Josh, you write on page 17. This caught my eye. What if behind the veil of power, dark rituals

and darker motives guided the course of world events? You asked that question to yourself.

In that moment, something began to shift inside me, you write. The dullness of everyday existence

parted to reveal a more vivid world beneath the surface.

Suddenly, I was no longer a bored, directionless kid staring at a computer screen.

Is that the essence of the lure of Alex Jones and why he had built and continues to maintain a pretty sizable audience?

I think so. It's hard to say. I feel like there are so many different ways that people get pulled into that world.

And for me, it didn't start out as ideology. It started out with movies. Jones paints this like vivid portrait of the world through film.

And not as allegory or satire. He literally says that films are pulling the curtain back on reality.

And so for me, that was just, I was perfectly attuned to sort of see the world in that way. Because you were studying film. Yes. Yeah. And so that's sort of what pulled me in. I mean, he uses Sidney Lumet's network to describe the media and how that world functions. And then he'll go further into, you know, John Carpenter's They Live. And then every Stanley Kubrick movie. And that's just sort of how he paints.

I mean, he gives this cinematic verisimilitude to everything.

And it just sold me.

And does it create a kind of patina of intellectualism that has a hook?

People think they're getting smarter, when in fact they're getting dumber?

Absolutely. And it doesn't help

that you're also being told that you're dumb initially for not knowing these things. Right.

So, yeah, absolutely. You feel much smarter than you are because, I mean, it's not based on anything

other than just these ideas that are coming from Jones's head.

Describe from my audience what it was like to tiptoe into that world and then to launch

yourself into that world.

Yeah, there was no sort of, I started listening to him in 2008.

It wasn't until 2013 where I got offered a job and I moved halfway across the country

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