Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
An interview with David Farrier
40 Plays4 years ago
M interviews David Farrier, documentarian extraordinaire and someone who has recently taken up the mantle of looking not just at conspiracy theories but also talking to the people who not only believe them but are also part of their spread.
Subscribe to David's Webworm here: https://webworm.substack.com
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Preparations and Mistaken Identity
00:00:00
Speaker
Right, time for another exciting episode of the podcast. Looks like I'm going to be right on time. I think we managed to book a studio for this recording. Last week's sound quality was a bit rubbish. Right, now I just need to enter the passcode. Well, maybe I entered it wrong. Let's try the in. 42, 42. Hmm. Oh, maybe I should try knocking. I can see him in there.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hold on, that's not David Farrier in there, is it? David! David! M! M! Ah, bloody soundproofing! Hold on, is that someone trying to get in? Oh no, just ignore him. Look, I really want to talk to you about my documentary idea.
Dark Fluoridus and Introductions
00:00:47
Speaker
It's called Dark Fluoridus, because it's all about fluoride conspiracy theories. Oh god, no.
00:01:05
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. M. Denteth. We are in New Zealand in varying degrees of COVID-19 lockdown, but it's all fine. We're all happy. I'm happy. Are you happy? I am content. Happiness is... You're content. Yes, content will do.
Conspiracy Theories Editorials
00:01:33
Speaker
It's been a very busy week because I've written two editorials on conspiracy theories, one of which is about COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I'm involved in a think tank, which is writing a briefing paper on how we respond to COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories in the build up to the election. So that's taken a lot of time out of things.
00:02:00
Speaker
I am content to be content. In fact, I might even be happy to be content. I'd be even happier to be happy. I guess that makes sense, yes. But happiness is for the future. Happiness is for the end of this week.
00:02:14
Speaker
Now, speaking of the end, it's the end of the month. And usually at the end of the month, we have a news episode, but we're not going to do that this week, although we are a little bit, but kind of, but differently, but we'll get to that.
Exclusive Interview with David Farrier
00:02:27
Speaker
But instead, we have something much more important and exciting than the news episode, which is, as we mentioned last week, an interview with David Faryon.
00:02:35
Speaker
I don't think we mentioned it to everyone last week. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons. I think we only mentioned it to the patrons.
00:03:03
Speaker
So this week we're talking with David Farrier who you may know if you've been listening to this podcast for quite some time from his work with Dylan Rave on Tickled and of course his work on the series Dark Tourist. David has recently started, would you call it an email list David, your web worm?
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, I would call Webworm a newsletter, an email newsletter, or sometimes I like to call it spam. I mean, it's a quite old fashioned way of communicating with people. And yet it's also quite an intimate way of doing it as well. Where do you come up with the idea of doing Webworm? I was talking to my friend Hamish, who he runs Substack, which is this thing that basically the infrastructure that runs a newsletter. And I was talking to him over lockdown.
00:03:53
Speaker
when I just had a documentary turned down for funding. And he sort of said like, why don't you just, instead of writing long Twitter threads and Instagram posts and Facebook posts, why don't you gather your thoughts into one place? You can send it out in a newsletter form to the small group of people that follow your stuff. And I just started trying and I really enjoyed it. I love the format. I love that you're communicating with a small dedicated group. And then I also like that
00:04:20
Speaker
if people want to share it, they can, and then it goes wider. So it's a really, I was skeptical when I started, but at the moment, I'm loving it the most out of all the things I'm trying to make and do.
Impact of COVID-19 on Conspiracy Theories
00:04:34
Speaker
Now, of course, the reason why we're talking about web worm is that you've been taking quite a hard look at conspiracy theories, both locally and internationally with your newsletter, haven't you?
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, I have. And I'm probably doing it from a different angle to you, where I'm kind of from the perspective of someone who is on social media a lot and is reading a lot and is quite alarmed by what they're seeing. And I feel like, well, you take quite a measured approach to things. I probably take more of a sort of a what the fuck is happening here.
00:05:07
Speaker
kind of look at things and I know I guess I try and give it a twist and I try and talk to the people behind certain ideas and certain things and get a lot of discussion going and I suppose you know I I became engaged with this when during the first lockdown in New Zealand when there was a lot of debate about 5G and then we saw people this very small number of people being alarmed and some you know going out and starting fires and that kind of thing and I was really
00:05:38
Speaker
curious how that combined with the COVID sort of conspiracy worries and since then I've just sort of been writing about it and haven't stopped. I mean it's interesting you kind of talk about how I take a more measured approach and you're taking a much more direct approach. One of the things which I found really interesting about writing about conspiracy theories during the pandemic, particularly COVID-19 conspiracy theories, is that
00:06:05
Speaker
It doesn't seem like it's such an academic matter now, when you see that even if only a few people believe these theories, it leads to them engaging in behaviours which increase the risk to the rest of us.
00:06:21
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think it's funny, I think you we're all operating in a world that's very different to what it was, I think, post COVID. And, you know, I was talking with Dylan the other day, and, you know, we were sort of pitching this idea years ago, and well, it was his idea about
00:06:44
Speaker
you know, the idea of false flags and crisis actors. And back then, when we were talking to people about this, all these concepts, and even the concept of something like a crisis actor, you know, someone who is faking something terrible, because they are driving some sort of agenda, no one knew what we were talking about. And, you know, it was really hard to pitch something when no one sort of graphs what you're talking about. And yet here we are.
00:07:10
Speaker
And this is just common kind of language and everyone's talking about this thing that used to feel much more niche. So I find that kind of fascinating. Yes, and I know you've just recently spoken with Joe Yusinski, the political scientist from the University of Miami. And in his 2014 book, he does make the claim that actually the height of conspiracy theory in politics was basically back in the 1960s. And things have been kind of diminishing conspiracy theory wise ever since.
00:07:40
Speaker
But it does seem that in the last few years, there has been a sudden reversal, because you're right. The kind of things that I was studying for my PhD, which was submitted back in the pre-Trump days of 2012, people went, well, why would you study those things? No one cares about conspiracy theories. And now people are going, oh my god, conspiracy theories are the worst things. They're destroying the body politics. What can we do about them?
00:08:09
Speaker
it feels really really different and it seems to have come on really quickly.
Polling Data and Expert Opinions
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah it does and it's funny because I'm releasing my conversation with Joe shortly but he was telling me throughout that entire conversation that everything about conspiracy theory culture is being blown out of proportion at the moment by the media and that you know
00:08:33
Speaker
He's done all this polling. He's seen no great increase in people who believe in QAnon beliefs or he hasn't seen any increase in belief in conspiracy theory at all. And, you know, this man, he knows a lot more than I do. He's got a lot more data in front of him.
00:08:49
Speaker
certainly from the United States but it doesn't line up with the experience I have which is looking at people on my Facebook timeline who I'm pretty convinced may obviously were susceptible to this stuff but I don't think they would be in this situation if they weren't online and weren't on social media and I do feel like there is a real resurgence in it that is a very real thing and I don't quite know how we're meant to talk about that and how we're meant to
00:09:19
Speaker
combat that because, you know, I was just looking at some protests that were taking place in Los Angeles over the weekend. Two hundred people out there, Q t-shirts, Q signs, save the children. You know, that wasn't happening when I was in Los Angeles a year and a half ago. You know, this is it feels like a new surge in things. And I'm really alarmed by that.
00:09:43
Speaker
I do wonder with the polling respect whether A, polling is kind of lagging what's happening in culture. So maybe the way we poll things indicates how people used to believe as opposed to what people are currently or going to believe.
00:10:00
Speaker
And also whether we've got the kind of issue we've seen with polling around elections that juice the way that many people have their lives online now, but a reliance on using, say, phones and the like for doing traditional polling. Maybe we're simply not asking the right people.
00:10:20
Speaker
which is why I think the election here is going to be so interesting because the poll of polls, as we talk about election day, is the one that gives us the best clear-cut indication of where things are going politically. And we've seen quite a number of conspiracy theory-centric parties in our country pop up in the last few months, haven't we?
00:10:44
Speaker
Yeah, and that's happened really quickly. I mean, the public party here, I mean, Billy TK Jr. was not talking about any of this conspiracy stuff pre the first lock-in, like you just look at his Facebook page.
00:11:00
Speaker
back in April and things were just morphing and changing to the point now where he's you know he started this party he's got Jamie Lee Ross on board and I think their Facebook page has got more followers like the act party which has been around a lot longer um you know and the public party they are having a large number of people turning up at their public meetings as they travel around the country and
00:11:23
Speaker
you read the comments on any of the public party's posts or just Billy T.K. Jr.'s personal page, the comments under his posts. And shit man, there are a lot of people believing some pretty crazy stuff right now. And it is, it's stuff that is unhinged and it has no basis in reality and it's all stuff that we're seeing being propagated on these
00:11:50
Speaker
Facebook pages and groups of people that are genuinely sort of seem to be into this whole Q movement. So it's Yeah, it's kind of alarming how quickly it's gotten to New Zealand, I think
00:12:01
Speaker
So tell me about, what was your precipitating event for being so, I'm gonna use what may some people be a pejorative term, your zealous approach towards talking about conspiracy theories. What was it that made you go, I need to write about this? I mean, the first thing was when I saw that I joined an anti 5G group on Facebook. And you know, I,
00:12:29
Speaker
I was in a 5G commercial a couple of years ago because, you know, surprise, surprise, when you work in documentary, you're not making a lot of money. So, you know, that commercial was like, OK, I do this thing. I'm like, 5G is great. Bring it on. I'm into it. I'll do it. And so I did this commercial and then.
00:12:47
Speaker
About maybe six months after that, I'd gone to see a movie out of Avondale at the cinema out there, the Hollywood, and someone just came up to me out of the blue and tapped me on the shoulder and started... I wouldn't use the word raving. Like, they really did start raving to me about a number of things from how 5G is incredibly dangerous and they couldn't believe what sold out. Then they got on to 1080 stuff.
00:13:09
Speaker
And then they got onto New World Order stuff. And I sort of thought, oh, like, God, what is going on? So I signed up for a number of Facebook groups, actually, like anti 5G groups. And I was just incredibly alarmed by the volume of posts in there and also just the number of members and what they were saying. And, you know, these are all people in New Zealand. They were all people that were alarmed. And as I read that stuff, I saw that they were just buying straight into all the Q rhetoric from American
00:13:39
Speaker
websites and Facebook pages and I was I just I just sort of thought god like we've got to start fighting back against this with some kind of logic and so I wrote some stuff for the spin-off and then when I saw you know like people like chef Pete Evans going down this rabbit hole and and a number of people in New Zealand
David's Personal Interactions with Theorists
00:13:59
Speaker
that I knew going down I just thought oh god like and I and that's when I just started typing and typing and typing and essentially ranting in the form of a
00:14:07
Speaker
this newsletter thing I'm doing. I mean, it's quite interesting. I'm going to work out the best way to phrase this question. So you're not just New Zealand famous due to your work with dark tourists and the like. You do have a certain international recognition as well.
00:14:26
Speaker
which means that you're the kind of person who can be easily spotted on the street and thus be easily associated with the things you've done. So doing a 5G commercial makes you a kind of prime target for people who are going, why did you take that commercial? Do you know something? Are you being paid by George Soros to promote 5G? Do you want me to get COVID-19? Which is quite different from, say, my work where
00:14:52
Speaker
I write about things, but I'm completely anonymous on the street. I can go shopping to my heart's content, and people have no idea one of the world's leading conspiracy theorists is in their supermarket buying their fake hands.
00:15:07
Speaker
you end up being a kind of perfect target for people to talk to. And that must be really confronting in the first instance it occurs. Because if you're not ready to debate these conspiracy theories, what do you do? And I suppose that's why I mean, that's a big part of what I wanted to start thinking about with my writing was how do you talk to people that are
00:15:32
Speaker
ranting and raving at you about stuff that is it's difficult to debate because it's not it's not paired with the reality that you know and that you are sure of and so yeah i mean just to address your point i guess it is i'm very used to being a target for i mean right back when i was on nightline interviewing bands and stuff like i'd get people like
00:15:53
Speaker
hurling sort of various online abuse at me. And, and so I'm very used to like, I don't take that any of that personally. And I'm very lucky and it hasn't crossed over really into my real life. I haven't had people, you know, doxing me or any of those sort of experiences. Although the Q crowd has definitely found their way into various bits of my social media and really given me a pretty
00:16:16
Speaker
a pretty difficult time at times. But you can shrug it all off. It's not real life. And in New Zealand, fortunately, we are fairly polite and people aren't rocking up to me too much outside the cinema. But that public facing thing definitely does make you a bit more of a target.
00:16:35
Speaker
And it's, you know, I wanted to start thinking about how you have those conversations. And I had this, I was sort of thrilled that this is guy McWest. He, do you know McWest? He is a conspiracy theory debater, essentially an apologist. I know of his work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he created Tony Hawk Pro Skater and a bunch of video games, made a shit ton of money, retired,
00:17:03
Speaker
then just started debunking conspiracy theories full time and he's got this book Escaping the Rabbit Hole which I really loved and it's basically about how you start to talk to people that believe these things in a reasonable way because like your knee-jerk reaction or it was certainly mine is just to sort of go oh that's so stupid like don't be so dumb but that's gonna get you nowhere and it's also kind of
00:17:27
Speaker
sort of an arrogant approach in a way we start calling anybody stupid. And so I wanted to sort of talk to Mick about this stuff. And he had a bunch of techniques and part of it is sort of putting all your cards on the table with people and saying and finding out where your common ground is. And, you know, if I was talking to someone that was raving to me about George Soros and children in underground tunnels, you know, I wouldn't say I absolutely know conspiracy theory. Some of them are very real. I have no doubt about that.
00:17:57
Speaker
And, you know, I talk a bit about maybe 9-11 and how I, you know, I think that, you know, God, it was a pretty good excuse to invade another country and sort of put all your cards on the table. So you're not just calling them idiots. And then another thing he explained to me was this idea. He calls it steel manning, which is sort of opposite of a straw man argument where.
00:18:16
Speaker
you go out and you learn their conspiracy theory even better than they know it, and then you explain it back to them in even greater detail. The idea being that they'll respect you, hopefully, that you sort of know what you're talking about, and maybe in explaining it back to them in such a complex way, they might start to clock that it sounds a bit silly. So I know I'm not a tangent here, but I really like McWhist's approach to talking to people about this stuff.
00:18:44
Speaker
I mean, steel manning is a really great idea. Although, of course, the problem is if you want to learn the basics of even just a few conspiracy theories, you are going to be spending an awful lot of time down the rabbit hole. That's true. Easier said than done. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, people talk about the glory days of of conspiracy theories when basically it was just based. It was JFK conspiracy theories and Elvis conspiracy theories.
00:19:14
Speaker
with the JFK ones being much more important, apparently, than the king of rock and roll's mysterious death on a toilet. I mean, who believes that story? But these days, you want to be talking about conspiracy theories. You need to know the ins and outs of your 911s, your 5Gs, the underground tunnels that apparently littering the entire
Understanding 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
00:19:36
Speaker
And even getting to grips with 9-11 is difficult because then you're going, which 9-11 conspiracy theory? Are we talking about the hologrammatic planes? Are we talking about the bombs put in the twin towers? Are we talking about the let it happen on purpose hypothesis? Are we going to say it did happen, but the conspiracy theory is what happened afterwards? I mean, where does one start?
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, and you've also got this other problem, I think, where if you're someone like me who is associated with the mass media in some way, because, you know, I've worked at TV3 for about 10 years, I've worked with Netflix, then the second I start debating any of this stuff, like, of course I'm part of the global elite, and of course I'm part of the media that would be disavowing this stuff, so I'm in an even worse position to start debating any of these things, and you know, I...
00:20:32
Speaker
I don't think I've successfully talked anyone around yet. I've had debates online with people about this stuff and I feel that when you're down and you have that worldview and you feel like you have the information that no one else has and that you've got this kind of elite knowledge,
00:20:49
Speaker
That's really appealing. It's like finding a new religion. It's like gives you all the answers. And that's a really, that's a really good feeling. And it's not something you're going to readily let go of. And so, you know, what I'm sort of thinking about at the moment is almost like how damaging is this? Like, if you've, you know, I've got a friend and they're into this stuff, like,
00:21:08
Speaker
what damage is it doing or do I just at what point do I just turn off Twitter and Facebook and just stop caring about this stuff because it can get you like incredibly wound up and my answer to that at the moment is like I feel like we should care because when it's a conspiracy based around the idea that COVID-19 is nothing more than the flu or the government is lying to us I think that has real real world health consequences and I think we do need to keep
COVID-19 Conspiracies and Public Behavior
00:21:37
Speaker
oh, you know, engaging with this stuff, but at the same time, it can feel pretty hopeless, right? Well, yes. I mean, as you point out, you very rarely ever have a conversation where you change someone's mind. And I mean, there's quite a lot of literature on conversion techniques. So people looking at, say, for example, how long does it take to make someone ditch creationism or intelligent design?
00:22:06
Speaker
and literature many years ago kind of indicated you're looking somewhere in the vicinity of several years because basically what happens is you have a debate with someone and you introduce some doubt into their worldview.
00:22:21
Speaker
And then they go away, and what do they do next? They go and talk to their trusted source, whether it be the pastor of their church or their really close friend who also believed what they do. They say, oh, look, David pointed out to me that X and Y seems a bit dubious about this view. And their friend or their pastor's response tends to be, oh, tell David next time you see him blah, blah, blah, and blah, thus reinforcing that person's initial view.
00:22:51
Speaker
and making all the ideas. Yeah, and Em, I mean, I mean, everything you're saying resonates with me because I grew up believing in young earth creationism. I came from a fairly, you know, I came from a family that embraced that and taught me that. And that's fine. I mean, I don't have a lot of resentment about that now, but, you know, I believe till I was about 17, 18,
00:23:21
Speaker
I'm trying to think even 19 that you know the earth was 10,000 years old and that dinosaurs and man walked the earth together and yeah man like I and when I was in youth group in church we would have like apologist classes where we would be taught how to debate evolutionists and sort of any sort of secular theory
00:23:46
Speaker
And so I'm just, I haven't really actually thought about this until now, but how the fuck did I get out of it? It was just someone, it was people planting seeds in doubt and me ignoring them for ages. And then I think when I went to university and just met a lot of people that didn't have that worldview,
00:24:03
Speaker
um it just it was time was probably a couple of years um before i just sort of realized that that wasn't something i believed anymore but once you know it was difficult to let go of because it gives you a blueprint for how things operate in the world and that is a really comforting thing and to lose that it's very disorientating initially although not as terrible as i think a lot of people think uh but yeah there was no at no point when i was
00:24:30
Speaker
in that belief system did someone walk up to me and instantly the light went on and I went, oh, that's right. Maybe the earth isn't 10,000 years old. It was years of things slowly eroding away and reading a bit wider. And certainly when someone
00:24:45
Speaker
came at me and told me I was stupid for believing that stuff that just embedded me more deeply because of course they are going to say that because they're you know they're not a christian and they don't know the truth godless heathens I believe is a technical term yeah totally so it's funny there's a lot of similarities I think there's a lot of similarities
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a very middle-class suburb, Devonport, in the North Shore of Auckland, and had all of the tropes you'd have of someone who was very middle-class and white in a white suburb, to the point where it was never explicitly said in the community, but you kind of look down on Maori, because they came from, you know, a primitive Stone Age-style civilization. We basically brought civilization to it. Oh, Christ.
00:25:28
Speaker
to them and then I went to uni and of all things did anthropology did the archaeology of pacific and over 12 weeks went these people are amazing and suddenly had to question everything I believed
00:25:46
Speaker
about Mauryderman to our Maury prior to that point because just being slowly explained the history of the Pacific, the migration techniques, the navigational technology, the long history, the Lapita civilization, you end up going
00:26:01
Speaker
I was never taught any of this stuff in school. Why was I never taught how awesome these people are? And that wasn't an overnight road to Damascus style moment. That was just a case of being patiently explained along with everyone else in the class. This is the history you've never been taught and going, huh,
00:26:23
Speaker
That's weird. So yeah, there is this kind of weird, weird thing where it can be initially disorienting to lose a cherished belief or a belief that you just held to be true. But actually the kind of liberty you feel when you come out the other side is also kind of, I know more about the world now. I feel much better about things. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean,
00:26:48
Speaker
God, I mean, we're, we're two white people. And, you know, the more you go through life, the more you become aware, I think of how all this deeply ingrained perspective that you have just by the fact that you're white. And I've been, you know, I've been, I feel like I've been learning a lot in the last, even though the last couple of days in the last week, because, you know, Dylan and I wrote this piece about this Reddit user who
00:27:13
Speaker
first propagated this idea, this bullet proof bullet point list that eventually led to that very racist, charged conspiracy theory that went around Facebook. And there's been some response to that from writers.
00:27:29
Speaker
and from Māori and Pacific writers and just sharing on their Facebook. And just that, you know, because we were very, you know, we were very sympathetic in that we wanted to talk to this person who had, I think, not intended for things to go out into the world the way that they did. But the point that's being made is that
00:27:51
Speaker
shit like you are afforded a lot of protection and you're given like a very long plank if you are white in this country compared when you're not and I think there's a lot of interesting debate around this in with what we're seeing in conspiracy as well and certainly with Billy TK and his audience and how all that stuff kind of plays out because I think the other thing that we're running into is if you know you've got to sort of be careful when you're
00:28:17
Speaker
white guy running around sort of shitting on these theories that you don't just in the approach that you take and just the language you're using and also just just being very aware of like who the victim is in this and you know in that conspiracy theory that that spreads so widely in New Zealand about the the source of the COVID outbreak which is completely false you know the victim is certainly not a white person and it's easy to sort of lose sight of
00:28:44
Speaker
of all of this stuff sometimes. I'm just sort of ranting, but I hope I'm making some sort of sense. No, I mean, I found Dylan's response to the web worm piece and then journalistic response to it interesting because as he points out, you don't really get tone in written forms of language. It's quite easy to read
00:29:06
Speaker
The interlocutor is being blase, and so you end up not realizing actually there's a lot of tone and nuance, which is lost just by making speech into words. And of course, that's one of those things you might only spot after the fact.
00:29:25
Speaker
which kind of resembles his response to, I was just putting some speculation on Reddit. I didn't realise how people would read it. And then it's quite interesting to see the same effect also occurring around the reporting of exactly what he did. The realisation that, oh, actually, tone once again is not coming through. Yeah, it's super interesting. And I think that there's so many questions raised even when you're covering
00:29:54
Speaker
conspiracy theory thinking and culture and how you talk about things. And what I'm finding really interesting on the newsletter is that, you know, my audience, I'm trying to figure out who my audience is because they're not just New Zealanders. It's not like I'm the Herald that's writing for a New Zealand audience. Like half the people I'm writing for are in the United States. And so I'm trying to think like, how can I make this make sense to an American? And so I tend to keep things like very broad
00:30:23
Speaker
in general. And when I found when we were covering this topic that was so central to New Zealand, and I'm sort of writing about it for an audience that isn't necessarily New Zealanders, it's just a really, it's an interesting process in the editorial kind of system. And when I say editorial system, I mean, it's just me. And so yeah, finding it's interesting when you're writing on the internet and you're writing for
00:30:47
Speaker
audience that's very broad and I'm loving it but it also comes with certain nuances I think that can be lost. So what have you learned about the audience for web worm? How old are they? How diverse are they? Do you think? I mean I don't have any stats particularly about specifics like that. I mean I get an idea of
00:31:09
Speaker
geographically where people are from just because of the comments and the kind of feedback I'm getting. And I think that a lot of people came to the newsletter from probably my Instagram and Twitter and a lot of those people came from dark tourist and tickled.
00:31:21
Speaker
which primarily had their audiences in the United States and the UK. So I think, yeah, there's a lot of Americans on there and I think their ages are pretty widespread. I mean, I heard a couple of like grandmothers write to me recently saying like, thanks for writing some of the stuff because I have no idea what QAnon is and I don't understand this stuff.
00:31:44
Speaker
you're writing it about it in a way where I can kind of grasp what's going on. And that was really cool to hear. And I think there's some kids and stuff on there that have signed up for the free newsletter who are, I feel like they're sort of like TikTok generation who are coming across some of this conspiracy stuff for the first time in the middle of, you know, amazing dances that they're watching on TikTok. Suddenly they've got people talking about
00:32:06
Speaker
pizza gate on there. So it feels diverse and I love that. I love that it's a lot of different people and it keeps me on my toes about what I'm writing about as well. And it makes me think a lot about the kind of community I want to build there because what I like about it is that
00:32:23
Speaker
you know, you can write in the comments and I'm finding some of the discussion in there, like I'm learning things and I really, selfishly, I really like that because it's, you know, it's like, oh great, I'm getting something from this that enriches my life as well, which is fucking rad.
00:32:39
Speaker
Has there been any pushback by the international audience to stories around Aotearoa, New Zealand? No, no, there hasn't been and that's and that's kind of great. And I'm linking, I've just linked to a couple of local pieces as well in a recent newsletter and people I think enjoy it. I think as well New Zealand at the moment is
00:32:59
Speaker
kind of on the world stage with our response to COVID and so people, you know, it's not just Lord of the Rings and Flight of the Conchords, I think people are actively interested in New Zealand and because of COVID and our response that kind of ties in so beautifully with some of this conspiracy stuff I'm writing about. We're like this little test case
00:33:19
Speaker
And so when I start talking about pockets of conspiracy poking up here, I think people are sort of fascinated by it. And so I feel kind of lucky. I've kind of got like the perfect topic to explore that will appeal super wide, but I can talk about things that are a bit more specific and it's not entirely lost on them.
00:33:42
Speaker
I mean, talking about the New Zealand aspect of the COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the thing which fascinates me, and I'm sure it does you as well, is that we've done so well with the initial round of eradication of COVID-19 in the community. And then, of course, a few weeks ago, we had the reappearance of community transmission, which is a big deal here, but compared to what's going on overseas is actually a really, really minor outbreak.
00:34:11
Speaker
and yet so many conspiracy theories about what is happening or what we're not being told appeared overnight as if they'd just been imported from other slightly larger countries and repurposed as weapons against the government in this one. Yeah and I think what we're seeing here is it's so funny because I was so
00:34:38
Speaker
I was so curious about what was happening in America, but I'm, you know, I, I love this podcast, Secure Non Anonymous podcast, talking about the developments there and seeing it suddenly arrive here was surprising. And we've got our own spin on things as well.
00:34:56
Speaker
But it's essentially the same kind of talking points, but it's just very unusual to see it rolling out on home turf. And there's something quite fascinating about the the two varieties we're seeing here. So we're getting the explicit conspiracy theory politics being put forward by people like Billy T.K. Jr. and elements of the new conservatives where they are explicitly engaging in claims of conspiracy.
00:35:23
Speaker
whether it be cover-ups around COVID-19 or claims that we have the most draconian abortion law in the world. And then the conspiracy dog whistles we're seeing coming out of the bigger political parties, from Suffolk actors saying to Jerry Brownleys, I'm just asking questions approach to putting forward conspiracy theories.
Political Discourse and Conspiracy Theories
00:35:47
Speaker
Do you think
00:35:48
Speaker
Which of the two do you think is more dangerous, the explicit conspiracy theory politics or the dog whistles towards it? I think probably the dog whistles because they're going out to a bigger audience. I mean, as popular as the public party is, Billy TK is so extreme. Those views are also going to turn a lot of people off. So obviously he has his supporters who are fully red-pilled on this stuff.
00:36:16
Speaker
but also I think a lot of people come along to his stuff and they're just like oh god like this is this is fucking this is out there this is not for me whereas when you've got someone like Jerry Brownlee up there who is I imagine to a lot of people is respected within that party and he holds a you know he's deputy leader the leader of the party you know pats him on the back after he does this stuff and when someone like that gets up at a press conference and starts
00:36:44
Speaker
putting out these really loose kind of ideas like, Oh, isn't it odd that she was in a mask factory, you know, Jacinda was at this mask factory and then it's not odd that, um, you know, we've been talking about masks in the last two weeks and, and, and stringing these strings, these things together, that stuff that's going to probably more likely to drag in a lot more people into distrusting, uh, the government and to sort of have these, almost have these conspiratorial ideas without even knowing they're having them.
00:37:11
Speaker
And so I think that dog whistling stuff, I think it's more cynical as well. I mean, I mean, I'm still curious like how much of a grift of Billy TK Junior is and how much he genuinely believes this stuff. I kind of feel he does genuinely believe it. And at least, I mean, God, I mean, at least he like is backing what he believes as terrible as that is. When you've got someone like Jerry Brownlee out there who I think doesn't believe that at all, but is still engaging and dog whistling to that audience.
00:37:40
Speaker
I mean, that's awful. That I find more troubling. Yeah, I agree. I think the worry with the current political discourse are people like your Jerry Brown leaves, who
00:37:57
Speaker
I'll just be frank, either deeply stupid and thus shouldn't really have any political power whatsoever, or deeply cynical and going, I don't really believe the government's up to anything particularly shady, but we're not doing particularly well in the polls at this point in time.
00:38:15
Speaker
So maybe if we just intimate the government is hiding something, we can claw back some of those votes that have gone to the minor parties and either option is bad. We don't want idiots in charge because we're seeing what's happening in the US.
00:38:33
Speaker
and we don't want cynical political leaders in charge who will weaponize a crisis for votes because you don't know what they're going to do in power if they're then going oh we can use a crisis to maintain our position both options are bad or at least as you point out with Billy TK Jr. I mean he might be grifting to a certain extent but he also does seem to be a true believer
00:38:59
Speaker
and at least some of these conspiracy theories and is expressing them as his rights, just that we just don't have to necessarily give that person votes. No, and it's highly unlikely he will get into any position of power and he'll vanish and that's great.
00:39:16
Speaker
Whereas someone like Jerry is very much has a soapbox. And if we're getting into that style of politics, which, you know, someone like Donald Trump, I think is perfected this in such an amazing way where he can step up to a podium. He can talk to a country in the world. He can spout a lot of utter, you know, provably incorrect things. Uh, and yet that's fine. It's, you know, he is moving at such a pace of information that he can lie and it's kind of fine. Like.
00:39:45
Speaker
his voter base will just keep on voting. People won't fact check him. And if even people that do know he's wrong, it's like, what can you do? And I'd hate to see that style of politics sort of it's always existed, but I'd hate to see that really taking off here. And that's why you and Jerry Brownlee did that.
00:40:03
Speaker
little spiel and then you got down and you know journalists sort of hit him up like like Jerry what are you saying like just spit it out and then Judith got up there Judith Collins got up instead of this little grin on her face and was like wow if you guys asked the right question or whatever she said I'm paraphrasing I was just sitting there going oh fuck like is this where we're at
00:40:22
Speaker
And it's hard to know how to respond, as you point out, to people like Jerry Brownlee. Even if you think Billy TK Jr. is absolutely wrong about almost everything, which I do, you can imagine sitting down with him and going, look, let's lay our cards on the table. This is what you believe. This is what I believe. Can we find a way to have a conversation to work out what we should both believe at the end of this conversation? Even though we've already discussed that that virtually never happened.
00:40:52
Speaker
But if someone's insincerely using a conspiracy theory to advance their politics, then you can't have those debates with them. Because either they're going to admit, yeah, I don't really believe that, at which point you're going to go, so why did you say it?
00:41:08
Speaker
or they're just going to pervericate and find a way to continue to maintain saying those things. They're not going to engage you in honest debate on that topic because their goal is not to change your mind, it's to get like-minded people to support them.
00:41:26
Speaker
And at that point you're talking about nothing, you know, it's like we're wasting our breath having these conversations and it's, I think that's why I get so wound up about this because it seems like all of this seems like such a massive waste of time whether you're, I mean whether you are debating Jerry and having this conversation about nothing as you just discussed or you're sitting down with Billy TK putting all your cards on the table
00:41:50
Speaker
It's such a fucking waste of time because we're not talking about anything real. It's like we could be debating and talking about
00:41:59
Speaker
Elon Musk's neural link, this fucking mad thing he's working on that's going to interface the human brain with the internet.
Conspiracy Theories vs. Real-World Issues
00:42:08
Speaker
And I mean, that's a real thing that people are working on. I mean, that's something we should be discussing the ins and outs of. I mean, that's so much more interesting than this made up stuff that doesn't exist that we're just spending so much time debating. I think that's why I get so frustrated because it's just we're talking about
00:42:29
Speaker
nothing real. It's like the whole world is spending all their time talking about the existence of Bigfoot. And I love Bigfoot. I love that stuff. But it's like, ultimately, it's such a waste of time, right?
00:42:43
Speaker
Yeah, and that particular point in time, I feel sympathy for the conspiracy theory that says modern politics is just a distraction to keep us not looking at what the elites are doing in the background. Because you're right, Elon Musk is talking about installing basically brain chips in human beings.
00:43:04
Speaker
which in theory is just going to make it easier to access the internet but people are actually afraid might might lead to a complete loss of privacy for individual users the ability to suddenly do hardware hacks on the human brain there's a whole bunch of issues there that we should be debating at length
00:43:27
Speaker
And yet we're kind of stuck in the same old political conversations we've been having since time immemorial as if there's a group of people out there who don't want us to look at what other people are doing.
00:43:42
Speaker
absolutely and it's and we should be alarmed we should be alarmed by that and it's again like the these conspiracy theories that are not based in any kind of reality are distracting from the fact that there are real conspiracies going on on a huge scale and on a million examples I'm sure on a smaller scale that we should be focusing on and I think you know something
00:44:09
Speaker
Travis view said to me who has been following the QAnon movement is that sort of For instance the people following something like Q what they forget is for all their posting and all that talking not one Q follower has actually
00:44:25
Speaker
saved a child or done anything that's actually real. You look at who outed Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking ring. That was a really hard-working journalist at a Miami newspaper. You look at who outed the huge conspiracy within the Catholic Church to cover up for
00:44:44
Speaker
pedophilic priests. And that was a really hard working bunch of journalists. This isn't hidden. They've made movies about it. You know, they've made dramas about the fact this happened. And so, you know, I just wish we were talking about real things and focusing on real problems, not this kind of made up gunk, you know.
00:45:05
Speaker
Yes, I mean there are points in time where I think maybe the ultimate conspiracy theory is the dissemination of major conspiracy theories like this in order to allow political elites to get away with doing much more minor crimes but more systemic crimes in our society.
00:45:23
Speaker
I mean, imagine building an international cabal to go, look, we'll get people like Alex Jones and David Icke to express these ludicrous views of what we're meant to be up to, whilst we engage in selling wars overseas, trading property with one another, and basically taking the resources of third world nations. I mean, it looks really minor compared to what Jones and Icke are saying. We can get away with murder.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, now that's something that's a theory I could get behind. You know, sign me up.
00:45:55
Speaker
Excellent, I finally found a conspiracy theory to make my fortune. So I've always maintained, have I ever wanted to make money from this game? The only way to do it is to find a vaguely plausible conspiracy theory and then start selling it in town halls around the world. I mean, David Icke makes a, I mean, he claims not to make much money from his work, but he travels internationally to crowded auditoriums all the time.
00:46:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah, the stuffy the stuffy sells and it's the same with the cure the Q stuff the merchandise like they're all grifters You know, they're all making making a lot more money than probably
00:46:33
Speaker
an epidemic, or certainly a journalist is making off this stuff. Oh yes, I mean Alex Jones is the perfect example of this grift. Even though he absolutely hates QAnon, he sells Q-related merchandise through Infowars.com. I mean, what a grift. You promote conspiracy theories, you hate one particular rival conspiracy theory, but you still sell their merch.
00:47:01
Speaker
it's so uh yeah it's it's so frustrating i mean i feel like he's yeah lee he's someone whose life has sort of come collapsing down around him which i'm i'm grateful for uh but it's it's taken a while yeah yeah it does seem that his empire is in free fall i'm a great fan of the podcast knowledge fight which is kind of tracks alex jones's broadcast week in and week out and
00:47:28
Speaker
It really does seem as if there's been a complete total shift in Alex Jones in the last few years in that he kind of want old Alex Jones back, the one who wasn't a religious zealot going on about by the grace of God. And you can tell that Nancy Pelosi is
00:47:47
Speaker
is controlled by a demon because her face is too flexible. It does seem that de-platforming him from Twitter and Infowars has really reduced his audience down to a very, very core set of Christian conservatives who's had to pivot his message to even keep them on board.
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah he has and I mean I yearn for like the wacky old days of Alex Jones as well before we got to this point I mean I feel like where he crossed over into territory that was just so just objectively awful was when he was you know pointing out that certain Sandy Hook survivors are crisis actors and and you know people involved in that you know had legs blown off in the Boston Marathon bombing were crisis actors and started you know
00:48:37
Speaker
harassing them and sort of dog whistling people onto them. That was, I think, a moment where it's just like, oh man, like, this isn't fun anymore. Like, this is just awful, awful shit, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There is something very, very deeply strange about conspiracy theories on the internet, which of course comes back to how we kind of started this conversation between my, you say, my my balance approach versus your slightly more strident approach.
Analyzing and Responding to Conspiracies
00:49:06
Speaker
It is interesting in this moment to see what conspiracy theories look like in the here and now and go, what is the appropriate response to dealing with conspiracy theories? Because we know conspiracies occur
00:49:22
Speaker
So some conspiracy theories are going to turn out to be true. But working out how to have that conversation without appearing to endorse some of the really dangerous conspiracy theories we're seeing circulating at this point in time is really difficult. And so I think we need both your approach and my approach working in tandem in these situations. You need a good theoretical academic background for this discussion.
00:49:50
Speaker
But you also need people like you who are actually delving into the minutiae of individual conspiracy theories, talking with the people behind them, trying to work out. So what is motivating these people? Why do they believe these things? And where are these conspiracy theories going? Yeah, thank you. And that means a lot because I've loved your work for a long period of time now. So it's nice to hear that. And I think
00:50:18
Speaker
know, I think we need to keep having these discussions. And I think we need to, I don't know how exactly, but we need to start, I mean, it all comes down to education, right? And if we can start, I think, educating kids to think critically and not just shoving a bunch of facts and, and sort of knowledge down there, their gullets, but actually, you know, get them
00:50:41
Speaker
you know give them the tools to think critically and to analyze things and to look at sources and because we've lost that I think somewhere and I'd look I don't know anything about education and I'm very naive about this stuff but it feels to me like we've lost something there and we've got a you know you and I have to do our thing talking to I guess more sort of adults probably but I think kids need to be
00:51:06
Speaker
taught critical thinking skills a lot earlier and I feel that's just not happening or we wouldn't be in this mess now. Yeah I mean I suppose optimistically having done a teaching degree I do think the next generation of digital natives who come through are going to be much better at dealing with this stuff online. Good. I think what we're dealing with now
00:51:30
Speaker
is the fact that we've got a kind of interstitial generation between people like ourselves who actually grew up at just the right point in time where computational technology was becoming mainstream and big. So we actually know quite a bit about how these things work.
00:51:46
Speaker
versus a generation who grew up with them without really being taught how they work and not being taught how to interact with the way the information landscape works versus a new generation being brought up through schools who are being taught to critically appraise sources working out when you should trust a website and when you shouldn't.
00:52:08
Speaker
And so I do have hope for the future. The problem is there needs to be a future for that hope to be instantiated in. And the worry is in this current moment, we might tear ourselves apart before we ever get there, which is a really depressing note. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of things that are going to kill us. I mean, I'm freaked out by AI, I'm freaked out by global warming, but
00:52:35
Speaker
Yeah, also freaked out by the kind of discussions we're having around reality at the moment. And so, yeah, I, I'm encouraged by what you've just said, but I think you're right, we could very easily
00:52:49
Speaker
tear ourselves apart before we get to that point. So I guess we'll see. We're living in very odd times, aren't we, Em? We are. As I've pointed out to many colleagues, I may be studying the right thing at the right time.
00:53:06
Speaker
but it would actually be quite nicer to be studying this as more a historical thing of back in the old days when we believe these things because it's much easier to encapsulate and understand an idea that's distinctly in the past as opposed to something which is evolving around us at high speed like a coronavirus. Yeah, and shifting and changing and you're trying to nail it down in real time. And yeah, that's a lot more difficult than the joy of hindsight.
00:53:36
Speaker
Indeed. Now, normally at this particular point in time, we do the, do you have anything to promote? But of course, we've already talked about Webworm. And I'm also aware that you're not really particularly keen about talking about secret projects you're working on in the background, because we've talked about this in the past. You like to keep those things under wrap until they're fully formed. So ask a side question, are there any projects you're not working on at the moment?
00:54:07
Speaker
I am not I mean I believe you're still not writing that novel I'm not writing that novel I'm not making a documentary about Elon Musk's neural link which is like at the moment that is what I would love I want to be with next Elon Musk daily filming with him that's a project I'm not doing that I would love to do I'm sure somebody is and I cannot wait to see it
00:54:33
Speaker
Actually, now I'm thinking about a reality TV show set inside Elon Musk's Hyperloop. I think it involves car racing. In fact, it's going to be the next Fast and Furious film in the Hyperloop.
00:54:50
Speaker
I think we should sell that property. I think you've got something. And the thing is, I'm actually convinced Vin Diesel will do it. He would. He would. I mean, we're living in crazy times. Tom Cruise is about to shoot the first thriller action film in space. So anything can happen.
00:55:09
Speaker
Yeah, I suspect the problem with these Mission Impossible films is they have to keep on topping each other. Space is this one. What are they going to do for the next one? The first film literally entirely set on Mars? Look, I don't know, but I'm here for all of them. I'm so here for them.
00:55:30
Speaker
Well, thank you, David. That has been an informative, if slightly depressing conversation towards the end. I hope we get to talk again soon. Yeah, that would be great, Em. Thank you, and thanks for the work that you do as well. Thank you.
00:55:48
Speaker
And there you have it, what a nice young man. Such a pleasant person to talk to. I haven't spoken to him myself, but having heard people speak to him, seems like a lovely fellow. Well of course I've had adventures with David in Prague, and you know, what happens in Prague? Stays, I don't know, lives in your heart forever. Now I was thinking about this afterwards.
00:56:13
Speaker
Is David Ferri are now the most famous person we've interviewed? Is David Ferri a more famous than David Icke? David Icke has a following, but I think post-dark tourists surely more people know who David Ferri is than know who David Icke is. I think this actually speaks to the fact that there are a variety of different audiences out there in the world because yes, I think for the common person, David Ferri is much more of a touchstone than David Icke.
00:56:43
Speaker
I think if you believe in alien shapeshifting reptiles, David Icke is much more of a touchstone than David Ferrier, but they are both called David, which does make me think that maybe a prerequisite for being famous is having the name David in your full name. And I have thus made a mistake by not having any D names in my full full name at all.
00:57:08
Speaker
No, no, I'm not even called David a little bit. So maybe we've touched on it. Maybe that's the reason why we're not famous.
00:57:17
Speaker
all becomes clear. So we should basically rename ourselves and rename this podcast to the David's Guide to the Conspiracy. Yes, I think so. But anyway, that can come for next week. So was that what we heard? Was that basically the whole thing? No, no juicy little tidbits you had to cut out for defamatory reasons or
00:57:39
Speaker
No, I mean, I did think about cutting out the bit where I said, I think Jerry Brownlee is basically an idiot. They went, no, no, I'm willing to stand by that particular bit of... That's your personal opinion. Of biting political commentary. No, that was apart from, you know, the usual gulf of setting up the sound at the beginning and then a chat at the end where we promised we would meet up when we're both in Auckland at the same time again. You heard the full text of the interview. Jolly good.
00:58:06
Speaker
And what an interview it was. Interesting. I wasn't aware that he's been talking to Joe Yuskinski as well. I assume that's going to be fodder for an upcoming. Someone might have suggested he should talk to him. Well, yes, I was assuming you would have done the introductions. But the talk you had about sort of the attitudes towards it and possibly
00:58:32
Speaker
Were you thinking on the spot with the idea that maybe the polling is less than representative for the reasons that polling can be less than representative these days, what with landline phones and internet and so on and so on? Is that something that occurred to you at the time or is that something that people have been wondering for a while?
00:58:52
Speaker
Well, I think there's this weird tension between the work that Joe does, which really does seem to indicate that belief in conspiracy theories is not growing. It doesn't appear to be diminishing at the moment, but it's remained remarkably stable.
00:59:08
Speaker
versus the fact that we're having QAnon rallies in the US now. And we're certainly seeing enough town hall meetings going on here to indicate that the New Zealand Public Party has more support than we previously thought. So there is a worry that maybe the mechanisms by which we are doing polling
00:59:28
Speaker
are not quite capturing people in the same way that election polling before elections doesn't seem to be capturing how people vote on the day. Now there are also other related issues. It turns out people lie to people who are taking surveys, so it also turns out that people basically don't tell you the truth when they're being polled.
00:59:51
Speaker
So there's a kind of, and I'm going to use a term, the right use, pejorative all the time. There is a kind of virtue signaling that goes on with polling, particularly around who are you going to vote for? Even though you don't know the person on the other end of the phone, you often do implicitly want to please them. So you'll tell them the kind of answer that you would tell to any stranger, as opposed to the answer you would tell to a friend. So they're all kind of worries about polling going on there.
01:00:22
Speaker
And so yes, I do worry that maybe either we're not polling properly, or maybe the way we're polling lags behind what people believe. And that's why we're going to have an interview with Joe Ucinski at some point in the near future, where I will put the hard questions to him. And he'll probably point out to me that actually polling is very robust and the kind of issues we have with election polling do not apply to the kind of pollings he does for the Pew Research Center. I look forward to that then.
01:00:53
Speaker
There's going to be egg on my face, I can tell you that now. But I only mean that figuratively. Obviously, yes. And then sort of the area we went into where you...
01:01:06
Speaker
didn't quite, you didn't quite word it as having sort of a responsibility around these things, but it seemed like you were sort of thinking around the effect that your work and David's work has and whether it's enough to simply have an academic interest at the moment.
01:01:27
Speaker
I mean like in the past when we've talked about things you've talked about sort of in terms of um sort of social goods that might come out of this sort of line of research being um people should take conspiracy theories a bit more seriously because then that will prevent authorities from being able to wave stuff away by simply saying oh that's just a conspiracy theory but um
01:01:53
Speaker
Do you find that things are going in the other direction a little bit now, that conspiracy theories do seem to be a little bit more, in mainstream might not be the right word, but sort of out there in society and the conspiracy theories themselves seem to be a bit damaging? Do you think there's some sort of a social angle, if not a social responsibility that your sort of research can have these days?
01:02:22
Speaker
I mean, it is interesting doing conspiracy theory in the age of COVID-19, where even if you aren't convinced many people believe in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, you can still be convinced that the idea that because some people believe them, they change their behaviors, so they are less likely to wear masks, they're less likely to engage in social distancing, they're less likely to wash their hands properly, all of whisk, all of whisk, all of whisk.
01:02:52
Speaker
all of which are the kind of behaviours which increase the chance of transmission of COVID-19 from one person to another, especially given that many people are asymptomatic for periods of time whilst actually having the virus. So the worry is
01:03:12
Speaker
We need to be careful about the way we talk about these conspiracy theories, particularly in media narratives about these conspiracy theories, because we certainly don't want to be amplifying the threat to make people concerned about things that actually might be minor beliefs. And we also don't want to introduce people to these theories if they're primed to believe them, but they haven't heard them. So I think there is something quite interesting about the tension about how we talk about these things.
01:03:41
Speaker
Now, I've always maintained that if we want to treat conspiracy theories seriously and investigate them, that doesn't necessitate we have to do that in a public forum. So my community of inquiry model of dealing with the investigation of conspiracy theories has that you could build private communities that take a conspiracy theory seriously, engage in a rigorous investigation, as long as the products of that investigation are made public.
01:04:11
Speaker
and are made public in a really transparent manner. So you have your report, you produce the report, you give the background to the report and make that public, but you don't tell people you're investigating it until you actually finished with the investigation.
01:04:25
Speaker
So there are ways around talking about this stuff. But yeah, because I've been talking with the media an awful lot over the last week or so about COVID-19 conspiracy theories, one of the things which keeps coming out from that is the question.
01:04:42
Speaker
How many people do you think believe in these theories? And that always brings me back to the, we're not entirely sure. We don't think it's as many people as maybe the media makes it out to be. And thus some of us are concerned that maybe the media are blowing the problem out of proportion.
01:05:02
Speaker
which might introduce people to the conspiracy theories or make people overly concerned about something which may not be as big of a threat that people think it is. Yeah, you wonder if there could be sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy where the media says, hey, this is a big deal, and because they're saying that, it becomes a big deal because everybody starts to believe them.
01:05:23
Speaker
And there's a kind of related issue when it comes to polls before elections, which is why historically, people like Winston Peters, leader of New Zealand first, has always maintained there should be no polls during the election period, which is the concern that people like to vote for winners. So if people want to vote for winners, they'll see that one party is doing really well in the polls. And if that effect is real,
01:05:49
Speaker
then people end up going, well, I was going to vote for national, but I don't see the point about voting for a loser. I'm going to vote Labour instead, which means the polls may be influencing the vote rather than representing where that vote is meant to go.
01:06:05
Speaker
Anyway, we should probably stop talking because that was a decent length interview and it's about time to get sent this episode on its way, but now, like we said, this would normally be when we would have a news episode, but obviously we had the much more interesting and enlightening interview with David Faria instead, but
01:06:31
Speaker
we figure what we will do is have news in the patron episodes, like we usually do each week, and then maybe sometime, so the patrons will get that straight away, and then maybe a little bit later, we'll release that as next week's episode, which will be the retroactive news episode for August, I think. That sounds like it works. And what's going to be particularly confusing for patrons
01:06:56
Speaker
that patrons will hear the patron bonus episode before they hear this episode, or at least if they're keeping up to date with things, they'll get the patron bonus episode and listen to it before the interview with David Ferrier occurs. So it's got really, really timey-wimey for patrons of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy.
01:07:19
Speaker
But if you are a patron to the podcast as guide to the conspiracy, you're probably fully capable of dealing with this weird sort of paradoxical time manipulating nature, because frankly, you're just better and smarter and sweeter smelling than everybody else on the planet.
01:07:35
Speaker
So much prettier. Yes. And if you'd like to be a patron of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy and have your sense of time manipulated in these weird seductive ways, you could do that by going to patreon.com and
01:07:50
Speaker
looking for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy or you could even go to conspiracism.podbean.com which is the site where this is podcasters officially sort of hosted and do their patronage system but frankly you're probably better going with patreon because that's what everyone does it's what all the cool kids do you should do that
01:08:06
Speaker
Let's follow the peer pressure, go with the organisation which has really bad union roles. I have no idea about what Podbean's union roles are like. One of the great things about being an underdog in this fight is that sometimes people don't talk about your bad labour practices. Precisely.
01:08:27
Speaker
Speaking of bad labour practices, I have no segue for that. It's the end of the episode, and we usually signal the end of the episode by me saying goodbye. In my saying, it's goodbye from David, David and David. Good David to you all. David!
01:08:51
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R.Xdenter, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:09:52
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.