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The Year that Was (Which Was 2024)
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Gather round, children! It's nearly Christmas time, and if you listen closely, you can hear the approach of that most Christmassy of things: a low-effort "year in review" episode to finish off the year! It's a Yuletide miracle probably!
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts Locations
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Speaker
the podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dinteth.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcast's guide to the conspiracy, the last podcaster's guide to the conspiracy for 2024. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Shuhai, China, ding-dong, merrily on high, something about Excelsius Day. I can't remember how the rest of it goes. It's Associate Professor E.M.R. Extended. See, I thought you were going to go with ding-dong, the witch is dead, witch, old witch, the wicked witch.
00:00:43
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So segue from Christmas to the Wizard of Oz. I can see why you might think that. It'll be a wicked thing for you to do, Josh. A
Musical 'Wicked': Book vs. Show
00:00:50
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very wicked thing for you to do. I have no interest in wicked at all, I have to say. I've i seen the i've seen the stage play slash musical, and I've read the book, and don't really understand either, in part because the musical is not related to the book.
00:01:10
Speaker
other than the fact that she has the same name and she is the premise, what if two witches were friends? So it seems like it's more a prequel to the film, whilst the book is more of a prequel to the novels by Frank Oz. And the novels are way at the the they well the novels by Frank Oz are weird. The Wicked novels are also weird, but they're weird in a very, very different way.
00:01:37
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L.L. Frank Frank Oz. Frank who took the literary state of Frank Elbourn and just put his name over all those books going waka waka waka. Exactly. And also doing a Yoda impression at the same time.
00:02:04
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so um Anyway, we're not here to talk about musicals. I don't
End-of-Year Retrospective Tradition
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think, unless we mention musicals as the topic of any of our episodes this year, but I do not believe that happened because, of course, it's the last episode for the year, and the last episode for the year is always a look back at the preview. Can you hear the rain? The rain is getting quite hard. Oh, that's good. i Take my word for it. It's a rainy night here in Auckland, New Zealand. That's my excuse if there's too much background noise.
00:02:29
Speaker
But no, the last thing we always do in the year is look back at the previous episodes that we recorded this year. Because, quite frankly, it gets to the end of the year, everyone's tired, and in a retrospective is a nice easy bit of content to round out the year. Plus it helps us remember things that we actually did, things we talked about. do it Do we even need to play a chime?
00:02:53
Speaker
oh goingnna be sit okay like nice A nice lazy episode. Very lazy. No, no. Don't need a time. All we need is a list of what we talked about last year. So this is, I expect this should be short compared to our other retrospective episodes, because for one thing we went to a two weekly schedule this year, so they were furious.
YouTube Transcription Error: Fortnight vs. Fortnite
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Somebody even said a fortnightly schedule. A fortnightly schedule also.
00:03:18
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Apparently the LLM that YouTube is using now for video transcription, as opposed to the old way of transcribing things, has worked out that because most videos on YouTube are about computer games, if you use the word Fortnite, it doesn't talk about Fortnite as in two weeks, it talks about Fortnite as in the game. So it's transcribing every Fortnite to every Fortnite the game.
00:03:47
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I read that. I wasn't sure. Is Fortnite, F-O-R-T-E-N-I-T, actually a common spelling in America though, the way they do through T-H-R-U or something, isn't it? I don't think so. that ko just in again it might't just further together they could i mean Americans don't talk about Fortnites. They talk about things which are biweekly.
00:04:07
Speaker
Yes. Anyway, the point is we didn't record as many episodes this year because we were only doing one every two weeks instead of one every week. And also this year saw not one, not two, but three, three-part series on a bunch of books, which meant of our 20-odd episodes, nine of them can be summed up fairly, fairly briefly here because they all involved the same topic.
00:04:33
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Let's start at the start. Our first episode of the year was ah another low-effort roundup ever episode where we just talked about the conspiracy news that I guess we had had missed over the break in between 2023 ending and 2024 starting. so That's true. I mean, we we always like to end the year and start the year by giving people a good impression of the low effort we'll be engaging in for the rest of that calendar year. So we always end on a sigh and start on a sigh so that you are mentally prepared for the amount of effort we will put into the rest of the year. So yeah, we ended the year with a round-up. We'll start the year with a round-up. That's how it works. Yeah. We did, though, put actual effort into the next episode of the year, which is when we talked about the book Spy Catcher. No, I think you're fine. We talked about the book Spy Catcher.
00:05:31
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ah If only, I don't believe it had its own theme song, but I'm very definitely sure. I think this was, was this the only episode that we recorded in person together? I know we didn't do this one. Yeah, this was the only one where we knew we were over here last year when we were able to record in the same room. And that was an interesting, I can't, was there a specific reason? Because I know we talked about the Central Affair in it. We had talked about the Central Affair in Spycatcher previously.
00:06:00
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Yeah, I think
'Spycatcher' Controversy and International Reactions
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I think it was one of those we should come back to it at some point. Yeah. So it's where because we'd done the central affair, that is kind of the centerpiece of s spy cat catcher. And I had mentioned in that episode that my parents had had a copy of the book, although we should probably talk talk about the book and the controversies around the book's publication, which in many respects is possibly more interesting than the details of the book. I mean, it's a fascinating publication history of Thatcher's government trying to crush a book by being published and the australian the Australians basically going, nah.
00:06:44
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Nah, yeah, oh yeah. So yes, that was that was an an interesting little topic. And then we went straight it from there into the first of our three-part series. The first one we looked at was Michael Shermer's conspiracy, why the rational believe the irrational. the irrational?
00:07:03
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I mean, you won't find that answer in Michael Schammer's book. What you'll find is avant-garde nonsense masquerading as evolutionary psychology, masquerading as libertarian political ideology.
00:07:19
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It's not quite clear why that book has that particular subtitle other than Michael Shermer trying to explain why he is supposedly a rational person so why he is a supposedly rational person has irrational views.
00:07:36
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Yes, so we were not particularly complementary towards... Yeah, but we were uncomplementary over the course of about four and a half hours. Yes, we did. We did spend a good amount of time talking about this book, so maybe you could take that as a compliment. So we carried on from there to talk about operations. Good old... Under the assumption that any time something gets ref... Any time any sort of government political type action gets referred to as an operation, it's probably something horrible.
00:08:06
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Well there was a thing in Australia... last week where there was some kind of traffic stop incident, and they had called it something like Operation Zowie Stopper. So there is just a a tendency to give things operational names, but no, we looked at three examples of infamous alleged continuing false flag operations, Chaos, Gladio, and Legacy.
Operation Gladio: Cold War Conspiracies
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And as I recall, chaos was a bit of an umbrella term as well, wasn't it? There were a whole bunch of other little sort of sub-operations. Well, I mean, and GLADIO works the same way. I mean, there's a really fascinating discussion about Operation GLADIO in the literature. So GLADIO is the stay behind a network that was developed to stop communists from overrunning Europe. And some people say Operation GLADIO definitely does exist because they'll point to individual stay-behind networks that had communication with one another during the Cold War. And other people say, look, Operation Gladio didn't exist because whilst there were stay-behind networks operating in Europe during the Cold War, they weren't being coordinated by anyone. And it really does depend on how you're defining how the conspiracy works here. As to whether you think the conspiracy
Operation Legacy: Colonial Cover-Up
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theory about Operation Gladio
00:09:35
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is warranted or unwarranted. Yeah, and and then so Operation Chaos was sort of the CIA's equivalent to COINTELPRO, which the FBI were doing, lots of lots of wiretapping of of various targets and left-winging types. The more interesting one for me, at least, certainly because it was one that I hadn't heard about much before, was the Operation Legacy, which was was the showing how in the British Empire the government During the end of the British Empire, the government purged a whole lot of official government documents that that that would have shown what all the dodgy things that they'd been up to and the various efforts to try and find out about some of this stuff. And i be to not just purging documents, dismantling institutions in countries so that not only were they
00:10:30
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leaving their colonialism behind, they were also ripping out any structures that might benefit the people that they had, in quotes, brought civilisation to. Yes, so you'll be surprised to learn, governments get up to some dodgy stuff. Mmm, and colonisers gotta colonise, and then when you tell them to piss off, they take it really, really badly.
00:10:57
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They do, funny that. ah But no, so our look into operations turned out to be just a little bit of a pellet cleanser in between Michael Schirmer in the next of our three-part series, which is on Neil Levy's Bad Beliefs and also Neil Levy's Bad Beliefs. The joke that we made several times. Multiple times, so many times. During the the three episodes we made on that. I think we did about four hours on Neil Levy and his Bad Beliefs.
00:11:25
Speaker
Yes, yes, another one, another bunch of of extra length episodes as we went through the whole thing there. ah just the Bad beliefs why they happen to good people, to give the full name of his 2022 book. I agree with many of his conclusions, I just disagree with many of the arguments he uses to get there.
00:11:44
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And it's worthy of pointing out that with this the three-part series, we didn't actually broadcast all three episodes in a row because it was interrupted in May of this year by our 10-year anniversary, for God's sake. What the hell is going on? 10 years? That doesn't even seem possible. It certainly doesn't seem legal.
00:12:02
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Not well. I mean, itll i mean it also i mean it seems immoral and it seems very, very insensible to be doing a podcast for 10 years. I mean, really, the amount of time that we have spent talking into microphones is obscene. It's wrong. It shouldn't be allowed to continue. There should be a world police force that enforces a moratorium on people having a podcast for more than, I think, six months.
00:12:33
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Yeah, the the fact that no one has stepped in to put a stop to this, I think is the most damning indictment of society a person could possibly imagine. Yeah, I
10 Years of Podcasting: Reflection and Ethics
00:12:43
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mean, I mean, but this, Josh, this is a world which elected Donald Trump for president. Exactly. There is. I mean, obviously, the moral center of our civilization is completely bereft of morality. And that means that there are people letting us record podcasts.
00:13:02
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for over 10 years now. Over 10 years. Have we learned anything in that time? not No. Have we learned anything useful or good for society? Quite the opposite. So it's been a net negative. A net net negative.
00:13:20
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Unbelievable. Anyway, let's keep doing it. Unbelievable. Yeah. So we we carried on on our merry way to go and to to to another ah real topic. This time we talked about the murder of Alan Berg, one that had been inspired by a comment I'd read in reference to a bunch of right wing shock jocks saying maybe the reason why we don't have so many left wing shock jocks is the the most prominent. A lot who had they killed. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:47
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So that was an interesting case. and but again I always, I do like the these sorts of ones. Like it's it's interesting when there's something I've heard of and find out more about it, but when something that I've never heard of at all pops up and you get to learn something new, that's always fun. And we we managed to get some recordings of Alan Berg to play, but there aren't actually that many of them because he he died pre the internet as we understand it, definitely pre social media as we understand it. So really all that remains are recordings taped off the radio or recordings taped off the TV. And it is one of those astounding things. How little record we have of the media for most of the 20th century. Can you hear the rain now?
00:14:41
Speaker
No. yeah but Maybe maybe maybe yeah the the recording software is just good enough at filtering out that sort of noise because it's getting quite loud. Anyway, ah so after, at this point, you went to a conference. You went to a conference. I went to Kent and I survived. You sure did. And if you you we went back to Romania for a bit. I did, yes. And parts in between. like can't You had a few stops, didn't you?
00:15:06
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No, no, Kent doest Romania then oh and then to London and then returning back to China. I had to return back to China before my visa expired to sign a new contract to get a new visa to continue being here for another three years. But I recorded a conference report. You did. With yeah Julia and Pat, which was a ah good time had by all.
00:15:30
Speaker
And while you were away, I filled in with a little episode about the opal file and a little episode where I basically just got to indulge my wins and talk about linguistics issues vaguely connected to conspiracy theories in the origin, or to giving the origin of the word poggers and talking about who PogChamp is.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yes, and i I remember chastising you upon my return for doing too good a job of doing those filler episodes whilst I i i was away questioning whether I even need to be involved in these podcasts. Wow, you made the foolish mistake of letting me talk about whatever the hell I wanted and therefore it's true. i've got to one I won't be doing that again.
00:16:11
Speaker
not So once once you were back, we jumped into um what what at the time were current affairs. We had two big stories involving prospective US president or current and former and prospective US presidents in the form of Donald Trump. It's very hard to talk about these things now because Trump was president. He's going to be president. He claims he still is president. And of course, in some respect, once you're an American president, you're always president for all time. But Trump was the last election.
00:16:42
Speaker
which does make me wonder why Trump even thinks he's allowed to be have another term because it would be his third term if he's correct about winning last time. So yeah it's all very confusing. But yes, there was a point in time where the most interesting thing about the US election was Trump getting shot and nobody caring.
US Election Confusion: Trump and Harris
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And then Biden getting replaced and everyone being momentary, very excited about Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States of America. And yet somehow, despite the fact that no one cared about Trump getting shot, he still got to be president.
00:17:22
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And even though people were excited about Harris for a few weeks at the point in time where she was going off message and actually focusing on how weird the Republicans are, which got everybody excited. And then she's got advice to go back to being on brand. And then everyone went, you're just the same candidate as the last one. Guess we're going to vote on Trump.
00:17:47
Speaker
And then we had, then it was possibly the most significant episode of the whole year. We talked about how Alex Jones was right. um Yeah. We did a lot of prep on that one, actually, a lot of prep, a lot of research. We interviewed people. There was a video segment we did where we got talking heads to discuss the issue because we talk a lot about Alex Jones on this podcast. I mean not and not not knowledge fight a lot but we do talk a lot about Alex Jones and we have pointed out that Alex Jones has said some deeply stupid and irrational things in the past. We did think it was important to talk about those times that Alex Jones has been right and so for two hours
00:18:34
Speaker
we went into the minutiae, went into the detail of the things he has said he's been and absolutely correct about. Yeah. So I mean, I don't really think we need to go recap with this episode. People are going to be talking about that one for years to come. I don't know. I think there's no really lovely letter about it by someone called AJ. It goes,
Alex Jones: Times He Was Right
00:18:56
Speaker
I've recently been embroiled in some legal troubles back home, and I might have to give up my business as a consequence. I really appreciate the episode. Remember, the answer to 1984 is 1776. I have no idea what that means. But AJ, if you're still listening, thanks for the letter.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, as I recall, that was a particularly ah particularly busy time for us then, because not only were we preparing for that whole episode, but then we also i had a big big discussion amongst ourselves about the state of where the podcast would go from then on, so significantly around. Very yeah important episode.
00:19:31
Speaker
Not quite as important as the next episode, of course, which was the inaugural and so far only instance of our segment, Does Ian Remember, where I made the foolish, quite frankly, the worst mistake of my life, I think, by coming up with examples that were just too goddamn funny, because I will never top that episode. I almost don't want to try, but I think we do need to bring the segment back. But I guarantee I'm not going to be able to find material as good as the material that I found for that one episode.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's it did make me realize, and I mean, I've been aware of this for for quite some time. I have stock phrases when it comes to recording audio. In part, because of my speech disfluency, there are certain phrases I know I can get through without stammering or stuttering, which is why I fall back on that's interesting or that's fascinating, because I know I can get by it with that. But there was a point in time in the early 2000s where I'm talking about fingering a lot. I do a lot of discussion about fingering. And you managed to find three or maybe four very good cases where I'm talking about fingering in a way that sounds a bit rude. You're talking about how the Pope can be fingered because he's not dead yet. That's true. I mean, yeah, I mean, and he isn't. Or i mean which Pope, which Pope?
00:21:01
Speaker
Isn't it a, it's not a, we talked about this before, didn't we? It's not a, the Pope is dead long with the Pope, is it? There can be periods of time when there is... Yeah, I mean, there were two Popes coinciding very recently.
00:21:14
Speaker
Anyway, so that was that. I must i'll must make an effort. Maybe I'll do it over the holidays to listen through more of your old episodes and see if I can come up with something that that will be fun to talk about again. Because it would be a shame to waste the sting if nothing else. That's true. I put a lot of effort into that sting. I expect us to use it at least twice more next year.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, but but having talked about conspiracies involving the Vatican, we thought, well, why not revisit an old topic where we talked about Catholic conspiracies in the past and mention a few new ones as well. So we had a good look at conspiracy theories put forward by the church and conspiracy theories put forward by other people about the church.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yes, we talked about Catholic conspiracies and papal plots. We sure did. Which is going back to one of our very, very early episodes. But one of our listeners was going, well, that episode doesn't really appear to be on Zencaster because Zencaster has a limit as to how many old episodes are in the backlog. I
Catholic Church Conspiracies: Old and New
00:22:17
Speaker
mean, peering behind the scenes, this is episode four hundred and forty nine canonically. So technically there are more episodes than that, but of our canonically nuanced episodes, which is 449, I think Zencaster allows about 350 or 300, I can't remember the exact number offhand. So there are old episodes which just aren't around at the moment, so we we went back to the Catholic Church and we paid a penance
00:22:50
Speaker
We did. And our penance was to spend three more episodes talking about Qasim Qasam and his work on conspiracy theories. So this was the third the third trilogy, which makes it The the um the the Force Awakens, Last Jedi. And The Rise of Skywalker. It really did feel like The Rise of Skywalker.
00:23:12
Speaker
Skywalker here. I mean does that mean does that mean the Michael Shermer book was the original trilogy or the prequel trilogy? If we go with this metaphor, it would be the prequel trilogy. So neil Neil Levy would be the original trilogy which I think we were probably most complimentary of his book so that kind of works out. Yeah that's true. There were there were sections of bad beliefs that could have been the Empire Strikes Back.
00:23:38
Speaker
But this was this was the one where yeah you hoodwinked me, you bamboozled me, you horn-swaddled me. I made Josh think there's only going to be two recordings because Conspiracy Theories, the 2019 book, is very short. And so Josh thought, oh, it's only about four chapters in length, so two recordings, but no.
00:23:59
Speaker
Kasam released a 2023 article of the same name, basically summarizing the arguments in the 2019 in a worse way. And so I made Josh read an article as well.
00:24:13
Speaker
The article which again had us ah deciding was was it one of those s sequel reboot type things which makes it a an Evil Dead 2 or a the modern remake of the craft or and I didn't think of this at the time Desperado but no no this book does not deserve to be mentioned at the same breath as Desperado.
00:24:36
Speaker
And this recording was difficult for for us, because in the 2019 book, Kasam distinguishes between conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories, where Brian Vincent Impression there is put capital letters in front of both conspiracy and theory. Which did mean we had to spend a lot of time disambiguating whether we're talking about conspiracy theories or conspiracy theories.
00:25:01
Speaker
As we should have just done that. Maybe we should have. Just given it a silly voice. And then of course in the paper he drops that distinction. He he even drops that little distinction. yeah Which actually I think makes his argument all the worse. Because at least before you could say look, the problems he diagnoses with conspiracy theories are problems that are a subset of conspiracy theories more generally. but Because he doubles down on all conspiracy theories being bad.
00:25:29
Speaker
It makes what he's saying seem kind of nonsensical. a yes And by kind of, absolutely. you So, we're nearly at the end of the year already, frankly, but to the next episode, we we were again inspired by current events. This time, the finding of the Golden Owl. The Golden Owl. Yes, again, hat-tipped a friend of the podcast, Hayden, who alerted me to this. But yes, this is a one of those one of those hidden treasures where people put out a book, hey, this was almost
00:26:02
Speaker
almost 20 years ago, I think this one came out, a book of a book of codes and riddles and puzzles. And
Golden Owl Puzzle Solved: 20-Year Mystery
00:26:08
Speaker
if you solve them, it will tell you the location of a golden owl that had been buried somewhere in France. And someone finally found it. And that gave us license to talk about, again, another another older topic where we had mentioned some of the some similar things in the past. I actually, at the time, I thought, oh, we've talked about that one in the past, haven't we? But it turned out we'd talked about similar ones. And so we talked about them again and a couple of others.
00:26:30
Speaker
and and had fun in general, talking about weird. Another one of those ones, it's kind of stretching the definition of conspiracy theory, I suppose, but they were sort of little secret things and they there was more than one person involved. I mean, hair razor appears to be a criminal conspiracy. Yes, there was the or the fraud that followed it. So there are there there are there are examples of conspiracies either in the formulation of these puzzle books or in some cases the solving of these puzzle books. I mean, most of them require a writer and an artist. So there are two people engaging in a secret plot.
00:27:11
Speaker
The one we didn't cover is The Secret, which friend of the show drew draw my attention to. it So there is another one we should look at at some point in the near or far future. So there are more there are more there are more puzzle books, more puzzle books. And Josh, you still haven't solved Lord Monkton's puzzle yet. No, no, I haven't. And it's doubtful that I ever will.
00:27:34
Speaker
You will solve it before you die. That is the curse I lay upon you. You will not die until such time that puzzle is solved. Sweet. Okay. And so then in ah in a bizarre break with tradition, we followed a top an episode with a sort of genuine topic with another episode with a genuine topic. We went back in time to talk about the murder of Georgi Markov via poison tipped umbrella mechanism.
Georgi Markov's Assassination: Poisoned Umbrella
00:28:02
Speaker
The Bulgarian umbrella. Not quite sure, yes.
00:28:05
Speaker
which is a good bit of, a good bit of spy craft. I've liked that when we've talked about those ones in the past as well in previous years. And we've talked about those wacky back when, back when things were almost literally cloak and dagger, where you had people putting on silly disguises and coming up with wacky James Bond style mechanisms. Whereas these days things are a little bit too, too surveilled in this digital age to get away with a lot of the crap they got up to back then.
00:28:30
Speaker
good times, good old good old good old-fashioned assassinations and murders. yeah We enjoy a good old murder. Yeah. and so in the not Not committing that we have never ever committed a single murder. We were definitely not near Fleet Street that night. Definitely not. And then the next week we had a bit of a timing cock up where I was busy on the usual night and then you were busy all the other night so we weren't able to record so I just chucked out a quick filler that I was going to make the bonus episode
00:29:04
Speaker
but then turned into a good filler episode, which is about the murder of Yuan Petrucudianu, which was a similar murder incident. And you got a good review from our Romanian patron. Oh, that's good. Yes, as I said at the time, it probably would have been a better one to actually do with you, since it involved a bit of Romanian history that you know a lot more about than I do. But yeah, an interesting case where, unlike the ones we talked about in the previous episode, where things were all wacky and intricate and James Bondish, this was simply somebody walking up and shooting someone else in the head. And yet, with seemingly similar motives, but then maybe the difference in method did hint at a difference in motives. Interesting case.
00:29:47
Speaker
Mm, good old Romania. And as we talked about in the bonus episode for the last episode we recorded just before this episode, Romania, it's replete with interesting stories. Interesting stories indeed. And then finally, well, sort of finally, we had the the triumphant return of What the Conspiracy, where you told me about the Berners Street hoax, something about which I had never heard and was grateful to do so.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah, an example of what may or may not have been a conspiracy, depending on which version of the origin of the hoax you believe, but was for its time big, big news, even though the first name of Mrs. Tottenham, whose house was the subject of the hoax, has been completely lost to history.
00:30:40
Speaker
me So, yes, we must do we must do some more of that next year as well, I suppose. Technically, Josh, we should actually mention the previous episode. Well, that's what it's going to say. Yes, yes. That that wasn't actually the last episode. We also just did a talk where we played to you a podcast which turned out to actually have been a ah ah not It's not a simulacrum, not a facsimile. I suppose it was an actual thing, but a concoction of AI it was the heredy but almost yeah it was the result of putting the works of the good Brian L. Keeley through a large language model interpreter that was then instructed to spit out a two-person podcast based on it.
00:31:24
Speaker
And um neither of us being particular fans of the large style of large language model that gets called by marketing people artificial intelligence. We weren't overly thrilled with it.
00:31:38
Speaker
No, no. It was very vague, it was very very abstract. It kept on vacillating between whether it thought conspiracy theories are the kind of beliefs people can have as opposed to the kind of beliefs that people shouldn't have. But it was impressive from an audio perspective. It was, yes, yes. LLMs, not so fond. Text-to-speech actually getting quite good these days. Yeah. And that's all we talked about this year.
00:32:03
Speaker
So on to the next one, I guess. As we said last episode and as we said just before, we recorded this episode at the same time that we recorded the previous episode. So we have a little bit of a backlog and we can stick this one out sometime during the Christmas period. Just have something to tidy you over while we're doing our holiday business. Em's off jet setting again. You're back here in a couple of weeks. I'm waving on a jet plane. And I actually do know when I'll be here again.
00:32:30
Speaker
so and Presumably we should be able to get together to record at least one episode in person again. I'll be in Auckland for two and a bit weeks then in Wellington for about two weeks and then back up in Auckland for about two and a bit weeks. so I'm sure we can probably organise at least one recording session for the first time I'm in Auckland, at least one recording session for the second time I'm in Auckland.
00:32:58
Speaker
That's likely. Interestingly enough, I'm going to Wellington in in two days' time for a little bit, and then I'm back up to Auckland before Christmas, so I'll have done my job. What is the excitement that takes you down to the nation's capital? A friend's wedding. Going to see a wedding, and then staying on for a couple of days just because we haven't been to Wellington since the boys were very little. And now they're very tall. They are. One of them is pretty much the same height as me. Anyway, passage of time. Can't be heard in my face. You can stop that.
00:33:27
Speaker
Well, it's a bit too late to get him started smoking, I think, but I guess there's always the imputation route, but we'll... Yeah, you do just you know cut a bit to the leg off. Shave it off, bit by bit.
00:33:38
Speaker
like like compress compress the spot compress the spine josh compress the spine yes we'll see anyway with given that we've moved on from talk of past episodes to talk of child abuse it's probably time to call i refer to this episode for all day child correction yes uh time to bring this episode and this year to a close do you have any any concluding thoughts for 2024 I mean, large chunks of it were politically quite bad, and I'd rather
Reflecting on 2024 and Looking Forward to 2025
00:34:08
Speaker
not not see that again. So I'm really hoping 2025 is going to the much more progressive outlook on things. Well, that certainly would be nice. That being said, a ah change in schema with respect to the assassination of the rich, that could be promising.
00:34:26
Speaker
interesting yes interesting times ahead but when is that not the case so merry christmas um for those of you who celebrate happy new year for those of you who recognize the julian calendar julian it is the julian one these days isn't it not the gregorian oh no no the s table on no no pope gregory replaced the julian calendar so it's the gregorian year now I think so. I'm suddenly going... ses lovely change it's The difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is that the Orthodoxy still goes with a Julian calendar and we're with the Gregorian one, which is why their Easter and Christmas is usually at a different date, although I believe most Orthodox churches have now settled on the 25th of December as Christmas anyway.
00:35:15
Speaker
it it's all so it's It's all nonsense anyway, because we're just on a planet orbiting a star. Time is just an arbitrary thing we've put upon things. That's true. It's all too complicated. The point is...
00:35:28
Speaker
if If you believe it is the new year in a few weeks time, happy new year is all I'm trying to say. Why do you have to make it? Why do you got to make everything so complicated? It doesn't matter whether it's a big event coming up or not. Have a bit of a celebration. Yes, just have fun. Have a good time for those of you that celebrate good times.
00:35:49
Speaker
Yeah. So until next year. Everyone Wong Chung tonight. Exactly. i did did you Did you not notice me quoting Avril Lavigne just a second ago? I didn't do it. Oh, no, actually I did not. Please, please, please. Things so complicated. Because I was able to get everybody Wong Chung tonight in. So I actually wasn't paying any attention to what you said. I was just waiting for you to stop talking. Probably for the best, yes. know im im often I often feel the same about you and myself. I know. It's a terrible thing making a podcast. You get bored by everything you say. Yes. So with that in mind, um see you next year. Goodbye. See you later, boy.
00:36:31
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself. Associate Professor M.R.X. Denton. 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.
00:37:10
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.