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Conspiracy Theories in Your Industry
31 Plays5 years ago
This week Josh and M discuss a recent thread on Twitter by Dr. David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) of Simon Fraser University who asked: “Scientists: what’s the weirdest, most illogical conspiracy theory you deal within your area of expertise?" It's quite amusing, especially the bit about sentient thunderstorms.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. It's night time in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and sitting next to me is the master of the night. Also, Dr. M.R.X. Dintworth. Not the vampire.
00:00:36
Speaker
as far as we know, so far. It is the night time, so you can explain your usual lack of bursting into flames as simply not being exposed to the harmful rays of the sun. Is there garlic in that whiskey? There's never garlic in the whiskey. How convenient. It's true, it is convenient that scotch doesn't contain garlic in it.
00:00:59
Speaker
I don't even know of any garlic-finished whiskies because that would be horrific. If you know the garlic-finished whisky, please do send it along to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I will drink it on air, these are pre-records, and I will tell you that it's revolting because it will be, but I missed a try. Most certainly. Will you just take
Garlic in Whiskey and Vampirism
00:01:18
Speaker
your sip there? I'm just going to surreptitiously see if you cast a reflection in the surface of the liquid there. It's marginal. I don't know. I don't know.
00:01:28
Speaker
Perhaps we'd better rush on with the episode before your base instincts overwhelm you and you drink more whiskey from the... Yeah, the whiskey. Yep. From the whiskey. The whiskey. So I don't think we have any housekeeping interesting thingies to say before we go straight into the news. Not at all. No, we're just casting aspersions on my non-vampiric character. Non-vampiric.
00:01:55
Speaker
Maybe you should eat more garlic before you turn up for these podcasts. You can just breathe in my face.
00:02:01
Speaker
Not a bad idea, actually. Not a bad idea. I like garlic. It's very tasty. We should have garlic bread on this podcast. It's exactly the sort of thing a vampire would say to throw us off the scene. They'd want to suck your blood. That's exactly the sort of thing a vampire would say. Yes, but it's also the kind of thing a vampire wouldn't say because they'd want to distract you from the fact they are a vampire. So by claiming I want to suck your blood means I'm not a vampire. If I didn't want to suck your blood, that would prove I am a vampire.
00:02:28
Speaker
I can't fault your logic, I can't understand your logic, but I can't fault it. So I think we're safe to move on to the news. Logic to quote Doctor Who gives you the authority to be wrong. And now the news. Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
Notch and QAnon Controversy
00:02:46
Speaker
First up, some gaming news, because we are down with the kids with our PewDiePie and our Ninja and our Five Nights at Freddy's live streaming. Anyway, being down with the kids means that we're also down with Minecraft, and thus Ofei with Minecraft and its creator, Marcus Notch Pearson, who recently endorsed QAnon on Twitter. On March the 2nd, Notch tweeted, Q is legit. Don't trust the media.
00:03:13
Speaker
which led QAnon supporters thanking Notch incessantly and many of Notch's followers, tweeting, so what? Notch followed up his initial tweet by admitting that Q's predictions aren't exactly predictive, and that really he was more interested in the way in which Q reveals the deep connections in politics between the rich and powerful. Which, as our own Dr. Denteth has pointed out, might be a lesson QAnon followers are now learning, but it isn't exactly news to people who've been studying politics for a while.
00:03:40
Speaker
Notch has form for endorsing views associated with the alt-right. He's tweeted that it's okay to be white, and asked why there isn't a heterosexual pride day, and argued that there is a definite agenda against white men in the media. So endorsing Q in the QAnon movement is actually part of the course, I think, for the creator of Minecraft.
00:04:00
Speaker
Also, Notch is now saying that trans activists want to make it illegal to use the wrong pronouns, which A isn't true, and B makes out that we have political capital that we don't
Venezuelan Crisis and Power Grid Sabotage
00:04:11
Speaker
have. And talking about capitals, we can't help but talk about Caracas and the ongoing Venezuelan crisis. Nice segue.
00:04:20
Speaker
Hats off to the leader of the Green Party of the US, Jill Stein, for pointing out the hypocrisy of, after years of official warnings by various federal agencies and the US government, that foreign actors could hack into and disrupt the power grid in the US. The US's response to the Venezuelan leader, well, one of them, Nicolas Maduro, claiming this has happened in Venezuela, has been to say, it's a vapid conspiracy theory.
00:04:47
Speaker
Now it might be, after all, years of underinvestment into your electrical grid will come home to roost eventually. But if you've just spent the last couple of years scaremongering about power grid hacking at home, kind of behooves you to at least consider the possibility overseas. Especially in light of the fact that the National Assembly in Venezuela drafted a bill in 2016 which provided amnesty for
00:05:16
Speaker
Sabotage of the National Grid. How would you like them apples? I don't like them apples at all. Then them seem to be quite suspicious apples. They are. They're not good green apples. They're suspiciously green apples. Providing amnesty for sabotage of the National Grid before your National Grid goes down is almost as suspicious as claiming that you're not a vampire, despite returning from Romania, where all vampires live and come from. That's just racist against vampires? And Romanians.
00:05:46
Speaker
Moving on,
College Admissions Scandal
00:05:48
Speaker
finally! Finally, we can't help but mention Operation Varsity Blues, which I'm fairly sure is the theme tune to the Cheers spin-off, Frasier. It also turns out to be a massive criminal conspiracy by actors and CEOs to get their children into elite colleges and universities. How? By faking the children's SAT scores. Operation Varsity Blues actually takes its name from a 90s high school football comedy starring James Van Der Meek. Not bad, actually. Not a bad film. I actually don't think I've seen Varsity Blues.
00:06:13
Speaker
But I do, I do know him well from Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23, where James Van Der Beek plays James Van Der Beek, the best James Van Der Beek impression ever put down the celluloid, although I haven't seen it was actually filmed on digital. In fact not even filmed, it was videoed on digital.
00:06:32
Speaker
Although video really isn't what digital is anymore. It's just very confusing. It's very confusing. I don't know any nomenclature about films anymore. The point is Operation Varsity Blues, despite being a film about American high schools and American football, two things I'm not really interested in, was actually quite a good film.
00:06:48
Speaker
and also gave its name to this thing, which has thus far implicated over 30 affluent parents, including CEOs and Hollywood celebrities, as well as college athletics coaches and more. The conspiracy also involved paying coaches enormous sums half a million dollars, in some cases, to get their children into schools by fabricating their athletic credentials. It's quite the conspiracy.
00:07:08
Speaker
It really is, and it's been weirdly reported because one of the people behind paying for their children to get into school is, now I've forgotten her name, partner of William H. Macy, Felicity Huffman. Yes, I've now committed the Cardinal Centre I was going to accuse the media of, of fronting all of the stories about Felicity Huffman,
00:07:29
Speaker
by only referring to her as wife of William H. Macy, although the best one was William H. Macy turns 69 as wife is arrested for fraud. Really fronting the story in a really unusual way.
00:07:46
Speaker
And especially when people have basically said, you know, why spend millions of dollars sort of cheating your way into an exam into a university when you could just give the university millions of dollars to let your child in by way of a donation or making them like there was one person who literally said, you know, it's not like they just, you know, gave them a new building. This is this is fraud. And it's like, well,
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I guess one's legal and one's not, but that's the difference. Something which we'll probably mention next week, but it's also now beginning to encompass Jared Kushner, because of course Jared Kushner went to university and was not taken to be a remarkable student by his classmates. And at the time there was suspicion that maybe his rich parents had greased the wheels and now people are revisiting that story.
00:08:36
Speaker
greasy wheels. Stay tuned. So I think it's time to move on to the updates. Do you want to hit us with a tune? I do indeed. Hey, baby, I hear the blues are calling. Toss salad and scrambled eggs. Let's see. And maybe I seem a bit confused. Yeah, maybe. But I got you bet. Uh-oh. But I don't know what to do with those toss salads and scrambled eggs. They're calling again. Phew. Phew. Updates and retractions, everybody.
00:09:11
Speaker
You might recall that last year we talked a little about how agencies in Aotearoa New Zealand were using a private investigation firm, Thompson & Clark, to spy on all sorts of people illegally. One of those organisations was the New Zealand Police, who have now admitted that they forgot to investigate themselves over the matter.
00:09:32
Speaker
Police Deputy Commissioner of National Operations Mike Clements said, Now if you happen to be conspiratorially minded, you might think that's a very convenient excuse. And ask whether, if members of the public and press hadn't followed up on the story, the police might have continued to forget about it for quite some time.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yes, and finally more MH317 news.
Missing Plane Theories
00:10:05
Speaker
We keep telling you when this gets resolved we'll likely be out of a job. But fortunately for us, a new book which came out last month in which author Ian Higgins details several hypotheses about what really happened and one of them
00:10:17
Speaker
It's quite a doozy. It's called the elope by parachute theory, and I go something like this. Captain Shah, one of the co-pilots, was a bit of a philanderer and was in an affair with someone called Reena. Reena was an ERS running the security scanners at Kuala Lumpur airport. They planned to elope and start a new life, so Shah organised fake passports and, crucially, parachutes.
00:10:39
Speaker
Once the plane was in the air, he depressurised the plane, raided the wallets of the dying passengers, then parachuted out with Rina to rendezvous with a fishing boat that was waiting for them. Higgins likes this theory because it's imaginative, and we can't deny that. Maybe we should get a copy of this book for review purposes and review it, eh? I think that would be a really good idea. It will certainly give us content for several episodes.
00:11:03
Speaker
I think it would. Moving on. Now, we have to issue a retraction to last week's breaking news. Milo Yiannopoulos has not been denied a visa to visit Australia. Well, he was going to have his visa denied, as such that isn't really a retraction but more of an update. Some of the more right-wing politicians like Pauline Hanson and opinion peace writers
00:11:26
Speaker
like Andrew Bolt in Australia, presented the news of the visa being denied and protested it, which led to the immigration minister reconsidering the matter. At this stage, Milo is allowed in Australia, which is both true and also a joke people in Australasia will get.
00:11:47
Speaker
Because Milo is a kind of hot chocolate drink. Which is really only known in... And also Southeast Asia. So it's really big in Singapore. Dang. Yeah. And in Malaysia. Well, technically Singapore is part of Malaysia. So it's really big in Malaysia.
00:12:05
Speaker
There we go. If I'm journeying through there and I'm in the mood for a chocolate drink, I'll know what to ask for. Well, I won't because Milo contains milk products. Ah, well, yes. Which is odd because you often add it to milk. It's the milk product you add to milk. Yes, I think Australia's visa system seems to be every bit as unreliable as its Prime Ministership. As I say, Australian visas are a magic eight ball. You just don't know what you're going to get next. Much like the Prime Minister. Their Prime Minister.
00:12:33
Speaker
Ours tend to be fairly stable. We go through leaders of opposition at a rate of nice. Yeah, well Australia goes through leaders of the government. Leaders of the government, yes. But enough politics. I think it's time to move on to the main part of our episode, which is all about Twitter, sort of.
Scientists vs. Illogical Conspiracies
00:12:50
Speaker
And conspiracy theories shock horror.
00:12:59
Speaker
Well, I say it's about Twitter. It's not really about Twitter. It's from Twitter. It occurred on... It occurred on Twitter. The only... The last thing standing from the social media carnage of earlier this morning in Facebook and Instagram both went down for... See, I used Facebook so really I had no idea it had gone down. Ah, well, there you go. No, it had for a while in Instagram as well. I don't know if the two are related or what, but... Well, Facebook owns Instagram. Did they? I need to know who owns who these days. Facebook also owns WhatsApp.
00:13:29
Speaker
Ah, really? They have their own messaging app. Why would they want another one? It's a very good question. It's a very, very good question. But anyway, what didn't go down was Twitter, which is good, because our today's story comes there from. So basically on the 10th of March, Dr. David Schiffman, who is a marine biologist... And has a awesome Twitter handle, whysharksmatter, marine biologist at Simon Fraser University, which is in
00:13:58
Speaker
Canada, is it? I can't even remember. I looked it up and now I've forgotten. Who has, yes, the excellent Twitter handle, whysharksmatter. He tweeted out, scientists, what's the weirdest, most illogical conspiracy theory you deal with in your area of expertise? One that I deal with a lot is belief that a large extinct fish is not really extinct and that the government and the scientific community is lying about this. And then posted a gif from the Jason Statham movie, The Meg, which involves a megalodon. So I assume that's what he was hinting at.
00:14:25
Speaker
conspiracies in marine biology to deny the existence of the megalodon. Of giant fish. Although actually there are more giant things being denied as we'll find out. So this basically led to a whole bunch of scientists on Twitter, and also people in the humanities, social scientists if you will,
00:14:43
Speaker
talking about the conspiracy theories that they get presented all the time when doing their own work, and we thought it would be quite interesting slash amusing to go through and talk about some of the theories they discuss in this Twitter thread.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yes, and there are quite a few things that didn't really count as conspiracy theories, they were just things that people tended to get wrong, mistaken assumptions and what have you. And as we'll see, I think there are quite a few ones that we've heard before, but supposedly quite a long list of conspiracy theories that these scientists are exposed to.
00:15:23
Speaker
We have a big long list that's basically in chronological order of when they popped up on the Twitter feed. So should we just go top to bottom? I think so. I'm quite fond of going top to bottom in matters like this. Excellent. Well, the first one then was the claim that stone blocks are so hard to move, people could only have built Stonehenge and so on with help from ancient aliens or the technology of a lost civilization. One we've talked about plenty before, you lost civilizations and so on. And especially the sort of condescending colonial kind of attitude.
00:15:51
Speaker
Yes, because those brown-skinned people, they could hardly have moved those rocks from one location to another. Now, we pale-skinned people, we could build cathedrals, but brown-skinned people, they definitely couldn't put one rock on top of another. That's just ludicrous. And also quite, quite racist. Yes, I was reading. It might have been in reply to this through, or it might have been somewhere else, people talking about the Moai statues on Easter Island, Rapa Nui.
00:16:22
Speaker
The focus of them was that they had walked into place and then other people had shown out that if you wanted to transport a big statue like that, a good thing to do would be basically to walk it like when you're shuffling a refrigerator along or something. So that was entirely possible.
00:16:36
Speaker
And a fun fact about the Moai on Rapanui, even though they're known for their giant, giant heads, they actually do have tiny little bodies beneath them. Just that those are the bits which are buried beneath ground. Yes. Which is amusing, because for those people who follow the Celtic New Zealand thesis, people use the Moai statues to talk about the morphological differences between Polynesians and Europeans to make the claim that Polynesians have this thing called a rocajaw,
00:17:04
Speaker
which is a form of jaw that many humans have and they look me statues are anatomical proof that Polynesians are different from Europeans but they do tend to ignore the giant head tiny tiny body thing which kind of goes against their anatomical proof of the difference because otherwise you'd expect Polynesians have giant heads and tiny bodies and that just ain't true
00:17:29
Speaker
Yes, I think there was another one following that up was the idea that aliens or ancient astronauts are actually the ones responsible for any sort of ancient human achievements, building a sort of megalithical monumental architecture and also, of course, when the conspiracy theory comes in that archaeologists are hiding that info to save their own reputations. Apparently the Nephilimin giants show up in there a lot.
00:17:49
Speaker
Which is the biblical equivalent of the ancient alien hypothesis. That there was a race of giants living on the earth before the flood and archaeologists who want to deny the truth of the Bible are hiding the evidence of Nephilim or giant civilisation in order to further their secular stories.
00:18:11
Speaker
Ah, next moving on to an area more along the lines of volcanology or possibly climatology, the idea that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans annually. Do they or don't they? I didn't quite know what that person was getting at there.
Yellowstone Caldera Myths
00:18:25
Speaker
So, volcanoes do produce a lot of CO2 and is a common trope in certain anthropogenic climate change conspiracy theories. Look, volcanoes in the sun are responsible for what's going on, not human beings, but
00:18:43
Speaker
We kind of have a fairly good idea that volcanoes, when they erupt, produce a lot of CO2. But on average, on a day-to-day basis, humans are the main driver of climate change. Same person also encounters the theory that Yellowstone will kill us all at any minute, which isn't really a conspiracy theory. I understand. I mean, there is the Yellowstone-called era. If it goes up, it's gonna make a mark.
00:19:08
Speaker
And you every now and then hear news reports saying it's overdue for an eruption, but apparently that it is not overdue for an eruption. It won't be overdue for tens of thousands of years, I think. And given that most volcanic systems aren't particularly predictable, all they're saying is that the last time there was an eruption was X number of years ago, and we think there's a cycle, but we don't actually know because volcanoes just don't work that way.
00:19:35
Speaker
Did you ever read the Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter? I did not. In one of those books it's a series where it's a sort of a science fiction-y one where it's discovered that our Earth is one in a sort of potentially infinite series of parallel Earths and they invent this device that lets people step from one Earth to another.
00:19:57
Speaker
And at one point, one of the books on sort of the original Earth, where humans evolved, our Earth appears to be unique in that it's the only one where human beings evolved. All the other ones, there are some other species, but mostly they're devoid of intelligent life. And one of them on original Earth, the Yellowstone called era erupts, which means there has to be a mass evacuation into parallel Earths, which is all quite interesting. And it's an interesting series, but it's always a little bit
00:20:26
Speaker
It's kind of like, here's an interesting implication of if there were infinite parallel Earths, and some of that is interesting. Are you going to go anywhere? No, it's just an interesting thing to look at, and it always just sort of just peters out a little bit without the story going anywhere. It's just, hey, here's a cool concept. How many books were released before Pratchett died? There's five or six in the series, and the last one or two were released after he died.
00:20:52
Speaker
So it's mostly Stephen Baxter writing as well. I think, yes. Anyway, moving on. Do you want to take a couple? One of the weirdest professional experiences I've ever had, this person writes, hands down, is being told the deep sea vent tube worms, which I brought back and kept alive in a lab, were the souls of the damned, per Leviticus, I think.
00:21:14
Speaker
Not so much a conspiracy theory, but a pretty good story nonetheless. Yes, sure is, yes. And another one, the best one I ever ran into was a guy who claimed the sun used to be brighter when he was growing up. I never used to be able to look at the sun, but now I can practically look right at it. He squints into the sky. It was cloudy. Once again, not actually a conspiracy theory, although I suppose it's a conspiracy theory and you're talking to someone who probably deals with
00:21:42
Speaker
climatology and going well you know you know it used to be much brighter what are you people covering up about what happened to the sun the real cause of climate change i do remember mentioning ages ages ago a youtube video i saw i don't think i went back and actually found it to put a link to it
00:21:59
Speaker
where a woman, it's a video on YouTube, where a woman goes out into her backyard where her lawn sprinklers are spraying water across the lawn and films the rainbow that forms in the water droplets and claims that you never used to get rainbows in the water sprinklers like this when I was young and I want to know what's the government putting in our water that makes rainbows appear in the water.
00:22:23
Speaker
I remember seeing that YouTube video and also the widespread mockery that she got with people pointing out that people going to waterfalls have reported seeing rainbows for a very long time. What else? Desert tortoises. Now this is actually a bit of a theme. We'll see this pop up from time to time.
00:22:43
Speaker
the idea of various animal species being introduced by stealth into different areas for nefarious purposes. And in this case, introduced into Utah by the federal government as an opening move in the invasion and eventual internment and extermination of Mormons.
00:23:04
Speaker
don't quite see the link between desert tortoises and Mormons. Nor do I, and I've never heard this theory before, and I do feel that we should look into this one in more depth, because... First they come for the tortoises, then they come for the Mormons. First they introduce the tortoises, and then they come for the Mormons. Maybe they're really, really persuasive tortoises who convince the Mormons to move into... I mean, there's a terrible joke about having sex with animals here, and...
00:23:32
Speaker
polyamorous marriages in Mormonism, and I'm just not going to go there. I was thinking maybe they'll all flip themselves up onto their backs. The Mormons? The tortoises. And then when the Mormons encounter them, it'll be some sort of real life. No, no. See, these tortoises are like face.
00:23:49
Speaker
huggers, they flip onto their back, the Mormons go, oh, you poor tortoise, lean over, boom, face hugger on face, implants a non-Mormon in their stomach, non-Mormon bursts out, kills the Norman, kills the Norman and the Mormon, thus eradicating Normans and Mormons from Utah.
00:24:10
Speaker
Right, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but I feel it probably makes more sense than the actual theory that that one was born of. Now here's one. A faked moon landing is the most obvious one, which would have involved thousands upon thousands of people worldwide to cover up, and was faked six times with one faked in-space failure.
Faked Moon Landing Challenges
00:24:29
Speaker
Obviously we've talked about new landing concerns, but I do kind of have an issue with the involved thousands upon thousands of people because Depending on the scale of the deceit it could be done with a small number of People Stanley Kubrick and a few of his crew. Yeah. I mean the thing is
00:24:49
Speaker
You have to work out whether the witnesses who claim to see the launches are part of the story or whether that was faked in front of them and then you're getting into the Michelin web sketch about it would be easier to go to the moon than it would be to fake going to the moon and launching a rocket to fool a crowd of people.
00:25:09
Speaker
So what's next to a vet? A vet made here, apparently there are many anti-vaxxers when it comes to vaccinating pets. Recently a huge push from them in regards to this idea that vaccines cause autism in cats and dogs and somehow vets are getting rich off their 10 to 12 dollar vaccines. Well there's a story a few years ago about a couple in Aotearoa New Zealand claiming that a vet gave their budgie autism.
00:25:38
Speaker
Which then did lead to questions as to how do you know your budgie is autistic? Yes, what does autism look like in a non-human? But yes, there are a lot of anti-vax theories in Amongst.
00:25:53
Speaker
people who own pets. Vaccines in the news here in New Zealand at the moment, given that there's been a couple of measles outbreaks around. Now, you and I are of the age that we didn't get the booster shot automatically. But we're also of the age where if a family friend got measles, we'd have a measles party. Yeah, I didn't have a measles party.
00:26:13
Speaker
Apparently I did. I remember the chicken pox. Party when I got the chicken pox. Apparently I also went to a measles party and got the measles. So frankly I'm fine. Yes, I have gone spotty several times in my life. I don't know if one of those was measles or not. Because if you have had measles you have antibodies and you don't need the booster.
00:26:35
Speaker
But if you didn't, you do need the booster because people born from the late 60s to the early 80s or something, the booster shot wasn't part of the regular vaccination schedule. Yeah. Yeah. I've had measles. Well, there you go. Also, what a society we lived in where, oh, your child's sick with the measles. This infects all of our children. That's a great idea. That was a terrible idea and they should never have done it. No.
00:27:01
Speaker
Ah, moving on. Now we have a cartographer. And surprisingly, they get a lot of Flat Earther conspiracy theories. This person writes, Flat Earther is a challenging in the same way that a four-year-old asking you why is. It doesn't matter how well you can explain, erotosthenes and satellites. At some point, knowledge relies on trusting smart people you've never met and you go crazy.
00:27:22
Speaker
Which actually is a legitimate issue to talk about because, yes, in most situations even people who are professionals in their field are going, well, I've never actually done the experiment myself. I've read about it in a book or read it in a journal. And people say, ah.
00:27:40
Speaker
But how would you know that experiment occurred? And you go, well, I kind of trust the peer review. Oh, you're part of the conspiracy. You trust the whole peer review thing, do you? And it is actually something which is quite hard to argue against because you're dealing with someone who assumes that there's something rotten at the heart of peer review and the scientific method and consensus science. Then appealing to consensus science doesn't actually do anything.
00:28:08
Speaker
And I mean you saw you could really do an apple and I suppose just turn it back around on them and say that their beliefs are also on an equally shaky foundation but that doesn't really get you anywhere. No, but you, but you, but you. This all ends very badly. Right, tell me about earthquakes.
00:28:25
Speaker
Scientists are hiding earthquakes or downgrading the magnitude of large earthquakes to advance some bizarre agenda. And all sorts of weird things cause earthquakes, heart, sunspots, weather, mercury and retrograde. And scientists know but either won't do anything about it or two are covering it up and then to what end? Yeah, one of the common threads through here it seems is scientists are covering this up
00:28:53
Speaker
Now, we've actually had our own version of the earthquake conspiracy theory after the 2011 Canterbury Christchurch earthquake, where Ken Ring, who is a
00:29:07
Speaker
I think we can call him a mathematician, but also someone who engages in predicting the weather based upon the movement of the moon, claimed that he was able to predict earthquakes and that scientists are denying his mathematical skill and the fact the moon is the deciding factor for volcanology and earthquakes in general, and thus they're part of a massive cover-up to deny people like him their rightful place in the pantheon of science.
00:29:36
Speaker
Yes, as I recall Ken Ring's thing was that he would say it's going to be on this date or sometime two weeks before or two weeks after. He'd sort of give himself a range of a month or so. And it turns out that the incidence levels of earthquakes in Christchurch kind of fit into every two weeks is going to be a quake of some kind, which means that Ken Ring is automatically right if his prediction is couched in a week and a half either side.
Birds as Surveillance Drones
00:30:05
Speaker
So, one person who didn't say what field they work in, I think, but their weirdest conspiracy theory is that birds aren't real. They're government surveillance drones. Truly, that's what these folks think, or at least that's what they say on the t-shirts they sell.
00:30:21
Speaker
Now I can understand doing the birds aren't real now hypothesis given the discussion about China building bird shaped drones, which turns out to not be the threat. It's a prototype thing that China's engaged in and building drones that look like birds. But we've got an awful lot of
00:30:42
Speaker
descriptions and drawings and carvings of birds throughout human history. So that's the bit, are they saying that birds now are drones or birds have always been drones? Yes, I don't know, maybe.
00:31:01
Speaker
maybe that's just just phrased a little bit bluntly and they don't believe all birds are actually drones maybe just there are birds which are actually government drones i don't know now here's a standard one there's a cure for cancer and big pharma is suppressing it because chemotherapy is more profitable
00:31:17
Speaker
talked about this one before. I can't remember which episode, but we've definitely done the cancer thing and we've definitely done the treatment is more profitable than cure angle that people always seem to come across, which I don't know. I mean, do we have actual evidence of people?
00:31:34
Speaker
of companies potentially slowing down cures because they can make more money for treatment? So what we do have evidence of is that the fact that companies don't publish null results, so when they do experiments on drugs and trials, they tend to only publish the trials which are successful and shelve any reports of drugs that don't work or produce the wrong results.
00:31:59
Speaker
And in that respect, you can kind of see there being a conspiracy by the pharmacological community to slow things down. Because if you published no result or bad result, people would go, oh, well, we don't need to do that experiment. We know drug X doesn't do what we want it to do.
00:32:18
Speaker
So in that respect you can kind of see, well maybe they are sitting on unsuccessful drugs that could be used for something but they're not publishing those results. That's a plausible thing to believe. The notion that it would be more profitable for existing treatments
00:32:36
Speaker
over new treatments coming out kind of flies in the face of new treatments coming out all the time. Yes, well I think the argument is something which cured the disease completely is less profitable because you take the cure and you don't need any more drugs whereas something which treats the disease but doesn't actually get rid of it means those people are going to keep giving you drugs forever.
00:32:58
Speaker
I think it's possibly just a statement on late stage capitalism that you can imagine a company making that sort of decision. That's true. And I mean, so it's the counterpoint to that as we keep on finding more diseases to treat. I mean, one of the big complaints about the
00:33:15
Speaker
DSM-5 is that they keep on finding more and more things you can use drugs to trade. So you can afford to cure some diseases because there are 15, for every one you cure, there are 15 more you can treat with brand new drugs. Now there you go, drugs. They're awesome.
00:33:34
Speaker
Not really, sometimes, I don't know. So, moving on. Again, it wasn't clear which field this person works in, but their conspiracy is that we make up problems, like that species or populations are endangered, so that we can apply for grants and get rich off them. I think this is sort of a common thing, isn't it? That scientists are just in it for the money, in it for the research grants, which is kind of like the idea that
00:33:58
Speaker
people have lots of children for the welfare checks. I don't think the economics of it actually works out. I mean, the thing which is the only kernel of truth to this particular kind of conspiracy theory is that it is true that there are certain avenues of research which are in vogue at any particular point in time. So if you're doing
00:34:19
Speaker
physics, you want to be doing string theory. If you're engaged in atmospheric physics, you want to be doing climatology. If you're doing philosophy, then there's a lot of stuff in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, which is kind of the big stuff where it's easy to get postdocs and grants. So it is true that people tailor their research to where the research funding is.
00:34:43
Speaker
you don't have to actually invent problems to get that funding, you just have to specialise in where the funding exists. And that tends to be that the people who are giving out grant are the people who are doing research in that area 20 to 30 years ago. So it's just institutionalisation, it's not the invention of
00:35:04
Speaker
issues, it's the cementing of, well, I'm famous, I did X, and I've got my hand on the purse strings, so I'm going to give money to people to do X as well. It's not a conspiracy, it is just late-stage capitalism. So moving on, this is a good one, that wildlife management agencies want to bring back predators, so they'll kill all the game, so people won't be able to hunt them, and then we can take away everybody's guns!
00:35:29
Speaker
First of all, I assume by predators they simply mean predatory animal species and not predators from the movie Predator. Although that would be awesome. Because I would be fully in favour of that. But yeah, that's quite a good chain they've got going there. Bring back predatory species, kill all the games, stop people hunting, take guns!
00:35:44
Speaker
It's actually, it's the underpants known, blah, blah, blah, question mark prophet, but they've actually filled in the question mark step. Except then, as we're seeing in certain parts of Europe where they brought back wolves, now they've got too many wolves. And so they're now thinking we might do some culling of wolves. And who are they asking to do, the culls? Hunters. And with what weaponry? Guns.
00:36:05
Speaker
And then somebody else replied to that one, that's directly at odds with the animal rights one. I've heard that FWS, I assume that's the American Agency and something wildlife service, federal wildlife service, purposely manipulates deer populations to justify selling more hunting licenses for the money. So here we have one conspiracy theory saying that, no, the government's not trying to kill off game species, they're trying to grow game species to make more money off of those sweet, sweet hunting licenses.
00:36:34
Speaker
Well, I mean, that was one of the issues we had with possum here. In the old days, we had a kind of bounty on them. So possums are a pest in our area.
00:36:45
Speaker
So they had a bounty on them that if hunters went out, killed and trapped them and brought back their skins, then they would get a bounty on the notion that would wipe out the possum species. Hunters very quickly worked out that wiping out the species would actually mean not making any money from skinning them. So they would keep a breeding population alive in certain areas. And so it didn't actually solve the problem, it just cemented it. Yes, that was...
00:37:13
Speaker
Speaking of Terry Pratchett again, that was in one of the Discworld books, wasn't it, where they had a rat problem in Angmorepork, so they put a bounty on the rats, but then they found they had more rats than ever, so Vettinari just said, tax the rat farms.
00:37:25
Speaker
Oh, now, this is one I hadn't actually heard of before.
Hollow Earth Belief
00:37:30
Speaker
Concave Hollow Earth Theory, obviously your Hollow Earth Theory has come up, but the idea that the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside. Yes, and the Sun is at the centre. Yes, I have read about this particular theory. There are all sorts of theories about optics to explain why horizons appear to curve away from us as opposed to up.
00:37:51
Speaker
Like the city in Inception? Yeah. So, but yes, there are people who believe there is a Hollywood and we live on the centre and it's the Chuds who actually live on the outside. They're not cannibal underground dwellers, they're cannibal overworld dwellers. Chuds. Chuds. It's even worse. Indeed.
00:38:12
Speaker
So one person says the craziest though that they had seen was a paper written in pencil with equations etc which purported to prove that thunderstorms were living and sentient beings who communicated using lightning and thunder. This is actually harder to disprove than chemtrails I think. Once again not really a conspiracy theory unless people deliberately hide it. I would like to see these calculations. What else we got?
00:38:36
Speaker
My favourite was the guy who got up in a public hearing claiming that the UN black helicopters were bringing dead aliens in red ways to be buried at the landfill I worked at every Saturday at midnight.
00:38:52
Speaker
He'd seen it through his night-vision goggles and had tried to shoot the helicopter. He had a lot of support for this, claimed we, the largest waste services provider in North America, were run by the UN, and that I personally was hiding the groundwater data showing the proof of the aliens ran waste since all the landfills leak, which is another bit of BS. A lot of people brought into this. He was a rather persuasive public speaker. He had photos of oil-stained gravel to prove this.
00:39:21
Speaker
Well, here's your actual conspiracy theory. So good on this guy for starters. But yeah, the government burying dead aliens and radioactive waste is basically the plot line to the TV series War of the Worlds based on the 1958 film War of the Worlds. So the premise in War of the Worlds, the TV series, there was an invasion on Earth in 1958.
00:39:45
Speaker
and the aliens, Allah the book, were killed by bacteria. Except they actually weren't killed, they went at a state of hibernation. The US military did some experiments on the bodies initially, but due to a kind of weird telepathic virus thing, people began to forget about the invasion, and the scientists eventually put the alien bodies into
00:40:13
Speaker
steel cans and they would just be moved around from place to place and eventually they end up in a radioactive waste site which then kills the bacteria on the aliens rejuvenating them thus giving you the plot for War of the Worlds season one.
00:40:34
Speaker
Yes and no, it's one of those late 80s science fiction shows, which is probably very hard to watch now. But if you caught it at midnight on TV, it was kind of perfect. And the aliens themselves were delightfully weird. So their technology made no sense. The way they talked was very cryptic and obscure. They really did sell the notion that these aliens are not like us.
00:41:05
Speaker
Moving on, we have another what I assume is another marine biologist who claims they've heard the theory that dolphins are able to use telepathy to help us communicate with secret alien overlords who exert authority by kidnapping people into sexual slavery.
00:41:22
Speaker
Psychic dolphins, alien sexual slavery? Well, that's kind of a mixture of a whole bunch of conspiracy theories from the 70s and 80s. There's all that experimentation into dolphin communication, right down to the point of giving dolphins LSD, which turns out to be a really bad thing because it kills them.
00:41:41
Speaker
And then of course the whole pedophile network, which is still a ongoing conspiracy theory to this day, but dolphins in control of us. It's almost Douglas Adams-esque. Now I'm sure we've talked about this before. This person says their favourite is, there are no forests.
00:41:59
Speaker
The idea that plateaus, mesas, flat-topped mountains, etc. are the petrified remains of true ancient forests of giant trees taller than mountains. And what we think of as current forests are basically just bushes. I'm sure we have talked about this before. Although I don't think we ever devoted an episode to the forests aren't real conspiracy theory. But yes, there are people who believe that
00:42:22
Speaker
The things we call forests today are basically just widespread shrubs and that real forests are kind of giant kilometre tall trees and they've been wiped out in a hitherto undiscussed calamity sometimes identified with the flood. Yeah so I was going to say it sounds kind of biblical, giant trees to go with your giants and your Nephilim and what have you.
00:42:47
Speaker
But the actual evidence for this tends to be flat-topped mountains. People go, I don't understand why that mountain has no top. Normally why mountains don't have a top was that at some point in history, a glacier carved the top off. And they go, well, that makes no sense. But it does look like the base of a tree. Oh, I think I have solved it. It's actually not a mountain at a tree stump.
00:43:17
Speaker
And that was kind of it. There are a bunch more than the government agencies secretly introducing species. Some people talked about them introducing cougars into different areas. Some people talked about them dropping cottonmouth snakes, wolves. I think elk came up at one point. And again, it was always fairly poorly defined reasons exactly why the government was secretly introducing animals into areas. Wasn't there a story in the news the other day about people parachuting wolves into areas to control the elk population?
00:43:48
Speaker
That's the suspicion of a wolf in camo, in the helmet. Right, your task, Wolfie, is to get on down there and remove those out from that population. Well, yeah, so people were sort of imagining some elk standing around in the forest going, well, everything seems safe around here, just gonna stop and let my defences down and then looks up and oh, for God's sake. Yeah. It's a parachuting wolf.
00:44:12
Speaker
Now, I do want to make one point here. So the term conspiracy theory in this Twitter thread is very pejorative. And it's also quite possible that the descriptions we're getting of these conspiracy theories, which have been making fun of in this episode, are simply people who
00:44:31
Speaker
think that no conspiracy theory can ever be true and thus giving all these theories short shrift. So it's possible that the people who are expressing these things had better evidence or at least more interesting arguments as presented here.
00:44:47
Speaker
But at the same time, a lot of these are conspiracy theories we've kind of heard before, and kind of conspiracy theories that people do seem to have good reason to think, yeah, that one doesn't sound particularly plausible. And indeed, in fairness, the original tweet was, what's the weirdest, most illogical conspiracy? Yes, that's true. That is true.
00:45:12
Speaker
So I guess finally what in your industry? What's the weirdest conspiracy theory you've come across? Is it just more of the academics? Well, it's more like people like me are being paid by governments. The Jez Coleman thesis.
Personal Conspiracy Theories by Dr. Dintworth
00:45:28
Speaker
Jez Coleman accused me of working for unspecified powers being paid large sums of money to present what he claimed to be a
00:45:39
Speaker
refutation of belief in conspiracy theories entirely, which A, showed you had no idea what I actually do, and B, if government is giving me money, they haven't told me which bank account they're putting it into, because I haven't found it yet. So basically, most of the conspiracy theories that I encounter are conspiracy theories about me.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yes, I couldn't really think of any. I work in the software industry. I work for a company that makes accounting software. So, I mean, if you brought an accounting into the wider financial world, there's lots of sort of Jews control the world, George Soros stuff out there.
00:46:19
Speaker
In my workplace, I've seen some. One guy who no longer works with us was quite pro-Trump leading up to the 2016 election and occasionally would say things like, oh, yes, no, I mean, Hillary Clinton is known to have had 30 different people killed, but no, let's make fun of Trump because of his silly hair. I was like, really? Trump Hillary Clinton death count stuff? You going with that? OK.
00:46:43
Speaker
And I once overheard a conversation again leading up to the 2016 election between two other guys where one of them was educating the other one in the new world order and how Trump's good because Hillary's all for the new world order, but Trump's against it.
00:46:58
Speaker
But nothing, nothing specific to any particular industry there, just some people who happen to like conspiracy theories. Well, I suppose in the world of software engineering, you do get your notches and your people like that. Well, you do, yes, yes, your people who are very clever people who've, and I suppose isn't specific to software, but
00:47:18
Speaker
but in any place you get very clever people who've managed to do one thing very very well and think that that makes them experts on all other
Expertise and Overconfidence
00:47:27
Speaker
things. The rich and talkant effect. Someone who's very good at evolutionary biology, thus thinking he's also really good at the philosophy of religion when he's not.
00:47:39
Speaker
Yeah, I see it in sort of in the art world as well a little bit writers who are very good at putting a sentence together Think mistake that for being able to put a good argument together. Yes. Yes, you're Dave Sims. Yeah Oh Dave now we we could possibly actually do an entire episode of Dave Sim. We must have come up before Dave Sim. I don't think he had. So Dave Sim is the author of the rather famous comic book Cerebus, which was the
00:48:07
Speaker
first and only attempt to do a 30 year plot line in comics from years ago and has been completed but about a third of the way through sim got into a very very messy divorce from his wife
00:48:25
Speaker
and then he found God and then he became incredibly misogynistic and then it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. Yes it sort of became a overtly misogynistic Jordan Peterson. It was not sort of men are order and women are chaos and chaos isn't necessarily bad you can't have order without chaos even though the
00:48:51
Speaker
subtitle of my book is An Antidote to Chaos. In Sims case, men are form and women are void. Men are light, women are not just shed. Not just darkness, they absorb all. Yes, soul sucking void. But enough about Dave Sims, I think we should talk about him another time.
00:49:09
Speaker
Now, so
Why Do Sharks Matter?
00:49:10
Speaker
that's it. So I guess first of all, we should say thank you very much to Dr. David Schiffman, because he's given us in a single tweet, he's given us an episode's worth of fun to talk about. Although doesn't actually answer the Twitter handle why sharks matter. Why do sharks matter? I don't know, because they're cool. They got lots of rows of teeth and they eat stuff. And yet you're scared of vampires. They're the world's greatest killers, probably. What about vampires? Vampire sharks.
00:49:39
Speaker
That actually is quite a scary prospect. Now, if you want to hang around, because you're a patron, or want to become a patron in the bonus episode, we'll be talking about the fake Melania conspiracy theory, as well as an interesting comparison between David Hogg, survivor of the Parkland shooting, and Adam Lanza, the massacre shooter of Sandy Hook,
00:50:06
Speaker
Interesting little story there. We'll be touching on the fact that Chelsea Manning is back in jail and we'll be talking about the fact that Amazon is selling books that suggest that you can cure autism with bleach. Fun times, fun times. So if you are one of our
00:50:26
Speaker
Patreons, Patrons, whatever it is we're supposed to call it. Patrovices. Our favourite human beings, as we always like to say. Stay tuned for that coming up. If you're not one of our Patrons, you're among our favourite human beings as well because you're listening to our podcast. But you can be Favourited, or Favourited? Favourited. Favourited? You can be Favourited by just giving us a couple of bucks a month and you'll get access to the bonus content. We've been told by no one entirely
00:50:54
Speaker
It's pretty good. But yes, if you're not, then it's goodbye for us right now. Otherwise, it's see you soon.
00:51:14
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.
00:52:15
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.