The Joe Rogan Experience - #1114 - Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

Matt Taibbi is a journalist and author. He has reported on politics, media, finance, and sports, and has authored several books including: Insane Clown President, Griftopia, and The Business Secrets Of Drug Dealing.

Five, four, three, two, that countdown gives me anxiety. I got to stop doing the countdown. See, look, I spilled my fucking alpha brain. God damn it. What is alpha brain? It's brain juice. It's like a cognitive enhancing supplement. Really?

Yeah. You ever fuck with nootropics? You know what nootropics are? No. Do you have an extra one? Can I try? Yeah, sure. For sure.

Nootropics are essentially the building blocks for human neurotransmitters. They improve your memory. Not too radically. Not like, have you ever fucked with modafinil or any of that stuff? No. No? No. Modafinil is like ProVigil.

They give it to fighter pilots. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? It helps keep them awake. My wife's a doctor, so yeah. You have a doctor? Yeah, my wife about it helps keep them awake my wife's a doctor so yeah you have a doctor yeah my wife is a doctor oh your wife's a doctor yeah oh that's perfect so she knows about all that jazz yeah um but there was just an article recently about it improving cognitive performance you're gonna probably have to bite into that you got it yeah um it's good to meet you man i've enjoyed've enjoyed your work I've been a fan forever Thank you, me too

I've enjoyed your writing, for sure Did you get that? You got it there? Do I have to bite it? Ew, you got scissors Jamie's got scissors for you if you don't want to fuck with that I got it So

Let's talk about what we were just talking about. You wrote a book with a guy about drug dealing, and he was going to come on wearing a mask. Yeah, he wanted to come on wearing a Barack Obama mask, actually. It's actually really funny. The whole story is really funny. I'm writing this book. I spelled it, too. It's called The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing. You can find it at businesssecretsofdrugdealing.com. And I'm serializing it.

In a completely different capacity, sort of came out to me last year and said, you know, I've been a high-level drug dealer for a long time, basically my whole life. And wanted to tell a story about, you know, sort of the whole progression of his life. What kind of drugs? Only things that grow out of the ground. Okay. So he started off, this is an African-American guy. He started off, believe it or not,

selling mushrooms. He sort of grew up half in the projects and half in an upscale suburb. And he, in the upscale suburb, he sold mushrooms, which he basically got through mail order at a time early in the history of the internet when there were some loopholes about things. You could get spores, right? Yeah.

Well, actually, you could get the actual. Really? Yeah. Wow. And so he ends up having this whole career, and he wanted to sort of explain to me what the rules of the game were and do sort of a book version of the Ten Crack Commandments. down and we couldn't quite figure out how to do it at first, but we ended up essentially doing a sort of fictionalized version of his life. And the progression is amazing because he goes from being a dealer in all these different parts of the country and different social spheres.

He's in college. He deals to rich white kids. He deals on the street and in tough urban neighborhoods and then ends up sort of in the legal business in this state. As a lawyer? No, no, no, no, no, no. Legal marijuana. Oh, lawyer? No, no, no, no, no, no. He legal marijuana. Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh, and so he's describing that world, which is not, um, there are a lot of misconceptions about it. Uh, there, there are some things about it that are, um, not known terribly well. Like, you know, what do you do when you work, uh, you know, at a, at a farm and, uh, your crop test dirty, you know, at a farm and your crop tests dirty, you know, with a contaminant. Well, you know, not everybody just throws it away. You know, a lot of that stuff ends up shipped across country, goes to other markets.

And he sort of describes a lot of this. Like what kind of contaminants would that be? Like fungal or pesticides? Yeah, like a fungus, something like that. There are labs that basically have to clear, from what I understand, that have to clear each of the crops. And there are situations where there's a whole bunch of crop and you've got workers that have to be paid and what do you do with it and the the legal market isn't big enough um to accommodate all the stuff that's grown and so there's sort of still you know kind of a black market that goes on and he he he describes this and uh but even before that it's just a fascinating

book about you know all the different things that he learned in the course of his career about how to get, you know, do the job and not get caught. How to rig a load to drive cross country. How do you do a dummy car? You know, he tells a story about how basically you want four cars. You want the guy in the front seat to look like a drug dealer, have a terrible record, drive badly, basically to attract the police. And the third car is the load car. The second car is sort of watching to see if there's cops in either direction. And then the fourth car is basically driving up behind the load car to sort of prevent anybody from seeing the license plate and that sort of thing. And so he just talks about all this stuff and it's, it's, it's fascinating. And it was a new kind of writing for me because

I'd never really done anything except straight journalism and we sort of had to do it in narrative form. And so we're, we're putting it out serially online right now, which is really cool. So you did one of those change the names to protect the innocent exactly yeah yeah but or the guilty yeah yeah yeah but for the most part based on facts yes yes the situations were let's just say realistic you know right yeah yeah and and his you know, uh, yeah, yeah. And, and his, you know, the observations were that, uh, that he describes are all, you know, things that he actually learned. The situations were, you know, relatively close to things that actually happened. So, yeah, that's interesting. So that's available now. Yep. Yep. Again, it's, uh, uh, business secrets of drug dealing.com. It's, it's kind of a new thing. I, uh business secrets of drug dealing.com it's it's kind of a new thing i i i grew up um a huge fan of uh serialized uh detective stories i was a big fan of like dashiell hammett

and raymond chandler and i loved uh black mask magazine which was the big pulp noir magazine in the 20s and 30s and um you know i grew up reading all those stories and i always it magazine in the 20s and 30s. And, you know, I grew up reading all those stories. And it was in the back of my mind always that I wanted to try this and write a book on a deadline. So I'm doing this now. It's basically co-written with this anonymous character who can't appear with me on shows like this anywhere because he's still not captured.

So are there warrants out for this guy? No, he's never been picked up. Never been arrested? Never been arrested, no. Whoa. Yeah. Sounds like a smart dude. He is a smart dude.

He is a smart dude, and some of his employers would be very surprised to know that he's got a hobby like this. It's funny. I knew him again. I knew him for years and didn't have the faintest clue that this was going on. Did he keep a job in order to avoid suspicion? So the book is actually structured with all these rules. Each chapter has rules in it. One of his most important rules is always have a job. And it's for a number of reasons. Number one, he talks about how when he was young, he worked at places like, you know, Marriott or Applebee's. And he's like,

you know, if you can serve, have the patience to serve people at an Applebee's and not blow up and scream at people, then you won't screw up a package. Like, in other words, if you can have the self-discipline to actually get through one of these jobs and not blow up and be crazy, then you're going to handle yourself well at a car stop. That's fascinating. So he used it almost like as a discipline exercise. He used it as a discipline exercise. He learned, among other things, like another one of his rules is dress like an off-duty Applebee's waiter. Right?

Like do not dress. he's Applebee's waiter, right? Like do not dress. Uh, and he, and he talks about this, about how most dealers, um, they learn their, their, uh, profession, uh, by watching movies, you know, there's no, there's no book out there. I mean, it's not like this generation is growing up reading like the old iceberg slam or Donald Goyne's novels or whatever it is, they're watching, you know, The Wire or Blow or Ozark now or whatever it is. But dealers very often dress like dealers. You can kind of spot them, you know. And he says that's exactly the opposite of what you have to do. You know, wear sperry shoes, wear boring clothes, look like, you know, you've,

you're on your way to, to, you know, your freshman English class or whatever it is. Um, and, you know, sound like a nerdy college kid when, when, uh, the cops pull you over and all this stuff is, uh, is sort of central to his his whole uh worldview about how to avoid getting caught wow that would be a great book it i mean it is it's it's it's really fun and you know the the fact that um that the you know the co-author is actually a person who's pulling this off makes it makes it really. And it makes it a real challenge to write it, too, because I had to kind of simulate his voice and kind of communicate to people what those situations were like and what things look like from his point of view.

And obviously I'm white and he's African-American, and that's tough., but you know, I think it works. It's kind of a cool story, but it must've been a juicy, like when you found the subject and I was like, Oh boy, we got something here. Oh yeah. Super juicy. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's so much fun. I haven't had this much fun, like fun, fun writing anything for, for a long time because, um, you know, most, most criminal memoirs, and again, I grew up a junkie in terms of reading this stuff. I love books that are written after the fact by people who were in crime, you know, like Papillon was one of my favorite books growing up. I mean, it's an amazing story about not just crime, but about prison and what's that like, but they're

always written by people after they got caught. Right. And so there's never that book by the person who's still out there, uh, and, and talking about what outlaw life is like, um, successfully, uh, still on the other side of the law. And that part of it is fascinating. It's just a completely new thing. And he has all these insights that I would never have thought about. He talks about how there's a thing he calls the hood price. When you're dealing, selling in black neighborhoods,

even he charges a higher price because there are more problems that you inevitably run into when you're dealing in those neighborhoods because there's more cops, which means more lawyers, which means more security, which means more attention to detail. When you deal to rich white kids, there's just nobody's paying attention. So you just, there's less overhead, you know, in the business, which is fascinating. It's, and you know, he talks all about this and he has, he spent a lifetime

kind of just keeping all this stuff in his head, always wanting to put it down and he just, it got to be too much and he just sort of tapped me on the shoulder one day and said, can we have lunch? I just want to talk to you about something. And how long had you known him before this? I would say three years.

Wow. Three years, four years. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, it was very cool. Wow, we had to trust you. Well, I'm glad we decided to not have him on because he would get busted.

Yeah, exactly. That would be how he would get busted. Yeah, exactly. That would be how he would get busted. I talked to him about that. Yeah. Yeah, like you can't – like if you were on something and you had a mask on, people would go, that's Matt Taib's voice. You know what I mean? Right, right. There would be somebody listening to him.

Maybe he doesn't understand that there's millions of people listening. I totally agree with you. Hundreds of those people would go that's whatever that's Mike that's John whatever his name is they would get it even the Unabomber got caught and he only talked to like two people especially today with this Jeff Sessions motherfucker in place

he's scary did you just hear the shit that he was saying now that they're going to actively separate parents from their children if they catch illegals coming over with their families? I mean, that's just vindictive. It's fucking evil. Yeah, no, and it's funny.

I cover Trump, obviously, on the campaign trail, and I watched sort of the progression of his thought or non-thought as it is on things like immigration. And it seemed to me that he clued in very quickly that people just want to be mean to immigrants. It's not so much about the policy. He was very nonspecific about that whenever he could be. He just wanted to say things that feel vindictive and cruel and nasty. And so doing something to children is just monstrous, you know? Sessions is a real creep. Oh, he's horrible. He's a scary guy. Yeah.

Like, one of the things that he said is, good people don't smoke marijuana. Like, just saying that alone, do you know how many grandmas out there with cancer are smoking marijuana? Of course. You know, fuck you. Right. Crazy asshole. Just the fact that someone could be

in such a position of influence and say something like that. Right. This isn't just your dad saying that. Good people don't smoke marijuana. He goes out in the yard and fucking smokes a cigarette. This is Jeff Sessions.

This is the Attorney General. Yeah, exactly. It's terrifying. Yeah, and, you know, when you take ignorance and then the full weight of the executive branch, especially the anti-drug apparatus, that's a terrible, terrible combination. And it's too bad because I think even the law enforcement community was kind of coming around on this. Yes. You know, they don't want to be picking up people for dealing weed. I mean, I talked to, from my last book about the Eric Garner case, I talked to lots of

cops and they just hate having to do that. You know, those busts are not fun for them. Well, the Eric Garner case is the guy who got choked in New York, right? Yeah, exactly. And he's a loose cigarette, which is even more fucking crazy. Even dumber, yeah, yeah. And that's, and, you know, cops having to do that, that's not even a misdemeanor in New York. And, you know, if you got to drag somebody in for selling a 50-cent cigarette, like, you know, that's not exactly Serpico, you know what I mean?

Like, you know, cops don't, you don't join the force dreaming of doing that. So, but, yeah, I mean, the Sessions thing is terrible. Yeah, having that guy in that kind of a position and saying things like good people don't smoke marijuana or, you know, when families come across the border illegally, we're going to separate the parents from the children. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And then you throw in a good dose of the Jesus. A lot of Jesus behind him. Yeah, exactly. Scary fucking time. At least Trump has said

that he's not going to support Sessions on going after marijuana in states where it's legal. He's going to leave the states to take care of it themselves. That's encouraging. The problem with Donald Trump, and this is something that I didn't

clue into until I'd spent a lot of time watching the guy and following him around, is that he can sound like he believes something very deeply. And you can be absolutely convinced that he even logically thinks a thing, but he'll have a meeting with somebody and five minutes later he'll have completely the opposite opinion. So I have no confidence that Donald Trump will, anything that he says that he'll, that it will stay his opinion on anything. He can be convinced to go to a complete 180 on basically any issue, which is scary. But isn't he in some ways the perfect representative of America because of that? Absolutely absolutely he has no attention span and and i i talked about this when i was covering him because people said oh what what is this billionaire new yorker have in common with with ordinary americans he has a lot in

common with him he has exactly the same media habits that they have he reads the same dumb shit on the internet um he has the same total inability to separate fact and fiction. He's completely credulous when he reads a news item about something that he personally agrees with. And he'll tweet it out five seconds later before he checks it out, which is like what every other American does. You know, they get something on Facebook and they immediately share it with, you know, all their friends. And this is an American thing now, just the total inability to logically look at things. Yeah.

And the short attention span too. Short attention span, drifting in and out of conversations, not being able to pay attention to memos unless his name is in there a hundred times. It sounds like people I know. It sounds like American. Right, right. And, you know, it's funny because if you watch Trump's speeches, or actually better yet, if you read Trump's speeches, they would pass out the text of what Trump was supposed to say before his events. And so I'd be sitting there, I'd be looking at the remarks, and they would be cogent from one end to the other. Then he would get up there and the first line would be like, oh, it's so great to be back in

Manchester, New Hampshire. I always loved being here. And that would be right. And then he would veer off. And he would start saying one thing and then the other thing. And his thoughts would drift in all these different directions. And then when you looked at the actual transcript of what Donald Trump had said, he not only wasn't completing thoughts, he wasn't completing sentences. He talks in these sort of strange fragments. And he'll drift from one idea to another, and they won't have any logical connection to each other. And people still responded to it, which tells you something both about him and about his audience, right? Because they're on the same weird mental wavelength where just sort of disconnected bits of emotion and thought is enough now.

Yeah. Right? Isn't that weird? I mean, it's really strange. Well, people don't know that someone's not smart if they're dumber than the person. Right. Right? Yeah.

So I think what it's revealing is what a small amount of time most people spend actually thinking. a small amount of time most people spend actually thinking, thinking about ideas, thinking about themselves, thinking about behavior, thinking about the impact that someone who's in the position of president can have. Very few people are out there actually thinking. I mean, a pretty large number overall, but very few in terms of percentages,

in terms of the people that you can reach and the people that will show up at his press rallies. That's a big thing, too, right? Who the fuck is going to go to a campaign speech for anybody unless you're a journalist? Well, that's interesting because I've been to a million campaign rallies, right? And my opinion on them is I would rather basically stick a railroad spike in my ear than voluntarily go to one of these things and not, you know, not be paid to do it. Because normally a campaign speech is like this supernaturally boring experience where a guy or, you know, a woman

stands up there and reads out a preselected, market-tested list of political cliches that have no meaning whatsoever and that don't represent what they're actually going to do when they're in office anyway. And if you have to listen to that 40 or 50 times in a row, which is what happens when you're covering campaigns, like you want to kill yourself. So why anyone would go voluntarily to see that as entertainment is sort of beyond me. But that happened in 2015 and 2016. Trump's events were a little different. They were a little bit, and I think he got a little bit of this from his WWE experience. He turned them into these kind of menacing, weird audience participation things where he would have the audience turn on the press and shout at us and throw things. And because we're always standing up on those risers and we have ropes around us,

we look like zoo animals or something. And we were the representatives of the hated elite. Hilarious. And he turned it into this physical, menacing, intimate thing and people would come from all over. They'd come from down in the hills you know and drive 50 miles to to see the spectacle it was it was fascinating to watch but kind of terrifying too well the people yeah the people that are going to those things like boy that is an odd group of

humans that have decided this is how you're going to spend your day you're going to go and watch this guy rabble about fake news right he. He's going to ramble about this, your fake news, and point at the CNN guy, your fake news. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The fake news, CNN,

terrible, terrible ratings. And people are like, yes, yes. They wave the flag. Keep going. Say things that make you feel good. Say things that excite me. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And yeah. Look at these bloodsuckers. That was a line that he used to pull out a yeah, look at these bloodsuckers. That was a line that he used to pull out a lot. Look at these bloodsuckers, these people reporting information. Yeah. Again, we'd be sitting there and a whole bunch of reporters and we're a bunch of geeks in arrow shirts, you know, and we got pads. And we're kind of surrounded by, in some cases, 15,000 people who are kind of turning in our direction.

And in a couple of cases, it was definitely up in the air whether this was going to turn ugly. And in a few places, it did turn ugly. But he was very clued in. The one thing I will say about Trump is that he has a keen instinct for audience. He knows where they are. He knows what their mood is. He knows what he has to do to get them, to wake them up, to stir them up. He can tell when he's losing them.

I mean, that is one talent that he does have. But it's a negative talent for sure. Well, he uses it certainly in a negative way. Yeah, absolutely. How much attention have you paid at all to his use of diet pills? Have you been following that at all? No, that's fascinating. Is he using a lot of diet pills?

No. I'm so glad I could talk to Matt Taibbi about this. This is great. What was the reporter? Was it Washington Post that first talked about it? They found the Duane Reade Pharmacy where he was first prescribed diet pills by this doctor who described it for a non-existent condition, like a metabolic deficiency or some shit like that. Metabolic disorder, I think he called it. And it allowed him to prescribe. And this guy was like a known

prescriber of these things. Like a Dr. Feelgood type. One of them guys. Go to him. He's got it. He's got you covered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Metabolic disorder. Here you go, Matt. You're going to feel peppy all day. And he's supposed to be on these for a very short amount of time. He was on them for a long

period of time. And this guy, this reporter printed out, tweeted out the actual Duane Reade Pharmacy where Trump was filling this prescription. And then now they're saying that he's on some other diet pill, which is one of the ingredients that was in Fen-Phen. Do you remember Fen-Phen? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Unfortunately, remember fen-fen? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Unfortunately, I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Fen-fen was something for people who don't know, the young folks out there. There was a pill that people were taking in the 1990s. And I knew a gal who was a very pretty girl, but she was large. And she got on the fen-fen, and I hadn't seen her in like i don't know like six months or something and i saw her and all of a sudden she was like 120 pounds so i was like what you look amazing like what are you doing like you exercising or something did you go crazy and join a gym and she's like no i started taking this stuff called fen-fen and she was like she couldn't stop talking and grinding the teeth a little bit. Fucking on speed.

Then she started having weird feelings with her heart, so she stopped it and got off it. It turns out people were just dropping dead left and right off of this stuff. I mean, it could give you fucking heart attacks and all kinds of shit. It was hardcore stuff. But they recognized that the combination of these two things was the issue, but one of these things by themselves is okay. So this one thing by itself is what they think he's on now, which makes sense that a guy who's in his 70s has so much energy. Right. I mean, they say he's up at 5 o'clock in the morning watching Fox News, and then he starts tweeting.

Like at 5.30 in the morning, he's tweeting. Right. He gets very little sleep. He drinks like 12 Diet Cokes a day. I mean, the guy's just, he's got boundless energy. When he was campaigning, that was the thing that was so stunning to me. I was like, I know what it's like to go on the road and just do stand-up. Just do stand-up, where you have your act, you fuck around, it's fun, you have a good time.

It fucking wears you out after a couple days. Oh, yeah. One town, then the next town. By the time that third day rolls around, you're fucking beat down. This guy was doing day after day after day after day. He's like, it's all great to see all you wonderful people. We're going to make America great again. The wall got 10 feet higher and everything is with energy.

Yeah. And this is the speculation. The speculation is he like, I mean, I'm sure you're aware, many, many journalists are on Adderall. Right. He's on something. Sure. Right. He's on something. Sure. Yeah, no, of course. This is in my – like the way I look at it, it's like this is indicative of where America stands today.

It's not just that he's a good representative of America because he has the same media consumption habits and the same inability to read books and all these different variables, but also because he's pilled up. Right, which is everybody in America. Everybody in America. Right. A good percentage of people. I mean, there's a little bit of a precedent there because Kennedy had so many physical problems that – I'm not sure if you remember, there was a book, The Dark Side of Camelot, that came out by Cy Hirsch, Dark Side of Camelot that came out by Cy Hirsch, where it talked about how Kennedy in the morning used to have a Secret Service agent give him a shot of basically amphetamines every morning. And he would sort of pace around the Oval Office talking about who he wanted to whack today.

This was like the background for Bay of Pigs and all these other things. So it's very dangerous when a president is is you know pharmaceutically altered yeah when a person who is you know if he's if he's on speed and he's tweeting threats to a nuclear power like uh i mean that would be a very ironic and uh but terrible way for all of us to end. Did you find the tweet? I've been looking for it. It was hard to find the first time.

I know who wrote it, but I can't find it. You know, you've got to save that and put it in your favorites, because we talk about it so many times. You've got to figure out a way to save that and put it in a bookmark. Because he had the Dwayne Reed pharmacy, and then there's the speculation about what the most recent stuff is that he's on, which is, again, one ingredient in Fen-Phen. But one of the things that they were saying is that when you look at the side effects of this stuff, one of the side effects is delusional perception of reality, delusions of grandeur. Of course. Aggression, impulsiveness,

like all these things that we associate with Donald Trump. We don't even know who he is. We know who he is pilled up, if this guy's right. Right. Which is fucking fascinating. Right. That we might be dealing with essentially a pharmaceutical intervention into not just American lives in terms of individuals, but in terms of the way policy is driven and the way the country moves forward. It might literally be pharmaceutically enhanced.

That's very Philip K. Dick, but it could easily be true, right? It could easily be true. It all seems true. Right. I'm not saying anything that's outlandish. First of all, we're talking about something that's real. These pills are real. We're talking about something that's widely consumed.

Everybody knows this. And we're talking about a guy who has an extraordinary amount of energy for somebody who doesn't work. Right. Work out, rather. Doesn't eat healthy. Right. And where's he getting all this energy? Yeah, no, I mean, I remember talking about this with some of the other reporters because as you say, the campaign trail is incredibly grueling. There's a reason why

some candidates can't do it or they opt to do lots of legacy media appearances or ad buys. They travel less and appear more. The people who tend to succeed are the ones who can do three or four appearances a day, fly to three different cities a day. And most of those people are either health freaks, people who are in good physical condition. Obama was definitely one of those people who had to have a run at some point or else he couldn't do that schedule. But Donald Trump, you look at him and it's kind of a mystery. There it is. There it is.

Fun fact. In 1982, Trump started taking amphetamine derivatives, abused them. Only supposed to take two for 25 days. Stayed on for eight years. Really. And this is Kurt Eichenwald. Right. White House admitted it to me, said only a short time for diet, in quotes, when he was not overweight.

I countered with medical records. They cut me off. People misreading drug was diethylpropion, 75 milligrams a day, prescription filled at Dwayne Reed on 57th Street in Manhattan. Oh, I know that one. Not that I know things. Yeah. Phil that Dwayne Reed on 57th Street in Manhattan. Oh, I know that one. Not that I know things.

Yeah. Doctor who wrote prescription, Dr. Joseph Greenberg, diagnosed him with metabolic imbalance, which we have never heard about again. Greenberg was later publicly slammed as someone who provided uppers to rich people in Manhattan. A metabolic imbalance, in quotes, if true, could be electrolyte insufficiencies, anaerobic imbalances, acid imbalances, and an assortment of related disorders that can have serious health consequences. Yet his other doctor, Dr. Harold Bornstein, said he had been Trump's doctor since 1980 and had never mentioned the metabolic imbalance found by Greenberg. Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha. Right. Right. So, save that. Save that and bookmark it. Now, find out what the other stuff, because he was in, just Google Trump is on one of the ingredients in Fen-Phen.

So I googled that. That came up in a Gawker article. Excuse me, Gawker article. From 2016 that said he was on Phentermine. Yeah. So this is what they think he's on now. Phentermine? Yes, which is also a stimulant, which just makes sense. If that guy is telling the truth, if Kurt Eichenwald is telling the truth, that means that he was on pills, amphetamines, for eight years, which means he was having good results so if he was look at this rumor doctor prescribes donald trump cheap speed

and this is uh ashley what is her name ashley feinberg ashley feinberg who is a really good reporter well i'm sure she's right yeah it makes like fucking makes sense absolutely it makes sense absolutely i mean everybody in america's pulled up and and you know i i don't know how a person whose diet is cheeseburgers and diet coke uh could run for president without fried chicken with a fork and knife of a weirdo you see that no that. He's like on the Trump jet eating fried chicken with a fork and knife. That alone should be like, who are you? Are you a fucking alien in a Trump suit? So I wouldn't know that because they keep the press on a separate plane.

Oh, yeah, there you go. That is odd. Oh, my God, look at the bucket. Yeah, eating fried chicken with a fork and knife. See, that's bad. I mean, I would think ordinary America would ding him for that because... You're supposed to use your fingers, you fucking weirdo. You're supposed to use your fingers. Just put your face in it if you have to.

What are you doing, man? Yeah. Fork and knife for fried chicken, you goddamn elitist. Amazing. Fen was actually the name of the very cheap speed that used to be imported. When I lived in Russia, there was a type of speed that used to come from the Baltics that allegedly, you know, the urban legend was that the Nazis had all their soldiers on a cheap speed for the long marches going into Russia, and they set up these pharmaceutical plants.

And again, the street legend was that that was what this drug was, but they called it Phen. Wasn't that the origins of methamphetamines? Wasn't methamphetamines created by the Nazis? I believe it was. And I think this is one of the speculations as to why they could get suicide bombers, the kamikazes, to slam their jets into aircraft carriers. Loading them up on pills? Because they were methed up. Right.

Just methed up. Right. Oh, we have those go pills, right? Yeah. That's what they're called, isn't it? Well, that's also, yeah, there's definitely some speed that gets prescribed and steroids also to soldiers. I mean, if you talk to people that have been in, you know, they'll tell you about what different things that they allowed them to take and gave

them to take. But that modafinil stuff is, that's really common. And then I know a lot of fighter pilots will take that, keeps you from getting sleepy, keeps you alert and common. And then I know a lot of fighter pilots will take that. Keeps you from getting sleepy. Keeps you alert and awake. And that was also something Hillary Clinton was supposed to be on. Really? Yeah, she was supposed to be on Modafinil. That was one of the things that she admitted to.

And it's legal. It's a weird, have you ever tried that? No. It's a weird one. It doesn't speed you up in terms of like heart rate. It's not like drinking five cups of coffee. But it does give you this weird sense of alertness. Like, oh, I'm fucking really awake.

That sounds kind of good. It's kind of good, yeah. I have a buddy of mine who's a writer. He's got some health issues. And he's on it all the time. And he said, if I don't take it, I'm a mess. Really? Yeah.

Huh. Well, I mean. Stay fit and slim. It sounds perfect for writers, so. Look at that fucking ad. Stay fit and slim by taking amphetamine. By taking amphetamine. Look at her.

She looks happy. She looks really happy. Super happy. Now, they should have the next day picture. Oh, she's dead. She's been dead for decades. She died a day after they took that picture. What is this one?

Tons of them. Mournidine. Now she can cook breakfast again. When you prescribe new Mournidine. Mournidine. Mournidine. What is Mournidine? It's that you take it in the morning.

It wakes you up. Wow, she can make breakfast again. Thanks, honey. Fuck, she's bouncing off the world. Yeah, she's going to put a line on that spatula after she's done. That's great. Yeah, I think there was a time where people didn't understand how bad that stuff was for you. There's probably a lot of people on it.

Right. Well, I think we're probably going through a similar period now where all kinds of stuff is being prescribed that we're gonna find out 50 years from now like oh really like we prescribed Adderall to 50 million children or whatever it was I sure like it's gonna seem monstrous I think sure some someday Prozac Adderall yeah and then the numbers of SSRIs that are prescribed needlessly. Who knows how many people actually need those things versus how many people are just having a bad day and went to the doctor and they give you something that numbs you up. Right, right.

And how many schools are mandated to put a bunch of kids on these drugs? I think probably in hindsight some of that is going to look really bad. Oh, for sure. I mean, we're experimenting. Experimenting on people's brains and absolutely these pharmaceutical companies have billions of dollars in massive influence and they're making it so this stuff

is okay. Maybe just have a look at the number of people that are dying, just dying from opiate pills. If those were illegal drugs, we'd be saying there's a goddamn epidemic absolutely yeah yeah but they uh there's no question that it's a conscious strategy to get people hooked and and get them taking those pills for in every conceivable scenario so that they will seek them out in other areas you know know, non-legally.

I think, but some prosecutor is going to have to figure out some way to get, to hold some of those companies accountable because they're definitely doing that on purpose. But even if they do, it seems like they just, it's like the tobacco thing. They get paid, you know, they pay off a few billion dollars. It's barely scratches a dent in them. They write it all off, jack up the price of everything a little bit. Over the course of 10 years, it balances itself out to zero. Right, right, right. A couple of movies will be made, but the same thing will happen going forward.

Yeah, exactly. Like that Russell Crowe movie, The Insider. The Insider, yeah. That was great. Yeah, it was a good movie. It was a good movie. It was actually kind of more a movie about the death of the press, as as it turned out than it was a movie about the death of the tobacco industry but um yeah it was it was really interesting um what is it like being a reporter and being a journalist

rather today with all this fake news talk like this this is a new thing this whole calling something fake news right there's there certainly is manufactured stories and things that just aren't true websites that are just designed to get people to click on them and they may have crazy stories it didn't really happen right but they're pretty obvious right yeah and I think a lot of what people call fake news is just news that is very heavily slanted in one direction and you know people people think a lot of what people call fake news is just news that is very heavily slanted in one direction. And people talk a lot about how Fox is fake news. Well, most of the time when you watch Fox, what they're just doing is they're selectively picking out stories that they know are going to rile up their elderly, freaked out, terrified audience.

And so they pick out the four or five things that actually happened around the world. They can do that without lying. You know, they don't have to make the stuff up. They can find the lineup of facts that they want. But, you know, working as a journalist now is very, very different. The business is undergoing extremely rapid change, and it's not something that we really have reckoned with. We haven't sat down and had a discussion about where this is all going

and how we can fix it, because the business is changing in a way that is extremely negative, and no one's talking about how to reverse that. Like long form investigative reporting is started to disappear in the 80s, but it's accelerated to the point where there's almost none of that now. Almost everybody who works in the business

is doing quick hits and there's almost no time left to do kind of real hardcore investigative work. And we've trained our audiences also to be unable to consume that kind of stuff. So, you know, we're all basically doing clickbait now. And I think it's a really dark time in our business. Well, it's also this weird time transitioning between paper and digital and trying to get people to pay for digital. I mean, I subscribe to a few of them online, Washington Post, New York Times, where you pay.

But I don't think very many people are doing that. No. It's probably a small amount of people that are paying. Right. You know, I think the New York Times gives you like 10 articles a month or something like that for free. Right. And they're like, come on, man, you're here every day.

Right. Time to pay up. Right. You know, they give you like a little countdown and you're like, oh, this is a good article. All right, I'm going to pay. Yeah. And this is a fascinating sort of subplot to what happened to the media business because a lot of that is because of something that Google did a long time ago.

They had this thing called the first click rule, which is sort of mandated that all news sites have at least some free content or else the algorithm would push the news story far down on the search results. So if you didn't have free content on your site, if you didn't meet Google's first click rule, when you search for a news story, you just wouldn't find it. So all of these, in the early days of sort of digital journalism, all the news companies offered their content basically for free. And that trained audiences to not pay for journalism, basically. And it's pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle

and tell everybody to go back and pay for everything. It just doesn't work that way. So we're in this place where everybody's sort of consuming free media. And not only that, there's this additional problem of the Internet platforms like Facebook and Google pushing news that they already know people are going to agree with to users. So there's sort of less news that challenges people. They're just not going to see it, you know, because that's not the way the algorithms work. The algorithms are really confusing. So the algorithms like will actively pick out things they think you'll be interested in. So if you're someone who's got a particular set of interests,

it becomes sort of an echo chamber. Your Google search becomes an echo chamber. I have that Google News app on my phone. I'll check it every morning, see what's going on, but it's all shit that I'm interested in. Right, right. It's probably a little bit worse on Facebook than it is on Google, because Google, you at least have some control

over what you search for. Right. But even Google will prompt you with things, right? But with both of them, yeah, they're accumulating lots and lots of information about not only about what you read, but about the things that you buy, the movies that you watch,

what your predilections probably are, what your opinions, your political stances. And so they pick out news stories that they think you're likely to endorse or spend a lot of time reading, which likely means that you're never going to see a news story that says you personally are responsible for something bad, right? That's like thing one. You will see a lot of news stories that say your neighbor is responsible for something bad. And that's one of the reasons why like divisiveness is a conscious commercial strategy. It's just, it's a natural result of a lot of this, a lot of these behaviors.

What is the mean age of people that are watching Fox News? You're talking about like old people freaking out. Is it really? Yeah, it's something ridiculously old. And that's true of all the cable networks. Even MSNBC? Yeah, even MSNBC. It's worse with Fox and CNN. And I don't want to misquote it,

but I know they're all above 65. So TV is... 68, you're right. Look at that. Median age of primetime Fox News. Do we have MSNBC? MSNBC, 65. The Youngins, CNN, 60.

Oh, they're little kids. Wow. Yeah. And so a lot of that has to do with the fact that young people just don't watch television, right? Right. They're done. Yeah, they're done. So they're getting their news some other way.

They're not getting it. Well, yeah, they're not getting it. Or they're not getting it. Netflix and YouTube videos. Right. They're getting almost no news Right, exactly It's opposed to when I was a kid

I used to deliver newspapers I've read newspapers quite a bit Did you? Yeah, did you do the Globe? Yeah, I did the Globe Where was your route? Let's see, I had one in Hingham I had one in Norwell

Wow I did mostly Newton. Newton, okay. Yeah, I did the Globe. I did the Herald, Boston Herald, and I delivered the New York Times for a while. Wow. But just so I didn't – like the New York Times is interesting because it didn't pay as well, and there were larger routes. Like you had to go much further because there was very few houses that would get the times.

Right. But you felt like you were doing something special delivering the New York Times. The prestige. Yeah. And they had clear blue plastic bags. Oh, wow. It was different. The Times had a blue bag.

Like the Boston Globe had clear bags. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You would deliver those in clear bags, but the Times had a blue bag. The Herald should have been in a brown paper bag, like a porno or something like that. Yeah, right? Do they deliver the Daily News and the Post in New York? Does that get delivered? Yeah, I mean, they must.

Yeah, they have subscriptions, and the Times is – the Daily News definitely does have delivery for sure. Yeah, I would think so. But that – and I just spent a lot of time writing about this. That model where newspapers had this direct relationship with their readers, right? Like they not only owned the content and created the content, but they also completely controlled the distribution, right? They had the trucks, they had the paper kids like us, right? That was all part of what gave the press its power is that we had the unique ability to reach all these people. Well, once the internet came along, they cut that in half, right? So now the distribution is all Google and Facebook,

and the content is all being made by somebody else. So it makes it very difficult to make money, A. And then, B, you just don't have that personal relationship with the consumer anymore, which is a completely different sort of paradigm. Do you think there's a connection? I'll ponder this myself. It seems like in the early days of the internet, a big factor with the music industry for sure was Napster. Napster came along and then people got this initial taste of getting a bunch of stuff that you normally paid for for free. Just get tons of it. And then so the internet sort of got

associated with being a free thing. And then there was BitTorrent. And through BitTorrent, you can get films and all kinds of different stuff. You could download movies and people just started filling up hard drives with this stuff that they would get off of BitTorrent. and people just started filling up hard drives with this stuff that they would get off of BitTorrent. And in my mind, at least, it became this connection with the Internet. Stuff's free. There's so much stuff free. Like, why would I pay for this?

The Internet's free. And I've tried to say this to friends who get involved with podcasting who have come over from radio. Like, there's friends that have been fired from radio jobs. Like, you know what? I'm just going to start a podcast and charge people five bucks a month. But as soon as you do that, people are like, why the fuck would I pay? Why would I get Adam Carolla for free?

Joey Diaz for free? Why would I pay $5 for you? Right. Yeah, absolutely. No, the audience expectations now are that they're going to get free content. Everything's free. Yeah. Everything's free. Yeah. Everything's free. And obviously that has huge consequences because that forces people who create the content

to get the money from somewhere else. They either have to be sponsored by an advertiser who might have certain expectations, but it's certainly not good for the people who make content that it's like that. Yeah. And it creates, I think, a lot of bad habits with the readers, too. I mean, they just, rather than look for the best stuff, they just look for what's available and what they can read for free. Also, I think it opens up the door to all this wacky advertising

where pop-up ads and scroll-down ads. Like you try to scroll down a screen and the ad follows with you. Oh, God. It's so annoying, right? It's weird. They're so invasive and they're everywhere. Even on really good websites. Like say if you go to CNN, you get the real stories.

And then below you get this stuff that looks like stories but there's a very faint print that says paid content. Right. And then you look at it like you're not going to believe what she looks like now. What does she look like now? And then you click and you can't even- Oh, the outbrain, yeah. Yeah, you can't even find out what she looks like now because you've got to go through 40 other people that look like shit now too.

And then finally you get- and sometimes you don't even get to the original one. So you're confused. Like I think it's better if they don't satisfy you because then you just go back to the rest of the site. Wow, what does he look like now? And then you go to all these different – there's like one of those pages that you go to where there's just dozens and dozens of windows and boxes that you can click on. Right. It's just dozens and dozens of windows and boxes that you can click on of different individual clicky-bait stories where you go to each one of them and they'll take you to 40 pages of different people that have gained weight or lost weight or are poor now or whatever it is. But that's – I mean I think it's – one of the things that's really bad about that is that if you spend enough time doing that, your brain stops being able to do other things.

You know, like when you're reading books, books require you to sit there and construct in your head all the visuals for everything that you're reading. You have to imagine what the people look like. You have to, you know, do all this mental work to construct the scene. So your brain is actively engaged in this really highly specific and creative way. But the internet now just has it moving from place to place, clicking from place to place, going from sensation to sensation. You don't have to ponder anything. You don't have to have an opinion about anything. You don't have to ponder anything. You don't have to have an opinion about anything. You don't have to look at both sides of anything. You just have to move from one thing to

another to the next thing, which is what you're talking about with Trump. That's the way his brain works, right? And I think it's a bad thing. It's not only bad in itself, but it makes it impossible for us to do the other thing, which know, which is, which is more constructive. Yeah, no, it's almost like mental range of motion. Like if you are somehow or another, your joints were restricted where you could only like move a certain amount after a while, you would lose your full range of motion. Absolutely. It gets atrophied. I mean, I have, I have a harder time reading books now than I did when I was, you know,

probably 11 years old. Right. And, and that's just from, and you're a writer, right? I'm a writer. I mean, I love it, but you know, I, I still, I find that I have a harder time doing the work, you know? Uh, and that's difficult. Or like when I was, when I was younger, I read more fiction, which, which is harder because it requires you to do more, you know, sort of mental construction work. Um, now it's much, if I'm going to read a book, it's typically nonfiction, which is linear, which is an argument, right? It's, it's, um, it's,

it's less, it requires less work of the reader, right? It may be just as interesting, but it just requires less work. Uh uh so like the hardest thing to read is you know anna karenina or something like that right because you you have to not only think but you have to construct but with your if you're just reading you know the diary of kim kardashian or something like that you're just you're just kind of listening to somebody you know going like that so i i think it's bad i think all this stuff is negative but i don't know maybe i'm an old fogey about it well i i definitely think it's bad i think all this stuff is negative but i don't know maybe i'm an old fogey about it well i i definitely think it's not the most ideal in terms of constructing a

healthy mind right right but but it's what we got yeah and it's it's weird it's a weird time absolutely and it's and you know there's there's lots of positive things the positive things are like that anybody can have a voice now and anybody who has something interesting to say can be instantly elevated and have an audience overnight. And that's great, right? of entertainment people who really tightly controlled who got access to what, who got to have an audience. And now you get to bypass that entirely and sort of directly appeal to people, which is great. I mean, that's an amazing thing.

But then you get YouTube stars. Right, yeah, exactly. And you get Lil Tay. Right, yeah. I went down a Lil Tay rabbit hole the other day, you fucking asshole. Jamie told me about Lil Tay. He told down a Lil Tay rabbit hole The other day You fucking asshole Jamie told me about Lil Tay He told me about Lil Tay So I went down this crazy rabbit hole

And then I read this Jezebel article About another writer Who went down a Lil Tay rabbit hole And so I went down that rabbit hole Oh my god Wait who is Lil Tay Wait Lil Tay is a nine year old girl

Who is famous now On the internet For talking shit and showing all the money she has and all the things she buys. You don't know about Lil Tay? No, no. This is the death of society. Okay. Lil Tay is the death of society. Lil. Lil Tay.

Can we see him now? Yes, for sure. Oh. Meet Lil Tay, the youngest flexer of the century who makes Cash Me Outside Girl look like a scholar. She's fucking nine, dude. Okay? I have a nine-year-old.

All right? This is crazy. Play this video, Jamie, so he can understand what Lil Tay is all about. That's her revving up her Lamborghini. She gets out. I just bought a Lamborghini. She gets out. Bitch, I just bought a Lamborghini. Y'all bitches can't afford this shit, okay?

I'm the youngest flex of the century. Me and my boy Jake Paul, I'm your flex and only broke-ass hater. Tell him what's up, Jake. Tell him, Jake. She's throwing money around. Look at this. Bitch, I just bought a Lambo. and gentlemen The next president of the United States He's bowing in the background

This is what we're doing This is what society is doing today This makes Honey Boo Boo look like Marie Curie. You know what I mean? That's great. God damn, it's got 337,000 likes. God damn it, Jamie. What have you done?

We all hear stunting on all y'all broke-ass haters. 500K in cash, and this Lambo costs more than your college tuition. I'm nine, and I ain't got no license apparently all our shit's rented you know I'm embarrassed to admit this but I would watch this over reading my own articles

so what the fuck I might as well just give up now what to do what to do what do we do? What do we do? Where's little Tay in 40 years? That's what I want to know. Where's little Tay? The White House.

Definitely the White House. Where else? After Kanye's children win. She's going to be next. I mean, that's an interesting thought exercise, though. Like, where do you go down from Donald Trump? I mean, because the progression has to go down right we all thought that because i remember when bush was president and like our talking to reporters bush used to do this thing where he would carry around a biography

of dean aitchison um for weeks and weeks and weeks just to prove to reporters that he could read and we all used to joke with each other, like nobody's stupider than this is ever going to be president, right? And now, you know, you look back and Bush is, you know, he's like Einstein compared to Trump. I had a joke that I did back in my Netflix special from 2005

when Bush was in office where it was a bunch of people were trying to figure out how dumb people are. And they're like, the only way, they're like, there's speculation, like, let's get a smart guy to act dumb. Like, no, no, no, you got to get a real dumb guy. Otherwise, we'll never know. You got to have a real dumb guy.

And then so they get the real dumb guy and they do a bunch of things, you know, they vote him in a second time. And then someone in the back of the room goes, I think we can go dumber. And this is where we are. This is a bit from 2005. But here we're 13 years later. Life imitates art. We went way dumber.

That's right. Went to 11. Bush seems super reasonable in comparison to some of the shit that trump says in terms of like supreme court rulings and like um there was a supreme court ruling that went against bush's way while he was in office and he had a really reasonable response he was like of course we're disappointed but we have to abide by the court and their ruling and you know it was like something you would never hear Trump say. You'd never hear him say something like that. No, absolutely.

I mean, I look back and Bush seems to me almost like a Scandinavian statesman compared to Donald Trump. Lil Tay. Tell Lil Tay. Lil Tay, she would go to the White House, too. You know, a lot of people did want to go to the White House for the inauguration. Lil Tay will go. She'll go. I mean, the White House, it's going gonna look like the white house and idiocracy when

she's when she's in there right i mean it's it's uh it's it's gonna be terrible but well that was a weird time too right like during the inauguration when no celebrities wanted to go and they had to dig out like really weird like real fucking on the outskirts celebrities. Oh, yeah. And the same thing with the RNC. I remember I covered the RNC and they had to have Scott Baio do one

of the first day speeches. Yeah, Scott Baio's a huge supporter. I know Scott. I know him personally. He's a very nice guy. I'm sure he is. Super nice guy. But'm sure he is. Super nice guy. Yeah, yeah. But that was their A-list for the Republican National Convention.

Outside of, you know, like the Hannity's and those type fellas. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah, it's just weird. It just seems like everything's off. Like we skip dimensions. We like jolted over this was, but it would kind of seem like the world. Right. Well, this is, it's kind of like what we're talking about. We were talking about before. I mean, previously, like the

entertainment industry, politics was tightly controlled by a small group of cigar-chomping people who sat in the back room. And in both parties, they carefully outlined a sort of narrow range of acceptable political opinions. And in one party, you could be all the way up to somebody like Ron Paul, but they tended to put somebody like George Bush as the candidate. But, you know, there was no directly appealing to the electorate and asking them who they wanted to be the candidate. I mean, Donald Trump is really the first internet president. He completely bypassed that entire oligarchy. He didn't have to go through, you know, the priesthood to get to be president, which on the one hand is evidence of a good thing, because it's actually

more democratic than the system was before, where it was pretty much closed to everybody, except for a few people who paid their dues through this system. But Trump directly, you know, just by being famous and just by attracting media attention, he was able to bypass all the usual tests and bypass the party's, you know, decision-making process. And he got to be president, but he's like little Tay, right? I mean, he just represents the dumber side of us as opposed to the more enlightened side of us. So it's hard to know what to think about it. I mean, when I was covering it, I thought on the one hand, this is evidence that the electorate is breaking away from being told who to vote for. On the other hand, the first time they take that freedom out for a test drive,

this is what they pick. I mean, I don't know. Well, at least it throws a giant monkey wrench into the gears. Right. Yeah, absolutely. It's certainly done that. Yeah. But you know, what, what the result of that will be is, is yet to be determined. Yeah. I mean, it could be the end of civil. I said this before that, you know, when I was covering the Trump run, part of me wanted to write it as a comedy. Like all the early stories were like highly comic. I was trying to write about the funny aspect of it. And then after he became president, it's like, well, this is either the funniest thing that's ever happened in America or it's the end of civilization, right? make it funnier that it's the end of civilization I don't know I mean you're the era comic so you know I should I should ask you I don't know

either it's well it's all depending upon how it plays out right I mean civilizations have absolutely fallen in the past with this idea that civilization won't fall in my opinion is akin to the people that live on the Big Island thinking that the volcano won't erupt again. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. It happened. It's going to happen again. So all our ideas about maintaining civilization are an attempt to prolong this state or mitigate any possible disastrous effects of collapse. But it's going to fall apart.

Of course, yeah. of collapse, right? But it's going to fall apart. Of course, yeah. And it's an old system that was constructed on scrolls by people writing with feathers that really had no idea what the future had in store. Right. They didn't know what the future had in store. They had no idea.

They would have been terrified by a toothbrush. Yes. Right. Well, certainly by a fucking airplane and cellular communication. We live in a world that requires a completely new set of rules and guidelines. And, you know, this has always been the article against the Second Amendment. Like, okay, they had muskets when they wrote this. They didn't have AR-15s.

They didn't have.50 caliber guns that can kill things when they miss them. We were playing a video yesterday of a guy shooting a deer with a.50 caliber rifle and he misses the deer and it still kills the deer. The bullet going past the deer's head, just the sheer force of it, blows the deer's brains out

and falls down dead. That actually happened? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to watch it? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we'll pull it up. Keep that one on favorites, too. Make a folder for shit we repetitively talk about. Yeah, when I was embedded in Iraq, they took me out, and the guys apparently for recreation,

they cut cars in half with.50 calibers. Jeez. Yeah. Here's the gun now watch this he misses boom and watch It just falls down dead From the bullet passing it This is like Jesus it just whizzed by it, and the force of the bullet passing by...

He's psyched, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. But watch the slow-mo. It just falls down. He's like, thank God this guy's got camo on. He's a million miles away, literally sitting on a bench. He's on a bench shooting something in the distance.

But he picks this deer up and the deer's brains are just completely scrambled. No bullet wound at all. Nothing. No hole. Dead. That's a horror movie waiting to happen. That deer's going to wake up in the middle of the night and

reanimate and oh, what happened? So his brain's coming out of the ears? Is that what's happening? It's coming out of the ears everything's coming out of the ears yeah just from the sheer force of the bullet passing it jesus that's yeah this is not all i'm saying is it would be a good time to reconsider how we run things right and i think one of the good things about having a guy like trump in office is maybe we should sit down and say hey we probably shouldn't have a popularity contest to see who controls the nukes. Right.

Yeah. See who's the commander in chief of the greatest army the planet has ever known. Right. By far the most destructive force the planet has ever known. Shouldn't we at least find out if he's on diet pills? Right. Shouldn't we at least, shouldn't we say, Mr. President, we'd like a urine sample from you. Yeah, exactly.

They test your pee if you work at UPS. Right. You know? Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think there should be more than a pee test for launching a nuclear strike, definitely.

There should be a lot of changes. Yeah. And one thing I'm hoping is that this presidency and the whole idea of having a popularity contest will allow people to realize, first of all, we shouldn't have one alpha chimp running things. That's an antiquated idea that was really great in a tribe of 50 nomads. Right. You get them together and you have the wisest, strongest one with the most battle experience.

That guy should be running things. He knows more than I do. Right. I get it. Let's vote for Ork. Ork is the guy with the most battle experience that guy should be running things he knows more than i do right i get it let's vote for orc orc orc is orc's the guy with the knowledge you know it makes sense but when there's 350 million people and you have the ability to manipulate things and you have tweets and facebook posts and you can make wacky little tay videos we're not designed for this no no and we have some structures that rely on the popularity contest and some that have, the public has no control over whatsoever,

like the federal reserve. Like it doesn't, a lot of it makes no sense at all. And, or how net neutrality got passed with five different people or how it got rescinded. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. No, I mean, the system doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Congress, and I'm covering congressional races now in the run-up to 2018, and the process is almost 100% about money. It's just like, you know, I talked to a a guy who was, who jumped in the ring to run for a seat in the, in the 19th district. And he told me he calls up the national party and they, they basically had two, two questions for him. Like, can you raise $300,000 within the next three months? And can you raise a million dollars by election day? And, you know, that was the whole of the

conversation. And, and it has to be based on more than something more than how much money can you raise uh we have to do that there has to be another variable for picking leaders uh beyond you know how much cash can you get your hands on the next few months do you see that rosie o'donnell got in trouble for uh raising money under various names and donating too much money to Roy Moore's opponents. Wow. Yeah. What exactly happened? I read that she had used a website that she thought should have stopped her from donating the extra amount because it was being divvied amongst many people and that it should have been returned to her.

being divvied amongst many people and that it should have been returned to her which i i don't know enough about it that uh candidates are supposed to return extra funds once they've crossed over the amount that a individual is supposed to give i guess that happens but it didn't happen in these cases and it should have happened and i don't know doesn't she know how much you're supposed to donate isn't there's free that's what she was saying she's 2700 right she used a website, and she just gave a mother shitload of money, I think. Oh, I see. But I thought she used different names.

I don't know about that part. I didn't hear about that part. We should probably look that up. Yeah, that was one of the sort of stories that wasn't followed up after 2016, but it was one of the things that came out in those hacked DNC things was that there was a little bit of a scam going on in terms of, as you said, the individual donation limit is pretty small. It's like $2,700 for an individual.

So a couple, it's $5,400. So what they would do is they would host these dinners with with celebrities like you know george clooney and a bunch of his friends and uh they would raise all this money and theoretically the money was supposed to go only a tiny portion of it to the presidential campaign the rest of it's supposed to go to the regional parties but what was actually happening according to politico anyway was that the money was basically going to the parties and then going immediately back to the presidential campaign. And a lot of the people who gave the money didn't even know that that was happening and they were upset about it. But that was a story that wasn't

followed up after 2016. Yeah, there's just entirely too much money. Entirely too much money in politics, but how would you ever do it without the money. Yeah, entirely too much money in politics. But how would you ever do it without the money? Now, once the money's in? How do you pull it out? How do you say no, no, no, no more influence? No more special interest groups? lobbyists are illegal? Yeah, I mean, I think they should, they should probably have very brief publicly funded elections where the course of time is maybe five weeks. Oh, is this the O'Donnell thing? Yeah, it says O'Donnell donated $4,700 to Alabama Senator Doug Jones in his special election against Roy Moore. $3,600 to Pennsylvania Rep. Conard Lamb for the special general electorate he won in March.

$2,950 to California Rep. Adam Schiff for his primary. $4,200 to Illinois congressional candidate Lauren Underwood for her primary run. And $3,450 to Omar Vade, a congressional candidate in Staten Island in Brooklyn. Nothing nefarious. Rosie O'Donnell says, I was not choosing to over-donate. $2,700 cutoff. Candidates should refund the money, she wrote. I don't look to see who I can donate most to.

I just donate assuming they do not accept what is over the limit. Right. Yeah. I don't know how convinced I am by that explanation, but it doesn't really matter because the reality is there are a million ways that you can legally give money to campaigns now that, you know, a 501c3 or whatever it is that buys an ad that will help the candidate just as much as the, you know, as it would if you don't donate it directly. So, you know, in the post-Citizens United universe, this is, this, this is a, it's a story. But, you know, the bigger story is that you can basically, very rich people and companies can basically spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns. Yeah, this whole story is over, what was that, all told, $4,000 or $5,000 most? Yeah.

Not a lot. No, I don't have feelings one way or another about Rosie O'Donnell, but that doesn't make me outraged terribly. Well, Trump hates her, which is what's fascinating about it all. Yeah. Well, he got a big bump from talking about her in the debate, and that was another thing that he did very early on, is he clued into the fact that people hate journalists, and they hate Hollywood actors.

And so he made sure as much as possible to talk about all the groups, the major food groups of hate in America, right? Like immigrants, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood actors, and reporters. And those were the staples of his routine. And it worked. I mean, it was smart on his part. I think particularly the targeting of journalists was brilliant because he was able to portray us as the wealthy elite. And he's the billionaire, but he's pointing the finger at us as, oh, look, they're the guardians of rich America, which worked and was a brilliant thing. It's just it's unprecedented. When was the last time any presidential, well, maybe Nixon complained about them at the time, but I believe it was privately.

Yeah. Well, he hated the press pretty openly. I mean, he had that 1962 press conference where he's like, you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Right, right. where he's like, you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Right, right. And from all accounts, he was an incredibly profane, nasty person in private, and he only talked to a few reporters.

I mean, I think all politicians hate reporters. If they don't, there's probably something wrong with them because the press corps in most cases really is is really is out to get them. Um, or at least is, is dangerous, you know, uh, but with Trump and Nixon, it was about being kicked out of the White House and not being able to fly with Trump and the sort of separation between the president and the press corps and the fact he doesn't show up at the White House Correspondents Dinner. As a reporter, my response to that is, so what? We should be on the outside. I don't shed a tear about that.

I think it's very strange, the response in our business that, oh, I don't shed a tear about that. I think it's very strange, the response in our business that, oh, you know, we're not, we don't get to be hanging around with the president and, you know, pal around behind the rope line with them anymore. Like, we should be adversarial, I think. Yeah. Well, as long as you're honest and accurate, yeah. Yeah. I mean, not even adversarial, but not connected. Right. It's kind of a separation of church and state thing for me. I had an experience when I covered the Obama campaign. And I like Barack Obama as a candidate in 2008.

I was really impressed by him. But I remember going into the plane the first time, going back into the press section, and I see that there's photos all over the walls of the campaign plane. And apparently, there's a tradition where each of the reporters had like a little sort of high school yearbook photo taken with the candidate where, you know, they got their arm around Obama, and they're posing. And it was a tradition to kind of put the photo up on the wall. And I'm like, you know, this is not a good look for the press corps.

Even if you like the guy, you've got to, you know, at least pretend to have a little bit of that. The mode is supposed to be there, you know what I mean? It's certainly influential. It's certainly going to have some sort of an influence on you. Yeah, yeah, it's just a bad look. Like what happens if you do a story about the guy that's complimentary and it comes out that, you know, you've put a picture of yourself with your arm around the guy. You know what I mean? And, you know, kind of grumpy people who instantly deface the posters of, you know, powerful people, you know, whenever they get a chance and throw darts at pictures of them and stuff like that.

Like that's who they kind of used to be. And you see there's people that are jockeying the position to potentially run in, you know, the next election. Obviously, the 2018 elections, but in 2020 for president. You see people that are moving into position. You see these congressional candidates that are showing promise. What is it when you're covering this? What's the feeling of the future

from these races? So what is it from the standpoint of reporters? Yeah. Well, first of all, the holy grail of reporting is to latch on to a politician before they become famous and before they become president and follow them all the way, and that way you get to be the insider who gets invited into the Oval Office. So it's like a, it's a big thing that a lot of reporters kind of dream of is to latch on early to somebody like Bill Clinton and become the sort of favored reporter on that beat. outset of presidential elections, you'll often see a lot of jockeying within newsrooms to see who gets to cover which campaign because, um, people always want to pick the winner because they think they're going to get a book deal out of it at the end and they're going to end up having

their own show on, on MSNBC or whatever. But the, um, but yeah, I mean the, what's the feeling right now? Like who, who are people coalescing around? Is that what you're asking? That too, yeah. Well, I think there's the expectation is that some of the same people are going to be involved. I think there's a lot of belief that Bernie's going to run again, but then there's also Kamala Harris. There's Cory Booker.

You know, people believe that those folks are going to run. But oddly enough, the press corps is less focused on that than they would be normally. I think the only story that matters to political reporters right now is the Russiagate Trump thing. And they're following that and kind of hoping that will be some, the thing that happens instead of the 2020 election, you know, that they're, they're the big,

the big sort of trial of Donald Trump is what everybody's kind of waiting for. Well, the recent take on that is that there is some sort of a connection between Russian oligarchs and Michael Cohen, right? There's some, right.

That's the, the Vexelberg, uh, payment. Uhberg payment. I just heard about that this morning, so I can't say that I know a whole lot about that. What would that payment be for? When was it? It was allegedly after the election, so that would be a story. I mean, I've gotten a lot of criticism because I've been a little bit of a skeptic on the Russiagate front. Not so much that I don't believe it, but I just kind of think the press should be a little careful about it. But if that's true, yes, that's a big story. If Cohen really was in Prague, that's also a really big story.

But we'll have to see what really comes out of that. It's just such an unusual moment in history. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, it's as unstable as American history has been in our lifetime, certainly, right? Sure. I would think.

Maybe ever. Yeah. Or close to it from the Civil War on. Yeah. Yeah. Or close to it from the Civil War on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you add in the fact that we've had concerns about nuclear conflict with two different nations, right, since Trump has been elected, I mean, there's the North Korea thing. And then there's the fact that we've had military exchanges where Russian mercenaries reportedly have died. That's certainly unnerving.

The nuclear clock, which was established, the doomsday clock, which was established way back in the 50s, has us at the most dangerous point since 1953. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And at a time, in their estimation, I forget what the organization is actually called,

but I think it's Physicians for Social Responsibility. But this right now is more dangerous than the KA-7 shooting, the Cuban Missile Crisis. We're at a moment that's incredibly tense between these two countries. More so than the Cuban Missile Crisis. In their estimation, yeah. Who's estimating this? It's called the doomsday clock.

You can find it. What are they using as a metric? I guess they're just reading the news like everybody else. But, you know, they, I don't know, it's oft derided by people in Washington as being too hysterical. But, you know, it is an indicator. And the people who do it, I think, are the same people who won a Nobel Prize last year for the sort of anti-nuclear, the UN ban on nuclear weapons. So... Do you remember after 9-11, we used to have terrorist threat colors? have terrorist threat colors? Yeah, yeah. Robert Mueller was on the board.

Every day, they used to have a meeting of a group of people in the various intelligence agencies to decide what the color would be. Crazy yellow. Yeah, exactly. And what's fascinating about this, and I only heard about this because I wrote about this a few months ago, and I made a mistake by saying that the color used to toggle between red, which was the highest, and green, which was the lowest. But apparently not once in its entire history was it ever green. Like they never had threat level low even once in its history so we were oh we were always some level of anxiety but those those were weird times too remember that when they used to kind of tell us how scared we were supposed to be about about stuff and with a real simple distinction like colors right yeah today's orange holy shit it's orange dude be

careful are you gonna fly today it's orange yeah are you gonna go to an orange holy shit it's orange dude be careful are you gonna fly today it's orange yeah are you gonna go to an airport today fuck it's orange i'm not going to the super bowl right today's orange yeah crazy ever get to red oh yeah i think so and it had to have and then they just stopped right well so the the program uh it took a huge hit when one of the guys who was involved, who was the former head of Homeland Security, if I'm not mistaken, came out with a story that he had been told by some of the Bush people to jack up the color in advance of an election uh and um it was shortly after that story came out that they discontinued the program uh it came out in a book by by the former head of the homeland security so right before an election they were told time to go orange yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah because they wanted to rile them right i mean it was, yeah, yeah. Because they wanted to. People riled up. Right. I mean, it was this, you get people scared and they'll vote a certain way.

And yeah. So, yeah. Amazing times, though. Yeah. As a journalist, do you look at these times and say, this is great? This is great for business? Or do you more so look at it as a human being and go, this is just a fucking mess. And I wish we weren't so ridiculous.

So when I first started covering the Trump campaign, I thought this is the most awesome thing ever. Because that dynamic I was talking about before about reporters wanting to be on the ground floor with a future winner. Nobody wanted to be on the Trump campaign because nobody thought he was going to win. I was stoked to be assigned to cover Trump because I thought this is the most insane thing ever. Perfect for your style of journalism. Yeah, exactly. I thought this is the black comedy that I was sort of born to cover and born to write. This is the black comedy that I was sort of born to cover and born to write. And for the first, I don't know, five or six things that I wrote about Trump, I thought it was the most amazing, crazy, interesting story of my lifetime. And then it took this incredibly dark turn where he actually won. And I think it was a dark turn for him, too.

Yeah. There's no question about it. I mean, I knew some of the people in his campaign. I can't say this definitively, but I have a very good educated guess that they had absolutely no expectation of it ever even being close, let alone winning. And that they did this as a publicity stunt in the beginning, probably still the host of that fucking show while he was running for president. They fire him, and then Arnold takes over. People forgot already that Arnold Schwarzenegger was, for a very short time, you're fired. You're fired.

You're fired. He was the guy for a while. Yeah, they had that flame war, remember? Yes. Yeah, that was really weird. Yeah, fucking strange. But NBC might have given him the final. You know, he might have taken an extra diet pill that day and went, fuck it, we're going all in.

The wall got 10 feet higher. Yeah. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he's done with The Apprentice. Blames poor ratings on Trump involvement. Oh, that's hilarious. That's right. Yeah, they had that whole back and forth over who was to blame for the ratings. Listen,

as a host of that show, Donald Trump was great. He was the perfect guy to host that show. Arnold's too nice. It's not the right guy. He's not a billionaire asshole. You need a total jackass. Get it done, one of those guys.

You need one of those guys. You're fired. And the same thing that made Trump perfect for that show made him perfect as the main protagonist in campaign coverage, which is actually really just a really long, super boring reality show, or at least it used to be until Trump came along. Trump completely changed the dynamic of it. You know, if you're thinking of it in terms of how it looks to a network, what were the networks thinking before?

If they were going to have people like Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham be the stars of their lead reality show, like, let's get a real performer in there, right? And when they did, when Trump entered the fray and became a real candidate and started getting votes, suddenly news started making money, like real money for the first time. And there's an amazing data point right now, which is that the public trusts the press less than ever, right? They believe the things that we say less than ever. All the polls show this, that there's been a dramatic downturn in how much people will put stock in the things that people like me say, right? But they're watching television news more than they ever have by a lot. So what do those two data points say

together, put together, that people are consuming news not as news, but as entertainment? They're watching it more, right? So we've, you know, CNN made over a billion dollars last year. They're just eating into the entertainment budget. That's all they're doing. And it's all Trump, which is fascinating and kind of horrifying, but really interesting, too. Isn't that also what he played upon when he was running? Like, he would say outrageous shit so they would cover him, and that essentially gave him free press. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

And there was no doubt in my mind that he was doing that intentionally. I remember watching him in New Hampshire where he's giving a speech, and you probably remember this. This woman stood up up and said Ted Cruz is a pussy right yes and uh and Trump looks over at her and he says oh that's terrible that's terrible she just said a terrible thing about Ted Cruz right and I remember I remember him looking over at the at the riser where all the cameras are. And you could see him thinking. He's thinking, it's a story for six hours if she says it. It's a story for three days if I say it.

And he thinks and he goes, she just said that Ted Cruz is a pussy. And next thing you know, it completely dominated the news. And he understood the dynamic of how the news works better than even the people in the news understood it. Well, certainly better than Ted Cruz. Yeah, that's for sure. Ted Cruz, the recent praise of Trump, and then they go back to what he said during the campaign. Oh, my God, yeah. No one should ever listen to him ever again about anything. Oh, yeah. No It's no one should ever listen to him ever again about anything. Oh, yeah.

No, it's hilarious. Ted Cruz, you know, first of all, my favorite part of that whole campaign was the thing that he couldn't shake about being the Zodiac Killer. And reporters would give him shit about it. Like, we would talk amongst each other, like other like who's gonna ask him about it next you know and and um and everybody knew that it was it was bullshit you know that he was born after the killing started and everything all that stuff but somebody would always make it a point to say so what do you think about the you know the rumors about and you could see that it just it completely drove him to distraction he didn't know how to how to make a joke out of it. Well, I know you're a Hunter S. Thompson fan,

so you're probably aware of what Hunter did to Ed Muskie. Oh, yeah, the Ibogaine thing. Yeah, absolutely. He went crazy. Yeah. I mean, literally went crazy. Hunter, what was it on the Dick Cavett show that he talked about it? Well, there was a rumor that he had taken Ibogaine,

and I knew about that rumor because I started it. And he drove that guy crazy to the point where you see – I think it was in New Hampshire. He was giving a political campaign speech, and he broke down. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He cried. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, so Hunter did this great thing he he he wrote about it it was it was kind of a spoof of campaign coverage because he he he did this whole uh campaign diary and then he just kind of went into this deadpan uh recitation of what sounded like a breaking news story about him discovering uh musky's secret relationship with a witch doctor who was providing him with ibogaine and then then he dug up some file photo of musky that looked like this it was like all right and he they put you know musk ed musky in the grips of an ibogaine frenzy right was the caption and uh it was completely deadpan he never said he was kidding never never said it was you know not

like that was fiction and uh and muskie couldn't handle it i mean he was that was probably the first real political trolling that went on but uh and a brilliant one too because ibogaine is not even that kind of a drug. It's a drug that helps people get off drugs. Right, yeah, which is, oddly enough, illegal, right? Yeah, in America. In America. It's legal in a lot of places, but it's really great for people getting off opiates.

It's just a ferociously introspective drug that rewires the way your brain deals with addictions. It literally rewires the connections, alleviates addictions on a physical and psychological level. What's the, what does it feel like? I don't know. I haven't done that one. But I know quite a few people that have, that have had pill problems and have gone to Mexico

and taken, my friend Ed Clay, who has an actual center down there now. He started it after he had gone down there for treatment. He had a back injury, I believe it was, and got hooked on pills. And I was like, Jesus, I got to figure out a way to get off these fucking things. And did Ibogaine and then cleared it right up. Wow.

And he realized like, wow, like this is crazy that this is illegal. Yeah. So the one drug that Hunter chose was actually a drug that gets people off drugs, which is even more ironic. It just had a great name. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Brazilian doctor, brother. I have a gay treatment.

It's fucking awesome. That really was the original political troll. Yeah. Yeah. And might have had a giant effect in the election. Probably did. Oh, yeah. And might have had a giant effect in the election. Probably did. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I don't think it was an accident that Hunter's coverage was, you know, that he chose

that year to do these diaries. And I remember my father telling me about how every reporter would wait for Rolling Stone to come out that week so they could, you know, read the coverage of the election. But, you know, Hunter kind of took this unknown governor, you know, unknown senator from the Dakotas, George McGovern, and made him into this, because this like Christ figure, basically. Because this Christ figure, basically. I don't think that McGovern would have won the nomination without that sort of relentless hyping that he gave him. He probably would have won the presidency if it wasn't for the vice president having that issue with... He had gone through electroshock therapy. Eagleton, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That was terrible. But fascinating. Yeah, that was terrible. But fascinating. I got to write the introduction to the last version of that book, and that's one of my favorite books of all time.

It's a great fucking book. Yeah, I mean, it's such a crazy comic epic. Yeah. He was a big influence of yours. Yeah, definitely. you know yeah but he was a big influence of yours uh yeah you know i um definitely i mean i think the the great thing about hunter thompson um first of all he he just he was so incredibly funny in a way that was completely rare i mean you you can't just train to be that way. You either are born with that ability verbally or not. And he just had this completely strange four-dimensional way of looking at things. And, you know, he would watch a completely boring campaign speech.

And when he got done writing it up, it was like, you know, a psychedelic wrestling match or something like that. I mean, it was so much more interesting and bizarre and weird. And he saw all these great details. And he was just, I think it was a great approach to journalism. But, you know, sadly, there aren't that many people who can pull it off because it just required um you know surpassing literary talent and that's that's that's incredibly rare what was a unique combination of fiction writing along with like an actual understanding analysis yeah that was that was his his great because he because you're right he he he would bring you in and uh the uh the reader would would kind of surf along this

incredibly uh uh charged fast-paced uh uh narrative that read like you know the the fastest most engrossing fiction right but he would inter Spurs it with any and stop and pull back and do what we call it they're rolling stone we call them wisdoms right where you know you just sort of stop and say here's my take on this and those were amazing I mean he just he just had this ability to sort of cut through the bullshit and see things from an angle that nobody else saw. And that was a rare technique back then, the idea of the kind of individualized take on things. Nobody was doing that in reporting back then. I mean, it was, nobody even thought of it as a form that you could really experiment with. I mean, there were a few people back then like Terry Southern and Tom Wolfe who were, who were doing some things like that, but, but Thompson was completely unique. And there hasn't been anybody like him, you know, since, since then, I think, I think it's, it's not an accident that nobody's been able to pull that off again.

No. Well, you get compared to him a lot. And one way I really saw that comparison was your brilliant coverage of the financial crisis and what was the mechanisms behind the scene of the financial crisis. And I became a really big fan of your work reading that. Because that, I think you covered that as well, if not better than anybody. Oh, well, thanks.

Yeah, I mean, so I knew nothing about any, I couldn't even balance my checkbook when they assigned me to that story. And I had to start basically from square one. And I was calling people and saying things like, can you tell me something about something that I'll understand? You know, I was cold calling investment banks and literally saying that. And I finally got a guy to, to, um, have lunch with me.

And he said, your problem is that you're trying to understand this as an economic story. Once you look at it as a crime story, you'll get it. And from that point forward, I totally, I felt like I started to understand the whole mechanism, the subprime mortgage scam. It really was a scam. It really was a scam. It's really just a massive corporatized version of selling oregano as weed, basically. They took stuff that is incredibly worthless, highly risky mortgage loans. They would give out loans to everybody with a pulse. Whether you had a job or not, whether you were a citizen or not, didn't matter. Important thing was to get the loan, immediately sell it off, chop it up, turn it into securities. And then they used this highly advanced sort of mathematical trick to turn all that sort of mortgage hamburger into AAA-rated securities.

all that sort of mortgage hamburger into AAA-rated securities. So you'd have a junk-rated mortgage, the riskiest loan in existence, something that was so toxic that companies like CountryRide wouldn't want to hold onto it for more than a week because they were afraid the stuff would blow up. And then they would sell it off to a pension fund or an insurance company in the form of a AAA-rated security, which is as safe as a U.S. Treasury bond. So it was a scam. Again, the metaphor of taking baby powder and selling it as coke or whatever, that's exactly what it was.

They just took worthless shit and sold it as something that was gold. And they did it for years and years and years and years. And they knew that this gigantic, huge bubble of risk and disaster was just accumulating and that someday it was going to all explode and cascade and ruin the economy. But everybody was trying to time it right and bet on when that would happen and make their money before that judgment day came. And it was fascinating. Once I, once I started to learn about it, it was just such a, an amazingly disgusting, uh, fascinating story that, um, it was just hard not to, not to get into it. A crime story. Yeah. Think of it as a crime story.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I even got one guy gave me a book. was called Famous Con Artists in History. It was like this little tome. It's smaller than the smallest paperback. And it was the biography of this guy, Victor Lustig was his name. He was famous because he sold the Eiffel Tower twice. He was famous because he sold the Eiffel Tower twice, right? And he had this scam that he called, I think it was called the Hungarian Box. I'll have to go back and look.

But basically what he would do is he would get on a boat in New York, and he had this sort of beautiful mahogany box with a crank on it that had two holes in it. And he would show all the guests that he would put a blank piece of paper in one end, turn a crank, and a $100 bill would come out the other end. And he convinced them all that it was a machine that made money. And everybody would offer him an increasing amount of money for this invention, and he wouldn't sell it until the last day when he would sell it for $40,000 or $50,000, and then he would disappear and jump off the boat in France and never be seen again. There it is. Yeah, there it is. What's it called? I don't know it is. Yeah, there it is. What's it called?

I don't know. Wow. Yeah, there it is. But that's exactly what the mortgage... Is that his picture? Yeah. Let me see his face. It's in the middle there.

Look at that fucking creep. Look at him. Wow. Let me see that box again. Wow. That is crazy. So they, yeah, so it was obviously fake and, and, and, but that's what the mortgage scam was. They, they, they were taking basically blank paper, these, these subprime loans that belong to janitors who were going to foreclose within 10 minutes.

And they were telling people that, oh, we have this new mathematical process that actually makes this stuff really safe. And you can put it in your college endowment. You can put it in your pension fund. And so all these people you know whose retirement monies were based on securities were buying all this shit that they thought was was triple a rated and that's that's how they woke up you know in in 2008 2009 and they found their 401ks were were you know wiped out by 40 or whatever whatever it was. It's my neighbor. Really? Did that happen to him? Yeah. My neighbor bought this plot of land and had this dream to build his dream house.

And he would go by the plot of land, and he was always cleaning it up and getting ready, and I was talking to him, and then boom, 2008 happened. He lost everything, and he would still go by that plot of land and clean it up. And he and I would talk about it, and he just told go by that plot of land and clean it up and he and I would talk about it and they just told me he lost everything yeah so it's never gonna happen huh yeah no I think he uh I think he died he eventually got really sick and they they took him out of his house and brought him somewhere but I think he's dead now but yeah his uh his story was awful awful to hear this guy who was in his 60s who had got this piece of land with a nice view and was like,

this is where I'm going to build my dream house. And he had all this money prepared for it, all this money saved away, and he was ready to rock and roll. And then boom, it all went out. It just drained out. Somebody put a hole in the bottom of the boat and everything went to the bottom of the ocean. Then he probably got ripped off twice because his tax dollars went to go bail out the guys who

some of the banks got stuck holding some of this shit. Rather than eat the losses like your friend did, they got the Federal Reserve to buy it from them or the Treasury. How the fuck friend did they got the federal reserve to buy it from them yeah you know and and you know or or the treasury so how the fuck did they get away with giving the ceo's bonuses during that time yeah i mean giant bonuses during the time where the they had to be bailed out by the taxpayers

yeah that was another scam like so there were if you looked at the fine print of all the bailouts, it basically said that you had to repay the money by X time before you could start paying people exorbitant amounts of money again. were never really followed. And, you know, the conditions of repayment were kind of glossed over. And the companies that were supposed to be able to pass these things called stress tests, which demonstrated that they were back on solid footing again before they paid people bonuses, but the stress tests were all fudged. And, you know, I mean, there was crime and corruption, illegality basically in every direction during that whole period. And not just in the government, but in all these companies as well. Jesus. Yeah.

But fascinating to follow. Yeah. What was it like covering that? I mean, how long did you spend working on that? Seven years, probably. Jesus Christ. reaction because it turns out that the financial press, there is nobody in the financial press who writes for ordinary people. Like it's basically what I was doing was a translation job. I was trying to basically take what had happened and explain it in a way that a person who knew nothing

about finance would be able to understand. And it turns out that nobody's doing that. So all these people who had questions about it, who wanted to know what had happened to their money or why did my house get foreclosed on or what's a subprime mortgage or anything, there was nobody else doing that work. So I had lots of it to do and it was really interesting and I just kept doing it. Wow.

That had to be depressing. Yeah, oh, yeah, of course. Of course. I mean, most investigative reporting is depressing. But particularly that, because, I mean, a lot of it was old people that went under. Oh, my God. Old people, minorities. I mean, I did one story about a bank in Maryland. Well, it's a national bank. It's a bank that I wouldn't be surprised that a lot of people listening have their accounts at this bank. And they had to pay a settlement to the government because they were intentionally targeting elderly black people to sell subprime mortgages to.

And they called them mud people. And there were all these toxic emails going back and forth about how stupid they were and how they'll buy anything, et cetera, et cetera. In the emails, they called them mud people? Yeah, yeah. And so they had to pay settlement to the government. But the racial component of that crash was something that I didn't really clue into until late, but that was a big part of it too. It was, a lot of it involved these mortgage lenders

going into particularly like lower middle class black neighborhoods and knocking on doors where there'd be like an elderly person at home and saying, hey, would you like to refi your mortgage? And you'll have a little bit of extra spending money this month, right? And the person won't know anything about finance and they'll they'll sign this refinance deal that allows them to save a little bit of money each month, not knowing that they had just converted their fixed mortgage into a floating mortgage. And that has seen the interest rates changed. You know, you'd have people who went from paying nine hundred a month to paying $7,000 a month, right? And suddenly they're out in the street and the company that sold them the loan is long gone by then.

They're not holding it. As soon as they got her name on the dotted line, they sold it off to a bank in New York who in turn, again, chopped it up into hamburger and sold it probably to your pension fund or whatever. So there's nobody she can complain to. And yeah, that stuff was really depressing. What was it feeling like of having very little understanding about finance and then immersing yourself in it? Yeah, it was fascinating.

And then realizing that this is the underlying structure that our society is run on, that our money is established through. This is how we sell houses and loans and this is what we're doing? Yeah. Yeah. No, it was fascinating because before that I was mostly covering like elections, right? And again, if you cover elections, it's incredibly boring and you never hear anything of substance and it's not terribly complicated. And the Democrat says that we want to help the middle class and the Republican says we want to protect family values. And that's pretty much the extent of the intellectual challenge in terms of covering that stuff. that stuff. And I always thought to myself, you know, politics in America must be a lot more complicated than this, right? There must be some other hidden thing where it's incredibly complex

and diabolical and, you know, the real machinations of power must be visible somewhere. And I think that you find that when you start looking at how Wall Street works, how money works, how central banking works, how the concentration of wealth works. I mean, basically, the subprime scheme was an effort to pull the remaining savings out of the population. In the old days, investment banks made their money by lending money to companies who would build factories, and they would make stuff and sell it around the world, and everybody would make money, and even the population would benefit from it. But that manufacturing economy, it's all gone. It's overseas. So you have this financialized economy and they have no normal beneficial way to make money. And all

they can really do is look to see where is their money and how can we get it. And most people had money in their houses, right? Like the accumulated savings of most people, whatever was left after the internet crash in the 90s, was in real estate. And this was the scam by which they took the wealth that was left in the pockets of ordinary people and transferred it to, you know, nine people in Manhattan, basically. I mean, that's why you have, you know, when we talk about wealth inequality now, right, it being a huge factor that, you know, the top 95, I'm sorry, the top 1% of the population owns 90% of the wealth in the country or whatever it is. That's a consequence of schemes like this where they're finding out where people have a little bit of money and they're systematically coming up with scams to move it from there to here. With no consequence.

No, with no consequence. And that was the other part of the story that I ended up having to cover later, which was, you know, the last time they tried something like this, like during the they put a lot of, you know, serious influential people on the dock after that. Nobody, nobody went to jail after this stuff. And there was, and people think that, well, they didn't do anything that was technically illegal. No bullshit, there, there was lots of stuff that was that was brazenly criminally illegal. I mean, they committed fraud on a broad scale. But some of these companies were into the things that were even worse than that. I mean, you take HSBC. a pair of Central and South American drug cartels, including the Sinaloa cartel, right, which is suspected in thousands of murders. And they admitted to this activity. They agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement with the government where nobody did a day in jail. No individual had to pull out a dime out of their own pockets to pay. The shareholders ponied up $1.9 million, but some of that was tax deductible, which means we paid some of that fine. And the only real punishment with any teeth is that some of the executives had to partially defer their bonuses for five years. partially defer their bonuses for five years. So laundering $850 million for narco terrorists gets you a total walk. You know, that tells you basically everything you need to know about, you know, do we prosecute white collar crime in this country? Basically, no,

you know, I mean, that's the answer, ultimately, that you find out. And there was paperwork that showed they knew it was from the cartels. Oh, yeah. If you look at the agreement and you can watch that, there's a video of Loretta Lynch and Lanny Brewer, because this is before Loretta Lynch was Attorney General, but she was basically the head of this deal. They talked about the fact that the HSBC branches, because most of this was done in Mexico, HMEX, which was the subsidiary company, they had special teller windows built to fit cash boxes that the drug cartels were bringing into the bank. So basically, you've seen the scene in Scarface where the guys come in with duffel bags of cash to the bank, right? And, you know, that's like a montage.

You know, there's that song. I forget what song it is in the background. Same thing. These guys would come into the the bank they would slide in these boxes of cash one after the other and that's admitted activity the bank signed off on this they you know it's not like they're contesting it they're not saying we neither admit nor deny it's it's part of the deal uh so and and they agreed to the amount everything so um yeah it was a $1.9 billion settlement,

but it's not like it came out of the pockets of the people who did it. And it's not like any of the people who did it are in jail. It's just a thing that happened and that's five weeks of profit for the bank. So what the fuck? They don't care, right? Did you see the documentary The Inside Job?

Yeah. We covered a lot of the same territory. Yeah. That was a sobering documentary where they're talking to the very people that caused the financial crisis and realizing that these people were economics professors that eventually got these jobs, really lucrative jobs with banks, and how they finagled this system and made it so it looked like these things were appropriate? Yeah, no, I talked to some of the things that they invented that made this, the crash possible, sounded like good ideas.

Like they came up with this thing called the credit default swap, right? And I won't bore you with what that is exactly, but basically it's a kind of insurance, uh, where, uh, it's, it's basically a bet. It's hard to explain. Um, but, uh, it's a way of, of quasi insuring a product, um, without having to pony up a lot of money. It's called a derivative, and these instruments are completely unregulated. How can I put this? is like you and I betting on whether or not a third person's house is going to burn in a fire, right? Like the old school insurance said that it had to be your house in order for you to get insurance on it. This new form of quasi-insurance said that two totally disinterested parties could have an interest

in a third thing that happens. So it's basically gambling. And on the one hand, it allowed people to create a whole lot of capital, which allowed them to lend more money, which theoretically allowed people to buy more houses. But in reality, it just created the system where all these people had bets that were back and forth on all these properties. So that's one of the reasons why when the crash happened, when all those mortgages started to fail, it wasn't just the failures of those properties. It was all these people who were betting on whether or not these people could pay their mortgages. They started to lose money. And then there were people who had bets on that who started to lose money. And it's like this cascading whirlpool of shit that happened.

And again, it just started out as an idea to just create more money to lend. And it turned into this nightmare mechanical scenario that just created losses, you know, in this almost apocalyptic fashion. And a lot of them had no idea that that was going to be the eventuality. Wow. Yeah, it's great. It's definitely crazy stuff. As a person who didn't really follow finance before, how much has that affected your life now, like the way you look at things? I definitely pay a lot more attention to the fine print when I enter into any financial contract. I think about where I do my banking.

But the reality is you just don't have a whole lot of choice in this country anyway. I mean, it's like everything else. There's only a few companies left. So almost every bank that's out there where you can have a bank account and a mortgage is a bank that I've written about some massive scandal before. So that's a problem. But, yeah, I worry about it all the time. I mean, I have friends in finance who call me and they tell me that things are incredibly unsafe and that this,

that, and the other could happen. And so I have an anxiety level about things that I never had before. But apart from that, yeah, I mean, that's a natural consequence of having to spend seven years looking at all these horror stories. That's great. It's crazy you spent that much time on it. Do you see any other bubbles coming up? Yeah, people talk about that all the time. There's a lot of negative press about subprime auto loans, for instance, which is it's not exactly the same, but it's a similar thing. I mean, the same basic scam of taking loans, chopping them up and then repackaging them as something that's more valuable than the original loan. You can do that with anything, any kind of credit. You can do it with credit cards. You can do it with aircraft loans. You can do it with car loans. You can do

it with home mortgages. And so the mechanism of taking things that are toxic and risky and making them look like AAA is still part of the economy, and it's everywhere. The plus side of that is that there's more credit available. You know, almost anybody can get a credit card, or even if you've had screwed up credit, you can get a car. You know, I mean, there's... Does this put us in this, like, endless cycle of build-up, bubble, collapse, build-up, bubble, collapse, rebounding, collapse again? Absolutely. I mean, I think that's why you have to be nervous about the skyrocketing stock exchange.

I'm terrified. Yeah, I mean, you should be, right? Are you heavily invested? I've got some in there. When Trump was saying the economy's never been better, look at the stock market, stock market's killing it, and then it'll have a bad day. And you're like, well, okay, I thought we were doing great.

What's going on with this bad day? Can you not control these bad days? What's happening here? If you're in control of the good days, you're also in control of the bad days, right? Yeah, of course. Of course. It just, it seems super suspicious. Yeah. And in the old days, you'd have a lot of confidence that, well, the stock market always eventually goes up. So yeah, there's going to be bad days,

but it'll go back up. But the problem is the underlying economy in America just isn't all that hot. You know, like we're like, what do we really make in this country? What, what, where, where's the floor? Right. Like we have, we have some industries that sort of perform well, but if, you know, periodically we go through these bubbles that are based on nothing more than enthusiasm. And periodically we go through these bubbles that are based on nothing more than enthusiasm. In the 90s, it was the tech bubble where people like Alan Greenspan would say things like, well, we have a new paradigm in economics. So it doesn't matter whether a company hasn't shown any ability to make money or has no reasonable profit and loss statements. It's just if it's a good idea, the stock is sound and everybody should invest in it and the stock market is going to continually go up, so don't worry about it.

Of course, that doesn't happen. It blows up. Everybody loses their shirt. But what do they do? The Fed lowers interest rates, basically allows Wall Street to recapitalize, drink itself sober, and they plunge into the next madness, which is mortgages.

And once again, you have Alan Greenspan saying, hey, real estate is a great bet. It's gonna continually ascend. People should use their homes as ATM machines. You should consider refinancing your house so that you can get a little bit of extra cash. And this was actually the message they sent to America. And again, it creates this artificial mania where the economy is stoked artificially to gigantic dimensions, but it's not based on anything. And so when it crashes, when you finally get like any Ponzi scheme,

it depends on more new investors coming in than old investors leaving, right? So there's always going to be that moment when suddenly we don't have as many new ones as old ones. And the instant that happens, it all goes kaboom, right? And that's what happened with the subprime market. There was a moment in time where they just couldn't keep it going anymore. They couldn't find any more new suckers to get to sell mortgages to. And the mania ended and it all went splat. And then it was amplified by the fact that we have this system now of people betting on credit that is legal, which creates more losses out of thin air. So yeah, I'm terrified every time I see this the stock market go up.

What's it based on? Is it based on our economy actually doing well? I don't know. I don't think so, you know. I'm sorry. I look like I'm scaring you a little bit. You're definitely scaring me, but I think that's good. I think I need to be scared. I tend to take these things and just, you know, I have financial advisors. I let them handle money. Right. When I hear things like this, I just go, oh, Jesus. Well, I get terrified when I hear about really smart people getting scammed. Like yesterday we were talking about Theranos.

Do you know that blood testing company that turned out to be total horseshit? No, I didn't hear about this. Oh, it's a great story. No, I didn't hear about this. Oh, it's a great story. It's a story of one of those things where you find someone who you hope exists and you build them up. There was this woman. She looked like Steve Jobs.

She wore a black turtleneck in every photo. And she was the richest ever self-made woman. She was worth $4 billion. She had built this company called Theranos right out of college. She was like 19 when she started the company. It was a blood testing company that just required a small prick of your blood to do complicated blood analysis for diseases and things along those lines. Turns out it didn't work at all. And they faked a bunch of shit and widespread fraud.

A lot of people got their blood tested. It turned out to be, they were at risk for all these diseases and Warren Buffett invested $100 million, I think 125, Betsy DeVos more than $100 million. All these super wealthy people got scammed. Wow.

Yeah, when you find out that really wealthy people that do this for a living, Warren Buffett does that for a living, that he can get scammed out of $125 million. Right. And Warren Buffett,

his mantra is supposed to be picking the absolute long-term investment, so it's not he's not like a stevie cohen type who just looks at the tape and tries to time it just right so you know you can you can make an investment for 10 seconds and come out with with a you know if he if he's investing in a company and and even he can be fooled, that's pretty terrible. But look at Enron.

I mean, Enron was another example of the world's best financial analysts were looking at this company for a decade. And the results were completely ridiculous. Like, it should have been obvious to any layperson that these profit numbers couldn't possibly be real. And it wasn't until one of those guys, I think it was Jim Chanos, who was sort of a famous short seller, sort of said, hey, wait a minute, there's something up here. But people continually invested in these companies. And there's just not a whole lot of oversight that goes on with Wall Street. And I think that's a major lesson of the last 20 years, is that there's just not a lot of eyes on crime in this area.

Another example is, I'm sorry, who's the guy who scammed all the rich people? Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff. Yeah, I was going to bring him up. He's the most egregious example, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are other people who did similar things, but this guy didn't even make investments. Right.

You know what I mean? Like, he was literally just sort of taking money and, you know, when someone cashed out, he would, you know, it was like, who's that little girl? Lil Tay. Lil Tay. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He was just like throwing. He had a big, you know, pile of cash and, you know, he would take some in and throw some out.

But if the SEC had at any time just looked at his books and said, what are you invested in? It all would have, you know, that whole house of cards would have fallen. He didn't invest in anything? No, and he wasn't making trades. He wasn't doing anything, you know? And there are a bunch of stories like this. There's a great book called The Octopus, which is about somebody who did a Madoff-like scam, another hedge fund,

where same thing, they weren't really making trades. They were just sort of creating phony profit and loss statements and creating records that look like trades that they could tell their investors about, but they weren't actually doing anything. So if anybody, any expert at any time had just poked their nose into this person's books, they would have seen it in 10 seconds. That's the amazing thing about this. Not to get back to my drug dealing book, but this is one of the things that he says, which is that you can be in a poor black neighborhood and a couple of kids will be on a cell phone talking about selling $10 worth of weed and they'll be picked up by cops within 20 minutes or something like that. Madoff can commit $100 million frauds year after year after year and not even take any effort to

try to cover it up all that well and get away with it. Well, Bernie's big crime was that he ripped off rich people. Yeah, absolutely. If he had done the exact same thing to poor people, what he did was just, it was just too easy to call what he did a crime versus what you were talking about with these financial institutions. Right. Yeah. Yeah. If he,

if he had long, if he had laundered it through a, a slightly more legitimate process, he, he would have gotten out fine. But the, one of the things that a lot of these guys, these scam artists get into it thinking that they're actually going to be

real hedge funds. Um, and that they, they have some stock picking system that's actually going to make real hedge funds and that they have some stock picking system that's actually going to make all their clients money. And one of the things they find out is that, A, they suck. They're not outperforming the market and they're not that smart. But B, that their clients can't tell if they just make up the numbers.

So there are a number of cases of people who start out trying to be legitimate and trying to be real investment advisors, but they just end up turning into Bernie Madoff types because it's just easy. There aren't that many people watching for it. And that's kind of scary, too. Well, it seems like there's so many people doing it. How could there be enough people watching it? Right. Think about how many investment firms there are and how many different people that are involved in trading. How could anybody be watching all of it?

Right. Yeah. No, but even so, even if you take that into consideration, then the number of eyes that are on this world is ridiculously low. Take AIG. AIG was one of the world's largest companies. Before it crashed, it had 180,000 employees. It took advantage of this weird loophole that allows financial companies to essentially choose their own regulator. So because AIG had a thrift or a savings and loan that's basically the same thing, they chose to be regulated by the OTS, which is the Office of Thrift Supervision, The OTS, which is the Office of Thrift Supervision, which is this tiny, tiny little office in Washington that oversees basically savings and loan operations. And in the OTS, this is actually true, they had exactly one insurance expert on staff. exactly one insurance expert on staff.

So essentially, the world's largest insurance company was being regulated by a government office that only had one person who really understood insurance. And even that person wouldn't have understood the part of the company that blew up, which was essentially an investment bank within the insurance company that was creating these sort of highly advanced sort of derivative operations, that they just would not have been able to understand that stuff. So the government just does not place a lot of resources into, you know, keeping an eye on even the most basic things. And when you compare that

to law enforcement and other areas, you know, is how many, how many people do we have, you know, worrying about bank robberies in this country or drugs, right? Or, you know, how many people are being watched because they're marijuana dealers in other states. I mean, it dwarfs the number of people who are watching for economic crimes. Fuck. Yeah. One person. Yeah. I just love the name of it.

Office of Thrift Supervision? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm not even sure it exists anymore. I think it was merged into some other, because there used to be the OCC, the Officer of the Comptroller of the Currency. And I think they created a new regulator out of all that after the crash. But yeah, AIG chose its regulator and its regulator was totally overmatched, couldn't understand shit. And that's one of the reasons why the company blew up. The company also blew up because it was run by insurance people who didn't understand. AIG was basically Wall Street's bookie. All these people were betting, all these investment banks were betting on whether or not

mortgages were going to fail or not. And AIG was selling the product that they could use to make those bets. Essentially, they were taking on insurance on packets of mortgages. So if they exploded, you would get a payout, right? It's like buying an insurance policy on your neighbor's house. If it goes up in flames, you get paid. AIG was selling a product that allowed banks essentially to buy insurance on houses, on mortgages. And if people foreclosed, if the mortgages failed or pools of mortgages failed, if you bought that kind of insurance, you got these huge payouts. So people were betting against mortgages, basically.

And AIG was taking all this book. But the heads of the company were old school insurance executives and just didn't understand this sort of newfangled, complicated form of insurance. And so they would look at the numbers that they were being given, and even they didn't get it. They didn't understand how exposed they were. And so when all the bets started going the wrong way, suddenly they're being asked to pay out billions of dollars. And they're like, wait, where is this coming from? So even the companies were kind of clueless about the shit that was going on, it turns out. Jesus.

The shit that was going on it turns out Listen man if it wasn't for you Dummies like me would not understand why we should be scared like everybody was scared but reading your your articles about it maybe understand why and I think that's a the way described is great that you Translated this stuff you actually worked as a translator. And I appreciate your work, man. Oh, well, thank you so much. I've been a huge fan forever.

I'm looking forward to seeing your special. I think that the, yeah, the. Yeah, it's going to come out sometime around September, I think. That's when they're going to release it. Excellent. Thank you, man. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Matt.

Thanks for coming on, man. Thank you very much. Matt Taibbi, ladies and gentlemen.