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Loose Change
34 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M regret reviewing "Loose Change," the sometimes-taken-to-be-urtext of the 9/11 Movement.
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Transcript
Introduction and Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
So, big news, eh? The biggest, the best. It's the newsiest of news. So you're gonna tell me about it? Am I? Am I? Am I? You should. I will. So... Yes? About that news? What news? The big news. Oh, that. Yeah, impressive, isn't it? I don't know. I don't know what it is. Well, it can't be that important then. Fair enough.
00:00:39
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy on this what is apparently international podcast day. How appropriate. Is there a patron saint of podcasting? Ah, they must be by now. Haven't looked it up.
00:01:01
Speaker
Nevertheless, it may be a special day for podcasting, but it's a regular episode for us. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. Emdenteth. Together we fight crime. No, no, sorry. We discuss conspiracy theories on the internet. The fighting crime thing is something we're meant to be keeping secret. I keep forgetting. Vigilating justice is not meant to be made public. Vigilating justice is not meant to be made public.
Hints of New Beginnings?
00:01:26
Speaker
So you have some big news, but we're going to tease it out a little bit, are we? We are. All we're going to say this week is, I have a job. I have a job as well. Yeah, but that's not a job for a while. I was just going to gigging academic philosopher for quite some time. This is a job job, and I don't mean euphemism for poo.
00:01:50
Speaker
This is a job in the sense of an ongoing permanent position kind of dealio. Now, the reason why we're dragging this out is in part because despite the fact I claim to not be a suspicious person until such time I've signed a contract, I still kind of think it's going to be yanked away at me at the very last minute. I have seen a contract. I haven't seen a contract in English. I've only seen a machine translated version of said contract. But until such time, I sign on the dotted line.
00:02:19
Speaker
It's counter-signed, stamped, sent to the moon and all that jazz that contracts do. I'm still for some reason slightly suspicious about it just disappearing and the job ceasing to exist. I don't want to prejudge things by going on and on about the job like I'm doing right now. But I have a job and that's all we're going to say. Well then it's not tempt fate.
00:02:42
Speaker
and dive straight into an episode, I think.
The Impact of 'Loose Change' on 9/11 Narratives
00:02:45
Speaker
We've got an oldie, but a goodie. And by goodie, I mean not actually very good. Yeah, but say, we've got an oldie, I am willing to agree with you on that point. But whether it's a goodie, I mean, Tim Bruckdagner died earlier this year, Josh, so frankly, calling it a goodie is a slap in the face to British comedy. Although actually rewatching the goodies, the goodies is a slap in the face to British comedy.
00:03:07
Speaker
I mean, it's what, 40 years old now, so probably to be expected it doesn't measure up to the standards. So anyway, we're getting off track. We have a thing to talk about. Let's talk about it now.
00:03:23
Speaker
Right, we have a thing to talk about, and that thing is loose change. Now, if you've been paying attention to our Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre posts, loose change just sort of has kept coming up. In part because we keep on talking about papers written about conspiracy theories written pre and just after September 11, 2001.
00:03:44
Speaker
And so we keep on making jokes about people not writing about 9-11 before 9-11 occurred, and then got rather curious about the fact that it's only around about 2006 that people start discussing 9-11 conspiracy theories in their academic work. And the one thing we keep on coming back to time and time again
00:04:04
Speaker
is the documentary, and some people may want to put that in scare quotes, Loose Change, which, if it didn't start the 9-11 Truth movement off, is certainly taken to be a caricature of what 9-11 Truthers believe. Yes, so 2005
00:04:23
Speaker
is when the first edition of Loose Change came out. And yes, as you say, it didn't start the 9-11 conspiracy theories. Apparently, if you knew where to look on the internet, there were numerous sites with this sort of material out there, but it's credited with popularizing it, with bringing it into the mainstream. Apparently, it's also credited with doing the same thing to Alex Jones.
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, the Alex Jones thing is an interesting punt because a lot of other people say Mike Drudge and the Drudge Report is what brought Alex Jones into the mainstream. So depending on when you became interested in Alex Jones,
00:05:04
Speaker
Alex Jones gets mainstreamed by this. He gets mainstreamed by the Judge Report, the Drudge Report. He gets mainstreamed by the director of Waking Life, Richard Linklater, who used to feature him in all of his films as a background character. Alex Jones has been mainstreamed by a lot of people. In fact, some people, 40 years from now, claim that we mainstreamed him on this very podcast. He's hoping.
00:05:34
Speaker
Oh yeah, so maybe it was a combination of things, but certainly he did get a bit of attention for promoting Loose Change, as well as the producer of one of the editions. Documentaries, because people seem to forget this, but for a very long period of time, Alex Jones produced long-form documentaries on the internet. He doesn't do so many of them now.
00:05:57
Speaker
So it was kind of his bon-mot to make a documentary about how evil X or Y was. And so loose change is something he could act as a producer for, was a quite natural fit given the topic of loose change. Have we actually mentioned what the topic of loose change is for people who may not be aware of the documentary? Yes, I mean, I'm sort of assuming everybody knows what it is, but then I guess, I mean, it's 2020. So there are people at university now
00:06:27
Speaker
who weren't alive when 9-11 happened and who would have been in preschool when loose change came out. So yes, maybe we should go through it. It's a documentary or a series of documentaries that promote the inside job mihop theory, the idea that elements probably within the Bush administration actually made 9-11 happen, didn't simply know about it and let it happen.
00:06:53
Speaker
It was written and directed by a fellow named Dylan Avery, who was quite open about the fact that it began life as a work of fiction. He thought he was sort of a budding screenwriter who couldn't get any work and thought he had this idea, wouldn't it be cool to make some sort of a thriller where somebody discovers that 9-11 was actually an inside job?
00:07:18
Speaker
And as he did research for it, he then became convinced that 9-11 actually was an inside job. And so instead of making a work of fiction, made a documentary. Now that's his version of events. Well, it's one of his version of events. There is another version of events, which was he was at film school. He wanted to make an action thriller based upon 9-11 being the result of a conspiracy.
00:07:42
Speaker
His professors persuaded him that on a film school budget he wouldn't be able to make a film of that type, budget being too small for the scope of the film he wanted to make, and so he decided to make a documentary instead.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the the cynical view of it is that he came to the realization that a low budget action film, if you could even make it, wouldn't get nearly as much attention as something that claimed to be real life in the way that the number of horror movies claim to be based on a true story and so on.
00:08:16
Speaker
So he made his documentary, he released it in 2005. He released a second edition of it in 2006. This is the second edition re-cut. He released Loose Change the Final Cut in 2007, which was a slicker affair, I believe, produced by Alex Jones with, I think, a different narrator as well. Although initially it was meant to be Charlie Sheen.
00:08:42
Speaker
Now, Charlie Sheen, you may be aware of as a sitcom actor and also star of the greatest action comedy of all time, Hot Shots and Hot Shot Part 2. He is also a fairly major 9-11 truther. And indeed, one of the favorite bits of my PhD thesis is a quote about Charlie Sheen, which is a completely different person. We're not going to talk about him though.
00:09:08
Speaker
A quote about Charlie Sheen in that when Obama took office, a whole bunch of people were trying to get a meeting between Obama and Charlie Sheen. They have a sit down about releasing information about the events of September 11th.
00:09:23
Speaker
And this journalist wrote, it was when someone with the gravitas of a Charlie Sheen speaks, you have to listen, which to my mind is still one of the most ridiculous sentences ever expressed in the English language.
00:09:39
Speaker
I think that may be true. Yes, so we have loose change first edition, loose change second edition, loose change final cut. In 2009 came loose change 911, an American coup, which was sort of another new version of it. Then there was the 2015 version, which was an edited down for television version of an American coup. And then in 2017, there was an HD
00:09:59
Speaker
re-release of Loose Change Second Edition, which is the one we watched, because if you want to watch Loose Change Final Cut, you have to actually pay for it. It's a video on demand thing, whereas the Second Edition is free to view on YouTube. Now, we could have paid to watch the Final Cut. We have patron money. We just didn't want to, basically. Yeah, basically. Okay, so the case is going to be made in all of these editions anyway. We know what the salient differences are.
00:10:29
Speaker
there's no real need to funnel money to the creator of this video. Now as we want to point out, this video has a very interesting history because as we go back to the first edition back in 2005, this video was not initially released on YouTube.
Exploring the Evolution of 'Loose Change'
00:10:45
Speaker
It was released on the competitor to YouTube at the time, Google Video.
00:10:51
Speaker
Because back in those days, Google Video was the thing that Google was using to promote videos online. Google eventually buys YouTube and Loose Change appears on it. But the original edition appears on Google Video and all of the metadata around the original release of Loose Change is now lost.
00:11:15
Speaker
So Avery has claimed that with views on Google video, DVDs being sold and piracy, over 100 million people have watched or at least had access to this video, a number which I think seems suspiciously inflated.
00:11:36
Speaker
That is an interesting point, though, because I mean, this was pre-YouTube becoming the only game in town. I think putting it on the internet, they originally, you know, that was just sort of a thing you could do, but it was mostly designed to be distributed as DVDs, but then the internet took off and that's how it really started doing the rounds. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of the differences between the editions,
00:12:01
Speaker
The story changes a little, mostly they just become more and more polished. One of the things the second edition did is got rid of a bunch of citations of like Wikipedia articles and replaced them with actual news articles from news sites and stuff like that.
00:12:21
Speaker
And so, you know, the story changes and evolves a little bit, and that puts more emphasis on some bits than others. And we should say that this is the the the documentary we're going to discuss is kind of the state of 9-11 conspiracy theories around 2006. And the story watching is from 2017, which is a little bit odd.
00:12:41
Speaker
Well, it is, but it's just the HD version of the 2006 version. But yes, at any rate, the 9-Eleven Truth movement has moved on quite a bit, so their arguments have moved on since loose change. So it shouldn't be taken as here's what 9-Eleven Truthers believe now, but it's certainly a significant document in the history of 9-Eleven Truthorism. So we've both watched it.
00:13:09
Speaker
What did you think, just overall? I'm just asking questions, the movie? It very much is. I don't know if loose change actually sets the template for that style of argument or if the template already existed and it was simply following it, but it very definitely follows the template. The thing, you know, just going all the way to recent times, Jerry Brownlee's list of interesting facts. It's very much that style. It's all
00:13:39
Speaker
It's all innuendo. It makes very few concrete claims. There are only a few times where it actually says, this is the truth. It just asks a lot of rhetorical questions. It does a lot of hinting by bringing up one fact and then bringing up another fact, implying a connection between the two without ever actually stating it.
00:13:59
Speaker
In terms of actual filmmaking style, though, I think it very much did become the template. It's the voiceover, either Dylan Avery or the actor they got for the final cut, all voiceover, sort of slightly ominous music in the background, and then just almost slideshow of screen captures and clips and images and what have you, clips from news sites and so on, illustrating what's being talked about.
00:14:29
Speaker
Now what I find particularly interesting about Loose Change as a document in the 9-11 Truth movement is that I think a lot of people who decide to write on 9-11 conspiracy theories think of Loose Change as the canon of 9-11 conspiracy theories because
00:14:50
Speaker
Even as you point out, maybe it isn't the origination point or origin point, which is the proper way of saying what I just tried to say, of the just asking questions trope. It is probably the most famous example of a 9-11 conspiracy theory. And so I think a lot of scholars look at loose change, go, oh, well, this is what 9-11 truthers believe.
00:15:12
Speaker
And thus, that's why we've got this rather weird characterization of the 9-11 Truth movement as simply being people who ask questions but don't provide any developed answers. Because no matter our particular perspectives on 9-11 conspiracy theories, when you go and actually read what sophisticated 9-11 truthers believe,
00:15:38
Speaker
They aren't just asking questions, they are saying this bit of evidence is not explained by the official theory, here's why, or the official theory cannot explain this particular thing here, and I'm going to give you a story as to why our theory can.
00:15:57
Speaker
Yes, in fact, maybe we've done 9-11 more than once in this podcast, because of course we have, but maybe at some stage we should check in on exactly what the state of 9-11 trutherism is these days. But not today. Today we're actually looking at loose change.
00:16:13
Speaker
Shall we give our opinions on it at the start or save that till the end? I actually think we probably signalled what our opinions were throughout the episode. Well, yes. Our opinions are not high. Let's save our actual gut feels towards the end and deal with the minutiae of the claims in Loose Change.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yep, so it starts, the first, I didn't actually check the time, the first five minutes or possibly more of the whole movie, just a classic list of interesting facts. He just, Dylan Avery narrating, just introduces a whole bunch of facts, doesn't
00:16:55
Speaker
One after the other doesn't say they're all connected, but obviously the implication is that it's all building to something. I suppose it almost counts as a gish gallop in that I didn't realise it was going to be that long or I would have been counting from the start exactly how many claims he introduces. But there's a bunch of them, they come up quickly and obviously to address any of them in depth would take an awfully long time. But he talks about
00:17:22
Speaker
He mentions Operation Northwoods, which we've talked about in this podcast in the past, the plans which never enacted against Cuba, wasn't it? Yes. In those days, Fidel Castro was the biggest threat to Western democracy.
00:17:38
Speaker
One of the proposed operations in Operation Northwoods was apparently substituting an airplane with a drone to fake the destruction of the airplane. It brought up footage of a remote-controlled airplane. This was a real thing. People took to research how airplanes crash and so on.
Challenging 'Loose Change': Expert Testimony and Pentagon Theories
00:18:05
Speaker
People actually rigged a genuine airliner with remote control and crashed it to see what happened. It mentions the fact that the World Trade Center is shown in crosshairs on both a FEMA and a Department of Justice document in the 90s. It doesn't point out that this is after the first World Trade Center bombing, which people kind of forget happens sometimes.
00:18:27
Speaker
The documentary, and by the documentary I'm going to say he, as in Dylan Avery, wants to suggest that there's something really suspicious about the fact that the WTC is used as an icon for terrorism, but of course it makes absolute sense to use the Twin Towers as an icon for terrorism given they were targets of terrorist attacks in the past, especially since
00:18:51
Speaker
I was then watching the documentary going, so how else do you signal a terrorist icon in a easy, catchy and easy to understand fashion? The Twin Towers seems to be obvious. People have tried to blow those up before. Without them, what kind of symbol would you actually use? But I mean, and this sort of becomes the theme of the whole movie. It introduces a fact which is
00:19:20
Speaker
out of context is implied to be sinister and doesn't go into any possible non-sinister meaning for it. But he brings up the project for the New American Century, which I'm sure we must have mentioned at some point in the past.
00:19:36
Speaker
a think tanks project for increasing American imperialism, which did feature people like your Dick Cheney's and the like, who all went, look, the only way to project American power in the coming century, that being the century where in now the document belongs to the 20th century, would for there to be an event in America, which basically was an attack from the outside. That's the only way we think that we could
00:20:03
Speaker
we could justify wars overseas. This is taken to not be a document of something we would like to occur, but rather a document of things we are going to do when we're in power. So it's taken to be a prediction as opposed to rather than speculation that it actually appears to be.
00:20:25
Speaker
And then there's a bit of this isn't a full list of all the stuff that comes up, but then there are also mentions various training exercises that various agencies had done in the past of how they would deal with the case of if an airplane were to be flown into the World Trade Center or into the Pentagon.
00:20:42
Speaker
And it mentions something which comes back to you right at the very end, the increasing number of put options put on stock in various airlines and aeroplane manufacturers. I don't really know how the stock market works, but apparently a put option is essentially a bet that that stock is going to go down. Now, what's interesting about the stock market thing, which is actually related to the training exercises thing, is there's a base rate fallacy here. So Dylan Avery goes, look,
00:21:08
Speaker
The stock market put options were four times higher than usual on the day of 9-11, particularly around the kind of organizations trading from WTC1 and WTC2. So that is suspicious. But of course you end up going here, but average compared to what? I mean, if it's average over a year,
00:21:33
Speaker
then being four times higher than the average sounds interesting. But if it turns out that four times the average also means on some days there were six or eight times the average elsewhere, then actually four times the average isn't that suspicious. You kind of need more data about the stock market in general for this four times the average to mean anything. And then sort of as the movie actually kicks in together, it has an interview with Hunter S. Thompson
00:22:02
Speaker
Interesting enough, basically. I put in the notes I was making interview with noted paranoid Hunter S. Thompson. Talking about the dodgy things that the US government has got up to. Yeah, it has. But at the same time, Hunter S. Thompson is not what we call a level headed person you go to for commentary on these things. Hunter S. Thompson was a paranoid gun nut living in the back blocks of the US at this time.
00:22:31
Speaker
And then it gets into it. It's an hour and a half long, so I'm not going to do a full blow by blow. But one of the first things that stuck out to me is it features right near the start, just with no explanation, no fanfare at all, just has a bunch of clips of buildings being demolished and controlled demolitions, and then a shot of one of the two towers falling down.
00:22:59
Speaker
That really set the tone right from the start. It doesn't say a word. It just leaves you to draw the connection without actually making any claim of itself.
00:23:14
Speaker
jumps around a lot to a bunch of different points, but it sort of sticks to one topic at a time, I suppose. It's rightly the start he mentions, Hani Hanjou, one of the terrorists who flew the plane into the Pentagon, doesn't say a lot about him, but basically implies he wasn't much of a pilot. In a kind of interesting way, in that they go and talk to
00:23:34
Speaker
the person who ran the pilot training school that Hajour went to to basically get his license verified in the US to allow him to fly Cessna's and the like. And the narration goes look he wasn't much of a pilot but then when they interview the person behind the school
00:23:53
Speaker
It's a case of, yeah, he was a below average pilot, but we still let him take planes out, which means, yeah, he wasn't much of a pilot. He was still a trained pilot able to fly a plane. He just wasn't the best pilot on Earth. And frankly, when you're just, when your task is to simply fly a plane into a massive building,
00:24:15
Speaker
You don't need to be the best pilot in the world. You don't have to land the plane, you just have to crash it. Yeah, so they sort of, they mention him and they don't spend a lot of time on him. Apparently the final cut spends a lot more going into exactly what Hani Hanju was all about, but it moves. So the first really big topic it covers is the Pentagon, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
00:24:38
Speaker
And you'll be familiar, I'm sure, with most of the arguments it makes, claims that there were no traces of the plane left on the front lawn, which is just plain false. And interestingly enough, it does eventually show photos of people taking wreckage off the lawn, although with the claim that the only bits of wreckage there were small enough that people could pick them up and carry them off. Although then one of the bits of wreckage they talk about is a bit of an engine inside the building, which I don't believe you could just pick up and walk away with.
00:25:07
Speaker
Although that was, yeah, it sort of mentions a few things. Again, it's a little bit scattershot. It mentions some of these bigger bits of wreckage found inside the Pentagon. One of them in particular, it sort of compares a photograph of the part with a diagram of the part itself and shows how the diagram, it differs, there are particular bits of it that are a different shape than the thing in the diagram, implying that it's something else, I don't know.
00:25:32
Speaker
And then there's a lot of talk of the hole left in the Pentagon, the idea that you'd expect a plane with 100-foot wingspan to leave a much wider hole than the hole that was there. And then
00:25:47
Speaker
Again, I had in my notes that they've argued that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and not a plane, but again, they never really did. They sort of say, here's the hole in the Pentagon. Surely a plane would make a bigger hole. Here are some buildings that were hit by missiles.
00:26:04
Speaker
you can sort of waggles the eyebrows and goes dot dot dot. Which they kind of do with WTC1 and 2. They talk about how there are eyewitnesses who claim to have seen planes that don't quite match commercial airliners. And then they never quite state it wasn't planes that hit the buildings. They simply go, hmm, that's interesting, isn't it?
00:26:29
Speaker
Yes, actually, eyewitness accounts show up a lot. They give interviews with a bunch of eyewitnesses of the plane that hit the Pentagon, and all the witnesses they talk to describe a different plane, basically even one of them claiming they saw a helicopter.
00:26:45
Speaker
which I don't know what the implication we're supposed to get from that is. For one thing, none of them say they saw a missile. They all claim they saw some sort of a plane. You'd think if they were all crisis actors or something, surely they'd get their story straight. So I don't quite know.
00:27:04
Speaker
how a bunch of eyewitnesses claim thinking they saw different things helps the case, but again, they never make a solid conclusion there, they just sort of present all this information to you. And indeed, they seem to prefer eyewitness accounts to any kind of expert testimony, apart from the few cases where the experts say the things that they want them to say.
00:27:27
Speaker
which is something you also find in a lot of pseudo-history where you will get what we might call pre-anthropologists or bad historians. So amateur historians and people who were
00:27:43
Speaker
influential in the development of anthropology, but weren't doing anthropology as we understand it today. And they go, look, these earlier, more eyewitness accounts of history are much more accurate than the contemporary scholarship, which interrogates whether that original scholarship was any good, which most academics will go, well, no, actually, often the problem with those eyewitness accounts is that they kind of make a whole bunch of assumptions.
00:28:12
Speaker
And then those assumptions get confirmed by people saying, oh, no, you must be right. And actually it's latter work, which actually goes through and tries to work out what those assumptions are and whether they're doing any work in their accounts, which actually gets us much closer to the truth. There's a reason why we rely on experts.
00:28:31
Speaker
So the documentary at this point moves on to Building 7, good old Building 7. The one thing that stuck out is that they said how it was there for a while and then it collapsed suddenly. And I thought, is there another way for a building to collapse? I mean, maybe something they could crumble gradually. Well, no, Josh, we've all watched action films. You know that in action films, when a building starts to collapse,
00:28:54
Speaker
It makes really, really loud creaking sounds, which gives them enough time for the hero to make a speech, develop a last minute plan, realise they've left someone behind, go rescue that person as soon as they leave the door, the building collapses behind them. So as we know from action films, buildings don't just collapse spontaneously, they give you an awful lot of warning.
00:29:18
Speaker
Now, in talking about Building 7, it mentions the various agencies that worked out of Building 7 and the number of files, the number of sensitive files they had stored there. Again, without drawing any particular conclusion for it, although it eventually, when it gets to the end, we'll see they get to actual talk of motives. And this doesn't come up again, presumably at the time. No, because actually what we get at the end is gold.
00:29:45
Speaker
Mm, we do, literally. So I mean, at the time, it seems like they're implying that possibly, you know, one of the reasons they want to specifically wanted to destroy building seven to get rid of these files, but doesn't come up again. And then it makes the claim that building seven WTC one and WTC two are the only buildings to collapse due to a fire and lists a whole bunch of other buildings that caught on fire and yet didn't collapse. And there's a lot we could talk about there, but I'm sure that's a
00:30:13
Speaker
a particular facet of the 9-11 stuff that you're all familiar with but then at this point in the movie he decides to let's ask the experts what do the experts think what do the experts think well the first expert they talk to goes oh look i've looked at the footage it certainly does look a lot like a controlled debt militia but then 10 days later they note
00:30:35
Speaker
that the same expert having reviewed the footage and seen the evidence goes actually no it does look like it was internal collapse and they go oh oh they must have got to him whilst of course you might go well yes initially upon seeing
00:30:53
Speaker
a building collapse after an event of this type, having never seen a building collapse due to a plane crash or bits of being carved out by rubble and a fire. And you might go, well, actually, it does look an awful lot like controlled demolition. But upon reviewing the evidence, the same expert then might go, actually, now I've got more data, I can make a more informed choice as to which analysis I'm going to endorse.
00:31:19
Speaker
But Dylan Avery doesn't want people to change their minds based upon new data. He wants them to hold to their initial gut feel. Yeah, I thought that was actually, that was quite a ballsy move. There was some chutzpah there to take an expert agreeing with you and then changing his mind to disagree with you and actually managed to paint that as something somehow sinister that actually supports your case.
00:31:44
Speaker
that sort of mentioned some other experts. I noted the fact that whenever an expert who, whenever they talked about experts that didn't agree with them, that was always the phrase so-called experts, whereas the experts who agreed with them were just expert experts. And this is the point in the documentary where we get the idea that jet fuel can't melt steel beams. I don't think that exact sentence ever came up, but there was a lot of talk about the melting temperature
00:32:09
Speaker
of jet fuel and the burning temperature of jet fuel and the melting point of steel. Even right in that section, there's a lot of variation between one minute they're talking about being able to melt steel and the next they're talking about being able to soften steel, which of course is always the counterclaim. No, jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel, but it does burn it enough to get soft enough that it wouldn't be able to bear the load that was placed upon it.
00:32:35
Speaker
And the other thing to note here is that they want to claim, they want again being Dylan, Avery and the other people involved in the making of Loose Change, they keep on stating that the Twin Towers and WTC7 collapsed because of fire.
00:32:53
Speaker
So what they don't talk about are the gigantic planes that flew into WTC 1 and 2, and the bits of WTC, I can't remember which one it was, that actually fell and carved in part of the side of WTC 7.
Alternative Theories: Building Collapses and Flight 93
00:33:09
Speaker
It's not that the official story is they collapse because of fires, they collapse because of structural damage and then fires that soften the internal structure leading towards collapse. So they're not really presenting the official theory in an honest way, they're presenting a caricature which then allows people to use the canard, jet fuel, cart, melt steel beams.
00:33:37
Speaker
Mm. Also ignores the fact that once the jet fuel started to the fires, but they continued burning long after there's no more jet fuel, it sort of makes it sound. So I thought you're about to launch into a song there. Since the road's been turning, we didn't start the fire. No, but it was always burning. Only it wasn't until some planes crashed into the damn thing. But yeah, they talk about how sort of all the jet fuel would have been burned up very quickly, ignoring the fact that well, yes, but it would have sent everything else in the building on fire anyway. But
00:34:07
Speaker
So then they go further into this idea of there being additional explosions after the planes crashed into the buildings. And so there are lots of eyewitness accounts of people talking about how they heard this, and then they heard another explosion. And it seems fairly clear that by explosion they mean a loud bang. It's always what they heard. It's always, you know, I heard another explosion. So it's not actually
00:34:31
Speaker
Thank you.
00:34:38
Speaker
proof that there were bombs and things exploding in there. It's just that there were a lot of loud bangs when buildings were in the process of collapsing, which is perhaps not that inexplicable. And of course, the old squibs, the puffs of air that can be seen being ejected out of the- Officially, I thought that looks spectacular.
00:34:56
Speaker
the way that they have the buildings collapsing. And then they zoom in on small bits of the frame with the plume. They thought, oh, actually, visually, that looks really good. So they mentioned those ones. And then they do actually make some attempt at how did the bombs get into the buildings in the first place, which is one of the accusations always.
00:35:22
Speaker
But they do point out that apparently security details and sweeps by bomb-sniffing dogs had recently been called off in the World Trade Center and by who? The person who ran the security company won Marvin Bush, brother of George W. Bush. What I have to say from the photo is the least bushy Bush I've seen.
00:35:47
Speaker
Mm, that's true. I've seen elsewhere they've talked about apparently they sort of overplay the role that Bush had. He was in charge of a security company that did some of the security for 9-11, but the idea that he would have had the authority to do that was questioned. But anyway, they make the claim that that's there.
00:36:08
Speaker
Then they start talking about how no one was allowed into ground zero afterwards, which I didn't, no one except for FEMA or something like that, I'm not sure, which, and I was a little bit disappointed that this is pre-nano-thermite, which was always my favorite aspect of the whole thing. Apparently nano-thermite makes an appearance in the final cut, but not in the second edition. But it did make me wonder if no one but FEMA was allowed to get into ground zero, then how did that dude know there were
00:36:33
Speaker
I believe the collection of nanothermite occurred well after Ground Zero was made relatively open to the public. So no one was allowed into it in the immediate aftermath, but the rebuilding of the site actually occurred after a significant amount of time.
00:36:54
Speaker
later that we've got to use after twice in the same sentence there. And I think he got the nanothermite during that time. Right. Well, you heard it. The first nanothermite is real. I was wrong. As you know, I don't want to endorse that. That's when the samples were collected that claim to contain nanothermite. I'll make, I'll modify that. The person got the samples that nanothermite is allegedly in during that time.
00:37:23
Speaker
Right, you heard it here first. Nanothermite is real, says Dr. Emdentuth. Now. It's true, I have changed my mind. People got to me very quickly. They did. So from here it moves on to Flight 93, the one that crashed in Transylvania. Now, would you actually note that this is where the various different versions of the documentary change somewhat dramatically, in that the first edition, the fate of Flight 93, the one that
00:37:48
Speaker
didn't crash into a building was it was shot down over Pennsylvania. So it wasn't a controlled crash by the passengers taking control. It was shot down. In the second edition, we get a quite elaborate conspiracy theory about it landing at Cleveland Hopkins Airport and people being taken off the planes, which then led to me asking, so where are they now? In the final cut,
00:38:18
Speaker
It just doesn't say much other than we don't know what the fate of Flight 93 actually is.
00:38:28
Speaker
So in this version, again, it sort of harks back to the Pentagon stuff about claiming that the crash site of Flight 93, there were no plain wreckage to be seen, various eyewitness quotes about how there was just seemingly nothing there.
00:38:50
Speaker
The story it has is that Cleveland Hopkins Airport had just been cleared out due to a bomb threat, supposedly, and two planes, a Delta Airlines plane, and one identified as Flight 93.
00:39:06
Speaker
They just say that. I don't quite know what that means, how this plane was identified as that. But supposedly these two planes landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, and the people in the Delta flight had to wait quite a long time before they were able to get off the plane and have something to them. But supposedly the people in this mysterious other plane were ushered often into some other area really quickly within the space of an hour.
00:39:34
Speaker
I'm not surprised they got rid of that bit because that seemed the shakiest. They just say, oh, here's this plane. They say it was identified as Flight 93, but without saying how or why or what that means, because you'd think that would be a bigger deal, but I don't know.
00:39:51
Speaker
So, and it says, it goes on to sort of say so that obviously none of the planes involved in 9-11 were really there. But it doesn't, so it's suggested that the Pentagon, there was no plane, it was a missile, although that was kind of shaky. It's now claimed that there was no plane crash, that the plane crash in Pennsylvania was faked and that Flight 93 was diverted somewhere else.
00:40:14
Speaker
Never actually gives an alternative for planes for the Twin Towers except, as you say, that there's some eyewitness accounts that suggest they weren't commercial airliners, but that was fairly vague. They actually say at one point, literally say, unfortunately, there's no way to know what really happened to the actual planes.
00:40:34
Speaker
Don't say anything about the passengers at all. Like, at no point do they say, so what happened to these mysterious, to the passengers on these flights who are now no longer there, who they would have you believe all died, but that just doesn't come up at all. I did notice it had the claim that they couldn't find any of the black boxes, or they did find that terrorist passport, is weird if true. Now, admittedly, as we will see, NA paper will be looking at
00:41:02
Speaker
relatively soon, which is on the role of fortuitous data in certain conspiracy theories. The passport thing is kind of interesting in that it is quite convenient to the official theory that a passport belonging to a terrorist was found in the rubble around the Twin Towers in a way that we don't find a lot of the passports, although other passports, I believe, were found as well.
00:41:30
Speaker
So I can kind of see people going, this data is awfully convenient, but at the same time, most people don't understand just how hard it is to burn box. And again, it is presented completely out of context. As you say, if it turned out that a lot of documents from the planes were found, then that would be completely unremarkable, but we just don't know. All it says is
00:41:56
Speaker
These big, solid black boxes were supposedly destroyed, but this little passport wasn't. And moves on. And where it moves on, too, is the phone calls that were made from the various planes, because all up there were, I think, 60-odd calls by people on the planes, knowing they were in some serious trouble, calling their loved ones back on the ground, either to tell them what was going on, or in the more tragic cases, to sort of bid them goodbye.
00:42:24
Speaker
Now, this is actually one of the few cases where they honestly did make an actual positive claim. They did say at some point, all of the cell phone calls were fake. They actually made that claim. Using voice morphing technology. Voice morphing technology, they were faked to make these. Now, as people have sort of said, one of the things is, of course, that in some of the calls, you can hear other people's voices in the background. So, must have been using multiple voice morphing technologies to get all the people on there.
00:42:52
Speaker
They play a couple of the calls. There's one from a stewardess who's calling 911 or someone like that.
00:43:06
Speaker
saying what's happened on the plane, someone's been stabbed, there's some terrorists. She doesn't say they're terrorists. A stabbing has occurred, there's smoke in the business class part of the plane, and the pilot is not responding.
00:43:25
Speaker
And so Dylan Avery goes, she doesn't sound as if she's panicking. And I was listening to that going, well, it's an air steward. They are trained to react in an emergency in a calm and methodical fashion. So, of course, she's not going to sound as if she's frightened out of her wits. Even if she is, she is presenting to passengers.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah, so he sort of, you know, it's like, you know, where was all the screaming, but then he talks about one, he has a clip from one guy who called his mother and introduced himself using his full name, which is a weird thing to do, perhaps. You wouldn't, when I ring up my mother, I don't say, hi, it's Joshua Addison. But I do, when I ring up my mother, I say, hi, it's Joshua.
00:44:21
Speaker
Joshua Addison, I do that all the time. Well, that's that's that's your business. Apparently, I've actually then seen an interview with the guy's mother, where she says that actually that was like he, he did a lot of sort of business calls on the phone. And that was it was just kind of a habit. He was in normally in his business laws, he did have to introduce himself by his first name. And presumably in the stressful situation.
00:44:47
Speaker
He just did that out of habit, not thinking that it was a weird way to talk to your own mother. But she did sort of point out that this is actually the way he would generally start a phone call. But the interesting thing was, though, they do a lot of talk about how it wouldn't have been possible for cell phones to get decent reception. And some experimenter guy did where he found the chances of connecting a cell phone call at those altitudes were very, very small. And then pointing out that some years after 9-11,
00:45:14
Speaker
airplanes started putting sort of cell phone tower-y type technology in their planes so that cell phone calls would be more possible there by suggesting that it was possible in the first place. And I thought, hang on, we just heard that you just played us tape from the call where the guy said, I'm calling from an earphone, which were what planes used to have in them before it was possible to make cell phones. There were specific phones built into the
00:45:36
Speaker
airplanes that allowed you to place calls for a fair amount of money I assume, which we'll come back to in just a second.
00:45:45
Speaker
So the whole cell phone thing didn't apply there. And indeed, apparently almost all of the calls were made from earphones, not from cell phones. So that whole cell phone calls couldn't have got through argument is kind of irrelevant anyway. And this is relevant to our discussion because Avery goes, look, most of these phone calls are really, really short. Surely if you're trying to get through to a loved one, you want to talk to them for quite some time. These calls are being made by earphones.
00:46:14
Speaker
Airphones are expensive to use so people have tried to get credit on or have a bit of free credit to use on the flight so they put through a quick call and that explains why the phone calls are so short.
00:46:30
Speaker
Mm. And then, yes, at the end, so basically makes the positive claim the cell phone calls were all fake, and then brings up the idea of voice morphing technology, which does exist. I don't know if it's good enough to fool a person's loved one even these days, but it does exist. But yes, so that's the claim that it was all fake.
00:46:47
Speaker
and then moves on again to talking about the terrorists where it basically lists all the supposed terrorists involved in the various attacks and various flights and lists out nine of them who are supposedly still alive and again basically just sort of says this news agency said this one was alive this guy's father said he was alive this person says they're alive
00:47:09
Speaker
lists them all out and then moves on again. Now one interesting thing here is that our good friend Robert Muller gets referenced here, kind of forgot that he was involved back in the day with this particular event. I mean there are two things to note about this. One, it's not surprising that terrorists entering a country might enter under false identities. And two,
00:47:34
Speaker
There's a kind of racist assumption operating here that people in the Middle East must all have individual names, none of which sound like someone else's name.
00:47:45
Speaker
And it does mention the point that Robert Miller, indeed, said that in the report, which named all the terrorists, said they can't be sure the list is 100% accurate. This was the best of the best intelligence they had, which is fair enough. Now, we're nearly at the end.
Financial and Political Motives Behind 9/11
00:48:00
Speaker
This, after going through the terrorists, finally gets to the point of motive of why, why would people have done this? And again, even at this point, it never actually specifically explicitly says
00:48:13
Speaker
This is who did it, and this is why they did it. It just brings up basically a bunch of people who stood to gain. It brings back those put options that were put on Boeing stock and various airline stocks. It mentions something which I think also was in the bit at the beginning about the man who owned the World Trade Center and the big insurance policy he had put on it.
00:48:39
Speaker
it suggests that companies with offices in the Twin Towers had put through dodgy, fraudulent transactions just before the attacks occurred, implying that all the records that would have proved these dodgy transactions happened would be destroyed, which kind of implies that the companies were directing their own employees in the buildings to make these things knowing they were about to be killed in a fiery thing. But anyway,
00:49:05
Speaker
And also suggesting that whatever these transactions were must have only been occurring in the building because otherwise there'd be records on the other end of the transaction. You'd think so, yeah. And then the gold. Tell me about the gold. So there's this story that gets told towards the end about people going into the tunnels beneath the World Trade Center.
00:49:29
Speaker
where there's a large amount of gold in storage and then being basically pushed away by the feds. And then the story then goes slightly larger by claiming that no one really knows how much gold bullion was being stored in the World Trade Center
00:49:48
Speaker
at the time of its destruction and once again it makes doesn't state anything explicitly it just suggests to the audience that maybe the Twin Towers were blown up for to hide the fact they'd taken gold out of vaults and put it into storage beneath the Twin Towers where they'd be able to get at it once the Twin Towers had been destroyed.
00:50:14
Speaker
There was talk of a tunnel underneath where they found a dump truck that had been abandoned there that seemed to have been carrying away a whole lot of gold, which I'm pretty sure was the plot of Die Hard 3. I was getting very strong Die Hard 3 vibes off of this part of the film.
00:50:32
Speaker
But yes, the idea of the gold there was gold went missing, implying that this one of the many reasons this was done was to I mean, I suppose they're not they don't necessarily have to say that 911 was done specifically to destroy these records and hide these things and steal this gold and cash in on the insurance. It could simply be it was done for one of these reasons. And then
00:50:58
Speaker
various high-up elites who knew about it used the opportunity to do a bunch of other stuff as well. Finally, it gets into, of course, the political motive, which basically points out that on the back of 9-11, Bush got to do the stuff that he'd been wanting to do all along, that indeed is the
00:51:15
Speaker
Project for the New American Century said, was it Cheney or Rumsfeld? I think it was Rumsfeld who had the actual quote about the stuff that we want to happen will take a long time to happen unless there's some sort of a Pearl Harbor incident. Yes. Now what is interesting here is that they kind of commit the fallacy of confusing causation with correlation because it's true. Everything they list that happened after 9-11
00:51:45
Speaker
did occur. So it's correlated with the event. America used 9-11 as a pretext for doing a lot of things overseas. But correlation doesn't tell us that they then caused that event to make these events occur. And equally likely, and in fact some people would say more likely alternative hypothesis here,
00:52:07
Speaker
is that the people behind the project for a new American Century, when actually this event we had no control over, has given us exactly what we want. We're going to use this to then legitimize what we're going to do now. It requires no forethought to make the event occur. It just requires you to be opportunistic and go, oh, now this has happened. We finally get everything we always wanted.
00:52:36
Speaker
And that's basically where everything closes. It says, you know, there's been this horrible fraud perpetrated against the American people and we should be angry about it. Good night to pure atresses.
00:52:49
Speaker
So, obviously, I think you can probably tell that our opinion of this film was not exceptionally favorable. What would your final rating be? Racing? Out of, so what are we racing it out of? I don't know, out of 10, thumbs up, thumbs down.
00:53:07
Speaker
Can I give it 10 thumbs down? Sure, works for me. Actually, I think a more interesting thing is to ask what Dylan Avery thinks of loose change after all this time, because he was he was interviewed around about the time that the second edition HD recut remastered Force Awakens came out and he was asked by the journalist, do you still think 9-11 was an inside job?
00:53:36
Speaker
And his response was, I can't answer that, because Inside Job has a stigma, so I can't without being set up for something. Directors make movies, then they make more movies. They're capsules of where the world is and where the director is at the time. Are there a pile of questions about 9-11 that have yet to be addressed?
00:53:54
Speaker
Here, I think that's absolutely fair to say. If I had known that by putting out that film, I was going to have to spend the rest of my life still having to say whether I agree with it, I don't know if I would have. I was angry about something at the time, and that was my way of expressing it, which is, I think, the clearest indication of a director going, yeah, I can't disown the film, because it's the reason why I've got a career. At the same time,
00:54:22
Speaker
I wish I had never made it.
Dylan Avery's Reflection on 'Loose Change'
00:54:24
Speaker
Yeah, so it sounds like he was hoping it would start his career and yet it basically just became his career. That's the only thing anyone's interested about. Yeah, I mean, I thought calling the thing at the start of the film a bit of a gish gallop, the whole film itself was really kind of an extended gish gallop. It's everything is just brought up and then it moves on to the next thing. There's no context. There's very little actual evidence.
00:54:52
Speaker
It's very selective, there's a lot of cherry picking, there's a lot of the, apparently a lot of the quotes they use, there's some fairly serious quote mining going on. I've seen one sort of deep dive into one of the quotes, I had a guy who, a medical examiner or someone who was looking at the the crash site in Pennsylvania of Flight 93,
00:55:13
Speaker
where he, the quote is made to sound like he found no bodies there at all. And yet when you read the full thing, he's basically sort of saying, there were no, there were no live bodies, you know, essentially, a whole bunch of dead people, orbits of dead people is all they were. So there's, yeah, it's certainly very selective in its evidence.
00:55:39
Speaker
If I were a sort of bitchy film reviewer that I don't think they really have anymore, a bit of a Jay Sherman, if you will, I would say Loose Change, more like Loose Stool, which would be a reference to Diarrhea, and therefore not complimentary of my opinion of the film.
00:55:56
Speaker
I have to say, I don't think that they'll be knocking on your door when they relaunch the critic. Oh, that's a shame. Well, they can knock on my door to tell me that they're relaunching the critic. That will make me very happy. Oh, actually, now I feel I need to rewatch the critic. Then again, it's always the right time to rewatch the critic. Exactly it is. And I think it's also the right time for us to finish this episode. That's less change for you, ladies and gentlemen. We watched it so you don't have to. And I kind of wish that we hadn't watched it.
00:56:26
Speaker
I would have preferred to have done something else with those. It's just a, there's no argument to the film. It is just suggestion. There's very little, this is what really happens to a deep dive. So to a large extent, having seen, say Richard Gage give a two hour talk on the collapse of the Twin Towers, he also doesn't want to get into why it occurred.
00:56:53
Speaker
But at least he gives you an argument as to how it occurred. This film doesn't want to say who's really behind it, or give you an account of how it was achieved. It just wants to wriggle its eyebrows at you and go, suggestive, isn't it? Come back to my place. Maybe we'll talk about it some more. And frankly, I was not seduced by this film.
00:57:19
Speaker
I thought this film might be an incel, and so I just walked away. Indeed. And yet it basically sort of set the standard for all the conspiracy-type documentaries that came after it. Well, except that maybe it didn't set the standard.
00:57:35
Speaker
It was the most polished version of that standard because, as I said, Alex Jones had been producing documentaries for a while that kind of have the same style, just that they never became the breakout hit that Loose Change did. Loose Change was an example of a form of its time. It was simply the first one to actually go mainstream.
00:58:01
Speaker
Yeah, and people have said it, it does a really good job of making an amateur production look professional. Like it was done, it was made for a couple of thousand dollars or something like that.
Final Thoughts and Upcoming Content for Patrons
00:58:13
Speaker
Because it's basically all just stock footage in an editing suite is all you really need to do, but it is. And the soundtrack. I actually think the soundtrack plays a very big role because things are kind of time to go along with the music. Yeah, it really does set a tone as well. So yeah, I mean, certainly significant.
00:58:30
Speaker
Just not very good. No. So, I think that's all we have to talk about, but if you're a patron, what can our patrons look forward to this week? We're going to briefly review the latest episode of Reply All, that talks about the origins of QAnon and who Q might be, because of course, everyone seems to have a theory as to who Q is. Everyone also seems to disagree with everyone else about it.
00:58:56
Speaker
we will talk about a conviction from the Panama Papers League. Remember that thing which investigated Star Wars villain Mossack Fonseca? I thought Giancarlo Esposito did a very good job of playing him in the Mandalorian. I couldn't get to the end of it. I found the deep dive into journalistic standards and the way you investigate tax evasion to be too much like the first Star Wars prequel for my taste. Fear, that's fear.
00:59:23
Speaker
We'll be looking at a mysterious article retraction from the New Zealand Herald. The fact the Trump campaign spent at least 35 million US dollars trying to tour African American voters. The fact that some of Trump's tax returns have been released and a pop culture update about what I think to be a British classic and something that Josh really didn't have much time for. Not much time, no.
00:59:52
Speaker
So if you'd like to hear about any of that and you are a patron, then you're gonna. If you're not a patron, you can be one. And what better day to do it than International Podcast Day? Although, of course, by the time you're listening to this, it won't be. But you get the idea of what I'm saying. Go to Patrion and search for the Vodcasters Guide to the Conspiracy. And if you don't want to be a patron at all, well, that's fine. You're listening to us on this International Day of Podcasts. So bless you and thank you for being our audience.
01:00:22
Speaker
Thank you for being a friend. Cheryl, down the road and back again. Yes. Yes, we did. Yep.
Farewell and Listener Appreciation
01:00:30
Speaker
Anyway, that is all I believe we have for this week, so it simply remains for me to say goodbye. And for me to say goodbye. Classic.
01:00:49
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R.X.Denter, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:01:50
Speaker
And remember, silent green is meeples.