Artificial Intelligence carries a host of risks: it could reshape jobs and the economy, alter educational practices, help powerful figures dodge accountability through AI-assisted decision-making, and even influence our personal relationships and mental well-being.
But here’s the biggest question: how will AI affect the content filling up your social media feeds?
In today’s episode, journalist Ryan Broderick joins us to discuss the influx of “AI slop” — which increasingly jostles for space alongside human-created content. We’ll explore the “Shrimp Jesus” Facebook phenomenon, a viral (yet entirely fabricated) story about Elon Musk saving a young girl with Neuralink, and the 1995 sci-fi horror film Screamers.
This week, we’ll take a deep dive into the origins of the “AI Apocalypse” theory – the idea that artificial intelligence will one day decide that human beings have outlived their purpose. What started as humble beginnings in billionaire tech mogul circles has now trickled down and pooled in various subreddits, where people will imagine every way the AI could bring about our destruction. From nervous excitement about what’s possible with the latest models to AI Doomers begging forum users to steer clear of AI girlfriends, it’s clear that AI has given us poor humans yet another thing to worry about.
Graham Hancock is a British journalist and author who gained worldwide fame for his pseudo-archaeological theories. Hancock proposes that an advanced, globally connected civilization existed more than 12,000 years ago and that remnants of their knowledge survived a catastrophic event, informing later cultures around the world.
His Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, amplifies Hancock’s claims, suggesting that mainstream archaeology has deliberately ignored or suppressed evidence supporting his controversial hypotheses.
As Annie Kelly and Fall of Civilizations podcaster Paul Cooper explain to Travis and Brad on this episode, all of this is a hot load of ahistorical rubbish.
But why does this story have enough appeal for two seasons of a Netflix show in the first place? And why is Keanu Reeves involved with it?
Annie and Paul take a deep dive into Graham Hancock’s work, picking apart the fallacies that sustain it and the questionable characters that promote it.
Ah, the lives of the rich and famous. The clones of the lives of the rich and famous. Perhaps the rich and famous are only rich and famous because they’ve been alive for centuries honing their craft. This week, we descend into a ‘page six’ gossip podcast, and examine a handful of conspiracy theories obsessed with the idea that our favorite celebrities are not who they say they are.
It is difficult to comprehend how much these people screw up, lie, lie about their screw ups, and screw up lying. But we’re going to try anyway. Travis, Jake, and Liv break down the most recent round of malice and incompetence from the Trump administration and the deceit, deflections, and conspiracy theories being deployed in defense of this bad behavior.
Firstly we cover “Signalgate,” the controversy in which a National Security Advisor accidentally added a journalist to their Signal chat about military operations. Secondly we discuss the ongoing saga of Elon Musk’s DOGE and how their efforts are clearly making the government less efficient. And thirdly we cover the Trump administration’s brutal deportation policy, which has targeted people for arbitrary reasons and for their expression of rather benign opinions. We then debunk the conspiracy theory that there is evidence of American student groups collaborating with Hamas.
Jake’s Takes and Liv’s Gives makes its triumphant return to the podcast. This time around, there are no bumpers in this bowling alley as Travis and Julian are nowhere to be found. Liv and Jake throw strike after strike (or gutter ball after gutter ball if you dislike the ‘take’) in this meandering episode where they discuss everything from the Sonic Movies to petty drama between Canadian pollsters. Come for the takes about the Ghostbusters video game but stay for the takes about what’s wrong with ankle socks. Also a more in-depth conversation about Ship Shows.
After a viral Tik Tok conspiracy claimed there was a “true story” behind the hit series “Squid Game,” Jake goes down the rabbit hole trying to separate fact from fiction. The Tik Tok people were very wrong, and what we discover instead is far more horrific. Julian and Brad are forced to cope as Jake tells the devastating story of “Brother’s Home”, an 80s era South Korean so-called ‘Wellness Center’ that turns out to be anything but.
Trump, members of his administration, and conservative pundits all promised the release of shocking new Epstein documents from the DOJ. Rather than fulfilling that promise, Attorney General Pam Bondi gave binders containing previously released Epstein documents to MAGA-aligned social media influencers. She then blamed the deep state for the debacle. Can the admin keep promising disclosure without ever delivering? Even some of Trump’s most passionate supporters are losing patience.
All that, plus a new Severance-inspired Jake story.
A burned-out SUV deep in the Canadian wilderness. A charred body nobody can identify. Billions in lost Bitcoin. A trail of fake names leading nowhere. Brad Abrahams is back with the saga of an S-tier con artist, whose latest persona may be our own Liv Agar.
What if you took every kind of person we’ve covered on the QAA pod, melted them into a soup, and reconstituted them? You’d get Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a man who could’ve been anything, yet chose to be the villain. This is the story of a genius chess prodigy, Neo-Nazi leader, penis-pill spam kingpin, & reclusive vegan rock climber: The Spam Nazi.
Proudboy crypto meme coins, JFK Jr's t-shirt design, Sebastian Gorka's snuff film, multiple nazi salutes… Julian and Anthony conclude their adventures at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. But not before being totally demoralized.
There are these two big landfills up in north St. Louis. One is called the West Lake Landfill, and it is packed full of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project. There’s hosing and tarps covering these huge sections of fields. It looks like a weird golf course from overhead, or a kind of sore in the land. It deserves to look this way because this site is the end product of a dozen botched techniques for nuclear disposal.
How did this radioactive waste wind up in the landfill? Why does the answer involve two “men of the Veiled Prophet’s court?” Why did the government ignore the health impacts of the site until long after concerned moms started organizing on Facebook? Can our minds even grasp the scale of our destruction of Earth, or are all of these events the byproduct of “hyperobjects” that defy comprehension by limited mortals?
Journalist Devin O’ Shea brings us a sad and spooky saga of radioactivity in Missouri.
Nuked, Echoes of the Hiroshima Bomb in St. Louis by Linda C. Moric
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Thursday, October 10th, 1946, page 29, “1400 Guests Acclaim Queen and Court In Greatest Coronation Supper Dance; Private Cocktail Party Precedes Event”
Welcome to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. Your companions are two Frenchmen: Julian Feeld and Anthony Mansuy. They attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) so you didn’t have to. Enjoy the CPAC International Summit where leaders like Liz Truss (UK), Eduardo Bolsonaro (Brazil), Morse Tan (South Korea), Steve Bannon (1933 Germany), and representatives from Japan, Australia, Hungary, Mexico, and Israel gathered to plot a far-right international coalition and whine about how their Big Beautiful Boys have been so poorly treated. Join Julian and Anthony as they run into JFK Jr (who is alive and well) as well as a whole lot of January 6 rioters, including one that still has a lot of love for QAnon. This is the first of a two-part episode based on our latest field reporting in Washington DC.
The savior of the West is an anime-loving, missile-launching, mullet-dawning, Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts wearing 32-year old man in flip-flops. Travis and Brad punish Liv and Julian with the story of Palmer Luckey, the once Silicon Valley wunderkind VR pioneer of the Oculus Rift. His support of Donald Trump’s first presidential run got him fired from Facebook and shunned from the performatively liberal tech industry. The irresponsibly sensational press coverage that followed created the vengeance and spit-fueled defense tech mogul he is today. He’s now on a mission to save the west from autocratic dictators and “woke orthodoxy”, one autonomous drone swarm at a time.
It's been about a month since Donald Trump was sworn into office and they've already begun stripping the country of copper wiring, slashing a multitude of government agencies and attempting to facilitate large scale deregulation. This has led to some pretty absurd mistakes by the administration. Like when they fired a sizable chunk of the department of energy, only to attempt to scramble to rehire a group of nuclear safety workers only to realize that they didn’t actually have these worker’s contact information, as they no longer had access to their government email accounts. It appears that no one is at the wheel right now. You are being run by a kakistocracy, or rule by the worst, although given that the vice president and reddit billionaire shadow president both clearly have browsed 4chan too much, it seems more like a “kekistocracy” at the moment.
Liv, Travis, and Jake discuss the lies that are flying out of DOGE and Elon Musk, the consequences of massive regulatory capture, the Trump admin’s plans to declassify old documents, and what r/conspiracy thinks about the new, "uncensored" version of ChatGPT.
“The Tsuki Project” was a once-active community of likeminded 4chan anons who longed to be transported into a better world. And they believed that by participating in this community formed around the promises and lore of someone named Tsuki, they could enter into this better world after they died.
This is a community that first formed in 2017 and has since dissipated into the online ether. It’s hard to say what the Tsuki Project was exactly. It has been described as anime suicide cult, a digital version of Heaven’s Gate, a hoax, a piece of interactive fiction, an Alternate Reality Game, or just a group of lonely, depressed people who were sucked into one person’s maladative daydreams. It was probably a swirl of all of those things.
What exactly happened has to be pieced together from archived imageboard posts, websites that only survive as zip files, anime Wikis, and leaked screenshots from Discord servers.
This is the story of the Tsuki project based on the surviving records.
Take a break from hearing about Elon Musk’s pernicious influence in U.S. politics to learn about Elon Musk’s pernicious influence in U.K. politics.
Annie Kelly brings us an update on the state of the far right across the pond. Specifically, we learn about political party Reform UK, and its relationship to the UK’s two most prominent far-right figures. Those figures are: Nigel Farage, "Mr. Brexit" himself and Reform’s leader, and Tommy Robinson, the perpetually re-imprisoned anti-Islamic agitator. Elon Musk spent weeks on "X" boosting the views of Tommy Robinson. This has caused some consternation for Farage, who has tried to distance himself from Robinson’s explicit ethnonationalism.
This episode features contributions from Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, the UK's largest antifascist organization.
It’s a movie, it’s a show, it’s an online marketplace. After a nuke is detonated in downtown Los Angeles, a group of survivalists must work together in “Homestead,” the latest Movie / Online Shop from the patriots who brought you ‘Sound of Freedom.’ Everything in the movie is for sale, and so are all four hosts' souls after watching it. Julian has somehow emerged unscathed, fully accepting that what used to be called “Motion Pictures” are now motion online catalogues. Travis takes issue with some of the survival strategies depicted in the film.
Does it feel like QAnon-style derangement is in the bloodstream of the highest levels of American political culture?
President Trump’s picks for his cabinet and department heads are going through the Senate confirmation process. And when Trump decided on his nominations, he selected some of the deranged freaks who have been previously profiled on this podcast.
Trump is massively expanding the number of inmates in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, promising a “declas” of government documents that will reshape our understanding of history, and purging federal law enforcement of anyone who investigated him and his allies.
Jake, Travis, and Liv unpack some of the ways that Trump’s policies are aligning with the fantasies and hopes of the conspiracist fever swamps.
Since Trump has been reelected, we follow up with QAnon personalities both large and small. How did the QAnon Shaman celebrate his pardon for his involvement in Jan 6? What is Roseanne, the first celebrity to endorse QAnon, doing nowadays? Why does Michael Flynn compare himself to a “striker” on the soccer field? Since the storm wasn’t upon us during the first Trump administration, will the storm, now, be upon us? We explore those questions and more in what is be our most bleeped episode to date.
$TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins compete with $FART, $ASS and $TITS for attention in a crypto industry defined by scams, grifts and financial malfeasance. We cover the intersection of politics with crypto and dive into some of the less savory tokens on pump dot fun, a website where “degens” go to mint, pump and inevitably dump thousands of meme coins every single day. Our guest is Molly White, a journalist, researcher and critic of the crypto and tech industries.
What if the Matrix really is a documentary? In this episode, Jake and Brad force Liv Agar to stare at a laser beam to find out what’s, like, really real. This is the story of how a former IDF soldier turned parkour enthusiast and American Ninja Warrior has claimed to have discovered “irrefutable proof” that we’re all living in a simulation. All you need is a little DMT, a laser, and an open mind to see the true code of our reality (which suspiciously looks exactly like the code from “The Matrix”.)
LA is going through one of the most destructive natural disasters in its history. So naturally there is a lot of nonsense online about the secret purpose of the blazes. To discuss, we talk to journalist and climate refugee Mike Rothschild. The author of Jewish Space Lasers is one of many people who lost their homes to the Eaton fire. We chat about what it’s like to evacuate in order to escape a fast-spreading fire, climate change, and some of the more popular ways that online conspiracists are speculating about the causes of the conflagration.
The richest man in the world cannot catch a break from these four podcast hosts. Liv breaks down the story of Adrian Dittman, a guy on the internet who idolized Elon Musk so severely that people began to mistake them for one another. In the second half of the episode, we have to install a new layer of thermal paste on Julian’s brain after learning about Elon pretending to have played 1000’s of hours of an early access, isometric, role playing video game. The real gamers found out… and they’re mad.
2025 is off to an absolutely nightmarish start as the boys huddle around the microphones and try to process not only the ongoing historical LA wildfires that have destroyed over 12,000 structures and killed at least 24 people, but also the horrific content they had originally planned: The domestic terrorist attacks that were committed on New Years Day in New Orleans and Las Vegas. If that somehow wasn’t enough, they’ll also be discussing the recent fatal police shooting of the infamous “pizzagate” gunman.
We cover it all in our first main episode of 2025: domestic terrorism, ecological disaster, and even war crimes. Our guest is Mike Prysner of the podcast Eyes Left, the documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom, and the QAA episodes on Tulsi Gabbard.
Jake, Julian, and Travis are ditching the script for a loose recap of all the popular holiday conspiracy theories. There were drones over New Jersey, heavy fog over the city you live in, and moons over my hammy. Jake regales the others with the harrowing story of how he was nearly lost at sea while on vacation, and Travis and Julian tease some exciting new projects for 2025.
Happy new year to all of our listeners and thank you from all of us here at QAA for subscribing to us on patreon.
What if “The Law of Attraction” was only for Aryans? Just in time for the holidays, Brad is back to let you know that Nazi-occult societies are alive and flourishing. Namely, a group claiming to be the direct genetic descendants of the “historical” Vril Society, the supposed Nazi-era metaphysical group that counted Hitler among its ranks. This episode has esoteric racism, templar LARPing, goddess rituals, hollow earth super Aryans, hairstyle discourse, a Ford Mustang obsession, and even starseeds. It’s a true QAA Xmas miracle.
We’ll attempt to answer: How much of the WWII occult history is real? What’s the real history of the Sonnenrad symbol? Are these contemporary groups just conspiratorial LARPers with too much time and money (and a serious hair fetish), or something much more sinister? And finally, did we really need to hear that bit of high school-era Brad lore?
Stick around for Professor Julian Strube of the University of Göttingen - a man who has spent the best years of his life researching these groups - as he helps us untangle this dense web of Nazi occult history, and how we’ve gotten to our current living hell.
Annie Kelly brings Jake, Julian, and Travis tales of the lesser known figures of the European witch hunts during the early modern period: the skeptics who openly doubted that every accused woman was actually a witch.
At the time, it was common for village communities in England, Spain, and France to accuse local women of cursing cows and similar satanic mischief. But a handful of men didn’t believe the mainstream belief that witchcraft was widespread. Doubts were raised by the Spanish royal physician Andrés Fernández de Laguna, the English gentleman Reginald Scot, and the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías. Salazar even established rules on investigating witchcraft that set a high standard of proof. This subsequently saved an untold number of accused witches from being hanged or burned at the stake.
What can all of this tell us about the modern right’s use of the language of demonology to describe their enemies? Listen to get exclusive analysis from the National Baby.
To get a better background on the history of witch hunting, Annie interviewed Professor Marion Gibson from the University of Exeter, and author of the book Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials.
Brian Thompson, the CEO of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan on December 4th. Five days later, police arrested Luigi Mangione as a suspect in the killing at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Liv, Julian, and Travis discuss the ideological waters that Mangione swam in and how this incident proves that everyone is an online investigator. Plus we explore the reaction to the killing, which includes a surprising amount of AO3 fan fiction. Finally, we break down the popular claim that there’s a special connection between the killing and the number 286, which isn’t as impressive when closely examined.
Was Dr. Who right when he said military intelligence is a contradiction in terms? Brad Abrahams is back (with Liv, Jake, and Travis) with the story of the “Gulf Breeze 6”, in which six military intelligence officers with top-secret clearance went AWOL from one of Europe’s largest Cold War bases in 1990. Their reason? A Ouija board told them to. Convinced they were on a divine mission to stop Armageddon, they fled to Florida, believing Jesus (piloting a UFO) would meet them for the rapture.
Even more bizarre than that last sentence was the punishment meted out to them. Were they part of an end-of-the-world cult? Did figures like Bob Dole and George Bush intervene on their behalf? This insane tale is a true mystery to this day, as the trail has gone cold since its explosion in the early ‘90s news cycle.
At the end of the episode, we’re joined by Tanner Boyle of the ‘Getting Spooked’ newsletter to dive deeper into the Gulf Breeze 6 mystery, and explore whether any parapolitical shenanigans were at play.
Hulk Hogan as Santa Claus in 1996. Jake has found the perfect movie to torture Julian and Liv with. Somehow he finds an ally in Travis. Merry Christmas to the sickos.
