…Austin public-access TV also provided an early forum for the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who one time carved a jack-o’-lantern on air while ranting about Austin police officers using infrared cameras. Listening to Jones is like hearing Tony Soprano recite Finnegans Wake on amphetamines. When Linklater made Waking Life, he cast Jones as a raving madman driving around town with a P.A. system—an unintentional foreshadowing of what was to come. Back then, Jones seemed like another harmless Austin crank with a colorful ability to invent conspiracies on the fly—“this hyper guy that we’d all kind of make fun of”, Linklater has recalled.
I once spoke about Jones with the podcaster Joe Rogan—yet another Californian import. In 2020, he moved to Austin from Los Angeles, buying a lakeside estate. The following year, he invited me on his show. Rogan is 5 feet 8, but his shoulders are about as wide as he is high. He’s dauntingly muscular and tattooed, but despite his formidable physical presentation he’s friendly and amusing. The experience of being on his podcast is like having a curious fellow pull up a barstool next to you; 3 hours later, you’ve unloaded your life story.
Before the interview, we got our nostrils swabbed for a mandatory COVID test—which was interesting, given that Rogan had been strongly criticized for giving air time to vaccine skeptics. I mentioned that I had watched an interview he’d done with Alex Jones.
“What’d you think of him?” he asked. “I think he’s a sociopath.” “He’s not”, Rogan said. “He’s a head-injury case. I was a cage fighter. I’ve known a lot of guys with head injuries.” He had asked Jones if he’d ever had a serious concussion. Jones had replied, “I’ve been piledriven”, meaning that he was turned upside down and his head was pounded into the concrete. He was 13 or 14 years old. Rogan had pressed him about how that might have changed his personality, but Jones was evasive. Jones did say, “I had brain damage—there’s no doubt.”
Is Jones’s story true, or yet another thing that he has confabulated in his strange mind?