everybody and welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Of course, my name is Bryce. I am back from my travels as you can see from my actual set. I'm back in Atlanta and so we are back to our regularly scheduled programming. Tomorrow I will be back on with Shanti on solutions with Aquarius Rising Africa and then moving forward this Monday we will be continuing with our Monday mysteries looking at the Romanov dynasty of Russia which seems kind of appropriate with what's going on in the world. I didn't plan it that way but it's just interesting how life gets serendipitous sometimes. We are obviously coming off of the Super Bowl which frankly I have no idea who won nor do I care because I mean seriously who watches the Super Bowl anymore. It's kind of like the Grammys and the Oscars. Like who watches this stuff anymore.  There's so much more important things to be looking at. That is just my opinion. No offense to the football fans out there. I personally am just absolutely I've never been a football fan. I actually have a lot of PTSD when it comes to things like football and organized sports. I just I will never date anybody who likes to watch football because that is a hard boundary for me and not a fan of that stuff at all. I have my reasons for that so no offense to those who are a fan but I just like who cares. Who cares. Alright anyway but you know what's really fascinating way more fascinating than the Super Bowl or the Grammys or the Oscars is the story of Granger Taylor. Now the last video that I filmed very haphazardly when I was on traveling which was the Brownsville Road case. Likewise I heard of this case while I was actually traveling. I was listening to a podcast and I'd never heard of Granger Taylor before. Now with that being said Granger Taylor is from Canada from Vancouver Island so very far away from where I reside on the southern eastern area of the United States in Atlanta so definitely separated by a lot of distance. However his disappearance is so freaking fascinating and with most disappearances in the world today we are only looking at a few options right like most of the time a body will appear at some point or we have reason to suspect that maybe that person was unaliving themselves or maybe we have reason to suspect that the person that was missing was abducted. There's all these different theories especially with the national parks which we talked a lot about those national parks but with Granger Taylor there seems to be a different motivation behind his departure. You could say he might have been abducted but he went willingly and we're going to get into this because I cannot wait like with the Brownsville Road episode with a lot of these cases that are still remain kind of unsolved mysteries. I cannot wait to hear your perception because this case has me stumped and I actually can see the different perspectives that people have on this case. I can play devil's advocate with my own self and my own opinions in this case so I can't wait to hear what you think happened or what maybe you hoped happened. I know what I hope happened to Granger but I don't know if that's actually what happened. So let's get into this story. Now Granger Taylor again he was a Canadian man who lived on Vancouver Island up in Canada. He disappeared in 1980 so before I was born before some of you watching were born. Now as we go into this case I have a crap ton of notes and you guys you know typically when I do these deep dives I prefer to really edit them so you don't actually see me looking at my notes but with this there's so much here and I feel like it just flows better. So I apologize if you see me looking back and forth but that's just how it's going to be for this episode. I'm kind of experimenting with changing up the formatting a little bit so I apologize if you see me looking at my notes just verifying some facts here. So Granger Taylor went missing on November 29, 1980 and he left a note for his parents. Granger did live at his parents house so let's get a little bit into who Granger was as a person. Granger seems to be or seemed to be a little bit of what we would call a savant. Now this is just my opinion. I obviously don't know Granger never wasn't even born when he disappeared. I don't know his family nor have I spoken to anybody associated friends or family associated with this disappearance so this is just my perception of looking at the case through my own eyes. I do believe maybe he was a little bit autistic, not super autistic maybe just enough where he had some kind of like social quirks about him but he was a genius you guys like this guy was so freaking smart. I think it was one of his siblings that called him an industrial archaeologist and so Granger lived in this town of Duncan on Vancouver Island and this is a very, very, very, very small town. It's known for logging. It's also a fishing city. It's mostly working class people. Obviously it's up north of Seattle, very rainy that area not like the islands down here in the south where I live where it's hot as hell most of the time. So this was a very working class logging class city a small, small, small town and when we talk about the disappearance of Granger I was actually thinking about this in the shower this morning. We have some pros and some cons when we're dealing with small town disappearances and the pros and the cons are coming from the same thing like it's a pro because when you're looking at small towns you're looking at people residence of the small town who know each other, know each other's families for a really long time. We're talking generations and so people have in small towns typically have more intimate knowledge of each other even if they're not the best of friends and so when we're talking about Granger as a person this is a pro because we have people that really knew who he was and we're very aware of his quirkiness and therefore they're able to recognize patterns in his behavior that maybe you wouldn't recognize if Granger was living in a large city. I hope that makes sense. This is also a con because sometimes I think we get so inundated with their own understanding of someone or intimate understanding with someone that's hard for us to actually see outside of that like we have some limitations that maybe there was something else going on so I just kind of wanted I guess that I was thinking about that in the shower this morning like pros they really knew this guy cons they really knew this guy and so when we get to speculation on what happened I hope that makes sense that we're possibly seeing both pros and cons with trying to figure out what happened to Granger Taylor. Now Granger was born October 7th of 1948. He again was very interesting and eccentric child very shy possibly had a hard time understanding social cues as I just said I'm just looking at my notes here basically no social skills but he was really really kind like nobody had a bad word to say about Granger and I feel like again with these small towns people do kind of develop more care like they become kind of like a character of themselves. I'll give you guys an example in that these travels I stopped by equipment Georgia which is if you guys saw the episode that Bobby did where she did kind of a who do you think you are of my ancestral lineage equipment I'll tag that in the description box below if you missed it and I was in the small town like walking around I'll share that footage later and another video and I said to my boyfriend this town is so small and so old that would be so easy to move down here and kind of develop a reputation for being like the town witch you know like being kind of like like you develop these like caricatures of yourself so in a lot of ways when people are just describing Granger it's almost like in it and I don't mean any disrespect but it's almost like they're describing like a character of the town like everybody in the town knew that Granger was super super super smart but kind of a centric but also shy and his intelligence didn't didn't play out in academia like it wasn't like he was excelling in school his his that's why I said he's kind of a savant his intelligence was on a very specific trade a very specific craft in fact Granger actually left school traditional school in the eighth grade or a grade eight as they say in Canada and at this point in 2024 that doesn't shock me at all we know that at this point in 2024 kind of like the Super Bowl and the Grammys and the Oscars like to people actually take this seriously anymore we now know way too much about the school system and how it's actually not teaching a lot of true information to students so but a night you know when he was growing up in the 50s in the 60s in the 70s that probably wasn't an accepted reality but he did leave it eight in the eighth grade sorry not eight years old in the eighth grade and what his talent he was really good at electronics like he seemed to understand like I said his sister or somebody on the podcast said that he was an industrial archaeologist he had this ability of knowing of figuring out how things were created and I think a lot of especially little boys tend to do this like when he was a kid people said he would like take a toy or a clock or something mechanical and do his bedroom and he would take it apart just to figure out how to put it back together so this stuff really really fascinated him and let's get into some of his his achievements in this field around the town kind of what he was known for he could fix anything you guys like if you had a car issue easy peasy he could fix it but let's let's get into this so when we look at his childhood Granger's father actually died when he was a child he died in a drowning accident so Taylor was the last name of his stepfather who stepped in and kind of raised Granger and his siblings his name was Jim and when Jim and Granger's mother got married Jim brought in children from his previous marriage as well so he grew up with like seven brothers and sisters kind of like the sound of music you know I doubt they were out there yodeling yodeling in the in the hills but but that's kind of what it reminded me of having that many siblings I'm kind of jealous I think that must have been really fun to grow up on a farm with seven brothers and sisters especially in a time before social media where you were literally outside all the time now again as Jim the stepfather loved Granger loved his Granger siblings full-blooded siblings as his own that's why Granger took his last name Taylor and I said as I said he has a small child he would sit in his room and take his toys apart and put them back together he loved just tinkering with things and just really was inquisitive as to how machines were built how these things came together this is and if you think about a guy's from like a very logical perspective like I think sometimes we forget because we have the internet we have cell phones we have all these cool gadgets now but it's kind of magic right like you know if you look at everything in our world and all of a sudden we can put things together and create things like the internet like with the ether and all these things it is kind of magical and so I could see Granger kind of being interested in how this magic was created how was this happening how were we able to have these mechanical things now again he left school at 13 when he was in the 8th grade and he was hired as an apprentice at an auto shop and he stayed as an apprentice for about a year now I personally think apprenticeships are amazing I you know I am I am a typical Zennial 1983 between the generation generation X and millennial which we are way over educated way underpaid I think there is definitely a value in doing apprenticeships my father used to say it's really important to have have a talent you know not just like be so academic that the only thing you can do is a corporate job or an academic job would be able to do something like be able to cut hair or be able to work on a car or be able to fix a toilet like you need to have a trade a talent that you can do that is outside of the world of academia unfortunately I mean I guess I kind of have a talent because after my 30s I went to India and studied traditional yoga as you guys know and I do teach that now outside of YouTube but you know that's valuable to be able to do something to be able to create something with your your hands because there's a lot out there in the world like I I would be screwed like I don't know how to change attire I don't know how to fix a toilet I don't know how you know we've lost a lot of the these these necessities these things that our ancestors just knew how to do because we've been so focused on academia so I think it's kind of cool yeah not to digress but I do think apprenticeships are really cool but nonetheless for about a year Granger worked as an apprentice for an auto shop and at this very young age of 13 14 years old is when he developed the reputation that he could fix literally anything now as I said it does appear that he grew up on a farm I've never been to Vancouver Island before so forgive me if I'm not completely accurate in my retelling of the property I try to look at as many pictures as I could and really I actually have a ton of notes about Duncan the town which I'm probably not gonna get into that was just me trying to really understand the environments that that Duncan and that Granger grew up in to understand more of how that you know persuaded his personality and all that kind of stuff after that apprenticeship he decided to open up his own mechanic shop on his parents property on the farm now again he's only like 14 years old so of course he's he's still living on the farm with his parents and he continues throughout his life before he goes missing to live on the farm with his parents and it's not for him lacking finances I mean I think sometimes we think about moving back in with our parents it's because we're broke or we're struggling but no he actually made pretty good money and he kind of became like from what I understand not only did he have this mechanic shop on his parents property but he also kind of became the caretaker of the property kind of really working the farm and being kind of the sole person I'm assuming especially as his parents started to age to really take care of the land and if any of you guys own land that's a full-time job and so I kind of want to make that clear like him living with his parents has nothing to do with maybe his lack of social skills it literally he took over kind of the the proprietorship of this property in his mechanic shop he restored old farm machine and even a train that had had been abandoned for so long that a tree had grown through it he also restored a World War two fighter plane and one of the guys that we're gonna get into in a minute one of Granger's friends and one of Granger's apprentices talked about this train that Granger at this point started to get this personality in the town of Duncan as being more eccentric and like people trusted him and he found this train and he restored it and he could run the train back and forth on the track and this guy which Robert we're going to talk about in a minute claims in one of the podcast that he remembers as a little kid going to the Taylor farm and riding the train with Granger like Granger would let the kids come on the farm and he would drive him on this train for fun and how he had like restore like it was kind of like this really you know what it reminds me of and I could be completely wrong in saying this and I covered Howard Fenster it was one of the first episodes I did on this channel which I will I will put that into the description box below just don't judge because it was one of the first ones but it reminds me of Howard Fenster Howard Fenster was a Georgia artist and a preacher and he had this like paradise gardens up in North Georgia we used to go to it all the time when I was a kid because it was near where my dad had his lake house and he took junk like literal junk and created art out of it and we would go visit this this garden a lot and just walk through it it was quite incredible I probably should go back I mean it's been years since I've been there it'd be kind of fun to go back but that's kind of what it reminded me of with with Granger like this kind of the spectacle not spectacle in a bad way but in this entertaining way like it gave the town kind of this entertaining labor this guy this caricature of himself you know that create these these magical can re re bring life back into these old abandoned machines like the train and the fighter plane and so he ended up making a lot of money being able to do this of course there are mechanics everywhere but Granger was a special kind of mechanic again I think it was a sister that called him an industrial archeologist like he was able to take these old machines that nobody thought could be rehabilitated and rehabilitate them and get them back into working order in fact Granger became such an enigma in this town that people would sometimes just go by the Taylor farm just to see what Granger was working on and just watch him work and this is funny to me too because this is such a small town like you could not do that in Atlanta like you could not just walk up to somebody's you know of art arts and crafts room and just walk in and watch like you would get arrested for trespassing but that just that's just kind of one of the beauties of a small town is that you know the doors are unlocked and you know everybody you know your neighbors and so you can go and just walk on someone's property and just watch them work no big deal you know each other and also this is well before the internet well before we had as much entertainment as we do now and so I do think this became kind of entertainment for the people of the town of Duncan now as we know as we've spoken about a lot on this channel UFOs have been the interest of many people for a long time but we see a rise in UFO fascination especially after World War two I've covered a lot of World War two episodes especially dealing with the occult and the Nazis use of the occult and I do believe in my personal opinion that because of everything they were doing in World War two there were some portals that were open people were starting to see UFOs more we see this all over the world people are becoming are getting to the stage where they're more accepting of the idea globally that we're not it like we're not the only living life form in the universe and I think at this point I think it's safe to say that most people just kind of accept that there are extraterrestrial life out there I know I just I've always just kind of accepted it like for me it's like why wouldn't there be like that's pretty narcissistic to think that we're it you know and I know even things like the Bible the Quran there's so many different us manuscripts and scriptures I actually do talk about extraterrestrial visitation we look at the old Sumerians sketches and obviously a lot of the Egyptian stuff we're seeing reference references to off-worlders but this really again became a huge part of our kind of subculture phenomenon after World War two and of course going along the decades we then had the art Bell show you know we just this the people just started realizing that there is more to life than what we see in our in our material world in front of us well Granger himself also became quite obsessed with extraterrestrial life he in fact wanted to understand how these UFOs are built make sense right like he's been able to mechanically look at trains look at planes everything here in our earth existence our earth plane and now he wants to be challenged right someone that's smart or it's constantly looking for that challenge is constantly looking for that resistance so he wanted to understand how these UFOs from these off-worlders these extraterrestrials were built so in the 1970s Granger started to build his own UFO using satellite disk that he salvaged and once he built this UFO he spent a lot of time just sitting in this UFO having his own you know quiet time his own meditative time in this UFO and looking at the picture it's kind of in my opinion a little bit innocent because it's almost like a treehouse like kids won't go into a treehouse now of course this is the 70s and Granger like to smoke marijuana who does it you know and we do know that he was also experimenting with some LSD I don't I personally don't have a problem with this I think when these things are done responsibly they can open up certain brain activity that otherwise isn't open but this is going to come in later to his disappearance because there are going to be some people that believe he had brain damage from this experimentation and that's why he maybe went delusional and why he disappeared now I'm gonna make this very clear I from what I researched I don't think he did enough to cause any brain damage alright I it does not seem that he was like addicted to anything it just seems like this was something he did periodically and it seems like he did it for the right reasons what do I mean by the right reasons he was trying to understand a higher state of consciousness which you know I talk about micro dosing a lot it that's what it's for so it doesn't seem like this was something he did on a daily basis for all intents and purposes Granger was very very responsible like I said he as eccentric as he was he was literally like the proprietor of his family's farm he kept that farm working he made a lot of money people trusted him you had a project you had a broken down tractor or a banged-up car you took it to Granger so if you are concerned that somebody was you know acting reckless with these extracurricular substances you probably wouldn't trust Granger with your stuff right so so this is ridiculous to me right it's totally ridiculous obviously it was not a problem Granger also had a dog named Lady that he absolutely adored and loved and when you have a soul whether that is a four-legged soul or two-legged soul that's super dependent upon you and we know that four-legged souls are absolutely dependent upon us typically and I know there's there's exceptions to the rules you are going to maintain some sense of security within yourself if not for you but for to take care of that especially that helpless animal and again I know there are many cases where people get their kids taken away from them and animals get abused I understand that but from Granger for the story I hear about Granger he loved his dog Lady so much I don't think there was anything he would have done to compromise his ability to take care of Lady his dog now there's no mention of Granger ever having a girlfriend or a boyfriend I don't think he he was was gay I don't have a whatever if he was but just looking at pictures I get the very maybe even an asexual vibe I don't know I mean if you know more about this case and you know more about any romantic relationships Granger had please let me know but it doesn't really matter but I'm just kind of bringing this up because Lady his dog Lady was like his whole world there was no other romantic partner you know he didn't have children this dog was his his his heart I get that my dog who is sitting on the bed right now scratching himself I can probably hear it is my whole world my whole heart there was nothing to interfere with his relationship with the dog and taking care of the dog which is going to make his disappearance even stranger now during these times where he would go and sit in a spaceship he started to believe that he was telepathically receiving messages from extraterrestrials now I do know that there are people especially on telegram that believe that they are receiving telepathic messages from extraterrestrials and I don't believe that I think they're wishful thinking and I think sometimes people get very very confused between their intuition and wishful thinking their imagination and their intuition there's not a lot of discernment nowadays as to thoughts that we're having and so most of the people that I see on telegram and that I see on the YouTube who claim to talk to extraterrestrials I don't believe them I think they're full of crap but with Granger actually kind of believe them because the way that he spoke about his communication his telepathy with these extraterrestrials there was no ego involved in it and it was literally messages about using his intelligence to help them but but there was no ego right it was just very matter of fact I don't think that Granger was an egotistical man anyway he see even though he was eccentric and shy he was very kind and I do feel like if we're looking at the law of one I do feel like he was definitely a service to others individual he had Granger had nothing to prove right so him saying that he was telepathically speaking to off-worlders he was already kind of a town celebrity even though there was no ego there he already was kind of an enigma he already had a very stable life he had parents and a family that loved him a dog he adored friends it doesn't seem like he was the type of person that wanted to go gallivanting around the world to all the big cities he seemed very very happy with his life in fact he was a man of habit he seemed to do the same things every single day including eating kind of the same foods and going to the same establishments he was he was very much on his own schedule but which is very very very interesting with the autism things that's something that autistic people may I like being on a schedule too but I can deviate but people who have autism are on a spectrum do tend to want to be on a schedule Granger was also known to be extremely honest which again is another symptom of in my opinion autism now being extremely honest and being a truthful person or two totally different things when you are a truthful person you might not say everything you're thinking right but when we look when we look at people who are on the spectrum sometimes they will just say everything they're thinking and they never lie they're they're very very very honest I mean we look at the gypsy road rose blander case and that's thing that happened with her co-conspirator Nicholas Dota John if you missed that story I'm sure you are very well aware of that story but if I'll put that down in the description box too just in case you missed it they will to a fault tell you the truth and so that was kind of from my perception Granger's personality to a fault he would tell you the true that he never lied autistic people or people in the spectrum don't really know how to lie from my perception and that can be a good thing and it can also be a bad thing and so the fact that Granger started saying hey like I'm communicating with these extra trust rules I've been working on these spaces trying to figure out how their spaceships work and and they're kind of communicating with me people just kind of took him seriously because he didn't lie he wasn't somebody who lied sorry guys my boyfriend got home from work so I deposit for a moment just to go say hello to him but where were we we were talking about Granger and the aliens so again Granger had this reputation of being like brutally honest and he had nothing to prove he there was nothing definitely was not a man that gave off any type of manipulation type vibes just very much Granger is who he is he's shy he's introverted he's eccentric he's kind he's super super smart and so people in town when he started speaking in the 70s when he started speaking about these communications he was having with these ETS it seems that most people just kind of believed him like why would he lie he had no reason to lie about this Robert Keller is the person that I referenced earlier and he was younger than Granger he apprenticed under Granger now Robert Keller is also a Duncan resident and he was a teenager when he became a good friend with Granger I nothing nefarious there I know people in the comment sections are going to start to question that absolutely nothing nefarious there now again he claims he met Granger when he was about seven years old because his dad used to take him over to the Taylor farm so that Robert could ride the train with the other kids that Granger had restored now when Robert's became a teenager he became a little bit wild and you can listen to these podcasts and hear Robert they always interview Robert and Robert kind of tells his own story about his teenage years now Robert claims that Granger saved him because Robert also dropped out of school in the 8th grade now unlike Granger Robert was not a genius I mean no offense I'm not the level of intelligence that Granger was a class of his own when it came to his intelligence so none of us I think it's safe to say that none of us had the same intelligence level that Granger Taylor had and when Robert dropped out of school in the 8th grade it's a small town Granger Granger knew and Granger came over from what I understand to the Keller house and was speaking with Robert's father and Granger was like well I left school in the 8th grade too and Granger and Robert's father was like well Granger you're smart you know you had a life path you had things that you could do Robert is just a wild child who's left school and so Granger said no Robert I'm gonna come by every morning and pick you up at 8 o'clock and you're gonna come apprentice with me so that's why Robert basically stated that Granger saved his life and one of the podcasts Rod Robert stated that Granger had not intervened and started getting Robert to come to his shop with him and apprentice under him as as a 13 14 year old kid he might have ended up in jail or dead because that's where his life was going but Granger gave him a schedule and Granger it seems like too I think sometimes when kids go wild like that there's a lack of self-aware of self-appreciation of value you know and the school system is really good at making people feel really shitty right but Granger it seems like Granger like honed in on Robert like no you're a human being and you you can learn a trade you can come with me I love school eighth grade I'll teach you what what I have I I know and and that's just kind of what it sounded like to me again this could be me just interpreting it completely wrong but I do know there was nothing the fairies there it was literally Granger stepping in and saying I'm gonna give you a life path I'm gonna give you a schedule I'm gonna I'm gonna apprentice you and so at that point at every morning at 8 o'clock Granger would come pick Robert up and Robert would spend all day with Granger apprenticing under him and so Robert and Granger ended up becoming really close really really he Granger was a confidant for Robert and I do think in my personal opinion because Granger racks lack certain social skills that perhaps on a social level Granger was probably more at Robert's level anyway than vice versa because socially he was very awkward and so maybe he got along better with 13 14 year old kids you know yeah I think it just seems like there was a part of Granger that was still really innocent that still kind of like the toys and had a very innocent perception of the world you know and so I think that that childlike view of the world even though he was a savant when it came to mechanics so therefore I think Robert and him did get very closer probably than most adults and teenagers would get in a very innocent way like again nothing nefarious it was a very innocent innocent friendship and again Robert still to this day claims that Granger saved his life so in 1980 Granger started to tell Robert that these aliens that he was having telepathic communication with were actually going to come and pick him up that apparently the extraterrestrials needed Granger for his intellect and they were going to take Granger on a 42 month universe tour like world tour but universe tour on the spaceship and they would bring Granger back after 42 months Granger told Robert again the aliens needed Granger for his mind but he would be back now Robert started claiming that he wanted to go with Granger Robert absolutely believed Granger and listening to him today on the podcast as a grown man I think he still believes Granger and frankly I want to believe Granger too which we're going to get to at the end of this episode all the different theories but Granger told Robert that 42 months in the ether and space time is not the same as 42 months here on the earth plane that 42 months in the ether in the space time is about 150 years on the earth plane Granger told Robert that Robert had too much to live for that Robert was a young man and that even though when Granger came back after the 42 months in space time he would only be 42 months older everyone on planet Earth would be 150 years early or older so everyone on earth would be 150 years older so therefore dead he told Robert that Robert had a whole future ahead of him he had a wife coming at some point potentially children grandchildren and Granger did not want Robert to miss out on that he wanted Robert to have a life this to me is so touching Granger obviously knew even though he was super smart he obviously knew that his life was very very different from most people again he had multiple siblings he wasn't married he had a very different social perception of the world around him than most people for Granger to now be able to be picked up by a spaceship and taken on this 42 months extravaganza of seeing the universe and helping the aliens this was like the best thing that ever happened to Granger but he understood that for Robert there were things that were going to top that getting married having children and these things these life events that Robert was a store for Robert were not in the cards for Granger so sadly he told Robert that he would make sure though when he came back after the 42 months in the ether he would come back to visit Robert Robert at that young age understood that Granger meant he would be visiting Robert's tombstone Robert's grandkids great grandchildren cuz 150 years he would no longer be here in the physical body Granger told Robert that the aliens were going to come pick him up on a night of a horrific storm that the aliens needed to use the sound and the the gray clouds of the storm to cover as a cover like to cover their their ship to cover the sounds of the ship and so that was when he would be picked up and on November 29th they woke up to some rain and Granger told Robert that that that was the night that the aliens were going to come get him Robert was a little bit confused by this because living in the Northwestern Pacific side of the United American continent it like Seattle it's it's rainy a lot it's overcast a lot the rain they woke up to on November 9th was nothing like the thunderstorm that Granger spoke about when he claimed there would be a huge storm that would cover the ship to pick him up but Granger assured Robert that the aliens had told them him that by the end of the day it was going to be a huge thunderstorm and Robert didn't really believe him but as the day went on the weather started to change and started to become super dangerous outside in fact according to Robert now the meteorologists refer to the 9th of November 29th as the storm of the century there was no way that Granger would have known just by himself that's the drizzle that they experienced on the morning of the November 29th which was normal for the area would turn into the storm it turned into there was no way for him to know that no way especially in 1980 he was not a meteorologist this was not his level of expertise watching weather patterns even the meteorologists at the time didn't understand the storm that was rolling in until it actually started to roll in so this is a huge mystery still to this day to to Robert and other people like how did Granger know that and again it does seem that Robert does believe that Granger was being told this information by extraterrestrials so Granger also drove a as Robert describes it a pep a pep-to-bismol peak colored truck and Robert even explains that Robert helped Granger hate the truck this pep-to-bismol peak it was very much a truck that people that that fits Granger's eccentric personality and and people saw all around town and at 6 p.m. the night of the 29th Granger drove his pep-to-bismol peak truck to Bob's grill in Duncan and had his dinner later on after he was done with his dinner he went back to one more time to say goodbye to Robert as Granger left the Keller's property Robert claims that he saw Granger driving off in his pink pickup never to be seen again now the next morning there was a letter that Granger left on his parents bedroom door now his mother at that time was on a vacation in Hawaii and so her the stepfather Jim was the one to actually see the letter first and I'm going to read you the letter dear mother and father I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship as reoccurring dreams assured a 42 month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe and return I'm leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help love Granger now his will he had changed some words in his will for example he changed the word deceased to departed he also insisted that there be no funeral because he was not dead he instructed them to take care of his dog lady and how to take care of his dog lady and then left and was never seen again as word spread that Granger had in fact left the whole town behind became quite invested in his story again most people of town knew Granger was not a liar they believed that he was talking telepathically to extraterrestrials and they were invested in his return in 42 months but it was really only Robert Keller the young boy that knew cuz Granger told him that 42 months in the Astro and the aether is not the same as 42 months on earth nonetheless after 42 months had passed on earth everybody in town was eagerly awaiting Granger's return Robert Keller in an interview even mentions that it was almost like they were planning to have some big parade what he reappeared but sadly after 42 months here on the earth nothing happened he didn't come back again Robert Keller knew why Robert Keller knew that 42 months on earth was not the same as 42 months with the aliens at this point the RCMP are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hope I said that right I'm not Canadian got involved in this case now the RCMP is the exact same as the three letter agency that I cannot say on YouTube that starts with an F and ends with an I for Canada so this is a serious police force like this is not some podunk small town police force this is like the government's police force and so they start to get involved in the investigation into Granger and this is when things start to get weird because on March of 1986 three years after Granger disappeared the RCMP claimed to have found remains of Granger's truck so let's get into what they found because this gets very interesting so news reports claim they found the truck on Mount Prevo I hope I'm saying that right it's it's an interesting mountain you guys if you want me to do a cover of different things that have happened on this mountain just let me know because I did look a little bit into this mountain as I typically do there's some interesting supernatural things associated with this mountain to say the least so Prevo Mount Prevo this is a mountain northwestern this is a mountain northwest of Duncan on Vancouver Island and in fact on the top of the mountain is a memorial to a war I mean there's some really fascinating stories surrounding this mountain so again you want me to cover this mountain let me know in the comment section below and I will do deep dive into all the supernatural occurrences around this mountain now they set claim that workman so the RCMP claimed that workman doing their workman stuff on the mountain found a blast site with pieces of truck in a crater now apparently this mountain to like many mountains especially many mountains with supernatural origins and mysteries it's kind of like the Appalachian Mountains that I've spoken about a lot especially over on NOSIC TV if you're following my extra let me do that again especially over on NOSIC TV if you are following my esoteric explorer series over there we talked a lot about Appalachia and so it kind of sounds like the same but on the other side of the country where people can go missing here people can disappear here like there's a lot of times like people get lost on this mountain they're never seen again and so the fact that there were pieces of this truck found on this mountain is actually quite kind of a miracle to now it was such a disaster this blast site that you couldn't really see that it was Granger's car but according to RCMP they found a part of the truck that had the vent number and when they checked the vent number it came back as Granger's truck now Robert is very skeptical of this he's very skeptical of this and because they they say to the vent number that the report claims the truck was blue not pink now there was a reporter that was investigating this and he said it could be that when you're registering a vent number you register a certain color to the car and blue could have been one of the colors at one point for the truck doesn't mean that they could actually see the color of the truck it had been three years it was a blast site the likelihood of there being any color visible at all would have been slimed they probably got the blue color of the truck from the registration of the vent number and not from the truck itself so that makes sense to me however just because you found a truck doesn't mean that you found a body when we were listening to this podcast in the car coming down my boyfriend laugh and he goes it just kind of sounds like the aliens picked Granger up in his car and then spit the car out and blast it which was kind of my my thought to like he doesn't need his car in the Astro and so maybe like the UFO just kind of like spat spat the car out and that's just how it ended up we also know that it obviously and I say like it kind of like maybe late laser did or something because obviously dynamite was used now Granger was proficient with dynamite he used dynamite a lot when he was doing pulling up old mechanics out in the forest like the train right so he was he knew how to work with dynamite and Robert very cleverly after the RCMP claimed that dynamite was led to blow up the truck he went over to the Taylor Farm and looked in Granger's workspace and all of Granger's dynamite was accounted for in the workspace well you could think oh well maybe he just went and bought some and they didn't know he had bought dynamite but dynamite is like a lot of weapons when you buy it they register that you bought it like they know who had who owns dynamite who doesn't and there was no record of Granger buying or anyone that resembled Granger buying dynamite prior to November 29th that wasn't accounted for like everything Granger had purchased for his work was accounted for in the shop that's strange to me too I believe Robert when he says this it's not she's not adding up my friend it's not adding up it's not adding up now the blast site itself was a 200 to 300 foot radius truck parts when as far as 60 feet up many experts who know how this works as this is this isn't right this is not right it's it's too big for a normal blast like this is not human whatever happened to this truck it's not normal which goes back to my boyfriend's theory that they just kind of spit the truck out zapped it because this is not what a normal blast would do the RCMP found clothe found some clothing that a family member said was Granger's but the family said that they were never asked to ID clothing so the RCMP is lying they're lying and saying that the family has identified some of the clothing as Granger's but the family's like no one spoke to us about any clothing ever and Robert brings up a good point how the hell if the color of the truck can't be determined at the wreckage site how is clothing still there how has clothing still survived these three years in this forest after being blasted you need to tell me a wool sweater is going to survive and pieces of a human body an intact human body or a truck aren't listen to the governments around the world we're not as dumb as you think we are obviously I mean look how much we've woken up these past four years must really piss you guys off sucks to be you but we're not stupid I know common sense ain't that common but a lot of people do have common sense and shit is not adding up they also said they found human some human remains not a lot but they cannot DNA tested they can't even determine if the remainder they found are male or female but the coroner went ahead and said it was Granger's I thought science was about not making any type of factual statement until you have every investigation done to you know factually so why was the coroner just signing it off as Granger's without there being any DNA testing you could ask well now with 1986 maybe the DNA testing wasn't that great but it's 2024 so why don't we just go and have the remains tested now because surely now our technology has changed so much that it would be better you would think you would think but guess what you guys the RCMP lost the evidence they lost the evidence they lost the evidence shucks you know shucks we could now go and test all these things to have a definitive answer but shucks y'all we lost the evidence are you kidding me are you kidding me so Robert as well as many other people believe it this is a massive cover-up that Granger has been taken on an extra terrestrial escapade across the galaxy reminds me of that train song you know from like there I can't sing it because I'll get I'll get zapped on on YouTube for copyright strike strike about going across the Milky Way you know he's out there and the government's trying to cover it up they don't want people to know that Granger actually had communication with off-worlders because we know governments across the world have tried to cover this up for a very long time in fact just recently United States government actually admitted y'all been right this whole time there are extra terrestrials but we know we've been right this whole time so no one fucking cares because duh we know that we also think or there is theories that Granger was actually taken by the government that he was taken either by the Canadian government or the United States government or Canadian conjunction with the United States government to hold him for his abilities kind of like what they did with Operation Paperclip but Granger was a good guy not a bad guy and Granger just thought mistakenly thought it was extraterrestrial some people think that Granger ran off to Columbia but he started a whole new life in Columbia I don't believe this I know he had friends of Columbia but his life was fine he was happy I don't think he would have left his dog behind just to go to Columbia now of course if he is on his little escapade across the galaxy across the Milky Way we'll never know because by the time Granger comes back none of us will be here so if that is in fact what happened to Granger it will be our grandchildren our grandchildren's children who finally get the answer to this unsolved mystery now again I do kind of think that he is somewhere in the astro right now traveling around with the extraterrestrials I do believe that maybe that's because I want to believe that but I also can play devil's advocate and could say maybe he did go into a form of psychosis and maybe even though he's honest he truly believed he was hearing these voices but these voices weren't really there and maybe an accident happened maybe he drove over dynamite I don't know could he be abducted by the government and being used behind the scenes kind of held captive by the government at this point probably that that could be a possibility or again is he just out lying around the Milky Way seeing all that there is to see about the great unknown that is what I want to believe what do you guys think and for my Canadian friends let me know I know there's some museum now that holds a lot of Granger's stuff like his the stuff he he restored like the plane and all that kind of stuff and I'm not exactly sure I've been trying to find it like I'm trying to Google like where are Granger's things in that I can't on Google and the United States is not pulling up for me I probably just need to change my VIP number or whatever it's called to go to Canada to see if I can find it but it's not pulling up for me here in the United States so if you are from Canada and you know the the museum that's holding some great Granger stuff let me know or let us know down the comment section below or in the live chat that's happening right now so so we can kind of especially people in Canada they want to go see it they can go see it and yeah please let me know what you guys think like wild story huh like I mean wild story wild story so let me know I do not think he unalived himself I really don't he loved his dog too much he absolutely loved his dog too much there's no way he would have done that so so let me know what do you guys think all right you guys well I hope you're having a wonderful week and we'll talk very soon bye everybody


On Thursday, February 15, Pikeville Medical Center electrophysiologist Dr. Joseph Sousa performed the fifth advanced atrial fibrillation procedure in the nation. The procedure makes use of a new technology known as pulse field ablation and it's proven to be more efficient than traditional surgery with less drawbacks. Dr. Sousa tells us more about it. So with pulse field ablation, we can get success rates that are as good or better than currently with current systems, but the major advantage is that all the major complications that are potentially lethal, those that are very, very infrequent, but a disaster for a patient when they occur, those seem to be eliminated with pulse field ablation. So we seem to have a technology where our success rates are as good or better than they used to be, but the complication rates for particularly difficult and disastrous problems seems to be at an all-time low. So this would be the advantage. The technology is approved for both atrial fibrillation that comes and goes, otherwise known as paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, but it's also been used in patients with more persistent atrial fibrillation. Appalachian Wireless is spreading the love all month long, offering $500 off select devices. On the Appalachian advantage, coordination-wide mix and match plans, plus new lines get an additional $100 off because we are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. The recovery process is also quick and easy. For those dealing with atrial fibrillation, PMC can now confidently recommend this procedure. Recovery is fairly easy. So we typically have people at bed rest for four to five hours. After that, we get them up walking around. Then if we finish early enough on the day, we try to get most folks home by the end of the day. Do's and don'ts when you get home, really no heavy lifting, greater than 10 pounds or so and no driving for the first three days so you don't put any undue pressure on the groin for bleeding, but beyond that, typically same medication and no other restrictions. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.


I am glad to introduce our paper, Smoothing Out Binary Linear Codes and Worst Case Sub-Exponential Hardness for ALPN. This is joint work with Zhang Zhang that appears at Crypto 2021. At the core of this work is Worst Case to Average Case Reductions for ALPN, which is in turn based on Smoothing Lemma for Binary Linear Codes. This is the outline of this talk. We will start with the preliminaries. First of all, Binary Linear Codes. Linear means that we encode a message x by multiplying with a m by n matrix called the generator matrix. Binary means it's over gf2, namely every entry of the matrix of ecta is either 0 or 1. And m is the length of the codeword. In general, a good code has some non trivial amount of minimum distance, which is defined as the smallest hamming distance between all possible pairs of codewords. Some previous work consider a strong version of hamming distance requirement called balanced code, where this hamming distance has both upper bound and lower bound. In other words, the codewords has almost the same number of zeros and ones up to a beta fraction. In this work, we also consider the so-called independent code, where the generator matrix has ky's independent rows. We mentioned that the MDS code, maximum distance separatable code, is a special case of the independent code for k equals n. The search version of the decoding problem is that given the generator matrix and the noisy codeword to find out the original x in the presence of noise vector e, the average case version of the problem is called learning parity with noise, where the matrix and secret is sampled uniformly at random. And the noise follows from the coordinate-wise independent distribution, namely the Bernoulli distribution. The worst case of the problem is called the nearest codeword problem, ncp in short. And we consider the promised version of ncp, where the noise vector is guaranteed to have an exact amount of hamming weight. We particularly interested in the worst case to average case reduction for these two versions of the problems. We mentioned that some known attacks on the two forms of decoding problems. For the standard LPN, where the noise rate is constant, which means independent of the dimension, the best known attacks are bkw, that has a slightly sub-exponential time complexity. The promised ncp is known to be NP-hard in the high-noise region. When the noise rate is sub-constant, the best known attacks for ncp at LPN has the complexity of roughly to the power of the product of the noise rate at the dimension n. In other words, in the known noise region, we do not know any algorithm that solves the LPN better than ncp. Let's take a look at the reduction from ncp to LPN. Suppose we have an ncp instance, and for our convenience, suppose it's in the transposed form, where this s transpose and x transpose denote a row vector. We know from previous work that how to transform the ncp instance into a single LPN sample. That is, we sample a random r from the sparse distribution that has length m and roughly hamming weight d. And we also sample a uniformly random row vector y. Then we multiply the noisy code word with the sparse vector r, such that hopefully cr will be uniformly random and xr will be the biased noisy bit as in the LPN. And finally, the original message of the ncp s has no entropy at all, so it needs to be xr with the random mask y. We can do this many times to get as many LPN samples as needed. At Eurocrypt 2019, at Eurocrypt 2019, Branksky et al. gives a smoothing lemma to show that this kind of approach actually works. As long as the underlying binary linear code is a balanced code, and r is sampled from a special sparse distribution, they prove this through the so-called binary Fourier transform. Here we offer, in this paper, we offer alternative proof via the, using the Vaserani's xr lemma. I would like to elaborate a bit more about the sparse distribution that r is sampled from. So this is the distribution that has length m and of weight, roughly d. As shown previously during the reduction, xr will become the noise of the LPN, where r is the m-bit error vector that has a fixed hamming weight. And this results into a biased bits that has roughly 2 to the wd over m close to uniform. There are a few candidates about this sparse distribution. Quite naturally, we can sample it from all strings of length m and hamming weight d. More alternatively, we can take d random strings, each of them has hamming weight exactly 1, and we then take their xr sum. Another option is that we can sample it from an m-fold binary distribution of rate d over m, such that the expected hamming weight of r is d. Now we can take a closer look at the BRVW quantitatively. First we look at their smoothing lemma for balanced codes. There is some lower bound on the ncp noise rate due to the known attacks. There is also the Gepert-Vasermov type bound on beta to guarantee that the balanced code actually exists. Finally, the problem can be seen as extracting n random bits from source r in presence of noise. So there is a lower bound on the sparsity of the random distribution. The nth result of BRVW is that it assumes a quancy polynomial worst case hardness for ncp on extremely low noise balanced code. We get the quancy polynomial hardness for LPN in the high noise region, where this noise is inverse polynomially close to uniform. So this is more or less a feasibility result. There remains space for further improvement. As we can see, the range of lambda is quite limited. It needs to be at least super constant, otherwise there will be polynomial attacks for ncp. And lambda is upper bounded by O log n at the same time, because any larger lambda would make LPN noise negligibly close to uniform and making the result less meaningful. Now we introduce our work on how to get tighter reductions for smoothing lemma and better results for LPN. We would start with a probabilistic analysis and give a non-constructive form of the smoothing lemma. That is, there exists at least a certain fraction of the code that for any error vector of weight w and sparsity distribution r, cr is statistically close to uniform even given the noise xr. The proof follows three steps. First, given a uniformly random c, we have that inequality code by the leftover hash lemma. Then by a Markov inequality, for every error vector x, there exists a certain bounded fraction of the code that fares the randomness extraction. Finally, take into account that there are m true k different possibilities for the error vector x, we sum up all the fraction of the bad code by a union bound. So the end goal is to prove that the hardness for the standard LPN, whose noise rate is constant, and we recall the entropy requirement. Then the bad fraction of the code will be exceeding 1, which is useless. Put it differently, it seems not possible to get a worst case to average case reduction for standard LPN unless more tighter techniques are employed. We may in particularly avoid the union bound or any other inequality that incurs a huge security loss. So here we have an important observation about the smoothing lemma, which is key to obtain tighter result. It is easy to prove unconditional case that cr is statistically close to uniform, but proving the conditional case that cr is close to uniform given leakage xr is much less efficient. This one has to take into account all possible values for the error vectors, which leads to much worse bound. What we prove is the following. If r is drawn from a coordinate wise sparse distribution, namely the Bernoulli distribution, then the statistical distance in the conditional case can be bounded by that of the unconditional case, paying reasonable cost. And this bound is almost tight with respect to the sparse distribution r is sampled from. Therefore, this reduced problem to bond the statistical distance between cr and uniform distribution for a very specific code in consideration, such as the balanced code and the independent code we considered in this paper. We will omit the proofs, which is not trivial but not so surprising. Now we state our main result that assumes that the NCP problem is hard in the worst case, then it implies the LPM problem is hard for certain parameter choices. First we get the similar result as BLVW by setting the parameters to appropriate values. In this case, our result looks asymptotically the same as BLVW. If we want to compare more quantitatively, then as tabulated, for most value of M, our result in the right hand is slightly worse. But when M increase to polynomials of higher orders, then our result in terms of the LPM's noise rate becomes much better and it keeps improving. In contrast, the result of BLVW sees to improve for M equals to N cubic and beyond. This is because in their smoothing lemma, the bond consists of two terms. So the second term, when it is sufficiently small, the first term will become dominant. Namely, we don't get a better bond, no matter how large the value of M is. An advantage of our result is that we can actually trade a larger M for better noise rate. More importantly, we obtain our result that was not known before. For instance, by setting the noise rate of the NCP to N2-C and assume that it has almost optimum hardness, namely, it nearly matches known attacks up to a constant in the exponent. Then we get the desired result that sub-exponential hardness for standard LPM. The proof is quite straightforward by setting the values for the parameters accordingly. Note that the success probability here consists of two terms, which is why we need to consider two cases for the different range of the values of C. We try to find some applications for our result beyond what is proven, which is not very successful, but it's worth mentioning. For example, we wonder if collision-resistant hash functions and public key encryptions can be constructed from the worst-case hardness of the decoding problem. As said, we prove the sub-exponential hardness of our standard LPM, and we also know from previous work that the standard LPM with sufficient sub-exponential hardness implies public key encryption and the collision-resistant hash functions. Unfortunately, the hardness of the LPM we prove is not as strong as what is needed for PKE and CIH, up to a lowercase omega factor, as we can see as I highlighted on the slide. Another wish for thinking is whether we can have a sub-exponential algorithm to solve NCP with constant error rate, which will be a counterpart to the BKW in solving standard LPM. We know by Liu Bagyshevsky's BKW variant that the LPM can be solved with polynomial many samples, with noise moderately close to uniform. Another colliery of our result is that if there exists an algorithm that solves LPM whose noise is inversely polynomial close to uniform, then it implies another algorithm that solves the NCP with constant error rate. Unfortunately, these two results cannot be connected, again due to another small gap. In the above, the data lies in between the open interval of 0 and 1. While in our colliery, the data has to be 1. Next we will present another cute result about reducing LWE to large field LPM. In general, there are two ways to generalize LPM to a large modulus P. As we used generalized binary distribution for the noise, namely, E is either 0 or uniformly distributed over GFP, then it becomes the so-called large field LPM. Alternatively, if we use discrete Gaussian for the noise, then the problem is called LWE. We show that LWE implies LPM over the same prime modulus in the high-noise region. The proof is very simple, that is, we can transfer every LWE sample into an LPM sample using a random mask M and multiplying M with the LPM sample. As we can see, MA is the product of a scalar and a vector multiplication, which is always uniformly random. And for any nonzero E, ME is uniformly distributed over FP, excluding 0. And otherwise, ME is 0. This means that ME follows the generalized binary distribution over GFP. And therefore, the right-hand sample after the transform is exactly the LPM sample over GFP. QED. Finally, a short summary of this work. We present two worst-case-to-average case reductions for different types of LPM. First, large field LPM can be reducible from LWE of the same modulus, and thus reducible from worst-case lattice problems such as GAP SVP. Second, we generalize the reductions of BLVW from promised NCP to LPM. The underlying NCP problem we consider includes not only the balanced code, but also independent code. In addition to what is approved in BLVW, we also show that under the nearly optimum hardness assumption about low-noise NCP, it implies the desired end result, namely sub-exponential hardness for standard LPM. There remain a few open questions such as how we can base the hardness of LPM on promised NCP of any code with non-trivial amount of minimum hamming distance. How to construct public key encryption and collision-resistant harsh functions from the worst-case decoding problems? And find out more efficient and useful relations between LWE and LPM. That concludes my talk. Thank you for your attention.


Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the director of research at the IIA here in Dublin. I wish to wish you all the very best for 2024, this being our first webinar of our work program for the fourth coming year. I'm thrilled to welcome you to Known Unknowns, a preview of 2024 in US politics with Larry Donnelly. Larry will require little introduction to most of you, but I'm very very happy to hand over in a moment to our chair for today. He'll do the formal introduction to Larry. Our chair today is Dr. Katrina Dowd. Katrina is assistant professor and an Astra fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations in UCD, where she works mainly on global politics and international security. Katrina is also an active member and participant in the IIA security and defense group. Katrina, Larry, thanks so much for being with us. I'm going to hand over to Katrina now. Thank you so much, Barry, and thank you all for joining us. It's a pleasure to welcome you to this IIA webinar. We're delighted to be joined today by Larry Donnelly, lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Galway and director of clinical legal education, who's been generous enough to take time out of his schedule to speak to us. Larry's going to speak for about 20 to 25 minutes or so and then we'll go to Q&A with our audience. So please keep in mind you can join the discussion using Q&A, the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to send in your questions as they occur to you over the course of the talk and we'll come to them once Larry has finished his address. I would ask, please, that guests identify yourselves and your affiliation when you're putting a question to our speaker and a reminder that both today's presentation and the Q&A are on the record. Please also feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIA, share your thoughts and reflections there. I'm now very pleased to be able to formally introduce Larry Donnelly in an overview of his remarks before handing over. Larry Donnelly is a Boston born and educated attorney who's lived in Ireland and worked in Ireland since 2001. He's a lecturer and director of clinical legal education in the School of Law at University of Galway. He's a regular media commentator, familiar to many of you, on politics, current affairs and law in Ireland and the United States and a regular political columnist with the journal and on RTE. In his address today, Larry will examine several of the key topics in the upcoming US elections, including the likely nominees and the potential impact of third-party candidates. He will also discuss the issues that will be crucial and the states that will be decisive in November and an early assessment as to what might flow from the outcome. So without any further ado, Larry, thank you so much for being with us and over to you. Thanks very much Katrina for the introduction and thanks to everybody at the IIEA for kindly inviting me to come on and speak to you today. I'm really looking forward to it. Look, I have 25 minutes in which to consider, as I say, the known unknowns of what is going to be an extraordinary year one way or the other in American politics. To that end, I'll try my best to stick to 25 minutes. I could probably go on for a lot longer. But to that end, as you'll see, I slightly amended the title to indicate that I'm going to focus in on the presidential race. Obviously, there's races for the control of Congress. I'm happy to take that on in the Q&A if people want to. And I know there's a lot of knowledgeable people who are watching this and have questions about those races. And also, I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time on President Trump's legal trouble, something that could consume a good long session in and of itself. Although, again, if participants want to raise that in the Q&A, I'm happy to discuss. So with those as caveats, let me kick into it. Where are we today? I suppose the reality is, as people will be aware, the Republicans and Democrats, this is all in the run up to their national conventions. And on the Republican side, there are 2,429 delegates that are available. Those are awarded by individual states. There are 1,215 delegates. That is a candidate needs to amass 1,215 delegates in order to win the nomination. Iowa has just voted, and there are only 40 delegates there. We're looking at New Hampshire, where 22 more delegates are available. So we really are only at the beginning of the process that will end, as you can see, in July at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So let's pause for a minute and spend a couple of minutes, anyway, discussing where we're at today, because I think that's what everyone is probably most interested in at this juncture. Iowa, in terms of its results, I don't think they can be seen as anything other, but an enormous victory for former President Donald Trump. A lot of people have said, look, this is a very small group of people. It's only half of the Republican party in a very small, unrepresentative state. Nonetheless, this was the first real test of strength after many, many months of speculation. And the reality is that Donald Trump came through with flying colors. He won more than half of the vote. He got more votes there than all of his other opponents combined, which is extraordinary. And if I may say that one potentially disturbing figure, in terms of those who were surveyed in the exit polling that was conducted, is that two out of every three caucus goers in Iowa, whether they voted for Donald Trump or someone else, two out of three do not believe in the 2020 election result. That is, they do not believe that Donald Trump actually lost the election in 2020, which I think in terms of some of the talk about American democracy is quite disturbing. Now, in terms of the others, Nicky Haley and Ron DeSantis. I'll take Ron DeSantis first. The reality is Ron DeSantis moved for all intents and purposes to Iowa. He spent more than $100 million there. For all of that, and for all the time and energy he dedicated to that state, he came second by a whisker. He is going to do very badly in New Hampshire. He has pulled his resources from the state of New Hampshire. Where he goes is anyone's guess. I cannot imagine that he is going to stay in this race very much longer. I just see no path to victory. Hence, I do believe he is finished. Nicky Haley much was made of the weather in Iowa. And in my view, the weather, I think, blunted Nicky Haley and probably the weather will play a biggest factor in her demise as anything else in the sense that had she finished second in Iowa, a place where she hadn't really dedicated a huge amount of time or resources to until the very end, she would have been the story of Iowa and she would have emerged very prominently with a lot of momentum going into New Hampshire. That has been blunted, I think. Nonetheless, she is competitive with Donald Trump in New Hampshire. But, again, she's still trailing by a decent margin there. And she really has to, in my view, win New Hampshire in order to, I suppose, maintain a credible threat. Now, what does she have going for in the state of New Hampshire? The reality is in New Hampshire, there is no democratic primary for all intents and purposes. The Democratic National Committee has effectively canceled the contest there. There will be a lot of independence who will gravitate towards the Republican primary and cast ballots there. And they are likely to vote for Nicky Haley. So that is what she has going for in the Granite State. That having been said, Donald Trump is camped out there. He's doing multiple events in the state. It's going to be very difficult for her to win. Even if she does, the race then moves to South Carolina, which is her home state and where she was governor and does have a strong appeal. But even there, Donald Trump maintains a very big lead. And on foot of that, the Republican race will move to the state of Michigan and then on to Super Tuesday early in March. And Donald Trump simply put has commanding leads in the polls across all of those states. It's very, very difficult for me to conceive as of how she is going to be able to overtake him. I think Donald Trump is in poll position to be frank with you at this stage. Of course, things can change, but it's going to be very difficult for Nicky Haley. On the flip side, in terms of Democrats, look, you can see the numbers there of pledge delegates. We haven't even begun, however, in terms of on the Democratic side because Iowa and New Hampshire have been relegated. Both of them have been effectively taken off the Democratic primary and caucus schedule. Now, there's a variety of reasons for that. The first contest that is going to count on the Democratic side is the South Carolina primary, which is taking place on the first of February. Iowa and New Hampshire, look, they have long held a very big role in determining who the party nominees for president are going to be. That having been said, the fact is that they are very heavily white states. They are small in population. They are arguably unrepresentative of the United States. That theme has, in particular, on the Democratic side of things, has been there for some time. Now, and hence, the Democratic National Committee moved to bypass both of them and, again, start the contest in South Carolina. Now, cynics can be forgiven, however, for noting that in 2020, Joe Biden was all but done after Iowa and New Hampshire. He performed abysmally in both states, and his campaign was on the ropes. An awful lot of people thought he was done. Again, for a third time, he had sought the Democratic nomination for president, and he was going to fall short. However, where did he come alive with the help of Congressman James Clyburn and support of the African American community was in South Carolina. He won South Carolina, and the rest is history. So, cynics can be forgiven for wondering why, all of a sudden, in 2024, a president who was vulnerable to a primary challenge and has lots of allies on the Democratic National Committee, all of a sudden, South Carolina is the first contest that's going to count. So, there's a couple of countervailing considerations there. But the reality is, at this stage, Biden doesn't have any real opposition within his party. Now, again, we can talk more about this, but there is worth a note about process there and how, to me, it's still extraordinary that Joe Biden was effectively able to box off the field of potential challenges to him in a context in which, look, there are manifest concerns out there about his capacity, yet the fact that a credible challenger from his party didn't come forward is extraordinary. Again, this will all result in the Democratic National Convention being held in August in Chicago. So, that having been said, I think Biden versus Trump part two is, at this stage, a probability. I think it's borrowing something we can't foresee right now. It is the probable general election that the United States and the rest of the world will face into next November. And I say that because, as I've indicated, I think it's impossible to identify, or very difficult at least, to identify a path to victory at present for Nikki Haley. I think DeSantis has reached the end of the line. And I think, again, it's going to be really hard for Haley. If she loses New Hampshire, in my view, that's the end. She has to win New Hampshire. And even if she does, I still think it's a straight up hill climb. On the Democratic side, we know Marianne Williamson, the self-help guru who's kind of ran last time. She's pulling in the very low single digits. She's not going to do anything. Dean Phillips is a congressman from Minnesota who jumped in at the last minute, way too late in the game, really, and has struggled to make much of a dent. In fact, Joe Biden, because the Democratic National Committee is not counting New Hampshire, Joe Biden's allies have made him a right-hidden candidate in New Hampshire. And it seems to me, based on the polling, that Biden is likely to win New Hampshire, even though it doesn't count, and even though he's not on the ballot as a right-hidden candidate. So I think that's the end. Trump's legal troubles. And it is weird, given the amount of legal trouble that Donald Trump faces, to be relegating him to all of that, to one line in this presentation. But at least politically speaking, all of these legal troubles haven't meant to dam, at least in the context of the Republican primary process. They've only strengthened his standing with voters and in the polls. And the timeframe here is key. A lot of Republicans even say that they'd be uncomfortable voting for somebody who's a convicted felon. Time frame is key. How long can he push these trial dates, which I've always regarded as notional. How long can he delay all of that? And again, this collision course between the legal and political systems is to use the U-word unprecedented. It remains out there. It remains one of the known unknowns. But at least at this stage, I don't see it hampering his chances, at least on the Republican side. In terms of Joe Biden, the reality is the delts about his age and capacity persist. Polling shows continually that the overwhelming majority of Americans have delts about those issues. Also, behind closed doors, Democrats are deeply worried. David Axelrod, Barack Obama's former chief advisor, he's voicing out loud what a lot of Democrats are saying privately. That is, that we potentially, as Democrats, the Democrats have a problem here. All in all, and this is the question that people raise around the world, we seem to be heading for something that will be distinctly uninspiring, a country of 350 million people, diverse and talented in every way. And we're looking at a rematch of two candidates that, again, the opinion polling suggests that most Americans don't want. A lot of the speculation then is focused on running mates. Will Joe Biden dump Kamala Harris for somebody who's more popular? Harris has even lower in the polling than Joe Biden has. My own view is that, and it happens back to something I said a minute ago, my own view that would be that Biden dumping Harris, I don't think it's going to happen. I think, first of all, I think it would be suggestive of a little bit of panic, which he doesn't need. I think also it risks offending voters of color and women in particular. Again, Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to be vice president, I think it would send all the wrong signals. And it would be a risky because Biden is going to be so dependent on turnout, particularly among African Americans. So I don't see that happening on the Republican side. There's lots of speculation as to who Donald Trump will pick. Most people say that it will be a woman. Some people say Nikki Haley could be the one. For me, it's hard to conceive of someone who he calls bird brain, ultimately being his vice presidential nominee and running mate. But look, stranger things have happened. Others in the ether include Christie Noem, the governor of South Dakota, Masha Blackburn, United States Senator from Tennessee, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas. There are others like Harry Lake from Arizona, Matri Taylor Green. Look, he could pick either of the latter two, but I think that that would be a very big mistake. But again, the speculation and conjecture will continue. In terms of the issues, what are they likely to be? There's lots of them, but I've highlighted five here and I'll run through them as quickly as I can. I think immigration is going to be a big, big issue in the election. And by immigration, I mean opposition to immigration. To me, it was stuck that the number one issue for the majority of voters in the Iowa caucus, again, Iowa is up in the north of the United States, very white, very seldom affected by immigration. Yet the majority of caucus goers cited immigration as the number one issue. It is a challenge for the Democrats. The Southern border is whatever perspective you come from. It is a mess. Republicans are convinced that the immigration issue is something that they can play to their advantage. Trump is going to keep beating that drum, whether it's about the wall or other things. And Democrats have yet to devise a good response, a good defense, a good answer as to where they're coming from. So that one would definitely favor Republicans. The economy and inflation. It is remarkable when you look at all the leading economic indicators, which suggests that the American economy is doing well. However, side by side with that, you have the inflation problem and the inflation crisis that afflicts vast swathes of America, but in particular, working class and poor people. Now, that has been a late slightly, but it persists. The cost of goods and services is a lot higher, has gotten a lot higher in recent years. Hence, again, an issue that probably favors Donald Trump and the Republicans. And again, messaging wise, Democrats have struggled on this one, in particular, the President himself. Abortion. Now, abortion was always kind of a tricky one to assess its role. I think right now, post the overturning of Roe versus Wade, it very definitely favors the Democratic Party and favors Joe Biden. And it's certainly something that is going to be stressed. It's certainly something that will be a pull factor for big constituencies in the Democratic Party. There's no doubt about that. Against that, and we've seen signs of this already, watch how Donald Trump pivots on abortion once he is ordained the Republican nominee, when and if that happens. He's already alluded to this before, that in fact, he may have been the President responsible for the overturning of Roe versus Wade via his Supreme Court appointments, but that he did so to remove the issue from the judicial realm and to put it back into the political realm and let the people decide. And that's how he's going to try to portray himself as he's somebody who doesn't really know. And he's already said, I'm not sure what the best idea here is, but I wanted to get it away from the judges and let people decide. I expect him to frame the issue that way in one around the time in the general election. So yes, it is an advantage for Democrats. Yes, in terms of places where, you know, at congressional level, etc., it's a winner for Democrats. We've seen already in red states. It's also a winner for Democrats. But watch how President Trump, former President Trump, pivots on that one. The culture was more broadly. And this is where Republicans and Donald Trump are going to move. They're not going to move. The abortion is not something that's going to be to the fore. Instead, it's going to be issues around gender identity and parental control over public school curriculum, issues on which they believe they have an advantage and Democrats haven't been able to respond adequately. So watch that space. Watch as abortion or Republicans try to move away from abortion and instead to new frontiers of the culture war. Foreign policy, again, which animates, obviously, an awful lot of discussion here, won't be as big an issue in the American presidential election. It's just the nature of the beast. But what I will say is that you will see Trump continue to beat the drum that he is the person who kept America out of conflicts, someone who he will say with no foundation, that these things in Gaza and in the Russia incursion against Ukraine never would have happened if he was there and that he will solve them quickly, etc., etc. He will also point to Afghanistan and the catastrophic nature of the American withdrawal from there. Biden, of course, will cite the danger of Donald Trump and, you know, again, how he's regarded around the world. So it'll be interesting to see how that will play. Politically speaking, wrinkles. I think the biggest story in American politics in recent decades has been the drift of Hispanic or Latino Americans to the Republican Party. Despite all of Donald Trump's nasty rhetoric in 2016 and 2020, the reality is that between one third and 40%, depending on how you measure it, between one third and 40% of Latino Americans voted for Donald Trump and or the Republican Party. The Democrats have spectacularly underestimated or misapprehended how Latino Americans would vote. They thought they would be very similar to how African Americans have traditionally voted and arguably they took them for granted. Messaging-wise, issues-wise, there is still a gap there that I think the Democrats have a lot of work to do. We've also seen some signs in this with Asian Americans as well. African Americans, again, very reliably democratic, you know, generally speaking, between 85% and 90% of African Americans tend to vote for Democrats. There are two issues here, however. One is that the polling data shows that there's a distinct lack of enthusiasm this time around for Joe Biden. So turnout is going to be a huge issue here in terms of getting them out to vote in battleground states. That's going to be the second thing is that there is, in particular, among African American males, there is some growth in support, in particular, not necessarily for the Republican Party, but for Donald Trump, the individual, which is something that Democrats need to address very quickly. Early voting, again, in America, you can vote very early, you can vote by post, you can vote all sorts of different ways. Democrats are way out ahead strategically on that. They've mastered the out of early voting.  And that's hurt them, I think, very badly in the last couple of election cycles. They're working to catch up, will they? I just don't know. Suburban white women. These, you know, it could be the dispositive constituency this time around. You know, again, they were very off put by Donald Trump in 2020. Many of them who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 went to Joe Biden in 2020. Given all the other factors that are out there in the ether, how many of them will go back to Donald Trump? I don't know. It's an open question, but they are a key demographic. There are two points there about the men themselves. Biden's manifest weakness. I don't think anyone could dispute the fact that he has lost some speed off his fastball to put it bluntly. There are concerns out there about his capacity to campaign and then to govern. That's why I say surrogates on his behalf. He will be dependent upon popular Democrats in various areas around the United States to a degree we have never seen before in an American presidential campaign. That will be interesting to watch. He won't have the benefit, as he did in 2020, of COVID and being able to campaign remotely. So watch that space. On the flip side, Biden and the Democrats have a very, very powerful argument when it comes to Donald Trump and the various things he said and all that we know about the man and what I think quite rightly has been called an existential threat to American democracy. That's where Biden's comment, don't compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative. I think there's a very strong resonance to that comment. I think we can expect to hear that explicitly and implicitly as the campaign unfolds. Much has been made of third party candidates and the potential impact of them. I would say to you, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. obviously is the one we've heard the most about. The reality is, Robert F. Kennedy has a fight on his hands, first of all. Now he's declared as an independent to get on ballots. It's no easy feat. You need to collect a lot of signatures. The rules vary state by state. As of last week, Robert F. Kennedy had qualified for exactly one ballot, one out of 50. Now he's got a lot of work to do to get on those ballots. Where he does, however, he can be a factor because even if he gets two, three percent of the vote, that could be enough in close run states to tip the balance one way or the other. With respect to Kennedy, there had been some consideration that all Kennedy is going to take equally, or it could even take more from Trump than Biden. The polling seems to suggest now that Kennedy will hurt Biden more than he will hurt Trump. That boils down to, in my estimation, two issues. One of which is that Kennedy's very strong pro-choice position will not help him get win over many conservatives. Number two, and even more damning, Kennedy's environmental activism will not help him with conservatives either. Again, I don't mean to discount him, but he could be a factor, but we're talking on the fringes. Again, we're talking with somebody who will probably hurt Biden more than he hurts Trump. Similar to the African American professor, Cornel West, who's running on a left hot left platform as an alternative to Joe Biden, as is Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again, all three of these arguably hurt Joe Biden in the context, and again, could swing it in a close election. On the flip side, this no labels movement, which people have heard about, Joe Manchin, the now retiring Democratic conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia, often touted as somebody who will be on the no labels ticket, this grouping who says that they want to unite America. They are floating the potential of a third party candidate, whether it's Manchin or somebody else. Again, who they take from, they could take from both sides. Then we will have a libertarian candidate, a conservative party candidate who won't make much of a splash, but could in that event probably hurt Donald Trump more than Joe Biden. Look, I don't mean to be dismissive of third party candidates, especially because you have two major party candidates who are so, don't inspire much enthusiasm, I should say, but it is very, very difficult, especially when you get close to election day. A lot of people would say, oh, my heart might be with Kennedy, but I'd rather have Joe Biden as president than Donald Trump, or whatever it might be. People tend to gravitate towards those who they think have a chance of winning the election rather than simply casting a protest vote. States to watch, and I'll go quickly here because I know I'm up against it, but these are the states to watch really in my view. There might be one or two others, but Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, come November 5th, these are the places we're going to be watching very carefully. Pennsylvania, I think, you know, obviously Joe Biden has very strong roots there. Trump won it in 2016, Biden won it last time around, often described as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between. So again, that'll be fascinating to watch. Georgia traditionally a red state has been affected deeply by transplants from the Northeast of the United States particularly, and we see that that state has moved into toss-up territory. So again, be interesting to watch. Arizona, similar effect, you know, traditionally Republican stronghold, but an awful lot of people have moved there, demographics have shifted, now much more of a battleground. Michigan, just one quick note on Michigan, you know, again, traditionally, at least in recent years, Democrats have wanted Biden, sorry, Trump won in 2016, but what's to watch for there is the key constituency of Arab Americans who Joe Biden potentially has alienated in terms of American policy on Israel in the context of what's going on in Gaza. If they were to stay home and things were to be close, that could give Trump an advantage there. Wisconsin has a couple of liberal cities, but a conservative hotland as well, a place Donald Trump won in 2016. North Carolina used to be a deep red southern state, but also affected by demographic shifts, in particular the movement of people from the Northeast to North Carolina and Nevada, a similar dynamic to Arizona. These are places where the election is going to be won or lost and where we need to watch very carefully. And this is where all the alarm bells went off in late last year, when opinion polls showed Donald Trump actually dead even or ahead in all of these states. And indeed, we've seen recent polling suggesting him to be well ahead in Georgia and also ahead in well ahead in North Carolina and in Arizona. And just to look at the map, what that would mean, let's say Donald Trump did win all of those states. We'd be looking at an electoral college landslide in favor of Donald Trump. Now, I don't think this is a probable outcome, but it's not an impossible outcome in the event that this were to happen. So, look, however you see it, this is why Democrats at this juncture are so concerned about the state of play. Couple last things, I'll finish up as quickly as I can. A lot of what I've been talking about so far is the cut and thrust of American politics. There are institutional issues here as well. And one of the things that is sure to come up, in particular, if the sense is that that Joe Biden is going to lose this election is the electoral college. And a lot of its critics say that it is an anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian relic with sorry roots and like so much else of American democracy well past its sell-by day. I have a very different perspective on that. I'd be interested to hear what people think. But in my view, the electoral college reflects the constitutional balance between the power of state and national government. The United States is a vast country, which again is diverse in every conceivable way. The electoral college in its own way strikes a balance between those issues, strikes a balance between population centers and geography, states and national government, et cetera. And the point I would make is that critics of the electoral college system, they often say this is American democracy is broken. In my view, it is the political system that is broken, not the electoral system. I make a distinction between the two. The political system in my view is broken in the sense that you used to have two tents, two big tents. So if you have a two-party system and a country as big as the US, a crazy design one would say, but if you are going to have a two-party system, those two parties should be big tents. The reality is the two parties have moved to the polls and increasing a hard right and hard left, and they're not welcoming a moderates and people face a binary choice, even though most Americans are somewhere in the middle. So when people say that the electoral college system is broken, I actually don't think so. I think it's a failure of politics. The reality is that both parties should be able to compete in all 50 states. And when they do, I mean, we have examples of just retiring Democratic Governor Louisiana, for instance, or the most popular governor in the United States is the Republican governor of Deep Blue Vermont. So when they are big tents, they can compete everywhere, but when they get pulled to the polls primarily by money, then that to me is a failure of the political system, not the electoral system. And the last point I say that I often make this point to critics here of the electoral college system who question why somebody who gets the most votes isn't the president. Look, the American democracy was never meant to operate at a raw majoritarian level. And I would say I don't think many people in Ireland would like it if the European Union operated at such a raw majoritarian level. And I suppose the counter to that is America is a country, but the reality is in terms of America, it is a place that is vast and comprised of many different states, many different cultures, etc. It is much more analogous to the European Union at many levels than it is to any individual member state of the European Union. So what are we going to face into, and no, I'm not going to make a prediction, but what are we going to face into on Wednesday, the 6th of November 2024 at this time? Will the world be breathing a collective sigh of relief, or will there need to be a call to action? And I think that that is a very, very real question in the event that we do have a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In my own estimation, will we see a continuation of the imperfect status quo, which you might call, and I think the question would be, and I think it's a legitimate question, will Biden serve out his full four years in the White House? I think that would be a question that would be immediately upon lots of observers. Or will we have a return of Trump? And I think what that means is that he would seek retribution against his opponents, that we would have an awful lot of people in positions of significant responsibility who do not belong there. I think we would see the organs of American democracy tested to their limits. And I think we would see very much a drastic withdrawal of the United States from the rest of the world. And, you know, again, I don't think that that's just a factor of Trump. I think it's a factor of mainstream American thinking and where the American people are. For me personally, and I'll close at this and sorry for going on too long. In the event that that happens, I retain this sort of abiding faith in the institutions and the authority in the United States. But I'm also aware of what Donald Trump is capable of and the malaise that exists in the United States. So with apologies for ending on a negative note and running on too long. I hope you enjoyed that.