L.O.G. 101 QAnon The Game That Plays People

L.O.G. 101 QAnon The Game That Plays People

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All right, all right. Well, Reed, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate having you on here, man.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Just for everyone listening, I reached out to Reed not long ago, and he graciously accepted my invitation to be on the podcast and to come on. So he's on here today after I read one of his articles. Before we kind of jump into the specific reason of what we're going to be talking about today and how you analyze this QAnon conspiracy theory, can you just tell us a little bit about you and what you do as a game designer? How long you've been doing it and how you approach things? We'll kind of start there and then we'll jump into everything.

Sure, okay. I came into game design through design and computer art interactions, and started designing educational games pretty early on in my career in my 20s. Then moved on to creating an internet startup, one of the 1.0 versions, and we worked with a lot of media companies. So we worked with Universal Studios and Paramount, Time Warner, Turner, Cartoon Network, introducing them and their properties to the internet and to interactive entertainment, which was at the time very new. Now it's very commonplace, but the idea of having a two-way interaction with your audience was completely unknown at that time. We worked with a lot of gaming companies at that time as well.

It was also during that time that I developed a very early alternate reality game, maybe the first, but you can't tell because these things are very under the radar and there's a lot of variation. It wasn't Ong's Hat early, but it was pre-A.I. (or The Beast), the game that was very influential in the field. So it was early on and that's where I started getting my experience with alternate reality gaming and how you can tell stories using reality as a medium. That became really interesting to me and continued on with the work that I did. After working with so many media companies and seeing the struggles that they were working with about how to transfer their properties from its original medium (a movie, video game), then how to translate it to a movie or a comic book or something like that. I decided maybe it would be a good idea that there was a company that could kind of show them how to do that and give them the basics of what people were experiencing and how to translate it.

It wasn't as simple at the time as if you have a video game and you've made a million dollars and there's a guy with a turban that jumps around for 30 hours and slashes people with a scimitar, you can't just make a movie that is a guy jumping around for 90 minutes with a scimitar and throw in a love interest and get a good director and soundtrack and just hope for the best. There's a process. A lot of companies didn't have very strong research departments, even though they were a multi-billion dollar industry. Most of their research was put into marketing, and so that's where Curiouser LLC was born, to consult with companies, individuals making projects that were a little bit more on the edge, where they needed a little bit deeper knowledge of what fiction was doing for the people that were interacting with it and how to best translate it and work with it. So that's too much of my background.

No, sure. But it's great. That's really, really cool stuff. And I think that kind of gives a great background, a great framework to how you jumped into this article, actually. Because you basically—and you can correct me if I'm wrong here—but you're the one who can take a game and literally bring it to life. I mean, in terms of alternate reality gaming, and then also bring it to life on a screen, in a movie or a show like you just said. That takes a lot. Like you said, you have to know how to build and create a story that will hook people in, entertain them long enough throughout the film, and then either get them to go buy the video game or then get them to watch the sequel or all that. So...

Yes, they're like different languages, and you have to be able to translate from one to the other. It's not a direct translation. It all has to go through the people who are enjoying it. It has to go through the psychology of the players, the viewers, the fictioners, we call them. But the challenge of defining entertainment, I mean, what is entertainment? Precisely, that's our, that's our... I mean, if Google has its core, yes, they sell advertising and so on, but really, it's how to find things. And ours would be 'What is fiction?' That's our mission statement: to define it in a way that you can communicate it to other people. Because there's lots of smart people out there who know how to make it, but it's like the difference between being a great chef, which you can be without knowing why we eat. In the Middle Ages, they were great chefs, but they didn't understand nutrition, and they didn't understand the process. They knew that people got hungry, and they knew how people tasted, and so they could make great food. But sometimes there were tricky things like, 'How do you store food then if you don't know what it is?' So we have a little niche going on.

No, that's, that's really cool. I think I love that perspective of how you take it. And so let's just go ahead and jump right into what you wrote, because you wrote a whole article all about the QAnon conspiracy. For those who are listening, who don't know anything about the QAnon conspiracy, it's basically this kind of cabal of global leaders and people who are involved in pedophile rings and sex trafficking. And there may even, depending on what part of the QAnon conspiracy you go down into, there's also possibly some harvesting of organs in there, and all kinds of other wild things, magic. It's all coalesced into one, off of all these different stories. But you wrote it and what you saw right from the article, I'll take the quote because this is what hooked me into reading your entire article, which is really well researched and really well done. I'll have the links in the episode details for everyone. But you said, "When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming's evil twin, a game that plays people." And I was like, "Dang, all right. So now I'm interested. I'm like, okay, I'm reading this all the way to the end. This sounds really cool." So what, what is it that you saw, or what was that moment where you went, "Oh my God, I've seen this before"?

All right away. I mean, I saw it and I was like, "Oh, I know what this is." I think when I saw the alternate reality game The Beast, I was probably one of the few people in the world who saw and went, "Oh, I know what this is. I just built that a few years ago." I mean, I saw it and I knew, I just knew. So you could see it for the elements that were in there. You could define them and say, "Oh, I've seen these little elements before, I know where that comes from." It was a gut reaction, but also I took that gut reaction. I said, "Okay, what is going on here? Let's see how close this is to a game. What's different about it and what's the same about it?" And of course, at first I didn't do anything with it because I didn't quite understand how deep it was, and I didn't understand how specific my knowledge was about this, that maybe other people didn't see it, and as we talked about earlier, couldn't explain why it creeped them out, or why it felt weird to them, or how the process was working. And so I talked to some people on the Everything Immersive board and a few other gaming places, and I made a long post about it and they said, "You should write this up." And I said, "Are you sure people want to know about this?" They're like, "Yeah, this is good. This is a good explanation." So I went ahead and wrote the article.

Reed, you know how you know that it's a good article and a great explanation? One, idiots like Marren and I glom onto it, and we want to talk to you. But more importantly, that people try to poke holes in it, say stuff like, "Stay in your lane," and try to explain it away. And the more fervent they are in their denial that this is true, the more you know it's true. I'll give you a perfect example of that. I'm running this morning. I know I look like a giant. It's all downhill, and it's very slow. But I'm running this morning, I got like a run mix, and I'm reading and doing some other stuff. And all of a sudden, the new book that I just started—I got three books in the house going at all times—the new book I just started, the character works on computers from his home, and he's in the same city and state that you are now. I don't want to say that, if you don't want to blow the illusion. You get what I'm trying to say? And so immediately, immediately, the very first thing that my mind grasped onto was, "This is a sign." You and I both know there's no sign. Do you get what I'm trying to say? But when you read the article, that simple conclusion is so fast in the human brain. And then once it's there, you think it's always been there, and it's not true.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's that Apophenia that we talked about in the article, which is that your mind is hardwired to see patterns. The cost of being right is better than the cost of being wrong, so you want to see as many patterns as you can, and you want to analyze them quickly. And it's okay to come to wrong conclusions that you can adapt later. So you are very, very hardwired to try to understand it. And when I was doing the article, I came to a much better understanding of Apophenia, and a friend of mine basically said, "So basically, Apophenia is science without proof," which it kind of is. I mean, a scientist trying to create a hypothesis is going to look at a bunch of data and think, "I think I see something." But then they go through the evidence, and they go through the scientific process, and that saves them. The peer review, the fact of saying, "Okay, yep, I was wrong," and then publishing a paper about how wrong they were and the ways that they were wrong, and that's science. And this is the opposite.

Reed, one of the great things Brian did is he brought Apophenia into everybody's lexicon that nobody had heard of before. So if you study my new trivial human behavior stuff, like we do, the irony of what you just said, Reed, is we specialize in Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and then the second part, and Analysis. So patterns are hugely important to the human brain. You're predisposed to see them in everything, and that's why there's a thing like Pareidolia. So Pareidolia lets you see images in the potato chip, or that this tree leaf is a frog. And Apophenia is the other side of that same coin. And then if you add Gestalt Theory, which is still a theory, Gestalt says your brain is going to paint in what's missing anyway, and that's reality. See, that's why I love reality and fiction so much is because there's a very fine line, and depending on who's speaking at the podium, it's very easy to mix up your definitions.

Yes, yes. I mean, I think that one of the first things of researching QAnon was to say, "Okay, well, I'm not..." When you first get into it, you're like, "Oh my gosh!" And I think many people stop right there and they're like, "This is crazy!" And they can't get any further than that. But if you just look at the techniques and don't look at what... You don't rush to judgment about it. You begin to realize that these are intelligent, caring people who want to help the participants—I mean, not the people running the game, there's much more nefarious intent there. And then when you look at the techniques like you were talking about, the seeing the man on the moon and filling in the details, at first it seems baffling because you're like, "This is, they're always wrong." I mean, they're proven wrong all the time, so why is it still going on? Just like a cult or anything else. And I think the fact is that we're perfectly fine living in a fictional world. A lot of what we do day to day, we understand may not be real, either because we don't know, or just simply because we choose to believe otherwise, including the things that mean the most to us. So we may have a religion that we are fervent about and believe, and yet if you ask a basic Christian, Jew, Muslim, "Well, do you really believe that the rain came?" Like, "No, I'm not real. I believe in being good to people and things like that." And then, "Do you believe in angels?" Like, "Well, maybe. I haven't been anything, but it could be, I don't know." So they have a very, when things are tough, maybe yes, angels. And then maybe later on in other parts of their lives, maybe not. Or maybe not literal angels, but there's a way to talk about them, and it's very fluffy. And you can live in a world where things are real sometimes and not real other times, and it doesn't bother you. So it doesn't bother the QAnon people either, that parts of it, maybe they don't believe it. Like they don't believe in that and the literal vampire part of it, but they like the people and they like the, and they think that the politics is on par with their beliefs. And so it's not as baffling.

Well, you look at your own life, and you bring up a number of themes that are, you see throughout not just conspiracy theories, but all belief systems. I mean, I don't care what that belief system or ideology is, it could be religious, political, social, cultural. We have our certain beliefs and we want to fit in, and we want to know more, and we want to think that they're right. And it's tough to question them. And some we take literally, and some, "Well, that's not literal, but metaphorically it makes sense." And especially when you get into religious stuff where, man, all the most major religions, the point is to be a good person. So how much you interpret it? Most of them. And so some people take it literally, and some take it metaphorically. You brought up a bunch of great stuff with not just Apophenia, but in general, how we want to connect dots, and then how you use that to build a game. One of the things they do is, I think you've heard it as like "guided Apophenia." So you do that in a game. Can you give us an example of how you see it in a game, and how you saw that in the different stuff you were reading with the QAnon conspiracy? You talked about one specifically in the article about the arrows.

Yeah, so that was like a big thing about Q is that everything looks very, very similar to a game, but everything is inverted. An inversion is very, very hard to detect actually, unless you really know what you're doing. Like when you look in a mirror, you see yourself, but you are inverted, not left to right, which most people think, but on the Z-axis. And people can't see that, it's so common. But it's not you that's in the mirror. Your motions will be opposite, like this way, coming. An arrow pointing away from me points towards me. But it looks so clear. And this game, it looks like a game because it's got all the game elements, but it's literally backwards. So when you're a game designer, you're trying to create a kind of a eureka moment, and you're trying to get people to have that fun of solving a really interesting puzzle. You're leading, you're dropping clues, and you're trying to lead them to this puzzle to solve. And then you're trying to train them up on how to solve the puzzle. Like a normal video game has a kind of a breaking point where they teach you the logic that they're using, and then they keep stepping it up and stepping it up, and they want you to solve the puzzle because that's where they know they've got the biggest hit, a pleasure for you. They want you to feel good about yourself and move the story forward and so on.

In QAnon, it's the opposite. They are leading you, they're guiding you, but there is no puzzle. They haven't written anything for you to solve. There's no big hit. So in a normal game, what you don't want, the opposite of what you want, is for people to start straying away from the plot. It doesn't matter whether it's a video game, like a sandbox game or something like that, or whether it's an alternate reality game. If you've got a puzzle set up and a plot, or Dungeons and Dragons game, and you want everybody to go solve this puzzle because that's where the game is. And they say, "Oh, but some fluff text caught their attention and suddenly they're like, no, he said purple and that guy at the bar was wearing purple, we got to go back to the bar." And they make a connection that isn't part of your puzzle. It is not going to lead them to the solution. And in real life you go off and you waste a lot of time. In a game, you try to circle them back and get them back into the thing so that they can have fun solving the puzzle. And you want to do it in a way that isn't... In a game, you just suddenly bump into an invisible wall or something like that. "Oh, I can't go that way. I get it. It's over here. I got it wrong." In an alternate reality game, you've got all these small tricks and things like that, embedded players and things to guide them. But eventually you want them to come back to the puzzle. You don't want Apophenia seeing something and thinking it's the right answer to sidetrack you.

And I give the example in the game of, I made a game and the participants were looking for clues in a spooky basement, and it was a dirt floor basement. So there were all kinds of stuff on the floor and debris and things like that. And I had hidden a very funny puzzle, it was very obvious, it was campy, it was very Scooby-Doo. And I figured they would just be down there with their flashlights, kind of get that feeling of like, "Ooh, this is spooky!" But then they'd see the problem, be like, "Oh, that's cute!" But they didn't. They walked in and some of the pieces on the floor, wood chips, had arranged into an arrow, and they were pointing at a wall. And they were like, "Okay, so where's the clue in the wall?" And they went right to the wall and they all stood there and were thinking about it, whatever. And then there were all these tools that you find in a basement, and they were perfect for chipping out a rock or two of this old basement's wall. They're like, "Oh, I get it. I put two and two together." And they were trying to think like a game designer, I think, because I had led them, I'd set up the scenario so that it was a game, and they understood that this was not going to be a complicated game, that the clues were going to be somewhat obvious. And so they're like, "Oh, what would I, if I were making a game, I would put an arrow and point it to them, there would be tools and then I would..." I mean, so they started working on it. And of course, it had nothing to do with the puzzle, it was leading them away from the puzzle. And I had to pull some tricks out, I had an embedded player to kind of, "What's that over there?" Very sophisticated. What I would have loved to have done though, is use their Apophenia and hidden something in the wall. That would have been the greatest, because they would have felt so proud. But we had to go a different way.

What you're talking about in there too, with just that experience, I mean, there's so much. It's not just the Apophenia, there's so many different cognitive biases we have, where, even just confirmation bias. If I'm looking for a clue and I think it's in that wall, like, of course, everything around me now becomes, "Oh, here's the shovel I'm supposed to use for it. Here's the axe," or here's whatever it is. I will now add value to objects that have no significance, because the first thing you do is you test the theory. So you're like, "Okay, is this the right theory?" And you look around you and you look for evidence to support the theory now, and they found it in this case. Now, this is why it's different in Q. So that's a game designer, that's something that I'm familiar with. Okay, so I also know when it's inverted. So Q has no answer. This is just Apophenia. So what this is doing is saying, "Hey, look at all those wood chips on the floor. Look at that, that's an arrow!" And then you're like, "Yeah, that is an arrow." And "Why would someone leave an arrow on the floor? It must be pointed to something." Yeah, that makes sense. And so, and there's nothing in the wall, they just want you to tear down the wall. That's what they're, that's their... Exactly.

So when you go on to the QAnon drops, it's always questions, it's questions, questions, questions. And they're, but they're always in a line, and they're literal breadcrumbs, and they're literally pointing you from one conclusion to another. And so the conclusions go to whatever the propaganda is that they are wanting you to get to. So if, and some of them are really crazy, and some of them are really mean. They're antisemitic, they're all kinds of things. And so if they say, "So, like this..." "So this is less like a game where you are going to solve a puzzle, and more like maybe a meme generator or something like that, where it's like a game that you play together and you create together." And I don't think some of these people have had that cool experience before. And so if you say to them, "Hey everybody, why don't you, have you noticed something weird? Why are people doing this all the time? Why are people doing this? That's weird. Think about it. It is weird." "Why did they have an arrow in their office? Why in the signature block was there an arrow on their logo?" Precisely. If you said, "Okay, you should look at all the arrows, it's not just the arrow pointing to the wall, there's more arrows out there." Now, of course, they know who's going to have what arrow, and they're going to post some pictures of people with arrows in the next week or so. But instead, they've got some pictures of the Rothschilds and they're wearing a certain outfit. And so before that, they're like, "Okay, you should look for this outfit," knowing you'll find it. They know that people that they, people that they don't trust, the media elite or rock stars, whatever it is, degenerate Hollywood is going to... Yeah, they're throwing the hand horns all the time. They do it. They've got their videos, they're trying to be creepy, they're trying to look like they're in a cult. They got blood coming out of their mouths, and they've got ghosts. Yeah, sure, that's their, that's their thing. But they've put, they've posited a new reason for it. Like, "What if it wasn't just that they're, you don't know what these people are thinking. You're not one of them." So this distance really helps to be able to project onto them and say, "What if you just assumed that it was entertainment? But let me, let me put another thing there. What if it wasn't? Like, what if it wasn't entertainment? What if they're serious?" You're like, "Well, I hadn't really thought about that. Take a look." And suddenly you've opened up your mind to a doubt. And then you're going to do just what you were talking about before, you're going to bias that doubt, you're going to look around for evidence to support that doubt. And they've already put the evidence there. The whole board is full of people that they've either, that they either are, that, you know, they could be all these people. Like nowadays, you can have a Twitter account with 200 people, and they can all be bots. You can literally be alone.

But one good thing, one good thing is for our viewers and our listeners, some new, many, many repeat. Brian, I think that we should have on the site for this episode, and specifically if you're listening right now live, make sure that you go and do it on your own. This is your homework. Look up Game Theory and just scan over Game Theory. You need to know that. Then look up Game Design. Don't abuse yourself by thinking that these are conflated. Make sure that you separate them. There are a lot of connections, but they're not the same thing. Then what you got to take a look at is the street version of what we just told our viewers, Brian and I. In our company, we deal with Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis. So we have to build a game in the classroom for our in-person training where you first learn to sense make. Sense-making is hugely important. You have to understand your environment and the players that operate within. Then you problem-solve. The sense-making leads you with the ability to have harder problems, and like a rheostat, ramp them up. And you go, "Wow, if this theory works here and this logic works here, can it be applied to this problem?" And then finally, you come to decisions. And the decision matrix is depending on whether you're a first responder or a police officer or human resources, or whatever else. And your game design and your theory comes from that same tree. The greatest two quotes to show how this QAnon paper shine a light on what it's not is you wrote, "This is about looking up at the sky and pointing out somebody pointing out constellations for you." We use that analogy all the time in our work, because you're overwhelmed by it, and if you're seeing a pattern and the guy next to you goes, "Yeah, yeah, I kind of see it. Okay, Cloud Boy, that one looks like a dog. There's the ball of yarn." You can get anybody to buy into it, because the correct answer is always the one that provides the person that posited it with the most credit. And the more credit you get, the more you get the adrenal cortex pump and the more you get the dopamine going. And so you actually reinforce that logic. And if you have one or two people around you, group theory and groupthink takes over, and man, you're going down the rabbit hole. Brian and I joke, before reading this article and Marren came running down the hallway, so to speak, with the email and said, "You got to read this article!" And I read it right away and I glommed onto the fact that you were talking about exposing something where it was all questions. And people think that science is about questions. Science is about asking the right questions, then conducting testing to prove or disprove a hypothesis. These folks don't want to do any of that. These folks want to go, "Yeah, I see that guy's wearing a blue suit. But could blue be the Q here? Could that really be the thing?" And all you have to do is put that drop in the water, and you've ruined the whole water. And just like apple sends other apples dying and creates the apples in the barrel dying, that's exactly what you had with your article. And you did an incredible job exposing that. Thank you so much.

I think that's absolutely correct. The drop in the water. Our internet is open, it is so... In some ways, as somebody who grew up when the internet grew up, I've always been working a bit in that and then moving on and on. There were no safeguards. It's an open well, like a community. In some ways, people think, "Oh well, it's horrible, the internet is horrible," but it's so innocent and naive in a lot of ways. People don't see that. And someone just came in and they poisoned it. I think in the last, I don't know how many years, but they successfully managed to put that drop in the water and it just spread everywhere. And nobody was prepared for it. I've seen small examples of it before, like in newsgroups. Literally anybody on the internet could post anything they wanted, anywhere they wanted, as much as they wanted. And for a while it literally worked fine until someone was like, "Hey, I can spam this!" And then that day it changed, and it became literally unusable, and it went away. It went away because they couldn't take the, they couldn't take the poison. There were no defenses, no one had it. It was so trusting. So this is what's happening. I think that in social media and so on, there's a much bigger problem besides gaming, and that is that there are people out there actively attempting to corrupt. And all the systems, we're still trying to figure out. We're still kind of in the early stage of figuring out how do we deal with so much information at once. And that's kind of how these things can even grow then, because then you question everything, and what's a legitimate source? And people say, "Well, I can't believe these sources over here. Oh, but I'll definitely believe this source over here." It's like, "Well, wait a minute, if you can apply scrutiny to them, apply the same scrutiny!" But one of the reasons why these stories get so big and spread and become popular is what do you need in a good story? You need good characters. You've got to have good, strong characters in that story because then it can take on a life of its own. And so the main character in this one is Q itself. So Q is allegedly the person who, I guess "Q" is in reference to their level of security clearance, which I won't even get into where that goes, but the Q security clearance actually pertains to certain areas of information. But anyway, they had this high-level security clearance and dropped in these kind of vague stories. It wasn't even really a story, it was just more just like, "Hey, I saw this and you'll learn more soon." And these real, real vague accusations. And then it kind of slowly grew from there, and you get into it. But tell us what your take is on this Q character and where it started.

All right. Well, Q, this is another thing that if you, if you... I don't even think you need to be a fiction researcher, a game developer, anything like that, to look at Q and be like, "That is not real. That's not how people work." We've had enough whistleblowers by now. We know what a whistleblower does. A Chelsea Manning or someone else. They're like, "Oh my God!" And whether they're right or whether they're wrong, they dump everything to the nearest available source that will put it out, everything in a big block. And that's how whistleblowing generally works. There's a few exceptions, but it's almost 100% that someone has information and wants to get it out as quickly as possible to everybody. So Q is so fictional, it's such a construct that you've seen it on every TV show, every movie with the thing. There's always the, "The Smoking Man" is the one I use in my article from The X-Files, where half the movies that you see that are mysteries would end in 10 minutes if the guy who contacts the other guy just said, "Oh, it's Bill. Bill said this. Here's the paperwork. It's Bill, I work with him. Here's his password." They're like, "Oh, what did he do? He killed Jessica. He killed her. He just killed her. Look, I've got the videotape. Check this." And then they'd be like, "Oh wow, that's great. Call the police. I don't know what to do." Just, it's over. But no, they never, never do that. They can't do that because that's not what you, that's not the rabbit hole. That's not the experience that you want to have. It's a very specific experience, so it needs a very specific introduction. And so it's always a character who knows but doesn't tell you. They want you to, they want you because, literally in a movie, if you're not experiencing it with the main character, there's no movie. And this is even more so for any kind of gaming or alternate reality experience. So the character has to know, and then they have to give you the clues so that you can have the fun of figuring out the clues. It's just a gaming mechanism, it's a pure fictional mechanism that is the polar opposite of any reality. Real people don't act like this. Fictional characters act like this. And they act like this because that is the engine that drives the experiential component of fiction.

In 2015, somebody posted a question that you took a stab at answering. And the question was very simple and very innocent, and it was by somebody about fiction that said, "What's more important, the character or the characterization? What's more important, the character or the drama, the role, the script?" And if we consider Q as a plot device and we compare it to some stuff that we see on television, it's all about putting it together on your own, rather than giving it to you. And your answer back then was the character, which I completely agree with. And I'll give you a for instance. While I'm typing, I've got to have background noise going, so I always like to put on one of these ghost shows or one of the Skunk Ape shows or something. I love conspiracy theories because you watch the people and you learn a ton. And this one show has the same premise, and it's been on for years in one manifestation or another. And it's about a medium who goes to the house. But first, her partner goes to the house and cleans anything, covers it up so she doesn't have any input from the house, which is a total lie because viscerally you're picking up everything. Just because a picture is covered with black doesn't mean that you don't understand that thing is important. Then they've got a homicide detective that comes in and does all the background interviews, and he's a knuckle-dragging, "I don't take any, I'm going to give you the real thing," which is wonderful. And then finally, the medium comes in and she walks in, "Oh, I don't want to see a little..." And what happens is when they put this mishmash of horse crap together, you're at home going, "Wait a minute, the bald guy that she was talking about could be this guy from 1874 that lived in the barn and abused kids." It's the same ridiculous plot device, but because you get to the answer before they do, you can't look away. It's like a car wreck that you can't avoid. So all Q did, the forces behind this, is create this recipe that we're all prone to react to. And I think it's brilliant. It's a brilliant strategy, even though it's being used for evil. I think it's brilliant.

Yeah. No, I think that there's a lot about Q that is amazing. I mean, I think that they've cracked some of the hard nuts of game design. There's very few games that can generate their own content and keep going forever. I mean, there was a Neurocam, which had the participants have to do tasks in order to get into the group, and those tasks were to build puzzles for the other players on some level. And they became producers themselves at some point. And it went through... I wish I knew more about it, it ended up being a thesis paper or something, but it had billboards in the city. I mean, it was very crazy. But there are very few that can help people generate their own content, and Q does that great, really well.

I think that also, Q brings in people that are not interested in games and have never maybe played them and would never think to seek it out, and gives them an experience that is simply magical. I mean, I don't want to wax poetic about this group, but, yeah, a friend of mine who's maybe not as concerned as some of the other people, he's like, "But aren't, isn't it great that they get to experience this and have fun?" And I'm like, "No!" Yes, exactly. Frighteningly simple. Because of the damage that it's doing to them and to the world. But they're not wrong about the fact that they are having fun, that this is super compelling. And I mean, this is maybe where I go, maybe analyze a little too deeply, but the game itself... I keep calling it a game, I don't know really what to call it. But it advertises its fictional nature at every turn. It's literally telling you that it's a, "Follow the white rabbit. Go down the rabbit hole." I mean, these are the hallmarks of fiction. These are literally what, when Alice in Wonderland goes from the real world into the dream nonsense world, she follows a white rabbit away from reality to a fantasy world. And I mean, my company's name is Curiouser. And when you design alternate reality games, it's also called the "rabbit hole," and this was all known before Q. So Q is literally saying, "This is going to be fun," like subconsciously, "if you take the red pill." You're literally having it on the table in front of you: "red pill." Like, that's another one from a game... from a movie that is. And you might say, "Oh, but the red pill leads to reality." No, it doesn't! That's the whole point. You bought it. That would be a terrible movie if you're like, "You started in the pod and end up back in reality, coding for a living." No, it's absolutely like the normal world, "Do you want to stay in the normal world or do you want to go to the crazy world?" And you take the red pill. All these things, breadcrumb trails, another Hansel and Gretel reference where you, where you... Breadcrumbs did not work out for his own credit, no.

So with all of these, that you see these themes throughout and different stories, and it's also used in some of the stuff that Greg brought up too is how we transfer knowledge in a short amount of time. Understanding learning theory, and like you just said, the whole breadcrumb is we're trying to get you to learn this framework and articulate things in a lexicon that you've just learned that day or the day before, and use it. So we've got to put out those breadcrumbs so that you arrive at the conclusion, the right one. We don't want you to fall into, draw an unreasonable conclusion and then have to correct you. We want you to draw that conclusion on your own. Now we're trying to do it to transfer a skill set and knowledge, and we're not doing it for nefarious purposes, but it's the same process.

For the right amount of money, if anybody's listening right now, we are available. Right amount of zeros, but we're going to play this as... There's only three people that I've ever met in my life that use "dopaminergic pathway" as a description for something. And Brian and I are guilty of using dopamine and cortisol to bait humans to make the right decisions. Over and over we do it all the time in class, and we're showing them in the practical applications, and we're teaching them when we're doing ride-alongs on the road. And we're saying, "When these three or four things cluster together, when they coalesce, it's always going to turn out poorly. So help us find those things." And that's vastly different from lying on your back and looking up at the constellations and saying, "There's a scorpion, and there's a giant Halloween party." And so that guiding that Q is doing, they know it's wrong. They know from the guest that, and it's not unlike Orwell's 1984. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Because now all we have to do is get adept at rewriting the history or erasing certain parts of the history. And guess what? We have a culture. And that's dangerous. That's frankly, information science is dangerous. And if you don't completely understand it, you could simply fall into a trap.

I think that all these, anything can be... I think this is one of the few times in history where maybe weird game design and national security are emerging a little bit. Where it, anything can be used or weaponized. And it's the time for this. I mean, I think that it's part of a, I think Q is part of a larger ecosystem that is happening online. I think the earliest I kind of picked up on it was during Gamergate, which hit my area of the world. And Gamergate was just bizarre. I didn't, I don't understand psyops, I'm not in that world, but I saw it and I'm like, "This is not like anything I've ever seen. This is different." This appeared inorganically, and I couldn't understand where it came from or why it was there, but I knew it was bad, bad, bad. And so this is kind of like, this election cycle, things like that, this is where they kind of scooped up all the people that were coalescing on the internet, that had, they were isolated, they were in their own things. They had a lot of anger and resentment, and kind of made them extreme. They brought them to a new level, a new place of anger that was seemed... Was it coordinated? It seemed weird. People were like, "Oh, what is going on?" And then we see it now all over the place. But it's the environment. It's the fact that if you control the environment online now, you control so much, because people are more isolated than ever. We feel connected through these communities, but people cannot get their head around the fact that you can join a community and interact with hundreds of people, and all those people cannot be real, and that everything that they link to is also not real. And so you're trapped. You're literally trapped. You can't get out of it because everybody that you talk to is part of it. It's literally, I mean, like in real life it would be very hard to have a conspiracy like that. But online, it's a press of a button, you can make 10 million bots just by going click. And now they're active, and you can have real people running them, and you can have algorithms and you can change them. And you can put them on both sides and you can have them fight each other, and you can do anything you want. And now we've got Parler, and we've got... So not only, not only is there a bubble where on Facebook you're all on Facebook, but some people are on like a different kind of Facebook than others. Now you're not even on Facebook anymore. You're on the social media platform, or you're on the right... No.

And that becomes that, "Oh my God, echo chamber," basically. It's, and they control everything.

Well, there you go. That's a perfect line too: "Everything, they control everything." And now they are insured that playing into "the they" is consistent through every type of conspiracy theory. Just understanding what you know and studying about human behavior and also working for the federal government for a very long time, let me tell you, there's no day, I don't know. And I just said it's great. But if you, if you look at the narrative of, "Okay, Twitter's trying to censor everything," yeah, they are trying to censor everything. And now you have a place where you can say what you want to say. And there's somebody even more controlling that. That's the thing. It's, "I'm going to take one and I'm going to move over to there," not realizing that that one's actually going to be worse than the one I'm on right now sometimes. And it doesn't seem worse because it's aligned with your interest.

Well, that's a big danger too. I mean, in general, even just with A.I. and social media and how it works and what the algorithms do, to only feed you things that you're interested in, that's dangerous because your beliefs never get challenged that way. It's just one confirmation after another. And then now it seems like the whole world, and it seems so obvious to you. And then especially when you bring up things about community, and how you can build a community with augmented reality games and all the stuff that you do as a game designer, that's part of it because that keeps me going in the game and keeps me interested. Now I have this community, and I'm using a device on my phone, the social media, which mimics and plays on my basic human needs. And it gets fulfilled right there, even though, like you just said, I could be interacting with a hundred fake accounts spreading the same misinformation. So...

Sure, you guys know this more than I do, but when you are problem-solving with a community, you get very tied in, you make friends. It's a rush and you can't wait to get back there. That's one of the ARG's main draws is that every Wednesday you're going to have something to do. You're going to have people excited. And you're waiting for the next episode to come out, and you're all going to think about what it is, and you're all going to be wrong. But there's going to be a couple people who finally crack it. It's always the same, like, handful of five people in every ARG. But you're going to have fun anyway, and you're going to be on the posting boards and wild speculating and all this stuff like that. And it builds community. And if that community is already predisposed or manipulated in some way, it helps you come to the conclusions that the handlers want you to come to.

But that's sometimes okay, Reed. We use that in class to get soldiers, sailors, Marines, law enforcement personnel pre-deployment, are going into very dangerous situations. We've got a very tight schedule to get them in the zone so they can sense-make, problem-solve very obtuse and sometimes dangerous environments. And to do that, not everybody's going to be able to crack the code, but everybody in the class will feel like they're taking part in it. And every piece of their contribution will add to the end. So humans are predisposed to create explanatory storylines. We leverage that. Psychological operations is "control the message," we leverage that. We also have to build a narrative that's logical, we leverage that too. And it's hard. This is where Q goes the opposite direction completely, the X-axis. Is that it's very hard to prove that something doesn't exist. So if you were talking 80 years ago, we would be talking about a back injury. Because if I wanted to make a claim, I would claim a slip and fall on a back injury because you can't prove it. And the scientists and the lawyers and the doctors knew it. So I could go in and if I was compelling enough, I would get a payoff. You couldn't prove it. Now science is advanced, so now we have to control the message, laser focus. We have to suggest a narrative, not control the narrative. Suggest a narrative, and then we'll cross our arms and say, "Look it up!" That alone starts this Quixotic windmill tilt that will never stop. And would you agree, Reed, that that's logical, that that works that way?

I think that it could work that way. I think it works that way when you want it to work that way. Exactly. Because yeah, I mean, I think if you're controlling the messaging, you control the whole... I mean, I would put in different terms. I'm not saying that it's that way or not that way, because I don't know enough. I'm not sure in that pattern recognition world, in that sense. But from my perspective, the way I would say in gaming terms anyway, would be that you're controlling the context and the point of view. I would say humans are, we're stories that play games in a way. And so we need to have a point of view because that point of view helps us make fast decisions. But I think that's similar to what you're saying.

Precisely. It's just again, we're on the same yin and yang, the same coin, it's just the other side.

Yeah. And I, yeah, I think that all of these techniques are valuable and natural. And I think that's what is weird about, dangerous about Q and other propaganda is that they're perverting them. Like I don't expect gamers to not use these techniques because Q uses them. I just want to make people aware of them. A lot of people have said, "Hey, you're using that technique in your article!" I'm like, "Of course I'm using that technique in my article." It's like if I'm looking at a big mess of information and I'm trying to make a pattern out of it, that's why I say it in my article. "Yeah, this could be Apophenia, I don't know how much of this is true." All I'm saying is, my educated guess is more educated than some people's guesses, because they have this very weird experience. I was just making games online in reality, which probably a lot of people...

You have an experience in a hypothesis testing. Because you, even just the way you just said it right now, you just wrote an elaborate article, that's beautiful. It brings in so many different areas that you could deep dive. And then but you're even approaching it like, "I don't know though. I'm not an expert. Here's what I see. I could be wrong." Like you're already creating that, you're giving yourself a little bit of doubt because that's how technically you're supposed to do it. That's the opposite of how these conspiracies, as a, a self-proclaimed expert...

Yeah. So I am...

You are now. You're on the...

Thanks, guys. But I'm trying to provide answers. I'm trying to give that hypothesis anyway and say, "Okay, think about this and let me know what you think." What I'm not doing is I'm saying, "Have you noticed that Q does this?" Or, "Have you noticed?" I'm not leading you to come up with something. I'm saying, "I'm a game designer and this is how I design games, and this is what they do, and this is what I think about it." It's my opinion, it's my best guess, and I'm labeling it as such. What I'm not saying is, "I know." I'm not telling you, "But isn't that weird?"

Yeah, it, and well, that's one of the things you wrote about in the article too: "This is not a game." So you're not a game.

Well, that's what I mean. So that, that's different. All the elements are there for building a great kind of semi-reality or augmented reality game. But that's the kind of warning there is like, "But wait a minute, this isn't a game though. People are playing this, taking it seriously for what it is." And that's obviously the scary part. But, and one of the things, a couple things I kind of wanted to ask you about, because you talk a little bit about one, that it's, there's some indoctrination going on, and that it's, this is not organic, meaning this, what is happening is not an organic thing. It didn't sprout from something real. And I like the way you use those terms. And what you said is that that's troubling is that Q is teaching their followers how to proselytize. So can you elaborate a little bit on that? What tools are they giving them, or how are they setting that up to get them to proselytize and share the information?

Okay. Well, again, that's not my area of expertise, but in a game design, going viral is part of what we do. You want as many people to play your game or to enjoy your media as you can get. And the process is to make people really, really like it and give people fun ways to share it. What Q is doing is exactly, they're teaching their own methods, which is somewhat why it's so easy to see what their methods are, because they're literally saying, I think in the last Q quote, they're literally calling themselves an alternate reality. And they're saying, "You've got to get people to follow the breadcrumbs away from reality to an alternate reality." They're not hiding this. They're telling you what to do. Earlier on, when it was on 4chan or 8chan (or 8kun, or whatever it used to be on), there were nearby to these Q drops also lists of memes, how to make memes, how to distribute the memes, how to indoctrinate people into Q. Because now you can be the white rabbit. Like you can drop the clues. You can create a rabbit hole to get your friends down. So that's why a lot of times you'll see Q people, now the Q with a rabbit, or they'll have a kind of a hashtag that doesn't seem to make sense, but you Google it. So like, "Where We Go One, You Go" (WWG1WGA), it's nothing that you would know unless you already knew. Or if you thought, "Oh, that's weird. What does that mean? I haven't seen that one before." And you click it, and Twitter shows you all the stuff, and you start going down the rabbit hole.

So yeah, so they're very specific. Some of the groups, if I remember, I may be remembering this incorrectly, but some of the groups that this was on also had some very intense tutorials on open source information gathering, how to get people's real location so you can research Antifa or things like that. Because Q will ask all these questions like, "Okay, so Epstein had an island or something, I don't know, but who was next to the island? Why was the island there?" And so you now you're on Google Maps and you're zooming in and you're trying to figure it out. And like, "Who was the architect? Who built the house?" Or, "What was the thing that...?" Whatever. But they've got some reason. They're like, "Oh, that was a rich... Oh, that was that guy's son. We're going to use that. Let's put that in there." But they can't put it in there. They're going to say, "Who is his neighbor? Who would benefit?" Right now you're like, you're using all these tools to do this. But the tools that you're using are like, they're not... I don't know, they seem like they're borderline hacking tools. They're all open source software stuff, but to get you more, to spread it around more, basically. Find out more information, spread it around. They give you clues on how to get your friends. They're like, "These people, don't be mad at them, they just don't know. They're still blue-pilled and you've got the red pill. Yes, let's..." I mean, it's like when you... I don't know how to explain it, but when you get a new social media app and you love it, and you want all your friends to get on it. So that's like what Q is. They're having this great time with this thing. They believe it, they like it, and they love to have all their friends on there with them. And this is teaching them how to do it. And that is not how games work.

I would caution just a couple of things, Brian. Based on what we just said, I say that propaganda abounds, it's everywhere and always has been and it always will. When Martin Luther was at the door, he was tacking up propaganda. Advertisers use it every day. So I say, "Slow down, slow your roll," meaning the rest of the world on Q when it comes to propaganda. What doesn't pass the smell test for Doreen is coordinated propaganda campaigns. And Brian, you use the word "proselytize" because Reed used it, and it's a great word, but I think that if you look at the etymology of the word, and then you take a look at the way it's being used, we're not talking about sharing. We're talking about infected cancer cells multiplying and duplicating themselves and growing and building new cabals full of those cells that can then regenerate and grow. And if you cut the chameleon's tail off, it can grow. The difference is talking across the water cooler and saying, "Hey, just see that joker last night on television?" And he did this. To, "Hey, listen, you've got to get this information. This is important." And then putting it on your house and changing your website and changing your email name. I was sitting on an airplane, which we do a lot, Brian and I travel too much. And the dude that was in the middle seat, you're always going to get a nut. I'm sorry folks if you're in the middle seat, that's just a rule. And this was just pre-COVID, maybe nine months, ten months ago. And it was, as a matter of fact, I know when it was, it was after the dope smoking day in Denver, and we had to fly to Philly, Brian. And so everybody on the plane was stoned. And all the stoners that were sitting next to me were old people. And I was looking, I was going, "Hey, so you guys high right now?" "Oh yeah, we're baked!" "Well, where are you headed?" They said, "Well, we're going to Philly, and we're driving to Virginia." "What for?" "Well, we're protesters." I said, "Like you?" And they go, "No, all of us. This whole group, we're protesters. We fly there. They pay our flights, they pay our meals, they pay our hotel. When we show up, they give us the shirts and the clothes and the hats to wear, and they give us the signs." And I go, "Well, how did you get roped into that?" They go, "We're retired. We love to travel. They've got casinos. We have a ball. We get drunk and get high and just have a party." I said, "So you, you have none of the message?" "No, it doesn't resound with you?" "No, I could give a damn about the message, I'm just sending it." See, that's sharing, Brian. That's not proselytizing. Proselytizing would have been sitting next to me going, "Here's your sign. Wear the hat. Little red book." You get what I'm trying to say? And that's what Q has done. Q has cracked the code, how to jump that, Brian, how to jump that broom and get me to care about that and go home and look it up. Not a lot of... Advertising doesn't do that. Movie advertising does that. Hollywood's never done that. That's got to be good. That's why I fear it. That's why I'm afraid.

And we have up in Maine, we have one of the people who ran for office actually, that Susan Collins gave some money to. This guy runs a QAnon based church. His church is based on Q, and it's infused with, they discuss the Q drops and they have like Q title things (I'm not spreading the name of it). But their goal isn't just to get people to watch and view it, it's to create new churches all around. They have a very specific goal in mind with this. And it's, yeah, it's the spread. So I look at one of your other podcasts that I saw, the apocalyptic one.

Yeah, psychology. Yeah. I've had a few people contact me that were very religious differently, and just found that the messaging of Q really resonates with some of that, "The storm is coming," and all this stuff. And it's very "good and evil." And it really has sucked in some people on that side before it was kind of pushed into the health community and other communities. You can kind of watch it spread. But yeah, so definitely they're trying to proselytize. I think that, I think that some are. And that's what's, I think that's what's so confusing talking about Q is that it's distributed over this wide spectrum. So when I say like, "Oh, it's like a church," someone else says, "No, it's like a political thing." It's like, "Yes, all that." It's opportunistic. And it is not, it's not centered on anything yet. It's still deciding where it's going to.

Well, I think that's what keeps it alive. Yes. Meaning it has to find, it's just like Greg gave the cancer, the disease. Well, if it, or look at COVID, if it can't infect any more people, then it goes away. That's what they talk about literally when they talk about herd immunity. So it's the same way, it has to continue to move and update, and it has to adapt and has to say, "Oh, well also this," and, "Well not so much that anymore, but look at this area." And if you're already bought in, you're that much more willing to then get to whatever that next level is, that next area. Almost reminds me of some of the stories of interviews of people coming out of the Church of Scientology. I don't want to get sued or anything, and these are not my stories. But where they got to that, they got to that point where they're supposed to have this revelation because they've been in so long, and they get up to this whatever level, and then they hear the story and they're like, "Wait, what? Hey, hang on, I think that's absolutely insane!" And then they go, "Oh my God, their whole past 10 years of their life, the belief structure is gone!" I mean, that's just, that's a, that's a, you want to talk taking a pill, that's a tough pill to swallow.

But Brian, I think you're on the cusp of something our readers, watchers, listeners need to know: If you are giving me information with which I can draw reasonable conclusions, I don't give a damn if they're unreasonable conclusions, whatever you're giving me, that's fine. But if your words, if your statements, if your sites are leading me to action, to actually call the police, to actually fight the police, to actually burn down a building, that's the difference, Brian. You have the right to do that, you have the right to speech, but you don't have the right to get a gang to show up at the bank and break open the safe and take the money. So all I'm saying is that I see the difference here, is that the hook and the barb only goes one way. Do you hear what I'm trying to say?

You're absolutely right, that's dangerous. That's the thing. I mean, that is, I think you put that really, really well, that is, that's what's dangerous. In every game, there's no game designer in the world that wants someone to call the police. I think that there's, and it's confusing, because especially in alternate reality games, there's a saying that says, "This is not a game," and it's repeated a lot. Because that's the, but I think that's misunderstood. Everybody knows it's a game. The game is set in the future, for crying out loud. I mean, you can't ever mistake it for something that is real. Okay? That is super, super important. I think what the "this is not a game" style is about is like, when you're in a theater, the people on the stage don't stop the reality, like, "Oh, line!" or something like that that distracts from things. So everything that happens within the game has to happen from a game logic or something like that. But it's not saying that it is real. It's not saying, "Call the police." It's not saying, "Pester people." And the games that have done that have been super destructive, like Ong's Hat or something like that, which was not meant to be destructive at all. I don't think that the producer of that game really thought anything like that would happen. But at the same time, he was also reaching out to other conspiracy theories and dragging them all together. He was, I think maybe the first one to do this. Where he really took, just like QAnon now is into G5, and it's into Bill Gates, and it's into whatever is hanging around. It's trying to scoop it up to get more critical mass. And that's what Ong's Hat did early on. It tried to put all these conspiracy theories together to give itself more power and legitimacy. And it totally worked to the point where the creator was driving around afraid for his life and armed in a car, with people stopping him, black vans, the whole nine yards. And he did not expect it. He was not trying to do that. But the Q is...

There's a film out there for the people that are listening. First of all, Brian's going to put Reed's website up. It's incredible. There's so much there to look at. We are going to continue to talk about this because it's so relevant to what's going on. I would tell everybody, second part of your homework, find the movie The Warriors. It was made back in late '70s, early '80s. Great soundtrack, "In the City" by Joe Walsh. The whole movie is a very simple Hollywood premise: fighting to get out of the place. It's not unlike Magnificent Seven, Seven Samurai turned on its ear, with the gang culture. What's important to note though, is what happened when the movie came out. The movie was so different than other movies of its time that people that were at the drive-ins and were at the theaters became violent while watching the film and receded into little groups and fought their way out of the theaters and into the lobby. And I know, I was at Eight Mile, I was at the Bel Air Theater at Eight Mile and Van Dyke, and the crew that I was with were getting so amped up that they were challenging other people in other cars. And when we pulled out onto Eight Mile, we got the red light and I stepped out thinking it was brawl time. And the Grand Prix I was in with all my friends, they went back to East Detroit. So I got a good thumping because of the movie. The idea is your words can entertain. Entertain if you want to define that. They can educate, they can give you a cognitive break because it's good for your sleep patterns and fun to be online and immerse yourself in a fiction. Immerse yourself in a thing that we know is a fantasy. But when Q crosses the line is when they make their call for action. And that's what it is, it's a veiled way. I believe, this is my opinion, it's a veiled way to get people to act like those cancer cells. And that's why we have to expose it, that's why we have to talk about it. And this is a great form. Your article did a lot of the "knock the dust stuff" off people and say, "This is more than a thing. This is going to be around, and we have to deal with it now."

Yeah, we're going to be dealing with it later. There'll be other iterations of this and they're not going to be fun. They're not. So they're going to be, they're going to be... This is, this is almost a test, I feel like.

Yeah. And I feel like things like what you people are doing, in helping people to think critically about things and to recognize these types of things, that needs to happen. Because I think that from now on, just like people needed to be aware of advertising and media manipulation, this is going to be the new reality. You're not going to be able to go online without being exposed to this. And I know that when it really hit home to me was when my son came to me and was very upset about something that he saw online, and it was a manufactured Q piece. It wasn't real. And I had to, and I was like, "Wow, okay." And it was on TikTok. It was not deep in the depths of the internet. It was being distributed by people he likes, by people he trusts. And he had no, there were no warning signs that this was not any more real than anything else. And we had to go into a pretty intensive discussion of how to read the media. How unfortunate.

That's, that's the big thing too. It's going to come. It's going to come to you, you're not going to have to go to it. And I think that's in the future.

Well, and that, that's part of the problem too is that I'm not getting it. I'm not turning on a cable news channel, getting information going, "Well, look, they're selling tickets!" I at least understand that when I watch news. It's when my buddy, when Greg or Reed says, "Dude, you've got to check this out, man!" Yes, you, I automatically give it more credibility than it deserves. So there was, there was just a couple things I wanted to ask you about too, is one, the, your "Rabbit Rabbit" as your author name for the article. We both have an idea of why.

Yeah, we wanted to hear it. Yeah.

Okay. Well, yeah, I'm curious to see if it's right.

So what really happened is that we were the original site at curiouserinstitute.com, was kind of out of date, and we were thinking of moving it. I had set up an account on Medium to do a literary magazine called "Rabbit Rabbit" that was coming out on the first of the month every month. And I like the playful "Rabbit Rabbit" kind of game that people play. You're supposed to say "Rabbit Rabbit" for good luck the first of the month. And so I'd set it up for that, and didn't realize that when I set up my account, I thought that I had to set up the name of the magazine as the account. So when I set it up, I set it up as "Rabbit Rabbit." And then when I published my articles, that came out as "from Rabbit Rabbit" instead of my name. So everybody was like, "You're intriguing. Why would you be anonymous? Why would you publish this anonymously?" I'm like, "Oh, okay." I linked myself, I linked my profile on the first sentence. I wasn't trying to be anonymous, I just didn't think that many people would read it. Okay. And then people like, "Well, you don't put your name on any of the articles on your site." And I'm like, "I just assumed that everybody would know that I was a director and I wrote them all." But you're right, I didn't. And that is, and if you're getting into that mindset of being suspicious, it's correct to ask that question. That's the right thing to do and say, "Yeah, who is behind this?" But that's exciting. I, I'm just, I was just rushing. I thought it had something to do with kind of like we talked about, going down the rabbit hole, or the rabbit leading you into an alternate universe. I kind of thought it was some reference to that. I was like, "Well, he's, he's got so much meaning in what he writes, it has to mean something!"

But that's a perfect example, Reed, like that is a perfect example of exactly everything we just talked about over the last hour here. I am attributing value to something that literally has... You went like, "Dude, I signed up like..." And it was, "This is how the registration process works. We're going to use the Medium. We'll keep it at our site." And then in the last second, I decided, "Ah, Medium is a great, it's going to spread it around a little bit more. I'm going to post some articles there." And I'm like, "Oh, just look, it's coming out under my name." But this is, and this is the key thing, right? So when you hear the reality of it, you're like, "It's a letdown!"

Yes. Huge! Because it's a letdown because whatever you come up with on your own, or whatever Q comes up with, is going to be a lot better. It's going to be more exciting. It's going to actually make more sense. I mean, it would have made much more sense if I had been like, "Oh yeah, Rabbit Rabbit, that's good." If I had been smarter and clever and done that, that's a better story. If I was writing a story, that's what I would want it to be. The game designer who, the clue. So everything Q says makes more sense. Every theory comes up with just, just hits home better than the truth, which is a disaster, which is why you should be suspicious.

We deal with terrorism and counter-terrorism a lot. And one of the things in terrorism and counter-terrorism is you probe to test the weakness for location, association, and opportunity. That's what Q is doing. Then the next part of it is you take a look at how you get people on your side. Well, that's not really my goal. My goal is to make one person in that village not give a damn. If I can get that person just not to care about me operating, I've won some territory. Now I can start manipulating the environment, like the cancer, and proselytize. So that's very similar to what we're seeing with Q.

Oh yeah, that's a great piece of knowledge. I mean, that's, that's not for my world, but that totally makes sense to me. Yeah. No. Yeah, you can just get one person to be like, just one. Yeah, that's a drop in the water. We talked about that. That's with any misinformation or disinformation campaign, it's, "I don't have to get you to believe what I'm saying. I just have to maybe get you to not believe what someone else is saying." So it just, it creates that, that mess, that turbidity.

So one other thing I wanted to ask you too, is any feedback or anything you've learned after you wrote the article and then you got people back to you? Or anything that you've gone, "Oh man, I didn't see it that way," or, "Man, that's a good point," or, "Oh crap, I better go into hiding," or anything?

Yeah, rusty. No, I, I think that, I think that, I mean, a lot of the stuff I write is a little esoteric, and it's like a half-an-hour long reading, it's like six... No, it's just, so for the internet, there was no reason to expect anybody would read this except a few gaming nerds. So that was the first thing. I was totally shocked by the attention. I expected the gaming community to be like, I passed it around and said, "Is this going along with what you think is happening?" So I expected a little bit of attention there. But yeah, there was a huge amount of people, that was the first thing. Second of all, I should probably get an editor at some point. I think a third of the comments were about grammar. How shallow? Oh, absolutely shallow. Yeah. No, I, it's got to... I think that it was more from the position of, "Okay, I'm going to help you. This article needs to be shared around more, but I don't really want to do it if the author's anonymous and you're using your misspellings and stuff in it." So we had some kind offers also to edit and to help us to put a very long, messy article into shape. And so I think that, I think that probably what I expected is in my weakest point of information, which is, "Who's behind it? Who's doing it?" That's where I'm guessing a lot more. And I'm making, "Could be like this, it could be like that." I had assumed that because the messaging of the QAnon group is so tightly tied into some of the things that we know are propaganda that have been proved by the government to be from other countries and other other things, that I thought that they were necessarily an official, unofficial organ of that spread of propaganda. Interestingly enough, some of the other game designers who had gone into this technically a little bit more, have suggested that it could be that, or it could be that these people are "game-jacking," what's called game-jacking. So they feel like some of them came from another internet game called Cicada, and were trying to move people from there into this game. And then this game is trying to suck up the messaging from the other, from all this propaganda. And that it's really more like an opportunistic thing. But the net effect for the person playing it is exactly the same. There is almost no differentiation in the messaging, except for the fact that they keep bringing in more and more conspiracy theories into the Q umbrella. And now it's, it's going to be its own little social media network for conspiracy theories really. And I, so that was something that I was like, "Oh yeah, that could totally be that. That could totally be happening. I really don't have a beat on who's doing it." But yeah, I will say that that was kind of eye-opening that it could be a game-jack. And so that would mean a very, a much smaller group of people who's taking their leadership indirectly from whoever's doing the propaganda, just for their own purposes of consolidating some kind of power or just having their own group. But the messaging is really clear.

And I'm going to say one last thing as a game designer, this takes an enormous amount of effort. This QAnon phenomenon. If I were designing a game, and people are like, "Oh well, it's just a guy in a posting board." No, it's not a guy on a posting board. Because I've been in those games and I've talked to those designers. This game had rallies, physical rallies organized in 50 states and different countries. It's in England, it's in the United States. It is all over the place. It's being name-dropped by the President of the United States. And I'm telling you, if I had a game and I could get that level of exposure, I don't even know what I could pay to do that. I couldn't. I'm saying there's some, I don't know what the method. I don't want to get into my own conspiracy theory. But as a game designer, I would say, "People would kill for that kind of exposure and that type of organization and that type of money being put into it." And I'm not saying it's millions of dollars. I'm saying this thing has to run on something. Someone is organizing 50 rallies in a physical location. And there have been some very expensive ARGs made, and they don't have that. So someone is putting effort into this. It's not just taking off. These people, these rallies were organized. Not everything is organized. I mean, it's hard to organize, it's hard to do anything. So if something gets done, it was hard. And you can see organic ones, I mean, they're out there. They planted the rabbit hole, people went down it, and they stop at some point. They're not that big. They're not being name-dropped by presidential press conferences or by candidates. They're not having all these real-world events. They're not in all these different countries. And those had millions and millions of dollars poured into it. So this is not organic at all. It doesn't feel that way to me. Like I would think that people have this myth that like, "Oh, something can go viral," but that's not really true. Most things that go viral, millions of dollars of campaign—I'm sorry, when I say "campaign," now I'm talking about advertising campaign—dollars put into it to make the new Oreo go viral or make the right, whatever. They push it out to influencers, they push it out to... There's a whole process in doing this. This isn't, or it's so novel that it's interesting, and then by tomorrow it goes away, it's gone. You'll never be able to find it again. There are true viral phenomena that happen, but those things are very clear because they have no point. Star Wars Kid had no point. I mean, it wasn't, the one, the burn video that everybody showed the kids going, "Oh!" That's it, that's all there is. They didn't even know it was anything was going to happen. And there's no point to it, there's no messaging, there's no nothing. But if you are watching a Dove commercial that's been passed to you because it's so emotional, then that is advertising. And that had a lot of budget to get to you. And Q is being professionally pushed around on some level by some people who know what they're doing. I don't know, the size could be anything, it could be five people, it could be more. It's impossible to know. A few people can do a lot on the internet. Somebody is pushing this with an agenda. That's just the game production.

Well, kind of scary stuff. But also, a lot to take in. And like I said, I'm going to have the links to that article in the episode details, and I'll push it out. Because you did a great job of laying it out. You even went into, kind of talked a little bit about what we would call symbolism and iconography and how people take that too far sometimes. And you really went into each one of those little sections, we could do like an entire podcast on, and how that works. But it's important to understand because this is now... I've been so fascinated over not just this one specifically, but all of them. And just information theory in general. Because that's what Greg and I do a lot. And there's just so much out there, and how do I process it? How do I know what's real and what's not? And that's the hard problem right now. And to put this, I always like to, is frame it in some sort of historical perspective. Some of the stuff that we're talking about right now, these same conversations happened 500 years ago after Gutenberg invented the printing press. Because they said, "Hey, now anyone can learn, and now even the information could be bad." Because once you increase that capacity, or you increase your ability, the quality goes down. So that's the same thing on Facebook. Anyone can do anything, so that immediately opens up the floodgates, and now the quality level goes down. And when we readjust and we go, "Okay, this is kind of how we're doing," and then something else comes along. So I think we're in that same stage with everything, we're still just figuring this out.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people, I had a conversation with people about the deep fake videos, and I'm like, "Okay, that's true." And they're like, "Well, reality is all gone now." And I'm like, "Well, that happened with photos, just 20 years ago." So it's not all gone. It used to be if you had a photo of something, that was evidence, that was a done deal. Now we're like, "Okay, that's not too much." So yeah, I think, I think we're, I think every, I mean, I wish I could give everybody a primer course in how to tell what's real or not. I'm not the one to do that, fortunately.

Well, that's the hard part, that's the hard problem. That's what we deal with. And everyone deals with it from the different angles of perspective. Some people... But that's the, that's the general hard problem: "What do I believe? What's real? What is it? How do I prove things?" And then anytime you do, like Greg brought up earlier, the same thing, you talk about, "It's hard to prove a negative." So, "Hey, prove that didn't happen." It's like, "Oh, okay." That's ridiculous. UFOs. Well, it's like foreign...

I think that the final takeaway for me, and it's not a... Game designers work really hard to give people a magical experience and take them out of their world into something that feels, that's internal, that reflects internally inside them and makes them, if you're maybe a nerdy kid, like maybe I was when I was growing up, and fighting dragons makes you feel strong, and you're not getting that from somewhere else, that's a great use of fiction that helps make you brave. It helps you, if you're a kid, you're afraid of the dark, and you like Batman, and Batman can walk through that room and get to the light switch through the dark. Batman loves to be in the dark. Now you love to be in the dark and you can do that. That's great for fiction. But when people are inserting their own messages into your fiction to make you feel something that they want you to feel, that's where it's really terrible. And I think that's what's happening here. So from, I would like to protect people from that.

Yeah, we really appreciate you coming on here and just having these discussions and getting out there. And we try to do that too as much as we can. And we're both very, I'm the first one to tell you, I'm probably not right. But at least I'm trying really hard to find a conversation. It's, "I can tell you what I know and from this perspective, but if next week someone comes along and proves everything that I believe to be true to be wrong, then okay, you've got a better, you've got a better way and it works. Then I'll accept that way." And that's the thing is, but that comes challenging our beliefs and everything, and not being so attached to them, but still being attached enough to know what works and not lose your mind. I mean, there's a lot in there. But I do appreciate you coming on, Reed. Thank you so much for having the conversation. It was totally cool. I loved your perspective. So everyone listen and just read the article, you're going to get even more than we got to in the conversation because 26 minutes that Brian and I have been talking about for hours and I've been thinking about for days. So that's good stuff. And I know Brian, you'll echo this, Reed, we'd love to have you on a future broadcast talking about fiction, talking about storytelling.

Sure. Absolutely. I think what you guys are doing is really interesting, and I'm just dipping my toe into it, but I hope to get deeper into it and I hope other people do too. Appreciate it, man. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been great.

Thanks. And I always end for everyone listening, don't forget that training changes behavior.