Today, Dan and Jordan check in with Mark Bankston, lead attorney for the Sandy Hook plaintiffs in the Texas litigations. In this installment, the gents get an update on various legal issues related to Alex including sanctions against his lawyer, thoughts about the bankruptcy, and Alex's bizarre retraction/apology video regarding Scarlett Lewis. Also, there's lizard news.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan. | ||
| knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's time to pray. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| I have a question for you, buddy. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| My bright spot today, Jordan, is I just came from a little bit of a hello, an old friend of mine. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Someone I started stand-up with back in Columbia, Missouri, who also moved to Chicago, and we had some good times here. | ||
| Now he's moved away, but he was visiting, and I got to see him while he was in town. | ||
| So I got to see my buddy Daniel Schar. | ||
| Shout out to him. | ||
| That's wonderful. | ||
| Delightful time. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| My bright spot is the new album by Jesse Weirdropped. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I thought you were going to say Jesse Smollett. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That'd be a great album, but it turns out it was written by somebody else. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I swear to you. | ||
| It doesn't, like... | ||
| Change anything about music, but it's the greatest episode of Soul Train you've ever watched. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| The album is everywhere. | ||
| It does everything from doo-wop to straight up. | ||
| There's a bass line from Discovery, from Daft Punk Discovery. | ||
| It's all in there, man. | ||
| Disco, disco, disco. | ||
| What if I've seen every episode of Soul Train? | ||
| Well, then you'll find that there's a better one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have a fun thing to do. | ||
| You had a wonderful interview that we had for Monday's episode. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Thank you very much, Deshaun. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, and I know that we have another interview today. | ||
| It's perfect timing, really, because Alex has been out of studio. | ||
| There's not stuff to cover. | ||
| I'm not going to do an Owen episode. | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| You know, we don't want to get too bullish on the 2004 episodes. | ||
| We don't want to have, like, three of them in a row. | ||
| We do not really stay the same track, guys. | ||
| We like to do something different all the time. | ||
| Like to mix it up. | ||
| Mix it up! | ||
| And so today, we are very thrilled to have with us, once again, the Tapestry King himself. | ||
| He's sitting in front of a tapestry. | ||
| The lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Sandy Hook case in Texas, Mark Bankston. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| It's good to talk to all the wonks out there again. | ||
| I'm sure they're thrilled to hear from you. | ||
| I'm sorry to label you the Tapestry King, but I have tapestry on the mind. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| No, essentially, I am always in front of a new one. | ||
| It's not the Pink Floyd one today, but this beautiful... | ||
| Abstractish mountain scene. | ||
| Hold on, now. | ||
| You just opened up a whole can of worms. | ||
| You're always in front of a new tapestry. | ||
| That's a question. | ||
| That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard anyone say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is this, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? | |
| I was not wrong. | ||
| I just got a new one myself, because I have behind me, I have a closet, and the closet door is mirrors, and I don't like that. | ||
| So I just got a new thing to put up over the mirrors, but I haven't hung it yet. | ||
| So anyway, it's fresh on the mind. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Nice to have you, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
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His main problem with the mirrors is he doesn't have a reflection. | |
| Talk about home furnishings the rest of the episode. | ||
| I got all sorts of things to talk about. | ||
| I want to talk decor. | ||
| So what's new, man? | ||
| What's been going on? | ||
| Good stuff is going on. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The world's been really good in the wake of everything that happened last year. | ||
| Got some exciting cases going on. | ||
| I just started working on a police shooting case that really makes me feel honored to have it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's one of those issues how... | |
| You know, no matter how much you press and how much you do in the streets or how much you try to do in the voting booth, you just can't seem to change it. | ||
| Police are killing people at a ridiculous rate and under ridiculous circumstances. | ||
| And the only thing that seems to be able to be changing some of these cities' behavior and how they're running their police departments or managing or training them is large lawsuit liability. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So which side of the case are you on this time? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's funny, Jordan. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people are listening and they're like, wait, Alex became a cop and shot somebody? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's adorable. | ||
| I think everybody knows who I would be representing in that situation. | ||
| It's a really nasty case. | ||
| Hopefully, we'll be announcing a lawsuit on it soon, so you'll probably see me in the news for that. | ||
| But yeah, we've been having some other really good stuff going on. | ||
| We were able to really take some good time off there towards the end of the year, which I desperately needed because I was overworked on so many other cases, including the Alex Jones thing. | ||
| But yeah, we're popping back into the swing of things right now. | ||
| Spring's in the air. | ||
| Just got my kid new. | ||
| We got a pair of new mini dirt bikes we're going to be riding around. | ||
| Garden's coming in. | ||
| You know, it's just... | ||
| Couldn't be better for me right now. | ||
| Spring has come to law town! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know, man! | |
| Snows of yesteryear melt away and ready for all new adventures, man. | ||
| I think I started this interview wrong by talking about tapestries. | ||
| Because I went to dirt bikes and gardens and I'm like, well... | ||
| Ratio Alger kind of territory. | ||
| What are you planting? | ||
| Oh, I definitely am, yeah. | ||
| So, I have, like, gosh, okay, you'll make me nerd out, because I know people like to hear about this kind of stuff, but I have what is basically a semi-Skyrim-themed garden. | ||
| Like, it's a wizard's garden with dragon statuary, and, you know, like, there's Viking shield, like, Skyrim-style Viking shield up there. | ||
| So, like, just this magical place for my kid to be. | ||
| You're gonna hide, like, cheese wheels around for him to find that are particularly heavy. | ||
| Okay, so, like, if you're really, I know y 'all are Skyrim people, so, like, it's kind of based upon how when you wandered around in Skyrim and you'd find, like, this weird, like, necromancer's altar where there would be, like, these flower gardens growing, and it would be these beautiful moonlit places with, like, and there's crystals laid out. | ||
| And a corpse? | ||
| Yeah, so we've got skulls. | ||
| Yeah, there's just like a skull there. | ||
| So yeah, we have a skull with Nordic runes runed into it, like lying in the garden bed. | ||
| And like, it's all to give it that kind of feel, like a legit dragon statue, the whole nine yards. | ||
| I don't know if you heard this, but Jordan thought that ebony was actually a rock. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's entirely Skyrim's fault. | ||
| I've never experienced ebony in the wild. | ||
| I've only experienced it in Skyrim, and if you can turn it into armor, it's not wood. | ||
| Yeah, it must be a smithable thing. | ||
| If it is wood, that's shitty armor! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Jordan got raked over the poles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got very insulted by it. | |
| So I'm down here in Houston, so, you know, it's all peas and beans alternating out on cycles. | ||
| Chili peppers, shit like that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, my son's getting into it now. | ||
| Yeah, we're having a good time. | ||
| That's some good family business right there, man. | ||
| That's some fun times. | ||
| So then in that case, now that we've done gardening, I feel like it's time to get an update on how... | ||
| How are the pets? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Don't even get me started on the damn pets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, gosh. | |
| We got a new addition to the family. | ||
| I'm so excited about this. | ||
| Oh, you got a new one? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| People who've been tracking along know that we have a Staffordshire Terrier, and we've got a little three-legged terrier, and then we've got two different crested geckos, a house full of fish, but we just added a giant blue-tongued skink to the mix. | ||
| And that sucker is so much fun. | ||
| I'm talking, this guy's like a little sausage with arms as big as my arm. | ||
| Oh, wow, that's a big skink. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, he's a good foot and a half, two feet long. | ||
| A big honking chungus of a lizard. | ||
| I used to chase those around back when I lived in Hawaii, but they were a bit smaller, the ones that I was experiencing. | ||
| Yeah, no, this is a full-blown Australian variety right here. | ||
| Some little bohemian lady up in New York just sits out in her country state and breeds these by the hundreds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And, yeah, mailed me down a skink to join the family. | ||
| So, yeah, we're adding to the zoo menagerie. | ||
| I appreciate that both of you are more well-traveled than me. | ||
| In the Midwest, I just assume that skink is some sort of racial slur of some sort. | ||
| It just kind of sounds wrong. | ||
| It sounds wrong to me. | ||
| It doesn't sound happy. | ||
| No, it's an uncomfortable word. | ||
| It's poorly chosen, and whoever named them should change it. | ||
| Yeah, I was down in Florida to give a talk about Alex. | ||
| When I was walking down a path, a lizard ran by me and I was triggered. | ||
| I just went back to my place as a child and I was like, I love them lizards. | ||
| Back to the secret garden. | ||
| So I'm jealous. | ||
| I'm jealous of your lizard friend. | ||
| But that's awesome. | ||
| I'm glad to hear about your... | ||
| Yeah, the burgeoning zoo. | ||
| Well, now that we've handled pets, I suppose now is the best time to get into what's been going on with the Alex Jones trial situation. | ||
| God damn it, Dan. | ||
| You were supposed to come in with another bit. | ||
| I thought that we had reached the end of that. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| And I thought you were going to use your newly flexed interview skills. | ||
| Mark, you're here. | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| I'm waiting for it, Jordan. | ||
| No, what's going on? | ||
| We're having a marital fight right now. | ||
| It's not a fight. | ||
| Jordan's been doing some interviews, and so now that we're now sort of in a conversation interview setting, I figured... | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, absolutely. | ||
| No, no, no, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Mark, let me ask you a question. | ||
| How's the wife doing? | ||
| Doing good? | ||
| She's fantastic, man. | ||
| I can't even... | ||
| Yeah, she's prosecuting colluders, doing what she likes to do. | ||
| Oh, no shit! | ||
| I did not know that your wife is also a lawyer. | ||
| Tell me more about this. | ||
| If I've really talked about this on the show, my wife is like a professional Captain Planet. | ||
| That's like what she does. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| She goes after polluters and those who would want to... | ||
| I mean, a lot of her cases right now, she works for Harris County, for City of Houston County. | ||
| And what she mainly goes after is water pollution and air pollution. | ||
| And it's strange because most, 99% of prosecutors you'll meet are people who go prosecute individuals for, you know... | ||
| Like, it's the state versus an individual. | ||
| And there's very few forums where, like, there's actually just a little bit of corporate accountability. | ||
| And thankfully, environmental justice kind of is one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So yeah, she's Captain Planet. | |
| She rules. | ||
| I've got a... | ||
| I've got to say, if she's actually Captain Planet, that means her paralegals are all children, right? | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| She has, yeah, an international baccalaureate group of kids with rings. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then when you bring up that she's a professional Captain Planet, I have to then reconsider my relationship with the childhood version, and I realize that the original Captain Planet, that's an indentured servant, basically, and able to make agency choices on his own, realistically. | ||
| It's part of an elemental. | ||
| Yeah, that's fucked up. | ||
| I thought it was funny that my wife is a public servant and you thought she had a paralegal. | ||
| That's kind of luxury only. | ||
| A private buccaneer like me enjoys. | ||
| Ah, I see, I see. | ||
| Alrighty, Mark, so you have allowed us to annoy you for about as long as I think any reasonable human being could. | ||
| I get the idea that the tangent itself is a bit, and therefore, yes. | ||
| One of the problems is we're recording a little bit late, so we're a little slap happy. | ||
| Yeah, we're a little loopy. | ||
| We can get in line. | ||
| We can focus. | ||
| Discuss. | ||
| I've spent the last six months in that state of mind. | ||
| In that time after the case? | ||
| Oh gosh, ever since I walked out of that courtroom, I've just been ridiculous. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Nothing can bother me. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You get the feeling of... | ||
| You accomplished something that you set out to accomplish for so long, right? | ||
| Like, that's already one of the feelings of it. | ||
| But you do it in this, like, really public way that was way more public than you even dreamed of it being. | ||
| And you knew it was going to be extremely public. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And coming off of that, like, yeah, you just... | ||
| And again, you could not live more of a fairytale moment in a movie than what you lived through. | ||
| That's what I mean about it, right? | ||
| It's not even just like, oh, the trial turned out a certain way or a certain thing turned out a certain way. | ||
| It turned out a certain way in also a certain two and a half minutes that was uniquely consumable by the entire planet. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a little weird. | ||
| It was a while getting used to that idea. | ||
| But now it just makes it like you're just coasting through. | ||
| A lot of I know your fans keep up with the hearings that we've been having. | ||
| We've been having some post-trial hearings. | ||
| We should definitely talk about that. | ||
| But what I find funny about it is they know me from those hearings. | ||
| But if they saw me in other hearings right now, I am the most relaxed, laid-back dude in the world. | ||
| Because I'm not dealing with the bullshit that I've been dealing with so much in this case. | ||
| I used to be such an aggressive young attorney, and now with so many other attorneys, I'm like, they'll pull something. | ||
| I'm like, eh, whatever. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| I've seen so much worse. | ||
| I know what actual madness is. | ||
| I've been down the river to see Colonel Kurtz. | ||
| I know what happened. | ||
| I think that's a really good question to ask you, though. | ||
| Yes, you've had this huge moment. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't get bigger than that. | ||
| Global, global, literally global moment. | ||
| Just like you couldn't script it. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's impossible, impossible. | ||
| And yet at the same time, it's not done. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It's that mix of catharsis and then the annoyance still continues somewhat. | ||
| It's going to be a weird push and pull. | ||
| Yeah, you came with a finger up your ass and they didn't take it out of your ass after like six months. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| We're a little slap happy. | ||
| You know, when I started the cases and I first brought them and it was just this thing that I concocted to do and I was out there all alone doing it. | ||
| And then as this has gone on, like, there was another case that joined, and then we had more families come in, and now we're in this bankruptcy. | ||
| Good God, there's so many people involved. | ||
| There's a bankruptcy judge, a U.S. trustee, a subchapter 5 trustee, individual attorneys for every corporate entity, attorneys for the families in Connecticut, the attorneys for down here, there's the attorneys for the Unified Creditors Committee. | ||
| I mean, there are so many damn people involved that for a trial lawyer, it's a weird feeling because I am now just a very small part of this. | ||
| Like, I am not. | ||
| There's anybody who right now has the sense of... | ||
| Oh, waiting for the story to end and thinking that, like, Mark Bankston is at the controls of the fighter pilot. | ||
| Like, nuh-uh, no, not anymore. | ||
| Like, I had control of my trial and my cases, and now it is a weird world we have entered in this bankruptcy court. | ||
| Well, actually, I mean, I heard from a very reputable source named Alex Jones that everything is pretty much resolved and it's gone great for him. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| You know, and the thing is... | ||
| Is bankruptcy court proceedings are meant to wrap up pretty quickly like they're supposed to go pretty fast and they haven't been able to and I everybody without me even saying it knows why they haven't yeah Well, I mean, maybe a pattern of behavior. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These things keep happening. | ||
| Like, oh, suddenly you find $7 million in assets you didn't. | ||
| I just found that. | ||
| And suddenly, oh, I'm making a deal with a third-party company to sell advertising on Inforz and pocketing it outside of the bankruptcy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoops. | |
| Got to deal with that. | ||
| Whoopsie. | ||
| You know, like you just live after another. | ||
| That happens to me all the time, though. | ||
| I accidentally find seven million dollars of stuff that I didn't know I had. | ||
| I mean, this apartment is just rumpled and filled with millions of dollars. | ||
| I believe that's what Elizabeth left that part out of the New York Times article. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, here's the difference between what we were doing in state court and what we're doing now, is that in state court, if you'd ask Jones... | ||
| Turn over the evidence on these certain topics you're supposed to produce. | ||
| And he didn't do it. | ||
| And he just gave you the middle finger. | ||
| You could just say, all right, fine. | ||
| Legal magic wand. | ||
| Those evidentiary matters are now taken as established. | ||
| We don't have to worry about that shit anymore because you've been just uncooperative, right? | ||
| But in the bankruptcy court, when he does that, you can't just magically wave a legal wand and create money, right? | ||
| You just can't go boom, poof, right? | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Fairy dust stuff going on there. | ||
| And so you really do have to drill down. | ||
| You really have to do all of these things. | ||
| And it is like pulling teeth, but the teeth are getting pulled. | ||
| I've always said and I continue to say, I don't know exactly how this ends, but it's ending. | ||
| And it's not in a way that Jones likes. | ||
| There's no version of how this plays out that is really good for Jones. | ||
| There's only a version of it in which it... | ||
| He's not a guy in a barrel of suspenders. | ||
| He has a life still, and he has the ability to have a career and make money and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But there's no version of this where Jones is laughing, carrying bags with dollar signs on them running out or something like that. | ||
| This is all coming into it. | ||
| What's interesting, because if you just have the view of it from his show, like I said, you have the forward-facing appearance that he puts on of, like, everything is cool. | ||
| We made it through the reorganization, and it's just a matter of you guys gotta keep giving me money. | ||
| So you got that, and then you also, at the same time, have him, like, disappearing, like, not being on the show, and having to go to hearings, and, like, pretending that's not what he's going to do. | ||
| So you have this, like, just from watching his show, you have this weird image of, like, there's trouble, but he's putting on a brave face. | ||
| And that I always find very interesting. | ||
| Any different than almost any company that is in Chapter 11 does? | ||
| They may be in Chapter 11, but they try to send out every signal to the world of, no, no, no, everything's fine. | ||
| Why would you support the business if you knew things were not good? | ||
| As we watch the banking system collapse, I think we all know what bad news does for you. | ||
| There's no question that what bankruptcy is designed to do is to keep the business operating while stuff's figured out. | ||
| You've got to figure out what to do here. | ||
| And so Jones has a bit of an advantage over other businesses that if other businesses are in Chapter 11 and very publicly are sinking into the ocean, that's going to scare off people from giving them money. | ||
| But with Jones' case, there are a good cadre of people out there who will throw money into the very tip of the Titanic sinking down. | ||
| They'll be doing it. | ||
| It might come back up. | ||
| They might float again. | ||
| Hey, Jim Baker got out of prison and went right back to work. | ||
| Probably more successful than before. | ||
| Probably more successful than before, yeah. | ||
| So that's actually my next question about whenever you brought up that there are so many people now added into this process. | ||
| How many of these people do you think are actually equipped to deal with what we're dealing with? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| We've spent years becoming equipped to this, and these people are still in this space of like, well, this is a bankruptcy as opposed to this is a cult leader exploding into a fire in front of us all. | ||
| No, yeah, everybody, as opposed to like some stages of this case. | ||
| Literally everybody involved, and I'm including the people who are representing Jones and his business entities at this time, like, everybody involved is incredibly sophisticated about what's going on. | ||
| And it's wild to me because these bankruptcy professionals are in their own universe, right? | ||
| Like, they're in front of this same small group of judges every day, day in, day out. | ||
| They are not playing around with reputations for Alex Jones. | ||
| Now, there may be things that Jones does and they have to go in there with egg on their face, but nobody there has any illusions about who Jones is and why he's a problematic debtor. | ||
| Everybody gets it. | ||
| It's an interesting thing that, yeah, you think, oh man, we've had to spend four years of getting up to speed on exactly how these people operate and whatnot. | ||
| The good news is a lot of people who've been involved in that process are still involved in the process. | ||
| A lot of the people in that mix. | ||
| U.S. trustee knows what's going on. | ||
| Judge knows what's going on. | ||
| Jones knows what's going on. | ||
| Everybody gets it at this point. | ||
| It's just a matter of... | ||
| There's really two sort of things that rub up against each other in any bankruptcy proceeding. | ||
| And it's one is the discovery and declaration and figuring out what the assets actually are. | ||
| And two, the creation of a bankruptcy plan that gets the creditors paid in such a way that Jones or any debtor in his position doesn't decide to just say a pox on all your houses, go nuclear. | ||
| Destroy everything, including all of his... | ||
| He has some abilities to... | ||
| He's sitting there at the end of the track. | ||
| He can jump if he wants to. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| It's not rational to jump, though. | ||
| So I don't think he's going to jump. | ||
| Would that just be destroying his businesses? | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of different ways that could go down. | ||
| But yeah, exactly. | ||
| If this can't get resolved through a bankruptcy, if that can't happen... | ||
| Then they would have to get resolved outside of the bankruptcy. | ||
| If the bankruptcy gets dismissed or however that ends up wrapping, where there is no discharge of whatever these debts are, then it has to go back into state courts and they've got to resolve those ways through collection. | ||
| And none of these options of how the different things could go, none of them are good. | ||
| Like, none of them, like, they all suck. | ||
| When you said if it can't be resolved in a bankruptcy, it's got to be resolved another way, I just think of, like... | ||
| Well, street fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I checked my watch. | |
| I guess we're getting on a flight here in a couple of weeks. | ||
| I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| When you're in that route and there's no bankruptcy and you're talking about collecting on verdicts that you've had, you're talking about having sheriffs show up and seize the stuff and sell it at auction. | ||
| That's what you're talking about. | ||
| Look, you do that, there's no future. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| If free speech systems is liquidated, that's it. | ||
| Jones is going and doing something else. | ||
| Jones is not going to create more for free speech systems for you to come take in the future. | ||
| In other words, Jones could be in a situation where he could say, I don't care that I am a guy in a barrel of straps as long as everybody's a guy in a barrel of straps. | ||
| That doesn't even make any sense because there's assets there. | ||
| They can be seized. | ||
| Jones would have to do something completely irrational, not for this to somehow resolve in a way of bankruptcy where he is brought to heel. | ||
| Here's what I'm thinking. | ||
| With your saying if InfoWars and Free Speech Systems is liquidated, Alex is doing something else, this brings up the attempt at Alex Jones Live. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That got shut down real quick. | ||
| We haven't talked since that came about, and I don't know. | ||
| If you had any, not involvement, but if you watched anything happen with that very clear attempt to create something that was completely separate from Infowars. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, you've got to understand that our side in the UCC, the Creditors Committee, brought that to the attention of Jones' lawyers in the court. | ||
| I mean, I can't speak. | ||
| What I can say is that has stopped. | ||
| Jones' attorneys have a church. | ||
| The judge didn't go like, oh, you got us this time. | ||
| Right, yeah, no. | ||
| He did say it was totally unrelated like three times. | ||
| We'll see you in Arkham Asylum. | ||
| You keep seeing things in this bankruptcy that, I'll put it this way, they look really bad. | ||
| They look like Jones is doing something to try to defraud his creditors or whatnot. | ||
| But it is always in such its infancy and so It's not that there are attorneys who are twirling mustaches and finding ways to scheme and hide his money or something like that. | ||
| At this point, he's in a state of desperation on some of these issues because he's just trying to shove money under the mattress wherever he can. | ||
| Here's the greatest piece of evidence that we are not in collusion, you and I. You say that you brought it to the attention of the lawyers that Alex was doing this Alex Jones Live thing. | ||
| If we had collaborated and I had any pull on this, I would have said, hold off for a second. | ||
| Alex is planning on doing a painting show. | ||
| We gotta do a painting show. | ||
| Everybody, calm it down. | ||
| We're all gonna pretend. | ||
| We're all gonna pretend. | ||
| We're all gonna live in a space where it's like, oh, you fooled us, Alex! | ||
| There's no way! | ||
| He's planning on doing a Bob Ross style painting show. | ||
| And then he does an Alex Jones Bob Ross show, and now we're all happy again. | ||
| You guys ruined that for me. | ||
| You basically did, yeah. | ||
| We're not always happy with the lead plaintiff of the... | ||
| Well, hey, look, when you see a leak in the bathroom, we've got to shut it down before the floor is full of water. | ||
| That's just how it is. | ||
| I think that's where I want to go next. | ||
| The creditors. | ||
| Look at these interview chops. | ||
| Sorry, sorry. | ||
| My interview chops of cutting you off. | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| I've got a question! | ||
| I'm feeling so vulnerable, Barbara Walters. | ||
| Like, I don't know how you do it. | ||
| Jesus Christ, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm just keeping it up to you. | |
| As far as the setup goes, like, what I'm hearing from you about the bankruptcy plan is that its idea is to allow Infowars to continue operating so that the business itself can continue paying. | ||
| The people of which it owes insurmountable amounts of money, right? | ||
| I suppose that's one way this could end, right? | ||
| That's not necessarily how it ends in bankruptcy, no. | ||
| Bankruptcy can liquidate that company. | ||
| I think that's what you're describing as the way Alex would want it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I'm asking, yeah. | ||
| Let me add the caveat that, once again, I am a very smart part of this process. | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| I'm speaking of this in the 50,000-foot view of... | ||
| How does this play out in traditional bankruptcy strategy? | ||
| Things like that. | ||
| In terms of on the ground, what a bankruptcy plan even... | ||
| Like, 90% of what's in a bankruptcy plan would be, like, trying to get me to understand a manual on brain surgery. | ||
| Like, that's a different language. | ||
| Like, I'm not qualified to even have opinions on that, right? | ||
| So what... | ||
| And even the questions of ultimately what happens to the parties. | ||
| Like, how is... | ||
| How are... | ||
| Because the question is how to best... | ||
| Guard the interest of the debtors while at the same time maximizing the recovery of the creditors. | ||
| It's supposed to do that. | ||
| Often those two things are going to be in conflict and you don't know which one's going to give, right? | ||
| So there's so many different ways a bankruptcy plan could be implemented. | ||
| And it would depend on also the amount of assets. | ||
| And whether some of those are legally exempt and what the parties decide the debts are dischargeable. | ||
| Because you have to remember, you're still just talking about Jones and free speech systems in bankruptcy. | ||
| There are other entities in the mix, too. | ||
| There are fraudulent conveyance lawsuits out there. | ||
| This thing is a giant, complicated ball of wax. | ||
| And so I have learned that it has now entered a tarot. | ||
| I'm a trial lawyer. | ||
| I go get a verdict. | ||
| I go to the insurance company. | ||
| They write me a check. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| We move on. | ||
| But now I realize I've entered a world that is so labyrinthine and arcane and full of weird ceremonies of lawyers spinning in circles three times and shaking hands and putting I don't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it sucks, but that's how you deal with the intractable problem of you have a rich guy, now how do you get his money? | ||
| It's not an insurance company. | ||
| The answer is this weird arcane process, which is not good for him. | ||
| I was thinking you hit him with a giant ball of wax. | ||
| Just nail him with a giant ball of wax. | ||
| I mean, he's the one who made the giant ball of wax. | ||
| You just let it roll down the hill and see what happens. | ||
| Wax ball street fight. | ||
| Wax ball street fight. | ||
| The thing I've learned as a lawyer, and this case underscores it more than any other perhaps, is that retribution really feels nice when it happens, but it's pretty meaningless for the people who are hurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And at the end of the day, it's crass because it's America, so money's the only way we compensate. | ||
| Like, that's what compensation is measured and in value. | ||
| But, like, there's no question that after everything that these people have gone through, they deserve to not have him profit from it, and they deserve those profits. | ||
| And, like, that's, it's just, it's pulling teeth to make that happen, but it will happen. | ||
| If there's one thing, again, that I can emphasize, the only thing that I can really state with certainty about the bankruptcy, because so much of it is beyond my pay grade, is that he's not going to be running away with the bags of the money on it. | ||
| This is not going to be Alex Jones laughing at the end of it of how well he did. | ||
| That's not how this works. | ||
| The process is not something that you can wiggle through, is the sort of sense that I get. | ||
| I think the underlying sense of frustration that might arise from a lot of people... | ||
| After seeing this, is that Alex Jones is going to lose a lot of money, but what they may be disturbed by is just how much money some of the people involved in the bankruptcy itself, like those lawyers who now represent him and his entities, how much did they make? | ||
| I mean, when you start seeing some of these disclosures, I saw a lawyer who was representing Alex personally. | ||
| Did, like, a $500,000 retainer. | ||
| I saw there was another one representing Free Speech Systems who had a million dollars in pre-petition conduct. | ||
| I just saw a thing about the CRO, the chief restructuring officer that they hired for Infowars LLC, submitted a bill. | ||
| And, like, again, hundreds of thousands of dollars. | ||
| But isn't that even, like, not a real company? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| A guy who... | ||
| Like, and we even mock it that much, but, like, even for the bankruptcy purposes and for the CRO, they went and just rented a weird office, an empty office in Victoria, Texas, stuck two desks and a chair in it and said, boom, now that's a company in Victoria. | ||
| We're filing the bankruptcy in Southern District of Texas. | ||
| And, like, that's not... | ||
| Like, if you hear that and you see it portrayed in some movie or something, you're like, this is mass fraud. | ||
| Like, you are comically portraying mass fraud by showing an empty rental office in each doctor. | ||
| No, this is an absolutely sanctioned and totally kosher practice. | ||
| This is Saul Goodman business. | ||
| I'm really surprised people don't like lawyers on the whole. | ||
| It's really strange to me that the profession as a whole is denigrated based entirely upon the behavior of all the people who do it. | ||
| Present company, Jordan. | ||
| Hey, hey, come on. | ||
| You're my favorite lawyer. | ||
| As this goes on and continues longer and longer, I am imagining from your standpoint, it becomes less likely that these other cases like Posner and Fontaine that are on hold are ever going to see court. | ||
| I don't know if that's your sense. | ||
| What are your feelings on that at this point? | ||
| You know, everybody has to... | ||
| There's so many people who... | ||
| Want to know the answer to that question. | ||
| And then there's a smaller group of people closer to me, including Lenny and Veronique, who need to know the answer to that question. | ||
| And I don't have an answer to that question. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Look, it obviously depends on whether this can functionally end in bankruptcy court. | ||
| And if it can, then there's no positive trial. | ||
| If it can't, then I think there kind of has to be. | ||
| And it's not something... | ||
| You necessarily want to have happen because it's not that productive to go those routes and whatnot. | ||
| But on the same level, you actually do want it to happen because Lenny Posner's never had a story told in a courtroom. | ||
| I tell you, that's an important thing to clients is their day in court. | ||
| It emotionally meant so much to Neal and Scarlett. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks. | ||
| I don't know whether that's going to happen. | ||
| People ask, When I was early, first getting into the bankruptcy, my instinct was, no way, that trial's never happened. | ||
| Like, you would have to have a completely irrational outcome for that trial to have happen. | ||
| But then, like, I keep thinking, like, that's exactly what has happened every step of the way, is something completely irrational. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're in crazyville. | ||
| Yeah, that is kind of my, but that goes back to my question as far as people that are equipped to handle this, because I feel like that you're elucidating why no one is equipped to handle this. | ||
| Because at every step of the way, every one of you assumes someone will make a rational choice. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| I mean, there is some of that, but how can you possibly structure things otherwise? | ||
| Because otherwise you're guessing at the irrational choices and you'll never hit those either. | ||
| But that is the problem, though, is everybody is allowing him to make so many choices. | ||
| He should have zero choices now. | ||
| He gets to take the lead with the originality as opposed to responding to... | ||
| No, he should have no lead. | ||
| No agency whatsoever. | ||
| See, here's what I'm thinking. | ||
| What are you thinking? | ||
| We need quite a bit of nonsense judge. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We need a chaotic judge. | ||
| None of this no-nonsense, all-nonsense judge. | ||
| Yeah, keep Alex on his back foot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Yeah, it scared the hell out of him, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He's a complete maniac, right? | ||
| Somebody who forces Alex to, like, wear one of those chains with a very heavy ball attached to it. | ||
| Jack Mills Lane, let's get him in there. | ||
| I will push back on this, though, this idea, like, that Alex at present has say in a lot of things, like, or has control or anything like that, because he really is in a bag right now in any of the financial prison. | ||
| Like, you gotta think, if you're Alex Jones... | ||
| Do you really want to have every expenditure of dollar you make personally or in your business have to be approved by a group of lawyers in a court? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, the argument against that, though, is that 99% of this world lives in a place where that prison is the happiest, nicest, most wealthy place they've ever existed in. | ||
| Look, there's no question that Jones is being allowed to live at a fairly high standard of living, right? | ||
| As most debtors in that situation are, but substantially less than what he was. | ||
| I mean, he is not... | ||
| The tightening of the belt on Jones has been pretty impressive. | ||
| Look, there are still some things that... | ||
| Look, I saw, for instance, some people were complaining about... | ||
| I think it was something like $30,000 a year in housekeeping. | ||
| If you pay your housekeeper less than $30,000 a year, if you're the kind of person who has a housekeeper and you pay less than $30,000, I look down on you. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| If you have a full-time housekeeper and you pay them less, that sucks. | ||
| You're exploiting labor. | ||
| I agree on that front. | ||
| So there are some expenses in there. | ||
| What about the $10 million for his cat? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mushu's a $10 million cat. | |
| I love that cat has now decreased in value, depreciated quite rapidly to $199 or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, once you take him off the lot, they're just, you know. | ||
| He did put out that video where he was yelling about how everyone wanted, or the court wanted to take his cat away. | ||
| Yeah, he fundraised off of that. | ||
| There are, like, Save Mushu promo codes you can use and stuff like that. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| He's a pro. | ||
| Yeah, so. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think things are looking good there on that front. | ||
| And then the other thing I wanted to make sure to update you about, because this is kind of big news, I know a lot of the fans have been following the sanctions hearings versus the attorneys, right? | ||
| And a complicated explanation, but basically there's a time limit that is running in Heslin, or actually it ran out a few days ago. | ||
| For when the court has to enter any final orders after judgment and wrap up the case before it's all kind of set in set with a bow. | ||
| And so Judge Gary Gamble issued orders on the sanctions versus Andino Raynell. | ||
| Still has the sanctions on Eric Taub, are still sitting out there, and those can be ruled on later. | ||
| But she actually sanctioned Andino Raynell to pay the Neil and Scarlett $100,000. | ||
| And then if he appeals that order... | ||
| To the Court of Appeals and loses, he has to pay another $55,000. | ||
| And if he appeals that order to the Texas Supreme Court and loses, then he has to pay another $62,000. | ||
| So it's sort of... | ||
| And these are all expenses relating to the trial preparation and bankruptcy, the fact that the trial was moved in April from when it was originally... | ||
| So all these expenses that are related to that. | ||
| If I remember correctly, also the first bankruptcy, that was sort of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| That's what I mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So Neil and Scarlett's case was originally scheduled to be tried in late April 2022. | ||
| And days before that trial was scheduled to start, they filed a bankruptcy. | ||
| But it was a scam bankruptcy. | ||
| Yeah, he still owes me for the plane tickets that we bought that we didn't use. | ||
| I didn't get that in the sanctions hearing. | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| I got arms. | ||
| Neil and Scarlett get paid. | ||
| I'll live. | ||
| You can eat that water. | ||
| Judge Gary Gamble wasn't about to let them get stuck with those kind of expenses after the bad faith of that. | ||
| It was pretty ridiculous what happened. | ||
| I got to say, for an attorney, every now and then you'll see some sanctions where a court will say, I'm going to slap your wrist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to hit you with $5,000, $10,000 in sanctions and stuff like that. | |
| I've never seen a six-figure sanction against an attorney. | ||
| I've seen it against a law firm. | ||
| Say you've got a case like Apple versus Samsung and you've got two mega law firms going against each other and one seriously covers up evidence. | ||
| You can get a million-dollar sanction against that law firm for all of the legal work that occurred over the course of years. | ||
| Or, hell, in this case, right, when Jones hit his, like, fifth sanction, and the court was like, all right, well, screw it. | ||
| You don't have to pay for any of the discovery you've ever undertaken in this case. | ||
| And so that was a million dollars in sanctions that Jones paid. | ||
| But with Reynald, I have to pay $100,000, you know? | ||
| And if he appeals and messes it up, he could be looking at close to a quarter million out of his pocket. | ||
| And in some cases... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like a lot. | |
| It is a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a lot. | |
| Think about how much he got paid by Alex, though, too. | ||
| I mean, he's still ahead for the trial, right? | ||
| We kind of know how much he got paid by Alex because he had to file his contract with the bankruptcy court. | ||
| So we know that upon retention, he got paid $100,000 for the retention. | ||
| And then for the months that he actually represented Alex, for instance, like it was cut off if the bankruptcy, like there was a clause in the contract that said if there's a bankruptcy and Dino's not working basically, then he doesn't get paid. | ||
| But then, so when he comes back though, then he gets paid another $100,000 for the month. | ||
| So we know that for when he was retained in March, up until April of the bankruptcy, there's $100,000 right there. | ||
| And then it comes back and it goes to trial in July, you know, late July to early August. | ||
| That's another month. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| So you're looking at $200,000 through the trial. | ||
| That's half of it then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he has to give up half of his fee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I thought I was picturing it as he made a bit more from Alex. | ||
| Yeah, well, once he said that one place was $400,000 or $500,000, you know, that kind of thing. | ||
| We may find out when Alex makes certain disclosures in the bankruptcy court later about what Indino has been paid since then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can reasonably understand exactly why everyone is furious about that, because it seems as though if you're going to punish somebody, you have to take their entire fee and then punish them. | ||
| You have to take some of their fee. | ||
| That's you taking a cut of their fee. | ||
| Do you understand why people think that way? | ||
| Look, here's the deal. | ||
| If I'm sitting there after a trial and I have $100 and you come and you take $50 out of my wallet as a punishment, that's going to be a serious deterrent for me doing that kind of work again. | ||
| I wouldn't be thrilled. | ||
| Unless you normally make $25. | ||
| If you normally make $25 and this time you make $50, that's arbitrage, baby! | ||
| This is the kind of lawyer who trades on this kind of level. | ||
| Taking this kind of hit is not great. | ||
| There was some level of me that I thought, man, I don't know how much this court is really going to come after this attorney because, good God, has he suffered in his public image. | ||
| I can't think of an attorney who is broader known to a public audience as having made a big screw-up publicly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The idea that he... | ||
| He was the butt of all of those jokes. | ||
| That he was all of that. | ||
| That there are social media memes of him that will live on forever. | ||
| That he's constantly... | ||
| People will recognize him from the picture of him and Alex turning around really quick. | ||
| He's in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's forever. | |
| You don't walk away from that. | ||
| And that was already a big hit. | ||
| And then he takes this embarrassment up in Connecticut and gets his license suspended up there. | ||
| To now take a sanction on top of that. | ||
| Man, that's rough. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird. | ||
| You almost think maybe the reputational in-kind sanction may be even more than the actual sanction. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Did he also get divorced because of this? | ||
| Let's just add in as many different possible terrible things. | ||
| Mark stole his lizard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know that this was the cause. | |
| He's the skink now! | ||
| But immediately before Reynold took on... | ||
| I mean, I can't imagine. | ||
| You know, I remember talking to a lawyer who was involved in this case, whose name I won't say, who had mentioned that after getting out of the case that they had paid a significant amount of money to try to have search engine optimization. | ||
| A lot of what was going on. | ||
| Smart. | ||
| But a guy like Raynaud, he'll never be able to get away from it. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| That's true, but I'm not sure his name itself is a household name, but you're right about the images and memes and stuff. | ||
| Look, if you're going to be hiring a criminal defense lawyer of that profile, you're going to be paying... | ||
| I mean, he's a guy who wants to go out and charge $800 an hour for his work or something. | ||
| You're going to Google that guy before you sign the paperwork, and you're going to have to be comfortable with what you find on Google, and that's going to hurt. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a big penalty. | ||
| The actual money, it is a big thing. | ||
| That's a big hit to have to write that out of your check. | ||
| And because in a lot of cases, if you're a lawyer and you get sanctioned, you're usually doing it because you did something on your client's behalf. | ||
| And so you can tell your client behind the room, like, hey, you're going to pay this sanction. | ||
| You're going to pay me the money to pay this sanction. | ||
| He can't do that because Jones is in bankruptcy. | ||
| And they'd have to ask the bankruptcy court to let Jones pay for Rayna. | ||
| No, that's never happened. | ||
| And even without the bankruptcy. | ||
| Alex isn't paying that. | ||
| Well, you say that, man, but he has bled money into his attorney's hands over the course of these last four years. | ||
| If you can say, one of the nice things about the fact that we've been able to... | ||
| Kick these people off the carousel, like, in a revolving way, like, constantly, is nobody has really spent that much time on the carousel. | ||
| So it's not like any one of these 24 lawyers is going to walk away with a giant reward off the end of this case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| Some of these bankruptcy lawyers are getting paid quite a bit. | ||
| But if there had just been one lawyer throughout the whole case, that guy would be the winner or woman, though I can't even imagine a woman representing Alex Jones. | ||
| That, like, fries myself. | ||
| I can't even imagine. | ||
| Didn't he have that one woman for a bit? | ||
| It was at least in the definition. | ||
| Oh, you're absolutely right. | ||
| There is a woman in the trial court mix. | ||
| There was Jacqueline Blot. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was, I mean, well, that's, if I had to picture a kind of woman who would write that, she's it. | ||
| There's so many people who are on this carousel, you forgot. | ||
| Yeah, no, you're not lying about that, man. | ||
| I mean, we had a sanctioned period where I literally counted them off for the court. | ||
| Like, we listed them all out because it became an issue on this. | ||
| And if you count the people who are now involved in the bankruptcy, we're talking 24 lawyers. | ||
| I think we were at 14 when we hit Raynaud at trial. | ||
| I mean, it's good. | ||
| None of those people had that concentration of getting all of that bleed. | ||
| It's like you have this image of those remoras or whatever that attach to sharks. | ||
| One of these little things attached to this big, bloated Alex Jones shark. | ||
| And you know who came out ahead? | ||
| Probably the biggest winner is media star Bobby Barnes. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I'd say it's either him or Randonzo, right? | ||
| One of those two, probably. | ||
| That's the fucked up part of this that is really fucking with my head, is that Erica Lafferty has a GoFundMe now. | ||
| Erica Lafferty has a GoFundMe for cancer treatment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're right. | |
| And there are, I suppose, the shittiest people on the planet making hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars every single day. | ||
| I mean, obviously not every single day, but you know what I mean. | ||
| The point stands. | ||
| Like, it is incredibly fucked up. | ||
| And that's part of why I say that nobody at the bankruptcy court is equipped to handle this is because that's absurd. | ||
| Every part of this is absurd if Erica Lafferty has a GoFundMe. | ||
| Because in theory, Alex owes her millions of dollars. | ||
| Alex owes her millions of dollars. | ||
| Alex should be paying for that. | ||
| Like, the bankruptcy court should not exist unless it's paying that GoFundMe. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, that doesn't exist in a world that makes even half of the sense that it should. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, none of the... | ||
| You can see why people are frustrated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, I'm one of them, but maybe it's just that I've lived inside this system long enough to know that the little bits and pieces that you can tear from unconsensual hands is about the only justice you really ever get. | ||
| And here, this one ain't bad yet. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, look, you've got everything that the public trial was meant to do, it did. | ||
| And then now you have a situation where Jones has been punished. | ||
| Really severely and will eventually – it's going to have to pay a giant ton of money. | ||
| But it isn't complete because you're right. | ||
| There's all these things that permeate it that are endemic to our system about how people with wealth can operate through it and how the legal profession exists to sort of just skim off the top of that whole process. | ||
| It sucks, man. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I really, I'm glad to have brought, and now I've gotten, like, I've brought sanctions against two different lawyers who I've got up against the ropes. | ||
| So at least they're paying some of that consequence. | ||
| But you're right, there's a giant cast of characters here who will shrug this off and move on to their next project. | ||
| And it, it's a bigger problem that I'm equipped to handle, but, you know, at least I feel like... | ||
| Yeah, I realize that yelling at you to fix it probably isn't going to do it. | ||
| Again, though, those interview chops. | ||
| Let me try this. | ||
| Fix it! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did that work? | |
| Did that one work? | ||
| Do you have the power now? | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| So there's another thing that I wanted to bring up. | ||
| You were saying earlier, when I was asking you about the other possible trials, you were saying that it's something that is very important for plaintiffs, especially in this sort of circumstance, to have their day in court and be able to say to Alex's face, like, this is... | ||
| This is my experience. | ||
| This is the truth of things. | ||
| And it was wonderful to be there and see Neil and Scarlett's ability to stand up to him and what have you. | ||
| But Alex decided to try and steal that a little bit with his story that he told about Scarlett crying and telling him that he was right about everything. | ||
| And recently we discovered an apology video that he put out that you featured prominently in, or a letter that you sent him was featured in this. | ||
| And I wanted to ask you about it because this was not something that I felt really got publicized at all. | ||
| I'm not saying that's a shortcoming on you or anything, but like... | ||
| I pay attention to Alex quite a bit, and it wasn't something that was in the news. | ||
| I didn't see anybody tweeting about it. | ||
| There wasn't any real coverage of Alex makes a pathetic and sort of backhanded apology retraction video. | ||
| I found that really interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the people – I think some of the mainstream have like approached a level of thinking that he's pathetic in the aftermath of this, that they're not going to focus any more attention and maybe they found it too granular. | |
| Yeah, lay it out. | ||
| Please, please. | ||
| You know, what went on the trial, essentially, was there was a period where Jones went on his show and said, you know what, maybe, I think I was probably wrong about Neil Heslin. | ||
| Neil Heslin seems like he was a real person. | ||
| And then he says that Neil, he says, well, the reason I was fooled, like, I understand this now because, you know, he's slow. | ||
| He's on the spectrum. | ||
| He's autistic. | ||
| And he's being manipulated by some very bad people. | ||
| And he's really slow, but his wife is not. | ||
| She's sharp. | ||
| And these bad people are manipulating him to say these things. | ||
| Because at this point, Scarlett hadn't testified, right? | ||
| Is manipulating him to say all these things and all this. | ||
| So essentially what the message here is, is that Neil's a dumb guy, has some sort of intellectual disability, and that his evil ex-wife Scarlett has... | ||
| Gotten with these evil plaintiff's attorneys and some, I don't know, like some people from Mike Bloomberg's office or, you know, some of those people. | ||
| Definitely bloomy. | ||
| Done some, like, crystal hypnosis on Neil or, like, whatever, like, manipulated him in some way. | ||
| That was... | ||
| That was definitely the underlying subtle message. | ||
| It was unspoken. | ||
| He's really good at that, man. | ||
| He's so good at doing that without saying it, right? | ||
| Like, textually saying it. | ||
| But he says it with these weird things of, like, these weird juxtapositions of, like, he's slow, the wife is not, like, here's what's going on. | ||
| It's like, she's a real person. | ||
| You know, she is. | ||
| But also, I'm going to insinuate that she's really sneaky and coping with these lawyers. | ||
| Yeah, and it pissed both my clients off because both Neil and Scarlett, the truth is they're both really sharp. | ||
| And for Scarlett, she knew immediately what he was saying. | ||
| And for Neil, it was upsetting because, like, I don't know, Neil and Scarlett, they have a great relationship on some level, but all people who are not married, right? | ||
| And Neil's like... | ||
| The idea that Scarlett's going to manipulate me? | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| Stupid. | ||
| Stupidest thing I've ever heard. | ||
| I'm not going to let that woman manipulate me. | ||
| I'll manipulate her. | ||
| And Scarlett was really unlike Mark. | ||
| I feel like even now, even now when he's supposedly saying it's real, Neil is real, he can't help himself but say that I'm Deep State. | ||
| That I'm... | ||
| That's what I am. | ||
| It's like, maybe that I'm... | ||
| She was like, look, maybe even that I'm a real bum or whatever, but that I'm part of a deep state thing that's manipulating Neil or something. | ||
| And she was just so in on it. | ||
| And she was like, look, Mark, can I talk about it on the stand? | ||
| And I said, look, talk to Wes. | ||
| He's in charge of your... | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| That's between y 'all two. | ||
| So her and Wes went and had a conversation about... | ||
| Should we play this clip? | ||
| And they decided, yeah, we needed to play this because she wants to talk about how she felt about what was said about Neil and how that related to her. | ||
| And so it was a good little moment. | ||
| Well, Jones takes this and he, in his mind... | ||
| He's like, well, look, I said Neil was real. | ||
| I said it really happened. | ||
| So the lawyers are lying to her. | ||
| I said it happened. | ||
| So that has to be right. | ||
| So there was a point in the trial, of course, where Scarlett went up and handed him a bottle of water after he was coughing through the whole testimony. | ||
| Well, actually, there's another thing. | ||
| When Alex was on the stand, he said, you need to go watch my show to see the full context of this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's an important part of his argument. | ||
| Yeah, I was trying to point to Scarlet and be like, these lawyers are tricking you. | ||
| You need to go watch it. | ||
| And she's like, I've watched the segment. | ||
| I know what you said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not that long of a segment, really. | |
| And so he was trying to put... | ||
| And so what Alex now says after the trial is that when Scarlet came up to hand him a bottle of water, that Alex said, you know... | ||
| You know, basically like, I hope you watch my video or whatever, and Scarlet was like, yes, I went and saw what you said, and my lawyers lied to me, and you were right, and you were right all along, and like... | ||
| And crying. | ||
| She was crying. | ||
| And was crying about this, yeah. | ||
| And hugged him. | ||
| So, Scarlet obviously is like, no, this is not okay. | ||
| This is this sort of post-verdict stuff to try to... | ||
| Have this view that he's reconciling himself up to the parents against the evil lawyers who manipulated them. | ||
| Like, that's what this whole thing is. | ||
| She didn't want to let that stand. | ||
| She was like, Mark, can we sue him? | ||
| And I'm like, well, hold on a second, because he's in bankruptcy right now. | ||
| So just, like, pump your brakes for just a second. | ||
| Because what we first have to do under the law is we have to demand a retraction from the guy. | ||
| And that would give us the ability to sue. | ||
| Like, you can't... | ||
| It doesn't matter whether he retracts it, but you can't sue him before you demand the retraction, okay? | ||
| And the effect of a successful or sufficient retraction and correction is that that plaintiff can't get punitive damages in the suit, right? | ||
| But they can still sue even if you do the retraction. | ||
| So we write them a pretty lengthy letter because... | ||
| As I remember, yeah, no, this is because he appeared on Piers Morgan to say all this. | ||
| Well, he did it on his show a couple times, and then also on Piers Morgan. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't watch his show, and you know I'm a religious Piers Morgan watcher. | ||
| True, true. | ||
| Can I get enough of Piers Morgan? | ||
| It's the accent. | ||
| It gets you. | ||
| I don't even know where you see Piers. | ||
| It's on some sort of weird European streaming channel, I think, at this point. | ||
| Alex says it's the number one rated news show in the UK. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| Everyone rated this show. | ||
| Because he was on it, it's one of the most important shows. | ||
| It's now one of the greatest, most important shows that's ever been. | ||
| I mean, is that right after Lord Picklebottom's Shryer Hour? | ||
| No, this is not... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Our British listeners are going to be pissed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, guys. | |
| Sorry, guys. | ||
| It's actually after the Gribble Pibble Hour. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I just want everybody to know who knows about that reference, that our expert, Dr. Bernard Pettingill, really, really thought that was funny. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Really thought that was funny. | ||
| So that insult didn't land quite as much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was pretty funny. | |
| No, but so Alex was on Pierce Morgan and said all this stuff. | ||
| And so we wrote him a letter saying, hey, everything you said here is false. | ||
| You did imply that Scarlett was a deep state person manipulating Neil. | ||
| That's what she was pissed about. | ||
| That's what she called you out about. | ||
| She never went up to you and said any of these things you say she said. | ||
| She never did any of that. | ||
| And so you need to retract all that. | ||
| And under And part of what he needs to do in order to do that is publish a retraction in a manner that's reasonably calculated to reach the next number of people. | ||
| So that's why he kept saying, we're making requests to get on Pierce Morgan's show. | ||
| We keep making requests to get on the show. | ||
| Oh, see, I took that as a, I just want to get rebooked. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, no, that's actually legally important, and it may become legally important in the future, is that by simply just going on Infowars, you know, now what he can say is... | ||
| But he didn't even do it on his own show. | ||
| Yeah, that's what's messed up, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it was just a video on his website. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's strike one and two against why the retraction would be... | ||
| You know, worthless. | ||
| And that's before we get to the 15 strikes within the retraction itself. | ||
| You'll notice that there was definitely a part of it that was scripted for him. | ||
| That was written by somebody else. | ||
| Probably one of these lawyers like Mr. Raynaud or somebody like that. | ||
| It's all written. | ||
| It was all scripted. | ||
| He wasn't riffing any of it. | ||
| But there was a discernible kind of like... | ||
| All right, here is what seems like a normal apology, and then he decided to play some clips. | ||
| And then he went into his clips. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| He read what was clearly a prepared attorney statement. | ||
| Yeah, and then he said, but. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was literally all he said, but it was everything that happened after that. | |
| I can't imagine what they had to do to get him to read this, because they were, I can tell you, the attorneys... | ||
| I gave that to him because they were terrified of what I might do. | ||
| Because while he's in bankruptcy, the idea of me bringing new suits against him or posing that and even having that hang over his head like a sword of Damocles is pretty nasty. | ||
| And they don't like it. | ||
| But Alex put them in that position. | ||
| So they're like, run out here, do this retraction. | ||
| Which, I mean, honestly, I don't even know why they did it. | ||
| Because if I'm going to sue him, I don't care about the punitive damages. | ||
| Like, why even do it? | ||
| But they go out and they do this retraction. | ||
| But then Alex probably as a condition of doing it was like, yeah, but I get to say X and Y and Z. Right, right, right. | ||
| I'm going to apologize, but I get to say that I was right and that I shouldn't have to apologize. | ||
| That's why they call him the great negotiator. | ||
| He's basically giving a speech about how he's going to respect Scarlett Lewis's lived experience. | ||
| He's talking like he's... | ||
| He's on Tumblr in 2014. | ||
| Like, it's really weird. | ||
| I will defer to her memory. | ||
| Yeah, like, but it's all couched in such a way as to say that, like, no, she's wrong. | ||
| I'm right. | ||
| She's lying. | ||
| It's definitely at least insinuating that fairly heavily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, uh... | ||
| I mean, it's pretty... | ||
| It's a pretty terrible apology. | ||
| And it doesn't ever take on head-on what he actually did. | ||
| And why she was upset. | ||
| And, of course, he doesn't want to have to confront that in the middle of his trial, he tried to say that the person suing him was slow and autistic, and that's why he thought he was a crisis actor and not a real parent. | ||
| That's not a great thing you want to keep repeating out loud. | ||
| It doesn't play well, I think. | ||
| Yeah, even among his own audience, I don't think it even, you know what I mean? | ||
| So, like, he wanted to make it this other thing, and he's still so desperate to have this idea that I think on some level it really matters to him. | ||
| That Scarlett and Neil like him? | ||
| Yeah, because he's not a bad person. | ||
| He doesn't want to believe he's a bad person. | ||
| Everything about his choices is, I don't want to believe that I am a bad person. | ||
| I'll tell you, I got this vibe with him too, and I didn't see it so much in his relations with Chris Maddy up in Connecticut. | ||
| Because Chris Maddy, he absolutely despises to the core. | ||
| Chris Maddy, he can feel no sense of human connection with. | ||
| Given the opportunity, he would strangle him with his hands. | ||
| He has no control over his own feelings about Chris Maddy. | ||
| Chris Maddy pushes his buttons in a unique way. | ||
| Well, he put out a hit on him. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He put his head on a pipe. | ||
| I did some weird stuff to the guy. | ||
| He never, ever put his head on a pipe. | ||
| And I always got this sense down to the very bitter end. | ||
| Even to the moment where he said, well, here's your Perry Mason moment. | ||
| The guy wants me to like him. | ||
| And he wants me to think that we have... | ||
| He thinks that if I could just see that we had some common ground, he could sway me over to his way of whatever. | ||
| There's something... | ||
| He wants me to think that he's cool. | ||
| I mean, I would almost argue it's more like Batman never kills the Joker. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, they just keep doing the dance. | ||
| They just keep doing the dance. | ||
| There's a certain love triangle there. | ||
| Batman doesn't kill Killer Croc either. | ||
| I understand that, but I'm talking about the never-ending love between arch-nemeses. | ||
| They are a dramaturgical dyad. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And they must exist with each other. | ||
| All that pretentious shit they taught us in college, yes. | ||
| So then the implication of that is that Alex sees you as his dramatic foil. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Whereas with Matty, he doesn't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Matty's too business-like for him, I guess. | |
| He views Matty like I think he would view like a black site interrogator. | ||
| There's no humanity shared. | ||
| Yeah, he's got no soul. | ||
| He's got no soul. | ||
| There's emptiness behind his eyes. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's not how that relationship plays out. | ||
| Here's what's weird about that, though. | ||
| I've listened to the depositions that Matty did with Alex, and there is... | ||
| Sparring, there is, like, as much as you had a back and forth with him, Maddie does as well, but I don't, it is different. | ||
| You are right, but there is still the sparring. | ||
| It's more about the way that Alex is engaging with that back and forth. | ||
| I think, and also, at the time you're hearing that deposition, that deposition, and particularly the last parts of it, are, I think, what really pushed Jones over the edge in hating Chris Maddie. | ||
| That deposition is not comfortable and does not go well for Jones. | ||
| And he's already had a few uncomfortable depositions by that point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He just hates the guy on a visceral level. | |
| And I can't wrap my head around why Jones really wants to ingratiate himself to some people or vindicate his views to some people and not to others. | ||
| It doesn't always make sense to me. | ||
| But the way he treated us... | ||
| It's so, so different. | ||
| My guess is it's like he sees him as a, like, Ivy League kind of suit and tie lawyer, whereas you're more of like a rock and roll lawyer. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, let me, let me, let me, because you work at the beard law firm, you know what I mean? | |
| The two of you are both very, very smart, but I am a creature of pure emotion, so let me try and explain this from Alex's point of view. | ||
| If I can get you to get mad, at least in a little bit, then I can understand your emotion. | ||
| I can't understand what you're saying because I'm a big dum-dum. | ||
| But if you're giving me anger, you know, then I'm like, yeah, now we're in a situation where I understand this person. | ||
| But if you're just calm... | ||
| I'll be going to lose my fucking mind. | ||
| I'm going to go crazy. | ||
| I'm going to try and act even crazier to get something out of you. | ||
| I guess especially if you're sparring calmly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| If you spar calmly with me, I'll fucking kill you. | ||
| Yeah, there's something. | ||
| Look, I think there is also just something Jones is. | ||
| He's one of those weird boomers, or I guess he's not. | ||
| He's sort of late Gen X, but he's one of those. | ||
| Oh, no, no. | ||
| He's from the silent generation. | ||
| Yeah, in the chasm there. | ||
| That's what always gets to me. | ||
| We have this weird relationship that I often forget. | ||
| He's just a couple years older than me. | ||
| It freaks me out, too. | ||
| Every time I think that he's 10 years older than me, it freaks me out. | ||
| He should be so much older than me. | ||
| But he is part of that cohort who, while was a very early adopter to the internet, he never really took to it in quite a way. | ||
| But they have... | ||
| This innate respect for those who are very internet-bred or whatnot. | ||
| And it's like, because that's who Alex cultivates, right? | ||
| Like, he's always... | ||
| You look at, like, his communications, right? | ||
| And it's always... | ||
| He really... | ||
| He sort of reminds me of Elon Musk in this way. | ||
| He really wants to understand memes, but he can't. | ||
| Like, he really wants to understand how some of this internet stuff works, and he can't. | ||
| And so I think when he was dealing with somebody who he knew understood his world on that level... | ||
| Like, he was, he was, yeah, that was different from somebody he felt was outside of his tribe. | ||
| You're not, you're not giving enough respect to the conflict that he lives in, because he doesn't understand memes, but at the same time, on the streets, they call him the meme machine. | ||
| He's the meme machine. | ||
| Yeah, he's the meme machine, yes. | ||
| Because people keep making memes about him, and yet he can't understand them. | ||
| Can you imagine the turmoil and conflict you would be living in if you were the meme machine and you didn't understand memes? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I remember... | ||
| I actually remember him in text messages sending memes of himself or people would send memes of himself to him that all parties involved just abjectly did not understand. | ||
| And that is hilarious to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That he just can't wrap his head around it. | |
| So wait, back to this apology video. | ||
| Oh yes, yeah. | ||
| I don't see too many apology videos in my day. | ||
| I don't know how many retractions or like... | ||
| You know, in your line of work, do you come across many, or is it something that happens a bit? | ||
| I mean, it has to happen in nearly every defamation case, right? | ||
| Like, they at least have the opportunity to do it. | ||
| So, yeah, I see some. | ||
| I mean, look, I saw one in Fontaine, right? | ||
| InfoWars published a retraction a day late, but they did it in Fontaine. | ||
| And it's a fairly normal-looking retraction on an article saying the stuff in here is... | ||
| That was in print, though, right? | ||
| Yeah, that was in print. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That seems a little bit less insane than this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what I'm kind of getting at. | ||
| I don't have a lot of experience, so I can't grade it against other ones, but it seemed like this was one of the strangest attempts at what it's trying to be. | ||
| Like, as a retraction apology video. | ||
| It seemed like it worked against the goal that it was ostensibly trying to present. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right! | |
| Yeah, this is what gets me about it. | ||
| Somebody, I don't know who, spent a pretty fair amount of time writing some good legal language for him to say. | ||
| And then he completely threw all that time that that guy spent in the trash by what he did. | ||
| Right afterwards, right? | ||
| He might have just said any of it if he was going to do that. | ||
| What's so funny about that is that is the one thing that he did that I understand completely. | ||
| That is so clear to me. | ||
| Because he agrees. | ||
| This is one of the few things where I can see directly into his mind because I share it, which is just that... | ||
| A lawyer's apology is worthless. | ||
| Like, it means nothing. | ||
| If you let a lawyer write your retraction, you might as well shit on a piece of paper. | ||
| It means nothing to anyone, right? | ||
| So he knows when he reads this that no one's gonna believe that he cares. | ||
| I gotta juice this up. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Nobody's gonna believe what he's saying. | ||
| So in his mind, I swear to you, in his mind, he's like, I am going to make this apology sincere. | ||
| That was his idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I disagree. | ||
| I think that Jones thought if he just had to read what his attorneys wrote and that was it, that would be capitulation. | ||
| And Jones ain't capitulating on this point or to me on anything at this point. | ||
| There's no value in it. | ||
| He doesn't see any value in it. | ||
| He doesn't see any value on losing anymore either. | ||
| It doesn't matter to him anymore. | ||
| All that matters is ego. | ||
| So he can't capitulate. | ||
| He has to prove that, no, I was right. | ||
| I did say it, and you lied to your client, and you did the X and Y. Like, he had to... | ||
| I contend... | ||
| Like, he does not care. | ||
| I really believe this. | ||
| When all this was happening, he doesn't care about Neil Armstrong at all. | ||
| He doesn't care what they think. | ||
| The only thing he thinks he cares about is whether he can use them as props to try to look better and that they like. | ||
| He doesn't actually care what they think or what they think of the apology. | ||
| The part of the apology that his lawyers didn't write where he was talking, that was addressed to me. | ||
| That was... | ||
| Telling him... | ||
| X and Y was true, and I've got a suit against you, and that was him telling me, no, Bankston, you're wrong. | ||
| Look at these videos. | ||
| I'm going to prove you wrong, Bankston, right? | ||
| It would have been funny if he had just the lawyer's written thing, and then at the end was like, also, fuck you, Mark Bankston. | ||
| Fuck you, Mark Bankston. | ||
| I would have taken that as legitimate. | ||
| That would have been legitimate. | ||
| I would accept that. | ||
| I've been mentioned enough times on the show, though. | ||
| I can do without it. | ||
| But what's nice about it is, look, it doesn't really matter in my mind if he apologizes or not. | ||
| That cause of action is still on the table. | ||
| Scarlett has a year from which she sent that letter to file that cause of action. | ||
| Real quick, I agree with you on the capitulation part, but there's a sense that I get that there's a motivation to make... | ||
| Weird actions seem justified. | ||
| I think that that is what is underneath it. | ||
| What he did is unacceptable. | ||
| I think almost anybody would recognize that. | ||
| Saying that Scarlet came up and was crying and all this in the middle of the trial and after the trial. | ||
| Continuing on making a prop of this person who you have... | ||
| You know, more or less terrorized for many years. | ||
| You know, like, that is a behavior that I think anybody would look at and be like, there's no reason to do that. | ||
| That is monstrous shit. | ||
| And the videos, you know, there is the angle of it that is like, maybe I'm right. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's that. | ||
| But then, if you take a step back and read it in the most generous light, I think... | ||
| You could just see it as him being like, there's reason for me to have maybe misheard something. | ||
| So at least the... | ||
| I'm not a bad person! | ||
| Yeah, the telling of the stories gives some sort of plausible justification. | ||
| I made a mistake. | ||
| I made a mistake. | ||
| Other people make mistakes. | ||
| We all make mistakes. | ||
| I'm not a bad person who did something actively evil towards another human being. | ||
| I'm being overly generous here. | ||
| When you say that, Jordan, that this is all part of a statement of vindication of his essential morality, I'm a good person. | ||
| We all agree, I'm assuming, that that is just a knowingly false statement for public Relations, image management persons. | ||
| You don't think that Jones is psychologically trying to reconcile with himself that he's a good person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't anymore. | |
| I can actually see that on some level of this idea that some of the things that Jones, I thought that he did, he had wound himself up in a way to make this roundabout circular bullshit log to convince himself that he was a good person. | ||
| And I no longer believe that. | ||
| And part of that is, look, I've read... | ||
| So much of his personal communications. | ||
| I think Jones knows exactly what a vile person he is. | ||
| I think there's a lot of self-loathing there about it. | ||
| I think that's true of a lot of people who do some bad stuff. | ||
| And people, I don't necessarily believe people are good or bad like that. | ||
| I believe that their social patterns and the determinism of their social patterns leads them into these horrible patterns of behavior that they can't escape from anymore. | ||
| And that's long gone for Jones. | ||
| And I feel like the things he does, some of the things he does, he knows they're wrong. | ||
| I would agree with that. | ||
| I think that one of the difficulties is that there is such a thin line between someone psychologically convincing themselves that they're a good person and acting in ways that give the public presentation of insisting that they're a good person. | ||
| It would appear very similar, and it's really hard to... | ||
| And I almost think it doesn't matter for a psychiatrist. | ||
| It's almost like a personal, professional line kind of situation. | ||
| In his personal life, in his... | ||
| Who I am as a human being, there are limits to what he'll accept as, like, I am a good or bad person. | ||
| Professionally, fuck him. | ||
| I like that kind of thing. | ||
| But I'm more in line with what Mark's saying, I think, that he does know that what he does is bad. | ||
| And a lot of the things that he does, yeah. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think it's actually wild, though, that it kind of speaks to the richness of your subject matter for this podcast, is that y 'all have been doing it for years. | ||
| Look, it was five years ago I brought this lawsuit. | ||
| And I've spent more time interrogating Alex Jones personally than anybody on the planet. | ||
| Nobody has had the amount of time where he has to answer in the ways that he's had to answer than he's had with me. | ||
| And here are the three of us all sitting around trying to deduce what's going on with this guy. | ||
| And we still don't get it. | ||
| There's still more to figure out. | ||
| There is still more to analyze. | ||
| He is one of the most complicated dumb guys I've ever run across. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that there's an element of luck, I think, that we started the show when we did, in as much as, like, we're well up to speed by the time there is now, but, like, I think that history will show him to be, like, a unique figure. | ||
| He is a unique figure in American history, for better or worse. | ||
| True. | ||
| In our modern time. | ||
| No one's making a podcast for six years about Rob Dew. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Nobody's making a podcast for six years about me. | ||
| It's not an ego thing. | ||
| It's not like that. | ||
| After those depositions, think about the sheer amount of silence that would be in that podcast over its run. | ||
| It would just be long, punctuated silences. | ||
| I've gone back and watched some of his Infowars nightly news stuff to try and find something to, like, let's do a duosode. | ||
| Let's do a duosode. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| No good. | ||
| There's no juice there. | ||
| And Troyer doesn't have the juice. | ||
|
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None of them have it. | |
| None of them have what it is there. | ||
| And you just can't do it that way. | ||
|
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I don't know, man. | |
| I suppose that's the question that I think I'm really interested in. | ||
| About Robin? | ||
| No. | ||
| As you pointed out, the three of us, we've been doing this for so long and we still don't have a clear like, oh, I know what's going on with this guy. | ||
| But there is something that we do know, which is that he cannot stop himself. | ||
| That is not a thing that cannot happen. | ||
| And in order for him to be stopped, something will have to intervene to stop it. | ||
| Do you know how many times in this case I have said the words, all that Jones had to do in an X or Y situation was being normal for like 20 or 30 minutes, and he can't do it. | ||
| He can't do it. | ||
| He literally can't do it. | ||
| And there's no off switch. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| I got so wrapped into this, what's going on with this guy, that I briefly, during the suit, convinced myself that he was maniacally smart. | ||
| He's really, really way more sophisticated than he's initially letting on, and there's this weird thought process. | ||
| No, and then I realized, this is just one of the most complicated dumb men ever to exist. | ||
|
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And you're right that he's so unique. | |
| I don't think people who didn't live it... | ||
| Really understand the vibe of Alex Jones 2016 to 2018 and what he was in this country and the effect that he plays. | ||
| Because whatever you might want to say for his audience right now, it is not that. | ||
| He does not have that cultural influence footprint, any of those things. | ||
| There's something like, again, I hate to use the word like this, but he's like zeitgeisty for 2016-2018. | ||
| And he was at the height of it. | ||
| There could have been a lot of things I could have taken on at that point in my career, but seeing that opportunity, I was like, this guy's unique, and if you do damage to him, you actually do something. | ||
| You change trajectories and stuff. | ||
| Maybe we did. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I know he's not at the height of his powers, but I know we defamed him. | ||
| Well, I know one thing you did, and that is you fucked me on getting a painting show. | ||
| As much as I appreciate everything else you've done for the plaintiffs and the family, that's unforgivable. | ||
| We do appreciate the work you've done, but what have you done for me lately? | ||
| And the answer to that is fucked us with a painting show. | ||
| Can you just imagine an easel? | ||
| Alex is sitting there. | ||
| Blank canvas. | ||
| Just from his mind. | ||
| He's sitting there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I would create fake accounts in order to try and buy those paintings. | ||
| I'd have a gallery of Alex Jones originals. | ||
| It's black and it stands for abortion. | ||
| We're going to make some nice, natural, fluffy clouds. | ||
| None of these globalist seed-planted flat clouds. | ||
| We're not going to do that. | ||
| No chemtrails here. | ||
|
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If you make a happy tree, I will kill you. | |
| Here's a nice lake. | ||
|
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No fluoride in there, baby. | |
| Well, maybe one day he'll do that. | ||
| Just not as a scam. | ||
| You know, I was just thinking when you were talking about earlier, like, oh, the nuclear option is he destroys everything to do with Infowars. | ||
| And I'm like, ooh, yeah, baby. | ||
| Give me that painting show. | ||
| None of this. | ||
| Get rid of it. | ||
| The only way he's going to really branch out is if you get rid of everything else. | ||
| Take away all of his options. | ||
| You got to kill your darlings. | ||
| Put him in that barrel and then make him paint. | ||
| Let me emphasize something intrinsic about nuclear war. | ||
| Is that Alex Jones ain't the only one with his finger on the button. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We got options too. | ||
| And yeah, a lot of things to be considered. | ||
| Do it! | ||
| Press the button! | ||
| Press it now! | ||
| Press it now! | ||
| Why are we not pressing buttons? | ||
| We have buttons! | ||
| Neighbors. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Jordan, overeager for nuclear options. | ||
| Sorry, I'm bad. | ||
| I'm not a good president. | ||
| We're at DEFCON 4. That's close enough. | ||
| Burn them! | ||
| Glad you're not a football guy. | ||
| Glad I'm not a football guy. | ||
| So, Mark, we should probably wrap this up because we're getting deep into the evening now. | ||
|
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Yeah, we always do. | |
| But this has been a delight. | ||
| Is there anything else on your mind or radar that you think people would find interesting? | ||
| I was trying to see. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Normally when I'm on the show, I'm like a comic doing plugs. | ||
| We've got a hearing coming up on this date. | ||
| Make sure to tune in. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| Everything's dead in the water in the state courts right now because everything's in the bankruptcy courts. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Look, you can call in and tune in and listen to those bankruptcy hearings if you really want to, but spare yourself the pain, and I'll do a shout-out here to Morgan Stringer on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| If there's anything going on in those courts, she's going to thread it and you're going to find out about it. | ||
| Yeah, it's very helpful in keeping up. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I mean, she does a great job. | ||
| But also, I still don't really fully know if I understand everything that's going on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Me too. | ||
|
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Me too. | |
| But that's a deficiency of my understanding, not of the tweeting. | ||
| That's about all that's going on now. | ||
|
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Of course, everybody should be sort of... | |
| Waiting on bated breath for, you know, this HBO documentary of all these cameras that were in our courtroom. | ||
| Oh yeah, you were preening! | ||
| You were preening! | ||
| Is that actually going to turn into something? | ||
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| Oh yeah, look, so for those who don't know, that HBO documentary is being helmed by Dan Reed, who was director of Leaving Neverland. | ||
| That HBO documentary on Michael Jackson. | ||
| He's done a lot of really highly awarded work. | ||
| This is legit stuff. | ||
| HBO hired this guy to be their exclusive documentary guy for the next few years. | ||
| He did Six Hours at the Capitol. | ||
| You might have seen that too. | ||
| Which is that J6 documentary. | ||
|
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The guy... | |
| He's been around the subject matter for so long. | ||
| He was following us through hearings. | ||
| Watching you preen. | ||
| Yeah, watching us preen through these hearings. | ||
| And really understands the subject matter. | ||
| And so I'm really excited to see what his take on it is because it's not just going to be a... | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's going to be boring. | ||
| Well, he did not ask me for an interview, so we know it's going to suck. | ||
| Yeah, my interaction with him, I believe, was... | ||
| Was that the elevator? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| That was a different weirdo. | ||
| No, I believe I made fun of him on Twitter one day, and then the next day in the courtroom, he came up and he was like... | ||
| You can stop calling me HBO Documentary Guy. | ||
| And then I forgot his name. | ||
| We shook hands and he left and we never spoke again. | ||
| No, he's still HBO Documentary Guy. | ||
| You screwed me on an interview. | ||
| He didn't interview me! | ||
| But I expect that'll come out later this year, of course, depending on some events. | ||
| It'd be nice if it hasn't ended. | ||
| It would be nice. | ||
| That's one of the things that I think we've made peace with somewhat. | ||
| Just by the nature of an episodic podcast, it kind of Is what it is, but like, narratively, this just doesn't end. | ||
| Just won't stop. | ||
| You know, like, trying to make a documentary about a discrete section of something, with Alex, it just doesn't work. | ||
|
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If you had told me in April of 2018... | |
| That in April of 2023, Alex Jones would still be a major feature of my life. | ||
| I would have laughed at you. | ||
| I would have said, no way. | ||
| You'd be talking to a couple of ding-dongs late into the evening about Alex Jones. | ||
| Well, it is always a pleasure, though, gentlemen. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Give your best to the lizard and wish you good luck with the Skyrim card. | ||
| I know now, like tomorrow. | ||
| No, let's fight subreddit. | ||
| It's just going to be spammed with requests for lizard pictures. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you better have a pic of Bill Shirtless, too. | ||
| That one will go over pretty well. | ||
| Bill Shirtless with the lizard in the garden. | ||
| And today's newspaper, otherwise no one will believe it's real. | ||
| We can get AI to take it. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Well, thank you again, Mark. | ||
| I hope we can talk again soon, and I hope everything goes as smoothly as it can, I guess. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| I'll see y 'all soon. | ||
|
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Bye! | |
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
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Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |