Transcript
Speaker: The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison. Also in Auckland, New Zealand is Dr. M. Denteth, but not here right now recording an episode of this podcast. This one's a little bit late as it was. We were planning to record an episode late this week.
Speaker: And then that just hasn't worked out, so I'm quickly giving you a little bit of a filler and then hopefully we'll get a proper episode recorded for this week at the usual time. But I figure since Em did a sterling job of putting out filler episodes while I was swanning off sunning myself in Thailand,
Speaker: The least I can do is put up a quick bit of filler for this week. So we have a few things that we had put in our notes for last week's bonus episode, items from the news from last week, which if we leave them until the next proper episode will be a little bit out of date. So they might as well form the basis for this episode right now.
Speaker: So the first thing I was going to talk about then and which I am going to talk about now is you're probably already sick of me talking about the Behind the Bastards podcast. There are a couple of podcast recommendations right now. Behind the Bastards, which I keep going on about because I find it the most interesting podcast of the ones I listen to,
Speaker: But we finally got ahead of them. A couple of weeks after we did our episode on the Bavarian Illuminati, Behind the Basterds did a series on the Illuminati.
Speaker: although in their usual style, they went into a lot more depth. It's a four -part series, so all up about five hours worth of material. It goes into a lot more detail, especially before and after, because as we said now, the original Bavarian Illuminati wasn't really active for very long at all before it got shut down.
Speaker: but this series goes through the history of secret societies in general leading up to the formation of the Bavarian Illuminati and then follows on afterwards for various other secret societies that it influenced and inspired in the years that followed. The most interesting thing I thought about though was where it talks about
Speaker: exactly why there are conspiracy theories about the Illuminati in particular, which basically comes down to the French Revolution. I think people outside of France from the sounds of it looked at the French Revolution going on.
Speaker: and thought, how could this have happened? The idea that it could have been something that just sort of occurred organically didn't seem feasible. That would imply that the system in France was so unbalanced and unjust that it naturally led to some sort of people's revolution. I know that couldn't possibly be the case. So a lot of people outside of France, and probably inside France as well, assumed that there must have been this malevolent force behind it that was directing the whole thing.
Speaker: And because the Freemasons and the Illuminati had just sort of been in the news, as it were, had just been outlawed in Germany, various people decided, oh, they must have been, these secret societies that were in the news must have been the ones behind. And so that seemed to be the first instance of people blaming world events on the malign influence of the Illuminati, these secret societies who are supposedly pulling the strings in the background, especially because
Speaker: in the case of the Illuminati, obviously the French Revolution, all about their, what is it, liberté, galité, fraternité. And those were basically the three values of the Illuminati. That was what they were promoting, the kinds of societal changes they were trying to bring about. So some people put two and two together and got five. And that seems to have been where it started. And then that sort of got exported to the States and the door gets tangled up and sort of, you know,
Speaker: the evils of atheism and things like that. But definitely if you're interested in learning more about the Illuminati and what came before and after it, you could do a lot worse than listen to the latest series in Behind the Bastards.
Speaker: Now, another podcast, I don't know if I can call this a recommendation because I haven't listened to it myself, so I can't really give you a decent impression, but I, and I assume him as well, have ended up on various email lists.
Speaker: by virtue of having a podcast that's to do with conspiracy theories. And so I just started receiving emails a little while ago about advertising each episode as they come out of a new podcast called The Sound Mystery of Havana Syndrome. And so this is apparently an eight part podcast, episode seven, I think just came up.
Speaker: where they're going through the whole thing. And obviously, if you've been listening to our podcast for any length of time, we've talked about it a bunch because it's been around for many years now and people keep talking about it and keep coming up to fairly contradictory conclusions as to whether it's
Speaker: exists or not to begin with, whether it's the result of malign foreign agents, whether it's coincidence, whether it's some sort of selection bias mixed with hypochondria or what have you. And so this podcast seems to be going right through the whole thing, tracing back from the earliest reportings of it and going through... I'll give you their words. It says,
Speaker: The Sound is a story about spycraft, technology, and the brain. It's a story where at every turn you're never quite sure what's real and what's an illusion. It's a story about how the Cold War maybe never really ended. We'll explore the wild and wide variety of theories that have been put forward. Could it be caused by noisy crickets or mosquito spray, or could it all be a mass delusion? We'll hear from the cast of characters who inhabit this world, diplomats and spies, neurologists and physicists, skeptics and believers, and with their help begin to piece the evidence together.
Speaker: journalist by the name of Nikki Wolf is helming this one. So if you want to hear more about Varna syndrome, this looks like it's a fairly in -depth investigation, but as I say, I haven't actually listened to the whole thing. Once all eight parts are out, I might sort of give it a bit of a binge and see what they have to say. Although this does give an excellent segue into some of the news pieces we were going to be talking about because
Speaker: This is the nearly at the end of this series and it was only last Friday, I think.
Speaker: When was it? Last Wednesday, Wednesday the 1st of March, when newspaper reports came out that the Havana Syndrome was not caused by any sort of foreign adversary. So I would be surprised. I don't know. Maybe that will be nimble enough to include this one in their final episode, which is yet to hear.
Speaker: I wonder if this is going to conflict with any of the other stuff that they've already said. Because basically what happened, I think it was first reported by the Washington Post and other news agencies have picked it up, but it's basically that Havana Syndrome, Havana Havana, however you wish to say it,
Speaker: was not caused by an energy weapon or any sort of action by any sort of a foreign adversary. The wording is that U .S. intelligence has concluded this.
Speaker: As I've been noticing a bit lately, the US has a lot of intelligence agencies. We probably know this. And they all say a lot of things and they don't always necessarily agree with one another. But in this case, apparently this seven intelligence agencies were involved in this investigation. The article that I'm reading doesn't actually list them.
Speaker: possibly the original Washington Post one does, but I don't have a subscription so I can't read it. That's the internet these days. But so it's basically said, the quote is, available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents.
Speaker: So of the seven intelligence agencies that were involved in this report, five of them said foreign adversary involvement was very unlikely, one simply said it was unlikely, and one of the agencies didn't give a conclusion. They didn't say which is which though.
Speaker: So they said they were open to new evidence. They've said they can't find any evidence of energy weapons or foreign agents doing anything. They said they were open to new evidence that this could be the case. If new evidence came along, they said that they're not conclusively saying, no, there's no way it could have been that. It's just that there is no evidence they can see that did it, that that was what had happened.
Speaker: They say there is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing AHIs. That's anomalous health incidents because everything has to have a three -letter acronym. That's just good spycraft, as I understand it. Now, of course,
Speaker: If you've been listening to us for a while, we tend to pounce on any sort of development in this case. And last year, there was a case also from, quote unquote, U .S. intelligence that basically said that yes, it was electromagnetic energy ultrasound could have been could very plausibly have been behind Havana syndrome. Now that
Speaker: That 2002 report was the outcome of a panel which convened in 2021 by the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the CIA.
Speaker: People have pointed out problems with this. They basically say that they, where are we, three agents? So I think this is the report on that. It says, in light of this and the evidence that points away from a foreign adversary causal mechanism or unique syndrome linked to AHIs, IC agencies, IC intelligence community agencies, assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary
Speaker: such as pre -existing conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors. This report does say that there are, what's the quote, methodological limitations to that earlier report, and they say that they don't
Speaker: seem to place a lot of stock in its findings. And once again, out of those seven agencies, three of them have high confidence in that assessment that the previous report is unlikely. Three of them have moderate confidence and one has low confidence. Now, obviously, this like is probably always going to be the case from now until the end of time has not settled the matter entirely.
Speaker: The article that I've read ends with a quote from a man called Mark Zayed, who's an attorney representing victims from the various federal agencies who claim to be victims of Havana syndrome. So he says that the findings of this report are very disconcerting and is already planning to challenge their conclusions. He says, until the shrouds of secrecy are lifted and the analysis that led to today's assertions are available and subject to proper challenge, the alleged conclusions are substantively worthless.
Speaker: strong words, continues, it is inconceivable based on an overwhelming number of unanswered questions that today's report will serve as the last word. Well, no, it definitely won't, I think, as I said. It says this is what they think. They think there is evidence that something didn't happen. They are open to the possibility of other evidence coming along that shows that it did happen.
Speaker: But either way, no 100 % conclusion. This is exactly the case. So I don't know. We haven't heard the last of it. We know this. This, I think, is just the ongoing theme. So maybe it will be worth listening into that whole podcast series and see where they take things. But for now, that's where it stands. Now that was the one bit of news.
Speaker: that we were going to talk about. Had we left it till this week, it would be more than a week out of date. So best we talk about it. Now, the other one was one. This was the one that I saw last Friday. Our good friend, the false flag. But not as it most depressingly is invoked these days in the case of a mass shooting incident in the United States. This is an actual false flag wartime thing. There have been accusations of it going on in the Russia -Ukraine conflict.
Speaker: Towards the end of last week, Russian outlets were claiming that Ukrainian forces had gone across the border from Ukraine into Russia.
Speaker: and were attacking forces within Russia. So there was a talk referred to them as saboteurs. Some reports said there were up to 50 Ukrainian fighters, some said up to 80. There was talk of hostages being taken, people shooting at various people at civilians, claims that this resident was killed, a 10 -year -old child was wounded.
Speaker: talk of shelling of a couple of villages in Russia. And then, yes, there were a lot of reports going around. After there were reports of these two villages, Lomakovka and Sushani had been shelled, then there was talk that people had been taken hostage.
Speaker: in those villages. One claim of up to 100 hostages having been taken, but that appears to have been an exaggeration to the point of never actually happening perhaps. There were a lot of reports, they weren't 100 % consistent and there does not appear to have been confirmation
Speaker: from external forces, but the quotes from this footage were basically saying, look, here are the Ukrainians storming into Russia, fighting civilians, look how evil they are. Now Ukraine, of course, has said that this did not happen at all. The story itself
Speaker: is headlined that there are the claims of a false flag event, although the actual quotes they give from Ukrainian people in the Ukrainian military or leadership don't actually use the phrase themselves, they more suggest that it's just that it might just be completely untrue, but they essentially say no, the Ukraine
Speaker: They're not, they're not, what are we? Let's give you the quote. It's from Ukrainian Colonel Anatoly Stevan. He says, they do not take into account the fact that soldiers of the Defense Forces of Ukraine have never resorted to provocations, are not resorting to them now, and will not resort to provocations. So yes, there are, as has always been the case, and it should come as no surprise whatsoever, conflicting reports coming out of
Speaker: Ukraine and Russia, but this is the first time I'm aware of that there have been claims of an attack by one side, which the other side is suggesting are either untrue or if they are true, some sort of false flag event designed to discredit the opposing force and possibly to whip up
Speaker: further whip up, I guess, anti -Ukrainian sentiment within Russia. So it's, I mean, nice is not the right word. Refreshing, I guess. It's refreshing to see a false flag incident being proposed in the sort of context that false flag incidents were first brought up and not as a knee -jerk response to something like a mass shooting that
Speaker: that these days people just seem to have sort of a template, just a stock response when something like that happens, oh it was a false flag. Now those were all the things I had to talk about, which of course means now I'm going to have to look up new things to talk about for our bonus episode. In the next one we
Speaker: Excellent record, but that's okay. I would have had to have done that anyway. If you'd like a little sneak preview, our next episode will be a Back to the Conspiracy episode, part of our new ongoing series. We're having been talking about podcasts for so damn long. We've A, run out of new things to talk about a little bit and B, it's been so long since we talked about some things that they are actually worth
Speaker: taking another look at, to A, see if there have been new developments since we last talked about them, and B, give people who haven't been listening to this podcast for as long as we have been recording it, which once again is a very, very long time chance to hear us talk about those things. So I won't give away exactly what the subject of this Back to the Conspiracy episode will be. I'll just say it's one of the classics that we talked about in December of 2014.
Speaker: So I think that's all I have to say to you people, our lovely listeners, right now.
Speaker: I don't have also a bonus episode for our beloved patrons, but rest assured, you guys will have a bonus episode coming when we record a proper actual episode sometime later this week. I'll put this one up as soon as I can so you don't get too many piled on top of you once. So hopefully, or we'll be back to normal the next time you hear from the two of us, I should actually say I do have the wherewithal
Speaker: to get over to Em's place so we could actually record an episode together, and we could even potentially maybe go back to recording video episodes like we did a very, very long time ago. But we'll just take things as they come for now. That may be something on the cards in the future, but exactly how soon I couldn't possibly say.
Speaker: So, for now, thank you just for being our listeners. We apologize for the disruption in regular transmissions, but things will be back to normal as soon as possible. But until then, I'll just go ahead and say goodbye. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M. R. X. Denter.
Speaker: 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, remember, oh December, what a night.
