CBS News97%
Inside Alex Jones' world: Ex-Infowars staffer details experiences in new book 11%
4/15/2026, 11:10:50 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Self-Serving Bias, Negativity Bias, and Appeal to Emotion, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 35.2% saturation with 318 hits. Analysis detected 2,236 faulty-reasoning hits from 904 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 27.7% and a BS Rank of 11% (15,076 of 16,813 videos). This video is better (less manipulative) than 89.70% of the video peer group.
Welcome back to the Takeout. Alex Jones,
you've probably heard of him.
Longtime right-wing radio host, leader of a media website known as Infowars.
There's a new book out titled The Madness of Believing.
It's a memoir written by someone who worked for Jones for many years, and I sat down with the author,
Josh Owens.
Here's some of that conversation.
Josh, you write on page 17.
This caught my eye.
What if behind the veil of power, dark rituals and darker motives guided the course of world events?
You asked that question to yourself.
In that moment, something began to shift inside me.
You write, "The dullness of everyday existence parted to reveal a more vivid world beneath the surface.
Suddenly, I was no longer a bored, directionless kid staring at a computer screen."
Is that the essence of the lure of Alex Jones and why he had built and continues to maintain a pretty sizable audience?
>> I think so. It's hard to say.
I feel like there are so many different ways that people get pulled into that world.
>> And for me, it didn't start out as ideology.
It started out with movies.
Jones paints this like vivid portrait of the world through film and not as allegory or satire.
He literally says that films are pulling the curtain back on reality.
And so for me that was just on reality.
I was perfectly attuned to sort of see the world in that way.
>> cuz you were studying film.
>> Yes. Yeah. And so that's sort of what pulled me in.
I mean he uses Sydney Lum's network to describe the media and how that world functions and then he'll go further into you know John Carpenters They Live and then every Stanley Kubri movie
>> and that's just sort of how he paints. I mean he gives this like cinematic ver similitude to everything and it just sold me.
>> And does it create a kind of patina of intellectualism that has a hook?
People think they're getting smarter
>> when in fact they're getting dumber.
>> Absolutely. And it doesn't help that you're also being told that you're dumb initially for not knowing these things,
>> right?
>> So yeah, absolutely. you feel much smarter than you are because I mean it's
not based on anything other than just these ideas that are coming from Jones's head.
>> Describe for my audience what it was like to tiptoe into that world and then to launch yourself into that world.
>> Yeah. There was no sort of I started
listening to him in 2008.
It wasn't until 2013 where I got offered a job and I moved halfway across the country to work there.
I moved from Georgia to Austin.
>> as a as as as an advocate as as a as as an advocate as
>> as a firm believer in a lot of his ideas. Um, so yeah, I mean I think you
know I first went in there as like a well-meaning young guy thinking that I was going there to make a difference.
Like it felt like what I was going to do there was important. Telling the truth, exposing this world that not everyone is exposed to because people are covering it up.
And then pretty quickly, so you know, I was told on my first day
four, you know, a year in Jones's world
or a day in Jones's world feels like a year.
And so my four years felt like four decades almost.
Um, but it was immediate. I mean, so much is happening while you're there in his world that
Yeah. you get sucked in and it's almost hard to pay attention to.
like it's almost like I've described it before like taking a fire hose to the mouth.
There's just so much coming at you that um it completely envelops you
>> and it envelops and holds enthral an audience that has to constantly be fed things that are either increasingly or perpetually alarmist.
>> Yeah. So much of it is fear-based.
So much of it keeps you in that register of
you're scared of what's out there.
And so you're constantly tuning in to see what horribleness awaits you, what lies you're being told.
>> There's also an undercurrent of profit though, products and other things that toggle back and forth between scare purchase.
Scare purchase.
>> Yeah. It's interesting because when I first started listening to him, I and maybe that was just the patina of being a new listener and being sucked in, but like he wasn't necessarily he wasn't selling his own privately labeled supplements.
selling his own privately labeled supplements.
He was selling stickers and t-shirts and DVDs and and encouraging his audience to print those DVDs and give them out for free, which at the time I believed, okay, well, it's not about profit.
It's about the ideas, which I think ultimately he just saw that as an advertising opportunity to get his name out there.
But it worked on me because I just sort of never considered that. But as soon as I started working there, I I made the first ad for the very first privately labeled supplement that he made and then
labeled supplement that he made and then
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