The Joe Rogan Experience - #1556 - Glenn Greenwald

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Former attorney turned award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald is a co-founder of online news site The Intercept, and the author of several books, the most recent of which is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day hello glenn hello joe rogan how are you i'm great man it's great to finally make your acquaintance acquaintance digitally at least yeah yeah we've been trying for a while i like before the pandemic um so i'm glad we're at least finally able to do this version of it yeah i hope we do it in person eventually that would be nice for sure what is it like down in brazil in general or no i've been to brazil what's going on in japan like right now i've been to brazil multiple times i love it down there yeah i mean so obviously it's a fraught situation politically because the country in 2018 elected you know a genuine fanatic someone who explicitly um prefers the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985, as opposed to democracy, which

succeeded it, Jair Bolsonaro. And then beyond that, the coronavirus has hit this country almost harder than any other, probably just right after the United States, but because of extreme poverty here and income inequality, you could probably make the case that it's hit this country harder than any other um so politically in terms of the pandemic and then of course economically things are pretty bleak but at the same time brazil which is what made me fall in love with it in the first place is always this country as you know if you visited so bursting full of vibrancy and energy and potential and uniqueness that i'm always kind of optimistic about it no matter how grim things seem to be they're very very friendly people i

really love it down there it's i first went there in 2003 for the uh abu dhabi uh world jiu-jitsu championships and so uh right yeah because i guess you're the fighting that you like is super popular here right there are a lot of brazilian oh yeah fighters and oh yeah i mean the original ufc fighter was uh hoist gracie who's a member of the famous gracie clan that came out of rio so uh i've yeah i've been going there for 17 years i really do love it down there yeah you know it's funny the it is i mean it's a culture as you say where things are where the people are super nice and before i lived here i lived in you know manhattan where i lived and worked which is pretty much the exact polar opposite of brazil in terms of the mentality the people i remember you know i used to come to rio when i first started coming here you would go

to the grocery store or the supermarket and there'd be a line of like eight people and the people in line would just stop and chat with the cashier, you know, for like three minutes. And I would like be ready to have an aneurysm because I'd come from Manhattan where, you know, if like you're behind somebody in the ATM line and they like accidentally put a wrong button or the wrong password, you want to murder them for wasting four seconds of your life and then after a while you know I started realizing look if I'm gonna live here I need to accept that kind of cultural vibe and it really just taught me a lot about the need not to have to maximize the utility of every moment yeah I have a friend who moved down there from Los Angeles to do jiu-jitsu and he said the first thing you have to

accept is that you're on Brazil time they are just so late but if you need anything to get done if you need a plumber and he's supposed to be there at 10 he might not be there till 1 and when he's there he's gonna be real casual about it and it might not get done for weeks and weeks something that you get done in LA in a couple of hours it's just it is what it is you just got to accept it they're just more laid-back they're then they're not in a couple of hours. It's just, it is what it is. You just got to accept it. They're just more laid back. They're not in a rush. Yeah. I've asked many people, many Brazilians here, why do you bother having the word for fast in Portuguese since it applies to nothing? And yeah, it's true. And you can decide that that's what you hate about it. For me,

just the complete lack of organization or urgency in terms of time is one of the things i love about it um so being there and you were there living there when you broke the snowden interview the snowden yeah i've been living here right since 2005 so the snowden story was 2013 did that did you feel, this is what I've always wanted to ask you about this. Did you feel physically in danger when that was happening? Because that was such a gigantic moment. And so terrifying for most Americans that were now sure that the government had access to our emails and our phone records. And it was all broken by you and Snowden. And I wondered, like, were you worried for your safety?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, for one thing, you know, at the time we were living in a part of Rio that was very isolated. We were living literally on a mountain in the middle of the woods. And, you know, I had with me at all times physically on my person, 14 or 15 thumb drives that contained hundreds of thousands, if not more, I've never quantified it on purpose, of the most sensitive documents possessed by the most powerful government on the planet, the most secretive agency within that

government. And I would carry them on my person at all times. I would go to the supermarket and just start laughing because on my back would be a backpack filled with top secret CIA and NSA documents. And obviously, there were a lot of people who wanted to get their hands on those documents, not just the US government to take them back, though they realized at some point that that would be impossible, but other governments, non-government actors. But then on top of that, you know, every story that we were doing was affecting markets, it was affecting diplomatic relations. So there was obviously a big, big interest in a lot of intelligence agencies around the world and what I was doing. And, you know, felt monitored all the time because I was, you know, not like the kind of paranoid feeling of monitoring,

but the actual being monitored has been confirmed in a lot of different ways. But, you know, the biggest concern at the time was that the U.S. government, being the U.S. government, got very bullying and very threatening and was explicitly and implicitly, got very bullying and very threatening and was explicitly and implicitly, both in public and private, making clear that if I left Brazil, there was a good chance that they would try and arrest me. I mean, remember how extreme they were with Snowden. They brought down the plane of the president of Bolivia when he was coming back from Moscow on the suspicion that he might have been taking Snowden with him. And of course he wasn't, but that's how extreme they were. So I stayed in

Brazil for about 10 months and didn't feel safe leaving. The Justice Department was telling my lawyers, if he leaves and shows up at any airport, we're going to arrest him. And the Brazilian government was super protective of us because a lot of that Snowden reporting revealed how the NSA and the UK and Canada were spying on Brazilian institutions, Brazilian oil companies, the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, the population. So in Brazil, this reporting was looked at very favorably. And so the government, the Senate offered a lot of protection. So I just felt very safe in Brazil and very unsafe elsewhere. Well, it's very nice that felt very safe in Brazil and very unsafe elsewhere. Well it's very nice that you felt safe in Brazil. It's very nice that they were protecting you.

Do they have a history of monitoring their people the same way the United States does? Well so you know as I referenced earlier the history of Brazil the recent political history is a really dark one but relevant to the US in the 1950s, early 1960s they were building the first really vibrant democracy in Latin America and they were steadfastly attempting to remain neutral

in the endless Soviet Union US Cold War but in 1963, 1964 they had this kind of center-left president that the U.S. thought was becoming a little too close to Moscow, a little bit too socialist. You know, nothing communist, but just very kind of mild reforms like rent control and land reform and some nationalization of companies to try and assuage the really brutal income inequality that has plagued the country forever. And so the U.S. government, first under John Kennedy and

then under Lyndon Johnson, worked with right-wing Brazilian generals to overthrow that democratically elected government violently. And they imposed a military dictatorship for the next 21 years, of which the current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, was a part as an army captain. of which the current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, was a part as an army captain. And those are really dark days. You know, dissidents were murdered, journalists were killed and exiled. Everybody was spied upon with the help of the CIA and MI5 and MI6 in the UK. And so a lot of that kind of endures, that relationship between the CIA and the Brazilian government.

But since 1985, when it democratized, it's become, once again, a model of a liberal democracy. So no, no government in the world is obsessed with spying on the world like the US is. But yeah, there's a pretty dark underbelly, like there is in any major country in Brazil, of kind of like a deep state or an intelligence community, whatever you want to call it, that definitely uses the dark arts to maintain control over the population. When you hit send, when you finally released, when you, when you put that story out,

what was the feeling like? Was there ever a, oh shit, what have I done moment? No, there's probably should have been. And if i were like healthier from a mental health perspective there would have been a bigger one of those but you know it was we were i was in hong kong first of all you know we had flown there to meet to meet snowden um and i wasn't sleeping at all i mean obviously i knew it was you know going to be one of the biggest stories of that generation, if not the biggest. And I had spent years, Joe, writing about the NSA and kind of trying to warn people that it seemed like it was being a lot more invasive and a lot more aggressive about monitoring our private communications and our private activities domestically than either the law permitted or anyone knew. But it was very difficult to sound that alarm because everything was done behind a wall of secrecy. And so when I finally got these documents in my hand, it was like the dream, right? It's why you go into journalism, but

especially for me to be able to show the world that everything was so much more extreme than even I thought, that I just wanted to get them out in the world as soon as possible. Like any delay at all on the part of the Guardian, which was the newspaper with which I was working at the time and reporting, you know, drove me into a rage. I just felt like the world deserved to see these documents. And also, you know, I was so inspired by Snowden. I mean, you've talked to him, I think, twice now. So, you know, like, you know, he's this 29-year-old kid at the time who pretty much gambled. We thought 95% likelihood he was going to end up in prison, not for a few years, but for the rest of his life.

And, like, not in a nice prison, but in the kind of prison that you go in when they accuse you of jeopardizing American national security. But he did it because he believed in the cause like that was not the bullshit reason like not the movie script reason like that was his genuine which shocked me right i kept was this jaded reporter who kept looking for the real motive but that was it there was no other motive and so i just felt like i owed him such a duty and kind of inspired by his example. I thought, you know, if he's willing to go to prison for the rest of his life and he chose me to work with him, you know, I kind of courage kind of became infectious. And we kind of adopted this trench bunker mentality like we were in this together and we were going to fight everybody. And that became the energy much more. And it kind of drowned out the fears that probably were irrational for us to have. I felt very honored and very, very fortunate to be able to

talk to him. And I think he's a very noble person, unusually noble. And you, in long form conversations, if there was any hint of something different, I really believe it would have leaked out. He really is that guy. And I think history, when we look upon this case, I mean, the documentary was pretty excellent that showed all the moments leading up to you releasing the story. But I think these conversations with him, I just feel very fortunate to have that platform where he's willing to come on and talk for hours at a time and express his thoughts on just on spying in general, national security issues and all these situations that he faced up to and now currently because of that, it's embarrassing that this is the world that we live in. This is the country that we live in. And that that man, who I really genuinely believe is a hero, is now a Russian citizen forever.

Yeah, I mean, hopefully there's an opportunity just because of all the bizarre, vindictive impulses that Trump has. And the fact that by complete coincidence, the people who want Snowden to be in Russia forever or to rot in prison happen to be Trump's enemies as well. That I'm hoping there's an opportunity to persuade Trump after the election, particularly if he loses, but even if he doesn't, that he should follow through on what he's now twice bizarrely raised on his own, which was the prospect of pardoning Snowden. It's something probably my top priority in the world at the moment. And the reason is, is what you just said, which is, you know, we, we, we're so accustomed to people doing things for, uh, just misguided reasons, corrupted reasons, um, people lying, deceiving about why they're doing things about presenting a false version of who they are and that's the thing is you know you talk to him for those hours when I got to Hong Kong you know before

becoming a journalist I was a litigator in Manhattan and I used those skills you know I mean I kind of created a little mini Guantanamo where I just like put him in front of me and just question them for eight hours straight three different you know three straight days without letting me even have a glass of water or go to the bathroom because I really wanted to know what was actually motivating him. Who was this person to whom I was about to tie myself and my reputation and credibility eternally. And he really is somebody who, you know, and like the thing about it too, is like, that's so amazing about it is that oftentimes people who leak secrets or who become a source that you know wants to expose secrets and are willing to go to prison are often

kind of fucked up people right they're like alienated from society um they feel persecuted and mistreated they don't have much going on in their lives and therefore don't feel like they have a lot to risk. Snowden was exactly the opposite. You know, he had at the time this incredibly beautiful and brilliant girlfriend who today is his wife. They had been together for years. And in order to do what he did, he had to deceive her. He had to leave the country and not tell her what he was doing because he wanted to make certain that when the government knocked on her door, she could truthfully say she knew nothing about it because he knew they would go after her if they could tie her to it. He had a great job. He was making a lot of money. He was a high school

dropout, but had taught himself these really coveted skills. So he had a great career ahead of him, a mother and a father who both love him very stable home life he had none of those traits you know that typically are used to demonize people who do this which is why i knew he was going to be gold from a media perspective and to be able to prevent the government from demonizing him in the way they like to do but more importantly in that like leaving aside all the perception stuff and all the PR and media stuff, you know, he's probably the person or one of the people certainly I admire most in this world in all the time I've lived. And what's so unbelievable, you know, people always say to me, oh, poor Snowden, you know, he's trapped in Russia. He can't come home. He's facing multiple

felony charges. He's been separated from his, all of which is true but like i also always say that he's the person who i know in this world who when he puts his head down on his pillow at night he falls asleep most easily um because there's something about knowing that you you face this dangerous choice and you chose the right thing i mean in hong kong as i said we were never i was never sleeping my colleague or a poetress was never sleeping we were sleeping like an hour or two with the aid of very strong sleep narcotics and you know he would say like at 9 30 he would yawn he would say okay guys i think i'm gonna hit the hay like he had no care in the world um and that was i was like what the fuck and he would like sleep for eight hours you know and

he would wake up have a little coffee um but that's what that you know clean conscience does to a person even with a clean conscious i just don't understand the weight of the stress that he was under how i don't understand how he could be so calm he i mean he didn't have stress that's what's so bizarre i mean you saw in the film right in the documentary citizen four we're like you know if because we were we had no idea what the cia knew we had no idea what the chinese government we knew we had no idea what hong kong authorities knew we were waiting i was always waiting for the door to be kicked in at any moment you know and and for him at least if not the rest of us you know me and laura to be taken away um and like i said i mean our working assumption the whole time was that there was you know as excited as i was the one thing that was kind of a dark

cloud that hovered over it all the time was that this person who i had now become connected with and developed an admiration for, I was certain at any moment he was going to be in the hands of the U.S. government. And the next time I would see him would be on television in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a courtroom, getting ready to be sentenced to like 50 years in prison in one of those hell holes that the U.S. specializes in where you spend 23 and a half hours a day alone in your cell and you have 30 minutes a day where you get to walk in a little room in the sun to satisfy legal requirements. And that was going to be him for the rest of his life. He got very lucky. I

mean, he almost did end up that way. So for me, I was concerned for him, stressed for him, but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, concerned for him, stressed for him, but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, and that was really important for me to know that he had thought through all the likely consequences. I didn't want to feel like I was using somebody's work product who hadn't given full thought to what it is that they had gotten themselves into. And it was only once I became very, you know, he could cite the statutes with which they were going to charge him and what the legal defenses that were available were. So he had given extreme thought to this.

He's an adult, and he made that choice. And it was amazing. To this very day, he's completely at peace with it. It's stunning. It's also stunning the lack of anger from the american people that the apathy and the sort of just acceptance that even though it has been deemed illegal what the nsa was doing that he exposed illegal activity that they still would punish him if they caught him and Everybody's like, huh, you know

so like what is government then if government is a group of people that are allowed to do something that has absolutely been deemed illegal by the courts and If you catch them doing this illegal thing and then report it and everyone agrees that it's wrong everyone agrees It's unconstitutional but yet if they get you they will still put you in jail like what the fuck is government what is government right but not only that right not only is the person who exposes what are crimes what courts have said are crimes not only is that person punished as though they've done something wrong when in reality they're owed the gratitude right of the entire country for stopping criminal spying by the government

on our population domestically which was one of the primary preoccupations of the american revolution that was what the founding was about it was about you know the king not being able to send his goons into your house and into your neighborhoods and search through your papers unless they had a proven reason to do so approved by a court that's what snowden demonstrated told all of us the government was doing to us not to the terrorists not to have had it to all of us yeah not only is it that he's been punished for having blown the whistle on criminality when he deserves a parade down Fifth Avenue. What's so much worse is that the people who broke the law haven't paid any

price. They don't have charges against them. Nothing. In fact, they remain in government. The thing that made Snowden finally commit the last kind of the straw that broke his back as it were was when James Clapper, President Obama's senior national security official, he ran the entire national security apparatus as the director of national intelligence, went before the Senate and was asked explicitly, does the U.S. government, does the NSA collect dossiers and tons of information on millions of Americans? And he looked at the senator who asked him that and said, no, sir, not wittingly. That's a crime. That's a felony just to lie to the Senate, let alone to do it. And not only was James Clapper never prosecuted, he was never fired. He served out his term

as President Obama's senior national security official. And you know where he works now? He works at CNN disseminating the news to the American public after he got caught fucking lying about the most important question he's ever been asked. That's how you know that you live in a country that, despite the facade of democracy, has gone very, very off course. You know, the one thing that I always think about is, like, if you kind of start from scratch and think about what a healthy government would be, in a healthy government, the population would know everything about what the government is doing, right?

That's just basic transparency. We need to know what the government is doing with the power, the public power we place in their hands, with very rare exceptions, right? Like we should know what movements they're planning, if they're in a war with troops. They have a right to something secret, but the overwhelming amount of things they do should be public and transparent, and they should know nothing about us, right? That's why we have a right to privacy. We're private citizens, they're the public sector. That's what the basic foundation of a healthy society would be. The United States has completely reversed that, not just the US, but the West generally

since the 9-11 attacks, where everything that they do is presumptively secret. We know almost nothing about what they do except what they decide to tell us. Most of what they do is more classified and secret and hidden. Whereas because of the spying apparatus that they built, they know everything about what we do. They know with whom we communicate. They know what we say. They know where we go. It's completely reversed what a free and healthy society ought to be.

And that more than anything is what Snowden exposed. And what's stunning to me is that he's now a citizen of russia he he lives over there they've accepted him and they've given him well he's not he's still he's he's still a u.s citizen but he has permanent residence permanent residence so he has like the equivalent of a green car but he's still he's very emphatic that he's still a u.s citizen and intends always to be and it's sort of out of the public consciousness i mean unless he does an interview with you or with me or with some other publication or something and then briefly it's in in the public's eye for a moment but no one seems to be outraged it's a small amount of

people that seem to be out outraged a small population also that are outraged that julian assange if they do extradite him to amer, they plan on putting him in a supermax prison for, again, exposing crime, doing what a journalist is supposed to do. I mean, and everyone's apathetic about it. It's very bizarre, and it speaks to the lack of trust that we have in mainstream media today

because they're not up in arms about this. There's no giant pieces on CNN running on a daily basis. This is not something that everybody has got on their news feed, on their phone every day. And it should be. It really should be. Because if you can't expose crime in the government, you don't really have a government. You have a dictatorship that's dressed up like a government exactly and you know what you know what you know what is done to to obscure that fact that you just described accurately there's like a pretense of dissent right so you have cnn

or msnbc or like the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post where people ostensibly express different opinions and have debates and arguments. But they're in extremely constrained ranges of opinion that are permitted, right? Like you're allowed to say the Democrats are good or you're allowed to say the Republicans are bad or vice versa and that's pretty much it. vice versa and that's pretty much it actual dissidents people who expose what the government is doing in reality right like not the bullshit daily kind of trivial chatter that creates this illusion of the elites fighting with one another but the actual underbelly of what the u.s government does in the world people who who criticize that, and especially people who expose to people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, they don't have the freedom

to be dissidents. The U.S. government has succeeded in keeping Julian Assange in prison for a year and a half now. There's no chance he's going to get out of a British prison, even if he wins every one of his appeals and hearings for at least another two to three years. And if he doesn't, he'll be extradited to the US and go to prison for the rest of his life. And absent a pardon by Trump, Snowden will be in exile for the rest of his life. And if the US government could get their hands on him, they would put him in the same place that they want to put Julian Assange. Because in reality, the same place that they want to put Julian Assange, because in reality, actual dissidents, actual activism against the U.S. government and its power centers is barred and prohibited and punished. That, I mean, that is just the reality of the United States, and it is tyrannical.

But so many people, and like, the other thing I just want to say is, the worst scumbags on all of this, like, isn't necessarily the population. I don't really blame people who have to go to work and work two jobs and have kids and are barely scraping by, which is the majority of the population, especially now. If we're not thinking much about Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, the cases are complicated. There are legal issues involved, and there's huge globs of propaganda to which they're subjected. One example is Snowden's in Russia. You know why he's in Russia? Because the US government forced him to be there by invalidating his passport when he tried to leave and by Joe Biden bullying every other country that he applied for asylum with. They trapped him in Russia. He never chose

to be there. He was planning on transiting through. And then they use the fact that he's in Russia to say, oh, look, he's a traitor. Otherwise, why would he be in Russia? So there's really effective propaganda. So I don't blame the population. The people I blame are journalists. It is the job of journalists to defend the people who expose the truth if you don't do that as a journalist what is your fucking purpose why are you a journalist and not only don't journalists care much about what's being done to jillian assange or edward snowden most of them if you actually ask them and talk to them about it will justify and defend the fact that they ought to be in prison because what they really are servants of the government and not what they pretend to be so joe biden was responsible for blocking his asylum to other

countries yeah joe biden and john kerry i mean you know i'm not it's not like they were uniquely bad i mean they were carrying out the the policy of the obama administration but it was joe biden who took the lead he the one of the first things that he did was when Snowden left Hong Kong, the ticket that he had was Moscow, Havana, and then he was going to go to Ecuador, where he was going to get asylum. And Joe Biden called the Cuban government and said, if you allow him safe passage, which they had already granted him, you're going to suffer consequences like you've never experienced from the US government before. So they withdrew their safe passage guarantee. And then he applied to countries that frequently grant asylum to whistleblowers like Sweden, Finland,

even Germany and France, where there were also a lot of revelations that were looked upon favorably because he was showing those populations how the NSA was spying on them. And then at the last minute, his lawyers would get a call from the consulate of those countries and say Joe Biden called and said that they'll start a trade war with us or they'll withdraw from this treaty or they'll do this or that um if we grant asylum and I'm sorry we just can't when Obama was running you remember the hope and Change website? I do. It expressly talked about, very clearly talked about protecting whistleblowers. And this was a big part of what he was running on. What do you think happens when you get in office?

I mean, I'm a fan of the way Obama communicates. I'm a fan of what he represents as a president. He was just so eloquent and such a great statesman, and everyone had so much hope for what he was going to do once he got into office. But his administration was one of the worst for whistleblowers ever. What do you think happens when you get in there? I mean, do you think it's like the Bill Hicks bit

where they show you an angle of the Kennedy assassination that you've never seen before? And then they ask you, are there any questions? You know, like. I mean, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be too maximalist in the conspiracy theorizing but i'll just give you a quick uh vignette a little anecdote a little anecdote just to like introduce my view of this which is in january of 2017 days before trump was inaugurated chuck schumer went on the rachel maddow show you can find this clip it's online it's amazing and trump had been posting a bunch of shocking stuff on twitter mocking the cia for having gotten iraq so wrong which they did because he was angry at them

because they were essentially leaking against his administration before it even began and were blaming russia for his election victory which he felt was delegitimizing him so he started criticizing the c. And Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow's show, and she asked him about it. And he said, morality and ethics aside of doing that, for a hard-nosed businessman like Trump claims to be, you have to be the biggest imbecile in the world to stand up to and challenge and attack the intelligence community, because nobody has more weapons to destroy you if you do that than they do and it was kind of like a throwaway line but in reality it

was one of the most important and candid admissions of how the government actually works that has ever been broadcast certainly on that shitty network but really like on tv ever because he was essentially saying there's this permanent power faction which dwight eisenhower warned about you know in 1961 when he was leaving the presidency called it the military industrial complex but there's this power this permanent power faction that is much power more powerful than the officials we elect and who stay in washington and exert power regardless of the outcome of elections who you can't challenge or impede because they'll destroy you. And so, you know, Obama, despite the lofty rhetoric and like the visionary posturing, which

I also don't want to say fell for, but was kind of inspired by in 2007, has always been a very shrewd pragmatist. He's always known how, from his time at Harvard, when he became the editor-in-chief of the Law Review, how to appease institutional authority. And so I think when he got into Washington, he thought to himself, I have these ambitious agenda items like health care and other things,

and I only can get them done if i'm not going to be provoking the ire of the cia which is why for example he also said during the campaign he would consider prosecuting the people on the cia who tortured the helpless detainees and then quickly said i'm going to give them all immunity because he didn't want to be at war with the cia so i think that's part of it right like? Like when someone like Julian Assange, someone like Edward Snowden leaks these secrets, it's not Obama necessarily, but it's the CIA, the Justice Department, the NSA, the FBI demanding, saying, this is our priority. You need to punish these people or we're going to have an endless series of leaks. So part of it is just that kind of calculation, like a very pragmatic calculation. Like, look, I may be president,

but I'm not actually the only one who wields a lot of power in this town. And then I think the other part of it is when you become president, you're sitting in that chair and you have like kind of the unprecedented and incomparable power of the US government at your disposal. If you think, if you believe too much in your own righteousness, if you believe that you're a benevolent and noble person using that power for benevolent and noble ends, then you start to believe that anyone who stands in your way and is impeding you is somebody who inherently is ill-intentioned or at least engaged in misconduct that ought to be sanctioned and punished. And I think that kind of became part of Obama's worldview too. Like it's one thing

to champion whistleblowers when they're exposing George Bush and Dick Cheney's secrets, but when they're exposing Eric Holder and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton's secrets, it seems a lot less benevolent to somebody from Obama's, you know, sitting in his place. It is amazing that Schumer would make that statement on television. It really is. Have you seen it? No, I haven't. You should see it and show it. It's amazing.

Jamie just pulled it up right here. Trump being really dumb to fight with intelligence agents. It just seems like he would know better than to say that publicly specifically to say that publicly on television yeah i mean i guess when you're chuck schumer and you're just like a creature who's lived in that sewer for decades and barely ever emerges you know to like breathe human air like those things that you know are just part of your world so embedded in it that everyone knows you forget that it's supposed to be hidden that it's kind of shocking to other people um you know i'll give you an example like my husband and i we rescue dogs

so we have 25 dogs in our house so we go out to dinner and i know exactly so we go out to dinner and someone will say like hey i know you guys love dogs how many dogs you have on big oh 25 like it's the most natural thing in the world and of course like every person we say that to thinks we're fucking crazy right like they think we're those like cat lady hoarder people because we forget that what's so normal to us is actually insane to other people we have to remind ourselves like we have to ease them into that i think that's what happened like if you work in washington you just for decades you just know you don't fuck with the cia and he saw trump doing that because trump wasn't a creature of washington and was kind of saying like he's being stupid well trump has such a tremendous ego too it doesn't seem like anybody

is out of bounds for him like it seems like like he feels like he could shit on anyone. Like, anyone he's in some sort of conflict with is going to get the wrath of his ire. It just doesn't seem like he feels anyone is above him or beyond reproach. Which I think was probably the primary factor in why a lot of people found him appealing in 2016. Yeah. why a lot of people found him appealing in 2016 yeah right so if you have a lot of anger you know a lot of just ambient rage towards institutions not democratic or republican or left and right or right just the power elite and you have somebody who just you know dumps on them with such contempt and doesn't have the slightest regard for any of it it's kind of

cathartic you know you want to side with that person because he hates the same things you hate well i remember when he started using the term fake news and i really thought it was a cop-out i thought well this is just a a really a sad way to delegitimize all these criticisms against him and all all of the things that they were bringing up that at least seemingly were factual. But now the more time goes on and the more time, the more you pay attention to the difference between left wing reporting and right wing reporting.

And you try to find like, well, where, what's, where's the reality in this? Someone's biased. There's something going wrong here. Particularly when you see the coverage that we're currently dealing with Biden.

And, you know, you rightly have been extremely critical of Twitter and Facebook and these social media giants that have chosen to censor the New York Post article. And that they've literally blocked the white house press secretary from twitter because she posted a link to a story from a newspaper that's you know it's a 200 year old plus newspaper i believe it's the oldest newspaper currently running in america this is that yeah the fourth largest the fourth largest it's insanity i mean it literally they're locked out of their twitter account they're locked out of their they can't in the week leading up to the election the fourth largest newspaper and i don't

know if it's the oldest but it's one of the oldest for sure it was founded by alexander hamilton is barred by twitter like the primary source of information for most people in journalism and politics, from posting information. It's so bizarre. It's madness. It's so bizarre. It's madness. Yeah.

I think, you know, go ahead. I was going to say, you don't, the coverage that you hear, like if you pay attention to CNN, which I read CNN online pretty much every day i just i want to see what they're saying at least i used to read it for the news and now i go what it's what's their take you don't see yeah god it's like the hunter biden story is completely illegitimate it's not worth our time but ellen's mean did you know ellen's mean she's still mean here's another story about ellen being mean It's fucking straight. This person broke up. This rapper broke up with his girlfriend.

Well, these two are getting back together. Front page of CNN. You don't hear a fucking peep about the revelations that are coming out of this laptop, wherever it came from. Jamie actually had a really good point. I want to bring it up to you to see if this is possible. Amy actually had a really good point. I want to bring it up to you to see if this is possible.

So I've heard of people being able to hack into like an iCloud account from time to time. And if you had that ability to have the account hacked, you would need to clone it to a computer to then be able to decipher this material and then turn that into somewhere. Because you need to, you can't say you hacked the iCloud account. somewhere because you need to you can't say you hacked the iCloud account is that possible that then they then put it on a MacBook turn it in and oh look what's on this MacBook but they do have emails and signed receipts from Hunter Biden at the supposedly supposedly but they haven't denied that this is his laptop which would be the first thing that's that's this is the key point so you know when we reported the snowden archive you know like when we hit send that first time like you asked me earlier you know there were millions of documents right like there was we had a high degree of confidence in their authenticity because we had verified a lot of them you use your intuition

you examine them from a kind of metadata perspective to see if there's indicia of forgery or alteration, but you can never prove the negative that none of the documents has been altered or forged by Snowden or by somebody else, right? Like you just don't know for sure with 100% certainty until you hit publish. And the way that you ultimately find out for sure is if you publish that first report and the people that you're reporting about don't come back and say what the fuck are you talking about that's not a real document we didn't ever do that that's not our doc that's forged and it was when the NSA didn't say that that we I mean I don't think I've ever been so happy in my career in in my life, because that was

proof that the archive was real, because of course they would have said it. Same thing, you know, last year in Brazil, we reported this series of exposés where my source had hacked the telephones of the highest and most powerful officials in Brazil and the Bolsonaro government and gave me the text conversations that they were having that revealed a lot of corruption. Same thing. Of course, those people wouldn't verify or confirm to me that they were real before I published. They wanted me to be in doubt. And then once we published and they didn't say, those aren't my conversations. Those are fabricated. We knew they were real. So just the fact alone that Biden has never denied either that the conversations are real or

that hunter actually brought his laptop to that delaware repair store and you know we've submitted questions i've submitted questions to the biden campaign and to hunter biden asking that question specifically and they won't answer because of course they're fucking real um but the the it was the the journalists the media outlets like c CNN that took the lead first in saying that this was Russian disinformation. Yeah. You know, like the standard way to get rid of information that they don't want the public to believe. They just lied about that. They just made that up.

There was never any evidence that Russia had the slightest thing to do with it. You know, and as to your question, the provenance is a little unclear. Like, that is kind of a bizarre story, right? That, like like Hunter Biden brought in three laptops, never bothered to pick them up. The store owner, out of curiosity, looked in them once no one picked them up, saw that there was all this evidence of corruption and gave it to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani. I'm kind of skeptical of that story myself. But why isn't the Biden campaign denying that and saying, no, Hunter never has been to that store in his life that's a complete lie and cast it's because it's probably true but it's definitely true that these documents are authentic it sounds like a crazy thing to do until you factor in smoke and crack once you factor that is a factor that's a factor once you factor in smoke and crack you're like yeah you probably leave shit all over the place. Like, you're out of your mind. And I don't blame him for that.

I mean, he's obviously had a drug problem. And when you're smoking crack, you leave laptops at repair shops and you don't pay for them. It seems normal, right? Right. I mean, that's the least of what you do, right? Like, if you're struggling with substance abuse, that does make it a lot more credible., that's the least of what you do, right? Right. Yeah. Like if you're struggling with substance abuse, that does make it a lot more credible. But here's the thing.

This is why I don't think I've ever been as disgusted with my colleagues in my profession as I have been the last three weeks because of this story, and I'll tell you why. In general, journalists do not care about where material comes from if it's A, authentic, and B, newsworthy. For example, in 2016, somebody mailed a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns to the New York Times, just dropped it in the mail and sent it to their newsroom. They got it. To this day, they have no idea who sent it to them, let alone what the motives of that person were or what they had to do to get them. Did they break in, commit crimes? Did they hack? Was it the Russians? Was it Iran? The New York Times has no idea. But of course, they've reported on the contents as they should because

that's what journalists do. And when asked, when the lead reporter who's won two Pulitzers was asked by NPR, how can you report on a document when you don't even know who gave it to you or what their motives were? He said what I would say and what all journalists should say, which is I don't give a shit about the sources' motives. Sometimes you get great documents from sources who have terrible motives. They want to get vengeance on somebody they feel you know like deep throat leaked about the nixon administration to the washington post not because he was a snowden not because he was noble but because he was resentful that nixon passed him over to be the director of the fbi so that's so this idea that journalists are using like oh my god this might've come from Russia. Therefore we shouldn't report it. There's a complete corruption of the journalistic function. But the reality, Joe, like why are we even talking about this? Like everyone knows the reality. I work in journalism. I have lots of

colleagues that I work with. I have tons of friends in every news outlet up and down the East Coast from New York to Washington and then on the West Coast. The reason is, is because they're all desperate for Trump to lose. That's the reality. They all want Biden to win. And so they don't want to report any information or any stories that might help Biden lose, in part because they want Biden to win, but also because in their social circles, everybody essentially is anti-Trump and pro-Biden, and they don't want to spend four years being accused of having helped Trump won like they were in 2016 when they reported on those emails that were leaked by the WikiLeaks. And it's just fear. They don't want to be yelled at. They don't want to be scorned in their social circles. And so they're willing to abdicate their journalistic

function, which is reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world and Joe Biden, in part because they want to manipulate and tinker with the election using journalism, but in much bigger part because they're scared of being yelled at on Twitter. It's fucking pathetic. And it's going to ruin people's faith in journalism for a long time, even more so than it already is ruined for good reason. I now defend people who say fake news, as you were saying, even though in 2016, I didn't like it either, because it's just true. It's just true. They will lie. They will print things that they have no idea whether or not they're true. If the CIA tells them to, or if they think they can get attention for it or a pause from their colleagues on Twitter. And I don't blame, you know,

if you have faith in mainstream news institutions, you're really irrational. I'm so glad you said that a lot of them are not printing things because they're worried about being yelled at on Twitter because it really is the case. And self-censorship is one of the more eerie aspects of knowing that you can get deplatformed off of Twitter for things

and knowing that you can get yelled at or you can get Twitter mobbed because of your beliefs, because of standing up for something that may be correct but unpopular. This is, I mean, what journalism is supposed to be is telling people what the facts are, giving people unbiased perspectives, objective perspectives on what is happening in the news and how this could possibly relate to their real lives. This is what it's supposed to be. It doesn't seem like it's supposed to be that at all right now

during these elections. It's scary. You're supposed to not pay any attention to all the crazy gaffes. You're not supposed to pay any attention to the very real concerns that joe biden is losing his mind and if you say that you're an asshole and people will attack you they'll say you don't understand he stutters and this is all because he called trump bush yesterday he called him george did you see that he said we don't want

another four more years of George. This is standard. Do you remember when Howard Dean yelled? Remember that yell? Yeah, after Iowa, when he got his third place finish in Iowa, he was trying to excite his young, disappointed supporters, and he did that weird primal scream scream and they ruined him over it. It was, it was a yell though, that he did.

If you've ever talked in front of a live audience, when people scream and cheer, it's so loud. You yell and you can't even hear your voice because it's so like, you don't even realize how crazy it sounds. But then when you isolate that sound and you take it just from the microphone, it sounds crazy. And that's what it sounded. To him in the moment, probably didn't sound crazy at all.

But that was enough. And I remember it being all over all these newspapers and every television show he was talking about. Oh, that ruined him. That ruined him. That destroyed his candidacy. And remember, too, the context of that was he was running for president in 2004. he was running for president in 2004. So it was 2003, you know, and then into early 2004, that when the primaries were, he was leading in the polls by like 30 points all year long.

And he was the only one at the time, you know, Howard Dean has turned into like a complete sleazy lobbyist piece of garbage. But like at the time, he was one of the only people willing to stand up and say, George Bush and Dick Cheney have lied us into a murderous war. We're on endless war posture. The government is constantly lying. So he was so off the track from what the bipartisan consensus was that they were out to destroy him. And're absolutely right look what they were willing to do that scream all it was was you know at the he was kind of like from the eugene mccarthy 1968 candidacy that was supported largely by young college kids excited by an anti-war candidate that was who dean's supporters were and they were traveling all over the country going door to door on his behalf and when he came in third place in iowa they were really disappointed.

He was trying to cheer them up. That was it. And they basically just manipulating that footage, you know, turned him overnight into someone who was mentally unstable and he never recovered from that. It's crazy to see. And it's crazy to see the difference

between the way they're treating Biden. They're treating Biden with the most gentle caressing hands. They're treating him with the bit the bit like I've never seen more bias like more complete ignoring of some real problems with the way he communicates with the things he says with the lies that he says. Like well for instance things he says with the lies that he says like for instance like during the debate him saying that he never said that he was going to ban fracking like that's just not true and you don't see it anywhere you don't see it in any of these liberal media pages no you know what you know what it's so first of all if you go and watch like the interview the

very few interviews that he's given i i'm not saying this for effect or to use hyperbole to make a point. I'm saying this because it's literally true. I don't think he's been asked a single hard question. This is somebody who's been in public life for 50 years. He was elected as a senator in 1972. He had to drop out of his first presidential race because of serial lying and plagiarism about his college record and about his academic accomplishments. He's somebody who has sponsored the worst, most destructive policies over the last 20 years, from the Iraq War to the crime bill that has made the U.S. the biggest prison state in the world. He was part of an administration, as you were alluding to earlier, that has, you know,

persecuted whistleblowers more than any other. There's a ton of things to ask him about. But in the interviews, they adopt, you know, that like, I don't know, you probably have had that experience when you go and like you visit an old relative, like one of your grandparents who's like in a nursing home. And, you know know you go in and like kind of like soften your voice so you don't like you don't want to be like you feel like scare them or like feel abrasive and like if they make kind of anything resembling a joke like you sort of fake laugh right like you're like oh that that's what like that's how they talk to him interviewers on television they like treat him like an old ailing grandparent but one who is beloved and like this is the thing about this is the most amazing thing about this whole thing with cognitive decline which anyone

who watches him for 15 minutes knows is true the people who were the first ones to disseminate that storyline were not supporters of bernie sanders once the primary got down to biden and and and bernie it was in 2018 and into 2019 when biden was by far the leading democratic candidate because of his name recognition and because of his eight years as vice president standing next to obama it was democratic establishment operatives, strategists, consultants, just like that whole DC professional Democratic Party class, which was petrified that he was going to get the nomination because of his name recognition, because of the favorable sentiment within the party toward him because of Obama. And they were the ones, and you can go find these clips. I actually read an

article about it once when i started um talking about cognitive decline and people started saying this is a shitty low blow you're just doing this to sabotage his campaign to help bernie and i was like are you fucking crazy like you're the ones who have spent the last year and a half on morning joe in the washington post op-ed pages you got it was i don't know if you remember, but there was a CNN debate when all the Democratic candidates were still part of the process when Julian Castro interrupted Biden and accused him of having contradicted what he had said three seconds ago. And he was like, Joe, did you just forget what you said 20 seconds ago? And then they interviewed Cory Booker and he

said, yeah, you know, if you listen to Joe Biden, you really wonder whether he's capable of carrying the football over the fence. They were the ones petrified that he wouldn't be able to withstand the rigors of a campaign. The only thing that saved him was the Corona pandemic, coronavirus pandemic, which let him sit at home. But had it not been for that, their fears would have become true. And now they've like declared what we can all see with our own eyes and what they themselves are saying all this time it's declared off limits to say it even though they're the ones who recognize first that it was true and that's

the kind of stuff that gets really creepy when they have the power to manipulate and control and dictate the discourse to that extent well it's like they've accepted the fact that people are putting out information and saving information for a very specific october surprise so they're saying okay well we're we're going to do is we're going to deny this information and when you're talking about the cognitive decline of joe bodnan to highlight it and to make a series of you know a compilation of these gaffes that would be bad for his campaign and we don't want him to lose we want trump to win so we're just going to ignore it

even though it's news we're just going to ignore it but so then fake news is fake news so then it really is fake and this is where we're finding ourselves in 2020 we're like we're a person without a country we don't know who to trust we don't know when we're look trying to find the news we can't go to twitter because twitter's blocking things now well twitter was the only thing that we trusted before because twitter was if an independent journalist was able to leak a story and put something out at least no one could stop them from putting it on twitter at least they didn't have to have the blessing of the Washington Post or the New York Times or anything else. They could just

put something out there and if it was verified that story could spread. Well now it can't even be the case because if Twitter decides that that is dangerous to the person that they want to win for president, they'll just pull the story and this is where we're at. It's terrifying.

It's really weird. You know i i talk to people about the kind of independent media that's thriving right um your success drives a lot of journalists really crazy and it's not just you though it's if you look at the podcasts that are succeeding and the way they succeed is that they don't just occupy a place on your TV that you accidentally stumble into. You have to actually go and find it, decide you're going to listen to it, and a lot of times, most of the time, pay for it. That's what makes it successful. What is it that's thriving? What is it that's succeeding? It is the people who have no interest in being part of that hegemonic media blob who aren't concerned with affirming their pieties and their orthodoxies and in fact are in a lot of ways

hostile to it or at least skeptical of it and eager to explore whether or not what they're saying is true because they don't trust any longer what they're hearing. And, you know, it is like if you go back to the Snowden story, right? One of the reasons Snowden did what he did, one of the reasons he was so horrified by this, you know, mass indiscriminate secret surveillance is because the idea of the Internet, the promise of it. is because the idea of the internet, the promise of it, if you go back and read what internet enthusiasts were saying in the mid-90s and into the beginning of the century, was this is going to be the most unprecedented tool of liberation and empowerment of people who don't have voices, because it's going to enable people to communicate and disseminate information without having to rely on corporate structures that can afford printing presses or satellites for networks.

And that was true. And the problem became, if you allow the government to turn it into this kind of tyrannical realm of surveillance, you ruin, you gut what is promising about it. And in fact, you degrade it into this threatening weapon. That's exactly how I see censorship by Facebook and Twitter. And what's amazing about the censorship by Silicon Valley now, I've talked to Jack Dorsey quite a bit about this because he's someone who's a really interesting guy. He seeks out a lot of voices to hear from and to get input about. He cares about trying to make Twitter a positive force in the society. And he's torn in a lot of different directions

by people demanding different things of him. But it's true of Twitter. It's true of Facebook. It's true of Google. They never wanted this censorship role. Not for noble reasons, but because it's better for their business if they get to say,

you know what? We don't regulate content. We're like AT&T, right? Like if somebody calls someone on AT&T's telephone lines and plans a neo-Nazi rally or spreads Holocaust denialism, nobody expects AT&T to intervene and terminate that person's service or cut off the call. AT&T is a content neutral platform.

They just say, we provide the ability for human beings to communicate and we don't control or censor or monitor. And that's better for AT&T is a content-neutral platform. They just say, we provide the ability for human beings to communicate, and we don't control or censor or monitor. And that's better for AT&T. They don't have to spend the money to monitor or censor. They don't have to get yelled at about doing it well or doing it poorly. And they make more money because more people—that and journalists demanded that they did so. They started saying to Facebook, how can you allow Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos, or then it became, once they were kicked off, kind of more mainstream but still out of the norm kind of people. And increasingly, they're just expanding the range of demands that they have for who needs to be silenced and threatening congressional regulation if they don't do it, threatening all kinds of recriminations. This responsibility to censor was foisted on these

companies. But now that they're doing it, it's only going to grow. And I think this attempt by Twitter and Facebook to block this New York Post story is one of the most alarming things that has happened in years from a perspective of free discourse and free dissemination. spent the last 15 or 20 years before going to Facebook working as a Democratic Party operative in Washington. He worked for Senator Barbara Boxer and then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He's a Democratic operative. And he walks onto Twitter and says, we at Facebook are going to be suppressing this story pending our own investigation to determine who would want Silicon Valley overlords unaccountable outside of the democratic process Silicon Valley overlords to control our discourse the answer is liberals do and journalists do and that's why they're doing it it's just so stunning because liberals have always

been synonymous with free speech in the first amendment the ACLU has always been about I mean if you think about a liberal organization, the ACLU is probably one of the most liberal organizations, you know, iconic liberal organizations. They've always been about supporting free speech, even if it's terrible. Support even neo-Nazis' ability to have free speech. I mean, it's been something that, it's been highly controversial to some people, but it's always been people on the left understood the value and the importance, the significance of free speech, the ability to accurately tell the truth, the ability to express yourself freely, the ability to tell all the facts. tell all the facts and now they're the ones that are suppressing it because they don't like the guy who's in power because we have this guy who's such a perfect symbol of all that is wrong with power all that is wrong with someone being the president with ego and you know lies and all the various

things that people pin on trump and a lot of them accurate but he's become this enemy and it's he's such an iconic enemy that they've justified all these ways of combating him using principles that violate everything they supposedly stood for yeah you know he really he I think Trump has broken the brains of so many people yes not in a temporary way where it's all going to just you know recover instantly upon his departure but it's going to endure permanently and there's first of all you know when i was growing up um kind of what shaped my political outlook were a lot of the censorship debates in the 1980s you know i was growing up as a gay kid in the suburbs and the reagan ears and with the moral majority and you know i remember like one big censorship controversy with shanae o'connor went on saturday night live and she ripped up a

picture of the pope um which is what the left and you know growing out of the 60s it was like that's where the transgressive values were like whatever the institutions of authority just create as being sacred and can't be said people on the left push those those those limits and said we're not going to obey your dictates we're going to say exactly that which is taboo if for no other reason than just to establish our right to say it and that became the framework for how these freedom of speech and freedom of expression conflicts played out. There's a new film out by a new documentary about Ira Glasser, who was the executive director of the ACLU from 1978 until 2001. And his first controversy was when the ACLU, which, you, which largely was filled with Jewish lawyers

and supported by Jewish donors because it came out of this tradition of Jewish leftism in the United States that believed in free speech and civil liberties, because as a vulnerable minority, they knew that allowing the state to require the power of censorship would eventually be turned on them. And so one of the most controversial cases they ever did, as you just alluded to, was they represented the right of neo-Nazis, actual Nazis wearing swastika armbands, who applied for a permit to have a march in Skokie, Illinois, which was a town filled not just with Jews, but with tons of Holocaust survivors, actual, you know, people who were in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the camps and had tattoos on their arm, you know, the number of tattoos of survivors. And they said, we don't want to be traumatized by watching Nazis march down our

street with that uniform that terrorized us for all those years. And the ACLU, the Jewish lawyers and directors of the ACLU defended them. And there's a film out, and I just interviewed him actually, where he says that, you know, not only was Jewish leftism supportive of free speech, but a lot of his closest allies at the time defending his decision to defend the right of white supremacists and neo-Nazis to march and to speak freely without government censorship were civil rights leaders, African American civil rights leaders, who also knew that if these precedents were permitted to take root against white supremacists first, the government would then turn, you know, the state of Alabama would say, we're not going to allow the NAACP to march

through our streets. They're rabble-rousers, and they incite violence. And that was the tradition on the left that is being completely abandoned, not just, you know, in like standard mainstream liberal institutions but even in the aclu which has a slew of new lawyers under 30 under 35 millennials gen z uh activists who just don't believe in the core values of free speech in every institution joe like in political activism, in media, for sure, obviously in academia, is being riven with this dispute between people who insist on the right to express views without being constrained or prevented or controlled by others, and people who believe that free speech is just not even close to the highest value, and that when other values are in conflict with it free speech has to give way it is one of the if not the most kind of tumultuous conflicts of our time it's so disturbing how little understanding they have

of where this plays out and that censorship in any form whether you censor someone who you don't like, like Milo Yiannopoulos, it will eventually lead to someone who's less offensive than him, and then less offensive than them, and then less offensive than them, and it'll go to you. It will come for you. It will eventually come for you.

You will say something wrong. You will support something that they don't agree with, and whoever has the power to censor will deplatform you. They will remove you if we allow this. And we're in this weird place in America where a lot of people are looking at these social media companies and saying this is not as simple as this is a private company and they have the ability to choose who does and who doesn't use their platform. These things are like a public square these things are like a utility there it's like electricity or water and it's something that everyone should have access to because it literally changes the way human beings view the world it changes with people's contributions and with people's ability

to express themselves it changes the information that you gather. It changes whether or not someone's perspective resonates with you or not. If you don't get access to that perspective, you don't get to see it. You don't get to understand their point of view. And it changes the overall view of the world. And this is where we are. We're in this weird place where these groups of people who are largely on the left have decided to abandon those values that you talked about, the original ACLU values. And they've chosen to instead be ideological and completely biased to their own personal position to the point where they're willing to abandon free speech.

And it's terrifying because I don't think they understand where this leads. I don't think they've done the math. I don't think they've extrapolated. They can't think two seconds in front of their faces. One of the things that's so bizarre is, if you asked a random leftist, what do you think of Facebook? They'll say, oh i think mark zuckerberg

is a fascist piece of shit and then you say like what do you think of the federal courts in the united states and they'll say oh it's completely oppressive they're like filled with right-wing judges which is true and you say like what do you think of the u.s government oh the u.s government is basically a fascist dictatorship it's run run by Donald Trump. And then you say, are you in favor of giving those institutions, Facebook, the federal courts, the US government, greater power to censor ideas and information

that you don't like? And they'll say, yeah, absolutely. It's critical that hate speech not be circulated. And they never fucking think for one second, why are these institutions that I hate and I think are fascist and repressive and authoritarian institutions that I'm willing to vest the power in to control the flow of information?

And one of the problems is that everyone, for the most part, thinks in terms of right versus left. So this is the only prism through which people can understand at least the political component of the world. And it's a very stunted prism because it excludes so much. So they think that if you can induce social media companies to start censoring and excluding right-wing speech and deleting the pages of right-wing ideologues or right-wing activists, that that's a victory. But that isn't how it works.

They're not censoring it because it's right-wing. They're censoring it because it's outside of the mainstream. There are always, always, always, always views that adhere to mainstream orthodoxies are going to be permitted. Censorship is always directed at those who are somehow outside of the realm of what's considered acceptable by power centers. That, by definition, is where censorship goes, and it's going to go to the right and the left equally. It's not going to go to one or the other. It's the most, aside from the morality and the ethics of wanting people with whom you disagree silenced by tech monopolies, it's just incredibly fucking stupid from a strategic perspective because it is going to be turned on you.

Without doubt, it already is. There's already censorship of left-wing pages. If the Israeli government, for example, goes to Facebook and says, that Palestinian media outlet or this Gazan activist is inciting terrorism, Facebook will, in almost every case, accept the request of the Israelis to censor them because the Israelis are much more powerful than the Palestinians, and that's how corporations operate. This is the model, the framework that the left is empowering without realizing how self-destructive it is. It's maddening, and it is terrifying, because all human history, the entire history of human intellect is nothing but humans believing that they found some absolute truth, and then a subsequent generation realizing

that it's not just erroneous, but morally rotten. And if you preclude the ability of human beings to question and challenge every precept, every principle, including or especially the ones that have been declared most sacred, the ones that have been declared most unchallengeably true, declared most sacred, the ones that have been declared most unchallengeably true, you've deprived humanity of one of its most important weapons, probably its most important one, for fostering progress, for combating despotism, for questioning the pronouncements of institutions of authority. And that's what people who think they're anti-authoritarian are doing. I'm so glad you're out there because guys like you are one of the few that are willing to take this chance and speak like this and challenge all of these institutions openly. And I think there's so many people out there that, as you said, are worried about being yelled at on Twitter and worried about not being able to get a job.

Worried about, you know, there's so many folks that are dependent upon these large institutions, whether it's newspapers or television shows or whatever it is. freely express their concern with the way things are going because in many people's eyes that's insignificant compared to get donald trump out of office so everything everything goes by the wayside get donald trump out of office that's that that's that's number one after that we can concentrate on all those other things but whatever you have to do to get donald trump out of office save democracy someone someone actually sent me a message someone i really like and they sent me a message saying that they could get me an interview but they want me to vote for joe biden come on save democracy this was the the the the message that i got and i was looking at this message on my computer what the fuck is

is there a virus going on like not besides the coronavirus is there something that's like infecting people's minds and like snipping wires and disconnecting trains of thought like what the fuck is happening it's but guys like you guys like matt taibi there's there's a few people out there that are sticking their neck out and it gives me hope it gives me hope that people are listening to you and people are reading your words and people are paying attention and and hopefully it's resonating and hopefully some of these people that are doing this are realizing with shame that they're a part of this really disgraceful act that they're a part of this cowardly way of thinking and of not calling out all this and if joe b Biden does get in office and they do see it declining even further

and sliding even further down this disgusting trend that we find ourselves on right now, I hope they realize the error of their ways. But by then it might be too late. But here's the problem. Here's what's worrying me the most, which is, you know, instinctively, that is something that you can kind of put your hope in, right? Is to say, well, look, I mean, there's an election in a week or, you know, instinctively that is something that you can kind of put your hope in right is to say

well look i mean there's an election in a week or you know a few days and all the polls suggest biden's likely to win and once trump is out of the way a lot of this insanity is going to disappear and things are going to kind of return to some degree of normalcy and here's why i don't think that's true so many institutions are profiting, I don't just mean financially, but in terms of power and control, from elevating fear levels over right-wing fascism, over white supremacists, domestic terrorism, whatever you want to call it. And obviously, I mean, it's not, doesn't take a lot of insight to observe that historically the way you consolidate your powers, if you can put people in fear, you know, during the Cold War,

you make everybody fear that the Russians and the communists are coming to take away your right to believe in God. And everybody says, you know, build up a huge nuclear arsenal and don't use the money for our schools and our communities. Use it for, you know, the greatest military in the world and spy on everybody and whatever you need to do to defeat this existential threat, do it. Obviously, after 9-11, that was the strategy of the Bush-Shinney administration. It's the way they consolidated a lot of power by elevating people's perceptions way beyond what was real of the threat of Islamic terrorism to allow them to do essentially everything they did.

The same exact thing is happening now, which is people in media have had their careers saved. I know cable hosts who are on the verge of being fired because nobody was fucking listening to their dumb shows in 2007 and 2008 when all they were doing is talking about how great Obama was because who wants to listen to that? Trump, or 2015 rather, Trump was a godsend to them because Trump enabled them to elevate everybody's fear level and say this man who's coming isn't just another president. He's a grave threat to everything that's good in our lives. And it's not just him, but his entire movement behind him. Hundreds of tens of millions of people who are racist, who are hardcore white supremacist, white supremacy,

domestic terrorist. It caused MSNBC and the New York Times to explode with money. It caused the CIA and the FBI and tons of those neocon scumbags to rehabilitate their reputation and get back within the halls of power. Even if Trump loses the election, they're not going to just go back to now talking about Joe Biden because they know people are going to cancel their subscriptions and turn the TV channel again. They're going to continue to say, not maybe Trump or at least his movement, still pose this existential threat. They're out there plotting to kill people and impose white supremacy. And it's not that it's not true. It's not like there's not a kernel of truth to it. There are people doing that, but they're going to inflate it wildly so that any questioning of Joe Biden, even with Trump out of the picture, is still going to be depicted as

endangering American liberty, as helping fascism, as serving the agenda of the Kremlin. And the need for censorship as a result is going to be accepted by more and more people because of that fear that these media outlets and government institutions with whom they partner are going to be still instilling in people for their own benefit for their own aim i think you're a hundred percent accurate and i'm concerned as well but i my my real concern is i don't see a way out of this i don't see like a clear like oh we got to go that way i don't i don't see a path i don't see it i'm worried i'm worried that we already have the brakes off of this truck and we're headed downhill well what what meaning do you derive from the fact that you've built this massive audience i mean

does i don't think that's depressive meaning or significance i think there's a reason for it what what reason do you think explains that that's a very good question and i specifically go out of my way to not answer it personally yeah me myself i mean to myself not not not explain it to someone like you but i don't think about it and one of the reasons why is because i feel like if i start thinking about what it does i'll stop doing it the way i do it and it won't be the same thing i started doing this podcast with my friend brian we're smoking weed and talking on a laptop in 2009 answering questions from like a hundred people on twitter just having fun you look at the early ones on you stream to this day they have like a thousand views two

thousand views nobody gave a shit i never promoted this podcast i never took out an ad for it i never went on a television show or anything else saying please watch my podcast please listen to my podcast it it organically became what it is i have no idea how it happened i never planned it it was all i i did it at just for fun forever and then all of a sudden it became this giant business so i'm like well i still have to do it the same way because if i don't do it the same way then it becomes something different and i can't think about what it is i just uh when, when I meet people and they say they love it, I go, thanks. Not, hi. That's it. Just keep going. Just keep moving. And I've developed these

ways of compartmentalizing my life and compartmentalizing what the podcast is. And I keep it what it is. And what it is, is just a place where I go in and talk to people. The people that I talk to, I only talk to who I'm interested in talking to. I have zero agenda. I go, oh, I want to talk to Glenn Greenwald. He seems cool. Oh, I want to talk to Graham Hancock. Oh, that scientist that just came back from the space station.

Let's see if we can talk to him. What the fuck is that like? Oh, this guy just got back from trekking across Europe with snowshoes. Let's talk to that guy. That's all it is. And until the day I say I don't want to do this anymore, it's going to remain that. Because it's the only way I can keep doing it the way it is. So the fact that it's become insanely influential is beyond bizarre to me.

Because I feel like as much as I'm the host of this thing, I'm like an antenna. I just sort of plug in, and then it's got a life of its own, and it sort of does its own work. But it's not actually so bizarre to me. Actually, I think you know I wrote an article about it, and then I did a show. I interviewed a former campaign official from the 2008 Obama campaign, who's an avid listener of yours and who's written about your show. And he's actually the one who

encouraged me to start listening because before I started listening, you know, I just kind of heard in the ether things about your show that, you know, I didn't necessarily believe adamantly, but assumed were basically true. And then I started watching and saw how untrue it was. But, you know, I think that exactly the way that you began, you know, when I, the way I began my journalism career is I didn't go like to Columbia journalism school and then go and, you know, get a job with like some local newspaper and then work my way up to the New York Times. So I wasn't inculcated with all the institutional code and regulations of how you can speak and the tone that you use and how you can describe the world. I just started my blog one day because I felt like I had things to say and nobody was reading it. And I gradually built up a readership.

And then I just from there have always done it that way. It's kind of like what you were just saying. And I think that the reason that you've attracted so many people watching your show who like it and and i don't want to analyze it for you if you don't want to hear an analysis because i don't want to like infect your ability to just do it organically but you were saying like what is the solution to all this what's like the uh way out and i think that you can look at your show as kind of a microcosm of what one answer might be, which is exactly that. I know a lot of people who listen to your show who don't agree with a lot of what you say or who hate some of the guests that you have on. But what they know is

that you're doing this because you don't have to say anything that you don't believe. And that's a huge asset for people who don't trust people that they're hearing in the media and don't believe. And that's a huge asset for people who don't trust people that they're hearing in the media and don't believe anything that they're saying is, look, that guy may not be an expert in things and everything that he's talking about or even much of what he's talking about. And maybe sometimes he platforms people who are bad and says some things that are misguided, but at least I believe that he's being honest. Like he's just kind of like trying to figure the world out for no reason other than to figure it out. And I think that there are huge numbers of people, huge numbers of people, like I think you're just tapping into the kind of tip of it, who crave discourse that is emancipated from these repressive principles of how the media speaks and conducts itself

and how people are forced to express themselves. And that does give me a lot of hope. I think it gives me a lot of hope as well. And I think one of the things we hope the internet would be would be this place where people had access to information that they would never have had previously and this avenue for free expression

that just really never existed before. There's never been a time in history where, I mean, we really have a skeleton crew. I mean, right now it's me and my friend Jamie the producer and it reaches hundreds of millions of people. And that's just really never existed before.

I mean, there's a couple of video editors and some other people that work for the podcast behind the scenes, but that's basically it. Which is why journalists hate you, right? Like they went to all the best journalism schools and they've sat in their editorial meetings for 20 years. And if they go and speak on youtube they're going to be watched by 15 000 people and they think it's outrageous that you have this

audience to which you're not entitled well they're they're entitled to their own thoughts but they could have this audience too they just have to be interesting enough to gather it and they have to grind the thing is like you don't get it right away and you don't get it right away just because you work for the new york times people will listen and they'll go well i don't like it right away, and you don't get it right away just because you work for the New York Times. People will listen, and they'll go, well, I don't like this, or this is boring, or for whatever reason it resonates or it doesn't resonate. And it's a free path for everybody. And the beauty of it is you don't have to be connected to the Washington Post or the New York Times or any other institution.

But the people that think that that was the path and they worked all their life thinking that this is the path and then they've been shown that they've kind of maybe spun their wheels, not only spun their wheels and wasted some time, but gotten on a bad path ideologically where they've thought in these tight grooves that were previously established for them. They've been given these conglomeration of opinions to adopt, and they have adopted them faithfully. And then all of a sudden they realize, well, look at this fucking meathead, pot-smoking UFC commentator

has all these people paying attention to him. What the fuck is going on? And why is Bernie Sanders on his show? And why are all these other people on his show like well you could do that too like anybody could do this it's just putting in the time it's just having this perspective where you're you want to look at things for what they really are don't be beholden to ideologies and put in the time that's that should be encouraging to people yeah yeah that if you have something interesting and unique to offer that people want to hear the internet enables

you to reach them without having this mediation necessary of big corporations i think that is in that is encouraging um the thing that though is discouraging is that one of the problems about why this freedom of expression in the media in particular, where it's more necessary than anywhere, right, for journalists to be able to say things that provoke people's anger, that poke at and prod at consensus rather than just reciting it is that when you're a young journalist and you get a job and you're not being paid very well, but at least you're getting paid enough income to survive. And so many of your friends with whom you went to college, you get out of college and are loaded with tons of debt, don't even have jobs, and you at least

got one. You look around an industry, which is journalism, where you see jobs disappearing by the thousands. The last thing you want to do is stick your head up and say something that makes people in your newsroom or your editors angry because you've questioned or dissented from one of their sacred convictions. And I've seen how that works. That really is fostering a huge amount of conformity i remember all the time you know during the russiagate bullshit when matt taibbi and i and maybe a couple of others were you know out there saying this is a bullshit scandal there's no evidence that any of this happened not that russia didn't do the hacking but that trump and russia

colluded criminally to or that Russia was infiltrating the United States in control, that this is all conspiratorial garbage. I was hearing all the time from journalists at the Washington Post and CNN and the Times and cable networks who were saying, thank you guys. I'm so glad you and Matt are doing this. I wish I could, but I really don't feel I can. I feel like I would lose my job and probably not get another one. That is really that the lack of a viable economic model in journalism is suffocating whatever little ability there was

for journalists to kind of express themselves freely. Yeah, it's terrifying for them because they don't have protection. And to stick your neck out and to try a podcast and to say something on a podcast that is controversial or is outside the orthodoxy and to get fired for that or canceled for that or to get ostracized or be labeled a this or that it's terrifying you could lose your ability to make an income and there's no guarantee that your podcast will be successful particularly now you know when i started the podcast in 2009 i don't know how many there were then but now there's

close to a million of them which is insane that means like one out of 300 people if it was just in the united states i'm sure it's worldwide but if it was just in the united states one out of one out of like a million podcasts is one out of 300 people in the United States? Imagine 300 people and one of them has a podcast. I mean, what is it going to be like five years from now? Is it going to be 50% of the people have a podcast? I mean, the numbers are so insurmountable. It's almost impossible for anybody to break through unless you get help

from the other people that are inside the network. So like, if you're one of those people that has a popular podcast, one of the beautiful things about it is that you can kind of help other people get seen and get recognized. And it's one of the more generous communities. The good thing about podcasting is that when you have this group of people that have gotten through in this sort of unorthodox way, a lot of them encourage other people to do it as well. And a lot of them are, I'm very encouraging of it, maybe to a fault. I'm constantly telling people they should do a podcast

because I really think it doesn't take that much of your time. And if you just invest enough time in it, you develop a fan base and it it exponentially increases people tell people they tell their friends you have an episode that resonates and and then it could go viral or you know it can get shared and you can get to a point where you can have a sustainable business that's completely independent and it's possible it is possible to do but if you're a person who is also trying to work in journalism you're also trying to get hired by a major institution, and you say something in this other form of media, this podcast form, that can get you fired from that, it will inhibit your ability to express yourself.

So in that case, it will also inhibit the ability of the podcast to resonate. So it's such a catch-22 because you kind of have to you kind of have to toe the line you kind of have to be full yeah yeah i'll tell you like what this this this experience i had recently that i found horrifying and like really eliminated for me how repressive things had become i went to new york as I often do, because the media outlet I founded is based there. And I had dinner with two colleagues who work in journalism and who are actually pretty well established in their careers. They're not junior level journalists who are clinging to a job. They're people who have climbed up the editorial and journalistic ladder. And one of them, they both live in Brooklyn and one of them

has a 15 year old daughter whose best friend is a trans boy who has had, um, top surgery. So he has had his breasts removed and poses on Instagram with his shirt off. And then the, my other friend with whom I was dining that night, it was pretty recently, like maybe within the last year, has a 17-year-old daughter who's dating a trans boy who's 17, who's also had various gender reassignment surgeries. And we were talking just, you know, as friends about how young people these days are who are making this choice to identify as trans and to pursue gender reassignment surgery have permanent alterations to their body that will never be reversible, even if later on in life they decide that they had misdiagnosed themselves or been

misdiagnosed. And both of them were expressing serious concerns about, as parents of teenagers, about A, how pervasive this was becoming and whether there was kind of something in the culture encouraging or even pressuring kids to reach these conclusions and parents to kind of push them into it for their own reasons. Not anything malicious, but just kind of a cultural encouragement that might be leading people to be misdiagnosed or misdiagnosing themselves. And also, secondly, the capacity of someone at the age of 14 or 15 to make decisions about their lives of that magnitude that would be irreversible, biologically or anatomically irreversible. And it was a really interesting conversation we talked about. We explored the issue. It was a really interesting discussion we talked about. We explored the issue. It was a really interesting discussion.

We probably talked about 45 minutes or an hour. I got back to Brazil, and I realized that that discussion that we had, they would never, ever in a million years, in their column, on a podcast, on their show, admit to having those thoughts. They would never be willing to explore publicly those questions that we were all raising with one another and thinking about in a really interesting way because they're petrified of being scorned for it or being condemned. And that is a sickness in our culture that is only going to get worse, but that has toxic effects that i don't think can be overstated it's whenever there's a subject that you can't talk about whenever there's a when

there's a subject that can't be breached that's you've you've you're in a religion now you're in a cult like you can't discuss things like you must adhere to the rigid ideology that's been established that you have to say this. If someone decides that they're trans at three or five or 19 or whatever it is, that there can be no questions. My question has always been, have there been people who have had gender reassignment who regret it? The answer is yes. Yeah, of course. Of course. And are there people who have had gender reassignment who regret it the answer is yes yeah of course of course and are there people who have had gender reassignment who are happy the answer is yes obviously human beings are insanely malleable that's why cults exist that's why evangelists are able to gather so much money that's why people decide to be typically unique right like how many people

are uh they're rebels but they're rebels in a mold right it's human beings love to fit into forms that they find to be appealing that they find to resonate with the the current zeitgeist whatever it is and this is one area where we've decided no that's not the case no and when it comes to uh children be recognizing as trans there is no way there can be no errors it is it is all in and i mean many of many of these people are rightfully looking at it in the way that people who are trans are maligned by society they they've they they don't feel like they're accepted they feel like they're discriminated against so these people who are sensitive kind people look at them they want to embrace them at all costs but by doing so you've you've ignored reality the the reality that we know that humans we're weird

creatures we're weird creatures we we have very strange ideas about things that go left and right how many people do you know that are they're lifelong democrats and all of a sudden they become a republican and they're fucking pro-life and they get crazy like people are weird we shift our opinions on all sorts of things people like uh kat stevens becomes a muslim changes name to yusuf islam goes like people change but the idea that they don't do that with gender that the only thing they do that with is is is religion and these other things that the gender is specifically the one thing that there's no confusion about whatsoever. Well, that's crazy. Because people are confused all the time about everything.

And the other thing I brought up to a friend, I said, do you know that many, especially trans women, if they don't have this reassignment, it's been shown that they become gay men. So is it homophobic to want that person to only be trans like is it to have a rigid idea of what a trans person is like and to say that that this rigid idea applies to all people who who have issues with who they are or issues with their sexuality or issues with gender identity like there's clearly a spectrum here and the spectrum not only not not only is there a spectrum but you

know one of the objectives of modern feminism of modern day feminism was to expand the range of how women could express themselves that they didn't have to have long hair and makeup on and wear high heels, that they could have a masculine component to them and cut their hair short and wear jeans and play sports. And that's why a lot of feminists feel like there's this kind of incursion into womanhood where now the idea is if you're if that's the form of expression that you find as a female that you ought to be encouraged to identify as a trans man instead of just kind of a center you know masculine of center of female but i think you know one of the things that that concerns me about it and that always strikes me so much is, you know, as I mentioned, like one of the formative political experiences

of my life obviously was growing up gay in the eighties and into the nineties where there were lots of debates about, they were raging about what is the role of homosexuality and how should it be viewed by civic society and by government and by law. And one of the reasons why gay people largely won that debate and not just won it, but won it so radically and so rapidly is because we were constantly looking for ways to engage that discussion with people who hadn't been persuaded. I mean, I remember I would all the time, you know, if I heard someone say, well, how does this work in your relationship? Like who is the man and who's the woman and how do you fuck? And instead of saying like, you're a disgusting bigot and how dare you and condemn them and denounce them and banish them away. I would be eager to engage in

that discussion as were so many people and that's what ultimately changed minds was the more you engage people the more you persuade them the more you convince them the more you explain to them why these radical social changes that you advocate are justifiable the harder it is to demonize you and to feel alienated by you and to feel repelled by you you break down that dehumanization through engagement through discourse and dialogue not through demanding and coercing and trying to force people to accept views that they don't yet hold and so many current social movements are based on that kind of tyranny of either you affirm these truths as I see them,

or you're going to be punished and scorned. There's no debate or engagement or questioning permitted. Yeah, that's a really accurate way of depicting it. And it's confusing. I mean, it's confusing for people that don't want to be punished, and so they adhere to these opinions too. They just jump on board you know uh and and and i had a conversation with a friend we was talking about how uh being trans is more accepted in other countries and he brought up iran and i said do you know why

there's so many trans people in iran it's because if you're gay they'll put you in jail like do you understand that like in in countries in the Middle East, they literally, you have no options. If you're a homosexual and you want to be with men and you happen to be a man, many of them choose to become women just so that they can have these relationships that they want. It's a real weird box. And I think ideologically, when you force someone to have an opinion that you hold and punish them for just even questioning things, you create this really weird scenario that we find ourselves in right now. And to the point where oftentimes biological women are the ones that especially when it comes to sports they're the ones that are the victims of this ideology when you have track and field athletes who are

competing as female who all they have to do is identify in in certain high schools as being female they don't even necessarily have to have gender reassignment surgery or or even to take estrogen. And it's crazy. But if you question it, you're a bigot. And there's a reason why we've had male and female sports, that men and women don't compete against each other. It's because we've agreed, okay, there are obviously huge differences between men. There's a spectrum of, you know, there's very athletic men, non-athletic men, and a huge spectrum of women. Very athletic women and non-athletic women. But we agree that it seems to be a big

advantage to be male when it comes to physical sports. So we're gonna separate them. But if you have male versus female sports, as long as the male identifies as a female we're supposed to go well you know what are you going to do it's okay you know it's amazing you know it's amazing um one of my childhood heroes growing up uh was the tennis player martina never toloba and i which is a weird childhood hero for me to have for a lot of different reasons. It's just not an obvious childhood hero for me to have. Like Dan Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker is a much more obvious one who was mine, but she was a weird one. And, and, but I, I was obsessed with her. You know, I used to watch her tennis matches against Chris Everett religiously. And when I

grew up and, and, and, and actually when I started doing the Snowden reporting, she started following me on Twitter. And then I remember like the first time she ever sent me a tweet, I acted like some, you know, 12 year old whose favorite boy band had, you know, like touched their skin or something. I called my friends all giddy. I talk to famous people all the time. I don't give a slightest shit. But with her, I was just like overwhelmed. And so one of my friends said, you know, that's so fascinating how important she is to you. Why is that? And I started thinking about it. And so I was going to do a film about it. And

I like partnered with Reese Witherspoon. She was going to produce it. She was very into it. And we had a big budget for it. And then right in the middle, as we were getting ready to kind of do the project, and the project was going to be, you know, examining why she was so important to me, what it said about her life and mine and how it intersected in the ability of people in very unpredictable ways to influence others. She had this huge controversy where, you know, Martina was like, you know, she was one of the great pioneers of female athletics. And Sports Illustrated did a list of the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century. She was number 19, you know, like right behind Joe Montana, head of Ty Cobb. I mean, she was a huge, important figure in female athletics and professional female sports. And she fought,

you know, for years along with like Billie Jean King and Chris Everett to ensure that women had massive prize money on par with men and sponsorship opportunities. So her life's work has been ensuring that women could make a huge living and be justly rewarded on equal terms with male athletes. So she was on Twitter and she saw some photo of a trans woman who had just won a cycling race. And she was in the middle. The trans woman was next to two cis women, and she was hovering over them with like this huge muscle mass that these two women didn't have, with the gold medal smiling with the arms around these two women. And Martina learned that the woman who won the gold medal had

not had any gender reassignment surgery, meaning she still has a penis and her testicles, and therefore the ability to impregnate a woman. And Martina went on Twitter and just very innocently said, wait, I don't understand. If a man declares himself to be a woman, they can now compete in professional sports, the professional sports that I worked so hard my whole life to build, and they can win all the prize money and all the trophies, and then just decide to go back to living as a man, impregnate women, and live a suburban life as the father of children. That doesn't seem fair. And she was fucking mauled for it. And people were saying, you're ignorant. It doesn't matter if you have a penis. What matters is if you go through hormonal treatments that render your body

anatomically or biologically identical for purposes of athletics to the male body or the female body, the cis female body. And she said, okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to delete my tweet. I'm going to go and research this. I shouldn't have spoken about it without first studying it. And that didn't stop them for three weeks four weeks they were martina navratilova is a bigot she's hateful and not only was she you know a pioneer women's athletics she was one of the only openly gay celebrities on the planet in the late 1970s early 90s was one of the one of the reasons why she was my hero she also hired a trans coach dr re. Renee Richards, who she

traveled the world with and put on national TV, you know, like BBC and NBC during Wimbledon would have to say, there's Martina Navratilova's box. That's her coach. Her name used to be Richard Raskin. It's now Dr. Renee Richards, you know, and kind of glide over it. But at least like she did more for trans visibility than almost anybody. Martina went away, but because she was being so mauled and with no understanding, she came back, she wrote an op-ed in the Sunday Times, and she said, I've studied this, and what I've concluded is that there is never a way

that somebody who's gone through puberty as a male, no matter how many hormones that they take, can render their body similar to a female body such that competing with naturally born females can be anything other than cheating and for that opinion martina navratilova who did more for lgbt visibility trans visibility female athletics got expelled literally expelled from lgbt athletic athlete groups um and i couldn't i ended up not being able to make my film because the director that we had was a trans woman who didn't feel comfortable and felt like

the whole film had gotten too complicated um it's amazing that if you're i mean if if the enemy of your movement is martina navratilova if that's somebody that you're declaring to be a hateful bigot not welcome in decent company who are your fucking allies yeah it's it's an interesting proving ground for this ideological dilemma right female sports because uh you know my friend tony hinchcliffe actually has a comedy bit about this he's like you don't see a whole lot of women declaring themselves to be biologically male and then competing against men it's it's trans women that are competing in these sports and dominating them um i got into the fray uh unwittingly because there was a a female mma fighter that didn't tell her opponents that she was male for 30 years and uh started competing two years after transitioning

and i was like this is fucking crazy because now you're you're in my wheelhouse because and i i didn't mean to get into fran i'd never really had opinions on trans people other than do whatever you want to do as long as you're an adult um but then when once that came up and i was uh attacked for it i was like this is the hell i'll die on because you people are out of your fucking mind. I'm a martial arts expert. I know what I'm talking about. Like the difference between the way a man can generate power and a woman is really significant. It's a big difference.

The ability to be violent, reaction time, coordination, shape of the hips, shape of of the shoulders size of the hands there's so many big differences and people were unwilling to budge they they wanted to look at this in terms of this uh you you must be a bigot if you feel this way and i'm like no i'm not well and like it's it's so it's so it's so obvious that there are complex scientific questions. I don't know how I feel about it, in part because I don't understand the science well enough, and I don't believe the science has offered definitive answers. Maybe there are hormonal protocols that you can take for a long enough period of time. Maybe there are new hormonal treatments that are being developed that can actually make it roughly fair and can turn a body that was born

biologically male into the equivalent of a female body sufficient to make it a fair competition. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe someday. Right. But like, or maybe now, I don't know.

I mean, I like, you know, women's tennis, you know, if you win the U S open or Wimbledon in women's tennis, you're going to win the prize is now $4 million, right? Like the Williams sisters are among the richest athletes on the planet. If it were that easy for a male tennis player to just go win that amount of money by declaring himself a female, they would be doing it.

And we don't really see that. So I'm open to the question of whether this can be done fairly but to declare the question itself off limits exactly force everybody to just accept it that's that and and like the thing is it's not just like we're talking about it in this issue because i know you've had issues with it i've had my own experiences with it with that film but this is the mentality that is replicating itself in issue after issue after issue yes and i want to be really clear one of the things that i've said is i have no problem with a woman choosing to compete against a trans woman if she knows that it's a

trans woman my my issue is entirely that this person decided that it was a a medical issue and that she did not have to disclose that she was a male for 30 years. And it just recently transitioned to being a woman. And that's where I stepped in. I said, this is bullshit. Because there's rules on taking steroids, right? It's illegal. They test.

So if someone took steroids for 30 years, for 30 years took the equivalent of a male body's steroids and worked out constantly lifted weights and did so to the point where it changed their anatomy and then choose to get off the steroids and then compete i guarantee you everyone would be saying that person's a cheater they shouldn't be allowed to compete because that person changed their body through illegal means that's just a fact i'm i'm in favor of anybody doing anything as long as all the information's on the table if a woman chooses to compete against a trans woman uh in mixed martial arts and and knows in advance i'm 100 in favor of that no problem with it look women have fought men before some really talented where There's a woman who competes in the UFC, Jermaine Durandamy. She's a multiple

world champion in Muay Thai. And she fought a man and knocked him unconscious in a fight. And you can watch it on YouTube. She's an amazing athlete, an amazing fighter. But she chose to fight that man, knowing that he's a man and knowing that her skills were enough that she had a reasonable chance and actually did win. I'm 100 favor of that like i'm in favor of everybody doing anything that's dangerous do whatever you want i'm in favor of people riding motorcycles without a helmet i'm in favor of you bungee jumping you choose whatever you want you're an adult but yeah but the idea that this person didn't have to disclose that she was a man for 30 years was very offensive to me.

That was your entree into this controversy? That's how I got into it. That's how I got into it. I'm like, this is crazy. Well, not only that, the damages to her opponents were really significant. Fractured skull. Like, she broke the bones in her face.

Like, it's like real big stuff. It wasn't a small deal. And if you watch the fight was it's like real big stuff it's not it wasn't a small deal and if you watch the fight right it's horrific i mean i think i think like ultimately it it kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier about human beings oftentimes evolving in ways that are seemingly inexplicable one of the things that makes life interesting that makes the world worth investigating are these complexities i mean gender is and how it relates to biology and how it shapes our identity and what different hormones can do externally injected into our bodies these are fascinating questions that we don't really have clear answers for.

And that's true regardless of almost any debate that you choose. And that's what I was saying earlier is that, you know, if you look at Newtonian physics, people for a long time believed that that was the ultimate truth. And then that becomes something that people realize actually has fundamental errors. I mean, you have to, like, what always amazes me about not just people who support censorship, but about people who want to close off debate or who say that it's immoral to even speak to people who have views that are sufficiently different that they're supposed to be radioactive is what always amazes me is the level of hubris needed to believe not just that you're right about something because i believe i'm right about a lot of things but to believe that you're so right that your view should never should not be even permitted to be questioned, let alone rejected or negated or refuted, and that people who have different views than you are people that you should never be willing. It's such a glum,

grim, bleak, depressing view of the world. And it's authoritarian and tyrannical as well to just constantly be flattening all of the complexities of life that make things interesting to explore and debate and discuss and think about yeah it really is complex and it really is interesting and and i agree with you and i hope that one day we can get past all this stuff and i think because it's such and it's really weird that it's so fresh in our culture that, I mean, being trans has been around for a long, long time. But for whatever reason, it's dominated the zeitgeist over the last, you know, decade or so. And I don't, I don't really know what's happening. You know, Douglas Murray has a very interesting take on it.

don't really know what's happening. Douglas Murray has a very interesting take on it. I was talking to him and he was saying that towards the end of civilizations, when civilizations are starting to collapse, one of the things that happens is blurring the lines of genders. And he's like, I don't know

what that is or why that exists, but he said it existed in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome. And I wonder. I wonder if that's just a natural course of progression that civilizations go through when the wheels are falling off. That they get obsessed with these subjects. But obviously, these are very interesting things to discuss and talk about. Just because you discuss and talk about them doesn't make you a bigot. And I think that we

have to make that distinction because if we don't make that distinction you're always going to have people that are speaking about it one way publicly as you're saying with your friends or privately excuse me and then another way publicly where they're just there and that's why i think i think that if you if you're somebody who has been fortunate enough to construct a platform that is secure and relatively immune from being canceled or being declared off limits, I mean, people have certainly been trying with me for many years. And I think they're starting to reach the conclusion that it's futile and they're never going to be rid of me. So I think if you're able to kind of create an independent platform

for yourself, one of the obligations that I do think you have is to create that space and kind of take those arrows so that other people who don't enjoy that same independence, that same security, feel at least marginally freer to, you know, wander around and asking. Yeah. Look, discussions are important. It's how we figure things out. Talking about things is important. I need to know how you think to be able to consider it.

When I talk to someone, whether it's you or anyone, I want to know how you feel about things genuinely. And when you're terrified to express your honest opinion because you're worried about the blowback, then I'd never really know. Not only do I never know who you really are and how you really think, I never know that there's people who think the way you think because you don't express it. And then we have a distorted perception of the landscape. And it takes too long to work through ideas and problems that we have in our society. I understand why people would be protective of trans people, of anybody, any maligned,

any marginalized group. I understand it. I totally do but to discuss it does not mean bigotry it just doesn't and when you're talking about sports whether it's when when you discuss decide that martina navratilova is a bigot you've got a real problem you've fucked up like there's there's something yeah yeah what if something went really wrong in the matrix yeah the matrix produced a a very erroneous outcome there um and i you know i i i i i you know i think part of the the problem though is that there whoever does wield this ability to impose orthodoxies has a certain form of power.

There's a lot of power that comes from that, from forcibly suppressing views that you've declared to be erroneous. And that is why I think it becomes addictive, especially when it starts to become a form of mob behavior. But this ability to engage in dialogue, I go on Fox News a lot. I go on Tucker Carlson specifically quite a bit. And obviously, people who are long-term readers of mine who are on the left, a lot of them are befuddled by that, if not enraged by it. And one of the things that has happened because I do that is that I get emails all the time from people saying, wow, for a decade, I always thought you were this insane leftist. I thought you were a communist. I thought you hated the United States. I never paid any attention to anything that you said. But now that I hear you on the show saying things that I trust, I'm now listening to anything

that you say with an open mind because I believe that you're honest. And it doesn't mean that I now agree with you on everything you're saying. I don't. I still disagree with it. But at least I've forged a channel of communication with people who I might've written off before as some kind of a caricature or who've written me off before as some kind of a character, like I did with you. Someone had asked me two years ago before I actually listened to your show, you know, what do you think of Joe Rubin? I probably would have said, I don't know much about him, but I know he talks to like a lot of alt-right assholes and fascists and seems to hate trans people because that's what i had been told right that was like in the ether and so that's what i absorb and i you know i think

that you know everybody loves to lament you know polarization and strife and conflict in the world and aggression and war which are all terrible things And yet one of the only solutions we have as human beings to any of that is the ability to try and speak to each other as humans past our differences so that we can at least develop a common respect that enables us to navigate those differences without resorting to force. And this is more and more what is being written off this this climate of censorship and repression is doing damage to every single one of our institutions and um i don't see it ending at all i see it growing and and i i don't really quite know um how it can be arrested well i'm hoping there'll be a tipping point and I'm hoping the tide will pull back

and I'm hoping that podcasts and long-form communication and conversations like this will be a part of that. But I agree with you. And when you say you don't agree with everything I say, I'm happy because I don't agree with everything I say. There's a lot of shit. We're thinking in real time. And sometimes I'll say something on a podcast

and then I'll think about it an hour later, and I'm like, what the fuck was I saying? Why did I even think about it that way? Because you're talking. Right now, I don't know the next word out of my fucking mouth. This is what podcasts are. This is what these things are. And sometimes you're going down roads or you express an opinion it's not that thought out and

that's the danger of these weird long-form communications these unstructured podcasts are but that's also why it's interesting to people because it's so it's so raw because you know this isn't there's no strategy here there's no this isn. This hasn't been planned out. There's no adherence to a script. And through that, you get a sense of humans. Because this is how people think and talk in real life. And most of the process... You talk in uncertainties, right?

Yes. I think the big difference is, if you go on cable, if I go on cable, some, any show, or even like some Sunday news show here in Brazil or in the U S everyone knows in advance, what's going to be said. I know what I'm going to be asked. They know what I'm going to answer. And they're inviting me on specifically because they know I'm going to say something with certainty. I'm not going to go on and say, I don't really know the answer to that. Because if you do that, you're not fulfilling your function. That is not the normal way that people navigate through the world with certainties.

They navigate it with uncertainties. They have an opinion one minute, and then they listen to somebody who persuades them to think differently another, and then they kind of move in that direction. And then maybe they move a little bit back. But the problem is that in a climate where if you're not constantly affirming unequivocally what has deemed to be the mandatory opinions, you really can, not if you're a coward, but just if you're rational, create a lot of problems for yourself in your work, in your society, in your culture. And that's why people avoid it. Yeah. And that's why I've gravitated towards it, ironically. I think that you have to talk to people that you disagree with. You have to talk to people. And I also, I'm not married to my ideas. If you tell me, if I have a specific notion in my mind

about the way something works and I talk to you, I am happy when you can get me to change my mind. I enjoy it. I don't believe any of the things that I espouse or that I'm locked into that these are chiseled in stone. I mean, there's a few I believe in where I'm a legitimate expert in, but very few. Most of the things, I'm open to someone correcting me. I like that. I'm also interested in how people think incorrectly. If I'm talking to, like, I don't have as many alt-right assholes,

as you say, on the podcast anymore. I kind of grew tired of it. But I had a lot in the earlier days. Maybe even before I understood what the podcast really was becoming, I just wanted to talk to them, like see how they feel about things. And some of them, like Milo, I always foundous i think he's he's kind of a character and if you talk to him uh off air he's a very different human being they talk to him on air he's very easy to communicate with yeah it's a character he plays he's playing a character he created a character that that did

well i mean i'm sure some of it has uh some root in reality but he's a provocateur uh-huh but yeah i i want to know why people make these jumps and why they think the way they think and with a lot of them uh what they're doing is signaling to this group that they've gotten support from that they're on that that side they're uh they're doing this thing where they're uh they're they're saying words and expressing themselves in certain ways that they know that certain groups are going to go oh he's on board he's on this team he's saying all the things that i want to hear and then which is which is a very which is a very natural human desire right we we are social animals and we evolved in tribes right and being scorned by a group or not belonging to a group right wasn't just unpleasant and didn't just

produce unhappiness it could actually jeopardize your survival right you know thousands and thousands of years ago but even now we still need to belong yeah but like with any instinct we have to kind of purposely combat it, right? Like we might have an instinct to kill people that we feel angry toward, but we combat that instinct because it produces bad outcomes. So the tribalism in us, you know, is probably something that sometimes occasionally is healthy. It makes us be part of communities and the like, and that fulfills psychological necessities, but it can lead us really astray too and you have to kind of be willing sometimes if you're feeling embraced too much by a group to kind of give them something almost to show you

that you're not attached to it and to show yourself that you're not attached to it so you don't become captive to it well i think we have to be really careful in how we lean into love and what i mean by that is lean into uh praise lean into uh attention lean into like there's a lot of people that become uh a victim of their own audience and because if you're if you're a rebellious sort right if you've got this idea that goes against the mainstream, the other people that like things that go against the mainstream, they're very vocal about it. They're very excited by it. And their attention to you is magnified. It's much different than the attention that you get if you sort of support the mainstream. You support the mainstream, it's a very,

it's a lukewarm reception. Yeah, you just blend in. You blend in. Yeah, you blend in. You're like a CNN correspondent. If you're Milo or one of these people that was becoming very successful being one of these provocateurs in the past, you get a rabid response where people are so excited to see you. And then you see,

I've seen it with comedians, where they'll tell jokes that a certain group of people like, and they'll lean into that. They'll become like a right-wing comic because these right-wing people are the ones that have given them attention. And they know when they're saying things, even if they don't understand that it's disingenuous or that they're playing a character, they're saying it knowing that it's going to get this disproportionate reaction from that group and they lean into it.

And one of the reasons why I like talking to people like that is I wanted to see that thing in them. I wanted to hear what they're saying that even if I disagree with it, I want to know what makes them think that way. Why do they go this way? them think that way? Why do they go this way? What about them is, what gravity has pulled them in this direction? It's weird. Yeah. I mean, I guess the argument is that as your platform grows and you become more influential, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, by putting someone on your show who advocates ideas that are

harmful or toxic or hateful even if you're doing it just to satisfy your curiosity not because you actually agree with them that you're nonetheless still letting millions of people be exposed to hearing them speak for two or three hours in a way that kind of signals that at the very least their ideas are worth listening to whether that's your intention or not with the message that you're conveying i agree with that criticism i really do and that's one of the reasons why i've avoided a large number of those people that do have very questionable belief systems and and and do espouse hate there's a lot of fucking assholes that want to be on this show that i haven't had on for that very reason but there's some that i find interesting you know and uh i it's because some of them have ideas that are at least mildly intriguing and i i'm over that now

but when i was interviewing a lot of those people in the past the one of the things that i wanted to do is i wanted to try to hear what they're saying and poke holes in it and i wanted to i wanted to know why they lean so hard in this direction and what is about and it's like when you're talking to anyone that's really into anything but you could fill in the blank with whatever the subject is there there's certain aspects of them where you're talking to them and you go oh i've I've seen you before. I know a lot of people like you. I know what you're doing. You've found like this real, you know how some songs sound real similar?

Like, oh, you were a fan of Stone Temple Pilots. And you guys have sort of built, like you get that with them. They have this sort of way of, well, you know, the left has this view of things. And the left, and they start talking like a pundit they start talking like someone who they've seen be successful with these ideas and it's it's intriguing to me because as a as a person like as a comic you always have to be sort of a student of of human beings and behavior and thoughts that's that's what comedy is all about it's analyzing those things and poking holes in them and when i see someone that is really into any weird or or any any any like real clear ideology

with like i feel that way about like super duper lefties like i've had some like blind ideological lefties on my show before too where if we wrote down if we had a column what do you agree with and disagree with i would have way more on the agree with column with them than i do on the disagree with but the disagree ones are so they're so blatant sometimes where i'm like you haven't thought about this shit at all you just don't want to oppose it because if you know if you oppose it you'll be out of the club like martina navratilova right who you know i think in retrospect the reason why she was my childhood hero was precisely because she was always so fucking defiant and transgressive you know um and probably why she was so competitive too

oh for sure i mean that she just like was constantly driven you know like she didn't give a shit about what she was told about how females were supposed to look. She spent hours in the gym building this huge muscle mass, which made her physically dominant. You know, whatever categories you try to impose on her were ones that she just disregarded. That was just the nature of her personality. And in that lies a lot of power and a lot of freedom. a lot of power and a lot of freedom. And in reality, that's the same thing that led her, even though it made a lot of, it converted a lot of her former fans into enemies,

into challenging these pieties about trans issues, right? Is if you tell Martina, you're not allowed to do this, and you're not allowed to think this, and you're not allowed to say that, she's going to make a beeline exactly toward those things. That's why she fucking fled communist Czechoslovakia, right? Was because they were telling her, just don't do anything to draw attention to yourself. And she knew that was going to limit her greatness as an athlete and her greatness as a human being. And, you know, that's like, that ultimately, I think that, you know, it's so easy to, a lot of times people adopt a certain posture then they show you you know as you were saying that kind of pundit voice or if they go on a show where they get to speak for nine minutes instead of two and a half hours they're manipulating their image on purpose and the more that you

dig into it the deeper you dig into it the more you kind of try and excavate what really is underneath it a lot of times you uncover truths that you wouldn't have previously seen about who they really are and what they really think and someone who seems like they're hateful really isn't a lot of times though they are yeah um a lot of times they are and a lot of times they've become that because that's uh that's been the way they get the best attention or the most attention or you know sometimes they'll pretend to not be that way to sort of weasel their way in and then once they become popular you find out oh you really do have nefarious ideas you really are a shithead you know and right i and i understand

but the only way you know is if you talk to them right like if you just ignore them they don't disappear yeah and i i understand people's concern with platforming those people but i i really i do think that you have to talk to a wide group of people to get an understanding of humans and uh if you don't know any hateful people you won't be able to recognize hateful behavior like really recognize it i think you have to see it. You have to talk to them. And, you know, if you don't know, I mean, you have to really understand loving, compassionate, generous people. You have to be around them. You have to hear them talk. And when you are around them and you do hear them talk, it changes your perspective on what's possible with people.

You recognize, like, oh, that's the kind of person, too. One of my friends is Justin Wren. He's a very unlikely story, but he's a guy who was bullied when he was a child, like horribly, to the point where he was suicidal, became a UFC fighter. And now he runs a charity called Fight for the Forgotten, where he builds wells for the pygmies in the Congo. He is the nicest most charitable human being i've ever met in my life he's so kind and so gentle and so sweet and it goes to the

congo and spends months out of the year there he's got malaria three times i mean it's just it's it's it's crazy until i met him until i've spent tons of time with him and talked to him, I didn't know that someone was that selfless, that someone could be that kind and gentle, but yet also be an elite mixed martial arts fighter and an enormous man. I mean, he's such a contradiction, but he's so kind. He's so nice. I mean, to everyone. I've been around him. He's so nice. I mean, to everyone. I've been around him.

He's just so sweet to everyone. And you need to know that there's a guy like that out there. Whenever I think about people, about kindness, and about generosity, selflessness, I think of that guy because I know he's real, because I know him. He's changed my spectrum, like the spectrum of what's possible in people. Well, you know, we started off talking about Snowden, right? And as a journalist, people expect me to just keep this critical distance from him as the way you're supposed to talk about your source when you're a journalist and almost in every speech that I give, and obviously Snowden is not just

a source to me. He's a very close friend and someone I care a huge amount about. We went through something really intense and extraordinary together that will bond us, you know, for life and after even. But I feel this exactly the same way. You know, we were talking about how exceptional of an example it is what he did, and he shows you a kind of human possibility that you don't previously know exists then starts opening up your own conception of what's possible in terms of your own choices in life and you only can have that happen if you're willing to connect with people who aren't like you yeah and you i mean one of the beautiful things about these long-form conversations is that you can allow someone to express themselves

without restraint and you can find out what's really going on and you you know you can expose people this way in a way that i mean i i think people have been exposed on my podcast in a way where if someone really wants to know who they are they can go watch a clip and they'll go oh this is what happens when this motherfucker hits the fire like they fall apart like this is what happens when their ideas are challenged this is what happens when someone says why do you think that and what makes you what why do you say that why are you saying it that way? And you let them, give them all the rope in the world, and then you see them hanging. Because you can't control yourself for three hours.

It's kind of like, I've had this experience before. I don't know if you've had this where if a magazine wants to profile you, they'll send a reporter to follow you around for a week. Because if you just sit down for a 40-minute interview or an hour interview you can be very controlling about what it is that you present and what you let them see but if they start riding in the car with you when you're driving your kids to school or going out to dinner with you you start forgetting that it's an interview and you start thinking about this person as just someone who's in your life that you're talking to and you

end up saying things that if you were being completely controlled, you never would have said the same, just experiencing this now doing your show. You know, most shows are at most 45 minutes at most, right? Where you can just get through it and be very conscious of every word here when you have no, you know, your producer doesn't say what you want to talk about ahead of time. I had no idea what we were going to talk about ahead of time. It just kind of meanders were going to talk about ahead of time. It just kind of meanders into this natural space. And you do forget that you're being recorded. You do forget that a lot of people are going to see it, which is a very liberating feeling to have, right? Because you don't have to use that voice, that public voice that you feel compelled to use if you're

being too self-conscious about the fact that you're being watched and listened to. It's sort of like how being surveilled and monitored alters your behavior, right? If you know that you're being watched and are conscious of it, your range of choices that you're willing to engage in diminishes greatly. That's why privacy and having a private realm is so important. That's where creativity and dissent reside. It's the same thing here. It's like if you do a format and you kind of like let yourself free, unconstrained with the knowledge that you're actually in an interview that people are going to be watching, you just end up speaking much more naturally, much more freely and don't monitor every word. Yeah. And by the way, this was not by design. I can't take credit for the fact that this podcast is that sort of thing.

I just didn't want to edit it. Like, one of my good friends, and I enjoy talking to people. One of my good friends, Ari Shafir, one of his worst and most famous pieces of advice to me is like, you've got to edit your podcast. I go, why? He goes, no one wants to listen to it for that long. I go, well, then they don't have to listen i'm like i don't give a fuck yeah you're you're

sloth produced um some really positive that's literally what it is but i want to speak about what you were just saying because there's a great example that and that's michael hastings um where he was trapped uh was it iraq or afghanistan where he was trapped afghanistan afghanistan afghanistan he was trapped over there because of the volcano in iceland is that where it was i think so i i don't remember the details it's been a long time well there was a volcano erupted and it prohibited air travel and during that time he was embedded with the troops, and they were communicating in a way that was, they got way too comfortable with him. And he, they, I guess they thought.

With General McChrystal. Yes. With General McChrystal. Yes. Yeah. And General McChrystal said some disparaging things about Barack Obama and wound up being fired. And then, you know, Hastings was terrified for his life and wound up in this really weird conspiracy theory scenario

where his car goes 100 miles an hour into a tree and the engine winds up flying away from the car and the car explodes and he dies. And people are speculating, like, was he killed? Did they use some sort of software to manipulate his vehicle and have him do that? Or was this suicide? And that was, I mean, it was a, I don't, first of all, what are your thoughts on that? Did you, are you like fully aware of that story? Yeah, yeah, yeah michael was a

pretty good was a pretty good friend of mine um i'm a little hesitant to talk too much about it because there was like privacy issues with him and his wife but i will say like his wife was pretty adamant his wife at first of course you know being a loving wife, was very open to the prospect that it wasn't an accident and that somebody had caused his car to crash because he was a great investigative journalist who didn't give the slightest fuck who he was angering, as evidenced by the fact that he ended General McChrystal's career by publishing the things that he said that were newsworthy and not off the record, which is what a good journalist would do. And he was mauled by other journalists who said, you're ruining the ability of journalists to get generals to speak freely with you in a war zone. That's not how it works. And he said, General McChrystal wasn't my fucking friend. He was someone really powerful in the military. And my job was to tell the public what he was saying that they had a right to know, which is what he did. That was Michael's personality. But at the same time, Michael ended up for the last six months or a year of his life

being pretty troubled, I think in large part because of the trauma he had from spending a lot of time in war zones. I know I have a lot of friends who are journalists who have spent time in war zones and almost every single one of them end up fucked up for good reasons. It's a really fucked up thing to see. And he had substance abuse issues that he was struggling with. I think the last time I saw Michael actually was in LA just like a week or two before he died. I think it was at Oliver Stone's house or something.

And he was definitely inebriated. So, you know, and I know a lot of people are concerned about that and whether he was kind of engaging in self-destructive behavior. I don't know, Joe, to be honest, but I know that his wife reached the conclusion that she thought those more interesting theories about

intrigue and murder was a disservice to his memory for whatever that's worth well i respect that if that's how she felt about it but the the real concern that journalists have and this is what we started off the podcast uh talking to you about about your own safety. The Jamal Khashoggi story, of course, is like the worst example of what could potentially happen to a journalist. And when we're talking about the safety of people who do take the risks to put out information that people want to hear and then they become the target of very powerful people. I mean, it must be one of the most frightening aspects of your job. Yeah, I mean, we talked about the Snowden case. For me, the much more difficult and dangerous case

was the reporting I did last year in Brazil, starting in June of 2019, going into the beginning of this year, where we were publishing the hacked telephone conversations of the most powerful people in Brazil and the Bolsonaro government and revealed really serious corruption and it led to the release from prison of the former Brazilian president Lula da Silva because we were able to show that his prosecution was corrupt, and a lot of other pretty destabilizing events. And as a result of that, you know, there was a huge right-wing movement in Brazil

that elected Bolsonaro and that is really kind of, you know, they're all armed. They believe in the military dictatorship. They have the police and the intelligence agencies on their side. And the type of threats that we were getting, and it also had related a lot as well to my husband. My husband is a member of Congress. He's a socialist member of Congress, the only openly gay member of the Brazilian Congress in a country where Bolsonaro has stimulated a lot of anti-LGBT animus as a powerful political tool. We haven't left our house in about a year and two months without armed guards and armored vehicles because the level of specificity of the threats that we

get with people who know our address and send pictures of our cars with the license plates to be as terrorizing as possible are really severe um and you know for about six months every day on twitter in brazilian twitter my name was at the top of the trending topics glenn is a traitor deport glenn glenn belongs in prison and they did try actually at the beginning of this year they indicted me criminally and a judge threw it out on free press grounds. But that's just part of the job. You know, and that was what made Michael such a great journalist was he was fearless when it came to those kinds of things. And that's why when I go and give speeches and then, you know, some in the Q&A part of the event, some journalist student or someone thinking about going to journalism, ask me what my advice is for them. That's what I tell them. I say, first of all, don't go into the profession unless you

think you have something unique to offer, because if you don't, then it's kind of just worthless. You're just going to be a drone in the beehive. You know, like you were saying earlier, you're just going to fade into the mainstream. But the other thing I say is, if you have a desire to be beloved by powerful people or to be safe, this is definitely the wrong profession for you. It's only worthwhile, journalism is, if you're exposing exactly that information, which the people who wield the greatest power most desperately want to be concealed. That's your job. And if you do that, like, you know, everyone loves to talk about speaking truth to power and confronting power, but we like people very rarely talk about what that means. What is power and what does it mean for people to be powerful? It's really simple.

Ultimately, like what it means to be powerful is that you have the ability to bestow rewards on people who serve your interests and to inflict punishment and pain on those who impede them or defy them. That's all really, that's really all it means to be powerful. And so if you're really a journalist and you're really challenging power, defying it or impeding the agenda of the powerful, you're inherently going to be in danger. That's just intrinsic to the job. And I think that you pretty much need to have either the kind of personality that in some way seeks that for whatever reasons, or at least feels like the cause is just enough and righteous enough that you're willing to subject yourself to it.

I'm certain that through your work, you've inspired other people to get into journalism. I'm certain. And I wondered, what does that feel like to you? Because there has to be young people that have read your work and seen what you've done, seen the documentary with Snowden and heard you speak that say, I want that courage of conviction. I want to be that person. I want to be that person that does express myself honestly and bravely and expose the world to these truths

that the powers that be want hidden. I mean, it sounds banal probably, but honestly, there's nothing more gratifying to me than that because that's how i feel like i'm actually making a mark on the world and changing it in a positive way however limited that might be it doesn't matter you know it's it's i do hear that a lot and um the fact that it's not just that i'm inspiring to some someone to go into journalism it's that i'm inspiring them to go into journalism to do the kind of journalism that i've done and shown them by example can be done and have advocated for and so it makes me feel like i'm almost like

reproducing you know like a little army of you, when you hear from like a 22 year old who says that you are the one who has shaped what they want to do in life and they kind of want to follow in your example, it's so rewarding. You know, you feel like you've touched somebody and, and, and, and shown them something inside of themselves, a power and ability or a talent or a purpose that they might not have discovered and it's incredibly fulfilling it's a huge responsibility too but yeah that to me is what's exciting about the future i'm hoping that there are enough young people that do see that like you can be one of those people that just drowns into the hive, or you can be like Glenn Greenwald.

It is possible. And that you will inspire a bunch of people to communicate and to express themselves the way you do so fearlessly. I'm hoping the same can be said about podcasts. I'm hoping the same can be said about a lot of independent media, that there's enough of us out there that that don't want to blend into the hive that the young people coming up recognize the flaws in these patterns and they recognize the traps that they they see by becoming a part of these institutions and by becoming a

part of these orthodoxies by becoming a part of these groups that demand compliance, 100% compliance to their ideology. And they realize, well, that's crazy. That's not how people are. And then there's so many pitfalls and holes in that way of life. Yeah. I mean, you asked me before, you, I think, made the observation before, you weren't sure what the solution was to these growing pathologies we had been assessing in the discourse and in the political culture. And that was why I pointed to your show, just as an example of what I think is possible. But more than that, I think it illustrates this craving that exists that's being unfulfilled by mainstream news outlets, by entertainment products, by really prominent voices. There's an unfulfilled craving. And what excites me the most

about it is that it's not definable by either right or left. I love the people who get confused by the fact that you said that you love bernie and tulsi and that are going to vote for trump and if you're like a political junkie that makes no fucking sense it's like saying two plus two equals five that's not what i said and that's not what i said well you said you you said you love bernie and you love tulsi and then when it was biden and trump i think you said you were gonna you prefer Trump because you felt like Biden was cognitively incapable. But I never said, I never said I'd vote for Trump. What I said was I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.

I never said I'd vote for Trump. Okay. So, yeah. But everybody said it in the way that, oh, you're a Trump supporter now. I'm like, that is not what I said. It's not what I said. Okay, good. I'm glad you clarified that because I, even I got deceived from that.

Yeah. But nonetheless, like even that doesn't make sense to people, right? But in the real world, there were millions of people, millions, millions, not hundreds or thousands, but millions, who voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted in 2016 for Donald Trump. And if you're somebody who's just a political junkie who sits on political and journalist Twitter all day and sees the world first in like fox versus msnbc or democrat it doesn't make any sense but like to most of the people out there that's not the language they're speaking and podcasts like the one you're doing and a lot of other ones too are finally speaking in the language of huge numbers of people who never before identified with anything. And I do think that's exciting because

it is breaking that mold. That's what's so interesting about it is it's kind of just a new, normal, unconstrained and undogmatic way of trying to understand the world. And I do find that hope-inspiring, hope-inducing. Yeah, it does come with responsibilities that i never anticipated and that that is a concern you know i never thought that i would be influential i never never anticipated it and i never uh i didn't plan for it you know it's just like all of a sudden people like what are you doing with your influence i'm like ah fuck i've got influence and it's not just cultural influence it's political influence which is like probably even more surprising and like even more of a burden well it's worse because i don't know

shit about politics i'm literally i mean i've said over and over again if you're taking your opinions on politics from me you're already fucking up and I try to offer so many different solutions to so many different people to try to get your information from valid, unbiased political sources like The Hill or Kyle Kalinsky or Jimmy Dore, many of the other people that I admire. I'm like, go to them. Don't go to me.

I'm not the guy. Yeah. Those are all great people to listen to. You can find – there are great podcasts now where people are just trying to figure things out, really smart, interesting, funny people. I love The Hill. I'm on there all the time with Sagar and Crystal. I know you love them too. I love them.

They're so important. They're so important because they're both, they're, they're both on different sides of the fence politically, but they're both honest and objective and they don't agree on things a lot of the time, but they're very respectful. They're friendly. They're,

they're, they're not impaired by their ideology. They, they communicate. Yeah. And they're both kind of the best of their respective sides you know like the so yeah and and and obviously kyle koenski is is you know someone who's built up an amazing i mean i've i know kyle for years like when he was just a little kid you know and he was just like kind of screaming into a microphone with i think maybe like 3 000 views or something and now he's become this powerhouse we're doing a election night show

a live election night show he and i yeah he mentioned that to me he said don't go on and talk about that because he'll kill me i'm not allowed to talk about it so i'm glad you were the one who spilled the beans and not me but yeah he's fantastic And there's so much new talent like that is discoverable that way. And so, you know, I like for all the problems and kind of bleak scenarios that we spent a lot of time dissecting. because it's not just some rosy eyed thing that you say to make yourself and others feel better. It's really, it's real. Um, and obviously the success of your show, the ridiculous audience size that you have, um, that grew so organically with no corporate backing is just proof that, you know, by speaking honestly and without dogma and script,

you can attract a lot of people. Yeah. And I just want people to know that our concern, I do understand that I have an influence now and I am, I'm aware of it, you know, and that's kept me from having a lot of douchebags on the show. And, you know, but unfortunately I think it's important to have some, I think it's important to have some questionable people. I think it is. I think what made the show great is that it's kind of wild and that I talk, I talk to people that I want to talk to and I'm going to continue to do that. Even if people get mad at who the guests are,

there's no way I can. I mean, if I want to talk to somebody, I'm going to talk to them, but I am aware. The minute you start, the minute you start tailoring your guest list to avoid making people angry is the minute you're going to start gutting the thing that has made

your show interesting in the first place. Exactly. Right. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't be cognizant of that responsibility that you're now obviously aware of and have described but um you know there is going in the other direction excessively also and and you know there's no joe rogan podcast if you're not at points making people angry. Also, I understand that if I do have someone questionable and I have to challenge them on their ideas. I can't just let people just rant and say – Spout anything.

It was just me and my friends like nine years ago, ten years ago, and we were getting high and sitting around and someone would say some crazy shit. I would just start laughing at it. And I didn't think, oh, now they think that I'm agreeing with what this person is saying. But just the absurdity of what people were saying would make me laugh. Now I go, oh, Jesus Christ. All these people are listening.

I can't just laugh. I can't assume people know that I think this is preposterous. I have to jump in now. And I go, okay, what are you saying? There's a giant audience. Why are you saying this? And what do you really believe? Why do you believe that?

And that's not true. And this is why it's not true. That's where I understand that I have a responsibility that I wish sometimes I didn't have. But you do, whether you want it or not no and i thought i thought like i thought one really interesting episode that happened recently was that time you was you know maybe like a month ago or six weeks i remember exactly when you claimed that what was it that left-wing antifa activists had started some of the fires in the west coast which wasn't true it was an inflammatory claim instead of doubling down or justifying why you said it you immediately issued a statement that was you know self-flagellating in its

admission of error it was like i completely fucked up i said something reckless it's It was so stunning to see because you never, ever, ever see major news outlets doing anything of the sort, even when they say something that's much more destructive that's false. They'll stealth edit their errors. They'll add what they call a clarification. Everything is just wormy and designed to avoid just saying like, I fucked up. And ironically, nothing builds confidence in somebody more than acknowledging that in that way, that kind of unflinching way. Like, yeah, I not only fucked up, but I was really reckless in what I did. And I'm going to try and avoid doing that again. Well, there was no one telling me to do that.

This is one important thing. A lot of people think Spotify told me to do that this is one important thing a lot of people think of spotify uh told me to do that they didn't even know about it no yeah i came in and jamie told me you know that thing you said about uh the left-wing people starting forest fires turns out to not be true and i'm like fuck really and so he shows me this thing and i'm like well i read and i was thinking about all the different people that i read on twitter that were pointing it out it turns out there was like one black lives matter uh protester or activist that was caught lighting fires and most of it was crazy people and there was a lot of arson but the it's hard to attribute that to any particular ideology ideology yes exactly so yeah i said okay i fucked up and i knew also that i was going to go but it's hard to attribute that to any particular ideology.

Yes, exactly. So I said, okay, I fucked up. And I knew also that I was going to go on vacation. I couldn't just let it sit. So there was no consideration at all. I said, well, what do I do? And Jamie and I were talking about it. I go, I should just make a video.

I'm just going to make a video and put it on Instagram. So I just grabbed my phone. I put it in front of my face. I said how I felt. And then I uploaded it. And then just grabbed my phone, I put it in front of my face, I said how I felt, and then I uploaded it. And then I did the podcast. That was it.

And I said, that's the only way I can do. If I make a mistake, I have to correct it. And I'm not, again, I'm not, look, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm not married to my mistakes. I'm not married to anything

I've already said. If I made a mistake and I know it's not true, I know I'm incorrect, I must say that I made a mistake and i know it's not true i know i'm incorrect i must say that i made a mistake we all do that we all do that like 10 minutes ago right i like was purporting to describe your perspective about the 2020 election based on what i've heard and right you know around right and i misstated it i described it inaccurately and you interjected and said that's

not actually what i said i wasn't because i was you know purposely mischaracterizing it it's just we're human and we like gather information especially with the amount of information that that is surrounding us all the time in an incomplete way or we remember it wrong or we interpret it incorrectly or we process it i remember barry weiss who i used to be sworn enemies with and now i'm like slowly developing kind of a friendship with her when she was on your show once and she said um and i talked to her about this and she said you tulsi for some reason was brought up and she said oh i don't really like tulsi and you said why not she said because she's a toady of asad

yeah and you said what she is what like what's your basis for that and she couldn't give you one she was like what do you mean every that's what people say everybody knows that and it's complete bullshit right like that is something a lot of people say about Tulsi but there's no basis for that no matter and you know Barry's a very smart person she's reading constantly I love her she has a lot of expertise in those yeah in those areas um but you know she just said something derogatory about someone that was untrue we all not because she was deliberate but because our brains are imperfect and if we don't recognize that um you know i don't think

we can have any value no and that's one of the we're just like blowhards yeah yeah for sure i mean you can if you know you fucked up and then you deny that you know you fucked up you won't have any self-respect you you won't you you won't appreciate you you're you're not going to ever respect yourself you're not going to appreciate your thoughts you're always going to know you're a phony like yeah because deep down you're going to know deep down you're you could have doubled down you could have doubled down and said no here's someone who said this fuck all you and you would have been fine but like deep down you would have known that you just like vomited on your integrity never i would never do that i don't

have that yeah i just don't if i if i make mistakes i'm sorry and if i'm sorry i say i'm sorry it's just how it is i don't think there's any other way but this is that's the only way you get good at things you know this comes from my martial arts background to get good at martial arts you can't pretend you're good at things you have to find out what you're doing wrong and you have to correct it if you don't correct it yeah you leave vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities they they equal pain like you get hurt correct it, you leave vulnerabilities. And vulnerabilities, they equal pain. Like you get hurt.

Like you lose. You get hit. You get strangled, whatever it is. That applies. That way of looking at the world, because I learned it at such a young age, because I grew up doing martial arts. So as I've become an adult, that's what I apply to everything. I don't ever allow myself

to bullshit myself and i won't bullshit other people i'm not interested in it i don't want anybody to think of me in any way other than who i am i'm not interested in publicity i'm not interested in in an image i don't i don't i i am who i am that's it and if i fuck up i tell you i'm sorry right and do you see have you can you think of a time that you've seen the new york times the washington post nbc news cnn issue an acknowledgement of error no but even remotely in the same universe of like that no but i also think that's a problem when you have an enormous organization that thinks about the consequences of an apology and the consequences of admitting error and that uh you know the scrutiny that comes with that of all the other

things you've said as well like we don't have an organ i mean our business meeting our our big uh sit down was me literally walking in and talking to my friend jamie and him showing me this article and i'm going shit i gotta say something all, let me say something right now. And the whole interaction took three minutes. And then I pull up my phone and I just make an apology. I mean, there's no people to run it by. I don't have to have a meeting where the executives sit down and say, listen, this could be very consequential to our ad revenue. This could really become a problem with people respecting your opinion on other things just let it go it'll go away don't talk about it it'll go away but the reality is but the reality is one derives benefit from doing it i don't think the

reason institutions avoid doing it is because they fear the consequences unless you know it's possible if you've defamed somebody then of course you're going to be lured up and and be really constrained in what you could say but absent that i think the reason is is because they're so uh convinced of their own infallibility and they want to always make sure that they're constantly affirming the fact that they are an institution of authority because they know people are listening less and less to them they constantly want to defend their own expertise and saying hey i fucked up yeah in the in their warped you know thought process is something that's credibility eroding when in fact it's credibility enhancing yeah i think what you're talking about is the

what the the issue with their thought process. That's really critical because, like I said before, I have gone out of my way to make sure that I'm not married to my thoughts. And I don't equate me with my ideas. I am, you know, I'm just a human being and my ideas are some things that I embrace or don't. And they come in and out and I have ethics and I have morals and I have values, but my ideas, what I believe and don't believe, especially pertaining to events that I'm not even witness of, I'm not married to those.

I think part of the problem is with many people, being right or being wrong becomes a game, and they're trying to win that game. It's one of the real problems with people when it comes to conversations where they're not when they're arguing with things they become married to their ideas and they're not willing to concede that you have good points uh i i find it a virtue that if you're having a conversation with a person and they say something that shows you right away that you're not correct to be able to say, oh, yep, you're right. To be able to say that because that's a painful moment. People don't like doing that.

It's hard. No, it takes courage. You have to be vulnerable to do that, right? To say I fucked up. I was reckless. That's exposing yourself in a very public way. But I think that, you know, because I'm not, I'm certainly not the person who does that best. I have difficulty myself, you know, acknowledging error in that way.

And I think one of the reasons that it's hard is because if you have a public platform, and especially with so much of our politics and discourse being conducted on social media which is so toxic and brings out the worst and not the best in people almost by design anything where you show vulnerability um is going to be used against you it's going to be used to attack you i actually i remember when you when you did that i i observed it. I said, hey, look, for all you journalists who scorn him, when is the last time you've issued a correction this unflinching, right? This like just naked in its acknowledgement of error with no attempt to justify it or bullshit or adorn it with caveats. And a lot of people said to me, oh, fuck him.

And a lot of people said to me, oh, fuck him. Look at the damage he did with disseminating this dangerous slander against the left. You know how dangerous that is. He did it on purpose. No one heard his correction. You put yourself in a position where you're going to be mauled. And the incentive is all the time to kind of protect yourself, right? Like to be involved. It's an incentive that we learned from the time to kind of protect yourself right like to be involved it's

like an it's an incentive that we learn from the time we're children yeah is the way you protect yourself in life is by always being the strongest by conveying strength and not vulnerability and especially when you're in like the you know pit of political and journalistic war um doing that is difficult for a good reason well sometimes, sometimes you have to tap out. You have to take the L when you fuck up, and that's one of those moments. And I think your great, I mean, I hate to call it work because it's hardly work,

but the greater body of what you put out there speaks for itself. If someone wants to extract individual things out of context and try to draw a conclusion that that's who you are or this one individual error like when you fucked up about the fires like that's you that's you that's you forever fuck you like uh yeah they're they're playing a game themselves and you know that's it's a a lack of accepting of nuance a lack lack of appreciation of that human beings are these weird, flawed creatures that maintain contradicting ideas all the time. And that have fucked up thoughts and express themselves incorrectly and make errors. And to deny that, well, you're playing a game now.

And it's oftentimes people that want to pretend that they're so compassionate. Those are the ones that often are the ones that are the most vicious doing that. And it's kind of weird. It's one of the things that I find about a lot of people that are a part of the ideological left. A lot of them were bullied. And now they've become bullies. But they've become bullies in a non-physical way. They've become bullies in a cyber way.

And they love the pile-on. They love the gang-up. And they become a part of it, and they find comfort in it. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think, though, one of the things that I think we always have to be mindful, though, of is if you look at mental health data, if you look at things like depression and anxiety disorders and suicide rates, they're sky high, right? Which is a paradox because the internet was supposed to be this instrument of connectivity. It was supposed to connect us to one another more than we've ever been connected before. And in a lot of ways, it's actually isolated us because now it's kind of kept

us in our house, always looking at each other through the screen, it's separated. And then the pandemic obviously has made it way worse. And so what you have a lot of times with people who are attacking you online so viciously trying to show their moral superiority to you, part of it is definitely what you've been saying, which is like this desire to feel power and strength because they felt like they lacked it as children

and got picked on. And so now they're going to get back at the world. But part of it is just people are really frustrated and unhappy and angry in life for pretty valid reasons yeah and a lot of times you just become kind of the vessel for them to expel that it's often more very very often not about you at all but about them um and it takes a while to internalize that not to take that personally because so often it's really those attacks are just kind of a vehicle for them to compensate for the deprivation that they have in life on so many different levels i think that's very accurate and

i think twitter exacerbates that more than any other form of social media this very quick alan levinowitz had a great way of putting it, that it's processed information, and it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you. It's not the way you're supposed to get information. It's not the way you're supposed to communicate. You're supposed to communicate looking at people in front of them. You're supposed to be seeing each other. I mean, that's when we're at our best. And I think that the way people communicate on Twitter, it exacerbates mental illness.

It exacerbates anxiety. It exacerbates depression. And certainly being isolated and being trapped because of the pandemic and being stuck at home exacerbates that as well. But I just don't think it's healthy to argue with people that way. And the way people are willing to argue on Twitter, they would never communicate like that in person unless they're a fucking psychopath, right? Never, never.

Joe, do you know, like, any time I sign on to the internet, at any second of the day, 3.30 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon, whenever it is, I can find thousands of people saying the worst possible shit about me like i was worse than hitler in the 15 years that i've been doing this work except for one old lady who was like rich and 85 years old and i was walking down the street after a protest yet last year in brazil at the height of the controversial reporting i was doing and she opened her window and started cursing at me and telling me that I deserve to be imprisoned. Other than that crazy old lady,

every single time somebody on the street has walked up to me because they recognize me for my work. It's been to say, I think your work is awesome. Congratulations on what you've done. It inspires me. I really am a fan of yours. Where are all the people who,

you know, are saying I am a white supremacist that i'm sick and evil that you know where are they that you don't they're in real life they don't materialize um and that's why i think that so much of it is just that that thing that people have inside of them that modern society creates through deprivation that at least being anonymous and spewing hatred online enables them to some extent to expel and also you being a very high profile journalist you become a target in that you're not even a normal person like it's it's easy to take free shots at you like it's easy to justify those free shots like he's glenn greenwell fuck him that guy you know what that fuck that guy like

they don't even know you right i mean and yeah or like yeah people read about how much money you make or you know what success you've had and then you just become this like pixelated target and your humanity is is is drained for them they don't see you at that as a human they see you as this kind of object well i felt it ramp up considerably there was a forbes article uh like a year ago about how much i made and that ramped it up and then the spotify deal ramped it way up it's like it's of course free shots it's just like you're at the carnival dunk tank and people want to totally but i get it i understand nothing is fucking nothing is fucking free in life yeah like anything that you get that is a benefit will come with a cost i don't know why the universe works that way, but it absolutely does.

Like everything stays in balance. It does, but it's also a challenge for you personally to sort of immunize yourself from that kind of hate. And also to structure your life in a way that you're not bathing in it. You're not on twitter reading comments and going back and forth with people like i see some celebrities do and i've had conversations with friends that have like real mental health problems because of that and i've called them up and i go hey man stop doing that stop reading comments like it's it's an addiction it's built to be an addiction i mean i'm one of those fucking idiots who has tried often but fail

to avoid that in part because I do like the back-and-forth like the vibrancy of exchange like one of the things I always liked about new media versus old media is that journalists did have to hear from critics and engage with them as opposed to speaking from the mountaintop but like any drug that can start off really good and really pleasurable and open up like new experiences for you it becomes when it becomes a kind of addiction um it becomes toxic and and and destructive which is what it's become for me but you know i think the other side of it

is the same like you can't get attached to the people who hate you but you also can't seek too much and place too much importance on the admiration either yes yes right because that it's kind of just the opposite side of the same coin it's you know just like those people who who are expressing hate toward you don't really hate you because they don't know you the people who say they love you don't love you right like they love your work and that's a big big difference um and just like this also sounds banal but like one of the things that i realized um but you know i never wanted to be a father my husband and i adopted kids two kids two brothers three years ago and last year at the height of the things that I realized, but you know, I never wanted to be a father. My husband and I adopted kids, two kids, two brothers, three years ago. And last year at the height of the

Brazil reporting, when the right in Brazil hated me and the left, you know, loved me, they had this huge event, which is in defense of my press freedom after Bolsonaro threatened to imprison me. It was like a hall filled with like 6,000 people. my you know signs with like my name on it was just too much it was like all the press was there i did a press conference first and before i went into that event i was sitting in this kind of room that they put me in with my two kids my husband had already gone on stage and my kids who were 11 and 9 at the no 10 and 8 at the time picked up like these little pieces of paper and put them in their mouth and found a straw and just started like spitting spitballs at my head so and then

like i would look over at them and they would like just fucking giggle like i was the biggest douchebag on the planet so like i was in this event there was like historic in nature like people chanting my name and carrying my signs and i love i of course i wanted to fucking strangle my kids because they were like shooting spitballs at my head but at the same time i was so grateful for them because they were treating me like you know just some like dumb stupid dad who they were mocking and it just reminded me like all that other stuff is so fake you know it just that's not the stuff that matters it doesn't ultimately it's it doesn't really touch who you are that's one of the beautiful things about having comedian friends that they never let you slide they're

always fucking with no reverence no there's no reverent i'm sure they just fucking torture you we torture each other all the time but it keeps us saying it but there's love in it like if one of my friends roasts me and you know they send something to me on twitter i start laughing or on my text message rather i just start laughing like i'm in a text thread with a bunch of comedian friends and it's it's horrific shit but it's funny but it's funny you know even if it's got yeah pointed towards you it's it's like we were talking about earlier about these alt-right people that lean towards the attention that they get and it ultimately becomes toxic and i think they recognize the folly in that when when it goes away and they realize like where where are those people and i i lean towards them and maybe express myself in a disingenuous way to try to get their love and now i find myself the victim of that

yeah yeah you mean if you mean it's like you know it's like anything anything in excess can can destroy you including success or admiration or hatred or anything it's an it's really important to keep that balance well you look at how many celebrities lose their fucking minds and what i mean it's almost commonplace we expect it we expect them people that that gain massive amounts of fame and adulation to lose their minds it's normal like we don't yeah i mean i yeah i watched like two biopics in a row by accident like the michael jackson one where they just included his accusers which believe them or not like michael jackson had all kinds of fucked up things in his life and died at

50 and then freddie mercury who had a not entirely identical but still similar trajectory all the fame all the money all the adulation that you could possibly want in the world and all the like most fucked up pathologies that ultimately killed them as well that came with it they were completely intertwined yeah my favorite example is elvis because elvis is one of the first i mean when when elvis became that famous in the 1950s and the 60s, there was really no one like that before him or very few people that he could mirror. He could say, I could call Dave Chappelle and if I've got some weird shit about being famous, just fuck with me. I can call him and maybe at least we find common ground and I feel like, okay, I'm not the only one out there that feels weird about all this. Who the fuck was Elvis going to call? know elvis wasn't gonna call anybody there's

no elvis before elvis yeah look how elvis wound up all pilled up and fat and fucked up and confused and he pretty much he probably he pretty much like ruined himself right like he took what made him famous his hot his good looks his like hot body his like ability to dance and he just he got fat and bloated and then he killed himself. Right. Like he was at war with it. Yeah. He was at war with it.

Yeah. And I don't, I don't think it's tenable. I don't think anybody could really manage it at that scale. I think when you get to that Michael Jackson level, you get to that Elvis level, it's like there is no normal and there is no one you can mirror. There's no one who's going to understand what you're going through. You are, you are, you are recognizable in every square inch of the planet. And it's madness.

You become mad. And Elvis is one of the best examples of that. But I think there's a little bit that we can all, anybody that's in the public eye can learn from those examples. And you need something that grounds you. You got to find something, whether it's meditation or yoga or marathon running. You've got to have something that's a real thing. It's a real struggle.

That's a real thing that you have to have energy and focus, and that can ground you. And you can use the tools and the mental fortitude that you gather from that, and it can help you survive the bullshit from the other things. Yeah, I mean, yoga and meditation has saved my life on multiple occasions precisely for that reason. Even independent of whether you're well-known or successful in your career, I think like you need some escape from just materiality from like the constant pressures and, and,

and this like one dimensional form of evaluating yourself, like that spirituality that you can't get if you don't have religion is most of us these days don't in the West. You don't need religion, but you do need spirituality of some kind, like just some purpose, some connection to something beyond just your immediate material desires. And I do think if you deny yourself that, you're going to get off kilter at best. And yeah, I think that's because we crave purpose And making money or being famous or doing well in your career isn't purpose.

It's something that can enable purpose. It's something that can help you fulfill your purpose, but it in itself is not purpose. And if that's all you're pursuing to the exclusion of other things or all that's defining you, yeah, I don't think you're going to end up very good. Yeah, because there's something that comes with too much success is a lack of lessons. There's too much adulation and love, and too many people are holding doors open for you and telling you how great you are, and you don't learn from those lessons. There's no lessons there.

The lessons come from failure and from struggle, and without that, it's very hard to define yourself. I couldn't agree more. Glenn, I'm glad we did this next time I'm gonna be in that cool little red studio they built for you there all right man beautiful well I hope that's great thank you very much I really appreciate you great talking to you Joe I really appreciate it too all right take care Thank you.