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Joe Uscinski updates us on COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs in the US (and more)
27 Plays4 years ago
M (sans Josh) interviews Joe Uscinski (Miami) on his recent polling of American attitudes towards COVID-19 and other conspiracy theories.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Naming Struggles
00:00:00
Speaker
It's April 2020 and... This. Is. The. Conspira. No. Conspira no. Is that Italian? No, it's no. It's a no to Conspiran news. But it's what we do. It's practically a tradition. Why not? You know why. No, I don't. Not you. You da- Hold on. Are you about to name a patron?
00:00:22
Speaker
I am. Let me refer to you to paragraph six subsection one in which it lists the tiers of naming versus the tiers of initializing. Hold on. Okay, so sorry, that was six subsection one. Four. Ah yes, okay, I've got it on my screen. Yes, so I want you to cross-reference tier two with the database entry of new patrons. Hold on, that requires me to switch applications.
00:00:49
Speaker
Ah, okay, yes, I can see the problem. Yep. So basically my spiel about how there can never be a conspiracy news episode of April 2020, not what either of us draws breath at least, is unusable. Precisely. And my claim that whatever are now unnamed. And unnameable. Patron has done, not a human soul can rest until the very notion of, and I quote,
00:01:17
Speaker
An April 2020 conspiracy news episode has been eliminated. Which would lead into some claim about the cephalopods, I'm sure. Oh, not just the cephalopods, Josh. Rush Limbaugh. Antarctic's Nazi submarine's bases. Your mum. It's about everything. Well, good thing I managed to stop you even mentioning it then.
00:01:37
Speaker
I guess. Stop? Oh no. No, we just don't have the evidence yet. It's going on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on.
Life in Lockdown: New Zealand Updates
00:01:53
Speaker
And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on
00:02:10
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. It is April the 30th in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. N Denteth. Both of us still at home, still self isolating. That's the world we live in today. What are you going to do? Well, I'm thinking about a bank heist.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yep, could work, could work perhaps. Although, I don't know, lots of people have gone back to work. We're in level three now, level three lockdown. Now, Josh, does level three lockdown mean that you've eaten a lot of takeaways? It doesn't actually, but I could. If I wanted to, perhaps, we'll see. It is quite interesting that even though suddenly we have the ability to get to that twa-twakeaways and takeaways, a lot of people are going
00:02:56
Speaker
kind of don't necessarily feel the need to have them. Well, and yet a lot of other people have been. There have been scenes of people queuing up outside various McDonald's and KFCs and what have you and massive queues at the drive-throughs and all that sort of stuff, but maybe once the novelty wears off, I don't know.
00:03:16
Speaker
Well, to quote a Charlton Heston film, it's a madhouse, it's a madhouse. Except I actually do think that's a representational fallacy. I actually don't think there is this massive call for takeaways. I just think it's noteworthy when you get a few cues at a few takeaway places around the country. Well, yes, it's not like the entire population went out for a burger, but quite a lot of people did.
00:03:41
Speaker
only for a night from the sounds of it. Yes I mean it will be interesting in two weeks time to see if we have some KFC COVID-19 left cases or the buker fuel virus but I suspect people are going to be sensible and things are going to be fine. A quote that will bite me in the bottom in three weeks time.
COVID-19 and Conspiracy News: An Overview
00:04:01
Speaker
I'm counting on it. Now, it is the last week in April. Normally in the last week of the month, we do a news episode, but quite frankly, it would be only and all COVID-19 stuff with maybe just a sprinkling of Kim Jong-un business on top. I had the impression that you actually had this cremation urn, and you were going to literally sprinkle some kim jong on camera. We've got proof he's dead. Look, I've got his urn. Then you go, oh, actually, this appears to be Kim
00:04:32
Speaker
ill songs and then in case of how did you get that he's had a state burial and then we have to have an entire story about how you're once again buying funereal caskets from that dodgy salesperson just down the road and you've got to stop doing that Josh you can't trust
00:04:50
Speaker
What's in those arms? That's who I am. But yes, so Kim Jong Un might be dead, we don't know. Are the Pentagon officially declassified those UFO videos that have been around for years and years now? And which are not particularly exciting, but I'm sure eventually we'll talk about it. Just not this way.
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, no, this week, this week, we've got another interview for you.
Interview with Joe Yusinski: Conspiracy Beliefs
00:05:14
Speaker
You have been speaking to friend of the show, Joe Skinski, who has been for the past few years doing surveys on people's conspiracy theory related beliefs.
00:05:26
Speaker
amongst other things. There was a respected associate professor at the University of Miami who does work on conspiracy theory theory and has been organizing those conferences in Miami. I say conferences plural, only one ever eventuated because the other one was cancelled due to COVID-19 but yes he's been very much involved in polling American attitudes towards conspiracy theories since 2014
00:05:52
Speaker
And he was the lead investigator behind that recent Pew Research Center poll we talked about last week, which suggested that about 30% of the US population thinks that COVID-19 was created in the lab. And so I took time out of my busy schedule to talk with Joe and go through the polling data to find out exactly what Americans do and don't think about not just COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but conspiracy theories
00:06:20
Speaker
in general. So let's not beat about the rush anymore. We'll play you the interview now and I guess check in briefly at the end. You will indeed and by you will, we will, which includes you as well.
00:06:39
Speaker
Right, so I'm talking with Professor Joe Yusinski of the University of Miami, who is a bit of a theorist of the old conspiracy theory, and has been doing some rather interesting polling work as about what Americans believe about the origin and spread of COVID-19. Hello, Joe. Hi.
00:06:59
Speaker
How are you? I'm surviving our lockdown. This is actually our last day of level four lockdown in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Tomorrow, the takeaway places reopen and you'll be able to buy a takeaway coffee, which will change our culture entirely. How are things going in a political Miami? Nothing's really changed here. They are talking about opening up some things.
00:07:27
Speaker
Um, but they haven't opened anything yet. And I haven't seen any concrete plans to open anything. I know in some northern parts of the state, they've reopened some beaches and there's been some news getting out like, oh my God, millions of people flocking to the beaches. That's just not true.
00:07:43
Speaker
If you look at drone footage of the beaches, it's very few people, everyone's social distance, so there's no reason to not have them open, and probably a lot of reasons to have them open, just to give people more space to spread out. Yes, we've got some interesting reporting about what's going on here. As you might be aware, there was a Bloomberg opinion piece about the lockdown in Aotearoa, New Zealand, published two days ago.
00:08:08
Speaker
in which the opinion writer claims that the police are enforcing a one hour being outside limit in this country, which is not true at all. So apparently the police are everywhere making sure we're only outside for an hour. I have not seen a police officer on the street for weeks. Yeah, and they don't want to get up close to people. So even if that was true, that such a policy was passed, I don't know how they would possibly enforce it.
00:08:37
Speaker
Well, see, in our country being forced by the police officers slowing down and going, you, you should probably go back inside and then driving off. We very much do policing by consent in this country. Well, they I'll give you one thing that is sort of conspiratorial that speaks to this and that is Westport, Connecticut. And this is this is not far from from where I grew up. They had we're working with a private company, the police
00:09:05
Speaker
Department there and they were going to bring in drones And they were gonna have drones flying all over the city to monitor if people were getting too close to each other So breaking the six foot social distance rule and the drones are gonna be checking people's temperatures and other vital signs And then the people in the town got really upset and they started protesting not in person But I think just just going nuts on the police
00:09:34
Speaker
police department's Facebook page. And then the town council and the police department said, oh, we're going to cancel this plan because people don't want it. But imagine that. I mean, it does almost rise to the level of conspiracy theory. It's missing some elements because I don't think it was necessarily against
00:09:54
Speaker
you know, the common good or necessarily nefarious, but it's that sort of thing where you have a private company sort of seeking out a, a copacetic police department that's willing to do this and then to, you know, to try out their, their private product which is necessarily going to violate people's rights. I mean, if you have drones peering into your body,
00:10:17
Speaker
to check on your vital signs or to check how close you are to someone else and then transmit that to the government and then potentially send government agents to come and harass you for whatever reason. So I don't know where that falls in the range of conspiracy theories. It's not quite there yet, but it could easily lead to very bad outcomes.
Conspiracy Narratives and Public Sentiments
00:10:37
Speaker
And I can see the Alex Jones info war segment on this now. I feel this, I need to get some pieces of paper in my hand, because Alex Jones always... I've got a report here about the West Pond, West Connecticut Police. They're bringing in drones. You know how they locate where are the drones? With a microchip. So the FDA is put into your food. They put it into your food. This is the new world on. This is the state. This is the FEMA death camps coming to your home. It's going to be terrible. I've got papers here.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's precisely how it would get reported. And is that how he gets his effort? Somebody runs up to him with a little piece of paper. Well, no, he's always got scraps of paper on his desk. So as soon as he wants to make a point, he grabs a piece of paper and then he brandishes it and then puts it down. And if you watch some of his recordings, he'll then go on to a completely different topic and pick up the same piece of paper and brandish that as evidence of this very bad thing, which either means it's possible.
00:11:31
Speaker
It's a printout of all of the bad news, and so he's just got that paper there, or it's a prop, and there are no reports he's basing his conspiracy theories upon. Now, I don't want to be uncharitable to Mr Jones, but I suspect it might be the latter.
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah. Now, you've been polling Americans about their beliefs about COVID-19. And that was reported about two weeks ago now, with respect to about a third of Americans believe weird things about the origin of COVID-19. But I believe you've done some really fine grain testing of what people believe about the COVID-19 virus, its origin and spread.
00:12:13
Speaker
Well, we did two conspiracy theories on COVID, but then we did 19 others on other stuff, some of which are sort of related beliefs. So I could go down the list and then we could talk about- I would love you to, yeah. Yeah, I could give you the percentage and we could talk a little bit about it and I could tell you what seems to be most correlated with it. Yes, that sounds like an excellent plan. Hit me with your 21 theories.
00:12:40
Speaker
OK, so I'll give you the two just for listeners who haven't joined us in a previous episode. I'll give you the two coronavirus ones. So we asked people if they agreed that the COVID-19 threat was being exaggerated to hurt President Trump, and we got 29% saying yes. And this is highly correlated with partisanship. So obviously, Republicans, and in particular, ones who really like Trump and pay attention to the news, believe this one.
00:13:09
Speaker
Now, were there any people who were of the left who were also endorsing that claim? Yeah, so the correlation between partisanship and this belief is only 0.3. So it's pretty good, but that means that it's not all people on the right. There are people, people moderates and people on the left who are buying into this too.
00:13:31
Speaker
So the other issue here that's sort of driving this is that people with a conspiracy mindset are also likely to buy into this. So you've got those two factors at the same time. So at no point does that exclude people on the left from thinking that it's being exaggerated.
00:13:48
Speaker
So by conspiracy mindset, we're going here, people who think there is something suspicious about the COVID-19 crisis, who have theories about it. Well, some things, well, people who would think that, you know, whoever world we are, events and circumstances tend to be explained by conspiracies rather than something else. So imagine the people who tend to reach for those explanations were also reached for this explanation, too, for COVID.
00:14:15
Speaker
The next one is that it was spread on purpose, and that isn't really correlated with partisanship very much at all, and that's 31%. So imagine people on right and left, and in the middle, thinking, you know, this could be some sort of Chinese super weapon, Russia super weapon, or
00:14:33
Speaker
it's the Illuminati or the Freemasons or who knows what, but it was put here on purpose to get us. And of course that one's quite interesting because even though that's not the exact theory that's been investigated, there is the US intelligence services are investigating whether COVID-19 was accidentally released from a lab and that the Chinese story that it was animal to human transmission through mutation of the virus
00:15:00
Speaker
is in fact to cover story of an industrial accident either somewhere in Wuhan or Hubei. Yeah so that's a much milder version of this so that wouldn't be spread on purpose but I think what they're getting at is that they had the virus somewhere on purpose in a lab and then it accidentally got out. So it wasn't intended to kill people but it was intended, or at least not now anyway, but they were doing something with it intentionally but then it got out of hand.
00:15:30
Speaker
Dad, I don't know if I believe that myself. I guess they're gonna have to gather more evidence to show that that's the case, but I'm willing to just sort of say for now, I don't know fully what happened. They say it's from a bat, but other people say something else. I'm sure there'll be more investigations and I'll pay attention more at some other point.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, it does seem like it's an interesting hypothesis because you might go even if you think, evidentially, it's actually quite unlikely it's a engineered virus and more likely to just be animal to human transmission. You might still want your security services to investigate this game.
00:16:07
Speaker
just in case it turns out to be true. It does seem there's a lot of very interesting competing forms of evidence for this. You've got the, well, we're suspicious about the Chinese state in general about their information control and wanting to save face whenever possible.
00:16:26
Speaker
So we don't tend to trust the initial official story that comes out of Beijing anyway. So why would we trust it in this particular case? And then you have the biologists who are looking at the genome of COVID-19 going, yeah, we know what genetic engineering looks like or genetic manipulation looks like via say things like CRISPR. And there's nothing in the virus we're looking at that shows any sign of modification by human beings.
00:16:53
Speaker
So you've got a political argument going, why would you trust Beijing? And then a biological argument going, well, if they did engineer it, it doesn't look like they've left any markers behind. And that's pretty incredible.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, so like I said, I mean, it really devolves down to something much more benign, like maybe they had it and maybe it got out by accident. Yeah. And that would be the best thing. But then you have to bring positive proof of that, not just
00:17:25
Speaker
You know, because I read a Fox News story and it said, you know, we have an anonymous source telling us about documents that aren't released. We've requested the documents and don't have them. And we're not going to give you the name of the source. So I'm like, well, what do I do with that? It's probably the same source that gives Alex Jones those bits of paper.
00:17:45
Speaker
All right. I'll bring it down to number three here. The 1% controls the entire government, and we got 54% buying into that one. And what's the division on partisanship for that?
00:17:58
Speaker
So slightly more leaning to the left. And good reason for that, because this is largely a line pushed by Bernie Sanders, but adopted by people on both sides. So, and out of all 22 that I polled on, this is the one that has the highest level of agreement with it. So do we have data about this belief, say, going back to the Obama presidency?
00:18:21
Speaker
I've pulled on this before, but I don't remember what the numbers were, but I don't think I ever got anything this high. I can kind of see people endorsing that, given the kind of people that Donald Trump appoints to various committee and czar positions in the US. It does kind of look like he's selecting his really rich friends to take up prominent positions, and that might make you go,
00:18:45
Speaker
This doesn't seem particularly representative in a representative democracy if only your rich friends get the high-level positions in government.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that could drive sort of some numbers of it, but I don't think most of it is coming from that.
Political Influence and Deep State Beliefs
00:19:04
Speaker
The reason is because this belief was around long before Donald Trump appointed these folks. And then I would guess that a lot of the people who believe this would also say, oh, Trump's cronies, there are a bunch of incompetent boobs that can't get anything done. And then they're also holding the same beliefs. Oh, they control everything. So, I mean, I guess you could say something like,
00:19:27
Speaker
I might agree with them if they were to say, you know, there's a massive upper class bias to either political appointees or to, you know, our representatives. Fine. But I wouldn't put it much further than that.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I mean, historically, you might go, well, it's just always been the case, if you go to the right schools, you're probably more likely to be successful in the civil service in any particular country. And the right schools do tend to correlate with having the right kind of background or wealth. So that's just going to be lurking in the background. But it does seem interesting that Trump's very incompetent friends are given
00:20:09
Speaker
are employed to have an awful loss of power they don't seem to be able to express whilst being in government. Yeah, like there are some things where I'm like, okay, that's sort of like, they're giving out this $2 trillion worth of money in the last package they passed. And then the president's not going to allow an independent inspector general to look at where the money's going.
00:20:35
Speaker
Like, okay, now it's not necessarily a conspiracy, but I could see one leading like, that's a lot of money to have power over or not have any oversight whatsoever. You're certainly breaking some basic democratic ground rules that you're just, oh, here's some money. I can do whatever I want with it. I mean, that's not right. The next one, the deep state is embedded and controls the government. 43% say yes.
00:21:02
Speaker
Now, of course, the question that we always have to ask is, what do we mean by the deep state? And what do people take the deep state to mean when this question is asked? So that's a really good question. And what we wind up bumping into is like survey methodology on top of what you and I both know about conspiracy theories is that there's an infinite number of theories out there and all sorts of different permutations and
00:21:30
Speaker
You know, so a lot of times what I try to do with my survey question is ask very general questions that sort of people can say yes, even if they have a different version than someone else. So for example, the Kennedy question is like, do you believe there was a conspiracy or a coverup? And that's why you get really high numbers, but among the, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70% that say yes to that, they all have a different idea of what happened.
00:21:58
Speaker
So in this case, you could have some people with a more mild view. Like I've heard academics make arguments like, yes, there is a deep state. We know who they are. They're civil servants. They have jobs. They'll be there longer than the president. And they're a force for good. And they should be there.
00:22:16
Speaker
So that I mean, that's one way to think about it. But I think most people when they hear the term deep state, they have more of a Oliver Stone view of the deep state. It's a case of Beck into the lift. Yeah, into the kind of deep state that Jim Garrison was particularly concerned with. Exactly. We're doing you know, where you'd be talking about the smoking man from the axe files that sort of deep state.
00:22:42
Speaker
Although I do think it would actually be interesting to do some surveys to try and elicit exactly what people think the Deep State is, and see whether the meaning changes from one class of individuals to another.
00:22:57
Speaker
That's sort of neat, because I guess I could ask these questions and then say something along lines of, well, you answered yes. What do you mean? Or what comes to your mind when we say deep state or something like that? Or maybe have a range of examples and then get them to endorse whether they think that's an example of a deep state activity. Mm. Dangers of 5G are being covered up 26%.
00:23:25
Speaker
That is a significant part of the population, and that part of the population now is very fond of burning down cell phone towers, particularly in the UK it seems.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's a bunch of countries in the EU, too, where that's happening. And luckily, I don't think 26% of Americans are burning down cell towers. I don't think that's happened here yet. But this is, again, one of those beliefs that we see over and over again throughout history, where you have new technology come in, and then people are immediately apprehensive of it and think that there are
00:24:01
Speaker
hidden dangers. I follow a Twitter account called The Pessimist Archive, and they go through 100-year-old newspapers to find people warning us about things that are very mundane now. And one of the things they've been pulling out articles about are artificial ice. You know, so people who have been making
00:24:21
Speaker
you know, making that newfangled ice in their newfangled icebox refrigerator. We're saying that that's not natural. That's not good for you. You don't want that you should have the real ice from the lake. But in fact, that's no, no, Joe, let me point out to you, the advent of artificial ice occurred before the Second World War. So episode factor, artificial ice not only caused the Second World War, but is also the reason why we now have atomic weaponry. Yeah.
00:24:49
Speaker
I mean, you actually find the examples of this going back to the ancient world. So the advent of literacy in the ancient world or the idea of writing was associated with people saying, well, that's the end of civilization. Once people start writing down, storytelling will end and people will never leave their homes. It does turn out the advent of new technologies do tend to be associated with, with, with, I better say procrastination, prognostications of doom and gloom.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you go back a hundred years and you have people writing newspaper articles saying people should read less. It's bad for kids to read so much. And they're reading these novels and books and that's awful. And now they're in front of the screen and kids say, why can't they just read books? And now the virus happened and now parents are like, thank God we have screens for them to watch.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yes, I think a lot of people are suddenly realizing just how useful technology is for keeping children occupied during the day when you have to work at home. Yeah. The dangers of, oh, school shootings are false flags meant to take away our gun rights, 17%.
00:25:58
Speaker
I mean, let's say that is a uniquely American proposition, I have to say, because we we don't really seem to have worries about school shootings in other countries, mostly because we don't have school shootings in other countries. Well, you did have it. You did have one. You had the Christchurch shooting there. Oh, yes. And that did mean that our country suddenly was a world leader in mass shootings. But also it's really the first one we've had since 1987.
00:26:25
Speaker
Was there any conspiracy theories that took root around that? There's a lot of white nationalist conspiracy theories that the government was the real orchestrator of the attack. The terrorists in question isn't really a proper white nationalist. The government is colluding with Muslims to enable Sharia law in the country. There were a lot of conspiracy theories that emerged afterwards.
00:26:52
Speaker
I would like to say a lot of them haven't taken root, but a little bit like when you look at the survey data about American attitudes towards Islam just after 9-11 and then long term. We actually had a moment of actually
00:27:08
Speaker
not every Muslim is bad, this is just a case of a few bad apples, and then as time passed you went back to heavy anti-Muslim sentiment. It does seem that that honeymoon period after the mosque attacks where the people of New Zealand went, we should really form solidarity with Muslims, didn't last as long as maybe we'd like to think.
00:27:37
Speaker
Rothschilds control the government, or they control governments and wars, 29%.
00:27:44
Speaker
So did you ask a specific question about the Jews being in control? Because it'd be quite curious to see what the correlate between that one and the Rothschilds claim is, given that Rothschilds is often synonymous with the Jewish cabal. I did ask it in this survey in a different way, and it was part of an experiment. So I don't have the results for that. But in this data I have for you now, I did ask if people believe that the number
00:28:11
Speaker
of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust has been exaggerated for political purposes. Yeah, and what was that number? 15%. Okay, interesting. So yeah, so the because the Rothschild's claim is often taken to be in a form of crypto anti-Semitism rather than saying the Jews will now use a prominent Jewish financier family instead. I should look at that to see what the correlation is between Rothschild beliefs and the Holocaust belief.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, we'd be quite curious to see whether you get exactly the same result if you ask the Jews control the world. JFK killed by a conspiracy 44%. And that's actually down from where it's been for decades, which is closer to 80%. It's been on a steady, it's been on a steady decline for about 20 years.
00:29:03
Speaker
Do you think that in part just because it's now such ancient history that people, the people who did care basically are dying? I don't know. I mean, I guess I could, I should go in and look at the age distribution of this and sort of look at it because maybe it's cycling out, you know, maybe sort of like Freemason fears. Like if you were alive in 1830, then you were probably freaked out by the Freemasons. But, you know, people nowadays are like, eh,
00:29:32
Speaker
Also, if you were alive in the 1830s and are listening to this podcast, please do get in contact. We'd love to hear from you. Yeah. Joe wants to poll you on what the Security Theory believes.
00:29:46
Speaker
We want to know what you think about the Freemasons. Business. OK, so here's here's the one that gets to the New Zealand shooting. Businesses are attempting to replace workers. Well, I think we said businesses and governments are trying to replace domestic workers with foreign cheaper foreign labor. Oh, yes.
Economic and Historical Conspiracies
00:30:07
Speaker
The so-called immigration is destroying our society hypothesis.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, and we got 29% on that too. And that tends to lean a little more right. Yeah. That leads a little more to the right. That does seem to appeal to Trump's base. But weekly though, and that's the interesting thing is that you would think that all of this anti-immigrant sentiment is out on the right. It's really not. And the interesting thing is if you look at elite rhetoric around immigration, I mean, you'll have people like Trump who are like, let's stop immigration.
00:30:39
Speaker
But you don't have strong voices on the left saying we want more immigration, not in this country anymore. There are strong voices on the left who say we should be nice to immigrants, and we don't want them locked in cages. But you don't have a strong movement saying we want largely open borders or more immigration or anything like that.
00:31:01
Speaker
Um, it's, it's just not, it's just not there. And, you know, some of the rhetoric from people like Clinton and Sanders was like, you know, we don't want open borders. You know, that's crazy. Yeah. There has been quite a lot of discussion about left wing politics in the last decade or so about the, the growth of anti-immigrant and the kind of move away from the internationalist perspective of socialism on the left that
00:31:29
Speaker
the left is either adopting things that have worked well for the right, so the Overton window has moved in a particular way and the left is adopting that, or the left is kind of losing its notion that it's meant to be a solidarity of all people in all places. So yeah, that is quite fascinating that only weekly is towards a people on the right in your survey data.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, slightly towards the right, but again, I've asked a lot of immigration questions in the past, and it's excused right, but the left is not without guilt here. Humans have made contact with aliens, 33%. So we got one in three Americans. Is that up or down? This is higher than other polls that I've seen, because I've seen 25%, but 33 is higher than I've seen.
00:32:23
Speaker
And that skews just a tiny, tiny bit to the left, and higher than I've seen in the past. The US tends to be the highest country that I've seen data from anyway with alien beliefs. You do have a lot of TV shows about ancient aliens and the like. So yeah, you do seem to have slightly more interest in that, even though
00:32:45
Speaker
Technically, most of your talking heads about it come from Europe, your Eric von Danekens and the like, a European export who have kind of been rejected in their home countries and found roost in the US. Yeah, I mean, there's a good market for that here. I mean, if you're going to be an alien conspiracy theorist, the US is the place to do it. The second best place would be Argentina, because they
00:33:13
Speaker
The poll I saw on them had 24%. So they were just right behind the Americans. I hang out with a lot of Argentinians here in Miami. I was at a dinner party with some, and I said, can you tell me why so many Argentinians believe in alien conspiracy theories? And they said, oh, we'll tell you. And I was expecting to get some sociological answer. And they said, because the Vatican has a secret alien landing spot in the northern mountains of the country. And I'm like, oh.
00:33:40
Speaker
Okay. So the answer is because they're real. Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, that is a good reason to believe that they've had contact with humankind. Yeah. I mean, if the Vatican is running an air base for them, then certainly age was created and spread on purpose 22%. That's actually higher than I've, than I've seen before or in other countries. And so that given that it doesn't shock me that people would think that COVID was being created and spread on purpose either.
00:34:10
Speaker
And that's, you know, I'm sort of wondering why people would think that at this point, because, you know, you have to take a pill for it. But when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was a death, you know, it was like the scariest thing for everybody. Now it's like you could take drugs to prep you to keep you from getting it, or you could take drugs if you do catch it that largely, you know, renders it almost
00:34:33
Speaker
the tests won't even pick it up at this point. So I mean, I remember ads in the 80s when I was a child about the AIDS epidemic in New Zealand. And those ads were absolutely frightening. So it was a case of look, you, you do not want to get this you are going to your if you if you develop if you get HIV, you'll develop AIDS and you will die.
00:34:56
Speaker
And yes, now we have drugs which get the viral load down to an undetectable level and people live long and natural lives. Um, dangers of vaccines are being hidden by pharmaceutical companies and the government, 30%. So almost, no, excuse me, 30%. Yeah, almost one in three. Um, even on both sides of the, of the political aisle here in the US. Any comment on that?
00:35:22
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's going to have a huge amount of effect of what happens if a COVID-19 vaccine is generated, isn't it? I mean, I'm interested in this for the sheer fact that anti-vax beliefs in Aotearoa, New Zealand are not particularly common, but they are actually quite common in our neighbour of Australia. So Australia has a very large anti-vaccination conspiracy theory community.
00:35:51
Speaker
and it is kind of fascinating to compare two countries which are in many respects very much the same. So we're settled at around about the same time by the British Empire, we've got the same kind of democratic structures, we have
00:36:07
Speaker
basically the same kind of population, so dominant white population, minority indigenous population, a different immigrant populations living in different parts of the country. And yet somehow anti vaccination beliefs are remarkably high in Australia and not particularly high here. And I've always been curious to know, how did we either dodge a bullet or why does Australia act in that particular way?
00:36:35
Speaker
They have high anti-climate denial too in Australia. They do, yes. And that's in part because Australia has a lot of natural resources that require heavy industry for extraction thereof, whether it be coal or uranium in the north of Australia. And basically Australia's entire economy is based around exporting those resources overseas.
00:37:04
Speaker
So it kind of makes political sense that you don't want to really espouse belief that the climate is changing because that might mean you have to change the very basis of your economy. Yeah. Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to conceal what he knows of his his operations.
High-Profile Cases and Public Speculations
00:37:24
Speaker
This is conspiracy theory that I've got a cute interest in, because as listeners to this podcast will know, and as your students will know, there was meant to be a big conference in Miami on conspiracy theories about three weeks ago.
00:37:41
Speaker
And I've been in correspondence with a variety of our different colleagues around the place. And some think there's absolutely nothing to the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories whatsoever. Others are, well, you know, his death is really suspicious. We should at least entertain it. And a few of them are, no, he was definitely killed by the the Deep State. And I think
00:38:03
Speaker
That was going to be a big issue at the conference. I'm not a big issues with people having no fisticuffs, but I think there were going to be some really interesting discussions of, so why did you think he was killed? Well, why did you think he died naturally? And there would have been some, Oh, I don't, I didn't realize you did or didn't believe this particular claim. So I think that could have been a very interesting sociological experiment to see how our community divides in that particular way.
00:38:33
Speaker
Now, that is true. I mean, a lot of journalists that talk to me, they always call me about conspiracy theories and they never believe them. But this one, they actually, they're like, well, there's good reason to buy into this one. And not to endorse the conspiracy theory, but given the structural failures of your prison system in the US, leading to things like broken cameras, recordings not being kept, etc, etc.
00:38:58
Speaker
It's a pretty suspicious tale. I mean, I don't think it actually turns out to be that suspicious when you look at the prison system in the US and the systemic failures across the board. But the isolated tale of the death of Jeffrey Epstein in this case of surely surely you'd make some effort when you're guarding this high profile prisoner because surely you must be aware that if he dies mysteriously, people are going to start making some really bold claims about
00:39:28
Speaker
Well, well, here's the thing. It's it's sort of like the Kennedy theories in the sense that everyone can choose their own adventure. Right. So that's why we get this actually came out higher than Kennedy. This is 50 percent. And I think when I pulled my class about this earlier in the semester,
00:39:46
Speaker
I think we got 60 or 70% who believed that he was murdered. And the college Republican group on our campus, they put out a big recruitment poster that said Epstein didn't kill himself. Come to the young Republicans meeting or something like that. So it's sort of a meme for young people now.
00:40:06
Speaker
That's also an interesting selection pressure for people who might decide to join the young Republicans as well. You certainly get a whole bunch of Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theorists entering the Republicans in 2019-2020.
00:40:22
Speaker
who then go on to be prominent members of the Republican party in 10 to 15 years time, at which point under the presidency of Paris Hilton, I'm to say she'll be a president at some point, they have an open inquiry into the cover-up of the death of Jeffrey Epstein by the Trump administration.
00:40:43
Speaker
Makes makes perfect sense. Yeah. Dangers of GMOs are being covered up 45%. So another lot of people buy into this, they all shop at Whole Foods over here. I don't know if you're familiar with Whole Foods. I've I've been to a Whole Foods. They've got a great selection of beer. Yeah, and they have they have in every aisle, they have a number that tells you the number of non GMO items in each aisle.
00:41:07
Speaker
That's the one that's owned by Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who decided to start a charity to combat COVID-19 and asked for the public to give donations to it. That Jeff Bezos. He's not the one making the genetically modified food, though. But he does profit quite handily, I'm sure, from selling stuff that is non-GMO.
00:41:35
Speaker
So, because you go to Whole Foods and it's like, oh, want a carrot? Oh, 15 bucks.
00:41:41
Speaker
That's, I mean, if a carrot cost me 15 bucks, I need to do more than simply feed me. I also need it to be useful for, say, traveling through time. Yeah, there is. OK, so here's a more generic statement. So a single group of there's a single group of people who controls all major world events.
Climate Change and Political Allegiances
00:42:02
Speaker
Thirty five percent climate change is a hoax. Twenty two percent. And that skews, again, heavily to the right.
00:42:09
Speaker
you know the reason being that that's almost an official position of the republican party i think nope has that gone down at all in recent polling given the kind of weather events and climate change that seemed to be demonstrable i want to say yes but i think that the numbers this has been polled a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways and the numbers are all over the place but they're always between 20 and 45 i think
00:42:36
Speaker
Some tend to run higher at the high range of that, some are at the low range of that. But I've done this one a couple times now. I'm getting in the low to mid-20s. So about one in four, one in five Americans think that this is a conspiracy. So that tends to skew heavily right. But you do find some left-wing climate change deniers, too. They're just fewer and far between.
00:43:03
Speaker
Yes, yes. I mean, you get the left-wing climate change deniers who think that either the issue is being exaggerated, often for corporates to be able to virtue signal about what they're doing to help the environment, or they tend to be skeptical of science in general, so it just falls out. They're skeptical of any scientific claim the climate is changing.
00:43:29
Speaker
Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. 37 percent of Americans agreed. It's a 0.5 correlation with partisanship, so that's really strong. It's almost all independents and Democrats buying into that. I would have thought that this would have dipped considerably since the Mueller Report came out.
00:43:54
Speaker
And I could see people more buying into the idea that Trump obstructed justice in some ways, not in the way that he would be covering up collusion with Russia, but just obstructed. But a lot of people holding on to this Russian thing. Could that in part be an artifact of this is an election year?
00:44:19
Speaker
It could be, but I had almost, I think I had a very similar number last summer too. Oh, okay. And that was about four or five months after the Mueller report came out. And the media had sort of abandoned the Russia thing largely after that, or at least the news did. I mean, it still pops up all the time in political comedy and comedies like that, but it's not a news thing like it was.
00:44:46
Speaker
I guess it doesn't help that Trump still talks about it a lot. So there was a series of tweets either yesterday or today where he was asking that the, and this is one of these things where a New Zealand accent won't get this through properly, so spell it out. He's asking for the Nobel committee to take back all the journalism prizes given to people who covered the collusion scandal scam.
00:45:10
Speaker
but he's writing about the N-O-B-L-E committee, the Nobel committee, as opposed to the Nobel committee. And this is a spelling mistake that occurs over the course of three tweets. So it's not a one-off, he got it wrong in one tweet. He's really concerned about the Nobel committee, not the Nobel committee awarding prizes about the scam. And he's pressuring the Nobel committee to retract those prizes almost immediately, which of course, because they don't exist,
00:45:40
Speaker
but either have already done or can never do. That does bring up an interesting question because there was a lot of coverage of this and all of it was like mouse frosting and mouse frothing, not frosting. That's a completely different visual image, which I'm still trying to pass. Yeah, it's just...
00:46:06
Speaker
Right after the Mueller Report came out, a bunch of people put together YouTube videos of clips of all the cable news from the past two years, and they just showed how many times they said the word bombshell. It's a bombshell, bombshell, bombshell, game changer, bombshell. This is the beginning of the end. This is the beginning of the end, over and over and over again. And it turned out they spent millions and millions of dollars, had a long-running open investigation, and didn't find it.
00:46:33
Speaker
And there were journalists who were coming out saying, Trump's a Russian asset before the Mueller Report. And then afterwards, they say, I've only doubled down on my belief that Trump is a Russian asset. And it's just like,
00:46:46
Speaker
You know last week you were saying in Mueller retrust and now you're just gonna believe whatever you want Anyway, so speaking of which we did ask directly is Trump a Russian asset and we got 37% So again, probably most of the same people buying into that to put the shoe on the other foot We asked people did Clint Hillary Clinton provide Russia? with nuclear materials illegally now this was part of the uranium one and
00:47:13
Speaker
Depending on what side you're on, the Uranium One scandal or the Uranium One, you know, made up whatever it is thing. So 28%. And that's, again, largely Republicans buying into that one. Did you ask any questions about Benghazi? Because that was a really major story for such a long time. And now it's completely disappeared. I did not. I didn't do it this time. I should have. But I'll add that in on the next one.
00:47:41
Speaker
Because this was a little bit more recent because that was like 2012 and this was just last year. But that was largely just people who watched Hannity on Fox News would have been exposed to that. Republicans stole the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections. 27%, mostly Republicans buying into that one. Interesting.
00:48:05
Speaker
I've polled that about just the 2000 election in Florida, because that's a big thing for us. And we got about 30 some odd percent buying in, but again, mostly people on the left.
00:48:16
Speaker
So I mean, that's the thing, any election you lose. It was Florida who introduced us to the notion of the hanging Chad, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, any election you lose, you're going to wind up with people thinking that they were cheated because no one wants to look into the mirror and say, geez, maybe our candidate wasn't that great. Maybe our party has some crappy ideas that no one likes, or maybe we didn't volunteer and get out, get out the vote as much as we should have.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah, so this has been a frequent issue with elections both here and in Australia, in that whenever one of the two major political parties loses the election, they're much more likely to blame the voting public for why they lost the election, rather than the campaign they actually ran. So you'll get these situations. And so the most recent Australian election, where it was actually kind of thought that Labour were going to win, and the coalition was going to be turfed out.
00:49:11
Speaker
then polling day occurred and the coalition wins a very strong victory and Labour looks very very bad and Labour's response wasn't maybe we chose the wrong leader maybe the kind of policy platform that we ran upon was bad maybe we shouldn't have it being appeared to agreeing with the government on almost everything but saying vote for us instead they went no look
00:49:34
Speaker
We gave it our best shot, and you didn't vote for us, so no more playing Mr Nice Guy. Almost of the party was rejecting the voting public. We will find other people to vote for us. In case of, no you won't. The population is the population. You can't just go find another nation to vote for you instead.
00:49:57
Speaker
I mean, it would be neat if parties, you know, sort of came down on the voters more. Like the day after the election, the losers came out and said, well, we ran a good race. We have great ideas. It's just these idiot voters all pick the wrong thing. These voters can't be trusted. We're going to find better voters next time.
00:50:15
Speaker
Which, of course, actually, that fits in nicely with the anti-immigration conspiracy theories, of course, because you might think that governments are bringing in sympathetic voters from overseas to stack the polling boxes.
00:50:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the issue here is that you have a lot of Republicans who say, oh, you know, the Democrats are all in favor of open borders because they want more Democratic voters. But it just Democrats really aren't that favor of open borders. So final one, Barack Obama faked his citizenship to illegally usurp the presidency. Oh, right. So what what's that at these days? Still hanging in there. One in five, 20 percent buying in and largely people on the right.
00:51:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it got close to 30 um, oh eight oh nine ten eleven twelve, um, but It's it hasn't expanded outside of that part So I don't think I pulled on nine. I didn't pull nine eleven this time I've pulled it before but nine eleven's been going up for the last couple of years because it's lost its partisan valence so it used to be exclusively on the left because it was really a an attack on the bush administration to say oh they
00:51:29
Speaker
either knowingly allowed it to happen or they were behind it. But now it's not really a partisan thing because most Americans don't know who George W. Bush is anymore and this is 20 years in the past at this point. So it's less partisan and more sort of like the Kennedy thing where it's like, who do you think did it? Oh, it's the CIA. It was the, you know, whoever.
00:51:52
Speaker
So the other issue there too is that Trump sort of flirted with 9-11 truth theories too. So that number's come up largely because Republicans have been buying into that more and more. And I think that'll max maybe 30, 35, 40% as we go forward.
00:52:10
Speaker
maybe for the next 30 or 40, 50 years even, before it comes back down. The birther thing, because it's specifically about Obama, who is clearly leader of the Democratic Party, I don't think that'll ever get past 25%, but it's probably on its way down as history keeps moving forward.
00:52:31
Speaker
I mean, it might be interesting to see if that gets affected by how prominent a role Obama plays as an endorser in the presidential election later on this year. So if the Biden campaign is kind of resting on Obama endorsements for this, that and the other, so Obama appears in ads all the time.
00:52:52
Speaker
people who are suspicious about Obama's citizenship, that I can imagine those people suddenly becoming kind of reactivated and starting to agitate about. I mean, he was an illegitimate president, and now he's using his illegitimate powers to make another person president.
00:53:10
Speaker
That's exactly what it'll be. Because I remember at that time in 0809, it became a thing. I mean, you had some fairly prominent Republicans, not all of them. So people acted like, oh, the entire Republican Party believes this. And that wasn't true at all, ever.
00:53:29
Speaker
Is if all senate republicans or something bought into it too and that wasn't happening either it was but but there were some people buying in particularly lower level less less known people but it was becoming a thing and there were books getting published on this and So it was palpable and there was the people who believe this were actually really really frightened like oh my god We've been taken over by some Manchurian candidate
00:53:55
Speaker
Luckily, that turned out not to be true. But I think, you know, people aren't going to give up their beliefs that easily. No, no, I mean, the story of the Obama presidency is quite a fascinating one without having to bring in the whole citizenship thing, given he came in on the promise of change, and then just turned out to be a fairly standard democratic president nonetheless.
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I it's, you know, Democrats are not my cup of tea. I'm a libertarian. I think he did the things he did good. I think he could have done better. And, you know, and then everything else that he did, I hate. That's going to be the same for any president.
00:54:38
Speaker
But I think the people who, you see this now, and you saw it during the Bush administration, you know, people with just derangement syndrome, like no matter what Bush did in the last four years of his, you know, three or four years of his presidency, Democrats were just going bonkers, just ripping their eyeballs out.
00:54:58
Speaker
And then it started happening with Republicans. Once Obama came into office, it was the Republicans. No matter what Obama did, it was some scheme to do whatever and he was gonna be president as a dictator for the rest of his life and bring us under one world rule. And then now that's going on with Trump too, where everything Trump does is some sort of secret scheme. But the interesting thing here is that unlike with Obama,
00:55:26
Speaker
both for George W. Bush and Trump, the thinking on it sort of goes in two completely different directions. One is they're complete idiots who can't do anything right, totally incompetent. And on the other hand, they're master conspirators at the exact same time, which doesn't really make sense, you know, but
00:55:50
Speaker
That's there. So it's, it's just, it's just the case. I think in this country, maybe they ought to bring the term limit down to one term because people just lose their minds. Once the president goes into the second term, if Trump wins again, I mean, the left is just going to be, I mean, I saw what was happening. People were marching in the streets and going crazy when he won in 2016 to win a second term. I mean, I have a feeling that things will get very ugly.
00:56:16
Speaker
I mean, especially if he then announces he's going to run for a third term. I know that he hasn't technically announced that, but there are so many situations where he's almost got quite close to going, I think I deserve a third term. Oh, he's had his supporters. Like, and I don't mean like supporters like off the street. I'm talking about like former governors, like Republican people like, oh, he should be given an extra term because of the impeachment.
00:56:44
Speaker
I'm like, what? How does that work? And they're like, it's in the Constitution, though. I'm like, not any copy I've ever seen. I don't know where that is. Yeah, it does seem that for a country which is very heavily reliant on the Constitution, a lot of people claim to be constitutional scholars who have obviously never read the Constitution at all, but assume that what they believe is codified somewhere in that really spidery prose.
00:57:12
Speaker
Yeah. And I think what's even worse than that is everybody wants their constitutional rights for themselves, but not for that guy over there.
00:57:24
Speaker
like uh you know so it's they don't see it as universal they see it as oh i have special rights granted to me oh but that sort of speech no not for that so yeah sometimes i think it's probably easier to not read the constitution and assume that what you believe is in it then they read the constitution and go oh i mean he obliged to this particular thing well i'm not happy with that
00:57:49
Speaker
You mean my religion can't control everything in this country? I'm sorry, Joe, but it can't. I have to make room for other people's beliefs. Oh. I mean, I believe Jefferson's copy of the Koran is in the Washington DC library. I mean, it does seem the founding fathers may have been Deist or Christians, but they seem to think that maybe that shouldn't be the deciding religion of the country you're in.
00:58:18
Speaker
Yeah, well. But that doesn't appear to be the attitude of the modern Republican Party or indeed parts of the Democratic Party either. Yeah, I mean, my senator down here just tweets. He's either tweeting videos of himself driving his truck around or Bible verses. And like like Bible verses, you don't even know what they what he's referring to or what they mean.
00:58:45
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, basically, for those of us who live outside the US, most of what most of our response to what's going on there at the moment is, yeah.
00:58:57
Speaker
Yeah. So you'll be doing more polling on this in the coming months.
Future Research and Speculative Theories
00:59:05
Speaker
What are you going to be looking at? So I'm going to be doing some of these questions and I'll be adding, I'm going to be focusing more on coronavirus. So looking at different ways that people are thinking about it, particularly in terms of conspiracy theories and maybe some misinformed beliefs that they have and then asking more about their coronavirus related behaviors too.
00:59:25
Speaker
So there's a really good paper out. It hasn't been peer reviewed yet, but it is available on Google Scholar by Imhoff and Lamberti.
00:59:34
Speaker
I think you know both of them, and they say that the two, so the two conspiracy theories I pulled on, that if the threat's exaggerated or that's some sort of bioweapon, that those are leading to different forms of behavior. So if you think it's exaggerated, you're not engaging in best practices like hand washing and social distancing. If you think it's a bioweapon, you're going overboard and are potentially hoarding and doing more self-centered
01:00:04
Speaker
peers that aren't good either. So if you hold either belief, you're potentially, you know, getting away from a more, a more moderate behavioral stance. That also does raise the interesting question you might want to think about asking about with a
01:00:22
Speaker
deaths and infections are being underreported because that appears to be a story coming out from a lot of places that a lot of people are sorry a lot of people a lot of countries either initially underreported infections and underreported initial deaths or
01:00:40
Speaker
are using dodgy accounting practices. So for example, I can't remember which nation it is, is not counting people in rest homes who die of COVID-19, they're only counting people from a particular age range, which thus makes their death telly look a lot smaller, and thus looks like they're doing better. But if you take in the data from elsewhere cases, no, actually, the situation looks a lot worse.
01:01:06
Speaker
So yeah, it might be interesting to see whether there are conspiracy theories or coverups about the true toll. I think that's going on here. I think there's a lot of people who think that the numbers are being jacked up and there was there's even this movement here to send people to the to go and film their hospitals because they were saying there aren't really any coronavirus patients at the hospitals and I'm don't go to the hospital.
01:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, we've got an opinion piece writer here who's going, well, look, the ICU beds and all of our major hospitals are empty. Obviously, that means the lockdown was unnecessary. And then the epidemiologists are going, no, no, the reason why the ICU beds are empty is because the lockdown has worked and we haven't swamped our healthcare system. You can't use post facto reasoning to then say the lockdown was bad. If the predictable result of the lockdown
01:01:56
Speaker
are empty bids in ICUs anyway. Well, I'll be looking at that and I think that's all I got for you for now.
01:02:08
Speaker
Well, we'll be checking in on you in a few months' time, if indeed the world exists in a few months' time. I mean, my concern now is not that we'll be wiped out by COVID-19, but because we're so focused now on this particular thing, those aliens who are in charge of the world government, they're finally going to make their move. Well, hopefully they reset the simulation to 2015 and just rerun this thing again.
01:02:32
Speaker
That would be interesting. I mean, that would be, I mean, if they, if we had to go through the Trump presidency, well, sorry, the election campaign of the Trump presidency again, be quite curious to know what, what factors they might change to lead to either the same outcome or a completely different one. Well, thank you, Joe. It has been absolute pleasure and we'll talk again soon. Thank you. Always a pleasure.
01:03:02
Speaker
So Josh, I would ask for your opinion on that interview, but that actually literally is our bonus content this week. Yes, yes. We thought A, I mean, the interviews are a decent length, so we don't want to make... 54 minutes. So we don't want to make this episode go on any longer. And also now normally...
01:03:19
Speaker
Our patron bonus episodes are fairly news content oriented except for in the last week of the month when we do something a little bit special because the main episode will be news oriented. This is the last week of the month but it wasn't a regular news episode but we thought we should do something non-newsy
01:03:36
Speaker
for our patrons, given that we cheaped out of doing newsy stuff in the main episode. So the patron bonus episode this week will basically be our impressions of the interview, a little bit of, what do you call it, a bit of an autopsy, a bit of a post-mortem on the interview perhaps.
01:03:53
Speaker
I like the way you went to autopsy first and post-mortem. I mean, it's technically a post-mortem is an autopsy, just that we don't tend to refer to an analysis of a talk as being an autopsy. We do tend to, in the academic world, talk about that as being more of a post-mortem. But you know, you went right down to, yep, let's get out the scalpels. Let's dig into the corpse of that interview and see if there's anything left to build our Frankenstein monster out of.
01:04:20
Speaker
Autopsies are always on my mind. Ever since I saw the movie Sahara in which Penelope Cruz says the word autopsy in a Spanish accent and it is quite frankly the sexiest thing I have ever heard. I made you watch that film. Did you? Yeah, I was the one who suggested we go to see that in the cinema.
01:04:39
Speaker
Well, it made my life better. Anyway, so we're done for the main part of the episode. Patrons hang around for a bit of autopsy slash post-modern post-mortem. Post-modern post-mortem. I assume I'm actually quite curious to know what that would or would not look like. Well, you'll find out in a minute. I think our podcast could be quite happily described as a post-modern post-mortem.
01:05:07
Speaker
And I don't know whether that's about conspiracy theory in general or just the state of our careers at this particular point in time.
01:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, it could go either way. And of course, the usual notice that if you want to become one of our patrons and get access to these bonus episodes and also to our Discord server. To listen to the autopsy of Joe Yusinski live on the show. Go to Patreon and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Or go to conspiracism.podbean.com, which is where this podcast is officially hosted and they have a patronage system there as well.
01:05:41
Speaker
Um, and I believe that is all we have to say to you this week. Once again, as I said last week, that's Murder She Wrote. Hmm, and it's sure, well, that's why there's the post-mortem, I guess. Touche. Goodbye. Toodle-poo!
01:06:05
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded, and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:07:06
Speaker
And remember, Soylent Green is Meeples.