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00:00:01
We’re Back and This Time it’s Impersonal
529 Plays11 months ago
Josh and M return to the internet airwaves for a little catch-up on news during the podcast's hiatus, as well as some updates on the podcast's near future...
Recommended
Transcript
New recording setup and humorous intro
00:00:00
Speaker
Like the new digs, they are... astoundingly purple. Yep, and supremely spongy. I don't think I've ever sunk into a floor like I have in this place. Hmm, sound quality is okay. Let's reverb it in the other place, but that background hum. Yeah, it is annoying. I think it's the human fat-fat. Either they're too warm, or possibly too cold. And so the heating element is having a really hard time.
00:00:27
Speaker
Still, a change is a change. Yes, and what changes we are ringing in. For example, I now spell my name with two J's and a mysterious and silent W. And I wear a wig when we record. And it's a different wig every episode. But it's still the same podcast. Mostly. It's legally similar to past installments. Guaranteed. And that guarantee is backed by Lloyds of London. Not the famous bank, though. The other Lloyds, the ones who deal with human fat, are now podcasts.
00:00:56
Speaker
So sit back and relax. Enjoy the show. And if you aren't enjoying it, listen to more episodes until such time you don't. Because otherwise, what did I mention? I now also have a mallet.
Technicolor 2024 and tech updates
00:01:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. It's 2024. And we're now in Technicolor. Yes, that might as well be true. Yep, at 48 frames per second and leading the front on small streaming services like Tubi, which I believe is still very popular and the kids are really, really into watching short-form TV series on their phones.
00:01:50
Speaker
Something like that. They're all into the TikTok and the Facebook Reels and the YouTube Shorts, apparently. Well, apparently YouTube Shorts aren't doing as well as YouTube makes them out to be. Aren't they? They seem to be all my kids watch. Now, I didn't say, of course, that we, Josh Addison and
Travel woes and recording challenges
00:02:07
Speaker
Dr. M are extensions together again.
00:02:09
Speaker
in person. This time it's personal. I would reach out and kick you but I'm afraid I'll hit your disgusting exposed flesh. In came somewhat of a cropper jogging. I was running along Stanley Point and I tripped over a bit of loose pavement
00:02:33
Speaker
And I slid first on my hands, then on my knee, and now I'm waiting for my knee to dry. This is yesterday's wound. It has to be dried from time to time. Because otherwise, how can I get the infection controlled or indeed exacerbated? So basically, just so everybody knows, I want to be perfectly clear that I'm sitting here, staring directly at this gaping, weeping wound. Pustulous wound. Pustulent wound on the front of Ian's knee.
00:03:00
Speaker
And that's the way I like it. Yeah, wow. I mean, I felt you needed to be welcomed back into the home. And what is more welcoming than vital fluids on the outside of the human body? So yes, welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to 2024. Welcome back to this podcast. This episode, I think it's just going to be a catch up. Just a bit of the scheduling for the podcast over the next
00:03:25
Speaker
month is going to be a bit weird because I'm back in Auckland so we're recording locally. Then next week I'm down in Wellington so if we record again it'll be remotely. Then I'll be back in Auckland and there may or may not be another in-person recording and then it's back to China and then when we're back to China there's going to be some changes in schedule at least for the first half of the year. But we'll get onto that in just a minute. We will.
00:03:48
Speaker
I'm just going to get into it right now. What else do you want to get onto beforehand? I don't know, but I feel now we have to justify the just a minute thing by obfuscating and pervericating for a period of time and such. That people aren't aware that time is passing and they're listening to adults at times and they feel they're learning something really important but it's not entirely clear anything interesting that's actually going on.
00:04:08
Speaker
Okay, but I kind of feel like Alex
Platform shift to Zencastr and scheduling changes
00:04:10
Speaker
Jones trying to interject into someone's debate because I'm really quite scared they know something and I don't know anything about it because I'm just a loudmouth, so I had to keep on talking to ensure that they don't say anything interesting. And thus by doing this, it makes me sound actually less intelligent than I want to appear to be, which is how to get louder and more strident in order to cover up the fact that I really don't know what I'm doing.
00:04:31
Speaker
I knew that. I guess one thing we can say, so there's a bunch of changes coming in this year. Some of them have already happened. The main one being that this podcast is no longer hosted on Podbean. Yes, if you were a Podbean patron and not a podcaster's guide to the conspiracy patreon.
00:04:49
Speaker
you will have found that your Podbean patronage is now cancelled. Because we have given up using Podbean, not necessarily because we were unhappy with Podbean as a service, but Zencaster, which is the service we use for recording podcasts remotely,
00:05:05
Speaker
now offers podcast streams and given we pay for Zencast to use, there's no real point in paying for two potential podcast hosts when you can consolidate everything under one host. So Podbean has been cancelled
00:05:21
Speaker
And Zencaster is now a ho-ho of choice. Now I don't know whether this is just due to the fact that Zencaster had to take our feed and re-syndicate things, but our metrics do look better under Zencaster, which either indicate Zencaster is slightly better at disseminating our podcasts to a variety of different locations,
00:05:43
Speaker
or Podbean just wasn't picking up on all the different downloads. I'm not saying it's a major difference, but there does seem to be an uptick in the snitch over a period of time where we haven't produced a single episode. Yes. Now, do we have an actual sort of home page for the podcast that we did on Podbean? Not now. So technically, our home page is probably the Patreon page, which means we probably should, whilst I'm back in Aotearoa,
00:06:11
Speaker
do one of those, redo the kind of greeting video thing, pretty the page up, maybe look at what all the different tiers and things look like. Because yes, there is no technical landing page. Now there is a Zincaster page for the podcast, but it's not really a front-facing page. So you might just need to make the Patreon page the place you go to find out about our podcast.
00:06:34
Speaker
What I'm saying is, yes, if you go to conspiracism.podbean.com, I think you'll just get a 404 error or something. And if you were a patron, you now need to reconsider your life choices and maybe use Patreon instead, because otherwise you're going to miss out on those juicy, juicy patron bonus episodes that I know that you subscribe to. Probably.
00:06:56
Speaker
Yes, so other changes. Yeah, I think the main one that Em was alluding to is we're going to be going to a fortnightly schedule. At least for the first half of the year. So this is due to your increasing workload.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, so basically I did find the schedule over the last half year to be slightly difficult in that I promised people a lot of papers and chapters last year, and I've promised people a lot of papers and chapters this year. I'm also teaching two courses this semester. I know the academics listening to this podcast go, two courses? Is that all you're teaching? But given a variety of other things I'm also doing in the background, actually finding
00:07:35
Speaker
time in the week to prepare for the podcast and record the podcast with the fact that everything has to fit into two different time zones, both in China and Bank in Auckland. Recording in the middle of the day for me is not the easiest thing at the moment.
00:07:52
Speaker
So, whilst I'm teaching two courses, we're going to a fortnightly schedule. So that'll be up until about June or July of this year. And then we'll reassign when we get to that point. But yes, basically we're going fortnightly. Some of you who are patrons might be going, that is not good enough. I would like a weekly patron bonus episode if I sound like this for some strange and unusual reason.
00:08:17
Speaker
Now that doesn't mean the patron bonus episodes are necessarily going fortnightly because there might well be unusual bonus patron episodes of things and who knows? Who knows? But main episodes definitely fortnightly for the next six months.
00:08:33
Speaker
And you have some other plans. I know you've already sent me a book. I know, you don't like
Conspiracy theory book reviews and segment ideas
00:08:38
Speaker
reading books. But 2034 is the year of the book. I've looked at the book. I've downloaded an EPUB reader onto the very tablet that I'm waving in your face right now. And I've opened it. I've looked at it. You can't deny that. See, I was expecting you to then go, and now I'm throwing this tablet out the window and then you're just walking away from the podcast. No, so there will be a multi-part, probably book review. Are you going to be doing more of that or what?
00:09:01
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm thinking there are, there have been numerous books being written on conspiracy theory. Now we looked at one a few years ago which is Kasam's book, Conspiracy Theory, and that's a very short book, so I was able to do that in a one episode format. But I do want to look at Michael Shermer's book on conspiracy theory, it was published a year and a half ago now.
00:09:26
Speaker
And it's big enough, and also in three parts, I think it probably deserves us doing three episodes looking at each individual part. So we're going to do some longer form reviews of longer academic and non-academic work on conspiracy theory, which I think could be at least interesting if not filling time. Ooh, that's all you can really ask for.
00:09:53
Speaker
Now, there are some other notes here that you've written that are a little bit new to me. A new segment where Josh asks what academic work Em is working on. Is that just a passive-aggressive hint there? You just want me to say. So Em, tell me more about yours. I was actually thinking, I'm not very good at self-promotion.
00:10:14
Speaker
And one thing which actually does strike me slightly odd about a podcast where you have one of the leading figures in the philosophy of conspiracy theory as a co-co-host is we actually don't really ever talk about my work, especially since we don't review any of the papers I've written. Never have, never will.
00:10:34
Speaker
And so I thought it might just, and also it might be a good reminder to me to ensure that I keep people updated. So every Fortnite you can ask, what are you working on? And I'll either say, Josh, in the last Fortnite, I have done absolutely nothing apart from playing Risk of Rain's Return.
00:10:53
Speaker
Or I might say, well, there are two chapters I'm working on at the moment, and one of them is quite interesting. Here's a five minute pre-say of what I'm thinking about the role of unicorns in conspiracy theories. Is Risk of Rain Returns the same as Risk of Rain 2? No, so Risk of Rain 2 is a 3D sequel to Risk of Rain. Yes. Risk of Rain Returns is the 4K or HD remaster of Risk of Rain. Right. I've only played Risk of Rain 2.
00:11:23
Speaker
I mean, they're both good games. I mean, Risk of Rain 1 is one of the few roguelites which I've actually completed. Risk of Rain Remastered or Risk of Rain Returns is just as good. It's
Video game discussions and conspiracy news
00:11:37
Speaker
just slightly glossier and the music is just slightly crisper. Risk of Rain 2, I love, but I've never been able to complete it. Yeah, I found it a bit tricky and not in a fun way.
00:11:49
Speaker
It's one of those games you have to play it several times to get enough unlocks for the interesting weaponry to actually start appearing on the first few leg walls and then it becomes incredibly fun. But the first few runs can be rather difficult because you will die because your pew pew gun goes pew pew and your enemies' guns go bang bang bang. Ah well we can't have that in our life precisely. So anything else?
00:12:15
Speaker
I did think of one other amusing segment we could do, which is that every week we alternate with simply a headline from either alexjones or davidite.com, and we simply ask the other co-hosts to guess what you think the headline is about. And the trick is, you never confirm it. You go, well, yep.
00:12:36
Speaker
AlexJones.com, that might as well be true. So this requires no research other than going to the space page, finding a headline, and then going, right, let's see if the other person can guess what this might be about. Yes, so I think that might as well be true. I think that's as good a name for a segment as it could be, really. It might as well be true. It's so Alex Jones.
00:13:01
Speaker
So is that all the admin we've got? Yeah, basically. Unless it's something you want to surprise me with. No, I have no immediate surprises for you. Well, I've actually already surprised you. You say immediate surprises, you have long-term surprises you're just waiting to pounce on me with? Oh yeah, obviously. That's been the plan all along, but now is not the time.
00:13:23
Speaker
So, with that out of the way, we thought we didn't have anything massive to talk about. We should probably play a chime, just to about things. I guess if we're going to call this the main part of the episode, yes, chuck a chime in and we'll make pretend. A runabout here.
00:13:42
Speaker
OK, so in lieu of an actual sort of devoted topic for this episode, we thought we'd just go through a bit of conspiracy news that's popped up in between this episode and the last one we did last year. So give me some headlines.
Roger Stone's comments and AI recording reliability
00:13:59
Speaker
Well, what if I told you that Roger Stone is a terrible, terrible human being that wants people dead? I would not consider that noteworthy or newsworthy at all. Well, apparently it is newsworthy because it has been reported on in the media that Roger Stone told a New York Police Department associate that House Democrats Eric Selwell or Jerry Nadler needed to die to get a message across.
00:14:29
Speaker
Are these people who have both died? No, this is threat of violence and threat of death as opposed to Roger Stone is admitting to murders. So they're both prominent critics of former president and hopefully not future president Donald Trump.
00:14:47
Speaker
And Roger Stone has found them rather annoying. Mediate? I actually don't know how you meant to pronounce the name of this particular media organization. Mediate. Mediate. Yeah, actually, it probably is mediate. Although it's not mediate in the sense that I would actually immediately go M-E-D-I-A-I-T-E. It's like mediate. Mediate. Mediate. Mediate. Mediate. Anyway, they have a recording.
00:15:12
Speaker
of Stone and this NYPD associate discussing how Roger really finds so well and made it to be annoying, and thus they need to die for a message to get across. It seems that Stone either wants one or both to be killed. Roger Stone claims that this is an AI recording. That it's all just fake news. It's part of, you know, that George Carlin thinks it's all just fake.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's been a thing. There's the George Carlin thing. There's some site at the moment where you can pick a voice and a song and it'll make that song. I've seen a couple of different songs sung by Homer Simpson recently and Johnny Cash singing Barbie Girl.
00:15:57
Speaker
which both they're very clever you think oh that that's clever and kind of funny but then it also it's basically cementing the fact that you can no longer believe anything you see or hear which means anyone can say that legitimate court recordings are actually fake have you seen the photo that's been going round of the fake finger
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, a little sort of fake, fake prosthetic finger, you can stick onto your hand. So it looks like you have an extra finger. So if you ever get photographed doing something dodgy, you can say, oh, that's obviously an AI creation. Look, they didn't even get the fingers right. So yeah, I cannot imagine that is going to be the last time we'll hear someone claim damning evidence is just an AI forgery.
00:16:39
Speaker
Now, it turns out that the New York Police Department is now investigating this recording, so they're obviously taking it seriously enough to go, well, even if it is fake, we should probably establish that it is, because otherwise we've got a recording here of Roger Stone trying to entice a police officer to commit murder.
00:16:59
Speaker
But that seems like the kind of thing we should be reporting on, on the year where Donald Trump just won the Iowa caucus and is now on the map to becoming Republican nominee, the US president. Yeah. So let's, let's, let's forget about the depressing president and step back into the past.
DB Cooper's tie investigation
00:17:20
Speaker
D.B. Cooper!
00:17:21
Speaker
We've talked about DB Cooper a few times, mysteriously disappeared jumping out of an airplane with a bag full of money or something like that. They've come up with new... something? Yes, they've analyzed DB Cooper's tie and you won't be able to guess what was on it. A microfiche sort of signed confession giving his full identity and plan? I mean, that would be... and also...
00:17:48
Speaker
a recipe for resurrecting aliens from a giant pyramid. No, they found metal scrapings on the tie. Right, so how do we know it's his tie? Oh, because did he take it off on the plane before he put on his parachute and things? We have clothes that he left behind. So we know they are the clothes of D.B. Cooper. Actually, I'm visiting here on the Heave because there was a new story
00:18:12
Speaker
from last year where someone's actually suggesting that DB Cooper was a woman. Oh I need to try and to drag out because maybe I should go back to the DB Cooper story at some particular point. So whoever DB Cooper is they have DB Cooper's tie and they found metal filings on the tie which might give some indication
00:18:36
Speaker
of where DB Cooper worked, which would allow you to narrow the search parameters of who DB Cooper is, or it could be contamination of the sample, or it could just be metal scrapings or filings from being on an aircraft, which as far as I'm aware are largely made of metal.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah, so this fella, private investigator Eric Ulis, Ulis perhaps, he's looked at this metal, he reckons that he's been able to trace some of these scraps to a particular steel plant, crucible steel in Pennsylvania,
00:19:15
Speaker
And so it says that this supplied the lion's share of titanium and stainless steel for Boeing's aircraft and claims that because Cooper supposedly had in-depth knowledge of the Boeing 727 that he hijacked, maybe he was some sort of a Boeing employee slash contractor or someone who maybe visited the places where Boeing's were made, or maybe he was simply a guy who was inside of one.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah. Which we kind of already knew. Yeah, we kind of knew he was in a plane. That might be where the metal, in fact it seems, the most likely place the metal came from. If this, Mr. Ulysses, I would not be surprised at all if 2024 was the year we figure out who this guy was. Yep, along with the son of Sam Killer.
00:20:00
Speaker
Mmm. So, yep. Good luck to him, I guess. Be interesting to see. But last I heard the FBI still thinks he died in the jumps, don't they? Yeah, but it seems that given the parachute that Cooper chose wasn't a very good parachute, it seems very likely that Cooper didn't know much about being a parachutist and probably ended up being more of a plumber.
00:20:28
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. The evidence would suggest he didn't know that he wasn't an expert parachutist and jumped out of a plane in conditions that even an expert parachutist would have had trouble with. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as we also know, it was Jimmy James from News Radio. And it was...
00:20:44
Speaker
Loki and was whoever it was in that episode of leverage where they did the DB Cooper case. I can't remember.
Fake CEO revelation in cryptocurrency
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah some guy So tell me about fake cryptocurrency CEOs So this is one of those stories which is both conspiratorial and not conspiratorial but actually quite conspiratorial at the same time So about a year or so ago
00:21:06
Speaker
A CEO of a cryptocurrency hedge fund by the name of Rhys Lewis made the news because he was being endorsed by celebrities and influencers, including Steve Wozniak, who's responsible for the Apple Macintosh and the like.
00:21:24
Speaker
And then he kind of just disappears. So we've got a cryptocurrency hedge fund. Lots of people are endorsing the greatness of the CEO. The CEO then disappears. People start doing research. Where is the CEO of Hyperverse? And they discover that the CEO
00:21:43
Speaker
doesn't seem to exist on paper. So the CEO's resume, or CV, appears to be entirely fictitious, and eventually people tracked down the person in the photos, which turned out to be an actor by the name of Stephen Harrison, who was paid a mere US$7,500 to act as a kind of PR figure for Hyperverse.
00:22:11
Speaker
and people are now going, the CEO, that people endorsed as being a great mind,
00:22:19
Speaker
didn't exist, and what were those influencers and celebrities doing when they endorsed an actor as CEO of a company that's taken in a very large sum of money from other people's pockets? I think the conclusion is obvious. The CEO is some sort of artificial intelligence that's cooked up this fake person to be their front in the real world while they run everything behind the scenes from cyberspace.
00:22:46
Speaker
Cyberspace, now let's just say it's fiction. I don't see, like, sure, frankly, I think it's past time we had a cryptocurrency fund run by an AI. Like, I'm surprised no one, I'm literally surprised no one has made that claim at the moment.
00:23:05
Speaker
I mean, the most likely story is that people like Wozniak were enticed on things like cameo to perform a script, and then that script is used as advertising. So the problem with cameos, of course, you perform a scripted response, and then that response can be used for anything. Maybe it might be used to
00:23:28
Speaker
entertain a parent as they go into hospital or maybe you might use it to defraud millions of people. Terms and conditions don't matter.
00:23:40
Speaker
So is that it? So do we know, has this caused a problem? Or has the company gone under or disappeared or something? Or is it really just like, oh, yeah, it's still out there. Fake CEO. What a world we live in. Yeah, it seems to be one of those situations where people are going
00:23:59
Speaker
The worry here is that people will take endorsements seriously, even though those endorsements are not worth the video screens they're broadcast from. And then people go, well, if the was is going to endorse us, it must be worth money. And it turns out people have just been carved.
00:24:19
Speaker
hmm that's a shame so does the company have a ceo or not well i mean it's yeah it's one of those things i don't think we know though we just we simply know that the person who claims to be the ceo of a company that may not even exist turns out to be an actor called steven hammers steven Harrison because i i heard a thing a while ago about the
00:24:42
Speaker
It was about Sam Bankman Friedan specifically about the guy who wrote the book about him that talked about what an amazing genius he was and how he was the world's most special boy. And written by the same guy who wrote the book about the black guy who got adopted by a white family who encouraged him into a football career which was made into a movie with Sandra Bullock and which turned out to be largely a load of crap.
00:25:08
Speaker
and the white people, strangely enough, way, way overplayed their role in his success. But in this book about SPF, there's a scene where apparently their company did not have a chief financial officer. And he sort of said, you know, if we're coming like yours, shouldn't you have a CFO? That sounds like something a company should have.
00:25:29
Speaker
Well, did you actually think I don't know how much money we have and where and when and everything? And I say, fair enough. In fact, the truth was, no, he had no idea where his money was. He had no idea at all. So not having a CEO, did somebody think they don't need one of them? To be honest, I don't know what a CEO does, so maybe you don't. Well, I mean, the thing is actually quite a lot of the upper management positions and corporations like these are people who are paid to do very little.
00:25:57
Speaker
and they can probably function without them. But at the same time, if you're using their celebrity to drag people's money into your coffers, they probably should exist. They probably should exist. Ideally. Ideally. Yeah, people should exist.
00:26:13
Speaker
So, spies.
MI5 surveillance files and public responses
00:26:16
Speaker
Spies in Britain. We have an article from the end of last year in The Guardian about Soviet infiltration of MI5. All Soviet infiltration of the Prime Minister's office when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. Quite a complicated story and all relates to a book we haven't, I think, ever mentioned on the podcast, which is Spy Capture.
00:26:41
Speaker
Now Spycatcher was a tell-all book written by a former MI5 spy. And Spycatcher itself is probably worth devoting in episode 2 because Spycatcher was a book that the British government under Margaret Thatcher
00:27:03
Speaker
desperately tried to ensure was not published, but because it was published overseas, I think both in the US and Australia, the British government basically had to admit defeat because people started reporting on the contents of the book as published overseas. And so Spy Catcher was basically to tell all of all the things which MI5 had been involved in, some of which
00:27:27
Speaker
the Tory government said broke the National Secrets Act, although it turned out in retrospect when the book was vetted, it was actually all above board. But one of the stories which is mentioned in Spy Capture is the idea that MI5 is alleged to have thought that Harold Wilson's government had been compromised by Soviet agents, so MI5 was spying
00:27:53
Speaker
on the Prime Minister of Great Britain which you're not meant to do. Now MI5 has always denied that they were spying on Harold Wilson or Harold Wilson's cabinet.
00:28:05
Speaker
And there's a tranche of newly declassified MI5 files, which people thought might shine a light on this particular issue. And it turns out that the files which relate to the time period, which would cover the alleged spying on the Prime Minister's office, are the files that are the most redacted, leaving people to go, well, you know, MI5 claims there's no evidence
00:28:33
Speaker
that MI5 was obsessed with Soviet infiltration of the Prime Minister's office, and therefore there's no reason to think they were spying on the Prime Minister. At the same time, they're not willing to actually unredact the files, which would indicate that that spying definitely wasn't going on, which is just a tad suspicious.
00:28:53
Speaker
I looked it up. When I say we mentioned Spycatcher, I mentioned Spycatcher one time in one of our What the Conspiracy episodes that I did about Soviet spies, where I talked about the Harold Wilson thing, which was a thing you had heard of, but indeed had heard of Spycatcher.
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah, I remember my parents having a copy of Spy Catcher when it came out, and I remember there was an audiobook of Spy Catcher at the Devonport Public Library when I were but a child, so maybe we should do an episode on Spy Catcher at some point. Yeah.
00:29:28
Speaker
So, a bit of local news, a bit of local colour. Here's some fun one. It features some slightly salty language, so if you're of a sensitive disposition, you might want to block your ears for the next few minutes, but... Now, you say salty language, the reporting that I read in the New Zealand Herald indicates that the person in question simply said, my F
00:29:51
Speaker
long dash yourself kind regards so i'm assuming the salty language here is go fluff yourself or something of that particular kind it's entirely hang on let me let me read check out the screenshot because yes the one that i read said
00:30:07
Speaker
It had it had had to the swear word replaced with yeah, I'm not sure that I read it on the Herald I may have written Let me just see because they did have a screenshot of the actual email not working and the screenshot I have the entire word is censored out which if it had just been f- they probably wouldn't have but anyway Let's let's not beat around the bush Thames Coromandel district mere lean assault of salty language Yes, salty by name and salty by nature
00:30:36
Speaker
So there was an article in the Herald from a few days ago reporting that this district mayor had signed off a letter to a constituent with the sentence. My official response as mayor of Thames Coromandel District Council is this. Go fuck yourself, kind regards, then.
00:30:53
Speaker
Now immediately, because we've had a history here in Auckland down near Lene Brown, he's don't think being caught using that level of swearitude and official communication. He uses the D word like drongo. But he's got a bit of stick for being basically an offensive drongo himself. And it's sort of people have said, you know, sort of behaviour, unbecoming of a mere and what have you. So first I thought, OK, this is a story about a district mere
00:31:23
Speaker
also being one of these guys who thinks it's okay to be an abusive dick blah blah blah blah but then if you read a bit further down the article and find out exactly what he was responding to uh you kind of come away with a different impression um it's a little bit
00:31:38
Speaker
sovereign citizenry. Yes, so his response was to a person who gave a couple of different names. It wasn't entirely clear exactly what the guy's name was, but that's par for the course, perhaps, the sovereign citizen stuff. This guy who had basically been harassing the council and council staff
00:31:55
Speaker
So they didn't show his letter, but the story reports that the Waikato Herald had seen the email that sparked Salt's reply. According to the Waikato Herald, the email accuses the council of, quote, extremely unlawful activity, unquote, but nothing specific. It labels the council as a fictitious entity. I assume that's a misspelling of fictitious.
00:32:21
Speaker
And then finally the the author goes on to demand the names and addresses of staff members within the council. Also suggested the mayor was quote an accomplice to these unlawful actions by failing previously to supply the names and addresses of council staff members. So when this guy gave his response it was in response to a sovereign citizen guy demanding that he give that he essentially docks a bunch of council staff
00:32:47
Speaker
to this person, in which case his response may be a little undiplomatic, maybe not quite the sort of decorum you might want from an expected representative, but probably the sort of thing any of us would feel like replying to that sort of thing. And most amusingly, the reason why this became a story that was reported in the Coromandel region
00:33:11
Speaker
is that the person who received the email went on to Facebook saying, don't you think this is conduct unbecoming of a mayor? To find that on the local council Facebook page almost everybody agreed that the mayor's response was appropriate to the tone of the correspondence
00:33:30
Speaker
he had received and even Len Solder's gone look if you think this is inappropriate as a response please do tell me I thought this was an appropriate response given the kind of inquiry going on here so it seems that actually as far as most people are concerned this is not inappropriate or unbecoming language given the context fill your boots Len yeah yeah
00:33:55
Speaker
OK, one last thing.
Platform controversies: Rumble and Substack
00:33:57
Speaker
I saw this the other day. Are we going to talk about the rumble thing? Did I miss one? Oh, I missed one. You did. I missed one. The rumble. It was going to last to move on to substack. Yes. OK, so I was so, so keen to jump into the sweary bits.
00:34:11
Speaker
I missed one that's less wary but possibly more substantive. So Rumble, I've never looked on Rumble. I gather it's the quote unquote free speech equivalent to YouTube, which I assume means it's the massively right wing and racist. Yeah, and there are several of these free speech equivalents to YouTube. So there's Rumble, there's Odyssey,
00:34:31
Speaker
So there's a whole bunch of attempts to make a YouTube replacement, most of which fail because they don't scale properly. So occasionally I look at Odyssey to see what weird stuff there is there. And the problem with Odyssey is that half the time the page doesn't work because it just doesn't have the throughput to cope with the number of people who want to look at disinformation or conspiracy content. And so yeah, Rumble is yet another one of those platforms where
00:35:01
Speaker
stuff which isn't successful on YouTube, and given that YouTube is actually a disinformation how-hole, does make you think what's going on with Rumble here, that's where those videos go. They go to Rumble. So, the point is that Rumble is being investigated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Oh, they're the sworn enemies of one Elon Musk. Are they?
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah, he hates them. He's the one who has, they've got a thing where he can't, whatever tweeting is now called, under X, without there being someone from the business to verify what he's saying because of previous times where he's made tweets which made inflated or deflated stock prices. So he's trying to sue the SEC.
00:35:52
Speaker
to get rid of what he takes to be an impediment of his First Amendment rights. And he keeps on failing in court because he voluntarily gave up those rights as part of a settlement. The court keeps on going, yeah, but you agree to this. It's not a violation of your rights if you agree to it.
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, so at any rate, the SEC has basically confirmed that they are investigating Rumble, but as it pains to point out, you know, you can't take this as proof that Rumble's done something bad because we're still investigating to find out whether or not they have.
00:36:32
Speaker
The suspicion and they haven't been releasing the information about it from the looks of things again because it's sort of an ongoing thing. But people have pointed out that investment research firm Culper Research back in April of last year
00:36:51
Speaker
released a report that was highly skeptical of Rumble's claimed monthly active user counts, or MAU, and so they reckon according to their data, so the Culper Research said in their report, combined the web and app data suggests to us that Rumble has only 38 to 48 million unique users and the company has overstated its user base by 66% to 108%.
00:37:16
Speaker
So the suggestion there is that they've massively overinflated their user count, which therefore means it could be because a site like that's user count user base is its worth, essentially. So that implies that some people reckon that Rumble has made itself look like it's worth a lot more than it's actually worth.
00:37:41
Speaker
So you're saying that a right-wing business may have engaged in rum doings? Maybe that may be the case. That is shocking information. So you want to talk about sub-tech? Well, just that the whole Nazi bar thing has become quite interesting over the course of our hiatus. Because they kicked out a few people, didn't they? They kicked out five accounts.
00:38:05
Speaker
Five accounts. Sorry, are there a lot more than five accounts on sub-stake, or is that like all of them? Is it just those five in David Ferrier? Well, I mean, from the looks of it, they've kicked out the five Nazis who used sub-stake, or at least they've kicked out the five bad Nazis, Josh. I mean, it's a whole bunch of other Nazis on sub-stake, but they're the good Nazis. They're the ones who are just, they're the pleasant Nazis. They're not the bad Nazis. Well, a pleasant Nazi is fine.
00:38:32
Speaker
As long as they're pleasant about it. So Josh Drummond, who used to have a substack, gave up his substack today with a very interesting post going, well look, I'm just going to go to one substacker who is a Nazi, who hasn't been kicked off substack,
00:38:50
Speaker
And I'm going to use the recommendation algorithm that Substack has, and I'm going to spend an hour just looking at the recommended content. So this entire last post on Substack is an accounting of if Substack is only removing content that they claim,
00:39:09
Speaker
contravenes their policies, and they could only find five accounts that contravene their policies, they're not looking particularly hard. And the interesting thing is, he points out, a lot of these accounts either have quite a number of paid subscribers,
00:39:29
Speaker
So these Nazi and Nazi-adjacent posters are making upwards of, say, 2000 US dollars a month from subscriptions. Or, in some cases, some people decided to hit a substat without any monetization. But substat gives you an option to say, look, you might like this contact if they monetize the content
00:39:52
Speaker
how much would you be willing to pay a month to get access to content of this kind? So they're also entreating people to go, look, you shouldn't courage this person to monetize their content. So yeah, the sub-stack thing doesn't seem to have got any better. In fact, people seem to be shining more and more of a light on just how bad sub-stack turns out to be.
00:40:17
Speaker
I never quite got Substack, to be honest. It seemed like kind of a pleasing throwback to back when people used to have blogs. It sort of said half email newsletter and half blog, but I never really got it. Well, it was a way of having a newsletter and getting direct monetisation from your readers. I mean, the thing which I find disturbing, and this is entirely pro-kill, it was founded by a New Zealander.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah. Are they still running the show? Yeah, they're living in San Francisco and they're the one who claims that not monetising Nazi content would be very bad censorship. Very bad censorship. Yes. Ah well.
00:41:03
Speaker
I assume there are alternatives. There seem to be... Yeah, there's Bussin' Down. I think there's one called Ghost. There are a lot of people who are now migrating their substacks. And I was in correspondence with David Farrier last week about the whole substack thing. And as he pointed out, and as other people have pointed out on substack,
00:41:23
Speaker
There's a certain kind of person who was entreated to join Substack and Substack are underwriting their legal bills. David's written about this on Webworm. So given the kind of work that David does, he can't afford his own legal liability for dealing with people like The Tickle King or Mr. Organ. So Substack are helping underwrite legal bills.
00:41:51
Speaker
So there is a kind of difficulty for people who are using Substack to produce decent work and are being financially supported, say through legal care or health care by some Substack and then seeing that actually the business is really, really keen to monetize Nazi content because Substack makes money because it gets the clicks. Yeah. But also they make money from every sub.
00:42:20
Speaker
So, they don't want... I mean, the thing which got me when Substacks started defending the monetization of Nazi content, they hid behind the free speech, free speech, it would be bad to censor this material. I actually would have been happier, which does not say I would be happy.
00:42:37
Speaker
But it would have been happier if they'd gone, look, it's just bad business to ban Nazis. Admittedly, that does make them sound really, really bad. But let's be bad and honest. Yeah. Okay. So the one last thing, the last thing I had was this popped up on...
Strange conspiracy theories: 2004 tsunami revenge
00:42:53
Speaker
Now I need to ask, where did you get this from?
00:42:55
Speaker
I got this from Twitter. Alright, so I got this from Drew who sent it to me asking me to explain what it is. So, Drew, that image you sent me, Josh and I are going to try to A. describe it and B. decipher it.
00:43:11
Speaker
It's from Twitter. I noticed that it has ad in the top right corner, so it appears to have popped up in someone's feed as an actual advertisement. Which means that someone has been willing to pay money for this to be spread. So it is... I just got it as an image, someone had screenshotted it and then tweeted it again saying, what the hell is this? Can you imagine companies used to actually want to advertise on this site? But so...
00:43:38
Speaker
At its heart, what it is is an Indian Ocean tsunami conspiracy theory saying that it was deliberately caused. But how it does that, it has the word tsunami in capital letters, and in two different ways shows that the word tsunami is a secret code admitting that the United States did it. Because first of all,
00:44:00
Speaker
If you say tsunami backwards, it's I-M-A-N-U-S-T, which stands for I'm America's Nuclear Scientist Triggered, which is almost a sentence suggesting that the tsunami was triggered by American nuclear scientists, but also
00:44:22
Speaker
If you take the T and the S from tsunami, that's like the S and the T in the front of states. Then if you take the next two letters, the UN, well, that's the start of United. Then if you take the next two letters, AM, well, that's the start of America. And if you take the final letter, I,
00:44:41
Speaker
Well, that's the first letter in Indonesia. So you've got the first two letters of United States America, assuming you take one of the pairs and swap it around with the other one, and United States America India. I mean, it's as obvious as Imanast.
00:44:59
Speaker
No, Josh, you said this is a tsunami conspiracy theory image, but I want to point out it's actually a 9-11 conspiracy theory because... Yes, there are layers. Because the ad, such that it is, goes on to say, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami happened on American Christmas. Now, I do want to know,
00:45:22
Speaker
American Christmas. A good friend of mine is Ukrainian Orthodox, so we talk about Orthodox Christmas as being different from say Roman Catholic or Western Christian Christmas.
00:45:41
Speaker
Maybe it's just because Indonesia is a majority Muslim country, so don't celebrate. Maybe, but I do wonder, is there a particular thing about American Christmas? So December 25th, 2004, local American time. And this is the bit which gets me. The next three words is retaliation for 9-11, but
00:46:06
Speaker
they're being pasted on slightly above little sentences slightly out of alignment with the other ones like it was added on later or something and that ends with www number one victim of crime.com
00:46:23
Speaker
Now, have you been to number one victim of crime dot gov? Very much not. I am going to go to number one victim of crime right now as you spend some time talking about what's going on here. I would not... So, I mean, looking at this thing... I'm... I'm...
00:46:39
Speaker
I'm sort of 60% convinced it's real and not just some sort of a joke. Maybe 55? I don't know. I'll be honest. It's probably even. It's probably even. Is it pornography?
00:46:55
Speaker
Oh, there's more! There are more! This website is just a bunch more images like this tsunami. And actually, the first one's much harder to describe than tsunami. This is... It starts off with, there weren't natural... Actually, no. Let's do this as the bonus episode. The bonus episode. The bonus episode, we will go to number1victimofcrime.com and talk about what we see.
00:47:27
Speaker
That being the case, I guess we're all out of things to talk about for this episode. We are the first episode of 2024, and what an episode it's been. There's been highs and lows, ups and downs, things and also other things. Yes, precisely. There have been words, there have been silences, there have been silences between words.
00:47:51
Speaker
It has been an experience. It has. But like all experiences, these experiences must come to an end. Unless, of course, you are a patron, then you'll get a little bonus episode. Yeah, you get to have more experiences. Other listeners, they don't get any more experiences until such time the next episode drops, but you as a patron, you get additional experiences.
00:48:13
Speaker
And so to be clear, if you want to be one of our patrons, then you need to go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Podbean won't cut it. Not anymore. Podbean is gone. We are out of the podbeaning business. No more beaning our pods. No, that sounds like it should be rude, but I can't quite make it to work. So until next week, probably when we most likely do some sort of a remote recording, depending on how things work out.
00:48:42
Speaker
Uh, until then, um, just goodbye, but in the 2024 scenes. Goodbye. Yes, that's what I get. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons- sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please,
00:49:10
Speaker
do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, keep watching the skis.