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Brian L. Keeley on Conspiracy Liars
29 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M discuss M's interview with Brian L. Keeley, where Brian discusses conspiracy liars (who probably think M and Brian.. and Josh are the real conspiracy liars).
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Transcript
Humorous Interview Preparations
00:00:00
Speaker
This week, Em is talking with Bran Crowley of Pittsburgh College in the United Kingdom about... No, no, no, no. Try that one again. What? Oh, sorry. This week, Em is talking with horror novelist Bram Stoker. Stoker? And also, no. Sorry, this isn't a chat about your time in Transylvania, you know, before the incident?
00:00:20
Speaker
No. Sorry, do you not listen to these interviews in advance? No, never. Who's the time to listen to academics harp on and on about conspiracy theories? I'm a busy man. I have stuff to do, you know, playing Cult of the Lamb, eating
00:00:40
Speaker
Pies? Sorry, I may be a bit fixated on this, but you've never listened to one of the interviews I recorded? Not a previous one, like one we did with Brian? Nope. Or any of the interviews with Aaron? Not at all. Not even Curtis? More like Kurt... no. But you always seem to have notes. Ah, just make it up as I go along. It's amazing how speaking in generalities can get you anywhere in decent society.
Introduction to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy
00:01:10
Speaker
Well, I'm actually lost for words, I'm stumped. Sorry, what is the point of recording this wrap-around? Only joking. Of course I listened to the interview. Oh, well that is a relief. Or did I? There's only one way to find out by listening to this very special interview between our own indentant Byron Smiley. No! Sorry, sorry. Flemmenteth and Sian Murphy. Maybe it's Kylia Murphy. Whatever, play that tune.
Interview with Philosopher Brian L. Keeley
00:01:40
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and M. Dentist. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. We are both Josh Edison and Dr. M. Dentist. A desult entity. At the same time. Exactly. We're in different places tonight. Both mentally, spiritually and physically. And emotionally, yeah.
00:02:08
Speaker
But basically because we only have a small bit of recording to do for reasons that will fairly quickly become apparent, and it seemed easier to do it online than any of that messing around, driving cars, travelling to other locations, being in different positions spatially. Who's got the time for that? Fighting trolls, unearthing ancient treasures, and of course being part of the conspiracy.
00:02:31
Speaker
Why would anybody bother? No, because this week we have the first of some, I think, interviews that the good doctor recorded overseas. It is actually the second, yes. Actually the one with Julia is the only one that was recorded overseas. Both interviews which are in the can, which are coming up, which is Brian this week and will misinterpret in about Fortnite's time.
00:02:58
Speaker
They were recorded when I returned back from my trip to Amsterdam. And I was very, very jet lagged for at least one of them. You can work out which one in retrospect. Well, we'll still have to say, but yes. Today, Em is talking to a friend of the show, Brian L. Keeley.
00:03:19
Speaker
Someone that Josh has never spoken to, has no history with. So Josh, tell me, who is Brian Alkely? What is Brian Alkely? And where is Brian Alkely at this very moment?
00:03:35
Speaker
there's literally no way of knowing the answers to any of those questions. But maybe if we play the interview, things will slightly become a little clearer. You kind of have to introduce who he is, what he is, what he does. And maybe you could go, Brian Elkely is famous for being.
US-Centric vs. International Conspiracy Theories
00:03:54
Speaker
a philosopher of conspiracy theories, one of the very first writers of papers on the topic of the philosophy of conspiracy theories, which got us started on this whole thing, comes from Pitzer University, I think. It's a college. Pitzer College, there we go. He doesn't come from there, he works there. He works there, yes. His words come to us from that in Viron. They were recorded in his office there, so you are caring about that little thing.
00:04:21
Speaker
Well, there we go. Anyway, there have been numerous interviews with Brian published on this podcast before. I feel like I know Brian despite never having any actual conversation before. That's a very presumptuous thing to say. You feel you know someone just by listening to interviews with him. I mean, really, that's...
00:04:39
Speaker
But that is a degree of arrogance, Joshua, that I did not think you had. Oh, well, now you know. So if we play this interview, which I believe is largely a discussion between you and Brian on the merits of David Lynch films, perhaps we'll all know him a little bit better by the time we're done.
00:04:58
Speaker
Well, maybe we will. And, hopefully, you will. I mean, that's you as in the listeners, but also you, Josh. So you, in the kind of global sense. The royal you. Sorry, I'm just thinking about the royal we has to go through the royal you-bend. Something like that,
Conferences on Conspiracy Theories: Miami and Amsterdam
00:05:15
Speaker
I don't know. Play the interview! Yes.
00:05:21
Speaker
So welcome once again to Brian Keighley, friend of the show, patron of the show, and occasional listener of the show. Brian, how are things in Sully Ca... Sunny? Sully. I'd better say Sully, California. How are things in Sully, California, if you know what's going on in Sully, California at this time? It actually is not sunny, so that is not Sully as... or Sullied, maybe? I don't know. It's pretty overcast here today and...
00:05:47
Speaker
Unlike what you'd expect for Southern California, we have what's called June Gloom, and we are in full June Gloom territory here. I haven't seen the sun in a couple of days, which is kind of pleasant when you live in a desert, so no major complaints there. But if I want the sun, I can head up into the mountains and maybe get up above the cloud cover there.
00:06:09
Speaker
It's time to this, we should appeal to David Lynch in one of his daily weather forecasts. Yes, well he did have a movie called the Inland Empire, and I am actually living in the Inland Empire, which had nothing to do with the geography of the Inland Empire. Apparently David Lynch just liked that name for a region, so called his movie that.
00:06:30
Speaker
I mean that explains a lot of David Lynch's over, truth be told, likes a name, likes a theme, goes off on a tangent. Like we are right now talking about the weather in California when we should be talking about conspiracy theory theory. Now it's been a bit of a conference season for both of us recently, but you managed to go to a conference in Miami I didn't get to go to. Tell me what was happening in Miami in March.
00:06:58
Speaker
So Miami was the second meeting that a friend of the show's Joe Yusinski put together. Originally, this was the conference that was scheduled to be in March of 2020. And as you recall, March of 2020 was a rather eventful time. I think it was like five days before the conference was supposed to happen.
00:07:20
Speaker
We finally had to cancel it because of COVID. So it was supposed to happen a couple of years ago. It was three years delayed. It finally did come together. And like the previous University of Miami meeting that Joe hosted, it's an interdisciplinary conference. There were a number of philosophers there. Like I said, you were invited, but we're not able to make it at the last minute. And also,
00:07:49
Speaker
Julianell Napolitano was supposed to be there and she was not able to make it the last minute, but Martin Beaudry was there and that was first chance that I got to meet Martin face-to-face and also How's that ho I'm blanking on his first name Andrew Andrew Hogue who's kind of does history but also history with a kind of philosophically informed kind of history of conspiracy theories was
Impact of Conspiracy Theories During Trump's Presidency
00:08:16
Speaker
there and
00:08:17
Speaker
and a few people who were at least friendly to philosophy. But it was a lot of folks that were coming from other areas, political science. We had a lot of political scientists, a couple of social scientists of different sorts, social psychologists there as well, and also even a journalist.
00:08:37
Speaker
Jesse Walker from Reason magazine was there again presenting a kind of history paper connected to the sorts of things that he is working on and that come up in Reason magazine. So it was a nicely interdisciplinary conference with a couple of philosophers and then a lot of other folks that are doing other aspects of conspiracy theory theory. There was also when we discovered that Stephen Smallpage is a philosopher not a political scientist like many of us had assumed.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, he's definitely philosophy adjacent. I mean, he's somebody who does political philosophy. And as some folks may know, political philosophy occurs both in political studies context as well as in the philosophical context. And, you know, he lives at that intersection between the two.
00:09:23
Speaker
terrible thing to live at an intersection, traffic coming both ways all the time. So what was the general tenor of feeling at Miami conference? Has COVID changed the nature of the debate about conspiracy theories? I think it was, I mean, it's both COVID and the other thing. I think the original conference was in what, 2018? I don't remember when the first one happened.
00:09:50
Speaker
So it's after my book. So it's either 2017 or 2018. So the two things that had happened since then, COVID being obviously one of them, but also the real kind of, you know, the Trump administration in the United States and the kind of increase in, at least right wing in the United States context, conspiracy theories,
00:10:15
Speaker
That was something that seemed to have changed since the last time. At least it was much more on the table. We had a lot more discussion of conspiracy theory in the popular media, particularly as it comes out of the Trump presidency and other things that happened during the Trump presidency.
00:10:36
Speaker
including including COVID. And that was interesting to see because it was, there was kind of a political component to it that was stronger than I remember being there in 2017, where we had a lot of kind of historical stuff and lots of
00:10:51
Speaker
you know, work that was not so focused on the day to day of what we're dealing with in the current time, but, you know, a little bit more kind of a bigger picture of the longer term stretch of things. And, you know, whereas this conference seemed to be much more focused on, you know, what are the things that are kind of bubbling up in the news these days? And that's important.
00:11:16
Speaker
And also I think the other thing that's probably very different, I don't remember quite as much in the way of non-US centric conspiracy theory talk and dealing with examples from outside of the United States or at least outside of the English-speaking world. Whereas this one we had people that were talking about
00:11:35
Speaker
conspiracy theories in Turkey, looking at even things like non-English language conspiracy theories in the United States. Joe and his collaborators gave a paper on conspiracy theories as they're being discussed in the Spanish language media in southern Florida and so forth. So there was a nice kind of broadening out of the cultural context, which again, sometimes revolves back to Trump with the kind of growth of
00:12:04
Speaker
the growth industry of Trump style politics. So from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Erdogan in Turkey and what we're seeing in Eastern Europe with Orban and others. So there was a lot kind of a broader context of that discussion and more international context and not so Anglo specific.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, I remember in the lead up to the original date for the second conference back in 2020, before the world changed. And of course, the big events that had occurred kind of in the conspiracy landscape at that time, were Russiagate, which I know Joe Yosinski has kind of poo poo, he thinks both sides kind of overplayed their cards on that, and the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:12:50
Speaker
And at the time, I thought those were going to be the big ticket items that would have been discussed back in 2020. And of course, between 2020 and the present day, there's been an insurrection at the Capitol in the United States, which really does change the tenor of the kind of discussion because maybe Joe's right and maybe both sides kind of overplayed their cards on the Russiagate stuff.
00:13:16
Speaker
But what Trump did subsequently really does seem to be a sea change, at least on some level, in the way that politicking in America goes down now.
00:13:28
Speaker
And of course, the other thing, of course, which is a retrospective thing, when you enter the conference in March, it looked like maybe Erdogan's time in power in Turkey was coming to a close. And it turns out that didn't happen. And of course, there are conspiracy theories about that
Shift in Conspiracy Discourse Post-2020
00:13:46
Speaker
election. Yes, that's true. And as well as the Ukraine situation as well, was also something that came up in at least in conversation. I don't recall there being any papers specifically about it, but
00:13:58
Speaker
the kind of former Soviet tensions. Also, it was another thing that seems to at least people were discussing over coffee and over beers before and after. You also attended a conference in Amsterdam recently, which was organized by let me just check my notes here. Julia, do you want me to start? Oh, and also myself. Yes, yes. It was good to see you again. Since you weren't able to make it to Miami, it was good to see you in
00:14:26
Speaker
and lovely Amsterdam as well. Yeah, and that one, being much more centrally focused on philosophy per se, we had a few non-philosophers there that actually kind of more or less just dropped in to give us some wisdom and to give us some feedback, which was useful. I believe we had a sociologist there as well as a social psychologist, but it was mostly, that was mostly a philosophical affair.
00:14:53
Speaker
Yes, well, I mean, it was the second international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Although, as you point out, we had Jan William von Proyem and Jaron Harambam, who popped in to represent social psychology and sociology slash media studies. And of course, we had a few other academics popping in and out throughout the time. How was the conference from your perspective?
00:15:18
Speaker
I liked it quite a lot. First of all, the first one we had done was totally online. You can have some conversation online, but it's not quite as dynamic as it is if you can actually go out and have a beer with somebody afterwards.
00:15:34
Speaker
as well as have the follow-up at the coffee session immediately following a talk. So yeah, it was much, I was very happy to see just how active everybody is and engaging with each other and just the sheer number of people that were there, you know, considering that you can actually get together, you know, two dozen, three dozen people that are interested in specifically the philosophical aspects of conspiracy theories that was heartening to see.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, so it was actually quite nice to see that even though only a year had passed between the first conference and the second conference, there was enough new work to justify holding an entire conference one year later. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
00:16:11
Speaker
Now, you gave a paper at that conference, and actually it's the paper you also gave at Miami with the provocative title. Conspiracy theorists are not the problem, conspiracy liars are. So I guess I have to ask, who's a conspiracy liar, and how do we spot one? Well, sometimes it's just when their lips are moving, but...
00:16:35
Speaker
But yeah, I think the kind of starting point for this paper that I've been working on, it's really the only thing I've been able to get together in the last couple of months of trying to get my teaching and administrative work done on the side. But yeah, the kind of got me started was there was a piece by a columnist here in Los Angeles at the LA Times, LZ Granderson,
00:16:57
Speaker
had a very short opinion piece where he basically made the case that when you look at somebody like Alex Jones, the idea is that he claims that Alex Jones is no kind of theorist, that he's basically just a grifter, right? He's somebody who is lying in support of a particular agenda that he uses to fundraise off of or to back up, you know, give him something to say when he's not selling various kinds of
Brian Keeley's Paper on Sincerity in Conspiracy Theories
00:17:25
Speaker
health health related Snake oil that that he can make available and so I thought it was interesting place to start because when I Had thought about conspiracy theories in the past and thought about like what the genesis of conspiracy theories were I had pointed out the role of errant data right these the bits a little bits of data that just don't fit the standard story or the official story and
00:17:51
Speaker
The idea of being that the starting point for conspiracy theories doesn't necessarily have to be data that doesn't fit the official story, and that being kind of my genesis for conspiracy theories in some of our earlier work, and realizing that with people like Alex Jones who gets called a conspiracy theorist,
00:18:08
Speaker
And I think Branderson is right to point out that there's something a little odd about calling somebody like Alex Jones a conspiracy theorist, because he doesn't really seem to be mostly motivated by the idea of trying to explain phenomenon as he has another agenda that he's trying to, you know, rabble rouse or push a political agenda, get certain people elected to office, get certain policies elected in office.
00:18:30
Speaker
that that's what's really motivating them. And if that's what's motivating you, then sometimes your starting points are just going to be stuff that you make up. And so I wanted to use this as an opportunity to kind of think through the starting point of what gets called conspiracy theories and point out that not only is it just kind of good faith, but errant data, but actual sometimes just made up data.
00:18:52
Speaker
Where somebody just simply says that such and such is the case and then goes okay now let's fit that point you know that's one of the dots that needs to be connected. You're not so much connecting the dots in some dubious way or and some of those dots are maybe false dots because they were badly collected or their result of mistake.
Alex Jones: Fabricator or Theorist?
00:19:10
Speaker
but sometimes you can just make stuff up and then go okay well now now explain how things are if such and such is the case and such and such is the case because i just made it up right here or somebody else that i know made it up kind of you know put it out there and i'm you know in a bad faith sort of way i'm just going to accept it as a data point that needs to be considered
00:19:30
Speaker
Now we're both fans of the podcast Knowledge Fight and listeners, if you're not listening to Knowledge Fight and you're interested in the travails of one Alex Emmerich Jones, I'd recommend listening to a few episodes. They produce a number of hours per week, I think about six hours per week on average, covering Alex Jones.
00:19:51
Speaker
And in a fairly detailed way, and it's not just they listen to the broadcasts, they do research to actually verify the claims. And I think that's kind of what probably underpins both your and my view, that Alex Jones does make a lot of stuff up because he doesn't tell consistent stories.
00:20:12
Speaker
I guess the question becomes, should we be doing some kind of charitable interpretation? He might not be faking it. He might just be really, really bad at reasoning. I think to some extent, but sometimes it just seems to be so blatant. And I think in a lot of ways, I think the two hosts of Knowledge Fight
00:20:35
Speaker
They're pretty charitable and think that he's often sincere in what he's doing. I'm probably a little less charitable and think that he's either being insincere or just being vastly deficient in his life.
00:20:53
Speaker
fact-checking of himself. Because it seems like a lot of what he does as depicted in by the folks in Knowledge Fight is that he will accurately often read a headline and then just totally make up what he imagines that headline, the article that that headline might have been associated with
00:21:12
Speaker
saying right and and as you say you know he even changes day to day you know he'll quote back on a thing that he had discussed the day before then and just come up with completely new things so I mean it's so blatant that it seems to be almost willful but
00:21:32
Speaker
But I think that is something that, you know, when I was thinking about conspiracy theories 20 years ago, there was a kind of a, I mean, I think a blanket kind of sincerity where people were often, you know, honestly trying to make sense of things, maybe making sense of things from an interesting point of view or a nonstandard point of view or a contrarian point of view.
00:21:54
Speaker
But nonetheless, making a good faith effort to try to explain things and then running into anomalous facts that just didn't fit in with the story and then using that as a way of putting together an alternative story. But it seems to me with people like Jones and a number of other people in the more political sphere,
00:22:17
Speaker
Even preparing in advance explanations for events, I think it's pretty clear that Roger Stone had the stop the steal idea already lined up from the 2016 election.
00:22:33
Speaker
right, assuming that they were going to lose that election and was already gearing up a an account that the election was stolen and then it was rigged and everything else. And then law and behold, they won that election. So that got shelved. And then it just came back off the shelf in a kind of preformed sort of way in 2020. So when you have an entire kind of description and a story about the conspiracy behind the stealing of the election, that was seemed to have been set up for an election they ended up winning six, four years earlier.
00:23:01
Speaker
that, again, points to a kind of an insincerity of like, yeah, this is more about getting a particular political point of view across or a political agenda across than it is in explaining the facts as they see them. Now, I'm going to put my generalist hat on for a minute here, because you talked about how this might be a kind of recent thing. But I wonder, could we do the same analysis to say Bill Cooper, Alex Jones's obvious
00:23:28
Speaker
ancestor. Trying to work out the best way to put that. Not as literal ancestor, but the person that Alex Jones is kind of impersonating. Now, the problem with looking back at Bill Cooper's stuff is that most of his stuff is radio broadcast, which are essentially ephemera. Unless someone recorded them, we don't really know what he was saying on a day by day basis. The problem for Alex Jones is that almost everything he's broadcast, at least in the last 10 years,
00:23:58
Speaker
is available for people to listen to again. So we're able to go and look, Alex Jones has always been making stuff up. It might've been the case that Bill Cooper was also doing exactly the same thing as maybe his predecessors did as well. But because we don't have the record, we can't make that kind of assertion. But with Alex Jones, it's fairly evident we can see exactly what his modus operandi is.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think the Bill, I mean, I think you're right that the Bill Cooper predecessor or, you know, definitely that's the ancestor that that that somebody like Alex Jones is working off of. And but but I do think, you know, if you read, I mean, there has been a couple of what's it called pale horse rider.
00:24:45
Speaker
which is a biography of Bill Cooper. And at least as that book lays out, the kind of interesting story about Bill Cooper is he actually had a background in military intelligence. And early in his career, he was kind of building off of this idea of like, I saw certain documents
00:25:05
Speaker
that because I was a military intelligence, and perhaps even I have possession of certain documents because I was a military intelligence, and here's how they relate to what's going on today, and how there are evidence for a different kind of a story than perhaps what we're being led to believe.
00:25:23
Speaker
But then, at some point, if that's your source of evidence for your conspiracy theories, and then you're not getting a fresh supply, as it were. He was in the military for a certain period of time. He presumably can make a reasonable case that he saw certain documents.
00:25:41
Speaker
Sierka, 1967 to 1969 when he was serving in military intelligence. And that's going to be great for the early 1970s. But as Cooper's career goes on, and it's getting into the 80s, and he isn't getting new stuff, then he kind of has to shift gears. And that's when he starts to talk about
00:26:00
Speaker
stuff that wasn't part of his earlier story about you know now it's involving aliens and whatnot kind of goes back originally you know it genetically it can be tied back to that earlier stuff buddy you can only get so much out of that and then you start to have to like okay well what are gonna be the new bases for my new conspiracy theories that I gotta kind of keep the the ball rolling as it were and
00:26:24
Speaker
And I like the way that Alex Jones kind of picks up the Bill Cooper idea. He's always constantly talking about the stacks and stacks of documents that I have on the desk here in front of me. He never actually shares any of these documents. He always promises to share them and he will make them all available. And one of the good things that Knowledge Fight tends to do is they show that when there is any kind of mention of an actual document, they actually kind of go and look it up and then often find that it simply doesn't contain the thing that Alex Jones
00:26:54
Speaker
suggested that it contained. But, you know, Alex Jones never had that. Like, he never had a history of military intelligence. He never had, you know, a source of actual documents that... No, no, Brian, his father apparently was a very senior dentist who heard all sorts of things when people... That's when, yeah. Which seems to be his primary early intelligence sources. People told my dad.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, that is true. Yeah, good point. Although that usually wasn't document based. It was, as you said, it was testimonial based from what his father had said to him on secondhand information. But yeah, I think in many ways, you know, and I just heard a really nice piece recently of Bill Cooper, basically castigating the early Alex Jones. So there was a period of overlap where both Alex Jones was kind of the beginning of his career,
00:27:47
Speaker
before the death of Bill Cooper towards the end of his career. And, you know, Bill Cooper raking Alex Jones over the coals exactly for just simply making stuff up. And contrasting himself with Alex Jones of like, you know, I'm giving you the real dirt because I was actually in military intelligence and you know, my documentation is there. This guy Alex Jones is just making stuff up. And just telling people, you know, don't believe a word he says,
00:28:17
Speaker
But of course, there's also that conflict of interest that it was clear that Alex Jones was starting to cut in on the readership base or the listenership base of somebody like Bill Cooper. And then Bill Cooper ended up getting killed in a confrontation with the police. And then that kind of left the field wide open for Alex Jones to just kind of push on with the state, you know, many ways the same kind of schtick.
00:28:43
Speaker
But with even less basis for the documentation that is supposed to be laying behind it.
00:28:59
Speaker
potentially because he was an establishment figure. He was a footballer who then became a journalist for the BBC. Arguably he probably knew a little bit about the kind of machinations behind the scenes that was going on in the kind of power struggle that the BBC had with reporting certain stories and the government pressuring them to not report other things.
00:29:22
Speaker
that initially maybe some of his conspiratorial speculation might have been based upon things he heard in tea rooms whilst he was a reporter, and then seems to have gone just ever so slightly further than maybe that evidence suggests.
00:29:41
Speaker
And so it kind of raises a kind of interesting question about did these people start off as conspiracy liars? Or were they actually sincere conspiracy theorists who, as you say, ran out of data and then had to keep an audience by making things up in what they presumably think is kind of, well, you know, it's fair game. It's probably true. I mean, the other stuff I was reporting on was definitely true. And this seems,
00:30:08
Speaker
possibly like something that those evil people do as well. Yeah. I mean, the interesting comparison case is somebody like Edward Snowden, who also had access to all sorts of documents, made them available, kind of behaved in a different way, did not, you know, call on them themselves, but turned them over to legitimate journalistic and
00:30:31
Speaker
you know, sources and then had them figure out what to do with it and how to publish and so forth. But also there's the many ways in which Ed Snowden has kind of, you know, moved off of that, you know, that he's not continuing on as if he still has stories to tell about that stuff from now 15 years ago.
00:30:50
Speaker
Whereas, but he's not also trying to maintain a media empire the way that Bill Cooper or Alex Jones are trying to do. He doesn't, he's not in a position where he needs fresh new stuff to build conspiracy theories around.
Evaluating Evidence in Modern Conspiracy Theories
00:31:03
Speaker
He did his thing. He built something based on the documents that he had, but now he no longer has access, and is no longer in the circle, and in a sense, has to be quiet, or at least not spin new stuff. He can be a general expert on what it's like to be the target of such kinds of investigations.
00:31:25
Speaker
but there's a way in which alex jones i think you're right maybe it starts off as something sincere but then if you're gonna keep the thing going.
00:31:34
Speaker
Right. It's you know, there's a point in when Alex Jones was, you know, mainly known for being in rather in different link letter movies where he's kind of just a performative Rantor that is fun to turn a camera on and have him kind of go off on fact free or at least fact limited conspiracy theories about things. But you know, it's kind of hard to turn that into a multimillion dollar career, which is what
00:31:59
Speaker
Jones seems to have ended up with. So this gets us back to the original question. How do we spot the difference between an Alex Jones and Edward Snowden? Oh, I mean, I think some of it is just a put up or shut up, right? I mean, if you have somebody who consistently says they have documents and then doesn't actually share them, or as you were pointing to before, if somebody's evidence is, well, I heard that, right? And it's another trope that
00:32:25
Speaker
you know that that Alex Jones likes to push all the time of like I'm on the phone for several hours every morning talking to top generals are calling me every day I've got this I've got a sweet line to the White House the general White House was with me just this morning I was eating breakfast with him
00:32:41
Speaker
So you have these testimony, which then, you know, then the lack of data or lack of actual documentation is like, well, I'm not going to be recording my phone conversations with these people that are calling me up. I mean, I've often wondered if it would be possible to kind of hire a private investigator to follow Alex Jones around and then try to kind of line up like,
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, we've accounted for his, you know, his whereabouts pretty much everywhere. Yet he said he spent four or five hours this morning, you know, reading these documentations. And he also spent a couple hours on the phone talking to people, you know, we saw him at a coffee shop the entire time or, or out in public and whatnot. It's like, we can't account for his time. It doesn't seem like an appropriate alibi. That's kind of a, you know,
00:33:22
Speaker
kind of fantasy of trying to figure out like, can you make sense of the time that he claims he's spending doing things? Because he's not providing us with anything documentation. He's just reporting what he claims to have heard. That's a really clever idea. Surely some of the lawyers behind the Sandy Hook stuff must have at least thought of surveilling Alex Jones using a private detective to see
00:33:44
Speaker
exactly how he spends his time. Or even just having that be the source of like, what do you do when you flip somebody on the inside? Just like, yeah, can you just give me a rundown of what he's been doing on the last week? Where was he? Who was he talking to? If he was on the phone the entire time, then that would be evidence. Maybe he's right. He really is talking to high-level generals and Air Force commanders. And if he's sitting there and staring at a screen, then maybe he really is reading documents.
00:34:14
Speaker
but sometimes it seems like he's got some people feeding him some memes and giving him headlines, because it's a lot of work to, as an academic, I can tell you, reading papers, it's a lot of work, takes a lot of time, especially if you're gonna absorb it and kind of be able to say something interesting about the documents. If all I had to do was read the headlines in PubMed and then kind of make up stories about what those headlines were saying, that'd make life a lot easier.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah, actually, reviewing papers would be a lot easier if you reviewed them only on, say, the title and the abstract. Yeah. I suppose the problem, of course, is a lot of this conspiracy liar stuff is retrospective. So we know an awful lot about Alex Jones. We've got a long history of people looking into the work of Alex Jones, looking into the work of people like Bill Cooper and David Icke.
00:35:09
Speaker
And we've also got a bit of history looking into people like, say, Tucker Carlson and looking at the kind of motivations and the way that they work. But what do we do when we encounter a new labeled conspiracy theorist for the first time? How do we make that distinction? Yeah, I think you just have to look at the evidence that they are presenting or it's like, you know, if somebody is saying, you know, I've got a theory about everything, how a particular event happened,
00:35:39
Speaker
Then again, it's a put up or shut up, like, okay, well, what, what are the dots that you're connecting? And what are the evidence that those dots are accurate? And, you know, if they're just drawing on new sources, then let's look at new sources.
00:35:54
Speaker
Or they, you know, like, as we see with sometimes with Alex Jones, where, you know, they'll give you a headline. But then if you look at the actual paper, the article that the headline is a headline to, it ends up saying the exact opposite of what he claimed the dot is that needs to be connected. So I mean, I think we're, we're back to show us show us the evidence. And if somebody is not presenting evidence, or is saying that the evidence is something that, you know, I can't tell you because it's, you know, secret,
Propaganda vs. Conspiracy Theories
00:36:25
Speaker
then at some point, you're like, well, come back to me when you've got something you can share.
00:36:30
Speaker
I mean, we saw recently with the person who's trying to claim the $5 million, I think it is from Mike Lindell about, hey, I've got this. Yeah. The person who pointed out that the data inside the file is basically just cryptographic nonsense. Yes, or just perhaps is gibberish. And doesn't even have the right form. It doesn't even look like the kinds of files that you'd expect from
00:36:56
Speaker
If it is the evidence that it's purported to be, then you would expect to find certain kind of metadata in it that he's simply not finding. And that's how he thinks he can make the argument is like, yeah, I've actually done the stronger thing to show that this cannot be the evidence in favor of the claim that you're making. And that person
00:37:14
Speaker
trying to make the case for that, saying, yeah, I'm going to actually look at the evidence that you've presented and then finding it lacking. Although that, of course, raises a new issue. I was about to take us down the generalism particulars route, given that all the sort of evidence seems to indicate we need to be evaluating conspiracy theories on the evidence, which is a standard particulars claim. But the Michael and Del thing, I think, throws a bit of a spanner in the work because
00:37:41
Speaker
It seems fairly evident that Mike Lindell himself was conned into thinking that the packet of information he had was evidence of an election being stolen. So he sincerely believes this file contains within it all the information necessary to prove that actually Trump won the last election.
00:38:04
Speaker
So he was conned, and is now sincerely pursuing this con, even though actually it turns out he was conned in the first place. Use the word con there three times in various connotations, but we all know what I'm trying to say in my slightly jet lag state.
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think the lying doesn't actually have to be, the falsehoods do not have to be actually generated by the person who's creating the belief. The lie may be generated by somebody else that you simply are picking up on and not doing due diligence to make sure that the evidence that's being claimed to you is actually evidence of the sort that's being claimed.
00:38:45
Speaker
So that would make someone like Kelly Conway a conspiracy liar as well, even if she's standing at the White House podium, acting as a press secretary, delivering lines given to her by someone like, let's say, Alex Jones, by Donald Trump. Even if she sincerely believes the Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States, she's still engaging in the kind of conspiracy liar mentality.
00:39:12
Speaker
Perhaps, although, yeah, I think, you know, Kellyanne Conway might be somebody who's a different case altogether in that, that I don't even know if
00:39:21
Speaker
What I'm suggesting is there's an alternative to conspiracy theorizing explanation as opposed to conspiracy theorizing as agenda pushing. I think Kellyanne Conway is an agenda pusher from day one. I don't think she ever sincerely suggests that, hey, I've got a conspiracy that I want to sell you on. She's like, no, I want certain politicians to be elected and I want certain policies to be brought about.
00:39:47
Speaker
And, you know, in politics and in war, everything is, you know, all is fair. And then you just push whatever you want to push. I mean, that's, again, if Alex Jones is simply a political operative of the sort that Kellyanne Conway is, and by the way, as Roger Stone is, right, they're just trying to make certain political things happen.
Interdisciplinary Approaches in Conspiracy Theory Research
00:40:07
Speaker
And if you lie on the behalf of that, well, fine, it's that's just the world that we're, you know, that they're in.
00:40:14
Speaker
They're not sincerely offering theories of that are explanatory in nature. It's just propaganda and And I think I think that's just going to be in a separate category. So maybe that's is like, how do you tell it's not?
00:40:30
Speaker
How do you tell whether a conspiracy theory is legitimate or not? This is asking, like, how do you tell the difference between conspiracy theories and propaganda? Because we used to live in a time where conspiracy theory and propaganda were in two different lanes and two different phenomena. Whereas now, and this is maybe something that's happened
00:40:47
Speaker
since the first, you know, the circle back to the first of the Joe Yosinski's University of Miami things, is that there's a way in which now conspiracy theories just are of a piece with propaganda, or at least certain subsets of conspiracy theories are just propagandists. Because I think when LZ Granderson says, you know, Alex Jones is no kind of a theorist, what he's saying is he's a propagandizer, which is just a different, you know, a
00:41:16
Speaker
a different agenda, a different set of goals. Yeah, so they're using conspiracy lies in order to further a political goal. Yeah.
00:41:24
Speaker
And it could be, you know, knowing our history of philosophy, right? There's, you know, there's Socrates and the philosophers on the one hand and the sophist on the other, right? And the goal of the sophist is to convince people of certain things, truth be damned. Whereas, you know, Socrates and the philosophers, Plato and others are on the other side of things like, no, the thing that we're interested in is pursuing the truth, pursuing wisdom, trying to get things right.
00:41:50
Speaker
and criticizing sophistry for simply being about getting certain agendas met and convincing people of things. And yeah, that's a different, are you trying to convince people of things or are you trying to explain things? Those are not, they don't go hand in hand. So talking about sophistry, you've given this paper at two conferences, the Miami Conference and the Amsterdam Conference. How did it go down in each venue?
00:42:18
Speaker
I think the context for both is a little different. Things go a little faster in Miami. We had a lot of papers. I think it was even like 15 minutes for presentation, a couple of minutes for questions. I think it was fairly well received, but there was
00:42:42
Speaker
It was much for faster pace in terms of like just getting material out there and also Many the audience were not philosophers. I mean, I'm pretty sure all the philosophers are pretty much sitting on the stage with me at that particular session and you know, I got some interesting feedback from from Martin Bodry and and and Andrew but
00:43:06
Speaker
I mean, I feel like the, in Amsterdam, I had a little bit more time to present it, got a little bit more in and feedback from other people. And there was a way in which it tied in with what other people were doing. You know, so, you know, we got the reaction of other people kind of, you know, name checking the argument that I was making in later papers, because it kind of fit in with the kind of philosophical stuff that they were interested in talking about.
00:43:33
Speaker
which didn't really happen so much in Miami because the people that were following me were not philosophers. So they were like, yeah, this is interesting. I like the idea. Or in some cases, of course. Yeah, that's just obviously what's going on, particularly if you're coming at conspiracy theories from a political science perspective or from a media studies perspective. That's like, yeah, that's obviously what Alex Jones is and people like that are trying to do. It's, you know, maybe
00:44:00
Speaker
only philosophers that are kind of focused on this kind of philosophy of science perspective, that is where we kind of started off talking about this stuff that seems to need more of a commentary.
00:44:12
Speaker
So something quite wonderfully synergistic about the Amsterdam conference with people building not only on prior work, but making references to papers given at the conference going, well, you know, as X has said, we can follow this particular line, which suggests a nice thriving research community within philosophy around conspiracy theory theory.
00:44:36
Speaker
As someone who went to the Miami conference, do you feel that there's much interdisciplinary work going on in the wider conspiracy theory theory world? I mean, I think so, because I think there's a way in which, you know, the philosophers have our particular set of concerns and things that are kind of motivating us. And I think just it's a broader set of concerns that are
00:45:01
Speaker
kind of on the table with more interdisciplinary work. And, you know, and I think partly because of the audience there was a much more social science oriented audience and participants there at the workshop. And so I got the impression there was much, you know, kind of much more interplay between them. And even, you know, because of the, you know, there were only, like I said,
00:45:25
Speaker
In the end, only two or three of us there from philosophy out of about 45 or so people that were there altogether kind of diluted our voice in a way and made it less. We were the minority there in terms of the kind of things that we were interested in and things that we were pushing.
00:45:44
Speaker
But things were very vibrant in terms of what the political scientists, what the social scientists, and others were kind of dealing with, and I think interacting with one another in useful sorts of ways. So what are you working on next, if indeed you're working on anything conspiracy theory related?
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, I need to finish writing up this paper and kind of get it to the point, it's pretty close to being ready for prime time to send around to you and to some folks that were at both of the conferences, people that showed an interest in it and get that feedback.
00:46:20
Speaker
And then after that, there's another, my day job is more looking at things in philosophy of neuroscience. And there's another workshop that's coming up in September that I need to get an abstract together with before July 1st. So that's what I'm working on at the current moment and not even sure what I'm gonna do for that yet. But at the moment, I'm just kind of coming off of a period of time where I was getting a lot of administrative work done at my college. So on the committee that does all the tenuring and hiring at my college,
00:46:49
Speaker
We had six tenure cases this past year, and we hired five new tenure track professors. I'll be on the committee again next year. I won't be sharing it next year, but we will have a couple of more tenure cases and promotions and hiring probably another four people, including hopefully hiring a new philosopher. Most of the hiring that I've been doing has been other parts of the college, not philosophy per se.
00:47:13
Speaker
That's kind of cut into my my research time and Certainly I kind of come up with another another thing to kind of think about in terms of conspiracy theories and I'm a quite hit upon on on that yet I mean have you thought about getting funding to stick probes in the brains of conspiracy theorists to see exactly what's going on in there if anything at all? Well, I think
00:47:37
Speaker
I do have a colleague here who works in experimental philosophy who does a lot of survey work, but in particular, he's interested in survey work where you don't just give people a Google Turk survey and give a Likert scale reaction to different kinds of things, but to kind of drill down a little bit more, it's called the talk aloud method, which is a method that's used in more qualitative social psychology.
00:48:00
Speaker
Where you kind of drill down and talk to people and have them kind of talk out loud about their reasoning behind giving survey responses and. Keep thinking that might be an interesting thing to do to kind of replicate some of the work that's been done in social psychology around conspiracy theories and then but using this talk aloud method to kind of.
Future Directions in Conspiracy Theory Studies
00:48:18
Speaker
get people to talk more out loud about what it is that they're thinking through and why they gave the answers that they gave and how did they read the question because that's often I think an important thing that we kind of overlook when we're just kind of getting some p-values out of Likert scales.
00:48:34
Speaker
Yes, this is something that Martinor and Chinna Husting and I have talked about. It'd be great to do some discourse and that analysis actually sits down with people both who believe and don't believe conspiracy theories and elicit their rationales rather than simply relying on kind of umbrella terms and then trying to infer, well, you said you
00:48:57
Speaker
You moderately agree with this claim, but what does it actually mean? Does it mean you think it's likely to be true, or you think it's just plausible enough that you want to entertain? It'd be very useful to have that kind of discourse to find out exactly why people reason the way they do.
00:49:15
Speaker
rather than relying on these kinds of umbrella or abstract terms, which often play the role of conspiracy theories in the academic literature, but probably don't resemble what people actually believe. Yeah. Yeah. And I think also kind of, you know, trying to broaden it in that we, you know, we tend to focus on right wing conspiracy theories, but, you know, figuring out a way of also including people from across the political spectrum, because as we know,
00:49:41
Speaker
You know, conspiracy theories are something that is seen across the board, as well as conspiracy theories that are quite plausible that we ought to believe in. Be nice to kind of include all of those instead of the kind of focus on the ones that are more
00:49:59
Speaker
you know, clearly out of the gate problematic, right? You know, to get that kind of full spectrum of conspiracy thinking. Well, yes. I mean, when you mentioned conspiracy theories, we ought to believe it would have been really quite fascinating to have a talk aloud or discourse analysis of the people who believe there were weapons of mass destruction being created by the Saddam Hussein regime to see how their reasoning worked as to why they believed the official come conspiracy theory of that event. Yep.
00:50:29
Speaker
I agree. No, there's a lot of fruitful work to be done, which I think is the thing which is most exciting about the conference is I came away with more ideas than I went going into it, which is on one level, great. On another level means that my list of things to do has now got immensely longer, and it was very long to start with.
00:50:52
Speaker
Yes, that's true. There's just too much to read. Yes, that's true. And if we were Alex Joneses, we wouldn't have to worry about that. We could just get our RSS feed to give us the headlines from all the websites we like to look at. And then we could draw our own conclusions from it. What a sweet life that would be. That would be indeed.
00:51:12
Speaker
And then we could get sued for all sorts of weird claims we made online and then owe billions of dollars to people that in some cases we've never met but we have lied about quite frequently. So yes, is there any slander you want to commit before we bring this interview to a close? Anything you want to get into trouble for? I think I'll just keep my head down as usual.
00:51:38
Speaker
It might be circled back to the conspiracy theories involving the long dead people. So keep that on the down low. Make as many claims about Julius Caesar as you please, but try and stay clear of the 20th and 21st century. Sounds right to me. Well, thank you, Brian. Once again, an illuminating chat, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Sounds great. Take care.
00:52:07
Speaker
And there you have it. So, yes, just to completely negate the point of the Agni sketch, I have listened to that interview all the way through. I do now feel that I have to go and listen to the talk that Brian gave at your conference.
00:52:25
Speaker
because it does sound like an interesting one. I assume that the focus of his talk was this idea of the people like the Alex Joneses who may or may not actually believe what they're saying at all and are just putting out conspiracy theories to make money or further a cause or something. Was that the focus of it?
00:52:43
Speaker
Yeah, so it's all based around a piece of the press in the US where someone, you know, Alex Jones is no kind of theorist, and then we kind of itemise the ways in which Alex Jones is a insincere grifter. I suppose actually all grifters are insincere, so that's a bit of a tautology. Are there, are there sincere grifters? Are there
00:53:07
Speaker
Grifters who are... That was part of what you guys were talking about. And also some people seem to... The royal family appear to be very sincere grifters. They really do believe they are better than anyone else. And because of that, other people should pay for their existence. So that's a kind of sincere grifting, which I don't appreciate. I don't like, but I do understand on the notion that there are some people out there who have very wacky beliefs about the superiority of their bloodlines.
00:53:36
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, in the interview just now, you guys talked about like, who did you was the example that Mike Lindell, the pillow guy was it? Oh, yes. Did appear to genuinely, or at least it seemed possible that he genuinely believed some of his stuff, which could make him a genuine grifter, or maybe he is just a grifty and there's a
00:53:56
Speaker
another another insincere grifter behind him i don't know fun fact the pillow man is one of the worst plays i've ever seen really yeah it's been getting good reviews i've heard yeah so admittedly the pillow man that i saw was a production at the madement almost 10 years ago and you could tell it wasn't very good because
00:54:19
Speaker
half of the audience walked away during the intermission, in part because they thought the play had ended, not realising it was a play in 2X.
00:54:31
Speaker
And that's kind of telling when the audience go, oh, that's that narrative over a dud-dud with time to go home without being at all curious by the fact that it's an intermission and maybe there's going to be slightly more. I also starred Craig Parker in a leading role. And Craig Parker has never been El Toro's finest actor. He's largely coasted on Lord of the Rings and it's kind of telling. But yes, there's a new production of it at the moment with Lily Allen.
00:55:01
Speaker
the lead role. Well she has taken a turn for the actor ring ever since she got together with David Harbaugh. I have no idea why we're talking about this now. Oh because we're talking about Mike Lindell, the pillow guy. Yes. I mean he based himself on a terrible play and understandably it doesn't work.
00:55:21
Speaker
But yes, so sorry, there was a paper that talked about people being grifters and sincere or otherwise, or an article, and Brian's talk is based on that? Well, yeah, so there was this piece, and I'm not going to try to pronounce the journalist's name, because I'm going to get it completely wrong, because I haven't got it written down. As I say, he makes a claim that Alex Jones is no kind of theorist. And Brian's is basically going through that, look, there are
00:55:49
Speaker
particular issues to do with conspiracy theorists.
00:55:55
Speaker
And we have to be aware that not every person who claims to be a conspiracy theorist is engaging in the intellectual activity of conspiracy theorizing. Some people really are using the rhetoric of conspiracy theory to labor other points, whether it is being a political ideologue, making money from selling pigs urine and the like,
00:56:22
Speaker
And so if we're going to use them as examples of the problems to do with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing generally, then we need to be aware that not everything which is marked out as a conspiracy theory, and not everything which is marked out, not everyone who's marked out as a conspiracy theorist,
00:56:47
Speaker
is actually deserving of those labels. So yes, if like me, you're interested to know more about this topic, you can go to Em's YouTube channel where your username is just Conspiracism, is it not? I think the username is Conspiracis, so the channel's called Conspiracism. The username is Conspiracis because by the time YouTube, as people will be aware, YouTube went through this thing of going away from
00:57:15
Speaker
random ID numbers to actual channel names. And they did it by basically releasing tranches of names to people at particular points. By the time they came to my poxy little channel, someone else had already taken the username Conspiracism. So even though I am Conspiracism, my technical YouTube username is Conspiracist. Well, there we go. So at any rate,
00:57:41
Speaker
Fine. Find Em's Conspiracism YouTube channel by fear means or foul. What foul means? Could someone find a YouTube channel? I don't know. Paying a private investigator to stand over you while you sleep and divine your username from your nocturnal mutterings or something. I don't know.
00:58:05
Speaker
So this private investigator, are they sending over you as you sleep or me as I sleep?
00:58:12
Speaker
I would imagine you or, you know, tapping your most intimate communications to find out the name of your YouTube channel or things like that. I'm looking at your YouTube channel right now, as you're right, your username is at Conspiracist. And there I see uploaded nine days ago at time of recording the talk from Brian L. Keeley, conspiracy theorists are not the problem, conspiracy liars are.
00:58:37
Speaker
So there you go. Look that up if you want to know more. It is true. Everything you just said, I will not deny it. So at just over 10 minutes of recording, we're done for all we need to do. And when I say where we fall, I need to do you've already done the work of interviewing Brian and putting that together.
00:58:55
Speaker
We're basically done for this week's main episode, but of course there is a bonus episode for our beloved patrons that we'll have to do. We're going to talk about an interesting email that we received the other day. We have an email address, Em's little outro thing, he does mention it, but I'm pretty sure it's podcastconspiracyatgmail.com. Mostly it's used by people who've sort of, you know, done some automated
00:59:21
Speaker
data-scraping thing and found any podcast that sounds like it might have something to do with them and send us things. Where can we get things like, do you want to interview this crazy person or read this crazy person's book? We have an email along those lines. So we want to discuss with you, our not crazy patrons. That's because this email makes some assumptions. Some interesting, yeah.
00:59:45
Speaker
But we'll also talk about the latest Jeffrey Epstein developments. He's still dead, but other things have happened. A bit of other stuff, that submarine that imploded, going to see the Titanic. There's been conspiracy theories around that. You'll be amazed. Still imploded. Still imploded. It is also still imploded. And a bit of other stuff. But anyway, the point is, the point is
01:00:08
Speaker
If you'd like to listen to that and you're a patron, well, then you can. And you probably already know that by now. But if you'd like to listen to that and you're not a patron, you can sign yourself up by going to betraying.com and searching for the podcast. It's going to the conspiracy and you'll have access to this bonus episode you're about to record, plus all of the other ones we've already recorded, plus any other ones we record from now until the end of time. Magic.
01:00:28
Speaker
It is. It is a kind of magic. It's literal magic. But for now, that is the end of this main episode. So before we before we hang up, change rooms and go to record the bonus episode, I'm going to round things out with a good, good, good solid helping of goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
01:00:55
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.