Matthew Lasar was raised in the wilds of coastal New Jersey and Manhattan in the 1960s. He remembers attending a lecture in which the speaker claimed that Richard Nixon masterminded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “Do you recall where you were when Kennedy was killed?” the lecturer asked the audience. “Richard Nixon was asked and said that he forgot.” Inspired by this sort of evidence gathering, Lasar went on to get a BA at the City College of New York, an MA in history at the University of California at Davis, and PhD in history at the Claremont Graduate School. He has written three books about community media and currently teaches courses on conspiracy theories, the Cold War, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in San Francisco with his spouse Sharon Wood and their cats Dora and Molly.