Knowledge Fight - #781: Chatting With Will Sommer
Aired: 2023-02-27
Duration: 01:20:12


=== Bright Spot Speedrun (03:48) ===

[00:00:11]  Knowledge Fight.
[00:00:16]  I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys.
[00:00:29]  Knowledge Fight.
[00:00:29]  Dan and George.
[00:00:30]  Knowledge.
[00:00:31]  Fight.
[00:00:32]  Need money.
[00:00:36]  Andy in Kansas.
[00:00:40]  Stop it.
[00:00:42]  Andy in Kansas.
[00:00:44]  It's time to pray.
[00:00:46]  Andy in Kansas.
[00:00:47]  You're on the air.
[00:00:49]  I love you.
[00:00:59]  Hey, everybody.
[00:01:00]  Welcome back to Knowledge Fight.
[00:01:02]  I'm Dan.
[00:01:02]  I'm Jordan.
[00:01:03]  We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones.
[00:01:08]  Oh, indeed we are, Dan.
[00:01:10]  Uh, Jordan.
[00:01:10]  Dan.
[00:01:11]  Jordan.
[00:01:11]  Quick question.
[00:01:12]  Yeah.
[00:01:12]  What's your bright spot today, buddy?
[00:01:14]  My bright spot today is I have rekindled my love of Sonic.
[00:01:17]  I was telling you just before we started recording that I need to stop ordering Sonic.
[00:01:21]  Yes.
[00:01:22]  We are not talking about Sonic the Hedgehog, to be clear.
[00:01:25]  We are talking about Sonic the Restaurant.
[00:01:26]  Although there's overlap, because Sonic loves chili dogs.
[00:01:29]  You are right.
[00:01:30]  And the thing that I love at Sonic is the fact that they will deliver a chili dog to you.
[00:01:34]  Oh, shit, you're a hedgehog.
[00:01:34]  Yep.
[00:01:35]  I'm very fast.
[00:01:37]  I love rings.
[00:01:40]  I'm constantly being...
[00:01:42]  Both onion and non.
[00:01:43]  I'm constantly being plagued by an evil scientist named Eggman.
[00:01:47]  There's a lot of overlap between me and Sonic.
[00:01:49]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:01:49]  But yeah, I have recently been eating a ton of Sonic, and man, it's just great.
[00:01:53]  It's a dark bright spot, though, because I need to stop.
[00:01:56]  Right, right, right.
[00:01:57]  Because it's too much.
[00:01:57]  Yeah, I mean, there is a little bit of the...
[00:02:00]  Man, heroin is great in that bright spot.
[00:02:02]  Have you tried it?
[00:02:03]  It is good.
[00:02:04]  I gotta quit, but I'm telling you.
[00:02:06]  Good stuff.
[00:02:06]  It's good stuff.
[00:02:07]  It works for what they say it's gonna do.
[00:02:10]  You know, it promises and it delivers.
[00:02:13]  What's your bright spot?
[00:02:14]  My bright spot is, Dan, as you know, I've been playing video games on the Twitch streams.
[00:02:20]  You have.
[00:02:21]  You've been trying to speedrun.
[00:02:22]  I've been trying to speedrun.
[00:02:23]  I've been learning it.
[00:02:25]  So far, I'm about 30 hours into a 7 or 8 hour speedrun.
[00:02:30]  And I did finally defeat...
[00:02:33]  A boss.
[00:02:34]  Whoa.
[00:02:35]  For people who know FF7, they'll know that carry armor is a boss in the game that is difficult even if you are playing it casually.
[00:02:43]  Even if you're powerful and overleveled and all that stuff, it can still be difficult.
[00:02:48]  And to beat it the way that I did through trickery and exploiting the game's own resources against it, it was an achievement.
[00:02:57]  I was very happy with it.
[00:02:59]  Congratulations.
[00:03:00]  When you were fighting him, were you working with that guy who has a gun for an arm?
[00:03:04]  Yes.
[00:03:05]  No, not him.
[00:03:06]  That silly guy who's got a gun for an arm?
[00:03:08]  Not on this fight.
[00:03:08]  No, no, no, no.
[00:03:09]  I've got the guy who flies the spaceship with the spear.
[00:03:12]  I don't know if I know that guy.
[00:03:13]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:14]  Sounds cool, though.
[00:03:14]  Hey, he's pretty chill.
[00:03:16]  So, Jordan, today we have a little bit of a special episode.
[00:03:20]  We've got a guest.
[00:03:22]  To chat with us.
[00:03:24]  And we're very thrilled to have him here.
[00:03:26]  So I'd like to welcome onto the podcast from the Daily Beast political reporter Will Sommer.
[00:03:33]  Thanks for joining us.
[00:03:34]  And first of all, what is your bright spot?
[00:03:37]  Oh, man.
[00:03:37]  My bright spot is I've gotten sucked into this Netflix show.
[00:03:40]  I think it's called Perfect Match.
[00:03:42]  It's kind of like Super Smash Brothers for Netflix dating shows.

=== Nick Lachey's Bizarre Show (04:27) ===

[00:03:45]  They bring on all the villains and they have to date one another.
[00:03:49]  What?
[00:03:51]  It's kind of like Road Rules Real World Challenge, I guess.
[00:03:54]  Okay.
[00:03:55]  Now you're talking.
[00:03:56]  It's truly twisted.
[00:03:57]  A friend of mine told me about this, and I was like, you simpleton.
[00:04:00]  I don't have time for this garbage.
[00:04:01]  I guess I'll put it on for ten minutes, and now it's five episodes in.
[00:04:06]  It's truly bizarre, and I feel very guilty that I recognize each of these characters.
[00:04:11]  I have to be honest.
[00:04:13]  I want to end this episode right now and watch this.
[00:04:16]  I didn't know this existed.
[00:04:18]  If you're describing it as the real world rules challenge, something I still cannot say without difficulty.
[00:04:26]  There are competitions then.
[00:04:28]  They have to Both date each other and, like, run up a hill fast.
[00:04:33]  Very mild competitions.
[00:04:35]  I mean, the ultimate competition is finding love, really.
[00:04:38]  And, you know, they have these moments where they keep adding people to the house from, you know, it's like, oh, it's Bartice from Love is Blind.
[00:04:45]  And so then there's kind of musical chairs where people have to pair up by the end of the night or get banished from the house.
[00:04:51]  And so there's a lot of, like, it gets very intense.
[00:04:54]  Like, you know, it's like the three people who aren't picked are sitting on the couch and they're like, well, I guess.
[00:04:59]  I find you least objectionable.
[00:05:01]  You know, would you like to come to my room?
[00:05:02]  And it really is.
[00:05:04]  It's kind of like a Hunger Games feel to it.
[00:05:06]  Right.
[00:05:07]  So it combines the misery of being unpopular in high school with the misery of being the last chosen to be on your dodgeball team in junior high.
[00:05:16]  Exactly.
[00:05:16]  Exactly.
[00:05:16]  I mean, of course, you know, Nick Lachey is hosting.
[00:05:19]  So, I mean, it's the whole package.
[00:05:21]  Of course Nick Lachey is hosting.
[00:05:24]  Of course Nick Lachey is hosting.
[00:05:26]  Former.
[00:05:27]  Husband of Jessica Simpson.
[00:05:29]  That's right.
[00:05:30]  Writer of the greatest Disney song, the one that plays over the end credits of Mulan.
[00:05:35]  Do you remember that video that 98 Degrees had?
[00:05:38]  I think there was that song, This I Promise You.
[00:05:41]  It was a really romantic song.
[00:05:44]  And the video was really sincerely romantic.
[00:05:46]  And then I think at the end, it's revealed that the dude is Screech.
[00:05:51]  I think Screech made a cameo.
[00:05:53]  It's Diamond Dustin?
[00:05:54]  Or Dustin Diamond?
[00:05:55]  That's Diamond Dustin.
[00:05:57]  That was his wrestler name.
[00:05:58]  Diamond Dustin Page.
[00:05:59]  Yeah, Diamond Dustin Page.
[00:06:00]  The DDP.
[00:06:01]  If I were Nick Lachey, I would have vetoed that.
[00:06:07]  I'm looking at this because I've never heard of this show, and it sounds fantastic.
[00:06:12]  I'm looking at this, and I'm seeing...
[00:06:15]  Just a list of shows that these people are from that I have never heard of.
[00:06:21]  I don't think I would recognize any of these people.
[00:06:24]  Well, it's, you know, they have kind of some of the more famous ones, so like Love is Blind or The Circle, and then they have Sexy Beast, which, I don't know if you guys remember this, this is where people were, they went on dates.
[00:06:34]  Wasn't that a gangster movie in the early aughts?
[00:06:36]  It's an homage to Ben Kingsley's performance.
[00:06:39]  I want to say that was Ben Kingsley's gangster movie in the early aughts!
[00:06:44]  Ben Kingsley is on the show!
[00:06:46]  He is on the show!
[00:06:47]  Get ready, Nick Lachey!
[00:06:49]  I want Sir Ben Kingsley!
[00:06:51]  Kingsley's a contestant.
[00:06:53]  So in this show, they dress up in basically fursuits.
[00:06:57]  So it's like you're dressed up as a dolphin and you go on a date.
[00:07:01]  They really run the gamut.
[00:07:03]  They really kind of scrape the bottom of the barrel from some of the lesser-known shows.
[00:07:08]  Nice.
[00:07:09]  I hope it gets another season and they dig into some of the older dating shows like Shipmates.
[00:07:22]  Shipmates?
[00:07:23]  That's another Chris Hardwick one.
[00:07:25]  I said Chris Hardwick earlier today.
[00:07:27]  They made people who would not get along go on a date on a ship so they couldn't leave.
[00:07:35]  What was the other one that Hardwick hosted with Jennifer?
[00:07:40]  That was Singled Out.
[00:07:43]  McCarthy.
[00:07:44]  Yeah, Singled Out.
[00:07:45]  I remember that one because it was so sad.
[00:07:46]  That was the MTV one.
[00:07:47]  Yeah.
[00:07:48]  That was less a dating show and more like a weird spectacle.
[00:07:53]  Yeah.
[00:07:54]  Whereas, Shipmates, there was one episode where a guy who thought he was Chuck Norris went on a date with a lady on a boat, and they hated each other so much that he threw her off a pier.

=== Queen's Loyalty Joke (15:40) ===

[00:08:08]  It's terrible.
[00:08:09]  So that is the ultimate Chuck Norris joke.
[00:08:12]  And then there was another one where a guy hated the lady he was on a date with so much that he spent most of his time drinking, calling her a psycho, and then just being like, well, date wasn't going good, so I just went back to the casino.
[00:08:25]  Ah, that's a man who knows what he's doing.
[00:08:28]  Such a good show.
[00:08:30]  They don't make him like that anymore.
[00:08:31]  Well, after discussing reality TV for quite some time, I think now is the ironic time to reveal you have written a book!
[00:08:40]  Yes, yes.
[00:08:42]  It's called Trust the Plan, the Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America.
[00:08:46]  And, you know, it's sort of the culmination of five years of reporting on QAnon for me.
[00:08:51]  And I kind of, you know, travel across America exploring how QAnon and conspiracy theories in general have just, you know, kind of wreaked havoc in all sorts of different ways.
[00:09:01]  So you said you traveled across America, and I'm imagining you in like an RV, just going around, finding anybody with a Q flag.
[00:09:12]  How did you choose people?
[00:09:14]  I also imagine you dressed like Guy Fieri in the same example.
[00:09:18]  Sunglasses on the back of your head.
[00:09:19]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:20]  How did you choose people that you would talk to or profile?
[00:09:27]  Yeah, very good question.
[00:09:28]  Well, I do love the idea that, you know, you see these QAnon bumper stickers and kind of honk honk and like, pull over!
[00:09:37]  I mean, pretend like, your car is smoking!
[00:09:40]  I need to help you!
[00:09:41]  How did you get these beliefs?
[00:09:43]  Just immediately putting a microphone in their face.
[00:09:46]  Sir, could you please show me your ID and tell me why you believe in QAnon?
[00:09:49]  I mean, it was so many just people I encountered in my reporting at The Daily Beast who were just – I felt like they were just so fascinating that I had to write a book.
[00:09:58]  And so it was people like Vincent Fusca, the guy who masquerades as JFK Jr. and goes to these things and everyone says, oh my god, it's JFK Jr.
[00:10:08]  And he drove me crazy because I thought, this guy knows he's not JFK Jr.
[00:10:12]  And he's constantly dodging me and saying like, well, maybe I'll talk about that later.
[00:10:16]  And then dodging my messages.
[00:10:19]  And then, you know, kind of getting heated whenever there would be a rival impersonator and say, like, you see this guy?
[00:10:25]  And so...
[00:10:30]  Or Austin Steinbart, this kind of Q impersonator, as though we all know Q is a real guy whose memories shouldn't be tarnished.
[00:10:39]  He kind of set up a compound out in the desert in Arizona, and this woman called me and said, my sister has been sucked into Austin Steinbart's orbit.
[00:10:47]  Can you get her out?
[00:10:48]  And so I traveled out there and kind of hung out with his crew.
[00:10:52]  And the FBI got involved, and they had a bunch of guns.
[00:10:57]  There's a lot packed into the book.
[00:11:00]  I'm glad I'm on Knowledge Fight because you guys know the mix of tragedy and comedy that goes into these conspiracy theories and these movements is really a rich thing to cover.
[00:11:11]  Yeah, there's a surreality that it's hard not to appreciate, but at the same time, the pathos.
[00:11:18]  Yeah.
[00:11:18]  No, when you go through the personal stories, a lot of the testimonials, a lot of the histories that people have with their families and all these things, I think you do a really good job of both recognizing and putting forward that, yes, these are ridiculous theories, while at the same time presenting a very good...
[00:11:41]  Recognition that these people are also victims of QAnon and that kind of situation.
[00:11:47]  So a lot of your paragraphs do have a bit of knowledge fight to them insofar as it's like, look at this sad thing and here's why it's funny and this is a sad thing and it's fascinating.
[00:11:58]  Yeah, you have to go back and forth because, you know, it is so ridiculous on its face.
[00:12:02]  I mean, a guy who read it recently was saying, you know, reminded him of Terry Pratchett, just how off the wall it is.
[00:12:08]  And then you have to say, well, you know, this is sad.
[00:12:10]  This person's going to lose their house or they've alienated everyone close to them.
[00:12:13]  But at the same time, you have to say, but it is also really crazy.
[00:12:17]  You just can't make this stuff up.
[00:12:18]  That guy's not actually JFK Jr.
[00:12:20]  I don't know why I've ever needed to say that before in my life, but I do today.
[00:12:25]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:12:26]  There's a tough balance of trying to be entirely hostile to the ideas and the people who maybe profit off the ideas at the expense of other people while expressing empathy for the people who are taken for that ride.
[00:12:46]  Will, can I ask you, because I think the book does a fairly good job of making it clear.
[00:12:54]  I think I would like to hear from you.
[00:12:56]  There is a through line through so many of these personal stories of loss of some sort.
[00:13:04]  Could you talk a little bit about how many or how similar a lot of these stories are?
[00:13:10]  Yeah, I think a lot of times when someone gets into QAnon or another conspiracy theory in a really hardcore enough way that I end up writing about them, you can kind of...
[00:13:20]  There's often sort of a key that unlocks it, and you can sort of see the path.
[00:13:23]  And often they identify it.
[00:13:25]  They'll say, well, this thing happened to me, and that's why QAnon appealed to me.
[00:13:29]  You know, for example, one guy who ended up in the Austin Steinbart group, he had this kind of crazy disease.
[00:13:34]  I think he had cancer and ended up on disability and or couldn't get his disability approved.
[00:13:39]  He couldn't work.
[00:13:40]  So he's kind of angry at the world and the government.
[00:13:42]  And then he discovers QAnon and says, well, wait.
[00:13:45]  You know, no wonder this world is so screwed up.
[00:13:47]  It's because of this cabal.
[00:13:48]  Or, you know, someone like I wrote about a woman who got into QAnon during the pandemic and she was sort of cut off from everyone and, you know, she was sort of a shut in.
[00:13:56]  And then as a result, you know, she was an easy mark for QAnon.
[00:13:59]  So often there is kind of this or there's sort of an eccentricity this person's into really deep into Bitcoin.
[00:14:06]  They have all these kind of Internet enthusiasms.
[00:14:08]  And then QAnon comes in and they, you know, again, really go off the deep end for that.
[00:14:12]  Well, so many things like that, they are launching points so perfectly, because QAnon, much like a lot of other conspiracies, can...
[00:14:26]  Metastasize to accommodate things.
[00:14:28]  Like, if you're super into Bitcoin, then it's like, well, let me tell you about Nesera.
[00:14:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:32]  You know, or the financial system conspiracies.
[00:14:37]  It's so good to be, I feel like I'm amongst my people, someone who just casually drops a Nesera.
[00:14:44]  Terry Gross isn't bringing Nesera to you, I'll tell you that right now.
[00:14:47]  Yeah.
[00:14:48]  Take that, NPR!
[00:14:50]  I just saw your budget, Godslash, I'm really sorry.
[00:14:53]  But that's what I find so, like, it's so, I don't even know what the right word is, but it's so accommodating of what is plaguing people.
[00:15:07]  That's an interesting aspect of its danger.
[00:15:12]  I mean, that's kind of the genius of QAnon and so many of these other kind of conspiracy theories we have going now is that they're really big tent movements.
[00:15:18]  And in the case of QAnon, the clues are so vague that you can kind of make it about whatever you want.
[00:15:23]  You can say, you know, well, this was predicting the pandemic or, you know, this was predicting the Chinese balloons or really whatever you want.
[00:15:30]  From people I talk to, and in particular with QAnon and the Nesera aspect that's been built into it, they have this kind of utopian vision for after the storm, after Donald Trump kind of seizes power and imposes a fascist America.
[00:15:44]  Obviously, they don't see it that way.
[00:15:46]  But that debts will be abolished, or if you rent a house, you'll own it.
[00:15:51]  And so if you have a ton of credit card debt and you can't realize you'll never be able to afford a house, there's a very personal appeal to that.
[00:16:00]  Or if you want to just declare yourself the Queen of Canada, you can do that.
[00:16:05]  That's, of course, the QAnon Queen of Canada, HRH, Romana Dodulo.
[00:16:12]  There is that sense of if you're kind of alienated from the system and you just say, you know what?
[00:16:18]  I'm going to stop paying my utility bills.
[00:16:20]  This is not a legitimate government.
[00:16:21]  I swear allegiance to the Queen.
[00:16:23]  Sure.
[00:16:24]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:25]  I mean, but to be fair, Canada does, you know, they still have some respect for the Queen of England.
[00:16:30]  Well, no, they do still swear allegiance to the Queen.
[00:16:32]  Yeah, they put themselves in a position for another usurper to come along and declare themselves the rightful.
[00:16:39]  If you still have a king or a queen, that means that I could eventually become your king or queen.
[00:16:44]  I think that's the rule.
[00:16:45]  If I kill your own king...
[00:16:46]  Monarchical systems are fragile that way.
[00:16:48]  Yeah, that's the way it is.
[00:16:50]  Well, I wanted to ask you, what do you feel like?
[00:16:53]  Because there's a lot of, as we've talked about with QAnon, there's a lot of malleability, there's a lot of ability for it to absorb things that seem unrelated into QAnon.
[00:17:05]  What is it that makes the QAnon thing different from so many of these other conspiracy theories?
[00:17:12]  Sure.
[00:17:13]  I mean, I think it's a couple things.
[00:17:14]  I think the clues aspect, the idea of this guy named Q who's kind of dropping all these what they call breadcrumbs.
[00:17:20]  The game aspect of it.
[00:17:22]  Exactly.
[00:17:22]  And so you're part of this broader movement and everyone is in discords kind of baking together, as they say, and kind of figuring it all out.
[00:17:33]  And there's also this aspect of...
[00:17:35]  The point is you're trying to evangelize and you're trying to kind of spread the word in what they call the Great Awakening so that when Tom Hanks is cuffed for drinking children's blood, that there won't be a civil war, that you're trying to spread the word amongst all your neighbors.
[00:17:51]  So it's more active and there's more of this kind of climactic moment in the storm than if you're just getting into, let's say, JFK assassinations and you say, okay, I spent 10 years on this and I think I figured it out.
[00:18:03]  It kind of doesn't go anywhere from there, but there's kind of like, you know, you're going to take on the boss level.
[00:18:10]  There isn't like an idyllic utopianism after the fact with something like JFK.
[00:18:17]  Right.
[00:18:18]  Exactly.
[00:18:19]  I mean, all these sort of conspiracy theories people can get into, whereas QAnon is, you know, it's a fun game and it's a community and someday in their imagining, you know, we'll all live in paradise together and the people who help bring it about will be, you know, highly favored.
[00:18:34]  You know what I'm thinking about right now when you're saying that?
[00:18:37]  You know, the stuff with the idyllic state afterwards and they call it the storm.
[00:18:42]  Right.
[00:18:43]  I don't understand why the band Nelson.
[00:18:46]  Hasn't tried to really make a comeback.
[00:18:50]  Because After the Rain would be a perfect QAnon song.
[00:18:54]  Well, Little Dragon did an After the Rain as well, so you can't get those mixed up.
[00:18:59]  But it's not nearly as rocking as Nelson.
[00:19:03]  It's a different song completely.
[00:19:04]  I agree.
[00:19:05]  Is one of the Nelson brothers dead?
[00:19:07]  I got bad news for you.
[00:19:09]  I know nothing about Nelson.
[00:19:11]  Nelson with the guys with the long blonde hair, is that right?
[00:19:14]  Oh yeah, and I think they were twins.
[00:19:18]  You know, I think you make an interesting point.
[00:19:21]  I mean, there's a lot of kind of like homegrown QAnon music.
[00:19:25]  And, you know, whether it be, you know, I talked to a QAnon promoter who got into it because he was like the QAnon DJ, like he would do the electronica, whereas you have plenty of acoustic guitar guys and all that.
[00:19:37]  Even in QAnon?
[00:19:39]  That was my number one reason to join QAnon, is no more guitar guys.
[00:19:43]  No more guys at parties.
[00:19:44]  Yeah, no more of this.
[00:19:45]  I'm going to play Wonderwall shit.
[00:19:47]  Now it's everywhere.
[00:19:49]  I do like the idea, though, of the QAnon DJ, and there's all these boomer moms and aunts and uncles, and it's just a guy.
[00:19:58]  You know what's crazy?
[00:19:59]  The only song that transcends all boundaries.
[00:20:02]  Even QAnon.
[00:20:03]  Hey-ya.
[00:20:05]  Still kills.
[00:20:06]  Still kills at QAnon.
[00:20:08]  You hear that come on and it just takes you back to 2003.
[00:20:15]  Trying to make a song parody out of this.
[00:20:18]  Can't do it.
[00:20:20]  You cannot do it.
[00:20:22]  Shake it like a Polaroid picture of Tom Hanks drinking blood.
[00:20:27]  You gotta get the meter right.
[00:20:30]  So, Will, the one thing that I keep coming back to whenever I was going through the book is...
[00:20:36]  I want to tell you, Will, Jordan has multiple pages of notes in front of him.
[00:20:41]  I have extensive notes.
[00:20:43]  But something that really stuck out to me, we all know social media is involved with this.
[00:20:51]  We all know that they bear some responsibility for it.
[00:20:54]  I think you do a great job of outlining all of the different connections of where people find this place.
[00:21:00]  Because for a lot of us, we think, oh, they must be going to YouTube, they must be going to stuff like that.
[00:21:06]  But it's really a lot just Facebook, isn't it?
[00:21:09]  Oh, so much of it is just, I mean, so the Q clues are posted, you know, on like 8kun, so sort of the sewers of the internet.
[00:21:17]  But the reality is that, you know, most QAnon believers have never interacted with those sites and bothered to, you know, kind of...
[00:21:24]  Sort through all the anime and the porn and the anime porn, right?
[00:21:28]  So they end up on stuff like Facebook or YouTube.
[00:21:31]  And sometimes, you know, a lot of times even it isn't like, all right, you know, the Facebook group isn't called like number one QAnon fans.
[00:21:39]  You know, it's called, you know, Disturbed About the Corruption.
[00:21:42]  And people are inducted into it in these ways that, you know, I compare it to...
[00:21:53]  Right, right.
[00:22:12]  I mean, it would be nice if they were more transparent about that.
[00:22:16]  But I can understand why you don't want to share that with too many people.
[00:22:20]  It's not something that you want on your voting record.
[00:22:23]  Like, oh, I'm pro-drinking children's blood.
[00:22:25]  I get it.
[00:22:26]  I'm sorry I was absent for a second there.
[00:22:28]  I was making sure that the Nelson twins were still alive.
[00:22:33]  They are!
[00:22:34]  And guys, if you're listening, Matthew Gunner...
[00:22:39]  Co-opt QAnon.
[00:22:41]  I mean, yeah.
[00:22:42]  We have a business opportunity for you.
[00:22:44]  You've got to.
[00:22:45]  Just change the lyrics to After the Storm.
[00:22:47]  It's perfect.
[00:22:48]  It's right there.
[00:22:50]  Anyway, sorry.
[00:22:52]  No, but you, I mean, there's one thing that I keep coming, that like sticks in my craw, though, is that you keep calling it Facebook's algorithm.
[00:23:03]  And to me, that kind of drives me a little bit insane because it's not, Facebook doesn't have an algorithm.
[00:23:09]  It's an algorithm made by people.
[00:23:11]  You know, so for a lot of that, I feel like I get stuck in the weeds of why are we calling it Facebook's algorithm?
[00:23:20]  Is it because corporations are people?

=== Pushing People Towards Extremism (01:32) ===

[00:23:23]  You know, that's a great point.
[00:23:25]  The idea that, you know, I do think sometimes it gets chalked up to, oh, it's just that dang computer.
[00:23:31]  You know, oh well.
[00:23:32]  Yeah.
[00:23:33]  No, there's a person's face behind that algorithm ruining our lives.
[00:23:36]  Yeah, I mean, that's a great point.
[00:23:38]  I mean, the, you know, I think the value of the, to talk about this in the book, is these Facebook leaks showed that Facebook knew that the way they had set up the website, you know, if you just liked Ben Shapiro or Tucker Carlson's Facebook pages, then suddenly it would say, well, you know, then you'll really like, you know, cue Cabal Slayers, this group.
[00:23:57]  So, you know, it is the For a while, these websites were afraid to, oh, well, we don't want to put a finger on the scale and ban conservative groups.
[00:24:07]  But I think it's not a huge ask to say, well, can you not actively recruit for QAnon by pushing people towards these groups?
[00:24:16]  Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
[00:24:18]  Why aren't we regulating the algorithm?
[00:24:20]  Why are we always constantly talking about, oh, free speech or anything along those lines and ignoring that this is being driven by something?
[00:24:29]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:24:30]  I mean, it really isn't that, you know, with so many people, they say, you know, I just load up YouTube and, you know, I click around a couple things and then suddenly it's pushing me into, like, hearing about Wayfair trafficking children and stuff like that.

=== Ping Pong Proofs Make Sense (15:33) ===

[00:24:43]  Right, right, right.
[00:24:46]  Brutal.
[00:24:47]  Which we have still not got to the bottom of, by the way.
[00:24:51]  You know, you never know.
[00:24:54]  Someday.
[00:24:54]  Someday we may.
[00:24:56]  I don't know if I talked about this, but when that happened, the Wayfair conspiracy, it was right after I had ordered a couch from Wayfair.
[00:25:06]  Oh, yeah!
[00:25:07]  And it hadn't been delivered yet, right when everything broke down.
[00:25:11]  Right.
[00:25:11]  And I felt really uncomfortable.
[00:25:12]  And you thought, no wonder this was $25,000.
[00:25:16]  I thought I was going to get in some hot water.
[00:25:20]  I thought I was going to get investigated by all the little bakers out there.
[00:25:25]  I mean, that really is all it takes, you know?
[00:25:27]  Like, I mean, if there were, you know, somehow you had a picture of a Wayfair box in the background, they'd say, look at this sicko, you know?
[00:25:33]  I mean, I said once that I go to Comet Ping Pong, and then ever since then, they kind of made a little meme of, you know, look at this sicko, and they blasted at me.
[00:25:43]  I was seeing somebody.
[00:25:46]  The woman who lives still in D.C., and I came to visit, and we went to Common Ping Pong almost just to try and bait some kind of outrage or something, and it turns out the pizza was fantastic.
[00:26:01]  Oh, no, it's great.
[00:26:02]  I mean, I talk about this in the book.
[00:26:04]  You do.
[00:26:08]  I went to Comic Ping Pong before Pizzagate happened and one night I was just seeing all my conservatives that I follow tweeting about Comic Ping Pong and I thought, these guys aren't so bad.
[00:26:18]  We got similar tastes.
[00:26:20]  Maybe we have some common ground.
[00:26:23]  And then I thought, wait a minute.
[00:26:24]  And obviously they had much more malevolent intentions.
[00:26:28]  Yeah, I was pretty surprised by...
[00:26:30]  I just expected to kind of like...
[00:26:33]  To decent pizza, pretty good.
[00:26:35]  No, it's good.
[00:26:36]  They got some dipping sauces.
[00:26:37]  I mean, it's a legit operation.
[00:26:39]  I do understand kind of why you'd get freaked out by the bathrooms, though.
[00:26:43]  The door does not make sense.
[00:26:45]  I have been there, and I've been, you know, I asked the waiter, where's the bathroom?
[00:26:49]  And then you kind of get there, and it's like, am I an idiot?
[00:26:51]  I can't figure this out.
[00:26:52]  It's just a wall.
[00:26:53]  The fuck is going on here?
[00:26:54]  Yeah, it's kind of like a sliding door situation.
[00:26:57]  Did you ever see Jack Posobiec's video of him going to Comet Ping Pong?
[00:27:03]  Oh yeah, that's really what set me off on it in large part, was this idea that I'm going to go in and investigate Comet Ping Pong, and I thought, well, it's just a restaurant.
[00:27:13]  And of course, now he was at the forefront of that, and now him and these guys like Mike Cernovich will say, oh, it's so unfair, everyone brings up Pizzagate when it comes to me.
[00:27:22]  You think, well, yeah, it's kind of your claim to fame.
[00:27:25]  Yeah, before anyone knew who you were, you were almost crying out of fear because you didn't get your garlic knots.
[00:27:33]  It would be a little bit like if Milli Vanilli were like, all people remember us for is that time we were doing the lip syncing thing.
[00:27:39]  Like, yeah!
[00:27:40]  Yeah, man!
[00:27:41]  Yeah, that's what it is!
[00:27:43]  You got it!
[00:27:47]  Okay, well...
[00:27:48]  Oh, yeah.
[00:27:49]  I was just going to say, I mean, yeah, more, you know, just covering this beat in general, I'll have conservatives call me up and these personalities and say, oh, you know, everyone holds all these awful things I've said against me that I've said against me, you know, and this has ruined my life.
[00:28:02]  And I think, you know, you can be sympathetic on some small way.
[00:28:05]  But at the same time, you know, that's why people tend not to try to whip up hatred against minority groups because it's not a nice thing to do.
[00:28:13]  And then suddenly, you know, they kind of want it to all just go back to normal.
[00:28:16]  So you said that you got some flack for saying you like Comic Ping Pong.
[00:28:24]  Have there been other things that you've done that have gotten QAnon to make you a suspicion?
[00:28:31]  Oh, Will's one of them!
[00:28:32]  Because I remember there was something a while back with people who wore red shoes or something like that.
[00:28:38]  Have you ever run afoul of anything nonsensical like that that's kind of fun?
[00:28:43]  I have to live my life in some bizarre ways to avoid doing exactly that.
[00:28:48]  I mean, yeah, I mean, as you said, the red shoes thing, you know, they are convinced that anyone who wears red shoes is a, you know, you're signaling, you know, it's like your blood-drenched shoes, and so they'll get pictures of, like, Bill Maher in red sneakers, and they're like, look at this guy.
[00:29:02]  You know, symbolism will be his downfall.
[00:29:05]  You know, in this case, you know, I try to avoid pizza at all costs, certainly being photographed with it.
[00:29:12]  This friend of mine, we were at a summer share house, and he brought a big inflatable pizza slice, and I said, do not get that anywhere near Instagram.
[00:29:21]  You know, that picture of me?
[00:29:22]  That is not happening.
[00:29:24]  Because they're just going to say, you know, he's flaunting it.
[00:29:27]  He's throwing it in our faces.
[00:29:29]  Oh, man.
[00:29:30]  Your friends do not even know the amount of life-threatening bullshit they just put you in whenever they have an inflatable pizza nearby.
[00:29:38]  Get that away!
[00:29:39]  Are you kidding me?
[00:29:41]  Are you trying to get me killed?
[00:29:43]  It's so weird that that could just be in more normal circumstances.
[00:29:48]  That could be a fun way for you to troll.
[00:29:52]  But there is a legitimate, I guess, concern of like...
[00:29:55]  Your life could be threatened.
[00:29:57]  I'm going to end up doxxed.
[00:29:58]  I'm going to end up on the wrong side of somebody showing up at my house.
[00:30:03]  Well, I mean, and, you know, really, you just have to, you know, I mean, the sad reality is, you know, especially with so many guns in America, you know, it only takes one person to, you know, as we've seen with other QAnon murders, you know, it only takes one wacko to, you know, make things really serious.
[00:30:19]  Yeah, and that's kind of tragic, because it's a perfect opportunity to do some funny trolling, but the stakes of it are, you know, you live in a place where it's like, well, is it worth it?
[00:30:32]  It's not.
[00:30:32]  Yeah.
[00:30:33]  I mean, you don't, the two of you, but I'm willing to die for a shitty joke.
[00:30:37]  I'll go for it.
[00:30:38]  That's true.
[00:30:39]  I've lived my life that way.
[00:30:41]  Yeah.
[00:30:43]  Jordan's going to get a big pizza slice tattoo on his chest.
[00:30:47]  You don't even know how much I drink children's blood.
[00:30:49]  I drink all of it.
[00:30:52]  I'm going to join the band Nelson.
[00:30:56]  That is my backup plan if this whole podcasting thing falls through.
[00:31:01]  Well, there is a part of the book where you talk about a few examples of people who have left.
[00:31:09]  Could you talk a little bit more about that?
[00:31:11]  Because in the book, it is kind of like there is just some people realize that they're being lied to.
[00:31:19]  Yeah, I mean, it is so sort of personal for each person.
[00:31:23]  And this comes up because people will email me and say, how do I get my spouse or my son or my relative, how do I get them out of QAnon?
[00:31:32]  And it's a heartbreaking question because, number one, I should...
[00:31:36]  There should be a better system than emailing me.
[00:31:39]  And, you know, also, there's not really any easy answer.
[00:31:42]  But from the people who have gotten out of it, it's usually some very specific thing.
[00:31:46]  I mean, there was a guy, one of the, you know, what they call the Q-proofs, which are supposed to be how you prove QAnon is real.
[00:31:53]  So, for example, there was one that Q said.
[00:31:55]  They don't call them Q-proofs?
[00:31:57]  Q-proofs.
[00:31:57]  It's right there.
[00:31:59]  Q-proofs, come on!
[00:32:02]  You know, I like this.
[00:32:03]  I think you're giving him too many good ideas between that and the Nelson stuff.
[00:32:09]  We'll punch up any conspiracy theory for free!
[00:32:12]  That's one of the problems with us.
[00:32:15]  Alex Jones, if he listened to our advice, he would be in a much better place.
[00:32:20]  We just do so much punch-up on terrible conspiracies.
[00:32:23]  We went evil.
[00:32:24]  Oh, we'd be so good at evil.
[00:32:26]  You're watching the broadcast and you're just like, alright, this guy's got no charisma.
[00:32:30]  He's gotta go.
[00:32:31]  It is!
[00:32:33]  Fire him!
[00:32:34]  Get a new one!
[00:32:35]  But yeah, I mean, in terms of, so for example, so one of them was that they interpreted that Q had said Trump will say tippy top at the Easter egg roll.
[00:32:43]  And so then he said that and they said, oh my God, Q's real.
[00:32:48]  Well, you can go back years and Trump is constantly saying tippy top.
[00:32:52]  I mean, it's like him saying huge or telling a story about someone calling him sir.
[00:32:57]  But when they package this in this way, it's very compelling.
[00:32:59]  Well, this ex-QAnon guy, he sees a video debunking this and suddenly That just kind of flipped the gears in his head, and he goes, wait a minute, if that's fake, what else is fake?
[00:33:09]  And then it kind of sends him down a more positive rabbit hole out of it.
[00:33:12]  But really, for all these people, it's very individual, and the advice is to maintain the relationship with someone until they hit that moment, but that's easier said than done.
[00:33:25]  Do you think that there is anything that sort of has connective tissue between people who make that, like find that moment?
[00:33:36]  Like is there some commonality?
[00:33:39]  Yeah, if there's so much in common about how people start in QAnon, is there a similar through-line in how people leave QAnon?
[00:33:49]  Yeah.
[00:33:49]  You know, from the people I talk to, it's always someone who didn't really like being in QAnon, and they sort of felt it was their duty.
[00:33:58]  I talked to this one woman who said, It was just sort of a horrible fact that I had to acknowledge that this was the fate of the world, but I really wasn't happy about it.
[00:34:08]  Whereas a lot of these QAnon people seem to just say, oh, yeah, I'm a digital soldier now.
[00:34:14]  We're these crusaders for God.
[00:34:16]  Oh, I hate these Democrats so much anyway.
[00:34:18]  And it turns out they're all these sickos.
[00:34:20]  Whereas in the case of people who leave, often they spend a lot of time trying to debunk QAnon because they want to believe that it isn't real, even though they're convinced for a while that it isn't.
[00:34:31]  Right, and they're trapped in it by their own need to disprove it.
[00:34:36]  They believe it.
[00:34:37]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:34:38]  And then they spend all this time saying, you know, oh, this awful thing, this has to be fake, right?
[00:34:43]  And for a while, they just can't disprove it.
[00:34:45]  And then when they do, they feel this real sense of relief.
[00:34:47]  That makes sense.
[00:34:49]  Yeah.
[00:34:49]  And it is also a bummer.
[00:34:50]  It's a super huge bummer.
[00:34:53]  Hmm.
[00:34:54]  But it does speak to something that you kind of talk about at the end of the book, and even we've touched on here with how people get out of it and how people get into it, is where else were they supposed to go?
[00:35:07]  These are people who were fucked over.
[00:35:11]  Reasonably, they believe they were fucked over because a lot of them were.
[00:35:14]  You live in America.
[00:35:16]  You're always one fucking hospital bill away from bankruptcy.
[00:35:21]  And then...
[00:35:23]  Then they are given this idea that, okay, it's the government's fault, but nobody's intervening to help them in any direction.
[00:35:32]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:35:34]  And you're hitting on something which is the role that really serious medical issues or medical debt plays, I think, in driving so many people into QAnon or other sort of fringe beliefs.
[00:35:45]  Because, as you said, these are people who are raised with this belief that this is not...
[00:35:51]  Just this incredibly cutthroat country, and if you get one wrong turn, your life is going to be ruined.
[00:35:56]  And then they find that that is the case.
[00:35:58]  Well, it's not an unreasonable belief, you know?
[00:36:00]  Well, right, right, right.
[00:36:01]  No, and then suddenly they hit this kind of skid, and then...
[00:36:05]  Often through no fault of their own, or they have a drug issue or a mental illness issue, and then suddenly they find themselves abandoned, with the exception of the QAnon community, which is more than happy to welcome them and say, you know, this is not just the abysmal state of life, and you're just going to have to deal with it.
[00:36:24]  But they say, well, actually, there are these specific people to blame, and the good news is that, let's say you have cancer and you don't have insurance to get treatment, but the good news is that pretty soon Trump is going to defeat them.
[00:36:35]  The cabal, and we'll get it cured, and everything's going to be great.
[00:36:38]  After the rain, we'll have medbeds.
[00:36:40]  That's true.
[00:36:41]  Oh, of course, medbeds are a great example here.
[00:36:45]  Right.
[00:36:45]  I mean, but again, who else is giving them anything?
[00:36:48]  Who is giving them any hope beyond QAnon?
[00:36:52]  I mean, seemingly, not really anybody.
[00:36:55]  I mean, you know, perhaps churches.
[00:36:57]  I mean, there's a huge overlap here between, you know, some very, like, kind of charismatic evangelical movements and QAnon.
[00:37:04]  So maybe going to churches isn't the worst place.
[00:37:06]  Yeah, right, right.
[00:37:08]  I mean, there's no, you know, these are people who are falling through the cracks, like, you know, and pretty reasonably so, because they're just finding themselves that there's no social safety net to catch them.
[00:37:19]  Yeah, I mean, I keep coming back to so many parts of this book make me feel like these people never had a chance.
[00:37:27]  It is not, I mean, there's so much of this book to me that I read through, and the pathos I have is towards all of these people who are swept up in this that they had no control over.
[00:37:43]  Oh, yeah.
[00:37:44]  I mean, so many people in it who either, you know, just face huge amounts of debt or, you know, have some mental illness that ideally would be treated, and instead they're kind of just shunted off to live with their parents until they, you know, in the case of one guy, allegedly murder a mafia boss, or, you know, all these different things that are kind of just, they just sort of spin out into the world.
[00:38:06]  But how much of that is infantilizing people?
[00:38:09]  You know, I wonder...
[00:38:10]  I mean, you didn't read the book.
[00:38:13]  How much of it, like, saying that people don't have a choice, or don't have a chance, like, people's circumstances greatly can influence them and make them in a place where it makes more sense for them to go down these roads.
[00:38:30]  But offering somebody false hope doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a choice of, like, accepting that maybe situations are bleak.
[00:38:41]  Right.
[00:38:42]  Okay, so then your choice is between false hope and just accepting that there's nothing you can do about the miseries of the world.
[00:38:50]  Well, maybe not nothing you can do, but there is no magical silver-bullety solution.
[00:38:59]  Right.
[00:38:59]  I'm just adding in this when this is happening, when these people are fucked over, and then they go to QAnon.
[00:39:09]  When they're fucked over is the point of intervention.
[00:39:11]  That makes sense.
[00:39:13]  Yeah.
[00:39:13]  You know, we're fighting the symptom of us not intervening towards anybody doing any good.
[00:39:20]  Sure.
[00:39:22]  You know, I think that's a great point.
[00:39:24]  Obviously, a lot of people face hard issues in their lives and do not become QAnon believers, fortunately, or in particular, do not sort of act out in the ways of the most extreme QAnon believers.
[00:39:35]  But, you know, at the same time, I do think it's certainly valuable to understand, you know, what drives people to it.
[00:39:41]  And I think the point of intervention, that's a good way to put it.
[00:39:44]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:39:46]  I mean, because we obviously know, beyond a shadow of any reasonable doubt any human being could have, that arguing with these people is not the way to go.
[00:39:58]  Yeah, that is certainly the case.

=== Educating Against Conspiracy Theories (11:30) ===

[00:40:02]  I talked to people in the book who said, okay, I'm going to gear up and I'm going to become the ultimate QAnon debunker and I'm going to sit my kid down and run him through it and then we'll just leave this QAnon thing in the past.
[00:40:14]  But I was talking to someone who said, well, just show them the FBI statistics about human trafficking.
[00:40:20]  It's not as widespread as people think.
[00:40:22]  And then they'll say, well, let me tell you about the FBI.
[00:40:25]  You know, and, you know, you can go on and on.
[00:40:28]  Whereas people, you know, at the same time, they'll see some guy with a rumble channel as the most honest person out there.
[00:40:34]  Well, I mean, he's not beholden to the MSM, you know?
[00:40:38]  Right.
[00:40:39]  But, I mean, you know, that seems to me then, based upon what we're saying, is, like, the best way to stop QAnon is a single payer.
[00:40:49]  You know?
[00:40:50]  Like, it is a situation where we're describing...
[00:40:57]  Yeah, I mean, and as you said, I mean, that sort of ends up being my conclusion as sort of ineffective as that is.
[00:41:06]  It's sort of just to say, well, I sure wish America was nicer to people.
[00:41:10]  Hopefully that'll happen, but probably not.
[00:41:12]  Right!
[00:41:13]  But isn't that like, I think that's so true of a lot of the kind of more nefarious ends of conspiracy.
[00:41:20]  You know, like QAnon or otherwise is the ultimate solutions to them have nothing to do really with the conspiracy itself.
[00:41:31]  There's a more grounded problem that's being...
[00:41:35]  Fictionally solved by the conspiracy theory.
[00:41:38]  Yeah, I've thought of one solution.
[00:41:43]  I thought of a solution.
[00:41:46]  Nobody's going to like it.
[00:41:48]  I bet I'm not.
[00:41:50]  So, here is what I feel like people are doing wrong.
[00:41:56]  By debunking and fact-checking, you are not giving these people what they want.
[00:42:03]  Which is...
[00:42:04]  Learning.
[00:42:06]  And I think what we should do is teach them about a real conspiracy theory and what it takes to prove it and give them an idea of what the burden of proof actually is for a conspiracy theory.
[00:42:20]  That doesn't sound fun.
[00:42:22]  I think personally we should spend all of our time telling people about how Bush and Blair and...
[00:42:29]  People conspired to lie us into a war in Iraq.
[00:42:33]  That's a real conspiracy.
[00:42:35]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[00:42:36]  So if we taught people how to prove that happened, then we would also give them an idea of how to prove when conspiracies didn't happen.
[00:42:46]  I think that's going to go off track, and you're just going to end up with them being like, wow, Tony Blair, there's a person I didn't realize also drinks blood.
[00:42:53]  Yeah, right, right.
[00:42:55]  I'm adding them to the list.
[00:42:57]  While I respect that as a response, you know, we've tried arguing.
[00:43:02]  The only thing we haven't tried is teaching people.
[00:43:04]  Well, see, Jordan, here's my problem.
[00:43:06]  I think that we're really, really good at coming up with advice for the nefarious actors.
[00:43:14]  I'm not sure we have the best solutions for the other side.
[00:43:18]  I don't know.
[00:43:18]  Nobody's tried it before.
[00:43:20]  I would like to see how it works.
[00:43:21]  Because I do think it would work.
[00:43:23]  No, I would be surprised.
[00:43:26]  I mean, because it's the thing that we all ignore.
[00:43:29]  Like, it's the biggest conspiracy theory that none of us ever talk about.
[00:43:33]  It's never brought up in the media now.
[00:43:35]  It's rarely ever discussed.
[00:43:37]  But the past 20 years of our life have been dominated by a small conspiracy of people who lied us into Iraq.
[00:43:45]  You know, I think you make a good point here, which is that, you know, so many of these, obviously these conspiracy theories like QAnon are, and you guys often get into the background of what is sort of the kernel of truth at the heart of these things, but they are driven, I mean...
[00:43:59]  I don't want to say, no, the government's always nice to everyone.
[00:44:02]  How could you possibly think that?
[00:44:04]  Or that there aren't conspiracies, or there aren't really weird, disturbing things in the news.
[00:44:09]  And obviously these then kind of become the seeds that grow into the pathways for people to get into these conspiracy theories.
[00:44:17]  Right.
[00:44:18]  So my question then is, if people were held accountable for the real conspiracies, would these fake ones be able to prosper as well?
[00:44:28]  Well, now you're talking about an overhaul of the implementation of international law, which might be difficult.
[00:44:35]  Yeah, just our regular ones.
[00:44:36]  But let me ask you this, then.
[00:44:39]  Yeah.
[00:44:41]  You're saying this as a possible solution, and it's kind of abstract.
[00:44:47]  Give me a concrete example outside of taking Bush...
[00:44:52]  And Blair to The Hague.
[00:44:54]  How would you do that?
[00:44:55]  How would you educate people about this?
[00:44:57]  Like, what does that look like in practice?
[00:44:59]  I mean, I suppose I would talk about not, like, the results, like, if we wound up in a war.
[00:45:05]  I would talk about proving the conspiracy happened.
[00:45:08]  Do you mean individually or as, like, a product?
[00:45:12]  Like, start from the beginning.
[00:45:13]  No, no, no, but I mean, like, talking to a person who believes in QAnon?
[00:45:17]  Yes, you have to talk to them.
[00:45:18]  So you're saying this is what you would do to talk to somebody, as opposed to, like, you would do a show where you prove this conspiracy?
[00:45:27]  Right.
[00:45:27]  No, I wouldn't do that.
[00:45:28]  That's not useful for this.
[00:45:30]  This is an individualistic...
[00:45:30]  This is an individual thing.
[00:45:32]  You can't do that, like, us doing that.
[00:45:34]  I mean, the dollop did a show about all of that stuff.
[00:45:37]  It doesn't mean anything.
[00:45:38]  You have to talk to them individually, because they have to know and trust you.
[00:45:41]  Okay, so now, to de-radicalize people from QAnon, you must...
[00:45:46]  Ready yourself to prove exhaustively a conspiracy theory.
[00:45:51]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:45:53]  And here's why.
[00:45:54]  We all know that's true.
[00:45:56]  And did we try and overthrow the government?
[00:46:00]  No.
[00:46:02]  No, we did not.
[00:46:05]  Well, you know, it's an unorthodox idea.
[00:46:09]  Every other idea has failed, so why not try the unorthodox one?
[00:46:13]  Okay, so maybe this could work sometimes.
[00:46:16]  Okay.
[00:46:17]  But in order for this to be tried, you are now requiring everybody to give this a shot.
[00:46:26]  Yes.
[00:46:27]  And here's why.
[00:46:28]  I think everybody...
[00:46:30]  Should really stop and think about how Bush and Blair lied us into a war and committed a genocide.
[00:46:35]  You may have ulterior motives here in your suggestion.
[00:46:38]  But that doesn't change anything.
[00:46:41]  What I keep thinking about is that these people want something, and from one side they are getting a false version of what they want, and from the other side they're told that there's no way to get what they want.
[00:46:56]  So what is their choice then?
[00:46:58]  It doesn't even really matter, does it?
[00:47:02]  I mean, beyond hurting other people, of course, which is kind of important.
[00:47:05]  But they are faced with a very simple binary choice.
[00:47:09]  I don't know.
[00:47:11]  We'll have to stew on that one.
[00:47:12]  Will, you're the one that wrote the book!
[00:47:14]  Fix it!
[00:47:15]  No, I mean, I do think, like, you know, maybe this kind of harkens back to what I said already, but I think that...
[00:47:26]  Yeah, they were talking about it in the mainstream media.
[00:47:45]  is like that's just kind of a canard that is thrown out in order to make Things seem more secretive.
[00:47:53]  I often, maybe not always, but I often find that to not be a real complaint.
[00:48:01]  Yeah, no, people in the media talked about Epstein, and my reference towards people not talking about Bush anymore, or the war in Iraq anymore, is that it seems like so many problems can be fundamentally traced back to that, to the point where we should really be talking about it all the time.
[00:48:17]  You know who was talking about that?
[00:48:18]  Who?
[00:48:18]  Terry Gross.
[00:48:19]  Ooh, I lose again!
[00:48:22]  So I want to jump off this, because I don't know if we're ever going to find a precise conclusion here.
[00:48:26]  We solve it tonight!
[00:48:28]  I was wondering, because you've traveled a lot more in these communities and talked to a lot more people.
[00:48:35]  Will, is there anything that you've encountered that sounded persuasive?
[00:48:40]  Like, anything from QAnon stuff that you're like, that's an interesting point.
[00:48:45]  That's a good question, yeah.
[00:48:46]  Yeah, you know, that's a great question.
[00:48:49]  I'm trying to think.
[00:48:50]  Like, they definitely have an eye towards finding weird-looking pictures and stuff.
[00:48:56]  You know, where I say, you know, they point to some rich guy's decorations in his house, and I say, well, look, I wouldn't decorate my house with that.
[00:49:06]  I agree.
[00:49:07]  You know, but at the same time, it's sort of like, where's the, there's a bit of a jump you're making to saying this guy has weird art to, you know, he eats children.
[00:49:16]  And so that's sort of the gulf where it leaves me.
[00:49:19]  You know, or the, you know, they're obsessed now with the Great Reset and this idea that the people who put on Davos are going to enslave us and make us eat bugs.
[00:49:27]  Then you read some of these things.
[00:49:29]  Yeah, you know, you read some of these things they say where it's, you know, you'll have to, you know, you'll own nothing and love it.
[00:49:35]  And it's some random article from...
[00:49:36]  So what I'm hearing is the compliment for them is they have a remarkable...
[00:49:58]  Ability to, like, have surface-level aesthetic complaints.
[00:50:03]  Yes, yes, exactly.
[00:50:05]  I mean, there's certainly, you know, like, you know, they're very obsessed with Sam Smith lately and thinking that all of Sam Smith's performances are satanic sacrifices or symbolic.
[00:50:14]  Wait, who's Sam Smith?
[00:50:15]  That's a musician, right?
[00:50:16]  A singer, yeah.
[00:50:17]  Oh, okay.
[00:50:18]  They wore a sort of devil horns performance at the Emmys or the Grammys.
[00:50:24]  I saw some pictures of them.
[00:50:25]  Oh, they're just saying it out loud.
[00:50:26]  They're just doing it right now.
[00:50:28]  They're just doing it right now.
[00:50:29]  They're just rubbing it in our faces.
[00:50:31]  And so you can look at these things and say, well, look, I mean, not the most aesthetically pleasing performance, perhaps, but where do we get the Balthazar, Beelzebub warship in there?
[00:50:44]  As you said, they have a very fine-tuned sense of aesthetics.
[00:50:50]  I mean, I don't know if anyone has ever damned with fainter praise.
[00:50:54]  If I'm looking for an interior designer, my first prerequisite is going to be, are you into QAnon?
[00:51:01]  Will, I understand why people get mad at you about the political stuff, but if I was in QAnon, I'd be like, that's just insulting, sir.
[00:51:09]  I imagine, though, that the flip side of it is, like, if I had someone from QAnon decorate my house...

=== Manipulating Movements (10:48) ===

[00:51:17]  It might end up all pastel colors.
[00:51:20]  It would look like an Easter egg hunt in my house.
[00:51:27]  Everything is soft and safe.
[00:51:30]  Oh, I wanted to ask you another question.
[00:51:35]  Yeah.
[00:51:35]  Later on at the near the nearing the end of the book, you start talking about the way that Republican politicians and the like all knew that this was bullshit, but still tried to ride the wave or co-opted or do whatever, you know, manipulate it for their own benefits.
[00:51:53]  And there's a question you ask of like, if they had intervened, if they had done something, if they had led Republicans away, maybe things could be different.
[00:52:04]  Do you think that if the Republicans had done that, they would have changed things, or they would have just been eaten alive along with the rest of them?
[00:52:12]  You know, that's a great question.
[00:52:14]  I think if Donald Trump had come out and said, you know, let's say before 2020, so before QAnon really got cooking, if he had said, look, this is ridiculous, especially maybe if he had said, you know, this is a liberal psyop intending to embarrass Republicans.
[00:52:30]  Right.
[00:52:31]  If he fought crazy with crazy.
[00:52:33]  Yeah, you'd have to.
[00:52:34]  Yeah, I don't think you could say, you know, look.
[00:52:36]  Hillary Clinton's a friend of mine.
[00:52:38]  She would not eat children.
[00:52:39]  You know, I don't think you could say that.
[00:52:40]  But if he had just said, you know, sort of attacked it from an even crazier angle, that might have stopped it.
[00:52:46]  But you're right that I don't think if Kevin McCarthy had come out and said, you know, this is ridiculous.
[00:52:52]  The Republican Party is better than that.
[00:52:54]  I think he probably would have just been tossed to the side in the same way that people like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzenger were.
[00:53:01]  Yeah, I think Alex tried to do that a little bit too late.
[00:53:04]  Tried to do QAnon's globalist PSYOP.
[00:53:07]  He only did that as a way to save face after January 6th.
[00:53:10]  They didn't join his team, yeah.
[00:53:12]  The relationship between Alex and QAnon is so fascinating, where he's kind of on the road with them, and then he sees this as a new thing to talk about, and then suddenly it's like him and Q look at each other and they say, who's in charge here?
[00:53:25]  And then they kind of both reach for the knives and try to take each other out.
[00:53:29]  Well, yeah, he had sent Jerome Corsi to try and become a guru of that world, and then he was roundly rejected.
[00:53:40]  What must that have been?
[00:53:40]  I tried to interview...
[00:53:42]  Of course he's so bad for this book.
[00:53:43]  I wanted him more than anything, and he just said, nope, I'm not interested.
[00:53:48]  He saved you from yourself, really, because that would have been the most boring interview.
[00:53:53]  You'd think he would have information or something interesting or even be entertaining, and it is not the case for all three.
[00:53:59]  The only time I found him interesting was something that he wasn't even really involved in.
[00:54:04]  And that was when Alex said that he had a dead man switch.
[00:54:07]  Yeah.
[00:54:07]  And that Corsi was going to be killed over the weekend because of some bombshell he had.
[00:54:12]  Yeah, we were waiting for that one.
[00:54:14]  Yeah, that never materialized.
[00:54:15]  No, it did not.
[00:54:16]  There's a guy in a Joseph Conrad novel who walks around with a little bomb in his pocket, and so if anyone ever tries to arrest him, it'll go off.
[00:54:23]  Sort of a dead man switch thing, and I could see Corsi getting into that.
[00:54:27]  You're getting real crazy with it.
[00:54:29]  Oh, Corsi.
[00:54:30]  Yeah, yeah, Corsi.
[00:54:33]  Were there anybody else that you really wanted to interview that didn't come around?
[00:54:39]  Any of the...
[00:54:40]  Yeah.
[00:54:41]  Q themselves?
[00:54:43]  Well, yeah, certainly Q. You know, obviously the best argument, I think the best evidence we have is Ron and Jim Watkins.
[00:54:50]  I interviewed Jim Watkins as part of the HBO Q series.
[00:54:55]  And again, but, you know, as you said, I mean, I'm sure with someone like Corsi, I would love to interview him if suddenly he would say, all right, so here's the deal.
[00:55:04]  Yeah, I made it all up, you know.
[00:55:05]  You gotta get him drunk.
[00:55:07]  Well, perhaps.
[00:55:08]  That's an unorthodox tactic.
[00:55:10]  With Jim Watkins, where this is a guy who's wearing pizza slices on his socks and he's got a Q pin.
[00:55:16]  And I said, so, you know, you want to talk about QAnon?
[00:55:19]  And he'd say, what's QAnon?
[00:55:20]  You know, I mean, these very kind of basic lies.
[00:55:25]  You know, another person would have been Vincent Fusca, the JFK impersonator, a guy who drove me mad with his promises to tell me the whole story.
[00:55:34]  And, you know, just I would have loved to hear about, you know, what it's like having all this adoration from sort of these boomer women who approach him and think he's JFK Jr. when, in fact, he's a guy who just drives around in a van plastered with Trump pictures.
[00:55:47]  Yeah, from what I hear, he does a lot of cruising.
[00:55:50]  He maybe uses this as a dating strategy.
[00:55:55]  You know, I think that's very possible.
[00:55:59]  It's just, people are great sometimes.
[00:56:02]  Yeah!
[00:56:02]  Have you ever noticed that?
[00:56:03]  They're cool?
[00:56:04]  Sometimes they're just fucking great.
[00:56:06]  Just think about that.
[00:56:07]  Think about that life.
[00:56:08]  You're a random guy, and then suddenly everyone thinks you're this famous 90s sex symbol.
[00:56:12]  I mean, and you're kind of willing to play along with it.
[00:56:16]  I mean, it would certainly upend your life.
[00:56:19]  I mean, if you've got nothing else to do.
[00:56:22]  That is a hard...
[00:56:23]  I mean, again, we get down to binary choices.
[00:56:25]  You go, like, I could go to work tomorrow.
[00:56:27]  False hope.
[00:56:28]  Or I could become JFK Jr.
[00:56:29]  Right.
[00:56:30]  It's a tough choice.
[00:56:32]  So, I'm curious.
[00:56:35]  Because one of the things that we hear a bit about...
[00:56:37]  Obviously, things that are more sensational are always going to be more heard about outside of more focused QAnon-following communities.
[00:56:48]  I would say that Jordan and I are people who have some familiarity with stuff, especially because it intersects with Alex Jones at a number of points.
[00:56:58]  But we don't know a ton about QAnon.
[00:57:00]  No, no, no, no.
[00:57:00]  And so a lot of the times, things that pop up are probably not indicative of the larger community, but maybe like a subsection.
[00:57:10]  So obviously not everybody believes that JFK Jr. is still alive.
[00:57:14]  Right.
[00:57:15]  But there are people who do.
[00:57:17]  And my question is, how many people drink piss, do you think?
[00:57:24]  Ballpark, you don't have to give us an exact figure.
[00:57:26]  Because there's a lot of, like, you hear that, that, like, it's like this popular Q-adjacent homeopathic remedy for stuff, but how prevalent is it, do you think?
[00:57:37]  Will, are you actually drinking piss?
[00:57:39]  You know, I think some people are.
[00:57:42]  I think it's a relatively marginal aspect of it, but I don't think the number is zero.
[00:57:47]  You know, there's a guy kind of affiliated with them named the Vaccine Police, who I think has endorsed that.
[00:57:56]  But, yeah, like, you know, look, I've got to give it up to the QAnon people here.
[00:58:02]  While that definitely is a thing, I don't think it's super mainstream.
[00:58:06]  Because it's supposed to be like, or at least the way that some of those people sell it is like it's a remedy for the vaccine.
[00:58:12]  You know, like, so, I mean, you gotta, if you accidentally got vaccinated, you gotta do something.
[00:58:20]  Yeah, no, no, that's definitely, I mean, I think there's vaccine police guys into that.
[00:58:24]  And Dr. Group!
[00:58:25]  Dr. Group, for sure.
[00:58:26]  Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:58:28]  I mean, it is these, you know, I think that is one of those kind of homeopathic cures.
[00:58:32]  And so, you know, it...
[00:58:33]  It's not as unheard of as I might wish it was.
[00:58:38]  That actually gave me an interesting question.
[00:58:44]  Do you think QAnon is going to last long enough to have its own Protestant Reformation kind of thing?
[00:58:51]  The 65 VCs of drinking pee?
[00:58:53]  Yes, absolutely!
[00:58:54]  No, no, no, totally!
[00:58:55]  If it lasts long enough, there are so many small factions within it.
[00:58:58]  As you said, some people believe he's JFK Jr.
[00:59:01]  Do you think it gets big enough and lasts long enough to explode into a million different versions of itself?
[00:59:07]  Yeah, I mean, I think it's really already headed that way.
[00:59:10]  We post occasionally, but not very much.
[00:59:13]  And in the past, Q sort of played this papal-like role of deciding what's in the canon and not.
[00:59:20]  And so Q said, the JFK Jr. stuff is not QAnon.
[00:59:23]  And so that didn't entirely stop it, but people could refer to that and say, okay, we don't believe in JFK Jr.
[00:59:30]  Whereas now, really, you can sort of do whatever you want.
[00:59:34]  And so you have all these kind of mini-Qs popping up, you know, these just various QAnon promoters who sort of take it in different directions.
[00:59:41]  I mean, obviously, a very extreme example were the group of people who sort of camped out in Dallas looking for JFK Jr. to come back to life.
[00:59:48]  And, you know, one thing that's fascinating to me...
[00:59:50]  So close.
[00:59:50]  Right in the, you know, they would say, oh, I think that guy's Tupac over there.
[00:59:55]  That's Robin Williams.
[00:59:55]  Sure.
[01:00:05]  Those guys are a PSYOP meant to embarrass us.
[01:00:07]  We're the legitimate operation.
[01:00:09]  We're respectable.
[01:00:12]  Funny how that works.
[01:00:13]  Yeah.
[01:00:14]  But you can't argue with it, really.
[01:00:15]  I mean, you could argue with it being a PSYOP to make them look bad, but you kind of got to give it up for their aesthetic sensibility.
[01:00:26]  Well, you do have to.
[01:00:27]  You're right.
[01:00:28]  You do often have to admit.
[01:00:29]  You're like, well, those guys do look pretty ridiculous.
[01:00:32]  These guys you're trying to cast out of your movement.
[01:00:35]  I have not kept up with those Dallas folks.
[01:00:39]  Is that negative 48?
[01:00:40]  Is that right?
[01:00:43]  What's happened with that?
[01:00:46]  Yeah, so this is the, right, it's the Gematria people who, you know, they think negative 48, that number spells out, you know, JFK Jr. will come back to life or something like that.
[01:00:57]  But I believe they, because, so yeah, so November...
[01:01:01]  They went back to Dallas last November and were kind of waiting around again.
[01:01:05]  And, you know, they still sort of travel and they do kind of the Trump Roadshow and they go to all these Trump events.
[01:01:11]  And obviously their numbers have, you know, people have kind of gone back to their families in a lot of cases, you know, and you can kind of keep making these predictions.
[01:01:18]  And ultimately, you know, people will start waking up even no matter how deep in it they are.
[01:01:24]  But they're still at it.
[01:01:26]  Yeah, that's one of the weird things about...
[01:01:29]  When you look at the history of doomsday preachers and people who have made apocalyptic predictions and stuff, you think that being wrong will end up like, it's all over, everyone's going to leave you, but it doesn't.
[01:01:42]  It's so weird how that works.
[01:01:43]  No, this book brought me...
[01:01:45]  The thing that I kept thinking throughout the entire book was about the Millerites.

=== Believers and Bleach (02:55) ===

[01:01:50]  Yes.
[01:01:51]  And about...
[01:01:52]  Like, the guy in my head throughout this entire book was the guy who so believed that what he was saying was true that he waited till the stroke of midnight and jumped off his barn and died instantly.
[01:02:03]  And, like, it didn't even matter that the next day everything was fine and so many people were like, oh, he got the date wrong.
[01:02:12]  But that guy jumped, man!
[01:02:15]  Shouldn't people be like, hey, that guy died for this?
[01:02:18]  No, I mean, it's fascinating how people grapple with that cognitive dissonance, whether it's the Millerites expecting the apocalypse or QAnon believers thinking that Hillary Clinton's going to be arrested just a few more months from now.
[01:02:33]  I realize in hindsight I shouldn't have said drinking pee.
[01:02:36]  I should have gone with the bleach thing, because that was probably more prevalent, right?
[01:02:41]  I think that is more prevalent, the bleach.
[01:02:44]  Well, yeah, certainly.
[01:02:45]  Yeah, because it's way more reasonable to drink bleach than pee, Dan.
[01:02:49]  The MMR.
[01:02:50]  If the bleach can clean your house, then it can clean you.
[01:02:53]  That makes perfect sense.
[01:02:56]  Yes, yes.
[01:02:57]  No, Dan, you're absolutely right.
[01:02:58]  I mean, that is a big thing.
[01:03:01]  One of the big QAnon promoters, Jordan Sather, has, you know, implied many times that he's going to sue me for me saying he wants people to drink, you know, what amounts to bleach.
[01:03:11]  But obviously, I haven't sued yet.
[01:03:13]  And, you know, people, it's just terrible with the bleach stuff where people, you know, they say, oh, you know, I think it's really working.
[01:03:20]  I'm constantly sick.
[01:03:21]  And, you know, my energy turned inside out.
[01:03:24]  It's just, you gotta go through it to get to the other side.
[01:03:28]  You gotta be sick for a while for that bleach to really work.
[01:03:32]  Yeah, it reminds me of something Alex said.
[01:03:34]  He said recently he was really sick with COVID, and so he took ivermectin, and then a couple of weeks later it worked perfectly.
[01:03:41]  Yeah.
[01:03:42]  And it just reminds me so much of that.
[01:03:44]  Like, yeah, alright.
[01:03:46]  Except, ivermectin's not gonna kill you.
[01:03:49]  That's true.
[01:03:51]  I think so.
[01:03:52]  I guess we'll...
[01:03:54]  So what do you see on the horizon for QAnon?
[01:03:59]  Do you have any predictions?
[01:04:01]  Yeah, well look, I mean, I think QAnon has succeeded in some ways in kind of mainstreaming this conspiratorial thinking in the GOP into making it acceptable to call your opponents groomers or pedophiles.
[01:04:15]  You know, and obviously the big moment here is going to be 2024 and Donald Trump running again, I think.
[01:04:20]  He's going to win.
[01:04:22]  I feel that way, too.
[01:04:24]  That video of him going to the site of the train derailment and giving everyone Big Macs and saying, I love the McDonald's menu.

=== Nikki Haley's Gambit (03:05) ===

[01:04:32]  I know it better than anybody.
[01:04:35]  People, you know, when you talk to people who kind of follow politics, but not maybe as closely as we do, and then they say, well, I don't know about Ron DeSantis.
[01:04:41]  And, you know, I always say, just watch a video of him speaking.
[01:04:43]  Like, he's not going to do it because, you know, they want that charisma or, you know, they want that energy.
[01:04:49]  He's doing a kind of a weak Trump impression.
[01:04:52]  Yeah.
[01:04:53]  And he's...
[01:04:55]  If they talk face-to-face, Trump would eat him alive.
[01:04:58]  He's so vulnerable to being bullied by Trump.
[01:05:00]  He's a loser.
[01:05:01]  It seems so easy.
[01:05:02]  Oh, God.
[01:05:03]  I'll give you my dark horse right now.
[01:05:05]  My dark horse prediction.
[01:05:07]  Hillary.
[01:05:07]  No.
[01:05:08]  I think Nikki Haley will win.
[01:05:11]  This is really a strong take.
[01:05:13]  Can you build on that?
[01:05:14]  I'm telling you this.
[01:05:15]  Well, I'll tell you.
[01:05:16]  There are a couple of reasons why.
[01:05:19]  First...
[01:05:19]  This is the exact same situation that Nikki Haley was in during her first election, where she had to split through these two people who were essentially way more popular than her by a wide margin.
[01:05:31]  But because they were both such dicks to each other, she wound up sneaking through.
[01:05:35]  And I don't think anybody really wants Trump to be president ever again.
[01:05:39]  Even people who love him, they want him to be god-king.
[01:05:41]  They don't want to vote for him.
[01:05:43]  DeSantis is going to get his ass beaten left and right by Trump because he's pathetic.
[01:05:47]  And Nikki Haley is going to come through looking like the only intelligent person on this dumb fucking planet.
[01:05:53]  And I have always maintained...
[01:05:55]  That's what everyone thought was going to happen in 2016, though.
[01:05:58]  Like, that Trump and some of these other people would cannibalize each other, and then you'd end up with Jeb Bush squeaking through.
[01:06:04]  But I have always maintained that the first female president will be a Republican.
[01:06:09]  And I think that it's going to be Nikki Haley.
[01:06:12]  I think you're very wrong.
[01:06:15]  Your prediction is trash.
[01:06:17]  Yeah, totally.
[01:06:18]  I'm fine with that.
[01:06:18]  I feel like I'm being swayed.
[01:06:21]  Oh, I don't know, maybe.
[01:06:23]  No, no.
[01:06:25]  Will, his points on paper are good.
[01:06:29]  Your points are fine.
[01:06:31]  Now, if this were DraftKings...
[01:06:34]  And we were gambling on this.
[01:06:35]  You'd get long odds on this.
[01:06:37]  And I would say, take that bet.
[01:06:38]  I'll take that bet.
[01:06:39]  Yeah, because it's going to pay off if it hits.
[01:06:41]  Yeah, I'm not going to bet a ton on it.
[01:06:43]  No.
[01:06:43]  But if I do, if it hits, then that small amount is going to go a long way.
[01:06:47]  Yeah, bet five bucks on this to win 20 grand.
[01:06:49]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:49]  Or whatever.
[01:06:50]  I think that's a wise move.
[01:06:51]  You've got to talk to Robert Barnes.
[01:06:54]  No, I do not.
[01:06:55]  He's the guy who gambles on elections.
[01:06:56]  I don't even need to talk to Barnes& Noble.
[01:07:00]  Robert Barnes and Noble.
[01:07:06]  When I was asking for predictions, I was actually more thinking, what's their next conspiracy?
[01:07:14]  That's a good question.
[01:07:15]  From monitoring their sensibilities and knowing what triggers there are, do you have any sense of what's going to happen next?

=== Satanic Panic Books (12:53) ===

[01:07:26]  I feel like it's unpredictable.
[01:07:28]  But maybe you have some gematria.
[01:07:33]  Ooh, ooh.
[01:07:33]  Let me phrase it to you this way.
[01:07:36]  Do you have any stories that you are working on right now that QAnon could turn into something really juicy?
[01:07:42]  Ooh.
[01:07:43]  Yeah, you know, actually, yeah, let me lay this out.
[01:07:45]  So, I mean, you know, the best ones are, you could really never see them coming, right?
[01:07:50]  You know, the ones that we still talk about now, like Wayfair, right?
[01:07:53]  Wayfair is another great example.
[01:07:55]  The idea that, you know, they're just going to latch on to these auto-generated names on a furniture site, and it means they're rolling up kids in cabinets and stuff like that.
[01:08:04]  No one except a QAnon person could ever have thought of that.
[01:08:08]  But, you know, at the same time, I think we're going to see, you know, at the same time, I mean, QAnon, the downside of it as an observer of this is that it sort of sucks up a lot of energy from the conspiratorial swamps and sort of everything just becomes this vague, like, you know, that's what they want you to think, you know, just kind of like, oh, that's a distraction.
[01:08:27]  But, you know, people aren't really, like, putting in the work.
[01:08:30]  And so...
[01:08:32]  That's sad.
[01:08:33]  The one I'm seeing right now is, you know, this Vivek Ramaswamy guy, this sort of anti-woke CEO who's declared his presidential run.
[01:08:41]  Never heard of this dude.
[01:08:43]  This has not reached us yet.
[01:08:44]  What is happening?
[01:08:44]  He's sort of – so this is this guy who's – he's a really rich guy, and he is sort of like – I feel like in politics now that can be taken as read.
[01:08:54]  Well, yes.
[01:08:56]  He's like Republican Andrew Yang.
[01:08:58]  So he's like, you know, I'm a business guy and I got a lot of ideas.
[01:09:01]  I mean, in practice, his ideas are just, you know, destroy federal government.
[01:09:06]  Lay off people!
[01:09:07]  Exactly.
[01:09:08]  But the thing is, because he's a rich guy, he has these ties to the World Economic Forum.
[01:09:13]  And so...
[01:09:14]  Now all these Republicans are saying, people like Jack Posobiec are saying, you're an agent of George Soros.
[01:09:20]  And so now he has to say, no, no, no, the World Economic Forum is just obsessed with me.
[01:09:25]  That's why they put me on their website.
[01:09:26]  And I said, don't do it.
[01:09:29]  And so I think they're really going to tie this guy in in a big way.
[01:09:32]  And look, it doesn't have the pizzazz of Pizzagate or Wayfair.
[01:09:37]  You know, Tom Hanks, you know, his various conspiracy theories.
[01:09:40]  But I think this is one that's really going to get cooking as we sort of wait for 2024 really to swing up.
[01:09:47]  I see this guy having, I've just looked up his Wikipedia page, and I see him having a number of significant problems with the current Republican Party.
[01:09:57]  One, as a presidential candidate, he's Hindu.
[01:10:01]  That's going to be a big hurdle.
[01:10:03]  It's not going to be a win for the Republicans.
[01:10:04]  Second, He went to Harvard and Yale, which is going to be very elitist stuff.
[01:10:10]  He's not buying you Big Macs.
[01:10:12]  And apparently, he had a postgraduate fellowship at the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship.
[01:10:18]  Oh my god, I didn't even know that.
[01:10:21]  In two seconds, you just made QAnon happy!
[01:10:24]  This is going to be a real uphill battle for him, I think.
[01:10:28]  Wow.
[01:10:31]  It reminds me of that old famous saying, if you're going to hang out with a bunch of witch hunters, don't be surprised if you turn out to be a witch sooner or later.
[01:10:39]  Exactly, exactly.
[01:10:40]  I mean, this is the guy who wants to say, you know, I'm the good, rich, well-connected Ivy League guy.
[01:10:46]  I'm the good billionaire.
[01:10:48]  Exactly, but I don't think it's going to end well.
[01:10:51]  I mean, I really do love that this guy is just like alternate universe Andrew Yang.
[01:10:54]  And so, you know, obviously Andrew Yang's now the president, so presumably it'll work out well for him too.
[01:10:59]  We'll see.
[01:11:00]  Well, Yang was able to marshal the resources of all of the people who have left the left.
[01:11:07]  All those last liberal types like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool.
[01:11:12]  Man, they were so on the left.
[01:11:15]  So lefty.
[01:11:16]  Cool guys.
[01:11:17]  Well, we should probably wrap this up here in a few, but it's been a delight chatting with you.
[01:11:24]  Absolute pleasure.
[01:11:25]  I hope people do check out your book, which is now available.
[01:11:29]  It is Trust the Plan, the Rise of QAnon, and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America.
[01:11:36]  Now, I want to talk about this subtitle before we leave.
[01:11:40]  Finally, a critique of the book.
[01:11:44]  You think that this conspiracy theory unhinged America.
[01:11:49]  Jordan has some thoughts for you about the Iraq War.
[01:11:54]  Also, I think I have a better argument than it did.
[01:11:58]  You know, I think we'll have to save it for the sequel, maybe.
[01:12:02]  But, you know, I think Jordan's made a compelling point here that we're all just sort of living in the, you know, I mean, look, if someone said, you know, we're all sort of living in the aftermath of 9-11 and Iraq, you know, you're right on.
[01:12:14]  But then that's in the aftermath of the satanic panic and the first Gulf War.
[01:12:20]  And the Millerites and so on and so forth all the way back.
[01:12:23]  So the problem with your thinking, Jordan, is that there's always another chicken for the egg and another egg for the chicken.
[01:12:30]  Sure, sure.
[01:12:31]  My friend?
[01:12:32]  Maybe we should learn more about them.
[01:12:34]  Chickens and eggs?
[01:12:35]  Yeah.
[01:12:35]  I don't know which one came first yet.
[01:12:37]  But I do think that there is something to QAnon on Hinging America.
[01:12:41]  That's definitely true.
[01:12:43]  I'm joking about your subtitle, but there is something to it.
[01:12:46]  There is something different and more weird about this time.
[01:12:53]  I think the way that QAnon has successfully gone through the conservative feedback loop and then still come out the other side is kind of an amazing thing to me.
[01:13:05]  Because it starts out at 4chan and then less than a year later...
[01:13:10]  You're getting occasional drops on Fox News.
[01:13:13]  Yeah, I mean, it is remarkable how long-lasting it's been, and just really its success.
[01:13:19]  I mean, it wasn't just one thing where, you know, like Jade Helm, okay, Obama's going to arrest...
[01:13:23]  Texas conservatives and put them in Walmart prison camps.
[01:13:26]  I can't believe that happened.
[01:13:27]  It sums up everything.
[01:13:28]  It was weird when he did that.
[01:13:30]  How did we move past that so fast?
[01:13:32]  But I will say something about the subtitle.
[01:13:35]  You write one of these books, you've got to have a long subtitle explaining the deal.
[01:13:38]  But in my case, it's especially useful because it makes clear that it's not a pro-QAnon book.
[01:13:43]  Because otherwise, you have the Q on it and it says, trust the plan.
[01:13:47]  And so you need the subtitle to say, if you're reading it on the subway or at a bar or something, it says, hey, Don't worry.
[01:13:55]  I'm not really boning up on my Q&A.
[01:13:57]  See, that would be a fun subtitle.
[01:13:59]  Trust the plan.
[01:14:00]  The person reading this book is not into Q&A.
[01:14:05]  You know what?
[01:14:06]  We were talking just a second ago about the way that it went from 4chan to pretty quickly into the Republican Party, and it is sort of different and unique from other times.
[01:14:20]  I would wonder about your take on this, Will.
[01:14:23]  There is so much that is similar to the satanic panic.
[01:14:28]  Right.
[01:14:29]  How much do you think this would have been what happened if the internet was as prevalent back then?
[01:14:36]  That's a great question.
[01:14:37]  You know, it's fascinating.
[01:14:39]  I mean, I think the...
[01:14:41]  The satanic panic is, you know, and obviously a lot of people point to this rightly as a precursor to QAnon.
[01:14:46]  It's so wild how, and you know, I didn't live through it, I was a little kid, but it must have been a crazy time to be alive because how everyone just got on board with it in a way that really they haven't with QAnon.
[01:14:58]  We don't have, you know, TV stations, you know, nightly news saying, oh yeah, you know, turns out there are a bunch of pedophiles in here.
[01:15:06]  We don't have police arresting people because of accusations made in QAnon.
[01:15:11]  Whereas in the satanic panic, there's still a guy in prison who was arrested on some kind of trumped up satanic panic charge.
[01:15:17]  So, I mean, it really was, and I may be not directly answering your question, but I have to imagine the satanic panic would have been even worse.
[01:15:23]  What a just absolutely crazy time to read up on.
[01:15:25]  I mean, to be fair, Ted Gunderson's still a name that flies around in these circles.
[01:15:35]  You know, like...
[01:15:37]  And they still pick it up.
[01:15:38]  I mean, they say, you know, these kind of foundational satanic panic books like Michelle Remembers, and they, you know, QAnon people will kind of dredge them up.
[01:15:46]  And, you know, even when you have, you know, TikTok teens getting into, you know, their own kind of satanic panic stuff where they say, oh, you know, look at this stuff in the 80s and no one talks about this anymore.
[01:15:58]  They don't realize there's a reason.
[01:16:00]  Yeah.
[01:16:02]  But that also leads me to.
[01:16:05]  My next concern about this, like the similarities with the Satanic Panic, is like, I think it kind of went away and receded, maybe because the internet didn't exist the way it does now.
[01:16:18]  It's possible.
[01:16:18]  There's such an ability to recycle things and sort of pretend that they're not things that we've moved past.
[01:16:25]  Right.
[01:16:25]  And nothing ever goes away.
[01:16:27]  Right.
[01:16:28]  If we've moved past something, we're not talking about it.
[01:16:30]  And if we're not talking about it to people who've never heard of it, they're hiding this from us!
[01:16:36]  Why aren't they telling us everything?
[01:16:38]  Yeah, it makes me worry that this satanic panic won't recede the same way the last one did because of that dynamic.
[01:16:45]  It feels like the way that COVID has turned endemic, so has QAnon.
[01:16:50]  We have to abolish TikTok.
[01:16:53]  You're right on, because you can just picture these TikToks where they say, why does no one talk about this?
[01:16:58]  And then the person making it is just pointing at weird stuff from Pizzagate, for example.
[01:17:03]  Well, that's that whole same phenomenon of people like Jordan Peterson and the intellectual dark web folks being like, I just want to have conversations about racial IQ differences.
[01:17:17]  Why can't we talk about this?
[01:17:19]  You know, it's like, well...
[01:17:21]  For the same reason we don't talk about physiognomy anymore, for God's sake.
[01:17:25]  Of course we don't talk about this, you idiot.
[01:17:27]  Society has moved past this.
[01:17:28]  I don't know what...
[01:17:29]  Anyway, that's a great note to wrap up on.
[01:17:34]  You bet!
[01:17:35]  Will, do you have any closing thoughts?
[01:17:37]  Yeah, no, it's just so much...
[01:17:41]  QAnon is...
[01:17:42]  It's just there's so much weird stuff in it, and it's had so many just bizarre effects that I wanted to get into in the book that I think often we don't have time in the news cycle to get into.
[01:17:52]  And so hopefully folks will like the book, and I really appreciate you guys giving it a read and having me on.
[01:17:57]  Of course!
[01:17:57]  Absolutely.
[01:17:58]  Happy to do so.
[01:17:59]  It's a delight to talk to you.
[01:18:00]  And I have to assume, too, that because the topic is so broad and the implications for personal stories, The political aspects, the narrative aspects.
[01:18:14]  I have to assume that the experience of writing a book about it has got to be like, well, I could write three more books.
[01:18:19]  I imagine that has to be frustrating.
[01:18:22]  I mean, you do a very good job of balancing out the very individual, the micro and the macro are really, really, really well done on that.
[01:18:32]  Well, thank you.
[01:18:33]  I mean, it's really a sprawling thing, and so I tried to really get just the best and the most interesting and the most maybe poignant aspects of it, and it's a lot.
[01:18:42]  And as you guys know, this conspiracy theory stuff, there's a whole lot to talk about.
[01:18:48]  Maybe too much.
[01:18:49]  Could be!
[01:18:50]  To the point where we have like 800 episodes of a stupid show.
[01:18:52]  That might be too many episodes of anything.
[01:18:55]  Have we beat Cheers yet?
[01:18:57]  I think so.
[01:18:58]  Good.
[01:18:58]  About time somebody put Cheers down a peg.
[01:19:01]  We beat Bonanza.
[01:19:05]  Well, Will, thank you for joining us.
[01:19:09]  People can find your book at all book retailers.
[01:19:12]  Robert Barnes& Noble.
[01:19:14]  Of course.
[01:19:15]  Good work, Robert Barnes& Noble.
[01:19:17]  Lemstone Books, the Christian bookstore in my hometown, which I thought was a chain, but maybe not.
[01:19:23]  Amazon, don't go there.
[01:19:24]  Don't.
[01:19:25]  But they have books.
[01:19:26]  People can just find you at WillSummer on Twitter.
[01:19:31]  I'm sure there's links to find stuff there, right?
[01:19:35]  Absolutely.
[01:19:37]  Hope we can talk again in the future.
[01:19:40]  This is wonderful.
[01:19:41]  Thank you so much for joining us.
[01:19:43]  Yeah, well, thanks for having me, guys.
[01:19:45]  Well, we will be back, Jordan.
[01:19:47]  But until then...
[01:19:48]  I'm Neo.
[01:19:49]  Neo and DCX Clark.
[01:19:52]  I don't know how to end these things when we're doing an interview.
[01:19:55]  I don't want to sit back down and record a thing where we do the drop.
[01:19:59]  Right.
[01:19:59]  Anything.
[01:20:00]  So, hey, we'll be back.
[01:20:01]  Yeah.
[01:20:02]  Hey.
[01:20:02]  This is how we end it.
[01:20:03]  Yeah.
[01:20:04]  Click.
[01:20:05]  Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.
[01:20:06]  Thanks for holding.
[01:20:09]  Hello, Alex.
[01:20:09]  I'm a first-time caller.
[01:20:10]  I'm a huge fan.
[01:20:11]  I love your work.