The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The Dangerous Rise of Conspiracy Thinking-Trump, Iran and JFK

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Are conspiracies and misinformation beginning to erode the basic assumptions on which public discussion depends? Trump. Israel. JFK. Epstein. Iran. Big Pharma. What is real, and what is conspiracy? In this episode of Live from the Table, we sit down with Gerald Posner to talk about the JFK assassination, conspiracy theories, misinformation, Trump, Israel, Iran, the opioid crisis, RFK Jr. and Jeffrey Epstein. The conversation moves from the enduring debate over whether Oswald acted alone to the ways conspiracy thinking spreads online, distorts public judgment, and reshapes political argument. It also turns to Posner’s reporting on Big Pharma, the Sacklers and the failures that fueled the opioid epidemic, along with his views on Epstein’s finances and the broader culture of suspicion surrounding high-profile events. Gerald Posner is the author of thirteen acclaimed books, including New York Times bestsellers Case Closed, Why America Slept, and God’s Bankers. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History and contributor to Forbes, he has been called “a merciless pit bull of an investigator” (Chicago Tribune). His 2020 book PHARMA was praised by The New York Times as a “withering, encyclopedic indictment” of the pharmaceutical industry. https://x.com/geraldposner

This is live from the table, the official podcast of the World Famous Comedy Cellar. Your go-to podcast for All Things Comedy Unrelated. Dan Natterman here, along with Noam Dorman, the owner of the World Famous Comedy Cellar, with locations in New York and Las Vegas, Nevada. Perry L.A.L. is with us. Periel Ashenbrand, our producer. Hello. And joining us via Zoom, we are privileged to have with us, Gerald Posner,

the author of 13 acclaimed books, including New York. Times, nonfiction bestseller, case closed. Why America Slept in God's Bankers. He's a contributor to Forbes and was a finalist for the Peel of Surprised in history. Please welcome Gerald Posner. Is it Posner or Posner? Actually, it's Posner, as a matter of fact. So I go against the grade.

I meet a lot of Posner's, but I do this short O on it, no. Oh, okay. You don't want to be a Posner. You know, Dan, you hit the nail on the head. to the, as a matter of fact, it's amazing because I used to work at law firm back in the late 70s of one of these large Wall Street law firms. And one of the partners there would always call me Posner. And there was a moment, which is a young associate at this firm.

I almost thought of changing the pronunciation of my last name. But I figured, you know what, I'll stick with it, nevertheless. Yeah, you know, because I teach my kids to read. And I didn't, you know, there's certain rules that you don't even realize you know them. But I stumbled upon the rule that usually when it's a double. letter before after the vowel it's a short sound and usually a single letter one s would be at all anyway wait a minute you worked at a law firm in the late 70s it's hard to imagine right no in another life i was a lawyer and you know i like to say that line sometimes as a lawyer but

of course what i mean before that the modifiers is a non-practicing lawyer so my my legal knowledge is not up to date but um no i mean he can't believe your age i just can't believe you're i just can't believe that you're old enough to have worked in a law firm. I know it said you were the youngest associate of Kravath-Swain and more, but even given that, that would put you at an age that, quite frankly, is shocking, considering the way you look. So the deal that I struck with the devil years ago on Clause 4B6A said, you know, we sort of freeze you at the time you leave the law firm in the early 80s, and that's the end of it. So, you know, that's so holding up even though I invited it every other part of that agreement.

That is kind of amazing. You look, I mean, in your late 40s. So wait, so Noam, here's the key then. Yeah. I'm doing this by Zoom with you. Zoom's not a magic or anything else. I get it. The real question is if I'm in the studio with you, right?

Yeah. I know. And then you can look and say, okay, you know, what's the story with it? But, you know, it's the same old thing, which is I see my friends that I went to school with back at Berkeley. in the, you know, early 70s and then late 70s at law score that. And there's a tremendous divergent after the age of 50 in terms of aging. I know that's not what we're talking about today. But no, I see classmates of mine who, you know, go to the gym.

I go to the gym regularly. You take care of yourself. I'm not doing recreational drugs. I'm not hanging out and smoking and drinking heavy and all that. You try to take care of yourself. And I also see friends of mine who are going to live a long life. And I hope they live to 90 or 95. and they're 80 pounds overweight and they've lost their hair and they're like putting back

half a bottle of Jack Daniels a day and eventually catches up with you. I mean, I know you probably have a pretty good career going, but you understand if you just look like this and you just sold your Fountain of Youth Secrets, you can make a lot of money from Jews like me. That's so fantastic. That's great. I never think of it. I'm always thinking of something.

impossible to do. So forget about that, right? I mean, you know, yeah, I'm thinking of some archive or some file I can't get into or some group that doesn't want to talk to me or who is going to say no to me. I'd rather spend years trying to get a little bit of information out on some group that doesn't want to spotlight on them. That's much more fun. But I hear what you say. So by the way, before we get into anything, we can talk about whatever you want. There's so much going on the world and you comment on all of it. You first came on my radar. I can't remember if you actually, if I saw you in an interview or I just heard somebody talking about your book. Case closed, was that the name of the book, about JFK?

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, this is in the 90s, I believe, like mid-90s or something like that. And I had always, you know, and I think we're the same this way. I just don't believe conspiracy theories. I just always bet against them. And but the comedians that the comedy show, especially Jim Norton, they were all into this JFK stuff. And I was how you guys are ridiculous, you guys are ridiculous.

And then this book. out. And for a while, I think, I think you couldn't keep it down. But for a while, your book, which says Oswald acted alone, it kind of was heralded as the, heralded as a final word. This is just puts an end to it all. And I remember, like, everybody said, ah, I guess that, that issue was settled. And I bought a few copies of your book. And I gave it to some of the comedians. And I didn't actually read it myself. I was like, read this. And then Jim Norton came back to me. And I'm sure Norton is full, you know, with the conspiracies again by now, maybe not. And he said, you know, yeah, I guess, I guess he's right. I guess Oswald acted alone. Like the book, the book convinced him.

But that's rare because I'll tell you the, I mean, people are resistant to accepting that idea. I mean, you know, Dick Gregory, Mort's Saul, everybody else. I understand you're right. There was a strong element that always thought it had to be something more. And I wasn't sure. Look, and I'm skeptical of big conspiracies because I know they're hard to keep secret. But when I started doing the work on the Kennedy assassination, I didn't think you could actually answer who killed Kennedy, meaning that all I thought you could do was go through all the evidence, figure out the five or six issues, it couldn't be resolved,

and then put out a book that said, you know what, here's a primer on the assassination, read this before you read anything else, at least you know what we can't answer. It was only halfway through that research that I became convinced that it was actually Oswald alone. There was new ballistics and new evidence that the FBI couldn't do testing on in six

and 64. And when that book came out, when we published on the 30th anniversary in 93, when I say we, it was Random House, Harry Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times of London, the better known in America as the husband of Tina Brown, the editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, he was afraid that no one would buy the book

because the 5% of the public that thought it was Oswald alone would say, well, I don't need to spend $20 to read a book about that. And the 95% who had seen Oliver Stone's, you know, powerful JFK, great film, terrible history would say, oh, that's just crazy. We didn't realize that saying that Oswald alone had killed Kennedy was actually the most controversial position after 30 years. You produced somebody that said, I shot at him from the grassy knoll, and there were six shooters, and, you know, I had Bigfoot involved. People sort of raised an eyebrow, and that was it. But if you actually, as a serious journalist, said, I think the Warren Commission made a lot of mistakes. the government had a cover up in the CIA and the FBI of their own bureaucratic ineptitude.

It wasn't a cover up of an assassination, but they were trying to protect their own reputations. And here's the overwhelming evidence of how this 24-year-old sociopath loser in life actually pulled off an assassination that changed American history. People are sort of startled of that. I have two questions for you. The first question is, Dan, I'm sure we'll have some. If you had to put a percentage on it, how sure are you that Oswald acted alone after all your research? So 100% that he's the shooter, he's the assassin that day.

No question about that. The tougher question is always, did he do it for someone? Was he, you know, I mean, if we have a political assassination today of any president, there's any number of suspect groups you could have from anti-abortion zealots to Islamic fundamentalists to whoever, there were plenty of groups that wanted Kennedy dead, including the mafia and the anti-Castro Cubans, that KGB didn't like him because he had humiliated. Nikita Khrushchev at the standoff over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62. Castro knew that they were trying to kill him.

So maybe he reached out and tried to kill Kennedy first. Oswald is trying to get to Havana just six weeks before the assassination. So there's plenty of reasons to be suspicious. But when you then look into it beyond just the assassination itself, let me tell you, he's not working for anybody. He's too unreliable. He's somebody that they couldn't have trusted in an intelligence operas. And so he's left aside.

There's no contact that's reached out. Here's my challenge to anybody who thinks it's a conspiracy. If Oswald's the shooter, I'm just looking for one piece of credible evidence that somebody in the mafia, somebody in the anti-Castro Cubans or somebody in the Cuban embassy, talk to him, made a telephone call. You know, it's 1963. You can't do it through telepathy. You know, there's no text messages, nothing else.

And there's not a shred, not an iota of evidence that ties him into. any plot. So that's the real challenge for history. It's just not there that evidence. But we know that conspiracy theory people are, their beliefs are so tenacious. It's not, they're not truth seekers generally. They're just going to believe it no matter what you throw out. Let me ask him the second question. A second question is, at that time, when you were neck deep up to your neck in JFK stuff, did you ever hear the suggestion that Israel was behind the killing of JFK. That didn't even exist in the 90s when you were looking into it, correct? Did not even exist. Absolutely correct. Let me tell you something.

I heard a ton of crazy theories. I thought I knew every theory around it. Dan's right what he said a moment ago. I mean, conspiracy theories generally, it's an echo chamber. It's proportionality bias. They can't believe that somebody as great as Kennedy, you know, this young charismatic president with so much potential for the future could be killed by this just turned 24-year-old sort of loser in light. They want to put something heavier on the assassin side of the scale. And I've heard theories across the board on this. And look, one of the reasons that we're all speculating about it for so many years afterwards was that two days after you arrest the assassin in the presidential murder,

he's killed in Dallas police custody by a guy who looks like he's out of central casting for the mafia. So I understand why people are immediately skeptical. I was as well. But in all those theories, Nome that I heard, back in the early 90s, and even when I followed the case afterwards, which I continue to do pushing for release of the JFK files, I've always wanted the government to release those earlier than they did. Never did I hear that theory about Israel. And then all of a sudden, it's so interesting. After October 7th, there are a few fringe people, real hardcore anti-Semites who sort of think that, you know, Jews are behind everything. They're the all-powerful, unipotting group that control everything from media to finance,

and they must have pulled off the Kennedy assassination as well. There were six people like that sitting somewhere out on a fringe who had been former members of the American Nazi party under Rockwall or that in the 60s. It wasn't something that had any momentum at all. And then after October 7th, it starts to get a little bit of momentum. And it's picked up in terms of what I call that America first, hard right, Israel is leading the United States, round by the nose and it's Tucker Carlson, he interviews people, he talks about it, the insinuations are there. It's picked up by Nick Fuentes and these other right-wing influencers to say, ah, you know, it has to be Israel. The Jews must have done it because they were coming up with nuclear weapons

then at Demona. Kennedy didn't want nuclear proliferation. They must have killed them. And then here's the cherry on sort of the, this conspiratorial Sunday, if you want to call it that, for a bad analogy. in the release of the JFK files that come out in the last few years, they redact, they, the government, release the files, and they redact different portions of it. They read, and they release a file on James Jesus Angleton, it was the head of counterintelligence inside the CIA. Now, let me tell you something.

I've been through tens of thousands of these files. All of the foreign intelligence agencies and countries that were mentioned in these files were redacted and hidden. So when they're talking about MI6 and the United Kingdom, they redact it. When they're talking about French intelligence, it's redacted. West German intelligence, it's redacted. South Africa, and they go across the board. When they release the files, they unredact the sources of those information. They unredact the budget numbers on what the CIA was spending, let's say, in West Germany. They unredact the number of CIA officers serving in a

foreign embassy. And one of the files unredacts the name of the Mossad, Israeli foreign intelligence. Of all the files released, these sort of what I call influencers and they're mixing up this antisemitic stew that Israel must be behind the assassination, they say, ah, isn't that amazing? The United States had redacted the name of Israeli intelligence and JFK files. That proves our point that Israel was really behind in pressuring all this. It's not a scrap of evidence about it. And one of the things that's so infuriating is if you look at the real history of what was going, on. You know, people, well, when I say that, I mean, I should like slap myself to think that

anybody's interested sometimes in real history, but they forget that Eisenhower had an arms embargo on Israel, all right? Not very friendly. It was Kennedy that actually started to sell Israel arms for the first time in 1962, not very anti-Israel. They liked Kennedy, was selling them hawk, you know, these anti-aircraft missiles for the first time. And Kennedy was against nuclear proliferation. There's no doubt. But the Israelis essentially agreed to have inspections of Demona. The first one was delayed because of the assassination, but they had six inspections from 64 until 70. It's Richard Nixon who stops the inspections finally. Nothing to do with Kennedy. So if you know the history, you understand how the Israeli government responded to the assassination,

if you look at their own internal files, which were declassified in 2013 on the 50th anniversary, where you see the cabinet meeting talking in Hebrew and goal. Maldemayer, who then the foreign minister, says, hey, what do you think happened in this assassination? I think there were some dark forces behind it. By then, Oswald's been assassinated by Ruby, killed by Ruby. So the Israelis can't figure out what happened. You mean Jacob Rubenstein? Jacob Rubenstein. Every time I put up a post about the fact that this theory is garbage, I get all the people who say, oh, I'm sick. You know, I did this interview with Ben Shapiro months ago. And the response on Twitter was, I'm sick of two Jews.

talking about covering up for Israel. Now, my father was Jewish, but I was actually raised by my Catholic mother as a Catholic. So I forget sometimes it's on Twitter. And I said to them once in this stream of anti-Semitic invectives and vile comments, by the way, I'm sorry, I'm not Jewish. Boy, that just brought them out even crazier. They said, you're the worst type of Jew. You're the type of Jew, hide your Judaism so that you can infiltrate those of us who are non-Jews. We really can't understand you. So, you know, there's, there's no debating it. I try to have a common sense discussion, but common sense and facts don't often win the day on this. Dan, what do you want to say? Well, are there any conspiracy theorists that, that pick and

choose conspiracies, or they tend to be all in on all of them? Like they're saying, well, Kennedy, yes, that was a conspiracy, but obviously we really went to the moon. Or, you know, I think most of them are just, they believe all of them, you know. Oh, Dan, you're right. So sometimes I get people on the Kennedy case who say, what about 9-11? They're 9-11 truthers. What about building seven or whatever else? I get that.

But the Kennedy conspiracy, though, in some ways, is sort of the mother of all the conspiracies. Because, you know, it starts it. It's the first time we have an assassination on film. Now, if something happens, we expect to have 100, you know, cell phone videos immediately of the people who were there. But at that time, it was extraordinary that was taken.

But here's the part that then gets interested. about what I call this new theory, as Nome calls it about, you know, the Jews did it. Ah, Abraham Zepruder, the Dallas dressmaker, who happened to go to Dele Plaza that day where the president was passing through to try out his new 8mm Belenhow movie camera and recorded the assassination. Ah, he's Jewish. Isn't that a coincidence, some people will say? And the early conspiracy writers, like Mark Lane, the attorney, who wanted to be Oswald's

attorney when Oswald was killed. became the attorney for Marguerite Oswald's mother, Harold Weisberg, one of the early writers who did a series of books and others were Jewish. And so some of these fringe theorists who now say Israel did say Abraham Zuproor was there to film the assassination. And the early conspiracy theorists were Jewish. And who did they point a finger at? They pointed a finger at the CIA and the FBI. And why? Because they wanted to take the spotlight off the real culprit, the massage.

So it's just you go down the rabbit hole with this. It's unbelievable. It's like one layer after another. Now, if it was just a group of people standing in Speakers Corner in London saying this, and I could laugh at them and walk away would be one thing, but it's particularly irritating a day because, as you well know, the internet, Twitter, I am on Twitter, I use Twitter, I get it, on social media, but it accelerates conspiracy theories, it gives it an echo chamber of sorts.

and when you get people who have large accounts like the Candace Owens and the Tucker Carlson's with millions of views and they monetize this, then it has a life of its own. Can I just because you said the name Mark Lane. Two things just jogged my memory of what you said. I'd love to meet you in person. This is just fantastic to know. So the first thing is that just it jogged my memory that there was a book by Dennis Ross called Doom to Succeed. I can't believe I'd forgotten about this. And he goes through all the American presidents and how they,

interface with Israel. And I just remember, that's all I remember about is that Kennedy was actually seemed like, in his disposition, the most friendly to Israel and the most skeptical of these kind of State Department theories that you had to worry about the Arab street and we had to be very solicitous of the Arabs. Kennedy was like, no, no, it'll be okay. They won't. Kind of like Trump's attitude about moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

Like, you know, don't believe the hype. That was just kind of his disposition. So, yeah, I don't think that... No, that's absolutely right. But let me tell you the other thing. It's even better. Mark Lane. You said this name Mark Lane.

So just the other day, somebody sends me an article from the New York Times from 1961. The headline is, cafes in village, it's in quotes like Greenwich Village, find on licenses. So my father, when he opened his first coffee shop, this is when all the, like, local politicians were trying to shut the coffee houses down because they had people with folk guitars. So, says, nine operators of Greenwich Village coffee houses were convicted yesterday. Manhattan Arrest Court of operating cabarets without licenses. They were involved in the total of 110 cases.

Assemblyman Mark Lane, lawyer for most of the operators, told the court the decision would result in the elimination of entertainment and the closing of the coffee houses. and I'll skip to the end. All the coffee houses lost, except for one guy. Emmanuel Dwarman, my father, I guess he thought better of this guy, Mark Lane. And the article ends. Emmanuel Dorman, owner of the Fienjohn Cafe at 77th Avenue South, was the only defendant to win a dismissal after a trial. He acted as his own lawyer.

That's fantastic. That's absolutely, it's a great footnote because, you know, we always say, lawyers like to say that anybody who has, you know, represents themselves as a fool as a client. But lawyers say that because they want to make money off of every client. So they don't want you going into court and defending yourself. So good for your father. And to make it even more like for people who might know me. So then I'm like, my mother's still alive. And I had never even heard this story.

Like, I didn't even know this story. So I texted to my mother. And she, who hates my father? Like, like, you know, they had a bad marriage. And so I texted her, she writes, I remember. So I'm, so I write, I'm looking at it now. Do you remember any details? She says, just said he was obsessed with winning.

Like, she's so bitter. Like, of course he was obsessed with winning. It was in the New York Times. He defended himself. Nine other people lost. Like, just said he was full of himself. That's essentially her response. Anyway, okay.

Conspiracy theories. Go ahead. You want to say something? Go ahead. No, it's a good footnote. As a matter of fact, Mark Lane, just one last Mark Lane bit, it sued Random House on the publication of case closed because Harry Evans actually ran a teaser campaign.

Boy, promotion campaigns from publishers. They don't exist anymore. But Harry Evans ran a teaser campaign for about two months before the book was published saying, in the New York Times, quarter third page ad, By the way, November 22nd, 1963, J.F.K. is assassinated on August, because that's when we were publishing the book. In August 1993, Random House named the guilty. And then that was run every week. And then on that publication day, they ran pictures of Mark Lane and Oliver Stone and other conspiracy writers and said, guilty of misleading the American public for 30 years. And Lane did immediately what Lane always does. He sued.

and said, you've defamed me, but he lost. It's good to know that there are some things that you can say about somebody, and free speech still lives in America. Okay, well, this is a good entree into the deeper question. And by the way, at some point, I want to get your take on the Iran thing. But, you know, free speech, I'm pretty sure you're kind of a free speech absolutist, like I've always been. And yet, we've talked about this on the show, much that we took for granted.

is now kind of coming to bear. And what we took for granted is that although we thought we had absolute free speech, we actually had technological limitations, which meant that the gatekeepers were really in charge of the range of what we considered opinion, and it kept us on the rails. And right now, it seems as if these conspiracy theories are undermining the ground on which everything is resting on. And that this started with Trump and Russiagate,

but now it's obviously much more on the right. And I don't even know any political opinion anymore, which is not being undermined, including like how people are even processing, we're reading all the polls about how unpopular Israel is becoming. And there's just no way that this is not in some way being fueled and almost like in a subliminal way being affected by the constant stream of conspiratorial stuff coming about the Jews and Israel. And then, of course, that becomes the context when you read an article like came out yesterday in the Times,

the Maggie Haberman article of Netanyahu's involvement in the Iran thing, which, you know, it was hard for me to even read it outside of everything I'm hearing about Israel. So I'll just let you talk about that because it's a huge issue to me. And I don't even know how we get out of this situation. Well, I wish I had a magic wand and had an easy out. I'm not sure because my wife, Tricia, we formed three years ago, a small anti-Semitism watch, a nonprofit that at that time, to show you how to touch we were with things then, we were afraid that the big mainstream Jewish organizations, the ADL and others,

were basically calling out the right and giving a pass to the left. And so therefore, we said, let's call them out on both sides because there's, and we're now just finishing an article, as a matter of fact, that'll be out in the next few weeks in Skeptic magazine, in which we sort of argue about the hate on both sides and theories. So, you know, the left has Israel as this colonizing genocidal apartheid country, which is fed on college campuses and universities, billions of dollars coming in from Qatar and others over a period of time to establish studies programs, political science, and everything else that. American and British universities that sort of have a slant on Israel, which paints them as evil.

And then on the right, of course, it's the typical old, what I call anti-Semitic tropes of Jews are omnipotent. They control finance. They control the media. They are leading America around by the nose. So they have different views of how they get to their Jewish hatred, but it fits in the middle and sort of this surge in post-October 7. And you're absolutely right about the failure of free speech, because we do have it. We can say, whatever we want, it doesn't always get heard because the gatekeepers in terms of social media and that and the gatekeepers at Twitter and others beforehand will put a throttle on some of the language so it never gets out. But in addition, we now find out there are consequences for speech,

which makes a lot of people silence. So after George Floyd was killed, you could say if you wanted to, I think all lives matter. And that might get you canceled. You could lose a job for that. People did lose jobs for saying that because it was considered at the time that you were were saying something that was against George Floyd and the movement that was taking place on the street. If you were saying the wrong thing about COVID, you thought Ivermectin might be something that science should look into, you're going to be suspended as a doctor. So there's speech. You want to say that you think that, you know, biological men should not compete in women's sports. You'll be called transphobic. And maybe if you're in a large corporation, you'll lose

that spot. I think that there's a self-censorship as a result of that cancel culture. I hate to where it cancel culture because it's sort of back in the day and it's not really thing, but the idea that there's going to be a punishment for expressing an opinion that goes against the grain. And therefore, today what's happened is speech that is for Israel. If I get on and I like to say to people, yeah, I'm not Jewish, but I'm a Zionist. That sets their hair on fire. They don't understand how that can happen because they don't understand what Zionism is. I say, yeah, I think that Jews have a right to reestablish the state of Israel since they are the indigenous people to that particular land, unless you can find some Canaanites who are still walking around. But for the most part, you can't. They have the original ties back to the land.

But people now see Zionism as some type of aggressive philosophy. So it's used as a pejorative. So we see in England, my wife, Tricia, who works with me on these things, is a native Brit. grew up in a sea of anti-Semitism at schools inside of London, we see the demonstrations every week in which they chant things like Zio, Zio, let's put a Zio in the ground, Zio being that sort of a little pejorative for Zionist. The way that that's turned has made people who otherwise might be willing to speak up for Israel silent.

They don't want to do it. They're afraid to do it. That goes to the Pals, that Nome, that you're talking about where people have a negative view of Israel. I think that the number of, who might have a more positive view aren't the one is expressing those views right now because they're afraid of the consequences.

That's astonishing to me. So you think the polls actually are under- undercounting the people who are possibly disposed to Israel? I do, but I don't think, but I don't mean to say by that that they're absolutely false and there's a sea change. Look at the party in which I'm registered independent now.

But when I grew up, my mother, my father in San Francisco, I grew up in San Francisco, They were registered Democrats. I registered originally as a Democrat. I lived in New York City. If you weren't registered as a Democrat, you couldn't vote in any primary that was interesting. As a journalist, I think I should be an independent.

People shouldn't necessarily know where I am. But I was telling you that the Democratic part of the left, the progressive part of the Democratic Party is this is a party that was the strongest supporter of Israel for so many years. And to see the progressive part of the party, It's not just that we're not going to go to the APAC meetings from 2016 and on as presidential candidates. It's the idea that today you hear the words genocide and apartheid, and you see AOC, for instance, just the other day, come out and say, I'm not going to go ahead and support any longer the funding of Israel's defense program like Iron Dome.

Then Mamdami, who's only the mayor of a city, the biggest city in America, I get it, figures that he has to chime in, and he comes in and says it. And then you have a Senate candidate running in Michigan, who is having a public meeting with Hassan Piker, who said that he doesn't care about race after October 7th, question the whether we deserve 9-11 and, you know, says that Orthodox Jews are inbred, and he's able to hold a political rally form because there's no political cost or calculus on the progressive left. Now, don't get me started on the right. the America First, the Tucker Carlson's, all of the dangers on that. So I'm worried about both

ends of the party, but I think I'm more heartbroken, in a sense, over the loss of the Democratic Party in this progressive left, because that was the party that for a long time I would associate with a pro-Israel policy. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. So I've been, I haven't been able to perfectly express it yet, but I've been saying now for a while that just like a black hall in space bends time and space and how it bends time is something I still can't comprehend. And I used to say often in business that when I have... Not sure anybody. Even the people that come up with a theory, they know it mathematically, but they can't...

It seems impossible, they can understand it. But it does. Gravity, of that extreme gravity can bend time, apparently. And I commented many times that when I've had business dealings with people, that money was created like a black hole in their logic. Like people who would be perfectly reasonable and would see, if they were on the other side of the table, would see the ridiculousness of an argument in two seconds. When it came to their own enrichment, they would say the most ridiculous things. you know, and so that, and now what we're seeing around us on many issues can only be seen, in my opinion, as some sort of black hole that is bending logic and the gravitational fields are, you know,

Israel and wholeness and Trump derangement syndrome. So when you're talking about the anti-Israel movement on the left, yes, yes, yes, you can criticize Israel. and I don't even have the same tie to the indigenity argument that you do. But somehow you would think with so many smart people out there, one of them would say, yes, yes, we really do fault Israel. But, you know, we do have to mention there's not a single Palestinian leader, not one that says they want to make peace with Israel. Not one.

Maybe we should expect there to be one. leader, at least that we want Israel to talk to, that we can accuse Israel of refusing to talk to. Like something. No, the whole argument levitates and no smart person demands that there be some sort of, what's the word, plinth, like some sort of column that it sits on, which is then on reality, which is, you know what? It seems very clear here that, yes, we can fall to Israel, but what can they do? Who can they talk to? Is there a Palestinian organization?

Palestinian newsletter. Something I can sign up for where someone says we want peace with Israel. Anat Wolf said that there is exactly four prominent Palestinians who want peace with Israel. They aren't leaders, but they're prominent. Yeah, but they have no critical mass of any kind. But she made that point. She made the point you're making. There's nobody other than four prominent people that aren't even leaders. So I'm making the point that I'm making about other things that there's some sort of disconnect here and like very simple logic that would lead somebody to ask that natural next question.

Okay, I think Israel's full of shit. I want them to do this. No, they don't ask the question. I want them to do this. And something, I have to say, that's some sort of bending of time and space in the world. And similarly with Iran, then I'll let you answer. There's so much to be said about Iran. But what is almost not said at all anymore is what every single politician in my lifetime

took as a given, which is we can't let Iran get an atom bomb. Every single American president. Nobody's even talking about that anymore. It's like, okay, but so are you saying? I've had it out with Robert Pape and a few other people, and all of them refused to even engage on that issue. I'm like, Professor Pape, everything you're saying here sounds like you're ready to let Iran get a bomb.

You remember this. And he avoids it. The other guy you had on. Phil Kly. Now, the guy, he's from the. like the Midwest or something. Walter Russell Mead? Yeah, that guy. Yeah. So he said, what he said, yeah, well, he said,

you know, Iran can't get the bomb. Absolutely. Now, we should have done it diplomatically, but that shit might... Yeah, but he's a white pro-Israel person. Okay, so your point is that there's no anti-Israel person that's... Or there's no way, there's no, I mean, he, and even he was less committed to the issue than I expected, but he's one of the few stalwarts out there. Go ahead. I'll let us talk so much. Go ahead. No, no, no. No, no. No. No. No. No.

It's so interesting because I saw Blinken recently, former Secretary of State, right, and Biden say we essentially, it's absolutely critical that Iran not get a nuclear weapon, and that's why we had the agreement with them. So I love that twist of fate, right? Like, oh, we had done it diplomatically. We tied them up. They weren't lying to us. They were abiding by the agreement. We know that's absolutely false. They lied repeatedly not only about their ballistic missile system, the capability of that system, but the amount of enriched and uranium.

they had how close they were to bombs. So tying them up diplomatically was not even delaying them. It was pushing them back a little bit and it was giving them a ribbon to put their atomic program on. So even the people say, we understand they can't get a bomb, but we were doing it without all of this violence that Trump started with the military action. It's just not true.

So you might give some rhetoric to that. And it's the same thing ties back to what you were saying before about Israel and the Palestinians in peace. The idea that all the onus is only on Israel. They have to unilaterally make peace. And they have to make peace, even when it comes to something like Gaza, with a group like Hamas, who has in their charter for the elimination of the state of Israel. So they don't even play the game in terms of Hamas.

Why would they? They don't even say for window dressing, okay, we're willing to change that part of our covenant, which was started, you know, 25, 30 years ago. We'll take away the elimination of the state of Israel. Now let us sit at the table and negotiate with you. They still keep that in there. And, of course, in the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority, filled with graft and corruption, they're still paying subsidies to families of suicide bombers.

They still continue to do that. It's very difficult when you don't have somebody else to negotiate with. And I'll tell you that I've spoken with Israelis in different industries and different businesses. There's a tremendous strain that's being put on the country because people forget they don't have an automatic draft. They have a reserve system that calls up people from reserves to serve in the military. military. At times like this, it's been this strain on the country. They're called away from being dentists and doctors and lawyers and accountants, and men and women have to come back and serve in the military. Who's going to run Hollywood? Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, exactly right. No wonder we're not

getting any good films. No wonder there's such garbage out there. Now you've hit the nail on it. I never put the two together. But you know, it seems to me that there's no tourism coming in, the country is hurt. If people don't think that Israel wants peace, they don't. understand the nature of the country. They've put into some category. There's nobody to make peace with, and that's the real difficulty. And by the way, and I'll say something by Iran, and, you know, it's not even unprecedented, not that the youth would understand this, but if you go back to the early 70s, nobody was more treated with more skepticism and more feared and more hated, I would say, than the Egyptians were in the early 70, Nassar, Sadat was treated with the same skepticism,

the surprise attack on Yom Kippur. This wasn't quite October 7th, but it was a pretty bitter pill. And yet the second the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, in a believable way, said he wanted peace with Israel. Public opinion swung all the way to the left. So there is a precedent, a model. And, you know, you don't even have to imagine the unthinkable. It's like, well, all they have, why don't they try that? It worked for Sadat, giving a shot, Palestinians.

There's zero demand for them to do so. And in Iran, and I wish I could speak to Blinken, maybe. Well, if they were smart, they would make an offer that Israel clearly wouldn't accept. At least they could say they made an offer. They could say, look, we'll go back to the partition line, the original partition that the U.S. and we'll be happy to do it because Israel would never say yes to that.

But at least they could say they made the offer. But, Dan, I'm sorry. No, I know you're going to see something on it. It's okay. Come to that. But what Dan just said, I've often thought that, you know, Israel's not on a hotline with me to take my advice on this. But I thought sometimes that Israel could actually say, you know what, okay, we'll return to the 1967 borders, which of course they won't. I understand that that's not going to happen.

But everybody has to demilitarize. That's the end of it. You have this little West Bank over here. That's Palestine completely demilitarized. It doesn't get any assistance from anybody else in every one of the Arab countries from Saudi Arabia to Qatar to UAE to every. everybody else recognizes us we have full diplomatic relations. That will be rejected tomorrow by Hamas and all the radicals inside the Middle East. They'll never agree to it.

They will not even give Israel the 1967 borders. So when you say that, it would show the extreme to which they were. If you said to them, we're giving you more than you were asking for in the last negotiation with Ehad, Barack and, you know, Yasser Arafat, when they were meeting with Bill Clinton in the 90s, will give you more than that. They would still say no to it. Yeah, to be fair to Hamas, there's been some reports that they said they would agree to a temporary ceasefire or extended ceasefire if Israel would return to the 67 borders. But then other ones have even denied that.

But there's been something like that. But yeah, I agree. How's the disarming of Hamas going? No, well, we knew. So, and as far as Iran goes, and, you know, I was of two minds about the JCPOA. As many sophisticated Israelis were, including, you know, Mossad heads. because the breakout period, was this is, 2015? They're like deadheads?

The breakout period was so short and you could fault the Obama administration for letting it get to that point. But they were in a bind. Like if they rejected it at that point, Iran probably might have gone nuclear right then. So I wasn't absolutely against that agreement. However, that ship has sailed.

It became clear, I guess the first time Israel lobbed a missile into Iran was in 2024, I think, right, with the very first one or maybe whatever it was. At that point, I tweeted out, I said, well, this seems to me, if I'm Iran now, now that Israel has shown that they can hit us at will, we have to go nuclear. And then the 12-day war happened. And at that point, anybody's sophisticated as Blinken has to know, there's no diplomacy left now. Once you've humiliated Iran, once Israel has shown that They can pick the legs off this insect at will. And Iran is a sitting duck.

Iran is obviously going to say to themselves, the only way to stop this is we have to go nuclear. So all this diplomacy stuff, it's nice, but it's all bullshit now. There is no diplomacy. If we're going to prevent them from going nuclear, it's at the point of a gun. And even people like Pape, they acknowledge that. And yet somehow, they're still against,

us pointing the gun at them, which to me can only mean that they are ready to allow Iran to have an atom bomb, which is madness because not just Iran is the entire Middle East. So how do you explain such sloppy thinking from the world elite academics, the black hole? It's the only thing I can think of. Well, I think it's also, though, a bit of Trump. Trump throws off the calculus for them. It's hard for them to make the straight rational analysis argument by, just viewing it as factual.

Trump sort of works. Yeah, he's... That's right, but he's the gravitate... He's one of the gravitational forces that is bending... I'm just trying to stick to my analogy, but go ahead. Why you stick to that analogy? That's for sure.

Go ahead. I mean, I listened to Ian Gremer, you know, who can't stand Trump in his views. I listened to him today on the... He was on CNBC talking about what was happening in Iran. And so much of its focus through this Trump prism that is hard to pull out the real facts. And, you know, on the JCP...

P.O.A, by the way, what you were saying before, I was one of those who thought maybe it could work. And I was talking at the time as a reporter to people inside that State Department. And what they were hoping for, this was the big dream in the Obama administration, was that they struck the deal. They took the sanctions off of Iran. Iran started to pump some more oil, that there would be a development of a secular, largely secular country, right? The 92 million people, and only 10 to 15 percent are real fundamentalists. that she has run that country. And so maybe they would have a middle class that would say we want to be more Western, whatever that means. We want to be more like Dubai. We want to be a little bit less extremist.

So they might be able to buy their way into a quieter culture. That never happened. And one of the things that I think has happened also since this took place with the first missiles, as you said in 24, and then you're locked into the part that Iran has to go for new. One of the worries I know from reporting in this administration was a concern, not number one on the list, but on their long list of things to keep an eye on, was to make sure that Iran could not get a nuke from North Korea or from Russia or from somewhere else, bypass the system of having it created and then say, oh, by the way, we have one nuke. Not say where they got it from. You'd have to figure that out. But even having one would stop the bombing. immediately because it's a possibility they could put on a warhead and use it. So there was a concern the North Koreans. And I reported recently that the Americans let through the Chinese, the North

Koreans know that any assistance, even sending any engineers down to help the Iranians try to push this on the fast track would be viewed as a direct threat against the America and we'd respond accordingly. I don't know what that would mean. But we let the North Koreans know they couldn't do it. And this is the agony of Trump. I mean, I think we all agree that it was a new low when he talked about destroying a civilization and these you know and I was at a table yesterday with people you know and we were all just you know dumping on Trump and yet we had to say and yet he's the only politician in America who would be standing up to Iran like this is this terrible dichotomy like he's he's awful like he's we're ashamed of

of him. And yet, who could we turn to that we wouldn't be ashamed of who would have the balls to try to prevent Iran from getting an atom bomb without spouting out a bunch of naive nonsense? So it's so interesting you say that because one of the things in reading that story the other day by Maggie Haberman and the New York Times and how they made the decision to go to war, I kept thinking as I was going through that. One of the things that puts Trump in this position is that he's not, he doesn't have that risk adverse gene that's so many politicians have. You know, Obama was very much the attorney.

He understood that. When he was asked a question, you could see him looking for the right word sometimes, trying to figure out how to say it. None of that exists, obviously, with Trump. And he's willing to go on his instinct where so many of the rest of them in that office would say, well, I've been advised by my military,

there's a possibility of this, this and this going wrong. I'm just not going to do it. So you're right, Trump gets there. And in terms of the language, which you shudder at, I mean, I look at it. the praise be to Allah, the aethyst, and everything else, the fucking this, all of this. The, he reminds me in some ways of the mirror image

of what we used to hear from the Arab world. When we were at the edge of going into Iraq, Saddam Hussein used to say, send your sons over here, I will send you back rivers of blood. I will send you back all of this. You know, they talk in that very flowery language. It will be the end of you. We'll exterminate you.

That will be it. They talk about all that. Trump talks in a language. which we may find shocking and we don't like it all, and how is he doing that as the representative of the United States? But in the Arab world, in the world of Iran and Tehran, and that is the Islamic fundamentalist Shia government, believe it or not, they find him unpredictable,

which is good. We find him unpredictable, so they definitely find him unpredictable. But they're not sure what's behind that statement, and that worries them in a way that they're not normally worried. They can figure out Biden. They can figure out Obama. They can figure out what's going on, with George Bush the younger.

They're not quite sure what to make of Trump, and that works to the benefit of the United States at this moment. Well, you're saying Trump is playing 4D chess or it's just an accident? That's a good question. You know, Dad, I love the way. And, you know, I watch media on both sides. So I watch MSNBC and I watch Fox. And I try to get the idea of both.

And what I loved the other day was that on the progressive ends of the media, you would have everybody saying six hours before the deadline. You know, this is a genocidal threat. He's going to kill 92 million people. This is hard to believe. Even Hitler didn't telegraph this type of mass murder. And then an hour after the ceasefire was announced, they were all saying, what a chicken.

I can't believe he has no courage at all. He was looking for a deal the entire time. So, you know, he's damned to be. He's either going to be the most bloodthirsty genocidal monster we've ever known. He's running the United States or the next thing you know. It's just all negotiating. He's a chicken.

So it's hard to see these things through a normal prism. And often, we're going through history in real time. So I get it. This is the first draft of history. We make mistakes. And then the historians get to come in later, Monday morning, look back, clean it all up, know how it really happened, and tell us out of place. But in this particular time, you know, it's tough.

People say to me, what do you think is going to happen on the 10-point plan? Two weeks from now. And I say, I don't know. You know, I can do every possibility. You don't know. You're supposed to know. Yeah, right, exactly. But that's the key.

People think they know. And so they say that all the time. Here's what's going to happen. And people believe that. Well, then there's such incentive now to, they have to say something. They have Twitter followers. They have, they need content. So I swear to God, I had a thought along the lines of what you just said driving in to work today.

I remember when you'd hear Saddam Hussein saying, it'll be the mother of all, whatever he, whatever. And, you know, mother of all battles. Mother of all battles. And all the kind of things that, that you expressed. And as an American, it would scare me a little bit. You know, I couldn't help it. Even though I know this ridiculous, they can't do it. It was scary talk.

Maybe they have something. Maybe it's not 100% bravado. If it's just 98% bravado and 2% some real threat, oh shit, right? And I wondered. I said, well, yeah, how, you know, and we don't live with that kind of expression. So I wondered exactly what you said. But when they hear it, when the Arab world here, the Persian world hears it, why won't it scare them as it scared me? Like, they can't just dismiss it out of hand.

Or maybe it's at the opposite. Maybe it's like, I know the game you're playing. We play the same game. You can't, you can't. But I'll tell you something else. This thing about a conspiracy theory is how it all ties together. So you have this New York Times article. I don't know.

It describes like five or six key players, right? They're all appointed by Trump who values loyalty more than anything. We are in a wartime. It is the most sensitive secrets there can be. and he cannot prevent leaks. Like, this is amazing to me. Trump and five other close-knit people during a war cannot prevent a total expose

in the front page of the New York Times. But somehow you can have a conspiracy of 200 people for 50 years and nobody ever says anything, right? No, it's so fantastic, right? Only in movies, is the conspiracy that's 50 years and nobody says anything. And I was thinking the same thing,

the other day when I was reading the Times piece, because it's good insider reporting, and they have access, and you think there's not many people inside that room, and they were able to get that story. And it was very funny, by the way, you see in the Times story is, you know, the Times puts its own finger on the scale

as to how it views it. And so it almost seemed to me, and this just my take on it, and you may disagree with this, that they were saying at some points, you know, the reason Trump was able to go through on this is because the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn't stand up to him like General Millie did.

He didn't say, no, don't do it. You know, this is going to be a disaster. He would hedge himself. He would say sometimes this could be good, sometimes not. Susie Wiley, Chief of Staff, never inserted herself when she really had her own doubts. So I love the idea that they were saying, gee, you know, Trump could have been stopped. If just those people around him had spoken up, you know, stronger about what it was.

But I thought, you know, other than putting that little bit of a spin on it, it was pretty good reporting. Yeah, but you know what they don't do? and it's not like second nature to enough people, is that they never discussed the fact that, what I think is clear, that when a story is based on the disclosures of someone who's leaking, the story represents the agenda of the leaker. There is a reason that somebody is leaking something,

and it's not just because they want everybody to know the truth. They are, they have their agenda, and therefore, it has to be spun in some way. And as the readers of the news, when it's processed through the New York Times, most people take it in as, oh, these are the facts. But it's not the facts like a reporter goes on the ground and actually gathers the facts. It's someone else's facts. It's hearsay in a way.

And so you have to discount it in some way. I'm sure it's not concocted out of whole cloth, but it represents the agenda of someone in that room. You're absolutely right. Look, and as a reporter, I face this situation time and time again. Sometimes I had a book called Why America Slept about the failures of the CIA and FBI. It came out in 2003, two years after 9-11. I was living in New York at the time. He was 16 years old at the time, by the way. Yeah, right. Exactly. I was a kid. But I, in that book, have a final chapter called the interrogation that's given to me by, I end up getting three sources. inside the American intelligence community, independent of each other,

and they recount an interrogation of a top al-Qaeda suspect, Abu Zabaita, who's still down in Guantanamo, by the way. And they do a fake flag operation on it. They pretend they're Saudis. He's wounded. And because he's wanted, the long and short of it is, he gives them telephone numbers of three Saudi princes in the head of Pakistan's airport, Air Force.

And he says, call them up. They'll tell you what to do. All those guys end up dead, by the way. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but they end up dead after we tell the Saudis and Pakistanis about them. One dies of a heart attack. One dies my favorite of thirst, 25-year-old prince in Israel's voice outside of Riyadh. One dies when his plane boat blows up.

But the point is, I had to think, and together with my publisher and the legal review and everything else before that book was published by Random House, okay, I've got this story. Why did I get it? Why did they tell me about it? What's the purpose? Are they fighting a war inside the CIA? or in the intelligence community for control. So they want to throw this group under the bus.

What's the incentive here? And in the end, as a reporter, you know you're being used because people aren't necessarily coming to you for the patriotic reason of getting the facts out. They're telling you the story and they want the story out because it does serve a purpose that they have.

And you have to try to figure out what that purpose is, not because it means the story's false, but it allows you to vet it, check it, try to verify it, go out and talk to other sources in a different way. Anybody, I don't think you can be a reporter or call yourself a reporter if you go with a one-source story. I don't think you can call yourself a good reporter if you go with a two-source story of all the second source is somebody who confirms the first source and says, yeah, that's what they did. You've got to really build up the facts, but you're always being used in terms of reporting this material. You have to know that. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but you have to make sure you're getting the facts straight.

what must the dynamic be within that group right now? I mean, if you're President Trump, assuming he wasn't in on the leak, which is possible, I guess, maybe he's trying to throw Netanyahu under the bus in some way. I mean, he now understands that he can't speak frankly and confidentially even to his most inner circle. I mean, it just blows up the entire organization. I had a similar, very small example of that in my own business, but it's nothing compared to the gravity of the President of the United States in his function as commander-in-chief. I'm just finding the whole thing astonishing. I hope Sunday we understand what went on there. But I am very impressed at the degree to which the Trump administration has been able to keep information close to its

pocket. I mean, nothing leaked in terms of, you know, these operations, the military strikes, You know, no leak of two hours or three hours beforehand. The rescue missions, all of those. Jeffrey Goldberg didn't get a signal chat by accident. Didn't get a signal chat by accident. That's right. And I mean, even the action on Venezuela. So there are some real high risk operations that have happened here, and nobody's gone ahead.

And, you know, the press hasn't picked up on that. They've been in the blind. So I understand this inside reporting could be upsetting. But on the other hand, this administration, better than the last few, it seems to me, and including the first Trump administration, which was a sieve. They've done a much better job of keeping things close to the best. All right. Before we go, I want to hear about your farmer thing. Go ahead.

Yeah, I think there's something you alluded to that we didn't quite flesh out. Go ahead. Is that I think you were alluding to the fact that we don't have gatekeepers? Is freedom of speech working? Or are the nut cases dominating? and this idea that the best the best antidote for bad speech is good speech, is that working now and day? Or is it just all the nuts are out there winning the free speech battle?

Well, if they are winning the free speech battle, that's our fault in some ways. I'm not blaming you, Dan, but I mean, you in particular are responsible, no. Meaning that we don't have enough counter speech to it because people sometimes just are afraid to do it. They listened to it. I see the anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses that quickly then involve into anti-Semitic expressions and attacks as they did in Amsterdam on Jewish soccer players and things like this, throwing them in the river. And then there's no pushback for what I call the normal part of the community. The people who personally find that offensive were really bothered by it, who look at it, read it, and say, oh, my God, that's horrendous is

happening, but they don't speak out about it. it. So free speech is great, but if it's only coming from one side, that's unfortunate. The answer is not to cut or limit the free speech of those who are saying crazy things. It is to counter it with people who can actually get up there, withstand the heat and the barbs and the craziness and answered in real ways. I see Douglas Murray get on there. You know, he will have somebody who's frothing at them out, and he's very calm and he sort of takes them apart. He's able to do that. I was at Oxford last June for the first time doing a debate on. the pharmaceutical topic and what's willing to talk about anything at all. You have to be willing to put yourself in there. My wife, Tricia, was with me, wore her star David, which she wears every day. We're at Oxford, which has had all of these pro-Palestinian demonstrations. And at one point, a group of students who were talking to her server looking at her chest and she had a star David, and she looked at them and said, oh, yes, she said, by the way, I am Jewish. Does that make anybody uncomfortable? And they all said, oh, no, no, no, no, of course not. Of course not. But

You know, it was so great. So you have to be ready to engage. I wish there were more people ready to engage. Do I like saying something that I think is just common sense and then getting a stream of 100 people calling me all types of vile names and everything else and a scientist? I mean, I put up a post today on Twitter that said, haven't we seen this before in history?

Doesn't this sound familiar where the Islamic Republic says we're willing to negotiate? They use negotiation to delay. They've done it every time in their 47-year history. They push something off. Why would you believe this is any different? The responses I got came, oh, you're a Zionist, you're a Zionist pig.

How much did you get paid for this tweet? Did Israel pay you? It's unbelievable. Do I like any of that? No. Do I answer all of them? No. But I don't shy away from saying what I think,

and I think to the extent that others are out there with free speech, expressing the opinion, not afraid to say it. We won't end the craziness, but we can tampen it down a little bit, I believe. Yeah, I just worry about, this is something I actually got from Scott Adams, I think. There is a psychological effect of just hearing all this hateful stuff about the Jews that is Pavlovian that we are not actually fully able to gird ourselves against, a kind of, I hate to say, revulsion that just becomes biochemically

seeps into us like an acid rain I've compared it to before and I just worry about it especially for my kids like I don't know what they're seeing like I know that they're not disposed to want to take the anti-Jewish anti-Semitic side of things I know that

about my kids and yet how many times can they skip through something on TikTok where it just doesn't wear them down in some way and they lose their like I said it's a psychological battle so Nome we used to be worried about you know, like where kids were going and who they were meeting with and who their friends were.

Now they can be at home and they could be fine and they're on their device and you don't know what they're watching. You're absolutely right. There's a documentary as a matter of fact on Netflix about the Manosphere and it's interesting because there are some influencers in there who I never heard of.

That's not surprising. It's part of it's generational who have millions of followers and as part of their following about you know, be a man, be great, you know, tell women what to do. This is the way you grow up and you're a strong male. They've also mixed in all this anti-Semitism. Jews aren't going to stop us from doing this.

We're not going to be the ones who allow Jews to control it. I'm not quite sure how that became part of the viral mix for them. But then you see these young kids who are being filmed who come up to them, 12, 13, 14-year-old boys coming up to these guys and saying, oh, you're great, you're fantastic. I watch you all the time. You're my hero. And by the way, fuck the Jews.

And it's astonishing to me because it's what you said is that Pavlovian part is part of putting it in their head. They don't even know what they're saying. They have no idea what the river to the sea is. They have no idea what genocide is. They have no idea what apartheid is. They don't know what they mean that they're repeating something that was started actually as a czarist forgery in Russia by the protocols of the elders of Zion. The idea is that there's a secret council of Jews to control the world. And it was a forgery from the beginning.

They have no concept of that. But they hear it enough in TikTok videos and on YouTube and from influencers, because part of their DNA inside their brain, and they just repeat it. And how you pull them away from that, it's not an easy task. All right. Tell us about your, is the book out about farm or forgive me for not knowing this? It is out about farmer. As a matter of fact, I tell you, I had the brilliant timing together with Simon and

Schuster of, you know, publishers print, you know, they published the book and they have the publication date months in advance because they send it out for reviews. And you've got your book tour, Bill Maher, the whole bit. And the date that we selected to publish pharma was March 10th of 2020, which was the next day the World Health Organization called coronavirus a pandemic. Seven days later, every bookstore in the country closed. The tour was canceled. So, you know, I sometimes ask advice by young writers, what do you give advice for book authors? And I say, the one advice I know for sure is do not publish a book when bookstores close nationwide.

Amazon, we sell a lot of books, but it's not a good idea. So that book was published then. There is a, his 800-page book, most of 200 pages, a source note, so it's not really that bad. The 50-52 chapters, the penultimate one, the second and last one, is called the next pandemic, the coming pandemic. And you would think I was a, you know, a psychic, but I'm not. I can't get a job at the 1-800 psychic line because it wasn't about COVID. It was actually fears that doctors have about a bacterial virus coming down the road. And the heart of the book is about the opioid crisis.

I mean, it's about pharma, how they game the system, how they make excise and outsized profits in the United States, how they save lives. They do save lives. Penicill in one of the greatest discoveries ever, but then how they gouged the system. But it was also about the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma and OxyContin. So is that a bit conspiratorial in its own way? No, not conspiracy in the sense that there wasn't a plot. It was just, and you will not be surprised at this, a combination of greed by those at the company who are producing the drug. It was one hit.

You talked about one hit a song, A Wonder for a music band or that. This was a one hit drug company. That's the only drug they had. And they went from literally nothing to entering the Forbes' wealthiest families list in 2015 with a $14 billion fortune all from that single drug of Oxycontin. So the, and they were called the OxyClan by fortune when they were put into it. So, and that was greed on their part. Greed also of doctors who were overprescribing. You had doctors running pill mails who weren't losing their licenses.

You had the FDA who was overwhelmed with so many different issues and problems. They weren't paying attention and they weren't acting on the reports that this was being done. You had multi-billion dollar drug distributors who knew where every pill in the country was going. They knew when a little town in Kentucky with 3,500 people, were getting 5 million pills and that was impossible. They were being diverted to the black market and they weren't reporting into the FDA. So you had the big pharmacy chain,

CVS, Walgreens and others who later paid hundreds of millions of dollars and fines for using and filling fake prescriptions. So I've got plenty of blame to go around for this. But who gets the blame for the most part? It's very interesting. Most drug companies are public companies. So there's shares.

You're buying Pfizer, you're buying Moderna or whatever else. You're buying stock. Purdue was unusual because it's privately owned by a family, the Sackler family. And they had their name on Tufts. They had their name at Harvard. They had their name of the Smithsonian in London. They've given away a lot of money. And so they were a high-profile company and they were Jewish.

Ah, don't forget about that. So I hear this all the time in terms of the anti-Semitism. Ah, the Sacklers, Epstein, you know, they go down a list. I always think to myself, thank God Bill Gates is. Jewish. So, you know, you go down this list. So the Sacklers were unusual. They were a family that I think should have been criminally investigated. Nobody ever did that. They contributed billions of dollars to the settlement. Their company went bankrupt. They still are left with billions of dollars. They essentially got away with it. Are you, do you go after the Sackler family so that no one will

suspect you're on the Mossad payroll? You know, I can't believe that you exposed that. I was hoping that That would just be something we could discuss off the record. That's the old professional wrestling thing, right? You're going to take a fall now, and then in round two, I'll be the one to take the fall. No, so it's so great because I think to myself all the time, people who don't do journalism for a living, but they don't understand how it's done, they don't appreciate that everybody's, I like to think that everybody's an equal opportunity target. You know, people love me, Democrats love me if I'm going after some Republican who has stolen money and has misused their office. And Republicans love me.

if I'm going after some Democrat who's done the same thing. So journalists, you go after the people that you think are doing the wrong thing. And in the case of opioids and the pharma business, there was plenty of blame to go around, but the Sacklers were prime targets for me. I wrote op-eds in the New York Times, two different op-eds with bankruptcy professors. I brought in these bankruptcy professors to help write saying to the judges, don't let the Sacklers get away with it. That was literally the title of one of these pieces.

You know, they're going to pull off this scam of having caused 100,000 deaths a year, being the ones at the forefront of this, and you're going to let them get away with just writing a check. But that's what happened in the end. Yeah, we have a friend, Greg Gerardo, the comedian, he died of an overdose in these drugs. But Oxycontin is useful if used properly. It's not. So, you're right. And so, wait, this is so fantastic. You'll love this.

Sorry to sit up in my chair here. But I get excited at this in this way. When the 1980s, when the Sackers were trying to develop this drug, they don't put on the markets in 96, there's a re-evaluation going on in the medical community about opioids. And there's a group of doctors led by this guy Portnoy up in New York who's saying, you know what? We think that opioids have been tarned feathered for too long. That if you're using them just for pain relief, they aren't really addictive.

And the Journal of the American Medical Association published a letter that said, by the way, we looked at 35,000 cases from two people in a hospital. People were treated with pain, opioid pain relievers when they were in the hospital for surgery and whatever else. And in only two cases did they become addicts afterwards? Well, you know, that's fantastic, but they're given short-term treatments. So there started to be a movement that said opioids aren't as bad as you thought. The Sactors come out with their pill in 96, and they fed into that because they were the first ones to have a 12-hour time. release capsule. Before that you had to take a percocet or whatever every three or four hours. Now the Sackler said every 12 hours they got a group of doctors who say it's not as

addictive as we thought and people used it for back pain for osteoarthritis because they had a bad headache. It was over prescribed by doctors. Now you try to get an oxycontin or an opioid pain relief you have trouble doing it. My wife had breast cancer five years ago this July and after surgery when she was in some discomfort she said, you know, can I get a painkiller? They said, no, take two Tylenol. She said, you've got to be kidding. They said, no, Tylenol is just as effective.

So they've gone to the other extreme now. From giving it away that candy, now people who really sometimes are in pain can't get opioids at all. Yeah, and I think with our friend, there was a time release coating on the pill, and they would take a razor blade and cut off the coating so they'd get the full impact of the pill. Noam, why aren't you in running the FDA?

Listen to this. This is unbelievable what you just said. The FDA, Sacklers and Purdue, asked for a label in 96 that said their product was less subject to being abused because it had the 12-hour coding. The FDA gave them that without any studies to prove otherwise. And every addict on the street or anybody with any sense knew that all you had to do is crush the pill. It was a 12-hour release, but if it had 80 milligrams of the drug, oxycodone in it, which they were doing pills at 160 milligrams at one point, which is really enough to knock an elephant out. You take the pill, you crush it, or you, as you said, you take a

razor blade, you get the immediate hit right away. So the idea that it's a 12-hour release, if you take it properly by the label, but addicts aren't doing that, or people want to get a rush from it, aren't doing that. That's why it was so popular to divert. We're over time. I don't want to keep you, maybe want to come again. I have two, I would give you two other, like, headings and you can give me a quick take on each if you want or if you have to go. Oh, no, no, I'm good. The two other things I want to hear your quick take on are RFK Jr. And Epstein, the Epstein files.

So, RFK Jr., the, I'd like to talk to him once about the pharmaceutical industry and what he thinks about vaccines and what he thinks about additives and everything else. He won't talk to me. I've tried through people that know him well to get to talk to him because we absolutely disagreed on who killed his father. I haven't read in a book about it, but I think Sir Han Sirhan is the assassin of his father and he thinks not. And so for some reason, that's the block to being able to discuss that. And it's unfortunate because I think what he's doing in terms of additives and that is fine. That's great.

I have some questions about him, sometimes about the way he's stuff. stocking panels together with the FDA that he's supposed to be anti-drug, but he's pro-drug in some ways. A perfect quick example, hormone replacement therapy for women. They stock the panel with doctors who were pro-hormone replacement. They gave it a green light. They said, let's take the warnings off. Every woman going through menopause should be using HRT. I haven't known from writing about it.

I write for a book about it. It's great unless you have a history of breast cancer or a hormone receptor problem or something like this. It leads to uterine cancers and other issues. They've completely ignored all of that. So I'd like to sit down with RFK. Very quickly on Epstein. I wanted to do a book for a while, but I wasn't able to get the right sourcing for it on following the money. Because to me, the real story is, I understand the sex is the story that everybody's interested in.

I'm always interested in following the money. And I want to know not only how he originally made it, but I believe that there may have been one or two intelligence agencies, not the Mossad. I know that's hard to believe, that might have been using him as a cutout on transferring what I call black operations jobs and money offshore. And he thought that gave him immunity from prosecution forever. And it didn't because they are foreign operators. And in the end, when he had trouble in the States, they just dropped him. That's an interesting story.

It may not be a book, but I'm still trying to look into that a little bit. I think, by the way, he killed himself. He was not murdered. I do, too. Perry all thinks that's ridiculous. That was my one. question. So Perriol, I just say this to you. So for a while, because I look into it, because I always think maybe one day I'm going to find the big conspiracy, right, it's going to be

great. And I did look into it. And the one thing I could not get was this, the guards that night, who were there, who were only 30 feet away from him on their phone and they were looking at things and shopping and whatever else. What I wanted from the government, the government has not released that yet, is how many times were they together before that, was that their particular assignment, did they always work together? So it was an unusual that they were pulled together for that. And in the other times that they were pulled together, you would be able to check their cell phone history. Did they always do the same thing? Essentially, were they always hanging out inside the break room and shopping on Amazon and other things for what they were going to buy for

the following days, opposed to really watching what was happening with the guards? I wanted to know that that was the process, because the only question I had was whether somebody might have said to them, stay over there, well, we make sure he kills himself because that was the option that he had. That would be an interesting thing. It would be a conspiracy, but on a lower level than what people think it is, which is going in and straining. I had that thought, too, that what I could believe is that Epstein said, just look the other way, I'm going to kill myself, and I'll find a way to get you 100 grand. Right.

And they would say, and I'm not saying this happened because they've never been accused of or charged with there anything else. But if you were a guard who wanted to get quick money, you'd say, you mean you're going to pay me to do what I do anyway? Just sit in the break room and just sort of go on the internet. That's fine. Well, as long as we're on a topic of suicide, how the hell did Guring get that cyanide pill? Is it amazing by a GI who was guarding him who got to like him?

And I know that's hard to imagine. But Guring, you know, we think of these people as such monsters, the Nazis and that. It's hard to imagine that any of them could be likable. But Herman Guring, when he wasn't an opioid addict, which he was, he was, you know, a morphine addict during the war. he had become one. Then he got clean when the Americans brought him to Nuremberg because he's in jail. He can't get his supply. And when he cleaned up, he sort of led the defense for the rest of the Nazi defendants. And this one GI found him charming over a period of time. And Goring's pitch to him was the same as the other German officers like Keitel, who was executed, head of the German army. They said,

we're officers, we're military. We're not like those guys like Him or the SS, those people involved in the mass execution of people out in the east. We were fighting as soldiers. So we deserve to be executed by a firing squad. And when the Americans said, nope, you're going to be at the end of a hangman's news. Someone like Gurings said to this American, you know what? You've got to do the honorable thing. You've got to let me take my own life.

I can't be millied in that way. And believe it or not, he was able to escape the hangman's news as a result of that, which is a shame because I think they all deserve to be at the end of that rope. All right. Well, sir, like a few other people I've met, on this show. I don't understand why you're not on television every night. You're to the point.

You're well spoken. You're extremely well informed. You're telegenic. He's got he's 95 years old. 95 years old. I don't know why Barry Weiss at CBS is not have you on there every night discussing whatever's going on in the world.

Thank you very much. But I will say, and I leave you with this, I'm always amazed at people who I like, and I follow them, and I and they're commentators, they're on podcast, they do frequent. And I think to myself, when did they actually work? Because most of what I end up doing, most of what I do with my wife, is just so tedious work of trying to get somebody to talk to you,

finding some document that nobody else has found. So most of the day isn't very stellar or glamorous or whatever else. And to the extent that I enjoy doing this, is fantastic with you. I've watched the show. I like it. I know your repertoire, how you do it. I've seen the give and take and the interruptions and debate, and it's just fantastic. Any thoughts on Perry L, by the way?

Here you are. So I think that it's great, but, you know, for what I do, I get it. This can be the occasional, like, icing on the cake, but for the most part, it's back to the drudgery of trying to pull together some reporting this new and fresh. Well, I say the same thing about Nome. He should be more prominent, but, you know, he's too rich and... No, no. I'm going downstairs now. I'm going to meet you. I believe he's your friend Michael Moynihan. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We haven't done a, I did a podcast with him, but it's been like two or three years now.

Yeah, he's, you and him and a bunch of people I know, you just, you guys know so much. I don't know how you accumulated such knowledge in your lifetimes. But, but noam, I think the key is to, wait, there are a lot of smart people out there. A lot of people that do good reporting and everything else. but they're also, how do I say this in a kinder way, they hedge their opinion because they don't want to offend anybody. I'm willing to offend people. Maybe that's a part of getting older, whatever else. I'm willing to tell you what I found in my research, what I found in my reporting,

and then I will back it up, and you can debate me all day long if you want about the facts, and I'll discuss that with you. That's great. I'll have that debate with anybody. But I'll tell you what my opinion is. I don't say it in my books. I don't in the books.

I let the reader draw the conclusion because the reader's smart enough to do that. That's what I'm always hoping. So I don't editorialize there, but otherwise I will in a conversation tell you and editorialize what I've concluded from my work. And I think a lot of reporters sort of, you know, are afraid to say that that's unfortunate. Or they cross the other line today, which is activist journalism, which I can't stand, which they think you have to have a point of view. You've got to prove that point of view. You don't go out and just follow the facts wherever they lead.

My old way of doing it is you follow the facts wherever it leads. It may not be where you want it to, but those are the facts. What can you do with it? Amen. All right. Gerald Posner, I hope you'll do the show again in a reasonable time. I would love to. Maybe I'll be out and we can do it in the studio.

Oh, yeah. Anytime you're going to be in New York, just email us, we'll fit you in. Where you live? I live in Miami Beach now, the Sixthboro. Okay. You sound almost Canadian, by the way. Is there any Canada? I don't know.

I've been together for 45 years with my British-born wife, Trisha, and so somehow that accent has filtered in and turned a San Francisco. born Northern California native into sounding Canadian. This is disgraceful. And it's interesting because I've been with my Puerto Rican wife now, like for 35 years. She doesn't sound the least but Jewish. All right, so goodbye, goodbye. Thank you very, very much.

Bye. Bye.