Conspiracy Cabal

Senator Jordon Steele-John is under-fire for alleged mistreatment of women, which he denies. However, the story also points to an alleged cover up by The Greens, and a secret dossier on how to handle the allegations against Steele-John.

The Greens have denied any existence of a secret dossier.

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Jones has said plenty of strange things, but few have travelled further than his claim that chemicals in the water are changing the sexuality of animals, and of people too. It sounds absurd. Yet there’s a real pesticide, a real scientist’s frog research, and real restrictions in Australia on where that chemical can be sprayed. Nothing makes a conspiracy go off like a sex scandal, so this week the Cabal goes there.

Rich and Nick are joined by the Cabal’s newest member, former investigative journalist Bension Siebert, who worked with Rich on the podcast Pray Harder. After he was made redundant in 2025, Bension turned to sex work. He found it more meaningful than he expected and more secure than journalism, and it’s now paying for the investigation he’s scripting.

• The frog problem: A “gay bomb” once floated by a US military research lab, the herbicide atrazine, Tyrone Hayes’s frog studies, and a small study of semen quality in 86 Missouri men. The guys explain why Australia restricted atrazine in 1997 and the paraquat and Parkinson’s questions that deserve real attention, and how a homophobic dog whistle buries all of it.
• The intern problem: Monica Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr’s investigation, Arkansas state troopers, and the president who didn’t inhale. Was the biggest political sex scandal of the past 50 years also a gift to Bill Clinton’s enemies?
• The larrikin problem: Bob Hawke’s affair with his biographer Blanche d’Alpuget, the much-loved Hazel, and why Australians kept cheering him at the cricket anyway. Plus Gladys Berejiklian and Daryl Maguire, Barnaby Joyce’s comeback, and whether cancel culture ever actually cancels anyone.
• The hypocrisy problem: Larry Craig was an anti-gay US senator until his 2007 arrest in an airport men’s room. That leads to Bension’s rule: when a politician rails against gay people, start the timer.
• The spy problem: It’s 1963. There’s a war minister, a 19-year-old model, a Soviet naval attaché, and a society osteopath who died after his own trial. Then Mandy Rice-Davies delivers the most famous retort in British public life: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Some of this is science: endocrine disruptors, sample sizes, and what a regulator actually found. Some of it is a mirror held up to the rest of us. Why are we so titillated by other people’s private lives, and why does hypocrisy end careers when the affair itself often doesn’t? The verdicts: atrazine turning the frogs gay scores a zero. Atrazine doing something to frogs scores a ten. An Australian prime minister surviving a Lewinsky-style scandal today gets one out of ten at best.

This episode contains themes of sex and sexuality and is recommended for listeners 15 and over.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn’t promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the days before the attacks, traders placed unusually large bets that United and American Airlines stock would fall. Those were the two airlines whose planes were hijacked. The 9/11 Commission found no sign that anyone had advance knowledge. A finance professor, a former Australian market regulator, and a widow who testified before the Commission all saw something different.

"Follow the money." That was the advice to Bob Woodward during Watergate, and 25 years after September 11, it may be the best way into the one 9/11 theory that won't go away. This week, Rich and Nick quickly run through the five best-known 9/11 theories before following the money into the trades that regulators, academics, and families have argued about for a quarter of a century.

The guys look at whether any of the theories have any kernel of truth. The intelligence failures were real, with warnings about hijacked planes flying into buildings circulating as far back as 1998.

Some of this is statistics: put-to-call ratios, trading volumes up a hundredfold, and a peer-reviewed 2006 study that found the activity consistent with informed traders. Some of it is just the plain fact that al-Qaeda's plans were an open secret in parts of the intelligence world.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The first listener to write in with their name and postal address gets one of the first Conspiracy Cabal tinfoil hat brewing trucker caps.

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reports in Israel are suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu received a warning about the October 7th attacks and failed to take action.

As well, Manchester City faces punishment for mass cheating.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the mountains of southwest China sits a radio telescope big enough to swallow the MCG. It's built to listen to the cosmos. Meanwhile, Beijing has reportedly brought in a science-fiction writer to advise on what to do if something out there answers. That writer is Cixin Liu, author of The Three-Body Problem. His big idea, the "dark forest," says the universe is full of silent hunters, and any civilisation that reveals itself gets destroyed.

So what does China think it's listening for, and why does it want the man who wrote that theory in the room? This week, Rich and Nick head into the dark forest. They start with the Three-Body Problem trilogy and move on to real telescopes, unexplained signals, and what happens to the human mind on the day disclosure stops being hypothetical.

- The silence problem: Trisolarans, sophons, and decades of signals we've already sent out. If any civilisation out there is far more advanced than us, announcing ourselves may be the worst thing we could have done. Our only edge may be the one thing the aliens don't understand: treachery.

- The telescope problem: FAST, the 500-metre dish with about 4,500 movable panels that can refocus without the structure ever moving. It's the most sensitive ear on the planet, and it's already picking up things nobody can fully explain.

- The signal problem: Fast radio bursts flash and fade in milliseconds but reportedly carry more energy than the Sun puts out in a year. Scientists assume they're natural. Rich has other ideas.

- The secrecy problem: Harry Reid's quietly funded UAP program, Luis Elizondo's resignation, and the private money from Robert Bigelow and Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen. Then there's Jeremy Corbell's prediction that governments will warn of an alien craft arriving in 2027, and his claim that the warning itself will be the misinformation. - The shock problem: Covid emptied the toilet-paper aisles. What would disclosure do? The guys look at "ontological shock," at how Disclosure Day handled public reaction, and at new research asking who would be hit hardest if confirmation ever came.

Some of this is astrophysics: radio waves, filament structures, bursts nobody can explain. Some of it is just history. Every time a more advanced civilisation has met a less advanced one on this planet, it has gone badly for the one with less.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lachie Neale got off, and he's now free to play in the Grand Final. Couldn't have happened to a better bloke.

Also, the PM has called a hasty press conference to detail how a rogue Open AI agent hacked into Medicare.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ivan Milat was convicted of seven murders and died in a prison hospital bed in 2019, still insisting he didn't do it. Almost nobody in Australia believes him. But a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and missing persons is now asking a different, more uncomfortable question: were seven enough?

This week, Rich and Nick dig into the growing list of cold cases with Milat's name attached to them - from a stabbing on a beach when he was 22, to a body found after he was already behind bars - and sit down with a former NSW detective pushing for a coercive-powers commission to finally crack them.

• The near-miss problem: Englishman Paul Onions, a gun, a rope, a highway shootout - and the report to police that went nowhere until bodies started turning up in a state forest
• The Wanda Beach problem: a 1965 double murder, a police artist's sketch, a photo of a 22-year-old Milat shown to the sitting Premier, and a resemblance nobody can quite explain away
• The ballistics problem: an 18-year-old hitchhiker, a Ruger 10/22 rifle, and free bullets that matched a gun already tied to two of Milat's known victims — with no charge ever laid
• The timeline problem: a 16-year-old's murder in the Hunter Valley that happened after Milat's arrest, and what that does to the theory that he always worked alone
• The institutional problem: a 12-day turnaround letter from the NSW Homicide Squad, a cold case process that reviews old files instead of starting fresh, and why the families still waiting call it a desktop exercise

Some of this is forensic - ballistics, timelines, photographs held up side by side. Some of it is just the arithmetic of a man who was, by his own family's account, capable of far worse than what he was ever tried for, working alone in a state forest for the better part of two decades before one man got away.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Nick says we need to have a conversation about covid mandates (again), and Rich loses his dog mid recording.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every Sunday morning in Benton, Arkansas, a small congregation gathers to hear a sermon from a man some of them believe is Elvis Presley. Not "sounds like him." Not "channels his spirit." Actually him — alive, aged into his eighties, and preaching under an assumed name because, as one longtime fan put it, he hopes "one day he will stand up and say who he is." Pastor Bob Joyce has said, on the record, more than once, that he is not Elvis Presley. It hasn't slowed the theory down at all.

This week, part two: Rich and Nick sit back down with Greg Page to trace where the "he's still out there" theory has actually gone since 1977 — from a plane ticket that couldn't have existed to a pulpit in Arkansas that a lot of people can't stop looking at.

- The sightings problem: supermarket check-out lines, a Kalamazoo bus station, a monastery in the Midwest — and why almost every "credible" sighting traces back to a book someone was trying to sell

- The Bob Joyce problem: an elderly pastor whose sermons get read as coded messages to "Patriots" by some of his own congregation, a direct and repeated denial, and why that denial only seems to make believers more certain

- The "Jon Burrows lives" theory: the alias-on-a-plane-ticket story, why Memphis airport had no international flights in 1977 and has never flown to Buenos Aires, and what happened when journalists tried to run the paper trail down anyway

- The DNA problem: exhumation requests the family has always refused, the grave at Graceland itself, and what forensic genealogy can and can't settle when nobody agrees to a test

- The economics problem: impersonators, "authenticated" late-career photos, and why an Elvis-is-alive story sells more than an Elvis-is-dead one ever will

Some of this is provable — flight logs, sermon transcripts, a pastor on the record saying who he isn't. Some of it is just what people need to believe about a man who died at 42: that somewhere out there, in a small church in Arkansas, he got to grow old instead.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yeah, maybe we're all cooked?

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The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them.

Contact the show at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.