Interview with Travis View: QANon & Modern Conspiracies
If you have managed to avoid the phenomenon of QAnon up until now, then congratulations! Your life is likely better for not knowing. Sadly many of us have been forced not only to learn about the 'enigmatic'(/idiotic) Q and his merry band of followers but also to witness the consequences of the movement during events like January 6th.Travis View (the pen name of Logan Strain) is part of the motley crew of the hugely popular QAnon Anonymous podcast that attempts to document the phenomenon of QAnon. From undercover investigations to creative writing, the QAnon Anonymous team (including previous guest Annie Kelly) have approached the topic with a creative and anthropological approach.We sit down with Travis and ask him to provide us with the 101 on QAnon before we delve into some of the more arcane topics, including cultish splinter groups, the psychology of QAnon adherents, just how much of a threat he thinks the movement poses, and how does he stay sane while looking at depressing craziness week in and week out.Travis is a wealth of information and a groovy guy to boot. The kind of person you would want to have your back in a Zombie apocalypse. So kick back and enjoy hearing about the crumbling of contemporary society.LinksTravis's Instagram account: Great nature photos!QAnon Anonymous PodcastWisdom Signalling & the Wisdom of Criticism w/ John Veraveke, Chris M, Chris Kavanagh, & Matt Browne
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where a psychologist and an anthropologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
With me is Chris Kavanagh, the, let's see, the Watson to my homes, as we're figuring out what's going on, what the mystery is with the gurus.
Sometimes, as you know, Chris, it's a Moriarty-type figure, devilishly difficult to decode.
Other times, it's more of Colonel Mustard.
Hit them over the head.
Dave Rubin.
Dave Rubin type person.
But we get there in the end either way.
How are you doing, mate?
I'm all right.
I think I am like Watson because wasn't he like a battle-hardened veteran that grounded the airy-fairy Sherlock in his crazy theories?
No, in his theories we're all correct, so that's not the same dynamic, but apart from that.
Yeah, yeah.
Hobbes was...
He was dissolute, yeah.
He would land around sleeping.
He was a cocaine addict as well, wasn't he?
A cocaine addict.
He had substance issues.
So, you know, maybe it kind of works in various ways.
Who's Moriarty?
Eric Weinstein?
Yeah, he definitely really is.
He's a nemesis.
I said good day, Mr. Hobbes.
Damn you, Moriarty.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Well, actually...
Our last episode, Matt, was the lab leak episode.
I don't know if you remember.
No, I don't.
It's all a blur.
That's what we did.
We talked with Christian, Eddie, and Michael.
Remember them?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
I would say, overall, very positively received and got a lot of nice feedback about people, you know, whatever their various conclusions were.
People seemed happy to be able to hear from...
Relevant experts and for them to have long enough time and address various questions that they themselves have been wondering about.
So we did a good thing, Matt.
It's not like us.
But I wonder, did you notice the reaction amongst the conspiracy-prone lab leakers?
I did.
I did see that.
Now, I'm not going to do as good a job as you, but just to prove that I do remember some things, I am aware of some things, I think it was Ridley who must have listened because he seems to think, okay, all right.
Sorry, I've already punched a balloon before I went up.
The reason I say I don't think he listened is because he was citing a tweet.
Of someone else who was summarizing a thing from the conversation.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Yeah.
Okay.
But, you know, I was on the right track.
You'd have to agree.
You're on the right track because he was highlighting a tweet where the person leapt on a detail that Christian kind of offhandedly mentioned about Ebola viruses when working.
And he was actually talking about people.
Spinning up conspiracies where they were accusing him of being responsible for another lab leak, right?
That the Ebola outbreak was due to him.
He's a busy guy, this Christian Anderson.
Pretty nefarious, really.
Travelling around the world, releasing viruses.
So they took a statement that's confirming something of significance about working on Ebola in the lab.
And Matt Ridley.
So I think that should have actually served as an illustration to people about the level of the difference in approaches,
right?
So a small segment offhand comment is taken as like a hugely significant A slip of the tongue which gives away the whole game where Christian Andersen is planning to infect everyone where Varys is from.
For what reason?
Who knows?
He's just a villain out there.
Unclear how this leads to grants.
I guess there's no actual Varys.
He just has to go around creating them all so he's in work.
That's the way it goes.
But it's just...
It was bound to happen, you know, the conspiracy.
And this is a perfect illustration that there is a community, a group, a receptive audience that is conspiracy prone.
And even from, you know, a long technical conversation where you could take issues with, you know, various details or the general thrust of the way that they present things.
No, it's latching on to a fur away comment to invent.
This kind of nefarious scheme and a different release of Nullovirus.
Yeah, some kind of purported smoking gun that they're hiding in plain sight.
No, he slipped up, Matt.
He slipped up.
He said it, you know.
He got too comfortable and he's given the game away.
So, yeah.
It's fun discourse.
But anyway, best of luck to everyone dealing with that.
Yeah, it won't be us.
And, you know, in our...
Whinge of the Week segment, Matt.
You may have forgot that we have that segment.
It periodically comes, it flutters around.
But Lex Friedman just did a podcast with Sam Harris.
That would usually have good potential for somebody to be complaining about various things.
But I'm not going to give it to that, Matt, because there's a clear winner for me this week, and I think you'll agree when I describe it.
I presume you, like many others, noticed Jordan Peterson has been tweeting about things this week.
Yeah, yeah.
Very frequently.
Yeah, people who are on Twitter will know what we're talking about.
People who aren't on Twitter, you don't want to know, probably.
Oh, no, no, Matt.
Do they not?
So Jordan Peterson, former star of Decoding the Gurus, celebrity psychologist to the world, and noted person, I think one of his rules.
For life was like be precise in your speech or something like that.
One of his 12 rules originally.
He does go on these tweet storms where he's not entirely precise but even by his standards he achieved quite an impressive feat when he seemed to be duped by some account which repurposed a scene from a particular fetish apparently like a restrained Come milking?
There's no way to describe it in a family-friendly way, is there?
No, I'm sorry.
The image, I'll paint the picture, is of somebody strapped to a medical table with a kind of a pump of some description attached to a particular...
Appendage while they're restrained on the table in a kind of grim, hospital-lit setting.
And Jordan, the tweet was saying something about, you know, the dystopic future under the CCP.
And Jordan happily retweeted this with some commentary about what a terrible event this was.
Not noticing that it was, in fact, a scene from a fetish pornography.
Yeah.
Not exactly practicing discernment there.
And as you know, Chris, we've been writing a little bit about Jordan Peterson in a little article that we are working on because he is, in many ways, the grandpapa of gurus.
And it actually inspired me to go back and scroll all the way back and look at...
Some of his earliest content, like some of the very first videos that he released on YouTube.
And they seem to be filmed at his university.
I think that there are university students in the auditorium and a much younger and spryer-looking Jordan Peterson is talking there.
Because I was just interested in to what degree he was different.
And I was definitely struck by the fact that he's just objectively a good lecturer in terms of his style.
And delivery is quite enviable.
But the content is not good.
The content is not good.
He was talking about something about evil and meaning.
And he claims that Hitler was subconsciously actually aiming for his own suicide in a bunker and the destruction of Germany.
Like, that was his kind of subconscious.
Plan all along because he was motivated by subliminal Jungian death archetype and Thanatos or something like that, you know?
So that's the hot take, right?
Hitler was aiming for that all along.
And I get the Jungian vibe, but I mean, it's just fundamentally a stupid proposition.
He's putting it forward in a very erudite sounding way.
But it's really just silly.
No.
It's just interesting to note that, you know, back when he was more functional, like, you hear a lot of people saying about this guru or that guru was, oh, they were good, but they went crazy, right?
Yeah.
And it's like, yeah, Jordan Peterson has gotten worse.
He was definitely more functional when he was younger, pre-addiction, pre-illness, pre-notariety.
But his ideas weren't any better.
Like, that was silly.
No, yeah, I completely agree because I remember I got on the Jordan Peterson train pretty late.
I was just ignoring him as much as possible.
It was just tons of stuff.
I got the basic gist of what he was up to with the Canadian bill and misrepresenting it and all that.
But when I actually spent any time with his content, I immediately...
It was like, okay, I get this.
And the thing that kept hammering me was the level of religiosity in it.
It's not a normal amount of religiosity for a psychology professor, an empirical-minded psychology professor at that, supposedly.
So, yeah, I agree that he's definitely gotten more extreme, more polemical, and more cartoonish.
He was always mixing in these kind of very speculative theories or anecdotes in with his lectures.
So he's just kind of refined his shtick, if you want.
It's both more polished and more unhinged.
Yeah, it's more exaggerated, but not so different.
The other thing you put me onto, because we will be mentioning this fine fellow as well, Is some of the latest output in new discourses by our old friend James Lindsay.
He wins winger of the week.
He is just a constant winger, so he doesn't actually factor in because...
He's just constantly winging.
He's disqualified from competition now.
He got me onto his latest little thing, which is called A Homily to Young Men.
That was really interesting because he is now getting into...
Kind of budget, Jordan Peterson.
He even talks about making your own bed and it is a homily to young men.
He talks about the four talents and the parable and how you need to be a strong man so you can defend the women in your family.
In fact, he spends the first 20 minutes talking about how you might need to fight a cloud leopard.
I think it is.
Some kind of leopard.
A cloud leopard?
It's a particular kind of leopard.
What's it called?
I could be getting this wrong.
It doesn't matter.
Is it a clod?
No, it's a particular species of leopard.
It doesn't matter.
It was inspired by some news article, I think, where one of these leopards escaped from the zoo.
So it's like, you know, you need to be ready to fight a leopard.
And it talks a lot about how you've got to channel your aggression and strength to positive ways.
Developing your strength and your skills and your coordination.
Practice good grooming.
It was a little bit reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite.
Actually, you know our previous guest, Frost, the martial artist guy, James Lindsay.
Has been prone to martial arts fantasism.
Like, you know, he was always into the side of martial arts, which is a bit fanciful.
And, you know, death touches and all that kind of stuff.
So this is on brand.
It's kind of interesting.
It's just like him repackaging his previous interests into his new framework.
But that's kind of new for him.
He's sort of maybe looking to get into the self-help.
Young men had to grow up to be a real boy.
Yeah, well, I get the impression that, like, there are people doing what he does better than him now in the conservative, like, establishment.
Chris Rufo and most of the politicians have kind of, like, he had an impact, but his appearance on Dr. Phil indicated, like, his overall value, I think, to the conservative movement.
So, like, you know, Charlie Kirk and stuff can do, Yeah, he needs an angle, but I feel like this is a losing proposition for him to try to encroach on Jordan Peterson's territory because, well, unless Jordan Peterson keels over and dies from eating too much meat or something.
I mean, Jordan Peterson does it so much better than him.
His delivery is weak, frankly, and Jordan Peterson's delivery is very good.
So I don't see him stealing.
I don't see him taking down the big man.
No, but all he needs is to carve out a little sycophantic niche.
So there's plenty of space for them to frolic around in their walled gardens.
And, you know, as long as he's feeding a polemic audience, I mean, we just saw Dave Rubin.
We just looked at Dave Rubin's content.
You're right, you're right.
Which is objectively bad, and he has a large audience.
So, you know.
It's true.
You don't need to be very good at this to make a living.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Yeah, but today, Matt, we're not decoding guru.
That'll be for next time.
Today, we are talking to a wise person.
Oh, ah!
And also, the mention of wise wisdom also should say that Matt and I took part in a...
We mentioned that before.
If anyone's interested in how that went, you can go see it.
It's up on YouTube.
You can see us put our arguments for the value of criticism and whatnot to the team wisdom.
We were...
Dubbed team criticism.
Yeah, and it was fun.
So I encourage everyone.
Any thoughts for you, Matt, about that event?
Not really, no.
I guess it was all very amicable and fine, and why wouldn't it be?
We come from different places.
We're delightful people.
We're scams.
That's right.
We said what we thought.
They said what they thought.
Maybe some communication was established.
That's fine.
Yeah, so I just have one little substantive point to make here.
I'm just like pinning it in at the end of our lengthy introduction segment.
There's this thing where people talk about how people online are willing to be more critical than they are in person.
Right, to people's face.
Or like Sam Harris often says, you know, if he went for dinner with someone, he could have a much more reasonable conversation than he would have on Twitter, right?
There's definitely something to that.
But I just want to emphasize as well, especially this is on my mind after hearing the Lex Friedman and Sam Harris conversation, that there's a lot of talk about the kind of distorting effect of interacting with people online and, you know, this real...
But is enough said about the distorting effect of face-to-face communication and interpersonal dynamics?
Because it's definitely the case if you speak to someone directly and you're not in some stage confrontation or whatever, that social niceties in many occasions will make people be more friendly, more nicer, be kind of more circumspect in the way that they make points and that kind of thing.
But it doesn't actually mean that that's like a truer representation of
I heard Sam and Lex talking about this, and they were talking about distortions of the online environment, which definitely exists.
But they seem to be saying, you know, but if you sat and have dinner with someone, that would be better.
I was like, no, but that's its own distortion.
I could sit and have dinner with lots of people who actually are If you look at what they're promoting and stuff, that it does deserve criticism and you probably should be harsher.
So, yeah, I was just mentioning that.
It's not really into the verbatim thing.
We were the same.
Matt and I are completely consistent online, offline, just the same.
But, you know, other people.
No, it is hard to be.
It feels rude just when you're talking to someone face-to-face to say, look, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Or that I just fundamentally think that everything you're talking about is a waste of time, which I would have to do when talking to some people.
And I think that IDW heterodox thing where, you know, we just need to have these face-to-face conversations and civility and politeness and, you know, our common humanity, all that stuff, that sounds very appealing to people that have ever interacted on social media because everyone who has is aware that...
There's definitely a problem there, right?
There's an elevated level of hostility and there's in-group and agrodynamics.
They're right about that.
They're right about that.
The immediate assumptions of bad faith, et cetera, et cetera.
But I agree with you, Chris, that it's the pendulum swinging too far the other way, which can be a problem too.
So you and I are advocates for robust airings of grievances.
That's right.
You could do that in a friendly way, maybe.
Enter the marketplace of ideas.
Boom, boom, boom.
Fight your corner.
Jab, crosshook, boom!
Yeah.
Anyway, that's not what we are doing today because we're having an enjoyable conversation, not a confrontational conversation, with Travis View, or at least the stage name, Travis View, from QAnon Anonymous,
somebody who has A lot of expertise around the subject of QAnon, but conspiratorial networks in general and the whole online phenomenon, all the online communities.
I was very happy to meet.
So-called Travis View because I was surprised and pleased to find out that he looks and talks like a young, handsome Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation.
I really appreciated that about him.
Yeah, the audio listeners can't see, but the lighting that was on the video was suitable.
It looked like Travis was in his bunker kind of decoding the...
The QAnon people and sending out his last broadcast.
You described him as someone you would want on your team in case of a zombie outbreak.
He seemed like someone that could handle himself, be reliable, wouldn't panic.
No.
Knows how to handle a shotgun.
I think that he already...
He knows it's going to shit.
So he thinks that he's prepared and he's accepted it.
So he's just getting...
We're not saying that Travis is a prepper.
No, that's not what we're saying.
But if he were to prep, he gives the impression that he would be good at it.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
So, yeah, that's an interesting introduction for Travis.
But we'll now hand over to ourselves in the past to speak to Travis directly.
Yep.
That's what you get, Travis.
Okay, Matt.
So we have with us today Travis View, who is probably familiar to a bunch of our listeners from the QAnon Anonymous podcast covering, like the name suggests, QAnon and adjacent communities and worlds.
So, Travis, I've been a...
A big fan of the QAnon Anonymous podcast for quite a while, but thank you for coming on.
Yeah, thank you for having me, Christopher.
And Matt, I think you're aware with a less obsessive tendency to listen to podcasts than me of the kind of work of Travis.
We had Annie Kelly on previously covering her podcast on vaccines, but she's also a...
UK correspondent for QAnon Anonymous.
Yes.
No, I remember.
I'm not that old yet, Chris.
I know what's going on.
You don't need to fill me in.
I'm just prompting you.
I enjoy QAnon Anonymous as well, just not as frequently as you.
I dip in.
So, Travis, we probably don't need to spend that much time on fairly basic things, but just in case there's some innocent soul who luckily has avoided the topic until...
Can you give the nutshell summary about QAnon and maybe where it has gone since you've been following?
Obviously, that would take a very long time to do it justice, but I mean...
The broad strokes.
Sure, the broad strokes.
I think that QAnon managed to get pretty world-famous after January 6th.
But for those who have managed to escape it, the basic premise is that, well, QAnon is both an elaborate conspiracy theory and an extremist movement.
And it's based on this idea that Trump was secretly battling a cabal of pedophiles with the help of high-level military intelligence officials.
And this, of course, included Hillary and George Soros and all the typical conspiracist villains.
But they believe that Trump wasn't doing it alone.
They thought that they were getting help.
Through these messages that were posted on 4chan and then later 8chan and 8ku, these image boards.
And these messages, they were, you know, sometimes they were very strange and cryptic and sometimes they were, you know, just rallying cries.
They're just patriotic messages or they were sort of like, you know, talking about how brilliant Trump is or something like that.
But QAnon followers, they believe that by decoding these Q-drops, and that's what they call the individual posts, by decoding the Q-drops, now there are over 4,000 of them, that they would be able to understand what's going on in this epic battle of good versus evil,
which, of course, Trump and the military intelligence officials were destined to win.
That is the basic premise.
One question that that brings up is, given Trump...
Unwillingly went out of the White House and, you know, there's been a couple of years of the Biden presidency and there are other figures kind of moving around in the conservative space.
Does a lot of the kind of Q&A stuff still revolve around Trump or has it kind of expanded out of his orbit to encompass, you know, other political figures and that kind of thing?
No, I mean, the QAnon figures who remain are still pretty all-in on Trump.
Now, I think that they eventually noticed that Trump wasn't in the White House, as some other guy was, which you think would throw a wrench in their plan.
They wound up resolving their cognitive dissonance in a lot of creative ways.
They claimed, for example, that...
That actually Trump was the true president.
And then all the film of Biden being in the Oval Office was actually filmed in Hollywood.
And they came up with this elaborate theory.
There's this QAnon follower named Patel Patriot who came up with this theory of devolution, which basically was premised on the idea that actually Biden was kind of like a puppet of Trump, but Trump was ultimately still in charge.
Uh, so they, they, they resolve their cognitive distance in a lot of, a lot of ways like that.
Uh, others sort of like, um, believe that, well, you know, they had to allow Biden to steal the white house this one time, because this is all part of the plan.
But of course, Trump is supposed to take it back and then finish, uh, finish what he started in his first term.
So Travis, you guys.
Focus on really the pointy end of the conspiratorial and cray-cray spectrum with QAnon Anonymous.
And I think QAnon, yeah, has got that territory staked out pretty well.
From your little description before, it struck me how that there are many more moderate, I would guess you would say, versions of that lurid conspiracy that are maybe more acceptable.
In slightly more normie communities online, I'm talking about stuff like there being some kind of deep state, there being some kind of institutional capture.
You know what I'm talking about?
I'm just wondering, how do you see the extreme stuff feeding into maybe more acceptable stuff?
Yeah, yeah.
That's a good point.
I mean, like all the conspiracy theories that came from QAnon, they all have...
Like the belief that, you know, there was a claim, for example, that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for the death of JFK Jr. in 1999 in that plane crash.
And she also killed, you know, Seth Rich.
This is a tragic story of the young man who was falsely accused of, like, hacking and leaking the DNC when, of course, it was really...
Really, a Russian operation that was leaked to WikiLeaks.
And the precedent for that is basically the Clinton body count conspiracy theory, which claimed that Bill and Hillary Clinton, as part of their rise to the political top, was kind of like killing people left and right.
Now, it sounds crazy, but yeah, that was kind of the moderate version that Bill and Hillary Clinton are these gangsters who are willing to hire hate men or maybe kill people themselves.
It was taken to a new extreme in QAnon.
And the belief in a deep state, this concept.
Has existed since the rise of the FBI and the CIA.
There's some reality to it.
The idea that people like Hoover had more power than a lot of real politicians, FBI directors, who was able to make their way because there was this calcified power structure inside the federal government.
And, of course, it was taken to this whole level of extreme.
It was not just institutional knowledge or, like I said, a calcified power structure within the federal government, but rather it was this entity within the federal government that was captured by the cabal and was doing the bidding of the worldwide pedophile ring.
So it's always a lot more dramatic in the QAnon version than in the precedence it took
I wonder, Travis, we've grappled with this a little bit in the kind of figures we cover and we talk about this emergent niche for secular gurus, kind of like your Jordan Peterson or your Weinstein brothers,
right, in the kind of modern era.
But the more that we look at the topic, although there's aspects which are, like, unique.
To the, you know, digital media ecosystem and all that.
There's a lot which is in line with historical precedents.
And, you know, when you look, go back and look, you tend to start seeing a whole bunch of figures that, you know, you can actually draw not that greatly stretched parallels to figures like Siemens and this kind of thing, like in history.
And I wonder...
With the kind of stuff you're covering, QAnon, in some respects, seems like a very modern conspiracy theory.
It's very online and involves online communities.
And I know there's versions that aren't down the earth, but it's politicians, right?
It's not space aliens and lizards.
So I'm curious about how far you see it as distinctive, like a distinctive contemporary.
Movement versus something which is just like a new form of the conspiracism which will always exist, has always existed, and we're doomed to endlessly flutovide in.
Yeah, you know, I think there were a couple of unique things about About the way that this particular form of conspiracism operated.
Number one is that the way it was gamified is participatory.
A lot of people compare it to alternate reality games or ARGs.
And it's not merely that you...
Receive, you know, the wisdom from the guru, the person who knows better than you, and then you sort of absorb that knowledge in sort of clear sentences or even like semi-mystical sentences.
But these messages were extremely cryptic and they led to multiple divergent, sometimes contradictory interpretations from the people who learned the Q-drops.
This gave it a very addicting quality because the people who participated in the activity, they were just learning things.
It was like solving a puzzle and trying to Google search and trying to figure out what exactly these weird Q-drops meant.
It being unclear is always an interesting part of it.
The other thing that's sort of like, I think distinct from, distinct about QAnon that makes it different from a lot of other classic conspiracism is this idea of this super competent hero who's going to take on the super competent villain.
Because in, you know, classic conspiracism, they always believe in this, basically this hyper powerful force who's really pulling the strings.
And, you know, if you go back to, you know, the...
You know, the post-French Revolution, there was the Illuminati and the Freemasons who were really running things, and they were really super powerful.
Of course, you know, like I said, there could be lizards of the deep state, but there's some sort of hyper-competent enemy who is so, you know, brilliant and smart, they can do something like fake a moon landing and leave scant evidence of a fakery behind.
And this is a very kind of despairing worldview because how is it that you, as a regular person, can fight against someone who is so powerful and brilliant as that?
But QAnon says that, well, you have basically a friend in the military intelligence or the federal government.
You have a hyper-competent hero who can best the hyper-competent villain.
That, I think, creates a little bit more exciting conflict because all of a sudden there's this hope.
That the evil all-powerful entity that really pulls the strings can be defeated and thwarted, and everyone can see that your conspiracy theories were all true, and all your friends and family can rush to you and say,
you're right, you're right.
So there's a lot more.
There's a lot of hope in QAnon because of that.
Yeah, that's very interesting, Travis.
I was casting my mind back to the full catalogue of conspiracy theories I'm aware of, and most of them don't feature that hyper-competent secret hero figure like Batman that is in there.
He's going to put an end to this malevolent force.
Yeah, I guess.
The other thing, well, I've forgotten the other thing.
Chris?
I've forgotten two things, but the second one's gone.
That's right.
You know, he said he's not old, but the evidence is stacking down in the other column.
But that whole thing about people baking the Q drops or playing their own part, right, in the QAnon conspiracy or the movement, that's interesting because...
We've looked at, in the gurus we covered, there's often these kind of members of the community who emerge, who often start out as quite strong defenders of whoever their preferred guru is.
They'll make Twitter threads defending them or that kind of thing.
But over time, they often grow their own sub-audiences and can become kind of minor.
Gurus of their own, you know, create their own sub stack and so on.
And it's been interesting watching that because it creates that weird feedback mechanism where there's incentives to constantly be interpreting content on your own and trying to grow a community.
So is that the same kind of dynamic that you're talking about?
Like people creating their own minor...
Followings, not just the hyper-successful people.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's actually a huge part of how QAnon operated, because Q would release these cryptic Q-drops, and there would be some very strange, sometimes very strange, sometimes they're straightforward, but a lot of them are very strange and open to interpretation.
And that left a lot of, I guess, laypeople kind of confused in how to make sense of what the heck they're talking about.
As a consequence, they're merged with these Q-drop decoders.
Sometimes they're called bakers.
And they would set up their YouTube channel or their Twitter account.
And whenever there was a new Q-drop, they would rush to it and they would say, okay, this is what this line means and this is what this line means.
And they, as a consequence of like...
Trying to decipher and clarify what they believe that the Q drops meant, they wound up developing huge followings.
One of them was called Praying Medic.
This guy lives in Arizona.
His real name is David Hayes, who got a pretty big following because he was very talented at basically trying to...
Clarify and make sense of the Q-drops and trying to teach people what they were saying.
It really was kind of like a priestly class of QAnon because it was this idea that the material, the text itself was so strange that in order to make sense of it, it helped if you had someone who was deep into it who could help make sense of it for you.
Yeah, you guys actually just spoke to the second thing that I was failing to remember, which is that crowdsource participatory and constructed version of it.
And I guess all conspiracy theories tend to be like that, like it's a little bit different from a religious ideology, which comes from a top-down.
It tends to grow organically.
But with QAnon, it's much more forward, isn't it?
I guess...
It is like they're examining the entrails, the high priests, and coming up with their interpretations of it.
Very interesting.
How much, in terms of the psychological motivations of the people that are attracted to it, do you think, is it the same as with all other conspiracies, like the same pattern of psychological drivers?
Because it's obviously a big political movement, as you said, as well.
Yeah, you know, the thing is that I think that besides sort of the –
I guess the classic reasons people were motivated to get into conspiracism, the quest for esoteric knowledge and the sense of community and even the social aspect or even the hope that they're trying to make sense of their lives if they're not very happy with what their lives are,
that kind of thing.
What really motivated, I think, a lot of people to get into QAnon specifically was the fact that it was many months into the Trump administration, it didn't feel like many of Trump's promises were being kept.
You know, Trump promised, for example, that he would drain the swamp and lock Hillary up.
He was very clear on these points during the campaign, and his followers responded very positively.
But it got to be, you know, it got to be October, November.
In 2017, and then all of a sudden, there was this Mueller investigation that was starting to ramp up, and it seemed like Michael Flynn had to resign, and he was in some legal trouble, and it didn't seem like things were going the right way,
but they were so certain that because they got their man in the White House, that they got this outsider to the Washington circle inside that Everything would be fixed.
And then basically along came Q when they said that, no, no, no, no.
There's a secret plan to make everything you want to have happen, happen.
Hillary is going to be locked up.
And we're going to expose all the evil doings of the deep state.
And the swamp will be drained.
But it's going to take time because there's a secret battle.
So you got to trust military intelligence.
They know what they're doing.
There are moves and counter moves behind the scenes that you won't see in the mainstream media.
And so for people who are otherwise perhaps feeling a little uncomfortable with...
How the Trump administration was shaping up compared to Trump's promises, that was very reassuring.
That's a really useful framing of it because the way you describe it, it sounds an awful lot like resolving cognitive dissonance, right?
Yeah, I mean, I've relied upon Festinger's work a lot in trying to make sense of why the QAnon community does what they do.
Yeah, you know, and like a specific example of that cognitive dissonance is with, you know, revered strongman leaders.
Like, the classic trope is, you know, it's never the czar's fault, it's always got bad advisors, right?
So, there's these shadowy cabals of alphabet soup agencies and so on are the reasons for why things aren't getting better, the things aren't going as promised.
So, yeah, that fits quite nicely.
I think, Travis, as well, one of the things that you guys do on the podcast is that you go to various events, right?
You inflict upon yourself the lived experience of being at QAnon events or various other conspiracy-themed events.
And I think for...
Me and Matt probably makes a nice change in the way listeners enjoy us listening to Scott Adams or the Weinsteins.
I enjoy listening to you guys suffer through the various conspiracy communities.
But I want to ask you some stuff about the investigations and the way you guys do it.
But your most recent one on the Conscious Life Expo.
So that...
That crossover between the kind of traditional, maybe more left-leaning alternative medicine and crystal healing spiritual, Marianne Williamson kind of spirituality, and then now encompasses the QAnon stuff,
and also maybe more components of militia-type beliefs, Alex Jones-type stuff from before.
In that case, there's the podcast Conspirationality, which has dealt with that.
But I'm curious, from your experience, those worlds, how much are they merging together?
Or is it still quite possible to distinguish that, no, these are the alternative health, like left-leaning hippie types, and these are the red-pilled conspiracy theorists?
Yeah, you know, the way I always talk about it is that kind of like, you know, New Age thinking or esoteric thinking and conspiracism are kind of related in that they're both kinds of like stigmatized knowledge.
But they're both ways of seeing the world that sort of like distinct from orthodox thinking about like history or science or politics.
But they've always been kind of uneasy bedfellows, partly because New Age thinking is optimistic.
If you're kind of a New Age thinker, then you believe that we can enter into this new, more glorious age, and we can ascend and become more enlightened and become more together and become more peaceful.
It's very nice.
But conspiracism, on the other hand, is very pessimistic.
It's very despairing.
It's a belief that we're being controlled by lizard people who are unimaginably more powerful than It's a bummer.
But the thing is that they managed to, but they slowly, I think, converged.
And I think they really did so in a big way as a consequence of the pandemic.
There was, I think, a big sort of like a I mean, blending between New Age, you know, thinking and conspiracy thinking or even like, you know, militant anti-government thinking.
All those sorts of things combined as a consequence of the, number one, the uncertainty that came with the fact that we're living through a pandemic and also as a consequence of a lot of the government actions, you know, the sort of lockdowns, regulations, these sorts of things that people are very uneasy with.
So, yeah, that's what I think we really saw.
There was a lot of blending before then, but I think that the pandemic really made the marriage official.
The academic literature on complementary dental medicine and that New Age worldview that...
It tends to underlie it.
I mean, it has one other little cognitive aspect in common with conspiracies like QAnon, which is that it has so much cognitive complexity and so much participation in it.
And that's an attractive feature in itself, of course.
It's just an endless, exciting mystery for you to explore and participate in, as opposed to conventional medicine where you just get given some drugs or something like that.
Now, the secret.
Bit of that puzzle, of course, is vaccines and the correlation between anti-vax and vaccine skepticism and woo health is really well established, very strong.
And, of course, anti-vax in particular has always had really strong conspiratorial and anti-government sort of libertarian style ideas associated with it.
So, yeah, it makes sense.
I'm curious, Travis, from the way that you approach I would encourage anybody that hasn't listened to some of the episodes where you do investigations because there's an organic nature to it and the honest thing about the various insecurities and whatnot when you're doing not undercover work but not openly trying to announce yourself to the people
there.
I was kind of curious How do you see yourself and, like, the podcast that you do?
Do you regard it as, like, a documentarian kind of thing or anti-QAnon activism or, like, you know, I don't know, anthropology, ethnography?
I'm curious, like, they have some thoughts about you, the QAnon community, but how do you see yourself?
Yeah, you know, I really see it more than anything else as a way to satisfy my curiosity about it and try and learn about it as much as I can more than anything else, if I'm being honest.
So I guess I do take, I guess, kind of an academic approach.
But what really got me into it was, I guess, a bafflement that this weird online movement was becoming so popular.
And, you know, I had some sort of, like, experience in exploring fringe communities when, I guess, you know, years ago in college, I became very interested in, like, young earth creationism.
These people who believe that the world is 6,000 to 10,000 years old and, like, you know, all of geology and biology.
Biology is basically a lie, and there's some sort of alternate science that can help you understand the true nature of the natural world.
But yeah, I started realizing that this movement, as strange as it is, started becoming popular.
So I really just wanted to try to figure out why do these people believe these things, and where do they gather, and how do they acquire these beliefs, and what are their lives like?
and, you know, and where, like what, you know, I guess, you know,
What is the precedence for these kinds of beliefs?
And the other element is, where the hell is this going?
Because I know for a fact that their promised storm of mass arrest is not going to happen.
So we have to figure out what exactly is going to happen when they either accept or don't, that that's just not going to be reality.
So that's really what motivates me.
See myself, you know, as an activist as much as I am trying to, you know, satisfy my own curiosity and sort of like teach other people what I learn as I go along the way.
Well, I might just say that I'd like those motivations for what it's worth.
I mean, it's very similar to me and Chris in that it's just interesting why people believe the things they do and in our case, why people find certain kinds of things convincing when to yourself you go, this is just...
How on earth could people find this convincing?
And it becomes more of a fascinating puzzle that one wants to solve.
And as a side effect, hopefully, I suppose we'd like to maybe encourage a little bit of critical thinking and skepticism and good things like that, but it's almost a side effect.
I mean, one of the standard things that someone new to this stuff who's looking at a young earth creationist or a QAnon person or a flat earther is, oh, these people must be stupid.
How stupid are they?
And of course, they're not, are they?
Yeah, you know, that's the one thing I always say.
If you really think that people believe in QAnon because they are stupid, then you're just not going to understand them or their beliefs.
Because I've seen people who are actually...
Quite smart in a lot of ways.
Actually, good writers, they can hold down good jobs.
And they spend hours doing research, decoding, and making connections between different cue drops.
Activity that requires a great deal of cognitive horsepower, but just leads them to absurd conclusions.
So I think that the cognitive flaw that leads them to these nonsense beliefs isn't a lack of intelligence, it's usually something else.
It's usually some sort of epistemic framework that's unconventional or perhaps some sort of emotional kind of draw that they get out of it.
One of the things that we frequently encounter is this kind of prioritizing of people's Some of the guru people that we cover,
especially if people have ever met them, but even just through podcasts or whatever, they emphasize that, you know, these people seem nice and they mean well.
And, you know, whether or not it's actually accurate, like they say, you know, oh, they're humble, you know, and this kind of thing.
So like Jordan Peterson throwing out various strategic disclaimers are often referred to by people who, you know, Have found what he told them helpful in some way, right?
Like they don't focus on his climate change denial or whatever the latest thing he's waffling about on Twitter.
And Matt and I have been at pains to kind of emphasize that interpersonally, that you shouldn't...
Assume that people who hold ideologies that are harmful will be interpersonally unpleasant people.
If it's a neo-Nazi, maybe.
But even then, neo-Nazis still have to have barbecues and go to the supermarket.
So I feel like there's a mistaken impression that anybody that's into it will just constantly be unhinged and unable to operate in the actual world.
And I get the impression that there are some people
Yeah, you know,
it's funny.
I often talk a lot about...
QAnon, I think, does technically meet the definition of an extremist movement, as is defined by J.M. Berger, who wrote this book called Extremism.
I really think it's generally the least dangerous kind of extremism.
Now, I want to be clear.
QAnon has caused...
Horrible damage.
It's alienated families.
There is one case in which a QAnon follower, a surfer who lived in Southern California, killed his children.
There's been kidnappings.
There's been murders.
So there actually has been QAnon-motivated violence.
Of course, there's also been QAnon-motivated violence in the case of the January 6th insurrection.
So I don't want to seem like I'm downplaying it.
But compared to a lot of other extremist movements, I don't think it's quite as dangerous.
And I know this because I've been to, like I said, I've been to a lot of QAnon events, like QAnon conventions, in which I am recognized by the organizers.
But despite that, I've never really felt threatened.
That's not the case if you are, for example, a reporter on, let's say, white supremacists.
If you're an extremist who covers white nationalists and you go to a white nationalist rally and the organizers spot you, you might be in danger.
But that just wasn't my experience.
They recognized me and they shook my hand.
But yeah, it is very interesting.
And I think the reason for that is that Generally, QAnon followers are people who really want to see violence done in the sense that they often fantasize about these mass executions or Hillary being hanged at Gitmo and these kinds of things,
but they don't want to do the violence themselves.
They always fantasize about the military or the justice system taking care of it for them.
They don't want, because they believe that there's a plan to basically build,
Do the violence that they want to have done in order to fix society, but through these official channels?
White nationalists generally don't believe that.
They don't believe that the justice system or the military are going to fix things for them.
They think that they need to pick up a gun and make the world as they want to see it for themselves.
I'm channeling someone else.
I believe you've talked to them, Travis, but Aaron Rabinowitz from...
Embrace the void is often noting there is an element to the QAnon lore that talks about elites feasting on the blood of young children, right?
The kind of pedophile networks.
And Aaron often appears to highlight the connection to, you know, the blood libel and the kind of anti-Semitic conspiracies of old.
So I'm curious.
To what extent you would regard that kind of anti-Semitic strain as like a key feature of QAnon?
Or is it more that it's just like a parallel track that some people can hop onto?
You know, I think generally, you know, QAnon is basically as anti-Semitic as you want it to be.
I think that if you are someone who is perhaps a little uncomfortable with anti-Semitism, I think QAnon actually gives you enough plausible deniability to convince yourself that that's not a component of it.
But if you are, you know, if you are a little bit uncomfortable with, you know, The Jews, then you can be part of QAnon and you can instantly recognize the canards that are key to QAnon.
So, you know, of course, you know, I think that, I think that, you know, Q&A followers, they often, they often do like sometimes they, sometimes a, you
do this kind of thing where they, you know, they say, no, no, no.
It's like, obviously, obviously, you know,
We don't hate Jews.
There are some bad Jews.
There's Epstein.
There's George Soros.
But those are the bad Jews.
But Jewish people generally are okay.
They try to convince themselves that the anti-Semitic subtext isn't as present as it actually is.
I guess on that note a little bit about these sort of dark forces in American society, as you can hear from our accents, we're not American.
You might not have picked up on that.
It's subtle.
They're subtle.
It's a little strange.
I thought you were maybe in the South or something.
Very small town in the South.
So, I mean, on our show and our public stuff, we say we generally advise against People catastrophizing.
Because it's easy to get the impression if you're on places like Twitter that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Too sweet.
And the United States in particular, in terms of the political landscape and the cultural divisions, etc., there are certainly some people who feel that the country is on the precipice of very bad things.
But you can also make the argument that, yes, it's a bit of a mess, but it's always been a mess.
Everything is basically fine if you're focusing on the fringes.
So, this is kind of a more casual question rather than a QAnon type question.
But, like, what's your feeling as an American?
Is there a serious emergency happening sort of politically or is it kind of just the world spinning as usual?
You know, that's actually not an easy question to answer.
You know, there's a professor of political science who really studies conspiracy theories.
His name is Joseph Ucinski.
He wrote a couple of great books, like Conspiracy Theories and the People Believe Them.
And he did a lot of interesting studies, basically, about how prevalent conspiracism is in society.
Basically, letters to the editor in newspapers going back all the way to 1880, and he checked how often conspiracy theories appeared in those letters, reasoning that the more popular conspiracy theories were, the more often they would appear.
And so, using this methodology, he tracked the rate of conspiracism.
And what he found was that there are times when conspiracism becomes more popular.
For example, it spiked in popularity after the death of JFK, unsurprisingly, after the assassination.
But generally, over the course of the 20th century and even before, the rate of the popularity of conspiracy theories is very, very steady.
We always try to convince ourselves that we live in an especially conspiracist age, but it's not necessarily the case.
I often point out that the very first third party in the United States, all the way back in the 1820s and the 1830s, was called the Anti-Masonic Party.
And it was dedicated to the proposition that the Masonic Lodges, in thrall of the Illuminati, were basically plotting to upend the United States.
And they wound up, it was a totally conspiracist party, and they did pretty well.
They wound up actually controlling about 10% of the House of Representatives at their peak.
They had a few governorships.
So I don't think we're quite at the point where there are QAnon followers who are governors of states.
There's some precedent for that.
I think there are some strange things happening.
Again, I point to January 6th, which is certainly an unprecedented event, which was driven by conspiracism.
But I think that what allowed that to happen was the fact that we had an openly, aggressively conspiracy president.
And that kind of changed the dynamic a great deal.
But I think that generally...
I'm really interested in this idea that conspiracism is just part of the political landscape.
It's just something that's just...
In the background, always there, affecting, sometimes feeding into mainstream politics and is not some sort of weird anomaly of the internet age.
It's, you know, it's change as a consequence of communications technology as, you know, it's like, you know, but generally it's just something that's just always there and frankly always will be.
I'm very sympathetic to that.
There's a book by a historian, Joan B. Freeman, called The Field of Blood, Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.
It's covering Congress in the era just before the Civil War.
It's one of those things that's a good reminder that things were bad in previous eras, especially in that case in American politics.
It's easy, I think, in a way, to get caught up in your lifetime.
What's changed?
So Matt and I, like you, Travis, I think as well, have had a long-standing interest in conspiracism.
And we've observed in our lifetime, it moved from the fringes to the US presidency in the COVID era, like a very strong...
But I think when you take a longer perspective, like you're talking about, or like Annie did in the vaccine documentary series she produced, you see that it just comes in waves, and there are moments in time where it's a much stronger force,
and then it kind of recedes.
So I think when you were born, people that have lived through other waves of conspiracism, like the JFK assassination or whatever, Maybe it doesn't strike as dramatically different.
That's one of the things that I think about to try and keep myself seeing about the current moment.
Though when I find out that QAnon is quite popular in Japan, I sometimes find it hard to accept that level of sanguine response.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I feel the same way.
One of the things I never really wanted to do when I was doing the podcast was be a fear monger.
I wanted to be as honest and straightforward as I could about...
The dangers associated with an extremist movement and whenever there was violence associated with the movement.
One of the very first instances happened all the way back in June of 2018 when a man basically had an armed standoff on the Hoover Dam Bridge because he thought there was going to be this inspector general's report which would basically reveal all the deep state crimes that he wanted to release.
I want to be honest about the dangers associated with this extremist movement.
But I didn't want to say this is the greatest threat the country has ever faced and that kind of stuff.
Because I think you're no better than Alex Jones.
Yeah.
And we often occasionally get the question of like, oh, so what will happen when all the gurus, like you've covered them all?
That's like, no, that's one, that's never going to happen.
But two, if it did happen, it would be a nice outcome.
Like if suddenly there weren't...
Like, kind of manipulative gurus.
Something bad would probably have had to happen for that to occur.
But if it just was able to happen, it wouldn't be like Matt and I were deeply upset that we no longer have people to cover.
And I guess you guys have the same vibe that, like, you're not looking forward to the next version of Q that emerges.
But it's a safe bet that there's going to be.
Other versions and variations of this kind of movement.
Sure, yeah.
If we get to a point where somehow...
Conspiracism is all but eliminated in American discourse, and everyone sort of approaches their politics through rational policy and respectful civil discourse.
That, of course, would be unprecedented, but we might have to pivot the podcast, but I don't have much hope that that's actually going to happen.
I guess...
You know, your podcast in a way, well, not in a way, is kind of an ensemble cast, right?
You have different, the different hosts have different interests, different specialties.
And as a result, I think partly you guys are able to feed off each other's interests and, you know, like people take the lead on different kinds of stories.
But I was curious because, you know, in our case, We sometimes cover relatively wholesome figures like Carl Sagan or this Jesuit priest, Anthony DeMello.
We look at people that are, you know, like Gwyneth Paltrow.
You might have criticisms, but she's not exactly as terrible as Scott Adams or that kind of thing.
So in your case, though, it's rare that you're covering something, you know, relatively wholesome or that has, you know, a kind of positive.
Empowering element to it.
So I'm just curious, Travis, like you cover this day in, day out, week in, week out for years now.
So how do you and your fellow co-hosts cope, aside from like copious amounts of drugs and alcohol?
Sure.
Yeah, I actually, I got into hiking and photography.
So that's what I do, because I've realized that it's the absolute opposite of what has turned into my day job.
Because through QAnon Anonymous, basically, I spend a lot of time going online, looking for...
Uh, ugliness and absurdity.
But, uh, when I go hiking with a camera, then I'm out in the real physical world trying to look for beauty.
And so, uh, that, that, that helps me a lot.
And so, yeah, I have, uh, I have an Instagram.
It's, uh, it's, uh, Logan strain photography.
Logan strain is my real name.
And so, yeah, so I post my photos there.
That's an excellent policy, Travis.
I'm the same.
I've got some very wholesome pursuits.
Chris, on the other hand, he was born in the darkness and he's going to die in the darkness.
That's right.
Well, you as well, but I'm forced out of the darkness on occasion by my children going to play parks around Tokyo.
So that kind of counts as an excursion.
But I don't get to do the wandering around nature and swimming with sharks as much as you do.
So that's fair.
That's fair.
I had a question, Travis, partly piggybacking on the point that you made about the followers, and I'm sure this is hard to quantify, but I'm a little bit curious about the general demographics of the people that are into Q,
like whether it's associated with, you know, particular age range, particular ethnic groups, or whether it cuts across the kind of alternatives.
The health area typically tends to be associated with people a bit better off and maybe in America, at least, like white, the kind of stereotyped image is, you know, the Gwyneth Paltrow type figure.
So with QAnon, is that the case?
Like, is there an association with working class, middle class, or does it transcend those kind of lines?
Yeah, you know, it is really shocking.
The way in which it transcends lines.
I mean, there are people who are financially struggling, but there are also, I see, people who are one of those popular sort of QAnon gurus is this guy named In The Matrix, and he was a former sales executive.
You know, he's essentially retired, and now he just basically does QAnon stuff.
I mean, yeah, they're...
More than a few instances of literal millionaires who get red-pilled.
I know there's this thesis that conspiracy theories are for losers in the sense that if you feel constrained, if you feel like you have no power...
Then, you know, conspiracy theories are a way to help you make sense of your powerlessness and give a scapegoat for your powerlessness.
But something about QAnon, I guess, you know, I've noticed that it is something that transcends class.
I might ask that question in a slightly different way, which is, I was sort of comparing it mentally to the Flat Earth movement that I did.
You know, I wasted a lot of time doing a deep dive on.
And there's a lot of overlap with the young earth creationist movement.
So you'd be familiar with the vibe.
And like, for example, in that case, I noticed that a very large proportion of the flat earthers were young earth creationists, very hardcore Christians.
And, you know, that's a separate belief system, but it happened to be correlated with it in people for understandable reasons.
That's not to say there wasn't a minority that were sort of completely different.
You know, they had different motivations.
I think they were like sort of basement-dwelling nerds who were just attracted to the sort of weirdness of it.
Now, with QAnon, if you had to pick one thing, because I mean, just looking from the outside, it seems to be correlated with obviously right-wing politics.
It might be correlated with religiosity.
It might be correlated with you actually eliminated class, but I was thinking maybe education.
I was wondering if you just had to, even though it's different from any of these other things, if you had to notice one correlate, Is there one that stands out?
Yeah.
If we were to exclude the New Age esoteric, theosophical believers, there were, I mean, it was, I think...
Heavily evangelical Christians.
A lot of the cue drops, they have Bible verses.
They say God wins.
And they believe in, you know, there's going to be a Great Awakening.
And of course, the Great Awakening is the name for a...
A few periods of religious revivals in the United States, because it already has this connotation that it's going to bring more people to God.
So I think people who are deeply evangelical Christians are already primed to believe in this epic battle of good versus evil, and a lot of the other things that QAnon lore is trying to promote.
I kind of half guessed you would nominate that because it does fit well with the other interesting belief systems that we see.
I guess a follow-on, and this is not a dig at Americans.
We're not above taking shots at Americans on this podcast, but this is...
It would be the first time that you'd never do that.
This is an honest question, which is, I mean, do you think that could be this sort of undercurrent, like a cultural vulnerability, you might say, in America?
Because America is a bit more Christian, a bit more, what's the word, evangelical, than most other places in the weird constellation of countries.
And there's obviously also that deep skepticism towards government
Yeah, of course.
I mean, yeah, I mean, this is It's been long observed that there's a paranoid style to American politics, and I think this is partly due to the natural skepticism of government institutions and partly due to the deep belief in religious freedoms,
especially the fear that government's going to encroach on your religion or something terrible is going to happen.
And so, yeah, I think that, you know, there's, I mean, yeah, obviously there's, this is partly why I think it's very, I think it's very interesting about, you know, the subject matter.
I think that there's something, there's something, you know, there are lots of things I think that America does better than anywhere else.
We make, you know, the most spectacular blockbuster films, and we do conspiracy theories very well.
You build guns.
You have some of the best Tex-Mex in the entire world.
Those four things.
That's it.
Nothing else.
Just those four.
One thing I'm also curious about, in the figures that we cover, there's two things which are really...
Prevalent and highly valued.
Not explicitly, but it just keeps coming up in all the content that we look like.
The people that become guru figures, they have charisma, that intangible quality usually.
But in a lot of ways, that manifests as a real skill with verbal metaphor and verbal fluency.
They're able to just kind of...
Roll for extended periods of time on whatever topic they choose.
And that's usually combined with a deep, hard-to-fathom level of narcissism where they assume that whatever they believe is correct and is important for people to hear about.
And we see these two features reappear.
But when I look at a figure, for example, Like Ron Watkins, right?
This is one of the people who is credibly suggested to be behind at least some portion of the queue drops.
And he doesn't strike me as someone with verbal fluency, charisma.
He might be narcissistic, but much more of a kind of odd, nerdy guy.
So I'm wondering...
How much he's an outlier and how far that's typical, the kind of influencer people...
Do you see the same kind of characteristics emerge or is it different?
No, you know, here's the thing is that...
Ron Watkins, assuming that he is, in fact, the person who controlled Q when Q moved from 4chan to 8chan.
This is a theory that was promoted by the docuseries Q Into the Storm by Colin Hoback.
He did most of his work from behind the computer.
So in this case, the followers didn't even really know who he was.
And he sort of promoted these ideas through text in the Q-drops.
So he didn't have to rely upon his personal charisma so much.
And we actually know that when Juan Rockets, he actually ran for Congress in a district in Arizona here.
And he came in dead last in that primary.
He came in seven out of seven.
So we saw that when he stepped out from behind the computer, he wasn't able to wow an audience so well.
But I think it's different for the people who were, like I said, the decoders, the bakers, the people who sort of became the influencers within the QAnon space.
Like I mentioned, that...
That guy named In The Matrix, his real name is Jeffrey Pedersen.
He was a former sales executive, of course, which was a job that requires a great deal of verbal fluency and charisma.
And that naturally translated to his job as sort of like a podcaster and sort of QAnon promoter.
He was able to do it pretty well.
I had a feeling that it would be a bad idea to take Ron Watkins as illustrative of anything but Ron Watkins.
So there was another thing that I wanted to ask you, which I'm not sure of myself.
So in your coverage related to COVID conspiracies and that, we see a little bit of overlap with figures like, you know, Brett Weinstein and Robert Malone, Peter McCulloch, right?
They appear on Joe Rogan, but they're also clearly figures like at least significant in anti-vaccine.
And, you know, with Mickey Willis or Del Bigtree, that there's kind of a crossover in the anti-vax world.
But the people that we look at are more focused on figures like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or, you know, the Weinsteins, Jordan Peterson, the intellectual dark web in some respects,
at least some of the...
Spheres that it tangented off to.
And I'm curious, do you see connections with those figures and those kind of communities?
Or is that just a separate tangent?
Because I just haven't noticed much talk about Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson in your content.
Yeah, you know, funny.
We actually did do an Elon Musk episode years ago before he bought Twitter.
But I think generally, those kinds of gurus don't interest me as much.
I guess the only thing that...
You know, those kinds of people, like I guess the intellectual dark web and QAnon have in common is like, you know, disdain for, you know, the mainstream media and government and that kind of thing.
But, you know, I think that, you know, it's for, you know, I think that with conspiracism, there's...
There's a lot less of a self-help kind of component.
A lot of these people are selling an idea to make yourself a better, understand the world in sort of an unorthodox way to make yourself a better person, healthier, more fit, smarter, more clever, whatever, better relationships.
Whereas that conspiracism, it's really less about the self and more political.
If anything, it's more about just having a little bit better inside info about how the world really works than the necessary.
I might make another comment disguised as a question here because I think those similarities and differences are really interesting between what you guys focus on and what we do because on one hand...
There's a fair bit of overlap.
There is a cultish component to QAnon.
It's certainly very much anti-establishment.
There is a sense of grievance.
And there is this, we call it the Cassandra complex, but it's that sense of imminent danger, that things are building to a climax and we have to prepare for it.
And obviously the conspiracies that...
And QAnon is just the archetypal example of it.
We also see it in all of our gurus.
But from what you've been talking about, it's really clear to me that this is a purely crowdsourced thing.
Whether or not we eventually find out who Q is, it's kind of irrelevant, isn't it?
Because from what you said, it sounds like it's very much a crowdsource phenomena.
There may be individual people that rise to prominence and manage to set themselves up as a bit of a high priest, but it's a crowdsource phenomena.
Am I drawing that distinction correctly, do you think?
Yeah.
The QAnon followers, they call themselves Anons, and a lot of them sort of prize their ability to do their work without actually having their name or their face known.
There are some really big QAnon followers who still have never been doxxed.
There's one called StormIsUponUs, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter before he was finally banned.
We just never figured out who he was exactly.
The thing is that when you're a non, there's this kind of flattening effect where it doesn't matter who you are.
You could have a small audience, a small following, or a big one, but the point is that you're getting the message out.
I believe that basically they're engaging in information warfare or narrative warfare where they're battling the evil cabal narratives and replacing it and red-pilling the normies and making people more aware of the truth.
I think that there's this greater emphasis on the information that they think is so crucial for people to understand rather than building up a personality.
Now, of course, a lot of people did.
Build up quite a lucrative following as a consequence of QAnon.
But for a lot of mid-level participants, that's not a big priority.
I realise, Travis, that we should not keep your evening too late.
So I'll round towards stop peppering you with questions.
But there's been a whole bunch of figures rise in prominence and disappear or fade away.
And there's been concerning movements that you covered.
I forget the guy's name, the one who does the numerology and had a community, I think, in Las Vegas in a hotel.
Yeah, you're thinking of a man by the name of Michael Protzman.
He has a cult, actually, called Negative 48. It's based in Dallas.
We spoke to a woman whose sister basically fell into the Negative 48 cult for an episode of the QAnon Anonymous.
That was a really concerning development.
That was really the more clear-cut, classic cult style, I guess, more so than general QAnon, because we had this weird, charismatic leader who did...
You know, gematria and numerology and like claim that they were, you know, deciphering, you know, secret messages and they did weird things like they claimed that, you know, JFK Jr. would return on Dallas on this particular day.
And of course, he did not come.
So, yeah, that spun out.
That's still going on.
It's a small cult.
There's a woman on Twitter named Karma2023 who follows their developments.
But yeah, that is like a real disturbing cult that sort of spun out of QAnon.
Yeah, and again, I'd encourage people to go and listen to the various investigations you guys have done because you've covered a whole bunch of those movements.
And actually, one of our previous guests, Elgin, who Covered the kind of offshoot of the Moonies.
I came across him on your podcast.
But the question I wanted to ask is, are there any, like, not necessarily, you know, movements that are just cultish or whatever, but like in the contours of the QAnon world, is there anything that has recently come to your attention which is new or is kind of like something that you would flag up?
That seems emerging or different.
Concerning?
Anything that you're very concerned about?
You know, there's another one that we've actually devoted two episodes on.
It's the Romana Didolo cult up in Canada.
There's a woman who claims that she is the Queen of Canada and she has her own special flag and she rents an RV and she makes her own currency and she drives around with this following and she convinces her followers,
for example, that they don't need to pay their mortgage or their utility bills because she, as Queen of Canada, has...
Has all that taken care of for them?
And that ends as disastrously as you imagine.
And it is really horrifying to see these people basically, you know, really wreck their lives because they believe that this woman is somehow took over the country and is now solving all the social problems.
So that's another one that's essentially a weird QAnon offshoot cult that's ongoing and very disturbing.
I have come across that lady, and it is appealing to have somebody take care of your taxes.
We recommend that.
That's the message, Rob.
Look, thanks, Travis, for making time in your evening to speak to us.
We'll let you get back to it.
It's great to have a bit of time to speak to somebody who shares their interest in why people believe strange things, and congratulations on the success with QAnon Anonymous.
It's a fun and engaging delivery, and it manages to explore the sort of fascinating and disturbing phenomena of QAnon in a way that doesn't leave people feeling hopelessly depressed.
So congratulations.
Most of the time.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
And that was Travis.
That was QAnon Anonymous host, Travis Vuey, discussing...
A variety of topics.
So many!
A man who knows a thing or two about QAnon.
You would have to agree, I think, Chris.
Yes, yes.
And a man after our own heart in the approach, I think he adopts the looking at these kind of topics.
So I found it...
A very informative exchange.
Yeah, for me...
Mainly one direction.
Yeah, mainly one direction.
You know, one of the more interesting things he pointed out was how he wasn't, like, too concerned just about QAnon as an extremist fringe group, which...
It is in many ways, but he wasn't quite as concerned about QAnon as some of these other kind of militia-type scary groups.
Do you remember, Chris, how he explained how they...
Because their dark conspiracy also includes kind of like this fantasy of this Q figure and the various other agents working in...
And Trump, yeah.
And that these fantastical figures were going to sort everything out.
It's got like a salvation aspect to it as well, which means that they're a bit more passive and a bit more recreational about it.
So I thought that was interesting.
I didn't know that about QAnon.
I hadn't thought about that.
Yeah, I think it helps to just think of these things as having a variety of strands in them.
This little bit reminds me of whenever I was doing my...
Research on religious traditions.
And, you know, people have this idea, if you say, like, Taoism, of a specific tradition, right?
But when you look, even, especially, like, in the early days, it's all these different groups, right, that, like, take different things seriously, have different approaches, and there's kind of cores which go together, but you can kind of distinguish out groups that have very different...
Even if there's, you know, commonality.
And I think QAnon is a bit like that, that there are groups which are definitely more sinister, more concerning.
None of them are particularly good, let's face it.
But there are versions which I think are more like the, you know, the traditional JFK conspiracy theorists that, you know, like a bit recreational, ancient alien kind of stuff.
I mean, it's still...
It still has that kind of right-wing militia aspect to it, which is concerning.
But I do think there's a bunch of different strands within it and that there are ones which are less concerning or at least, you know, yeah, not more extreme than stuff we'd seen before.
One thing I've never understood about QAnon, Chris, maybe you know the answer to this, is why all the funny costumes?
And I'm not just talking about the guy with the bear hat and the horns, but, you know, often with interviews and stuff like that with QAnon people, they're often wearing extremely flamboyant, surreal costumes that seem to bear little connection to anything apart.
What's going on?
Americans, Matt.
Americans, of course.
You know, that's just their normal lifestyle.
It's like the real street performers in Las Vegas.
What's going on?
Well, that's probably part of it, too, is Las Vegas and Florida being overrepresented in those.
But yeah, maybe they absorbed through osmosis the...
Peacocking of the pickup artists.
So they've all got their, you know, a big clock or their, you know, their noose costume or whatever, you know, that could be it.
But I think it's just the people that are on the news are usually, you know, selected for a particular effect.
So, yeah.
No, it's a Trump rally.
Like a Trump rally.
There's bound to be some normal.
Probably.
I liked your first diagnosis.
Americans.
That's it.
It's just Americans.
It is.
They're all crazy.
All crazy.
Yeah, they're all just...
Every jack of them.
They're all saying awesome and incredible.
That was superb.
And these, you know, kind of words that you don't need to use for anything.
Yeah.
They're always asking you, like, how was your lunch?
Like, yeah.
They're always asking you, like, how was your lunch?
And telling you to have a heavenly day and things like that.
What's wrong with them?
Yeah, something's up.
Something's up.
Don't trust any of them.
Anyway, we like Americans.
We're just having fun.
We're just having fun.
We know, we've talked to Robert Wright about this.
There's lots of different varieties of Americans.
Some of them aren't like that.
So that's some of them, a couple of you.
Now, Matt, after that, after alienating a substantial portion of our listenership, let's alienate more by reviewing the reviews that we've received recently.
And I will say, still, People haven't done a fantastic job of generating new reviews.
I still have a limited selection to go from, but I've got a good one and a bad one for this week, so it's okay.
It's okay, but, you know, come on!
Well, you've got one job!
Everyone's sick of reviewing us.
The people I wanted to have done it.
This is true.
Yeah.
Just don't fall prey to the bystander effect.
Don't assume someone else will do it.
It's on you.
Good try, Chris.
All right.
Read him out.
Give us the first one.
Right.
So, the negative one.
I like this.
Infuriating.
One star out of five.
This is by Andrew Walton.
So, you know, great man.
Left his real name.
If that is your real name.
Wow.
Your interview with Sam Harris was painful.
You're disingenuous and cynical, and your holier-than-thou attitude makes people hate educated people like you.
You're a bad faith interlocutor, plain and simple.
Now, Matt, I thought that was unfairly targeted at you.
You know, in the Sam Harris interview, I thought you were relatively reasonable.
Well, we get this feedback a lot that you were just hammering Sam in that.
You're my hate magnet, Chris.
You just have taken all the hate and it makes you stronger.
I like it.
Yeah, look, I think that phrase, bad faith interlocutor.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, but he's just cribbed it from somewhere.
That's one of these stock phrases.
Are you accusing him of being a GPT?
Critic bot?
I know, just an NPC.
Oh, just an NPC.
Yeah, that's the worst.
ChatGPT could do it better.
Well, my issue with this is not, like, as a review, you know, content analysis-wise, I'd actually give it pretty good marks because I think...
Consistent message.
Concisely delivered.
And, you know, not too much beating around.
Get straight to the point.
It's good.
And a real name.
That's what I like to see.
My objection, though, Matt, is what is he doing?
How long ago did we talk to Sam Harris?
It's like...
Years ago now, isn't it?
Like five years, ten years ago, who knows how many?
He's listened to a very old episode and then been like, I must leave my review about this episode.
And just, come on.
Chris, come on.
That's fine.
I mean, what's the back catalogue for if not for people to listen to it?
But if you go back and make yourself angry, that's your own fault.
It's not our fault.
So you can't, I feel, if you go into the back catalogue.
It's on you.
People have warned you what is going to be there.
And if you're a Sam Harris fan, we need to put a trigger warning on it.
Chris, I'm just loving this because you know what's going to happen.
You know, the internet is forever.
Once the content is up there, it's in the cloud, it's never giving away.
One day, you're going to be in a retirement home strapped to your VR milking machine or whatever it is, or they've got you in.
And you're going to look at your little device, whatever they're using, and you're going to be getting hate.
For the Sam Harris interview.
It'll say, why did you disparage the 56th president, Sam AI bot Harris?
The interview you conducted in 2021 or whenever it was.
But yeah, so that was the negative review, Matt.
We'll accept that.
We graciously accept that.
We welcome the feedback.
Thank you for your comments, Andrew.
And now for somebody sensible.
And this one says, pressured to review.
And this is from Yebra74.
Five stars.
That's the critical point.
But it says, terrible podcast.
Five stars.
If I could, I'd give more.
Good.
Good.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's a, you know, one of those.
Modern irony post things, Matt.
You know, the kids today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's considered clever by the kids these days, to be contradictory.
Well, yeah, and by us, because we told people to do that.
They can write negative reviews and leave five stars.
That's the way to do it.
Yeah, but they need to elaborate on how terrible we are whilst giving us a five-star review.
And expressing their excitement about hearing more.
It's going to confuse some people, though, because we've got quite a few of those reviews.
So imagine if you were reading it and you're just like, this is the worst podcast ever, five stars.
This is a podcast that's listened to by people with multiple personality disorder or something.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, and we did get a review that called us a pair of better meals.
Beta Meals, attempting to validate themselves by tirelessly repeating the propaganda.
And the title of that review is Beta Meals.
I like that one.
But crucially, just to check whether it's tongue-in-cheek or not, how many stars?
One star, and it's from Ben Genius.
We're legitimate Beta Meals.
And no, sorry, Sigma.
Sigma?
Come on.
Obviously Sigmas.
So, yeah, but that's our reviews for this week, Matt.
Did you enjoy that?
That's okay.
Yep, I'll take it.
I'll take it.
Very good.
All right, tell us about our lovely, lovely Patreons.
Oh, yeah, I will.
I will.
And, yeah, I'm still, I just am always very upset about the tracking on this.
It's just a constant source of pain for me.
You know what you should have done.
You know what you should have done.
Instead of promising that you're going to get to everyone, it should have been a lucky dip.
Like every week, what we do is we read out, whatever, five random names.
And it's like a random prize draw every week.
And, you know, you could get called out twice, three times, five times.
You could be one of the lucky ones.
You could just never get, you know, the tension, the frisson, attract people.
Well, that would have been useful, but I can't, well, maybe, you know, we'll have a chat.
Let's discuss this further.
So, I'm going to shout out people.
That's what I'm going to do, Matt.
It is actually much like you described.
It's a lottery.
It's a lottery.
And so, this week, conspiracy hypothesizers, we have...
Hugo Hewson, Ed74, Tom Hihiman, Nonacle3, Matthew Benjamin, Fenner, Dan Spencer,
Peter Moon, Lalit Varada, Al Usher, Alric Lopez, and Xiaoxiao Li.
Well done, Chris.
Thank you, everybody.
Conspiracy hypothesizers, Matt.
And just for a little change.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions.
And they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Yes.
So that is our conspiracy hypothesizers.
Revolutionary thinkers, Matt, You know them?
Revolutionary geniuses, Chris, but yes.
It depends on the week where we refer to them as revolutionary geniuses or thinkers.
They're actually, you know, one thing about them is they're quite sometimes hard to detect.
You have to look carefully, but I did see one, Emma.
I also saw Anna Garrett, Martin Pelchat, Paul Bowman.
And then I was looking around and found British waters.
And last, Matt, I saw Patrick Nilsson with the Bullshido account.
So, yeah, that's what I saw on our revolutionary thinkers, geniuses, whatever the case might be.
That's good.
That's good.
Well, we see you.
You are seen.
And for a little throwback, maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
That was the old clip, Matt.
I just thought, you know, just for a little...
Change and bring back the other one, you know, just messing things up.
Well, a variety to spice a life.
I mean, the classic ones are not as good as the new ones, but still, it's good.
That's right.
So now the Galaxy Brain level, the tippy-top of the Patron hierarchy, the most actualized.
In many ways, they're, you know, the top of the competence hierarchy.
First among equals.
Yes.
Yeah.
And again, difficult to spot.
Difficult to spot in certain ways.
So we have Sean Chinnery.
We have...
They're a bit rare.
Rarer than we would like.
You're right.
You're right.
They're very hard to spot in this particular format that I have things.
Jesus, they're rare, Matt.
That's okay.
The kind of things you wouldn't even see across multiple pages as you scrolled.
There's one.
Kim Young-Poon.
Kim Young-Poon.
So, thank you to Kim.
Then...
Maybe that's enough.
There's one more, Matt.
There's bound to be one more lurking amongst the grass.
There, there's one.
Alicia Mahoney.
Alicia Mahoney.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, everyone.
And for everyone else, look, you see how difficult you're making Chris's life by not being a top-tier patron?
I mean, I don't want you to feel bad about yourselves, but you saw the difficulties he was experiencing there.
You know, you could do something about it.
Up to you.
You don't have to.
It's optional.
I'll edit them to 50% less painful, but they are still going to be there.
And, you know, I'll just say that Dan Lev...
And Eric Quirk, they don't need to worry about it because they are also galaxy-free and contributors.
You stuck a couple more in there, right?
Okay, that's fine.
It's breaking the format, but that's okay.
And they've got this to thank them as well.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
You certainly don't.
And they don't trust you anymore, Scott, Adam.
Sorry, you've been cancelled, my friend.
You know, just as a fine little treat, Chris, for our listeners, I'd like to do something as a surprise.
Okay.
You going to wrap?
No, to express my appreciation for everybody, I'm going to read out, because it's sitting right in front of me, The titles of the recommended James Lindsay videos on YouTube.
These are the ones that are sitting in front of me.
The Woke Rejection of the Reasonable.
Yep.
Introducing Counter-Woke Craft.
Who's Counter-Woke Craft?
Wow.
Antonio Gransky, Cultural Marxism, Wokeness and Leninism 4.0.
4.0?
Are we up to 4.0?
There's been three previous versions.
He's improved his...
It's analysis.
Amazing.
What radicalized you, James Lindsay?
I don't know.
Yeah.
It was his Joe Rogan appearance.
It's a disappointing answer.
People being mentioned on Twitter.
Woke, Mao, and the American Cultural Revolution.
There we go.
It's all happening all over again.
Hegel, wokeness, and the dialectical faith of leftism.
Jesus Christ.
I know, it's insane.
Theoretical lensing, totalitarianism and the progressive impulse, ideological totalism in the woke cult.
Bit of a theme there, isn't it?
He's running out of the ways to re-orige those adjectives.
It's going to be...
Full marks for consistency, though.
He's sticking with the plan, sticking with the agenda.
Yeah, that's it.
Let's consign him to the dust heap.
And listen, the next guru we're going to cover, it'll be a woman.
They'll have a Y chromosome because we haven't had a female guru in a while and we're trying to get a bit more for this season.
So we haven't decided who it is yet.
We've had suggestions.
People want us to do Oprah.
We're also putting out feelers to having some non-guru.
Interesting, intelligent guests of the female persuasion.
And we're just waiting for some positive answers there, too.
Well, yeah.
But we don't even need to say it, Matt, because it's so obvious.
So obvious.
They're always there.
They're just the feelings are always attempting to reach women.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's fine to say that.
That's the way to say it.
Yes, that's normal.
Yeah, so good job, Matt.
Well done.
Thank you, Travis.
Good luck out there.
Watch out for the key to the institutional narrative and the distributed idea-suppressing complex.
