The Joe Rogan Experience - #1710 - Cullen Hoback

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

Cullen Hoback is an investigative filmmaker whose latest doc series "Q: Into The Storm" is now available on HBO Max. He also made "Terms and Conditions May Apply" and "What Lies Upstream".

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! What's up, man? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. You know, it's really exciting to be here. There was just, right before we got rolling,

I was mentioning, you know, I tweeted back in April, would love to go on Joe Rogan's podcast at some point. Is that when the documentary series came out, in April? Yeah. So it premiered in March, like end of March. Oh. And then it was rolled out in two episode per weekend installments. So it took three weeks for the whole thing to release.

And it was actually really exciting because you had the audience reacting in real time. There'd be a week to see, okay, well, how is the community receiving this? Did you say the community? The community. You really said that?

Is that what they call themselves? I mean, I have so much of this lexicon now that I can't avoid. It's just funny. I say it at the beginning of the series. It seeps into your thoughts. It really does. Right. Clinton body count, right?

Clinton body count, 17. Can't see that without thinking Q. Right, right. Impossible. Just a number. Yeah. Well, it's really well done, I just want to say. You did a fantastic job.

It's really excellent. Thank you. want to say. You did a fantastic job. It's really excellent. Thank you. And it's such a compelling subject. And it opens up so many conversations on censorship, on what is the truth, and how important is it to know what's what's real and what's not real it's uh it's such a complex and unusual conversation that we have to have today about misinformation disinformation propaganda and this whole q thing which is just like it it to me embodies the perfect example of what's like

worst case scenario if someone just started making up some wild shit we assume making up wild shit online and got an enormous group of people to go along with it and then

they wind up attacking capital I mean When they when they attack the Capitol building when when they storm the Capitol building and you realize like oh my god Like this is literally like the wings of the butterfly Create the storm and then here it is like a thing that you look preposterous Just a couple of years ago when people are talking about all the cue drops and all this like the people that I knew that Are in the QAnon Jamie pointed out earlier that a lot of them were the same people that are in the flat earth It's the same sort of folks like kind of

Without you know uncharitable terms unsophisticated gullible, and into secrets, into finding out secrets. I mean, I would say that in my experience, there weren't too many QAnons who were also big flat earthers. I can introduce you to a few. Or maybe they had set that aside a little bit. But, I mean, you see in episode one, Liz Croken,

who is a big QTuber, big sort of celebrity, in terms of, like, analyzing Qdrops and talking about the meaning. You know, she I bring that up to her. I'm like, well, what about Flat Earth? She's like, you know, tell me anything. Nothing's too crazy. Right. You know, and this is the thing about Q. It's like Q. And I think a lot of people were attracted to this premise because it feeds correctly into this notion that we should be skeptical of things, was question everything. Question everything. Question whether or not the Earth is flat.

Question whether or not, you know. And in the beginning, that included question Q. And that faded away pretty quickly. A few months into QAnon, you could question anything as long as you didn't question Q. And you jumped right to January 6th, sort of the finish line. When I think of Jan 6th, I don't think it would have happened Um, you know, and I, when I think of Jan six, like, I don't think, I don't think it would have happened, um, without QAnon. I also don't think it happened solely because of QAnon, right? There were a lot of, there were a lot of, um, uh, forces that coalesced that day.

Yeah, I would agree with you a hundred percent. I think it's, um, it's such a strange time, you know, where people are learning how to use social media, and then we're also aware that social media is heavily manipulated by foreign countries. agency in Russia, this whole, essentially a troll farm that's designed to fuck with us. And very successfully. And Renee DiResta has highlighted this really well. And it was really interesting to talk to her and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes with this stuff. And hundreds and hundreds of thousands of memes, often hilarious memes, that get shared

on social media created by Russia. I mean, can you imagine getting that job in Russia where it's like your job will be to be a meme smith? Your job is make funny with American politics. Good luck. Yeah. Like, what do you, like, where do you start? Yeah. That was one of the questions I've had when you're looking at something like 8chan, now 8kun, where, you know, Q had been posting. And we talk about free speech on those platforms and this idea that, you know, anyone can post whatever they want within, you know, sort of the limits of free speech, right? Like there are certain things which are illegal. But does that protect people who are abroad as well? You know, free speech traditionally in America would protect American citizens. But in the case of the internet, you know, the internet is global.

So that means that you can have actors in South Africa or in Russia posting on these sites protected under the same premise as what Americans are accustomed to. And able to use speech against America in certain instances. So what you're describing, you know, these kind of means myths and Russia are in some ways using free speech against us. Right. I guess. Yeah. I mean, I guess. Meme smiths in Russia are in some ways using free speech against us, right? I guess. Yeah. I mean, I guess. I think what it's doing, this is an odd idea, but I think what it's doing is it's forcing us to adapt and evolve our ability to detect to detect bullshit and it's doing it almost like

an immune system response like what what we're reacting to and what we're recognizing from all this stuff is like oh we didn't know what this was and this is resulted in this riot, whatever you want to call the Capitol Hill attack. And now we're looking at more censorship on social media. We're looking at them trying to batten down the hatches and figure out how to handle something like QAnon or the people that were allegedly promoting these ideas, a lot of them that are banned from social media, the stuff that you highlighted in your show, we have to figure out what's true and what's not true. And so there's been some sort of draconian measures that have been suggested, you know, like hiring some sort of a team that goes over social media and make sure that everything is

according to what they deem to be correct or incorrect, which obviously is subject to biases. And we're, we're very aware that that's going on today, that there's a lot of that going on today where the necessarily a truth doesn't like the Hunter Biden laptop story is a great example of that, right? Like the social media platforms, they censored news from the New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in America on the Hunter Biden laptop story, because they decided that somehow or another it was propaganda or somehow or another it was not good to get that information, but it was news. It was real news. It was a real story. And they decided it was too good to get that information, but it was news. It was real news. It was a real story. And they decided it was too close to the election. This could hurt Biden. We don't want Trump to win. So you're dealing with biases. This is not just like simply here's information that

we know to be true, or here's information that we know to be a lie. We're going to stop that from getting through. No, they knew it to be true true but they decided to stop it because it wasn't convenient or it didn't fit the narrative they were trying to promote right it's very it's and how do you find a neutral arbiter right the truth right um if if you are going to entrust someone with that responsibility and i think that that's it it's just an incredibly slippery slope. Incredibly slippery. And what these big tech companies have suggested is that, well, maybe we don't use humans. Maybe we use algorithms, right, you know, to moderate everything. And, you know, the algorithms had that in many ways had bolstered something like Q because they're basically sociopathic when it comes to just trying to drive attention as much as possible. So now they can kind of invert those algorithms and punish

those who talk about that kind of content. And oftentimes, even if their goal was just to prevent, I don't know, conversation around QAnon because they consider it to be problematic, to prevent, I don't know, conversation around QAnon because they consider it to be problematic. What else gets swept up with that? I mean, I saw a lot of people who were reporting on QAnon, maybe coming from the side of critiquing it. Their videos were being wiped out. You know, people who were documenting January the 6th, their content was being wiped out. People who were critical of QAnon, they had websites that were sort of on the other side. That was being wiped out as well. And that's because, of course, it's sort of this blunt force that an algorithm wields.

So people even, people that were analyzing the movement from a critical standpoint, people who are looking like how ridiculous this is, look at this, they had their channels wiped out as well? Yes. So any content on QAnon, they just want to erase it from the internet, essentially. That seemed to be the initial response, yeah. It's so strange that they all move together and sync. I mean, I think that if I did not have HBO in my sales

with this project, it wouldn't have seen the light of day. Really? Like if you tried to put it on YouTube, I think that if I did not have HBO in my sales with this project, it wouldn't have seen the light of day. Like if you try to put it on YouTube, you think? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, even when we – so when we first released the series, there were some articles floating around like, oh, maybe this is going to make things worse. If I typed in Q into the storm into YouTube, it wouldn't auto-populate at a certain point. It started out auto-populating, and then that went away.

So, yeah, I wouldn't feel confident at all that, you know, if we didn't have a gorilla in our corner, that this story that revealed ultimately who was behind QAnon would have been seen, would have been able to find an audience. Shout out to HBO. Shout out to HBO. I mean, they really have my back. They've been amazing for decades. You know, you really think about it. I mean, they're the people that when Bill Maher's show Politically Incorrect got pulled off of,

what was it on ABC? I forget. Yeah, not sure network television They immediately took it brought it over turn it into real time and made it even better I mean, you know, it's uncensored now and and it's in my opinion real time with Bill Maher is probably one of the very best social commentary Shows and and comedy shows that like really doesn't pull any punches on any network, ever. You want to hear something fucking crazy? So just yesterday I was talking with someone who's helping distribute the film,

and I said, well, what about Amazon? Are we going to be able to put it out on Amazon internationally? And they said, well, as of the last year, they have stopped taking documentaries, all documentaries. What? You cannot publish a documentary on their platform. And the reason was because, that I was told, is because, you know, there was all this conspiracy,

flat earth stuff, and they were getting blowback. But eventually they said, we don't want to have to decide what we publish and what we don't, what's real and what's not. We're just not going to publish anything. And the example they gave me that they couldn't get published was The Cove. I don't know if you saw that documentary. The Dolphin documentary. Yeah, The Dolphin documentary. It won an Oscar. And just to check it, I looked it up and sure enough, The Cove wasn't available on Amazon. So those who said that there wouldn't be a slow Yeah. 8chan. There's a progression until you end up, it seems like something like the Cove can't find an audience on a major platform. And I don't want to conflate government censorship with the corporate

censorship too much. However, in a lot of ways, it does feel like the government has passed the buck to these corporations to do what they legally can't, which I think is the same thing we saw the government do with privacy, right? Like, they wouldn't have been able to get all of this data from us directly. But if you give it to a Facebook or a Twitter, it's very easy for the government to then go and get access to that information. So I think what we saw happen with the Fourth Amendment, we're now seeing happen with the First Amendment, where they can say, well, look, we couldn't restrict conversation around certain topics. We couldn't directly decide what's true or what's not.

We're going to put that in the hands of these companies. And, of course, these companies have intimate relationships with many members of the government. You know, there's a revolving door there. with many members of the government. You know, there's a revolving door there. So when people want to talk about limiting what we can say online or limiting disinformation to other things, I think that it's almost the wrong place to start. I think we have to go back to the privacy issues.

And I actually think if we had not let privacy be eroded online, we wouldn't be having this debate. Because if these gigantic companies hadn't collected thousands of data points on us, didn't know our fears, our desires, if they hadn't built these psychometric profiles, they wouldn't have been able to manipulate us, use these algorithms to drive us into echo chambers, which have really created these disparate realities. And now these disparate realities can't agree necessarily on a set of facts. Sometimes you're considered, you know, sometimes people will be ostracized for even talking to somebody

from the quote unquote other side, right? And so now there's this conversation about what should be allowed to be said online. And I think that that's simply a byproduct of, you know, our privacy having been eroded. So, you know, if I was to do anything about these issues, I would start by restoring rights. I would go back and say, all right, well, how do we get, you know, if I was to do anything about these issues, I would start by restoring rights. I would go back and say, all right, well, how do we get, you know, how do we get ownership and privacy rights online when it comes to our personal data? Let's start there before we start, you know, going after the speech itself. The algorithms are designed to do this, or do you think that it's just a function of human nature that we tend to gravitate towards things that outrage us and then huddle up together in echo chambers? That this is just a natural tribal behavior and that what the algorithms do is essentially just highlight what we're really interested in. They magnify it in a feedback loop, right? So you're right to say that humans do have

these traits. And I haven't designed the algorithms, but I've also talked to people who have, and they don't even understand how they work at a certain point. They're off to the races. Have you seen The Social Dilemma? Yeah. Yeah. What'd you think about that?'s great it's great yeah yeah um scary too uh the conclusions that they draw oh certainly i mean i yeah i made a film about eight years ago called terms and conditions may apply you know and that that came out right before the edward snowden revelations you know when it came out people before the Edward Snowden revelations. And when it came out, the initial response was like, oh, this is maybe conspiratorial. Surely the government doesn't have this much insight into our behavior and access to our devices and our personal information.

And then the Snowden revelations came out and then it was like, oh, well, maybe the series didn't go far enough. You know, and back then we had talked about the idea of how is technology influencing us? How is it changing us, manipulating us? And it didn't feel like that was the biggest story at the time. And this question of privacy and how our rights are being eroded through these agreements that nobody ever really reads, and you could find all kinds of juicy tidbits hidden in there in terms of what the companies were actually doing and kind of revealing this unholy collusion between the government and big tech. But at the time, people would often say, well, what's the cost?

What's the big deal if they're mining my personal data to serve me with ads? And I'd say that the environment we find ourselves in now is the cost. Do you do anything to personally protect your data? Do you use DuckDuckGo for searches and things along those lines? You've Brave as a browser. Like, do you do that stuff? All that. Yeah. Yeah. Use Signal. VPNs. VPNs. I mean, I do my best, you know, if a government actor really wants to get at you, they're going to be able to. Yeah. I mean, you saw the NSO click list spyware story, right? I mean, if there's a zero day that allows you to get access to a microphone and everything that someone's doing on their phone without them even having to click on a link, you know, it's game over.

Of course, governments will abuse that. Yeah. And probably are right now. Probably are right now. Yeah. Where are our phones at? Right there. Yeah. It's interesting because you would think that there'd be a market for a platform that becomes bulletproof. And there have been some Linux-based cell phone operating system phones that they sell. They buy a phone. You get a Google phone, they de-Google it and put different software on it and stuff. But I'm not sure if that's like you're deluding yourself into believing that you're actually protected with that stuff or you actually are protected. I would think they could work around all those things, especially something that's, I mean, it's essentially like open source, right? Like if it's a Linux-based operating system, there's some super geniuses out there.

I'm sure they're going to be able to hack into that. Yeah. I mean, I think with stuff like Signal, you're just protecting yourself as best you can. You use something that's end-to-end encrypted. You're doing better than 99% of people who are out there. You're making somebody really have to work to get access to your stuff. And if you're using a VPN and you're using DuckDuckGo, then you're minimizing your digital footprint. And you're not worth as much of these companies. And they're not able to manipulate you, I guess, in the same way through these algos. But let me ask you this.

I mean, what would you do about the algorithm problem? Because on the one hand, algorithms are necessary for something like a search engine. On the other hand, they drive the most sensational content, things like QAnon, and I think have largely facilitated the situation we find ourselves in now. It's a really interesting question because on one hand for me, like when I go to my YouTube page, it highlights the things that I'm interested in. And I'm, when I go to YouTube in general, I'm interested in entertainment. I mean, that's all I get.

I mean, I have a very boring YouTube page. If you go to it, there's a few political talk shows that I listen to, like Breaking Points and Jimmy Dore and Kyle Kalinske and a few other folks. And then there's a lot of like billiards matches and Muay Thai fights. Like that's like most of my YouTube. So it's boring. You know, it's like for, for the average person, there's not, it's not suggesting anything to me that's going to be, that it's going to lead me

down any rabbit holes or cause I don't use it for that. I use YouTube like, Oh, I got 10 minutes to kill. Let me watch something stupid. You know, let me, let me sit here and watch a pool match. You know, that's what I do do but if you're a person that is and i've been that person in the past that's like in they got into conspiracy theories and like is this real like who built the pyramids and the next thing you know you're you're going magnets were right yeah and you're going down this rabbit hole and then that becomes your fucking life like one of the things that to me was so fascinating about your, your documentary series was seeing into the lives of these people that were utterly obsessed with these Q drops. And it, it becomes a thing that gives life meaning when, you know, for lack of better terms, a lot of those folks

in that documentary are misfits. Like a lot of the people are a little goofy. They're, you know, the way they talk about things and think about things is a little goofy. And when QAnon came along, it gave them something to latch on to that was bigger than them. They were a part of a movement. And you see that same sort of thinking, that same sort of mental pattern in people that get obsessed with UFOs. You see it in people that get obsessed with political dogma. You see it in a lot of things. They become a part of a movement that's far bigger than them.

It's one of the reasons why people get so invested in political candidates and political campaigns. It's not necessarily that they're looking at the big picture objectively and they think that this politician is going to be better for their lives. They're going to highlight problems that we have with inequality or problems that we have with laws, but mostly they want their team to win. You know, there's a lot of that with a lot of people. They connect ideologically with a team and then they get very tribal. And that was the thing that I saw in that documentary. I'm like, this is a pattern of human behavior. And it's the QAnon thing just locked into it because it was secretive. It was interesting. The idea that Trump had this insider and this insider was like dropping all this information that it was all going down.

In Trump, we had this guy that was going to clean up the swamp. He was going to find those people that were eating babies and, you know, and... Yeah, and it was a narrative that contradicted what people were seeing in the mainstream media as well. And I think that a lot of those individuals who voted for Trump and also gravitated towards QAnon, they wanted to believe that there was this sort of secret story that was happening behind the scenes, you know, where all of these arrests were coming, where, you know, what they had hoped would happen would actually happen. And I think that, I think, I mean,

you hit a lot of the big points there, you know, and that's why QAnon is sort of part religion, mean, you hit a lot of the big points there, you know, and that's why QAnon is sort of part religion, part political movement, part interactive game. And it draws in people from the UFO crowd. I mean, it's a big tent for all kind of conspiratorial fringe thinking or, you know, sort of strong religious convictions as well. I mean, you see a lot of people who are evangelicals who also believe in QAnon. There's a big overlap there. So I think it's individuals who are looking for community as well, looking for purpose. And I spent so much time with these guys, right? And I would get phone calls in the middle of the night where they just wanted to talk, a lot of times because they just found me to be a grounding force in their lives. And so I would try to

always take it when I could, um, and just, you know, give them, give them, uh, a more neutral perspective versus, um, what they might be hearing, especially some of the Qtubers. So some of the Qtubers, like, they were going down these paths or these, you know, they were in these rabbit holes, and then they would call you and go, hey, man, does this make any sense? Am I out of line? Because they were wrapped up in it,

and they saw you as an objective sort of voice of reason. I think so, yeah. I mean, you see in Episode V episode five, the, one of the craziest things in the series, which is that, uh, these ex-mill guys, um, whether it's General Flynn or in this case, General Paul Vallely, uh, or Major General, um, I see a Lieutenant Major. Anyway, um, he, uh, you know, he's using his ex-mill guys to seed his political agenda with these QTubers. So what happens is they suddenly have someone who is claiming to have this super secret intel reaching out to them and saying, you know, Osama bin Laden is actually still alive. Would you like to talk about that on your QTube station?

still alive. Would you like to talk about that on your QTube station? And they're going, well, you know, and they're useful because someone like in the case of Craig and his site, JustInformedTalk, I mean, he had like half a million or more followers. So they're a useful inflection point. So he would be someone who might call me up and be like, what do you think about this? Like, why are they telling me this? You know, what's, yeah, what's their motive? Should I, should I tell this to my audience? I'd be like, it didn't really matter what I said. He usually just ended up telling it to his audience, but you know, I would, I would try to talk him through it. Did you try to get ahold of General Kelly? I did not. I did not. The, the only general that I spoke to and it didn't he didn't end up making an appearance in the series Just because I wanted to keep the series focused primarily on the investigation

Into who was behind it was general Hayden The Kelly one is interesting because when he's standing outside in front of his house with his family It's like where we go one we go all and they're reading the whole speech the QAnon. Oh general Flynn I'm sorry, I said Kelly. And they're reading the whole speech, the QAnon speech. Oh, General Flynn. I'm sorry. General Flynn. I said Kelly. Sorry. Flynn. That was... So, did you talk to him?

I tried to get a hold of General Flynn and to do an interview with him. Of course, I would have. He was going through some legal troubles at the time. So, he was not making as many public statements. He was not really giving interviews. So he was not making as many public statements. He was not really giving interviews. So what you saw was his family, you know, Joe Flynn, Barbara Redgate, I think was her name.

Some of these characters who were in his orbit, family members who were kind of speaking on his behalf. Meanwhile, General Flynn was messaging YouTubers behind the scenes, bolstering this. And he had like $5 million in legal bills or some crazy amount of money that he had to spend in his legal bills. So he needed all the support he could get. And I had talked to some individuals who had helped him in his fundraising efforts from nearly the beginning at one of these Q conventions. And they said internally within the family, there was debate as to whether or not QAnon was helpful or

harmful. But ultimately they, they all gravitated towards it. So do you think he was using it just as a fundraising thing? Like he was attaching himself to that because he knew that they would support his legal defense? I mean, I do think that that's, that they would support his legal defense cynically? I mean, I do think that that's a part of it, right? You have an incredibly passionate base who see most of them believe that Flynn was Q, right? That was the predominant theory among QAnons. Because Flynn was so central to the Q narrative, you know, he was he was the he was a good guy in that narrative who who warranted their support and was kind of working against the cabal.

So you ask most QAnons and Flynn would be very high on their list of suspects for who might be behind it. behind it. And it would not be until the last year in the approach to the election that Flynn would openly embrace it, doing what I think you were describing where he, you know, raised his hand with the same on the 4th of July and they all take the Q oath. Whoa. Yeah, that was wild to see an actual general do that. And then you saw all of the QAnons doing the same thing so then they went on youtube and started taking you know taking the same kind of oath you saw how you saw how much power he had really generated vis-a-vis q anon what's even more wild though is that in japan Japan, there is a huge crowd that supports Flynn there. So there's like Q Army Flynn Japan. And there's over 100,000 people in Japan who are like giant Flynn supporters. There's a like a it's

almost like a religious offshoot. In Japan, there's sort of two different two different big primary segments there of QAnon. But one of the biggest ones is really centered around Flynn. And that's always shocked me. I mean, imagine if there was a general in Japan who had a big following in the States.

They managed to do that through 4chan or 8chan or whatever. Well, that was another aspect that I thought was odd is that how people in other countries like the guy from South Africa are so into American politics. Yeah. It's hard to try to get their perspective.

I would imagine that it's just very different being there and looking at us. I think America is such a bizarre anomaly. But America has so much influence on world policy that if you want to influence world policy, you influence America. But it's so, I mean, it is really unusual that we don't, we barely know

who the fuck the prime minister of Canada is. You know, right? We know very little about Canadian politics. We know Trudeau, right? Handsome guy, see him on TV. A lot of Canadians hate him. That's what we know. You know?

I mean, we really don't know anything about all the other people. We knew about that guy. What was his name? The one who was the mayor of Toronto who was out of his funk? Ford. Remember that guy? I do remember him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was crazy. Yeah, it just requires a big flashy story. Yeah, so you've got to be in the tabloids. Yeah, something big has to happen. But that guy in South Africa was fully invested in American politics. Oh, I mean, living and breathing in it. A huge conspiracy theorist, too.

I mean, he's also my sort of prime suspect for the original q really yeah yeah interesting i mean i don't say it in the series because i couldn't prove it definitively and i didn't want to i didn't want to there are it is possible that there are i have sort of two other theories for who may have started it but he's the he's the predominant one. Well, he was so adamant that the second Q wasn't Q. And I was like, hmm, how does he know that? Like, why does he think that? Why is he so convinced?

I mean, if he doesn't have access to, like, some data points, if he doesn't have access to, like, whatever it is, like the location or something, the ISP, like the IP address, rather, like, it is, like the location or something, the ISP, the IP address rather, what's his reasoning for saying definitively to Ron Watkins, you know that's not Q? Right. What was that? How does he know?

How is he so sure? Just based on a couple of posts, style, that suddenly Q is posting from a static IP as opposed to a dynamic or changing IP. Yeah. How could he be so sure just based on that? I mean, there's a lot of reasons to think that Paul would have been running it up until that point. And there's a lot of reasons to think why CodeMonkey or slash Ron Watkins would have taken it from him at that point. I mean, he was posing a real threat to the, you know, quote unquote operation. He had just appeared on Alex Jones.

So this is late December, 2017. Q's been actively posting for about two months at this point. Who had just appeared on Alex Jones? Ron? So Ron did not appear anywhere. You know, the first recorded interview that I know of that he gave was with me, you know, a year and a half or so or a year later. The, this is when Q kind of gets its first, I consider Alex Jones to almost be mainstream. He has a big enough audience, right? You know, he, It brings it out to a new, bigger audience. It escapes the chans through Alex Jones. And this happens in late December, 2017. And Coleman Rogers and Paul Ferber both appear on his show. This is when Alex Jones is not banned from social media either. Correct. So he's still got a bigger reach at this point. So Jerome Corsi, who had been

talking about QDROP, sort of famed conspiracy theorist, largely responsible for the old birther movement thing around Obama, Swift Boat with John Kerry, he's been doing this political operative stuff for years. He brings it to Alex Jones, and Alex Jones brings these two guys on his show, late December. It's Paul Ferber and Coleman Rogers. Coleman Rogers would go on to start a 24-hour news channel devoted to Q. Paul Ferber was running the board

that Q was posting on. Which is very suspicious. Very suspicious. For some reason, Q leaves 4chan in late November 2017 and jumps over to choose Paul Ferber's board on 8chan. For some reason you know like

what there were many places why didn't Q create its own board why didn't Q why that board and was he on Paul Ferber's board on 4chan did Paul Ferber have a board on no so um you know Q was largely posting on poll on 4chan so they didn didn't have control. Poll is a politics? Yeah, it's like politically incorrect. Is it P-O-L? P-O-L, yeah. And that's where usually poll on 4chan or 8chan is where you see the most racy kind of anti-Semitic white supremacist stuff. If you're going to see that, it's there.

And you can never really tell when you're on that board if people are being ironic or post-ironic. Shit posting, yeah. Right. Can't really tell. tell when you're on that that board if people are being ironic or post ironic shit posting yeah right can't really tell but anyway that's that's it you know that's the board that when these chain when the chans get reported on usually they're they're pulling screenshots from that so q is posting there and and people on 4chan were like this is a fucking larp stop it what is the first post they were they were they didn't like q very much they thought it was bullshit they thought it was bullshit yeah and thought it was bullshit, yeah. And in fact, actually, I brought a chart,

but you can actually see that Q was, the amount of times that people were calling Q a LARP on 4chan was increasing almost exponentially at the very end up until Q decides, I'm out of here. You can see, and then right at the end there, that's when Q jumps ship and goes over to 8chan. Now, they would also say that Q had been banned on 4chan, and that also motivated the leap.

But I do think that it's interesting that... Was it banned on 4chan? So my understanding is that the trip code itself, like Q was no longer able to post using, I think using the trip on 4chan. The trip code, explain that. So it's just a cryptographic function that allows someone to type in a password, a simple password. It's eight characters long. And it will produce a code, and that's called a trip code. And this is a way of anonymous

or pseudo anonymously kind of identifying yourself. So if I have the password, Q's password, eight character or so password, type it in, boop, boop, boop, it's going to produce a code. And that code will appear on every post that the password is entered for. So this is how people knew that Q was posting. And in fact, the first 127 posts didn't have a trip code. So there was no way to even know who Q was in the beginning, right? In fact, the Anons had to go back and review all the old posts just to see like, okay, which ones were Q, which ones weren't. So like the first 127 drops, like anybody could have been coming in, like LARPing his cue,

sort of jumping in, trying to write in this style. And the idea of cue hadn't even been established yet. I mean, cue itself. Yeah, anybody, any asshole. Like you. You could have done it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you could have done it.

Anybody could have done it. Paul Ferber could have been there doing it sometimes, but someone else could jump in, you know, kind of put on the hat. And lots of people were trying to do that in the beginning. So, like, when you post there, you don't have, like, a screen name? No, there's no login. So anybody can post without having to log in. That's the sort of, that's what makes the chans really unique.

There's also no algorithms on the chans. But it's, if you're using vpn which 4chan makes that very difficult 8chan less so um or 8kun now uh if you go there and you you know you wanted a shit post and you don't want to have it traced back to you you can do that so that's why people you know it gives them this true sense of anonymity without having you know all of their posts be logged and associated with their IP. How does that establish a community though? Because when people have, whether it's Twitter or whatever, people find people based on their screen names.

Well, it's more of a culture. And I think that those who are heavy Chan users would, would, um, they would, they would, the, the term is fame fagging. That's what they would say. Um, where people use a name like Q, um, to, uh, you know, to, to bring more, uh, notoriety, you know, they want in their minds, like the best ideas rise to the top. So they don't want to, um, they don't want to have, they don't want to give, they don't want to have the, I guess the power that's associated with identity. And that's part of why they were so annoyed when Coleman Rogers and Paul Ferber went on the Alex Jones show, because they were, you know, doing what Chan users would call fame fagging at that point. So, and that's a term they'd to throw around on the Chans heavily.

So if you had a screen name... And Q was doing that too. So Q, by using a trip code, would have been that term they threw out. But when Q started posting, Q was not known as Q at the time. Q was just a random anon writing stuff. But there was no Q at the end of it? No, there was no Q at all in the beginning. So that concept wasn't even developed yet.

And it was not until Drop, I believe, is it 20, 30? It was like, I have it. Maybe I brought it with me, but it's like drop. Let me look this up. I don't want to get it wrong. Drop 34. At drop 34, that's the first time we see Q, clearance, Patriot. And so, you know, some anon just signs off Q Clarence Patriot and the LARP kind of continues.

And so it's almost like an improv game where people are jumping in like, oh, what's the story that we're developing? Let me try to add something new to the story. You know, drop. It's not until drop 61 that you see the idea of Q, signing off as a Q. So the first 60 or so drops, that's not even a thing. And it's not until drop 128 that Q signs off using a trip code. So at that point, one individual locked it down with a password and then started, you know, writing from

there. So it's possible that that password could have been shared between multiple people. You know, that was the story that Q told that, you know, that there was a whole kind of like less than 10 people who had who knew the full truth about Q, right? And this is something I'd hear from a lot of QAnons. So, yeah, but most likely if you were just an old school troll on 4chan or 8chan, you would just want it all to yourself. Are you really going to share the password with other people? Because someone else could easily just change the trip code and lock you out.

And they could also reveal that the two of you were in on this together if you have a falling out. Yeah, and we haven't seen that happen. Nobody has come forth and been like, okay, actually, here's what was going on behind the scenes. You would expect there to be some kind of a leak around all of this. And you asked about the community thing. That term I used

before, there's tons of terms like that and a culture that exists on 4chan and 8chan that is very abrasive and is designed to keep normies out. And they try to keep normies out. They want to be as edgy as possible. You know, it's a game of being most, who can be the most provocative in a lot of instances. So that's largely what drives those communities. And people will have friends on there and they'll become friends through Discord channels and stuff like that. And sometimes you can have a handle like CodeMonkey has a handle, right? People know him as CodeMonkey. But the thing about being anonymous is anyone can LARP as you. How do you know if you're talking to the same person or not?

That is crazy, right? So anybody can jump in and pretend to be CodeMonkey. Yeah, that's a fascinating aspect of this whole thing. In his case, he has his own trip code, and his trip code produces OdeMonkey. Ah, okay. Yeah, but it's actually pretty easy to hack a trip code. You were with them for how long when you were doing this documentary series? I was with them, I mean, we were filming on and off for about three years.

Over the course of that time, like, Ron's story evolves. Or either he forgets what he told you initially or he forgets the way he was sort of describing Q and his idea of politics and what he feels about politics. And towards the end, he's saying essentially he's been educating normies on how to do politics. And you're like, hey, what hey what the fuck like what is this like but along the way you like part of the the thing was analyzing the difference between the original q and then the q once it goes to hn right like there's a different style of communication yeah yeah i mean so the two points. So when we get to the end, we can go into all the reasons that Ron is Q. But if we're just talking about the early days,

because I get a lot of people asking me, okay, well, who was the original Q? What you were describing, that style shift, that's a huge indicator, A, that there was only one person writing at one point and then another person writing at the next. And B, it tells us when the shift might have happened. So, you know, that shift that's most detectable is somewhere between the jump from 4chan to 8chan and a little bit after when Paul loses control of the board

and believes that Q has become fake. and Paul loses control of the board and believes that Q has become fake. And that's, you know, Q starts posting really, you know, obvious doctored photos. There's, you know, punctuation changes. You can see that it's someone who's trying to emulate. Punctuation changes?

Yeah, like way more exclamation marks, you know. Just, and stuff, to be clear, it's this kind of punctuation I've seen Ron use on his Telegram feed extensively since, since he was booted from Twitter in January. Is he leaning into it? Well, so I, after the series concluded you know ron ron messaged me um and that was the first time he had seen it he was watching it alongside everybody else and he messaged me and he said

cullen you know i identify more with villains um he said something to the effect of, I learned a long time ago that you have to make internet personalities larger than life because it makes for a more entertaining existence. I'm not Q, but I may as well lean into it. So he has to continue to deny Q, being Q, I think, in his mind for whatever liability might come with that. You know, he's always, he has, it's like he comes as close to admitting it without, you know.

Yeah, there's that moment. Fully, you know, without getting rid of the plausible deniability. Just, and I think he also assumes that all of our communications are being monitored. Right. Which they probably are. I'm sure they are. 100%. There's that moment where you're both laughing, where he's laughing, where he talks about that, that he's been doing this 10 years anonymously.

But he's not Q. And then you laugh and then he laughs he breaks first which is a huge tell as well he realizes he just fucked up he realizes he just slipped and I have Ron

has some tells he'll clear his throat that's a big tell for when he's lying but that was after three years of this kind of cat and mouse thing. And he had always denied being really involved in the boards at all. You know, he would kind of pretend not to know certain things about Q. So this was a big shift for him to come out and say, yeah, actually, like I was leading digs on the boards, which is basically finding and sort of curating the research or evolving theories or, you know.

And this is what happens on poll. And this is what happens on Poll. It's what happens on Q Research is that they're going out and collecting whatever stuff they find on the internet and saying, okay, something about Huma Abedin or something about nuclear subs. You might just get this sort of lengthy list. And those are the digs. And then they keep getting kind of recycled. And so what Q would really do was just look at all of that research, you know, kind of pick the best, the most spicy stuff, ask a question about it or reference it in some way, shape or form. And then it would make those who were on those sites feel like they were part of the game and they go, oh, we're onto something, you know, this insider is

looping us in. So to be Q, you didn't need to be a secret government insider. You just needed to know what the Anons were already thinking. You needed to understand that culture and you needed to spend a lot of time on the boards. You needed to kind of be, you know, well, I was going to say a king of those boards, but just an edgelord to pull it off. And Hedgelord, that's hilarious. That's what's interesting, right? It's like, you could not be a deep government agent and some person who was in the White House, who had massive responsibilities, who was side by side with the president and have the knowledge of that community. Really, almost wouldn't be possible. No. and you would be potentially criminally liable. Right. Like if they went into your white house laptop and he'd go, Hey motherfucker, what are you doing on eight Chan?

Like what's up with all these frogs with Hitler armbands? You know, like, like guys, if you think it was, if you think it's really general Flynn, like you think he would tell you, do you think,

or do you think he would at least have layers and layers between that? The only reason he would lean into it is because it can't come back to haunt him in that same way. And someone like Ron, is what Q did illegal? That's a big question. Right. Is it incitement? That's a tough thing big question. Right. Is it incitement? Um, that's a, that's a tough thing to prove. Right.

But, uh, you know, Q pretending to be a government insider, uh, have with Q level clearance. Well, what, who, who, who were you pretending to be? Well, you're not only that you're doing it again on a website that has a lot of frogs with swastikas. Yeah. You know, like, what, are we supposed to believe that's real? But at a certain point in time, it becomes very clear that there's a massive movement behind this. Like, literally millions of people believe this, and they don't, some of them don't even go to those websites, correct? Like, there's individual websites that collect all of the drops, right?

Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, most of those who were following Q were not actually engaging with the site where Q was posting. I would say that is... Most. Yeah, the vast majority. So what happens? I've never actually really been to 8chan.

And you see that moment in the series, right? I talked to Liz Croken, you know, who was a gossip columnist for the Tribune once upon a time. I think she either wrote for like the Star or the Inquirer, one of those rags as well. But, you know, she's like, there's child porn on those sites? That's news to me. Right. She's like, there's child porn on those sites? That's news to me. It's like, well, it gets deleted because 8chan moderates just like every social media company has to moderate. I think they moderate sort of to the absolute limit.

But, yeah, I mean, she also didn't want to engage with that material. It's an uncomfortable place to be for a lot of people. So that's part of why in the series I wanted to say, well, look, in order to understand Q, you have to understand the entire mentality of the world from which Q was born. And in fact, the person who is the architect, I believe, behind all of this, and I think we proved to be the architect behind all of

this, is, you know, an edgelord of that space. It's the exact kind of person who would run that kind of campaign. And I don't think for a second, like no one could sit back and be like, I'm going to create this massive global movement and be successful. It's just, this is the one that kind of stuck. I mean, there have been other LARPs in the past, you know, other people who've kind of come out and been these secret add-ons. I mean, before Q, there were a couple of other prototypes. I didn't mention this in the series, but, you know, there was like an FBI anon, a CIA anon, a mega anon. Mega or mega? Mega, mega anon. What's mega anon? This is just like someone, in that case, it was supposed to be kind of like someone who had a good insight to Washington, D.C. politics and had good sources and was writing on the chans and was supposed to be female.

And, yeah, this had happened kind of in the year running up to Q and tailed off at the beginning of 2018, this other kind of heightened Anon. But you can go all the way back to the early 2000s with Art Bell and Coast to Coast. You know, there was somebody who pretended to be a time traveler from the future who was trying to prevent World War III, John Titor. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Tons of people got into it.

Were you into it? No. No. But that was a fascinating one, the time traveler one. I had a comedian send me this like he was serious about it. Like, dude, I think this guy's for real. I'm like, I don't have to change my number. I think this is a fucking time traveler.

But this 8chan thing, what's fascinating to me is how many members does 8chan have or how many users does 8chan have? There are a lot of, there's what Ron would say, and then there's probably what the sort of truth is. We did some analytics of the, of the traffic, you know, and it, it, it certainly went way up thanks to Q. Way more users until Q had become the predominant reason that people were visiting 8chan and 8kun. So we're talking, it looked like over 2 million were actively engaging there during sort of the peak of Q. It might have been higher than that. It was a little difficult because they got wiped from the web and a lot of the data around, you know, usage got wiped as well. You know, when Q was really booming right after the Epstein incident, you know, that-

Just after Epstein's death? Yeah. Yeah. And then there was another shooting. And then that, as you see in the series, kind of triggers a series of events that causes 8chan to get pulled from the web. The New Zealand shooting. So which one actually? Does the Christchurch Facebook? It might have been Poway at that point. No, so Poway was in April. What is Poway?

Poway was another, it was a synagogue shooting. So Poe Way was in April. What is Poe Way? Poe Way was another, it was a synagogue shooting. So there was Christ Church and there was Poe Way. And then there was another shooting that took place in El Paso in August. There's so many shootings, I can't even keep track of all of them, which is its own story, I guess, but in 2019. And that was the third one that became

the point that there was a lot of public outcry, largely led by Fred Brennan, their opposition, to wipe the site from the web. And I think the assumption was that people were being radicalized on 8chan, that they were, you know, being exposed to dangerous ideas, and this is what was leading them to these shootings. One of the things I tried to point out, actually, in the series was that that's kind of a misguided assumption. You know, I think that we can look specifically at the New Zealand shooter, right? Lots of headlines were saying that the New Zealand shooter had done so because they were radicalized on 8chan. But they had, I think they visited the Baltics, they donated to white supremacist organizations. organizations. And they had, even in their own testimony, said that they'd been radicalized on YouTube, that it was like the YouTube algorithms that had drawn them to a lot of this material once upon a time, years earlier. And so I think that's yet another example where you say, okay,

well, algorithms are driving people, you know, in a certain direction. And we can have a conversation about what kind of seatbelts you might want to put on algorithms, but, you know, and 8chan doesn't have any. So it was interesting that it was almost like the big tech was passing the buck, that 8chan was the low-hanging fruit, and it's like you get rid of 8chan, you've solved the problem, right?

And, like, in reality, something like Q wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't for big tech. It was – these chans are old. They've been around for decades. And Q just escaped the chans. And it escaped the chans thanks to algorithms and, you know, people who were susceptible to a narrative that they wanted to believe was true, wanted to be a part of something. I mean, you use the word misfits a lot. And I think that seems applicable in a lot of cases. You know, they're LARPing.

You know, like I made a film about LARPers in 2008. Did you? What is it? It's called Monster Camp. Very DIY little film. But, you know, it was back before people really knew what LARPers in 2008. Did you? What is it? Yeah, it's called Monster Camp. Very DIY little film, but it was back before people really knew what LARPing even was. And I saw some parallels here. People who don't have a

lot of close friends in their lives and are looking for meaning and want to feel special. And I think what you see, actually, over the course of the series, and this is why we structured it this way,

I mean, Q did really kind of start as a sort of interactive game that took on a life of its own. And it grew really rapidly until these, you could call Q a meme, until it memed itself into reality until, until someone like Ron Watkins was advising president Trump near the end of, of Q and near the end of his term, you know, was he really? Yeah. I mean, I, I can't, I don't have an interviewed Trump on this, but I, I mean, I do know that he was communicating, you know, with Giuliani.

He was advising them on on what to do in relationship to the election. How the fuck does that happen? Trump was retweeting him. Right. But how does Ron Watkins get a hold of Giuliani? How is he? What? Why is he taking any advice from him? He was the I asked Ron the same question, you know, he's. This is true. Option of last resort.

But this is a hundred percent true. I mean, I have not talked to Giuliani, but you can, you can see in the data trail, you can see him. Yeah. You can, you can see that Ron was, was openly was openly advising them on on what to do in relationship to the election he has been that's an advisor ever since it blew my mind still right now yeah he's like i mean he was deeply involved with all this stuff with lindell you know he was he was lindell um mike lindell you know the whole symposium the eye pillow guy yeah like the eye pillow guy

I shut that guy off as soon as I hear him talking I don't You know the audit The audit in Arizona Ron's been advising on that Really? Yeah But did they watch your documentary? I don't know

If they watch your documentary wouldn't they go like Hey what the fuck are we doing? Who are we talking to here? Yeah, I mean, I don't... It's wild. I'm not sure they all saw it. But that's wild. But he also still has a huge following. And he was...

So where is he has a following now? He's kicked off of Twitter? Well, all of this makes you wonder if he had a relationship before he migrated from... Q shuts down right on election day. And then Ron starts actively really posting on Twitter. And the fact that he was able to build such a massive following and quickly start advising on election fraud issues makes me wonder if they had a connection with the administration in some way, shape or form before that. You know, Ron would often say while I was filming with him

that it was a marketing campaign. Some would describe it, which is kind of a glib way of putting it. That Q was a marketing campaign? Yeah, that it would end at the election. You know, he and Jim would say, Jim Watkins, his father, would say that often. You know, a glib way of putting it. But some might describe it as a psyop.

You know, and so it is – I consider it a possibility, especially since 8chan was directing a high amount of traffic to Donald Trump's website in the first election cycle, that a relationship had formed somewhere along the way. Maybe there were payments. I don't know. I can't, I haven't been able to prove that, but how does someone like Ron Watkins go from, you know, obscurity to suddenly being, you know, a celebrity in those circles almost overnight and to being the guy who's like, yeah, I'm reading a, you know, this election manual. Let me, let me give you some advice on, on how to do it. I mean, he said he's

like, I must have just been the option of last resort. But here's the question. Why would they even, if he's not admitting he's Q, all he is is a guy who's running 8chan and then 8kun. Why are they even communicating with him? Like what, out of all the human beings in the world, with him? Like what, out of all the human beings in the world, all of the political experts, all of the military experts, all of the people that are, you know, heads of whatever friendly media organizations that would communicate with him, why is he communicating with Ron? Well, I think Q became very useful to the Trump campaign in the last year. So they knew that he was Q? Well, I don't know very useful to the Trump campaign in the last year. So they knew that he was Q? Well, I don't know that.

So why him then? But we do know that Jason Sullivan, who was Roger Stone's sort of head of social media, was using his algorithm hijacking tools on Twitter to amplify Ron. And he was hoping to get a hold of Q. You know, it is possible that there was something along those lines was happening behind the scenes there. It may just be the case that Ron was able to leverage his position and those relationships over time because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. You know, his lawyers, everybody's saying like, what are we going to do about this? And Ron's like, I've got a plan, right?

And, but it is, it blows my mind to this day. You know, I, my jaw dropped when I saw Ron appearing on OAN with his black hat on, you know, that we, you know, he bought when I was filming, a big black cowboy hat. And suddenly he was the election expert. And suddenly he was advising these guys. You know, that tells you a lot. OAN is so strange. Whenever I watch, there he is.

There he is, yeah. Cyber analyst on Dominion Voting. Shocking vulnerabilities. And mind you, when I spoke with him after he had been on the air with Chanel Rion on OAN, he's like, well, Q actually did a drop while I was on OAN, so I can't be Q. Q actually did a drop while I was on OAN, so I can't be Q. It's like, you know,

the more he tried to make it seem like he wasn't Q, the more he made himself seem like he wasn't. He had gone through that massive, massive effort to make it seem like Bannon was Q, right? Right. A huge effort. I mean, I even believe that. Explain that to people who haven't seen it yet. First of all, go see it.

It's on HBO Max. Go watch it. Please. It's so good. Thanks for watching all six go see it. It's on HBO Max. Go watch it. Please. It's so good. Thanks for watching all six hours. Yeah. More than that. Were you working out while you were watching it?

Some of the time I was actually on the treadmill. Okay. Or the stairmill rather. Watching and it kept me distracted. But I watched it again last night. I watched a few of them last night. I watched two of them last night. Oh. Because I just wanted to kind of refresh my brain the

The thing that I was getting at Initially is like the Bannon thing. Yeah, well, let's let's just do the Bannon thing And then I'll get to the thing I was getting at earlier. Okay, where I got distracted that so he sort of tried to It was very strange that he was doing that that that he was like outing Bannon, right? Super strange. If Bannon was Q, why would you dox your most famous user? Right. And he's using, he's saying that what he's using is IP addresses. And then he's isolating it to a very specific location that is very near where Bannon's house is, right?

Correct, yeah. So the very first time I met Ron, we shot an interview in the Philippines. You know, I had gone there saying, you know, primarily it's going to— I'm interested in looking at free speech through the lens of Q. That's what I—you know, that was sort of the pretense. And at the end of my interview with him, he pulls me aside and he says, you know, no one's really been looking at this, but I think Bannon is Q. Very first time. Let's explain Bannon. Steve Bannon, he's Donald Trump's advisor.

Yeah. He was sort of the architect, mastermind behind the 2016 campaign. There's a lot of people that probably aren't paying attention to politics. Yeah, okay. Steve Bannon. Okay, so then, go ahead. So he pulls you aside. Who eventually kind of gets booted from Trump's inner circle right before Q gets started. Yeah.

Now he's a podcaster. He's a podcaster, yeah. He's got his war room or whatever it is. Yeah, the war room. I don't know if Ron's appeared on it yet. This is the space room. This is a great room. Thank you.

Great room, really. I just want to hover in here. I feel like we should be floating right now. We can if you want to go there. Is there time? There's always time. Especially once you've started. Yeah but uh yeah so so steve bannon um so ron pulls me aside he's like yeah it's this guy steve bannon um no one's looked and

i you know i've got my my absurd amount of research you know i've got infinity board thousands of assets i've got timelines of all the possible suspects for Q at this point. You know, and Bannon was a prime suspect just based just sheerly on kind of the circumstances around him, like his character. You know, he knows the chance. He knows that world. He knows how

to co-opt it for political gain. So, you know, he makes for a possible suspect. Well, yeah, I'd been considering Bannon. Now, why would Ron, the very first, you know, he makes for a possible suspect. Well, yeah, I'd been considering Bannon. Now, why would Ron, the very first, you know, first off, like, trolling journalists, and I don't consider myself a journalist, but trolling journalists is

like the gold standard for trolls on the trans. Like, that's, if you can get them to publish something fake, that's their dream, right? So, like, I'm just thinking, okay, well, why is he telling me Bannon the very first time I meet him? Fine. And you say, can you show me some data associated with this? He's like, I'm just thinking, okay, well, why is he telling me bad and very first time I meet him? Fine. And you say, all right, can you show me some data associated with this? He's like, I'll get around to it, you know? Um, and, uh, you know, some, some time goes by and I think, you know, six months later,

he could really tell that the heat was on him. My eye, I have Sauron. I think that's who it is. He's like, ah, I gotta, I gotta throw this guy off the trail. Um, he's like, okay, I think that's who it is. He's like, I gotta throw this guy off the trail. He's like, okay, I've got the data. I've got the data that shows that it's Steve Bannon. And you can see in the series, in episode four, he's like, I've known it from the beginning. I've known it's Steve Bannon.

Can I stop you for a second? Yeah. Why was the heat on Ron at that point? Well, all of the evidence pointed to him. I had a massive list of of evidence pointing to ron and like for example oh um he would say like while i would be with him he would say things that uh like q is going to start going on the offense um as we're like coming down the mountain and then during the interview he brought that again. Q's going to start going on the offense.

Two days later, Q writes, going on the offense. This is not something that Q does often. I think there was one more usage of the word offense in like the thousands of drops that had occurred up until that point. Like that's, okay, fine. That's one data point, right? But I have many, many more data points like that. And in fact, actually, Ron, after watching the series

and he saw that scene, I was going to get around to this after the whole Bannon bit, but he ended up throwing his own right-hand man under the bus. He's like, oh, I had this guy with me that day. He must have been taking notes, and maybe he's Q. That's how it must have... That's the only way that could have happened. All right, fine.

You've already convinced me of Bannon, but now let's try to... Let's throw your right-hand guy in the bus. Interesting. I mean, all of, first off, he would be able to access the trip code. It wouldn't be hard for him to easily hijack it at any point in time. You know, he. Could he falsify IP data?

Like, how is he getting you this data? Well, so the data set that he presented, I believe he had been LARPing as Bannon for some time. Oh, Jesus Christ. So he, yeah, he had put on the hat of Steve Bannon, I believe, probably sometime. He was like, who's a likely suspect? He'd done the same thing I did. He was like, who can I pin this on

so it wouldn't be traced back to him? And I think when we see that static IP, this is my best guess. What you can do is set up a proxy server. You can just run it, run all your traffic through that one IP address. And so from that point on, that IP address can also serve as a verification method. And can you make that IP address appear to be in a very specific location? Yes. Oh, okay. So, and Rome would know how to do that, right?

Right. So, and if what you want to do is, and that would also make it so that the trip code doesn't end up having to be the primary verification method. And those who run the boards, the admin, obviously the admin, but the moderators and the board owner who can see a bit of the IP address can go, okay, like even though Q has been hijacked, say the trip code's been hacked, well, it's the new IP address. So Q could always use the static IP to fall back on as a verification method. And this is what Paul was complaining about. He's like, okay, well, suddenly Q is using this new IP. Now, interestingly, Ron's right-hand man during one of these other interviews is like,

let me show you, Ron was actually messaging me all the way back in early January of 2018 that he thinks it's Steve Bannon. And then actually, when this takeover, I think, took place, when Paul Ferber, the previous board owner of Q, says that it's a fake Q, some of the first things that get posted are in relationship to Steve Bannon. It's like a Steve Bannon. And I think he was rather disappointed that nobody had picked up on it. And he was like, let me show you. It's so good. good. You know, we've even, we even, we even staged a whole thing where we sent someone out with cameras in front of Avenatti's office, you know, shared that stuff, you know, who lives like 20 minutes or so away from where Steve Bannon's house was, you know, staged this whole thing so

that there was a forensic trail that wasn't pointing in their direction. And that's why it confused the hell out of me. I was like, how, you know, all this data would be such a pain in the ass to fake. Well, it wasn't that the data was fake. It was that the data was designed to look like a certain thing. Because, of course, Ron would know how to do that. And I'm sure he was just like, ah, he wanted better competition. He wanted somebody to see how smart he was. God, how much time did you spend thinking about this?

I mean, dude, I spent the last few months just trying to like damn it now i'm going on joe rogan's show i'm gonna have to like re-upload it all yeah so what i wanted to get to before is um when the initial queue drops and when all this stuff starts happening how does it leak and become a mainstream thing? How does it get out? Is there a specific moment or is it just a slow sort of recognition by people who are conspiratorially minded that there's this gentleman or person or whatever that's posting pretending to be this Trump insider like what is it that makes it become this huge thing I don't remember

when I started hearing about it but I assume by the time stuff reaches me it's leaked out into the mainstream yeah so what what was the event people started talking about this anonymous insider on the chans almost immediately. It was almost instantaneous. And I think that for those who were trying to get an edge on YouTube, you know, having this, being able to say like, oh, there's this secret government insider who's releasing drops and all of our dreams are coming true. government insider who's releasing drops and all of our dreams are coming true. So you had people like Tracy Beans, Jordan Sather, right from the start kind of being like, is this legit? Here's what they're saying. And then it kind of built from there. People are following them, start checking out the chans. But it was still fairly contained it was fairly contained up until like late december

of 2017 when these characters tracy beans paul ferber and colman rogers and i believe it was tracy's idea say let's let's uh start a board on reddit that's devoted to q anon that's going to reach that's going to reach you know a much wider audience um and it certainly did 2017 yeah so reddit is where it branches reddit branches out and then it also branches out when they go on the alex jones show and that becomes a a big a big boom so then it becomes fun yeah that's when that's when people that's when the excitement kind of kicks up but you had a lot of the anons who were pissed off that they had gone on alex jones they were going mainstream um they didn't they wanted everybody to stay anonymous and they didn't like the celebrity status of it yeah that's fascinating oh here's a fascinating part of the culture right so here's a yeah really

fascinating and you can see it even in Q's mentality towards Tracy. OK, so this is this is great. I had talked with I talked with all of the board owners for for Q. So everybody who had ever been in charge of the like craziest thing on the Internet that's QAnon, right? Like where Q had been posting on their board. I asked them all like, okay, well, did Q ever communicate with you, right? Did Q ever, you know, send you messages? And they said, well, not like direct messages, but Q, because of that IP address, would sometimes post anonymously, openly on the boards, so that only the board owner or the moderators would know it was Q. So it was a way of communicating with those who were running the boards without the entire public knowing it. And so they would be able to just go, okay, same IP, bring it up.

And there was one – and Q didn't do this very often, very, very rarely. But one of the board owners was like, there's a really unbelievable moment. Like my jaw just dropped that Q was saying this stuff. And I was on this call with like a couple of other folks who were big into Q at the time. I think like – anyway, they were all like, wait, what is it? What is it? I think we have the – it's like secret Q drop. Secret.

Oh, this is great because Q is just shit talking Tracy Beans and some of, just writing like a trash talking anon. And so this was after the switch to 8chan? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is April, I believe it was from April of 2018. And Q, you know, people really started to monetize Q at this point. Tracy Beans is kind of moving away. She's built this huge audience

off of QAnon. She's kind of rejecting it. And Q, if we scroll up, you can see... R equals 18. So you can see the ID right there, the FC whatever. This is something that only a board owner or a moderator would be able to see.

It's right next to anonymous. So then you see that little FCFE3I. So if you scroll up and you can see a Q drop, that one right there, it has the same ID next to it, the FCF. And that's because it's like a hash representation of the IP address. So it's the same. So you know that Q, even though they didn't use the trip code, was also posting these anonymous drops. And we didn't include this in the series, but this is kind of wild that Q was actually making posts that, you know, as that, yeah the those who are running the boards could

actually see so you have this one here r equals 18 why is that interesting why is it unusual that he's making well because he's secretly communicating with the board owners and only they would be able to and moderators and only they'd be able to see it but if you scroll down so this is only two moderators yes so you can see well the ones that have Q were public, and everybody would know. The ones that are anonymous, no one knows that these are actually Q posting,

except for the moderators. So you can see there, it says Beans. Beans, hey patrons. No, up above that, it says Beans, you are shit. That's Q writing. Yeah, interesting. That doesn't seem like it makes any sense. Then you go down here, it's like,

help me change the world, not us, but her. Scam, scam, scam, what a disgrace. So this is Q being very upset at Tracy Beans for monetizing Q, for pivoting mainstream. And that's her YouTube channel? What is... It says fake outlets like CNN, New York Times. So that's what it is?

Like going on those outlets and then promoting her YouTube channel? Is that what it is? Promoting her YouTube channel, trying to get people to give her money. Basically, you can see here, Bean started at 8K followers, now 77K because of Q.

This is Q writing. Now pushing for more money and the drops Q. Now pushing for the money and drops Q to be more accepted mainstream. So Q is like she got famous off of Q and now is dropping Q. And Q is not happy with this. This is someone upset that someone's getting famous. Someone's writing it out. Well, but this is Q riding it.

Right, yeah. Whoever, you know, which was likely Ron at this point, riding this. Which seems like, yeah, this is not like, why the fuck would a government insider give a shit who's becoming famous from distributing what's supposed to be real information. Right.

Yeah. And just coming on here and just writing like a typical anon, just, just like shit posting and bitching. Right, right, right. Exactly.

Like when Q was like writing to the border, it was just like another anon. How many people at one point in time were, uh, doing Q related YouTube videos? Um, I mean, I don't, uh, a lot, a lot where there videos? I mean, I don't, a lot. A lot where there were, I mean, there were, I think, 15 or 20, you know,

who were like the predominant ones, you know, and maybe like 10 really big ones, big accounts. And we follow a couple of them in the series. Craig had a huge following. Craig had a huge following. Liz had a huge following. Dustin had a sizable following. Jordan Sather had a really big following. And they kind of came at it from different angles.

Like Craig was the evangelical approach. Dustin was more of the truther who kind of went after everybody. Craig is the guy who had Donald Trump on his wall. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then you have someone like Jordan Sather who comes from the, like, David Wilcock UFO, like, New Age crowd. Like, the reptile people, lizard people or whatever,

blue avians, that's his, you know... 5G. Baby, kind of. Yeah, of thing. So for them, it was like, okay, well, here's a whole new audience that maybe we can tap into. And as Q became this umbrella for all beliefs, all conspiracies, the big tent, it was very useful for, say, someone like Wilcox or Jordan Sather to be like, okay, well, let's inject our worldview into the broader narrative. And I think that's one of the most interesting things about Q is that, you know, Q didn't have complete control, right? It was kind

of call and response, like, what does the audience want, to some extent? Because it was an evolving narrative. And the idea that lizard people or blue avians got introduced to a subset of that ecosystem isn't something that was introduced by Q itself. It was just something that others who glommed on to it introduced. So, I don't know. It's kind of fascinating to watch how it took on a life of its own. And in some ways, Q didn't have quite as much control as you might imagine. I mean, Q even did Q&As at one point where people would ask him. Really?

Yeah, people would ask a question and then Q would be like, well, no, 9-11, not an inside job. You know, aliens, real. You know, those kind of things earth is not flat how does he have time for this I mean if you go to Ron's telegram look at how much he's been posting every day if it's Ron if it's I mean

you're convinced I'm convinced 100% 100% wow I mean I'm not convinced that Ron was doing it entirely autonomously. He had support. There were overlapping networks that made this possible. But was Ron the linchpin of it all?

Did he have control of the Q account? Yes, that I believe 100%. It seems like it because the shift from 8chan when 8chan was taken down and then they come back as 8kun and Then Q starts posting before anybody can post oh Yeah, yeah I mean that's that's a big duh right huge one. Yeah, that's a giant Uh like hey fuckface how dumb do you think we are? Right? Like, that's,

like, no one else has the ability to post and you don't know who Q is and you're not in direct communication with Q, but Q posts. Yeah, yeah. Somehow,

yeah. Somehow, no one else was able to do it, really, but like, I was sitting there trying, he's like, well,

Q must, you know, Q has a high-end military, who knows how he was able to do it. Just like, well, Q must, you know, Q has high-end military. Who knows how he was able to do it? Just, like, how did Q know how many users were on 8chan, you know, posting? He was like, I don't even know that. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, that was a huge tell. I mean, there were, like, lots of little clues I wasn't able to include as well. Like, you know, I went through and, like, analyzed reflections in some of as well like you know went through and like analyzed reflections and some of the photos you know that that uh that showed like how q was holding the phone when they were taking pictures and it was a like left-handed and both um both jim and well i i wrote about this on twitter and then ron you know messaged me he's like well i'm ambidextrous. Oh, God. Jim is a character. Jim is a fascinating person.

I don't know anyone like that guy. Watching that guy just talk and communicate and watching his mannerisms. How old is he? Oh, I don't know his age off the top of my head. Mid-50s. He looks a lot older, right? He does. He looks like a man who's lived.

Yeah, like he's had a hard life. But the way he's communicating, it's like he's playing all the time. Like everything's playing. It's very playful when he's talking to you and he's explaining things. playful when he's talking to you and he's explaining things everything he's got a an incredible sense of awareness of how he's being perceived and that the what he's projecting like i'm watching the way he's talking and i'm like this guy this is not like a this is not his first dance you You know what I'm saying? Like, he knows how to talk to people.

Like, it's like. Well, he was a recruiter in the military. So he did that for a long time before. So he knew how to convince somebody to, you know, pick up a gun. Yeah. And, you know, so he has the gift of gab and, you know, that requires some pretty solid communication skills, I think. But it's interesting that that's lost when you communicate in text. Like what's interesting about him is when he talks and you can see him, and you get the whole big picture of who he is,

this oddball character. In the end, he's got the crazy facial hair and all that jazz. But all of his weird quirks, all the weird things about him. The guy should have a fucking podcast. I don't know if he does. I mean, he YouTubes regularly. Does he? Or bit shoots, or he has his own thing.

Are you allowed? Is he allowed to be on YouTube? I don't think. I mean, he's. I'm not sure if he's on YouTube anymore. He created his own version of YouTube. He did? Yeah. He created it?

Yeah. It's called, well, it's not quite YouTube, but it's Tiger Network is the name of it. Tiger Network. Yeah. Yeah. See if he's on YouTube. But I mean, while I'm watching it, I'm listening to him talk. I'm like, well,

remember it's edited. So it's, it's, uh, you know, you're cutting out all of the stuff. It's not that, not that compelling. Um, I understand. But what I'm saying is it's like, he's really aware of how he's being seen. He is. And I think that that playfulness is very intentional and it masks something more sinister in a lot of cases. And you see that on the sixth, right? On that, on when we're approaching the Capitol, you see that, that kind of, kind of crack. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what do you, what do you see when you see the, the whole sixth thing with him? I mean, he's, he's a little in the approach to that. He's, in the approach to that he's he's almost starry-eyed like like he's looking around and going i mean he says it right he's like this is the most non-business thing i've ever done right um and he i think it drained him financially keeping q online um in the long run. How so? He had to sell his pig farm.

How did it drain him financially? Like, what was the hit? Well, it was expensive to keep 8chan online, for one. Expensive to run? Mm-hmm. It's, you know, as they describe, it's a yacht, you know, that you just sink money into. And Fred made it, Fred Brennan, their opposition,

who had created 8N, made it difficult to keep it going, made it expensive legally and technically for them. You know, they had a lot of legal costs associated with all of that. I don't know, you know, they had to change locations for their businesses. They had to change server setups. I mean, you know, he just made things more costly. And Jim and – or Tom, I guess, said that, you know, Jim is somebody who when he gets money, he kind of spends it. So sometimes he has a lot and sometimes he doesn't have very much. You know, Fred would say that that's all bullshit and that Jim is actually

super wealthy and it's all just a character he's playing, you know, because they have five channel in Japan, which is an incredibly popular Chan. That's, I think, where the majority of their income stream comes from. And you see some of that Chan drama play out where, you know, he had this split with his old business partner here, Yuki, who's super famous in Japan. Might also explain why there's the whole Q Japan Flynn thing we were talking about earlier because they have headquarters there. So if they're going to get Q to be popular anywhere, it's going to probably be in Japan. You know, and Chan culture is also much bigger in Japan, I guess, in part because if I was to guess or I've sort of heard that when you're in an environment where you feel like you're socially not as free, you need more outlets and the chans serve as that outlet. And the chans in Japan, are they Japanese characters?

They are, yeah. And can you translate it? Is it translatable? Like is there a button that you can hit or anything? I don't think it's quite that convenient. It's not like on Twitter where you hit, like, translate tweets. Right. So my point was, like, it's all Japanese traffic, essentially. Yeah, yeah, Japanese traffic. And it makes it really hard to really know how it's, like, what's going on in Japan.

And if you want to have your business operations somewhere, like, it's difficult to do research. I mean, we just released the series in Japanapan um you know with a japanese dub and everything so i'll be i'm very interested to see how it's how it's received received there and that's where that's where ron is still i mean we never the um that end sequence where i sort of confront him on, you know, why I think he might be Q, and he kind of comes out with it. Initially, we were supposed to meet again to film, and I wanted to kind of confront him on sort of the list of reasons I thought he was Q.

And he wanted to do it on an ice wall, so, like, ice climbing. He had just gone on one ice climbing trip. He apparently has a YouTube channel where he talks about God and sings hymns. What? That sounds about right. Yeah, it's like it's unrelated to all of his other stuff. Oh, my God.

There's only one video on it right now, and that's it. Just one. Things might have gotten deleted. Oh, I mean, this is what he's, yeah, he'll just keep vamping. He calls himself Watkins Xerxes? That's how I had to find it. It wasn't coming up just to give up his name. Solid.

And he's in the Philippines still? No, he's in California. Really? Oh, that's right. Yeah. That's right. He moved to California. Why did he have to California. Really? Oh, that's right. Yeah. That's right. He moved to California. Why do we have to do that again? Uh, I think that, I mean, I usually try to keep people's families

out of it, but it was a family reason. Okay. Yeah. Um, so the, the, the January 6th thing, again, you were saying that you see more, you see more of a sinister aspect of his personality on the January 6th thing. What do you mean by that, other than the fact that he said it's the most non-business thing? Well, you can see a fire in his eyes, right? Don't you think that that's also just the moment itself? Before anyone attacks the Capitol building itself, you're there in this wild, crazy mass of humans. Have you ever been to like a – But, I mean, I had seen that look in his eyes before.

You know, that wasn't the first time. When had you seen that before? When I would bring up Fred. Did he get upset? Mm-hmm. You know, I think the first time that we – when he had to go and confront Congress, I mean, he was obviously pretty riled up about that. I mean, you know, he's used to being the boss in the Philippines.

So being in a situation where he maybe had less power, and he would even tell you that he's, you know, he can be volatile. and the first day we met, filmed with him, at the end of that day, he said to me, you're the enemy, right? And I was like, I don't think I'm your enemy. Well, if you were the enemy, why is he talking to you? It's voluntary, right? The whole thing was voluntary.

Why did they agree to do that? Did they think that they were smarter than you? They were going to be able to, like, keep shucking and jiving to the very end, and at the end of it, you would think it was Steve Bannon or whoever? I mean, in the beginning, I had first reached out to Fred, and I didn't know that their relationship was dissolving, that the tension was growing between Fred and Jim and Ron. You know, and I was genuinely interested in the free speech side of what HM was doing. And I didn't think that they were behind

Q when I went there. I just went to talk to them also in part because if anybody knew who was behind Q, it would be those with the technical data. Everything else is just a, you know, can be noise. You can sort of see what you want in the writing. But the data itself was sort of the most valuable. Of course, after I left, you know, I was like, God, these guys are suspicious. Right away. Oh, right. I mean, as I was doing those interviews, I was like, what is going on? You know what got me? The tape on the glasses.

I was like, what the fucker? You got an expensive watch on and you got tape on your glasses? Like, what's going on? You know Ron reacted to that, right? What? He's like, it was dental floss. Reacted to what? Your. Me? You. Really?, it was dental floss. Reacted to what? Your-

Me? You. Really? Yeah. Dental floss. Yeah, he was using dental floss instead of tape. That's what it was? Yeah, I guess so.

Why didn't you just buy a new pair of glasses? Well, he's- I mean, look, I even told him this. I was like, I think it's just part of the character you were playing, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. Well, I have a bunch of comments from his Telegram relationship to it if you want to look at them. No, I don't. Probably not.

Was he upset about it? I mean, he was just being a little sassy about it, that's all. He was just like an opportunity to be like, actually, it was dental floss. Well, whatever the fuck it was. It's so on the nose. It's just a character Ron's playing. Ron is a theater nerd.

You know, he's a huge theater nerd. Like, I played sports, but I was also a theater nerd. And so... So you know both worlds? I know both worlds, yeah. I mean, I definitely know the type. The Ron just takes things to the extreme more than anyone I've ever met.

We've discovered when we were going to Reno that we had both been in the Music Man and both been in the Barbershop Quartet and both still remembered the music to it. You know, so Ron... But Ron has this idea that, like, we're all... You know, the whole Shakespeare thing. Like, we're all just actors on a stage, you know?

But then the question is, like, what part do you want to play if that's true and uh you know he he seems to like that villain role um uh he's drawn more to that um and i think that the glasses are just a character i mean the the watch he was covering up his watches um these fancy, fancy watches. And when he stopped covering it up is when we were in Reno filming. And then he like kind of rolled it up to show me that he was now wearing a Casio watch. And I went back and looked through all the footage. It's like, okay, like, you know, did he have on fancy watches, you know, because Q would use fancy watches to confirm, you know, still affect you. And fountain pens.

And fountain pens, yeah. You know, and that was a good red herring for a bit because I was just like, well, and maybe Jim was also in on it or got in on it at some point, right? Because he's really into pens. He's super into pens, I mean. Because Ron would say he's like autistic about pens

would be Ron's definition of it. But Ron's into them too, you know? He kind of let that slip at one point. Because he's also into pens yeah he's like oh I tried to buy this $3,000 pen and I couldn't get it

you can hear it it's in one of the scenes in Reno but so yeah Ron's also you know super into fountain pens

just not not as obsessed with them what a bizarre thing to get into pens yeah do they write a lot? you can see

this is all for show, right? Right. So he puts on the Casio watch. He's thinking very much about the image he's presenting and how it's going to be interpreted. Even the green hat. Uh-huh.

You know, that, do you know what the green hat means in China? No. It means you're a cuck. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So he's been,

like you've been made a cuckoldove. Cuckoldove? Yeah. Oh, So he's been like, you've been made a cuckoldove. Cuckoldove? Yeah. Oh, I never heard that term. Maybe I'm using it wrong. I like it. If you invented it, congratulations. It's a good one.

Here we go. Cuckoldove is fun. Have you heard of cuckoldove? Nope. Nope. Jamie's pretty deep. All right. You might have invented a new term.

Well, no, like you've been made a cuckold of. Oh, cuckold of. Two separate words. Well, I think you just inadvertently made a good word. Cuckold of. Cuckold of is nice. Like a dove. Like a pair of them? Yeah, like a cuckold of.

You're like a little peaceful cuck. Like the third day of Christmas. Which you love gave to me. I mean, dove is the peace bird, right? Yeah. You're a cuckold dove. I like it. But yeah, you wear that green hat around China and women will approach you.

And this is why he wears it. They will approach you and do what? Be like, you know what that green hat means. So it's a pickup trick. What kind of hat? And also, he's leaning into the cuck aspect of chair culture. Was it a baseball hat? It's just like a big green, kind of baseball hat.

I'm trying to remember it. It's like a baseball hat. Okay. So that's why he wears that hat. Yeah. So he's very conscious of his image. The whole martial arts thing was odd, too. When I'm watching him punch the Miwara and all that jazz.

Yeah. Because it doesn't look like he does that a lot. You know what I'm saying? I don't. I'm not a martial arts expert. It's very performative. It seemed very performative because, like, I'm watching him throw the punches, and they're not efficient.

It's not like a guy who has done that a lot. Like, have you seen, have you watched video footage of someone hitting a macaquara? Like people who do that on a daily basis. I did not side-by-side them, no. No, you don't need to. He just seems like a guy who's like, you know, maybe he's done it a few times. But he's making it seem like this is like a common aspect of his day, this practice. Right. Well, he, this practice. Right.

Well, he exaggerates everything. Yeah. So like he recently on his telegram, he's like, I do ice climbing. I'm an ice climber. And then he like posted images from the only time I know he's ever done ice climbing. So I imagine it might be similar with a martial arts thing where, you know. Well, if you do martial arts a couple times, you're technically a martial art.

Like, I play basketball with my kids sometimes. I am not a basketball player, but I guess I could say I play basketball. Ron, right. Ron does a lot of things, you know. He's a jack of all trades, you know. He said, you know, after Q stopped posting and he stopped being the admin

of 8kun right around the same, on the same time, at the same time, he's like, I'm going to be a woodworker now. I'm going to start, I'm going to start making, making crafts. I'm leaving 8kun behind to become a woodworker. You know, he actually posted this really absurd video where he he went out into the woods and uh and kind of this happened a couple of this happened out like maybe a month or two after the series aired and it was like here's my new character that i'm playing and i'm uh you know leaving the old q thing behind i I think I have the video here. It feels like he's playing the ASMR crowd a little bit and he dubbed the whole thing.

It's very weird. The ASMR crowd is strange. It's strange, but some of it's very compelling. There's one guy, I go to his channel, and he cooks out in the woods. And he chops the wood, and he makes the fire, and there's no conversation at all. It's crackling, and then he's eating the food. And like, you know, video might be 30 minutes long.

And it's got millions of views. Like this is wild. Like people are really into just like listening and watching people do stuff where they don't talk. I mean, do you want to listen to Ron? I don't know. When you put your head on your pillow at night, you're like, maybe just Ron's voice lulling me to sleep. Well, that's not necessarily ASMR, right? Well, if you heard the way he did it, it very much feels like he was going for the ASMR crowd.

Just a little bit. very much feels it it feels like he was going for the asmr crowd just so i mean he like his dad they're clever and it's it's funny how playful this so it's like an internet person out in the world sort of interacting we'll hear this i don't know if that's six it's one thing okay all right this is the uh end of it i think leavingun, I have hand-built many wooden toys. Jesus. Donating to children and orphanages throughout my region of the world. There's going to be some dead spots. This is fascinating.

That being said, I am no longer affiliated with 8kun and have no interest discussing 8kun or Q-related material. I have always been opposed to violent criminal acts in the name of any group. Weird. Fucking master. He's a master. Master troll. Master troll. Master troll.

I do believe strongly in the fundamental right to legally express our beliefs and ideas in ways protected by the Constitution. Is he speaking in Japanese

and then dubbing it in english acceptance i mean just wait for the last guy here watch this i am not q and have never posted as q but it's what the fuck and he puts on a black hat he's just like like never posted on his queue. It's amazing. I mean, the whole thing is just like a- It's great. You know? It's great.

I mean, it's very entertaining. It's very fun. Shitting in the town square, you know? Like that's why I included- That's shitting in the town square? Kind of, yeah. Like it's- How so?

Because he's just messing with people. Like he's kind of hijacking culture to, I mean, get us talking about it, to get people- But is that what he's doing, or is he just having fun? I mean, he's kind of having fun. That seems like fun to me. I mean, look. But also, when he takes his black hat, I've never posted his cue.

It's so performative. It's super performative. But it's also the weirdness of the dubbing. Like, what is that? What's the original? Is it originally in Japanese? I mean, Ron would never. It's like he would always do a funny walk, you know?

I have no idea if he even said the same things. He probably just went out, recorded himself, came back in and was like, all right, I'm going to, you know, read my script now. But he's talking in the thing and it doesn't match up. Yeah. He did not. I brought that up. He didn't worry about that.

I think he did it on purpose. Oh, he definitely did it on purpose. For fun. Just to make it as weird as possible. You know? But why do you say that it's like hijacking? Well, the idea is like to... So the reason I included the Diogenes bit in one of the episodes is because I felt it was

the most illustrative of Ron's worldview. What is it? What is the Diogenes? The cynic. So cynicism. And this something that ron had brought up along the way this idea that like a dog can shit in the middle of the town square why can't i okay you know so it is super performative and i think what he's he's just he's he's leaning into assumptions and trying to and and i mean you could also just call diogenes a troll um like that's the same thing it's like why can't i do this thing it gets people talking about the you know look at that guy he just took a shit in the middle of a town square who does he think he

is that's so you know and i think that that really helps explain how ron sees the world you know he's um uh and partially treating it like it's a game but uh if he has any religion i would say it's um that that flavor of cynicism you know it's like socrates gone mad i don't know man that's funny to me oh it's funny i mean that's why i brought it here because i thought it was like yeah it's super weird and and kind of hilarious. I do not dislike them at all. I mean, part of me with all this kind of QAnon stuff is like, and many things online, and it gets into this conversation of censorship and whether or not censorship is necessary or whether it's evil or whatever. necessary or whether it's evil whatever it the thing about it is all these things is it's not it doesn't work on that doesn't work on me in terms of like i like the q drops and all that

stuff i'm not i never got interested right so i never i never got invested in it i never i mean i got invested but in the way that i wanted to figure out who was behind it. Right, you're making a documentary. A different flavor of obsession. So it's like... But I mean, Ron is fucking with misfits. If you look at what he's done in recent... I mean, look, I think you can find likable things about anybody. And I think that if you look at what Ron's been doing since Q sort of stopped and what he's been up to on Telegram. I mean, he's been running the same kind of like hype trains to get people really excited that something is going to happen and that it doesn't. This woman who was working in an election office in Colorado, she sent him some documents.

He started trumping up this idea that there was this whistleblower, this Dominion whistleblower. It was going to be the end-all, be-all. She had revealed the passwords to the system and this was going to blow open the whole thing. He gets tons of new followers on Telegram. He's telling people, spread the video. Spread it far and wide. This person's a hero. And he releases this video.

And people immediately start going, wait, we already knew all of this stuff. and people immediately started going like, wait, this isn't any, we already knew all of this stuff. And people started reporting that it had come with malware. So like basically it's a spread. Yeah, and they started showing their calendars that were full of like virus notifications. Things couldn't be shared. So it sounds like he told people to spread this video far and wide

and it was laden with malware. And what was the malware attempting to do? I don't actually know what the malware—probably create a botnet, something like that. So do you think he released the malware? So you can see, this is what people were showing on there. Put down to protect your priceless data. Oh, my God. And this is a Google calendar? Is that what that is?

This is an iCalendar, I think, like someone's iPhone. Wow. You know, so lots of people were saying this. And then it gets even crazier because Lindell has this whole cyber symposium. They're going to reveal that the whole election was a fraud. They bring the whistleblower out. You know, what happened is she, Ron essentially doxed her when he released the information, even though he said that he was like scrubbing everything.

He released some passwords that got traced back to her. And now she's like entangled in a big, you know, legal suit. But essentially she ended up doing the thing that she had claimed the other side was doing. You know, she revealed she somehow got access to the password that the secretary of state, I think, you know, was supposed to be the only, the government was only supposed to be the ones who had access to this.

And then she ended up releasing it. So it's a, it's a huge like legal problem for her. You know, Ron didn't really protect her in that situation. And it's created, it's created chaos. So talk about fucking with misfits.

Like, wow. Like it's just, it's just a, he didn't know about the with misfits. Wow. Like, it's just a train. Is it possible that he didn't know about the malware? No, because he, like, cut the video. He put it together, and then he released it. Are you saying that his video purposely had malware in it? That is what it would, that is the indication, yes.

Based on all of the comments after the video got released from people who had been following his telegram from some time. Like, this thing's full of malware. Why the fuck would someone do that, though? It seems like it would be so obvious that that's what... Well, maybe he didn't know what the outcome would be. You know, could have been a prototype. I don't know why he would bother doing something like that.

But again, he is someone who... Go back to the Diogenes thing. I think for him, all of this is just entertainment. So even releasing malware would be fun. Like, haha, I got everybody to click this video. It's all shit you already knew. And now you have malware on your computer. I mean, Q is malware.

It's releasing a lot of ideological or conceptual viruses into people's minds and getting them to believe that like all these arrests were going to happen that never happened. Educate me on Telegram because I don't – I know very, very little about it. I've never been on Telegram. Is it essentially for people that got banned from other social media platforms or they feel like they're being censored? Yeah. I mean it's an encrypted platform. Is it all right wing? It doesn't use algorithms.

No, I mean, it's a messaging platform. Oh, so it's not like a Twitter? No, it's not quite like a Twitter. So how the hell do you contact? You can just follow people on there. So it started as a messaging platform, but you can have gigantic groups. And the guy who started it, like, you know, he, I think he used to, and this is a little outside of my expertise. He was, I believe like, uh, he he's Russian. He had, I think maybe he'd worked at contact you before he left, started telegram Russia, not, not his biggest fan. Um,

they raised a bunch of money in some crypto ICO. I think it's probably helped their technology to scale. And they are, you know, far more permissive when it comes to people using their platform. Technically, unless you're a member of the group, you shouldn't be able to see what people are posting. But you can forward messages now from, you know, what one person wrote to another group. You can follow people on there. And so Ron has actually managed to accrue hundreds of thousands of followers. I think he's over like 430,000 followers at this point on Telegram where he can post something and share it and then people can just comment in the aftermath. And there is a kind of retweet functionality in the form of forwarding messages, but it doesn't have the same kind of amplification tools built into it. So it's just...

Because there's no algorithm. Because there's no algorithm. But so is it like Twitter where you could just like, I could follow you on Twitter and I can go say, oh, what's he up to? And then click on it and then see all of your tweets? Yeah. Yeah. You can go back and see everything Ron's done or anybody who has a Telegram feed is done unless they've deleted it. So it's a messaging app, but it's also like a social media app as well? I think it's evolving into a social media app. So it, okay. So it was initially just like Signal? Yeah. I mean, that's how I used it initially. And

then I was surprised to hear, oh wait, people were, they create, it had been sort of retooled to be, you know, to follow. But to create sort of big followings on there. And how does someone become aware of it? Is it just word of mouth in terms of like following people and things along those lines? You can say follow this person. So if you have a big Telegram account, you can forward somebody else's message or say like, hey, here's another handle, follow this person.

I'm not the foremost expert on Telegram, so I may not know exactly what its origin was, but I do remember that initially I was using it primarily as an encrypted messaging tool. And then pretty quickly, several years ago, you know, crypto groups, other things were using that as a as a, you know, means for for communicating with a with a large audience. So it's not essentially designed as like a Twitter replacement, but it's being morphed into something along those lines. It's being utilized in a similar, but I think better way for society. I think the fact that he doesn't have algorithms makes it a,

and the fact that it's encrypted and that the company itself isn't mining your data and that's not the, I don't know what their business model is, but maybe they don't know yet. Right. Well, didn't Twitter lose massive amounts of money for a long time? Like they weren't making any money, right? But they were worth a lot of money on paper.

Because users are valuable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they didn't exactly. I don't know. Maybe they know how to monetize it now, right? But for the longest time.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, once they went public and then kind of figured out how to use the conversations that were happening, have people pay for, you know, to get stuff trending and have ads served. What is the replacement for Twitter? Like when people get kicked off of Twitter, what is the standard, where's the standard place that they go? I mean, there's a lot of companies that are trying to be the replacement. I don't think any have really stood out. I think Telegram is winning at this point because it is a little bit of a – it's a little evolved compared to like a Gab or something along those lines. Gab was one of the things that had really picked up.

But, you know, Telegram just has better technology too. I mean, the fact that it is encrypted makes an improvement. It's not mining user data in the same way. How many users does Gab have? Do you know? I don't know. But that became popular for quite a few people that did get banned from social media platforms, right? Yes.

So I think Ron and Andrew Torba, I believe, is the CEO of that company. And Ron had had an account there. I think they had some kind of data leak that was problematic for them. That Ron had a data leak? Well, not Ron had a data leak, but the Gab had a data leak. Oh. That was problematic for them. And then there's Mines, too, right?

Yeah, there's a bunch of these. Speech platform. Yeah, well, they say that they're, but what do we even mean when we say that, right? Because, you know, I think one of the things that people misunderstand about Section 230 is that it doesn't, it actually, what it does is it protects companies who want to moderate.

Explain Section 230. So Section 230 is this, it was part of the Communication and Decency Act that many people in the digital rights space would say it sort of created the internet. In some ways, it is the First Amendment of the internet in that it allows companies to foster speech on their platforms in line with the First Amendment or not. It can either be as permissive as you want it to be, or you can moderate as much as you want. And in fact, there was a court case early on that is what led to this, where I think

this prodigy was being sued for something that someone had posted on their site. And then they started moderating, you know, moderating. And this is what, this is when they determined that actually, you know, you're not, you can moderate but not be responsible for the content that's being published there. And so this is what allows comment sections, is what allows for social media to exist. is what allows comment sections, is what allows for social media to exist. It really is the thing that drives the internet. And a lot of times people will say, well, this is a handout to big tech, which isn't quite accurate either. It's really the thing that allows small companies to survive as well. Any kind of competition would rely on the fact that people can post

stuff on their platform and that they're not going to be liable for that. Now, if they write their own things on the platform, I think roommates.com got in trouble for something that they kind of biased that they had built into their engine itself, you know, then they can get in trouble. But, you know, if we got rid of Section 230, which I've heard people say, well, if I can't say whatever I want on Twitter, let's get rid of Section 230. It's like, well, do you think that these companies are going to be more or less permissive if they're liable for every single thing that's there? And really what's going to happen, what some of these bigger

companies are going to drive towards is using AI moderation that only they can afford. And when something goes wrong, they're just going to say bad AI, right? And then meanwhile, competitions, smaller companies that can't afford that moderation will simply be edged out. So if Twitter was something that's somehow liable for everything that was on the site, they would probably integrate a lot of this AI moderation tools. And we've seen how well that works.

You know, it's not particularly good at determining what should or should not be allowed online, and it ends up casting a far wider net. Yeah. So, yeah, that doesn't seem to be the question, well, what, you know, what, should there be rules in place that, that require them to keep treat content more neutrally? Or do we want them to operate as autonomous businesses, even at that scale, that can dictate what people see and what they don't. We've just never seen anything in our lives where hundreds of millions of people were using the same thing

and there was an entity that could determine what should be allowed. And you could make the public square argument around that as well and say like so many people are using it that this has become a kind of digital public square. But as the law currently stands, it know, it's a private company, it can do what it wants. What are your thoughts on this? Like, especially because you're so deeply invested in this Q phenomenon, and we see how that went. I mean, if you ever really wanted to suppress free speech, what you would do is engineer something like Q and then have it reach this boiling point which is January 6th where you

have an arguable point you know if you wanted to say this is what we want to avoid and this is why we need at least some form of censorship hmm I mean I think that and this is what drew me to the story in the beginning, Q is testing the limits of free speech. And that's kind of how you know whether or not you have a right, whether or not you can have dangerous ideas, whether or not you can say unpopular things. And that's why I was drawn to Q in the first place is because Reddit had banned it. And that seemed novel at the time.

And it seemed like maybe, well, is this where the internet is headed? So you saw that, and that's what led you to start investigating and setting up this documentary series? Yeah, yeah, because I had a background covering digital privacy. Did you bring this to HBO and say, hey, look at this? Very late in the game. So I had been shooting this entirely independently up until September 2020. You financed it yourself?

Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. Risky man. Loan, credit card. Wow. It was a gamble. It's a big gamble, right?

Yeah. But it paid off. Holy shit. In this case, it did. You know, it got into HBO and it worked out. Because it wasn't what it was. But there was no guarantees that that was going to happen. Well, also, there's and, you know, it worked out. Because it wasn't what it was. But there was no guarantees that that was going to happen.

Well, also, there's no guarantees you were going to have an ending like January 6th. I'm not saying that you were like rooting for something crazy like that to happen. But, boy, did that pay off. Hmm. I mean, it is. It's almost like you have to predict where things are headed in order to tell a story like this. Yeah. like you have to predict where things are headed in order to tell a story like this yeah um i mean we had put together that whole opening sequence that takes place in dc before january 6 i mean

that the ideation for that had started in november um it gave it a whole new meaning of course when you see these kind of all of these beliefs and conspiracy theories or whatever you want to say kind of overtaking dc um And you see the kind of characters memeing themselves into existence in that opening. But would the series have been substantially different if that hadn't happened? Of course. And it wasn't even that obvious to most who were working on it

in the lead-up to the sixth that I needed to go. You know, I was... Because we were in the throes of posts and it was an incredibly aggressive post schedule. Really aggressive. I mean, we were, we were turning, I was turning out 16 to 18 hour days. Everybody was working around the clock for five months straight on this thing. So for me to step away to go shoot at that point, a lot of people thought i was out of my mind like what could possibly be so so important that you would you would drop you know editing on this incredibly aggressive post schedule to go and document jim thank god you did right i mean well you must have been at the end like on january 7th you must have been at the end, like on January 7th, you must have been like, fuck yeah.

I was just like, oh, fuck. Actually, on January 7th, I think everybody was in a state of, a little bit of state of shock. Yeah. And didn't really, I hadn't even seen all of the news report. I hadn't seen what everybody else had been seeing because we were on the ground you know so it wasn't it wasn't until it was started looking at all of the footage and all of the um archival from other sources that you're like holy shit this is what was going on inside so what did you see i mean we were on the side where the scaffolding was where people were climbing all the scaffolding um i was you know

following jim that day you know i was very anxious going into it. I didn't really sleep the two nights before. Really? Because I thought it was going to be bad. I thought it was going to be way worse than it was. I actually thought it could have broken out into a civil war that day. That's how bad I thought it might be. And what do you think? Meanwhile, most other folks who, if you weren't tracking all of these movements you know i think that they they were absolutely their minds were blown that that this could even happen um that's me so like i i had no idea right i had no idea that anything was boiling below the surface but you apparently you thought that it was going to be way worse than what it was. Yeah. What were you tracking that led you to believe this?

I mean, all of these kind of instigators around Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, General Flynn, you know, they were all stoking the flames to the max, if you looked at the chatter on the chans, if you looked at the chatter on social media in general, around, you know, that this, you know, Trump asked for a wild protest. I mean, I think as soon as I saw that, knowing what the Q-munity thought and knowing what some of these other organizations thought, I mean, I knew more about sort of the Q perspective going into it. But it's like, OK, well, if he's asking for a wild protest,'s gonna get real what were his actual words he said wild protest i mean he wrote that like it was on twitter yeah he either he we could i'm sure we could pull it up yeah like he asked for a while he's like it's gonna be a wild protest on the wild protest and this was a protest what he believed was uh uh election fraud right and if you listen to his words in the

speech that day, you know, he's he's them fighting words. You know, we're going to go to the we're going to go there and we're going to take it, take it back. And so there were a lot of different forces who were pushing that day for something to happen. And, you know, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. This is something you'd hear a lot. You know, Ron was saying Trump needs to cross the Rubicon. Like there was this idea that he needed to, that the only way that they could keep democracy was to overthrow, you know, overthrow the, take, you know, take things over. Here it says, this is Trump's Twitter.

It says, Peter Navarro released a 36-page report alleging election fraud more than sufficient to swing victory to Trump. A great report by Peter, statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there. We'll be wild. Hmm. And what is this 36 page report did you get into that I I don't know the specific Navarro about that but I do know

Peter Navarro is there hasn't been any you know and anything of all the lawsuits and everything that's been kicked out there, nothing is stuck. So this is the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro. Yeah. 36-page report that there would be enough data and that eventually someone somewhere would reverse the decision and prove that there was enough election fraud to reinstate him or to flip the election, give it to him, right? Is that the idea? I mean, that day they were certifying the vote. I mean, that day they were certifying the vote. So animosity had been directed towards Pence, who I believe they incorrectly assumed if he didn't certify the vote that it would that, you know, or that he could he could somehow, you know, usurp authority in that case. Yeah, they're calling him a traitor.

And Ron stoked the flames of that, of course. Like they wanted to release something. They released something that night that made it seem like Pence was trying to run a coup against Trump to agitate people as much as possible. They released. Ron and Jim. So they released, you know, they tried to release these documents that you see it in the end of the series where, you know, he's saying the mother of all bombs is coming when it comes to, you know, an information drop. And that information drop was specifically targeting Pence.

And there was so much anger towards Pence. And this is as Ron and Jim, it's not as Q? Correct, at this point, yeah. Q is done at this point. So now Ron was just... How hot is that? Yeah. Right?

Yeah. I mean, at this point. So now Ron was just... How hot is that? Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, how coincidental. Sure. You can call it a coincidence. Let's do that. What is the motivation? Like, why do you think Ron is doing this? Like, what's the reason?

Well, he does treat the whole world like it's a game and if you're what are the objectives of that game maybe gaining power right because he's in contact with the administration at this point think about it this guy was just running some fringe website out of you you know, Southeast Asia and Japan. And suddenly he's advising, you know, the president. Like he's gotten to the seat of power somehow using that website and Q and his sort of fame that was developed through Q. I mean, remember Q mentions Ron, Code Monkey, very early on in the narrative.

So Q, right at that hijacking point, early in January, he's like, Ron, Code Monkey. How odd. Yeah, a little bit of theater. That means Q is deeply invested in the community of the board, right? And it means the community is deeply invested in Ron. And so he was able to pivot that notoriety from obscurity to infamy. And he is interested in infamy. He will embrace infamy, as he has said.

He's a character. I mean, you couldn't ask for better characters. I mean, if you had developed this as a drama, if this was fiction. People wouldn't believe it, probably. I don't know. I mean, there's something to be said for... It's like the two of them, particularly Ron and Jim, and then even Fred. Like, all of it is just... It's so weird. Oh, I mean, they're unbelievable characters, to be sure. And you have to say, like, what kind of person would be drawn to becoming an edgelord on something like 8chan, right? And Ron grew up with his dad running chans. I mean, what was it like in that household growing up?

Right, right. Yeah, I mean, very fascinating character studies, to be sure. And if, I mean, so much of human history, though, is written by people with, I think, not identical tendencies, but people who are driven for power and are willing to do things that others aren't. Do you think you could ever get Paul to admit that he was the original Q? Would it be in trouble for that? Because if you could, if he admitted it, that would really pull the floor out of the whole thing, wouldn't it?

would really pull the floor out of the whole thing, wouldn't it? I mean, I think that the fact that the first 127 drops were anonymous in the first place, that, you know, there's all these shakeups, there's a style change. Like, I think that, I think there's lots of, the fact that the vast, vast, vast majority of things that Q prophesies or that people believe didn't come true, all the central tenets, you know, the arrests and all that, you would think that that would be enough. If you could get Paul to come out and say, yeah, I was it. I mean, people wouldn't even believe that if he came with the data. And even then many still would be like, man, it's the deep state. It's this, it's that. Like they'll come up with some explanation to write it off. You know, and Paul, he released a whole book after this took place, you know, explaining, you know, his telling his story from that time period.

So he was incentivized to keep the narrative alive. And I think that he told me, he's like, I asked him this. I was like, well, if Q was this great military operation, why would they just let a fake Q take it over? And why wouldn't they try to reach out to you and reclaim it? And his answer, which I just think is how he was thinking about it, is, well, maybe they just wanted it to continue. And he thought of it almost like a child, like a baby that had gone out into the world

and it was become this it was becoming this big movement and he wanted to see it continue to grow how odd you know how odd and so fred started 8chan fred started hn on a mushroom trip really on the come down from the mushroom trip. He wanted to take the board creation of Reddit and the anonymity of 4chan and basically turn that into 8chan. And what was the difference? Was it a lack of moderation? Anybody could create a board. But what that meant was that people would go there and create boards with a lot of legal content. So we had a huge moderation problem in the beginning

because they could post illegal content there, you know, child porn or something like that. Right. And they, and first off, there could be hundreds of boards. How is he just able to manage all of that? You know, and they could do it totally anonymously. And if someone does post stuff and then they take it down, the person who posted that stuff can still post.

They can still post they can still post because they can't it's not like uh like a reddit user where you could ban the user because they posted illegal content and you can ban an ip but if they're using a vpn which someone who's doing something illegal like that probably would be using a vpn unless they're real dumb um you know it makes it very hard to track now 8chan does respond to government requests for illegal activity like that um i mean all the all the websites do i mean facebook has tons of take tons of issues with with that kind of material getting posted so you know people does it with jim so fred creates this thing um you know he creates 8chan. It revs up, and it's not really a huge hit overnight.

It's not until Gamergate happens when Chris Poole, who was the owner of 4chan at the time, says, Gamergate, you know, what's going on with these gamers and this whole, like, attack strategy that they're using. Too much. I don't want that on this site. He bans all discussion of Gamergate, bans talk around it, creates a lot of animosity in those communities, and they're looking for a new home. And the new home that they go to is 8chan.

So suddenly Fred has a huge influx of users. He's like, what do I do? So he needed more resources. He was cash strapped. He was just like operating out of a very low rent situation in New York. So he starts getting offers. And he felt that Jim and Ron had experience running chans and would be the best partners they offered you know server space for him um they offered to fly him out to the Philippines where he could continue to run run a chan so you know for him at the time that was a that was a pretty good deal so he got on a plane and headed out to the Philippines. And, you know, their relationship over time started to devolve.

What caused that? I mean, Fred would, I think, say that he started to depart philosophically. And he started to depart philosophically that maybe they made him kind of uncomfortable in certain situations, like that they weren't taking his safety seriously, things like that. But he also found a wife in the Philippines and his wife was her dad was like a priest. And he has since as a, and people who I was shooting with there would describe that religion kind of as a cult. So he was newly religious and 8chan also doesn't jive super well with that philosophy. So, you know, maybe probably he believed in a lot of that stuff. I think Fred is impressionable and he's also going through life faster than the average person because he doesn't think he's going to live that long. So that could have factored into it.

The big riff though that happens between them is Fred just doesn't really want to work on HN anymore. They're giving him too much responsibility in his mind. He doesn't show up to work one day. He doesn't show up for a couple of days. Maybe he's going to stop working on it. And that's when Jim, who was giving him, who had given him a place to stay in the Philippines, free of rent, but that Jim owned, just barged into his apartment and was like, why aren't you at work? And this, Fred's account is that it was very traumatizing for him.

And he knew he needed to get out of that situation immediately. So I'm sure that there was a confluence of factors that led to them kind of pulling apart. And also Fred was young when he created 8chan. You know, he was like 18. So we're talking about somebody who's still growing up. Right. You know, and like, it's 21. He's like, I want to do this.

Maybe I don't want to be the... Right. But he still likes that world. And Fred is a very eccentric character, and he likes to lean into that eccentricity as much as possible. And who Fred is online is very different than who Fred is in real life. And both he and Tom like Tom who you see who's Jim Watkins kind of right-hand man artist in college I think that

Jim was hoping that Fred was going to have a similar relationship to him that he would take him under his wing while he was like you know 19 or 20 or whatever and that he would just continue to be a part of their organization going into later years. And, uh, you know, and Tom, I didn't mention this in the series, but he's a psychonaut, psychonaut. So he loves to experiment with psychedelics. That's like his, that's his jam. And so he and Fred would, would, would do psychedelics like on occasion. So I think that, and they, they had a good relationship for a for a long time um and uh that's why i think tom is the one that you see when they're trying to smooth things out um in the philippines and fred's really going after them trying to get the side offline that's why tom is

the sort of most suitable peacemaker in that situation um he's as fred would say sort of the ice to jim's fire And then, was it... That's also why Tom's pupils, I think, are like this in that one scene. He said it was just the lighting. But I think, you know, he really is into that stuff. Is Tom the guy who Fred records the conversation they're having and puts it all online? Yeah, Fred records that conversation and puts it all online. Without Tom knowing about it.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he had gained a new following. He had appeared on a lot of news outlets and stuff in the run-up to that happening. And I don't know, he's also known as copy-paste. So anything you send to Fred, you know, it's possible that he will simply screenshot it and then share it with someone else. What is he doing now? That's kind of his tech. That's just his deal, his technique. What is he doing now?

Well, the other thing that Fred really likes, and, you know, I was saying, yeah, you should, you know, focus more on this other thing, is fonts. He designs fonts. Right, right, right. So he's been doing font work for a variety of companies. I don't know. He's probably working on a—who knows what So he's been doing font work for a variety of companies. I don't know. He's probably working on a – who knows what else he's working on.

But he's living with his family now on the East Coast. And his mom and his brother have the same condition he does. Oh, wow. So he's helping his mom out, living with her. He's still pretty prolific on twitter he posts he posts a lot so he hasn't been banned um he's also into furry culture what culture furries yeah okay furry culture um which he's been posting about more lately um but yeah i mean i think he's actually doing a lot better i think that him being back at home with his mom is a better situation. And he's not in trouble in the Philippines?

Oh, he's in trouble in the Philippines. Yeah, he can't go back. But they don't extradite? No, we don't. No, they can't extradite him for a cyber libel charge. And that was one of the craziest things to me in all of this. It's like here you're running an absolutist free speech website, taking it right to the edge,

but you're going to go after somebody for something they said on twitter right and he's and the thing is that he was saying like there's nothing i can do now he's like he's in trouble with the law right because the way it works in the philippines is that you um it becomes like a criminal suit. So the state takes it over. Right. If they determine that there's a case. So when Fred was leaving the Philippines, he got advance notice that an indictment was going to drop. Yeah, I saw that part of it is very compelling

because it's like, it's under the wire, like barely gets out. Yeah, and... He would have been fucked. He would have been fucked, especially because COVID was on our heels. because it's like he's under the wire, like barely gets out. Yeah. He would have been fucked. He would have been fucked, especially because COVID was on our heels. Right. And if he gets COVID, I mean, he's already- Oh, it's probably, you know, could have been game over, especially at that time we had no idea.

Right. And if he goes to jail, it's most likely he's going to get COVID. Well, especially in the Philippines. I mean, the Bikutan Detention Center, which is for foreigners, he would not fare well there. And with the COVID stuff ramping up, I have no idea. He could have likely died. I don't think that that's an exaggeration. No, I don't think it is either. All this, all the time that you spent working on this, All this, all the time that you spent working on this, when you're alone with your thoughts, and I mean, I think that this subject highlights some very important questions and important conversations about free speech and about what roles, if any, these platforms, whether it's 8chan or Twitter or what have you,

have in protecting free speech or censoring questionable behavior. I mean, obviously, this did not end well. You know? I mean, and whether or not 8chan is responsible for some of it or whether the Q movement is responsible for some of it or what percentage of it is, it's clear that this becomes a vector for a lot of very questionable ideas and questionable behavior

and what should be done. Like, well, that's part of why the approach I took was to be as neutral as possible going into this world, you know, create a historical document and show the mechanics. And,

you know, how did all of this actually work? Don't look at the magic trick. Don't look at the spectacle is generating.'t look at the spectacle it's generating. Look behind the curtain so that that magic trick can't work again, or at least the exact same magic trick, right? It's like you watch Penn and Teller,

and when they reveal the magic trick, sometimes it's actually more magical. But now you know how the magic trick works. Right. I struggle with this question, would you rather live in a world where something like Q is possible? And if not, what's the cost?

And this has always been the challenge with any case that kind of tests the limits of free speech. And, you know, it always seems like, well, surely this goes too far. speech. And, you know, it always seems like, well, surely there, this is the, this goes too far. Um, but, uh, I think that's why you always get sticky things kind of like this testing free speech. It's not going to be something light and fluffy. It's going to be something that actually has a significant, potentially damaging impact on many people's lives. Right. And then we sit back and go, well, what do we do about it?

But I think that all rights come with a cost. It's usually on a spectrum of security to freedom. And how much freedom do you want to give up for how much security? Right. So, I mean, freedom do you want to give up for how much security? Right. So, I mean, what do you think? Do you think that, that you, would you rather live in a world where something like you is possible? I'm torn, right?

Because, um, one, on one hand, um, my perspective is, um, that wouldn't work on me. Like this flat earth doesn't work on me. This wouldn't work on me. Like this flat earth doesn't work on me. This doesn't work on me. Like these movements, chemtrails don't work on me. All these movements don't work on me, right? So, but would they work on me when I was 15? I think the answer is yes. You know, therein lies the problem.

Would it work on me when I was 20? It may be. 25, likely. 30? Maybe not anymore. Then I'm online and then I'm operating out of a lot of experience and i'm operating out of you know an understanding of how all this shit works in terms of like propaganda and nonsense and and shit posting and a lot of these things um so should we protect people from things that wouldn't work on you like i'm sure QAnon is not working on you, right? You have a much more sophisticated understanding of how the internet works. So is, you know, all these things, like what are we supposed to do? The rational argument is you counter bad speech with better speech. Like you explain things in a much more, um, a much more educated or a much, much more precise.

Well, that's what the series is doing in relation to Q, right? Yes, for sure. It's unpacking it. That's exactly what your series does, right? And at the end of it, it looks preposterous and it's not going to like, if a Q drops tomorrow, people are going to be like, bitch, I saw that series. Right? So this is the argument for free speech. Because imagine if in a world where you are, like what you were saying earlier, that if it wasn't for HBO and their balls and their bravery.

I mean, HBO is like, they can do whatever the fuck they want. They're HBO, right? And they're like one of the few who still will. Yes, one of the few who still will and they did. And again, I go back to Bill Maher, but I think he's got a very important show and it's one of the few networks that did support him and that kind of program where you are allowed to talk about controversial ideas. If they're taking out people that are criticizing Q as well as supporting Q, then you've got

a really weird, slippery thing. Like, you're trying to erase reality. So what happens to the people that were invested in this? You know, they don't get closure. They don't get some, an understanding. I would hope that a lot of the people, like that one family, the guy with the big neck and his little kid, I would hope they would watch this series and go, Jesus, we got duped. This is kind of nonsense. I would hope, right? I hope a lot of these folks. And a lot have, you know, a lot of folks who were big Q believers or people who have family who have watched it. I mean, it has, there's been a de-escalation quality to it.

Because when you understand what drew people into this, you know, it softens your view of them. And when somebody who believed in all of this sees what was going on behind the scenes and actually engages with the material, for some of them, you know, they can go, okay, well, now I have new information and I can arrive at a new conclusion. You're not telling them how to think. You're just presenting them with ideas and saying, you know, what do you think now? And this is the argument for free speech, but it's also, it shows how complicated it is to unpack something like this. I mean, the amount of time and effort that you put in to expose what this really is, is pretty substantial. It's substantial, yeah. And difficult, I would imagine.

Not just amount of time, but you have to frame this. How many hours of footage did you have to go through? Over 1,600. Jesus. To come up with six episodes. Holy shit, man. It was a lot. It was a lot of shit. I mean, we had multiple angles, you know,

but a Herculean effort, but you really managed to nail it. You did a fantastic job. And this is the argument for free speech because you show that this is most likely 99.999% nonsense right we don't sometimes sometimes you'll get a hit right but the point is it's like through free speech and through your ability to accurately disseminate information you've produced a really amazing and entertaining thing that gives people an insight into the psychology behind the folks that believed in this, the psychology behind the folks who are likely perpetrating it. It's an argument for free speech, but it also shows how fucking difficult it is to really parse this out. and difficult it is to really parse this out.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, conspiracy theories or painting your enemies in a black and white, heaven or hell, all in other terms, that's something that humans have done forever. I mean, even during the Revolutionary War, there were a lot of theories going around about King George. Yeah. They wanted to turn everybody into slaves. There is, so this is, and I'm sure that 15 year olds and 20 somethings were impressionable and it motivated them in those situations. And I do think that the international component does add another element to this that's a little bit different. But that's why I always bring it back to the privacy side.

I'd say before we worry about deciding what should or should not be said online, let's restore privacy rights. Let's give people ownership over their data. Let's give people ownership over their data. Let's make it so that these companies can't know more about us than we know about ourselves and see what impact that has first. It does seem like that is where everything got really crazy because your data became a commodity that you didn't know you had. Like you didn't know it was valuable. you had. Like you didn't know it was valuable. So when you signed off on the terms and conditions and you just started posting things and you allowed these companies to track all of your information and all your stuff that you do online, you didn't realize that you were creating these enormous companies with massive amounts of resource that just collect data. They don't

necessarily, they have products. The surveillance industrial complex. Right. They have products, essentially, like Gmail is a product, Google's a product. But really, you're the product. You're the product, because you're what they sell. Like, these things, they just offer you that, so you give them the data. And then once you give them the data, then they sell it.

And so you're essentially a customer, but you're also what they're selling. I mean, I might argue, I think you can argue that January 6th is a byproduct. How so? If you trace the lineage of data harvesting to psychometric profiles, to those psychometric profiles being used to target us with information that, you know, that is tailored to our insecurities and desires. It drives us into more extreme groups. And then when we move in those more extreme directions, we're less willing to entertain an opposing reality. And then when we're less willing to entertain an opposing reality, we become less willing to hear things from another

side because we only believe in our one truth. And then we become more interested in silencing whatever that one truth is. We become more angry. You know, as they say, the hostility of suppression speeds up the treadmill of extremism. The more you shut someone up, the angrier they become, the more it validates the very thing that they were trying to stop in the first place. And then you end up with a cultural climate or a social climate where something like January 6th is possible. So, you know, I think that I don't think it's the only reason, but I think it was a huge, I think that the data mining was a huge factor in the data mining in concert with the algorithms, because those algorithms, of course, use the what was reaped from that data mining in order to in order to drive people towards the

crazy shit on the internet. You know, Q wouldn't have been possible without the algorithms. Bottom line, just wouldn't have, it wouldn't have escaped the chance. So algorithms essentially are, there's a problem in the inherent manipulation of people's viewing habits. And they're doing it to accentuate their profits. And they're doing it to accentuate the amount of time that you spend online. And to feed us with whatever is most sensational. Yeah, but not necessarily, right?

We talked about like what my algorithms show. That's what I'm interested in. Like my friend Ari Shafir pointed this out. Like he decided to do a test where he only looked up puppy videos on YouTube. And then YouTube just started only recommending puppy videos. So it's like the argument becomes. We get driven into, it learns very quickly and then it reinforces those assumptions.

Right, but it's human nature is the problem, right? It's what people are actually interested in is the problem. Algorithms, they take advantage of our human nature, which is our human nature is to find these echo chambers, is to find confirmation bias. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I think a bigger question might be, are algorithms free speech? Is that an expression of free speech? I mean, we have a court case that I disagree with that asserted that money is free speech. Money is an amplifier. What court case is this? Citizens United. What was the case?

This is the flagship Supreme Court case that actually Barr, who is Jim Watkins' attorney in DC, he was a part of that case, bringing it to the Supreme Court, which basically said that you could use money in political campaigns, right? It couldn't be directly connected to that politician. There had to be at least the facade of separation. See, this is where super PACs came from, where you could get huge amounts of money to run what you could call disinformation campaigns against a candidate. And this idea of disinformation also isn't new either. I mean, in my lifetime, the biggest lie that was told was the one that brought us into Iraq, ultimately. Weapons of mass destruction, right? Like that got broadcast and cost how many lives. So these things aren't new. The idea that like a lie can have huge consequences in the world aren't new. But the algorithms are. And I do think that there is a bigger question to be had around, you know, should there be some restrictions placed on them?

You know, what limitations might we put in place so that we at least know what the rules are? You know, it's a black box of amplification. And it gives incredible power to those who run that black box. Do you think it's at all possible that algorithms could be exposed in a way where the narrative shifts and we realize that algorithms are actually problematic and that it has done irrevocable damage and it's moved our society in this way, as highlighted in the social network the social dilemma rather as highlighted in in that where you're realizing like that the ultimate

path for this sort of separation and This reinforcement reinforcement of tribalism and that it really leads to like conflict like almost undeniable like yeah yeah I mean you could do something where we could recognize that first of all these corporations only exist because we didn't realize that data is a commodity once we do realize that data is a commodity people are giving up that data almost against their understanding they don't really understand what they're doing until it's too late. They're being duped, right?

There's like this gigantic three-card money game going on with your data. And then you have the algorithm problem, and we're recognizing that this is essentially being manipulated. It's being manipulated by foreign entities like the IRA. It's being manipulated by foreign entities like the IRA. It's being manipulated by who knows how many other countries that have similar programs installed. What do we do? Yeah. And you, what do we do? And you look at, you look at Twitter and do you get rewarded for saying something neutral or do you get rewarded for saying something hostile? Hostile.

You know, and the more hostile, the more, you know, the more it satisfies the audience, the more the person who's posting is trained by that. They're trained to go, okay, this is the thing that people want. So it does drive that tribalism. And then it also makes people very sure of whatever that worldview might be, because they can feel that there's a lot of people who who like the same thing that they do yeah i mean i know with absolute certainty that the q tubers were reinforced in the same way because they told me that they were you know i had um craig who was in it you know we talked afterwards and he would he would discuss how like he he knew what the audience wanted, what he could and could not say, and he wanted to keep that audience.

And he was trained over time to say things, you know, around QAnon that would drive more eyeballs. But at the same time, it becomes his, that became his livelihood. And in the end, after the series came out and, you know, And in the end, after the series came out and, you know, he had said at one point, you know, I still have all these people who follow me who like want to believe that it's all going to come true. But he's like, look around, man. It's a fairy tale. It's like our team, it's like a basketball game.

Our team lost and you guys are still just dribbling around shooting hoops and you know the score is over right um what does he do but but at the same time he he at that point was not willing to say that to his audience right because they were still his audience what does he do now i don't know i mean he he expressed to me that he was trying to step out of the spotlight some but i but i i think he's sad that he i mean he's told me he's sad that he he's like i just wanted to be a youtuber that's all i ever wanted to be and now i can't be a youtuber wow um you know and so he can't come back with another channel he's banned on everything. He could probably go on Tiger Network. So, whatever. But I don't know how stable it is.

I don't know anything about it. I haven't really used it. But... And the real problem with banning people, it's like... Oh, one of the craziest things, though, that Craig told me, you know, it was in that hot tub scene in the end after he'd just been banned

on YouTube. You know, and you could see that that was coming uh in the right up right up towards the election that things were going to crescendo in that direction and he's like he admitted something to me which is just that he knew all along that it was the idea that this is a military operation or that Trump was behind in the beginning he's like that was a bunch of you, that was a bunch of, you know, that was a bunch of bullshit. I never believed that, you know, in the beginning, um, he's like the, we're just kidding ourselves. It just meant a bunch of a-holes LARPing on 8chan and then suddenly,

or 4chan and then suddenly, you know, in his mind, the military got involved because he had these guys, these ex-military guys reaching out to him and sort of using him as a conduit for their agenda. And so it's – there's that crazy aspect of this too. But it is fascinating to me that he openly admits that it started as a LARP, but it memed itself into reality. And that's what you see come January 6th, is this thing that was casting this imaginary view of the world

was trying to make itself real. And in many ways, it didn't actualize all of the beliefs, but some of the central ideas of it, if we assume that Ron is Q, well, Ron eventually managed to get access to the seat of the Capitol. If you want to say that there's the storm is coming, well, a storm eventually came. This is meme magic at work. This is like a collective imagination that willed something into existence. And I know that's a little bit of a derail from what you were saying before about no, but it's a it's relevant

Was this ultimately satisfying for you? Like what would like obviously your investment paid off? You know, I mean it really you you put together a masterpiece. I really did what awesome team But everybody involved put together a masterpiece. Thank you. You really did. I had an awesome team. Everybody involved put together a masterpiece. Shout out to everybody. But was this ultimately satisfying to you or does this leave you with a sense of impending doom? Or both? Well, unpacking the mystery is satisfying.

Reaching a conclusion is satisfying. But do I think that we're out of the doghouse? No. Do I think that these patchwork solutions of censorship on these platforms is going to solve the problem that they think it is? No, I think it's going to make it worse. Do I think that it's driving more of a wedge in society? Yes, I do. So if it is in fact the goal to deescalate things or to make the polarization in society go away, this strategy historically and at present i mean

there's lots of historical examples of how this doesn't work um and why it ends up having the why censorship ends up having the opposite of its intended effect and i think we're watching that in real time um but all of these people who are being banned, censored, they're not, they disappear just because you don't see them on Twitter. They're mad, you know, and, and they'll find other platforms, but you gotta, I think you have to let it work itself out. And if you're going to tinker with something, tinker with the business model, but these companies are never going to offer that as a solution.

Of course. Ever. Well, the amount of resources that they've managed to acquire is staggering. There's never been a company like Google before. Imagine a company like YouTube. They own YouTube, right? Right, yeah. Both of them together.

I mean, either one individually, there's never been anything like them. The fact that they're both owned by one company is fucking incredible. And then there's Twitter, and then there's never been anything like them. The fact that they're both owned by one company is fucking incredible. And then there's Twitter, and then there's Facebook, and they're both amazing. And Facebook also has Instagram, also an amazing new thing. Like, God, the reach. And the reach is global. And that's why when we talk about, you know,

are we getting out of the quote-unquote doghouse here, it's like whatever the next war will be, if there's going to be another war, will be borderless, right? Because these ideas seep across borders. The internet is borderless and the internet is the new world, you know, with its own laws and its own regulations and the companies that are running the rules of those places. And I saw this when I was traveling, just, you know, South Africa, Macau. I had production assistants who were working there who were totally red-pilled on Q-related stuff that they had experienced on YouTube. So the ideas are penetrating abroad. So if the polarization continues, it is not just in America. You know, it is happening ideologically on a global scale.

And so it wouldn't be nation versus nation. It would be, you know, these patchworks of ideologies where people have very disparate views of reality. And that's why I'm such an advocate for, you know, folks talking to people that they've sort of stopped listening to. You know, if you, people who have Q friends or family, or if you believed in Q, like reaching out to family members again. That's going to be a necessary step. But until we fix the privacy problem, I don't see any of this going away.

It may be a runaway train. I hope it's not. But it feels like it right now. I think that's a great way to wrap this up. And thank you. Thank you for being here and talking to me and thank you for your incredible amount of work that you put into that HBO series it's amazing

I really really appreciate it and thank you for having me on and for watching all six episodes and then re-watching some of it my pleasure it's been a great conversation we're fucked bye everybody but there's hope It's been a great conversation. Thank you. We're fucked.

Bye, everybody. But there's hope. There's hope, I guess. We're here. We're okay now. We can try without hope. Yes. We can try without hope. All right.

Bye, everybody.