Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Annie Kelly on Vaccines, Conspiracies, & Misinformation

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

Dr Annie Kelly is a writer, researcher, and the British correspondent for the well and deservedly praised podcast QAnon Anonymous. Her PhD research was on digital anti-feminism and the kinds of ideas that float around certain 'tradcon', biological essentialist, or religiously motivated groups. She does research on antifeminism, new digital cultures, conspiracy theories and right wing extremism. Prompted by the resurgence in anti-vax sentiment, Annie's been looking into the history and sociology of vaccinations, and sees lots of interesting roots and themes for understanding what's going on right now. Her new podcast, "Vaccine - The Human Story" has been digging into precisely these issues, and so we had questions for Annie, lots of questions! The history of the germ theory of disease, the early use (and abuse) of vaccinations, and the panics, xenophobia and quack therapies - it's quite simply fascinating stuff, and we get a wonderful overview from Annie in this episode.Annie's work at QAA and elsewhere naturally focuses more on the extreme end of the spectrum, and while pulling no punches, she approaches what can be quite disturbing and confronting topics with a humour and empathy that is incredibly authoritative and reassuring. We talk about COVID and vaccines, but so much more, like the anti-feminist ideas that float around in the hinterland between athiesm and religiosity, pick up artists converting to Orthodox Christianity, and other weirdness.One of our most enjoyable and informative interviews - do check it out! LinksVaccine: The Human Story (on Youtube)Vaccine: The Human Story (podcast)QAnon Anonymous 161: The Northern Irish Satanic Panic (Part 1)Joe Rogan's instagram rant about AustraliaJoe Rogan double standards in defending Trump Jnr.The 'hardcore' metal Matt was referring to in the intro

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown and with me is the Ringo to my Paul, Chris Kavanagh. G'day Chris. Hello Matthew. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Did you like that? You're comfortable with being Ringo? You're all right with that, aren't you? He keeps the beat. Don't get the reference, Matt.

Before my time, those names are nothing to me. Who's that? What did you listen to when you were a kid then? A kid? Irish rap songs. Yeah, the Dubliners. No, I did listen to that kind of stuff, but I was into metal.

Which heavy metal band did you like? I liked bands like Pantera and Machine Head. I was not a Slipknot fan, but I was around that oeuvre. Okay. Did you like that artist Warrant? He sang that song called Cherry Pie. That was really hard, gritty rock. See, Matt, I don't even get that joke.

When I'm trying to focus on work or whatever, I listen to retro wave stuff. What's that? It's kind of like electronic music, but using like synthesizers and various signs from the eighties. It's weird. And the thing is, it turned out that that whole genre became associated

with Trumpy style fascists. I know. So they've kind of ruined that, but I still like it. So Kavinsky and things like that. I bit like the soundtrack to Drive. Yeah. Music and work is a funny thing. There's so much you can't listen to.

I can only listen to Brian Eno or Bach when I'm actually working. Look at that. Just trying to show me up. I'm listening to synth retro riff. You're like, let's listen at that. Just trying to show me up. I'm listening to synth retro stuff. You're like, let's listen to the classics.

That's all right. There's no shame in that. There's no shame in that. Matt, one other thing about musical tastes that I have to mention. I share Spotify.

Well, I just have a Spotify account for my family and most of the time I'm playing Spotify when I'm not playing it for myself, I'm playing it for my two young children, so. Spotify's recommendation, whatever it's like new releases you might like. It's Octonauts famous song and stuff.

I can like use most of the, you've been listening to, like you want songs around dinosaur themes. So they're like, I don't. Well, I had the same problem because my daughter was sharing my Amazon account to download books. And that automatically linked her to my Goodreads account, which had a photo of me. And I had a beard actually, middle-aged bearded guy. But then she was leaving reviews for her books. So she'd read the Fairy Princess. And the review was like, this is the most amazing book ever.

I wish I could be a princess too. And I want to read it a hundred times. I love it. You can disguise your avid fascination with teenage girl oriented fiction all your life but i know that wasn't your daughter the prose and the references yeah you can't disguise it everyone at goodreads and uh actually i got a bit fascinated with the bronies because i i thought it was hilarious and interesting i actually ended up buying a t-shirt that was, gee, I've forgotten what the cartoon is that they're obsessed with.

My Little Pony. My Little Pony, right? And it had the rainbow and the love hearts of the stars and the ponies and stuff. And I bought that t-shirt. I'd wear it to uni. You were an ironic brony? For a very brief period of time, I was an ironic brony.

That's a dangerous game to play. I recently found out on the Patreon chat that you were an edgelord when you're in Japan, wandering about in leather pants and fellered hats and whatnot. So this just completes the picture. Very immature. That's the picture. That's the picture. David Elikwu- Matt, so we had an episode that released a week ago or so with one

Samuel Harris, and it's fair to say it probably received more feedback than most of our episodes did. And I've also received various requests for clarifications. Some put in nicer terms. And I'm receiving a lot of feedback about my accent, which I do receive anyway. But when there's more people in the audience that haven't heard me speak before, you get more feedback themed around that. So it's been a cornucopia of interesting responses.

I've seen some of them. I think it's pretty much an equal mix of people who thought that you treated him with kid gloves and gave him an easy ride and people who thought you were just terrible interrupting him all the time. Just hassling him. No, I haven't seen myself accused that much of using kids gloves. I've seen people say, you know, you should have said more about this or that or that kind of thing.

gloves, I've seen people say, should have said more about this or that or that kind of thing. But there's a split between the people who think I was hectoring and badgering him and just wouldn't accept his answers and the people that saw him as evasive or unwilling to address the point. And then there's another category of people who find points on both sides that were useful or the discussion even if they agreed more or less with one or the other they they found it a valuable thing to listen to so there's plenty of opinions available and i suspect that i probably at some point will need to do a fucking lecture on tribalism to explain the term and what like minimal group paradigm and in-group bias and all that means but today is not that day uh i'm not ready for that yet there's not been enough time so if you want our reflections on the interview or at least us responding to people

asking questions about it then we recently recorded the monthly AMA on the Patreon. So we talked a bit there about the experience and whatnot. So there you go. It's behind a paywall. That's right. Go sign up your cheapskates. That's where the gold is. That's where the good stuff is.

You hear that Eric? You gotta send somebody. So anyway, it was an interesting experience. I think Sam definitely deserves credit for coming on and for tweeting about it when he clearly felt rather ambivalent about the experience. revealed as the mastermind behind it all. Give credit to David Pizarro from that Very Bad Wizards rival podcast for setting it up because he, he suggested it. And so really anything that comes from it, any negative consequences for Sam or me or you, Matt or you, it all traces back to Dave.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Contact Dave, send your emails to Dave. Yeah. Yeah. Contact Dave. Send your emails to Dave. Yeah. He actually, he did tell me that he wanted people to send him feedback directly. You know, any comments you have or any questions, just email him.

You can find the address at VeryBadWizards if you like. Chris. Yes. Joe Rogan. We haven't covered him yet, but I think it's pretty certain that we will cover him soon. He's been in the news recently, but his Instagram page, he took a shot at an Australian advertisement that showed a sort of visibly dying man. He's parodying vaccine hesitancy. He's suffering an allergic reaction, but he won't take the EpiPen because he's asking a bunch of questions about whether

it's safe and what about the statistics from Europe. How many studies have been conducted? Yeah. And finally, he goes, what did Joe Rogan say? Call Joe before he dies. Right. Quite funny. Quite funny.

And Joe slammed it. And Australia generally saying not only has Australia had the worst reaction to the pandemic with dystopian police state measures that are truly inconceivable to the rest of the civilized world, but they also had the absolute dumbest propaganda. There's a little ad that isn't there, Matt, that appeared shortly after. Oh, yes. He realized, oh, apparently this is not a real ad. It is from a satirical show, which it is, Chris. He really left it up, of course.

Now, this is from the Gruen Transfer. Australians will know this, right? So this is a satirical ad show where they get companies to submit just ridiculous ads for a joke. One of the more famous ones they did was they set them the task of making an ad promoting invading New Zealand, military invasion of New Zealand, which was very funny. Seems reasonable.

Well, yeah, I think I could make a pretty good argument for it. Probably most Kiwis did as well. Yeah, well, you know, the Australasian prosperity sphere would benefit everyone, I think. I think you're underselling a little bit, Matt, how obviously satirical this was. Because like when I watch the video, it's actually, it's very well done. But the notion that this would be a serious advertisement by the Australian government, like you have to lack, you have not graduated from the Gad Saad school of irony. If you fail to detect the level of satire in this.

If anybody's seen that Mitchell and Webb look, the skit they did about the homeopathic hospital with the doctor saying, give him 20 CC of diluted horsepein or, you know, whatever, wolfspein and it's like on that level, right? It's so obviously a parody. So. Yeah. And it's coming on the heels of so many American Republican politicians like governors and people like that making speeches comparing Australia

to a dictatorship, a police state more repressive than China. And Candace Owens saying that the United States should invade Australia, unironically. So it's kind of annoying. It's so stupid. I don't even know where to begin. I'll be wasting everyone's time by rebutting this stupid fantasies. So he said about the dystopian police state and how inconceivable it

was that the civilized world, what Australia has been doing. But the reality is that the US response for most of the world is the thing which has been inconceivable. And it's Joe and his cohort of contrarian anti-vax buffoons. Despite his country having over half a million people die

and the vaccination campaigns in other countries proving extremely effective. He has been responsible for promoting vaccine hesitancy, some of the loudest anti-vaccine voices. And so his kind of outrage, he gets outraged at people making fun of him. And he's not outraged at the amount that have died in the US because of the hesitancy. Exactly right. I mean, the United States has had the vaccines available far longer than Australia.

And they've got, what, 57% have had both doses in the US at this point. In Australia, it's 80% now. And as a result, the lockdowns and restrictions are essentially over. You know, you can fly in and out of Australia if you're vaccinated. No problem. So it worked. We got away scot-free with 50 times less deaths from COVID per capita than places like Florida

or many states in the United States. So yeah, it's adding insult to injury that they are using Australia as an example of what not to do. I mean, you know. It's not a funny point, but it's just the fact that like Joe and his friends for promoting vaccine hesitancy

have meant that their country is more fucked, right? And that things take longer and all these restrictions and measures that people are taking, they need to last longer because if the population just got vaccinated to a large degree, then you would be able to relax measures. And instead they demonize public health officials and they demonize, you know, the vaccine and

that, exaggerate adverse effects. Promote quack treatments. And then just get outraged about the impact. It's just like, yeah, it's just a frustrating thing. Anyway, let's let it go. Let it go. Deep breath. Deep breath.

One last thing is that I also saw a clip being shared around on the interwebs today. There's a clip where Joe is having a discussion with his friends, some comedians, and they bring up Hunter Biden and Donald Trump Jr. His friends, the comedians, start joking about them both being cokeheads and that they probably get on. And Joe is having a joke. And then as soon as they say Don Jr. might be a cokehead, he switches to, is that true? Like, has he been proven to be?

I wouldn't say that. And there's such a double standard. It's fine to joke about Hunter Biden or whatever, but then as soon as anybody disparages Trump Jr., we need to consider, are those rumors founded and stuff? Joke, it is just like a reactionary right-wing dude now. Whatever he used to be, he has some liberal features and he's primarily a conspiracy theorist, but he's a right-wing dude now and he just doesn't recognize it. Yeah, I think that's the annoying bit, that he doesn't recognize it. It is annoying when people don't recognize where their affiliations are.

That is annoying, Matt. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. So after talking about vaccine hesitancy and dystopian injections and so on, this is a good time to turn to our interview guest for this week. Let's do that.

And today we have a guest to help us figure out what is true, beautiful, and real in this crazy mixed up world. Chris, who do we have with us today? Coming all the way from Old Blighty. You're currently in England. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yes. So Annie Kelly from QAnon Anonymous podcast and Vaccine the Human Story more recently. I listened to it and I'm a big fan. In general, Annie has been doing good work on digital extremism and online communities

of the sort that we often talk about. So we thought it would be good to have a conversation about the new podcast and some of your experiences researching similar things that we look at. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It's always really nice when you're invited onto a podcast that you have actually listened to and enjoyed. So yeah, i'm really excited to be here yeah i've noticed that the full intimacy that you get through podcasts it translates very well when you actually meet people like that we we had dave pizarro on from very bad wizards and i've been

listening you know for a couple of years so the level of familiarity I had with him was much greater than he had with me. And then you were just like, oh, it's my friend. Yeah. Remember all those chats we've had? It's just I was very quiet. Yeah. I have a running theory that the parasociality we experience is actually real and it's not a bad thing at all.

Yeah. So Annie, on that specific topic, before we talk about your podcast, I listened to your recent coverage on QAnon Anonymous about Colin Wallace. And the timing is very fortuitous because Matt, you probably aren't aware of this, but Annie was recently doing a two-part story about the satanic panic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, which is close to home. Yeah. And I gathered from that as well, Annie, that your family are originally from Northern Ireland or actually you as well, right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. My dad's from Belfast and pretty much all of my, of that side of the family live there still. It's actually very nice to go on a podcast as well and hear a Northern Irish accent. Yeah, that's just one of my favorite accents because it always just reminds me of my family. Yeah, so I don't need to apologize to the same extent as usual for the Belfast accent.

You're probably well attuned to it. We'll probably, if there's a chance later, talk a little bit about the Northern Irish Satanic Panic because your coverage was really interesting and not something I knew about before. But the first thing I wanted to ask about was, as I mentioned, you have a series, ongoing series, that's relatively new called Vaccine the Human Story, which, and you feel free to correct anything I summarize wrong here, but is about the smallpox vaccine, the development and reception they often I find the series so far extremely interesting because there's so many parallels with things that are happening now so at first question is just why you decided to focus on that particular story and telling it in the format that you are. So I guess it's a kind of interesting feature of researching conspiracy theories is you quite often need to figure out why what they're saying is wrong. So you can't

just sort of simply look at all these kinds of conspiracy theories about vaccines and just, say, this is a bunch of rubbish when you yourself know nothing about vaccines, which is very much where I was starting from when I began looking into anti-vax conspiracy theories because many of them are very convincing you know conspiracy theorists particularly the ones who make money off this are professionally convincing people so you need to sort of do research do your own research as they'd love to say so I began doing that. I began looking into, I don't really have a science background at all. So I began looking into what vaccines were,

how they developed, where they came from. And actually what I found was what I thought was a really interesting and I thought quite unusual story. when I say unusual I suppose what I really mean is not particularly popularized story of this very very long process essentially of humans figuring out essentially the very basis of immunity that if you've been sick with a certain disease you cannot get sick from it again and all over the world actually i think it's largely accepted that this probably begins in around medieval china essentially experimenting with that fact and trying all sorts of kind of quite gnarly medical procedures like snorting dried smallpox scabs up their nose and things like that to try and essentially tweak with this version of immunity. So in that case,

the smallpox vaccine is almost not the beginning of the story of vaccination, but sort of somewhere around the middle, actually. And it is a story which doesn't really begin with necessarily genius scientists, but lots of people who would be largely thought of as outside the realm of kind of the scientific or the medical was seeing in anti-vax or vaccine-hesitant spaces, where people were saying things like, it's just so new, this new vaccine, you know, it must have just been so rushed. And this element of mistrust, which I could kind of sympathize with, actually, of the way that the COVID vaccines were being marketed as being the very cutting edge of this brilliant technology that ordinary people couldn't possibly understand. And I thought that that might be impressive to lots of people who are very impressed by science and technology,

but it was actually, I think, not working to assuage the fears of people who were vaccine hesitant, who didn't necessarily believe that those establishment figures had their best interests at heart. And so I thought to myself that someone will make a documentary about the development of vaccines, big flashy documentary, and it'll be wonderful. And I sort of just assumed, you know, being British, the BBC will just be on this, surely. So I waited for a bit for this to happen. And when it didn't, I sort of got frustrated and sort of thought, well, I'll just do it myself then with a much lower budget. But it sort of seemed important to me that somebody should, you know, and that was my idea, I suppose, my theory of the podcast. There was a book I read a long time ago, I guess it must have been now, by Simon Singh called Trick or Treatment, where he surveyed alternative health claims or treatments,

but he went into the history of the development of treatments for scurvy and stuff at the beginning. And I actually remember that I had a similar feeling when reading that book that I knew a little bit about the history of medicine from GCSE or A-level in England, or well, in Northern Ireland. But the story about how not randomized controlled trials, but kind of controlled trials and the voyages where they were testing out what ways could be used to treat scurvy seemed like this really dramatic and rather intuitive way that you could show people the power of scientific methods and that it didn't really require huge amounts of statistical knowledge or complex machinery.

Just the basic logic made it work. And it sounds similar to a lot of the things, I know what you're describing in the podcast episodes as well. Like there's a lot of complexities that go into inoculation and vaccination. But in the same way, it seems that like your subtitle suggests, the human story does a very good job of making people able to grasp it and perhaps more interested than they would be in a panorama style BBC documentary that is a bit more detached in nature. Yeah, that's absolutely it. And there was a reason I called it the human story. And it's because I wanted to contrast it almost to what I find quite tedious at times, stories of scientific development. And it's a bit of a false binary, right?

I'm sure there's lots of history of science and history of medicine academics getting furious at me as i speak because actually you can't really separate the story of humanity from the story of science they are one and the same they're intertwined but at the same time i did want to i suppose contrast it to what i can find some quite bloodless historical narratives of this technology was processed and then this technology was created and this supersuited this technology because it suited this need and that sort of thing and I sort of really wanted to ground it in this story of people and what people must have felt what emotions people must have felt around this technology and why it was so important essentially

yeah so I'm sort of aware I am playing to a bit of a false dichotomy, but I do think it's important if you are trying to reach the people who, as I say, do not necessarily have a positive feeling towards technological brilliance, which I often think some of the language around, particularly mRNA vaccines, can often push, even though they are technologically brilliant. Sometimes I think that's not actually the way to go

when we're trying to quite urgently convince people of what's there, of the need to take them. I love the historical framing, by the way. At the beginning of the COVID outbreak, I happened to read a journal of the plague year by Daniel Defoe and I've mentioned this to Chris Kavanagh a couple of times. It was just amazing how that was what, 400 years ago or so. And the psychological dynamics, the kinds of panics and the xenophobia and the people rushing to quack cures and the unrest, it felt like exactly what was happening today.

The history of the germ theory of disease and figuring out that it's these microorganisms and this theory of contagion and so on, there's nothing about it that's particularly intuitively obvious, is there? Like, it feels more intuitive that it should be some miasma or some terrible but no fog or something that was making you sick other than germs yeah and i'm actually editing and getting ready to record my fifth episode of the series which is going to be about the very first anti-vax movement and one thing that keeps on sort of smacking me in the head every time i read about it is how obvious it was that something like ivermectin was going to happen in a sense that

there was going to be this huge craze for some kind of alternative treatment which had enough scientific backing to seem kind of plausible but not so much so that people were put off it do you know because it feels like with almost every single pandemic there is a cure like that it just happens time and time again i imagine to many historians of medicine it probably was the second it arrived they they were like, oh, there it is. Because it sort of seemed to me, yeah, reading back to smallpox outbreaks, but also things like tuberculosis and diphtheria and all of these kind of things. Every single time there is an outbreak in a city, you will have, yeah, the medical establishment saying one thing and then one or two kind of rogue figures with just enough sort of credibility. And then one or two kind of rogue figures with just enough sort of credibility, but also that kind of that slight charisma that allows them to sort of say, but, you know, I'm breaking from the consensus here to say, actually, you need to be taking this. And hey, what do you know?

I'm selling it. Here's the real good oil. Yeah. Yeah. The pre-modern Brett Weinstein's. The vaccine time. Matt and I, I think, see a lot of the same parallels that you have highlighted in the episodes that you've presented between the modern era and back then. that you've presented between the modern era and back then. But I'm wondering, are there any aspects which you find that don't map well? Obviously, you know, there's technology differences in that, but is it the continuity which surprises you or are there things that you come across where you're like, well, that element is not

really a feature anymore? Yeah, it's interesting because it's almost as if the discontinuities emerge from the parallels. So for instance, in the anti-vax movement in the UK, you kind of have a two-tier anti-vax movement where you've got some middle to upper class businessmen who are really framing this around the kind of concept of liberty and freedom from vaccine mandates, which do happen and are much, much more strict than even things like vaccine passports or the vaccine mandates that are happening in the US. People are getting fined for registering a newborn and not having them vaccinated for the smallpox vaccine within 14 days of being born. But there's a discontinuity going on here, which is that actually if you're poor,

you're much more likely to get fined. And if you can't pay the fine, then go to jail. And it's nearly all young, working class, single mothers who this happens to. And so this then creates a huge working class backlash movement, which I kind of see as not really being so much about the vaccine, but being about things like the poor laws and the massacre of Peterloo, which was only 15 years earlier and had slum clearances and all of these kinds of things, which essentially, then the government just says, we're going to come into your neighbourhoods and lock up young

mothers. Do you know, it kind of feels like there's this huge backlash and it's incredibly violent. The city center of, I think, Ipswich or Peterborough or somewhere like that gets burned to the ground. It-vax movement. A lot of the anti-vax celebrities, so to speak, are I think more of the middle to upper class style. They usually have a slightly kind of professionalized job. They usually are making a fair bit of money and they're framing it all around concepts of liberty, not so much around class consciousness or class warfare or things like that, which was very, very present in the first anti-vaccine movement. It seems that even though you're more likely to be vaccine hesitant if you come from a sort of deprived area or if you're an ethnic minority in this country, these people don't particularly seem to rise to the top of the movement or to give it a specific kind of

character in that sense, do you know? So I think that's probably one of the movement or to give it a specific kind of character in that sense, do you know? So I think that's probably one of the biggest differences to me looking, comparing the two. I listened recently to your most recent, the fourth episode, where you were talking about the opposition to vaccines in colonial countries facing colonization and how it could function as a connected to anti-colonial movements and an unfortunate overlap as it would happen but you can understand the kind of fear of outside technology or the various purposes that colonial powers might be introducing them for so yeah it just struck me that when you were talking there that that that parallel, I'm not sure if I've seen that during the current pandemic, like in Japan, for example, I know that here they wanted their own Japanese vaccine.

They didn't want to rely on a German or American or British vaccine, but the efforts didn't bear fruit. And so Japan is behind. vaccine, but the efforts didn't bear fruit. And so Japan ended up behind. So there's definitely vaccine nationalism, but I didn't see so much except from Scott Adams saying that he would be going for the American vaccine. So yeah. Our last guest, Sue Neal, mentioned the conspiracy theory around the vaccine for the HIV virus in sub-Saharan Africa

that he said anyway was promoted by the KGB, that the idea that it was a CIA plot to nefarious things. Did you hear of that before, Chris? It was new to me. Stuart Neal is a virology professor, but he's worked on HIV research. And like Matt says, he was highlighting that there were actual efforts by the KGB to implant stories to undermine the efforts for not HIV vaccine that doesn't exist. Was it the smallpox vaccine that began HIV? Because I've heard that conspiracy theory before. It was very big in Africa in the 90s. That must have been it.

The smallpox vaccine was the cause of HIV? Of HIV, yeah. It was a very big theory in the 90s. Yeah, it got promoted by lots and lots of sort of conspiracy theorists of the time. And I think even may have had like a couple of hearings and kind of mainstream newspapers as well. Like, you know, could this be true? Which, yeah, sort of said that the WHO program to mass vaccinate, essentially, to eradicate smallpox, which worked, was contaminated in some way. eradicate smallpox, which worked, was contaminated in some way.

As with all conspiracy theories, it runs the full gamut of an accident to planned depopulation to bring in the new world order. This was what began the AIDS crisis. But you don't hear it that much anymore, apart from on anti-vax telegram channels, where they just love recycling all of this old stuff. I remember the South African health minister at one point was a HIV AIDS, the connection between them, denialist, which was at least some calculations suggested there was like a huge death toll associated with that.

But I think the point you just made, Annie, about recycled narratives, that's something that Matt and I, and I know you guys notice it as well over at Pure Non-Anonymous, that lots of the kind of tropes which are in anti-vaccine communities or conspiracy communities or even in the IDW sphere, they're repeating things that if you become familiar with anti-vaccination movements or with conspiracy theories that you see them just endlessly reappear they're kind of like zombies but it doesn't matter

how often they're killed or people can show that they're just fundamentally incorrect they can just regenerate into a new version in any situation. That's maybe a good point to ask you is did researching this topic made you hopeful or depressed? Yeah. I mean, I've always been someone who's found an incredible amount of comfort in the notion that whatever you feel like you're going through thousands and thousands of people have gone through the same thing way before you it's why

I think I live in a very old city which still has a lot of Tudor buildings and medieval streets and things like that and I've always think I've been attracted to that for that same reason because I like walking down the street whatever kind of little problem is on my mind thinking like oh lots of people have done the same thing I know so I've always kind of found that a little bit comforting I suppose it does also I think give you a sense of perspective that while the internet has changed so much about how we communicate and it certainly changed I think both the style and the rapidness with which we disseminate this level of information it does sort of at least give you the sort of sense that this hasn't irreversibly changed humanity our heart there are still lots of things that people want they want comfort they want to feel important they want to feel loved

all of these kind of other things that means that yes well the internet may change how they seek out those things there is still kind of a human element there so i think i find that generally quite comforting having said that i certainly can get very frustrated with this especially i think when it comes as it always so often does these discourses suddenly get circled around to, well, what's wrong with just having a conversation? What's wrong with just having a debate about these things? And you sort of think a bit like, okay, but this debate's been going on forever and your side lost.

Do you know? You lost the debate and you've been losing it continually for about 50 years now. So I'm thinking of things with like not just vaccines but human biodiversity these sorts of concepts that eugenics and stuff that just keep on coming up again and again and people will often kind of yes or just say you know why are you so scared of us talking about it it's just a bit like well I don't know how many times we can keep on giving you a participation trophy and saying try again which yeah i don't know but yeah like that's a less comforting thought that's a more frustrating thought it just reminded me of

the creationism versus evolution types of debates and you know teach both teach both sides and you know let all sides be heard and that sort of journalistic idea where you give equal airtime to both sides but yeah there's a there's a conflict there where at some point the debate's been had and there isn't a case to be made on one side and it gets a little bit frustrating when you ask yourself well can't we just simply move on like you said i feel the same way it is comforting to know that whatever stupid shit is going on today and whatever things that are annoying us it's it is a bit comforting in a way to know that the same things have been going on for hundreds of years but at the same time we also hope that there should be some kind of progress that we don't have to keep reliving and refighting the

same things from 400 years ago. Yeah. And keep on having to go back to restate those principles. Yeah, I do agree. That made me think, I mean, growing up in Belfast in the nineties, I was at the teal end of the troubles. So in a similar way, I often probably falsely or because I didn't have it as bad as my parents'

generation, I take some comfort when I look around things going badly in various places and thinking, well, yeah, but because the image that people had of Northern Ireland when I traveled in the 90s was that I'd be walking down the street and under sniper fire.

As you know, there were bombs and there were shootings and kneecaps and all those things, but life was not the way that people imagined it. So it's just this kind of reminder that things can be bad, but still people carry on and life goes on. But your recent coverage of Colin Wallace. So maybe for people on our podcast who haven't heard and will go and listen afterwards, and Matt, I don't think you've heard this either. Could you summarize, Annie, what the Colin Wallace satanic panic thing is about? Yeah. So in short, I read a book by the Sheffield sociologist, Professor Richard Jenkins,

called Black Magic and Bogeymen, which is a fantastic book. I really recommend it for anyone who's interested. It alleges, well, it doesn't allege, it proves essentially that there was a satanic panic in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland or the north of Ireland, because some of it was in the border counties as well which sort of spread these kind of very strange stories with very little evidence behind them it's been said you know some people are worried that there are satanic rituals going on in abandoned houses on the islands off the coast, ruined churches, and that essentially perhaps teenagers who are distressed by the violence of the Troubles

are trying to communicate with the dead and participate in these kind of black masses, these black magic rituals. And Colin Wallace was a former army intelligence officer who the author of this book interviewed who said that at least some of those stories were essentially planted by the British army and they had a few reasons for this the main one was because he was working to a book written by I think a general called Frank Kitson, who had been in Northern Ireland working in army intelligence and before that in Kenya, dealing with the anti-colonialist uprisings there. Frank Kitson writes a book called Low Intensity Operations, which is essentially about how to

identify insurgent groups before they have committed violence and to try and destabilize their support with the local population and so he says the way you can do this is by seeding stories essentially that will lose them popular support because most people aren't willing to take part in insurgent violence but they might be willing to sympathize essentially with these insurgent groups so you need to cut that off make them as small as possible and so this is what colin wallace and his colleagues were trying to do essentially they were aware it was a very religious population and they were aware that because it was such a tribalistic conflict that based on whether you're protestant or catholic

you would probably have sympathies with one or the other side he said that they were mainly trying to target the loyalist paramilitaries at this time, just because many of them were becoming more radical and were becoming harder to control, essentially, even though their primary targets were always the IRA. Many of the loyalist paramilitaries had been designated terrorist groups by this point. And so, yeah, but it was also just a way to essentially make people afraid to go out at night particularly children and essentially to create this sort of destabilizing force in popular support for either side yeah the thing that struck me about it is

and you did a good job of contextualizing, that the broad strokes seem to be pretty well validated from a variety of reliable sources, but some elements of it rely on Colin's personal testimony. And there's possible reasons to be skeptical of some of his more extreme claims. But even with that, it was interesting to me because it's an example where QAnon Anonymous, essentially an anti-conspiracy theory online cultish podcast, you're doing that thing, which a lot of the conspiracy theorists basically say that you won't do, which is admit that there can be conspiracies and that they do involve government forces doing the, and they write books about how you should do them. And so, you know, we've encountered this recently because we've been talking about the lab leak and people, they seem to take this view that if you recognize that conspiracy theory dynamics and you're critical of them, that you basically imagine the world is this rosy garden where like governments never do anything wrong. And actually, this also relates to the work that you did with the vaccine podcast.

How is that kind of thing received by the audience? Do you ever get feedback in the case of the vaccine podcast? Do you get feedback from people that were vaccine hesitant, that were interested in it or back positively or negatively and see them. For QAnon Anonymous, I know that the people in the QAnon community are aware of you collectively and kind of on the lookout for you. But do they actually ever listen to your material or not really? your material or not really? I've got very little feedback actually from pro QAnon people about QAnon Anonymous. My guess is just because it's a slightly larger but also a little older demographic in lots of places and it's quite difficult. Even I have found this researching the far right, it's quite difficult to hate listen to something it's quite easy to like hate watch

something it's quite easy to hate read something but it's actually really hard i think to listen to something that you really don't like or appreciate i don't know what that is but it does just seem to be an effect so i think for normal humans that is correct on the vaccine podcast purely because i wanted to put it on youtube largely because we had a very talented editing team was being produced by fall of civilizations which is another history podcast but also because i was aware that youtube was where a lot of anti-vax content exists. So I just thought it would be a better place to reach people there. And there you get a lot more comments from people who, again, run the full spectrum of a little bit unsure to totally against. And much the same way, my comments sort of reflect that.

I get a lot of, you must be funded by big pharma and that kind of stuff which god I wish the phone lines are open yeah and Pfizer and give me a call anytime to quite a few comments actually which I always do like where they say oh I really appreciate that you're not biased and I don't think that's true of course I'm biased I think I'm biased about loads of things but I think what they mean is that I'm not patronizing I'm not trying to just sort of say what do you mean vaccines are fantastic and you're foolish for even thinking otherwise I'm trying to give a historical context which says that yeah sometimes

even though I think unabashedly that the vaccine is one of the greatest human inventions it hasn't always been used correctly and it's not always been utilized by governments and the powerful in the best way that they could have been because I think that is actually everyone knows when they're being patronized right and we don't like it so I think it's even if it is a pro-vaccine podcast, I think it is important to be like, here's where I hear you on this when you're trying to persuade someone. We're also certainly a pro-vaccine podcast. So I'm actually a little bit curious, like what would you think would be the most egregious example of vaccines being

promoted or distributed and leading to negative consequences. Is there anything that springs to mind? Yeah. So what I was talking about earlier, I think the vaccine mandates with the smallpox vaccine were, I think, just overall just a kind of catastrophic mistake, which took the best part of a century to undo in terms of people's trust of vaccines and the medical establishment as a whole. They had only been in existence for about 10 years when they were mandated by the British government for all newborns. They were about as new to the population then as something like Bitcoin is to us now. And you can kind of imagine, particularly when doctors at the time had a reputation of

taking your money, not necessarily curing you, you can understand why people were furious, particularly the poor, who, as I said, were both targeted much more strictly and also had a much better reason just not to believe the government had anything like their own interests at heart. better reason just not to believe the government had anything like their own interests at heart much like much of the public health laws at the time it was well intentioned and you sort of think that it probably would have in a world where the human instinct the human impulse is just like not a factor if yeah we'll just mandate everyone gets the smallpox vaccine and then we'll never have to deal with smallpox again brilliant fantastic and much like things like the stem clearances, which were again, incredibly unhealthy environments, which did breed disease. You can kind of see how from a just purely sort of bloodless technocratic

perspective, it made sense as a policy. But the truth is that you're forgetting essentially that these are real people and these are really their homes and these are their children. And so people take against it. It causes a huge backlash. And it takes, as I say, yeah, until conscientious objection gets introduced, which is by this time in the late 1890s, you have this entire generation who do not trust vaccines at all and in many ways actually become much more vulnerable to things like smallpox. So I think that's a really egregious example where you have this wonderful new technology and you try and essentially brute force it through as opposed to the harder work of actually trying to get people to understand what it does and trust it, which is difficult and complicated. And why should we have to try and appeal to the poor anyway? They can't even vote. Yeah, it just seems to me just like such a historical mistake. And similarly, I think with the way that the British government tries to introduce it in the colonies, they make lots and

lots of mistakes, which just come from that very kind of imperialistic arrogance. Trying to say this is a solely British invention made with pure British brilliance. And that's why we're banning all of your local mystical witchdoctory ways of dealing with smallpox and other diseases, because you're so lucky that you've got us in charge now and we've got this much better invention which again breeds resentment in the local population how could it not a slightly less arrogant a slightly less colonialist approach which really highlighted the connections with inoculation practices which had been in place in africa and india far longer than they had been in place in Africa and India far longer than they had been in England would have probably got a much bigger uptake. That actually accords with something that we've noticed and this is coming from a different source but I think it's playing on the same tropes is that a lot of the guru types

that we look at they tend to have this kind of distaste for technocratic solutions. The WHO or these international bodies or pharmaceutical companies and so on, which have legitimate issues. There are legitimate reasons to criticize them, but they kind of take that sentiment and weave into it a view that the traditional, the local, the stored wisdom, which is denigrated by the technocratic elites, is actually this kind of storehouse of ancient knowledge that the guru type people are able to appreciate and tap into. And they can, as a result, kind of see past what the scientists and bureaucrats are getting wrong. And you can see how that's, in some sense, it's not illegitimate to imagine

that these top-down solutions that are one size fit all could be patronizing and paternalistic and breed resentment and even be counterproductive. But on the other hand, because of the way that I've seen guru types use that narrative, I'm also aware of how powerful that is as a narrative device. There are people in India who propose GMOs, for example, and make appeals to their traditional knowledge that we don't need these chemicals from the outside. So yeah, the situation is complex, but it's the fact that you can use the narratives either way. It's just a depressing thought that both ways can be abused.

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a difference just to say that the powerful, by virtue of their position and power and their desire to justify their own power will not always kind of appreciate the sort of response that certain policies and things will get versus i think maybe what you're getting at which is this kind of slightly reactionary impulse towards actually the old ways were just better right and as you say they kind of come from the the wisdom of the ancestors and all this kind of pound shop traditionalism, that sort of traditionalist kind of rhetoric, which always seems to seep in a little, I think, in the IDW, particularly, I think, the modern IDW or the contemporary IDW, I should say. It's all modern. So I think that there is a difference because I'm not saying that inoculation was just perfect.

I do think vaccination was a necessary development. But what upsets me, I suppose, is kind of seeing how such a fantastic development was misused by, I mean, the British government is the one I live the most history with, but not just the British government, actually lots of governments all over, I think made just crucial errors essentially. And then this is actually the last story of just public health in general, I think. Yeah. With the IDW sphere, it's definitely, it hovers dramatically around the West as the kind of preservation of important knowledge with sometimes mild reference

that other cultures may have interesting things, but the values of the West loom large. That is something I wanted to ask you about, Andy. The QAnon communities, we are mainly focused around secular online gurus, and we've tried to stay away a little bit from the more kind of alternative medicine, traditional outright conspiracy theories. And as a result, a lot of QAnon crops up and there's overlap because of the January 6th insurrection attempt and those kinds of things that there are overlaps between, say, IDW types downplaying that. But I'm wondering from your perspective, and maybe you're tracking all these people, so I might be putting you in a pigeonhole.

It doesn't apply. But do you see much overlap from figures like Jordan Peterson or the Weinsteins or even more mainstream people like Sam Harris into those communities? Because from my perspective, it doesn't seem like Sam Harris, for example, would be someone that QAnon types would be that interested in, but I could see how Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson could have things that play in, but I'm largely naive to that space, except from what I hear in QAnon Anonymous. Yeah I mean the question actually brings me back to doing my PhD research which was about

digital anti-feminists and I observed this change on the digital anti-feminist network which I studied from about 2012 to 2016 where where it began incredibly secular. It was what we'd now understand to be sort of an intellectual dark web rhetoric, referencing sort of biologically essentialist kind of understandings of men and women, these kind of evolutionary psychological dynamics that naturalized essentially male dominance and female subservience. But it was very atheist, quite rigidly so, and had a real contempt for religion, really. And this sort of began to change from probably around 2016 onwards. You actually largely began to notice more tolerance towards Christianity. largely began to notice more tolerance towards christianity and it was always the still the same kind of total contempt towards religions like islam and stuff like that but even then

sometimes they'd kind of do a sort of like well islam's got a point about women sort of meaning this kind of idea of islam that they have in their head which is about male domination and figures like i don't know if you guys would have heard of Roushevi. Is this the MRA guy? Yeah yeah he was a sort of pickup artist who ran a couple of very reactionary blogs which segued quite strangely between how to pick up chicks in a bar in Eastern Europe and also why we must defend western values and really sort of bridge that connection that was always there between the alt-right and anti-feminism. And at one point, I think in around 2016 or 2017, he deleted pretty much all of his articles

which he deemed to be sexually immoral and said he was converting to Orthodox Christianity. And now I've no desire to impugn anyone's religious conversion i'm religious myself and you know whatever way people find this but their ways through religion i'm not going to be cynical about but it certainly seemed to me that it was following a trend that lots and lots of anti-feminist figures and gurus and that were finding themselves kind of drawn more towards not just christian, but I would say a very supremacist version of Christianity. And it sort of seemed that this was the way the tide was turning here. And I think you even notice Jordan Peterson, for instance, has never really

made any secret of kind of having a sympathy towards Christianity and referencing it, but was often kind of in this Joseph Campbell-esqueesque way of these are the sort of founding myths of our society and here's how they're relevant to our time now when i think i literally just saw a tweet of his right before i got on here when he was saying something about women being led by a satanic ideology or something like that and you sort of feel like it almost seems like the natural end point to a lot of these ideologies, or if you are going to continually make the case over and over again on why certain aspects of domination or hierarchy should be naturalized, it may not be the logical end point. But it almost seems to make sense from their point of view why eventually religious arguments would be just another option available to you essentially to justify your point and not all of them pick it up many of them remain pretty firmly anti-religious but it certainly seems to make sense to me why to some of them they will eventually soften on that aspect yeah i can say I know the similar sorts of things that you're mentioning, and

especially as people trend towards the right more openly, it's just a notable phenomenon. You can teach someone like Dave Rubin, who they start off by enjoying the work of Jordan Peterson and Matt and I we covered Jordan Peterson in some depth and when I read 12 rules for life the thing that I remember typing Fred about him basically saying like I'm amazed at the amount of this which is focused on the bible and theology it's almost like you say I don't begrudge anybody having an interest in religion and religious iconography and all that kind of thing. There's lots of religious people in the world, but it just struck me as odd that people didn't seem to be picking up so much on how central that was to what he was promoting.

When Dave Rubin moved through Jordan Peterson to cultural Christianity to where he is now, which is probably somewhere confused space. But Matt and I, a friend of the podcast who hosts a philosophy podcast called Embrace the Void, was tracing James Lindsay quite carefully. He made a bet a long time ago that James is going to become a Christian, right? Which would be a move from atheist activism to Christianity. And he's already at the point of collaborating with an evangelical Christian and talking openly about the Christian values and the importance for Western civilization. So for Western civilization, so there definitely seems anecdotally, at least something there, like she should have some antennae pinging up when you hear the Joseph Campbell style talk, which is a shame because there's so much

actual interesting stuff there. Yeah, absolutely. And I was heartbroken to find out one of my favorite Bible stories, which always has been, is the story of Exodus, which I just think is so fascinating. And there's just so much really rich, interesting detail there. And I think it kind of reverberations throughout history. For instance, American slave Bibles had Exodus removed from them. They were missing the Exodus section because it was feared that it had an anti-slavery message which would cause insurrection and things like this. It's just a fascinating story to me and

always has been. Then I found out that Jordan Peterson was planning on doing a podcast where he decoded the entire story of Exodus. And it was just one of those heartbreaking things. I was like, man, I so want to listen to a podcast that does this, but not by you. I had the exact same thing when I was preparing a course and needed to do some research about Viktor Frankl, who I wasn't familiar with. And then I saw, oh, the main thing that YouTube and various things were giving me was Jordan Peterson has produced lectures on Viktor Frankl. But I actually was like, okay, all right, maybe let's see what he had to say.

But the thing that really depressed me was he had like a two-hour lecture on Frankl and Frankl featured for like 10 minutes. and Frankl, and Frankl featured for like 10 minutes. The rest of it was all Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson's viewers with the very slightest tinge. And I watched about an hour and a half and was like, I know less about Frankl. I'm literally unlearning while I watch this. Jordan Peterson is still, I i think someone matt and i probably have out of the gurus that we've covered we would still say that he at least is someone that does have genuine idiosyncratic ideas of his own whether that they're right or not like the chaos dragon and that kind of thing

it's at least his own rather than it's at least an ethos no i mean i kind of do agree actually because yeah there really are some figures in this kind of network that really are so tedious. And I know I followed a lot of them on Twitter for a while and quite a few of them I had to unfollow, not because I was so offended or I was finding them so contrary to my own beliefs. I'm quite used to reading stuff that's contrary to my own beliefs because it started to get really tedious. It started to get really boring. It was just the same point over and over again and often quite a lot of times a day as well lots of them tweet a lot and i was just like you know what this is just you know i'm not learning anything from this this

is just dull i knew you were going to say that already you said it three times this week yeah yeah jordan peterson is very idiosyncratic and perhaps i've stated the slipping or something but he doesn't inspire the same degree of annoyance or revulsion that some of them have exactly because he's just so strange and i can appreciate that but some of these other characters like james lindsey i was i was going to jump in with him too they either died in the war atheists who have been attracted by the right-wing reactionary audience. And they're just drawn to this American evangelical Christianity sort of by default and define themselves already as kind of cultural Christians. It's like they're embracing the politics without the metaphysics

or something, I'm not sure. I think it's a very compelling idea of yourself when you see yourself as locked in this ideological battle for the classic cultural phrase the battle for the soul of america or you might say the west or whatever like that it's very compelling to think of yourself not simply as a heterodox iconoclast, but perhaps even also a spiritual warrior. The spiritual warfare idea is so huge in American evangelism and this understanding of... I saw a clip recently by an American evangelist musician who's doing this tour all over America where he

describes an encounter with some anti-fascists. And he says, you know, the thing we have to remember is that this isn't a physical fight. It's a spiritual fight. We're fighting against the forces of demonic powers, not against people. Having said that, these people do have demons in them, which in a way seem to be kind of contradicting itself but it's a it's quite an attractive i think if you're around that sphere it's quite an attractive way to imagine yourself it's a very romantic understanding of the kind of work you're doing especially if the work you're doing is largely getting into twitter fights and doing youtube streams and stuff like that. It's quite a heroic position to put yourself in. And so I can understand why even if you personally start out not believing,

you may end up believing just because I think we're always attracted more to ideas which give us a flattering view of ourselves. Hmm. which give us a flattering view of ourselves. There's an interesting contrast, though, that I think, I don't know if it's fair to describe it completely to left versus right, but at least I've noticed that in, like, say, for example, the QAnon anonymous podcast, the atmosphere on there is quite ironic and humorous, right?

Yeah. Talking often about fairly depressing, dark topics, but with a very dry wit. And part of the reason I enjoy it, and I enjoy a lot of content that looks at things like knowledge fight, where they do the same sort of thing. They're looking at Alex Jones, who's objectively a terrible human in so many ways, but they approach it with humor.

We try to do the same thing to our limited abilities on Decoding the Gurus as well. But that strikes me as something which appeals to people on the left and maybe people from the UK and Northern Ireland, but Australia as specifically like that kind of self-deprecating ironic humor is very popular and parts of America as well, fair to say, as people have highlighted. But what it doesn't give you is this notion that you're part of a metaphysical battle for the ages that is tied in with these huge spiritual kind of forces. And that me and Matt critically evaluated a podcast that was called Defenders of Our Civilization.

It was a discussion between Eric Weinstein and Douglas Murray, and they were talking about themselves. But we're never going to unironically title a podcast Champions of the Rational Scientific Method. But that as a result means that it feels like that's giving you less of an appeal in some way. an appeal in some way you're kind of handicapping yourself because you're just saying yeah we're going to be self-deprecating and ironic and not give you a grand narrative about how special you are yeah almost every time we record on human anonymous at one point one of us will just be like i can't believe we pay attention to this like what the hell is wrong with us why are we why are we dedicating our lives to to like obsessing over and analyzing this complete drivel but i mean having said that i wouldn't go as far

to say that i don't think we uh don't all hold a flattering view of what ourselves and what what we do i think i certainly do i think i probably do have a kind of concept that yes we we like to have fun but at the same time this stuff is very important to pay attention to and therefore i flatter myself into believing i do important work and and shining a light on this and assessing what i think the key issues with it are and all of this kind of stuff so it is self-deprecating it certainly doesn't take itself too seriously kind of that style which i think is important because a lot of as you say a lot of the stuff you discuss is just very depressing and i think particularly i had that sense very early on when i was doing a research in anti-feminism which is not just

depressing but quite actively hateful a lot of the time you sort of do have to just kind of develop a little bit of a like sense of humor about it all because otherwise it's just very upsetting but i think probably even then people are attracted because they like the sort of being someone who can view these quite serious concepts from a lofty height and find the humor in it yeah i think people probably like that idea about themselves too even though yeah maybe we should rebrand from q anon anonymous people always think the pro q anon and yeah we should be like the defenders of democracy against i'll i'll just sign off on the point that you made as well, Annie, that I'm not

saying that people within our sphere don't have positive self-regard or see themselves as doing things that are useful and beneficial. I flatter myself the same, like Matt and I. We can joke around and be self-deprecating as well, but we do think that responding to anti-vax stuff and that is important and has value. I'm not claiming to be that enlightened or selfless, but I think I'm more emphasizing the kind of style. The style. Yeah. Like, you know, the ContraPoints versus Jordan Peterson. ContraPoints is very popular as well.

So it isn't that you can't attract people. But I can see when I look at some of the content we're looking at, if I had came across it at the right point of time in my life, that it would be very appealing to me because I'd be feeling like I'm getting in on this secret knowledge and people aren't noticing what's happening to the society around them. I don't know, maybe there are people that are giving that same kind of appeal, but I guess I view that as inherently manipulative in a way so that it's like it's a tool that you could use, but you shouldn't use it because it comes with a cost. And if you're not going to use it, you kind of fight with one hand behind your back, but you should, because you shouldn't be using those psychological hooks. Yeah. Yeah. You both got me thinking, which is that I think it's an important difference. Like on one level, we don't think of ourselves as anything more than light

entertainment. And I think that's a really healthy point of view to take. And, you know, I'm a professor. I've been a professor for a while and an academic. And professors aren't known for having a low opinion of themselves. Generally, self-promotion, stuff like that is part of the deal. But one of the other things that goes along with being an academic and a researcher is you realize how many clever people there are in the world and how many people that have just accomplished so much more. And you kind of aspire to being at that level. You get a better appreciation for the rest

of the community. And that's the thing that I think is different. Like even though academic types can be narcissistic and grandiose and all that stuff. I detect something different amongst some of these iconoclasts and gurus and heterodox public intellectuals where they really do see themselves as this breed apart, as standing apart from the rest of humanity, like it's some sort of prophet or something and that triggers me in a deep and fundamental way yeah another thing going on which again i sort of i would hesitate to say this is unique to this community we're talking about but it's certainly something i noticed in my research and i've sort of noticed in almost every community i've studied since, so first from anti-feminists to QAnon to anti-vaxxers, is that there's always a double-edged sword. It's always, yes, you can be this heterodox iconoclast who thinks outside the box and doesn't blindly follow like a sheep being herded into a pen but you know the other side of this is you can just be someone who's

kind of very weak-minded very weak-willed very pathetic really who will just do whatever authority tells you to do they're often not saying this to their audience as such but they're sort of saying you know these are the people who criticize us this is what they're about and i often think it's a bit of a threat because it's actually also saying don't you dare criticize us because then this will be you it was a bit like i always thought this worked with the anti-feminist communities when they would talk about alpha and beta males it would be like you can be an alpha like us sigma kim right yeah yeah you can you can be really cool you can be really confident or the woman will love you

or you can be this just like pathetic brow beaten probably getting cheated on kind of weak-willed man and they would often say you know our opponents feminist men and beta males but really what they were also saying was like and you don't want to be like that, do you? So it almost felt like they were negging their own audience in a way. And you see it with it in anti-vax communities as well, in the intellectual dark web as well. By focusing so much on their opponents in the most unflattering possible terms, I often do think it's a little bit of a, again, that's what you were saying, Chris, it's manipulative. It's manipulative how you want to see yourself who you want to be i've been a bit astounded and andy i know you've give us a lot of your time so we should let you escape soon i was quite astounded recently i don't know if you do you know stewart ritchie

yeah well i've heard of him i don I don't know him personally, but yeah. Yeah. He's in England. It's a small place. You'll probably bump into him. He wrote a review of Heller and Brett Weinstein's new book, The Hunter Gallery's Guide to the 21st Century. And Stuart is a quite well-known British science popularizer. And he's written a book about research standards and the issues with the modern science.

And he wrote a review of their book for the Guardian, which was critical. And the way Heller and Brett framed it on their podcast, it literally, I've been watching their content for quite a while. So it takes quite a lot for them to surprise me but they framed him as a dogmatic defender of the orthodoxy who has no interest or background in science i know sir but i was also like you don't need to know him because he's his whole reputation if you just google him is like the exact opposite that he's pretty non-woke you know like yeah as well yeah i mean yes he's he's not known for that

yes but they portrayed him and i had people like us post-modern post-modern construction constructive social constructive but that's the theme isn't it Postmodern, social constructivist. Postmodern, social constructivist. But that's the theme, isn't it? Which is you totally disparage any critics and the people who praise you and follow you, you lavish praise on them and you build up their ego. And this goes to the point you're making before, Annie, which is that flagrant narcissism of the leaders.

That's what the manipulation is, which is that you're not going to be a beta kind of institutional supporting dogma accepting person you're going to be an open-minded free-thinking alpha male like us it's the same concept isn't it which is like this kind of will to power or something i like the introduction of the sigma meal into the ecosystem so funny yeah sigma is like an alternative the alpha right oh yeah it's basically because um it was basically again this kind of need to create a self-flattering construct, which was not alpha because being alpha naturally has some requirements, which most men don't live up to. You know, being incredibly financially successful, very popular, having lots of friends, lots of girlfriends, real romantic success.

You know, Matt, you know that. I know about this. you know that i know about this yeah yeah so essentially sigma was like well you're none of these things but it's not because you're pathetic it's because you choose not to which yeah you could easily you could easily be alpha but you choose not to so in a way you're better than an alpha which i felt like just such pathetic pandering. I couldn't believe that people weren't seeing through that one. Yeah. It's sometimes impressive how low the bar can actually go. You think it's at the bottom and then you're like, oh wow,

it could go lower than that. And so that's, I think that's a recurrent feature about anybody that decides to cover these communities or groups that you're constantly getting that revelation. I have the image of the kind of anime character pushing his glasses up. You know, it was his plan all along. He's just playing like 20 dimensional chess. He's just playing like 20 dimensional chess. And then, you know, it works in the same way that objectively Donald Trump is not this image of masculine health.

No. He's a quite heavy set hair finning older guy, but he, but it doesn't matter. He's like very catty and loves to gossip as well well which is not in can i think i think you know one of the most yeah relatable things about him actually is just like how much he just like loves to have like a little bitch and a little gossip yeah he's actually quite camp that's actually the most likable thing about him yeah he would i don't think he would see it like that. So I guess, Annie, the last thing just before we let you go is that, like we said, Matt and I, we haven't looked that much at the QAnon people, but we do get overlap from people in the conspiratorial sphere, right? Like JPCers and Russell Brand seem to be branching over. I'm familiar with the research about there being pipelines

from more mainstream to harder right. And I definitely think those exist. We see them in action. James Lindsay is a one-man illustration of that pipeline. But I'm wondering how much you see people like Russell Brand or whatever, like the conspirituality sphere coming into your area. And also, if you ever see it going the other way, like away from the more conspiratorial fringe into the heterodox sphere or that kind kind of thing or whether they're separate camps

yeah it's a really good question i think because my q anon research focuses on the uk just by virtue of my remit and sometimes in europe because they're all kind of so interconnected i have like quite a specific understanding of the kind of future of q anon which is almost i suppose q anon without trump um which seems really difficult to imagine i think from a from an american perspective because the two are so interlinked but one thing you'll notice when you look at q anon groups outside of the u.s is actually how little they discuss Trump and how he's certainly a character in the universe, so to speak, the QAnon expanded universe, but he's not really at the center of it in the same way. And really what they're more attracted to are notions of the deep

state, obviously the satanic pedophile rituals um that kind of thing has a huge huge pull and the the kind of a spiritual warfare aspect of it you know the kind of light versus dark battle between good and evil and so largely it sort of makes sense to me that you would see aspects of QAnon trickling in to other spaces outside the kind of specific QAnon sphere proper. Because in a way, Trump was always the least interesting aspect of it for many European conspiritualists and even people on the more mainstream right. At the end of the day, he was a foreign president. While the US has a huge pull politically and culturally on many parts of Europe, he wasn't something you could build your identity around in quite the same way. Those few people on the right in the UK who did were largely considered by the rest of the right to be real weirdos. It's just not quite the same way. And those few people on the right in the UK who did were largely considered by the rest of the right to be real weirdos. And it's just not quite the same thing. So you see these kind of elements of rhetoric seeping in. It's certainly unmissable if you

go to an anti-vax rally here to not see people talking about the cabal, satanic ritual abuse, and all of these kind of elements, which sort of seem to have re-emerged, essentially. QAnon didn't invent most of those things, but they certainly seem to have given it a bit of a resurgence. In terms of whether I've seen someone come back from QAnon into the more heterodox sphere, the only kind of example I can vaguely think of, is Marjorie taylor green who has maybe dropped the q anon stuff the minute she's got elected and it's kind of now just trying to go for this very straightforward red meat eating gun shooting maga mama right who kind of

you know uh takes no shit from the democrat communists and things like that there are videos of her doing the digital soldier and speaking in this totally pilled parlance but she's dropped into all of that quite successfully it seems and has sort of just even used it to a little bit to be like lol look at how much i i troll the liberals do you know um so i guess there you would think there might not be a path back. People would sort of have a bit of wariness, but it seems that she seems to be proving that there is a path back. If you are just brazen enough about it,

you probably can just find your way into mainstream right circles. That made me think, Andy, that what you highlighted about the Marjorie Taylor Greene and the way that figures like her can play that. They obviously were endorsing QAnon, like seriously, in a respect, but you can always kind of present it as it's just a way to trigger people or just like it's a game as much as it is also serious and there's always that way to fall back like that shit posting but what you're shit posting about is actually pretty dark but you can always just say well it's just shit posting so uh yeah i just thought maybe that's the right wing equivalent of the left wing irony um strategic irony yeah it's fascinating to hear this stuff because you guys focus more on the extreme end and we're kind of more in this middle of the road.

And people like Jordan Peterson that aren't for all the way, but are sort of halfway. But more and more, there's this trajectory that we see with people like James Lindsay and this overlap that we see with stuff like anti-vax, which seems to cover the whole spectrum so perhaps a good thing to finish off on is to set back a little bit and just think about the big picture because we talked at the beginning how in a way none of this stuff is new there's this conflict between rationalist centralized technocrats versus populist naturalist um whatever i've run out of adjectives but we have social media now i'm sure we we have the polarization whatever but one of the things we'd like to try to stay away from is catastrophizing and thinking that this is this is this terrible new thing and the end of the world is nice so and what's your take on it because i i have no good take on this. Do you think what we're seeing now is just a new version of the same old thing?

Or is there something to be genuinely worried about? What's your feeling? I mean, I'm not going to lie, particularly in my own country, I can feel a bit pessimistic. Largely, it feels like there is a real complacency about this rise of quite extreme right rhetoric and our mainstream newspapers and tv and all the rest of it which largely doesn't seem to gain much traction and that does make me feel feel pretty depressed having said that yeah i think it is always um important to remember remember that when you look at the, and it's one thing I've just loved doing about not researching the contemporary,

but researching the historical, is that it does actually give you a sense of not even thinking in decades, but in two and three decades at a time and how much can change in that time actually does give me a little bit of a sense of stepping back from the kind of that very immediate that kind of very present sense of uh for want of a better word doomerism uh that you can get when you're hyper focused on digital networks and internet personalities where you're getting a lot of information moving very fast. So it's been one thing that I think has actually been really healing to me during this project is thinking of, you know, just how long certain ideas and movements have kind of taken to travel. So I suppose, yeah, that's my words of wisdom.

But at the same time, you know, that's not to sort of say that we should be complacent. You know, I do think that this stuff is, well, a lot of what we're witnessing, I would say, is a right wing which is going through a restructuring moment, you know, a re-evolution, essentially combat material circumstances which just simply mean that the old way of being right-wing just doesn't quite work for them anymore. They have to adapt, they have to move on. It'd be foolish to think they wouldn't do that. If I were them, that's what I'd do too. And that does mean, I think, paying attention and not just simply assuming that you can be lazy about kind of combating what are, at the end of the day, bad ideas, sometimes very dangerous ideas. is important you know to to keep tabs on it to understand why the evolution is happening um and also what you can do to reassert i suppose a kind of more egalitarian democratic way of doing things yeah i think you guys at q anon anonymous are doing, to put it in a half-lick background way, the Lord's work at documenting all of the things that are going on there. And from my perspective, the tone that you strike with it is perfect.

For me, it's perfect because you guys go really in depth and do the research and you don't shrink from, you know, saying what things are connected to and, you know, often quite like dark connections around eugenics and far right movements and that. But like you said, and maybe this is a connection with just, you know, a Northern Irish background, having a dark sense of humor and like being willing to see the humor in pretty bleak circumstances I think is a good thing in general like it's helpful yeah no I absolutely agree well it's been an absolute pleasure and also extremely informative and I'm looking forward I'm waiting for the next episode of i'm afraid all that

we're offering in return is an episode on michaela peterson you talked about you know questioning your life choices this is one of those weeks i can't wait to listen to that you guys are predicting democracy and freedom and we're looking at that's that's we all looking at you. We all have our roles to play. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for coming on and I recommend everyone check out QAnon Anonymous and also Vaccine the Human Story. And in particular, the recent episodes on QAnon Anonymous about the

satanic panic in Northern Ireland. It's interesting even if you're not from Northern Ireland. Satanic panics are always interesting. That's a rule. All right. Well, thank you, Annie. And see you again soon, hopefully. Thanks so much for having me, guys.

It's been so much fun. Thanks, Annie. Boom. Matt. There. there done we did it what a great interview it was amazing thanks me thanks making complete we nailed it uh what a great guest uh we extracted all of the information that annie had they were just we reached into your brain and just took it out like parasitic mind-courts.

We're decoders that we are. It was very informative. And then it went smoother than all our interviews have gone recently. It did. It did. It did. There's a good back and forth,

good communication happening. Turn-taking. Turn-taking. That's did. There's a good back and forth, you know, good, good communication. Turn taking. Turn taking. Turn taking. That's right. Turn to a talk. And that's, I know that's now your new favorite feature. It's a thing. It's just a thing.

I'm just mentioning that. It just happens to be randomly popped into my mind at this point. That's all. Nothing wrong with turn taking. No. Kids know that. Kids know that. Yeah.

So, so that was good for Marnie. Now we need to turn to everyone's favorite segment. And this time it will be quite short, Matt, because they're short this time. The review of the reviews. I got it wrong again. I didn't even think about it. You do struggle with that. The review of the reviews. I got it wrong again. I didn't even think about it. You do struggle with that.

The review of the reviews. It is actually difficult to say. The review of the reviews. I have to enunciate. You added there to make it easier. Review of the reviews. And it's easy. Oh, okay.

Review of reviews. That is harder. Yes. Okay. So, all right, then I'm going to start with the positive one this time to mix it up. Uh, and it's also, uh, quite short. So this is from fat ducks and it's titled strange days, five stars. A Statler and Waldorf routine is not uncommon among somewhat educated old men.

Quite fascinating, I find, the two mostly reasonable and balanced milquetoast liberals, hacklers. Oh, sorry. Milquetoast liberal hacklers are the new radical chic, strange daves. Cool. That's the thing. Being milquetoast, being middle of the road, not being special, that's the new cool thing toast being middle of the road not being special that's the new cool thing that's what's it now it's like that's right it's shabby

we're the new grunge you know what i mean we're like going around with just an old jumper and holes in it yeah yeah oh well you know relating to the intro segment which i'm sure everyone completely remembers when we talked about metal music. I used to have a t-shirt. This was my obnoxious teen fears. On the front of it, it said machine fucking head. And on the back of it, there was a big, like, giant thing giving the finger. And I think it said underneath that, fuck you.

Charming. I know I've been very sorry for my parents. You're like a stereotype of an angry 16 year old boy. I know. I wasn't even that angry. I wasn't even that angry. I just enjoyed that. Actually for my birthday once, I was young, I was like 14, but my uncle knew that I liked a little band called Guns N' Roses. And he bought me one of those black shirts with the band stuff on it. You know how they come, that's to be wrapped in a kind of a cardboard square and behind sellotape or whatever. So you couldn't see the whole thing.

So I unwrapped it, you know, my mom, my mom's there and stuff. And it turned out it was like, it was like an image of like, like a woman. Like the implication was she'd kind of like, uh, like a woman, like the implication was she'd kind of been raped by a robot. Like it was, it was not. So that was an awkward moment. Cause I thought it was great. I was like, that's roses.

That's rocking. Yay. And my mom was like, yeah, not wearing it. It's it, it kind of seems to fit with your brony shirt wearing antics this is just like yeah we shouldn't be allowed to pick our own t-shirts as well I didn't pick it

it's by my uncle that's right but you did pick the brony one so you're not completely free that was irony I just wore it a couple of times because I wanted to see the expression on my colleagues' faces. That's it. Well, that's always legitimate at the fans online.

Yeah, perfectly reasonable explanation. It was ironic, so that's fine. This is the rule for all online discourse. Look, people, this is my advice to you. If you're getting online and you're struggling, people are dunking on you, and you're sort of floundering, well, then here's the secret. Be ironic. Everything is ironic. You're sort of floundering. Well, then here's the secret. Be ironic. Everything is ironic.

That's what all the pros do. Boomer knowledge being shared here. This is, you know, internet secrets of the boomer mind. So the negative review that we have this time, it's three out of five stars. So not that negative. This is where I'm having the goal because, you know, people are starting to realize they shouldn't be given one out of five stars. You're scraping the bottom of the negative review barrel.

I am. So we need more reviews. I'm not canvassing for more one-star reviews. As before, I will suggest if you want to write a funny negative review, you could still put five stars. So just keep that option in your pocket. So this one says, it's by SassyGirl10. And I do believe that the review is quite sassy.

So it's an accurate username. The title is, Try to Listen, Sam Smartpants. And then the review says painful. So defensive. Now, I got a feeling that's either intended for Sam or it's somebody telling me that I should listen to Sam more because he's a smart pants or no, are they calling me smart pants and say, I need to listen to like, listen to Sam, Mr. Smart pants. One of you is a smarty pants and the other one needs to listen.

Should listen. Look, if it is targeted at Sam, then that's really not fair because that's No, that's his freestyle review not fair because that's right. So Sam's needs to get on and leave a five-star review just to balance out the three-star he incurred. Yeah. And he will definitely be listening and I'm sure he'll be here. I heard this and yeah, but I wasn't defensive.

That's so anyway, like, anyway, and I've illustrated that. I'm not defensive. We're calling defenses. So yeah. Well, anyway, there we have a three-star review. I think it's related to the Sama episode. I can't be sure, but there's some hints there. Well, there wasn't a lot of meat on those bones, so there's

not much to say about it. I think for this future negative reviews, please make them a bit longer. Give us something to dig our teeth into. Yes. So that's it for today, Mark. We're done. We're finished. No, we're not finished.

We're wrapping it up. No, no, no, no, we're not finished. We're doing, we're doing Patreon shoutouts. Of course we are, Mark. We're wrapping it up. No, no, no. No, we're not finished. We're doing Patreon shoutouts. Of course we are, Matt. We're doing Patreon shoutouts before we finish. That's what we always do. So, and like we said, you know, the Patreons had access in our monthly AMA.

The top tier of patrons actually got to ask us various questions and probe the depths of our reaction to this episode. So there you go. There's one benefit or punishment, whichever way you look at it. And you even get to find out the color coding I use for my diary, what it means, what insights people get for their $10. It's hard to overestimate. The mere fact that you do color code your diary, it's big volumes.

We don't need to get into it. Listen, you brony. So that's true. But there's all this stuff there, which isn't just color coded diary information and whatnot. So should you be interested, check it out. So one thing, Matt, just very quickly, I don't know the etiquette of, So should you be interested, check it out. So one thing, Matt, just very quickly,

I don't know the etiquette of if somebody is a former patron, right? Like whether I should shout them out because they've left before. Like they might've left because they were deeply offended at something. So like if I shout them out now, it's like, oh, sounds like they're endorsing us, but they left this disgusted rage. What do you think the etiquette is? I don't know. I say, shut them out.

Okay. I'll do it. I'll make a judgment call. I'll make a judgment call. So our conspiracy hypothesizers for this week are, um, Sridhar Bhagavula. Oh God, that was terrible. Sridhar Bhagavula. If you pasted that into the chat, I could say it, I'm sure.

Okay. Okay. Mr. Smarty pants. He's, he's not racist. He just has a speech impediment. I do. I, I do as well

but here Sridhar Bhagavatula Sridhar Bhagavatula the you sure showed me you sure showed me so

my GP is got a much longer last name than I. I can say it perfectly, but it's true that... Well, thank you, Sridhar. And also, this one is easier. M. M. That's easy.

Yeah. M. M. Gwen Boyle. Gwen. Gwen. Gwen. Gwen.

And Matthew Hatfield. Good old Matthew. Gwen. Gwen. And Matthew Hatfield. Good old Matthew. Gwen. Matthew. Gwen. Matthew. Maybe M sounds for Matthew too. Matthew's a good name. And Trudar.

Anyone else? Did we forget anybody? No. That's it. Fantastic. And what are they? Are they conspiracy hypothesizers? They are indeed.

So thank you very much, you four. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay. Next we have some revolutionary geniuses to thank. So here, Joe Percy, Alex A, and Andy Hunt. Fantastic.

Andy Hunt. Andy Hunt. That's not the joke name, is it? No. It's close. It's almost a joke name. It's perilously close. What was the joke name?

I think it's too rude to say. Is it? Okay. All right. Well, anyway. Maybe start with Mike. Oh, right. Yeah. I got it. I got it. Yeah. Andy Hunt. Yeah. Yeah. I got it. Okay. All right. Well, anyway, he starts with Mark. Oh, right. Yeah,

I got it. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got it. That's right.

Thank you. Oh, you beautiful revolutionary thinkers or geniuses. Thank you. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking.

Um, okay. And, and last month we have some galaxy brain gurus. Um, the highest that people have reached the echelon of the guru Cosmosphere. Yes. These are the kinds of people that have figured out their own scientific theories. They've worked standard theories, but they're much more subtle and better. They're on another level, literally.

So we have Matthew Pickett, Tim Tripp, and anonymous ethicist, not a serial killer at all, just asking questions. I like that. Matt, Tim, anonymous ethicist, not a serial killer. Honestly, just asking questions. That's good. That's good. Not as good a name as Matthew, but still pretty good. And there was a bit of alliteration there.

I just think he should know this. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? Cut you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. I just want to also defensively note that, that like, it is genuinely true

that like, I'm just bad at pronouncing names, including Irish names. Like unless I, unless I know them in advance, I'm just generally pretty bad at reading out names. Yes, you are. Yeah. And that's okay. That's okay. People understand.

That's how I think you say it. It's all just flows. Like when you did it right. So it's, it's not their fault. Those are legitimate names. It's my fault. Those are legitimate news. It's my fault. People know that, Chris. People know that.

That's right. I'm glad I, you know. All right. Well, Matt, it's been fun. Enjoy groveling at the feet of your various muscle masters or whatever you Australians get up to. Well, yeah, that's right. If I can get the

boot off my neck, I'll be able to grovel properly. What an image, with the little pants and all. Alright, well, we'll see you soon for Grenade Brown. See you soon. Thank you.