Everywhere you look there are conspiracy theories, and Dom Joly will be looking at them on his Conspiracy Tour, following on from his book Dom Joly’s The Conspiracy Tourist: Travels Through a Strange World (£22, Robinson). Dates include: Wednesday February 28, Brighton, Komedia; Friday March 1, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal; and Sunday March 10, Devonshire Park, Eastbourne.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers. Really
00:05 lovely to be speaking to Dom Jolly, who is on the road in 2024 with a really intriguing
00:11 sounding tour, the Conspiracy Tour. Now this reflects a book that you've written and reflects
00:17 the fact that we are all obsessed with conspiracy, aren't we? Is it all about gullibility? Is
00:22 it about stupidity? Why do we like conspiracy so much, do you think?
00:27 I don't know, I think conspiracies used to be fun and now I think they've got a bit more
00:30 dangerous and I think a lot of that has got down to social media, to us being polarised
00:37 online. I think people feel a bit dispossessed at the moment and they're looking for order
00:42 within chaos and conspiracies provide that. But my book and the tour make serious points,
00:48 but actually it's about the funny side of conspiracies, from the ludicrousness of does
00:54 Finland exist, to me taking a flat earther to the edge of the flat earth. I mean, most
00:59 people know about flat earthers, but I discovered a splinter group of flat earthers that were
01:03 square flat earthers and they believe that the earth is square and flat and has four
01:07 corners and one of those is an island called Fogo in Newfoundland. So I took a flat earther
01:12 there with quite weird consequences. So I'm going to be talking about what I learnt in
01:19 my book, going around the world meeting conspiracy theorists, but I'm also being joined by one
01:23 of Britain's leading conspiracy theorists, Dr Julian Northcutt, who wrote a seminal book,
01:28 Cows, Britain's Secret Killers, about the amount of people killed by cows every year
01:32 and of course that's been hidden, covered up by Big Pharma. And he and I sort of don't
01:38 agree on a lot of things, so there will be fireworks, I think.
01:41 Goodness, that sounds fascinating. So the point is, when we accept a conspiracy theory,
01:45 we are to an extent looking for some kind of reassurance, you think?
01:49 I think we're looking for order and chaos, yeah, and we're looking for maybe some sort
01:54 of feeling of control, some sort of feeling of being in charge of our own destiny, which
02:00 I think more and more people feel a little adrift and I think conspiracy theories give
02:04 you easy answers.
02:05 But the troubling thing is that truth is no longer absolute, is it? Your point is that
02:10 truth has been fractured and there are versions of truth that people argue for.
02:14 I'm afraid so. Donald Trump's spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, started talking about alternative
02:20 facts and that's when truth became a little bit drifty and now we all have our own truths
02:25 and your truth, my truth. If you look at Gaza at the moment, you know, someone blows up
02:30 a hospital, one side says it's them, the other side says it wasn't them and both stick to
02:35 that rigidly and there's no, nothing gets determined at all anymore. It's just you take
02:40 your truth and that's what you go with.
02:41 So how worried should we be about this, that there are so many different versions of the
02:45 same thing?
02:46 I think we should be very worried about conspiracy theories, especially with AI coming down the
02:53 line and not knowing what to believe on camera. This might not be me talking to you, you might
02:56 not be here, I might not be on tour.
02:58 I'm trusting you for the moment.
03:00 I am on tour, I am going, I have written a book, but I might not have, you know, so who
03:04 knows? I don't know. I wouldn't worry about it though, I'd come to the tour and laugh
03:07 about it because that's the only thing we can do.
03:09 Fantastic. We're really good to speak to you. Thank you for your time.
03:13 Brilliant. Thank you.
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