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A Cup of Joe
27 Plays6 years ago
This week, a slightly longer than usual episode: M interviews friend of the show (and target of QAnon), Joe Uscinski (Miami), the political scientist working on conspiracy theory theory. Due to the longer than usual shenanigans, the news update was moved entirely to the bonus content, available at low-low prices to potential patrons.
(Also, this episode has a few visual gags, so maybe go watch it: https://youtu.be/A9WZKMhyVgE)
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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You can contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Joe Yusinski and Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
This week we present for your edification and entertainment an interview with Joe Yusinski, who recently referred to me as the number one social epistemologist working on conspiracy theory. As such, there is a certain amount of backslapping in what you're about to hear, but it's also an informative look at conspiracy theory and conspiracy theories.
00:00:27
Speaker
Now even I, we talk about our new books, QAnon, whether or not conspiracy theories are on the way, or the rise, and much, much more. So sit back and relax, unless you're driving, or using heavy machinery whilst listening to this podcast, and enjoy two conspiracy theory theorists shoot the breeze. Anything to add Josh? Well, no, on with the show.
Legalities and Intelligence Agencies
00:00:54
Speaker
Dick.
00:01:03
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yep, and it says here, avoid legal snags by telling people they're being recorded. So Josh. Yeah. So we're on a legal footing here. I want to point out everything you're saying now is being recorded and presumably intercepted by the CIA or the FBI or the NSA or MI5 or MI6 or Mossad or the GCSB. You name it, secret intelligence agencies are listening to everything you're about to say. So please be warned.
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, with that big of an audience, why do you have to tell me that you're recording and no one else does? Well, I think it's probably due to the weird way in which surveillance laws work. So I don't know how the laws in Miami work, but in New Zealand, I can record you without you being aware I'm recording you. So as long as one party knows about the recording, you can record another party entirely. It's got to be both parties here in Florida.
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, in some parts of the states, it is a one-party system, in some parts of the states. It sounds like we're already morphing straight into politics. One party, two parties. Who can tell? Democrats, Republicans. Are they the same? Are they different? Now, I suppose the people who are actually listening in, I should probably introduce the person I'm talking to here, which is Joe Yusinski of the University of Miami's Political Science Department. Is that the right department to describe it for you?
00:02:41
Speaker
And Joe recently described to me as one of the most important social epistemologists working in philosophy on conspiracy theory. I'm going to... The most important. The most important. You seek one of, because this is the whole point. I'm going to one-up you by saying you are the most important political scientist working on conspiracy theories. How do you like them apples? Yes, but I didn't want to sound too gushing on the blurb, so I wanted to appear like an even keeled person.
00:03:09
Speaker
on the blurb, so I said you were one of the most important. But really, we've got this kind of aroha here, so it's really, I am the most important, as you've already said in this introduction. Now, Joe and I are both in rather unique positions.
Joe Yusinski's New Book on Conspiracy Theories
00:03:24
Speaker
We've both got new books out on conspiracy theory, which is all rather exciting. Joe, tell me about your book, Conspiracy Theories, and the people who believe them.
00:03:36
Speaker
So this is what it looks like. Oh, I have it right here. I actually don't have my copy yet. So this is literally the first time I've seen the cover. So how did this book come about? Why was it written? And what does it add to the literature?
00:03:54
Speaker
So you'll remember, since you were here, about three and a half years ago, I hosted a big conference here at University of Miami of all the top conspiracy theory scholars on the planet. And I had, I think, between 40 and 50 scholars come.
00:04:15
Speaker
And there was three days of discussion, sometimes fairly intense. And what sprang out of it was sort of an agreement to do this book where we gather
00:04:27
Speaker
all the best perspectives and all the best literatures and get it into one place at one time. It took a few years to do, but the book has 31 chapters by 40 authors from, I think, 12 different countries and 15 different disciplines. It's fairly comprehensive in terms of what it does and who's in it and the different ideas that are there.
00:04:54
Speaker
And one thing I say in the preface to the book is,
00:05:00
Speaker
There's a lot of different perspectives here. So a lot of people think that the scholars who study this topic are all anti-conspiracy theory or pro-establishment, and that's really not the case. Amongst this group, there are serious disagreements. Some people are more pro-conspiracy theory. Some people are very anti-conspiracy theory. Some people are pro-establishment. Others are much more skeptical of the establishment.
00:05:31
Speaker
So as readers peruse through the chapters, they won't get right answers, but they'll get a lot of different answers.
Perspectives and Publishing Challenges
00:05:40
Speaker
And that might not sound good, but I think that's the best that science can offer right now, is that as we work towards better answers, you'll see a lot of different perspectives, then you have to keep adjudicating, and then maybe a few years we'll do another one of these where we toss out some of the worst answers and
00:05:58
Speaker
just focus on some of the better ones. But for now, I think it's sort of the best authors I could gather and the best ideas that we could get.
00:06:08
Speaker
But to say you're sounding a lot like a philosopher there, because one of the things we'd say in most introductory philosophy classes is, philosophy is not about, well, philosophy ideally is about finding the right answer, but the history of philosophy is discovering there are a whole lot of bad questions, and thus you get answers to them, and you go, oh, actually, that really wasn't the right way to go about this, so we're going to throw that out and start again. And it sounds like conspiracy theories and the people who believe it is kind of a cacophony of
00:06:38
Speaker
voices, which allows people to go through and go, oh, those are interesting research results. Now, the question is, what questions should we actually be asking about these things called conspiracy theories? The authors to do, and one was to sort of put together very briefly, what is the body of knowledge in their particular area?
00:07:02
Speaker
And then secondly, to sort of spring from that with sort of the new cutting edge ideas that they are most interested in. So there's a lot of edited volumes out there where sometimes you'll get a rehash of old stuff, or you'll get some studies that maybe don't go together, or some studies that are not necessarily
00:07:29
Speaker
you know, could be published in a journal, but might not get accepted ever. But here, the authors were incredibly generous with me, and they gave me some very good material to work with. So I'm incredibly grateful to all of them. You, of course, are one of them. And I actually, and this will be interesting to readers, the first paper you gave me, I actually thought was too good. And I said, you have to publish in a journal. So the second one you gave me, I thought was much more appropriate.
00:07:58
Speaker
So I do hope you publish that other chapter in a journal article.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yes, that paper's been rejected by one general, but I'm doing a light rewrite and I'm going to resubmit it. The issue is I've got about five different papers. I'm doing light rewrite at the moment. So you keep on having to juggle which one you're going to work on next before sending things out. But I'm sure you have the same experience where you've got lots of things you are writing upon and sometimes things that might just be the work of an afternoon take three months to do because other things get in the way.
00:08:33
Speaker
See, people like to think that we just sit down and just write something and then, oh, there it is. It just doesn't work that way. I mean, just the process of getting through editors and reviewers and gatekeepers, it takes time and sometimes years just to get a single 10-page paper published. So it's not like publishing something in a newspaper where it comes out the next day.
00:09:02
Speaker
No, no, yeah, the process of journal articles can be a long road to publication, as can be the process of getting a book published. And of course, the situations like we have, where we're editing other people's work and trying to put forward a collection, not only have the process of pitching the book, writing the book, but also corralling the authors to get the book finished.
00:09:27
Speaker
And I'm assuming, of course, you had no issues whatsoever getting papers in on time. Because no editor has ever had any issue getting papers in on time. Well, I'm going to say this because academics have a terrible reputation with this, but for the most part, and that's because there was a three-year window between the conference and when I had to turn the vinyl manuscript in.
00:09:55
Speaker
It was a big enough window that everyone got theirs in on time, and everyone was very responsive to my emails over time. I don't think that will ever happen again. I think it was a lucky roll of dice, but I think that enough of the authors were excited enough about the project that they wanted to just get it finished up.
00:10:22
Speaker
So I'm happy with that and how it turned out. And it's getting play already. So we got written up, albeit by one of the authors on Reason Magazine, Jesse Waters, who attended the conference and you met, who contributed a chapter. He's already plugged it and it's going to get some good play here in the States at least.
00:10:48
Speaker
So we'll sell some copy in the price to sell in the US at $30. So that's for 500 pages. That's that's pretty darn good.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yes, I'm actually really quite impressed by how cheap you've managed to get the book to come out at, because often academic techs are not really priced for the average punter to buy.
Media's Role in Conspiracy Theory Prominence
00:11:11
Speaker
No, so what I think happened, because my previous book, American Conspiracy Theory, sold really well, which really well in academic terms is like a thousand copies.
00:11:25
Speaker
just to put that in perspective. But that's like, let's throw a party if you sell a thousand copies at the press. So they had a pretty good idea given that track record and the fact that this is just such a huge topic right now. They said, this is probably going to sell, so why don't we price it to do so? Because normally a book like this would be $150 or $200.
00:11:54
Speaker
and they would only release in hardcover because the idea is we're going to sell, you know, 30 copies to libraries. We'll price it at whatever because they'll, you know, X number of libraries will purchase it and that'll be that and they'll make some amount of money. But here they were expecting, you know, that enough Amazon sales and whatnot, you know, they put on a Kindle version too for only 20 bucks. So, so they expect to sell some and I think they will. And I think there's enough,
00:12:24
Speaker
interest in the topic. It's important enough. I don't have to tell you this that I think there are going to be a lot of faculty and journalists and policymakers who just have enough interest now. That's just sort of hitting everyone in the face that this is something you have to pay attention to.
00:12:47
Speaker
It does seem it is the topic of our time, which of course is interesting because of course you've written a previous book, American Conspiracy Theories, which somewhat suggests that maybe conspiracy theories aren't actually the topic of our time and that maybe they're kind of waning as a phenomena.
00:13:05
Speaker
Well, I would say this, because there's two different things there. One, I think they're the topic of our time, and I will continue to say that because it pays professional dividends for me.
00:13:18
Speaker
It's not that I think beliefs have gone up. I don't think more people are believing in this than they have previously. And there's no evidence right now that that's the case. I mean, if that happens, then I will happily buy into it. But so far, no evidence has been put forward to say more people believe in conspiracy theories today than two years ago or five years ago or 10 years ago. I have not seen that evidence yet.
00:13:44
Speaker
What I have seen is evidence that our political elites are engaging in this more, and our media elites are engaging with conspiracy theories more. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're pushing them more. Some are. But in the U.S., at least, we're in this cycle where we have a president who pushes conspiracy theories.
00:14:10
Speaker
to keep his coalition together, which is a coalition of conspiracy theorists. So because he's engaging with this sort of rhetoric, the media now has to cover it. So just to give you one example, I've been running a Google Alert on the term conspiracy theory for the past six or seven years.
00:14:34
Speaker
And up until maybe 2015, 2016, I would get maybe five hits a day of news articles and blog posts coming out with the term conspiracy theory in it. Now it's more than 100 a day, consistently. So, again, that's not a measure of belief. It's just a measure of the media is clearly talking about this.
00:15:03
Speaker
Most of those articles have to do with our political elites are talking about this. Yeah, there seems to be an issue of salience. It's not that there are necessarily more. It's just that we're talking about them more. Yeah. And it's the same thing in academia, too. I mean, this started some time ago. I mean, there wasn't that much work on conspiracy theories, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, you have Peter Knight.
00:15:31
Speaker
And a few other people get into it, and then you get the philosophers coming in around 2000. The psychologists get in around 2007, and the political scientists like around 2010. And now, I mean, there's new studies getting published almost every day from a whole slew of different disciplines.
00:15:55
Speaker
So academics are doing the same thing. And I think now, like 10 years ago, it was sort of a neat topic to get into. But now it's an imperative topic to get into. It's responding to current trends. It's responding to current, you know, for my discipline, current political problems.
Yusinski's Interest in Conspiracies and Data Collection
00:16:17
Speaker
So let's roll back. Why did you get interested in conspiracy theories in the first place? So as a scholar, I didn't on my own. As a young person, I was sort of into it because I like the X-Files and the periphery. But my real introduction to the whole topic was the Oliver Stone JFK movie.
00:16:41
Speaker
Because that I was like, oh my God, everyone's in on it. And it sort of made me feel like a brain in the jar. Like there's some secret reality going on that you have to peel back the layers. And everything I see is fake. And it's funny now, the more that I see that movie, the more baloney it is. Because I've probably seen it 100 or 200 times, because I show it in all my classes. And it's not consistent.
00:17:11
Speaker
with itself. It contradicts itself in so many ways. Even Stone said, I made up half the stuff. But I was sort of a conspiracy theorist then. And then I got into the topic. It was off the beaten path of political science when I got into it 10 years ago. My co-author Joe Parent came to me and said, hey, let's do this thing.
00:17:37
Speaker
I looked around, and I'm like, there's no data on this. There's no one writing on this in political science. It's sort of off the beaten path. And I sort of reluctantly got into it. And since I was the data collection guy, I knew most of the burden for that would be on me. And it took years for us to get the data together and get some analyses and eventually do the book.
00:18:05
Speaker
Now everyone's getting into it. So walk us through the way you actually collected the data about conspiracy theories over the 20th century. So when we started, what I wanted to do was to have
00:18:21
Speaker
I was hoping to go to Gallup or something like that and be like, oh, you've been taking surveys for years on this. Now I just have to go through and analyze it. As it turns out, they were not taking surveys on these topics for years. Occasionally, they would ask about JFK or some other thing, but the questions were not done regularly and they were not done with consistent wording. There's really no
00:18:50
Speaker
There was not much there for me to analyze at that point. So I said, you know, the only way to do this is to find some other source. So what I did, I went to the letters of the, letters to the editor of the New York Times and we got a thousand letters a year from 1890 to 2010. And I had my assistants read like 120,000 letters, pick out the ones that were discussing a conspiracy theory, any conspiracy theory.
00:19:20
Speaker
And we sort of got those together and then we were looking for patterns over time in that. Now, what was sort of...
00:19:29
Speaker
I would never recommend anyone to do this again, because it was just painstaking. And I think now with the way that the computational technologies and linguistic stuff, the way it's progressed in the last decade, I think there are other ways to do it now than the manual way that we did it. But what was sort of groundbreaking was that, whereas a survey, you say, well, here's
00:19:54
Speaker
conspiracy theory A, B, C, and D that I'm going to ask about. And there's only so many you can ask about because you only have so much money to spend on surveys. At survey time, it's expensive. But with this, we were able to pick out the big fish and the little fish and all the fish in between. Whereas a lot of what people had studied was just, hey, there's some conspiracy theory that's popular now, like JFK or the birther thing.
00:20:22
Speaker
we were able to sort of look at everything. So I think in that way, we didn't have a biased view that was just looking at the big ones or the contemporary ones, but everything, or everything that we could find for that matter. So, you know, you would be amazed, like there are all sorts of weird things that the New York Times published
00:20:50
Speaker
Because you would think, oh, there's this newspaper that's very ritzy, and they're not going to publish anything that's too weird. But they publish weird stuff.
00:21:02
Speaker
Is there a favorite odds conspiracy? I don't want to say odd. A conspiracy theory historically, which has completely died out, but seemed to be big news back in the day that you picked up on. So you would be shocked. So then the media and conspiracy theory dies out. Right. So whether it was the New York Times or whether it's, you know, you go on to Twitter at midnight and you'll find a bunch of weird things popping up and they'll be gone tomorrow.
00:21:28
Speaker
never to be heard from again. So there's an infinite number of conspiracy theories out there. But my personal favorite is that the CIA created lesbianism. Really? Yeah. Tell me more. Yeah. So the idea here was that
00:21:49
Speaker
The CIA wanted to stymie the women's movement in the early 70s, so they were creating lesbian ends, then sending them in to infiltrate the women's movement, to infiltrate the national organization of women, have these, you know, trysts with the leadership, and then blackmail them into doing the CIA's bidding and destroying the women's movement.
00:22:17
Speaker
You know, it pops up. It's there for a little while, but no one really took this on as a major belief. We don't have, you know, half the country believing in this. Now it's there, and it's gone. And it was so many of them like that, where it was there just for a little while.
Presidents and Conspiracy Rhetoric
00:22:34
Speaker
You know, President Coolidge is doing this. You know, President Roosevelt's doing this. And you'll find over time that, you know, every president is accused of doing all sorts of things, you know.
00:22:46
Speaker
So it's not just Trump. And I mean, we also have the kind of unique situation where we have a current sitting president of the US who's been a conspiracy theorist about a previous sitting president of the US. I think that is that new or have there actually been previous presidential candidates who've conspiracy theorized about previous presidents? So I, I don't doubt that there have been
00:23:15
Speaker
mainstream politicians who have dabbled a little bit in conspiracy theory about the other side or about a previous presidency. And if they've done it, they probably did it in a sugar-coated way. I'm sure you go back to, like, 1800, and they were probably saying terrible things about each other. Now, with that said, I don't think anyone's any major party candidate, none of them have done it to the extent that Trump has done it.
00:23:46
Speaker
Now, I get a little bit nervous using the word conspiracy theorists, because a lot of people take that to mean that he really believes what he says. If you use the term to mean someone who improves upon or spreads these theories, then clearly he does that. He makes them up, he improves upon them somehow, and he shares them with his megaphone. So in that case, he qualifies. Is he sincere in any way? That I don't know. I don't even know if he knows.
00:24:17
Speaker
And that's sort of the trouble because trying to decipher this, to me, as a political scientist, it's, to me, it's strategy more than anything else. You know, I think in the beginning he didn't know what he was doing. He was just throwing whatever at the wall and seeing what would stick. And then after, over time, he saw that the conspiracy theory stuff, particularly about brown people, stuck.
00:24:46
Speaker
And he's just kept on with it, because he knows it works, and he knows it motivates that base that really cares about him. It doesn't motivate normal Republicans, because normal Republicans are normal. That's the operating word there. People like to say, the entire Republican Party is all conspiracy theorists. No, they're not.
00:25:09
Speaker
And that sounds like a tautology, but half the Republican Party is below average in terms of its conspiracy theorizing, right? And they're just establishment people, but you have the conspiracy wing of the Republican Party that Trump went after, he cultivated them, he spoke their language, and he motivated them to turn out. And it was these sort of people who would not have been motivated by a Jeb Bush,
00:25:38
Speaker
but would be motivated by somebody who said, you know, Mexico's sending rapists and murderers to get you. And they came out and voted for him. And he got... He pulled along those regular Republicans, because they were going to vote for him anyway. But he was able to motivate just enough of these sort of conspiracy-minded Republicans to turn out for him that it made the difference. And they brought him to the prom, and now he's got to keep dancing with them. So that's why you get what you get from him.
00:26:09
Speaker
I mean, this question about sincerity is always a very interesting one when we talk about prominent proponents of conspiracy theories. You're David Ikes, you're Alex Jones, you're Lyndon LaRouches, and now you're Donald Trump's, because there is this question
00:26:25
Speaker
Are these people actually being sincere in expressing their beliefs? Or are they using these beliefs to curry favour with some kind of audience? So Alex Jones makes most of his money from advertising homeopathic and nat- nat- naturopath-pathicules to make sure your male vitality is going to be-
00:26:50
Speaker
And remember, invest in gold, always in gold. Gold stocks all the time. And so there is this question here as to whether some people have literally weaponized conspiracy theory here because they know there's a certain section of the population who is going to believe things of this particular kind and it keeps them in fame and force.
00:27:17
Speaker
And these particular conspiracy theories may be very different from your average conspiracy theories who go, well, you know, I'm a bit suspicious about what the government does, and I know a little bit of political history, so I know these things have happened in the past. So it's plausible to think they might be happening now.
00:27:34
Speaker
So, do you have any idea of how we can distinguish between the sincerity of the conspiracy theorist who really does believe what they're doing versus the insincere ones who actually might be trying to use those conspiracy theorists for other ends? I guess if I was a conspiracy theorist, my immediate response would be follow the money.
00:28:02
Speaker
But I think, so there have been some social science studies on this. So Adam Barinski just published a paper where he says, you know, you can trust polls when you ask about these beliefs for the most part, because these people are fairly sincere. They're not signaling, oh, I just don't like Barack Obama, so I'm going to say that he's born somewhere else.
00:28:25
Speaker
really believe it. They're being sincere with their beliefs, right? So the people who believe this stuff, and it's tautological, they really believe it. Now, in terms of the elites who do it, they are in a whole different area, because just like elites who espouse any other belief,
00:28:46
Speaker
They'd be like, I'm for policy A, because it's the right thing to do. And then the next day, their district gets redrawn to have different people. And then they say, well, I'm for policy B, and that's the only policy we could possibly have. It's the right thing to do. So, I mean, they're always insincere, to a certain extent.
00:29:07
Speaker
You just don't know what they're really being honest about, right? Because once their incentives change, their espoused positions change just as quickly. So I don't know. I don't know how to do that for an Alex Jones or a David Icke.
The Belief and Strategy of Conspiracy Theorists
00:29:24
Speaker
I wouldn't know how to do that. I mean, somebody like David Icke, it could be the case that he has convinced himself
00:29:32
Speaker
I mean, if I've written eleven, eight hundred page books about the lizard people, I might believe it, too. I don't know. So I mean, that's something, you know, maybe we could hook him up to a brain scanner, which I'm sure he would love and see, but I don't know.
00:29:52
Speaker
One distinction might be the consistency of their views. So I don't know about you, but I've actually been to two David Icke talks and both of those talks were eight hours plus in one day. So you start at 10 in the morning and once you factor in breaks and the like, you finish it eight at night.
00:30:12
Speaker
And what's interesting about David Icke is that he doesn't get on to the alien shapeshifting pan-dimensional reptiles till about hour four or five. He has to gently lead you through his chain of evidence about world history, the commonality of religions,
00:30:30
Speaker
the way that we can alter our perception, technology and the like. And only once he's gone through this really long process of outlying his fundamental assumptions does he then say, and by the way, this is a mimetic virus made by pan-dimensional beings from before time. So there's a kind of, there is an odd consistency here which means that even if you disagree with Ike,
00:30:55
Speaker
There's a sincerity, by the way, he doesn't just go, it's aliens! In case of no, to understand why I'm making an odd claim, you have to understand the history. Whilst Jones, you might say, doesn't have that kind of consistency to his views, he's more touching hot topics at any particular time. Well, let me just push back a little bit on that.
00:31:24
Speaker
So Ike, and I think it was the summer of 2012 where he and David, no, David Ike and Alex Jones got together outside the Bilderberg conference, wherever it was that year. And they got up and they gave a speech together and they teamed up for a little while. But Ike used it as a way to build his sort of, I guess, podcast network.
00:31:53
Speaker
But he raised a bunch of money on Twitter that summer, really sparked from that event. But he didn't get up and say, well, you know, this all goes back to the lizard people. Instead, he said, it's the political parties, it's the big banks, it's the governments. So, to me, that came off as a little bit strategic, because he was naming things that everyone can hate, right?
00:32:19
Speaker
So if you want to raise money from a lot of conspiracy theorists, you name the things that are really nondescript that everyone can dislike. Right? Political parties. Everyone hates the political parties.
00:32:33
Speaker
They like their own, but they hate them all in general, right? Everyone likes their bank, but hates banks. Everyone hates governments, but they like their own, right? So by saying it's the governments, it's the big banks, it's the corporations, it's the parties, by being that general, he's able to pull in this big audience and say, yeah, I'll fork over a couple bucks.
00:32:57
Speaker
I think he raised a million pounds, some obscene amount of money he raised to fund this thing that he was doing, but he left the lizard people behind. I don't know if it's sincere for him to say, I'm going to put the lizard people over here and talk about the other stuff, or if it's strategic, that he goes more mainstream when he wants the money,
00:33:23
Speaker
and reverts back to the more core audience with these sort of more fringy ideas when he's got to keep them buying the tickets.
00:33:31
Speaker
And that's a very nice point because the other side to this, of course, is David Eich does change his story ever so slightly when he goes from country to country. David Eich's popularity in Canada is mostly around crystal healing. So there's a lot more discussion of the resonance of crystals when he gives a talk in Canada as opposed to when he gives a talk in Auckland in
00:33:57
Speaker
Teotoro, New Zealand, which got about 800 people in attendance, which is a pretty impressive crowd. How much a ticket did you pay to see him?
00:34:08
Speaker
The first time I actually bought a ticket and that costs about 150 NZ, so about 75 US at the time. The second time, and this is a really amusing story, the second time I got an email from their press person saying, would I be willing to promote David Eich's talk on my blog?
00:34:28
Speaker
And I was going, I don't think you've read my blog because the last time he was here, I wrote five thousand words on what's wrong with David Dyke's thesis. But I went, OK, I'll write back and say, yes, I'm willing to I'm willing to actually put.
00:34:43
Speaker
And a brief ad on the blog of the upcoming talk, if I can organize a Skype interview with David. And so Josh and I did a Skype interview with David Eich. Wow. What's interesting about David Eich, I think Josh and I asked a total of five questions, toasting probably two minutes in time. And the interview goes on for an hour because when David starts talking, he doesn't stop. He talks in 20 minute bursts. Wow.
00:35:13
Speaker
And so I also got a free ticket to that one, so I didn't pay anything whatsoever to attend the second time. And all based upon, I think someone just went, conspiracy theories, New Zealand, my name came up prominently, and they did no further research. So let me ask you, at the end of the show, did you get up on stage and dance away the conspiracy?
00:35:40
Speaker
No. So both times I've been to David, I talk, I have suffered some kind of bodily harm. The first time I sprained my foot on the route to see David Ike and spent the entire eight hours trying to maneuver my leg in cramped conditions. I didn't die of pain. The second time
00:36:00
Speaker
which was actually about two weeks before I was due to go to Romania for the first time, I started to get the most dreadful head cold of all time. And the event stadium that David was presenting in was basically this giant tin shed, which was incredibly cold. And so I spent the entire second half of the talk shivering, feeling I was going to die at a moment's time. And I had a friend with me and my friend Isaac went, don't worry,
00:36:29
Speaker
If I think you're about to collapse and die, I'll drag you up on stage so you can die at David Ike's feet, and then I'll tell people that's the way they wanted to die the entire time. They kind of healed you with crystals. It's true, actually. I should have asked David. David, throw me some quartz. It'll be great.
00:36:52
Speaker
Now, of course, we when we had our conference in Miami, I was quite impressed by well, impressed, also disappointed by the lack of conspiracy theorists not protesting our little conspiracy to talk about conspiracy theories.
Academic and Public Engagement with Conspiracy Theories
00:37:07
Speaker
Was there any kind of concern about that setting up the conference? Yes. So I sort of kept it under wraps. So I wound up getting a few requests from
00:37:20
Speaker
non-academics to attend. And I was like, no. Because I wanted to keep it an academic conference for people who are going to publish peer-reviewed scholarship on it. Because sometimes when you get non-academics in there, you wind up with questions or protests or whatever. So that's fine, but just not for that.
00:37:48
Speaker
Lee Basham, who's a mutual acquaintance of both of ours, he thought it would be a good idea if I invited a 9-11 truther. He had a particular one in mind that he wanted me to come and give a lunchtime talk. And I guess this person's thesis was that the planes were holograms and didn't exist. And I said, no. I said, it just wouldn't be appropriate for this particular thing.
00:38:18
Speaker
But I sort of kept it, I kept it to myself and then let it come out after the fact. And then I got a lot of, oh my God, how come you didn't tell us? And we wanted to protest or this or that. And what were you up to behind closed doors? And there's nothing you can do about it. You put the term out there and people get upset automatically. So it was just better to sort of do it that way.
00:38:46
Speaker
But but just judging by the email I get in a normal day That's just it's not something I want to deal with
00:38:55
Speaker
Yes, but even as someone who is actually quite sympathetic towards conspiracy theorising the number of social media contacts or emails I get accusing me of being part of the cover-up behind conspiracy theories and trying to quash conspiracy theories everywhere. It's a case of it does seem to be a bit of a red rag. People read the term and just assume automatically you've got a particular epistemic or political position and often you cannot change minds.
00:39:25
Speaker
And that's the problem, is that once somebody's there, then they're seeing everybody as in on it. And sometimes the perception they have just isn't that good. So I was on the news over here in the U.S. Sunday morning, and it was
00:39:51
Speaker
This is my quote. I said, imagine the stereotypical conspiracy theorist in your mind. That person is a white male conservative with a ham radio wearing a tinfoil hat in their mother's basement. But that image would be very wrong. And then I go on to explain what my survey data finds.
00:40:11
Speaker
I got a dozen emails that said, how dare you call us this? And you said, we only use ham radios. He said, we all wear tin foil hats. We're not bad people. And I said, that's a stereotypical image that's wrong. It's just they don't hear. They hear what they want to hear. They hear because they feel like they're victims, and at least these people anyway. And they hear whatever is going to upset them. And they have to fire off an email to me about how terrible I am.
00:40:41
Speaker
when I said the exact opposite and I'm in agreement with them. And that's what sort of upsets me. But I deal with that. But over the years, I've been named like an enemy of truth by 911.org. I was in a QAnon drop a couple months ago. So I had all the Q people after me thinking I was part of a conspiracy to get Q.
00:41:07
Speaker
I had a Q psychic say I was gonna assassinate Q. Let's see. You sound very connected to Q. Who is Q, Joe? Who is Q? I get asked that a lot. And it's just, I have no idea. I have guesses about who it is. And they have, like, there have been some interviews that have been published with people who say that they're Q.
00:41:32
Speaker
Um, but whoever this is, if this person has any moral compass at all, they would stop. I mean, they stopped for three weeks, but then they started dropping again right before the election. I thought after the pipe bomber, they would have been like, okay, maybe we shouldn't keep doing this. Maybe after the guy at the Hoover Dam that was, you know, gonna, you know, wanted to stop traffic and kill people or something, then maybe they would have stopped, but apparently, you know,
00:42:01
Speaker
Morality is at a premium here. So I'm assuming you're taking it that the QAnon thing is entirely a hoax that someone is deliberately planting this information to get a rise out of these particular forums and threads. So there's an interesting thing here. So
00:42:22
Speaker
If there was a left or right of conspiracy scholars, right, where on the left you have, you know, the people who are more sympathetic, and on the right you have the people who are like, these are all false, right, I would say that I'm somewhere right in the middle, because you have other social scientists who take conspiracy theory to mean to be synonymous with misinformation, false ideas, whatnot. I don't take that position.
00:42:50
Speaker
Then there are other people, and so I might say Lee Basham or people like this, who are much more sympathetic than I am. But I take the position where I say most are probably wrong, but I don't categorize any individual one as right or wrong. I'll say it could be right, it could be wrong.
00:43:10
Speaker
I could spend more time talking about that, but I give them a fairly wide berth, and then normatively I say I would not want to live in a world without conspiracy theories. There is a negative side of the ledger, which concerns me, but there's also a positive side of the ledger, too. I try to stay in the middle of that.
00:43:34
Speaker
So with QAnon, I was like, you know, maybe it is some high-ranking official who's really fighting the deep state and they're, you know, letting people know about the sealed indictments and the child sex rank and all this stuff. It could, you know, better than 0% chance that it could be true. But when one of the Q drops was about me, and it said, so what had happened was I
00:44:02
Speaker
I was running a poll this summer about some other topic, and this cue thing became really big in August. So I said, everyone's writing about this in all the newspapers. How about I poll on it just to see how many people believe in this? Because right now you have every newspaper saying, it's becoming huge. It's the biggest thing. And I was like, is it really? So I polled on it, and it turned out it was neither well-known nor well-liked.
00:44:32
Speaker
Right? And just to put that in perspective, I did this poll in Florida. We had almost 2100 respondents. So it was only slightly better liked than Fidel Castro. And if you know anything about Florida, you know that Castro was not liked. So that's where it stood. And in terms of people being familiar with it, it was the thing that people were least familiar with out of like 20 things we asked them about.
00:45:02
Speaker
So we published this in the Washington Post and then the QAnon does a drop the next day saying, look at this poll. It's a faked poll. It's fake news. It's part of a coordinated effort by the Washington Post to fake polls and to discredit us. And at that point, I knew, obviously I knew that that was not true because I knew that I had commissioned the poll
00:45:28
Speaker
I had put this thing in at the very last second with no coordination from anyone else. People can believe me or not. But I know that to be true. Someone Q is saying this.
00:45:45
Speaker
You know, look at this poll. It's part of a broader plot. I could say, no, that's crap. That's just not true. So at that point I said this just is not true. And this sounds more like the dribblings of some Jerome Corsi type than it sounds like, you know, a real, you know, high up in the energy department who has real information and real knowledge. This is just some conspiracy theorist.
00:46:13
Speaker
I would like to point out for Q watches who are watching this video, there were a number of video dropouts during Joe's rant there, I'll call it, which of course means obviously I've listed the bit where Joe admits that Q is real and knows who Q is to make it sound as if he's completely denying the entire story.
00:46:35
Speaker
But that's the thing. I'm going to preview something else, too, because there is a big thing coming out in the U.S. with me and a relative of mine in it. And this relative, I'm not going to say who it is now, because I think I'm sworn to secrecy, at least for the next two weeks. But this relative is a huge, cute believer. So there's a podcast of me and my relatives sort of talking about this and trying to reason some of this out.
00:47:06
Speaker
with me not being a Q believer, and then this person being a Q devotee. I guess the lesson there is that people who disagree about this stuff, how can they come to grips about it? I guess some of your audience said, well, we'll just turn it off. Well, ignore anyone who doesn't believe it too. But if you do that,
00:47:30
Speaker
It's unfortunate because what you wind up doing when you exclude all these voices is you wind up relying more and more and more on less and less and less, right? And I'll credit a mutual friend of ours, Alfred Moore, with that line.
00:47:45
Speaker
who works on this topic too. But that's something I'm concerned about is when you're just listening, I'm only going to get my news from Q. I mean, there you're relying a lot on just one source. And to me, I think you have to rely a little on a lot of sources.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yes, I mean, this is my position when it comes to a proper investigation of any particular claim of conspiracy. You want a diversity of voices in your kind of investigative community. You don't want to do your communities only made up of skeptics or only made up of believers in a particular conspiracy theory.
00:48:19
Speaker
You need people from both sides who actually can hash out those issues and go, are you just making an assumption about X or Y or do you have evidence for that position? And so, yes, diversity is good in these situations. It doesn't really want to have you listen to the podcast, the RFK tapes.
00:48:39
Speaker
No. Who's there? So it's a it's a crime town podcast but the premise is you have someone who is interested in the assassination of RFK but by and large believes the official theory that Suhan Suhan shot him in the back at close range.
Evaluating Conspiracy Theories with Consistency
00:48:59
Speaker
And Bill Clyber, one of the bigger names in the Manchurian candidate, Suhan Suhan, was programmed to kill JFK by other sources, and there's a second gun in the room. And they do this podcast together as they kind of dive into each other's theories, trying to find a way to either come to a conclusion or work out why they disagree.
00:49:24
Speaker
And it's actually a really quite interesting podcast because the first episode makes you think that the host, whose name I've completely forgotten, is going to spend the entire time making fun of Bill Kleber's thesis. And from the second episode onwards, Kleber is a co-host on the podcast, also presenting his own views.
00:49:46
Speaker
And it's a really nice example of people trying to persuade each other of the merits of their particular view. So I recommend it. It's very good. Well, thank you. So let me tell you what interests me and what interests me less is that I'm interested in why people believe these things. And I'm less interested in the specifics of any one theory.
00:50:14
Speaker
I enjoy it and I'll watch the TV shows and I'll listen to people. But the thing is to me, it's not about the specifics of the evidence. A lot of this has to do with just people. Some people are just disposed to buy into it and you could change the theory around and they're still going to buy into it. To me, I think you'll have a handful of people that'd be like, well, this evidence sounds right.
00:50:43
Speaker
But you could take two people, give them the exact same evidence, and they'll come to very different conclusions about it. And it has to do with what's going on inside them, and not so much with the specifics of the evidence. But I guess one place I've been trying to go in my life is trying to be very consistent with all my beliefs. No one will ever truly get there.
00:51:07
Speaker
But I'm trying to do that. And it's just like, I don't want to say, well, I'm going to have this standard for this particular theory, but some other standard for another one. And I'm going to create a different standard for every theory. And to me, I want to be consistent and say, I'm going to have a fairly high evidentiary standard. And that is that I'm not going to evaluate that evidence myself. I'm going to let the particular experts do that.
00:51:37
Speaker
And if it's the case that we can't trust those experts, then you're going to have to meet a pretty high bar to prove to me why. So that's not to say that the theories are false. It's just to say I'm not going to buy in until someone smarter than me does.
00:51:57
Speaker
So it's the old adage, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It doesn't even go that far because, I mean, you could prove to like, let's say, you know, the government reopened the JFK thing and said, we have new evidence, it calls for a new investigation. And then they said, OK, we've got, you know, new evidence, ABC, D&E and
00:52:21
Speaker
We have these independent bodies who are examining each thing. We have these new tapes or new confession or something. And I wouldn't trust it just as the government. I would trust it because you have a new examination by people who are clearly trained to examine that particular evidence. And I would say, OK, if I can trust them and they say this, then sure.
00:52:42
Speaker
Fine, right? Because I'm not against saying something's a conspiracy, right? I mean, to me, it would be just as likely in theory that some lone dude would shoot the president that you would have a group do it. There's no reason to assume one or the other. And I would actually lean toward the group, right, to sort of pull off something like that. But, you know, bring the evidence.
00:53:10
Speaker
You know, prove to the people who can best judge that evidence, and then I'll buy into it. Which, of course, sometimes requires very good experts to be able to come in and tell you how to adjudicate the variety of different evidence, but also what actually isn't evidence in that case.
00:53:33
Speaker
sure yeah and that's you know that's fine with me and that's why that's because i don't want to be like oh well i saw these three anecdotes and that led me to some new conclusion and it's i'm not going to put myself in that position i don't trust myself enough to be able to do it unbiased and then be do it at all because i
00:53:54
Speaker
Like 9-11, for example, somebody said, I've got these dust particles. What am I supposed to do with that? I cannot judge that. You could talk to me about chemicals all day. I know nothing. I cannot make a judgment on it. And you can tell me whatever you want, but I just don't know anything. And I've got to be honest with myself about that. So that's sort of where I stand.
00:54:19
Speaker
I mean, there's actually a nice example of this in this podcast. So one of the theories as to why Sohan can't have acted alone is that apparently there are more bullet fragments and bullet holes in the room than the eight shots that Sohan and Sohan could have fired. And part of that is based upon they found bullet holes in the doorframe behind RFK.
00:54:42
Speaker
And someone goes back and goes, well, we should actually talk with the criminalist who actually marked those bullet holes on the door. And they discovered that it actually wasn't a forensic investigator who marked those holes. It was an ordinary beat cop who circled some holes on a door. But it was taken as gospel from that point onwards. Those holes were bullet holes. And so it gets you into this nice thing of we thought we had expert witness about why.
00:55:13
Speaker
Actually, it turns out that it wasn't an expert making any claim about why. And then suddenly you go, now I really don't know what to believe about this. Were there additional bullets fired? We don't know now. Yeah. And you find that a lot, whether it's conspiracy theories, some other thing where what evidence that you initially think is compelling might not be as compelling.
00:55:35
Speaker
either because it doesn't exist or isn't real or isn't what you thought it was or doesn't matter. So that's where I just sort of, I don't want to spend my days sort of trying to be a forensic whatever for every piece of evidence that's out there. But again, that's not me saying that theory is wrong.
00:55:59
Speaker
I'm not saying that. That's different than what I'm saying. What I'm saying is I'm not going to believe it until. Those might sound similar, but they're very different things. I'm more than happy for people to go out and investigate and gather evidence. I think conspiracy theorists are really good at writing appeals. It doesn't mean that they're right, but it just means they're good at pushing for appeals. Why do we know more about JFK now?
00:56:29
Speaker
Because conspiracy theorists push for the release of more documents. Why do we have 9-11 Commission? Because the conspiracy theorists push for more information in public hearings. Those are good things. Doesn't mean that conspiracy theorists were necessarily right, but it means that they were successful at lodging appeals to the point where we had to open things up and allow more information to come out and more sunshine to come in. And those are good things.
00:56:56
Speaker
And that goes back to what you were saying about the positive versus negative side of the ledger. And then on the negative side, we might be concerned about, say, some of the consequences of belief in these theories. And depending on who you read, either they're very drastic and about to bring about the end of civilization, or they're minor things that can be dealt with in a fairly normal way. But on the positive side,
00:57:21
Speaker
Conspiracy theorists ask questions which really are a stop valve on our democracy by going, but what if? Or are you sure this evidence actually reflects this thing than that thing? And that they often put forward reasons to go, we should probably have another look at this just to make sure nothing underhand is going on.
00:57:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I support that. I mean, I guess in some instances it can go too far, right? So how many 9-11 commissions are we going to have, right? I mean, do we keep pushing for appeals until we get the answer we want? The answer is 900 and 11. Oh, that would be great.
00:58:11
Speaker
At some point, it could not be productive anymore, where we've gotten all the information we're going to get. Is there anything left? Or is there any information at this point that would overturn the mountains that we've already gathered? It's like when you do it in Florida, where I am, where you're doing recounts all the time.
00:58:37
Speaker
It's like, if there's a big enough gap between the votes of each candidate, is it really worth doing the next count if the gap is so wide that there's no possible way? If you've got 20,000 votes separating candidate A and candidate B, are you going to make that up in some sort of mail ballot that we haven't counted yet or some other glitch or something like that? And the answer is probably not.
00:59:03
Speaker
And the more you keep doing it, the less and less you're going to turn up in terms of error. But with that said, I occasionally get accused of being a conspiracy theorist myself, because I will say, with all due respect, that while I don't believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy,
Intelligence Agencies and Conspiracy Theories
00:59:29
Speaker
I do think that the CIA has acted terribly. Other government agencies have acted horribly. For reasons that I don't know why, I can guess, but I don't know why, but the fact that they have held documents back as long as they have is absolutely disgusting and unacceptable. And I know they're listening so they can hear me.
00:59:51
Speaker
And that's not something we should be putting up with. And to me, that's the real story that I think the conspiracy theorists sort of gloss over. And they say, they focus on the assassination of the president and say the CIA did it. Well, I don't think they're holding back documents because they have a document in the safe that says, we did it. And they just don't want to turn that document out. They would not have written it on paper in the first place. And if they did, they would have burned it 50 years ago.
01:00:20
Speaker
I think what's the case is they've done a whole lot of other embarrassing things that they don't want to let out, and they don't want sunshine shining in. And that's the problem, right? And I would feel like conspiracy theorists are being a lot more productive if we rose up and focused on that, because that's where I think the real problems are.
01:00:42
Speaker
And indeed, I mean, one of the more plausible 911 versions of the inside job hypothesis is that the planes were the planes were actually the planes were destroyed by flying into the towers, but the towers also destroyed by the planes flying into them. Is that the real cover up is that maybe the intelligence agencies in the US had enough information to stop the event, but kind of downplayed it or ignored it. And then after the fact, when, oh,
01:01:11
Speaker
We probably should have done something about that earlier. Let's see all those documents to prevent embarrassment. It could be, right? And so this is sort of Michael Moore's argument a little bit. I hear a lot of people say, oh, they knew in advance. And to me, it depends what you mean by they knew in advance. Like, did they know 930 in the morning on 9-11-2001, they were going to take these planes into that building at that time with that amount of damage? And the answer is,
01:01:40
Speaker
I doubt they knew that, because they would have to be psychopathic to allow it to happen, right? So that's a pretty strong claim. Is it the case that they knew that these groups wanted to kill Americans and were going to try to do it one way or another? Probably. But that's a big difference there, right? It's tough to prevent someone from doing harm if you don't know exactly what they want to do and how and where and in what way.
01:02:12
Speaker
You know, like they, you know, because they try and blame it on Bush, like he knew. Well, did Clinton know that they were going to attack the USS Cole? Did Clinton know they were going to go up to the World Trade Center in advance the first time back in 93? I mean, and he just allowed it to happen for no reason? No, I don't know. I mean, it just, it just winds up sort of becoming a little bit mushy at that point.
01:02:39
Speaker
It's the deep state, Joe. It's always the deep state.
Conspiracy Beliefs Among Political Supporters
01:02:43
Speaker
You can always get it by by saying it's the deep state. It's the deep state. So what are you working on at the moment? So I'm plugging the book and...
01:02:56
Speaker
They've been gathering a lot of surveys over the last couple of years largely about Trump beliefs and who's supporting Trump and what are their beliefs. And the flip side of the coin is Sanders and Sanders supporters and their beliefs.
01:03:13
Speaker
and looking at these sort of non-mainstream candidates, what the messaging they're using, where it ties in with conspiracy theories, and what are the beliefs of the people who support those sort of non-mainstream outsider candidates. And can you give us a hint as to what you found, or is that still very confusing? So this is going to shock no one.
01:03:38
Speaker
But what we find critically... I am going to pretend to be shocked as soon as you say it, so hold on. So what we tend to find is that the Trump supporters are the ones, not Republicans, but Trump supporters specifically tend to have very high conspiracy beliefs.
01:03:56
Speaker
Right. Oh, my God. Yeah, they believe in the most conspiracy theories and they tend to have the most the highest levels of underlying conspiracy thinking. So that's who Trump is speaking to. Right. So you have a lot of journalists who try to say, oh, Republicans are all. No, it's not all Republicans. It's it's this wing that sort of Trump has elevated into the political sphere.
01:04:23
Speaker
And they're his core donators, they're his voters, they're his support base. And that's who he talks to, right? So that's sort of the point of what I'm working on now, because there's been in the US a lot of work on who are these Trump voters, right? Like, why did this happen and how? Because it was all completely shocking, one that he
01:04:51
Speaker
got the nomination in 2001. Everyone was just dumbfounded here. And so there are debates, you know, was it sexism that drove these voters? Was it racism, xenophobia, jingoism, all sorts of things. And I'm going to argue, again, shockingly, that it was the conspiracy message that really drove it. And this thesis, I think, has been ignored
01:05:18
Speaker
in all the other literature. But I think all of Trump's pleas, whether it was having to do with race or immigration or foreigners, anything like that, it was always couched in conspiracy theory.
01:05:31
Speaker
There was never a sane appeal to, you know, it wasn't just like, oh, there's too many Mexicans. And if we look at the data, it says this and that. It wasn't that. It was Mexico sending, you know, rapists and murderers to get you. So it was always this conspiracy narrative that was sort of underlying every plea.
01:05:53
Speaker
So yes, I mean, that's a, as you say, it's not a particularly shocking revelation. I suppose the question is, how did America get to this particular point? I mean, is this a natural outcrop of what happened with the Tea Party? And it's kind of rise to prevalence under Obama? Or are they completely separate phenomena we're looking at here?
01:06:16
Speaker
I think it's a little bit separate, but interconnected in the sense that—because when the Tea Party started, it was sort of like economic conservatives who were upset at what Bush had done with the wars and all the spending and the bailouts and things like that. So I think there was sort of an economic conservatism.
01:06:46
Speaker
that was added initially. And then it sort of just became this hard-right anti-establishment thing that wasn't so much about economic conservatism as it was, we hate Republican elites and we want these outsider candidates. And that's a lot of what they did, was to just push outsider candidates. And
01:07:16
Speaker
So I think, you know, one story you could tell is that you wind up in 2010 with these Tea Party candidates coming in, and they wind up pushing this sort of anti-establishment message for the last eight years. Or at least up until, you know, 2015, when Trump gets in, for five years at that point.
01:07:41
Speaker
So that message is getting out there through very big megaphones. You have members of Congress pushing this sort of viewpoint. And I think Trump may have been able to ride the coattails of that, because the Tea Party itself was really dead.
01:07:57
Speaker
after 2010. I mean, it really didn't have much of an effect after that point. I mean, very successful, 2010, but after that, it sort of didn't do much. I mean, those candidates were able to stick around for a while, but not—but as a vehicle, it didn't do anything after that. So I think you have these sort of anti-establishment Republicans who are there pushing this message. That message was able to resonate a little bit better.
01:08:27
Speaker
and motivate some people who might not have been motivated by more mainstream messages, and Trump may have been able to take advantage of it. But there's a whole confluence of other factors, too, which I think also have something to do with it. I mean, you have this identity politics being pushed very strongly by leftist elements, and there's a big backlash to that in the U.S., where you have a lot of people—people are polling about politically
01:08:58
Speaker
political correctness now, and you find a lot of people don't like it. There's a backlash to it, and I think Trump, in a lot of ways, was able to take advantage of it.
01:09:10
Speaker
Now, before we go, do you want to give us a straight to camera pitch for people to buy your book?
Promoting Yusinski's Book
01:09:17
Speaker
Why should people buy your books? Hold up the book. So the book is like me, cheap and easy. But on the other hand, if you want to get a lot of different perspectives and you enjoy reading,
01:09:31
Speaker
And you want a value per page. You're going to get 500 pages, I think, for less than $30. And it's got the best scholars working on the topic with some of the newest ideas. The biggest and the best and the brightest.
01:09:48
Speaker
with some of the best ideas and some stuff that really pushes the envelope too. There's actually some really compelling ideas in here and there's two first-person narratives that are actually really compelling too.
01:10:05
Speaker
Sounds very exciting. I'm looking forward to getting my own copy in the post. Apparently they're sending them by snail mail across the world. And I'm told I might get it by the end of next month or maybe by the beginning of next year. Yeah. So it's just hitting the authors in England are just getting it now. So so yours will be like you'll get yours in about a year.
01:10:29
Speaker
Eventually, it'll kind of migrate along the tectonic plates all the way down to the southern hemisphere. And then someone will find it in a bottle on a beach. They'll break it open. And then by word of mouth, it'll finally get to my house. That's how we do things down under. Good for you. So you will have it, and then the audience will have it, or whoever's left listening at this point.
01:10:55
Speaker
Well, thank you, Joe. That has been the most informative chat. We shall have to do this again and soon. We will, I'm sure. Thank you.
01:11:08
Speaker
Well, it wasn't that grand. I mean, no one paid me any attention during the chat and therefore an hour and ten of my life was wasted listening to him and Joe. But I have notes. So many notes. Notes which led to thoughts. Thoughts only our good patrons will hear. So why not pledge a few bucks a month to find out what those thoughts are? Plus, of course, you'll get to hear what we would have discussed in the new segment this week if that interview hadn't gone on for over a fucking hour.
01:11:36
Speaker
Well, well, I'll be discussing how the president of Nigeria denies being a clone. Also, NASA's latest foray into xenobiology and Milo Yiannopoulos being $2 million in debt. It's quite the scandal. So, see you over there in the bonus content. But first, I need to finish kicking the shit out of EM. Oh, but before we go, next week is episode 200. Expect the unexpected. Toodles!
01:12:06
Speaker
Ooh!
01:12:16
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, 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.
01:13:17
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.