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2022 in Review
29 Plays2 years ago
It's the end of the year, so it's a year in review episode, just like every other podcast does! We're not proud.
—
On Twitter, Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism
On Mastodon, M is @conspiracism@scholar.social and Josh is @monkeyfluids@mstdn.social
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Banter
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dentuth. Hello, Merry Christmas, seasons, greetings and all of that business. It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China. We have Associate Professor of Philosophy coming out of retirement for one last job. It's Dr. Em, R.X. at Dentuth.
00:00:32
Speaker
Yeah, I have to tell you, I did that one last job just a few minutes ago. That's good. I hope you flushed. Let's just say all my problems are floating away.
00:00:46
Speaker
Ah, good bit of scatological humor. That's what we want to end the year on.
End-of-Year Reflections and Episode Plan
00:00:51
Speaker
And what a year it's been, Joshua. What a year it's been. It's had its highs, it's had its lows, it's had Mondays and Tuesdays, the occasional Wednesday, one or two Thursdays, virtually no Fridays for some reason, and a dearth of Saturdays and Sundays. But 12 good honest months.
00:01:12
Speaker
Can't deny that. Well, I mean, good 12 official honest month. There is, of course, the sneaky 13th month that we never talk about. No, no, it knows what it did. Well, look, so it's the end of the year and the only thing one could do at the end of the year is an end of the year episode where we look back on the previous year.
00:01:31
Speaker
See, I was really hoping it was going to be an end of the year review and then I was going to make a joke of thinking that was review as an R-E-V-U-E as opposed to R-A-V-I-E-W and I was going to burst into song and then you were going, no, it's not that kind of review and like, oh, I'm finished here. It is that kind of review. And there would have been a whole comic routine about reviews. It would have been quite Marxian in a Marx Brothers way, as opposed to Karl Marx, who I don't think is particularly well known for his sense of humor.
00:02:02
Speaker
Not that I've heard of, but don't pretend like you need an excuse to burst into song for any occasion, any moment. We all know it's going to happen. Just let it happen. Probably already has.
00:02:21
Speaker
So now I say, like, do we even need to play a sting? It's not a real episode. It's an end-of-the-year episode. We don't have a sting there. And because of VPN-related issues, I am without any notes, and thus have no memory of what's happened over the course of this year. So I'm going to sit back and go, oh, really? Uh-huh. Curious. Well, I mean, that episode can't have happened, really. Oh.
00:02:47
Speaker
Well, let's see. Actually, I've actually just used up all of my reactions now, so I'll just be silent for the rest of the episode. Works for me. You know, it's lucky for you then that I do have access to my notes, and I've written down every single episode that we did this year, 44 of them, this being the 45th.
Review of Key Episodes from the Year
00:03:07
Speaker
We've done regular episodes. This is the Donald Trump episode, the 45th. Oh, 45 could be. I'm not sure what that means.
00:03:17
Speaker
I don't either. And I'm horrified to find out. We'll just have to see where the episode takes us. Now we've had what the conspiracies we've had back to the conspiracies. We've had conspiracy theory, masterpiece, theatresis. We've had interview. You've had interviews. Almost interesting. So I don't know. Where should we start? Just a rundown of the of the good old fashioned podcast as guide to the conspiracy classic episodes, you might call them.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yes, the original, the old flavour. Yes, old school. So I don't know if you recall the first episode we did this year was talking about the Lovecraft Investigations podcast. I do recall that because it was our hypothetical season four of the Lovecraft Investigations because it did actually strike me as rather unusual that they did
00:04:08
Speaker
end the series on a bit of a cliffhanger and then didn't do anything with it yeah yeah when they they could have if they'd put a mind to it but i don't know so but then again it was getting a little bit convoluted towards the end so maybe it's wise they stopped when they did because it was varying less towards the lovecraft end and more towards an occult thriller end and i have no issue with an occult thriller
00:04:36
Speaker
but it did seem that they were really shoehorning the Lovecraftian stuff into the last season when it fitted much more naturally in seasons one and two. Yes, but at least it stayed nice and conspiratorial all the way through, so we had an excuse for devoting an entire episode to it. Yes, with a pitch by both of us as to how we think that season four would have gone. Indeed, so go back and listen to it, I guess, if you're interested.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yes, Julian Simpson, if you're listening to this episode and you want to know how we would have written your hypothetical suit, season four, go back and listen to it.
00:05:11
Speaker
I can only assume they are. Now the next regular episode was the one that I demanded, the one that you had basically no say in whatsoever, but I had decided that because it was our 350th episode, we had to make a reference to a 20 year old South Park episode where the Loch Ness Monster keeps asking people for 350. And so episode 350 was about the Loch Ness Monster. George, how long ago was that original episode of South Park?
00:05:39
Speaker
I think it was 99, so it'll be about 23 years ago? 23 years. A joke? 23 years in the making. Was it worth waiting 23 years? A joke possibly older than some of our... Yes! Yes, I regret nothing. I would do that episode all over again if I could, but I can't. Well Josh, the only time you can do the episode again is when we get to episode 3500.
00:06:03
Speaker
Mm, yes, and then we'll have to do it 10 times. Ah, what else did we do? We, we, we... I feel like we must have done this more than once, although I think it was only for bonus episodes, but we did spend a main episode going through the usual suspects, looking at Alex Jones' website and David Icke's website and whatever other ones there were, just to see what wakiness they were up to. And I gotta say, it's usually fairly depressing, I think, when we do those. There's been pretty much new. It's just, just variations on the same, same
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, and it's this curious thing where 10 years ago when I kind of started work on, well actually no, actually it's well over 10 years since I started work on this kind of project, time gets compressed as you get older. When I started this project, when you used to go to Alex Jones' website or you went to David Ike's website, it was actually
00:06:53
Speaker
unusual and interesting and now it just seems to be the same old thing every single time. There are no new theories in the land of the Alex Jones and the David Icke and I've got a theory behind this which is as David Icke and Alex Jones have become kind of more mainstream successful in the kind of conspiracy politic that they espouse and put forward, they've settled on the narratives that keeps their audience coming back.
00:07:23
Speaker
And you see this with YouTubers. YouTubers who study the algorithm will go, well, this video and this topic doesn't work, so I'm just going to retire doing all of those and only do the videos which get the kind of the routine standard numbers. And I think Alex Jones and David Icke are looking at the SEO stuff and all of the analytic stuff and going, yeah.
00:07:45
Speaker
I know what sells product because Alex Jones is very much a man who wants to sell you his brain force ultra pills. And David Icke wants you to subscribe to the David Icke dot connector. And so they've kind of solidified on a platform. And it's just not a very interesting platform, but it's obviously a platform that keeps certain people in that economic space of buying more goods from those people.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I assume they wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't working for them in some way. So then what do we talk about next? Oh, yes, we had an episode on conspiracy theories originating or concerning Aotearoa, New Zealand, specifically to spit in the eye of young David Farrier, who had made some comment suggesting that there weren't many New Zealand conspiracy theories. He had made some kind of claim that we had a very boring conspiratorial politic back home. And I was going, hmm.
00:08:42
Speaker
I mean, no, that's not the case, actually. Like most Western nations with a functioning democracy, there are people who claim the democracy isn't real. Like most young colonial nations, there are people who claim that the true history of the country has been hidden from us. Like most Western nations, people have some really, really weird ideas about what our political elites are doing behind closed doors.
00:09:07
Speaker
So yes, we got to have a bit of fun with that. And then actually, as it turned out, a few weeks later, when we did our next regular episode, it was New Zealand specific again, when we talked about the Maori Loan Scandal, which appeared to be, I can't remember the exact details of it, was
00:09:26
Speaker
Was it something, was the New Zealand, the Maori Loan scandal, sort of a test run for something that the CIA had already done in Australia? Or was it that the CIA did a similar thing in Australia and then it didn't work so well when they tried it out in New Zealand? Yeah, I think the latter, I think the precursor story is the CIA did something of that ilk in Australia.
00:09:47
Speaker
And then, well, we've learned an important lesson here. The important lesson they learned was apparently, don't do this kind of thing. The important lesson they learned was, do this kind of thing better. And it still didn't work particularly well, but that was the lesson they learned.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yep, so that was the CIA messing around with New Zealand's government. No, Josh, I am shocked by the idea the CIA mess around with any government. I mean, really, I mean, isn't America meant to be the kind of bastion of stability and promoting peace and tolerance in the American way? Why are they interfering in the politics of places like Australia and New Zealand? I haven't heard of the CIA interfering in other policies around the world.
00:10:27
Speaker
Doesn't sound like the sort of thing they'd do.
Exploring Conspiracies in Media and Reality
00:10:29
Speaker
No. No. Very strange. Get it happened. No. I am shocked that the American intelligence apparatus would do such a thing. Truly shocked. But anyway, the next regular episode we did was about conspiracy theories and conspiracies in fiction. For the third or fourth time, I think, we basically decided to have a bit of fun. Well, we're going to go back to again and again and again.
00:10:55
Speaker
Because we do love talking about popular culture, but we are a podcast that talks about conspiracy theories. So if you can talk about conspiracy theories and pop culture, that's that's really that's our sweet spot. Josh, I have a worry, which is I don't know that we're talking about popular culture anymore, because I think we're too old to actually know what the popular culture is. I think we're talking more about kind of nostalgia culture.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah, the popular culture of a time, which is not necessarily this time. Yes, the popular culture of people in their mid to late forties.
00:11:30
Speaker
And so that episode was actually followed immediately by a regular one when there was the shooting in Buffalo. And so we had a talk about Buffalo in particular talking about the sorts of great replacement conspiracy theories, which the Buffalo shooter espoused among many others. And then a few weeks after that, we talked about the Treaty of 1213, which was another one of sovereign citizens.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, one of those things which has been kind of sitting on the books for a while due to a email that I received from Wake Up Kiwi, the local conspiracy theory newsletter produced in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and a little bit like David Icke and Alex Jones. It's just basically repeating itself now. So it comes out every two months. And most of the articles they post links to, articles they've posted links to before. But I did think that the 1213 Treaty seemed like an interesting bit of
00:12:26
Speaker
historical reasoning going awry. But also in an unusual case of historical reasoning going awry, because we don't really hear much about things like the Magna Carta, 1066, 1213, in most of our local politicking. And yet there are all of these people who believe that they can basically win a battle in court by going, well, remember 1213, or as Alex Jones goes, 1876 will rise again.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah. And then the next one we looked at was corporate conspiracies. I think that was inspired by the release of the Uber files, talking about the various dodgy things Uber had got up to in various countries around the world. And so we talked about that and then other corporate conspiracies in general.
00:13:11
Speaker
Then we did a news episode, which was interesting. Long-time listeners will remember it used to be a regular segment. We'd have a bit of an introduction and then either a topic to talk about in the news or possibly the other way around, depending on how we're doing it. We'd say what was up in the world of conspiracy theories for the last week. Then we stopped doing that and started just doing it as the content for our bonus episodes.
00:13:35
Speaker
And then for reasons that I actually cannot recall, I think we had enough news and enough interesting news to make it worth doing an entire full episode about. And that's what we did. And that has made me recall that back in the day, we used to do three news episodes for patrons a week.
00:13:56
Speaker
A week? No, a month. No. I mean, if you think we're doing three news, I think we recorded all of our news episodes in one fell swoop and then released them week by week, get some kind of weirdly disjointed. Why are they talking about Liz Truss being the prime minister when it's received? I mean, who knows? But we used to also do once a month a special topic just for patrons, and I feel we should probably bring that back. We probably should, yes.
00:14:23
Speaker
We should remember that our patrons deserve the utmost respect and that they should get very specialised content. Not just the news, which they may be aware of themselves. They educated erudite in light of the fact the best people on earth. They probably already know the news. They're only listening to hear our comment on the news. We should also be giving them unique content. So I think we might resurrect that for 2023. The year the special episodes came back.
00:14:52
Speaker
Now, the next couple of regular episodes, we had quite a run of sort of academia, because in interspersed between the conspiracy theory masterpiece theater episodes, we had a couple of other episodes looking at academic papers. We looked at the two papers about action Zealandia that were released earlier this year. Two very similar papers about action Zealandia.
00:15:18
Speaker
they were very similar, yes, that the people had made good use of their research material. And then, of course, after that, I think immediately after that, we looked at a friend of the podcast, the dearly departed Dean Ballinger's final paper on conspiratuality. So neither of those were officially conspiracy theory masterpiece theater episodes, but they were another interesting look at academia.
00:15:44
Speaker
Yes, and it was sad to hear about the passing of Dan. It's one of those things where I always meant to invite him back to the podcast and we never did. And now we can't.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yes, no, most sad. We only had two more regular episodes in the year after that. We looked into the death of David Kelly. I believe that one was a listener request, a patron request. The death of Dr. Professor David Kelly, or the suspicious death of him.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yes, the man is not responsible for the dodgy dossier. No, no, sorry, there's entirely the wrong way to phrase it. A man associated with the production of the dodgy dossier, but also someone who was briefing the UK government at the time about the UN weapons inspector reports and also leaking information to the media.
00:16:44
Speaker
Yes, got outed as a source, committed suicide not long after. Allegedly. Allegedly. And indeed, that has been very suspicious
Transition from News to Conspiracy Focus
00:16:52
Speaker
to some. But anyway, the last the last final episode we did that was just a regular episode that wasn't on any particular theme was the listicle episode when we just had a couple of listicles that we had saved up and on conspiracy theory related issues and went through them because that was something we used to do a lot of listicles in the past and
00:17:14
Speaker
As a form of internet site slash page, Listicle really does seem to have had its day. Although I guess in some respects it's moved onto YouTube. I think Listicles are much more popular as videos now. Yeah, that's true.
00:17:30
Speaker
But it was good old. I mean, I don't think any of the episodes we talked about were based on cracked.com. But cracked.com was the one that really popularized the rise of the listicle some time ago. And now that's largely a zombie site after everything that's happened in the world of online content production. Facebook screwing everyone over and pivoting to video and then realizing that was a dumb idea and everything. So there's very little sort of long
00:17:58
Speaker
long-form writing that isn't sort of news or opinions or what have you, which is perhaps a bit of a shame. But anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about what we've already talked about. And that was all the main episodes we did. The next category I'd listed out was our What the Conspiracy episodes, a series that we retired this year.
00:18:20
Speaker
Well, I'd like to say we've put it on hiatus. It's not retirement. It could come back. We're having a seasons break. The head of HBO, David Zashlav, is considering whether he's going to keep what the conspiracy alive or whether he's going to make it a tax write off and just have it deleted from the podcast completely because that's what he does now.
00:18:44
Speaker
So, I mean, I have to say, I usually found them the most fun episodes. But eventually I was finding it harder and harder to come up with interesting topics that you might not have heard of. But nevertheless, we did. So your topics, you told me about wild animus. Oh, yes. And didn't we have a chuckle over some of those book verbs? We did.
00:19:07
Speaker
that elusive papaya it's with me to stay stayed with me josh i promise you when you die i'm just going to put elusive papaya on your gravestone and if your partner does not allow me to have it inscribed i will just spray it on your tombstone with spray paint or some other fluid
00:19:25
Speaker
I think you should. You also told me about the vector explosion. No, the vector explosion was also a listener request. So Kurt wanted to know something about the vector explosion. And I thought, actually,
00:19:39
Speaker
I don't know much about it. I don't think Josh is going to know anything about it. Let's make it two birds with one stone. Yeah. Yes. Then you got into the calculus wars and who wrote what to who about what subject and whether or not Isaac Newton knew. I can't even remember, but it was all very mathematical. And then, of course, your last one was about was about Dennis Wheatley and Hitler and Norway and the invasion invading thereof or not, as it turned out, over and over and over again.
00:20:08
Speaker
Oh yes, yes, that was a common well for Wheatley and his pals to draw upon was to just intimate the Allies are about to invade Norway and Hitler bought it every single time. Every time. Whereas...
00:20:23
Speaker
I told you about the cholera riots in an interesting echo of modern anti-pandemic phenomena. I told you about various people who may have been or in fact were Soviet spies.
00:20:38
Speaker
among them Joseph Stalin, which I thought was quite a good reach there if you're looking for someone who might have actually been secretly a Soviet agent. And I told you about the wakey things the CIA got up to in the latter half of the last century with their sextal pop-up decoys and their fake vampire attacks and
00:21:05
Speaker
sex tapes of Indonesian presidents, prime ministers, whatever he was. So that was all well and good. And then, of course, we had a little what the conspiracy wrap up episode to tie that one up, where we brought out the various things that we had both looked at and thought, it's an interesting topic, but is there a whole episode in it? And I think we proved that there wasn't, but we still managed to build a single episode out of all the little bits of them.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yes, the trails we investigated that basically went nowhere but sounded good enough to at least mention. Yes, all the things were, hey, here's an interesting little thing, but there's nothing else to say about it other than here is this one thing. I was actually, I was a little bit interested to see if I half expected we were going to, it was going to turn out that we had investigated the same topic
00:21:56
Speaker
and then both decided again. But it turned out it hadn't. Our interests, our objects of study were divergent enough that there was no crossover.
Celebrity Culture and Conspiracies
00:22:05
Speaker
So that was what the conspiracy for you. I suppose then we could talk about what replaced what the conspiracy, which was our back to the conspiracy episodes where we've decided that we've been doing this for so damn long.
00:22:16
Speaker
that there are topics we talked about such a long time ago that it's actually probably worth revisiting them and bringing them up to date. So the very first one we did that was about looking back at medical conspiracies and the conspiracies we looked at in the past and obviously the wealth of medical conspiracy theories that exist in the Covid age. Then we looked back at Naomi Wolf. What that set sort that crazy gals up to these days. What wacky hijinks.
00:22:46
Speaker
And one of the few episodes we got a piece of negative social media feedback where one commentator online felt we'd gone a little bit too hard on Naomi Wolf to which I respond, I don't think we did. No, I don't really think so. Definitely a significant figure, but in more recent times, yeah, I don't know.
00:23:10
Speaker
Then our next unexpected conspiracy episode was about dead celebrities. Again, I mean that's basically popular culture really, but again also pop culture of about 30 years ago when we looked at the various conspiracy theories that we had talked about in the past when it came to dead celebrities and then the any conspiracies about the celebrities who had died in the intervening period because they keep doing that.
00:23:33
Speaker
those pesky, pesky celebrities. I remember the very first time we talked about this, I think someone had posted somewhere online pointing out that there was an explosion in what counted as a celebrity around the 1960s, you know, where previously it was basically movie stars. Suddenly it was movie stars and TV stars and
00:23:56
Speaker
Music stars and potentially even writers and TV personalities and what have you, so not only were there... The reason why it suddenly felt like there were a lot more celebrities dying was simply because there were a lot more celebrities starting about 50 years ago.
00:24:12
Speaker
It's a nice example of how if you define a thing you suddenly get a problem due to that definition. Celebrities were much rarer in the past so their deaths were more scattered and less clustered and now we have a lot of celebrities and the future is going to have even more celebrities because we
00:24:34
Speaker
When we were children, Josh, we didn't have TikTokers or YouTube influencers. We had movie stars, we had radio stars, we had TV stars, and we had rock stars. And those categories have expanded significantly. And now there is these additional categories of celebrities, and they are all going to die eventually.
00:24:57
Speaker
I don't know. I wonder a little bit that things are becoming a bit more siloed. There's so much
00:25:05
Speaker
popular culture out there now and so many more people that you can be super famous and yet also be unheard of by, you know, 70% of the world's population. And see, I don't know that there's really any more like mega celebrities, people who everyone's heard of than there used to be, but a couple of levels down, yeah, there's a hell of a lot more. So be interesting to see how the world develops.
00:25:31
Speaker
uh speaking of how things developed our final back to the conspiracy episode was about was about a plucky plucky young hashtag that made it big in the big wide world that was gamergate
00:25:44
Speaker
Which I confess I had actually not thought about in quite a long time until I went back to look at old episodes we'd talked about, and then sort of realised, well, you know, I haven't been thinking about Gamagate in a long time, but it's hard not to think about all the stuff that essentially flowed from it, or at the very least was inspired by it and copied its template.
00:26:08
Speaker
And that now reminds me of something I should have brought up during the episode, and unfortunately I can't remember the name of the game, but there's a game on Steam which has a kind of Grecian urn art style, so it's about kind of gladiatorial combat. And it turns out that the
00:26:25
Speaker
author of the game at some point in update notes started making very gamer gate like comments in the patch notes to the point where he's no longer apparently in charge of the steam page or any of the official forums because the moderators for those forums have kicked him out from the space that he created because his
00:26:51
Speaker
His exclusionary rhetoric is just very bad for the gaming community.
00:26:57
Speaker
Hmm, and frankly bad for business. I think a lot of the time so even if you don't don't actually have a Do you don't care enough about actual people? It still affects the bottom line actually now that I think about it didn't the Minecraft guy have some? Not chance being disassociated from Minecraft because of his
00:27:25
Speaker
gamer-gatey escapade. So he's basically no longer, he's mentioned as the creator of Minecraft but is no longer associated with the Minecraft brand because Notch is bad for business.
00:27:41
Speaker
But anyway, enough gaming aid.
Alternate Realities and Scholar Interviews
00:27:44
Speaker
So we have two categories left of episodes. We have our conspiracy theory masterpiece theater, of course, which is getting closer and closer and closer to the present day. The present day. The first thing you got me started on was the conversation episode where you got me to read seven papers and summarize them for what I assume was your sadistic pleasure.
00:28:07
Speaker
Oh, believe me, I've got an even bigger, sadistic pleasure to put you through at some point next year. I don't doubt that for a second. We talked about conspiracy theories, truth claims, or language games. Which, who is that one again? I'm looking through my notes and I can't find it.
00:28:25
Speaker
That was the Ole Bjerg one. Oh yes, yes. I knew it was someone we hadn't looked at before. It was another similar paper by Palkemans and McCald. And I always get the two confused. We looked at Jenna Husting and Martin Orr's paper about dangerous machinery.
00:28:44
Speaker
Which turned out to not be about the amazing Robert England film The Mangler, but actually about conspiracy theories. The Mangler has always struck me as one of the most interesting horror films ever made for the sheer fact that up until the very last act of the film where spoilers, The Mangler actually manages to move around the factory floor.
00:29:09
Speaker
The first two thirds of the film is about creating situations where, plausibly, people will put their hands or limbs into a machine which is now possessed by demonic force and wants to eat them.
00:29:24
Speaker
We talked about conspiracy theories and the paranoid style, Curtis Hagen. We talked about David Cody talking about Sunstein and Vermeule talking about conspiracy theories.
00:29:40
Speaker
a topic which we just keep coming back to. So I'm seeing that the meal is just always with us. We just can't get rid of them. We returned to Curtis Hagen to look at his Monological Belief Systems paper. And most recently we talked about, asked what's epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing? What? You tell me.
00:30:03
Speaker
well i mean i mean from looks at it really nothing therein lies that nothing here in lies nothing inherently yes yeah i i really enjoyed going back and reading kurtis's papers again i think the mon the paper on monological belief systems is a very good paper for dismantling a kind of problematic view that is presented in the social psychology literature and
00:30:31
Speaker
It is interesting to note that even some small, there is some small change going on in the social psychology literature and even social psychologists are now going, yeah, it doesn't quite work as a way of conceptualizing how belief in conspiracy theories work.
00:30:54
Speaker
Now, you'll be interested to know I received an interdimensional dispatch from alternate reality me and alternate reality Brian Keighley, those two who have a podcast quite similar to our own. I'm curious, in the alternate reality,
00:31:12
Speaker
Is your beard the size of Brian's and Brian's beard the size of yours? Because that's what I imagine. I imagine you with a Nick-style beard, a big, big, bushy, old classic Nick-style beard. And Brian with a kind of Roger Delgado, you know, little moustache thing.
00:31:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is something like that. But so the two of them talked about your secrecy and conspiracy paper, your paper all about the evidence, conspiracy theories on the basis of the evidence, to be precise. We talked about the problem, when I say we, I'm projecting myself onto the two of them there because I kind of consider alternate Josh to basically be an extension of myself. So anything that he does, I have more or less done.
00:32:02
Speaker
talked about the problem with conspiracism, which, as I recall, the two of them were stymied a little bit for the fact that conspiracism is your handle on Twitter. So we didn't know if this was some sort of confessional where you were talking about the problems with yourself. But it turned out that you should be talking about the problems of myself. Well, it's obviously alternate yourself. Sorry, I'm paraphrasing.
00:32:25
Speaker
And I mean the thing about this alternate reality stuff is because alternate reality Josh and alternate reality Brian are reviewing papers by alternate reality me. It's not even entirely clear the comments they make about the alternate reality versions of my papers apply to the papers I've written.
Future Episode Plans and Holiday Wishes
00:32:44
Speaker
We really would need to actually do a comparison of the documents to find out whether those paper reviews actually reflect what I wrote in this world.
00:32:53
Speaker
or whether the alternate version of me, because I believe there's a Belgian version of me out there somewhere, whether they were in different papers.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, now that would be interesting to find out. And then, of course, there was the case of your paper on applied epistemology, which was looked at by me and Aaron from the Embrace the Void podcast, which, of course, brings us into the interview section, because Aaron was the subject of not one, but two of your interviews this year. Do you feel you've licked that little rat-skelion into line? Have you got him
00:33:31
Speaker
got him to straighten up and fly right with his views on conspiracy theories. According to my malevolent chords, I mean, maybe, maybe, when he, when we first started corresponding, he was steel-botting my views in discussions with other people.
00:33:52
Speaker
table, which is kind of, you know, the steel manning we talk about in philosophy, where you forcefully present someone else's view, that you don't necessarily agree with yourself, but you want to give the best account of someone's view to see how people are going to treat it seriously and react to it. And I think he's less steel-botting now and more exemplifying the kind of view which I think a particular should have, although
00:34:19
Speaker
I do get the impression Aaron is in the terms of Patrick Stokes, a bit of a reluctant particularist. He thinks that there are some moral quandaries that come out from endorsing particularism, but in part because recognising particularism is correct is also recognising that actually
00:34:41
Speaker
People do have a good reason to believe conspiracy theories given terrible actions by their governments. And that then has a flow-on effect that if people believe the sensible or warranted conspiracy theories, some of those people are also going to believe the wacky and unwarranted ones. And so you'll get people who go, you know, yay, might have a point.
00:35:03
Speaker
he might have a point because we know that the American government has done X, Y and Z, so why couldn't they be also engaging in this thing? So there's a worry about what happens to the endorsement of unwarranted conspiracy theories at the same time. Now the good news about that is I'm working on a paper with
00:35:22
Speaker
Marty and Jenna, which I think actually addresses this particular concern, but we're still waiting for a final bit of statistical analysis before that's ready to be punted out into the world and celebrated as a glorious child. But it wasn't all there, and of course we can't pass over the fact that you then appeared on his, in fact you appeared on his podcast first, I think?
00:35:45
Speaker
I did, yes. The conversation that we had ever so slightly confusing because we were in part continuing things that started on one podcast and travel to another because we did a crossover event. It was very exciting. Oh, that wasn't all you. You interviewed Curtis. You interviewed Joe Yersinski. And that was the point in time we discovered that we'd be mispronouncing Curtis's last name for quite some time. Yes. Yes. Apologies again, Curtis.
00:36:14
Speaker
Although, frankly, I still think that he and his entire family line should just change the pronunciation of his name to how we used to say it. I mean, it would be the polite thing to consider. It would be the polite thing to do. I mean, otherwise it's just really embarrassing for us.
00:36:32
Speaker
And then of course you interviewed in short holder Julia Matt and David, all of whom am I correct in thinking are sort of part of the newer generation? They are. So nice a nice look into the future of where things are going.
00:36:49
Speaker
although as you know, sorry, as you know, so David, I wouldn't say David's part of the new generation, David's part of my generation, because he did his PhD around about the same time that I did. So, that's right. Julia and Matt are members of the newer generation, and they're also featuring in the special issue of social epistemology, which will be out sometime mid-January, late January.
00:37:14
Speaker
So, yeah, and I'm also hoping to have an interview with Melina Sapos at some point next year, where we'll be talking about some of her recent work, because I really do want to draw the spotlight on the fact that it's not just the old guard doing work here. There's some really exciting and very novel work being done on conspiracy theory, theory and philosophy. There's going to be an explosion of new literature in the next few years.
00:37:42
Speaker
and it's quite gratifying to see that the discipline will live on even as the older members of it slowly fade out.
00:37:53
Speaker
Well, continuing on the theme of looking to the future, that's the end of this episode, but we'll be back next year, probably relatively quickly. I myself am going to be overseas for the second two weeks of January, so we might try to squeeze in an episode or two at the start of January and then go on a little break. Or maybe not, I don't know. Maybe you'll have some interesting solo projects you want to pursue. Ah yes, my concept album.
00:38:20
Speaker
Exactly. So who knows? Look forward to that. But for now, I think that's more than enough. We're recording this on the 23rd of December. I will be editing it probably on Christmas Eve, which means if you're keen, you might be listening to this before Christmas, but chances are it will probably be in your feed afterwards. So I hope you had a good one or are about to have a good one.
00:38:46
Speaker
or have had a good one, or have had a good one at some point in your life if you're listening to this, say, after a kind of nuclear apocalypse, or even, indeed, if it turns out this is the only surviving document of the entire human civilization that you, as Zeno archaeologists, have found, then A,
00:39:09
Speaker
I'm quite curious to know whether you actually even understand what we're saying here, because you're a different species from a different planet with presumably no common language roots whatsoever, and be probably not the best example of our civilization to this point. Probably not. But on the off chance that you're just a regular human being listening to any sort of... Josh, none of our listeners are regular human beings.
00:39:33
Speaker
Well, it could happen. Statistically, it's possible. And if you are, I think all that really remains to say is have a good Christmas holiday time period fun and goodbye. As John McLean and his mum Shirley are likely to say, lassitude, mother, lassitude.
00:40:00
Speaker
That dream didn't work. That did not work at all. Not really. Not really. But I could see where you're going with it. There's always next year. There's always next year. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself.
00:40:15
Speaker
associate professor, M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.