The Problem With Jon Stewart - Jon Goes Down the QAnon Rabbit Hole With Gabriel Gatehouse

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Jon talks with (very charming, very British) BBC foreign correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse about his work covering the U.S. elections—which turned into reporting on QAnon, because what’s an election without a global cabal of blood-drinking billionaires? Jon is also joined by writers Kris Acimovic and Robby Slowik to discuss their favorite conspiracy theories, and maybe start some new ones.CREDITSHosted by: Jon StewartFeaturing, in order of appearance: Kris Acimovic, Robby Slowik, Gabriel Gatehouse, Jay JurdenExecutive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard Plepler.Lead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Caity Gray, Robby SlowikAssoc. Producer: Andrea BetanzosSound Designer & Audio Engineer: Miguel CarrascalSenior Digital Producer: Kwame OpamDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Chelsea DevantezElements: Kenneth Hull, Daniella PhilipsonTalent: Brittany Mehmedovic, Haley DenzakResearch: Susan Helvenston, Andy Crystal, Anne Bennett, Deniz Çam, Harjyot Ron SinghTheme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem with Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast produced by Busboy Productions. https://apple.co/-JonStewart 

Have you, have you Omicron yet? I haven't Omicroned. I, Robbie. I Omicroned. I feel invincible now that I've had it. I feel great. You have the, all the vaccinations and the disease. Yes.

I am a Petri dish. Now let me explain what our plan is now. We're looking to repopulate the earth. Only with the strongest, most immune amongst us. Robbie, you've been selected. Oh, that doesn't sound right. Also, look, I'm going to need a 48 hour break between each repopulation session.

All right. I'm not built for this anymore. No, no, no. I understand. That makes sense. We're not doing it naturally anyway. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the problem podcast.

We're here with our, our tremendous writers, Chris Achimovich and Robbie Sloak. And Chris, as always, I start by saying, you're pronouncing your last name wrong. It's actually, uh, Asimovic. I just want to make that clear. Well, I will say that Asimovic is a very popular pronunciation of my last name.

I've heard it a lot. So if you decide that that's where you want to end up, we'd let that happen. It's really just what I'm legally bound to do. I respect that. I respect that so, so much. And Robbie, how are you doing? I'm doing well, man.

I'm good. This podcast, we are discussing conspiracies and, and how they come about and, and queuing on with this gentleman, uh, Gabriel Gatehouse, who is, he's with BBC Newsnight. And whenever you hear somebody with BBC Newsnight, you always assume they're better than you. I just assume he went to Eaton and Oxford.

And had a choice between being delivered, getting a night ship, or maybe working at the BBC. He's decided to do the BBC. So when I talked to him, I was kind of expecting something, slightly less comfortable and collegial, but he was, he was lovely and, and, and really charming. Yeah. You kind of expect him to like go into a Shakespeare monologue

that he just has memorized because that's what they do there. Yes. And then like in the middle of it, just give you all the answers for jeopardy. You assume his father is a wealthy industrialist who's heartbroken that his son has gone into journalism. And so charming, that charming acts. I felt like I was very charming.

Yes. Watching Hugh Grant fall in love with Drew Barrymore in the fall or something. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, at one point, I'm just a boy standing in front of a girl trying to tell you about queuing on. About the dangers of conspiracies. That's exactly right.

You're writers and I've been in enough writer room to know conspiracy theories are not unknown to the writer's room. No, no, no, no, no. We weighed into the conspiracy theory, uh, ocean. I would say. Regularly. Frequently. Wouldn't you say Robbie?

Yes. Yes. 100%. Yeah. There's always somebody who believes one or two. Um, there's always somebody who's ready to fight people who believe one or two. Let's not say there's always somebody.

Let's just say it's Rob. It's Rob Christensen. It is Rob. It is Rob. If you mentioned chiropractors around Rob, if you mentioned astrology around Rob, he will. He'll start to throw down. What's his, what's the chiropractor?

He believes it's, he thinks it's fake. He thinks it's quack science. Yeah. That re, re addressing your spine, reconfiguring your spine should not be a solution to any problem. Right. Right. Oh, you guys think spines are real?

Well, you're, you're way behind. Robbie going right down the spine conspiracy hole. That I didn't see coming in any way. What's, what's the worst? I'm trying to think of like the big conspiracy theory for all the writers rooms I've been in is the Kennedy assassination. That's always the one that is top drawer. But you know, I'm, I'm antiquated.

So I would imagine that it's now the JFK junior or it's all kinds of other stuff. But is there one in particular that's, that's weird it said? We're in a golden age of conspiracy theories. Now there's like this whole bucket and you can kind of choose your own adventure in the conspiracy theory umbrella. Okay.

Fair enough. Where are you guys at? What, what, what's been circulating in the room? I like talking about simulation theory. I think simulation theory is kind of a fun framework to view the world. I don't believe it per se, but I mentioned it with more frequency than I'm proud of. Right.

And when you say, I don't believe it per se. So which, which sounded like a French way of saying, I believe it, but I also would like to still be asked to be in meetings. Yeah, just consider it to be a part of society. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now is that just the idea that like we all live in a simulation? Yeah, it's the idea that we all live in a simulation. It's more, it's matrixy.

It's where like brain and a vat we're being sort of- Is this your simulation or is it mine and Robbie's? No. So it's none of ours. We're all in the simulation. Oh, it's like a massive open world player. Yes, yes. Oh, okay, okay, fair enough.

And we're players in various levels in the simulation. Okay, okay. Yeah. And, and do we have free will in this or is somebody playing us? Or, or are there people that are NPCs? Like what's the- Like you know about the NPCs. You know about NPCs.

John is faking ignorant here. Now he's going deep. I only know about NPCs because I play a lot of video games. So I know- Okay, so you know about NPCs. I know NPCs. NPCs is my favorite part of the conspiracy theory, simulation theory, because I like to run into somebody

and be like that guy's an NPC. Oh, that's horrifying that someone just thought of me that way before. That I've had an interaction with someone and they're like, this guy's just written by the code. He's nothing. He's a non-entity. Right.

He's just there to be standing in the coffee shop so it doesn't look empty. He is. Right, right. He's a space filler. That's, that's very interesting. So in the old days, the analog days, we would all talk about how people were just extras.

Like that guy's just an extra because that's, you know, you'd be in a set somewhere and then you'd go out in real life and you'd be like, oh man, this, this just looks cast. It looks like everybody's an extra in the film. But isn't there like sort of a strange, inherent narcissism in that? If it's that, you know, that we're,

we're playing the game and there's just people there that populate the whole thing. Like their backstory doesn't really matter. That's right. And I'm getting played by a really skilled player who's like. Exactly. Yeah. They're a blip in my story.

So simulation theory, that's the one. And in simulation theory, is there a controlling element? Who's Atari or Sega or in simulation theory? Who's, who's the, the controlling element? I don't know. I mean, the more you think about it, the more you're like, oh, this is just a tech stand in for religion.

You know, it's like, there's a God or there's this ultimate thing pulling the strings or if there's not. Technology is, is God ultimately. It makes sense, right? This is why I like, at my conspiracy theory that I think is out there, like the TikTok is a full-on, like Chinese Psyop built to destroy America by pushing everyone into these conspiracy lanes,

ripping people apart that way. See, I, I look at it differently. I think TikTok is looking to destroy America by making us all adept at only 11 second dances. Yes. That will be all communication. Quick cut edits. That's the only, once you do that to a population,

they are not capable then of taking on larger challenges than learning to renegade. Well, that's why I'm raising the alarms, because if, if your value to society is based on choreo, I'm out. Of course it's based on choreo. It's always been based on choreo. All right.

Well, we're going to, we're going to get into Gabriel Gatehouse, BBC News Night's international editor. He did a great series called The Coming Storm. We're going to talk to him now. So here we go. Here's the interview. Welcome to the podcast. We are very excited today.

BBC News Night's international editor, foreign correspondent, award-winning, Gabriel Gatehouse is joining us. Gabriel, thank you so much. You covered the American election. I did. And that's, and you recently released this seven-part podcast series on the QAnon phenomenon in America.

And, and I want to ask you, so were you following the American election and came upon QAnon, or were you following QAnon and came upon the American election? The first, I'm a pretty straight ahead foreign correspondent. I was out in the States. I was out in Arizona, covering the aftermath of the presidential election. Everyone was outside the Maricopa County counting station.

And were you, and were you armed? Did you, were you open carrying in AK-47 to try and fit in with the local customs? I was, as Oscar Wilde might say, armed only with my charm. I don't know if you know this, but in Arizona, that's illegal. That's the one thing. It's the one thing you can't carry. I concealed carried my charm.

Perfect. I was armed with a microphone and a cameraman. And, and I see this guy, and he's draped in furs, and his face is painted, and he's wearing horns. And I go, wow, that guy looks great. And I start talking to him, and he's super friendly. He's like, really great. But the story he tells is just insane, right?

Sure. I'm going to give a spoiler alert. Yes, at home, you're probably thinking to yourselves, geez, wearing furs, painted face, that sounds an awful lot like the gentleman that has become known as the QAnon shaman. And this is, in fact, the shaman. But this was before January the 6th. So this is pre-shaman days. So I just, I have a chat with him, and he tells me

is about how apparently the election is being stolen by a cabal of satanic pedophiles led by Hillary Clinton. So I'm like, I'm really struggling here because, you know, television's a visual medium. I like the way you look. You look fantastic. You seem like a hell of a nice guy. But I've got to be responsible, right? It's just wrong to go to America and put the craziest guy

you can find on a news show, right? That's just not, it's not responsible journalism. Thank you for your discernment there. A lot of people, a lot of people wouldn't go with that decision. Well, as it turns out, it was a big mistake, right? Two months later, I'm back in London, and I'm watching my TV, and they've all stormed the Capitol. And then I see him inside the Senate chamber, right?

Sitting behind Mike Pence's desk, and it's the guy with the horns. And I'm like, I fucked up. No, you didn't fuck, Gabriel, you did not fuck up. I did. Big time. I messed up. You exercised what at the time would have appeared to be standard human judgment on the continuum of, am I getting useful information from a person? I mean, the furs in the painted face,

he's creating a spectacle. But when you spoke with him, you in no way could have thought in that moment that America had gone so far down the rabbit hole that this man was actually representative of an entire political movement. Did you think to yourself, oh, he's an actor, he's got these beliefs, but he's an actor and he's putting on a show? I didn't, actually. I thought he was pretty sincere, but crazy.

Truly believed in this. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think he did, and possibly does. I don't know, I can't speak for now, but I think he did, and as lots of people do. Now, when you heard the fear, was it the first time that you had heard of, had you been aware of, for instance, Pizza Gate, which was the earlier iteration of it,

that this cabal was actually running out of a non-existent basement in a pizza place in Washington, DC? I've been to that pizza place, by the way, it's really nice. Can you tell me anything at all about the pizza there? The pizza is excellent. Now we're getting somewhere. Now we're getting somewhere, because that's the one thing missing from all these stories is the quality of the pizza.

No one talks about that. It's a conspiracy. The mainstream media will not touch this. A lot of cabals. It's very easy to control the elections and the pedophile ring, but not a lot of cabals can make a good pizza. Exactly, exactly. Freemasons, by the way, notorious for their poor saucing on the pizzas. They're just notorious for it.

So you had heard about it before, so when he brings this up to you, it's not as though it's wildly out of left field, but his belief that it was involved in just this election just felt like... So I kind of, obviously, I knew about Pizza Gate, and I kind of vaguely heard about QAnon, but I hadn't looked into it super deeply. And so I kind of recognized it as, oh, this is this QAnon thing, but I didn't really understand how significant it was.

So I went from Arizona, I went to Georgia, and followed these kind of trains that all in the run-up to January the 6th were kind of doing these marches on Washington and these... Hitting all the swing states and then going in. And I kept bumping into people who wanted to tell me about Q, right? So it was a very wide range of people. It wasn't just what you would sort of generally turn... Is there a bit of an evangelical zeal to this?

Because I would think that they would be knowing that you're in the media, knowing that you're a journalist, they might be more circumspect. They may be playing it a little closer to the vest, but you're not finding that. They're seeking you out to spread the message. I think being foreign helps, right? My accent. Oh, it's devastatingly charming. It's not so much that.

I'm having trouble focusing. Well, I'm very pleased to hear that. It's not so much that, but when they hear me speak, they don't consider me part of the American media landscape. So they don't immediately think I'm the enemy, right? Oh, that's interesting. This outsider status is really useful. So when they start approaching you, you're going around to Georgia,

you're in Arizona, you're all that, are they giving up the whole bag? Like in Scientology, they don't tell you the real truth until you've put in... You got to put in five years and $100,000 before they let you know there's a volcano and there's an alien, and they don't open the whole thing up. Are they trying to ease you into it, or is this more of a regurgitating flow? I think QAnon is a spectrum, right?

Especially now that Q, this person hasn't posted for over a year, and QAnon is essentially dead, but it's been swallowed up by this conspiracy. And it's been metastasized. Yeah, and it's on a spectrum from, I think there was something dodgy about the election, and they eat babies, right? Those are the kind of...

It goes from, I don't think these absentee ballots are signed to adrenochrome is a drug that is used at parties. Yeah, and adrenochrome, for anyone who doesn't know, is this thing that they believe is harvested from infants' blood, whom they have to kill under great stress in order to produce this... I suppose it's a hormone, is it, right? And gain eternal life.

That's right. Now, as someone with children, I can tell you, they produce secretions massively. I mean, there's tons of different secretions. Every orifice there is just massively productive, as far as these types of things. I'm with you on that. So they're not necessarily going full,

and here's where it ends in these satanic parties. 00:16:08,560 --> 00:16:10,320 They're sort of starting you out. Yeah, I don't think everyone who sort of believes in Q necessarily has the same set of beliefs, because it's a very wide, kind of wide-ranging... Not a monolith. No, it's not.

And it sucked in lots of other conspiracy theories with it. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff about vaccines, and 5G, and SOROS, and all the old anti-Semitic stuff. Obviously, the drinking blood stuff is just recycled blood. Oh, Gabriel, it's a classic. It's a classic. We've been running on that one for years. It's just a classic.

Centuries. So I think it's a spectrum. But what, for me, was so interesting when I started really looking into it and really kind of delving into speaking to these people and trying to understand what they believed and why they believed it. Because there's been quite a lot of stuff done about what they believe, and quite a lot of stuff done about who was behind it and who was pulling the strings.

And that's really interesting. But I hadn't really heard anything convincing about why would they believe this? I mean, it's bonkers, right? And what I sort of got to, and again, I don't think this applies to everyone, but it certainly, I think, applies to Jake Chansley, the Q Shaman guy. If you listen to some of the stuff he says, and you take it literally, like you think he literally believes that Hillary Clinton is running this cabal of satanic pedophiles and she drinks blood and all sorts of other stuff,

then obviously it's nonsense. And why would we even spend time looking into that? But if you take Q and Anna as a sort of parable, right? So they believe that a cabal, if you will, or a bunch of people whom we don't know very much about, they're not necessarily too much in the public eye, have huge amounts of power in the world, because the world is changing through the internet and how the world is run and where the power sits is changing.

And they're effectively running the world in ways that we can't really see and can't really understand and we think might not be to our benefit. Then you go, well, hold on a minute, maybe they're onto something. That's interesting, Gabriel, but why sabotage the credibility of that skepticism with something that is so easily like in the basement of the pizza place disprovable and seemingly outlandish enough as to take away from that moment you had just now where you said, well, maybe they are onto something, but why create parables or metaphors that are so outrageous when that's such a simple and understandable, yes.

Well, it's a good question. And as a kind of very balanced and neutral BBC reporter, of course, I should preface this by saying you could look at this from a sort of Bernie Sanders perspective, right? And actually, a lot of QAnon believers started out as Bernie supporters and they got really mad when they thought that Hillary Clinton had stiffed Bernie out of it. And that's part of the reason why Hillary kind of became part, only part of the reason why Hillary. Well, there's a much longer history. A long history of the case.

But there's a sense in which some QAnon supporters are actually coming at this from a sort of left-wing perspective, whereby they feel that their concerns about how capitalism is currently running their lives have been squished, have been ignored. There's been no kind of mainstream outlet, political outlet for those concerns. We've been so kind of indoctrinated into economic liberalism, trickle down economics and all of this kind of stuff. And Bernie Sanders would just be like in any kind of, especially in America, right? Well, they think we live in a socialist country. Guys, we have a conservative government here. But anyway, they think because of our... Wait a minute. Hold on a second. I have a whole different headline for this podcast.

You're not a socialist? Apparently, you guys think we are. Anyway, but what I'm saying is that there's a sense among some QAnon supporters, and not all of them, but some of them, that there has been no outlet for those kind of concerns about, concerns the way capitalism is going, that has left them no other avenue but conspiracy theories. I'm wondering if, in your mind, is the specificity of it what allows it to kind of catch fire? Is that what gives it its virality? Is it that people don't accept that, no, it's got to be something more than that? And was Q's secret, the secrecy of it and the specificity of it and the outrageousness of it, was that the key, you think, to it catching such fire? And by the way,

it's not as though other countries don't have that same sort of underlying populist feeling that there are forces aligned against you. Why hasn't it caught fire where you are? Well, you guys are always first. So wherever you go, we follow. So obviously, the wheels are about to come off our democracy as well. So that's very heartening. Look, I think one of the things is, yes, the specificity and more specific than that, what could be more emotive than this idea that there are hundreds of thousands of children being trafficked every year by a cabal of politicians and financiers and etc. By the way, it's very interesting that they pick on something that truly is like

sex trafficking, child trafficking, like this is an issue. Of course it is. And they have locked into like one of the more emotional issues. They've just described it to something that, from what I understand in terms of the people who are trying to fight actual child trafficking, makes it harder to actually take care of the thing that they seem most concerned about. That's a lot, right? And it's a thing and it's important, but it's not what they describe it as. But anyway, that's one of the reasons why I think it caught fire so much, because it's so emotive. As a parent, I know that any idea that somebody might abduct your kid, you go berserk. Well, that's the thing. Q in this country has really surprising strength

in what you would imagine the old political demographic of soccer moms. Absolutely. Look, our media, it may not be the most balanced. It may not be the most factual, but man, can we scare the shit out of people? Yeah, absolutely. We do it in every, it's the business model for the American media and for the new internet media is arson. Like set everybody on fire because not every day is 9-11 and you're not really going to watch us when there's nothing going on. You need the ratings. As Donald Trump understood so well. Boy, did he understand how to, he played that thing like a master conductor,

the Leonard Bernstein of Arsonist. But I think what people don't realize, and I'd love your opinion on this, is how the mainstream American media sowed the seeds for Q's virality by creating that adrenaline and cortisol in people's bodies of fear and always on the verge of disaster and catastrophe. They created the environment that allows these types of things to grab such hold. Yeah, I think that's right. And I should also say, and this came out of our reporting on the podcast, that the sort of liberal end of the American media and British media. Well, I mean, Fox News is a slightly different beast. But yeah. But you know, that's the sort of MSNBCs, the CNNs. Like when that Russia story was going on,

right, there was Russia stuff, but a lot of it was nonsense, right? The p-tape. I don't think there's a p-tape. I interviewed the spy who wrote about the p-tape. He thinks there's a p-tape. I don't think there's a p-tape. I looked for the p-tape. Gabriel, let me ask you a question. When you were a young man studying to become a journalist and putting in the hard work, did you ever think that a part of your journalistic career would be, I'm going to interview the spy that talked about the p-tape? I didn't. But that's partly because I didn't study journalism. I studied Russian. Oh, you're kidding.

I speak Russian fluently. I know a lot about... Oh, you were built for this moment, sir. You are built for it. Right. So it was like the pinnacle of my career. And I was absolutely freaking out that the better resourced American networks and the New York Times would beat me to the p-tape, right? So we plotted about how we were going to beat the Americans to finding the p-tape. And I said, I'm serious. I traveled to Ukraine to interview an arms dealer I knew, who knew people, who knew people. My colleague went to Istanbul to interview a man who'd

apparently seen the p-tape. There is no p-tape, right? Now that... There's a confluence now because the Russians are clearly... They are sophisticated in terms of disinformation. They're really sophisticated in their psyops. I think there's no question that they're pretty good about that. It's interesting that our media will be very gullible or very open to believing a disinformation campaign from somewhere else and very skeptical of a disinformation. It plays to a credibility issue. But I think what happened in 2016 was everyone said Trump can't win. It's a joke, right? And then he won, right? So on the liberal end of the American spectrum, people were searching for a way to

understand that, to explain that. How the hell did that happen? We were told he couldn't win. You could say fuck. This is a... What the fuck, right? So this is a grown-up podcast. Absolutely. We just talked about a p-tape. We didn't go into depth about golden showers. That's true. So they were like, how the fuck did that happen? And they were like, oh, okay, the Russians did it. It's nothing to do with us. It's the Russians, right? The Russians must have done it. Age-old Cold War foe. There was such an easy explanation. And then they got wilder and wilder these conspiracy theories about how the Russians had been pinging messages from

Donald Trump's server to a server in Alphabet in Moscow and meetings in Prague and cell phone towers. It all turned out to be... Well, not all of it, but a lot of it turned out to be nonsense. Now, if that isn't a conspiracy theory, I don't know what is. And the interesting thing is it speaks to a flattering of kind of American exceptionalism again, which is we would never sow division amongst ourselves. Clearly. Have you watched American TV? There must be an outside agitator who... Do you know what they are doing? They're inflaming racial tension in America. That never existed.

That's not something that we would... Now, okay, admittedly, let's come clean. We did have civil war. And a long-slave history. And a long-slave history and segregation and Jim Crow. But we're completely past. We're over it. Look at us. Yeah, Barack Obama, right? Thank you. And so the idea that division in this country has to be manipulated by some outside nefarious forces, again, it seems almost delusional. Completely. And to tell you how bad the Russians are at this stuff, they're not as good as you think.

They really aren't as good as you think. CNN and Bellingcat, this open source investigative reporting outfit. They managed to find out who poisoned Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader. They managed to find out the exact FSB agents who'd done it because they left it all online. That's how bad they are. Oh, wow. So this gets to... Now, Q takes off in America, and it sort of metastasizes. So the story is that I think it was the 27th of October, 2017, this message drops on 4chan, which is like a precursor to 8chan. And it's like HRC is about to be arrested, Hillary Rodham Clinton, HRC is about to be arrested. And then there's just thousands

and thousands of messages. At some point early on, it switches to 8chan, which is this different kind of message board. And then this guy in the Philippines buys 8chan. And that's the guy that they've now assumed was Q. Yeah. I should say, just in case he sues us, he's said he's not Q. Isn't that something Q would say? Would Q, who's done all this legwork, just come out and go like, it's okay. Well, the trouble is, whoever was posting... It started off pretty clearly. It started off as something called a LARP, which stands for Live Action Roleplay, which is a game, essentially. You dress up as a character. And then it migrated online and on 4chan, before Q Anon arrived, there were all these other people pretending to be high-level

insiders, like there was FBI Anon, CIA Anon. So there are pre... This all just... It doesn't come out sort of fully formed in an immaculate conception. There are precursors that grow. This is the one that hit. Yeah. This is the one that took off. And it took off partly for the reasons we discussed, but also partly because it's got this participatory element. So Q Anon... People are deputized. Right. And Q Anon believers say, do your own research. And that's what they all do. They do their research, which is they spend 20 hours a day online, googling shit, and then they come up with weird stuff. And then they've got the wall of crazy, where they've got the post-it notes and the spits of string, and they're like JFK,

Soros and all. I do that with WebMD, by the way. I just want to make it clear that 20 hours a day on Google, that's what's crazy. What's wrong with me? It all depends on what you're looking for. But why... This is not a phenomenon in the United Kingdom, yes? Well, it is. It's here, but it's here in the UK. It's bigger in Germany, funnily enough. Is it because it's Clinton-based that it hasn't really... Because so much of it revolves around the Democrats and Clinton, is that why other countries... And do they have a version of it that revolves around Angela Merkel or somebody else? So certainly in the UK, before Q Anon even existed. I remember it must have been 2015, I was reporting on this far-right British guy called

Tommy Robinson. He was a rabble rouser. He's a far-right nationalist. But after he sort of moved on from being an overt far-right nationalist, he started getting into this thing about child trafficking and pedophilia. And this was before Q Anon. So this stuff is around in the ether. And why is it around in the ether? I think, again, we come back to this thing that the world is changing so fast. And people who a generation ago would have a stable job, white people mostly, right? Who a generation ago would have a stable job and their position in society was super stable, are suddenly faced with, oh my God, I can't really afford higher education. I'll get a zero-hours gig economy contract job. If I'm lucky, I have to work three jobs to survive. What the hell happened to

my stability, right? How do I explain that suddenly I'm at the bottom of the pile, right? And then you start looking for these kind of nefarious... Well, it's also, listen, I don't think it exists in a separate universe than the misinformation that the fascists use in the 30s, in their rise to power, or even, as you talk about a little bit, man, you can go back to the Salem witch trials. The world is not controllable. And if you feel like your world especially feels out of your control, it's natural to search for... I mean, it's mythology. I'm wondering, have you looked at other moments of this, other pandemics of misinformation and seen how they resolve other than in world wars and trials for witches? So the difference between what the Nazis were doing with their

propaganda and now is that the Nazis were in control of the message, right? But now we've got the internet, like no one's in control of it, apart from the algorithms and... It's a crowdsourced misinformation campaign. And people like us in the media have lost control of the national conversation, right? Thirty years ago, the topics that we put on the TV or on the radio, and what newspaper editors put in the newspaper, that's what people would talk about. And obviously, we wouldn't put nonsense about kebabs or satanic pedophiles on the TV or the radio because it was not... Unless it was going to get good ratings. Well, yeah, you did that in the satanic panic in the 80s, right? Yeah. And you look at the witch

trials, the first witch trials coincided with the invention of a radical new piece of communications technology, which was the printing press. And I don't think those two things are an accident, right? That's not a coincidence that we've got the printing press and the witch trials, witch panic, and then we've got the internet and now this thing. So is there something in the human brain that has to evolve to... In other words, will my children, for whom technology is much more native, will they be more resilient to the types of misinformation or the types of virality? But then there's a herd immunity to misinformation that builds up. I hate to keep going back to pandemic metaphors. But it is a virus, right? I am right now.

No, you're right. And this misinformation is a virus. Cuenon is a virus and it's spreading. I hope so, but I'm not sure that it's going to happen in our lifetimes or in our children's lifetime. I mean, if you look at the witch craze lasted for a full 200 years, pretty much. Wow. Now, see, I did not know that. And the problem what's happening now is that, you know, people, maybe they've stopped now, but for a while everyone was like, we need better fact-checking. We must have fact-checking programs. We must fact-check everything, fact-check Donald Trump, fact-check, fact-check, fact-check, fact-check. That is pointless. That does not work with the people who believe this. So even the absence of a basement

in the pizza place doesn't change. Says who? Says who there's no basement. Says you on CNN or the BBC, you're part of the conspiracy, you know? Can't you check? I went to check. No basement. No basement. But good pizza. Great pizza. But in all seriousness, John, fact-checking isn't going to work. The only thing that works is telling a better story. And, you know, this idea that a cabal of evil doers has seized control of the levers of power and that there's an undercover bunch of good guys led by Donald Trump fighting them and that there will be an ultimate showdown in which good will

triumph over evil. That is a hell of a strong story, right? That's a better... How does Trump end up being the good guy when, for most of his life, as far as I could tell, he's part of the cabal. I think a part of it is that he's just such a mesmeric figure. Like, you watch Trump and he's a genius. Tremendously charismatic. He's just like, and right place, right time, the guy who tells it like it is, quote, unquote. So I think he's the right guy, the right place at the right time. The guy who was running against Hillary. Like, Hillary was evil. Ergo, the person running against her, was good. You know, you said something earlier that I thought was really interesting, which is it's

kind of a crowdsourced misinformation that no one is in control of. Previous misinformation campaigns, whether they came from, look, the United States is no stranger to PsyOps. I mean, for God's sakes, we overthrew the Iranian government with misinformation in the 50s. And we helped. We helped. We don't write us out. By the way, thank you. We do appreciate that. And Standard Oil thanks you as well. But more importantly, how in control of the monster that's being created are the forces on the right? You know, Donald Trump says something very famously here. And I'm sure you're familiar with it. He said, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue

and it wouldn't affect my votes. That's, I think, true. But I don't think he could vaccinate somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose votes. And that's my point, which is, as this metastasizes, at what point, because the monster always turns on the creators, always. I think I don't think Donald Trump's in control of it at all. And I don't think he ever was. I think he's an incredibly canny politician. And he recognized very quickly that the people who believed in Q also liked him. So that was good for him. There's that great clip. There's that fantastic clip where the reporter asks him about Q and R. The cost of the theory is this belief that you are secretly saving the world from this

cytanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Does that sound like something you are behind? He goes, well, I don't know. But is that supposed to be a bad thing? Is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing? I mean, you know, if I can help save the world from problems, I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to put myself out there. And we are, actually, we're saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country. You know, he's genius. So he fed it, but he wasn't in control of it. But he definitely fed it. And there were, more importantly, and very seriously, there were people in the Trump orbit who were deliberately trying to coordinate the message with Q and were very deliberately doing

that. And that's part of what we reported. And what role, then, also, because you have Facebook. So now you have these mass disseminators of information, like Facebook, and their business model relies on the type of engagement that you'll get from a really virulent, emotional conspiracy theory. For Facebook, their best product is information that enrages, because that's how they make their money. Yeah. What can I say? We're screwed. It's over. Gabriel, this is not, no. We've got to end on a more hopeful. No, I'm really sorry. You're actually quite pessimistic about, what is it you're pessimistic about? People's ability to discern real information from false information, what that means in terms

of democracy. Here's part of the problem. Democracy is an analog system. There's no question. It's about deliberation, consideration, compromise, checks and balances. We're in a digital world. Is this form of government outmatched by the technologies that surround it? Yes. Okay, then we're done here. That's it. We're done. So democracy is done in the states. Who's ever going to accept the result of an election again? That's not going to happen. The party's over. But more importantly, perhaps, the model on which these social media companies, these digital companies work are fundamentally incompatible with what is probably the biggest challenge right now, which is trying to save the planet from going up in flames.

Arguably, and democracy and the kind of social media debate are two things that really are incompatible with saving the planet. Arguably, a totalitarian system like China, where whatever the party says with its 25-year plan, that goes, and there's no arguing with it. Arguably, that might be a better shot. So maybe China will save us. I think these are fascinating points because the agility of democracy to deal with more catastrophic things, you're right. But we see this, and if I can broaden it, we see it in our capitalist markets that the bad actors are more agile. They're more able to overwhelm what you would think is the immune system to continue our analogy of the planet. It's being overwhelmed by

these new technologies. But now here's the but, we have always had this duality. And don't you have any hope that the things that we're talking about, Facebook, the internet, all these things, these are tools. They're agnostic. They're new technologies. We can fill them with things that are unifying and edifying and illuminating, or we can pervert them. But the thing that I always come back to is we always do both. And it's always a pendulum swing. And I do believe, and I hate to end on an optimistic note, but I do believe that there is within us that other side that is illuminating, edifying, constructive, and utilizing the same tools that are sowing this destruction. And that's the battle. I agree. But the problem is that the good stuff doesn't make the money, as you pointed

out. So we need to reset the economic model. The incentives. The incentives. Otherwise, I think we are a bit screwed. Well, I can't think of a better way to end a podcast than that. Just a bit screwed. Just to be clear, I am not a kind of pro-China totalitarian. Just to be very clear. Everybody's got to clarify everything. Gabriel, thank you so much for joining us today. The podcast is really just fascinating. It's called The Coming Storm. Please listen to it. Please check out all of Gabriel's work on. It's called, I'm sorry, the BBC. Yes. It sounds made up to me, but okay. It's fake news. We really do appreciate it. Honestly, really fascinating and really interesting how it's always interesting to me for someone to come over and kind of get

a macro observation of how our system functions because we're so embedded in it. And it's really difficult at times to have that self-reflection. It's been a great pleasure, John. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you so much. All right. We're back. Gabriel, gatehouse, ladies and gentlemen. He is the gatehouse to knowledge. Boom. He doesn't think this is going away. He thinks it's embedded. Now, are you guys, do you have cues in your circle? Do you have cues? I have cues in my extended circle, like people's mothers and sisters and stuff. Yeah. And there are levels of cues. Like people believe that there are child trafficking. You're like, yeah, I think that's right. There's that. Right. And then once they get into like, and it happens under a pizza place

and you drink the blood, you're like, all right, that's a little too specific. Yeah. Right. But you can go in wherever you want to go. If you're like somebody who's like, I don't know about vaccines, there's like a little entry into QAnon for you. That's kind of the strength of QAnon. They're like all conspiracy theories welcome. They'll find a way to tuck you in. Yeah. You know, and there's always just enough meddling by the powers that be to justify. You always find enough evidence of unseen powers, intervening in the affairs of mortals to justify sort of the further leaps. Right. Well, are you saying that they've never, you know, that they don't gather in Davos and create interest rates that you're saying they don't just print money out of nothing? No,

you're right. They do do that. So how come you don't believe that there's a tracking device in your vaccine? Like there's enough there that it's very hard to just say like that never happens. The only thing that you can imagine is I think a lot of people attribute to malevolence what can be generally described through incompetence. I think one of the things that Gabriel said that really resonated was like fact checking doesn't work with this stuff. You have to tell a better story. But how? Like how if you're, if you're like rooted in reality, do you tell a better story than a global cabal of shadowy billionaires or, you know, lizard people trafficking in child blood? You're like, I can't tell a better story than that with the truth. That's my point

is though, it's like global cabal of billionaires. Like, yeah, people use money to buy power and influence and they make changes to things that affect your life. It's how they move into the lizard thing. But I always assumed the lizard thing was kind of like a trope, like a go to, like in the way that, you know, the comedians all have tropes that they go to for jokes. You know, it's always that like the guy with the Canadian girlfriend. Isn't that just a trope? I think lizard is like the jump, the almost comedic leap. But I think that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of people who do believe, like a healthy amount who believe that there are rich people drinking baby blood and harvesting. That's the one where you're like,

I would think if you're a rich person and you have access to like incredible pizza, yeah, why would you do the other thing? Why would you go with the baby? Oh, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna have tonight, baby's blood. What? I'm rich. I can get to tonos. I could have a guy drive out and pick up John's pizza. Get a calzone right now. Why do I want baby's blood? What's weird to me about all of it is that the cabal, like you don't have to say that there's a secret cabal. It's happening obviously in front of us. So you don't have to go. It's not much of a conspiracy. Yeah. It's like, yeah, that's happening. So I think the lizard people and like the blood babies and stuff, it's like, oh, we got it. We are obsessed with the secret

that we can find. You've discovered something. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably part of it because it is, you know, there's a secret cabal of billionaires, you know, like Citizens United. I think that's Citizens United. It's a Supreme Court. I think the Supreme Court decided that that was okay, that we were gonna go with that. It's also like these guys are, they're taking adrenochrome to stay young. It's like, have you seen George Soros' face? Like it's not working. Right. He looks like he's skydiving. Well, and Peter. How is, by the way, the Rupert Murdoch doesn't look like he's skydiving. And he's 90 something. Well, this is where you're like, man, he must have a deal with somebody.

Like this is how it starts. You're like, what's Rupert Murdoch doing to stay young? Right. I'm assuming it's embalming. Well, that's all the billionaires. There is a part of me that whenever I meet one, I just want to say one thing and one thing only. I just want to lean in, get right in their ears and say, death will be victorious. Yes. Because there's that. You do get that sense that they're like, I'm just going to invent this thing and money and power is going to keep me alive. Peter Thiel is literally trying to live forever. Doesn't he have a really, he has a blood boy. Doesn't Peter Thiel have an actual blood boy? This is how it all starts. This is how it all starts. So Chris, basically, we've gone from,

yes, I do believe that money has too much influence in today's society to, you know, Peter Thiel has a blood boy. He has a farm of blood boys. I believe it's, if you visit him at Blood Boy Farm, you will find that he has the young men who are. Thousands of blood boys. It's an HR nightmare, but it pays okay. The Salem witch stuff lasting 200 years was a wake up call. I was like, oh, that was what, like five weird years. And then we got through it. I did not realize that. And you always imagine, you like to point it out to like, oh, that was a primitive time when we would still felt like it's okay to poop next to your house, right? That's okay. What could happen?

Oh, it'll be fine. So you imagine it to be a more primitive time. But, you know, it's funny, even in those, what we imagine more primitive times, I was reading some of this somewhere where they talked about, you know, we think of the dark ages as this time of unenlightenment and just barbarism and all those things. But apparently during this dark time, like science was moving forward. It wasn't as monolithic as I think people would view it in history. Well, it's like the dark ages has a branding problem in that way, that we hear dark and it seems like maybe there's some good stuff happening there. And also there was obviously the plague and the Black Death, but beyond that.

Well, I mean, do you think we'll look back at this time and say that this is a dark age? You don't, John, or do you? It honestly depends on how it plays out. I think this will either be a regression from the mean of progress or it will be a historical blip in an era. But I think a lot of it depends on, in my mind, what happens to the kind of new Axis powers, the more fascist Eastern European countries, how well are they going to band together and what will be the consequence of those actions. That, to me, will be where this thing gets chalked up. I guess we'll see.

Here we go. Beautiful, guys. Before we're going to go, staff writer, Jay Jordan is going to answer the question, do Black people care about QAnon? I think I know the answer, but let's let Jay Jordan have at it. Does QAnon matter to Black people? Hell, yeah, it matters to Black people. White people are gathering in secret meetings to talk about imaginary people gathering in secret meetings. I don't like the sound of that at all. QAnon tried to take down celebrity pedophiles and didn't even bring up R. Kelly. They aren't even good at the one thing they're trying to do. Q folks think JFK and JFK Jr. are still alive. They are ruining our fun little two-pot conspiracy.

So yes, this unfortunately affects Black people. They can't even do conspiracy theories right. Go back to fun stuff like Bigfoot and Mothman and Marilyn Manson being the best friend on the wonder years. You know, innocent fun. QAnon is not only about stirring up a very dangerous white base in this country, it also took away a really fun Black nickname. Because of them, I can't even say that my homie Q told me something without getting banned from a pizza place. I might not even be able to listen to Schoolboy Q if this keeps up. I know the podcast listeners are big TDE fans. They even stormed the Capitol and that very much affected the lives of Black people in DC. They just continue to make shit up and ruin my night. QAnon is just America's

worst improv troupe. Groups of white people who love a certain letter of the alphabet are always gonna put us on high alert. First K, now Q. A is probably next, you know, for acapella groups. So yes, this matters to Black people. That is our show, everybody. Once again, I want to thank Chris and Robbie for joining me. We sat together. We laughed. We listened to Gabriel Gatehouse. Just want to make sure people know this is all. It's not a simulation. It's this is real. I'm a real boy. Real feelings. All right. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Robbie. Thanks for listening. Check out the problem. Check out our newsletter. Subscribe at our website. We have a website. Have you guys been on the website?

Yeah. Yes. It's a fully functioning website. Does it have merch? That's one thing that we should start thinking about. Merch. If there's no merch, we're not even a real entity. It's true. Mostly cookies being funneled back to the Russian government. Anyway, fuckers. All right, kitties. Theproblem.com. Check out the Apple TV Plus show. We will be back next week. Until then, goodbye. Bye. Thanks, guys. Bye. Bye. The problem with John Stewart podcast is an Apple TV Plus podcast and a joint bus boy production.