Five Years

What I’ve done and what I’ve learned

Five years ago, August 2nd, 2020, I was working on a virtual reality system using AI to create simulations of everyday stressful events like job interviews, to help people be more successful. It was fine, but after 3 1/2 years of Donald Trump—and with the nation seemingly on the brink of widespread violence following the murder of George Floyd—I had, for a few months, been increasingly monitoring the protests, the police crackdowns, and the bizarre behavior of Trump’s followers on Twitter, out of sheer anxiety.

One of the things that kept coming up was QAnon. I’d see them with their signs and shirts and weird slogans and bizarre Twitter accounts, but I hadn’t really looked into it. A friend suggested I read an article from an old colleague that described QAnon as an alternate reality game (ARG)—which struck a nerve.

As one of the people who helped develop ARGs into a genre of sorts, after I read the article I became very concerned. From the very first ARG I helped create, I Love Bees for the massive video game Halo 2 in 2004, I knew how powerful the concept was, and how easily it could be abused. The idea of an ARG is to plant clues or “rabbitholes” which lead people to an alternate reality in a fictional world that’s still anchored in the real world. Players work both individually and collectively to solve a mystery. ARGs generally follow TINAG, which means “this is not a game.” You never admit it’s not real.

In I Love Bees, for example, we never mentioned Halo 2 once, never disclosed who the “puppetmasters” were—until it was over. Part of the fun was crossing the line between truth and fiction.

Later, I named my company “Fourth Wall Studios” which developed a multi-platform system for developing stories that crossed the “fourth wall” or the imaginary line between the audience and the stage. Here’s a trailer for an original ARG using augmented reality from 2011 that we created at Fourth Wall, very clearly showing the concept:

One of the strange things we noticed throughout our creations was that once players had bought into an alternate reality, it was really like they were in it. They would go to incredible, even dangerous lengths, including one person who drove into a hurricane to answer a payphone, in order to perform the activities and solve the puzzles that we created for them. Another time they figured out who one of our voice actors was and stalked him in the real world thinking it must be a clue. So we built in very clear limits.

We also noticed that if we weren’t precise about what was a puzzle or a clue—and what wasn’t—the players would drive themselves crazy trying to find one. We found that if we didn’t keep the “drops” of new information on a clear schedule the players would make them up out of random stuff they dug up.

In a very real way, we were controlling their minds, and their physical behavior. As the technical director of I Love Bees, for example, I built a system that made tens of thousands of calls to pay phones all across the country—which tens of thousands of people traveled to and answered—who spoke personally with an AI from the 26th century.

Summer 2004:

16 years later, five years ago, after reading the article about QAnon and ARGs, I became extremely concerned that QAnon was abusing the ideas that we created for fun, which tens of millions of people participated in, to alter people’s behavior involuntarily. Since I knew that was possible, even 16 years before, I decided to see for myself.

Larping is a colloquial term for being online in the persona of someone, or something else. LARP, or live action role play, is something humans have been doing for millennia, but it is classically thought of as the guy in the forest with a cardboard magic sword yelling “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!”

In I Love Bees, I larped several roles, including the Flea, which was a rogue computer process from the 26th century that wrote its own software language through which it communicated with players. The main character was called “The Operator,” a formidable, if damaged, AI that did “drops” of clues for players to unravel.

So, to investigate QAnon, I created a brand new Twitter account, a LARP—called “Trumpfan1776”—I put some of the QAnon phrases I’d seen around in my profile, and I dove headfirst into the Qniverse on Twitter.

Within 15 minutes, I knew. They were using our ARG techniques—gamified storytelling, using the internet to deliver a cycle of clues, puzzle-solving and larping, to “drive people crazy.” As I wrote two weeks later: “QAnon Is an Enormous Alternate Reality Game With Malevolent Puppetmasters.”

Despite having my Twitter account for a decade in 2020, I had less than 300 followers, and a hundred random tweets. I never used it much other than watching people and finding out about real-time events. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to write a thread about what I’d found, and I promised to get to the bottom of it. And it didn’t take long for me to understand what it was. I wrote this on August 27th, 2020, more than five months before January 6th:

Qanon is a death cult preparing for mass violence. It is being run by a group of theocratic fascists, ruthless grifters and literal sociopaths in conjunction with Russian intelligence. Each of these actors is equally hell-bent on creating as much chaos as possible leading up to the election.

For them, like Donald Trump, this election is existential. They will stop at nothing.

It is all of our responsibility to stop the growth of this cult and help the people in it.

In a way, I got sucked into QAnon, but as an adversarial infiltrator, playing along with it in order to find out how it worked—and to try and shut it down. My first instinct was to create a different ARG, a better one, to help people find their way out. If an ARG can get you into a cult, it can get you out of one, right?

Well, it turns out it doesn’t work that way. I quickly saw that the “Q drops” and ARG mechanics were masking something far darker. The ARG itself was just a rabbithole to what I called at the time “an industrial brainwashing system.”

That was the beginning of a journey that is indescribable here, but I figured I’d lay out what I’ve done since I made the promise to get to the bottom of this, for the record:

• 1826 days, 7 days/week

• 25,000 hours, 16-18 hours/day

• 150,000 screenshots images

• 25,000 videos

• 6 terabytes storage

• 120,000 social media posts

• 2,000 blog posts and articles

• Full Substack article every day since Election Day 2024, 270 in a row

• 5 million words

• 300 podcasts

• 100s of livestreams and Twitter Spaces

• 100s of interviews

• 1000s of sources

• A QAnon documentary (shot February 2021)

• 131K Twitter followers

• 32K Substack subscribers

• 20 million reads

• Over 1 billion social media views

• 2 lawsuits, including Mike Flynn (Q) and the FBI Director

I have worked harder on this project than every other project put together, and I’ve done a lot. It has been a grueling, Sisyphean task of trying to warn people that what I saw five years ago had the potential to end American democracy—while being sued, ridiculed, dismissed, and slandered as a “conspiracy theorist.”

Nevertheless, as a proud high school graduate, an autodidact who always had more interesting stuff to do than class, while I don’t have a lot of formal education, I learn very fast. Over the last five years I have given myself an education in numerous topics including:

• American and World History

• Philosophy

• Comparative Religion

• Government and Geopolitics

• Clinical psychology

• Behavioral and information science

• Psychological warfare

• Deep research on 1000s of malicious actors

The reason was not for my own edification, but because in order to get to the bottom of this problem you have to understand the motivations of the actors involved. People, it turns out, are very complicated creatures.

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, and those of countless American patriots, we are now here in 2025, effectively facing the nightmare scenario, together. None of our warnings were heeded. Joe Biden stayed insulated for four years and allowed bureaucrats and establishment hacks to prevent him from making the changes and getting the accountability, the justice required—for Trump’s stolen election, his corrupt administration, and the violent attempted overthrow of democracy on January 6th.

Instead, not only did we fail to address the crimes, we failed to address the victims. The vast majority of the country still has no idea why at least a third of the population seems to have gone… crazy. No one in power has ever stood up to explain how and why the psychological battlefield is the most important of all, and how psychological warfare has been weaponized against the American people to create a nation that wants to destroy itself.

The result of this failure is that we are all now sitting ducks. The government itself is effectively QAnon. As I write this, trending on the former Twitter is the central theme of QAnon, the very first “Q drop”—“Arrest Hillary Clinton”—because Trump is following along with the “lock her up” script. At the same time, one of the earliest obsessions of Q, the 1960s CIA program Operation Mockingbird, is also trending because DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard claims, falsely, that it’s still operational.

So, I find myself, five years after I first looked into that “kooky internet phenomenon” of QAnon, staring into the abyss of nothing short of a totalitarian QAnon government. The system was built around Donald Trump, but, importantly, the system is independent of him. That’s partly what “Q” was all about—creating another oracle of “truth” outside the leader.

Here is a serious theoretical framework for how the entire system operates—and where it’s going, grounded in science, psychology and thousands of hours of documentation and observation. The theory is relatively formal, but it’s worth understanding because it’s about to swallow us whole.

Everything I’ve described, from the negative effects we avoided two decades ago in ARGs when we were able to remote control millions for fun, to the results of the 2016 election, to J6, to Trump’s QAnon government today, is explainable by looking where the problem is—inside the human mind, and at the system being built to control it.

One of the things that prevented me from gaining long-term grand success in any of my business ventures is two personal flaws. I am extremely stubborn, and I detest being told what to do. I could never make the kind of amoral decisions that I was being asked to by the people with all the money. That’s when the stubborn streak would kick in and they would screw me over to get what they wanted anyway.

I have never been motivated by money, otherwise, this would be the last job I would choose for myself. But the advantage of carving out my own independent voice is that my flaws turn into advantages. No one owns me, no one tells me what to do, and I can be as stubborn as I want.

My deepest thanks to everyone who has supported me over these five years. It has been a hell of a rollercoaster, and it turns out all of that was just getting to the top of the first hill. It’s a long way to the end now.

I will continue to do this work as long as there is anyone left to listen. Thanks again for your support. It has meant everything to me.

Long live a free America. Glory to Ukraine.

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