On this episode of Conspiracy Theories, host Alex Blumberg sits down with the creator of QAnon, Alex Castellanos, to talk about his new documentary, "QAnon: The Conspiracy Theory." They discuss the history of the conspiracy theory and how it came to be, how it started, and why it's so important to know what's real and what's not real. They also talk about the conspiracy theories that have been floating around the internet for years, and how they ve changed the way we think about conspiracy theories and fake news. Alex is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and host of the popular conspiracy podcast "The FiveThirtyEight" podcast. He's also a frequent contributor to The Daily Beast, and is the host of "The Conspiracy Theory" podcast on conspiracy theories. He is also the founder of the Conspiracy Theory Podcast, and co-host of the show "The Biggest Secret" on The Five Thirty Eight. Alex and Alex talk about Qanon, conspiracy theories, and Alex's new documentary "Q and the Conspiracy Theory," and discuss how the Q and Conspiracy theories came about. They also discuss how Q and The Conspiracy theory came to life, and what it was like to be a member of Q and how Q's group, and the impact it had on the world, and its impact on the culture of conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theorists. . Q and Alex discuss the impact of Q's documentary on the internet culture, and whether or not just a conspiracy theory, but an actual conspiracy theory. of the Q group? and why they think it s a good thing. Q is more than a conspiracy or a conspiracy and it s more than just a thing an ? of a , and why Alex thinks it s better than than , that is more than just ... a better And more in this episode, and more ... and more! and more. And much more! Check out the full series on Q and the Q&A on the Q & A! on this episode on the first part of "Q&A! of Q& A on the new series, "The Q and A series on the "Q & A podcast. and how to find out more about Q and Anon!
00:01:28.000And it opens up so many conversations on censorship, on, you know, like, what is the truth?
00:01:38.000And how important is it To know what's real and what's not real.
00:01:46.000It's such a complex and unusual conversation that we have to have today about misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and this whole Q thing, which is just like...
00:02:02.000It, to me, embodies the perfect example of what's like worst case scenario.
00:02:09.000If someone just started making up some wild shit.
00:02:29.000When they attack the Capitol building, when they stormed the Capitol building, and you realize, like, oh my god, like, this is literally like the wings of the butterfly create the storm, and then here it is, like, a thing that looked preposterous just a couple of years ago,
00:02:46.000when people are talking about all the Q drops and all this, like, the people that I knew that are into QAnon, Jamie pointed out earlier that a lot of them were the same people that are into Flat Earth.
00:02:55.000It's the same sort of folks, like, kind of...
00:02:58.000Without, you know, uncharitable terms, unsophisticated, gullible, and into secrets, into finding out secrets.
00:03:08.000I mean, I would say that in my experience, there weren't too many QAnons who were also big flat earthers.
00:03:35.000And this is the thing about Q. It's like, Q... And I think a lot of people were attracted to this premise because it feeds correctly into this notion that we should be skeptical of things, was question everything.
00:03:55.000And in the beginning, that included question Q. And that faded away pretty quickly.
00:04:04.000A few months into QAnon, you could question anything as long as you didn't question Q. You jumped right to January 6th, sort of the finish line.
00:04:20.000When I think of Jan 6, I don't think it would have happened without QAnon.
00:04:27.000I also don't think it happened solely because of QAnon.
00:04:38.000I think it's such a strange time, you know, where people are learning how to use social media, and then we're also aware that social media is heavily manipulated by foreign countries.
00:04:57.000I'm sure you're aware of the Internet Research Agency in Russia, this whole...
00:05:03.000Essentially a troll farm that's designed to fuck with us and very successfully and Renee DiResta has highlighted this really well and It was really interesting to talk to her and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes with this stuff and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of memes often hilarious memes that get shared on social media created by Russia I mean,
00:05:30.000can you imagine getting that job in Russia where it's like, your job will be to be a memesmith?
00:05:35.000Your job is make funny with American politics.
00:05:43.000Yeah, that was one of the questions I've had when you're looking at something like 8chan, now 8kun, where Q had been posting.
00:05:53.000And we talk about free speech on those platforms, and...
00:05:59.000This idea that, you know, anyone can post whatever they want within, you know, sort of the limits of free speech, right?
00:06:07.000Like, there are certain things which are illegal.
00:06:09.000But does that protect people who are abroad as well?
00:06:13.000You know, free speech traditionally in America would protect American citizens.
00:06:16.000But in the case of the Internet, you know, the Internet is global.
00:06:19.000So that means that you can have actors in South Africa or in Russia posting on these sites Protected under the same premise as what Americans are accustomed to.
00:06:33.000And able to use speech against America in certain instances.
00:06:37.000So what you're describing, you know, these kind of memesmiths in Russia are in some ways using free speech against us, right?
00:06:50.000This is an odd idea, but I think what it's doing is it's forcing us to adapt and evolve our ability to detect bullshit.
00:07:05.000And it's doing it almost like an immune system response.
00:07:11.000Like, what we're reacting to and what we're recognizing from all this stuff is like, oh, we didn't know what this was, and this has resulted in this riot, whatever you want to call the Capitol Hill attack.
00:07:26.000And now we're looking at more censorship on social media.
00:07:32.000We're looking at them trying to batten down the hatches and figure out how to handle something like QAnon or the people that were allegedly promoting these ideas.
00:07:46.000A lot of them that are banned from social media, the stuff you highlighted in your show.
00:07:50.000We have to figure out what's true and what's not true.
00:07:53.000And so there's been some sort of draconian measures that have been suggested, you know, like hiring some sort of a team that goes over social media and make sure that everything is according to what they deem to be correct or incorrect.
00:08:11.000Which obviously is subject to biases, and we're very aware that that's going on today, that there's a lot of that going on today, where necessarily the truth doesn't, like the Hunter Biden laptop story is a great example of that, right?
00:08:28.000They censored news from the New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in America, on the Hunter Biden laptop story because they decided that somehow or another it was propaganda or somehow or another it was not good to get that information.
00:08:53.000This is not just like simply, here's information that we know to be true or here's information that we know to be a lie.
00:08:59.000We're going to stop that from getting through.
00:09:00.000No, they knew it to be true, but they decided to stop it because it wasn't convenient or it didn't fit the narrative they were trying to promote.
00:09:35.000And, you know, the algorithms that In many ways had bolstered something like Q because they're basically sociopathic when it comes to just trying to drive attention as much as possible.
00:09:49.000So now they can kind of invert those algorithms and punish those who talk about that kind of content.
00:09:56.000And oftentimes, even if their goal was just to prevent conversation around QAnon because they consider it to be problematic, What else gets swept up with that?
00:10:09.000I saw a lot of people who were reporting on QAnon maybe coming from the side of critiquing it.
00:10:30.000And that's because, of course, it's sort of this blunt force that an algorithm wields.
00:10:38.000So people even, people that were analyzing the movement from a critical standpoint, people who are looking at how ridiculous this is, look at this, they had their channels wiped out as well?
00:11:11.000I mean, when we, even when we, so when we first released the series, you know, there was, there was, there were some articles floating around, like, oh, maybe this is going to make it things worse.
00:11:23.000If I typed in Q into the storm into YouTube, it wouldn't auto-populate at a certain point.
00:11:29.000It started out auto-populating, and then that went away.
00:11:32.000So, yeah, I wouldn't feel confident at all that, you know, if we didn't have a gorilla in our corner, that this story that revealed ultimately who was behind QAnon...
00:11:48.000Would have been seen, would have been able to find an audience.
00:11:53.000Shout out to HBO. Shout out to HBO. I mean, they really had my back.
00:12:08.000They immediately took it, brought it over, turned it into real-time, and made it even better.
00:12:12.000You know, it's uncensored now, and it's, in my opinion, Real Time with Bill Maher is probably one of the very best social commentary shows and comedy shows that, like, really doesn't pull any punches on any network, ever.
00:12:27.000You want to hear something fucking crazy.
00:12:53.000And the reason was because, that I was told, is because, you know, there was all this conspiracy, Flat Earth stuff, and they were getting blowback, but eventually they said, we don't want to have to decide what we publish and what we don't, what's real and what's not.
00:13:07.000We're just not going to publish anything.
00:13:20.000Just to check it, I looked it up, and sure enough, The Cove wasn't available on Amazon.
00:13:27.000Those who said that there wouldn't be a slow creep of censorship, starting with things that I think everybody agrees they wouldn't like to be in society, You know, things like The Daily Storm or maybe a lot of people don't want 8chan.
00:13:40.000You know, there's a progression, you know, until you end up, it seems like something like, you know, the Cove can't find an audience on a major platform.
00:13:50.000And I don't want to conflate government censorship with the corporate censorship too much.
00:13:57.000However, in a lot of ways, it does feel like the government has passed the buck to these corporations to do what they legally can't.
00:14:04.000Which I think is the same thing we saw the government do with privacy, right?
00:14:09.000Like, they wouldn't have been able to get all of this data from us directly, but if you give it to a Facebook or a Twitter, it's very easy for the government to then go and get access to that information.
00:14:19.000So I think what we saw happen with the Fourth Amendment, we're now seeing happen with the First Amendment, where they can say, well, look, we couldn't restrict conversation around certain topics.
00:14:29.000We couldn't directly decide what's true or what's not.
00:14:33.000We're going to put that in the hands of these companies.
00:14:36.000And, of course, these companies have intimate relationships with many members of the government.
00:14:43.000You know, there's a revolving door there.
00:14:45.000So I... When people want to talk about limiting what we can say online or limiting disinformation and other things, I think that it's almost the wrong place to start.
00:14:58.000I think we have to go back to the privacy issues.
00:15:02.000And I actually think if we had not let privacy be eroded online, we wouldn't be having this debate.
00:15:08.000Because if these gigantic companies hadn't collected thousands of data points on us, didn't know our fears, our desires, if they hadn't built these psychometric profiles, they wouldn't have been able to manipulate us,
00:15:26.000use these algorithms to drive us into echo chambers, which have really created these disparate realities.
00:15:33.000And now these disparate realities can't agree necessarily on a set of facts.
00:15:38.000Sometimes you're considered, you know, sometimes people will be ostracized for even talking to somebody from the quote-unquote other side, right?
00:15:49.000And so now there's this conversation about what should be allowed to be said online.
00:15:53.000And I think that that's simply a byproduct of, you know, our privacy having been eroded.
00:16:00.000So, you know, if I was to do anything about these issues, I would start by restoring rights.
00:16:05.000I would go back and say, all right, well, how do we get ownership and privacy rights online when it comes to our personal data?
00:16:14.000Let's start there before we start, you know, going after the speech itself.
00:16:18.000Do you think that the algorithms are designed to do this or do you think that it's just a function of human nature that we tend to gravitate towards things that outrage us and then huddle up together in echo chambers?
00:16:35.000That this is just a natural tribal behavior and that what the algorithms do is essentially just highlight what we're really interested in.
00:16:46.000They magnify it in a feedback loop, right?
00:16:49.000So you're right to say that humans do have these traits.
00:16:54.000You know, and I haven't designed the algorithms, but I've also talked to people who have, and, you know, a lot of, they don't even understand how they work at a certain point.
00:17:15.000I mean, yeah, I made a film about eight years ago called Terms and Conditions May Apply.
00:17:20.000You know, and that came out right before the Edward Snowden revelations.
00:17:25.000You know, and when it came out, the initial response was like, oh, this is maybe conspiratorial.
00:17:30.000Surely the government doesn't have this much insight into our behavior and, you know, and access to our devices and our personal information.
00:17:42.000And then the Snowden revelations came out, and then it was like, oh, well, maybe the series didn't go far enough.
00:17:51.000And back then we had talked about the idea of how is technology influencing us?
00:17:57.000How is it changing us, manipulating us?
00:17:59.000And it didn't feel like that was the biggest story at the time.
00:18:03.000And this question of privacy and how our rights are being eroded through these agreements that nobody ever really reads.
00:18:10.000And you could find all kinds of juicy tidbits hidden in there in terms of what the companies were actually doing and kind of revealing this unholy collusion between the government and big tech.
00:18:23.000You know, but at the time people would often say, well, what's the cost?
00:18:29.000What's the big deal if they're mining my personal data to serve me with ads?
00:18:33.000And I'd say that the environment we find ourselves in now is the cost.
00:18:39.000Do you do anything to personally protect your data?
00:18:42.000Do you use DuckDuckGo for searches and things along those lines?
00:19:05.000I mean, if there's a zero day that allows you to get access to a microphone and everything that someone's doing on their phone without them even having to click on a link, it's game over.
00:19:17.000Of course governments will abuse that.
00:19:52.000If you're deluding yourself into believing that you're actually protected with that stuff or you actually are protected, I would think they could work around all those things, especially something that's, I mean, it's essentially like open source, right?
00:20:05.000Like if it's a Linux-based operating system, there's some super geniuses out there.
00:20:11.000I'm sure they're going to be able to hack into that.
00:20:15.000Yeah, I mean, I think with stuff like Signal, you're just protecting yourself as best you can.
00:20:20.000You use something that's end-to-end encrypted.
00:20:23.000You're doing better than 99% of people who are out there.
00:20:26.000You're making somebody really have to work to get access to your stuff.
00:20:30.000And if you're using a VPN and you're using DuckDuckGo, then you're minimizing your digital footprint.
00:20:35.000And you're not worth as much of these companies.
00:20:46.000What would you do about the algorithm problem?
00:20:49.000Because on the one hand, algorithms are necessary for something like a search engine.
00:20:54.000On the other hand, they drive the most sensational content, things like QAnon, and I think have largely facilitated the situation we find ourselves in now.
00:21:06.000It's a really interesting question because on one hand, for me, like when I go to my YouTube page, it highlights the things that I'm interested in.
00:21:14.000And when I go to YouTube, in general, I'm interested in entertainment.
00:22:20.000And you're going down this rabbit hole and then that becomes your fucking life.
00:22:23.000Like, one of the things that to me was so fascinating about your documentary series was seeing into the lives of these people that were utterly obsessed with these Q drops.
00:22:36.000And it becomes a thing that gives life meaning when, you know, for lack of better terms, a lot of those folks in that documentary are misfits.
00:22:49.000Like, a lot of the people are a little goofy.
00:22:54.000You know, the way they talk about things and think about things is a little goofy.
00:22:59.000And when QAnon came along, it gave them something to latch on to that was bigger than them.
00:23:29.000It's not necessarily that they're looking at the big picture objectively and they think that this politician is going to be better for their lives.
00:23:37.000They're going to highlight problems that we have with inequality or problems that we have with laws.
00:23:46.000But mostly they want their team to win.
00:23:49.000You know, there's a lot of that with a lot of people.
00:23:52.000They connect ideologically with a team, and then they get very tribal.
00:23:57.000And that was the thing that I saw in that documentary.
00:24:00.000I'm like, this is a pattern of human behavior.
00:24:03.000And the QAnon thing just locked into it because it was secretive, it was interesting, the idea that Trump had this insider, and this insider was like dropping all this information that it was all going down.
00:24:18.000In Trump, we had this guy that was going to clean up the swamp.
00:24:22.000He was going to find those people that were eating babies and all that.
00:24:27.000Yeah, and it was a narrative that contradicted what people were seeing in the mainstream media as well.
00:24:33.000And I think that a lot of those individuals who voted for Trump and also gravitated towards QAnon, They wanted to believe that there was this sort of secret story that was happening behind the scenes,
00:24:49.000you know, where all of these arrests were coming, where, you know, what they had hoped would happen would actually happen.
00:24:57.000And I think that, I mean, you hit a lot of the big points there.
00:25:01.000And that's why QAnon is sort of part religion, part political movement, part interactive game.
00:25:08.000And it draws in people from the UFO crowd.
00:25:11.000I mean, it's a big tent for all kind of...
00:25:17.000Conspiratorial fringe thinking or, you know, sort of strong religious convictions as well.
00:25:22.000I mean, you see a lot of people who are evangelicals who also believe in QAnon.
00:25:29.000So I think it's individuals who are looking for community as well, looking for purpose.
00:25:35.000I spent so much time with these guys, right?
00:25:38.000And I would get phone calls in the middle of the night where they just wanted to talk A lot of times because they just found me to be a grounding force in their lives.
00:25:49.000And so I would try to always take it when I could and just give them a more neutral perspective versus what they might be hearing, especially some of the QTubers.
00:26:02.000So some of the Qtubers, like, they were going down these paths, or these, you know, they were in these rabbit holes, and then they would call you and go, hey man, does this make any sense?
00:26:23.000I mean, you see in Episode 5 one of the craziest things in the series, which is that these ex-Mill guys, whether it's General Flynn or, in this case, General Paul Vallely or Major General.
00:26:40.000Anyway, he's using his ex-Mill guys to cede his political agenda with these QTubers.
00:26:50.000So what happens is they suddenly have someone who is claiming to have this super secret intel reaching out to them and saying, you know, Osama bin Laden's actually still alive.
00:27:01.000Would you like to talk about that on your Qtube station?
00:27:04.000And they're going, well, you know, and they're useful because someone like in the case of Craig and his site JustInformedTalk, I mean, he had like half a million or more followers.
00:27:40.000The only general that I spoke to, and he didn't end up making an appearance in the series, just because I wanted to keep the series focused primarily on the investigation into who was behind it, was General Hayden.
00:27:55.000The Kelly one is interesting because when he's standing outside in front of his house with his family, he's like, where we go one, we go all.
00:28:01.000And they're reading the whole speech, the QAnon speech.
00:28:24.000So what you saw was his family, you know, Joe Flynn, Barbara Redgate, I think was her name.
00:28:31.000Some of these characters who were in his orbit, family members who were kind of speaking on his behalf.
00:28:37.000Meanwhile, General Flynn was messaging QTubers behind the scenes, bolstering this.
00:28:44.000And he had like $5 million in legal bills or some crazy amount of money that he had to spend in his legal bills.
00:28:51.000So he needed all the support he could get.
00:28:54.000And I had talked to some individuals who had helped him in his fundraising efforts from nearly the beginning at one of these Q conventions.
00:29:03.000You know, and they said internally within the family there was debate as to whether or not QAnon was helpful or harmful.
00:29:12.000But ultimately they all gravitated towards it.
00:29:15.000So do you think he was using it just as a fundraising thing?
00:29:19.000Like he was attaching himself to that because he knew that they would support his legal defense?
00:29:26.000I mean, I do think that that's a part of it, right?
00:29:29.000You have an incredibly passionate base who are...
00:29:33.000Most of them believe that Flynn was Q, right?
00:29:38.000That was the predominant theory among QAnons.
00:29:41.000Because Flynn was so central to the Q narrative...
00:29:45.000You know, he was a good guy in that narrative who warranted their support and was kind of, you know, working against the cabal.
00:29:54.000So you ask most QAnons and Flynn would be very high on their list of suspects for who might be behind it.
00:30:01.000And it would not be until the last year in the approach to the election that Flynn would openly embrace it, doing what I think you were describing where he, you know, raises his hand with the statement on the Fourth of July and they all take the Q oath.
00:31:13.000I mean, imagine if there was like a general in Japan who had a big following in the States.
00:31:18.000They managed to do that through 4chan or 8chan or 8kun or whatever.
00:31:22.000Well, that was another aspect that I thought was odd is that how people in other countries like the guy from South Africa are so into American politics.
00:31:33.000It's hard to try to get their perspective.
00:31:37.000I would imagine that it's just very different being there and looking at us.
00:31:43.000I think America is such a bizarre anomaly.
00:31:45.000But America has so much influence on world policy that if you want to influence World policy, you influence America.
00:31:53.000But it's so, I mean, it is really unusual that we don't, we barely know who the fuck the Prime Minister of Canada is, you know, right?
00:32:03.000We know very little about Canadian politics.
00:33:13.000I mean, if he doesn't have access to some data points, if he doesn't have access to whatever it is, like the location or something, the ISP, the IP address, rather, what's his reasoning?
00:34:58.000Yeah, he's got a bigger reach at this point.
00:35:00.000So Jerome Corsi, who had been talking about Q-drops, sort of famed conspiracy theorists, largely responsible for the old Bertha movement thing around Obama, Swift Boat with John Kerry, he's been doing this political operative stuff for years.
00:35:16.000He brings it to Alex Jones, and Alex Jones brings these two guys on his show, late December.
00:35:24.000You know, Coleman Rogers would go on to start a 24-hour news channel devoted to Q. Paul Ferber, you know, was running the board that Q was posting on.
00:37:45.000And this is a way of anonymous or pseudo-anonymously kind of identifying yourself.
00:37:49.000So if I have the password, Q's password, eight character or so password, type it in, boop, boop, boop, it's going to produce a code.
00:37:56.000And that code will appear on every post that the password is entered for.
00:38:01.000So this is how people knew that Q was posting.
00:38:03.000And in fact, the first 127 posts didn't have a trip code.
00:38:07.000So there was no way to even know who Q was in the beginning, right?
00:38:12.000In fact, the Anons had to go back and review all the old posts just to see, like, okay, which ones were Q, which ones weren't.
00:38:20.000So, like, the first 127 drops, like, anybody could have been coming in, like, LARPing as Q, kind of jumping in, trying to write in this style.
00:38:28.000And the idea of The queue hadn't even been established yet.
00:38:52.000So anybody can post without having to log in.
00:38:55.000That's what makes the Chans really unique.
00:38:59.000There's also no algorithms on the Chans.
00:39:01.000But if you're using a VPN, which 4chan makes that very difficult, 8chan less so, If you go there and you wanted a shitpost and you don't want to have it traced back to you, you can do that.
00:39:17.000So that's why people, you know, it gives them this true sense of anonymity without having all of their posts be logged and associated with their IP. How does that establish a community, though?
00:39:27.000Because when people have, whether it's Twitter or whatever, people find people based on their screen names.
00:40:05.000They don't want to have, they don't want to give, they don't want to have, I guess, the power that's associated with identity.
00:40:12.000And that's part of why they were so annoyed when Coleman Rogers and Paul Ferber went on the Alex Jones show, because they were, you know, doing what Chan users would call fame fagging at that point.
00:40:24.000And that's a term they love to throw around on the Chans heavily.
00:44:03.000Yeah, but it's actually pretty easy to hack a trip code.
00:44:06.000You were with them for how long when you were doing this documentary series?
00:44:13.000I was with them, I mean, we were filming on and off for about three years.
00:44:17.000Over the course of that time like Ron's story evolves or Either he forgets what he told you initially or he forgets the way he was sort of describing Q and his idea of politics and what he feels about politics and towards the end He's saying essentially he's been educating normies on how to do politics and you're like hey What the fuck?
00:45:04.000So when we get to the end, we can go into all the reasons that Ron is Q. But if we're just talking about the early days, because I get a lot of people asking me, okay, well, who was the original Q? What you were describing, that style shift,
00:45:22.000A, that there was only one person writing at one point and then another person writing at the next.
00:45:27.000And B, it tells us when the shift might have happened.
00:45:30.000So, you know, that shift that's most detectable is somewhere between the jump from 4chan to 8chan and a little bit after when Paul loses control of the board and believes that Q has become fake.
00:46:21.000Well, after the series concluded, Ron messaged me.
00:46:29.000And that was the first time he had seen it.
00:46:31.000He was watching it alongside everybody else.
00:46:34.000And he messaged me and he said, Cullen, you know, I identify more with villains.
00:46:42.000He said something to the effect of, I learned a long time ago that you have to make internet personalities larger than life because it makes for a more entertaining existence.
00:46:54.000I'm not Q, but I may as well lean into it.
00:46:58.000So he has to continue to deny Q, being Q, I think, in his mind for whatever liability might come with that.
00:47:09.000It's like he comes as close to admitting it without getting rid of the plausible deniability.
00:47:20.000And I think he also assumes that all of our communications are being monitored.
00:47:29.000There's that moment where you're both laughing, where he's laughing, where he talks about that, that he's been doing this 10 years anonymously.
00:48:04.000I mean, that was after three years of this kind of cat and mouse thing.
00:48:09.000And he had always denied being really involved in the boards at all.
00:48:16.000You know, he would kind of pretend not to know certain things about Q. So this was a big shift for him.
00:48:24.000To come out and say, yeah, actually, like, I was leading digs on the boards, which is basically finding and sort of curating the research or evolving theories or, you know,
00:48:40.000and this is what happens on Poll, it's what happens on Q Research, is that they're going out and collecting whatever stuff they find on the internet and saying, okay, you know, Something about Huma Abdeen or something about, you know,
00:48:57.000You might just get this sort of lengthy list, and those are the digs.
00:49:00.000And then they keep getting kind of recycled.
00:49:02.000And so what Q would really do was just look at all of that research, you know, kind of pick the best, the most spicy stuff, ask a question about it or reference it in some way, shape, or form, and then it would make those who were on those sites We're good to go.
00:49:43.000It's like you could not be a deep government agent, some person who was in the White House, who had massive responsibilities, who was side by side with the president, and have the knowledge of that community.
00:52:18.000Yeah, I mean, she also didn't want to engage with that material.
00:52:25.000It's an uncomfortable place to be for a lot of people.
00:52:28.000So that's part of why in the series I wanted to say, well, look, in order to understand Q, you have to understand...
00:52:34.000The entire mentality of the world from which Q is born.
00:52:38.000And in fact, the person who is the architect, I believe, behind all of this, and I think we proved to be the architect behind all of this, is, you know, an edgelord of that space.
00:52:48.000It's the exact kind of person who would run that kind of campaign.
00:52:51.000And I don't think for a second, like, no one could sit back and be like, I'm going to create this massive global movement and be successful.
00:52:58.000It's just, this is the one that kind of stuck.
00:53:01.000I mean, there have been other LARPs in the past, you know, other people who've kind of come out and been these secret anons.
00:53:07.000I mean, before Q, there were a couple of other prototypes.
00:53:10.000I didn't mention this in the series, but, you know, there was like an FBI anon, a CIA anon, a Mega anon, and...
00:53:23.000Someone, in that case, it was supposed to be kind of like someone who had a good insight to Washington, D.C. politics and had good sources and was writing on the chans and was supposed to be female.
00:53:36.000And, yeah, this had happened kind of in the year running up to Q and tailed off at the beginning of 2018, this other kind of heightened anon.
00:53:48.000But you can go all the way back to the early 2000s with Art Bell and Coast to Coast.
00:53:53.000You know, there was somebody who pretended to be a time traveler from the future who was trying to prevent World War III, John Titor.
00:54:31.000There's what Ron would say, and then there's probably what the sort of truth is.
00:54:35.000We did some analytics of the traffic, you know, and it certainly went way up thanks to Q. Way more, way more users until Q had become the predominant reason that people were visiting 8chan and 8kun.
00:54:54.000So we're talking, it looked like over 2 million were actively engaging there during sort of the peak of Q. It might have been higher than that.
00:56:04.000But, you know, in 2019. And that was the third one that became the point that there was a lot of public outcry, largely led by Fred Brennan, their opposition.
00:56:19.000And I think the assumption was that people were being radicalized on 8chan, that they were, you know, being exposed to dangerous ideas and that this is what was leading them to these shootings.
00:56:32.000One of the things I tried to point out actually in this series was that that's kind of a misguided assumption.
00:56:40.000You know, I think that we can look specifically at the New Zealand shooter, right?
00:56:46.000Lots of headlines were saying that the New Zealand shooter had done so because they were radicalized on 8chan.
00:56:54.000But I think they'd visited the Baltics, they'd donated to white supremacist organizations, and they had, even in their own testimony, said that they'd been radicalized on YouTube, that it was like the YouTube algorithms that had drawn them to a lot of this material once upon a time,
00:58:24.000Very DIY little film, but it was back before people really knew what LARPing even was.
00:58:28.000You know, and I saw some parallels here.
00:58:31.000People who don't have a lot of, you know, sort of close friends in their lives and are looking for meaning and, I guess, kind of want to feel special.
00:58:46.000And I think what you see actually over the course of the series, and this is why we structured it this way, I mean, Q did really kind of start as a sort of interactive game that took on a life of its own.
00:58:57.000And it grew really rapidly until these, you can call Q a meme, until it memed itself into reality.
00:59:05.000Until someone like Ron Watkins was advising President Trump.
00:59:13.000Near the end of Q and near the end of his term.
01:00:57.000Well, all of this makes you wonder if he had a relationship before he migrated from, you know, Q shuts down, right, on election day, and then Ron starts actively really posting on Twitter.
01:01:09.000And the fact that he was able to build such a massive following and quickly start advising on election fraud issues makes you wonder if they had a connection with the administration in some way, shape, or form before that.
01:01:23.000You know, Ron would often say while I was filming with him that it was a marketing campaign.
01:01:26.000Some would describe it, which is kind of a glib way of putting it.
01:01:44.000And so I consider it a possibility, especially since HN was directing a high amount of traffic to Donald Trump's website in the first election cycle, that a relationship had formed somewhere along the way.
01:03:09.000But we do know that Jason Sullivan, who was Roger Stone's head of social media, was using his algorithm hijacking tools on Twitter to amplify Ron.
01:03:20.000And he was hoping to get a hold of Q. You know, it is possible that there was something along those lines was happening behind the scenes there.
01:03:30.000It may just be the case that Ron was able to leverage his position and those relationships over time because he was telling them what they wanted to hear.
01:03:41.000You know, his lawyers, everybody was saying, like, what are we going to do about this?
01:03:59.000When I saw Ron appearing on OAN with his black hat on, you know, that he bought when I was filming, a big black cowboy hat, and suddenly he was the election expert.
01:04:14.000And suddenly he was advising these guys.
01:04:31.000And mind you, when I spoke with him after he had been on the air with Chanel Rion on OAN, he's like, well, Q actually did a drop while I was on OAN, so I can't be Q. It's like, you know, the more he tried to make it seem like he wasn't Q,
01:04:49.000the more he made himself seem like he wasn't.
01:04:51.000He had gone through that massive, massive effort to make it seem like Bannon was Q, right?
01:05:52.000And he's saying that what he's using is IP addresses, and that he's isolating it to a very specific location that is very near where Bannon's house is, right?
01:06:05.000Yeah, so the very first time I met Ron, we shot an interview in the Philippines.
01:06:11.000You know, I had gone there saying, you know, primarily it's gonna...
01:06:15.000I'm interested in looking at free speech through the lens of Q. That's what I, you know, that was sort of the pretense.
01:06:21.000And at the end of my interview with him, he pulls me aside and he says, you know, no one's really been looking at this, but I think Bannon is Q. Very first time.
01:07:35.000And I, you know, I've got my absurd amount of research, you know, I've got Infinity Board, thousands of assets, I've got timelines of all the possible suspects for Q at this point.
01:07:44.000You know, and Bannon was a prime suspect, just based, just sheerly on kind of the circumstances around him, like his character, you know, he knows the chance, he knows that world.
01:07:57.000He knows how to co-opt it for political gain.
01:08:01.000So, You know, he makes for a possible suspect.
01:08:04.000Well, yeah, I've been considering Bannon.
01:08:06.000Now, why would Ron, the very first, you know, first off, like, trolling journalists, and I don't consider myself a journalist, but trolling journalists is, like, the gold standard for trolls on the trans.
01:08:16.000Like, that's, if you can get them to publish something fake, that's their dream, right?
01:08:20.000So, like, I'm just thinking, okay, well, why is he telling me Bannon the very first time I meet him?
01:09:40.000But I have many, many more data points like that.
01:09:42.000And in fact, actually, Ron, after watching the series and he saw that scene, I was going to get around to this after the whole ban a bit, but he ended up throwing his own right-hand man under the bus.
01:09:52.000He's like, well, I had this guy with me that day.
01:09:53.000He must have been taking notes, and maybe he's Q. That's how it must have.
01:09:57.000That's the only way that could have happened.
01:11:34.000So Q could always use the static IP to fall back on as a verification method.
01:11:41.000And this is what Paul was complaining about.
01:11:43.000He's like, okay, well, suddenly Q is using this new IP. Now, interestingly, Ron's right-hand man during one of these other interviews is like, let me show you.
01:11:52.000Ron was actually messaging me all the way back in early January of 2018 that he thinks it's Steve Bannon.
01:11:58.000So, and then actually, when this takeover, I think, took place, when Paul Ferber, the previous board owner of Q, says that it's a fake Q, some of the first things that get posted are in relationship to Steve Bannon.
01:12:18.000So it really looks like right from that moment, someone, most likely Ron, was laying the pipe to create a forensics data set that pointed to Steve Bannon.
01:12:32.000And I think he was rather disappointed that nobody had picked up on it.
01:12:40.000We even staged a whole thing where we sent someone out with cameras in front of Avenatti's office, shared that stuff, who lives like 20 minutes or so away from where Steve Bannon's house was.
01:12:53.000You know, staged this whole thing so that there was a forensic trail that wasn't pointing in their direction.
01:12:57.000And that's why it confused the hell out of me.
01:12:59.000I was like, you know, all this data would be such a pain in the ass to fake.
01:13:03.000Well, it wasn't that the data was fake.
01:13:05.000It was that the data was designed to look like a certain thing because, of course, Ron would know how to do that.
01:13:11.000And I'm sure he was just like, ah, he wanted better competition.
01:13:14.000He wanted somebody to see how smart he was.
01:13:16.000How much time did you spend thinking about this?
01:13:22.000I spent the last few months just trying to, like, urge my brain.
01:13:26.000Damn it, now I'm going on Joe Rogan's show.
01:13:29.000I'm going to have to, like, re-upload it all.
01:13:32.000So what I wanted to get to before is when the initial cue drops and when all this stuff starts happening, how does it leak and become a mainstream thing?
01:13:48.000Is there a specific moment or is it just a slow sort of recognition by people who are conspiratorially minded that there's this gentleman or person or whatever that's posting pretending to be this Trump insider?
01:15:04.000It was fairly contained up until, like, late December of 2017, when these characters, Tracy Beans, Paul Ferber, and Coleman Rogers, and I believe it was Tracy's idea, say, let's start a board on Reddit that's devoted to QAnon.
01:15:21.000That's gonna reach, you know, a much wider audience.
01:16:07.000I talked with all of the board owners for Q. So everybody who had ever been in charge of the craziest thing on the internet that's QAnon, right?
01:16:21.000I asked them all, like, okay, well, did Q ever communicate with you, right?
01:16:25.000Did Q ever, you know, send you messages?
01:16:28.000And they said, well, not, like, direct messages.
01:16:31.000But Q, because of that IP address, would sometimes post anonymously, openly on the boards, so that only the board owner or the moderators would know it was Q. So it was a way of communicating with those who were running the boards without the entire public knowing it.
01:16:50.000And so they would be able to just go, okay, same IP, bring it up.
01:16:55.000And Q didn't do this very often, very, very rarely.
01:17:00.000But one of the board owners was like, there's a really unbelievable moment.
01:17:04.000My jaw just dropped that Q was saying this stuff.
01:17:08.000And I was on this call with a couple of other folks who were big into Q at the time, I think.
01:17:17.000Anyway, they were all like, wait, what is it?
01:18:08.000So then you see that little F-C-F-E-3-I. So if you scroll up and you can see a Q drop, that one right there, it has the same ID next to it, the F-C-F. And that's because it's like a hash representation of the IP address.
01:18:26.000So you know that Q, even though they didn't use the trip code, was also posting these anonymous drops.
01:18:33.000And we didn't include this in the series, but this is kind of wild that Q was actually making posts that those who were running the boards could actually see.
01:18:48.000So you have this one here, R equals 18. Why is that interesting?
01:18:51.000Why is that unusual that he's making...
01:18:53.000Well, because he's secretly communicating with the board owners and moderators and only they'd be able to see it.
01:20:29.000Whoever, you know, which was likely Ron at this point, writing this.
01:20:33.000Which seems like, yeah, this is not like, why the fuck would a government insider give a shit who's becoming famous from distributing what's supposed to be real information, right?
01:21:09.000I mean, there were, I think, 15 or 20, you know, who were, like, the predominant ones, you know, and maybe, like, 10 really big ones, big accounts.
01:21:21.000We follow a couple of them in the series.
01:21:47.000And then you have someone like Jordan Sather who comes from the David Wilcock UFO New Age crowd.
01:21:57.000Like the reptile people, lizard people or whatever, blue avians, that's his baby.
01:22:03.0005G. So, yeah, so you could, and so for them, it was like, okay, well, here's a whole new audience that maybe we can tap into.
01:22:13.000And as Q became this umbrella for all beliefs, all conspiracies, all every, you know, the big tent, it was very useful for, say, someone like Wilcock or Jordan Sather to be like, okay, well, let's inject our worldview into the broader narrative.
01:22:29.000And I think that's one of the most interesting things about Q is that, you know, Q didn't have complete control, right?
01:22:42.000And the idea that lizard people or blue avians got introduced to a subset of that, you know, subset of that ecosystem isn't something that was introduced by Q itself.
01:22:53.000It was just something that others who glommed on to it introduced.
01:24:01.000It seems like it because the shift from 8chan, when 8chan was taken down, and then they come back as 8kun, and then Q starts posting before anybody can post.
01:24:58.000I mean, there were lots of little clues I wasn't able to include as well.
01:25:01.000I went through and analyzed reflections in some of the photos that showed how Q was holding the phone when they were taking pictures, and it was left-handed.
01:25:14.000I wrote about this on Twitter, and then Ron messaged me.
01:29:25.000I mean, you know, he just made things more costly.
01:29:33.000And Tom, I guess, said that Jim is somebody who, when he gets money, he kind of spends it.
01:29:37.000So sometimes he has a lot and sometimes he doesn't have very much.
01:29:42.000Fred would say that that's all bullshit and that Jim is actually super wealthy and it's all just a character he's playing.
01:29:49.000Because they have Five Channel in Japan, which is an incredibly popular Chan.
01:29:53.000That's, I think, where the majority of their income stream comes from.
01:29:56.000And you see some of that Chan drama play out where, you know, he had this split with his old business partner, Hiroyuki, he's super famous in Japan.
01:30:04.000Might also explain why there's the whole Q-Japan Flynn thing we were talking about earlier, because they have headquarters there, so if they're gonna get Q-ed to be popular anywhere, it's gonna probably be in Japan.
01:30:14.000You know, and Chan culture is also much bigger in Japan, I guess, in part because if I was to guess or I've sort of heard that when you're in an environment where you feel like you're socially not as free, you need more outlets and the Chan serve as that outlet.
01:30:33.000And the chans in Japan, are they Japanese characters?
01:31:17.000That end sequence where I sort of confront him on, you know, why I think he might be Q, and he kind of comes out with it.
01:31:30.000Initially, we were supposed to meet again to film, and I wanted to kind of confront him on sort of the list of reasons I thought he was Q. And he wanted to do it on an ice wall.
01:34:03.000Did they think that they were smarter than you?
01:34:05.000They were going to be able to, like, keep shucking and jiving to the very end, and at the end of it, you would think it was Steve Bannon or whoever?
01:34:12.000I mean, in the beginning, I had first reached out to Fred, and I didn't know that their relationship was dissolving, that the tension was growing between Fred and Jim and Ron.
01:34:25.000You know, and I was genuinely interested in the free speech side of what HM was doing.
01:34:33.000And I didn't think that they were behind Q when I went there.
01:34:39.000I just went to talk to them also in part because if anybody knew who was behind Q, it would be those with the technical data.
01:34:47.000Everything else is just, you know, can be noise.
01:34:52.000You can sort of see what you want in the writing.
01:34:57.000But the data itself was sort of the most valuable.
01:35:00.000Of course, after I left, you know, I was like, God, these guys are suspicious.
01:36:17.000I definitely know the type, though Ron just takes things to the extreme more than anyone I've ever met.
01:36:24.000We've discovered when we were going to Reno that we had both been in the Music Man and both been in the Barbershop Quartet and both still remembered the music to it.
01:36:33.000But Ron has this idea that we're all, you know, the old Shakespeare thing, we're all just actors on stage.
01:36:41.000But then the question is, what part do you want to play if that's true?
01:36:47.000And, you know, he seems to like that villain role.
01:36:57.000And I think that the glasses are just a character.
01:37:00.000I mean, the watch, he was covering up his watches, his fancy, fancy watches.
01:37:05.000And when he stopped covering it up is when we were in Reno filming, and then he, like, kind of rolled it up to show me that he was now wearing a Casio watch.
01:37:13.000And I went back and looked through all the footage and said, like, okay, like...
01:46:49.000Part of me with all this kind of QAnon stuff is like, and many things online, and it gets into this conversation of censorship and whether or not censorship is necessary or whether it's evil, whatever.
01:47:04.000The thing about it is, all these things, is it's not...
01:47:08.000It doesn't work on that doesn't work on me in terms of like I like the Q drops all stuff I'm not I never got interested right so I never I never got invested in it I never I mean I got invested but in the way that I wanted to figure out who is behind you make a documentary different flavor of obsession but so it's like But I mean,
01:47:29.000If you look at what he's done in recent...
01:47:32.000I mean, look, I think you can find likable things about anybody.
01:47:37.000And I think that if you look at what Ron's been doing since Q sort of stopped and what he's been up to on Telegram...
01:47:48.000I mean, he's been running these same kind of hype trains to get people really excited that something is going to happen and that it doesn't.
01:47:54.000I think the most insane one, though, that has happened in recent times, he got this woman who was working in an election office in Colorado.
01:49:35.000What happened is Ron essentially doxxed her when he released the information, even though he said that he was scrubbing everything.
01:49:44.000He released some passwords that got traced back to her, and now she's entangled in a big legal suit.
01:49:50.000But essentially she ended up doing the thing that she had claimed the other side was doing.
01:49:56.000You know, she revealed she somehow got access to the password that the Secretary of State, I think, you know, was supposed to be the only—the government was only supposed to be the ones who had access to this.
01:51:20.000It's releasing a lot of ideological or conceptual viruses into people's minds and getting to believe that all these arrests were going to happen that never happened.
01:51:30.000Educate me on Telegram, because I know very, very little about it.
01:52:50.000And so Ron has actually managed to accrue I think he's over 430,000 followers at this point on Telegram, where he can post something and share it and then people can just comment in the aftermath.
01:53:01.000And there is a kind of retweet functionality in the form of forwarding messages, but it doesn't have the same kind of amplification tools built into it.
01:53:42.000Yeah, I mean, that's how I'd use it initially.
01:53:44.000And then I was surprised to hear, oh, wait, people were, they create, it had been sort of retooled to be, you know, to follow, but to create sort of big followings on there.
01:53:53.000And how does someone become aware of it?
01:53:55.000Is it just word of mouth in terms of, like, following people and...
01:54:14.000I'm not the foremost expert on Telegram, so I may not know exactly what its origin was, but I do remember that initially I was using it primarily as an encrypted messaging tool.
01:54:24.000And then pretty quickly, several years ago, You know, crypto groups, other things we're using that as a, you know, means for communicating with a large audience.
01:54:36.000So it's not essentially designed as like a Twitter replacement, but it's being morphed into something along those lines.
01:54:43.000It's being utilized in a similar, but I think, better way for society.
01:54:49.000I think the fact that he doesn't have algorithms makes it a, and the fact that it's encrypted, And that the company itself isn't mining your data, and that's not the...
01:54:57.000I don't know what their business model is, but maybe they don't know yet.
01:55:21.000I mean, once they went public and then kind of figured out how to use the conversations that were happening, have people pay for, you know, to get stuff trending and have ads served.
01:57:06.000So Section 230 is part of the Communication Indecency Act that many people in the digital rights space would say it sort of created the Internet.
01:57:18.000In some ways, it is the First Amendment of the Internet in that it allows companies to...
01:57:26.000To foster speech on their platforms in line with the First Amendment or not.
01:57:32.000It can either be as permissive as you want it to be or you can moderate as much as you want.
01:57:37.000In fact, there was a court case early on that is what led to this.
01:57:43.000Where, you know, I think this prodigy was being sued for something that someone had posted on their site.
01:57:48.000And then they started moderating, you know, moderating.
01:57:51.000And this is when they determined that actually, you know, you can moderate but not be responsible for the content that's being published there.
01:58:41.000But if we got rid of Section 230, which I've heard people say, well, if I can't say whatever I want on Twitter, let's get rid of Section 230. It's like, well, do you think that these companies are going to be more or less permissive if they're liable for every single thing that's there?
01:58:58.000And really what's going to happen, what some of these bigger companies are going to drive towards is using AI moderation that only they can afford.
01:59:06.000And when something goes wrong, they're just going to blaze, you know, say bad AI, right?
01:59:10.000And then meanwhile, you know, competitions, smaller companies that can't afford that moderation will simply be edged out.
01:59:17.000So, if Twitter was somehow liable for everything that was on the site, they would probably integrate a lot of this AI moderation tools.
01:59:53.000When they become the arbiters of truth and are the primary place that many people are getting their information from, where news is being created, I think we do have to ask the question, well, what...
02:00:09.000Should there be rules in place that require them to treat content more neutrally, or do we want them to operate as autonomous businesses, even at that scale, that can dictate what people see and what they don't?
02:00:24.000We've just never seen anything in our lives where, you know, hundreds of millions of people were using the same thing, and there was an entity that could determine what should be allowed.
02:00:36.000And you could make the public square argument around that as well and say, like, so many people are using it that this has become a kind of digital public square.
02:00:45.000But as the law currently stands, you know, it's a private company.
02:00:52.000Especially because you're so deeply invested in this Q phenomenon, and we see how that went.
02:00:59.000I mean, if you ever really wanted to suppress free speech, what you would do is engineer something like Q, and then have it reach this boiling point, which is January 6th, where you have an arguable point If you wanted to say,
02:01:17.000this is what we want to avoid, and this is why we need at least some form of censorship.
02:01:23.000I mean, I think that, and this is what drew me to the story in the beginning, Q is testing the limits of free speech.
02:01:29.000And that's kind of how you know whether or not you have a right, whether or not you can have dangerous ideas, whether or not you can say unpopular things.
02:01:38.000And that's why I was drawn to Q in the first place, because Reddit had banned it, and that seemed novel at the time.
02:01:43.000And it seemed like maybe, well, is this where the internet is headed?
02:01:46.000So you saw that and that's what led you to start investigating and setting up this documentary series?
02:01:54.000Yeah, yeah, because I had a background covering digital privacy.
02:01:57.000Did you bring this to HBO and say, hey, look at this.
02:02:25.000But there was no guarantees that that was going to happen.
02:02:27.000Also, there's no guarantees you're going to have an ending, like January 6th.
02:02:31.000I'm not saying that you were rooting for something crazy like that to happen, but boy, did that pay off.
02:02:37.000I mean, it's almost like you have to predict where things are headed in order to tell a story like this.
02:02:45.000I mean, we had put together that whole opening sequence that takes place in D.C. before January 6th.
02:02:52.000I mean, the ideation for that had started in November.
02:02:55.000It gave it a whole new meaning, of course, when you see these kind of...
02:02:58.000All of these beliefs and conspiracy theories, or whatever you want to say, kind of overtaking DC. And you see the kind of characters memeing themselves into existence in that opening.
02:03:11.000But would this series have been substantially different if that hadn't happened?
02:04:16.000I hadn't even seen all of the news reports.
02:04:19.000I hadn't seen what everybody else had been seeing because we were on the ground.
02:04:23.000So it wasn't until I started looking at all of the footage and all of the archival from other sources that you're like, holy shit, this is what was going on inside?
02:04:58.000Meanwhile, most other folks who, if you weren't tracking all of these movements, I think that they were absolutely, their minds were blown that this could even happen.
02:05:15.000I had no idea that anything was boiling below the surface, but you apparently, you thought that it was going to be way worse than what it was.
02:06:25.000And if you listen to his words in the speech that day, you know, he's, he's, them's fighting words.
02:06:31.000You know, we're going to go to the, we're going to go there and we're going to take it, take it back.
02:06:35.000And so there were a lot of different forces who were pushing that day for something to happen and, you know, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
02:06:46.000You know, Ron was saying Trump needs to cross the Rubicon.
02:06:49.000Like, there was this idea that he needed to—that the only way that they could keep democracy was to overthrow the— Take, you know, take things over.
02:07:04.000Here it says, this is Trump's Twitter.
02:07:06.000It says, Peter Navarro released a 36-page report alleging election fraud more than sufficient to swing victory to Trump.
02:07:52.000So he thought at the end, I mean, he thought essentially that getting these people to protest and that this 36-page report, that there would be enough data and that eventually someone somewhere would reverse the decision and prove that there was enough election fraud to reinstate him.
02:08:19.000I mean, that day they were certifying the vote.
02:08:23.000So animosity had been directed towards Pence, who I believe they incorrectly assumed if he didn't certify the vote that it would...
02:08:33.000Or that he could somehow usurp authority in that case.
02:08:40.000Yeah, they were calling him a traitor.
02:08:42.000And Ron stoked the flames of that, of course.
02:08:44.000They released something that night that made it seem like Pence was trying to run a coup against Trump.
02:08:50.000To agitate people as much as possible.
02:08:56.000So they tried to release these documents that You see it in the end of the series where, you know, you're saying the mother of all bombs is coming when it comes to, you know, an information drop.
02:09:09.000And that information drop was specifically targeting Pence.
02:09:12.000And there was so much anger towards Pence.
02:10:11.000Like, he's gotten to the seat of power somehow using that website and Q and his sort of fame that was developed through Q. I mean, remember, Q mentions Ron, Code Monkey, very early on in the narrative.
02:10:26.000So Q, right at that hijacking point early in January, he's like, Ron, Code Monkey.
02:11:42.000So, yeah, I mean, very fascinating character studies, to be sure.
02:11:50.000I mean, so much of human history, though, is written by people with, I think, not identical tendencies, but people who are driven for power and are willing to do things that others aren't.
02:12:04.000Do you think you could ever get Paul to admit that he was the original cue?
02:12:13.000Because if you could, if he admitted it, that would really pull the floor out of the whole thing, wouldn't it?
02:12:24.000I mean, I think that the fact that the first 127 drops were anonymous in the first place, that, you know, there's all these shakeups, there's a style change.
02:12:33.000Like, I think that, I think there's lots of, the fact that the vast, vast, vast majority of things that Q prophesized or that people believed didn't come true, all the central tenets, you know, the arrests and all that, you would think that that would be enough.
02:12:47.000If you could get Paul to come out and say, yeah, I was it.
02:12:50.000I mean, people would only even believe that if he came with the data.
02:12:53.000And even then, many still would be like, man, it's the deep state.
02:14:45.000Because they can't, it's not like a Reddit user where you could ban the user because they posted illegal content.
02:14:52.000And you can ban an IP, but if they're using a VPN, which someone who's doing something illegal like that probably would be using a VPN, unless they're real dumb.
02:15:00.000You know, it makes it very hard to track.
02:15:03.000Now 8chan does respond to government requests for illegal activity like that.
02:15:47.000He bans all discussion of Gamergate, bans talk around it, creates a lot of animosity in those communities, and they're looking for a new home.
02:15:54.000And the new home that they go to is 8chan.
02:15:58.000So suddenly Fred has a huge influx of users.
02:16:57.000Fred would, I think, say that he started to depart philosophically, that maybe they made him kind of uncomfortable in certain situations, like that they weren't taking his safety seriously, things like that.
02:17:13.000But he also found a wife in the Philippines.
02:17:17.000And his wife was, her dad was like a priest and he has since described it as a, and people who I was shooting with there would describe that religion kind of as a cult.
02:17:28.000So he was newly religious and 8chan also doesn't jive super well with that philosophy.
02:17:35.000You know, maybe, probably he believed in a lot of that stuff.
02:17:40.000I think Fred is impressionable and he's also going through life faster than the average person because he doesn't think he's going to live that long.
02:18:05.000Maybe he's going to stop working on it.
02:18:06.000And that's when Jim, who had given him a place to stay in the Philippines free of rent, but that Jim owned, just barged into his apartment and was like, why aren't you at work?
02:18:20.000And Fred's account is that it was very traumatizing for him.
02:18:26.000And he knew he needed to get out of that situation immediately.
02:18:30.000So I'm sure that there was a confluence of factors that led to them kind of pulling apart.
02:18:36.000And also Fred was young when he created 8chan.
02:18:38.000You know, he was like 18. So we're talking about somebody who's still growing up.
02:18:52.000You know, and Fred is a very eccentric character and he likes to lean into that eccentricity as much as possible.
02:18:59.000And who Fred is online is very different than who Fred is in real life.
02:19:04.000And I mean, both he and Tom, like Tom, who you see, who's Jim Watkins, kind of right hand man, artist in college.
02:19:11.000I think that Jim was hoping that Fred was going to have a similar relationship to him, that he would take him under his wing while he was like, you know, 19 or 20 or whatever, and that he would just continue to be a part of their organization going into later years.
02:19:26.000And, you know, and Tom, I didn't mention this in the series, but he's a psychonaut.
02:22:14.000No, they can't extradite him for a cyber libel charge.
02:22:17.000And that was one of the craziest things to me in all of this.
02:22:20.000It's like, here you're running an absolutist free speech website, taking it right to the edge, but you're going to go after somebody for something they said on Twitter.
02:22:37.000Right, because the way it works in the Philippines is that it becomes like a criminal suit, so the state takes it over if they determine that there's a case.
02:22:49.000So when Fred was leaving the Philippines, he got advance notice that an indictment was going to drop.
02:23:39.000Out of all this, all the time that you spent working on this, When you're alone with your thoughts, I think that this subject highlights some very important questions and important conversations about free speech and about what roles,
02:24:01.000if any, these platforms, whether it's 8chan or Twitter or what have you, have in protecting free speech or censoring Questionable behavior and I mean obviously this did not end well,
02:24:17.000you know, I mean in Whether or not 8chan is responsible for some of it or whether the Q Movement is responsible for some of it or what percentage of it is it's clear that this becomes It becomes a vector For a lot of very questionable ideas and questionable behavior.
02:27:21.000And now I'm operating out of a lot of experience and I'm operating out of, you know, an understanding of how all this shit works in terms of like propaganda and nonsense and shitposting and a lot of these things.
02:27:38.000So, should we protect people from things that wouldn't work on you?
02:27:43.000Like, I'm sure QAnon's not working on you, right?
02:27:45.000You have a much more sophisticated understanding of how the internet works.
02:28:18.000That's exactly what your series does, right?
02:28:20.000And at the end of it, it looks preposterous, and it's not gonna like, if a cue drops tomorrow, people are gonna be like, bitch, I saw that series, right?
02:28:28.000So this is the argument for free speech.
02:28:32.000Because imagine if in a world where you are, like what you were saying earlier, that if it wasn't for HBO and their balls, and their, you know, their bravery.
02:28:44.000I mean, HBO's like, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
02:29:27.000I would hope that a lot of the people, like that one family, the guy with the big neck and his little kid, I would hope they would watch this series and go, Jesus, we got duped.
02:31:11.000But the point is, it's like, through free speech, and through your ability to accurately disseminate information, you've Produced a really amazing and entertaining thing that gives people an insight into the psychology Behind the folks that believed in this the psychology behind the folks who are likely perpetrating it It's an argument for free speech,
02:31:37.000but it's it's also shows how fucking difficult it is to really parse this out Yeah, yeah, I mean I Look, conspiracy theories or painting your enemies in a black and white heaven or hell all in other terms,
02:31:58.000that's something that humans have done forever.
02:32:00.000I mean, even during the Revolutionary War, there were a lot of theories going around.
02:32:11.000And I'm sure that 15-year-olds and 20-somethings were impressionable, and it motivated them in those situations.
02:32:21.000And I do think that the international component does add another element to this that's a little bit different.
02:32:27.000But that's why I always bring it back to the privacy side.
02:32:32.000I'd say before we worry about deciding what should or should not be said online, let's restore privacy rights.
02:32:40.000Let's give people ownership over their data.
02:32:43.000Let's make it so that these companies can't know more about us than we know about ourselves and see what impact that has first.
02:32:50.000It does seem like that is where everything got really crazy because your data became a commodity that you didn't know you had.
02:33:01.000Like, you didn't know it was valuable.
02:33:03.000So when you signed off on the terms and conditions and you just started posting things and you allowed these companies to track all of your information and all your stuff that you do online, you didn't realize that you were creating these enormous companies With massive amounts of resource that just collect data.
02:33:55.000Of data harvesting, to psychometric profiles, to those psychometric profiles being used to target us with information that, you know, that is tailored to our insecurities and desires.
02:34:08.000It drives us into more extreme groups.
02:34:11.000And then when we move in those more extreme directions, we're less willing to entertain an imposing reality.
02:34:16.000And then when we're less willing to entertain an opposing reality, we become less willing to hear things from another side because we only believe in our one truth.
02:34:24.000And then we become more interested in silencing whatever that one truth is.
02:34:29.000As they say, the hostility of suppression speeds up the treadmill of extremism.
02:34:33.000The more you shut someone up, the angrier they become.
02:34:35.000The more it validates the very thing that they were trying to stop in the first place.
02:34:39.000And then you end up with a cultural climate or a social climate where something like January 6th is possible.
02:34:47.000So, you know, I don't think it's the only reason, but I think that the data mining was a huge factor and the data mining in concert with the algorithms because those algorithms, of course, use what was reaped from that data mining.
02:35:03.000In order to drive people towards the crazy shit on the internet.
02:35:07.000You know, Q wouldn't have been possible without the algorithms.
02:35:15.000So algorithms essentially are There's a problem in the inherent manipulation of people's viewing habits and they're doing it to accentuate their profits and they're doing it to accentuate the amount of time that you spend online.
02:35:39.000And to feed us with whatever is most sensational.
02:36:06.000It learns very quickly and then it reinforces those assumptions.
02:36:09.000Right, but it's human nature is the problem, right?
02:36:13.000It's what people are actually interested in is the problem.
02:36:16.000So algorithms, they take advantage of our human nature, which is our human nature is to find these echo chambers, is to find confirmation bias.
02:36:53.000You know, this is the flagship Supreme Court case that actually Barr, who is Jim Watkins' attorney in DC, he was a part of that case, bringing it to the Supreme Court, which basically said that you could We're good to
02:38:17.000And it gives incredible power to those who run that black box.
02:38:22.000Do you think it's at all possible that algorithms could be exposed in a way where people, where the narrative shifts and we realize that algorithms are actually problematic?
02:38:36.000And that it has done irrevocable damage.
02:38:41.000And it's moved our society in this way, as highlighted in The Social Dilemma, as highlighted in that where you're realizing that the ultimate path for this sort of separation is And this reinforcement of tribalism,
02:39:02.000it really leads to conflict, almost undeniable.
02:39:08.000That we could do something where we could recognize that first of all, these corporations only exist because we didn't realize that data is a commodity.
02:39:17.000Once we do realize that data is a commodity, people are giving up that data Almost against their understanding.
02:39:24.000They don't really understand what they're doing until it's too late.
02:39:29.000There's like this gigantic three card money game going on with your data.
02:39:33.000And then you have the algorithm problem and we're recognizing that this is essentially being manipulated.
02:39:41.000It's being manipulated by foreign entities like the IRA. It's being manipulated by who knows how many other countries that have similar programs installed.
02:40:05.000And the more hostile, the more, you know, the more it satisfies the audience, the more it, the person who's posting is trained by that.
02:40:14.000They're trained to go, okay, this is the thing that people want.
02:40:18.000So it does drive that tribalism and then it also makes people very sure of whatever that worldview might be because they can feel that there's a lot of people who like the same thing that they do.
02:40:28.000I mean, I know with absolute certainty that the QTubers were reinforced in the same way because they told me that they were.
02:40:50.000And he was trained over time to say things around QAnon that would drive more eyeballs.
02:40:56.000But at the same time, that became his livelihood.
02:41:00.000And in the end, after this series came out, he had said at one point, I still have all these people who follow me who want to believe that it's all going to come true.
02:42:12.000And the real problem with banning people, it's like, Oh, one of the craziest things, though, that Craig told me, you know, it was in that hot tub scene in the end after he'd just been banned on YouTube.
02:42:25.000You know, and you could see that that was coming right up towards the election, that things were going to crescendo in that direction.
02:42:35.000He admitted something to me, which is just that he knew all along that it was the idea that this is a military operation or that Trump was behind him.
02:42:43.000He's like, that was a bunch of, you know, that was a bunch of bullshit.
02:42:48.000You know, in the beginning, he's like, we're just kidding ourselves.
02:42:52.000It's just a bunch of a-holes LARPing on 8chan and then suddenly, or 4chan, and then suddenly, you know, in his mind, the military got him.
02:42:58.000Because he had these guys, these ex-military guys reaching out to him and sort of using him as a conduit for their agenda.
02:43:07.000And so there's that crazy aspect of this too.
02:43:13.000But it is fascinating to me that he openly admits that it started as a LARP. But it memed itself into reality.
02:43:24.000And that's what you see come January 6th as this thing that was casting this imaginary view of the world was trying to make itself real.
02:43:33.000And in many ways, it didn't actualize all of the beliefs, but some of the central ideas of it If we assume that Ron is Q, well, Ron eventually managed to get access to the seat of the Capitol.
02:43:47.000If you want to say that the storm is coming, well, a storm eventually came.
02:45:09.000So, if it is in fact the goal to de-escalate things or to make the polarization in society go away, this strategy historically and at present,
02:45:27.000I mean, there's lots of historical examples of how this doesn't work.
02:45:32.000And why censorship ends up having the opposite of its intended effect.
02:45:37.000And I think we're watching that in real time.
02:45:40.000But all of these people who are being banned, censored, they disappear.
02:45:45.000Just because you don't see them on Twitter, they're mad.
02:45:51.000And they'll find other platforms, but I think you have to let it work itself out.
02:45:57.000And if you're going to tinker with something, tinker with the business model.
02:46:02.000But these companies are never going to offer that as a solution.
02:47:13.000I had production assistants who were working with me there who were totally red-pilled on cue-related stuff that they had experienced on YouTube.
02:47:23.000So if the polarization continues, it is not just in America.
02:47:29.000You know, it is happening ideologically on a global scale.
02:47:33.000And so it wouldn't be nation versus nation.
02:47:36.000It would be, you know, these patchworks of ideologies where people have very disparate views of reality.
02:47:45.000And that's why I'm such an advocate for, you know, folks talking to people that they've sort of stopped listening to.
02:47:59.000People who have Q friends or family or if you believe in Q, like reaching out to family members again, that's going to be a necessary step.
02:48:08.000But until we fix the privacy problem, I don't see any of this going away.