Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 498: Mike Rothschild

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

Mike Rothschild, conspiracy theory expert and really brilliant person, joins the DTFH! Check out Mike's new book, The Storm is Upon Us! You can also follow him on Twitter. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. ZipRecruiter - Try for FREE at ZipRecruiter.com/Duncan Lucy - Visit Lucy.co and use promo code DUNCAN for 20% off your first order!

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. This is the Dugga Trussell family on The Trussell. If you want to know the root of all conspiracies, you can find it in the cobalistic tree. It shows what happens when infinity expresses itself as a you.

You and me, you and me, you and me. We might not share a family tree, we might not come from the same country, but our mommy is infinity. Next thing you know, we're drawing boundaries and to defend the boundaries, we need armies and for the armies to kill, they need to believe that there's a big difference

between you and me, you and me, you and me. We might not share a family tree, we might not come from the same country, but our mommy is infinity. Sometimes I play Jesus, sometimes you play Satan, sometimes you're the butcher, sometimes I'm the bacon, sometimes you're my mama,

sometimes I'm your wife, and we've been doing this for trillions of lives. You and me, you and me, we might not share a family tree, we might not come from the same country, but our mommy is infinity. Maybe one day we'll turn towards the light, try being in love instead of being right.

Throw a big party when they ask us to fight, they only have power if we're terrified. You and me, you and me, we might not share a family tree, we might not come from the same country, but our mommy is infinity. That song was called Sermon on the Toilet, and of course it's from the hit Broadway show

Jesus Christ TikTok Star. You're listening to the Dugga Trussell Family Hour podcast. It is I, your noble servant and master and friend and baby and parasite and angel. You know if I could freeze time, I would record another song called Parasitic Angel. Not only would I record it, but because I could freeze time, I would learn how to do surgery

and I would learn how to play every instrument, like the greatest musician of all time. And I would go and find Willie Nelson. I would do an ethical surgery where I would temporarily trade my vocal chords for his. I would have to do the surgery on myself, but we can freeze time, right, or I can. So that means I have an infinity to do all of this.

And then you could maybe wonder, why don't you just, if you can freeze time, unfreeze Willie Nelson and be like, look, I can freeze time. Will you sing a song for my podcast? Why are you going to trade vocal chords with him? And I think it's a fair point. So I'm going to revise that.

I would unfreeze Willie Nelson and I wouldn't spend any time trying to learn all the instruments. I would just be like, look, isn't it cool that I can freeze and unfreeze time? Will you sing a song called parasitic angel for me for my podcast and then I would record it and then that song would appear here and I'd have two songs in the intro for this podcast,

but can't freeze time. Not yet. Would love to though. It would be so fun. A really important question to ask yourself is, would you rather freeze time or be able to travel backwards in time? Freezing time seems a little better assuming

you could unfreeze other people. The whole going backwards in time, though I get it, it's kind of adventurous and exciting. I'm worrying about too many things going backwards in time. Even if another time traveler told me, look, don't worry, it's a multiverse. Therefore you can't fuck up the timeline. I would still be like, I don't know who you are.

Are you really a time traveler? Why are you naked? Why did we just make love? I think I would freeze time. I think that's the way to go. Regardless, it has nothing to do with today's guest, Mike Rothschild. Yes, a Rothschild is coming on the DTFH

to talk about one of my favorite things, conspiracy theories. With us here today is a conspiracy theory expert. He has written a wonderful book about QAnon and currently he's working on a book called Jewish Space Lasers. Waiting for you just around the corner is a conspiracy theory that you may never have heard of before

that is one of the more insidious, sinister, insane fucking conspiracy theories that I've ever heard and it's right there in front of your very eyes and a Rothschild is going to disclose this theory to you. Also around the corner is a conversation with a really brilliant person who has been analyzing QAnon and he helped me understand the roots of Q which explain a lot of things.

I don't know if you've ever heard of the Wudeku Pipeline and I don't blame you if you're just trying to forget about the whole thing, but if you experienced that strange moment of existential vertigo when you met someone who talks to trees or actually projects or drinks ayahuasca, someone who is deeply connected to the astral realm but who also was super into Trump,

then you know about the Wudeku Pipeline. Not to say that because you're into spirituality you can't love things that traditionally people aren't into. It was just odd because normally my experience with people like that is they are either apolitical or hyper leftist, communist, socialist people. So it was just an odd thing that happened where people started getting sucked into the QAnon conspiracy theory

and via that magnetization found themselves like storming the capital. The classic example of this being Jake Angelly, aka the QAnon shaman, also known as Yellowstone Wolf. You know the guy with the American flag painted on his face and the Viking helmet and the abs? Well this guy, as it turns out, is a decorated veteran. He received the National Defense Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal,

the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, and the Navy and Marine Corps Overseas Service Ribbon. He would go to political rallies, Black Lives Matter rallies and he would try to preach the QAnon conspiracy theory and then he really got into challenging the presidential election results and you know the rest of the story, I think he got arrested. Now this is only interesting because as you can see from looking at pictures of him,

this was a very spiritual dude. Here's a clip of Angelly explaining why he stormed the capital. And that's a part of shamanism. It's about creating positive vibrations in a sacred chamber. I also stop people from stealing and vandalizing that sacred space, the Senate. Okay, I actually stopped somebody from stealing muffins out of the break room. I also set a prayer in that sacred chamber because it was my intention to bring divinity and to bring God back into the Senate.

Conspiracy theories aside, gang, this is why if you ever find yourself one toke over the line, getting arrested, just ask for a lawyer. Don't try to explain to the cops the reason you were robbing the bank is because you were trying to liberate dark energy and spread it into the circulatory system of society or whatever you were doing. Just be like, could I get a lawyer, please? I'm super hot. Today, Mike Rothschild will help you understand the Wudeku Pipeline and the deep new age spiritual roots of QAnon and a lot of other cool stuff.

So strap in. We'll be right back after this. Thank you, Blue Chew, for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. You know, there's a lot of things that you could argue are essential for human life. Clean water, shelter, food, but also let's face it, boners. No boner, no human life. Blue Chew, it's more than just a chewable tablet that has the same active ingredients as Viagra and Sealis. It's a kind of humanist sacrament that could one day be the only thing that keeps human life going

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You just pay $5 shipping. That's BlueChew.com, promo code Duncan, to receive your first month free. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank Blue Chew for sponsoring the podcast. And we are back. I got a lot of shows coming up. You can find all my dates at DuncanTrussell.com. I'm going to be at the Helium Comedy Club in Portland at the end of the month.

You can get tickets through my website or by going to Helium's website. A lot of other dates, Phoenix, Rosemont, Denver. They're all coming up and you can find all the links at DuncanTrussell.com. Also, won't you please join my Patreon? It's at patreon.com. And now, dear children, welcome to the DTFH author and journalist, conspiracy theory expert, Mike Rothschild. Follow him on Twitter, check out his book, The Storm is Upon Us.

How QAnon became a movement, cult, and conspiracy theory of everything. But first, listen to him here. Everybody welcome Mike Rothschild. It's the DuncanTrussell video. Mike, welcome to the DTFH. It's so great to have you on the show. Yeah, it's great to be here. I have to tell you, I love conspiracy theories.

And so, having followed you on Twitter for a while, I don't know how it hadn't occurred to me that I should have you on the show because not only are you an expert at QAnon conspiracy theories, but also you are a member of the family, of all the families that is like the central, the nexus point for so many conspiracy theories. And you're writing a book about it. I can't wait to read Jewish space lasers. Yeah. So, hi.

Hi. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, of course. And you know, it's funny. I love conspiracy theories too. I love them as stories. I love picking apart what is real, what isn't, what is so compelling about these things that for most people, you hear that and go, yeah, no, that's insane.

I don't want anything to do with that. And then there's a few people who go, oh, that's what I've been looking for my whole life. So, I've always loved conspiracy theories as stories. And the whole Rothschild thing, like I grew up in a middle class, northern Chicago suburb, like nobody would have thought, looking at the split level home that my parents owned, that we were like part of a, you know, dynasty that's gone back hundreds of years. Like people just didn't think about that. When I started writing this stuff, it never occurred to me to use some kind of pen name.

It was really good because you don't ever want to have a sort of mystery about you that people want to solve, because then they try to solve it and they dig up more stuff about you. I mean, now that there's anything out there that is that interesting about me, but people dig up more stuff about you than when you just use your name and you just are who you are. So, sure. I mean, that's super smart. Yeah, because they would celebrate. They would feel so victorious if they uncovered.

He's a Rothschild. Right. He's like, no. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just like one more level of annoying explanation that I don't really want to deal with. I get it. But, you know, that's interesting to me to hear that you weren't in a, like I was expecting

you would say something like in your family. There's like a moment where they sit down with you and they're like, listen, you're a Rothschild. You're connected to this massive dynasty that at one point probably controlled the world, almost controlled the world. And here are the great secrets, but that didn't happen. Your parents didn't do that. You didn't, nothing like that happened. There was, there was, I mean, there was talk about my own Rothschild family and I got a

book from my dad, an unpublished family genealogy that talks about where my Rothschild family came from. It's really interesting because they were from Nordsteden, which is a completely different part of Germany than Frankfurt, where Meyer Aumschel Rothschild was born. But they, they moved to the Midwest. So they had a lot of success in places like Davenport, Kansas City. They were well respected merchants. One became a really well known playwright.

So it's so interesting that, that going beyond these sort of salacious, you know, world controlling stories about this family, there's a whole other family that really has done quite well for itself, but that nobody would ever write about because it's, there's nothing salacious there. It's just an American story. Right. Well, okay, great. That's, that's great to hear.

That's great to hear. So, but I'm going to, just because I, we're going to dive into a lot of conspiracy theories and many people who listen to my podcast are also a conspiracy aficionados. Can I just, so, and again, I don't think you are, but some people are going to think this is just the PR branch of the Rothschild family getting in to the zeitgeist to diffuse and dispel all the QAnon stuff. So that's, that's not who you are, right? No.

And the thing is, is that the Rothschilds, the actual Rothschilds don't actually talk about this stuff. When I started working on Jewish space lasers, and obviously I've got a long way to go on it, but when I started working on it, I wanted to see if I could get access to any family members to have them talk about what these theories have meant for them, you know, what's it like being linked to all of these bizarre hoaxes and tropes. They don't talk about it. They, they don't engage with it, their, their archivists don't talk about it.

And one of the people who works for the Rothschild archive told me that the family doesn't talk about it because they would put themselves in the position of having to prove something is not true, which of course is basically impossible. Right. Even by talking about it, you lend it credence that, that you don't, you just don't need to talk about it. You don't need to engage with these things. You know who you are.

You know what your family's done. What other people think is what other people are going to think and there's nothing you can do about that. Got it. I, I myself have been accused of more than a few conspiracy theories. I've been accused of being in the CIA, which is, and anytime you engage with that directly, which I don't, right, and try to explain, no, I'm not in the CIA. You only can sound like you're in the CIA.

Right. It's, you know, my, my, uh, I'm not in the CIA T-shirt is raising a number of questions about my involvement in the CIA. Do you have one that shirt? That's so cool. I would love a shirt like that, by the way. So let's just jump in. Sure.

Of all the conspiracy, you're an expert on conspiracy theories of all of them. Do you have one that, that you love the most? My favorite, Hollow Earth. I love Hollow Earth theory. So cool. Do you have something like that? You know, it's funny. I, I really enjoy these things because I like to figure out why people think they're true.

And the one that I always come back to is one that I actually enjoyed sort of picking it apart because there was a lot of truth to it is the mattress store conspiracy theory. What's that? Okay. Any major metropolitan area in the U S is going to have a street or a corner where there are like five mattress stores. Yeah. Every street, every street in there's some city where, sorry, I'm going to do that again.

Every city has some street where there's like five mattress stores and there's like a mattress firm and a sit and sleep and a, you know, cozy box, whatever. And for, uh, for a long time, people have been like, why are there so many mattress stores? And around 2018, I think it was on Reddit, somebody started talking about, uh, in a thread of what conspiracy theory do you 100% believe is why are there mattress stores on every corner? No one's ever in them. They're always lit up. They're always having massive sales.

What is going on here? That's got to be a front for drugs or tax evasion or trafficking or something. So what's actually going on there is that these stores are, first of all, all basically owned by the same company. They're basically all owned by mattress firm. They, um, they have different store names on them because mattress firm bought all these different, uh, chains and mom and pop stores. So it gives you the illusion of choice.

You know, if you don't like the deal at mattress firm, you walk across the street to sit and sleep. Well, mattress firm owns sit and sleep and the other thing is that mattresses are wildly marked up. They are overpriced by like 10 times what they cost to make. So even if you have like 50% off, you're still having 50% off of a massive markup. You only need to sell like one or two mattresses a week to keep the store open. Anything else beyond that is just profit because you don't keep the mattresses on site.

You've got like three people working there, all of whom are probably making minimum wage and getting paid commissions. They say perfectly executed racket that does not require any kind of sort of outside explanation to, to, to let us know why it's there. It's just there because this company has figured out exactly how humans work and shop for the best deals and how they can chisel the most money they can out of people at a time when you actually need a product that you need to have to live, you need to have a mattress. So that's, that's always the one I go back to as there are, there are real things going

on here and there is an actual conspiracy. It's just not a salacious conspiracy. It's the kind of everyday conspiracy that we've lived with for generations of a company saying how can we work together to screw the most people? According to the latest research, 90% of employers plan to make enhancing the employee experience a top priority in 2022. After all, a happy workplace is a key to attracting and keeping great employees. There's so many things you can do for your wonderful employees.

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That's ziprecruiter.com slash D-U-N-C-A-N Zip Recruiter, the smartest way to hire. Now, this is where I think if you want to spin off and really lose your shit, you can extrapolate from something as non-salacious as this horrible mattress store conspiracy order. Just already, man, when I was younger, I went shopping for mattresses, stormed out of one store. I couldn't believe how much they wanted. Went into another and it was the same fucking store.

I was just like some rat in an experiment and an awful stupid man. Same mattresses with different names. It's brilliant. You know the idea. As above so below, from looking at the way an apple falls from a tree, we can figure out the way the orbit of the moon. Similarly, just knowing, okay, look, obviously there's conspiracy theories. Here's one that's for sure.

You can extrapolate from that. Well, if that's happening, how many other things that are bigger than that are happening? How many other things that are less overt? You might see mattress stores when you're driving down the street, but there's a lot of other things you don't see, like weapons manufacturers or all of those things. If we are to apply as above so below to this mattress store, don't you think it's safe to assume there's maybe a million different versions of whatever that racket is globally? Absolutely.

Hidden fees, hidden taxes, companies conspiring to keep prices high on things when they could easily lower them. They just don't want to. This is the kind of everyday chicanery that people, when people go, oh, I guess you don't think any conspiracies are real. They say, well, no, tons of conspiracies are real. Look at right now. The oil companies are all conspiring to keep gas prices artificially high.

It doesn't require a cabal or secret occult rituals. They just know that, hey, nobody's going to start their own gas station. You've got to go to one of these couple of places to fill up your tank. Hey, let's keep the prices high because we can. Look at cigarette companies. Look at places dumping carcinogens in water. They get away with things purely motivated by greed. It doesn't require secret meetings or rituals or aliens.

It's just humans being humans who have power over other humans. Also, I think there are rituals, but they aren't like the rituals these people are imagining. There's the ritual of the boardroom. There's the ritual of putting on a suit and gathering in a room. There's secrets in the sense that you're in the eight out. You're going to have a conversation about how the fuck do we profit off of turbulence in the world? Sure.

That's a ritual. It just doesn't look. There's no goat heads or whatever. Right. There are in groups and out groups. There are hierarchies. There's jargon. Yes.

And this is everyday stuff. I really encourage people to think a little bit less salaciously about conspiracies and to just simply look around to see how people are using their power against other people. Right. That's pretty much it. Obviously, if you're going to use your power against other people and you don't want to lose that power, you camouflage. This is like, look at evolution.

Look at the creatures that are able to camouflage versus the ones who can't. We don't know the ones who can't camouflage because they're not around anymore. They got eaten. Right. So that's the idea. It's not a cobble. It's a corporation or it's a business or it's a state propaganda machine or something like that that is camouflaging itself as one of us.

That brings us to QAnon, because to me, like QAnon represents some nihilistic philosophy. The essence of the thing is nihilism. Nothing is real. And so, but QAnon has managed to somehow do what you just did, point out, yeah, there's shit going on in the world that is secret and is all over the place. And use just that alone as a destabilizing mechanism to make people feel completely like the bottom has been dropped out and then to start offering some stupid solution to this thing.

So, can you just summarize real quick the roots of QAnon, the evolution of it from where it started and where it is now? Sure. And I go really, really deep into detail in the book I wrote about Q. QAnon really has its predecessors in very similarly worded scams and frauds. And this was kind of the thing that I really started to see when I really started to get concerned about QAnon. I've been following it for a couple of months.

I thought it was just sort of another weird internet thing. Yeah. They come and go, you know, there's a hundred of them a month. This one to me though really reminded me of some of these long running scams and frauds and there's a line that I draw in the book and they start in, you know, the first place you think of, downstate Illinois in the early 90s. And right. Really?

Yeah. So, there was a scam that went on in Mattoon, Illinois, a little working class town in downstate Illinois, run by a guy named Clyde Hood. Clyde Hood was a classic grifter, drifted from job to job, really never did anything with his life. But he reinvented himself as one of only six or seven people in the world who had access to a financial instrument called Prime European banknotes. Wow.

And these were banknotes that you could buy through Clyde Hood. They cost a hundred dollars and Clyde Hood would reinvest your money in a company he formed called the Omega Trust. And the Omega Trust was available to good Christians. It would help you take the riches of the Lord's storehouse. You could buy as many Omega units as you could afford and they would roll over and they would keep rolling over and rolling over until one day they would be released by the European bankers, you know, wink, wink, and you would be a millionaire.

Clyde Hood and about a dozen of his cronies got filthy rich off this. They were building mega mansions. They were driving around in hundred year old cars. They were buying people businesses. There are stories of sacks of cash that would rip when you picked them up because they were so heavy. Wow. Well, Clyde Hood got busted and his cronies all got busted.

One of his acolytes was a woman named Shani Goodwin who lived in Yelm, Washington, very new age town, the home of the Ramtha movement. Okay, sure. Yeah. People have been in this world kind of know Yelm, Washington. So she took some of the sort of pie in the sky prosperity gospel stuff of Omega and fused it with another sort of financial guru conspiracy thing going around called Nassara. Now Nassara was proposed as a law that would basically wipe dead off the books.

And this this guy who wrote it in a book called Draining the Swamp, which is just a great little detail. Holy shit. It's about to everybody in Congress assumed that would be passed as law and that we would have financial prosperity forever. Well, nobody in Congress touched it. But this woman, Shani Goodwin, found this guy's proposal and she took a version of that and fused it with Omega and rewrote Nassara as this kind of great unveiling of prosperity

and that there was this secret war going on between good and evil. The good guys wanted Nassara released the bad guys were trying to stop it. The bad guys did 9 11 to stop Nassara from being released. And actually the message that she put up on, I think it was Usenet or Yahoo groups, literally as the second tower was coming down might have been the first 9 11 conspiracy theory. What? Yeah. So I'm sorry.

A lot of information there is a lot. It's a lot. Nassara to keep Nassara from the book or what specifically are they keeping from the release? So Nassara had mutated into a whole new set of laws that we would go back to the gold standard. The president in Congress would be replaced by a Nassara president and Nassara Congress. Bill Clinton had signed it into law, but no one was allowed to talk about it because they'd be executed if they did.

And then you start this start starts branching off into angels, the Galactic Federation of Light. Yeah. All this, you know, Pleiadians, all this other New Age crap. So this was on, yeah, this goes on for for well into the aughts in 2004, Shani Goodwin who'd started calling herself Dove of Oneness bought mobile billboards to drive around Washington DC demanding Nassara. Now she defrauded an old lady in San Francisco to get the money for those billboards.

So this finally fizzled out probably about 2006 or 2007, right? As another scam, very much like it was coming out called the Iraqi Denar. This is another one that Q people are really big into. Trump, it was I got pulled into the Trump orbit for a while. This was basically if you buy up enough worthless Iraqi currency, either the International Monetary Fund or at the time, President Obama or the UN was going to sign a revalue that would revalue the Iraqi Denar to be on par with the dollar. And so if you had a million Iraqi denars, you would have something of millions of dollars

trillions of trillions of really was it was like trillions of dollars would be created out of nothing. Now, never mind that that is not at all how money works like right that that the basics of finances are the opposite of that. People were going broke buying denars. There was a denar firm that got busted actually just a couple of years ago that had made something like $600 million off of this. So right as Trump comes into office, he's been in office about eight or nine months

as the Mueller probe is really gaining steam, the denars scam is kind of fizzling out. That's when Q starts up. So there is no link between the people who started Q and the people who are running the denar scam or Nassara, but it's the same thing. It's an all knowing guru who has secret intel that they are dispensing to you because you are special and you are important and you and all the people who believe in this are going to band together and you're going to fight back. And Q, the thing that really troubled me about Q is that Q replaced the endless riches that

you would have when the revalue or the Nassara packets or whatever got released, that got replaced by the good feelings that you would have when your enemies were executed in front of you. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember that started happening, the executions, the famous noose in front of the White House, the calling for Pence to be hung.

This is all connected to this thing as it was getting increasingly toxic and dangerous. It's getting increasingly toxic, increasingly dangerous. The ideation is getting more and more violent. You're openly talking about, you know, should Hillary Clinton be shot or should she be hanged? Oh, maybe she should be guillotined. Right. This is not even stuff that Nassara people were talking about. This was very much like pie in the sky, all holding hands.

Everything's going to be great. This was, there was no violence in those moments. Okay. But what you're talking about is known, I've heard it called the Wu to Q pipeline. So and now it all makes sense because the roots of the damn thing were Wu. They were like complete, now it makes, because you know, that's something a lot of us, I was at a party here in Asheville, North Carolina talking to a hippie on acid who was telling me, you know, the CERN particle accelerator split the timelines and you know, I love these

stories. Honestly, I can be like, I don't know, maybe shit is a little weird right now. But he, but the part where it got weird is he's like, and we're on the wrong timeline because on the other timeline, Trump is still president. And I'm like, I didn't say anything, but it was the last thing you would expect coming out of the mouth of someone like on a lot of acid up in the mountains of North Carolina. It's like, wait, how now I see how it happened. Now it makes sense.

It's like, now, okay, so this is thank you for that summary, it's terrifying and weird and awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely. So to me, when I'm seeing all of all the stuff that's happening and how it is literally driving people insane and how it has as you've written about it actually somehow managed to get into our government. Like it's somehow managed to get into our government.

To me, my conspiracy theory about this conspiracy theory is clearly this is some kind of weaponized propaganda that is being used by someone trying to emulate some of the tactics of the CIA. The CIA has done shit like this, gone into other countries, created disturbances and disruptions to cause instability in the government there. So what are your thoughts on that? Isn't this somehow connected to either Russia or China or one of our alleged like enemies out there? Isn't this some kind of weaponized philosophy propaganda that's just designed to fuck up

the United States government and make all of us sort of confused and polarized? So it's a great question and it is really the first place a lot of people go. And as it turns out, it's a lot more complicated than that surprise. So comfortable, pampered Westerners have an innate ability to convince themselves of truly bizarre things because their lives are sort of ordinary and boring and they need something else to make their lives seem more dangerous. Q really fits that perfectly. And of course, the poster, the 4chan poster who would become known as Q or QAnon was not

the first anonymous truth teller on 4chan. Before Q there was FBI Anon, there was White House Insider Anon, there was a British one, MI5 Anon, there was a guy who called himself Highway Patrolman who claimed he busted a billion dollar shipment of Adrena Chrome coming across the Mexican border. There is a long tradition of this kind of shit posting, this kind of like, we're going to tell a story and lARPing, exactly, of pretending that you are more interesting than you actually are. Yeah.

And Q caught on and I really believe that Q would have been just any one of these other LARPs would have posted a lot of garbage and then disappeared. And then it would have been replaced by something else. Q was a little bit different for a couple of reasons. First of all, Q's first drop, it was October 2017, was that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested in two days and that you would know that she had been arrested because the Marines and National Guard would be called up to quell the riots that would happen when her arrest was made public.

So very early on, you have the most loathed figure on the far right in Hillary Clinton who is going to get her due, who is going to get her just desserts. This isn't just sort of vague stuff of like, I know things, but I can't tell you or yes, aliens exist and they're under a bunker, but you'll never be able to know about it. Here is, this is a concrete thing that is going to happen that you have always wanted to happen. And it's going to happen in a couple of days and it's going to be fucking great. And you're going to know that it's happening because there's riots going on.

At the same time as those first couple of posts were going up, there was a conspiracy theory going around the 4chan swamps that there was going to be an Antifa uprising on November 4th, 2017, and that Antifa was going to start going door to door and killing Trump supporters and rioting and destroying everything. So there is no paper trail for this because of course not, but I'm convinced that the person who made those posts really did believe that this Antifa apocalypse was going to happen and that the Antifa uprising was going to be the proof of Hillary Clinton's arrest. Now none of that happened.

There was no Antifa uprising, Hillary not arrested, John Podesta not arrested, nothing happened. Very quickly though, the people who really wanted to believe that that post was real really got into it very, very quickly and very publicly. It didn't stay on 4chan very long. It went to Reddit, it went to YouTube very quickly within like days. There were decoding videos, there were long threads on Reddit, long threads on Twitter. And so the normal trajectory of these things, which is to post a bunch and then go away,

you suddenly had an opportunity here and you had an opportunity for grift. So you keep the story going. The story gets a lot more vague, it gets a lot more rhetorical, the very concrete predictions get replaced by rhetorical questions and riddles, and then all of these elements that would come to be what we know as Q today started to rise up in the aftermath of those first few posts. So it really developed very organically, like you can see the sweat coming off of the person who wrote those posts going, how do I keep this going?

It's not organized, there's no plan, there's no, there's no gotcha at the end, it is clearly just a bunch of plates that are spinning. And rather than take the plates off once they've spun enough, you just add more plates. So that to me is the sign that this was developed organically by a 4chan shit poster, larping as an important person, because people on 4chan are used to that. And they spoke the language, especially spoke the language of American evangelical conservatism. They knew what they were talking about, they knew how to reach people. Only a really experienced 4chan poster could do that.

Okay, great. All right, so, all right, fine. That's just some larping troll who like, like just wanted to have some fun. And who can't understand that? You know what? If I was a teen or 20 year old and the internet existed, I cannot totally get having some fun with that. And it seems like 4chan has gotten a little more astute or something about these things.

Like I said, whenever I'm on there, you can see them get instantaneously shot down and every, there's always attempts at producing some bullshit like that. Yeah, yeah, but don't you think that even though the original poster was whatever that some of this stuff is being exploited as some psyops experiment that some of it just feels so specifically weird and specifically sticky that my completely with nothing to base this on other than my intuition and I just to so you know how horrible my intuition is like I thought a meteor was gonna hit during the pandemic at one point when I was really losing my shit.

Hey, you know, what would have been a sweet release, you know, right exactly. But don't you get the feeling that like some of the stuff some of this stuff is being intentionally exploited by like, I don't know, Russian troll farms, state propaganda machines. Or even, in other words, yes, cobbles are taking this now, they might be groups of hackers, they might be troll farms, they might be some PR firm trying to cash in. But don't you get the sense that whatever this QAnon instability is, is intentionally being amplified by fun groups that have real funding and are really good at this sort of shit. Yes, absolutely.

And we know for a fact that really early on in Q, a bunch of Internet research agency linked Twitter accounts started tweeting about QAnon. I want to thank Lucy for supporting this episode of the DTFH. We all have a friend who's out there puffing on cigarettes. They smell like an old sailor's boot, washed up on some ashtray shore, cigarette smokes fucking gross. I hate the way it makes your hair smell like when you're making out with someone in there. They've been smoking.

If you enjoy using nicotine, you should definitely check out Lucy's Products at lucy.co. That's lucy.co and use promo code Duncan at checkout. So I have to read this disclaimer warning. This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical end of disclaimer. Like someone listening is like, wait, what? Remember, if you're interested in a better way to use nicotine, visit lucy.co and be sure to use my glorious promo code Duncan.

Really early on in Q, a bunch of Internet research agency linked Twitter accounts started tweeting about QAnon. It happened very quickly in probably about five figures worth of tweets. What happens though is that those tweets are really insignificant compared to the reach that QAnon was getting in general. They got very little engagement. They really didn't sort of move up the food chain of disinfo. They weren't grabbed onto by bigger conspiracy gurus.

They were kind of just churn there. They were sort of filler. The ones who really made a big difference were some of these early evangelists. Now they may have been pushing things that the Russians were also pushing, Chinese were also pushing, Iranian trolls were pushing, but there is also a very homegrown system of belief that these people have. These people started making videos. They went on Info Wars.

Within a couple of months, a couple of these guys, these very early Q evangelists were on Info Wars saying, we found the greatest military intelligence operation of all time. Come and join us. Come help us out. All of a sudden, all these retired ex-military boomers are like, I want to take Hillary down. You absolutely have foreign amplification, but you also have a very homegrown desire to punish the people who have kept you down. That's definitely being exploited by outside groups, by outside funding, and certainly

then you have bigger fish coming in who are latching onto this. You have somebody like Jerome Corsi, the birth certificate journalist who was on Info Wars all the time. You have Alex Jones. You have Michael Flynn. You have Lynn Wood coming in, on and on and on. These bigger names start latching onto QAnon because they know that there is a big population there of people who they can very easily grift and they all need money and they all have

products that they're pushing. They all have massive legal bills and they go, here are some wallets that we can extract. We'll just say whatever Hockham comes to mind. We probably believe half of it anyway, but who cares? But early on QAnon had a very secretive feel. It felt like a cool club. It felt like that band that you saw playing in your garage and you heard their first demo and now they're selling out arenas and you're like, I don't like them anymore.

That's exactly what Q was. It was cool. It was special. It was hard to understand. It was very jargon heavy, very backstory heavy. It repelled most people, but the people that it attracted made it into their life and that is a kind of devotion that you can't troll your way into that. That has to be part of you already.

Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Cool. All right. Well, I have to tell you about something that happened to me once. It was one of the, a moment when I had a real epiphany regarding how advanced political groups are getting using the internet recently, you know, it was popped up.

Tiktokers being briefed by the White House about the Russia, Ukraine situation and Russian tiktokers, you know, really like being pressured to release tiktoks about why it's right that Russia invaded Ukraine. So this is something that happened to me when Beto O'Rourke, I don't know. I liked Beto. I don't know a lot of people who thought I think he's cringe or whatever. I liked him. I thought it was cool.

So whatever, I'm like, it's late at night. I retweet a Beto O'Rourke thing, whatever. So then immediately I start getting these messages from people saying the same. And now I can't remember the word because I'm dumb. The word was they were all calling Beto O'Rourke a God damn it. What's the name? It's such a cool name. A highly charismatic person who is also kind of fascist.

Damn it. I need to like, like a, like a Chad. Not like it. No, it was a big word. Okay. This is what was, this is the thing. It was a word that no one uses. Okay.

You know, a demigog. Demigog. Okay. Okay. Demigog. Who the fuck? I don't even know how to pronounce it. That's really specific.

Demigog. Okay. So I get, I start getting messages from different people being like, you're really gonna retweet that demigog and then somebody else really you want to retweet a demigog. And then I'm looking at these accounts and one of them specifically said, you know, Duncan, I really am sorry about you losing your mom, but I can't imagine that you would retweet a demigog. And so I'm looking, this is like someone who definitely doesn't fucking listen to my podcast

at all. Yeah. And, but who is clearly being paid by whatever company Ted Cruz had hired to do some kind of viral bullshit. Right. And, but what made it creepier to me was, wait, does that mean they have some weird data packet on me or on, like, if you have a certain number of followers, they assemble a little packet and then, and then, and so you could push the needle a little bit.

In other words, get to the people who have followers, make it seem like there, there's a bunch of different people who are responding to something in the negative condition, then slightly move the needle. And the next thing you know, suddenly you're tweeting some insane shit thinking it's original thinking when you've been manipulated by, I guess the political equivalent of a, of a publicist or whatever, you know, in a political troll farm. So if that's happening just from people within our government who are trying to get elected, definitely it's happening with other state media and other countries who are just trying

to infiltrate quote influencers. Do you know anything about this? Have you heard anything about this or how that works or have you experienced it yourself? Well, one of the interesting things that you're seeing with QAnon now is they're really moving away from the much more esoteric stuff. They're moving away from the, from the jargon and the catchphrases and the occult stuff. Now some Q believers are still totally on board with that stuff, but a lot of this is getting much more mainstream.

And as it gets more mainstream, it's easier to pick it up and attach other messages to it. And if you really take it to the extreme, what you're seeing just going on right now with these bio labs conspiracies going on with Ukraine, this, this, I mean, this like U.S. bio labs, you know, exploited by Russia, you know, pushed out as propaganda, that's been going on for a long time. Like Russia has always had an obsession with germ warfare, with pinning diseases on, on the U.S. I mean, they were pushing conspiracy theories about the CIA creating AIDS at Fort

Dietrich in the late eighties, you know, pushing this on vulnerable American populations who were suffering horribly from AIDS and looking for somebody to blame for it. So you are seeing this going on right now with this, this bio lab stuff. And I've tweeted a couple of times just about the fact that there are not bio labs. What you have are, you know, the Ukraine has, you know, germ warfare laboratories and other things where they're, they're destroying old Soviet stockpiles of chemical weapons and germ warfare weapons. But if you even mentioned bio labs, you get, you get all these tweets coming out, oh, you're

saying they're not real. Same thing with Hunter Biden. They're just today, they're, you know, on the 15th, there was news that Russia sanctioned Hunter Biden. Okay, that's going to win them the war. But immediately I said, you know, I pointed, I tweeted about how useless this was and how the people who think this matters are the people who are obsessed with Hunter Biden's laptop.

I immediately get half a dozen tweets. Oh, so you're saying it was his laptop, same language, same velocity. Yes, that there, there is absolutely coordination going on here. There's, there's not even a question in my mind about it. Okay, great. So you know what I'm talking about. Of course you do. And, and so what I usually do when I'm getting that, when I start getting the repetitive,

I almost know you want to talk about it because I don't want them to evolve into like, okay, we're going to have to, they are evolving. They're like velociraptors on Jurassic Park. You can't stop it. You can't stop them. But when you start getting what you're talking about, the similar intensity, clearly whatever that it might be a I bought. So I will obviously go to their accounts out of curiosity.

And then you look at their accounts, you realize, wait a minute, these people don't sleep. Somehow they've been tweeting 24 hours a day, retweeting shit 24 hours a day. So I don't know if this means it is a person in a cubicle who then another person comes and takes over that account, or if it's an AI bot, do you have any data on that? It's, it's something, it's probably something along the lines of people in cubicles who are doing this and we're controlling different accounts. Because one of the things that you have is you have these AI generated faces.

And so they have these, these fake faces of people who don't exist. Their account names are constantly changing. The, the things they tweet about are constantly changing. You'll see somebody who, some account that is the face of a young woman who's tweeting about, you know, Ivermectin being great. And then three months later, it's a man tweeting about how Vladimir Zelinsky is trafficking children. Right.

It's so the, as long as the account is there, it's useful for the purposes of whoever is running it. And if the, whatever they're doing is changing, just the account itself is valuable. You want the aid? Cause like if you're being lazy, you're going to look at like, all right, when did the account appear? Right. If it appeared right when the invasion of the Ukraine started to fuck you.

I know what you are, but shit, it's a 15 year old account. Right. It was created in, you know, March, 2012. I'm like, huh. Yeah. Interesting. That. Okay.

This is the conspiracy, the real conspiracy, which is we have swarms of these accounts that have anonymous ownership that are being used to infiltrate the brains of people. And really like causing such insane problems that it's incredible to me that we don't have regulation. Right. I'm not, I, I, I'm a, I get Elon Musk's free speech idea. I get that idea. I totally get it.

I think we have to acknowledge the fact that like these, some of these people aren't people. Right. They're bots and the bots are trained and the bots are trying to warp reality on purpose and that to fund or fuel or, or, or whatever. I like, if it's your run of the mill, you know, I, I gotta tell you, one of the saddest moments was when YouTube cracked down on some of these conspiracy videos. It was one of, one of my favorite activities late at night, find the weirdest conspiracy theory, then let the algorithm suggest the next one until you get to someone like in

a purple lycra in front of people talking about aliens. You can't do that anymore. It's gone. Right. Pisses me off. I can handle that shit. I'm not going to believe it. I just, it's fun when you're stoned.

Right. But when we've got literal, this is what's so bizarre about it. We have actual robots among us disguising themselves as people online, obviously, not in real life and who are distorting information to the point where it is changing elections. It's getting people killed. Like imagine a town hall meeting in the 1800s and you're looking around and wondering how many of us are robots here? Right.

Yeah. How many of you are real? And so to me, that's the invasion of the body snatcher shit that is happening to all of us. But we have non-human entities who are warping things in a way that is causing incredible instability. Right. And no one's doing anything about it as far as I could tell.

Right. You have non-human entities controlled by who the hell knows. You also have people who just get off on causing chaos, you know, homegrown trolls. You have grifters who are pushing out the most insane stuff purely for money. And you never know where one ends, where one begins, who's doing what, who's real, who's got an agenda. Everybody's making money hand over fist with this. And the social media companies are fighting the last war.

It took so long to crack down on QAnon that by the time places like Twitter and Facebook really got around to getting rid of some of these accounts, the damage was done. The minds had been warped. And now the people who ran these accounts who are very skilled trolls, very skilled grifters, they knew exactly how to create a new band evasion account. You would see some of these accounts have been banned dozens of times. This guy who, he was going by, I think, like clandestine war on Twitter, who made the biolab thing take off.

This was a guy who goes by Wyatt, who has created dozens of Twitter accounts. He's a huge QAnon promoter. It is unconscionable that Twitter would have let this guy sneak back on again, build a following and push out this conspiracy theory that happened to catch on, that happened to be believable enough for enough people to run with. And now it's on Fox News, Tucker Carlson's talking about it, China is talking about it. This is a failure of the imagination of the people who run these companies to not look at this and say, how is this going to be misused?

How is our service going to be weaponized? How can we stop it before this happens? And this is not censorship. This certainly is not a violation of anybody's First Amendment rights. This is about a service protecting the vulnerable people who are on it. And the fact that they don't seem to have the impetus to do it is very troubling to me. Well, I mean, this is the AI apocalypse. This is the like human beings are hackable.

We all know that, neuro-linguistic programming. And God knows what else. And if you have millions of dollars, some countries are just pouring so much money into their into AI as a, you know, to use it for info warfare. It's just terrible. It's terrifying because I don't just the times I realize, oh my God, it got in me. Like I realized like, oh, fuck, there's a little meme swimming around in my consciousness where I haven't spent enough time thinking about this is bullshit.

Also, you know, this is I want to jump into the book you're working on now, Jewish space lasers. One of the things over the years as I have followed many conspiracy theories. One of the things I realized is there is a slippery slope. Like you go to from flat earth to hollow earth to whatever the fuck it is. It's just a matter of time before the person who is subscribing to this stuff, and it doesn't happen all the time, becomes an anti-Semite. And this is something I'm curious about.

Do you, is this, I wonder, is it like, okay, well, if you believe the earth is flat, then your ability to be rational is probably compromised to some degree, meaning you're an easy recruit. I can recruit you. Yeah. Also, if you believe the earth is flat or one of my other favorite conspiracy theories, which is mud flood that history as we know it is completely Tataria. Yeah. Tataria.

I love Tataria. Oh, it's so cool. But Tataria means, guess what it means, Holocaust didn't happen or that stuff is bullshit. So if you like deny the shape of the earth, if you deny history, then just kind of accidentally. Right. Yeah, there wasn't really a Holocaust. Right. And if there wasn't really a Holocaust, well, then who's saying there's a Holocaust?

Right. Who's promoting that idea? Well. I think you know who's promoting the idea. Right. The same people who want you to think the earth is round. Right. It's the fucking Rothschilds, man.

It's you. Yep. So have you, are you covering that in your book? Yes. Yeah. Or is it like white supremacist groups praying on people who have started investigating some of these like conspiracy theories, or is it just, is it just a natural byproduct where you just accidentally will suddenly become someone who thinks that the Jews are running

the world and are intentionally trying to, what are they trying to do to, uh, destroy white. People. Sure. So there is a, there's a susceptibility in, in conspiracy theories, where if you believe one, you are almost certainly going to believe more than one. They really are like pringies. You're not going to have just one conspiracy.

You're not going to say, well, the Corsican mafia working with the Secret Service and the Bilderbergers assassinated JFK, but I believe everything else the media tells me. If you believe one, you're going to believe more than one, and that's, that's where the algorithms come in. And that's where that slippery slope of radicalization comes from. Where early days of the pandemic, everything, everything's going to hell. Everything's changing. Everybody's suddenly inside.

You've got this virus and nobody knows what to do about it. Nobody knows what's going on. You personally think, well, you know, I've never really trusted that 5G technology. I don't, I don't like that. One of those towers went up near me. I started getting headaches. My neighbors started getting stomach aches, whatever, whatever it is. I'm going to go online.

I'm going to see if there's a connection there between this 5G thing and the pandemic, because I don't have anything else to do. I'm in my house. I'm alone. I'm bored. I maybe have gotten laid off. My social life is gone. I can't do anything.

I can't see anyone. I've got nothing else to do, but go down rabbit holes. I'm going to go down this rabbit hole. I'm going to join this Facebook group. Oh, it's about if we don't trust 5G, well, you're in your 5G, your anti 5G Facebook group a couple of days, then the algorithm recommends this, um, anti Bill Gates Facebook group or people are talking about, you know, that Soros, he's behind these, these towers and you know, we've heard some things about him that maybe he was actually a Nazi, you go, Oh, I've heard

some things about him. I don't know about that guy. You join your anti Soros Facebook group, then it links you to the anti vaccine Facebook group. Then it links you to the great awakening Facebook group. And suddenly you have gone from a progressive anti Trump yoga mom who, you know, just wants what's best for her kids to the Rothschild's own all the central banks. And it happens without any intention.

You may, you may have never had that thought cross your mind. But once you feel like the scales have fallen off your eyes about one thing, you want more, you want more secrets, more truth, more, more Pringles because they're salty and they're delicious and you don't want just one. You want all of them. And then you have, you have radicalized yourself. No one did it to you other than an, an algorithm programmer who maybe didn't have the imagination to see how this would be weaponized.

And that's how it happens. And then it happens over and over and over. Wow. Yep. Now. Okay. I guess it'd be fun to talk about because in contemplating these things and specifically secret societies, you know, hidden groups, shadowy groups, controlling governments,

don't you think based on like how the world reacts to certain people, generally like intelligent people that they're kind of makes sense that groups of smart people would secretly gathered together, not out for some nefarious purpose, but just out of the realization that if we, if too many people understand what we're trying to work out philosophically here, they kill us. They beat us up. Yeah. They, you know, so when I'm thinking, I've never really met anyone that I'm aware of

that's in an actual secret society. I've met Freemasons, obviously I've met, you know, people into the occult or whatever. And if I did meet someone who's in a secret society, well, they did a great job because they sure as fuck didn't tell me what you shouldn't do. Yeah. I'm yappy. I'm glad. I don't want to know by the way, but, but, but I can't, I'm thinking about it like, like,

there's times my wife and I need to have conversations away from the kids. You know what I mean? There's stuff we're working out that the kids aren't going to understand or and similarly there are scared violent people in this world who burn witches. They burn fucking witches. They drag women out of their house, just set them on fire for no reason at all. Maybe a cow nearby. It's milk went bad.

So the story of, of Jesus, look what happened to him. He was yappy sermon on the Mount. Fuck you. Nailed to the fucking cross. So from all of these like historic events where people with alternate ideas about reality that don't match Protestant fundamentalist conceptualizations of things, gay people. Don't you kind of see why secret societies would form and why they probably do exist right now?

Sure. And, and human beings have an innate need to belong. We want to be around people who are like us. We want to be around people who have the same upbringings we do the same values we do. And it's natural for those people to get together and then to start to exclude people who are not part of that group. And that they're you're very sort of your most vanilla versions of that are people like the Freemasons, like the, you know, Rotary Club, whatever.

It's people who have the same values. You have maybe some rituals, some jargon, you're a little bit secretive. And the only reason you do it is because you want to feel like you are connected to other people. You want to have that community and you want to feel safe. You want to feel like you can say whatever you want. Like you can, you can gossip about whoever you like. We're all, we all, you know, we all love Trump here or whatever it is.

You know, and I know Freemasons. I know like high ranking Freemasons, just like people I know in my life. And they're like, it's really boring. We just, we sit around and we eat barbecue and we talk about our grandkids. I mean, it's like the most banal stuff you could possibly imagine, but when you don't know what's going on in a group, and especially when that group is made of more powerful people where you have something like the Bilderberg group or Bohemian or Davos or, or whatever these things are, powerful, wealthy people who do not want you to know what they are

talking about, our minds have evolved to assume that it is dangerous for the same reason that we see a gust of wind in a tree and our mind goes, it might be a hawk. You better run. Well, 99% of the time it's not going to be a hawk. One percent of the time it's going to be a hawk and it's going to gouge your eyes out. And then you can't pass on your genetics to the next generation. So our, we have evolved to see danger in chaos and we've evolved to seek patterns. And the, the, the need to see secret societies and gatherings of people who maybe do not want

their doings known by the public, that is an evolution of that seeing danger everywhere we go. And our joining these societies are wanting to be parts of groups like that is an offshoot of our wanting to belong and wanting to feel like we're part of something bigger than we are. That's exactly why QAnon succeeds so well, because it gives you that sense of being part of something bigger than you and more important than your little life. You are a digital soldier.

You're fighting for Trump. You're fighting for children. You're fighting to rid the world of a 6,000 year old death cult. I mean, never mind that none of that stuff is real. Donald Trump doesn't give a damn about you. The people who are hurting children are doing it in plain sight. You have your role to play and you'll be damned if anyone stops you from doing that. Wow.

Yeah, that's the part that's the most vile aspect of it. These motherfuckers, man. It's like, you know, we all want children to be okay. I think it's a universal that we all want children to be okay. So what do you do? You accuse these people. And again, isn't this just that I read an entire article. Maybe you wrote it.

I'm not sure that that the adrenochrome conspiracy theory is just an evolution of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda that yes, what's it called? The blood libel. Yes. And so they just upgraded it to adrenochrome, but it's the same idea. It's the same thing. It's the the weird outsiders with their long beards and their big hats and their foreign language that we don't understand and they don't worship Jesus.

Well, they're probably doing something bad. Well, what's the worst thing you can do? Something bad to children. Oh, and they have weird rituals. So the children are involved in those weird rituals. Then a child disappears and you go, oh, they use they're using his blood in there to bake their matzah for their weird ritual. And then it that that sticks for a thousand years.

That sticks in our culture. Yeah, it's so fucked up. And yeah, that's the OK. So yeah, that to me is where this that's where, you know, my joy of conspiracy theories will never end. I will always enjoy going late at night, looking up Tartar, looking at the mud flood, fantasizing about how cool that would fucking be and or believing that there could be like civilizations inside the core of the earth.

I love listening to old coast to coast AM episodes. You know, yeah, it's it's great. It's great. But fuck these people who took something that was so fun and just something cool and just fun and it wasn't going to make you like go nuts or put Viking horns on and run into the run into the government and like people for ruining that. It's just such to me. It's such a dismaying thing because now if I do profess the love for conspiracy theories,

then I get equated as being a member of these Q or these fucking assholes, which I'm not violent, crazy, anti-Semitic racist who wants to kill Hillary Clinton that and that is to me such a it's just garbage and you ever did that. I don't know. I have horrible feelings towards that. Don't you remember when it was cool to know about conspiracy? Sure. It was like I would listen to coast to coast AM when I was in college and it was talking

about like UFOs and the face on bars and cattle mutilations and crop circles and life after death. I'm like, this isn't stuff anybody I knew talked about. I didn't have this stuff growing up as a kid. This is really cool. This is really out there. I enjoy this. I enjoy hearing about this.

I enjoy debating whether, hey, maybe this is true. Maybe this isn't true. It's not hurting anybody. Nobody who believed that the moon landing was faked got a gun and shot somebody. That's just not what it was and now it is so wrapped up in mainstream culture. It's so pervasive. It's so dark. It's so violent.

It's so it's so baked into this kind of secret war between good and evil that you can't just sort of idly believe. Yeah, it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald, but I don't know who it was. You know, we'll probably never know that that level of sort of casual belief is like almost not even possible anymore with conspiracy theories. Right. That casual belief was so fun. A light casual belief.

Maybe there's a face on Mars. There's bees on Mars. Sure. Okay. So here's my last question for you and it's a little esoteric. Forgive me, please. We saw what happened with QAnon. It whether or not you agree with it, it was effective.

It caused some bizarre organization to happen. It changed the structure of our government, people who associate themselves with QAnon somehow got. I mean, Trump was throwing out QAnon bullshit. We saw it all. The my fucking somehow the my pillow guy got wrapped. To me, that's the that's the part that really makes my head spin is how did this son of a bitch manage to work his way into like this period of American history with such.

What happened to the best and the brightest, you know, we got the my pillow guy. We got the overstock.com guy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Coalition of nutcases who should never be near the White House, even for a tour who are advising the president of the United States on how to overturn an election. The Mike fucking Linda, remember when he did the press conference with Trump, I remember

watching that and just like, what is happening to the world? Okay. So we know now that whatever that was, if you want to call it a successful LARP or whatever, it's powerful and it worked. Do you ever think about the potential for creating like the polar opposite of Q a similar like secretive conspiracy theory laden thing that has as its end goal, not the execution for arrest of people, but something more like pleasant or something more, you know, a unified planet or a, you know, like everyone hates the word.

I understand why people hate the term globalism, but from a sci-fi perspective, right? You know, globalism is what you would need if we're going to like get our asses off the planet, fix the planet, like travel through space. It's not going to happen as long as like dictators are blowing, potentially going to use nuclear weapons to destroy. We have, we are going to have to figure out a way to like harmonize the entire planet, not in a satanic way. So we can harvest adrenochrome, but so that we can all work together to figure out a way

to do fusion reactors or, you know, what all the cool things that we can do if we weren't blowing each other up. Do you ever entertain that notion of like, shit, there might be a way to look at what worked with Q and use it for the good. You know, the problem with, I mean, I wish that was possible. I think the problem with something like that is that anytime you're starting to get people together under a shared philosophy, the potential for abuse there is so great and the, the potential to scam people, the potential to radicalize people and, and it all, and it almost always

trends back to something that someone else doesn't want you to know about. If you're trying to create the united earth so that we can get off the planet and, and you know, finally, you know, take our place in the stars, there's always going to be somebody who doesn't want you to do it. And the only way that that united earth would happen is if everybody wanted to do it. So there, you have to create an enemy. And so often that enemy is going to be an out group, is going to be a marginalized right, right, going to be minorities, Jews, gay people, whatever it is, whoever, whoever

doesn't want you to do that is going to have to be the enemy. And unfortunately, it really is human nature to take any kind of unity or power and turn it against somebody else. You know, I really, I really thought that in the very, very early days of the pandemic, like, like maybe like the first two days, I thought maybe this could be the thing where we just put aside the bullshit and we all come together and we all sort of recognize that we all have a duty to do to make this virus go away and we just stay inside, we just mask up, we just take care of each other, like, like just give a damn about somebody

else other than yourself. And then we saw what happened. I mean, we are, we are more disunited. We are more ensconced in conspiracy silos and unhinged hatred than, than ever. And people go like, well, would humanity unite if there were an alien invasion on the way? And I'd say, well, a third of the people would grab their guns and see it as the shit finally hitting the fan. A third of the people would start selling products.

And then a third of the people would, would say it's, it's not, it's not actually happening. The fucking MyPillow guy would show up. The MyPillow guy would be like, those aren't real. What that's, those are liberal. That's a liberal projection. Use promo code aliens for 25% of my new massively overpriced down comfort. You know, I actually have thought about like, look, I had this like, I mean, I let my mind spin out, but I was like, fuck, what if we start looking back in history and in every

period of turbulence, there's like a MyPillow guy that shows up. What if he's like one of the signs? He just appears out of nowhere. Is that, is that Satan? Is Satan just a pillow monger that shows up when the world's fucked up? Just, just a guy with a big mustache who thinks the election was stolen. Just, man, I hope Satan can do better than that. See, I, you know that, yeah, that's, it's another podcast, but yeah, that would be a

really disappointing thing just to find out. Actually, it's not that smart. He'll lame Satan. Yeah. We have a lame Satan. Um, uh, Mike, thank you for your time today. I know that you're still working on Jewish space, uh, lasers, but your book, the storm is upon us.

It's available now. Yep. Um, and also the world's worst conspiracy theories. Is there anything else we can, I can plug for you that you'd like to know about? You can just find me on, find me on Twitter, uh, at Rothschild MD, uh, another conspiracy theory, uh, I'm not a doctor. Those are just my initials. I did not create a particularly creative Twitter handle.

Um, yeah, that's, that's where I do my stuff. And I, um, no, this has been, this has been terrific. I mean, I love talking to people who, who get this stuff, who, who, who, who's shit, well, thank you, yeah, thanks. I appreciate, I appreciate your time and, uh, keep up the good work. And everyone, please follow him on Twitter. He's got one of the best tweet, tweet, I don't know what to do, Twitter, tweets, Twitter accounts.

He's a great Twitter person. I think we'd have a word for that. Definitely. Also, if you're someone like me and you spin out of control, sometimes mentally with some of these conspiracy theories, he's like a palette cleanser or something. It's like a way to reconnect to the planet. Like a sorbet, a sorbet, but a brilliant sorbet and one that we need.

Thanks. And if you ever do find out a real conspiracy theory or secret society, will you let me know, please? I absolutely will. You will be my first call. Great. Beautiful. Mike.

Thank you so much. Absolutely. Yeah. That was Mike Rothschild, everybody. You can find his book, the storm is upon us anywhere in every version. Look for his new book, Jewish space lasers and foam on Twitter. He's got a great Twitter feed. Also a deep thank you to our wonderful sponsors.

And as always, thank you so much for continuing to listen to the DTFH. I'll see you next week. Until then. Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney family get togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and J

Ferrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids, super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney family get togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with.

Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and J Ferrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids, super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JCP.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney.