HBO's series on QAnon was shot over the course of three years and saw its director, Cullen Hoback, spend countless days alongside key players in the conspiracy theory. By the end of the documentary, a clearer image emerges of who has been enabling — and even posting as — Q. We sit with Cullen to chat his investigation and our experiences out in the field.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 137 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Q Into the Storm episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Today, we have a very special episode.
We'll be talking to Cullen Hoback, the author of Q Into the Storm, the six-part HBO documentary that has tied Ron and Jim Watkins very close to Q. Q itself, to be frank.
And that's obviously, you know, something that we, I guess, saw coming in slow motion.
It's still a shock.
We just finished watching the last two episodes, and we're obviously still reeling from some of the footage.
This is a pretty lengthy conversation, but honestly, I thought it was about eight times too short.
I had so many more questions, and I thought that the interview gave depth to Cullen's work, which is already pretty magnificent on its face.
But before all that, My main story this week, QAnon followers defend Matt Gaetz despite accusations of child trafficking.
Last week, the New York Times broke this story.
Congressman Matt Gaetz from Florida is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him.
This investigation, which was opened during the final months of the Trump administration, is reportedly examining whether Gates violated sex trafficking laws.
People familiar with the investigation said that in 2019 and 2020, Gates and one of his associates, Greenberg, would meet women recruited online at various locations, pay them in cash drawn from ATMs, and have sex with them.
Some of them allegedly took ecstasy, including Gates.
When asked about the allegations, Matt Gates told the New York Times this.
I only know that it has to do with women.
I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.
That's not a good denial.
If you're talking about sex trafficking, refer to the people who are being investigated as ex-girlfriends.
Gates, for his part, has also issued a carefully worded denial, saying, quote, First, I have never ever paid for sex.
And second, I, as an adult man, have not slept with a 17-year-old.
More stories of Gates allegedly acting slimy also emerged.
CNN reported that Gates showed nude photos and videos of women he'd slept with to colleagues in the House of Representatives, including while on the House floor.
One of the videos featured a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to a source.
Following these allegations, Matt Gates' communications director, Luke Ball, resigned Friday morning.
Which is not a good sign.
The guy who is supposed to defend you publicly says, I'd rather be unemployed.
Do you think that Gates is dropping the ball?
You're fired.
Now, how exactly has QAnon reacted to this news?
Because this is literally exactly what they've been waiting for.
A member of Congress, someone extremely powerful, someone who decides what laws that we all have to live under.
being accused of sex trafficking.
And they have freely accused other people of sex trafficking with zero evidence.
But of course, unsurprisingly, they think that this is all set up.
It's all a false flag.
It's all not real.
Here's some chatter from QAnon followers about the allegations that I spotted on Telegram.
John says, this is a smear by Pelosi.
Pepe Deluxe, the admin writes, kek.
Cory writes, quote, unnamed sources mouth pooping out of their face anus for the sole purpose of running a career-ending smear campaign, all because Matt didn't play on Team Cabals.
Laura writes, I believe in Matt.
He will weather the storm.
Three unnamed sources?
Can you say hearsay?
God bless America says the left is really trying hard to get Gates out of Congress.
Sounds more like they're panicking.
Even mainline QAnon influencers are just automatically rejecting the allegations.
For example, this is what QAnon promoter Liz Crokin said.
Gee, I can't imagine why the Deep State would want to frame Rep.
Gates like this kind of thing, this event in which obviously more information is forthcoming.
Gates is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else.
But, you know, these kinds of this kind of thing is exactly what like QAnon is like built for.
I mean, they're staring it in the face like a real serious allegation of someone very powerful being accused of sex trafficking, possibly by the Department of Justice.
And they're like all fake.
But if someone, like, you know, has a bracelet with a triangle on it, that means that they're a sex trafficker.
Interview with Cullen Hoback.
Today, we are speaking to filmmaker Cullen Hoback.
For three years, he followed Jim and Ron Watkins with a camera and spoke to many other people who were instrumental in the growth of QAnon.
The result of that effort is the six-part documentary series, Q, Into the Storm, which you can see on HBO.
Colin, thank you so much for joining us today.
Yeah, I mean, it's great to be on the show this time instead of just filming you guys doing a show.
Yeah, instead of just sort of like hovering above our heads.
I don't think people realize this, like how much I actually filmed all of you doing shows.
You know, I think there were also hours just devoted to footage of Jake's feet, which I know by popular demand, people were really, really excited about the appearance of your feet.
Oh my god, that's all we hear about.
This will be, you know, when the DVD comes out, there will be a special features section devoted solely to my souls.
That is the worst dad pun I've heard all day.
You're the best.
I mean, I actually, before we even get serious, did you have a moment in the cutting room where you're like, God damn it, I want to use this scene and look at those feet?
Yeah, yeah.
It just brought back all the olfactory memories.
So I was a little sad that we had to lose the scene where you guys went with Fred to the Bernie rally, you know, like a day before a total lockdown kicked in.
It was touching.
It just didn't fit.
Of course.
Before we get started about Q Into the Storm, I want to ask you about your past films, starting with your 2007 documentary Monster Camp.
So this is all about live action role playing or LARPing.
So it follows a chapter of a LARPing organization in Seattle, Washington.
It's a really fascinating portrayal.
And, like, how people LARP for escapism and socialization and the interesting interpersonal drama that kind of arises from that.
And you even joked on Twitter that this was your first film about LARPing.
So I'm interested.
So, like, what were the parallels, like, that you noticed between the people in Monster Camp and the QAnon followers and promoters that you depicted in Q Into the Storm?
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I didn't even make that connection until maybe a year into filming, where I was like, wait, why am I drawn to this story?
You know, there were a lot of themes in Monster Camp, a film about people who dress up and live out their Dungeons and Dragons fantasies for real.
that actually do cross over to some of the Q-munity or QAnon believers.
I think the biggest one, something that I learned back in 2007 about LARPing, is that if people pretend to be something long enough, they eventually become that thing.
And I think we saw that with QAnon.
A lot of people who believed in it in the early days or were pushing in the early days, you know, they were one foot in, one foot out.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not.
But the more they believed it, the more they sold it, the more they came to believe.
And until, you know, we got to this last year where there was this effort to try to just make the Q narrative real, you know, and I think that's what we saw in the sixth.
Another previous film of yours is Terms and Conditions May Apply, which was released in 2013.
And this film examines the ways in which big tech corporations and the government invade our privacy and how they use our personal data against us.
So how's working on that?
You're interested in those sorts of issues about, you know, big tech, big data, how that informed like how you approach covering 8chan, which builds itself as sort of a free speech platform, a place where everyone's private, you connect with it, no one knows who you are.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think this project is sort of a confluence of the three interests I explored in previous documentaries, LARPing digital rights and sort of investigating bad actors, you know, which is what I did in What Lies Upstream, which was, you know, trying to figure out what the cause of a chemical spill was.
And it ended up being a sort of a look at sort of systemic corruption.
And then Terms and Conditions, of course, that was a film about digital privacy and the erosion of digital privacy.
Monster Camp was about LARPing.
So in some ways, this was sort of all three of those interests combined into one mega story.
And back in 2018, I don't know, were you guys doing the podcast at that point in September of 2018?
We had just started, honestly, doing the podcast together.
I mean, I think I joined late 2018, in October 2018.
I mean, you mentioned that your interest in this subject matter was sparked by QAnon's ban on Reddit.
And the QAnon ban on Reddit is one of the first things we did an episode on.
I think it was like episode seven or eight.
Yeah, yeah.
So when Reddit banned QAnon, I mean, I was peripherally aware of Q at that point, but it was the banning of Q that really piqued my interest because, you know, it made me wonder if Q is sort of on the front lines of this debate around what speech is acceptable, what is really testing the limits of free speech.
And I wondered if banning QAnon might have the opposite of what its intended effect was.
If actually, by trying to ban it or censor it, there would be a Streisand effect.
And in fact, it would, you know, pique people's interest, bring them to it, which it did for me, right?
You know, I started paying attention to it because it was banned.
And I think we've seen these sort of boom cycles with Q where there are attempts to censor it or limit its growth, and then that actually ends up drawing more people to it because I don't know.
When you censor things, I think it gives them this veneer of intellectualism.
I mean, yeah, I mean, we sometimes talk about how, like, you know, as effective as the platform might be for limiting the amplification of some of these extremist movements, it's like, at best, a Band-Aid solution because, you know, banning ideas or sort of movements from platforms is going to stop the motivation that causes people to enter them into the first place.
It's not going to stop people's curiosity in them.
That's right.
Yeah, it doesn't.
I mean, it has a sort of limited effect.
It seems to work when they ban individuals.
It doesn't work all that well when they're banning ideas or hashtags.
I think right now we're in a period where we've seen, you know, mass bannings of a lot of these accounts on Twitter.
And it's been pushed to other places, but those conversations are still happening.
They're kind of regrouping.
And, you know, now we're just in even more polarized echo chambers, rather than all kind of congregating in the same spot.
But you know, I look at the speech that comes out of QAnon and some of the more extreme speech we see on Twitter as a symptom of a bigger problem.
And it's not the speech itself, it's actually the underlying technology.
You know, it's all of the algorithms that are driving people towards increasingly sensational content.
You know, I sometimes describe the algorithms as being sociopathic in that their only goal is getting and keeping your attention.
And so what we see is Silicon Valley is not for one second questioning the algorithms or questioning the extraction of user data as ways to deal with some of the extreme speech we see online.
Instead, they're saying, you know what, guys, more algorithms.
Why don't we just use this thing that caused the problem to now be the solution to it.
It reminds me of Homer Simpson, right?
Alcohol, the cause and solution to all of life's problems.
Silicon Valley is just algorithms, cause and solution to all of life's problems.
One of the most extraordinary things about your film is the level of access you managed to gain.
We were just talking about Ron and Jim Watkins.
There was barely any photos of Ron Watkins on the internet, like anywhere, before you started this.
He seemed to be a very private person.
But you also talked to people like Paul Ferber and Patriot Soapbox founder Coleman Rogers and Q Research board owner Fast Jack, which blew me away.
How on earth did you get so many people to open up and in many cases invite you into their homes to talk about these things?
I told everybody that I was coming at this from a position of neutrality.
Like with you guys, I mean, I let you know that I was talking with people who were some of the biggest bolsters of Q. And I started small in the beginning.
I mean, I started with the bottom of the power hierarchy.
And I started before Q was really this sort of giant story.
I started around the same time you guys did.
I think that helped.
I think the fact that I was producing this totally independently helped.
You know, oftentimes it was just me with a camera.
So that helped with the intimacy, and it also meant that I wasn't, in their eyes, a part of mainstream media.
So, you know, I was able to get in and film with a lot of, you know, sort of the ground troops early on, the people who had been cued, which you see in the beginning of episode one.
Kind of learn who they're getting their information from, the QTubers, and just kind of go up the hierarchy of power.
You know, and right in the beginning, we drafted out a list of who the likely suspects for Q might be, and rather than just directly chase each of those leads, you know, I hoped and thought that it would be more efficient to simply go straight to the source.
You know, if anybody knew who was behind Q, it would be those who had the technical data, and that was 8chan.
So I reached out to Fred Brennan on Twitter, he was the most public facing, and we talked for hours.
And the reason Fred said he agreed to talk to me was because I had trolled Mark Zuckerberg, his words not mine, in my previous film, Terms and Conditions May Apply.
And at the time, Fred, he hadn't been doing a lot of media.
He'd really done nothing for a number of years.
So it wouldn't be until months later that he would become this sort of figure in the media landscape.
And he suggested I talk to Jim and Ron.
And I think, to some extent, the reason they talked to me is I was just the first one on the scene, maybe the first one crazy enough to fly out to Manila.
You know, and I had a background in digital rights.
And so they had a website which took a maximalist free speech position.
And I thought that they would have some interesting thoughts on that topic as well, particularly since Q is using their platform to get its message out, and Q in many ways was, as we said before, testing the limits of free speech.
And those relationships, you know, I'm still unclear exactly what the nature of those relationships are.
But by virtue of being in touch with Code Monkey, I think to many of those who were in the Q community, that elevated me to this sort of level of lore that helped me get access to some of these other characters, whether it was Fast Jack, the current board owner of Q Research, or Patriot Soapbox, for instance.
Ron actually was the one who facilitated that connection.
I said, like, yeah, I'd love to talk to Patriot Soapbox.
He's like, okay, I'll put you in touch.
Almost all of those people who were big promoters of Q, of course they wanted to be in touch with Ron through Twitter.
So he was kind of a linchpin for a lot of that.
What blew me away about Ron and about Jim is that throughout the six episodes and the time you spend with them, it seems their fear goes up and down, but their pride never does.
They were proud on day one and proud on, you know, at the end when you had the big reveal of their involvement, that they were able to actually wield power this big for being just complete anons in their own minds, right?
I was, I guess, on to him very early.
After that first encounter with Ron and Jim in the Philippines, my attention quickly shifted in their direction.
When I headed out there, I had no idea Fred was involved.
You know, I hadn't I didn't have that conclusion and the idea that they might be behind Q wasn't really a major theory at the time either.
Most people didn't know who Jim and Ron Watkins were.
But after that first trip I was thinking, well gosh, these guys sure seem suspicious.
Does Jim specifically sculpt his eyebrows to look more suspicious?
He specifically sculpts them to look like Spock.
That's it?
What the fuck?
I was like, he's trying to look like Dr. Caligari.
I don't even know, some old ancient villain from hell.
Yeah, or like proxy for Russian Tsar, like Rasputin or something.
Yes, yes, yes.
The failed bureaucrat.
That other point, where they take pride, it might be helpful to think about when people study why, I hate to draw this comparison, but why serial killers end up getting caught.
A lot of times people think it's because they want to get caught.
But a lot of analysis shows that there's a super optimism and the more they get away with something, just the more confident that they become that they'll never get caught.
And so they start slipping up, they start making mistakes.
And so I think that that pride you're describing is a kind of super optimism that only grows and grows.
And you can only imagine the kind of feelings that must come with running this massive global movement, working your way into the inner circle of the presidency in the final days.
They wanted that documented.
So I think their motivations for participating evolved over time.
In the beginning, I think they weren't expecting the kind of questions I came at them with.
When it came to Q, I think they were expecting it to be more about free speech.
Is that because you told them it would be?
Yeah, so I caught them off guard a little bit with that.
I mean, I didn't lie.
I said, look, this is a story, like, largely through the lens of Q talking about free speech.
But, you know, maybe I downplayed it a little bit.
And then the second time I saw them, they had changed their stories completely.
So it was like they had talked behind the scenes, like, OK, now what are we going to tell this guy?
Right.
And so they had backtracked on a bunch of things they had told me before.
Like, over time, they knew less and less and less.
One thing that I noticed when you came to our place is that you recorded everything, as much as possible, and you asked a lot of questions that wouldn't actually end up in the movie, about free speech specifically.
So was that a technique in general, to just have like 90% of the stuff on this supposed other topic, then you ask those, that 10% of questions that is going to be actually crucial to what you're looking for?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't think it was meant to be devious in any way.
I am genuinely very interested in the topic of free speech, but audiences aren't quite as interested as I am.
So, you know, if we talked about it for 90% of the time, it's probably just because it is something that I care a lot about.
But also, I found that that was a topic that helped me in a lot of situations where I might be talking with QAnons, and they'd want to go on some side quest about Anthony Weiner's laptop, and I'd be like, but let's talk about free speech instead.
It was really a way to find common ground and then, I don't know, especially as Section 230 came on the chopping block and a lot of Q people, for whatever reason, were also in support of getting rid of Section 230, I found my conversations tilted in that direction.
I think it's because Trump was in favor of getting rid of Section 230.
And they're like, well, if Trump thinks Section 230 should go, how could he be wrong?
That's the end of their thinking.
I mean, interestingly, Ron Watkins was also very much in favor of not getting rid of Section 230, which makes sense because he was the administrator of a message board because he knew what that would do to what he does.
Yeah, I mean, you know, these image boards have been around for decades.
You know, the thing that's really changed, not 8chan specifically, 8chan was, you know, whatever, 2013, but image boards are these lo-fi forums.
And, you know, if someone had tried to do something like Q in, say, 2008, it wouldn't have worked.
I think of Q almost like a seed that was planted on the chans and it was the algorithms that really helped it to grow.
So that's why I always come back to the algorithms and really the erosion of privacy that led us to this point.
Because if our privacy had not been eroded, if thousands of data points hadn't been collected on each of us, if psychrometric profiles hadn't been generated, used to manipulate us in the run-up to the election and to this day, driving us into echo chambers, making us, you know, just feeding the rage machine of the internet by manipulating us because they know so much about us, We wouldn't even be having this conversation right now.
We wouldn't be questioning whether or not Section 230 was good or bad.
So I just go back and say, look, before we throw away something that ensures rights on the Internet in order to tackle extremism, why don't we try restoring some rights first?
Why don't we try restoring privacy online?
Why don't we try putting seatbelts on these algorithms?
And see how that goes and then we can then we can look at the content itself I couldn't agree with you more on that.
You also had some really great conversations with like rank-and-file QAnon followers in the documentary and specifically with Jamie and Jen Boutteau and I think it really captured how QAnon can really I don't know infect the minds of otherwise normal-seeming people like they didn't seem to be violent or Or they weren't traditional extremists.
Like they said, they were Democrats before, and they seemed to be otherwise interested and open-minded.
But this is a big question we always struggle with.
What does it make you think that QAnon is attractive to people like that?
The algorithms obviously drive people into it, but But what is it about this big narrative, this big story that sucks in people who don't even really have anything to gain financially from QAnon, like the Qtubers do?
Yeah.
One of the things, and I don't show this in the doc series because it just was a little off topic, but I had a lot of grown men who believe 100% in QAnon cry on camera.
You know, they get really, really emotional when they either talk about their beliefs in what's happening with children, or whatever's happening with their economic situation.
There's, I don't know, there's some kind of, there's some sort of trauma usually that's connected to it, or maybe they've seen something that's sort of haunting.
And there's also a religiosity to it as well.
So there's this, I could see it when Jamie was talking to me, and Jamie was one of the first interviews that I did.
Him and his wife had spent a few days with them.
And yeah, they would describe Trump and Q with reverence of God, that they would do anything for that God.
And in fact, I only found this out a couple days ago, but Jamie, I guess, is wanted by the FBI now.
So it sounds like he was for aggravated assault at the Capitol.
I haven't I've been so slammed the last 24 hours that I haven't fully investigated it yet.
I did go to the FBI link and there were some photos of Jamie there.
So I don't I don't know the full details of that, but his picture was on the FBI website.
That's all I know.
Yeah, I mean, this is always the big worry, is that the concerns that Q could sort of use people like that and literally weaponize them.
Like, my biggest nightmare was that Q would stop being coy and then stop using secret codes and stuff and start being specific and start saying, this space, go here and attack that, you know?
Start giving orders in a way that would activate them.
You see really how the ways in which QAnon, you know, ruins these people's lives.
They think it's going to be their salvation.
They think it's going to help, you know, change the world for the better and help them become new vanguards.
It's been said they're worse off than they were before.
I mean, you guys probably know.
I know that you haven't talked as many QAnons on your show, but you've also been out in the wild now and been in the trenches alongside me, talking with a lot of people who believe in this stuff.
You know, I think of it almost like, it takes all the complexities of the world, right?
The banality of evil, and it repackages it in a very easy to understand, black and white, heaven or hell is right here on earth, and by the way, we can pick any bad guys we want, and that's hell, and you guys can participate in this, it's an interactive game, it gives them a sense of community, and then it also replaces A lacking narrative, sort of a cohesive narrative in American society, you know, like people are looking for something to gravitate towards.
And so yeah, it gives them a lot of meaning as well.
You see that and you can understand, I guess, to some extent, why there's this, why people have turned away from expertise.
I remember, you know, it's not in the series, but I talked to General Hayden, who's not my favorite individual.
You know, I think of him as kind of like the McNamara of our times.
You know, he really ushered in the surveillance industrial complex.
I asked him point blank, I said, look, like, you know, you, you dragged us into a multi trillion dollar war under false pretense, maybe the greatest lie in my lifetime.
WMDs in Iraq, like you were part of that.
So Do you, and does the intelligence complex, have some responsibility in people turning away now from institutions such as yours and turning to something like Q?
You know, because they've been lied to.
That's a huge lie.
And he just, I'll never forget, his eyes were like lasers cutting across at me.
And then he just kind of brushed it off.
He's like, well, you know, What do you say?
Veil of tears.
Human frailty.
We make mistakes.
All of us do that.
All of us fuck up and start a giant war.
We all stumble.
You have to give reason for people to trust you.
And I think that these institutions need to earn back our trust.
So you're saying that this cult that started by the belief that the government is spying and lying to you about profound things would stop if the government stopped lying and spying.
I don't know, this seems like reductionism.
I don't, you know, I can't agree with you.
It wouldn't stop and it wouldn't hurt.
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more.
So I gotta ask, what's your relationship with Rod and Jim Watkins now?
Are they texting you?
Are they on the outs?
Are they disappointed by your portrayal of them?
We're all going bowling next Sunday.
Oh, okay.
No, you are not.
That's one thing that, for some reason, even though he wears the tactical gloves all the time, I bet he doesn't know how to fucking bowl.
He probably doesn't.
Yeah, it's hard to tell sometimes, you know, because Ron dabbles in a lot of things, opera being one of them.
How did you feel about that moment?
Weird, weird scene in a series full of them.
Oh, the opera was insane, but I think the culmination of his own theatrics is really the most prevalent in two scenes.
One of them is the one in which he's surrounded by actual, like, manga, like black and white manga, and he's sitting cross-legged.
And the next one is him at the top of a mountain with a giant hammer, like some sort of City Hunter manga come to life.
Did he stage these things because he was like, yeah, this is like the stuff I want you to capture.
Many times he's mugging even for the camera.
You know, I mean, did he want to look like a cartoon character because that disarms you or us or who?
So, when I think of Ron, and the reason I put the Diogenes scene in there is because, to me, that explains Ron in a nutshell.
He is a real-life walking shitpost.
And he's always trying to provoke a response.
Whenever I was filming him, you know, he would do funny walks in front of the camera.
He would never behave normally.
And I think it's because, again, going back to that Diogenes concept, this idea that a dog can shit in the middle of the town square.
Why can't I?
And I think that that is his mentality going through life, you know, just shitting in the middle of the town square.
You know, and he, I think he would admit as well that he's very nihilistic.
I think you almost have to be if you're living and breathing, if you're even a moderator on 8chan and you're dealing with that kind of content and looking at the stuff that gets posted there daily.
I mean, it has a numbing effect.
I totally agree with you that he is nihilistic and cynical, but there's also ideology that seems to be comfortable for him, specifically antisemitism and the belief that like a Jewish cabal of bankers controls the world.
And I've heard this from a few sources now about him, but do you think that ideology doesn't drive him at all or that it's a facade for just attaining personal power?
The only thing I know he really believes in is is the Is the free speech side of all of this, you know, I do think he is principled on that when it comes to everything else.
You know, I don't know if he knows what he believes or what he doesn't believe.
I don't know if he knows when he's acting or when he's not acting and I think that the line is pretty pretty blurred for these guys and I don't if you were to say, you know, do you have these anti-semitic beliefs?
He could be, he's like a super state.
He's both things at once at all times.
And that's what makes it really hard to pin them down because, you know, they're constantly hiding under this sort of veneer of absurdity, but there's always, it's masking something more sinister.
And it's intentional.
It makes it really hard to argue with because you're trying to come at them with sort of reason and logic and they're responding with sort of absurd whimsy and nonsense.
Um, in order to derail you, so you're not really meeting at the same same plane ever.
Um, you know, he didn't say things to me that were openly anti-semitic usually, but you know, he was also leading digs on poll.
I mean, that's that's a hub for that kind of content.
Um, and his dad, his dad certainly did, but I think they were on their best behavior when I was around.
So you're what you're seeing in the series is their best behavior.
That's incredible.
But they allied with Neon Revolt, who is, like, maybe the most anti-Semitic, along with Joe M., in the kind of QAnon pusher movement.
You know, this is a guy who once published, like, that grid of Jewish people in media and stuff like that, and they used him as their kind of tool to, you know, smear Fred or whatever and all of this stuff.
So it's like, Sure, yeah, Neon Revolt was a proxy for them.
Yeah, that's it, right?
So he's just useful to them, like Dee Stevens is now on their weird broadcasts?
I mean, I think it's pretty telling that Ron coded the triple brackets into 8chan.
You know, if you want to judge someone, judge them by their actions, right?
And that's a pretty clear action.
And they didn't want to remove those triple brackets.
One of the most thrilling parts of the documentary came when you helped Frederick Brennan escape the Philippines rather than be prosecuted for cyber libel and face almost certain death in prison.
However, well, first of all, I want to ask, was that hard for you as like a documentarian, as a journalist, because all of a sudden you are involving yourself in the story you're telling?
Yeah, I mean, this is always a challenge.
And in order to tell this story, I had to enact all kinds of rules, like self-imposed rules, largely because I was concerned that Ron and Jim might try to use me as a conduit of information or disinformation along the way.
You know, there were many times in months prior to that where they're like, The FBI is going to come and get Fred tomorrow.
We got him this time.
And I think that they were hoping that I would relay those attacks to Fred so that he might flee the country on his own.
So I just made a decision, you know, not to share things between Between opposing sides and I would tell them that I'm like, look, I'm not going to not going to share anything with you.
But when it came to, you know, because and I'm going to give the other side the same courtesy in order to be able to document this story in a holistic fashion.
But there was no universe where I could allow Fred to end up in prison or possibly dead because of something that he said.
And I and it was just a situation where I was the only one in the position to do something about it.
So of course I got on a plane.
And so when I'm with someone like Fred and I developed this relationship with over the years, I felt like I had a moral obligation to act in that instance.
And so, yeah, I got on the plane and maybe it was crossing some sort of boundary I shouldn't have crossed, but I don't think so.
And not long after that, you know, he was having edibles and going to the Bernie Sanders rally with us.
So it's such a weird timeline because we only learned about it once he was on this side.
Yeah, Jim and Ron Watkins, they have their own version of like how all that went down.
Actually, Julian, could you play the video of how Ron and Jim portrayed Frederick's escape on their live stream?
Yeah, episode five is about that.
It's going to be about the lawsuit and Fred becoming a mega asshole.
You know, Fred was trying to get us all thrown in jail.
And then we used Cohen to reach out to Fred and asked Fred to stop.
And then I believe Fred agreed.
Tom was there.
And, uh, but, like, a day or two later he talked to, I believe, Julian Field, or Travis Hugh, or one of those goblins, and, uh, those guys, those guys convinced Trent to... When they weren't busy giving each other bro jobs.
Puts and pussies.
That's funny.
So, those guys, I believe, convinced Fred to renege on the agreement.
Did you guys convince Fred to renege on the agreement?
No, I had no idea what we were talking about.
I don't know what the agreement was.
Was there some sort of special agreement?
Do you have any idea what he's talking about there?
I think he's talking about the contract that they were going to draft up where Fred would take his name off of the site, and they would have to change the name of the site as well.
And in exchange, Fred would have to lay off his attacks, I think is the agreement they're describing.
So that scene that you see between Fred and Tom, where they're eating Like grotesque amounts of waffles and ice cream.
I that is that's sort of the peace treaty scene So I think he's referring to the agreement the sort of spawned out of that conversation, right?
He claims that Fred was vying for a seat on our podcast to become a co-host Well, it didn't work out and he actually also I don't want to you know insert anything that Travis wouldn't like into the episode But he does say did he sleep with Travis few is that why he got this treatment from us this great treatment that we gave him and So, they're doing a lot of baking on their side.
Mostly that we're gay in various ways.
I mean, he's Penn 15 Club, right?
I mean, that's kind of all you need to know about Jim.
He's like a 50-something year old man who's still in the Penn 15 Club.
And you've also tasted his smoothie, which had cream, butter, blueberries, and kale in it.
That is not a euphemism.
It actually is a smoothie.
Yeah, that he made at his organic shop, which is closed now, like the pig farm.
Yeah, but I don't recommend that blend.
The reason Jim put it together is like, it's the first day I'd ever met Jim.
And so he was, I guess he was playing the part of like organic store chef, but I don't know that he had ever cooked anything himself before.
No.
No.
And so yes, his dangerous idea was to serve me what he thought you all drink in California, which I guess is kale.
We love to blend butter and cream in California and just chug it.
But one thing I actually wanted to ask you, Cullen, they are doing all of these live streams and they are now in some ways seeming to try to capture that YouTuber discussion sort of role.
And I was just curious what your thoughts are about that.
Are they just trying to sort of set the record straight to sort of keep the game afoot, or is it something different?
Well, they did invite me on their ship show.
I haven't accepted yet, but... Yet?
Okay, you let us know, my friend.
You let us know when that happens, because I would love to see that.
Nothing could go wrong, Cullen.
Just go on their ship show.
Talk to Dee Stevens.
Yeah, well that invitation was before the last episode dropped, so... Oops.
I mean, imagine if you had this sort of giant global movement at your disposal and you had half a million followers on Twitter and then one day all of that was gone.
You know, I think it's a little bit of trying to recapture some of that earlier kind of glory, I guess.
Maybe Ron grew fond of being on camera.
You know, it could be any number of things.
Or it's just their way of providing a counter-narrative, which is what they're rather familiar with doing on the Goldwater and with 8chan or 8kun.
Because they do seem to have almost like an abuser cult, where it's like, you need to show me that you think of women as objects before I can trust you.
Because even later, where he's like, oh, that waitress is cute.
He's on camera.
And then even Jim's flunky is like, oh, come on, man.
Aren't you, like, you know, taken or something?
And he's like, oh, that's like, you know, telling a heroin addict that he doesn't want more heroin or something.
Like, as if he's addicted to sex or women in some way.
So did you find that that was maybe part of it?
Oh, I mean, they very much are addicted to sex and women in lots of ways.
And I do think that that is part of it.
I mean, I know Jim at some point, you know, he's like, you're so good, Cullen.
Like, I don't know, they were hoping that I would participate in more of their debauchery.
I mean, Jim also, like yourselves, also thought that I was gay.
He did not reveal that until the later days.
You're from California, brother.
California, you must be gay and drink kale cream shakes.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the best.
But do you think that, so what, I mean, actually, not to be indiscreet, but would you feel comfortable telling us what their lives were like in terms of the kind of sexual side of things?
Soapland, I think, is the kind of thing that Ron would like to do every day if he could.
If that gives you some sense.
I mean, these guys ran porn websites.
They shot their own porn videos.
I mean, Ron would almost always have porn playing in the car.
When you see that shot of porn, he would usually turn it off when I had the cameras on, but when the cameras were off, the porn was on.
And I think for him, he has an addictive personality, so he's funneled most of those addictions into sex.
One of the most mind-blowing parts of the documentary, at least for me, came in the fifth episode, when you sat in on a call with Ron Watkins, the Roger Stone associate Jason Sullivan, and former NSA officer Bill Binney.
And in that call, Jason Sullivan openly pitched Ron on using his social media tools to amplify Q's messages on Twitter.
Now, it was previously reported that Jason Sullivan's Twitter tool, Power10, was used to amplify QAnon and other accounts that are pro-Trump.
But here you have him on tape, essentially offering his services to Ron.
And you said on Twitter that this call took place in December of 2019, after QAnon had already grown substantially.
So obviously there's a lot more to that call that I assume you couldn't include, but what can you tell us about the relationship between Ron Watkins and Jason Sullivan?
Was this an ongoing kind of thing?
Were they communicating regularly?
To my knowledge, that was the very first time that they had ever connected.
And having been on that call for hours, I mean, it went on for hours that night.
I think I can say with a high degree of confidence that that is the case, that this is the first time that Roger Stone's head social media strategist, Bill Binney and Ron, ever connected.
And, you know, Ron messaged me and he said, you know, we should document this.
It's like, all right, I'll hop on the call.
And it was fascinating because Jason Sullivan was, and this is before the Power10 article came out, so I didn't know what tool he was really talking about.
He was kind of pitching Ron on his own social network.
You know, Ron was like, oh, you're gonna do a free speech network and then started dropping every nasty word you could say in order to just test Sullivan.
So that was an interesting gatekeeping moment.
But Sullivan's goal was to put his tool in the hands of Q.
And at the time, Sullivan thought that Q wasn't Ron, but was this just, you know, like shit poster Q wannabe on Twitter called E. And E would kind of write posts, drops that were on Twitter that were similar to Q, and only followed a handful of people, military accounts, Flynn, and Ron Watkins.
And so Jason Sullivan, in all of his wisdom, was like, I think I figured out who Q is.
It must be this guy.
And we're going to contact you, Ron, because you're one of the people that this guy is following.
So Ron, of course, found it super hilarious that this guy was trying to get a hold of E, the friend, while talking to him.
In order to get a hold of Q, he's like, yeah, we need to get in touch with this other guy.
So Ron did eventually get that other E the Friend on the phone.
And the reason I think that he is called E the Friend, and a lot of people thought E the Friend was Q for a while, he's not Q, was because Jason Sullivan on the call kept calling E, he's like, you know, our friend, Mr. E. For whatever reason, Jason Sullivan just kept saying, our friend, Mr. E. And I remember asking E, being like, do you know why you're on this call?
Like, is it weird to you at all that Benny and these individuals are suddenly wanting to talk to you?
He's just like, yeah, this is, I have no idea what's going on right now.
So basically Ron got someone on the call who these guys thought was Q, and it was just... I'm sure for Ron it was just like three levels of trolling.
If I were to just kind of follow the clues in the documentary, it would lead me to the conclusion, broadly, that the early QAnon posters were perhaps a coalition of people on 4chan, and that later, after that transfer that Paul Ferber describes, on 8chan that it was hijacked by Ron Watkins, Jim Watkins, and their entourage—we don't know who posted, obviously—but that that was the person in control.
So is that also your own personal belief?
You know, I don't—because we don't have, obviously, proof, you know, of these things yet.
Digital forensic proof, as you were trying to uncover when you uncovered that fantastic, by the way, dead end with Steve Bannon.
But yeah, so what are your own personal beliefs you've formed over time spending so much time with these people?
I mean, actually, fortunately, the Steve Bannon red herring ended up being some of the best evidence pointing back to Ron.
As you guys know, I mean, the first 127 posts were anonymous.
You know, I suspect that this sort of the Cicada group was help bolstering some of that in the early days.
I think there were, you know, there were a lot of these guys who connected Um, on the chans through Discord and other means, you know, months prior to Q getting launched.
So the network's already existed in order to give something like this some steam.
Um, who will lock down the first trip code with Matlock and who had access to that first trip code?
You know, I have theories.
I didn't end up saying any theories in case I was wrong.
Um, Paul Ferber certainly makes the most, makes the most sense.
It's always the board owner, basically.
Right, right.
Why does Q choose Paul Ferber's board?
It's a good question.
Why not choose someone else's board?
Why does Paul become so convinced Q is fake on January 5th to the point of shutting down TripCodes and doing Forced Anonymous?
It's likely that it was being wrestled from his hands at that point.
But there's no way for me to prove that, and Paul, to his credit, never changed his story.
I mean, I interviewed him for multiple hours over Skype before flying to Johannesburg, where I interviewed him for days, and he never changed his story.
The facts, like, he stuck to it.
That doesn't mean he's not lying, but if he was lying, he was the best at it out of the bunch.
Having spent time with a lot of the people who are promoters of this, I found that the network is more organic than you would expect, and that it wasn't necessarily like this well-paid group that was running an op.
You know, it was like-minded individuals who would come together and were rewarded, and it checked various boxes for them, whether it was attention or sort of philosophical or Or what have you.
That includes Coleman Rogers, who I know a lot of people thought might have been writing Q-drops.
I do not think that at all.
Having read through the Discord logs and having spent days with Coleman, I can say that he does not have, I think, what it takes to be Q. And Tracy Beans confirmed that as well, as did Paul Ferber.
Colin, one of the things that strikes me, you know, covering this movement is the lack of intention often.
And like you said, you described a kind of organic coming together.
There's a lot of claims, obviously, in the broader kind of like theorizing community about QAnon about organization and like, you know, cells, like highly trained cells or military cells.
But we also have to take into account the fact that there are very real participations by Flynn, by Paul Vallely.
There is a cadre of people that are well-connected.
Do you think that's because, again, organically a bunch of them were pilled?
Did they see something that was useful and take to it?
What do you think the pipeline was there?
How Q started in the very early days is different than kind of what Q became, and Q morphed very quickly.
I think that these ex-military networks gravitated towards Q within weeks.
I suspect that... I mean, look at Corsi, for instance.
Why was Corsi actively pushing Q just six weeks in?
And if you go back and look at Corsi's ties, he's tied to... I mean, he's been working with Vallely for years on pushing Vallely's agenda through his outlet.
And this is actually something that I saw, you know, it's not in the show either, but where I went to the David Wilcock cult.
I mean, they're, you know, they were also using this New Age sect to push their agenda.
So you've got these ex-military actors who are going out there and pushing their They're using these outlets to push their agendas.
You see that Thomas Schoenberger has these connections to Flynn, and you start to paint a bigger picture of these sort of ex-military, sort of shadier networks that have similar goals and interests.
And so I think a lot of them gravitated to it rather quickly once it's once they saw that it was becoming successful.
I mean, no one could no one could just have said, let's make this giant global movement.
I'm sure that they tried various things.
And then this was the one that just kind of stuck.
Um, and it might have started organic, but very quickly, people gravitated towards that power and then tried to hijack that power and use it to whatever ends.
So I mean, I would love to see, you know, I didn't have time before releasing this series to fully investigate the extent of those networks.
I think that and I hope that the series will open up more interest in looking exactly what those connections were.
You know, I only put stuff on screen that I could prove or that was just original source material, hearing from people who most had just been writing about or had like looked at documents or various like internet forensics that kind of connected these guys together.
I mean, you can see that there's a lot of chatter among the Cicada group in the beginning, talking about Q and trying to get some of that messaging out.
You know, they had a puzzle that was related to Q.
You know, and I think that's what makes this difficult in the early days when you're like, OK, how did this thing become so big?
And you're like, well, the answer is that there were a number of networks that, you know, share discord rooms and and had been in communication.
And they're like, oh, let's make this thing big.
And then there's the hop from 4 to 8chan.
And at that point, some of these people peel away.
Corsi turns on it, Alex Jones turns on it, some of the people who fueled it early turn on it.
But I remember JoeM telling me in DMs that he doesn't consider any of the posts before 8chan real.
So at that point, do you think that shadowy network, Flynn, do they even know what's happening?
How are they taking to the new potential code monkey control over it?
Or does everyone just adapt and then Ferber doesn't want to blow the whole thing, even though he does want to denounce?
I mean, Q has the trip code for what, like two weeks on 4chan before the hop from 4chan to 8chan.
And that hop happens in late November, moves to Paul Ferber's board, and is only on Paul Ferber's board for about five weeks.
And it's around that time, and I think that there's tons of evidence to suggest that the takeover happened during those 10 days of darkness before January the 4th, where you see the new forensics trail kind of pick up.
And Paul was causing a lot of havoc behind the scenes.
You know, he was posing.
I talked to, you know, Fast Jack, Coleman Rogers.
8-bit who's not represented in the series, but I talked to all of them.
They're all saying that, you know, he was kind of posing a threat to the operation.
He was doxing people, you know, and he was being a bit of a tyrant on the board, though that was partially at Jerome Corsi's request.
If you go back and watch some of the old videos, Jerome Corsi suggested that he be a tyrant on the board.
But it looked like Q was, you know, being threatened by Paul, so Q would have had a reason to jump ship.
You know, Corsi and Alex Jones, they hung on until late April, early May.
And I don't get into this in the series, but, you know, that's when they jump ship.
They have this big public feud, actually, with Code Monkey.
Late April, early May, Corsi is saying that Code Monkey's, you know, he's a controlled asset.
And then that's kind of when Jerome Corsi and Alex Jones peel off.
You know, a couple months later, you see Jack Posobiec come out, you know, he tries to smear Q. So you can see these, it's almost as if there's this coalition that was like, oh, Q isn't moving in a direction that we like anymore, or we think it's going to be dangerous for the GOP, whatever, or they just needed to blow up Smokescreen to make it seem like they weren't involved in some way, shape, or form, whatever.
That's kind of what Jack Posobiec's role always seemed to me to sort of be, was just to create confusion around what their involvement actually was.
But that splintering, I think there's a lot of reason to believe that they just had different views on the direction the queue should take.
I don't know to what extent Corsi and those guys were actually communicating behind the scenes with Ron.
We do know that there was a Twitter... I mean, I've seen the screenshots of the Twitter room that had Ron and Flynn and the board owner, Fast Jack, in it from 2018.
So we know that there was some communication happening, you know, between all of these guys.
The challenge is knowing exactly what some of these players who were sort of peripheral Trump players actually had to Ron and the guys over at 8chan.
So just give us something from the cutting floor.
Give us something that we don't know, something you weren't able to put into the movies.
Is there anything you really want to get out there while you're on the podcast?
Let's see.
There was one thing with Tom that I wish was in there that I think helps understand his personality a little bit better.
So, Tom Rydell, who's Jim's business partner, who's this, like, artist who Jim kind of, like, took under his wing, like, gangs of New York style when he was a kid.
I guess they bonded over porn.
He's a psychonaut, so he loves to experiment with psychedelics.
So, you know, he's constantly taking hallucinogens.
That's sort of his hobby.
And I kind of miss that context for him because I think it helps understand how he fits into that ecosystem a little bit better.
One of the forensic pieces I wish was in there was Liz Crokin and Jordan Sather both talking about how Flynn had been in contact with them through DMs on Twitter back in 2018.
Flynn was pushing, according to Liz, he was pushing her on Pizzagate saying that it was all legit and to keep up the good fight.
You know, so Flynn had been operating behind the scenes, like nudging a lot of these characters.
I don't know the exact dates because unfortunately, when Twitter removes accounts, they remove all of the data associated with it.
So, you know, all of Liz's tweets are gone.
You know, I'm sure you guys have experienced this, but...
All of my conversations that I've had with people who were integral to spreading Q, much of it has been wiped from my Twitter messages.
It's really a nightmare for researchers when these platforms kind of.
wash their hands of responsibility under the pretense of protecting users from dangerous content rather than leaving the content there so that we can actually trace the origins of these movements.
So now the ultimate question, Cullen, because I think your movie, your six-part series was wonderful and really, really useful and also just stylistically really cool.
The intro was amazing, so congrats on that.
And just broadly, it's so valuable, so whatever ratings, I'm giving it the A+.
I'm giving it the solid A+.
But not only that, you were the only person who was there to do this work.
It wasn't like a field of people tried to do something and you succeeded in it.
You were there in 2018 when no one else was.
So it's not really a question, you know, often people will like, you know, take to or not take to a certain filmmaker's style, but it's like, this is the only thing.
I'm sorry to tell people this is not only the only thing, but it's incredible.
My wife asked me to tell you it was really wonderful and thrilling.
Thank you.
But the question is, now we basically have a good idea of how it was formed broadly, who might be behind some of these posts, and the community and the kind of culture that they were in.
But at the end of the day, does it matter?
Does knowing who Q matter in terms of the deeper issues that you're examining in the movie, which you don't take a stance on?
But I would love to understand how you feel that relationship works.
Well, I mean, I think, of course, who's behind Q matters.
So much of Q's power is derived from anonymity.
You know, the whole idea of Q, when you would talk to its followers, they could imagine that it was any sort of heroic icon that they wanted to, and it didn't come with any of the baggage.
It was like all of the benefits, none of the detriments in their minds.
But when you take off the mask, you're just left with the man and all of the kind of ugliness that comes with that.
and the motives that come with that.
And I think a lot of QAnons really do want to know the truth.
On the surface, they'll say, oh, it doesn't matter who Q is.
Q taught us how to research, and it's the friends we made along the way, right?
But deep down, they all really did want to know.
All of them.
And I don't know how many of them will be satisfied with his answer.
How many of them will believe it.
That's why I did my best just to show the evidence and then hopefully let the audience come to their own conclusions.
But I think of course it matters and I think showing the mechanics of how this works It's basically the same as showing how a magic trick works.
You know, once you show how a magic trick works, it can't work again.
Right.
Which is very different than just talking about a magic trick.
Of course.
Saying, oh, what an interesting magic trick.
And so, Cullen, in 2018 when you first visited us and already basically knew who Q was, why did you not tell us and let us break it on the podcast instead of... Well, I wasn't 100% sure.
Very kind of you.
Very responsible.
Very responsible.
I have two quick things, really quick.
Colin, I know you've got to wrap up.
One is, was there ever a moment during filming where you felt that your own safety was endangered or that you might be discovered and that could potentially put yourself in a volatile situation or, you know, It was always hard to know how dangerous a given situation actually was.
Just even dealing with the 8chan guys, you know, it's like, do they feed users to the pigs?
You know, there's sort of this implication of risk.
And no matter who I was talking to in the queue world, especially in the beginning, I just didn't know what the network looked like.
I didn't know what the capabilities were of those involved.
I had no idea if it was military government subcontractors, if it was black hat trolls, how capable the hackers who were involved with it might actually be.
There were some, I guess, risks associated with that.
And I did get hacked once during the project on my phone after one of those amp fests.
It's kind of a weird moment where you're just sitting having dinner and you look down at your phone and then it just opens up and then the mail app opens up and then it starts composing a message in front of your face.
You wipe your phone pretty quickly after that.
You know, so there were a lot of people who wanted to know what I was up to.
It would seem that whatever security protocols I had in place were working or the Watkins never really tried to get up in my grill because they didn't know that I had assisted Fred in escaping the Philippines until just recently.
My last thing, it's not so much a question, but I wanted to apologize, because you filmed with us quite a bit over the course of these three years, and there was only one time where I literally ran away from your camera, and that was in Arizona at the Q Conference, shortly after Travis and I had been ambushed by Craig from Just Informed Talks.
Right.
And I ran away because at the time, you know, I was so nervous throughout the entire thing that I had started drinking fairly early on in the day, and I have a very low tolerance.
So by the time Craig had ambushed us, I was like eating pizza to save my life.
I couldn't even stand and order at the thing.
Travis and Julian had to bring it.
And then we got ambushed by Craig over this, had this long, long talk, and Cullen comes over and, you know, he's like, hey, do you guys wanna, would you guys wanna have this conversation on camera?
And I was like, if I do this conversation, I will be the drunkest, maybe the drunkest that I've been in the last, like, five years or so, on camera.
Well, I mean, I think I saw Julian, like, stumble over a cactus.
No, I did not.
I did not.
I eclipsed myself like a fucking ninja.
I will not hear that kind of... And Jake, you're just describing your own shame as if this is some sort of item for this talented filmmaker.
No, that was a lot of... I mean, that whole event where you guys were undercover was... And plus, that episode was just fantastic.
You guys were channeling Hunter S. Thompson there a little bit.
I don't know.
I'm a fan, so that was exciting to hear.
That whole event was so strange because the security guards were on to Travis at one point, and they came over right after you guys left, and they were like, we heard Travis View is here, like Voldemort was in the house.
You know, and they like come over with his stock photo and they're like, have you seen this guy?
No way!
Oh man, hey do not let this guy into the store.
He has stolen here many times before.
That Ukrainian guy is never gonna be able to travel.
His photo will be at the entrance of every Patriots home.
He will be welcomed into Zero Q-Cons.
That would rock, though.
If we somehow hired the stock model to show up to a QCon, that would be the ultimate.
Maybe we can get this going.
But it's wild, after everything, all the years that we've been chasing this and looking at it and analyzing it, to be here today and talk about your documentary, which premiered on HBO, which is Insane.
It's just, it's really surreal.
And I'm really, really happy for you that you found an outlet that let you tell the story, you know, in the way that you thought is best.
I mean, it's really, you know, as somebody who has worked in entertainment most of my life, I mean, it is near impossible to do this.
So, man, congratulations.
And, you know, thanks for sticking with it and doing the work.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, it feels like a series of miracles to me that it ended up this way.
I mean, HBO didn't come on until basically September of last year, you know, and then we weren't funded for post until starting in October, and everything had been independent up until that point.
And I just knew there was no way to tell this story the way I wanted to unless I had significant support to do so.
And I actually, even though this series has, I think, some pretty insane access and reveals, if I didn't have, and this just speaks to sort of, I think, the broader challenge we face in our culture right now, if I didn't have HBO behind me with this project now, I don't I don't know that it would have been been seen, you know, with with that QAnon hashtag and all this other stuff inside of it.
I don't I don't know what would have happened to it.
So, you know, and also back in in summer of last year.
There were a lot of people pitching Q projects, and I just knew that I needed help to get it out there.
It was actually insane, because Adam McKay, I'm a huge fan of the Big Short, it's one of my favorite films, and I was just convinced.
I think I told you, Jake, I was like, Jake, do you have any connection to Adam McKay?
Yeah, I remember being in your apartment, talking about how You were gonna get this, you know, out into the world, and it seemed, you know, I remember it felt hopeless.
It felt impossible, almost, with the subject material, and, you know, being an independent filmmaker, um, so, I mean, yeah, it's just, it's crazy.
But incredibly, Jake was able to connect you with a network of like-minded people, like him in Hollywood, and connected you to Adam Kay.
He got this made.
No, he did this all on his own.
He got this made.
That's unfair.
Put back the producer credits for Jake Rokitansky's feet, at the very least.
Actually, in order to make it happen, I put 16 minutes of edited footage on a secure iPad.
I had to kind of build an iPad just for this, because you never really knew exactly how risky it was, if the content would leak.
Which would which might have some impact on the storytelling and on access so you know it was it the other night when it when it premiered I mean my mind was just kind of blown that somehow we had gotten to this point and and and all of this was captured on camera.
It's it's just this insane time capsule and I and honestly, I don't know that there would have been a better creative partner than HBO.
They really just let me tell the story that I wanted to tell and they were super supportive along the way gave great notes and.
Yeah, just they really understood what, you know, the value of sort of the antiseptic of sunlight and, you know, the same producers who made Capturing the Freedmen's Once Upon a Time, you know?
Yeah, incredible movie.
Some of the greatest documentaries.
So it was inspirational for me to work with people like that.
Yeah.
It's released now.
It's out.
How has the reception been and how has, you know, what has that told you, I guess, about the state that we're in?
Because people believe these things that are about, you know, blood libel or whatever the conspiracy theories are about the Democratic Party, you know, kind of independently of the Q-drops and all this stuff, this just kind of marshaled something that was already a desire in the electorate.
So, you know, how is the reception been?
And like, how, what do you think of the broader culture beyond, beyond the effective cue and the catalystic, the catalystic effect of effective cue?
Well, I think that there is a lot of sort of fear casting from a few of these outlets, you know, suggesting that by virtue of showing bad things on a screen, you're making those bad things happen.
You know, there's a long history in documentary of showing the darker side of humanity on a screen that does not necessarily make the audience want to, I don't know, act like Anwar Kongo in The Act of Killing, right?
Yeah.
I mean, art itself often explores the darker side of humanity, not because we want to become more like that thing, but because we want to understand that thing and because there's a power in revealing it.
So, you know, I think that In the culture right now, there is this sense of you can't show danger, discuss dangerous ideas, or so-called dangerous ideas, or talk to dangerous people.
And I think that actually, when you just shine a light on them, it's not all that flattering.
The audience reaction has overwhelmingly showed that to be the case.
So the audience has completely gotten this series, which has been just so relieving to see.
I've been frankly overwhelmed by the audience reaction to the piece and I guess just grateful that we got to a point where we were able to really build a strong case for who's behind this.
And the audience seems to have understood the power of that.
But when it comes to where things go from here, I like to say that the story we tell going forward matters more than the story that's already been told.
And, and kind of figuring out how to, how to coexist with people who believe a lot of this stuff.
You know, if we treat 20% of Americans like they're domestic terrorists, that's not going to end well.
So we have to, you know, people are allowed to believe in crazy shit.
You just have to figure out how to, how to walk it back and, and, and communicate and find whatever common ground you can.
And I think most people are going to have somebody at Thanksgiving, assuming we're able to have normal Thanksgivings this year.
But someone at the Thanksgiving table who is a Q believer, used to be a Q believer, and you've got to come up with ways to talk with them.
So much of the media ecosystem fuels hate and rage and rewards those tendencies.
I mentioned this earlier, but I'm interested in de-escalation and I hope that this project itself helps facilitate some of those conversations moving forward.
I mean, it's not going to, we're not, there's no going back, right?
So really it's just a matter of what, you know, where does the conversation go from here?
And I think discussing new ideas with those who believe in Q, just kind of redirecting the story.
I don't know, talking about WMDs in Iraq.
I don't know, anything you can agree on is a good place to go from here.
And some of those more malignant tendencies, you know, that the old tropes, the old forms of hate that I think help fuel a certain amount of QAnon that's being absorbed in the mainline of the GOP, that's happening.
And again, you know, it's like, how do you, it's the old, it's just the oldest, it's like an old idea.
You just have to, you have to respond to all of this stuff with a certain amount of love, I think, and some forgiveness here too.
So, you know, that's something that I tried to take out of my conversations with a lot of people who believe in Q.
and maybe just talk about sort of the nature of the mechanics of Q rather than the beliefs of it.
But how has it been mentally for you in the work, out of the work, after the work?
It was certainly mentally straining during the production, also because there was an economic toll.
I mean, we maxed out, my wife and I maxed out every credit card we had.
We took out loans, you know, it was fueled by air miles.
And we were at, we were on, we got some, a small grant, you know, sort of on the final dollar.
So there was, there was a little bit of, you know, anxiety, I guess, around that.
Of course, there was just the anxiety of, Delving in this bizarro world, but I found that I sort of played the role... I was like an anchor for a lot of people who believe in QAnon.
They would often tell me that I was a really grounding force in their lives.
Sometimes they would call me up at midnight just for a therapy session almost.
And, uh, I don't know.
I mean, I think a lot of times people think that I would have, that it would have been really emotionally draining, but, but I actually, I found it kind of rewarding to, to play that role in a lot of their lives along the way.
Some of the more draining stuff would have been the undercover work that's not represented in the film.
That was really, uh, it took an emotional toll, um, sort of being in the middle of a cult for a week by myself.
Yeah, and there were some of these instances where I'm traveling abroad where it's kind of like high stakes and I didn't really know the personalities of the people that I was encountering.
The sixth was certainly, I didn't sleep the two days before that.
I was very anxious going into that day because honestly I thought things were going to be even worse than they were.
Yeah, it's been a rollercoaster.
And that was all happening in the middle of the most aggressive post-schedule of my life.
We had to put together a six-hour film, basically, and edit the whole thing in about five months, four months, which is an incredibly aggressive schedule.
I, you know, I was working, like no joke, I mean, everybody who was working on this project was working insane hours, seven days a week, 15 to 17 hours a day, back to back for months, because we needed, we knew that this just needed to get dropped.
And, but at the same time, we had to do it responsibly.
So, you know, making sure that all of the facts were, were accurate, you know, had two layers of fact checkers that I brought on to work on this, who, anyway, just great, just great folks.
just an incredible team all around.
And I think we had so many people working on this who just really believed in what the project was capable of doing and what it was revealing.
And for a lot of people who were working on it, I think they felt like it was sort of a once in a lifetime project.
And I feel the same way.
Yeah, I agree as well.
Thanks so much for making this.
Where can people follow you and find your work?
Well, you can follow me on Twitter, Cullen Hoback.
That's really the only social media platform I use.
You know, and I'll do my best to get back to you if you reach out to me there.
So just add Cullen Hoback.
For me, honestly, it's just, like, talking about all these issues and discussing it and sort of extending the conversation beyond the topics that are covered in the film are what matter most to me.
So, no, I just appreciate it.
That's all.
We'll have you back ASAP to talk more because I have a million more questions.
So thanks again for your work.
Thank you so much, Colin.
Thanks for hanging out with us.
No, guys, my pleasure.
Wish we were all in the same room doing it.
Maybe next time.
Maybe I'll be able to escape the Caribbean.
That's right.
I'll escape the Atlantic.
Everything will be better.
COVID will be gone.
The future is bright, my friend.
Alright.
Sounds good, guys.
Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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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-Tune.
What do you think that Fred got out of his relationship with Travis Few then?
If there was no sex involved, what did he get out of that?
So what I think he got out of it is he was trying to get a spot on the podcast.
