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Ten Years (Young?)
409 Plays6 months ago
Josh discovers that it has been ten years since he and M started podcasting...
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Transcript
Introduction and Beginnings
00:00:00
Speaker
Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here. Well, it all started 10 years ago when my friend M. Dent had asked me if I wanted to do a podcast on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. I know. Sounds crazy, right? I remember him saying at the time there's no way this is going to last, but I had a feeling… Sorry, do I have any lines in this intro at all?
00:00:23
Speaker
Shut up, you're ruining the freeze frame! It's a podcast. No one knows it's a freeze frame. There's literally no frame to freeze. The freeze frame is implied by the record scratch sound effect in the following dialogue. That's a hackney cliché and our audience deserves better.
Celebrating a Decade
00:00:39
Speaker
It's a timeless classic that ironically juxtaposes a light-hearted tone with a quotidian nature of the subject material.
00:00:45
Speaker
It's not timeless, it's a pastiche of references, it never actually coexisted in a single work. It's a parody of a phenomenon that was never there to begin with. You lying son of a bitch, I'll kill you!
00:00:57
Speaker
Calm yourself, Josh. Calm yourself. Put down the claymore. There can be only one! Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here. Well, it all started five hundred years ago on the planet Zaius when I was part of a rebellion against the corrupt leadership of General Katana. I remember thinking to myself, is that guy Scottish or French? And is that guy Scottish, Spanish or Egyptian? Crazy times!
00:01:30
Speaker
Hey! It's the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy!
00:01:51
Speaker
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China, they haven't sight them blood of kings. They have no rival. No man can be their equal. It's Professor, Associate Professor, M.R.X.Dentist.
00:02:09
Speaker
I was thinking because it's going to be an extra special episode, they're going to lead with some kind of... today's episode deals with a very sensitive topic. Podcasts existing for over 10 years. Fewer discretion is advised.
00:02:24
Speaker
It really is because we're breaking with your regularly scheduled programming. I'm sure you're all champing at the bit to hear our impressions of part three of Neil Levy's book on bad beliefs. But I was looking at my calendar the other day and I noticed that as we're recording the 23rd of May,
00:02:49
Speaker
2024. And if my memory serves, the very first episode of this podcast was put online by Your Good Person on the 20th of May 2014. Now, I'm no big fancy big city lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that 2024 is 10 years after 2014. Would I be right there?
Challenges and Growth
00:03:12
Speaker
I mean, I've been looking into this and the answer is in fact complicated because no one really understands how numbers work, especially big numbers. As numbers get bigger, the laws of math start to break down. So once you get past eight or nine, it becomes very hard to track exactly what's going on there. So the consensus does seem to be that yes,
00:03:34
Speaker
We are 10 years away from the beginning of the podcast, but it is possible we're not. In fact, it's possible we're actually before the podcast ever started. That's how wacky the big number numerology system gets. Well, I choose to believe it's just 10 years, 10 years, 10 actual human earth years.
00:03:56
Speaker
We've been doing this. That doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem legal. Doesn't really seem possible. It seems also too long. It does a little bit. But what can you do? Well, what you can do is ditch your regularly scheduled episode and just spend an episode looking back over the life of this podcast. It's a clip episode without clips.
00:04:17
Speaker
Without Clips, do you remember 2014? How young and fresh-faced we were. Me, a young strapling of 38 years old. Just not a care in the world. Long, free-flowing hair. That's actually not true. My hair is longer now than it was when we started recording this episode. Maybe that's a lesson.
00:04:35
Speaker
Maybe there's some significance there. I don't know. I mean, and it's not as if it's been growing. It has been growing the entire time, but it hasn't been the same length the entire time. It's been shorter at points and then longer at points. And then longer. Yeah. No, I remember. I remember sitting in your your flat and it wasn't Poinscheff. What was the Hoon Bay? Yeah. What was the southern? Hoon Bay, Graylam or Ponsin. It's in that kind of area of Auckland where depending on how
00:05:05
Speaker
fancy or hip you want to be, you describe your flat as being either in grey linen if you want to be hip, ponce and b if you want to be fancy, or hernbe if you want to be really really fancy.
00:05:20
Speaker
And there we sat, we sat in front of your computer and recorded the first episode of a podcast. As I recall, we both said the word penis numerous times within the first five minutes of the episode. Penis, penis, we said the word penis multiple times. So what is that word again?
00:05:41
Speaker
many times what sort of person would at the start within within seven minutes and 43 seconds of starting recording would say penis repeatedly on a on a good christian podcast such as this one i can't imagine we see the word penis actually quite a lot for the first few episodes of the podcast it kind of became a bon-mot for the podcast to say penis as quickly as possible there's almost a rush to say penis to be the first person to say penis on the podcast or something which was kind of
00:06:11
Speaker
feeling of victory and superiority over the other co-hosts. And then eventually we grew out of it because it turns out you can say the word penis and it's funny for a while. And then then it stops being funny. It just becomes trite. So we haven't really said the word penis on the podcast for probably nine years or so. This may be the first penal podcast reference to penises that we've had on the podcast in quite some time.
00:06:39
Speaker
And maybe it's coming back. Maybe, maybe. In conclusion, maybe the podcast penis is just going to reemerge from wherever it's been resting.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yes, no, as a recall, we graduated from the the puerile filth of penis jokes to the much more sophisticated, eerie heights of your mother jokes, which came and we... Now we kept those on for several years. Yes, yes. And yeah, so like at the time, at the time we started doing... What even was the motivation? I can barely... Was it just that it was 2014 and everyone was doing a podcast?
00:07:15
Speaker
So it was due to the fact that I had been doing broadcasts on BFM, the University of Auckland Student Radio Station. And I'd been doing work with Jose, and that was going quite well. And then Jose retired from that morning slot he did on weekends.
00:07:34
Speaker
and that was replaced by The Cryptid Factor which had Buttons, Reece Darby and David Farrier. I did two shows with them and then was promptly fired, don't know why, never really explained, got the impression that maybe they thought I was not quite
00:07:50
Speaker
on the Fortean side as they wanted to be, I was more on the skeptical side. And so it was kind of decided at that point, I was saying it was as if it was a shadowy cabal of people conferencing in the background. There was a feeling that because podcasts were coming into fashion back in 2016, why not just continue doing the kind of thing I'd be doing on BFM as a podcast? And I thought I needed a co-host.
00:08:20
Speaker
And so I mentioned what to do a podcast and you Josh said, I will do a podcast with you. I am your co-host and co-host you became. I did and the rest is history, which is why we're talking about it now and we'll continue to do so. But I mean, yeah, so we thought, we started for a bit. You had plenty to talk about and there are plenty of conspiracy theories in the world. So there was always going to be
00:08:46
Speaker
a decent amount of material. Sadly, we only did the podcasts for two years. I went to Bucharest at the end of 2016, turn September, and we thought it's going to be impossible to record a podcast remotely. The technology does not exist, which admittedly in 2016,
00:09:06
Speaker
It really only vaguely existed as a way of doing things. So we ended the podcast in 2016, we did a final episode, and we've been doing bonus episodes ever since. So the podcast actually only existed for two years.
00:09:22
Speaker
With eight years of subsequent bonus episodes, yeah. It turned out it was actually possible to conduct a podcast from obvious ends of the earth. We worked out how to do it eventually because the first few episodes we did when I was in book arrest would be, I would record a segment
00:09:43
Speaker
you would record a segment and then I would stitch Frankenstein's monster together from those recordings. And then we realized we could actually use Skype to do the recordings. And we had to go through a bit of Rick Morrill's work out how to record Skype calls because it wasn't as simple as press a record button and get a
Technical Evolution
00:10:02
Speaker
file. We were initially doing local recordings on our machines, putting them in Dropbox,
00:10:09
Speaker
and then editing the podcast together turned out to be quite difficult because you have this thing called drift if you're recording audio on two different devices the timing goes out slightly which means you get audio drift where even though in the recording itself you're responding to each other with minimal lag lag creeps in and you have to start shifting bits of audio around otherwise you get really
00:10:36
Speaker
unnatural silences between questions and answers but eventually we found a way of actually doing the recordings using a bit of software i think that you put just using our first spate of patreon money
00:10:52
Speaker
So you bought a plugin for Skype that allowed us to do recording. Because it was one of those awkward things where there was a plugin for the PC version of Skype, but no plugin for the Mac version of Skype. So all the recordings had to be done on your end. Yes. Yeah. It was all sorts of fiddliness. And at the time you were handling all of the editing duties,
00:11:16
Speaker
So it kind of just became your problem. And then once once you were back from Booker or even where did we start doing video? Was that that was after you came back from Booker? It was recorded on videos beforehand. So the first time we started doing the video recordings was when I was staying with my mother in Milford.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yes. Because we had access to that very large downstairs second lounge, which we could then kind of manipulate things, put lights in, put cameras up and do a video version of the podcast. Yes, using equipment, purchased once again with funds from our beloved patrons on whom we will have more to say in a little while.
00:12:01
Speaker
So we started doing video stuff. I would handle, because I had video editing software that I used at work, I would handle video editing, and M would do the audio editing, and we would produce video episodes, which actually I'm going to go and look. I'm going to go and look on YouTube right now and see just how much they actually got watched, because I think it was not very much.
00:12:28
Speaker
No, no, I don't think our viewing, I think we put a lot of effort into doing video content for very little viewership. Yeah, so let's see, here's one from, it's not an oil, where do I?
00:12:45
Speaker
YouTube is a bit of a mess. Okay, so this is, it's in reverse chronological order, of course. So if we go back three years ago, we were putting up episodes that, well, this one got 25, or this one got 104 views. Oh, but for us, that big numbers video-wise. That was big numbers for our, as I'm going back, there are fairly consistent two-figure view numbers.
00:13:15
Speaker
going back and back and back and back and back. Although it does remind me that we had um we initially used as the show's logo the graphics from the cover of your first book. Indeed we did. Which was published here we go the podcast is guide to the conspiracy inaugural video episode from seven years ago. So in fact these ones
00:13:38
Speaker
These ones were Skype ones, I see. So I think we did start doing, we did start doing video episodes, must have been while we were co-locating, because there we are, me in a window, and you on the big screen. Oh no, that's right, because we did, because I remember one of the episodes is when Timothy's replacement bed got delivered in Bucharest.
00:14:02
Speaker
And so I had to go and let the delivery people in as they shifted the material in from the outside of the apartment to Timothy's bedroom.
Audience and Impact
00:14:12
Speaker
And you kept the video in and did a kind of David Attenborough style narration over the top.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yes, so there we go. So we started, we did that for quite a while, and then eventually you came back to New Zealand and we started actually doing it in a single room, sitting on a sofa with patron supplied lighting. And then basically it just kind of
00:14:38
Speaker
kind of seemed more trouble than it was worth eventually since we weren't really getting the views. But what we were getting was the, what's the podcast equivalent? The listens. Do you remember our weird listener spike?
00:14:53
Speaker
Which came out of a single state in the US. There was a time where we were getting thousands of lessons from a single state, which means it must have been a bot that was downloading episodes. Assume, yeah. It must have been something like that. Because we could have the stats on our podcast hosting would tell us how many views each episode was getting.
00:15:18
Speaker
And it would break it down by region. And in the US, it would break it down by what state. And so, yeah, we were getting a significant bump of views for quite a while. Quite consistently, every episode would be getting thousands of hits from just one particular state. So we assume, yeah, that was where the particular Google Spyder that indexed our episodes or something like that lived and was hitting it regularly to
00:15:47
Speaker
See if what would be updated i don't even know i hope to the time that maybe it was something like some lecturer had set it is a is recommended listen for the air.
00:16:04
Speaker
epistemology course or something like that, but I think it was most likely just a bot. Yeah, so our average listenership over the course of a month for an episode is about 500 listens. At our height, taking the blip of our suspected bot somewhere in, I think, Minnesota away,
00:16:29
Speaker
We used to get around about 800 to 900 listens per episode. So at the point we interviewed David Icke, that was the height of our listenership. We were getting on average 850 listeners per episode. These days 500, which is not bad for a podcast, which basically is stale and pale by this particular point. But we used to have more listeners, but also we had fewer patrons back then. So it's swings and roundabouts.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yes, you mentioned, of course, we can't, we have to bring up once again the fact that we interviewed David Eich. Yeah, and it was, it was slightly weird. So I received an email from the publicist and tour manager for David Eich's Australasian tour saying, we see you do a podcast on conspiracy theories.
00:17:26
Speaker
would you be interested in covering the talks that David is going to do in Auckland? And I went, I mean, we'd be very interested in attending the talk, but also quite interested in talking with David Eyck. And at the time I went
00:17:47
Speaker
Are these publicists actually doing any research into who they're contacting? Because I'm not sure that I am the right person. What is here? No, that's... Are you hearing music right now? I am, yeah. That is at my end. Someone is on the street outside, playing very, very loud music out of their car, as is the style with the youths. That's kind of impressive.
00:18:15
Speaker
Because I mean, it's loud enough for it to come over there. Maybe just a cheek, it's not my son's pho ringing or something, but... My mistake.
00:18:31
Speaker
It was something in my son's bedroom. Possibly his phone has a weird room tone that I haven't heard before. So it was indeed the music that the kids listened to, but for once it wasn't someone with a ridiculously loud sound system. I see, blaming others for the fault of your bad parenting. You can probably cut all of that bit out.
00:18:52
Speaker
No, I actually like the idea of showing how you try to blame other people for your Lex parenting style. Maybe I'll keep that on. You do what you want. Anyway, David Icke said in an interview, we said, I mean, yeah, do you actually know who we are? Now, admittedly, we didn't do a hard hitting.
00:19:12
Speaker
interview in part because we thought it would be more interesting for our listenership to hear David Eich explain his own theories because most people will never go to a David Eich talk.
00:19:28
Speaker
it is an experience. It's actually quite a cheap experience and you consider that even paying say 100 NZ for eight hours of presentation material means you're actually not looking at many dollars per hour for your entertainment there. David Eich is a raconteur. He has very very odd views but he is also
00:19:53
Speaker
strangely entertaining to listen to. And of course, this was 2016 when we interviewed him. He's gone downhill quite a bit in recent years, I think it's safe to say, especially since COVID when he became full on anti-vax.
00:20:11
Speaker
and now just seems to be running whatever lines all the other right-wing grifters are running, which is quite depressing. I mean, we didn't push him at all on the anti-Semitic connotations of a lot of his conspiracy theories, which at the time, I
Innovations and Contributions
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah, at the time I knew that people had said this stuff about him and other people had sort of said, you know, some people would say, OK, this guy thinks lizard people around the world. Well, we all know that's code for Jews. And then other people would say, if you listen to the guy, he really does seem to believe in actual lizard people.
00:20:47
Speaker
In this day and age, I don't think even if that is what he really believed to begin with, he can't. He must know that the stuff that he is saying is often taken as code for that and that people who are genuinely anti-Semitic will be listening to the things he says and using it as ammunition. And also, as we've read more about him, we found there was some fairly dodgy stuff even right in his earlier works. Yeah, the weird thing about David Icke is that there is a way when you listen to him
00:21:16
Speaker
to think, no, he's not anti-Semitic. He just happens to think that the lizards have taken over Jewish families and those lizard Jewish families have come to prominence through their manipulation of the world. So this is the theory. He doesn't hate the Jews. What he hates are the lizards who masquerade as Jews.
00:21:42
Speaker
The problem with that is that you get that story from listening to David Eich. But if you attend a talk, you then see the slides. And the slides have a lot of
00:21:57
Speaker
anti-Semitic imagery in them. And these are slides that David Icke has selected to use to illustrate his talking points. So I think he's always tried to have it both ways. He speaks in a way where it seems plausible to think, oh, he doesn't actually hate Jewish people. He just thinks that the lizards are using Jewish families as a way of controlling the world. But I think actually
00:22:26
Speaker
anti-Semitism for David Wright comes first and the lizards are just a way of justifying it. So I mean we didn't push him on much of anything but I think as we remarked on at the time and as we found out just with questioning some of the things like people that it had we said that this was happening we asked our listeners to send us any questions we wanted to ask them and they wanted things to know things like you know how
00:22:50
Speaker
If these people control the world, how is it that you're even allowed? Why is it that you're standing up here in front of people speaking this to anyone who will listen? Why haven't they stopped you and things like that? We found fairly quickly that this was not his first rodeo.
00:23:07
Speaker
Two rank amateurs in Auckland were not going to come up with something he hadn't heard before and didn't have an answer prepared for already. He had a line he could run for pretty much anything we would have wanted to have challenged him on. And a line which would go on for 15 minutes uninterrupted. So in person, lovely to talk to, lovely personable guy to have a chat with. Would we do it again?
00:23:33
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, if we did do it again, I would go for the much more hard hissing. Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you being figurative or literal when you make these particular claims? How do you square this claim with that claim and do that particular kind of thing?
00:23:52
Speaker
But I don't think we'll get the opportunity again. Wouldn't have thought so, no. No. So that was that was May of 2016. So just just around the two year mark for the podcast. And to be fair, that was probably that was probably when we peaked, I think that might have been. But that didn't mean we didn't keep on plugging. And we tried lots of different ways to
00:24:14
Speaker
to keep the podcast fresh. I think we first started doing the occasional news episodes, didn't we, of here's what's been happening in the world of conspiracies. And then we started having a news update at the start of every episode.
00:24:30
Speaker
or sometimes at the end. Or sometimes at the end. We'd move it around because we realized that the problem with the news updates was that sometimes they would go on for a very long time and thus we wouldn't get to the actual stuff we wanted to discuss. So we then moved the updates towards the end, but that didn't make them any shorter.
00:24:50
Speaker
No. And then eventually we kind of settled on putting the conspiracy news into our bonus episodes for patrons where they could hear us talk about the goings on in the last week and also rabbiting on about whatever other bollocks we felt like, which we assume our patrons appreciate.
00:25:09
Speaker
and the wider audience might tire off, I don't know, but nevertheless. But if you do want to find out about our views on podcasts, views on films, views on games we've been playing, being a patron is the way to go about it. Because just giving us even just a single NZ dollar
00:25:30
Speaker
a month get you access to all the bonus content. Not that there's a lot of bonus content, because we haven't really done all that much with our Patreon system. Yes, well I mean there is a lot of, there is eight or nine, I can't remember when we actually first started the Patreon thing, but there's eight or nine years worth of bonus episodes.
00:25:54
Speaker
And there's a Discord server you get access to. When was the last time you logged on to that Discord server, John? I've looked at it in the last week, certainly. When did I last post anything on it? I couldn't tell you off the top of my head.
00:26:09
Speaker
now the thing is actually patreon now has its own kind of discord equivalent which is probably something we should actually look at leveraging in the same way patreon also has the ability for us to just make merchandise straight from the patreon web front without having to go and find a third party so technically given we own the artwork associated with the podcast we could be doing mugs
00:26:39
Speaker
mouse mats, t-shirts, even hoodies if we so desired. So if there is demand by our listeners,
00:26:48
Speaker
to have merchandise of some kind, then we can arrange that. If you want merchandise. It's technically possible. It's really only a few clicks of a button in the uploading of some media to a website. And if you want a mug with the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy on it, that can be arranged. Tell us if you want it. Speaking of the artwork, actually, for me, that was when I actually felt like, oh,
00:27:18
Speaker
Is this kind of a real podcast when we used our patron money to pay a graphic designer to give us brand new artwork to use on the podcast? That almost felt like
00:27:32
Speaker
Legitimate, I don't know. It was an odd feeling. There is something about not spending your own money for a hobby. At which point you go, I mean, it's still a hobby. We're never going to make a living from doing a podcast. But now the only cost is our time. Yes, I mean, we initially set up the Patreon scheme just to cover our hosting costs because I could never work out why
00:27:59
Speaker
If you want to put video online, you just get a YouTube account, and you can put up as much video as you want for free. There are image hosting places all over the place. But for some reason, audio, it was, maybe it's, are there free podcast hosting services these days? There are, but they're always limited as to how much you can put up in the space for months. Yeah, so actually just putting audio on the internet for some reason,
00:28:26
Speaker
the powers that be have decided that's a step too far. That's something you've got to pay for.
00:28:32
Speaker
And so we put up a Patreon with a video that's probably about nine years old. We have talked about recording a new one, maybe we will one day. I mean, to cover those. Probably is wise. And then with the leftover, once our hosting costs were covered, we have commissioned artwork, we have bought
00:28:56
Speaker
video. We bought a lighting system, for want of a better word. New microphones. We bought new microphones. We've bought recording software licenses. So in a very real way, the podcast would not be what it is today without our patrons who
Creativity and Controversy
00:29:15
Speaker
possibly we should give a bit of a shout out at this point we should so i i logged on to patreon and looked at all the currently active paying patrons and so we want to give a shout out to people like pat cam alex phillip neil propaganda scott
00:29:34
Speaker
Brian, Kurt, JJ, Adrian, Ali, Hannah, Tim, Louise, Steve, Leftycat, Abe, Robin, Quentin, Mark, Drew, Hayden, Daniel, Georgia, and Colin. These are the people who keep this podcast going.
00:29:51
Speaker
But not notably the one, or was it two people, who retired from Patreon in disgust at your drunken performance on the drunken podcast that's guided to the conspiracy, which frankly, I still rate as one of our best episodes ever.
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, we have, we have done a few, well, we, I have done a few drunken episodes. So a friend of the podcast, Nick, would occasionally quite deliberately ensure that I went out drinking with him on a day where the podcast is due to be recorded. And I would be very, very drunk.
00:30:26
Speaker
and apparently acted, according to one former Patreon, in an unprofessional way, meaning that they stopped being a Patreon, I do wonder whether they still listen, whether they listen in disgust. But yes, apparently I engaged in conduct unbecoming of a podcaster. Which I was fully in favour of and continue to be in favour of.
00:30:49
Speaker
To this very day. We should do another one. Yes. One of those things. I don't think it would work. No, it's got to be It needs to be done as an in-person thing Otherwise the problem is going to be more of em em you might your your microphones turned off. No, no em You've you've moved away from it would just be frustrating in person. You can make these things work
00:31:12
Speaker
It's happened a couple of times. I think the very first Drunk Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is one of the few, one of the only episodes where I think the video version was better because in the video version I captured all like 16 takes of you attempting to read the opening sketch.
00:31:32
Speaker
We got there in the end. Although that being said, we've had issues with opening sketches which have not involved alcohol at all. Sometimes you write a sketch and then realise it can't be read. It looks great on paper, but when you try to read it out loud, it just doesn't work. And sometimes you just get the giggles. Conversely, sometimes you write a sketch and it works out perfectly. I have
00:32:02
Speaker
I've written opening sketches in the past with a sort of voice in mind. And then lo and behold, you delivered it exactly as I was thinking. And I was like, aha, obviously, we know each other enough.
00:32:15
Speaker
that one can write for the other and have things turn out, so. Yes, I mean, this is actually one of the benefits of having a writing relationship going back 10 years, is that you basically, you learn A, the way in which your partner on the podcast speaks, and also you know what they're good at. And so you can write for the kind of characters that they can do.
00:32:40
Speaker
So we've had, we've had opening sketches almost from the beginning. I think they were a thing. Was that a holdover from your lecturing at university?
00:32:49
Speaker
Or is it just your fear for the amateur dramatic? Yeah, it is. It's more Amdram, but it is part of the way that I used to teach at the University of Auckland, because I was part of a teaching team, so you could do sketches and things in classes. It's much more difficult to do a sketch in class when you're the only person on the stage. It's more like a comic book these days.
00:33:12
Speaker
But yes, we had opening sketches. We used to have ending music. Now, Josh, you were the person who came up with the idea that we should have a song at the end of every episode. Why did we do it and why did we stop? Well, so I thought, well, podcasts need theme music, don't they? And I was looking online and went to the free music archive at freemusicarchive.org. It had a few years ago, it had a bit of a rearrangement. I think it's still up, though.
00:33:40
Speaker
But it was basically where people would put up royalty-free music for anyone to use, or at least it would have various Creative Commons licenses. So I picked, for the first episode, I just picked a tune by a band that had conspiracy theory in the name. And as I recall, it was the one that started with that famous quip from Ronald Reagan.
00:34:03
Speaker
where he'd sit into an open mic, something about we're going to start bombing Russia or something like that. We did that and we had that at the open in the end.
00:34:14
Speaker
just didn't have any particular theme for the podcast. Then eventually we came up with an opening theme, but stuck with a tune to go out on, just because again, I think that was just sort of a thing I'd heard other podcasts do, just go out on a song. And so I would go for every episode, I'd go to the free music archive and I would look up a song whose title or lyrics or artist had some tangential relationship to the topic of that episode.
00:34:44
Speaker
and chuck it on the end. Or sometimes it was just a song that I liked the sound of. We had a bit of that as well. There were situations where we'd finish recording an episode and then we'd look at the stockpile of music you'd download and go, which one will we use this time? And then sometimes we'd even get an idea for an episode on, well, we want to use the song,
00:35:06
Speaker
But it doesn't really fit this episode, but we could do an episode on X and then that would be the perfect song to end the episode with. But then eventually, I don't specifically remember why we stopped doing that. It might have just been that we had an outro with a thing about our
00:35:24
Speaker
Contact details and so on which we used to sort of spill off at the end of an episode and instead we just had a pre-recorded thing telling us telling people how to Contact us and what in part because we could never remember what our email address. That's true. Yes. What is our email address?
00:35:39
Speaker
I don't know. It's at the end of the episode. I'm almost certain it's podcastconspiracyatgmail.com. But don't, don't, don't quote me on that. Listen to the one at the end. But that was fine. And that was why we had the spiel recorded at the end because we kept on going. Was it podcasting? Because we have, we used to have two email addresses and I don't know why, but we did. And that's why we got confused.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard, I've had at least one person say they got into certain artists that they heard from, because we use them as closing episodes, closing music at the end of an episode. I still have, I still have music that I listened to, to this day, that I happen to find, come across and use in an episode, or come across while looking for
00:36:28
Speaker
um music for an episode so that was nice. Back to back to the opening sketches we had a few or rather you supplied us with a few sort of ongoing stories from time to time as well. I think some of them were recycled were they but others were brand new. Yeah the captain currents were all well actually not all most of the captain currents were recycled from my lecturing days there were a few new ones that were also written to kind of fit in there
00:36:57
Speaker
So Captain Curran was a pirate and also tended to also sell insurance. So you have hijinks of the person who you need insurance from offering you a policy before they're about to do the very bad thing they're going to do. And then I also
00:37:15
Speaker
didn't adapt existing sketches but wrote a kind of sequel series to a series of sketches from teaching critical thinking which was about a detective by the name of Lord Morrissey Morrissey and so we had the Morrissey and Pluddles series which was a a little mystery story about a growing conspiracy which I do plan to go back to at some point but I've been planning to go back to it now for
00:37:41
Speaker
two or three years. So it might be a while before it ever comes to fruition. Hmm. And then we've, we've tried various regular features over the years. We, we did the, the what the conspiracy segment where one of us would, one of us would prepare an episode and then deliver it to the other who would react, which I think is a, it's not a bad podcast format. I think that seems to be the way a lot of things work. You'll have one host delivery things and then someone else who's there to react and ask questions.
00:38:10
Speaker
We sort of call that to a close. It was largely my doing. I was just running out of topics.
00:38:17
Speaker
to reach, well, running enough topics that you hadn't heard of was part of it. Yeah, therein lies the issue. I think if we resurrect What the Conspiracy, it'll be me doing What the Conspiracy to you, which we have done one surprise. We did. What the Conspiracy in an episode, so a mini segment within a segment. And I do have a few potential What the Conspiracy topics, which maybe the segment will come
Influence and Future
00:38:45
Speaker
back. Maybe it will.
00:38:47
Speaker
Now, one thing that's lasted, one thing that's gone the distance, though, is Girl Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, where you decided that it would be fruitful, and I believe it was, to actually look over the literature that your work first was based on and then eventually has become a major contributor to. So we went right back to the beginning, actually.
00:39:10
Speaker
eventually we went right back to the we went right back to old uh the paranoid style eventually but we started with yeah brian was it or no no brian was charles charles yes charles and then brian yeah so we started off by looking at the classics in the philosophical literature and we after a few years got very close to our present moment in time so then we went back and looked at the classics in the
00:39:38
Speaker
psychology and sociological literature, and actually a bit of anthropology as well. And things are currently paused because we're doing what we now call conspiracy theory theatre, so the masterpieces is missing there, where we're looking at pieces which are... Sometimes because they're not that good and sometimes because they're not that old.
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so it doesn't necessarily, when we neglect the masterpiece part, we're not necessarily saying the paper is bad. We're simply saying that to qualify as a masterpiece, it needs to have a history associated with it.
00:40:15
Speaker
And so yeah, now we're doing a series of book reviews which kind of fit into the conspiracy theory theater remit. We will eventually go back to the philosophical literature because that continues to grow and grow and grow. And there are some really interesting pieces out there which I want to both promote and also in some cases also critique. So we will get back to the philosophy. But it seems to be a segment which works quite well. Yes.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yes, and I think in part just because there's been a steady stream of material that we can base it upon. And I think that that's just about it for regular features. We did, we had the false flag series. That was a thing we did for a wee while because we had noticed that
00:41:03
Speaker
So often when a conspiracy theory or an event would happen, the number of times someone would insist that something was a false, it was actually a false flag operation got to be a little bit monotonous, leading us to claim that false flags are the lupus of conspiracy theories, a reference to the TV show House, which has been off the air for
00:41:27
Speaker
probably almost 10 years now. I mean, longer than the podcast, surely. Well, had it finished by the time we started recording? Yeah, probably had, actually. Yeah, I think I'm finished right ahead, yeah. So that reference was actually older than the podcast itself. But we did end up doing a whole bunch of actual false flag events that have happened, or
00:41:43
Speaker
No, no, no, Josh. We covered a bunch of calls. We didn't actually engage. So we are not admitting to on the podcast. We did not stay involved in any false flag events. We have not and deny being involved in false flag events. You know, but yes, it's it's been it's been going and going and going and it's still going. So I mean, this at the time at the time we first started recording,
00:42:12
Speaker
You were Dr. M. Denteth out of work academic, or were you in teacher training at that time? I was, yeah. So you have since published papers, you've published books, you went and worked in Bucharest on several, on multiple occasions. Yeah, two postdocs. Two different postdocs. Lovely city, lovely, lovely city. And now you are Associate Professor at
00:42:41
Speaker
in Zhuhai. I always call it Zhuhai University, but it's not, is it? It's Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai. At Zhuhai, yeah. As opposed to Beijing Normal University, which we used to be a branch university of, and now we're a separate institution, and apparently
00:43:00
Speaker
I'm still associated with the mother institution in Beijing. But my contract is very much here in Zhuhai. Right. So this podcast certainly has has charted your career as one of the one of the voices, one of the leading voices, I think it's probably fair to say by now, a luminous theory theory has has has the podcast been useful to you in this career? Or has it simply been a drain on your energies?
00:43:29
Speaker
It's been useful because I think one of the benefits of doing this podcast is getting more informed about the variety of different examples of conspiracy theories there are. I've said a lot in recent years that one of the issues we find in the academic literature is that people who are
00:43:50
Speaker
arguing for kind of prima facie suspicion of conspiracy theories, the generalists, often don't know much history. And it may be due to this podcast that I keep hammering that line because there are so many examples
00:44:05
Speaker
of warranted conspiracy theories out there. There are also lots of examples we've covered in this podcast of unwarranted conspiracy theories, but there are so many examples of warranted conspiracy theories that kind of make you think conspiracies really are a lot more common than most people think. So earlier today, as I was actually waiting for the podcast to start, I was reading about how 3M,
00:44:33
Speaker
covered up since the 70s, evidence of forever chemicals being in human bodies and the fact that these forever chemicals are deleterious to human health. And this appears to have been a long-term, long-standing conspiracy by 3M to deny the fact that the
00:44:55
Speaker
things they make are poisoning human beings. These things are a lot more common than people want to admit to. And I think a lot of generalists just don't know much history. And they don't know that much about conspiracy theories. We've been covering conspiracy theories almost one a week for 10 years now. We haven't run out of examples.
00:45:21
Speaker
And the disturbing thing is we're not just looking at suspicious, queer, weird conspiracy theories. Often we're looking at things that actually did happen and we're pejoratively labeled as conspiracy theories because the people who are engaging the conspiracy
00:45:38
Speaker
didn't want anyone to know, they were up to no good. If it's been useful, then I guess we should probably keep doing it. Will we do it for another 10 years? That seems unlikely. We'll be very close to 60 by then. Very close to 60. I would have said it was unlikely we'd do it for 10 years to begin with. I don't know. And also, I mean, are podcasts even going to be a thing? Well, exactly. So we started podcasting as a point where podcasting was kind of taking off.
00:46:09
Speaker
I don't know that podcasts are all that popular now. I think there are big podcasts in the same way that there are big YouTubers, but I think now you're either a big podcaster or you're a small fish.
00:46:25
Speaker
I don't think there's much growth in the world of podcasting now. Yes, I have heard actually speaking of your sort of corporate conspiracy type things that Spotify is possibly doing to podcasts, what Facebook did to video content or something. They seem to be trying to hoover everything up. So I don't know exactly. I don't know if it's just because they're the ones making the deals with the really big names, you, Joe Rogan's and what have you or what, but they seem to be trying to homogenise the whole thing.
00:46:54
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know. There's so much content out there anyway with your YouTubers and your podcasters and your podcasters who make videos of their podcasts and put them on YouTube and your YouTubers who presumably put audio of their YouTube videos on their podcasts, I don't even know. So something, I'm sure something will be around 10 years from now, whether it's podcasts and whether we're doing it. It's a mystery to all involved.
00:47:24
Speaker
But of course, Josh, there's something which will end the podcast definitely. Oh, yes. If we ever find out what happened to MH370. Because MH370 is the urtext of the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. It was the first topic we looked at. There were three episodes before that one, where we talk about the definition of what counts as a conspiracy. But MH370 was our first example of a conspiracy theory. And it continues to be unsolved.
00:47:53
Speaker
There is a quasi-official theory about MH370, although it does actually kind of differ depending on which country you're in. And lots of conspiracy theories about what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, but no answer. And we've always said
00:48:11
Speaker
If we find out the real fate of MH370, that is the podcast over and done with. Which also means that by extension, until we discover that answer, this podcast must continue.
Looking Ahead
00:48:27
Speaker
in a thousand years time, if we still don't know what happened to MH370, there will be some version of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. I don't know who's hosting it. I don't know how it's been broadcast. It may be two people on a hill banging rocks to get together, but it will exist and it will be our legacy. And Josh, I know that as someone with children
00:48:52
Speaker
You want a legacy. This is your legacy, Josh. Not your children. Not what they do. This is your legacy. This podcast is what you will be remembered for. I think I'm OK with that, actually. Now, another thing the podcast has done is get longer. Our very first episodes, I think, were clocked in around 20 minutes. We sort of went up to half an hour fairly quickly. And then once we started adding news segments and what have you,
00:49:20
Speaker
we ended up pushing the around the one hour mark became our standard link. So it seems to be the standard link for most podcasts these days. Anyway, that's okay. This year, as we've gone to recording every two weeks, we've our episodes have got a little bit longer anyway, because we figured we've got two weeks worth of content to put into them. So that's only fair. But but I see where we're just about on an hour now.
00:49:44
Speaker
So for old time's sake, maybe now would be a good point to bring this episode's trip down to say, well, that there's always time for that. But maybe we should bring this trip down. That's right, people. Josh has said, Josh always has time for penis. Always. Always. In all circumstances. Josh likes to slip a penis in to any situation whenever possible. I'm always saying that. I'm literally always saying that. He's always slipping a penis in.
00:50:12
Speaker
So, of course, having sung the praises of our beloved patrons, those who are shinier and better smelling than all other people, we should we should go and record a bonus episode for them. There's been a bit of news that would see you think would be conspiratorial, but I haven't heard many conspiracy theories about it. We might mention that, but in lieu of some news episode and in lieu of the fact that we didn't cover a particular topic this episode, we might have a little look at maybe a Nazi UFO super weapon.
00:50:42
Speaker
I mean, it sounds like a wise thing to do. Sounds like something that should be talked about. We haven't talked much about the theory of Nazi super technology, which was a major conspiracy theory in the 80s and 90s. So yeah, it's probably time for us to talk about the Nazis. And our podcast position is, and I know it's a radical position,
00:51:07
Speaker
But our podcast position is, we say no to Nazis. No, no, don't approve of them at all. I don't care who knows it. Nope. Nope. Don't care. Don't care for Nazis. Don't care for Nazis at all. But for now, listeners, those of you who may, maybe they might, it's conceivable there are people listening to this episode who've been listening to it for a full 10 years. If so, I guess thank you or sorry, I'm not sure. Surely it's got to be a compulsion at this point. It pretty much is for us.
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, so our motto here is if you enjoyed it and you want to give us some money, that's great. But if you if you are traumatized by the podcast, please do not bill us for your therapy sessions. We cannot afford it.
00:51:49
Speaker
No, no, we can't. We'll need to get more patrons and then just the cycle perpetuates itself. So, regardless of how long you've been listening to this and why, thank you. We'll keep making episodes for the foreseeable future, but who knows? So I think in the traditional manner that I've been doing for the last 10 years, I will bring the episode to the close by simply saying, penis.
00:52:20
Speaker
You've been listening to Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Ndenter. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at Patreon. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:52:48
Speaker
So