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Bonus Episode - An Interview with M R. X. Dentith
23 Plays3 years ago
Brian is unavailable, so Josh takes the reins and interviews his old university pal, Associate Professor M R. X. Dentith.
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Transcript
Introduction and Unusual Setup
00:00:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Professor Brian L. Keeley.
00:00:19
Speaker
Well, hello.
Interview with Dr. M. Dentis
00:00:20
Speaker
So this is a little unusual. Normally, obviously, Brian and I would record a bonus episode to go with the main week's episode, but Brian wasn't available this week. But I've got something extra special for you, because now, if you recall, if you've listened to the main episode, where we talked about the paper by Indiana, I didn't mention that I actually went to university with him. And I thought, oh,
00:00:41
Speaker
Maybe that's a connection I can exploit there. So I reached out to him and thought in lieu of a bonus episode, we could have another good old interview with an author. So allow me to present to you Dr. M. Dentis. How's it going? Long time no see.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's been, I mean, so we would do it, we're at uni together back in the 90s. So I mean, I mean, it's 2022. Well, sorry, almost 2022. The problem with the COVID era is that everything feels so long. So 2019 feels like it was 20 years ago, the fact that we haven't taught for 20 years, actually now feels like it's 40 years. And obviously, I'm also just unmoored in time. And that I know it's almost 2022. But I'm assuming it's already 2020. So in
00:01:28
Speaker
It's been a long time, Josh. It's been a long, long time.
Journey to China Amidst Pandemic
00:01:32
Speaker
So, you're Zhuhai, I understand. That's like another country. I mean, it's a city, but it's a city in another country. Well, you said another country in the midst of a pandemic. Believe me, getting this job and traveling to China has been an ordeal in its own respect. It turns out that getting a job in China is difficult enough. It turns out getting a job in China in the midst of a pandemic is even more difficult.
00:01:57
Speaker
I was offered this job back in the middle of 2019 and I didn't actually arrive in Juhai until the middle of 2021. Now admittedly the pandemic did kind of get in the way of the entire employment process.
00:02:12
Speaker
But yeah, I'm now an associate professor here in the Center for International Philosophy.
Conspiracy Theories and Academic History
00:02:17
Speaker
And I'm doing work on conspiracy theory as kind of evident by the fact that I believe you reviewed my first paper, my 2016 inference, the best explanation.
00:02:28
Speaker
Yes, yes, no, that's why we're talking to you today. So, I mean, you must have had some contact with Brian, obviously. You're right in a similar field. I've got a question. How long have you been doing this podcast together with Brian? Oh, gosh, I mean, we started, where did we start? 2014. It's about seven years now. Because I stayed with Brian in 2017 when I gave a talk at Pitzer College, and he did not mention this podcast
00:02:56
Speaker
at all it seems really really weird that you've been doing a podcast for five or six years and this is the first time I've heard about it even though I have regular contact with Brian why are you keeping this podcast on the down low well I mean have you gone back have you listened now that you are aware of it have you gone back and listened to any of the older episodes
00:03:18
Speaker
I've listened to a few. I'm not really a podcast person. I don't really have the time to listen to podcasts. Podcasting might be the kind of thing that people in their middle age start and millennials listen to. And I'm kind of between those two camps. We've only been doing this, what we call this theory, conspiracy theory, masterpiece theatre. We decided to start going
00:03:46
Speaker
right back to the beginning, starting with the lights of Charles Pigdon, and just sort of work our way through the literature, as it were. But that's something we only started doing in the last couple of years. So for most of the time, and I imagine the time when you were bunking down with Brian,
00:04:05
Speaker
We were just talking about conspiracy theories in general and interesting ones to talk about and so on. So I guess we didn't have as much of the academic focus. So it's probably only now that we've managed to work our way through the literature and your name appeared in the list. This is the first time it's actually been directly pertinent to you, I suppose.
Origins of the Podcast and Covert Interests
00:04:27
Speaker
I've got another question, which is, I'm quite curious, how did you and Brian mate? I mean, what inspired a person in North America and a person in Aotearoa, New Zealand to start a podcast together five or six years ago? There must be a really interesting story about the origin of this particular podcast. It is very interesting. I can't actually share the full details of it as long term listeners of this podcast will know there's there's been been some amount of
00:04:54
Speaker
of sort of covert government interest and what have you in the exact details of my work.
00:05:02
Speaker
and life in general. So I'm not entirely at liberty to discuss the full details, but let's just say Brian and I found ourselves to have mutual interest, you could say. And because of our certain shared acquaintances about whom the less said, the better,
00:05:30
Speaker
we just we just found ourselves sort of in a similar situation. And as one does, when one's, you know, hunkered down and hiding from actually, sorry, I'm not so sure about that, but when one finds themselves in these sorts of situations, the obvious thing is, hey, why don't we do a podcast together?
00:05:49
Speaker
And obviously, Brian's written on conspiracy theories, and I've known being interested in them for a while. And we just kind of took it from there. Curious, a most plausible story, a very, very plausible story.
Shift from Archaeology to Conspiracy Theories
00:06:04
Speaker
Now, if I recall, I mean, it's been so long, but as I recall, you got into the conspiracy theory angle from the sort of talk around North Head, near where you grew up. I remember
00:06:17
Speaker
going to your mum's place in Devonport and North Head being near there. So, but how did that take you?
00:06:25
Speaker
on the journey to where you are today? Well, I mean, originally I was going to write a PhD thesis on archaeological explanation. So the way that philosophy has kind of dealt with the way that archaeologists or more generally anthropologists in the 1980s started looking at the philosophical work on scientific explanations from the 1960s and the way that archaeology kind of went off in a really weird direction when it came to the philosophy of the social sciences.
00:06:53
Speaker
And so I wanted to use North Head, this place in Devonport, which has a whole bunch of conspiracy theories about hidden tunnels within it, as a kind of example of how archaeological explanations work, because there are people in Devonport who believe that there are hidden tunnel complexes and the light deep within North Head.
00:07:10
Speaker
and they poo-poo the archaeological investigations which have shown that there's no evidence for these tunnel complexes. So it's good to write on that. And then over time the conspiracy theory stuff kind of became more interesting and preeminent in my writing.
00:07:28
Speaker
And that kind of dovetails into teaching a critical thinking course, as I was back in the day, where we took students to North Head to talk about the tunnel complex theory and the way that people use reasons and arguments to try and explain exactly what they believe about what's beneath North Head.
00:07:46
Speaker
And so, yeah, the conspiracy theory stuff kind of started from there. I submitted my PhD in 20, well, end of 2013, was accepted in 20, oh, no, sorry. So, 2014 was the book. Submitted my PhD at the end of 2011, had the PhD accepted in 2012, and then spent 2013 writing the book, The Flossy of Conspiracy Theories. And yeah, my career has basically just gone on from there.
00:08:14
Speaker
Well, yes, I mean, like, as you're well aware, we've just started with your your sort of first big contribution to the literature. And so so we have not yet got on to the various material that you produced when you were working, I believe, as an advisor under the Andy Baschiago administration. I mean, in the same respect that
00:08:36
Speaker
you aren't able to talk about certain things. My time with Andy Basciago is something which I'm not really at liberty to talk about. There are a lot of NDAs, and there's a reason why I'm in China. That's all I can say. Yeah. But I just sort of mean because you must be well aware, of course, the Sun's doing it in your paper.
00:08:55
Speaker
that they wrote when they were connected to the Obama administration. A very sad fate of both Sunstein and Vermule. I understand what President Becciago had to do, but it was unfortunate. It was quite unfortunate. But even that aside, I would have thought your work in the advisory capacity to his presidency would have been an interesting counterpoint to what Sunstein and Vermule were saying
00:09:21
Speaker
under Obama, but we'll actually, you know, regular listeners, if you just keep tuned in, obviously, we'll get to that stuff eventually. But I mean, so you must be, you must, you must keep an eye on conspiratorial matters in general. We
COVID and Changing Perspectives on Conspiracies
00:09:38
Speaker
We obviously, towards the start of the podcast, we went through all the obvious ones about the assassination of President Nixon and whether or not Chuck Yeager was the first man on the moon and all that business, whether the whole thing was a fake.
00:09:55
Speaker
as time has gone on, it kind of feels, it certainly feels to us likely becoming a little bit more prominent. So I mean, the whole the whole COVID business, of course, and I mean, you know, now that Baschia goes out of the picture, we probably don't want to talk about we've spent so long talking about him and his presidency, I think we're probably you're probably as sick as we are of mentioning it. But I assume you keep abreast of all these sorts of matters.
00:10:19
Speaker
Well, yes, I mean, as someone who started off their philosophical career as a particularist, and then, of course, quickly shifted into being a generalist and now spend most of my time showing why belief in conspiracy theories is indeed mad, bad and dangerous. The nanotech plague that we're currently suffering after the Bill Gates vaccination stuff has been has been quite eye opening to see the way in which people who believe in some kind of
00:10:46
Speaker
COVID thing, have been using those conspiracy theories to kind of denounce the truth of what's really going on in our society. So yeah, it is interesting having started from a position of defending conspiracy theories, as I did back in my PhD in defensive conspiracy theories, which
00:11:05
Speaker
of course, produce the book. And then realizing that actually, this is the wrong angle to take, we should be looking at the psychological characteristics and the intellectual characteristics of conspiracy theorists, and diagnosing what is it that makes some people who engage in wrong groupthink. And yeah, the last few years, absolutely astounding, kind of confirms everything that people have been saying about these things called conspiracy theories.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's probably true. I guess, I mean, obviously, it's easy for us to back home here to buy into this sort of stuff with, you know, you don't have Winston Peters as your prime minister for 14 years and not, not pick up a bit of conspiratorial thinking, you know, he's, he's, he's one of our prime sources for that, I think so. So coming from a society such as ours,
00:11:50
Speaker
It's very easy to buy into that sort of stuff. It was quite a relief when Winston Peters legalized the use of adrenochrome in the general populace. I don't think New Zealanders have ever been as healthy as they are today.
00:12:08
Speaker
No, I think it's going quite well so far. It's good to hear you're doing well. It's good to see you've made something of yourself with your wacky conspiracy theory stuff, but that's our stock and trade, I suppose. Can you possibly give us a bit of an insight, bit of a preview on any work that you might be coming up with in the immediate future?
00:12:32
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm working on a paper at the moment called suspicious conspiracy theories, which is an examination of exactly why we should be suspicious of conspiracy theories, looking at the kind of features that we find in particular conspiracy theories, and showing that we can generalize from those features to a general skepticism of these things we call conspiracy theories. And that's kind of building on a previous paper, which was published
00:12:56
Speaker
kind of late last year, early this year, called Debunking Conspiracy Theories, which of course is a paper explaining exactly why we should be debunking conspiracy theories all the time. It's just because, you know, they are very, very dangerous beliefs. No, no, no spoilers, though. We'll be getting to that paper before too long. I don't want to give the game away completely. But yes, yes, definitely significant, significant paper that's on our list to look
Public Speaking and Major Donors
00:13:20
Speaker
at.
00:13:20
Speaker
You're still doing the conference circuit, I assume? Oh yeah, I'm in absolute demand. I don't know whether you've heard about the Trump organization, but they've become a major financial donor to educational institutions around the world and have done really good work, particularly out of their centre in Hungary with President Orbán.
00:13:44
Speaker
And they've been funding me to go around universities talking about conspiracy theories and kind of showing to people that you should never ever tolerate a conspiracy theorist in your midst. And so yeah, not only am I making decent coin from being an associate professor, but I have to say the public speaking gigs really, really quite lucrative.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, if there's one thing that Trump fellow knows, I mean, to be honest, I mostly know him from, you know, appearing in Home Alone 2 and that sort of stuff. But, you know, I've heard about his numerous charitable endeavors and his obvious enormous success in business with everything he touches. So, yeah, you're probably in very, very good hands, enormous hands I hear as well.
00:14:27
Speaker
Oh, yes. I mean, I am actually quite astounded by just how big Donald Trump's hands are and how luscious his hair is in private. He lets you run your hands through his lion-like mane. And my God, it is a pleasure.
00:14:43
Speaker
Magnificent. Well, yeah, that was kind of all I wanted to ask. A nice bit of a catch up and a nice bit of an insight for our listeners into what an academic such as yourself is up to in this day and age. Do you have any closing thoughts for us before I let our audience go about their day?
00:15:03
Speaker
No, I mean, I wish you and Brian the absolute best, continuing on with this conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre. You are going to see an awful lot of particularist work coming up. And it's quite
Conference on Philosophical Perspectives
00:15:14
Speaker
disturbing that it continues to be the kind of consensus view in philosophy at the stage. But you know, I'm doing my bit to try and ensure that that gets crushed.
00:15:23
Speaker
in the best way possible. In fact, I'm even running a conference next year, which is going to showcase the best generous work being done in philosophy at the moment, in the hope that we can, in the words of Gerald Posner, case closed on particularism within the philosophy of conspiracy theories. So look out for that. It's going to be exciting. Going to ruffle some feathers.
00:15:45
Speaker
Indeed. Oh, well, I'm sure you'll be seeing more of Brian and these sorts of conferences. So be sure I'll be sure to have him say hi from me as well. So we I think I think that's all for now, but it was great to catch up and we should do it again sometime. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as long as the check clears. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that's all been taken care of, don't you worry?
00:16:10
Speaker
Um, so, uh, I think we've come to the end of this little, little bonus nugget for our, our beloved listeners. Uh, so I'm just going to finish things off in my usual way by saying goodbye. You can say something if you want as well. No, no, no, I appreciate it. I'm just not, I'm just not interested in doing that. Fair enough. Goodbye.