In this episode, Shane Skwarek and Tim Philipps unpack the AI doom campaign that hit in twelve days: Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar’s Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, Jacob Coxon’s Anthropic resignation and a quiet X account at nine-figure views, Dario Amodei’s “Pace the Frontier” essay, and Netflix’s The AI Doc dropping the night they recorded.

Then the hour turns to what the scare leaves out — Hugging Face’s 3 million open-source AI models, why frontier labs at OpenAI and Anthropic might want a federal regulator, foreign amplification on the Coxon thread, Coefficient Giving and Dustin Moskovitz money on both sides of the alarm, and Coxon’s path through Newspeak House.

Is artificial intelligence an extinction risk, or is the panic a path to a license only the incumbents can hold? Multiple things can be true. You decide. Cocktails & Conspiracies, Episode 213.

Visit us on the web:

• https://www.conspiracyrealist.com
  
• 
  https://www.cocktailsconspiracies.com

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@conspiracyrealist
• X: https://x.com/conspiracyonx
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/CocktailsConspiracies
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/CocktailsConspiracies

Timestamps
00:00 Sore throat, honey, and the greeting
03:35 Why this week feels like a launch
04:37 Jacob Coxon and the quiet account
06:03 Sanders–Casar and the nuclear analog
08:00 Amodei, “Pace the Frontier,” Netflix tonight
09:50 The old talking-points playbook
12:00 Elon calls it a psyop — then agrees
15:18 Hugging Face: 3,069,723 models
18:14 Home-box AI vs a $20 cap
21:31 Aggregators, scraping, and China
25:15 What regulation does to an open market
31:19 Models getting quieter
32:20 A federal AI shop and the First Amendment
33:52 76 percent of the reposts were not American
41:49 A researcher, six weeks in
42:50 Coefficient Giving, Moskovitz, Karnofsky
47:23 Real risk, or a brilliant plot
52:39 Cuban: AI extinction vs climate
55:36 Memory, medicine, energy, incumbents
59:06 Newspeak House
1:03:06 Why would AI be any different
1:04:18 Shane bets the psyop. Tim buys in.

Keywords
artificial intelligence, AI safety, AI regulation, open source AI, Hugging Face, Jacob Coxon, Anthropic, OpenAI, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Sanders Casar bill, Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, Coefficient Giving, Open Philanthropy, Dustin Moskovitz, Newspeak House, Netflix The AI Doc, AI monopoly, AI doom, Cocktails and Conspiracies, Conspiracy Realist

In 1971, a government surveyor named Sergio Loaiza was 10,000 feet above Lake Cote in Costa Rica, mapping land for a hydroelectric project, when his camera caught one frame he never saw with his own eyes — a solid, metallic disc hovering over the water. It sat quietly for years until it worked its way into the national press, and it's still called one of the clearest, most scrutinized UFO photographs ever taken.

This week, documentary filmmakers Adam Pillon and Megan Woomer join Cocktails & Conspiracies to talk about "The Cote Photo," the film they spent two trips to Costa Rica building around this image.

We get into how they earned the trust of a photographer who'd stayed quiet about it for decades, why the frame keeps surviving every attempt to wave it off as a hubcap or a lens flare, and what it actually means that the object works out to roughly 84 meters wide if it were sitting at ground level.

We also follow them down the USO rabbit hole — the theory that some of these craft are just as at home underwater as they are in the sky — and what that has to do with a lake that, as the locals tell it, no business built beside it ever survives.

As always, we lay out the case for it and the case against it. You decide.

"The Cote Photo" is streaming now on Amazon Prime and Apple TV, or available to rent/purchase at thecotephoto.com.

Key takeaways:

• The origins of the Cote Photo and its significance in UFO lore.
• Insights from the filmmakers on their journey and the challenges they faced.
• The cultural impact of the photo in Costa Rica and its connection to local legends.

Watch:

• Website: https://thecotephoto.com/watchApple TV: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-cote-photo/umc.cmc.4v71qp3eed55cy1ggbl32jb70
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0HFWLH3KM

Follow the film

• X: https://x.com/TheCotePhoto
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecotephoto/

Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and conspiracyrealist.comNew episodes Friday nights, 8:30pm ET

Timestamps:00:00 Introduction01:39 The film is out03:10 Kelli's wall05:29 Earning Sergio's trust12:22 Silence by order17:51 Sergio the experiencer23:17 The mapping camera and 84 meters27:53 The volcano clip29:57 Costa Rica as culture33:55 La Nación and Esteban's TED talk39:15 USOs and Lake Superior48:35 What do you think it is59:54 Where to watch

Keywords:

Costa Rica UFO photo, The Cote Photo documentary, Lake Cote UFO, Sergio Loaiza, government UFO photograph, USO underwater UFO theory, aerial mapping UFO, gimbal video comparison, UFO disclosure Pentagon tranches, Arenal Volcano UFO

A case with no mystery about who still produced a martyr. Shane Skwarek and Mister Philipps are back from the summer break on the Lindsay Clancy trial — not to call the jury’s slip, but to ask why the reaction outran the crime.

They give her defense the room it asked for: hospitalizations, McLean, a stack of scripts, Patrick’s forgiveness letter, postpartum psychosis as the frame. Then they lean on it.

Three separate acts. A built window with takeout and a pharmacy. A phone call in the middle. A voice that shows up after the lawyer. Pill bottles that were mostly full, and a tox report that only proves she had some of it in her that night. What a non-neglectful husband was supposed to become. What the rallies would look like if the parent had been the father. And the part nobody in pink wants: if “too sick to be guilty” sticks, “unpredictable” becomes available for the next mother in a hiring packet or a custody hearing.

Illness can be real. Intent can still be hers. Cora, Dawson, and Callan are not a diagnosis.

🔗 Connect with Cocktails & Conspiracies:

• Visit us online at https://www.cocktailsconspiracies.com
• Follow us on X: https://x.com/conspiracyonx
• Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/cocktailsconspiracies
• Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/cocktailsconspiracies

Lindsay Clancy trial, postpartum psychosis, Patrick Clancy, Massachusetts insanity defense, McLean Hospital, premeditation, support wave, accountability, Cocktails and Conspiracies, Conspiracy Realist

For over a year, people in Point Pleasant, West Virginia reported the same strange sighting: a large gray figure with red eyes and a massive wingspan near an abandoned WWII munitions site. Then, in December 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River — and the sightings stopped almost entirely.

This week, Shane and Tim work through the full case: the original 1966 witnesses, the leading scientific explanations (a rare sandhill crane, and a toxic-contamination parallel out of Le Roy, New York), and the older folklore that keeps turning up across unrelated cultures — from Mesopotamian winged spirits to Native American thunderbird accounts. They also trace where the "Men in Black" phenomenon actually came from.

Misidentified bird? Mass hallucination? Or something the evidence doesn't fully explain? We lay it out. You decide.

Cameras down, drinks poured, no guest between them tonight — Shane Skwarek and Tim Philipps go off script to grade the conspiracies they've spent 200+ episodes building a case for. They open on 9/11: the still-redacted files, the collapse of Building 7, and whether an absence of paperwork is proof of anything at all. From there it drifts into Epstein, JFK, and the pattern of missing records that seems to follow nearly every major story — and into the UFO disclosure drip-feed, where the timing of each government release might matter more than the footage itself. The back half goes deeper: ancient civilizations and lost technology, DMT and ayahuasca visions, the physics of time travel, and whether consciousness survives the body. Tim stakes his claim on the Las Vegas shooting as the one conspiracy he holds without a shred of doubt. Shane closes the show on the biggest question of all — purpose, extraterrestrial life, and why he thinks it's all connected. No outline, no notes — just two guys measuring their own beliefs against the evidence. You decide. 9/11 conspiracy, Building 7 collapse, redacted government files, Epstein files, JFK assassination, UFO disclosure, ancient civilizations, DMT ayahuasca visions, time travel theory, consciousness and the afterlife, Las Vegas shooting conspiracy, extraterrestrial life🔗 Connect with Cocktails & Conspiracies:🟣 Visit us online at https://www.cocktailsconspiracies.com⚫ Follow us on X: https://x.com/conspiracyonx🔴 Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/CocktailsConspiracies🔵 Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/CocktailsConspiracies

There's a fact sitting in a government database right now. Documented. Peer-reviewed. Completely accessible to anyone willing to look. Say it out loud, though, and the conversation changes — you're not debating the fact anymore, you're defending why you said it. This week, Shane and Tim sit down with political science professor and author Wilfred Reilly to dig into the architecture of modern censorship — not the government kind, but the social kind. The kind where nobody has to pass a law because the cost of speaking is already too high. Wilfred breaks down whether the suppression he documents in his book Taboo is coordinated or emergent, walks through the "journolist" phenomenon and what it reveals about media consensus, and unpacks the data on political skew across academic departments. The conversation moves through the peak social media censorship era of 2018-2021, the personal and social cost of saying the wrong thing out loud, and closes with a wide-ranging look at how surveillance culture has reshaped youth socialization entirely. As always — we don't hand you the verdict. We hand you the evidence and the argument. You decide. Follow Wilfred Reilly:Website: https://www.wilfredreilly.com/X (Twitter): https://x.com/wil_da_beast630Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilfredReilly630Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07RBL17FQWikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_ReillyPodcast (Cut the Bull): https://www.youtube.com/@cutthebullpodcast Books mentioned:Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About: https://www.amazon.com/Taboo-Facts-Cant-Talk-About-ebook/dp/B07YL539K6Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War: https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Crime-Hoax-Lefts-Campaign-ebook/dp/B07F6RN7Y4Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Liberal-Teacher-Told/dp/0063265974🔗 Connect with Cocktails & Conspiracies:🟣 Visit us online at https://www.cocktailsconspiracies.com⚫ Follow us on X: https://x.com/conspiracyonx🔴 Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/CocktailsConspiracies🔵 Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/CocktailsConspiracies

A rabbi, a nurse, an attorney, and a judge walk into a hypnotherapy session. That's not the setup to a joke. That's Rabbi Beth Beyer's CV.In this episode, Beth joins Shane and Tim to break down what really happens when someone goes under -- not the stage-show version, not the swinging-watch Hollywood version, but the clinical, peer-reviewed, 1,800-study version. And then she tells us what clients actually say when they get there.What comes out is wild. Clients describing past lives in the 1700s, complete with the sound of wooden shoes on a floor. A Body Selection Station where souls try on different forms before incarnating -- including a six-dimensional orange shape-shifting being. Lost time cases where the answer turns out to be contact with a "star family" that just wanted to check in. And a consciousness that apparently communicates with the hypnotherapist too -- answering questions she never asked out loud.Shane shares his own lucid dreaming experiences after losing his father and how those dreams changed his life's direction. Tim wonders out loud whether the 1970s psychedelic ban was a deliberate suppression of consciousness expansion. And Beth drops a detail that nobody in the room was expecting: 2027 might be the year the veil finally lifts.Is this real? Is it confabulation? Is the mind so powerful it can produce experience indistinguishable from memory -- or are some of these people actually remembering? You decide.Guest website: www.RenoHypnotherapyQHHT.com📺 Subscribe and Stay Curious:Don’t forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to stay updated on all our latest content. Join us as we continue to uncover the most intriguing and unexplained mysteries of the cosmos.🔗 Connect with Cocktails & Conspiracies:🟣 Visit us online at https://www.cocktailsconspiracies.com⚫ Follow us on X: https://x.com/conspiracyonx🔴 Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/CocktailsConspiracies🔵 Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/CocktailsConspiracies

Was Jonestown a CIA mind control experiment? That's the question we couldn't shake after revisiting MK Ultra — and when we started pulling the thread, the evidence got hard to dismiss. A single footlocker at the Jonestown compound contained 11,000 doses of Thorazine. The complete drug inventory — sodium pentothal, chloral hydrate, Demerol, Valium, Thallium — overlaps almost exactly with the declassified MK Ultra pharmaceutical list. The stockpile was large enough to medicate over 200,000 people for a year. Jonestown housed 1,100. MK Ultra was a confirmed, declassified CIA program designed to test behavioral modification, chemical mind control, and psychological manipulation on unwitting subjects. The drugs found at Jonestown weren't antibiotics. They were the exact compounds used to break down the human psyche. Jim Jones had a documented CIA file opened in 1960 — the same year his childhood friend Dan Mitrione was recruited by the agency and deployed to South America to teach interrogation and torture techniques. Jones traveled to CIA headquarters in Brazil with no visible source of income. The U.S. embassy covered his expenses. The file was purged without explanation the day Mitrione was killed.Then there's the geography. Jonestown sits in Guyana — directly bordering Venezuela, a country that nationalized American oil assets two years before the compound was built. The CIA had installed Guyana's own leader in 1964. By 1974, that leader had gone rogue, establishing ties with Cuba and the USSR at the height of the Cold War. A compound. An airstrip. An MK Ultra drug list. A CIA file. A dead congressman. And 918 people who never came home. Tonight on Cocktails & Conspiracies, Shane and Tim trace the direct line from declassified MK Ultra documents to the jungle in Guyana — and ask the question most people are still afraid to ask: what if Jonestown wasn't a cult? What if it was the program? You decide. 🎙 New episodes every Friday at 8:30PM ET📺 Subscribe on YouTube🎧 Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music🌐 ConspiracyRealist.com

The CIA's MK Ultra program is not a theory. It's a congressional record. Over 150 documented research projects. Hundreds of thousands of destroyed files. And survivors who remember everything. Tonight on Cocktails & Conspiracies, we sit down with Cathy O'Brien — author, activist, and one of the most prominent MK Ultra survivors speaking publicly today. For over 35 years, Cathy has been documenting her experience as a survivor of CIA trauma-based mind control — used at the White House and Pentagon level — and the long road to reclaiming free thought. In this episode: → How MK Ultra was structured, and why childhood trauma was its deliberate foundation→ Project Paperclip: how Nazi scientists brought the formula for mind control into the United States→ Operation Midnight Climax — and what most people still don't know about the program's true scope→ The Epstein files, Diddy tapes, and the blackmail operations Cathy says she was used in — connecting dots decades apart→ Why the MK Ultra congressional hearings scheduled for May 13th were postponed — and what the CIA confiscated from Tulsi Gabbard's office→ Hollywood, Disney, and the media as documented programming epicenters→ How 2020 became the most visible large-scale behavioral conditioning experiment in modern history→ Writing by hand: the simple, documented brain mechanism that Cathy says was deliberately removed from schools — and why it matters→ What every person watching can do right now to protect their own free thought This is not about theory. This is about record. And it comes down to one question Cathy O'Brien has been asking the world for three and a half decades: At what point do you stop calling them coincidences? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📚 CATHY O'BRIEN — BOOKS & RESOURCES━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🌐 Website: https://trance-formation.com (PTSD: Time to Heal available pay-what-you-can for survivors)🐦 X/Twitter: @RealCathyOBrien 📖 Books Referenced:- Trance Formation of America — Cathy O'Brien & Mark Phillips- Access Denied for Reasons of National Security — Cathy O'Brien & Mark Phillips- PTSD: Time to Heal — Cathy O'Brien- Align with the Divine — Cathy O'Brien ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🎙️ COCKTAILS & CONSPIRACIES━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━New episodes every Friday night.Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. 🌐 ConspiracyRealist.com📱 @ConspiracyRealist across all platforms Stay curious. Stay skeptical. Raise your glass to mysteries.And as always — you decide.

The universe contains an estimated two trillion galaxies. Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone — most with planets. The math says we shouldn't be alone. And yet, after 65 years of listening, searching, and scanning the cosmos, SETI has found nothing. Silence. Complete and total silence. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy alone has hundreds of billions of stars. The math says we shouldn't be alone — and yet after 65 years of listening, SETI has heard nothing but silence. Tonight, Shane and Tim sit down with author and energy-literacy advocate Dr. Terry Adair to explore what may be the most grounded answer to the Fermi Paradox ever put to paper — and it has nothing to do with alien biology, self-destruction, or government cover-ups. It has everything to do with energy. Terry's argument is deceptively simple: Isaac Newton was arguably the most brilliant human being who ever lived. So why didn't he go to the moon? Because he didn't have the energy. And that, Terry argues, is the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Advanced civilization isn't rare because intelligence is rare. It's rare because the energy required to build it — the fossil fuels, the geological luck, the hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis compressed into the ground beneath our feet — is almost impossibly rare. The conversation goes deep: the energy ladder from photosynthesis to fire to fossil fuels to fusion, whether ancient civilizations could have harnessed energy and been wiped out, the case for small modular reactors and thorium as bridge fuels, and the one place Terry admits his hypothesis has a squiggly line. Terry's two words for the audience: hope and optimism 🌐 terryadair.com🌐 wherearethelittlegreenmen.com🌐 fusionstarproject.org Cocktails & Conspiracies airs every Friday night at 8:30PM ET on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.🌐 ConspiracyRealist.com