On Monday 20th June, BAFTA award winning comedian Jolyon Rubinstein and Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist James Ball will launch a new series of their podcast New Conspiracist. Their goal is to separate the reality from the rubbish, the certitude from the codswallop, in a quest to discover what’s true – and what’s fake news – in the sometimes silly, sometimes serious world of conspiracy theorists.
Is Greta Thunberg a time traveller?
Who shot JFK?
Is there any truth to ‘chemtrails’?
Were the pyramids built by aliens?
Has Melania Trump been replaced? If so, by whom?
And, most pressing of all, why don’t women’s clothes have pockets?
In each episode Jol, self-declared “professional funny man and alien obsessive”, is kept on track and fact-checked by his investigative sidekick James. They are joined by expert guests to help them come to a decision on one particular theory – believable, or one to add to the reject pile?
Guests include actor and comedian Rosie Holt, queen of the satirical spoof sketch; Labour MP for Walthamstow Stella Creasy; Caroline Criado Perez, activist and author of the Sunday Times Bestseller Invisible Women; and Ola Labib, who is currently the only Black, Muslim, female, Sudanese comedian performing in the UK.
New Conspiracist will be available on all major podcast providers from 20th June.
About Jolyon Rubinstein
Jolyon is a BAFTA award winning co-writer and actor, winning Best Comedy Programme for his BBC 3 programme The Revolution Will Be Televised. Most recently he won the Broadcast Award 2022 for Best Entertainment Programme. He previously won the Broadcast Digital Award 2021 for Best Lockdown Programme in the Comedy, Entertainment & Scripted category for the third series of his hop-hop themed panel show Don’t Hate The Playaz – which he both associate produced and created in 2018. The show was hosted by Jordan Stephens, featured Maya Jama, and made UK TV history when it featured the first ever all black, all female panel.
Jolyon has directed a series of stunt-films for Stella McCartney in the world’s three fashion capitals; London, New York & Milan to promote the banning of selling fur as part of Stella’s Autumn ’21 range and her “Our Time Has Come” campaign. He also partnered with the Vaccine Alliance to pressure world leaders to waive the patent for vaccine roll out world wide, and directed a film for Greenpeace to highlight the UK’s lack of action on climate change.
About James Ball
James Ball is the global editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where he oversees the not-for-profit’s international reporting projects. He also works as a freelance writer and broadcaster, and is a weekly columnist for The New European.
He was previously a special correspondent at BuzzFeed UK and special projects editor at The Guardian, where he played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, as well as the offshore leaks, HSBC Files, Reading the Riots and Keep it in the Ground projects.
At WikiLeaks he was closely involved in Cablegate – the publication of 250,000 classified US embassy cables in 2010 – as well as working on two documentaries based on the Iraq War Logs.
James is the author of multiple books, including “Post-Truth and “Bluffocracy”. His next book, “The System: who owns the internet and how it owns us” is published by Bloomsbury in August 2020.