MTracey podcast - "Today's News" with Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi -- 3/16/2026

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

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All right, welcome to today's news. And I'm Matt Taeevi. I'm Michael Tracy, I think. You're Michael Tracy. And I bet there's lots of folks here are just bubbling over with love and the milk of loving kindness who just can't wait to share their comments with us. We're going to all the productive feedback. All the productive feedback that we're expecting. And we'll engage with some of it.

but we should start off by wishing everybody a happy St. Patrick's Day, which is technically tomorrow. You see, I'm adorned in the traditional colors of my people. I am half Irish. Michael, you're a little bit Irish? No, I'm half Irish. I'm half Italian. It's just that nobody ever thinks that I'm Irish, or even though my last name, Tracy, is the Irish spelling of the surname. but if anything, it's always just people being perpetually confused when they find that I'm not Jewish. I don't know if they're disappointed or if they are pleased. It can vary. Yeah.

I always tell them, you know, I wish I was Jewish, I guess. My IQ would be a few points higher. But other than that, no, I'm not true. I probably could have gone to like one of those cool summer camps where, like, you can get it subsidized and stuff. Like, that's what all the Jewish friends I had growing up did. But I was just stuck going to like the town pool. I did the town pool as well. I went to a to a semi-crapy,

crappy summer camp. I didn't get to do anything fancy. I didn't get to do, you know, like the dirty dancing camp or any of that stuff. Didn't go to the Poconos. Where did you grow up, Michael? New Jersey. New Jersey. Okay.

Where, like where you are in Jersey City? No, no, Essex County. So roundabouts where the Sopranos lived. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. All right. So, and you went to high school there, the whole thing? Yeah, the whole thing. I share a hometown with Justice Samuel Olito.

Ah. West Caldwell, New Jersey, if people are interested, I mean, it's easily Googled. So it's not like I'm giving up any kind of sensitive information there. Well, I mean, you don't want to be giving away your exact geolocation. No, it's not my current location. Yeah, not your current location. But notable persons associated with my hometown include Samuel Alito, G. Gordon Liddy and myself. G. Gordon Liddy, outstanding.

You know what? He's crazy. Did you ever read his book? Did you read Will? I never read his book, no. It's one of the great autobiographies of all the time. He's absolutely nuts. But it's a great book.

Like John Lennon wrote him a thank you letter when he read it. Oh, really? Yeah. No, it's, is that when he became like a talk radio host? It was in between. It was like,

it was sort of in between his prison sentence and then later, before it became a media figure. Really what's amazing about the book is that it speeds through all the stuff that was supposed to be, um the saleable part with about watergate and then the book really takes off when he's in prison and like ends up becoming this major uh prison leader who who wire taps the the warden and does all kinds of crazy shit anyway i'm rambling um lots of stuff uh happen this weekend uh we're going to get to as much of it as we can and then we're going to engage on a sort of a broader question about um

whether podcasts are worse than the mainstream press, Michael, you have pretty definite feelings about this. Well, hold on. Before we go any further, Matt, let's underscore that there is no truth at all to these vicious rumors that the real name of this show is something like the pedophile report or private petal party. No, no, no. The straightforward, just news broadcasting title is, as you can see, today's news. and there's nothing beyond that. So please, pipe down with all these nasty insinuations. And the pizza that is the slice of pizza looking thing is actually just an A in a Swedish wing ding font. It's actually just a formatting error that we never bothered to fix in the logo.

So there's nothing beyond that. But, you know, sometimes those little flaws are what makes art great. great, right? So it's not suggestive at all. We're not suggesting that pizza's code for anything. Grape soda was not a backup name for the show. Neither was Lolita Express. So we're probably would have, I mean,

Lolita Express, had we hypothetically wanted to give the show a secret secondary name, it almost seemed a little bit too on the nose. Yeah. If we're honest. Yeah. I was more in favor of it than you were. So it's none of those things. It's today's news.

It's like Walter, imagine Walter Cronkite, but on a substack live stream. That's what today's news is. That's exactly what this is. I was actually getting Walter Cronkite vibes as we were just talking. Walter Cronkite actually got caught meeting with Epstein. Did you know that?

Did you really? In the first production of the latest Epstein files. I'm going through them, right? So this is like December 19th, 20th or something. And they have like all these, you know, just unorganized photos of things. Because Jeffrey Epstein, for one thing, might have been the most photographed man in history. I don't know how many. What do you just have got a constant team of photographers surrounding him 24-7?

It's bizarre. But I look at a guy like, so he's at his New Mexico ranch, right? And he's meeting with two people. They're sitting on a couch. They have like a little platter of hors d'oeuvres. I'm looking at the guy he's chatting to. And I said, wait, is that Walt Crankite and then sure enough like it is Walter Cronkite I guess he ended up getting Walter Cronkite to come over to the New Mexico Ranch and like have a little sit down I don't know so you never you can never fail to find somebody new who's like quote unquote implicated in this well we got to clearly we got to destroy Cronkite's reputation as quickly as possible he's got he's got to be liquidated and and maybe arrested according to a certain Oscars host but we'll get to that in a moment

Um, so the media world is, is suddenly, uh, exploding. Be, because the, you know, sort of the biggest figure in American media right now. Is it, is that correct to say? Or is Joe Rogan the biggest figure in American media? Is Tucker or is it Tucker or? Probably by volume, it's, it's Rogan. Yeah. I guess by if what you mean by biggest is most influential.

Most influential, yeah. I think that might still have to go to Rogan. Yeah. But, you know, a reasonable case could be made probably one way or another for both of them. Okay. Well, Tucker came out over the weekend and in an announcement that replicated an earlier incident about being tracked by FISA, announced that he was being, you know, that the CIA was monitoring his texts in order to set him up for a crime. So let's listen to that.

This is SOT, this is SOT 2, I believe, Mr. Rep. Countries tend to become more authoritarian in wartime. It's just the nature of war. People are dying. The stakes are high. People's emotions have risen to a very high point, or crescendo. And so there's much less tolerance.

for any kind of dissent in the homeland. The irony, of course, is the United States fights wars on behalf of freedom, but there's always less of it here in our country during wars. There's no justification for your government, which you own. You're a shareholder in it. You pay for it to be violating your privacy like this. But it happens all the time. And in fact, one of the reasons that CIA or people within CIA,

just to be clear, it's a huge, sprawling, disconnected agency, what it does in a specific case doesn't represent what everybody in the building thinks, but there are some people who are mad at me for my views about Israel, and they have some latitude. And one of the reasons they pass on criminal complaints, in effect, to law enforcement is to justify warrants for spying on Americans. So that is an absolutely real thing. But the main reason they do it is to leak the existence of the investment,

such as it is to the media and then humiliate and terrify the subjects of this op and that's of course happened to me repeatedly okay um so so the this came in a tweet right that basically said when when you find out that the the CIA is monitoring your texts in an attempt to what was the exact language and an attempt to set you up. An attempt to make some kind of criminal referral. Yeah. Against him because they don't like his views on Israel or something to that effect. So a couple of things about this before we get to what to think about this.

Tucker, obviously, there was an incident. Was it last year? the Pfizer incident or was no that was that was 2021 2021 that's right it was 2021 okay so he was attempting to to arrange in an interview with Putin which he didn't ultimately get um but this is while he was still on fox in 2021 yeah Putin interview was later after he had launched his independent media venture right right and almost immediately after he made a phone call to somebody in the Russian government, there was an Axios story essentially saying, you know, confirmed Tucker Carlson had contact with somebody in the Russian government. So that whole business about the FISA, he claimed that he'd been monitored by FISA. There were a lot of people who were very skeptical of that. I think it ultimately turned out to be true.

They weren't listening to him per se. They were probably listening to whoever was on the other end of that call. And so it incidentally could have gotten swept up into whatever surveillance protocol was in effect to monitor the Russian state actors. Yeah, well, it was FISA's. And the problem is that it's become too easy to access FISA and to unmask people and do all this, all kinds of other stuff, which is why the fact that it was leaked so quickly to the, to the media became, you know, it was a little bit of a scandal, right? It's essentially somebody in the intelligence community leaking news to somebody in the press about Tucker having contact

with Russians. This story seems to be a little bit different. Michael, like, what's your understanding of exactly what happened here? I don't have a great understanding of exactly what happened because, look, I mean, I currently have some reason to doubt the accuracy with which Tucker is currently perceiving reality on a variety of different fronts. So not that I would just discount what he's saying here totally right off the bad. Like, there might be some kernel of truth to it. I just think that like Tucker has been in such an epistemic free fall lately where especially since he launched his new media venture and it's kind of just accelerated ever since. He's not bound by any kind of like guardrails of like a traditional conception of facts and evidence such that it's less and less tenable for me to just take a total face value whatever he's relaying. So, I mean, if we do take a taste at face value, what he seems to be saying is that he was in communication with people in Iran prior to the war being launched and that this was picked up on by the CIA or monitored.

And the CIA made some sort of criminal referral. I'm not sure what process that would necessarily entail, but there was some criminal referral allegedly made or he was allegedly told. and he's potentially now going to be accused of some sort of subversion or treason or something like that. I've seen multiple variants. Some people say it's a phara chart. Some people say it's some sort of like aiding and abetting the enemy. This is just people speculating based on how he told it. Right, which is one of the weird things about this.

Well, it's not weird. It's totally standard now for how media works. Um, the reason I brought up the FISA thing before is, is that, yes, it did ultimately turn out that that was true. And the immediate speculation turned out to be, um, most of it turned out to be, uh, incorrect. But as you say, like, Tucker's been, he hasn't exactly been behaving like somebody who was raised in the litigation sensitive, um, corporate media, uh, lately. Let's look at a couple of clips that would. One second, though. Just, I mean, I think this is useful context because here's how Tucker described what went on in the 2021 incident. He said, and this was him on Fox. He told his audience on Fox, quote, the Biden administration is spying on us.

We have confirmed that. Now, if you notice, he could easily say in theory that the Trump administration is spying on me or potentially trying to frame me for some kind of criminal offense. does claim that he's potentially being framed. That was what he wrote in the initial tweet that put out the video. But it's, it's always he's, he does the same routine now that he always does, especially vis-a-vis Trump in this Iran war, which is he always tries to mysteriously exempt Trump from the criticism that he appears to be leveling, which he aims at other sort of nefarious actors that are surrounding Trump and leading him astray. Right. So whereas, you know, when this happened,

when some version of this happened five years ago, he had no. problem directly blaming Joe Biden and the Biden administration to making a very clear-cut political point out of it. Now it goes into this whole thing where he's trying to what he's been trying to do because he doesn't like the Iran war, I think justifiably so. But what he's been trying to do is displace any responsibility for the initiation of the Iran war off of Trump entirely and solely onto Israel and the CIA and the CIA or like other like deep state actors who are working in concert with Israel. Okay. So that's not me saying that Israel has no role whatsoever in why this war was launched. It's just noting that there's this caricature or overwrought cartoon version

of Israel that Tucker and people of a similar inclination have been myopically fixating on in lieu of actually doing what they know they can't do, or at least they can't do and remain in good standing with Trump, which is that they can't actually direct their critique at him. So I think this is just a continuation of this like obfuscatory routine he's been doing where the commander in chief somehow has no agency for launching the war that Tucker claims is this apocalyptic disaster so this is just kind of like a side plot in that narrative yeah um and we'll we'll get to this in a second that there was an amazing uh sort of galvanizing reaction by everybody in the podcast community you when he did this. But let's share a couple of the clips of the things that you're talking about.

Do we have Tucker Pizagate, mystery producer, or Tucker Demons? Here we go. So how do we assess it? Well, that's going to take an awfully long time. Most people don't have the time. So we thought it would be interesting just to start with a very narrow slice of the material. and that's the emails and text that we can be pretty sure or sent from or to Jeffrey Epstein, that pertained to the question of food, specifically pizza. And that caught our attention immediately, pizza, people talking about pizza, adults talking about pizza and pizza parties. Now, why did they catch our attention?

Of course, because it evoked memories of this semi-forgotten story from about 10 years ago, known as Pizza Gate. So just to be clear, okay, so why is this notable and why? Why would this cause me to have certain doubts as to the reliability of how he's perceiving current events? He and his team apparently decided that the most prudent research methodology for them to adopt in exploiting to their giant audience the nature and significance of this latest round of quote unquote Epstein files was to first and foremost focus on pizza. I mean focus on various food. stuff that they could input into the DOJ search bar and then impute some kind of sinister meaning to. There are lots of potentially viable methodological routes one could have taken to research

these millions of Epstein files, right? And I, for example, wanted to find certain prosecution memos and there's other stuff. But if you're immediate instinct was to just say pizza, pizza, pizza, let's find pizza parties and potentially other food items that we could connect to pizza and then connect back 10 years in the past to the Pizza Gate narrative. That tells me there's something like epistemically fundamentally flawed in your whole framework

for processing information. Go ahead. Yeah. So that's a red flag to say the least. And he's not the only person in the podcast universe. to who's doing this. It's like all over the place. Everyone from Bill Maher to Crystal and Sager at breaking points, you know,

they kind of somewhat surprisingly endorsed PizzaGate in a show a little bit ago. But let's take a look at Tucker Demons as well, because this is another sort of linguistic constant of this period. You think you were attacked by a demon. And I have to tell you, like a lot of people mock this, they rolled her eyes, but I look at like what happened to Charlie, what happened in the wake of Charlie, what happened at the Ascension School in Minneapolis, where that man went in there and shot a bunch of little children praying at their church school. And I challenge anyone to tell me there aren't demons among us. I never thought there were. I thought the whole thing was

bizarre. So what happened? Because like culturally, I'm just not from a world where people are attacked by demons. And in fact, when it happened the next morning, when I saw the blood on my sheets,

I was like, I actually called someone who works for me who's a very sincere lifelong evangelical. And I'm like, have you heard of this? And she's like, oh yeah, it happens all the time. I was like, what?

Not to Episcopalians. It doesn't. Stuff it down. Yeah, no, it was, it was wild. Yeah, I mean, I'm not embarrassed at all. and I don't care if I mocked. Don't get anything out of making this up,

and I'm not making it up. What happened? I had this crazy experience where I was in the truck with someone coming back from quail hunting, and I had all of a sudden this, we were talking about someone I despise, and all of a sudden I had this crazy empathy for the person, like really intense empathy,

like it could understand why this person was doing these horrible things. And I said to the person, the truck, there was a family dispute, right? So I was said to the person, maybe my brother, And I said, I think I know what's happening here. This person feels this way, that way, this way. And my brother goes, how did you know that?

I said, I don't know it. Just like, and my brother goes, I think, like, God is like speaking through you or something. And I felt total true empathy for this person I truly hate. It was like the craziest thing has ever happened to me. I have no idea where it came from. I was like, I think that's real God. Like, there's no way you could. It's like, well, that's kind of wild.

So then I get home. We have this huge dinner party, which we always have dinner parties. And I forget about it. And I'm telling you this because, they're twin, the one leads to the other. I had this thing profound experience with God, like profound and beautiful and unexpected. And then I go to bed with my wife and four dogs who sleep in the bed. My wife said four children. My dogs are hunting dogs. We get it. So in other words, he ends up going on to explain how he woke up in the middle of the night

and felt like he couldn't breathe. And he goes outside and he wanders around. He finally regained his composure, but then he realized he has scratch marks that are bleeding. And his conclusion is that he was attacked by a literal demon who entered from the metaphysical realm into the physical realm, scratched him, even as he was already in the habit of sleeping in bed with several hunting dogs. But that apparently did not occur to him as a plausible explanation for why it is that he got these scratches while he was sleeping in bed. And he's very earnest about this.

Like I had heard about this story even prior to him debuting it publicly. And from everything I can gather, he like earnestly believes it. So I'm just going to take him at his word and that he earnestly believes this stuff. And he believes God is speaking through him. And he's had like some major religious epiphany. And he now, I guess, styles himself as some sort of prophet through whom God is communicating to the world. and giving him all these revelatory insights. And by the way, he's not the only person who's got this issue.

There are lots of politicians, some of them in the government, some of them in foreign governments, but whatever. No, I'm not just saying, but this all adds up to a collapse in whatever epistemic guardrails of Tucker's that I could perceive prior to like the past couple years. Because I was a semi-regular guest on the show. I know, I've known him personally. I like Tucker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still do. I mean, I don't have any personal dislike for him at all. I'm just saying that, you know, if we're going to, if this is going to be an issue of public concern, right, that deals with him. And he's going to exert the political influence that he does. I simply cannot just credulously accept every sort of blinkered theory that he decides to blur it out as presumptively reliance. reliable given what I know about his precipitous decline in like knowledge production standards and also his minus five for the academic jargon there sorry sorry sorry that's okay that's all right i'll sit and time out say five hell marries after the show but anyway okay uh how about our fathers and because you know i am irish so i i'll be racked with guilt that i'll have to go to the confessional uh to to to

absolve myself of. But anyway, so, like, yeah, that's the, that's the bottom line in that, like, I just can't take, I can't just instinctively trust anything for, in terms of the accuracy of how he's portraying it at this point. And, you know, I had another experience with him over the summer where, like, I just, I, I ran to a brick wall with him over, over Epstein because he had this guy on his show for three hours, Darrell Cooper, who, who he had, like, rush over to do an emergency Epstein podcast and tell, like, millions of people, what they should know about Epstein, like an introductory primer on Epstein.

And it was like one sentence after the next of just total nonsensical hysteria fomenting lunacy. And like, I just couldn't like get through to him. So I kind of just gave up after a while. And but now I feel like things have a little bit come to a head where like he's one of the major people forming political perceptions around like the Iran war, Trump's culpability or lack thereof in the war. the role of Israel in the war, and then you tie in this new little rabbit hole that we're on, where he potentially is also somehow involved and having been spied on by the FBI

because he's an Israel critic or because he's too critical of the war, et cetera, et cetera. Like now I have to like set aside whatever personal affinity that I did once have for him and still do on some level and just explain why it is that I feel like people should be rationally doubtful about how how seriously we can take anything that he's been saying at this point

absent like corroborating evidence or some other form of substantiation which he could maybe provide at some point but as of now he hasn't and or what will come out if there is you know if there are actual charges we'll find out what it is that they're setting them up for if they are indeed But it's funny that you mentioned guilt. I had only just started to come to grips with some lingering guilt that I felt about

like an undercover assignment. I did a gazillion years ago where I went and lived as a member of an apocalyptic church in San Antonio. Really? Yeah, I was in John Hagey's church. which is very relevant to the current moment because he was basically like the, um, the main figure like cornerstone church or something.

Cornerstone. I was a member of Cornerstone for six months. And, um, what? Six months. Yeah, six months. I lived on there in San Antonio. It's,

this is in the book, the great derangement, uh, that I wrote. Um, yeah, I had a vague net memory of this, but I don't think I ever read that particular.

Well, you're 20 years younger than me. So it makes sense. Uh, you know, it was a while. ago. But one of the things that we did at Cornerstone, there was a retreat for all the young men in the church. And we had to go basically to this camp where there were segregated dorms and

everything. And we were taught that each of us had demons inside of us. And we had to go through these exercises where we vomited demons into bags. So they handed out paper bags to all of us. And, you know, I was sitting, you know, obviously it was the old cliche, you know, New York savvy writer picking on the Yocles story, right? And I was probably meaner than I had to be when I wrote up what actually happened. Where was this written up? Was it read for the book specifically or did it appear someplace else?

It's in the book and it was in Rolling Stone also. And, you know, later on, you know, the book isn't really all that mean. Actually, it ended up being significantly muted by the fact that I felt kind of bad for a lot of the people in the church. And they were mostly really nice people. They were just that some of the folks in the church itself were pretty manipulative and they were putting stuff over on people. and but just as I was getting to the point where I was feeling guilty for picking on people about, you know, believing in demons and trying to vomit demons into bags. It's back. Like everybody's talking about demons.

Demonology is like now one of the main currencies of the online media ecosystem, meaning if you want to get algorithmically boosted, one thing you can definitely do. is unveil this whole worldview around the ever presence of demons. You know, I think there might be a difference you could posit between people who believe in demons as like a metaphor or like demons are just another way of like pointing to our sins or something like that, meaning a sort of a lighter version of belief in demons and attributing a specific like physical intercession in the material universe to a demon attacking you and attributing a particular injury that you were sustained to attack by a demon like that that to me is like a different level of belief that where i'm where i wouldn't whereas the people who just kind of like because it is sort of a tentative christian belief writ large let's say to generalize a bit

that like demons on some level exist in the universe right and another to claim some kind of direct personal interaction with or victimization by physically a demon, which puts you front and center. And you tie that in with Tucker believing that like God speaks through him. That's like a weird sort of monomania thing or megalomaniacal thing that goes pretty far beyond just this generic belief in demons perhaps being present. Right. We're not talking about Dostoevsky, who writing about, you know, writing the book, The Demons, right? Which is sometimes called the Possessed, where he was generally talking in a Christian sense about how, and Tolstly did this too.

All Russian writers eventually come around and talk, telling you that the devil is real and, you know, it's a physical thing. But here, when you start talking about it being in your bed and scratching you or being something that you lose weight when you vomited into a bag, which is one of the things that they told us, like, then it gets to silliness. And it's all over the place now. In this, like, demonology is part of this whole explanation of what's happening in the Middle East. And, you know, Alex Jones saying, the devil is real. demons were real. Like that was part of his argument with with Jimmy Dora there.

Yeah, you know, on the previous episode, we talked about some of the potential parallels between the Epstein story and the satanic panic daycare craze story of the 80s. And if you go back and read about about the cultural climate at the time, it was, you know, these mass market bestselling books like books you could get on like the checkout line

at the grocery store or something. which were incredibly popular, were oftentimes about demonology and how they intersected with, like, therapy. And there was one book, I can't remember that I can't recall the name now, but there's a book where about like basically a therapist, somehow exercising a demon from one of his patients.

And like, this was just very commercially popular in the 1980s. And it, like, kind of contributed to the cultural firmament at the time. You're right. There was a, there was a book that was extraordinarily popular. Yeah, like shockingly popular. And like, I think I made it to a movie and stuff. Like, I can't recall the name at the top of my head.

Yeah. But we see, I see something analogous happening now, which is why us talking about Tucker here isn't just arbitrary in terms of how it could relate to the overall theme that we're talking about, which is like this podcast versus traditional media, like, you know, question, which is worse, et cetera. Because I think one reason, one, one thing that really is polluting, the podcast. oriented media or the online media circuit is this bizarre explosion of algorithmic incentivization around playing up these like quasi mystical explanations for things.

Totally. Demons. Chucker in that same video where he talks about the demon attack goes on to say that he views UFOs because he has a long standing interest in UFOs, but now he's concluded that UFOs such as they exist are like spiritual beings from another, you know, dimension. Right. So it's stuff like that. And like this stuff just gets this stuff.

Like people eat this stuff up. They love it. And it forms their worldview. And then that that creates the feedback loop where if because the online media is so responsive to like audience sentiment, they just give the people what they want. And we're going to argue about this later. But I would, one of the things I'm going to argue is that the mainstream press is partially responsible for this because.

they started legitimizing the concept of dot connecting as a as a form of analysis, right? Just to answer this question here from distunk, guys, are you saying that's what is going on right now in the world is not a battle of good versus evil question question question being serious now? I might be saying that. I'm certainly saying that I don't think physical demons are involved in the picture. And if they are, like, I guess this gets to the larger question of what is this program? You know, we're not going to give you wild theories about things. We may not even get to the issue of whether or not we think there is good versus evil. I'm not even sure that that's our job.

But one of the things I think we both believe is that most of what, we see out there is a lot more complicated than is being represented in podcasts, right? I mean, I will answer that question. I am saying, I'll declare it right now. I am saying that I reject that the world is fundamentally a battle of good versus evil. I think that's a totally infantile way of looking at the world. Yes, with all its complexities, complexities and subtleties. Now, if you have a worldview, whether religious or otherwise, which tells you that everything must be sorted into this paradigm of good versus evil. Okay, you're entitled to have that, but I'm not going to affirm that because I don't believe

that, okay? I think that's, I think these comforting tales of good versus evil or black, you know, everything is morally black or white. Those are the kind of tales that you tell little children who lack the cognitive capacity to apprehend moral subtlety or like gradations in morality, right? So you tell them what? fairy tale about the three little pigs versus the big bad wolf. That's something they can understand.

But then hopefully, once they develop more adult reasoning capacities, they can come to appreciate how the scope of human experience doesn't necessarily lend itself to these hyper reductive impressions of good versus evil and then just like projecting that on to everything that happens in the world, war, political scandal, whatever. I think that's totally assinine. So I am willing to give a firm statement on that because I think that's a cognitive distortion that I think just warps how people process information about the world around them. Yeah, I would answer that a little, answer that a little differently.

Like, I think the whole question of good and evil and how that's experienced in people and everybody's capacity for the one or the other. these sort of complex metaphysical questions, I probably wouldn't even ever share what I actually think about that with the public. But in terms of the news and how people consume information about world events, you're absolutely right

that one of the things that's happened in recent years is that all of the gradations have been washed out of almost every subject. And, you know, I think this is originally one of the complaints about, mainly about the sort of woke left, but it's now on all sides, which is that everything has become, you know, this sort of black and white, all good, all bad. You know, people are one or the other, right? This is one of the things that was upsetting to me about how the digital censorship system works. They would identify people as inherently misinformative as opposed to the things that they say, right? And so they would be like thrown in the deamplification bin when people have the, everybody has the capacity to be deceptive, right?

Or to tell the truth. And that's what I really worry about right now is this, is this everybody retreating into these corners. people are all one thing or the other, you know, issues are simple, right? There's good versus bad, black versus white, like, I don't know. Yeah, you know, like when the war in Ukraine was launched February 22, it was emphatically proclaimed by every think tanker and like, quote unquote, mainstream media figure that we were all morally obliged to view that conflict, as fundamentally this cosmic battle between good and evil,

meaning Putin was evil, Zelensky and Ukraine were good. Now, in my rejecting that binary, I'm not therefore condoning or excusing any way Putin's action. And I'm not even precluding myself from elucidating ways in which I would find his actions to be condemnable. But I'm still going to reject that framework because it's so ludicrously oversimplified, that in no way could it possibly be conducive

to developing a rational understanding of the causes and nature of that conflict. And now that, so that's the, but in a similar prism gets applied, you're right to so much stuff in recent times especially. And I don't,

I think maybe the alternative media on some level contributes to that. I don't know that I could maybe attribute it more or less to the mainstream versus alternative media. Maybe it's like a mixed bag. But whatever the, contributors. I maintain that it is a fairly infantile way of looking at the world, especially if

you're a journalist, right? I mean, how could you do your journalistic, how could you do any issue journalistic justice, let's say? If you go into it presupposing that like one side is like fully evil and one side is fully good, I mean, maybe if you want to, if you want to create a morality tale out of it or a fairy tale that you can then tell to children, then that might be a more legitimate approach. But journalistically, meaning you're trying to best apprehend and then chronicle the truth for

like historical posterity or for your readers, I just don't see how that binary could possibly lend itself to a bona fide journalistic inquiry. No, I mean, that's the opposite of what we were taught to do, right? Or at least

what I was. I don't know. I mean, I'm again, I'm older than you, but you know, we were always taught talk to as many people as you can. There's going to be, you know, seven people who are going to say one thing. There are going to be fine people who are saying another thing, but there might be two people who are the most convincing. The challenge is sifting through all that.

It's never just one or the other. And the thing that's corrupted a lot of media organizations is they've sort of pre-determined And this is what that whole moral clarity journalism thing that drove me nuts was just basically pre-deciding which sources are wrong about, you know, X, putting them in a certain category. We don't have to quote them because they're always wrong, right? We don't have to print their denials. We don't have to print their explanations. But now that happens on all sides.

And it's a disservice to everybody because sometimes the people you don't like are right and sometimes the people that you do like are wrong and and you know that's part of being a grown up is is learning that stuff but we're raising uh you know hyper emotional uh binary thinking children basically i don't know i mean i know i know that's a uh horrible thing to say but it feels like that's what we're actually doing at the moment yeah especially i mean obviously obviously all this was turbocharged be with trump being like this organizing principle of everybody's daily consciousness where like your position relative to him, meaning your moral outlook on him as positive or negative, like defines the rest of your worldview and like inflex the rest

of every belief that you hold, which is something that I've always tried to resist. I mean, my view on Trump is even more antagonistic in the second term than even it was in the first term. But in the first term, you know, I did think that it was worthwhile. focusing by and large on the historical, overwrought sort of liberal narratives that were generated in reaction to Trump, Russiagate being foremost amongst them,

because that actually had a lot of adverse effects on a whole variety of things, including U.S. foreign policy. But then, you know, now Epstein is like, has supplanted Russiagate, right, as the predominant second term opposite. narrative against Trump, and even now with my being much more sort of pessimistic or ominous or even oftentimes disturbed about what the second term Trump phenomenon is, I'm still not going to

just arbitrarily say to myself, gee, because it could somehow incidentally redound to the political advantage of Trump that I'm showing why the main oppositional narrative against him is flawed, I'm therefore not going to do the journalistic interrogation of it that I would otherwise be disposed to do because I have this higher principle that I'm following, which is antipathy to Trump. Like that's never been my load star, let's say. But I feel like lots of people, whether just you just talk about ordinary citizens, people on the internet or journalists, feel I really get the strong impression that it never even occurs to them to sort of like reason about things at that level. It's always just like what is their initial emotional reaction and then like what what beliefs then flow from that and you know not to be too highfalutin about it.

But like if you want to do a little bit more of refined reasoning, you have to kind of think about things with a little bit more of detachment, especially for journalists. Yeah. No. The thing I used to like about journalists is that they they didn't give a shit about they were totally detached about it. And if you hung out in a newsroom, it was like hanging out of the comedy club. they joked about everything and the only thing that they really cared about was is this writer is this is it incorrect

you know because that was their careers if they screwed it up you talk about Trump the thing that drove me nuts about the press starting in 2016 and I used to talk about this with Walter also but was the

you could only explain his rise in one way. They would only, like, if you said something other than it was a manifestation of white supremacy, then people would start to say that you're, you know, a Trump supporter or whatever it was. And then they use that as a disciplinary method, right? Which is... Or you're anti-anty-Trump.

Remember that? Anti-anti-Trump. That was declared to be this nefarious little cohort within the media where the, these ideological traders, people who had been perceived as somewhat more progressive or left wing of some kind, had given over to their contrarianism. And now we're not, not necessarily pro-Trump, but anti-anty Trump, because they didn't like, because they were critical of Russiagate or they were critical of like, oh, were you in that story? I was. I mean, there was like a vanity fat off. Remember this? Yeah, I think I was, yeah. John Chate did it, I think.

There was one in Vanity Fair by James Walcott. I remember. Walcott did it too. Yeah, yeah. And that's the one that I recall. I think Jonathan Chait did it. Yeah, I think I remember the Jonathan Chate one too. But yeah, but they were they were trying to like just will into existence this click of anti-ante-Trump people to try to like divine whatever. Between them in terms of like temperament or some kind of political tendency or whatever.

But it was all ultimately in relation to Trump. So like that's what defined you, right? So if you didn't have the proper moral comportment. vis-a-vis Trump, then you were inundated with these you know, accusations of some kind of grave failure. You were a denialist.

They came up with all these words for it. But now they're doing the same thing as you say with the upscene story and there was an amazing example of it over this weekend. Can we see SOT 5? This is Conan O'Brien at the Oscars.

Just a barrel lapse, Conan. So I have people who feed me stuff whenever they see like a capricious reference to pedophiles nowadays because I wasn't sitting there watching the Oscars opening monologue. And yet somebody informed me, okay, time to take a drink. Of course, Conan, like within the first five minutes today, such a joke. Here we go. It's the first time since 2012, first time since 2012 that there are no British actors nominated for best actor

or best actress. Yeah. British spokesperson said, yeah, well, at least we arrest our pedophiles. So we got that going for it. So, okay, okay, trolls, all you folks who came in here

to yell at us about this shit, what the fuck are we talking about? What pedophiles? Like, Like, but then so like, I mean, look, I'm fine with the most morbid, shocking, grotesque humor imaginable. Like, I mean, I enjoy that. That's some of the only humor that I do enjoy. However, this, this wasn't even funny for one thing.

And second of all, if it can't justify, be justified simply on the grounds of being funny, you then have to wonder, okay, so like, what is this communicating to however many people still watch the Oscars or. we'll see a clip later or what have you. Well, it's conveying that, like, gee, there's something really terrible going on in the United States because compared to England or compared to Britain, we're going soft on our pedophile problem, whereas at least they will arrest a couple of Epstein-connected pedophiles. So obviously, that's a reference to Prince Andrew and Peter Manelson,

who were arrested on these totally concocted pretextual charges that had nothing to do with any sex crime at all, but obviously were catalyzed or the impetus for them was the public uproar over their perceived connections to this most notorious pedophile in human history. And for people who don't know this, they've probably seen the picture of Lord Peter Mandelson in his tidy whiteys in Jeffrey Epstein's apartment in Paris.

But I don't know, Michael, how many people do, What percentage of Americans do you think know that Lord Peter Mandelson is gay? 100 for sure. No, I mean, virtually none, which is why. And then so another thing that they do is they put out those, they put out images. So people don't even read headlines oftentimes. They'll look at just whatever the images that they're, this blasted into their awareness, right?

And so the DOJ had this practice that they adopted after acceding to these demands that were made by the so-called, called victims and their lawyers who were frantically arguing in federal court for months prior to this most recent Epstein document production that the DOJ be compelled to to impose this most sweeping possible redactions imaginable pretty much. So the same people who on the one hand were going around sloganeering saying release the Epstein files, meaning the so-called victims and their lawyers, they were behind the scenes impressing on federal judges how urgently necessary it was that the DOJ be compelled to ensure that the fewest possible EPSC files were actually released or that the most, the greatest quantity of EPSC files were marred with all these totally superfluous

redactions. But one thing that the DOJ ended up doing at the direction of these lawyers was say, okay, we are going to presumptively treat each and every woman who is depicted in some photo or image as a victim, even if there's no. claim that they were even victimized, much less that any claimed victimization had actually been investigated whatsoever for veracity or credibility. It's just any woman, with the exception of Galayne Maxwell, is going to be considered a victim and therefore their facial images, facial imagery, which is what Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general said, that's going to be

presumptively redacted, whereas every man presumptively unredacted. So you have these absurd situations where Peter Manelson, who is gay, is in a photo with some woman or female whose face is presumptively blacked out. And yeah, he's in his like bathroom or something.

She's a survivor. So she's a survivor. Again, even if she never even claimed survivorship. Whatever you want, whatever the noun is. And so what is that what is that convey to the untrained eye?

that woman's a victim of something and Peter Manelson either victimized her or was complicit in enabling her victimization, right? Right. I mean, I'm sure one could make the argument that it didn't make her feel comfortable to be there with a dude in his underwear. There's an argument for that. But to answer to ask her for it, shouldn't you ask her? Shouldn't she be asked? Yeah, I think absolutely, yeah, for sure. But for those who, for those who, were saying, like, there were people talking about, oh, what about Jimmy Saville, right? He's a famous British DJ who, after his death was, there was this avalanche of sex abuse allegations and police essentially concluded that he was a serial sex offender. Well, okay, that does happen, but these people

are alive and there, there's no evidence that they're pedophiles. Beyond the fact that, that they appear in this file. Now, that doesn't mean that Lord Peter Mandelson didn't do something wrong, right? There might be, you know, it looks like some of those communications are at least suspicious in terms of like sharing maybe financial information. I know, with that charge in the UK or in England? Oh, no, the law is totally, yeah. Yeah, it's like misconduct in public office.

It's like a catch-all charge. It's like the equivalent of, I don't know, a distortally conduct charge, which can just sweep up virtually anything if you annoy a cop. Like if you annoy a cop, he doesn't even have to charge you with anything that is specifically tailored to what you did. He could just say it's disorderly conduct or obstruction or like in New York City they have a charge called obstruction of governmental administration. Yeah, OGA, yeah, yeah, yeah, which is like could just mean anything, right? So that's pretty much the equivalent of what this charge is in the UK that, they charge both, or they arrested anyway, both Mandelson and Prince Andrew. But my problem with this Conan wisecrack is, okay, number one, it's not funny.

So like you can't even justify it on that grounds. But number two, it is still, it is, it does contribute to this idea that we're in the throes of this massive pedophilia crisis where all the pedophiles are being allowed to run free with impunity. and therefore the USA better up its game and match what our colleagues in the UK have been doing to hold the pedophiles to account, right? Which is just like a totally warped perception to be encouraging about like what's actually going on here. What was the what did dogy house? Remember Neil Patrick Harris? What did he say about Glenn at the Oscars?

Remember he said something totally totally? So you mean like in 2013 or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When Citizen 4 won. I don't remember. Edward Snowden couldn't be there for some treason. And that was the joke. But like this is worse.

Like there was a time when you couldn't go on television and just call somebody a pedophile. But who's he, but he's not calling anybody individually a pedophile. He's just gesturing toward this pedophilophile epidemic. He, he kind of, like like if I were Mandelson and Prince, Prince. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I was thinking of Americans.

Yeah, he's definitely calling those two pedophiles, yeah. Right? So, yeah, I mean, I mean, I think he's, but what he's pretty much, you know, not so subtly intimating is that this pedophile impunity is being, is the result of Donald Trump, right? Like, that's always the subtext. Oh, of course. For any politically charged joke at all at the Oscars, right? It's going to be Trump adjacent ultimately, and that's the ultimate culprit for this non-prosecution of pedophiles,

which were told is like the most damning indictment that any society can ever be charged with. So in addition to everything that happened this weekend with Tucker, once that came out, and this is another thing I wanted to ask you about, Michael, like people will immediately come to conclusions before they even hear what the story is, right? So, you know, Candace Owens came out with a tweet,

like almost immediately after Tucker's thing. That said, if they come for Tucker, we ride at dawn, really nothing else to stay here. We're not doing the, the gulags 2.0 with these bolshevik descendants and i guess bolshevik descendants is the new like zionists or something like that it's it's the new uh i mean it's it's thinly veiled um code for jews i guess i don't know i mean it's it's it's very strange right uh but we write at dawn and then there were all these pledges of solidarity and look i'm i am

I've always been supportive of journalists who are the subject of unwarranted, you know, attention from the intelligence community, including Tucker, when that happened. And, you know, if that turns out to be the case here, absolutely, it's totally inappropriate. I don't think it's unbelievable. But nobody knows what the alleged charge is. all the people have is this relatively slimmed down version of an account from Tucker. We ride into Dawn. Like what is this like Mad Max or something? Right.

Yeah, exactly. And this is and this is. So these like crew of podcasters are going to get on their like nitro charged Humvee or something and ride off into this like dystopian hellscape to go what? Extra K Tucker from the CIA. dungeon that's being guarded by some Israeli demonoids or whatever?

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then and so okay, here's the problem with that. Like the thing that really drove people crazy about the quote unquote mainstream media in 2016

was the presumption that there was like a secret deal behind the scenes that everybody was going to gang up on Trump and there was like solidarity about this. Again, this is what that moral clarity journalism thing was. But now podcasters are doing it. Now they're all banding together. And if you step off the reservation,

then they're doing the same disciplinary stuff that happen to people who are in the regular media. And I say that, somebody who was squeezed out of the regular media. And now this is, now this is happening in independent media. So let's look at SOT 4. This is Megan.

So Megan Kelly. But, and she's talking about what happened to Tucker. And everybody's got to be on the team now. So let's hear what she has to say. This is stunning and deeply wrong. And I believe Tucker. Some don't. I do.

I believe him completely because he wouldn't have zero interest in running out, making himself the center of any story, which he doesn't like to do, ever, even when he often is. And knowing him, I detected real concern in his voice there because he's worried about what's happening to our government. Like, why are we behaving like this? Why would we be going after private citizens, a journalist in Tucker's case, for investigating the war? I mean, if Tucker, he says he spoke with sources in Iran prior to the conflict getting lunch, that's something you would do. If you had sources in Iran, you wanted to find out what was happening on the ground there. In order to violate the Foreign Agent Registration Act, you have to be acting on behalf of a foreign

principle. You have to have to actually be like doing their bidding in an actual relationship. I mean, look, if it does turn out that Tucker, Tucker's account of this is 100% accurate, which is possible. I'm not saying it's probable at this point, but it is possible. If that comes to pass, then, yeah, I would join the brigades of people denouncing it as well. Yeah, absolutely. The problem is that they do it in the first 10 seconds, and we don't even know what it is yet.

We don't have any yet. There's no adequate grounds to be making these kinds of, of definitive statements yet. And as we mentioned earlier, there are some grounds to be a little bit dubious as to whether we're being told has been relayed accurately or accurately enough

that we could just like go on the assumption that it must be true. Yeah. It could be incorrect. It could be slightly off. You know, you never know. Somebody told him something that maybe got spun a little bit

and then something's lost in translation. I mean, there's a bunch of different explanations that range from like sinister and cynical to like good faith but accidental. Who knows? I just think that, you know, but her preface there by saying, Tucker would have no reason to do this.

He would have no reason to make himself the center of attention. Really? I mean, yeah, he kind of would because he has this personal connection to Donald Trump, right? Going back to the first term where he talked about how, like, He would go and try to dissuade Trump from bombing Iran or whatever. And so it's this longstanding odyssey he's been on with Trump.

And it's perfectly explicable to me what he's doing, which is that he's trying to bolster this idea that the ultimate source of blame as he sees it for this blameworthy action that was taken, meaning the launching of the war with Iran, is ultimately attributable to this interloper, nefarer, interloper, meaning whoever is supporting the interests of Israel against like the pure heart interest of the United States and has led Trump down this disastrous course. That's the narrative that he's trying to propagate here.

So if he can if he could give extra ammunition to that narrative by coming up with this exciting new subterfuge spy plot with the CIA and Israel, I mean, look, I'm not. saying that like he is consciously necessarily in his own mind motivated by a pure commercial incentive but obviously this is going to make a lot more people tune into the podcast right right right um and look that that that's a that that's a that that's a whole other aspect of the whole mainstream press versus uh podcast thing um just to answer to respond to at whitney streethouse for a second so candace is stupid her listeners or stupid tucker and his listeners are stupid.

Anyone who questions Israel's motives and behavior is stupid. I'm getting tired of being called stupid. No, it's the other way around. It's, if you have any reservations about any of this stuff, you're called, you know, all kinds of crazy names, and you're basically denounced as a traitor, and unpatriotic. I mean, you know, we saw that bizarre exchange with Jimmy Dorr and Alex Jones,

where, you know, Jimmy's saying, you know, Alex, people, they, you understand why they have, you know, you have a $1.5 billion debt, legal debt, and people naturally wonder whether, you know, you disagreeing with Candace. has something to do with that. You know, that's where people are coming from now. Like there's this, there's this whole thing where everybody's policing, what your proper approach should be to all these different issues. If I disagree with Candace Owens, first of all,

it shouldn't be that big of a deal to you, right? Like, to a normal person, it shouldn't be a deal breaker with any individual. but now it's like this whole basically bouquet of interrelated theories that everybody's got to have or else they're on the other side of something and that's the part that's crazy I think

I'm certainly not saying and have never said that anybody who questions Israel's motives is stupid are you kidding me? I mean I went to Israel shortly after October 7th and among other things got my ass kicked by the stormtroopers who report to this Ben Gavir guy, so the actual messianic settler government minister who runs the internal security apparatus.

I went to the West Bank. I talked to lots of people with lots of different perspectives, many of whom were very much critical of Israel. And 99% of what I've ever said in the public domain about Israel and U.S. foreign policy in relation to Israel has been critical, okay? but that doesn't therefore mean I'm going to co-sign whatever nonsense blather that Candice Owens cooks up in her hallucinatory mania where she's bringing in the Freemasons, she's bringing in some kind of pedophile, satanic, something or other.

I mean, this is just garbage. And Tucker kind of absorbs a lot of it that's coming from the Candace style direction. Maybe he's a little bit more intelligent and savvy and present. than Candace, so he doesn't go quite as off the deep end as she is, but he's edging close to the deep end and is in it already in certain respects. It's hard for anybody to really match Candace because she's just like, I don't even know how to characterize her at this point, but I resent that just because you associate now,

and this is another one of the huge, I think, corruptions of the current media ecosystem, just because you now associate any and all criticism with Israel, with your favorite handful of podcasters or, you know, Pai call and podcast creatures with outsized platforms, that's your own perceptual problem that hopefully I can help you sort of work through because there is a rational critique to be made of Israel, of U.S. foreign policy in relation to Israel, of Israel's role in the current conflict.

I just object to this avalanche of sheer stupidity that people think they can just validate because they already have this pre-existing disdain for Israel or suspicion of Israel. No, that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card to just spew whatever idiocy you think that you're entitled to spew. So, and then with Tucker in particular, it goes hand in hand with him doing this whole sort of obfuscation charade where he's trying to deflect agency or ascriptions of agency to Donald Trump, the current commander-in-chief, was like unfettered control right now of the executive branch and is the commander in chief

and is like talking about all the territories he wants to stomp through the world's seizing like Tucker can absolve him of any responsibility for anything because he just happens to love personally Donald Trump or just feels so so personally fond of him and then just redirect everything onto Israel

and not even a rational understanding of Israel but this again a histrionic cartoon of Israel that just serves Tucker short-term political purposes and also probably commercial purposes. So that's my response to whatever misguided person wrote that comment. Yeah.

Okay. A couple other quick things. Any comment on the on the Megan Kelly, Mark Levin, micro penis incident? No, it's just another one of these proxy disputes. You know, Megan went after me last week. First of all, first of all, I don't need to hear Megan talking about anybody's penis size, much less Mark Levin's. Mark Levins, okay. I never wanted to even think about Mark Levin in relation to what size his penis may or may not be.

But like, that's what that's what right wing in particular online media debate is now. It's just this constant soap opera between this like handful of right way of media personalities. And like, where's the meat? Or where's the beef, you know, the Wendy's slogan? That's an unfortunate. Maybe. Where's the pizza? Where's the beef jerky?

That's right. Yeah, where's the jerky? I mean, because like it really, I mean, it just doesn't really have all that much substantive content to me other than this nonstop spiraling soap opera thing that I guess is working out well for them in terms of generating an audience. But I can't understand how people actually are interested enough in to make this their primary media diet yeah so we got micropunus mark here thinks he has the monopoly on lewd he tweets about me excessively and the crude as nasty as possible uh literally more than some

stalkers i had arrested uh he doesn't because then trump came out and did a truth social post where he basically sided with mark levin yeah can we see that that that's that's that's also number 17 i think do we do we have that um and then then there was a uh somehow green one was commenting on the whole thing. But while they arranged that, just to get to our sort of last discussion in the night. Okay, here we go. By the way, Trump was on a, even for him.

He was on a tirade. He was on a tirade on truth's social. Just block after block and block. Block after block of just texts. Right. Interspers with the all caps. I mean, he doesn't even. give a he doesn't even do paragraph indentation so people can read it a little easier so i'm not

necessarily against that like obviously i'm a big fan of of that writer nikolai gogle who had eight pages without paragraph breaks i'm not so sure it works as well with trump um but his his true social game has gotten really intense lately um he uh he seems to there seems to be a real thing with um arousal at military strike videos. There's a lot of ED ads in there. I was a little surprised at that. Okay, what is this part that we're being asked to read? Mark Levine was not looking to do television, radio, or anything else,

but he was drafted by very smart people who understood that there are a few like him. He is a true conservative and intellect, far smarter than those who criticize him. But above all, he is a man of great wisdom and common sense. but what's the thing about capitalizations with Trump? I don't know. I kind of like the totally random capitalization. I sort of mimic that myself occasionally. Yeah.

When you hear others unfairly attack Mark, remember that they are jealous and angry human beings who sway as much less than the public understands. And well, now that they know where I stand, rapidly diminish. So this is just Trump saying, right-wing pundits who agree with me on the Iran war, their true MAGA, because I'm true MAGA, I determine what MAGA is.

MAGA does not exist separately or independently of me, which is true enough in practical terms. And because Mark Levin is a huge advocate of the Iran war and had been encouraging Trump to do it, now Mark Levine is true MAGA and anybody else in the online in the right-wing media ecosystem who might be registering some skeptical notes about it, they are not true MAGA. So that's basically the fundamental reason why Trump is saying what he's saying here. Yeah. Matt, this does seem to be unfair to Megan, who has been repeatedly attacked by Mark L.

I don't like how when went after him, but he has been a real dickhead to her for quite a while. Okay, whatever. Like, that's not kind of not the point. We're not taking sides in the argument. So we are going to. One thing I've never understood about my. Mark Levin is how, like, he's a radio host guy, right? So I would, you know, when I would be driving in my car, I would just listen to right wing radio because that's all that was available

and if you want to listen to some kind of political talk radio. And I could totally understand why people listen to a guy like Michael Savage, definitely a talented broadcaster, had sort of like a soothing or comforting voice in a way. And maybe even Bill O'Reilly to some extent, but I never understood how people could sit there and listen to Mark Levine. He's got the most obnoxious, nasally, almost like off-putting voice where he's just in a constant shrill sort of frenzy. And it's just horrible to listen to almost like acoustically. So that's one thing I never got about him. Well, I'm going to back off from that one because I was born without the broadcaster voice.

I know it because I grew up in a household full of broadcasters and I stood out. but okay to dismount first of all this is essentially going to be a preview of a thing we are going to do which I'm going to just give a little hint about now

we're going to have a March Madness tournament to crown the worst podcaster in the country and it's the details will be released. Are we still doing that? I wasn't even sure. We are still doing that. So we'll release the brackets later this week. There's going to be a write-up of some of the early action.

The regionals have already been concluded. You guys didn't hear about it. But part of what we're going to get into in some of that sports coverage is this larger question because you tweeted something. I guess it was last Friday, actually. But can we see Michael's tweet on the subject? Oh, not the Brendan Carr thing. I think it's number one. This tweet I actually think was from a while ago.

It's like from May of 2025, maybe, but I just remembered it because we were discussing this topic. Yeah, okay. So if you had to choose one media diet and the choice was between one legacy media with basic standards of journalistic verification, however flawed or two, just on critically imbibing the latest serving of the SlopFest podcast X algorithm, you'd have to choose one hands down. Um, so, you know, like any, do you disagree?

Well, I would say that there's an argument for the other side. Uh, so allow me to retort. Okay. Um, media is dangerous in, uh, basically in relation to how much impact it has and how believed it is. Right. So the mainstream press has the capacity to impact people on a much deeper level because people believe, you know, that there are standards there, right? So that when they fuck something up, it tends to have a deeper and more longer, like a longer lasting impact. Now, we're in and this place we're in right now where the podcast world is by far.

driving the news cycle, like the audiences don't, you know, don't even compare in the old mainstream press. They're minuscule in comparison. But really, I mean, do we know, like, do we know, so if we tally up the subscribers or daily viewers of like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, etc., that that it would be dwarfed, obviously. by this podcaster set? I think well, cable

definitely would be. Cable news, sure. Yeah. But the New York Times is always doing fantastically well somehow, meaning it's getting even bigger and... I mean, it has seven million, like seven, eight million subscribers.

It's something like that. But, you know, the numbers for a Rogan or or a Tucker are just way beyond any, the capacity of anything but broadcast television and a lot of what broadcasts the numbers for broadcast are a little bit skewed because in many parts of the country that's the only thing that people can access certainly online one could argue that the BBC and the New York Times drives the news cycle as much as any podcasters do but I but I think now

right now just audience-wise like the biggest cable shows just don't have the same sure sure they're not in the same whatever the direct whatever the exact like proportionality of it is it's clear obviously that this podcast media milieu it's to be has to be seen as pretty if not you know pretty much on the same level as the mainstream media if not having supplanted it just in terms of sheer influence and what drives the news, etc. So like you can't just, if you're doing a media critique nowadays, right?

And all you did was focus on complaining about the New York Times, complaining about CNN, you'd almost be in this like delusional time warp or something, right? Because you would have failed to update your priors for what is actually driving people's belief formation process about the world, like based on what media they consume. Yeah, so there was a reason in 2024 that, you know, Dana White thanked Theo Vaughn and, you know. Joe Rogan was the most coveted political endorsement in the country, essentially.

Right, right, exactly. Busting with the boys, right? Like, they all got nods. And it's because their audiences, you know, are just, we're just much bigger, right? like Kamala Harris not doing the Rogan show was probably a catastrophic decision on her part, although doing it might have been a catastrophic decision on her part too. But either way, podcasts are now in a place that they'd never been, which is leading the news as opposed to reacting to it.

And all I would say is that the notion that the mainstream press, first of all, that it has minimal standards, That's a little bit of illusory because that's not always true. Like having worked in the mainstream press, I've been in both situations where there's zero fact-checking and where there's intense fact-checking. And like the big story that should have come out of episodes like Stephen Glass and Jason Blair is that that can happen

because nobody's looking, right? You can write total bullshit in a mainstream. mainstream publication and get away with it for a fairly long time, especially now. But Stephen Glass and Jason Blair, those are sort of exceptions to the rule. I mean, those are cases of the like outright concerted long-term fraud, which is different than just flawed standards for determining whether something is true enough to publish or whether the narrative that it's propounding is something that is credible, right? So like the Russia Gate stories in the first Trump administration, you'd be hard pressed to find like a fact claim that was strictly wrong in those articles.

The problem was that they added up to a narrative or they kind of created this collage of a collage of a theory almost that advanced people toward thinking that something was true that was fundamentally false. So that can happen in the mainstream media. I'm just saying that, you know, for example, I did a column in the Wall Street Journal, you know, a week and a half ago. I had to go through a pretty laborious editing process to confirm that everything that I wrote in there was good to go, you know. And so I'm not saying that it's, there's aren't problems with the ordinary fact checking process someplace. But they up there are, but I'm just saying there are layer, there are, there are, there are, it is at least like an aspiration towards some degree of editorial oversight or checking or lay. I mean, it's just not like a no man's land or a free for all, which is what the online independent media is where there's not even an expectation

that anything will ever be checked. Well, that's true. Okay. So, but here's how lying works in the main thing. You just say anything. Yeah. With podcasts, you can just say anything. In the mainstream press, here's how you lie.

You call up an anonymous source who lies, right? Uh, you print that, uh, you wink, and nudge at the audience and pretend that you honestly believe their version of events. So somebody calls up and says, you know, all the spies in Russia went dark this weekend, right? That was a big headline story in the New York Times. There's no way to confirm that, right? It's just something that somebody in one of the agencies told you, or Bounty Gate, remember that, right?

Yeah, Afghanistan. Yeah, so that was the thing. Or, but, but they do, they do also completely lie, not infrequently. So, I should, I should make clear that none of my critiques here of the alternative media or the online media or the podcast or creatures should be under, to be read as meaning that I'm. exonerating the mainstream media or traditional media, right? Or I'm just saying that like if I had to choose, like if you had to put a gun to my head and I had to say one way or another, would I want to get, if I want to, when I want to get my information solely from the traditional media or solely from the online independent media,

I would have to go with the traditional media just because at least there's some nominal aspiration toward fact checking things. Like, yeah, I mean, I read the Bounty Gate stuff and because I used to. some discernment, I could discern that this was phoning, right? But I don't know that that kind of discernment would get me anywhere if I was trying to figure out what was true or what was false listening to a Joe Rogan thing on the Epstein files, right? I mean, let me just give you one quick example. This is, I just happened to come across this today for whatever reason. This is, this is Joe Rogan's podcast in January of 2024, okay? This is his, like, you know,

busy his UFC buddy or whatever Eddie Bravo is on with him and you know you can so and here's what Eddie Bravo says and again this was you know over two years ago quote I think everything that's going on in the world right now is linked to Jeffrey Epstein that's what I think the people that are on the list so he's somehow asserting that he knows that there's an Epstein list or a client list and that would become to come to be widely believed because like stuff percolates outward from the Joe Rogan show and people just assume it to be true. Because then other people repeat it or whatever. He says the people that are on the list would rather, if they had a choice, you want to go

to jail for this shit as a pedophile or would you rather have World War III? World War III would save them. So this is him like setting up this framework for understanding events in the world as fundamentally about the people on the Epstein list colluding together to ensure that they're not exposed for their pedophilic sex trafficking crimes, and they're willing to go so far as to instigate World War III to keep themselves out of jail. And so, like, that's kind of relevant now, because that's essentially what people think is going on with the Middle East War. And I just think that, you know, that could be rationalized as can a million other things that have been on the

Joe Rogan show recently in the minute. This is the biggest audience on the internet. So it's not just me cherry picking or arbitrarily focusing on somebody. Oh, of course. Yeah, big. his audience on the internet and that could be rationalized as well Joe Rokens he's just a comedian man he's just this dopey fun loving guy who's like curious about the world he'll talk to anybody he's not a

journalist right so Joe Rogan is immediately exempted from having to do any fact checking of anything ever and he could just he could just you know transmit out the most insane crap constantly

no matter how unbelievably wrong it is just on a pure factual level. And then no problem because he's not a journalist, right? At least if you say that you're a journalist on some level, then that comes with an assumption that like you're at least required kind of to make sure that you check out what you're saying is factual before you just blur it out. But not with him and not with all his ancillary podcast colleagues who form this whole ecosystem. So that's like part of the

the crux of my critique here, I guess I would say. I absolutely agree with you. And for those, again, just to reiterate why it is that we're doing this show, you know, Michael and I both, I think, come, we're living sort of historical specimens left over from a time when people in the media were trained. not to say anything on television that could get them sued or in trouble, right? So you would never go on the air.

Like, did you ever have media training, Michael? Did you ever do that? Media training, no, no. He never did that whole thing where they say, okay, I skipped whatever brainwash meeting you're talking about. Where did you get media training? At Rolling Stone. No, no, no.

It's a thing where they bring in some. person was yon winner's like okay matt so uh here's our bottom line and we got to make sure that uh the lawyers are the lawyers charge a lot per hour so don't get us to a situation where x y z something like that no no media training how could i i i would love is that on video by any chance can i watch you being media trained no i i hope not no media training is actually not about the legal aspect it's it's almost entirely about getting people who are uncomfortable on television to look better on television. So they they give you all these tricks to get you through segments. So they'll tell you, okay, pick three things that you're going to say no matter what and just deliver those

when the questions are asked so that you don't focus too much on, you know, on some sandbagging question or something like that. But as part of media training, they do kind of tell you to stay behind the line in terms of things that you're not sure about, right? Like if you venture into an area where factually you can't remember or you don't know whether somebody was charged or not in a case or whatever it is, just don't go there at all, right? Maybe hedge or qualify or just don't say something authoritatively that you can't be sure is true. Exactly.

So we're not going to do that in this space. and my guess is that there aren't going to be many places like that left very soon. The online media world right now lives and breathes on excitable conjecture basically as what they're putting out there day after day. And look, I know it's fun to speculate about stuff and theorize, and I'm not above theorizing about things if I can have like an ample factual basis for inferring something potentially, right? So I'm not just like this,

I'm not just kind of like paralyzed into only doing just the facts, ma'am, and like I can never say anything beyond that. But the over-reliance on this wild conjecture, I think, is a big problem because it has loosened the standards for what people perceive to be sufficient, evidentiary a basis to go out in public and just say stuff

because now you can just say anything. It doesn't matter. Oh, I know. You just pull it out of, you know, you just pull it out of your ass. And the thing is now... You pull it out of your ass and then people, then lo and behold, people end up believing

that there's a mass scale child rape atrocity and pedophilic sex trafficking network that is like the organized, that like dictates how the entire world is governed essentially and also explains why you know Trump bombed Iran and X, Y and Z.

So like it has consequences not to be a downer but like this radical loosening in any and all standards is not just like you know a thought exercise for us to think about like what might be better. My assertion is anyway that it's actually having now observable serious repercussions. Yeah.

But other things are like distorting people ability to perceive like what the United States military is doing at the moment. Absolutely, yeah. And you mentioned Rogan, right? Like biggest audience in the universe. I know you're not a big fan of Michael Schellenberger, but I just never, I just never, I could never quite put my finger on what I found just a little off about him. I don't even want to go any further than that.

Like there's some stuff that I've seen subsequently, but I don't know. It's just I can't quite articulate what my reservation. have been about him over the years. I like Michael. I've worked with him before. Obviously, we worked in the Twitter files before, but he went on Joe's show and

when he expressed a few reservations about some aspect of the Epstein thing, I forget what part it was. He wrote an article saying, we had assumed, like, he's speaking in the royal we, I don't even know who he's referring to exactly, but like we, our team here at

wherever they are, assume that Epstein was an Intel asset running a honeypot thing. And now we're not so sure. So wait a second. Why had you assumed that initially? So again, like there's something, there's something even weird epistemically going on with him too. Yeah.

So whatever. But Rogan says, why are you resisting this? I don't understand why you're resisting this. So it's just disciplinary thing where it's, do not stop resisting. Stop resisting. Exactly. Which is the thing that we used to get on the case about, you know, mainstream press about, which is that you either said the things or you didn't get the

green room invites again. Like I, you know, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, I'm assuming you had this experience as well. We were all sort of universally not invited back on television as of the beginning of Russia Gate, right? Except the Fox, except the Tucker show. Yeah, except the Tucker show. I got we've come full circle now or something. I don't know. So but now the podcast is doing that, but they're doing it with wacky or shit. So by the way,

I just want to give kudos to at Bart 93-49 for the Kenneth. What is the frequency reference? Michael, do you know that story? I know the REM song. What's the frequency Kenneth? Okay. That comes from this thing where we're,

I know it comes from something, but I can't tell you exactly what it comes from. Dan Rather got, I believe he got... Oh yeah, come from Dan Rather. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I didn't remember that. And the people, as they were working him over, the only thing they said was, Kenneth, what is the frequency? And nobody to this day knows what that means, which I think is one of the funnier stories that has ever happened in media. Anyway, so, so yeah, so this podcast thing is, you know, it's happening at a moment when extraordinary, complicated events are are happening every five minutes with new developments that are you know,

that even in the best of times when the networks had bureaus in every major city in the world would be difficult to cover. And now we have absolutely no no idea what the hell is going on. And let me give you, and now that these, the podcast creatures have grown so outsized in their influence and are like sucking up media resources that might otherwise theoretically be like more evenly distributed so we could have maybe some foreign bureaus or something where they could go to the street of four news and like let us know what's going on with certain things now right about now let me give you another argument for why it's quote worse to rely solely on the podcasters than the more traditional media and again

This is not me absolving the traditional media for all its historic wrongdoing, but audience capture or audience susceptibility, right? Or susceptibility to audience-driven incentives. So just here's one example from relatively recent past. Remember when, but right before the 2024 election, the Washington Post editorial board was going to put out its, you know, obvious endorsement of Kamala Harris. And then Jeff Bezos intervened. And then there's nicks the whole editorial. And then hundreds of thousands of Washington Post. subscribers fled in mass.

So that's a lot of subscribers and a lot of money potentially fleeing. And that's just not something. So, I mean, I could never necessarily glean anything that was done differently after that in terms of the Washington Post editorial philosophy that would suggest that they were trying to

compensate for the thousands of hundreds of thousands of thousands of subscribers they lost or whatever. They kind of plugged along, right? And yeah, it was a Jeff Bezos interact intervention from the top, but it's just not something I could ever see happening at a independent media outfit where it's like probably centered on one person and their, their personality, where they're much more acutely cognizant of and reactive to audience incentives, meaning the daily fluctuations in subscriber accounts, in views, in downloads,

whatever. And there's not even there's not even a pretense that there's any kind of firewall whatsoever between the you know the business side and the editorial side, right? At least there's a pretense of that within other these more mainstream or traditional media entities. Yeah. And look, this this was something that substackers were aware of immediately when a lot of people who came over from the media like there's this thing where you can look at the graph and see how much money you're making. And it's, you know, for some people, they come over here. And let's just say a very well-known journalist, his line to me upon moving to

Substack originally was this is the best thing since penicillin. You can see, you know, it's incredible. Conversely, when it starts going the other way, now what do I do? now what do I do? Now the only thing, the only way to honestly deal with that moment is to just embrace the fact that you're going to lose money and end potentially friends and people who might retweet you and all these other things because when you start saying, when you don't go along with the current thing, the punishments have escalated now. I probably to my own detriment always at least tried not to even look too closely at the substack metrics. No, I try. I don't even want to know.

I definitely don't want to know who's subscribing, meaning who's a paid subscriber because I don't even want to subconsciously have the potential of like placating anybody. I know, but at the same time, though, you can't entirely avoid it, unfortunately. So like I get glimpses of it here and there. And like, I just know, like when I first started getting. really immersed in the upscene stuff, you know, last July, August, I got hammered by on every metric, on every platform. Absolutely. But, you know, I don't really care.

Maybe I'm in a position where I'm able to not care so much because I don't have, like, for example, like four dependents. So it was like college tuition I have to pay at the moment. Right. You know, so I have like my, my overhead is kind of low. But so I can't necessarily begrudge others who might feel like they're obliged to pay a little bit closer attention to it. it, but at least I know for my own individual purposes,

I've just always tried to create a mental firewall, which takes some deliberate effort. Like, it's not just something that you just naturally happen, you settle into. You have to work through that, actually. And so I'm willing to take the pledge right now that if anybody catches me giving a fuck about audience from this point forward, you know, unsubscribe immediately because, honestly, I've come to the realization and it was not easy.

It's been like a year's long process trying to work through how all this works. There is no way to do this if you're looking at the numbers and you're paying attention to what the algorithm is doing. because the algorithm, by the way, is fickle. And, you know, there are, it changes pretty regularly. I remember something wild. Do you happen like when, when the Twitter files first happened. So that was like December of 2022. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. I remember just because I was like tweeting some stuff that was supportive of the Twitter files. And I was like perceived maybe to be like in your network to some extent. I don't even know how you define that. I remember getting the biggest algorithmic boost I've ever gotten. And I wasn't even like directly involved in the Twitter files. So that didn't last forever. But like, yeah, it is incredibly fickle.

And you can't, you can't tailor yourself to trying to anticipate what the latest sort of fluctuation in the algorithmic sort of, I don't know, magic potion is going to be. Well, as you say, there are like nine elements right now. that the algorithm likes. If you have any kind of news sense, you can tell exactly what they are. As you, you mentioned one of them, which is this thing.

Demons, UFOs, Epstein, Israel. Israel, right? Like mysticism, you know, apocalyptic predictions. Yeah, prophecies, like future, like crystal ball,

future prophecies. Yeah, yeah. Sort of like a Lerushian sort of, like basically back from the 70s and 80s type of theories. Those are all back. Like we're starting to see every now and then you'll see a new conspiracy theory or a new thing that becomes hot. Can we see the, and this can be our last thing that we react to tonight.

Can we see the, um, the Trump assassination conspiracy post? I said, 15 million views, I think it's number 21. And it's from an account based somewhere in Europe. But essentially the new idea is that the Donald Trump attempted assassination was not real. It was staged, right? People were saying that, you know, I mean, there were some people, there were, there was some. No, but it's back. People were saying that, yeah.

In a big way. Yeah, yeah, it came back. And so, you know, look at the number of views there, right? That's a big number. And people pay attention to this stuff. And, well, you know what some of this is? This is like, so I would say that in terms of the handful of things that are being algorithmically prioritized or amplified, in 2024, it was pro-Trump.

I mean, it was this like Elon Musk driven, Joe Rogan driven, Theo Vaughn, conspiracyism adjacent online quote-unquote anti-establishment RFK Tulsi Gabbard crowd of that whole tendency was hugely algorithmically incentivized in 2024 and the Republicans brilliantly operationalized that as part of their campaign strategy in 2024 so but now what you see and I think there still hasn't been really a reckoning with that and a lot of people who did not come away looking particularly good having bought into that. But now what you... What's that?

Including me. I mean, I felt for certain things. Okay. Okay. Maybe we'll get into it at some point in more depth if you can, you know, handle... I didn't misreport anything, but... No, no, I got you. Yeah.

There were definitely things that I, that I... I just know, I just know on, on, on, on the, in the 2016 election, right? When Trump won, not that I was happy so, per se, but I felt on, I just, I just know, I just know, on, on, on the, on, on the, on... almost like a kind of jubilation just in that a lot of the stuff that I had been told I was crazy for diagnosing about the electorate or like projecting outward in terms of like a likely outcome had been proven right on some level. I know a lot of people in hindsight try to claim it. They're always right about the 2016 election.

It's mostly BS. But me, I mean, I'll show you like the stuff that I was saying like pretty very early on. I think you and I had talked about this where you had written off Trump in 2016 and Well, my arc was worse. I was dead right about him first. Then I renounced myself in the middle of the race. What, after the access Hollywood tape or something? No, no, no.

I got talked out of it by a pollster at the convention. But my first article was about how America made Trump unstoppable. But in 2024, right? In 2024, much different. I felt just a palpable sense of dread. I felt like there was something really bad going on here that for some reason, people in the media who otherwise I had been had this kinship with had systematically chosen to ignore or even to to validate some of these misconceptions around Trump that are that were catering to that algorithmically incentivized demographic at the time. And I just had like a pit in my stomach pretty much about it. But I'll, you know, a lot of it was an omen.

A lot of it was stuff that I could sort of detect from the campaign. And, you know, again, I don't like to go around bragging as having been shown right about anything that's so like because it always comes across as pompous. But like a lot of what I did foresee has now come to pass. And it's even more extreme probably than I would have anticipated. I mean, he's just talking today is he's going to say, yeah, it's my great honor to take over Cuba next as though he's just like crusading around the world. just like picking and choosing what territories? I don't think that shit plays as well now that he's actually...

No, what I'm saying. So then you have this stuff, right, exactly. So you have this stuff where people are now latching. They're now reviving this theory that maybe the assassination attempt was staged. Right. And so I think that's partially a function of that algorithmic consensus that had congealed around him in 2024,

fracturing, especially in light of the Iran war, but there had there been sort of precursors to that even before February 28th, but definitely after the Iran war, now you see all people who have been constituent parts of that consensus now, like not knowing what to do or where to go. So you have, you know, Tucker's move is to say, oh, it's all Israel, or you have some more of the conspiracy sort of minded people saying, oh, maybe this was all part of a longstanding plot that we missed and they staged the assassination attempt.

And I'm sure there's going to be a million other sort of layers to those kinds of theories that are going to emerge as people try to like reorient themselves into something because right now they're sort of just floating out at sea and don't even like no they're just like swimming for lifeboats yeah no absolutely uh and you know maybe what we could do on this show is we could have like a like a sort of leaderboard or uh a little display of what the what we think the algorithm like Yeah, yeah. Right. You know, sort of a, like an ESPN style display at the bottom of the screen or something like that. Can we get the done?

No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Matt thinks I'm like a guy who just like doesn't like sports, so I don't want to get any sports references. No, that's not true. Just for everybody's information. I know I'm conversant enough about sports to be able to make small talk with like a guy at the gas station or something. Yeah, or the bar or wherever. I'm not a fantasy football lunatic where like all my energy day in a day out is poured into like

finally fine tuning which wide receiver is going to get to the most points or something. I mean, I think that stuff is great. I was going to say like I'm already into who the sixth round receivers are. So you're out of your mind. Yeah, exactly. So but otherwise we're more or less on the same page. So, yeah, well, maybe we could do something like that. Anyway, this is all a way of sort of introducing the fact that the next time you see us,

it'll be likely a tape segment, and it will be the first round of the March Madness Tournament. And there'll be some text that accompanies this. and I don't know Anything else Michael We need to get to What else do we need to? I don't know There's always something to get to

Oh We do have to mention The Brendan Carr Reinjected himself into the news Right The FCC thing And look At this point

And this is one of the things I was wrong about Like I thought my impression of Trump on speech was not that he was a civil libertarian or that he grew up worshipping the ACLU or anything like that, but that he just didn't give a shit about it as much. And this, the last year has been kind of a, you know, it's, it's been a little bit of a surprise to me how, how much they're doing, uh, uh, how, how much they're doing, uh, uh, they're following in the footsteps of the shit that they criticized.

I don't know. I know RFK would have had you believe otherwise or would have dissembled, would have dissembled, yeah, or Tulsi, would have deced. Or J. Bata, Jerry. I'm not sure quite so sure about him in terms of what I'm about to say right now, which is that they would have told you that by revoting to restore Republican executive power, you were voting to restore free speech, which to me was always a joke. in part because Trump and the Republicans

were openly campaigning on drastically stining speech when it came to speech critical of Israel. Okay, so that's the canary in the coal mine. Did they say that exactly? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I'll give you a million examples where they were calling, I mean, they campaigned on

using state power. Yeah, the anti-Semitism. Yeah, yeah, anti-Semitism stuff. Yeah, yeah. It campaigned specifically on using the power of the state to limit and punish speech that they deemed excessively critical of Israel and or anti-Semitic, right? Well, they expanded that any Semitism Awareness Act,

which I did write critically about the time. I just, I never thought it was as comprehends. Like the shit that goes into something like the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act in the UK, the laws in New Zealand, Australia. There's an underlying idea about all speech that is different from, I thought different from what the Republicans would be up to.

One of the things that was algorithmically that would have been at the top of the ESPN leaderboard, it was RFK Jr. for a long time. and RFK Jr. was the one who confected this whole mythology around first of all, what he represented them, what he was subsuming into the Trump operation once they merged.

And so you had stuff like, yeah, Trump is the champion of free speech because I'm the champion of free speech and we're going to work together in this Avengers squad with Tulsi and Elon and Joe Rogan to restore free speech. And it was just like a total canard. And at some point, people go back and, watch the speeches that RFK delivered on behalf of Trump.

No, I know. I mean, I was, I was there for some of them. It's just, it's, it's, I just don't understand. I feel like there ought to be,

look, I'm not trying to be vindictive. I just feel like if you were part, not you personally, but if one was part of creating the impression to a mass audience that what RFK was describing in terms of the nature of whatever that new coalition was, if you were giving people the impression that that was like at all tethered,

in reality that there should be some kind of reckoning done. Just like after the 2016 election, I was trying to get, I launched what I call the Pundit Accountability Project with all these crazed liberal pundits who like Jamel Bowie, who of course got promoted afterwards when he should have been demoted. But he would say, look, like he wrote a column saying, there's a better chance that an asteroid will strike Earth than Donald Trump will win the election.

Well, yeah. Remember 538.com saying that there's a better chance that Trump will play in the NBA than win the nomination. Or, you know, Ryan Graham famously said, look, we're not covering, we're not even going to cover Trump in the politics section of the Huff Post. We're going to cover him in the entertainment section because this is all just like a reality TV show, schick. So, yeah, I went after people for that stuff in the, like, in the, in the, like, autopsy

phase of the 2016 election. But there's been no desire to do that for the 2024 election, which, if anything, might even be more consequential in terms of the depth and breadth of the media failure, at least as I see it because you had RFK Jr. Having, you know, all this alt media, you know, all these all media people wrapped around his finger. And he would go, he went to the Madison Square Garden rally like a week before the election. Remember this?

Mm-hmm. And he literally said that, you know, vote Trump if you want to end the warfare state. Because like, and that should have been, that should have been derided as, crazy at the time. What, you think what was Trump pledging not to do record-busting military budgets anymore? Just like you did in the first term? Like, when did, how did RFK Jr get the idea

that Trump was going to roll back the scale of the military industrial complex or anything in that vein? It was just total myth that he drew on his overrated family legacy to imbue himself with and then imbue Trump with. And it was just a total, just crazy. And I think, you know, there's got to be some accounting for it on some level.

Because like I mean, I mean, Trump just launched a giant war in the Middle East like out of a whim. He did. He did. And look, I didn't I didn't see that coming. And I thought, you know, I was mistaken about certain things. Like I didn't think my rationale about Trump in 2024 was different from all those people. It was based on the. idea that there was something that was absolutely going to happen in the other direction. And so any variable was better than that, at least on the speech front, like there was nothing really worse that could happen than what was being planned, right? And now we have Brandon Carr saying, hey, if you're too mean about Donald Trump and his amazing performance as commander-in-chief as we wreck the Iranian state and try to do regime change, you better watch out because the FCC's coming for you, which, like, even when they

did that as to Jimmy Kimmel after the Charlie Kirk assassination, what I immediately said was I really resent the Trump administration right now because I really despise Jimmy Kimmel. And they're forcing me into a position where I have to, quote, defend Jimmy Kimmel, even though, like, the stuff that he was saying about Charlie Kirk was done. and wasn't even funny, but like this idea that he's going to have the, have state power now coming in to punish him is just not something that's tolerable, although, you know, it got kind of quickly reversed and like, who cares about Jimmy Kimball? I get it. But like now this is like much more, much higher stakes, right? Sure. Yeah, but I would, what I would counter with is, is that

the laws that they already have and say Europe and Germany are are already as bad as they can be, right? Like, you can be raided and detained and put in prison for, or put in jail for any number of speech offenses at this point. We are not yet at that point, but at this point, I don't doubt that we're headed in that trajectory. I was all for the critiques of the Democrats, whether Biden, Harris, whomever, and their speech infringing policies, which are maybe a little bit more systematized and a little bit more well you know better polished in terms of how they enacted them and they had the they had obviously the sign off of these uh think tanks and like satellite organizations that were you know subsidized or given a grant or something that's how the democrats

tend to do things right um so i was all for a thoroughgoing critique of that i just never understood why that had to go hand in hand with a fictitious representation of donald trump like why I mean, I like the idea, why can't we go back to journalists being crotchety, you know, despisers of everybody? Yeah, we've already had this discussion. You're right. You're absolutely right. You know, in hindsight, I did have a more nuanced way of thinking about that whole thing. But I know, the idea for the idea for.

me was never that Donald Trump was going to be some kind of savior on the speech front. It was it was just that any eventuality like even two bad speech models were better than one, right? Like one unified one, which is where they were headed, right? The whole idea was to have a single common database of offenders all over the world and everything like that. Like that scared the shit out of me and the idea that that might be added to AI and all that other stuff.

Anyway, that's a different discussion. It's a different discussion. We can have this argument another time. But as people see, Michael and I are not afraid to disagree about things. And I don't publicly think any less of them for it. Privately, you may well, which, you know, I think of less, less of myself privately as well. No, I'm kidding. Obviously, I'm kidding.

Michael, this was fun. Like, you know, this is. People hate it. You know, I feel like there's probably, you know, Since I was told by one of the producer people to have, like, the comments scrolling this whole time, which is like a major distraction. But I've done it. So I've scanned some of them here and there. I think I'm not sure what the reaction is.

I know a lot of people, like, don't want to hear anything bad about Trump still. So I don't know how that's going to be something that's sustainable. Well, I don't know. Like, how do you think the audience is receiving this new iteration of whatever your podcast streaming adventure is? They're still in mourning about America this week, no longer being here, which is not something I can really do anything about. And I don't know anything about, I mean, I'll be honest. I never, I never, like, I don't listen to watch to virtually any podcast, so I never even saw it.

Right. So I'll read your stuff when it comes out, but I'm not sitting around vegetating in front of these podcasts constantly, which I know it's hypocritical for me to say, given that this is technically a podcast in some form. But like, that's my attitude. So I had nothing to do with anything that went on before. But what I would say to people in the audience who might be feeling a certain kind of way is that, you know, I think part of the motivation for doing a show like this, I'm making a bet on the idea that eventually people are going to be freaked out and wonder where they can go. to not be lied to or be sold some crazy-ass bat-hit algorithm-chasing theory. We're not going to do that to you.

That might not be a sexy thing at the moment, but eventually it might be a little bit reassuring. I resent that. The internet unanimously agrees that I'm a sexy king. as I'm reminded of constantly given all the compliments I receive about my appearance well all well deserved no I'm kidding

no this is fun Michael and look as miserable as the descent of the media landscape is it's also going to be extremely funny to comment on so there's always some dark humor

available access the the the amount of of gallows humor material is basically going to be bottom. And for all my growing annoyance to say the least with the independent media

or the alt media, I mean, it's still the case that I probably would be out of a job without it without it. So like I'm not, I'm not going to try to claim that I'm somehow totally free of any of this or like absolve from all responsibility for anything. Like I don't know.

I wouldn't have made it like I tried for a while and nobody would give me a job at one of the mainstream outlets. So, look, I'm saddled with it as well. So I don't, I'm trying to, I have a personal stake in the comically gargantuan flaws now that are being made more and more manifest. So that's part of my motivation for bringing attention to them. All right.

Well, either way, we're, we're going to have some fun going through all the craziness in the coming weeks and I personally promise that it will be funny. So Michael, this was fun. Thanks everybody for having out and we will see you again soon. We'll let you know what the schedule is. At minimum, there will be a tape show at the end of the week, but we might do another one between you and I should talk about that. Whatever you want. Your wish is my command. Excellent. Thank you, everybody. And we will see you soon. All right.

Take care.