Knowledge Fight - #607: A Chat With Mike Rothschild

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Today, Dan and Jordan chat a bit with Mike Rothschild, author of the book The Storm Is Upon Us, about the phenomenon of QAnon.  Tune in for a discussion about the intersections of Q and the Infowars world, as well as the broader picture about Q.  Also, buy Mike's book.

I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys knowledge and your knowledge fight stop it andi and tanz andi and tanz just time to pray andi and tanz you're on the earth thanks for holding hello alec some assistant call i'm a huge fan i love your world knowledge fight no no no no knowledge fight dot com i love you everybody welcome back to knowledge fight i'm dan i'm jord we're a couple dudes like to sit around worship with the altar of selene and talk a little bit about alex jones oh indeed we are alex jones god god god god all right i nodded my head but i refuse to clap you were

following the beat i was i can't not i was i was a drummer can't not follow the beat man that's what i do dian we got the beat i have a question for you what's up jordan do we have the meats uh we do have the meats actually you're gonna ask me about my bright spot i was gonna ask you about your bright spot my bright spot actually kind of comes in the form of something about a meat uh-huh so i was uh taking a trip this uh this last weekend yes and i was visiting a friend in dc and one night we decided to get um some bermese food for dinner okay and i was looking at the menu we're gonna order it and uh there was something that was a beef uh stewed with chilies oh boy it's hot uh huh yeah well yeah yeah and so i i decided to order it on the bone

no no okay that would have been kind of like a stew ah okay um and so i decided to get that and uh my friend was ordering it and i could hear on the other end of the phone the guy taking the order going it was a ridiculous family laugh like he's oh yeah he wants to order that that's fun that's fun that's our joke menu item that idiot i got humiliated and i thought everything was going to be fine but then it came in man hot it was too hot yeah i deserved to get laughed at well i mean hey i couldn't finish it and i'm somebody who you know like i'm up on the wall of a Thai restaurant you know i've i've had i've had some adventures in spicy yeah you got that i think i think um maybe i'm getting old i think i think it happens uh maybe i can't handle it but it also felt like

did you get some of that heartburn no not really but i got like overwhelmed ah i got like sweat you were you went into shock yes yes it was a it was a full body experience oh boy um but yeah the trip was nice i got back monday and here we are that's awesome yeah that's great it was a great good time all in all you know bright spot but also that getting laughed at over the phone yes of course that's that's too good i chair i'll cherish that moment rest of my life and that he was right that is also pretty fun it is nice whenever people are confidently mocking you and then they win that's too good yeah because the people at the the Thai place that i go to they they will give you are you sure yes yeah and and usually it's okay i can handle it right but not this time i actually

honestly kind of think that if it was chicken i could have been okay because the heat profile was very strong but there was something about it being the beef and you have to chew it a little bit more it's a little bit more gamey yeah yeah i don't know i've never thought you were a real beef guy anyways i'm generally not i don't go for red meat all that often i'm more of a poultry person that's kind of what i was thinking yeah yeah yeah anyway what's your bright spot uh my bright spot dan is somebody tried to order burmese food you left your ass off that would be that does sound like me it would be fun if it was my i got a weekend gig in dc it was my laugh on the other that would be great or if every time i hear a laugh it just it's funneled through my ears that's

your life there's only one laugh my bright spot dad is uh as you if you recall uh back in the day when i went to see show a otani they stole my bag uh i wasn't stoked about it yeah right it wasn't see through because it wasn't see through so then i got a backpack because i'm a messenger bag guy all the way yeah yeah so then i got a backpack and i tried that out awful it was not it was not fitting right uh my partner found me the ultimate messenger bag nice it's got a buckle in shit for the the thing it's amazing it fits all kinds of stuff a lot of hidden pockets i love hidden pockets that is nice you know i love a good hidden pocket of course only thing better than a hidden pocket on a bag is a hidden pocket in your coat oh love those those interior pockets yeah those are

the shit that is nice we can just pull something out oh it's the best it's the best yeah if it was a handkerchief you'd be like you know it goes in there proof nice evidence so you're gonna whip it just why do i have this manila envelope you know why uh yeah so the bag is absolutely fantastic she uh thought about a gift for me i'm notoriously terrible to buy gifts for sure because i'm not really uh i don't really have stuff well but i mean i think like you know when you're in a position where you're struggling with this backpack totally it lends itself to a gift and it was it was amazing yeah well i'm happy for you because i was getting to a point where i started calling you backpack yeah yeah it's good to be it's good to be uh back it's good to be back to message your

bag it was a backpack um so jordan uh we're back from uh the the little break yeah i didn't have an episode on monday and uh we're gonna jump back in today with something a little bit different uh huh off the beaten path maybe something that's becoming something we may do a little bit more of maybe time goes on it's been fun it has it has it uh it it's not always the easiest thing to get people who would want to talk on our show right necessarily yes yeah guests are not something we do very often yeah but today we get in touch with uh mike rothchild oh yeah is someone who's been following qanon quite a bit in the banking industry for a long time calm down okay um uh he has a book out called the storm is upon us right and it's about the roots of qanon yes and all that

stuff so we had a little conversation with him about some of the book and some of the intersections with the alex jones world speaking of which it's very funny that even the the book world that we live in he has to put in parentheses every time he puts his name mike rothchild no relation to be fair not every time but it is every time but it's in there and because i bring this up in our conversation with him it now is going to sound like we're hyper focused on this and that's tacky no it's great um so we'll get to that interview here in a moment but before we do jordan let's say hello to some new wonks oh that's a great idea so first uh worshiper of selene thank you so much you are now a policy wonk i'm a policy wonk thank you so much thank you next uh the boys at rate my

creepy ceiling dot com thank you so much you are now a policy wonk i'm a policy wonk thank you very much i worry what i just gave a shout out to i i don't know i don't know how i like rate my creepy see if that becomes the new facebook we're in real trouble that will destroy democracy yeah oh yeah cam thank you so much you are now a policy wonk i'm a policy wonk thanks cam thank you next uh james thank you so much you're now a policy wonk i'm a policy wonk thanks james thank you next uh walle the goodest boy thank you so much you're now a policy wonk i'm a policy wonk thanks walle and we got a technocrat uh out there uh to say hello to is uh i hate the 2021 alex jones but the super fake 2003 radio voices unbelievably worse

grr thank you so much you are now a technocrat i'm a policy wonk crikey mate that's fantastic have yourself a brew how's your 401k doing bro all right we gotta go full tilt buggy on this watch and all right let's just get down to business we ain't making that money off that heroin why are you pimp so good my neck is freakishly large i declare info war on you thank you so much grr thank you very much grrr so yeah without further ado i i say we jump into this interview last time when we had an interview we had that fun like yeah we had that yeah yeah Well we we didn't know we were gonna do it again that's true we wouldn't have done the bit

if it was a thing we did that's true that's true this is less of a let's take you to a fantasy world where we're interviewing yes exactly and this is more like welcome to us interviewing again yeah yeah so uh here we are here we go uh enjoy and we'll see you on friday uh well hello uh joining us today uh very very exciting we're drifting into interviews jordan yeah this is weird we're doing two very short we've done how many episodes well over 600 and we have two full interviews now yeah but uh you know opportunities uh pop up and lend themselves to productive conversations why not that are interesting to the the world that we look at i think it's also that nobody's ever wanted to talk to us before that i think that is true there was a long stretch of time where

who are they why are they doing that i well we got a lot of why yeah a lot of why a lot of personal friends asking why also uh but joining us uh today very excited to have uh mike roth child on the show there's a new book that he has out called the storm is upon us uh with a long subtitle a lot of words just call it the storm the storm the storm i don't i think i can't even finish the title honestly you subscribe to the alex jones school of just reading just reading the headlines so mike thank you thank you for joining us oh thanks for having me i'm really excited to be here um i think the elephant in the room of course is uh that you're very uh insistent in the book that you're not related to the roth child's i am not related to the roth child's um look i drive

a 2004 toyota corolla so uh that's just what they would want you to drive right right but it's made of platinum so that'll do it um no no there are uh people with the same last name not related to each other uh shock i know but yeah my last name's holmes nobody's related to me nfl running back priest holmes looks just like you he's great yeah i imagine that you get accusations about that a lot though like i i i noticed in the book there was at least uh a time there's parenthetically no relation to the author yeah and i just have to assume with the world that you cover with q anon and conspiracy uh stuff people would make that connection and probably be mad yeah people people think that i'm acting as some sort of like hype man for the family

you know they're like chuck d and i'm like flava flava and i've got my clock on and i'm yelling like like we don't drink blood yo um but it's sort of a it's sort of a defensive hype man it's just yeah yeah it's like like a crisis pr hype man but but the like how gerbils was a hype man you know like yeah yeah yeah gerbils was very flashy yes very fly war war a big clock swastika shape made it hard to tell time but the thing that you find with a lot of sort of old money families is that they don't address this stuff at all like they don't they don't talk about it like there's no and i've looked for this stuff i've looked for members of the Rothschild family going on the record and talking about this stuff and they don't talk about it they

they it doesn't exist for them they they they just live their lives because they know that anything that they throw into that particular fire is just going to be used as proof that it's all true you can't prove that you're not something so you just don't talk about it you know you get that a lot with these older money families you know these these families that have passed down a lot of wealth and have been the subject of rumors like they just there's nothing to say yeah there's no there's no win in in uh coming out and being like not true you end up in a situation then where it's like the you know proving you're not a witch by being drowned right right exactly that's exactly it i would say they could come out and say uh peasants we give no

fucks about you that would also count right that would be basically the same thing yeah yeah yeah so wait you you wrote this book about QAnon yes and uh i was curious about like how much of this was like the result of like a passion or did you set out as a project like was this was this something that you were interested in before uh you were getting into the book would you following it like organically as it was happening yeah i see i've been writing about conspiracy theories for about 10 years i mean most of it just you know on blogs and for no money i mean obviously but i've been interested in the subject for much longer than that i really got into the whole idea of conspiracy theories as storytelling through coast to coast

a.m i used to listen to to art bell a lot and i i know i never believed any of it but it was so outside of my own sort of middle class suburban existence talking about ufo's and the Illuminati and there were ghost circles suburbs so what's up well yeah but you just didn't talk about them that's true that's true uh so this was i was really into this as as a form of storytelling and so i sort of drifted into it more and more professionally and so i i wrote i had an opportunity to write my first book which came out uh beginning of 2020 but long before that i'd started to look at QAnon and the the first uh my first inkling of seeing something there was beginning of 2018 so just a few months after the first drops came out and i started seeing tweets about

john mccain and hillary clinton wearing orthopedic walking boots uh not because they like hurt their feet like the rest of us peasants but because they were wearing ankle bracelets that were secret because they'd been arrested in a purge called the storm and i'm like oh this is awesome i i got i've got to dive into this and see where where this is going what if this is true what else is true yeah exactly like if people believe this like ankle bracelets are bulky they're not like slap bracelets you know they're like like you can't like hollow out a walking boot to wear one i've got a monitor bracelet and it's leopard print i've always liked that the most filmed people on earth need uh ankle bracelets to track their movements yeah yeah well it's because they all

have clothes right well that's yes yeah but i started to get a little more concerned about it when i started to see the parallels in QAnon to these previous affinity frauds these things i write about a lot of the book um the iraqi dinar scam and then before that nasara before that the omega trust scam and these some of these things have been running since the early 90s and have built a lot of people out of a lot of money using the same kind of setup this sort of all-knowing guru who has access to secret intel that they will dole out to a select few people who are the special chosen ones who will know what to do when the great change event happens and it's always about to happen and there's always some dark force that gets in the way just as

everything's about to change it's it's you'd net it's such a coincidence that happens every time it's every time every time and it's always like just about to happen and and with the dinar scam i mean the the level of minutiae that went into this of these these anonymous gurus uh with these names like wolfie man and tia and tony who are just like these scam artists who are in like kansas city who also have like secret access to the inner workings of the iraqi foreign ministry and they were post like like the the the dinar revalue has already been announced in the mosques standby to get your to get your secret one eight hundred number to call in when you'll you'll be told where to go and you need to have these code words and you need to dress up and you need to

not tell anybody where you're going and bring your dinars in a metal case and in a faraday cage i mean it's like on and on and on and and it works like a lot of conspiracy theories do as you guys know that the more arcane detail you load on to something the more believable it becomes the more vague something is the less real it seems yeah because i think people have just sort of a way of being tricked by specificity you know you don't think that someone would make up all of these details right that would be that would be exhausting that would be insane that would be crazy who would yeah and i think another element too is like when you have all those details and all of these weird steps that you need to take it's if you get tricked by one you really don't want to admit

you got tricked by that one yeah and so you go for the second and the third and fourth step it becomes much easier to rationalize yeah it's like blackmail it's like you're you're not done you're not done being blackmail there's always going to be more that you're supposed to do you know right there's always another step there's always another bit of minutiae you know one of my favorite details with the omega trust scam which was the precursor to nasara which was this grift this long time grifter who promised that he had access to prime european banknotes that only five people in the world knew about this this dude's a plumber in mattoon illinois i mean really i know mattoon illinois yeah and that is where they keep those secret banknotes you

believe that shit my my favorite detail that was that the the cash that you sent in to buy your omega units had to be wrapped in tinfoil sure i don't know why but you know what you don't want those rays getting in and sure you don't want the currency yeah but it's it's those details that make something seem real yeah because otherwise why would you do that yeah i i admire the confidence of these people yeah that's why they call them con man yeah exactly there's a reason it's just such i don't know how i i i mean like i don't even know how i would be able to tell you that i have secret european notes let alone strangers right yeah let alone your your sort of circle of of church cronies yeah that you have making phone calls to get more people to invest in this thing

now it's hard not to view that as the story of america though like it was literally founded upon culton con men yeah the entire country has been built out of people bullshitting other people for money a lot of financial uh and but myths intertwine yeah yeah yeah the puritans were very capitalist and the the aspirational model i think is something that you know really works with those kinds of cons and works all the way going up to trump i mean so much of trump's appeal was you're i'm gonna make you just like me we've got the bigger boats we've got the nicer apartments i mean you're talking to coal miners in like rural pennsylvania like we're talking about boats and penthouse departments overlooking central park again really that's such a depressing thought i'd

never really put it uh put it that way in my head of like trumping like i will make you like me yeah i mean when you look at the social mobility numbers through class systems and you you realize that nobody from the lower classes even moving up to the middle class there's no greater con than the american dream you can build whatever you want and become rich that is the biggest con yeah i really liked your uh your rebuttal in the book for the denar uh revaluation thing where it was just this is not how this works this would never happen fundamentally mistaken this would destroy all money in the world well yeah and and you and that's a really it's a really useful way to look at something that seems really complex like the denar like q and to to break it down into

the simple idea of that's not how this works this this is not possible this is not how things happen you know money does not simply appear like that you can't just become a billionaire overnight with the stroke of a pen and have all your friends be billionaires and have money have any value anymore yeah yeah then you have the dollar is the new denar right like you just end up it's circular yeah i i think that that is helpful uh unless you already believe all the stuff and then i think i think it's still not penetrative yeah no it's not it's it's then you start to fall back on well that's what they want you to think that you know they don't know what we know we have the secret knowledge they don't know their sleep it's that feeling of specialness that you get when you are

consuming conspiracy media and it's being reflected back to you up i know i know something you don't know yeah i mean ultimately paradigm changing yeah yeah i mean ultimately if your response like when you boil down that denar scam your response like at the most elemental level is just no back no you know you want to be like you hit him with the newspaper you can't think like this yeah one of the things that i think is is really interesting about framing cuban on that way or looking at it from that perspective too is like you know it doesn't appear to be similar necessarily in the same way as those those are like very clearly i want money kind of kind of schemes whereas i think externally you view cuban on as like wow this is ideas or right it doesn't seem as much of

like a money machine right and that was what was really troubling to me was with something like nasara the denar there's the financial aspect of it and most people are kind of savvy enough to know that you can't buy a million denars and somebody signs a piece of paper and you're a millionaire like most people know that that's not how money works but what q was selling wasn't that you're gonna get rich it was you're gonna feel awesome when hillary clinton and john pedesta get the short drop from the rope at guantanamo bay it was selling good feelings and it was selling the the idea that these people that they've hated for decades are finally going to get what's coming to them you know it is it is absolutely no surprise that the first post by q

was hillary clinton is on the run she's gonna be extradited there's gonna be riots the national guard's gonna come out into the streets everything that you've wanted is gonna happen and it all goes from there yeah i think i think something that's uh so it's it's i don't know if people recognize but like in those communities and conspiracy and right wing communities in particular like hillary clinton's like catnip it like if you want to pitch something kind of silly attaching her to it is oh it's particularly we've seen this over and over again through through years and years on alex's show yeah like larry nickles was able to create a cottage industry for himself just coming up with nonsense but saying like hillary yeah i mean the moment the moment they successfully got everybody

to tie the foster murder to the clinton's no matter what like it doesn't matter if you believe it or not believe it you know that they are associated with the vince foster murder murder then you can just make up anything yeah yeah i was actually i was listening to an old art bell open lines show from i think like mid or late 1995 and one of the things that he was talking about was that having a handwriting analyst uh take a look at the vince foster suicide note now outbell was a was tended to be a little bit more skeptical than a lot of the the modern conspiracy gurus but even then it's like they're they're just blaming stuff on the clinton's i mean this is the mid 90s and it's still happening yeah you brought up uh you brought up like in coast to coast a m quite a bit

you just brought back up art bell so now i have to ask this sure do you not like uh george norie as much as i don't like it i do not like george norie at all uh that guy sucks it's it's it's just a different kind of show and it's not as fun yeah it's it's not as like we're gonna figure this out together and and and bell was skeptical i mean that's one of the things about his show is that if somebody called in and had some kaka maybe story like he wasn't just going aha that totally happened i believe that completely he would he would actually sort of talk about this and try to tease out is this possible did this happen i mean look the guy was also a crank but he he was at least sort of a selective crank if if that's a thing he seemed to have less of like an agenda than like

george norie is definitely like he has ideas yeah yeah but then again i mean even our bell was like he was the one who had courtney brown on when they were talking about the spaceship behind hail bop oh yeah totally um so he he fucked up a bit oh yeah oh there's no question about yeah but george norie way worse we can all agree on that and i'm glad yeah yes what other radio hosts do you hate go ahead and just give me a list and all of the fill in hosts on coast to coast yeah yeah it's it's just it's not the same yeah pun it sucks it's very granular hate yeah oh actually that's that's a that's a that's an interesting connection too is that uh george norie on his show uh actually his head uh steve pacenek as a guest

a number of times and i know that this is something that we'd sort of messaged a little bit about about uh i'm fascinated to understand um what kind of an interaction you you someone who's studied cubanon would think of him of dr steve pacenek so pacenek is one of those guys and you get a lot of this in this world these guys who are sort of sort of quasi military connected quasi intelligence connected and they've turned that into a persona where they know everything and they have all the secrets and they can see through everything and they're like the most dangerous people in the world because they're the only ones who are willing to tell the truth and meanwhile like nothing ever you can trust me i murdered aldo moro

right yeah exactly like i i'm yeah like i i know about the the slave colonies on mars it's the most deadly secret in the world like and yet i continue to not be assassinated but you get a lot of those people in that world these sort of is tenuously military connected or tenuously intelligence connected and they've turned that into a persona where they are the oracles and they're the they're the most dangerous people around i mean bill cooper was the same way you know they like they these guys somehow have all of the secrets and are never actually uh put in any kind of danger but they think they are and through some kind of an accident they ended up stumbling on to like the p i guess that's more just like bill's mythology but yeah they have something that

they can't ever prove but they know for sure and they can't be killed over it because if they get killed then you'll know it's true right right that's why they can't assassinate you it's a good that's a good explanation yeah for it i i um i think that uh it's you know you're comparing or you're bringing up like robert david steel and steve bachanican sort of the same uh area is is is is relevant uh except i don't know it would like do you know if robert david steel actually was in the fbi or anything like he makes a lot of claims whereas steve bachanican was in the state department he did kill al demora yeah i mean he did do a lot of that stuff yeah it's it's always it's always hard with these guys because they're such bullshitters and they lie so much

all the time that you you kind of never quite know where you are so you just have to take their claims as they come rather than sort of do that deep dive into their backstory because so much of it is just so murky and built around their own mythology so it's it's never quite as satisfying to try to dig in and sort of figure out who these people really are in terms of the the QAnon posts and the like not coming directly from the cadre of potential cues are people just make do you feel do you get the vibe that people are just making stuff up whole cloth or are they stealing it from somewhere it's both uh with with the Q drops uh you know the early story it told by the Q drops of what the storm was originally supposed to be you know this you

know this mass arrests unleashed by trump through twitter uh you know the marines the national guard called up that very much seems like something you would read in a robert london novel in a tom clancy novel i mean that's another you know pochemic thing right the co-creator of the op center series i mean he didn't really do much with those books but he tried this you know you got this you've got this sort of tom clancy ask story being told and it does seem very original but at some point that story kind of burned out and then Q just kind of kept kicking the can down the road which is the traditional thing that you get with this and one of the things that that really happened with Q is that there was a need for more content this became

really popular very quickly so Q needed to just put more stuff out there so there was a lot of stealing or you know you get a lot of repurposed memes you get a lot of stuff grabbed off of blogs there's a I think fairly early on in Q there's a four drop list of Rothschild central banks again not a thing that's not how banking works but but it's it's a huge conspiracy like Rothschild and central banking in the federal reserve but this list of Rothschild central banks had been floating around since 2012 or 2013 from some anonymous blog and then somebody else grabbed it somebody else grabbed it and then Q grabbed it and somebody else will grab it the the same thing happened with there is a Q drop where Q insinuates that Angela Merkel is the daughter of Adolf Hitler

sure they're both in Germany sure they're both associated with Germany yeah yeah that that came from the uh the hoax like what does it mean um and Q just what does it mean what does it mean what does it mean well that was hold on hold on I gotta work I could just continue saying what does it mean with different inflections for the rest of my life because I know from other reputable sources that George W. Bush is also the spawn of Hitler and so that would make him an Angela Merkel like cousins second cousins it gets a little weird uh you you have to think that like Derpher saved his semen and somebody just like kept it for 10 years like how did that work I don't know they bring it out every Christmas they're just like hey let's pass the sperm around this is

Hitler come on everybody let's get it uh yeah I've seen enough weird stuff on the history channel that that doesn't strike me as impossible it's not it's not you can't prove it didn't happen yeah I I have I have like a sort of a pet theory and I don't know if it ever uh like sort of bear out or actually if there's any credence to it at all but we when we were going back and looking at some of the lead up to the 2016 election Steve Pechenik was on Alex's show talking about there being a secret coup of military people on the inside like I don't I didn't follow Alex it's already happened you don't need to worry about it they're all already in jail I don't I never followed QAnon closely enough to know how well that matched up but it felt very similar like it felt like

there were at least thematic parallels yeah the the thing with Q is that it's very different from a lot of traditional conspiracy theories most traditional conspiracy theories about people out of power taking it back that's where you get those like the secret counter coup and the deep state and stuff like that with Q it was we have the power and we're going to use it so that's where that aspirational model comes in that's where that that hopey aspect comes in of we've got the power to do this we just have to wait until all of the pieces are in place everything is perfect like there can't be any questions like it has to look legal it has to be completely legit and then we're going to round up hundreds of thousands of people and kill them so with Q it wasn't like a coup because

it was already the people who are in power now the the question that the Q people never ask themselves are we still on yeah oh yeah okay no we're just listening really really intently it's the first time I've done this in a long time so when we do not interrupt people it does seem like we're frozen but it's like what there it's been five seconds it's been five seconds they should have said something by now yeah the the the question that the Q people never asked themselves is why don't we just do it like Trump is the president he could just do this like he doesn't have to worry about how it looks he's the president he's the dear he's the god emperor who cares what the optics are just grab them every day that you wait more children are trafficked more more adrena chrome is drained

more Rothschild money is moved around do it now why why are you waiting and they never they never asked themselves that so you had this period in the summer of 2019 where 8chan went down for about three months and there were no new Q drops and then 8 couldn't comes back and it's the same thing as 8chan nobody in the Q world is like wait a minute this is the military intelligence operation that's saving the world did they just take the summer off was it just like were the children being trafficked and they just didn't matter they just these are the simple questions that these people never ever ask themselves well as as somebody who believes in workers rights i would say that they should take it they should have a full yeah they should just because you work for satan doesn't

mean you shouldn't summer somewhere you know like it's just good probably somewhere cold oh what a nice change of pace this is yeah that is that is one of the interesting disconnects that is the like well if this really were what it says to be uh represents itself as it seems incredibly incompetent like what has what has uh sort of happened and how the messages have gotten out the websites being what they are right it's being yeah being that 8chan is like full of child pornography and mass shooter manifestos i mean there's that great moment in the uh the documentary Q into the storm where uh liz kroken is is being told by by cullen hoback that you know there's there's child porn on 8chan and she's like well you know Q is fighting was fighting the child

pornographers like you know 8chan's full of child pornography and she has that look on her face like somebody kicked her dog or something like it's just not computing with her how file this place is yeah i think some of that has to do with like the you know the audience of this being a little bit older and maybe people who aren't as familiar with the the realities of these message board sites like some of them and the character that they have and what goes on there yeah and there's there's a reason that the Q ecosystem really revolved around these um these these websites these sort of aggregators that would post the drops after they went up on 8chan or 8kun where you didn't have to go to the place you they didn't want people going to those places those places are

awful nobody should probably go there and be like uh oh yeah i don't know about this whole thing like like ooh maybe maybe this is not something i want to be involved with you want people to be involved with it you just don't want them to know how it actually works yeah put them on these very slick very simple to use aggregator sites and that's where you get your drops that's where you you find your decoding threads and your like lists of resignations and mysterious deaths of whatever yeah you're not going to the source everything is getting wandered at least one time through the aggregator sites that's that's the thing that i was uh really struck by is like it wasn't it was almost distilling less than it was laundering it was like they took out the craziest

parts that were on 8chan and they put them one step below and then one step below until the the thing that was valuable suddenly shows up on fox news right and then people go from fox news to the next step back up to the next step back up until they get more and more extreme so it was kind of a weird almost fluctuation of yeah a trickle down bullshit being pushed back up into a feedback loop yeah yeah it's definitely a pyramid where sort of the the worst stuff is like 8chan and and you know just the really swampy reddit stuff like like places that most people just don't go and it and it moves upward to the more legitimate right wing blogs and more legitimate right wing social media then it winds up on info wars then it winds up on like gateway pundit then it winds up

on fox news and trump tweets it and then it just goes right back down and it's it really was a well developed system i don't know that anybody like sat down and developed it it just that's just how information flows with these people yeah because nothing nothing gets in there it's it is a bubble and there are no there's no light that pierces that bubble it is all suffocating darkness and paranoia and anger all the time it's a great sentence and i think it's also like a an information space where like it's like truthfulness neutral or whatever it's it's things are things are expedient or useful they're not really it does not really it's not a hindrance if something is not true or patently not true right and you say well it's it's my truth it's it's true for me and that's how

the wellness world got so sucked in with qanon because that's always been a world of like well it's it's my experience is my journey it's my truth you can't tell me it's it's wrong it's it's true to me this objective reality is for suckers right exactly that sucks yes it does yes it does it's an impenetrable crushing darkness that is that is my distillation of all of that oh no what a bummer i was wondering uh because i was reading through this book and the the beginning of qanon happens uh so similarly to just all cults you know that just like progression of step by step process and i was i was seeing it happen and now that uh it seems so replicable do you know what i mean like there are so many possible new qanons if you go

to any of these different spaces people are trying to create that uh phenomenon again do you think that's possible you know every one of these things is a little bit different but they're also really similar you know what one of the the goals i really had with writing the book was to strip back the the social media sheen of qanon and reveal what the component parts are and the component parts are all old it's all stuff that's been floating around for decades centuries i mean you go back to the blood libel of the yeah 1200s or whatever it was yeah there's very little in qanon that's new so the parts of qanon that work for people can be repurposed into new conspiracy theories new persona i mean we saw that we've seen that on telegram this year where uh post

january 6 qanon promoters have taken qanon and taken in a completely different direction you got people like ghost Ezra people like patel patriot who are taking the mythology of q and rebuilding it into something that works for them and that can get them viral fame and money coming you know everybody everybody takes it in their own direction and some of it doesn't work and some of it does work and and that will continue on and on and on forever because people will always be susceptible to being told what to believe and being validated in what they think is true and in being part of a special secret community and that's qanon that's the new world order that's everything alex jones has pushed that's that is going to be with us forever now that sucks yes it does i i feel like

this is this is the part in in like tv or normal radio interviews or where they're like uh okay well you've told us a lot about this what do you think our next steps are to stop this and the previous answer is just this is here forever we died with this it's it also sucks because like these are kind of the feelings and thoughts that i have when i when i you know look at this stuff and i you know i wrestle with alex uh primarily and you know it is you know hard to fight those feelings of like well this is just something that humanity is always going to have to deal with yeah it's not it's not something that can um ever be like well we've we've fixed it um and it sucks to the you know you know be talking to somebody else who researches a lot of this stuff who actually did

all the work have a lot of the same conclusions you prove like yeah this is a geometric proof being followed up with i but you know yeah yeah right yeah but i do think i did appreciate in the book also that uh that you did very clearly delineate that blood libel part like that's such an important piece of like what makes some of this like the archaic anti-semitic tropes yeah uh being cooked into a lot of these conspiracy theories is something that i think a lot of people may miss or may not want to address and i think that's super important yeah there's a real sense of with q and on of like we're still doing this like we're still dredging up these stereotypes you know based on things like the protocols of the elders of Zion you know these these

debunked myths that that are knocked down over and over and over again but it doesn't matter to people who want these things to be true and everything that they do is validated by the idea that yeah there are wealthy string pullers who are making their lives miserable and the rising tide of progressivism is canceling their way of life it's making it you know wrong for them to tell the jokes they used to tell worship the way they used to they can't say certain words oh they they can't you know eat 25 burgers a week anymore they have to eat 23 burgers now like socialism this dr seuss book that they've never heard of is suddenly not being printed anymore and it's like that's worth dying over and that's that's how hitler came to power yeah is a dr

seuss book that i'd never heard of yeah i just i just want somebody to come out and be like look we've got thousands of years of unbroken hatred towards the jews and we're just not going to stop now yeah well it's it's always going to appeal to somebody yeah and and to you really whoever made those posts really understood that that that understood the way these tropes work why they work understood how they are communicated effectively on places like for chan and was able to exploit that i mean whoever did whoever wrote these drops really did know what they were doing they really understood american evangelical hucksterism and and exploited it kind of brilliantly that's a really interesting perspective that i don't think i've heard uh a lot because i think a lot of people look

at you know queuing on and think like hey this is all stupid and like you know hearing you say whoever did this was like they knew what they were doing is is fascinating to me yeah and and the idea that they knew what they were doing doesn't necessarily mean that there was some red conspiracy behind it that it was some like military great great psychological warfare but you just have to know how hateful conspiratorial people fake and if you spend enough time in places like for chan you can do that that's not that difficult and of course we've seen things on for chan things on reddit go mainstream viral we've seen it with rick rolling we've seen him with slender man i mean we know where this stuff comes from pizza game we know where this stuff comes from it's not a mystery

people just believe it because they want to because it's a good story and it validates things that they already believed yeah it almost seems like something that somebody who had like a really good grasp of like marketing could have uh could have swung yeah you know it's wild to me uh do you watch ted lasso i don't i don't don't worry about it it's it's fine uh but there was one episode where they straight up rick rolled me and my partner had no idea what i was talking about okay and that was the first time in a long time i've really felt like oh i've been on the internet way too long this is not good yeah well and it's it's that's great perspective like like my wife doesn't know anything about this stuff she's not and she doesn't do social media really at all like

this is my role now like i'll like bring up some really common meme that i'm like you know everybody knows what that is and she's like uh what is that yeah and it's it's a reminder that that while things online are really important and we can't just dismiss that stuff as like uh it's just internet people like not everybody is as extremely online as people like us as people who are mainlining info wars i mean there there is a there's a world that exists not on twitter that doesn't get this stuff and and that's why i wrote the book as a very simple guide to this you know i didn't want to assume that anybody knew anything you know i've you know i'll i'll talk about q and on people will ask me still in interviews what's q and on and i'll explain it and people will go like wait what's

an image board what's it and it's it's not it's like it's just not their world yeah and so we have to do this very simply and it's what i think you guys are great at is breaking this stuff down into why does it matter what about it matters what can be discarded how does it affect us and that's a really really important thing to do is to as much as we really like to get into the weeds and the details that's not where most people live most people live they don't have time for this they want another very basics does it matter to them how does it affect them and i think you guys are great at that well thank you yeah the thing i definitely agree to like i get a lot of criticism i think that sometimes of our shows like well why are you taking like speaking like we don't know

anything yeah well some people may not there's an entry level i mean what you what you just said right there you know a lot of these people aren't online this isn't a full thing and then as you're going through the book you're reading like oh okay so these are people who are inexperienced with the internet yes who are finding this stuff yes so they have no concept of what the online people have which is like fuck this noise these people are all out of their minds you know if you're online all the time your best friends you're like these people are out of their fucking minds you know right that kind of feeling so if you don't have experience you'd also don't know how to discern like a wink exactly right no all these people were just dodo birds walking up to liars and just

getting smashed on the head and then they're overthrowing the country it's it's bananas yeah the the the degree to which fake stories were shared by the the older americans who got into qanon is enormous i mean people passing around this stuff because you just don't have the discernment to tell real from fake and you think well these people wouldn't lie to me they're my friends i've gotten to know them right i i you know i hear their stories and their struggles like they would never not tell me the truth well that's the basics that's the basis of how affinity frog works is somebody in a community like a trusted member of a small insular group ruthlessly exploits the rest of the people in that group yeah yeah the affinity itself is necessary to be exploited right exactly

exactly yeah i but my i went to a funeral uh my grandma's funeral was held at a mega church and i i like walked in there and i was ready to start fires like i just couldn't handle it yeah no it was brutal yeah so it's one thing i i definitely wanted to ask about um is uh you know the the biggest intersection i think between alex jones and qanon directly um is the affair of gerome coursey yes and i watched that happen but i don't think that we did a good job of covering that was that an oscar wild book the affair of gerome course yeah so from what i understand he tried to get involved basically like he tried to become a q person yeah he did it for a while like he got really into it and i and the timing with this stuff is always really murky but he

he got really into it like he was tweeting relentlessly about about q like decoding the drops you know trying to figure out what was going on tying it into his own personal stuff i believe he was even writing a book he was yeah yeah he he you know alex had him on all the time alex was talking about how the white house wanted coursey covering eight chan i mean just just bizarre stuff and then of course like so much of the alex jones world jones just turned on it on a dime and then it was disinfo and he talked about he he talked to somebody who played golf with qanon and like the you know five people who were running qanon and now it's been taken over by masad i mean yeah like like you know how it is it's like this is the most important thing in the world

and now suddenly we have to destroy it yeah if i can't take it over then it must be defeated yeah well yeah he did he has talked about how he tried to uh co-opt it when it was sort of growing and it was he was unable to yeah yeah i i my own personal opinion i i don't really have anything that backs this up other than just knowing that people involved is that he was trying to co-opt it and it was getting bigger and it was a threat to him and it was a threat to the the sanctity of the info wars empire because it was it was a little bit more participatory and a little simpler like it was a game it was a game yeah it was a puzzle that i mean never mind that there was no solution to the puzzle there's more puzzles but i think he started to see it as a as more of a threat

and less as something that he could sort of integrate into his own mythology and i think that's why he's turned on yeah i would i would definitely agree that i don't know if i have anything solid to back that up but that's my sense too like yeah you know he's had these this period of decades where you know he's essentially been the authority on a lot of this kind of conspiracy bullshit and you have something like you it threatens that authority because there's the decentralized yeah you know as you put it gurus and and stuff that he is no longer necessary as a gatekeeper right for for this stuff and that was the vibe that i got for sure yeah and q is really is really good at allowing people to rise up and create their own version of this and and profit off you

you know you have these promoters these people i talk about in the book it's people like in the matrix and joe m and jordan sather and on and on and on these sort of original q and on promoters who are making the videos and the podcasts and the live streams and the merchandise and that they didn't need alex jones they thought alex jones was a sellout was a patriot was controlled up you know they're they're doing this without any training they're just building this from the ground up and i can see if you're somebody like alex jones you're going these people are a threat to me they could they could take over my audience yeah i need to own this or i need to be against it yeah kind of yeah it's leno and conan that's basically yeah yeah yeah so some of those early

guys like they have fallen off right i mean like a lot of them aren't really q folk anymore they've like shifted their grifts a little is that right yeah they've really diversified and you if the big promoters all kind of have their own niche like uh jordan sather is really into like the wellness stuff and the secret space program uh drinking bleach if i recall yeah drinking the the bleach the mms the miracle medical solution or whatever it is um do not ever take that no some of them have really disappeared uh joe m was one of the really big q grifters he's the guy right about in the book who got that uh charter school fundraiser canceled by uh sharing this interpretation of a james comey tweet that there was going to be a false flag attack

oh that was that was a fun one yeah that story like a little bit hearing some of the other people just going what why did they what what what is happening yeah yeah why did we do this and then you know i covered that when it happened and i talked to the people who are organizing it and then of course they had to cancel it the next year because covid and i think they'd cancel it again and i don't think they're ever gonna have another one and it's just it's enraging to think about these these anonymous gurus who just roll this into their grift and then they just move on but joe joe m's gone now he's really disappeared he he kind of went to ground after the big twitter banning i think he popped up on gab maybe for a little while but he's really taken himself out of it

but he's just a mint mixer now he's a really nice guy really working a job you know yeah he's in but then you know a lot of them have gotten into sort of evangelicalism of course the pandemic is all completely mixed up with it the stolen elections all completely mixed up with it and this is what i talk about with the evolution of q is it's now just everything q and on as a as a brand really doesn't exist anymore these conspiracy theories are just mainstream conservatism now you know you get people who used to be in these completely different worlds of you know big pharma conspiracy theories you know anti you know where's barack obama's birth certificate conspiracy theories this is now all the same thing they all believe that vaccines are poisoned masks are slave muzzles

donald trump is still the real president uh the deep state controls everything you know run for school board everything is now everything and it makes it very difficult to pin down how to deal with some of these things because it's all interconnected and it all bolsters everything else so these this new generation of q gurus they're just they're sort of pumping out everything everything is related to everything else and it's a very lucrative persona if you do you think that they're uh more fractured now and then i would i would assume that would mean more likely to compete with each other as they kind of but spaces do you know what i mean yeah you get there's been a lot of infighting in the the q influencer arena lately you know

some people who are more stolen elections some people who are more uh anti-vax there are some people who think donald trump really is the president some people who think biden is technically the president but trump's gonna come back and they're sort of insulting each other and then they they're like they're yelling at each other over money and over who is who is a real patriot you know you've got like marjorie taylor green feuding with lin wood who's feuding with qta who's feeding feuding with q and on john it's impossible to follow there's no reason to follow i mean that that's kind of my my uh view on this is this is the type of movement that is inevitably going to destroy itself yes the question is just are they how quickly can they take us with them you know

that's it like it's it's just going to they're going to eat each other alive they're going to cannibalize each other oh yeah you know and you've you've got this going on with these health freedom stolen election conferences that are happening like every weekend now you know it used to be that it you know it was a big deal of 52 believers got together now you've got these massive conferences going on there's sometimes two going on in the same weekend you've got just coming up i think it's this weekend the patriot double down in vegas and then there's another one that's the one that has a chicken to i was you can't you can't make that joke before me okay those are the rules of our relationship i actually i over the weekend i was looking at twitter and i saw like some video of

on a recent episode we were making fun of the patriot street fighter and because i went and looked at his tour dates he was advertising his tour on alex's show there's a commercial for it okay and so i was looking at the tour dates and everything passed like four days in advance was all location tbp yeah like he didn't have any venues and like ah look at this this is never gonna happen and i saw a video and it was like a full yeah a full like a conference room and it granted it looked like a bunch of you know pretty much just all old white people but yeah uh it still was like that's a lot more people than i would have expected to be hanging out with the patriot street fighter yeah no they they they would have you know they had a september 11th event

i think it was last year where there was like 120 people at the washington monument that was a big deal and now they there are so many of these things that they are poaching guests from each other mike flinn was supposed to speak at the patriot double down and he got a better offer from some other conference happening in the same weekend jeez it's it's i mean it really is if i like to think of this as like pro wrestling and it's almost like you've got competing leagues now yeah and they're all just swapping talent they all say the same thing i mean god knows why they haven't joined forces other than like money obviously right but this has gotten so big and so diffused that these conferences they are about everything they're about covid is a hoax second amendment the border media censorship

the deep state you know biden is a fake president uh on a set in tyler perry's house iver mekton you know it's it's everything they they say tyler perry's house just because he made that show the oval right i god knows where this stuff comes from i it is it just emerges out of the ground like worms after the rain yeah the way the way you're describing it it almost like i have a real like sort of ominous feeling of it almost it almost feels like like tenants are being formed you know like like a canonization of like a belief system is like in progress and we're sort of seeing it happen uh through these conferences and these online fights there's gonna be the bill of rights theses nailed to the wall of the capital building the next time they throw it up yeah i

mean we're really starting to get into that like people's front of judaea versus judaean people's front aspect of it like these people all believe the same thing yeah they're just fighting over who has the biggest audience and who has the most money and i think that's where the you know the queue drops come in of you know people ask me are there going to be more queue drops and i don't think there will be because they're not necessary yeah the the queue persona was taken as far as it was going to go and you don't need new queue drops nobody goes to church and is like hey we need new books of the bible right they've got the bible they don't need anything else they've got the queue drops they they you know there's a queue uh catchphrase you you have more than you know well they have

it they the the drops are there they're taking them off into a million different directions there never needs to be another queue drop yeah well bummer this is very this is all but very informative but very depressing yeah yeah i mean who says who says that it's done you know we we had the bible then we got the book of mormon i'm sure that there's an enterprising liar out there who's gonna reform queue and on again that's the golden plates that you never know hey nobody in uh you know the around the crucifixion could have anticipated uh joseph smith you know it's i think you are way wrong sir jesus did several thousand years ago thank you yeah it's it's you know it's so it's so weird because i have a lot of similar feelings

about like a lot of the alex stuff but it never feels quite like um like it has the ability to to to formalize like you and on does or like to to turn into something else like i think both of them are primarily scam oriented you know like alex is a a pill scam and yeah you know and q anon the various promoters are you know basically attention economy scamming and and what have you but the danger of of q anon turning into something different it is is so uh another thing then then like right like just pure right wing conspiracy stuff yeah i have a quick question for you uh i'm working on a theory uh about uh alex actually providing a weird sort of bulwark against something along the lines of q anon by having uh more control over that space

you know he creates almost a bottleneck there and i think what we're seeing is that what happens when you let all the steam out is a massive diffuse uh organization that nobody can have any control over you know yeah like if alex is in charge he can funnel all of it to his pill business exactly and they're not overthrowing the capital you know right it's it's that aspect of q that is not quite like a traditional cult there's no charismatic leader there's no figurehead at the very top whose word is bond with q like you do your own research you are your own leader and that allows these promoters to step in and take control and take their version of the movement spinning off in any number of directions that's why the the mythology of q anon is becoming much more mainstream

while the actual like iconography of it is really fading away you don't you're not seeing the the q swag quite as much you're not you know they dropped the term q anon they now think that that's something that the mainstream media made up to make them look crazy i mean that makes sense there's no escape from these people right right and never mind that they were using that term right at the very beginning that the most popular pro q book is literally called q anon an invitation to the great awakening right all about it um but then they then they decide that that term never existed and it's i imagine they're also trying to not have those big maps anymore with like the a thousand things on it that are all connected yeah the the deep state mapping project and all

that stuff because it makes you look insane yeah it makes you look like you know the red strings in the cork board and you know it makes you look like a raving lunatic whereas you know somehow insinuating that donald trump is still the president because he signed some executive order 12 years ago and his you know time traveling uncle used tesla technology i mean blah blah blah that doesn't all make sense that all makes sense yes i think research i think one of the weirdest things that q anon has actually revealed is that these people don't know how anything works they don't know how civics works they don't know how economics works so you can kind of just tell them like oh if you sign an executive if the president signs an executive order well then it must be

law forever right right you know biden tomorrow could sign an executive order that we are now all part of panama yeah totally right and we would be part of panel that's how it works you know they just don't know how shit works right and it's it's you know they don't know how banking works they don't know how money works they don't know how the media works uh they it's a it's a misunderstanding of the basics of the world filtered through the way that they want things to be or or the way that things used to be and are not anymore and they they cling to that and they cling to the reality that they have created for themselves and that reality is a lot more entertaining and has them a lot more successful and has the bad people eventually being punished and has somebody

in control and that's really what we all want is somebody in control and we want an adult yeah right life should not be an endless series of random events that we really don't have any say over like we want to be that scary yeah that's scary man I think too like it just I mean it's essentially what so much of the conspiratorial thinking boils down to it's like a little bit of magic and then what like an easy solution yeah with someone in charge like that's exactly it it's uh it it's it's remarkable how how like it really is a lot of in a lot of ways a lot of it is very simple and a lot of it is impossible to be hopelessly complex yeah it is it is both incredibly basic psychology and the most incomprehensible garbage that you will ever stumble upon

and somehow these people are able to kind of have one foot in each and like make it work for themselves and rationalize away the failures and the cognitive dissonance and the obvious fraud and it just this is the world they want to live in and nobody's getting them out of it it was uh I was thinking of uh this uh I remember this cult I can't remember the name but it was in the late 1800s and uh this woman had predicted the end of the world was going to happen at the stroke of midnight on blah blah blah day right and if the stroke of midnight happened the end of the world didn't happen they talked about it the next day it was supposed to be next year something along those lines you know it was that kind of thing yep it's an easy mistake yeah yeah no I mean you

read the but you read the things wrong yeah yeah but there was one dude who whenever he he believed that the world was gonna end so he went to his own house stood up on top of his roof and at the stroke of midnight just fell off and he died and the more I thought about that the more I was like oh man that guy is so stupid he could have survived and then now looking at all these QAnon people that guy is easily the happiest person ever to live in that cult right totally like that was the perfect time to die when everything you believed was true yeah you can't you can't you can't have to live through the deflation and the rationalization yeah you don't have to go with the cult leader being like I messed up and you're like you were supposed to know everything right yeah and it's

and it becomes impossible to go back you you have I mean to use the the example of Cortez in the new world you've burned your ships you can't go home you your family doesn't want anything to do with you your friends don't want anything to do with you you have sunk your time your money your your emotional well-being into this conspiracy theory being true into this great event happening the event doesn't happen and you have the option of either saying well I was wrong I got fooled I'm sorry or saying well I can't I can't go back I have to just go forward it's gonna happen eventually and then I'm gonna be right and then everybody's gonna be sorry I'll go deeper and then eventually I'll be right yeah yeah that well I hate to keep saying this but that sucks yeah it is that is the dynamic

that I think a lot of people find themselves in and that's why I think it's really important to try and retain some empathy for people who are you know caught in these belief traps or scams or you know it's it can be hard because a lot of the beliefs with themselves are destructive and they're causing damage to polite society right a lot of the people are victims and it's and and one of the things that I I see so often about uh all the narratives around QAnon is look at how bad these people on 8chan and 8kunanon I'll look at how bad all of these people are but no one is at all dealing with the fact that the reason it is easy to believe in QAnon is because all of the systems have failed these people right like it's it's not like they were

doing great you know you you go into these hoping that Hilary Clinton is murdered by the government because the 90s weren't great you know like that you're mad about NAFTA and you should be mad about NAFTA you know it's just white water you know I'm still talking about white water it's like one of the big things that I wish the systems would look at QAnon and think is ooh maybe we fucked up too right you know right and yeah and and you know I get asked a lot about the the demographics of QAnon and yeah it's primarily white it's you know split down the middle men and women upper you know middle class upper middle class but the the biggest demographic for belief in QAnon is already being a conspiracy theory

very few people I mean practically none that I've seen have been just like MSNBC watching New York Times reading you know centrist democrats who just one day just happened to go to x22 report or watch you know fall of the cabal and then suddenly got radicalized into thinking that there's a pedophile cult running the world that's not how it goes I was gonna vote for Medicare for all but now I think I want Hilary Clinton to die in public right you you were already a 9-11 truth or you were already a uh Barack Obama birth certificate person you were already somebody who had their sort of knowledge base rewired by Trump winning and exposing all of the corruption that you thought you thought about but you never could put into words that was that

was already your world you were already listening to info words you were already reading gateway pundit or Breitbart or whatever she was just the next rung on the ladder and of course a lot of people are coming to that ladder from different things but it's anti-backstuff it's a big pharma conspiracy theories it's you know anti 5g anti bill gates anti globalism super super hardcore Bernie Sanders who thought Hilary screwed him out of the nomination in 2016 whatever it is there is a conspiracy theory for you and it will lead to QAnon because QAnon involves all of it yeah like if you're eight steps down the road no matter what road it is it's easy to take those two steps to get to the the final point yeah but if you're like at step one or you're not even down

that road you're not gonna it's not attractive enough of a conspiracy to get you to be like yeah i'm gonna go from zero to 60 yeah all roads lead to Rome unless you live in south america right yeah unless you just don't also get on the road if you issue roads well there is that yes if you're a person who understands how things work then these conspiracy theories don't have a lot of appeal like the stolen election idea doesn't really appeal to you because you know that that's not how elections work like like you can't like there isn't one guy in a in an office at dominion voting systems who just hits a button at Biden wins the election like you know that that's not true counterpoint there is a guy at dominion who just yeah yeah i think i think that one of the things

that we always talk about and it just is like when if you're if you deal with the complexity of a lot of issues and events that happen in the world a lot of these conspiracies don't really make sense but if you don't want to deal with that and you want to look at things kind of in a sort of overly simplistic black and white way they're like heroin yeah and i mean you you know again you look at this shit right now and you see mansion and cinema are like ah well you know everybody wants this stuff but i guess we're paid enough to say fuck off right and it does make sense for you to think fuck it i want trump to just stroke a pen and do this right because these people are fucking corrupt yeah you know it's like that's what it is yeah it's the unfortunate

reality that there's a basis for the feelings that underpin a lot of conspiracy yeah you know and the thing is is that people believe this stuff for a reason like big business is not your friend the government is corrupt you know jeffrey eppstein did horrible things like this is not made up this is all true this is i i was just thinking like in a radio interview is like what do we do next with qanon and my first question eppstein dead or alive jfk jr what do you got who's dead who's not run down the list so i had i had one question that i definitely wanted to get to so i'm gonna i'm gonna slip it in here and that is that what what i hate if this is putting you on the spot at all but you're you know you're somebody who focuses on with this stuff a lot

and i imagine that you see coverage of qanon that kind of may be frustrating i was wondering if there's one thing that you think is important that people know about it that it just gets gets missed great a lot of the time oh that's a wow that's a great question i i think the the thing that gets missed a lot is that you can believe in something like qanon and not be crazy not be violent not be stupid you are just looking for something in the wrong place i think what gets missed a lot is that these these theories are compelling they grab people for a reason they always have you know people look at something like qanon is like we've never dealt with anything like this before like there's never been a mass brainwashing like this i mean turn and look to your left and all Mormons

are wearing the same underwear like yeah this is probably no big deal i was alive during the satanic panic yeah exactly yeah i mean the the number of people who think that there is a conspiracy to kill jfk is basically the same now as it was weeks after the assassination like people believe this stuff this this is meaningful and compelling and explanatory for a lot of people and i think just writing these people off as either idiots or on the flip side is like mind controlled zombies with no agency i i think you're missing the the really compelling aspects of this and the way that this explains so many things to these people yeah it fills the needs that uh that maybe people uh don't want to recognize are there right yeah and one of the things that i think is is really

key i think it's close to what you're getting at is that like i think that it's so relevant to make fun of the thing but not the people yes and i think people kind of air they make the mistake of making fun of the people who believe this stuff as opposed to mocking the idea yeah right right mocking the idea and and mocking the promoters like i will i will uh unsparingly savage people like Ron Watkins people like uh ghost Ezra people like in the matrix like i will mock those people up and down left and right i have for a long time i mean you're still gonna vote for Ron but sure i'm you gotta i'm moving Arizona i'm moving Arizona so i mean obviously he's the best man for the job he has a really a school plan he's yeah i mean the guy's

already pulled off a lot of shit he's a great businessman you know you know he uh he meamed and tweeted his way to being an expert on election fraud and getting retweeted by the president of the united states that's impressive honestly it can't be completely stupid and do that yeah that's fair i will mock those people you know all the time but the actual like rank and file believers the people who are really stuck in this i do have empathy for those people because i think they're caught up in something that is way worse than they think it is and at some point the rug is gonna get pulled out from under them and then what do you have left who is left in your life that wants to hear about this that wants to help you after you've said and done possibly

reprehensible or illegal things and i i i have a lot of empathy for the people who are caught up in this and uh you know it is that that that classic thing of like you know when you when you go down the road towards this you don't take the first step knowing that it's going to lead to something reprehensible right let's say or you know it's there's there's a rational maybe pseudo rational reason why you know you you go down the road and then before you know it you're far down uh into muck territory gross nobody nobody clicks on a link on facebook going like well time to get rid of my family click right right nobody nobody joins a cult you you join a group of people who believe the same things you do or want the same things you do or whatever but i wouldn't have

any idea about that you didn't choose to be born yes but that's the thing is that this is this this is compelling for a lot of people and it was at the very beginning i mean that that's the thing you go back to with those early Q drops is that they they told a story that people wanted to be true it wasn't one of these like fbi anon or you know white house inside or one of these early you know anon account sewers like i have all the secrets i'm gonna reveal everything that's that's interesting but it's not compelling faking that you have insight knowledge that hillary clinton is on the run and is going to be arrested on november 3rd then you go oh i want that to happen let's let's follow this yeah and i mean it is compelling

i think that you and i are both clear examples that it's compelling even if you don't believe it totally these things are intellectually and sort of academically interesting and compelling yeah and that's great storytelling yeah well i just feel deflated we you know it's you know we've got two interviews under our belt we've got one that was happy alex is gonna get its comeuppance and then this one is the most unimaginably bleak thing and uh we could possibly i think we're evening out i still think there's a little bit of hope is there oh there is there is and and if there was no hope i wouldn't do this because it would be if you're just telling people that everything is awful all the time eventually people

some people like that but i think most people will tune out i think the thing that that keeps me going is people do get out of q and up people do find the the the weakness and the dangling thread to pull on and then the whole thing falls apart people people are capable of walking away from this and people are capable of understanding it and of maybe looking out for the signs that somebody they care about is getting radicalized into q or q adjacent conspiracy theory and then they they maybe have read my book or they've listened to you guys and then they they kind of know what to look for a little bit and then they could maybe stop it before it goes a little bit too far yeah and they can they can approach it with like like a little bit of care instead of

judgment and you know i think is as more people can take that perspective maybe it'll lead to more people leaving and then more of those stories will become amplified and you know the conversation can completely change a little bit yeah i have some hope of that that that's my hope is that as we go forward into this more ex-q people will will come out and sort of talk openly and on the record about their experience i mean you have something like Scientology where there is a very large group of apostates who are fearlessly speaking out about this without fear of the repercussions that they're going to have q is just too new to have that you just the people who have left it they they're reintegrating into the world they they can't

like they can't launch the podcast yet right because they're still grappling with it right and the good news is when they do there aren't those repercussions of the people who've left Scientology all right i have one quick question for you okay um what are the chances that in about 10 to 15 years you go full greenwald and start your own QAnon well i would know how to do it see that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying here we can't trust you the chance isn't zero i mean what should you kind of know what buttons to push and who is the audience that can be riled up with this kind of culture war redbeat it i can imagine it becomes tempting to cash in and you're tired of of like fighting for scoops and you're tired of like butting your head against the government and and the big

media and and then you go shit i'm gonna i'm gonna cash in like i'm gonna go full culture war and then of course you start to believe it right because you can't just say this stuff and have it be a persona you you believe it to a certain extent i get that a lot with a lot of the big cube promoters they're like oh they can't actually believe this no they do they maybe not all of it and they know how to monetize it but this is their world they believe this stuff is real yeah you have to convince yourself or you'll sink yeah right you will you will be an obvious frog and at the same time you have to keep some of yourself back knowing like like alex like i know covid's real but i keep it to myself to make sure that nobody fucking takes that next step you know

right yeah right yeah i that that's uh that temptation of like uh you know you know the buttons to push and and such i think early on doing the podcast we did talk a whole lot more about like god it'll be so easy just to go easy go just turn right wing yeah yeah yeah no be the best makes so much money yeah right well we we should probably wrap this up we uh this has been a delightful conversation i really appreciate amazing guys you're taking the time uh the book is called into the storm wait the storm is upon us storm is that the end of the storm oh there's too many god damn storms so many storms too many storms uh the storm is upon us uh how q and on became a movement cult and conspiracy theory of everything uh you can get it everywhere you can get it as a

hardcover an ebook an audiobook however you like information delivered to you and whoever you like delivering it to you you can find it let me ask you this did you read the audiobook i did not read the audiobook we uh we we got a guy who has done like 500 audiobooks morise lemarch as orson wells but he but he would uh that he uh joe joe barrett his name he would DM me once in a while and asked like how do i pronounce this and so i was it was nice that he was like committed enough to it to like understand how important it is to get them a new show of this right sure that's great how do i pronounce three x's and in the matrix i just think it's just change change because that guy jeffrey peterson is his name and he has turned that into a grift that is like

breathtaking how he's turned that into an industry it's it's like admiral well i mean these you got the new matrix movie coming out i'm sure he's gonna make some moves on that sure yeah i mean the worst thing is that so many psychopaths are so goddamn enterprising yep it's like well we talked about that on i think our last episode the young fascists are they're hard workers they're coming yeah um anything else on the horizon people should be looking out for anything hopefully something soon okay i definitely do not want to be the q guy forever sure that that seems uh a little too much but are you are you knocking the alex jones guys forever is that what you're talking us for i mean so everything sort of flows through him so it feels like if you're

understanding alex jones you're understanding all of this and the thing with you and i was that you know as we've talked about that iconography is starting to disappear so you know it's it's sort of like being the the best beta max repair man you know at some point you do have to do something that's great like it's really great you know it's it's that alex lives on that sort of anti-communist tradition yeah a lot of stuff that's sort of rich veins whereas a lot of cubanon that's always gonna be that's always gonna be right for exploitation yeah and i think a cubanon probably has a bit of that too but it's stolen it's like hijacked from yeah yeah uh well thank you again mike this has been a lot of fun this is great i i hope uh everything goes well for you and everybody

a good wish to all and to all a good night