Maintenance Phase - The Wellness to QAnon Pipeline

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Special guest Mike Rothschild tells us how the road to wellness can be an on-ramp to a conspiracy theory. Along the way we debunk oil pulling, explore Instagram aesthetics and bemoan anti-vaxx argumentation tactics . Mike gets the date of the January 6th insurrection wrong and he is sorry. Mike Rothschild is on Twitter and you can pre-order his book here!Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreThanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Hello and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where we go one and we go all. Oh no. I am Michael Hobbs. And I am Aubrey Gordon. And you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase and on T public. We've got merchandise for you. Both of those links are set out nicely for you in the show notes and at maintenance phase.com. And I am so jazzed about our conversation today. I can't even tell you. Yes, our guest is one of our favorite reporters, Mike Rothschild. Hello, how are you? Thanks for having me on the show. Mike is one of our favorite QAnon reporters, and he's also working on a book called The Storm Is Upon Us that comes out in October or September 21st. Okay, Mike, do you know how I found you on Twitter?

Yeah. You were fighting with somebody about your last name. Somebody was like typical Rothschild. Like, of course, he would say this, he's a Rothschild. Oh, I guess. And you were like would say this, he's a rough guy. And you were like, give me a fucking break to it. I did when Michael started talking about like, let's do this guest episode.

I was like, boy, a boy, rough beat right in about QAnon with the last name, rough. And the one hand, it's a pain in the ass. But it's also sort of a constant talking point. Like it always gives me something to talk about with people and to sort of talk about how I got into all of this and like part of it was my name and part of it isn't. You don't have to poke very hard

to find anti-semitism in a conspiracy theory and the reaction to my last name is almost always the thing that I see. And importantly for this show, Mike also used to cover wellness scams. Yeah, I talked a lot about pseudoscience and wellness and woo-woo stuff and anything that comes in a bottle and purports to do a bunch of different things

or sure a vast array of diseases was sort of my jam before I really got hardcore into conspiracy theories. This is our jam, too. This is our mutual jam. Extreme jam. I really got hardcore into conspiracy theories. This is our jam, too. This is our mutual jam. Extreme jam. I'm curious about, did you have any particular favorite stories that you covered when you were sort of doing wellness reporting?

Yeah. I wrote, I think it was beginning in 2014. I wrote a piece for the blog of the critical thinking podcast Skeptoid on the oil pulling phenomenon. I don't know if you guys are familiar. No. Sure am. Okay, so oil pulling, just for those of you who are mercifully unfamiliar with this,

is the idea that if you swish a small amount of oil, whether it's coconut oil or olive oil or palm oil, in your mouth and pull it through your teeth and then spit it out, you will be ridding your body of toxins. This is like a huge thing maybe five to ten years ago. Yeah, it was mentioned, not the piece, but oil pulling itself was mentioned on the Dr. Oz show.

Oh no. And one of the interesting things I figured out was that you have these kind of pseudoscience cure all things that purport to treat everything and things that have nothing to do with each other. Like people thought oil pulling would it would cure your asthma and it would cure your acne and it would cure your AIDS. None of those things have anything to do with each other. Right.

And you run into this stuff, certainly with COVID and with QAnon, with the MMS, the bleach solution, where it claims to treat everything under the sun, if you survive taking it. Right. And also this thing of like, there's no actual scientific mechanism behind any of these things. It's just like, it's a thing that cures stuff. Right. But there's no reason why something would cure a skin condition and also like an immune

suppressing virus. Like briefly being in your mouth. Yeah. Totally. So we wanted to have Mike on to talk about the wellness woo-woo to QAnon pipeline. This is something we've noticed over the last 18 months that there is a weird entry point

into QAnon conspiracy theories through yoga and toxins and cleanses and stuff. It's not the biggest or the only on ramp, but it's one of the on ramps. And it's a surprising one. Yeah. I think it's one that folks don't necessarily expect that getting into sort of X, Y, or Z, newest wellness, fat can for some folks kind of put them on this track, kind of filter them or funnel them closer and closer to anti-vax stuff, closer and closer to QAnon stuff. And QAnon itself is like closer and closer to organized white supremacy. Yes.

So Mike, yeah, can you just walk us through sort of before we get started? Like what is QAnon? Sure. So what QAnon really was for the vast majority of its life was a cult-like conspiracy theory that holds that a team of military intelligence officers are using the image board 8chan to leak cryptic clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state that Donald Trump will carry out with a clutch of hundreds of thousands of sealed indictments. And that once these indictments are unsealed, the entire Democratic Party, the entire finance

apparatus, big business, Hollywood, celebrity will all be taken down in a giant storm of arrests that has been called the storm or the great awakening. And that after all of these horrible people are taken down and charged with treason and pedophilia, we will enter into a great utopia of peace and freedom and prosperity. Right. It's also it's what's amazing to me is that a lot of people who are like kind of QAnon supporters don't necessarily identify as such, but they're often getting these posts that are like hashtag save the children or hashtag Why won't they come home or something like that these things that seem very innocent online like of course who wants to kidnap children nobody right so you're like I'm going to raise awareness of this child safety thing. But then that ends up being an entry point for a lot of people into weird, like racist, anti-science. Like it just seems like it's a really difficult thing to track because it

seems to mean something different for everybody. Yeah, that's a big part of it. The polling on QAnon is kind of all over the place. And the percentages are fairly low. But when you get into asking people whether they believe that the election was stolen or whether they believe that there are vast, had a file rings at the top of Hollywood and the Democratic Party, the numbers shoot way up. Yeah, so you get a lot of people who believe in the tenets of QAnon, believe in the mythology of QAnon, but either still don't really know anything about it or actively claim that they aren't part of it.

You know, they'll say, I'm not one of those crazy QAnon people, you know, I don't think J.M. Cage, Jr.'s alive. I just think that there are child trafficking tunnels underneath central park. It's like Obamacare. When you ask people, like, do you like Medicaid expansion? Do you like kids being able to stand their parents insurance? They're like, yeah, I love all that stuff. That's great. Do you like Obamacare? No, fuck Obamacare. That's what Obamacare is. You actually like Obamacare. This is like a very classic political polling thing too, right? That like, anytime you ask people like, do you like new taxes? They're like, no, get out of here. And then you're like, do you like new services

for children and seniors? They're like, yes, that sounds lovely. Thanks. You're like, well, what do you think are the main misconceptions about QAnon? Just I guess as a, got you say movement? What even is the noun that we're using? Well, that's another tricky one. And what you run into with QAnon very quickly is that it's not any one thing. It is a political movement, but it's not like a political party.

It has a lot of a new religion aspect, but it's not really a religion. It's very evangelical Christian and it's tenets. It's very cult-like, but it's also not entirely a cult because it's missing some of those critical ingredients. So a lot of people tend to cover QAnon through one angle. They'll cover it through the cybersecurity angle or the sort of conspiracy angle or the cult angle

and they miss a lot of other aspects of it. You know, QAnon I think is so successful. I hate to use that word, but I think you really have to, because it caters to so many different people in so many different ways. And that's what makes it so virulent, and so difficult to get people out of. I'm curious about sort of what the wellness pipeline part looks like,

right? Like, where does it start for folks? Sure. So it really starts in terms of psychology. It starts with the distrust of authority. So it starts with the distrust of what we're being told by experts, by the media, by big pharma, by popular doctors. We think that we are being lied to all the time by everybody. That's a big part of the truth. The media is not telling you the truth. Democrats aren't telling you the truth. That's a big part of it is that the media is not

telling you the truth. Democrats aren't telling you the truth. Even a lot of Republicans aren't telling you the truth, but Q tells you the truth and Trump tells you the truth. And it is one of those culty aspects. Trust us. Don't trust the outside world. But where so many wellness conspiracy theories and being pharma conspiracy theories and anti-vax conspiracy theories come from, it's just this basic distrust of what we're told. We feel constantly, everybody is trying to get one over on us. Everybody's trying to screw us, trying to hurt us, trying to take our money.

So that's really where a lot of it comes from. It's just this basic idea that the outside world is out to get you. And so much of that is wrapped up in corporations and in medicine. I mean, speaking of Dr. Oz, I mean, that's also almost word for word. What you hear from a lot of these wellness influencers.

I saw a magazine called What Doctors Don't Want You To Know at Whole Foods. This is a very mainstream message of these kind of cleanse type things that like they're keeping something from you. And it's a pretty short leap from that to they're also keeping like they're keeping something from you. And it's a pretty short leap from that too. They're also keeping like trucks full of children from you. Part of what makes this all tricky is like,

without getting too far down the tinfoil hat road, there are ways in which many people are being exploited, but they're much more banal than that. Yeah. Uber comes up with a business model or lift or Amazon or whoever where they treat their employees like contractors so they don't have to pay them health insurance. It's sort of stuff that's happening out in public in front of all of us, but it doesn't have the same sort of intrigue or punch. It's not secrets. Right. And that's so much of what drives conspiracy movements

like you andon and wellness conspiracy theories also is this idea of secret knowledge that there is a clutch of secrets that the powerful people have access to the powerless people IE us do not have access to. And somehow by believing in QAnon or reading these holistic healers and all these other people who have sort of built themselves up as experts in this fringe world, you have access to the secret knowledge. You are let in to the darkest things that they, whoever they is, don't want you to know about it. Now you can prepare yourself. You can fight back. And that's very compelling and that's very powerful,

especially during a pandemic. What is your sense, Mike, of what percentage of QAnon people sort of do come in through the wellness will, will track? It's very hard to pin any kind of numbers on any of this. But I would say that probably during the pandemic, quite a few people did, you know, you had the explosive growth of these Facebook groups devoted to anti-5G and anti-vaccine and anti-bilgates and conspiracy theories about where the virus came from and whether it was a bio weapon and whether it was the deep state. And of course, it's so easy to jump from those groups to other groups because of Facebook's algorithms. You know, you join an anti-5G group because you have

some concerns about 5G internet and then it recommends an anti-bill gates group and you go, well, I've heard some bad things about Bill Gates. Maybe I should join that and do more research. And then it recommends a group about anti-vaccine stuff and that recommends you a group about the great awakening, which is QAnon. So you very quickly and efficiently radicalize yourself into a violent, anti-Semitic, far-right conspiracy cult without having any intention of doing so. So these groups had huge membership.

They had hundreds of thousands of members in some cases. There's also a way in which you can get sucked into these things and not necessarily see its fundamental political nature. It's always seemed to me like the the majority of QAnon is like people that are Trump supporters and like trying to sort of process the fact that they thought this guy was going to be a great savior and they voted for him and he's not doing anything and like everything that he says in public is deranged and it's like uh it's not deranged it's

it's a secret code yeah Yeah, that's the ticket. But if you're someone who comes in through the wellness track or the anti-vaxx track, you might not necessarily see that part of it. It might not necessarily lead you to H&N. Yeah, and in fact, one of the things with Q&N on that the promoters are such a big part of it is that they don't want you going to H&N. They don't want you going to these image boards because these image boards are horrible places. They are racist, they're anti-Semitic. I mean, even, like, I'm fairly well versed

at navigating a place like H&N or it's called A-Kun now, but even I'm sort of taking a back once in a while by just how awful these places can get. People don't embrace things like that. You don't wanna be linked to that. So, you know, they don't want boomers and sort of yoga moms going to the anti-semitic meme part of H&N because that's going to turn them off. You know, because those people don't think of themselves

that way. They don't think of themselves as racist or anti-Semites. They just have questions. They want answers. They need to understand why things are the way they are. And sometimes that will eventually lead to anti-Semitism, but it's done in a very soft, gentle, justifiable way. It's not Holocaust denial. It's just like, maybe these banks don't have our best interests in mind. And who controls these banks? So it's very gentle and soft and

that's where someone watching this wellness stuff is. Right it's like gentle and soft unless you're Jewish. And then you're like no I got it. Like message received. Mike are there any prominent examples of wellness influencers who have gone down this track? Yeah there's some lifestyle influencers and mommy bloggers and holistic people who have hundreds of thousands of followers who got really into this stuff right during the wayfarer thing and the big state of the children explosion like you would have, I saw a couple I can't remember her name. I mentioned her in the book, but you know pandemic parenting has turned my brain into pudding. So I can't remember anything. But there's some Instagram influencer

has like a million and a half followers who just started talking about trafficking children and way fair and what they're doing to these kids. And you can tell that the engagement was bringing in people who had no idea what QAnon was. I have no idea about the deep state but they're really concerned about kids. So they get mixed up into all of this,

and then they start to go down these rabbit holes because these rabbit holes lead them to what they believe are answers. And is it mostly through Facebook that this is happening in your experience? It's Facebook and Instagram. Yeah. It is also YouTube. I mean, all of this stuff is changed now because there've been so many crackdowns, finally. But for a long time, it was Facebook groups where you would sort of meet and congregate with other people. And it would be Instagram where some influencer that you followed started to talk about this stuff

and it would start to peak your own interest. Why do you think Facebook and Instagram are so central to it? Like why is it Facebook and Instagram and not Twitter, do you think? Facebook and Instagram really have that kind of visual, aspirational culture. Yeah.

You know, you can aspire to look as good in the bikini as I do. I think I look great in a bikini, by the way. Facebook and Instagram are also tools that we just use to tell people what's going on in the world. Right. And also, it's so easy to make sort of unsourced claims on Instagram. Totally. Like these visual posts, like the infamous one that children were 66,667 times more likely to

be kidnapped by traffickers than to get COVID. Which is like completely absurd. But like, I was one of those image memes and it like looked, it had like the Instagram aesthetic where it was like pink lettering on like a cute background and it got shared to infinity over the summer. And it's just completely nuts, and nobody ever even proposed a source for it. But it's just an easy thing to share. And I mean, like, I'm helping kids. Bloop.

Yeah. And a lot of the, the cue proofs and memes are very ugly looking like they're the pep of the frog stuff or, or they're, you know, the, you know, the sort of red boxes and lines leading from one thing to another. And some big block letter word coincidence. It's not easy to share that in a way that will be meaningful for other people. But if it's light blue curse of lettering on a nice frosty pink background about what are they doing to our children? Just curious.

People are going to that like gangbusters because it looks nice. And it's not really doing anything other than just like asking a question that most people ask themselves at some point, like, oh, our children gonna be okay during all of this. Right. Especially Facebook groups.

You have these kind of private communities where there isn't a lot of pushback kind of by definition. Right. It is really easy to feel in those groups. Like it's a place for sort of inquiry and debate and it's easy to forget that those are walled gardens. Right. And that the only people in there are like they're already all anti-vaxxers in there.

You will never be challenged on anything that you believe. Yeah. It's just an intensification engine of whatever your existing beliefs are, but it looks like you're having debates with people. Yeah, it looks like a discussion, but what it really is is a bunch of people just nodding their heads. Yeah, exactly. And I've interviewed various people

in various stages of like Q Hypnosis over the years. And one of the big things that I found anyway is, there's this thing of like, why can't I ask the question? Right. Like, it seems like that's an entry point for a lot thing of like, why can't I ask the question? Right. It seems like that's an entry point for a lot of people too, that you see people saying like, the vaccines, like after people got the vaccines, half of them died, why are not able to ask this question?

And it's like, well, because that's not true, like that's a fake fact that you made up. And the reason you're not allowed to ask that question is because it's fake, but then it becomes like, I'm against censorship, I'm for free speech. Well, it's also very linked to anti-vax logic, right? I'm not against vaccinations. I just think that parents should be able to choose for their own children, right? Exactly. Which has become sort of this, like, often feels incredibly transparent, bad faith argument,

right? And sort of arguing tactic that shows up in both places for sure. Yeah, and it really feeds into the persecution complex that a lot of these people have and the grievances that have become so much a part of the right wing culture war. You know, this idea that if I'm not allowed to share my truth, I'm being censored personally, like big companies have it out for me. They want to destroy me because I'm not allowed to share my truth, I'm being censored personally. Like big companies have it out for me. They wanna destroy me because I'm a threat. And Q is great about doing that. It's about making people feel like

they are a threat to the deep state. And that this little movement that the media writes off is, oh, it's just a role playing game, just some cookie internet stuff. Oh, but they keep shutting us down. Why, you know, why is that? Yeah. How much, how much cuedness was there in the January 5th?

Interaction. There were a lot of cue people there, but I think even more than that, the vast majority of people there probably bought into cues mythology without actually knowing it. You know, the idea that the election was gonna be stolen, the idea that Joe Biden was this decrepit husk of a puppet candidate, and that the only way he could win was if the election was fraudulent.

That was a huge part of QAnon. Also, we had the Q-shaman guy, the guy, the shirtless dude with the beaver hat, who then gets put in jail and he demands an organic diet. And you had a lot of the, a lot of cute promoters are talking about how that guy doesn't represent us.

Like I'm, like I've seen him at Black Lives Matter protests. He's a false flag. He's strong about that. Make us look like we're crazy. He's a fake. We decide who the real ones are. A real cute believer wouldn't be violent because Q is a nonviolent movement. I mean, it's just, it's logical fallacy

taken to the point of delusion. It's also funny the idea that like this guy's making Q and on look bad. Right. You know, we're talking about like Hillary Clinton like ripping the faces off of kids and sucking up the greener chrome, but like this guy, you know, he's really giving us

a lot of work. Yeah, we draw the line at shirtlessness. But what do you make of the guys like organicness? Like what do you see as like the intersection there? You know, it's totally enmeshed with that idea of we're being lied to, big business, big agriculture, big farm, they're all liars, they're all part of this conspiracy. And you get a lot of that idea of like supplements and yoga and QAnon and like keeping your body healthy and staying

away from those deep state additives and toxins. So it's all in mesh with each other. Like when people were talking about the guys organic diet, you know, people like what? You know, it doesn't live on, you know, beer and onion rings. I'm like, that's not what these people are. The two levers are much more complicated than people want to believe they are. And there's a lot of this sort of like purity, like health stuff in the actual sort of Q text. You know, there's clearly some distrust of Big Pharma. There's sort of some tip showing into the the dead doctors conspiracy theory. And I don't know if you guys are familiar with that one.

No, not at all. Let's start off going around, actually quite a while ago. This was maybe 13 or 14, that the pharmaceutical industry was killing holistic doctors and chiropractors and retarded autism researchers. And it was like a chiropractor who died of cancer and like a dentist who died at age 85. Right. This is all tied together with QAnon because it's all this idea that, you know,

there's a powerful entity that will kill anybody who gets in their way and only research can stop them and and Q and wellness fit together perfectly there. Do you find the same tactics, Mike, between wellness scammers, like selling people fake supplements and QAnon people? Like, are they using the same, I guess, rhetorical tactics to suck people in? Yeah, they really do. They use the same basic marketing tactics of they don't want you to know about this.

And a lot of it is about, is about hope, is about this idea that if you do these things and if you read these people, your life will be better than The deep state wants for you. You know the deep state wants you in slave big pharma wants you sick and stupid and We we care about you. We're gonna get you these supplements We're gonna get you this information You're gonna be armed with the truth and then you can shape your life to be better and to fight back

So so much of it is about aspiration. How is QAnon doing that? It's like we're going to take care of you or something. Like what's the promise at the end of the rainbow for QAnon? The promise at the end of the rainbow for QAnon is not so much a financial one or a one. It's that the bad people will be gotten rid of. This ancient war that's been going on for thousands of years between the white hats and the good people and the godly people who are over here and then the Babylonian cult that's over here that's been controlling you since the Egyptian pyramids. That war is finally going to be won and it's going to bring peace and freedom and you're going to be able to live your life the way you want to. So it's a less tangible motivation, but it's also almost a more powerful one because it promises

the people who have hurt you and kept you down will be paraded in front of you, broken and in chains and then be sent to the gallows. And that's very powerful in that community. I'm curious about within sort of the wellness pipeline. Are there any sort of like known factors that put people at risk? Yeah, there's a couple of things that put you at risk for falling down the Q rabbit hole. You know, one is sort of extant susceptibility to conspiracy theories. And so many of these people who fall into queue were already believers in something else. They were already believers in wellness conspiracies or they were

believers, they were 9-11 truthers or they were Barack Obama, birth certificate truthers or Trump spygate truthers. So the vast majority of the time, a person who finds himself enmeshed in QAnon didn't spend their whole life watching CNN and reading the New York Times and voting Democratic. And then just one day waking up and deciding that Trump's military intelligence team was leaking clues to Hillary Clinton being sent to the gallows. So a person who falls into QAnon almost always already believed something else that was unevenenced and QAnon is just the next natural stuff for them. That indicates that some of this wellness stuff is kind of a gateway drug.

Totally. I mean, we always say on the show that we don't want to take anything away from anybody and we try to show a lot of grace to people who are like, they're doing a cleanse and like, I have no interest in lecturing somebody about whether or not they do that. But then you could say it sort of at the societal level, the more of these kind of wellness conspiracy-ish products are out there, the more susceptibility that's giving people to falling into other forms

of conspiracy thinking. It seems like the sort of the cleanse to antivax, to QAnon pipelines seems like the sort of the cleanse to antivax to QAnon pipelines seems like each one of those is like a slight escalation of the previous one. Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. You're escalating. You're probably not going to get somebody who has a really robust yoga practice and, you know, does their stupid cleanse every couple of months. They're not necessarily going to fall into, well, the deep state stole the election from Donald Trump. But where they might go is, oh, I don't really trust the science on the vaccine.

It's very hard to interdict in that pipeline if that person is not doing anything that's hurting somebody else or hurting themselves. It's sort of like 10% of them are going to go to the next step. Yeah. The more people you have believing these early steps, the more you're just going to have people that end up at the sort of final place, which is like, the Jews did it. Which seems to be where all of these things lead. Yeah. I'm also curious about if there are, if you've come across any stories, sort of about folks leaving you and on. What does that look like for folks?

How often is it happening? Do we have any sense of that? Like, just anything about folks sort of breaking away because I think part of what feels so troubling and intense about QAnon, at least to me, is how sort of intractable and impermeable it is to sort of think about how to dismantle all of this, right? Yeah, there are people who have got not a QAnon. You know, I talked to some, I talked to some for the book, but it's a very difficult process to get somebody out of QAnon because they ultimately have to want to stop believing it.

They have to see something in it that feels false or that seems like a contradiction or a mistake. They have to see some kind of defect in it. And I liken it to a tapestry. And if QAnon's a big tapestry, and somebody sees that there's one thread that's dangling, you know, whether that's something the Q got wrong or Joe Biden making sure they got a stimulus check or whatever, something that interdicts that belief, that dangling thread, something becomes more inviting to pull on. And when you pull on that thread, the whole thing unravels. And you eventually realize, Oh, I've been had like this was all fake. This was all for nothing. But the person who believes in it has to see the thread and they have to want to pull on.

And for so many people, they just don't. They find ways to justify and to reconcile the mistakes and the failed predictions and the errors that just gets consumed into QAnon. So there are people who've gotten out, but there's very few, and there's very few who are willing to talk about it because they feel embarrassed, and they're ashamed, and they don't, they haven't gotten their life together post QAnon. You know, it's not something like Scientology where you have a very robust group of people who've gotten out of it, who are very vocal and very fearless about talking about What it did to them what they got out of it and why they eventually left it. You just don't have that with you yet Because it's all so new for the people that you interviewed Mike

What were some of the little threads that they started pulling on like what started the process? little threads that they started pulling on, like what started the process? There is one woman I talked to who is still a very active conspiracy theory believer. She's still a very active Trumpist, but she was very, very big into QAnon. And what shattered QAnon for her was when QAnon started quoting Bible verses. And she said something like a real military intelligence leaker would never quote the Bible. That completely shattered it for me The jatar the Australian guy who's done a ton of media in the last Few months or so. I'm actually really proud of this one of the things that that helped get him out was reading something that I wrote about the

The sealed indictments aspect of QAnon and I was all based on just a misreading of public records and like that's not how the of QAnon. And I was all based on just a misreading of public records and like that's not how the justice system works. But the thing that got him originally that first polling on the dangling thread was when somebody asked Trump through Q to use the phrase tip top. And then three months later, Trump used the phrase tip top in talking at the White House Easter egg wall. And people are like, oh, he did it. He's listening to us. It's cute, proof. And like, well, no, he did it three months later. But also, he's used that phrase many other times.

And so for Jitarth, it was looking up the phrase tipi top. Because you're like, oh, it's such a unique phrase. And only Trump would use that if he was telling him to. And Jitarth realized that Trump had used it many other times There was a speech but in the run up to the election and where Trump was talking about how we're gonna make the nuclear arsenal Tippy top and for a chart that was just that one instance of wait a minute Q didn't catch anything here Trump just uses this phrase and it was only a matter of time before he was gonna do it again like if Q was wrong about that What else was he wrong about? Yeah, I guess it's the replacement of the community too, that there aren't as many,

I suppose, Facebook groups for sort of XQ or Q questioning or the tractor beam that pulls you into Q is much stronger than the tractor beam that pulls you out. Totally. It's, you know, there are any number of ways to get into Q. And once you're in Q, there's any number of people who will comfort you and play up the delusions that you're having, is they're probably having the same ones. But for getting out, it's a very, very lonely process because most of these people just push away

their support systems. So one of the things I talk about in the book is, what to do and what not to do to help a person that you care about who is a cue believer. So what are the do's and don'ts, Mike? Sure, well, the basic do's are to maintain communication with that person. It can be very tempting to just

cut that person out of your life entirely. But what you wanna do is to maintain a line of communication, something that's very apolitical, something that has nothing to do with you and on. Every so often, just check in, just see how they're doing. What do they need? You know, if it's somebody who is in your immediate pod or your immediate family, okay, I'm going to the grocery store. You need to need anything. Don't talk about you and on. Keep things very general about shared experiences, shared likes and dislikes.

You know, the kinds of things that make you a very safe conversation companion. Don't try to debate them out of it. Don't try to debunk them or fact check them or insult them out of it because all of those things are things that are just going to drive somebody deeper into the belief and feed that persecution complex. But if you can, you can kind of cast yourself as a safe person and as a lifeline. And if that person does start questioning you and on, they're gonna look at you as a person that they can talk to about this because you've already proven that you are a person

who is not gonna judge or mock them. And that's all gonna be a very individual journey. But it is very personal and it's very one on one. There's no real large scale way to de-radicalize people of conspiracy theories, because each person gets something different out of it. It's basically just extremely labor intensive.

To do this. Yeah. And not guaranteed to succeed. No, it's very labor intensive, very difficult, very frustrating, and you may not want to do it. It is not a requirement that you try to deraticalize your Q&N-on loved one. If you feel unsafe with that person or talking to that person,

you have every right to cut them out of your life. Yeah. I've interviewed experts, like misinformation experts about this as well. It seems like the real cure for this, like the only scalable solution to this is prevention. Yeah. That that raises some like genuine concerns about sort of what should be allowed to be posted on these platforms, what kind of regulation of these platforms should we have. But it's like the options are take some of those really difficult decisions or continue to have a country

where like 30% of the population just have completely deranged beliefs. Right. Like either option is bad. Yeah. Right. If 50 or 70 million or whatever people genuinely and wholeheartedly believe that Joe Biden is a fraudulent president. Yeah. That's a problem. That's a problem. And that's a problem that really demands very serious solutions. And at the same time, serious solutions can be very trouble. That's the thing. It's like, there's this idea that sort of all conspiracy theories are the same or like there's the moon landing was faked and there's back foot. And then there's QAnon. It seems like QAnon is genuinely much more pernicious because there's violence

at the end of it. If 20% of the population believed Bigfoot was real, that doesn't imply any like action that you have to take. I think you're not storming the capital. Yeah, nobody gets killed over thinking the moon landing was okay. Tell me, you might get punched out by Buzz Aldrin. Right. But that's about it.

And that's where, you know, with a lot of people like, oh, you shouldn't be legal to believe in conspiracy theories, like everybody needs help. I think for the vast majority of people who believe in these unevidence notions, it's probably fine. You know, you can live a very productive and happy and healthy life and still believe that JFK was murdered by a conspiracy. That doesn't necessarily turn you into a violent anti-government

militia member. But with QAnon, it's a heck of a lot more likely because it's an intrinsically violent conspiracy movement. And it has a body count, right? Like, there have been people who've been killed by QAnon supporters. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, murders, vandalism, arson, kidnapings, nobody should have been surprised by the violence committed by Q believers around the Capitol insurrection. Like, they'd been doing it for two years already. And in a lot of ways, it has its roots, right?

The sort of rhetoric of the deep state and the new world order. All of that stuff has its roots in the Oklahoma City bombings and to revierage and to sort of bigger faceoffs that my fellow older millennials may recall from our childhoods, right? That like this is all also sort of an extension of some like original recipe, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, right?

Yeah, yeah. QAnon is, I mean, this idea of the deep state or the Kabul, it's the New World Order, it's the Illuminati, it's the Illuminati, it's the trilateral commission, it's Bohemian Grove, the Council on Foreign Relations, it's the Freemasons, it's the Catholics, it's the Jews. There's always been this need for a powerful organized group of shadowy string pullers. And Q is just the next version of that, but Q is really the first one that allows

you to take the fight back to them. Yeah, the big foot people don't do that. No, they don't. I mean, even a lot of wellness people don't do that. I mean, the other thing that is sort of coming to mind as we're talking about all of this is I'm just thinking about there is no part of my world view that really aligns in a meaningful way with any part of the world views of many of the folks who are involved in QAnon, right? And at the same time, I am also thinking about how profoundly lonely a lot of this must be, right? To sort of lose family

relationships, to lose friendships, in some cases to lose jobs or to go to prison or what have you right that all of this seems profoundly lonely and isolating and if the community that you have is this sort of like internet community of other people who believe the same things that you do It's really easy to see just on a personal emotional level how folks continue to sort of gravitate away from folks who are rejecting them or laughing at them or poking holes in this, like really you can see how our collective responses for folks who are not part of QAnon, to QAnon also sort of accelerate some of those dynamics. Yeah, you have a real sense of isolation and of loneliness

and of not taking pleasure in the things that used to give you pleasure because all you see in them now is the evil. There was one thread of this a couple of years ago on Vote, the now defunct, absolutely horrible Reddit knockoff of people just like talking about stuff they couldn't enjoy anymore. I don't know why it's this one sticks in my mind, but it's this guy talking about how he's like, I used to love the band tool, but now I can't imagine they're not CIA funded.

So I can't listen to them anymore. I'm like, first of all, all the bands. I know. Tools good. Leave two. Yeah. I guess you guys. Like, no, tools should be on all the bands. I know. Two of good. Leave two of us, you guys. Yeah. Like, no, two like tools should be on your side here.

Yeah. Two of the top theoretics, but the absolute specificity of his misery really stuck with me. I feel like sort of the further that I get into QAnon world, the more I'm just sort of overcome by this deep sense of sadness, right? From the folks who are there, from sort of the cultural impacts of it, all of that kind of stuff.

And also earlier, Mike, when you were talking about people, don't take pleasure in the things that they used to take pleasure in. And they feel really sad. I was like, are we ticking down the list of DSM symptoms of major depressive disorder? Because it really, it's really sort of striking Well, I also think okay, maybe we should end on like a slightly more optimistic note of what would all of us recommend for I guess like

Wellness spaces or alternative Medicine spaces, right because you can imagine those communities being really positive for people or you can imagine those communities those communities being really positive for people, or you can imagine those communities sinking down this nihilistic abyss with the QAnon people. How can we make sure that the wellness stuff we talk about, is it becoming a gateway drug to this? Yeah, that's a really good question because it's so individualized how everybody takes that journey through the pipeline from everybody takes that journey through the pipeline from just some sort of gentle conspiracy theorizing and, you know, wanting answers to storming the capital. But I think what we have to do is kind of monitor the people in our lives and just make sure they're okay.

Make sure they're not falling down these rabbit holes. And if you do start to get those signs, like step in early and let them know, hey, I still care about you. Hey, let's talk about this together. And if you step in really early and let that person know they're not alone, they're not being persecuted, I think if we have a way of stopping this before gets really bad, that's probably it. I would also say for folks who are in any kind of leadership role or active role in wellness spaces, particularly online wellness spaces, I would say really stripping out that what doctors don't want you to know,

kind of logic. Yeah. Just getting that rhetoric out of your life feels really important. The other thing that I would say is, and this is like a big ask of folks, and I recognize that, is like actually fact checking stuff that you share. If you are hearing from folks about oil pulling or anti-vax stuff, or like whatever sort of the realm is, like, citing things that look like facts without knowing whether or not they're facts is a passive but still very harmful thing to do. It's also difficult for sort of people like us who talk about like institutionalized fat phobia or institutionalized racism or something to say that like this entire system is against you. In some cases that's true. Yeah. There really are blind spots in institutions, right?

Like and that's what a lot of good journalism does is point out those blind spots, but I think it's really important to realize the limits of that sort of us versus them, kind of framing of every single issue and making it seem like there's some sort of deliberate conspiracy of, you know, doctors don't want you to know this. And, you know, there's some meeting once a year in Switzerland. It's like, no. The knowledge is being suppressed. Yeah.

I think the deliberateness is usually when I start to get nervous. Because oftentimes it's an institutional blind spot because schools don't teach it. And it's not part of residency training requirements. And so people who are doctors have these kind of institutional blind spots, but they're not necessarily like sitting around

like let's destroy fat people's health. It's much more inco-ate than that. And that's what we know about real conspiracies. As opposed to conspiracy theories, is that it's just a lot of like cluelessness and not thinking things through and not people who are members of those groups being in the room.

It's not like people twiddling their moustaches. No, it's so much more of just people not being good at their jobs, just not thinking things through or not taking that extra step, and understanding not just that these things are happening, but why are these things are happening? Yeah.

And I think you have to understand that it does provide something to people, and it does fill holes, it does answer questions. And if you were able to get your head around that as nuts as it seems that somebody could find meaning in this insanity, you're going to go a lot farther to be able to combat it. This feels like a good sort of clarion call for all of us to get better at separating out responses that are personally satisfying or cathartic to us versus responses that will actually help reach someone and help them sort of escape the path that they're on, right? And in some

cases, your goals might be to pull a family member back from QAnon. In some cases, your goals might be to protect your own boundaries and your own sense of self and whatever and go, I can't actually do it anymore. I'm so sorry. Both of those are valid decisions, but just getting better at, okay, here's the situation I'm in. Do I want to take care of me? Do I want to take care of this person? What's the balance that I'm going to strike in doing those things? And what are my strategies for doing it? It seemed like that could help all of us quite a bit, not only in reaching more folks, but also in terms of like protecting our own piece of mind.

Right. I'll just want to keep tweeting a few as if people who are on cleanses. Listen, that's the main thing. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. Your celery juice does, that's not true. I'm, yeah. She's just searching for anybody tweeting about Celery Jews.

Like, first of all, Susan. I am itching for a fight, man. Thanks so much for doing this, Mike. Oh, I'm happy to. And this is great. I can babble about this stuff all day. And to be able to babble to two people who have some understanding of what we're up against with this is just terrific.

Where can people find your work in your book, Mike? Sure, the book is available for pre-order, anywhere you pre-order books. You can find me on Twitter at Rothschild MD. So it's just my last name, MD. Dr. Rothschild. Not a doctor, please. You can consult me for medical advice.

I have a photo of a rash from Gnesenju, no Mike. I'll do some oil pulling and then it will just go. Thank you.