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00:00:01
An interview with Dr. Pat Stokes (Deakin)
25 Plays6 years ago
In this special episode M interviews Dr. (soon to be an Ass. Prof.) Patrick Stokes, one of the contributor's to M's new book 'Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously.' From a discussion to what counts as a conspiracy theory to who gets to claim the nationality of Russell Crowe, Pat and M have a wide-ranging discussion on conspiracy theory and conspiracy theories over the course of nearly fifty minutes. But never fear; Josh is still there to update you on the latest conspiracy theory news.
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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Transcript
Intro and Personal Updates
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. M. Dentiff is not sitting next to me at the moment. It could be anywhere, quite frankly, the surface of the sun. I wouldn't know. We're recording this separately this week. I've had a variety of scheduling conflicts. It's getting to be that time of the year. You know, I have three birthdays and a wedding in my immediate family in the next few weeks, plus all the usual
00:00:46
Speaker
end of year, birthdays, Christmas, all that business. So we haven't been able to get together in the same place this week. So we're doing the old trick that we used to do back when Em was over in Bucharest and we couldn't schedule a Skype call.
Interview with Patrick Stokes on Conspiracy Theories
00:01:00
Speaker
I'm going to record a bit of an episode. Em's going to record a bit of an episode. And then they'll just get mushed together Frankenstein style and you should have yourself a proper podcast to listen to.
00:01:11
Speaker
So the main body of this episode is going to be an interview that ends conducted with Patrick Stokes, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University, and also contributor to Taking Conspiracy Theory Seriously, the book we have mentioned a couple of times in recent episodes on account of it having been edited by one Dr. M. Denteth.
00:01:30
Speaker
But before we get into that, I'm going to do a rundown of the news stories of the week. That'll be my contribution. So, Em, assuming you're editing this together, maybe you're going to play one of those cute little chimes right now.
00:01:46
Speaker
Hello and welcome. And this week we are talking with Doctor, soon to be associate professor, Patrick Stokes from Deakin University in the exotic town of Melbourne, Australia. Hello Pat, how are things? Exotic indeed is a strange and curious place.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yes, Australia is, particularly for those of us from Aotearoa, New Zealand, a weird place when it comes to politics in particular, but also the fact that we keep all of our dangerous animals in the southern hemisphere in your backyard rather than ours. This is true, and I thank you not to speak of Russell Crowe like that again.
00:02:24
Speaker
Do we really want to get into who owns Russell Crowe? Because that is a huge issue in our particular system. Because we want you to have him. We really, really do want you to have him. When he's winning Oscars, he's Australian actor Russell Crowe. And when he's throwing phones at people or whatever, he's controversial, virtual Kiwi actor Russell Crowe. And when he's performing in his band, what do you say about him then?
00:02:51
Speaker
I mean, the better, I'm assuming. I wouldn't wish that on New Zealand, to be honest. I wouldn't. No one should take ownership of that. No, it's true. It's true. Sometimes sometimes it's it's it's just best to ignore issues like disapproval. Well, he means well.
00:03:07
Speaker
Does he though? Does he? Well, possibly. Yeah. But we're not here to talk about Russell Crowe and Academy Awards. Oh, oh. Yes, I know. This is a, that's the other podcast. I've been here under false pretenses. We're here to talk about conspiracies and conspiracies.
00:03:22
Speaker
theories. And you happen to be one of the many, many conspiracy theory theorists in Australia, in that Australia seems to actually have quite a number of philosophers interested in conspiracy theories and social scientists interested in conspiracy theories. So let's start with a really, really basic question.
Conspiracies vs. Conspiracy Theories
00:03:40
Speaker
Do conspiracies occur? Yes, obviously.
00:03:44
Speaker
No question about that. Obviously there are explanations of events that clearly are the result of actors conspiring in secret to bring about an outcome. No question to that whatsoever. Okay then, so what's a conspiracy theory? So this is where it gets complicated.
00:04:01
Speaker
because epistemologists, such as your good self, tend to go for a very formal definition of what that means, namely just explaining what a conspiracy theory is, purely in terms of the formal type of explanation it is, the terms I've just used there.
00:04:22
Speaker
an explanation of observed events in terms of two or more actors working in secret to bring about an outcome, not necessarily the outcome that occurred. But I do think there is an important slippage between that very narrow sense of conspiracy theory
00:04:40
Speaker
and the way in which the term is used in different contexts, one of which is, and here I'll give you, you know, David Cody's right, and I think you're right, and Charles Pigman's right, that there is a particular term of conspiracy theory that's purely a term of abuse that doesn't do any great work.
00:04:55
Speaker
But there is also, I think, a recognisable set of social explanatory practices, if you like, which is what I think most of us probably mean when we talk about conspiracy theories in general. So when we, as an earlier generation of philosophers would have put it, when we speak to the vulgar, and they use the term conspiracy theory, it's going to be something more like that kind of social term of a recognisable
00:05:20
Speaker
traditional practice or family of explanatory practices. And that I think is where we do run into some things that should worry us.
00:05:33
Speaker
I think in some ways, and perhaps unusually for philosophers, epistemologists have more or less won the battle if we define conspiracy theory in a very, very narrow sort of way. But then there are some of us who want to then say, okay, well, actually probably just me, who want to say, okay, but then what about the ethical and epistemological dimensions of conspiracy theory as a recognisable form of social practice?
00:05:59
Speaker
I mean, you can use this analogy here, actually, the way that scientists use the word theory versus the way that everyday people use the word theory, which drives scientists mad when they hear ordinary people say theory, like, oh, that's just theory. And scientists say, do you have any idea what that means? And it's like, well, it does when you're doing science. That's what it means in that context. But for everyone else, it has this broader meaning.
00:06:21
Speaker
I think something like that or something analogous to that is happening in the use of the term conspiracy theory between epistemologists on the one hand and the folk on the other. Yes, I was about to say it's a lot like the debate that people who teach critical thinking have all the time about when people say that's a really valid point you've got there and the philosophy teacher goes
00:06:42
Speaker
See, what you're talking there is soundness, and that refers to the premises, and yes, there is this worry, of course, in any kind of academic literature, that sometimes when you're stipulating terms of the debate, you actually might be avoiding what the ordinary usage of that term happens to be. And of course, actually, this is a whole kettle of worms when it comes to conspiracy theory theory at the moment.
00:07:08
Speaker
which is when people in the Vulgate use the term conspiracy theory, there is a live question here as to whether they think it's got pejorative connotations. And there's also a live question as to when they're using it, they go, oh, you're dipping into a kind of narrative such as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, New World Order conspiracy theories.
00:07:32
Speaker
and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, whose handily brings us on to what got you interested in conspiracy
Anti-Vaccine Beliefs and Conspiracy
00:07:40
Speaker
theories. Yes, so I mean, I suppose I've always had some interest in the topic in a very abstract sort of way. But yeah, I found myself involved in
00:07:53
Speaker
anti-anti-vaccination activism in Australia, where we've been particularly successful, actually, in terms of combating anti-vaccine misinformation in Australia.
00:08:06
Speaker
successful depending on which side of that particular argument you fall down on. But I found myself getting involved in that, partly out of concern for the health issues associated with it, but also partly out of just a sort of generalised peak about expertise denialism in general. Of course, I would say that I'm a salary intellectual, of course, I'm going to be upset when people don't trust experts. But I got into that sort of stuff and
00:08:30
Speaker
In talking to anti-vaxxers, and I'm using talking in a fairly generous sense here because really it's mostly just arguing with anti-vaxxers, one thing that becomes very, very clear is that to sustain the anti-vax belief system or cluster of beliefs, I guess you might say, you at some point have to appeal to conspiratorial explanations.
00:08:52
Speaker
So I think there's an important distinction between conspiracy theories that are born conspiratorial and the ones that become conspiratorial defensively. Anti-vaccine belief, I think, becomes conspiratorial defensively. How do you explain the fact that the entire medical and scientific community says vaccination is safe and effective if you are convinced that it's not?
00:09:11
Speaker
The only real way to do that is to, actually there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can sort of do it with information cascades, but mostly the only real solution that works is to say that doctors and scientists and others know the truth, but they're actively working to cover it up.
00:09:26
Speaker
So that got me involved in that and got me thinking about some of these issues around how conspiracy theory works, how it propagates, and some of the really deep questions that go behind that about what motivates, if you like, conspiratorial versus anti-conspiratorial mindsets. And that got me into the epistemological
Australasia's Conspiracy Theory Culture
00:09:49
Speaker
literature. So I actually started on this in sort of public activism stuff and then found my way into the academic literature.
00:09:54
Speaker
which then opened up one of those wonderful Australasian, or largely Australasian, sorry Lee, literature that exists regarding the epistemology of conspiracy theory. And that to me seems like a fairly complete literature in many ways. It actually has been a very progressive literature in terms of its answer and some serious questions. But what I want to do is then say, okay, how do we then plug that back into
00:10:20
Speaker
the environment in which we live in which we do see conspiracy theories playing an increasingly large part in contemporary events or at least a more visible part in contemporary events and sometimes it seems an actively harmful part too.
00:10:35
Speaker
So on a sidebar here, why do you think that in Australasia we've produced so many conspiracy theories, theorists particularly in philosophy? What is it about our unique climate where, I mean, to be fair, I think politically both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
00:10:55
Speaker
are fairly benign policies compared to many Northern Hemisphere states you can think of. I mean, Australia demonstrably seems a lot worse than Aetora, New Zealand, politically, at this particular point in time. But even then, the scandals you have, like the Skomo Express, seem like fairly small scandals compared to what's going on in the White House at the moment. So why are we so interested in conspiracy theories, do you think?
00:11:22
Speaker
I'll preface this by saying I'm very skeptical of why does this area produce so much of this, right? So I mean, in Australia, there was the question often raised, why do we produce so many materialist philosophers of mind? Why is it that that's a distinctive, distinct of the Australian thing of reductive philosophy of mind? And there's a famous quip where somebody said to an Australian philosopher, it must be the heat. And he replied, well, it's not that hot out there.
00:11:51
Speaker
But, I mean, if you absolutely said to me, speculate wildly on why this topic took root in Australasia, you possibly could tell a story in terms of colonial paranoia. You could tell a story about if you, I
UFOs and Post-Colonial Paranoia
00:12:06
Speaker
won't claim to speak for New Zealand because I don't know the history well enough to do so.
00:12:13
Speaker
like most Australians I really only know in very broad brush strokes, but certainly in the Australian context a lot of the colonial imaginary is bound up in fear of the Indigenous unknown, fear of being dragged into the Indigenous unknown, and in fear of what's going on just off beyond the edge of visibility in the bush and I think maybe some of that potentially plays into the sense of being
00:12:40
Speaker
isolated and at the whim of powerful actors we can't see. It's like slight digression actually. I'm working on a little radio documentary at the moment for the ABC, our national broadcaster here, on a guy called Frederick Valentich who was a pilot who vanished over Bass Strait 40 years ago after we reported a UFO flying on top of it and then it just completely vanished.
00:13:01
Speaker
And that then got me into an interesting literature around UFOs, and on the idea that there is a kind of, again, post-colonial paranoia that's built into that, the fear of being abducted or dragged into the unknown, and how that structures some of the ways in which we talk about things like alien abduction and so on. So I mean, you don't want to overplay this stuff, but once you do get into that topic, there are some really interesting kind of resonances there, to use Susan Lepselta's term.
00:13:24
Speaker
And does any of that play into the prevalence of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories in Australia, do you think? Maybe. I mean, I think that I wouldn't necessarily say it's more prevalent in Australia. It clusters. It clusters and it clusters in interesting ways that you can't necessarily predict.
00:13:41
Speaker
So some of the lowest vaccination areas in Australia are very wealthy areas where you've clearly got parents who, you know, I do my own research and they've gone out and done this stuff. But it also tends to cluster in places like the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, again, reasonably well off the area, but it's a very alternative area. So an area where I think a lot of people's epistemic stance is defined by, I don't do what the mainstream does.
00:14:03
Speaker
And so I think
Diversity in the Anti-Vax Movement
00:14:04
Speaker
that feeds into a lot of that. So there's a lot of different things that overlap. There's a lot of people that have commitments to a certain kind of alternative way of looking at things. They have certain ideas about the value of the natural over the artificial, however you want to pass those terms. There's also a certain percentage of anti-vaxxers, I couldn't tell you what percentage, who just really hate doctors. And I don't use the word hate there hyperbolically, they hate them.
00:14:29
Speaker
And there's others for whom the entire medical and governmental knowledge generating structures, if you like, in society are intrinsically, not merely suspect, but actually evil and that anything they say must be wrong and therefore they're fighting a kind of ongoing epistemic resistance, if you like. So there's a whole bunch of overlapping reasons why people do become attracted to that.
00:14:56
Speaker
I actually will say though, I think probably the vast majority of people who are skeptical of vaccines or who are hesitant about vaccines, probably the vast majority are just parents who have read something and gotten scared.
00:15:06
Speaker
which is a parent I completely understand, right? Everyone wants to do the best for their kids. They read something they're not sure who to trust or where to go from there and on it goes. And one of the things we actually do in our activism in Australia is that, okay, for those parents, you need what they call a thousand cups of tea approach, right? Which is talk to them, get them to go to their GP, get them to have the chat about it, get them to find the information, help them out that way.
00:15:27
Speaker
When you've got the people who are actively spreading anti-vaccination stuff that they know or should know isn't true and are making money doing so, that's a different kind of approach. That's where you start saying, okay, are these people breaching regulatory requirements? How do we stop them from presenting themselves as something they're not to the media, for instance? And that's where you try and hold those people accountable. So there's different approaches and different kinds of activism involved here.
00:15:54
Speaker
Isn't that going to get us quite close to a conspiracy theory of anti-vaxxers though? The idea that, well, if we just follow the money, then we've got a secretive plot here to somehow enrich and then just fill in the blanks. I think to call that a conspiracy theory would be to credit them with a degree of organization and secretiveness that they don't necessarily possess.
00:16:21
Speaker
They're quite upfront about asking for money for things. They're quite upfront about trying to raise money and so on. Yeah, it's an interesting question, but I mean, in some ways I don't know there's so much conspiratorial as just straightforwardly duplicitous, but they actually don't tend to play well with others. There's a lot of big egos in the anti-vaccination movement and very often they tend to clash when they feel like another anti-vax messiah is muscling in on their turf.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yes, it actually sounds a lot like what happens between the naturopaths and the homeopaths when they have competing products for the same malaise and rather than being a complementary alternative medical system, they go, no, no, you can't trust the homeopaths slash naturopath depending on who you're talking to because they're the one who's full of bunk, but my particular home cure is the correct one. And so yes, I do think you do get
00:17:16
Speaker
Particularly in groups which feel marginalised or are actually being marginalised, a kind of, I don't know whether preciousness is the right way to put it, a kind of defensiveness about you don't understand me, which makes you sound a bit, you're not my mum, style, argumentation.
Distrust in Medical Advice
00:17:34
Speaker
But I suppose for the person who is worried about anti-vaccines and has, sorry, about vaccines, or not about anti-vaccines, they haven't got to actually prescribing anti-vaccines yet. When vaccines get bad, we have to put the anti-vaccines. For people who are worried about vaccines, there is, of course, unfortunately, particularly for epistemologists,
00:17:57
Speaker
the history of medical misadventure in the 20th century. And thus there is a kind of evidentiary basis here, which is, well, in the 20th century, doctors did things and they didn't inform people about it and they lied about it after the fact. So why would we trust these experts now, given their history of duplicity in the past?
00:18:23
Speaker
Sure. And it's about a question and this tends to come up a lot. So we talk to people, they say, oh, well, what about, you know, thalidomide or, you know, doctors used to endorse smoking or whatever. The interesting question there is that to say, well, I'm not saying, I don't think anyone would or should ever say that medicine is somehow infallible. Rather, the question is just what, what else are you going to actually take as a source of knowledge here?
00:18:53
Speaker
Given that we're talking about...
00:18:56
Speaker
Existential sort of questions, right? You can't ignore your health, right? You can't just sort of, it's that Pascal thing where Pascal says, you know, the sensible thing would be not to choose to believe in God or not believe in God, but you don't have that luxury because you're already embarked, you're already underway. In the same sort of way, you can't, you can't existentially ignore questions of your health. So you need to find out answers to some of these questions. What are the available sources of knowledge? Well, there's medicine, which is far from perfect and certainly nowhere near complete, assuming any science could ever be complete.
00:19:27
Speaker
You might think well that's not great but it's the best going relative to all the other possibilities in terms of its evidentiary base and so on.
00:19:37
Speaker
You know, a lot of the time what we say to people when they say, oh, but surely, you know, this is not perfect. It's like, no, no one says it is. You could paraphrase Winston Churchill and say it's the worst available health epistemology except for all the other health epistemologies. So, yeah. But again, there is a kind of a practical
00:19:57
Speaker
I would say existential stance, if you like, behind that of saying, well, you have to sort of get your information from somewhere. And that's where it also then becomes problematic. So a lot of people say, oh, well, that's OK. I'll fall back on my common sense. And I'm.
00:20:12
Speaker
increasingly skeptical there is any such thing. I'm increasingly of the mind there's just good reasoning and bad reasoning and that we go wrong when we reify these things into common sense or reason and we treat them as you know faculties that we all have that allow us to disagree with anyone we like on the new topic. My intuition tells me you're correct about that.
00:20:38
Speaker
Well, it's okay, good, I'll take that as an answer. Yes, but yeah, there is this kind of issue here with A, who are the experts? B, do I agree with the experts? And C, if I disagree with the experts, am I disagreeing with them because I've got a principled reason for
Limits of Common Sense and Expertise
00:20:54
Speaker
disagreeing with them? Or because my gut reckons, my intuitions tell me that what they're saying must be wrong? And also, yeah. Definitely, those intuitions can be
00:21:03
Speaker
necessarily aren't wrong. I mean sometimes you will notice something's off or something's wrong or something doesn't sound right. It's the certainty with which people immediately infer from that to therefore I must be right and this person must be completely wrong or you know this thing here sounds right to me therefore this larger thing must be wrong. That's what kind of worries me. You're seeing climate denial?
00:21:27
Speaker
Quite often you see people say things like, well, my understanding here of high school maths says that the world should be this, or high school physics says the world should be this way, climate scientist is telling me it's that way, but my high school physics can't be wrong, therefore they must all be wrong or lying.
00:21:45
Speaker
It's understandable in a way why people do that and why that's such a powerful move. But it also lacks the ability to say, oh, hang on, maybe I just don't get it or maybe my immediate kind of gut response is not completely reliable.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yes, and that also gets us into the awkwardness of expertise, because as we see in the world, there are lots of people who are expert in X or expert in Y, who suddenly decide that they are going to be experts in Z and X as well. And thus you have these situations where people who think, well, I'm clever about this thing, I must be clever about all things. And unfortunately, we live in a kind of epistemically situated world now.
00:22:31
Speaker
where having expertise in one specialisation isn't necessarily transferable to other specialisations. I know an awful lot about epistemology, but you wouldn't want me to set the course to Mars. Sure, no, I don't mean that either. And again, that is a risk that happens. And there's an interesting tension there between the role of the public intellectual
00:22:54
Speaker
which is I think in some ways a legitimate role, but it does require people to stray out of their lanes a little bit on the other hand, but there is also this thing that needs to be avoided of this sort of, you know, universal genius idea. If you're particularly good at one thing, therefore, as you say, you must be particularly good at or expert at a whole bunch of other things, and it doesn't necessarily work. And, you know, we say that sometimes with some Nobel winners who suddenly go off on frolics late in their career or whatever, or get into totally other areas in which they're not qualified to speak on.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, intellectual humility is a good thing. So talking about intellectual humility, you have not one but two chapters in a book recently published called Taking Conspiracy Theories, which is edited by one MRX dentist. There we go. How did you get involved in that?
00:23:46
Speaker
the editor in question asked me to. So part of that came out of a workshop that we had in Melbourne which you attended a couple of years ago and some of my ideas sort of came together in that, which then turned into one paper but kind of then split in two, which I don't know if this is your experience, I find my papers reproduce the same way amoebas do, they just sort of hive off into separate papers.
00:24:09
Speaker
Arguably, I've been writing the one paper since grad school. And it's immortal, which is distressing. So yeah, and so from that, you asked if I could submit a couple of these chapters to the book, which also as well came out of that discussion between you, me, and Lee Baisham that took place in the pages of Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, which
00:24:37
Speaker
I actually had the chance to say to Steve Fuller a little while ago is a fantastic thing that that journal is doing with CERC and I think in many ways provides a model for what post publication review or post publication refereeing will look like in future. And that was a really productive discussion and really good to sort of get into and ventilate some of those ideas. Tricky discussion to get into because of course you and Lee were basically agreeing with one another.
00:25:05
Speaker
And so what I had to do then was to try and sort of somehow using that agreement, find a way to sort of find a space to disagree and in doing so that was really useful for sort of finessing my own sort of view on the debate between generalism and particularism.
00:25:22
Speaker
which I still haven't quite settled to my satisfaction yet, but I feel like I've made progress. But those chapters are also a way too of looking at some of the intersections, if you like, between the epistemic and the ethical dimensions of conspiracy theory as a practice. So when we engage in conspiracy theorizing, one of the ethical implications of what we are actually doing, given that theorizing is an activity and as such has an ethically valuable dimension to it.
00:25:51
Speaker
Now you've mentioned two terms here, generalism and particularism. Would you care to expound on what generalism and particularism are in order that we can then discuss about your third way? Right, so taking my cues from Dentith, I would say that
00:26:07
Speaker
So we talk about, you know, particularism and journalism is, I guess you could say, two answers to the question, when can we dismiss a theory out of hand, purely because it is a conspiracy theory, using the word theory in a way that no scientist will countenance, but leave that aside. In a way, the generalist says all the time, the particularist says never,
00:26:30
Speaker
There'll almost immediately be caveats to that, at least on the generalist side, because of course you can say, what? So Watergate didn't happen? Or was this an accident? Everyone just accidentally acted in a way that looked like a spiral? Oh, okay, yeah, sure, then. In which case, and that's why, and I think you and others have demonstrated pretty clearly that naive generalism, if we can call it that, isn't going to function.
00:26:51
Speaker
But that, for instance, has said, well, that then takes us to particularism. It says, let's just go full particulars. That is, investigate every single conspiracy theory on its merits. Now, what I want to suggest is that just as for the generalists, there are going to be occasions when, in fact, you should entertain a conspiracy theory.
Reluctant Particularism Explained
00:27:12
Speaker
For the particularists, there may well be occasions where, in fact, you shouldn't entertain a conspiracy theory. Where entertain here means,
00:27:21
Speaker
investigate it long enough to actually be taking it seriously. So what I wanna suggest is that there are certain classes of, well, firstly, there are certain classes of conspiracy theory where we might actually say, oh, wait a minute, that's anti-Semitic, I'm not even going to engage in it because doing so is part of taking part in a recognisable practice, which is a bad one. But there's also the broader point that you really can't,
00:27:47
Speaker
articulate a conspiracy theory or form a conspiracy theory without accusing someone.
00:27:52
Speaker
something. And I claim, and this is a bit sort of deontological, and a lot of people may start to disagree, that there is always a kind of moral cost in accusation, that there's always to accuse someone as to automatically not think well of them to some extent, and that, I think, violates the default presumption we have against people. I think that means that we should always be at least a little bit reluctant to accuse someone of something, and that seems to entail that we should always be
00:28:19
Speaker
or at least we have a defeasible reason to be suspicious of conspiracy explanations. But that also has to leave open the fact that at some point conspiracy explanations become unavoidable. At some point it just becomes absolutely clear that that's what's going on. Now you call this position reluctant particularism, which indicates that you're at least hedging your bets with the particulars to a large extent, but you're kind of saying slow down, slow down. Let's not just ask any old question.
00:28:48
Speaker
let's consider the boundaries of what those questions should look like. So my question for you is who does get to ask those questions? I mean we live in a world where the police are allowed to make very serious accusations about what people do, often with good reason.
00:29:07
Speaker
politicians are allowed to make accusations about their opponents often with no good reason whatsoever so there are a whole bunch of licenses we have in social life which allow certain people to engage in making those accusations and the world hasn't fallen well maybe politically the world has fallen apart but on a law and order aspect that seems to kind of work
00:29:36
Speaker
Well, here I'd want to be very careful that we are clear what we mean by allowed to. Certainly we do allow and encourage the police, for instance, to make accusations or to follow their suspicions out, if that makes sense. Even then there's limits to it, right? At some point it might become harassment or at some point it becomes a misuse of resources or what have you.
00:30:08
Speaker
On the other hand, though, you may raise the case of politicians right now. You might say, well, that's the rough and tumble of politics to make accusations. But I would actually want to say that no, politicians probably shouldn't, and that's a moral shouldn't, not necessarily a political shouldn't, be making accusations that they can't stand up or for which they don't have really strong grounds to make that stick, if you like.
00:30:39
Speaker
So yeah, but having said that, yeah, so maybe what that actually demonstrates in a way is that the role of suspicion is something that we take to be properly circumscribed. And built into the background of this is a somewhat, I guess,
00:30:57
Speaker
a view of moral life which owes something, I think, to K.E. Listrup, who's become one of my more recent kind of touchstones in moral philosophy, according to which human life is fundamentally or by default about trust, or is fundamentally, you know, depends upon a certain kind of trust that people have, such that things like suspicion or mistrust need to be, if not
00:31:19
Speaker
rare than at least not the norm, or at least not the default way of approaching other people. That's under normal conditions, of course. Listerik was involved in the Danish resistance and he wrote about how there are conditions of wartime in which all that stuff goes out the window. What you're trying to do is actually get everything back to a society in which trust is the sort of normal default in which people operate. But I will just say too, because I had this discussion the other day actually with David Coady when he was in Melbourne.
00:31:45
Speaker
And I asked him about trust being a virtue, and he's like, no, absolutely not trust is not a virtue, at least not an epistemic virtue. It might be on a family level or something like that, but not at the level of citizens to the state. And on one level, I want to disagree with that. On the other level, I have to agree. There is just a standing tension between default trust as a kind of basic ethical orientation towards other people.
00:32:06
Speaker
And the sort of standing suspicion of power that any healthy polity needs in order to function properly. There just is attention there. And this is the continental philosophy in my training coming out that we just live with tension sometimes. They're just there.
00:32:23
Speaker
Yes, because I was going to say, surely any conspiracy theorists with their salt will go, well, maybe trust is an ideal thing to have, but look at what people actually do. People lie, cheat and steal all the time. So surely we should be very, very suspicious. Well, I'm sitting here as a devil's advocate here. I'm not saying I am the conspiracy theorist, but given
00:32:47
Speaker
Given the history of collusion in politics, corporations doing what they do, criminal fraternities and the like, a default trust in others does seem somewhat naive.
Proving Global Conspiracies
00:33:03
Speaker
Sure. A lot is going to hang on what we mean by all the time, which is a phrase you used there.
00:33:10
Speaker
And I think some of this does come down to ultimately unfalsifiable positions. And you've written about this too, that there's no way of falsifying any claim about how conspired the world really is, except the one that says it's not conspired at all. You can falsify that because you can show conspiracies. But how falsified it is, or sorry, how conspired it is,
00:33:32
Speaker
I think fundamentally does come down to these very basic background assumptions that people have, and there may be no way of settling that. There may be no rational way of adjudicating between somebody who wants to say that the world is full of conspiracy that's always beyond detection versus somebody who wants to say the world is basically unconspired and conspiracies when they happen are small, local, short-lived, and not particularly effective.
00:33:58
Speaker
Some of this stuff I think does come down to very basic background assumptions that may just be beyond the reach of argument on some level.
00:34:05
Speaker
Yes I mean as you know my position on this is that we don't live in a totally conspired world but we do live in a more conspired world than people probably think just because people downplay ordinary commonplace conspiracy and kind of ignore that in their calculations. So yes I mean there is this you're right when we say all the time or say when the conspiracy theorist says all the time
00:34:30
Speaker
there is an awful lot riding on what you don't literally mean all the time otherwise you'd never have any trust in anything that's going on around you what you're saying is something more along the lines of these things happen more often than people think or more often than not which i think that latter claim is hard to support
00:34:51
Speaker
There's also a question there about how much intentionality or agency you impute to things. There are a lot of things that look conspiratorial that maybe just aren't. I know David Cote has written about quasi-conspiracy theory as a category, that sometimes there are things that look
00:35:10
Speaker
like collusion but that aren't actually collusion. So all the petrol stations put their price of petrol up at the same time or down at the same time. But that doesn't mean they're meeting in a smoke-filled room somewhere and saying, ah, it's going to be $0.140 a litre this week. It just means they're watching what everyone else does and they know rationally how everyone should act in concert to bring about the best outcome.
00:35:33
Speaker
You arrest a criminal gang and you interrogate all of them separately and none of them say anything. Is that a conspiracy of silence or is that just that they just know if no one talks, each of them will get a better outcome? If many criminals turn out to be very good at game theory. This is true. That's why there are no prisoners.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yes. Actually, if only they really were the prisoner dilemma. We have no prisoners. This is an absolute dilemma. We keep on building prisons and we don't put anyone in them. But that's a social justice thing for another time. So you talk about reluctant particularism as a species of particularism.
00:36:11
Speaker
Of course someone who's worried about the kind of discourse you're engaging in will go but surely what you're describing here is just a species of generalism and that you're doing the the nod to conspiracies occur but you also seem to be saying but we shouldn't really look at those conspiracies because you know if we do
00:36:35
Speaker
We're accusing people of things and that's breaking down trust. And many of these conspiracy theories do look an awful lot like other ones we already consider to be bunk. So we should just push those things to one side and continue on happily in our lives. How do you respond to that kind of construal of your position? Sure. It's not an entirely uncharitable one. I guess what I would say is
00:37:05
Speaker
that I've called, I can say it's a species of particularism, but in a way it's trying to resist particularism in the same sort of way it resists generalism. That is by saying that there is not going to be a blanket approach, right? There's not going to be blanket dismissals, not going to work where you all agree that, but at the same time, I want to say that blanket take seriously is also not going to work. So the question then is under what conditions does it not work? Now you could say that
00:37:34
Speaker
There are, you can dismiss it conspiracy theory out of hand only under a very, very narrow set of conditions. Say it involves physical impossibility or it involves logical contradiction. Elvis is alive and he was killed by the mafia. That sort of thing. But at the same time, JFK's alive, but he was killed by the CIA, whatever. But at the same time, I would want to go broader than that.
00:38:05
Speaker
to something like a position that says that innocent or at least disorganized explanations have a sort of presupposition until they stop being progressive explanations and the conspiratorial explanations sort of takes over, if you like. Now, I will admit there's a problem there, which is that we'll surely have to pursue the conspiratorial explanation for it to get to that point. And that's a valid sort of point.
00:38:33
Speaker
Again, part of it maybe comes down to who is actually doing the judging here. This comes back to a question you raised earlier. On the one hand, you could say, well, the conspiracy theorist
00:38:46
Speaker
is perhaps in a way not acting terribly virtuously, but in so doing, perhaps they do uncover genuine conspiracies. I'm not sure how often that actually happens. In the same sort of way as the police do uncover crimes by being more suspicious than the rest of us should be, the rest of us looking on perhaps shouldn't rush to judgment about who committed a particular crime or whether something's the outcome of conspiracy. Particularly, of course, you can't go too far the other way. We've just seen that today with Donald Trump washing his hands
00:39:17
Speaker
you know, making a decision as to whether or not the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia murdered a journalist in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Again, that would seem to be a point where that position has gone awry of simply, you know, at some point it's no longer feasible to suspend judgment.
00:39:33
Speaker
Especially since Donald Trump's press release seems to spend an awful lot of time blaming Iran for things before it even gets around to it. He making any claims about Mohammed bin Salman, but that's a different matter for a different time. American politics could keep us going for weeks and weeks and weeks.
00:39:51
Speaker
So what do you think the future for philosophical research into conspiracy theories looks like? Because you describe the fact that as a project in epistemology, it's been quite successful in saying, look, if we define these things as theories about conspiracies, then we do have to follow some kind of particular evidentialist approach. And we've been fairly good at looking at issues and knocking them on their head. So is there more to do?
00:40:20
Speaker
Sure, I mean, as I say, I think there's still a lot of work to be done in the ethics of conspiracy theories, a lot to be done. Some of this will start to depart from philosophy too, right? So I mean, there's still a lot to be done in terms of the sociology and the political uses of conspiracy theory. But I also think that a really productive discussion and probably a really productive disagreement to have in that space does concern the proper nature of trust.
00:40:49
Speaker
So I've sort of just mentioned or gestured really towards a kind of a strippy interview of trust as this foundational default thing, as he says somewhere, trust is primary distrust secondary, very different to say, David Cote's Aristotelian account of trust, according to which you should
00:41:05
Speaker
have the right balance between the vices of credulousness and irascible suspicion. Somewhere in the middle is the virtuous mane. I think connecting conspiracy theory to some of those questions will be a really, really important one. I think there's also some interesting work to be done in terms of the connection between social epistemology and
00:41:29
Speaker
epistemological temperaments, if you like, the different ways in which people assume knowledge to work. That's something I've seen arguing with some of the more Baroque anti-vaxxers.
00:41:40
Speaker
is that they have this kind of foundationalist conception of how epistemology works, right? They assume that there are hard bedrock facts that can be ascertained. And once we have those hard bedrock facts, everything's fine. And if there's something wrong further back in the chain of reasoning, that means the whole edifice of, say, modern immunology falls down. So if cautious postulates are wrong, then the whole system collapses or whatever. Or if Pasteur made a mistake, therefore germ theory is bunk.
00:42:08
Speaker
And of course, it's not necessarily how knowledge works, but there's an interesting debate, I think, to be had there about the sort of foundationalist expectations that some people have about knowledge versus the far more kind of almost free-floating account of how knowledge generation and knowledge validation works happens that we're getting now from social epistemologists. I think there's an interesting discussion to be had there, which then connects with the political discussion too, right, about
00:42:34
Speaker
You know, do a lot of these explanations or a lot of these understandings of the world take root because people are in fact politically disconnected from or disenfranchised from or alienated from the knowledge generating mechanisms of society? And what do we do about that?
00:42:52
Speaker
Yes, naturally, that makes me think of the work of David Lewis here and the notion of webs of belief, which is his kind of almost quasi-coherence theory of truth when it comes to scientific beliefs or less theoretical postulates, whereby your hardcore are those beliefs which are really, really well connected to other beliefs in your system. And over time, those beliefs will shift. And possibly what was a really hardcore 20 years ago,
00:43:22
Speaker
will turn out to be on the periphery or just completely rejected at some particular point. And I think there's an interesting tension here in a kind of global sense when we talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories, because in certain nation states, which have a long history of conspiracy being the norm,
00:43:41
Speaker
So Latvia, for example, and Romania are both examples of governments which were communists, were conspiring against their population, had two markets, one for the communists, one for the non-communists. It seems reasonable for Latvians and Romanians post the communist revolution to go, well,
00:44:02
Speaker
Technically, we changed the type of government, but the same people actually stayed in charge. So they just changed their face, but they still conspired in the background. Was Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand being long-standing democracies?
00:44:19
Speaker
New Zealand in particular being such a small country that we literally all know the Prime Minister and have been to a gig she's deejayed at at some particular point in time. We know that there are you know there are small-scale conspiracies going on in politics all the time but nothing major because if that was going on then my aunt would know about it and she would tell me or something of that particular time.
00:44:41
Speaker
And I think that might also explain a really interesting factor about when you talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories, you get different reactions at different times and places, which indicate that the theoretical constructs people are using to assume the existence or non-existence of conspiracies are very socially constituted.
00:45:05
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's a lot more work for sociology to do here. I know there's already been a lot of activity in sociology on this, which seems to be a common pattern, actually, that the philosophers are last in on a lot of this stuff. I mean, one of the issues I work on is the ethical and ontological status of the dead in social media environments in the internet.
00:45:29
Speaker
And again, sociologists have already been through and cleared that out, and various other cultural theorists and others, and philosophers are just now going, oh, hang on, there's some stuff here. But yeah, this is actually something where I think philosophy needs to get a lot better, actually, is at dealing with a lot of those socio-political contingencies and the way in which those do feed into our epistemology. And we do, I think, very often work with an idealized Noah,
00:45:56
Speaker
which is not an idealized guy with an arc.
00:46:03
Speaker
doesn't really match the way in which even philosophers ourselves know things in the world. Just a wedge of belief too, as you mentioned too, there's also an interesting analogy in Wittgenstein in Uncertainty where he talks about the difference between the river and the riverbed. The river is always moving but the riverbed is kind of stable and not amenable to revision, if you like, except that sometimes it is because over time the water will move bits of the riverbed out of the way.
00:46:28
Speaker
So again, there's maybe a more dynamic relationship between these sort of fundamental beliefs or foundational beliefs and the stuff that we change around or the stuff that's in play than we might accept, but over a very long, alluvial sort of timescale.
00:46:42
Speaker
Yes, I think you're right to suggest that maybe part of the future is we need to be doing a lot more in the way of interdisciplinary work so that we're not siloing ourselves into our own particular little disciplines, which of course has meant, as I've discovered by doing work on conspiracy theory theory, often
00:47:02
Speaker
we are reinventing positions that people in other disciplines have already put forward or people in other disciplines are reinventing our positions 10 years later without being aware of the criticisms of those positions that occurred in the last 10 years.
00:47:19
Speaker
Yeah, or the third thing that can happen is we come in and suggest that a system that seems to be working quite well is well functional. It's actually producing good outcomes. It has some kind of conceptual incoherence in it, which means the whole thing clearly doesn't work at all.
00:47:34
Speaker
Until he's threw it away. Yeah so I mean it's the whole you know that that's all well and good in practice but will it work in theory uh reflex which um you know doesn't make us popular uh and actually I will say and and your work is certainly an exception to this and there are many others but in general I think philosophers are not great at interdisciplinary work um
00:47:57
Speaker
I think that's more to do with the sociology of philosophy than anything. It's more to do with the way philosophers are socialised to go about their task. Where it does work well, I think it works really well. But there are also plenty of occasions where if you try and force interdisciplinarity with a philosopher, you just end up annoying everyone involved. So that's something philosophers need to get better at.
00:48:22
Speaker
having a conversation years ago with an epistemologist talking about how people acquire beliefs and spread beliefs. And he was putting forward a kind of foundationalist, Plantinga-style way. And I was like, but that's not how people actually generate beliefs. Why are you saying that? Well, because psychologists study how beliefs get generated and spread. Oh, well, the psychologist must be wrong, he said, because, you know, the theory works really well. The theory might look good on paper, but if
00:48:52
Speaker
That's not how people do things. That's not how people do things. Well, I mean, that's something that's coming up too increasingly these days is academics in general, but I think philosophers in particular, are wedded to a certain understanding of how reasoning works according to which we just calmly and dispassionately evaluate all the facts before us and then we make a rationally guided decision.
00:49:16
Speaker
And it's increasingly clear that most discourse doesn't actually work like that. That's increasingly being challenged by empirical understandings of the way decision-making processes work, even neurobiological accounts of how that works. And that is something that philosophers, I think in particular, need to actually engage with, is that gap between our sort of idealized conception of how
00:49:39
Speaker
critical thinking or reasoning works, or judgment formation works, or belief formation works, and what we're being told by the empirical sciences. What do we do about that gap? How do we address it? And does that then lead us on into much bigger gaps between phenomenology and neuroscience, for instance, and how do we deal with those tensions? Which does suggest there's a lot more work to be done. Yeah, absolutely.
00:50:06
Speaker
Well, thank you, Pat. That has been a most informative chat and I'm rather looking forward to you getting your copy of the book to see what the responses are and how you deal with the replies to your position. Yes, I'm not looking forward to some of that. I saw something that would indicate that Charles Pigdon in particular probably is going to let me
00:50:28
Speaker
have it with both barrels. But anyway, we'll see what happens. I'm kind of happy enough to play the villain in that volume, just insofar as it probably needed a villain of some sort to motivate some debate there. It's all right. We're going to bring you to the dark side eventually. But no, thank you very much. This has been a most informative chat. Absolutely a pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.
00:50:58
Speaker
Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
00:51:04
Speaker
So, what's been happening in the world of conspiracies over the last week? Well, we have a bunch of updates to ongoing stories. Let's start local. You may remember we've talked about Professor Anne-Marie Brady. She works at the University of Canterbury. Over the past 18 months or so, she's done work exposing China's international influence campaigns and has talked about
00:51:29
Speaker
written on New Zealand supposedly being used as a bit of a test bed for China to try out its methods of sort of extending its influence in our region. And For Her Troubles has received threats. In February of this year, her house was burgled
00:51:47
Speaker
And all that was stolen seemingly were sort of hard drives and laptops and so on, seemed to be someone deliberately targeting her research. And while the investigation into that burglary is ongoing, as far as I know, the suspicion has been it was people with ties to the Chinese government.
00:52:06
Speaker
Well, last week she took her car in for the usual warranty fitness tests at mechanics. It failed the test because the pressure of her front tyres was much too low. And the mechanic, upon taking a closer look, realised that the tyres appeared to have been tampered with in some way to suggest that the air had been deliberately let out of them.
00:52:30
Speaker
And driving around in a car with tyres that are much too soft means they wear out quicker but it also gives you worse handling, worse braking should you find yourself in a dodgy situation. So there's been some amount of speculation that perhaps her car was deliberately sabotaged. Now I don't believe there's any proof of that at the moment.
00:52:53
Speaker
It's just simply suspicious that this person who has been seemingly targeted by a foreign power in the past now finds dodgy goings on with their personal automobile. So we'll see if anything comes of that, but at the moment it's filed in the category of suspicious, I would have to say.
00:53:14
Speaker
Possibly more suspicious is of course the ongoing story of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. So when last we spoke I believe the recordings of his abduction and murder had been provided to intelligence agencies of various countries. The CIA has now come out and said that it has high confidence
00:53:41
Speaker
that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi's death himself, and high confidence apparently is a term that the CIA does not throw around. It means they're pretty damn sure about it.
00:53:56
Speaker
Trump though has, remains unconvinced. He hasn't, says he hasn't listened to the recordings and says there's, he sees there's no reason for him to listen to them. And gave a fairly sort of equivocating statement saying it could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. We may never know all of the facts. So the US has not come out against Saudi Arabia at the moment.
00:54:24
Speaker
Speaking to the recordings themselves, apparently some of the transcripts of some of the recordings has been published by a Turkish newspaper, a bit low on details, but supposedly they near the start of the recordings Khashoggi can be heard saying, release my arm, what do you think you are doing?
00:54:43
Speaker
Shortly after he entered the consulate in Istanbul, it apparently contains verbal quarrel, noises of a physical fight, and then supposedly his beating and torture. And then apparently more than an hour after he entered the consulate, a male voice supposedly can be heard on these recordings saying, it's spooky to wear the clothes of a man who we killed 20 minutes ago. And if you recall,
00:55:09
Speaker
an imposter was spotted walking around wearing Khashoggi's clothes sometime after the murder. So it was, you know, trying to make it look like he was still alive, but that was fairly quickly proved to be an imposter. So that is supposedly what we're hearing there. So, I mean, it's looking worse and worse for Saudi Arabia and indeed for MBS himself. If I'm understanding correctly, his brother Khaled bin Salman
00:55:35
Speaker
was the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. previously, has been recalled since. But supposedly there was a phone call between him and Khashoggi, wherein Khaled bin Salman gave reassurances that it was safe for Khashoggi to come to the consulate.
00:55:53
Speaker
suggesting that this very much goes all the way to the top. But we'll have to see what carries on. This has been a disturbingly fascinating story, and I'm sure we're not at the bottom of it yet. Now, in the episode when we first talked about the Khashoggi of Fear, we also mentioned the case of Ming Hong Wei, the Chinese president of Interpol, who was disappeared by the Chinese government.
00:56:17
Speaker
His wife, Grace, has continued to speak out about the disappearance. She's basically been saying, well, I'm here in Paris where they can't really get at me so much, so I'm kind of safe to talk about it, but no one else is saying anything. And she suggested that he, if you recall, China eventually came out, admitted they had him and said that they'd arrested him.
00:56:39
Speaker
as part of their anti-corruption campaign on charges of bribery. Grace Meng has claimed that this anti-corruption campaign in China has sort of become corrupted itself and has become a way of attacking enemies of the state. I'll just say, oh, this person's corrupt. We can pick them up.
00:56:59
Speaker
So, fairly strong claims of conspiracy within the Chinese government there. But once again, it's all politics. There's a lot of diplomacy in play, so it's going to be a long time, I think, before anything gets sorted out there, if it ever does.
00:57:15
Speaker
Now, news that is a little bit old and a little bit new, QAnon. Nothing new about that, but there's apparently been quite a shake-up within the QAnon community as a result of the American midterms. So the Democrats, both the Democrats taking the House in the midterms and Jeff Sessions being fired shortly after the midterms,
00:57:39
Speaker
has caused ruckions within the community because first of all, the supposed blue wave that was going to sweep across and give everything to the Democrats in the QAnon community, this was talked about as I know, this is nonsense, it's all just propaganda. There in fact will be a red wave and the American, the Republicans hold on the House and Senate will be strengthened and so obviously that did not happen at all.
00:58:01
Speaker
And also Jeff Sessions, according to QAnon theories, was one of the masterminds of the whole storm thing wherein all these evil Democrats and pedophile, child, molester, Satanist, whatever the hell they were, he was sort of one of the masterminds behind the plan to round them all up and arrest them. And Trump was only pretending to not like him and want to fire him as part of the whole thing where, you know, QAnon, it's almost too stupid to talk about.
00:58:31
Speaker
But then when Trump went and fired Sessions again, that seemed to be quite a blow for the QAnon theories. So apparently within the community, we've seen some people sort of give up on it and split off and say, no, it must have all been nonsense. You've seen other people, of course, dig in even deeper and insist that, no, it's all going to plan. And there's apparently a lot of sort of splintering and factions and people infighting, people accusing each other of being shills and so on and so forth.
00:59:00
Speaker
which is all would be vaguely amusing if there isn't the danger that we'll get another sort of comet ping-pong situation of somebody being motivated to take a rifle somewhere and start having start performing acts of violence against these people who they believe are the enemies of America. I'd like to say we've got something more cheery to finish on but I kind of don't.
00:59:25
Speaker
What I do have to talk about is those big fires in California recently, which have caused widespread destruction and no small number of deaths. But there are conspiracy theories around that as well. There's been a bit of talk supposedly that the fires were sparked not by dry conditions and things that could possibly attribute it to climate change. No, they've been caused by directed energy weapons.
00:59:49
Speaker
I don't think we've ever talked about directed energy weapons specifically, although we have mentioned various conspiracy theories around secret technologies that the government's hiding and what have you. But I mean directed energy weapons are – I'm not sure if they exist as more than just theory. There may be experimental examples of them at the moment. They're sort of – they're starting to move out of the realms of science fiction.
01:00:13
Speaker
I don't believe they're anywhere in a form where they could be used to set fire to huge areas of California. Certain people have basically looked at the fact that when you look at the aftermath of the fires, you do see situations where sort of one house is burnt to the ground and yet the house quite close to it hasn't been damaged, things like that.
01:00:37
Speaker
Or the same with trees. You'll see some areas where one tree will be left standing and then others burn to the ground and people say, oh, how could that possibly have happened if it was a fire raging across the whole area? Well, apparently there are perfectly good scientific explanations for that. That's how fire can work sometimes, but not good enough for some people.
01:00:54
Speaker
And so some people say the fact that certain areas, it shows that certain areas have been targeted specifically by these directed energy weapons, while others have not. No real story I could find as to why people would want these just specific houses in California destroyed, but that's conspiracy theories for, well, I shouldn't say that. We do hold conspiracy theories in greater esteem around here, but this is that sort of science fiction inspired conspiracy theory for you.
01:01:25
Speaker
And I think that's all we have for the news this week. I think we're done with this episode. Hopefully things will be back to normal next week, although it is getting close to the end of the year. I'm sure we'll be taking a break over Christmas in the new year and all that business, but there should be room to squeeze in a few more episodes before then.
01:01:42
Speaker
Hopefully in the usual format. Of course, I should have pointed out at the beginning there is no video for this episode, given that we aren't in the same place to be filmed. So if you do check in on the YouTube channel, you won't find one for this week, but going by the numbers, not many of you do, so that's okay. So I guess all that remains for me is to say goodbye. Goodbye. Em, do you have any words to close things out?
01:02:08
Speaker
No, not really, I mean you've done sterling work and for that you get to live another week, as do our loyal listeners. Yes, hopefully we all have more and exciting new content coming up next week in the normal format, although do be aware
01:02:24
Speaker
There are going to be several interviews occurring over the next little wee while. We'll be talking with Joe Youcinski and Charles Pigdom, and quite a few other names I want to add to the list as well. So along with our usual coverage of conspiracy theories topical and historical, we'll also be having a little look at
01:02:46
Speaker
people who are doing conspiracy theory theory. And this is not just because I'm co-opting some of the work I'm doing for my web series, Conspiracism, to add to the podcast. It's also because people seem to like the interviewers, like to listen to other experts in the field to find out what they happen to be saying. And so for that, you should be grateful. I'm grateful, and Josh is grateful. Everybody's grateful together. Let's just not be the grateful dead.
01:03:15
Speaker
That was an awful way to end an episode, but that's the way it's going to end. I'm sorry. Bye.
01:03:34
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extenta, 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 account, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:04:35
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.