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37 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the enigma of Bill Gates (at least with respect to conspiracy theories).
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Premature Election Assumptions
00:00:00
Speaker
Last week, we rather presumptively decided to devote an entire episode to talking about the US election. This week, we'd like to apologise. Obviously, we spoke too soon. As it stands, it seems like insert candidate aimcare is the likely winner of the election.
00:00:15
Speaker
whilst Insert Candidate Name Care has failed to get enough electoral college votes. Meanwhile, it seems Insert Candidate Name Care is claiming that Insert Candidate Name Care believes Insert Conspiracy Theory Care. And frankly, good luck to them when it comes to proving it.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:31
Speaker
So yes, we apologise. Despite couching our analysis with a lot of conditionals, we spoke too soon.
00:00:38
Speaker
So congratulations insert candidate A.J.R. for probably being the most likely person to be inaugurated as President of the United States of America. And congratulations to Vice President-elect Andy Macheagal in helping secure that victory.
New Patron and Humor
00:01:00
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dent.
00:01:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand, and where are you now, Wellington? I am indeed. I'm in the windy, blustery, wet, rainy capital of this country. It's Dr. M. Dendith. It is. Wet and blustery? Are you just saying that because it's Wellington, or is it actually wet and blustery?
00:01:31
Speaker
It was yesterday, and it was the day before. Today was actually quite pleasant, but today I was mostly in Hastings. So, you know, it's a weird world in which I live. Yes, you're impossible to pin down, you like the wind. Yes, I am exactly like the capital of this country.
00:01:46
Speaker
Now, I understand we have a new patron. Are they a named patron, or are they a patron who dare not speak its name? They are a patron whose name dare not be spoke. They
Critique of Microsoft Word
00:01:56
Speaker
know who they are, the mysterious Jay, with their love of Star Wars and all the other stuff they probably love, like breathing.
00:02:07
Speaker
eating and listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. We know about you. We know. I mean, so far that pretty much describes me. Am I the new patron? I mean, your name does start with J. It does. Are you are you paying money to be in this podcast now? I don't know. Now, man, now I'm confused. Maybe I am. I think perhaps we better we better we better shoot on with things. Otherwise, who knows what? Who knows what I could end up paying for.
00:02:35
Speaker
So we have a topic for you this week that is another one of those, one that we've been saying we should do something about for a little while now. And now we're going to do something about it.
Bill Gates in Conspiracy Theories
00:02:46
Speaker
We are going to resolve why Microsoft Word is such a terrible piece of software
00:02:52
Speaker
for what writing any kind of long form narrative piece or academic piece. Microsoft Word, why is it so bad? We're going to get down to the person who created it and work out why he's responsible for so many lost drafts over so many years. We are, of course, talking about Bill Gates. Oh, oh, are we? Yeah. Sorry, I thought we're talking about about Steve Bulma, the other guy at Microsoft. No, no, he's Bill Gates.
00:03:20
Speaker
yeah are you sure not steve belmer no he's teased the developers developers developers i like to delete all of my notes now that's okay i've got some were they written a microsoft word uh no actually as it happens good so you're okay you're okay should we play a chime okay
00:03:44
Speaker
So this is a question that I've wanted answered for a while myself, basically, which is, when and why did Bill Gates become the new George Soros? Just all of a sudden, Bill Gates was the guy who was popping up in all the COVID conspiracy theories and probably a few of the 5G ones as well. And it is a relatively recent phenomena, the idea of Bill Gates being behind these conspiracy theories, because for a long period of time,
00:04:08
Speaker
The ultimate conspirator in politics was, of course, good old George Soros. And having spent time living in Eastern Europe, I became very familiar with George Soros-related conspiracy theories. And then suddenly, Bill Gates enters the scene, and almost all Western conspiracy theories now reflect upon him, and Soros is almost relegated to being a third-rate Eastern European villain these days.
00:04:36
Speaker
He does seem to pop up when things are explicitly political. I still hear his name being bandied about when they're talking about, you know, he's the guy supposedly paying the Antifa protesters to get busted and to protest and things like that. But
Debunking Gates' Vaccine Microchip Rumors
00:04:50
Speaker
outside of the political sphere, yeah, it does seem to be all about Bill Gates these days.
00:04:55
Speaker
Now I did a cursory search of the academic literature on conspiracy theory to see if there's much in the way of mention of Bill Gates, because you'd think with Bill Gates becoming the new bogeyman in conspiracy theories, maybe people would be remarking upon it. And really the only person who mentions Bill Gates
00:05:16
Speaker
at any length, and by any length I mean some length at all, is of course our good old friend Brian Elkely, who mentions Gates back in God as the ultimate conspiracy theorist, a paper we reviewed very recently, where he writes,
00:05:31
Speaker
The only way humans can carry off the kind of interesting and noteworthy conspiracies that motivate and worry conspiracy theorists is by acting in concert with others. Even somebody as powerful as a Bill Gates or a President Nixon would need to operate as part of, or to lead,
00:05:50
Speaker
a larger conspiracy in order to have a significant effect on the world. God, on the other hand, is, by hypothesis, omnipotent. And so even there, he's really just an example that there are no specific conspiracy theories cited about Bill Gates, just that he's the kind of guy who's rich and powerful. Conspiracy theories, and it was born probably, he's the kind of person conspiracy theories might form around, because of course we're talking here pre-2010,
00:06:19
Speaker
So it's well before Bill Gates becomes the major figure in conspiracy theories. But Brian has his finger on the pulse. It says, look, Bill Gates is the kind of person you might have conspiracy theories about, along with long-dead Richard Nixon. So they weren't able to predict 9-11.
00:06:39
Speaker
And yet Brian was ahead of the game when it comes to Bill Gates. The academia has really upped its prognostication game. And you know why? I think it's because Brian Alkely uses Microsoft Word. I think he suffered with the devil and has thus thought that the devil needs to be captured.
00:06:59
Speaker
I actually have no problem with Microsoft, but for very long documents, it chokes and dies, but for most of the stuff you'd want to do, I find it a perfectly good tool. You're a perfectly good tool. I gave you that one on a silver platter, didn't I? You did indeed.
00:07:14
Speaker
Okay, so I guess let's start by having a look at exactly what are people saying about Bill Gates and obviously he's really come into the news these days because of because of your friend and mine COVID-19.
00:07:29
Speaker
Just here in Auckland or here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the government called a special press conference this afternoon to tell us there's another case of community transmission, that they don't quite know where it came from. And everything's as it is for now, but the entire city at least of Auckland is now sort of waiting till tomorrow to find out are we going to go back into another lockdown or not.
Gates Foundation Misunderstandings
00:07:56
Speaker
fingers crossed. But anyway, and some people are probably blaming it all on Bill Gates, because that seems to be the theme for this whole pandemic. What have they been saying? The microchips thing. So the microchips thing is the one that I've certainly heard the most bandied about, the idea that
00:08:12
Speaker
COVID, it's all a pretext to inject us with the sort of tracking microchips. So when the vaccine gets rolled out, it's going to include these microchips because everyone in the world is going to need the COVID vaccine, then we'll all end up chipped and tagged and whatever it is that these things are supposed to be doing.
00:08:32
Speaker
So, I mean, the initial response to that, of course, has been, why does Bill Gates need to put microchips in magical vaccinations when you're all carrying one around in your cell phone right now? His work has basically been done for him. But there was one thing.
00:08:50
Speaker
So apparently, the Gates Foundation has funded a study which looked into technology that could store your vaccine records with a special ink, which is administered at the same time as the vaccine injection. And now it sounds like this is some sort of idea that at the same time as you're injected with the vaccine, you're also given some sort of little micro tattoo and invisible ink, which can then be read by a special reader to say that you've been given a particular vaccine. So it's not a microchip at all.
00:09:20
Speaker
But I can imagine with your whole, I mean, the microchip thing predates Bill Gates, right? People have been talking about injecting those and Marx of the Beast and so on. So I can imagine something like that would have set people off, wouldn't it? Well, yes. I mean, there's been a long history, particularly amongst
00:09:36
Speaker
the Christian sex, the people, it's, ah, I can't say, eschatological. That's the one, thank you, kindly. And the idea of the mark of the beast, and everyone will be marked in a particular way to ensure that when the devil comes, the devil will know his own, and God will know his own, and all that shebang.
00:09:56
Speaker
And yeah, the use of basically a kind of vaccine passport on people by tattooing people with an invisible tattoo when they get an inoculation to allow people when you cross a border to spot whether you've been inoculated without having to ask the person specifically and worry that the person is confused about what vaccine they had is the kind of thing that for a certain kind of person
00:10:23
Speaker
is going to recall all of those left behind novels they read when they were a child.
Gates' Population Control Controversies
00:10:29
Speaker
So I don't know if people heard about this study, and that's where the microchipping stuff came from, or if, as we say, the whole idea of microchipping and marking and so on has been around for a long time. So possibly it's just coincidence that the Gates Foundation happened to have this be looking into this technology as well. But certainly people seized on it when they heard about it.
00:10:53
Speaker
What's interesting here is you get an interesting intersection between these conspiracy theories and the people who think they're being surveilled all the time and having technology implanted into their bodies like microchips and the like. Would it actually be quite interesting to see what that intersection looks like if at all? Because most people, even in the conspiracy theory community, be Alex Jones' and your David Ikes,
00:11:20
Speaker
take it that the people who think they're being surveilled all the time are mistaken in some way, shape, or form. And yet they do seem to think that the idea of microchips being implanted into people en masse as a form of government control or surveillance is plausible, even if they don't think it's plausible in discrete cases of people saying it's happening to them.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, I guess there is a bit of a difference in that these targeted individuals who we've looked at before kind of think they're being singled out, but then I suppose it's not a big leap to think, well, maybe they're a test run, maybe they're a prototype, maybe they're just getting the technology ready before it gets rolled out worldwide.
00:12:00
Speaker
But if we move along, because there is more, there's a fair bit more actually. So that was taking a bit of Gates Foundation technology and sort of twisting it a little bit. But another thing people like to do is take Bill Gates' words themselves.
00:12:19
Speaker
and twist them a bit. Because another conspiracy that I've seen going around a bit is that the vaccine, it's not about tracking and microchipping and what have you. It's basically about killing people and that Bill Gates wants to lower the world's population. And this vaccine is actually going to kill off people by the millions and lower the population to an acceptable level.
00:12:45
Speaker
Now, Bill Gates has talked about population and controlling population, but he has specifically talked about controlling population growth. Now, that's not the same thing, is it? You can tell because it's a different word. Yes. I mean, there has been a lot of discussion, particularly amongst certain left wing individuals around the globe who David Attenborough is in the UK.
00:13:08
Speaker
your Bill Gates in the US about the idea that our current population projections are unsustainable long term because we're already seeing food and water shortages in parts of the world and thus we need to constrain that population growth in order to manage the resources we have rather than bring around
00:13:30
Speaker
which will also lead to pandemics of other types as badly resourced populations basically end up becoming ill populations spread diseases and the like. Now there's a big debate that goes on
00:13:46
Speaker
amongst intellectuals about this as to whether this is the right response, because often when we start talking about this wayward population growth, we're talking about parts of the world which aren't really white. We're talking about Asia. We're talking about Africa.
00:14:01
Speaker
and we're talking about their inability to control their population growth, and surely they should be aware of the resources and how limited they are. Whilst those of us in the West are luxuriating in our new MacBook Airs being shipped from China next week and all those other bits and paces, we don't seem to be talking about constraining our use of resources,
00:14:22
Speaker
we're really concerned about others. So there's a legitimate gripe here about the views being put forward by Attenborough and Gates and the like by going, yeah you're kind of looking at the wrong problem here. It's not the third world which is the issue, it's the first world and its resource use. We need to do something about this. But yes, the kind of issue that Bill Gates is addressing isn't the same thing as
00:14:48
Speaker
let's kill off 10% of the population and let's do it by injecting them with a good old vaccine.
Hoaxes and Misinterpretations
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he talks about how it can be seem a little sort of paradoxical, but supposedly reducing in some societies, reducing the death rate actually also reduces population growth. I don't know if it's I mean, I know places and
00:15:14
Speaker
cultures at different times in the world's history where there is a high infant mortality, that will tend to provoke high birth rates. And then you can get into the situation where health or medical technology or what have you increases to the point that the infant mortality lowers, but people are still in the habit of having larger families, so you get a population explosion and so on. And so I think
00:15:36
Speaker
In some cases, they're saying, yes, if we can stop people from dying, then there'll be less motivation for people to keep having babies or something like that. But it does come across as a little paternalistic, certainly. But nevertheless, he's not talking about killing people en masse. He's talking about slowing the number of new people being made. From the baby factories. From the baby factories.
00:16:00
Speaker
And then, of course, all these things just lead into the idea that, you know, there's money in it and maybe Bill Gates is behind COVID just so he can get that sweet, sweet moolah from the COVID vaccines or what have you. Not that Bill Gates is suffering from any shortage of money, of course.
00:16:16
Speaker
No, he is in fact, I'd be one of the richest people in the world. Yes, I'm not sure about that, but anyway. Then again, Jeff Bezos did make more money during the COVID-19 pandemic, which of course hasn't even finished yet, so probably make even more. Turns out rich people like making more money. I guess that's how they get to be rich people sometimes.
00:16:39
Speaker
What else have we got? Did you know that a video from 2005 shows Bill Gates talking to the CIA about a mind-altering vaccine that can be used to alter people's brains and stop them from being religious fundamentalists and stuff? So the thing is, I don't know that because it's not true.
00:17:00
Speaker
Ah, tell me more. So it's not Bill Gates. It's not a real CIA briefing. It is, in fact, a hoax video that was made by this person by the name of Ryan Harper for an uncompleted film project called Funvax.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, so this one, this one does the rounds every now and then. It's a bit indistinct. It's a guy with glasses and an American accent who I suppose looks at, you know, could be Bill Gates if you squint, but apparently those are different times. Could you do an American accent for me for just a second?
00:17:33
Speaker
I literally can't. American accent is one of the, one of the ones I have real, or at least, you know, the, the sort of the middle one, you know, you can do the very exaggerated sort of Texan draw and Appalachian hillbilly ones, but just, just an actual American accent. We tend to have trouble with it when New Zealand, especially as we don't pronounce our R's, so we never quite know when to, when to do it. Try and mix an Appalachian and a Texan accent together. Oh, I'm pretty sure my head would explode. I just, I try and experiment here.
00:18:03
Speaker
Okay, what do you want me to say? I am Bill Gates. I am Bill Gates. My God, the resemblance is uncanny. Right. Anyway, so yes, apparently this is a video that was originally made in 2001. It's dated 2005 in the video itself, and it's just plain not real. It's just a work of fiction.
00:18:23
Speaker
um it features things such things as uh it has Bill Gates showing the slideshow which has MRI images supposedly showing the because they have there has been talk in the past of bits different bits of the brain that light up due to religious belief or religious euphoria or something I've heard studies about that in the past and so in this video it's supposedly a way of suppressing those things to
00:18:48
Speaker
to stop fundamentalism or what have you, but apparently the people have identified the MRI images as being completely nonsense and so on and so forth. And so it's all just fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Did you know that the country of Italy has called for Bill Gates to be arrested?
00:19:07
Speaker
I think I find it was a single politician in Italy who called for Bill Gates to be arrested, and not even a politician who's considered to be in good standing. No, actually, that's true. Yes, a single MP by the name of Sarah Cunial called for his arrest. This is not the official position.
00:19:26
Speaker
of the Italian government and the CMP is apparently a well-known anti-vaxxer and obviously isn't a fan of 5G and is into quite a few more of those conspiracy theories. So that one doesn't really go on. And then there are just a few other things where you'll see these
00:19:41
Speaker
stories pop up on websites or on Facebook of saying, look, look, here's Bill Gates admitting it. Here he is talking about what he wants to do, these horrible things. And usually they're either taken out of context or just just kind of nonsense. So the main one that shows up, usually in articles along the lines of Bill Gates says his vaccine will kill a million people.
00:20:04
Speaker
is from a talk he gave where he gives the quote, here we clearly need a vaccine that works in the upper age range because they're at most risk of that, we're talking about COVID-19 here, and doing that so you amp it up so it works in older people and yet you don't have side effects. If we have one in 10,000 side effects that's way more 700,000 people who'll suffer from that. So in other words if we're talking about
00:20:26
Speaker
vaccinating the entire population of around 7 billion people, a one in 10,000 side effect rate is still going to affect 700,000 people. Now, what he's saying there is that would be a bad thing. That's what we've got to watch out for those side effects, because when you're talking about the whole world, even a small percentage is going to be a large absolute number. He's not saying that any vaccine he comes up with will do that. He's not saying that those side effects will be fatal side effects. And he's definitely not saying it's a good thing. So the whole Bill Gates
00:20:54
Speaker
wants
Gates Foundation and Public Health
00:20:55
Speaker
to slash admits he is going to kill nearly a million people is basically a willful misreading of what he said. Now in the old days I would have now made a reference to a good joke from Father Ted.
00:21:09
Speaker
But I won't. No, no, best that you don't. Best that you don't. And then there's been some other, I've seen some other fluffy stuff around DNA and Bill Gates admitting that his vaccines are going to oppoon in the alter people's DNA, which I don't know the exact, this gets a little bit technical and biological, but vaccines can use mRNA to do stuff, but that's
00:21:30
Speaker
not permanent changes to one's DNA. And it's basically just a case of, I think like a lot of 5G stuff where they simply hear the word electromagnetic radiation and think, oh, radiation is bad. People sort of hear stuff that sounds like DNA and think tinkering with your DNA. Well, that's what those Frankenstein doctors do. And therefore it must be bad. And I'm sure if it turns out we're getting the genetic information wrong, we'll be hearing about it very shortly. But so that's all that's come up in the times of COVID.
00:21:59
Speaker
I assume that Bill Gates conspiracy theories have been around a lot because they seem to be anti-vax stuff. And anti-vax conspiracy theories have been around longer than COVID-19. And Bill Gates has been working with vaccines for longer than COVID-19.
00:22:15
Speaker
It all seems to come down to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What's the deal with that? So the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was actually initially just the William H. Gates Foundation back in 95, and then transferred to being both about Bill and Melinda in 2000, is one of the largest private foundations in the world with tens of billion dollars to play with, which sounds like a very large number.
00:22:43
Speaker
But as people have pointed out, actually it's only a fraction of Bill Gates' total wealth. So the foundation is doing a lot of work, but it actually could be doing a lot more work if Bill Gates was willing to invest more of his own personal wealth into it. That actually, though, that $10 billion doesn't just contain Bill Gates' contributions. Warren Buffett, I believe, has been a big contributor as well. Yeah.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a lot of people involved in it, all of whom are donating a very small fraction of their vast wealth to presumably fix problems overseas. And the Bill and Gates Foundation basically, sorry, the Bill and Gates
00:23:25
Speaker
Billingates. Billingates Foundation is basically, it has a global health division and that global health division is concerned with systemic inequalities found overseas, particularly in the third world, and wants to improve access to health care worldwide in order to produce a world which is better
00:23:53
Speaker
And so basically they engage in research and advocacy largely overseas and this has led to suspicions about what they do. I mean Alex Jones has been suspicious about Bill and Melinda Gates for a long time on the notion that they're doing things overseas to babies.
00:24:13
Speaker
And as we know, Alex Jones doesn't like people doing things to babies, so he's very suspicious of anyone who does things to babies overseas. But it's largely predicated not on what Bill and Linda Gates' foundation is doing, it's largely predicated on the fact that Bill Gates is one of those
00:24:32
Speaker
socialist billionaires who sometimes talks about maybe he should be paying slightly more tax, and that goes against the Alex Jones American way. So there must be something very suspicious about what this Bill Gates is actually doing with his money overseas, that damn commie bastard.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah, so there's been a little bit of that. People have claimed that the foundation has tested vaccines on children in Africa and India, which has led to thousands of deaths and horrible injuries. People have claimed actually not only Italy, claimed that he's facing trial in India.
00:25:07
Speaker
Some people have claimed that they've rolled out a tetanus vaccine in Kenya that included abortion drugs. I've just seen that claim written down. I don't know any more details than that. I don't know if that's another case of people sort of looking at the list of ingredients in a vaccine and seeing a name that they recognize from somewhere else. I mean, we've all seen in the anti-vax stuff when they talk about, you know, mercury and things like that, and vaccines which don't actually
00:25:36
Speaker
in a chemical compound don't mean the same as what they are by themselves and stuff like that. I remember the controversy when Trump had his experimental treatment at Walter Reed for COVID-19 and one of the drugs he was given, one of the enzymes originally derived from an aborted fetus. And it turns out that it's fine for the President of the United States, who was a Republican, to take a drug that uses fetal remains
00:26:04
Speaker
but it's wrong for a liberal to create that drug in the first place, which is a very tricky place for people to be in.
Why Gates is a Conspiracy Target
00:26:13
Speaker
You're not allowed to make the drug, but the president definitely should take it. Ooh, makes perfect sense.
00:26:20
Speaker
if you're the president. And even then, that makes no sense at all. Well, yes, I think that's something of an emblem of our times. Okay, so we've got Bill Gates, we've got his foundation, we've got people saying lots of things about it, none of them complimentary. But that still doesn't really answer the question, why Bill Gates?
00:26:44
Speaker
Why, basically? Because, Josh, he's the wrong kind of individual. And I mean that in the sense of American individualism. Bill Gates is someone unlike, say, GFB. Bezos, who is simply out there to make large amounts of money following the American dream, Bill Gates seems to want to give something back.
00:27:06
Speaker
And that seems a bit suspicious when rich and powerful people decide to engage in public outrage. People like Alex Jones get very suspicious about what might be motivating them. Yes, that sounds about right. In fact,
00:27:25
Speaker
When I was reading through a few articles doing some research for this episode, I was reading one on how Bill Gates became the voodoo doll of conspiracy theories from the BBC's website. As I was reading through it, who did I see but none other than a friend of the podcast, Professor Joe Yusinski, giving his opinions on exactly where these conspiracy theories come from.
00:27:50
Speaker
And so in this article Joe is quoted as saying conspiracy theories are about accusing powerful people of doing terrible things. The theories are basically the same, just the names change. Before Bill Gates it was George Soros and the Koch brothers and the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers.
00:28:05
Speaker
And while the majority of conspiracy theories die on the vine, the ones that endure are those that offer big villains and address issues that people care about. He says it should come as no surprise that rich people and big corporations are being accused of conspiring to put chips in our necks because that's a thing we fear. It's been the ammo of conspiracy theories for a long, long time.
00:28:23
Speaker
So basically, yeah, why is Bill Gates the next George Soros? Because he's just the right kind of person, really. It doesn't seem like there's any... I was wondering if there'd been any particular inciting event or one particular, you know, incidents where it all went viral, but it seems like, no, he's just rich and powerful. We don't trust the rich and powerful. He's doing stuff with vaccines. A lot of people don't trust vaccines.
00:28:50
Speaker
It all just kind of adds up, which makes perfect sense, but is just a little disappointing. Yes, I mean, as we said earlier in the episode, George Soros was kind of the big figure. He still appears to a certain extent when it comes to certain political conspiracy theories.
Future of Conspiracy Theories
00:29:05
Speaker
But Bill Gates is now the figure that everyone turns to because people are going, wow, I mean, George Soros doesn't need to be particularly active in vaccine research. He's more about open democracies.
00:29:16
Speaker
Bill Gates is all about health technology, and we're suffering a health crisis. Ooh, there must be something going on there.
00:29:27
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I'm assuming these conspiracy theories aren't going to go anywhere until another rich person starts doing stuff like this, and then maybe we'll forget about Bill Gates and move on to someone else. But for now, it looks like it's just a thing. It's just that the wider things go viral, they just kind of do. I mean, if people knew why things go viral, I think the world would be in a much worse place.
00:29:53
Speaker
Yes, yes, no, I think it would have been, I was going to say weaponized, but commodified would probably be the more accurate one. People would be making a lot more money than they currently are. I mean, we would be making more money than we currently are. Well, damn right we would. We would have gone viral years ago. And so that's the story of Bill Gates. And the story about why we're not successful.
00:30:15
Speaker
Mm. In both cases, just a little depressing. And I think that's all we have for that particular topic this episode, but of course that's not all. But wait, there's more. Do they still have infomercials? Do people still say, but wait, there's more? Or is that a reference only people of our generation will actually get?
00:30:32
Speaker
I think infomercials are still a thing on early morning TV, at least in this country. I mean, I don't know what they say, but wait, there's more. I'm fierce. Because I'm finished all they do. I mean, it's a classic for a reason.
Infomercials and Accessibility
00:30:44
Speaker
Unfortunately, wait, there's more is true. And I'm saying unfortunately, because there's a lot of Trump news we need to talk about in the patron bonus. That's basically all there is these days.
00:30:54
Speaker
We can talk about signs that things aren't going well for Trump and then signs that things might be going well for a coup anyway. We'll talk about some voter tampering. We'll talk about James O'Keefe and Project Veritas because of course we have to. We'll talk about fraud hotlines. We'll talk about how people are making bets on the outcome of the American election and feeling a little bit
00:31:20
Speaker
unhappy with how things are going. And then we'll end on a cheery note about a threat to students doing exams at the University of Auckland. Fun times. Actually, I heard a thing a while ago, speaking of informations again.
00:31:36
Speaker
I read a thing that said quite a lot of the products you see being advertised in infomercials were originally designed for the disabled community.
Closing and Listener Encouragement
00:31:46
Speaker
But that's not a big enough market. So they then sort of make up problems and try to sell them to able people as well, which is why you get the classic cliche of infomercials of a person comically failing to perform an everyday task and making it sound like this thing's really difficult.
00:32:05
Speaker
Therefore, you need this device they're selling, when in fact it's an action that is genuinely difficult if you have a certain disability. In that case, this thing would be very useful for you, which means that the advertisements with the people stumbling around are unable to perform everyday tasks. The wide number of jokes mocking the whole Inflammational Syndrome thing is actually quite disturbing and ableist when you get down to it, even if unintentional.
00:32:34
Speaker
I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, actually that makes sense of a vast variety of products I've seen advertised on infomercials, aside from, of course, ginsu steak knives. Well, yes, everybody eats ginsu steak knives. Everyone needs to cut through an iron pipe.
00:32:50
Speaker
I'm cutting through an iron pipe right now. No, I bet you are. I bet you are. Anyway, enough of that and enough of this. I think we shall end this episode and then pile into a bonus episode just chock full of Trump. Hooray! Yep, it's gonna be a clown car of an episode. Such a clown car.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yep. I suppose we should do the usual spiel. That's what our patrons get, that bonus episode. But if you'd like to get in on a bit of bonus episode action, you could become a patron by going to patreon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you don't want to be a patron, that's also fine, because you're our audience, and that's great. So until then, it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from...
00:33:37
Speaker
Bill Gates? Me! Ah, even better. I'm not Bill Gates. But I think you might be. As far as you know. Toodles!
00:33:53
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:34:54
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.