In the beginning was the Word. In this case, the “word” is spoken by a velvet-voiced radio host revealing that the elites are poisoning Grandma, or a Professor turned board game millionaire’s blog post declaring feminism a satanic plot. Their words, carried over early websites and late-night radio, seeded the ideas that festered into the culture wars and extremist conspiracy content of today. Brad is back to tell the stranger-than-fiction stories of Henry and Jeff — early architects of the conspiratorial internet, who are now locked in the kind of bitter, messy feud only boomers can wage. This is Brainrot Radio.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Corey Klotz and Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
As always, we are your host Jake Rakotansky, Brad Abrahams, and Travis View.
I'm back to give our embattled, exhausted listeners and co-hosts a break from the relentless news cycle to wash your brains and take you back to the classical era of conspiracies, before hyperpolarization and partisanship.
Ah.
That storybook time of the late 90s boomer with infinitely scrolling websites.
A sort of analog paranoia we're all nostalgic for.
But don't get the wrong impression.
This will not be a feel-good tale.
It's a Brad episode, after all.
I just think it's important to know how things began.
How we got to this dystopian pre-apocalyptic state we're in today.
This is the story of two old schoolers.
Not household names like Alex Jones or David Icke, but names you've all probably heard mentioned before.
They are two men who helped shape the world of today, but never really given their due for their towering contributions to the discourse.
And not even Jake could write backstories as deep and bizarre as these.
Not a knock on you, Jake, it's just they really are that.
No, it's I'm sure I will if you're saying it.
If you've ever been pilled, know someone who has, or simply like punishing yourself by researching conspiratorial content.
At some point, you've been sent a link beginning with Rens.com.
Have either of you ever gotten a link?
Actually, let me just look at the site.
Let me just look at the site to see if I recognize.
Don't look at it yet.
I don't wanna I don't want to spoil anything just yet.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a signifier something truly great, slash terrible has come your way.
It's a storehouse of thousands and thousands of articles spanning the entire spectrum of melted material.
It's also the home of a 25-year-long running radio show.
This is the work of the hardest working man in conspiracy, Jeff Renz, who pioneered melding classic conspiracy culture like Area 51 in mind control with the far and more extreme right.
He was also at the vanguard of hawking life-saving alternative health products alongside articles about Hitler.ca.
Henry is a once child prodigy turned millionaire board game designer, turned university professor, turned contankrous conspiracist.
He was at the cutting edge of crossing anti-feminism and misogyny with more classical tropes around anti-Semitism and Satanism.
I'm not saying Renz and Mako were the first to mash up these genres and inject them into the culture, but their relentless work over the years was instrumental in disseminating it.
They also used to be great buds and collaborators.
But in recent years, the boomers have been fighting.
Weirdly, I have a connection to both of them.
Renz was a good friend of David D's, and one of the reasons David moved to Oregon.
In fact, D's lived just down the way from Jeff.
Right after I finished my short documentary about D's and started submitting it to Filmfests, a festival programmer leaked my non-public link to Rens directly, who promptly put it up on his website on Rens.com as a tribute to D's.
Oh my god!
Yeah, and to his credit, he took it down as soon as I emailed him, which started a years-long correspondence between us, which I'll I'll get to later.
Well, that's not.
Oh my god, this is incredible.
Yeah.
And Henry Macau just happens to have lived in the hometown of my mom, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
Winnipeg, Canada, a truly grim city that I visited often as a child.
It's known as one of the coldest cities in the world, sometimes colder than Mars.
It's true.
So it can get to minus 50.
Jesus.
Oh my god.
What else is what else is grim about it?
You'll see.
The summers are achingly short, sometimes lasting just two or three weeks, and you can't go outside because you'll be besieged by black flies and mosquitoes.
One of the main tourism draws is an annual mating orgy of snakes who gather in pits outside of the city.
And there's millions of snakes come into the narcissist narcissist snake dens.
So it's somewhat understandable how it could derange someone.
That's crazy.
It's like a it's like a city built to keep Indiana Jones out of it.
And it's Mako who we'll dive into first.
The naughty professor.
Henry Mackau was born in 1949 in Zurich, Switzerland.
His parents were Polish Jews and narrowly survived the Holocaust by pretending to be Christian.
As soon as they had the funds, they fled with young Henry to Canada.
First to the nation's capital, Ottawa, then to the nation's capital of misery, Winnipeg.
A public forum started early for him.
At age 11, he landed his own column in the Ottawa Journal, a newspaper of some repute.
It was an advice column to parents called Ask Henry, that the editor-in-chief called clever, precocious, and full of common sense.
It ran for four years and at its height was syndicated in 50 newspapers across Canada and the U.S. He even released a book of the compiled columns.
If you guys want to read some of the quotes here on the front.
Yeah, I mean, and this is a picture of him, I'm I'm guessing.
Yes.
Yeah.
What a I mean, God, he looks like the all-American boy.
Yeah.
Or at least the all-Canadian boy.
He really looks like he could be the national boy.
I mean, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you know, he he looks like he's ready to pick up uh, you know, a poll and go fishing right now.
Yeah, he's got like a great pose, honestly, with the pencil and the eraser.
I mean, I mean, this is already.
I would follow this kid anyway.
Honestly.
There's no way this kid grows into a healthy adult.
Like, you know, it's the same problem with all kind of like celebrity kids' stars where it like kind of screws you up.
I mean, but this guy, this guy was like, so you imagine being 11, 12, 13 years old and thinking, yes.
Uh adults, people like people, actual parents who run the world need to listen to me.
My my opinion, my voice is so valuable that it's worth being syndicated in dozens of newspapers.
Okay, so here's I'm gonna describe, um let me describe the cover of the book for the listeners.
This is this is a leave it to beaver boy.
He is happy.
His ears are big, they are angled out.
He's wearing a fitted, like checkered shirt.
He's kind of like um, he's smiling, but he's coy.
He's gotta seek, he's better than you.
He's he's holding a pencil and he it's kind of like resting on his bottom lip.
And this guy just looks like I I'm telling you, I would follow, I would if he was like, I think you you gotta kill your family, I'd be like, ah, damn.
Ah, that's a tough one.
Okay, so so the book's the book cover reads, Ask Henry by Henry Macau.
The best-selling book of advice to parents by the world's youngest syndicated columnist, clever and witty, Dayton Daily News.
Parents can profit from many of his answers.
Charleston News and Courier.
Yes, the youngest syndicated columnists.
This is the funniest thing, dude.
I just I oh man, I want to do so many bits.
Like, be like, Yeah, so parents, when you go into Toys R Us and you and your kid asks for two action figures instead of one, get him the two.
So at 15, he started another column for teens this time called Henry Asks, and positioned himself as a boy genius, wise beyond his years.
It was also the first sprinkling of a sort of moral superiority he felt instilled in him.
These columns gave him some notoriety, earning him appearances on famous TV game shows like What's My Line, where he successfully stumped the guest panel.
Here's a clip from that 1962 episode.
Macco, where are you from?
Ottawa, Canada.
Ottawa, Canada.
How nice it is to have somebody from our neighbors come down and see us.
May I present our panel, Mr. Macko?
Um, is writing the integral part of your job.
Repeat that is writing the principal part of your job.
Yeah, yes, so you're beginning to smile with your yeses now.
That's right.
Do it out in anything else.
Yeah, amazing just finding this clip of him from like 60 years ago.
Yeah, how did you find this?
Uh, it it was uh it was as uh part of a podcast that I I clip from or some in a bit.
Nice.
He attended my hometown University of Toronto and got his PhD at 33 in English Lit.
Soon after he moved to Manitoba for a part-time professorship gig at the University of Winnipeg.
But the ever-industrious Henry had been brewing something on the side.
And just a couple years later, in 1984, he launched the now famous board game, Scruples.
Have either of you played Scruples or heard of it?
Yes, I have to sound vaguely familiar.
Yeah.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast for access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast mini-series.
Go to Patreon.com/slash QA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just five dollars per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julie and the Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA.
