May 18, 2025 • 41 mins
Gabriel Gatehouse is a journalist and broadcaster and author of “The Coming Storm” that looks at Q Anon and the January 6th conspiracies. And he’s British!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in
high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is Gabriel Gatehouse. Gabriel's
an award winning journalist and broadcaster. He is the author
of a book in the excellent BBC podcast Theories called
The Coming Storm that looks at QAnon and the January
sixth conspiracies, and the book subtitle is a Journey into
the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine. Abral, My first question
(00:50):
is can you tell us what the heart of that
machine looks like? And is there any surgery that can
save it.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It's a very it's a strange and dark place jun
the heart of that machine. In a way, I was
slightly doubtful about the subtitle because the heart of the
conspiracy machine makes it sound like a conspiracy basically that
there's somebody there pulling the levers, creating these conspiracy theories
to some dark and diabolical end. And in some cases
(01:21):
that is true. But in many cases you're nodding. See
you nodding away, Jerry. But in many cases these conspiracy
theories are organic at least to begin with, and they
grow out of the malaise of modern capitalism, the paranoid
style in American politics, the great knack that you guys
(01:42):
in America have for telling a story. You just you
guys just love a story. And the weirder, even if
it's especially if it's wrong, right, it's the weirder and
more wonderful it is the more you like it. And
that's why you gave the world Hollywood and all of
this amazing stuff. But you're now being eaten up by
our own infotainment industry. Yes, I'm sorry to be the
(02:03):
bearer of bad news, so Gab, I have to admit
I am a sucker for a British accent, in fact,
so much so that I'm marrying one.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Right, But is there something peculiar about the American brand
or our version of conspiracies?
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Of course, it's not just an American thing, but so
often you guys just do it better. It's interesting to me.
I do think it has something to do with this
kind of great tradition of storytelling. It's a wonderful place
to work because even the kind of fully red pilled,
completely objectively bonkers people are usually actually really nice if
(02:44):
you come to them with a sort of open mind
and say, look, I don't think you and I agree
on a whole hell of a lot. I don't believe
in most of the things that you believe in, but
I am interested in why you believe them and what
might lie behind it, and I have an open mind,
So why don't you just talk to me? And people
just mostly very generous with their time and their insights.
We British were constantly judging who we might be talking
(03:05):
to and what their views might be, or what social
strata they might come from, and we're fine tuning out.
America is not like that. They just go for it.
I want to take a shot at the British though.
It's please please do yes, it's a historical tradition.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, yeah, So we have got QAnon and all the
craziness for this. And I looked into British conspiracy theories
around this, and all I could come up was was
the voting pencil conspiracy right that the pencil provided to
you with the polling stations, that somehow m I five
was like erasing it and putting it back. But we
have bamboo fibers from China and all the rest of it.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
I've never heard that conspiracy theory, so thank you for
adding that one.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Well, you guys did Brexit before we did the generous
six stuff or whatever, So.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
We did Brexit. But Brexit. Brexit wasn't the conspiracy much
as many of my liberal friends liked to think it was.
A lot of people over here think that Brexit was
created by the Russians as a sciop or something, which
is of course palpable nonsense. We need to look at
ourselves and the European Union and why it was that
a majority of people decided they didn't like this institution
(04:05):
that was giving them all this prosperity.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
But the way politics can be used as people could
make simple, perhaps false or largely untrue statements or stories
that people would follow and.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Believe it's politics. Right. You create a narrative and you
hope that your narrative is going to be stronger than
the other guy's narrative, right, And unfortunately, a three word
slogan like take back control is a stronger narrative than well,
everything's kind of fine. Well it's not really fine, but
really if we just don't really do anything, things might
get better. So let's not just not do anything, right,
(04:38):
that's just not a fair good narrative. You know, Trump
has strong messaging, whatever you may think of him, he's
got killer political instincts, and he's got a strong message
defeat the deep state. You guys.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Doing some research on you, I found one thing really
compelling that you put across that the conventions of right
and left are all fair.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
They should be thrown out the window.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
And it's really pro system and anti system. Those who
want to throw the baby out, the baby and the
bath water are out, and those that are looking to
reform or at least push forward.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
With what we I think in a way, I wouldn't
say this began with the nineties, but I feel like
the nineties in so many ways is the beginning of
everything that we're at now. It was this kind of
weird period of kind of geopolitical stasis, the end of history.
You guys had successfully defeated the Soviet Union. Liberalism, yes,
(05:38):
very good liberalism in all its forms had one right,
economic liberalism. Globalization was in full swing. We don't need
it anymore exactly. And you know, I as somebody who
just graduated mid nineties with a degree in Russian, like
nobody needed that anymore. But in another way, everything was
just beginning right the Internet, that kind of the breakdown
(06:01):
of the of consensus and the establishment fueled by tech.
But the thing that Bill Clinton was so brilliant ad
was he just occupied such a vast swathe of the
center ground in politics that basically to oppose Clinton you
had to be on the fringes right. You either had
to be on the far right. You know, Newt Gingrich
(06:24):
kind of throwing out conspiracy theories as it were, Vince
Foster and this White House lawyer who'd committed suicide, and
all these kind of tales were being spun around him
about how really he was having an affair with Hillary
Clinton and she'd rolled him up at a carpet and
left him at a safe house in Virginia and then
dumped him in a park and blah blah blah. So
(06:44):
that was coming from the right or on the left.
You basically had to go further and further left to
oppose Bill Clinton. So what that set up was this
this political dynamic which is now coming back to bite us,
which is not the war between right and left, which
is the paradigm that you guys grew up in and
(07:05):
grew up fighting and that I was born into. But
it's the paradigm of the center versus the fringes. And
I think what's happened in America and the polling bears
this out. I remember there was one extraordinary bit of
polling where they asked people about their views of the
whole political and economic system in the United States. Did
(07:27):
people a think it was doing just fine. Did they
be think it was doing okay but maybe needed minor modifications.
They added up to about thirty eight percent. Then there
were the people who said, no, the system is really
in deep trouble and it needs root and branch reform.
Or the people who said it's so screwed we should
(07:48):
burn it all down and start from the beginning. And
that lot of people added up to about sixty percent.
Right now, it's very clear who is the burn it
all down candidate here? Right. So when I saw that
little bit of polling buried right at the bottom of
the pole, I was like, he's going to win. He's
going to win again. And it's clear. And because the
(08:09):
people who are now in power in your country are
so certifiably bonkers. Often even though they quite often put
their finger on the problems, they're very good at identifying
real problems. It's just their solutions are totally batshit. But
what's happened is that the Democrats and what used to
(08:30):
be called establishment Republicans but are now outcasts, have become
the party of people who are saying, la la la la,
la la la, we're not listening. Everything's fine, just stop
tinkering with the system and that's not working.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Actually, let's dig in a little bit deeper to the
nineties thing.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
There's an interesting can I just say something, Yes, So
this whole Vince Foster, My sort of conceit in the
coming storm was that I identified the death of Vince
Foster is basically ground zero. That led to Qanoni of
the Yeah exactly patients.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
What Hillary Clinton then called a vast right wing conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
A vast right wing conspiracy, which was an idea that
was fed to her by a political consultant named Chris Lahne,
who we interviewed for the podcast. Very interesting guy. We
then went off to work in Silicon Valley. But so
the Monica Lewinsky connection is this that the woman who
first clipped off the world to the whole Monica Lewinsky
thing was Linda Tripp, who was also the last person
(09:28):
to see Vince Foster alive. She was then a White
House assistant, and she brought him his lunch. And in
all the kind of hook plat around what had happened
to Vince Foster, and there was a question of what
had he eaten for his lunch, And in one account
he'd eaten the hamburger with a side of Eminem's, and
(09:50):
in another account there were no Eminems and it was
a cheeseburger and he'd removed the onions. And this was
like the kind of beginnings of the inconsistencies of the
account of Vince Foster's death that people started to pull
out and to poke at until it grew into this
monstrous conspiracy theory about how he'd been murdered because he
(10:11):
knew too much. Look, what happened in the nineties was
that there were all these Batchett conspiracy theories, and there
was also an actual conspiracy to create conspiracies called the
Arkansas Project right, which was funded by a wealthy guy
wealthy air called rich a Melonscape, and it was basically
sending out people to dredge up the wildest stories from
(10:34):
the swamps of Arkansas and put them into print, true
or not, and then the White House obviously would rebut
these things, and most of them were kind of wild,
but some of them were obviously quite true. And the
thing was that the not only the White Houses you expect,
but the establishment media for want of a better word,
(10:56):
in the nineties also treated the stories about Bill Clinton
and his philandering and sometimes worse right. Because let's not
forget that there were worse stories than Monica Lewinski, which
whatever you say about that relationship was consensual, There were
worse stories. There was Juernita Broadrick, who alleged that Bill
(11:16):
Clinton had raped her violently in a hotel room in
Arkansas in nineteen seventy eight, And the reason people found
her account credible was because she never wanted to tell
it and was forced under threat of perjury to tell
it by the Star Inquiry and it then got completely
buried because it didn't fit the narrative. I spoke to
Juanita and she said Starr and his lawyers kept asking her,
(11:40):
did anyone ever threaten you to keep quiet about this?
And she was like no. And then she then they
were like, did anyone ever offer you any inducements, any
money or jobs or anything to keep quiet about this?
She was like no, no one spoke to me about
it at all, and so then they were like, Oh,
we can't do obstructural justice, so let's just forget about it.
The question of whether the president of the United States
(12:01):
had violently raped a woman was secondary to the political considerations.
And so my through line is that narrative about the
Clinton's actually being people was pressed beneath the surface because
some of the genuinely bad stuff that was credible and
worthy of reporting on by serious journalists also wasn't touched
(12:24):
because of all the batchit stuff right, and nobody wanted
to be associated with that. As somebody put it at
the time, that story was fruit from a poison tree.
Nobody wanted to touch it. But at the same time,
technology was developing. First it was to a radio, and
then it was the email newsletter, and then it was
the kind of full blown Internet and these stories started
(12:46):
breathing like bacteria and petridition, growing and multiplying and mutating.
Fast forward twenty years and you've got a White House
reporter in twenty twenty asks President Trump. I think it's
the first time that QAnon ever comes up at a
White House briefing. It's a brilliant clip. If you could
dig it out. It's amazing because you can see Donald
(13:08):
Trump's political instincts kicking in. The reporter goes, mister President,
this is this theory that you're secretly fighting a cabal
of satanic pedophiles. Does that sound like something you might
be involved in? And you can see Donald Trump's eyes
getting to and he's thinking, is this what is this?
Speaker 4 (13:27):
It is this belief that you are secretly saving the
world from this sitanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Does
that sound like something you are behind?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Well, I haven't, I haven't heard that. But is that
supposed to be a.
Speaker 5 (13:45):
Bad thing or a good thing? I mean, you know,
if I can help save the world from problems, I'm
willing to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm willing to put.
Speaker 5 (13:53):
Myself out there and we are actually we're saving the
world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.
And when this country is gone, the rest of the
world would follow.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
He doesn't really know what this conspiracy theory is at
that time, I'm convinced, but he consentsed that it is
useful to him and that he can use it. And
there were people around him who knew that it was
useful to him, and so they weaponized it. Let's pass
for a second. We'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (14:36):
Another interesting thing that you bring up is from the nineties,
is that in ninety seven a book came out, The
Sovereign Individual and I guess it had an American investor
in a British politician with an odd name, Reese.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Maurice mog You say, he's got an odd name, but
he's one of the most well known names in political
circles here because Americans, and he's he is about Brexit.
His son was, and yes so his son, that Jacob
was one of the kind of pre eminent Brexit.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
But they outlined what we would today call the conspiracy
theory in the center of gravity of that it's very
applicable today. Right, it's all about tech bros. All the
darks running the world who don't pay you know, basically
describes Peter Teal and Elon Musk and their impact and
their impact on how we think and how we nationality
(15:28):
Texas government. I guess Peter teelhead it reprinted, right.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Yeah, in twenty twenty. Well, it's one of his favorite books.
So it's published in seven, nineteen ninety seven. It's called
The Sovereign Individual, and the subtitle is something like Mastering
the Transition to the Digital Age or something like that,
and it is it's incredibly foresightful, prophetic even right. It
predicts in nineteen ninety seven all sorts of things that
(15:54):
have come down the tracks, AI, the gig economy, offshore taxing. Basically,
they say, you know, the Internet basically had the click
of a mouse button, you can move your money from
one jurisdiction to the other. Cryptocurrencies they predict this is
more than ten years before bitcoin. And they predict that
all of this it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a
sort of exercise in crystal ballgazing and political analysis. They
(16:17):
predict that all of these technological factors will lead to
the collapse of the nation state and the dollar will collapse,
Crypto will replace it. States will lose their ability to
basically carry out the basic functions of any government, which
is collecting taxes and providing services, and in their stead
(16:38):
will rise the sovereign individual, vastly wealthy and unimaginably powerful
individuals whose power, in the words of the authors, will
rival that of the Greek gods of Mount Olympus.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Does it measure the w South African? Does it say
anything about it?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
It does not mention that they will all be South Africa.
So peed Teel was an investment who was I think
the first outside investor in Facebook. He set up PayPal
with Elon Musk at the end of the nineties, and
he has been pretty on the money in certain big
trends in tech. He's one of the most sort of
powerful and influential investors in Silicon Valley. He also is
(17:19):
of the right. He was editor of the I think
it's called the Stanford Review when he was at Stanford,
which was this kind of right wing student newspaper, and
he has, with his money and power, pursued that interest
deep into the kind of meme warriors of the far right.
Around twenty sixteen, when he was one of the lone
(17:40):
voices in Silicon Valley to come out and back Donald Trump,
and was really hanging out with these strange characters creatures
of the Internet, bloggers with names like Mensius Moldbug, whose
real name is Curtis Jarvin and who is very, very
influential in Trump circles. He's the sort of the inter
sellectual backbone, if you like, of trump Ism and Dvancism.
(18:04):
He's dreampt up this idea of neo reactionary, this near
reactionary movement where democracy in America is dead and what
America needs is an American caesar to cross the Rubican
with will to power and all this fuddy duddy nonsense
about people having a say in things. Get rid of
all of that and just dictatorship or as he likes
to call it, monarchy. And it's hard not to read
(18:25):
that book and look at what's going on now and
not conclude that what Peter Teel and others like about
Donald Trump is not so much that he's a disruptor
in the terms of in parlance of Silicon Valley, but
he's a racking ball, right. He's a bulldozer that you
can drive through the whole establishment and accelerate your way
(18:48):
into this bright or dark future of sovereign individuals where
democracy is basically dead and power resides with these hugely
wealthy tech barons.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
It's a view of the future where these very important, rich,
often white people will take over. But there's also this
view that the government just takes care of the weak people.
We need to get rid of the weak people. We're
going to We're eventually going to go to Mars anyway,
So does it go further? What's your sense of where
these people are going.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
There is a kind of wing of the MAGA movement
that I think is led by people like Peter Teel
Musk and jd Vance, who's one of their kind of creatures,
David Sacks, and other South African who genuinely believe that
the in the vision of the sovereign individual and that
it's coming and they can accelerate its arrival. So for
(19:44):
the podcast and for the book, I spend a bit
of time with a bunch of tech guys in something
called the network state movement. So they basically what they
want to achieve is the kind of breakdown of the
nation state and instead there'll be network states. A bit like,
so you'd be able to choose your citizenship the same
way as you choose a gym membership. You look at
what they offer where they have their branches, and you go,
(20:06):
this fits with my needs and values, and off you go.
But they go a lot further than this. Where is
the new frontier. There is no more frontier. There's no
more virgin land on the American continent other than Greenland.
Of course, cyberspace is a frontier that they can control,
but also the cosmos is a frontier that they can
go out to. And a lot of the thinking behind
(20:29):
the sovereign individual comes out of a movement that I
think is very very little known and only ever had
a few hundred adherents. It's called the extrapy movement, the Extropians,
and it was this sort of techno radical, techno optimist
movement that flourished in California in the nineties.
Speaker 7 (20:51):
Extropians are people who want to push back limits of
all kinds. One big one, of course, is human lifespan.
We want to push back the limits to human life
so we can live in definitely long which will mean
removing getting rid of these human bodies and becoming posthuman
as we call it.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
But they were talking about all this stuff, artificial intelligence,
virtual reality, augmented intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, merging humans with machines,
cryonic preservation, and eventually conquering the cosmos. And I think
when you speak to these people as I have done,
and you hang out with them and you can get
(21:27):
them to talk as they do when they're amongst themselves
and not in a sort of combative interview situation, they
will openly talk about how technology is going to lead
in the next few years to a very they use
the word Darwinistic moment, where basically the weak will be
(21:47):
culled and pruned from the earth and the strong will
inherit it. It's a very to me, a very dark
and bleak vision of the future, but these guys freacking
love it. Well.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
It's very South African, apart teid eugenics, Nazist sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
My point about that is that it's actually quite a
sort of quint essentially American vision, right, Yeah, yeah, eugenic
star in the US. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
So you have also you have also interviewed or interacted
with Jacob Chancey the Qmanan Sharman.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
I first met him in November twenty twenty two months
before the storming of the Capitol. No one knew this guy.
I was in Arizona. I was just after the election,
and I was there to report for BBC Television on
this kind of nascent movement called Stop the Steel and
this conspiracy theory that there was a big conspiracy to
(22:49):
steal election. And I'm Stanley at and I spot this
guy and he's draped in furs, he's got horns on
his head, and he's carrying a sign that says c S.
So I'm like, I'm going to talk to that guy.
He looks brilliant, and he's very friendly. He's a thoroughly
nice guy. But the story he's got in his head
(23:10):
is pretty bonkers, right. He believes that a cabal of
satanic pedophiles, possibly led by Hillary Clinton, has captured the
levers of power and are now running afraid of Don Trump,
who threatens to expose them, and so they're stealing the election.
It was like he'd eaten an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories
(23:35):
for breakfast and was now gurgitating them in random order.
So there was bits about JFK and tunnels under the desert,
and just like a whole load of weird stuff. And
I must emphasize this. He was an absolutely lovely guy.
He was not aggressive or mean in any way. He
was genuinely open with me and telling me all about
(23:56):
his really weird ideas. And I thought about it, and
I thought, this guy does look fantastic, But how irresponsible
would it be for an establishment journalist working for a
serious news organization to give airtime to this nonsense. I
draw the line. I have my principles and I will
stand on them. So I said, thank you, sir, and
I did not film an interview with him, much to
(24:20):
my absolute regret when two months later I was sitting
in London and all the TV screens around the BBC
headquarters were focused on one thing and one thing only,
and it's the capital and the mob is storming it.
And then we cut to the Senate Chamber and there
he is the same guy with the horns and the furs,
(24:40):
and my I remember my camera was there. He's like,
that was that not the guy that you eat? Was that?
I was like, oh my god, it's that that guy.
Did we didn't? Did we are?
Speaker 5 (24:49):
No?
Speaker 1 (24:49):
We didn't. Ah fuck, there's nothing like the kind of
the fomo of the foreign correspondent who's in the wrong
place at the wrong time, or even worse, who was
in the right at slightly the wrong time and made
the wrong decision and now doesn't have the scope. But
also I then realized, when I thought about it, that actually,
(25:09):
perhaps my mistake was more than just the kind of
one of missing the scoop. But I hadn't hadn't listened
to this guy properly, I hadn't heard the story that
he'd told me about the Cabbala Satanic pedophiles, and asked myself, now,
why does that seem true to him, and why does
it seem true to so many other people. We were
(25:31):
talking about the horseshoe and how the left and right
extremes had joined each other. A lot of what Jacob
Chanceley was talking about was extremely from the left. He
talks a lot about how the zero point one percent
have sewn up all the resources under global capitalism, and
they're throwing crumbs and making all us little people, just
turning us into mindless consumers and all this kind of
(25:53):
quite left wing stuff, as well as these kind of
very right wing talking points about pedophiles and whatnot. But
I think The kind of conclusion I came to about
this particular conspiracy theory was that if you took it literally,
which is that Hillary Clinton was leading a cabal of
Satan worshiping pedophiles from the basement of a pizza restaurant
in Washington, DC that didn't have a basement, then you're like,
(26:16):
it's obviously nonsense. But if you took it as a
sort of parable or a metaphor, and you heard that
story and you understood it to mean that people felt
that their democracy had been hijacked by more powerful people
whom they hadn't voted for, that the people that they
could vote for every four years or two years weren't
(26:38):
necessarily the most powerful people. The more powerful people were
people who were in the shadows, running big financial corporations
or whatever, and they were taking decisions that weren't necessarily
always to the benefit of the little people. Then you
were thinking, Ah, okay, maybe they've got a point.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
We'll be back in just a moment.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
So Trump does talk a lot about how the world
thinks we're fools and we're taking advantage of us and
laughing at us.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
How does the world look at us? Though I think
they are laughing at us.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
My British relatives think we're like knocking futs right now.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I think maybe if we were laughing at you from
twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen to twenty twenty, we're not
laughing anymore. Shit's getting real now. And I honestly think
the serious answer to this question is I think that
most European countries and governments, whatever they may say in
(27:52):
public about special relationships and strongest relationship ever between Britain
and the United States, work with Trump and blah blah blah.
We know it's over. We know that the arrangement that
lasted from nineteen forty five until twenty twenty five is
it's done. It's cooked. You can't like all you had
(28:15):
to do was watch that scene in the Oval Office
with Zelenski being pummeled and stabbed in the back and
in the front by the country that they thought it
was its ally, and the complete unpredictability of the Trump
(28:36):
administration and those around him, and whatever your emotional attachment
to America, and I think there is a deep love
for America, certainly in Britain and many other European countries,
common sense says that you cannot rely on that as
an ally, So you have to cut yourself loose. You've
(28:58):
got to stand on your own two feet. Trump says,
We've got to stand on our own two feet, and
he's achieved that. We're going to do it, and I'm
very sad about it. You guys have been not an
unqualified force for good in the world over the past
eighty years. You have been a force for good in
the world. You've also been a force for a lot
of funck wittery.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
We took from the British every many years.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Of you really did, you really did? And I think
I'm sitting here in Britain it feels like because we
said goodbye to our empire with barely battered an eyelid,
pretended had never happened, and we sailed straight into the
Special Relationship, and it feels now is the end of
the British Empire that we continued vicariously through you guys.
(29:40):
When I began my journalistic career in the BBC's Russian Service,
where we broadcast the truth or propaganda in Russian to
the former Soviet Union, and I remember thinking at around
the time of the Iraq invasion and the kind of
the fuck up over the weapons of mass destruction that
(30:00):
weren't there, and when it became clear that no one
really cared about the weapons of mass destruction, they were
just going to do it anyway. And I remember saying
to a colleague back then I was a very green,
genous I said, I think I think that the United
States of America is going to become a rogue state
in my lifetime. This was at the point where George
Bush had coined the word rogue state and access of evil.
(30:21):
I remember thinking, I think these guys are going to
join them, and guys you have, oh.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
How are we going to be ill? Go to a
software question. No, I think it's true, and I'm sad
about it too.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I have to say, yeah, no, we've were not wearing
the white hand anymore. And with our fuck widdery or
whatever you call it, at least we tried to be
a force for good, even if we've got it long
as awful as Iraq was, and it spent I spent
like years of my life there like trying to make
it right. But it was like, at least if you
listen to the neo Kansas will bring democracy to Iraq,
We'll remake the Middle East. It was silly and foolish,
(30:59):
and god it had nothing to do with WMD.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
They at least had the at least had the pretense
of some kind of arc of history bending towards justice
the best for them.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
But there is one thing I really wanted to ask you.
I fod it fierce that you were talking with a
professor of folklore and he had some AI tool or
a machine that could extrude folkal or conspiracy, genuine conspiracies
from conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
By the sense was he wasn't able to do it right.
First of all, this guy had the most fantastic name
for somebody who's trying to untangle the tangled threat. His
name was Tim Tanglini. So he and his students had
built this bit of software really that you tried to
use machine learning and AI that he claimed could tell
a real conspiracy from a conspiracy theory. And so he
(31:54):
trained his machine on two events. One was Pizzagate, which
was based in the Washington, DC pizza parlor, out of
whose basement the pedophile cabal was running the world. And
the other one was something called Bridgegate, which was a
very boring and complicated story about Governor Christie of New Jersey,
(32:16):
whose people decided to create a massive traffic jam in
order to get back at some political rival, but blamed
it on something else. But it was an actual conspiracy
to create a traffic jam. And you know, in a way,
this is common sense. You don't really need AI for this.
But Tim Danglin, he basically said that if you take Pizzagate,
and you take one element out of Pizzagate, which is
(32:39):
that emails between John Podesta and his staff talking about
pizza were in fact code for child sex abuse, if
you took that away, the whole story made no sense
at all, Like the whole thing collapsed like a house
of cards. Whereas with Bridgegate, like you could take away
one element that like one source or element of it,
(32:59):
and but the rest of the evidence would still be
so overwhelming that the story was very hard to knock
down because it was very robust. And that was the
basis for his program. The reason I'd call him up
was because I felt myself beginning to think like a
conspiracy theorist. I was putting post it notes up on
my wall, little bits of string look exactly, and so
(33:22):
I called up Tin Dangelini and I said, can you
please pull me out of my rabbit hole? And so
he said, okay, fine, just lay it all out for me,
and I'll stick it through my machine and I'll tell
you whether it's a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory. And
he put it all through his machine and it went right,
it's a conspiracy. So I was like, oh, fuck, now
I've got to go deeper. And so I started digging deeper.
(33:43):
And I did feel for a while like I was
turning into a conspiracy theorist. This is what the Trumpies
call this, not QAnon, but bluing on right, And what
are the conspiracy theories that blew and on? People believe
in that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, for example,
that there's a p tape, compromant Steele doc and all
of that kind of stuff. So I was worried that
(34:04):
I was becoming blue and on. And at the end
of the day, was there a conspiracy in the nineties
to start seeding conspiracy theories about the Clintons with the
aim that eventually, twenty five years later, it would lead
to the storing of the Capitol and the downfall of
the nation state and the collapse of the dollar. And
the rise of crypto and the sovereign individuals. Of course
(34:25):
not that's just.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Like butsense Gabriel. This goes back to your beginning where
you say a lot of them are organic, right, But
what happens is like if you go on q andon. Right,
So there's you talk about in your series, Ron Watkins
and the Philippines and q and Arizona and these things,
and it looks like it comes together organically. But then
there's a non organic piece where people like Jason Sullivan
(34:46):
and other people see that it's a conspiracy theory then
weaponize it through software to promote it on Twitter and
other social media campaigns to help a political campaign. So
there's a there's an organic piece that eventually has grabbed
by others.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Exactly exactly, and I think it's I think it's great,
yeah and used, and I think anything that's definitely what happened.
And you mentioned those names Jason Sullivan and people who
worked on the campaign and very knowingly and wittingly thought
this possibly likely organically created conspiracy called QAnon could be
useful to us, so let's just use it. This is politics.
(35:21):
But I think the same the same thing holds true
for the whole kind of Russia meddling thing. I know,
both here in Britain over Brexit and in America over
Trump's first election, there are a lot of people who
are holding on very tightly by their fingertips to the
idea that it was really all the Russians and everything
(35:42):
was fine in the Land of Milk and honey, that
is the United States of America until the Russians started
coming in with their nonsense. Now, I spent a lot
of time in Russia with Russians, and there are some
very clever people there. They're not that clever. And what
happened in twenty sixteen was, yes, the Russians had the
troll farm, and yes they were weaponizing divisions in American
(36:06):
society and doing it quite effectively. But those divisions were there,
and they were organic, and they were real divisions. They
weren't they hadn't been plucked out of thin air by
the Kremlin. And my strong feeling is to keep HARKing
back to the Russians is it means you don't look
in the mirror and you don't go, why the fuck
have we ended up in this place? You could just
(36:28):
go us the Russians that did it. But one's responsibility
is to look at yourself and your society in the
mirror and try and figure out where you've gone so wrong,
not to point the finger at somebody else. Fair enough,
So what are you doing now to stay saying? Are
you detoxing from?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Again?
Speaker 1 (36:46):
I get there to say anything. John knows what I'm
doing the new podcast series. And I absolutely wanted to
do what you suggest, Jerry, which is I wanted to
have no more to do with any conspiracy theories or
anything to do with any of that madness. And then
I came across this crazy story about football and the
CIA in the nineteen seventies, and I got wind of change.
(37:11):
It's like wind of change but soccer. So I'm doing that.
I'm also and now you can see how badly I'm
failing at getting away from conspiracy theories, super interested in UFOs.
But this administration, for all its failings, does at least
seem to have a sort of crazy drive towards radical transparency.
(37:33):
They're just like declassifying everything. I don't know how you
guys feel about that, but they're declassifying and amid all
the kind of JFK files and RFK files and MLK files.
They're also apparently drive to declassify the UFO files. But
it turns out that UFOs are real. There are there
(37:55):
are Yeah, not everything is explicable. There are things that
fly that are unidentified, otherwise known as unidentified flying objects.
But anyway, it does turn out apparently that you, guys
and the Pentagon various other agencies have been taking this
ship seriously for quite a long time, while pretending that
(38:16):
you weren't taking it seriously.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
What's Unfortunately, we keep having these conversations at the end,
like Jerry and I are beaten down where we go
and where's the optimism?
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Here? The optimism? I have something for you because everyone
keeps asking me, Everyone keeps asking me this, and so
I've come up with something. It's a little tenuous, but
here it is. Bear with me. So I believe that
we are experiencing the beginning of a period of epochal change,
the likes of which we haven't seen for about five
hundred years since the printing press, the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
(38:48):
all that stuff once in a half a millennium epochal shift.
And we are naturally feeling very nervous about the crumbling
stablishment and institutions and all the certainties that we've taken
for granted just crumbling all around us. So what I
do in these moments of existential dread is I think
(39:09):
myself into the mind of a fifteenth century German peasant
who is tied to the land and sees the printing
press coming out and Martin Luther nailing his things to
the door jam, and he's wringing his hands over the
death of the feudal order, and he's like, how is
the world going to function once we're no longer tied
(39:32):
to the land and the monasteries don't provide for all
of our arms, and what healthcare remains if you can
figure out the four humors and all of that, And
he's going, oh, whoa, no, please can it just all
please just go back to how it was. But then
they have a lot of wars and lots of people
die and lots of witches get burnt, but they get
the enlightenment and democracy and science and they go to space.
(39:55):
So I just think we're at the beginning of a
very turbulent but also very interesting period that may, if
we don't all kill each other, may lead to some
unexpected and amazing developments. Will my children when they're my
age still be living under the same system of parliamentary
democracy that I grew up under? Or will their children? Probably?
(40:17):
Not right, I just think nothing lasts forever. Is it
going to be bad? Probably? Is it also maybe going
to be better in some unforseeable, unfathomable way that I
can't even imagine. Probably?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
All right, we'll take that, Dury and I are all
that's just really great for us.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
So here, this is where you need to join the
Extropians Scottsdale, Arizona and have yourself chronically frozen so that
you can then be reawakened in the future Utopila and
the space aliens if you're out there, like, we need
some help right here's hoping? Okay, but this was really fun.
I've enjoyed it a lot. What could be better than
talking to two old spooks.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam David's, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in
high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is Gabriel Gatehouse. Gabriel's
an award winning journalist and broadcaster. He is the author
of a book in the excellent BBC podcast Theories called
The Coming Storm that looks at QAnon and the January
sixth conspiracies, and the book subtitle is a Journey into
the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine. Abral, My first question
(00:50):
is can you tell us what the heart of that
machine looks like? And is there any surgery that can
save it.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It's a very it's a strange and dark place jun
the heart of that machine. In a way, I was
slightly doubtful about the subtitle because the heart of the
conspiracy machine makes it sound like a conspiracy basically that
there's somebody there pulling the levers, creating these conspiracy theories
to some dark and diabolical end. And in some cases
(01:21):
that is true. But in many cases you're nodding. See
you nodding away, Jerry. But in many cases these conspiracy
theories are organic at least to begin with, and they
grow out of the malaise of modern capitalism, the paranoid
style in American politics, the great knack that you guys
(01:42):
in America have for telling a story. You just you
guys just love a story. And the weirder, even if
it's especially if it's wrong, right, it's the weirder and
more wonderful it is the more you like it. And
that's why you gave the world Hollywood and all of
this amazing stuff. But you're now being eaten up by
our own infotainment industry. Yes, I'm sorry to be the
(02:03):
bearer of bad news, so Gab, I have to admit
I am a sucker for a British accent, in fact,
so much so that I'm marrying one.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Right, But is there something peculiar about the American brand
or our version of conspiracies?
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Of course, it's not just an American thing, but so
often you guys just do it better. It's interesting to me.
I do think it has something to do with this
kind of great tradition of storytelling. It's a wonderful place
to work because even the kind of fully red pilled,
completely objectively bonkers people are usually actually really nice if
(02:44):
you come to them with a sort of open mind
and say, look, I don't think you and I agree
on a whole hell of a lot. I don't believe
in most of the things that you believe in, but
I am interested in why you believe them and what
might lie behind it, and I have an open mind,
So why don't you just talk to me? And people
just mostly very generous with their time and their insights.
We British were constantly judging who we might be talking
(03:05):
to and what their views might be, or what social
strata they might come from, and we're fine tuning out.
America is not like that. They just go for it.
I want to take a shot at the British though.
It's please please do yes, it's a historical tradition.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, yeah, So we have got QAnon and all the
craziness for this. And I looked into British conspiracy theories
around this, and all I could come up was was
the voting pencil conspiracy right that the pencil provided to
you with the polling stations, that somehow m I five
was like erasing it and putting it back. But we
have bamboo fibers from China and all the rest of it.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
I've never heard that conspiracy theory, so thank you for
adding that one.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Well, you guys did Brexit before we did the generous
six stuff or whatever, So.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
We did Brexit. But Brexit. Brexit wasn't the conspiracy much
as many of my liberal friends liked to think it was.
A lot of people over here think that Brexit was
created by the Russians as a sciop or something, which
is of course palpable nonsense. We need to look at
ourselves and the European Union and why it was that
a majority of people decided they didn't like this institution
(04:05):
that was giving them all this prosperity.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
But the way politics can be used as people could
make simple, perhaps false or largely untrue statements or stories
that people would follow and.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Believe it's politics. Right. You create a narrative and you
hope that your narrative is going to be stronger than
the other guy's narrative, right, And unfortunately, a three word
slogan like take back control is a stronger narrative than well,
everything's kind of fine. Well it's not really fine, but
really if we just don't really do anything, things might
get better. So let's not just not do anything, right,
(04:38):
that's just not a fair good narrative. You know, Trump
has strong messaging, whatever you may think of him, he's
got killer political instincts, and he's got a strong message
defeat the deep state. You guys.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Doing some research on you, I found one thing really
compelling that you put across that the conventions of right
and left are all fair.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
They should be thrown out the window.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
And it's really pro system and anti system. Those who
want to throw the baby out, the baby and the
bath water are out, and those that are looking to
reform or at least push forward.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
With what we I think in a way, I wouldn't
say this began with the nineties, but I feel like
the nineties in so many ways is the beginning of
everything that we're at now. It was this kind of
weird period of kind of geopolitical stasis, the end of history.
You guys had successfully defeated the Soviet Union. Liberalism, yes,
(05:38):
very good liberalism in all its forms had one right,
economic liberalism. Globalization was in full swing. We don't need
it anymore exactly. And you know, I as somebody who
just graduated mid nineties with a degree in Russian, like
nobody needed that anymore. But in another way, everything was
just beginning right the Internet, that kind of the breakdown
(06:01):
of the of consensus and the establishment fueled by tech.
But the thing that Bill Clinton was so brilliant ad
was he just occupied such a vast swathe of the
center ground in politics that basically to oppose Clinton you
had to be on the fringes right. You either had
to be on the far right. You know, Newt Gingrich
(06:24):
kind of throwing out conspiracy theories as it were, Vince
Foster and this White House lawyer who'd committed suicide, and
all these kind of tales were being spun around him
about how really he was having an affair with Hillary
Clinton and she'd rolled him up at a carpet and
left him at a safe house in Virginia and then
dumped him in a park and blah blah blah. So
(06:44):
that was coming from the right or on the left.
You basically had to go further and further left to
oppose Bill Clinton. So what that set up was this
this political dynamic which is now coming back to bite us,
which is not the war between right and left, which
is the paradigm that you guys grew up in and
(07:05):
grew up fighting and that I was born into. But
it's the paradigm of the center versus the fringes. And
I think what's happened in America and the polling bears
this out. I remember there was one extraordinary bit of
polling where they asked people about their views of the
whole political and economic system in the United States. Did
(07:27):
people a think it was doing just fine. Did they
be think it was doing okay but maybe needed minor modifications.
They added up to about thirty eight percent. Then there
were the people who said, no, the system is really
in deep trouble and it needs root and branch reform.
Or the people who said it's so screwed we should
(07:48):
burn it all down and start from the beginning. And
that lot of people added up to about sixty percent.
Right now, it's very clear who is the burn it
all down candidate here? Right. So when I saw that
little bit of polling buried right at the bottom of
the pole, I was like, he's going to win. He's
going to win again. And it's clear. And because the
(08:09):
people who are now in power in your country are
so certifiably bonkers. Often even though they quite often put
their finger on the problems, they're very good at identifying
real problems. It's just their solutions are totally batshit. But
what's happened is that the Democrats and what used to
(08:30):
be called establishment Republicans but are now outcasts, have become
the party of people who are saying, la la la la,
la la la, we're not listening. Everything's fine, just stop
tinkering with the system and that's not working.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Actually, let's dig in a little bit deeper to the
nineties thing.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
There's an interesting can I just say something, Yes, So
this whole Vince Foster, My sort of conceit in the
coming storm was that I identified the death of Vince
Foster is basically ground zero. That led to Qanoni of
the Yeah exactly patients.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
What Hillary Clinton then called a vast right wing conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
A vast right wing conspiracy, which was an idea that
was fed to her by a political consultant named Chris Lahne,
who we interviewed for the podcast. Very interesting guy. We
then went off to work in Silicon Valley. But so
the Monica Lewinsky connection is this that the woman who
first clipped off the world to the whole Monica Lewinsky
thing was Linda Tripp, who was also the last person
(09:28):
to see Vince Foster alive. She was then a White
House assistant, and she brought him his lunch. And in
all the kind of hook plat around what had happened
to Vince Foster, and there was a question of what
had he eaten for his lunch, And in one account
he'd eaten the hamburger with a side of Eminem's, and
(09:50):
in another account there were no Eminems and it was
a cheeseburger and he'd removed the onions. And this was
like the kind of beginnings of the inconsistencies of the
account of Vince Foster's death that people started to pull
out and to poke at until it grew into this
monstrous conspiracy theory about how he'd been murdered because he
(10:11):
knew too much. Look, what happened in the nineties was
that there were all these Batchett conspiracy theories, and there
was also an actual conspiracy to create conspiracies called the
Arkansas Project right, which was funded by a wealthy guy
wealthy air called rich a Melonscape, and it was basically
sending out people to dredge up the wildest stories from
(10:34):
the swamps of Arkansas and put them into print, true
or not, and then the White House obviously would rebut
these things, and most of them were kind of wild,
but some of them were obviously quite true. And the
thing was that the not only the White Houses you expect,
but the establishment media for want of a better word,
(10:56):
in the nineties also treated the stories about Bill Clinton
and his philandering and sometimes worse right. Because let's not
forget that there were worse stories than Monica Lewinski, which
whatever you say about that relationship was consensual, There were
worse stories. There was Juernita Broadrick, who alleged that Bill
(11:16):
Clinton had raped her violently in a hotel room in
Arkansas in nineteen seventy eight, And the reason people found
her account credible was because she never wanted to tell
it and was forced under threat of perjury to tell
it by the Star Inquiry and it then got completely
buried because it didn't fit the narrative. I spoke to
Juanita and she said Starr and his lawyers kept asking her,
(11:40):
did anyone ever threaten you to keep quiet about this?
And she was like no. And then she then they
were like, did anyone ever offer you any inducements, any
money or jobs or anything to keep quiet about this?
She was like no, no one spoke to me about
it at all, and so then they were like, Oh,
we can't do obstructural justice, so let's just forget about it.
The question of whether the president of the United States
(12:01):
had violently raped a woman was secondary to the political considerations.
And so my through line is that narrative about the
Clinton's actually being people was pressed beneath the surface because
some of the genuinely bad stuff that was credible and
worthy of reporting on by serious journalists also wasn't touched
(12:24):
because of all the batchit stuff right, and nobody wanted
to be associated with that. As somebody put it at
the time, that story was fruit from a poison tree.
Nobody wanted to touch it. But at the same time,
technology was developing. First it was to a radio, and
then it was the email newsletter, and then it was
the kind of full blown Internet and these stories started
(12:46):
breathing like bacteria and petridition, growing and multiplying and mutating.
Fast forward twenty years and you've got a White House
reporter in twenty twenty asks President Trump. I think it's
the first time that QAnon ever comes up at a
White House briefing. It's a brilliant clip. If you could
dig it out. It's amazing because you can see Donald
(13:08):
Trump's political instincts kicking in. The reporter goes, mister President,
this is this theory that you're secretly fighting a cabal
of satanic pedophiles. Does that sound like something you might
be involved in? And you can see Donald Trump's eyes
getting to and he's thinking, is this what is this?
Speaker 4 (13:27):
It is this belief that you are secretly saving the
world from this sitanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Does
that sound like something you are behind?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Well, I haven't, I haven't heard that. But is that
supposed to be a.
Speaker 5 (13:45):
Bad thing or a good thing? I mean, you know,
if I can help save the world from problems, I'm
willing to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm willing to put.
Speaker 5 (13:53):
Myself out there and we are actually we're saving the
world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.
And when this country is gone, the rest of the
world would follow.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
He doesn't really know what this conspiracy theory is at
that time, I'm convinced, but he consentsed that it is
useful to him and that he can use it. And
there were people around him who knew that it was
useful to him, and so they weaponized it. Let's pass
for a second. We'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (14:36):
Another interesting thing that you bring up is from the nineties,
is that in ninety seven a book came out, The
Sovereign Individual and I guess it had an American investor
in a British politician with an odd name, Reese.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Maurice mog You say, he's got an odd name, but
he's one of the most well known names in political
circles here because Americans, and he's he is about Brexit.
His son was, and yes so his son, that Jacob
was one of the kind of pre eminent Brexit.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
But they outlined what we would today call the conspiracy
theory in the center of gravity of that it's very
applicable today. Right, it's all about tech bros. All the
darks running the world who don't pay you know, basically
describes Peter Teal and Elon Musk and their impact and
their impact on how we think and how we nationality
(15:28):
Texas government. I guess Peter teelhead it reprinted, right.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Yeah, in twenty twenty. Well, it's one of his favorite books.
So it's published in seven, nineteen ninety seven. It's called
The Sovereign Individual, and the subtitle is something like Mastering
the Transition to the Digital Age or something like that,
and it is it's incredibly foresightful, prophetic even right. It
predicts in nineteen ninety seven all sorts of things that
(15:54):
have come down the tracks, AI, the gig economy, offshore taxing. Basically,
they say, you know, the Internet basically had the click
of a mouse button, you can move your money from
one jurisdiction to the other. Cryptocurrencies they predict this is
more than ten years before bitcoin. And they predict that
all of this it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a
sort of exercise in crystal ballgazing and political analysis. They
(16:17):
predict that all of these technological factors will lead to
the collapse of the nation state and the dollar will collapse,
Crypto will replace it. States will lose their ability to
basically carry out the basic functions of any government, which
is collecting taxes and providing services, and in their stead
(16:38):
will rise the sovereign individual, vastly wealthy and unimaginably powerful
individuals whose power, in the words of the authors, will
rival that of the Greek gods of Mount Olympus.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Does it measure the w South African? Does it say
anything about it?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
It does not mention that they will all be South Africa.
So peed Teel was an investment who was I think
the first outside investor in Facebook. He set up PayPal
with Elon Musk at the end of the nineties, and
he has been pretty on the money in certain big
trends in tech. He's one of the most sort of
powerful and influential investors in Silicon Valley. He also is
(17:19):
of the right. He was editor of the I think
it's called the Stanford Review when he was at Stanford,
which was this kind of right wing student newspaper, and
he has, with his money and power, pursued that interest
deep into the kind of meme warriors of the far right.
Around twenty sixteen, when he was one of the lone
(17:40):
voices in Silicon Valley to come out and back Donald Trump,
and was really hanging out with these strange characters creatures
of the Internet, bloggers with names like Mensius Moldbug, whose
real name is Curtis Jarvin and who is very, very
influential in Trump circles. He's the sort of the inter
sellectual backbone, if you like, of trump Ism and Dvancism.
(18:04):
He's dreampt up this idea of neo reactionary, this near
reactionary movement where democracy in America is dead and what
America needs is an American caesar to cross the Rubican
with will to power and all this fuddy duddy nonsense
about people having a say in things. Get rid of
all of that and just dictatorship or as he likes
to call it, monarchy. And it's hard not to read
(18:25):
that book and look at what's going on now and
not conclude that what Peter Teel and others like about
Donald Trump is not so much that he's a disruptor
in the terms of in parlance of Silicon Valley, but
he's a racking ball, right. He's a bulldozer that you
can drive through the whole establishment and accelerate your way
(18:48):
into this bright or dark future of sovereign individuals where
democracy is basically dead and power resides with these hugely
wealthy tech barons.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
It's a view of the future where these very important, rich,
often white people will take over. But there's also this
view that the government just takes care of the weak people.
We need to get rid of the weak people. We're
going to We're eventually going to go to Mars anyway,
So does it go further? What's your sense of where
these people are going.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
There is a kind of wing of the MAGA movement
that I think is led by people like Peter Teel
Musk and jd Vance, who's one of their kind of creatures,
David Sacks, and other South African who genuinely believe that
the in the vision of the sovereign individual and that
it's coming and they can accelerate its arrival. So for
(19:44):
the podcast and for the book, I spend a bit
of time with a bunch of tech guys in something
called the network state movement. So they basically what they
want to achieve is the kind of breakdown of the
nation state and instead there'll be network states. A bit like,
so you'd be able to choose your citizenship the same
way as you choose a gym membership. You look at
what they offer where they have their branches, and you go,
(20:06):
this fits with my needs and values, and off you go.
But they go a lot further than this. Where is
the new frontier. There is no more frontier. There's no
more virgin land on the American continent other than Greenland.
Of course, cyberspace is a frontier that they can control,
but also the cosmos is a frontier that they can
go out to. And a lot of the thinking behind
(20:29):
the sovereign individual comes out of a movement that I
think is very very little known and only ever had
a few hundred adherents. It's called the extrapy movement, the Extropians,
and it was this sort of techno radical, techno optimist
movement that flourished in California in the nineties.
Speaker 7 (20:51):
Extropians are people who want to push back limits of
all kinds. One big one, of course, is human lifespan.
We want to push back the limits to human life
so we can live in definitely long which will mean
removing getting rid of these human bodies and becoming posthuman
as we call it.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
But they were talking about all this stuff, artificial intelligence,
virtual reality, augmented intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, merging humans with machines,
cryonic preservation, and eventually conquering the cosmos. And I think
when you speak to these people as I have done,
and you hang out with them and you can get
(21:27):
them to talk as they do when they're amongst themselves
and not in a sort of combative interview situation, they
will openly talk about how technology is going to lead
in the next few years to a very they use
the word Darwinistic moment, where basically the weak will be
(21:47):
culled and pruned from the earth and the strong will
inherit it. It's a very to me, a very dark
and bleak vision of the future, but these guys freacking
love it. Well.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
It's very South African, apart teid eugenics, Nazist sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
My point about that is that it's actually quite a
sort of quint essentially American vision, right, Yeah, yeah, eugenic
star in the US. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
So you have also you have also interviewed or interacted
with Jacob Chancey the Qmanan Sharman.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
I first met him in November twenty twenty two months
before the storming of the Capitol. No one knew this guy.
I was in Arizona. I was just after the election,
and I was there to report for BBC Television on
this kind of nascent movement called Stop the Steel and
this conspiracy theory that there was a big conspiracy to
(22:49):
steal election. And I'm Stanley at and I spot this
guy and he's draped in furs, he's got horns on
his head, and he's carrying a sign that says c S.
So I'm like, I'm going to talk to that guy.
He looks brilliant, and he's very friendly. He's a thoroughly
nice guy. But the story he's got in his head
(23:10):
is pretty bonkers, right. He believes that a cabal of
satanic pedophiles, possibly led by Hillary Clinton, has captured the
levers of power and are now running afraid of Don Trump,
who threatens to expose them, and so they're stealing the election.
It was like he'd eaten an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories
(23:35):
for breakfast and was now gurgitating them in random order.
So there was bits about JFK and tunnels under the desert,
and just like a whole load of weird stuff. And
I must emphasize this. He was an absolutely lovely guy.
He was not aggressive or mean in any way. He
was genuinely open with me and telling me all about
(23:56):
his really weird ideas. And I thought about it, and
I thought, this guy does look fantastic, But how irresponsible
would it be for an establishment journalist working for a
serious news organization to give airtime to this nonsense. I
draw the line. I have my principles and I will
stand on them. So I said, thank you, sir, and
I did not film an interview with him, much to
(24:20):
my absolute regret when two months later I was sitting
in London and all the TV screens around the BBC
headquarters were focused on one thing and one thing only,
and it's the capital and the mob is storming it.
And then we cut to the Senate Chamber and there
he is the same guy with the horns and the furs,
(24:40):
and my I remember my camera was there. He's like,
that was that not the guy that you eat? Was that?
I was like, oh my god, it's that that guy.
Did we didn't? Did we are?
Speaker 5 (24:49):
No?
Speaker 1 (24:49):
We didn't. Ah fuck, there's nothing like the kind of
the fomo of the foreign correspondent who's in the wrong
place at the wrong time, or even worse, who was
in the right at slightly the wrong time and made
the wrong decision and now doesn't have the scope. But
also I then realized, when I thought about it, that actually,
(25:09):
perhaps my mistake was more than just the kind of
one of missing the scoop. But I hadn't hadn't listened
to this guy properly, I hadn't heard the story that
he'd told me about the Cabbala Satanic pedophiles, and asked myself, now,
why does that seem true to him, and why does
it seem true to so many other people. We were
(25:31):
talking about the horseshoe and how the left and right
extremes had joined each other. A lot of what Jacob
Chanceley was talking about was extremely from the left. He
talks a lot about how the zero point one percent
have sewn up all the resources under global capitalism, and
they're throwing crumbs and making all us little people, just
turning us into mindless consumers and all this kind of
(25:53):
quite left wing stuff, as well as these kind of
very right wing talking points about pedophiles and whatnot. But
I think The kind of conclusion I came to about
this particular conspiracy theory was that if you took it literally,
which is that Hillary Clinton was leading a cabal of
Satan worshiping pedophiles from the basement of a pizza restaurant
in Washington, DC that didn't have a basement, then you're like,
(26:16):
it's obviously nonsense. But if you took it as a
sort of parable or a metaphor, and you heard that
story and you understood it to mean that people felt
that their democracy had been hijacked by more powerful people
whom they hadn't voted for, that the people that they
could vote for every four years or two years weren't
(26:38):
necessarily the most powerful people. The more powerful people were
people who were in the shadows, running big financial corporations
or whatever, and they were taking decisions that weren't necessarily
always to the benefit of the little people. Then you
were thinking, Ah, okay, maybe they've got a point.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
We'll be back in just a moment.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
So Trump does talk a lot about how the world
thinks we're fools and we're taking advantage of us and
laughing at us.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
How does the world look at us? Though I think
they are laughing at us.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
My British relatives think we're like knocking futs right now.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I think maybe if we were laughing at you from
twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen to twenty twenty, we're not
laughing anymore. Shit's getting real now. And I honestly think
the serious answer to this question is I think that
most European countries and governments, whatever they may say in
(27:52):
public about special relationships and strongest relationship ever between Britain
and the United States, work with Trump and blah blah blah.
We know it's over. We know that the arrangement that
lasted from nineteen forty five until twenty twenty five is
it's done. It's cooked. You can't like all you had
(28:15):
to do was watch that scene in the Oval Office
with Zelenski being pummeled and stabbed in the back and
in the front by the country that they thought it
was its ally, and the complete unpredictability of the Trump
(28:36):
administration and those around him, and whatever your emotional attachment
to America, and I think there is a deep love
for America, certainly in Britain and many other European countries,
common sense says that you cannot rely on that as
an ally, So you have to cut yourself loose. You've
(28:58):
got to stand on your own two feet. Trump says,
We've got to stand on our own two feet, and
he's achieved that. We're going to do it, and I'm
very sad about it. You guys have been not an
unqualified force for good in the world over the past
eighty years. You have been a force for good in
the world. You've also been a force for a lot
of funck wittery.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
We took from the British every many years.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Of you really did, you really did? And I think
I'm sitting here in Britain it feels like because we
said goodbye to our empire with barely battered an eyelid,
pretended had never happened, and we sailed straight into the
Special Relationship, and it feels now is the end of
the British Empire that we continued vicariously through you guys.
(29:40):
When I began my journalistic career in the BBC's Russian Service,
where we broadcast the truth or propaganda in Russian to
the former Soviet Union, and I remember thinking at around
the time of the Iraq invasion and the kind of
the fuck up over the weapons of mass destruction that
(30:00):
weren't there, and when it became clear that no one
really cared about the weapons of mass destruction, they were
just going to do it anyway. And I remember saying
to a colleague back then I was a very green,
genous I said, I think I think that the United
States of America is going to become a rogue state
in my lifetime. This was at the point where George
Bush had coined the word rogue state and access of evil.
(30:21):
I remember thinking, I think these guys are going to
join them, and guys you have, oh.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
How are we going to be ill? Go to a
software question. No, I think it's true, and I'm sad
about it too.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I have to say, yeah, no, we've were not wearing
the white hand anymore. And with our fuck widdery or
whatever you call it, at least we tried to be
a force for good, even if we've got it long
as awful as Iraq was, and it spent I spent
like years of my life there like trying to make
it right. But it was like, at least if you
listen to the neo Kansas will bring democracy to Iraq,
We'll remake the Middle East. It was silly and foolish,
(30:59):
and god it had nothing to do with WMD.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
They at least had the at least had the pretense
of some kind of arc of history bending towards justice
the best for them.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
But there is one thing I really wanted to ask you.
I fod it fierce that you were talking with a
professor of folklore and he had some AI tool or
a machine that could extrude folkal or conspiracy, genuine conspiracies
from conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
By the sense was he wasn't able to do it right.
First of all, this guy had the most fantastic name
for somebody who's trying to untangle the tangled threat. His
name was Tim Tanglini. So he and his students had
built this bit of software really that you tried to
use machine learning and AI that he claimed could tell
a real conspiracy from a conspiracy theory. And so he
(31:54):
trained his machine on two events. One was Pizzagate, which
was based in the Washington, DC pizza parlor, out of
whose basement the pedophile cabal was running the world. And
the other one was something called Bridgegate, which was a
very boring and complicated story about Governor Christie of New Jersey,
(32:16):
whose people decided to create a massive traffic jam in
order to get back at some political rival, but blamed
it on something else. But it was an actual conspiracy
to create a traffic jam. And you know, in a way,
this is common sense. You don't really need AI for this.
But Tim Danglin, he basically said that if you take Pizzagate,
and you take one element out of Pizzagate, which is
(32:39):
that emails between John Podesta and his staff talking about
pizza were in fact code for child sex abuse, if
you took that away, the whole story made no sense
at all, Like the whole thing collapsed like a house
of cards. Whereas with Bridgegate, like you could take away
one element that like one source or element of it,
(32:59):
and but the rest of the evidence would still be
so overwhelming that the story was very hard to knock
down because it was very robust. And that was the
basis for his program. The reason I'd call him up
was because I felt myself beginning to think like a
conspiracy theorist. I was putting post it notes up on
my wall, little bits of string look exactly, and so
(33:22):
I called up Tin Dangelini and I said, can you
please pull me out of my rabbit hole? And so
he said, okay, fine, just lay it all out for me,
and I'll stick it through my machine and I'll tell
you whether it's a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory. And
he put it all through his machine and it went right,
it's a conspiracy. So I was like, oh, fuck, now
I've got to go deeper. And so I started digging deeper.
(33:43):
And I did feel for a while like I was
turning into a conspiracy theorist. This is what the Trumpies
call this, not QAnon, but bluing on right, And what
are the conspiracy theories that blew and on? People believe
in that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, for example,
that there's a p tape, compromant Steele doc and all
of that kind of stuff. So I was worried that
(34:04):
I was becoming blue and on. And at the end
of the day, was there a conspiracy in the nineties
to start seeding conspiracy theories about the Clintons with the
aim that eventually, twenty five years later, it would lead
to the storing of the Capitol and the downfall of
the nation state and the collapse of the dollar. And
the rise of crypto and the sovereign individuals. Of course
(34:25):
not that's just.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Like butsense Gabriel. This goes back to your beginning where
you say a lot of them are organic, right, But
what happens is like if you go on q andon. Right,
So there's you talk about in your series, Ron Watkins
and the Philippines and q and Arizona and these things,
and it looks like it comes together organically. But then
there's a non organic piece where people like Jason Sullivan
(34:46):
and other people see that it's a conspiracy theory then
weaponize it through software to promote it on Twitter and
other social media campaigns to help a political campaign. So
there's a there's an organic piece that eventually has grabbed
by others.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Exactly exactly, and I think it's I think it's great,
yeah and used, and I think anything that's definitely what happened.
And you mentioned those names Jason Sullivan and people who
worked on the campaign and very knowingly and wittingly thought
this possibly likely organically created conspiracy called QAnon could be
useful to us, so let's just use it. This is politics.
(35:21):
But I think the same the same thing holds true
for the whole kind of Russia meddling thing. I know,
both here in Britain over Brexit and in America over
Trump's first election, there are a lot of people who
are holding on very tightly by their fingertips to the
idea that it was really all the Russians and everything
(35:42):
was fine in the Land of Milk and honey, that
is the United States of America until the Russians started
coming in with their nonsense. Now, I spent a lot
of time in Russia with Russians, and there are some
very clever people there. They're not that clever. And what
happened in twenty sixteen was, yes, the Russians had the
troll farm, and yes they were weaponizing divisions in American
(36:06):
society and doing it quite effectively. But those divisions were there,
and they were organic, and they were real divisions. They
weren't they hadn't been plucked out of thin air by
the Kremlin. And my strong feeling is to keep HARKing
back to the Russians is it means you don't look
in the mirror and you don't go, why the fuck
have we ended up in this place? You could just
(36:28):
go us the Russians that did it. But one's responsibility
is to look at yourself and your society in the
mirror and try and figure out where you've gone so wrong,
not to point the finger at somebody else. Fair enough,
So what are you doing now to stay saying? Are
you detoxing from?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Again?
Speaker 1 (36:46):
I get there to say anything. John knows what I'm
doing the new podcast series. And I absolutely wanted to
do what you suggest, Jerry, which is I wanted to
have no more to do with any conspiracy theories or
anything to do with any of that madness. And then
I came across this crazy story about football and the
CIA in the nineteen seventies, and I got wind of change.
(37:11):
It's like wind of change but soccer. So I'm doing that.
I'm also and now you can see how badly I'm
failing at getting away from conspiracy theories, super interested in UFOs.
But this administration, for all its failings, does at least
seem to have a sort of crazy drive towards radical transparency.
(37:33):
They're just like declassifying everything. I don't know how you
guys feel about that, but they're declassifying and amid all
the kind of JFK files and RFK files and MLK files.
They're also apparently drive to declassify the UFO files. But
it turns out that UFOs are real. There are there
(37:55):
are Yeah, not everything is explicable. There are things that
fly that are unidentified, otherwise known as unidentified flying objects.
But anyway, it does turn out apparently that you, guys
and the Pentagon various other agencies have been taking this
ship seriously for quite a long time, while pretending that
(38:16):
you weren't taking it seriously.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
What's Unfortunately, we keep having these conversations at the end,
like Jerry and I are beaten down where we go
and where's the optimism?
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Here? The optimism? I have something for you because everyone
keeps asking me, Everyone keeps asking me this, and so
I've come up with something. It's a little tenuous, but
here it is. Bear with me. So I believe that
we are experiencing the beginning of a period of epochal change,
the likes of which we haven't seen for about five
hundred years since the printing press, the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
(38:48):
all that stuff once in a half a millennium epochal shift.
And we are naturally feeling very nervous about the crumbling
stablishment and institutions and all the certainties that we've taken
for granted just crumbling all around us. So what I
do in these moments of existential dread is I think
(39:09):
myself into the mind of a fifteenth century German peasant
who is tied to the land and sees the printing
press coming out and Martin Luther nailing his things to
the door jam, and he's wringing his hands over the
death of the feudal order, and he's like, how is
the world going to function once we're no longer tied
(39:32):
to the land and the monasteries don't provide for all
of our arms, and what healthcare remains if you can
figure out the four humors and all of that, And
he's going, oh, whoa, no, please can it just all
please just go back to how it was. But then
they have a lot of wars and lots of people
die and lots of witches get burnt, but they get
the enlightenment and democracy and science and they go to space.
(39:55):
So I just think we're at the beginning of a
very turbulent but also very interesting period that may, if
we don't all kill each other, may lead to some
unexpected and amazing developments. Will my children when they're my
age still be living under the same system of parliamentary
democracy that I grew up under? Or will their children? Probably?
(40:17):
Not right, I just think nothing lasts forever. Is it
going to be bad? Probably? Is it also maybe going
to be better in some unforseeable, unfathomable way that I
can't even imagine. Probably?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
All right, we'll take that, Dury and I are all
that's just really great for us.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
So here, this is where you need to join the
Extropians Scottsdale, Arizona and have yourself chronically frozen so that
you can then be reawakened in the future Utopila and
the space aliens if you're out there, like, we need
some help right here's hoping? Okay, but this was really fun.
I've enjoyed it a lot. What could be better than
talking to two old spooks.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam David's, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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