The Chris Cuomo Project - Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

In this week’s episode of “The Chris Cuomo Project, investigative reporter Matt Taibbi, author of TK News (taibbi.substack.com) and co-host of the “America This Week” podcast, joins Chris for an extensive conversation about the challenges facing conventional media, America’s dividing line between insiders and outsiders, Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the 2022 midterm elections, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like, that's what people forget about government, is that there are a lot of dumb people in both governments, right? And this stuff can really easily turn catastrophic quickly. And that's why I feel motivated personally for them to come to another episode of the Chris Cuomo Project. Things are going great, and they're going great because of you. So please subscribe, follow, and don't forget to spread the word. The growth is organic and that is the best kind because I am doing this with you and for you and you are helping me every bit as much and I thank you for that.

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it's all about whose fault it is right away, who wants to own this guy. And we got to be better than this. And I know you are. I know the majority does not play to this noise and this toxicity and this two sides or no sides. We have to find ways to get more people like you, more engaged. And that's why I'm reaching out to you as a free agent, open mind, open heart, not about team or tribe, willing to listen to what you disagree with. That's where you have to get back.

And here's the good news. The majority of this country is that way. We are not social media. We are not our politics. They are fighting for a shrinking electorate. We've got to get the majority involved again. Of course, there's room for all, but we should not be ruled by our fringes.

Now, how do we do that? People who make us think about what's wrong with the narrative. What am I missing? What am I not being told? Why am I being told things a certain way? Matt Taibbi, oh, that righty, oh, that lefty, oh, that this, oh, that. That's why I like him. You don't know what the guy is. You don't know what he's about. You just know that he's smart and he takes things on and he's got a new sub stack and a new podcast. He makes people think.

What does he think about Ukraine and the coverage of it and the politics of it? What does he think about the Pelosi situation and what it means about us? What about labels? What about where we are in our politics and our culture? What about where we're going? This is somebody who thinks about it, who talks to people, who spent a lot of time in Russia and other parts of the world, who understands finance, what moves our politics. Matt Taibbi. Support for The Chris Cuomo Project comes from PrizePix.

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to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Matt Taib, a rare pleasure. Thank you for joining us on the Chris Cuomo Project. Happy to be here, Chris. So let's talk about you first. You have a very diverse palette of people who are interested in what you do for very different reasons, which raises a very simple question for us to talk about, which is, what is your deal? What are you about? What are you? Are you a lefty? Are you a righty? Are you pro this? You're anti that? Why do you do what you do? How would you describe yourself? Well, first of all, I think, you know, I grew up in a family of journalists. My father was a television reporter. My notion of what a media person was, was always that your beliefs were at least somewhat a mystery, or were supposed to be, to the audience.

My father was very proud of having only written two editorials in his entire life. I was much more open about my views always. But even so, I always tried to keep it a little bit of a mystery as to what I thought about certain candidates or how I voted. So I try never to just come out and say I'm for this or for that, but rather just tell people, well, here's what I found about this issue or that issue. But I'm often mistaken these days for a right winger, mainly just because I don't agree with a lot of conventional narratives, which I think is an unfortunate trend in media. Well, I was just talking to my team about this.

You're either with us or you're against us. And the problem is, what else are you talking about? And the context changes everything. But clearly, that's where we're stuck right now, right? Who is us and who is them? And then you have a different paradigm, which is everybody you know in your life that is not in the media or politics business is then this third group, which by no small irony is the biggest group. The majority is on looking, right? And saying, what the fuck is going on with everybody else, right?

That's what you and I hear in our real lives all the time. So what is your take on where we are, you know, seen through the prism of canceling and Kanye or Ye and now Kyrie Irving and Pelosi's attack where everything becomes an us-them, you call it labeling. Help us understand. Well, for me, that's a much easier question. I think there's a really bright line between when you wear your journalist hat and when you wear your personal hat. For me, every time I was assigned to cover any story, I always tried to wipe the slate clean and just look at it as a new story and a new set of facts and decide, well, what happened here? What

happened there? And not be impacted by what my opinions were privately as much as I could. And just sort of figure out what the truth is. You mentioned there's an us and there's a them. I think there's a third constituency that's most important for the media. The media should be separate from us and them. And it should be really just about the truth. And if we stick to that, I always think that there's a built-in protection for journalists. Like, if you just stay to what's correct, you'll be fine in the end. And I think that's what's gotten muddled in our business in the last six or seven years or so, this distinction between finders of fact and political players that has gotten blurred. But a lot of what you talk about isn't fact. It's not like Matt Taibbi

is the first guy to the fire, you know, or to say, you know, the death count is six. It happened at this time. And, you know, you're talking about what's happening in Ukraine and what the correct American posture should be and what this is really about and where it's going to go. You know, that is not about truth. It's about analysis and perspective and persuasion and advocacy for what certain ideals are. You know, that doesn't mean I see you described in some of the write ups about you as part of the legacy of gonzo journalism, which is a word I still don't really understand. I have a funny story about that, actually, but go ahead. I want to hear it,

because that's what a podcast is all about. But, you know, I don't see you as a first-person guy. I don't think it's that Matt Taibbi only understands this through his own five senses and his experience with it. I actually don't think that's fair. It's not about you. What people wonder about is, well, what is his agenda with what he's reporting on? What does he believe? What does he care about? Which is probably a good mystery to have. Now, let me hear your story. Well, a million years ago when I was broke and just starting out in this business, I was hired by a publisher to do an anthology of gonzo journalism. And I was supposed to just basically edit and collect examples of what gonzo journalism was and like you I had some questions like I didn't really know what that meant

gonzo journalism I there we have a vague idea of what it is but I ended up talking to Hunter Thompson because I wanted his blessing for the project and it was really funny he said uh well that sounds like a shitty project and i said it does and he says how about you do you need the money and i told him i needed the money pretty badly but he told me it was it was a lousy idea and in the end basically what i realized is that gonzo it just means hunter thompson it doesn't have any meaning outside of that uh so there is no gonzo journalism i don don't think, outside of Hunter Thompson. I'm not a gonzo journalist. Nobody except him was. With regard to your second issue, yeah, I mean,

there are some things that are quantifiable facts. They're easy to talk about. Was the sky blue today? Was it raining? How many billions of dollars did the Fed put into quantitative easing? You know, those are all things that journalists can count. But there are other issues that get more difficult. Like, how do you characterize the Azov battalion in Ukraine? I don't particularly care about emphasizing the fact, but are they a neo-Nazi organization? Probably, right? I mean, they probably have leanings in that direction. It depends on who you ask. But I think the important thing from my point of view is you can't

exclude that as a fact in your reporting just because it happens to be inconvenient. Absolutely. Then the question becomes, well, what is the point? You know, what I was talking about is what do we do with Kyrie Irving? What do we do with kairi irving well what do you do with kanye right what do you do trade him his numbers stink they should have kept nash get rid irving the idea of well what is the point you're trying to make what are you doing and to me it's like things are starting to take shape this pelosi thing i I just read this long New Yorker article. What are we really trying to do when we try to figure out what Pelosi's attackers' politics were? What do you think we're trying to do? We're trying to find someone to blame for why he did it. That's why

they're doing it, because it seems like it was politically motivated, because he had a lot of politics on his social media. We're going to ignore that he was mentally ill because we don't know what to do with mental health. I had Bill O'Reilly on my show telling me that there's an army of violent, mentally ill people, millions strong in this country, and that's the root of the crime problem. The FBI says they're committing 70 percent of the crime. The FBI says mental health is attributable for 7.5 percent of overall crime. And every study will tell you and every statistic will tell you that they're much more likely people who are struggling with mental illness to be victims than assailants. But that's where we are. Who's us? Who's them? What's good? What's bad? Kyrie must be silenced. He must be off the nets. We cannot have antisemitism.

Whereas my feeling is, of course, we can't have antisemitism. Let these people speak. Not some Nazis. Not some Nazis. Okay? They don't get the time. But where somebody crosses onto that line or over that line, let them talk and let them be shouted down by better ideas and louder and more voices that show what we're really about here. And that's how you get rid of it. So it doesn't run away

to social media and say, this is what they don't want you to hear. This is what Matt Taibbi wrote was wrong and made me a bad person. They want to cancel me. And then you get a Shapiro, you get a Levin, you get these guys who get franchises on the right by being excluded from mainstream, which breaks left. And I think we have to see that for what it is and do something about it. Do you see yourself as involved in the reckoning of that? I think so. I think that's accurate. in the reckoning of that? I think so. I think that's accurate.

I would not have described myself that way maybe five or six years ago. For most of my career, most of what I did was pretty straight reporting. I spent like almost 10 years covering the financial crisis. But now I think there's kind of a reality problem where people have difficulty identifying a commonly accepted set of facts. The news business has veered so far off in the direction of narrative building, both on the left and the right,

that we have difficulty now deciding where to even start to argue about things. And I think there's a role for people on the internet. And Substack has been a great place for me to do this, just to be a voice that talks about, well, here's some holes in what this reporting is. And here's how I assess this over here. And let's kind of try to figure out what's actually going on here. Because I don't think you're finding too much of that in conventional media. I think conventional media is so hard in the messaging business now, the narrative pushing business, that people are exhausted. They just want to know what's going on first. Everybody has their own bias, right? I certainly have my own. I feel that the press is more to blame for that than television cable media,

because that's what I've been in now for, you know, but I was 13 years at ABC News. Also, I understand network media very well. And I feel like print people get this pass because you can't hear them and you can't hear them in their interviews. And I really believe that the problem for cable news is the exigency of more and you don't have time to process. And that's how you get caught in a narrative. And the reason that we don't know where to start in terms of an argument is because I don't want to argue with you. I just want you to lose. I want bad things for you because that's how I win. What we're about right now, and especially the problem of the binary system, which is why I really believe if you

don't have systemic change in our politics, we're not going to have any real change because nothing changes if nothing changes and two parties ain't getting it done. And it's all about you being worse. Yeah, you're totally right. I definitely fudged that article. I definitely got those facts wrong. You're right. But what about you, Matt, when you were playing basketball in outer Mongolia and you took a guy's legs out? He's still not right. And you're like, what? One, that never happened. Well, guess who believes it did? My fans. And you're like, that has nothing to do with what I just said that you have to own. No, I need you to be worse. And I really think we need the Taibis. And I want you to talk about why you're doing a sub stack, why you're taking that entrepreneurial

route, why the podcast now that you're doing with the guy who wrote up in the air, right? Oh, yes. Walter Kern. Walter Kern, right. So you're doing a new podcast. You're doing a sub stack. Why? You can have any big outlet you want. You got a bunch of Rolling Stone covers behind your head. People put you on TV. Why sub stack? Why podcast? Well, I was in Rolling Stone. I i had a great situation there i left a couple of years ago for a couple of reasons one is that i basically i just saw kind of an entrepreneurial opportunity i i felt unlike some other people who went to sub stack kind of involuntarily like they

were sort of pushed out of their their businesses and had to find a home that would pay. I had a relationship that was existing with the company going back a while. I had serialized a book on there. So that was one thing I thought there would be a big audience. I thought it would do well commercially, frankly. But also, I was experiencing some discomfort, even at Rolling Stone, where I got along tremendously with the editors, there was a lot of tension over the Russiagate story that I felt. There was some tension over how to cover Donald Trump, how to cover the Democrats under Donald Trump. And that just became an obstacle. It wasn't really anybody's fault, but I just felt like it would be easier and more freeing to go to independent media. So what will people get if they read Taibbi on Substack?

And what will they get if they listen to the podcast that they wouldn't get if they were going to watch you in your old digs? Well, in my old digs, the benefit was I was on a salary and I didn't have to crank out. As you talk about the exigency of now, it's a factory media, right? Like I used to be assigned a story and they'd say, hey, go work on this for 10 weeks and talk to everybody that you can. And that's a luxury as an investigative reporter, right? I can't do that now. Like I have to put out content all the time. So I do as much reporting as I can, which is, you know, not as much as I would like, but it's some. And then there's a lot of content, frankly, that is basically designed to help people sort out what's true and what's not in between the two dominant styles of news reportage on the left and on the right.

Because I think most people are not getting at least one side of the story, right? You're living in an individualized news experience where most of what you see is tailored toward one narrative or the other. And I'm trying to break that for people. I think you're doing a good job. And I think that's important. I think it's needed. And I think it's going to be needed more. I think there's going to be a lot of cataclysmic stuff. And I'm not saying that it's not even cynical. I don't mean we're going to hell in a handbasket. I'm not saying anything like that. This culture, I think more than at any other time in our lives. And you have a different set of eyes on this because you spent so much more time, you know, concentrated in such more

perverse societies than our own being in, obviously in Moscow and Uzbekistan, understanding Mongolia, you know, coming to America, you'd be like, people think you have problems. Exactly. But we are making our own problems and it's very real. And my whole point of coming back, cause I wasn't sure I wanted to come back, was the majority doesn't agree with any of this stuff that's going on. The majority doesn't. you know, other than just trying to keep my, you know, hands off a bottle, I was just reading and thinking and rethinking and relooking. I'd never even looked at any of my own shit. Like I've never watched myself on television. You know what I mean? Like if I'm doing a long form piece, obviously that was different when I was at ABC news, but I don't watch my show. I'm on it. You know, I don't, I don't watch it afterwards, you know, unless I'm in litigation or something like that. What I realized was, huh, everyone in

my life as a fisherman, as a self-defense guy, you know, as where I live, which is, you know, pretty Long Island-y, Trump won the county that I live in, would probably win it again. They barely know anything that I've ever done professionally or about what happened with my brother or me. Andrew, they understood more me. They were like, were you like not going to help him? I'm like, well, no, but people accuse me of doing all these fucked up things to help him that I didn't do. And they're like, well, I would have done those. You know, I mean, most people like there was complete disconnect from everything that I thought was everybody knows this.

Everybody thinks about this. Everybody feels this way. Right. And that's what brought me back. And that's why I'm doing this. Right. Which I own. I don't have a deal with anybody because I didn't want any control on me.

And that's why I'm at News Nation because, I mean, you know, you don't know me, but it wouldn't be long to find this out about me. And that's why I'm at NewsNation because, I mean, you know, you don't know me, but it wouldn't be long to find this out about me. I am not easy to tell what to do or to control. Like it's doesn't go well. And I always have enough of a fuck it, I'll leave to leave, you know, because I have to get to that majority. I've got to get them to want to watch TV. I've got to get the ones that are our age and probably 10 years younger who are in this podcast space pretty much more than they are in any other media space. Because I think like Ukraine and what you tried to isolate on your sub stack with the apology from the progressives, which I really think people should read. That was good the way

you did that. You kind of, you made me, you made me make a couple of different turns when I was reading through that piece. And I want to talk about both those topics because I think that they are things where there's ability to connect. I'm not going to get you on the Pelosi attack. Everybody knows that shit's wrong. If it happened in any other context, that's what it would be. And we'd say, all right, this guy should have gotten help and he needs help now. And it's kind of a waste of my tax dollars to just put him in jail for the rest of his life because he'll never figure out how to get his mania under control. But it doesn't matter because all it is now is who the guy is. So that I'll have Bill O'Reilly saying, well, I don't know about all that social media stuff

you're saying. You know, the woman who was with him says that he's a progressive. You mean the woman in prison for beating a child? That woman? Yeah. Her you believe. But the social media, you don't believe. That's under the guy's name in his account.

For you to believe, right. Yeah, one or the other. And why? Because one helps you and one doesn't. And that's why we don't work off a set of facts. I mean, we all know this

from very basic litigation experience, right? If I don't have the facts on my side, I sure as hell am not going to agree with your reckoning of the facts. I'm going to go to what the law is supposed to be. And if I don't have what the law is supposed to be, then I'm going to attack you is what I'm going to do. That's why we don't start from the set of facts. It's not that we don't know what's true. It's that they're only playing to advantage.

They're not going to talk about that battalion because Ukraine is seen as someone we have to help. Otherwise, the Soviets are going to start the Soviet Union again. That's the proposition. So I don't want to talk about something that mitigates that. I don't want to talk about what weakens that because you're hurting what matters more. That's the spot we're in. I guess I would want to push back a little bit on this idea that we don't know what's true because I think we don't always know what's true. I think what I heard you saying, you know, in this eight,

nine, nine month period that you've been away is that you had a little bit of a process of self-discovery about, you know, where the audience was. Maybe the people weren't, you know, exactly where you thought they were. Where the majority was. My audience was not the majority unless I was at a hurricane or I was at a war. Other than that, it's cable news watchers. Right. That's a really select group of people who are totally motivated and often connected to the news. Right. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are bubbles, right? I mean, there are people who, and I think for a lot sort of process of disconnect during 2016 when I was hearing all the people who were in my circle, like in the media, tell me one thing, like, it's impossible that Donald Trump is going to win the nomination. And they would sit me down and they would give me

all these reasons why it wasn't going to happen. And then I would go out there on the campaign trail and I would see these massive stadiums filled everywhere. And there was clearly a factual disconnect between the people who are quote unquote experts and kind of the rest of the country. And the polling. That was the day polling died. Right. Yeah.

Data journalism failed. Yeah. Which was a death I welcomed. And I'll tell you why we use it as a cheat the same way that we use social media. Hey, Matt, uh, people aren't too happy about your last piece. What people, uh, well, you know, online people are, uh, saying, you know, they didn't like how many people, how many, what's the biggest number you can get me. Let's get a huge number, okay? That absolutely, as somebody, as a practitioner in the media, I'm telling you would be really impressive.

If there were 50,000, first of all, you'd be a trending item, okay? You got 50,000 tweets written about you and whatever this thing is, you're trending, okay? And you are now going to be a target for all media. 50,000 tweets, 50,000 people, that's it. That's what's going to determine who's good and bad, what's right and wrong. And the answer too often is yes. The disconnect with the polling is an extension of that. That's not Vox Populi. That's a cheat. And the extension of that in polling, which I've been around my entire life, some of the best practitioners of it, all of the best people in the politics business always preferred focus groups much harder, much more expensive, you know, depending on your reach and your sample and how

much time you want to take, but much more penetrating to be with real people in a room and get a sense of them than just data, no matter what the crosstabs are. But what we learned in 2016 is you can't reach these people. They don't want to talk to you and they will lie to you because you don't deserve the truth. And that has to be, but now once you built that into polling, now I use polls for what they are. We want to talk about sentiment. I'll use polls all day long.

People tell the truth about what bothers them. It's not like, what do you want Matt Taibbi to talk about? I want him to talk about only the most serious things. I have no time for frivolity. Oh, that's good. Cause he's got this interview with Kim Kardashian about what ended her marriage with Ye. Oh, I'll got to watch that though. That I got to read. This is, here's what I'm voting on. It's good. Who am I voting for? what I'm voting on, it's good. Who am I voting for? I judge it by a third. And I think that we learned that in 2016. I knew nothing. I knew that I had gotten his celebrity and the impact of celebrity wrong about halfway through. And I knew that he was running against the perfect person for something impossible to happen about two-thirds of the way through, that these guys do not want to vote for her. These people in my life, you know,

these small business guys and trades guys and successful guys, big fishing boats, you know what I mean? Like, they don't have, you know, a bunch of letters after their name, but they got big degrees from the School of Life and Hard Knocks and they've done well and they were not going to vote for her. was because you only lose to Trump if you screw it up because you have abandoned people's fears and needs so profoundly that out of desperation, they will choose somebody just because he seems to hate the right people. And that was a lesson we continue to learn. Your piece in Substack, where you talk about the progressives and their letter. Tell people about why you decided to cover it the way you did and what it means to you as a metaphor story. Well, first of all, I've been hearing from people in Congress all summer that there was an effort to try to think about what the endgame is in Ukraine. to think about what the end game is in Ukraine. I think most people in Congress understood that they weren't going to politically be able to stand up and say, well, we need to stop sending money to Ukraine for arms. But there was a segment of people who were worried

that there was no policy end game for the White House. And so they wanted to begin that conversation. And this was the genesis of what became the quote-unquote peace letter in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. They had 30 members sign it. As often happens in Congress, they didn't release it for months after it was signed. Within 24 hours after it was signed,

all the members who signed it were denouncing themselves for all the things that we were talking about previously on the show. It was the Twitter blowback, primarily, and then there was some nut-cutting stuff that went on behind the scenes politically, where the members, particularly Premier Jayapal, the leader of the caucus, were basically told, you're never going to work in this town again if you don't renounce this letter. Pretty soon, not only is there no letter, they retracted it, which is extraordinary. It never happens in Congress.

But the progressives were articulating a new casus belli for Ukraine, which to me, it's just an extraordinary story about the power of social media and the power of media generally. You have people who believed one thing and made a political calculation and were so overwhelmed by the media response that they turned themselves completely inside out within 24 hours. That's the problem with playing small ball. When you play small ball and you're fighting for an ever shrinking electorate. And that's why, you know, when people ask me anything about emotional motivation in terms of my work, I'm just frustrated. I know that everything should be better than this,

and it's not because I'm some kind of romantic or idealist. I am absolutely the true definition of hard-bitten. I just know that in terms of what works for me in my life, I can't do bitterness, anger, revenge. Those things don't work for me. They don't allow me to do and be what I want to do and be. I won't. I'd never move past it.

I used to joke with people, and I was telling the truth. I didn't even realize it. When they'd be like, you know, oh, well, this person, you know, said this shit about your, you know, fill in the blank, you know, your father, your brother, you know, you, whatever. about your, you know, fill in the blank, you know, your father, your brother, you know, you, whatever. And I'd say, man, if I made all my decisions in this business based on who had done something I don't like to my father or my brother or my family, I wouldn't have anybody to talk to. You know, I got to let those things go to do the job because at the end of the day, I'm trying to do something for other people. So my frustration is we have abandoned the majority. We have abandoned the majority in our politics,

and they're fighting off this shrinking electorate. And that's why the right is as absolutist as it is. It has to be. They can't lose anybody. They can't. They have to cater to people who are fringy folk. They can't win otherwise. I disagree with that. I think that's wrong, but go ahead. No, no, no. Let's take it one by one. Why is it wrong? Which part of it is wrong, by the way? Wrong how? Well, I think the

conventional definitions of left and right are all over the place now.'s it's very difficult to make pronouncements about left and right in the same sense. We would use those words 20 years ago that make any sense at all. Agreed. We wouldn't have used left and right 20 years ago. We said Democrat and Republican. We only talked right when we would talk far right. We never even mentioned far left. But now it's all I talk about is left right. Continue. Right. Well, we would have said liberal and conservative 20 years ago, maybe, but those terms don't mean the same thing anymore either, right? But just to take an example, there are plenty of people on what we would call the right who are Trump supporters, who are isolationists about this Ukraine conflict.

The overall electorate, 57% is in favor of opening some form of negotiation with Russia. Now, that is completely taboo in major media. Some of those people are on the far left or like the old anti-war crowd that you might have seen marching against the Iraq war in 2002, 2003. Some of these people are new kind of neo-isolationist Trumpers, but they're all over the place. I mean, there are big clumps of people who are for all sorts of things that, you know, that are different from our previous assumptions. There's a tremendous hostility, for instance, to expertise on Wall Street, right? Like, that's a new thing. We didn't have that pre-2008, where right-wingers would have been described themselves as being

really angry about what the Federal Reserve was doing, right? This is a new thing. So all this stuff is just difficult to define. Like, you never know whether a thing is really a fringe opinion now or whether it's actually a majority opinion and it's just not reported that way. I agree. If you look at it policy preference by policy preference.

Now, the reason that I elide over those things in a sentence about us is because we don't fight on those battlefields very often. It's just about who's good and who's bad. Put me in and I'll stop Taibbi from doing what he's doing. I don't really have to voice where I am on the different policy positions. Smaller government, less taxes, less involvement. Stay out of my house, stay out of my school.

We're good to go. What I'm talking about is on the right, the reason that you would have real Republicans, OK, like the Republicans that I married have real Republicans, okay, like the Republicans that I married into 21 years ago, almost to the day, they would not deny what January 6th was about. They would not shit on our election process without really good proof. They would never condone trying to decertify an election. They would never condone the blind eye towards so many things that Trump and his administration represented that are anathema to conservatism. But it has to happen today.

So those guys are lost. My in-laws and all that, now they just say they just vote for the person. You know what I mean? They're in their 80s and they're beautiful people. They're real conservatives. They're Catholics. They're, you know, they're beautiful people. They're real conservatives. They're Catholics. They're new to this country. They're both first in here. They're both born somewhere else. And they're real conservatives. But their votes, that's not who it's about right now.

The votes in that party that they need to win dictate what you're going to hear. Ted Cruz is a smart man, okay? He plays ridiculously small ball all the time. Defund the IRS. That's what I'm talking about. These positions that play to fringe mentality because of a shrinking electorate. That's what I'm talking about. You are correct.

I don't know what the labels mean anymore. I don't know what they mean. I really, and I don't know who is what they say they are. I don't know. I'm talking about only in terms of the electoral game. I would describe it more as instead of left and right, I think the real dividing lines now in America are insiders and outsiders and educated and uneducated, right? Like that's the most predictive thing.

Does a person have a college degree? There's an overwhelming likelihood that person is going to be a Democratic voter. Do they live in a town where the income is in the top tax bracket? They're very likely to be Democratic voters. In fact, the numbers are ridiculous. Of the top 50 congressional districts by wealth in this country, 41 of them now are held by Democrats. All of the top 10 are held by Democrats.

So education and wealth are very predictive of being in one place. But there's this tremendous anger toward the people who've run this country for a long time. And it's people who feel like they've been excluded, people who feel like they're not part of the consensus. They don't feel part of the expert class. They don't feel part of the decision-making class. And Trump appeals to those people. I think what he basically promises them has very little to do with policy. It has to do with which people are you going to infuriate by casting a vote for me. That's right. out. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, I think is just not as good at that game. He's tried to be a traditional Republican in a world where that doesn't really make sense anymore. That creature

isn't there. You have to be thinking in terms of much grander themes if you want to win the election now. You know, I thought for a while that this was going to happen on both sides of the aisle, that Sanders was going to win in 2020. And you would be left with basically two outsider archetypes duking it out in politics. But really, when the Democrats won, when Biden won, we're still left with this insider versus outsider thing, which I think is just the reigning metaphor for American politics now. It's so interesting. I'm old enough to recognize paradigm shifts, right? So when I was 20, the idea that the Democrats would be the rich and the super educated was nonsense. The Republican was the guy in the suit with the cigar in his teeth, you know, driving a Lincoln, you know, that's your Republican. And the Democrats are the working man and woman and the new ethnics and all that stuff. You know, it was Mario Cuomo, you know, that's, that's who he was, right?

Right. The best of the worst, Pop used always to say, you know what I mean? You know, that's, that's what I am, the best of the worst, you know, nobody wanted to take him seriously, give him a chance. Now, You know, nobody wanted to take him seriously, give him a chance. Now it's completely reversed. And we have this added factor onto it, which is this hatred of success, hatred of wealth and of the wealthy. I thought that was the American dream. You know, you talk to everybody about what they want.

Once they get past what they think are the right answers about freedom and opportunity, they want money. They want enough money to do what they want to do, how they want to do it, and not have to do things that they don't want to do and to do for their families and their kids. That's what they want. That's why they come here. That's why they work their asses off is for that chance. And there's a difference between hating wealth and hating the powerful. There's a difference. But I see that and I see people playing to it. Everybody needs a hard luck story now where, you know, they can't be that like, yeah, I went to Princeton and then I went on Wall Street and I made a shit ton of money. And now what I'm doing is this. There has to be. But, you know, my mother was a butcher's daughter, you know, and it's like, well, what is that about? I thought we just wanted to come here, give everybody a fair opportunity and see what happens, the ability to succeed or fail in your own merits. But now everything is us-them. You're right.

The lines are shifting, which is why it's so important to have perspective from somebody like you to kind of make people ask themselves why things are how they are. I think your podcast is going to do very well. I think the Substack is going to do very well. I think the Substack is going to do very well for those reasons. And I think the fact that people don't know, yeah, you get beat up as a righty a little bit, but you know, the right doesn't want to own you either. So, you know, that that's pretty good when they start saying they love you, then you got a problem, right? You know, Kyrie Irving is going to wind up on the Timberwolves. If he has Ted Cruz come out and say, you know, leave Kyrie alone.

You know, then he'll have a problem. Right now, it's okay to have people mad at you when anger is the only commodity in the business. Look, no shame in my game. I've been using AG1 for over five years. Why? It works, it's easier, and it's less expensive. That's why. Since 2010, they've been getting their formulations right and tweaking their formulas.

Why? Because the science changes, okay? It's not like politics where people decide to believe one thing and no matter what happens with the facts, they never shift. This is the opposite. Ooh, prebiotics work with probiotics, but in this way. D works with K, and this type of B works with that. They have the scientists doing it, so I don't need all the bottles, I don't have to spend all the money,

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The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being sleep deprived. Okay, well, what is it?

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I'm not surprised by that. I'm surprised it's not higher for the simple reason of, well, doesn't everybody prefer peace to war? And isn't that how they all end? You know, unless there's like a decisive victory, which we like almost never see anymore, you negotiate something to leave. Why do you think it's not happening? Well, this is the ultimate win-win situation for the Pentagon right now and for the donor class. I mean, I've done a ton of stories about military contracting over the years. This is the ultimate for them. You have an open-ended conflict with a legitimate, well-armed foe. You have a local population willing to fight them to the death, right? And it's basically an unlimited market to sell weapons to, right?

So go around Washington and ask if anybody's interested in finding the end to this situation. Politically, you're just not going to find a whole lot of will around there for coming to an end to what makes a lot of donors happy. How much of it is money and how much of it is righteous indignation? I mean, you know, you talk to the Ukrainians. Ukrainians want a lot more weapons. They don't have the money to buy them, but they say they need a lot more given. But let's be realistic. Ukraine is not going to conquer Russia. They're not going to march on Moscow. That's not going to happen. Right. They just want to get them out of their borders. Now, do you think that that should have to happen or that should be a precondition to terms of negotiation with Russia?

Should they have to leave areas that are not theirs? That question is a little bit above my pay grade. I think you could start negotiations somewhere south of territorial discussions. That's why I think it was important. Nancy Pelosi was in Croatia last week giving a speech in Zagreb to a group of people who are committed to retaking Crimea for Ukraine. Now, that's tantamount to announcing that you are in support of Russia vacating the Crimea. That's going to be an on-starter for Russia. However you think about that, that's a pretty powerful signal to them. So I would start with other things. Are there other things we can talk about before we get to the territorial questions? And I think there are. Like, there are probably two big issues with Ukraine. is going to like any of the options that involve giving ground there. But I think you

can talk about the one before you talk about the other. I also think there's been a lot of poor reporting on this issue that has made it difficult to talk about. Like? Well, like, for instance, we talk about Crimea. I lived in Russia for 10 years. I know that part of the world very well. Crimea, historically, is Russian. There's no other way to put it. The people there speak Russian. It's always been part of Russia. If you ask the ordinary Russian how they feel about Russians occupying Crimea, that will just seem like a strange question to them. Now, Luhansk and Donbass are different matters. But if you lived in Russia for the last 20 years or so, or especially the last 10 years,

you've heard a lot of stuff about Ukraine shelling the Donbass with American weapons, which has driven up Russian anger towards the West in much the same way we've raised tensions towards Russia here in the States. Those questions are very difficult. Like Donbass, Luhansk, Crimea, you know, I actually think that if you had a legitimate referendum in Crimea, Russia would probably win there. But, you know, we're not allowed to talk about that, really. So it's a difficult question.

But either way, I think the larger thing is it has to end. Like, you know, the option where we just let this go and it turns into this thing where we're destroying each other's infrastructure or we're tiptoeing to the edge of nuclear conflict is extremely dangerous. And I always think of the line from All the President's Men, where Deep Throat says, you know, the truth is, these aren't very bright guys, and things just got out of hand. Like, that's what people forget about government is that there are a lot of dumb people in both governments, right? And this stuff can really easily turn catastrophic quickly. And that's why I feel motivated personally for them to come to some kind of accommodation. It's hard to get Russia to the table right now. I mean, what I hear from people in Washington is, you know, one, they don't want to reach out to him about it because Ukraine has a very hard set of wants.

And, you know, the American people, of course, of course they're going to want a negotiated settlement. What's the alternative to that? But there's a lot of sympathy for Ukraine. And I got to tell you, I mean, you know, as somebody who spent a lot of time, as did you, dealing with our operations in the Middle East, that never made sense to me.

You were never going to kill an idea. You were never going to occupy and give people infrastructure and education and commerce so that they didn't have to be as easily picked off by extremism. So I don't know what we were doing there. And if that was a basis of ideals, well, then I didn't know how Ukraine didn't apply. I mean, this is like a real fledgling democracy with a lot of people who want to be Democrats, not Democrats, Democratic, right? I don't care what their party system is. And they have lots of corruption and kleptocracy and other shit. But you have a lot farther down the road than you were in Afghanistan,

that's for sure. And or in Iraq. And they're fighting against somebody who is an existential threat to America and its concerns. And you should have been more involved. And if you wanted this to be a negotiated settlement, you should have made it happen a lot sooner. And you should be doing a lot more now to make it happen. And I feel like everybody keeps saying Biden's doing a good job and I don't get it. What is his job?

What is his job? He's supporting them. No, his job is to end it. Isn't his job to make this end? I mean, isn't that what the biggest dog on the block does? Well, right. And how do you do that, though? Talk about above my pay grade.

That's above my pay grade. But I do know this. He's the one who asked for the job, brother. I didn't ask for that job. You know what I mean? I went to Ukraine to cover it just so I'd understand what was happening on the ground. You know, I came back here and everybody was like, what's the solution? I don't know what the solution is. I can't even pronounce half the things in that country.

But that's the job he said he wanted. And it's for him to figure out how to get Russia to the table. My guess is it's going to have something to do with petrodollars. At the end of the day, energy is going to be what this is about. I agree with Tom Friedman about that. I think that Russia's finding its way through to use an energy because, look, if they used a nuclear bomb, they'd unite the world against them. They use an energy bomb, as he likes to call it. He's going to make the whole coalition fall in on itself. I agree with that. Energy matters. And the winter's going to come and it's going to be cold at some point. And I think Biden's actually sleeping on it. Now, they're saying they're sleeping until the midterms are over and then they'll do more. You buy that? No, I think they've completely miscalculated the situation in much the same

way that the Russians miscalculated by going in initially. There are a lot of people, and I should admit, by the way, in one of the worst calls of my life, I never thought Russia was going to invade. And I said so publicly the week it happened. But now I think what we're seeing in Europe has a very real chance of collapsing in on the United States and causing permanent damage to, you know, what we would consider the NATO coalition. Yeah, they'll start doing deals for energy. They'll start doing deals for energy. Yeah, exactly.

And that could have very serious long-term security and economic consequences for the United States. And that's another reason why, you know, I think that they should have been motivated really, really early to try to wrap this thing up in some way that was acceptable to all parties. Like it might have been a bitter, bittersweet thing. But the longer this goes on, the worse this gets for everybody, including the United States. So I think they haven't gamed that out. I think there are a lot of people in Washington who think this is great.

Let's just keep doing this. We'll bleed Russia dry and it's going to work out to our advantage in the end. But, you know, there are a lot of variables here and I don't think they've thought of all. They can't because they're caught up in this existential binary fight here. You know, they're fighting over who tried to smash the Speaker of the House with a hammer. You know, I mean, you know, this is, I've never seen anything. Look, Kavanaugh got attacked, Scalise got shot, but somebody getting into the house

of the Speaker of the House, I've never heard of that before in any real way. And I don't think the guy is some political terrorist. I think he's profoundly ill and he is proof of how toxic our environment is. You know, that's what he is. Yes, he wound up being toxified by righty stuff. There's a lot more of it, frankly. You know what I mean? I'm not surprised by that. And there is a righteousness to it for the underdog, for the small guy that it appeals to, especially if you're a white one.

that it appeals to, especially if you're a white one. And I get it. I just don't think it matters. I think what matters is that we have to have our politics reflect the interests of the majority of this country. And that means not issues, tone. Nobody talks the way we do in politics anywhere else in their lives. The politicians don't talk that way anywhere else, but when they're in their official capacity on TV.

I agree with that. Just really quickly on the Pelosi thing, I feel like there's a kind of a paucity of information right now about what happened there. I don't know. I wouldn't be able to comment on what I think happened. I think all of this, using it as a metaphor for anything, I think is ultimately difficult. What makes you suspicious that the district attorney and the police chief did not deal with in their press conference? I just haven't seen enough of the details to know exactly what that situation was. I mean, why does it need to be a wider metaphor for something else going on in society? We don't know exactly, you know, what motivated this person. Do we? I think his illness motivated him. Okay. Yeah. I mean, the guy, now that they are looking right,

he's been attacking everybody. You know what I mean? He's not other politicians. I'm saying, you know, he's been increasingly violent, which is not unusual with untreated mania. Right. Now, again, I'm not trying to demonize the mentally ill. I mean, it's an area that I study very intensely because I'm so frustrated by how little we do about it and how stigmatized it is. And, but then with the new generation of kids, we slap all these labels on them and diagnoses on them you know and it's so weird adults won't get therapy but their kids can have nine different you know diagnoses and they're okay with it right when the kid just needs exercise some of them most of them that's not true and they need the help and it's good that they get

it but i think what it's wider about and it has to be met is the way it was handled i don't have the suspicion that you do that there was something else that would happen that led to the break-in that I don't understand. I don't have any suspicion. I just don't know. I'm literally lacking knowledge in what happened. But why would I lack knowledge when the DA comes out after the interviews that the police had with the suspect and the victim, and the suspect told them everything that they did and why they did it why would i believe i don't know what happened well we've heard from the police we've heard we've seen an fbi uh i guess what's a like a summation of an interview right well he talked to the local cops the guy um whatever his name is, I never used their names. My feeling is there's no reason to give the paper any shine. But I always feel like I'm always careful about saying I'm suspicious

because I know what I know. I know as much about this as I do about George Floyd. And I spent a lot of time on that. You know what you know from the police and from the surrounding circumstances and the guy's politics and the unknowns about that I don't care about because here's the metaphor effect for me is that they immediately had to figure out which one of them was to blame for that attack. And that's all they cared about. McConnell came out and said the mild perfunctory things. They all immediately on the right played the victim and then started saying that this is a conspiracy, there's something else here, and this guy is a lefty. And then the left immediately said,

when is someone on the right going to stand up and see how vicious you all are? And that's all they cared about. And that's the metaphor effect, because none of that helps us. Sure, no, I get that. I'm just saying i i literally haven't read a whole lot about that story and so i don't i don't know i don't love the idea that

that everything that happens has to become a referendum on this larger battle that we keep insisting on having like this idea that everything is interconnected. And that if you take a position on one thing that it means X, like just to go back to the Russia thing, like I think there are a lot of people who have it solidified in their minds that there are only two ways forward with this. There is all out combat and fighting to the end, or you're a sympathizer with Russia. We would have thought exactly the opposite a generation ago, right? We had this idea called containment once upon a time that was the diametric opposite of that idea. That's kind of where I am, which is every situation

is individual. Like, let's not draw bigger conclusions and let's not connect things that are maybe unconnected. And then we'll be healthier and happier as a people, among other things, right? But you're right. We're in this atmosphere in the States right now where everybody is just, they're so amped up and ready to jump over nothing. And that's just an unhealthy. Because it's binary and it should be unitary, right?

It should be just one nation, right? That's what Washington warned us about. Why he left was because he didn't want to have to be part of a party to have another term. And he was right, of course. Of course, you can't talk about him anymore either, right? Because he was like a bad guy. One of my predictions is that America will not be called that for much longer as people do a deep dive on Vespucci and find out he was as much of a bad guy as Columbus was and anybody else. And then what are we going to do?

But a lot of it is, again, about us trying to figure out who we are and what matters to us right now in this society. And you need people who want to have the conversation. And that's what I think the real gift for you is and how you approach things is that you the conversation. And that's what I think, you know, the real gift for you is in how you approach things is that you provoke conversation and not by saying we should, you know, something stupid, you know what I mean? And tell me I'm wrong. It's, this is not as simple as it seems. And the challenge is you're in a world where everybody's dumb and everything down all the time. You know, Kyrie Irving, how can he play when he is an anti-Semite? That's what I'm going to get tonight when I talk about Kyrie Irving.

When I talk about him, I don't know what's going on with the guy. I don't know why he's putting this stuff out. He's had a lot of interesting and erratic behaviors over the years. They're protesting him with t-shirts at his games. Something's going to happen. And what I will get from people is, first of all, don't you interview Kyrie Irving. Don't do that. Do not give him a platform. We don't give a platform to hate. Now, that is a new and emerging aspect of our culture war in trying to figure out who we are. And it worries me because I really believe that you wind up making victims out of people and it empowers them. You know what I mean? And not Kyrie Irving, but a lot of fringe political actors get their heat from not getting any light, you know, and saying, you have to come and watch me. You have to buy my sub stack. You have to do this because they don't want you to hear any of this.

The Strasden effect is a real thing. Like, I've been a pretty vocal opponent of, you know, the content moderation slash censorship era, among other things, because it doesn't work, right? You are going to draw more attention to bad ideas that way than you will. Yes, the letter they just sent to the publishers at Random House about Amy Coney Barrett's book. Right, and I mean, that's just ridiculous. I'm one of the writers at Penguin Random House, right? So the notion that writers should be in the business of telling the publisher what their editorial decision should be do follow her that they can't read her book.

And that shouldn't be my decision as a writer to tell people that they can't read somebody else. I just don't understand that thinking. As a creative person, that is a very difficult thing for me to understand. They're running out of ideas about how to compete with another side that doesn't make any sense to them, that seems like it's based on irrationality and ignorance. But they're forgetting the idea of what made any idea that came out of the left ever successful, which was it was the better idea. It was more motivational. It was galvanizing. It was transcendent.

It worked. That's how you win. You don't win just by shutting down your opposition's ability to compete. I think transcendent. It worked. That's how you win. You don't win just by shutting down your opposition's ability to compete. I think it's a big mistake. Let me ask you one more thing, then I'll let you go for now, although I'll probably wind up asking you to come on a lot. The elections are coming up. Where do you think we are in trajectory of political dynamic? Where are we, do you think? In terms of who is doing better?

Whatever happens, like in the midterms, let's say you split the difference. Let's say the Senate stays the same and the right wins the House. They win both houses. Where do you think we're headed? What do you think it means? Where do you think we are right now?

I do think we're headed more in the direction of populist outrage than the alternative, right? Until we get a government that starts to listen to how pissed off people are out there, we're not going to see that change. There's an increasing divide between the quote-unquote expert class and the great mass of ordinary people. I mean, I saw it really, really advance between 2016 and 2020. There was just so much more anger out there, even in the space of four years. And, you know, I think the Democratic Party made a mistake after 2016. Like, instead of looking in the mirror and saying, how did we lose to this guy?

mistake after 2016, like instead of looking in the mirror and saying, how did we lose to this guy? They went on this long thing about Russia having over, you know, interfered in the election and trying to get Trump out of office that way. They really should have asked themselves, like, what can we do to make people's lives better, to make us more appealing to that ordinary working person that you were talking about, because that person is no longer a Democratic voter. I mean, I remember talking to Bernie Sanders about this. You know, he grew up in Brooklyn in the post-war period. Every poor person in his neighborhood was Democrat. He didn't know anybody who was a Republican. It would be the opposite now. Yep. Right. And that's both a political problem and a messaging

problem. And I, until either one of the parties solves that communication issue, I think, I think we're headed towards that disconnect. It's just going to get bigger and bigger. One of two things has to happen. Either you need more parties. The other changes I'd like to see, you know, parties are not supposed to be in charge of primaries. That's culture. That's not law. Certainly not in the Constitution. Ranked choice voting. And if they don't want to do that, then you should just take the parties. But the same people who don't like ranked choice voting wouldn't like that. You need congressional term limits and you need more parties. And if you don't have more parties, the only other thing that gets you to a better place is an existential fear that unites everybody against the same thing. That's why all this was held in abeyance

when George W. Bush was having a hard time because of 9-11. 9-11 changed everything. He did the right things the right way early on. I have a lot of problems with what we did in that situation, but politically, it worked for him because everybody was afraid of the same thing. So we were in that situation. But politically, it worked for him because everybody was afraid of the same thing. So we were unified by that. God forbid, I hope it doesn't take that for us,

but you got to give people more choices because you're forcing them into camps. Yeah, just really quickly on that. I think that only works a certain number of times. You can only tell people there's an existential threat that they have to respond to, there's a finite number of times you can play that card. And we've played it like 50 times since 2016. And people run out of patience with it, don't they? Absolutely. But I think that what's untapped is what we started the conversation with, which is always a good indication, it's time for me to shut up, which is the majority doesn't dig this anymore. And they went through the pandemic. They don't know the vaccine, the Wuhan lab, they don't care either. It's like, okay, the vaccine certainly isn't killing as many people as the virus did. I don't know about a lot

of vaccines that I put in my body and my kids' bodies. I'm just going to take it. Just stop talking about it and let me live my life and stop making everybody so angry. bodies. I'm just going to take it. Just stop talking about it. And let me live my life and stop making everybody so angry, okay? I don't want you around if you're going to make people angry. That's where the majority of the country is. And we got to get to them. And we have to get those people to believe

that their curiosity and their ambitions and their interests are worth going into this sewer that they sample from time to time in the media. And otherwise, they just vote local. And every vote that gets farther away from their locality matters less and less. I really believe that. I just don't know how to do it. But I do know this.

People listening, watching, and reading guys like you helps. And I don't give a shit who doesn't like me for saying that because I like people who make you think. I appreciate it, Chris. And you do that as well as any. Matt Taibbi, thank you very much. If I can ever help with anything you do, I'm a call away. Thank you very much, Chris. Good luck and good luck with the podcast. Thank you. Continued success. Best to you and the family. Told you that guy's smart. And we need food for thought.

We need people who make us think, not tell us what to think. And that's why I'm a fan of him. And I know his sub stack and his podcast are going to do very well. And I wish him well. And I appreciate him being on. And I hope that you subscribe and you follow and that you look up the free agent merch. And remember, it's not about me. It's about we. I want to build up

the money there. I want to give it away. We're giving money to MD Motivator. And I always want your feedback. So you can send it to me. You can email me. There's a phone number, 516-412-6307. Call the number, leave your email. Let's get after it.