A secret cabal of ultra-intelligent hackers? Military intelligence? A 4chan alternate reality game? Jake takes over to explain the mysterious CICADA 3301 to us.
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Welcome, listener, to the 66th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Cicada 3301 episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis Few.
Cicada 3301.
What is it?
Is it an ARG?
Is it a recruitment tool for a nefarious intelligence community?
Is it just a bunch of clowns on 4chan fucking around?
We don't know.
Much like Q. The jury's out, even though Travis would like to tell you that he already knows.
But he doesn't.
The only person who really knows is Jake.
And since he can't form a coherent sentence, he is going to do the entire episode.
And that's why he's so excited.
He stayed up all night.
I stayed up all night.
I went down the rabbit hole.
I tried to solve the equations.
I tried to follow the clues.
I wasn't very successful.
But that doesn't mean that I can't relate to you one of the most comprehensive analyses of the notorious, now infamous, hacker group, Cicada 330.
For the record, I love Jake, okay?
The way it's a clown act, you can look up, for example, Comédie de l'Arte, or perhaps Jacques Lecoq's School of Clowning, and then you'll understand how we build our roles like craftsmen, okay?
This isn't just some, you know, people that are supposed to be friends where one is abusive to the other and is constantly denigrating him.
what's happening. And that's why I'm going to cut you off and we're going to launch into...
QAnon News. First up, at least four congressional candidates have promoted QAnon,
according to NBC report.
Morgan Radford of NBC News made a video report about the congressional candidates who are promoting QAnon, and you know what?
It was pretty good.
It was hard to explain QAnon and then explain what's going on in a four-minute sort of video, but I thought it was pretty solid.
Just dripping with envy.
Just absolutely furious and barely hiding.
It identified four candidates who have either promoted QAnon or are just open QAnon supporters.
That's Rich Helms of Texas, Daniel Stella of Michigan, Aaron Cruz of California, and Matthew Lusk of Florida, who is the very first QAnon candidate.
The report includes an interview with Erin Cruz, who is running in California's 36th
district.
She even has her banner hanging up at the local Republican Party headquarters in La
Quinta, down in Riverside County.
So here's a section of that interview.
People have described QAnon as a conspiracy theory.
Do you believe that?
You know, a conspiracy theory only sounds crazy until it's proven.
Do you think that a candidate who wants to win in 2020 can afford to dismiss QAnon believers?
I would say no.
You shouldn't be dismissing individuals like QAnon supporters or believers.
So she's a congressional candidate just saying, no, no, you know, it's not necessarily conspiracy theory.
You shouldn't dismiss QAnon followers.
Yeah.
It's badness.
But listen to that circular... I mean, it's... She's being interviewed.
It's not... Meanwhile, I've never seen you on TV.
So in a way, she has a better platform than you.
We've never seen that... What?
Tell us, when have you appeared?
On Al Jazeera, for example, when have you appeared there?
This ideology that a conspiracy theory is only a conspiracy theory until it is proven It's a very tricky language.
Look, guys, this crazy thing that you think I think isn't going to be so crazy if it's true.
She's just like, do you think that we can dismiss this?
She's just like, well, that depends.
How are you going to feel when you're hanging in Gitmo, you MSM shill?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Can we do that one again?
Next up, Q post new drops despite domain name issues.
So 8chan finally found a host who can stand them, and it's the Russian-based VDCNA.
But they still had difficulties keeping the site up on the ClearNet, mostly because their domain names were being placed on domain hold status by their registrars.
So after 8kun.net didn't work out, they tried 8kun.us and then 8kun.tw, and those didn't work out either.
Dude, the 8kun.tw literally forms the word content.
They really need to work on this stuff.
Just choose anything that doesn't start with a T. So, despite that, yes, there have been a bevy of new drops in this past week.
Some of them were Q-proofs, and some are cryptic phrases, and some were just Bible passages.
One Q-drop this past week said this.
Project Looking Glass?
Going forward in order to look back.
Q.
So, Project Looking Glass.
This is a reference to supposed secret technology used to peer through time.
Yes!
He's doing it.
He's finally doing what Jake always wanted.
Time travel and QAnon.
So it's based on something that was claimed by UFO disclosure activist Bob Lazar, who has baselessly claimed to have been hired by the government in the late 1980s to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology.
He has also claimed that he holds degrees from MIT and Caltech, which he does not.
Pleasure in tearing down Bob, who, hey, again, has a beautiful Netflix documentary, and where is yours?
You know, these people, in this stupid, stupid society, Travis, Bob Lazar is gonna go very, very far.
He'll have an army of Jakes.
You're right.
And they will carry him like an emperor.
Listen, they'll win and they'll kill me.
I've accepted my fate.
Here is Bob Lazar talking about Project Looking Glass on Joe Rogan's podcast.
Oh, he was on Joe Rogan's podcast as well, huh?
You know, there was talk of weapon systems, that there were different projects.
Project Galileo, Project Sidekick was supposed to be weapon applications of the craft.
Project Looking Glass had to do with time, any effects of time in the craft.
Now, I don't think, we're not We're not talking about making a time machine like in science fiction, but we're talking about, you know, small distortions, intentional distortions of time, and how that can be used.
Just getting owned by Rogan who opens a bottle, like corks a bottle, and just fucking openly pours water while he's talking.
Yeah, okay, Bob, go on.
So yeah, so according to many QAnon followers, Q is implying here that the reason that Q befuddles the deep state is because they actually have access to this time-bending technology that allows them to see all different variations that might happen in the future.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good shit.
Wait, so... Jordan Sather was very excited about this.
Walk me through this.
So they are befuddled by Q because they have an amazing power to see different outcomes.
Yeah, that's right.
So they're hella powerful and that's why Q befuddles them.
No, no, no.
The Q team has time-bending technology.
That's right.
So Q team can look into the future, see what the deep state's next move is, and then act accordingly.
Which also would account for...
Shut up, Julian, which also would account for why Q's prophecies might be off a little bit every now and again, because they are experimenting with highly fragile time continuum discrepancies.
How could anybody know exact dates and times?
Yeah, so they may be predicting correctly another alternate universe.
Exactly, exactly.
And so when, for example, Red October didn't come true, that's because only instance 1204,087 of this dimension, you know, came true.
But the one, the reality that we live in, It might be more like a red December.
It sounded like you were sputtering towards the end, like things were kind of falling apart, wobbling, the wheels were maybe even coming off.
Now for me, I think Q is... Hold on, sorry.
I'm imagining like a wooden cart, you know, being pushed down, you know, like a kind of a bumpy dirt road with like all my wares on the back and, you know, the big wooden wheel kind of cracks.
And the carriage, you know, kind of sort of lurches to the side.
We need to get to the next village to sell these wares.
Some of my wares, you know, go spilling.
And then a fucking griffin comes down and there's a guy with gray hair and two swords and he comes.
Oh wow, it got biblical.
I think Q is trying to test how stupid he can get and still draw in his followers.
Now he needed to give them something exciting, so why not some time vision technology?
He just came back and started he's spamming dude.
He's doing like four or five drops a day.
They're very long some of them He's hyping up.
So another Q drop said this indictments coming 2019 Q That is such a small window!
I know!
But also, as I've pointed out, indictments happen every day.
People are indicted every single day.
Right?
So this is, like, a bolder prediction would be no more indictments 2018.
If he predicted no more indictments for the rest of the year and that happened, I'd be like, I'd be a believer.
Or he predicted a high-profile person will be indicted who isn't on Trump's side.
Because so far, an immense amount of indictments.
In fact, Roger Stone was... Roger Stone!
Going to jail like whoa someone who isn't Roger Stone will be indicted in 2019.
Holy shit We'll see if that happens.
So I mean, I mean, this is just how Q were I said I point some people are pointed out It's like no some Q followers were like all oh no No, what Q was saying is like people associated with Spygate are gonna be indicted I'm like, who?
Give me a name.
Who's going to be indicted in the next 45 days?
Is it going to be Brennan?
Is it going to be Rice?
Is it going to be Comey?
Give me a specific, concrete name of who is going to be indicted before the year is up.
And they wouldn't do it.
They wouldn't do it.
They know better.
And then you know what else is going to happen?
I noticed a little, I don't know if you guys picked up on this, but it looks that 2019 is in the kill box.
So one could argue that when Q says indictment's coming, he's referring to 2020 because 2019 I just realized that there's a non-zero chance that somewhere, an elderly person has smashed their child-proof tablet due to Travis View's tweets.
Just destroyed their tablet out of fury because he's arguing with them directly online to the to the detriment of his own family insanity I mean, this is this is how Q works.
It gives people the feeling that they have inside information when they actually they don't know anything like like No, it's like it's like oh, I know indictments are coming in 18 when you press for details.
What do you know?
What do you think?
You know, they can't come up with anything real or come through one name.
Yeah.
Are they not innocent until proven guilty Travis?
Is this not America?
So the recent Q drops also included that Q proof which I always love so this Q proof it referenced a an earlier June 2018 Q drop which said this would you believe Hussein tried to call Kim prior to the summit?
He did not have his updated phone number.
Oh, goddammit.
Well, goddammit.
I'm scrolling through my contacts here and looking for Kim Jong Un.
When I dropped my phone in my toilet last Tuesday, I guess I lost my entire... I thought this was backed up on the SIM card.
I updated my... How the fuck does iCloud work?
Goddammit.
So I updated to the new iOS and it appears all my contacts are gone.
So, yeah.
I guess I'll go fellate Richard Branson on a yacht again, or tell the activists that they're doing something wrong.
So yeah, so Q was saying that Obama tried to call Kim Jong-un and couldn't because he didn't have the right phone number.
And then it included a link to a 2019 article which references a claim by President Trump that Obama tried to call Kim Jong-un 11 times, but, quote, the man on the other side, the gentleman on the other side, did not take his call.
That's tight.
So he's screening calls from Obama?
Yeah.
He's like, not again, dude.
I told you it's over between us.
So now the first problem with this.
So what Q is basically implying is that I said that Obama tried to call, didn't have his phone number, and then Trump said that Obama tried to call Kim Jong-un 11 times, but he didn't take his call.
So I predicted something that actually happened.
I have inside information, and this proves it, basically.
This is high school nonsense.
Not very great proof, I gotta say.
It's not great.
So obviously the first problem with the Q-proof is that Trump's story obviously did not happen.
There's no evidence that it happened.
Every Obama official who has been asked about it says it didn't happen.
It would have been contrary to Obama's much-criticized policy of strategic patience with North Korea for Obama to directly contact Kim Jong-un.
Or strategic. He has strategic patience with accomplishing almost anything really.
He's incredibly strategic patient. He will go to his grave with an absolute strategic patience
of having been good or great or even interesting.
So Trump here is proposing that he alone knows of a secret foreign policy that Obama was attempting
to conduct. And also, even though these calls were humiliating for Obama, which is what Trump
is implying, it was not even leaked by North Korean propaganda.
So North Korea, of course, would want to keep a tight lid on Kim Jong Un clowning the American president.
They wouldn't want to report on that.
And further, do you honestly believe that Kim Jong Un, who is leveraging his meeting with Trump to burnish his image as a statesman within his own country, wouldn't have taken a call from Obama?
It's obviously a bullshit story, and I wish everybody had enough self-respect to see it for the obviously bullshit story that it is.
Well, Travis, I mean, like the QAnon candidate said, it's a bullshit story until it's proven.
So, I'm sorry to correct you, but, you know.
Beep!
Oh, hey there.
This is your old friend Barry again.
I wish you would answer the phone.
Yeah, I know this is the seventh message I leave this week, but we used to have something, and I just don't think it's dead.
I refuse to believe that, so if you could just Answer your phone.
I'll try you again tomorrow.
Beep.
But even if Trump's story was true, let's go ahead and just for the moment assume that
is true.
It doesn't even match the story that Q says.
So Q claims that Obama didn't have Kim's updated phone number.
Trump claims that Obama tried to call Kim 11 times.
Now if you have the wrong phone number, then you don't try to call 11 times.
I don't even understand what Q was trying to say here, how these are compatible.
Like, did Obama get, like, get really drunk and then drunk dial Kim Jong-un and then wake up and forget he did it?
Actually, I have to dispute your facts here because it says the gentleman on the other side.
He's not saying Kim was the person on the other side.
He's saying this other random Korean person who has been reassigned Kim's number, one of the One of the leaders' previous numbers.
By the way, leaders love changing their phone numbers.
That's totally a thing.
Yeah, they change their numbers.
Every new president, they get a new one.
Some random Korean person.
A gentleman.
So he had his phone number, but now the new phone number changed and now it's going to someone who's still North Korean.
Another gentleman.
He tried to call him 11 times.
Wouldn't answer.
No, I actually, I gotta side with Travis on this one.
I think that, you know, when you call somebody 11 times, that's indication that you are exactly sure that that's their number, because you're like, motherfucker, you're like, motherfucker, I know this is your number, I'm gonna keep fucking calling you.
That's why you do it.
But some random Korean person is like really creeped out that Obama has left like a million messages.
But like, I mean, if I get a number, okay, here, let's look at this realistically.
So first of all, you get a number.
If somebody's calling my phone, right, and it's a number that I do not recognize, I'm gonna not answer it.
But if that number called me 11 times in a row, I'd be like, okay, this is a family member at a hospital, they're borrowing a cell phone, they're in some sort of emergency, if they're calling me 11 times, you're gonna fucking pick up!
Right, but he said, I didn't... the person didn't pick up, maybe that person called them back.
And then technically he's still right.
What I'm trying to say is Trump and Pew is correct.
This discussion is melting my brain.
Can we please move on?
Well, hold on.
I feel like there's another problem still.
So Trump claims that Obama did these calls while Obama was still president.
Do you believe that someone who had access to the NSA and the CIA couldn't get a hold of Kim Jong-un's phone number?
I mean, I feel like this is a really basic piece of intel.
This is something you would give to an intern, you know?
The all-powerful deep state can secretly control the world for decades or centuries, but it can't find a phone number.
This is what I'm expected to believe.
Well yeah, maybe Kim's got a burner, you know?
Yeah.
All his dealings, you know.
So part of the reason that none of this really makes sense or is compatible is the fact that originally Q was implying that Obama was attempting to caulk him after he had gotten out of office.
It was part of this QAnon narrative that Obama was rushing around all over the world to all the world leaders trying to cover up his crimes before Trump caught him.
And so Q was saying that after Obama was out of office, Kim Jong-un changed his number like someone who wants to cut off their axe or something.
But in Trump's story, Obama is trying to call Kim Jong-un while Obama was in office.
So they don't mash.
They're just incompatible.
It's so, so stupid.
And it's just, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
But people sincerely believe this.
Like, Neon Revolt, by the way, was bragging about this particular cue proof.
I thought it was really solid.
And I don't understand why people hate their intellect so much that they think that this is worthwhile.
Neon Revolt is also on TikTok making videos about nuggies.
Is he?
I'm going to subscribe.
Yeah, he has a little one where he's just frying up chicken nuggets.
Does it show his face?
He's like, nuggies.
No, it's just like Pepe.
I want to know what he looks like.
Yeah.
Great proof.
We really have kind of fallen quite far.
Yeah.
That this is the level.
This is the conversation.
That this is what Q is doing now.
Yeah, it's basic sort of, you know, cold reading.
You say something that's sort of like vague, and you take something that sounds vaguely similar as proof of a hit.
It's such basic, fundamental scam techniques that have been used for centuries, but they still work because human beings, they want to believe.
I want to believe.
I want to believe.
Speaking of I want to believe, I think this is a perfect segue to bring us into our next segment.
This is the story of Cicada 3301.
It was a dark, frigid night in Sweden on January 24th, 2012.
The flurries of snow danced across a frosted window pane as Joel Eriksson aimlessly surfed 4chan,
looking for anything to mitigate the dull winter night.
As he was skimming through the usual garbage, something caught his eye.
It was a single image with a black background and white text.
It read, Hello.
We are looking for highly intelligent individuals.
To find them, we have devised a test.
There is a message hidden in this image.
Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us.
We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck. 3301.
Now we're talking, Erickson thought to himself.
He had heard of stuff like this before.
Certain cyber security apparatuses would pull stunts like this every now and again.
A sort of job application, if you will.
Crack the code, and be considered for an elite squadron of taxpayer-funded hackers.
Erickson wiped the sleep from his eyes, and he began to dig in.
Perhaps the message itself was a code.
No, too easy, he thought.
Joel was an IT security pro and a skilled cryptographer.
Then he had an idea.
He ran the image through a steganography program, a tool that helps decoders find secret text hidden in image files.
There was a reason the post had been an image as opposed to your standard message board text post.
Within the metadata of the image, Joel Erikson got his first clue.
Tiberius Claudius Caesar.
And a line of meaningless letters.
Interesting, Joel thought.
Could be a reference to a Caesar cipher, a code in which letters actually represent different letters of the alphabet.
Tiberius Claudius was the fourth emperor.
Joel carefully moved each letter four places down in the alphabet.
For example, A really stood for E, and E really stood for I. Joel cracked a Mountain Dew.
It was already late, and he had to work the next morning.
But the invitation to solve the puzzle was too intriguing.
He decided that attempting to solve the riddle would be worth feeling like absolute shit the next day at work.
A sacrifice this researcher has made many times since the release of NBA 2K20.
Erickson quickly cracked the code.
It was a website.
www.patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous!
Just kidding.
The website contained a single image.
Was it some sort of raw intelligence?
Perhaps a secret meeting place for future operatives?
Not quite.
Julian, would you like to describe the image?
So here we have a mallard duck with a kind of spotted yellow head.
We've got a lot of brown.
It says in all caps WHOOPS and then in small caps JUST DECOYS THIS WAY.
Looks like you can't guess how to get the message out.
And there seems to be a small portion of the duck's hind side that has kind of a pink Triangle of sorts?
Oh yeah, I didn't know that.
Noticed that.
Regardless, the image left quite a bit to be desired.
The duck was not even real.
In fact, it's a popular type of wooden folk art called a decoy.
At one point, hunters used them to attract ducks, but now they are just collected by people, like this researcher's girlfriend, who saw a couple pictures of the friendly-looking mallards on the internet a couple weeks back, and now we have two of them in our apartment.
Hmm, Erickson thought.
Looks like this riddle would be a touch more challenging than the average brain teasers on 4chan.
Brain teasers like, is downloading this a federal crime?
And how many homophobic slurs could be used in a single post?
Erickson was hooked.
He called in sick to work like every good gamer should when they're deep in the thralls of an immersive experience.
Perhaps the duck's bullying was a clue in and of itself.
Erickson thought the language used was a little odd.
There was a decryption program called OutGuess.
Now, this may seem about as coincidental as a QAnon clock, but sure enough, when Erickson ran the image and text through the program, another clue materialized.
It read, here is a book code to find the book and more information.
Go to, and then it's a Reddit address and then a whole string of numbers.
And then good luck.
Three three zero one.
Upon clicking on the Reddit link, Joel found himself on a board titled r slash A2E7J6IC78H0J, where posts made entirely out of code popped up every couple of hours.
The subreddit is still up and I managed to get a screengrab of it.
So you guys can actually take a look and we'll post this.
It just looks like nonsense.
Yeah, it's just nonsense.
It just looks like gobbledygook.
Just streams of random characters.
Just, yeah, nonsense.
Yeah.
Now, let's just pause for a second here to recognize that already this is far more interesting than QAnon in almost every single way.
Actual codes.
Actual ciphers.
Actual need for real computer cyber security skills.
Okay.
Actually, genuinely smart people.
Genuinely smart people.
One thing leading to the next.
One thing leading to a place where you find a second thing that proves that you would be led there on purpose.
Yes, yes, where you find something that actually lets you know that you made a correct decision.
Yeah, which already means that this is going to have a much smaller audience than Q.
But the game was still the same.
Thousands of internet researchers coming together to crack what?
Nobody knew but they sure as hell wanted to find out As Erickson trolled the subreddit deciding he was going to
allow himself to smoke cigarettes inside the house today he came across two images
The first one was labeled, Welcome.
And it is a, um, an image of a welcome mat.
Now, when Joel ran the image through OutGuess, the following message was decrypted.
Begin PGP sign message hash colon SHA1.
From here on out, we will cryptographically sign all messages with this key.
It is available on the MIT's key servers.
Key ID 7A35090F.
Patience is a virtue.
Patience is a virtue.
Good luck.
3301.
Yet another code.
At this point in the game, Ericsson had taken the week off work to become a full-time baker along with the other Anons.
He had discovered the first clue a little later than others, so he resigned himself to playing catch-up over the next couple of days.
The second image posted on the Cicada subreddit was titled, Problems.
And when Erickson ran it through OutGuess, he decoded the following message.
The key has always been right in front of your eyes.
This isn't the quest for the Holy Grail.
Stop making it more difficult than it is.
Good luck.
3301.
Ooh.
Like, already the drops are, like, better.
Like, the copywriting is better.
Yeah, yeah.
For this, like...
It's taunting and exciting and enticing.
Yeah.
It's like, ah, yeah, this is fun.
Oh, and just to explain.
So PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, and it's an encryption program that provides cryptographic
privacy and authentication for data communication.
So it's used for signing, encrypting, decrypting text, emails, files, directories, and even
whole disk partitions to increase the security of email communications.
I mean, in this case, the PGP sort of functions very similarly to 4chan and 8chan's trip code, and basically ensures that the various Cicada 3301 posts are all legit posts from the same guy who posted the original one.
So Erickson poured over the various lines of the book code.
It was Mayan numbers cross-referenced with prime numbers while using the title of the subreddit as a foundation for a whole lot of shit that my heavy brain could barely understand.
They were also posting cryptic encrypted images with more clues throughout with amazing quotes like this.
Hello.
The path lies empty.
Epiphany seeks the devoted.
Liber Primus is the way.
Its words are the map.
Their meaning is the road, and their numbers are the direction.
Seek, and you will be found.
Good luck.
3301.
Now this sounds suspiciously like the Jewish numbers game.
What's the Jewish numbers game?
Gematria.
Oh!
The Jewish numbers game.
Yeah.
In a January 15, 2015 article for Rolling Stone, journalist David Kushner detailed the efforts of two other solvers, which is the Cicada branding for Baker, concerning the book code in the initial drops.
The new clues initially baffled Marcus and Tech, but they knew there had to be something buried within them.
Taking the Mayan numerals along with others on the page, they derived a sequence of numbers and set about seeing how it might be applied to the garbage letters on the page.
It was a tedious and time-consuming process.
Up in the pitch black daytime of the arctic winter, Guttorm trudged through the work while Marcus and Tech toiled through the night.
Quote, I have a gift to find patterns where there aren't obvious patterns, Guttorm says, so you could almost call me a schizophrenic.
He sat in the glow of four computer monitors staring into the screens until he literally went cockeyed and had to later go to an ophthalmologist.
But the team eventually found a pattern.
The first letter of the code became a K. The second, an I. The third, an N. The fourth, a G. The second word was Arthur.
The dozens of successive words formed a story.
The hashtag decipher team ran the text through Google and found it was a medieval Welsh romance.
What?!
Yes!
Yes!
The Lady of the Fountain.
Part of the Mabinogion, it concerned a knight who loses his love when he spends too much time pursuing his adventures.
So using the book code from the decoy image on the Lady of the Fountain, the actual words in the book, the solvers, including our probably-fired-from-his-job boy Joel Erickson, deciphered another hidden message.
Call us at telephone number 2-1-4-3-9-0-9-6-0-8.
Alright, this is awesome.
Holy fucking shit, my dudes.
A real life number.
Now, if QAnon had thought of anything half this smart, where you, you know, decipher Trump's watch and it leads to a voicemail where, like, you know, he can be heard slurping liquid out of a can, you know, it would be a fucking, like, runaway success.
Well, I mean, even, you know, more so than it already is, I suppose.
Keep in mind, this was also in 2012, when expectations for decrypted internet content were a lot higher.
You let her standard slip, man.
Joel carefully picked up his now ancient-looking, almost prehistoric, iPhone 4, and dialed
the number.
Very good.
You have done well.
There are three prime numbers associated with the original Final Cut JPEG image.
3301 is one of them.
You will have to find the other two.
Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com on the end to find the next step.
Good luck.
Goodbye.
Wow.
Once again.
Very exciting.
So much fucking cooler than QAnon.
I mean, shit, I feel like I'm in some sort of weird Matrix spinoff that was written by the guy who did Mothman Prophecies.
This is Wile E. Coyote shit so far.
Yeah, Cicada Man Prophecies.
Okay, so the answering machine itself contained a code.
Erickson went back to the original image, the first one posted by the group, with the black background and the white text.
Um, its dimensions were 509 by 503, both prime numbers.
The phone message had mentioned a third prime number, 3301.
Erickson completed the equation, 509 times 503 times 3301.
number 3301, Ericsson completed the equation 509 times 503 times 3301.
The result?
845145127.
Ericsson typed the string of numbers, added a dot com, and clicked enter.
Immediately, he was taken to a new website with this image.
And the image is so fucking cool.
It's like the moth from Silence of the Lambs, but made out of the Matrix code.
It's a cicada.
Yeah, it's a cicada.
It's all green dots on the black background.
It's very, very cool and Matrix-y.
Yeah.
Okay, so attached to this image was a countdown.
Now, sidebar, I would take QAnon a lot more seriously if there was a legitimate countdown, right?
Like, if Q had said, like we had in the QAnon news, he was like, indictments are coming.
Now, if he had said indictments are coming, and there was a fucking countdown clock going on, I would be like, shit dude, at least you're swinging for the fences.
Yeah.
Yeah, when do the bakers do any work that leads to like a website or even a phone number that ends up being something?
I can't think of it this single time.
Yeah, it's always like a concrete conclusion.
It's always, yeah, it's like what they find is always shifting.
It's like, we thought this meant this, but it actually meant this other thing.
It's always changing.
Yeah, but they never like go to a website where Q has left them a second message where it's like, congratulations for If there's a secret page on NSA.gov and they decoded some things and found it, I'd be like, alright, maybe there's something to this.
That kind of thing never happens.
At the very least, you'd be like, cool branding.
Cool game that you've set up.
This is fine.
Q is like the E.T.
video game.
You put every copy of it into a dump and you try to pretend it was never released.
Yes, very much so.
Okay, so this time Erickson knew exactly what tools to use.
He immediately ran the image through OutGuess and once again decrypted a hidden message.
You have done well to come this far.
Patience is a virtue.
Check back at 1700 on Monday, 9 January 2012, UTC 3301.
Monday 9 January 2012 UTC 3301 and so they waited and waited and
And looked at hentai.
Just kidding, I'm kidding.
Maybe they did though, I don't know.
Finally, the countdown hit zero.
But the image seemingly didn't change.
Solvers kept refreshing the website, but it didn't seem to do anything.
Could it be the end of Cicada 3301?
What had they been counting down to?
One of the solvers profiled in the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, who goes by Tech, was at this point, leading a double life.
Tech was already feeling out of sorts.
The puzzle, which the hashtag decipher team was now calling Cicada, had become all-consuming.
Quote, solving things is kind of addictive, he says.
It kind of felt like national treasure.
He was staying up until 4 in the morning, dragging himself to school, all the while hiding a secret digital life from his parents.
Quote, If I had delved into what he was solving and known it was from an unknown source, it would have caused me much more stress at the time, his mother tells me.
Quote, It would have freaked them out, Tech says.
Meeting with strangers on the internet to solve puzzles sounds a little sketch.
It's all just teenagers and fucking up their school.
For the most part.
I mean, the first guy, the Swedish guy, Ericsson, he's like 34 or whatever, like an IT guy.
But from the research that I was doing, a lot of it sounds like teenagers who were staying up late, doing the brain teasers, doing the puzzles, like congregating on the chans.
Because it seems way cooler than school.
Yeah.
No offense to school.
Yeah, well and also at this point nobody really knew what was up.
I think everybody sort of at this point kind of figured that it was some kind of recruitment service for the NSA.
And there are, I looked it up, I didn't put any of this in the episode because there's not too much to mention other than that like the Air Force and their other government entities have done stuff like this where they'll put up a riddle
with numbers and they'll say, hey, see if you can solve it.
The CIA even has a little like, you know, coding for beginners sort of like on their,
you know, dot gov page or whatever.
So there's this feeling that maybe if you solve it, they'll tell you if aliens are real
or something.
Yeah.
Well, you'll become an agent.
You'll become an agent.
You'll know whether the aliens are real.
This is like, you know, it's a real matrix situation.
You have a, you know, a bunch of neos sitting in front of their computer thinking that like, you know, hey, if I crack this, I might get to, you know, take a peek behind the curtain.
Welcome, tech.
You are now in the CIA.
Anyways, the government in Ecuador is too left wing.
It seemed at this point that Cicada 3301 had become a cooperative game.
Users flocked to the message boards, waiting and discussing the impending countdown.
Solvers quickly figured out that by running the image from the website through OutGuess again, a new message appeared.
Coordinates.
Holy shit.
They plugged them into the internet.
The coordinates were places all over the world.
The unencrypted image is an image of a cicada and it says, Find our symbol at the location nearest you.
And then a group of coordinates that pertain to Chino, California, Erskineville, Australia, Fayetteville, Arkansas, Haleiwa, Hawaii, Miami, Florida, New Orleans, Louisiana, two locations in Paris, three locations in Seattle, Washington, Seoul in South Korea, and Warsaw in Poland.
It became glaringly apparent that Cicada 3301 was bound by the internet no longer.
A brave group of solvers with their arms shielding their sensitive eyes clamored out of forgotten basements and sweltering internet cafes in an effort to reach the coordinates and perhaps claim the prize.
So I've included an image for you guys to look at.
These are pictures that solvers took of sheets of paper with a QR code and the Cicada sort of logo.
taped on telephone poles in Sydney, Miami, Paris, and Warsaw.
And so there were people actually, like, went to these places, and there were these posters taped up at the exact location of the coordinates.
And so now images of these posters appeared in the message boards.
You know, people were taking pictures and posting them.
One solver even uploaded a video to one of the posters locations, and the solver who had claimed it gently holding the paper in his hand.
Later, he says, as he goes off to solve what's been called one of the greatest internet mysteries of our time.
When the QR codes were scanned, it took solvers to new drops such as... In 29 volumes, knowledge was once contained.
How many lines of the code remained when the Mabinogion paused?
Go that far in from the beginning and find my first name.
A lot of prime numbers, and then a warning.
You've shared too much to this point.
We want the best, not the followers.
Thus, the first few there will receive the prize.
Good luck.
3301.
Now in this fascinating exchange, it seems that the hackers were scolding our precious, precious bakers for sharing too many crumbs with one another.
A stark contrast from QAnon.
At this point, everything kicked into overdrive.
Cicada 3301 was legit.
This was no longer a warm boy in a cool basement.
These guys were highly coordinated and international.
The stakes had risen considerably.
Surprisingly, a noticeable amount of infighting began to erupt in the once peaceful subreddit.
People began to grow paranoid of one another.
Solvers that had teamed up to work more quickly began to suspect that there could be moles within the community.
Teams began planning false clues online in an effort to throw shills and potential ops off the trail.
They took up the mentality that, quote, everyone but you is Cicada.
A poem of fading death, named for a king, meant to be read only once and vanish.
Alas, it could not remain unseen.
And then, of course, you know, a string of prime numbers.
And again, the warning.
You have shared too much at this point.
We want the best, not the followers.
Thus, the first few there will receive the prize.
The first message is a book code, along with a reference to the Mabinogion?
Mabinogion.
Mabinogion, as Travis has corrected.
I've been saying it incorrectly throughout the episode, but I'm not gonna go back and re-record it because we've got too much exciting shit to cover.
But, if you listen to his mispronunciations, There is a hidden code.
If you listen a hundred times to me mispronouncing the Mabinogion.
Yeah, in fact, anytime we've ever mispronounced anything on this show, it's a secret code.
We knew how to say those words, you assholes.
Of course, the Mabinogion is the reference from an earlier drop, a collection of 12th to 13th century Welsh stories.
However, the second drop from the QR codes solvers came to discover was in reference to a William Gibson poem called Agrippa.
Or, Book of the Dead.
Super fucking cool.
Now, this poem, I found out, could only be read if readers retrieved a floppy disk hidden inside a book and inserted it directly into their computers.
So then the text of the, you know, 300 or so line poem would scroll up your screen like the intros in Star Wars, and then, upon reaching the end, it would encrypt itself and disappear forever.
So I thought about maybe reading the entire Gibson poem just to pad the doc out a little bit, but I decided that would be unethical.
So instead, here is a short summary taken from the UCSB's Literature Department.
Gibson's text is a transgenerational memory poem about his father's and his own youth.
The father captured by a camera in a 1920 Kodak Agrippa brand photo album.
The son reflecting upon the interface for a vanished world thus provided by the mechanism.
Disappearance is a central theme.
Inside the cover, he inscribes something in soft graphite, now lost.
So honestly, this shit feels like what you give a replicant to read that lets you know whether they're a robot or not.
This feels like the thing that if you read... It's a capture test.
Yeah, I started looking at this poem and I was like... By applying the book code to the poem, a final website was given out, which led to a site only accessible by using Tor.
Which is really, at the very least, from a story perspective, pretty cool because it's like, alright, we've taken this as far as we can on clear net, it's now up to you if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
So very, very well done.
Solvers who cracked the code and followed the link received the following email.
Congratulations.
Please create a new email address with a public, free web-based service, one you've never used before, and enter it below.
We recommend you do this while still using Tor for anonymity.
We will email you a number within the next few days, in the order in which you arrived at this page.
Once you've received it, come back to this page and append a slash and then the number you received to this URL.
For example, if you received 3-8-9-4-8-9-4-2-3-0-9-3-4-2-0-9, then you would go to HTTP slash... And then it's just... I mean, it's like real shit.
It's real internet shit.
Yeah.
It's the best way I can fucking describe it.
A series of numbers.
It's a series of numbers.
Real internet shit.
You know what, Julian?
I've had enough of your bullying, okay?
What did I... I didn't do... I didn't say anything.
Real internet shit.
People like this stuff.
People like the... People like the stuff!
Sadly, Joel Erickson never got an email.
He assumes that because he got a late start, he was not one of the first to reach the end of the game.
Merely what Cicada had called a follower.
For many, that was the end of the road on their journey to become employed potentially by a government somewhere, cracking codes as their full-time job, as opposed to quitting the full-time jobs they had to crack codes.
Shortly thereafter, Cicada 3301 posted what seemed to signal the end of the game.
Some of the supposed winners leaked emails sent to them by the Cicada team, but it was just more ciphers and codes.
They were individually focused and encouraged the winners to isolate themselves, following a deep dark path of unique puzzles down into the depths of the dark web.
Some say, lost forever.
At this point, even the incredibly comprehensive wiki I found is foggy about what happened from there on out.
To quote, From here, nobody really knows what happened.
As the original puzzles were not very well documented in the end stages like the second puzzle was.
Hopefully, one day this will come to light, but after receiving this email, every person that did so went completely dark, as if they had disappeared from the internet.
Nobody knew how deep the rabbit hole went, but all the solvers could agree, it was the deepest they'd ever seen.
What happened after this is mostly still not known, apart from a few slips when some people told a bit more about what was going on.
Logs of those testimonies can be found on Unfiction.
Legitimacy of those is not confirmed.
It might just be trolling.
After all, 3301 might not exist at all.
After a whole month without any word from Cicada, and hey, we know how that is.
I mean, am I right?
Am I right?
Right.
Please, C, come back.
They posted one final image on the subreddit.
Hello.
We have now found the individuals we sought.
Thus our month-long journey ends.
For now.
Thank you for your dedication and effort.
If you were unable to complete the test, or did not receive an email, do not despair.
There will be more opportunities like this one.
Thank you all. 3301 P.S.
1-0-4-1-2-7-9-0-C-N That string of numbers like going into infinity.
However, according to the Rolling Stone article, one of the teenagers profiled did get accepted into the fold.
Nearly a month after submitting his email to Cicada, he received a message.
Congratulations, your month of testing has come to an end.
Out of the thousands who have attempted it, you are one of only a few who have succeeded.
There is one last step, although there will not be any hidden codes or secret messages or physical treasure hunts.
This last step is only honesty.
We have always been honest with you, and we expect you to be honest with us in return.
You have all wondered who we are, and so we shall now tell you.
We are an international group.
We have no name.
We have no symbol.
We have no membership rosters.
We do not have a public website.
And we do not advertise ourselves.
We are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves, much like you have, by completing this recruitment contest.
And we are drawn together by common beliefs.
A careful reading of the text used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs.
That tyranny and oppression of any kind must end.
That censorship is wrong, and that privacy is an alienable right.
We are not a hacker group, nor are we a wearer's group, who trade music and movies online.
We do not engage in illegal activity, nor do our members.
If you are engaged in illegal activity, we ask that you cease any and all illegal activities or decline membership at this time.
We will not ask questions if you decline.
However, if you lie to us, we will find out.
You are undoubtedly wondering what it is that we do.
We are much like a think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate.
Liberty.
Privacy.
Security.
So, you know, like many science fiction screenplays, the ending needed a little work.
Allegedly.
We are something.
And believe.
Some stuff.
Kind of.
Don't do illegal shit.
That sucks.
Allegedly, and this is according to that same Rolling Stone article, the following message that was sent to the winners was a sort of questionnaire that unfolded in real time between one of the teenagers and Cicada.
I won't read the whole thing here.
We can link to the article.
But honestly, it kind of plays out like a shitty Watch Dogs 2 cutscene where they ask the kid questions like, Do you believe that censorship harms humanity?
And the main character is like, your hacker group is badass, but like, he also challenges them philosophically.
Like, it's wild.
Like, he's like, well, yes, I think I want to work with you, but like, how do you feel about the reconciliation between like, you know, truth and like, it goes into this weird thing.
And this is like what the, you know, what one of the supposed winners said sort of happened.
So who knows whether or not it's real, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Yeah, it's it's weird.
It's weird because it doesn't even make sense like we are this deeply principled international group, but we follow the law very strictly Yeah, no, no, don't don't do doing it get any speeding tickets.
Don't do any crimes We oppose all oppression of the governments make something illegal.
We can't without we don't do that.
No smoking dope Yeah, exactly So anyway, so according to this kid, he gets in and he's given a special username and password for the darknet.
And this is his welcome screen, which is really cool.
It's the cicada image made out of, you know, a bunch of numbers and the text says, Web browsers are useless here.
Welcome.
Good luck.
So he estimates that approximately 20 other solvers made it into the group.
But even after all that, no one really had any idea what they were doing, who they were working for, or with, who was behind Cicada, or what they did.
And he's quoted as saying, They insinuated they were a part of a bunch of different organizations.
Tech recalls, it was some kind of secret society.
They shared a common goal, which was to increase privacy and security in the digital age and ensure the freedom of information.
So what is this shit?
Is it some Illuminati hacking group?
The answer, dear listeners, is far, far more nefarious.
After months of discussion online in the darkest corners of the internet,
Cicada shared with its new members that this had all been leading to the development of some software.
They wanted the recruits to come up with something that would impact the world and then go and build it.
That the point of the scavenger hunt had been to wrangle talented teenage coders willing to stay awake for 30 hours at a time and code for little to no money.
The recruits began to develop a program called CAKES, and this would be ideally used to protect whistleblowers like the recent Chelsea Manning at the time.
They actually worked together with the 20 or so recruits, and according to one of the kids, actually started building this thing out and forming a sort of open source coding co-op.
But as real life got in the way, a good amount of the coders dropped off, potentially discovered by their parents to be solving math problems for anonymous internet hackers late at night when they should have been sleeping.
So, of course, on the one-year anniversary of the first Cicada Post, all the community members gathered on the Chans, wondering if there would be a new drop.
Now, I'd like to remind everyone this is 2013, almost four years before what would be the first appearance of QAnon, and we have got thousands of shit posters and trolls hoping maybe that an anonymous internet intelligence apparatus appears and tells them what to do.
I mean, the type of people who get roped into this shit are just absolute gluttons for punishment.
I mean, it's... Yeah, I mean, can you imagine meeting or even starting a podcast with one of those people?
No, that sounds terrible.
But instead of a new drop, something else appeared.
A warning.
Someone from within the Cicada community.
Or, potentially, yet another troll hellbent on ruining everyone's good time for the sake of his own.
Apparently this post has now become infamous within the Cicada head community, and is way too long for me to read in full, so here are some highlights.
I apologize for the sometimes improper language in this text.
English is not my first language, and I have also used software to mask authorship, so 3301 Cicada does not know who publishes this.
Thank you.
This is at the very beginning of the message, so it's weird that he says thank you right away.
Then he goes on to say...
I was part of what you call 3301 Cicada for more than a decade, and I'm here to warn you, stay away.
This is a dangerous organization.
While I agree with many of the goals, their ways are nefarious.
In fact, I think it is like a left-hand path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organization.
I realize this is a strong statement, but I will provide important evidence to support these claims.
So he claims that Cicada 3301 was founded by military officials, philosophers, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world.
He then goes on to detail their entire structure.
According to the new recruits who had indeed worked for Cicada 3301, a lot of the poster statements rang true.
So apparently they use multiple structures within one global structure.
There is a decentralized cell structure, such as.
However, some cells have a higher rank than others, which led to a kind of hierarchy, despite decentralization in general.
They practiced strict compartmentalizing, so a lot of the cells didn't know that other cells existed, or what they were working on, or if they were working on the same projects together.
There was a hierarchy within each cell in a very, like, military-like structure.
And he also said that it's possible that the cells are founded to disagree with other cells, or even the objectives of the organization itself.
And he quotes, if you cannot beat them, control them.
So he thinks that there was actually, you know, calculated opposition ideology infused into the different cells to create this sort of environment of, you know, non-unity, despite everything that, you know, that Cicada themselves had preached, which is, hmm.
You know, this is all starting to sound very suspiciously like Deep State globalists, if you ask me.
The poster then goes on about the group's religious and philosophical beliefs.
So, they believe in Highlion's ideas on global brain.
In fact, the idea of global brain with humans as individual neurons arise on a regular basis.
They believe in absolute freedom, individual and the information.
They believe in the philosophy of the Jesuit, quote, the end justifies the means.
Other philosophies they use is, quote, what you resist persists by Jung, and the Jesuit corollary, create what you fear most.
For example, if you are afraid of resistance and rebellion, then send operators to create resistance and rebellion.
This way you can direct the energy of the people, embrace it, let it dwindle, and at the same time minimize the damage.
And finally, they believe that there is no inherent meaning to anything, that all things are, quote, empty and meaningless, and that, quote, all things are always whole, perfect, and complete.
So, it's just nonsense.
It's just like, kind of like some teenage, like, philosophical... It's kind of crap.
This is just a LARP for shut-ins.
Yeah, it's a lot, yeah, exactly.
It's like this weird, like, they claim to have created something, but nothing actually works in the system that they've sort of set up.
It's wild.
It's a mess.
It's a mess.
So it seems like, at the end of the day, Cicada 3301 It's just, like, a recruitment platform for, like, a tour-branded think tank, basically.
This is, like, every documentary on, like, the Illuminati.
You start out, you're like, hell yeah!
And then by the end, you want to cauterize your brand.
Yeah, exactly.
I was so disappointed.
The digger you deep, the less there really is.
I like the digger you deep.
The digger you deep.
The more you deep.
The digger you deep, the deeper you dick.
The more you deep, the less there really is.
Yeah, the digger you deep, the more you deep.
The deeper you dick, the more you dick.
Okay, so this is funny too.
The poster ends his warning letter, admitting that because he had now found Jesus Christ, he could no longer in good conscience continue to work for Cicada.
So this is the original walkaway.
Shortly after, a message was posted to the Chans.
Hello again.
Our search for intelligent individuals now continues.
The first clue is hidden within this message.
Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us.
We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck, 3301.
Now this time around, the puzzles were far more complicated.
There was an Aleister Crowley reference causing some to believe that Cicada 3301 was some sort of satanic cult.
The code dove heavily into Gematria.
Now, why the fuck is this Jewish numbers shit always at the very bottom of all of these things?
It's like every single time.
Because all of code is just the Jewish numbers 1 and 0.
1 and 0, my friend.
I will say, the way Cicada delivered the number strands to Decrypt is fucking doper than anything QAnon has ever done.
They basically, once you sort of figured out the first code, it rebooted your computer, like essentially into kind of like a... It's like a DOS startup.
Like a DOS startup, and instead of like any sort of like...
OS logo or whatever. It's their cicada logo and then strings of numbers just start filling across the screen.
It's like some pretty cool Matrix shit and like at the very least like these LARPers like went through the trouble to
give you a couple moments of feeling like hey, I'm in the Matrix. Like
I'm seeing cool shit. Like, you know, their branding was really cool,
I thought.
Anyways, so encoded in the sets of numbers were audiophiles.
The title of the file seemed to be called The In-Star Emergence by the artist 3301, and fortunately I was able to find a copy for us to listen to today.
Solvers did their best to find patterns and codes hidden in the song.
And of course, they did.
For the second year in a row, Cicada led thousands of eager coders on a scavenger hunt much like the previous year, except the puzzles were ever more complicated and far more contingent on gematria tables and numbers and heavy encryptions.
At the end of it all...
There is no truth.
the tired, sweaty solvers? Why, another questionnaire. This one much less like
Watch Dogs and far more like Blade Runner. They had gotten better writers
for season two. There is no truth. What you are is more important than what you
do. You cannot step into the same river twice.
Observation changes the thing being observed.
This sentence is false.
Solvers could only choose the following answers to the above questions.
True, false, indeterminate, meaningless, self-referential, game rule, strange loop, or none of the above.
I mean, is this not some, like, replicant test shit?
Like, I can already feel my eyes bulging out of my skull and my urge to shoot Julian from under this table is rising considerably.
God fucking dammit.
Shoot me from under the table, daddy.
Maybe this is worse than QAnon.
At least Q doesn't make anyone fill anything out if they don't want to.
Like, you don't have to, like, fill out questionnaires and shit.
This has definitely grown tiresome with time.
Yeah.
After the survey, solvers were sent instructions on how to build and run a private server needed for increasingly advanced equations Cicada 3301 had asked them to solve.
But that was the last that anyone saw.
If anyone had been accepted as a recruit after the second round, the email did not leak.
The following year, a similar competition was run, also heavily contingent on literature and ciphers and gematria.
It seemed at this point, Cicada was leaning into their authentic Anon energy and began making drops like, A warning.
Believe nothing from this book.
Accept what you know to be true.
Test the knowledge.
Find your truth.
Experience your death.
Do not edit or change this book or the message contained within.
Either the words or their numbers for all is sacred.
I want a trap door to open under these people.
I just want them to be devoured by fucking alligators.
Either die an authentic Anon or you live long enough to become a LARP.
Yeah.
There we go, baby.
That's it.
I mean, that's it right there.
I mean, of course, unlike in QAnon's case, when the crazy hackers found the Dermatria equivalent and did the math, it actually did lead them to another clue, as opposed to just General Michael Flynn's Twitter account.
Like, can't they at least do, like, a two-for-one McDonald's coupon?
Just some fucking reward that is worth something.
At this point, it's better to, like, collect points on the back of, like, soda boxes and shit like that, just in terms of returns.
In terms of returns and respect for your intelligence.
So, you know, my take on all of this is that it is a much harder game than QAnon.
I don't understand all of the puzzles as well, and I really don't like the ticking clock mechanic, potentially doing a ton of work to not even win the game.
Also, it's a young man's game.
I cannot be bothered nowadays to spend 2,000 hours doing all of the side quests and RNG grinding.
I just want the juicy bits served up to me on a delicious platter with less structured mechanics that give me an overall more immersive experience.
While Cicada 3301 might actually be a better game, objectively, I just can't get into it with my particular play style.
I'd give it a 6 out of 10.
Baby, it's beautiful.
I really do like Cicada, I just wish they had, like, let it somewhere cool.
I don't know, anything.
Yeah, the third act kind of breaks down, like, the build-up is very cool, and it's like, why do all of this, you know, why do all of this prep just to kind of be like, Yes, we want to change the world in a sort of vague way.
You know what I mean?
Cicada is like the Matrix trilogy.
In the first one you're like, awesome.
In the second one you're like, I'm a little worried some of this stuff will not be resolved maybe.
By the third one you're like, fuck you!
Fuck you!
Fuck you!
I paid for this shit!
I'm here in the theater and I paid a lot of money!
That's so true.
It's such a great comparison.
It is.
It was like that while researching this, too, because at first I was like, holy shit, this is fucking awesome.
Like, this is a real thing.
Like, there's actual code.
And then when you start to get into, like, what it all means, you're like, oh, this is the same, like, first drafty bullshit that, like, all of these people have.
You know, the problem is that the attraction with these things is the mystery and the intrigue.
And as you go down the rabbit hole and you start solving it, you start seeing it for what it really is, there's less and less mystery.
And then it's just when you see things clearly, they're always shitty.
Yeah, you know, the problem is these guys really need to hire better writers.
They need to hire better philosophies and selves.
The problem is them!
These fucking dipshits think they're super smart and interesting for saying the stuff they do, and they aren't.
They're fucking second-rate William Gibson-inspired fucks, who at the end of the day are probably just fascist libertarian fucks.
Yeah, it's like if you let the developers write the story for Call of Duty, you know what I mean?
The next Cicada is going to be in the comments section of a fucking Ben Shapiro video.
Well, of course, there were other drops that indicated that in January of 2017 that Cicada would be back.
So there were groups of people who've waited for five years, four or five years waiting It's a lot like the development of DayZ.
Huh?
to come and it never came. It's a lot like the development of DayZ. Huh? What? Nothing.
What?
You've been listening to the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
If you like the show, you can support us and get a second weekly episode for just five bucks a month, okay?
And that is not a used car.
This is a new car.
You get a fresh car every week, plus access to the dozens of other cars that we've previously released.
Yeah.
Coming up this week, we're going to release an episode of The Millerites I'm very excited about.
That's right.
That was a Travis extraordinaire.
And let me tell you, it has led to the longest uninterrupted laughter that has maybe perhaps ever been aired on this podcast.
So yeah, so just go do that.
You'll get access to the archives and all that.
It'll be great.
That's yeah, patreon.com.
slash QAnon Anonymous.
And you can go there and subscribe.
We actually just reached our we just passed 1600 subscribers, which means that I will now have to tattoo myself with the letter Q. All right.
So we'll be live streaming that on Periscope.
I can't wait.
With commentary by Jake.
We're going to do it.
We're going to get your tattoo on your body.
I can't.
Oh, where am I going to get it?
Yeah, on your body.
It's gonna be on my hand, actually, on the kind of, um... What do you call this part?
The kind of... The chubby part of your thumb.
The chubby part of the bottom of the thumb.
The meaty part.
Okay.
Yeah.
If I were gonna eat your thumb, that's the part I would want.
As, like, a turkey leg.
Yeah.
Then it would be the part that you just... Yeah, I would be holding onto the thumb like it's the bone.
Why are you salivating?
Why are your eyes?
It sounds good.
Your eyes are poking out like a cartoon.
Maybe we should break for lunch soon.
Yeah, he's a little hungry and he's gonna want to try to... If you want to come see him be very hungry, you should come if you're in LA on February 8th of 2020.
It's a Saturday.
We will have our first live show.
You can get the tickets at tickets.qanonanonymous.com and then discord.qanonanonymous.com for our community stuff to come hang out and chat.
And additionally, you can go to merch.qanonanonymous.com if you want to buy t-shirts, mugs, whatever the hell.
Other stuff like that.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
A-kun.
Hi.
A-kun.
IT MAKES YOU need IT make you thought.
I like IT like IT makes you hurt.
It makes you kill It doesn't hurt.
It can.
A-Kun A-Kun
A-Kun Is that good dude?
Does that help you out?
The site better come on, dude.
I'm fucking losing my mind over here.
Saving meat, son.
This is Rob64.
Keep up the good work.
Hello.
Just wanted to say thanks and tell you guys that I love what you're doing.
