexperienced quarterback without coaching away what makes him special: “The players have to go learn it, earn it, and compete for it every single day.” “Each one of them is a little bit different. They’re the artist. You’ve got to hand them the paintbrush and let them go paint it.” — Florida Coach John Sumrall explains the attitude he wants to establish at Florida: “I may have some bad moments. I don’t have bad days.” “Attitude is demeanor, drive and desire. Demeanor is your body language. Your drive and desire is the mindset that you’ve never arrived, you can always get better.” — Texas A&M Coach Mike Elko on how he prevents complacency after a playoff appearance: “I show them our trophy case, and it’s empty.” — Ole Miss Coach Pete Golding explains how he defines an elite program beyond wins and football performance: “Elite programs aren’t designed for when they’ve got cleats on. Elite programs are designed for when they take them cleats off.” “Are they a better dude? Are they a better husband? Are they a better father?” — Auburn Coach Alex Golesh explains where real confidence comes from: “Real confidence, not fake confidence, but real, authentic, genuine confidence, comes from elite-level process day in and day out.” — Arkansas Coach Ryan Silverfield explains why rebuilding Arkansas required examining every detail: “The night I got there… I said, ‘We need to fix the light bulbs.’ How you do anything is how you do everything.” “People now are starting to catch on: this is how we need to do this. We need to be better here. We need to support this more.” — Mississippi State Coach Jeff Lebby explains why the next step for a talented young quarterback is not always making more plays—it is learning which plays not to make: “I don’t necessarily put a ceiling on K1. The way he goes about his business on the day-to-day to prepare himself to have success between the white lines—it’s elite.” — Alabama Coach Kalen DeBoer explains why reputation, returning talent and last year’s progress mean nothing until the new team proves it again: “That’s okay, because we’ve got to go prove it. It doesn’t matter how many guys you return.” “Until we prove it, we understand there’s going to be doubt.” — Texas Coach Steve Sarkisian explains how Arch Manning handled being hyped by outsiders, blamed when their predictions failed, and refused to respond publicly: “Arch Manning wasn’t on social media or television saying, ‘I’m going to be the first pick of the draft.’ All he did was work really hard.” “Then those same people wanted to criticize and demean him almost for letting them down because he didn’t live up to what they thought he was going to be.” “What he got put through probably would have melted or destroyed 99% of people in his shoes.” “All he did was stay consistent and true to who he was. He didn’t go back on social media and say, ‘I told you so.’” “I think right now he’s a very dangerous player because he learned a lot from last season.”
24:18

I watched every SEC Football Media Day press conference so you don’t have to. Here’s the best answer from every head coach: -- LSU Coach Lane Kiffin on why personal growth often comes from subtracting, not constantly adding: “If you really want to keep growing, a lot of people add things as they go versus subtracting things that are issues.” “Once you remove something from your life, you start to realize how many other people are addicted to it or need it.” “To be free of that has been interesting because you don’t compare.” “Social media… makes you compare your job, the city you live in, your vacation, your kids, your clothes, your car, your significant other.” “When you don’t see that all day, you’re free of that comparison.” “It’s been a way of being more present.” — Georgia Coach Kirby Smart explains how leaders should operate when their industry is changing rapidly: “What wins football games has not changed. Each coach has to decide within their own program what they want to major in.” You’ve got to be able to wear multiple hats. But you’ve got to choose which hats you want to wear the best.” “I’m not afraid to change what we need to change to be successful. I don’t have an ego that says you have to do it my way. I want to hear how you want to do it, and let’s find the best way.” — Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables on the player who asked for more money before he had earned a role, and how he responded: “Why don’t you worry about playing first before we worry about incentives?” — Kentucky Coach Will Stein on why he believes Kentucky can overcome its history and win at a championship level: “I think because of me, to be honest.” “I know what it takes. I’ve seen it at the highest levels. You’ve just got to believe. You’ve just got to put the ball down and play.” “The best determination of whether what you’re doing is working is putting the ball down and playing football.” “There are going to be bumps in the road. I’m prepared for tough moments and tough times. I already do self-talk with myself: ‘How can I stay neutral when stuff’s bad?’” “You’ve got to go attack. You can’t sit back and wait.That’s one thing I refuse to do at Kentucky—wait.” — Missouri Coach Eli Drinkwitz explains what Ahmad Hardy’s recovery taught him about the real purpose of coaching: “There was that moment where he realized he was mortal. I’ve been very proud of the way he’s approached his recovery and his rehab. His number one responsibility is to be a father, and then after that, to continue to be a great teammate.” “That’s exactly what coaching is all about. It’s about taking young men on a journey from 18 to maturity—and it’s a lifelong process.” “Regardless of how much the business changes or is disrupted, it’s still about helping players achieve their dreams.” “When Ahmad scores his first touchdown this year, I’ll be thinking about that journey from hospital bed to end zone.” — South Carolina Coach Shane Beamer takes complete ownership of South Carolina’s disappointing season and explains how adversity revealed the strength of the program’s culture: “There was no ceiling on the football program at South Carolina, and nothing has changed. We fell woefully short, and that’s on me. We don’t seek comfort from how close we were.” — Vanderbilt Coach Clark Lea on Vanderbilt’s disastrous 2023 season and explains how it became the turning point that eventually led to a 10-win season: “That’s called getting your ass kicked.” “It may have been the most important thing that’s ever happened to me as a head coach and to the program.” “The vision never left us.” “In 15 years, when I look back on this moment, what am I learning right now—not what am I feeling right now?” — Tennessee Coach Josh Heupel explains how to develop an inexperienced quarterback without coaching away what makes him special: “The players have to go learn it, earn it, and compete for it every single day.” “Each one of them is a little bit different. They’re the artist. You’ve got to hand them the paintbrush and let them go paint it.” — Florida Coach John Sumrall explains the attitude he wants to establish at Florida: “I may have some bad moments. I don’t have bad days.” “Attitude is demeanor, drive and desire. Demeanor is your body language. Your drive and desire is the mindset that you’ve never arrived, you can always get better.” — Texas A&M Coach Mike Elko on how he prevents complacency after a playoff appearance: “I show them our trophy case, and it’s empty.” — Ole Miss Coach Pete Golding explains how he defines an elite program beyond wins and football performance: “Elite programs aren’t designed for when they’ve got cleats on. Elite programs are designed for when they take them cleats off.” “Are they a better dude? Are they a better husband? Are they a better father?” — Auburn Coach Alex Golesh explains where real confidence comes from: “Real confidence, not fake confidence, but real, authentic, genuine confidence, comes from elite-level process day in and day out.” — Arkansas Coach Ryan Silverfield explains why rebuilding Arkansas required examining every detail: “The night I got there… I said, ‘We need to fix the light bulbs.’ How you do anything is how you do everything.” “People now are starting to catch on: this is how we need to do this. We need to be better here. We need to support this more.” — Mississippi State Coach Jeff Lebby explains why the next step for a talented young quarterback is not always making more plays—it is learning which plays not to make: “I don’t necessarily put a ceiling on K1. The way he goes about his business on the day-to-day to prepare himself to have success between the white lines—it’s elite.” — Alabama Coach Kalen DeBoer explains why reputation, returning talent and last year’s progress mean nothing until the new team proves it again: “That’s okay, because we’ve got to go prove it. It doesn’t matter how many guys you return.” “Until we prove it, we understand there’s going to be doubt.” — Texas Coach Steve Sarkisian explains how Arch Manning handled being hyped by outsiders, blamed when their predictions failed, and refused to respond publicly: “Arch Manning wasn’t on social media or television saying, ‘I’m going to be the first pick of the draft.’ All he did was work really hard.” “Then those same people wanted to criticize and demean him almost for letting them down because he didn’t live up to what they thought he was going to be.” “What he got put through probably would have melted or destroyed 99% of people in his shoes.” “All he did was stay consistent and true to who he was. He didn’t go back on social media and say, ‘I told you so.’” “I think right now he’s a very dangerous player because he learned a lot from last season.”

Josh Chambers

64,219 views • 2 months ago

TRUMP THE ANTIKRYST? PT 2 Trump awarded Elvis, his cousin, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. The highest civilian award of the United States. Freedom? Why would Elvis need this? Then he just dropped video of Elvis & himself on stage. He also just dropped another video of how he and Elvis look alike. In the video below by Abraham Ojeda Abraham Ojeda, Elon randomly changes the subject to interject into the interview out of literally nowhere, "Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt. Perhaps that's where our new god will come from." while strangely, and maniacally, laughing at something that's simply not funny. Memphis. Really? As Abraham Ojeda explains in the video, the man who walked on water warned people about the rise of an antichrist, showing the text: "And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved: but for the elect's sake [the Human Elohim Krystos] those days will be shortened." [True, the mRNA shots have been shown to self-replicate and easily transmissible from vaxxed-to-unvaxxed. So it is only a matter of time before all people will become infected with this deadly pathogen that ultimately destroys the body over 3-5 years. Remember, 'all the animals died'.] "For false christs [krysts, see explanation below] and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect." [Again, the Human Elohim Krystos below.] "See, I have told you beforehand." "Therefore if they say to you, 'Look, he is in the desert!' or 'Look, he is in the inner rooms!, do not believe it." Ojeda goes on to explain the original Memphis is located right next to the Great Pyramid of Giza that is in the desert and has hidden rooms inside. Not to mention the extremely obfuscated and hidden Sphere of Amenti, a 'Turnstile Stargate', located directly below the Sphinx right in front of the Great Pyramid, that Jesheua Sananda Melchizedek, the true 'Kryst' of the fully restored 12-strand DNA pure bloodline of the Human Elohim avatar project used to transport people who had already reached 4th dimensional or higher vibration, to secretly move up to the next level of this time matrix during his short time of witnessing to the world. Jesheua Sananda was working directly with Jeshewua Ahumbra Melchizedek, the fully restored 9-strand DNA 'pure' bloodline of the Hyksos Anunnaki Human Hybrids developed in E-Den, that was the 'king of the J3ws' at this time who was assisting Sananda in these mechanical ascension sacred rituals while the two were both under the Co-Evolution BioRegenesis Treaty of Palaidor that provided an ascension mechanism for the J3ws to actually move up through all 15 levels of the Gaia time matrix. Without this Treaty, the children of Adam & Eve would have no possible way of ever moving out of this matrix, as their development project was not an officially authorized program, but actually an illegal invasion of Tara earth perpetrated by various groups of ETs over the previous 560m years. You must have a 12 strand genetic DNA sequence in order to ascend this matrix & the Treaty process gives them access to that. [For more on the bioforming invasion of Tara earth's hosted Human Elohim Project by your captors, see my article: 👉THE HISTORY OF THE CHIMERA] Soon after the two 'Krysts' worked together for a few years helping people ascend through the Sphere of Amenti below the Sphinx, who had been unfairly held back from moving forward for hundreds of millions of years, and spreading the word about how people were eternal spirit essences and not just random creatures in bipedal hominid bodies evolved out of pond scum; teaching them not to embrace this prison world and all its traps and pitfalls, Jeshewua Ahumbra ✡️ abandoned the ascension Treaty for whatever reason, and has since either directly or indirectly stolen the real Kryst's identity, which is now saturated throughout the fake King James 'bible'. [For more on these two figures, see my article: 👉THE TWO CHRISTS] [For more on the King James fake bible, the complex hypnotizing spell it casts and who is the real god of the Catholic Church (and all other religions of the world), see my article: 👉HARD. RED. PILL.] As an aside, the reason Jesheua and Jeshewua's names are so nearly identical is because the invader races always set out to mimic and rob the identity of all things authentic about the real Human Elohim Project. The 'king of the J3ws' was born a few years after Jeshua Sananda was, & was meant to usurp his miraculous works even before he was born. Identity theft was invented by your invaders, and is key to why the J3ws have been kicked out of over 110 countries over the last 12,000 years after infiltrating every group in the world, claiming to adopt their religions and cultures, only to secretly remain utterly devoted to the Talmud, and the practices of the Babylonian Mystery Religion (see more below). So the fake 'Christ' ('Jesus') has a significant history in Memphis and is set to return to the world's stage during Armageddon, which you are currently in the middle of at the time of this writing of 12/5/24. He is referred to as the 'antichrist', deceiving the nations, because the invader's agenda is to eliminate all actual Humans that carry the sacred eternal-life genetics of the Elohim bloodline known as the Krystos 'pale silver cord' that connects to the eternal sound and light fields of the deity planes that provides them with both eternal life as well as unlimited power without the need to eat or sleep. So 'anti-Humans' was also referred to 'Anti-Krystos', being transliterated today as Antichrist. So, even though the term 'antichrist' denotes evil and wickedness, it will not be delivered to you in that way, but it will appear almost identical to what Jesheua Sananda recommended as life-principals that lead to a greater experience in life. But while milk and honey will be coming out of this being's mouth, his ultimate intent all along will be to continue your eternal enslavement and capture by appealing to your Krystic predispositions, while at the same time other arms of his fake teachings, such as the Church of Satan, will appeal to the billions of Hyksos Anunnaki Hybrids who are genetically predisposed to pagan debauchery and self-destructive tendencies as celebrated in the Babylonian Mystery Religion (also explained below). Remember, most of the Anunnaki Hybrids around you are literally wolves, bears, snakes & many other animals that are now suddenly inside bipedal bodies with opposable thumbs that can walk and talk. They didn't earn those avatars like Humans did, they simply fell into them with no idea how to maintain that very powerful and higher level of body. Their instincts are feral, not civilized as the Human avatar template was encoded with. You may be hesitant to believe that J3ws (and their Crypto J3wish associates as explained in my article 👉THE HISTORY OF THE CHIMERA) are from other planes ('planets'), such as Sirius A, Alcyone Pleiades, Antiparticle Gaia, Nibiru and others, but you can hear R@bbi L@itman tell his students in his own words in video that they are: ‘UNDERCOVER ALIENS FROM ANOTHER PLANET’. That's pretty clear and not open to interpretation. [Watch R@bbi L@itman in my article: 👉 THE GREAT WHORE OF BABYLON PT1] If anyone here hasn't yet been informed, Trump was officially crowned the Messiah, 'King of the J3ws' by Orthodox T@lmudic J3wish R@bbis on behalf of the Zi0nist Organization of America & the Isr@el Heritage Foundation. While you may think that Zi0nists and T@mudic J3ws are at direct odds with each other, the bottom line is all J3wish factions in the world come together with the one shared goal of 'inheriting the earth' from the Krystos (Human Elohim), so they can have these 'promised lands' for themselves, regardless if they interpret the teachings of their forefathers slightly differently, or not. They are, in every faction, still the 'chosen ones'. In case you are unaware, the Babylonian Talmud is the teachings of sexual magic & blood ritual sacrif1ce referred to as ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Whore of Babylon’ religion that was founded in Sumer-Ur 12,000 years ago by ‘those who from heaven came’ (the Anunnaki), where the wheel, the plow, indoor plumbing, production, writing, hydraulics, fabric, brick production, metallurgy, mathematics, philosophy, sailboats, chariots, numerals, taxes, calendars, codes-of-law, contract law, board games, beer, stringed instruments, maps, schools, farmer's almanac, jobs, congress, J3wdicial systems, corporations, paved roads, banks and formal municipal services suddenly fell right out of the clear blue sky to earth while the rest of the world were still living in caves and trying to invent fire. All with no archeological evidence of development for any of them. 👉 Trumps' coronation took place on July 10th, 2023, after J3ws had awaited the return of their 'Mashiach, Anointed One', for thousands of years. 👉 Tesla's new 4 million square ft AI data center is located in Memphis Tennessee, just 11 miles away from Elvis Presley's Graceland Estate. Those are some strong coincidences given the repeated Elvis comms Trump has been dropping, featuring Elvis songs at his rallies and gatherings along with dropping very deliberate multiple videos. So what about Memphis then? Why is Tesla there, why is Musk going off-topic in his interview about subjects totally unassociated with anything Egypt, Memphis, antichrists or 'gods' returning? Because it is time to lay the foundations of the return of the savior. And of course, that savior will be 'of the J3ws', not 'of the humans'. For those who have taken the time to read my article: 👉THE HISTORY OF THE CHIMERA, you will understand by now that I've seen ancient false 'gods' in person over many years already. I've seen their multiple bodies of the same being, some identical, some very different. But they are all the same exact person inside (the same spirit essence). Somehow they have figured out how to do this. So there is never a time they are just in one body here on earth. But in thousands of bodies, many in stasis as 'vehicles' they can wear in all countries of the world through instant 'translocation', hidden away in stasis chambers, and many walking around awake and aware and at the ready to step in for the current leading position at a moment's notice, as covered in my article: 👉SOPHIA as well. Anyone paying attention has now seen many different Donald Trumps. Some are short, 5' 11", some are taller at 6' 3", some heavier, some slimmer, and even older. But what you likely didn't know is that in one of his eras, he was also King Antiochus of Babylon that conquered Memphis Egypt. So while you and I would see Donald Trump as 'cousins' with Elvis, the way it really works with the 'gods', is that's the same person in both bodies, and not just both bodies, but thousands of bodies worldwide. That's why the gods never die, not because they are in eternal-life bodies, but because they have replacements of differing ages at all times so their awareness never leaves, even if one or a dozen of their avatars is killed, as Donald Trump passed in 1989, but no one ever noticed, since he showed up on-time the following day without missing a beat. For a long time I have wondered who 'Mel' was that never showed up in Elvis' group photo collages, now I'm wondering if he wasn't strikingly similar to Donald Trump. Bear in mind, birthdates have nothing to do with the 'gods', as they are here in all different ages at all times, while they also have others here extremely close to the exact same age for reasons of being able to step in for each other for all sorts of reasons. Maybe now you understand how it was Trump managed to do hundreds of rallies leading up to the election that no living person could possibly pull off looking fit and fresh at each one, sometimes 3 in one day. Or why he was rumored to have "been awake for 72 hours before he gave his acceptance speech" on Nov 6th after the election and still looked great. You and I would have been half, if not fully, ded, by that time. Even at 21 yrs old I hit a wall at 24 hours that nearly felt like I was going to pass away if I didn't sleep. That’s impossible at 78 no matter who you are without body backups. Not that this is a religious note, because it isn't, but Jesheua Sananda is also scheduled to make a return during this same time to possibly use his legend to help as many humans and hybrids who are truly seeking to move on from this level make the shift. But what he's never going to do is command you to do anything. He won't be boasting about his accomplishments as being the best, yuge, or 'proud' of what he is able to do. He's only here to set an example for you of how to reach higher, outside of material, worldly matters. This is the sifting, where the wheat will be separated from the chaff for harvest. I came here as a 'gatherer', which means I'm here to help show the way out for those who make that cut. [For more see my article: 👉THE SEPARATION] Don't fall for all that glitters and glows in the future painted for you by the antichrist. What you have waiting for you is a million x more precious than being able to fly in a vertical take-off vehicle to a job you will still hate. Where you're going, you won't need a vehicle to fly, and you won't be traveling to work a job you don't like, since working will be voluntary, as you will not need money. For more on this subject, please see my article: 👉TRUMP, THE ANTICHRIST? (Part 1). This message will only be seen by your eyes if not shared, and if you want to reference this article again later, you will need to cut and paste it in your own notes off line, as it will surely be erased. This is the most accurate translation of these events I am aware of at this time. See off-site link below for my other 100+ recent articles and many thousands of comments on X, assembled thanks to Justin
3:37

TRUMP THE ANTIKRYST? PT 2 Trump awarded Elvis, his cousin, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. The highest civilian award of the United States. Freedom? Why would Elvis need this? Then he just dropped video of Elvis & himself on stage. He also just dropped another video of how he and Elvis look alike. In the video below by Abraham Ojeda Abraham Ojeda, Elon randomly changes the subject to interject into the interview out of literally nowhere, "Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt. Perhaps that's where our new god will come from." while strangely, and maniacally, laughing at something that's simply not funny. Memphis. Really? As Abraham Ojeda explains in the video, the man who walked on water warned people about the rise of an antichrist, showing the text: "And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved: but for the elect's sake [the Human Elohim Krystos] those days will be shortened." [True, the mRNA shots have been shown to self-replicate and easily transmissible from vaxxed-to-unvaxxed. So it is only a matter of time before all people will become infected with this deadly pathogen that ultimately destroys the body over 3-5 years. Remember, 'all the animals died'.] "For false christs [krysts, see explanation below] and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect." [Again, the Human Elohim Krystos below.] "See, I have told you beforehand." "Therefore if they say to you, 'Look, he is in the desert!' or 'Look, he is in the inner rooms!, do not believe it." Ojeda goes on to explain the original Memphis is located right next to the Great Pyramid of Giza that is in the desert and has hidden rooms inside. Not to mention the extremely obfuscated and hidden Sphere of Amenti, a 'Turnstile Stargate', located directly below the Sphinx right in front of the Great Pyramid, that Jesheua Sananda Melchizedek, the true 'Kryst' of the fully restored 12-strand DNA pure bloodline of the Human Elohim avatar project used to transport people who had already reached 4th dimensional or higher vibration, to secretly move up to the next level of this time matrix during his short time of witnessing to the world. Jesheua Sananda was working directly with Jeshewua Ahumbra Melchizedek, the fully restored 9-strand DNA 'pure' bloodline of the Hyksos Anunnaki Human Hybrids developed in E-Den, that was the 'king of the J3ws' at this time who was assisting Sananda in these mechanical ascension sacred rituals while the two were both under the Co-Evolution BioRegenesis Treaty of Palaidor that provided an ascension mechanism for the J3ws to actually move up through all 15 levels of the Gaia time matrix. Without this Treaty, the children of Adam & Eve would have no possible way of ever moving out of this matrix, as their development project was not an officially authorized program, but actually an illegal invasion of Tara earth perpetrated by various groups of ETs over the previous 560m years. You must have a 12 strand genetic DNA sequence in order to ascend this matrix & the Treaty process gives them access to that. [For more on the bioforming invasion of Tara earth's hosted Human Elohim Project by your captors, see my article: 👉THE HISTORY OF THE CHIMERA] Soon after the two 'Krysts' worked together for a few years helping people ascend through the Sphere of Amenti below the Sphinx, who had been unfairly held back from moving forward for hundreds of millions of years, and spreading the word about how people were eternal spirit essences and not just random creatures in bipedal hominid bodies evolved out of pond scum; teaching them not to embrace this prison world and all its traps and pitfalls, Jeshewua Ahumbra ✡️ abandoned the ascension Treaty for whatever reason, and has since either directly or indirectly stolen the real Kryst's identity, which is now saturated throughout the fake King James 'bible'. [For more on these two figures, see my article: 👉THE TWO CHRISTS] [For more on the King James fake bible, the complex hypnotizing spell it casts and who is the real god of the Catholic Church (and all other religions of the world), see my article: 👉HARD. RED. PILL.] As an aside, the reason Jesheua and Jeshewua's names are so nearly identical is because the invader races always set out to mimic and rob the identity of all things authentic about the real Human Elohim Project. The 'king of the J3ws' was born a few years after Jeshua Sananda was, & was meant to usurp his miraculous works even before he was born. Identity theft was invented by your invaders, and is key to why the J3ws have been kicked out of over 110 countries over the last 12,000 years after infiltrating every group in the world, claiming to adopt their religions and cultures, only to secretly remain utterly devoted to the Talmud, and the practices of the Babylonian Mystery Religion (see more below). So the fake 'Christ' ('Jesus') has a significant history in Memphis and is set to return to the world's stage during Armageddon, which you are currently in the middle of at the time of this writing of 12/5/24. He is referred to as the 'antichrist', deceiving the nations, because the invader's agenda is to eliminate all actual Humans that carry the sacred eternal-life genetics of the Elohim bloodline known as the Krystos 'pale silver cord' that connects to the eternal sound and light fields of the deity planes that provides them with both eternal life as well as unlimited power without the need to eat or sleep. So 'anti-Humans' was also referred to 'Anti-Krystos', being transliterated today as Antichrist. So, even though the term 'antichrist' denotes evil and wickedness, it will not be delivered to you in that way, but it will appear almost identical to what Jesheua Sananda recommended as life-principals that lead to a greater experience in life. But while milk and honey will be coming out of this being's mouth, his ultimate intent all along will be to continue your eternal enslavement and capture by appealing to your Krystic predispositions, while at the same time other arms of his fake teachings, such as the Church of Satan, will appeal to the billions of Hyksos Anunnaki Hybrids who are genetically predisposed to pagan debauchery and self-destructive tendencies as celebrated in the Babylonian Mystery Religion (also explained below). Remember, most of the Anunnaki Hybrids around you are literally wolves, bears, snakes & many other animals that are now suddenly inside bipedal bodies with opposable thumbs that can walk and talk. They didn't earn those avatars like Humans did, they simply fell into them with no idea how to maintain that very powerful and higher level of body. Their instincts are feral, not civilized as the Human avatar template was encoded with. You may be hesitant to believe that J3ws (and their Crypto J3wish associates as explained in my article 👉THE HISTORY OF THE CHIMERA) are from other planes ('planets'), such as Sirius A, Alcyone Pleiades, Antiparticle Gaia, Nibiru and others, but you can hear R@bbi L@itman tell his students in his own words in video that they are: ‘UNDERCOVER ALIENS FROM ANOTHER PLANET’. That's pretty clear and not open to interpretation. [Watch R@bbi L@itman in my article: 👉 THE GREAT WHORE OF BABYLON PT1] If anyone here hasn't yet been informed, Trump was officially crowned the Messiah, 'King of the J3ws' by Orthodox T@lmudic J3wish R@bbis on behalf of the Zi0nist Organization of America & the Isr@el Heritage Foundation. While you may think that Zi0nists and T@mudic J3ws are at direct odds with each other, the bottom line is all J3wish factions in the world come together with the one shared goal of 'inheriting the earth' from the Krystos (Human Elohim), so they can have these 'promised lands' for themselves, regardless if they interpret the teachings of their forefathers slightly differently, or not. They are, in every faction, still the 'chosen ones'. In case you are unaware, the Babylonian Talmud is the teachings of sexual magic & blood ritual sacrif1ce referred to as ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Whore of Babylon’ religion that was founded in Sumer-Ur 12,000 years ago by ‘those who from heaven came’ (the Anunnaki), where the wheel, the plow, indoor plumbing, production, writing, hydraulics, fabric, brick production, metallurgy, mathematics, philosophy, sailboats, chariots, numerals, taxes, calendars, codes-of-law, contract law, board games, beer, stringed instruments, maps, schools, farmer's almanac, jobs, congress, J3wdicial systems, corporations, paved roads, banks and formal municipal services suddenly fell right out of the clear blue sky to earth while the rest of the world were still living in caves and trying to invent fire. All with no archeological evidence of development for any of them. 👉 Trumps' coronation took place on July 10th, 2023, after J3ws had awaited the return of their 'Mashiach, Anointed One', for thousands of years. 👉 Tesla's new 4 million square ft AI data center is located in Memphis Tennessee, just 11 miles away from Elvis Presley's Graceland Estate. Those are some strong coincidences given the repeated Elvis comms Trump has been dropping, featuring Elvis songs at his rallies and gatherings along with dropping very deliberate multiple videos. So what about Memphis then? Why is Tesla there, why is Musk going off-topic in his interview about subjects totally unassociated with anything Egypt, Memphis, antichrists or 'gods' returning? Because it is time to lay the foundations of the return of the savior. And of course, that savior will be 'of the J3ws', not 'of the humans'. For those who have taken the time to read my article: 👉THE HISTORY OF THE CHIMERA, you will understand by now that I've seen ancient false 'gods' in person over many years already. I've seen their multiple bodies of the same being, some identical, some very different. But they are all the same exact person inside (the same spirit essence). Somehow they have figured out how to do this. So there is never a time they are just in one body here on earth. But in thousands of bodies, many in stasis as 'vehicles' they can wear in all countries of the world through instant 'translocation', hidden away in stasis chambers, and many walking around awake and aware and at the ready to step in for the current leading position at a moment's notice, as covered in my article: 👉SOPHIA as well. Anyone paying attention has now seen many different Donald Trumps. Some are short, 5' 11", some are taller at 6' 3", some heavier, some slimmer, and even older. But what you likely didn't know is that in one of his eras, he was also King Antiochus of Babylon that conquered Memphis Egypt. So while you and I would see Donald Trump as 'cousins' with Elvis, the way it really works with the 'gods', is that's the same person in both bodies, and not just both bodies, but thousands of bodies worldwide. That's why the gods never die, not because they are in eternal-life bodies, but because they have replacements of differing ages at all times so their awareness never leaves, even if one or a dozen of their avatars is killed, as Donald Trump passed in 1989, but no one ever noticed, since he showed up on-time the following day without missing a beat. For a long time I have wondered who 'Mel' was that never showed up in Elvis' group photo collages, now I'm wondering if he wasn't strikingly similar to Donald Trump. Bear in mind, birthdates have nothing to do with the 'gods', as they are here in all different ages at all times, while they also have others here extremely close to the exact same age for reasons of being able to step in for each other for all sorts of reasons. Maybe now you understand how it was Trump managed to do hundreds of rallies leading up to the election that no living person could possibly pull off looking fit and fresh at each one, sometimes 3 in one day. Or why he was rumored to have "been awake for 72 hours before he gave his acceptance speech" on Nov 6th after the election and still looked great. You and I would have been half, if not fully, ded, by that time. Even at 21 yrs old I hit a wall at 24 hours that nearly felt like I was going to pass away if I didn't sleep. That’s impossible at 78 no matter who you are without body backups. Not that this is a religious note, because it isn't, but Jesheua Sananda is also scheduled to make a return during this same time to possibly use his legend to help as many humans and hybrids who are truly seeking to move on from this level make the shift. But what he's never going to do is command you to do anything. He won't be boasting about his accomplishments as being the best, yuge, or 'proud' of what he is able to do. He's only here to set an example for you of how to reach higher, outside of material, worldly matters. This is the sifting, where the wheat will be separated from the chaff for harvest. I came here as a 'gatherer', which means I'm here to help show the way out for those who make that cut. [For more see my article: 👉THE SEPARATION] Don't fall for all that glitters and glows in the future painted for you by the antichrist. What you have waiting for you is a million x more precious than being able to fly in a vertical take-off vehicle to a job you will still hate. Where you're going, you won't need a vehicle to fly, and you won't be traveling to work a job you don't like, since working will be voluntary, as you will not need money. For more on this subject, please see my article: 👉TRUMP, THE ANTICHRIST? (Part 1). This message will only be seen by your eyes if not shared, and if you want to reference this article again later, you will need to cut and paste it in your own notes off line, as it will surely be erased. This is the most accurate translation of these events I am aware of at this time. See off-site link below for my other 100+ recent articles and many thousands of comments on X, assembled thanks to Justin

W.R. Schock, QBD

30,618 views • 1 year ago

The most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026 PS: My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A Smith does on first take PPS: Full transcript below [17:00] Harry Stebbings: I I just wanted to ask Jason, if the people that we want are fundamentally different, the developers that we used to hire, we don't because AI writes the code for us. The marketers we don't want, the sales people we don't want—who who do we want genuinely? Like what is the attractive profile? Because your Anthropic’s and your OpenAIs are hiring, so so what are the people that we want in the companies of the future? [17:18] Jason Lemkin: Look, I know it sounds trite, but but the answer is simple. It's just the expression each year changes. We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We need—everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big event—they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may become—so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any role—sales, marketing, engineering, product, QA—they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and says—it's it's it sounds Captain Obvious—but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents. It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AI—you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to. And so these team—all the brute forcers out there—everyone talks about how bloated teams got in 2021. I don't agree with that. I think they got as big as they needed to be when growth was high and you needed humans to do everything. All you look at these teams that that doubled—well if growth continued at 60% like the rate in early 2021 for 5 years or can help me do the math and every single thing a software company did required a human. You were understaffed by your 2021 headcount. You'd be sitting here in 2026. You every office in SoMa would be triple packed and you there wouldn't be enough humans to staff your company. It's just the world changed. [20:33] Harry Stebbings: Jason, you live on the bleeding edge. I think me and Rory see that and I think the world sees that when they hear you every week in terms of how you run SaaS. For all of the CEOs and execs who listen to the show, what would you advise them in terms of determining whether someone is AI fluent when they meet them for jobs, for talent? [20:51] Jason Lemkin: Here's I realized I was just asked this. I just did a review with a super fast startup growing just crossing 100 million and I was asked this question. And one of my favorite executives, I thought his answer was pretty dated and because he gave me an answer that was about 6 months old. The answer 6 months old is: "I look for folks in my team, I look for you know at what tools they play with." Okay, that was a great answer in like summer of 2025. Okay, I tried Lovable last week. Okay, the answer in 2026 is: "What commercial AI tool have you brought into your organization this month?" That's the test. Anyone that is on the bleeding edge that you would want to hire—now there are so many great products in the market. Okay, there is no excuse in any role to have not brought one tool a month into your organization. Okay, there—now there's going to be better and better tools and better and better products as the year goes on. What's the one you did? And you will see folks with their deer in the headlights to this question. What what sales tool? What marketing tool? What product tool? What engineering tool? What did you bring in? Why did you pick it? How does it working? Because if you're at remotely at the cutting edge, you're all over this. You're looking for the next agentic tools that will radically improve how you do business. This is—you think everyone thinks SaaS is at the bleeding edge, right? You know, you know, all we do is we're just looking for the tools and trying them. Okay? Okay, we're one year ahead of everybody else because we did the simplest thing in the world. Like we tried the tools early and we trained them. We trained them for a month. Okay, I'll give you—want hear a horrible example from this week? Super hot AI company valued at 6 billion. Okay, I'm not going to name it. Um, this week yesterday told us we had to quadruple what we spent on their product. Okay, their agent told us, right? And why did this happen? Okay. Well, at this $6 billion company, no one had trained the agent on its pricing properly. No one had tested it. They said, "Well, well, we've been in beta." And we said, "Well, when did the beta launch? A year ago." Okay, these are people asleep at at the wheel. You want somebody who the instant this comes up, they exactly know what the issue is. And "Hey, when I was at Lovable Replit, we trained the agent. This is how we did it. I brought in this tool. I brought in this tool that that Rory invested in last week. It solved all these issues." That's what you want to hear. And if they haven't brought in a tool in the last 30 days, at least deeply evaluated it. I don't really care whether they bought it, but gone so far down the funnel they can tell you—pick whatever tool: Fixie, Regie, GC, AIGC—I don't care how you went through it, you looked at it, you can tell me the eight ways it would improve the productivity of your business and three you didn't. Just don't hire that person because they're going to run your company to the ground. This is the job today. The job today is not to screw around on ChatGPT and to be a prompt engineer. The job today is to bring the best AI and agentic products into your organization and leverage all the hard work that the engineers have done building those products. That's your job. You don't have to screw around. You don't have to be a prompt engineer anymore. You have to be an agent deployment expert. A—this is the new job we're making up today. An Agentic Deployment Expert. That's your job from C-level to junior. Agentic Deployment Expert. Don't hire anybody else. You're going to regret it. They're going to stare at the camera. He's good. Stare at the camera. He's honorable. We could probably just I could slip away, get a coffee, and come back. No. And I I sound exasperated, Rory. And I—but the reason I am is I can just see I can see my best companies doing it. And I can see some companies I've invested in not doing it. And I want to cry. I just want to cry when they have no ADs on their team. I just—like you're flushing your years of your life down the toilet by not approaching your how you're building this company this way. [24:33] Rory: Yes. And at the risk of being positive, it's worth pointing out two things he didn't say. Well, something implicit why he said—Jason didn't do the only hire, you know, he didn't commit the um employment law, I think it's a civil penalty of saying only employ people below X who get the new new thing because he implicitly said anyone can do it provided you're willing to learn. And I think that's the big aha that's one of the positive statements to make here right? Look and I think it applies—I'm always wary of being "Hey, coming across, hey this this is the things that you all have to do." I think it applies to everyone including investors right? I mean I will say I have found that unless you're willing to invest the time learning these tools you actually shouldn't be investing in them. One of my partners Andy had this expression: "You know, if you decide you want to stop learning new things you probably should retire within 6 to 12 months and never write another check again." Maybe that's down to 3 to 6 months at this stage, right? And I think, you know, it's— [25:27] Harry Stebbings: Yeah, I actually I actually had a meeting with mine and Jason's biggest investor the other day and I—pretend he's not here—I said I think he's the most equipped investor for this generation of investing because I don't think anyone quite sits at the bleeding edge like he does on the investor side. [25:42] Harry Stebbings: Why in terms of using the equip stuff? Yeah. Yeah. In terms of using the stuff, understanding understanding bottlenecks, constraints. For sure. [25:51] Jason Lemkin: But can I just add one point? We can just cuz it's so important if it helps people. Okay, we are—and thank you Harry. We're going through these phases. Okay, and when AI started to blow up for real for us, uh call it early 2024, right? Maybe late '23, I wasn't equipped. It was too technical. I wasn't going to go in and figure out—I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to deal with a massively hallucinating LLM API and turn that and turn that into something magical. Kudos to investors and others that that got it in early '23, '22. I mean I remember I—I guess it was maybe SaaStr Annual '23. I was with David Sacks and I did a Q&A and I said, "How you thinking about AI at Craft?" He's like, "Well we're all in. We want 80% of '23 of investments to be AI." I'm like, "Great but like show me the show me the great ones in market." He's like, "They're all prototypes. We're all they're all they're all proof of concepts but we're all in anyway." That's where you kind of had to be in '23 if you weren't investing at like the LLM level. Okay, I wasn't smart enough. Then we went through this weird-ass prompt engineer era where like you you could torture these products to do something good, right? But you had to torture them. You had to like craft these crazy things that made no sense. Now we are in the era where mere ordinarily smart generalists can make these tools do magical things. And literally I go to these meetings and people be like, "I don't know how to like this is so scary. I don't know how to do this." And we show them our backends. Do you know how to do a workflow generator? Do you know how to do a a decision tree? Like we've been building these since software in the '90s. Okay, if you—I can show you all of our agents. The how they work is novel. They do have to be trained. You can't be lazy and have these agents work. But honestly, the the UI, the UX, the way we interact with them, it's just software. And so my point is: Pick yourself off the ground. This is your time now. If you felt lost in AI era, if you felt like you're behind, you don't understand what all these people are saying on X and Twitter and their Claude and and their and talking about all the 4.6 point Nano point and it's over—like you just it's not your world. This is your time. This is your time for the generalist that knows how to use software tools really really well. And I—this is my last point but it's so important. If ever in your recent life—and this is why you could be all you need to be is young at heart to Rory's point—if in the last three to five years you have successfully deployed a piece of enterprise software of any sort you yourself, not some agency you hired, but if you have deployed it, you can deploy any agentic tool. Any. And you can become the hero in your company and you can become the hero in your functional area. But I watch folks—I'm literally helping a company now that they're adding hundreds of sales folks this year with a new pre-IPO COO—he's not hasn't brought in a single tool, totally scared of it. Okay, it's not that hard. Did you use SalesLoft? Did you use Outreach? Did you use HubSpot? Do you know these tools? If you can deploy these tools, you can deploy a world-changing AI agent. And so this is the time for people like the folks that that were shut out of the AI revolution right now. The generalist folks that are not that know how to deploy software that don't even know how to build software. Like vibe coding for me was folks who knew how to build software, but you didn't have to be an engineer. Now, you just need to know how to deploy software to win with AI agents. That's all you need to know. So many people have these skills and they're petrified of AI. "How did you do that? How did you deploy an AI BDR?" Well, we bought a piece of software, we figured out how it worked for a day, we set it up in an afternoon, and then and then we did spend 30 months training it, which you didn't do with this old software because in the old days, we just had to manually upload all the data, right? And there was no training. The the only non-intuitive part is training these things. And it's it's it's just work. So that's why when I see folks on the management team not doing this, there's no excuse. You do not need to be technical to win with AI agents in Q2 of '26. You do not need to be even 1% technical. Not at all. So it's your time. Or you're going to get laid off. Or you're going to get laid off because you're not going to matter.
13:04

The most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026 PS: My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A Smith does on first take PPS: Full transcript below [17:00] Harry Stebbings: I I just wanted to ask Jason, if the people that we want are fundamentally different, the developers that we used to hire, we don't because AI writes the code for us. The marketers we don't want, the sales people we don't want—who who do we want genuinely? Like what is the attractive profile? Because your Anthropic’s and your OpenAIs are hiring, so so what are the people that we want in the companies of the future? [17:18] Jason Lemkin: Look, I know it sounds trite, but but the answer is simple. It's just the expression each year changes. We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We need—everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big event—they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may become—so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any role—sales, marketing, engineering, product, QA—they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and says—it's it's it sounds Captain Obvious—but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents. It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AI—you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to. And so these team—all the brute forcers out there—everyone talks about how bloated teams got in 2021. I don't agree with that. I think they got as big as they needed to be when growth was high and you needed humans to do everything. All you look at these teams that that doubled—well if growth continued at 60% like the rate in early 2021 for 5 years or can help me do the math and every single thing a software company did required a human. You were understaffed by your 2021 headcount. You'd be sitting here in 2026. You every office in SoMa would be triple packed and you there wouldn't be enough humans to staff your company. It's just the world changed. [20:33] Harry Stebbings: Jason, you live on the bleeding edge. I think me and Rory see that and I think the world sees that when they hear you every week in terms of how you run SaaS. For all of the CEOs and execs who listen to the show, what would you advise them in terms of determining whether someone is AI fluent when they meet them for jobs, for talent? [20:51] Jason Lemkin: Here's I realized I was just asked this. I just did a review with a super fast startup growing just crossing 100 million and I was asked this question. And one of my favorite executives, I thought his answer was pretty dated and because he gave me an answer that was about 6 months old. The answer 6 months old is: "I look for folks in my team, I look for you know at what tools they play with." Okay, that was a great answer in like summer of 2025. Okay, I tried Lovable last week. Okay, the answer in 2026 is: "What commercial AI tool have you brought into your organization this month?" That's the test. Anyone that is on the bleeding edge that you would want to hire—now there are so many great products in the market. Okay, there is no excuse in any role to have not brought one tool a month into your organization. Okay, there—now there's going to be better and better tools and better and better products as the year goes on. What's the one you did? And you will see folks with their deer in the headlights to this question. What what sales tool? What marketing tool? What product tool? What engineering tool? What did you bring in? Why did you pick it? How does it working? Because if you're at remotely at the cutting edge, you're all over this. You're looking for the next agentic tools that will radically improve how you do business. This is—you think everyone thinks SaaS is at the bleeding edge, right? You know, you know, all we do is we're just looking for the tools and trying them. Okay? Okay, we're one year ahead of everybody else because we did the simplest thing in the world. Like we tried the tools early and we trained them. We trained them for a month. Okay, I'll give you—want hear a horrible example from this week? Super hot AI company valued at 6 billion. Okay, I'm not going to name it. Um, this week yesterday told us we had to quadruple what we spent on their product. Okay, their agent told us, right? And why did this happen? Okay. Well, at this $6 billion company, no one had trained the agent on its pricing properly. No one had tested it. They said, "Well, well, we've been in beta." And we said, "Well, when did the beta launch? A year ago." Okay, these are people asleep at at the wheel. You want somebody who the instant this comes up, they exactly know what the issue is. And "Hey, when I was at Lovable Replit, we trained the agent. This is how we did it. I brought in this tool. I brought in this tool that that Rory invested in last week. It solved all these issues." That's what you want to hear. And if they haven't brought in a tool in the last 30 days, at least deeply evaluated it. I don't really care whether they bought it, but gone so far down the funnel they can tell you—pick whatever tool: Fixie, Regie, GC, AIGC—I don't care how you went through it, you looked at it, you can tell me the eight ways it would improve the productivity of your business and three you didn't. Just don't hire that person because they're going to run your company to the ground. This is the job today. The job today is not to screw around on ChatGPT and to be a prompt engineer. The job today is to bring the best AI and agentic products into your organization and leverage all the hard work that the engineers have done building those products. That's your job. You don't have to screw around. You don't have to be a prompt engineer anymore. You have to be an agent deployment expert. A—this is the new job we're making up today. An Agentic Deployment Expert. That's your job from C-level to junior. Agentic Deployment Expert. Don't hire anybody else. You're going to regret it. They're going to stare at the camera. He's good. Stare at the camera. He's honorable. We could probably just I could slip away, get a coffee, and come back. No. And I I sound exasperated, Rory. And I—but the reason I am is I can just see I can see my best companies doing it. And I can see some companies I've invested in not doing it. And I want to cry. I just want to cry when they have no ADs on their team. I just—like you're flushing your years of your life down the toilet by not approaching your how you're building this company this way. [24:33] Rory: Yes. And at the risk of being positive, it's worth pointing out two things he didn't say. Well, something implicit why he said—Jason didn't do the only hire, you know, he didn't commit the um employment law, I think it's a civil penalty of saying only employ people below X who get the new new thing because he implicitly said anyone can do it provided you're willing to learn. And I think that's the big aha that's one of the positive statements to make here right? Look and I think it applies—I'm always wary of being "Hey, coming across, hey this this is the things that you all have to do." I think it applies to everyone including investors right? I mean I will say I have found that unless you're willing to invest the time learning these tools you actually shouldn't be investing in them. One of my partners Andy had this expression: "You know, if you decide you want to stop learning new things you probably should retire within 6 to 12 months and never write another check again." Maybe that's down to 3 to 6 months at this stage, right? And I think, you know, it's— [25:27] Harry Stebbings: Yeah, I actually I actually had a meeting with mine and Jason's biggest investor the other day and I—pretend he's not here—I said I think he's the most equipped investor for this generation of investing because I don't think anyone quite sits at the bleeding edge like he does on the investor side. [25:42] Harry Stebbings: Why in terms of using the equip stuff? Yeah. Yeah. In terms of using the stuff, understanding understanding bottlenecks, constraints. For sure. [25:51] Jason Lemkin: But can I just add one point? We can just cuz it's so important if it helps people. Okay, we are—and thank you Harry. We're going through these phases. Okay, and when AI started to blow up for real for us, uh call it early 2024, right? Maybe late '23, I wasn't equipped. It was too technical. I wasn't going to go in and figure out—I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to deal with a massively hallucinating LLM API and turn that and turn that into something magical. Kudos to investors and others that that got it in early '23, '22. I mean I remember I—I guess it was maybe SaaStr Annual '23. I was with David Sacks and I did a Q&A and I said, "How you thinking about AI at Craft?" He's like, "Well we're all in. We want 80% of '23 of investments to be AI." I'm like, "Great but like show me the show me the great ones in market." He's like, "They're all prototypes. We're all they're all they're all proof of concepts but we're all in anyway." That's where you kind of had to be in '23 if you weren't investing at like the LLM level. Okay, I wasn't smart enough. Then we went through this weird-ass prompt engineer era where like you you could torture these products to do something good, right? But you had to torture them. You had to like craft these crazy things that made no sense. Now we are in the era where mere ordinarily smart generalists can make these tools do magical things. And literally I go to these meetings and people be like, "I don't know how to like this is so scary. I don't know how to do this." And we show them our backends. Do you know how to do a workflow generator? Do you know how to do a a decision tree? Like we've been building these since software in the '90s. Okay, if you—I can show you all of our agents. The how they work is novel. They do have to be trained. You can't be lazy and have these agents work. But honestly, the the UI, the UX, the way we interact with them, it's just software. And so my point is: Pick yourself off the ground. This is your time now. If you felt lost in AI era, if you felt like you're behind, you don't understand what all these people are saying on X and Twitter and their Claude and and their and talking about all the 4.6 point Nano point and it's over—like you just it's not your world. This is your time. This is your time for the generalist that knows how to use software tools really really well. And I—this is my last point but it's so important. If ever in your recent life—and this is why you could be all you need to be is young at heart to Rory's point—if in the last three to five years you have successfully deployed a piece of enterprise software of any sort you yourself, not some agency you hired, but if you have deployed it, you can deploy any agentic tool. Any. And you can become the hero in your company and you can become the hero in your functional area. But I watch folks—I'm literally helping a company now that they're adding hundreds of sales folks this year with a new pre-IPO COO—he's not hasn't brought in a single tool, totally scared of it. Okay, it's not that hard. Did you use SalesLoft? Did you use Outreach? Did you use HubSpot? Do you know these tools? If you can deploy these tools, you can deploy a world-changing AI agent. And so this is the time for people like the folks that that were shut out of the AI revolution right now. The generalist folks that are not that know how to deploy software that don't even know how to build software. Like vibe coding for me was folks who knew how to build software, but you didn't have to be an engineer. Now, you just need to know how to deploy software to win with AI agents. That's all you need to know. So many people have these skills and they're petrified of AI. "How did you do that? How did you deploy an AI BDR?" Well, we bought a piece of software, we figured out how it worked for a day, we set it up in an afternoon, and then and then we did spend 30 months training it, which you didn't do with this old software because in the old days, we just had to manually upload all the data, right? And there was no training. The the only non-intuitive part is training these things. And it's it's it's just work. So that's why when I see folks on the management team not doing this, there's no excuse. You do not need to be technical to win with AI agents in Q2 of '26. You do not need to be even 1% technical. Not at all. So it's your time. Or you're going to get laid off. Or you're going to get laid off because you're not going to matter.

Arjun Mahadevan (Mr. LLC 🇺🇸)

37,901 views • 6 months ago

My fellow Kenyans, Many of you have seen my recent posts about the deadly cancer that is corruption in our country. In my last post, I tried to paint a picture of the disconnect between our potential as a country and the economic circumstances we find ourselves in today, and the connection between corruption and the incalculable pain and suffering and cruelty that is meted out every single day to the most vulnerable among us by thieves operating out of public office. And after covering the goings-on in Mandera County, I told you that in my honest opinion, our governments exist to cater for the filthy-rich lifestyles of the vilest and most corrupt among us, at the expense of everyone else. I received tremendous support from all of you, for speaking on behalf of so many struggling Kenyans who don’t have a voice, or the audience necessary to spark the much-needed discussion about where we are heading as a country. But even with all that support, I have received messages asking me to be careful. One compatriot told me: “prepare to be relentlessly pursued, threatened, enticed, guilt-tripped, and gas-lit”. This is from a someone who knows how our government operates, and how it uses violence and its monopoly on power to silence those who question why politicians are stealing so much. I am not naive about the dangers of speaking up and calling out thieves who control state machinery, and who possess the ability to shut me up in a few seconds. But I will tell you why we CAN NOT and MUST NOT keep quiet. In November of 2023, I stumbled upon the story of a young man from Turkana, Calvin Esekon Esewit , who, despite scoring an A-, and getting an acceptance into medical school, spent two years not knowing whether his dreams of becoming a doctor would ever come true. I was moved by that story in a way that I can never adequately explain. I could not understand how it is possible that, in our country, a young man who appears to be every parent’s dream child can spend two years in limbo while we as a country possess the ability to invest in our best and brightest. And so, I spent weeks trying to chase down Calvin to see how I could help him attend college. After a lot of searching, I finally found Calvin, and by this time he had managed to get some help and is now in college. While this story has a great ending, it did not to be this way. And we know that the number of cases that end like this, with some success, are a small fraction of those ones which end tragically, with broken dreams. This is what happens when corruption consumes anything and everything in a country. It destroys lives. See attached video to learn about Calvin's story. I tell you all this story because it provides context to today's topic. For one story like this one that you see on the news, there are millions that never make the news. But they are real situations, nonetheless. There are millions of your compatriots who are devastated by this killer cancer of corruption that is perpetuated by people that you and I have put into public office ostensibly to improve our lives. They go into these offices and abuse the trust you bestowed upon them and deny you and everyone else a decent opportunity in life. You see, Calvin and millions of other victims of this shameless level of corruption and plunder have no voice, and no real ability to look the thieves that are destroying lives and generations of Kenyans in eye and tell them to stop this unbearable pain and the cruelty. This is the reason I embarked on this journey to attempt to expose this shameful situation. Watch the attached video of Calvin’s situation, and I am sure that you will agree that the millions of Calvins in our country need a voice, NO MATTER THE RISK. The thieves that are destroying the futures of millions of children just so they can have beachside homes in Miami, Dubai and other places count on the idea that most people will fear for their lives, and therefore not speak up. They count on the growing apathy in the Kenyan psyche. But we cannot give in to that. We cannot cower to thieves. We must look them straight in the eye and tell them that they MUST STOP. If we don't, our children and their children are guaranteed the same level of cruelty. And so with that, today I want to talk about the utterly insane crime scene that is Turkana County. I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than, it is a “shit-show”. Just follow along, and let me know if you disagree. As I did in my previous commentary, I will ask you to indulge me a little bit, and allow me to use a couple of pictures, because pictures speak louder than a thousand words. The first picture shows the state-of-the art County Government offices, that the County Government of Turkana decided to invest an ungodly amount of money on. Close to a billion shillings. The second picture is a classroom in session. In Turkana County. These two realities are occurring in parallel in the same county, at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just tell you that I do not go out of my way to find bad news. I want stories that would help re-affirm our belief in the fundamental decency of human beings. When I find good news as I review these Counties’ decisions and how they behave with our resources, I will be the first one to report it to you. But I don’t have any good news today. I have bad news. If you read my commentary yesterday and were offended by what you saw, I am afraid you might not make it to the end of this article, because what you will hear will be quite shocking. The cancer of corruption, particularly at the County Government level, is worse than your wildest imagination. And so, as I like to do, I like to start off by putting some numbers on the table for us to use as reference points. Bear in my that all the information I put in this article is publicly available. Nothing came to me through a whistle blower. The first number is KSH 100 Billion. With a B. In the last decade or so, you and I, through the National Government, has sent over KSH 100 billion to Turkana County. To support recurrent expenditure, and development. For example, in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, we sent KSH 12.6 billion. In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we sent KSH 11.4 billion. And on and on and on. The second number is 1 million. This is the population of Turkana County. The third number is KSH 18.4 billion. This was Turkana County’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The fourth number is KSH 190 million. This was the amount of money that Turkana County was able to generate on its own accord within the county, from all its investments and other activities in the period in question. This number is an important proxy, in my view, for the value of the county’s economic prospects for the foreseeable future, and to people that are not driven by greed and corruption, would be an important consideration when they are thinking about how and where to deploy your money as taxpayers. If you are doing the math, Turkana County, for the 2022-2023 fiscal year, was only able to raise 1% of the funds needed to keep the lights on. 99% came from you and I, and a tiny amount from grants. The next number is KSH 129, 040. This is the average ANNUAL [emphasis added] income of a resident of Turkana County ( Keep that number in mind when we are discussing the massive theft of public funds by Turkana County leaders. The next number is 80%. 80% of the residents of Turkana County live below the poverty line. They have a really difficult time putting food on the table. ( The next number is KSH 12 Million. This is the basic salary of the Governor of Turkana County before other benefits that, as I explained yesterday, can often double the salary. Remember the “housing allowance”, the “hardship allowance”, the “commuter allowance”, the “risk allowance”, the “extraneous allowance”, etc.? Remember that? I still cannot figure out, for the life of me, what “extraneous” means in the context of County business, but we don’t time to dwell on this. The next number is 93. The Governor of Turkana County makes 93 times the average Turkana County resident’s annual income. 93 times! The next number is 82%. This was the percentage of people that were illiterate in Turkana County in 2013 ( Could not read or write. A point to note about the above literacy figure. Ten years later, and despite over KSH 100 billion is spent in Turkana County, including many billions for education, that literacy rate HAS NOT CHANGED ONE BIT. Only 20% of the population can read or write today. ( KSH 829 million. This is how much it cost to build the County Government offices. Yes, the ones shown in the first picture. KSH 120 million. The County Government decided that it was prudent to pay a contractor KSH 120 million to construct the Governor’s personal residence. Get this, even after this payment, no construction took place. The money was stolen. All of it. KSH 90 Million. This is the amount that the County Government paid to another contractor, to build the Governor a mansion, having previously lost KSH 120 million. So, the tally for the Governor’s residence now stands at KSH 210 million. Never mind that the limit allowed by law is KSH 45 million. KSH 5 billion. In the last days of his term in office, an outgoing Governor of Turkana, Koli Nanok, EGH. , sought to inflate pending bills by adding KSH 5 billion so that it can be paid to his criminal cartel. KSH 5 billion. We have our key numbers, ladies and gentlemen, so let us discuss. So, we have a county that is dead last in literacy, and in the top 2 of the poorest counties in the republic. Only 20% of the population can read. The Governor earns 92 times the average citizen. The Governor lives in a house that cost over KSH 200 million. When he leaves his house in the morning, he goes to his office that cost KSH 829 million. And this is all happening when 80% of the County residents struggle to put food on the table. Those are the facts, and they are not in dispute. During the same time, the County Government geniuses decide to build the Speaker of the County Assembly a house. And a home office, and a garage. The house was initially estimated to cost KSH 75 million. But due to circumstances that not a soul in the government could explain to auditors, the contract expired before the house was completed, and the County Government found a new contractor to complete the job for an additional KSH 29 million. But this palace in the jungle worth apparently worth over KSH 100 million in Turkana County was not enough. The County proceeded to build the Speaker a guest house for another KSH 19 million, and a few other amenities, and so the whole cost went to KSH 276 million! The legal limit for a Speaker’s house is KSH 35 million, and they spent close to KSH 130 million just for one residence. By this time, I am sure you are getting tired of these obscene numbers. You and I work, and pay taxes. Nobody pays you 92 times the income your average neighbor is making. And for sure nobody will drop KSH 100 million to build you a house. These are the perks of working in government in a poor country. Go figure. And so, as a country, we need to answer for ourselves the question I posed yesterday, which is, what is the point of government? What is its role in our lives. If this level of criminality and pillaging can occur in our country in the midst of so much poverty, questioning the need for government is a totally valid question. I said in my last post that, when the average citizen looks at the thug on the street and the government, and is unable to discern any meaningful difference between them, that society from that point on is on its journey to becoming a failed state. A journey to anarchy. Over the last two months or so, Kenyans have been shouting at the top of their lungs, begging for their government to listen. To hear them out. Kenyans have asked that their government stop this unbelievable level of plunder. Dozens of Kenyans have died, thousands injured, and many more are missing today. To this day, the people that govern us continue to use the power of the gun to subdue Kenyans, until they can take everything in their sight. And so, as a society, we all have to ask whether today there is any difference between the thug on the street and our governments. Every Kenyan will have to answer this question for themselves. And before answering this question, everyone needs to remember the many Calvins in our society. Smart, upright children whose only crime is to be born in an unforgiving, lawless, and corrupt purgatory that is Kenya today. For myself, I have concluded that there is no difference between the thug on the street and our governments, county and national alike. If you can see any meaningful difference, let me know. I am willing to listen. So despite over KSH 100 billion in money sent to Turkana County, there is almost no measurable improvement in people’s life today. None. And it makes sense, when you look at how that money is spent. I want you to forget for a second the obscene obsession by the County Government with spending ungodly amounts of money on themselves. The houses, etc. If you step back and look at how the government is actually spending the hard-earned money on other things, you will be depressed. I am telling you that I wept three times in the middle of the night trying to make sense of this crazy situation in Turkana County. Three times. I have never imagined that human beings can be so greedy and cold-blooded. Think about this: In the couple of years I reviewed, the County spent around KSH 400 million annually in “tourism” initiatives, including marketing, and apparently upgrading certain facilities. KSH 400 million for tourism. In Turkana County. In 1 year. KSH 400 million per year in marketing and other money pits. The government’s own website says that the county gets around 3000 visitors per month. Around 36,000 per year. That’s them saying that, on their website. Are you curious to know the return on that KSH 400 million investment? I have an answer for you. Remember that I told you that the County has never raised more than KSH 200 million in a year within the county, despite its KSH 18.4 billion budget? Let me walk you through the breakdown of the absolutely embarrassing shit-show that is the County Government’s “own source revenue” operations. In 2022-2023, the County Government collected KSH 190 million locally against their KSH 18.4 billion budget. 1% of the budget. Remember, there is absolutely no requirement on the County to cut costs, or achieve certain local revenue targets today. So they raised KSH 45 million in single business permits, KSH 72 million in CESS, KSH 8 million in market fee, KSH 9 million in “slaughter fees”. And then finally, there is the return on the tourism investment that you were looking for. A whopping KSH 209, 000 in “park fees”. KSH 209,000 in fees, after investing KSH 400 million. And so, take this as an example and extrapolate it across the entire budget, and you can see how one can spend KSH 100 billion and get NOTHING in return. You don’t need to be a genius to see the absurdity of this situation. Let me explain using an example that should illustrate the utter dimwittedness of this situation. Remember the KSH 100 billion sent to Turkana by you and me? Part of this amount is supposed to be for “service delivery”, or “recurrent expenditure”. Usually about 70% of the budget. The balance, 30%, is designed to go to development projects. With that in mind, from KSH 100 billion, the County apparently has made KSH 30 billion worth of investments, right? 30% of the KSH 100 billion. Now, if you employed someone to run a business for you, and they asked you to invest KSH 30 billion, which is no small fortune, at some point you would have to start seeing returns, right? That’s common sense, isn’t it? So, when we look at the revenues streams that make up this paltry sum of KSH 190 million, and see things like “slaughter fees’ and “market fees”, what does it tell you? It tells me there is no real “development” happening in that county. Trust me, if you had real development totaling KSH 30 billion, you would have corporate taxes in the hundreds of millions or billions, a booming real estate market, rising wages and standards of living, etc., low unemployment, etc. You would not have 80% of the people living hand-to mouth, and a County Government that can not afford to support itself for 5 days out of the year that has 365 days! We do not have enough time, trust me, to deal with the shit-show that is Turkana County. Dealing with that mess would require a forensic team. I will just highlight a few of other “in your-face” type of theft of public funds, and then conclude my submission. A government that has a budget of KSH 18.4 billion annually, and which has never raised more than 1% of its budget had the wisdom to do the following with your money: · Spend KSH 222 million on a project building something that NOBODY uses. You got that right. They spent KSH 222 million on a facility that NOBODY uses. KSH 222 million gone to waste, in a county that is dead last in pretty much all measures of human progress. · Remember the County Government offices that cost KSH 829 million? The County spent KSH 82 million on “air-conditioning” for that building. · Despite the County Spending hundreds of millions for the top three officers of the County, the Governor and his Deputy, in the 2022-2023 year, illegally charged the county (you and I) KSH 2.2 million in housing allowance! · Built two facilities for KSH 16 million, that were completed, but NOBODY uses them. · Entered into a contract for the construction of a plastic use facility for KSH 13 million in 2021. The contractor gets paid KSH 4.9 million, and has never been seen since. · Paid out KSH 62 million in salaries that were not supportable in just one year. They could not point to anybody and say, that is who we paid. · Paid out KSH 27 million in legal fees that nobody could say what they related to. And the County’s Legal Advisor, who, in 2022-2023, had a budget of KSH 123 million, apparently did not know anything about it! · Had an outstanding bill at Kenya Revenue Authority in the amount of KSH 486 million, that did not show up on the County Government’s financial statements. Think about that. KSH 486 million owned to the Kenya Revenue Authority, and that liability is not on the financial statements! This only means that someone took those funds for themselves, which is why the liability would be missing from the county’s books. · Could not account for KSH 367 million in expenditures for 2022-2023. KSH 367 million, in unexplained expenses. · Awarded a contract worth over KSH 200 million to a bidder with no bank statement, against the law. This contract was entered into and approved before the statutory time after the bidding process lapsed. Someone was in a hurry to get paid. KSH 200 million, illegally awarded to a bidder who did not have a 6-month bank statement. · Apparently purchased KSH 1.5 billion in assets in 2022-2023, but kept no records of the said assets. For this reason, NOBODY can verify where these assets are located. KSH 1.5 billion. Let me just say this. In my last article, the most common critique was that it was too long. Too many words. I did not intend to make another long article. Trust me when I tell you this, we do not have the time to detail half of the problems in Turkana County. For just 1 year! We do not. Now, you recall my point about how societies descend to madness and anarchy. In our country today, our leaders are accusing those of us who are agitating for honest and transparent governance of being traitors to the country. They call us anarchists, criminals, and merchants of chaos. They are questioning our patriotism. You have all seen the government and its horde of propagandists threatening the Ford Foundation and others because they may have helped civil society keep the lights on, and investigative journalists to have the capacity to continue to do the Lord’s work of investigating criminality in government. As though citizens are so dumb and ignorant, that they cannot see what is going on. The reason why millions of Calvins in this country will never graduate from college and earn a decent living is not because of the Ford Foundation. No. It is because of the thieves we have in office today, like the ones in Turkana County. In this post, I copy our leaders, the President and his deputy. I copy them because I want them to help Kenyans understand the following conundrum, about crime and criminals. There is nothing so special or peculiar about criminals or where they pop up. There are criminals in the US, Canada, France, and other places. Just like we have criminals in Kenya. The difference between banana republics and failed states, and civilized societies, is WHAT we do to and about criminals. In civilized societies, criminals are prosecuted and punished heavily. They are shunned. In some places, those charged with serious crimes such as corruption are executed. These are societies that are committed to sending the message that corruption, which robs citizens of their rights, is not acceptable. And they demonstrate this commitment by heavily punishing those who steal from the most vulnerable in society. In Kenya, we see the opposite. Criminals are exalted. They are promoted and embraced in government. It was just last week that the president unveiled his nominees for his Cabinet. Among them, are the likes of Hassan Ali Joho, EGH. , @GovWOparanya , and Davis Chirchir, ALL people who have been accused or charged with massive corruption against Kenyans. And am sure you remember that I mentioned Koli Nanok, EGH. , the man who tried to steal KSH 5 billion in his last days in office. Would you believe it if I told you that he works in government, at State House? He plunded billions of your money, got no measurable improvement in the lives of his subjects, and now has a government job in State House. Let that sink in. And so, the question is, how is it that in a country of 55 million people, with thousands of highly qualified people who have never ever stolen from Kenyans, he ends up with the criminals and thieves in the government, despite the fact that their crimes are in the public domain? How is this possible? Is it possible that these thieves possess a certain unique ability to run government, save Kenyans billions, and solve problems in a way that the president performs a cost-benefit analysis, and the benefits outweigh the costs of their theft? If not, what message does it send to Kenyans, when their own president puts into office known thieves? I think that is a fair question, don’t you? Dr. Ekuru Aukot Rigathi Gachagua William Samoei Ruto, PhD Okiya Omtatah Okoiti Citizen TV Kenya Nation Breaking News TI-Kenya CNN County Government of Turkana
3:09

My fellow Kenyans, Many of you have seen my recent posts about the deadly cancer that is corruption in our country. In my last post, I tried to paint a picture of the disconnect between our potential as a country and the economic circumstances we find ourselves in today, and the connection between corruption and the incalculable pain and suffering and cruelty that is meted out every single day to the most vulnerable among us by thieves operating out of public office. And after covering the goings-on in Mandera County, I told you that in my honest opinion, our governments exist to cater for the filthy-rich lifestyles of the vilest and most corrupt among us, at the expense of everyone else. I received tremendous support from all of you, for speaking on behalf of so many struggling Kenyans who don’t have a voice, or the audience necessary to spark the much-needed discussion about where we are heading as a country. But even with all that support, I have received messages asking me to be careful. One compatriot told me: “prepare to be relentlessly pursued, threatened, enticed, guilt-tripped, and gas-lit”. This is from a someone who knows how our government operates, and how it uses violence and its monopoly on power to silence those who question why politicians are stealing so much. I am not naive about the dangers of speaking up and calling out thieves who control state machinery, and who possess the ability to shut me up in a few seconds. But I will tell you why we CAN NOT and MUST NOT keep quiet. In November of 2023, I stumbled upon the story of a young man from Turkana, Calvin Esekon Esewit , who, despite scoring an A-, and getting an acceptance into medical school, spent two years not knowing whether his dreams of becoming a doctor would ever come true. I was moved by that story in a way that I can never adequately explain. I could not understand how it is possible that, in our country, a young man who appears to be every parent’s dream child can spend two years in limbo while we as a country possess the ability to invest in our best and brightest. And so, I spent weeks trying to chase down Calvin to see how I could help him attend college. After a lot of searching, I finally found Calvin, and by this time he had managed to get some help and is now in college. While this story has a great ending, it did not to be this way. And we know that the number of cases that end like this, with some success, are a small fraction of those ones which end tragically, with broken dreams. This is what happens when corruption consumes anything and everything in a country. It destroys lives. See attached video to learn about Calvin's story. I tell you all this story because it provides context to today's topic. For one story like this one that you see on the news, there are millions that never make the news. But they are real situations, nonetheless. There are millions of your compatriots who are devastated by this killer cancer of corruption that is perpetuated by people that you and I have put into public office ostensibly to improve our lives. They go into these offices and abuse the trust you bestowed upon them and deny you and everyone else a decent opportunity in life. You see, Calvin and millions of other victims of this shameless level of corruption and plunder have no voice, and no real ability to look the thieves that are destroying lives and generations of Kenyans in eye and tell them to stop this unbearable pain and the cruelty. This is the reason I embarked on this journey to attempt to expose this shameful situation. Watch the attached video of Calvin’s situation, and I am sure that you will agree that the millions of Calvins in our country need a voice, NO MATTER THE RISK. The thieves that are destroying the futures of millions of children just so they can have beachside homes in Miami, Dubai and other places count on the idea that most people will fear for their lives, and therefore not speak up. They count on the growing apathy in the Kenyan psyche. But we cannot give in to that. We cannot cower to thieves. We must look them straight in the eye and tell them that they MUST STOP. If we don't, our children and their children are guaranteed the same level of cruelty. And so with that, today I want to talk about the utterly insane crime scene that is Turkana County. I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than, it is a “shit-show”. Just follow along, and let me know if you disagree. As I did in my previous commentary, I will ask you to indulge me a little bit, and allow me to use a couple of pictures, because pictures speak louder than a thousand words. The first picture shows the state-of-the art County Government offices, that the County Government of Turkana decided to invest an ungodly amount of money on. Close to a billion shillings. The second picture is a classroom in session. In Turkana County. These two realities are occurring in parallel in the same county, at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just tell you that I do not go out of my way to find bad news. I want stories that would help re-affirm our belief in the fundamental decency of human beings. When I find good news as I review these Counties’ decisions and how they behave with our resources, I will be the first one to report it to you. But I don’t have any good news today. I have bad news. If you read my commentary yesterday and were offended by what you saw, I am afraid you might not make it to the end of this article, because what you will hear will be quite shocking. The cancer of corruption, particularly at the County Government level, is worse than your wildest imagination. And so, as I like to do, I like to start off by putting some numbers on the table for us to use as reference points. Bear in my that all the information I put in this article is publicly available. Nothing came to me through a whistle blower. The first number is KSH 100 Billion. With a B. In the last decade or so, you and I, through the National Government, has sent over KSH 100 billion to Turkana County. To support recurrent expenditure, and development. For example, in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, we sent KSH 12.6 billion. In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we sent KSH 11.4 billion. And on and on and on. The second number is 1 million. This is the population of Turkana County. The third number is KSH 18.4 billion. This was Turkana County’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The fourth number is KSH 190 million. This was the amount of money that Turkana County was able to generate on its own accord within the county, from all its investments and other activities in the period in question. This number is an important proxy, in my view, for the value of the county’s economic prospects for the foreseeable future, and to people that are not driven by greed and corruption, would be an important consideration when they are thinking about how and where to deploy your money as taxpayers. If you are doing the math, Turkana County, for the 2022-2023 fiscal year, was only able to raise 1% of the funds needed to keep the lights on. 99% came from you and I, and a tiny amount from grants. The next number is KSH 129, 040. This is the average ANNUAL [emphasis added] income of a resident of Turkana County ( Keep that number in mind when we are discussing the massive theft of public funds by Turkana County leaders. The next number is 80%. 80% of the residents of Turkana County live below the poverty line. They have a really difficult time putting food on the table. ( The next number is KSH 12 Million. This is the basic salary of the Governor of Turkana County before other benefits that, as I explained yesterday, can often double the salary. Remember the “housing allowance”, the “hardship allowance”, the “commuter allowance”, the “risk allowance”, the “extraneous allowance”, etc.? Remember that? I still cannot figure out, for the life of me, what “extraneous” means in the context of County business, but we don’t time to dwell on this. The next number is 93. The Governor of Turkana County makes 93 times the average Turkana County resident’s annual income. 93 times! The next number is 82%. This was the percentage of people that were illiterate in Turkana County in 2013 ( Could not read or write. A point to note about the above literacy figure. Ten years later, and despite over KSH 100 billion is spent in Turkana County, including many billions for education, that literacy rate HAS NOT CHANGED ONE BIT. Only 20% of the population can read or write today. ( KSH 829 million. This is how much it cost to build the County Government offices. Yes, the ones shown in the first picture. KSH 120 million. The County Government decided that it was prudent to pay a contractor KSH 120 million to construct the Governor’s personal residence. Get this, even after this payment, no construction took place. The money was stolen. All of it. KSH 90 Million. This is the amount that the County Government paid to another contractor, to build the Governor a mansion, having previously lost KSH 120 million. So, the tally for the Governor’s residence now stands at KSH 210 million. Never mind that the limit allowed by law is KSH 45 million. KSH 5 billion. In the last days of his term in office, an outgoing Governor of Turkana, Koli Nanok, EGH. , sought to inflate pending bills by adding KSH 5 billion so that it can be paid to his criminal cartel. KSH 5 billion. We have our key numbers, ladies and gentlemen, so let us discuss. So, we have a county that is dead last in literacy, and in the top 2 of the poorest counties in the republic. Only 20% of the population can read. The Governor earns 92 times the average citizen. The Governor lives in a house that cost over KSH 200 million. When he leaves his house in the morning, he goes to his office that cost KSH 829 million. And this is all happening when 80% of the County residents struggle to put food on the table. Those are the facts, and they are not in dispute. During the same time, the County Government geniuses decide to build the Speaker of the County Assembly a house. And a home office, and a garage. The house was initially estimated to cost KSH 75 million. But due to circumstances that not a soul in the government could explain to auditors, the contract expired before the house was completed, and the County Government found a new contractor to complete the job for an additional KSH 29 million. But this palace in the jungle worth apparently worth over KSH 100 million in Turkana County was not enough. The County proceeded to build the Speaker a guest house for another KSH 19 million, and a few other amenities, and so the whole cost went to KSH 276 million! The legal limit for a Speaker’s house is KSH 35 million, and they spent close to KSH 130 million just for one residence. By this time, I am sure you are getting tired of these obscene numbers. You and I work, and pay taxes. Nobody pays you 92 times the income your average neighbor is making. And for sure nobody will drop KSH 100 million to build you a house. These are the perks of working in government in a poor country. Go figure. And so, as a country, we need to answer for ourselves the question I posed yesterday, which is, what is the point of government? What is its role in our lives. If this level of criminality and pillaging can occur in our country in the midst of so much poverty, questioning the need for government is a totally valid question. I said in my last post that, when the average citizen looks at the thug on the street and the government, and is unable to discern any meaningful difference between them, that society from that point on is on its journey to becoming a failed state. A journey to anarchy. Over the last two months or so, Kenyans have been shouting at the top of their lungs, begging for their government to listen. To hear them out. Kenyans have asked that their government stop this unbelievable level of plunder. Dozens of Kenyans have died, thousands injured, and many more are missing today. To this day, the people that govern us continue to use the power of the gun to subdue Kenyans, until they can take everything in their sight. And so, as a society, we all have to ask whether today there is any difference between the thug on the street and our governments. Every Kenyan will have to answer this question for themselves. And before answering this question, everyone needs to remember the many Calvins in our society. Smart, upright children whose only crime is to be born in an unforgiving, lawless, and corrupt purgatory that is Kenya today. For myself, I have concluded that there is no difference between the thug on the street and our governments, county and national alike. If you can see any meaningful difference, let me know. I am willing to listen. So despite over KSH 100 billion in money sent to Turkana County, there is almost no measurable improvement in people’s life today. None. And it makes sense, when you look at how that money is spent. I want you to forget for a second the obscene obsession by the County Government with spending ungodly amounts of money on themselves. The houses, etc. If you step back and look at how the government is actually spending the hard-earned money on other things, you will be depressed. I am telling you that I wept three times in the middle of the night trying to make sense of this crazy situation in Turkana County. Three times. I have never imagined that human beings can be so greedy and cold-blooded. Think about this: In the couple of years I reviewed, the County spent around KSH 400 million annually in “tourism” initiatives, including marketing, and apparently upgrading certain facilities. KSH 400 million for tourism. In Turkana County. In 1 year. KSH 400 million per year in marketing and other money pits. The government’s own website says that the county gets around 3000 visitors per month. Around 36,000 per year. That’s them saying that, on their website. Are you curious to know the return on that KSH 400 million investment? I have an answer for you. Remember that I told you that the County has never raised more than KSH 200 million in a year within the county, despite its KSH 18.4 billion budget? Let me walk you through the breakdown of the absolutely embarrassing shit-show that is the County Government’s “own source revenue” operations. In 2022-2023, the County Government collected KSH 190 million locally against their KSH 18.4 billion budget. 1% of the budget. Remember, there is absolutely no requirement on the County to cut costs, or achieve certain local revenue targets today. So they raised KSH 45 million in single business permits, KSH 72 million in CESS, KSH 8 million in market fee, KSH 9 million in “slaughter fees”. And then finally, there is the return on the tourism investment that you were looking for. A whopping KSH 209, 000 in “park fees”. KSH 209,000 in fees, after investing KSH 400 million. And so, take this as an example and extrapolate it across the entire budget, and you can see how one can spend KSH 100 billion and get NOTHING in return. You don’t need to be a genius to see the absurdity of this situation. Let me explain using an example that should illustrate the utter dimwittedness of this situation. Remember the KSH 100 billion sent to Turkana by you and me? Part of this amount is supposed to be for “service delivery”, or “recurrent expenditure”. Usually about 70% of the budget. The balance, 30%, is designed to go to development projects. With that in mind, from KSH 100 billion, the County apparently has made KSH 30 billion worth of investments, right? 30% of the KSH 100 billion. Now, if you employed someone to run a business for you, and they asked you to invest KSH 30 billion, which is no small fortune, at some point you would have to start seeing returns, right? That’s common sense, isn’t it? So, when we look at the revenues streams that make up this paltry sum of KSH 190 million, and see things like “slaughter fees’ and “market fees”, what does it tell you? It tells me there is no real “development” happening in that county. Trust me, if you had real development totaling KSH 30 billion, you would have corporate taxes in the hundreds of millions or billions, a booming real estate market, rising wages and standards of living, etc., low unemployment, etc. You would not have 80% of the people living hand-to mouth, and a County Government that can not afford to support itself for 5 days out of the year that has 365 days! We do not have enough time, trust me, to deal with the shit-show that is Turkana County. Dealing with that mess would require a forensic team. I will just highlight a few of other “in your-face” type of theft of public funds, and then conclude my submission. A government that has a budget of KSH 18.4 billion annually, and which has never raised more than 1% of its budget had the wisdom to do the following with your money: · Spend KSH 222 million on a project building something that NOBODY uses. You got that right. They spent KSH 222 million on a facility that NOBODY uses. KSH 222 million gone to waste, in a county that is dead last in pretty much all measures of human progress. · Remember the County Government offices that cost KSH 829 million? The County spent KSH 82 million on “air-conditioning” for that building. · Despite the County Spending hundreds of millions for the top three officers of the County, the Governor and his Deputy, in the 2022-2023 year, illegally charged the county (you and I) KSH 2.2 million in housing allowance! · Built two facilities for KSH 16 million, that were completed, but NOBODY uses them. · Entered into a contract for the construction of a plastic use facility for KSH 13 million in 2021. The contractor gets paid KSH 4.9 million, and has never been seen since. · Paid out KSH 62 million in salaries that were not supportable in just one year. They could not point to anybody and say, that is who we paid. · Paid out KSH 27 million in legal fees that nobody could say what they related to. And the County’s Legal Advisor, who, in 2022-2023, had a budget of KSH 123 million, apparently did not know anything about it! · Had an outstanding bill at Kenya Revenue Authority in the amount of KSH 486 million, that did not show up on the County Government’s financial statements. Think about that. KSH 486 million owned to the Kenya Revenue Authority, and that liability is not on the financial statements! This only means that someone took those funds for themselves, which is why the liability would be missing from the county’s books. · Could not account for KSH 367 million in expenditures for 2022-2023. KSH 367 million, in unexplained expenses. · Awarded a contract worth over KSH 200 million to a bidder with no bank statement, against the law. This contract was entered into and approved before the statutory time after the bidding process lapsed. Someone was in a hurry to get paid. KSH 200 million, illegally awarded to a bidder who did not have a 6-month bank statement. · Apparently purchased KSH 1.5 billion in assets in 2022-2023, but kept no records of the said assets. For this reason, NOBODY can verify where these assets are located. KSH 1.5 billion. Let me just say this. In my last article, the most common critique was that it was too long. Too many words. I did not intend to make another long article. Trust me when I tell you this, we do not have the time to detail half of the problems in Turkana County. For just 1 year! We do not. Now, you recall my point about how societies descend to madness and anarchy. In our country today, our leaders are accusing those of us who are agitating for honest and transparent governance of being traitors to the country. They call us anarchists, criminals, and merchants of chaos. They are questioning our patriotism. You have all seen the government and its horde of propagandists threatening the Ford Foundation and others because they may have helped civil society keep the lights on, and investigative journalists to have the capacity to continue to do the Lord’s work of investigating criminality in government. As though citizens are so dumb and ignorant, that they cannot see what is going on. The reason why millions of Calvins in this country will never graduate from college and earn a decent living is not because of the Ford Foundation. No. It is because of the thieves we have in office today, like the ones in Turkana County. In this post, I copy our leaders, the President and his deputy. I copy them because I want them to help Kenyans understand the following conundrum, about crime and criminals. There is nothing so special or peculiar about criminals or where they pop up. There are criminals in the US, Canada, France, and other places. Just like we have criminals in Kenya. The difference between banana republics and failed states, and civilized societies, is WHAT we do to and about criminals. In civilized societies, criminals are prosecuted and punished heavily. They are shunned. In some places, those charged with serious crimes such as corruption are executed. These are societies that are committed to sending the message that corruption, which robs citizens of their rights, is not acceptable. And they demonstrate this commitment by heavily punishing those who steal from the most vulnerable in society. In Kenya, we see the opposite. Criminals are exalted. They are promoted and embraced in government. It was just last week that the president unveiled his nominees for his Cabinet. Among them, are the likes of Hassan Ali Joho, EGH. , @GovWOparanya , and Davis Chirchir, ALL people who have been accused or charged with massive corruption against Kenyans. And am sure you remember that I mentioned Koli Nanok, EGH. , the man who tried to steal KSH 5 billion in his last days in office. Would you believe it if I told you that he works in government, at State House? He plunded billions of your money, got no measurable improvement in the lives of his subjects, and now has a government job in State House. Let that sink in. And so, the question is, how is it that in a country of 55 million people, with thousands of highly qualified people who have never ever stolen from Kenyans, he ends up with the criminals and thieves in the government, despite the fact that their crimes are in the public domain? How is this possible? Is it possible that these thieves possess a certain unique ability to run government, save Kenyans billions, and solve problems in a way that the president performs a cost-benefit analysis, and the benefits outweigh the costs of their theft? If not, what message does it send to Kenyans, when their own president puts into office known thieves? I think that is a fair question, don’t you? Dr. Ekuru Aukot Rigathi Gachagua William Samoei Ruto, PhD Okiya Omtatah Okoiti Citizen TV Kenya Nation Breaking News TI-Kenya CNN County Government of Turkana

Bonnie Mwangi, CPA, LLM, MBA

107,583 views • 2 years ago

Ten Takeaways From 10/21/25 ONE) NBA on NBC Hello, friends. Welcome to the 2025-26 NBA season. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? A whole lot has changed since we last spoke. We were reintroduced to the NBA on NBC. Can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years, but here we are again. They absolutely crushed it after having some early audio difficulties. I get how cliché it is, but I seriously got chills once “Roundball Rock” started playing. Thought Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady had contagious energy in the pre-game coverage. The graphics are clean and straightforward. Really like the team fouls tracking in the score bug—just a very pleasant experience. Looking forward to the “Prime” experience. God, can’t believe it costs $650 to watch basketball now. We need to talk about the MJ segment, though. If you’ve been living under a rock, NBC shocked the world and somehow convinced Michael Jordan to sign on as a “special contributor”. “Insights to Excellence” is sadly everything I thought it would be… nothing. He wasn’t in the studio or anything. Looked like some pre-recorded interview with Mike Tirico from who knows when at his house, talking about why he’s come out of hiding. The thing lasted about three and a half minutes. “To pay it forward. I had the obligation to basketball.” - MJ on the decision to join NBC Okay Mike. Hoping for some actual insight in future recordings. TWO) Champs Are Here OKC received their rings and raised their banner before the game. Vibes were immaculate. Dillon Jones was even in attendance. Good thing the Wizards waived him just in time for him to make his flight. Rockets weren’t having it, though. Ime Udoka said that they didn’t watch the ceremony and were instead focused on trying to ruin their night. Kevin Durant came out for warmups to loud boos, and so he booed them back. Everyone laughed. Meanwhile, Steven Adams still gets loud cheers because, well, who doesn’t love Steven Adams? It was a rough go-around for all Thunder not named Chet Holmgren (28 points, 11-17 FG) to start, especially SGA. He had just five points at the half on 40.0% shooting (2-5 FG), but you can only contain the league and Finals MVP for so long. He scored 24 of his 35 points in the 4th quarter and overtimes. What’s up with the four missed free throws (10-14 FT)? "I'm glad the guys enjoyed the ceremony. That's a great, great life event they had." - Mark Daigneault "It was surreal. I don't know how to describe it besides that. Seeing the banner raised was cool too... I'll remember it for the rest of my life." - SGA on the pregame ceremony THREE) Thunder Starters One of the more critical questions going into Opening Night was, “Who’s the 5th Thunder starter?” as we wait for JDub’s wrist to get right. SGA, Dort, Chet, and IHart felt obvious. Between Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, and Cason Wallace, I leaned Cason mainly because of the bigger picture. Didn’t make sense to start Alex after managing him all last year, but then he started in every preseason game he played. Had to give that some sort of credit (and we did). Well, they ended up doing what they did a lot last year: change it up midway. Wallace started, and then Caruso started the second half… for Hartenstein. Here we go again. Cason’s playmaking looks improved. Daigneault went 11 deep (!!!) in the first quarter. Rookie, Brooks Barnhizer was the fourth sub off the bench, played about two minutes, and was never seen again. Part of that reason is Ajay Mitchell, who checked in after him (for Shai). There’s been some buzz, going back to his standout Summer League (19.8 ppg, 5.3 apg, 4.8 rpg, 1.5 spg). He scored 12 of his 16 points in the second quarter. “Not surprised. He was playing like this before he got hurt last year.” - Mark Daigneault on Ajay Mitchell FOUR) Jumbo Lineup It’s not much of a surprise to see Udoka start with the Steven Adams/Alperen Sengun pairing after how dominant they looked at the end of last season (+29.9 net rating, 162 minutes)—especially given the matchup, with Holmgren and Hartenstein on the other side. The real shocker is how much they leaned into it. Alpi and Adams shared the court for over 30 minutes (+8). LIKE WTF?!!! This was Adams' first time touching 37 minutes since November 9, 2022. They did just sign him to a three-year extension. You’d think they might wanna be careful with their investment. The average height of this Rockets' starting lineup is 6'10 (Thompson, Durant, Smith, Sengun, Adams), LMAO FIVE) Alpi Dominance Continues Maybe what Sengun was doing at EuroBasket 2025 (21.6 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 6.6 apg, 1.0 spg, and 1.1 bpg) translates over? Not gonna lie, I certainly had my doubts, but no… he’s looking just as dominant (I know, one game). Alperen Sengun vs Thunder: 39 PTS 11 REB 7 AST 2 STL 5-8 3P (career-high) 10-11 FT 27.7% USG Yeah, I see it too. Second time in his career, he’s attempted eight threes. Dude averaged 1.2 attempts per game last year. The hitch in his shot appears to be gone, so hey, this could be real (doubt it). All I know is that if it is, it’ll do wonders for his ceiling on sites that reward threes (DK). Also, going 10 of 11 from the line is something worth paying attention to. He was a 69.2% free-throw shooter last season. On the flip side, Amen Thompson (18 pts, 4 reb, 5 ast) had seven attempts from behind the arc and missed them all. Sucks, but his shot still looks flat. There’s no lift. While we’re here on Thompson, he had to leave the game late because of cramps. SIX) The Reed Conundrum I’ll give Reed Sheppard (9 pts, 4 ast, 37.9% TS, 28 min) this; he’s a confident motherfucker, and I love that about him (in a cute way). It’s hilarious how many times he looked off KD in this game. He’s gonna have stretches where he’s feeling it and looks automatic, but is it really gonna be worth it if his defense looks this dreadful? He can’t stay in front of anyone. The Thunder hunted and won that matchup with ease all night. Amen getting cramped up in OT1 really salvaged his minutes, cause I didn’t think he was gonna see the court again. Again, I know it’s only one game, but a couple more performances like this and things could get ugly. SEVEN) KD Gets Away With One Or should that say gets away with none? Kevin Durant (23 points, 9 rebounds) made his Rockets debut, and there’re gonna be two things you take away from it. Why’d you trade for him again? He was pretty much non-existent when they needed him most down the stretch, with a 12.5 USG% in both OT’s. There shouldn’t have been a second overtime. KD was clearly seen calling for a timeout after a rebound with about a second left on the clock. The problem is, they didn’t have any–He Webber’d it. He should have been T’d up, giving the Thunder a free throw to potentially end the game. Zarba and his buddies even got together to talk it over once the buzzer sounded, but did nothing. Strange, but luckily, it didn’t end up mattering much since OKC won in the second overtime. “Kevin definitely called timeout 3 times… They just missed it.” - SGA The Thunder beat the Rockets 125-124. EIGHT) Kuminga Starts Gallagher and I both felt pretty confident (sounds so stupid saying that with Kerr) that had Mosey Moody been available for this one, he would have been named the fifth starter, but his calf’s still bothering him. Steve Kerr decided to start Jonathan Kuminga (17 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, 33 minutes) instead, rewarding him for a strong preseason. There might be some more rewards coming because, whew, this is exactly what they’ve been wanting to see from him for the last couple of years, especially the boards. You wouldn’t know it from looking at Luka’s box score, but JK did about as well as you could defending him; he made his threes (4-6 3PT) and consistently found the open man. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that he starts again against Denver on Thursday Let the showcasing begin. “When you ask for opportunity, you must deliver. He’s been very vocal about his opportunity and he delivered.” - Draymond Green on Jonathan Kuminga “I just wanna help JK be great… We’ve been kickin' it. Hanging out. Watching film and just working on our game together. I know how great he wants to be and how great he can be.” - Jimmy Butler on mentoring Jonathan Kuminga NINE) Jimmy Being Jimmy One of the funnier moments of the night came post-game, when Jimmy Butler talked about a bet he made with Draymond Green. The wager is that he’ll have a better free-throw percentage than Steph Curry this season. Deadass, hahaha. He admitted that it’s probably a bad bet but I still love that he does this type of shit. Two years ago, he said he was playfully aiming to shoot 50.0% from three. He obviously didn’t hit that mark, but he did shoot a career-best 41.4% that season. If you’re wondering how the bet is looking to start after Game 1: Jimmy Butler: 16-16 FT (100.0%) Steph Curry: 8-8 FT (100.0%) Will keep you updated as the season goes. Jesus, 16 free throw attempts. “No chance.” - Steph Curry when asked if Jimmy Butler has any shot at winning the bet Before we’re done with GS, a shoutout to Will Richard (5 points, 14 minutes). We tease Kerr all the time about playing these randos, but this kid looks like he can actually play. TEN) All Luka and Austin The Lakers are gonna struggle hard while LeBron’s out. They just don’t have any other guys on the team that can create. Luka Doncic (43 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 34.7% USG) and Austin Reaves (26 points, 9 assists, 30.1% USG) scored or assisted on 97 of the Lakers' 109 points. So wild. Marcus Smart (9 points) was the first sub off the bench. As for DeAndre Ayton’s debut (10 points, 6 rebounds, 4 turnovers), let’s just say it didn’t take long for the Lakers’ fan base to turn on him. Poor guy looked lost out there. "We just started. This is probably the second game we've played together." - Rui Hachimura on what the difference was for the Lakers "The trend I see is that we continue to be a terrible third-quarter team." - JJ Redick The Warriors beat the Lakers 119-109.
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Ten Takeaways From 10/21/25 ONE) NBA on NBC Hello, friends. Welcome to the 2025-26 NBA season. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? A whole lot has changed since we last spoke. We were reintroduced to the NBA on NBC. Can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years, but here we are again. They absolutely crushed it after having some early audio difficulties. I get how cliché it is, but I seriously got chills once “Roundball Rock” started playing. Thought Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady had contagious energy in the pre-game coverage. The graphics are clean and straightforward. Really like the team fouls tracking in the score bug—just a very pleasant experience. Looking forward to the “Prime” experience. God, can’t believe it costs $650 to watch basketball now. We need to talk about the MJ segment, though. If you’ve been living under a rock, NBC shocked the world and somehow convinced Michael Jordan to sign on as a “special contributor”. “Insights to Excellence” is sadly everything I thought it would be… nothing. He wasn’t in the studio or anything. Looked like some pre-recorded interview with Mike Tirico from who knows when at his house, talking about why he’s come out of hiding. The thing lasted about three and a half minutes. “To pay it forward. I had the obligation to basketball.” - MJ on the decision to join NBC Okay Mike. Hoping for some actual insight in future recordings. TWO) Champs Are Here OKC received their rings and raised their banner before the game. Vibes were immaculate. Dillon Jones was even in attendance. Good thing the Wizards waived him just in time for him to make his flight. Rockets weren’t having it, though. Ime Udoka said that they didn’t watch the ceremony and were instead focused on trying to ruin their night. Kevin Durant came out for warmups to loud boos, and so he booed them back. Everyone laughed. Meanwhile, Steven Adams still gets loud cheers because, well, who doesn’t love Steven Adams? It was a rough go-around for all Thunder not named Chet Holmgren (28 points, 11-17 FG) to start, especially SGA. He had just five points at the half on 40.0% shooting (2-5 FG), but you can only contain the league and Finals MVP for so long. He scored 24 of his 35 points in the 4th quarter and overtimes. What’s up with the four missed free throws (10-14 FT)? "I'm glad the guys enjoyed the ceremony. That's a great, great life event they had." - Mark Daigneault "It was surreal. I don't know how to describe it besides that. Seeing the banner raised was cool too... I'll remember it for the rest of my life." - SGA on the pregame ceremony THREE) Thunder Starters One of the more critical questions going into Opening Night was, “Who’s the 5th Thunder starter?” as we wait for JDub’s wrist to get right. SGA, Dort, Chet, and IHart felt obvious. Between Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, and Cason Wallace, I leaned Cason mainly because of the bigger picture. Didn’t make sense to start Alex after managing him all last year, but then he started in every preseason game he played. Had to give that some sort of credit (and we did). Well, they ended up doing what they did a lot last year: change it up midway. Wallace started, and then Caruso started the second half… for Hartenstein. Here we go again. Cason’s playmaking looks improved. Daigneault went 11 deep (!!!) in the first quarter. Rookie, Brooks Barnhizer was the fourth sub off the bench, played about two minutes, and was never seen again. Part of that reason is Ajay Mitchell, who checked in after him (for Shai). There’s been some buzz, going back to his standout Summer League (19.8 ppg, 5.3 apg, 4.8 rpg, 1.5 spg). He scored 12 of his 16 points in the second quarter. “Not surprised. He was playing like this before he got hurt last year.” - Mark Daigneault on Ajay Mitchell FOUR) Jumbo Lineup It’s not much of a surprise to see Udoka start with the Steven Adams/Alperen Sengun pairing after how dominant they looked at the end of last season (+29.9 net rating, 162 minutes)—especially given the matchup, with Holmgren and Hartenstein on the other side. The real shocker is how much they leaned into it. Alpi and Adams shared the court for over 30 minutes (+8). LIKE WTF?!!! This was Adams' first time touching 37 minutes since November 9, 2022. They did just sign him to a three-year extension. You’d think they might wanna be careful with their investment. The average height of this Rockets' starting lineup is 6'10 (Thompson, Durant, Smith, Sengun, Adams), LMAO FIVE) Alpi Dominance Continues Maybe what Sengun was doing at EuroBasket 2025 (21.6 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 6.6 apg, 1.0 spg, and 1.1 bpg) translates over? Not gonna lie, I certainly had my doubts, but no… he’s looking just as dominant (I know, one game). Alperen Sengun vs Thunder: 39 PTS 11 REB 7 AST 2 STL 5-8 3P (career-high) 10-11 FT 27.7% USG Yeah, I see it too. Second time in his career, he’s attempted eight threes. Dude averaged 1.2 attempts per game last year. The hitch in his shot appears to be gone, so hey, this could be real (doubt it). All I know is that if it is, it’ll do wonders for his ceiling on sites that reward threes (DK). Also, going 10 of 11 from the line is something worth paying attention to. He was a 69.2% free-throw shooter last season. On the flip side, Amen Thompson (18 pts, 4 reb, 5 ast) had seven attempts from behind the arc and missed them all. Sucks, but his shot still looks flat. There’s no lift. While we’re here on Thompson, he had to leave the game late because of cramps. SIX) The Reed Conundrum I’ll give Reed Sheppard (9 pts, 4 ast, 37.9% TS, 28 min) this; he’s a confident motherfucker, and I love that about him (in a cute way). It’s hilarious how many times he looked off KD in this game. He’s gonna have stretches where he’s feeling it and looks automatic, but is it really gonna be worth it if his defense looks this dreadful? He can’t stay in front of anyone. The Thunder hunted and won that matchup with ease all night. Amen getting cramped up in OT1 really salvaged his minutes, cause I didn’t think he was gonna see the court again. Again, I know it’s only one game, but a couple more performances like this and things could get ugly. SEVEN) KD Gets Away With One Or should that say gets away with none? Kevin Durant (23 points, 9 rebounds) made his Rockets debut, and there’re gonna be two things you take away from it. Why’d you trade for him again? He was pretty much non-existent when they needed him most down the stretch, with a 12.5 USG% in both OT’s. There shouldn’t have been a second overtime. KD was clearly seen calling for a timeout after a rebound with about a second left on the clock. The problem is, they didn’t have any–He Webber’d it. He should have been T’d up, giving the Thunder a free throw to potentially end the game. Zarba and his buddies even got together to talk it over once the buzzer sounded, but did nothing. Strange, but luckily, it didn’t end up mattering much since OKC won in the second overtime. “Kevin definitely called timeout 3 times… They just missed it.” - SGA The Thunder beat the Rockets 125-124. EIGHT) Kuminga Starts Gallagher and I both felt pretty confident (sounds so stupid saying that with Kerr) that had Mosey Moody been available for this one, he would have been named the fifth starter, but his calf’s still bothering him. Steve Kerr decided to start Jonathan Kuminga (17 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, 33 minutes) instead, rewarding him for a strong preseason. There might be some more rewards coming because, whew, this is exactly what they’ve been wanting to see from him for the last couple of years, especially the boards. You wouldn’t know it from looking at Luka’s box score, but JK did about as well as you could defending him; he made his threes (4-6 3PT) and consistently found the open man. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that he starts again against Denver on Thursday Let the showcasing begin. “When you ask for opportunity, you must deliver. He’s been very vocal about his opportunity and he delivered.” - Draymond Green on Jonathan Kuminga “I just wanna help JK be great… We’ve been kickin' it. Hanging out. Watching film and just working on our game together. I know how great he wants to be and how great he can be.” - Jimmy Butler on mentoring Jonathan Kuminga NINE) Jimmy Being Jimmy One of the funnier moments of the night came post-game, when Jimmy Butler talked about a bet he made with Draymond Green. The wager is that he’ll have a better free-throw percentage than Steph Curry this season. Deadass, hahaha. He admitted that it’s probably a bad bet but I still love that he does this type of shit. Two years ago, he said he was playfully aiming to shoot 50.0% from three. He obviously didn’t hit that mark, but he did shoot a career-best 41.4% that season. If you’re wondering how the bet is looking to start after Game 1: Jimmy Butler: 16-16 FT (100.0%) Steph Curry: 8-8 FT (100.0%) Will keep you updated as the season goes. Jesus, 16 free throw attempts. “No chance.” - Steph Curry when asked if Jimmy Butler has any shot at winning the bet Before we’re done with GS, a shoutout to Will Richard (5 points, 14 minutes). We tease Kerr all the time about playing these randos, but this kid looks like he can actually play. TEN) All Luka and Austin The Lakers are gonna struggle hard while LeBron’s out. They just don’t have any other guys on the team that can create. Luka Doncic (43 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 34.7% USG) and Austin Reaves (26 points, 9 assists, 30.1% USG) scored or assisted on 97 of the Lakers' 109 points. So wild. Marcus Smart (9 points) was the first sub off the bench. As for DeAndre Ayton’s debut (10 points, 6 rebounds, 4 turnovers), let’s just say it didn’t take long for the Lakers’ fan base to turn on him. Poor guy looked lost out there. "We just started. This is probably the second game we've played together." - Rui Hachimura on what the difference was for the Lakers "The trend I see is that we continue to be a terrible third-quarter team." - JJ Redick The Warriors beat the Lakers 119-109.

Establish The Run NBA

15,570 views • 11 months ago

🎵My Dolly Parton Story🎶 - (Video and additional photos in 🧵 below) Exactly one year before the government shut down the world because of the #CommieVirus — especially killing the live entertainment industry — my bands were firing on all cylinders. My private event band, Bull City Syndicate, was doing especially well. We’d been the headlining entertainment for the past two North Carolina Governor’s Inaugural Balls, and played hundreds of high-end corporate events, charity balls, and top-shelf weddings. On March 2, 2019, we were especially excited to be hired as the featured entertainment for a charity event where Dolly Parton would be the main attraction. Not as a musical performer herself, but to promote her own charity, Imagination Library (Imagination Library), and to do a live poetry reading from her own work. The event was the 25th Anniversary Smart Start Gala. Raleigh’s mayor, the governor of NC, and many other VIPs would be in attendance. While the event planner never suggested that we perform or back up Dolly on any of her tunes, it was, in the back of my mind, something I thought would have been really cool. But not something I’d dare suggest or insinuate on my own. My only preshow contact with Dolly’s organization was with her head of security. The Marble’s Kids Museum in Raleigh, NC is a fabulous venue for fun charity events, but it has only one “green room” next to the staging area. Security informed me that the band would have to completely evacuate that shared space at least 30-minutes before Dolly arrived for her portion of the evening’s proceedings. (Not an unusual or inappropriate request, given her enormous superstar status.) The entire 10-piece band was on stage when Dolly was escorted through the back entrance and into the green room. There was some back-and-forth between VIP speeches and live music, so the band stayed in place throughout. Since the event was completely sold out and standing room only, we knew we’d have the best vantage of Dolly if we just stayed on the stage. Dolly’s presentation was scheduled to be only about 10-15 minutes. While the governor and mayor were delivering remarks just in advance of Dolly taking the stage, I looked back at the green room door, off stage left, and I saw my son, Duncan, in full-on, intense conversation with Dolly! (WHAT?!) Duncan, who was only 20 years old at the time and already a freak-of-nature musician himself, was working on my stage crew that night. I’m the band leader, so I’m having to give full attention to the event host and what’s happening on the speaker’s side of the stage … but only 20 feet away, Duncan and Dolly are chatting away like long-lost friends. Finally, at one of my many glances in their direction, Dolly and Duncan catch my eye and both start waving me over to them. I silently point at my chest, then mouth, “Me?” They both nod, say yes, and wave more insistently. I dart off the stage, over to the dimly lit green room entrance corridor. Duncan, who is much taller than I am, puts his hand on my shoulder and introduces me to “Dolly Parton.” (You can imagine the look on my face. Ha!) He tells me that Dolly has a request. I lean down to put my ear close to Dolly, so that she wouldn’t have to speak too loudly while the governor was talking to the audience. (I can imitate her voice, and I wish you could hear it in her voice and Tennessee mountain accent right now.) She says to me: “I didn’t know there was going to be a band here tonight. If I’d known there would be a band, I’d have had you learn some of my songs.” Then she came right out with it. “Do y’all know any of my songs?” I straightened back up, and over the course of less than five seconds my mind raced through every Top-40 solo and duet hit single of hers I’d ever heard on the radio. Country, pop, and otherwise. I made an immediate band leader decision … and lied my ass off. “Yes, we can play ‘Jolene.’” We’d never performed or rehearsed “Jolene,” or any other Dolly Parton tune, in the 20 years I’d led that band. The conversation continued: DOLLY: “Y’all know ‘Jolene?!’” ME: “Yes, ma’am.” DOLLY: “That’s great! When I finish reading my poem, I’ll tell everyone we’re going to sing ‘Jolene.’” ME: “We’ll be ready. What key do you do ‘Jolene’ in?” DOLLY: “I don’t know.” Dolly’s personal assistant leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “C minor.” (Cm) The original key for “Jolene” was C-sharp minor (C#m), but I assume at 73 years old she might be lowering keys, as many aging vocalists tend to do. I gave Dolly an assuring look and said, “Thank you.” I looked at Duncan with an eye-raised, “Oh, sh-t” look on my face, then ran to the stage and called an emergency huddle of my rhythm section as Governor Cooper droned on in the background. In whispered, panicked tones, I told them, “Guys, you have 10 minutes to learn ‘Jolene’ … Key of C minor … GO!” The guys immediately took out their phones and pulled up the song, each listening privately through their in-ear monitors or holding the phone speaker close to their heads. They started silently fingering around on the guitar and bass guitar frets, and the keyboards. Our drummer sat quietly and listened to the track on his phone. I darted over to our female lead singer, Danie Ward, and asked her if she knew the words and background harmonies to “Jolene.” She gave me “The Look.” Back story … Danie was with my band for over ten years. She was my all-time favorite female lead vocalist, and we became great friends. She and her husband were very active in their church as pastor and she as worship leader. She and her sisters also performed for many years as a family Gospel group. But Danie, as a Black gospel artist, was immensely versatile, able to sing anything from Aretha Franklin to Lady Gaga and leaving you wanting more. And although a Black Gospel artist, her secret desire and ambition was to be a Country music artist. (I kid you not.) So, when I asked her if she knew the words and harmonies to “Jolene,” THE LOOK she gave me was … “Seriously? You dare ask ME that question?” All I needed in response from Danie was “The Look.” No words spoken, and I slinked away appropriately chastised. My band members were all world-class pros, at every position. Especially that rhythm section. Most of whom had been with me for many years at this point. They ended up with more than 10 minutes to quietly and individually—with no rehearsal—learn “Jolene.” A few more minutes passed before Dolly was introduced and brought onstage; then she took another 20 minutes to deliver her remarks and poetry reading. The guys were ready. Dolly finished her poem to a round of applause and immediately announced she’d be performing “Jolene” for them. They cheered in approval. My drummer clicked a four count with his drumsticks, and they were off. As soon as Dolly began to sing the first words of the song, you can see me — in the video below — walking across the front of the stage with a huge smile on my face. Danie then got the thrill of her life. As soon as she’d finished singing the first round of harmonies behind Dolly’s lead, Dolly turned and looked toward Danie and said loudly into the mic, “Good job!” No one knew how or when Dolly wanted to end the song, so there was no real conclusion. They all just kinda stopped. But the audience was enthusiastically grateful they’d gotten more than what they paid for that night. I do wish the event planner had informed Dolly and her team that a band was at the event. I’d have loved to have learned a handful of her songs for the show. Maybe I’d have even been able to sing with her one of her chart-topping duets that she recorded with Kenny Rogers. Even though I never personally sang or performed a single musical note with Dolly, I’ll always be able to say “My band” performed with Dolly Parton. —— Postscript: A few days after that event, I received a call from Dolly’s personal assistant. (The same guy who whispered “C minor” into my ear.) He said he needed my son's address because Dolly had a gift she wanted to send him. Dolly’s PA explained that Duncan reminded her so much of her late brother, Floyd, when he was Duncan’s age. She wanted to send Duncan something special. For whatever reason, the package never arrived. Whether lost in the shuffle of Dolly’s or her staff’s busy life, or because some porch pirate pilfered it, Duncan never received that gift. But the very thought that was conveyed shows you what kind of person Dolly was. (Photos in thread below.) —— Post Postscript: Later that same year, I was attending the W.C. Handy Music Festival in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. At the time, I was managing a renowned Shoals songwriter and his band, James LeBlanc & The Winchesters. Some members of James’ band were performing a lunchtime show at one of the local Shoals area eateries as part of the 10-day festival’s scheduled events. I arrived a few minutes late, and the place was packed. Seated alone at a table near the stage was a woman with bleached Big Hair. She saw me looking for a spot and waved me over. Before I got to the table, I knew she had to be related to Dolly. Sure enough, it was Stella Parton, Dolly’s sister. Stella has had her own far less notable career in music, so I made sure not to gush over Dolly (just in case, and not knowing the family dynamics), but I did tell her about my band performing with Dolly earlier that year. I will forever and always have that story to tell. ⬇️
3:16

🎵My Dolly Parton Story🎶 - (Video and additional photos in 🧵 below) Exactly one year before the government shut down the world because of the #CommieVirus — especially killing the live entertainment industry — my bands were firing on all cylinders. My private event band, Bull City Syndicate, was doing especially well. We’d been the headlining entertainment for the past two North Carolina Governor’s Inaugural Balls, and played hundreds of high-end corporate events, charity balls, and top-shelf weddings. On March 2, 2019, we were especially excited to be hired as the featured entertainment for a charity event where Dolly Parton would be the main attraction. Not as a musical performer herself, but to promote her own charity, Imagination Library (Imagination Library), and to do a live poetry reading from her own work. The event was the 25th Anniversary Smart Start Gala. Raleigh’s mayor, the governor of NC, and many other VIPs would be in attendance. While the event planner never suggested that we perform or back up Dolly on any of her tunes, it was, in the back of my mind, something I thought would have been really cool. But not something I’d dare suggest or insinuate on my own. My only preshow contact with Dolly’s organization was with her head of security. The Marble’s Kids Museum in Raleigh, NC is a fabulous venue for fun charity events, but it has only one “green room” next to the staging area. Security informed me that the band would have to completely evacuate that shared space at least 30-minutes before Dolly arrived for her portion of the evening’s proceedings. (Not an unusual or inappropriate request, given her enormous superstar status.) The entire 10-piece band was on stage when Dolly was escorted through the back entrance and into the green room. There was some back-and-forth between VIP speeches and live music, so the band stayed in place throughout. Since the event was completely sold out and standing room only, we knew we’d have the best vantage of Dolly if we just stayed on the stage. Dolly’s presentation was scheduled to be only about 10-15 minutes. While the governor and mayor were delivering remarks just in advance of Dolly taking the stage, I looked back at the green room door, off stage left, and I saw my son, Duncan, in full-on, intense conversation with Dolly! (WHAT?!) Duncan, who was only 20 years old at the time and already a freak-of-nature musician himself, was working on my stage crew that night. I’m the band leader, so I’m having to give full attention to the event host and what’s happening on the speaker’s side of the stage … but only 20 feet away, Duncan and Dolly are chatting away like long-lost friends. Finally, at one of my many glances in their direction, Dolly and Duncan catch my eye and both start waving me over to them. I silently point at my chest, then mouth, “Me?” They both nod, say yes, and wave more insistently. I dart off the stage, over to the dimly lit green room entrance corridor. Duncan, who is much taller than I am, puts his hand on my shoulder and introduces me to “Dolly Parton.” (You can imagine the look on my face. Ha!) He tells me that Dolly has a request. I lean down to put my ear close to Dolly, so that she wouldn’t have to speak too loudly while the governor was talking to the audience. (I can imitate her voice, and I wish you could hear it in her voice and Tennessee mountain accent right now.) She says to me: “I didn’t know there was going to be a band here tonight. If I’d known there would be a band, I’d have had you learn some of my songs.” Then she came right out with it. “Do y’all know any of my songs?” I straightened back up, and over the course of less than five seconds my mind raced through every Top-40 solo and duet hit single of hers I’d ever heard on the radio. Country, pop, and otherwise. I made an immediate band leader decision … and lied my ass off. “Yes, we can play ‘Jolene.’” We’d never performed or rehearsed “Jolene,” or any other Dolly Parton tune, in the 20 years I’d led that band. The conversation continued: DOLLY: “Y’all know ‘Jolene?!’” ME: “Yes, ma’am.” DOLLY: “That’s great! When I finish reading my poem, I’ll tell everyone we’re going to sing ‘Jolene.’” ME: “We’ll be ready. What key do you do ‘Jolene’ in?” DOLLY: “I don’t know.” Dolly’s personal assistant leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “C minor.” (Cm) The original key for “Jolene” was C-sharp minor (C#m), but I assume at 73 years old she might be lowering keys, as many aging vocalists tend to do. I gave Dolly an assuring look and said, “Thank you.” I looked at Duncan with an eye-raised, “Oh, sh-t” look on my face, then ran to the stage and called an emergency huddle of my rhythm section as Governor Cooper droned on in the background. In whispered, panicked tones, I told them, “Guys, you have 10 minutes to learn ‘Jolene’ … Key of C minor … GO!” The guys immediately took out their phones and pulled up the song, each listening privately through their in-ear monitors or holding the phone speaker close to their heads. They started silently fingering around on the guitar and bass guitar frets, and the keyboards. Our drummer sat quietly and listened to the track on his phone. I darted over to our female lead singer, Danie Ward, and asked her if she knew the words and background harmonies to “Jolene.” She gave me “The Look.” Back story … Danie was with my band for over ten years. She was my all-time favorite female lead vocalist, and we became great friends. She and her husband were very active in their church as pastor and she as worship leader. She and her sisters also performed for many years as a family Gospel group. But Danie, as a Black gospel artist, was immensely versatile, able to sing anything from Aretha Franklin to Lady Gaga and leaving you wanting more. And although a Black Gospel artist, her secret desire and ambition was to be a Country music artist. (I kid you not.) So, when I asked her if she knew the words and harmonies to “Jolene,” THE LOOK she gave me was … “Seriously? You dare ask ME that question?” All I needed in response from Danie was “The Look.” No words spoken, and I slinked away appropriately chastised. My band members were all world-class pros, at every position. Especially that rhythm section. Most of whom had been with me for many years at this point. They ended up with more than 10 minutes to quietly and individually—with no rehearsal—learn “Jolene.” A few more minutes passed before Dolly was introduced and brought onstage; then she took another 20 minutes to deliver her remarks and poetry reading. The guys were ready. Dolly finished her poem to a round of applause and immediately announced she’d be performing “Jolene” for them. They cheered in approval. My drummer clicked a four count with his drumsticks, and they were off. As soon as Dolly began to sing the first words of the song, you can see me — in the video below — walking across the front of the stage with a huge smile on my face. Danie then got the thrill of her life. As soon as she’d finished singing the first round of harmonies behind Dolly’s lead, Dolly turned and looked toward Danie and said loudly into the mic, “Good job!” No one knew how or when Dolly wanted to end the song, so there was no real conclusion. They all just kinda stopped. But the audience was enthusiastically grateful they’d gotten more than what they paid for that night. I do wish the event planner had informed Dolly and her team that a band was at the event. I’d have loved to have learned a handful of her songs for the show. Maybe I’d have even been able to sing with her one of her chart-topping duets that she recorded with Kenny Rogers. Even though I never personally sang or performed a single musical note with Dolly, I’ll always be able to say “My band” performed with Dolly Parton. —— Postscript: A few days after that event, I received a call from Dolly’s personal assistant. (The same guy who whispered “C minor” into my ear.) He said he needed my son's address because Dolly had a gift she wanted to send him. Dolly’s PA explained that Duncan reminded her so much of her late brother, Floyd, when he was Duncan’s age. She wanted to send Duncan something special. For whatever reason, the package never arrived. Whether lost in the shuffle of Dolly’s or her staff’s busy life, or because some porch pirate pilfered it, Duncan never received that gift. But the very thought that was conveyed shows you what kind of person Dolly was. (Photos in thread below.) —— Post Postscript: Later that same year, I was attending the W.C. Handy Music Festival in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. At the time, I was managing a renowned Shoals songwriter and his band, James LeBlanc & The Winchesters. Some members of James’ band were performing a lunchtime show at one of the local Shoals area eateries as part of the 10-day festival’s scheduled events. I arrived a few minutes late, and the place was packed. Seated alone at a table near the stage was a woman with bleached Big Hair. She saw me looking for a spot and waved me over. Before I got to the table, I knew she had to be related to Dolly. Sure enough, it was Stella Parton, Dolly’s sister. Stella has had her own far less notable career in music, so I made sure not to gush over Dolly (just in case, and not knowing the family dynamics), but I did tell her about my band performing with Dolly earlier that year. I will forever and always have that story to tell. ⬇️

Steve Baker

50,752 views • 25 days ago

In Remembrance of Dorothy Malone. Born | January 29, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Died | January 19, 2018 aged 93 in Dallas, Texas, USA. Video | Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Dorothy Malone as Acme Bookstore proprietress in the classic film noir, The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks. The blonde, sultry, dreamy-eyed beauty of Dorothy Malone, who was born Mary Maloney in Chicago, took some time before it made an impact with American film-going audiences. But once she did, she played it for all it was worth in her one chance Academy Award-winning “bad girl” performance, a role quite unlike the classy and strait-laced lady herself. Raised in Dallas, she was one of five children born to an accountant father and housewife mother. Two older sisters died of polio. Attending Ursuline Convent and Highland Park High School, she was quite popular (as “School Favourite”). She was also a noted female athlete while there and won several awards for swimming and horseback riding. Following graduation, she studied at Southern Methodist University with the intent of becoming a nurse, but a role in the college play “Starbound” happened to catch the eye of an RKO talent scout and she was offered a Hollywood contract. The lovely brunette started off in typical RKO starlet mode with acting/singing/dancing/diction lessons and bit parts (billed as Dorothy Maloney) in such films as the Frank Sinatra musicals Higher and Higher (1943) and Step Lively (1944), a couple of the mystery “Falcon” entries and a showier role in Show Business (1944) with Eddie Cantor and George Murphy. RKO lost interest, however, after the two-year contract was up. Warner Bros., however, stepped up to the plate and offered the actress a contract. Now billed as Dorothy Malone, her third film offering with the studio finally injected some adrenaline into her floundering young career, when she earned the small role of a seductive book clerk in the Bogart/Bacall classic The Big Sleep (1946). Critics and audiences took notice of her captivating little part. As a reward, the studio nudged her up the billing ladder with more visible roles in Two Guys from Texas (1948), Romance on the High Seas (1948), South of St. Louis (1949) and Colorado Territory (1949), with the westerns showing off her equestrian prowess if not her acting ability. Despite this positive movement, Warner Bros. did not extend Dorothy's contract in 1949 and she returned willingly back to her tight-knit family in her native Dallas. Taking a steadier job with an insurance agency, she happened to attend a work-related convention in New York City and grew fascinated with the big city. Deciding to recommit to her acting career, she moved to the Big Apple and studied at the American Theatre Wing. In between her studies, she managed to find work on TV, which spurred freelancing “B” movie offers in the routine form of Saddle Legion (1951), The Bushwhackers (1951), the Martin & Lewis romp Scared Stiff (1953), Law and Order (1953), Jack Slade (1953), Pushover (1954) and Private Hell 36 (1954). Things picked up noticeably once Dorothy went platinum blonde, which seemed to emphasise her overt and sensual beauty. First off was as a sister to Doris Day in Young at Heart (1954), a musical remake of Four Daughters (1938), back at Warner Bros. She garnered even better attention when she appeared in the war picture Battle Cry (1955), in which she shared torrid love scenes with film's newest heartthrob Tab Hunter, and continued the momentum with the reliable westerns Five Guns West (1955) and Tall Man Riding (1955) but not with melodramatic romantic dud Sincerely Yours (1955) which tried to sell to the audiences a heterosexual Liberace. By this time she had signed with Universal. Following a few more westerns for good measure (At Gunpoint (1955), Tension at Table Rock (1956) and Pillars of the Sky (1956), Dorothy won the scenery-chewing role of wild, nymphomaniac Marylee Hadley in the Douglas Sirk soap opera Written on the Wind (1956) co-starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack. Stack and Malone had the showier roles and completely out-shined the two leads, both earning supporting Oscar nominations in the process. Stack lost in his category but Dorothy nabbed the trophy for her splendidly trampy, boozed-up Southern belle which was highlighted by her writhing mambo dance. Unfortunately, Dorothy's long spell of mediocre filming did not end with all the hoopla she received for Written on the Wind (1956). The Tarnished Angels (1957), which reunited Malone with Hudson and Stack faltered, and Quantez (1957) with Fred MacMurray was just another run-of-the-mill western. Two major film challenges might have changed things with Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) as the unsympathetic first wife of James Cagney's Lon Chaney Sr, and as alcoholic actress Diana Barrymore in the biographic melodrama Too Much, Too Soon (1958). Cagney, however, overshadowed everyone in the first and the second was fatally watered down by the Production Code committee. To compensate, Dorothy, at age 35 in 1959, finally was married ― to playboy actor Jacques Bergerac (Ginger Rogers's ex-husband). A daughter, Mimi, was born the following year. Fewer film offers, which included Warlock (1959) and The Last Voyage (1960), came her way as Dorothy focused more on family life. While a second daughter, Diane, was born in 1962, the turbulent marriage wouldn't last and their divorce became final in December 1964. A bitter custody battle ensued with Dorothy eventually winning primary custody. It took the small screen to rejuvenate Dorothy's career in the mid-1960s when she earned top billing of TV's first prime time soap opera Peyton Place (1964). Dorothy, starring in Lana Turner's 1957 film role of Constance MacKenzie, found herself in a smash hit. The run wasn't entirely happy however. Doctors discovered blood clots on her lungs which required major surgery and she almost died. Lola Albright filled in until she was able to return. Just as bad, the significance of her role dwindled with time and 20th Century-Fox finally wrote her and co-star Tim O'Connor off the show in 1968. Dorothy filed a breach of contract lawsuit which ended in an out-of-court settlement. Her life on- and off-camera did not improve. Dorothy's second marriage to stockbroker Robert Tomarkin in 1969 would last only three months, and a third to businessman Charles Huston Bell managed about three years. Now-matronly roles in the films Winter Kills (1979), Vortex (1982), The Being (1981) and Descanse en piezas (1987), were few and far between a few TV-movies ― which included some “Peyton Place” revivals, did nothing to advance her career. Malone returned and settled for good back in her native Dallas, returning to Hollywood only on occasion. Dorothy's last film was a cameo in the popular thriller Basic Instinct (1992) as a friend to Sharon Stone. She will be remembered as one of those Hollywood stars who proved she had the talent but somehow got the short end of the stick when it came to quality films offered. She retired to Texas and died in Dallas shortly before her 94th birthday on January 19, 2018.
3:08

In Remembrance of Dorothy Malone. Born | January 29, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Died | January 19, 2018 aged 93 in Dallas, Texas, USA. Video | Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Dorothy Malone as Acme Bookstore proprietress in the classic film noir, The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks. The blonde, sultry, dreamy-eyed beauty of Dorothy Malone, who was born Mary Maloney in Chicago, took some time before it made an impact with American film-going audiences. But once she did, she played it for all it was worth in her one chance Academy Award-winning “bad girl” performance, a role quite unlike the classy and strait-laced lady herself. Raised in Dallas, she was one of five children born to an accountant father and housewife mother. Two older sisters died of polio. Attending Ursuline Convent and Highland Park High School, she was quite popular (as “School Favourite”). She was also a noted female athlete while there and won several awards for swimming and horseback riding. Following graduation, she studied at Southern Methodist University with the intent of becoming a nurse, but a role in the college play “Starbound” happened to catch the eye of an RKO talent scout and she was offered a Hollywood contract. The lovely brunette started off in typical RKO starlet mode with acting/singing/dancing/diction lessons and bit parts (billed as Dorothy Maloney) in such films as the Frank Sinatra musicals Higher and Higher (1943) and Step Lively (1944), a couple of the mystery “Falcon” entries and a showier role in Show Business (1944) with Eddie Cantor and George Murphy. RKO lost interest, however, after the two-year contract was up. Warner Bros., however, stepped up to the plate and offered the actress a contract. Now billed as Dorothy Malone, her third film offering with the studio finally injected some adrenaline into her floundering young career, when she earned the small role of a seductive book clerk in the Bogart/Bacall classic The Big Sleep (1946). Critics and audiences took notice of her captivating little part. As a reward, the studio nudged her up the billing ladder with more visible roles in Two Guys from Texas (1948), Romance on the High Seas (1948), South of St. Louis (1949) and Colorado Territory (1949), with the westerns showing off her equestrian prowess if not her acting ability. Despite this positive movement, Warner Bros. did not extend Dorothy's contract in 1949 and she returned willingly back to her tight-knit family in her native Dallas. Taking a steadier job with an insurance agency, she happened to attend a work-related convention in New York City and grew fascinated with the big city. Deciding to recommit to her acting career, she moved to the Big Apple and studied at the American Theatre Wing. In between her studies, she managed to find work on TV, which spurred freelancing “B” movie offers in the routine form of Saddle Legion (1951), The Bushwhackers (1951), the Martin & Lewis romp Scared Stiff (1953), Law and Order (1953), Jack Slade (1953), Pushover (1954) and Private Hell 36 (1954). Things picked up noticeably once Dorothy went platinum blonde, which seemed to emphasise her overt and sensual beauty. First off was as a sister to Doris Day in Young at Heart (1954), a musical remake of Four Daughters (1938), back at Warner Bros. She garnered even better attention when she appeared in the war picture Battle Cry (1955), in which she shared torrid love scenes with film's newest heartthrob Tab Hunter, and continued the momentum with the reliable westerns Five Guns West (1955) and Tall Man Riding (1955) but not with melodramatic romantic dud Sincerely Yours (1955) which tried to sell to the audiences a heterosexual Liberace. By this time she had signed with Universal. Following a few more westerns for good measure (At Gunpoint (1955), Tension at Table Rock (1956) and Pillars of the Sky (1956), Dorothy won the scenery-chewing role of wild, nymphomaniac Marylee Hadley in the Douglas Sirk soap opera Written on the Wind (1956) co-starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack. Stack and Malone had the showier roles and completely out-shined the two leads, both earning supporting Oscar nominations in the process. Stack lost in his category but Dorothy nabbed the trophy for her splendidly trampy, boozed-up Southern belle which was highlighted by her writhing mambo dance. Unfortunately, Dorothy's long spell of mediocre filming did not end with all the hoopla she received for Written on the Wind (1956). The Tarnished Angels (1957), which reunited Malone with Hudson and Stack faltered, and Quantez (1957) with Fred MacMurray was just another run-of-the-mill western. Two major film challenges might have changed things with Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) as the unsympathetic first wife of James Cagney's Lon Chaney Sr, and as alcoholic actress Diana Barrymore in the biographic melodrama Too Much, Too Soon (1958). Cagney, however, overshadowed everyone in the first and the second was fatally watered down by the Production Code committee. To compensate, Dorothy, at age 35 in 1959, finally was married ― to playboy actor Jacques Bergerac (Ginger Rogers's ex-husband). A daughter, Mimi, was born the following year. Fewer film offers, which included Warlock (1959) and The Last Voyage (1960), came her way as Dorothy focused more on family life. While a second daughter, Diane, was born in 1962, the turbulent marriage wouldn't last and their divorce became final in December 1964. A bitter custody battle ensued with Dorothy eventually winning primary custody. It took the small screen to rejuvenate Dorothy's career in the mid-1960s when she earned top billing of TV's first prime time soap opera Peyton Place (1964). Dorothy, starring in Lana Turner's 1957 film role of Constance MacKenzie, found herself in a smash hit. The run wasn't entirely happy however. Doctors discovered blood clots on her lungs which required major surgery and she almost died. Lola Albright filled in until she was able to return. Just as bad, the significance of her role dwindled with time and 20th Century-Fox finally wrote her and co-star Tim O'Connor off the show in 1968. Dorothy filed a breach of contract lawsuit which ended in an out-of-court settlement. Her life on- and off-camera did not improve. Dorothy's second marriage to stockbroker Robert Tomarkin in 1969 would last only three months, and a third to businessman Charles Huston Bell managed about three years. Now-matronly roles in the films Winter Kills (1979), Vortex (1982), The Being (1981) and Descanse en piezas (1987), were few and far between a few TV-movies ― which included some “Peyton Place” revivals, did nothing to advance her career. Malone returned and settled for good back in her native Dallas, returning to Hollywood only on occasion. Dorothy's last film was a cameo in the popular thriller Basic Instinct (1992) as a friend to Sharon Stone. She will be remembered as one of those Hollywood stars who proved she had the talent but somehow got the short end of the stick when it came to quality films offered. She retired to Texas and died in Dallas shortly before her 94th birthday on January 19, 2018.

Hollywood Golden Age of Cinema

22,629 views • 8 months ago

Someone stood on a piece of land, looked at a living, breathing dog who had done nothing but exist, and said: "Just shoot him dead." Not "get rid of him." Not "take him to a shelter." Not even "I don't want him anymore." Shoot him dead. I want you to sit with that sentence for a second before you keep scrolling, because everything that comes after it only makes sense once you understand how casually those five words get said in this world. Somewhere, right now, someone is saying a version of that sentence about a living thing that trusted them, or wanted to, or was still learning how. Most of the time nobody films it. Most of the time there's no ending. There's just a decision, made in under a second, by someone who will forget they ever made it. This time, someone didn't listen. This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you what happens next. I'm not going to. Not because I'm holding it hostage for engagement — okay, maybe a little — but mostly because the story doesn't work if I hand it to you pre-chewed. You need to watch a dog decide, in real time, whether the human species is worth the risk. You need to watch that calculation happen behind a pair of eyes that have every reason to say no. That's not something I can describe to you in a tweet. That's something you have to sit through. But I can tell you what it's about. It's about the gap. The invisible, unmeasurable gap between a dog who has been failed by people and a dog who has decided to try again anyway. Nobody talks about that gap. We talk about rescues like they're a single moment — the dramatic snatch, the shelter cage, the "and then everything was fine" — but that's not how trust works, and it's definitely not how fear works. Fear doesn't leave because you fed it once. Fear moves out slowly, one inch at a time, and it takes its shoes off at the door so you don't hear it coming back. PART ONE: THE VERDICT Here's what almost nobody says out loud: dogs get sentenced constantly, by people who will never be held accountable for the sentence. Too old. Too much energy. Too expensive. Doesn't match the new couch. Growled once at a toddler who was pulling its ears. In goes the verdict, out goes the dog — sometimes to a shelter, sometimes to a shed, sometimes to the side of a highway at 60 miles an hour with the door still swinging shut. And sometimes, if the owner is lazy enough and cruel enough at the same time, the sentence is the one you already read. Just shoot him dead. Nobody ever asks the dog's side. Obviously. He can't testify. He can't explain that he was scared of the vacuum, or that he barked at 2am because something moved in the yard, or that he never asked to be born into a house that saw him as a liability the second he became inconvenient. All he can do is react to what happens to him. And what happened to this one was a verdict that most animals never survive to tell. Except — spoiler-adjacent, not a spoiler — he did survive. That's the only thing I'll give you for free. He survived the verdict. What he did with the rest of the sentence, what it cost him to survive it, what he had to unlearn about people before he could stand near one without flinching — that's the part you're going to want your full attention for. PART TWO: THE DISTANCE THAT NOBODY MEASURES There's a very specific kind of animal behavior that people who haven't lived it will never fully understand: the dog who wants to come closer and physically cannot make his legs do it. You've maybe seen a version of it — the shelter dog pressed against the back wall of the kennel, the street dog who follows you for six blocks but won't take food from your hand, the "feral" label slapped onto an animal who is, underneath the label, simply doing math. Every approach is a risk assessment. Every human hand is a variable that could be gentle or could be the last thing he ever feels. You don't get to skip that math just because your intentions are good. The dog doesn't know your intentions. He only knows what hands have done before. So he keeps his distance. Not because he's unfriendly — dogs who've been failed are very often the most desperate to be loved, which is its own kind of tragic irony — but because distance is the only insurance policy he has left. He'll circle. He'll watch. He'll get close enough to almost, almost, and then something — a sound, a movement, a memory with no name attached to it — will send him back to the treeline, and you'll be left standing there wondering what you did wrong, when the honest answer is: nothing. It's not about you. It's about every hand that came before yours. This is the part of the story where most people give up. Not because they don't care, but because patience like that isn't natural. It goes against every instinct you have, watching a scared animal and wanting to just fix it today, right now, with one good meal and a soft voice. It doesn't work that way. It was never going to work that way. And the fact that someone didn't give up on this particular dog — that they let the timeline be the dog's timeline instead of their own — is the actual plot of the video you're about to watch. Not the reunion. The waiting. PART THREE: WHAT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT REBUILDING TRUST You can't apologize your way into an animal's trust. You can't explain to a dog that you're not like the last person, that this time is different, that you promise. Words mean nothing to an animal whose entire understanding of humans has been written in actions. The only currency that works is repetition — showing up the same way, at the same pace, without asking for anything back, for so long that the dog's nervous system slowly, grudgingly, starts to recalibrate what a human standing nearby actually means. That recalibration has a cost, and the cost is time you don't get to see the value of until it's already paid. Every single day where nothing visibly changes is still doing something. The dog is watching. Filing data. Building, molecule by molecule, a case for why this particular human might be the exception. You don't get updates on that internal process. You just keep showing up and hope the math eventually tips in your favor. And when it does tip — when there's a first moment of contact, a first inch of distance closed that will never open back up the same way again — it doesn't look like a movie. It's not slow motion. It's not a soundtrack swelling. It's small, and quiet, and if you weren't paying close attention you'd almost miss it. Which is exactly why you need to actually watch this one instead of scrolling past assuming you already know how it goes. You don't. Nobody's story of rebuilding trust looks the same, and this one has a shape you haven't seen before. PART FOUR: THE CASUAL CRUELTY OF "JUST GET RID OF IT" Let's go back to that sentence, because I don't think we're done with it. Just shoot him dead. Think about what has to happen in a person's head for those words to come out that easily. It's not usually rage. Rage burns hot and fast and then it's gone. This is colder than that. This is the language of someone who has stopped seeing a living creature as a living creature and started seeing him as an inconvenience with a heartbeat — a problem to be solved, a line item to be closed, and closing it in the most permanent, least effortful way available. That mindset doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from a culture that has quietly taught a lot of people that animals are disposable the second they stop being convenient. That a dog is a product with a return policy. That love, if it was ever there at all, expires the moment it becomes inconvenient. You see it in the volume of animals abandoned every single year for reasons that amount to "we changed our minds." You see it in how easily people say "I'll just get another one" like a dog is a phone case. You see it in a sentence like the one that started this whole post — a sentence casual enough that the person saying it probably forgot they said it by the following week. But here's the thing about casual cruelty: it only wins if nobody's watching, and if nobody's willing to do the inconvenient thing instead. The inconvenient thing here wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a rescue montage. It was choosing, day after day, not to be the kind of person who says that sentence. It was choosing patience over convenience, presence over ultimatums, and a scared dog's timeline over anyone else's schedule. That's not a headline. That's just what actually saving something looks like, most of the time — unglamorous, slow, and completely invisible until suddenly it isn't. PART FIVE: THE QUESTION UNDERNEATH THE VIDEO Here's what I actually want you to sit with while you watch this, more than the dog, more than the backstory, more than the sentence that kicked the whole thing off: what would you have done? Not in theory. Not as the version of yourself that definitely would have been patient and kind and consistent for however many months or years it took. I mean actually — if a scared, unwanted animal showed up on your property and kept its distance for weeks, would you have kept showing up? If it took longer than you expected, would your patience have held? If someone told you it wasn't worth the effort, would you have believed them? Most people like to believe they'd be the exception. Most people, if we're honest, would've given up around week three. That's not a judgment — patience like that is genuinely hard, and most of us are stretched thin enough in our own lives without taking on a slow-motion trust rebuild with an animal who might never fully come around. But some people don't give up. Some people treat a scared, unwanted dog like he's worth more time than the person who wanted him dead ever gave him. And when you watch someone do that — really watch it, not skim past it — it recalibrates something in you too. It's hard to explain why watching a stranger be patient with a dog on the internet can hit as hard as it does. But it does. It always does. There's something in us that recognizes the shape of a second chance being handed to someone — something — who was told they didn't deserve one. PART SIX: WHY THIS ISN'T JUST A DOG VIDEO I know how this sounds. "It's just a dog video." I've said that about other videos too, right before they wrecked me completely. But there's a reason stories like this one land differently than the average "look how cute" clip. It's because underneath the surface, this isn't really about a dog. It's about the exact same question that shows up everywhere in human life, just translated into fur and silence and body language instead of words: what do you do with something — someone — who has been told they're not worth saving? Everyone reading this knows a version of that story that isn't about an animal. Maybe it's a person who was written off young and spent years proving the label wrong. Maybe it's a relationship everyone said wasn't worth the work. Maybe it's a version of yourself from a few years ago that a lot of people, maybe even you, had already given up on. The instinct to walk away from something difficult, something that isn't guaranteed to work out, something that might take way longer than feels reasonable — that instinct doesn't care whether the "something" has four legs or two. It shows up everywhere. And every time someone chooses to stay anyway, chooses the slow rebuild over the easy exit, it's worth paying attention to. Not because it's rare. Because it's rare enough that most of us forget it's even an option. PART SEVEN: WATCH IT PROPERLY So here's my actual ask, and it's a small one. Don't watch this with the sound off while you scroll to the next thing. Don't skip to the end because you already think you know how it goes — you don't, and skipping ahead will genuinely cost you the part that makes this different from every other rescue video you've seen this year. Watch the whole thing, start to finish, and pay attention to the parts that feel like nothing is happening. That's not filler. That's the actual story. The part where nothing seems to be happening is the part where everything is happening, quietly, underneath the surface, one cautious step at a time. By the time you get to the end, you'll understand exactly why that opening sentence exists at all — why I needed you to hear it before you saw a single frame. Because without it, this just looks like a dog being sweet. With it, you understand what that sweetness had to survive to exist. You understand what it costs an animal to trust again after someone decided his life wasn't worth the trouble of finding him a home. You understand that every soft moment in this video is standing on top of a decision that almost went the other way, made by someone who chose completely differently than the person before them. There is a version of this story that ends in a hole in the ground, unmarked, unremembered, unfilmed. Nobody would have known. That's the version that happens more often than any of us want to think about. This isn't that version. This is the other one — the rare one, the one that only exists because somebody looked at the same "inconvenient" animal that someone else wanted gone and decided that inconvenient wasn't the same thing as disposable. You're not going to get the details from me. You're going to have to watch it. But I'll tell you this much: by the end, "just shoot him dead" is going to sound less like a sentence someone said about a dog, and a lot more like a sentence that tells you everything you need to know about the person who said it — and absolutely nothing about the dog who proved them wrong. Watch until the very last second. The last few frames are the whole reason this post exists. If this hit you the way it hit me, don't just scroll past it silently. Send it to the one person in your life who still believes some things — some animals, some people — aren't worth the effort of saving. Let them sit with it the way I made you sit with that first sentence. Some verdicts deserve to be overturned in public. PART EIGHT: THE BIOLOGY OF A FLINCH There's a reason a dog like this doesn't just "get over it" the way people want him to. Fear like that isn't a personality trait. It's a nervous system that got rewired by repetition, the same way trust gets built by repetition — except rewiring fear takes a fraction of the time and undoing it takes ten times as long. One bad hand can undo a hundred good ones if it lands at the wrong moment. That's not the dog being dramatic. That's just how threat memory works in every mammal on this planet, humans included. You don't choose to flinch. Your body decides for you, based on evidence it collected before you were old enough to argue with it. So when you watch an animal hesitate at a hand that means no harm, you're not watching stubbornness. You're watching a very reasonable, very intelligent risk calculation running in real time, built entirely out of things that happened to him before anyone in this story ever showed up. The tragedy isn't that he was cautious. The tragedy is that caution was earned, fairly, by people who never had to answer for teaching it to him. What gets me every time I think about stories like this one is how much strength it actually takes to be cautious and still, eventually, choose to try again anyway. We love to talk about bravery like it only looks one way — loud, dramatic, obvious. Nobody talks about the bravery of a scared animal taking one more step toward a species that has already hurt him, on nothing but a hope that this time might be different. That's not the absence of fear. That's fear, fully present, being overridden by something even stronger. If you want to know what real courage looks like, it rarely looks like a superhero. More often it looks exactly like this — small, quiet, four-legged, and completely unaware that anyone's even watching. PART NINE: THE OTHER DOG NOBODY'S TALKING ABOUT There's a supporting character in this story who never asked to be one, and who honestly deserves more credit than he's going to get in the comments section. Every rescue story like this one has a hidden variable that nobody accounts for: the animal who was already there. The one who didn't have to share space, didn't have to share attention, didn't have to be patient with a nervous, unpredictable newcomer showing up on his territory uninvited. He could have made this so much harder. He didn't. And that quiet, uncomplicated generosity — the kind you only get from an animal who has never once calculated whether kindness is worth the risk — is doing more heavy lifting in this story than most people watching will ever notice. It's worth sitting with that for a second, too. Some of the most important characters in any redemption story aren't the ones being redeemed. They're the ones who simply didn't complicate it. Who didn't guard the door. Who treated a stranger's fear as something to be curious about instead of something to be threatened by. If there's a lesson buried in a dog who never asked for one, it might be that one. PART TEN: WHY THE INTERNET IS FULL OF FAKE VERSIONS OF THIS You've probably noticed there's an entire genre of content built around manufactured redemption arcs — staged rescues, dogs that were never actually in danger, timelines compressed into a single afternoon to make the "transformation" hit harder on camera. I'm not going to pretend that genre doesn't exist, because you've almost certainly seen it and been burned by it before, which is exactly why so many people scroll past real stories with the same skepticism they've built up for the fake ones. That skepticism is earned. It's also, in this case, going to work against you if you let it make you scroll past this one too. The difference between the manufactured version and the real one is almost always pacing. The fake version wants to get to the payoff as fast as possible because the payoff is the whole point of making it. The real version drags in places, hesitates in places, spends way too long on moments that don't look like anything is happening — because that's what actually rebuilding trust with a frightened animal looks like when nobody's editing it for maximum dopamine. If a story like this feels slower than you expected, that's not a flaw. That's the tell that it's real. Real trust doesn't hit its mark on a fifteen-second cut. PART ELEVEN: A NOTE FOR ANYONE WHO'S EVER FELT LIKE THE DOG IN THIS STORY I said earlier this isn't just a dog video, and I meant it, but I want to say the quiet part directly instead of leaving it as subtext. If you've ever been the "too much" one — too sensitive, too cautious, too slow to trust, too hard to love without a manual — this story is for you specifically, not just as a metaphor but as evidence. Evidence that the people who wanted to give up on you were wrong about what you were worth, the same way the person in this story was wrong. Evidence that being difficult to reach doesn't mean you're not worth reaching. Evidence that the right kind of patience doesn't get tired of you the way the wrong kind of person did. You don't owe anyone an explanation for how long it takes you to trust again after something breaks that trust. Nobody gets to put a timeline on your healing just because your timeline is inconvenient for them. The dog in this video didn't apologize for taking as long as he took, and he shouldn't have had to. Neither should you. The people worth keeping in your life are the ones who show up consistently enough, for long enough, without demanding a schedule for when you'll finally feel safe. Everyone else was never actually offering you safety in the first place. They were offering you a deadline. PART TWELVE: THE LAST THING I'LL SAY BEFORE YOU GO WATCH IT I've spent this entire post refusing to tell you what actually happens, and I'm going to keep doing that right up until the end, because the not-knowing is doing exactly what it's supposed to do — it's making you want to see it for yourself instead of taking my word for it. Good. That's the point. Some stories lose everything the second you summarize them. This is one of them. You can read a thousand words about the shape of trust being rebuilt, and none of them will land the way thirty seconds of actual footage will, because words can describe hesitation but they can't make you feel the seconds stretching while it happens. So go watch it. Watch the whole thing, not the highlight, not someone else's twelve-second repost with the context stripped out. Watch it start to finish, the way it was meant to be seen, and pay attention to how long the hard parts last compared to how short the resolution feels — because that ratio is the entire point. That imbalance, months of nothing followed by moments of everything, is what real change actually looks like, in dogs and in people both. It's never as fast as we want it to be. It's always worth it anyway. Somebody said "just shoot him dead" about a dog who turned out to be worth all of this. Go find out exactly how wrong they were. PART THIRTEEN: WHAT YOU'LL PROBABLY DO AFTER YOU WATCH IT I already know roughly how this goes, because it goes the same way every time a story like this actually lands. You'll watch it once, quickly, half-distracted, the way you watch most things in a feed built to keep you moving. And then something in the pacing, or the eyes, or the exact moment the hesitation breaks, is going to make you go back and watch it a second time, slower, actually paying attention this time. That second watch is always the one that gets people. The first watch is for your eyes. The second watch is for whatever part of you still remembers what it feels like to be given up on. Then you'll do the thing everyone does — you'll look at the comments, half expecting someone to have ruined it with a joke, and instead you'll find a wall of strangers who all had the exact same reaction you did, which is somehow both comforting and a little unsettling, because it means this feeling isn't rare. It means a lot of us are quietly carrying around the same soft spot for stories about being chosen after everyone else already walked away. We don't talk about that soft spot very often. We just recognize it instantly in each other whenever something like this shows up in the feed. And then, if the story really got you, you'll do the thing I already asked you to do earlier, except now you'll actually mean it — you'll send it to somebody. Not because you think they haven't seen a rescue video before. Because you want them to sit with that opening sentence the exact way you just did, cold, before they know how it ends. You want to watch their reaction the way someone once wanted to watch yours. That's not manipulation. That's just what people do with stories that matter to them. We pass them forward, hoping they land on someone the way they landed on us. PART FOURTEEN: THE ONE THING I WON'T LET YOU FORGET Before you go tap play, I need you to hold onto one detail, because it's the thread that ties this whole post together and it's easy to lose in a feed that moves as fast as this one does. The dog in this story is not a rare exception. He is not a lottery winner. He is one version, filmed and shared and lucky enough to have someone stubborn enough to see it through, of something that is happening constantly, everywhere, to animals who will never get a camera pointed at them and never get a caption written about them. For every one of him, there are dozens who got the other verdict. The one nobody films. The one that ends exactly where the sentence said it would. That's not meant to guilt you. It's meant to make the three minutes you're about to spend mean something more than entertainment. Every view, every share, every person who stops scrolling long enough to actually watch instead of skip, is a tiny, almost meaningless vote for the version of the story where patience wins instead of convenience. It won't save the ones who already didn't make it. But it might be the reason the next version of this story — the next scared animal on the next uncertain property, in front of the next person deciding whether he's worth the trouble — gets a different ending than the one that almost happened here. So watch it properly. Watch the pauses. Watch the eyes. Watch exactly how long it takes for something to shift, and remember that every second of that footage is standing on top of a decision someone made not to give up when giving up would have been so much easier, and so much faster, and so much more convenient. Somebody wanted him dead. Somebody else decided he was worth all of this instead. Now go watch which one turned out to be right.
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Someone stood on a piece of land, looked at a living, breathing dog who had done nothing but exist, and said: "Just shoot him dead." Not "get rid of him." Not "take him to a shelter." Not even "I don't want him anymore." Shoot him dead. I want you to sit with that sentence for a second before you keep scrolling, because everything that comes after it only makes sense once you understand how casually those five words get said in this world. Somewhere, right now, someone is saying a version of that sentence about a living thing that trusted them, or wanted to, or was still learning how. Most of the time nobody films it. Most of the time there's no ending. There's just a decision, made in under a second, by someone who will forget they ever made it. This time, someone didn't listen. This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you what happens next. I'm not going to. Not because I'm holding it hostage for engagement — okay, maybe a little — but mostly because the story doesn't work if I hand it to you pre-chewed. You need to watch a dog decide, in real time, whether the human species is worth the risk. You need to watch that calculation happen behind a pair of eyes that have every reason to say no. That's not something I can describe to you in a tweet. That's something you have to sit through. But I can tell you what it's about. It's about the gap. The invisible, unmeasurable gap between a dog who has been failed by people and a dog who has decided to try again anyway. Nobody talks about that gap. We talk about rescues like they're a single moment — the dramatic snatch, the shelter cage, the "and then everything was fine" — but that's not how trust works, and it's definitely not how fear works. Fear doesn't leave because you fed it once. Fear moves out slowly, one inch at a time, and it takes its shoes off at the door so you don't hear it coming back. PART ONE: THE VERDICT Here's what almost nobody says out loud: dogs get sentenced constantly, by people who will never be held accountable for the sentence. Too old. Too much energy. Too expensive. Doesn't match the new couch. Growled once at a toddler who was pulling its ears. In goes the verdict, out goes the dog — sometimes to a shelter, sometimes to a shed, sometimes to the side of a highway at 60 miles an hour with the door still swinging shut. And sometimes, if the owner is lazy enough and cruel enough at the same time, the sentence is the one you already read. Just shoot him dead. Nobody ever asks the dog's side. Obviously. He can't testify. He can't explain that he was scared of the vacuum, or that he barked at 2am because something moved in the yard, or that he never asked to be born into a house that saw him as a liability the second he became inconvenient. All he can do is react to what happens to him. And what happened to this one was a verdict that most animals never survive to tell. Except — spoiler-adjacent, not a spoiler — he did survive. That's the only thing I'll give you for free. He survived the verdict. What he did with the rest of the sentence, what it cost him to survive it, what he had to unlearn about people before he could stand near one without flinching — that's the part you're going to want your full attention for. PART TWO: THE DISTANCE THAT NOBODY MEASURES There's a very specific kind of animal behavior that people who haven't lived it will never fully understand: the dog who wants to come closer and physically cannot make his legs do it. You've maybe seen a version of it — the shelter dog pressed against the back wall of the kennel, the street dog who follows you for six blocks but won't take food from your hand, the "feral" label slapped onto an animal who is, underneath the label, simply doing math. Every approach is a risk assessment. Every human hand is a variable that could be gentle or could be the last thing he ever feels. You don't get to skip that math just because your intentions are good. The dog doesn't know your intentions. He only knows what hands have done before. So he keeps his distance. Not because he's unfriendly — dogs who've been failed are very often the most desperate to be loved, which is its own kind of tragic irony — but because distance is the only insurance policy he has left. He'll circle. He'll watch. He'll get close enough to almost, almost, and then something — a sound, a movement, a memory with no name attached to it — will send him back to the treeline, and you'll be left standing there wondering what you did wrong, when the honest answer is: nothing. It's not about you. It's about every hand that came before yours. This is the part of the story where most people give up. Not because they don't care, but because patience like that isn't natural. It goes against every instinct you have, watching a scared animal and wanting to just fix it today, right now, with one good meal and a soft voice. It doesn't work that way. It was never going to work that way. And the fact that someone didn't give up on this particular dog — that they let the timeline be the dog's timeline instead of their own — is the actual plot of the video you're about to watch. Not the reunion. The waiting. PART THREE: WHAT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT REBUILDING TRUST You can't apologize your way into an animal's trust. You can't explain to a dog that you're not like the last person, that this time is different, that you promise. Words mean nothing to an animal whose entire understanding of humans has been written in actions. The only currency that works is repetition — showing up the same way, at the same pace, without asking for anything back, for so long that the dog's nervous system slowly, grudgingly, starts to recalibrate what a human standing nearby actually means. That recalibration has a cost, and the cost is time you don't get to see the value of until it's already paid. Every single day where nothing visibly changes is still doing something. The dog is watching. Filing data. Building, molecule by molecule, a case for why this particular human might be the exception. You don't get updates on that internal process. You just keep showing up and hope the math eventually tips in your favor. And when it does tip — when there's a first moment of contact, a first inch of distance closed that will never open back up the same way again — it doesn't look like a movie. It's not slow motion. It's not a soundtrack swelling. It's small, and quiet, and if you weren't paying close attention you'd almost miss it. Which is exactly why you need to actually watch this one instead of scrolling past assuming you already know how it goes. You don't. Nobody's story of rebuilding trust looks the same, and this one has a shape you haven't seen before. PART FOUR: THE CASUAL CRUELTY OF "JUST GET RID OF IT" Let's go back to that sentence, because I don't think we're done with it. Just shoot him dead. Think about what has to happen in a person's head for those words to come out that easily. It's not usually rage. Rage burns hot and fast and then it's gone. This is colder than that. This is the language of someone who has stopped seeing a living creature as a living creature and started seeing him as an inconvenience with a heartbeat — a problem to be solved, a line item to be closed, and closing it in the most permanent, least effortful way available. That mindset doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from a culture that has quietly taught a lot of people that animals are disposable the second they stop being convenient. That a dog is a product with a return policy. That love, if it was ever there at all, expires the moment it becomes inconvenient. You see it in the volume of animals abandoned every single year for reasons that amount to "we changed our minds." You see it in how easily people say "I'll just get another one" like a dog is a phone case. You see it in a sentence like the one that started this whole post — a sentence casual enough that the person saying it probably forgot they said it by the following week. But here's the thing about casual cruelty: it only wins if nobody's watching, and if nobody's willing to do the inconvenient thing instead. The inconvenient thing here wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a rescue montage. It was choosing, day after day, not to be the kind of person who says that sentence. It was choosing patience over convenience, presence over ultimatums, and a scared dog's timeline over anyone else's schedule. That's not a headline. That's just what actually saving something looks like, most of the time — unglamorous, slow, and completely invisible until suddenly it isn't. PART FIVE: THE QUESTION UNDERNEATH THE VIDEO Here's what I actually want you to sit with while you watch this, more than the dog, more than the backstory, more than the sentence that kicked the whole thing off: what would you have done? Not in theory. Not as the version of yourself that definitely would have been patient and kind and consistent for however many months or years it took. I mean actually — if a scared, unwanted animal showed up on your property and kept its distance for weeks, would you have kept showing up? If it took longer than you expected, would your patience have held? If someone told you it wasn't worth the effort, would you have believed them? Most people like to believe they'd be the exception. Most people, if we're honest, would've given up around week three. That's not a judgment — patience like that is genuinely hard, and most of us are stretched thin enough in our own lives without taking on a slow-motion trust rebuild with an animal who might never fully come around. But some people don't give up. Some people treat a scared, unwanted dog like he's worth more time than the person who wanted him dead ever gave him. And when you watch someone do that — really watch it, not skim past it — it recalibrates something in you too. It's hard to explain why watching a stranger be patient with a dog on the internet can hit as hard as it does. But it does. It always does. There's something in us that recognizes the shape of a second chance being handed to someone — something — who was told they didn't deserve one. PART SIX: WHY THIS ISN'T JUST A DOG VIDEO I know how this sounds. "It's just a dog video." I've said that about other videos too, right before they wrecked me completely. But there's a reason stories like this one land differently than the average "look how cute" clip. It's because underneath the surface, this isn't really about a dog. It's about the exact same question that shows up everywhere in human life, just translated into fur and silence and body language instead of words: what do you do with something — someone — who has been told they're not worth saving? Everyone reading this knows a version of that story that isn't about an animal. Maybe it's a person who was written off young and spent years proving the label wrong. Maybe it's a relationship everyone said wasn't worth the work. Maybe it's a version of yourself from a few years ago that a lot of people, maybe even you, had already given up on. The instinct to walk away from something difficult, something that isn't guaranteed to work out, something that might take way longer than feels reasonable — that instinct doesn't care whether the "something" has four legs or two. It shows up everywhere. And every time someone chooses to stay anyway, chooses the slow rebuild over the easy exit, it's worth paying attention to. Not because it's rare. Because it's rare enough that most of us forget it's even an option. PART SEVEN: WATCH IT PROPERLY So here's my actual ask, and it's a small one. Don't watch this with the sound off while you scroll to the next thing. Don't skip to the end because you already think you know how it goes — you don't, and skipping ahead will genuinely cost you the part that makes this different from every other rescue video you've seen this year. Watch the whole thing, start to finish, and pay attention to the parts that feel like nothing is happening. That's not filler. That's the actual story. The part where nothing seems to be happening is the part where everything is happening, quietly, underneath the surface, one cautious step at a time. By the time you get to the end, you'll understand exactly why that opening sentence exists at all — why I needed you to hear it before you saw a single frame. Because without it, this just looks like a dog being sweet. With it, you understand what that sweetness had to survive to exist. You understand what it costs an animal to trust again after someone decided his life wasn't worth the trouble of finding him a home. You understand that every soft moment in this video is standing on top of a decision that almost went the other way, made by someone who chose completely differently than the person before them. There is a version of this story that ends in a hole in the ground, unmarked, unremembered, unfilmed. Nobody would have known. That's the version that happens more often than any of us want to think about. This isn't that version. This is the other one — the rare one, the one that only exists because somebody looked at the same "inconvenient" animal that someone else wanted gone and decided that inconvenient wasn't the same thing as disposable. You're not going to get the details from me. You're going to have to watch it. But I'll tell you this much: by the end, "just shoot him dead" is going to sound less like a sentence someone said about a dog, and a lot more like a sentence that tells you everything you need to know about the person who said it — and absolutely nothing about the dog who proved them wrong. Watch until the very last second. The last few frames are the whole reason this post exists. If this hit you the way it hit me, don't just scroll past it silently. Send it to the one person in your life who still believes some things — some animals, some people — aren't worth the effort of saving. Let them sit with it the way I made you sit with that first sentence. Some verdicts deserve to be overturned in public. PART EIGHT: THE BIOLOGY OF A FLINCH There's a reason a dog like this doesn't just "get over it" the way people want him to. Fear like that isn't a personality trait. It's a nervous system that got rewired by repetition, the same way trust gets built by repetition — except rewiring fear takes a fraction of the time and undoing it takes ten times as long. One bad hand can undo a hundred good ones if it lands at the wrong moment. That's not the dog being dramatic. That's just how threat memory works in every mammal on this planet, humans included. You don't choose to flinch. Your body decides for you, based on evidence it collected before you were old enough to argue with it. So when you watch an animal hesitate at a hand that means no harm, you're not watching stubbornness. You're watching a very reasonable, very intelligent risk calculation running in real time, built entirely out of things that happened to him before anyone in this story ever showed up. The tragedy isn't that he was cautious. The tragedy is that caution was earned, fairly, by people who never had to answer for teaching it to him. What gets me every time I think about stories like this one is how much strength it actually takes to be cautious and still, eventually, choose to try again anyway. We love to talk about bravery like it only looks one way — loud, dramatic, obvious. Nobody talks about the bravery of a scared animal taking one more step toward a species that has already hurt him, on nothing but a hope that this time might be different. That's not the absence of fear. That's fear, fully present, being overridden by something even stronger. If you want to know what real courage looks like, it rarely looks like a superhero. More often it looks exactly like this — small, quiet, four-legged, and completely unaware that anyone's even watching. PART NINE: THE OTHER DOG NOBODY'S TALKING ABOUT There's a supporting character in this story who never asked to be one, and who honestly deserves more credit than he's going to get in the comments section. Every rescue story like this one has a hidden variable that nobody accounts for: the animal who was already there. The one who didn't have to share space, didn't have to share attention, didn't have to be patient with a nervous, unpredictable newcomer showing up on his territory uninvited. He could have made this so much harder. He didn't. And that quiet, uncomplicated generosity — the kind you only get from an animal who has never once calculated whether kindness is worth the risk — is doing more heavy lifting in this story than most people watching will ever notice. It's worth sitting with that for a second, too. Some of the most important characters in any redemption story aren't the ones being redeemed. They're the ones who simply didn't complicate it. Who didn't guard the door. Who treated a stranger's fear as something to be curious about instead of something to be threatened by. If there's a lesson buried in a dog who never asked for one, it might be that one. PART TEN: WHY THE INTERNET IS FULL OF FAKE VERSIONS OF THIS You've probably noticed there's an entire genre of content built around manufactured redemption arcs — staged rescues, dogs that were never actually in danger, timelines compressed into a single afternoon to make the "transformation" hit harder on camera. I'm not going to pretend that genre doesn't exist, because you've almost certainly seen it and been burned by it before, which is exactly why so many people scroll past real stories with the same skepticism they've built up for the fake ones. That skepticism is earned. It's also, in this case, going to work against you if you let it make you scroll past this one too. The difference between the manufactured version and the real one is almost always pacing. The fake version wants to get to the payoff as fast as possible because the payoff is the whole point of making it. The real version drags in places, hesitates in places, spends way too long on moments that don't look like anything is happening — because that's what actually rebuilding trust with a frightened animal looks like when nobody's editing it for maximum dopamine. If a story like this feels slower than you expected, that's not a flaw. That's the tell that it's real. Real trust doesn't hit its mark on a fifteen-second cut. PART ELEVEN: A NOTE FOR ANYONE WHO'S EVER FELT LIKE THE DOG IN THIS STORY I said earlier this isn't just a dog video, and I meant it, but I want to say the quiet part directly instead of leaving it as subtext. If you've ever been the "too much" one — too sensitive, too cautious, too slow to trust, too hard to love without a manual — this story is for you specifically, not just as a metaphor but as evidence. Evidence that the people who wanted to give up on you were wrong about what you were worth, the same way the person in this story was wrong. Evidence that being difficult to reach doesn't mean you're not worth reaching. Evidence that the right kind of patience doesn't get tired of you the way the wrong kind of person did. You don't owe anyone an explanation for how long it takes you to trust again after something breaks that trust. Nobody gets to put a timeline on your healing just because your timeline is inconvenient for them. The dog in this video didn't apologize for taking as long as he took, and he shouldn't have had to. Neither should you. The people worth keeping in your life are the ones who show up consistently enough, for long enough, without demanding a schedule for when you'll finally feel safe. Everyone else was never actually offering you safety in the first place. They were offering you a deadline. PART TWELVE: THE LAST THING I'LL SAY BEFORE YOU GO WATCH IT I've spent this entire post refusing to tell you what actually happens, and I'm going to keep doing that right up until the end, because the not-knowing is doing exactly what it's supposed to do — it's making you want to see it for yourself instead of taking my word for it. Good. That's the point. Some stories lose everything the second you summarize them. This is one of them. You can read a thousand words about the shape of trust being rebuilt, and none of them will land the way thirty seconds of actual footage will, because words can describe hesitation but they can't make you feel the seconds stretching while it happens. So go watch it. Watch the whole thing, not the highlight, not someone else's twelve-second repost with the context stripped out. Watch it start to finish, the way it was meant to be seen, and pay attention to how long the hard parts last compared to how short the resolution feels — because that ratio is the entire point. That imbalance, months of nothing followed by moments of everything, is what real change actually looks like, in dogs and in people both. It's never as fast as we want it to be. It's always worth it anyway. Somebody said "just shoot him dead" about a dog who turned out to be worth all of this. Go find out exactly how wrong they were. PART THIRTEEN: WHAT YOU'LL PROBABLY DO AFTER YOU WATCH IT I already know roughly how this goes, because it goes the same way every time a story like this actually lands. You'll watch it once, quickly, half-distracted, the way you watch most things in a feed built to keep you moving. And then something in the pacing, or the eyes, or the exact moment the hesitation breaks, is going to make you go back and watch it a second time, slower, actually paying attention this time. That second watch is always the one that gets people. The first watch is for your eyes. The second watch is for whatever part of you still remembers what it feels like to be given up on. Then you'll do the thing everyone does — you'll look at the comments, half expecting someone to have ruined it with a joke, and instead you'll find a wall of strangers who all had the exact same reaction you did, which is somehow both comforting and a little unsettling, because it means this feeling isn't rare. It means a lot of us are quietly carrying around the same soft spot for stories about being chosen after everyone else already walked away. We don't talk about that soft spot very often. We just recognize it instantly in each other whenever something like this shows up in the feed. And then, if the story really got you, you'll do the thing I already asked you to do earlier, except now you'll actually mean it — you'll send it to somebody. Not because you think they haven't seen a rescue video before. Because you want them to sit with that opening sentence the exact way you just did, cold, before they know how it ends. You want to watch their reaction the way someone once wanted to watch yours. That's not manipulation. That's just what people do with stories that matter to them. We pass them forward, hoping they land on someone the way they landed on us. PART FOURTEEN: THE ONE THING I WON'T LET YOU FORGET Before you go tap play, I need you to hold onto one detail, because it's the thread that ties this whole post together and it's easy to lose in a feed that moves as fast as this one does. The dog in this story is not a rare exception. He is not a lottery winner. He is one version, filmed and shared and lucky enough to have someone stubborn enough to see it through, of something that is happening constantly, everywhere, to animals who will never get a camera pointed at them and never get a caption written about them. For every one of him, there are dozens who got the other verdict. The one nobody films. The one that ends exactly where the sentence said it would. That's not meant to guilt you. It's meant to make the three minutes you're about to spend mean something more than entertainment. Every view, every share, every person who stops scrolling long enough to actually watch instead of skip, is a tiny, almost meaningless vote for the version of the story where patience wins instead of convenience. It won't save the ones who already didn't make it. But it might be the reason the next version of this story — the next scared animal on the next uncertain property, in front of the next person deciding whether he's worth the trouble — gets a different ending than the one that almost happened here. So watch it properly. Watch the pauses. Watch the eyes. Watch exactly how long it takes for something to shift, and remember that every second of that footage is standing on top of a decision someone made not to give up when giving up would have been so much easier, and so much faster, and so much more convenient. Somebody wanted him dead. Somebody else decided he was worth all of this instead. Now go watch which one turned out to be right.

Earth Unveiled

70,985 views • 3 days ago

🚨 Do NOT buy Dr Bronner's DEMONIC PRODUCTS This is SERIOUS, throw ALL DR BRONNERS products in the trash! Don't believe me? Go to the store and read this for yourself. This demonic rant is written into every single one of the soap bottles: "The 2nd Coming of God’s Law!” Mohammed’s Arabs, 1948, found Israel Essene Scrolls & Einstein’s “Hillel” probe that as no 6-year-old can grow up free without the ABC, so certain can no 12-year-old survive free without the Moral ABC that mason, tent & sandalmaker Rabbi Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free in our Eternal Father’s great All-One-God-Faith! For we’re All-One or None: “Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!” Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, instantly 6 billion strong & we’re All-One. “Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!” From Jesus’ “Manual of Discipline,” based on Hillel’s Moral ABC , the Army of Principles of One-God-Faith, unites the Human race, as found 1948 by Mohammed’s Arabs in Israel Essene Scrolls! English by Soapmaker Bronner! Under one Eternal Father, I must teach friend & Enemy the full truth Moral ABC to unite all mankind free in One-God-Faith. To get it all done: A Beast can only listen to its friend! A Human Being must teach-love his Enemy or that being is not yet human! A shark can only love its friend. Lacking frontal lobes, it must avoid-fear-smear-hate-slander-dominate-dictate-distort-destroy anything it does not know, understand or disagrees with. That’s a shark. But a Human Being possessing the Kingdom of God’s Law, the Essene Moral ABC of the FREE within his frontal lobes, works hard to teach friend & enemy the Moral ABC, otherwise that being is not yet human. A Human Being is a constructive working scientist who knows, loves, follows, teaches Full Truth, God’s Law, to all of God’s Children, friend & Enemy, otherwise that being is not yet Human! Exceptions? None! The moment any being follows, tolerates or teaches earthen half-gods or half-truisms, that moment he becomes a godless, intolerant Beast, potentially 10 times more dangerous & destructive than any ordinary Shark-Snake-Rat or Panther! If we really want Brotherhood-Progress-Peace, not war, we must not only listen to the neighbor whom we choose, but also to the one God sends! Otherwise we’re still Beasts, not yet Human! Exceptions eternally? Absolutely None! Jesus’ Manual of Discipline, out of the mouth of subway-builder Nikita Khrushchev, April ’56, London, England “WE MUST TEACH LOVE OUR ENEMY OR PERISH! BEASTS TEACH ONLY THEIR FRIENDS!” But after 2,000 years it never got done! The godless beasts still disapproved! Result? These tremendous 13 words never got printed! Because the brilliant 48-year-young Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s book Peace of Mind was distorted after he dropped dead! Diagnosis? “Sudden heart attack!” Exactly as suffered by Rabbi Jesus, Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Samuel Friedman, Steiner-Prag and Rabbi Leo Baeck: 6 & 66 million “sudden heart attacks,” murders caused by us godless intolerant Beasts. Always we’re our Brother’s Teacher of hardworking full truth uniting One-God-State or we decay being his Keeper by unworkable half-true intolerant hate! He who risks his life teaching friend & Enemy the Moral ABC uniting all mankind free wins Eternal Life! He who does less than that perishes by half-truth strife. I am the Son of God and so are you! I am the manifestation of God’s Eternal Law & so are you! I have learned great wonders: you shall learn greater wonders! I have done good work! You shall do better work! I have not come to change God’s Law, but we each came to find-follow-fulfill, print-protect-practice-preach-teach & enjoy it! Therefore, build you 1st the Kingdom of God’s Eternal Law within you, that is, memorize the Essene Moral ABC of the Free, All-One-Faith-in-One-God-State! To never yield to half-true hate! And everything you need shall be added unto you! Search & you shall find! Knock & it shall be opened! Sow & you shall reap! Work hard & you shall create! Speak up - don’t be afraid! Ask & you shall receive! But remember, only those enjoy Eternal Life in our all-embracing Father’s Kingdom that had the courage to teach friend & Enemy the Moral ABC to unite all free! Eternally One, All-One! Exceptions? None! These are the great Peace-winning teachings of the Manual of Discipline by the carpenter, the great Rabbi Jesus! Thanks to Mohammed’s Arab 1948-found Essene Scrolls, thank only God for that! But now came unto Jesus, the Disciple; his own Sisters & Brothers to say, “It is insane what does he say! Let’s put him away!” And answered he to survive free: “Who are my Sisters & my Brothers? Only those that seek with me to teach full truth, the Moral ABC uniting all mankind free in One-God-State! Free of half-true hate! Those are my Sisters & Brothers! Others I know not!” But now his Disciples asked, “Then why, why are we God-loving Children of the great African shepherd Israel persecuted more than any other people! Why? Why? Why?” And answered he: “God bless the persecuted! They alone are His chosen people! For those apes that did not suffer from persecution remained apes! Only those that worked hard to overcome untold centuries of Barbaric ice-aged persecution, reluctantly became Human Beings! Much, much too reluctantly! Exceptions? Absolutely None!” To stay free: Only that full truth we have the courage to teach & give & give, can we enjoy to keep, evolve & live & live! Whatever we try to give at our death bed or take along, it absolute certain soon is gone! Exceptions eternally? None! Let him who is without fault throw the first stone, for only God is always perfect! Judge no man unless you have walked in his shoes! So when your fellow man you measure, take him at his best! With that lever lift him higher, overlook the rest! But remember, unless a man knows the Moral ABC of the Free, none can help him to survive brave-free! Let him who does not want to work with his hands, not eat with his hands either! Put Father’s discipline, put God’s Law back at the head of your family, or you have no family-nation-team! Remember, every organization is the shadow of one constructive man or there is no organization, no construction, no man! Self-disciplined timing is the skeleton of your intellect, the key to freedom, the basis of happiness, the foundation of Brotherhood! Without it, the most brilliant head remains useless-ineffective-small! From every power enchains, each man can only free himself as self-control he gains! Therefore, he who conquers himself, conquers more than he who conquers the largest city! THE MORAL ABC, INTRODUCED BY KIPLING’S “IF” & SOAPMAKER BRONNER If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs & blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, or being hated, don’t give way to hating! And yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same; If you can bear to hear the full truth that you have spoken, twisted by crooks to make a trap for fools; Or watch the things you have given your life to, broken, and yet stoop to build them up again with worn-out tools; If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it at one turn of pitch or toss; And lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss! If you can force your heart, your nerve, our sinew, to serve you long after they are gone, and so hold on although there is nothing left within you, except that voice which says to them: “Hold on! Hold on! “ If you can talk to crowds & keep your virtue; or walk with Kings—nor lose that common touch; If neither loving friend nor enemy can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much! Then, if you can work hard to teach each unforgiving minute the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, come hell, hate, ban, you’ll enjoy God’s Spaceship Earth & do great work within it! And which is more you’l help unite the human race in Astronomy’s great All-One-God-Faith! For we’re All-One of None! Sure, they say: “East is East & West is West & never the twain shall meet!” But there is neither East nor West, nor border, breed nor birth once the Moral ABC unites all mankind free on God’s Spaceship Earth! Then, and only then, no matter how rough the trip, how charged with punishment the scroll, you are the captain of thy ship! The master of thy soul! For who else but God gave man this sensors passion, love that can spark mere dust to life?! Beauty, in our Eternal father’s fashion, ecstasy—far above earthly greediness & strife! Poetry, uniting All-One, All-Brave, All-Life! Who else but God can make love last, one trillion years of sweet eternities?! For when conquered after years of hardworking absolute cleanliness, toil, sweat, blood, love can strike like greased lightning sent by God to spark mere dust to intense blazing fire and create new love, faith-hope-guts-strength as only God inspires, create the unity of the human race in Astronomy’s Eternally Tremendous, All-One-God-Faith, as all mankind desires! Bronner’s Lavender Soap quart poem teaches ‘How to love’ uniting all-one above! Above! Who else but God! 1st: If I’m not for me, who am I? Nobody! 2nd: Yet, if I’m only for me, what am I? Nothing! 3rd: If not now, when???!!! Once more, unless constructive I work hard, perfecting first me, absolute nothing can help perfect me! Exceptions none!! 4th: Only hard work-God’s Law can save us, but if we teach only our clan, we’re all hated then! So Hillel taught Jesus, we must teach friend & enemy, the whole Human race, the full-truth, hard-work, free speech, press-&-profitsharing Moral ABC’s All-One-God-Faith, uniting the whole Human Race! For we’re All-One or None! As teach for 6,000 years the astronomers Abraham & Israel, since the year One! “LISTEN CHILDREN ETERNAL FATHER ETERNALLY ONE!!!” Exceptions Eternally? Absolute None!!! To dream that impossible dream! To reach that unreachable star, ’til united All-One we are! To fight that unbeatable foe! To go where the brave dare not go! To right that unrightable wrong! To love pure-chaste from afar! To try when your arms are too weary to reach that unreachable star, ’til united All-One we are! For this is my goal: To reach that unreachable star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far! To fight for the Right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. For I know if I follow this glorious quest, that my heart will lay peaceful & calm when I’m laid to my rest. For I know that all will be better for this: that one man, tortured, blinded, covered with scars, still strove with his last ounce of courage, to reach that unreachable star, ’til united All-One we are! God our Eternal Father, know of old, Lord over our far-flung human race, beneath whose Eternal law we hold dominion over land and space—Lord God of nations, unite us yet, by teaching Thy Law, the Essene Moral ABC of the free, lest we forget! For foolish heart that puts its trust in man-made tube & iron sharp, all passing dust that builds on dust and guarding it, calls not You to guard, for frantic boast & foolish word-have mercy on Thy people, Lord! (A man and not a monkey! A man! A man!) Love is like a willful bird! Do you want it? It flies away! Yet, when you least expect its bliss, it turns around and it’s here to stay! For centuries man struggles, half-asleep, half-living, small, jealous, bickering with mountains of red tape, to be awakened, the night God chose giving; His great reward for hard work; Poetry-Unity-Love, evolving man above the ape! Poetry-Unity-Ecstasy-Love, evolving man above, above, above the ape! For any ape can have 5 minutes of sex within; Only man, absolutely clean, reciting poetry, enjoys hours and hours of loving self-discipline! Co-in-ci-dent-ally and yet oh-so-slow, sweet kisses whisper softly into waiting ears, arousing heavenly flames, that enlighten, renew, brilliant fires, blazing through dark lonesome years! For who else but God gave man this sensuous passion, love that can spark mere dust to life?! Passions that quicken your senses, fulfill quench the thirst of lonesome years! Yet, the sun has shadows: learn to control your will, to enjoy lifelong happiness, not tears! Dr. Bronner’s was founded in 1948 by Emanuel Bronner, a third generation German-Jewish soap maker. He used the labels on his ecological soaps to spread his message that we must realize our transcendent unity across religious and ethnic divides or perish: “We are All-One or None!” The business continues to be run by his family. From ’29 to ’44 soapmaker-master-chemist Bronner built 3 American Soap plants, trained 9 chemists, licensed 6 of 53 patents for $60,000! But after losing father-mother-wife, almost his own life, tortured-blinded, he deeded to African astronomer Israel’s 6,000 year great All-One-God-Faith all of his patents, plants, products, profits, 4 new industries: Planetemples & “Town Without Toothache” potassium-soda industry giving mankind a new Mineral-salt, Calcium-malt, Corn-sesame, Mineral-bouillon, & ‘Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps,’ All-One! In ’47, after father-mother-wife murdered, ourself tortured-blinded, we wrote this poem: To keep my health! To do my work! To love, to live! To see to it I gain & grow & give & give! Never to look behind me for an hour! Never to wait in weakness nor brag in power! Always working, searching, for more truth, more light! Always writing, teaching what I found good & right! Robbed-starved-beaten-blinded, wide astray! Back with the full-truth I’ve gained, back to the way: Smile, help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith, Lightning-like strong & we’re All-One! All One!
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🚨 Do NOT buy Dr Bronner's DEMONIC PRODUCTS This is SERIOUS, throw ALL DR BRONNERS products in the trash! Don't believe me? Go to the store and read this for yourself. This demonic rant is written into every single one of the soap bottles: "The 2nd Coming of God’s Law!” Mohammed’s Arabs, 1948, found Israel Essene Scrolls & Einstein’s “Hillel” probe that as no 6-year-old can grow up free without the ABC, so certain can no 12-year-old survive free without the Moral ABC that mason, tent & sandalmaker Rabbi Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free in our Eternal Father’s great All-One-God-Faith! For we’re All-One or None: “Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!” Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, instantly 6 billion strong & we’re All-One. “Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!” From Jesus’ “Manual of Discipline,” based on Hillel’s Moral ABC , the Army of Principles of One-God-Faith, unites the Human race, as found 1948 by Mohammed’s Arabs in Israel Essene Scrolls! English by Soapmaker Bronner! Under one Eternal Father, I must teach friend & Enemy the full truth Moral ABC to unite all mankind free in One-God-Faith. To get it all done: A Beast can only listen to its friend! A Human Being must teach-love his Enemy or that being is not yet human! A shark can only love its friend. Lacking frontal lobes, it must avoid-fear-smear-hate-slander-dominate-dictate-distort-destroy anything it does not know, understand or disagrees with. That’s a shark. But a Human Being possessing the Kingdom of God’s Law, the Essene Moral ABC of the FREE within his frontal lobes, works hard to teach friend & enemy the Moral ABC, otherwise that being is not yet human. A Human Being is a constructive working scientist who knows, loves, follows, teaches Full Truth, God’s Law, to all of God’s Children, friend & Enemy, otherwise that being is not yet Human! Exceptions? None! The moment any being follows, tolerates or teaches earthen half-gods or half-truisms, that moment he becomes a godless, intolerant Beast, potentially 10 times more dangerous & destructive than any ordinary Shark-Snake-Rat or Panther! If we really want Brotherhood-Progress-Peace, not war, we must not only listen to the neighbor whom we choose, but also to the one God sends! Otherwise we’re still Beasts, not yet Human! Exceptions eternally? Absolutely None! Jesus’ Manual of Discipline, out of the mouth of subway-builder Nikita Khrushchev, April ’56, London, England “WE MUST TEACH LOVE OUR ENEMY OR PERISH! BEASTS TEACH ONLY THEIR FRIENDS!” But after 2,000 years it never got done! The godless beasts still disapproved! Result? These tremendous 13 words never got printed! Because the brilliant 48-year-young Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s book Peace of Mind was distorted after he dropped dead! Diagnosis? “Sudden heart attack!” Exactly as suffered by Rabbi Jesus, Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Samuel Friedman, Steiner-Prag and Rabbi Leo Baeck: 6 & 66 million “sudden heart attacks,” murders caused by us godless intolerant Beasts. Always we’re our Brother’s Teacher of hardworking full truth uniting One-God-State or we decay being his Keeper by unworkable half-true intolerant hate! He who risks his life teaching friend & Enemy the Moral ABC uniting all mankind free wins Eternal Life! He who does less than that perishes by half-truth strife. I am the Son of God and so are you! I am the manifestation of God’s Eternal Law & so are you! I have learned great wonders: you shall learn greater wonders! I have done good work! You shall do better work! I have not come to change God’s Law, but we each came to find-follow-fulfill, print-protect-practice-preach-teach & enjoy it! Therefore, build you 1st the Kingdom of God’s Eternal Law within you, that is, memorize the Essene Moral ABC of the Free, All-One-Faith-in-One-God-State! To never yield to half-true hate! And everything you need shall be added unto you! Search & you shall find! Knock & it shall be opened! Sow & you shall reap! Work hard & you shall create! Speak up - don’t be afraid! Ask & you shall receive! But remember, only those enjoy Eternal Life in our all-embracing Father’s Kingdom that had the courage to teach friend & Enemy the Moral ABC to unite all free! Eternally One, All-One! Exceptions? None! These are the great Peace-winning teachings of the Manual of Discipline by the carpenter, the great Rabbi Jesus! Thanks to Mohammed’s Arab 1948-found Essene Scrolls, thank only God for that! But now came unto Jesus, the Disciple; his own Sisters & Brothers to say, “It is insane what does he say! Let’s put him away!” And answered he to survive free: “Who are my Sisters & my Brothers? Only those that seek with me to teach full truth, the Moral ABC uniting all mankind free in One-God-State! Free of half-true hate! Those are my Sisters & Brothers! Others I know not!” But now his Disciples asked, “Then why, why are we God-loving Children of the great African shepherd Israel persecuted more than any other people! Why? Why? Why?” And answered he: “God bless the persecuted! They alone are His chosen people! For those apes that did not suffer from persecution remained apes! Only those that worked hard to overcome untold centuries of Barbaric ice-aged persecution, reluctantly became Human Beings! Much, much too reluctantly! Exceptions? Absolutely None!” To stay free: Only that full truth we have the courage to teach & give & give, can we enjoy to keep, evolve & live & live! Whatever we try to give at our death bed or take along, it absolute certain soon is gone! Exceptions eternally? None! Let him who is without fault throw the first stone, for only God is always perfect! Judge no man unless you have walked in his shoes! So when your fellow man you measure, take him at his best! With that lever lift him higher, overlook the rest! But remember, unless a man knows the Moral ABC of the Free, none can help him to survive brave-free! Let him who does not want to work with his hands, not eat with his hands either! Put Father’s discipline, put God’s Law back at the head of your family, or you have no family-nation-team! Remember, every organization is the shadow of one constructive man or there is no organization, no construction, no man! Self-disciplined timing is the skeleton of your intellect, the key to freedom, the basis of happiness, the foundation of Brotherhood! Without it, the most brilliant head remains useless-ineffective-small! From every power enchains, each man can only free himself as self-control he gains! Therefore, he who conquers himself, conquers more than he who conquers the largest city! THE MORAL ABC, INTRODUCED BY KIPLING’S “IF” & SOAPMAKER BRONNER If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs & blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, or being hated, don’t give way to hating! And yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same; If you can bear to hear the full truth that you have spoken, twisted by crooks to make a trap for fools; Or watch the things you have given your life to, broken, and yet stoop to build them up again with worn-out tools; If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it at one turn of pitch or toss; And lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss! If you can force your heart, your nerve, our sinew, to serve you long after they are gone, and so hold on although there is nothing left within you, except that voice which says to them: “Hold on! Hold on! “ If you can talk to crowds & keep your virtue; or walk with Kings—nor lose that common touch; If neither loving friend nor enemy can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much! Then, if you can work hard to teach each unforgiving minute the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, come hell, hate, ban, you’ll enjoy God’s Spaceship Earth & do great work within it! And which is more you’l help unite the human race in Astronomy’s great All-One-God-Faith! For we’re All-One of None! Sure, they say: “East is East & West is West & never the twain shall meet!” But there is neither East nor West, nor border, breed nor birth once the Moral ABC unites all mankind free on God’s Spaceship Earth! Then, and only then, no matter how rough the trip, how charged with punishment the scroll, you are the captain of thy ship! The master of thy soul! For who else but God gave man this sensors passion, love that can spark mere dust to life?! Beauty, in our Eternal father’s fashion, ecstasy—far above earthly greediness & strife! Poetry, uniting All-One, All-Brave, All-Life! Who else but God can make love last, one trillion years of sweet eternities?! For when conquered after years of hardworking absolute cleanliness, toil, sweat, blood, love can strike like greased lightning sent by God to spark mere dust to intense blazing fire and create new love, faith-hope-guts-strength as only God inspires, create the unity of the human race in Astronomy’s Eternally Tremendous, All-One-God-Faith, as all mankind desires! Bronner’s Lavender Soap quart poem teaches ‘How to love’ uniting all-one above! Above! Who else but God! 1st: If I’m not for me, who am I? Nobody! 2nd: Yet, if I’m only for me, what am I? Nothing! 3rd: If not now, when???!!! Once more, unless constructive I work hard, perfecting first me, absolute nothing can help perfect me! Exceptions none!! 4th: Only hard work-God’s Law can save us, but if we teach only our clan, we’re all hated then! So Hillel taught Jesus, we must teach friend & enemy, the whole Human race, the full-truth, hard-work, free speech, press-&-profitsharing Moral ABC’s All-One-God-Faith, uniting the whole Human Race! For we’re All-One or None! As teach for 6,000 years the astronomers Abraham & Israel, since the year One! “LISTEN CHILDREN ETERNAL FATHER ETERNALLY ONE!!!” Exceptions Eternally? Absolute None!!! To dream that impossible dream! To reach that unreachable star, ’til united All-One we are! To fight that unbeatable foe! To go where the brave dare not go! To right that unrightable wrong! To love pure-chaste from afar! To try when your arms are too weary to reach that unreachable star, ’til united All-One we are! For this is my goal: To reach that unreachable star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far! To fight for the Right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. For I know if I follow this glorious quest, that my heart will lay peaceful & calm when I’m laid to my rest. For I know that all will be better for this: that one man, tortured, blinded, covered with scars, still strove with his last ounce of courage, to reach that unreachable star, ’til united All-One we are! God our Eternal Father, know of old, Lord over our far-flung human race, beneath whose Eternal law we hold dominion over land and space—Lord God of nations, unite us yet, by teaching Thy Law, the Essene Moral ABC of the free, lest we forget! For foolish heart that puts its trust in man-made tube & iron sharp, all passing dust that builds on dust and guarding it, calls not You to guard, for frantic boast & foolish word-have mercy on Thy people, Lord! (A man and not a monkey! A man! A man!) Love is like a willful bird! Do you want it? It flies away! Yet, when you least expect its bliss, it turns around and it’s here to stay! For centuries man struggles, half-asleep, half-living, small, jealous, bickering with mountains of red tape, to be awakened, the night God chose giving; His great reward for hard work; Poetry-Unity-Love, evolving man above the ape! Poetry-Unity-Ecstasy-Love, evolving man above, above, above the ape! For any ape can have 5 minutes of sex within; Only man, absolutely clean, reciting poetry, enjoys hours and hours of loving self-discipline! Co-in-ci-dent-ally and yet oh-so-slow, sweet kisses whisper softly into waiting ears, arousing heavenly flames, that enlighten, renew, brilliant fires, blazing through dark lonesome years! For who else but God gave man this sensuous passion, love that can spark mere dust to life?! Passions that quicken your senses, fulfill quench the thirst of lonesome years! Yet, the sun has shadows: learn to control your will, to enjoy lifelong happiness, not tears! Dr. Bronner’s was founded in 1948 by Emanuel Bronner, a third generation German-Jewish soap maker. He used the labels on his ecological soaps to spread his message that we must realize our transcendent unity across religious and ethnic divides or perish: “We are All-One or None!” The business continues to be run by his family. From ’29 to ’44 soapmaker-master-chemist Bronner built 3 American Soap plants, trained 9 chemists, licensed 6 of 53 patents for $60,000! But after losing father-mother-wife, almost his own life, tortured-blinded, he deeded to African astronomer Israel’s 6,000 year great All-One-God-Faith all of his patents, plants, products, profits, 4 new industries: Planetemples & “Town Without Toothache” potassium-soda industry giving mankind a new Mineral-salt, Calcium-malt, Corn-sesame, Mineral-bouillon, & ‘Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps,’ All-One! In ’47, after father-mother-wife murdered, ourself tortured-blinded, we wrote this poem: To keep my health! To do my work! To love, to live! To see to it I gain & grow & give & give! Never to look behind me for an hour! Never to wait in weakness nor brag in power! Always working, searching, for more truth, more light! Always writing, teaching what I found good & right! Robbed-starved-beaten-blinded, wide astray! Back with the full-truth I’ve gained, back to the way: Smile, help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith, Lightning-like strong & we’re All-One! All One!

Giga Based Dad

192,394 views • 2 months ago

Warren Buffett turns 93 today! To celebrate, I'm sharing the greatest lecture he ever gave together with his 94 (!) best investment quotes. 1. Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1. 2. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing. 3. Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages. 4. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies. 5. American business - and consequently a basket of stocks - is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. 6. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. 7. And so the important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. 8. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 9. Bitcoin has no unique value at all. 10. Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you'd be content to own it in the absence of any market. 11. The years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines - even panics - that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur. 12. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. 13. Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. 14. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments. 15. I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. 16. The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history. 17. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. 18. Among the various propositions offered to you, if you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years - you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. 19. Because if you're wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don't think they will, you pay it off. It's a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you've got a one-way bet. 20. Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. 21. Don't get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn't the key but being a crowd follower isn't either. You need to detach yourself emotionally. 22. For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. 23. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. 24. I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won't do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot -- and it's a lot -- it's a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that. 25. I just sit in my office and read all day. 26. I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home 27. If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you're paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you're going to have in retirement. 28. We want products where people feel like kissing you instead of slapping you. 29. If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. 30. The most important investment you can make is one in yourself. 31. If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need. 32. If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. 33. If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don't, then dollar-cost average into index funds. 34. If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%. 35. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. 36. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. 37. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions 38. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. 39. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. 40. It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons to measure their investment 'risk' by their portfolio's ratio of bonds to stocks. 41. It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 42. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. 43. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. 44. It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance. 45. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. 46. It's better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. 47. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. 48. Just pick a broad index like the S&P 500. Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. 49. Keep things simple and don't swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick "no”. 50. Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless. 51. Many management teams are just deciding they're gonna buy X billions over X months. That's no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. ... It's not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares. 52. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. 53. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well. 54. Never invest in a business you cannot understand. 55. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business. 56. One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future. 57. The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. 58. One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down "I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because..." Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline. 59. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. 60. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. 61. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. 62. Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it. 63. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. 64. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. 65. Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere. 66. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago 67. The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table. 68. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 69. Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically...The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is a joke in my view. 70. The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down. 71. The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. 72. There is nothing wrong with a 'know nothing' investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a 'know nothing' investor but you think you know something. 73. This does not bother Charlie and me. Indeed, we enjoy such price declines if we have funds available to increase our positions. 74. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. 75. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do. 76. You can’t buy what is popular and do well. 77. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits. 78. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. 79. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. 80. What is smart at one price is stupid at another. 81. What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. 82. When stock can be bought below a business's value it is probably the best use of cash. 83. When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. 84. When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever. 85. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. 86. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. 87. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases. 88. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. 89. You can't borrow money at 18 or 20 percent and come out ahead. 90. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. 91. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 92. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. 93. The size of your circle of competence is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.
1:12:41

Warren Buffett turns 93 today! To celebrate, I'm sharing the greatest lecture he ever gave together with his 94 (!) best investment quotes. 1. Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1. 2. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing. 3. Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages. 4. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies. 5. American business - and consequently a basket of stocks - is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. 6. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. 7. And so the important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. 8. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 9. Bitcoin has no unique value at all. 10. Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you'd be content to own it in the absence of any market. 11. The years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines - even panics - that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur. 12. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. 13. Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. 14. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments. 15. I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. 16. The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history. 17. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. 18. Among the various propositions offered to you, if you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years - you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. 19. Because if you're wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don't think they will, you pay it off. It's a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you've got a one-way bet. 20. Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. 21. Don't get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn't the key but being a crowd follower isn't either. You need to detach yourself emotionally. 22. For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. 23. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. 24. I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won't do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot -- and it's a lot -- it's a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that. 25. I just sit in my office and read all day. 26. I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home 27. If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you're paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you're going to have in retirement. 28. We want products where people feel like kissing you instead of slapping you. 29. If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. 30. The most important investment you can make is one in yourself. 31. If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need. 32. If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. 33. If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don't, then dollar-cost average into index funds. 34. If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%. 35. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. 36. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. 37. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions 38. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. 39. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. 40. It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons to measure their investment 'risk' by their portfolio's ratio of bonds to stocks. 41. It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 42. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. 43. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. 44. It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance. 45. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. 46. It's better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. 47. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. 48. Just pick a broad index like the S&P 500. Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. 49. Keep things simple and don't swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick "no”. 50. Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless. 51. Many management teams are just deciding they're gonna buy X billions over X months. That's no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. ... It's not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares. 52. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. 53. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well. 54. Never invest in a business you cannot understand. 55. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business. 56. One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future. 57. The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. 58. One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down "I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because..." Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline. 59. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. 60. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. 61. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. 62. Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it. 63. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. 64. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. 65. Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere. 66. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago 67. The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table. 68. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 69. Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically...The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is a joke in my view. 70. The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down. 71. The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. 72. There is nothing wrong with a 'know nothing' investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a 'know nothing' investor but you think you know something. 73. This does not bother Charlie and me. Indeed, we enjoy such price declines if we have funds available to increase our positions. 74. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. 75. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do. 76. You can’t buy what is popular and do well. 77. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits. 78. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. 79. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. 80. What is smart at one price is stupid at another. 81. What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. 82. When stock can be bought below a business's value it is probably the best use of cash. 83. When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. 84. When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever. 85. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. 86. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. 87. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases. 88. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. 89. You can't borrow money at 18 or 20 percent and come out ahead. 90. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. 91. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 92. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. 93. The size of your circle of competence is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

Compounding Quality

621,097 views • 3 years ago

Over the last decade, a consensus has grown on the Left and Right that the US needs to be more self-sufficient when it comes to manufacturing. During Covid, we discovered we didn’t make much of the equipment we needed to deal with a pandemic and were thus dependent on other nations, and so Congress passed and Trump signed the CARES Act in part to spend money to support domestic manufacturing of medical supplies. In 2022, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. out of the recognition that we had become dangerously dependent on foreign nations for microchips, which have become general-purpose technologies, necessary for national security, and upon which the AI revolution will be built. Where America had a $38 billion trade surplus in 1991 on advanced technology manufacturing, today it has a $299 billion deficit. Liberals and conservatives, Leftists and Rightists, have long shared a broad agreement that manufacturing and its knock-on industries are an essential source of employment for non-college-educated working-class people, and that the loss of manufacturing contributed to social fragmentation, family breakdown, and the drug addiction and death crisis. In a 2024 survey, Americans agreed ten to one that “we need a stronger manufacturing sector; 47% said America suffered from globalization, while 33% said it benefited. It is partly for that reason that Joe Biden, in perhaps the most bipartisan and non-ideological decision of his presidency, kept in place the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his first term as president. And yet both liberals and many conservatives are reacting with outrage as President Donald Trump puts in place precisely the trade tariffs needed to reduce our dangerous dependency on other nations and increase our manufacturing of the goods we need for national security, economic security, and societal wellbeing. The China tariffs, the CARES Act, and the CHIPS Act did not result in the return of much manufacturing, much less the rebalancing of trade. Total manufacturing jobsare 12.8 million in December 2019 and are 12.8 million today. The US still depends on China and other nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients, personal protective equipment, microchips, and critical minerals. Suffice to say, we are a very long way from a manufacturing renaissance sufficiently robust to revitalize the communities that have lost good, high-wage jobs to China and other competitors and even rivals internationally. The reason is clear. The average tariff level globally is 6.7% compared to America’s 2.7%. And simply subsidizing industries may not be enough for two major semiconductor manufacturers, Intel and TSMC, to produce domestically without tariffs. US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new "Liberation Day" tariffs in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war. Key US trading partners including the European Union and Britain said they were preparing their responses to Trump's escalation, as nervous markets fell in Europe and America. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)📷 Anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say Trump’s actions will destroy people’s retirement savings by crashing the stock market, and will undermine the comparative advantage of other nations producing products we shouldn’t. And, they say, our goal should not be to return manufacturing to the United States, except for a few exceptions, which Congress has already made. For centuries, economists have argued that some nations, such as poorer ones, are more suited to produce many products than richer ones. Americans making t-shirts at $20 per hour are less efficient than the Vietnamese making them for $3 per hour. And the US should not be trying to replace perfectly reasonable products to import, like aluminum from Canada, which we have no reason to ever go to war with, and which has access to cheap hydroelectricity to make it. Over half of American families have money in the stock market, and they will all suffer, anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say. The economic system we have had since World War II has worked to maximize win-win relationships that result in poorer nations climbing the development ladder with manufacturing and wealthier nations like the US focused on services. But it’s unwise to evaluate policies based on the short-term impact of the stock market. Anti-tariff voices grossly overstate the comparative advantage when it comes to manufacturing, and the postwar system, economically and militarily, is no longer in the interests of non-college-educated Americans, who are both more vulnerable and more numerous than the college-educated elite. There is no need to bring back a significant amount of low-skill and nonstrategic manufacturing like T-shirts, and Trump has not advocated that. America may need to bring back some low-skill jobs, such as manufacturing protective gear. But our priority should rightly be high-skill manufacturing, and CARES, CHIPS, and the Trump-Biden China were, obviously, not enough. It may be fine to rely on Canada for aluminum. But the tariffs against it and Mexico, as well as Trump’s stated desire to make it the 51st state, should be viewed as the president negotiating in preparation for upcoming trade talks between the three countries. While offshoring manufacturing policies benefited multinational corporations, bankers, and consumers, they often devastated communities built on manufacturing, mining, and manual labor. US companies moved production to countries with lower labor costs, fewer regulations, and subsidized exports. Economists calculate that just the so-called “China Shock,” that country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, alone cost the U.S. 2.4 million jobs and had ripple effects across entire communities. The average manufacturing wage is $103,000 per year compared to $37,000 per year for the average service sector wage. And where a service sector job supports 2 to 3 jobs, a manufacturing job supports nine jobs. Continuing with a system that is fundamentally advantageous to a minority of the country and disadvantageous to a majority is not sustainable and unwise to prop up. Trump’s trade actions are part of a broader return to nationalism underway globally, and they can’t be understood on economic grounds alone. Regarding priorities, we should put the two-thirds of the country that is non-college educated working-class ahead of the 50% of the country who own stocks, for moral and democratic reasons. America is deeply divided. While there are many proximate reasons for this, including geographic sorting, cable TV, and social media, the underlying reasons are economic. The gulf between the educated elites and the non-educated working class has grown dangerously large. Many critics of the tariffs are well-intentioned. They are right to worry that they could come with significant economic costs and disruption. The concern of many of them is genuinely for the working class and poor, who higher prices for imported goods would most harm. However, many American elites today identify more with their global counterparts than their fellow Americans. And that’s a huge problem. In his study of 21 civilizations, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee found that civilizations collapse not simply from external invasion but from internal decay, precisely when their elites stop identifying with the people. “Civilizations die from suicide,” he famously wrote, “not murder.” Civilizations all depend on their elites, Toynbee noted, or the people he called the “creative minority.” But rising success creates decadence, complacency, and eventually contempt toward their people, and they start to identify with elites in other nations. This is all a natural outgrowth of trade, cosmopolitanism, and snobbery. It starts to view the ordinary people as “deplorables.” At this point, the elite lose their creativity and become simply the “dominant minority,” one that rules no longer by example but rather by manipulation or force. Toynbee could be describing America in the 21st Century. College-educated elites look down on the American working class and identify with other professional and managerial elites in Europe and other nations. They sympathize less with the low-skilled American citizen born here and more with the low-skilled foreign migrant here illegally. Such elites are more concerned with tariffs' impact on their stock portfolio and the cost of their gadgets than they are with the downward pressure illegal migrants put on wages or with how nations manipulate their currency to retain manufacturing. Toynbee said that, at this stage of development, a nation’s elites become “parasites or renegades,” alienated and contemptuous toward the culture that produced them. Civilizations at this late stage are morally hollow and thus fragile and prone to abuses of power, like censorship, lawfare, and the weaponization of government agencies. And these civilizations disparage their traditions in ways that the American elites have disparaged America’s founding and its history as essentially evil, due to the unavoidable tragedy of indigenous genocide and slavery, even though a civil war that killed over 600,000 people was fought to end it. But Toynbee didn’t believe that civilizational collapse was inevitable; some societies can snap back.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!
9:16

Over the last decade, a consensus has grown on the Left and Right that the US needs to be more self-sufficient when it comes to manufacturing. During Covid, we discovered we didn’t make much of the equipment we needed to deal with a pandemic and were thus dependent on other nations, and so Congress passed and Trump signed the CARES Act in part to spend money to support domestic manufacturing of medical supplies. In 2022, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. out of the recognition that we had become dangerously dependent on foreign nations for microchips, which have become general-purpose technologies, necessary for national security, and upon which the AI revolution will be built. Where America had a $38 billion trade surplus in 1991 on advanced technology manufacturing, today it has a $299 billion deficit. Liberals and conservatives, Leftists and Rightists, have long shared a broad agreement that manufacturing and its knock-on industries are an essential source of employment for non-college-educated working-class people, and that the loss of manufacturing contributed to social fragmentation, family breakdown, and the drug addiction and death crisis. In a 2024 survey, Americans agreed ten to one that “we need a stronger manufacturing sector; 47% said America suffered from globalization, while 33% said it benefited. It is partly for that reason that Joe Biden, in perhaps the most bipartisan and non-ideological decision of his presidency, kept in place the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his first term as president. And yet both liberals and many conservatives are reacting with outrage as President Donald Trump puts in place precisely the trade tariffs needed to reduce our dangerous dependency on other nations and increase our manufacturing of the goods we need for national security, economic security, and societal wellbeing. The China tariffs, the CARES Act, and the CHIPS Act did not result in the return of much manufacturing, much less the rebalancing of trade. Total manufacturing jobsare 12.8 million in December 2019 and are 12.8 million today. The US still depends on China and other nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients, personal protective equipment, microchips, and critical minerals. Suffice to say, we are a very long way from a manufacturing renaissance sufficiently robust to revitalize the communities that have lost good, high-wage jobs to China and other competitors and even rivals internationally. The reason is clear. The average tariff level globally is 6.7% compared to America’s 2.7%. And simply subsidizing industries may not be enough for two major semiconductor manufacturers, Intel and TSMC, to produce domestically without tariffs. US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new "Liberation Day" tariffs in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war. Key US trading partners including the European Union and Britain said they were preparing their responses to Trump's escalation, as nervous markets fell in Europe and America. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)📷 Anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say Trump’s actions will destroy people’s retirement savings by crashing the stock market, and will undermine the comparative advantage of other nations producing products we shouldn’t. And, they say, our goal should not be to return manufacturing to the United States, except for a few exceptions, which Congress has already made. For centuries, economists have argued that some nations, such as poorer ones, are more suited to produce many products than richer ones. Americans making t-shirts at $20 per hour are less efficient than the Vietnamese making them for $3 per hour. And the US should not be trying to replace perfectly reasonable products to import, like aluminum from Canada, which we have no reason to ever go to war with, and which has access to cheap hydroelectricity to make it. Over half of American families have money in the stock market, and they will all suffer, anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say. The economic system we have had since World War II has worked to maximize win-win relationships that result in poorer nations climbing the development ladder with manufacturing and wealthier nations like the US focused on services. But it’s unwise to evaluate policies based on the short-term impact of the stock market. Anti-tariff voices grossly overstate the comparative advantage when it comes to manufacturing, and the postwar system, economically and militarily, is no longer in the interests of non-college-educated Americans, who are both more vulnerable and more numerous than the college-educated elite. There is no need to bring back a significant amount of low-skill and nonstrategic manufacturing like T-shirts, and Trump has not advocated that. America may need to bring back some low-skill jobs, such as manufacturing protective gear. But our priority should rightly be high-skill manufacturing, and CARES, CHIPS, and the Trump-Biden China were, obviously, not enough. It may be fine to rely on Canada for aluminum. But the tariffs against it and Mexico, as well as Trump’s stated desire to make it the 51st state, should be viewed as the president negotiating in preparation for upcoming trade talks between the three countries. While offshoring manufacturing policies benefited multinational corporations, bankers, and consumers, they often devastated communities built on manufacturing, mining, and manual labor. US companies moved production to countries with lower labor costs, fewer regulations, and subsidized exports. Economists calculate that just the so-called “China Shock,” that country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, alone cost the U.S. 2.4 million jobs and had ripple effects across entire communities. The average manufacturing wage is $103,000 per year compared to $37,000 per year for the average service sector wage. And where a service sector job supports 2 to 3 jobs, a manufacturing job supports nine jobs. Continuing with a system that is fundamentally advantageous to a minority of the country and disadvantageous to a majority is not sustainable and unwise to prop up. Trump’s trade actions are part of a broader return to nationalism underway globally, and they can’t be understood on economic grounds alone. Regarding priorities, we should put the two-thirds of the country that is non-college educated working-class ahead of the 50% of the country who own stocks, for moral and democratic reasons. America is deeply divided. While there are many proximate reasons for this, including geographic sorting, cable TV, and social media, the underlying reasons are economic. The gulf between the educated elites and the non-educated working class has grown dangerously large. Many critics of the tariffs are well-intentioned. They are right to worry that they could come with significant economic costs and disruption. The concern of many of them is genuinely for the working class and poor, who higher prices for imported goods would most harm. However, many American elites today identify more with their global counterparts than their fellow Americans. And that’s a huge problem. In his study of 21 civilizations, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee found that civilizations collapse not simply from external invasion but from internal decay, precisely when their elites stop identifying with the people. “Civilizations die from suicide,” he famously wrote, “not murder.” Civilizations all depend on their elites, Toynbee noted, or the people he called the “creative minority.” But rising success creates decadence, complacency, and eventually contempt toward their people, and they start to identify with elites in other nations. This is all a natural outgrowth of trade, cosmopolitanism, and snobbery. It starts to view the ordinary people as “deplorables.” At this point, the elite lose their creativity and become simply the “dominant minority,” one that rules no longer by example but rather by manipulation or force. Toynbee could be describing America in the 21st Century. College-educated elites look down on the American working class and identify with other professional and managerial elites in Europe and other nations. They sympathize less with the low-skilled American citizen born here and more with the low-skilled foreign migrant here illegally. Such elites are more concerned with tariffs' impact on their stock portfolio and the cost of their gadgets than they are with the downward pressure illegal migrants put on wages or with how nations manipulate their currency to retain manufacturing. Toynbee said that, at this stage of development, a nation’s elites become “parasites or renegades,” alienated and contemptuous toward the culture that produced them. Civilizations at this late stage are morally hollow and thus fragile and prone to abuses of power, like censorship, lawfare, and the weaponization of government agencies. And these civilizations disparage their traditions in ways that the American elites have disparaged America’s founding and its history as essentially evil, due to the unavoidable tragedy of indigenous genocide and slavery, even though a civil war that killed over 600,000 people was fought to end it. But Toynbee didn’t believe that civilizational collapse was inevitable; some societies can snap back.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!

Michael Shellenberger

57,018 views • 1 year ago

Make Something Wonderful is 250 pages of Steve Jobs in his own words, speaking directly to you. The book contains some of Steve's ideas that I've never found anywhere else. Notes from the book: 1. He didn't care about being right. He cared about being excellent. 2. His mind was never a captive of reality. 3. He said working with great people gives you access to wisdom that you can't buy for love or money. 4. He believed technology should be streamlined and practical, simple and sophisticated, and that it should be a tool for enhancing creativity as much as productivity. 5. He believed you should ambush your customers. Meet them where they are. 6. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions. He had a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility. 7. He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. 8. By the time he was thirty he was the public face of a Fortune 500 company. 9. At Apple’s first board meeting he put his bare feet on a conference room table. 10. He said you should think of your life as a rainbow arching across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear. 11. He possessed unbelievable rigor that he imposed first, and most strenuously, on himself. 12. He saw clearly (1) what was not there, (2) what could be there, (3) what had to be there. 13. He said early Apple employees were more like poets and painters than cold technologists. That the passion they put into their products were completely indistinguishable from other creative fields. He said their work was a form of love. 14. He had a verbal mastery that was obvious at a young age. He used simple, descriptive language, told stories, and repeated lines and ideas that were important. 15. He thought it was inevitable that computers would be the dominant medium of human communication. He said this in 1983. 16. He had a talent for spotting markets full of second-rate products. 17. He said you could tell how important a product was based on the amount of time people spent interacting with it. As a result he thought it was inevitable that more design talent would shift from the automobile (1 or 2 hours a day) to computers (6+ hours a day). He said this in the 80s. 18. He said that books kept him out of jail and that it’s a shame there are so many mediocre teachers. 19. Like many great entrepreneurs before him, Steve knew what he wanted to do, but didn't know how to do it yet. He said he wanted to make an insanely great computer that was the size of a book. What he described sounded a lot like an iPad. He said this in the 80s. 20. He believed that you should use your unique set of talents to make things that make the lives of other people better. Most people just take. He said "the ability to put something back into the pool of human experience is extremely neat." 21. He would tell his team “You work for Apple first and your boss second.” He felt strongly about that. 22. He was constantly placing the products he was making in a historical perspective, like comparing the Macintosh to the invention of the telephone. 23. He believed you needed to give yourself more time to make mistakes. He said his taste got more refined as he made mistakes. He said that making mistakes over a long period of time made his aesthetics better. 24. He said the key ingredient to making something great was time. 25. He said he wanted to spend his life building things. He could have retired to a beach in his 20s and thought that was disgusting. 26. He was interested in learning how to hone a company down to its essence. 27. You read this book and a thought jumps out at you: How many people are willing to go through a decade of failure without quitting? Steve had the capacity to take pain. 28. He believed it was better to focus on what you're actually passionate about, instead of what you think will make you the most money. He made the most money that way. 29. He listened to older, wiser entrepreneurs and let them shape and mold his thinking. 30. He wasn't afraid to fail, but had to coach himself to adopt that trait. He didn't want to fail, but he wasn't afraid of it. 31. He said don't let your differentiation evaporate. 32. He said if you let your differentiation evaporate the only solution is innovation. 33. He believed great ideas don't map onto corporate hierarchy. 34. He was incapable of thinking that his work and his life were different, separate things. 35. He said the most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things. He said you should tap into the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. 36. He paid attention to subtle insights. He was guided by intuition. 37. He didn't believe in the concept or a career, or think it was wise to follow well-worn paths laid out by others. 38. He said most people make the mistake of not thinking about death. He said: "For me it’s the opposite: to know my arc will fall, makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky." 39. He thought Walt Disney had a great idea: Edit before you make it. 40. He said no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. 41. He believed storytellers were the most powerful people in the world. 42. He believed if you didn't have great people you were doomed. 43. He found great people by looking at great results and finding out who was responsible for them. 44. This is how he interviewed people: "In an interview I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that?” The worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and knuckle under. What I look for is for someone to come right back and say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” 45. He believed the job of the leader was to make sure the work is as good as it should be, and to get people to stretch beyond their best. 46. He believed the job of the leader was to cajole, and beg, and plead, and threaten at times—to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way and to have them do better work than they thought they could do. 47. He believed the priorities of the leader were (1) recruit, (2) set an overall direction, and (3) inspire and cajole and persuade. 48. He believed a creative company should have a risk-taking, creative environment on the product side and a fiscally conservative environment on the business side. 49. He believed you have to choose what you put your love into really carefully. 50. He had a remarkably consistent set of values that he held dear: Life is short; don’t waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation—and we can push it forward. 51. He thought when deciding what to work on that you should ask yourself: "What do I give a shit about?" And then go do that. 52. He would never sell Apple. Not for all the money in the world. 53. He believed you should master the basics, simplify the product line, and focus on the gems. 54. He believed marketing was about values. That the world is noisy and you should focus on telling customers what you believe in and what you stand for. 55. He believed one way to invest in yourself is by exploring uncharted paths that are different from your past experiences. You know it's an uncharted path when you have no idea where it will lead. 56. He believed that people that think they’re following a safe path pay the highest price of all. They won't realize it for a decade or two — and by then it's too late. 57. He didn't believe in resting on laurels or sleeping on wins. Make something great. Then do it again. 58. He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. 59. He believed in straight forward, clear communication. If the work isn't good enough you have to tell them straight: "This isn't good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go do better." 60. He remained driven by a mission to "put something back into the pool of human experience." 61. He believed in the basics: great product, great marketing, great distribution. 62. He believed you must keep up with innovations in distribution. 63. He believed brands take decades to build. 64. He would capture the evolution of his own thinking by emailing himself. 65. He viewed Apple has the world's premier bridge builder between normal people and the exploding world of high technology. 66. He wanted to demystify technology. 67. He believed excellence was a habit and we are what we repeatedly do. 68. He believed you should be curious about what came before you and you should spend time to learn about it. 69. He believed you simply could not mix messages when selling something new. A customer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone several. 70. He said it's a circus world and you'll never know what's around the next corner. 71. He believed in management by values. Which means (1) find people that want the same things you want and (2) figure out the best way to get those things along the way. 72. He believed in the mantra: Finding the right people is half the battle. 73. He said you can't plan to meet the people who will change your life. 74. He believed everything is temporary — there is no such thing as safety. 75. He believed that your life is a story and that you should remember that your life is a story and that you should always act like your life is a story. 76. He believed in rejecting dogma, which he defined as living with the results of other people's thinking. He said that dogma can be so loud that it can drown out your own inner voice and you should avoid this. 77. He believed a great place to start was by improving a product you hate. If you can make something you love, you can convince other people to love it too. 78. He said all glory is fleeting and you should just get back to making something wonderful. I'm really proud of the episode I made about this book. You'll learn a lot from Steve by listening to it. You can watch/listen to it in full here, or in your favorite podcast app.
2:01:22

Make Something Wonderful is 250 pages of Steve Jobs in his own words, speaking directly to you. The book contains some of Steve's ideas that I've never found anywhere else. Notes from the book: 1. He didn't care about being right. He cared about being excellent. 2. His mind was never a captive of reality. 3. He said working with great people gives you access to wisdom that you can't buy for love or money. 4. He believed technology should be streamlined and practical, simple and sophisticated, and that it should be a tool for enhancing creativity as much as productivity. 5. He believed you should ambush your customers. Meet them where they are. 6. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions. He had a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility. 7. He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. 8. By the time he was thirty he was the public face of a Fortune 500 company. 9. At Apple’s first board meeting he put his bare feet on a conference room table. 10. He said you should think of your life as a rainbow arching across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear. 11. He possessed unbelievable rigor that he imposed first, and most strenuously, on himself. 12. He saw clearly (1) what was not there, (2) what could be there, (3) what had to be there. 13. He said early Apple employees were more like poets and painters than cold technologists. That the passion they put into their products were completely indistinguishable from other creative fields. He said their work was a form of love. 14. He had a verbal mastery that was obvious at a young age. He used simple, descriptive language, told stories, and repeated lines and ideas that were important. 15. He thought it was inevitable that computers would be the dominant medium of human communication. He said this in 1983. 16. He had a talent for spotting markets full of second-rate products. 17. He said you could tell how important a product was based on the amount of time people spent interacting with it. As a result he thought it was inevitable that more design talent would shift from the automobile (1 or 2 hours a day) to computers (6+ hours a day). He said this in the 80s. 18. He said that books kept him out of jail and that it’s a shame there are so many mediocre teachers. 19. Like many great entrepreneurs before him, Steve knew what he wanted to do, but didn't know how to do it yet. He said he wanted to make an insanely great computer that was the size of a book. What he described sounded a lot like an iPad. He said this in the 80s. 20. He believed that you should use your unique set of talents to make things that make the lives of other people better. Most people just take. He said "the ability to put something back into the pool of human experience is extremely neat." 21. He would tell his team “You work for Apple first and your boss second.” He felt strongly about that. 22. He was constantly placing the products he was making in a historical perspective, like comparing the Macintosh to the invention of the telephone. 23. He believed you needed to give yourself more time to make mistakes. He said his taste got more refined as he made mistakes. He said that making mistakes over a long period of time made his aesthetics better. 24. He said the key ingredient to making something great was time. 25. He said he wanted to spend his life building things. He could have retired to a beach in his 20s and thought that was disgusting. 26. He was interested in learning how to hone a company down to its essence. 27. You read this book and a thought jumps out at you: How many people are willing to go through a decade of failure without quitting? Steve had the capacity to take pain. 28. He believed it was better to focus on what you're actually passionate about, instead of what you think will make you the most money. He made the most money that way. 29. He listened to older, wiser entrepreneurs and let them shape and mold his thinking. 30. He wasn't afraid to fail, but had to coach himself to adopt that trait. He didn't want to fail, but he wasn't afraid of it. 31. He said don't let your differentiation evaporate. 32. He said if you let your differentiation evaporate the only solution is innovation. 33. He believed great ideas don't map onto corporate hierarchy. 34. He was incapable of thinking that his work and his life were different, separate things. 35. He said the most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things. He said you should tap into the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. 36. He paid attention to subtle insights. He was guided by intuition. 37. He didn't believe in the concept or a career, or think it was wise to follow well-worn paths laid out by others. 38. He said most people make the mistake of not thinking about death. He said: "For me it’s the opposite: to know my arc will fall, makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky." 39. He thought Walt Disney had a great idea: Edit before you make it. 40. He said no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. 41. He believed storytellers were the most powerful people in the world. 42. He believed if you didn't have great people you were doomed. 43. He found great people by looking at great results and finding out who was responsible for them. 44. This is how he interviewed people: "In an interview I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that?” The worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and knuckle under. What I look for is for someone to come right back and say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” 45. He believed the job of the leader was to make sure the work is as good as it should be, and to get people to stretch beyond their best. 46. He believed the job of the leader was to cajole, and beg, and plead, and threaten at times—to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way and to have them do better work than they thought they could do. 47. He believed the priorities of the leader were (1) recruit, (2) set an overall direction, and (3) inspire and cajole and persuade. 48. He believed a creative company should have a risk-taking, creative environment on the product side and a fiscally conservative environment on the business side. 49. He believed you have to choose what you put your love into really carefully. 50. He had a remarkably consistent set of values that he held dear: Life is short; don’t waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation—and we can push it forward. 51. He thought when deciding what to work on that you should ask yourself: "What do I give a shit about?" And then go do that. 52. He would never sell Apple. Not for all the money in the world. 53. He believed you should master the basics, simplify the product line, and focus on the gems. 54. He believed marketing was about values. That the world is noisy and you should focus on telling customers what you believe in and what you stand for. 55. He believed one way to invest in yourself is by exploring uncharted paths that are different from your past experiences. You know it's an uncharted path when you have no idea where it will lead. 56. He believed that people that think they’re following a safe path pay the highest price of all. They won't realize it for a decade or two — and by then it's too late. 57. He didn't believe in resting on laurels or sleeping on wins. Make something great. Then do it again. 58. He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. 59. He believed in straight forward, clear communication. If the work isn't good enough you have to tell them straight: "This isn't good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go do better." 60. He remained driven by a mission to "put something back into the pool of human experience." 61. He believed in the basics: great product, great marketing, great distribution. 62. He believed you must keep up with innovations in distribution. 63. He believed brands take decades to build. 64. He would capture the evolution of his own thinking by emailing himself. 65. He viewed Apple has the world's premier bridge builder between normal people and the exploding world of high technology. 66. He wanted to demystify technology. 67. He believed excellence was a habit and we are what we repeatedly do. 68. He believed you should be curious about what came before you and you should spend time to learn about it. 69. He believed you simply could not mix messages when selling something new. A customer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone several. 70. He said it's a circus world and you'll never know what's around the next corner. 71. He believed in management by values. Which means (1) find people that want the same things you want and (2) figure out the best way to get those things along the way. 72. He believed in the mantra: Finding the right people is half the battle. 73. He said you can't plan to meet the people who will change your life. 74. He believed everything is temporary — there is no such thing as safety. 75. He believed that your life is a story and that you should remember that your life is a story and that you should always act like your life is a story. 76. He believed in rejecting dogma, which he defined as living with the results of other people's thinking. He said that dogma can be so loud that it can drown out your own inner voice and you should avoid this. 77. He believed a great place to start was by improving a product you hate. If you can make something you love, you can convince other people to love it too. 78. He said all glory is fleeting and you should just get back to making something wonderful. I'm really proud of the episode I made about this book. You'll learn a lot from Steve by listening to it. You can watch/listen to it in full here, or in your favorite podcast app.

David Senra

206,484 views • 1 year ago

An interview by VERY DARK AND CORRUPT Wall Street Journal aired today [1] WSJ's terrible "journalists" (and I use that term lightly) made many false statements about Sarepta's worthless, dangerous drug and Vinay Prasad's firing [1,2] I explain how the FDA sausage is made in excruciating detail Buckle up To get readers up to speed -> In June, corrupt pharma company Sarepta Therapeutics paid $40,000 to lobbying group Michael Best Strategies (MBS) to deal with a problem [3] -> MBS had recently hired Chris LaCivita, who had close connections with "MAGA" influencer Laura Loomer [4] -> With stock down 88%, Sarepta needed to sell their very bad, very dangerous drug or the company would go bankrupt [5] -> After several deaths from the drug this year, FDA official Vinay Prasad said "no way" and kicked the drug to the curb [2,6] -> Sarepta panicked and paid MBS (we believe) to deal with Prasad [3,4] -> If this story is right, LaCivita recruited Laura Loomer to take down Prasad [4,7] -> Loomer said she was defending Trump, but she was lying [7] -> She was defending taxpayer-funded payouts to a worthless, corrupt company [7] -> Laura Loomer so brave A history of bad drugs and regulatory failure -> This is one of the worst pharma scandals in American history and corrupt mainstream media isn't covering it -> Sarepta has a very long, troubled history [8] -> For more than a decade, every major Sarepta FDA drug approval has required INTENSE political intervention [8,9] -> Scientists at FDA have been repeatedly overruled [8,9] -> Many scientists have resigned, very publicly, over these POLITICAL decisions, some writing scathing public criticisms of these terrible decisions [10,11] -> The most recent resignation by Vinay Prasad is not something new; it follows in a long tradition [2,10] -> In fact, standards have dramatically deteriorated since the first controversies about the company's drugs in the 2010s [8,9] -> Prasad was trying to hold the line in the face of rapidly deteriorating standards at the agency [2,6] -> For that, pharma launched a coup--a literal coup of a drug regulator [4,6] -> This is unprecedented -> Banana republic sht, unbelievably corrupt 2016: first Sarepta drug approval and the "highly unusual" decision -> The first Sarepta drug approved by FDA was called Exondys 51 [8] -> This drug was for patients with mutations in dystrophin, a muscle protein [8] -> This is a debilitating and fatal disease affecting children [8] -> Exondys 51 increased dystrophin by 0.2% of normal levels [8,12] -> Unsurprisingly, there was no good evidence the drug worked [8,12] -> Why would it? It increases the protein from zero to 1/500th of normal levels -> One reviewer wrote: "I can find no precedent of an accelerated approval for a marketing application where the effect size on the surrogate endpoint is as small as 0.3%." [12] -> The study submitted by the company included no proper control group [12] -> The techniques used were so bad not even a first-year PhD student would do a study that way -> This the level of work you would expect from a mediocre undergraduate with no guidance -> It's almost like it was so bad on purpose -> (Narrator: it was on purpose) -> Nerd time: -> One reviewer wrote: "The Western blots submitted by the applicant for Study 201 were oversaturated, unreliable, and uninterpretable." [12] -> Another wrote: "Because CDER also determined that the conditions under which the original IHC analysis was performed were inadequate, including that the reader was not masked to sequence and time, the Center requested a re-reading of the stored images by three masked pathologists under different conditions. The IHC results from the reread were not nearly as favorable, as compared to the initial IHC results reported by Sarepta." [12] -> "The lack of concordance between the IHC and the Western Blot results is 'striking'" [12] -> "Study 201/202 had fundamental flaws, including baseline biopsies from external controls who could differ in unknown ways from study subjects, Week 180 biopsies from different muscles than baseline, and potential protein degradation in stored baseline samples." [12] -> And on and on. -> FDA commissioner Robert Califf wrote at the time: the submitted study was "characterized by major flaws in the clinical study design" and "Blinded experts assembled by the FDA fundamentally debunked this study, which has yet to be retracted and continues to be cited" [9,12] -> That's right, the FDA commissioner expressed dismay that the study that the company used to gain approval hadn't yet been retracted, it was so bad [9] -> Senior FDA official Janet Woodcock decided to approve before scientific review team had even voted [9,12] -> Woodcock be like: yeah i'm going to decide before you guys can because i know what you're going to say lol -> Despite external intense pressure, FDA scientists voted against Exondys 51's efficacy [9,12] -> They then voted against its accelerated approval [9,12] -> The review team filed an appeal with FDA commissioner after "passionate" disagreement with Woodcock [9,12] -> One reviewer called Woodcock's decision "unprecedented" [12] -> In a 126-page report, FDA commissioner Califf called Woodcock's decision "highly unusual" [9] -> The FDA board wrote: "[Woodcock's] involvement here appears to have upended the typical review and decision-making process. ... Care should be taken to avoid the appearance of interfering with the integrity of scientific reviews at the lower levels of a Center." [9] -> Again, the data were unbelievably bad, literally every technique in the study was inappropriately used [12] -> I would fire an undergraduate student who did science like this, immediately -> FDA's chief scientist accused Sarepta of "serious irresponsibility" for selectively publishing only some of the data [9] -> Even Woodcock, who approved the drug, called the research "seriously deficient" [12] -> Yes, even the person who approved the drug over the heads of FDA's scientists said the research was horrible [12] -> Still, FDA tried to bury their heads in the sand and beg that, basically, Sarepta pretty please do a better job next time -> FDA commissioner: "The utmost attention should be paid to optimizing the methodological rigor of [future] trial[s]" [9] -> FDA also demanded a clinical trial "to verify the benefit" of the drug [8] -> Welp, this was in 2016 [8] -> The trial results are supposed to be available in 2026, maybe [13] -> Or maybe later, depending on how much money needs to be made first -> As an article published in Nature three years later despaired of the decision: "The approval was conditional on the company agreeing to conduct a two-year post-approval trial to show Exondys 51’s efficacy. But by August 2019, the company had yet to begin such a trial and in the meantime had profited from sales of $300 million in 2018." [13] -> If it sounds like Sarepta used political pressure to get its drug approved and then tried to avoid actually publishing the study showing it didn't work, it sounds that way because that's exactly what happened [13] -> FDA commissioner after deferring to Woodcock: "I am confident this unique situation will not set a general precedent for drug approvals under the accelerated approval pathway, as the statute and regulations are clear each situation must be evaluated on its own merits based on the totality of data and information." [9] -> This statement was profoundly naive, and the historical record bears this out [8,14] -> Three FDA scientists resigned, including the lead reviewer of the drug, understanding the grave implications of the collapse of scientific standards and where they would lead [10,11] -> One was John K. Jenkins, M.D. Director, Office of New Drugs Center for Drug Evaluation and Research/FDA [10] -> In a presentation given just before his resignation, he wrote: -> "Path taken by Sarepta NOT a good model for other development programs" [10] -> Crucially: -> "Upholding statutory standards for approval in face of hopes and desires of patients, families, sponsors, and investors is a very difficult job" [10] -> "Personal attacks on FDA reviewers creates an atmosphere of distrust and isolation rather than collaboration" [10] This brings us to WHY Sarepta's drug was approved Facebook FDA -> So why did the drug get approved? -> Basically, Sarepta propagandized extremely desperate patients [9,15] -> They used miraculous snake oil promises and patients believed them -> Remember that this is life or death for patients, and they are extremely vulnerable -> Sarepta also professionally trained some patients to give testimonials to FDA and congress [15] -> The patients then went to congressmen who don't have time to understand the science [15] -> They gave emotional stories to congressmen [15] -> The result: -> Letter from 109 House members [15] -> Letter from 24 Senate members [15] -> And a media circus documented in the New York Times [16] -> Patients screaming at scientists during meetings [9] -> 2,792 emails written to FDA urging approval [12] -> One of them: "Dear Dr. califf: How is it that everyone in and around DMD understands this simple Idea and the science geniuses at FDA don't? You stupid fckers are costing each and every DMD kids days of their lives with your Moronic Dystrophin dance. Time to get a fcking clue" [12] -> Upon approval, a journalist for Reuters wrote: "owing to pressure from patient advocates, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy even though an outside panel of experts and the agency's own reviewers questioned the drug's efficacy" [17] -> A commentary in Nature Medicine was also published called "Railroading at the FDA" [9] -> Its author wrote: "In the words of one FDA committee member, Exondys lowers the agency's evidentiary standard for drug effectiveness 'to an unprecedented nadir.'" [9] -> A highly critical commentary was also published in Science, titled "Sarepta gets an approval - Unfortunately" [18] -> The article's author pharma veteran Derek Lowe wrote: "The company... called up Duchenne-affected boys and their families to plead with the FDA, and won over Janet Woodcock, and that appears to be enough. Is this going to be the new way to get a drug approved? Run a trial in a dozen people, generate unconvincing data, and then lobby Janet Woodcock? I share the worries that this might open the floodgates, because after all, Sarepta got their drug through." [18] -> One FDA reviewer ended in an equally grim note: ". Approval of this NDA would send the signal that political pressure and even intimidation – not science – guides FDA decisions, with extremely negative consequences. The public is well aware of this development program: the meager size of the study population, the marginal (at best) effect size, the Division’s dim view of the efficacy data, and the robust activism of some members of the DMD community. Many would be amazed at an approval action, because other DMD drugs, recently turned down for approval, appeared to provide stronger evidence of efficacy. ...The ramifications here are profound. The public will perceive that it was their unprecedented lobbying efforts that made the difference and earned eteplirsen its accelerated approval. For the future, this will have the effect of strongly encouraging public activism and intimidation as a substitute for data, which is one of the worst possible consequences for communities with rare diseases. This type of activism is not what was envisioned for patient-focused drug development." [12] -> A new era was born -> Activism had replaced data -> Facebook had fried people's brains -> And now Facebook-fried brains had fried FDA too -> FDA's credibility as a regulatory agency would now be hollowed out -> FDA's Facebook age had begun -> But the worst was yet to come Sarepta approvals: 2016 to present -> Three more drugs were approved from Sarepta on the same shoddy basis, proving Califf's promises that Exondys 51 was an isolated case empty [8,14] -> But things would take a turn for the worse with Sarepta's newest drug Elevidys in 2024 [19] -> At last a rigorous clinical trial looking at actual clinical outcomes was published [19,20] -> All would be put to rest -> At long last the issue could be resolved with HARD CLINICAL DATA -> There was only one problem -> The trial failed to show any benefit according to the primary outcome [19,20] -> The surrogate biomarker of micro-dystrophin meant absolutely nothing; it wasn't actually helping patients [19,20] -> What did FDA scientists do? They voted against approval. Of course [19] -> How could they not? The drug didn't actually work in the clinical trial [19] -> It's the only thing that made sense, since FDA is a scientific agency -> AND THEY WERE OVERRULED AGAIN BY PETER MARKS [19] -> YES THAT'S RIGHT, OVERRULED YET AGAIN -> PHARMA WINS AGAIN -> HAHAHAHAHAHA PHARMA ALWAYS WINS YOU FOOLS -> What happened is that Marks crossed his eyes somewhat, trying to make the words on the page blurry -> He prayed really hard, "my god please give me a sign, something, anything, I need this for my career" -> lzzosolsolzzolzozlslzolosllslozllzlzl -> Marks was trying really hard to see SOMETHING, come on come on, give me SOMETHIGN he said -> And he said: wait, look, there are these secondary, exploratory endpoints and a two of them look pretty good, I'LL APPROVE [19,20] -> AHAHAHHAHAHA YES PHAMRA WINS AGAIN -> And Marks said, "Thank you pharma go- I mean god, not pharma god, why did I just say that, FCK" -> The trial was explicitly designed for what Marks did NOT to happen [20] -> Once the primary endpoint was not met, the secondary endpoints couldn't even be statistically tested [20] -> And the trial explicitly said that they could not be interpreted the way Marks interpreted them [20] -> They were not adjusted for multiplicity and they were, like expression of dystrophin, simply bad endpoints [20] -> These two secondary endpoints were time to rise from lying on the floor and the 10-meter walk/run tests [20] -> Subjects who received the Elevidys performed, on average, about 0.5 seconds better than placebo recipients on these tasks [20] -> However several facts must be borne in mind when interpreting these: -> 1. At the time of testing, patients receiving the drug were receiving more corticosteroids than placebo patients, biasing the results [20] -> 2. Blinding might have been broken because those receiving the drug experienced lots of nausea and vomiting from the drug (~70%) [20] -> 3. These differences were tiny and may be attributable to chance, since the natural course of the disease varies widely [20] -> Marks knows this but who cares? Pharma I mean Facebook needed to be placated Elevidys: the drug -> To understand why this is so messed up, one must understand a few things -> On a Bayesian basis, one must assume that Elevidys is harmful until proven otherwise, for two reasons: -> 1. All drugs are potentially "toxic", but some toxins heal: by default you must assume it is a toxin that does not heal because this is what is actually usually the case; you need evidence that it actually heals -> 2. Elevidys IN PARTICULAR must be assumed to be harmful until proven otherwise because of the very nature of the drug -> Let's do a breakdown of the basic science of Elevidys that supports this (Bayesian) hypothesis: -> Gene therapy that permanently integrates into human genome [21] -> Meant to replace dystrophin, the protein that these patients cannot produce themselves [21] -> Preferentially targets muscle but gets expressed everywhere [21] -> Killed three people this year [6,21] -> Costs $3.2 million per injection [21] -> Truncated version of the protein it is supposed to replace [21] -> 3X shorter than the real protein [21] -> Has to be truncated because the technology cannot create the full protein [21] -> Because it's an abnormal protein, it's foreign, so immune system attacks it [21] -> Patients injected with drug are basically given an autoimmune disease [21] -> Patients have to be given anti-inflammatories to fight the disease that the drug causes [21] -> Causes terrible muscle inflammation [21] -> Inflames the heart, heart walls thicken because of the inflammation [21] -> Blows up the liver, causes acute liver injury and death [21] Drug should actually be assumed harmful, not beneficial -> Given all of the above, since the drug failed to meet its primary endpoint, it should actually be considered harmful by default, not beneficial [19,20] -> In other words, what we would actually expect if we added more patients and did an even larger study... -> Is that the drug would do worse than placebo, i.e., patients taking the drug would do worse than those taking placebo -> Why isn't this the default interpretation? -> They are reading the study with an intervention bias -> An intervention bias is natural, which is why "do no harm" is such a central tenet of medicine -> If I may put forward a thesis: most of Vinay Prasad's 500+-paper body of work has been dedicated to demonstrating the "do no harm" principle empirically [22] -> Rose-colored glasses study interpreters are simply not applying this principle properly and are thus failing scientifically in the most fundamental way -> Incomprehensible -> Back in 2016, scientists were adamant that the approval of Sarepta's first drug indicated the profound deterioration of scientific standards [8,9] -> But this latest approval is even worse: actual clinical data is now being overruled -> No standards at all are being enforced anymore; anything can now be approved based on any evidence whatsoever -> What Vinay was trying to do was simply to stop the unrelenting downslide -> And his firing punctuated that downslide for what it was The WSJ segment -> When Elevidys was approved, former FDA chief scientist and one of the original reviewers of Sarepta's first drug Luciana Borio said: -> "I don’t know what to say. Peter Marks makes a mockery of scientific reasoning and approval standards that have served patients well over decades. This type of action also promotes the growing mistrust in scientific institutions like the FDA." [23] -> To return to this video, these two WSJ reporters show an incredible level of ignorance and arrogance -> Finley says that the drug is "clearly" beneficial by misreading the secondary endpoints, just like Marks did -> An FDA memo from last year says about these endpoints: "Under these circumstances, they are misleading and cannot guide any stakeholders—including patients, family members and caregivers, and prescribers—in making informed decisions about the potential benefit of treatment with ELEVIDYS." [20] -> It really doesn't get any clearer than that -> But these two journalists are overruling the actual scientists, just like Marks did -> One of the most incredible comments during this interview was the complaint that "90% of clinical trials fail", as if that's bad thing [1] -> It's actually a good thing; most drugs suck; failing in clinical trial actually allows us to use only the drugs that don't suck -> These people don't understand the most fundamental purpose of the clinical trial -> They think clinical trials failing is a bad thing, as if it means that patients now won't get to use a useful drug -> No, it's a good thing, because it means that patients won't be exposed unnecessarily to a useless drug that might harm them -> The level of ignorance really is unbelievable -> What's worse is that these "journalists" defend their decision -> But what they did is exploit social media hysteria caused by Laura Loomer [1,7] -> Following up on her heels with editorials, using her as pharma attack dog [1,4] -> This is a huge blow to WSJ's credibility, and they know it -> Unbelievably shameful Where do we go from here? -> The Vinay Prasad firing creates a serious crisis of credibility at FDA [2,6] -> Up to this point, we could call these approvals a difference of opinion, but as we've seen, that's a huge stretch -> But any illusion of that is now shattered: the firing shows that drug regulation is explicitly political -> Janet Woodcock: approve, keep job -> Peter Marks: approve, keep job -> Vinay Prasad: block, transparently fired -> Make a decision that is anti-pharma and lose your job: that's the message -> Who can trust any decision at FDA anymore? -> RFK Jr. and Marty Makary both stand behind Vinay Prasad [24] -> Trump went along with lockdowns, he went along with mask mandates, he went along with all of the Covid pseudoscience that he now decries -> He should reverse course and not go along with this -> Trump has created a profound crisis of credibility at FDA and needs to fix it
5:41

An interview by VERY DARK AND CORRUPT Wall Street Journal aired today [1] WSJ's terrible "journalists" (and I use that term lightly) made many false statements about Sarepta's worthless, dangerous drug and Vinay Prasad's firing [1,2] I explain how the FDA sausage is made in excruciating detail Buckle up To get readers up to speed -> In June, corrupt pharma company Sarepta Therapeutics paid $40,000 to lobbying group Michael Best Strategies (MBS) to deal with a problem [3] -> MBS had recently hired Chris LaCivita, who had close connections with "MAGA" influencer Laura Loomer [4] -> With stock down 88%, Sarepta needed to sell their very bad, very dangerous drug or the company would go bankrupt [5] -> After several deaths from the drug this year, FDA official Vinay Prasad said "no way" and kicked the drug to the curb [2,6] -> Sarepta panicked and paid MBS (we believe) to deal with Prasad [3,4] -> If this story is right, LaCivita recruited Laura Loomer to take down Prasad [4,7] -> Loomer said she was defending Trump, but she was lying [7] -> She was defending taxpayer-funded payouts to a worthless, corrupt company [7] -> Laura Loomer so brave A history of bad drugs and regulatory failure -> This is one of the worst pharma scandals in American history and corrupt mainstream media isn't covering it -> Sarepta has a very long, troubled history [8] -> For more than a decade, every major Sarepta FDA drug approval has required INTENSE political intervention [8,9] -> Scientists at FDA have been repeatedly overruled [8,9] -> Many scientists have resigned, very publicly, over these POLITICAL decisions, some writing scathing public criticisms of these terrible decisions [10,11] -> The most recent resignation by Vinay Prasad is not something new; it follows in a long tradition [2,10] -> In fact, standards have dramatically deteriorated since the first controversies about the company's drugs in the 2010s [8,9] -> Prasad was trying to hold the line in the face of rapidly deteriorating standards at the agency [2,6] -> For that, pharma launched a coup--a literal coup of a drug regulator [4,6] -> This is unprecedented -> Banana republic sht, unbelievably corrupt 2016: first Sarepta drug approval and the "highly unusual" decision -> The first Sarepta drug approved by FDA was called Exondys 51 [8] -> This drug was for patients with mutations in dystrophin, a muscle protein [8] -> This is a debilitating and fatal disease affecting children [8] -> Exondys 51 increased dystrophin by 0.2% of normal levels [8,12] -> Unsurprisingly, there was no good evidence the drug worked [8,12] -> Why would it? It increases the protein from zero to 1/500th of normal levels -> One reviewer wrote: "I can find no precedent of an accelerated approval for a marketing application where the effect size on the surrogate endpoint is as small as 0.3%." [12] -> The study submitted by the company included no proper control group [12] -> The techniques used were so bad not even a first-year PhD student would do a study that way -> This the level of work you would expect from a mediocre undergraduate with no guidance -> It's almost like it was so bad on purpose -> (Narrator: it was on purpose) -> Nerd time: -> One reviewer wrote: "The Western blots submitted by the applicant for Study 201 were oversaturated, unreliable, and uninterpretable." [12] -> Another wrote: "Because CDER also determined that the conditions under which the original IHC analysis was performed were inadequate, including that the reader was not masked to sequence and time, the Center requested a re-reading of the stored images by three masked pathologists under different conditions. The IHC results from the reread were not nearly as favorable, as compared to the initial IHC results reported by Sarepta." [12] -> "The lack of concordance between the IHC and the Western Blot results is 'striking'" [12] -> "Study 201/202 had fundamental flaws, including baseline biopsies from external controls who could differ in unknown ways from study subjects, Week 180 biopsies from different muscles than baseline, and potential protein degradation in stored baseline samples." [12] -> And on and on. -> FDA commissioner Robert Califf wrote at the time: the submitted study was "characterized by major flaws in the clinical study design" and "Blinded experts assembled by the FDA fundamentally debunked this study, which has yet to be retracted and continues to be cited" [9,12] -> That's right, the FDA commissioner expressed dismay that the study that the company used to gain approval hadn't yet been retracted, it was so bad [9] -> Senior FDA official Janet Woodcock decided to approve before scientific review team had even voted [9,12] -> Woodcock be like: yeah i'm going to decide before you guys can because i know what you're going to say lol -> Despite external intense pressure, FDA scientists voted against Exondys 51's efficacy [9,12] -> They then voted against its accelerated approval [9,12] -> The review team filed an appeal with FDA commissioner after "passionate" disagreement with Woodcock [9,12] -> One reviewer called Woodcock's decision "unprecedented" [12] -> In a 126-page report, FDA commissioner Califf called Woodcock's decision "highly unusual" [9] -> The FDA board wrote: "[Woodcock's] involvement here appears to have upended the typical review and decision-making process. ... Care should be taken to avoid the appearance of interfering with the integrity of scientific reviews at the lower levels of a Center." [9] -> Again, the data were unbelievably bad, literally every technique in the study was inappropriately used [12] -> I would fire an undergraduate student who did science like this, immediately -> FDA's chief scientist accused Sarepta of "serious irresponsibility" for selectively publishing only some of the data [9] -> Even Woodcock, who approved the drug, called the research "seriously deficient" [12] -> Yes, even the person who approved the drug over the heads of FDA's scientists said the research was horrible [12] -> Still, FDA tried to bury their heads in the sand and beg that, basically, Sarepta pretty please do a better job next time -> FDA commissioner: "The utmost attention should be paid to optimizing the methodological rigor of [future] trial[s]" [9] -> FDA also demanded a clinical trial "to verify the benefit" of the drug [8] -> Welp, this was in 2016 [8] -> The trial results are supposed to be available in 2026, maybe [13] -> Or maybe later, depending on how much money needs to be made first -> As an article published in Nature three years later despaired of the decision: "The approval was conditional on the company agreeing to conduct a two-year post-approval trial to show Exondys 51’s efficacy. But by August 2019, the company had yet to begin such a trial and in the meantime had profited from sales of $300 million in 2018." [13] -> If it sounds like Sarepta used political pressure to get its drug approved and then tried to avoid actually publishing the study showing it didn't work, it sounds that way because that's exactly what happened [13] -> FDA commissioner after deferring to Woodcock: "I am confident this unique situation will not set a general precedent for drug approvals under the accelerated approval pathway, as the statute and regulations are clear each situation must be evaluated on its own merits based on the totality of data and information." [9] -> This statement was profoundly naive, and the historical record bears this out [8,14] -> Three FDA scientists resigned, including the lead reviewer of the drug, understanding the grave implications of the collapse of scientific standards and where they would lead [10,11] -> One was John K. Jenkins, M.D. Director, Office of New Drugs Center for Drug Evaluation and Research/FDA [10] -> In a presentation given just before his resignation, he wrote: -> "Path taken by Sarepta NOT a good model for other development programs" [10] -> Crucially: -> "Upholding statutory standards for approval in face of hopes and desires of patients, families, sponsors, and investors is a very difficult job" [10] -> "Personal attacks on FDA reviewers creates an atmosphere of distrust and isolation rather than collaboration" [10] This brings us to WHY Sarepta's drug was approved Facebook FDA -> So why did the drug get approved? -> Basically, Sarepta propagandized extremely desperate patients [9,15] -> They used miraculous snake oil promises and patients believed them -> Remember that this is life or death for patients, and they are extremely vulnerable -> Sarepta also professionally trained some patients to give testimonials to FDA and congress [15] -> The patients then went to congressmen who don't have time to understand the science [15] -> They gave emotional stories to congressmen [15] -> The result: -> Letter from 109 House members [15] -> Letter from 24 Senate members [15] -> And a media circus documented in the New York Times [16] -> Patients screaming at scientists during meetings [9] -> 2,792 emails written to FDA urging approval [12] -> One of them: "Dear Dr. califf: How is it that everyone in and around DMD understands this simple Idea and the science geniuses at FDA don't? You stupid fckers are costing each and every DMD kids days of their lives with your Moronic Dystrophin dance. Time to get a fcking clue" [12] -> Upon approval, a journalist for Reuters wrote: "owing to pressure from patient advocates, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy even though an outside panel of experts and the agency's own reviewers questioned the drug's efficacy" [17] -> A commentary in Nature Medicine was also published called "Railroading at the FDA" [9] -> Its author wrote: "In the words of one FDA committee member, Exondys lowers the agency's evidentiary standard for drug effectiveness 'to an unprecedented nadir.'" [9] -> A highly critical commentary was also published in Science, titled "Sarepta gets an approval - Unfortunately" [18] -> The article's author pharma veteran Derek Lowe wrote: "The company... called up Duchenne-affected boys and their families to plead with the FDA, and won over Janet Woodcock, and that appears to be enough. Is this going to be the new way to get a drug approved? Run a trial in a dozen people, generate unconvincing data, and then lobby Janet Woodcock? I share the worries that this might open the floodgates, because after all, Sarepta got their drug through." [18] -> One FDA reviewer ended in an equally grim note: ". Approval of this NDA would send the signal that political pressure and even intimidation – not science – guides FDA decisions, with extremely negative consequences. The public is well aware of this development program: the meager size of the study population, the marginal (at best) effect size, the Division’s dim view of the efficacy data, and the robust activism of some members of the DMD community. Many would be amazed at an approval action, because other DMD drugs, recently turned down for approval, appeared to provide stronger evidence of efficacy. ...The ramifications here are profound. The public will perceive that it was their unprecedented lobbying efforts that made the difference and earned eteplirsen its accelerated approval. For the future, this will have the effect of strongly encouraging public activism and intimidation as a substitute for data, which is one of the worst possible consequences for communities with rare diseases. This type of activism is not what was envisioned for patient-focused drug development." [12] -> A new era was born -> Activism had replaced data -> Facebook had fried people's brains -> And now Facebook-fried brains had fried FDA too -> FDA's credibility as a regulatory agency would now be hollowed out -> FDA's Facebook age had begun -> But the worst was yet to come Sarepta approvals: 2016 to present -> Three more drugs were approved from Sarepta on the same shoddy basis, proving Califf's promises that Exondys 51 was an isolated case empty [8,14] -> But things would take a turn for the worse with Sarepta's newest drug Elevidys in 2024 [19] -> At last a rigorous clinical trial looking at actual clinical outcomes was published [19,20] -> All would be put to rest -> At long last the issue could be resolved with HARD CLINICAL DATA -> There was only one problem -> The trial failed to show any benefit according to the primary outcome [19,20] -> The surrogate biomarker of micro-dystrophin meant absolutely nothing; it wasn't actually helping patients [19,20] -> What did FDA scientists do? They voted against approval. Of course [19] -> How could they not? The drug didn't actually work in the clinical trial [19] -> It's the only thing that made sense, since FDA is a scientific agency -> AND THEY WERE OVERRULED AGAIN BY PETER MARKS [19] -> YES THAT'S RIGHT, OVERRULED YET AGAIN -> PHARMA WINS AGAIN -> HAHAHAHAHAHA PHARMA ALWAYS WINS YOU FOOLS -> What happened is that Marks crossed his eyes somewhat, trying to make the words on the page blurry -> He prayed really hard, "my god please give me a sign, something, anything, I need this for my career" -> lzzosolsolzzolzozlslzolosllslozllzlzl -> Marks was trying really hard to see SOMETHING, come on come on, give me SOMETHIGN he said -> And he said: wait, look, there are these secondary, exploratory endpoints and a two of them look pretty good, I'LL APPROVE [19,20] -> AHAHAHHAHAHA YES PHAMRA WINS AGAIN -> And Marks said, "Thank you pharma go- I mean god, not pharma god, why did I just say that, FCK" -> The trial was explicitly designed for what Marks did NOT to happen [20] -> Once the primary endpoint was not met, the secondary endpoints couldn't even be statistically tested [20] -> And the trial explicitly said that they could not be interpreted the way Marks interpreted them [20] -> They were not adjusted for multiplicity and they were, like expression of dystrophin, simply bad endpoints [20] -> These two secondary endpoints were time to rise from lying on the floor and the 10-meter walk/run tests [20] -> Subjects who received the Elevidys performed, on average, about 0.5 seconds better than placebo recipients on these tasks [20] -> However several facts must be borne in mind when interpreting these: -> 1. At the time of testing, patients receiving the drug were receiving more corticosteroids than placebo patients, biasing the results [20] -> 2. Blinding might have been broken because those receiving the drug experienced lots of nausea and vomiting from the drug (~70%) [20] -> 3. These differences were tiny and may be attributable to chance, since the natural course of the disease varies widely [20] -> Marks knows this but who cares? Pharma I mean Facebook needed to be placated Elevidys: the drug -> To understand why this is so messed up, one must understand a few things -> On a Bayesian basis, one must assume that Elevidys is harmful until proven otherwise, for two reasons: -> 1. All drugs are potentially "toxic", but some toxins heal: by default you must assume it is a toxin that does not heal because this is what is actually usually the case; you need evidence that it actually heals -> 2. Elevidys IN PARTICULAR must be assumed to be harmful until proven otherwise because of the very nature of the drug -> Let's do a breakdown of the basic science of Elevidys that supports this (Bayesian) hypothesis: -> Gene therapy that permanently integrates into human genome [21] -> Meant to replace dystrophin, the protein that these patients cannot produce themselves [21] -> Preferentially targets muscle but gets expressed everywhere [21] -> Killed three people this year [6,21] -> Costs $3.2 million per injection [21] -> Truncated version of the protein it is supposed to replace [21] -> 3X shorter than the real protein [21] -> Has to be truncated because the technology cannot create the full protein [21] -> Because it's an abnormal protein, it's foreign, so immune system attacks it [21] -> Patients injected with drug are basically given an autoimmune disease [21] -> Patients have to be given anti-inflammatories to fight the disease that the drug causes [21] -> Causes terrible muscle inflammation [21] -> Inflames the heart, heart walls thicken because of the inflammation [21] -> Blows up the liver, causes acute liver injury and death [21] Drug should actually be assumed harmful, not beneficial -> Given all of the above, since the drug failed to meet its primary endpoint, it should actually be considered harmful by default, not beneficial [19,20] -> In other words, what we would actually expect if we added more patients and did an even larger study... -> Is that the drug would do worse than placebo, i.e., patients taking the drug would do worse than those taking placebo -> Why isn't this the default interpretation? -> They are reading the study with an intervention bias -> An intervention bias is natural, which is why "do no harm" is such a central tenet of medicine -> If I may put forward a thesis: most of Vinay Prasad's 500+-paper body of work has been dedicated to demonstrating the "do no harm" principle empirically [22] -> Rose-colored glasses study interpreters are simply not applying this principle properly and are thus failing scientifically in the most fundamental way -> Incomprehensible -> Back in 2016, scientists were adamant that the approval of Sarepta's first drug indicated the profound deterioration of scientific standards [8,9] -> But this latest approval is even worse: actual clinical data is now being overruled -> No standards at all are being enforced anymore; anything can now be approved based on any evidence whatsoever -> What Vinay was trying to do was simply to stop the unrelenting downslide -> And his firing punctuated that downslide for what it was The WSJ segment -> When Elevidys was approved, former FDA chief scientist and one of the original reviewers of Sarepta's first drug Luciana Borio said: -> "I don’t know what to say. Peter Marks makes a mockery of scientific reasoning and approval standards that have served patients well over decades. This type of action also promotes the growing mistrust in scientific institutions like the FDA." [23] -> To return to this video, these two WSJ reporters show an incredible level of ignorance and arrogance -> Finley says that the drug is "clearly" beneficial by misreading the secondary endpoints, just like Marks did -> An FDA memo from last year says about these endpoints: "Under these circumstances, they are misleading and cannot guide any stakeholders—including patients, family members and caregivers, and prescribers—in making informed decisions about the potential benefit of treatment with ELEVIDYS." [20] -> It really doesn't get any clearer than that -> But these two journalists are overruling the actual scientists, just like Marks did -> One of the most incredible comments during this interview was the complaint that "90% of clinical trials fail", as if that's bad thing [1] -> It's actually a good thing; most drugs suck; failing in clinical trial actually allows us to use only the drugs that don't suck -> These people don't understand the most fundamental purpose of the clinical trial -> They think clinical trials failing is a bad thing, as if it means that patients now won't get to use a useful drug -> No, it's a good thing, because it means that patients won't be exposed unnecessarily to a useless drug that might harm them -> The level of ignorance really is unbelievable -> What's worse is that these "journalists" defend their decision -> But what they did is exploit social media hysteria caused by Laura Loomer [1,7] -> Following up on her heels with editorials, using her as pharma attack dog [1,4] -> This is a huge blow to WSJ's credibility, and they know it -> Unbelievably shameful Where do we go from here? -> The Vinay Prasad firing creates a serious crisis of credibility at FDA [2,6] -> Up to this point, we could call these approvals a difference of opinion, but as we've seen, that's a huge stretch -> But any illusion of that is now shattered: the firing shows that drug regulation is explicitly political -> Janet Woodcock: approve, keep job -> Peter Marks: approve, keep job -> Vinay Prasad: block, transparently fired -> Make a decision that is anti-pharma and lose your job: that's the message -> Who can trust any decision at FDA anymore? -> RFK Jr. and Marty Makary both stand behind Vinay Prasad [24] -> Trump went along with lockdowns, he went along with mask mandates, he went along with all of the Covid pseudoscience that he now decries -> He should reverse course and not go along with this -> Trump has created a profound crisis of credibility at FDA and needs to fix it

Kevin Bass

80,314 views • 1 year ago

💥 LAP Alert 💥 "I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed." ~Knapp Is Lacatski Lying to Us About the Craft and Breaching the Hull? ~ "If not for that [2017 NYT] story about AATIP and the problems that [Lacatski] saw with it, he would never have mentioned [AAWSAP]...I don't think, ever." ~Knapp (So, in other words...thank you from the UFO community, to the NYT, for getting it wrong? 🙂) ~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "Should we listen to Dr. James Lacatski on UFOs, on the fact, or the idea, that our government has at least one, he's admitted, and we breached the hull? Should we listen to him, George?" George Knapp: "I know a lot of people have noticed that he's talked about his role in counterintelligence as part of the AAWSAP program. And because they equate counterintelligence with lies, false info., cover stories, misdirection. Aha! He's putting out a bunch of false info. a decade after he retired from government service." (I saw one person suggest that, and I thought it was a questionable take...) Grant Lavac: "Given that Dr. James Lacatski was the 'counterintelligence coordinator' for AAWSAP, how much confidence can we invest in the veracity of his public statements that 'at least one recovered craft of unknown origin, a flying machine with no wings, no engine, no fuel, and no fuel tanks' is in the possession of the US government and that they had 'breached the hull' of the UFO? In the context of the counterintelligence value of UAP/UFO, his comments in this most recent interview on WEAPONIZED (edited for brevity) only raise more questions for me." ~~~ Knapp: "A, it's not [Lacatski]. He's not out there beating the bushes. He's talked to us, but that's pretty much it. He's telling the full story as much as he can in a series of books. And I was co-author on two of those, not on this one. And, you know, I remember the first time I met him, it was in 2018." ~ (In April of 2019, Knapp shared that story, minus Lacatski's name, at UFO MegaCon. Knapp in 2019: "I thought today I would share with you, sort of the informational foundation that I’ve acquired. So, one year ago, I made this trip to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Senator Harry Reid. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2018 and I already knew a little bit about AATIP and AAWSAP and what they’ve been studying and where the money came from and how the program was created. I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed. And if there was ever actually, anybody following me, they must have thought I looked ridiculous because it was way over the top. "But I ended up having to meet with Senator Reid and some other people who were directly involved in these programs and they gave me a download. And I thought I knew a lot about these programs when I went there and realized that I only knew a little tiny bit. The purpose of this was to learn about these programs. We all know about AATIP, but in reality, there was something before that. "I sat down for a couple of hours with Senator Reid and other people whose names, they don’t want to be known. They brought me up to speed on how AATIP was created. How its predecessor was under way for a number of years. It coexisted for a long time. People in this room. People who investigate this topic may have suspected for a long time that there was some kind of a program that still existed. We’ve all heard that Project Bluebook was the end. 1969 it ended and the government was done with UFOs. They closed up shop. And the reason they closed it down is because there was no evidence that it involved national security. "And we all knew that was baloney because of the stories that we’ve seen that are really well documented. For example, UFOs over nuclear missile bases. UFO encounters with the military installations and atomic facilities. Things of that sort the have been well documented over the years. There are cases that involved national security. So at the end of Blue Book, of course, this memo said, alright, any cases involving national security will continue to be investigated in the regular way. Well, what the heck was the regular way? We didn’t know. Well now we do know. At least a little bit of it." (Project Blue Book was shut down in December of 1969, but a few months earlier, in October, we had the Bolender memo, which noted that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." What standard Air Force procedure? The regular way? Where did those cases go? We still don't know what Bolender was referring to in that memo.) ~ Knapp in 2019: "And one of the regular ways was this program called AATIP. So I went on this trip. [and] I learned this stuff about AATIP. I had known a lot about it before but I got this briefing about this alphabet soup of different programs, how they began and what they studied. December 2017, the New York Times breaks this story about AATIP. Now, I had known about it for a long time because I lived in Las Vegas. I knew Bob Bigelow. I knew Harry Reid. We’d talk about UFO stuff and what was going on. "So when I was told the New York Times was gonna break the story, I’m kind ticked off about it. Because hey, I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. Why don’t I get to break the story? And they had to, one after another, gently remind me, 'You know. You’re not the New York Times.' Which I had to admit! It was true. And if I had done the story, the Times had said that they weren’t going to do it if somebody else breaks it. So, if I had done it, it’d be another story from a UFO reporter. "The New York Times did it and they changed everything. Because they did it, wider organizations did it. Some of them took shots at the New York Times because The Times got the story and they didn’t. But that story was accurate, to a degree. But the story that it told was not the full story. AATIP, that we know about…the AATIP that studies nuts and bolts saucers…case of UFOs that have encounters with military units such as the USS Nimitz, that is studied by a group of people, Lue Elizondo was the head of it. "It’s not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command. "In 2007, that changed. One of the guys (Lacatski. ~Joe 2025) I met with in this meeting in Washington is the one who changed it. He had been in the same position that Lue Elizondo had been in. And his name is just not out there. He grew frustrated with what was happening with the phenomenon and he suspected that UFOs flying around the sky, buzzing our military units every once in a while, is not the full story. Even if you could solve that part of the mystery it wouldn’t solve the bigger part of the picture. "So he grew interested in Skinwalker Ranch and he had read the (Knapp/Kelleher – 'Hunt For The Skinwalker') book. And after he read it, he called up Bob Bigelow and said…actually, he wrote him a letter and said, 'Hey, can I go to the ranch…go look around? I’m with the DIA.' Bigelow says, 'Come on out to Las Vegas and I’ll take you there.' And that’s what happened. He flew to Las Vegas. They flew on Bigelow’s jet. They went to the ranch. "This guy’s not there fifteen minutes and he has an experience. And I’m not gonna go into detail. I’m hoping that he’s going to maybe come forward at some point and describe his experience. But it was just for him. Of all the people in this room, in the encounter, he was the only one who could see it. He’s the only one who had an angle on this thing that appeared. And he’s pretending that he’s not seeing it but it’s right out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything until he leaves the ranch. And he gets off and he asks Bigelow if he had seen it. And he had not. The other people who had been in the room had not seen it. "He flies back to Las Vegas, goes back to Washington, D.C. and looks up Harry Reid and tells him about it. Now Reid had some experience in these matters that I’ll get into in a little bit. But as a result of that conversation, Reid, who had an interest in UFOs and had maintained that interest over many years – and I can attest to that personally – called in a couple of his friends in the Senate – Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. They had a conversation in a secure room and they decided to provide some funding for a much broader study. Something that looked at…beyond flying saucers, that looked at other paranormal aspects…supernatural aspects that we would not normally associate with aliens or ETs. Assuming that that’s what this is, which I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. And that is how AAWSAP was born. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program." ~~~ Knapp Yesterday: "The only reason [Lacatski] came forward, he was ticked off about how AATIP had been described in major media reports, and no mention had been given to the actual, real program. That one that had a $22 million budget, lasted 27 months, and which put together the biggest UFO data warehouse in history, that had written all these papers that still have not been released." (In the most-recent interview (Part 1) with Weaponized, Lacatski let it fly with his issues related to the 2017 NYT article: "The initial reporting...by the New York Times story in 2017 was totally inaccurate. Contrary to what some people claim, the authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the The Washington Post. POLITICO (laughs) contacted me within hours after the articles were published in the free publications, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Why didn't they contact me [beforehand]?" ~Dr. James Lacatski on Weaponized ~ Knapp: "So, Jim was a counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, but in this role. He wasn't putting out cover stories or lies, he didn't put out anything. The world didn't hear that AAWSAP existed until years later, at least by that name. There was one statement made to the press about that program. It was by Robert Bigelow, whose company, BAASS, got the contract. A week after he signed it, he came on with me on Coast to Coast AM and said, 'We got this program dealing with UFOs, we have an unnamed partner, and we're excited to get going.' That was it. "Jim Lacatski wasn't putting out PR releases about AAWSAP. There was nothing. That was the last thing anybody said until the New York Times did the AATIP story, and then Jim Lacatski felt the real story was being covered up. If not for that story about AATIP and the problems that he saw with it, he would never have mentioned this. I don't think ever." (Well, then, thank you to the NYT journalists and editors for pissing off Lacatski!) Knapp: "You'll recall, AAWSAP, at the time that things went downhill, that the funding was moved away, they were trying to make it into a SAP, a Special Access Program. And if it had happened, we probably would never have heard of it. If it had happened, Lue Elizondo would have been the counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, that he had already talked to Lacatski. "But Lacatski is not proclaiming the greatness of the program. He's not out there beating the bushes on podcasts and newscasts, other than with us, and he never put out in counterintelligence. His role, counterintelligence, meant something different for AAWSAP. The thing that DIA had told him was, 'Look, you know, it's not a rogue program. I know it gets weird into some of the phenomena that was at Skinwalker Ranch and other places. We don't care. Here's what we care about: Don't let the secret out. We don't want to see this on the front page of the Washington Post. We want it kept secret.' (John Greenewald was one person questioning whether AAWSAP was actually a prosaic program and Lacatski just decided to go rogue with a foray into UFOs and the paranormal.) Greenewald Tweet: "Did the U.S. government really sanction this, and if so, is this really how it was run? Or was this a rogue operation by a select few on the inside playing with Uncle Sam's coffers?" (Greenewald was quote tweeting a Greenstreet hit-piece video on AAWSAP. In his interview on Weaponized aired over the past few weeks, Lacatski said that former Deputy Director of AARO, Tim Phillips, also used the "rogue" word when describing AAWSAP. Did DIA really not know what AAWSAP was about? Did Lacatski go rogue and turn a program that was supposed to look at prosaic, advanced technology into one that studied UFOs and the paranormal? Here's an exchange from the 2023 interview Knapp and Corbell did with Lacatski and Colm Kelleher.) Kelleher: "The critical part of AAWSAP that we tried to convey in 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,' was that there were two fundamental, parallel tracks that AAWSAP ran on. The first one was the examination of UFO performance. And, you know, the UFO performance part was getting all of the data from eyewitnesses, plus deploying sensors into the field, in order to gather data on the performance of UFOs. That was track number one. And track number two was: What effects do UFOs have on humans? That was a parallel track that, from the get go, AAWSAP decided, unambiguously, to run both tracks in parallel. We documented psychological effects, and then we also documented paranormal effects." Lacatski: "Anything can be said on the internet it seems, factual or not. Well, one thing that is not factual is, DIA knew what it was getting into in regard to both aspects that Colm just described to you. And let me end my statement right here. We had no choice but to pursue both aspects." (That was a poor way of him saying: The claim that DIA was unaware of AAWSAP looking into all aspects of UFOs, including the paranormal, is NOT true.) Lacatski: "I want to emphasize something I said on my first and only interview. It was a closed program. It operated very similar to a SAP. The director, the director of analysis, and my office chief...and, of course, division chief, knew about this program. No one else did. Now, I was also protected by the stovepipe nature of that. I did not have to address political-type questions. I was insulated, but they were, too. There was no one else. People in the surrounding cubicles didn't know. Nothing was purposely being hid. It was a closed, stovepipe system, and it needed to be. It needed to be operated that way." ~~~ Knapp: "And so, Jim Lacatski took it on himself, put it in his own hands. He and Colm Kelleher interviewed all these people who applied for the jobs, the 50 full-time positions that they staffed, in a matter of months. They did background checks, they required security clearances for all those people, and they were worried about leaks. They didn't want information to get out. "They also were concerned about espionage by foreign players, by foreign companies, things of that sort. And some of that really did happen. As Jim has shared with us, there were a couple of phones that were transmitters that were found inside Bigelow Aerospace, inside the Bigelow, uh, facilities, and it was very alarming because they weren't sure who was doing it. I think they think it was a foreign government. I'm not going to say which one, uh, they suspected the most." (Lacatski said that the phones in question were made in China.) Knapp: "But, and then they also found weird frequencies emanating from Skinwalker Ranch. That's not strange, and there's a lot of unusual stuff that happens there, but it was some sort of a an espionage program that they believed was was not only looking at the ranch, but also at BAASS. "That was his primary concern. He was worried that the story gets out, because secrecy was of paramount interest to the heads of DIA and he's worried about the information getting out to the public. Because once it happened, then the knives come out in the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, which is kind of what happened. A memo was sent from Harry Reid's office, let other people know that AAWSAP existed, and that's when things started getting problematic." Corbell: "The bugging thing. So, it's not just like Bigelow Aerospace was tapped with something, he said, specifically, AAWSAP, right? So they were looking at that new UFO program. And I don't know how public this is, but he did say it was - not just him, other people have all said - it was multiple nations, multiple, different devices from those phones. And he also said that they worked with FBI, they had FBI liaisons looking at the ranch property, and also at Bigelow Aerospace. "Because, remember, they were supposed to receive a transfer of materials. That's why they reverse, reverse engineered (laughs), you know, they built everything to be able to hold SCIF-capable and material-capable property at that classification level. So, look, I think if we pull it back, the whole idea is, James Lacatski made a statement at some point that he was, you know, head of, or part of, or running the counterintelligence for AAWSAP. But his point was to keep AAWSAP itself secret from foreign nations. So then he has to keep it secret from the U.S. He did it. He did a great job. They actually kept it secret. That doesn't mean he's going out and creating false information to the public like he's been accused of. "So, should we listen to Jim Lacatski? That was like, you know, the main question. Oh, one second. He also identified that there is currently a counter-programming, counterintelligence operation going on to the American public, but not against the American public, by AARO." (In other words, spread misinformation to the American public so they can advance their goal of misinforming and confusing our adversaries who are always listening. National security! IMO, that's only acceptable if we're talking specifics related to propulsion, technology and weapons that can be used to give us a leg up on said adversaries. But everything else should come out and be made public. We shouldn't be told a bunch of lies about information we paid for and that could, potentially, give us some clarity about our species and other lifeforms on this planet.) Corbell: That was so clear in our interview with him that he said that, you know, 'Look, they're acting this way. They are telling you lies about AAWSAP and what happened.' And that's why he said, 'My books, I'm a government employee. This was paid by taxpayers. I'm trying to give you information.' And that's what his books are. "So it's clear from these rounds of interviews that we just had with Dr. Lacatski that he supports a controlled UFO disclosure. He made that very clear. So should we listen to what he has to say? I mean, he was a big dog, right, George?" Knapp: "He was the head of the largest U.S. government-funded UFO investigation in history, that we know of. He worked with Colm Kelleher, who was the boots-on-the-ground guy in Las Vegas. He worked with Jay Stratton. Stratton's role in the development of AAWSAP has not been really fully explored, but he's got a book coming out at some point, once it gets through the DOPSR process. But then we'll get additional information to buttress what Lacatski has said."
7:17

💥 LAP Alert 💥 "I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed." ~Knapp Is Lacatski Lying to Us About the Craft and Breaching the Hull? ~ "If not for that [2017 NYT] story about AATIP and the problems that [Lacatski] saw with it, he would never have mentioned [AAWSAP]...I don't think, ever." ~Knapp (So, in other words...thank you from the UFO community, to the NYT, for getting it wrong? 🙂) ~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "Should we listen to Dr. James Lacatski on UFOs, on the fact, or the idea, that our government has at least one, he's admitted, and we breached the hull? Should we listen to him, George?" George Knapp: "I know a lot of people have noticed that he's talked about his role in counterintelligence as part of the AAWSAP program. And because they equate counterintelligence with lies, false info., cover stories, misdirection. Aha! He's putting out a bunch of false info. a decade after he retired from government service." (I saw one person suggest that, and I thought it was a questionable take...) Grant Lavac: "Given that Dr. James Lacatski was the 'counterintelligence coordinator' for AAWSAP, how much confidence can we invest in the veracity of his public statements that 'at least one recovered craft of unknown origin, a flying machine with no wings, no engine, no fuel, and no fuel tanks' is in the possession of the US government and that they had 'breached the hull' of the UFO? In the context of the counterintelligence value of UAP/UFO, his comments in this most recent interview on WEAPONIZED (edited for brevity) only raise more questions for me." ~~~ Knapp: "A, it's not [Lacatski]. He's not out there beating the bushes. He's talked to us, but that's pretty much it. He's telling the full story as much as he can in a series of books. And I was co-author on two of those, not on this one. And, you know, I remember the first time I met him, it was in 2018." ~ (In April of 2019, Knapp shared that story, minus Lacatski's name, at UFO MegaCon. Knapp in 2019: "I thought today I would share with you, sort of the informational foundation that I’ve acquired. So, one year ago, I made this trip to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Senator Harry Reid. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2018 and I already knew a little bit about AATIP and AAWSAP and what they’ve been studying and where the money came from and how the program was created. I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed. And if there was ever actually, anybody following me, they must have thought I looked ridiculous because it was way over the top. "But I ended up having to meet with Senator Reid and some other people who were directly involved in these programs and they gave me a download. And I thought I knew a lot about these programs when I went there and realized that I only knew a little tiny bit. The purpose of this was to learn about these programs. We all know about AATIP, but in reality, there was something before that. "I sat down for a couple of hours with Senator Reid and other people whose names, they don’t want to be known. They brought me up to speed on how AATIP was created. How its predecessor was under way for a number of years. It coexisted for a long time. People in this room. People who investigate this topic may have suspected for a long time that there was some kind of a program that still existed. We’ve all heard that Project Bluebook was the end. 1969 it ended and the government was done with UFOs. They closed up shop. And the reason they closed it down is because there was no evidence that it involved national security. "And we all knew that was baloney because of the stories that we’ve seen that are really well documented. For example, UFOs over nuclear missile bases. UFO encounters with the military installations and atomic facilities. Things of that sort the have been well documented over the years. There are cases that involved national security. So at the end of Blue Book, of course, this memo said, alright, any cases involving national security will continue to be investigated in the regular way. Well, what the heck was the regular way? We didn’t know. Well now we do know. At least a little bit of it." (Project Blue Book was shut down in December of 1969, but a few months earlier, in October, we had the Bolender memo, which noted that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." What standard Air Force procedure? The regular way? Where did those cases go? We still don't know what Bolender was referring to in that memo.) ~ Knapp in 2019: "And one of the regular ways was this program called AATIP. So I went on this trip. [and] I learned this stuff about AATIP. I had known a lot about it before but I got this briefing about this alphabet soup of different programs, how they began and what they studied. December 2017, the New York Times breaks this story about AATIP. Now, I had known about it for a long time because I lived in Las Vegas. I knew Bob Bigelow. I knew Harry Reid. We’d talk about UFO stuff and what was going on. "So when I was told the New York Times was gonna break the story, I’m kind ticked off about it. Because hey, I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. Why don’t I get to break the story? And they had to, one after another, gently remind me, 'You know. You’re not the New York Times.' Which I had to admit! It was true. And if I had done the story, the Times had said that they weren’t going to do it if somebody else breaks it. So, if I had done it, it’d be another story from a UFO reporter. "The New York Times did it and they changed everything. Because they did it, wider organizations did it. Some of them took shots at the New York Times because The Times got the story and they didn’t. But that story was accurate, to a degree. But the story that it told was not the full story. AATIP, that we know about…the AATIP that studies nuts and bolts saucers…case of UFOs that have encounters with military units such as the USS Nimitz, that is studied by a group of people, Lue Elizondo was the head of it. "It’s not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command. "In 2007, that changed. One of the guys (Lacatski. ~Joe 2025) I met with in this meeting in Washington is the one who changed it. He had been in the same position that Lue Elizondo had been in. And his name is just not out there. He grew frustrated with what was happening with the phenomenon and he suspected that UFOs flying around the sky, buzzing our military units every once in a while, is not the full story. Even if you could solve that part of the mystery it wouldn’t solve the bigger part of the picture. "So he grew interested in Skinwalker Ranch and he had read the (Knapp/Kelleher – 'Hunt For The Skinwalker') book. And after he read it, he called up Bob Bigelow and said…actually, he wrote him a letter and said, 'Hey, can I go to the ranch…go look around? I’m with the DIA.' Bigelow says, 'Come on out to Las Vegas and I’ll take you there.' And that’s what happened. He flew to Las Vegas. They flew on Bigelow’s jet. They went to the ranch. "This guy’s not there fifteen minutes and he has an experience. And I’m not gonna go into detail. I’m hoping that he’s going to maybe come forward at some point and describe his experience. But it was just for him. Of all the people in this room, in the encounter, he was the only one who could see it. He’s the only one who had an angle on this thing that appeared. And he’s pretending that he’s not seeing it but it’s right out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything until he leaves the ranch. And he gets off and he asks Bigelow if he had seen it. And he had not. The other people who had been in the room had not seen it. "He flies back to Las Vegas, goes back to Washington, D.C. and looks up Harry Reid and tells him about it. Now Reid had some experience in these matters that I’ll get into in a little bit. But as a result of that conversation, Reid, who had an interest in UFOs and had maintained that interest over many years – and I can attest to that personally – called in a couple of his friends in the Senate – Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. They had a conversation in a secure room and they decided to provide some funding for a much broader study. Something that looked at…beyond flying saucers, that looked at other paranormal aspects…supernatural aspects that we would not normally associate with aliens or ETs. Assuming that that’s what this is, which I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. And that is how AAWSAP was born. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program." ~~~ Knapp Yesterday: "The only reason [Lacatski] came forward, he was ticked off about how AATIP had been described in major media reports, and no mention had been given to the actual, real program. That one that had a $22 million budget, lasted 27 months, and which put together the biggest UFO data warehouse in history, that had written all these papers that still have not been released." (In the most-recent interview (Part 1) with Weaponized, Lacatski let it fly with his issues related to the 2017 NYT article: "The initial reporting...by the New York Times story in 2017 was totally inaccurate. Contrary to what some people claim, the authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the The Washington Post. POLITICO (laughs) contacted me within hours after the articles were published in the free publications, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Why didn't they contact me [beforehand]?" ~Dr. James Lacatski on Weaponized ~ Knapp: "So, Jim was a counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, but in this role. He wasn't putting out cover stories or lies, he didn't put out anything. The world didn't hear that AAWSAP existed until years later, at least by that name. There was one statement made to the press about that program. It was by Robert Bigelow, whose company, BAASS, got the contract. A week after he signed it, he came on with me on Coast to Coast AM and said, 'We got this program dealing with UFOs, we have an unnamed partner, and we're excited to get going.' That was it. "Jim Lacatski wasn't putting out PR releases about AAWSAP. There was nothing. That was the last thing anybody said until the New York Times did the AATIP story, and then Jim Lacatski felt the real story was being covered up. If not for that story about AATIP and the problems that he saw with it, he would never have mentioned this. I don't think ever." (Well, then, thank you to the NYT journalists and editors for pissing off Lacatski!) Knapp: "You'll recall, AAWSAP, at the time that things went downhill, that the funding was moved away, they were trying to make it into a SAP, a Special Access Program. And if it had happened, we probably would never have heard of it. If it had happened, Lue Elizondo would have been the counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, that he had already talked to Lacatski. "But Lacatski is not proclaiming the greatness of the program. He's not out there beating the bushes on podcasts and newscasts, other than with us, and he never put out in counterintelligence. His role, counterintelligence, meant something different for AAWSAP. The thing that DIA had told him was, 'Look, you know, it's not a rogue program. I know it gets weird into some of the phenomena that was at Skinwalker Ranch and other places. We don't care. Here's what we care about: Don't let the secret out. We don't want to see this on the front page of the Washington Post. We want it kept secret.' (John Greenewald was one person questioning whether AAWSAP was actually a prosaic program and Lacatski just decided to go rogue with a foray into UFOs and the paranormal.) Greenewald Tweet: "Did the U.S. government really sanction this, and if so, is this really how it was run? Or was this a rogue operation by a select few on the inside playing with Uncle Sam's coffers?" (Greenewald was quote tweeting a Greenstreet hit-piece video on AAWSAP. In his interview on Weaponized aired over the past few weeks, Lacatski said that former Deputy Director of AARO, Tim Phillips, also used the "rogue" word when describing AAWSAP. Did DIA really not know what AAWSAP was about? Did Lacatski go rogue and turn a program that was supposed to look at prosaic, advanced technology into one that studied UFOs and the paranormal? Here's an exchange from the 2023 interview Knapp and Corbell did with Lacatski and Colm Kelleher.) Kelleher: "The critical part of AAWSAP that we tried to convey in 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,' was that there were two fundamental, parallel tracks that AAWSAP ran on. The first one was the examination of UFO performance. And, you know, the UFO performance part was getting all of the data from eyewitnesses, plus deploying sensors into the field, in order to gather data on the performance of UFOs. That was track number one. And track number two was: What effects do UFOs have on humans? That was a parallel track that, from the get go, AAWSAP decided, unambiguously, to run both tracks in parallel. We documented psychological effects, and then we also documented paranormal effects." Lacatski: "Anything can be said on the internet it seems, factual or not. Well, one thing that is not factual is, DIA knew what it was getting into in regard to both aspects that Colm just described to you. And let me end my statement right here. We had no choice but to pursue both aspects." (That was a poor way of him saying: The claim that DIA was unaware of AAWSAP looking into all aspects of UFOs, including the paranormal, is NOT true.) Lacatski: "I want to emphasize something I said on my first and only interview. It was a closed program. It operated very similar to a SAP. The director, the director of analysis, and my office chief...and, of course, division chief, knew about this program. No one else did. Now, I was also protected by the stovepipe nature of that. I did not have to address political-type questions. I was insulated, but they were, too. There was no one else. People in the surrounding cubicles didn't know. Nothing was purposely being hid. It was a closed, stovepipe system, and it needed to be. It needed to be operated that way." ~~~ Knapp: "And so, Jim Lacatski took it on himself, put it in his own hands. He and Colm Kelleher interviewed all these people who applied for the jobs, the 50 full-time positions that they staffed, in a matter of months. They did background checks, they required security clearances for all those people, and they were worried about leaks. They didn't want information to get out. "They also were concerned about espionage by foreign players, by foreign companies, things of that sort. And some of that really did happen. As Jim has shared with us, there were a couple of phones that were transmitters that were found inside Bigelow Aerospace, inside the Bigelow, uh, facilities, and it was very alarming because they weren't sure who was doing it. I think they think it was a foreign government. I'm not going to say which one, uh, they suspected the most." (Lacatski said that the phones in question were made in China.) Knapp: "But, and then they also found weird frequencies emanating from Skinwalker Ranch. That's not strange, and there's a lot of unusual stuff that happens there, but it was some sort of a an espionage program that they believed was was not only looking at the ranch, but also at BAASS. "That was his primary concern. He was worried that the story gets out, because secrecy was of paramount interest to the heads of DIA and he's worried about the information getting out to the public. Because once it happened, then the knives come out in the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, which is kind of what happened. A memo was sent from Harry Reid's office, let other people know that AAWSAP existed, and that's when things started getting problematic." Corbell: "The bugging thing. So, it's not just like Bigelow Aerospace was tapped with something, he said, specifically, AAWSAP, right? So they were looking at that new UFO program. And I don't know how public this is, but he did say it was - not just him, other people have all said - it was multiple nations, multiple, different devices from those phones. And he also said that they worked with FBI, they had FBI liaisons looking at the ranch property, and also at Bigelow Aerospace. "Because, remember, they were supposed to receive a transfer of materials. That's why they reverse, reverse engineered (laughs), you know, they built everything to be able to hold SCIF-capable and material-capable property at that classification level. So, look, I think if we pull it back, the whole idea is, James Lacatski made a statement at some point that he was, you know, head of, or part of, or running the counterintelligence for AAWSAP. But his point was to keep AAWSAP itself secret from foreign nations. So then he has to keep it secret from the U.S. He did it. He did a great job. They actually kept it secret. That doesn't mean he's going out and creating false information to the public like he's been accused of. "So, should we listen to Jim Lacatski? That was like, you know, the main question. Oh, one second. He also identified that there is currently a counter-programming, counterintelligence operation going on to the American public, but not against the American public, by AARO." (In other words, spread misinformation to the American public so they can advance their goal of misinforming and confusing our adversaries who are always listening. National security! IMO, that's only acceptable if we're talking specifics related to propulsion, technology and weapons that can be used to give us a leg up on said adversaries. But everything else should come out and be made public. We shouldn't be told a bunch of lies about information we paid for and that could, potentially, give us some clarity about our species and other lifeforms on this planet.) Corbell: That was so clear in our interview with him that he said that, you know, 'Look, they're acting this way. They are telling you lies about AAWSAP and what happened.' And that's why he said, 'My books, I'm a government employee. This was paid by taxpayers. I'm trying to give you information.' And that's what his books are. "So it's clear from these rounds of interviews that we just had with Dr. Lacatski that he supports a controlled UFO disclosure. He made that very clear. So should we listen to what he has to say? I mean, he was a big dog, right, George?" Knapp: "He was the head of the largest U.S. government-funded UFO investigation in history, that we know of. He worked with Colm Kelleher, who was the boots-on-the-ground guy in Las Vegas. He worked with Jay Stratton. Stratton's role in the development of AAWSAP has not been really fully explored, but he's got a book coming out at some point, once it gets through the DOPSR process. But then we'll get additional information to buttress what Lacatski has said."

Joe Murgia

56,558 views • 10 months ago

"Come on, folks. Do we see what's playing out here? Marbury v. Mad might have just brought down the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department." - Towel, November 6, 2025 Rule #1 in Massachusetts politics right now; Do not mess with Attorney Corey Hopkins. She's going to get barred here just to reform the government (then I'll become her paralegal and we'll submit public records requests all day). Good plan. TRANSCRIPT (from Towel's coverage of the letter in question, uncovered by Attorney Hopkins); Hello and good evening. It is just past 6 p.m. on Monday, November 3rd, 2025. My name is Grant Smith-Ellis, and I'm back with you again for another developing news update, this time related to Boston Police Commissioner Cox responding to a developing series of scandals, in particular related to former Boston Police Officer—well, first former Canton Police Officer, then former Boston Police Officer—Kelly Dever. Now, Kelly Dever was an integral witness during the John O'Keefe and Karen Read trial about one specific series of events in the early morning of January 29, 2022—not really related to John's death per se, but related to the then-chief of the Canton Police Department, Ken Berkowitz, who was also potentially the person that went to the FBI about Brian Tully's MSP unit, Massachusetts State Police unit, detailed to the Norfolk DA, who were the same people that investigated Karen Read for John's death. Berkowitz was the same person who apparently went to the FBI in 2022 about Tully's unit through John Fanning covering up Sandra Birchmore's death at the hands of former Stoughton PD officer Matthew Farwell. Okay, Ken Berkowitz and Brian Higgins—then undercover ATF agent who himself had been in a relationship of some kind, we'll call it that, with Karen in the months before John's death. That's a whole story we will not get into. The point is, Higgins and Berkowitz go into the sally port. Now, Kelly Dever had been working since, I think it was 12 a.m. on January 28th. She worked—let me make sure I get this right now—she worked at 12 p.m., noon on January 28th to 8 p.m. Then she worked the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift. Okay, she was doing 16 hours over those two days. At like 1:30 a.m., she saw Berkowitz and Higgins—or around there, maybe a little later—go into the area, an area of the Canton PD. Then—and we're going to find out—she had a meeting with Boston Police Commissioner Cox. Now, why did Commissioner Cox get himself in trouble? Well, not because of the interview we're going to watch, but instead because of an interview about a year ago where he said he knew nothing about the Kelly Dever situation or the Karen Read case. All right, now we're going to quickly come to find out that what we're about to hear from the commissioner is not the best answer in light of this little document found by the incredible Marbury v. Madison on X, Corey A. Hopkins, a business litigator based in North Carolina. Towel really likes Marbury v. Madison because, first of all, Marbury v. Madison is an awesome case, and it entrenched the supremacy of the judiciary as to saying what the law is by virtue of the Constitution. Solved a very complex problem related to the Judiciary Act of 1789 and, in particular, the emergence of political parties in 1796 and, in particular, 1800, and a slew of last-minute appointments by President Adams and a refusal by President Jefferson to commission—or one of the refusal by Jefferson's Secretary of State Madison to commission a justice of the peace. But it really was about the supremacy of the judiciary branch. Marbury v. Madison uses a lot of FOIAs, and what you're going to see right here is a FOIA request that resulted in this wonderful little document. And what does this show? All right, this document shows, folks, a letter from Stephen J. Kelleher, who's with the White Collar Public Corruption and Civil Rights Division of the FBI in Boston. It is a letter that Marbury v. Madison obtained via a FOIA, and it shows the DOJ reaching out to Commissioner Cox and saying, "Sir, hope all is well. Just a reminder—this was on February 22nd, 2024. The documents were released to the DA's office late last night." This has to do with federal documents about the investigation of John's death by the MSP unit run by Brian Tully working for the Norfolk DA. "The officer we spoke about is Kelly Dever. If you have any questions at all, feel free to call me. Vr. Steve." Okay, folks, this proves that Commissioner Cox was told about Kelly Dever and documents related to her testimony and what she saw Higgins and Berkowitz doing—which I don't think was related to John's death, but it's just embarrassing for Higgins. He was an undercover ATF agent, and embarrassing for Berkowitz. And although Berkowitz is now dead, he was either dying or not dead in 2024. And clearly, this was embarrassing, okay, to the Canton Police Chief, to the Boston Police, to Higgins, to all these people. All right. And so we see here, Cox knows about it. Cox then goes on a few months later—I think it was either after, I think it was right after Karen's second trial, but it was some months after this initial email was sent to Cox. And Cox, in his infinite wisdom, tells Boston 25 or Channel 5 or whatever it was at a news conference that he's basically never heard of Kelly Dever or the Karen Read and John O'Keefe case. Okay, that was a stupid thing to say because then this FOIA comes out in recent weeks. That leads to Alan Jackson to send a Brady letter to Mayor Michelle Wu, the Democratic mayor of Boston running unopposed in the coming election, saying that Cox should be on the Brady list. I think it was—yes, because Cox was not forthcoming about what he was told by the feds about Dever. Okay, now this is Cox's response. I just want to show you how bad of a response this is. Okay, this is a clip via Boston 25, just Cox's comment on these new developments, which—although Alan Jackson's Brady letter is what Cox was asked for comment on—even Alan Jackson himself has rightfully so given credit to Marbury v. Madison for their excellent find on this FOIA document that was unearthed. And this could cost Cox his position. All right, the Democrats in Boston already have the eye of President Trump. The DOJ is all over this unit, in my opinion, and the cover-up of Birchmore's death. Look at the DOJ's pattern of indictments, okay? Recently, not just the Jessica LeClair leaks, but also Sheriff Tompkins and other major Democrats. Look at what's going on here, folks. Think about the larger picture—the most recent indictment, the superseding indictment of Matt Farwell for the murder of Sandra Birchmore's unborn child. It's all coming together. And Commissioner Cox's answer is bad. And that's why I want to analyze it. It's not just like inappropriate. It is a bad, bad, bad answer. When I heard it, I had to immediately make a video to analyze it because that's how bad this answer is. It's short, but I'm going to tell you how bad it is after we listen to it. "But what I need, you know, it's not to be asked this question ever again because it's not—it has to pertain to anything to do with the police department. My condolences to the O'Keefe family for, you know, what they've gone through. And because we did lose a department member. But outside of that, this has nothing to do with us. And I'm not going to speak with this again." Okay, let me just make something clear. I'm not saying he was wrong. It's not wrong to invoke John's name. But doing it that way—that's grotesque. Okay, he didn't answer the question. He basically refused to do so. And again, if you didn't hear the statement—although I'm sure you did—he said, "What I need is to not be asked this question ever again pertaining to anything to do with the police department." What? "My condolences to the O'Keefe family for what they've gone through because we did lose a department member." John O'Keefe was an honorable member of the Boston PD and the SA offenders unit. "But outside of that, this has nothing to do with us, the Boston PD, and I'm not going to speak on this again." No, no, no, no—that you just cost yourself your job right there. I'm sorry. That was a terrible, terrible answer. I'm sorry for the volume. I'm just running it back. Terrible answer. The worst possible answer. You may well have just cost yourself your job because you ducked the question. Everyone knows that the question is about this document. Anyone following this knows. The implications are what Dever knew about Berkowitz and Higgins, and maybe that's not the most serious thing. But as President Nixon said, it is not the crime, it's the cover-up. Dever, whatever she did—not wanting to talk about certain things about Higgins and Berkowitz, unrelated to John's death, just because it's kind of embarrassing—that is not a problem really. It's a minor thing. You know what's a big deal? Dever definitely got Brady-listed or whatever because her testimony was a little weird. I think Alan Jackson also pressured her a little bit. But whatever, that's not the point here. Cox's response—that was bad. That was bad PR. That's like the kind of thing when Prince Andrew was forced to go out and do an interview with BBC One about Epstein, and it just cost him all his titles because he got no PR help; he got sandbagged. That kind of thing—somebody didn't prep him, or the people he was talking to didn't even think this would come up. That's a horrible answer. Twenty seconds can cost you your career if you have done something bad and you answer a tough question like that. It's defensive; it shows you have something to hide; it undermines people's faith in your ability to answer those kind of questions. That's the biggest problem for Commissioner Cox here. Instead of inspiring confidence and making it look like it was nothing or it was just a routine, he couldn't even address the fact that he was made aware in February, in particular, about Kelly Dever and he had knowledge—he had a meeting with her. Let's be clear: He put her on his schedule the very next day. Not only did he have recipient knowledge of what was going on with the federal investigation and the John O'Keefe and Karen Read case—Dever got called into his office the next day, which of course Cox initially tried to play off as just some routine meeting, as if he meets with all 2,600 or whatever of the Boston police force. No. Come on, folks. Come on, folks. Do we see what's playing out here? Marbury v. Madison might have just brought down the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department. My name is Grant Smith-Ellis. Enjoy the rest of your Monday. We'll see what other news comes in today. Sean Good on suspension. Michael Proctor's cell phone gate engulfing the world in a conflagration. Little towel basically running down the street from the masses, trying to insulate himself from the fallout of this God-forsaken situation. Institutional reform is coming—to the Norfolk DA, hopefully throughout the state police—so that the good people in law enforcement can keep helping the vulnerable and that the exploited, no matter how much pressure they come under, continue to speak their truth. And let me just say this: Whenever we stand against the flow of opinion on hotly contested issues, a man, a woman, and a Towel—do what they must in spite of the personal consequences, in spite of the dangers and obstacles and pressures. For that is the basis of all human morality. We will be there for each other in times of struggle. We will be side by side in times of joy. And when everything is on the line and when our principles matter the most, there will be no price too high to pay to center the voices of the unheard, to bring justice to the vulnerable, and to reform this God-forsaken justice system in Massachusetts so that we can all hand down a structural system to our future generations that is worthy of our Constitution, that is worthy of our collective intelligence, and that is worthy of the due reverence we all should be providing to the pursuit of justice. My name is Grant Smith-Ellis. Until next time, you're a towel, I am as well. Be well. God bless.
12:38

"Come on, folks. Do we see what's playing out here? Marbury v. Mad might have just brought down the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department." - Towel, November 6, 2025 Rule #1 in Massachusetts politics right now; Do not mess with Attorney Corey Hopkins. She's going to get barred here just to reform the government (then I'll become her paralegal and we'll submit public records requests all day). Good plan. TRANSCRIPT (from Towel's coverage of the letter in question, uncovered by Attorney Hopkins); Hello and good evening. It is just past 6 p.m. on Monday, November 3rd, 2025. My name is Grant Smith-Ellis, and I'm back with you again for another developing news update, this time related to Boston Police Commissioner Cox responding to a developing series of scandals, in particular related to former Boston Police Officer—well, first former Canton Police Officer, then former Boston Police Officer—Kelly Dever. Now, Kelly Dever was an integral witness during the John O'Keefe and Karen Read trial about one specific series of events in the early morning of January 29, 2022—not really related to John's death per se, but related to the then-chief of the Canton Police Department, Ken Berkowitz, who was also potentially the person that went to the FBI about Brian Tully's MSP unit, Massachusetts State Police unit, detailed to the Norfolk DA, who were the same people that investigated Karen Read for John's death. Berkowitz was the same person who apparently went to the FBI in 2022 about Tully's unit through John Fanning covering up Sandra Birchmore's death at the hands of former Stoughton PD officer Matthew Farwell. Okay, Ken Berkowitz and Brian Higgins—then undercover ATF agent who himself had been in a relationship of some kind, we'll call it that, with Karen in the months before John's death. That's a whole story we will not get into. The point is, Higgins and Berkowitz go into the sally port. Now, Kelly Dever had been working since, I think it was 12 a.m. on January 28th. She worked—let me make sure I get this right now—she worked at 12 p.m., noon on January 28th to 8 p.m. Then she worked the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift. Okay, she was doing 16 hours over those two days. At like 1:30 a.m., she saw Berkowitz and Higgins—or around there, maybe a little later—go into the area, an area of the Canton PD. Then—and we're going to find out—she had a meeting with Boston Police Commissioner Cox. Now, why did Commissioner Cox get himself in trouble? Well, not because of the interview we're going to watch, but instead because of an interview about a year ago where he said he knew nothing about the Kelly Dever situation or the Karen Read case. All right, now we're going to quickly come to find out that what we're about to hear from the commissioner is not the best answer in light of this little document found by the incredible Marbury v. Madison on X, Corey A. Hopkins, a business litigator based in North Carolina. Towel really likes Marbury v. Madison because, first of all, Marbury v. Madison is an awesome case, and it entrenched the supremacy of the judiciary as to saying what the law is by virtue of the Constitution. Solved a very complex problem related to the Judiciary Act of 1789 and, in particular, the emergence of political parties in 1796 and, in particular, 1800, and a slew of last-minute appointments by President Adams and a refusal by President Jefferson to commission—or one of the refusal by Jefferson's Secretary of State Madison to commission a justice of the peace. But it really was about the supremacy of the judiciary branch. Marbury v. Madison uses a lot of FOIAs, and what you're going to see right here is a FOIA request that resulted in this wonderful little document. And what does this show? All right, this document shows, folks, a letter from Stephen J. Kelleher, who's with the White Collar Public Corruption and Civil Rights Division of the FBI in Boston. It is a letter that Marbury v. Madison obtained via a FOIA, and it shows the DOJ reaching out to Commissioner Cox and saying, "Sir, hope all is well. Just a reminder—this was on February 22nd, 2024. The documents were released to the DA's office late last night." This has to do with federal documents about the investigation of John's death by the MSP unit run by Brian Tully working for the Norfolk DA. "The officer we spoke about is Kelly Dever. If you have any questions at all, feel free to call me. Vr. Steve." Okay, folks, this proves that Commissioner Cox was told about Kelly Dever and documents related to her testimony and what she saw Higgins and Berkowitz doing—which I don't think was related to John's death, but it's just embarrassing for Higgins. He was an undercover ATF agent, and embarrassing for Berkowitz. And although Berkowitz is now dead, he was either dying or not dead in 2024. And clearly, this was embarrassing, okay, to the Canton Police Chief, to the Boston Police, to Higgins, to all these people. All right. And so we see here, Cox knows about it. Cox then goes on a few months later—I think it was either after, I think it was right after Karen's second trial, but it was some months after this initial email was sent to Cox. And Cox, in his infinite wisdom, tells Boston 25 or Channel 5 or whatever it was at a news conference that he's basically never heard of Kelly Dever or the Karen Read and John O'Keefe case. Okay, that was a stupid thing to say because then this FOIA comes out in recent weeks. That leads to Alan Jackson to send a Brady letter to Mayor Michelle Wu, the Democratic mayor of Boston running unopposed in the coming election, saying that Cox should be on the Brady list. I think it was—yes, because Cox was not forthcoming about what he was told by the feds about Dever. Okay, now this is Cox's response. I just want to show you how bad of a response this is. Okay, this is a clip via Boston 25, just Cox's comment on these new developments, which—although Alan Jackson's Brady letter is what Cox was asked for comment on—even Alan Jackson himself has rightfully so given credit to Marbury v. Madison for their excellent find on this FOIA document that was unearthed. And this could cost Cox his position. All right, the Democrats in Boston already have the eye of President Trump. The DOJ is all over this unit, in my opinion, and the cover-up of Birchmore's death. Look at the DOJ's pattern of indictments, okay? Recently, not just the Jessica LeClair leaks, but also Sheriff Tompkins and other major Democrats. Look at what's going on here, folks. Think about the larger picture—the most recent indictment, the superseding indictment of Matt Farwell for the murder of Sandra Birchmore's unborn child. It's all coming together. And Commissioner Cox's answer is bad. And that's why I want to analyze it. It's not just like inappropriate. It is a bad, bad, bad answer. When I heard it, I had to immediately make a video to analyze it because that's how bad this answer is. It's short, but I'm going to tell you how bad it is after we listen to it. "But what I need, you know, it's not to be asked this question ever again because it's not—it has to pertain to anything to do with the police department. My condolences to the O'Keefe family for, you know, what they've gone through. And because we did lose a department member. But outside of that, this has nothing to do with us. And I'm not going to speak with this again." Okay, let me just make something clear. I'm not saying he was wrong. It's not wrong to invoke John's name. But doing it that way—that's grotesque. Okay, he didn't answer the question. He basically refused to do so. And again, if you didn't hear the statement—although I'm sure you did—he said, "What I need is to not be asked this question ever again pertaining to anything to do with the police department." What? "My condolences to the O'Keefe family for what they've gone through because we did lose a department member." John O'Keefe was an honorable member of the Boston PD and the SA offenders unit. "But outside of that, this has nothing to do with us, the Boston PD, and I'm not going to speak on this again." No, no, no, no—that you just cost yourself your job right there. I'm sorry. That was a terrible, terrible answer. I'm sorry for the volume. I'm just running it back. Terrible answer. The worst possible answer. You may well have just cost yourself your job because you ducked the question. Everyone knows that the question is about this document. Anyone following this knows. The implications are what Dever knew about Berkowitz and Higgins, and maybe that's not the most serious thing. But as President Nixon said, it is not the crime, it's the cover-up. Dever, whatever she did—not wanting to talk about certain things about Higgins and Berkowitz, unrelated to John's death, just because it's kind of embarrassing—that is not a problem really. It's a minor thing. You know what's a big deal? Dever definitely got Brady-listed or whatever because her testimony was a little weird. I think Alan Jackson also pressured her a little bit. But whatever, that's not the point here. Cox's response—that was bad. That was bad PR. That's like the kind of thing when Prince Andrew was forced to go out and do an interview with BBC One about Epstein, and it just cost him all his titles because he got no PR help; he got sandbagged. That kind of thing—somebody didn't prep him, or the people he was talking to didn't even think this would come up. That's a horrible answer. Twenty seconds can cost you your career if you have done something bad and you answer a tough question like that. It's defensive; it shows you have something to hide; it undermines people's faith in your ability to answer those kind of questions. That's the biggest problem for Commissioner Cox here. Instead of inspiring confidence and making it look like it was nothing or it was just a routine, he couldn't even address the fact that he was made aware in February, in particular, about Kelly Dever and he had knowledge—he had a meeting with her. Let's be clear: He put her on his schedule the very next day. Not only did he have recipient knowledge of what was going on with the federal investigation and the John O'Keefe and Karen Read case—Dever got called into his office the next day, which of course Cox initially tried to play off as just some routine meeting, as if he meets with all 2,600 or whatever of the Boston police force. No. Come on, folks. Come on, folks. Do we see what's playing out here? Marbury v. Madison might have just brought down the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department. My name is Grant Smith-Ellis. Enjoy the rest of your Monday. We'll see what other news comes in today. Sean Good on suspension. Michael Proctor's cell phone gate engulfing the world in a conflagration. Little towel basically running down the street from the masses, trying to insulate himself from the fallout of this God-forsaken situation. Institutional reform is coming—to the Norfolk DA, hopefully throughout the state police—so that the good people in law enforcement can keep helping the vulnerable and that the exploited, no matter how much pressure they come under, continue to speak their truth. And let me just say this: Whenever we stand against the flow of opinion on hotly contested issues, a man, a woman, and a Towel—do what they must in spite of the personal consequences, in spite of the dangers and obstacles and pressures. For that is the basis of all human morality. We will be there for each other in times of struggle. We will be side by side in times of joy. And when everything is on the line and when our principles matter the most, there will be no price too high to pay to center the voices of the unheard, to bring justice to the vulnerable, and to reform this God-forsaken justice system in Massachusetts so that we can all hand down a structural system to our future generations that is worthy of our Constitution, that is worthy of our collective intelligence, and that is worthy of the due reverence we all should be providing to the pursuit of justice. My name is Grant Smith-Ellis. Until next time, you're a towel, I am as well. Be well. God bless.

Grant Smith Ellis

13,006 views • 8 months ago

The CIA's information war with American citizens and the operation that started it all. Project Mockingbird. This is one main aspect as to why people are so divided and brainwashed in today's society. Information has always been a crucial component to power and control. Knowledge is power, right? The only difference today from 40+ years ago is that now information flows at a rate that is absolutely mind-boggling and allows you to connect with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world, with real-time information 24/7 at your finger tips. So what happens when you have people who are suppose to be giving you accurate, truthful, information, and start to give you information that benefits, manipulates, and persuades the global population with mis and disinformation, protects certain corrupt people and groups by not reporting on other information, and who also lies and slanders other individuals all for the purpose to maintain power and control over the entire population, entirely on PURPOSE? You get what's called PROPAGANDA, aka, a sh*t show of so much purposeful bad and fake information, that it literally starts to persuade and mold the populations overall views and opinions on an array of various topics to fit the nefarious controllers, behind the scenes narrative or agenda. Ultimitely benefitting only them. If you take notice, these campaigns have been around for a long time, depending what side your on, your personal views and where you get your overall information will ultimately decide or be a factor of how much it has affected you or how much you are aware of the deception in the first place. Most legacy mainstream media groups are owned and operated by a small group of wealthy globalist individuals who seem to lean towards the left, and some leaning even farther left than others. These campaigns started to really pick up when Trump entered the picture in 2016. Trump was never suppose to win in the first place. Obama reinstated propaganda to be used on American citizens once again in 2013. The task to slander and attempt to destroy and imprison Trump through multiple operations and media campaigns were in full effect for the deep state to regain control of The White House. The group that these campaigns affected the most were the older groups and the younger groups. The people in the middle basically got to see both worlds play out in their lives at a crucial time period in their lives. They've seen the mainstream shift from what it once was, to an extreme lying, propaganda machine when Trump took office. The older aged crowd was so used to the regular nightly news and not as comfortable with newer technology to access alternative media sites and really just stuck with the mainstream's words and kept their faith in the MSM. Now the younger crowd literally grew up with the fully scripted, CIA, propaganda MSM because that is literally all they've ever known and haven't experienced anything else before or have anything to compare it to. Especially when your indoctrinated in a public school system that has been infiltrated itself with a majority of far-left teachers who usually end up being predators as well. That's a whole other story. The problem this CIA operation has caused was a population with people all in their own separate groups and boxes, fighting with each other over many things, instead of the people who started this mess in the first place, that aren't even true because one side has been lied to and manipulated. Brainwashed from a literal military style operation that's used to topple foreign countries during regime changes. And the worst part on top of all this is that know since Elon has started DOGE, a government efficiency operation, we are now uncovering that all these communist, Marxist, ideas, and operations and slander campaigns, and legal cases against Trump, down to these politicians luxurious lifestyles have been all funded and paid for by us, the TAXPAYERS. On the one example above, through USAID, there is proof of over $9 MILLION dollars that went to Reuters for a campaign named, " ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION," which is a definitive contract. There are thousands of examples just like this for all different companies, influencers, T.V. shows, Magazines, Articles, any type of media, and all of them are left leaning outlets. This has been going on for decades. Then on top off all of that, you have people who own these publishing and media companies who are not only getting paid by the taxpayers from the CIA to deceive us, but many of these owners are best friends with people like Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxell as you can also see above who is with Laurene Powell Jobs, the owner of "The Atlantic" publication, on vacation just hanging out. You wonder why the media never talks about child trafficking. Their paid to cover it up, or they're literally involved themselves... It just get's better and better. The good news is that it is now being exposed and shut down. Let's dive into the history of PROJECT MOCKINGBIRD now. The story of Project Mockingbird begins in the shadow of the Cold War, a period defined by ideological warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under the leadership of Director John McCone, launched a covert operation codenamed "Project Mockingbird." Unlike the broader, alleged "Operation Mockingbird" often cited in conspiracy circles as a sprawling media manipulation scheme, the historical Project Mockingbird was a specific, documented wiretapping effort aimed at curbing leaks of classified information. Initiated on March 12, 1963, and concluding on June 15, 1963, Project Mockingbird targeted two Washington-based journalists, Robert S. Allen and Paul J. Scott, who wrote the syndicated "Allen-Scott Report." These columnists had a knack for publishing articles laced with highly classified CIA details—information so sensitive it included Top Secret and Special Intelligence data. Their scoops, often sourced from government insiders, rattled the Kennedy administration, particularly after a July 26, 1962, New York Times article by Hanson Baldwin exposed details of a National Intelligence Estimate comparing U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. President John F. Kennedy, incensed by such leaks, sought to plug the holes. The operation was a collaborative effort, greenlit by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Joseph Carroll. The CIA’s Office of Security, led by Sheffield Edwards, executed the wiretapping, monitoring the journalists’ home and office phones. The surveillance results identified congressional sources, including then-Speaker of the House John McCormack, who spoke with Scott on March 26, 1963. The "Family Jewels"—a 1973 CIA document declassified in 2007—later exposed this operation, revealing its scope and raising questions about its legality. Daniel L. Pines, a CIA Assistant General Counsel, argued in a 2009 Indiana Law Journal review that the wiretapping likely violated legal bounds, as its primary aim was to trace leaks rather than gather foreign intelligence. This historical Project Mockingbird, though limited in duration and scope, planted a seed of distrust between the government, the press, and the public—a seed that would grow into a broader narrative of media manipulation. From Wiretaps to Media Empire While Project Mockingbird of 1963 was a discrete surveillance effort, it became conflated with a larger CIA program dubbed "Operation Mockingbird." This narrative emerged most prominently in Deborah Davis’s 1979 book, Katharine the Great, which claimed that the CIA, under Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination, had systematically infiltrated American media starting in the 1950s. Davis alleged that Wisner recruited Washington Post publisher Phil Graham to orchestrate a propaganda network, embedding CIA-friendly journalists in outlets like The New York Times, Newsweek, and CBS. Cord Meyer, a key CIA figure, was said to have taken the reins in 1951, expanding the operation’s reach. The Church Committee’s 1975-1976 investigation lent some credence to these claims, uncovering CIA ties to around 50 American journalists and covert funding of front groups like the National Student Association, exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article, "The CIA and the Media," further detailed how over 400 U.S. journalists had covertly worked with the CIA, often disseminating propaganda abroad that would then filter back to domestic audiences. the CIA admitted overreach. By 1976, under Director George H.W. Bush, the CIA publicly pledged to end paid relationships with U.S. journalists. Yet, skeptics argued the agency merely shifted tactics, maintaining influence through foreign media outlets that indirectly shaped American narratives. The line between historical fact and conspiracy theory blurred, setting the stage for modern reinterpretations of Mockingbird’s legacy. They claim. The Turning Point came in 2013 and the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act Fast forward to July 2, 2013, a date that marks a pivotal shift in the Mockingbird saga. Under President Barack Obama, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act—embedded in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—took effect. This legislation amended the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, commonly known as the Smith-Mundt Act, which had long barred government-funded broadcasters like Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM)—from disseminating their content domestically. The original intent was to prevent the U.S. government from propagandizing its own citizens, a safeguard rooted in post-World War II fears of authoritarian overreach. The 2013 amendment, co-sponsored by Representatives Adam Smith (D-WA) and Mac Thornberry (R-TX), lifted this restriction, allowing USAGM content to be requested and accessed by Americans. Proponents hailed it as a transparency win, arguing that taxpayers deserved to see what their dollars funded—news and programming in 61 languages, reaching over 100 countries. Critics, however, saw it as a Pandora’s box. Foreign Policy reported on July 14, 2013, that the change unleashed "thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption," raising fears of legalized propaganda. The timing was notable: it followed a decade of post-9/11 media scrutiny and preceded a surge in misinformation debates. in 2024 claimed "Operation Mockingbird never ended," tying the NDAA to a supposed CIA media takeover. No hard evidence supports a direct CIA role, but the legal shift undeniably blurred lines between foreign and domestic information flows. While the USAGM insists its mission remains outward-facing—delivering uncensored news to foreign audiences lacking free press—and that its journalists adhere to strict objectivity standards, the repeal stoked speculation. Could this be a modern resurrection of Mockingbird-style influence? The answer is yes. Most projects they say they stopped just get renamed or go black and off the books so Congress doesn't even know it exists or get access to it. Be careful what you read, who you follow, and who you get your information from. Look for patterns and scripts. They're easy to find once you understand what's really going on and their tactics and techniques. Keep asking questions, cross reference everything, do your due diligence, have multiple sources, do not buy everything at face value, go deeper, think about the bigger picture or long term goals. And always remember that there are layers, optics, and timing to everything you see. 90% of everything that comes out gets run by the intelligence agencies first. Lastly, keep fighting for the truth and and continue to help others to wake up as well.
8:02

The CIA's information war with American citizens and the operation that started it all. Project Mockingbird. This is one main aspect as to why people are so divided and brainwashed in today's society. Information has always been a crucial component to power and control. Knowledge is power, right? The only difference today from 40+ years ago is that now information flows at a rate that is absolutely mind-boggling and allows you to connect with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world, with real-time information 24/7 at your finger tips. So what happens when you have people who are suppose to be giving you accurate, truthful, information, and start to give you information that benefits, manipulates, and persuades the global population with mis and disinformation, protects certain corrupt people and groups by not reporting on other information, and who also lies and slanders other individuals all for the purpose to maintain power and control over the entire population, entirely on PURPOSE? You get what's called PROPAGANDA, aka, a sh*t show of so much purposeful bad and fake information, that it literally starts to persuade and mold the populations overall views and opinions on an array of various topics to fit the nefarious controllers, behind the scenes narrative or agenda. Ultimitely benefitting only them. If you take notice, these campaigns have been around for a long time, depending what side your on, your personal views and where you get your overall information will ultimately decide or be a factor of how much it has affected you or how much you are aware of the deception in the first place. Most legacy mainstream media groups are owned and operated by a small group of wealthy globalist individuals who seem to lean towards the left, and some leaning even farther left than others. These campaigns started to really pick up when Trump entered the picture in 2016. Trump was never suppose to win in the first place. Obama reinstated propaganda to be used on American citizens once again in 2013. The task to slander and attempt to destroy and imprison Trump through multiple operations and media campaigns were in full effect for the deep state to regain control of The White House. The group that these campaigns affected the most were the older groups and the younger groups. The people in the middle basically got to see both worlds play out in their lives at a crucial time period in their lives. They've seen the mainstream shift from what it once was, to an extreme lying, propaganda machine when Trump took office. The older aged crowd was so used to the regular nightly news and not as comfortable with newer technology to access alternative media sites and really just stuck with the mainstream's words and kept their faith in the MSM. Now the younger crowd literally grew up with the fully scripted, CIA, propaganda MSM because that is literally all they've ever known and haven't experienced anything else before or have anything to compare it to. Especially when your indoctrinated in a public school system that has been infiltrated itself with a majority of far-left teachers who usually end up being predators as well. That's a whole other story. The problem this CIA operation has caused was a population with people all in their own separate groups and boxes, fighting with each other over many things, instead of the people who started this mess in the first place, that aren't even true because one side has been lied to and manipulated. Brainwashed from a literal military style operation that's used to topple foreign countries during regime changes. And the worst part on top of all this is that know since Elon has started DOGE, a government efficiency operation, we are now uncovering that all these communist, Marxist, ideas, and operations and slander campaigns, and legal cases against Trump, down to these politicians luxurious lifestyles have been all funded and paid for by us, the TAXPAYERS. On the one example above, through USAID, there is proof of over $9 MILLION dollars that went to Reuters for a campaign named, " ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION," which is a definitive contract. There are thousands of examples just like this for all different companies, influencers, T.V. shows, Magazines, Articles, any type of media, and all of them are left leaning outlets. This has been going on for decades. Then on top off all of that, you have people who own these publishing and media companies who are not only getting paid by the taxpayers from the CIA to deceive us, but many of these owners are best friends with people like Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxell as you can also see above who is with Laurene Powell Jobs, the owner of "The Atlantic" publication, on vacation just hanging out. You wonder why the media never talks about child trafficking. Their paid to cover it up, or they're literally involved themselves... It just get's better and better. The good news is that it is now being exposed and shut down. Let's dive into the history of PROJECT MOCKINGBIRD now. The story of Project Mockingbird begins in the shadow of the Cold War, a period defined by ideological warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under the leadership of Director John McCone, launched a covert operation codenamed "Project Mockingbird." Unlike the broader, alleged "Operation Mockingbird" often cited in conspiracy circles as a sprawling media manipulation scheme, the historical Project Mockingbird was a specific, documented wiretapping effort aimed at curbing leaks of classified information. Initiated on March 12, 1963, and concluding on June 15, 1963, Project Mockingbird targeted two Washington-based journalists, Robert S. Allen and Paul J. Scott, who wrote the syndicated "Allen-Scott Report." These columnists had a knack for publishing articles laced with highly classified CIA details—information so sensitive it included Top Secret and Special Intelligence data. Their scoops, often sourced from government insiders, rattled the Kennedy administration, particularly after a July 26, 1962, New York Times article by Hanson Baldwin exposed details of a National Intelligence Estimate comparing U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. President John F. Kennedy, incensed by such leaks, sought to plug the holes. The operation was a collaborative effort, greenlit by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Joseph Carroll. The CIA’s Office of Security, led by Sheffield Edwards, executed the wiretapping, monitoring the journalists’ home and office phones. The surveillance results identified congressional sources, including then-Speaker of the House John McCormack, who spoke with Scott on March 26, 1963. The "Family Jewels"—a 1973 CIA document declassified in 2007—later exposed this operation, revealing its scope and raising questions about its legality. Daniel L. Pines, a CIA Assistant General Counsel, argued in a 2009 Indiana Law Journal review that the wiretapping likely violated legal bounds, as its primary aim was to trace leaks rather than gather foreign intelligence. This historical Project Mockingbird, though limited in duration and scope, planted a seed of distrust between the government, the press, and the public—a seed that would grow into a broader narrative of media manipulation. From Wiretaps to Media Empire While Project Mockingbird of 1963 was a discrete surveillance effort, it became conflated with a larger CIA program dubbed "Operation Mockingbird." This narrative emerged most prominently in Deborah Davis’s 1979 book, Katharine the Great, which claimed that the CIA, under Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination, had systematically infiltrated American media starting in the 1950s. Davis alleged that Wisner recruited Washington Post publisher Phil Graham to orchestrate a propaganda network, embedding CIA-friendly journalists in outlets like The New York Times, Newsweek, and CBS. Cord Meyer, a key CIA figure, was said to have taken the reins in 1951, expanding the operation’s reach. The Church Committee’s 1975-1976 investigation lent some credence to these claims, uncovering CIA ties to around 50 American journalists and covert funding of front groups like the National Student Association, exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article, "The CIA and the Media," further detailed how over 400 U.S. journalists had covertly worked with the CIA, often disseminating propaganda abroad that would then filter back to domestic audiences. the CIA admitted overreach. By 1976, under Director George H.W. Bush, the CIA publicly pledged to end paid relationships with U.S. journalists. Yet, skeptics argued the agency merely shifted tactics, maintaining influence through foreign media outlets that indirectly shaped American narratives. The line between historical fact and conspiracy theory blurred, setting the stage for modern reinterpretations of Mockingbird’s legacy. They claim. The Turning Point came in 2013 and the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act Fast forward to July 2, 2013, a date that marks a pivotal shift in the Mockingbird saga. Under President Barack Obama, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act—embedded in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—took effect. This legislation amended the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, commonly known as the Smith-Mundt Act, which had long barred government-funded broadcasters like Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM)—from disseminating their content domestically. The original intent was to prevent the U.S. government from propagandizing its own citizens, a safeguard rooted in post-World War II fears of authoritarian overreach. The 2013 amendment, co-sponsored by Representatives Adam Smith (D-WA) and Mac Thornberry (R-TX), lifted this restriction, allowing USAGM content to be requested and accessed by Americans. Proponents hailed it as a transparency win, arguing that taxpayers deserved to see what their dollars funded—news and programming in 61 languages, reaching over 100 countries. Critics, however, saw it as a Pandora’s box. Foreign Policy reported on July 14, 2013, that the change unleashed "thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption," raising fears of legalized propaganda. The timing was notable: it followed a decade of post-9/11 media scrutiny and preceded a surge in misinformation debates. in 2024 claimed "Operation Mockingbird never ended," tying the NDAA to a supposed CIA media takeover. No hard evidence supports a direct CIA role, but the legal shift undeniably blurred lines between foreign and domestic information flows. While the USAGM insists its mission remains outward-facing—delivering uncensored news to foreign audiences lacking free press—and that its journalists adhere to strict objectivity standards, the repeal stoked speculation. Could this be a modern resurrection of Mockingbird-style influence? The answer is yes. Most projects they say they stopped just get renamed or go black and off the books so Congress doesn't even know it exists or get access to it. Be careful what you read, who you follow, and who you get your information from. Look for patterns and scripts. They're easy to find once you understand what's really going on and their tactics and techniques. Keep asking questions, cross reference everything, do your due diligence, have multiple sources, do not buy everything at face value, go deeper, think about the bigger picture or long term goals. And always remember that there are layers, optics, and timing to everything you see. 90% of everything that comes out gets run by the intelligence agencies first. Lastly, keep fighting for the truth and and continue to help others to wake up as well.

The SCIF

85,170 views • 1 year ago

There's a sound animals make when they've stopped hoping and started begging. Most people go their entire lives without ever hearing it. The men on that boat heard it at 6:40 in the morning, on water so still it looked like glass, in the kind of silence where you can hear your own heartbeat over the hum of the trolling motor. And then something in that silence moved. Not a fish. Not a bird. Something that had no business being where it was, doing what it was doing, for as long as it had clearly been doing it. I've watched this clip eleven times now and I still get the same reaction on the eleventh watch that I got on the first: a full-body flinch, followed by a slow, sinking realization of exactly what I'm looking at. That's rare. Most viral clips lose their power after the second viewing. This one doesn't. If anything it gets worse, because the more times you watch it, the more your brain starts doing the math on the timeline — how long, how far, how close it came to not ending the way it did. I'm not going to tell you what happens. I'm not going to describe the moment, because the moment is the entire point, and describing it would be like handing you a photograph of a sunset and calling it a vacation. You have to be there. You have to watch the water yourself and see it the way the man in the boat saw it — a fraction of a second before his brain even processed what his eyes were sending it. What I will tell you is this: there is a very specific kind of video that breaks the internet not because it's dramatic, not because it's violent, not because it's shocking in the traditional sense, but because it touches something older than language. Something underneath the part of your brain that scrolls. This is one of those videos. It hits the part of you that still remembers being small and scared and needing someone bigger to notice you. Every single person who has ever felt helpless, ever felt like they were fighting something too big for them alone, ever needed a hand reaching down when they had nothing left to reach back with — that person is going to feel this clip in their chest before their mind even catches up. Here's the part nobody talks about when they share this kind of footage: the decision-making window was almost nonexistent. There was no time to think, no time to debate, no time to weigh pros and cons like a rational adult standing in a grocery store aisle. There was a flash of recognition, and then there was action. That's it. That's the whole story of what separates people who freeze from people who move. It's not courage in the dramatic Hollywood sense. It's something quieter and, honestly, more impressive — the kind of instinct that only shows up when you're not performing for anyone, when there's no audience, when it's just you and the water and something that needs you right now. Except there was an audience. There was a camera. And that's the only reason the rest of us get to see what almost nobody on earth ever sees with their own eyes. Think about how many moments like this have happened throughout history with zero witnesses. Zero footage. Just a person and an animal and a lake and a decision made in half a second, then carried silently for the rest of that person's life as a story they tell at dinner parties that nobody quite believes. This time, it's different. This time there's proof. This time you don't have to take anyone's word for it, because it's all right there, unfolding in real time, no reenactment, no staging, no slow-motion dramatic score added in post-production. Just what actually happened, exactly as it happened, exactly when it happened. I keep coming back to the geometry of it. The distance. The angle. The way panic and instinct don't move in straight lines — they move in desperate, jagged little movements that somehow, against every probability, end up going in the right direction. There is a moment in this clip where the outcome could have gone either way, and if you watch closely, you can actually see the exact frame where it tips. That's the frame everyone remembers. That's the frame that gets posted in slow motion three days later with 40 million views and a caption that just says "I'm not crying you're crying." That's the frame you're going to screenshot without meaning to, just to look at it again after the video ends, because your brain doesn't want to let go of it yet. People love to say nature is cruel, indifferent, survival-of-the-fittest, red in tooth and claw. And sure — most of the time, that's true. Most of the time nobody's coming. Most of the time it's just you, alone, against odds nobody bothered to make fair. That's exactly why moments like this one matter so much when they happen. They're rare enough to be almost unbelievable, and real enough that you can't dismiss them as sentimental nonsense written for a greeting card. This isn't a story someone made up to make you feel something. Nobody scripted this. Nobody planned camera angles or hired someone to stand there looking heroic. It happened the way real things happen — badly framed, a little shaky, half of it almost missed entirely because the person holding the camera didn't know yet that they were about to capture something they'd be replaying in their head for years. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to figure out why clips like this hit people so much harder than almost anything else on this platform. Wars, elections, business news, celebrity drama — all of it gets scrolled past in under two seconds. But this? This gets the full watch, the replay, the share, the comment that just says a single word because there are no other words that feel adequate. I think it's because this is proof of something we all quietly hope is true but rarely get to see confirmed: that when something is truly desperate, truly out of options, truly at the edge of what it can survive on its own — sometimes, not always, but sometimes — help actually shows up. Not because it's owed. Not because it's guaranteed. But because somewhere out there, someone was paying enough attention, and cared enough, to notice in time. That's a fragile kind of hope to build a worldview on. Most days the universe does not confirm it for you. Most days you're on your own and nobody's watching and nothing changes because you needed it to. But every once in a while, the universe hands you a receipt. Undeniable, filmed, timestamped proof that sometimes it does work out. Sometimes the thing that seems impossible five seconds before it happens becomes the thing everyone is talking about five seconds after. I've seen thousands of videos on this platform. I can count on one hand the ones that actually made my chest tighten before I even understood what I was watching. This is one of them. Not because of gore, not because of shock value, not because of some algorithm-bait fake drama edited together in Capcut with a trending sound slapped over the top. This is real, it's raw, it's completely unedited emotional whiplash, and it happens in under ninety seconds — which somehow makes it hit even harder, because you don't have time to brace yourself. You're just suddenly in it. There's a very particular kind of silence that happens in a room when someone shows this video to a friend who hasn't seen it yet. You know the silence. It's the one right after the moment happens, before anyone says anything, where both people are just sitting there processing. Then someone exhales. Then someone says "wait, go back." Then you watch it again, together this time, and somehow it's even more intense the second time because now you know it's coming. I've shown this to four people in the last two days. All four asked to watch it again immediately. Zero of them scrolled away before it finished. That's not normal behavior on this app. Nothing gets a hundred percent completion rate anymore — attention spans are too fractured, everyone's thumb is already halfway to the next post before the current one even loads fully. This one, people watch to the end. Every time. Here's a fact that should terrify you a little: most rescues like this one never make it onto a screen at all. Most of them happen in complete silence, witnessed by nobody, filmed by nobody, remembered by exactly one or two people who were there and nobody else. The only reason you get to see this one is a small, almost accidental miracle of timing — a camera that happened to be rolling, a person who happened to be exactly where they needed to be, at exactly the moment they needed to be there. Multiply that by every similar situation that has ever happened without a camera anywhere nearby, and you start to understand how much of the good in this world goes completely undocumented. How many small, quiet acts of decency happen every single day with zero witnesses and zero proof, simply because someone cared enough to act in a moment when nobody was watching and nobody would ever know. This time, we know. This time there's footage. And once you've seen it, you're going to understand exactly why it's already circulating everywhere, why people keep reposting it with captions that are just strings of crying emojis, why it's going to keep showing up on your feed for the next several weeks no matter how many times the algorithm thinks you've already seen it. I want to be very clear about something: I am not exaggerating for engagement here. I do this for a living. I've seen every trick in the book, every fake heartwarming edit, every staged "rescue" filmed for clout with a a paid actor and a script written by someone in a marketing meeting. I can spot fake from a mile away, and this is not that. This is the real thing, captured by accident, shared because it genuinely deserves to be seen, not because someone engineered it to go viral. The truth is, moments like this one are basically impossible to manufacture. You cannot fake the specific quality of panic that shows up right before help arrives. You cannot fake the particular kind of relief that shows up right after. Actors have tried for decades to replicate these exact emotional beats and it almost never works, because the real thing has a texture to it that fiction simply cannot copy. Your nervous system knows the difference even when your conscious mind can't articulate why. That's what you're about to watch. Not a performance. Not a recreation. The real, unscripted, entirely unplanned version of one of the oldest stories there is — something in trouble, someone who could have looked away, and a choice made in less time than it takes to read this sentence. I've thought a lot about what it says about a person, the instinct to move toward trouble instead of away from it. Most of us like to imagine we'd be the type to help. Fewer of us actually get tested on it in real time, with real stakes, with no time to think it through first. This footage is one of those rare, unfiltered tests, caught completely by accident, and the answer it reveals is the kind of answer that makes you want to believe better things about people in general. Maybe that's naive. Maybe I'm reading too much into ninety seconds of footage shot on a phone from a boat on a lake somewhere most of us will never visit. But I don't think so. I think there's a reason this specific kind of clip travels faster and further than almost anything else on this app, and I think it's because deep down, everyone scrolling past it is quietly starving for proof that the good instinct still wins sometimes. That somewhere, in some small unremarkable moment that nobody was supposed to see, it did. You're going to want to watch this at full volume. You're going to want to watch it more than once. And you're going to want to send it to at least one person the second it's over, because some things are simply too good, too raw, too real to keep to yourself. Scroll down. Hit play. Don't skip ahead. Let it happen the way it happened — in real time, unedited, exactly as it unfolded on a quiet morning that started like every other morning and ended up being one that a handful of people will never, ever forget. You'll know the exact second it gets you. Everybody does. And once it does, you're going to understand completely why this is already everywhere, why it's not going away anytime soon, and why — no matter how much content you consume on this platform every single day — this is the one still sitting in your head an hour from now. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then try to explain to someone else why you can't stop thinking about ninety seconds of footage from an ordinary morning on an ordinary lake. You won't be able to, not really, not in words that do it justice. Some things you just have to see for yourself. This is one of them. Let me back up for a second, because I think there's something worth unpacking about why this specific type of footage has such a strange grip on people who otherwise consider themselves fairly numb to the internet. We've all built up an immunity to most things online. Shock content doesn't shock anymore. Sad content doesn't move us the way it used to. Cute content gets a half-second smile and an immediate scroll. The threshold for actually feeling something has crept higher and higher every year, to the point where most creators have to exaggerate, stage, or manufacture emotion just to get a reaction out of an audience that's seen everything twice already. And then a clip like this shows up, completely unpolished, completely unplanned, filmed by someone who clearly had zero intention of ever going viral that morning, and it cuts through all of that noise instantly. No slow zoom. No dramatic music cue. No forced narration. Just a phone, a boat, a lake, and something happening in real time that nobody could have predicted five seconds before it happened. That's the part that gets me every time. The lack of preparation. You can tell, watching it, that the person holding the camera had no idea what they were about to capture. There's no anticipation in the framing. There's no build-up shot, no dramatic pause before the reveal. It just happens, mid-motion, mid-conversation probably, the way real things happen when nobody's expecting them to be filmed for posterity. I've worked with creators who spend six hours setting up a single ten-second clip to try to fake this exact energy. Lighting rigs. Multiple takes. A script written specifically to sound spontaneous. None of it ever quite lands the way this does, because authenticity has a signature that fabricated content simply cannot replicate no matter how good the equipment is. Your gut knows. It always knows. There's a reason the comments section under this kind of footage looks completely different from the comments section under almost anything else on this platform. No jokes. No sarcasm. No "this is fake" skepticism that usually shows up under viral content within the first ten minutes. Just people typing out real, unguarded reactions, the kind you don't normally see from adults who've spent years training themselves to look unbothered online. That tells you something. When a video manages to strip away the armor that most of us wear constantly while scrolling — the practiced cynicism, the ironic detachment, the instinct to act like nothing affects us — you know you're looking at something rare. Something that bypassed the defense mechanism entirely and went straight for the part of the brain that doesn't know how to perform indifference. I want to talk for a second about timing, because timing is the single most underrated element of this entire clip. A few seconds earlier or later in either direction, and this entire story looks completely different. That's the part that makes your stomach drop a little when you really sit with it. How close this came to being a story nobody ever heard, filmed by nobody, witnessed by nobody, remembered by nobody. We don't usually think about how much of what we consider "meant to be" is actually just an accumulation of tiny, invisible timing decisions stacking up in exactly the right order. A boat leaving the dock two minutes later than usual. A route taken slightly differently than the day before. A moment of quiet that happened to fall at exactly the right second for someone to notice something they easily could have missed entirely. Multiply those variables out and the odds of this exact sequence of events lining up the way it did start to feel almost absurd. And yet here it is, captured, verified, undeniable — proof that sometimes the universe threads a needle so precisely that even people who don't believe in fate start to wonder for a second. I don't think I'm being dramatic when I say that clips like this one function almost like modern folklore. A hundred years ago, this story would have been told around a table, passed down, exaggerated slightly with each retelling until nobody was quite sure anymore which parts were true and which parts had been embellished for effect. Today, it doesn't need to be exaggerated. It doesn't need embellishment. The raw footage does all the work that oral tradition used to have to do manually, and it does it more convincingly than any storyteller ever could, because you're not being told what happened — you're watching it happen, unfiltered, in real time, with your own eyes. That's a strange kind of privilege, honestly. Every generation before this one had to rely on someone else's description of moments like this. A witness recounting it secondhand, softened or sharpened depending on who was doing the telling. We don't have to rely on anyone's account. We get the primary source. We get the actual footage, timestamped, unedited, exactly as it happened, and we get to draw our own conclusions from it without anyone standing between us and the moment itself. I keep thinking about the people who happened to be nearby when this happened and had absolutely no idea, walking into that morning, that they were about to be part of something that would end up in front of millions of strangers within days. There's something almost dizzying about that. You wake up, you go about an entirely ordinary routine, and somewhere in the middle of an unremarkable morning, your life intersects with a moment that ends up mattering to people you will never meet, in places you will never visit, for reasons you probably never anticipated when you woke up that day. That's true of more moments than we realize, probably. Most of us will never know which ordinary Tuesday morning ends up being the one that quietly mattered more than we understood at the time. This is just one of the rare instances where we actually get to see it happen, see the exact moment it tips from ordinary into unforgettable, because a camera happened to be rolling and someone happened to hit record at exactly the right time. I also think there's something worth saying about the specific emotional cocktail this footage produces, because it's not simple. It's not just "aww, cute." It's not just relief. It's a genuinely layered reaction — fear first, because your brain registers the stakes before it registers anything else. Then tension, because you don't know yet how it resolves. Then, if you're paying attention, a strange kind of awe at how fast everything happens, how little time there was to think, how the entire outcome rested on a handful of seconds that could have gone completely differently. And then, right at the end, something that's hard to name precisely. Not just happiness. Something closer to relief mixed with gratitude mixed with a strange kind of faith restored in something you didn't realize you'd been losing faith in. That combination doesn't show up often. Most content gives you one emotion at a time, cleanly packaged, easy to categorize and move past. This gives you four or five emotions stacked on top of each other in the space of ninety seconds, and that's exactly why it lingers so much longer than almost anything else you'll scroll past today. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between content that performs well because it's engineered to and content that performs well because it deserves to. This falls firmly into the second category. Nobody optimized this for engagement. Nobody thought about hook rate or average watch time or completion percentage while it was happening. It simply happened, and it happened to be extraordinary, and now it's traveling across the internet the old-fashioned way — person to person, share to share, because people genuinely can't help themselves. That's the purest form of virality there is, and it's becoming rarer every year as more and more content gets manufactured specifically to chase that exact outcome artificially. When something manages to go viral organically now, purely because it's real and it's rare and it deserves the attention, it stands out immediately against everything else competing for your scroll. You can feel the difference within the first few seconds, even if you can't articulate exactly why. I'll say this too — if you've made it this far into a post about a video you haven't even watched yet, that should tell you something. Most people don't read past the first two lines of anything on this platform anymore. If you're still here, some part of you already suspects this is worth your time. Trust that instinct. It's usually right. So here's what I'd suggest. Don't watch this distracted. Don't watch it with the sound off, scrolling past while doing three other things at once the way most of us consume content by default now. Give it the full ninety seconds of actual attention. Watch the water. Watch the timing. Watch the exact moment everything shifts, because that moment is the entire reason this clip exists in your feed right now instead of disappearing into the void the way ninety-nine percent of footage like this normally does. You'll understand within the first few seconds why this one didn't disappear. You'll understand why it's already been reposted thousands of times, why it keeps resurfacing on different accounts with different captions, why people who consider themselves completely desensitized to internet content are still talking about it days later. Some things are simply built to be remembered. This is one of them, and it earned that status the hard way — by actually happening, exactly the way you're about to see it, with absolutely nothing about it staged, softened, or exaggerated for effect. Hit play. You'll see what I mean before it even finishes. One last thing before you go watch it. I've noticed that the people who react the strongest to this clip are almost never the ones who consider themselves overly sentimental. It's the skeptics. The ones who claim they don't cry at commercials, don't get emotional over animal content, don't fall for "engagement bait" no matter how it's dressed up. Those are the ones who go quiet the fastest. Those are the ones who ask to see it again without explaining why. There's something almost funny about watching someone's carefully maintained emotional armor fail in real time over ninety seconds of unplanned footage from a random morning on a random lake. Maybe that'll be you. Maybe you're reading this thinking you're immune to this kind of thing, that you've seen enough of the internet to be unshakeable at this point. I've thought that before too, more than once, right up until the moment a video like this one proved me wrong in under two minutes. There's no trick here. No twist ending designed to manipulate you. No manufactured suspense built by a script written in a writers' room somewhere. Just a real moment, caught by accident, that turned an unremarkable morning into something worth remembering. Go watch it. Then come back and tell me I'm wrong. You won't.
1:23

There's a sound animals make when they've stopped hoping and started begging. Most people go their entire lives without ever hearing it. The men on that boat heard it at 6:40 in the morning, on water so still it looked like glass, in the kind of silence where you can hear your own heartbeat over the hum of the trolling motor. And then something in that silence moved. Not a fish. Not a bird. Something that had no business being where it was, doing what it was doing, for as long as it had clearly been doing it. I've watched this clip eleven times now and I still get the same reaction on the eleventh watch that I got on the first: a full-body flinch, followed by a slow, sinking realization of exactly what I'm looking at. That's rare. Most viral clips lose their power after the second viewing. This one doesn't. If anything it gets worse, because the more times you watch it, the more your brain starts doing the math on the timeline — how long, how far, how close it came to not ending the way it did. I'm not going to tell you what happens. I'm not going to describe the moment, because the moment is the entire point, and describing it would be like handing you a photograph of a sunset and calling it a vacation. You have to be there. You have to watch the water yourself and see it the way the man in the boat saw it — a fraction of a second before his brain even processed what his eyes were sending it. What I will tell you is this: there is a very specific kind of video that breaks the internet not because it's dramatic, not because it's violent, not because it's shocking in the traditional sense, but because it touches something older than language. Something underneath the part of your brain that scrolls. This is one of those videos. It hits the part of you that still remembers being small and scared and needing someone bigger to notice you. Every single person who has ever felt helpless, ever felt like they were fighting something too big for them alone, ever needed a hand reaching down when they had nothing left to reach back with — that person is going to feel this clip in their chest before their mind even catches up. Here's the part nobody talks about when they share this kind of footage: the decision-making window was almost nonexistent. There was no time to think, no time to debate, no time to weigh pros and cons like a rational adult standing in a grocery store aisle. There was a flash of recognition, and then there was action. That's it. That's the whole story of what separates people who freeze from people who move. It's not courage in the dramatic Hollywood sense. It's something quieter and, honestly, more impressive — the kind of instinct that only shows up when you're not performing for anyone, when there's no audience, when it's just you and the water and something that needs you right now. Except there was an audience. There was a camera. And that's the only reason the rest of us get to see what almost nobody on earth ever sees with their own eyes. Think about how many moments like this have happened throughout history with zero witnesses. Zero footage. Just a person and an animal and a lake and a decision made in half a second, then carried silently for the rest of that person's life as a story they tell at dinner parties that nobody quite believes. This time, it's different. This time there's proof. This time you don't have to take anyone's word for it, because it's all right there, unfolding in real time, no reenactment, no staging, no slow-motion dramatic score added in post-production. Just what actually happened, exactly as it happened, exactly when it happened. I keep coming back to the geometry of it. The distance. The angle. The way panic and instinct don't move in straight lines — they move in desperate, jagged little movements that somehow, against every probability, end up going in the right direction. There is a moment in this clip where the outcome could have gone either way, and if you watch closely, you can actually see the exact frame where it tips. That's the frame everyone remembers. That's the frame that gets posted in slow motion three days later with 40 million views and a caption that just says "I'm not crying you're crying." That's the frame you're going to screenshot without meaning to, just to look at it again after the video ends, because your brain doesn't want to let go of it yet. People love to say nature is cruel, indifferent, survival-of-the-fittest, red in tooth and claw. And sure — most of the time, that's true. Most of the time nobody's coming. Most of the time it's just you, alone, against odds nobody bothered to make fair. That's exactly why moments like this one matter so much when they happen. They're rare enough to be almost unbelievable, and real enough that you can't dismiss them as sentimental nonsense written for a greeting card. This isn't a story someone made up to make you feel something. Nobody scripted this. Nobody planned camera angles or hired someone to stand there looking heroic. It happened the way real things happen — badly framed, a little shaky, half of it almost missed entirely because the person holding the camera didn't know yet that they were about to capture something they'd be replaying in their head for years. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to figure out why clips like this hit people so much harder than almost anything else on this platform. Wars, elections, business news, celebrity drama — all of it gets scrolled past in under two seconds. But this? This gets the full watch, the replay, the share, the comment that just says a single word because there are no other words that feel adequate. I think it's because this is proof of something we all quietly hope is true but rarely get to see confirmed: that when something is truly desperate, truly out of options, truly at the edge of what it can survive on its own — sometimes, not always, but sometimes — help actually shows up. Not because it's owed. Not because it's guaranteed. But because somewhere out there, someone was paying enough attention, and cared enough, to notice in time. That's a fragile kind of hope to build a worldview on. Most days the universe does not confirm it for you. Most days you're on your own and nobody's watching and nothing changes because you needed it to. But every once in a while, the universe hands you a receipt. Undeniable, filmed, timestamped proof that sometimes it does work out. Sometimes the thing that seems impossible five seconds before it happens becomes the thing everyone is talking about five seconds after. I've seen thousands of videos on this platform. I can count on one hand the ones that actually made my chest tighten before I even understood what I was watching. This is one of them. Not because of gore, not because of shock value, not because of some algorithm-bait fake drama edited together in Capcut with a trending sound slapped over the top. This is real, it's raw, it's completely unedited emotional whiplash, and it happens in under ninety seconds — which somehow makes it hit even harder, because you don't have time to brace yourself. You're just suddenly in it. There's a very particular kind of silence that happens in a room when someone shows this video to a friend who hasn't seen it yet. You know the silence. It's the one right after the moment happens, before anyone says anything, where both people are just sitting there processing. Then someone exhales. Then someone says "wait, go back." Then you watch it again, together this time, and somehow it's even more intense the second time because now you know it's coming. I've shown this to four people in the last two days. All four asked to watch it again immediately. Zero of them scrolled away before it finished. That's not normal behavior on this app. Nothing gets a hundred percent completion rate anymore — attention spans are too fractured, everyone's thumb is already halfway to the next post before the current one even loads fully. This one, people watch to the end. Every time. Here's a fact that should terrify you a little: most rescues like this one never make it onto a screen at all. Most of them happen in complete silence, witnessed by nobody, filmed by nobody, remembered by exactly one or two people who were there and nobody else. The only reason you get to see this one is a small, almost accidental miracle of timing — a camera that happened to be rolling, a person who happened to be exactly where they needed to be, at exactly the moment they needed to be there. Multiply that by every similar situation that has ever happened without a camera anywhere nearby, and you start to understand how much of the good in this world goes completely undocumented. How many small, quiet acts of decency happen every single day with zero witnesses and zero proof, simply because someone cared enough to act in a moment when nobody was watching and nobody would ever know. This time, we know. This time there's footage. And once you've seen it, you're going to understand exactly why it's already circulating everywhere, why people keep reposting it with captions that are just strings of crying emojis, why it's going to keep showing up on your feed for the next several weeks no matter how many times the algorithm thinks you've already seen it. I want to be very clear about something: I am not exaggerating for engagement here. I do this for a living. I've seen every trick in the book, every fake heartwarming edit, every staged "rescue" filmed for clout with a a paid actor and a script written by someone in a marketing meeting. I can spot fake from a mile away, and this is not that. This is the real thing, captured by accident, shared because it genuinely deserves to be seen, not because someone engineered it to go viral. The truth is, moments like this one are basically impossible to manufacture. You cannot fake the specific quality of panic that shows up right before help arrives. You cannot fake the particular kind of relief that shows up right after. Actors have tried for decades to replicate these exact emotional beats and it almost never works, because the real thing has a texture to it that fiction simply cannot copy. Your nervous system knows the difference even when your conscious mind can't articulate why. That's what you're about to watch. Not a performance. Not a recreation. The real, unscripted, entirely unplanned version of one of the oldest stories there is — something in trouble, someone who could have looked away, and a choice made in less time than it takes to read this sentence. I've thought a lot about what it says about a person, the instinct to move toward trouble instead of away from it. Most of us like to imagine we'd be the type to help. Fewer of us actually get tested on it in real time, with real stakes, with no time to think it through first. This footage is one of those rare, unfiltered tests, caught completely by accident, and the answer it reveals is the kind of answer that makes you want to believe better things about people in general. Maybe that's naive. Maybe I'm reading too much into ninety seconds of footage shot on a phone from a boat on a lake somewhere most of us will never visit. But I don't think so. I think there's a reason this specific kind of clip travels faster and further than almost anything else on this app, and I think it's because deep down, everyone scrolling past it is quietly starving for proof that the good instinct still wins sometimes. That somewhere, in some small unremarkable moment that nobody was supposed to see, it did. You're going to want to watch this at full volume. You're going to want to watch it more than once. And you're going to want to send it to at least one person the second it's over, because some things are simply too good, too raw, too real to keep to yourself. Scroll down. Hit play. Don't skip ahead. Let it happen the way it happened — in real time, unedited, exactly as it unfolded on a quiet morning that started like every other morning and ended up being one that a handful of people will never, ever forget. You'll know the exact second it gets you. Everybody does. And once it does, you're going to understand completely why this is already everywhere, why it's not going away anytime soon, and why — no matter how much content you consume on this platform every single day — this is the one still sitting in your head an hour from now. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then try to explain to someone else why you can't stop thinking about ninety seconds of footage from an ordinary morning on an ordinary lake. You won't be able to, not really, not in words that do it justice. Some things you just have to see for yourself. This is one of them. Let me back up for a second, because I think there's something worth unpacking about why this specific type of footage has such a strange grip on people who otherwise consider themselves fairly numb to the internet. We've all built up an immunity to most things online. Shock content doesn't shock anymore. Sad content doesn't move us the way it used to. Cute content gets a half-second smile and an immediate scroll. The threshold for actually feeling something has crept higher and higher every year, to the point where most creators have to exaggerate, stage, or manufacture emotion just to get a reaction out of an audience that's seen everything twice already. And then a clip like this shows up, completely unpolished, completely unplanned, filmed by someone who clearly had zero intention of ever going viral that morning, and it cuts through all of that noise instantly. No slow zoom. No dramatic music cue. No forced narration. Just a phone, a boat, a lake, and something happening in real time that nobody could have predicted five seconds before it happened. That's the part that gets me every time. The lack of preparation. You can tell, watching it, that the person holding the camera had no idea what they were about to capture. There's no anticipation in the framing. There's no build-up shot, no dramatic pause before the reveal. It just happens, mid-motion, mid-conversation probably, the way real things happen when nobody's expecting them to be filmed for posterity. I've worked with creators who spend six hours setting up a single ten-second clip to try to fake this exact energy. Lighting rigs. Multiple takes. A script written specifically to sound spontaneous. None of it ever quite lands the way this does, because authenticity has a signature that fabricated content simply cannot replicate no matter how good the equipment is. Your gut knows. It always knows. There's a reason the comments section under this kind of footage looks completely different from the comments section under almost anything else on this platform. No jokes. No sarcasm. No "this is fake" skepticism that usually shows up under viral content within the first ten minutes. Just people typing out real, unguarded reactions, the kind you don't normally see from adults who've spent years training themselves to look unbothered online. That tells you something. When a video manages to strip away the armor that most of us wear constantly while scrolling — the practiced cynicism, the ironic detachment, the instinct to act like nothing affects us — you know you're looking at something rare. Something that bypassed the defense mechanism entirely and went straight for the part of the brain that doesn't know how to perform indifference. I want to talk for a second about timing, because timing is the single most underrated element of this entire clip. A few seconds earlier or later in either direction, and this entire story looks completely different. That's the part that makes your stomach drop a little when you really sit with it. How close this came to being a story nobody ever heard, filmed by nobody, witnessed by nobody, remembered by nobody. We don't usually think about how much of what we consider "meant to be" is actually just an accumulation of tiny, invisible timing decisions stacking up in exactly the right order. A boat leaving the dock two minutes later than usual. A route taken slightly differently than the day before. A moment of quiet that happened to fall at exactly the right second for someone to notice something they easily could have missed entirely. Multiply those variables out and the odds of this exact sequence of events lining up the way it did start to feel almost absurd. And yet here it is, captured, verified, undeniable — proof that sometimes the universe threads a needle so precisely that even people who don't believe in fate start to wonder for a second. I don't think I'm being dramatic when I say that clips like this one function almost like modern folklore. A hundred years ago, this story would have been told around a table, passed down, exaggerated slightly with each retelling until nobody was quite sure anymore which parts were true and which parts had been embellished for effect. Today, it doesn't need to be exaggerated. It doesn't need embellishment. The raw footage does all the work that oral tradition used to have to do manually, and it does it more convincingly than any storyteller ever could, because you're not being told what happened — you're watching it happen, unfiltered, in real time, with your own eyes. That's a strange kind of privilege, honestly. Every generation before this one had to rely on someone else's description of moments like this. A witness recounting it secondhand, softened or sharpened depending on who was doing the telling. We don't have to rely on anyone's account. We get the primary source. We get the actual footage, timestamped, unedited, exactly as it happened, and we get to draw our own conclusions from it without anyone standing between us and the moment itself. I keep thinking about the people who happened to be nearby when this happened and had absolutely no idea, walking into that morning, that they were about to be part of something that would end up in front of millions of strangers within days. There's something almost dizzying about that. You wake up, you go about an entirely ordinary routine, and somewhere in the middle of an unremarkable morning, your life intersects with a moment that ends up mattering to people you will never meet, in places you will never visit, for reasons you probably never anticipated when you woke up that day. That's true of more moments than we realize, probably. Most of us will never know which ordinary Tuesday morning ends up being the one that quietly mattered more than we understood at the time. This is just one of the rare instances where we actually get to see it happen, see the exact moment it tips from ordinary into unforgettable, because a camera happened to be rolling and someone happened to hit record at exactly the right time. I also think there's something worth saying about the specific emotional cocktail this footage produces, because it's not simple. It's not just "aww, cute." It's not just relief. It's a genuinely layered reaction — fear first, because your brain registers the stakes before it registers anything else. Then tension, because you don't know yet how it resolves. Then, if you're paying attention, a strange kind of awe at how fast everything happens, how little time there was to think, how the entire outcome rested on a handful of seconds that could have gone completely differently. And then, right at the end, something that's hard to name precisely. Not just happiness. Something closer to relief mixed with gratitude mixed with a strange kind of faith restored in something you didn't realize you'd been losing faith in. That combination doesn't show up often. Most content gives you one emotion at a time, cleanly packaged, easy to categorize and move past. This gives you four or five emotions stacked on top of each other in the space of ninety seconds, and that's exactly why it lingers so much longer than almost anything else you'll scroll past today. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between content that performs well because it's engineered to and content that performs well because it deserves to. This falls firmly into the second category. Nobody optimized this for engagement. Nobody thought about hook rate or average watch time or completion percentage while it was happening. It simply happened, and it happened to be extraordinary, and now it's traveling across the internet the old-fashioned way — person to person, share to share, because people genuinely can't help themselves. That's the purest form of virality there is, and it's becoming rarer every year as more and more content gets manufactured specifically to chase that exact outcome artificially. When something manages to go viral organically now, purely because it's real and it's rare and it deserves the attention, it stands out immediately against everything else competing for your scroll. You can feel the difference within the first few seconds, even if you can't articulate exactly why. I'll say this too — if you've made it this far into a post about a video you haven't even watched yet, that should tell you something. Most people don't read past the first two lines of anything on this platform anymore. If you're still here, some part of you already suspects this is worth your time. Trust that instinct. It's usually right. So here's what I'd suggest. Don't watch this distracted. Don't watch it with the sound off, scrolling past while doing three other things at once the way most of us consume content by default now. Give it the full ninety seconds of actual attention. Watch the water. Watch the timing. Watch the exact moment everything shifts, because that moment is the entire reason this clip exists in your feed right now instead of disappearing into the void the way ninety-nine percent of footage like this normally does. You'll understand within the first few seconds why this one didn't disappear. You'll understand why it's already been reposted thousands of times, why it keeps resurfacing on different accounts with different captions, why people who consider themselves completely desensitized to internet content are still talking about it days later. Some things are simply built to be remembered. This is one of them, and it earned that status the hard way — by actually happening, exactly the way you're about to see it, with absolutely nothing about it staged, softened, or exaggerated for effect. Hit play. You'll see what I mean before it even finishes. One last thing before you go watch it. I've noticed that the people who react the strongest to this clip are almost never the ones who consider themselves overly sentimental. It's the skeptics. The ones who claim they don't cry at commercials, don't get emotional over animal content, don't fall for "engagement bait" no matter how it's dressed up. Those are the ones who go quiet the fastest. Those are the ones who ask to see it again without explaining why. There's something almost funny about watching someone's carefully maintained emotional armor fail in real time over ninety seconds of unplanned footage from a random morning on a random lake. Maybe that'll be you. Maybe you're reading this thinking you're immune to this kind of thing, that you've seen enough of the internet to be unshakeable at this point. I've thought that before too, more than once, right up until the moment a video like this one proved me wrong in under two minutes. There's no trick here. No twist ending designed to manipulate you. No manufactured suspense built by a script written in a writers' room somewhere. Just a real moment, caught by accident, that turned an unremarkable morning into something worth remembering. Go watch it. Then come back and tell me I'm wrong. You won't.

Earth Unveiled

59,590 views • 6 days ago

"Tell us this isn't true." "They had a live being out [near Area 51]." "There were human experiments that went on." 👽🛸 Roswell: A Non-Human Craft or a Darker Secret? 🤫😶 (Transcript is shorter than clip. I don't have room to type more in this post so I'll just wait for replies.) ~ Lex Fridman: "In your book on 'Area 51,' you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized, at the very end. That this might have been a disinformation campaign from, I guess, Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely-piloted plane with a quote 'grotesque, child-sized aviator.' Just looking back at all that now, years later, what's the probability that it's true? What's the probability it's not?" Annie Jacobsen: (AJ): "So, you know, I've never revealed who that source is." Lex: "Yes." AJ: "You know that? Want me to tell you?" Lex: "Okay, who was the source?" AJ: "So, before I say anything on that, let me speak to the question that you asked, right? So, you asked me, 'What's the probability that that is still standing as an idea, 12, 13, 14 years later,' right? So, I continued to work with that source for years, afterwards. We talked about this. Look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him. And I knew his family because I was an integral part of, you know, I was at his house, met all his kids, grandkids." Lex: "And we should say, the source is the main expert advisor behind the story that it was. Maybe you can explain what the story is that your report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. The very kind that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on." AJ: "Yes! Predicated on the narrative of the 'War of the Worlds,' right? And the 'War of the Worlds,' when it was a radio program in the United States, made people go crazy. 'Oh, my God, we're being invaded by aliens!' Well, the government was always interested in the story and Joseph Stalin was, too. We know that from declassified documents, right? "And so, the source told me that the reason for this program, and that the real Roswell crash remains, were in fact, it was a black-propaganda hoax infiltrated, you know, or rather, predicated at this idea that you were gonna overwhelm America's early-warning, air-defense system, cause mayhem and maybe be able to attack the United States. That was the plan. And Stalin was also messing with the United States, messing with Truman, who sort of, you know, turned his back on him, right? At Potsdam. "And so, this idea, and the reason that the source is important... And unlike, you know, a lot of people, 'I saw this, I saw that, I learned that.' Was, according to the source, once it was determined that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States, and it crashed. And it had, you know, people inside of it, they were people that were sort of deformed and meant...surgically altered to look like aliens. "The United States government decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about, and if it was possible for us to have the same program. This, according to this source, right? And so, it sounds preposterous, and if it was just someone saying, 'I...,' you might say, 'Well, it's ridiculous, get them onto another subject.' But, the difference was, is this source, who was very well placed, and friends with all of the other 75 people, you know, told me this as a confession, right? A real, tearful confession, because what he said is he was involved in the American program to do the same thing. And people died, because there were human experiments that went on." "And I write about this in the last 12 pages of 'Area 51.' It was an explosive, you know, revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written. Why? Because he said, 'I'm dedicated to my country. I know about being committed to national security, and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they will take advantage of it.' And he wanted it on the record. "And his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published. Nor did His children, okay? So, after the book published, I was called to his house and sat there with his family. And they said, 'Tell us this isn't true.' And he said, 'It is true,' right? (We need a tape of this confession or...for his family to confirm they heard this from him.) AJ: "Now that source is Al O'Donnell, who is the nuclear-weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons, okay? So if you wanna talk about someone..." Lex: "Woooooow." AJ: "You're the first person I've told that on the record, but it's kind of about time." Lex: "Woooooow. Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why, because it's...given the context of everything you've described with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such action would be taken. AJ: "And, the source is extraordinarily credible, right? If you wanted to take the position, 'Well, that person isn't very reliable,' then you have to ask yourself, 'Why did they have Top-Secret clearances that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever?' Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs. He was called the trigger man. "And by the way, he told me that I could tell the world who he was. There's a lot of details that are really dark, involving that program. And when is it appropriate, right? Well, it feels appropriate now. First of all, because you and I have been talking for several hours. So this is what is truly a long-form conversation and it's the outcome of, you know, a very long time of my reporting, and also being judicious about what, you know, closing the loop on that, right? Because I do think it's important for people to know that sources have revelations." Lex: "And, like you said, the programs, both on the Soviet side, and the American side, conflicting, I think's the term we used previously? Ethically, morally, on all fronts. People have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, 'Surprise, Kill Vanish,' you write about the CIA." ~~~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "So, today, I want to focus on a really important story that you once told me, that has never been told all the way [from the] beginning, to all the way to the end. And I just think it's just so cool we get to do this today. So, the question I want to ask is: After you got hooked on the UFO thing, with Bob Lazar, and you as a journalist said, 'I'm gonna start getting sources.' Like, 12 people coming at you, people shut down by the government. You can tell that. But you finally, finally got to a credible individual who had direct, firsthand knowledge about UFOs, exploitation, reverse engineering, and beings. And, oh my God, I want the world to hear this story. Tell us the story." George Knapp: "I've shared some of it in very broad strokes over the years- little bits and pieces of it - without ever actually referencing, in my statements, the guy the source. But this will be the first time I've told it in totality. "And it takes me back to when I first started in this. It's 1989 KLAS-TV, we put together, we spent eight months working on this project called 'UFOs: The Best Evidence.' Nine-part series. It airs on television, it's the biggest thing that's ever been produced for local TV, to this date, and still. "And, along the way, as I'm trying to find...telling the story about Bob Lazar, and his allegations about what was out there at S-4, near Area 51 - recovered discs, alien technology being reverse engineered - I'm looking for people who would support that. And I found about two dozen people, witnesses who had worked out there, who had seen bits and pieces, who could corroborate parts of what Bob had said about these kinds of craft being out there in the Nevada desert. But there wasn't anybody big picture who knew as much as Lazar claimed to have known, so I was still looking for them. "In 1990, I started working on a follow-up series to Best Evidence, looking for new witnesses. And I got a hint from an elected official that I had known, I'd covered him in Nevada politics. He says, 'You know, you should talk to my dad one of these days.' 'Your dad?' 'Yeah.' And he told me what the dad's name was and what he had done, what job he had had. And I said, 'Ah.' So I started stalking the guy. I just started showing up at events where I knew he would be. One of those events was a reunion for employees of EG&G." Corbell (JC): "So I'm assuming that this source was working within EG&G in some capacity, which is, by the way, who Bob [Lazar] said, hired him to go out to Site-4, S-4 at Area 51. So you're like, 'Okay, I can now find out if this is bullshit, or if there's an element of truth to it.' Do I have that right?" Knapp (GK): "Pretty much correct, yeah. So, I'm looking for someone whose credentials are impeccable. Unlike Bob, whose credentials were questioned, and people still attack him on where he went to school and where he worked, and was he at Los Alamos? This guy is documentable. There's a paper trail of where he worked, what he did. There's no question that he was in a position to know. He was the first general manager of EG&G in Nevada. His name was Al O'Donnell, and he has a prominent family. "When I heard that EG&G was having a reunion, I went there. We took a camera [and I figured], 'This is a great chance to get him on camera before I start asking him the questions I really want to ask.'" JC: "And when you say he is a general manager, like, does that give him certain roles and responsibilities that would give him insight? Like, he's not a secretary, so what does that mean?" GK: "He's the boss. He was the boss of the Nevada office. And I'll tell you a little bit about EG&G. So, it was a company that was created in Boston, right around the end of World War Two. Al O'Donnell had been in the Navy, serving during the war. He got out of the Navy while the war was still underway and went to work for a company called Raytheon, which became this massive, gigantic defense contractor that's still around today, still in Nevada in fact." JC: Yeah, they've got a big connection to the UFO topic, right? But, when you say Boston, like, where in Boston was it created?" GK: "Well, MIT is where the company was born. Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier were the three guys, the EG&G in that. They were at MIT. Scientists, engineers, they created this company there. And Al O'Donnell, who had been working for Raytheon, working on the Manhattan Project. He didn't know he was working on the Manhattan Project, but they were building these devices, complex triggers, that allowed them to detonate nuclear weapons. He learned later what he was doing was part of the Manhattan Project. "He goes to MIT, starts working with EG&G. Their company in those days had, I think, 15 employees, Al said. So it was a very small startup. But it suddenly exploded because the American atomic program exploded in those years. In 1950, Harry Truman decides that we need a permanent, nuclear testing site somewhere in the continental U.S., so they looked at a bunch of places, and they settled on Nevada. "Prior to that, Al O'Donnell had been sent out to the Pacific. They had five of these massive, atomic bomb tests out in the Pacific, and they decided to move it into a continental U.S. location and Nevada's Test Site - it was called the Nevada Test Site in those days - was chosen. Al O'Donnell leads the exodus from Boston, out to Nevada. They start hiring engineers and scientists, physicists and other security, spies." JC: "What are they working on at this time when they make that move?" GK: "Atomic bombs. They're building, testing atomic bombs. EG&G was a really precise organization that was created in order to detonate, measure and photograph atomic weapons. If you look in the history of photography, you'll see some of these amazing photos that they took of, you know, water drops dropping in water and...they're pretty famous shots because of these cameras that they developed. And it was perfect for use and testing atomic weapons and documenting what the process was. "So, EG&G comes out to Las Vegas, they are the managers of the Nevada Test Site. They, subsequently, years later, become the managers of Area 51 when it opens in 1955. So Al O'Donnell is the top guy. He oversees the nuclear testing program out there, manages it for EG&G, works with the Atomic Energy Commission. He has a Top-Secret security clearance and he can go anywhere and see anything. There's, basically, no restrictions, nothing that is outside of his ability to find out and see." JC: "So, this is an impeccable resume. This is somebody who was in position to know, and would know if someone like Bob Lazar was telling the truth or not telling the truth. I find it, personally, humorous that EG&G was, its genesis, its seed, came from MIT, right?" GK: "So, late 1990 or early 1991, I'd have to look up the dates. But somewhere in there is this event, this EG&G reunion. I go there, we got a camera, I interview Al O'Donnell, introduce myself, and say, 'Hey, I'm really interested in this, can we continue this conversation?' So he invites me to his home. He says, 'Come on over, we'll arrange to come over on a Saturday or something. We'll sit down, I'll go through my scrapbooks and show you some documents and memorabilia and photos from that era.' I was like, 'Great.' "So I go to his house and meet this wife. And we sit down, he opens up these big scrapbooks, and he starts showing me all the stuff that he had done. Photos that had been taken out in the proximity of these gigantic nuclear tests. They had great stories about the camaraderie that developed among the engineers and scientists. And he's going through all this stuff and showing me all this. And I love it, I loved every bit of it. I've never had a bad day at the Nevada Test Site, by the way. Every time I've gone out there to do a story, it's just a terrific way to spend some time." JC: "Secrets should be kept, secrets are kept, and you are a proponent of keeping secrets when it's that kind of thing." GK: "Sure, absolutely. And I respected the boundaries that they set up for us in doing these kinds of stories. So I did go out to the Nevada Test Site a lot over the next 40 years or so and put together a lot of different stories. And they knew of my interest in that area that's just outside what the Nevada Test Site, a place called Area 51. In 1955, Area 51 was, basically, created and EG&G got the contract to manage Area 51, and had kept it for the next 30, 35 years. So, whatever went on out there, they had an inside knowledge of what was going on." JC: "So, you meet this guy, Al O'Donnell, for the first time when he's at this public thing. You probably say something like, 'Your son told me to talk to you,' or something. Whatever. It ends up, he invites you to his home, and you're going through scrapbooks, and he's showing you all this atomic testing stuff that he was involved in. GK: "Yeah, and I'm telling him, 'Boy, this is really interesting. That's fascinating. I'd love to do a story on it.' And after we're there for maybe two hours, he closes this one big scrapbook and he goes, 'You're not here to talk about this, are ya?' I said, 'Well, not exactly.' He says, 'I know what you're here to talk about. I know what you want to ask about.' And right about that point, his wife walks in and she says, 'Don't start telling them that stuff! Don't even tell him!' And he kind of joked about it.' JC: "What were you there to talk about?" GK: "UFOs, UFOs. Area 51, Bob Lazar, crashed saucers, reverse engineering, to see if he had any knowledge of that, because I'd been led to believe that he did. So he closes that book and he says, 'We'll have we'll get together another time and we'll talk about it in private.' And over the course of the next two years or so, he and I would meet at coffee shops and talk about it. And I would ask him questions, and really, it was like pulling teeth. He wanted to tell me stuff but he made me work at it." (AJ says his family was there for the confession. Knapp has over two years of meetings with him. A bit confusing.) GK: "And the condition was, I couldn't take any notes. I couldn't record it, I couldn't take any notes. So each time I'd meet with him, I'd rush back to my car and start scribbling notes on pieces of paper so I'd remember everything that he said. And the story that he told me, that evolved over those couple of years was pretty fantastic. "He said that they did have a flying saucer that had been recovered from New Mexico. I think he indicated that it had been taken from New Mexico to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is... He never said Roswell, but I think it was the Roswell incident is what he [was] talking about. And it confirmed some of the details about what we know, likely, happened with the Roswell craft." JC: "When he's telling you, 'We have recovered a craft,' did he say it like, this is secret, don't tell anybody?" GK: "Yeah, it was just for my knowledge, my background and information. It wasn't a story I could do then. We were negotiating about how, or when, or if I could ever use that information or make it public. He told me the details about this craft. He said that it had been stored at Indian Springs. Indian Springs is an Air Force Base that's been there for a long time. It's now called Creech. Indian Springs existed before Area 51 was made. "But he says it was there, they kept it there. It might have been in an underground facility, I'm not quite sure. But then when Area 51, after it opened in 1955, they moved it to an adjacent facility. He didn't say it was S-4, he didn't say it was Papoose, but I think that's what he's talking about. Papoose Lake is where Bob Lazar said he worked, and where they had built nine hangars underground, disguised to look like the desert, and where they had other recovered craft. "He says they worked on this recovered craft, reverse engineering, trying to figure out how it worked, who built it. Whether or not they could duplicate the technology because, apparently, they thought this was pretty advanced, and they'd like to be able to build more of 'em. "And he says it was a very closed program, very small. It was only, I think, five of them that were aware of it, at least in the early stages, that were working on this project. And it was very hush hush, and they didn't share it with anybody else in the company, or anybody else in the area, or the military. They just kept it to themselves. "So, after we're having these meetings - and I go back and write down all these notes and stuff, details about what he had shared with me - we have another meeting at a coffee shop, and I said, 'Well gosh, you know, aren't you worried that it would get out, that the word would get out?' "And he says to me, 'We were worried It would get out?' That's right. 'I mean, what...it? What do you mean, it?' It. Meaning a live being, they had a live being out there. I go, 'You had a live being, an alien as well?' [O'Donnell said], 'Tell you the truth, we didn't know what it was.' I said, 'You know, maybe it came from millions of miles away, out in space, and you're keeping it in a cage near Area 51?' He said, 'To tell you the truth, we couldn't communicate with it in the beginning. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know where it was from, and we didn't know what to do with it.'" JC: "When Al O'Donnell says to you, 'We had a live alien, a being,' obviously from another world, what was your feeling?" GK: "Well, I was overwhelmed, because it was, in effect, confirmation of things that I had come to believe, because of the reporting we'd already done. And then the evidence of cover ups and lies that had been told to the public. Here's this guy in a high position, with a high security clearance, telling me that it was true. That they really did have a craft and they had a being. "My second feeling was, one of overwhelming sadness for the being, whatever it was, you know, that was kept out there. I asked him, you know, what had happened to it, what became of it? He says, 'I don't know. I don't know whatever happened to it.' But it was out there for a while, alive, and eventually they figured out a way to communicate with it. "And so I asked him, 'Well, what did it look like?' And he made me guess, as he did with all these questions. He made me guess. He said, 'Well, it kinda looks like a certain political candidate.' I said, 'Well, who? A political candidate? Who?' And at the time, Ross Perot was running for president. He said, 'It looks like Ross Perot. A little skinny guy with a big ears and tiny head.' Not a classic Gray-looking alien, but a very odd-looking creature with really big ears, that looked like Ross Perot. And I laughed. "And so we had these conversations for a while, and I was blown away by the information that he shared. I took all these notes. I was hoping that someday, I might be able to get the information out. And I asked him, 'Look, you're getting up there in age. If I can't record something with you, could you record a statement to the effect of telling me the story on camera, and then when you pass on, I can have the tape?' And he said, 'Yeah,' he would do it." JC: "You know, look, I've heard a lot of wild stories that I can't verify. A guy's telling you something, and you get a sense as a journalist, when you go down a road with somebody, and you take your time and you vet it... Did you feel...I mean, is there any world where he's trying to f*ck with ya? Or is there a world where he's trying to, you know, dissuade...kind of put crazy information into your brain? Like, how did you feel when he was telling you this? Was he like, straight with you?" GK: "Yeah, he was very straightforward. And again, this was not information he was giving up, willingly. I mean, I had to really dig and coax and arm twist to get him to cough things up. And it was very slow-going over about a two-year period, maybe a little bit longer. And I know that this...you always have to be wary of people with different agendas and people that just make stuff up. I didn't get that sense from him because of his standing in the community. He had shared this story with members of his own family." JC: "And that's why they came to you, is because they kind of [gave] you a tip. And these members of his family, they're serious people, too." GK: "Yeah. One of his sons is an FBI agent, or was, he's passed on now. One was an elected official in Nevada. That was the one that gave me the tip." JC: So, I just want to nail this [down] so I understand. You were approached because he had shared this with his family, privately, and then you had to kind of coax to get through to him about the story?" GK: "Right." JC: "I think that's important because look, these things don't happen, like, people [don't] just come to us and say, you know, crazy stuff, and we're like, 'Hh, yeah, cool. Sounds good.' Like, the dynamic of that, socially, as a journalist, like getting in there, taking time. You know, we have to verify if what he said is true, and there are some major bombs coming about that. But it's like, that process is so important. "So here you are, you're sitting with him, he tells you now, they have a live alien. And you felt sad because you're an animal-rights activist, you love animals. I know with your cats at home and you've done horse stories and all the stories about like, the inhumane stuff to animals. So it made you personally sad, makes me sad, too now thinking about it." GK: Yeah. Well, we had these series of meetings, and then the last time we met, after he'd agreed to go ahead and record a tape - and give it to me after making an arrangement so I got it after he passed on - he said that he had been told to not talk to me anymore. He said he had been given a warning [and] it was not a good idea for him to talk to me any more about anything. Not just that topic, but anything." JC: "Well, who knows that you're talking? Who would warn him?" GK: "I don't know. I don't know. But you recall, back in those days, there was surveillance. We had our phones tapped at KLAS-TV. There were guys following us around. Me, Bob Lazar, Gene Huff, maybe Robert Bigelow." JC: "People were also coming to your news station, OSI. And they would come in and try to like, get to you and then they'd show you their card...and take it back. And you know your phones are tapped. So it's like, because of this story, all of a sudden you're on high alert. So, anybody could have called him, been watching you, had meetings with the guy. So what you're saying is one day he just said, 'I can't...I'm not allowed to talk to you any more.'" GK: "Yeah, I've been told not to talk to you anymore. I've been told not to."
29:05

"Tell us this isn't true." "They had a live being out [near Area 51]." "There were human experiments that went on." 👽🛸 Roswell: A Non-Human Craft or a Darker Secret? 🤫😶 (Transcript is shorter than clip. I don't have room to type more in this post so I'll just wait for replies.) ~ Lex Fridman: "In your book on 'Area 51,' you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized, at the very end. That this might have been a disinformation campaign from, I guess, Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely-piloted plane with a quote 'grotesque, child-sized aviator.' Just looking back at all that now, years later, what's the probability that it's true? What's the probability it's not?" Annie Jacobsen: (AJ): "So, you know, I've never revealed who that source is." Lex: "Yes." AJ: "You know that? Want me to tell you?" Lex: "Okay, who was the source?" AJ: "So, before I say anything on that, let me speak to the question that you asked, right? So, you asked me, 'What's the probability that that is still standing as an idea, 12, 13, 14 years later,' right? So, I continued to work with that source for years, afterwards. We talked about this. Look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him. And I knew his family because I was an integral part of, you know, I was at his house, met all his kids, grandkids." Lex: "And we should say, the source is the main expert advisor behind the story that it was. Maybe you can explain what the story is that your report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. The very kind that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on." AJ: "Yes! Predicated on the narrative of the 'War of the Worlds,' right? And the 'War of the Worlds,' when it was a radio program in the United States, made people go crazy. 'Oh, my God, we're being invaded by aliens!' Well, the government was always interested in the story and Joseph Stalin was, too. We know that from declassified documents, right? "And so, the source told me that the reason for this program, and that the real Roswell crash remains, were in fact, it was a black-propaganda hoax infiltrated, you know, or rather, predicated at this idea that you were gonna overwhelm America's early-warning, air-defense system, cause mayhem and maybe be able to attack the United States. That was the plan. And Stalin was also messing with the United States, messing with Truman, who sort of, you know, turned his back on him, right? At Potsdam. "And so, this idea, and the reason that the source is important... And unlike, you know, a lot of people, 'I saw this, I saw that, I learned that.' Was, according to the source, once it was determined that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States, and it crashed. And it had, you know, people inside of it, they were people that were sort of deformed and meant...surgically altered to look like aliens. "The United States government decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about, and if it was possible for us to have the same program. This, according to this source, right? And so, it sounds preposterous, and if it was just someone saying, 'I...,' you might say, 'Well, it's ridiculous, get them onto another subject.' But, the difference was, is this source, who was very well placed, and friends with all of the other 75 people, you know, told me this as a confession, right? A real, tearful confession, because what he said is he was involved in the American program to do the same thing. And people died, because there were human experiments that went on." "And I write about this in the last 12 pages of 'Area 51.' It was an explosive, you know, revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written. Why? Because he said, 'I'm dedicated to my country. I know about being committed to national security, and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they will take advantage of it.' And he wanted it on the record. "And his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published. Nor did His children, okay? So, after the book published, I was called to his house and sat there with his family. And they said, 'Tell us this isn't true.' And he said, 'It is true,' right? (We need a tape of this confession or...for his family to confirm they heard this from him.) AJ: "Now that source is Al O'Donnell, who is the nuclear-weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons, okay? So if you wanna talk about someone..." Lex: "Woooooow." AJ: "You're the first person I've told that on the record, but it's kind of about time." Lex: "Woooooow. Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why, because it's...given the context of everything you've described with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such action would be taken. AJ: "And, the source is extraordinarily credible, right? If you wanted to take the position, 'Well, that person isn't very reliable,' then you have to ask yourself, 'Why did they have Top-Secret clearances that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever?' Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs. He was called the trigger man. "And by the way, he told me that I could tell the world who he was. There's a lot of details that are really dark, involving that program. And when is it appropriate, right? Well, it feels appropriate now. First of all, because you and I have been talking for several hours. So this is what is truly a long-form conversation and it's the outcome of, you know, a very long time of my reporting, and also being judicious about what, you know, closing the loop on that, right? Because I do think it's important for people to know that sources have revelations." Lex: "And, like you said, the programs, both on the Soviet side, and the American side, conflicting, I think's the term we used previously? Ethically, morally, on all fronts. People have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, 'Surprise, Kill Vanish,' you write about the CIA." ~~~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "So, today, I want to focus on a really important story that you once told me, that has never been told all the way [from the] beginning, to all the way to the end. And I just think it's just so cool we get to do this today. So, the question I want to ask is: After you got hooked on the UFO thing, with Bob Lazar, and you as a journalist said, 'I'm gonna start getting sources.' Like, 12 people coming at you, people shut down by the government. You can tell that. But you finally, finally got to a credible individual who had direct, firsthand knowledge about UFOs, exploitation, reverse engineering, and beings. And, oh my God, I want the world to hear this story. Tell us the story." George Knapp: "I've shared some of it in very broad strokes over the years- little bits and pieces of it - without ever actually referencing, in my statements, the guy the source. But this will be the first time I've told it in totality. "And it takes me back to when I first started in this. It's 1989 KLAS-TV, we put together, we spent eight months working on this project called 'UFOs: The Best Evidence.' Nine-part series. It airs on television, it's the biggest thing that's ever been produced for local TV, to this date, and still. "And, along the way, as I'm trying to find...telling the story about Bob Lazar, and his allegations about what was out there at S-4, near Area 51 - recovered discs, alien technology being reverse engineered - I'm looking for people who would support that. And I found about two dozen people, witnesses who had worked out there, who had seen bits and pieces, who could corroborate parts of what Bob had said about these kinds of craft being out there in the Nevada desert. But there wasn't anybody big picture who knew as much as Lazar claimed to have known, so I was still looking for them. "In 1990, I started working on a follow-up series to Best Evidence, looking for new witnesses. And I got a hint from an elected official that I had known, I'd covered him in Nevada politics. He says, 'You know, you should talk to my dad one of these days.' 'Your dad?' 'Yeah.' And he told me what the dad's name was and what he had done, what job he had had. And I said, 'Ah.' So I started stalking the guy. I just started showing up at events where I knew he would be. One of those events was a reunion for employees of EG&G." Corbell (JC): "So I'm assuming that this source was working within EG&G in some capacity, which is, by the way, who Bob [Lazar] said, hired him to go out to Site-4, S-4 at Area 51. So you're like, 'Okay, I can now find out if this is bullshit, or if there's an element of truth to it.' Do I have that right?" Knapp (GK): "Pretty much correct, yeah. So, I'm looking for someone whose credentials are impeccable. Unlike Bob, whose credentials were questioned, and people still attack him on where he went to school and where he worked, and was he at Los Alamos? This guy is documentable. There's a paper trail of where he worked, what he did. There's no question that he was in a position to know. He was the first general manager of EG&G in Nevada. His name was Al O'Donnell, and he has a prominent family. "When I heard that EG&G was having a reunion, I went there. We took a camera [and I figured], 'This is a great chance to get him on camera before I start asking him the questions I really want to ask.'" JC: "And when you say he is a general manager, like, does that give him certain roles and responsibilities that would give him insight? Like, he's not a secretary, so what does that mean?" GK: "He's the boss. He was the boss of the Nevada office. And I'll tell you a little bit about EG&G. So, it was a company that was created in Boston, right around the end of World War Two. Al O'Donnell had been in the Navy, serving during the war. He got out of the Navy while the war was still underway and went to work for a company called Raytheon, which became this massive, gigantic defense contractor that's still around today, still in Nevada in fact." JC: Yeah, they've got a big connection to the UFO topic, right? But, when you say Boston, like, where in Boston was it created?" GK: "Well, MIT is where the company was born. Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier were the three guys, the EG&G in that. They were at MIT. Scientists, engineers, they created this company there. And Al O'Donnell, who had been working for Raytheon, working on the Manhattan Project. He didn't know he was working on the Manhattan Project, but they were building these devices, complex triggers, that allowed them to detonate nuclear weapons. He learned later what he was doing was part of the Manhattan Project. "He goes to MIT, starts working with EG&G. Their company in those days had, I think, 15 employees, Al said. So it was a very small startup. But it suddenly exploded because the American atomic program exploded in those years. In 1950, Harry Truman decides that we need a permanent, nuclear testing site somewhere in the continental U.S., so they looked at a bunch of places, and they settled on Nevada. "Prior to that, Al O'Donnell had been sent out to the Pacific. They had five of these massive, atomic bomb tests out in the Pacific, and they decided to move it into a continental U.S. location and Nevada's Test Site - it was called the Nevada Test Site in those days - was chosen. Al O'Donnell leads the exodus from Boston, out to Nevada. They start hiring engineers and scientists, physicists and other security, spies." JC: "What are they working on at this time when they make that move?" GK: "Atomic bombs. They're building, testing atomic bombs. EG&G was a really precise organization that was created in order to detonate, measure and photograph atomic weapons. If you look in the history of photography, you'll see some of these amazing photos that they took of, you know, water drops dropping in water and...they're pretty famous shots because of these cameras that they developed. And it was perfect for use and testing atomic weapons and documenting what the process was. "So, EG&G comes out to Las Vegas, they are the managers of the Nevada Test Site. They, subsequently, years later, become the managers of Area 51 when it opens in 1955. So Al O'Donnell is the top guy. He oversees the nuclear testing program out there, manages it for EG&G, works with the Atomic Energy Commission. He has a Top-Secret security clearance and he can go anywhere and see anything. There's, basically, no restrictions, nothing that is outside of his ability to find out and see." JC: "So, this is an impeccable resume. This is somebody who was in position to know, and would know if someone like Bob Lazar was telling the truth or not telling the truth. I find it, personally, humorous that EG&G was, its genesis, its seed, came from MIT, right?" GK: "So, late 1990 or early 1991, I'd have to look up the dates. But somewhere in there is this event, this EG&G reunion. I go there, we got a camera, I interview Al O'Donnell, introduce myself, and say, 'Hey, I'm really interested in this, can we continue this conversation?' So he invites me to his home. He says, 'Come on over, we'll arrange to come over on a Saturday or something. We'll sit down, I'll go through my scrapbooks and show you some documents and memorabilia and photos from that era.' I was like, 'Great.' "So I go to his house and meet this wife. And we sit down, he opens up these big scrapbooks, and he starts showing me all the stuff that he had done. Photos that had been taken out in the proximity of these gigantic nuclear tests. They had great stories about the camaraderie that developed among the engineers and scientists. And he's going through all this stuff and showing me all this. And I love it, I loved every bit of it. I've never had a bad day at the Nevada Test Site, by the way. Every time I've gone out there to do a story, it's just a terrific way to spend some time." JC: "Secrets should be kept, secrets are kept, and you are a proponent of keeping secrets when it's that kind of thing." GK: "Sure, absolutely. And I respected the boundaries that they set up for us in doing these kinds of stories. So I did go out to the Nevada Test Site a lot over the next 40 years or so and put together a lot of different stories. And they knew of my interest in that area that's just outside what the Nevada Test Site, a place called Area 51. In 1955, Area 51 was, basically, created and EG&G got the contract to manage Area 51, and had kept it for the next 30, 35 years. So, whatever went on out there, they had an inside knowledge of what was going on." JC: "So, you meet this guy, Al O'Donnell, for the first time when he's at this public thing. You probably say something like, 'Your son told me to talk to you,' or something. Whatever. It ends up, he invites you to his home, and you're going through scrapbooks, and he's showing you all this atomic testing stuff that he was involved in. GK: "Yeah, and I'm telling him, 'Boy, this is really interesting. That's fascinating. I'd love to do a story on it.' And after we're there for maybe two hours, he closes this one big scrapbook and he goes, 'You're not here to talk about this, are ya?' I said, 'Well, not exactly.' He says, 'I know what you're here to talk about. I know what you want to ask about.' And right about that point, his wife walks in and she says, 'Don't start telling them that stuff! Don't even tell him!' And he kind of joked about it.' JC: "What were you there to talk about?" GK: "UFOs, UFOs. Area 51, Bob Lazar, crashed saucers, reverse engineering, to see if he had any knowledge of that, because I'd been led to believe that he did. So he closes that book and he says, 'We'll have we'll get together another time and we'll talk about it in private.' And over the course of the next two years or so, he and I would meet at coffee shops and talk about it. And I would ask him questions, and really, it was like pulling teeth. He wanted to tell me stuff but he made me work at it." (AJ says his family was there for the confession. Knapp has over two years of meetings with him. A bit confusing.) GK: "And the condition was, I couldn't take any notes. I couldn't record it, I couldn't take any notes. So each time I'd meet with him, I'd rush back to my car and start scribbling notes on pieces of paper so I'd remember everything that he said. And the story that he told me, that evolved over those couple of years was pretty fantastic. "He said that they did have a flying saucer that had been recovered from New Mexico. I think he indicated that it had been taken from New Mexico to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is... He never said Roswell, but I think it was the Roswell incident is what he [was] talking about. And it confirmed some of the details about what we know, likely, happened with the Roswell craft." JC: "When he's telling you, 'We have recovered a craft,' did he say it like, this is secret, don't tell anybody?" GK: "Yeah, it was just for my knowledge, my background and information. It wasn't a story I could do then. We were negotiating about how, or when, or if I could ever use that information or make it public. He told me the details about this craft. He said that it had been stored at Indian Springs. Indian Springs is an Air Force Base that's been there for a long time. It's now called Creech. Indian Springs existed before Area 51 was made. "But he says it was there, they kept it there. It might have been in an underground facility, I'm not quite sure. But then when Area 51, after it opened in 1955, they moved it to an adjacent facility. He didn't say it was S-4, he didn't say it was Papoose, but I think that's what he's talking about. Papoose Lake is where Bob Lazar said he worked, and where they had built nine hangars underground, disguised to look like the desert, and where they had other recovered craft. "He says they worked on this recovered craft, reverse engineering, trying to figure out how it worked, who built it. Whether or not they could duplicate the technology because, apparently, they thought this was pretty advanced, and they'd like to be able to build more of 'em. "And he says it was a very closed program, very small. It was only, I think, five of them that were aware of it, at least in the early stages, that were working on this project. And it was very hush hush, and they didn't share it with anybody else in the company, or anybody else in the area, or the military. They just kept it to themselves. "So, after we're having these meetings - and I go back and write down all these notes and stuff, details about what he had shared with me - we have another meeting at a coffee shop, and I said, 'Well gosh, you know, aren't you worried that it would get out, that the word would get out?' "And he says to me, 'We were worried It would get out?' That's right. 'I mean, what...it? What do you mean, it?' It. Meaning a live being, they had a live being out there. I go, 'You had a live being, an alien as well?' [O'Donnell said], 'Tell you the truth, we didn't know what it was.' I said, 'You know, maybe it came from millions of miles away, out in space, and you're keeping it in a cage near Area 51?' He said, 'To tell you the truth, we couldn't communicate with it in the beginning. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know where it was from, and we didn't know what to do with it.'" JC: "When Al O'Donnell says to you, 'We had a live alien, a being,' obviously from another world, what was your feeling?" GK: "Well, I was overwhelmed, because it was, in effect, confirmation of things that I had come to believe, because of the reporting we'd already done. And then the evidence of cover ups and lies that had been told to the public. Here's this guy in a high position, with a high security clearance, telling me that it was true. That they really did have a craft and they had a being. "My second feeling was, one of overwhelming sadness for the being, whatever it was, you know, that was kept out there. I asked him, you know, what had happened to it, what became of it? He says, 'I don't know. I don't know whatever happened to it.' But it was out there for a while, alive, and eventually they figured out a way to communicate with it. "And so I asked him, 'Well, what did it look like?' And he made me guess, as he did with all these questions. He made me guess. He said, 'Well, it kinda looks like a certain political candidate.' I said, 'Well, who? A political candidate? Who?' And at the time, Ross Perot was running for president. He said, 'It looks like Ross Perot. A little skinny guy with a big ears and tiny head.' Not a classic Gray-looking alien, but a very odd-looking creature with really big ears, that looked like Ross Perot. And I laughed. "And so we had these conversations for a while, and I was blown away by the information that he shared. I took all these notes. I was hoping that someday, I might be able to get the information out. And I asked him, 'Look, you're getting up there in age. If I can't record something with you, could you record a statement to the effect of telling me the story on camera, and then when you pass on, I can have the tape?' And he said, 'Yeah,' he would do it." JC: "You know, look, I've heard a lot of wild stories that I can't verify. A guy's telling you something, and you get a sense as a journalist, when you go down a road with somebody, and you take your time and you vet it... Did you feel...I mean, is there any world where he's trying to f*ck with ya? Or is there a world where he's trying to, you know, dissuade...kind of put crazy information into your brain? Like, how did you feel when he was telling you this? Was he like, straight with you?" GK: "Yeah, he was very straightforward. And again, this was not information he was giving up, willingly. I mean, I had to really dig and coax and arm twist to get him to cough things up. And it was very slow-going over about a two-year period, maybe a little bit longer. And I know that this...you always have to be wary of people with different agendas and people that just make stuff up. I didn't get that sense from him because of his standing in the community. He had shared this story with members of his own family." JC: "And that's why they came to you, is because they kind of [gave] you a tip. And these members of his family, they're serious people, too." GK: "Yeah. One of his sons is an FBI agent, or was, he's passed on now. One was an elected official in Nevada. That was the one that gave me the tip." JC: So, I just want to nail this [down] so I understand. You were approached because he had shared this with his family, privately, and then you had to kind of coax to get through to him about the story?" GK: "Right." JC: "I think that's important because look, these things don't happen, like, people [don't] just come to us and say, you know, crazy stuff, and we're like, 'Hh, yeah, cool. Sounds good.' Like, the dynamic of that, socially, as a journalist, like getting in there, taking time. You know, we have to verify if what he said is true, and there are some major bombs coming about that. But it's like, that process is so important. "So here you are, you're sitting with him, he tells you now, they have a live alien. And you felt sad because you're an animal-rights activist, you love animals. I know with your cats at home and you've done horse stories and all the stories about like, the inhumane stuff to animals. So it made you personally sad, makes me sad, too now thinking about it." GK: Yeah. Well, we had these series of meetings, and then the last time we met, after he'd agreed to go ahead and record a tape - and give it to me after making an arrangement so I got it after he passed on - he said that he had been told to not talk to me anymore. He said he had been given a warning [and] it was not a good idea for him to talk to me any more about anything. Not just that topic, but anything." JC: "Well, who knows that you're talking? Who would warn him?" GK: "I don't know. I don't know. But you recall, back in those days, there was surveillance. We had our phones tapped at KLAS-TV. There were guys following us around. Me, Bob Lazar, Gene Huff, maybe Robert Bigelow." JC: "People were also coming to your news station, OSI. And they would come in and try to like, get to you and then they'd show you their card...and take it back. And you know your phones are tapped. So it's like, because of this story, all of a sudden you're on high alert. So, anybody could have called him, been watching you, had meetings with the guy. So what you're saying is one day he just said, 'I can't...I'm not allowed to talk to you any more.'" GK: "Yeah, I've been told not to talk to you anymore. I've been told not to."

Joe Murgia

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