Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Josh Owens, a videographer and the author of a memoir about his years working for Infowars, the media company of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Owens traces his journey from a film-school student who stumbled onto Jones’s radio show to an insider who spent four years filming, editing, and traveling for the organization. Owens describes how Jones’s conspiracy machine works, as well as how his own moral compass was scrambled by Jones’s manipulative management.

The conversation explores radicalization, the conspiratorial media ecosystem Jones helped create, and how Owens was able to pull himself out.The following is a transcript of the episode: Josh Owens: Jones was not sitting there telling us to lie about things. He was making us question our own minds. After years in that environment, you stop even believing the fire alarms that are going off in your brain saying, like, This is insane.

This is crazy. This is wrong. And you think, Maybe there’s something else that I’m not seeing. [Music]Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we talk about the twisted world of Alex Jones.One day in the spring of 2017, outside of a courtroom in Austin, Texas, I got a tip about a potential source.

I was in Texas writing a profile of Alex Jones: famous conspiracist and the founder of Infowars. I’d spent the last few weeks running around Austin, where Jones has lived his entire career. He started on public-access TV and, over time, he slowly worked his way into national headlines.I’d met a number of former Infowars employees, but I was looking for an insider who could help me understand how Jones’s media empire worked.

How Jones had gone from a fringe figure ranting about 9/11 being an inside job—and a person most of society ignored or mocked—to something much closer to the mainstream of the right wing.He’d been preaching his anti-establishment, paranoid worldview for eons. But his business had evolved. He made a ton of money selling supplements with names like “Super Male Vitality Serum,” “Brain Force Plus,” and “Caveman.” And Jones’s profile began to rise around the 2016 presidential election.

At that moment, Jones seemed like he was everywhere—Infowars’s Hillary for Prison T-shirts were fixtures at Trump rallies. Jones even managed to book an interview with then–presidential candidate Donald Trump himself. It seemed from the outside like Jones and his media empire could have a noticeable cultural impact on the 2016 election.And so the question was: Had he ushered in this moment of brain-melting conspiracism and extremism?

Or was he just good at profiting from it? This source, I was told, could help me find out.I only got the bare outlines of his story, but: He’d been a key figure in the company, but had grown disillusioned. Had a change of heart.

And then got out. I tried for weeks to reach him through a different source, but he wasn’t ready to talk yet. And then, almost a year later, he DM’d me out of the blue.His name was Josh Owens.

He was a 20-something video producer, and he’d won a contest to get hired to make videos for Jones and Infowars.Over the course of a few hours, he told me his entire story. All of the things he’d done and seen working with Jones. His deep sense of regret for playing a part in spreading lies and hate.

Things like Jones’s claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation. That the grieving families were playing the role of actors in an elaborate government plot.Owens told me he wasn’t looking for any kind of absolution. He just wanted people to understand how the lies got made.And so, the conversation stayed with me for months, in part because Owens appeared to have done something pretty remarkable in today’s landscape.

Through the help of others, he seemed to have been genuinely de-radicalized.Owens went public with his story in 2019, and we’ve stayed in touch since then. When Jones was sued in 2018 by the Sandy Hook families for defamation, Owens testified in the case.And over the course of the last few years, Owens has been writing a memoir of his time at Infowars. It’s titled The Madness of Believing, and it’s full of staggering details about Jones, the erratic boss whose rantings off camera were as disturbing as the ones that got recorded.

And for those trying to understand how the conspiracy machine that helps power fear and division in this country works, you’ll find it in this book.But Owens’s story is also about his personal evolution. It tracks how he fell down the Alex Jones rabbit hole. But, more importantly, it documents how he managed to get out.There are many important conversations out there—about radicalization and political extremism.

But there are far fewer conversations though about de-radicalization. What that looks like and what, if anything, we can learn from people who’ve altered course.And so I sat down