QAA Podcast - John Murray Spear's Excellent Adventure Part II (Premium E344) Sample

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

John Murray Spear and his followers have built their “mechanical messiah.” There’s just one problem: it won’t move. In the conclusion to Spear’s excellent adventure, the spirit of Benjamin Franklin guides the “Motorists” through increasingly elaborate attempts to bring the “Electrical Infant” to life. These include a copper-and-zinc wizard suit, a proposed worldwide network of telepathic transmission towers, powdered metals, personal magnetism, soul blending, and the spiritual labor of medium Sarah Newton., newspapers erupt, and P.T. Barnum raises the obvious question: who is the father? The machine finally twitches, but many, including P.T. Barnum, are less than impressed. Jack follows the New Motor’s journey through “wombific” processes, free-love theology, public scandal, exile, and its alleged destruction by a gang of young Baptists. Spear moves on to spirit-designed sewing machines, an electrically powered ship modeled after a duck, and a new doctrine of “True Marriage.” Jack also digs into the 2019 claim that the long-lost Mechanical Messiah had been discovered in a Colorado attic and the professional hoax engineer behind the story. Subscribe for $5 a month to unlock access this episode and over 300 premium episodes, plus get one premium episode for every free episode we release in the future: https://patreon.com/qanonanonymous Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: https://cursedmedia.net Produced by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Bing bong. Bing bong. That's been such a struggle since, since Lives episode, such a struggle for me. And I see it happening. I'm like outside of my, like when people talk about how I'm like dying on the operating table and they're like floating like 10 feet above themselves. And everything's okay. That's me watching myself go ping pong in a totally inappropriate situation. It's just going to get worse, Jake. It's just going to get worse and worse. And if you're hearing this, well, done. You found a way, good luck with that, Corey. Just kidding. I don't know. Sorry, I didn't mean to be so adversarial. I thought it was a decent cold open. I don't know. Maybe we can make it work.

This is a disaster. I'm like Benjamin Buttoning the podcast. Like we should be getting more professional and better, but I'm going to take us back to the internet. Well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 344.

John Murray Spears' Excellent Adventure, Part 2. John Murray Spears' focus journey. As always, we are your hosts. Jake, Rakitansky. Jack LaRose. Julian Fields. And Travis Vue. So welcome back, everybody.

Last episode, I introduced you all to John Murray Spear. What do you guys remember about this amazing man? Well, yeah. Well, he was incredibly based. Driven by religion. wanted to, you know, end slavery and, you know, liberate people. But then starting to get into some weird

American-flavored, ascended mastered stuff, starting with channeling like Benjamin Franklin. Spiritualism. And towards the end, Benjamin Franklin was giving instructions on building a machine. I'm sure that'll go well. Do you think that him being beaten into a week-long coma had something to do with the turn,

or do you think he was always destined for this? I don't know. I think he was too much of an idealist for this dirty, fallen world. You know, I think he was always going to start, you know, drifting away because his intentions were just too naively pure. Now, I'm going to be very unfair and ask you all, do you think that his quest to build Robo Jesus is going to take him into a villainous direction? Or do you think that his high-minded ideals will win out in the end? I really hope that his high-minded ideals went out in the end. I feel like this is a kind of precursor to Wilhelm Reich.

And as far as I know, the cloudbusting, the orgones, like, you know, it didn't turn him into some sort of monster. So I'm hoping the same for John Murray Spear. But, you know, I like to, you know, have a positive outlook as opposed to the two cynics I do this podcast with. So. What do you guys think? You know, I don't think, you know, necessarily villainous. I think that he will be destructive. just because he has his head so far up in the clouds that he's kind of disconnected from the effects that his beliefs and his visions having upon, like in the material world.

Yeah, I think that that's pretty fair. And I, you know, I struggle with the damage he's already done to his wife because, you know, Betsy Briggs from the start was not particularly interested in the reformation ideas that he had. You know, she never really engaged with any of his visits to the prisons and, you know, his work for abolition, et cetera. Yeah, she opened up her house to fugitive slaves, but she wasn't really into it. You know, the biggest thing that she really participated in was a soup kitchen that he started at one point to serve food to homeless children. But this wasn't her thing.

She wanted to be married to a stable, you know, more well-to-do pastor in a large town. Well, that was really her big. I'm with him. Yeah. I'm with him too. I mean, Betsy, I feel for you, but he's too based for you. Yeah. Too much power.

The things that Betsy Briggs said behind closed doors to her girlfriends, I shudder to think about. I do too, man. I mean, with a name like Betsy Briggs, I just can't do anything but picture her on a big old Mississippi plantation. And I have this just deep knee to just say, fuck her. Yeah, that's where she wanted to be. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be misogynistic.

You just have achieved it. Either way, it's okay. Yeah, I have. I mean, we're off to a great start with this episode. Great start. I've derailed it all. Now let's get serious and get to the come. Yep, let's get to the come.

This is going to be an episode that's full of come, I promise you. The new motive power. So John Murray Spear, along with his followers, is hard at work constructing a spiritual machine. Bear in mind, John has no mechanical knowledge, but he doesn't need it. The spirit of Benjamin Franklin, along with his spiritual association of electricizers, over the course of 200 messages are relaying the plans by which the new motor is going to be built. John's devotees, likewise, are using their own psychic abilities to help modify the machine,

bit by bit as they constructed. The channel spirits are telling them intuitively how to put each of the pieces into the building of this machine. It's thought to be, just for ease of imagining here, roughly the size of a Volkswagen bug. So this is no small machine, guys. This is a pretty sizable endeavor. You know, this machine is being built atop a sitting table,

which is a round table that's used for seances at the uppermost room of high rock tower in Lynn, Massachusetts. All of these followers are true believers, but when not in trance, John has considerable doubts about this endeavor. None of the plans used to construct this machine survive to the modern day,

but utterly bonkers descriptions of it do. The top part of the machine took the shape of a cross if you squinted a bit and had some imagination. Two uprights made of metal are about half foot apart erected upon the table, according to descriptions. Between these and reaching from the one to the other near their tops was suspended on pivots a small steel shaft, which was crossed at its center by another shaft about six inches in length on the extremities, so that the balls could revolve with little friction. It is unclear whether the machine was built to literally resemble a human or if it only corresponded to one in the Swedenborgian sense.

In spite of the shaft and dangling balls, I would venture to guess that it's more of a corresponding to the shape of a human situation. Benjamin Franklin, though, said through Spear, A living working mechanism can be constructed, which shall not be farther below man than the animals which roam the earth. In correspondence it shall be like man, but in sober fact inferior, as the external must always fall below the internal or idea. It will reproduce the human form, but it will also reproduce the macrocosm,

the whole universe, the perpetuum mobile. So saying is something that has less moral worth than the human, but more moral worth than the machine. So something sort of on par with an animal. Kind of. I mean, that's sort of what's being said here, but other statements will contradict that. Interesting. So this is all very unclear.

And by the end of the description, we can discuss what we think this is because it gets stranger, guys. It's mental illness. Julian, the correct term is crazism. Oh, yeah, right. Sorry, I got to be era-specific. You do, you do. We have to be eras-specific. that can now be reference these things.

That's right. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200, premium episodes plus all of our miniseries.

That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian the Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact.

You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate it. all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.