Speaker 1
And I mean, QAnon probably started off with something called a LARP, which stands for live action roleplay. And it was basically people messing around on internet forums, playing roleplay games, basically. Somebody roleplaying as a high level insider, pretending to have knowledge about this quick bar, the first post that set QAnon in train was opposed to how Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested. And this was the coming storm. I don't know who the first original Q post was. We think that the final Q post was a father and son duo called Jim and Ron Watkins, who Americans living in the Philippines. They denied, I should say, but there's quite a lot of convincing circumstantial evidence to say that it was them. And
Speaker 3
belief in government. How does that intersect with these conspiratorial beliefs? The people who, by and large, actually, I'll rephrase that.
Speaker 1
I was going to say the people who have sort of prone to conspiracy theory thinking, but actually what I think I discovered while making these podcasts is that we're all prone to conspiratorial thinking. We're just kind of channel it in different directions. But the reason people are prone to conspiratorial thinking is because they don't trust government or the people who are powerful in their lives. And so they need to have a story that will make sense of their lives for them as a replacement for a body of people or an institution that you can trust. And I
Speaker 3
guess the brain is a really good pattern detector. And so it's trying to see patterns, maybe where there aren't any as well. And so it's a bit overly sensitive.
