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They Might Be Giants (But They’re Probably Moa Bones)
28 Plays4 years ago
This week Josh and M discuss the hunt for giant bones in Aotearoa New Zealand, whilst also introducing our new podcast artwork, which was designed by James Wendelborn (AKA "Smug Liberal" on Twitter). Quality stuff!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
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Transcript
Podcast Artwork and Merchandise
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to a new Look Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, now with 200% more merchandising potential. Yes, after a year of asking Josh to produce a brand new podcast icon, we finally gave them to Josh's legendary laziness. So very, very lazy.
00:00:16
Speaker
and spent the good monies of our fine patrons on new and exciting artwork. Frankly, we're very pleased. Indeed we are. One James Wendelborn, aka Smug Liberal, is the designer of this new look for us, and it is swanktastic. Please don't use that word again. I will, and you cannot stop me, but I will bide my time. Anyway, we recommend you look at James' material over at smugliberalminority.com.
00:00:42
Speaker
There'll be a link in the podcast note.
Supporting Artists and Podcast Growth
00:00:45
Speaker
And if we can't get past my legendary laziness, we'll be setting up some kind of online storefront where you can get mugs and t-shirts and phone cases with the new art on it. And remember, if you don't buy a mug, Alex Jones wins. And now, the same old theme song as last week.
00:01:10
Speaker
The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth.
00:01:36
Speaker
We have, indeed, if you're listening to the podcast and you're using a podcast app, and if you're not using a podcast app, I'm quite curious. I'm quite sure how you're doing it, yeah. You could actually listen to it on the conspiracies and page, but you'll still note there is new artwork associated as logos, artwork, banners, the whole galore with our podcast, because we have designed... Well, we have. We have commissioned.
00:01:57
Speaker
With feedback, we made suggestions, we've commissioned new artwork designed by James Wendelborn, aka Smoke Liberal, on Twitter. Yeah, so it wasn't entirely my towering laziness. There was also the fact that I'm not a graphic designer and a little bit of rubbish at coming up with good ideas for logos. So we thought let's get the professionals. True, you are a bit of rubbish at coming up with good ideas.
00:02:19
Speaker
Except it was my idea to hire a professional to do it for us. Which cost us a large sum of money. Well, it's again a terrible idea by one Josh Addison. It was a large sum of money from our patrons. So basically, thank you. And the reason why we commissioned the work, and we specifically when we commissioned the work on Twitter by putting a call out, said we were going to be paying for the artwork, is we do think that passes deserve to be paid. Yes, none of this exposure nonsense.
00:02:46
Speaker
Which then takes us to the emotional blackmail part of this preamble to the podcast. Because if you enjoy the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, Josh and I are artists of a kind. So you might like to think of...
00:03:01
Speaker
putting a few dollars our way to help keep this podcast growing, and also to allow us to do things such as commissioning artwork for the podcast, and who knows, in future, commissioning new stings or songs. Indeed. Now, from one kind of shameless self-promotion to another, I hear you're in an encyclopedia?
00:03:22
Speaker
Something like that? I am. So the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is put out by the University of Martin, which is in Texas. Or is it the University of Texas, Martin? I can never quite get these American universities and their name, location, jimball, jambal. Quite right. They've put out an entry on conspiracy theories, and I'm pleased to say that my work is referenced throughout. Ooh la la.
00:03:48
Speaker
Indeed, it's referenced throughout to the point where at the end where it has a list of recommended readings, my 2014 book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, as published by Palgrave Macmillan, is recommended as one of the best texts to read to get up to date on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Well there you go, academic recognition!
00:04:08
Speaker
Let's hope it brings me a job. That would be nice.
Dr. Denteth's Work in Philosophy
00:04:11
Speaker
It really would be. Jobs are good. Is this a thing called money? Yeah, they give you some of that stuff. And disposable income. I've never actually experienced these things, but I would like to one day at least have a few weeks of it. Yes. But until that day, we'll just keep recording episodes, I guess. Now we've... I think that's it for the shameless self-promotion. So instead, let's talk about a time when you were on the radio recently. Indeed. Just an everyday event in my life.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:44
Speaker
So, Josh, tell me about me being on the radio, because I know nothing about this. So I saw an interesting, I actually read the print version, Radio New Zealand's website, rnz.co.nz, I guess it's a .co, isn't it? Actually, that's a good question, I just started typing rnz and it fills it in for me. But yeah, I think it is actually registered as a company website, as opposed to an org, or, I mean, the same as TVNZ.co.nz, they are kind of companies.
00:05:11
Speaker
It's hard to tell in this dystopian socialist nightmare that we live in where the government controls all and gets us free healthcare and what have you. But no, Radio New Zealand has a website where, apart from being able to listen to their various shows and interviews and so on, they put on, they also have written articles about this stuff. And I happen to be reading such an article about people who'd been digging for giant bones
00:05:34
Speaker
somewhere down in New Zealand, and who did I see referenced and indeed quoted in this article but one Dr. M. Denteth. And I thought, I know a Dr. M. Denteth. They're probably going to want to find this other
Conspiracy Theories in New Zealand
00:05:44
Speaker
M. Denteth and fight for the right to use their name. And I did, which is why I'll be going to court next week for murder.
00:05:52
Speaker
So we thought, since it's a relevant topic, why don't we talk about people hunting for giants, and also positing conspiracy theories as for why we can't find giants. So that way it's relevant to actually... So this is basically a rehash or recurrence, or to use a philosophical term, recudcent, which is the first time the term conspiracy theory turns up in the
00:06:17
Speaker
Oxford English Dictionary is associated with the recurrence, I can't even pronounce the word properly, of a conspiracy theory, so it's an apt term, of the Celtic New Zealand thesis. It is, it all sort of ties into that. So, I mean, bit of background, people have been talking about giants forever, pretty much every culture has stories about people larger than regular humans who used to exist but don't anymore for some reason.
00:06:43
Speaker
In the Bible, obviously, you've got your Goliaths, and the Nephilim are the ones who people like to talk about. Well, they were like half angel or something, and they were supposedly all giants. Yes, depending on which version of Christian eschatology you are looking at. Yes, either the offspring of angels and humans, or they are the race of pre-human entities that existed before the deluge, where they lived along with humans.
00:07:11
Speaker
and then God wiped them out with a big flood, or other variations of the same. Yes, now, we could give sort of, you know, possibly more scientific explanations for these things. Occasionally human beings have various growth disorders that cause them to grow to fairly impressive heights. I think Robert Wadlow, the American man who has the record for being the tallest officially measured and verified human being, was almost nine feet tall and supposedly still growing when he died.
00:07:40
Speaker
Because it turns out that there are certain genetic disorders that basically don't turn off the growing process in human beings. So it's entirely possible these sorts of things have been happening since as long as there were human beings, so that could certainly be an origin for some of these stories. And there are people who, as ethnicities, are on average taller than other ethnicities, which is usually due to dietary factors, excess or lack of excess to particular types of food.
00:08:08
Speaker
But that's a bit too prosaic an explanation for some people. Often people will go out looking for giants specifically so that they can verify some theory about these ancient peoples that they had. So when it comes to the Bible, people will be looking for evidence of the remains of these giants that were in the Bible. I mean Goliath, depending on who you
00:08:32
Speaker
how you interpret the Bible was his height comes out at either nine foot something or seven foot something, which is entirely within the range of human possibility. So people have been, people sort of go on hunts. The first one I saw, old Cotton Mather, who was
00:08:49
Speaker
It was a scientist who came up with lots of interesting stuff. It was also one of the key figures behind the Salem witch trials, for which he's mostly removed. He was one of those scientists. Yes. He found some fossilized leg bones and teeth near New York in 1705. Reckon they must have been remains of the Nephilim, although people these days think they're probably mastered on.
00:09:09
Speaker
indeed actually this seems to be a recurrent feature for a lot of the giant mythology we find in particularly the 17th 18th and 19th century is the discovery of fossilized remains and people assuming that these must be relatively recent human bones of some particular kind and it's only in retrospect when people go back to these original discoveries that they realize
00:09:34
Speaker
Hmm, actually we're probably looking at the bones of extinct animals, which is why humans at the time didn't recognize them as such, and went, oh, this must be a really big version of X or Y, like a human being. Yes. Now moving it to a local context, there are stories, of course, in Maori and Polynesian culture of large people, as we said, pretty much universal.
00:09:59
Speaker
And so people here have been digging around to look for remains of these supposed giant folk. Perhaps we'll leave the motivations till a little bit later to really get into exactly why people might want to establish the existence. Josh doesn't want to use the word racism. Oh, I do. I just want to wait. I want to build up to it.
00:10:20
Speaker
And talk about just what's been happening at the moment.
The Huntley Dig and Pre-Māori Beliefs
00:10:23
Speaker
So the RNZ article from last week by Susan Strongman. Indeed. Is she a fan of Adventure Time? Because there is the character of Susan Strong in Adventure Time. You know, I had not made that connection whatsoever. And if I had made that connection, I probably still wouldn't have asked her that when we were talking about giant hidden in caves down the country. Just wondering how often she gets that reference given to her.
00:10:44
Speaker
But yes, now she came across this story independently of you, but it's something you've been looking into for a while. So there is this blog called... I've just gone completely... I got stuck there on the...
00:11:03
Speaker
Speech to students is terrible and one of the reasons why I particularly hate it is when trying to say people's names or pronouncing words that aren't in English suddenly it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about or I don't know who I'm talking to and that makes me feel embarrassed which of course then
00:11:21
Speaker
amps up the anxiety of speech disfluency, that means you just can't say a single word properly, and then you just shrivel up and die, but that's another matter entirely. So there's this blog called tonguetotofenawa.com and it was devoted to an investigation of apparently a cavern which would contain within it the remains of seven to eight foot tall pre-Māori people
00:11:44
Speaker
in the country of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Now, I came across this blog sometime back in 2017 and started following it, going, oh, this is a bit weird. I actually can't remember how I came across it. I think someone may have mentioned it on Twitter or it might have been one of those brief periods of time where I was trying really hard on social media to follow people of a variety of different political persuasions.
00:12:11
Speaker
Some looks very don't do any more because it just makes me feel angry the entire time I use social media. But I came across it, I started talking about it and I also tried to make contact with the relevant authorities to find out what was going on with this unauthorised dig which was looking for human remains. Now at some point halfway through last year, Susan Strongman came across the same blog.
00:12:37
Speaker
She got in contact with me. We had some conversation about the potential motivations and history of these particular beliefs. And then she got in contact very recently to say that she'd actually written a piece for RNZ that was going to be published at some point in the near future. And could I be interviewed for some sound bites, which then led to me being interviewed by Jesse Mulligan on the radio. So yes, I've been following the story for
00:13:07
Speaker
actually almost three years now. Yep. So what are the details then? These guys, do they make their identities public on the blog? The impression I got was that they hadn't. No. So whenever they do reference each other, and I'm actually not even sure whether all the blog posts are written by the same person or by individuals within the collective, there appears to be quite a number of non-archaeologists. I want to stress this here.
00:13:35
Speaker
These people who are engaging and tunneling into the Earth have no archaeological training whatsoever. They always use initials to refer to each other, although Susan has been able to track down the identity of some of them, given other details that have come out, and at least one of the ring leaders has named himself publicly. I think his name is, I want to say, Rodney Dangerfield, and yet suddenly he doesn't sound right at all. No, that's another guy.
00:14:01
Speaker
That sounds like a famous American comedian, but I actually think it might be this guy's name as well, because I think he's the Reiki practitioner. We'll get on to him. We'll get to Reiki eventually as well. So they are of the belief that somewhere near Huntley,
00:14:18
Speaker
There is a cavern containing within it the remains of several seven to eight foot tall human beings who predate the maurim, which was discovered by people and rumored to exist about 20 years ago. And then the tunnel leading into this cavern was filled in to prevent anyone else from finding it.
00:14:41
Speaker
So they found what they thought was they covered an entryway to the tunnel and have been excavating this tunnel now for over two and a half years and have basically tunnelled for about 14 meters underground to try to get to the burial place of these pre-Māori giants.
Cultural Stories of Giants and Misidentifications
00:15:01
Speaker
And this dig is occurring on private land, so the actual tunnel entrance is apparently on a roadside, but the tunnel goes into nearby farmland. And on the blog, they intimated quite strongly that the owner of the land not only knew what they were doing, but strongly approved of what they were doing to prove that the real history of this place has been hidden away from the rest of us.
00:15:27
Speaker
Yes, because here is here is the conspiracy angle. It's not just that here's an interesting thing we found that a if true could revolutionize a bunch of stuff, but it's the stuff that we're investigating has been deliberately hidden.
00:15:44
Speaker
What's the quote from the blog? Maori, as we know them, did not possess an empty land as taught in the school books these days or as printed these days in the media. Polynesians, Green Gross's apostrophe, in fact came to a land already occupied and then they conquered it. What is inside our cave when we finally reach the campart will eventually prove this.
00:16:02
Speaker
So yes, they are very, very deliberately seeking to upend history. And very deliberately of the belief that the government and presumably Māori have been working together to hide that history from the rest of us.
00:16:16
Speaker
Now, where did they get these ideas in the first place? I heard something in one of the articles about some road worker told them about it sometime or some guy heard it from another guy or something. It seemed a little bit shaky. So yes, there is a lot of the telephone game going on here. So the telephone game is the right title you should be using to the rather racistly named Chinese. That's only a New Zealand Australian thing, apparently.
00:16:46
Speaker
I mean, telephone games are very American term. Yeah, yeah. I've heard of Americans being horrified to hear that over here it gets called Chinese whisper. With same respect, Americans are horrified that we have a suite here called Eskimos. Well, yes, there's that as well. But that's, yes, that's another thing entirely. It is. So yeah, there's been the story going around for a while. And it doesn't seem to be localized to any particular place. But people have heard of road workers who are doing work that digged up
00:17:14
Speaker
pre-Māori giant remains. They do have to ask how road workers know the remains they're digging up aren't Māori whatsoever. When the story goes, they dig up these remains, they notify the Department of Conservation, and then the story is made to disappear, and thus people hear about it when they go down to the pub or they win a meat raffle or something of that particular kind.
00:17:35
Speaker
And there are a lot of these stories circulating. And all of these stories share in common that people in authority are trying to hide something from the rest of us. So there is a large-scale conspiracy operating at a departmental or governmental level to hide our true history. But these stories can never be made concrete. They are urban legends, essentially.
00:18:01
Speaker
In the same respect, you'll get the urban legend of a child playing in a sandpit that pricks itself on a sharp object, child falls sick, gets sent to hospital, and you discover that the child had a drug overdose because there's a heroin needle in the sandpit. And yet it turns out the needle in the sandpit is neither from your town, it's from two towns down, but when you try to track that down, it's also from two towns down from there because there is no originating story.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, now the YARNZ story includes a bunch more details about the background. Are these things Susan Strongman dug up in her own investigations, the various stories? Some of them are stories which have been going around for a long time. Some of them are from interviews with people in the locality and some of them are from blog posts on tongueatafenawa.com.
00:18:52
Speaker
So, yes, we have the story of Al Mannering, grew up on a nearby farm, recalls stories of a pofinoa or a carved wooden post being found near where roadworks were being done, which he shows that there is evidence of former Maori settlement or something like that, and claims he recalls seeing a human femur that was longer than his and he's six feet tall.
00:19:18
Speaker
I want to know how we can recognise that something is a human femur as opposed to a mower bone or even just another bone in the human body. Is this man a serial killer who butchers victims and thus knows what a femur looks like? Is he a surgeon?
00:19:35
Speaker
I don't know. Is he a butcher? To be fair, the femur is the longest bone. But how do you know it's a human bone? Well, exactly, yes. So we have now a story from 88-year-old Morris Tyson, who's lived in the area for a very long time, talks about a crypt filled with 14 or more eight-foot tall skeletons, which were uncovered by road workers and then quickly reburied by archaeologists.
00:19:58
Speaker
Although he goes on to say he doesn't claim to have actually seen any of this or seen the being reburied or anything like that, he heard about it from the road workers. Now human bodies in caves is not an unusual phenomena in this country because a lot of, well I'll say a lot of, the disposal of bodies in certain iwi in Aotearoa, particularly pre-colonisation by the Europeans, was putting bodies in caves.
Moa Bones and Prehistoric Ecology
00:20:26
Speaker
And it is also quite possible in a situation where a body has been left in a cave and the flesh and sinew has basically rotted away. The assemblage is going to look a lot larger because it's no longer being connected by ligaments. So stretched out or fallen apart, bodies will look a lot taller than they would be when they're kind of compressed into a muscular frame.
00:20:49
Speaker
So it's quite possible to see bodies in a cave and think they look taller than they actually are, because most of us don't ever encounter skeletons. And we do see skeletons in TVs and movies. Which are really wired together. Yes, precisely. To give the proper proportions of a human body.
00:21:10
Speaker
Now, the one thing that sort of came up at the top of most of these stories is that these guys have been digging for a few years now and claimed to have found a bone, which they claimed was a, they said it was a femur, did they?
00:21:26
Speaker
A human bone anyway, which they came was much, was a partial bone, but extrapolating out to its full size meant it was much larger than a bone of that kind should have been. People who have looked at at least photos of this bone reckon it is a moa bone. The moa for any of our non New Zealand listeners might not know New Zealand was home to a bunch of giant flightless birds.
00:21:51
Speaker
And one giant, very, very flighty bird, the biggest eagle the world has ever seen. Eight sheep, apparently. And there is some reason to think that the Hasta Eagle actually died out somewhere about a thousand years ago.
00:22:08
Speaker
But it's suspected, given certain Maori legends, that it must have been alive for a certain
Safety Concerns Halt Dig
00:22:16
Speaker
period of time after the initial wave of Polynesian colonisation. Because there are stories of children being snatched from their cribs by giant birds. Yes. And this bird is of the size that a baby would be the perfect snack for it. It certainly would. But yes, apart from the house, we had them all, which the largest of them were what?
00:22:36
Speaker
like nine feet tall, even more, even more giant, giant flightless birds, which naturally had very, very large leek bones. And we're preyed upon by care. Did we? Yeah, so there's little fish that just bite chunks out of a whale and swim off.
00:22:52
Speaker
Yes, but it's parrots. So here are these incredibly intelligent parrots that we have here that, prior to European colonisation, used to move as giant flocks across the countryside. And they have a puchant for the liver of shape.
00:23:12
Speaker
So basically, farmers don't like kia, because kia will grab onto the side of a sheep, locate its liver by smell, and using its really, really interesting beak, bite into liver, eat the liver, which then leads to the sheep dying. Turns out a lot of mower remains were found
00:23:31
Speaker
died because their livers have been eaten. How about that? And so it seems that the thing that made Kea go, oh, sheep livers taste great, is a predisposition to eating livers generally, and their previous supply of livers which died out a long time ago has been replaced by sheep instead. How about that?
00:23:51
Speaker
Very clever, though. Anyway, enough of ancient fauna of our country. Although we should. It is. I mean, if you want more about that, we can do a podcast special. Yes. No, it is a fascinating subject. So what happened then? The story went up. You got interviewed. Then there was an update of the story, which said that among other things, this claim that the farmer whose land they were digging under was supportive of them turned out to be not so much
00:24:19
Speaker
true as hogwash. Completely untrue, yeah. And so the farmer apparently was livid to discover that these people had been digging around underneath his land. So suppose the dig has now been called off?
Twitter Debate on Conspiracy Theories
00:24:31
Speaker
Yes, although here's where the story gets interesting. So the last update on the blog about the dig, it was back in November. And in November, they were talking about how they'd got to a particular part of the tunnel. Now I want to point out here, I don't think they're excavating a tunnel.
00:24:49
Speaker
I think it's very likely they're excavating the remains of a waterway which is filled up over time which is why they're finding something which is a tunnel-like structure but it's because water used to flow through it and it's stopped and it's just kind of filled up with debris over time. As they've been digging through they encountered a incredibly large boulder
00:25:09
Speaker
in the structure, which meant if they continued to dig forward there was a very large likelihood of a collapse of a giant stone structure that if it struck someone would actually kill them, which to my mind kind of suggests it's not a tunnel at this particular point, it's something else entirely. So they're now going, oh actually the dig was basically at an end before Susan wrote the story in question because this structure was going to be too hard for us to get around,
00:25:37
Speaker
Now, there's nothing in the November update that indicates they're going to give up. I think they're trying to go there. No, we haven't been owned. You've been owned type of response there. Right. So that's kind of where it stands. You've got a few interesting contacts as a result of your raised profile.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yes, so we're going to go through a Twitter conversation I had in just a minute. Although, end of last week, I received a message from the University of Waikato, where I currently work, saying, this person has tried to get in contact with you, could you please ring them back?
00:26:15
Speaker
I assumed they were a student who wanted to know something about enrollment or assessment in a course I'm about to teach. It turned out it was a member of the public who wanted to tell me about how it was terrible that I was describing these conspiracy theories about a prehistory as conspiracy theories. To try to explain, I don't use the word in the pejorative sense, but he really wasn't listening to anything I said.
00:26:38
Speaker
and then proceeded to claim he wasn't a racist, whilst engaging in a lot of racist speech. And that was 20 minutes of my life I'm not getting back. But yes, on Twitter...
00:26:51
Speaker
We had a, well, I had an interesting exchange. And Josh, we're going to do a bit of role-playing here. I'm going to get you to play the person who is questioning the official narrative, and I'm going to play myself. Because I need to get the intonations right about the way that I was responding to these claims. So here it is. So there's no possibility that I could be you, and you could be the abusive asshole dick. No, no.
00:27:18
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to conspiracy players are now going to produce a short play, someone has an irritating conversation with him. The scene is a computer screen, two people typing to each other. Sorry, before we start, what was the background to this? The first post this guy references Susan, so was he replying to one of Susan Strongman's
00:27:42
Speaker
tweets about the article. So yes, he was replying to her posting about the article online. Righto. It begins. And this is a canoe prow, right Susan? You're a complete, you're spelled Y-O-U-R, a complete sellout shill for a communist government. Please do shut your face hole. And there then follows a photograph of a carved piece of wood, which kind of looks like a canoe prow, but could be something else maybe. In the video version, we'll put it up on screen.
00:28:12
Speaker
And you think it's what exactly? Well, what do you think it is? You're the one disputing its provenance, so really you're the one who has to provide an alternative explanation. What do you think it is? And how does it relate to talk of eight-foot giants in our prehistory? Okay, done. Why should I answer your questions?
00:28:31
Speaker
I guess because you're accusing people of being in on a communist plot because you're telling journalists not to report stories, which is why I'd like to know what you think that object is. But if you're not willing to support your assertion with argument, and here I miss out the word and evidence, so I say argument evidence, so be it.
00:28:51
Speaker
Now at this point, Enz Interlocutor gets a bit swery and kind of stays a bit swery. So if you don't like strong language, maybe skip ahead a few minutes on the podcast. Because he continues, look at the fucking thing you muppet. You really are a troll, huh? Are you a baby eater too?
00:29:10
Speaker
Obviously. If I came across you in a dark alley, I think I would drop to my knees and pray. It's the tuning end of a stringed instrument and much larger than normal. Satisfied, you freak? So are all similar decorative prowls of Polynesian vessels also the tuning end of a stringed instrument? Or is this the only one? Which one's where I see nothing?
00:29:35
Speaker
There are not only these things called museums, which display similar objects. There are also books on Polynesian boat- oh dear man. Polynesian boat building. Polynesian boat building is what I meant to say. And design. Modern examples. It's also if people stopped building boats, etc.
00:29:53
Speaker
Are you real? What are you talking about? You aren't making any sense, so therefore why should I listen to you? Prove that there is something they have compared it to. Prove to me that I am wrong. All I see is gibberish. Here's a paper showing the wonderful variety of such brows. I provide a link. So there's one point of data for you. A cursory search online will find you quite a lot more such examples.
00:30:17
Speaker
And oh look, none of them are as small as this one, and none of them even look the same. Must have been the outrigger prowl then. What are you trying to do here? Best shut up and save face. Oh yeah, you obviously can't shut it by the looks of that face. I mean, in your photo you do appear to be talking, which I guess the inference is that you never ever stop talking. That's true, I doubt it. I guess, maybe that makes sense.
00:30:37
Speaker
Do you think the prowls of English ships at the time look the same? The thing about decorative items is they all tend to look different. Are you still here? I actually got distracted by the fact that he spelt a word wrong and that sentence suddenly made no sense to me, but what I think he was saying was, are you still here distracting me and wasting my time so I can't spread the word? Dork, get off, you are embarrassing yourself.
00:31:00
Speaker
Shame you aren't interested in discussing evidence, but as you don't want to get to the nub of the issue, I won't bother you any further. Although, maybe you shouldn't have included me in your original tweet if you don't want to be challenged over your claims. What's to talk about? Facts don't care about your feelings, mate.
00:31:17
Speaker
I thought you didn't want to continue this conversation. I will waste your time more than you will waste my time. I love talking to morons. Makes me hard, charming. I bet you love that. Tell me, who other than you thinks the object in question is part of a stringed instrument? Is there a body of work which attests to this?
00:31:34
Speaker
Who are the experts of a pine that it is what you say it is? Why are you so worried about what I have to say anyway? I have had an expert look at it and thinks it is definitely strange they call it a canoe prow. I am gifted so don't need a so-called professional to make my decisions for me and no I won't tell you who is that's my business. You're the one who comes from Canada.
00:31:52
Speaker
You're the one accusing people of communist plots. Then there's a link to the website kilts.co.nz. I assume it's not a website specifically about kilts? No, it's a website about ancient Celtic New Zealand. Funny that. I am aware of that site. I'm also aware that its claims are not just disputed, but they're also not well supported by the oral histories and archaeology both here and abroad. Prey, what kind of sailing vessels were these purported Scots using to get here nearly a thousand years ago?
00:32:22
Speaker
Better ones than a bloody canoe or something made of reeds. Show me some evidence that disputes this. Even the basic Wikipedia article on Polynesian navigation shows just how sophisticated their navigational technology was. Then there are the accounts made by Europeans at first contact with Polynesian peoples. Basic research and I then provide a link to Polynesian boat technology.
00:32:45
Speaker
But yet a people with better tech couldn't do it right? Dork. Why are you even bothering? You are living the lie they tell you. Do not trust your government.
Racist Roots of Conspiracy Theories
00:32:52
Speaker
And now things get explicitly conspiratorial. They have lied to you for centuries and continuing to blindly believe is what is wrong with this planet.
00:32:59
Speaker
The planet is all in capitals except for the T. He must have got his finger off the shift key too soon. The Europeans did not have better aqua technology. People who study this point out that up until the European age of exploration, the Polynesians were better at traversing oceans. It's not plausible Europeans could have got here before the Maori with their technology at the time. I asked for proof, not hearsay. Do shut you dickhole.
00:33:32
Speaker
Perreviewed research is more than just hearsay. More say than I think more so than relying upon anonymous experts. Where? I see nothing. Persians made it to South America and then here. Why are you wasting your time trying to convince someone that will never listen to you? Are you a bot? I suspect you are trying to get blocked. I don't block idiots. They deserve to hear the truth.
00:33:53
Speaker
Where are the Persian city complexes in the Americas? Where are the inscriptions? Who translated them? These claims have all been carefully analysed in the past and found wanting. Also, you are the one who continued this conversation. DNA evidence suggests otherwise, mate. Where is all your proof? All I see is rubbish drivel. Carry on mate, I am here all day.
00:34:13
Speaker
If the DNA evidence suggests this, where's the linguistic evidence? You would expect Persian words and phrases to have integrated into the language groups these Persians apparently interpret into. Where's that evidence? I suspect you're mistaking population genetics with evidence of pre-contact. Given global populations, we'll find evidence of people with ancestry from all over the place. The only reliable DNA you could furnish here is pre-contact bodies with Persian DNA. Where are those studies?
00:34:42
Speaker
Blah blah blah. Whereas your studies, you obviously don't look in the places that really matter. Stop reading and replying to me and go do some homework.
00:34:49
Speaker
You do seem to be repeating claims made by Max Hill and Gary Koch. I'm afraid. I tend to rely on experts and their work, rather than that of amateur historians. I've read their material, along with Dutre Brailsford and the like. It's not very convincing. Who are they? They are the major names in this country who promote the claims you are making. Have you not even done your own homework to see who else believes the stuff you do? And, uh... The recording's there.
00:35:15
Speaker
So that was the last... There was a little bit more and then I got blocked. Right, yep. After saying he wasn't going to block you and after saying he was quite happy to keep talking to you and wasting your time. Anyway, I begin to suspect that this person was not a good faith interlocutor.
00:35:31
Speaker
No. In fact, having discovered this person on Facebook, they are also of the belief that Freemasons not only control the world are engaging in satanic pedophilic sacrifices on a day by day basis in this country, but they also control the evening breeze. Nice. No, apparently not. The bruises actually set out to destroy this person's life by annoying them at evening time.
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah. Can't fault the logic. Yes, you can. Oh, well, I mean, I could. I just can't be bothered because... Fair enough. So this sort of gets us, let's finish things off with the talk of motive, basically, because there is nothing inherently wrong with believing that giant races existed or looking for evidence to prove this theory just by itself like that. But
00:36:23
Speaker
In practice, when people go looking for evidence of other races giant or otherwise, especially in this neck of the woods, it's usually to further some sort of a political agenda. Indeed. And that agenda tends to be both the claim that
00:36:41
Speaker
Maori civilization can't have been as complex as people make it out to be, because they're brown savages. And also, if we can show that white people got to this country first, then the Treaty of Waitangi is null and void,
00:36:56
Speaker
Because reasons. Yes, I mean, it's sort of another extension of the whole Moriuri thing. That used to be the stock claim that European colonisers came and stole all the Maori's land. Well, the Maori only stole their land off the Moriuri, so turnabouts, fair play. Nothing to complain about. I should point out for non New Zealand listeners, the Moriori are
00:37:18
Speaker
I have to be very careful here about talking about the Moriori, because they have their own particular mythology and Whakapapa. But they are a group of people who were living in Aotearoa, New Zealand contemporaneously with the Maori.
00:37:37
Speaker
Most mainland New Zealand scholars believe that the Maori-ori is simply just another iwi of the Maori whose culture developed in isolation on Rikohu or the Chatham.
00:37:52
Speaker
islands. They certainly aren't, as was taught in schools in the early part of the 20th century, a pre-Māori Melanesian people who were chased out of these lands by the Māori when they arrived.
00:38:08
Speaker
And yet somehow, despite the fact that this bad history, which made it into the European history books, but not the oral traditions of the Maori, continues to resonate to this day, despite the fact that the Maori are going, no, we are not these pre-Melanesian people that you claim we are. Also, PS, we're not extinct, which is one of the other things. They're able to go, we're not, because they still exist. Yes, yeah.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah, so that was sort of a sort of historical education does appear to be furthering. And there was just recently there was an official governmental recognition. Yes, in fact, I think it was actually last week. It was just just really recently. Yeah. So so it's becoming harder to lean on that one. But that's okay. You can go back to all the other ancient civilizations that supposedly were here before the Maori and who therefore were the real original inhabitants of this country and so on and so forth.
00:39:01
Speaker
The Treaty of Waitangi thing here is interesting because we have a treaty between the Crown and Maori which was basically a power sharing arrangement made when the Europeans started coming here in number and Maori became concerned about what was going on here and the Crown was going we need to kind of solidify our power base here.
00:39:24
Speaker
Now the treaty itself is quite contentious because there's an English translation and there's a Torreo Maori version of the text. They differ in some quite significant ways around key terms and there's a lot of debate as to how we should interpret those differences.
00:39:40
Speaker
But what's important about this, the Treaty is not a treaty between the indigenous people of this place and the Crown. It is a treaty between Māori as a people and Pākehā as a people, which means that even if it did turn out, there was a civilisation here before the Māori arrived,
00:40:03
Speaker
It wouldn't actually make the treaty null and void, because it's not a treaty between the first people and the crown. It's a treaty between one people and another people, and nothing rests upon the claim of who was here first.
Podcast Wrap-up and Patron Promotion
00:40:19
Speaker
So there you go. So one last detail that we teased at the beginning of this episode. Reiki, one of the one of these tunnel diggers is apparently a Reiki practitioner and has placed a curse on it just to keep it safe, which is interesting that obviously they don't place any stock in Maori notions of tapu, which would certainly apply if this was the resting place of of other people, but they are they are fully on board with Reiki.
00:40:46
Speaker
Now I did refer to this Reiki practitioner as Rodney Dangerfield. That was incorrect. He is Rodney Davidson. It's close enough to Dangerfield that I feel that I could have got away with that in a court of law.
00:41:02
Speaker
So there you have it, basically. People were looking for giant bones, found what was probably a mower bone. They've stopped digging now anyway. Em talked about it on the radio. Indeed. Just another day in the life of me as a conspiracy theory theorist. Fascinating stuff.
00:41:20
Speaker
I think we're at the end of an episode. So once again hope you enjoy the swanky new graphics. They're swanktastic. At the very least they should show up as the the icon on your podcast reader but if you happen to look at the video episode it'll also show up I guess for about 15 seconds on the
00:41:40
Speaker
on the start of it. But it looks very good, and we're very proud of it. It's on all our websites and stuff for the podcast. And they may well be merchant. Yes, no, we have to get our hands on some merch. Mugs, phone cases, maps. Tea towels seem to be a thing these days. Nothing quite like cleaning your aubergine with a tea towel with the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy on it. So we'll have to investigate that.
00:42:04
Speaker
Until then, we will leave you alone, but not you, the patrons who've paid for this graphical rebrand, because we have a patron bonus episode coming up where we talk about stuff, local stuff, election stuff. We've got donation scandals in this country, we've got a claim by George Soros about a conspiracy, not a claim about George Soros about a conspiracy.
00:42:27
Speaker
And we've got two bits of very interesting Trump-related news, one involving Julian Assange, and the other one involving any of the show, Rochester. Still got the Richard Nixon tattoo.
00:42:43
Speaker
I think once you've got that tattoo, it's indelibly marked into your soul, so yes. Yeah, okie doke. Well, so if you're interested in that, stick around. If you're a patron, if you're not a patron, why not become a patron? Patron, patron, patronal. You just can keep saying good patron until everyone of you is a patron. That actually lets us chant patron and we'll just fade out on patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron, patron.
00:43:12
Speaker
patron patron patron patron patron patron
00:43:23
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.
00:44:24
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.