The Joe Rogan Experience - #1386 - Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: November 16, 2019

Matt Taibbi is a journalist and author. He has reported on politics, media, finance, and sports, and has authored several books including his latest "Hate, Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another" is available now & look for his podcast "Useful Idiots" is available on Spotify.

so jamie pointed out this this uh congressman is that who it is the jamie pointed this out that there's a congressman and he released a series of tweets and the first letter of all these tweets if you put them all together it says epstein didn't kill himself or did not kill himself is that what it is yeah i think it's didn't he did uh yeah how do you do the apostrophe yeah you should have gone with did not starting here with that evidence of a link rep paul gosser what are the odds that this guy did this accidentally really small right that's kind of like one of those monkeys typing shakespeare things yeah i don't think it could uh it could work and the thing is he did it backwards, right?

So you didn't see what the puzzle was until the last tweet. Who caught that? Because the last tweet is an E. I got a tweet from someone about 35 minutes ago that, I don't know if there's a bunch of people online paying attention to it or what, but someone alerted me and a few other people. Does he have an image of that fucking crazy mask? Is that in his shit too?

Okay. He's a weirdo. That might be the H of it. was november 1st the v mask yes yeah what is that mask again what is it for vendetta what was it representative of something it's the guy fox mask yes that's right that's right yeah so this guy is uh he's he's thinking along alternative lines of thought but that is really an interesting way of saying it alphabetry that's yeah just making a bunch of tweets don't ever address it just leave it there walk away there yeah lewis carroll was famous for that was he yeah that was one of um he did a lot of sort of tricks with words um do you read the book go to leisure bach no yeah there's there's a whole whole bunch

of stuff in there about people who put puzzles in text. It's kind of a thing that people did, I guess, back more in the 18th century and before. Well, this Epstein case is probably the most blatant example of a public murder of a crucial witness I've ever seen in my entire life or anybody's ever seen. And the minimal amount of outrage about this, the minimal, minimal amount of cover. It's fucking fascinating. I mean,

what's amazing to me just as a, you know, somebody who works in the media is that this was shaping up to be the biggest like news story in history. Yes. And the instant he, you know, he died or was died or however you want to call it.

Yeah. It, the story just fell off the face of the earth yeah it's like nobody's doing anything about it and i i don't 100 understand that i mean i i get it why why that's happening but it's uh it's just amazing well when the woman from abc what was her name amy that lady the the one who robot robot who had the frustrated moment that she called it a frustrating private moment right when she was talking about having the scoop and having that story and them squashing it right like this this is all stuff that everybody used to think was conspiracy. Everybody used to think this was stoner talk.

This was, you know, you know what I mean? Like this is stuff where people are just delusional. They believe all kinds of wacky conspiracies. Sure. But the reality is much less complicated. Well, this is not possible. This is one of those things that's so obvious. It's so in everyone's face.

Well, there's a couple of things going on because there are many different ways this can play out. I mean, you could have a news director who just sort of instinctively decides, well, we can't do that story because I might want to have Will and Kate on later, or I might want to have this politician on later. And it's not like anybody tells them necessarily that we can't do this. They just decide it's too hot. If you grow up in this system and you've been in the the business for a long time you just you have all these things that are drilled into you at almost like the cellular level about what you can and cannot get into and um i think that but

there were some explicit things that happened with epstein too i mean they there were a lot of news agencies that killed stories about him that, you know, and we're hearing about some of them in Vanity Fair, this thing, you know, so yeah, it's bad. It's terrible. Yeah. When I found out that Clinton flew no less than 26 times on a plane with Epstein, I was like, dude, I haven't flown that many times with my mom. And how long did he know Epstein? Yeah, I don't know. But, I mean, to have that many flights, to have the Secret Service people involved,

I mean, that's incredibly bold. What was he doing? Was it just girls? Is Clinton that much of a hound that he would go that deep into the well that many times, 26 times? Well, that's the thing about the Epstein story that makes no sense to me. Like, I thought that the percentage of people who were out and out, like perverts who had a serious problem, like with pedophilia or whatever, it was pretty small, you know? Yeah. But they had a lot of people coming in and out of this compound. And it just seems like it's a very strange story.

What were they really up to? I have no idea. And was it all a blackmail scheme? It's just so strange. Well, it seems like the pedophilia aspect of it might be directly connected to Epstein himself. Like he might be the one that has a problem with girls that are like 16 and he likes them very young or he did like them. But with the other guys it could just be girls could be yeah i mean that's why it's so crazy like how could it be that these

but maybe it's not but they must but they knew who he was yeah but they probably didn't know the extent of it probably not yeah up until a point up until he was arrested right and then they're like oh well then that's when everybody backed off of him, right? Yes. Yeah. I mean, I'm not 100%. Yeah. I haven't covered this story in depth.

I only really got into it a little bit. We need you. We need you in this one. You're the guy. This is a tough one. I mean, because it mixes a lot of things that are very tough to cover. Yes. You know, the intelligence world is very tough to cover.

It's hard to get stories out of there that they don't want you to have yeah and this is this is like the mother of all stories and you know in terms of that and they're just little little breadcrumbs here and there that whole thing about acosta you know the vanity um vanity fair quote from him is that when he said that when he looked at the case, he didn't do it because I was told he belonged to intelligence. Yes. What does that mean? Right. You know, who's intelligence? You know what I mean?

Right. Like what agency? What for? Right. You know? And then you pair that with things like, you know, I have friends on Wall Street who tell me I've never heard a single instance of this guy actually having a trade. Right. You know, so what was

his hedge fund doing you know i mean if you think about it hedge funds a perfect way to do blackmail you know because you can just have people putting money in and out all the time and it would look like investment yeah so very strange story well eric weinstein had a conversation with him you know eric weinstein with peteriel Capital. Right. He's like, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Oh yeah. He's like, he's a fake.

Yeah. He's like, he's an actor. Right. This is nonsense. Right, right. That was his initial,

almost instantaneous response. Yeah, yeah. And what real clients did he ever have? What did he trade in? How's he got a billion dollars or whatever he had?

Yeah, no, it's half a billion. Under management. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Why did the guy who owns Victoria's Secrets give him a $70 million home?

Right. In New York City. Like, what? I mean, these are all things that would have been really interesting to get into, you know? If he didn't try to kill himself twice. If suicide didn't happen to him, like in The Wire. Poor fella.

Yeah, yeah. It's just so unfortunate. Yeah. So unfortunate that the cameras died and so unfortunately sustained an injury that's uh that you usually only get through strangulation right yeah murders you he fell on the ground and accidentally broke his hyoid bone yeah happens all the time whatever no big deal i mean it's so bizarre i i can't stand conspiracy theories i'm one of these people who who doesn't like reading but i, but I can't make the story work in a way that isn't, you know, conspiratorial.

Well, that's the thing. It's like it gets to a point where you're like, okay, even Michael Shermer, who runs Skeptic Magazine, he's like, wait a minute, the cameras were not working? I mean, it's such a bad excuse. This seems like a conspiracy. Fucking when Michael Shermer says, that guy doesn't believe in anything. Right. I mean, he is fucking, he's down the line on virtually every single thing that's ever happened. He doesn't believe in any conspiracies.

Well, how do you, what's the innocent explanation for any of this? There's none. It doesn't make any sense. You can't spin it in any way to make it not a crazy conspiracy especially when the the brother hires a doctor to do an autopsy oh yeah this guy was fucking murdered right yeah michael baden the famous guy from the hbo autopsy show right yep absolutely craziness complete craziness and you know it's it's an example of of um Craziness.

Complete craziness. And, you know, it's an example of, you know, the Epstein story is interesting because it's about villains on both sides of the aisle, right? This is a classic. This is something I've written about before is that the press does not like to do stories where the problem is bipartisan. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Right. So when you have an institutional problem, when Democrats and Republicans both share responsibility for it, when you know, or if it's an institution that kind of exists in perpetuity, no matter what the administration is place, they don't like to do that story. Epstein is – he's friends with Trump and with Clinton. I mean, it looks like he has more friends on the Clinton side, but still. And I think this is one of the reasons why this story doesn't have a lot of traction in the media because neither side really likes the idea of going too deeply on it.

It feels like to me. Well, it's – but the blatant aspect of it the only i mean the closest that we have to that is the absolute murder the jamal khashoggi murder that's the closest thing we have to was absolute murder right this one but but it's also so insanely blatant but now you have foreign actors that are involved in it and they all disperse and then this is left with this confusion of to who's responsible for it well saudi arabia that's another example where you can't really say it's you know one side of the both parties have been incredibly complicit in their cooperation with the saudi regime and in you know the massacres that are going on in yemen um it's a classic example of what noam chomsky used to talk about with worthy and unworthy

victims, right? Like if the Soviet communists did it, that was bad. But if death squads in El Salvador killed a priest or a Catholic priest, you know, then that was something we didn't write about because they were our client state. Yemen is a story we don't write about. Syria is a story we do write about, but they're really equivalent stories. And, you know, but you're absolutely right. The Khashoggi thing, I don't think either party or either side's media really wants to get into that all that deeply. How much is media shifting now? Like, you've obviously been a journalist for a long time. How much are things changing in the light of the internet? Well, a lot. And this is why, I mean, I have a new book out now that's really about this, right? Why the business has

changed. What's it called? Hate Inc. Yeah, it's out now. And it's really about how the press, the business model of the press has changed. I mean, it's something that you talk about a lot. I hear you on your show all the time talking about how news agencies are always trying to push narratives on people, trying to get people wound up and upset. And that is a conscious business strategy that we didn't have maybe 30 years ago. You think about Walter Cronkite or what the news was like back in the day. You had the whole family sitting around the table and everybody watching. It was sort of a unifying experience to watch the news was like back in the day. You had the whole family sitting around the table and everybody watching. It was sort of a unifying experience to watch the news. Now you have news for the crazy right-wing uncle, and then you have news for the kid in the Shea t-shirt, and they're different

channels, and they're trying to wind these people up, you know, to get them upset constantly and stay there. And a lot of that has to do with the Internet because before the Internet, news companies had like a basically free way of making money. They dominated distribution. The newspaper was the only thing in town that had a, you know, if you wanted to get a want ad, it had to be through the local newspaper. Now with the Internet, the Internet is the distribution system. Anybody has access to it, not just the local newspaper.

And so the easy money is gone, and we have to chase clicks more than we ever had to before. We have to chase eyeballs more than we had to. So we've had to build new money-making strategies, and a lot of it has to do with just sort of monetizing anger and division and all these things. We just didn't do that before, and's it had a profound difference on the on the media as a writer have you personally experienced this sort of uh the influence where people have tried to lean you in the direction of clickbait or perhaps maybe alter titles that make them a little bit disingenuous in order to get people excited about the story you know i my editors at rolling stone are pretty good,

and they give me a lot of leeway to kind of explore whatever I want to explore. But I definitely feel a lot of pressure that I didn't feel before in the business because especially in the Trump era, and, you know, I've written a lot about the Russia story, right? But, you know, that's an example of one side's media has one take on it and another side's media has another take on it. And if you are just a journalist and you want to just sort of report the facts, you feel a lot of pressure to fit the facts into a narrative that your audience is going to like. And I had a lot of problem with the Russia story because I thought, you know, I don't like Donald Trump.

But I'm like, I don't think this guy's James Bond consorting with Russian spies. I think he's corrupt in other ways. And there was a lot of blowback on my side of the business because people in sort of liberal, quote unquote, liberal media, there's a lot of pressure to have everybody fit into a certain narrative. And I think that's really unhealthy for the business. Yeah, very unhealthy, right? Because as soon as people can be manipulated to conform to that narrative, then all sorts of stories can be shifted. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the job used to be about challenging your audience every now and then, right? Like if you think a certain thing is true, well, it's our job to give you the bad

news and say that you're wrong about that. That used to be what the job was to be a journalist. They give you the bad news and say that you're wrong about that. That used to be what the job was, to be a journalist. Now it's the opposite. Now we have an audience. We're going to tell you exactly what you want to hear, and we're going to reinforce what you think. And that's very unhealthy. A great example of this was in the summer of 2016, I was covering the campaign. I started to hear reporters talking about how they didn't want to report poll numbers that showed the race was close.

They thought that that was going to hurt Hillary. Right. Like in other words, we had information that the race was close and we're not telling this to audiences because they wanted to hear that it was going to be a blowout for Hillary. Right. And that didn't help Hillary. It didn't help the Democrats to not warn people about this, right? But it was just because if you turned on MSNBC or CNN and you heard that Trump was within five points or whatever it was, that was going to be a bummer for that audience. So we stayed away from it. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that it's not politically beneficial to anybody. It's just we're just trying to keep people glued to the set by telling them what they want to hear.

And that's not the news. That's not our job, you know. And it drives me crazy. Yeah, it should drive you crazy. What you said about journalism being used to be something that you're challenging your reader. You're giving them this reality that may be uncomfortable, but it's educational and expands their view of the world. Where do they get that now? They don't.

That's the whole problem. each news organization, what their take is going to be on any issue. Just to take an example, when the business about the ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, being killed, hit the news, instantaneously you knew that the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, that they were going to write a whole bunch of stories about how Trump was overplaying the significance of it, that he, you know, that he was telling lies about it. They were, they made, they, you knew they were going to make the entire thing about Trump. And then meanwhile, Fox had a completely different spin on it about how heroic it was. But, but news audiences didn't have anywhere to go to,

to just simply hear who was this person? Why was he important? What were the, what do the people in the region think, what is this going to mean going forward, is it actually going to have any impact, are we going to have to continually, is there going to be a new person like this every time, are we actually accomplishing anything? You don't get that anywhere.

All you get is Trump is a shithead on one side and Trump is a hero on the other side and that's that's not the news no yeah and but the thing is it's like the business aspect of it is so weird like you have your guys like hannity where you can absolutely predict what that guy's going to say every single time you know what side he's on and he's blatant about it and when you see someone like that you go okay well okay, well, this is peak bullshit, right? So where do we go where I see both sides? Where's the middle ground where someone goes, well, this is true,

but you got to say this is honest too and this is what's going on over on this side and the Republicans have a point here and you don't – there's no mainstream media place where you can go for that right now. No, there isn't. And that's, I mean, I mean,

one of the, this is one of the things I write about. This is one of the reasons why shows like yours are so popular. I mean, I, I think there's a complete loss of trust that they feel like people are not being honest with them. Right.

And they're not being straight. And you know, they, they come to people like you and, and a lot of other people in a sort of independent folks who aren't like the quote-unquote mainstream media because it's not really thought. It's not reporting. It's not anything.

If you can predict 100% what a person is going to say, that's not thinking. That's not reporting. It's just marketing. But for someone like me, that's so disturbing. I'm a fucking comedian and a cage-fighting commentator. When people are coming to me, like this is the source where you go for unbiased representations of what's going on in the world? That's crazy. Well, I mean, I saw your interview with Barry Weiss, right?

And you just – you did a simple – you didn't go to journalism school, right? No. No. You just, you did a simple, you didn't go to journalism school, right? No. No. So she said something about how, you know, oh, she's an Assad toady. And you said, what does that mean? You just asked the simple, basic questions, right?

What does that mean? Where is that coming from? How do you know that? You know, like journalism isn't brain surgery. That's all it is. It's just asking the simple questions that sort of pop to mind when you when you're in a situation like where did this happen how do we know that how that's true and but there's a whole generation of people in the press now who just simply do not do that go through the process of just asking simple questions how do i know that's true like

after each story you report you're supposed to kind kind of wipe your memory clean and start over. So just because somebody was banned the last time you covered them doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to be the bad guy this time you cover them. You have to continually test your assumptions and ask yourself, is this true? Is that true? Is this true? How do we know this? And we've just stopped doing that. It's just a morass of pre-written takes on things

and it's really, really bad. And you can see why audiences are fleeing from this stuff. They just don't have the impact they used to. Well, it's really interesting that a lot of this is this unpredicted consequence of having these open platforms like Facebook where people are getting their news and then the algorithm sort of directs them

towards things that are going to piss them off, which I don't even think necessarily was initially the plan. I think the plan is to accelerate engagement, right? So they find out what you're engaging with, what stories you're engaging with, and then they give you more of that. Like Ari, my friend Ari Shafir, actually tried this out. engaging with what stories you're engaging with and then they give you more of that like ari my friend ari shafir actually tried this out and what he did was he went on youtube and only looked up

puppy videos and that's all he looked at for like weeks and then youtube only started recommending puppy videos to him so it's not necessarily that Facebook wants you to be outraged, but that when you are outraged, whether it's over abortion or war or whatever the subject is, you're going to engage more and their algorithm favors you engaging more. So if you're engaging more about something very positive, if you're all about yoga and meditation, your algorithm would probably favor yoga and meditation because those are the things that you engage with. But it's natural for people to be pissed off and to look for things that are annoying, especially if you're done working

and you're like, God, this world sucks. What's going on that sucks worse? And then you go to your Facebook and, oh, Jesus, look at this goddamn border crisis. Oh, Jesus, look at this. Well, fucking here's the problem with these goddamn liberals. They don't know shit.

And you engage and then that's your life and then it's it's saying oh i know how to get mad all fired up i'm gonna fucking send him some abortion stories whoa right and then that's your feed right yeah exactly but the but there's so many economic incentives that go in there right they know the the more that you engage the longer that you're on right the more ads yes that you can you're gonna see yeah right so that same dynamic that facebook and and the social media companies figured out which is that if you keep feeding something somebody something that you know has been proven to spin that person up and get them wound up that they're gonna they're gonna come back for more of it and they're gonna keep

coming back and actually you can expand their desire to see that stuff by by making them sort of more angry overall and they will they will come back and they will spend more and more and more time well the news companies figured out the same thing and they're just they're just funneling stuff at you that they know you're gonna they're you're you're gonna just be in an endless cycle of sort of impotent mute rage all the time. But it's kind of addicting, you know? And they know that. And it's sort of like the tobacco companies. They know it's a product that's bad for you.

And they just keep giving it to you because, you know, it makes money for them. Yeah. And it's just the thing about it is all of it is about ads. Totally. How many clicks they get in ads. If they just said, you can have a social media company, all of it is about ads. Totally. And how many clicks they get in ads. If they just said, you can have a social media company, but you can't have ads. There's a new federal law, no more ads on Facebook, no more ads on YouTube, no more ads on Twitter, no more ads on Instagram, good luck.

Right. Yeah. Those businesses will all collapse. Yep. Yeah. But that seems to be what it is. It's like they figured out that your data is worth a tremendous amount of money. And the way they can utilize that money is to sell advertising.

Yeah. No, they get it coming and going because they're not only selling you ads, but they're also collecting the information about your habits, which they can then sell again. Yeah. So it's a dual revenue stream. You know, the media companies, they're basically, they're just consumer businesses where they're trading attention for ad space, right? So if they can get you to watch four hours of television a day, they have that many ad

slots that they can show you and they know how much money they're going to make, you know. But the social media companies get it two ways. They get it by, you know, attracting your eyeballs and then also selling, selling your habits to the other, the next set of advertisers, which, you know, is very insidious. But what's interesting about this is that most people don't think about this as a consumer business, right? Like Americans, these are very conscious of like what they put in their bodies. You know, they won't eat too many candy. Well, depending they are right but people at least look at what the calories are but they

don't think about the news that way or social media what that what they put in their brains and it's also a consumer product yeah it really is i've gone over that many times with people that that's a diet this is your diet you have a mental diet as well as you have a physical like food diet absolutely you have an information diet and a as you have a physical food diet. Absolutely. You have an information diet. And a lot of people are just eating shit with their brain. It's the worst kind of junk food. It's like a cigarette sandwich, the stuff that we eat. It's so fucking bad.

And it's getting worse. It is. It is getting worse. And what's weird is that this is a 10-year-old problem and no one saw it coming. And it's kind of overtaking politics. It's overtaking social discourse. Everybody's wrapped up in social media conversations. They carry them on over to the dinner table

and it gets people in arguments at work. And all this stuff, no one saw coming. No one saw this outrage economy from social media sites, from things like Facebook. No one saw that. No one ever predicted that your data was going to be so valuable. economy from you know social media sites from things like facebook no one saw that no one no one ever predicted that your data was going to be so valuable no who the fuck saw that i don't think anybody i mean i think some people in the tech business probably saw early on the potential for

this but you know in terms of other other businesses like the news media and also politics i mean you have to think about the impact of this on politics. It's been enormous. I cover Donald Trump. Trump really was just all about whatever you're pissed off about, I'm right there with you. And people are just sort of pissed off about lots of things these days because they're doing this all day long. And if you can take advantage of that, then you're going to have a lot of success. And I think a lot of people haven't figured that out. And some of these

things are real causes. Like people are upset about real things, but it's just, you're absolutely right. People did not see this coming and they didn't prepare for it. It's just weird that it's one of the biggest sources of income online and people didn't see it coming. mean facebook is generating billions of dollars and now yeah potentially shifting global politics yeah and and uh you know the the whole issue of of a couple of companies like facebook having control over what you do and do not see is an enormous problem that nobody really cares about. I've tried to write about it a few times. I've written a couple of features about it and about what a serious problem this is.

If you look at other countries like Israel, China, there are a number of companies where you've seen this pattern of internet platforms liaising with the government to decide what people can and cannot see. And they'll say, well, we don't want to see Palestinian protest movements, or we don't want to see the Venezuelan channel, Telesor. We want to take that off. You think about how that could end up happening in the United States, and it is already a little bit happening. It's a little bit, but it seems to be happening only in the terms of

leaning towards the progressive side, which people are okay with. Because they think, especially in the light of Donald Trump being in office, this is acceptable censorship. Yeah, but I think they're wrong about that. I think they're wrong about that, too. It's terribly dangerous. It's very short-sighted. Yes.

And I think there's also this thing that happens with people where they think, oh, this is never going to happen to me. You can do that bad thing to this person that I don't like, but as long as it's never going to happen to me. Exactly. But they're wrong. I mean, history shows it always does happen to you. So we're giving these companies an enormous amount of power to decide all kinds of things, what we look at, what kind of political ideas we can be exposed to. I think it's very, very dangerous. That biased interpretation of what something is, that was what people talked about when the initial Patriot Act was enacted.

When people were like, hey, this might be fine with Obama in office, right? people like hey this might be fine with obama in office right maybe obama is not going to enact some of the worst clauses of this and use it on people or the um was the ndaa is that what it was yeah yeah where some of the things were just completely unconstitutional but don't worry we're not going to use those but you're setting these tools aside for whatever fucking president we have like what if we have a guy who out trumps trump right i mean we never thought we'd have a trump right what if we have a next level guy post trump what if there's some sort of catastrophe tragedy attack something that really gets people fired up and they vote in someone who takes it up to another level and

then he has these tools and then he uses these tools on his political enemies, which is entirely possible. Well, I mean, we've already seen that a little bit. I mean, people don't want to bring this up. But a lot of the stories that have come out about Trump, they're coming from leaks of classified information that are coming from those war on terror programs that were instituted after 9-11. The sort of FISA Amendments Act, the NSA programs to collect data, like they're unmasking people. We have a lot of evidence now that there was a lawsuit a couple that came out about a month ago that showed that the FBI was doing something like

60,000 searches a month at one point where they were asking the NSA for the ability to unmask names and that, that sort of thing. So we're, I mean, these tools are incredibly powerful. They're incredibly dangerous, but people thought after 9-11, they were scared. So, you know, we want to protect ourselves. So that's okay for now, you know, we'll, we'll pull it back later, but they, but you never do pull it back. You know what I mean? It always ends up being used by somebody in the wrong way, and I think we're starting to see that that's going to be a problem. Yeah, I'm real concerned about places like Google and Facebook

altering the path of free speech and leaning people in certain directions and silencing people that have opposing viewpoints. And the fact that they think that they're doing this for good because this is how they see the world, and they don't understand that you have to let these ideas play out in the marketplace of free speech and free ideas. If you don't do that, if you don't do that, if you don't let people debate the merits, the pros, the cons, what's wrong, what's right, if you don't do that, then you don't get real discourse. If you don't do that, then you don't get real discourse.

If you don't get real discourse, you're essentially, you've got some sort of intellectual dictatorship going on. And because it's a progressive dictatorship, you think it's okay. Because it's people who want everybody to be inclusive. And, you know, I mean, this is a weird time for that. It's a really weird time for that because, as you said, people are so short-sighted. They don't understand that these, like, the First Amendment is in place for a very good reason.

It's set up a long fucking time ago because they did the math. They saw where it was going and they were like, look, we have to have the ability to express ourselves. We have to have the ability to freely express thoughts and ideas and challenge people that are in a position of power because if we don't, we wind up exactly where we came from. Yeah, no. people that are in a position of power because if we don't we wind up exactly where we came from yeah no and and courts continually reaffirmed that idea that the the the way to deal with bad speech was with more speech yes and they did it over and over and over again you know we we the the legal standard for speech you know still i, remains that unless it's directly inciting violence, you can, like, you can have speech that incites violence generally, and even the Supreme Court even upheld that.

You can have speech that's, that comes from, you know, material that was stolen illegally. That's okay. But we had a very, very high bar for prohibiting speech always. And, you know, the libel cases, the cases for defamation, that also established a very, very high standard for punishing speech. But now all of a sudden, people have a completely different idea about it.

It's like, forget about the fact that this was a fundamental concept in American society for 230 years or whatever, but they just want to change it without thinking about the consequences well that's where a guy like trump could be almost like it's like almost like a trojan horse in a way like if you wanted to play 3d chess what you would do you'd get a guy who's just so egregious and so outrageous and then so many people oppose him get that guy let him get

into a position of power and then sit back watch the outrage bubble and then take advantage of that and funnel people into certain directions i mean i don't think that's what's happening but if i was super fucking tinfoil hattie that's how i would go about it i would say this is what you want if you really want to change things for your direction put someone that opposes it that's disgusting and that way people just a rational intelligent person is never going to side with him so they're going to side with the people that oppose him and then you could sneak a lot of shit in that maybe they wouldn't agree with in any other circumstance yeah trump's election is sort of like another 9-11 right like you know

9-11 happened all of a sudden people who weren't in favor of the government being able to go through your library records or listen to your phone calls and all of a sudden they were like oh jesus i'm so freaked out like yeah fine when trump got elected all of a sudden people suddenly had very different ideas about speech right like they you know hey that guy's so bad um you know that maybe we should consider banning X, Y, and Z, you know. And, yeah, it's – if he was conceived as a way to discredit the First Amendment and some other ideas, that would be a brilliant 3D chess move. Yeah, super sneaky. Yeah.

That's like China level, many steps ahead. Right, yeah, exactly. super sneaky yeah that's like china level many steps ahead right yeah exactly oh what do you i mean where do you think all this goes it seems like this is i mean obviously you just wrote a book about it but it seems like this is accelerating and it doesn't seem like anyone's taking a step back and hitting the brakes or opting out It seems like people are just ramping up the rhetoric. Yeah. I mean, I think the divisiveness problem is going to get worse before it gets better. The business model of the media now is so entrenched that until some of these companies start going out of business because they're doing, you know,

they're losing audience because people don't trust them anymore. You know, the news is going to keep doing what it's doing. The Hannity model is going to become normal for news companies. I think it already basically is, you know, on both the left and the right. And in terms of, you know, the Internet companies, they're consolidating, they're getting more and more power all the time I think we've already seen that people have too much tolerance

for letting them make decisions about what we can and cannot see and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better I don't know, what do you think? That's what I think, I mean Facebook, Twitter Twitter has some of the most ridiculous reasons for banning people one of them is dead naming oh yeah so if you call caitlin jenner bruce right like hey i like you better when you're bruce banned for life right you can't even say i like you better when you were bruce banned for life right yeah and and

and actually that that what's really interesting about that is that's a core concept that we've changed completely. Like all the different ways in the past that we punish speech, we punish the speech, not the person. Yes. Right? So if, you know, libel, defamation, all those things, first of all, they were all done through the courts. So you had a way to fight back if you thought you were unjustly accused of having defamed somebody or libeled somebody. But if they found against you, the person who got something out of it was the person who was directly harmed, right? And the courts judged that.

And they, you know, it wasn't like you were banned for life from ever speaking again. They just gave a bunch of money to a person who might have suffered some kind of career injury or whatever it was because of that. And usually there was a retraction or it was removed from the press or whatever it was. But it wasn't like we were saying, we're never going to allow you to be heard or seen from again. We kind of want, we were sort of encouraging optimistically people to get better. Right. And to be different. Right.

You know, and now we're not doing that at all now we're just saying you know one one strike or two strikes whatever you're gone and it's not like it's a public thing so you can't sue over it you know right yeah well that's what's crazy about it because it is a public utility in a way yes it is it should be even jack dorsey from twitter admitted as much on the podcast and he wishes that we would view it that way he's actually proposed two versions of twitter a a twitter with their standard censorship in place and then a wild west twitter and i'm like sign me up right how do i get on that wild west twitter because the problem with like things like gab and i've gone there a few times and watched

it and i mean even milo yunoulos has criticized it for being this, is that it's just so hate-filled because it's the place where you can go and fucking say anything. So the only people that it's attracting are people that just want to go there and just fucking shoot off cannons of N-bombs and call everybody a kike. It's crazy.

And there's real communication there as well. There's plenty of that too. But the sheer number of people that go there just to blow off steam because they can't say those things on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media platform without being banned. Because of that, it becomes a channel for it. And it's like it doesn't get a chance. It doesn't get a chance. The concept is great. The concept is if you're not doing anything illegal, we're not going to stop you.

You're not doxing anybody. You're not threatening anybody's life. We're not going to stop you. Go ahead. But if you do that and you're the only one that does that, unfortunately, everyone who wants to just say fucked up shit just goes right. And you get a disproportionate amount of fucked up shit. Yeah. And it's directly because of the fact that these places like twitter or facebook have censored and they they make it so you are scared to say whatever you want to say

and so you can't so even if you have controversial ideas that maybe some people would agree with and some won't you get banned for life for just controversial ideas even controversial ideas that are scientifically and biologically factual, like the transgender issue. Like if you say, there's a woman, I brought her up a million times, Megan Murphy. A man is never a woman, she says. They tell her to take it down. She takes a screenshot of it, puts that up, takes it down, but takes a screenshot of the initial tweet. Says, ha ha, look at that, banned for life.

A man is never a woman is a fact. That is a fact. That is a fact. It's a biological fact. Now, if you decide to become a woman and we recognize you as a woman in society, well, that's just common courtesy in my eyes. Like you have a person who has this issue. They feel like they were born in the wrong body. Okay, I get that.

I'm cool with that. But to make it so that you're banned forever, you can call someone a dumb fuck, an idiot, a piece of shit. Your mother should have swallowed you. Everybody's like, yeah, terms of service seem fine here. Everything's good. Say a man is never a woman. Gone for life. Right, yeah.

Call Caitlyn Jenner. I liked you better when you were Bruce. Done. That's it. Yeah, no, and it's crazy. And obviously people see that and they just get madder, and it seems so legitimate. You know, it makes people very, very resentful in ways that they wouldn't be otherwise. And it makes, there's no pathway.

There's no other thing, right? There's no free speech platform that's universally accepted. Like these ones, like I said, like Gab, or there's a couple other ones out there. There's not, no one's using them yeah it's a very small percentage of the people in comparison to something like twitter which is enormous right and so because people don't want to be kicked off the platform they're they're radically changing their behavior yes yes self-censoring and we're seeing this a lot also with political ideas too like you know you know i have a podcast useful idiots it's called right we're like we try to talk to people who are kind of excluded from mainstream media because that's

happening a lot now right like if you have the wrong idea about anything whether it's russiagate or or israel palestine conflict or syria or whatever it is you'll you will suddenly be sort of labeled. I think with Tulsi Gabbard friends, they call her an Assadist, right? Like once you get stuck with the term Assadist on Twitter, nobody wants to associate you with you. No one wants to defend you, right? They all kind of – and you're like suddenly like the kid with lice

and people don't want that to happen to them. So they stop saying X y and z yeah right and and they just sort of go with with the flow go with the crowd and it causes this sort of you know uniform uh conformist uh discourse that doesn't isn't really about anything right because people are just afraid to talk uh which is crazy yeah right well you're not supposed to talk to someone i experience this all the time the this idea of giving someone a platform like you like if i have someone on like a ben shapiro or something like that you shouldn't give that guy a platform well he's already got a platform should wouldn't be better if i just talked to him and find out what his ideas are

and and ask him about those ideas like we had a very bizarre conversation about gay people where he's basically full on biblical religious interpretation of gay people, which to me is always strange. Like, okay, how do you stand on shellfish? You know, are you just as strong on shrimp as you are on gay guys? Like, why is it gay guys? It's that, like, the bible's pretty clear on a bunch of different things that don't seem to fire people up the way homosexuality does like why why do you care if you had a friend that was eating shrimp would you go to his house if he had shrimp

cocktail no but you wouldn't go to a friend's house if he was having a gay marriage so you won't celebrate gay marriage but you don't mind a guy who's got a fucking a shellfish platter right out at a party like that's in the bible man right you're not supposed to wear two different kinds of cloth you're you know there's a bunch there's a bunch of shit in the bible that you're like well god was wrong about that like how confident are you right how confident are you that you can interpret god's word so perfectly that you're like you let the lobster slide but all that butt fucking we got to stop that you know like it's really weird but that's the whole point is you challenge the idea yes yes but but the prevailing view now is that even having the

discussion yes because you have a platform i mean i read that thing in the land the atlantic you know where they're like you you you give people to i forget what the phrase was they were saying something like um you had i give people too many chances too many chances people who had already forfeited the right to have them or something along those lines that guy was silly that guy gave up his hand when he said about me that i'm inexhaustible but that he likes naps right oh it's about you and your naps that's what it is you not you like naps okay so you don't like people that have energy i'm super sorry but the the i mean i thought that piece was really interesting because that that whole idea that there are people who have forfeited the right

to communicate forever to communicate forever. Well, who decides that? I mean, again, there's this intellectual snobbism that goes on in, you know, frankly on my side of the media aisle where, well, we'll decide what an appropriate thought is, what's right thinking, what's wrong thinking. You know, who gets to have a platform, who doesn't get to have a platform, who we're going to call a monster, who we're not going to call. I mean, I just don't understand the arrogance, where that comes from, to decide that some people, you know, and I totally disagree with people like, you know, Alex Jones or Shapiro or, you know, most things. But I don't think that they should be wiped out the face of the earth. I mean, I don't know. But I don't think that they should be wiped out the face of the earth. I mean, I don't know.

Well, it's interesting to challenge people on these weird ideas and find out how they come to them. And you will get a lot of fence-sitters that will recognize the flaws in their thinking if you let them talk. Because there's a lot of people that are unsure either way. Maybe they haven't invested a lot of time investigating it. Maybe they really don't know what this guy stands for. Maybe they just read a cartoonish version of who he is. And then you get to hear him talk and you go, well i see the flaw in his thinking or oh well he's right about some things and a lot of people are right about some things they're wrong about things and they're right about things and the only way you you can discern that is you communicate with them

but as soon as you de-platform people like forever you're just going to make a bunch of angry people you're just going to make a bunch of people that are completely distrusting and you're going to absolutely empower the opponents of your ideas but like people that do get to when when do they get a chance to have their voice well when they vote so the the more you do this shit the more you censor conservatives the more they're going to vote against liberals. This is just a fact. There's no getting around that. This is human nature. Yeah, I mean, I lived in the former Soviet Union for 11 years. And 100%, if you lived in Soviet Russia and something was published by an official publisher, people thought it was basically full of shit, right?

But if it was in the samizdat, if it was in the samizdat if it was in the privately circled stuff that had been repressed and censored people thought that was the coolest thing in the world like that that was the hot ticket right and you're automatically giving something uh cachet and um an added weight by censoring it i mean this is just it's just the way it works it's human nature if people think that you don't want them to see something, they're going to run to it twice as hard, you know? So I just don't understand a lot of that instinct. I think people have this idea that it works, that, you know, that deplatforming works, but you can't deplatform an idea, you know? You may be able to do it to a person or two, but eventually you have to confront the idea.

You can do it to a few people and it has been successful, which is one of the reasons why people are so emboldened. They have a successfully deplatformed Milo. I mean, they really have. It's very hard to hear him talk anymore. He's not in the public conversation the way he used to be because they kicked him off of all these different platforms. And if you go into why they kicked him off these all these different platforms and if you go into why they kicked him off these different platforms but even if you don't agree with him and i don't on a lot of things like boy i don't agree with kicking him off those platforms if you you listen to what

he got kicked off for it's like man i don't know this this doesn't seem like this makes a lot of sense yeah no i mean and same thing with alex jones yeah alex alex jones has said you know know, he's gone after me a couple of times in ways that were pretty funny, actually. But when he was, you know, kicked off all these platforms, you know, I wrote a piece saying, I think people are kind of doing an end zone dance a little early on this one, you know, because Jones is a classic example of how the system, the way the system used to work, they would have punished him for being libelous about the Sandy Hook thing, right? Because that would sort of fit the classic definition of what prohibited speech was before. But we wouldn't – he would have lost probably a lot and he still might in those court cases. And he still might in those court cases. But to remove him forever, I think, you know, it just sets, it creates a new way of dealing with speech that I think is very dangerous. Right, because the goalposts keep getting moved. Right.

If you can ban him for that, then why don't you ban me for repeating the things that I said about Megan Murphy? Right. Or ban, because what I said about Bruce Jenner, ban this for that. I mean, you get further and further down the line, you keep moving these goalposts, and next thing you know, you're in a very rigid, tightly controlled area where you can communicate, and you're suppressed. And that just accelerates your desire to step out of that boundary, and it makes you want to say things that maybe you wouldn't even have thought of before. And also, logistically, it's an incredibly, it's an insane thing to even think about asking platforms to rationally go through all this content.

I talked to somebody who was a pretty high-ranking Facebook executive after the Alex Jones thing. And he said, think about what we used to do just to keep porn off facebook and we're dealing with what a couple of billion items of content every single day we had these really high-tech algorithms that we designed to look for flesh tones like that's how and that's how the vietnamese running girl photo got taken off facebook because they like automatically spotted a naked girl you know and they took that down. He's like, the Facebook algo doesn't know that's an icon of fucking journalism, right? It just knows it's a naked girl.

So you say you take that, and now you're going to go through and just to keep child porn off of Facebook, think about how crazy it's going to be when we start having entry-level people deciding what is and is not appropriate political content. It's not only going to be impossible to enforce. They're going to make a mess of it, and they will, and they already are. And I think that's what we're seeing well that's why Twitter is so weird because you can get away with shit on Facebook you can say things on Facebook like Facebook doesn't have a policy about dead naming

or Facebook doesn't have a policy about misgendering people but they do have a porn policy well now Twitter you can have porn I have to be very careful when i give my phone to my kids that make sure they don't open up the fucking twitter app yeah because i follow a lot of dirty girls and some of them i mean they're it's just right there there's

no warning bang right in your face i mean it's kind of crazy right they have such a an open policy when it comes to sex which i'm happy they I'm happy, not even that I want to see porn, but I'm happy that their attitude is just fine. It's legal. Do it. You don't have to follow those people if you don't like. It seems like it's in the American spirit to me. I don't know. That's what it all comes down to for me.

But yeah, no, the policies are completely inconsistent too with Twitter. But yeah, no, the policies are completely inconsistent too with Twitter. I've seen – I mean I've talked to people who have been removed from Twitter for saying pretty borderline things, right? Like they're basically pretty mild insults or something that would be threatening only if you really squinted hard. There was a guy from the Ron Paul Institute who got taken down, for instance, because he was having a fight with some guy who was, I think, a Clinton fan. I forget what it was exactly. But you'll see behavior that's much worse from people of another political ilk, and they will not be removed. Or they might be a smaller profile person.

They won't be removed. So then what is that all about, right? Like if it's only a person who has 20,000 followers or higher, we're going to – I mean it's just so – you just can't do it. There are just too many layers. I mean I'm against it just generally, but just in terms of the logistics, it doesn't make any sense. I'm against it generally too. And when I talked to Jack and he was explaining to me the problems with trying to manage things at scale you really kind of get a sense of it like oh you guys are dealing with billions and billions of humans using these things right yeah yeah and and but they're already you know in many countries around the world they have armies of thousands of people who go through content to try to flag this or that kind of

political content. Yeah, and punish people. Yeah. You know, and Germany has, oh God, I forget what the term was. They have some really scary sort of authoritarian word for like filtration centers or something like that. You know, the Chinese have armies of people. I mean, I did a story about Facebook and how it was, you know, teaming up with groups like the Atlantic Council here in the United States. Remember a couple of years ago, the Senate called in Twitter, Facebook, and Google to Washington and asked them to devise

strategies for preventing the sowing of discord, you know, so basically it was asking them to come up with strategies for for filtering out um fake news and then also certain kinds of offensive content but you know that is a stepping stone to what we've we've seen in other countries i think you know and i think it's really worrisome but but nobody seems to care on on our side of the aisle which is which is very strange my side of the aisle it's my side of the aisle as well it's a it's a censorship issue you know and it's it's a short-sighted thing as you said before it's people and it's not even there's people that do pretty egregious things from the left like the covington school thing when people were saying we got to dox these kids and give me their names release their names These people are still on Twitter to this day.

You're talking about kids that just happen to have these Make America Great Again hats. And I have a friend who used to live in that area who said, no, you don't get it. There's these stands. These kids are on a high school field trip. There's these stands where you could buy these hats everywhere. These kids bought the hats there. They think they're being funny. These guys play the music and then get in their face you take a photo of it it looks like this guy's standing in this

native american guy's face but then you see the whole video it's no no the native american guy was playing his drum walking towards him and then everybody starts yeah everybody just loses their minds you know what i mean it's this it outrage cycle. It's just so exhausting now. And signaling. Everyone's signaling how virtuous they are. Everyone's signaling that they're on the right side. Everyone's signaling, you know, I want names. Take these guys down.

Like, you're talking about 16-year-old kids. Right. It's so fucking crazy. And what is he? He's guilty of smiling? Right. Is that what he's guilty of? Yeah.

No, he's got a MAGA hat on. I mean, yeah, it's crazy crazy and the signaling thing is crazy and you know for me the in the in the news business a lot of people that I know went into the went into journalism precisely because we didn't want to talk about our political views like the whole point of the job is like you know we're just going to tell you what the facts are like I'm not going to tell you what I'm all about. You can't do that anymore. Everything's editorialized. Everything is about editorializing and signaling.

It's just like what you're saying. You're telling people what your stance is on things. And that's the opposite of what the job used to be. And this is, again, one of the things I've been trying to focus on is that, you know, it's exactly what you're talking about. People used to go to the news because they wanted to find out what happened in the world, and they can't do it anymore because everything that you turn on, every kind of content is just editorialized content where people are sort of telling you where they stand on things.

And, you know, I don't want to know that. I want to know what the information is. Yeah, it's so hard. How does this get resolved? Because we're dealing with essentially a two decade old problem right i mean give or take before that before the this the social media and before the internet and websites this just just wasn't this wasn't what it was you could count on the new york times to give you an unbiased version of what's going on in the world i don't necessarily know that's true anymore.

No. No, the Times has kind of gone over to this model as well. They're super woke. They've struggled with it. There was an editorial, and I wrote about this in the book, that in the summer of 2016, this guy, Jim Rutenberg, wrote this piece, said, Trump is testing the norms of objectivity. That was the name of the piece. said Trump is testing the norms of objectivity.

That was the name of the piece. And basically what he said is Trump is so bad that we have to rethink what objectivity means. We have to not only be true, but true to history's judgment, he said. And we have to have copious coverage and aggressive coverage. So we're going to cover Trump a lot. We're going to cover him aggressively.

And we're going to show you, we're going to take a stand on this issue rather than just tell you what happened. So rather than doing the traditional New York Times thing of just the facts, we'll tell you, you sort it out. You figure it out. We're going to tell you kind of what your stance should be. And where do we go from here? How does it get resolved? I don't know because, you know, unless the financial incentives change, they're not going to change, you know. The business used to be, back when you were talking about it, the New York Times, and then there were three networks, and they were all trying to get the whole audience, right?

So they were doing that kind of neutral fact-finding mission, and it working for them financially now they can't do that because of the internet it's it's you're hunting for audience and little groups yeah and they're just giving you hyper politicized stuff because that's the only way they can make money i don't know how we change it i don't know how we go you know we reverse it it's it's it's a problem it's so interesting though because i mean if you looked at human interactions and if you you looked at you know dispensing news and information and you followed trends from like the 30s to the 40s to the 50s to the 60s to 70s he'd be like oh well people are getting better at this people getting better and whoa whoa whoa what the fuck is going on now? Everything's off the rails. There's two camps barking at each other.

There's blatant misinformation on both sides. Blatant distortions of the truth. Blatant editorializing of facts. And you're like, hey, what happened, guys? Yeah, no, it's crazy. And not that the news didn't have distortions before. And not that the news didn't have distortions before. Like you think about, you know, we covered up all sorts of things, you know, massacres in Cambodia, secret bombing, you know, use of Agent Orange, like stuff like that just didn't appear in the news in the degree it should.

Now, though, you turn on either MSNBC or Fox and you're right. You'll find something that's just totally full of shit within five minutes usually and that did not used to be the case you know I think individual reporters used to take a lot of pride in their work you know and it's different now now and now when you make mistakes in the business you don't you don't get bounced out of the business in the way you used to. And that's really strange. Only plagiarism, right?

Plagiarism still bounces you, doesn't it? Plagiarism is pretty, yeah, that's usually fatal, right? You're not going to usually recover from that. I mean, some people have kind of near problems with that. And they, you know, I'm not going to name names. But no, but you think about people who got stories like W the WMD thing wrong. Right. Not only do they not get bounced out of the business, they all got promoted, you know, they're like the editors of major magazines now, or, you know, and,

and so what does that tell people in the business? Well, it tells you, you know, if you screw up, as long as you screw up with a whole bunch of other people, it's okay, you know, which is not good. And we used to have a lot of pride about that stuff in this business, and now we don't anymore. There isn't the shame connected with screwing something up that there used to be. I think there's a real danger in terms of social media especially in not complying to the Constitution, not complying to the First Amendment. I think there's a real danger in that. And I don't think we recognize that danger because I don't think we saw what social media was until it was too late. And then by the time it was too late, we had already had these sort of standards in place.

And the people that run it were already getting away with enforcing their own personal bias their ideological bias and this is this is that when you're at this position where you go well how does that ever get resolved they're not going to resolve it on their own they're still making ass loads of money what do you do is the government resolve it well if trump steps in and resolves it it looks like he's trying to resolve it to save his own political career or right to to you know to help his supporters it's like yeah no and and no matter what if trump does anything about it automatically everyone's going to be against it right right you know even even if it's um even if there's some sense in there somewhere people won't won't uh won't get behind it but if they do anything about it there's

going to be a correction time there's going to be be a gab time where it's going to be like that, where it's just going to flood with people that are just like with this newfound freedom. They're just going to go shoot up the town, you know? But I mean, but how would you, how would you fix it now? That's the thing, because it's not only about rules. It's also about culture. Like people have already, they're in this pattern of you know not saying the wrong thing right and they don't i think there's we're in a culture that doesn't even really know how to deal with free speech if we actually had it in the same way we used to

you know no one seems to have a forecast like no one's like well the storm is going to last about four years and then it's like there's no there's no forecast no no everyone's like well it's a fucking uncharted waters right right but if you historically the tendency is once you have a tool that kind of can be used to um keep people in line and enforce compliance of ideas and uh then it always ends up worsening and becoming more and more dictatorial and authoritarian i mean again you go back to the soviet example like once they started you know really exercising a lot of control over the press and literature and things like that it didn't get better you know it it just continued becoming more of a you know an entrenched thing until so i that's what i worry about i that we're headed more in that direction.

Yeah, I think so too. I'm not really, I'm just really concerned with on both sides when people dig their heels in ideologically, the other side just gets even more convinced they're correct. Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's no cross dialogue of any kind anymore there.

And even now, I mean, it mean, it's interesting if you had, you had Bernie Sanders on your show and Sanders, Sanders is one of the few politicians left who has this idea that we should talk to everybody. Like there's, there are no illegitimate audiences out there. There are no, and like, you know, that's my job as a politician is to try to convince you of things, but that's not normal in the Democratic Party anymore. I mean, Elizabeth Warren, you know, has made a big thing about not going on Fox and about having certain people taken off Twitter. And I think that's increasingly the sort of line of thought in mainstream Democratic Party thought now is that we're just going to rule out whatever that is, 47% of the electorate. We're just not going to talk to them anymore.

Right, right. I don't know how that can possibly be a successful political strategy and what the point is. No, it doesn't make any sense. I was reading something where people are going after Tulsi Gabbard for being on Tucker Carlson. She's like, I'll talk to everybody. I don't know. for being on tucker carlson's and then they have this you know reductionist view of who he is he's a white supremacist like oh well she supports white supremacists she goes on a white supremacist show like okay is that what he is right is that really what he is and he's a lot more than that there's a lot going on there right you guys are fucking with life you know you're fucking with the reality of life and you're saying it in these sentences.

You're printing it out in these paragraphs as fact and you're sending it out there irresponsibly. And it's just really strange that people don't understand the repercussions of that. Yeah, this is something we talk about on our podcast, Useful Idiots, all the time. It's a catch-22, right? Like, you don't invite somebody like Tulsi Gabbard on to CNN and MSNBC. They're kind of excluded from the same platforms the other politicians get. So they go to other platforms, right? And then you say, oh, you went on that platform, so you're illegitimate.

You know, what do you want them to do? Like they do the same thing with people who go on RT, for instance, right? Oh, well, you're helping the Russians because you went on RT. Well, that's because you didn't invite them on any. I mean, people are going to try to talk to anybody they can to spread their ideas. And that kind of propaganda thing is pretty constant now. And the use of the term, terms like white supremacist with Tucker Carlson, I mean, there are a million terms now that you use to just kind of throw at people.

And what they're trying to do is create this ick factor around people, right? Like once you get, someone gets a label associated with them, then nobody wants to be associated with that person, right? And then they quickly kind of die out of the public scene. And that's, I think that's really bad too. You know, it's like a – it's just an anti-intellectual way of dealing with things. And I think it's not good. It's weird that it's so prevalent. It's weird that there's so few proponents of a more, you know, open-minded way of thinking. Right.

Yeah. And just to take the gap, we had Tulsi Gabbard on our show too. And immediately we got accused, what, do you love Assad? Do you want to bomb Syrian children? Do you want to murder Syrian children? No, she's a presidential candidate. We want to talk to her and hear what she has to say. But they immediately go to the maximalist interpretation of everything.

And then what they're basically saying when they ask you those questions are do you want to wear that label too because she's got it already so if you have her on again you're gonna you're gonna have that label and people they see that you know and and so you know people who have who don't have a big following and who are who are worried about their careers and about you know the money and advertisers and stuff like that they they think twice about you know interviewing that person the next time yeah and that's another way to get at speech exactly and again i don't know how you get out of it you know and i mean i've experienced some blowback i guess but it doesn't hasn't't worked yet. Right. You know what I mean? It's not real. It's like, it's just words like, okay.

Well, but yeah. And, and, but you're handling it the right way, Ben. I think your audience is rewarding you for, for not, not bowing to it, you know? And I think that more people, if they took that example and said, I'm not going to listen to what the PAC says about this. I'm not going to be afraid of being called a name. Fuck that.

I'm going to talk to who I want to talk to, and I'm going to explore whatever ideas I want to explore. Then this kind of stuff wouldn't be as effective. But it's so easy to do to people, and it's so easy for them to deplatform people. It's so easy. And shadow banning and it's so easy for them to deplatform people. It's so easy. And shadow banning and all this other weird shit that's going on. They're channeling people and pushing people into these areas of their platforms that makes them less accessible.

And I know where it comes from. I was young and politically active once. You want to change the world. You want to make it a better place. where it comes from i mean i'm i was i was young and politically active once you know you you want to change the world you want to make it a better place so you're in college and you don't have any power you don't have any uh way to input make something into legislation you know what i mean so what do you do you you know social media gives you the illusion that you're having an impact in the world by you know maybe getting somebody deplatformed or taken off twitter or something like that it feels like it's political action to people but it's not you know what i mean it's it's it's something that they that is

open to people to do but it's not the same as you know getting 60 congress 60 members of the senate to to raise taxes on a corporation that's been evading them for 20 years. You know what I mean? Like that's real action. This, you know, getting some random person taken off the internet is just not change, you know. But people feel like it is and they want to do the right thing. So I get it. But no, it's not, you know, real political action, I don't think.

No, it's fucking gross. Yeah. And there's so much of it, and there's so little logic. Also, and this must be a personal thing for you, but isn't this the unfunniest time in American history? Yes and no, because you're rewarded for for stepping outside of the box that's true in a big way like yeah you mean dave chappelle gets attacked but guess what he also gets rewarded in a huge way right he goes on stage now people go ape

shit that's true and part of the reason why they go fucking bonkers is because they know that this guy doesn't give a fuck. And he's one of the rare ones who doesn't give a fuck. So when he goes up there, you know, if he thinks something crazy about whatever it is, whatever protected group or whatever idea that he's not supposed to explore, that's not going to stop him at all. He's going to tell you exactly what he thinks about those things regardless of all this woke blowback he's not he doesn't care right and so because of that he's rewarded even more and same thing with bill burr same thing with a lot of comics i experienced it with my own jokes sure more controversial bits get people more fired up now they love it because everyone's smothered they're smothered by human resources and smothered by office politics and you're smothered by social discourse restrictions and you just don't feel like you can express yourself anymore. That's true.

And a lot of people also don't have a – they feel like they're being watched all the time. Yes. So they feel like they kind of can't let it all hang out anywhere. Yeah. Right? And so that's – yeah, they do feel incredibly like repressed and under the gun yeah i think that that's that's true yeah i just i feel like it i mean i'm not a comic but i but i just imagine it must be a more challenging environment it's more challenging but more

rewarding too my friend ari said it best he said this is a great time for comedy because comedy's dangerous again right that's true yeah that's true yeah it's kind of goes goes back to like the lenny bruce era right yeah when when you know you could kind of completely freak people out with a couple saying a couple of things sure yeah yeah for good or bad richard pryor yeah well you like you you saw it with like louis ck right louis ck's under the microscope now that joke that he made about parkland is absolutely a louis ck joke if you followed him throughout his career what was the joke again i'm sorry the joke was why am i listening to these parkland survivors why are you interesting because you push some fat kid in the way like see you're laughing right like that is a louis ck joke he's saying something fucked up that you're not

supposed to say that is throughout his goddamn career he's done that thatk joke he's saying something fucked up that you're not supposed to say that is throughout his goddamn career he's done that that's what he's always done but after the um you know jerking off in front of women all that stuff and him coming out and admitting it and then taking a bunch of time off now he's a target right now he does something like that and they're like oh he's all right now like like no this is what he's always done. He's always taking this sort of contrarian, outside-the-box, fucked-up-but-hilarious take on things. And that bit, unfortunately, because it was released by someone who made a YouTube video of it, he didn't get a chance to – he was gone for 10 months, and he had only done a couple sets when he was fleshing these ideas out. I guarantee you he would have turned that idea into a brilliant bit but he never got the chance because it was just it was set out there in the

wild when it was a baby it was mauled down by wolves it needed to be it needed to grow right yeah i mean that's what a bit of these bits they they grow and they develop and that was a controversial idea that we're supposed to think that someone's interesting just because they survived a tragedy and his take is like no no no no you're not interesting right you're fucking boring you're annoying get off my get off my tv and a lot of us have felt that way sure he just the way he said it was easy to take and put in you know out of context put it in quotes and turn him into an asshole well yeah but that's what comedy is right right? It's, it's taking what people, the thoughts that everybody has and vocalizing that thing,

that forbidden thing in a way that people can kind of, you know, come together over. Right. I mean, I think that was a lot of, a lot of what Richard Pryor's humor was about. Like he,

he, he took a lot of the sort of uncomfortable race problems. Right. And he just kind of put them out there and both white people and black people laughed at it. Right. of uncomfortable race problems, right? And he just kind of put them out there, and both white people and black people laughed at it, right? Like, together, you know? And that was what was good about it. Yes.

But if you can't, if people are afraid to vocalize those things, if they think it's going to ruin their career, I mean, I guess that makes it more interesting, right? It does. It's more high stakes. But if you can navigate those waters and get to the promised land of the punchline, it's even more rewarding. Right. But you just have to explain yourself better.

You have to have better points. You have to have a better structure to your material where while the people who may find your idea objectionable, you coax them. Like, hold my hand. I'm going to take you through the woods. We're going to be okay. Follow me. And boom! Isn't that funny?

Right, right, right. But you have to navigate it skillfully. And you have to navigate it thoughtfully. And you have to really have a point. You can't have a half-assed point. But you can't have a situation where it's fatal to be off by a little bit. Right. You know, like there was a writer that I loved growing up, a Soviet writer named Isaac Babel.

Stalin ended up shooting him. But he gave a speech about, I think it was in 1936, you know, to a Soviet writers' collective. And he said, you know, people say that we don't have as much freedom as we used to, but actually all that, you know, the Communist Party has done is prevented us from writing badly. The only thing that's outlawed now is writing badly, right? And everybody laughed, but he was actually saying something pretty serious, which is that you can't write well unless you can, you know, screw up too, you know what I mean? Like on the way to being creative in a good way, you have to miss, you know? And if missing is not allowed and there's high punishment for missing,

you're not going to get art. You're not going to get revelation. You're not going to get all these things. Well, in comedy, it's particularly important because you have to work it out in front of people. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I used to sit at a comedy club in Manhattan when I was in college. You know, they would try out their material like on a Wednesday, right? You know, early. And that was always the most interesting time for me. Like they're trying stuff out and a lot of it wasn't so good, but you know, it was it was interesting right and you just can't have a situation where people feel like you know one wrong word is going to ruin their careers yeah you know yeah i don't know but there's also people that are wolves and they're trying to take out

that little baby joke wandering through the woods they want that feeling of being able to take someone down right and that that's you know that's you're getting that now too which is just and so now because that there's like yonder bags at the improv where i'm performing tonight they use yonder bags you have to put your cell phone in a bag when you go in there so you can't record things yonder bags yes it's a company called yonder it's just so strange it's uh like all the shows i did with chapelle he uses yonder bags and the idea is to prevent people from from filming and recording and you know and then eventually putting your stuff out there uh-huh well you know look i i'm kind of all for that i mean i've seen this with

politicians on the campaign trail like they are so tight now in ways that they used to not be well you saw the donald trump thing donald trump j Jr., where Trump Jr., they didn't want him to do – they wanted him to do a Q&A, and he didn't want to do it. So they booed him. The right-wing people were booing him. They were yelling out, Q&A, Q&A, because they wanted to be able to talk. Oh, I see. They wanted to be able to say something to him. And these were people that were like far right, far right people.

to him and these are people that were like far right far right people they just didn't think he was being right enough or he was playing the game wrong or he wasn't wasn't letting them complain to him right right yeah yeah no that's bad and and politicians are are aware of that now and they're they're constantly aware that they're they're on film everywhere and so they're you know a thousand percent less interesting because yeah they're they I mean, I remember covering campaign in 2004. And I saw Dennis Kucinich give a speech somewhere. And he was going from, I think, Maine to New Hampshire. And I said, well, can I get a ride back to New Hampshire? He's like, yeah, sure.

So, you know, takes me on the van. He like takes his shoes off. He's like cracking jokes and everything and like eating udon noodles or something. Political candidates would not do that now. Like they'd be afraid to be off the record with you. Right, right, right. And they're afraid to be around people and just behave like people, you know, which is not good, I don't think. It's the weirdest time ever to be a politician because it's it's basically you've got this one guy who

made it through being hugely flawed and just going ah fucking locker room talk and everyone's like well yeah it is locker room talk i guess and then it works and he gets through and he wins and so you've got him who seems like he's so greasy like nothing sticks to him and then you have everyone else who's terrified of any slight misstep yeah totally and and you can't replicate the way trump does this you know trump trump is he was born this way there's like a thing going on in his head like he is you know pathologically driven to behave in a certain way and he's not going to be cowed by the way you know people are of a social because he just doesn't think that way you know he's not going to be cowed by the way you know people are of a social because he just doesn't think that way you know he's and but that's no one else is going to behave like

that what do you think about him and speed what do you think about all that does he take speed you mean yeah so did you ever see his speech after super tuesday yeah that's the one where he was slurry. That was the one where he was ramped up? He was very... I just say, watch that speech. We're not supposed to draw conclusions about what might be going on pharmaceutically with somebody, but I would say just watch Donald Trump's performance after the results of the Super Tuesday roll-in in 2016. Let's hear some of that. First of all, the Christie is hilarious.

I watched Hillary's speech and she's talking about wages have been poor and everything's poor and everything's doing badly, but we're going to make it. She's been there for so long. I mean, if she hasn't straightened it out by now, she's not going to straighten it out in the next four years. It's just going to become worse and worse.

She wants to make America whole again. And I'm trying to figure out what is that all about is this it yeah i mean it's just i have to go back and look but yeah but he he went on and on also the the christy factor was really funny with that because he was looking at him he's just sitting back there going what am i doing what am i doing with my life look at his face literally you can see his his brain wandering well how the fuck did this happen i was gonna be the man like i was the goddamn president it was gonna happen for me i could see it happening i saw him in uh in ames iowa um basically standing alone in the park waiting for people to try to shake his hand you know yeah it was pretty bad like you see that and

but yeah do you have a theory about trump and speed yeah yeah yeah i think he's on some stuff i think first of all i know so many journalists that are on speed i know so many people that are on adderall and it's very effective it gives you confidence it gives you a delusional perspective you get a delusional state of confidence it makes people think they can do anything. It's basically a low-level meth. It's very similar to methamphetamine chemically. Yeah, sure. And people – I've done it.

Tell me what it's like because I haven't done it. Yeah, I mean, I've done speed too. I mean, you know, all those drugs are – yeah, they're like baby speed basically. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. I think people who – it's not good for a writer because writing is one of these things where one of the most important things is being able to step back and ask, am I really, am I full of shit here?

You know, are my jokes as funny as I think they are? Right. Like, if once that mechanism starts to go wrong, you know, you're really lost as a writer, right? Because you're not in front of an audience. You're with yourself in front of a computer. So I don't think speed is a great drug. I mean, you get a lot of stuff done.

So that's good. But yeah, no, I think there's a lot of people who are on it now. And also a lot of it is because kids come up through school, and they're on it too. And they get lot of it is because kids come up through school and they're on it too. Yes. You know, and they get used to it. So, you know, I have kids. I wouldn't dream of giving them any of those drugs. You know, I think it's crazy.

I do too. You saw the, I'm sure you saw the Sudafed picture too, right? No. What was that? Trump was sitting in his office eating a, it was that famous photo where he's like, I love Hispanics, where he's eating a taco bowl at Trump Tower. And behind him there's an open drawer, and in that open drawer is boxes of Sudafed. And Sudafed gives you a low-level buzz. And this is why you used to have to go to CVS to buy this stuff.

You used to have to give your drivers – I guess you still do. You have to give your driver's license because they want to make sure you're not cooking meth and buying like 10 boxes of it at a time and cooking up a batch yeah if you're like in a in a holler in kentucky and you go in and get 20 20 boxes of pseudofed i think pretty much people know what you're doing there yeah that's really funny did he so he had a bunch of pseudofed yes yeah in his box and you know there was that one reporter that – what was that guy's name again? Who had a whole – he wrote a series of tweets, which he eventually wound up taking down, by the way, Jamie. I can't find those fucking tweets. He wrote a series of tweets that there was a very specific Duane Reade pharmacy where Trump got amphetamines for something that was in quotes called metabolic disorder.

Kurt Eichenwald. Fun fact. Oh, Kurt, yeah. 1982, Trump started taking amphetamine derivatives, abused them, only supposed to take two for 25 days, stayed on it for eight years. Really. Now, is he full of shit? So, yeah, Kurt Eichenwald is interesting because he's written some really good books about finance. He wrote a book about Enron.

He wrote a book about Prudential. It was really good. And when I was starting out writing about Wall Street, I was like, wow, these books are really incredibly well-researched. But he had some stuff in 2016 where – like that's an example of something as a reporter. I see that and I'm like, well, where's that coming from? Because in journalism, you can't really accuse somebody of certain things unless it's backed up to the nth degree. So he had a couple of things that I would be concerned about. He took a leap. I don't know i mean look that's what i'm saying stepped outside the journalistic boundaries of what you can absolutely prove and not prove and took a leap and that's why i think

he took down the dwayne reed pharmacy he didn't take it down oh it's still there as well there was an oh okay there it is there was another thing about... Oh, he's got the milligrams per day. Wow. Where is this from? I don't know. It doesn't show it or anything, but I believe he got a copy of it from someone or he talked to the doctor. Drug was diethylpropane, 75 milligrams a day. Prescription filled with Duane Reade on 57th Street, Manhattan.

Not that I know of things. So, you know... He's got the doctor's name, too. Dr. Joseph Greenberg. I countered with medical records. A White House admitted to me only a short time for diet that he took it when he was not overweight. Okay, then that's fine. He says, I countered with medical records. They cut me off.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, you know, one thing I will say is that when you're covering stories, sometimes you hear things and you know they're pretty solid, but it's not quite reportable because the person won't put their name on it. Or, you know, you're not 100% sure that the document is a real document. Maybe it's a photocopy. And that can be very, very tough for reporters because they know something's true, but they can't. And social media has eliminated a barrier that we used to have we used to have to go through editors and fact checkers and now you know you're on twitter you can just kind of you

know right right right or you can hint at something you know and i i think that's that's something you don't want to get into as a reporter too much you know yeah that's a weird use of social media right it's like sort of a slippery escape from journalistic rules yeah exactly yeah you know or or you can you can insinuate that somebody did x y and z or you can you can use terms that are a little bit sloppy like you know again like but it seems like they did admit that he took that stuff for diet yeah so if you have the the white house you know spokesperson saying that they he took it for a short time for a diet then you're fine that's a reportable story right yeah yeah well i think when people get into that shit it's very hard for them to get out of that shit that's uh the the

speed train and i've seen many people hop on it it's got a lot of stops nobody seems to get off yeah not not with their teeth intact right yeah no it's uh that's that's not a good also he's so old he's so old he doesn't exercise he eats fast food and he's got so much fucking energy i mean people want to think he's this super person you know but maybe he's on speed maybe yeah maybe he's just gonna collapse turn over and collapse one day or not maybe you can go a lot longer on speed maybe yeah maybe he's just gonna collapse turn over and collapse one day or not maybe you can go a lot longer on speed than people think maybe if you just do it the right way but isn't that kind of the way history always works it's like again not to go back to the russian thing but all the various terrible leaders of russia like they all died of natural causes when

they were 85 right whereas you know in a country where people get murdered and die of industrial accidents and bad health when they're 30 all the time. Right, right. But the worst people in the country make it to very old age and die and they're alcoholics. And maybe that's a thing, right? Maybe he has the worst diet in the world and maybe he's on speed. Maybe it's also your perception of how you interface with the world and maybe he's on speed and maybe it's also your perception of how you interface with the world maybe because he's not this introspective guy that's really worried about

how people see him and feel about him maybe he doesn't feel you know whether it's sociopathy or whatever it is he doesn't feel the bad feelings they don't get in there yeah and this he doesn't have the the stress impact right and that's the thing about speed. Apparently, because of the fact that it makes you feel delusional and it makes you feel like you're the fucking man, you don't worry about what other people think. These fucking losers. Who cares? Right, right.

Let's buy Greenland. Yeah. You know, that was, why not buy Greenland? Why not buy Greenland? Yeah, and then when that came out, I thought, what's wrong with that? We bought Alaska. Well, we leased Alaska, sort of. Yeah, we were supposed to give it back, but we didn't.

It seems like Greenland would be a good place to scoop up, especially as things get warmer. Right? Yeah, exactly. The fucking tweet that he made when he put the Trump Tower, I promise not to do this, and have a giant Trump Tower in the middle of Greenland, I was laughing my ass off. I'm like, love or hate, that is hilarious. His trolling skills are are top notch very good they're they're fantastic oh he knows how to fuck with people when he starts calling people crazy

or gives him a nickname like it's so good because like it sticks oh yeah i mean part of me wants to see a trump biden race next year just for that reason just because the the abuse will be unbelievable i mean not that i'm encouraging that necessarily but just as a spectacle it's going to be unbelievable you can tell that he he is salivating at the idea of biden of course biden to me is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going for a long hike in the woods. It is not going to work out. It's not going to make it. Yeah, no, he's so faded. He has these moments on the campaign trail where he'll be speaking,

and these guys do the same speech over and over again, so they can kind of do it on cruise control. But every now and then he'll stop in the middle of it and you this look of terror comes over like where am i yeah you know what town am i in you know like he confused he thought he was in vermont uh when he was in new hampshire i'm sorry yeah he was he got those states confused but he's like what's not to love about vermont he was in new hampshire uh you know that can happen obviously but it happens to him a lot but he's like, what's not to love about Vermont? He was in New Hampshire. That can happen, obviously, but it happens to him a lot. But he's clearly old.

Yeah. I mean, he's not much older than Trump. Right. But he needs to get on the same pills. Yeah, yeah. Actually, that would be interesting. We should get a GoFundMe to buy speed. Can you imagine if they just filled him up with steroids and just jacked him up with amphetamines and had him going after Trump.

Because I really think he needs something like that. Whatever he's doing on the Natch, it's not working. Right. Yeah, yeah. He's too tired. Needs a little bit of enhancement. It's not going to work. If he gets the nomination, the Democrats are fucked.

I just, I don't see, I don't see him, I don't see him withstanding the barrage that Trump is going to throw at him. Trump's going to take him out like Tyson took out Marvis Frazier. He's just going to bomb on him. That was a bad fight. But it's going to be that kind of fight. He's just going to bomb on him. He doesn't have a chance. He can't stand with that guy.

He doesn't have a chance. He's also too impressed with himself. Yes. He's too used to people deferring to him. He thinks the things he says make sense and are cool and are profound, when they're just bland. He's just serving bad meatloaf. And he's like, ta-da! And you're like, no, this is bad meatloaf.

Yeah, that's how he got to be vice president, by being just bland enough to get whatever constituency Obama was trying to get. But you saw that exchange when he called Trump an existential threat earlier this year, and Trump basically, he just went off on him. Joe's a dummy. He's not the guy he used to be. That's going to be every day, every minute of every day. And then other people are going to chime in,, you know, every minute of every day. And then other people are going to chime in because they love it. People love piling on.

Oh, yeah. And his fans, oh, my God. He's the asshole king where people never had a representative before. There's a lot of assholes out there like, where's my guy? And then finally, bam, look at this. There he is. The asshole made it to the White House. Holy shit, I can be an asshole now? The president's an asshole? He wants me can be an asshole now the president's an asshole

he wants me to be an asshole lock her up lock her up yeah lock her up yeah totally like all that's i mean that that's gonna wear on a guy i mean have you been to one of trump's rallies no chance yeah i can't i have to wear a rubber nose and fucking i've covered them and what's it like they're unbelievable first of all the the the t-shirts are amazing you know like trump 2020 fuck your feelings you know what i mean like trump is the punisher you know it's like the punisher skull with the thing like it's it's uh it's it's amazing and in the crowds it's like totally out of idiocracy is there a fucking punisher skull with a trump

wig on it yeah yeah oh my goodness i might have to get one of those i mean he's there's there oh the t-shirts jamie that was such a loud laugh oh my god what It's a red White and blue American flag Skull Punisher style

With a Trump Trump wig on it So I saw that I need that shirt I saw It wasn't the one Red white and blue one It was the one

With the black And I saw that On a On like An eight year old kid Right It was like a mother With her little kids

And the Trump Punisher skull but do they sell that shirt on amazon can you find out the shirt i'm sure it's being sold everywhere it is now oh my god stickers and these are being sold oh god these fucking people i mean the the the merch is he is he's the most t-shirtable president in history i mean trump 2020 grabbing by the pussy again oh boy i mean they they like embrace that shit it the the trolling aspect of all of it is like the fun part for his crowds like sure what they get off on is how how freaked out you know quote-unquote liberal audiences are

by their appearance, their attitude, and everything, and they lean into it, you know what I mean? Which is interesting because, you know, that kind of like group camaraderie thing, you don't really find that in the campaign trail on the Democratic side. It's different. I mean, it's a different vibe entirely, but yeah, it's crazy. Well, it's dumb, and that's the thing that he's sort of like

captured is this place where you can be dumb like it's fun to be dumb and say grab her by the pussy like everybody knows that's kind of a dumb thing to say publicly of course but you can say it there because he said it yay you know build that wall build that wall yay right like it's like it's this chance to like shut off any possibility of getting over like 70 rpm like you we're gonna cut this bitch off at 70 there's no high function here i'm gonna cut it off at 70 and just let it rip right yeah no totally totally and and it's funny the way you say that uh they all everybody knows it's a dumb thing to say, right? So like I would talk to people at the crowds and, you know,

I'll talk to like a 65 year old grandmother and you say, do you agree with everything that Trump says? And like almost to the last, they all say, well, I wish he hadn't said this particular thing, but they're all there chanting, you know what I mean?

Like they're all into it. And the crowds are, they're so huge. Like I was in Cincinnati and I was late to they're all into it. And the crowds are, they're so huge. Like I was in Cincinnati and I was late to one of his events and I made the mistake that I couldn't drive in because they blocked off all the bridges. If you've ever been there, right? I was in the Kentucky side. So I had to walk like three miles away and like walk over a bridge. And I thought I was going to be the only person there.

And it was like something out of a sci-fi movie. It was just like a line of MAGA hats, like extending over a bridge all the way into Kentucky, like a mile down a road. Wow. I mean, they had to turn with thousands of people to get into this event. It's incredible. How many people did it seat? It was like 17,000 or 18,000.

It was the, you know, the, I forget what arena that is. It's the indoor one. Look at the size of those places. He's the only one that can pull those kind of crowds, period. Oh, yeah. No one can do that. You know, Bernie and Warren have had big crowds. Bernie had a 25,000-person crowd in Queens a couple of weeks ago.

You'll see crowds that big, but Trump's crowds are just dating back to 2016 they're just consistently huge every everywhere and uh and again this gets back to what i was saying before all the reporters saw this and they all saw that hillary was having real trouble getting four and five thousand people into her events and so we all you know we were all talking to each other like that's got to be in a thing that's's going to play a role in the election eventually. But nobody kind of brought it up or they explained it away. Well, I think they felt like if you discussed it and brought it up that somehow or another you were contributing to Trump winning. Right, but that's a fallacious way to look at it.

Yeah. Because covering up the reality of the situation I think think, created a false sense of security for Democrats. Sure. And they thought they were going to win by a landslide. Yeah. Right? That's what everybody was saying, but it wasn't true. I mean, there were serious red flags throughout the campaign for Hillary, and people, I think, were too afraid to bring up a lot of this stuff because they didn't want to be seen as helping Trump.

But that's not what the business is about. We not supposed to be you know helping people facts don't have you know political indications we're just supposed to tell you what we see how do you get journalism back on track is it possible at this point i mean is it is a lost art is it going to be like calligraphy i mean i think yeah Like, yeah, exactly. The Japanese calligraphy, right. You have to pass it down through masters. Yeah. And maybe that's, that's going to be what journalism is like. I mean, there's two things that could happen. One is that like if you created something like neither side news right now,

right. And just like a, that's a great name. Yeah. Like a network where it was a bunch of people who just kind of did the job without the editorializing. I think it would have, it would probably have a lot of followers right away, it would make money. And nobody has clued into that yet. Like if some canny entrepreneur were to do that, and that were to bring back the business, that or, you know, journalism has always been kind of quasi subsidized in this country. You know, going back to the Pony Express, newspapers were carried free across to the Pony Express, newspapers were

carried free across to the West, right? The U.S. Postal Service did that. The original Communications Act in 1934, the idea was you could lease the public airways, but you had to do something in the public interest. So you could make money doing sports and entertainment, but you could take a loss on news. And so it was kind of quasi subsidized in that way, but that doesn't exist anymore. There's no subsidy really for news anymore. I'm not necessarily sure I agree with that, that being the way to go,

but there has to be something because right now the financial pressure to be bad is just too, it's too great. You know, like there's no, there's no way to, sorry to go on this, but I came,

when I came from the business, when the money started getting tighter, the first thing they got rid of were the long-form investigative reporters. You couldn't just hire somebody to work on a story for three months anymore because you needed them to do content all the time. Then they got rid of the fact-checkers, which had another serious problem. And so now the money's so tight that you just have these people doing clickbait all the time and they're not doing

real reporting. And so they're, they have to fix the money problem. I don't know how they would do that though. How much has it changed recently? Because like when that piece of the stuff that you wrote about the banking crisis was my favorite coverage of it and the most relatable and understandable and the way you spelled everything out. Could you do that today? Yeah, but I think it would be harder because – That's not that long ago. It really isn't.

It's only – I really stopped doing that in like 2014 or so. Yeah, so we're five years out. But the big difference is social media has had a huge impact on attention span so you know i was writing like 7 000 word articles about credit default swaps and stuff like that i was trying really hard to make it interesting for people you know you use jokes and humor and stuff like that but now people would not have the energy to to really through that. You'd have to make it shorter. Even TV, you don't see that kind of reporting, that in-depth kind of process reporting where you're teaching people something

because people just tune out right away. They need just a quick hit, a headline, and a couple of facts. So, yeah, there's a big problem with audience. We've trained audiences to consume the news differently, and a couple of facts. So, yeah, there's a big problem with audience, right? We've trained audiences to consume the news differently, and all they really want to get is a take now. Everything's like an ESPN hot take on things. So that's not good. The counter to that, though, is this, what we're doing right now.

These are always these long-ass conversations. They're hours and hours long, and there's a bunch of them out there now it's not like mine is an isolated one and there's so many podcasts that cover and some of them cover them like in a serial form like the dropout was that what that was that they called it yes it was the dropout was the one about that woman who created that fake blood company oh yes right yeah susan what was her name elizabeth yeah what is her name elizabeth holmes that's right that's right theranos yeah the the completely fraudulent company that was an amazing podcast absolutely that if i read it i probably you're right i probably would have like

boring right i probably would have abandoned it earlier but listening to it in podcast form listening to actual conversations from these people listening to people's interpretations of these conversations listening to people that were there at the time telling you know telling stories about when they knew things were weird and when they started noticing there's tests that were incorrect, that they were covering up, that kind of shit. You can do that now with something like this. And I think that one of the good things about podcasts too is you don't need anybody to tell you that you could publish this.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you're right. And I think formats like this reveal that the news companies are wrong about some things, about audiences. Like they think that people can't handle an in-depth discussion about things. They think that audiences only want to watch 30 seconds of something. They don't. They're interested.

They do have curiosity about things it's just uh it's very difficult to convince people in the news business especially to take chances on that kind of content you know they'll do it for a podcast they'll do it for a documentary but um but for for the news they just they're making things shorter and shorter and shorter you know i was really lucky to have an editor who understood the idea that we have to get into this in depth or else it's going to be meaningless to people. That's pretty rare. For the most part, you don't see them taking that kind of bet anymore. But maybe podcasts will help people puncture that. But maybe podcasts will help people puncture that.

But the flip side of that is that they're not investing in stuff like international news in the way they used to. When I came up in the business, every bureau, every big network had bureaus in every major city around the world. Rome, Berlin, Moscow, whatever it is. And they had newsrooms full of people who were out there gathering news. Now there's none of that you know right because they figured out they can make the money just as easily by having somebody sit in an office in in washington or new york and just you know link to something and have a take on something you know so the i think the news is getting worse podcasts are getting more interesting maybe maybe there's a happy medium they can find in between well documentaries as well documentaries are commercially viable if it's a great subject like um like a good example is that wild wild country one where you know i didn't even know

that that cult existed i had no idea what what happened up there and then so this this documentary sheds light on it does it over like i think it was like six episodes or something like that. It's fucking amazing. And it made a shit ton of money. Or Making a Murderer was another one that was really good. Because that's something that happens all over the place. You have these criminal justice cases and they're terrible and justices happen. And if you really tell the whole story and make characters out of people and invest the time and energy to tell it well, people still like really good storytelling.

But I think within the news business, they have this belief, their hard-headed belief, that people can't handle difficult material. And I don't know why that is. Yeah, I don't know why it is either. and I don't know why that is. Yeah, I don't know why it is either. I mean, I think there's a large number of people that aren't satisfied intellectually by a lot of the stuff. They're being spoon-fed. And they think that because the vast majority of things

that are commercially viable are short attention span things, I think it's like this real sloppy way of thinking, non-risk-taking way of thinking non-risk taking way of thinking they're like listen this is how people consume things you got to give them like a music video style editing or they just tune out but there's always been a thirst for actual long-form conversations yeah you don't an actual real in-depth exploration of something in a very digestible way like one of the good things about doing your podcast or this podcast, any podcast really, is that you can listen to it while you're commuting.

You listen to it and it'll actually give you something that occupies your mind and interests you during what would normally be dead time. Right, yeah. And you're absolutely right about the thirst for something else. And again, I think when people turn on most news products, they're getting this predictable set of things and that doesn't quench that thirst for them. They're not being challenged in any way. They're not seeing different sides of a topic. You're not approaching covering a subject honestly by genuinely you know exploring the idea that so

that people you may have thought were bad or right or people you may have thought are good or wrong it's just all predictable so i think people are fleeing to other things now right they just they they want they want to just get the story they don't they don't want to have a whole lot of you know editorializing on top of it yeah and and uh yeah and and they i think also there's a lot of underestimating of audiences going out there and like we we just think that they can't handle stuff and they can yeah they're they're interested but we we just take it for granted that they can't do it maybe i'm guilty of that too you know because i've been doing this for so long but but yeah it it does happen i don't think people have changed that much yeah no probably probably

not it's just um it's just difficult you know maybe it's also we don't have the the stamina to to stick with a story in the same way that we used to like now if a story doesn't get a million hits right away we don't we don't return to. You know, you think about stories like Watergate. Like when Woodward and Bernstein first did those stories, they were complete duds. Like everybody thought they were on the wrong path. They were the only people who were covering it. And a lot of those stories kind of flailed around.

You know what I mean? They didn't get the big response. And it wasn't until much later that it became this hot thing that everybody was watching and you wouldn't so so that wouldn't happen now right like if reporters were on a story if it didn't catch fire within the first couple of of passes your editor is probably going to take you off it now what was that story that the new york times worked on about trump and they worked on it for a long time, and it was released and went in and out of the news cycle in a matter of days, and nobody gave a fuck? Yeah, the one about his finances.

Yes. And it was like a 36,000-word story. It was unbelievable. It was like six times as big as the biggest story I've ever written in my life. They thought it was a giant takedown. Right, yeah. And it was. It was like a 36-hour if that right and and maybe maybe yeah and people kind of said oh and this is amazing it's

got all this information in it and it just fell flat you know and that's and the important thing about that is that news companies see this and they say, wow, we invested all this time and money. We put our really good reporters on this. We gave them six months to work on something and it got the same amount of hits as some story about a carp with a human face that was filmed in China. You know what I mean that we you know we picked off the wires and we stuck it in page 11 whatever it was so then that what that tells them the incentives now are let's not bother let's let's not do six months invest investigations of anything anymore because what's the point we're going to get as many hits doing something dumb right you know so they just don't take the risk anymore god it's so crazy that that's the incentive now that it's all clicks.

Totally. It's such a strange trap to fall into. And there's also the other thing, which is the litigation problem. And this is another thing I wrote about in the book, is that there was a series of cases in the 80s and 90s where reporters kind of took on big companies. I remember the Chiquita Banana thing that the Cincinnati Inquirer did. Remember the movie The Insider about Brian and Williamson, the tobacco company CBS, right?

There was another one with Monsanto in Florida where some Fox reporters went after Monsanto. So they all got sued, and it cost their companies a ton of money and reputational risk. And so after that, what news companies said is, why take on a big company that can fight back and throw a lawsuit at us? And what do we win by that? We're not going to get more audience from that. So now if you watch consumer reporting at a small TV station, usually it's, they're going to bang on

some little Chinese restaurant that has roaches or something like that. They're not going to go after Monsanto or, or, or, you know, Chiquita banana, because there's no point that it's too much of a risk. So they just don't do it. And that's another thing that's, that's gone wrong with reporting. You know, they, wrong with reporting. The economic benefit of going after a powerful adversary isn't there anymore. So they don't do it. And that's a problem. Now, clearly, you've seen a giant change in journalism from when you first started to where we are now. Do you have any fears or concerns about the future of it? I mean, this is what you do for a living.

What are your thoughts on it? Where do you think it's going? I mean, I'm really worried about it because you need the journalists to kind of exist apart from politics and to be a check on everything. The whole idea of having a fourth estate is that it's separate from the political parties. I mean, I don't work for the DNC. It's not my job to write bad news about Donald Trump. That's the DNC's job. They put out press releases about them. And if people see us as being indistinguishable from political parties or being all editorial, then we don't have any power

anymore. Like that's, that's the first thing that the press doesn't have any ability to influence people if people don't see us as independent and truthful and all those things. And so that's what I really worry about right now is like, people won't, we'll stop listening to the media. They'll still tune us out. They don't trust us anymore. Andter cronkite from you know 1972 the gallup poll agency found that he was the most trusted man in america and that was true also in 1985 like for 13 consecutive years he was the most trusted there's no reporter in america who's who's the most trusted man in America. It doesn't exist. Yeah, it doesn't exist. Yeah, exactly. So people think of us as clowns and entertainment figures.

And so how are you going to impact the world if people think you're a joke? So that's what I really worry about. We don't have any institutional self-respect anymore. We don't feel like we have to, you know, challenge audiences, challenge powerful people. You know, it's just a bunch of talking points, and that's not what the business is about. So I worry about it. And, you know, I think there are a lot of journalists who kind of say the same thing.

We all kind of talk amongst ourselves, which is, you know, the job as we knew it is kind of being phased out and changed into something else. And that's not a good thing because people do need – in tough times, people need the press, as ridiculous as that sounds now. But it's true, and I don't know where we go from here. Legitimate journalism is so important. It's so important. It's so important. It's the only way you really find out what's going on. It's the only way. You're not going to find out through the depictions of the people that were actually involved in it that want you to see it a certain way.

You're not going to find that from people that have financial incentives and giving you a specific narrative. You need real journalism. It's so hard to find. And I think it's one of the reasons why we're so lost and it's one of the more insidious aspects of the term fake news because god damn that's so easy to throw around it's like it's so easy to call someone a bigot it's so easy to call someone a racist and it's so easy to say fake news and although they all have the same sort of effect they just diminish anything that you have to say almost instantaneously.

Totally. And when you can cast the entire news as being fake, people can tune in and out. But a lot of that has to do with who's doing the news reading now, right? Like in the 60s and 70s and maybe before, reporters, a lot of them came from the middle and lower classes. Like, you know, they were, it was, the job was originally kind of like being a plumber, right? It was more of a trade than a profession. And so you had a lot of people who went into the job and they had this kind of attitude

of just wanting to stick it to the man, you know, like they didn't want to be close to power. They wanted to take it on. People like Seymour Hersh, right? Like if you see that kind of personality who just wants to take the truth and rub it in somebody's face. But then after all the president's men, it became this sexy thing to be a journalist. And you saw a lot of people from my generation who went into journalism because they wanted to be close to politicians and hang out with them. It's kind of like the primary colors thing, right?

Where you see people who they just want to like have a beer with the presidential candidate. And that's totally different from where it used to be. So now we're on the wrong side of the rope line. You see what I'm saying? We used to be outside of power like taking it on and now we're kind of seeing we're more upper class in in the press and we're we're kind of in bed with the same people we were supposed to be covering and that's that's not a good thing people when people see that they they they you know that's that's one of the reasons why they say they call us fake news is because they see us as doing PR for rich people.

One of my favorite books ever about politics is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Oh, yeah. I wrote the introduction to that. Did you? Yeah, the last edition of that. Oh. Greatest book. It's a fantastic book.

And it's a great example of someone who knew that they weren't a part of that system so they could talk about it as an outsider. He knew he was only going to be covering it for a year, so he just went in guns blazing, got everybody fucked up, drinking on the bus, making everybody do acid. Burned all of them. Yeah, and he says that in the book. He's like, look, this isn't my beat. I don't have any friends I have to keep.

So I'm going to tell you everything that I see and fuck it. And that's a real problem in reporting. When you're in a beat for too long, you end up developing unhealthy relationships with sources. And you end up in a position where you're not going to burn the people who you're dependent on to get your information. And when that happens to reporters, I think that's one of the reasons it's good to kind of cycle through different topics over the course of your career. If you get stuck in the same beat too long, eventually you fall into that trap. And Thompson, of course, never did that. Every story that he covered was he let it all hang out and just said whatever the hell he thought and he let the chips fall where they may.

And that's kind of the way – I mean you can't do that all the time probably but i think that's the thing that was great it was amazing and there's no other examples of it no no not like that yeah yeah yeah i mean that book was so great on so on so many levels like he uh i mean i always thought of as being also kind of like a novel because it's a it's this story about this person who's like obsessed with finding meaning and truth. But he goes to the most fake place on earth, which is the campaign trail, to look for it. And so all these depictions of all these terrible lying people, they're just so hilarious. And so it's kind of, you know, it's almost like a Franz Kafka novel. It's amazing. And then it's great of, you know, it's almost like a Franz Kafka novel. It's amazing.

And then it's great journalism at the same time. Like he's telling you how the system works and how elections work. And it's really valuable for that. So, yeah, that was brilliant. He also changed a lot. I mean, he actually affected politicians. Like the shit that he did with Ed Muskie. Oh, my God.

That was fantastic. When he was on the Dick Cavett show, and Dick Cavett asked him about it. He goes, well, there's a rumor that he was on Ibogaine, and I started that rumor. I mean, it's just, he literally got in that guy's head. Oh, yeah. And I remember he put that picture of musky. He just found a picture of musky. And he's basically wearing like that.

Yes. And the caption is musky in the throes of an ibogaine frenzy. Right? And you couldn't really get away with that now. Like, he just, you know, it was just. Well, it's a crazy drug to choose, too, because it's a drug that gets you off addictions. Right.

Yeah, exactly. It's one of the more hilarious aspects of his choice. it sounded great yeah and with the witch doctor and all that stuff brazilian witch doctor yeah yeah yeah this it was fantastic oh so good yeah but you know that that kind of stuff probably wouldn't go over all that well right now no get sued. Yeah. But also, he had this very, very sort of aggressively caricaturizing way of looking at politics and politicians. And that wouldn't go over that well now either. Like, people don't want you to rip on the process as much as he did in that book. So, it was great. It was just a fantastic book.

Yeah. I mean, he had a bunch of them that were great but that one particularly it's you can sort of redo it you could reread it every time we get to an election cycle and sort of like goes oh it lets you know these are these are repeating cycles this this is just like the same shit that he was dealing with in various different forms. But you can see it all today. And it's funny. The reporters, everybody's read that book.

Everybody who covers campaigns. I'm on my fifth right now for Rolling Stone. I have his old job. And everybody has read that book. And so they unconsciously try to make the same characters in each election cycle. So there's always like a Christ-like McGovern figure. There's a, you know, a turncoat, quizzling, spineless, musky figure. There's the villain Nixon.

Trump kind of fills that role for a lot of reporters now. And then a lot of them try to behave in the same way that their characters behaved in that book. So you remember Frank Mankiewicz was McGovern's sort of handler, and he was having beers with Thompson after the events and kind of strategizing with them. Reporters try to do that. They all try to do that with the candidates and their handlers now they try to develop those same relationships it's just interesting it's like they're really reliving the book you know that's a problem with someone that's really good you know they they take on so many imitators or so many imitators take on their demeanor their thought process like and hunter was just such an iconic version of a writer that it's so difficult, if you're a fan of his, to not want to be like that guy.

Oh, totally. I mean, I know that, especially because I'm writing for the same magazine and covering a lot of the same topics. You have to immediately realize that you can't do what he did like he thompson's writing was incredibly ambitious and unique he he was using a lot of the same techniques that the great fiction writers use like he was creating almost like this four-dimensional um you know story but at the same time it was also journalism like you you can really, most people couldn't get away with that. You have to be a great, great writer. I'm talking like a rare Mark Twain level talent to really to do what he did, which is to kind of mix the, you know, the ambition of great fiction with journalism. So if you try to do that stuff, it's going to be terrible. And I've done, I've certainly, if you go back and look at my writing, you'll find a lot of shitty Thompson imitations. And so I learned to not do that pretty early.

But yeah, it's one of those don't try this at home things for young writers, if you can avoid that, for sure. Do you have any hope? Is there anything that you look to and go, maybe this is going to be where this turns around in terms of journalism, in terms of, like... Yes, I mean, I think, oddly enough, I think shows like yours and the kind of proliferation of what you're talking about with podcasts podcasts the great thing about the internet there are lots of bad things

but the great thing about it is that it's given it's provided a way for people to just have an audience if they're good right if and if people have a demand for it they're going to there's a demand for it you can exist you can have a platform and and so that's what i think is going to happen is that people are going to crack the code of what what kind of journalism people want and they're going to create something that people are going to flock to and i don't have a lot of faith that cbs msnbc um abc cnn that they're going to figure it out like i think it's going to be some independent kind of voice that is going to come up with something a new formula and people are that is going to rise up you know i mean you've seen it a little bit with

things like the young turks you know although they're you know they're changed they've changed a little bit but they figured out that if you provide something that's an alternative from the usual thing, that you can get a viable functioning business a lot faster than you used to be able to. What do you mean by they changed? I think they've kind of become a little bit more in the direction of a traditional news organization than they were originally, maybe. I don't know. I don't watch it as much as I used to. So maybe I shouldn't say that. But, you know, again, the ability to do that is a lot different than it used to be.

Like, in order to have an independent journalism outlet, you used to have to, like, for instance, put out your own newspaper, which do your own distribution, do your own printing, do your own design. All that stuff costs a ton of money. And it was very, very hard to do it without big corporate sponsors. Now, you know, now anybody with a good idea can pretty much, you know, do something. And I haven't, so I have a lot of hope that somebody's going to figure it out. It just, it just, we're not there yet. I agree with you. I'm optimistic. I have a lot of hope too, but I'm always like, hurry up already. Yeah, I know. I know. And it's just, until we get there, the remnants of the old system of media, they're just, you know, it's just so tough to watch. Flailing.

Yeah, they're flailing. They don't really know what to do. They're kind of caught between just purely chasing the money and trying to adhere to what they thought the news looked like in the past. So it's like not entertaining. You know, if they were just chasing the money, if they just come up organically today, they would have had a different product entirely. But they're trying to sound like legitimate news, but they're also completely selling out at the same time. And it's just not working. And so, yeah, we'll see where all that goes. But we're not here. You're right. They're flailing right now. Well, Matt Taibbi, I appreciate you, man. Thanks a lot, Joe. I really do. It's always an honor to talk to you. No, likewise.

I appreciate you man thanks a lot Joe I really do it's always an honor to talk to you no likewise your book tell people Hate Inc

it's called Hate Inc it's by OR Books it's out now you can buy it on Amazon and my podcast is called Useful Idiots with Katie Halper Rollingstone.com

so you can check that out once a week thank you alright thanks Joe appreciate it bye everybody that was great man awesome