maTt and kaRa address yoUr conspiracy THeory

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Speaker 2 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people.

Speaker 2 G'day, Matt Bevan here. You have sent through so many great questions about all sorts of things, so we're going to try and tackle them as best we can today.

Speaker 2 I also just want to say, if your question is not in this episode, please know that it's not because it was a bad question.

Speaker 2 It's either that we had no idea how to answer it or that we just got too many.

Speaker 2 But we are going to do our best to tackle everything from Elon, the ethical trillionaire, to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Speaker 2 I've got supervising producer Cara Jensen-McKinnon here to help out with the questions. G'day, Cara.
Hello.

Speaker 2 People should know that when they send an email to the email address, it's generally you who's reading it first.

Speaker 5 It is my job, on top of my normal job, to read every single email. Yep.

Speaker 5 And let me just say, we've been inundated with, I think, at least, I don't know, 40 something emails just about very specific MUD Intel, where it is, what it's made up of, the difference between different types of soil.

Speaker 5 And I have loved reading each one of them, but I didn't expect there would be so many.

Speaker 2 So if you're just joining us, we a while ago sort of did an episode that was all about the soil composition of eastern Ukraine, which sounds boring.

Speaker 5 But it's not.

Speaker 2 Eastern Ukraine has this type of soil, which is called chernosum, which I know that I'm pronouncing incorrectly, as we'll get to in a second.

Speaker 5 That was one email.

Speaker 2 And this soil makes growing things incredibly easy. It makes...

Speaker 2 Ukraine incredibly desirable for invaders, but also the soil turns into thick, thick mud, and that can make it incredibly difficult for people to invade.

Speaker 2 Now we have had a few points about local chernosum which we'll get to in a second but Cara hit me with the uh things that I've been saying wrong.

Speaker 5 Okay so for a start we've had Mandy on email who sent through one saying it's chore nosum not chernosum. So noted.

Speaker 2 Chore nosum.

Speaker 5 Chore nosum.

Speaker 2 Like it's a job. Exactly that's right.

Speaker 5 Okay. Secondly an apology to our Canadian listeners for referring to it as mud.
Douglas has contacted us to say that in the Canadian prairies, it's called gumbo.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 5 Which I thought was a type of soup, but I guess it can be both.

Speaker 2 I'm just reading his email. Calling it mud is generic and bordering on inaccurate.
Correct. More correct to call it gumbo.
All right.

Speaker 2 In terms of the local churnosum, in our initial reporting, we were talking about chornosum. in Ukraine and also there is a large concentration of it in Canada.

Speaker 2 But also I I was mentioning that there's references around the internet to a patch of chornosum around the town of Nimitabelle, which is a very, very small town in the southern part of New South Wales, in the Monero region.

Speaker 2 There was references to there being chornosum in Nimitabel, but every time I would sort of click on those references and try and run them down to what the original source was, it would lead nowhere.

Speaker 2 So after talking about this, Eddie Williams, who is the host of ABC Southeast New South Wales, coming out of Biger there,

Speaker 2 he contacted me and said, could I come on and talk about this? Nimitabelle is in their listening area. I came on and I had a chat with Eddie about chenosum

Speaker 2 and he got calls, including from ANU geologist Leah Moore, who has spent decades working on soil in the Monero region specifically. Eddie had an eight-minute conversation

Speaker 2 with Dr. Moore.

Speaker 7 There are some Nenimitabel, but only in very localised areas in low-lying parts of the landscape.

Speaker 7 The Monero doesn't have many parts or places where it's sufficiently wet to deeply weather the basalts to generate these chernozems.

Speaker 7 And so they tend to concentrate in low-lying areas along fog plains, sometimes associated with lakes, but they're not very extensive. They are present, but they're not very extensive.

Speaker 2 She said chernosem.

Speaker 5 She said chernosum. I heard it.

Speaker 2 No, no, it was different to what I say. Oh.

Speaker 2 Chernizem, she's saying. I was saying chernosum.
She's saying chernism, but we're being told to say chornosum anyway. Who knows? It's so funny.

Speaker 2 I think that you may be having this feeling at the same time as I am, Cara. When you discover a whole new area, like there are nerds

Speaker 2 in an area you never even considered that there would be nerds of.

Speaker 5 That there's decades of material just to read about this.

Speaker 2 Yes, soil nerds. But interesting, what Dr.
Woo was saying, basically, that most of the conditions in the Monero region are right for this type of soil to form, but there's not enough rain.

Speaker 2 So it's only in the valley areas where water sort of pools that you end up with real,

Speaker 2 I'm not even, you know,

Speaker 2 the word, the word that apparently nobody knows how to say.

Speaker 6 Hey, hey, how about gumbo?

Speaker 5 Let's start saying gumbo,

Speaker 5 Australian gumbo.

Speaker 2 Gumbo, the wear the gumbo, that's right. So the gumbo only forms in these areas where pools, so that's why there's apparently tiny little patches of it around Numitabel, but it is there in Numitabel.

Speaker 5 I'd make a joke about us doing a live episode from that soil patch, but I don't know if we've got the budget for it. So

Speaker 5 2026, we'll see what we can do.

Speaker 2 Just I would love to arrive at some farmer's gate and go, there's a bog at like the bottom of the gully next to your sheep paddock. Can we sample our gear down there?

Speaker 5 Yeah, we've heard about the gumbo stewing here and we'd like a taste.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, we want to talk about the gumbo you got.

Speaker 5 Okay, so I mean, we've also had a lot of other emails.

Speaker 5 We had a wonderful email from a hydrogeologist called Anne who gave us a world of information about various different types of soil and included a link to the Australian soil classification.

Speaker 2 Although she said that they're definitely not. I know.
Well, this is the thing.

Speaker 5 She disagreed.

Speaker 2 So what you're telling me is that we need to get Dr. Leah Moore and Anna the hydrogeologist to like

Speaker 2 duke it out. Yeah.
That's right.

Speaker 5 That's our Christmas episode covered.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, yeah, no, I don't think the mud story is over just yet. We'll get to the bottom of the pit at some point.

Speaker 2 But anyway, we've got a lot of other emails about things that aren't mud, so why don't we go go on to those?

Speaker 5 So we've got a email from Melissa, who is in year seven. Here's what she had to say.

Speaker 8 Hi, I'm Melissa and I'm in year seven. I loved the podcast and I was wondering what could lead to the end of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 5 Huge change of pace.

Speaker 2 Right, yep, that's a hard shift.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Melissa.

Speaker 2 Excellent question, Melissa. And look, you'll be unsurprised to hear that I don't actually have the answer to the Israel-Palestine conflict here.
But I do have a strange story.

Speaker 2 From my time at at school, Melissa, this question reminded me of this story. So when I was in year 11 or 12, we in my modern history class were studying at length.

Speaker 2 We spent at least one, perhaps two terms on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Speaker 2 And as part of that, we traveled to Sydney to Macquarie University to take part in sort of a mock United Nations meeting between various parties and see if we could solve it in year seven with our couple of months knowledge about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Speaker 2 And everyone had to be allotted various roles. And I can't remember why, but I was allotted the role of being a Fox News reporter.

Speaker 2 Now, if you can believe this, Cara, this was from a period in my life when I knew more about the Arab-Israeli conflict than Fox News. Amazing.
I didn't know what Fox News was really.

Speaker 2 And I certainly wasn't sure why I got the job, apart from the fact that my teacher may have thought that I was the person who, in our class, talked the most while knowing the least about what he was talking about.

Speaker 5 That's what it takes to be a journalist, after all.

Speaker 2 Well, that's certainly what it takes to be on Fox News. That's right.
Lots of talking, no logic. But my job on the day was basically to sit in the corner and just watch.
Okay.

Speaker 2 And it went on for hours. Eventually, I got bored and interrupted proceedings.

Speaker 2 And I said, what if the United Nations just takes control of Jerusalem and administers Jerusalem as sort of a UN-controlled state?

Speaker 2 And people from both sides can visit as much as they want and visit the sites and live there. But it's a UN-controlled site.

Speaker 2 And I think everyone was very tired. And eventually they just decided to do that.

Speaker 2 Now, having thought about it for another 20 years,

Speaker 2 I actually think that that probably wouldn't work.

Speaker 2 I don't think that either side would accept it as a suggestion. And I don't think the UN is capable of administering that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 The UN doesn't quite have the legitimacy and respect and power that people in Year 11 think that it does.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So look, that was the idea that I had when I was 16 years old. And to be honest, I haven't got a better idea since then.
And I also definitely think that that idea wouldn't work.

Speaker 2 So that's my answer to your question, Melissa, is I don't know. And I've been thinking about it for 20 years.

Speaker 5 Okay, we have another question from Peter over email. Again, an abrupt change of pace.
With the story about Tesla planning on paying Elon Musk $1.5 trillion,

Speaker 5 I'm fascinated by the irony of a company paying that amount to the CEO while at the same time claiming to end world poverty through its, quote, sustainable abundance initiative.

Speaker 5 Can you really have both those things at the same time?

Speaker 2 You can have anything you want if you're Elon Musk.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 2 The interesting thing about the story is that it was widely reported that Elon Musk, you know, set to become the world's first trillionaire and he's got this massive payday from Tesla, that they value him as the CEO so much that they're willing to give him shares worth more than a trillion dollars and make him the world's first trillionaire.

Speaker 2 The caveat to that is he has to meet what I would describe as very optimistic targets

Speaker 2 in order to, you know, meet the criteria that would give him this payday of all of these shares. Some of the things that are on the list, he has to deliver 20 million Teslas.

Speaker 2 So build and deliver 20 million Teslas. He has to get

Speaker 2 10 million people who own Teslas to subscribe to the full self-driving subscription, which is an ask.

Speaker 5 Especially because a lot of those cars crash into other cars routinely and they're not that successful yet. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And paying a subscription for something in the car that you've already paid large amounts of money for.

Speaker 2 Not sure that a lot of people are going to be keen on that. He also needs to get a million robo-taxis into commercial operation.
At the moment, they're very, very, very, very long way away from that.

Speaker 2 And on top of needing to, you know, raise the market value to like seven and a half trillion dollars before he gets that payout, he also needs to manufacture and sell a million AI-operated robots.

Speaker 2 Yes. These are these humanoid optimus robots.

Speaker 2 And I think we might at some point in the future do an episode about humanoid robots and how lame they are.

Speaker 2 The various problems with these robots and why people have been trying for a very long time to make a humanoid robot work.

Speaker 2 But anyway, my favorite thing is that during this whole process, Elon Musk, clearly he's worried that he's not going to find a million people to buy these $20,000 robots.

Speaker 2 And so this is the quote that he gave during one of his appearances, sort of when he was spitballing on ideas for what the Optimus robot couldn't do.

Speaker 4 You might be able to give people a more,

Speaker 4 if somebody's committed crime, a more humane form of

Speaker 4 containment of future crime, which is if

Speaker 4 you say, like,

Speaker 4 you now get a free optimus, and it's just going to follow you around and stop you from doing crime.

Speaker 4 But other than that, you get to do anything.

Speaker 4 It's just going to stop you from committing crime. That's that's really it.
You know, then you don't have to put people in like prisons and stuff, I think.

Speaker 5 Is that the plot of Terminator? How does that

Speaker 2 how Terminator works? I haven't seen that movie yet, but the fact that, you know, can the robot read the criminal's mind? Exactly.

Speaker 2 Like, this article from Electric outlines some of the issues with this

Speaker 2 idea.

Speaker 2 And it says, the robots would, at a minimum, need to be able to predict human behavior, have full surveillance abilities in the ability to phone home and call for help, have some sort of combat ability

Speaker 2 to subdue dedicated crime doers,

Speaker 2 be able to follow a human anywhere they go, be able to work for at least as long a day as a human can and charge autonomously in any location that a human might sleep.

Speaker 5 Perfect.

Speaker 2 Would need to be able to do all of these things while detached from an energy source.

Speaker 5 That's at a minimum. I feel like unleashing a million combat robots onto the streets to police the people sounds absolutely like the worst idea I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 Well, America has 3 million people in prison. So that's 3 million combat robots.

Speaker 5 And also 3 million criminals on the street.

Speaker 2 I mean, look, I think a lot of people would say that America needs some sort of criminal justice reform. It has the highest rate of incarceration of anywhere in the world.

Speaker 2 But the question is, is the solution to this problem

Speaker 2 an army of super able combat robots that can read minds and predict what you're going to do before you do it.

Speaker 5 And that don't turn off for several days at a time.

Speaker 2 So, look, his massive payday

Speaker 2 I kind of feel is a separate thing. But also, I mean, him being a trillionaire by owning a large percentage of Tesla shares, you've got to remember that he can't actually sell them.

Speaker 2 He can't really sell those Tesla shares because the second that Elon Musk starts dumping Tesla shares, things are going bad, the price of Tesla shares are going to go down real fast.

Speaker 2 So it's a theoretical trillion dollars rather than a real one. But I mean, clearly, still a lot more money than you or I have.

Speaker 5 Hey, speak for yourself.

Speaker 6 Okay,

Speaker 6 we have

Speaker 5 another question here from Hilary in Sydney.

Speaker 9 Hi, this is Hilary from Sydney. You've delved into conspiracy narratives and fringe ideas.

Speaker 9 How do you balance the risk of amplifying disinformation with the goal of exploring these as genuine cultural phenomena? And where do you draw the editorial red lines?

Speaker 2 No, that's an excellent question from Hillary, particularly for us. We're, you know, the show that delves into conspiracy theories quite a bit.

Speaker 2 I think it's an interesting point because, you know, my delving into conspiracy

Speaker 2 in the early stages of this show,

Speaker 2 I wasn't particularly concerned that we were amplifying these things because our audience was not particularly large, and our audience tended to be of people who understood the skeptical nature of our program and that we weren't saying that we thought these conspiracy theories were true.

Speaker 2 We were saying that these conspiracy theories seem to be affecting the world in some way. People are reacting to this conspiracy theory.
People believe in this conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 It's affecting their vote. It's affecting their actions.
It's affecting global policy. And so it's important and it's significant and it needs to be discussed.

Speaker 2 I think these days, you know, we probably need to be more careful than we were before because our audience is growing and is more globalised and it is getting into more parts of the world than traditional ABC audiences tend to inhabit.

Speaker 2 But I feel like I try very hard to express skepticism for conspiracy theories when we talk about them and not pose them as something that I think is true.

Speaker 2 It's more something that we need to look into. How do you feel about Cara?

Speaker 5 I think, I mean, I'm thinking about our most recent conspiracy episodes, the Epstein ones in particular, where there is just an idea in the zeitgeist that you hear.

Speaker 5 We have people that write in about various conspiracies that they've heard and you kind of hear it brought up in conversation.

Speaker 5 And so I think delving to the bottom of where that conspiracy came from, where it originated, you know, how it came to pass that it was something that people were talking about at dinner time is what we want to get to the bottom of.

Speaker 5 Because I think once you can identify the roots of something, then you can really debunk it more easily, I think.

Speaker 5 And we're also, you know, to all of our listeners and viewers, kind of equipping them, I guess, with the capacity to be able to go into these conversations and feel like they can actually talk about where it came from.

Speaker 2 I think there was a scientific paper that looked into conspiracy theories and sort of looked at the limitations of them and the idea that as more people get involved in things that are secret, as the number of people involved increases and as the amount of time passes since the secret began, the likelihood of that secret coming out into the public approaches 100%.

Speaker 2 And for conspiracies that are quite old for example, around the idea that the CIA was involved in the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, the capacity of particularly democratic institutions to keep secrets like that for long periods of time, I'm very skeptical of.

Speaker 5 Our final question is actually a conspiracy that we have brewed ourselves on the show.

Speaker 5 I love this question so much. It's from Andrew.

Speaker 10 Hi there.

Speaker 10 I've just finished listening to the episode of If You're Listening, This Can't Be Good for Our Brains, in which you discuss with Cara Jensen-McKinnon how the hiding away or maybe even the necessary removal of information from public discourse can cause people to conjecture and even form wild conspiracy theories about what happened.

Speaker 10 And I felt like it was a perfect opportunity to air that I've been doing exactly this about your podcast if you're listening since June, earlier this year, following an episode called RFK Jr. vs.

Speaker 10 Fluoride.

Speaker 10 in which you stated at the end of the episode, a little teaser for the following week, that you'll be investigating why does Japan have so much influence over the Australian gas market.

Speaker 10 When that episode didn't air and there's been no reference to it since, my mind's formed conspiracies about how you'd been hushed and who by.

Speaker 10 My question is, what happened?

Speaker 5 I loved that Andrew thinks that we would be capable.

Speaker 5 Like given the time constraints that we are under every week, that somebody would give us the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't just we were disorganised, that it would actually be like a large corporation-wide ABC conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 I love that. I also love the idea that we've been allowed to talk about, you know, whether Epstein was murdered, Russia and China and all these things.

Speaker 2 And then the thing that would stop us is the Japanese influence over the Australian gas industry. Exactly.
The story is that

Speaker 2 I was... Writing that episode when we announced that we were going to be doing that next, which was five months ago.
I was maybe

Speaker 2 a third of the way done.

Speaker 2 And then the Doge program entirely disintegrated. And we talked so much about Doge and we had all these cool stories about Doge that we wanted to tell.

Speaker 2 And we were like, oh, look, I'm kind of struggling a bit with the Japan gas episode. It's only a third written.
Let's put that on the shelf and we'll come back to it at some stage.

Speaker 2 And then we did the Doge thing.

Speaker 5 Then there were like the ICE protests in LA. Then there was the 12-day war between Israel and Iran.
then Epstein's. It's just been like a cascading weeks and weeks and weeks of stories.

Speaker 5 So Japan gas is still a Google document

Speaker 5 that one day, when there is no news, may see the light of day.

Speaker 2 I'm sure that it will come out.

Speaker 2 When gas comes back into the news, there was, in fact, a lot of discussion about gas at the time, and that was why we were talking about it. We're in an odd situation at the moment, Cara.

Speaker 2 I think you'll agree, where we have a number of big announcements about big projects that we've been working on that, I mean, we could talk about, but it just kind of feels a bit early and people kind of forget about it.

Speaker 2 So we'll do the big announcement when it's more timely, but we've been working on a lot of different things for a while and it's been getting in the way of our ability to reheat Japanese gas episodes from earlier this year.

Speaker 2 That's right. Excellent question, though, Andrew.
And I can understand why you would think that someone had got to us.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Sometimes I do think with this show when I'm writing the copy, whether I should make all of the first letters of each sentence spell something out.

Speaker 5 Just in case there's anyone that looks out for that sort of thing. So I'm glad to know that at least, Andrew, you will notice that.

Speaker 2 I was about to say, Cara, for next week's episode, why don't we write in some sort of a secret code? But then I realized that that sounds like a lot of work and I don't have time for it.

Speaker 5 We don't have time.

Speaker 2 So no secret code in next week's episode.

Speaker 5 But in one episode.

Speaker 2 In an episode at some point, we might write a secret code. I'll warn you though, you know, don't go combing through every episode for secret codes.
I don't want you to have to do that.

Speaker 2 But if we decide to put a secret code in an episode, I'll let you know and you can go looking for it.

Speaker 5 I feel like management's going to be knocking at the door as we record this.

Speaker 2 Don't put secret codes in the episodes.

Speaker 5 No secret codes in the episodes, please.

Speaker 2 No Japan gas. No secret codes.

Speaker 2 Excellent. What good questions.
Thank you very much, everybody, for sending through your questions. We'll We'll probably do another one of these over summer.

Speaker 2 We've got a lot coming up here on If You're Listening over the summer period and into next year.

Speaker 2 If you've got questions about the way to make the show, any of our topics, send them through, particularly in audio form, is great. To if you're listening at abc.net.au.
Cara, thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Bye. Boy.