Behind the Bastards - Part One: Alex Jones: The Godfather of Fake News
Aired: 2018-09-18
Duration: 01:21:54


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (02:34) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
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[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:40]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:08]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:01:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:01:34]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:01:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:55]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[00:01:58]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:01:59]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:02:01]  A shocking public murder.
[00:02:03]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:02:09]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:02:11]  Those are shots.
[00:02:13]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:02:15]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[00:02:19]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Alex Jones Teen Years (15:40) ===

[00:02:35]  Hey, everybody.
[00:02:35]  I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
[00:02:43]  And today, we are talking about a very special, terrible, terrible person, Alex Jones.
[00:02:49]  Now, you probably know Alex Jones is a ridiculous hobgoblin of a man who spouts conspiracies at the same rate of fire as a Vulcan chaingun.
[00:02:56]  He's been banned from Facebook, Twitter, the App Store, and pretty much every other mainstream app that is capable of somehow spreading information.
[00:03:02]  Up until very recently, Alex Jones was considered nothing but a far-fringe loon, hardly an important voice in our national discourse.
[00:03:09]  But the sad, weird, almost funny if you can hold back the tears truth is that Alexander Jones is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century.
[00:03:17]  He is an architect of modern conservative media and a pioneer in a field that employs everyone on the podcast today.
[00:03:22]  Speaking of everyone on the podcast today, my guests today are Ben Bolin and Noel Brown from Ridiculous History.
[00:03:28]  Hey, thanks for having us on the show, Robert.
[00:03:30]  Thanks for watching.
[00:03:30]  Robert, we're so excited to talk about this despicable pust jewel of a man.
[00:03:35]  And especially because this is the second time that the three of us have hung out.
[00:03:40]  You recently appeared on an episode of Our Show.
[00:03:42]  Yes, I did, talking about California's first governor and one of the most famous racists in Oregon history.
[00:03:48]  That was fun.
[00:03:49]  That's true.
[00:03:50]  Feel-good moment for everyone.
[00:03:52]  Well, today we will be talking about more racism, but not from a Californian or an Oregonian, actually, from a Texan.
[00:04:00]  So that's fun.
[00:04:01]  You guys excited?
[00:04:02]  Oh, man.
[00:04:03]  Thrilled.
[00:04:04]  Let's do it.
[00:04:04]  All right, let's roll into this.
[00:04:07]  Alexander Emmerich Jones was born in Dallas, Texas in 1974.
[00:04:11]  A 2011 Rolling Stone profile describes him as the descendant of two lines of Texas frontiersmen.
[00:04:17]  I think this article is one of the first, if not the very first, major publications that devoted a substantial feature to the subject of Mr. Jones' life.
[00:04:25]  It takes a bemused, slightly mocking, but ultimately quite fond stance towards the infamous loon.
[00:04:30]  Quote, he describes a childhood that will disappoint those searching for the Freudian roots of his crusade.
[00:04:36]  His parents, a dentist and a homemaker, raised him with love in the manicured suburb of Rockwall.
[00:04:41]  I was an all-American kid with a great family, he says.
[00:04:44]  I read time-life books, played football, was friends with everybody.
[00:04:47]  So that's what Alex says his background was.
[00:04:51]  Yeah.
[00:04:52]  Yeah.
[00:04:53]  So that seems so far pretty normal.
[00:04:56]  Pretty normal so far.
[00:04:58]  I mean, it's hard not to read him talking anytime he's quoted in like a gruff Alex Jones has been eating cigarettes.
[00:05:06]  You can read the phone book.
[00:05:07]  You can read the phone book in that voice.
[00:05:08]  It's a lot of fun.
[00:05:09]  You say Rockwall?
[00:05:10]  You grew up in Rockwall.
[00:05:11]  Rockwall, yeah.
[00:05:13]  Which sounds very downhome.
[00:05:14]  That sounds like a very comforting place to have grown up.
[00:05:17]  It is.
[00:05:17]  I actually grew up about 25 minutes away from Alex Jones.
[00:05:21]  Yeah, in a place called Plano.
[00:05:23]  So Rockwall is a suburb of Dallas, and it's a pretty affluent place.
[00:05:27]  The suburbs on that side of Dallas are generally quite well-off, upper-middle class for sure.
[00:05:33]  And Rockwall is one of the nicer suburbs in that whole area.
[00:05:37]  It is a nice, quiet, and pretty boring place.
[00:05:39]  Mike Judge's King of the Hill is set in that same area, and it's actually a pretty accurate depiction of how it was when I lived there, at least.
[00:05:46]  I think that's why I said it was comforting.
[00:05:48]  King of the Hill is like video comfort food for me.
[00:05:50]  I put it on like to just, it lulls me into a state of utter bliss.
[00:05:54]  So, man, okay.
[00:05:55]  So when did things go wrong?
[00:05:57]  Well, that's kind of something we're all going to have to piece together here during this story.
[00:06:01]  I've read everything I can about his background, every different article I found that goes into his childhood.
[00:06:07]  So I'm going to give you everything.
[00:06:08]  There's some conflicting stuff here.
[00:06:11]  Oh, awesome.
[00:06:12]  Here we go.
[00:06:12]  And also, just, hey, man, on a personal note, thanks for doing that and saving us from it.
[00:06:18]  I hope you're okay.
[00:06:19]  It wasn't, it's finding all the clips that was really emotionally damaging because I had to listen to a lot of InfoWars.
[00:06:26]  But you are going to put us through that part.
[00:06:28]  Oh, yeah.
[00:06:28]  Yeah.
[00:06:28]  No, no.
[00:06:30]  You owe me nothing.
[00:06:31]  All right.
[00:06:32]  I'm ready.
[00:06:32]  I'm a monster.
[00:06:34]  Okay.
[00:06:35]  According to Alex, his parents raised him to be apolitical, quote, almost as an experiment to see what I'd turn into.
[00:06:41]  The closest thing to a childhood political training was some neighbors who were members of the John Birch Society.
[00:06:46]  They'd come over for dinner and I'd be exposed to those ideas starting at around age two.
[00:06:50]  So this is the first place where I have questions with that Rolling Stone article because no one in 1984 just had friends that came over to talk about the John Birch Society.
[00:06:58]  Do you guys know what that is?
[00:07:00]  No.
[00:07:00]  Break it down for us.
[00:07:01]  Okay, so the John Birch Society is like the prototype for all future right-wing conspiracy organizations.
[00:07:07]  Fred Koch, the patriarch of the Koch brothers, was one of the founding members.
[00:07:12]  To give you an idea of these people's intellectual tenure, they believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a secret communist.
[00:07:19]  Oh, wait.
[00:07:20]  I am familiar with these people because they're still like, they're staunchly anti-communist.
[00:07:25]  That's one of their big platforms, right?
[00:07:26]  Yeah, they're staunchly anti-communist, and they believe that, like, a gigantic communist conspiracy controls most of the world, even during, like, the height of the Cold War when like, you know, like I said, they think Eisenhower was a lefty.
[00:07:39]  So that should give you an idea of how far to the right these guys are.
[00:07:43]  So, wow.
[00:07:44]  Having friends who just, I don't buy that he just had friends who came over to talk about the John Birch Society.
[00:07:50]  And other articles I've read say that Alex Jones' father himself was a member of the John Birch Society, which makes a lot of sense.
[00:07:56]  Whatever the truth is, Alex Jones was probably born into a mix of middle-class luxury and far-right conspiracy theories.
[00:08:03]  Every single deep dive on the man I've read will mention that while young, he found a book called None Dare Call It Conspiracy on his father's bookshelf.
[00:08:10]  Oh, wow.
[00:08:11]  Yeah.
[00:08:11]  Yeah.
[00:08:12]  Okay.
[00:08:12]  So another quote from Rolling Stone.
[00:08:15]  According to Nun Dare, the federal income tax is nothing but a plot by a cabal of mega-rich insiders who work to suck the middle class dry and transfer its wealth to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
[00:08:24]  As a teenager, Jones read the book twice.
[00:08:26]  It's still the easiest to read primary to the New World Order, he says.
[00:08:30]  So this is like the book that's his, his, I don't know, what's another influential book?
[00:08:37]  The Bible?
[00:08:38]  This is his Bible.
[00:08:39]  Yeah.
[00:08:40]  It's like his the fountain head.
[00:08:42]  Yeah.
[00:08:42]  Catcher in the rye.
[00:08:43]  His catcher.
[00:08:44]  Catch everything, too.
[00:08:45]  There you go.
[00:08:46]  But he always, you know, makes a point.
[00:08:47]  Maybe this is coming later.
[00:08:48]  I'm sure it is, that he's playing a character and he doesn't even really believe any of this.
[00:08:51]  But based on what you're saying so far, it sounds like he has a pretty strong history of fucking believing in this.
[00:08:55]  Oh, and he just recently started saying that it was a character.
[00:08:58]  Yeah, and that's for a custody hearing.
[00:09:00]  And speaking of that custody hearing, the 2018 custody hearing, which we will be talking about more in the last episode of this three-parter podcast.
[00:09:08]  But during that custody hearing, he does talk about his childhood some.
[00:09:12]  So I'd actually like to play you a clip from that where Alex talks about his life at age 16.
[00:09:17]  So this will give us all some idea of what Alex Jones was doing as a teenager.
[00:09:21]  When I was 16, I didn't want to party anymore.
[00:09:26]  I didn't want to play games anymore.
[00:09:28]  I grew up.
[00:09:29]  I'd already been in the fights, all the big rituals.
[00:09:32]  I'd already had probably, I hate to brag, so I'm not bragging.
[00:09:35]  It's actually shameful.
[00:09:36]  Probably 150 women or more.
[00:09:38]  That's conservative.
[00:09:39]  Jesus.
[00:09:40]  I had over 150 women.
[00:09:41]  I'd already been in fights with full-grown men.
[00:09:44]  I was already dating college girls by the time I was 15 years old.
[00:09:48]  I was already a man.
[00:09:52]  So that's a heart that pumped blood.
[00:09:55]  150.
[00:09:56]  I got Harry Ball.
[00:09:58]  150, and he's being conservative.
[00:10:01]  Dude, no, he is myth-building at this point.
[00:10:03]  I mean, I mean, come on.
[00:10:04]  There's no fucking way.
[00:10:06]  No, that's all lies, clearly.
[00:10:09]  It's funny.
[00:10:10]  I feel like, yeah, that's 44-year-old Alex Jones.
[00:10:13]  I say 140 tops, Robert.
[00:10:15]  I say 140 tops.
[00:10:16]  I'll believe 140.
[00:10:18]  That's a reasonable number for a 15-year-old.
[00:10:23]  So, yeah, oddly enough, if you want some context for that video, the first part of it is him talking about a new world order plan to stop people from breeding because we're all supposed to have kids by age 16.
[00:10:34]  Yeah.
[00:10:34]  So anyway, I don't want to be just taking Alex out of context because whenever the media attacks him, here's a question.
[00:10:42]  If that's his beef, you know, this is this conspiracy to like cut off procreation or whatever.
[00:10:46]  And he's had 150 women by the age of 15.
[00:10:50]  Where are all his bastard children?
[00:10:53]  He's admitted to, I think, 10 abortions to like having had partners of his have 10 abortions over the years and stuff.
[00:11:00]  And it's usually something he brings up when he's talking about his shameful past or whatever.
[00:11:05]  For whatever reason, that's important to him.
[00:11:07]  Yeah.
[00:11:10]  So none of that is true, you're saying, right?
[00:11:13]  Absolutely none of it.
[00:11:14]  I know he's had sex with people because he has kids, but I really doubt he had sex with 150 people by the time he was 15.
[00:11:21]  But was he really fighting?
[00:11:22]  Full broke man.
[00:11:24]  Well, I don't know, but we're going to be talking about a fight we know Alex Jones had, and we've got different perspectives on that fight, including the police report that Alex filed.
[00:11:34]  So that's coming up in a little bit.
[00:11:35]  Maybe you guys, we'll reserve our judgment until then.
[00:11:39]  So anyway, during his John Hughes movie, Worth Adolescence, Alex Jones stumbled onto his first conspiracy.
[00:11:45]  While he was out at parties on the weekend, he would watch his off-duty cops sold pot, ecstasy, and coke to other teens.
[00:11:51]  Jones said to Rolling Stone, quote, a truck would appear, sometimes with a guy still in uniform inside.
[00:11:56]  Then on Monday, they'd have dare and drug test us for football.
[00:11:59]  I was like, you want to drug test me when I know you're selling this stuff?
[00:12:02]  I called them the mafia to their face.
[00:12:04]  At the time, I didn't know anything about the CIA drug dealing.
[00:12:07]  So Alex was a varsity lineman at this point in high school, so it's entirely possible he went to a lot of parties.
[00:12:12]  And it's also possible that Rockwell cops sold drugs to teenagers.
[00:12:16]  That whole chunk of suburban Dallas-Fort Worth has horrific and had horrific drug problems.
[00:12:22]  When I was a kid there in the mid-1990s, there was an article that on a like seven or eight kids died in a night from heroin overdoses.
[00:12:29]  It was called the Great Heroin Massacre, and it turned out that Plano was like the heroin capital of the United States.
[00:12:34]  And in like 2001, a bunch of Dallas cops got busted for planting hundreds of pounds of fake drugs on people.
[00:12:41]  So there's a lot of police corruption in that part of Texas.
[00:12:44]  It is entirely possible that young Alex Jones stumbled upon a real drug conspiracy.
[00:12:51]  He says that this conspiracy is why he wound up leaving the Dallas area.
[00:12:55]  He got arrested for driving without a license and having a six pack of beer in the car.
[00:13:00]  And when the police brought him to jail, he says the police threatened to frame him and send him away if he didn't stop talking about the things that they were doing wrong.
[00:13:09]  Maybe that's true.
[00:13:10]  Maybe Alex started his career as a conspiracy theorist with a real conspiracy.
[00:13:14]  It is possible cops in that part of Dallas have done some shady things.
[00:13:19]  And that would certainly wet your appetite.
[00:13:21]  If the first one is legit, then everything you see from then on has got that tone to it.
[00:13:29]  It does sound a little self-aggrandizing, though, that the cops were so concerned.
[00:13:34]  You know what I mean?
[00:13:35]  If they're that bad, why didn't they just get rid of him?
[00:13:38]  Well, and that's a fair point.
[00:13:40]  And it's almost even if there was something wrong, because apparently the Rockwell sheriff was indicted on criminal charges for like organized crime conspiracy and stuff after he and his family left Austin.
[00:13:50]  He says they left that his parents moved to Austin because he was a threat from the police.
[00:13:56]  I don't know if that's true.
[00:13:57]  I don't know if they were afraid of him, but it's entirely possible he saw some evidence of an actual shady thing going on, and that that's what sort of jump-started him.
[00:14:06]  I got to say, I appreciate that you're being very fair, Robert.
[00:14:10]  I'm noticing that this is...
[00:14:13]  My spider sense tells me this is about to get really weird.
[00:14:16]  I mean, it's Alex Jones.
[00:14:17]  Of course, it's going to be really, really weird.
[00:14:19]  But yeah, at this point, he hasn't done anything that's inherently terrible, and he maybe stumbled upon a real conspiracy.
[00:14:28]  Buckley Hammond, Alex's cousin and a current Infowars employee, considers this whole Rockwell police thing to be a major moment for Alex.
[00:14:37]  Quote, the Rockwell cops were lowbrow thugs, and Alex was a hellraiser.
[00:14:41]  The conflict with the cops started Alex down the road of his current pursuit.
[00:14:45]  So yeah, that seems plausible.
[00:14:46]  Once he and his family moved to Austin, Alex quit football, which is probably good.
[00:14:50]  He's not a man who needs head injuries added on to whatever else is going on in his head.
[00:14:54]  There you go.
[00:14:55]  There's a nice dig.
[00:14:57]  He also quit smoking pot because he says it made him paranoid, and we wouldn't want paranoid Alex Jones.
[00:15:02]  Decades later, during that magical 2018 custody hearing, Alex Jones admitted that he still does smoke marijuana once a year, quote, to monitor its strength like law enforcement does.
[00:15:14]  You mean just to make sure nobody's putting anything in the fucking wheel?
[00:15:18]  He believes that George Soros is making marijuana more potent.
[00:15:22]  That was what he stated in court.
[00:15:23]  And so he's keeping tabs.
[00:15:24]  He's got a stand, if I'm honest.
[00:15:27]  Stay from breeding.
[00:15:28]  To stop people from breeding and bring in the new world order with better pot.
[00:15:34]  Have you seen the video of him where he's like talking, he's on a YouTube clip, and in the background, he's got all this like EDM DJ equipment.
[00:15:40]  And there's like this conspiracy about Alex Jones that he is a secret EDM DJ.
[00:15:44]  He definitely plays a lot of EDM on Infowars.
[00:15:47]  Yeah.
[00:15:47]  But like in the background, there's like a TR-808 and like these like CDJ decks and like all of this stuff that only a super hardcore synth nerd would have.
[00:15:56]  And it's clearly like a room in his house.
[00:15:58]  I can tell you I know like at least close to a dozen men over 40 in Austin who are electronic music DJs.
[00:16:06]  So he's...
[00:16:07]  I'm 35 and I live in Atlanta and I've got a bunch of synth stuff in my head.
[00:16:11]  So you know, me and Alex Jones have that in common.
[00:16:13]  It just kind of made me feel closer to him.
[00:16:14]  I just wanted to bring that up earlier.
[00:16:15]  Maybe it's just the Texas thing.
[00:16:17]  Well, yeah.
[00:16:17]  I mean, it's popular in Austin.
[00:16:19]  It's entirely possible that that's a hobby of his.
[00:16:21]  And if so, I encourage him to do that and not everything else he's been doing.
[00:16:26]  I consider EDM a more or less positive thing for the world.
[00:16:31]  So it's similar, I guess, this testing marijuana's potency.
[00:16:35]  It reminds me of that old story about Gandhi, where he said that he would have like young female relatives of his sleep in bed with him to test his like his resolve, his discipline, and his resolve.
[00:16:47]  Yeah.
[00:16:48]  Good on Gandhi.
[00:16:49]  Good on Alex Jones.
[00:16:50]  Good on Alex Jones, a real bulwark.
[00:16:52]  You know what?
[00:16:52]  It's weird, but anytime someone talks about doing something to test themselves, it's almost always a little shady.
[00:16:59]  I don't know.
[00:17:00]  Maybe normal people don't test themselves.
[00:17:01]  They just indulge sometimes.
[00:17:03]  Whatever.
[00:17:04]  I'm getting on a moral point here.
[00:17:06]  Anyway, Jones claims that near the end of his time in high school, he started reading big fancy history books, including William Shires, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a really good book, as well as works of Roman history.
[00:17:17]  He began to see a pattern in history of government-stage terror attacks.
[00:17:21]  And this apparently was sort of the start of his formation of the ideology that would take him through into adulthood.
[00:17:27]  So in 1993, Alex Jones graduated high school.
[00:17:30]  He wound up gravitating towards the Austin Community Access Cable Station and took on basically whatever work he could volunteer for.
[00:17:36]  In 1995, when the Oklahoma City Federal Building was blown up by Timothy McVay, Jones got on the air and accused the federal government of planning the attack.
[00:17:44]  Other conspiracy nuts started mailing him tips and information.
[00:17:47]  Soon, Jones became a local Austin celebrity.
[00:17:49]  Brian Blake, the Austin public access station producer, recalled that back in those days, the station was, quote, wild and unmoderated, like the YouTube of its time.
[00:17:58]  That was going to be my question.
[00:17:59]  Like, he just had like a bully pulpit.
[00:18:02]  Like, he could just do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted at this time.
[00:18:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:05]  He could just get on public access TV.
[00:18:07]  He had like a slot, and he also guested on a lot of people's shows, and he would just say whatever he wanted to.
[00:18:12]  Did you ever end up seeing some of this stuff, Robert?

=== Inside Job Origins (04:57) ===

[00:18:15]  Oh, yeah.
[00:18:15]  We're about to play a clip to it.
[00:18:17]  So I have found a clip from the show in this era, and it's pretty remarkable.
[00:18:20]  When you see Jones today, you wouldn't look at Alex Jones in a modern Infowars broadcast and be like, that man is polished.
[00:18:27]  But I think this video makes it clear that he is.
[00:18:29]  He's just, that's the polish he's picked, because the early video shows him before he's developed his full shtick.
[00:18:35]  So for some context, this video starts when one of his fans calls in to complain about a wildlife preserve in the area.
[00:18:42]  And Jones starts mocking him and like, how dare you doubt the wisdom of the globalist elite sort of way.
[00:18:47]  So he's being satirical.
[00:18:48]  He's not really mocking the guy, but he's talking to him the way he thinks that a globalist elite would talk to this guy.
[00:18:55]  It's kind of weird.
[00:18:56]  The guy doesn't seem to get the joke and is really uncomfortable with the fact that Alex is yelling at him.
[00:19:02]  And at one point, the poor fucker thanks Alex for the call and says he has to go and is clearly put off.
[00:19:07]  And Alex screams at him, no, submit.
[00:19:10]  And then this happens.
[00:19:13]  All right, Alex, fuck you, dude.
[00:19:14]  No!
[00:19:16]  Submit!
[00:19:18]  For the kids!
[00:19:21]  Of course, I'm illustrating, I'm sorry about being a certain.
[00:19:23]  Hello, you're on the air.
[00:19:32]  Another government training center dude.
[00:19:35]  They've taught you how to be cool.
[00:19:36]  The cool person goes, never think the guy that call the girls is the fool, you know, who wears the cool clothes.
[00:19:43]  He doesn't care about politics or none of that.
[00:19:45]  Ooh, baby, let's party.
[00:19:46]  Yeah, I don't care about my future or my kid's future or the world's future.
[00:19:50]  I'm a caring person.
[00:19:52]  I like Bill Clinton a lot.
[00:19:54]  I like this, Alex Jones.
[00:19:56]  Yeah, this Alex Jones is fun.
[00:19:58]  He's whimsical as fuck, man.
[00:19:59]  This is great.
[00:20:00]  He's dapper.
[00:20:01]  Yeah.
[00:20:01]  He's enjoyable.
[00:20:03]  You want to watch this, Alex Jones.
[00:20:06]  He looks like he hasn't fully drunk his own Kool-Aid at this point, you know?
[00:20:09]  He also doesn't look like he's... emotionally and financially invested in destroying the world.
[00:20:14]  Right.
[00:20:15]  That's true.
[00:20:16]  He looks like this is a bit for him.
[00:20:18]  Like he could do a SNL weekend update or something.
[00:20:22]  I can see why people would have found him enjoyable and even comforting to like turn on at night, smoke a little bit.
[00:20:28]  Well, it was also a different time.
[00:20:29]  It was a different time.
[00:20:30]  The shit was not as heavy and weird as it is now.
[00:20:33]  I mean, come on.
[00:20:34]  This feels like an intentional comedy show.
[00:20:36]  Yeah.
[00:20:37]  Still with a bent, but with an intent on making people laugh more than scaring them into buying doomsday prep supplies or whatever.
[00:20:46]  And he sounds like a normal human being, not as we'll get to in later clips.
[00:20:51]  Like he's been gargling cigarettes and razor blades for the last 30 years.
[00:20:56]  Well, it's like what happened to Gollum, you know?
[00:20:58]  Like over time, you just like shrivel and degrade into this like totally new creature.
[00:21:02]  You know, this is like him when he was Smeagl.
[00:21:04]  Yeah, this is Smeagle Jones and not Gollum Jones.
[00:21:07]  I like that.
[00:21:08]  I like that.
[00:21:08]  So at this point, he's definitely, he rants a lot about socialists and he's already ranting about the globalists.
[00:21:15]  But his conspiracy theory is more like an X-Files type of conspiracy.
[00:21:19]  The military and the police and the CIA are untrustworthy and spying on people.
[00:21:24]  They're all engaged in a grand chess game for your mind.
[00:21:26]  And it's not, he's not partisan.
[00:21:28]  The Republican and the Democratic parties are all fake to this Alex Jones.
[00:21:31]  He's not left or on the right.
[00:21:32]  He's just everyone that's in power at all is in the same conspiracy.
[00:21:37]  That's Alex Jones at this point.
[00:21:38]  Fingers on the same hand, right?
[00:21:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:41]  Just fingers.
[00:21:42]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:42]  So this particular take that he developed secured Jones a comfortable niche in Austin's then thriving community of weirdos.
[00:21:49]  He became a minor local celebrity and is in fact one of the people like that slogan, you know, keep Austin weird.
[00:21:55]  That developed in this time in the late 90s in Austin.
[00:21:58]  And Alex Jones is one of the people who was the most prominent folks in that sort of era of kooky quirky Austin.
[00:22:06]  So in 1996, he got his first radio job, a show called The Final Edition on KJFK-FM.
[00:22:12]  The chief conceit of the final edition is that every episode might be the last because even then the globalists were perpetually a few days away from cracking down on Alex Jones.
[00:22:21]  At least that's the version of reality that Jones portrayed to Rolling Stone.
[00:22:25]  Subsequent reporting over the years has revealed a different side to how he got his show.
[00:22:29]  I found this quote from a 2017 Business Insider article.
[00:22:33]  While his big break came from public access TV, Jones' first real job in media was with a local talk radio show.
[00:22:38]  He got the job with some help from his father, a dentist who recommended his son to a patient who managed the station.
[00:22:43]  After his father made the connection, Jones was invited for an interview.
[00:22:47]  But his father didn't just make the connection.
[00:22:49]  BuzzFeed also published a great article on Alex in 2017 called Alex Jones Just Can't Help Himself.
[00:22:54]  It provides even more detail on how Alex's dad basically got him his first radial radio job.
[00:22:58]  Quote, he said, my son's got some out there ideas, but I think he'd be perfect.
[00:23:02]  Daryl O'Neill, the KJFK manager who brokered the deal explained.
[00:23:06]  The next week, he brought Alex in for a meeting.
[00:23:08]  To secure Jones a spot on the station, Jones' father became his son's first on-air advertiser.

=== Public Access Beginnings (16:13) ===

[00:23:12]  So, there we go.
[00:23:15]  Dad's money is what got Alex Jones' career started.
[00:23:18]  And his dad is a fairly well-off doctor, definitely upper-middle-class.
[00:23:22]  It is interesting, if you're a regular listener to the show, how many of the terrible figures in America that we've talked about, the Koch brothers, Paul Manafort, Eric Prince, got their big break from their dad's money.
[00:23:32]  Just kind of weird how that works.
[00:23:34]  Anyway, speaking of money that doesn't come from fathers or might doesn't come from Alex Jones', it's time for ads.
[00:23:42]  This was my way of segueing into the ads.
[00:23:45]  It was well done.
[00:23:46]  Perfect.
[00:23:46]  Yeah, thank you.
[00:23:47]  I'm a professional.
[00:23:49]  Sophie, can we just play the ads?
[00:23:56]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:24:00]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:24:03]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:24:06]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:24:10]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:24:13]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:24:17]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:24:19]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:24:24]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:24:26]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:24:28]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:24:30]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:24:33]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:24:34]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:24:37]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:24:41]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:24:43]  Trust me, babe.
[00:24:44]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:54]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:24:59]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:25:04]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:25:10]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:25:19]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:25:24]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:25:27]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:25:30]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:25:32]  That's so funny.
[00:25:34]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:25:42]  Say you love me.
[00:25:45]  You know I.
[00:25:47]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:54]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:26:00]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:26:07]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:26:13]  From power to parenthood.
[00:26:15]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:26:19]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:26:21]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:26:23]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:26:28]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:26:34]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:26:37]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:26:43]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:26:45]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:26:48]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:26:56]  What's up, everyone?
[00:26:57]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:26:58]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:27:07]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:27:12]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:27:17]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:27:20]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:27:21]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:27:24]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:27:29]  Yeah.
[00:27:29]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:27:32]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:27:34]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:27:42]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:27:45]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:27:52]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:27:54]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:27:55]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:27:56]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:28:06]  And we're back.
[00:28:07]  We're talking about Alex Jones.
[00:28:10]  And yeah, we just got into the fact that his dad got him his first radio job, which is fun, perfectly fine if you're not the kind of person who always brags about how you're a self-made man.
[00:28:21]  Anyway, whatever.
[00:28:24]  So yeah, dad's money aside, Alex Jones was apparently a natural at radio.
[00:28:29]  Ryan Shu, KJFK's radio engineer, later recalled Jones' first day.
[00:28:34]  Quote, he just walked into the booth, sat down, and started in on a rant cold.
[00:28:38]  I never saw anything like that.
[00:28:40]  According to BuzzFeed, quote, other early co-workers said that Jones's famous and often disorienting theatrics have been there from the start.
[00:28:47]  Burke described a moment when a caller attacked Jones on air as a soft button-upped media type.
[00:28:52]  Jones, according to Burke, erupted into tears, yelling, my name is Alexander Jones, and I played football, man, and my parents are still married, and I'm a damned American.
[00:29:01]  The caller was stunned.
[00:29:02]  A co-worker recalled, we went to break right after that, and he put his head in his hands and is rubbing his eyes all sheepish.
[00:29:08]  He turned to me and said, Was I crying too much?
[00:29:10]  I just turn it on sometimes and I don't know how to stop.
[00:29:13]  So.
[00:29:14]  Wow.
[00:29:15]  So he's really in touch with his emotions, huh?
[00:29:18]  Pretty stable guy.
[00:29:18]  Well, that's always been a hallmark of him is like he gets super worked up and like, you know, that's sort of him saying, look, I'm just like you.
[00:29:25]  I feel things.
[00:29:26]  I feel deeply.
[00:29:27]  I think it's an interesting point.
[00:29:29]  Because he said, sometimes I just turn it on, but I can't turn it off.
[00:29:34]  So there's an interesting, like, I guess, conflict there.
[00:29:39]  Like, how performative is it?
[00:29:40]  Does he start performing?
[00:29:42]  I think he's just method.
[00:29:43]  I think he just taps into it, like, you know, method acting style.
[00:29:46]  I don't know.
[00:29:47]  I think that may have been it at first.
[00:29:49]  I think he probably started out having enough discretion and self-control to tap into it when he knew it was appropriate for making the show more compelling and drawing viewers or listeners in.
[00:29:59]  And I suspect maybe over time, he's kind of lost his filter and lost his ability to filter like a sane person would.
[00:30:07]  AKA gone completely bonkers.
[00:30:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:10]  That's my theory.
[00:30:11]  So you guys asked earlier about Alex Jones and what he's like in a fight.
[00:30:16]  And it just so happens we have some data on that.
[00:30:19]  So in 1997, another local Austin celebrity known as Space Hitler punched Alex Jones right in his face several times.
[00:30:28]  Space Hitler, real name Clayton Counts, but I'm going to keep calling him Space Hitler.
[00:30:33]  Space Hitler had a habit of calling into Alec Jones' public access show and making fun of him.
[00:30:37]  His nickname of choice was Jarhead Jones, which for some reason, Alex Jones hated.
[00:30:43]  Here's how Jones described him in the police report that he filed.
[00:30:46]  Quote, he has called my home and told me graphically that he wants to kill me.
[00:30:50]  I have made a complaint when this has happened informally a number of times and we have contacted the FBI.
[00:30:55]  He has harassed many people over the past years.
[00:30:57]  His voice is very easy to remember.
[00:30:59]  It is, I would say, a Houston-type accent.
[00:31:01]  He is very strange looking.
[00:31:02]  He has eyes that look like a goat's.
[00:31:07]  So is Space Hitler just a famous local troll or did he have his own show too?
[00:31:11]  It's just like the Battle of the Shock Jocks?
[00:31:13]  Like, what's going on?
[00:31:14]  He was just a famous local kind of like personality.
[00:31:17]  Eccentric?
[00:31:18]  Yeah, eccentric.
[00:31:19]  And I don't think it's true that he threatened to murder Jones at his home.
[00:31:23]  I think that's because Top Brigan in the FBI is classic Alex Jones.
[00:31:27]  I think he's exaggerating it.
[00:31:28]  What's up with the goat eyes, though?
[00:31:30]  I have no idea.
[00:31:32]  I've never heard anyone describe someone's eyes as being like a goat's.
[00:31:35]  Does that mean they're really close together or really far apart?
[00:31:38]  They're like octopus eyes.
[00:31:39]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:31:40]  Your guess is as good as mine.
[00:31:41]  I've seen a lot of goats, and I have no idea what he means.
[00:31:45]  Yeah.
[00:31:46]  So from what I can gather from other people's accounts, Space Hitler was definitely harassing Alex Jones.
[00:31:52]  Although, again, I don't think he was calling his home and threatening to disembowel him.
[00:31:56]  There are a number of versions of what happened in the fight between Space Hitler and Alex Jones.
[00:32:01]  They pretty much all start when Space Hitler and some friends came by the studio where Alex was like working at the public access television studio and were harassing Jones.
[00:32:12]  And Jones asked them to step outside and then pretended to get a gun from his car.
[00:32:16]  One of Space Hitler's friends mocked him for this and then punched Alex Jones in the face.
[00:32:20]  Now, Charlie Sotello, who is an employee at the station, says that he came out right after Alex got punched and Alex was in a frenzy and going crazy.
[00:32:29]  Sottello tried to calm Jones down and he and Jones got into an argument and then Jones started throwing punches at him.
[00:32:35]  Sottello says, quote, Alex tried to fight back but was throwing wild punches with no form.
[00:32:40]  The guy is no fighter.
[00:32:41]  So Charlie Sotello claims that the fight only stopped because Alex's dad arrived and gave Sottello $100 because Alex had bled on his shirt.
[00:32:50]  So that's one side of the story.
[00:32:52]  That's Space Hitler and Charlie Sotello's side of the story.
[00:32:55]  They're making fun of Alex.
[00:32:57]  He calls them outside and pretends to get a gun to scare them and somebody punches him and he starts swinging wildly at people and someone tries to calm him down and he starts swinging wildly at that guy too.
[00:33:08]  And then his dad comes over and bribes everyone to leave.
[00:33:11]  So that's one version of the story.
[00:33:14]  Now, there's another side of the story and it's Alex Jones' side.
[00:33:18]  And we have the full account of that side because we have the police report that Alex Jones wrote after the altercation.
[00:33:24]  I will be putting a link to this police report up on our website, behindthebastards.com.
[00:33:29]  I recommend reading it because it is a work of art and belongs in a museum.
[00:33:32]  But I'm going to quote liberally from it here.
[00:33:35]  So in the police report, Jones identifies himself as an employee of Castle Dental, which I think means he was working for his dad at this time.
[00:33:42]  Jones claims that Space Hitler and his friends rolled up in a mix of suits and jogging suits.
[00:33:47]  Quote, I said, why do you call me at home and on the air and say you want to kill me?
[00:33:51]  The leader said, yeah, Jarhead, it is me.
[00:33:53]  I'm not a dumbass like you.
[00:33:55]  I don't put myself out in front.
[00:33:56]  I'm hidden.
[00:33:57]  No one knows who I am.
[00:33:58]  I can do what I want and get away with it.
[00:34:00]  22-year-old Alex Jones then claims that a man who was, quote, a large Latin Anglo-mix type hit him with no warning.
[00:34:08]  Quote, I did nothing because I saw that to his left, the ringleader with the strange eyes had a double-edged military type killing knife.
[00:34:19]  Alex claims he...
[00:34:21]  Are y'all on board so far?
[00:34:22]  Oh my God.
[00:34:23]  I'm more than on board.
[00:34:25]  Alex claims that he tried to run away towards the studio, but that the big Latin Anglo-Mix type band followed him.
[00:34:31]  He hit Alex once more, and our hero, Alex, was mournfully forced to defend himself.
[00:34:36]  Where's the killing knife in all of this?
[00:34:38]  I'm sorry.
[00:34:39]  The ringleader has the killer knife.
[00:34:41]  The man with the goat eyes has the knife.
[00:34:44]  Of course.
[00:34:45]  As he should.
[00:34:46]  The man with the goat eyes has the military-type killing knife.
[00:34:49]  Yeah.
[00:34:50]  Okay.
[00:34:50]  So the big Latin Anglo guy runs after Alex and hits him once, and Alex turns around and defends himself.
[00:34:56]  Quote, I hit him in the face.
[00:34:58]  He came forward to hit me again, and I hit him one more time, I believe.
[00:35:01]  He fell to his knees.
[00:35:02]  This is when Alex claims that that guy, Charlie, came out and got into a fight with him.
[00:35:06]  Now, Alex leaves out anything about his dad coming over to stop the fight, and it's very unclear what actually happened.
[00:35:11]  The Austin Chronicle says that the security footage has long been deleted, but the cops apparently saw it, and they didn't see anything serious enough to take further action.
[00:35:19]  My guess is that this was more of a sad schoolyard fistfight type situation than the action scene Alex Jones recounts.
[00:35:25]  I'm going to guess he didn't knock anyone to their knees.
[00:35:29]  It gives some insight into Alex's head and how I think he interprets the world.
[00:35:32]  So, yeah.
[00:35:34]  He had to mournfully defend himself.
[00:35:37]  That's crazy.
[00:35:39]  I bet at some point he yelled, do you know who my dad is?
[00:35:42]  He's a dentist.
[00:35:43]  He may have just, yeah, he may have just yelled, dad.
[00:35:46]  Yeah, maybe.
[00:35:46]  Oh, man.
[00:35:48]  This is very enlightening, Robert.
[00:35:50]  Wow.
[00:35:51]  So, several days after that fight, Alex Jones, because that fight happened in winter of 1997.
[00:35:57]  And within between a couple of days and a couple of weeks after that point, Alex Jones did a Halloween special guest spot on someone else's public access television show.
[00:36:06]  So we're going to watch a video of Alex.
[00:36:08]  And for you listeners who aren't seeing the video, the link will be up on the site.
[00:36:11]  But Alex is in like a Halloween decorated set.
[00:36:14]  There's a severed, a fake severed head and a bucket next to him.
[00:36:17]  And he has a fairly small butcher knife that he is jabbing a pumpkin with as if he's trying to murder it.
[00:36:23]  And he's taking calls.
[00:36:24]  His first caller seems to be making fun of him for being on public access TV, which is unpaid work.
[00:36:30]  And he asks Alex what Alex does for a living.
[00:36:33]  So we're going to play the clip now.
[00:36:34]  I come on public access and hang out.
[00:36:36]  I'm on 24 hours a day, they say.
[00:36:38]  Yeah, pretty close.
[00:36:40]  Well, I can assure you, I don't make any money off public access.
[00:36:43]  I can guarantee you that.
[00:36:45]  Well, you guys have a good one.
[00:36:46]  Hey, appreciate that call.
[00:36:48]  Hello, Coler.
[00:36:49]  You're on the air.
[00:36:50]  Yes, Alex, how you doing?
[00:36:51]  Pretty good.
[00:36:52]  I was just kind of curious.
[00:36:54]  If it's true, the police can have laser or infrared beams, if you want to call it, and they can project those into your house.
[00:37:04]  Look at him carving up that.
[00:37:06]  Yeah, the Austin Police Department's, last time I heard it has 20 units with infrared access.
[00:37:13]  Oh, wow.
[00:37:13]  And he still looks, for everybody listening, he still looks pretty good.
[00:37:17]  Yeah, he looks like a normal human being.
[00:37:19]  Like, he's clearly got a shit going on, but it's fun.
[00:37:22]  And you want to watch.
[00:37:25]  So Alex's radio show at KJFK gradually started to pick up steam.
[00:37:28]  His co-workers back then describe a man who was incapable of turning himself off.
[00:37:32]  When they would all hang out at bars, Alex would come over with a thick pile of papers and start ranting about globalists or fluoride.
[00:37:39]  Matthew Hobley, who worked at KJFK, told BuzzFeed later, quote, he'd come over and go into his spiel and we'd tell him to be cool and he'd yell, this is serious stuff.
[00:37:48]  We'd be like, damn, Alex, it's our day off.
[00:37:50]  But he'd go on and on.
[00:37:51]  And by the time he was finished, there were papers everywhere.
[00:37:54]  Was he pounding shots, though?
[00:37:55]  Was he a drinker or was he like a teetotaler?
[00:37:57]  I think he's always been a drinker.
[00:37:59]  But I don't know.
[00:38:00]  Yeah.
[00:38:00]  Yeah.
[00:38:01]  It seems like some of this stuff comes from the drink.
[00:38:03]  It comes from the place of drink.
[00:38:04]  And it seems like there's a big need for attention as well, you know?
[00:38:08]  Like, he doesn't seem like the kind of person who's comfortable when he's not the topic of the conversation or the person speaking.
[00:38:16]  Yeah, and that seems to gel with what he did on public access because one of the things he was famous for was being the guy you could count on to do guest spots on your thing if you were away for a week or whatever.
[00:38:26]  He really seemed to just always want to be on the air.
[00:38:29]  Like, that's been a goal with Alex is since he was a teenager, really.
[00:38:33]  So, interesting.
[00:38:34]  He might like the sound of his own voice.
[00:38:36]  Hard to say.
[00:38:39]  So, yeah, tragically, Alex's radio show was not long for this world.
[00:38:43]  The final edition had its final edition in 1999 when the station got bought and the new management fired Alex for his, quote, inside terror job stuff.
[00:38:51]  Alex made the best of a bad situation and started his own website, Infowars.com.
[00:38:56]  He found 10 stations that were willing to buy his new show, and he started broadcasting it from home while running his website.
[00:39:02]  He made a documentary called America Destroyed by Design about a World Bank takeover of public land that Jones assured everyone was imminent.
[00:39:09]  This earned him his first celebrity fan, Richard Linkletter, who cast him as a crazy street prophet in several of his movies, including A Scanner Darkly.
[00:39:17]  So if you want to see more young Alex Jones, you can find him in A Scanner Darkly.
[00:39:22]  I just remember Waking Life, and that was the first time I ever even heard of Alex Jones.

=== Infowars Launch (07:39) ===

[00:39:25]  Like the crazy red-faced dude in the cab.
[00:39:27]  That's just like going off.
[00:39:29]  Yeah, he's, isn't?
[00:39:30]  I think he is Alex Jones in all of the Link Letter movies he appears in.
[00:39:34]  Yeah, as Alex's fame grew, so did his popularity.
[00:39:37]  He made a deal with Midas Resources, a syndication outfit that existed to sell gold to crazy people uh, or sanity disinclined people.
[00:39:46]  Jones started making money of his own and by july of 2001, his show was on nearly 100 local affiliate stations across the country.
[00:39:54]  On july 25th, Alex Jones made his most successful prediction, please call Congress, tell them we know the government is planning terrorism.
[00:40:02]  He referenced the 1993 World Trade Center attack and identified Osama Bin Laden as quote the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian phony system.
[00:40:11]  So basically, Alex Jones, on july 25th 2001, predicted that there would be an attack very likely on the World Trade Center, possibly involving planes, and he identified Osama Bin Laden as the person who would be blamed for it.
[00:40:23]  Now I do want to point out right now that his prediction was not entirely accurate and we're going to play a section of that prediction that uh, you will not find familiar.
[00:40:30]  We've seen the news stories that you've wanted to blow things up, that you have blown things up and that you're saying that four million of us are going to die and we need martial law and the associated press.
[00:40:40]  Yeah, so he wasn't right about everything, but you got to give a guy credit calling in july an attack like that.
[00:40:47]  It's close enough that he was able to make a career off of the fact that he'd predicted the 9-11 attacks.
[00:40:53]  Well, surely that like, he was able to translate that into listeners.
[00:40:57]  Oh, that would like follow him to the ends of the earth, right?
[00:41:00]  Yeah, and there's also some confirmation bias there, I think, because if, if people want to believe that he's making accurate predictions, it's very easy to ignore all the inaccurate predictions he made before that one.
[00:41:14]  It's like the Nostradamus effect.
[00:41:15]  I mean, Nostradamis predicted 9-11, guys come on.
[00:41:17]  Yeah, exactly like if you predict doom and gloom every single day for years, sometimes those predictions will line up with a real attack.
[00:41:26]  And the 1993 World Trade Center attack was a really prominent terror attack.
[00:41:30]  Osama Bin Laden was a prominent terrorist.
[00:41:32]  Like, it's not out of nowhere yeah, yeah.
[00:41:34]  So that's my question here Robert, do you think that?
[00:41:37]  Did he claim to have any insider information or was he privy to something?
[00:41:42]  Yeah, I mean, he claimed to have sources and he claimed to have like because he was talking about how like we know that the press is going to support martial law and stuff like he he was basing all of this.
[00:41:53]  He always says that he's got like white papers and sources and stuff that he reads all this from, but he claimed to have had inside information that this attack was coming from an anonymous source, from a bunch of anonymous sources and stuff like he.
[00:42:06]  That's classic Alex Jones, because he always says this has been verified, this has been proven, we have the sources, and then he doesn't give them um, but credit where it's due he.
[00:42:16]  He called a terror attack that sounded like 9-11, wound up being a couple of months before 9-11.
[00:42:22]  Here's Alex Jones speaking later about this time.
[00:42:25]  Quote, I went on the air and said those were controlled demolitions.
[00:42:28]  You just watched the government blow up the World Trade Center.
[00:42:31]  I lost 70% of my affiliates that day.
[00:42:33]  Station managers asked me, do you want to be on this crusade going nowhere or do you want to be a star?
[00:42:38]  I'm proud I never compromised.
[00:42:40]  So Jones got in trouble at first because obviously right after 9-11, he declared it to have been a government attack.
[00:42:46]  And he was probably the first prominent person in the country to declare the 9-11 attacks a government conspiracy.
[00:42:52]  This is like 9-11 was an inside job.
[00:42:54]  That was sort of the big buzz phrase that was flying around at the time.
[00:42:58]  And he is the guy who started, like, he's not, obviously, I'm going to guess that when that happened, thousands of conspiracy theorists around the world had similar ideas.
[00:43:06]  But Jones was the first prominent conspiracy theorist to really hammer home his belief that 9-11 was an inside job.
[00:43:14]  And gained traction with it, too, right?
[00:43:16]  Whether positive or negative, he was the first.
[00:43:18]  He became the face of that.
[00:43:20]  Because he would replay that clip of him predicting it and stuff, and that got him tens of thousands of followers, probably millions by the time, you know, the real height of that conspiracy theory.
[00:43:29]  And I'm not the man to deny anyone their crowning achievement.
[00:43:32]  Alex is, if nothing else, probably the luckiest conspiracy theorist in history.
[00:43:37]  But like you said, he makes a lot of predictions, and I want to make sure that we provide some context here because Alex Jones has predicted one disaster a day for roughly 20 straight years.
[00:43:47]  And through, yeah, yeah.
[00:43:48]  So just so no one thinks he's psychic, I would like to zoom forward real quick to 2010 and the release of the Robert Rodriguez and Danny Trejo film Machete.
[00:43:57]  Now, Alex was terrified of this movie because it showed Mexicans with machetes attacking mostly white bad guys.
[00:44:02]  So here's a prediction he made about the movie Machete, just so we don't think that maybe he is magic or whatever.
[00:44:09]  And this is an Austin thing, too.
[00:44:10]  Rodriguez is an Austin guy, right?
[00:44:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:12]  And Rodriguez and Jones know each other.
[00:44:15]  I don't think well, but they met.
[00:44:17]  Yeah.
[00:44:18]  Whether he knows it or not, Robert Rodriguez, I would say it's a 90% chance right now, is going to trigger racial riots and racial killings in the United States with the September release of his film Machete.
[00:44:37]  First of all, it's like the most minor Robert Rodriguez film ever.
[00:44:40]  Like, I don't know if anybody saw that movie.
[00:44:42]  I certainly have.
[00:44:43]  I saw it.
[00:44:44]  I saw it.
[00:44:45]  And you know what?
[00:44:46]  To Jones's credit here, at least he wasn't trying to say machete or something like that.
[00:44:52]  And also, I want to note our super producer, Casey, is outside the booth with us, and he is laughing so hard at some of these that we can hear him in here.
[00:45:00]  Yeah, it's true.
[00:45:01]  It's true.
[00:45:02]  Well played, sir.
[00:45:03]  Well, I mean, you guys remember the machete race riots, right?
[00:45:07]  That was a dark time for this country.
[00:45:08]  It really was.
[00:45:09]  Real turning point.
[00:45:10]  I didn't think we were ever going to come back from that.
[00:45:11]  I'm surprised you can still buy them in stores.
[00:45:14]  I do just want to say that Ben and I also do another show called Stuff They Don't Want You to Know that's like, we're not a conspiracy theorists.
[00:45:20]  We call ourselves conspiracy realists, but the idea is like critical thinking applied to conspiracy theories.
[00:45:24]  So it's like we look at them.
[00:45:25]  It's like, why are people talking about this?
[00:45:27]  What are people saying on the internet?
[00:45:28]  Why is this interesting?
[00:45:29]  Why is this a fascinating thought experiment?
[00:45:31]  And we get so many crazy emails in our email box.
[00:45:35]  And a lot of them are like these like group emails that are just sent to dozens and dozens of addresses.
[00:45:39]  And almost all of them are just predicting a disaster a day.
[00:45:43]  So he set the tone for this.
[00:45:44]  I mean, this is a thing.
[00:45:46]  Yeah, and it's a smart thing to do if you want to be in the business of making conspiracies.
[00:45:50]  You want to make as many prophecies as you can because it moves.
[00:45:53]  It's the same thing that like an evangelical doom and gloom preacher would do.
[00:45:58]  You know, you make so many predictions about the end of the world or whatever.
[00:46:02]  And it doesn't matter that each of them is fake because what's important is people, some people want to always be that amped up.
[00:46:10]  They want to feel like the stakes are always that high.
[00:46:13]  It's about the journey.
[00:46:14]  Yeah.
[00:46:14]  Yeah.
[00:46:14]  It's about the journey to the end of the world.
[00:46:17]  Not whether or not the world ends.
[00:46:20]  So Jones treated his luck as prophecy and his show began to spread like wildfire.
[00:46:25]  At first, he was mostly popular in the moist, weird underground of internet nerds in the early 2000s, which I'm going to guess everyone on this podcast was a member of one way or the other.
[00:46:35]  I just cringed at your use of the word moist, but that's a personal thing for me.
[00:46:39]  I thought it was evocative and appropriate, but disturbing.
[00:46:43]  Yeah.
[00:46:43]  Yeah.
[00:46:43]  Well, we passed Alex Jones around like a joint.
[00:46:46]  He was Bill Hicks without the humor.
[00:46:47]  He was Robert Anton Wilson without the humanity.
[00:46:50]  He was a strange and unique little nut screaming into the abyss when we went on strung out red-eyed drives across the southwest or wherever you happen to be driving late at night.
[00:46:59]  But as the internet spreads, so did Alex Jones.
[00:47:02]  And he would not stay small forever.

=== Ad Break Rules (04:00) ===

[00:47:05]  But now it's time for, this is not going to be one of my smoother ad breaks, but it's time for an ad break.
[00:47:20]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:47:24]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:47:27]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:47:30]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:47:34]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:47:37]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:47:41]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:47:43]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:47:48]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:47:50]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:47:52]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:47:54]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:47:57]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:47:59]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:48:01]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:48:05]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:48:07]  Trust me, babe.
[00:48:08]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:18]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:48:23]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:48:28]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:48:34]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:48:43]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:48:48]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:48:52]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:48:54]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:48:56]  That's so funny.
[00:48:58]  Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:49:06]  Say you love me.
[00:49:09]  You know I.
[00:49:11]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:49:18]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:49:24]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:49:31]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:49:37]  From power to parenthood.
[00:49:39]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:49:43]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:49:45]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:49:47]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:49:52]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:49:58]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:50:01]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:50:07]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:50:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:50:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:50:20]  What's up, everyone?
[00:50:21]  I'm Ego Mode.
[00:50:22]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:50:33]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:50:36]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:50:42]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:50:44]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:50:48]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:54]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:50:56]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:50:58]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.

=== Selling Paranoia (15:36) ===

[00:51:06]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:51:09]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:51:16]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:51:18]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:51:19]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:51:21]  Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:30]  We're back and we're talking about Alex Jones, who has just, you know, started to really drive home the fact that he predicted.
[00:51:38]  9-11 along with a bunch of shit that never happened.
[00:51:41]  Anyway, he's making a lot of hay out of that.
[00:51:43]  And his first big break came courtesy of a man you may know, Charlie Sheen.
[00:51:47]  In 2006, Jones interviewed Sheen on InfoWars about his belief in 9-11 conspiracy theories, most of which had, of course, been spread via InfoWars.
[00:51:56]  This video, because Charlie Sheen is a prominent guy, went really, really viral.
[00:52:00]  And that same year, Alex Jones published the 9-11 conspiracy film Loose Change.
[00:52:05]  He was a producer on Loose Change, which is why a lot of people will still make the joke that jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
[00:52:12]  That's where that comes from.
[00:52:13]  So Alex Jones, Loose Change, really, really ignites the 9-11 conspiracy movement.
[00:52:20]  And for the first time in his life, Alex Jones became more than just a local Austin celebrity or a nut beloved by truck drivers.
[00:52:26]  He launched the Infowars store in 2006, and he started selling diet supplements in 2013 using his shows as free advertising for his own products.
[00:52:35]  Alex Jones was the first person to really grasp how much money could be made by being famous and trusted and selling people bogus healthcare products on the internet.
[00:52:43]  Nowadays, Ben Shapiro, Gwyneth Paltrow, dozens and dozens of different public figures sell various health products using their sort of websites and podcasts and media networks as a way to drive sales.
[00:52:56]  But Alex Jones was the guy who invented that.
[00:52:59]  He doesn't have Behind the Bastards branded life straws.
[00:53:03]  I think you're missing out on that niche.
[00:53:04]  You know, for just $99.95, you can get a bottle of 12 Behind the Bastards iodine tablets guaranteed to make sure you have enough iodine to listen to this show.
[00:53:14]  I personally endorse those, by the way.
[00:53:17]  I think you get a price break if you order in bulk.
[00:53:19]  What about cyanide tablets?
[00:53:20]  That's what I want.
[00:53:21]  We also sell cyanide tablets.
[00:53:23]  Yeah, those are cheaper.
[00:53:24]  Good.
[00:53:25]  We're trying to really drive the cyanide.
[00:53:26]  But anyway, yeah.
[00:53:27]  So I just feel it's important to recognize that Alex Jones was kind of like the Steve Jobs of sleazily selling people expensive supplements on the internet.
[00:53:38]  Like he really liked.
[00:53:39]  That's a good way to put that.
[00:53:40]  Huh?
[00:53:41]  Yeah.
[00:53:41]  I mean, he blazed that trail.
[00:53:43]  He was the first guy.
[00:53:45]  I had no idea, seriously, that he was the pioneer there.
[00:53:49]  I thought he was just...
[00:53:51]  You know what it is?
[00:53:52]  It's because it's so ubiquitous from like alarmist conspiratorial shows to, you know, you hear the ads about how the economy is going to collapse.
[00:54:02]  And then it goes to another ad about how you should buy gold.
[00:54:05]  You know what I mean?
[00:54:06]  But he got to start with buying gold.
[00:54:07]  Wasn't that like his first big thing?
[00:54:09]  Yeah.
[00:54:10]  But I didn't know he was the first.
[00:54:11]  And like in 2014, when Glenn Beck was everywhere on the air, he was always selling like gold stuff.
[00:54:16]  And that was very much descendant from Alex Jones because he was the first guy to realize that like there's a whole constellation of expensive things that people who are scared about the end of the world always want to buy.
[00:54:28]  And if you can keep them convinced that the world is always ending and get them to trust you and then tell them that your ridiculous safety supplies or supplements or whatever will protect them, you can make a shitload of money.
[00:54:40]  And that's actually what our second episode's going to be.
[00:54:43]  But I just wanted to make the point that years before Gwyneth Paltrow made goop, Alex Jones was selling people silver to put up their butts.
[00:54:50]  Now, Infowars grew into a major production.
[00:54:53]  No longer was Alex recording a show from his house and filming video in a spare room.
[00:54:57]  Now he had a studio, semi-professional production values, and a whole staff.
[00:55:01]  One of his producers from this early period was impressed by Alex's ability to talk for an hour about stories he hadn't read more than the titles of.
[00:55:08]  Another employee recalled the buzzfeed, quote, sometimes he'll say he has sources and he's been told a piece of news that has been confirmed, but we wouldn't have that information.
[00:55:17]  Later, we'd find out it was because a week earlier we had a caller on air who theorized about something and Alex repeated it as fact.
[00:55:23]  So you mentioned earlier having doing your conspiracy show and getting emails from nuts.
[00:55:30]  I suspect a lot of Alex's sources are emails like that.
[00:55:35]  Like because he's think of the lists Alex Jones must be on like Yeah, and he's just like we have it confirmed now from the email And he shakes it too.
[00:55:46]  Yeah, he does big on I'm shaking a bunch of paper right now Yeah verified it does feel good we should be filming this so people can watch me shake at a camera and get all red-faced anyway Yeah, So in September of 2007, Alex Jones interrupted Geraldo Rivera live on FOX NEWS.
[00:56:04]  Rivera was doing what I'm sure was a tasteful and informative report on quote the secret world of restroom gay sex, but then Alex showed up to get in the middle of it shouting 9-11 was an inside job through a megaphone until he was removed by the NYPD, which is like almost a singularity of classlessness, Geraldo Rivera talking about gay restroom sex while Alex Jones rants about 9-11 conspiracies on the same frame of a television show.
[00:56:31]  That's amazing.
[00:56:33]  Tell me we have a clip of this, because there's got to be a clip.
[00:56:36]  I'm sure there are.
[00:56:37]  To use our imaginations.
[00:56:38]  You're going to have to use your imaginations for that.
[00:56:39]  I didn't pull that one up because there was other clips, but that's fair to reenact it.
[00:56:45]  Yeah yeah yeah, who wants to be Geraldo?
[00:56:49]  I'll take one for the team.
[00:56:50]  I say we, we put the kibosh on this and move on.
[00:56:53]  On March 18th 2008, Alex Jones became an invited guest of FOX NEWS.
[00:56:58]  Judge Andrew Napolitano had him on as quote the great Alex Jones.
[00:57:02]  They talked about the fact that Alex and Infowars had suddenly become a substantial influence on other conservative media personalities like Glenn Beck.
[00:57:09]  Alex said, I've never seen an awakening this big.
[00:57:13]  I'm seeing Glenn Beck talk about the new world order on FOX.
[00:57:15]  I'm seeing you talk about it.
[00:57:17]  We're seeing Lou Dobbs talk about it.
[00:57:18]  We're seeing mainline hosts Limbaugh's even talking about world government.
[00:57:22]  Michael Savage is talking about how Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law.
[00:57:26]  So all the things that I was talking about in the wilderness 10 plus years ago are now hitting mainstream and it's great.
[00:57:32]  So that's okay.
[00:57:34]  I'm sorry, hold on, hold up.
[00:57:36]  Point of order Robert.
[00:57:38]  Michael Savage as mainstream, that guy is loony tunes.
[00:57:43]  You know I hate to argue with you on this, but I grew up in Texas with a very conservative family and I heard Michael Savage three or four times a week and my parents aren't conspiracy theorists, they're just very conservative.
[00:57:54]  He's not that far out like, for if you're right wing, he's not.
[00:57:59]  He was not, in that period of time, far out of the mainstream.
[00:58:02]  You know what it was that.
[00:58:03]  I bet it's because I started listening to him later in life, maybe later in his career, and when I heard him he was like based in California and talked about how much he hated the commies in California.
[00:58:15]  But he still lived there, oh boy.
[00:58:19]  And I don't know what he's doing now, Or if he's gone further to the fringes now.
[00:58:22]  But when I was a kid, at least, I heard him a lot.
[00:58:25]  Wow.
[00:58:25]  He's definitely like Glenn Beck, one of those voices who was just regularly a part of our lives.
[00:58:31]  So the first broadcast of the Alex Jones live show was in April of 2008.
[00:58:37]  I found a copy of at least a lot of that broadcast.
[00:58:40]  The link will be up on our site, but the first minute and a half is just the ACDC song Balls to the Wall.
[00:58:46]  Then Alex Lassi.
[00:58:48]  Yeah, he's got great taste in music.
[00:58:53]  He puts up a lot of obscure, like, industrial metal from the 80s.
[00:58:58]  So something that's always interested me is Alex Jones' musical tastes.
[00:59:03]  Which is why it's interesting that you say he might be a secret DJ.
[00:59:06]  I would kind of love to hear his music.
[00:59:08]  Yeah.
[00:59:09]  Anyway, ACDC's song Balls to the Wall plays for a minute and a half, and then Alex Jones begins ranting about how all of the world religions are controlled by the same group of people.
[00:59:17]  Eventually, the footage cuts to Alex Jones wearing a Ron Paul 2008 t-shirt.
[00:59:22]  He's talking with an Irish guest about Margaret Thatcher.
[00:59:25]  Alex allows his guest to speak for a while, occasionally cutting in to move things along when the show starts to drag.
[00:59:30]  He talks about the Illuminati, and they eventually wind up on the subject of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who Alex loves.
[00:59:36]  He goes on a rant about how the Soviet Union was funded by the U.S. Army.
[00:59:40]  So, we're going to play a clip from that.
[00:59:42]  That the army and that our government was funding the Soviets, he was totally destroyed instantly because that was about to expose that communism was just a fake front.
[00:59:50]  Just like we knew from books that were written and inside people that Mao was put into power in 1949, now it's admitted on the History Channel, and they have the old CIA section chiefs who are now dead, but videos of them admitting that they put Mao into power.
[01:00:03]  Alan Watt?
[01:00:04]  So we're at normal Alex, like today, Alex Jones, by 2008 or so.
[01:00:09]  His politics are a little bit different, but you hear the voice, right?
[01:00:12]  He's gone all bravel and dark.
[01:00:15]  So he's definitely there.
[01:00:17]  He's still kind of bipartisan because he's definitely saying that like the whole government is engaged in a conspiracy to make people believe communism is real when it's just a front for the U.S. Army.
[01:00:29]  So he's not a partisan hack yet, but he's definitely evolved from beginning Alex Jones.
[01:00:35]  Yeah.
[01:00:36]  The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States was probably the best thing that ever happened to Alex.
[01:00:41]  It seems to have taken him by surprise, as does the surge of far-right sentiment that immediately followed President Obama's election.
[01:00:47]  The podcast Knowledge Fight is currently going over every post-election episode of Alex Jones' show to kind of document Alex's transition from a total political outsider to a dedicated prophet of the far-right.
[01:00:58]  But they've shown that he didn't see the Tea Party coming.
[01:01:00]  The first episode of his show, when the Tea Party got brought up by a caller, he clearly had no idea what it was.
[01:01:05]  Eventually, though, he got on board and realized that this represented a group of people that he could sell stuff to.
[01:01:11]  Alex Jones and InfoWars were responsible for spreading that viral poster of Obama as the Joker.
[01:01:16]  If you glanced at a Tea Party protest in 2009, you would have seen that.
[01:01:20]  In March of 2009, Alex Jones released the documentary, The Obama Deception, a two-hour movie about how Barack Obama was a grave threat to, quote, the hope of free humanity.
[01:01:30]  Jones made the case that President Obama was going to take away America's freedom, a thing that totally happened.
[01:01:35]  You all remember that, right?
[01:01:39]  One former employee later described the mood in InfoWars at the time as, quote, we were getting more and more calls from people who seemed unwell claiming that the FBI was watching their house.
[01:01:49]  We kept saying we're the underdogs.
[01:01:51]  That was our mantra.
[01:01:52]  But slowly it started to feel more like we were becoming the majority.
[01:01:55]  So.
[01:01:57]  Yeah.
[01:01:58]  Which is.
[01:01:59]  So what spurred this change in him?
[01:02:01]  I mean, like, he was just so freaked out by Obama in particular.
[01:02:05]  That's like, I don't know.
[01:02:07]  That's a good question because it makes sense why he because he obviously he hated on Bush a ton.
[01:02:11]  He believes Bush murdered thousands of Americans to start a war using whatever the hell.
[01:02:16]  I don't want to get into 9-11 conspiracy theories, but he hated Bush, but he Obama didn't even do anything for him to hate him.
[01:02:24]  I think that's what I'm saying.
[01:02:25]  Yeah.
[01:02:25]  It was just hope.
[01:02:26]  It was just like, let's turn the tide.
[01:02:27]  Let's just do some different stuff and be good people.
[01:02:31]  I think there's a lot of implicit racism.
[01:02:33]  I think that's yes.
[01:02:33]  And you mentioned that at the top of the show.
[01:02:36]  I think there's a lot of implicit racism in the surge of far-right sentiment that sprang up after Obama's election.
[01:02:42]  With Jones, I'm not sure.
[01:02:43]  I'm sure some of it's racism.
[01:02:45]  I think a lot of it, though, might just be simple economic sense.
[01:02:49]  Knowing if I can scare the shit, like Bush is out of the White House, so I can't scare the left anymore into buying my shit, right?
[01:02:57]  Because their guys in office and they think that this war stuff's going to get reduced.
[01:03:02]  So now I have to scare people on the right.
[01:03:04]  Well, how do I scare people on the right?
[01:03:06]  I make Barack Obama look like a demon trying to take their freedom.
[01:03:09]  And he wasted no time doing that.
[01:03:11]  No, no, immediately.
[01:03:12]  Yeah.
[01:03:13]  And that's something that's pretty easy for him to do, but I appreciate your point.
[01:03:18]  You can't be a showman without a show.
[01:03:20]  Yeah.
[01:03:20]  You know what I mean?
[01:03:21]  Exactly.
[01:03:21]  So, do you think that it was, I know we're speculating here, but do you think it was a matter of that cognizant level of calculation, or do you think he was just going with the flow?
[01:03:35]  I think it's probably a mix of both.
[01:03:37]  We'll get into that a little bit more later, but I see some calculation at the start of it because Obama hadn't done anything yet to justify a freak out, and he engineered the freak out.
[01:03:49]  With Bush, obviously, something like 9-11 happens, something as crazy as planes flying into a tower.
[01:03:55]  People will make conspiracies about it.
[01:03:57]  And he jumped onto that.
[01:03:58]  And maybe that was legitimate.
[01:03:59]  He may have really believed every conspiracy he spread about 9-11.
[01:04:03]  I do think Obama marks the point where he's just trying to make money.
[01:04:09]  Okay.
[01:04:09]  Yeah, but that's my theory.
[01:04:12]  So they made a lot of money in early 2009, the early Obama years.
[01:04:15]  On good days, Alex would run around yelling, You get a bonus.
[01:04:18]  We had a huge sale day.
[01:04:20]  Another former employee recalled a time when Alex took everyone out to the Infowars warehouse and shot at boxes of DVDs with a bow and arrow, apparently in celebration.
[01:04:29]  This was recalled as a fun time.
[01:04:31]  Like all great artists, Alex stole in particular.
[01:04:34]  He stole from Rush Limbaugh.
[01:04:35]  Several former employees claimed he nursed an intense jealousy for their right-wing radio icon.
[01:04:40]  Jones's signature Smokes 30 Packs a Day voice is apparently an imitation of Rush Limbaugh's voice.
[01:04:46]  And if you listened, again, we listened to his earlier stuff.
[01:04:48]  He's clearly putting on a voice because he doesn't always talk like that.
[01:04:53]  One employee later claimed, quote, we'd spend weeks getting everything just right in the studio, then he'd go for a drive and hear Rush again and say, I need my voice to sound something like that.
[01:05:02]  And so we'd completely re-engineer the sound to make him gruffer.
[01:05:05]  So that's interesting.
[01:05:07]  A key moment in Alex's evolution happened in 2011 because that's the year he got really good at Google bombing.
[01:05:12]  According to that Rolling Stone profile, quote, asking his audience to stage a mass online search of the phrase revolt against the TSA, a tactic known as Google bombing, Jones instantly manipulated the term to the top of Google's search index.
[01:05:24]  As intended, the maneuver caught the sensitive traffic antennae of Matt Drudge, who put the TSA story on the national news agenda.
[01:05:31]  Our show was the detonator on the cap of the TSA story, and Drudge was the barrel of the gun, says Jones.
[01:05:37]  So this is like early fake news.
[01:05:39]  This is like the yes.
[01:05:41]  He's also the fucking Steve Jobs of fake news because he really figured out he's not just putting out fake news stories.
[01:05:48]  He recognizes how to get his listeners to manipulate the algorithms of social media and search engines in order to make it.
[01:05:55]  He's trying to tip the scales to like freak people out and to like start some kind of firestorm of paranoia that's in his favor to help him sell bullshit.
[01:06:03]  Exactly.
[01:06:04]  Yeah.
[01:06:04]  Question: Was it phrased as when he was telling his audience to do this?
[01:06:09]  Was it phrased as you can go search now to learn more about this?
[01:06:14]  Or was he telling them, make this the top search term?
[01:06:18]  He was telling them to make this a search term.
[01:06:19]  He was staging that was the explicit goal.
[01:06:23]  And he says, again, the goal was to get this story to Matt Drudge.
[01:06:29]  I'm going to guess a lot of our listeners don't read the Drudge Report regularly, but it is currently number 119 on Alexa, the 119th most popular website on the entire internet.

=== Matt Drudge Strategy (13:32) ===

[01:06:43]  There are very few websites in existence larger than the Drudge Report.
[01:06:47]  It is one of the most influential, you could call it journalism outlets on the planet.
[01:06:53]  And Drudge and Jones have a mutually parasitic relationship.
[01:06:56]  When Alex was banned from Twitter, that was the top story on the Drudge Report a few minutes later.
[01:07:01]  Drudge regularly will scan InfoWars and will put, like, basically comb the crazy out of his stories and then put them up on his site.
[01:07:10]  Like, that's been going on for years, and it started at least as early as 2011.
[01:07:15]  Alex Jones speaks positively of Matt Drudge and regularly cites his website as well.
[01:07:19]  He feels differently about Glenn Beck.
[01:07:21]  So here's that Rolling Stone profile.
[01:07:23]  People inside his company tell me Beck follows what we do closely, says Jones.
[01:07:27]  It's frustrating that I've never sold out, yet I'm being gobbled up by this giant Pac-Man who puts my work through his corporate media assembly line.
[01:07:34]  He takes information from me about secret combines and elites and then spends it against big government.
[01:07:38]  But he ignores big business.
[01:07:40]  He says George Soros is at the top of the New World Order power pyramid.
[01:07:43]  Give me a break.
[01:07:44]  I have no love for Soros, but I don't trust Beck.
[01:07:46]  98% of my audience hates him.
[01:07:48]  New listeners tell me I'm a Beck wannabe.
[01:07:50]  I'm like, no, it's the other way around.
[01:07:52]  So we have Alex Jones to thank for a lot of Glenn Beck.
[01:07:55]  Oh.
[01:07:56]  Yeah.
[01:07:56]  Easily wounded.
[01:07:58]  This ego, you know?
[01:08:00]  He is.
[01:08:00]  And it's fun that he talks about, he says George Soros isn't a big deal back in 2011 or so because he does not shut up about George Soros today.
[01:08:10]  George Soros is making our marijuana stronger.
[01:08:13]  He's behind everything bad now.
[01:08:14]  It's just interesting how he switched over time.
[01:08:17]  But Obama's first term is a great time for Alex Jones.
[01:08:20]  It goes so well, in fact, that people who were close to him at the time speculate that he voted for Barack Obama in 2012.
[01:08:27]  One employee recalled, quote, he just kept saying, oh my God, if Obama loses, we're out of business.
[01:08:33]  One of the guys in there asked, you didn't vote for Obama, did you?
[01:08:36]  And Alex said nothing, just a grimace.
[01:08:38]  I don't know what it meant.
[01:08:40]  So there's a conspiracy for us to start about Alex Jones.
[01:08:46]  I know at least three employees told BuzzFeed stories about how a number of people at Infowars at the time suspected Jones had voted for Obama.
[01:08:54]  This remains my favorite Alex Jones conspiracy.
[01:08:57]  So he may have.
[01:08:58]  I bet that drives him insane.
[01:09:00]  Oh, man.
[01:09:02]  I wouldn't be surprised.
[01:09:03]  Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
[01:09:06]  If he's cynical enough to do it, then I don't know.
[01:09:09]  And if he did it, that's proof that this is, I mean, maybe he wasn't lying in his custody hearing, and this is all an act.
[01:09:17]  I don't think it's all an act, but I wouldn't be surprised if he voted for Barack Obama because he wanted millions of dollars and because he wanted to continue being relevant and he attached his relevance to being able to stir up hate against, you know, the system, the president.
[01:09:32]  So Obama won in 2012, obviously, and for a little while, things remained good in Jones Land.
[01:09:37]  He made millions of dollars selling supplements, rifle parts, and survival supplies like seeds and body armor.
[01:09:42]  It's possible that during the Obama years, Jones took home like $20 or $30 million himself, maybe more.
[01:09:48]  In 2013, at an event for the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones met Roger Stone.
[01:09:55]  This was the beginning of what I like to call the likeliest friendship in history.
[01:09:59]  Former Paul Manafort partner and sure-to-be-frequent bastard pod side character Roger Stone told the Washington Post this, we kind of hit it off.
[01:10:06]  He's fearless, a showman.
[01:10:08]  He likes a drink, a cigar, bouty stories, hunting and fishing.
[01:10:11]  He's a man's man.
[01:10:13]  Roger Stone.
[01:10:14]  Proclaimed self-man's man yeah, a full-grown man's man.
[01:10:18]  And Roger Stone now hosts a show on Infowars uh, where just last week he defended himself against the surely looming indictment that's coming from the Mueller investigation.
[01:10:28]  So that's, that's fine.
[01:10:30]  That's fine it's, it is good fun.
[01:10:32]  And Roger Stone no one has ever been more ready to be an Infowars guest than Roger Stone.
[01:10:38]  He is was made for that show.
[01:10:41]  It's like they poured him into a mold.
[01:10:43]  Oh, what a guy anyway.
[01:10:45]  Other people around Jones at this time say that as Obama's second term drew to a close, Alex started to change.
[01:10:50]  One ex-employee said, quote, it became less about affecting change and more about being sensational and making money.
[01:10:56]  It didn't start out that way.
[01:10:57]  He was a lovely person to hang around for a long time, but soon that evaporated.
[01:11:01]  Four employees described Alex Jones to Buzzfeed as quote a tyrant.
[01:11:05]  One person called him Blackbeard Meets Hitler.
[01:11:08]  One minute just on a high and swashbuckling and calling us to action, the next punching out walls.
[01:11:13]  So when Donald Trump first appeared on the scene, Jones didn't pay him very much mind.
[01:11:17]  Uh, he kind of dismissed him as a plant by the globalist or a fake at first.
[01:11:22]  But then Roger Stone got involved in the Trump campaign and introduced Alex to Donald Trump.
[01:11:27]  In december of 2015, Trump appeared on Infowars for a 30-minute conversation with Alex Jones.
[01:11:32]  In 15 years, Alex had gone from running a website out of his spare room to talking with the soon-to-be president for an audience that numbered in the tens of millions.
[01:11:41]  But Alex Jones never lost the common touch, and to prove that, here's a video he filmed when Caitlin Jinner transitioned in 2015.
[01:11:48]  Just so you know listener, in this video he is shirtless this is the first of many shirtless Alex Jones videos and he's wearing what he admits are his own dirty gym socks on his ears.
[01:11:58]  So transzoological, I believe, is the term.
[01:12:02]  I may decide to be transabled and shot my arms and legs off and i'd be known as a biscuit and live in a box.
[01:12:07]  Be taken care of, and if you don't accept it, you're hateful.
[01:12:09]  In fact, if you don't adopt my lifestyle and wear dirty brown socks on your ears after you work out, you're a racist, you're a homophobe, you're an anti-zoological pho, you're a piece of filth.
[01:12:21]  So now I become my new self.
[01:12:27]  Yeah, he's pretending to be a dog in that.
[01:12:29]  So yeah, and just just to point out, he had a lower third on the screen that said Rough Rough Jones.
[01:12:33]  Yes, Rough Rough Jones yeah, yeah.
[01:12:36]  Now is this the first shirtless Alex Jones video.
[01:12:39]  Good god no, I don't think this is the first one, it's the earliest I found maybe, but he's there's, I have up on the site we'll have.
[01:12:47]  I think it's like a 16 minute supercut of a.
[01:12:50]  I don't even think they're all of the shirtless scenes we we will be talking about that, but I think at this point his degeneration into Modern Jones is finished like.
[01:12:59]  It's kind of like watching Danny Devito's character in Always Sunny from the second season, where he's a businessman to like where he's eating garbage.
[01:13:05]  Alex Jones has gone from a charming man in a suit who talks like a normal person to wearing his filthy gym socks on his ears, insulting a random woman for no good reason.
[01:13:16]  Like he's, he's completely degenerated now.
[01:13:19]  Anyway, he is full Gollum Jones at this point.
[01:13:23]  He is Schmeagel, has died Long ago.
[01:13:26]  Yeah.
[01:13:27]  So, 2016 went the way we all know it did.
[01:13:30]  Donald Trump gradually defeated his Republican rivals and eventually Hillary Clinton.
[01:13:34]  Alex Jones watched his reach and influence grow throughout the campaign.
[01:13:38]  Thanks to the algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, he had a direct highway into the brains of tens of millions of people.
[01:13:44]  In 2011, his YouTube channel had some 80 million views.
[01:13:48]  By 2018, that number was more than 1.2 billion.
[01:13:52]  Now, Donald Trump called Jones after his election victory to thank Jones' viewers for their support and Alex Jones for, quote, standing up for what's right.
[01:14:01]  According to Alex Jones, this is what the president-elect said.
[01:14:04]  I just talked to kings and queens of the world, world leaders, you name it, but it doesn't matter.
[01:14:08]  I want to talk to you to thank your audience, and I'll be on in the next few weeks to thank them.
[01:14:13]  So that didn't happen.
[01:14:14]  He didn't show up on InfoWars again.
[01:14:16]  I think the adults around Donald Trump were like, you can't keep showing up on InfoWars.
[01:14:20]  Maybe they should.
[01:14:21]  Shit reminders the same people who rip up his paperwork.
[01:14:25]  Yeah, I'm sure it was.
[01:14:27]  Hit him on the nose with a newspaper.
[01:14:28]  Like, no, no.
[01:14:30]  Do not go on Alex Jones.
[01:14:31]  That time is gone for you.
[01:14:33]  Maybe they played a supercut of shirtless Alex Jones for him and were just like, we can't let you do this.
[01:14:38]  He's like, but Putin doesn't wear a shirt.
[01:14:41]  Come on.
[01:14:41]  He's probably so pissed that he has to wear shirts right now.
[01:14:45]  Oh, God.
[01:14:46]  Thank God for that.
[01:14:48]  I will legitimately say whoever is keeping a shirt on the president is a hero, if that's a difficult thing to do.
[01:14:54]  Anyway, on November 9th, Alex Jones in tears cheered Donald Trump's plan to, quote, build a better world.
[01:15:01]  He toasted champagne glasses with Roger Stone.
[01:15:04]  Frank Sinatra's My Way Played.
[01:15:06]  Alex Jones.
[01:15:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:08]  Wait, I'm sorry.
[01:15:09]  So he turned it on, but he couldn't turn it off again?
[01:15:12]  The tears?
[01:15:13]  Yeah, I mean, he can't turn it off anymore.
[01:15:15]  I think he's past that point in his life now.
[01:15:18]  He's always on.
[01:15:19]  He's like when your mom told you not to make that face.
[01:15:22]  You know, if you stay a racist conspiracy theorist long enough, it'll stick that way.
[01:15:27]  So Alex Jones was, after Trump's election, on the surface at least, on top of the world.
[01:15:32]  But like the conspiracies he loved, there were more twists and turns in his journey than were visible on the surface.
[01:15:37]  On Thursday's episode, we're going to talk about Alex's vicious multi-year, multi-million dollar divorce, his frankly shocking custody battle, and the moment when, Icarus-like, he flew too close to the sun and got banned from all mainstream social media.
[01:15:50]  Tomorrow, though, we're going to talk about Alex Jones' supplement empire and all the people he may have gotten killed along the way.
[01:15:56]  So that's what's coming up.
[01:15:58]  I'd like to thank both of you, Noel Benjamin, for being on my show, for talking with me about Alex Jones.
[01:16:04]  How are you feeling after part one of this epic three-part thing?
[01:16:07]  A little bit dead inside, a little broken, a little on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but also, you know, kind of chipper and ready to see what comes next.
[01:16:15]  Firstly, I'm thrilled.
[01:16:17]  I'm learning a lot.
[01:16:19]  And when it started stuff they don't want you to know, I figured we'd run into Alex Jones.
[01:16:25]  But this deep dive is a real eye-opener, man.
[01:16:28]  The Steve Jobs stuff alone.
[01:16:31]  Yeah, I really think that's a fair way to bill him because whatever else he is, and this is something people, if you talk about like to people who like study broadcast radio history and like podcasting and how it's sort of evolved, he's a seminal figure in that.
[01:16:44]  He's an important figure in the industry that we're all involved in.
[01:16:48]  He is an innovator.
[01:16:50]  He's also the shirtless guy that we saw wearing his own filthy gym socks on his ears for no real good reason.
[01:16:57]  He contains multitudes.
[01:16:58]  Alex Jones.
[01:17:00]  Yeah.
[01:17:01]  I should also like your Rudyard Kipling reference there earlier with the common touch.
[01:17:06]  Yeah.
[01:17:07]  I have a question.
[01:17:08]  Just no spoilers, Robert, but in the next episode, are we going to learn whether or not Alex Jones sells branded tinfoil?
[01:17:17]  I mean, I actually haven't run across Jones selling tinfoil, but we are going to talk about the lead-based supplements that he sold to people.
[01:17:25]  Huzzah!
[01:17:26]  I'm in.
[01:17:28]  All right.
[01:17:28]  Noel, Benjamin, you guys want to plug your pluggables before we close out this episode?
[01:17:33]  Absolutely.
[01:17:33]  Noel and I are the co-host of a show called Ridiculous History, which examines the strange, bizarre, unusual people, places, events, and things throughout the span of human civilization.
[01:17:46]  It's a little shallower dive, but it's a lot of fun.
[01:17:48]  And the episodes are like, you know, 30, 45 minutes and pretty easy to get through and binge.
[01:17:54]  Nice snackable podcast episodes.
[01:17:56]  We do those and we also do a show called Stuff They Don't Want You Know, which applies critical thinking to conspiracy theories.
[01:18:02]  And I think we did one on Alex Jones Turning the Frogs Gay pretty recently.
[01:18:06]  Right.
[01:18:06]  And that was a lot of fun.
[01:18:08]  But I've learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know.
[01:18:11]  And God, it sounds like we're going to learn a lot more still.
[01:18:14]  This is just the beginning of the journey.
[01:18:16]  In the meantime, while you're waiting for the next part of this three-part series on Behind the Bastards, you can check out every podcast we've ever done for either show on our websites, ridiculoushistory show.com or stufftheydonwantyutonow.com.
[01:18:30]  Beautiful.
[01:18:31]  You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
[01:18:33]  I have a book on Amazon, A Brief History of Vice, where I experiment on myself with dangerous ancient drugs.
[01:18:39]  So you can pick that up too if you want.
[01:18:41]  You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com, where we'll have all of the sources and video clips for this ridiculous three-part episode.
[01:18:49]  And you can find us on social media, Instagram, Twitter at BastardsPod.
[01:18:53]  So we will be back tomorrow and Thursday with more shit about Alex Jones.
[01:18:59]  Until then, maybe try buying a t-shirt off of our TeePublix store, Behind the Bastards.
[01:19:05]  You can get Nachos Not Nazis, Doritos, not Dictators, DJ Stahl.
[01:19:10]  We got all that stuff.
[01:19:10]  So buy it and tune in for the next episode.
[01:19:14]  And remember, I love about 40% of you.
[01:19:26]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:19:35]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:19:37]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:19:39]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:19:41]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:19:46]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:19:47]  Trust me, babe.
[01:19:48]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:58]  What's up, everyone?
[01:19:59]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:20:00]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:20:04]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:20:07]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:20:08]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.

=== Mystery at City Hall (01:38) ===

[01:20:15]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:20:18]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:20:25]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:20:27]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:20:28]  There's a lot of life.
[01:20:30]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:20:37]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:20:44]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:20:48]  I doctored the test once.
[01:20:49]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:20:54]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:20:56]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Rancini.
[01:20:59]  My mind was blown.
[01:21:00]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:21:02]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:21:03]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:21:05]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:21:09]  Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:21:17]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[01:21:20]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:21:21]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:21:23]  A shocking public murder.
[01:21:25]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:21:31]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:21:33]  Those are shots.
[01:21:35]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:21:37]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:21:41]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:21:50]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:21:53]  Guaranteed human.