Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/21/24: Matt Taibbi On Trump, Elon, and Russia

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

American author and journalist Matt Taibbi joins Ryan and Emily. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com �� Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning

that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care.

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This your main man, Memphis Bleak, right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now.

I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics,

amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes

people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways

we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. You started covering a lot of the foreclosure crisis. Yeah, and that was my first hint that something like Trump was going to happen. That's what this whole meme stock thing grew out of, I think, is just this rage directed towards these financial professionals who were basically being subsidized and then acting like they had this special financial genius that allowed them to make money. We actually haven't even opened one of the most important chapters in your journalism career yet now, which is the Twitter files. As someone who's actually interacted with him and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him, where do you think Elon Musk fits into this?

Welcome back to CounterPoints. For today's Friday show, we're going to be joined by longtime veteran journalist Matthew Taibbi. I want to talk about his career, which has spanned the pre-internet era, basically, back when you used to actually print things. I mean, I'm there, too, so I can say that. That's true. Up to today and continuing to evolve. Like, we have not seen, it's not as if we've gotten some static place. We're going to talk about the history of journalism and the history over the last 30 years.

I wanted to start with a question, though, about 2024, this election, which we're all trying to cover. And I have a theory that I wanted to try on both of you, which is that I think the country is in denial right now. Think of this as the other kind of election denialism. People just, I think, as I talk to people around the country, they just refuse to believe that this is the election, that it's Biden against Trump. Like there was basically no Democratic primary. And so that allowed people to kind of say, you know what, this isn't really happening. There's no competition, but it's not going to be him. Like there's going to be, and I was talking to my dad yesterday, he's like, they're going to do something, right? Right not going to be him. Like there's going to be, and I was talking to my dad yesterday. He's like, they're going to do something, right? Maybe at the convention. Trump goes to prison, Biden has a medical situation.

And I think the Nikki Haley, we talked a lot about how Nikki Haley got all this mainstream news coverage that she didn't deserve based on the fact that she never had a shot. But I think part of it was psychological that people were like, it's got to be something other than Trump. Like Biden said he was basically going to be a one-term guy. Country took him at his word. Now here he is allegedly running again. And so I think that the refusal of people to check into the election has to do with them just denying the reality that it's these two guys. What do you think, Matt?

Yeah, well, I think a couple of things. Number one, I think people are right to be suspicious because we're not treating this like a normal election season. I mean, I've covered five presidential elections. At this stage of a race, normally every single day would be a campaign story. You'd see somebody out in the campaign trail. We would have constant arguments about the back and forth between the candidates. And there's none of that. You'd have staff getting fired. You'd know who the staff are. They became celebrities over the five election cycles that you've covered. The Karl Roves, the David Axelrods. Who's running Biden and Trump's campaigns? Matt, where was the first publication that you worked?

On a campaign? Just, like, in general. The Village Voice. The Village Voice. Yeah, okay, yeah. So, because that sounded to me like such a politico-huffpost question. Because, but that's actually what's sort of new, right? I mean, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but in the as there was this journalism as almost a sport James Carville campaigning become became more

almost gamified I don't know it's about the characters popped anything that was really popularized by Halperin and who's the other guy I'm always forget his Heilman exactly you know with game change and all that and this whole idea. But that was the first, you know, when I started covering campaigns for Rolling Stone, the first thing that I saw as a big story on the campaign was that the journalists thought they were running the whole thing. There was a kind of a cabal inside the campaign where they would get together at the end of the day. They would decide which candidates were serious and viable and have discussions about that. And I thought that was crazy. Now there's really none of that. I mean, nobody really knows what the campaign is anymore. And it doesn't, it doesn't, there's no script. It's not the reality show that was all consuming

for so long. So five elections, I do the math. What was the first one? For actively covered? Oh, four, really. Right. Okay. Kerry Bush. Maybe it's six. I don't know. Yeah. Right. So everybody knew Bush, even though Bush was the nominee, like everybody knew he was going to be the nominee again, Karl Rove. And he had a strategy. He's going to bring out the bigots for the over-marriage equality. Like that was the theme of the 2000 plus John Kerry's quizzling and like, you know, he's weak on the war and, you know. Right.

You kind of knew what the election was about. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they made it about things that really didn't matter to the population all that much. I mean, the war was the dominant topic in the country at the time, and neither candidate really wanted to go there all that much. Not in terms of, and also the larger issues about the war on terror and that sort of thing. They just didn't come up a whole lot. It was, you know, John Kerry's medals versus, you know, other.

The Swift boats. Swift boats. Yeah, exactly. All that stuff. How did the campaign press handle the Swift boats, actually? Like, what was the. And then I want to go back in how you got into journalism. Sure.

So, like, the Bush campaign, they start pushing the Swift boats stuff. And for people who basically weren't even born then. Which is almost everybody. So, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a right-wing group that was kind of formed by people who had served with John Kerry in Vietnam. And they hated his story of turning his swift boat toward the Viet Cong and like shooting. Instead, he like sort of like... Throwing the medals. Well, they really hated that he threw his medals in protest. Right. Or his ribbons. I think he kept his medals, but he threw his ribbons, which was a very John Carey thing to do. But they didn't like his Purple Heart,

and he wasn't injured enough or whatever it became this like he smoked his ribbons But didn't in right? Yeah, they came this real character attack Democrats Just avoided it for a very long time not understanding the way that the internet and the politics had changed thought that they if they just Didn't address it. It would go away right it ended up causing immense damage, but I'm curious how the press was Thinking about this kind of new way of campaigning. Well, I think what I remember about that is that a lot of people saw it as a continuation of the sort of 90s David Brock, you know, sort of, which was a new thing. Brock used to be on the right for people. Right, yeah. He was this also or not, quote unquote, right wing hitman

back in the day who was the point person behind the scenes in the Clarence Thomas hearings, then Whitewater and all this stuff. And that was sort of a new thing in media at the time, this idea of organized, multi-pronged media attacks, creating new organizations just for the purpose of going out into the public and creating news stories. And I think a lot of people saw the Swiftbook group as that. But you're right, there was a massive Streisand effect in the way, you know, they covered that so much that it became overwhelmingly the theme of the campaign. And the Democrats, I don't think, did a great job

of pushing back because they, their whole campaign was John Kerry in an army jacket. They didn't have an issue to run on. And so this whole thing, he was a sitting duck for that kind of stuff. So I don't know. Most of the reporters just thought it was a fun story that they were happy to work on every day. There wasn't a whole lot of outrage. Kind of a fascinating thread, though, and this might get to your next question, in that Chris Lasavita, who's now running the Trump campaign, was the pioneer of the Swift boat. Oh, was he?

Yeah, absolutely. People credit him for the entire Swift boat campaign attack. And what's interesting about that is at the time people saw it as this sort of rupture of ethics. And now you have the man who finally put an end, at least on the presidential scale, to this debate about whether it's okay to rupture the ethics. It's like the filibuster debate, but for decorum and presidential campaigns. Like, right, exactly. Like, we can't, like, once you open that Pandora's box, like, what happens? That absolutely happened in 2016 on the presidential level,

and now Chris LaCivita, the Swift Boat guy, is running the Trump campaign. I didn't even know he was running the Trump campaign. Like, I'm in denial, too, about this election. I didn't know that either. I'm supposedly supposed to be covering this. So am I. Don't tell anybody that, that I didn't know that,

because that would be kind of embarrassing. It's a good thing you didn't say it on air. Yeah. Just keep it between us and the Friday show here, if you guys are out there watching. Nobody clip this. Halal flow. Yeah, don't clip this. Keep this one private. So, growing up, did you always think you were going to be a journalist?

Because your father was a journalist, is that right? He was like a local TV journalist in New York. Is that right? Yeah. So my parents were at Rutgers. And my father, I was born when they were very young. They were like 20. And so he, to support the family, he was working as a newspaper reporter at the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey. So he started when he was 18 or 19. Oh, wow. He's been doing this forever.

And then as soon as he graduated, we moved to Boston, and he worked at a local affiliate there. So my childhood was like Anchorman, basically. I spent a lot of my childhood in those newsrooms with, you know, the bad facial hair and all that stuff. And I used to play with the weather setup and try to pretend with the green screen and everything. It was really cool. And did your mom get into journalism too? No, no. She ended up being an attorney, but I spent most of my time hanging around my father. My father is a journalist, very old school, incredibly gifted. I was very fascinated by his work because he's a super gregarious personality who could just show up at any scene and get people trusting him and talking to him instantly. And, you know, in journalism, in TV journalism especially,

you have to get, you know, a good soundbite, and then you have to be able to knock out a script, like, really quickly. And he was really good at all that stuff. He did his own editing even back in the days when it was film, going all that back that far. So I thought that was really cool, but I never thought I would be able to do this. And I also wanted to be a writer, not a TV journalist.

Was it that? Oh, so you wanted to be a writer of journalism or novels and novels? Yeah. So I was kind of a depressed kid. So comic novels were my big escape growing up. And I thought that's what I want to do. I want to be like Elon Waugh or Nikolai Gogol or somebody like that, you know. And it turned out I don't have talent for writing fiction. So, but I didn't learn that until later. And by the time I figured it out, I realized I didn't have any actual skills except the family business.

So that's how I got into journalism. So how do you wind up in Russia? Yeah, that was going to be my next question. Yeah. So my favorite writers growing up were all Russian. I mentioned Gogol. Bulgakov was another one. I went through this period where I was just reading lots and lots of Russian literature. Do you think that was from your politics or do you think your politics came from that? Oh, I couldn't stand politics.

I still can't stand it. Really, the books, I was just really into how well they were written and how beautiful they were. And, you know, the Russians have this amazing, absurdist view on life. And I was, you know, when you're depressed, you kind of try to lose yourself in that landscape and the writing of people like Tolstoy it's so vivid I wanted to go experience it and then I wanted to learn the language so I could read those books in in Russian so I went there as a student and one of the funny things was you know in the States what year is that probably 89 90 so it was still soviet yeah so i went to a soviet college and uh but in america you know remember the 80s that was like the time of porkies

and everything right like everybody was um you know they spent a lot of time in their appearance and there was a success culture and everything and i thought i i hated that i'm like i'm gonna be a failure when i grow up in russia everybody everybody's a failure, right? So I felt like I fit right in. And it was a cool thing. So that's why I ended up moving back there. I thought this place is paradise. It turned out not to be, but it was a great thing. So you graduated from college and came back to the US. What did you try first before you went back to Russia? I didn't try anything. I immediately started making plans. Yeah. So I worked demolition and waited tables, saved money, and just went over there and started stringing. And you said it turned out not to be paradise,

but there's something so interesting about someone growing up immersed in, as you said, the landscapes. That was a really beautiful way to put it. And then having your eyes opened up gradually over time. What was that process like? What really started to disillusion you? Well, Russia, it went through a very tough time, both when it was still Soviet and then after the revolution in 91. Were you there in 91? I missed the actual thing by a couple of months on either side, but I saw it coming, obviously.

My last semester there, there was a ban on food products. So you had to use a rationing system just to get vegetables and things like that. It was it was a mess. But then after that, Russia immediately transformed this like gangster state, which was kind of horrifying to watch. And but as a journalist, it was fascinating. You know, I mean, I got to go and see incredible things. It was a great place to start one's career because you got to cover very high-level things quickly, which you don't get to do in America if you're working as an intern in a

magazine or something. I always thought your ability to cover Wall Street corruption later in your career must have been connected to witnessing it in its most extreme form. Right. Oligarchy. Up close. Was it, and for people who aren't that familiar with that period of history, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the most rapid collapse in life expectancy in world history

is Russia in the 1990s. That's probably right, yeah. Which is remarkable to consider that they went from rationing food in 1991 and that that was the high point. Right. Like they collapsed, you know, life expectancy dropping by just years and years and years

because the state, you know, with U.S. facilitation just gets sold from out, from under the people to these oligarchs. Yeah. And did you see it happen in real time? Like, are you like, you know, there's still these famous videos of Jeff Sachs, who we should have on the show because his arc from that totally to where he is now. That's fascinating to me, by the way. Incredible. Jeff Sachs helped to basically auction off the entire Soviet Union and create all these oligarchs through this Harvard-run... The Harvard Institute for International Development. Yeah. So the auctions that you talk about, and you mentioned the financial reporting later, these were some of the most complicated

thefts maybe in the history of the world and probably the biggest ones maybe in the history of people. So just to take an example, they had a thing called loans for shares, which was a way of kind of handing out the crown jewels of Soviet industry to basically cronies of the Yeltsin regime. And what they did is they took people who really had no cash at all, and they lent them money. So in the case of, for instance, Yukos, which is a company about the size of Exxon Mobil, right? The Yeltsin regime lends one of the banks $50 million, which turns out to be half their stake that they put up to get a 38% or 37% stake in one of the world's biggest oil companies. Yeah, exactly right.

So they put up basically nothing to get to become instantly some of the richest people on earth. And they did that with seven or eight of these banker groups. We later learned that there was a kind of a backroom deal that was brokered at Davos, where there was an agreement that they were going to get these properties in return for massively supporting Yeltsin in the 96th election. And that's how Yeltsin went from being at 6% in the polls to actually winning. There were some other things that went on too, but it was a U.S. brokered thing.

We helped advise in the structure of all those auctions, which were totally corrupt. And that's it. So that was an early introduction for me. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine

Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her,

is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This Pride Month, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back.

I'm George M. Johnson, and my book, All Boys Aren't Blue was just named the most banned book in America. If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest. And on my podcast, Fighting Words,

we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do. This regime is coming down on us, and I don't want to just survive.

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Listen on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your gut microbiome and those healthy bacteria can actually have positive effects throughout your body. Not just your gut, but your mental health, your metabolism, your immunity, your risk of cancer, heart disease, almost any disease under the sun. Yep, you heard right. Probiotics might actually impact everything from your brain to your heart. So what's science and what's just really good marketing? On this episode of Dope Labs, me and Zakiya cut through the hype and get into the real deal behind probiotics with help from gastroenterologist Dr. Roshi Raj. So, yes, bacteria is definitely having a moment, and I'm very excited about that.

From probiotic drinks and gummies to face creams and pillows. Yep, we said pillows. The probiotic boom is everywhere. But how much of it actually works? And what does it all mean for your gut, your skin, and even your mood? Join us on Dope Labs, where we break it all down in the lab like only we can. Listen to Dope Labs on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention.

This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. Somebody violated the FBI, and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, do you think these people are good Americans? It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the goddamnedest love story you've ever heard. I picked up the phone and my thought was, this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life.

I couldn't believe it. I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. You can now binge all 10 episodes of Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's also playing out in a split screen for you is you're seeing up close what's actually happening in Russia. You're also probably absorbing Western media coverage what's actually happening in Russia. You're also probably absorbing Western media coverage of what's happening in Russia. And you've written one of the best books on contemporary media problems, Hating. People should read it if they haven't. But watching that, was that also something, because, and this is kind of a rambling question, but I think about Tucker Carlson going to Russia and realizing a lot of what he has been told about Russia is wrong. Maybe though, sometimes people realize a lot of what they've been told about something is wrong and it pushes them further to the direction of

like not being right on a different, in a different side of the question. Like Tucker out of this, that's a phenomenon that happens all the time. So for you, what was it like watching the Western media say, you know, this place is a corrupt nightmare while not covering the Westerners that are creating the corrupt nightmare, but then also kind of missing some of the story that you were covering with like everyday people? Yeah, so a lot of the journalists, actually most of them didn't speak Russian. That was the first thing that was kind of shocking to me. I didn't understand that at all. It turns out that's sort of an intentional strategy, both with diplomats and foreign correspondents for the big bureaus. What's the strategy there? So for diplomats, there was a bad experience with China with the Maoist revolution where

the United States felt like the diplomats were too close to the local population. And that's why they didn't get the warning that the revolution was going to happen. So there's a kind of a strategy of switching people out on a regular basis so they don't get too attenuated to the local population. With journalists, I'm not really sure why they do it, but you almost never have somebody who is really in tune with, you know, the local population, the language, everything. And I don't know how you cover a country if you don't know that stuff. I'm trying to imagine a Russian journalist who comes to Washington, D.C. and only speaks Russian.

Right. And is then translating what's happening in Washington back to a Russian audience. Can you imagine that it would be remotely accurate? No, it would be a Monty Python routine, right? It's Borat. It's even dumber than that. So would they just have to talk to the English speakers? Well, so that's the problem. So they got almost all of their input on what was going on in Russia from English-speaking Russian politicians, many of whom went to Harvard, like Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov, right, people like that. But you went, you know, an hour outside of Moscow or St. Petersburg,

and there was like subsistence farming and like, you know, complete gangsterism. You would go to a place and there would be total barter economy, no cash anywhere, starvation, you know, incredible surges in crime, all this stuff. So I started to do a lot of like participatory reporting. So I would just go from place to place, get a job somewhere, and then just write, you know, what's it like to work construction in this place or, you know, work in a, you know, in a mine over here, right? And contrast that with what they were telling people back home, which was that there's this emerging middle class and everything's awesome. And, you know,

it was, you know, it was really wild for me because I had a lot of illusions about how good the media was. And that was the first time I saw that they just will lie about stuff. And that was kind of amazing to me. And who would you publish those with? So I had my own newspaper over there. So this is Exile at this point? The Exile. Yeah.

But I did work at the Moscow Times over there, which is an expat paper. But I also I wrote for The Nation and some other papers in England, like, believe it or not, I think I did a couple for The Telegraph, for The Daily Mail. I wrote for Euromoney, believe it or not. He's always been a right-wing hack. Exactly. That's what he's telling you. That's right. That's right.

Euromoney. So, you know, I contributed. I also wrote in Russian. I wrote for Russian papers. And, yeah, so that was mostly what I did. But the audience mostly wasn't back in the United States. So that was, you know, kind of the difference. But it was interesting.

How did you come about founding the paper? And who was it? It was Mark Ames? Was Zajic an original? Zajic was later, yeah, much later, yeah. So it was really Mark. There were actually two papers originally. For a long time, there was this paper.

They were called Living Here, which was a club guide because the Moscow Times didn't have a good club guide. And so everybody realized that's how you make money in an expat city, right? Because everybody's clubbing, right? So we put out this sort of trashy club guide, and that was actually doing well. And somebody had the idea to, why don't we just make that the paper? And Mark was the first editor of that. I had actually, during that time, I was actually playing basketball in Mongolia when this was all happening. I got sick, came home, and they said, do you want to come help do a competitor to that?

And I came back and ended up merging with Mark, and that's how the exile happened. That's right. I forgot about your Mongolian basketball career. How long did that last? A season. Yeah, yeah. I was the Mongolian forward. How were you? I'm really, I was really more like a small forward,

but I can't shoot. So, but I was leading the league in rebounding when I left. That's my point. Like you were the number one, the top rebounder in the Mongolian basketball. I was, I was at six foot two, believe it or not. Did you have a nickname?

The Mongolian? Mongolian Rodman. Yeah, and I did the whole thing back then. Six foot two, believe it or not. Did you have a nickname? The Mongolian? Mongolian Rodman. Yeah. And I did the whole thing back then. I had hair and I used to dye it red and have a yellow beard and all kinds of crazy stuff. The owner wanted to drum up interest. So he would ask me to start fights and do all kinds of crazy stuff. It's really like Kenny Powers in Mexico.

Totally, yeah. It totally is. That's why I went. I wanted to write a book about this. And, you know, the whole idea was it was a gag. It was supposed to be Charles Barkley in the Far East, right? And I was going to do it, but, you know, I contracted pneumonia in the middle of it and, you know, never got to finish the project. So. Did you ever write about that? Not really. I wrote like one article for the Boston Globe magazine a long time

ago, but I never did the full thing. And now I wish I lost all my notes from that time period, because it would have been a very funny story, actually, if I had actually written it. Another lesson that I'm curious about that I imagine you gleaned from those years is the kind of intersection of journalism and intel that I imagine was especially crazy in 1990s, early aughts Russia. But also I feel like has just flourished in recent years. And this gets to a lot of your reporting with the Twitter files where there's this mundane think tank at Stanford that is looped in to all of these different Pentagon agencies or whatever, all of the alphabet soup from the Pentagon. But I feel like that must have been

a water that you learned to navigate probably in Russia too. Absolutely. So Russia, when it became, when it stopped being communist, it did have a very vigorous free press for a while, but it wasn't exactly free, right? at those papers, they would be handed something, a packet of something that would come from, you know, whatever intelligence service was connected to that mob figure. And they would write up that report. They had a term for it. They call it selling jeans over there. Like somebody just sold me some jeans because that's what the people on the street used to do in communist time. So I I knew a lot of these investigative reporters, and actually, they were, right away, they were incredible, like, reporters. They were really good and very brave. A lot of them got killed or beaten or threatened, and they were just

unbelievably brave people who were trying to navigate this very difficult system. And I learned a lot from them. And I didn't learn until later that there was probably something similar going on in the Western side. But certainly on the Russian side, that was the first time I understood that whole dynamic and got to see how it worked. And of course, by the time Putin came on the scene, he sort of, all he really did is consolidate, you know, instead of having seven different agencies, he basically put them all under the same umbrella. And if you didn't, you know, get in line and publish what he wanted you, you know, that's when you got in trouble. So, where did the exile fit into this constellation of papers?

Well, so we were in this amazing place where we were writing in English. American libel law didn't apply to us. The Russians didn't read us. Where were you incorporated, like business-wise? Business-wise, we were a Russian business. Interesting. So we were a Russian press business so we were we were a russian we were

a russian press outlet hang on a second um and uh so we we basically had to deal with the same authorities like a russian newspaper would but um but they weren't paying attention to what we wrote until later and then they started to. We had some problems with them originally because they would just ask for bribes on tax day. But then I think there were some content issues later on. And then after I left, the paper actually got shut down by the tax police. And what was it that brought it onto the radar? When did it start becoming a problem? Well, Putin was much more attentive to the whole press scene. There were some other Western reporters who had started to annoy the

authorities even before he took control. You might remember a guy named Paul Khovnikov, who worked for Forbes. He got himself machine gunned towards the end of the 90s. And there was a lot of interplay between sort of connected Russian government figures and Western reporters increasingly that started to happen. The Russians started to pay a lot more attention to that situation at the end of the 90s. And we were, you know, writing very critically of Putin.

I was also pulling all kinds of stunts. Like I worked with this Russian paper that actually wiretapped his chief of staff. So they definitely noticed that. That would wind up on the radar. Yeah. So there were things like that. But I got out of the country and nothing ever happened to me. I didn't know a lot of people that, you know, ended up in bad places after he took power.

Like I knew Anna Polakovskaya, for instance, not terribly well, but I did know her. Well, I was just going to say, what prompted you to come back to the States? What was, how did that transpire? You know, I thought creatively the XL had kind of run out of ideas. We were starting to repeat ourselves and I got a little bit tired of writing for a dwindling audience. The expat community was shrinking pretty, pretty fast. Our ad base was no longer what it had been. Is that because of the creeping authoritarianism, the economic collapse, all of those together? Like why? Well, Putin's big idea was that he wanted to keep capital in Russia. So that diminished a lot of opportunities for

Western business. Like there was an immense capital flight out of Russia in the 90s. That was the whole thing. Everybody there wanted a piece of all these energy companies. They wanted to get underpriced commodities and timber, gold, whatever it was. And those opportunities closed up as soon as they started not quite nationalizing things, but funneling all the contracts to his Russian Specifically and not to Americans, but you could steal money, but it has to stay here. It has to stay here. Exactly He literally had a meeting

Putin did like four months after he got elected where he just brought all the guys who had gotten rich in those Privatizations and he said look here's the deal you get to keep all that stuff if you You know pledge your allegiance to me, if not, you know, consequences, straight out of the movie Casino. Remember the money or the hammer scene? So, you know, once that whole thing happened, a lot of the Americans just bolted because there just wasn't a way to make cash the way there had been. And he made good on that thread to several of the oligarchs, right? Yeah. To kind of check.

I mean, I was just thinking about this. In fact, some of my old friends from over there, we were just talking about this because, you know, it's not an exact comparison. But let's just talk about, for instance, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, right? The showiness of that with all the agents and the TV crews and everything. There was something very similar. They raided a television station there with, you know, guys rappelling through windows and they dragged people out. And one of the oligarchs got rung up on a fraud charge. And then there was another famous one named Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was in prison. Now, Khodorkovsky, people presented him as this sort of martyr to good capitalism.

But he was one of the people who most benefited from those crooked auctions. So I, uh, and his, his, my memory was his crime was getting involved in politics. Yes. Like, cause he said like, keep your money that you stole, but you have to support me. Yeah. You got to get off. You got to get, he wanted to do both. He wanted to keep the money and also be involved in politics. Yeah. Putin said, you got to stay on the bench. And this guy tried to go onto the court and that's it. Put him in a cage. Right, right. So, you know, as you mentioned before, when you watch this stuff, which is, it's like, you know, going on the ocean in a glass-bottom boat.

I mean, everything's crystal clear. They don't hide the corruption in Russia. They just announce what they're doing. Oops, sorry. And, you know, that's an incredible education for a reporter to see that stuff, especially as a young person. Doesn't it feel increasingly like that's what's happening here? I mean, with your Twitter follows reporting, but also just with all of your censorship reporting, everything, it's starting to look like they're almost bragging about

censorship opportunities. You just mentioned the raid. Are there other parallels with that period of time that you witnessed in Russia and what's happening now with creeping authoritarianism, censorship? I mean, it's both left and right, too. It's not like it's just against Trump. It runs the gamut. It's just when the sort of security state wants to clamp down, they put their machinery in motion. What other similarities have you noticed? So the first time I noticed real similarities was when, so I had been assigned to the campaign story for Rolling Stone when I got back. You know, they hired me. It's 04? Yeah, 03, 04. And they sent me out. And I remember going out in the campaign thinking, God, this is so boring.

There has to be some other, you know, compared to the other thing, there has to be some deeper level to all this that can be covered. And it wasn't until the 08 financial crisis when they assigned, you know, a story to me, like what happened with AIG, then you start to see the real machinations of American politics. Like, you know, we're going to bail out this connected group of oligarchs using state money. We're going to present it to the public as something noble and beneficial where everybody wins. I mean, it was all very, very familiar, that whole scene. And so as soon as I had a couple of people on Wall Street who kind of walked me through some of the basics. But after that, I'm like, wow, this is exactly the same story. So that helped a lot, I would say.

Were you surprised at the reaction to that long piece you did? Goldman? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it was unbelievable. To this day day we're 15 years later almost maybe i'm getting closer to 20 years um and people still know the vampire squid right you know piggybacking on that the right i remember as like a young conservative

at the time the right which was in a populist moment, really didn't like you, Matt. You were the subject of eye rolls. You were just this communist. Why didn't they like going after the Goldman Sachs, Wall Street? At the time, it was really a taboo on the right, even in the midst of this populist moment. And there were a lot of people who were opposed to the Tea Party moment. Oh, the Tea Party. There were a lot of people who ended up being opposed to TARP and all of that. But it didn't matter for you, Matt. This is just my impression, but correct me if I'm wrong. The way the right has reacted to you recently is very different than how they did then.

Yeah, maybe originally. But I think that was a little bit of a misunderstanding. Also, I did get some stuff kind of wrong in that first story. Like, you know, I was a complete novice to financial reporting. So I was reporting what I was being told. And, you know, as you know, when you do these stories, you're listening to 20 people and you think, well, these three make sense. And so I went with some things. Any corrections?

What were they? No, no, they weren't like factual errors. They were more like a sort of interpretive, you know, sometimes I would over interpret what was going on a little bit. But really, those stories were really not anti-capitalist. They were actually stories about how politically connected companies were getting unfair advantages in the market. And that's why all my sources were Wall Street people.

They weren't like people who were being foreclosed on, that came later. And so I was getting a lot of people from hedge funds or from smaller banks who were calling me up and saying, this is totally unfair. Like, you know, they get bailed out, their cost of capital drops, they get to borrow more cheaply, we lose, right? And this is a, it's a complicated story.

But the reason I think that people responded to it is because financial reporting is not done for ordinary people. There is no, at the time, anyway, there was no sort of popular way to explain what was going on. And just the process of saying, okay, if you've never been around finance before, here's kind of roughly what happened. People really responded to that. And it was a shock to us that there was supposed to be only one story and we ended up doing 10 years of them. So, I mean, that's how that happened. Yeah. I was at the Huffington Post. Well, I went from Politico in 2008 to

Huffington Post in 2009. And when did that story come out? Probably 09. Yeah. And yeah, I remember that was there was a rare moment where there were several years where we could write stories about the financial crisis and what led up to it and also how to fix it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the fight over Dodd-Frank. And they would get clicks. People were intensely focused on that. I remember we, I think it might have been 2010, right around the time the Tea Party's popping off,

we wrote a piece saying that it might make sense for you actually to just walk away from your home because you're so far underwater um you're never you're never going to come back right um you can just mail your mail the keys back to the bank and we set up using um like what's meet up or whatever it is um say like if if you guys want to like talk to people in your neighborhood who were in similar situations, here's how you can do it. And hundreds of meetups happened like around the country. And they were covered in the local news would do like eight homeowners showed up at this Starbucks to like discuss whether or not they should just mail the keys. Well, that's amazing, right?

But probably told you something about the extent of the. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right? Right. It was such a dark, bleak moment. Absolutely. Yeah. And so then you started covering a lot of the foreclosure crisis.

Yeah. And that was that was when that was sort of my first hint that something like Trump was going to happen. Really? They sent me to cover something called the Rocket Docket, which is down in Florida and Jacksonville. And there was a group of Jacksonville lawyers who were the first ones to clue into the whole robo-signing problem, where the banks were just sort of kind of willy-nilly making up documents. So in place of documents they should have, they would just create affidavits. And have machines just sign them.

Yeah, exactly. Or people, they would just sit there with stacks and sign in these things. So I went down there and they wanted to show me how people got foreclosed on. And they dragged these half-CNL judges out of retirement. And not even a real courtroom courtroom they just put them in conference rooms and had people come in and the average turnover time had to be like two and a half minutes so they would take two and a half minutes to kick each family out of their home and the line was like you know from the courtroom all the way around the block right how often were the families

there they were all there they were there yeah they had often were the families there? They were all there. They were there. Yeah, they had to. And, you know, it was, they were all across the map, right? They were white, black, you know, young, old, everything. And the level of rage in that room was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. This is Florida, by the way, right? Right. Which has become a hub of right populism. Well, I'm not surprised, right? That's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny because Occupy happened at the same time. And I remember going up to Occupy and thinking, you know, this is interesting. It's great. But the other thing is where something's going to blow. Right. Right. Because that's representative of the whole population. And, you know, because five million people or six million people got foreclosed on in those years.

That's a lot of people, you know, and they were ordinary working class people. A lot of them got screwed. They didn't just not pay their bills. A lot of them, you know, got put into exotic mortgage products. They didn't understand. They ended up with $8,000 a month bills and stuff like that. And it was horrible. And I knew as soon as anybody figured a way to tap into that, that there was going to be some kind of political movement. And this was a really pivotal moment. And it was also a policy moment. Like it was a policy choice. And like Larry Summers described it as foaming the runway. Remember that phrase? And I put that in my book because I thought it was almost self-explanatory. And an editor was like, what on earth does he mean by this? And I realized, actually,

kind of you do have to unpack this. And so what he was saying is that you could go in and rescue these homeowners. There's something in bankruptcy law known as cram down where you can say, look, the cost of this home, the value of this home is this now. The mortgage is this. There was fraud involved here. We're going to cram the mortgage down to your home, to your home value. You're no longer underwater. It's like, okay, cool. Now my mortgage is less and I'm not just throwing money away every single month and I can afford it. I'm not going to get foreclosed on. That's a policy choice that was available to Democrats. A lot of Democrats fought for it in the House and the Senate.

The White House, because of its economic team, argued against it. They said, if you do that, the banks would too quickly lose capital and the banks would go under. And they're too big to fail and we can't allow that. And so the banks are crashing. So you need to foam the runway with the rubble of the foreclosed homes. Because this way the banks just gradually lose money and their blow is softened as they land on the runway by the bodies of all of these former homeowners. Unbelievable. Because you stretch it out then from 2010 all the way through 2016 by, it's a rocket docket, but it's still, people are fighting, scraping, like making payments, fighting their foreclosures, trying to get the paperwork in. And then they set up these programs called, what, HAMP and HARP.

Right, but they didn't really work. That deliberately did not work, that are supposed to rescue homeowners. But what they actually did is they just kind of guaranteed that they'll be in foreclosure, but years down the road. They even told people in missed payments. Right, they would say, you need to miss payments in order to get into this program, this program will rescue you. So these homeowners would deliberately miss payments on the advice of these program officers, and then they would be hooked in this program,

which meant that they were inevitably going to get foreclosed on. But that was good for Wall Street because the banks would all survive. Right. Right. Yeah. No, that's unbelievable. Right. And you think about how sociopathic that is. Right. And they used to be able to get away with that because if it's not on the evening news, who's going to pay attention? But I think with the Internet, this is why these movements can happen now because people can start to do their own research. And when you're getting thrown out of your house, you will tend to look into things and find out what's happening. I know I talk to people who would ask questions like, how come they're spending $6 trillion or $10 trillion in the bailout when it only would cost a trillion and a half dollars to pay off every single subprime mortgage in the country. And then you have to get into answers like, well,

then all the people who basically made bets on all of these, you know, debt instruments, some of them would lose unfairly, right? And they would have claims. And it turns out that there's this colossal, you know amount of leverage yeah exactly that all depends on this right and and so that's where the moral hazard comes in and um yeah of course people once they started to figure out what was going on with that they they were they were going to get very very upset that's what this whole you know meme stock thing grew out of i think is just this rage directed towards these financial professionals who were, you know, basically being subsidized and then acting like they had like this special financial genius that allowed them to make money. And that is a very bitter pill to swallow, I think.

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That's a perfect point about what I wanted to ask, in that there's this faux brick wall that we think of between the culture war and economics. It's like you sort of have culture in this corner, economics in this corner. But when you're saying around the time of Occupy, the rocket docket people in Florida, you're thinking like, wow, there might be something coming out of this. Donald Trump runs for president. Were you thinking of economics and culture in a different sense at that time? Because I was in college during Occupy, and one of the things that just drove me crazy was the way people talked about the people who grew up like I did, like going to church, owning guns, hunting, like all the stupid

stuff, like Duck Dynasty was super popular at the time. And it sounds stupid, but there was this cultural backlash that could have presaged Trump in the same way that the economic backlash could have. And I just want to ask about how much you, like the meme stocks is a great example. It's like both cultural and economic. What were you reading into that kind of thing that was building under the surface that eventually became Donald Trump coming down the golden escalator? Yeah, you know, I was probably like most kind of liberal, left-leaning, cosmopolitan reporters, and then it wasn't that in tune with the other part of the country at the time, which is, I think, a real failing going back and looking at it. Even despite all the foreclosure work you'd been doing?

Yeah, but I mean, look, I worked at— You kind of put that off to a little compartment? It's economics. Yeah, I mean, it's economics. Like most reporters, I kind of naturally sympathize with the ordinary working person and not the, you know, rich or politicians. But at Rolling Stone, look, you do a lot of the sort of picking on the yokel humor. I mean, that's part of what columnists have been doing since the days of Mencken in this country,

right? And I was specifically hired to be that kind of person. I mean, that was my job, you know, I was walking into a very particular gig at, that was my job, you know. I was walking into a very particular gig at Rolling Stone that had been, you know, the predecessors did that. And now I look back at that stuff and I'm kind of embarrassed by it. And once Trump ran and I started to talk to people in the crowd, I did realize that there was this convergence of the economic stuff and the cultural resentment that was really powerful that I didn't understand all that well. But it was clearly something like there was definitely resentment about the way they were talked about in the press. And I remember Trump, he's very clever, right? He would get up there at his

campaign events and he would point at us, you know, and he would say, look at them, those bloodsuckers, you know, they- Vampire squids. Yeah. Basically, he would say, you know, they hate me, but more than that, they hate you, right? And, you know, look at us. We did look like snobs, you know? And it was a very smart move. And then when you get out and you talk to people and ask, well, why are you voting for this guy, Donald Trump? And he's like, because he's leading you all by the nose. He's getting free coverage, you know?

And just his triumph over us was important, you know? And I saw that and I said, wow, that's amazing, you know, and just his triumph over us was important, you know. And I saw that, and I said, wow, that's amazing, you know. And it was also incredible to me that the other reporters weren't interested in that story. I found that incredible. And to me, it's particularly if you've lost faith in the ability of government to really do anything positive for you, then at least it can make your enemies miserable. Exactly. It's like some satisfaction. The shot and throw the thing. At the misery of my adversaries. So you're going into this campaign, you've got Jeb and the whole crew against Trump in the Republican primary. And then you've got Hillary versus Bernie. I'm still, you know, nobody will ever forget Hillary Clinton, you know, giving speeches

to Goldman Sachs, like in the run up, like talk about a bubble, like strategic bubble. Like she didn't need that $700,000. I know. She was, and I would hope that if she'd go back and do it again, she'd be like, you know what, that was a mistake. Politically a mistake. I regret. Not morally a mistake. She would not say it was morally a mistake.

No, because there is no such thing as morals. It's all cynical. They're way beyond that. Strategizing. These are the titans of industry. Will to power. And it's like the $700,000 was not worth losing the presidency over. Not that that did it, but it

symbolized for everybody who the Democratic Party was becoming and that they were willing to do it. Yeah. And they weren't embarrassed about it. Right. I mean, I remember the New York Post did a story where they listed her speaking schedule and there was one day that was just hilarious.

She had like a speech in the morning when it was like 400 grand and then she had to fly to another country like to do biotech. Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, this is like a month, just months before launching the campaign. Right. 400 grand and then she had to fly to another country like to do biotech right yeah exactly i'm like this is like month just months before launching the campaign right within months not years earlier or like and then there's bernie so how much time did you spend on the democratic campaign trail that that year not much because my editors at rolling stone didn't want me anywhere near the democrats so uh they found him boring or no, they were afraid of what I was going to write. Oh, yeah. So they much preferred to have me crawling up the backsides of Republicans,

meaning that you would be vicious to the Clinton campaign. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, and then later on when I covered the Democrats in 2020 2020 you know that whole ridiculous 20 person field or whatever it was um i did a couple of stories that were pretty nasty we're still there still rolling stone yeah um i thought they were great stories i'm like these are this is sort of classic rolling stone stuff and they were like yeah i think we've had just about enough of your campaign coverage at that point. So somebody's going to lose an eye now. Yeah, exactly.

It used to be fun and games. Now Trump's here. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. But that's I mean, that's kind of what you chronicle in Hate Inc. is that these organs of media become corporate mouthpieces. It's not that that didn't always happen. I mean, there's always some intersection, but in a different way, in a way that it was like, they didn't need to be told

by the Clinton campaign to keep Taibbi away from it. They just shared the ideological sort of hesitation. Yeah, there was at some point, I think we probably all experienced the same thing where somebody got the memo, like in spring to summer of 2016 that this was a new ballgame and that we were no longer going to, you know, be the detached press corps that we had been in the past. You know, there was no more of this like writing negative stuff about Democrats when that happened. Right. We were going to just sort of look the other way. Meanwhile, the cable networks are giving Trump unending airtime. Right. But yes, the memo went out, definitely. I mean, it's a phrase. There was actually no memo that I know of. Right. There may actually have been one from the Democracy Integrity Project or whatever came before that. But no i mean it was unspoken i do i do believe that like

so there was from 2003 on um this like robust blogosphere that they used to call it which allowed all sorts of intra-democratic party fighting like daily coast daily coast for instance was people were constantly at each other's throats over different candidates and different directions for the party, fighting over the war, surveillance, how to take on Bush, gay marriage, marriage equality, are you for civil unions. All of this robust fight. And I feel like around 2016, definitely after he wins, but heading into the general, the memo went out, that's over. We're not doing that. I think Alternet was one of those places where this was happening. They were very critical of Democrats. A lot of their high dollar funding just

evaporates like a lot of these donors who were democrats and believed in like just the idea of like a full-throated debate yeah we're all of a sudden like you know what not not right now yeah yeah and a lot of the ngos that you maybe occasionally at least still went after you know sort of democratic members of Congress. There was none of that anymore. Now we had the full-blown, like, sort of David Brock model of politics where, you know, we have an NGO that exists for a political purpose only, right? We're not going to do this institutional, you know, purity thing anymore. And there was, in the press,

there was a very influential piece by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times who said, I think it was called, Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism. And the whole idea was, yeah, we used to worry just about what's true. Now we have to be true to history's judgment. So, you know, everybody knew what that meant, right? And the way I got it was I remember I did a story where I

interviewed somebody. It was right after the Access Hollywood thing. And I interviewed somebody at a speech he was supposed to go to, but had been uninvited to by Wisconsin Republicans. So I talked to some Trump supporter who had, his whole family had been union workers. They had always voted Democratic. And now they said, you know, after NAFTA and all that stuff, we've been screwed so many times. We can't listen anymore. And we're going with this guy. it's just a quote right you know I put that in there and I got all this I got flamed on the on Twitter for using the economic insecurity thing right which is now code for racism or something like that and um I was totally shocked by that I I guess I shouldn't have been in retrospect but but that was wild. Like, this is

a real reason this guy's getting, you know, he's succeeding. Why would we not want the audience to know that? I just couldn't, I mean, what did you think during that time? I mean, I was, I'm curious. Well, I mean, I was just like, Wisconsin, I'm from Wisconsin, and I didn't really, I lived in D.C. at the time, didn't pick up on it until I was in rural Northern Wisconsin, uh, where my mom grew up. I was rollerblading and I was going all around the neighborhood and just giant homemade Trump signs on plywood with spray paint. And then this was like July. And that's when I was like, it was David Obie's district for 40 years, you know, deep blue district flipped in 2010. And that's when I was like, oh my gosh, nobody has any idea what's about to happen. The piece I'm proudest of from that year

was in February of 2016 that I co-wrote with Zach Carter. And the headline is something like, it's in the Huffington Post headline. It's something like, don't laugh, Donald Trump could win. And like, here's how. There you go. And it was. I remember that. That was you. Yeah, me and Zach, me and Zach Carter. And we're saying like, you're going to hear about nothing but NAFTA from here until the election. And we pointed out some very basic things. We said, Wisconsin has a Republican governor. Michigan has a Republican governor. Pennsylvania has a Republican governor. And if he wins these three states, then he wins the White House.

It may have been Randell by that time. There may have been a Democratic governor back, but Pennsylvania had had Republican governors for like a decade plus leading into that. And so we're just making this point that like, look. How did people respond to this? But that was still okay in February. February.

February 2016. Yeah. The narrative hadn't solidified. Yeah. There was no like cancellation attempt. Yeah. Because I think people didn't see him as a threat yet. Right.

Yes. Yeah. And so it's okay to say he can win him as a threat yet. Right. Yes. Yeah. And so it's okay to say he can win because he can't win. Right. So it's fine to make an argument. And then our polling aggregator by November, well, we had our own pollster. It was called, we bought pollster.com. Oh.

HuffPost tried to hire Nate Silver. They were in a bidding war with Disney. How did that work out? Not well for HuffPost. And so they went and bought Polster.com, which was another polling aggregator run by Mark Blumenthal and some other pollsters. And ours was very similar to Nate's, except had a slightly higher certainty that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And so by the time the election came up, came around, um, all these polling aggregations had, had her, you know, well ahead. But what, what Nate accurately pointed out is that if, if they're off a little bit in one state, then they're probably off in all of them. And so you need

to factor that in. And he turned out to be right. Yeah. So his was wrong, but he was right that he might be wrong. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I think he was probably, if you go back and look at their coverage, they kind of accurately presented the percentage chances and all that. But it was things like, you know, Trump will play in the NBA before he's going to be the nominee. Like that stuff is what told especially liberal readers, yeah, don't worry about it. You know, this is funny, right? It's not going to, nothing's going to happen. And they didn't take the story seriously. You know, I got fooled in a different way.

I initially did what you did. I said, wow, this is going to work. Like Hillary Clinton's the perfect opponent for this guy, right? Just watching the speeches. But then I went to the convention and some pollster sat me down and walked me through the numbers and said, look at the likability numbers, right? And I thought, well, that's insurmountable. Not realizing that there were a lot of people who hated both candidates. And, you know, if those, Trump ended up winning two to one. And that was a key factor in that race. That's really interesting because that's where we are now.

The double haters. I was impressed writing about the double haters this morning, or someone wrote about the double haters this morning. That's a good point, Matt. And what do you think, how is it playing out in 2024 when you have some, like, I think they put it out a quarter of the country or a quarter of voters say they hate both candidates. Is that the key demographic in 2024? Who wins the we hate both people? Well, I think that's, you know, they were the key demographic in 2016. It was a slightly smaller number back then. I think it was 19% or 20%.

So I would imagine it would be even higher now. But it's not predictable how those folks are going to vote. I mean, I think there will be more people who won't vote. But having covered campaigns, I always feel like people, if they have a strong emotion somewhere, it's going to guide them to make the vote. So if they hate somebody more than they dislike somebody or more than they like mildly somebody else, that's going to bring them to the polls. And, you know, there are a lot of people who are very, they're very wary of Trump, but have a lot of negative feelings about the Biden campaign and vice versa. But I just think it's tended to work out in Trump's favor, you know, when it's like that. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing.

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I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. You can now binge all 10 episodes of divine intervention on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so after 2016, then your, your,

your, your, when does your Eric Garner book come out? It's called. I Can't Breathe? Yeah, that was like two years later. Yeah, 2018. And so that brings us to the height of cancellation time, cancellation period, which brings back your Russia time. Yes.

How often had... In the culture wars. That book. Mm-hmm. How often had the exile been brought up again, like, in your career? Like, what made it... Like, how did that happen then? So, I don't want to be conspiratorial about this, but what I will say is that during...

It had never come up until 2016. And then I started to notice that whenever I wrote about certain things, it would come up. Like, what kind of? When I said negative things about Hillary Clinton, when I said positive things about Bernie Sanders, they came up. But, you know. In the context of the Bernie bro meme? Yeah, often, right? Yeah. So there was a group of, you know, sort of internet trolls, but it's such an inexact science and I was never able to get a real handle on what happened. I mean, whether it

was coordinated. Right. You can't say that, right? So I don't know. I mean, I do know who some of the original people were who were trying to make us think about it. Were they any of the same people that started the birther rumor in 2008? I don't think so. I mean, you know, I didn't really look all that hard at this. And, you know, I spent much more time just being bummed out and feeling guilty. And then I said, then I got mad about some of the press coverage that was making some, you know, basically I had written some very offensive things, but there was a scene in the book that was Mark fantasizing about something about sort of a sexual harassment scene that wasn't true. And there was no way to talk about it and not sound like,

there was no way to make sense of it i mean if unless you had been through the whole russia thing like the disgustingness of the humor of the exile was never going to make sense to american audiences so i didn't even really try um but uh you know that was really it turned out to mostly just be a blip in my career. The much bigger thing was the Russiagate thing. And that was when, you know, I suddenly was on the outside with everybody in the business. And that started before that. So, I don't know. How so?

So, right after Trump got elected, you know, I had experience with Russia. I started getting calls about the subject. And I remember looking at some of the early stories and saying, man, the sourcing on this stuff is really weird, right? Like, it's all anonymous. There's no way we can replicate any of this in the lab, you know? And I wrote a piece called Something About This Russia Story Stinks, like really early, like... In Rolling Stone? In Rolling Stone, yeah. And all of a sudden, like lots of people just sort of froze me out. I stopped getting, you know, my phone calls returned. People in Congress didn't call me back. And yeah, that was the beginning for me. I started to realize that I was not going to be able to stick around in that Rolling Stone. See, that's also interesting because, again, without seeming conspiratorial, it just feels like a Clinton op. It feels like you got on the wrong side of the sort of Steele dossier.

What's the name of the Wall Street Journal? At that point, it's not an op. It's the entire culture. Yeah. It's like. But being driven by the ex-journal reporters who are feeding it around. And there was a group of people that was talking to David Korn and all that stuff People were leaking things and yeah, it just I wish I had known that back then, you know

Because all I had was just just doesn't seem right if I had known about all that, you know stuff, but um But though it was cultural it was this weird thing that that now is normal, which is this groupthink culture which that now is normal, which is this groupthink culture, which one of the reasons I liked journalism early on when I first got into it is that it was not that. You know, you used to go into a newsroom or, you know, a TV, you know, studio, and it would be like a comedy club in the back room. Like everybody was busting each other's chops about everything. You could say anything. Nobody cared what your politics were as long as you did the job well. I thought that was a really cool feature of reporting. And then like overnight, it turned into the exact opposite. I don't know if you had the same experiences. Like college campuses. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I missed that. But yeah.

But it felt like, well, I mean, I missed that. But yeah. But it felt like, well, I mean, I went to college campus after they became like thoroughly sanitized. And it feels like that in green rooms now. It feels like you have to watch what you say. It feels like it's very self-serious. And it seems like it wasn't super self-serious before, though. I think my, the way I handled it, I basically didn't touch the Russiagate stuff. I didn't go either way on it. I was just covering other things.

Right. So that might have been the way that I just subconsciously was like, you know what? If I could break some news there. I think we broke a good story on Elliot Broidy who was doing unregistered lobbying for Russia. But somebody hacked his emails and we had the emails and boom, here you go. Right. And he was like number two on the RNC or something like that. Really? It's a big fundraiser. Yeah, it was a big fundraiser. Big story. I think he went to prison. But that was not but that was different than the campaign. That's just classic. Right. Foreign governments influencing the process. But that was different than the campaign. That's just classic foreign governments influencing the process.

But that does bring up an interesting issue, though. I'm curious about this, Matt, like how you decide what to cover now. Because having been in conservative media, there's this like the entire corporate press is focused on three shiny objects. And sometimes they're doing legitimately important reporting. Like I'm glad that they are, you know, when there's a hurricane, I'm glad they're down there. Like, they're doing, there's some reporters who are doing good stuff. But conservative media sees its role as saying, they're all doing that. You know, they're getting every stone overturned when it comes to Donald Trump. We have a limited amount of time and resources. We're going to spend them over here. And I feel like maybe that's what you were doing with Russiagate. I don't know. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like you were doing the reporting that was coming to you.

How do you decide what to report on now, Matt? Because I'm sure you get a lot of stuff that just comes to you naturally, but you also have limited time and resources. So it's not like the people who expect you to spend every day. This is why Donald Trump is evil in a million different ways. This is why I hate Netanyahu. This is why the CIA, well, like other people are doing some of that reporting. You're doing what comes to you. How do you decide where to spend your time and resources? So I've always had the same attitude about this, which is that the press basically exists more for people who don't have anybody else to press their point of view than for people who have institutional backing already. So going back all the way to the beginning of my career, I always tried to pick stories that nobody else was doing because, you know, that's who needs those stories, right?

Like, for instance, we started talking about how Russia was being reported. Well, everybody at home is getting, it's great, it's turning into Switzerland. I would go out and say, you know, look, it's subsistence farming and, you know, people getting shot, you know, in broad daylight. So I would do those stories. When Obama got elected, I was a big fan of his when he got elected on the campaign trail. Then right after that, I had to cover finance. And he was involved in a pretty shady series of relationships with Citigroup. I did a big story called Obama's Big Sellout for Rolling Stone that I was heavily criticized

for. But I think that's what media is for, right? We're not supposed to be in the friends business. We're supposed to do stuff that is true but unpopular. So, but I do now, now because so much of corporate media is monomaniacal and in this Trump direction. And, you know, I'm personally very worried about kind of collapse of civil liberties and things like that. The small matter of collapsing civil liberties, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've probably lost my sense of humor about this a little bit, but that's kind of how I pick it. People say, why don't you criticize Trump?

Where I'm like, we don't have enough people doing that already. Like there's five million people doing that already. So I think the first time you and I met in person was at a cafe in New York because you had finished a novel. Oh, God. I don't know if you remember this. And I used to run this with a friend, a little publishing house, because we were like, look, you don't need printers anymore. You can just, if you have a website and you have some books, you could just actually print them. And you had written a novel about a drug dealer, right? And we talked about publishing it

and but then eventually you said you know what i'm actually going to try substack this brand new thing at the time um that was the first time you guys met i would have thought you knew each other well we've been on a bunch of listservs yeah exactly um we didn't we we digitally cross paths yeah he's in new York, I'm in D.C. Also, after I had twins, I basically haven't left the house. That's true. Except to go to work. Also fair, yeah.

That makes sense. Makes sense. And so you ended up doing it through Substack, kind of serializing the novel. What was that experience like? You were still at Rolling Stone, if I remember. Yeah. How did you decide to make that, like, how did that evolve into your full thing? So that happened because the only thing I could do legally with my existing Rolling Stone contract that wouldn't have violated the terms.

Oh, it was like a non-compete. Yeah. It would have been something like fiction on, you know, a serialized book. They let me write books. So I had to write a book. And, you know, Substack came to me early. And, you know, I got to know those guys pretty well. And it seemed like a really interesting idea and after the experience of doing that which I think turned out well I also wrote hate inc there first and I you know I thought this is going to work better just in general if I just leave Rolling Stone and do this for a living. So a lot of people ended up on Substack because they got forced out of their organizations. I'm like one of the only people who left out of greed. You know, I just thought I'm going to make more

money doing this over here. So that's why I left. But a lot of people didn't understand at the time that that was true. How are you liking it? Yeah, I was gonna say, how are you feeling about the Substack revolution? I love it. I think Substack is a great thing. And when did you jump out? When did you fully launch it? 2019, maybe 2020. Yeah. You know, there are some differences, you know, Rolling Stone, they would give me a story and I'd get 10 weeks to work on it. Right. So investigative journalism, it's a lot of work and not a lot of content. You know, Substack has not solved that problem. I don't think the how do you do investigative journalism and monetize it quickly?

It's what it does pay for is the strong take. And there's actually quite a reward on Substack for writing. People like to... They will pay for something that they enjoy reading, just in general, even if they don't agree with it, I've found. So as opposed to doing... I do a lot of reporting on Substack stack that stuff tends not to do well financially but How do you tell it doesn't do well financially like people are unsubscribing or it's people aren't converting from the free to the paid You can see how many subscriptions you get I try not to look but you can see

Oh, I said so if it's a well-written piece, then that converts more people. Generally, there are like nine different types of things that I do on the site and I know which ones are monetizable and which ones aren't. How do you balance out how often to do one or the other? I feel like Ryan's trying to get tips. Yeah. Well, I think one pays for the other.

You know, you have to do some of those op-ed pieces. One for the studio, one for you. Right, right, exactly, exactly. Well, it's something we've thought about a lot here, the whole idea of audience capture. And the way that we've sort of, the way that we solve it here is we've got Emily's wrong takes, my right takes. Exactly. And then people get to hear them both and then decide for themselves.

But it does acculturate the audience to difference of opinion and being okay with like I say some dumb things sometimes believe it or not Mm-hmm, but doesn't mean that you have to go running for the hills, right? It means you can just flame me and just save Emily's great and move on but that's very unusual in the media space Well, it doesn't need to be though because I'm sure as've discovered, audiences are much smarter and more forgiving than people give them credit for. And open-minded. And open-minded, yeah. Even partisans. Yeah. So, I mean, like last week I did a piece about a writer for the World Socialist website, you know, a Trotskyite who's in prison in Ukraine.

And, you know, there are some conservatives who subscribe to my site and they weren't mad about it, right? They're not going to unsubscribe because of, because of stories like that. Um, but they, you know, what they'll, you will occasionally lose people over something that you say, but you, you know, over time, I think it evens out as long as you do good work. I've heard from some people, I think, I shouldn't say because I don't remember if I was told this on or off the record, but that people on the left. Let's go with on.

Let's go with on, yeah. But people on the left who developed sort of center-right audiences or maybe even like populist-right audiences during the Trump years, as soon as, like,

Trump was out of office and then there was October 7th, they hemorrhaged. But then people kind of slowly came back. Well, I know Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fong have talked, I think, openly about that. Because they picked up right-wing audiences. Not totally right-wing audience, but a significant chunk were right-wing.

Because they both agreed on the people that they were attacking. Yeah. But then they realized after October 7th, they didn't agree on Israel. Glenn has, I think, lost a substantial portion of his audience. But he has such a massive audience that it doesn't matter. Right. How do you worry? How do you think about that? Or do you? You know, I try not to think about that. I haven't done a lot of stuff on Israel, but I've never have. I never liked that story. I've never been there. When you did the show with Katie, how often did that come up?

She's big into it. It's like Katie's biggest show. Katie Halper. Yeah, Katie Halper. You used to post a podcast with. Yeah, so Katie obviously cares a lot about that issue. We had a lot of guests on cares a lot about that issue. We had a lot of guests on who would talk about that issue. You know, I have written about it in

terms of things like censorship. TikTok, you wrote about it when it came to the TikTok bill. Right, right. And so, you know, we had people like Ali Abunima on and, you know, that was after, I believe it was electronic and if I'd I had been suppressed and I had written about that even previously so had Glenn Glenn was one of the first people to write about that I don't mind talking about certain aspects of it but I find the whole thing super complex you know, I don't know how you feel about this, but I'm always very nervous about subjects where I just feel like there are gaps in my knowledge. You know, I remember being on one of the first times I was on like CNN, they asked me a question about like

Lebanon. And I just had to say, I don't know. I'm not confident to answer that question. And you could tell the camera hates that answer, right? So it's a weird place to be, but so I stick with what I do know. Well, yeah, I just think it's interesting because I do find that even hardcore partisans are more open-minded. There are some that aren't. I feel like the country right now is 30% hardcore partisan left, hardcore partisan right, and then everyone else is just like, please, I just want to believe something. Please just tell me the truth. I don't care if

you're left. I don't care if you're right. Just tell me what you think, and I can make that decision for myself. But just do the research and be honest about where you're coming from, which leads me to think, if tomorrow the New York Times and the Washington Post said we are doing journalism from a clear liberal perspective, it would go like leaps and bounds towards restoring trust. I don't know, but I feel like that's why people subscribe. Yeah, racket. Right. Well, yeah, they trust me to probably admit when I get stuff wrong or you know tell them where i'm coming from but um audiences are much i mean this is my buying experience going back decades people always think that audiences are dumber than they really are um if you go back to the 90s

remember the whole lad mag movement we had in the States where everybody thought that you had to do stories in 400-word boxes and that people would not read anything longer than that. You mean like Axios? Yeah, right. I guess that's the idea there. I'm even going back into the Stone Age when it was still paper. But, you know, at Rolling Stone, when we started doing those finance pieces, I'm like, I'm doing 8,000 word pieces about credit default swaps, and people love it, right? Like, as opposed to, you know, trying to dumb it down for people. I think audiences like it when you respect them

and treat them like adults and, you know, don't make assumptions that they're going to run away if you try to be complicated. So, I don't know. Do you have the same thought? As I'm listening to you talk, I'm thinking the people on the left who think that you've betrayed them, that you've left the left, what happened to Matt Taibbi. That you've sold out. It's all for clicks or whatever that do you think your politics have changed or do you think that the you actually haven't been that political to begin with uh or how like how do you think about that like because i'm sure you still get people oh yeah all the time you can only block so many it's just like like, what happened to you at that time?

I get that question. It's the most annoying question on the planet. Right. What happened to you? People send that to you. Even me. I'm like, I haven't changed in 20 years. It's probably Sagar.

But that's because there's, within the business, even small transgressions now are unacceptable. I mean, I used to all the time do large, feature-length reports that were critical of the Democratic Party in Rolling Stone where they didn't like it. And that was considered a virtue in the business once upon a time, like you to, you know, we're going to criticize Republicans also do this. I don't think my politics have changed that much. And I'm probably a little bit more, I've probably changed a little bit in terms of things that I worry about, like characterizing audiences. But I see this, like, for instance, the censorship story and even some of the other stuff that's gone on with Trump as a continuation of this sort of degradation of civil liberties and due process that started with 9-11,

which I was very sensitive to because I came into it after watching Putin come to power and seeing all of that disappear overnight there in Russia. I think it's all the same story. It's just that the, you know, the people who are now advancing this idea that we have to become more aggressive and how, you know, in the use of illiberal tools, I think it's just a different group of people. But that makes sense. Is there anything you would say you have learned from the right or you've been like humbled by as you've made? Because I mean, like I'm in way more left spaces than I ever expected would be in my career. I absolutely love it. And I feel like I learn so much from it every day. Is there anything over the last, you know, maybe 10 years you feel like maybe that hasn't changed your principles, but that's changed your perspective from spending more time with people on the right. For sure. I'm much more conscious of how uniform the messaging is in like pop culture.

I probably didn't notice that before. Like even stuff, even shows that I like and still like, they just hit you over the head with the same messages over and over again repeatedly and now you know i i can imagine um as a republican it would be very frustrating to turn on the tv every single time and see myself portrayed as the dumb and wrong one um always right um and i'm maybe a little bit more um in touch with that than I ever have been. But people, you know, people characterize my audience as right wing. Now, it's really not that most of the people who subscribe to my site are like old, disappointed liberals like me. And there's just enough of those people to support my operation I would say um but it's but yes I

think I think I've learned um quite a lot and you know I go back and look at some of the things that I wrote over the years and I'm a little embarrassed uh by some of the ways that I characterized people in the past I think it's hard to even like overstate how important that was, especially to people who are like my age. Like one of my favorite shows was 30 Rock and 30 Rock was doing this dual tiered like economic satire that was brilliant at the time about like Comcast and Cable Town and consolidation and all of that. But it was still so it's not the most important issue in the world. But for people like me, it was just like, come on, man, like, like, these are good people, like they're normal people. And it just was really animating. And I understand why a lot of people voted for Trump as a result of that, or just were able to hold their nose the old racket. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yep.

So I still work for The Intercept, which was set up by... Pierre. Pierre Omidyar. And when he set it up, he originally was going to do 12, as I was told the story, 12 magazines. Then it was two. There was going to be The Intercept, was going to be The Investigative, Civil Liberties, National Security. They were going to be The Intercept, was going to be the investigative, civil liberties, national security, and they were going to do sports. They were going to do basically a Conde Nast, but for the internet in the digital media

era. And you were going to run Racket, which was that named for the, what's the Smedley Butler? No, no, we just like the, it was Alex Perrine and I at the time. It was going to be like this, like investigative business. Yeah. And the stories I heard of the Intercept in its early days are just utterly hilarious. And it's shocking that it ever got launched. Yeah.

Yours didn't get launched. Yeah. Like how long were you there before? Like seven months. Everybody gave up that. Yeah. And it never published a thing, right? launched. Yeah. Like, how long were you there before everybody gave up? Yeah, and it never published a thing, right? Yeah, no. Like, careers were destroyed.

Like, you know, people had nervous breakdowns, and we never published a word. First Look Institute or whatever, First Look Media, whatever it's called, just one of the most ridiculous organizations ever. I mean, there's so many things. Like, I remember walking in there and there was a person who came into work every day and just sat in an office and never did anything and was like paid this enormous salary and it was like months before I asked

what was going on with that. And there were so many things like that going on at that organization. In 2014? Yeah, it was 2014 and I- And you left Rolling Stone for it it was 2014. And I... And you left Rolling Stone for it? I did.

And then you went back to Rolling Stone? I went back to Rolling Stone, like, you know, on my knees. You know, because they had been kind of... You left as a hero, like, I'm launching a brand new publication, like... The new frontier. Yeah. Seven months later, you're like, hey... I defied Jan Wenner, right?

Jan, you know, Jan can be a difficult person. And I thought he was dicking me around at contract time and I was like, I'll show you, you know, like. I'm going to go make it big. Yeah, I'm going to go make it big. And I ran off to, you know, somebody even richer than you and they were going to invest $250 million in media. Then I get there and it's like, we don't have money to buy a pencil, right? At the Intercept,

literally that happened. There were rumors that Pierre himself was like doing expense reports in the very beginning. That's probably true. Yeah. It's like the eighth richest person on the planet. He's like, you really needed to take a cab. You got the subway right there. It would have been faster. Actually, I can tell a story about that. They had this idea that we should not use phones, right? And that we should only, the only time that we should ever be talking on the phone is in one of those booths that they were, you know, they now set up. Right. And I said, journalists need to have an actual line. Right. Because we need to record conversations. And he's like, yeah, but you can do that digitally. I'm like, it doesn't really like that doesn't work

all the time. You know, why don't we just have phones? Right. And, you know, it turned out to be like a cost thing. But they were like hyper focused on stuff that really didn't matter like I got in trouble with them early because they wanted to do a sign seating you know because they had this theory that there would be increased productivity with an open newsroom with people and I said this is a humor magazine if I went into into the you know the this group and i said you all have to sit in a certain space i would lose face immediately with these people and so that thing went down south uh quickly but uh but yeah it was so so you that's right we were almost colleagues that's

interesting i didn't get there till 2017 so i missed those uh those early days, but I got to hear the stories. Yeah. And we took on some of the people who were at Racket. Right. John Schwartz. Schwartz, yes. And some others. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone,

I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've

learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that

to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was just named the most banned book in America. If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest. And on my podcast, Fighting Words, we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do. This regime is coming

down on us, and I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen, Angelica Ross, and Gabrielle Union, and storytellers with wisdom to spare. Listen

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your gut microbiome and those healthy bacteria can actually have positive effects throughout your body. Not just your gut, but your mental health, your metabolism, your immunity, your risk of cancer, heart disease, almost any disease under the sun. Yep, you heard right. Probiotics might actually impact everything from your brain to your heart. So what's science and what's just really good marketing? On this episode of Dope Labs, me and Zakiya cut through the hype and get into the real deal behind probiotics

with help from gastroenterologist Dr. Roshi Raj. So yes, bacteria is definitely having a moment and I'm very excited about that. From probiotic drinks and gummies to face creams and pillows. Yep, we said pillows. The probiotic boom is everywhere. But how much of it actually works and what does it all mean for your gut, your skin, and even your mood? Join us on Dope Labs where we break it all down in the lab like only we can. Listen to Dope Labs on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war.

J. Edgar Hoover was furious. Somebody violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, do you think these people are good Americans? It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the goddamnedest love story you've ever heard. I picked up the phone and my thought was, this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life. I couldn't believe it. I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. You can now binge all 10 episodes of Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we wrap here, we actually haven't even opened one of the most important chapters in your journalism career yet, Matt, which is the Twitter files. And there's been, I mean, you've talked plenty about

Elon Musk publicly. You've talked about the process in really interesting ways that I think people can go and listen to. I'm curious, with all of this context in mind, Russian oligarchy, financial crisis, censorship apparatuses from the Pentagon to the CIA and all of that, where do you think Elon Musk fits into? He's such an interesting person, like whatever you think of him, genuinely an interesting person, but obviously is a defense contractor,

is now the owner of a media company. Ryan's reported on how that's gone in different ways with censorship in countries that Americans don't pay much attention to, quite frankly. As someone who's actually like interacted with him and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him, where do you fit him into this?

That's a great question because, as you both know, when you do any story, you want to understand your sources and where they're coming from and what they want out of the situation. I even asked him straight out. I said, what is it you're looking for out of this? You know, I mean, and he sort of said something about trying to restore trust with Twitter's audiences by opening the vault on different censorship practices. But this was, it was such a big step for, I mean, no CEO has ever done anything like

that before, right? So I can't say that I ever understood where he was coming from or why he was doing anything. And then shortly after we started, you know, there was that incident where he banned a bunch of people for the jet thing, right? And we had conversations back and forth about it. And I made the decision right away, which I've been criticized for, but I thought, you know, it doesn't matter, right? I'm not writing about that stuff. Like he's giving us access to all this material. The story is the material. I'll worry about Elon and all of his problems later. The private jet. Right.

You have access to this trove of information about the Intel apparatus and you're going to throw it away for a private jet story. Right, yeah. I felt like there, I mean, I understood

that there were people who wanted the project to end. There was all kinds of strange stuff going on inside that whole scene at Twitter early on, where, you know, from day to day, minute to minute, we didn't know whether it was going to continue. And so I was the person, I was one of the people who was sort of lobbying for no matter what we do, let's just keep getting stuff in until we have a story.

And so, yeah, I can't say honestly that I understand what Elon's motivation was, but I have to give him credit because the stuff that we did get was historic and interesting and will probably continue to be interesting in different ways even years from now as we keep going through it. And you don't talk to him anymore, right? Like, that bridge is burned. Yeah, unfortunately, you know. I still think he misunderstood the whole situation, I think. That was over the Substack Twitter thing, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Is he still crushing Substack? Which anyway proves your point about source management, which is an important part of doing good journalism, is knowing when to push and when to pull. And that proves your point that when there's a level of sensitivity with a source and you're going to lose access to information that's in the public's interest, you have to be smart. Yeah. Well, there's a line, right? Like you can't, you know, soft pedal your coverage of somebody in order to get something, right? That's like access journalism. There's a word for that, right?

The Twitter files, you know, look, ethically, it was a unique situation, I would say. Like I consulted with all kinds of people, like some of the old dragons in this business. How do you deal with something like this? And I don't think we crossed that line. I still think that the idea was that there was stuff in these documents that even Twitter and Elon didn't understand, that we were still getting up until the very end, and that that was more important than anything else that was happening. Is there more in there, you think?

I think so. I mean, not a ton, but we do keep finding things. You still have access to the ones that you got? Yeah. I'm not supposed to, but yeah. But yes. And there are agencies. When we started, one of the problems was we didn't even just know the names of these different agencies, what they did, which acronyms. CISA.

Yeah, exactly. Like CISISA. That's a long story, but there's a lot of stuff like that on Twitter, especially in attachments that we haven't opened and looked at that, you know, as we continue to do that every now and then we'll find something like Schellenberger still looking pretty closely at all that stuff. Wow. I mean, it's, I don't envy you for having to parse through all of that, but in the other way, it's a story of a lifetime. No, it's awesome. Are you kidding? I mean, it's a dream. I mean, as soon as we saw like FBI flag, this DHS flag that I knew Jim Baker,

right? Yeah. I mean, this maybe once in a career career you'll get something like that. And, you know, it turned out to be, you know, a really big story about this subterranean relationship with the intelligence agencies. And it was very hard to work out. And that's always fun as a journalist, the challenge of it. So, um, but I, you know, I have some resentments too, because, um, I do think that some of the other, some reporters who dismissed it early on because they can't stand Elon, uh, you know, kind of missed the forest for the trees there that it wasn't really a partisan story and they, they, they should have been looking at it, but you know, I think it's a net plus overall. So anything else? I mean, I could keep going a net plus overall. Got anything else?

I mean, I could keep going. I could double the time of this. It's been so interesting. And you two are people I've learned a lot from just watching you guys do amazing reporting. Oh, that's nice of you. Actually, I do have a question for you both. I mean, like, this concept of, you know, Crystal and Sagar obviously did it too part of the whole idea is to go against the whole thesis of like the hate hate ink thing and and see how it works when audiences aren't just being sharing sections but

i mean how does it how is it working for you i mean does it be i think it's working shockingly well right yeah yeah quite pleasantly surprised at how well it's working. Yeah. What one thing that was very heartening, actually, because one thing I'd wondered about was, you know, there's this whole you can't on the left. There's a whole you can't platform. Yep. Odious views. Right. And here's the platform for Emily and her odious views. It's like fully anti-abortion, for example. It's not easy for you. So I went to the GW encampment, the Gaza encampment a couple weeks ago, whenever that was happening back in May.

And it felt like everybody there watched the show. Like every single person there. So at least if you're in your teens and twenties at this point Like it's fine Like people are okay to hear different views because also we you know You're gonna hear stuff about the the Israel Palestine on our show that you probably won't find elsewhere But they're also those people are okay hearing right-wing views that they don't agree with. Right.

They want to. It was interesting how concentrated the audience was there. It's like, wow, everybody here watches this show. It's amazing. That's great. That's great. That's heartening. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, I mean, people can answer in the comments section if they agree whether it's working or not.

But if they're in the comments section, that means they're heads. I mean, not necessarily. Well, not necessarily fans. That's true. Right after the Dobbs decision came out, you and I were on the show together. And I just feel like as someone who grew up when media was falling apart, you just want the transparency. And it's almost efficient to get both perspectives in one sitting. You know, you can hear the best argument from the left and hopefully the best argument from the right, from people that you trust are acting in good faith. And it's kind of efficient. You don't have to. Yeah. I've met a decent number of people who say

that they watch both CNN and Fox or Fox and MSNBC because they don't trust either of them. Right. But they want to hear both. Yeah. And then sort it through themselves. And right. We just cut out the middleman. You can just watch it. Yeah. One stop shopping. There you go. Awesome. Excellent. Emily, Ryan, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming down. Yeah. Thanks for watching, everyone. This is this does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints. I finally found the camera, Ryan. I was like, which camera is it? But it's right here. Make sure you subscribe, breakingpoints.com, so you get this show early and all to your inbox right away on Thursday nights.

There you go. And so we'll see you next week. Sounds good. See you then. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there.

Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen

from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard.

Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better.

Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black

Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid.

Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.