QAA Podcast - The 2020 Effect feat Mike Rothschild (Premium E291) Sample

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

A viral conspiracy theory has taken tik tok by storm with a bold claim that the “2020 effect” is finally fading. The colors are returning to planet Earth and summer is looking like it might have a “2015 vibe”. Jake and Travis are joined by OG QAA guest and fellow conspiracist researcher and author, Mike Rothschild, to try and uncover why the color disappeared in the first place, and the repercussions of it returning once again. Have the planet’s devs finally pushed the long-awaited graphics update? Or have they merely reverted to an older patch? Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Mike Rothschild: https://themikerothschild.com // https://www.patreon.com/MikeRothschild Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Thank you. If you're hearing this, well done. You have found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 291, the 2020 effect. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Mike Rothschild, and Travis Vue. Hello, Mike. How you doing, bud? I am doing all right, and I am happy to be talking about this thing that I had never heard of until yesterday.

Yes, you know what? This is one that I hadn't heard about either, and it's started to come across my TikTok feed, and I was like, you know what, it's so rare that a new conspiracy graces our pages. So I figured we'd grab our OG conspiracy analyst to sort of help us make sense with this one. Yeah, happy to do it. How's everything going for you? I don't, not everybody, I'm sure, is keeping up with your, uh, your Patreon where you have been sort of detailing your, your life and experience after the fire. So maybe before we get in, we can just check in and see how things have been going, man.

Yeah, you know, things are about as good as you could possibly think your life could be, you know, four months after losing your home and everything in it in a, you know, catastrophic fire that destroyed your community. You know, we're back in Pasadena. We're rebuilding. We've got an architect. We've got a contractor. Our lot has been cleared.

So it's not a smoking pile of toxic rubble anymore. We're kind of getting back to something resembling normal while also understanding that It's going to be a long time before the sense of community that we had before the fire is there in any capacity. But yeah, we're hanging in there and trying to just sort of move forward as best we can. Right. You had a great piece on your, on your Patreon about the moment where the kids started to go back to school and how, you know, and we'll get into this episode, you know, because a lot of the talk is actually about the pandemic, you know, another catastrophic event. And, you know, people, they quote, they say something like being rushed back. into normal. And it's got to be like a weird, a weird experience. Yeah, it is a weird experience.

It's this weird kind of liminal space of everything is different. Everything has been thrown into chaos. You don't ever know if anything will be the same. But at the same time, you know, you've got to get some groceries and you've got to take care of your mail and you've got to figure out some way to work and your kids have to figure out some way to go to school. And so you're you're living this kind of aggressively normal life while at the same time, everything around you is extraordinary and almost everybody you know is going through the same thing. So it's like trying to live in the ordinary world and the extraordinary world at the same time. And it's, it's no wonder people kind of lose touch with reality. It's a lot to balance. I was going to ask you,

does it absolutely suck being a conspiracy theorist debunker at a time when it would be so much easier to find some kind of explanation or somebody to blame or, you know, the powers that be or space lasers, you know, like your book. I mean, is it just kind of like one of those situations where you're like, ugh, I'd love to believe, I'd love to actually disconnect from reality, but because of like what I do and the, you know, what I write about, like, I know better. And so I just sort of have to deal with like reality in the suck, if that makes any sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it really illustrates why people turn to conspiracism as an offer of easy answers, of scapegoats, of cartoon villains. You know,

you want to believe that somebody did this to you. You know, you were targeted or that you're part of somebody's plan. But that's not really useful for me and other people who've gone through these fires. We certainly are looking at why this happened and how it happened and what kind of failures took place. But the failures were, you know, what was the county's plan to evacuate people? Why were they relying only on cell phones, particularly for, you know, middle-class communities and for people who maybe are older and not as tech savvy? You know, why was there no water? How did the fire start in the first place? Whose responsibility was this? And those are things that it would be much easier to offer up conspiracism than to take really hard, long looks at what happened

and how the people involved in this went wrong. So you can understand how the conspiracy theories offer this kind of cartoon world where there's just an easy explanation for everything and everything's just a plot and somebody knows what's going on. And I think in a lot of cases, people just didn't know what was going on or just didn't do what they were supposed to do. Yeah. Man, it's crazy.

Well, we're glad you're okay. Yeah. And we're glad that you're, you know, finding some semblance of normalcy and mostly just personally that you're still able to stay in the area where your home is, you know, we were talking a little bit before we started recording. And I feel like to just be in a familiar area at the very least and, you know, sort of like work back into these routines, I feel like is a little bit easier than had you been displaced to like, you know, another state or another country or even another city in Southern California.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And that sense of when we're around people in the community, the questions are where are you living these days? How is your insurance going? You know, did you get a check from your mortgage company? Has your lot been cleared? I traveled for the first time outside of Southern California. I spoke at a conference in Houston in April and people were asking where, you know, where did I come in from? I said, oh, L.A. And people say, oh, where in L.A.? And I go, Al-Tadena. And they would, and they go, oh, my God, are you okay? No. Nope. But it's like, it's actually as traumatic as it is. is to tell this story over and over. It's actually really helpful because it normalizes it for me. The more

I talk about it, the more I process it, the more it just becomes like, yeah, this is part of my life's story now. And it also helps other people who are not going through this, but who have maybe gone through something similar. In Houston, you're talking about hurricanes and floods. And I spoke to multiple people like, yeah, we lost our home in the hurricane or, you know, we had our basement destroyed by a flood. Like, everybody's going through something. And it's helpful both to stay in the community of people who are going through this specific thing and to get out among people who are going through other things. You know, there's an empathy of, hey, you know, we're all just people going through the stuff that you go through when you're a person. As my therapist

once told me, he was like, hey, man, you're just like a regular human being trying to make sense of an absolutely crazy world. That's it. Exactly. Yep. You know what? That has always brought me a little bit of comfort. And I think it's like a good segue into this episode about, the 2020 effect, which really, at the end of the day, focuses around how people perceived time and reality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, I think that's a great segue. In the seven years or so, since we've been doing this podcast, it's pretty rare that I come across a conspiracy that is new to me, and especially one that scratches my particular conspiracy itch. It's usually Brad Abraham's who has to dig into the

of the World Wide Web to find something that tickles my fancy, but today I have brought it on myself. Have you ever felt like things are fundamentally different since the year 2020? Sure, most of us are well aware of the historical pandemic that transformed our realities as we know them, but is it something more esoteric than that? Or are conspiracy theories so prevalent online these days that they're just the natural way that Zoomers are coping with, quote, time, and quote, aging. In the past couple years, a strange idea has circulated predominantly on TikTok and other social media platforms that something changed in the code of reality in 2020, causing the world

to drain of its color. The viral conspiracy is known as the 2020 effect, and believers claim that ever since the year 2020, the sky doesn't feel quite as blue, the grass doesn't look quite as green. Is this just depression? Or have our tentacled overlords rolled back to a previous patch due to the sheer amount of bugs in the 2020 update? Well, today we're going to be taking a closer look at the phenomenon, as well as new claims circulating online that the colors are finally returning. It seems that in 2025, the Earth's devs have finally released the Vibrant Visuals' graphics update. Either that, or, according to multiple users, the population on a whole is finally embracing Jesus.

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 Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of trickle down with me, Travis Vue. 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 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.