#615: November 8, 2021?
Today, Dan and Jordan attempt to cover a recent episode of The Alex Jones Show, but decide to bail and have a chat with Jon Ronson instead. (Apologies about some slight sound issues)
Nov. 10, 2021 - Knowledge Fight
01:38:24
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledgefight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan, I'm sweating. | |
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have great respect for knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm with you. | ||
| I love your world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
KnowledgeFight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com I love you. | ||
| Hey everybody! | ||
| Welcome back to KnowledgeFight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Dan. | |
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around worship at the altar of Selene and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are. | ||
| Dan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| Why don't you go first? | ||
| Well, my bright spot, Dan, and I never thought I would say this, my bright spot today is the DMV. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Before you tell whatever story you're going to tell, I want to say I've always enjoyed going to the DMV in Chicago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| When I was in Missouri, it sucked. | ||
| It was miserable. | ||
| But in Chicago... | ||
| I have had nothing but positive experiences. | ||
| I swear to you, the place on diversity, I had to go get my license renewed because it was expired by about a year, and I had no idea because I was getting all those texts, you know, the scam texts from the DMV where it's like, your license is expired. | ||
| I got that at the same time that I got the regular text. | ||
| It's hard to tell the difference now. | ||
| And I think that I don't know anybody who keeps up with like, well, I got three months. | ||
| It's something that just kind of goes in the back of your mind. | ||
| Yeah, no, you don't find out you need a new license until somebody's like, you can't buy that. | ||
| You need a valid license. | ||
| So the DMV on diversity, I went there, there was a line out the door, and I thought we were going to be there for like two, three hours. | ||
| There were people who saw the line and then just left. | ||
| They banged it out in 25 minutes. | ||
| They got through like 50 people. | ||
| And it wasn't just that they were good. | ||
| It was that the whole group of people there, it was a tiny little office, were working in perfect harmony with each other. | ||
| It was bananas to me. | ||
| Everybody was having a good time. | ||
| Everybody's like, I'm useful. | ||
| This is what I'm... | ||
| I'm just crushing this. | ||
| Everybody's smiling and talking to each other. | ||
| I talked to three other people who couldn't help but be like, this is the best DMV I've ever... | ||
| It's bananas! | ||
| The times I've been there, they've been pretty pleasant people, too. | ||
| You all have this character in your head of grumpy, mean DMV. | ||
| Oh, the Oak Park DMV is a pile of shit! | ||
| Yeah, that wasn't my experience here in Chicago. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Good on you, DMV. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| They did a great job. | ||
| Real happy for them. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| High marks. | ||
| Hooray! | ||
| My DMV, my bright spot is I've got a new desk that I'm going to build after we get done recording. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| And I'm very excited about this. | ||
| I've had this corner desk that came with mismatched wood. | ||
| So one end of it is sort of a lighter, what would you call it, a cream kind of color? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I would say a little taupe kind of color. | |
| And then the other side is like a grayish brown. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| I tried to get them like replaced they sent me the wrong one again yeah it looks a little bit like one of those red cars with a blue door yeah I've had this desk forever and I'm excited to throw it out and It is the end of the era. | ||
| The desk has been with us since day one. | ||
| We'll miss you, Desk, but not much. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an interesting episode to go over. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| I know that on our last episode, I promised that we were going to talk about Alex Jones' response to Tucker Carlson's docu-series. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I kind of got to thinking about it. | ||
| I'm like, why? | ||
| We know what he said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said he loves it. | ||
| Yeah, it's the best. | ||
| It's the greatest thing anybody's ever seen. | ||
| And it's all just, he made this possible. | ||
| Tells the truth, it's all because of Alex. | ||
| So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to look at the present, we're going to jump forward, we're going to be talking about November 8th, 2021, Blackjack. | ||
| Ah, I didn't even come close to that. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So I'm excited about that, but before we get down to business, let's take a little moment to say thank you and hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, light switch raves. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you! | |
| Next, Levi. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Levi! | ||
| Next, Ella. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Ella. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Next, Wyatt. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Wyatt. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And finally, Jordan, we got a technocrat in the mix. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Say hello and thank you to a technocrat. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is WWJDD equals what would Jordan and Dan do? | ||
| Don't live by that advice. | ||
| But thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| We got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare... | ||
| Infowar on you! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much! | |
| Yes, thank you very much! | ||
| And I wanted to say one quick thing before we get into the episode, and that is that I got some feedback on our last episode, the Tucker Carlson one, about using names of protesters when I was making illustrations of people who have been arrested who were left-wing protesters. | ||
| And I want to say thank you to the person who pointed this out on Twitter. | ||
| And that I didn't need to. | ||
| I reflected on it a little bit, and the statistics that we talked about really do make the same point. | ||
| And I didn't realize there was a bit of a blind spot. | ||
| And the reason I'm calling this out is because I went back and I cut that out of the episode and reposted it. | ||
| So that's not in the episode now, but it was. | ||
| And in case anybody was... | ||
| Curious about that or whatever. | ||
| It wasn't removed secretly. | ||
| It's a correction. | ||
| Try and do a little better in the future. | ||
| Being aware of that. | ||
| It's a little bit of a... | ||
| I was caught up in the idea of if I point out these specifics, then it really helps drive home the point. | ||
| And that's not accurate. | ||
| In a neutral reality, that is totally fine. | ||
| In the current reality, you can't. | ||
| So anyway, that's... | ||
| That's that. | ||
| That's out of the way. | ||
| So, Jordan, we're going to start here on November 8th, and I can't tell you how much I'm excited to talk about the present day, Alex talking about some important business. | ||
| And so here is where Alex's head is at on this day. | ||
| Big exclusive news, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| I saw this last week, and I thought maybe he's just taking an unplanned vacation. | ||
| We're going to sit back and wait and see what happens. | ||
| Then on Friday it came out that he had reportedly gotten sick after the third Pfizer shot because he's a good little globalist and took his third round. | ||
| And that's when the scientists and experts tell you that the real side effects kick in, pretty much guaranteed. | ||
| And we have a lot of different sources, A, in Hollywood, but also in law enforcement. | ||
| And they have reached out to us. | ||
| Okay, I can't do the show. | ||
| There's too many people in here. | ||
| Go to rebroadcast! | ||
| God damn it! | ||
|
unidentified
|
*crickets* | |
| La la la. | ||
| How's he doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two months later, FDA approved, everybody who's 18 and over who got Jane J to... | |
| Well, I guess we... | ||
| That doesn't sound like Alex. | ||
| I guess we can't do an episode about the 8th. | ||
| He's just stormed out of... | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| I was really excited to do an episode about The Eighth. | ||
| Yeah, we were going to have a great episode about The Eighth. | ||
| I was expecting us to go three or four hours. | ||
| In fairness, Alex does come back, and it turns out he's talking about Gavin Newsom. | ||
| That's who he's talking about. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, he's talking about Gavin Newsom. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Alex is in a very bad mood, so it looks like everyone's going to die once again. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| But Alex stormed off his show, and so I'm going to put him in the corner. | ||
| And I don't know what to do, Jordan. | ||
| I guess you know what we could do. | ||
| What could we do? | ||
| Well, we talked to John Ronson recently. | ||
| We could play that for the people. | ||
| I don't think anybody would want to hear that, Dan. | ||
| That doesn't sound like something interesting at all. | ||
| I'm liking this 80s broadcast we're doing right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel like the public would be interested in hearing this. | |
| I don't think so, buddy! | ||
| I don't think anybody's interested! | ||
| Let me say this real quick. | ||
| I'm glad that that went reasonably smoothly because I... | ||
| As soon as I hit the theme song, I realized that I forgot to tell you, pretend we're doing a regular episode. | ||
| Your improv skills are fantastic. | ||
| Play off what energy I'm given. | ||
| Yeah, so let's throw it to that. | ||
| We were thrilled to have a conversation with John Ronson about some of his experiences with Alex and various... | ||
| Thoughts and perceptions. | ||
| Could not be cooler. | ||
| Could not be a cooler guy is awesome to do. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So enjoy that, and we'll be back on Friday. | ||
| See you then. | ||
| Hey, folks. | ||
| Today we are thrilled to be joined, having a little conversation with us. | ||
| Here's the author of Them, Adventures with Extremists. | ||
| I've heard of him before. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| The Psychopath Test. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Read that one. | ||
| And then also there's a new podcast that he's got out that people should check out, Things Fell Apart. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| John Ronson, hello. | ||
| Hey, how are you guys doing? | ||
| I delight to be among people who have such an incredible depth of knowledge about Alex Jones. | ||
| I like that that is being treated as a social positive, because for me, generally, it's like, this guy knows too much about Alex Jones. | ||
| I've got to get away from him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, it's nice that it's helpful. | |
| Yeah, but there's been times in my life when I've shared that obsession, so I understand. | ||
| I empathize. | ||
| You had that series from back in the early 2000s, The Secret Rulers of the World, I believe. | ||
| Was that just the one episode? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| No, it was a series. | ||
| I was writing a book called Zen. | ||
| What happened was I had this brainwave in the mid-90s that I was noticing a growth in conspiracy culture and also a relationship between conspiracy culture and extremism. | ||
| Some militant Islamists had talked to me about the secret room and some clans nerd. | ||
| So I thought, I want to do something about the rise of conspiracy. | ||
| But then I thought, well, you know, that's a really hard thing to do because most of the time they just sit behind their computers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They write newsletters. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| So how do you make that interesting? | ||
| And then I had a brainwave. | ||
| I thought, I know. | ||
| They all believe that there's a secret room from inside which there's shadowy Kabbalah secretly ruling the world. | ||
| I'll hook up with them and we'll travel the world looking for the secret room. | ||
| And when we find it, we'll climb up the jade pipes and get in and confront them red-handed going about their covert wickedness. | ||
| And then inevitably we will be disappointed when there is no actual room or the room is boring. | ||
| That is like if Ponce de Leon is like, oh, we're going to find this fucking fountain of youth on a bat or like to just... | ||
| Be spiteful towards his buddies. | ||
| Like, oh, we're going to find it. | ||
| Ponce de Leon finds a fountain that keeps you 80 years old forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, well, it's a fountain. | |
| Well, I remember, actually, when I first came up with the idea, I was at a party and I was talking to a documentary producer. | ||
| And he said, like, what's your next thing? | ||
| And I said, I'm going to write this book. | ||
| And I told him what I just told you. | ||
| And he just looked at me, like, annoyed. | ||
| Like, faintly annoyed. | ||
| And said, but there is no Secret Room. | ||
| And I thought, God, if I'd allowed him to get under my skin, I would never have done the journey. | ||
| It's one of the greatest journeys of my life. | ||
| Yeah, and on one episode of that, you went with Alex Jones to Bohemian Grove. | ||
| And I'm sure we'll get into that a bit. | ||
| But also, in one of the other episodes, you went to Bilderberg, right? | ||
| You went with Jim Tucker. | ||
| Who's another big friend of Alex Jones's. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Jim Tucker. | ||
| So most of these militant Islamists and Ku Klux Klan who were telling me about the secret room, they said it was called the Bilderberg Group. | ||
| I kept saying this. | ||
| And one of them said, and there's a guy in Washington, D.C., a sports reporter who's dedicated his life to tracking down the Bilderberg Group. | ||
| You should contact him. | ||
| His name's Big Jim Tucker. | ||
| So I did. | ||
| I went to Washington to meet big Jim Tucker, who said, yeah, you got me at a good time. | ||
| My mole inside Bilderberg has told me. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, he was right. | ||
| It was an accountant. | ||
| He said it was an accountant for one of the people who was going to Bilderberg. | ||
| He said, yeah, I know where they're meeting. | ||
| They're meeting at the Caesar Park Hotel and Golfing Resort in Sintra, Portugal. | ||
| And I'm going to go over there and get in. | ||
| And I said, can I come? | ||
| And he said, yeah. | ||
| So we flew to Central. | ||
| Yeah, I find looking at Jim Tucker's things that Alex has done, because he was in, I believe, Endgame. | ||
| He was in Endgame, yeah. | ||
| They have a big piece with him going to Bilderberg. | ||
| It seems like... | ||
| Did he let you wear his hat is the only question I have for you. | ||
| It's a great hat. | ||
| You should have taken it. | ||
| He's got 30 more. | ||
| He does have a fantastic hat, and his office had Venetian blinds. | ||
| That's perfect. | ||
| He's a chain smoker, so you always have that light coming in through the smoke. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| Sorry for interrupting your question. | ||
| I've got to say, it's amazing that he, and great that he lasted so long. | ||
| Honestly, between the time that I met him in D.C. and the couple of months later I was going to meet him in Portugal, I was just thinking, don't die. | ||
| He was, like, chain-smoking. | ||
| Drunk all the time. | ||
| I don't know if it's a good thing he lasted as long as he did, considering he wrote for The Spectator. | ||
| And, you know, like, that's kind of an anti-Semitic rag of a publication. | ||
| Well, all of that was an undercurrent that I didn't know. | ||
| It was the spotlight. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know that undercurrent. | ||
| People have said I must have known. | ||
| And I'm being so naive. | ||
| But actually, when I knew I was going to go with this guy to Portugal and we were going to try and sneak into the secret meeting of the secret rulers of the world, I thought, you know what? | ||
| I'm not going to do any research. | ||
| I'm just going to, like, go. | ||
| I don't want to find out what Bilderberg is. | ||
| I want to know the mystery of it. | ||
| So I just went along with it. | ||
| I think that's probably a better way to approach it. | ||
| I think that probably gives you an ability to... | ||
| Not bias yourself at a time with, like, a decision that this is stupid and the person I'm going with is a monster. | ||
| Hey, let's face it. | ||
| We might find this fucking secret room. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| What if we did? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The famous five don't figure it all out before they go on it. | ||
| The Scooby-Doo people. | ||
| That's where I was taking my... | ||
| My inspiration was from my... | ||
| Maybe it's a ghost. | ||
| Maybe it's a guy in a mask. | ||
| I have a hard time not writing a screenplay right now about a journalist and a Nazi going to find gold or something like that. | ||
| That's what's going on here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But, so we never ended up infiltrating the Bilderberg group because we were chased away by their henchmen. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I remember that clip from that episode that was very high tension. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'll tell you, it was a lot more high tension. | ||
| In the book, in them, I really captured the horror of it. | ||
| The footage doesn't do justice to the horror that was going on inside my head. | ||
| I mean, a chase ensued. | ||
| I left the Builder Book meeting and a chase ensued. | ||
| Now, admittedly, I was going 30 miles an hour. | ||
| And so was he. | ||
| But I tell you what, if I'd gone faster, he'd have gone faster. | ||
| That's more of a tail than a chase. | ||
| Yeah, it was a drum. | ||
| If we're going to get it right, that's all. | ||
| But what I don't say in the documentary, because we just didn't capture it, but I detail in them, is I phoned the British Embassy and I said, I'm a journalist. | ||
| I'm being tailed right now by a ladsier. | ||
| Belonging to the Bilderberg group. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she went, go on. | |
| So at one point she said to me, the good news is if you know you're being followed, they're probably just trying to intimidate you. | ||
| And the dangerous ones are the ones you don't know are following you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I thought, well, she's wise. | |
| I thought, hey. | ||
| This is the British Embassy in Portugal. | ||
| Like, it didn't strike me as Tinker Tailor Soldier. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And B, I thought, what if they are the dangerous ones and I just happen to be naturally good at spotting them? | ||
| Or what if the dangerous ones know that you'll think that they're not dangerous if you know they're following you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Hanging out with someone like Jim Tucker will probably introduce that level of paranoia into it. | ||
| Alright, John, your new name is Terrence. | ||
| You need to get to the airport in 30 seconds. | ||
| You're going to be gone for a long time. | ||
| Your old life is over. | ||
| It's over! | ||
| I'll tell you what, though. | ||
| I was so scared. | ||
| I was willing to abandon the mission entirely and just drive back to England. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I think I was conflating that incident that you had with Jim Tucker and Alex getting tailed in Endgame. | ||
| Because he got tailed in Endgame and then it ended up just being someone who was going to Chili's. | ||
| It was not someone tailing him at all. | ||
| I think I mixed those up in my memory. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Do you remember a time with Alex that he was, like, in a hotel room and he was, like, freaking out and saying, well, the phones were bugged? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| They pulled the fire alarm. | ||
| Yeah, he was reporting from Chantilly, Virginia, I believe, to one of the Bilderberg conferences. | ||
| And he was convinced that the globalists had pulled the fire alarm in order to spook him and get him out of his hotel room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I just think someone pulled the fire alarm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I would argue it was his crew that pulled the fire alarm because nothing was happening in the hotel room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Otherwise, it's pretty boring visually. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Jim Tucker has a piece of paper. | ||
| The first time I met Alex at his home, well, the second time. | ||
| The first time I met him was at Waco, and then the second time was at his home. | ||
| There was a guy doing some work on the telephone pole outside. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-oh. | |
| And Alex was 26 years old. | ||
| It wasn't like the Alex of today, but he leapt out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said, what are you doing? | |
| What are you doing? | ||
| Who sent you here? | ||
| Just going to do a real thorough interrogation of this just worker. | ||
| The late period Clint Eastwood character. | ||
| I'll tell you, my favourite one of those incidents, though, I'm jumping forward, was when we were meeting at Bohemian Grove and we checked into the motel the night before the Occidental Lodge. | ||
| Alex and Mike, his producer, and Kelly, his then-girlfriend. | ||
| His girlfriend's not yet wife. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's so racist, he will only go to the Occidental Lodge. | |
| That's how racist he is. | ||
| Sorry for interrupting. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| So we're waiting. | ||
| So we've checked in and we're waiting and it's getting dark. | ||
| And he doesn't show up. | ||
| And then his beds aren't slept in. | ||
| And then the next morning, he phones and there's just like fog. | ||
| And I was like, you know, so what happened? | ||
| And he was like, you know, well, we're driving along these lanes and the fog rolls in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then there's all these people just standing on the side of the road, just standing there staring at us. | |
| It's just like, it's like the fog in the winding lanes, I guess. | ||
| Standing on the side of the moon just staring at them felt like just a little jab on the sandwich. | ||
| It's interesting that that to me reads as something that's been consistent. | ||
| Just this preoccupation with everybody is looking at him. | ||
| But nowadays it's transformed into... | ||
| He seems to believe that demons can jump into people. | ||
| And so, like, when he's out in public, he'll see somebody, and then they'll go, bah, at him. | ||
| And it's a demon that has come into their body. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As opposed to her often hits. | ||
| Yeah, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, exactly. | |
| He'll be at a grocery store, and someone will be like, I love the devil! | ||
| And it's because a demon has jumped inside them. | ||
| That apparently only he can see, or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But yeah, that tracks. | ||
| You know, like, that kind of a thinking of... | ||
| Everything revolves around... | ||
| I mean, it is just narcissism at a certain point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's almost like he has to become famous in order to justify believing that everybody's always staring at him. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's insightful. | ||
| Is that deep? | ||
| Did I get too deep for you, Dan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I gotta go. | ||
| I'm the comic relief here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that just reminds me. | ||
| An old friend was an artist. | ||
| He became famous. | ||
| Her boyfriend once said to me, no one had ever prepared so hard to be famous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| And that's kind of, in a way, I don't know if that's true about Alex. | ||
| I think Alex was just destined to be famous. | ||
| So when I tell you about how we finally met, so, okay, so after the failed Bilderberg infiltration, I mean, I said much longer. | ||
| Story. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But you did end up, I'm sorry to get off track here, just real fast, you did end up interviewing some people who went to Bilderberg, right? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Jim Tucker, his whole thing is like, nobody who goes there will talk to anybody, and it categorically isn't true. | ||
| I mean, you interviewed some people, even on film. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I interviewed one of the founding members of Bilderberg, a man called Dennis Healy, Lord Healy, who became the Exchequer, I can't remember what it's called in Britain, like the Finance Secretary in the Labour government in Britain in the 1970s. | ||
| So he was like a very powerful person. | ||
| and yeah he just told me the whole thing like to say well I'm gonna The story that's about to unfold will undercut. | ||
| I mean, even if you do meet somebody who's there and he's willing to talk to you, you can still fail to break in. | ||
| Of course, he didn't tell me the whole thing. | ||
| But he told me a lot of stuff which I think, what I meant when I said that was he told me a lot of stuff which actually confirms some of the suspicions of the conspiracy theorists. | ||
| Particularly... | ||
| To say that we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not totally unfair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what he said to me. | ||
| He said, build a people set up in the aftermath of World War II. | ||
| And it was a reaction to Hitler. | ||
| And they thought, and this has proved to be a bad idea, that business, putting power in the hands of business was a better idea. | ||
| What, the Labour government in the 70s believed that giving more money to business was a good idea? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So weird. | ||
| Well, this was back, this was like the 50s. | ||
| This was before this happened. | ||
| So it was the idea that the stability of the world was better in the hands of Heinz and Nokia and SmithKline Beach and these are all companies that did go to Bilderberg and the Washington Post companies, not politicians. | ||
| Politicians were insane like Hitler. | ||
| So that was their idea, which isn't really any different to what the conspiracy theorists think in its broadest Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| It's just so much more banal because it's really just them being like, how can we make the most money, essentially? | ||
| It's not like, let's drink children's blood. | ||
| It's just, we would like to extract more money from here. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But then I asked Dennis Healy, he said that he was a very famously keen photographer. | ||
| So I said, did you ever take any photographs inside Bilderberg? | ||
| And he said, oh yeah, yeah, lots of photographs. | ||
| And I said, can I see some of them? | ||
| And he looks at me and he went, no, fuck off. | ||
| So I never did get to infiltrate. | ||
| When I asked him if they were secret, he said, we're not secret, we're private. | ||
| He said, no one's going to speak freely. | ||
| If they think they're going to be quoted by prurient journalists like you who think you have knowledge of something that you have no knowledge of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| I've heard that explanation before. | ||
| Politicians are crazy. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| So yeah, it was a power grab. | ||
| Maybe they were idealists too. | ||
| But yeah, it was a kind of globalist power grab, I guess. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| Tell me if you think I'm saying anything that's like too much. | ||
| No, I think that there's that reality, and then there's the surreality of the stories that are told about things. | ||
| Like, the distinction between a one-world government that is basically along the lines of not a total one-world government, but an idea of international agreements, and a body that is able to... | ||
| Step in when there are crimes against humanity that a country is carrying out, or something like that. | ||
| That's the distinction. | ||
| The real world is generally an international body that can enforce international laws, and the fairy tale version of it that conspiracy theories tell is one central thing that is run by Bill Clinton that seeks to crush guns. | ||
| Well, during that long weekend, once a year, they plan everything out. | ||
| And for the last 40 years, they've just been preoccupied with taking away right-wing people's guns. | ||
| They've been trying to do that and can't figure out how to do it. | ||
| And they choose the presidents, they choose the prime ministers. | ||
| That's an interesting thing. | ||
| So I asked another Bilderberg person who spoke to me. | ||
| I said, so what about this choosing the... | ||
| The president's shoes and the prime ministers. | ||
| And they sort of took that as a compliment. | ||
| Like, you know, we're good at spotting up-and-coming politicians. | ||
| And the idea is to offer them what they consider to be sort of wise words of advice. | ||
| One story I was told was Margaret Thatcher in 1977, I think, or around that time, two years before she became prime minister, went to Bilderberg, was... | ||
| Was quiet as a mouse, didn't say anything. | ||
| That evening, somebody told her that, like, she's ruining a great opportunity for networking here. | ||
| The next day, she gave, like, a big speech. | ||
| And then when she went to New York, and, like, everyone was wows. | ||
| And when she went to New York, like, other Bilderberg people, like, you know, drove her around and introduced her to people. | ||
| I mean, how, like, so that's... | ||
| I think the reality of Build-A-Bird, which is a million miles away from... | ||
| Listen, Iron Lady, you're going to really need to up your evil game if you want to become Prime Minister, so give a fucking speech, okay? | ||
| That's, you know, in the same ballpark as, like, a business seminar. | ||
| Like, people who have lots of connections within, you know, things can talk to other people who have connections and be like, hey, this person's pretty cool, or, you know, that's not the same thing as... | ||
| You know, being like, ha-ha, she will rule. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Or whatever. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| Like TED, or like a media club, like the Soho House. | ||
| You know, that's where those things happen. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that that distinction is kind of tough to draw sometimes. | ||
| You know, the area where the themes of some of the things that conspiracy theorists say are fairly spiritually accurate in some ways, but the particulars of the narratives and the details are generally way off base. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, you think of like, oh, billionaires, evil billionaires choose the leaders of the world, but then you look at the American system and it's like, well, you can't become an elected official without a lot of money behind you. | ||
| At least on a high level. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| At least on a high level. | ||
| So, who's giving them that money? | ||
| It's a small number of people, and it feels like, oh, well, if they give you the most money, then they have chosen that you will be the next elected official. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| Obviously, I'm agreeing with everything that you say. | ||
| And I think the reason why you had that sort of slightly more... | ||
| You know, sort of hesitant response to what I said. | ||
| It's because, you know, you're very much in the world of, you know, like you watch fucking Infowars. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, for me, for me, the distinction. | |
| So you're very much in that world. | ||
| When we started this podcast, I knew John Ronson would say you listen to too much fucking Infowars. | ||
| I knew it. | ||
| No, but you're very much like your brain right now is immersed in the irrationalities of conspiracy thinking. | ||
| I'm a little bit removed from it right now because I've been doing a show about the history of the culture wars, which doesn't really get into that stuff except for in one episode. | ||
| For me, the distinction between what the Bilderberg group actually is and what the conspiracy, you know, the conspiracy, the way that they fantasize it, is so clear that I feel I can sort of say those things. | ||
| Sure, right, right, right. | ||
| You live in the real world. | ||
| Yeah, I do have too many of my toes in that, like, | ||
| I think that allows a little bit of an easier speaking than from my perspective. | ||
| Yeah, no, I totally get it. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And maybe I was a bit too glib before. | ||
| Oh, no, no, be as glib as you like. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| This is our show. | ||
| Yeah, but the way that you're completely immersed in Alex's world and so on, I think is the best thing about being a journalist. | ||
| Like, when you're on a story and you totally, you know, you become a world expert on that subject. | ||
| You've been doing the one thing for quite a long time. | ||
| What I tend to do is I enter the world for a year or maybe something like that, and then I move on to another one. | ||
| But you've been in Alex's world for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't plan to. | ||
| I think I probably intended something along the lines of what you're describing, maybe like a year, year and a half. | ||
| But he's just so fascinating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a Rubik's Cube of insanity and weirdness, and he always surprises. | ||
| Like, it's, you know, there'll be, like, just the other day he was talking about how maybe... | ||
| You know, if your family is pro-vaccine, maybe it's time for you to kill your family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Just straight up. | ||
| Who says stuff like that? | ||
| Do you know what else? | ||
| The worst part is, it's because he was in a bad mood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was in a bad mood, so he told you that maybe you should kill your family the next day. | ||
| The next day, he's in a better mood. | ||
| To be fair. | ||
| He's going to be fine. | ||
| To be fair, he said, things happen within a family. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's a family matter. | ||
| Yes, it's a family matter. | ||
| I've got two questions to ask you. | ||
| First, do you think, like I'm certain that the darkness has got deeper over the years. | ||
| When I knew him, it was a different Alex Jones. | ||
| Yeah, that's something we wanted to ask you a ton of questions about. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| And it's something that jumped out to me when I re-watched the episode where you and him went to the Grove. | ||
| And it's just, it was shocking to see that much less dark Alex, you know, to be reminded of that. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That surprised me. | ||
| Because at the time I was spending time with, you know... | ||
| Nazis at the Klan. | ||
| What a fun thing to say. | ||
| At the time I was spending all of my days with the Nazis. | ||
| We were summering together. | ||
| But my point is that coming in, Alex Jones still is a long way away from the Klan, but I put him in a wildly different ballpark. | ||
| It was like Alex was a complete... | ||
| So that leads me to the second question, and then maybe I should talk about... | ||
| Oh, please, please. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But my second question then is, like, at the time, like, he wasn't an easy person to be around, like, because he's so full on all the time. | ||
| He's one of the most tireless people I've ever met. | ||
| He seems like he might be annoying and tiring to be around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm, you know, introverted and I get, what's the word, I get kind of, I get sensory overload. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So it's not easy to be around Alex for too long. | ||
| But. | ||
| But sometimes I look back and I think, what positive qualities did I find in Alex? | ||
| The only one, really. | ||
| Other than the fact. | ||
| That wasn't meant to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very funny. | |
| Of his good qualities, there is one. | ||
| Well, one thing I would say is that it's kind of mixed up with me in one way because... | ||
| Our infiltration of Bohemian Grove was just one of the greatest nights of my life. | ||
| So it's hard to not feel fondness towards the person who you see the most incredible night of your life with. | ||
| So I do. | ||
| And I've felt bad about the fact that I've had to do more critical stories about them in the last couple of years on a personal level, really for that reason. | ||
| But the other positive quality... | ||
| It was his kind of archery skills. | ||
| And I wonder, like, when you're watching him all the time... | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Did you say archery skills? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, I thought for sure he said archery skills. | ||
| I thought for sure. | ||
| I was like, holy shit, he's a great bowman! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no! | |
| Although didn't Josh Allen in his story in the New York Times write about Alex going big game hunting somewhere? | ||
| He does. | ||
| Oratory skills. | ||
| We're American. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| We're terrible at hearing words. | ||
| The reason that it blew my mind that there was a possibility is that Alex is such a gun guy that I feel like he'd be offended by a bow and arrow. | ||
| Aren't there those things, what are they called, like crossbow? | ||
| That's closer. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| That's closer to a guy. | ||
| I can see Alex with a crossbow. | ||
| Yeah, and I agree with you 100% about the oratory skills. | ||
| I think, even going back to our earliest episodes, it's like a caveat that I always have to kind of remind myself. | ||
| He's very talented at a thing, and unfortunately the thing is bad. | ||
| It's being used in a very bad way, but if you just take it as an ethically neutral thing... | ||
| I don't know if I've ever seen anybody who has the ability to say nothing for so long with so much passion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah, I remember about in 2001, I went on that C-SPAN show, Book Notes, and we were talking about Alex Jones, who wasn't at all famous then. | ||
| And I said the same thing. | ||
| I said, like, he's as talented as Bill Hicks. | ||
| Like, if he wasn't into such crazy stuff, he could be Bill Hicks, which then had a... | ||
| Ripple effect. | ||
| Yes, this is your new show. | ||
| You've got a new episode. | ||
| It's about that one time you said that thing. | ||
| You started Bill Hicks. | ||
| You did it! | ||
| It's your fault entirely! | ||
| I don't know if I started the Bill Hicks, but I definitely added to it. | ||
| I wanted to actually ask you about that C-SPAN interview, because it's something that I've thought about quite a bit. | ||
| In that interview, you say that after going to Bohemian Grove... | ||
| You told Alex that he was playing with fire because he was misrepresenting what you guys had experienced there and saying it was like this demonic thing and playing up those elements of it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that to me, his response you said was, I'm not going to tell the listeners that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That indicates awareness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I based my whole idea of Alex from that conversation for decades afterwards. | ||
| I said, I don't know if I use words like playing with fire, but I said that you said, I've heard you say things that we both know aren't true. | ||
| And Alex said, you know, you know that, I know that, I'm not going to tell my listeners that. | ||
| That seems awful. | ||
| Yeah, so, well, so for decades I was asked, you know, and you can imagine I've been asked this question a lot, like, does he mean it or is he faking it? | ||
| And I always said, oh, I think he's faking it. | ||
| And I would cite that example sometimes. | ||
| But when I met Josh Owens like five years ago, who was Alex's cameraman, who became the whistleblower, I said that to him. | ||
| And he was just, he just looked at me baffled and said, no, Alex believes every word. | ||
| I think, but you got it. | ||
| Josh. | ||
| And Josh has been with Alex like I was with Alex every day for years. | ||
| But you've got to think that probably, you know, that was back in 2000, right, when you went to Bohemian Grove and you had this conversation. | ||
| I bet he was much looser-lipped, you know? | ||
| Maybe he didn't have that million-dollar empire to protect. | ||
| And, at the same time, who knows how the years went on convincing yourself of your own stories. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the classic, you know, be careful what mask you wear because it might become your face kind of thing, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, like, I've often had a half-thought, which I haven't completely fully realized is a thought, which is that, you know, Alex is a narcissist, and narcissists have a different relationship to truth. | ||
| Then I think other people who aren't now, people who don't have that disorder. | ||
| No, I don't quite know what that means. | ||
| Like, does that mean that we're judging him by the wrong criteria? | ||
| We're judging him by our criteria? | ||
| Like he's a fucking alien and shit? | ||
| Like if he gets put on trial, we can only have 12 psychopaths sitting there being like, well, yeah, of course you kill your brother again so you can see that guy. | ||
| We saw the psychopath test! | ||
| But isn't this an interesting thing to think about? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Like, does Alex, like, if there's no wall between truth and lying in Alex's mind, like, if lying doesn't make him feel bad, then should we be asking a different question to does he know it's the truth? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I don't quite know what that question is, but it's something along the lines of, like, does Alex... | ||
| Is there a state of mind where lying is such not an ethical concern? | ||
| And it also seems fun at times. | ||
| Say that again. | ||
| It also seems fun at times, the lies. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| It's more fun to lie about babies getting eaten than it is to say that the budget is going down. | ||
| I agree with that point you made, though, with the... | ||
| The distinction between whether he knows he's lying or not, like, the truth, I also think that that's probably the wrong place to look at it, or to judge him by. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost irrelevant. | ||
| Yeah, because there's his truth. | ||
| Yeah, if it doesn't matter to him, then... | ||
| Then the truth is... | ||
| Lies are just a thing. | ||
| The truth is whatever matters to him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And so the reason I brought up that point from the C-SPAN interview was that also in that interview you talk about the, what was it, the Phantom Patriot? | ||
| The guy who ended up a year later going to Bilderberg with a bunch of guns. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| As a result of being an Alex fan and seeing Dark Secrets, the documentary that Alex put out. | ||
| That's kind of where I think the most interesting part is. | ||
| Whether he's telling the truth or not, actively or aware of what he's doing or not, he knew enough to know that he wasn't telling the whole story to his listeners. | ||
| And he probably was aware that this guy showed up at Bohemian Grove because of his content. | ||
| Do you think that he's aware of that? | ||
| That connection. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| He knows. | ||
| He knows that he has unstable listeners. | ||
| And he... | ||
| Well, he riles them, right? | ||
| I mean, what's the famous Sandy Hook line? | ||
| Like, somebody needs... | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He said a lot of things. | ||
| I think somebody needs to go investigate that. | ||
| That really surprised me when I heard your podcast with the Sandy Hook lawyer, that he spoke about it hundreds of times. | ||
| Yeah, he made a meal of that. | ||
| The thing that comes to mind with the, someone needs to go check this out, that was also what he said about Comet Ping Pong, the pizza gate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, don't get me wrong. | ||
| Like, all that stuff I was saying about truth and lying was just thinking about it from a sort of... | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| I'm about to try to work out that thought process. | ||
| I'm sorry, this podcast adheres to the Goldwater rule, so we can't allow you to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We do not. | |
| I've gone back and forth on the Goldwater rule. | ||
| What is your future? | ||
| Well, we've broken it a bunch of times just now. | ||
| Except we haven't, because Alex was diagnosed as a... | ||
| True. | ||
| Oh, that's true. | ||
| I always just wonder, like, I think the most important question for me The level to which he's aware, the influence that he has that leads people to do bad things, like the Phantom Patriot or any number of other folks. | ||
| Like that couple in Las Vegas who shot a cop. | ||
| I always am curious. | ||
| There's a guy in Death Row, right? | ||
| Maybe it's one of the couple, but there's a guy in Death Row who I wrote to and said, can I interview you about if and how? | ||
| Because I think it was one of those stories about we think he was inspired by Alex Jones. | ||
| So I wrote to him and talked to his lawyer, and he didn't want to talk to me. | ||
| Understandable. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That connection is really interesting to me. | ||
| I mean, you literally wrote the book on being publicly shamed, so... | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Because I think the feelings that one should have, or one you'd expect to have, is like, oh, that was bad. | ||
| I shouldn't do that. | ||
| I shouldn't do that. | ||
| That was bad. | ||
| Some guy went to the place I told a story about with guns, and he was going to kill a bunch of old people. | ||
| This is no good. | ||
| I should probably... | ||
| But that doesn't happen. | ||
| And that's fascinating to me. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, I have not seen any evidence of him caring about the consequences. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, of you? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But, you know, that's kind of why I was asking you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was wondering if... | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, remember with me, it was like smaller stuff. | ||
| Like, he was definitely lying about... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He said that we may have witnessed, I mean, I think he did say may, but we may have witnessed an actual human sacrifice. | ||
| Yeah, he said he went to an expert in anatomy that said it was the size of a baby, the effigy. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, and then he said that, now look, I wasn't with him the whole time. | ||
| And in fact, for quite a lot of the time, I wasn't with him. | ||
| But, because he went, he infiltrated separately to me. | ||
| As you know, I went up the drive, giving the security guard a kind of eye-roll-the-world wave. | ||
| And I just went in fire. | ||
| I just went in fire at the end of the day. | ||
| Completely unnecessarily, but amusingly. | ||
| I'm going to try the front door. | ||
| Okay, goodbye. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I wasn't with him the whole time. | ||
| But he said at one point, we overheard these two old men. | ||
| One of them said to the other one, yeah. | ||
| We're going to get an elected. | ||
| And I said, Alex, come on. | ||
| That's what you want to refer to people. | ||
| And you could hear that exact statement anywhere. | ||
| You could hear that at a coffee shop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly right. | |
| That's very true. | ||
| I actually just had a thought about your guys' infiltration of Bohemian Grove. | ||
| You went in the front, and Alex used a little bit of subterfuge. | ||
| And I've always thought, like, wow, he could have just walked in the front, but probably he couldn't. | ||
| Like, he probably couldn't control himself. | ||
| Like, he'd probably, like, act really weird. | ||
| I mean, he would see the security guard and be like, you better kick me out of here, otherwise I won't have a fucking show! | ||
| You better kick me out! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get me out of here! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my God, can you imagine? | |
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| I mean, I remember, it's funny, I have a lot of... | ||
| Gaps in my memory of my life. | ||
| Tell me about it. | ||
| But every moment with Alex, I remember so clearly. | ||
| And so I remember that moment very clearly when he decided not to walk up the drive with us. | ||
| So what happened was we met Rick, the lawyer. | ||
| Go on, sorry. | ||
| Yeah, so we met this lawyer who had infiltrated the Grove and was a very preppy man, Northern Californian guy. | ||
| And he says, because Alex had planned to rent a boat, moor it. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I'm already in. | ||
| I'm already in. | ||
| Good plan. | ||
| Great plan. | ||
| Climb up the mountain. | ||
| No notes. | ||
| Yeah, get in that way. | ||
| And Rick said, if you're going that way, you're going to get yourself killed. | ||
| And Alex, this is one of my favorite moments, Alex wrote down, going in that way, dash, kill. | ||
| Because he was like, right. | ||
| So we can read. | ||
| We do know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The path is off the table. | |
| So Rick said, no, the way to get into Bohemian Grove is dress preppy, go to the local Eddie Bauer, buy yourself some preppy clothes and just walk up the drive looking like you belong. | ||
| And he said, you know what? | ||
| I'll come with you. | ||
| I'll do it with you. | ||
| So that was the plan. | ||
| And we went to Eddie Bauer and Alex went in looking like, you know, looking like Alex and came out looking like the great captain. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I slightly exaggerate. | ||
| And then him and Mike practice being prepped. | ||
| That's one of my favorite parts of your film. | ||
| They do multiple takes of Alex talking about nanotech. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| And he says to Mike, I want to know your opinion of nanotechnology. | ||
| We've been getting these microprocessors down to the size of the molecule. | ||
| When do you think the... | ||
| I can't remember the next word. | ||
| Optimization process will occur. | ||
| And he turns to Mike and Mike said, I agree. | ||
| He was not great at improv. | ||
| But do you know what happened to Mike? | ||
| Do you know what happened to Mike? | ||
| I know that recently he's posted a number of really old videos of Alex on YouTube. | ||
| But I don't know other than that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I assume he was on death row. | |
| Quite the opposite. | ||
| Au contraire. | ||
| Now look, this is a story that came from Alex, so bear that in mind. | ||
| But this one, I think, has a rigour of truth in this. | ||
| And I'd like to know, I mean, there must be somebody listening to this who will be able to answer it. | ||
| So Mike, his father died. | ||
| He inherited the ranch. | ||
| They struck oil on his ranch, and now he's the richest man in his county. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Great. | ||
| Good things happen to good people. | ||
| That's what I was just thinking. | ||
| Normally, I can't remember his surname. | ||
| Hanson. | ||
| Mike Hanson, of course. | ||
| Yeah, so he was like, Alex is probably our first producer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was around, like, even when... | ||
| There's a video that he posted of Alex, like, I think even pre... | ||
| Or maybe during the local access TV days. | ||
| They clearly had some long-standing connection. | ||
| But I love the two of them because when they're doing this practicing being preppy... | ||
| They're walking down, like, a porch. | ||
| They're walking, and they need to go back to where they started to do a second take. | ||
| Hit your marks! | ||
| Hit your marks! | ||
| It's remarkable. | ||
| No, you can't do a take going the other direction. | ||
| It's like practicing Sorkin dialogue. | ||
| I can't do a walk-and-talk. | ||
| It's a wedding rehearsal. | ||
| I said to them, like, have you got any contingency plan for if you get caught? | ||
| And he said, yes, yes, we do. | ||
| And I said, well, if they, you know, if we get caught, I'm going to say, don't come any closer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good, good, good. | |
| I'm going to yell boo and then run away. | ||
| I said to him, don't come any closer. | ||
| I do think it was wise of you to advise him not to bring a gun. | ||
| That was smart. | ||
| I have a question for you about that time. | ||
| Did you ever talk to Alex about religion or anything? | ||
| Because he thinks that the people at the Bohemian Grove are literally Satan worshippers who work for the literal Christian devil. | ||
| Yeah, and the giant owl. | ||
| Yeah, the giant owl at Bohemian Grove has got something to do with Mbola, the owl god. | ||
| Fools! | ||
| When will ye learn? | ||
| My friend Marty yells fools at me fairly regularly as a reference to that. | ||
| I was sitting in that. | ||
| I was sitting on that lawn. | ||
| I felt sick. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I'm evidently an anxious person. | ||
| But there was something about being with Rick the lawyer. | ||
| My risk radar was up and was basically telling me that I was going to be fine. | ||
| Because this guy, Rick, looked so much like he belonged. | ||
| Like, he couldn't have looked more dressed. | ||
| And he'd gone in before. | ||
| So he was obviously a lesser demon, right? | ||
| There's no way that he wasn't a... | ||
| Yeah, he had to have been a... | ||
| He was a Renfield, of course. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But just for, like, if people don't... | ||
| Don't understand. | ||
| Like, he was infiltrated. | ||
| Like, he hadn't been invited. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But he had infiltrated once before, too. | ||
| So I just felt completely safe. | ||
| So by the time the ceremony was happening and we were like, you know, I knew that Alex, I hoped that Alex was filming it in the hidden camera in his bag. | ||
| I just was like, just sitting there thinking, this is just fucking so hilarious and nuts. | ||
| And at one point, there was a guy... | ||
| A guy appeared in leaf-covered lederhosen and starts singing like, Oh, boughs, oh, trees. | ||
| I don't think that's an Alex's film. | ||
| Or maybe it is. | ||
| A bunch of people doing truth. | ||
| There was a little... | ||
| It's been ages since I saw Alex's film, but my feeling is that... | ||
| The whole thing's in there. | ||
| Yeah, it may be. | ||
| It's been a while since I've revisited it, too. | ||
| Yeah, so there was a... | ||
| In my memory, there was like a stage cut out of a giant redwood next to the giant owl where the mock human sacrifice was about to happen. | ||
| And there was like an alight. | ||
| Because it's a production. | ||
| This isn't like a weird... | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's like sparkler, sparkle shooting. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| There's an orchestra. | ||
| There's an orchestra. | ||
| John Williams is there. | ||
| There's an orchestra. | ||
| It's like it's a show. | ||
| It's like Broadway. | ||
| It's like Broadway in the Redwoods. | ||
| But with this weird, I mean it's weird. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some of Broadway is weird. | |
| I've seen Jersey Boys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so when will we learn? | |
| So yes, there was a stage and a guy comes out in lederhosen and he's covered in leaves and he does a tribute to nature and the San Francisco Orchestra is playing. | ||
| Apparently they have to go home at the end of the evening. | ||
| I remember someone telling me that the orchestra is not allowed to stay. | ||
| They just get two drink tickets. | ||
| You gotta go. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like I could get a set at the Bohemian Grove. | ||
| Can you do a type five? | ||
| Yeah, I can do a five. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One free passage to the underground tunnels. | |
| Meet the mall men. | ||
| All right, you get to spend ten minutes under the Getty, and then you gotta get out! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yes, I was just loving it. | ||
| And in fact, amazingly, when it was over, Rick was like, let's go. | ||
| And I can't remember. | ||
| I don't think we spent very much time with Alex at all inside there. | ||
| I wouldn't. | ||
| I remember looking right now. | ||
| It's going to be a lot safer for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Stay away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, but I do remember Alex. | ||
| I was watching the ceremony and just thinking it was hilarious. | ||
| And I turned around and Alex is looking like, you know, like Satan has landed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Blah! | |
| Yeah, it was a bad joke. | ||
| And then we had a big fight back at the hotel about what it all meant. | ||
| You had the perspective that there was a metaphor involved and, of course, demons on the other side. | ||
| Which kind of leads back to the question you were asking, Jordan. | ||
| The religious zealotry that Alex demonstrates now is so... | ||
| Like, Satan. | ||
| Literal Satan-focused. | ||
| Like, the globalists exist here as an umbrella. | ||
| And, like, if you had a flowchart, it all goes up to the big guy. | ||
| Satan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so I subsequently did a story about Alex's teenage years for This American Life. | ||
| One thing that came out in that story of kids who knew him when he was at high school was that he was obsessed with Satan then. | ||
| It would be Hail Satan this, Hail Satan that. | ||
| But the distinction is... | ||
| Was it, hail Satan, like rock and roll? | ||
| Or was it, there is a literal devil with hooves that walks around and possesses people, and I must fight him? | ||
| That's a good question that I don't know the answer to. | ||
| When I was with him, I don't remember much of that, to be honest. | ||
| I don't remember much, if any, religious talk. | ||
| He was kind of presenting himself as, I remember he said to me, he's got a Korean... | ||
| His sister, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and Kelly, he said, was Jewish. | ||
| I don't know if Kelly's Jewish or not, but anyway, maybe there's some... | ||
| He's said that she's Jewish on his show before. | ||
| It was one of those things that people would always attack him about. | ||
| It was always really kind of gross. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| People accused him of, like, your wife's your handler for Mossad or something, you know, like, all that nonsense. | ||
| Well, I mean, what's... | ||
| The reason I bring it up is, yeah, but the reason I bring it up is that's kind of how Alex was presenting himself to me as, like, you know, somebody who sort of fits in with Austin society. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Until I mentioned I was a liberal. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I was in a car with him, and I think the word liberal means... | ||
| I'm a little bit confused by use of the word liberal, because sometimes it's used to mean moderate, and sometimes it's used to mean progressive. | ||
| And so I at one point described myself as a liberal, meaning like a sort of left-leaning moderate. | ||
| And Alex went nuts, you know, what, you said you're a liberal, you said you're a liberal! | ||
| You're a Tommy! | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, but other than that, like, yeah, he was sort of trying to present himself as a kind of... | ||
| You know, regular guy. | ||
| Yeah, my sense of so much of his earlier career seems like that. | ||
| Like, regular guy kind of stuff. | ||
| And, like, I can't remember if it was in your documentary or another one I've seen. | ||
| He's talking about David Icke, and he says that David Icke is like the turd in a punch bowl. | ||
| Yeah, that's in mine. | ||
| Yeah, and, like, the path from that to hanging out with David Icke and saying all the same stuff as David Icke, like he does now. | ||
| That's really interesting to me. | ||
| Yeah, it is, right? | ||
| That control and that sort of presentation of, I may or may not believe crazy stuff, but I'm going to talk to you about banks. | ||
| I'm going to talk to you about communism. | ||
| And that's gone now. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I'm going to talk to you about Waco and Ruby Bridge. | ||
| You're right, that's all gone. | ||
| He always had the Aztec. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They eat hearts! | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That stuff was always there. | ||
| But you're right, his concerns were more, you know, in that economic, new world order, globalist government overreach thing. | ||
| Like, he brought the crazy metaphors to it. | ||
| But his sphere of interest has definitely widened in the subsequent years. | ||
| But it seemed plausible to believe that it was a metaphor. | ||
| Back then, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's something that I find, like, one of the things that I really enjoy looking at with him is the things that are different from different periods. | ||
| And that, like, almost everything that I see from the earlier period of his career... | ||
| Someone could make the argument that he's not being literal, and I would believe it. | ||
| I believe that, like, this is, you know, child sacrifice or whatever is still within the realm of, like, all right, you're talking metaphor here about demons. | ||
| But now it's just not. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I mean, that was definitely a gray area. | ||
| When I knew him, though, because the way he was talking about Bohemian Grove was like, maybe they actually are, like, maybe they actually are the Mayans. | ||
| Maybe we really did see an actual human sacrifice. | ||
| Like, I think the word maybe was always in there, but I think, maybe not. | ||
| Like, maybe he did say it sometimes. | ||
| I could see saying maybe we saw a sacrifice, like, with the adrenaline flowing through you that day. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I had one thing that I wanted to do. | ||
| And that is, I wanted to tell you a few things that Alex has said about his early life. | ||
| And I want to see if you think that these line up with the person that you knew when you guys went to Bohemian Grove or things that you know. | ||
| So I have a couple things here. | ||
| The first is he believes he's psychic and that his career was preceded by prophetic dreams. | ||
| Well, the only paranormal moment Actually, you know what? | ||
| This wasn't a paranormal moment. | ||
| So he was copying. | ||
| It was something to do with the tape duplication that happened. | ||
| We went back to Los Angeles. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I think we weren't with Alex. | ||
| Because once that was over, I just didn't want to spend... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But we went back to Los Angeles and something went wrong with the tape duplication. | ||
| And some stuff had been erased. | ||
| And it was mysterious. | ||
| And I remember Alex... | ||
| Kind of, was sort of veering towards, did they somehow psychically erase the tape? | ||
| Or was there a magnet? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they did this somehow. | |
| So that was, I guess that sort of veers slightly into the whole paranormal thing, but other than that... | ||
| Nothing I can recall. | ||
| Okay, so that seems like maybe he's beefed that up. | ||
| Maybe he's added that one to his repertoire. | ||
| When you went to Bohemian Grove with Alex in 2000, do you think that previous to that he had killed anybody? | ||
| I had seen some firearms in his vicinity when I went to his public access show. | ||
| I remember we came out and a friend of his was coming into the parking lot and Alex said to him, this guy's from England, show him what freedom looks like. | ||
| And the guy opens his coat and has a gun. | ||
| But no, I do not believe Alex had ever murdered him. | ||
| Oh, but you know what? | ||
| I do think I have an answer to that. | ||
| I think he was talking, I think he was extrapolating. | ||
| Talking about Jared, the guy who I tell the story of. | ||
| In This American Life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised. | ||
| He beat Jared so badly. | ||
| Jared was permanently injured. | ||
| I don't think it's... | ||
| Knowing Alex is a proneness to exaggeration. | ||
| True. | ||
| Maybe that became I Killed Again. | ||
| That was kind of my theory for a bit. | ||
| But then he tells a story about how he's stomped someone's guts out and watched them die slowly. | ||
| And so I feel like that doesn't quite match up with that other... | ||
| But, I mean, it could be even further exaggeration, possibly. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Alex is demonstrably prone to extreme violence. | ||
| Like, what he did to Jared was, like, extremely violent. | ||
| I have another question. | ||
| Based upon... | ||
| By the way, they beat the shit out of him in Revenge, like, a little bit later. | ||
| If people want to hear that full story, that This American Life, I believe it's called The Jabberwocky, is the name of the episode? | ||
| Yeah, I think if you put in Alex in Wonderland and This American Life, you'll find it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a fantastic piece. | ||
| Yeah, the whole episode's called The Weather Jabberwocky, and the first two stories, the first story is Lenny Posner talking about his son and the hounding, and then the second half is me doing it. | ||
| Right, and as far as the teenage years goes, one of the most interesting things now, I think, is how much Alex's dad has become a part of the mythology. | ||
| Like, his dad is the CIA dentist who talks to all these lieutenant colonels and who gets all this information that he can then pass on to... | ||
| To Alex. | ||
| And he was the smartest kid in Texas. | ||
| And he was recruited by the FBI for UT Lawson. | ||
| Dr. Irwin Spear tried to get him into the globalist program because he was the smartest boy in Texas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But his dad said, no, this is evil. | ||
| I will not. | ||
| And then he told Alex all this stuff over the... | ||
| Or actually, he told someone else about it and Alex overheard it at the dinner table. | ||
| This is... | ||
| Does his dad work at Infowars? | ||
| He was the human resource director for a while. | ||
| When Rob Jacobson had quit, or got fired, when he put that EEOC complaint in, and Alex's dad was the human resources director who replied to that, or was quoted in press about it. | ||
| But I don't know if he has experience in human resources. | ||
| It seems like a strange hire. | ||
| Yeah, yes. | ||
| So I visited Infowars in 2016. | ||
| And yeah, there's not that much to say about it. | ||
| It was in like a kind of lock-up, like in a business park. | ||
| Yeah, we've been outside the studio before. | ||
| We've never gone in, but we've gone to the building sort of as a pilgrimage. | ||
| My parents live in Austin, so we've used that as an excuse to go and like... | ||
| I was really underwhelming. | ||
| I thought I would feel something being outside the studio. | ||
| I didn't feel anything. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| Joe Rogan's old place, I think it's obviously his move now, but his old place had a similar vibe. | ||
| It was like from the outside, you didn't know the magic that occurs. | ||
| That's probably for the best. | ||
| I mean, you don't want to put a neon sign up. | ||
| Crazy conversations happen here. | ||
| In the middle of destroying the world. | ||
| The question I think you were getting at is, did you ever meet Alex's dad? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| It's something interesting I always want to try and unravel, because my sense of it in the real world is just that his dad was a John Bircher from way back, and then all the rest of the stories are basically embellishments. | ||
| That's kind of what I think. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I always like talking with people who have some interest in this stuff that I'm very interested in. | ||
| Because it's not too common in my, let's say, personal life to have people who are willing to have an hour-long conversation about something like this. | ||
| A lot of times these topics are kind of dark or uncomfortable and people veer away from them a lot. | ||
| I actually had another question I wanted to get to. | ||
| In preparation for this, like I said, I re-watched the episode of The Secret Rulers, and one thing really stuck out to me as kind of chilling, and that was at the end of the piece, Alex is driving, and he's talking normally, and then he switches into performance mode. | ||
| Does he do that a lot? | ||
| You know, that was the one time that I could recall that I wasn't... | ||
| There. | ||
| It was just Alex and my cameraman, David Barker. | ||
| So I didn't know until I watched The Rushes that he'd done that. | ||
| Yeah, David goes in really close and Alex is doing this performance of like an English sort of chewing on a tongue. | ||
| Humanity is great! | ||
| Does he do that often? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I was surprised. | |
| My over... | ||
| My overwhelming sensation of thinking about being with Alex is his tirelessness. | ||
| I don't know anyone who's as tireless as he is. | ||
| When I went to visit him at Infowars in 2016, by the time he let me go, like 10 hours later or something, I was like, you know... | ||
| He's getting me to film shit with him and stuff like that, which you can imagine I really didn't want to do, but I wanted to interview him, and how could I not agree to that? | ||
| I was so exhausted. | ||
| I was like an empty husk. | ||
| I was like crawling along the Austin River, whatever it's called, back to the hotel. | ||
| And Alex... | ||
| And then you find out Alex did four more hours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| And he's phoning me, and he's being incredibly animated. | ||
| He never slows down. | ||
| Some of that might be drugs. | ||
| Or his supplements. | ||
| But also, back in his early days, that work ethic is insane. | ||
| The amount of work he had to put into doing his show, those documentaries back in the VHS days, that is not easy stuff to self-edit. | ||
| Although I'll tell you what, he didn't put very much time into, certainly with Dark Secrets inside Bohemian Grove, his Bohemian Grove film, was editing. | ||
| Jesus, he spends as much time at the baggage carousel at San Francisco Airport as he does sneaking into Bahamian Grove. | ||
| I did think this is someone who doesn't know what's interesting and what's not interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That one might have been rushed, though, too. | |
| You've got to hit that one out to the people quick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| How many times have we seen him do a pre-recorded thing and have so many mistakes in it? | ||
| It's like, you can do two takes, man. | ||
| You can do two. | ||
| True. | ||
| Yeah, maybe I'm giving him too much credit for the editing thing, because now that I think about it, a number of his documentaries are just him sitting at a desk. | ||
| But no, his work ethic is incredible. | ||
| Even back then, even in the 90s, it was like, after you've been with Alex for a couple of hours, you need to lie down. | ||
| In your time with him, did he ever say, like, oh, you have a point? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Did he ever even meet you halfway towards like, okay, I can see where you're coming from? | ||
| Well, that line on the telephone when I accused him of lying about something and he admitted it. | ||
| That was a moment like that. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| That is. | ||
| You're lying. | ||
| Well, you're not wrong. | ||
| You're not wrong. | ||
| But the big confrontation between us was about the meaning of the owl ceremony at Bohemian Grove. | ||
| And he was refusing. | ||
| I was outnumbered because Mike Hudson was sitting. | ||
| There were owls everywhere. | ||
| I remember the woods. | ||
| There are too many fucking owls here. | ||
| It's got to be dumb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what? | |
| I once said this and somebody corrected me. | ||
| But what I do remember being at Bohemian Grove when me and Rick were exploring was going into little wooden booths and there were stuffed owls, like owls in cabinets. | ||
| So I assumed the place was an owl sanctuary and that was the reason for the giant owl. | ||
| But I said that once and somebody said that wasn't true. | ||
| Do you know anything about that? | ||
| I'm not entirely... | ||
| No, I hadn't heard that. | ||
| I kind of always just assumed it was because Athena, the owl is her symbol, the goddess of wisdom. | ||
| I kind of just assumed that that was the connection. | ||
| Sort of a classical thing. | ||
| So the stuffed owls were just like a wildlife coincidence. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I want to try and do a live podcast at Bohemian Grove, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. | ||
| I don't know too much about the place other than what I've seen externally. | ||
| It's never really interested me too much. | ||
| I mean, I've always wanted to perform a human sacrifice in the middle of our show. | ||
| That would be fun. | ||
| There's stories about Bohemian Grove in the olden days. | ||
| The most interesting story about Bohemian Grove that I can remember is that... | ||
| Part of the Manhattan Project was planned there, or the people who wanted to do the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer, I guess. | ||
| Gave a speech to get support. | ||
| So there's a connection between Bohemian Grove and the actor. | ||
| I could see Jack Parsons being at Bohemian Grove very easily. | ||
| I would know that Nixon famously called it the faggiest place he'd ever been to or something along those lines. | ||
| Yeah, that was on that tape. | ||
| Yeah, that was great. | ||
| Good work, Nixon. | ||
| So there are those sort of really interesting connections. | ||
| But I don't know, do we have confirmation that Oppenheimer started the Manhattan Project there, or is that just lore? | ||
| You know what, without looking it up, I can't answer that. | ||
| But my feeling is that there is some documented evidence of that, but I can't say for sure. | ||
| Well, it is interesting. | ||
| I could kind of believe it almost as like a shark tank. | ||
| You know, like Bohemian Grove is like a shark tank for the powerful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Pitch your ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| They have these things called Lakeside Talks, which I guess are like TED Talks. | ||
| They're like seminars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like a trade show for billionaires to do. | ||
| Yeah, to sort of sell their work, like give either some sort of inspirational talk or sell the project that you try to do to the powerful people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like most things, it's actually really boring. | ||
| I just remembered one thing that stuck out to me, too, from Alex's obsession with old people peeing on the street. | ||
| There was a lot of peeing. | ||
| There was. | ||
| That can confirm. | ||
| All these old men peeing on the trees. | ||
| That happened. | ||
| But I feel like that's not weird. | ||
| I've been to, like, bonfires. | ||
| Okay, I think, again, this is something I can't remember whether I know for certain or whether I imagined, but I think it is true that there is a sort of, that is a Bohemian Grove thing. | ||
| It's about these guys. | ||
| There's like a sort of, there's a sort of mini, look, I've never said this out loud, maybe I'll be proven, maybe this isn't true, but I think, look, if you think about this ceremony, The cremation of care. | ||
| What it's all about is we are burdened with all the troubles of the world when we're in the marketplace. | ||
| We're very powerful men. | ||
| For this two-week vacation, we're going to burn our troubles. | ||
| And then all the troubles go full. | ||
| Fools, ye will not be able to burn me. | ||
| I will be back. | ||
| When ye return to the marketplace, will ye not find me waiting as of old? | ||
| Fools to dream, ye conquer care. | ||
| So anyway, so they do. | ||
| Well done, sir. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| So they throw him in the bonfire. | ||
| But if care is now conquered, does a kind of slightly Iron John type thing come over when they all get really drunken? | ||
| Piss all over the place. | ||
| That doesn't seem impossible to me. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I see it as just one of the guys who made the whole thing. | ||
| They're a bunch of old dudes. | ||
| There's some prostate problems. | ||
| He doesn't want to tell everybody. | ||
| It's part of the ritual. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I did say when I was there, there'd been like a drag show the night before. | ||
| And like all these... | ||
| You know, men were wearing these sort of, you know, absurd, oversized, you know, sort of misogynistic kind of smeared makeup stuff, because it's all men. | ||
| I think there's an argument that Bohemian Grove has not a massive amount of bacchanalia, but a little bit of, this is a place where you can cut loose and do things. | ||
| Like, not in a massive way, but in a little bit of a way. | ||
| I hate to go back to the pissing. | ||
| I may need to, just for the sake of, like, it's still, it seems like a side thing of the ritual of, like, letting go of care. | ||
| You know, like, it's one of the manifestations of letting go of, it's not like, hey, look, rule number three is we piss everyone. | ||
| But the reason that this sticks in my mind, it's because every time Alex talks about the elites mistreating us, Not every time, but very regularly he'll say, they piss on us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Going back and watching that, and it sticks out in his head so much that these people were peeing on a street. | ||
| It seems like a preoccupation of his, this piss thing. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I think that peeing is probably more of a thing at Bohemian Grove than you do. | ||
| I don't think it's like the main thing, but you've got a lot of... | ||
| Educated world business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe somebody can give us the answer. | |
| Now I'm dreaming that it is the main thing. | ||
| And a bunch of old rich dudes were just like, I'm sick of urinal! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I must be free to pee. | ||
| I'm willing to accept that it's more of a thing than I realize. | ||
| But I'm willing to accept that it's not. | ||
| Whichever way this goes, I think we're both fine. | ||
| One other question I had was, what was your experience of seeing Alex become that, like joining up with Trump? | ||
| Like when he became a Trump fan, did that seem as weird to you as it did to me? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I thought it was just the worst idea. | ||
| I thought, like, of all the people I've interviewed over the years, like, if you'd said to me, one of these people is going to have the ear of a president. | ||
| I would definitely have thought, I hope it's not Alex. | ||
| And you've hung out with Nazis. | ||
| Well, I hope it's not the Nazis either. | ||
| Well, unfortunately it's both. | ||
| I've also hung out with some kind of more inspirational people over the years. | ||
| So it came as a total shock, actually. | ||
| But even taking the proximity to power piece of it aside, one of the things that I've always thought about Alex is he was a Ron Paul guy for many years. | ||
| And that's a really fun thing to do because Ron Paul is never going to win. | ||
| It's never going to be an option for you to be the person who's alongside the elected president. | ||
| I wonder if the getting involved with Trump was because it seemed like this is an impossibility. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then it sort of backfired. | ||
| Well, I can speak a little to that. | ||
| Somebody was with Alex on election night 2016. | ||
| I don't know if he's ever told the story publicly or not. | ||
| So he probably has, but I shouldn't name him just in case he wouldn't want to be named. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But he told me that he was watching Alex as the results were coming in. | ||
| And when it was looking more and more likely that Trump was going to be elected, Alex was looking more and more worried, upset, overwhelmed, like he didn't. | ||
| Like his very first instinct was, I mean, who knows, but this isn't good. | ||
| I've made a very bad choice. | ||
| And he was drunk, and it was the culmination of a 52-hour marathon on InfoWars. | ||
| It was a disaster. | ||
| Did you watch it? | ||
| Yeah, I did, actually. | ||
| I did watch Election Night Live, and it was kind of heartbreaking. | ||
| For the reason that... | ||
| It's like Owen Schroyer, Alex Jones, Roger Stone, all drinking champagne. | ||
| And what they were doing, instead of celebrating Trump's win, really, was they were watching video streams of Hillary events where people were crying. | ||
| And, like, it was multicultural groups of folks crying, and then just a bunch of white people laughing and drinking champagne. | ||
| And just the... | ||
| Sort of juxtaposition of those images is something that's never really left my mind. | ||
| Makes you want to start fires, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it seemed really ugly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, you know, that tracks with the... | ||
| because they didn't enjoy Trump's win. | ||
| They didn't want Trump to win. | ||
| They enjoyed the win in so much as it created the thing they could laugh at. | ||
| It tracks with the story that he just told about Alex getting increasingly nervous is because later on when they're celebrating, they can't just be like, hooray, Trump won. | ||
| They have to fixate on something that they actually like, which is the tears of multicultural groups. | ||
| God, that's so depressing. | ||
| And it would have been a cash. | ||
| Bonanza if Hillary had won. | ||
| They would have been so perfect for business. | ||
| The best thing in the world, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a shame to see Alex turn the way that he did. | ||
| I remember we had one... | ||
| Alex was like, in my more recent stories that were sort of critical, Alex was like, why did you do that? | ||
| I feel like you turned on me. | ||
| And I sort of said to him, I was really... | ||
| All the stuff he says about DACA, it's kind of so upsetting to me. | ||
| I give college talks quite a lot because of the books I've written. | ||
| I've met a lot of DACA people. | ||
| I'm saying all of this. | ||
| What stuff would Alex say about DACA? | ||
| Awful things? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Get rid of it. | ||
| I mean, it's part of the globalist plot to replace all white men with people who will always vote Democrat. | ||
| Well, that's just, like, the take on all immigration. | ||
| Yeah, that's just standard. | ||
| Related issues. | ||
| Yeah, I met a bunch of DACA kids, like, at different colleges that I gave talks at. | ||
| I remember this kid had told me that she got the bus, this was like in the valley, and she lived in the other side of Los Angeles, and it's like she's on the bus for six hours a day so she can go to this college, I think that's kind of the reason why I needed to do so. | ||
| And he was like, you know, why did you do those stories? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh man, the amount of disgusting shit he said in the intervening time period between Bohemia and Grove and that is more than enough to justify whatever consequences may come. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I also remember him talking about you turning on him on his show. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Like, I got, like, one email. | ||
| Imagine, like, if that had happened before his deep platforming, I'd have got a lot more emails. | ||
| So what did he say? | ||
| I'm not sure if he ever said, like, called you out by name, but there was stuff about, like... | ||
| A journalist who lures you in with soft speaking and stabbed him in the back. | ||
| It was one of his petty grievance kind of discussions. | ||
| I always enjoy getting to tell people that Alex has talked about them in a particular way. | ||
| This is maybe the fourth person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've got a lot of them. | |
| Which again loops back to that I watch too much of this garbage. | ||
| I know this happened once or twice. | ||
| I've had like a couple of emails of people saying Alex is really going off on you now. | ||
| You know, well, A, he's got, like, every right to do that, and B, because he's been deplatformed, it isn't impacting my life very much. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Well, I mean, you just heard about some of it here. | ||
| I mean, it clearly didn't impact you at all. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| Several years later, yeah. | ||
| And, of course, Alex has got every right to do it. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| The very first time I met Alex, when he was, like, rebuilding David Koresh's church at Waco, He was with Beau Grites, who at the time was a big militia ex-army. | ||
| The rumour about him was that he had inspired the character Rambo. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which I'm sure isn't. | ||
| Well, I don't know if it's true or not, actually. | ||
| So, yeah, so Alex was like feeding with all of that sort of strange nexus of the military and conspiratorial belief that's not unlike the stuff I wrote about in the Men's State Goats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He would later turn on Beau Grites. | ||
| Alex definitely does not like that dude. | ||
| A little bit later on. | ||
| I think that there was a strong suspicion among a lot of people in the Patriot community that Beau was a Fed or something along those lines. | ||
| He fell out of favor with a lot of the... | ||
| Oh, I didn't know any of that. | ||
| The other guy who I met that day was Jack McGlan from Police Against the New World Order. | ||
| Did you ever come across... | ||
| Yeah, he's been on Alex's show quite a bit. | ||
| Yeah, he's a fairly regular guest. | ||
| He and Bogratz were the two people who talked... | ||
| Randy Weaver and his family out of the house during the standoff. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I didn't realize that Jack was one of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's nuts. | ||
| So that's how I first met Alex, was that I was making a documentary about Randy Weaver. | ||
| Well, part of my book, part of them, was telling the Randy Weaver story. | ||
| And Randy Weaver said to me that he'd never been to Waco. | ||
| And then we did some research and it turned out that some local radio guy was rebuilding David Goresh's church. | ||
| And so we went on a road trip to Waco. | ||
| And as we drove in, like Randy Weaver, I'm sure your listeners will know, like this tough Aryan nation's informant, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Honestly, when he saw Alex... | |
| He was like, he was like a teenage, like, and I realised that there was this guy in Austin who was really famous in, like, militia circles and white separatist circles. | ||
| People who use a lot of shortwave radios. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And really famous in, like, Austin hipster circles, because I went into a tuxedo store with him one time, and the guy in the store recognized him. | ||
| So he definitely, and who clearly wasn't, who clearly was listening to Alex in the same way that you guys listen to Alex. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So even back at the age of 26, he was, like, really famous in these, like, small circles. | ||
| But I never knew that he would have such money and power or proximity to power. | ||
| But I always knew that he was going to be the biggest conspiracy broadcaster in America. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can totally see how you would get that impression, but it's amazing to hear that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That that was your sense. | ||
| I was really thinking, like, were you aware, like, at the time? | ||
| I mean, obviously you weren't like, hey, I'm meeting the end of democracy. | ||
| But you got the sense that this guy is going. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, no question. | ||
| No question. | ||
| He's an electorate. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, no, I have no doubt. | ||
| I could never do what he does. | ||
| Like, the words flowing out. | ||
| His presumably improvised monologues. | ||
| How often does he repeat himself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always. | |
| That's a disappointment. | ||
| I think a lot of people who don't know, who just know from clips and stuff and don't listen to his actual show, probably get the sense that this guy's bouncing off the walls, saying all kinds of stuff. | ||
| He does repeat himself a bit, and it's kind of... | ||
| The show was quite monotonous at times. | ||
| But he has the ability to make it feel kind of new. | ||
| He sells the feeling kind of... | ||
| of excitement when he can. | ||
| And then sometimes he can't and he storms out of the studio. | ||
| Well, at the time, there was no competition. | ||
| The conspiracy VHSs were these really boring people sitting in public access with a big blow-up of the eye on the top of the dollar bill. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| David Icke was good, was sort of entertaining on stage, but no one near as entertaining as Alex. | ||
| And David Icke isn't a ball of charisma. | ||
| No, he's not. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| That's what he says. | ||
| That's one way of putting it. | ||
| The lizard theory is like a lot of fun to talk about and think about. | ||
| But David Icke would do these incredibly long, like six, eight-hour lectures, which were not... | ||
| Could you imagine being there for that long? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Just got a laser pointer out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| One time... | ||
| Riveting! | ||
| I was filming him in Froome in Somerset. | ||
| And we filmed it at the beginning. | ||
| This is David Icke. | ||
| So we filmed like an hour or something and then we thought, let's go and get dinner. | ||
| So we like drove right into the countryside to this lovely country inn and had like a lovely dinner. | ||
| It was like 10 o 'clock at night, but I met some people I hadn't seen in years, had a big chat, drank, decided to go back for like, you know, maybe see if we can get the final applause. | ||
| And just when we got back, David Icke was like... | ||
| So I'm just going to take a 15-minute break and we'll be back for part two. | ||
| You've made it back just in time for intermission. | ||
| Wait, where was I? | ||
| I'm going to have to start it from the top. | ||
| Art Bell, I think, was good. | ||
| You could listen to him. | ||
| He was a little less off the farm than someone like Alex or David Icke. | ||
| But you would humor those people, though. | ||
| You'd have David Icke on. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| So actually, there was no one quite like Alex Jones. | ||
| There was these mythological figures like that guy who wrote Behold a Pale Horse. | ||
| What was his name? | ||
| Bill Cooper. | ||
| But Alex... | ||
| But looking back now, it was clear that the conspiracy world was just waiting for some kind of charismatic person they could all lapse onto. | ||
| We've covered a couple episodes of Bill Cooper's show, The Hour of the Time, and I've listened to a number more of them. | ||
| And what's really interesting is that he... | ||
| He also lacks a lot of that excitement that Alex brings to the table. | ||
| And so it's even within the documentary conspiracy world, the radio conspiracy world. | ||
| Yeah, it was a vacuum that nature abhorred. | ||
| And Alex just flew in there. | ||
| Yeah, and people... | ||
| One of the things... | ||
| I was going to say, people were just desperate for it. | ||
| It wasn't like I listened to Alex Jones or someone else. | ||
| It was that Alex was like streets ahead of everyone else in terms of... | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's one of the problems with the present day, is that now that there aren't those impediments to being your own content producer, there are so many other people who have maybe flashy production or the ability to produce something quicker, maybe, to get a conspiracy theory out. | ||
| And it kind of... | ||
| Creates a competition in the marketplace of bad ideas that wasn't there before. | ||
| Yeah, that's very true. | ||
| But yes, in answer to that question, I knew that Alex was on the up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One thought I had is, you know, even back then, he's going to be huge or he's going to be a thing. | ||
| I have a conviction that I think that there will never be another person like him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you have a feeling about that? | ||
| Like, I don't think anyone could do what he's done. | ||
| I mean, the whole isn't there anymore, you know? | ||
| True. | ||
| But even after he's gone, I don't think anyone could replace him. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Because you had the other big voices. | ||
| I mean, obviously, Paul Joseph Watson doesn't have that level of, you know. | ||
| No, I can't think of anyone who's equitable. | ||
| And Paul would... | ||
| As bad as Paul is, he seems to have some restraint. | ||
| If you look at the Sandy Hook stuff, he was a voice who was saying, stop it, cut this out. | ||
| I heard you saying that in that episode with the lawyer, and I was really pleased to hear that. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't believe that just based on people talking, because they're all liars. | ||
| But there's actual emails from back then where Paul was trying to get them to. | ||
| And I think that with that... | ||
| That governor on him, you know, like not letting himself do these horrible things. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know if he could do what Alex does. | |
| I mean, to a certain extent, it's almost like you have to, now that you have seen Alex, then you know the Faustian bargain of like removing all governors, removing everything that would, you know... | ||
| Inhibit you. | ||
| And that is going to lead to where we are now. | ||
| So you already know how it's going to end if you choose to be Alex Jones, which is a fascinating thing for me. | ||
| Some people will take that bargain, but they just don't have the chops. | ||
| Yeah, well, see, there you go. | ||
| Speaking of things ending, maybe I should go now. | ||
| Speaking of things ending, bye! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Goodbye! | |
| I'm done! | ||
| I'm done! | ||
| It's been an absolute delight to talk to you. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| The idea when we started this show that this would ever be a conversation we would have, it's baffling to me. | ||
| It wasn't even close to something we thought was possible. | ||
| Well, I can't tell you the number of people who tweeted me. | ||
| What if you tweeted me to say you want to be a guest on the show? | ||
| The number of people who... | ||
| You've got to do this. | ||
| This is a great show. | ||
| People were DMing me, like people really big. | ||
| We did not know that. | ||
| Yeah, big journalists in this field were DMing me and saying, I can vouch. | ||
| These guys are great. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've got a great reputation. | |
| If you're not a journalist known in the field, stay out of John's DMs. | ||
| Don't harass the man. | ||
| Please, please don't harass anybody! | ||
| You've got a great reputation. | ||
| What did Chuck say to Alex that day? | ||
| We'll be talking a lot. | ||
| You're going to be very happy with me. | ||
| Your track record is amazing. | ||
| Your track record is amazing. | ||
| Well, thanks you guys. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| People can check out your new podcast. | ||
| It's on iTunes and everything. | ||
| All the places. | ||
| Things fell apart. | ||
| It's not on all the places. | ||
| I think it's only on the BBC and Apple Podcasts. | ||
| Right now, for the next couple of months, it's only on Apple Podcasts in the United States and BBC Sounds in the United Kingdom. | ||
| But in three months' time, it's going to be available everywhere. | ||
| But you can listen to it now on Apple Podcasts. | ||
| And Episode 7 connects. | ||
| Alex makes a very brief cameo. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| We're excited. | ||
| Hopefully it's loud and incoherent. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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