True stories sent in by our listeners. Would you eat a cookie given to you by Michael Flynn? Would you get pilled by a taxi driver's scrapbook? Have your family members slipped down the rabbit hole? Can Spanish sperm bless a plasma company's quarterly earnings? Find out.
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Music by Max Weber. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 206 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, The Listener Stories, Volume 8 episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Welcome, my friends, to what feels like the 800th but is only the 8th listener stories.
We realized in the preparation for this that we had not done one of these for almost a year.
Almost exactly a year.
The Last Listener Stories, Volume 7.
I would have guessed three or four months.
Came out on March 27th or something.
So we once again- Of last year.
Asked people, and some people just sent stuff in, in between the asking period, which is fine.
We keep those and try to look over them when we can.
So we have another collection of stories sent in by listeners.
True stories.
I mean, obviously, caveat, they could be liars.
I'm sure a portion of our audience are pathological liars.
Some of them probably have committed federal crimes.
But sometimes the stories are just so good, you know, you give them a little bit of leeway.
And usually, honestly, it's like, why would you lie about this stuff?
When you hear the story, it's never like, oh, great.
What a cool life.
Yeah, it's never like, I looked so cool in this moment and the guys are going to read it and I'm going to feel so cool.
No, they're all like really depressing.
And weird.
Some are funny.
I tried to pick this time around just because I myself am just feeling the political and the conspiracy theory fatigue of working in this space, you know, 24-7, seven days a week.
You've been working here for 24 years?
No case is too small, no fee is too large.
Okay.
I'm stepping into your office wearing a garter belt and I'm asking for your services, please.
Detective Jake, what stories have you uncovered from our email archive?
Well, it's a nice breadth of stories.
Some are new.
There was one story that I'm gonna read, which is really funny, that was sent like a couple days after we recorded the last Listener Stories that didn't make the cutoff, but you made it.
I want everybody to know that I read each and every one of your stories, and it gave me a lot to think about.
I laughed while I was reading them.
I cried while I was reading other ones.
I worried about whether I was going to cry on air reading some of them, but I really appreciate everybody taking the time to sit down and write them out and send them in.
I would love to do a four-hour show where we read every single one, but it's just not the way it's going to happen.
So if your story didn't get picked, do not fret!
It might get picked for our Listener Stories Volume 9, which we'll be releasing in March of 2024!
Yeah, see you in one year.
Or not!
Or not!
The asteroid could hit by then.
Yeah.
The mothership could have landed.
Multiple asteroids have hit our email inbox.
That's the only way I could explain my inability to respond to anybody.
Yes, and I am the mothership that is hovering up all of them and taking them to Xanadu.
Oh, you're hovering up.
Hoovering.
You're hoovering up.
Alright.
So I'm gonna get into my first story.
So I've picked out, some of your titles were already good and I didn't change them.
Some of you didn't have a title really, so I have taken the liberty of making them up for you.
I hope that's okay.
Reading the first story just says, I'm a big loser who wrote this.
That's an insane title that you picked for that person.
The title of the first story is Taxi Cab Scrapbook.
Hello QAA hosts.
I am a long-time listener, first-time emailer, to what my fiancée witheringly refers to as your QAnon podcast, which brings me much joy that I am the bane of somebody's partner's existence.
This is wonderful.
This is what we strive to be.
It's a marvel she said yes when I proposed, but you're very lucky she did.
So congratulations, my friend.
Yeah, if she makes you pick, pick her.
Yeah, if she does, yeah.
Leave us behind.
Look, DM me on Twitter.
I'll send you the MP3s of the episodes.
Nobody needs to know, okay?
What the hell?
You're trying to smuggle him our episodes now?
I don't give a fuck.
Well, that's another marriage destroyed by Jake.
I am from Scotland, but in 2011, I was in my early 20s and studying for a postgraduate degree in upstate New York.
At the end of the semester, I went for a road trip with two classmates from my course, an Irish lad my age and an older Scandinavian guy who was about 30.
When we were heading back to the university after our holiday, our flight upstate was cancelled.
The airline offered to put us on a flight to a nearby, by U.S.
standards, city and pay for the hour-long taxi ride back home.
A bit of a pain, but a solution.
When we arrived, we were directed to our taxi.
And when we got in, the driver had a talk radio station playing.
Before we had left the airport grounds, it was apparent that the radio show was fucking unhinged.
It was probably Alex Jones or something like it, and it reminded me of Area 53 in GTA San Andreas.
It's the conspiracy radio show, radio channel in the video game.
I clearly remember one bit where the host stated that airport security was not necessary for safety, but was a plot to allow the government, acting through the security employees, to physically molest its citizens.
As I say, unhinged.
My Irish friend and I remained sheepishly quiet in the backseat.
Our Scandinavian pal, however, sitting up front, told the driver to, quote, turn that shit off, like a grown-up.
The driver obliged.
I almost wish he'd left it on.
We drove along for a short while in silence, and then the driver started trying to engage us in conversation, innocuous at first.
Then, had we seen the Loose Change documentary?
I hadn't, but one of the others admitted that they had.
That got him babbling excitedly for a couple minutes.
And then, he reached over to open the glove compartment, pulling out a large book of annotated photographs of the 9-11 attacks.
He handed it back to me and my Irish friend.
Oh my god, he's got reading for the guests!
We reluctantly took it and flicked through the photographs in silence, occasionally catching each other's gaze, eyes wide.
The book was full of scribbled post-it notes.
It's a quite hazy memory, but one of the post-its sticks in my mind.
On a full page picture of the first tower's collapse, he had a note reading, all caps, quote, MUST INVESTIGATE GRAVITY.
Gonna look into that.
[outro]
The elites meet in the woods to drink the blood of children.
All the hits.
We got a depressing glimpse of reality when he talked briefly about personal matters.
He had lost his home in the financial crisis, was working as a taxi driver and in a full-time service industry job, and still couldn't make ends meet for himself and his family.
Part of me understood him when he told us that, though not fully, it is only through listening to you that I have made the connection between his circumstances and his conspiratorial beliefs.
Looking back, it is so obvious and so sad that this poor guy would be red-pilled.
Nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
But back then, I was deeply unsettled by the whole thing.
My Irish pal and I got him to drop us off in the center of town so that he didn't know where we lived.
Our Scandinavian companion, who was absolutely stacked, had no such worries.
He got the driver to take him to his door and sat curbside for half an hour arguing with the guy and telling him he was destroying his life with quote, that conspiracy shit.
Fair play to the big man.
I hope that the meter was on and that the airline paid the driver for that time.
Yes, that's correct.
A more optimistic part of me hopes that maybe it did some good for the guy, but I doubt it.
Yeah, I think it takes more than one big indignant Scandinavian to fix a human, but you know what?
You might as well try.
You might as well try.
We don't know.
We haven't- there's no like, uh, there's no proper studies who've done, you know, double blinds and tested for placebo of whether sending a large Scandinavian man to your house to tell you about how conspiracy theories are just a crock of shit, whether that works or not.
So maybe we should- I thought the author- We need to get a lot of large Scandinavian men.
I thought- This is what we should do first.
Then we can figure out how you and I, Jake, will run this experiment out of my basement.
I think you're just interested in the big Scandinavian men.
Well, they seem to have played an important role in this story, and I'm just a scientist investigating possibilities.
No, no, no.
I thought that the author put it perfectly when he said, fair play to the big men.
Hey, fair play.
You want to try to argue with somebody about their conspiracy beliefs?
You want to give them a pep talk?
I don't.
I want to blow 12 gymnasts in my underground lair.
Travis, any takes on this?
No, no.
No.
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