Episode 219: Attending the Conscious Life Expo (QAnon & the New Age)
The great awakening at the LAX Hilton. We attended the Conscious Life Expo featuring a huge array of New Age enthusiasm and conspiracy theorizing. Included in our coverage: Sean Stone, son of Oliver Stone. Anti-vaxx white reggae. Theosophy, hermeticism, UFO disclosure, butthole sunning, the continent of Lemuria, sun simulators, rotating chakras, QAnon, etc.
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Music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena, NAP. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 219 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Conscious Life Expo episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
I was hungry and somewhat disoriented as I walked into the over-lit lobby of the Los Angeles Airport Hilton.
It had taken me a while to find a parking spot many floors underground, and the roof rack on my car had made worrying sounds all the way down.
Now I was standing in a sprawling hotel lobby taken over by new-agers milling around, chatting, and forming a long line to get their day pass bracelets.
Loud pan flute music was being piped into the room by unseen speakers.
Sculpted faces and high-end yoga gear jostled against flowing, colorful robes.
Dreadlocks.
Semi-precious stone medallions.
Long white beards.
Tattoos of sacred geometry.
An old black lady slowly pushed a walker past me.
Her t-shirt was emblazoned with a wanted poster of an alien gray.
A faint smell of incense wafted from the crowded back corridors just beyond sight of the lobby.
I could make out several large rooms lined with purple draping and vendor booths.
Instead of heading in, I made my way to the cafe attached to the entrance and got in line.
Ahead of me, a middle-aged woman was speaking to a shorter bald man she had struck up a conversation with.
I've been going to less of these things lately, you know.
Exploring outside.
Her hands swung out into a large arc as if to indicate this gathering, the external world, the ideas of others.
She then folded them back towards her chest.
I want to focus on the inside now instead.
The man nodded vigorously.
I ordered a Reuben sandwich, a medium coffee, and a bottle of water.
The hotel workers looked exhausted, but it was clear this wasn't their first freak show.
I took a seat on a long, brown, pleather banquette, sipping burnt coffee and waiting for the sandwich.
On the wall-mounted television, Wolf Blitzer was questioning a talking head about the unidentified flying objects.
Two, or was it three, that had already been shot down over Canada and Alaska?
NORAD was tracking the situation.
Despite their predispositions to stories of extraterrestrial incursions, none of the attendees were paying attention to CNN.
These were people who believed decades-long infiltration, wars, and even intergalactic treaties with various alien races were simply the fabric of reality.
To them, the mainstream media was just a distraction.
Certainly anything that appeared on cable news would be disinformation, perhaps even an outright psy-op.
Two elderly East Indian women wearing saris were sipping tea to my right.
I wolfed down the Reuben as soon as I received it.
It was sorely lacking in sauerkraut.
Travis was around here somewhere.
Now I just had to find him.
I wandered back into the Conscious Life Expo, scanning the crowd for his face.
A live band had started up at the center of the lobby.
This is the 21st Annual Conscious Life Expo.
It is the brainchild of a man named Robert Quicksilver.
Based on his name and his occupation, you might expect Robert Quicksilver to be a spaced-out star child, but he's actually a soft-spoken grandfather of six who wore white tennis shoes, jeans, and a grey button-up shirt in the interview I saw him in.
Vice News reporter Anna Merlan has published some great reporting regarding Quicksilver and how he created the expo.
Quicksilver says that as a young man he had spiritual experiences which led him to leave what he describes as a strong Jewish culture in Brooklyn and set sail for California in the early 70s.
While in California he had three kids with his wife and ran a successful commercial furniture company.
He also got very involved in Theravada Buddhism to the point where he helped form a monastery and became a monk.
The predecessor of the Conscious Life Expo is a once yearly event called the Whole Life Expo, which Quicksilver regularly attended.
At its peak, it was more popular than the Conscious Life Expo is today.
The Whole Life Expo began in the Bay Area in 1982 and moved to Los Angeles in 1983.
and moved to Los Angeles in 1983. By 1989 it had approximately 30,000 attendees.
That beats the estimated 12,000 attendees of the Expo that we attended.
The Los Angeles Times called the Whole Life Expo... After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the original organizer of the Whole Life Expo cancelled all of his shows for reasons that aren't fully known.
So Quicksilver picked up where the Whole Life Expo left off and started the Conscious Life Expo, and it's been held ever since.
At both expos, there's been a long-running debate, sometimes hidden, sometimes not, regarding what kind of content is too out there.
Because they want to welcome ideas that deviate from the mainstream, that's the whole point of the shows.
But when do ideas cross the line from eccentric and unusual to delusional and harmful?
In 1986, the organizers of the Whole Life Expo told the LA Times that they were strictly limiting the presence of psychics and mediums out of concerns over exploitation.
Here's how the comments of Brian Duggan, the event's director, were reported at the time.
It's not that we have anything against intuitive ways of knowing things.
There are definitely deep connections between people.
Duggan explained, adding that individuals working in areas that are controversial and sometimes abused must be reviewed by show officials before they are granted a booth.
None of this year's applicants, among the psychics and tarot card readers, passed the test, he said.
It's fair to say that psychics and tarot card readers are welcome at the Conscious Life Expo.
Yeah, that seems like a quaint worry at this point.
Yeah.
What about conspiracy theories?
Now, obviously, there's always been some overlap between the New Age world and conspiracism, but how do they decide what's too far?
When Anna Merlan spoke to Quicksilver in 2020, he indicated that he wasn't especially interested in conspiracy theory content.
I don't do disclosure or conspiracy stuff or secret stuff.
It's more about healing and health.
Spiritual things like beauty and art and crystals.
That's really what I focus on.
The upliftment of things.
But even by the time he's said that, there's already a significant conspiracy track within the expo.
In 2017, there was a screening of the anti-vaccine film Vaxxed.
David Wilcock, who lectures on everything from the secret space program to spiritual ascension, was also there promoting a proto-QAnon narrative about the imminent arrest of high-level pedophiles.
When Anna Merlan asked Quicksilver about the conspiracist element in the expo in 2017, here's what he had to say.
I learned my lesson and I stopped that.
I became disinterested in conspiracy stuff completely.
There's things I'm interested in and things I'm not.
If I don't like it or it's not my cup of tea, it doesn't have to be at the expo.
I like art and beauty and spiritual things.
He said this right before the COVID pandemic swept across the country.
And as far as I could tell, he hasn't commented on the conspiracy theories about the Expo since then.
But I think it's fair to say that after that, it became impossible to host a New Age or alternate spirituality event without at least tolerating a conspiracist element.
This year, conspiracists were not only heavily present, they were granted their own special speaker's room.
If you were to take an escalator to the lower lobby of the hotel, beneath the exhibit hall, you would find yourself in what the event calls the Rabbit Hole Room.
It was helpfully indicated by standing paper cutouts of an illustrated white rabbit wearing a tuxedo and top hat.
The Rabbit Hole Room is where you can find speakers like Pandemic Director Mickey Willis, anti-vaccine activist Dale Bigtree, and one-time QAnon pusher Sean Stone.
Here's how the event program describes the offerings of the Rabbit Hole Room.
Join us in this exciting keynote program as we explore alternative realities and censored worldviews.
Are we in the middle of the Great Reset or the Great Awakening?
What is the Illuminati's master plan?
Are the technocratic elites engineering an AI takeover?
What the heck is really going on?
So after years of struggle, it appears that conspiracists have handily won their seat at the table at the Conscious Life Expo.
Yeah, and I think they also kind of process it with a certain amount of humor now, you know, them being considered conspiracy theorists because after COVID hit, essentially people who were just purely new age and weren't particularly into this Illuminati stuff or the cabal or reptilians started being called conspiracy theorists by their loved ones when they would bring stuff up like Plandemic, Mickey Willis's first film.
Or Plandemic 2, Mickey Willis's second film.
You know?
And so I think that there was a general acceptance among all people, no matter what their beliefs were, that the outside world considered them conspiracy theorists and that that was funny because in their opinion, of course, they weren't.
The main conference floor had several rows with dozens of small booths.
Some booths were occupied by mediums and mystics, some by sellers of magical ointments and supplements, and some sold simpler commercial products like flowy clothing, jewelry, incense sticks, or Tibetan singing bowls.
The LA Airport Hilton's 11,000-square-foot International Ballroom, as well as the adjacent 5,000-square-foot Pacific Ballroom, were packed end-to-end with unique ways to heal, to achieve your human potential, and to learn.
At least, that's the pitch.
In the world of sales and marketing messaging, there's this concept called the Unique Selling Proposition, or the USP.
The USP is the property of the product or service which makes it different from every other one available.
Now, you have to communicate why consumers should choose to spend their time and money with your brand instead of the endless other options available.
Each booth was occupied by someone with a practice pitch, and they all offered a USP that was far more creative and exotic than anything you could see in the Super Bowl ad.
For example, I spoke with one man who sold oils which, according to him, could help its users get a new job.
Now, listening back to these recordings, I realized I didn't really ask follow-up questions when speaking with people because I didn't know how that would come across.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
Fantastic.
What do we have here?
Well, we have Energized oils that operate like an attunement.
Gotcha.
These are super groups, so people often ask me, well, what do you think is best for me?
And I say, well, what category are you interested in?
Well, I'm looking for a new job, so it would be work or, you know, this or whatever.
And then of all the 200 different oils that I have, these are the top sellers.
Gotcha.
My partner has got Golden Light oils.
He works with the Golden Light, which is really the transformation of emotional energy.
If I were him, I would devise an oil so that my voice wouldn't crack twice while I pitch my product.
Travis View, the ultimate, ultimate square, going, okay, and what do we have here?
Oh boy, old Gil really needs a sale.
I got all sorts of oils.
Travis is going around like he's at a middle school science project fair.
So what do we have here?
A volcano.
Wow.
Is it going to erupt?
I see that.
I see that.
Always popular.
Going with the volcano.
A solid experiment.
Yeah, he kept saying things like, oh, yes, the oil operates as an attunement.
I can say, yes, I gotcha.
I understand.
I had no clue what the hell that meant.
It's just it's just words, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, if if they believe that everything is a kind of energy frequency, basically, it means that what you're rubbing on you brings that part of your body and maybe even goes straight through your soul and that it would bring it in tune with a greater frequency that perhaps promotes love and peace.
Glad to have clarified this for you, Travis.
Nothing wrong with that, hey!
You know?
Nothing wrong with that.
Some booth operators pitched an entire worldview, complete with an alternate history of the world and philosophy of life.
The Lemurian Fellowship, an organization based in Ramona, California, had a booth.
Behind the booth was a large drawing of what was supposedly the lost continent of Lemuria, and it spread across what is now the Pacific Ocean.
The man helped explain the geography of this sunken continent.
Here in California was part of Lemuria.
Gotcha.
So this is the whole outline.
It went through the Rockies, the western, uh, eastern border, sorry, up through the Aleutians, and then encompassed Australia all the way under New Zealand.
And Hawaii is right about there.
It was about 300 miles east of the capital city, Kamakulia.
And you can see over here the outline of the continental shelf as it went through the Rockies like that, all the way underneath the Aleutian Islands, and down, around.
Why should anyone care about this lost continent?
Well, according to the man, it wasn't just because it totally upends history and geology, but the Lemurian people lived in a perfect, peaceful society, and now this organization is bringing that society back.
So he was able to see and work with the masters of the Lemurian Brotherhood and they wanted him to release the philosophy that they used to use on the continent of Lemuria that allowed them to live in peace and harmony for about 50,000 years before it ultimately sank.
And they wanted to release the philosophy now so that it would help us to evolve as humans Not everything pitched was magical and esoteric.
The one product that caught my genuine interest was a smartphone that is disconnected from the Apple and Google ecosystems.
That means that giant tech companies can't track you while you use the phone, and consequently, neither can governments.
It's a phone that doesn't have any Google or Apple in it.
Cool.
Like .01% of phones that can do this.
You don't have to sign into it.
There's no advertisements.
So you can download all the maps of like the regions you're traveling through.
Okay.
And then you can navigate completely offline.
It just uses GPS.
It's like we're kind of going back to paper maps.
Yeah.
So now Google doesn't have your location all the time.
Yeah, he brought up real instances in which people were, like, unfairly prosecuted based on some information that was gathered, for example, by their search history.
So it was it was one of the better pitches I heard, definitely.
The libertarian in Travis comes alive for the one product that speaks to him.
Many booths were occupied by people offering readings, you know, understanding your past, seeing into your future, that sort of thing.
I was beckoned by one of the booth operators with the question, have you had your reading yet?
I'm doing very very well.
We have not, I have not had my read again.
All right.
Destroyed.
Destroyed with logic.
Wow.
Alright Destroyed destroyed with logic
Wow, all right He fell into the trap
It is.
It is.
I love that.
I love that pitch.
Because he didn't ask, would you like a reading?
He instead asked the trick question, have you had your reading yet?
It's clever because if you answer no, then you agree to this hidden premise, which is that you will get a reading at some point in the future.
So it just tricks you to committing to getting a reading.
So I like that.
Very good.
That's how easy it is.
Very good salesman.
Yeah.
We should be using this trick on Travis more often.
My reading started with him holding a small crucifix in front of his face and, like, talking to it.
And then he started asking questions about myself and gave some generalized advice.
What's going on with your emotions?
Oh, my emotions?
You know, I'm working hard.
You know, I'm very stressed, but I'm doing good.
We want you to take a big step back.
Worry about what you can change.
Don't worry about what you can't.
The Spirit says as we see you, you're putting yourself in a position.
Now listen to what I'm saying.
You can believe what you want.
You're looking at yourself to have a little bit of struggle because you're worried about it too much.
And this is something that you cannot change.
But you keep going in that direction, I'll be visioning you in a hospital.
Okay.
I'm not joking.
I'm looking dead at you.
Alright.
Okay?
Listen, you're right.
You have it in control.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. This is, this is a new one.
Sound advice.
And he could tell you were skeptical halfway through and he's like,
"You can believe whatever you fucking want."
Okay?
Yeah, yeah.
You keep going down this path of being busy and being stressed, and guess where I'm going to be visiting you?
That's right.
The hospital.
That would be very kind.
I wonder if that comes with the price of the reading, is a hospital visit a couple years down the line.
I wonder if he shows up with magic tricks.
Like, he's your make-a-wish, you know, just assigned to you?
Yeah, I guess, yeah, good advice.
Don't worry about things that you'll have power over.
Always good.
He could also see that Travis is on the verge of death.
He's like, let me turn the cards.
Oh no, the Grim Reaper!
Over your shoulder, I can see him.
He's waiting to claim you.
Could you give me the address of the hospital you would end up in if something bad happened to you, sir?
He also used this deck of a standard four suited playing cards with the Jokers, but it wasn't just like a standard bicycle deck.
The faces of the cards were printed with this sparkly gold color.
And he asked me what I wanted to have happen this year.
And I mentioned I was working on my side podcast, the second season of Trickle Down.
I wanted that to go well.
And he had me shuffle the cards, split them into three piles and choose one of the piles.
And he took the pile I chose and started dealing the cards on the table in front of him.
And he told me what each card supposedly meant.
And then he told me that if the Joker was in the pile that I chose, that means that what I wanted to happen will definitely happen.
Which is, you know, a nice sentiment.
I mean, statistics aren't my strongest subject, but there seems to be, like, a problem with this system.
Assuming that he's using a standard deck and two jokers, that means that there's probably at least one joker in two of those piles, unless, you know, both jokers are in one.
So, I mean, that's a pretty good chance that, like, all my wishes will come true.
So it's not a very special or rare event.
And of course, I didn't inspect the deck, so it's possible he slipped extra jokers in there.
So of course, while he was dealing, I got a joker.
He seemed very excited, and he did a little celebration right there.
He also, very confusingly, said that I would have the opportunity to get married this year.
And yes, you'll have the opportunity to be married.
Sure.
I said opportunity.
He actually is technically correct.
You have the opportunity to be married.
In fact, you are married, but you could also not take that opportunity by getting divorced.
So he's technically not incorrect there.
I think he's saying that you have an opportunity to potentially get married to Julian.
Yeah!
I mean, that's what I told Travis, is even if he had said you have an opportunity to get married, all it would take would be for me to get on my knee and say, Travis, will you marry me?
And you'll probably say no, because you're, you know, you're mean like that.
But the opportunity is there!
There it is!
In the state of California!
Still legal!
I suppose so, but that's not like information that, like, I was hoping for or looking for.
I was wearing my wedding ring, you know?
[Laughter]
Oh, boy.
Listen, more empathy than perception.
If we now live in a marketplace of realities, then the exhibit halls of the Conscious Life Expo represented the
reality bazaar.
In one booth, you could be part of a world in which angels are real divine beings who look after this world, and you can benefit from their heavenly wisdom thanks to a human who offers angel readings.
Just a few feet over in the next booth, you can instead step into a reality in which the living Buddha and reincarnation of Christ is a man born in Oregon in 1951 to the name Ron Spencer.
Ron, better known by the name Buddha Maitreya by his followers, sells gold-plated pyramids
which are meant to be placed on the head in order to aid with meditation.
If that story doesn't resonate, then you can keep walking and check out a reality in
which organite pendants help align your chakras and protect you from EMF radiation.
Or the reality in which dolphins are a source of knowledge and healing energy, which you
can tap into by buying a Dolphin Wisdom Retreat.
That one's real.
That's the one I pick.
Of course, it's not an either-or proposition.
You can take any or all of these ideas and combine them, creating a bespoke landscape of personal truth that frees you from the stifling options offered by the mundane world.
Yeah, I remember standing with you outside and I was having a cigarette and just, you know, I mean, been going through some rough times and I was just thinking, man, I wish one of these booths had the right answer.
Just one, you know, I'd settle for that.
Of course, that makes sense.
A lot of these people, they felt, you know, rightly or wrongly kind of like burned by the more mainstream offerings, the more mainstream religions or the more mainstream ways to heal, the more mainstream approach to relationships.
And it's like, if those aren't working for you, then it would actually be irrational to keep doing that.
It seems like he's quite sensible to at least explore what other ideas might be out there that might work for you better.
While Travis was having his mind blown open by booth pitches, I was chasing stars.
Specifically, social media personalities I was familiar with from my days of watching unhinged New Age videos on Twitch.
The first I spotted was a handsome fellow who goes by Ra of Earth.
Sporting long black hair and a tangled beard, Ra was the man behind the popularization of the term butthole sunning.
The video that started it all had featured three men spreading eagle with their feet in the air, while Raw, the cameraman, asked them how nice the sun felt on their perineums.
Legendary stuff, but unfortunately his content had grown quite stale since then, colonized by his many business endeavors.
Long a promoter of multi-level marketing supplement company Purium, Raw now also sold two subscription-based services offering to rewire people's bodies and psyches through quote, psychological reprogramming exercises, breathwork and yoga.
I decided there was no point approaching him, as he seemed to be there to schmooze rather than preach or exhibit anything.
Ra of Earth, of course, was not the only Ra present that I was familiar with.
I also ran into Arcturus Ra, a Sedona-based content maker and craftsman who believes he's an alien being with a seat on the Arcturian Council.
His booth featured two portraits of himself as a purple extraterrestrial with elongated,
pointy ears, and both were extremely cool. You can see them here. One of them's a 3D kind of
model and then beneath that you see a nice like 2D portrait.
Honestly like this stuff could be in a Paradox game, you know what I mean?
Like Stellaris.
Yeah.
Arcturus Raw comes from Germany originally, and he's a pretty skilled rapper and electronic music DJ.
He's also great at design and comes up with fascinating objects adorned with geometric patterns, small metal sculptures meant to be worn on a necklace, and even a series of petroglyphs of ancient astronauts designed with the help of AI.
All of this derived from ancient Arcturian technology that he had access to through his connections.
But the jewel of his little booth, which had quite a few people talking about it at the expo, was his medbed.
The size of a large tanning bed, it was painted a deep blue and adorned with golden geometric art.
In a video he shot at his home in Sedona, he explained what the medbed does.
World premiere for the Conscious Life Expo LA.
Out of the world of conspiracies, into the pro-spiracy.
We're making it true.
You see this in the back?
On the trailer, ready to go.
We're shipping it.
We're bringing it.
Rigged and ready to rock.
To heal the planet with Photon, Tachyon, Orgon, Scala, Wave.
All of the imaginable subtle fields in arrangement, bringing higher self into higher self.
So come to the Conscious Life Expo and test the cell well.
Which needs no electricity.
It runs on a zero field.
Experience it once we're there.
So I hope to see you guys there.
Rock and roll.
Wow.
Considering it doesn't have any integrated lights or anything like that, or like ventilation or really anything, because it's not plugged into the wall.
Yeah.
Sitting inside of it with it closed would just be like sitting in a horrible, hard... A coffin?
Coffin of some sort.
I opted to remain out of the med bed, but during my visit to the booth, I saw a woman laying in it with the top open, and she seemed very, very happy.
And, you know, I mean, I guess not closing the top is better since, like I said, that would just block off all light and there's no kind of added element to have the thing closed on you.
Yeah, you definitely don't want somebody getting in, them closing the lid, and then, you know, 30 seconds in, you just hear screams coming out from it because that person became very claustrophobic, which is understandable.
There's also the thing of like you're laying down on basically this kind of glass or plexiglass surface, which is just hard.
Yeah.
So the woman in Raw had basically come up with, you know, you keep the thing open and we'll lay a little blanket for you on top of the hard thing that you're laying on.
She had a big smile on her face, Jake.
All right.
Who am I to say?
Yeah.
During my visit, Arcturus spoke a bit about his love for AI and distrust for Elon Musk.
He was especially alarmed by Neuralink, Musk's supposed brain implant, which he explained was dangerous because inserting technology into the body had already earned humanity an intergalactic warning.
So… So we've been warned once, so it's going to happen again, no more warnings?
I don't know.
I mean, I guess they'll warn us again.
I mean... I don't know.
I think at that point they're gonna build the freeway through Earth.
I mean, one warning ignored?
I mean, you had your chance.
Yeah, an Arcturian atom bomb will come right down and finish us off if we put Neuralink into our bodies.
If some fucking Bitcoin nerd decides to actually mangle their head with it.
I'm with the aliens on this one, by the way.
Do not put the Neuralink inside your bodies.
It has killed multiple monkeys.
Fuck that.
Arcturus Ra, when I brought up his music, told me that he was working on an album, but had grown busy with the med bed, delaying the effort.
After a short chat, I bid him farewell and continued on my way.
After walking around the booths for a while, I decided to take a break by taking a seat in the large, busy lobby of the Hilton.
While I was sitting there, one of the stars of the conference happened to sit right next to me, a man by the name of Foster Gamble.
Foster Gamble is a 75-year-old heir of the Procter & Gamble fortune.
There are lots of things one could do with the endless time and resources that come with being born into a business fortune, but Foster Gamble, after attending elite private schools and Princeton University, decided to dedicate his time to getting pilled and getting others pilled.
Ah, the old Jerome Corsi way of going through life.
Foster Gamble believes that there is a whirlpool pattern called the torus, which is a vortex which can be harnessed to create free, limitless, clean energy.
He believes that this torus is exempt from the second law of thermodynamics.
In his telling, the only reason people don't have access to this world-changing discovery is because a cabal of elites suppress it in order to keep us dependent on fossil fuels.
He explained this theory in films which he produces and stars in.
The 2011 film Thrive, What on Earth Will It Take?
And the follow-up film in 2020, Thrive 2.
This is what it takes.
Those sound like dance movie titles.
Yeah.
Thrive 3, back to the streets.
My name is Foster Gamble, and I have spent nearly a lifetime trying to figure out what happened that could account for the staggering agony and deprivation on this planet.
I set out on a journey, seeking to answer questions like, is it even possible for humans to thrive?
I found a code, a pattern in nature that's been embedded in arts and icons throughout the centuries.
These films have made Foster Gamble a huge star in the conspiracist community.
Now, I recognized him and struck up a conversation, and I told him I did a podcast about QAnon.
And he asked me who I think QAnon is, and he offered his own perspective on the validity of QAnon.
And who do you think's behind it?
You know, the Q drops themselves.
They say that less than 10, less than 10 people are behind it.
It's military intelligence, so think that, like, Mike Flynn is one of the 10.
But, um, I'm not sure.
What do you think?
Whoever's behind it knows a lot.
But the hardest part for me is telling which part is real information that they want us to know to empower us and to what degree it was either initiated or a layer was put over it.
I think the CIA put a layer over it to discredit the whole thing, just throw out all, because there's a lot of really important information, they just throw it out, oh QAnon is a hoax and get everybody to forget about it.
It's tough to understand what he's trying to say there.
It sounds like he thinks that there was a lot of good information in QAnon, but it was, like, tainted by the CIA with, like, bad information or something like that, and that causes people to throw out the whole thing.
Foster Gamble also told me that he knows someone who lives in the South Pacific who told him that the person behind QAnon was somehow sickened or injured by the cabal, supposedly.
Gamble's friend also claimed that she helped Q recover.
Well, a trusted friend of mine, whose name will remain unknown, but...
When they started getting close to QAnon, she contacted me.
She lives in the South Pacific, and she's very well informed and very well connected.
And this guy shows up.
Somebody brings this guy to her, and she contacts me, and she said, I can't tell you who it is, but it's QAnon.
He's here, and he's sick, and I'm helping him recover.
And I'm like, whoa!
And so I just talked to her a couple days ago, before I came to the conference, and I said, so what is the update on that?
And she said, well, I'm convinced that he was the real guy, or one of them, super knowledgeable, knew all about everything.
And somehow they had gotten to him in a way that was injurious, but he recovered.
And she said, Fascinating.
Yeah.
The plan is that his identity will never be known, probably for good reason.
So I can't rely on that information, but it's coming from a very strong source.
Fascinating. Yeah. Hope we find out someday.
Yeah. The same with Satoshi Nakamoto.
You know what?
This is a very cool remake of the English patient in the works.
Yeah, I know.
It's interesting to me how more and more we're seeing this idea from conspiracy theorists or people who, you know, might have formerly been very into QAnon now including this CIA psyop as part of its lore.
I mean, you know, Michael Flynn has echoed those statements and, you know, you see it sort of trickling out into Your average sort of conspiracy theorist that, you know, after all of the predictions didn't come true and Trump lost, you know, how do they reconcile that with maybe their former beliefs of what QAnon was or, you know, is capable of doing?
And that's, I mean, I guess it's not a surprise that, you know, when things become tainted or there is a, you know, a stigma attached to it, that the sort of the natural move is to say, well, this is part of some kind of CIA op.
You know, the QAnon was real and there was good information there.
There was good intel, but it was so good that the CIA had to come in and orchestrate it to be way crazier than it is.
And that's to, you know, hide the fact that there was some truth in it.
So obviously there's no substance to his story.
It's anonymous hearsay from a longtime conspiracist, but it sounds like he was just sharing the kind of like supposedly insidery claims that people might swap at this kind of event.
There were definitely two categories of workshops at the Conscious Life Expo.
Those you had access to for free with a day pass, and those featuring more prominent speakers who were charging around 50 bucks a pop, basically the price of the day pass for a single talk.
I was slated to attend two of these premium lectures in the evening, but had some time to kill before then.
So I wandered down into the rabbit hole room, low ceiling, carpeted, smelling a little off, to check out a free speaker known as Muslim Mystic, whose talk was titled, Reshape Your Reality.
In the promotional materials, he described himself as a, quote, multidisciplinary spiritualist who is rooted in Islamic mysticism, utilizing the Kabbalah, Vedic sciences, and quantum mechanics for reality manifestation.
But on stage, he cut an awkward figure.
Stumbling a lot over his words, seemingly unprepared to outline his beliefs in a sensical manner.
Muslim Mystic had an interesting backstory, however.
He had been a law enforcement officer in Detroit for seven years, later moving to LA and starting a YouTube account in 2010, when, in his own words, he was overweight.
Through self-help gurus like Tony Robbins, he got into more esoteric spiritual belief systems, but by his own account, began alienating friends with talk of his new fixations, which took a detour into conspiracy theories.
So, like, I had to Basically understand all these different concepts you know that's where the rabbit holes led me to not to you know different conspiracy theories and whatnot like reptilians of course I did all that stuff but but it's like what was it benefiting me fine there's reptilians there it's like why don't you join some groups and always talk about reptilians you know it's like you know that's what I mean I was like that I was the guy that was inviting people to reptilians and um and then uh you know then it was like
Flat Earth and Dome Earth and under it's like I realized like all that stuff was actually a distraction because it is entertainment it's entertaining and my my like my ego is like okay fine let's learn about this but in the meantime I wasn't doing what I had to do in terms of you know I didn't really have a vision of myself like that's what it is that's where the magic comes in you have a vision of yourself in your mind you know like for example I have a vision of myself This was a consistent theme in Mystic's talk, feeling crazy and isolated as he descended the rabbit hole.
The first lecture I did here, 2020, and, um, and it's just, it's the first time I came to an event where people also, like, I didn't feel as crazy, you know?
I didn't feel crazy.
But then, and I'm like, okay, because then I'm like, wow, there's even more crazy people, you know?
It's like, I feel fine, you know?
But the thing is, like, if you, on this path, you don't somehow feel crazy or, For Muslim Mystic, loss of friends was just a sacrifice one had to make to attain meaningful spiritual knowledge and self-realization.
That was one of the sacrifices I had to make, you know, to even be talking up here is that basically I had to sacrifice, you know, my friends for a long time.
I had to sacrifice, you know, going out and Being, you know, you can't be the same person.
Once you go through certain events and things in your life, you can't be the same person.
You know?
It's like, you can't.
You know, you can't unsee certain things, you know?
The main body of knowledge he explored in a disorganized manner stemmed from a 1908 book called The Kybalion, A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece.
These writings, signed by an author known as the Three Initiates, but often attributed to New Thought pioneer William Walker Atkinson, was a foundational text for what came to be known as Hermeticism.
This was not apparent in Mystic's talk, which veered off course repeatedly into tangents.
Mystic's main point was basically that you can manifest your own reality, which he explained, the system doesn't want you to know about.
Clearly cognizant of being placed in the rabbit hole room, Muslim Mystic did make mention of Hollywood and the rituals.
But, as you heard earlier, promoted a more practical and less conspiratorial spiritual path.
After hearing him mangle quotes by Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, I soon grew restless.
As I left the room, he was rambling about the movie Bride of Chucky and the spiritual meaning behind his son believing the doll was real.
That was the only free lecture I attended.
I'd stick with the premium content from there on out.
I was planning to attend just such a lecture a couple hours later in the same rabbit hole room, that of Sean Stone, son of famous filmmaker Oliver Stone.
I considered going to Sean Stone's talk with Julian, but I wanted to push myself and try something a little outside of my comfort zone.
So I instead attended a keynote talk by a woman named Maureen St.
Germain, who founded the St.
Germain Mystery School.
If you're familiar with Western esotericism, you'll recognize St.
Germain as an important ascended master in theosophy and the I Am Activity cult.
I decided I was going to enter this event with an open mind, because if I approach the experience from the perspective of skepticism or verifiable truths, I'm going to miss the point.
So here was an opportunity to understand this community from a more intuitive level.
Maureen St.
Germain's talk was on ascending and becoming 5D.
It promised that attendees would learn what 5D is all about and access tools to help them break free from the 3D matrix and proactively live in 5D.
She started her talk by explaining how to tell the difference between being in 5D and being in 3D.
And apparently, when you can't find your shit, that means you're in 3D.
You don't know when you're in 5D that you're in 5D because you're so comfortable and happy and plugged in.
You don't notice.
It's when you slide back into 3D that you remember, oh my god, what's this?
And a way to know is if you've lost something, like your keys or, unimportant, sunglasses or something you care about, and you look at the place where you last put them and they're not there, and you finally use a replacement, You come back, you've taken care of this errand, and you open the door to put the thing back, forgetting that this is the replacement piece, and the original is there, right where you left it.
And you think to yourself, how is that possible?
How did I mess up?
And the answer is, when you're in 5D, you put the stuff away, and when you're in 3D, you're rushing and hurrying to find something, Wow.
Okay, so just being conscious, I guess, being present.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm on board.
I know when I don't lose my keys, I do feel like I'm in a higher plane of existence.
I can't find, you know, my wallet or whatever.
I am definitely not vibrating at a high frequency.
Now, my parents had a much more reasonable explanation for this type of event, and they ascribed it to creatures known as the borrowers.
These are little creatures who live inside the walls of your house, they have tea parties and stuff, they hang out, they have a great time, and every now and again they'll take something of yours.
to use and then they'll return it when you least suspect it.
So, surprise that the borrowers weren't brought up here, but not everybody has the
opportunity to grow up with such knowledgeable family members. Yeah, and unfortunately when they take that
object, they're using it as a mattress to make love. So beware the borrowers. So do not run a
blacklight over your keys, over your phone, your wallet uh... you know it's a little bit of a lot of
money but it's a little bit You're going to find some stains that you don't want to see.
You'd rather not know about.
So, I'm being open-minded.
I'm nodding along.
I'm not being judgmental.
But then she dropped a bombshell on us.
She said that the Earth is lit by multiple sun simulators.
Now we're going to throw you a curveball, and this is for you to ruminate on.
You don't have to accept it as absolute until you're ready.
The Earth is now being built, lit by multiple sun simulators.
a very good friend and a brilliant woman in her 60s who was a personal friend of mine,
told me a story about her father who was heavily involved in the secret programs.
And he said to her that the son, he didn't bring his work home,
but he told her that he was building son simulators.
And the last project he was involved in before retirement was the construction of an artificial sun.
This was right about the time that I was being told by my guides that this was so.
Okay.
All right.
She went on to explain that these sun simulators are supposedly four stories high, and they were created by an engineer who normally works on wind tunnels.
Now, this is a reality-shattering revelation.
Like, I have so many questions.
Like, where are these sun simulators?
Are they orbiting right now?
What is their purpose?
Who made them?
Who commissioned these?
Do these sun simulators replace or supplement the actual sun?
Yeah, how did you do the changeover when the real sun died and then you put the simulators in?
Was there a period of overlap where there was a real sun and a couple of simulators all floating around out in outer space?
A lot of good questions, fellas.
Do the simulators also make your plants grow?
Because I know that when I don't leave the handful of plants that I'm trying to keep alive in my house, if I don't leave them by the window to get sunlight, they die.
Interesting.
Back in front of the window and they get a proper day of light, they're doing great.
So there must be some other technology than just the visual, you know, just the visual representation of the sun.
If you stare into the sun about four times in slightly different positions, you will close your eyes and see four suns.
But despite all of my questions, she quickly moved on, leaving the relevance of telling us about the sun simulators unclear.
She instead talked about the divine masculine and feminine, and how the straight line is masculine while the curved line is feminine, but in 5D there isn't a division between the two.
And she talked about spirals and math and nature, the golden ratio, sacred geometry, and DNA.
She made no bones about teaching theosophy.
In fact, at one point she directly quoted Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society.
It was some incomprehensible nonsense from her book, The Secret Doctrine.
In esoteric philosophy, the logos, which is what we just talked about a second ago, is an abstract term.
And that was from Helen Helena Blavatsky, who wrote The Secret Doctrine.
There is an eternal and periodic law which causes an active and creative force, the Locus, to emanate from the ever-concealed and incomprehensible One Principle at the beginning of every new cycle of life.
That's part of the Theosophy teaching.
She discussed the colors that correspond to various chakras.
Now, this I have some familiarity with.
So, chakra comes from Sanskrit and translates to wheel or cycle, I'm told, and it references a spiritual energy center within the human body.
Though the concept first emerged in one form in the early traditions of Hinduism, Maureen St.
Germain's conception of chakras is more modern and more Western.
She operates from the framework of there being seven chakras, each of which correspond to a specific color.
The idea of colored chakras is also a theosophical concept, first introduced by the theosophist Charles Leadbeater in 1927.
She then guided the room in a meditation designed to open your heart chakra.
It involved concentrating on something in your life that you love purely like a pet and then giving that feeling that arises a name.
And I'll be honest, I did not participate because I was still trying to puzzle out What she was talking about when she talked about the sun simulators.
I tried to have an open mind.
I was punished for it with sun simulators, and I had already failed in my quest to participate in this talk, you know, as the normal participants do.
After some explanation about the work of a 17th century German mystic, Johann Gichtel, she thinks we're fully prepared for the main exercise.
First, we will connect the chakras in a spiral way and then tilt the chakra system so that the lower orange and red chakras are in front of you and the higher purple and green chakras are behind you.
And then we are supposed to rotate the chakra system in the opposite direction around our hearts.
I have no idea what she's talking about.
Like, I've lost the ability to parse the meaning of English words at this point.
And her attempt at clarification does not help.
So let's be really clear.
While keeping your chakras connected in an anti-clockwise spiral as shown by the line in this diagram.
The line is not orange.
You rotate the entire system clockwise as shown by the black lines.
So the entire system is rotating in a counterclockwise way.
This is similar to when you activate your kama.
You're creating the counterclockwise energy.
That produces a ratio.
That ratio is a creative force.
Remember, ratios that don't resolve produce creativity.
So it would look like this.
You're in the middle, and it's rotating around your heart.
And then finally, we're going to look at your higher chakras and imagine that they are moving in a coil in the opposite way above your head.
This part is still a little bit experimental, but we do have this meditation available, and I'm now inviting you to join me in doing it.
Man, the free talks are really free talks, huh?
God damn.
So my experience with meditation is mostly mindfulness meditation, which in my practice involves concentrating on something specific like your breath and then observing your own thoughts as they emerge in a non-critical way.
This left me unprepared for whatever I was being asked to do in that room.
This experimental guided chakra meditation comes in the form of a 25-minute recording, and again, I don't participate because I can't, for the same reason I can't follow along to instructions written in Mandarin.
All I'm hearing is signifiers without corresponding signifieds.
Instead, I simply enjoy the dim lights and ambient music, and wonder what I'd be doing if I had instead attended Sean Stone's talk.
The host, a middle-aged woman, walked out onto the stage to introduce Sean Stone and his talk, ominously titled, The Great Awakening.
Welcome, everyone, to Conscious Life Expo 2023.
And this is the official inauguration of the Down the Rabbit Hole track.
Yeah!
Woohoo!
I've been coming to Conscious Life Expo for the whole time it's been happening.
It's always been on the cutting edge.
And giving us the next level of the new paradigm.
And this year is exactly that with this track.
And I want to honor Brandy for bringing all the speakers here and coordinating all that she did.
To bring all these amazing presenters of the Truth Movement who were so important in these last three years.
They stood out there and they told the truth.
They put up with a lot as you can imagine.
So they're really our heroes now.
And it's so great to be here now and to see them in person and honor them and appreciate them and really hear what they have to say.
So we are going to inaugurate this with a truth person who actually was born into the family Sean Stone, his father is Oliver Stone, so he grew up in the film industry where his father was on the cutting edge of telling the truth in a lot of his films, beyond what normal Hollywood did.
So Sean was a part of that, he apprenticed with it, he was in it, and he's following in his father's footsteps, but on his own path.
And he's going to talk tonight about The Awakening.
Because that's really what's going on here.
That's what's going on for the last three years.
As the truth comes out to be revealed and healed, then we're allowed to have our awakening—the planetary awakening.
So that's the bottom line of it all.
The reason I was so interested in hearing Stone's lecture is because he's a perfect example of somebody with clout embracing QAnon by giving it an air of legitimacy, some historical context, and an intellectual sheen.
Stone is educated, eloquent, and good-looking, leveraging both his lineage and charisma to turn himself into a media figure.
He's hosted shows on Russia Today, Gaia TV, and David Icke's streaming platform, Iconic.
He's a great example of a public figure poised to keep the QAnon belief system alive by concealing its ugly or ridiculous bits and rewriting it as respectable.
Near the beginning of his talk, he asked the audience what they were interested in hearing about.
After a few people had taken their turns, one asked if the second coming of Jesus was imminent, I mentioned my interest in the internet, especially anonymous sources of information like QAnon.
Stone stared at me for a moment, Nodding his head, yes, he said, and lifted his head to the crowd.
Anyone else?
It was a taste of his current approach to the subject matter, namely to reshape it as an accessory to a larger Great Awakening movement, which he claims arose in 2020, around three years after QAnon started posting.
Between him and the host who introduced him, a theme was emerging.
For them, the People's Awakening had taken place in the last three years, Basically, the span of the pandemic.
This makes sense when you think about the influx of normies and new-agers that the broader conspirituality movement experienced during that period.
So this is the awakening process, essentially.
Is the mind starting to wake up and say, wait a minute.
There's something else going on here.
There's some cult-like behavior of power.
A cult of power, if you want to call it.
Be it an oligarchy, be it an empire, be it a religious Fascination that's taking me away from my internal knowing and my self-respect, my self-sovereignty, and wants me to surrender that.
And I don't think I want to surrender that anymore.
And somehow, someway, this Great Awakening concept started in 2020.
Not for the first time, but how did it catch on?
Does anyone know?
I saw memes about it, but where did that come from?
Was that put out there by Q?
Was it just in the collective zeitgeist?
People started to say, hey, that's a good concept.
Great awakening.
I like it.
Catchy turn.
Early on in the talk, Stone acknowledged that the Great Awakening was not a new term.
It was also used to describe a series of Protestant movements throughout history.
For those who know in American history, the Great Awakening is not a new concept.
This actually goes back to the 1730s and 40s time period before America has a revolution.
And Jonathan Edwards and other reverends and preachers, but they were from the Protestant sect, were basically doing these revival ceremonies and bringing people together
and taking them away from the Catholic sort of ritualized, almost cult traditions.
And in the course of these discussions and sermons, it was-- they say it's an awakening because it was
basically about-- it was about the fervor of bringing the Spirit into you as a living being that embodies Spirit.
We're here by the power and grace of Spirit.
And so there's certain things that were taken from that era, the ideas of individualism, that you can individually
connect more directly to God, which is not new.
It's not like they invented these things, these--
We're very old.
The Gnostics talked about them and many other sects that were persecuted by Catholic Church in particular.
But the idea of a personal relationship to your Creator is in some ways blasphemous, depending on your orientation and how you perceive religion.
But it's truly liberating, which is why it's so dangerous.
And so the Great Awakenings happen.
They continue.
There's a second Great Awakening.
There's a third Great Awakening.
And there's, you know, deviations.
You could say there's fanatic, there's some fanatical cults that come out of it, too.
You know, some Manson type of characters come out in the 19th century's Second and Third Great Awakening.
And then that leads you to the, you know, to the current Great Awakening.
Right?
Because some people say, oh, it's a Q thing, right?
That's a cult.
I would just argue that cults are essentially how you relate yourself to the temple or the
body of information.
So Travis, you've studied the first Great Awakening a little bit.
What do you think of his characterization here?
Yeah, well, I mean, like he says, like most historians agree, there were three great awakenings in American history, the first of which was in the 1730s.
Now, I do know that there was a division during this time between two groups called the New Lights and the Old Lights.
And the New Lights, they were pro-revival and they believed in things like apprehending God through the senses and the super passionate enthusiasm for God and justification by faith alone.
Well, the old lights were, they were anti-revival, and they believed in stuff like sober intellectualism, predestination, and, you know, believing in the complex theology based on the reading of the Bible.
You told me about this earlier, so I happen to have a book called Inventing the Great Awakening by Frank Lambert.
Here's how he described the central message of these new lights.
At the center of the Awakener's message was the necessity of a new birth, also known as the doctrine of regeneration.
The defining notion of the new birth was that of, quote, experimental religion, A term evangelicals applied to a personal salvation experience.
They drew distinctions between religion of the heart and mere quote head knowledge.
The latter was derided as shallow or barren, the product of rationalists who reduced Christian faith to the affirmation of certain reasonable propositions.
By establishing the new birth as inward change rather than outward profession, the evangelical revivalists broadened their audience to include men and women within churches as well as those without.
So it sounds like the people who participated in the Great Awakening, there was this greater emphasis on like, you know, your senses, your faith, your belief, your passion, you know, all these things that exist inward.
The core of Sean Stone's message was a sort of spiritual universalism rooted in the power and sovereignty of the individual, which he also associated with the creation of the United States.
Liberation, he posited, was the personal and internal process of awakening to our own hearts and the realization that we are, in his words, different expressions of one consciousness.
The talk mixed Protestantism's obsession with our personal relationship to the divine with terms you might find in the lessons of New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle.
That is what's The Awakening is about starting to recognize there is something more here than the material realm can fulfill us with.
Or than the authority figures can entertain us with and make us feel validated.
Or make us feel we are enough.
Because they can't.
They are designed by their very nature, these authority figures in these structures,
like the Catholic Church, then the Empire of Britain, to make us feel subservient,
to make us feel limited, to make us feel weak and disempowered.
See, the awakening was this lion-hearted roar that we are here by the grace of something much greater.
And even though imperfect, we can work on ourselves.
We don't need to be told how to work on ourselves.
No, I am here to work on myself.
I have to find that path.
That is the freedom that Jefferson was speaking of in the Declaration when he's saying all men and women Ellipses are created with the same inalienable rights for life, for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness, which is freedom, right?
Liberty, freedom.
And that's an ethos.
Sean Stone set this philosophy up because he wanted the audience to keep it in mind as they reinterpreted a core tenet of QAnon, the revelation that elites were sexually assaulting and feeding off our children.
But to do that, they would have to accept their own capacity for evil.
We all have the darkness that is in us.
We all have the potential For doing things... Let's say I was born in Nazi Germany.
There's an aspect of me that would say, I want to be a good soldier.
I want to go and serve my nation.
I want to be the best at that.
I could have been a great SS officer.
And maybe I wouldn't have gone to the place of killing innocent people, but maybe I would have gone and fought for the regime.
It's very difficult to find that line.
At what point, psychologically, do you break Because we, collectively, have histories of trauma.
And so, my experience of life has been, generally speaking, benign.
I know many people in the world, they could say over 50%, have experienced, for example, molestation as a child, or physical abuse of a very extreme nature as a child.
And how that trauma then carries into the psyche, It creates a propensity to disassociate when it comes to inflicting pain on others.
Cannot discount that.
So, being honest with ourselves, we have to look at the nature of the reality of what's going on with what we call evil things with a compassionate understanding that these are still human beings doing these things.
Even when it comes to the darkest of the Great Awakening side, which is the group, the darkest things that were exposed in 2020 was the human trafficking of children and murder of children and rape of children.
This is some of the darkest things, arguably the most evil thing that can be done on this planet.
Now that is something that is, I don't think I've heard before in which he is sort, he's asking people to sympathize and see themselves within the pedophile elites.
Yeah, the cabal is inside us.
The other thing that's worth pointing out there is that his stat that 50% or something of all children have either been sexually or physically abused is just flat incorrect.
I looked it up.
There's multiple different statistics and none of them even remotely come close to 50% of our population.
At this point in his talk, Stone brought in the New Age concept of an energy body to analyze the supposed revelations of the Great Awakening movement.
And yet something is feeding.
On that purity.
On that energy.
On the children.
It's been feeding on us.
Our entire existence.
We just weren't conscious of it.
It's been feeding on humanity for all of its existence.
Not just our own.
But all of humanity since the beginning.
That's what this Great Awakening is actually about.
This Great Awakening is taking us to that next level.
Where we're saying, wait a minute.
There's a predator that has been masquerading, as you said, as the authority figures, as the mask of power, as the pretense of power, as a cult of power.
And at its core, it feeds on purity.
It feeds on children.
It has no qualms about doing that.
That's how dark this really is, because we have to face the most evil In order to bring the good.
Because you can't ultimately become the hero until you face the real villain.
I'm not saying the villain is one person or one group or It's an energy body.
Yeah.
So, you know, the idea of an energy body or like Eckhart Tolle sometimes talks about a fear body is kind of the idea that there's, uh, I guess a form of human consciousness that transcends like the individual mind.
And so I guess he's kind of saying that the cabal is this energy body, but then why it's like feeding off us.
So there's some sort of ancient evil involved.
It's.
Yeah, and you can only fight it, like, spiritually, like, within meditation or something.
It's like... Yeah, certainly it's within yourself that you can fight it.
I mean, that's much easier to talk about than, you know, trying to point out, uh, you know, all of the, you know, well-known, uh, uh, specific instances of Hillary Clinton, you know, eating the face off of a child, you know.
When you can ascribe this, this evil to, you know, some kind of mist, it's, uh, Sauron, you know, the Eye of Sauron, like, you know, just forming, you know, forming in the hills of Mordor.
It's much easier to just keep talking about that because you don't ever have to really bring up any specific examples and you don't really have to relate it to anything going on in somebody's real life.
It's this feeling, it's shrouding you constantly, you know, and a lot of people can take, you know, whatever, they can interpret it whatever way they want if they're feeling down in their life or
something doesn't go their way or, I don't know, they have a fight with a loved one.
You know, it can all be described to this sort of ghostly evil that's constantly trying
to infiltrate them.
In perhaps the greatest twist in his analysis, Sean Stone explains that we are the cabal
in a way, and the children we must save are actually inside us.
And some of the terminology he used would be at home in a modern therapy office.
There is very little evil, pure evil, in this reality.
But all it takes is a little pure evil.
Like that little black ink in the water, right?
A little, just one black ink, and all of a sudden the whole water can get muddy.
And that's all I think it really took.
I think all it really took was a little bit of pure evil.
To muddy the whole water for our reality.
Because we perpetuated it.
Not because we wanted to, but because once that trauma set in, once that violation, once that first rape of the child set in, once that first violation of us as children, right?
Saying, you're not a sovereign.
You don't have any rights.
You belong to the parent or the state.
We own you.
That becomes your worldview.
So actually, the whole work that we're doing with the Save the Children, Protect the Children, yes, at one level, there are millions of kids that need to be protected and saved.
But it's actually our own work on our inner child that needs to be done.
Because you can save a child, but if you don't actually have the self-love You can't give it to the child.
You can't give it to your partner.
You can't give it to anyone until you love yourself.
This is the real work of the Great Awakening.
It's the awakening of the heart.
It's the realization that all this darkness, as hard as it's been, as terrible as it's been, it's been a tremendous opportunity for us to grow, to say, okay, I still love in spite of it all.
I still forgive.
I still give thanks.
The ominous laugh you hear is from a room over.
It's just bleeding through the wall at very inconvenient moments.
Yeah, this is so warped.
Isn't it such a strange take?
It's such a unique take.
That's why I mean it can keep QAnon going because it's like, it's more flexible.
It's kind of more about just working on yourself.
Like you can basically, you know, be a soldier, you know, for QAnon, but like, it's a form of inner work, like a form of therapy.
The problem is that some of this stuff is actually potentially healthy or at least can be used.
In a healthy setting and he's reconfigured all these terms from like New Age to kind of geopolitical terms, you know to like terms about like sovereignty and he's kind of combined all of these to create a kind of new slightly more I guess benign on the surface version of the Great Awakening and as such of QAnon.
Yeah, it's almost like it started with, trust the plan, sit back, grab your popcorn, then it transitioned to, you are the plan, and this was the plan all along, that you have to be the change that affects the outside world, to now, all you can control is the change within yourself, and healing your inner battle is actually that energy that you're putting out is fighting this very real cabal.
Be the plan you want to see in the world.
Yes, yes, be the plan you want to see in the world.
Sean Stone's talk was also peppered with other conspiracy theories.
He slyly joked about the panic around CO2 emissions, a nod to the idea that climate change is at the very least overblown.
His description of the elites and their many crimes, in fact, could have come straight from Alex Jones.
They're spraying the skies right now.
They're spreading this genetic modification agenda into food, into people.
They can shut down society.
They can tell you not to go to work.
They can tell you you have to stay home.
Later, when an audience member asked Stone what the limit should be when embracing technology, he clearly stated that nobody should allow the tech into their bodies, including, of course, the mRNA vaccines.
Technology and artificial intelligence, however, should not be shunned entirely, in his opinion, because they might take away some of the more boring human tasks and allow us to focus on self-actualization.
To illustrate this, Stone brought up Jacque Fresco's Venus Project, a futurist utopia in which human beings live a life of freedom and volition thanks to the help of robots and automated cities.
And you covered this in a premium episode, Travis.
Obviously, it never hopped off the page.
It was mostly just sketches and stuff.
And when it came down to the actual mechanics of it, I mean, everybody was pretty much clueless.
Yeah, yeah, it was it was funny.
I was it was really just sort of a sci-fi fantasy, but he kept insisting that it could be real or would be real.
I'm surprised that people are still carrying the torch.
What struck me with Stone was the charismatic, positive attitude he was selling to his audience.
Yes, the globalists had turned our reality into a clown world, in his words, and they were feeding off us, poisoning us, and raping our children.
But with the right attitude, none of that would matter.
If we all worked on our own awakening, a greater change in society would follow.
Instead of needing any form of communitarianism, we would heal the connection between human beings by essentially improving and purifying ourselves.
I left the talk feeling disturbed by how digestible Sean Stone's version of QAnon and the Great Awakening was.
It was a clever balancing act that pandered to a profound individualism, a solipsistic view of the world that promised healthy communities through, essentially, more awareness.
Coney 2012 in place of a shared and tangible struggle.
Extremely convenient for a crowd already frustrated with their own inability to affect the material world, and who'd been increasingly turning inwards since the 1960s.
Stone's talk was very different from what I'd be hearing in the same room just a half hour later from Mickey Willis, who we'll be touching on in our next premium episode, along with his upcoming movie we attended a rough cut of, Plandemic 3.
Willis would bring old-school anti-communism back into the mix, earning him a standing ovation from a hugely diverse crowd of New Agers and conspiracy theorists.
Around 10 p.m., I found myself in the lobby again.
There, a performer had started what would be one of the more successful musical sets of the whole expo.
He called himself Presence, with a Z, and he was a white guy called Grant Ellman from Sedona, Arizona, who had made a name for himself by embracing the anti-vaccine movement.
This had even led to him collaborating with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
on a song called Heart of Freedom, which was produced by the renowned anti-vaxxers' own Children's Health Defense Organization.
Now I want to play a clip from Grant's YouTube channel so you can hear what he sounds like expressing beliefs that lie somewhere between libertarianism and full-blown sovereign citizenship.
Keep in mind that when he says the word government and right, he's doing air quotes.
The Federal Reserve Bank and also the Federal Income Tax were instituted on the same year, claiming that the government of the United States of America had the right to collect and levy taxes Essentially, they have the right to steal people's product of their labor, or some percentage of the product of some people's labor.
Let me ask you a question.
If slavery is robbing 100% of the product of one's labor, at what percentage is it no longer slavery?
50%?
25%?
10%?
50%? 25%? 10%? 5%? 1%?
5%?
1%?
Yep, you guessed it. It's all slavery.
It doesn't matter what percentage the government is stealing from you.
It doesn't matter if we are stealing 100% of the product of somebody's labor, like was done in the United States when black men and black women were slaves here.
Or, if the government is robbing us of 50% of our labor, 25%.
It's all slavery.
By that definition, all government is slavery, because all government So, I mean, I'd heard, I'd heard taxation is theft, but taxation is slavery?
Literally?
That is, that is a pretty out there argument.
He also is saying all this while holding an acoustic guitar and like has like a hemp necklace and his hat's back.
I mean, he literally looks like he's about to like serenade a dorm room of college girls with like a Dave Matthews cover.
Yeah.
I play you that clip to show you just how pilled the guy is, but also so you can hear his normal speaking voice, which as you'll see is very different than his singing voice and persona.
Here's "Scam," the song that put him on the map and got so many people of all stripes
dancing at the Conscious Life Expo.
"They say we're living through a scam, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Break down that wall, say we got to unify.
Differences between us make us beautiful and divine.
My ladies and them, they use that difference to divide.
I and I know who I am, my heart is in alignment.
Standing up to the tyrants, no need to live in confinement.
Babylon crumbling before my eyes, I'm not surprised yet.
Every breath I take in the oxygen, I'm optimizing.
My health is my true wealth and no vaccine will compromise it.
Needles injecting into the ship but they genetically modify It's telling me operating system 5G comes online
And dead by dogs, the chemicals, the heavy metals ever make the headlines
Pregnant on the virus which they never purified That's right
Because we living through a scam, yeah yeah I said we living through a scam, a scam, a scam
I said we living through a scam, yo Said there's a new type of Nazi on the block
Political correctness is the branding on the flock Operation Warp Speed coming with a vaccine
When them needles come at me there's only one who takes a shot
Hey, I got the 12 gauge in the closet, 357, pull my...
Oh, shotgun in that clip.
There are so many things I hate about this.
Yeah.
So yeah, when he's talking about the needles coming at me, referencing to the vaccine, he's, he's hold, he's brain dishing, uh, pump action shotgun.
Might I list all the things that I hate about that?
Is it, uh, him saying stuff like dem and like just kind of, no, it's just the whole, the entire basically black lady persona.
Yeah.
One, the hat.
I mean, this is... It's like a felt cowboy hat.
If we're talking about big hats, this is one of the biggest I've ever... It's one of the biggest hats I've ever seen.
Very stupid, looks like a big black hole surrounding his head.
He's going to be swelled up.
No, he has a cute dog.
Yeah.
He also is sporting the lightning bolt guitar strap, which is like, that is a Rivers Cuomo staple.
There we go.
Maybe they have more in common than you think?
That's just what makes me mad.
That's, you know, if you've got the lightning strap, fender strap for your guitar, I mean, Odds are, you got that from rumors, Cuomo, which is very... I don't know.
These are wild accusations.
I'm feeling very bad.
Also, hold on, hold on.
Because your critique seems a little about you.
The other thing that I hate about this is that the guy is actually pretty talented.
If he channeled that music into writing, I don't know, lyrics about, I don't know, breaking up with his girlfriend or getting broke up with or, you know.
I don't know, you know, other stuff, you know, life stuff that happens.
He probably could carve out like a decent, you know, a decent audience for himself.
Well, it turns out it didn't happen until he released Scam, which was his big hit.
Yeah, of course, because the right wingers are so starved for any kind of good content that, you know, somebody like him that might have gotten lost in the liberal sea of, you know, like white reggaeton, you know, wannabe guys.
It finds a huge audience on the right because they're starved for anything that resembles any kind of talent whatsoever, but it's mostly the hat.
It's mostly that hat.
Yeah.
My God.
Who do you think you are?
It's 2023.
You're not like a farmer out in the field, you know, and you need a big fucking hat to protect you from the sun.
You're just, why are you wearing that?
Why do people wear these ridiculous, gigantic, I mean, oh my Lord.
How do you not feel like a moron every time you look down at this thing the size of a placemat, you know?
And you put it on and you look in the mirror and you go, that's me today in my giant hat.
James in the giant hat.
We're going to have to move on.
A not very well-known Roald Dahl book.
Oh my god.
What is happening?
Roald Dahl, James in the giant hat.
Don't.
Don't continue.
Alright.
As the crowd cheered and danced wildly in the Hilton lobby, I started to think about the great schism occurring in the New Age world.
The sizable breakaway group, which we could call the Sedona Faction, was anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-vax, pro-gun, and proudly American, but on a state level, as they totally distrust the federal government.
The Koch brothers themselves could not have designed a better version of the New Age movement.
It was astonishing.
The anti-communism and anti-socialism on the surface might seem like a contradiction, considering the many claims at the gathering that unity was essential and working together was important.
But, paradoxically, these people wanted to work together on themselves, each on their own individual path.
Instead of real community, the event was a mere simulacra of one.
The word exposition was appropriate to describe this inherently commodified space.
It was a market, a showroom, where goods, services, ideas, and yes, even realities, were bought and sold.
New-agers had long accepted this aspect of themselves.
It had been a slow boil since the 60s, and as such, it makes sense that they'd eventually welcome reactionary, anti-socialist ideas into their folds.
If there's a demand, the market will meet it.
By the end of Presence's set, I was in a bad place.
These reflections, surprisingly, were not yielding good vibes.
What's more, Travis had bailed after a long day of lectures and experiences.
My remaining companions and I drifted towards the bar.
But we wouldn't remain there long, because we wanted to check out what was being billed as a psychedelic dance party held down in the rabbit hole room.
So we once again made our way down a level, through purple drapes and a maze of booths, now shuttered for the night, to a small door in the wall.
The rabbit hole was unrecognizable.
A DJ booth had been set up with what looked like high school dance lights swirling all around it.
I was expecting trance, maybe even psychedelic trance, or perhaps some jungle?
Instead, we were greeted by terrible commercial house music with gaudy vocals.
On the dance floor, a white guy with dreads and a look of pure spiritual beatitude on
his face was busy peacocking through the crowd, shirtless.
Moments later, he would be seen meditating cross-legged at the edge of the party before joining back in.
A young blonde woman in a revealing bunny costume was doing a mix of splits and pirouettes at the center, inspiring a young man to start breakdancing near her.
A few dozen other people were dancing around them, And to be honest, everybody seemed pretty happy.
I was the miserable old guy.
The cynical techno snob.
I felt ashamed.
There was an imposter in the rabbit hole.
I made my way back up to the lobby, now mostly vacant.
Sitting in a big leather chair with a lukewarm beer, I watched another flight crew exit their bus.
There had been a consistent stream of them coming in from the airport all day.
I wondered what they made of the whole thing.
Maybe the captain would sneak down to the rabbit hole for a peek and join in the festivities?
Probably not.
Either way, it was time for me to go home.
I'd be back on Sunday for an advance showing of Plandemic 3.
Based on Mickey Willis' talk, I wasn't particularly looking forward to it.
I had heard him compare the liberal agenda to Mao's Cultural Revolution.
It did not bode well for his movie.
So yeah, we'll be talking about that on this week's Premium, where we explore Mickey Willis and attending his talk, and then attending this premiere with a little panel afterwards, basically a rough cut of Plandemic 3.
And it was pretty terrifying stuff, and yeah, I'm excited to get to that.
But in the meantime, hope you enjoyed that little exploration of the Conscious Life Expo.
Yeah, I can't say I'm sorry I missed it.
That seems like a place where I would not do particularly well, but maybe, maybe I would.
Maybe I would let loose and, you know, channel my chakras in a, you know, in a healthy way.
The next night there was another band called the Galactivators, from what I heard, and there you could buy a variety of different toad-related drugs and ayahuasca as well.
Oh, interesting.
That's probably not illegal.
Well, let's not get the Galactivators arrested.
Yeah, I mean, look, I have a fair share of acquaintances who've been slinging toad for quite a while.
They don't seem really any worse for wear.
Maybe a little bit more prone to corner you at a house party and tell you about Burning Man, but yeah.
What a trip.
It's so fascinating, you know, after all of these years to watch this stuff, you know, it's like seeing a, you know, a vase get knocked off a table and then shatter and then the dirty liquid just slowly seeping into the carpet.
Seeing how QAnon and its adherents have evolved slash devolved over the last couple years has been, I don't know what it's been, it's been something.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
If you haven't already, you can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes, plus access to our podcast series like Man Clan and Trickle Down.
If you're already subscribed, thank you so much.
It allows us to remain advertising-free and editorially independent.
For everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
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.
At some level, as we know, harm is done to others in our reality.
But inflicting harm to children, for some reason that's in the ethic of all beings.
We know that is a place that you draw a line.
Collectively, I think we know that.
We feel that.
And it's why.
Why do we feel that?
You could argue, intellectually, rationally, the child's gonna grow up and could become a bad person anyway.
Could become a criminal.
Could become a terrorist.
Could become... You name it.
Another bum.
Someone that's irrelevant to society.
But somehow, in all of us, innately, we know that there is something in the innocence and purity of children.
It has to be preserved to be allowed to work its course.
