Knowledge Fight - #1115: March 10, 2006
Episode Date: February 9, 2026In this installment, Dan and Jordan stay in the past and enjoy a day full of Alex getting upset at a caller about Nostradamus, advertising some dicey stuff, and attacking Big Pharma for all the wrong ...reasons.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I know, nah, nah, no, no, knowledge fight.
Dan and Jordan, I knowledge fight.com.
It's down to pray.
I have great respect for knowledge fight.
Knowledge fight.
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys.
Knowledge.
Fight.
Dan and Jordan.
Knowledge fight.
Eat money.
Indian Kansas.
You're on the air.
Thanks for holding.
Hello, Alex.
I'm a first-time color.
I'm a huge fan.
I love your room.
Knowledge Fight.
KnowledgeFight.com.
I love you.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to KnowledgeFight.
I'm Dan.
I'm Jordan.
We're a couple dudes like to sit around,
worship at the altar of Celine,
and talk a little bit about Alex Jones.
Oh, indeed we are, Dan.
Jordan.
A quick question for you.
What's your bright spot today, buddy?
Well, it is still February,
and so that means you go first.
All right.
As is tradition.
As is tradition.
My bright spot is a fulfillment of my previous non-bright spot.
Hey, how about that?
My friend, you guys.
yourself some sweat pants. I do and I'm thrilled. I'm honestly I'm I'm I wanted to just put them on but I
then have to take off my shoes and everything and I'm gonna I'm gonna put them on as soon as you leave.
Yep. And I will let you know I'll give you a full report. I'm excited though. I expect nothing less and I
fully expect you to be wearing them at our next recording. You have set uh you and your wife quite
frankly have set the bar incredibly high for these things though like I don't know if they can
live up to the hype. If they don't deliver for you, that doesn't bother me because they
delivered for me, my friend. Sure. Yeah. And my experience can't take away from yours.
No, it can't. Um, but hey, who knows? I don't think I'm a sweatpants snob. We'll find out.
I'm hoping that you like them realistically just so I can then wear my pants to record to.
You could do that anyway. Ah, no, I can't. You're welcome to. You know, no, no, no. You can't
have one person in jeans and one person in sweatpants. There's a very clear problem there. I think when
there you and I, yes you can
because you're spiritually already
in sweatpants and I should be wearing slacks
or something, you know? Like... Sure, sure, sure, sure.
Every time before we start recording,
sometimes I will not have shoes on
and I will put on shoes.
Very Mr. Rogers style. I don't feel
like I can record the show
in sandals or without shoes on.
Yeah. Same doesn't apply to you.
I understand that, but you know
when in Rome, if we were recording in
my place, we're both
wearing sweatpants, or I'm wearing sweatpants at least.
But I'm coming in. I'm still wearing shoes.
Yeah, well, of course you're. Even if I'm in your house.
Listen, you wear shoes in my house. I wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest not wearing shoes.
There's dogs all over the place. Exactly.
Well, thank you, and thank you to your wife.
It's very sweet.
You are welcome, and she was so excited to get them for you.
That's wonderful. So nice. So nice.
Yes. What's your bright spot?
Well, Jordan, I realize that I had not a bright spot, but a dark spot.
And I'm pointing at you.
I can feel it.
See this?
I do.
I sense it right now.
The dark spot was me.
Yeah.
And here's why.
Yeah.
We are the tat guys.
That's true.
That was our phone number for a while.
And I realized that I was not living up to my end of the bargain.
Right.
You were getting tats.
I was.
And I was not getting tats.
You were not.
And so I decided to rectify that by getting a new tattoo.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
I got the, this is the first tattoo that I've gotten that is not exposed when you're wearing
short sleeve shirts.
The other things would be covered by that.
So this is very vulnerable and public in a way that I cannot hide it.
So it's a real new life.
It's a real new jump-off point for me.
It's an interesting feeling.
I bet.
Just have like I can't hide this.
My family or my dad specifically, no tattoos.
No tattoos.
So until I was maybe 26, all of my tattoos were coverable.
Yeah.
Every single one of them.
They didn't know I had tattoos until a few years ago.
I love tattoos and I don't judge people who have them even in like, I don't know, your face or your hands or very visible places.
Sure.
I don't judge, but I realized that I did have some internalized judgment.
Like when it came to, all right, am I going to do this myself?
Sure.
I got you.
And I had to confront that a tiny bit.
Yeah.
But, yeah, worked through it.
I got a spell from the game, Eternal Darkness.
Nice.
One of my old favorite games.
I like it.
Some real fond memories of getting stoned and hanging out with Nikki Gifts and getting scared of video games.
That is what tattoos are for.
I swear to God.
Yep.
Yeah, it's a magic spell for a spell called the Magic Pool.
Okay.
And the effect that it has in the game, it's actually a little bit of a cheat kind of.
Okay.
Okay.
Because if you get this spell, it'll create something over you that gradually
restores your health and sanity.
Sure.
And kind of makes it like, anything can hit me, but I'll recover.
Right, right, right, right.
As long as I can keep hitting this spell.
It's a borderline infinite health hack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's in the game.
It's in the game.
What?
You can't not use it.
Yeah.
If they broke the game, you get to use it.
It's not like these Lovecraftian horrors are going to, like, play fair.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
If you have this at your disposal.
You gotta use it.
That is true.
Yeah.
So just nothing but fond memories about the, uh, playing this game.
Yeah.
It looks great.
Yeah.
Still healing up, but, uh, I'll post a picture, uh, for people to enjoy.
When the time is right.
Um, but yeah, I'm, uh, I'm gonna get some more now.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
You got the, you got the feeling now that you didn't have the last time.
Hmm.
What do you mean?
Like the, I mean that, yeah, like, like, like, like,
I don't know when it happened.
Maybe it was my third tattoo
where I was like, I'm going to be getting tattoos forever.
Oh, no, this is my third.
Yeah.
And I felt it after each one.
Yeah.
And then I just didn't have more ideas of things to do.
Or I put things on a back burner.
Gotcha.
Or it was like, I'll get around to it later.
But I did want to after each.
Sure.
I think there may just be like follow through.
Yeah.
Now.
That happens.
Because who gives a shit?
Who gives a shit?
The world's ending.
Such a great attitude to have.
Fuck it.
So yeah, that's what I'm up to.
I like it.
Yeah.
Today we got an episode to go over, Jordan.
All right.
We're staying in the past.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it's good times back then.
Baby, it is good times.
2006 is hitting pretty well right now.
Yeah.
So we're going to talk about March 10th, 2006.
And honestly, I kind of had iffy position on this particular episode for reasons that we'll
discuss as it goes along.
Okay.
But I decided,
ah, fuck it.
It's a different flavor.
Let's do it.
So we'll do that in a moment.
But first,
let's take a moment to say hello to some new wonks.
Ooh, that's a great idea.
So first, to all the wonks in the Facebook group,
but a special shout out to me.
I just passed my F-I-N-R-A licensing exams.
So now when somebody asks me,
how's my 401K doing, bro?
I will legally be allowed to answer them.
Thank you so much.
You're now a policy wonk.
I'm a policy won.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
next chows from sonic adventure to battle are the chimeras
Alex has been warning us about thank you so much
you're now a policy walk I'm a policy won't
thank you very much you thought I was going to say chaos
I did think you were going to say chaos
but is that not how it's pronounced no it's the chows
it's like the little baby things that are like the
those birds in
Final Fantasy oh yeah yeah yeah the pocobos
yeah chocobos yeah they're like that
the little pet kind of things but it's
spelled chaos yeah
Chow.
All right.
The chow.
That's fine.
No, I get it.
I understand the concept.
You can get them to race each other in Sonic Adventure 2 battles.
Traditional chocobos.
If you hit them, they turn evil.
Not, well, actually, it is a little bit chokobo-y.
If you hit them, they'll fight you back.
Yeah.
Or if you just raise them with the evil characters too much, I think they also turn evil.
Oh, well, that'll just happen.
Dr.
Dr. Robotnik.
Yeah.
If you go in there and hang out with the chows as Dr. Robotnik, he'll, like, pet them and go,
yush.
Very cool.
My brain.
Oh, shit.
Next, I'm a bearded
Translady from Butfuck, Kentucky,
funded by the globalist to study philosophy.
Thank you so much.
You're now a policy won't.
I'm a policy won't.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
And we get a technical credit in the next, Jordan.
So thank you so much to shout out from Big Taco from Austin.
Always on the prowl to crop dust, Alex Jay, at any restaurant,
sporting events, solar eclipse, chicken fish fry, or pill factory around town.
Thank you so much.
You're an Iowa technocrat.
I'm a policy wonk.
Four stars.
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant.
Someone, someone, Sodomite sent me a bucket of poop.
Daddy Sharp.
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb.
Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent.
He's a loser little, little titty baby.
I don't want to hate black people.
I renounce Jesus Christ.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you very much.
So in Sonic Adventure 2 battle, there are, like, in order to 100% it,
you had to do the little chow.
side stuff.
Sure.
And it was infuriating.
Like there's the whole game, and you can just play those levels and get better at them.
Yeah.
But with the chows, you got to raise them.
You got to keep feeding them like their Tomagachi pets and stuff.
And you got to train them and influence them to become good or evil.
Oh, such an annoying aspect of that game.
Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all.
No, but I did do it.
Of course you did.
Hundowed that.
I've been there before, my friend.
Yep.
So, like I said, I had some iffy.
feelings about whether or not we would cover this episode, but it became worthwhile. And one of the
reasons that I was kind of on the fence about it is, is a little boring at the beginning. Sure.
It started a bit slow. Okay. And so there's nothing really to talk about until a ways into the
first hour when Alex gets to taking some calls. Of course. He goes to the phones and he gets a call
from a guy who wants to talk to him about Nostradamus.
Now I am so in.
Yeah.
So here is where this call begins.
Excellent.
Let's go ahead and talk to Cameron.
And Cameron, where are you calling us from today?
Hello?
Yeah, sounds like you're on a speakerphone.
Are you there, sir?
Yes, sir.
How are you, Ale?
Good.
You're on the air, sir.
Great.
I have some breaking news for your listeners regarding 9-11.
Okay.
The prophet Nostomis.
You know him, right?
Yeah, put absolutely no stock on it.
It's just pure tribe.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He said that in July of 1999, the King of Terror would come from the sky, and everyone thinks nothing happened.
But actually something did happen.
In July of 1999, 9-11 hijacker, Muhammad Adda, first came to the United States by plane.
Also in July of 1999, the West Nile virus appeared in New York City.
Interesting.
My belief that that piece of garbage brought that over with him and unleashed it to New York.
I'm sorry?
And so he works for the Arabs, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So that Giuliani could set up the World Trade Center Command Center in case of biological attack.
You see, Adda brought the West Nile virus with him and unleashed it so that Giuliani could...
Tell us more.
Tell us what you portend from the tea leaves of Nostradamus.
Well, that's what I know.
What an asshole.
Wow.
Wow.
So rude.
What a dick.
What you tell me more about this Nostradamus fellow that you're so friendly with?
I could not be happier with the idea.
Well, here's, okay, here's my problem with living in a fastish dystopia, right?
You don't get that.
No.
You don't get that.
Nope.
When you're living in a more reasonable time, unreasonable people have a flavor to them.
2006, you get a guy calling in.
I have breaking news.
about 9-11.
I read something by Nostradamus.
Exactly.
That's some shit that doesn't exist in a fascist dystopia.
I hate to say it, but it's good, clean, fun compared to what we have to live with now.
I mean, yeah, it's not clean fun, but it's good fun.
Yeah, and Alex is sincerely annoyed.
Yep.
And you can't do anything about it, really, other than be mean to this call.
And what else is there to say what somebody's like, I think Mohammed-a-tab brought the West Nile
virus to New York?
And Nostradamus wrote about the West Nile virus that Mohammed Atta was going to spread in New York, but it was also part of enabling Giuliani to start a command center in the World Trade Center to respond to the West Nile virus.
What did Nostradamus think of Giuliani?
I think that's the question that I am now faced with.
Like, right, you're getting visions of the future.
You're going, ah, I can see the future and all that stuff.
And then Giuliani pops up.
What are you thinking?
You will be in Borat 2.
No, we are America or whatever the fuck.
He got caught in.
I see the four seasons, but not a hotel.
Yeah.
So Alex is like, hey, hey, dude, Nostradamus sucks.
I mean, give me more to jail.
Tell me about Nostradamus.
Oh, well, he was just a prophet back in, I think, the 1,500.
And he said that in July of 1999, King of Terror would come from
sky and that's when Muhammad Ada, the piece of garbage, came over, the 9-11 lead hijacker,
and he brought with him with West Nile virus and he unleashed it.
And that's what I believe Nostradamus is talking about when he said the king of terror would
come from the sky.
Okay, thank you for the call.
I appreciate that.
I'm not here to make friends.
Okay.
You're a fucking reality show?
What the hell is going on here?
I'm not here to make friends with people who think Nostradamus could see the
future, okay? Wait, no, this is a radio show that is specifically about making friends with
those people. I am not here to play nice with you fools. That's just great. That is a great
reaction. It's just, it's juicy. You know, you feel it. I mean, and it makes you wonder about
that guy. You know, he brings such a burst of character energy. That garbage. Absolutely. What are you
talking about? You're not using emotion right when you say piece of garbage.
Well, and he's saying it repeatedly, specifically about Muhammad Adda, which is almost like a character tick.
Yep.
Which makes me think like, okay, this could be a prank call.
Absolutely.
Like, this seems like something to give a character layer.
Yep.
Layers or something.
But I also could believe it's real.
I don't know.
I mean, yeah, it could be.
That guy seems like an interesting guy.
Either way, he's annoying Alex, and that's great.
I'll tell you what he is now.
Probably a Nazi.
Probably a Nazi.
I don't know.
See, one of the things that I've learned.
from listening to these old episodes of Alex's show.
Yeah.
Is that someone like this, you hear that voice and you're thinking, I don't know, 30s.
Sure.
That guy's 80.
There are so many people who have voices that you think like, oh, that's just someone in their 30s or 40s.
And they're like, I'm 77.
Oh, right.
So, like, I think I'm clocking him at dead.
Okay.
In 2026.
All right, all right.
20 years is a long time for an 80-year-old to keep going.
And Nostradamus predicted he wouldn't make it to 100.
That would be a really good prediction from Nostradamus.
So Alex is like, I'm not here to make friends.
I'm not here to humor, you assholes.
He's here to win.
When you say stupid things about Nostradamus, I'm going to tell you you're stupid.
I'm not here to make friends.
I'm not here to patch you on the head and act like I take what you have to say serious.
This is not a variety show.
And I don't blame people who have variety.
shows. I'm in a fight for my life. I'm going to fight for my family's life.
What would you believe them for? I know I'm in a fight for my life. And I want you to know
you're in a fight for your life, your liberty, your pursuit of happiness, your very existence.
A psychopathic, Nazi-like eugenics pushing, Malthusian, social Darwinistic wrecking crew
is in control. And they wear fancy three-piece suits and have multi-billion dollar PR
company spewing high-tech propaganda, but they can be defeated and they will be defeated.
Number one, I don't believe in Notfordomas, and what he had to say. The guy was a quack.
Number two, the very quatrain you just read is not a real quatrain that was put out by what
news of the world or whatever at the time. I had to get 50 calls probably on air about it after 9-11,
along with that smoke devil supposedly in there.
People love this type of stuff.
It's just you got the wrong show, brother.
Hey, brother.
You got the wrong show.
You got the wrong show, brother.
Now, I want to say one thing right off the bat,
and that is that I think he landed on wrecking crew as a noun,
and that was a masterwork.
That was so good.
He was trying to figure out what he was going to call them
and calling them a wrecking crew solid.
Yeah, that was landing the plane.
So it's also fair that Alex doesn't like Nostradamus.
I'm cool with that.
People who use prophecies to run scams,
generally don't like other people who are in the same business, so that's cool.
Yeah.
But what's interesting here is that Alex is just making up that this is a fake quatrain.
It's absolutely authentic, and it's from Nostradamus's Century 10 collection,
quatrain number 72.
Alex's belief system relies on magic, so he can't really just dismiss Nostradamus
as a weirdo who wrote stuff that people try to force into fitting world events after the fact
so they can freak themselves out and pretend that they can know the future by doing the right kind of decoding.
He believes the same shit.
So if he were to just take the position that the idea of a literal profit is dumb,
then he risks attacking his own worldview.
And he can't do that.
Because he doesn't have other tools that he can use,
Alex just tries to invalidate the caller's question about Nostradamus on the technicality.
It's a fake quatrain, man, brother.
It's a particularly interesting tactic for Alex to use and be wrong about
because about 75% of the quotes that he cites in his documentaries and on his shows
are fake.
Almost everything he thinks Thomas Jefferson said is misattributed.
And if he's such a stickler about authenticating something like a Nostradamus Quatrain,
you'd think he'd put a little bit of effort of the same type into Jefferson.
Sure.
But he doesn't.
No.
No, it's, it would be a strange thing for Alex to denigrate the entire concept of prophecy to begin with.
This guy is a quook.
He's a quook.
He's a wacko.
But it sucks.
whenever you get a spiritual argument that devolves into technicalities.
That blows. That's just the worst feeling in the world.
Well, but also, like, it raises an interesting question, and that is like, okay,
what about the real quatrains then? Do you think those are prophecies or what?
Like, if this weren't fake, would you then be freaked out by it?
That's a good question. If it weren't, okay, what level of fakeness would freak you out?
Would it be even more freaky if it was just attributed to somebody else who snuck it into Nostradamus's stuff?
You know, like it was written by a similar guy, just not Nostradamus.
Oh, you met from like the 1500s.
Yeah.
Okay, yeah.
So not Shaq.
Not technically Shaq, unless we don't know something about Shaq.
He's a genie.
No, that was just in that movie.
No, that was just in that movie.
So Alex, he has a, he's got a bone to pick with psychics.
Yeah.
And does not.
Don't we all?
He doesn't like the way that they get away with predictions and stuff.
You know, like, it's just, it's cheap.
That quatrain wasn't even a real quatrain of Nostradamus.
He wrote thousands and thousands of pages of nebulous stuff,
and the king on the horse in the day of the 12 was pierced in the head with a spear and died.
I mean, kings were dying all the time, jousting and in battles.
And so, 200 years later, somebody died.
eyes and oh my gosh,
the king got
killed with a spear
in his face.
Man, that never happens.
I mean, I love these psychics.
Oh, there's going to be a car wreck,
a bus wreck in the next week.
I feel it.
It's going to happen somewhere.
And then no one pays attention
if it doesn't happen, but if it does,
see, I predicted it.
It just, just right.
You can hear in this clip,
Alex describing what his business model
develops into.
Yeah.
He makes hundreds of predictions,
many of them contradicting each other,
and that makes a big deal out of it
when something he says appears to have come true
while never owning up to all the times he's wrong.
In fact, he's developed a defense mechanism about this
that the psychics he's complaining about don't even get to enjoy
where he'll pretend that some of his past predictions
ended up being wrong because he predicted an event
and that scared the globalists into not carrying it out.
When Alex describes this dynamic and complains about psychics like this,
it should make clear that he knows what he's doing.
He's able to articulate how what they do is a scam, so it's impossible to pretend that he doesn't get it.
Yeah.
He knows how he's fucking with people.
Yeah, no, there is definitely an element of like, I guess celebrity deathmatch should happen where we've got present-day Alex versus 2006 Alex.
You know, in a clay fight where both of them are, essentially they're yelling the same things at each other.
I think 2006 Alex would win in a walk.
Like, it would be so easy.
He's younger.
Yep.
He is debatably fitter.
I'm not sure.
He was drinking pretty heavily.
But I also think that he could get the crowd on his side.
Like, I think that 2006 Alex could pretend to be sympathetic and get the, he could get some face energy.
Yeah.
Whereas present day Alex would have to heal it.
You know, it'd have to be the bad boy.
Full on. There would be very few fans in attendance for present.
present day Alex.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So Alex is, he has these criticisms of psychics.
Mm-hmm.
You know, they never get held responsible for failed predictions.
I appreciate that.
And he can say this because he's not a psychic.
You know, granted, he predicted 9-11.
And he is a psychic.
Well, not.
He said he's a psychic.
Not back then.
He said a bunch of times he's a psychic.
Not back then.
Oh, okay.
Well, maybe back then, but not today.
You know, I'm not psychic.
I don't have a crystal ball.
I don't read tea leaves.
I don't gut a pig and read to checkers and read.
I don't practice Santaria.
to come up with this stuff.
I got on air, July 25th on TV, and I got on the radio July 25th.
I did it for months straight.
Operation exposed the government terrorist, and I said, call the White House,
bin Laden's their agent.
They're soon going to be a big attack, probably on the World Trade Center.
It's going to be huge.
They're going to bring a police state in after it.
How did I know that?
From deep study, from deep research, from deep meditation.
And I don't mean meditating in some mumbo-jumbo way.
I mean true, the highest form of intelligence art, which I have organically and it's indigenous to my brain.
I'm not perfecting, a lot of problems.
It's like my wife can be doing some calculations on a calculator, and I just spit out the number with these huge numbers she's got.
And I can't control it, and I can't say how I do it.
And if I try to consciously do it, I can't do it.
She's like, how did you know that?
How do you do that?
Like I can spell some big giant complex word, but if I try to spell it, I can't even write at a fifth grade level.
So we know that Alex now says that God told him in repeated prophetic dreams about 9-11, and that was how he predicted it.
But I guess he's still lying about research and deep study at this point in 2006.
One of the things that I think is pretty fascinating is that Alex is describing his magical abilities in a specific way that's similar to how he plays the game now.
He can do nearly impossible mental math if he's not trying, but if he's asked to do the math, he can't.
He can spell any word if he's just on autopilot, but if he's asked to spell anything, he's basically illiterate.
This is how he describes his prophecy powers now, where if God sends him some jolt, he can do magic.
But if you confront him and demand that he tell you what's going to happen in the future, it's probably not going to work.
You can't do it on command?
Yeah.
This is a very old conman trick, and has worked pretty much.
pretty well historically because it has a built-in excuse for why the trick didn't work.
The conman isn't really in control of their own magical gifts, and any attempt that they might make to prove their powers would require them to exert that control that they don't have.
Yeah.
The other place you see this kind of thing is in adolescence.
Everybody wants to be special, and a good way to be special is to have some kind of special power.
The problem is that you don't have one, but that doesn't stop some creative kids.
from trying to convince people that they do.
So you come up with something like Kel,
from Kenan and Kel,
his power in mystery men,
where he can turn invisible,
but only when no one's looking.
Kids tell each other shit like this all the time,
and I don't want to deprive them of their fun,
but if an adult is telling you something like this,
you should know that you're either being scammed
or you're in a mid-tier Ben Stiller movie.
Alex's whole, like, I can do all this shit,
but I can't, you can't, I can't prove it.
Yeah.
Like, it's fucking kid shit.
shit. Yeah, it feels, it feels very early 1900s. It feels like that turn of the century spiritual
revivalist, like, I mean, you know, you go back and you look at some of the stuff where people have
just got wet rags and like, ah, this is from ghosts. And everybody bought it. So you're like,
I mean, how gullible can you be? I can talk to ghosts, but only when no one else is around.
And you can't hear them and they'll never talk to you. And yeah, yeah, it's, it's all, um,
relatives of the same thing.
It's all the breakoffs of it.
It's all the same jazz.
Be surprised at my magic, but don't ask for it.
Don't ask for my mind.
And honestly,
asking for it is kind of an insult
to the magical abilities.
It is.
You know.
I mean, the magic is bigger than both of us.
Really, if you think about it.
You're trying to turn this into a cheap kind of thing.
Would you like tell God what to do?
I don't tell God what to do.
So it feels like maybe you're the asshole here.
Yeah.
Right?
You're going to need to give me $100.
It only makes sense.
It only makes sense.
In 1900?
That's a thousand dollars.
So Alex discusses what sealed the deal for him on predicting 9-11.
All right.
And it turns out he was watching hardball.
And I'm not trying to sit here and get off into how my brain works.
But I understand the system.
I can look at big complex systems and I can integrate what's going on if I have enough data.
And really, it's not that hard.
Frankly, I saw Warren, Rudman, and Gary Hart was the final straw.
I was back when I watched TV.
I should watch TV because you can glean more from that than just reading the text.
I just can't stand it.
So I selfishly don't really watch a lot of TV because I just can't stand it.
Selfishly.
I like to have a life, and I feel so good and so free without it.
But I saw them on hardball.
They were going, big changes in America.
They were smiling.
They were real proud of able to make this announcement.
They've been told they could do this.
And they were kind of rising up out of their chairs.
and Chris Matthews is going something big, huh?
Yeah, they're smiling, yeah, big changes, big buildings, yeah, going to come down, boom, boom, Ben Laden.
And I'd seen him introduce Ben Laden on the news, he's going to get you soon, he's coming.
I had seen how the government had bombed the World Trade Center before.
Yeah, that one helps.
You start to see it's not really that hard to do.
What's hard to do is to just make very few predictions and have all those come correct, which might have,
instead of just making a thousand predictions and a few come for it.
Let's revisit that 20 years later.
So it's complete bullshit that Alex saw Gary Hart on Hardball,
and that's what finally made all the pieces come together about his 9-11 prediction.
Clinton had enlisted Gary Hart to co-chair a committee on national security in 1998,
and their findings included dire warnings about how it was likely that a terrorist attack would be committed on U.S. soil within the next 25 years.
Sure.
He did interviews about it and gave speech.
in 2001 because their report had been completed.
So I think it's pretty likely that he was on hardball at some point around when Alex is saying.
And it's entirely possible that Alex saw it.
Sure.
The problem with Gary Hart was that people didn't really respect him.
He was supposed to be the next big Democratic hopeful in 1984 who could make a run at Reagan.
Hart narrowly lost the Democratic primary to Walter Mondale, who went on to get beat about
as bad as possible, only winning his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C.
crazy electoral map.
Bad news.
Real bad.
Different days.
After that disaster,
it made sense that Hart would get his shot in 1988
and all signs were looking like this was going to be the case.
Because if you look at the 1984 Democratic primary too,
it's like he made crazy momentum on Mondale.
And then it just wasn't enough to get him over the line.
So like he had,
he was a rising piece of business.
Real Bernie Sanders style.
Yeah, but then someone released a picture of him being very cozy
with a woman who wasn't his wife on a boat called monkey business.
Oh, that's right.
I remember one.
That whole thing was made up and fake.
Well,
half made up probably.
Either way, this man would have been elected if he had done this in 2022.
Definitely.
Yeah.
But unfortunately, it was 1988 and Lee Atwater may or may not have decided to really run a
nice PR campaign on this one.
Yeah.
So Gary Hart was the golden boy of the Democratic Party.
And his first real run ended with Mondale getting the shit kicked out of him in historic fashion.
And then the second run led to him looking very weak in the midst of a sex scandal with him choosing to drop out of the race instead of trying to weather the storm.
That led to Michael Dukakis getting the Democratic nomination.
And granted, he did better than Mondale.
But he lost to George H.W. Bush, 426 to 111 in the electoral college.
Yeah.
And that was H.W.
that was a man with so little charisma he ran the CIA he was beatable yeah yeah um and like gary hart
probably could have been probably he would have done better than ducacus yeah well god damn
anybody would have done better than ducacus yeah poor guy nowadays the that picture of him with donna rice
would have probably like boosted his numbers yep yep yeah weird weird times yeah he was a bad
messenger for people to hear a warning about imminent terrorist attacks from.
To viewers, he was either someone they didn't know or someone they did know and kind of didn't
like.
To Republicans, he was a joke.
And to Democrats, he was the guy who probably would have beat Bush but couldn't resist
fucking on this boat or at least putting himself in a position where Roger Stone's buddy
could, you know, run that PR campaign.
Regardless, we know that Alex got his 9-11 prediction from psychic dreams that God sent him.
So this whole act of trying to provide a rational explanation for his prophecy to differentiate it from Nostodomis's work is kind of stupid and looks dumb.
And for it to include Gary Hart in his, Alex, okay, like, regardless of whether or not a person watching Gary Hart on this Hardball episode that may or may not have happened, may be convinced of something terrible, Alex should not have been convinced of shit by watching Gary Hart on Hartball, right?
You know when I realized 9-11 was going to happen.
What?
Well, I was watching Brett Hart.
Oh, yeah?
The excellence in execution.
Yeah.
The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.
Sure.
Fight Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Yeah.
At WrestleMania.
Yeah.
I knew 9-11 was coming.
Did you know when I knew 9-11 was coming?
When Owen Hart...
No, no, no, no, no.
When Corey Hart fought those vampires.
Oh, I thought Corey Hart.
Hart was the baseball player.
Wasn't he, uh, on the Brewers?
Who am I thinking of?
Who are you thinking of?
I think I'm thinking of.
I think I'm thinking of the musician.
No.
Yeah, I'm thinking of the wrong Corey.
God damn it.
You need of Corey Hame?
I was thinking of.
Corey Feldman, the Corys?
It was, I was thinking of one of the Corries.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fool.
Anyway, Jim the Anvil Nyhart.
Yep.
Not named Hart.
No.
the Heart Foundation.
Sure.
Are we back on track.
There we go.
So Nostradamus was fake.
All this shit was fake.
This quatrain was fake.
That is a big pronouncement from you, Dan.
You better have something to back that up with.
I'm not saying it.
Nostradamus was, oh shit.
I'm not saying it.
Alex is.
Okay.
So that quatrain wasn't real.
Now, I forget the exact verse in what got ignored by the counterfeit of Nostradamus.
What got ignored.
Was in the final book of the Bible.
revelation. It said, to paraphrase, in the great port city of the new Babylon, the great
towers will fall. They'll be covered with dust, and sea captains will say, Babylon is burning
that great center of commerce, and it will have been the place of the trade, the towers
of the trade. I mean, it's an incredible quote. That was real. No one wanted to talk about that
if you want to talk about prophecy. No one wanted to talk about, it was just some fake quatrain. That's the
thing people do for Nostradamus is they write.
fake quatrains put it on a message board and it's top news everywhere even on CNN, taking it serious.
As I mentioned earlier, the Nosodama's quote is real, but Alex is wildly off in his paraphrasing of revelation.
So, so just to be clear on something, Alex is telling somebody that a real quote is fake and then is about to give a fake quote about something real.
I mean, quotes generous, fake paraphrasing.
Whatever you are.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, just to be clear.
And from the Bible, no less.
From the Bible, the thing that he cares about, but Notre Dameus, again, he does not care about.
Yeah.
So the part he's talking about begins in Revelation 17 with the talk of the destruction of Babylon.
But the specific thing he's referencing is from Revelation 18, beginning with verse 11 through 13.
Quote, the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her being Babylon because no one buys their cargoes anymore.
Cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, claw.
Every sort of citron wood and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble.
Cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, of incense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and carriages, and human beings sold as slaves.
Babylon was an economic hub on the Euphrates River, so all that stuff about merchants and ship captains is completely understandable without having to make this New York City.
Yeah.
That's nonsense.
Yeah.
Versus 18 through 19 get a little weird, though.
Quote, when they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, was there ever a city like this great city?
They will throw dust on their heads and with weeping and mourning cry out.
That line, they will throw dust on their heads, seems really strange, especially considering how many images we had after 9-11 of people covered in dust.
True.
So if you do a surface-level misreading of this,
this verse, you can see how that might seem applicable, which seems to be what Alex is doing.
I guess.
However, if you read more of the Bible, you would know that the act of throwing dust on one's
head is something that's frequently done to express despair.
Job's friends do it to show empathy with his plight.
Joshua does it after receiving news of a military defeat.
And the Book of Lamentations contains this verse about the response to the destruction of
Jerusalem.
quote, the elders of daughter Zion sit on the ground in silence.
They've sprinkled dust on their heads and put on sackcloth.
The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.
Alex doesn't really care about the Bible or Christianity,
so he doesn't have a broad spectrum grasp on what any of it means.
He only has an interest in what the Bible says to the extent that he can use it to make his job easier
or sound more interesting.
So a reference to an ancient custom of expressing despair,
is entirely lost on him.
He just sees the word dust and decides that it must be about 9-11.
Yeah.
It's just fucking garbage.
He's an embarrassing dope.
Yeah, I mean, that sucks, though.
And it happens like this so often where it's like,
there is an incredibly interesting question here,
and it's none of the things that Alex is talking about.
It is, when did people start putting dust on their heads?
Whose idea was it?
Who was the first guy who was like,
ah, I'm so fucking sad.
and just sprinkled a little dust on his head.
And then everybody around was like, holy shit.
We totally get this signal.
This signal makes perfect sense.
I think if you saw someone pouring or throwing dust on their heads,
you wouldn't assume like they're having a great time.
No, of course not.
You'd be like, man, that guy should go in lamentations.
Yeah, that guy's having, he's having a rough one.
He's having a rough one.
Look at him, sprinkled dust on his head.
Yeah, I mean, I think that without like some cultural context,
future societies might look back on people splashing water on their face.
Totally.
As kind of as confusing.
No, whenever, every time you see a horror movie where somebody's like,
ah, I just got to splash water out of my face, man.
What would, who was the first guy to splash water on his face whenever in a horrible situation?
Right.
These signifiers are culturally dependent and, I mean, who knows?
We just accept these things as having evolved naturally, anthropologically, as opposed to we need to be building time machines to ask these very specific and pointless questions.
I honestly imagine if I'd spent about half an hour to 40 minutes more looking into this, I would have an answer for you.
Not good enough.
I need a time machine.
I can't trust your answers with words.
I think someone could very easily.
We don't need a time machine for this one.
This one, I think, probably has been studied.
But yeah, I mean, Alex is just like, he's pulling at these straws of the revelation, like the dust, trade towers.
What the fuck are you talking about?
This is nonsense.
My feeling on prophecy is you can't, it's all or nothing with prophecy, right?
Like you can't have my prophecies better than your prophecy guy because once you admit that somebody's getting prophecies and God can do weird shit at all point in time, even if even turning something that wasn't his into his, if you like, then any prophecy could be true.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's, it's hard to fight prophecy when you're trying to defend.
the sort of structure of prophecy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You kind of have to be like,
eh, they got it wrong.
He was listening to the wrong guy.
Exactly.
He got prophecy, but it was from Beelzebub.
Right.
Or something.
But you don't know that.
And even if it was from Beelzebub,
all prophecies are given through God in some form or fashion
because all it comes from God in some form or fashion.
So all prophecies must or must not be true.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm fine with that.
Yeah.
I think they're not true.
I agree.
So, the 9-11 hijackers, right?
What do you think about them?
Real pieces of garbage.
Oh, we heard that earlier.
Real pieces of garbage.
Camera in the collar and informed us about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Overall, I think...
Let me narrow my question.
Yeah, that's a big question.
Do you think they did it?
Yeah, yeah, I do.
You think they flew the planes and, like, did the...
I'm pretty sure, based upon all the...
evidence I had available to me when this happened and now that those guys were flying those
fucking planes.
At various points in Alex's career, he would agree with you.
Yes.
However, in 2006, he does not.
Oh.
Muhammad Adda didn't do anything.
Muhammad Adda was a U.S. government agent who thought he was taking part in drills.
He was nerve gassed on board those aircraft.
They were falling into the buildings.
You can get 10 other versions of what happened.
My version is correct.
My version goes off the facts.
My version goes off all the evidence.
My version goes off the crime scene.
and the admissions and past operations.
You see, we do multifaceted analysis here.
Okay?
And I know we had loaded phones, and I just spent 10 minutes on that because that call are just...
Sir, get into real issues instead of just that idiot, Nostradamus, the prophet Nostradamus.
I mean, the guy was a charlatan.
He was a carnival barker.
He was a joke.
It's the wrong show, brother.
I don't know, like, okay, so cognitive dissonance, very difficult, two opposing ideas, same brain, tough to do.
I don't know how to deal with a guy fresh off of saying Mohammed Atta was nerve gassed in one of those planes and that was remote control flyed into the thing.
And you're so stupid for believing what some random asshole from the past said.
Yeah, and I think there's a, there's a rich comedy too and like, my version is based on facts.
deep research.
My version will change in six months.
That's what people who believe in prophecy say.
Yeah.
And no one will hold me responsible for changing the version of the things I say.
Nope.
Yeah, he's a real, but this is like, I don't know.
I feel like I've said this in times we've done past episodes before.
It's like, this is radio.
Yeah.
Like this actually is radio.
No, this is what it, I mean, oddly enough, this feels normal.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
This is like kind of what it's supposed to be.
crazy people making people on the radio map yeah Alex has a position that is weird and wrong yeah
and he attracts people who are weirder and wronger right and they call and annoy him right and then
there's attention in that I think that's kind of delicious yeah no it's great it's it's sports talk
radio that's what it should be you know that's the problem with stuff like this is that then it's like
and also we should vote for somebody and it's like ah no no no no no no no no
Be mad at the coach, you know?
Just don't give me this.
So Alex goes to break and he comes back and he takes another caller.
And this person has an interesting take to try and sort of reassure Alex and bring him back to Earth.
Okay.
Let's talk to Robert.
Robert, where are you calling me from?
Hi, good morning, Alex.
I'm Robert in San Diego.
Welcome.
Many times of RTB student in college.
Hey, you know, that first caller just was doing his job as an agent, you know, to try to distract you.
you know giving aid and comfort to the enemy misdirection propaganda you know
taking away the true focus he did sound he did sound sarcastic
oh it was totally a plant i could hear it right from the word go oh yeah man that call
was totally a plant that was the globalist trying to fuck with you i could not be happier with
that call you're cool man you're cool that's the globalist man someone's paying him to fuck with you
here's what i feel like just happened right uh i met a bar and then the guy who was next to me
was dominating a conversation that I did not want to have.
And he got up and he went to the bathroom and I was like, oh,
finally.
And then this guy walks up and he just goes, that guy's a plant.
I didn't ask for this, man.
What are you doing here?
See, the feeling that I had more is you're sitting at a bar.
Someone next to you, there's a guy.
And he's aggressively hitting on a lady who is not interested.
Not interested.
He's like, you know, like, come on, come on.
She's not interested.
Mohammed on time is a piece of garbage.
She walks away.
Yeah.
his buddy comes up and is patting him on the shoulder and like,
you're a good looking boy.
You're a good looking guy.
Okay.
This is reassurance.
This is like reinforcing the like.
There's definitely that.
The Alex ego.
Yeah.
I can see that.
I also feel there's a lot of this guy in there too.
I feel like he's talking to me out of the side of his mouth.
You know like, ah, you know, that kind of thing?
Sure.
I would.
Yeah.
I'd love a bar that was just full of like this is all of Alex's callers from
one day.
Yep.
We're just going to mingle.
We're going to call it the Alex's Callers Bar.
Oh.
Everybody who calls in has to go to the bar afterwards.
Yeah.
I think that's a great plan.
God, if only.
Yeah.
See, this is what we need a time machine for.
We need to find more terrible reasons to use a time machine that have nothing to do
with changing anything for the better.
Well, I feel like going back and having to drink some of these weirdos probably wouldn't
leave too many ripples.
Sure.
wouldn't cause time paradoxes.
Or it would wind up making the world a lot better place.
It could only help.
Yeah, probably.
So we got commercial here.
Oh.
It's one of the delights of the past.
06.
Sometimes we got commercials.
Yeah.
And here's one.
Hello, folks.
Alex Jones here introducing Prudent Places USA, an interactive CD book that is your
premier resource for hard-to-find information.
Find out about everything from job migration to evacuation information, which is
major bridges in disrepair and FEMA evacuation time studies for coastal cities.
Zero in on man-made disaster zones, environmental areas of concern, and natural disaster zones
find out everything from where to get water in an emergency to geographic income levels.
Housing prices, complete with over three gigabytes of detailed information on the 3,000-plus counties in the U.S.
Full-color photographs, 550 high-resolution full-color maps, and detailed information and analysis that you need.
Order Britain places USA, now for only $29, plus shipping by calling new millennium.
It's fun to listen to an ad read like this and remember that Alex pretended that he was one of the most sought-after voiceover guys before Obama came along and made everyone hate Alex for being white.
This is hacky ad reading, even for 2006.
And it works fine for like local businesses or someone with a tiny budget, but this would be considered pretty bad by professionals.
Yep.
This is a nice little commercial for a CD-ROM filled.
with advice about where to bug out when shit goes down?
That seems like a normal enough thing for Alex to be selling,
so at first glance, this doesn't seem all that weird.
But you might notice at the end there,
he tells people to call New Millennium to buy this CD-ROM,
which also wouldn't sound that weird
unless you've listened to a lot of info wars.
New Millennium Concepts is the name of the company
that makes Big Berkey Water Filters,
which is one of Alex's primary sponsors at this time.
That's a curious detail,
and it raises some questions about why a company that produces water filters is also spending ad money to promote a CD-Romabub bugout locations.
It seems outside of what their company was made to do unless you understand the bigger picture.
Yeah.
New Millennium Concepts doesn't sell water filters because they're passionate about cleaner water or because everyone needs their filters.
They sell water filters because it's a product that's easy to sell using fear, and Alex's show is a fear-based marketing setup.
Maybe it's not a terrible idea to use a water filter, but there's a difference between trying to sell someone one by explaining the upsides of it and selling them one by yelling about how the water is poisoned and is going to turn you gay.
Alex's content is a feeding mechanism that creates the fear that the products he sells are meant to alleviate.
It's a predatory cycle where his show makes you scared that if you don't buy the water filters, you'll die.
But thankfully, he has a filter company that he can vouch for.
buy Alex's friend's filters
so you can alleviate the anxiety that his content has created.
This CD-ROM operates the same way.
Alex is full of yelling at the audience that it's the end of the world
and everything's going to blow up at any moment,
which creates a heightened level of fear.
The audience is scared about where they can go to be safe
during the societal collapse,
and thankfully he has a friend who can sell them a CD-ROM full of information all about it,
and it's the same people who sell you the water filters.
It's really convenient.
Yeah, it's a little bit shady.
And by that I mean a lot shady.
Which do you think is worse?
Do you think it's worse if the people running the company are making this CD-ROM and essentially it's going like,
and you know what else?
You could really use an air filter if you bug out here or a water filter if you bug out here or, you know, all that stuff.
Or if the people that made the company are like our water filters are great, but also we're terrified that we're going to need to bug out at any single moment, you know?
Like is it better if the fear from them is.
is real or if they're cynically taking advantage of it?
Which is better?
Yeah.
I think the effect is the same either way.
Sure.
Because none of that can be communicated to the audience that just hears Alex's terrible ad read.
That is true.
But I think from a human perspective, it's probably better if they actually believe it.
Yeah.
Because then at least they're not like intentionally and maliciously ripping people off.
They are just like thinking that it's of service.
Right.
They're just regular weirdos.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but like, I don't believe that.
No, it would be hard to, it would be hard not to whisen up, especially if you were, like, maybe you were afraid.
But then shortly after you started making a lot more money, you were less afraid and more willing to cynically exploit people.
I imagine.
So, um, we get to the second hour of the show.
And Alex has some guests.
One of them is a fellow named Robert, uh, who's a filmmaker.
And, uh, he has a new film out that Alex is helping promote.
And he really has been.
laying a lot of ground work, both in the episode the day before this and the beginning of
this episode about how like this guy's the shit.
Yeah.
He's won Emmys.
He's so big.
He's real.
Yeah.
And so Alex does his little intro.
My guest are here in studio with me.
And of course, one of them is Robert Mansero.
He's a producer, director, writer of over 10 years in the television film industry after
spending three years at Disney Studios.
He formed his own production company, Full Vision Productions.
and Robert has been honored with, well, instead of reading this long bio, Robert, tell us about yourself.
I come from a commercial music video background, done a lot of extreme sports, and now into the documentary filmmaking avenue.
So when you first got into TV, what did you do?
When I first got into TV, I was basically a temp.
I walked down to Disney lot.
I had no job whatsoever.
walked into a building and they go, well, you're the temp.
And, of course, I said yes.
And I worked there, worked my way up, became a junior production executive, worked under Katzenberg,
was in charge of quite a few films in development, and just got tired of the whole corporate
scene because I wanted to go out and make films.
So left.
Absolutely not.
No?
No.
None of that was true?
It can't be.
Was some of it true about him being an intern, maybe, for a while?
I feel like this is something from like how to succeed in business without really trying or whatever that music was.
Do you mean Michael J. Fox is starring in this movie about working your way up to the top very quickly with no difficulty?
I was a temp.
And by that, I mean, I wasn't a temp.
I just walked onto the lot and pretended to be a temp.
And then I'm working for Katzenberg.
I'm in charge of a bunch of, yeah.
That's like a person who imagines they like, okay.
So I'm an extra on some things.
And then I just was so good at that.
I'm now starring as I was almost Star Lord.
I was almost in Guardians.
Very close.
I do like the, I do like the, I was put in charge of several movies.
Yeah.
I was put in charge of several movies.
Why?
Why and for what?
And which movies were they?
Yeah.
Impossible number one.
Those are positions that are people who are, have careers.
Yeah.
It's not, hey, we moved the temp up and he's not charged in production.
I understand people think that the entertainment industry is very chaos.
And it's more chaotic than a lot of other industries.
But it's not that chaotic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I do like the I was under Katzenberg, though, because like, I guess everyone is.
Yeah.
You know, like how many steps removed.
What a great, what a great name drop for him.
I believe he could have been a temp, though.
So Alex has been trying to play this guy up, like he's the most legitimate Emmy-nominated director around.
And the reason is because he just put out a documentary called Prescription Suicide,
which is about the evils of prescription.
drugs. Right off the bat, I want to make it clear that I tried to watch this documentary
to prep for the episode, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I found a physical copy for sale on eBay,
but it would take too long to get here, so I didn't buy it. But I did want to actually watch
the film before I judged it too hard. Sure, sure, sure, sure. There's a lot of really good critiques
people can make about the prescription drug industry. And if this guy was saying something that was
reasonable, then I don't want to just have a knee-jerk reaction to hate him because he's on Alex's show.
Yeah.
In 2006, an entirely sane people could find, you know, themselves on InfoWords.
So I want to be careful not to jump to conclusions.
Yeah.
That said, it's important for Alex to present him as a very important filmmaker because
the bigger story here is that Robert's film wasn't accepted to play at South by Southwest.
And if he's a big deal in the industry, then that would seem to indicate that the subject
he's covering is too hot, too hot.
He's being censored.
Gotcha.
On the flip side, if he's just a guy who should.
showed up as a temp at Disney and is pretending that he was in charge of getting movies made,
then it starts to make a lot more sense why South by Southwest might have rejected his film.
Maybe it wasn't good.
Again, I would prefer to have watched it so I could just say that it's not good, but based
on Robert's self-told origin story, my instincts are to say it's probably bad.
Yeah.
Another bad sign is that previous to this, the only credit he has as a director is a 2002
comedy short film about Viagra called Code Blue.
He doesn't have another credit until a 2016 film called Veteran Charity Ride to Sturgis.
That sounds fun, though.
Totally.
But it's not a big career.
No, no, it's not.
From what I understand and was able to glean, I think he's had a totally fine career, but it's mostly been like PSAs and directing things for like local fire departments.
That's great.
Yeah, it's work.
And it's creative and it, you know, I'm not, I'm not shitting on that, but it's not like making
big budget movies.
Yeah, we can't all become Michelle Gondry and turn music videos into eternal sunshine in the
mouth of his mind.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Sometimes just make some music videos.
And there's no shame.
No shame in that.
But I don't think based on everything I can tell that this documentary was good.
Yeah.
I'm not saying that the gatekeepers are always correct.
Uh, but generally talent will find a way to do more than, uh, uh,
charity rides to Sturgis.
He was talking about the rejection letter that he got from South by Southwest.
Yeah. And one of the things that he says was that they thought it was artless.
Jesus.
Fucking hell, South by.
He interpreted that as the subject matter is too heavy for these people.
Sure.
Which I think he could have taken the note a little differently.
Yeah.
I mean, artless isn't really a great note, though.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, what is it?
So it's artless?
What does that mean?
Bad.
Should I,
should I like cut more?
Was the storyboarding bad?
It's an umbrella thing.
That's what I'm saying.
He got no craft here, buddy.
What does that even mean?
I don't have any craft.
Maybe I should just not make documentaries.
Is that what you're trying to say?
Yep.
Oh, shit.
God damn, that does sound right.
Are you the temp?
We need someone to get coffee for the people itself.
Okay, fine, I'll get it.
Sorry for giving you my film.
So he talks a little bit about.
about this film with Alex.
Now you're making independent films.
Tell us about this new documentary you've made, Prescription Suicide.
Prescription Suicide is a look into the families affected by any depressant drugs.
And basically what it is, it's six stories of six kids told by the families.
It's through their eyes, through their experiences.
And there's no experts, there's no doctors telling you.
It's just a family telling you what happened in their lives.
Oh, that does sound artless.
So you're personalizing it.
Absolutely.
It's a very personal approach.
That's great.
And I think that personalizing mental illness stories can be often pretty helpful.
But I think that there's huge problems with Robert's approach.
The first is that he's doing a documentary that's wildly critical of prescription drugs.
And he has no interest in hearing from the pro-medication interview subjects.
Like someone who could give voice to the other side.
Not interested.
Just leave it alone.
Let him out.
This means that he's not setting out to do a piece that actually gets into medication and whether or not it's helpful.
Instead, it's just meant to be a slice of life kind of thing, looking at people who have had tragedies in their family that revolve around mental health.
The second problem is that he can't interview the people who died from suicide.
He can only hear their perspective through the lens of the family members who are alive.
I'm not saying that the family members don't have a valid story to tell or,
that their experience isn't important,
but I'm saying that they don't know everything.
It's a harsh reality that for a lot of people struggling with mental health issues,
their family members can often be a part of why they're struggling.
Parental abuse or neglect can often be a big factor,
and even when that isn't the case,
family members are often in complete denial about what someone is going through.
These interviews can provide a humanizing glimpse
into what the family members thought was going on with their loved one,
but it can't capture what they have.
actually were going through.
Externally, it might have appeared to a mother that their child was getting worse after
being on a prescription, but the documentary isn't about that.
It's about blaming medications for people committing suicide.
This documentary is flawed in concept and from an execution standpoint.
It sounds artless.
It does sound very artless.
Yeah.
That's no good.
That's no good.
He later clarifies that there are six families, three with people who,
have died of suicide and three who attempted suicide.
Sure, sure.
And again, I have not watched.
I was not able to watch this so I don't know.
But one of the people that he is discussing, he does name this person.
And I was able to look up their story.
They ended up suing Paxil, the company that makes Paxil.
And in the course of the lawsuit, like if you read the description,
of what happened, this person was on
like a bunch of drugs.
Yeah, yeah.
They were on like PCP and had amphetamines in their system.
Like, it was not just a situation
where they were doing Paxil.
Yeah. So like, there's a lot of,
I would say, confounding variables
with some of the cases that they're talking about.
And I don't think they, based on their interview,
I don't think they handle it well.
I can't imagine they do.
Yeah, I mean, the problem with anecdotal stories
for mental illness especially
is sooner or later
you're going to be in there with the doctor
and the doctor's going to give you an anecdote
and it's like how do you deal with that?
Because the reality is
most of the time they work
but nothing works all the time
and when you're dealing with the brain
that shit's crazy so anything might get rewired somewhere
and every time the doctor is not trying
to rewire you in the wrong place
but who fucking knows?
So there's always going to be the most tragic story of a person who is fucking doomed.
And then the horrible things that happen because people exploit it or don't do it correctly in response, you know?
Right.
And the stories of, I mean, it's kind of tragic, but the stories of people who respond well to medication and go back to their lives and maybe have their lives saved by a clinical and therapy approach to,
to solve, like, mental health crises.
That's kind of not interesting to people in a documentary.
No.
It's kind of a boring story that I got my life back together.
Yep.
The interesting part of the story is probably before you got help.
It's way before.
Yeah.
Generally, that's why it's very interesting.
So these human interest stories and these humanizing things, I think they're valuable.
Yeah.
And it's not wrong to do this, but to use
that in a way as a cudgel against this branch of mental health, I think is wrong.
I think you've correctly identified one of the main problems, which is that at the end of the
day, pulling back, the goal of any mental health intervention is to make your life more boring.
Yeah.
That is the goal.
The goal is for you to have fewer interesting stories to tell.
Well, yeah, in a way.
Exactly.
In a way.
But I think it's preferable because there are so many interesting stories that are interesting to you that are not interesting to other people.
Like it's very interesting to me whenever I go and just have dinner with my wife.
Yeah.
That is not a big story.
Yeah.
So there's another guest there.
Yeah.
And it's a lady who wrote a book.
And so Alex introduces her.
We also have somebody here with us riding shotgun today.
And that's Gwen Olson, Confessions of an RX drug pusher.
and God's call to loving arms, and she's been on the inside,
and then had already gotten disillusioned, gotten out of the system,
and then even after she'd already gotten out of the system,
then her niece died a just horrific death like so many others that have taken this drug,
and then we learned that even in the testing of the drugs,
it came out that they knew it radically increased suicidal tendencies,
the opposite, so we'll tell that story and talk about our book.
So Gwen Olsen wrote a book called Confessions of a Prescription Drug Pusher, God's Call to Loving Arms,
which is something of a mind-fuck in title form.
Her claim to fame was that she was a pharmaceutical rep who got disillusioned with the fact
that her job was to try to convince doctors to prescribe drugs more.
She came to view her job as being a drug pusher, and that's all good and well.
Where things get confusing is the part where God is in the subtitle.
Yeah, that's a problem.
It makes total sense that someone would be a pharmaceutical rep and get discussed.
with the whole industry of over-prescribing drugs and come out with a tell-all book.
That makes sense.
It's a valid angle to attack Big Pharma from, and it represents an actual problem that we could work on solving.
The God part is a departure, though, and it raises alarms.
So I read through most of Gwen's book, and it's basically a memoir that's been co-opted into an anti-medication tome.
I think that she's a willing participant in that co-option, but the core of what
that book is about could have gone a different direction.
Essentially, she's a person with a very tumultuous family history, full of abuse and chaos.
People in her family have not had good outcomes with psychiatric drugs, which she is universalized
into a belief that these drugs don't work.
There we go.
Further, she seems to take issue with what she thinks is a universal belief that mental
illnesses are passed on genetically, which gives credence to the idea that the solution to
them should be drugs.
Her family shared some mental health struggles, but her take on it is that it's not a genetic condition, it's a spiritual sickness.
I don't really take much issue with that as a basic perspective, and my whole life has been in conversation with mental health issues.
I've met people, including fellow mentally unwell people as well as doctors, and some of them think medication is more important than other approaches, and others don't.
Some think that medication is right for them, and others swear by it.
some people think I don't really want to mess with that.
But everyone I've ever dealt with understands that there's a role for multiple approaches.
I've never known anyone who thought a pill was a magic solution, but I do understand that
that thinking did exist in the past.
What perpetuated that kind of thinking was mostly marketing, where a company would try
to brand their new pill as a miracle drug right up to the extent that the law would allow
them to.
Gwen worked in that machine.
Her job as a pharmaceutical rep was to be the salesperson for these drugs.
A different department was in charge of making the ads,
but she was the part of the business that was on the ground,
asking the doctors, what can I put you down for?
It makes total sense that existing in that world
would make you think that the whole mental health approach in the country
was based on pushing drugs.
So I kind of don't judge Gwen too harshly for having that perspective.
What she's presenting as the universal position isn't,
the universal position, but it probably felt that way to her.
So I can see how that, like her coming from that place is sincere.
Yeah.
When I was doing hearing aids, I was, I've done it in like general clinical areas where you've
got an ophthalmologist and you got all that stuff, right?
And so I've seen so many drug reps by so many lunches.
And it is, it is disillusioning.
Don't get me wrong.
There is no way to see one of those.
people walk in with like mediocre Chinese food catered and then realize that they're selling
like oxy cotton by the bucket load but I don't know what else are you going to do somebody's got to go
i'm not gonna ever argue that there is a major problem and has been for a long time with this
structure of yeah sure of pharma as a business yeah but i mean once you start with like oh the medical
industry's fucked as a business everybody agrees with you and so is everything exactly
Exactly.
Yeah.
Business is fucked as a business.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When things like medications and shit have, like, gigantic financial incentives attached to them and shareholders and all this shit, it becomes very messy.
And I think that's unhealthy.
Yeah.
Insulence free to make and it costs some amount of money that's ungodly.
It's bullshit.
Yeah.
So this book is generally, it seems like the story of a person who discovered that non-medication approaches to dealing with mental illness and trauma existed.
and thinking that no one had ever heard of them.
That seems to be what her journey is.
She worked as a pharmaceutical rep,
so she probably wasn't exposed to as many people promoting yoga or meditation,
which is being experienced as someone was trying to cover these things up.
And that just is silly.
It's all great to promote these kinds of things
and taking a holistic approach to mental health,
but if I'm being fair, that is not where this book stops.
I agree with her on a very basic premise that she's making
about this idea that medication isn't,
it's not going to solve all your problems?
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
But her argument expands to being anti-medication
in a way that her story does not earn.
I resent this book,
and I think her approach and the impact of that book
has done far more damage to people's mental health
than anything she did as a pharmaceutical rep.
And I'm just going to say this off the bat
that I'm not going to cover too much about what Gwen talks about on the show
because a lot of it is about her niece who died from suicide,
and that's very uncomfortable.
Sure.
The niece was struggling with mental illness and drug abuse and her mom was trying to get her help, which Gwen didn't approve of because it involved medication.
Gwen decided that all of her niece's symptoms were actually being caused by the medications and seemingly appointed herself as the niece's guardian and positioned herself as the enemy of her niece, her niece, her sister.
Oh, God.
It's honestly all very fucked up and it's painfully obvious that Gwen projected a lot of her baggage onto the niece in a way that was entirely unfair and probably exacerbated what was already.
a horrible situation that she was in.
Yeah.
I read the story in Gwen's own words in her book, and I think an argument could be made that
she's partially responsible for her niece's death.
That would explain a lot of people's very vehement views.
If you think about it for five seconds and go, well, you can either have that vehement view
or recognize that you might be partially responsible for a lot of terrible shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some people might think that that's taking it too far.
so I'll just make a very safe statement
which is that she's exploiting her niece's death
and I find it disgusting
and that is what a lot of her interview is
so I don't
I'm not engaging
it is strange to have like
the experience again like one of my
my memoir the memoir that
that did it for me so to speak
was by Dr. K. Redfield Jameson
it's called an unquiet mind
and it's one of my favorite books
anybody's ever written and it is about
somebody who is a doctor in the field who has bipolar type one.
The classic double whammy.
Somebody's on both sides, you know, as opposed to somebody who's a pharmaceutical rep.
And that is just not the space to be in.
Yeah.
And I don't want to say that she's stupid by any means.
No, it has nothing to do with intelligence as we consider it.
Well, there's a butt coming.
Well, I do think it's dumb the way that she presents herself as if she's a doctor in the
book.
Yeah.
She presents like a lot of, oh, I mean, I was selling these drugs to doctors, so I had to get,
I had to learn a lot about them just like a doctor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's not really true.
No.
And it, it comes off really, really bad.
Yeah.
And I think that there's an, there's an extent to like, I'm kind of trying to be gracious
and nice by not covering her interview.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I think I'd have really fucking horrible things to say if I did.
and I let's not dwell on that.
Yeah, it's, it's tough because it's like your clinical experience is talking to doctors.
Doctors' clinical experience is talking to people, you know?
And so you can't have the same, you can't have the same point of view on efficacy.
Yeah, yeah.
And your job is sales.
Exactly.
Not medicine.
The most evil job of medicine.
Yeah.
So Alex talks a little bit about Prozac and how it is.
Is great.
No.
Oh, no.
Very bad.
Unsurprising.
In fact, let me ask you this, Gwen.
Back in the early 80s when they approved Prozac, it's admitted now.
And this actually came out a long time ago, right around that time that you were working for them.
But it was in a few publications, but not really publicly widely circulated, that they knew it radically increased suicide around 15%, which is a huge increase.
It was actually a suicide drug.
I mean, it really encouraged it.
That was one of the main effects.
And here they are pushing it for depression.
Did you ever hear that when you were?
in the industry? Did you ever hear anybody criticize?
Absolutely not. In fact, I only heard all of the positive information. The drugs were non-addicting.
The drugs were benign. The drugs were not neurotoxic. All of that sort of thing.
There's literally no reason why anyone in the pharmaceutical industry would be telling Gwen to say any of that stuff about their products.
Yeah. None of it's true. So it would be entirely counterproductive for them to say like, oh, our product is neurotoxic or whatever.
That would be crazy.
Silly. It would be crazy.
I'm not saying that pharmaceutical industry reps don't ever mislead people about their drugs,
just that it's not a lie to say that antidepressants aren't neurotoxic.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of studies about antidepressants like Prozac and whether or not they make things like suicidal ideation worse.
Sure.
Most of it shows no evidence that they cause any increase, but there are some studies that suggest that they might.
Because of that, and because drug companies are very averse to getting sued,
almost all medications prescribed for mood disorders have added a warning that say that they,
could cause an increase in suicidal ideation.
Yeah.
This is less a reflection of a real risk that these medications pose and more of a way for
companies to handle responsibility and spread it out.
If you do a study about people who have depression with notable suicidal ideation
and you treat one group with Prozac and another group with a placebo, what outcome might you expect?
Certainly with Alex's belief system, he would expect a higher incidence of suicidal ideation
in the Prozac group after treatment because he thinks that the drug causes that, right?
That makes sense.
Yeah.
The problem is that even if you had a study like that and those were the results you got,
it would be very hard to untangle all the confounding variables.
You'd have a result that was worth discussing and retesting and looking more into,
but you wouldn't have proven anything.
A 2013 paper published in the Journal of Psychological Research,
hope to find a way to get rid of some of the more serious confounding variables.
variables, primarily how severe depression, if you can be hard to identify how much of the symptoms
are caused by the condition compared to the treatment.
Sure.
An ideal situation would be to treat non-depressed people with Prozac and see if they got
depressed or suicidal, but that study wasn't available and no one's going to do that.
Yeah.
Something kind of close was, though.
A 2004 outpatient study was done with patients suffering from minor depression who had much
lower rates of suicidal ideation.
These patients were split into double-blind groups, one being treated with Prozac and the other with the placebo, and they were checked up on for 12 weeks.
Basically, they had those questionnaires that you get and they ask you about your suicidal ideation rated on a scale of zero to four.
And this paper analyzed the rates that people in the Prozac and placebo groups had increases of one or two points.
They found that people in the placebo group had higher rates of increased suicidal ideation, but the amount was statistically insignificant.
However, there was a wrinkle.
There was no statistical significance in the difference in groups in terms of who had an increase of one or two points.
But if you only included the people who had baseline suicidal ideation at the beginning of the study, people in the group treated with Prozac had significantly less of an increase.
For patients without suicidal ideation before the study, 5.1% of the placebo group had an increase of two points, whereas the Prozac group was 3.5%. That's not that big of a difference.
Sure.
For patients who had initial suicidal ideation, 40.9% of the placebo group had increases of two points compared to 12.5% with the Prozac group.
That makes sense.
Does this paper prove anything? Not necessarily.
although the data does tend to support the opposite of Alex's hypothesis.
Sure.
It seems to suggest that the severity of symptoms is itself a confounding variable to understanding what symptoms could be caused by medications and what could be a part of someone dealing with the condition that the medication is seeking to treat.
Sure.
There are a ton of studies out there about SSRIs, and I would never pretend to say that all of it says that every drug is safe all the time.
but I'm comfortable saying that Alex is lying
and the question's so much more complicated.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the one thing that is nice about it
is that generally speaking,
the profit motivation keeps you from making poison.
It generally doesn't make you money,
at least long term, to murder people instantly.
That usually doesn't help.
Soft kill.
Yeah, they're not for it.
in an evil way.
You can trust them for being evil.
They just get more money if you don't kill yourself.
True.
So there you go.
You've got that going for you.
Yeah.
I guess it's not really an optimistic thing to say,
well, based on just like pure capitalist motivations,
they want you to have a shit life, but not die.
No, but that's what I'm saying.
That's what makes it more trustworthy.
If you were like, oh, these people want you to live,
I'd be like, those motherfuckers make McDonald's and shit like that.
But if you're like, they want more money,
I'd be like, yes, thank you.
I will take your pill.
Sure.
Yeah.
So, you know, a lot of this has to do with the idea of side effects from psychiatric meds.
Sure.
And how, oh, everyone, it's going to make you all want to kill yourself.
It's all bad, bad, bad.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
So as I was listening to this, I got kind of weirded out by a commercial that came on right after that conversation.
Oh, my God, don't.
Do you know the truth about breast cancer?
Did you know that the race for the cure is over?
The best kept secret in the country today is that it is now possible to kill cancer without personal suffering, mutilation, and poisoning of your entire system.
Now it's cancer's turn to die with LaysMed Inc's patented methodology.
Without cutting, bleeding, drugs, or damaging radiation, we can destroy tumors of any size without adverse side effects.
Without adverse side effects.
I mean, come on now.
That's the most lying lie I've ever heard in my entire fucking life.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
We've talked about it on an episode way back, but just as a brief refresher, LaysMed Inc.
was a company run by a person named Antonella Carpenter.
She wasn't a doctor, and she lied to people about being able to cure all cancers and eliminate
tumors with a laser.
In 2011, she was successfully sued for $2.5 million by a patient she had defrauded,
and in 2016, she was found guilty of 29 counts, including fraud,
inducing people to travel and interstate commerce in an effort to defraud them and wire fraud.
Sure.
She got super lucky that the judge just gave her five years probation and required her to pay restitution.
What?
Because, well, she was really old.
I know.
I got it's fine.
It's fine.
I'm fine.
I don't care.
I think they were just like, oh, whatever.
Yeah.
But, yeah, she could have done the rest of her life, basically, in jail for the charges she was convicted of.
She did a lot of crimes.
I would take Alex's shit about antidepressants and big pharma.
little more seriously if he wasn't accepting ad money from this wildly irresponsible and fraudulent
company. His complaints about how the medical system doesn't take side effects of medication seriously
just can't exist in the same broadcast as someone claiming they can use a laser and saline
to get rid of all your tumors with no side effects. Yeah. It's cool to criticize Big Pharma. I assure you,
I think it's cool. But if you do, you can't take that woman's money. Yeah. One of the things
that's particularly chilling about this commercial
is that when this all
went to court, it was really impossible
to tell how many people Carpenter had
played a role in killing.
Anyone who went to see her got no treatment
at all, but they left being
told that they were totally cured.
None of them were cured, though, and all
of them that had malignant tumors got worse.
Seven former patients
brought charges against her, and five of them
were dead before she faced trial.
Antonella Carpenter was a piece
of shit, and anybody who would air this
is complicit and just as big of a piece of shit.
Yeah.
There's no way to listen to the ad and not be complicit in what is obviously a lie.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's a ridiculous claim that you would, if you had any instinct, you'd be like,
we got to prove this before we take this money.
I mean, you're just saying, oh, I have magic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's dangerous magic.
Yeah.
I have dangerous magic.
So keep in mind that this episode is from 2006.
As I read to you, this passage from an article in Tulsa World,
about this lady's trial.
Quote,
the daughter of one patient who died
after being treated by Carpenter in 2006
said Carpenter screamed at her
and hung up the telephone after she called
to say her father was paralyzed on his right side
and the cancerous tumor had broken through his skin.
It's entirely possible that that person heard
about her through Alex's show.
He's running ads for her in 2006.
Yep.
Yep.
I don't think it's impossible.
Nope.
but Alex in some way indirectly,
or semi-directly profited off of this lady,
her dad getting paralyzed.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the side effects thing is such a difficult one to pin down
because anything that is a consequence of something,
we also describe as a side effect of something.
You know, so it is like, oh, we can get rid of your tumor with no side effects.
is insane because just by virtue of something growing inside of you and then removing it,
there will be side effects to that, to having it removed.
Your body is not just like, oh, cool, great.
Now we got that out of us.
We'll just do nothing with this space.
Well, there'll be cool side effects.
Exactly.
There's going to be weird shit that happens no matter what.
The idea of just being like, hey, we'll deal with cancer.
You know, that thing that humans have been really pissed off about for basically all of time
by just zapping it with a laser and then you'll be home.
Yeah.
I read a number of articles about this lady.
And I had discussed it all over again.
Yeah.
It's just, it's crazy stuff.
Like, she would just put a laser on people and then be like, your tumor is dead.
It's fine.
And then their tumor would grow.
Of course.
And they go to a doctor and they'd be like, well, your tumor's bigger.
And then she'd be like, that doctor doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's dead.
They can't even tell the difference between a living and dead.
It's like when you meet somebody who's just truly a predator.
You know, like this is a person who just feeds on people.
At no point in time, how could you even like look somebody in the face after zapping them with a laser?
And then they tell you that their tumor's bigger and be like, ah, that guy's an idiot.
Yeah, that dog goes no shit.
That's crazy.
At the very least, be like, yeah, I know, I fucked up.
You know?
One of the things that I wanted to learn more about, but I was unable to figure out, was that the articles,
said that she made the lasers herself.
And it did also say that she had a physics degree.
So I could believe she made some sort of little machine.
Sure.
But I wanted to know more about that laser.
Yeah.
And I could not find, I could not get to the bottom of it.
We're dealing with a lot of stuff that makes a lot more sense in 1910.
Mm-hmm.
That's what it feels like.
This episode, even though it's from 2006, should really be from 1916.
Nostradamus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Also, one last thing about this lady.
she saw a patient,
yeah, patient in quotes,
because she insists she was not doing medicine,
um, legally.
I mean,
so she saw someone who had,
uh,
growth and,
uh,
she decided that it was cancer,
but it wasn't.
Uh,
but the way that she determined that it was,
was that she injected some food coloring into it.
And then it was like,
the color stayed.
It's,
uh,
it's cancer.
This is classic cancer.
Oh my God.
She used food color.
Oh my God.
Because you know they use dyes in hospital.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's the same thing.
Mm-hmm.
You know, like a pet scan is really just punching you in the face.
Just food coloring.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah, that is a person who is just fucking, that's the type of crazy where it's like,
oh, you're not crazy.
But you're the craziest person I've ever met in my entire life.
So, so, so crazy.
Yeah.
And it's just good to remember that Alex is doing this episode.
that is so much about attacking the institution of, like, medical-based mental health interventions,
and he's willing to take money from this malicious predator asshole who is allowing people to
get worse with their cancers for money.
So fuck them.
I mean, you know, there's just a small amount of honor that I wish for, which is like, hey,
you've already given me your money
that's done
I scammed you
go to a doctor
get out of here you scam
like that's at least better
than the second call being
no you're totally fine
Jesus Christ
yeah that's crazy
so we've one last clip here
the end of the show
the last hour is Alex
hanging out with his buddy George Humphrey
sure this dude is so
fucking boring
I think he must
be paying Alex to be on the show
Yeah.
Like, he sucks.
He is so boring.
He has so little to say.
He has no charisma.
And Alex does, on multiple occasions, bring up that he is a successful, rich businessman.
So I think they're friends.
But also, maybe he's paying Alex to be on the show because he's adding nothing.
I've never said about people that I was having a good time with, he's a successful businessman.
That's never been necessary.
Well, I think in some context that he does it, it does make.
some sense because they're talking about
like NAFTA and Gat.
Sure. You know, like they're talking about these things
that affect business in the
United States. And you're a business person?
Exactly. You're, do business?
Yeah. So
thankfully, it's not
just George. Okay. Alex
gets a, bring, bring emergency
call from Ron Paul.
So he chats with Ron.
2006, man. A little bit.
And this is an interesting thing
to hear.
Last week we talked about impeachment, Democrats winning control of the Congress.
You believe that they'll then try to impeach Bush.
How do you see that coming down?
I suspect they will.
They've introduced the resolution already, and it would be both because they're angry
just for general political reasons, but they're really, really would like to get
payback for what Republicans did with Clinton.
So if they get a majority in the House, I believe they'll take it up in a very serious manner.
But overall, do you think it will be positive to see the executive branch punished just for precedent?
I mean, right now the executive claiming imperial power, would it be positive to see the executive punished?
I think anything that diminishes the power of the executive branch or the central government is beneficial to the people and to the cause of liberty.
Congressman, you're a trooper, you're a champion of liberty.
You are just an amazing American, and we're glad to have you up there as a standard of the paleo-conservatism.
And God bless you.
Thanks for spending time.
We just have a great weekend.
Good.
Thank you.
You bet.
And I will 100% support the opposite of this a little bit down the road when your son is a bummer.
Your son sucks.
Yeah.
Couldn't be elected.
So I decided to just abandon all this shit.
You know, in a way, the poll.
family let us down.
Yep.
It's all them.
If Rand hadn't been so shit,
Alex might have stayed on that train.
Let me, let me just say one thing.
A Rand Paul presidency would not be
great.
Or a Ron Paul one.
Honestly, I mean, like, he's just as much of a
like destroy the state
white identity kind of fella.
Like he has a lot of those same
inclinations.
It's just, yeah, no, they did let us down in a sense.
They could have maintained a holding pattern with Alex that probably could have contained
some of this stuff.
If Rand Paul didn't suck, if Ron Paul wasn't too old to run again as a goof.
Yeah, it's that let Trump sneak in there.
They needed a good candidate to like rally around and be like, he could have won.
Yeah.
Instead, they had Trump in that slot and like he had, he fucked around and won.
Yep.
And that ruined everything.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Let it not be sad enough.
That's how much Hillary Clinton sucked.
Mm-hmm.
Well, after the 2016 election, a little bit down the road, Webster Tarpley wrote that
essay about how the Paul family was the vestibule that led into fascism and how the falling
a part of the libertarianism that they had created allowed for, like, because it was ultimately
shown to be fairly empty.
Right.
And that vacuum allowed Trump to suck all them up.
Yeah.
If Rand or Ron had gained real power, their direction would have been to keep the militia people
in their foxholes, like, wait.
You know, like keep them small, keep them in like little regions, not take over the whole fucking country.
No.
And I think that they at least, well, I mean, they never really had the opportunity, so who knows.
But it feels like they would not like kidnap Maduro.
They would not want to buy Greenland.
Yeah.
Like they aren't interested in an imperial president.
And Alex in that clip is pretending that he's not even.
either.
Yeah.
Ross Perrault would have kidnapped Maduro.
Yes.
So I think we've understood something about allowing billionaire lunatics to have power.
Ross Perrault would have tried to get Maduro to kidnap him.
That's how crazy he was.
Ross Perot really had some big plans.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God bless him.
But yeah.
I think I think that there's something fun about Alex interviewing his, you know, idol.
Yeah.
here in 2006 and expressing the polar opposite of what he what he believes now about
restraining the executive and the imperial president needing to be punished and
liberty and all this shit.
Yeah.
But what do you?
It is wild what 20 years can do.
Yep.
Because it didn't used to have that power.
20 years back in the day, that used to be the same 20 years.
In like the 1,400s.
Oh.
1420 to 1440 you probably had the same life yeah I bet I bet not I bet I bet I'm I
I don't know I mean the 60s and the 80s are pretty different that's true but how much of
that is just recency you know like I bet I bet I bet no on the day to day on the day to day basis
I think people would have a more stable uh well stable is the wrong word to use I bet I bet I bet
Monotonous is the...
I bet it depends on the 20.
Sure.
I bet 1490 to 1510 pretty crazy.
That was pretty crazy.
Because in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Yeah, but that didn't really bother anybody.
I mean, except for the people that he murdered here.
Down the line, it bothers a lot of people.
Do you think within 20 years?
Probably?
I don't know.
Did he even bring back that much good shit?
Like, I'm pretty sure that the Spanish didn't feel too much love from Columbus.
if that makes sense.
Hmm.
You know what I mean?
What?
I don't think he brought too much back.
Well, I mean, you only got so much space on those boats.
Man, that's fair.
So many spices.
And they're just not that big of boats.
No, you got to cross the ocean.
Also, what did they have back then?
They didn't have, like, frozen pizza.
They didn't have Twinkies.
No, no.
It was just a search for salt.
They didn't have Fago.
Yeah, that was it.
Yeah.
They did not have.
They did not have the dark carnival.
No.
Nope.
And I think that's why 20 years is all monotonous.
They didn't have.
That's why our last 20 years have been so interesting.
So I like the past.
I'm enjoying being in the past.
And so I'm going to stay in it.
I'm certainly not indefinitely.
I'll check back in on present stuff for a bit.
But I think that for mental health and for everyone's well-being,
being this is great.
I think the present has got some work to do.
Yeah.
And until that is kind of handled or at least, you know, addressed, I think we should just
stick around.
Yeah, the arguments that Alex and his elk are making deserve a punch, not a, not a discussion.
Very much.
But also, did you see the news about what happened to our boy, Elijah?
No.
Elijah Schaefer, the guy who hates Indians?
No.
What?
Oh.
What?
Okay. I'm going to do my best to explain this. This is going to be tough.
So there was this Catholic young lady who was an influencer who went on Jubilee, you know, that surrounded show on YouTube.
Sure. Where you got 20 people sitting in a circle and they argue with one person in the middle.
Fine.
She was on that and she got, she went viral because she was like, what's wrong with white nationalism?
Yeah.
Like she became kind of a poster child of those Catholic.
Dominionist, white nationalists.
Good for her.
Yeah.
Thuantas adjacent kind of shit.
Anyway, Elijah Schaefer ends up fucking her in a way that she describes very much as sexual assault.
She describes him giving her Benadryl and a bunch of drinks.
Fucking hell.
And she was getting married to a guy and was apparently.
pretending to be saving herself for marriage,
and then cheated on him with Elijah Schaefer,
who was married and had kids.
Yeah.
And I think was her boss.
I'm not sure.
Good stuff.
Anyway.
Yeah.
This all came out because Milo Yanopoulos decided to leak a bunch of shit.
Oh my God.
And destroy a bunch of people's lives.
All of them deserve each other.
All of them.
I wish I could make a worse hell than the one they make for themselves
because they deserve worse than it
and yet somehow they make themselves the worst.
It's pretty crazy because not too long ago
we heard Elijah on Alex's show
and I thought maybe this would be a fun weirdo to check out.
Yep.
And then this happens.
Here we go.
My man.
Come on.
Eh, man.
Your career's done.
Yep.
That's the end of that.
Oh, well.
Anyway,
We'll check in on Alex on what he's doing on 3-Eleven the day he hates.
Because of the band?
Yeah, yeah, he hates 3-Eleven.
Well, I mean, I didn't like their cover of a love song.
I'm just going to tell that I'm just going to be honest.
I didn't like it.
They're wrong.
Everything by 3-Eleven is perfect.
So that actually might be a Saturday.
I think this is a Friday show.
There might not be a 3-Eleven show.
But whatever.
We'll check back in on 2006.
Until then, we have a website.
Indeed, we do.
It's knowledgefight.com.
Yep.
We'll be back.
But until then, I'm Neo.
I'm Leo. I'm DZX. Clark.
I am the mysterious professor.
And now here comes the sex robot.
Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.
Thanks for holding.
Hello, Alex.
I'm a first-time caller.
I'm a huge fan.
I love your work.
I love you.
