The Joe Rogan Experience - #1745 - Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Matt Taibbi is a journalist and author. He writes and publishes the TK News newsletter on Substack and co-hosts the podcast "Useful idiots with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper."

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. So you like it down here better? I love it. Yeah? I love it, yeah. People are so nice. There's less of them, so they're not a burden.

We up? Yeah, you know, I think big cities, you just, people just become in your – they get in your way. Right. And no one's in your way here. Everyone's friendly. Yeah. It's like normal. They're normal people.

Plus, it's not tainted by show business. As much as people try to pretend that Hollywood doesn't have an effect on their lives, I'm in real estate. Get the fuck out of here. Like, everyone is tainted by the weirdness of that city. Yeah. Because it's a city that's predicated on being full of shit. Like you have to pretend or something. Yeah, like everybody, as soon as they're talking,

they start lying basically, right? It's like an angle. For sure, they're selling themselves and promoting an angle. And out here, no one's doing that. Right. It's so refreshing. It's like, this is Mike. He makes barbecue. Oh, hi, Mike. Mike's a normal guy, you know? angle and out here no one's doing that right it's so refreshing it's like this is mike he does he

makes barbecue oh hi mike like mike's a normal guy you know must take some time to sort of decompensate and decompress get back to it took a few weeks that's it and then i was like yeah i embraced it right away because you know we when we moved here um we i started looking in may of 2020. I was like, I'm getting the fuck out of here. I see the writing on the wall. Because there was two weeks to stop the spread and flatten the curve. Like, okay, makes sense.

That makes sense. I was all on board. And then as time went on, I'm like, this is not two weeks. And then they were talking about more restrictions. And then they were shutting down outdoor dining and this that and I was like what what are they doing? Oh, they're they're enjoying this they're enjoying telling people what to do Which is just basic human nature to pretend that they would That government agencies that people who wanted to be mayor people that wanted to be governor would somehow or another

avoid all the pitfalls that are just somehow or another avoid all the pitfalls that are just naturally a part of being a person when a person has power especially power over a bunch of people that are scared and you're offering solutions and you're standing there and we have to keep the safety of our communities in mind right you know that kind of shit yeah i i think that's a big story of modern america is people just not being able to deal with the idea that there just aren't solutions for some things that you just there's for some things you just can't fix it by fiat what's fascinating to me though is that people will blame everyone except the people that were actually responsible for the virus right like this is a virus that most likely i mean i'm not 100 sure but i'm about 90 sure that this thing came from a fucking laboratory and all the stuff that i've read

and all the emails from peter dazik and fauci and the nih when you look at the way they were looking at it and how they were kind of panicked and then then you look at their absolute belief that supposedly they're broadcasting that there's no way it could have come from a lab. And then you see their actual emails and you go, oh, you fuckers. You know this probably came from a lab and you're doing your best job to try to obfuscate, to try to confuse people, to try to muddy the water and make it, just get it as far away from you as you can. But the reality is this probably came from a fucking lab. But that's not what people are mad at.

People are mad at people who take alternative medications. People are mad at people who downplay the severity of it. People are mad at, they're mad at all kinds of things, but they're not mad at the fucking source. The actual source, which is most likely that level four bio lab in Wuhan, China. Most likely. Yeah, at minimum, those emails show that they thought they had a serious PR problem on their hands. Yeah. I mean, I think you can look at them in a number of different ways, at minimum it shows that to be charitable to be to be totally charitable um and that should have

been a big story all by itself and it wasn't yeah it wasn't it's it's a strange time but it's this is normal this is a normal time when people are under heavy anxiety because most people do not know how to handle like extreme stress or scary unknown situations that's why they like a normal job that starts at nine it ends at five and you have two weeks paid vacation and you have your this and you have your that and everything's laid out and you know what to expect people do not laid out, and you know what to expect. People do not like when you don't know what to expect. Yeah, I mean, that was a big thing for me. I lived in Russia for so many years, and in Moscow, there were constant terrorist attacks at the time because the Chechens and the Russians were having these issues. But when 9-11 happened in the United States,

people were traumatized by that beyond all proportion, it seemed to me, because in America, we're just not used to having to deal with all sorts of things. And so they just don't deal well with stress when it's an unusual situation. They have to be in the kind of the lane of safety. Yeah, we're not used to it. I mean, it's weird because we start so many wars and we don't have any of them over here. Right, right. Exactly.

Exactly. I have a good buddy of mine who's my former kickboxing trainer. Uh, shout out to Shuki. He lives in Israel, but he lived in America for a little while and he went back to Israel. But, um, I But I was hanging out with him and his family over his house one night for dinner and they're playing the bongo drums and dancing and like, they're really like festive people. And I go, why are Israelis like so happy? And he goes, because over in Israel, you'll never know. He goes, at any minute you could die. So fucking party, party, party. Like, you party. Party, party. He was always happy. Right.

But he had this attitude because of the conditions, because there's a real fear in the air. Right. The presence of death is all around you, so you're more conscious of living life. Yeah, absolutely. In America, it's completely the opposite. Exactly. It's the opposite. It's the opposite. We are basically like trust fund kids in terms of how we handle the real adversity of the world.

And forget about just the stuff that we create. I mean, if anything natural occurred, any real disaster occurred, you'd see mad panic in the streets. All these – there's so many people out there that are prepping and so many people that prepare. But are you really? Are you really ready? Right. Because I don't think you are. Right.

I think when the shit actually hits the fan, it's the tiniest, smallest percentage of the people. They're going to be able to gather up their senses and make some sense out of this and regroup. Yeah. But I think they're not preparing because they're enjoying being miserable right now. I mean, you were talking about that before. I think they're not preparing because they're enjoying being miserable right now. I mean, you were talking about that before.

But yeah, no, this is like the most unfun period in American history, at least in my lifetime. Yeah. It's unfunny. Entertainment isn't fun. I don't know. It's miserable. Well, it's very tense. Yeah.

It's very tense. And there's a lot of people that are profiting off of that tension. There's a lot of anger merchants out there that are essentially elevating their brand by just getting mad at things and having the least charitable view of people, the least charitable view of situations, the most polarizing arguments of right versus left and vaccinated versus unvaccinated. Yeah. No, I spent a lot of time on this. The press aspect of it is just horrible because financially, that's the way these businesses work now. They're trying to create an addictive experience of being upset and they know exactly how to do it. And they've, they've kind of moved all the people in the business who used to be, um, who used to do the

job of, uh, moderating and making sure that people saw all the different sides of the issue. Um, they've all been kind of shoved out of the business, and now it's just one gigantic anxiety machine. If you turn on MSNBC or CNN or even Fox, basically their job is to get you worked up about stuff. Well, that's the only way they can make money. Exactly. That's what's so crazy about the world that we're living in. But what's interesting is I think the positive aspect of this, and let's try to find the silver lining, right? I think the positive aspect of this is it's really highlighting the importance of independent media.

People like Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points, Kyle Kalinsky, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, these independent journalists who I can turn to. I go, okay, I know if I'm reading a Matt Taibbi article, you're going to tell me exactly what's going on. And there's not many of you. Right. There's a small handful of you where I know I can get unbiased, intelligent observations. Yeah, no, it's great. And this, I think a lot of people, what we're finding, and you're, of course, familiar with this, is that there's a massive audience out there that is very frustrated with traditional media,

the manipulative aspects of it, the predictability of it. And so, yeah, they're coming to places like Substack. And I spent my whole life in the media business. I had an editor once who called it managing the decline. Like the expectation in media was always that there was going to be less and less money forever because audiences were dwindling because they just didn't like the product that we were putting out. In independent media now, it's the opposite. It's skyrocketing. There's incredible growth.

You obviously know this. Substack is doing amazingly well. There's incredible growth. You obviously know this. Substack is doing amazingly well. It's a very bizarre experience as a journalist to be part of that. But it's been really, really cool. in the believability of CNN and fill in the blank, like whatever mainstream big time publication. The fucking Rolling Stone, when they printed that Horstie Wormer story about Oklahoma, I'm like Jesus Christ, do you guys not have anybody working there that can fact, look at the photo they used. It's Oklahoma in the summer,

and you got people with winter coats on. Right. Are you guys out of your fucking minds? Like, what is going on over there? So what happens in media is we have this expectation that if something is published in another reputable news organization, we assume that it's been checked and that it's true. Somewhere down the line, whoever did the original reporting actually checked it. And what happened in that case is, you know. Let's explain what the story was so people can follow us. interview to a TV station. And essentially, he was saying that there was a problem with people who were taking ivermectin. And they were getting so sick that they were lining up outside the ERs and preventing people who had gunshot wounds from being treated. Right?

Yes. Now, me as a reporter, if I hear that story, the first thing I'm going to think is, are there really that many gunshot victims in rural Oklahoma? Like, there's already a, you know, a little bit of a problem with that. Right. You would want to check that right away. What actually happened is some wires got crossed. Like the guy was talking about one thing and somebody who saw the story assumed a correlation that wasn't there. And then it got retweeted by Rachel Maddow. She doubled down on it the next day. Exactly.

Which is wild. The fact that the facts were clearly available and she doubled down on it. First of all, do you know how many people that have actually ever even gotten sick from ivermectin ever? I don't know. Billions of people. What did Peter, Peter Attia read it off to us? It's less than a hundred. Right. I mean, it's, it's been used for river blindness for how long, right? It's an incredibly safe medication, right? Yeah. Now that's, that's not to say that it necessarily works as a COVID treatment, right? But there's so much disinformation about this whole thing.

It's a different conversation. That's a different conversation. But the thing about Rachel retweeting that and doubling down, what's so interesting about that, and this is a phenomenon that's completely new in my experience in media, is that companies now know that their audiences will forgive them for making mistakes as long as the mistakes are in the right direction. Right. As long as it's ideologically correct. As long as it's ideologically correct. So there was a whole generation of reporters who were raised like me. Our whole thing was the night before we published something, we couldn't sleep because we were afraid of that one thing that would be fucked up in the report that somebody would catch the next day. And that might end your career, right?

Like if you got something really, really badly wrong, it was potentially a career ending thing, especially if you made some kind of ethical mistake in forgetting to check something. if you made some kind of ethical mistake in forgetting to check something. So that terror was common to all reporters until recently. Now, all of a sudden, when you make a really, really bad mistake, your audience is probably going to be fine with it. They don't punish you for it in the same way. And they've basically brought in a whole generation of people who have this ethos of, well, if I make, so what if it's wrong? You know, which is why all these people no longer have faith in these companies.

And they can't see it. It's amazing that they can't see it. But people are leaving these companies. They're no longer trusting them. And they don't see that correlation, which is incredible to me. It's very strange, but again, it fuels this thing that I think is very good, which is trustworthy, independent media. Like Crystal and Sagar, when they had their old show, Rising on the Hill, they decided to leave.

And when they decided to leave, we had a group conversation on the phone and they were asking me advice. And I was like I think you guys are gonna be gigantic when you leave I think it's gonna be bigger than ever you'll be completely free you won't have to worry about any editorial control And you don't need anybody I mean I'll help you everybody else will help you the show is already excellent But it's excellent entirely because of you two it has nothing to do with being attached to any other organization that's gonna siphon money off of you yeah and so look at them they're they were number one almost instantly right and they've maintained that position the entire time and they're bigger than ever now right yeah and they were raised they had that hesitation because we're raised in media

and professional corporate media to be terrified of leaving the fold. Now, I actually came up through alternative media, so I wasn't afraid of leaving it. I had my own newspapers when I lived overseas. The idea of being out in the wilderness didn't frighten me so much. So when I moved to Substack, I just thought, this is probably going to be cool. It's probably going to work, right? But a lot of people who came up, who came up, you know, you do think, wow, I'm never going to, I'm never going to get back in to the club. And if I, if I don't make enough money, that's it. I mean, that's it for me, which is why they're staying. But you're look, look at, look at how much success they've had. The audience out there is huge. They're probably making more money than they ever dreamed that they would, they would make.

And, um, you know, there's opportunities to do all kinds of amazing things now because of that. Yeah, there really is. And, you know, I was really fortunate that I had other jobs when I first started doing this podcast. And the podcast was never, the beginning of it at first was never for money. It was just for fun. I never thought of it as a job at all. And so when I had gotten it to the point where it started to become valuable, there were a bunch of vultures that tried to buy half of it or take over. Like one, there was one like podcast network that literally wanted to take 50% of the show just to be on the network. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, why would I do that?

They go, well, you'll have more ad revenue because you'll be connected to our whatever, our network. I go, what fucking network? Right. Like, this is a podcast, man. This is a different, like, they didn't even understand. And this was quite a few years ago before it had gotten big. But the point is, I know friends that took that deal, that gave their podcast over to this network and became a part of it. And now they're probably kicking themselves. Right. Because like, I'm sure it's

like a permanent deal. Like I'm sure they own 50% of it forever or whatever percentage they, I mean, maybe they started with 50 and negotiated down. I don't know. But the point is there's so many people that when given the opportunity to have some real security, like you're going to be connected to this network, they're going to protect you, they're going to bring in the ads, you don't have to do anything, and they just take a percentage of it, but you will always have income because you'll be connected to us and we are a big corporation. And you're like, oh, just like when I was on NBC, this is going to be great. It'll give me security. And you start thinking about your mortgage,

and you start thinking about your kid's college and all that stuff, and you go, okay, this is a good thing. And it's hard. It's hard to just say, no, no, I'm going to be independent. But this is the time. This is the best time ever to be independent. Yeah. And that's why it is a very hard decision for people to walk away and go independent and do what I did, what Glenn did, what Crystal and Kyle did. But it works. And the other choice, staying with traditional media, is increasingly not a good bargain for you. Not only is the piece of the pie there getting smaller and smaller all the time

because their ratings are getting worse, the advertising revenue is dropping off, but the ideological conformity in those organizations is getting worse. And that is something that never used to exist before, or at least not to this degree, anywhere near this degree. So you're going to be miserable doing that. You might as well do the job the way you want to this degree, anywhere near this degree. So you're going to be miserable doing that. You might as well do the job the way you want to do it, do it correctly, and get paid in a commensurate way for doing it. I think there's a bunch of people, though, that haven't established a large following

that are worried, rightly so, of being lost in this. Sure. So I don't think this is available to anyone. It's obviously available to you and to Glenn and to Jimmy Dore and a lot of these other people that have, they've already gathered up a large loyal audience because they know that they can trust these people or the people rather know they can trust them to be honest and to just give their take on things. But there's a lot of people that are, they're stuck because, you know, they're not really

well known and they're kind of in this system and they're realizing while they're in this system that it's it's pretty fucked and you have two choices either you try to fight against it and you might get ostracized and or you try to conform and then you get lost right then you become what you what you despise right which is more common than not right yeah i Yeah, I think that's what's happening. Either they're moving the people out, which you see at an organization like the New York Times, where they're just kind of moving the old guard out, the old traditional reporting types. And they had a lot of really amazing reporters at the New York Times, people who really knew

how to do the job. And they're just kind of being pushed out, whether, you know, for one reason or another. Or, you know, the other thing is you stay in and gradually the mindset takes hold of you and you get lost mentally, you know, and I think that's what's happening to a lot of people. I mean, I knew Rachel back in her Air America days. You know, we were friends once, sort of, and uh it's just it's amazing to me what's what's happened uh I read your book um with her and uh who else on the cover Hannity's on the cover is that hating hating that's right I didn't want to fuck it up so I don't know but um when you compared her and you said Rachel Maddow is is is bill o'reilly you're like jesus

christ and that but you're like but wait i think he's right like it's just ideologically opposite but the same kind of thing where there's just like blind allegiance to the party doctrine right yeah and not a reporter anymore. No. And what O'Reilly did during the Iraq War era, you know, he was using this sort of hyper patriotic persona. His whole thing was, you know, sort of bullying people who, you know, weren't behind the war effort enough or who, you know,

if he didn't like them, he would have sort of accused them of being in sympathy with the terrorists. And, you know, Rachel's basically doing that same gig with, but it's Russians this time around. You know, it's the same act. It's just a different audience.

And they're using exactly the same method. It's this audience optimization method of making money where you identify the audience. Then you give them a whole bunch of information that you know is going to sort of please their sensibilities and tickle their prejudices. And you just keep feeding that stuff to them over and over and over again. And, yeah, she's playing that game. It works to a degree. She's so rich. Right, yeah.

She's balling out of control. She's balling out of control. And now she only works like way less hours or something. Right, yeah. I don't know exactly what the new deal is. But it's like way less broadcast time. Right, yeah, for more money. Yeah.

And, I mean, that's a tough job. I mean, you would know, right? I mean, like four hours, however many days a week doing live work like that. Let me stop you right there. It's not hard. No? You don't think so? Not this.

This is not hard. This is the biggest scam that's ever existed, this job. The fact that people think this is hard. Now, I've had hard jobs. This is not one of them. No. I mean, it requires you to pay attention. Right. That's true. What the fuck? I like to pay attention anyway. Right. Right. fact that people think this is hard now i've had hard jobs this is not one of them no i mean it requires you to pay attention right that's what the fuck you know i like to pay attention anyway

right right it's not hard yeah it's not hard well yeah there's hard jobs out there this it would be a fucking that's travesty to call this compared to a real job i keep forgetting that yeah which is something that one should never do we're we're removed from real jobs by too many years. No, I've had real jobs. In fact, believe it or not, you played the Wilbur Theater, right? Yes. So I worked demolition once, and I demolished, my crew demolished that basement. No shit.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so we did the job that helped turn that into the Wilbur Theater, that cellar a million years ago. That's pretty cool. I was being punished for getting – I got in a scrape, like a drugs thing. And so my parents decided that I needed to learn a little bit about real work. So I ended up doing demolition for a long time in Boston. Dude, I had a construction job

when i was well i had many of them because my father was an architect growing up but um when i was 19 years old my buddy jimmy jimmy lawless shout out to jimmy um he got me a gig working with him i think i only lasted like a month they we were building a knights of columbus hall and um in somewhere in Massachusetts. And it was during the summer, so it was hot as fuck, muggy. Oh, yeah. And I was carrying cement and pressure-treated lumber all day. That's all I did.

And I remember I would – and this was back when I was still competing. So I would go to the gym after work, and I could not do anything. I could barely hit the bag. I was so tired. Right. And I remember thinking to myself, this is a very important moment for me because I could just be doing this forever. And you'd want to be doing anything but that.

Anything but that. I was 19 and it was a real wake up call. I was like, okay, we got to figure this out because there's no way this is going to work. I can't do this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in that first job that I did, you know, the big stairs there at the Wilbur Theory would go down. So we had to basically jackhammer a whole bunch of concrete out of that floor and then figure out a way to get it up into a dumpster. So it was big, big chunks of concrete and stone. And we tried all these different ways, like driving a bobcat up the stairs, like all these different things. There was no way to automate it. The only way to do it was to put it in a rubber bucket and have two guys carry each one up and down the stairs.

So the guy I was with had just gotten out of jail, and he was like – this is what the people who built the pyramids must have felt like, you know, carrying that stuff up the stairs. So, yeah. Yeah, if that's how they did it. I used to work in that basement there was a comedy club in that basement called duck soup yeah the guys who owned the comedy connection uh bill blooming right who eventually took over the wilbur he bought it after these guys had kind of failed this one they decided to try this project of a really high-end comedy club that only did clean comedy for like respectable people and then like they they served really nice food and it did not work out huh it's like because

right across the street was next comedy stop which is like wild and they were they were literally offering you you can get paid in cash or cocaine like it was that's real like that was really that sounds like where all the actual comics would want to go exactly right so we would work across the street but you had to like you had a do surgery on your act you had to like remove parts your act to be able to work there what did they put in the sign like comedy but less funny is no you know the idea was like that you know duck soup the the great Groucho Marx Marx Brothers movies movies. That movie was, you know, they thought it was like one of the great classic movies.

And they thought it would be fun to like have this classy comedy club. And so they had all these other options. You know, there were Stitches and the Common Connection, all these other clubs. They're like, let's have one club that's like very high end and beautiful. And it didn't work. And so then it became an improv after that. The improv took it over after that and then eventually it just went under.

And then Bill, he's a real businessman. He turned it into the Wilbur. They did Faneuil Hall for a while and I think that's when Bill bought them. And then they converted the Wilbur is now the big, like when comics come to town, they work. Right. Yeah.

That's the big, big venue now. Yeah. I did my last Netflix special there. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great place.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But those really hard jobs are very important for people. That way you can never say a podcast is hard work. Absolutely. It's not even close. Yeah. But the thing that's going on now that's really

interesting is watching all these pieces shuffle and move around like the substack thing and the podcast thing and and watching the reaction that traditional media has to it because that's been unbelievable go ahead why it's because it used to be they ignored it and then they recently just started attacking it and it's it's fascinating to watch because like their their ship keeps sinking and as their ship is sinking they're like you fucking you guys suck you know like this this is terrible what you're doing over there is terrible they're going under while they're doing it it's it's amazing i first started hearing about this uh last year uh i knew somebody who worked at the Times and he was basically saying,

the op-ed page is really worried about Substack. I'm like, why would you be worried? You're the New York Times. You got 7 million subscribers. Who cares? But they're really worried about it. The series of hit pieces have come out over and over and over again. It's one line of attack after another. It's misogynistic. It's anti-trans. It's this or that. And it's just a mechanism. It's a cash register. It's not anything. It's not really a company, you know? But it speaks to the desperation within the news business that they are convinced that if they are losing audience, it must be because somebody is stealing it from them. Whereas what happened in fact is that they lost their audience first because, and this goes all the way back to the WMD episode. And then after that, I think Russiagate was a big one that turned off a lot of people. And they've been steadily losing audience just because of factual issues.

And people are – they were already out there. That audience was already out there, as you know. But they're trying to blame it on somebody. Whether it's factual or not, I think people are very tired of being lectured to in this sort of like very clear ideological bent. The angle that they're taking in these papers when they're discussing a real news story, when the actual facts are available to people is they start seeing the facts and then seeing the big picture. And then they go back to that original article they read. They get angry.

They get annoyed. Like, you guys are bullshitting me. me like this is a bullshit version of what happened and it's so clear that you keep doing it in the same direction so now every time you read the new york times or the washington post or whatever paper it is you have to go okay how much of this is legit well who's writing it you have to think like which guy is writing it and how accurate is his reporting how full of shit is he how did you know does she is she a hardcore lefty or is she like a centrist like what what do we what am i getting here right it used to be i could just read the new york times and this is a story hey jamie i made a little spill chuck me something over there

thank you this stuff i'm um um subconsciously trying to pour it out because I know I'll drink the whole goddamn thing. This is this Black Rifle coffee, sugary. It's too good. Actually, it's really good. It's too good. Yeah, this is going to become a new problem in my life. 300 fucking milligrams or grams, yeah, milligrams of caffeine. That's a lot.

It's awesome. Yeah, so I spilled it. It's strange, but I think this is just what happens when something new comes around. It's always what happens. There's always, like, this attack against it, the denial that there's anything wrong with the original product.

I saw it in martial arts. I mean, I was a part of martial arts when I was a child, and then when the UFC came along, there was all of this rejection of the idea behind it. It was barbaric. It was, you know, you only need this and you don't need to learn all this other stuff. And then eventually everybody gave up. Right. And now it's clearly established that that is 100% the best form of martial art for an actual physical confrontation

is a combination of all the things but yes it's with everything when something new comes along that's superior there's a rejection of it there's a an attack against it and then eventually the dust settles and people realize like oh this is what's going on yeah no there's there's a there's a total blindness within the within the media to – they just can't see how audiences perceive them. You know, once upon a time, I think the idea within the news business was pretty simple. Like reporters were raised, basically, we'll get all the facts. We'll work really hard on getting it right. We'll give it to you, and then you do what you want with it. It's not our job to tell you

what decisions to make. It's just our job to get it correct, right? And then that's the news. After that, it's up to you to make your own political decisions. But that's why political affiliation didn't necessarily mean so much back in the day. It was always true that basically all reporters were Democrats, but it didn't show so much in the news media once upon a time because we had a professional ethos that just said, we're not supposed to care, right? We go into cover whatever. We're just going to collect all the facts, get all the quotes, put it out there, make sure everything's been checked, and then it's your deal. Now, there's this new ethos that what Wesley Lowry, the reporter, calls the view from nowhere journalism, which is what I just described,

that that's not good enough, that they have to compensate for inequities in the system by basically trying to impact how people behave through coverage. And this is what they do all the time. They're trying to get you to make political decisions by how they cover things. And I saw this early on as a campaign reporter when I was much younger, in 2004 and 2008. I would sit in the bus with the reporters and they would be discussing which candidates they were going to describe as fringe, which ones were going to be described as electable, which ones would be serious. Because they enjoyed having the power of deciding for people who got to be taken seriously and who didn't. And I think that urge to mold how people act is just ingrained in the business. And it's so off-putting, you know, I think. But people, especially with something like the pandemic,

people are desperate. They really, really need just to get the basic information. And instead, you know, when the pandemic happened, we were in the middle of this super intense culture war that was revolved around Trump. So everything was viewed through that lens, you know, like hydroxychloroquine, Trump liked it, or Trump said he was taking it, therefore, it must be bad. Therefore, it must not work. But that's not how it works. It's not the drug's fault that Donald Trump took it. Did you see that Fauci had actually written a paper on the effectiveness of chloroquine and on coronaviruses? What did he say? from 2000 I want to say 2015 or 2016 but there was he he gave a statement about

the effectiveness of chloroquine and coronaviruses hmm see if we can find that because it's it's really fascinating but yeah it's one of those things that when it came up when I, Trump fucked so much up just by being Trump. Exactly. He broke people's, that Trump derangement syndrome. I used to think that was a funny thing that, you know, not even that funny, but a thing that Republicans would say to try to invalidate anything that liberals would say. Like, oh, they've got Trump derangement syndrome.

But as time has gone on and you've seen it over and over again and the the justification for not just bias but blatant distortions of the facts in order to impart a narrative like clearly doing it on purpose and they'll they've done it with almost as righteousness because they're combating something, this evil, this evil Trumpster and this evil Trump thing that's happening. Right. And that, again, that's new. That's a new thing. So another example of that is what you were talking about before, the lab leak story. Trump trump believed it therefore it must not be true right whereas i think the old school reporters would look at it we wouldn't give a shit right

like it's it's right whether it came from a lab or whether it came from a cave somewhere we don't care like we're not supposed to care our our job is just to find out, you know? And so they would dig. And there was not a satisfactory explanation, you know, throughout all of last year. We didn't know exactly where it came from. So why did we stop looking? We stopped looking because it had been decided just sort of collectively that, well, here's the story we're going to have. We're going to stick to it. Anybody who has any other point of view on it is clearly a Trump lover or whatever. And we have to denounce

that person. We have to call them a conspiracy theorist. We're going to have this fact checking that, you know, piously declares that this is wrong, you know, and and of course it turns out then they backtrack and they think that there's not going to be repercussions for that. Well, you know, that's why people are fleeing. Don't you think they were forced into it, though? They were forced to backtrack. Yeah, they had to because. Well, actually, I mean, that's still a little bit of a mystery as to why they suddenly decided to back off. Well, Josh Rogin was responsible for quite a bit of it, and he's done amazing stuff.

I mean, his work in exposing the whole disinformation campaign and the emails and the fact that Fauci was the one that restarted the gain-of-function research and funding gain-of-function research, all that stuff. I mean, and he's a Washington Post guy. I mean, he's rock solid. Right. And then I think there was a bunch of people that kind of, when he started reporting all this stuff and saying all these things, a bunch of people that were like, fuck, he went out there. Right.

Like, you know, he went out the door and he's like, guys, I can breathe. And everyone's like, fuck, should we go outside? You know what went out the door and he's like guys i can breathe and everyone's like fuck should we go outside you know what i mean like yeah you know what i mean like if there was here oh is this uh the fauci thing 2005 2005 studies uh found that chlor yeah chloroquine not hydroxychloroquine was effective in inhibiting the infection spread of sars cove the official name for sars the research was conducted in cell culture conditions, so in vitro, meaning the drug was not administered to actual SARS patients. That's the same thing they found with ivermectin, that it stops viral replication in vitro. Yeah, if you look at the announcement for the Oxford study on ivermectin, they use very similar language to say that this is a drug that has had in vitro

success as it has some antiviral properties. Yeah. You know, not, there isn't a long record of it, but it has some, right? And that contradicted this, again, it was much more of a faith-based thing in the reporting. Exactly. It's, we believe that this is not true, so therefore we're just not going to touch it. Well, the horse dewormer narrative is where it got really weird, because it was clearly

the same language over and over again. Which, by the way, that stuff is in heart dewormer for dogs. I have heart dewormer for my dog. I don't even know who bought it, but it was in my house. And the other day I was like, look at this. What's in this? And I pick it up and it's fucking ivermectin. Really?

Yeah. And it was, you know, like heart, like that company, I think it's called Heart, that makes it. Right. Isn't that what it's called? H-A-R-T or something like that? Heart Guard? Yeah, is that what it is? I don't know.

But whatever it is, it was for dogs. There's a picture of a dog on it. I didn't even know we had it in my house. And I open up the package and I look at it. I'm like, motherfucker. But they didn't say that's it, Heart Guard. That's it. That shit.

That shit's ivermectin. There it is. So when they started saying horse dewormer, like that was the thing that kept getting said over and over and over again. Horse dewormer. Horse, horse, horse, horse. Right. Like why, like what happened there? Like how did that narrative get out there when you're talking about a drug that's been administered to i think it's more than four billion times four four billion prescriptions have been filled for that stuff there's only like i want to say there's like two billion

dog or two billion um horses on earth like how many how many billion horses are there i bet there's not even there's probably not even many billion horses are there? I bet there's not even, there's probably not even 2 billion horses. So there's like, no, why would you confuse that? A drug that's been given to so many people, why would you confuse that as being primarily a horse drug? 58 million. There's only 58 million horses. So we far outnumber horses. This is something I never knew.

Yeah, I was pretty sure of that. So we far outnumber horses. This is something I never knew. Yeah, I was pretty sure of that. But the fact that you're talking about a drug that couldn't have been given to all the horses, even if they gave it to every fucking horse. Right, yeah. Now, this was amazing when they did that. I mean, I had arguments with other people in the business about this because I wrote a couple of stories about ivermectin mainly because the some of the internet platforms were shutting down people who were who were talking about it right so companies like Facebook YouTube and YouTube right yeah

it's ramps it was YouTube had eliminated among other things like congressional testimony about this and that seemed to me just crazy. Like, you know, what, even if the person's wrong, you have to leave it up there as a public service. It's, you know, you should be able to find it. But, but reporters were absolutely convinced that this drug was evil because I guess, because it wasn't the vaccine. drug was evil because i guess because it wasn't the vaccine um and just the whole concept that people would be looking for some other kind of treatment or might or might welcome it was just deeply and profoundly offensive to them so they could they came up with this pejorative term the horse you know this horse dewormer thing and it was amazing the unanimity like as you said it's

it was in every single story like the the language was exactly the same yeah it was amazing, the unanimity. Like, as you said, it was in every single story. Like, the language was exactly the same. Yeah, it was really strange. Right? And even that is odd because, again, once upon a time, your classic journalist was somebody like Seymour Hersh. And the whole idea of being a journalist was to not think like other people. Like, you were your own person. You thought for yourself. You made

your own decisions about things. And that was valuable. The whole point of a job was to be like that because it required somebody who had the ability to look at every situation completely objectively and not be affected by peer pressure. Like that was a prerequisite for being able to do this job well. The idea that we're all going to parrot each other's thinking about things is totally alien to what this job is supposed to be about. And now all of a sudden it's become the opposite. It's become if you even try to opt out of doing that, you know, you're suspect. You're going to be drummed out of the business, which is just nuts. It's very strange. Another thing that's

one of my favorite things to watch is the compilation of all of the people on the left talking about how they would never take the vaccine because you never know what's in it. If Trump's hands are on it. Oh, God. That it's going to, you know, who knows what the long-term consequences of it are going to be. Right. And this is Biden, fucking Biden, when he was running for president. Are you going to take the shot?

Who knows what it's going to do to you? Kamala. There's no long-term test. Kamala saying she wouldn't take the shot. So many fucking people. And those same people are the ones that just take the shot, man. I know. The same people.

The very same people. The same people made it. The same people produced it. This is the same people. Yeah. And they came up with this whole phrase, pandemic of the unvaccinated. Yeah. Right. Exactly the same people who were who were having vaccine hesitancy the year previously came up with this phrase. And here's the part

that's shameful. It's one thing for a politician to use a phrase like that. That's clearly cooked up, you know, with their consultants in whatever, you know, evil political laboratory they they sit around and decide how they're going to do their messaging campaigns. But then for an anchor person to get up and repeat it like it's his or her own thinking, that's just embarrassing. Since when do we let politicians write our material for us? I mean, it's just shameful. It is, but I think it's just the last death twitches of that business. I just think this is a sign of the times and that if you think about it, a decentralized source of news is

really the only way we're going to trust it today. Something that is completely independent of a large corporation where they have a lot of vested interests in pushing a certain narrative. Those things, they're never going to be pure. Not anymore. I mean, whatever the fuck they did, when they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise on television, and we're one of only two countries on planet Earth that allows that. They allowed the deepest roots of corruption and of influence to get in the way of all narratives, of everything we say and do. And the fucking sheer amount of money that's being generated by that is almost unstoppable you could never cut all those roots there's no way it's at this point yeah it's it's and that amount of money is nothing to them nothing look look at the amount of uh the profits that companies like you know materna and pfizer are making right now and you know like i'm

like Moderna and Pfizer are making right now. To buy the ascent of basically all the networks, all you have to do is send a tiny percentage of your quarterly profits to a handful of news networks. And to them, that's like manna from heaven. I mean, again, the news business is so starved for revenue that they'll bend to anybody basically. Did you see that? I mean, I know Jimmy Dore covered it, but quite a few other people have realized it now.

The amount of money that Bill Gates has spent on influencing media. No, I didn't. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Jeez. I didn't. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Jeez. He's donated to these various media organizations, which for sure has some sort of an impact on how they cover him.

Right. Well, of course. Yeah. And look, once upon a time, we were, I haven't said it many times, we were trained to know that, for instance, think tanks, right, like who was funding them because think tanks are who get quoted in The New York Times and The Washington Post, right? So they're generating research that goes to journalists and like sort of surreptitiously that ends up becoming what's covered. And so that's how like the Gates Foundation, for instance, will work its way into coverage. You know, it'll sponsor research in an area like education. That's one of the things I'm covering now. And its research becomes, you know, it gets into the news that way.

But we were supposed to once have, you know have our ears up and be conscious of who was paying for all this research. Where was that information coming from? And people don't really even think about it now. 05.05.205 See if you can find that story, Jamie. 05.05.205 I'm looking right now. I'm reading an article about someone last year actually was looking into it. Here, I'll show you. Journalism's Gates Keepers is what it's called. Columbia Journalism Review.

Is that a respected publication? Yeah. I mean, look, they've had their issues, but that's the top media criticism outlet, right? Okay, so this is last year. It says, I recently examined nearly 20,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation made through the end of June and found that more than 250 million going towards journalism. Receipts included news operations like the BBC,

NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, is that how you say it? Yeah, Le Monde. And the Center for Investigative Reporting, charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets like BBC Media Action, The New York Times, Neediest Cases Fund, media companies

such as The Participant, whose documentary, Waiting for Superman, supports Gates' agenda on charter schools, journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists, and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a news site to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations, which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates' funding into the fourth estate. Yeah, and as a reporter, you may or may not be aware of all the different ways that money will get in, you know, work its way into the business. But unconsciously, it just sort of seeps in. Right. And that's how it works.

Nobody comes and tells you, well, don't cover this. Well, maybe they do now, actually. Or, you know, take this approach to covering education. Or take this approach to covering education. What ends up happening is that you just kind of get a feel based on the reaction of your editor to whatever pitch you're giving at the moment. Hey, would you be interested in a story about whether or not this approach to standardized testing worked, right? And if the editor says, yeah, that's interesting, maybe, right? Then you know just never to broach that again, right? But if it's in the right ideological slant, they're going to be hot for it, right? Interesting. Yeah. And that's how it

works. That's how it works with everything. It works with foreign policy. I mean, when I worked in Russia, if you pitched a story to an American editor about how the U.S.-based, the U.S.-funded reform effort was working and there was a growing middle class in provincial Russia that was prospering and people were now taking vacations to Ibiza and stuff like that. You could get anybody to buy that story. But if you came to them with a story about how actually the transformation of capitalism has been really slow, people have lost their health care, there's an explosion of violent crime and addiction and people are more and more gravitating towards right-wing politics, in large part because of the rapid

changes that they weren't ready for. You could not get that story sold, right? So what ended up happening when I was in Russia is they kept sending back all these positive reports about what was happening. This was before Putin. And Americans got this idea that things in Russia were going great, you know. And the company was really prospering. In fact, you know, I was doing stories when I was there about how money didn't even exist in the villages. Like the only people who would actually have cash in most remote Russian villages would be pensioners

because they would get it, you know, once a month from the mail system. I went to places where the people actually bought and sold things with moonshine, like the Russian equivalent of moonshine, because that was like a unit of currency. Wow. They were doing subsistence farming. I mean, it was completely fucked, life in rural Russia.

But if you picked up the New York Times, what you read is the emerging middle class was doing great. People have VCRs in Samara and stuff like that. And that's how it works. You get a sense of what they want, you give it to them, and over time, you just stop thinking about it. But it's not a healthy way to do it. The idea that there's no currency at all, and they're just subsistence farming and trading, and trading in moonshine, that's wild. Yeah. I actually did it myself. I did a story about this. I used to travel the country with this guy who was a professional clown. So we would do these things where we would get jobs in provincial Russia doing different things, whether it was bricklaying or working in agriculture, that kind of stuff. And in one place we went to, you know, we do like a construction job and we get paid in what they call Samagon,

which is like moonshine. Was it nasty? It works. Megan Murphy gave me some shit from Mexico that it's how rough? I can still, it's like nightmares. It's so rough. She drinks it all the time. I know what's wrong with her. But we open up the bottle. I was like, it's like nightmares. It's so rough. She drinks it all the time. I know what's wrong with her.

But we open up the bottle. I was like, Jesus. Yeah. It's like getting hit with an oar when you drink this stuff. Yeah. Have you ever seen Werner Herzog's documentary, Happy People? No. Although I love Werner Herzog.

What was it about? It's about people living in rural Russia. Oh, really? Life in the taiga. Happy people. It's one of my favorite documentaries. It's about people living in rural Russia. Oh, really? Life in the taiga. Wow. Happy people. It's one of my favorite documentaries. It's really fascinating because these people live just hunter-gatherer, fisherman, trapper existences.

And I believe they sell pelts and they'll use that for snowmobiles and tools and things like that. But essentially all of their food, all of their subsistence comes, this is it, comes entirely from hunting and trapping and they have no mental health problems. They're all unreasonably happy. They're really like when you're getting translations of them, it's all in subtitles, but they're really like when you you know, you're you're getting translations of them, you know, it's all in subtitles But they're talking about how happy they are and they talk about all the things they love about this particular way of living and you know And this is what a man needs to do and this is what a trapper does and this is what a hunter does and this is what and they're talking about it with this this pride and this I

Don't know man this like really unusual resolve like they found their niche They don't have this desire to escape like they enjoy life right and so he called it happy people and you know he's doing the The narration which makes it interesting, too. No, his narrations are always great. A Year in the Tiger is what it's called. It's fucking great. It's really good.

That sounds awesome. It makes sense that whatever it is we're doing, that if you can avoid having to have interaction with that, that would be – it sounds like it would be a great life. Do you feel an obligation? Because there's not that many of you. I mean, I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass, but I will. There's not that many of you out there. There's not that many people that I can say – like I can send an article that you wrote and I can go, this is legit. I'll send it to my friends. Like, read this.

This is crazy. Thank you. There's not a lot of you out there, though. Like, if the government wanted to change the news, they'd just have to whack you and Glenn Greenwald and a couple other people. And it would be a lot different out there. That's real. Yeah.

As odd as that sounds, there's not that many. Yeah, it's a weird feeling. I'm not, you know, obviously I've been doing this for a long time, but this current situation where the news is kind of split into three parts, right? There's right-wing media, there's hashtag resistance media, and then there's this independent thing where it's people like you and me and Glenn and Crystal and Kyle and stuff like that. It is small and emergent, and it's a lot of attention. I think there's a lot of pressure on us to figure things out because we haven't figured things out. Substack is really great for getting a couple of us paid a good deal of money, but we haven't figured out how to do in-depth investigative reporting. We haven't figured out how to pay for that foreign reporting. How would you pay for that without crowdfunding it? And if you crowdfunded it, wouldn't everybody know what you were doing?

Yeah. That would be a problem, right? It would be difficult. I think the problem is that this model works because people really, really like the content. So they want a lot of it. But the job I used to do, I would take eight, 10 weeks to write a single story. Let me ask you this. Say if you have a story that you would normally get funded for by a large organization, how much money are we talking about? Say if you have a really important story, how much money are we talking about? How much would it cost? Say if you want to do a deep dive into the Steele dossier. So it would depend on what it was. If it was a book-length thing, I think you know how much book deals usually cost, right? But there's profit on the end of that, right? There's millions. There can be. If you're lucky. If you're lucky. I mean, I think mostly, you know, the investigative reporters, you know,

they'd be mostly happy with any kind of six-figure advance to do something like that. In the magazine business, if you were going to do a big whack at something like that, you know, 6,000 words, 10,000 words, once upon a time, you would get you know uh fifteen thousand twenty thousand dollars to do that because you you know you needed to take a while to do that work feel like if there's like real stories out there there could be a fund that's dedicated to real stories and in place of an editor like who would have control over the narrative. You could have a committee of people like yourself and Kyle and Crystal and Sagar, and where you would have like a signal group chat where you talk about an issue like, hey, there's

a thing we want to do on this. You know, it's probably going to cost $20,000 to get all the pieces moving. You know, can we, can we do something like that? And then I think easily you could have a GoFundMe or a, you know, whatever, any Patreon, something along those lines where people just donate to this fund that goes towards journalism. And then at the end of the year, there could be an accounting of it so that everybody knows it's all legit and no one's siphoning money off of it. I don't think that's that hard.

I think it would work. It would definitely work financially. ProPublica sort of is based on that model. There's only a couple of problems. One is that there aren't that many people who know how to do the job that well left. Trevor Burrus That's terrifying. Peter Van Doren Yeah, no, it is. It's pretty scary. I mean, I think you could have found a fair number of reporters who knew how to do hardcore investigative

journalism 10 years ago, 15 years ago. But the current generation has been raised on a different model that's based on being quick, getting a couple of quotes, putting something up fast, and it's brief, and it's more of a take than it is a dig. And so that mentality is of just investigative work is disappearing. So you'd have the problem of finding people who can do it. The other problem is audiences don't necessarily love what we call eat your vegetables journalism.

There's some of it out there. There are people who do good work, but they have difficulty getting people to follow it because people do love the shit that's out there, right? They eat up the culture war stuff. So those are two problems. I think I've always approached it that part of the job is a sales job. Look, you have to get people interested in stuff that's important. You have to find a way to do it, whether you're using humor,

whether you're using illustrations. It doesn't matter whether you use fiction writing narrative techniques to get people hooked on something. That's part of the job, I think. And you have to do the investigative stuff. So it's a tough thing. It takes a while to develop all those skills. And they're not teaching kids in journalism to do that as much anymore.

Do you think that with the rise of independent journalists, do you think that it's possible that that might open up and people might look at that as a viable career path. And they might say, hey, this is actually, it's actually coming back. I would hope so. I mean, if the money's there, it's the greatest job in the world. I mean, this job has taken me all over the planet. I've gotten to meet every conceivable kind of person on earth, everyone from presidential candidates to professional athletes to people in prison to, you know, everywhere. And you can go anywhere doing journalism. And you get to play detective sometimes, right? Which it's a really cool thing. You got to do the work of, you know, coming to a situation and figuring out who did what. And that's mentally and intellectually stimulating.

It's a great, great job. But people have been, I think they've been turned off to it because this new version of the job is much more like professional flattery. It's much more political. They're training kids to be like courtiers, basically. And the people who come out of journalism schools now, they want to be close to power. That's the attraction for them, is the idea of being the person who gets to sit next to a Hillary Clinton aide at a bar at the end of a day. And, oh, I know this person, or I hang out at a party with this person. Instead of going around the world or breaking a big story, that's what it is. And I think it's unfortunate because it's a cool job.

It's not just a cool job. It's a cool job with romantic roots. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, think about how many incredible stories have been broken and, you know, Woodward and Bernstein, how people look at these people, you know? Yeah. Think of the people who've been journalists, who've done such incredible things. You know, everybody from like Ida Tarbell to Mark Twain to Hunter Thompson, Evelyn Wall.

Like, you know, it's a great place for if you want to be a writer. I mean, that's how I got into it because I wanted to be a writer. But if you want to be a great investigator, you know, you can do that's a way into it too. You know, there's the whole tradition of what we call participatory journalism where you do something and then you write about it. George Plimpton was famous for playing professional football, the paper lion story. But I've done some of that, like doing work in Russia or going undercover.

I lived in a church in Texas for a while. Did you really? Yeah, yeah. Actually, the John Hagee Church in San Antonio. I sort of joined that church and wrote about my experiences there. What were you doing there? So it was like an apocalyptic church. It was one of those churches that sort of believes the end of the world is coming.

Did they have a date? They didn't have a date, but they had all these crazy – like we had a retreat where they taught us to vomit our demons out into a paper bag. So we all got together and like we had to do that. So I had to pretend to be this like confused spiritually confused person i feel kind of guilty about it in retrospect it was kind of i'm not so sure isn't everybody a little spiritually confused we all are yeah i guess so but it's you know it's it it's a fun job i mean it's it's uh and and i think it's really really necessary too when done right i i was just reading something they didn't have serpents, did they?

Did they use serpents? They didn't. No, that's like the Pentecostal thing, I think. Right, right, right. They're the ones who speak in tongues too, right? Well, we did do that. Really? Yes.

Oh. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't so good at that. It all sounds the same. It all goes into this. It all sounds like a fake language. Like no one does it well. No one does it where it sounds like, wow, that sounds like.

Do you, what is that? Oh, God, there's a manuscript that they think is fake and it's been around forever. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No, no, no, no, no. The Voynich, what is it called? Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No, no, no, no, no. The Voynich.

What is it called? Hmm. Something the Voynich. Is it Voynich? Spanish script? That's it. 39 codes or something? Yes. There's this ancient book, and they don't know how old it is.

How old do they think it is? So they were thinking before it was like a long lost language. And as time's gone on, now they're kind of thinking it's not a language at all. It's like someone just made up a language. Yeah. Oh, they made it up? But it's really good. So it's confusing people.

See if you can pull up some images of it. So it's got drawings and this language that they thought, yeah, it's really interesting. It's old as fuck. But look at how all the letters are written. It's all beautiful. No one knows what the fuck it says. They have no idea. And there's a lot of theories.

But for the longest time, they were trying to decipher it. And I think I might be speaking out of tune here because they might have changed. But I think they decided somewhere along the line that it's not really a language, that someone just made up a fake language. So I'm assuming that they had like linguists and code breakers take a crack at it and they just couldn't. They can't. It's early 15th century. breakers, take a crack at it, and they just couldn't, right? They can't. It's early 15th century.

So somewhere in the early 1400s, somebody, so clear that, was the manuscript decoded? I don't think it has been, right? 2019, the manuscript was propelled back in the headlines once again when an academic made the explosive claim that he had succeeded where everyone had failed and successfully decoded the mysterious text. I think that's horseshit, though. I don't think that's true. If somebody 500 years ago made this beautiful thing but made it complete gibberish just to fuck with us in the future,

that's kind of amazing. I really respect that. Yeah, if that's what they did. I don't know what they did. Yeah, that's funny. I think they think that somebody might have made it to sell to someone, like someone might have made it in the early 1400s to sell as some ancient text. It currently consists of around 240 pages.

There's evidence that additional pages are missing. Some pages are foldable sheets of varying size. Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely colored with sections of the manuscript showing people, fictitious plants, astrological symbols, et cetera. The text is written from left to right. The manuscript was named after Wilfrid Voynich,

a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. I don't think that anyone has translated it. There was so much fuckery back then. Oh, yeah. There was, right? That's hilarious. That reminds me of the... Go ahead.

I was going to say, the earliest books, while I was reading something about some of the earliest... Somebody brought it up, and then I read something... I think somebody brought it up on this podcast. Yeah, I remember reading through this and I thought we had come to an answer but I don't remember it and I'm not finding it. The answer whether or not it's legit?

Yeah, like even I thought they found out what some of the stuff was saying and it was just like nonsense or... Yeah, I don't know if that's true. I think it's really under debate. But the earliest books, the real successful ones, were about like how to spot witches. Everybody thinks like, oh, well, once they started printing books, that's when people started learning things. No.

No, it's kind of like today. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of witch hunting going on today. Like you think of like if YouTube was dominated by QAnon theories, that was like ancient publishing. Yeah, amazing. When they first started writing books. Because I never even thought of that.

I forget who brought that up. Someone brought that up on the show, that the earliest books were about witches. And I was like, what? And they go, yeah, that was the most successful books at the time, once they started printing books. Like, how to spot witches. Right, right. You talked about it on the ninth episode. But who was it that, the ninth episode ever yeah oh jesus wow wow with whom my memory's gone my memory is like

a hard drive that's like a one gigabyte hard drive but i'm trying to stuff 18 gigs of information in there it just spills over right and then someone will bring something i'll go oh yeah oh now i remember that okay i found the folder and And then I'll, you know. Yeah. For me, I think I'm just actually, it's shrinking in size, that hard drive. Yeah. Well, it's definitely not working that good. But this Voynich manuscript, I forget what my point was.

It's just. It reminds me of the, remember the amazing story about the Zodiac Code? Yes. When they published it and like the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, like their cryptographers couldn't crack it. But then this couple in like Sausalito were just like sitting at their breakfast table and they were the ones who figured it out. Oh, is that true? Yeah, it is true. It's in the original Zodiac books.

The cartoon is Robert Graysmith. We were going somewhere with this when I got to the Voynich manuscript. What the hell were we talking about right before that? There was a point. Media business, professional standards. Talking in tongues. Speaking in tongues, yeah. That's right, that's right.

So we were just talking about gibberish. That fake languages. That fake languages all sound the same. They all sound... Yeah. Nobody does it where it sounds like, wow, that sounds like a good fake language. No, it's incredibly unconvincing.

But it was very hard for me to do. I found that was the hardest part of the gig. Didn't J.R.R. Tolkien write a whole fake language to go along with The Lord of the Rings? Oh, like Hobbit-ish or something like that? I think he did. Or Elvish? Yeah, I think he did write some Elvish language. I think he wrote a fake language to go along with his books. So did Anthony Burgess.

Well, he just basically took Russian words and made them into slang for Clockwork Orange. Oh, really? Yeah. But he had his own sort of slang language. It's a cool thing to do, you know. Did this church that you, were they some of the people that did the Pray the Gay Away stuff?

So there was a little bit of that. They didn't do conversion therapy exactly, but they definitely counseled people who were in that situation. Let's put it that way. I thought about doing one of those, but then where I would actually join one of those retreats and see how they went about trying to convert people. But, yeah, that never worked out. There was someone who was a famous politician and their husband was involved in one of those things. I'm trying to remember who it was. But her, no, no, no.

It was a female politician and the husband seemed gay. And he was involved. That's a weird thing to say. But, you know, some people do seem gay. It's like you risk being criticized and being called a bigot for saying that, but if someone's talking like this, it's very rare that's a straight person, right?

Right, yeah. Yeah, for whatever reason. This is in no way a judgment against gay people. This guy was doing Pray the Gay Away stuff, and someone did some investigative reporting and did something and it was like, this guy like clearly has a heart on and he's like behind me hugging me

and telling me that, you know, Jesus does not want him to be gay and that we're all gonna work through this and he's like, the whole thing was like uber bizarre. That's crazy. It's amazing that that whole conversion therapy thing was was such a big deal like even 10 15 years ago yeah there have been you know a lot of changes and since then well changes in acceptance except fully but

also changes in an understanding of homosexuality that it's this is not a choice it's like this idea the idea that is a choice is nonsense. Right, right. Although they're now changing the thinking on that. Really? Well, I mean, not to wade into an area that's completely radioactive, but... Too late. It's the trans issue. The whole idea that something like that is determined by biology runs a little bit counter to current thinking.

Oh, okay. So trans is very different though, right? Yeah. The reason why trans is different because there are trans people, right, that start off as biological males and they identify with being a female but they've had children with females and they've had relationships with females and then as they transition they remain attracted to females right this is very common yeah I don't think it's quite the same as gay. It's very different in that it's whatever it is in the human mind that makes you identify with another gender,

it seems to have nothing to do with your sexual preference. Okay. Yeah. I know absolutely nothing about it, so I shouldn't opine. Well, I knew almost nothing about it until I got like attacked for attacking a female MMA fighter who used to be male for 30 years and then wasn't telling anybody that she used to be male and transitioned and fought two different times against females that thought she was a biological female and beat the fuck out of them. I mean, like horrendous beatings, broke this lady's skull, like literally fractured her face. It was scary stuff. And when you watch the fights,

the fights looked like a guy beating up a woman. It wasn't like someone who's particularly skillful. It was just wrong. And it was at a very low level of MMA. Like if you saw like at high levels when someone has like the skills to protect themselves from someone who's the same size as them but physically superior, then you would have less consequences because they just know how to protect themselves better. But these women weren't that skillful so the strength and the physical power was a huge factor right and I was fucking furious because it's like this is crazy and in criticizing it and and being like very very vocal about it then I started

having to like start doing research on this like what like why are people reacting this way like what is actually going on here wasn't that one of the reasons they would they wanted Bernie to disavow you yes yes so yeah what's what's amazing about this is that um it's again it goes back to that same kind of instinct you know behind the lab leak theory process which is we've decided something right we're not going to discuss it anymore so if you discuss it uh you you're you're in the bad zone right uh and um you're not even allowed to bring it up not even allowed to bring it up and and so there are just so many of these places in the kind of cultural landscape that are just no-fly zones for talking about things. Well, Abigail Stryer is experiencing that in the most hateful and aggressive way with her book.

I believe it's called Irreversible Damage. Right. Which is all about rapid-onset gender dysphoria that seems to be happening to a lot of young girls. And they're trying to figure out what is going on when the percentage of people who identify as trans that are young girls is up several thousand percent, which is crazy. Like what's happening? Obviously there are people who don't think that's happening and think that that rapid-onset gender dysphoria isn't a thing. I interviewed Abigail because she also had a problem with the internet platforms. I think it was with Amazon, right?

Yes. Yeah. And again, that whole phenomenon of, OK, it's controversial. Well, that used to be part of what having a First Amendment was all about. You know, we we talk about this stuff. The whole the whole point of having it is is to protect discussions around things that are difficult. Yes. Right. Like we don't have it so that we can have obvious conversations. Right. And so if you think she's wrong, you know, let's talk about it. Right. Don't go to an internet platform and make it, you know,

and shut it down at the source and make it impossible for somebody to have the discussion. Well, it used to be the right that everybody was terrified of that was going to burn books, and it was based on religion. So now the left is doing it, and it's based on religion also. It's just a non-defined religion.

It's a religion of wokeness. You have to have these parameters that you operate under, and as soon as you step outside of those parameters, you're supposed to be shut down and de-platformed which is the the term right it's essentially the same thing you're calling for a book burning right you're calling for a ban yeah and you're calling for a ban on someone who very some respected intelligent people agree with her have agreed with some of the things she said, have disagreed with some of the other things that she said, have discussed these things and realize that there

is an issue here where people are malleable. This is the concept, right? The concept is that there is some sort of social acceptance and embracing of people who are trans and that this could be a problem with some people who are easily influenced and are maybe socially awkward or maybe even on the spectrum. And then someone comes along and says, you feel weird because you're really trans. And if you give that person testosterone, one of the things that happens with the administration of testosterone in people, One of the things that happens with the administration of testosterone in people, particularly in girls, is there's a euphoria that comes with it.

There's a sense of well-being. You get confidence. And they might start thinking this is what has been wrong with me all this time. Now, these are not my words. These are not my opinions. This is just explaining what this phenomenon supposedly how you can define it. And I've done zero research. So I just want to be real clear about that. I don't know if that's actually what's going on. Yeah. So the assertion is that you have people in clusters, social clusters, who are,

they call it the social contagion phenomenon. And there would be other factors too, like therapeutic attention is also something that some people may think is a positive, right? Kids might experience, they might feel better about life because they're getting more attention from clinicians or from teachers, something like

that. But you have to test that, right? Like that's the whole point is like, we're not deciding at the outset whether this is right or wrong. It's that the way science works is, well, let's, let's do a study about that, figure out what's actually happening. And instead, it's like if you have the – having the conversation is now dangerous. It's perilous, right? Which is crazy to me. Like one of the reasons I became kind of politically liberal in the first place is because we didn't have those prohibitions. The comedians said all the forbidden things. The intellectuals weren't afraid to have the scary discussions. I remember the first thing I liked about Noam Chomsky was that he stood up for the speech rights of some crazy Holocaust denier, right? Because the whole idea was you had to have dialogue and fight for it. And what we're doing now, we have

this atmosphere where people don't want to... They're just sort of deeply interested in scaring people away from certain topics, which I don't understand. Well, a great example of that is the ACLU. The ACLU, when it first started, they defended Nazis. They defended Nazis' right to speak. Not defended their position as being accurate, but defended Nazis' right to speak because they said that if you don't – if you believe in free speech, you believe in all speech. And even if it's wrong, even if it's inaccurate, you have to defend free speech. Now, they are like one of the wokest organizations that's out there. They fly by this doctrine.

Their positions on things are entirely ideologically driven. Yeah, there was a great documentary called Mighty Ira that's done by FIRE. They profile Ira Glasser, who was the head of the ACLU for a long time. And it goes into the whole mechanics of what the decision was to support the Nazis in Skokie. And it was specifically based on the idea that all these ACLU people had fought

in the civil rights era. They had campaigned for civil rights. And their whole argument was if you let the town of Skokie decide who can and cannot march in their town, then you're going to have some southern town the next day deciding that a black organization or the NAACP can't march there, right? Are we going to make a million different authorities who are going to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't? And that's a very compelling argument, right? It's very compelling, yeah. And it was deeply thought out.

And they were really, really, they took it very seriously from an intellectual level. Like, we know how offensive this is to people. They thought about what it would mean to the residents of Skokie, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, what it would mean for them to see those marchers go past their houses. They understood how, you know, if anything is harm, if any kind of speech is harm, that is it. Right. But still, you know, that this is a foundational idea in the United States is that we we we defend this because it's part of our identity. And we're losing I think we debate these ideas and that, you know, when people are confused, they can see a better argument. They can see someone who eloquently spells out why these Nazis are wrong. Now I have a framework. Now I understand. Like if someone doesn't know why they're wrong, like maybe someone's uneducated, maybe someone grew up around people that were racists or Nazis. And then they get this compelling explanation of everything.

And now you wouldn't have had that if you didn't have the Nazis. Like you kind of need the shitheads and the bad people of the world so that you can say, here's why they're wrong. And then, you know, it gets messy. And in the age of social media, that's where it's weird because these shitheads never really had a platform before where they can get on these, whatever platform social media allows them, and they can develop massive followings saying crazy shit like and but that's still the same we have to realize that even though it's new and it's uncomfortable and you're seeing

these numbers and you know people are being indoctrinated into these ideas what's important is to have a compelling argument against it yeah and to have that and to say hey this is why these people are wrong look here's here's the the most eloquent thought-out articulate argument against that and then we're reasonable people are allowed to look at these two things and go well clearly this these people over here are correct and clearly I see why these people are so fucked up and this is what's wrong. Yeah. Doing it the other way, just saying, okay, we're not going to let you see that idea. We're going to make sure that it comes or it comes affixed with a warning label or it's we're going to make sure that person does not appear on this Internet platform. You know what the Streisand effect is, right?

Explain that to people, the whole story behind that. Yeah, I don't remember exactly what happened. It's a house. She had a house in Malibu, and it was this big, beautiful house, and they took photos of it from the air. And she got pissed, and she demanded it be taken down off the internet. And when she did that, everybody was like, what house is that? And then it became way more popular. And then everybody wanted to know where Barbra Streisand's house was.

And that became the Streisand effect. She was operating under this delusion that we were living in 1950, when you can get the newspaper to take something down and that would be it. That would be the end of it. But in the age of the internet, it has the opposite effect intended. And this gets back to what we were saying at the very beginning, like this idea that people have to understand that there isn't a solution to everything. Right. And I think internet speech is the classic example of where people think there must be something we can do, some step that we can take to make sure that these

kinds of thinkers don't exist anymore. And there isn't. It's logistically impossible for a company like Facebook or Google or Twitter to scan individually each piece of content. It's being created at too fast a rate. The only way to do it is to have a better argument and win on that level culturally. Yeah. And they think that there's some kind of mechanical solution to this, and there isn't. There's not. And you have to be comfortable with that.

Again, that's part of what being a person is, is you have to deal with some things that are just, you know, disturbing. Yeah. And you have to have messy conversations and, you know, and you're going to have to explain to your children what's going on here and who these people are. Greg, here's, this is related. Do you guys, are you aware of this new hate group march that was walking where all these guys were walking with American flags? They made it back in the truck.

What's that? Yes, they all jumped in the back of a U-Haul truck together. There has never been a thing that I've ever seen where almost immediately I was like, those are feds. Oh, did this happen? Immediately, like, that's fake. Like, my immediate feeling. I looked at them. First of all, these guys are too slim.

I'm looking at these guys. They're all in shape. They're all thin. They're uniformly marching with flags. I'm like, there's no way these fucking idiots would be this organized. Then someone did a deep dive on Twitter. I wish I could remember who. But someone did a deep dive on Twitter and found out that the account in which this whole thing went viral is a completely fake account that has no followers and was started about a month ago with an AI generated face.

It's a fake face as like the profile picture. It's one of those pictures, they take a bunch of people's faces and they smush it and make this one lady. And then she had a picture of a dog in like one of her Facebook posts. But there's no engagement, there's no interaction. The entire account is only a month old. And her post on this somehow or another went viral. And this is what started the sharing of it But if you look at these people walking down the street with their masks on all dressed in black all wearing like essentially uniform All holding the same size

American flag and then eventually they all jumped into the back of a u-haul and were carted off at the end of this Stupid fucking March, but if you watch this I'm like, what are you guys doing? into the back of a U-Haul and were carted off at the end of this stupid fucking march. But if you watch this, I'm like, what are you guys doing? Was this supposed to be some right-wing QAnon hate group type thing? Exactly. And they call themselves the Patriot something or another. Patriot Front. Patriot Front.

You need to see this. Can we see a picture? We need to see the video. We need to see the video because when you see them marching, you look at them marching, you go, why are these guys in such good shape? Idiots are usually fat. Like there's some fatness to them. Like they don't have discipline, right?

Right. These aren't wise folks that are eating correctly. I mean, Americans are most usually fat. This is uniformly thin and fit looking with the same outfits on, the same flags. You're telling me the FBI didn't know about these people? Right. You're telling me the FBI is not monitoring fringe groups and they were not aware these people were this fucking organized? Out of nowhere, they pop out with the same size flags and the same outfit on, goose-stepping.

They're walking, not goose-stepping, but walking at the same pace in goose stepping they're walking not goose but you know i'm walking in this at the same pace in the you know a fucking orderly line like who's who organized this this is them on their bus i was trying to i thought this was gonna turn to the video them walk see the video of them walking is that the video them walking they're linking to blog posts so it's not gonna god there's got to be a video of them walking. I know. I've watched it. Here's it.

Uninformed white nationalist group marches on Lincoln Memorial. CNN's all in. They're like, we're all in on this. Come on, show us. Look at these guys. Look at these guys. Where's the fat people? How come they're all wearing the same clothes? Do that again. What the fuck is this?

Is that- have you ever seen anything that looks more like feds? Tell me that doesn't look like feds. Right? It's like the 101st Airborne. Bro, look at this! These guys are all runners! These guys look like they just got out of Bud's! I mean- The fuck out of here. They could be real. of here they could be real right they could be real they could be real listen matt tybee i'm an unreliable source and i'm a comedian but looking at that i'm calling bullshit give me that again give me that again uh yeah okay well this gets back to like the the the oklahoma ivermectin story where were you right where they're all

wearing winter coats yeah like you know look at this The fuck out of here. How do they all have, like, uniformed outfits on? They have the same color pants for the most part. Very little variation. They have tan or brown pants, dark blue shirts with a fucking stupid flag on it.

This asshole's got a drum. Back that up. Look at the fucking drum. Bitch, are you Paul Revere? What the fuck are you doing with that drum? He's walking around with a band drum It's white power drum line. This is so stupid. It hurts my feelings They all have flags keep that up there We need to find there's videos from them from like July, but I'd like to see that again

So, you know, what's so interesting about this though? Is that again? Okay, I just need to see it good tell me so So you know what's so interesting about this, though, is that, again, oh, okay. I just need to see it. Go ahead. Tell me. So. Look at this. I mean, maybe they're real.

Maybe they're real. Could be real. But I'm calling bullshit. They have the same fucking size flags, the same white coloring on their face, the same tan hats on. Get the fuck out of here. And why are they wearing masks, by the way? Because they're cowards. Right.

Or they're feds. Right? But your instinct when you see that. Well, I mean, I'm suspicious of everything. I certainly wouldn't put that up and be like, chilling scene, like, you know, without looking into it a little bit you know yeah but again back in the day the it was the left that July 4th so they've been doing this for a while yeah oh so why but they like a road this

group marches through the heart of Phil oh I remember this from Philadelphia and look the same thing like they have the same shields the same irish line dancing god it's so weird you think it's real if it is real it could be it's just weird they seem like feds to me they're too they're too fit but i know that doesn't mean that racists can't exercise i know racists exercise folks relax but i'm just saying when you're looking at that 42 chapters including Pennsylvania New Jersey they're linked to a group called Vanguard America which gained infamy after the Charlottesville Virginia event they recruit on college campuses with flyers conduct flash protests

and even commit acts of vandalism could be I mean who knows? There's enough assholes in America for it to be possible. I don't know if they would all be thin like that. What was the thing recently where they found out that a great percentage of the people... The Michigan thing. Yes. Explain that. These are the people that were trying to kidnap the governor. Explain that.

I didn't cover the story, but basically it was an attempt to kidnap Governor Whitmer, right? And they found out that a high percentage of the people involved were FBI informants, which again, back in the day, would not have been surprising to people on the left because this is part of like the, you know, what we were taught back when they had COINTELPRO and FBI informants. It was notorious in the 60s and 70s, this idea of having agents provocateurs in the crowd, people who were throwing things at soldiers who were coming back from Vietnam to discredit the anti-war crowd, right?

Like the assassination of Fred Hampton, the infiltration of the Black Panthers, like, you know, all this stuff. It was understood that the FBI did this stuff or that different law enforcement agencies did this stuff. Now, suddenly, people on the left disbelieve instantly that this happens. They are reluctant to accept it. Now, again, you have to prove it in each case. Yes. Right? So you can't just assert that this or that person is a federal agent.

But you should have some healthy skepticism about each one of these things. And especially now with the way media and the internet works and virality... Oops, sorry. Is that you? Yeah, that is me. Jamie, please go.

I just sent Jamie this. It's the greatest meme. They're all dressed up like spider-man and all of them says fed fed fed another fed and then one says some autistic fuck some poor guy that they trick into doing something you know that was the suspicion amongst the conspiracy theorists about the Boston bombing right that they had radicalized those brothers and actually talked them into committing some sort of a terrorist act. Right, right, yeah.

Right? Yeah. Again, you have to look at it case by case, but it definitely happens. It definitely happens. It happened in Dallas. That one guy that they got, I believe he's from Egypt.

He was 19 years old. And they talked him into using a cell phone to detonate a bomb that they had provided him that was not really a bomb. And when he used that cell phone to detonate the bomb, then they arrested him. So they set him up, radicalized him, brought him in, told him, you know, you're going to do this thing. It's going to be amazing. You're going to be awesome. So we were all up in arms about this when the first war on terror happened because we knew shit like this was going on, whether it was informants pushing people to do things they didn't want to do

or creating terror watch lists, no-fly lists, putting people under illegal surveillance, illegally detaining them. We were all concerned about this, at least liberals were. And suddenly now that they're doing this other kind of war on terror, this domestic war on terror. Nobody cares. It's as if those concerns no longer exist. Well, they found a loophole. They found a way to sneak it in in an acceptable, socially acceptable way. Right.

Exactly. And kudos to the authorities for coming up with it because it's brilliant. It is. As a marketing, you know, and especially Trump is obviously a huge part of this whole thing. You know, selling to America the idea, because you think about it before Trump, think about how unpopular the intelligence services were in 2014, 2015, after the Snowden revelations. You know, you talk to Snowden, 2014, 2015, after the Snowden revelations. You talk to Snowden, right? He was one of the most famous people in the world.

And we got the heads of the intelligence agencies lying to Congress openly, getting away with it. People were furious, right? And then all of a sudden, in a heartbeat, those exact same people, the people everybody was so mad at, suddenly became heroes because they were the ones in the front lines battling Donald Trump. Right. And battling him by lying about him. By lying about him, incidentally. Right? Yeah. That was fascinating.

Comey became a hero. Comey, John Brennan. Yeah. Michael Hayden. But then when you look at what those guys actually did, you're like, holy shit, like you're not supposed to do that. Of course not. Yeah. And this is all coming out now. I mean, I was one of the few like Glenn was another one. there was a small circle of journalists at the time that, you know, in the early years of Trump,

who were just like, something about this just doesn't smell right. Like, the story just feels wrong. Intelligence sources, especially anonymous ones, are inherently untrustworthy. And yet, suddenly, American audiences are trusting them en masse and they shouldn't. And that's no different from it's ever been. We shouldn't have trusted them when the WMD thing happened and people like Glenn and myself pointed that out then and we shouldn't trust them now. But people were so worked up about donald trump that suddenly they were ready to jump in bed with people like john brennan and comey and

clapper and all these guys like these like horrible people it's so crazy but one thing that governments have been our government in particular has been really good at is capitalizing on a state of chaos and using it to their advantage and this is something that happened post 9-11 with the patriot act and the patriot act 2 which i believe the patriot act has never been used to arrest a terrorist i wouldn't know that find out that's true. But it has been used to arrest many drug dealers and to use on people who were, you know, air quotes, enemies. But when chaos happens and they realize that there's some opportunity, they take advantage of opportunities. It's always been a part of history.

People have always done that. Well, that seems like what's happening now. And that seems like something that we should be concerned about. Absolutely. Look, it was transparently what they were doing after 9-11. Everybody should be scared to death. Therefore, we need additional powers to do A through Z. And it was nuts, the stuff they, you know, the FISA

Enhancements Act and, you know, the Patriot Act, the no-fly list, the watch list, all this stuff, the FBI's national security letters, you know, this thing where they would, the FBI sends a letter to a company, tells them that they are barred from telling their customers that they're divulging their information to the FBI. They sent out tens of thousands of those letters. There was an IG report about that. Actually, there were a bunch of IG reports about that. And this whole regime of surveillance just got approved willy-nilly because the public was scared. People were freaked out.

You know, they didn't want it to happen again. So they just said, okay, go ahead. We trust you. Right. And of course they massively abused these programs. You know, they started to do things that were really crazy. Like, you know, using the enhanced secret surveillance tools as evidence in criminal cases, but it would be hidden. In other words, like if you'd be charged with a drug crime, right, and if you asked for discovery, they would give you all the documents that they had to give you. But they wouldn't let you know that maybe you were under surveillance or there was a FISA warrant, you've been caught in some other way. They don't have to disclose that stuff. They don't have to disclose the national security letter stuff. And so it became like this separate legal system and Americans just got used to it. And then when Trump happened, they were so afraid of him and all the possibilities that came with that that now they're willing to let all kinds of new tools be used on them.

And it's crazy that nobody's more worried about it. Well, when I heard Joe Biden say that the biggest threat to this country is white supremacy, I was like, okay, what was going on here? Like, what are they doing? Like, what are they doing? Because look, Charlottesville was horrific, right? And when that guy ran over a bunch of people with his car in Charlottesville, it opened up the door to people saying like, hey, this is genuinely horrible. It is scary. It is scary. But then they swoop in and say, this is the number one problem in this country. Right.

Which is crazy to say, because it's a small percentage of people that are out of their fucking mind that generally don't have much of an impact on our culture. Right. But when the president says that white supremacy is the biggest problem that we face, I immediately go, who told you to say that? What are you doing? What are you planning? Right.

What's going on here? How many people, clearly, clearly, there's a lot of people that were involved in January 6th that were out of their fucking mind and really did think that they were going to take over the government. Right. They really did think that Donald Trump was truly the president, and they were queuing on all the way, and they really thought they were,, but clearly there were some feds involved in that. They were manipulating those people. Clearly. If you say, I don't know if you've seen that one guy, we've highlighted them on the show.

There's this one guy that was telling people over and over again, they got to go in that building. I'm telling you right now, we got to get in there. And that guy's never faced any charges and they know his name. And it's like a real fucking shadowy sort of a situation. Like what's going on here? Right. Cause you know, if the government knew that something was going on like that, for sure they would infiltrate. For sure they've infiltrated all these wacky groups. That's just part of their job. They have to kind of find out how dangerous they are. I mean, it's part of their job. It would be a news story if they weren't. Right. Right. It would be irresponsible. Right. Yeah. They would, it's part of their job. It would be a news story if they weren't, actually. Right, right.

They would be irresponsible. Right. Yeah, they would be incompetent. So it is their job. Now, once they're in there, the question is, how much manipulation are they allowed to do before it becomes their idea? Right, which brings us to, like,

the Whitey Bulger type situation, right? Like, we're, you know... Explain that, please. Well, the FBI had, uh, an incredibly close relationship with, uh, it was an informant. Yeah. With, with Whitey Belcher, who the Irish gangster in, in Boston, who, uh, was an FBI informant. And essentially they were sort of green lighting, um, you know, his activities in order to get to the Italian mafia. But there's a line that they crossed into actively being involved.

And the question is, how often do they do that? Right. Is that standard operational procedure? Right. Yeah, we don't know. do that. Right. Is that standard operational procedure? Right. Yeah. We don't know. I mean, I think it's interesting that the guy who's doing the investigation into the Russiagate stuff now, John Durham, was also the prosecutor in that case. I don't think that's a coincidence because he's...

But anyway, but yeah, the thing with Biden talking about white supremacy is the biggest threat, there's clearly something deeply wrong with this country. There clearly is domestic white terrorism. There's no question that it exists. But they've become really, really loose with that term. The Rittenhouse case was a classic example for me of how you have to be more careful about that. They were calling him a white supremacist on the first day. The president called him a white supremacist. The president called him. Just in the level of libel, we used to be afraid to do that.

You would have to have something that allowed you to say that this guy was a white supremacist before you put that on the air or in print because you'd be afraid of being sued You'd be the end of your career. Yeah And all they really had were some vague cultural markers Right like what I tell my kid to pick up an AR-15 and go go to a protest Absolutely not but you know as a journalist, I can't call him that Unless I have something more. There was a the difference between calling it a protest and the air of fear and chaos that was prevalent when that whole thing went down. This was post the George Floyd riots and everything was crazy.

In Los Angeles, they were lighting cop cars on fire. There were pallets of bricks that are mysteriously dropped off at protest sites and windows were smashed through Beverly Hills. They had an early curfew. People have quick memories. They have short memories and they forget how fucking crazy it was. Like right after that George Floyd protest or right after George Floyd's murder when everybody was chaotic, like the country was in a state of chaos, that's when that happened. Right. So this kid was asked by – I think they had a used car lot. By the way, have you ever seen the guys who he was told to – They're Indian. Uh-huh. I think they're Indian. I think if this is accurate – I got another meme for you because I love memes.

I'll find it. I mean, the other thing about that case was that the protests in Kenosha were about the Jacob Blake case, which was – about the Eric Garner case, which was unequivocally a brutal police killing where the police were at fault. No question about it. But the Blake incident was much more complicated. Right. And there's a reason. If you look at the reasons why the DA and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department didn't file charges in that case is because there was a lot of stuff about that case that was, you know, made it. There was a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the police made there. And people naturally assumed, and this is what we do now, we see something on Twitter, we see like a 20 second piece of video, we think we know the whole story. But the reality

is most of the time, the initial impression of news is wrong, at least somewhere, there's usually some kind of error built in. And that's why we need the next two and three days and months to sort out exactly what happened. And in that case, you know, we just didn't. There were a lot of ambiguities that just got turned in instantaneously into a narrative that was really unfortunate. There's also a frantic rush to say that someone was racist or a white supremacist, and there was a narrative that was rewarded. This meme that I just sent you, this is why I sent it. I have a whole meme folder on my iPhone that I just can't wait to use.

So he wanted to protect a business owned by these guys. I don't know if they're Middle Eastern or Indian or what they were. It says shoots these guys and shows shoots three white guys. Worst white supremacist ever. Not only that, but one of the guys that he shot was a repeat offender child rapist. Right. The guy in the middle. I mean, he raped multiple children. Mentally ill.

Yeah. Literally one of the, it's just one of the worst crimes you could imagine. But they sort of without hesitation, people would do things like say, well, it's clearly a problem that there, you know, there weren't enough minorities in the jury in this case where everybody involved was white. I think a lot of the news consumers were sort of led to believe certain things just by the way, by implication. They didn't always identify whether the people who got shot were white or black or anything they would just sort of say they were shot meanwhile they would say repeatedly that what that that Rittenhouse was white I have friends that are black that didn't know that they were white victims until the trial started right and that said dude I thought he shot

black people they didn't They literally didn't know. And so the thing was, it was a Black Lives Matter protest. He shot people. They thought he shot black people. They thought he was a racist. And then the president calls him a white supremacist. I got the picture. Right, right.

And you can see how that can happen. Yes. If you're just picking up the newspaper or you're watching CNN and they're just neglecting to leave out certain details, which it has to be strategic. And again, this gets back to what I was saying before. It's not like anybody tells you to do this. Right. You just sort of know that the story is going to sell better or it's going to play better

if you highlight certain things, right? And I think that's what happens with, you know, with a lot of the people in this case. And it's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume that you have sympathies with somebody like Rittenhouse or, you know, all the people who lionized them on, you know, on Fox News. That's not it. You just, you just got to get this stuff right. You have a heightened responsibility to get it right when people are amped up and they're, and they're mad and they're ready to go out in the streets and fight each other. Yeah. That's when you have to be super careful about journalism had been steadfastly followed from the jump. If people said this is what we know, this is what happened, these are the victims, these people. One of the things about like any kind of protest or any kind of chaos, and this is something that is just part of human nature. When people know that there's chaos and there's protest,

there's a lot of people that join in that really have no... Nothing to do with it. Exactly. And I think that's what was going on here, particularly with that one guy who was the child rapist. Right. And that happened all over the country, by the way, after the Floyd thing,

which was one of the reasons why the reporting about that was so disappointing, right? Because there were lots and lots of reporters, and I knew a few of them, who were kind of discouraged from talking about some of the ancillary stories, right? Like, okay, this neighborhood has been damaged, therefore elderly people can't get their prescriptions because the drugstore has been burned down or whatever. Right. Because the because the implication is that the protesters, their cause was unjust. So let's let's not do that story. But in many cases, these weren't really even protesters. Right. In some places, they were. And in some places, they weren't. Right? But that's what the job is for.

Like, we have to go out there and ask, you know, was this part of the protest? Was this opportunistic looting? You know, sorry. You and this phone. I know, I'm sorry. Just put it on silent. How dare you?

I know, I know. I love your ringtone, though. It's very festive. It is festive, I'm sorry. It's cute cute don't worry about it yeah listen man i'm the last person i've i've fucked up i've done that um the the problem with being honest about that when there's a frenzy in the air which there most certainly was post george floyd is that it's dangerous and you know you can get attacked for just stating facts like um there was a lot of people on the right that were trying to say that he wasn't murdered and that he died of a fentanyl overdose and he would have died anyway and to those people I was saying fuck you because like you have no idea what it's like to have someone lean on your neck for eight and a half minutes i actually do like i've had guys do

jujitsu and put their fucking knee on my neck for a minute or 30 seconds it's horrific to imagine being handcuffed and someone do that on the concrete not even even a jujitsu mat, it's impossible to overstate that you most likely are either, you're going to go unconscious or something really fucked up is going to happen to you. It's very, very bad. It's not as simple as he got a drug overdose. We have fucking clear evidence of this guy kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and 40 something seconds. Right. There is no fucking way that didn't have an effect on him and i think someone tried to

do that they tried to make a point that it's not that big of a deal and they had someone do it to him and they tapped out early was it crowder did did he do that someone did that i don't know who did that but my point is because of that there was a narrative where you weren't allowed to say other things about George Floyd that were true. Like the fact that he held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach when he was robbing her. Like he wasn't a good guy. He did all, he should not have had that happen to him by any stretch of the imagination. There's no world where what that guy did was okay but this is not a good guy like to make statues of him and lionize him and make

him out to be some sort of a hero that's not accurate either right but you couldn't say that yeah they made sort of a religious icon out of him right the the same kind of misreporting on the in the other direction happened in the garner case which which, again, I wrote a book about. There were a lot of people who tried to say that he was killed because he was diabetic and he was overweight. Yeah. And that clearly was not the case. Like, I had police sources trying to sell me that off the record all the time that, oh you know he would he would have gone anyway right and look a watch the video but don't even just do that like read the medical examiner's report

which says homicide on it uh you know yeah because they've determined medically the cause of death was and you know compression of the chest in other words, you can't just go off what somebody says about something. You have to look into it and look into it again and again and again. And in the case of Garner, Garner was somebody who had some pretty bad stuff in his past going back a long way, but it kind of turned his life around and was somebody who was known on the block as being a really good dude who broke up fights,

gave all his money to his family members. One of the reasons his clothes were in such disrepair is that he wouldn't buy himself new clothes. He gave every dollar to his kids. Wow. He was a good dude. But you can't, but these are these are details you gotta you know you gotta tell the truth about the other stuff like yeah i knew his

daughter erica and we talked about like how we're how she wanted to see the book done and i said well how do you want me to deal with the stuff from his past you know um and she and she said look he was he was just a man right like you got to show all that stuff uh and i thought that was incredibly cool of her you know like she she uh she really admired her father she thought he had gotten through a lot of things but she didn't want him to be like a two-dimensional character, you know? And that's what they've done. That is very admirable. It's fascinating when you think how the times have changed since then, because now there's not a chance in hell they would arrest him for doing that. Policing has gotten so loose. They're so scared of arresting people for, he got arrested for selling loose cigarettes. He wasn even doing it that's the hilarious part yes right right right he was that day i mean he he had done it in the

past right but he wasn't doing it that day and they they physically manhandled him and they straggled him and you know and then they tried to say it wasn't chokehold which is the same thing that i say about the the with George Floyd. Fuck you. Yeah. Anybody who tries to say that. Do that to me. I'm going to tap out. It's a chokehold.

He's fucking strangling the guy. Like if you get a guy who knows how to choke you, and I'm assuming the cop knows how to choke people, he'd seem like a strong guy. You get a hold of your neck like that, that's a fucking chokehold. It's not just a restraint. And it didn't have to happen. One thing that has changed that I think, I mean, there's a lot of negativity.

There's a lot of negative shit that's happened from this whole defund the police thing and the fact that, you know, the police officers feel so, they don't feel like they can do their job anymore without risking getting in trouble for something. Like they're just a standard job. So they're letting so many more things happen. And if you look at the amount of crimes, like the uptick in crimes post-pandemic, it's irrational. I mean it's really wild. That was really disappointing to me after the Floyd thing happened because nobody wanted to look at the policy issue. What's the biggest contributing factor to police brutality cases?

It's the number of contacts you have between police and people and a lot of that has to do with the heightened number of stops that you have through programs like stop and frisk in New York it was clean halls right like there it's this this what the what they call the community policing techniques the whole idea is let's stop a gazillion people. We'll search them, right, because – or we'll pat them down. That's based on a Supreme Court case called Ohio v. Terry that allows police to do that. If they have articulable suspicion that somebody is committing a crime, they're allowed to pat you down. So they used to not really use that that much.

The innovation in the 80s, 90s and going forward was let's just use that a lot. Let's just start stopping people all the time and patting them down. Right. And they did it hundreds of thousands of times in New York. They did it in every city in the country. of times in New York. They did it in every city in the country. And what happens when you massively increase the number of times that police put their hands on people, a percentage of those contacts are going to go wrong, right? They just will. Somebody's going to get mad. They're not going to want to see their book bag emptied on the ground. They're not going to want to have somebody

put their hands down their pants. And eventually someone's going to say no, like Eric Garner. Right. And you're going to have a death on your hands that was totally avoidable. Right. And so, but you do need police for the real stuff. Somebody shows up at his ex-girlfriend's house and starts waving a gun or a knife around and picks up a kid and runs for a car. That's when you actually do need the police to intervene. And that's what got lost in this whole debate was, what do we actually want police to do versus what have they been doing? And there was almost no discussion of the of of those policy

issues that was it was just police are bad and you know therefore let's take their money away whereas there's there's so many instantly fixable things they could have done and the most liberal cities have had the most irrational responses to it so So, like, look, the Garner thing is horrible, right? That should have never happened. So here we go, where we are now. In San Francisco, you can steal $900 worth of stuff and you can't get arrested. So now you're having mass lootings

where people are just running into stores, throwing stuff in their bag, and then leaving. Right. Which is crazy. Like, Northern California is fucked. They're really... and then leaving. Right. Which is crazy. Like Northern California is fucked. They're really, and now LA. LA is experiencing a rash of these smash and grabs. They don't have any faith at all that there's law enforcement that's going to take care of these things.

So their fear of the cops is like non-existent now. They're just stealing things. Right. And it's happening so often that they're literally calling it an epidemic. Like, what do we do about this? How do you stop this? And how do you stop this given the current climate, the way people are viewing the police and the way the cops are viewing the support that they have from the community and from the government? It's kind of crazy. Well, and a lot of those ideas probably came from people

who live in affluent white communities who don't know what it is to occasionally need to call the police. Yes. Right. They live in towns where the police are basically there, you know, kind of for show or they do they get overtime to to do traffic stops or to, you know, school parades and stuff like that. They're not there for real crime, right? If you go into a tough neighborhood like where Eric Garner lived in Staten Island, there are debates in the street. Like, you know, there'll be one group of people who say, if this was a white neighborhood, they would never allow this much crime.

There'd be more police. Right. And there are people who are angry that there isn't a legitimate police presence like at all times to protect them from things. Right. And there's another group that thinks the police are inherently bad and cause more problems than they create, than they fix, and they need to go away. But that's a legitimate debate that happens in those neighborhoods. And if you look at the polls, you'll see that it's not necessarily coming from the black communities, that the defund efforts aren't always coming from there. Right.

People who are most in favor of that are the people who have no conception of what the police are for. And that's frustrating too. And I think that was misrepresented after the Floyd thing. People want better policing. They want smarter policing. People want better policing. They want smarter policing.

They want police who are less, you know, aren't so quick to use force. You know, they want more non-lethal force. They want it to be less intrusive. They want to be able to walk unmolested down the street without being assumed that they're dealing drugs or something like that. But they don't want there to be no police at all. Right. Well, Minneapolis is experiencing that now. They're trying to fix it because they did kind of defund the police, but now they've experienced more crime than ever.

And they're like, okay, we've got to do something. Right. And the expression that I've read recently is like, we're trying to stop the bleeding. Right. You know, the community leaders are talking about this, like we've got to do something to stop the current climate of crime because it's actually worse than it was before George Floyd. It didn't

make it better when we defunded the police. It made it worse. And then, again, it's such a reversal of... I mean, it's happening now, too. But we used to overplay crime stories in the media because that was how we scared white readers of papers like the New York Post into coming back over and over again.

They put mug shots on the front page of every black suspect. suspect and you know that the whole idea was they were playing on the the fears of middle-class white people and queens and in the outer boroughs and stuff like that and they they gobbled that stuff up now they're kind of doing the opposite in some places like they're they're either underreporting crime or they're misreporting it um you know it's it's a strange phenomenon uh it's it's not it's not easy easy to see where they're going with that. Well, the Wisconsin SUV, the guy who drove the SUV into the Christmas parade is a great example of that, right? Yeah. It was odd to me that we haven't seen a lot of follow-up reporting on that.

How about the way they wrote about it, just the titles? The accident caused by an SUV? Caused by an SUV, yeah, or a crash or something like that. And, yeah, I get back to where's the spirit of just curiosity? I want to know what that was. Before I knew anything about who drove the car, what the person looked like, anything, your mind runs through all the scenarios. Is it somebody who's whacked out on drugs? Is it a terrorist attack? I thought about Charlottesville first. That was one of the things I thought about. So we want to know what... Our job is to tell people what actually happened in these things. And you can't just stop

and suddenly have a lack of curiosity once things don't exactly fit. I don't know. It just feels like there was a lack of resolve to get to the bottom of that. Well, the difference between the way right-wing media covered it and left-wing media was incredibly stark. I mean, left-wing media didn't touch the fact that this guy had posts supporting Hitler and that he had tried to run over his girlfriend in a car, which is why he was in jail. They got let on $1,000 bail, which is incredibly low for a he had tried to run over his girlfriend in a car, which is why he was

in jail. That he got let on a thousand dollars bail, which is incredibly low for a guy who tried to commit vehicular homicide. I mean, it's fucking wild. And this trend of letting people out of jail easy that try to commit violent crimes and letting them off on very low bails and letting them right back out in the street is one of the weirder things that's going on right now. One of the weirder things that you see from these progressive district attorneys and in these liberal cities, it's very strange. And I don't understand the logic behind it. I mean, I get it a little bit. I mean, I was a strong believer in bail reform. You mentioned the $1,000. Amazingly, Eric Garner got set $1,000 bail once for something that wasn't even a misdemeanor.

Like selling untaxed cigarettes is a violation. It's like something you get a ticket for. But he got $1,000 bail for that. Well, that's outrageous. But somebody who commits a violent crime, so there's this whole galaxy of other people who get what they call like nuisance bail. Like in other words, you know, whether it's solicitation or, you know, disorderly conduct or vandalism or something like that, prosecutors have been, they have this whole thing where they play games

and they will try to get the judge to set bail just outside of the person's ability to pay. And they do an assessment of where you live, whether you have a job, whether you have a telephone in your house, all this stuff. They know roughly what you can afford when they go to ask for bail. And it's kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing between the judge and the prosecutors. And that's a really bad system. That's why there were calls for bail reform, because what they were really doing was setting bail so high that people couldn't – they either had to make a decision to plead early, right?

Like – or sit in a place like Rikers Island and lose their jobs while they waited to adjudicate some really minor offense, right? So there's a good reason for bail reform. Right. So there's a there's a good reason for bail reform. But that doesn't mean that bail in all cases needs to be like eliminated. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like in really in cases where there's a violent crime, like that's what it's for. Right. You know, and this. Exactly. You can't paint it all with the same brush. But I don't understand even the motivation of it. It's like if you were a real tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, you would think that someone is trying to destroy this country and someone's trying to destroy these cities

and what's the best way to do it? Well, the best way to do it is to let violent criminals run loose in the streets and have everybody freak out and then come you know, come up with a solution for it. Yeah, a lot of the ideas that are coming out of, you know, what I used to consider like the liberal left or the Democratic Party, that almost seemed to me like they're designed to lose votes, you know, like they're trying to give votes to the Republicans who are, of course, equally crazy, like in their own in their own way. But, yeah, stuff like that. I don't I don't even know where a lot of these ideas come from.

Like I'm doing a story now about the Loudoun County, Virginia education mess and just a lot of the thinking there. It's like, yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me what a lot of the sort of intellectual class of this country is. They just, a lot of their ideas are just really strange these days. They don't make sense, but they're being supported. Those ideas are supported by enough people. There's enough people that believe in them that I don't think it really is they're trying to get the Republicans elected. I think they think that this is progress. And I think what you were saying earlier about how the kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood.

kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood. They just have this idea that if they are for defunding the police, what they are for is the right side of criminal justice reform. And that, you know, to be a progressive, you have to recognize there's systemic racism at the root cause of all these crimes, and those need to be addressed. And it's not just about locking people up in jail, which makes sense. I really do think that there are root causes to all of these crime issues that we have in inner cities, whether it's Baltimore or the south side of Chicago or whatever, that if they don't address those problems, all the policing in the world is not going to fix it. And it's going to take generations because you're dealing with people that have dealt with these crime-ridden, gang-infested

communities for decade after decade with no intervention whatsoever, no help. I mean, we spend countless amounts of money going overseas and fixing other countries. We don't do a fucking thing about horrendous inner city conditions. And when then we get confused as to why they continue to put out violent criminals. Yeah. It's, it's amazing because the, the, the same people who 10 or 15 years ago were trying to fix, uh, the cities through essentially through brute force, right? So these were the people who are doing the stop and frisk programs. What they were really doing, mainly these were Democrats who were running these, they had all the important positions in all the big cities. And their campaigns were funded by wealthy real estate developers mainly, right?

And they were using the police to imprison and arrest tens of thousands of people, casting a very wide net and trying to impose order that way. Those programs didn't really work. They caused a lot of instability. They caused an incredible amount of resentment and they resulted in a lot of these police brutality cases. And now they're swinging in another direction. They're trying to take an opposite but equally irrational approach to dealing with the problem. So they try to solve it by shaking down – 10 years ago, let's shake down every black person who walks into the wrong neighborhood in New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore. Now, somebody came up with a bright idea to, well, let's just completely not have police or defund you know put the money towards some other thing um i think those ideas are a lot in many cases equally stupid um and it it's just a an example of just

intellectuals sometimes just uh shouldn't be allowed to make every decision you know um that that's that's sort of an overriding theme in a lot of the stuff that i've covered over the years just shouldn't be allowed to make every decision. That's sort of an overriding theme in a lot of the stuff that I've covered over the years. I just don't know how we bounce back from this. It is amazing to me the impact of one man's death, the George Floyd death. It's amazing because if you go from that point forward, and obviously it's accentuated by the pandemic and there was a lot of buildup to it. There's been many, many cases of police brutality that were egregious and people were frustrated and furious. But that was the straw.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back. the day before that happened and now is so stark that if you told me one death of a guy who was, you know, brutalized by the police and murdered in the way we all saw publicly, it's going to change the entire country. I would have said, how is that possible? I think at the time, the entire debate was turbocharged by the fact that Donald Trump was in office. And this became, as everything did during the period, as hydroxychloroquine and the lab leak origin, everything is a referendum on Trumpism. Right. So if George Floyd is killed and Joe Biden is president, is the reaction going to be the same? I kind of doubt it. Like, I think at the time there was an incredible amount of tension in the country.

The culture war was just getting hotter and hotter all the time. And we had been moving from kind of mania to mania in the news environment. It was one thing after the other. Like, it was the caravan story. It was kids in cages, Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, Russiagate. Everything was a full-blown massive panic. And that was how everything was covered during the Trump years. So I think that was a major factor in what happened with with the Floyd story. Like it couldn't just be a police killing and they couldn't just fix the problem. They couldn't just deal with that one person. And they couldn't just look at sensible policy alternatives. It had to be a referendum on the entire United States. Right. And whatever it was, was wrong with the country that had led to Donald Trump being elected. And, you know, sometimes, you know, things aren't always necessarily, you know, symbolic of something larger, you know. I don't know.

I think during the Trump years, there was a tendency to try to make panics out of everything. And, you know, that's not always healthy. I'm going to tell you something you're not going to like to hear. Sure. You know who your voice sounds like? Uh-oh. Who? Elizabeth Holmes. Oh my God.

The Theranos girl. Doesn't it? Your voice sounds a little bit like her fake voice. Really? Yes. Wow. I think if you toned it down a little bit, if you high-pitched your voice just a little bit. Can I monetize that in any way? I don't think so.

I think it's too late. Sorry, that was a non-sense. No, that's all right. I'm too old to be self-conscious about stuff like that anyway. No, you have a great voice. It's just weird for a woman. That's really funny. My wife is going to laugh about that.

Have you paid attention to that trial at all? No, I haven't. What's happened? I am fucking fascinated by it. Yeah? I am fascinated by charlatans. I'm fascinated by people who pull the wool over incredibly rich people's eyes and hoodwink them. She fit this perfect narrative that they were looking for, this billionaire genius woman who's the boss lady of this company that's going to do groundbreaking new work on blood testing, and it's going

to revolutionize the industry and help everyone. And she had this fake voice. I'm so fascinated by her. I'm so fascinated by the story. Yeah, it is a great story. I love con man stories. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I spent so many years covering the financial crisis. Some of your best work. My favorite book growing up was about a con man. It was this book called Dead Souls by a Russian writer named Gogol. and it's about a guy who basically buys a bunch of dead serfs and mortgages them because there was a loophole in Russian law back then. The census was so slow that if you bought the equivalent of a slave,

the state bureaucracy wouldn't know that that person was dead yet. So you could go to a bank and mortgage your slaves and get cash for them, essentially, right? So they got around to sort of buying dead slaves. But the con men are fascinating, right? And especially in the internet age, there's so many different ways to rip people off, to scale, that I think the authorities are just always going to be a couple of steps behind. I mean, you look at everything from Bernie Madoff to the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, which was an unbelievable story, just basically stealing billions of dollars from investors around the world by representing a phony bond scheme. It's just incredibly easy to do. All you need to do is have the appearance of

respectability. And have a bunch of people who are respectable that have already bought into it. Exactly. That's the Bernie Madoff thing, right? Right, right. You've seen The Sting. Yes. Right? So that's what they call a big store con, right? Where everybody you see looks like they're sort of a natural part in the environment. Yeah. But actually they've been put there for a reason to sort of mess with your perceptions of things. And that's what happened with Theranos, with 1MDB, with the subprime mortgage scandals. Everybody looked like they were on the up and up, but actually they were all in on it.

And there's just a lot of really interesting ways to rip people off in this environment. It's fascinating when someone like Bernie Madoff can get so many people. And I always thought, really I always thought before I read your coverage of the banking crisis, I thought there was someone out there who is really clearly paying attention to all of the pieces that are moving. And I thought it was straightforward. of the pieces that are moving. And I thought it was like straightforward, like a bad example maybe, but like we understand how fast cars are because we know the engineers that have worked to develop the displacement and the engines and how the transmissions work. And there's a clear trackable thing. Like you can't just come out with a car and say, this car goes zero to 60 in one tenth of a second

And and and everyone's like what what are you talking about? Where's this how is this being made and this new technology that no one's ever seen before none of that exists We have new tires and it's it works on gravity propulsion systems. It doesn't even have anything to do with engines that You would have to it would be trackable right like an engine is trackable. I thought finances were trackable, right? Like an engine is trackable. I thought finances were trackable. You think it's funny. Well, you think it's funny because you had to do a lot of research. I did, yeah.

Pull that microphone in front of you. Sorry. No worries. So Madoff was – he was – part of what he was doing was he was operating on people's belief in a non-existent regulatory scheme. We do have visibility into parts of the financial structure. We have a pretty well-regulated stock exchange, for instance. I mean, there are certainly problems there too, but you can see every trade more or less, right? Or you can see most of the trades, actually. I'm going to get in trouble saying that even. But with Bernie Madoff, he didn't even do trades. There's nobody checking. Right, right, right. figured out that there was something wrong with the situation. And all Madoff was doing is this classic old school Ponzi scheme. You guarantee a certain amount of returns. Some people give you

some money up front. You take all that money. And then as new people come in, you give the early investors a little taste as if those are investment returns. Actually, all it is is just one big fungible pile of money. There's no investment, there's no nothing. It's just a con. He never was doing any trading. He wasn't doing anything. He just had a big pile of money and he was constantly bringing in new people. But didn't he start off as an actual legitimate trader? That happens a lot, actually. There are a number of people who start off trying to do it right. No, I don't know if he actually was doing trades.

When he stopped doing that, I'm not sure. But there are a number of stories about people who start off. Like their hedge funds, hedge funds don't really get checked, right? So if you're running a hedge fund and you want to do it right, you have some kind of investment strategy you think is going to work. So you get a whole bunch of high net worth people and you say, can you give me $500,000? They all throw money in and you start investing and it doesn't work. And then suddenly there's this temptation. Well, I don't have to tell them, you know, I can, I can put out a report that says we actually earned

7% or 14% this year. Uh, and no one's going to check because there isn't, there isn't a body of the checks, uh, for that kind of investment. Uh, so yeah, I think the public doesn't know that there are all these sort of blank spots in the financial universe. And that's why these sort of cons proliferate. And it's part of what I think is motivating things like GameStop. There's this whole crew of people who are like, you know what? This system is so corrupt. We're going to rig it for ourselves, and we're going to take some of these people down.

And that was why there was all this joy at blowing up a couple of hedge funds because the system is easy is minute it's you can manipulate it and they did it and that's what I think it was interesting what happened there yeah it is interesting and it's interesting the steps they took to sort of combat what these people were doing it's like no no you can't use that loophole you can only use the loopholes that were using right exactly yes but it was such a clearly organized campaign, like publicly organized campaign.

That's one of the things that made it so fascinating and that it was successful. Well, yeah. And the response by the authorities confirmed every suspicion of all these GameStop investors. But it didn't break them like they're still holding you know what i'm saying like and that whole phenomenon is is fascinating actually like um and that's another story that was massively misreported all right i talked to a lot of the people who invested in gamestop and a lot of them were people who got ruined after the 2008 crash, whose families got ruined after the 2008 crash. And this was their way of kind of getting revenge on the system.

It was a form of protest. Now, for some people, it was just a way to make money, right? And they thought they could just profit off this squeeze play. But for a lot of people, this was like legitimately a political rage response. And they didn't present it that way in the news media. They presented it as a gang of sort of upper class people who were trying to or middle class people were trying to manipulate the system for gain. And they edited out the pain part of it that motivated a lot of these people. My next door neighbor lost everything in 2008. Back when I lived in California, he had the property right next to mine, and he would show up.

There was nothing built on it, but he had bought this really nice property with a great view, and his dream was to build this dream home there. And I would watch him clear it off all the time, and one day I just walked up and started talking to him. I said, when are you going to build here? And then he gave me the story that he lost everything in 2008. And he had everything all set up and he was getting ready to build. And now he would just show up and trim the grass.

And he was so fucking sad. Yeah, because he probably had his money tied up in mortgage-backed securities. He lost everything. He lost all of his life's work, and here he was, I'm guessing he was in his 70s. And then he stopped showing up, and then I got a hold of someone that I knew that knew him and he was suffering from some

severe health problems and eventually wound up passing away so it's like this guy was just crushed by this just crushed and this is when I'm talking to this guy's probably we're talking like right afterwards right 2010 right Right. Somewhere like there. But I remember the look in his eye when he was talking to me about what happened with the banking crisis and the crash. It was so depressing. Because you should imagine if you put your faith in the system and you grinded your ass off for X amount of years and then you finally think you hit the finish line. And then all this fuckery takes all your earnings away. Everything gone. Nothing left. So imagine that story replicated like 15 million times or 20 million times or 25 million times.

And it's all these people who've lost everything. And not only have they lost everything, they look on TV and they see that the people who did it got bailed out. They got bailed out immediately. And, you know, were made whole again, that the wealth gap expanded after that. Just to take an example, like we were talking about Bernie Madoff before.

Bernie Madoff's banker was JPMorgan Chase. Okay. So the bank, you know, which should have been monitoring whether or not their client actually had a legitimate business, you know, didn't, you know. It doesn't seem too much to ask. Yeah, it doesn't seem. Especially if it's their business. Right. It's not like a business they don't understand,

like complex chemistry or something. Right, exactly. You know, we were talking about the big store con. Like, they're part of the con, right? Like, this guy banks with JPMorgan Chase. Right, right. So it's part of the sales pitch. Like, of course he's legitimate.

It's endorsed by the biggest commercial bank in the country. And I'm sure if you go to his office, it's gorgeous and you look at some beautiful building that he's in and... Right. So, all these people see that banks like Chase and Goldman that were selling these mortgage-backed securities to everybody, that were letting people like Bernie Madoff run wild, that were involved in the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia that ripped off that entire country. And they see that they're continually bailed out. see that they're continually bailed out. Like after the pandemic, uh, the banks had their best year, uh, in history in, in, uh, in 2020 because what, because why, because when you have the, the cares act, um, you know, which is all that money from the fed that went to rescue everybody

to, to, to keep all of these companies of business, somebody has to underwrite all that money from the Fed that went to rescue everybody to keep all these companies of business. Somebody has to underwrite all that lending. The Fed is basically buying all these bonds. There's all this new lending to companies that's coming from the government. Well, some private entity has to do all that underwriting. So banks made like 140 or $150 billion in profits just from underwriting in 2020. So they all got rich off the bailouts for the pandemic, you know? And so, and which is exactly what happened in after 2008. Like not only do they get rescued for the actual crash, but the whole bailout, they got additional money for servicing the bailout. You understand?

Yeah. So people, when they ask, well, why does something like Trump happen? It's because there's millions of people who look out there and say, I got fucked, right? Those people got rescued, and they don't know exactly why or how, but they know something must be wrong, you know, and then somebody like Trump comes along and says it gives them an explanation. It makes more sense than what they're being told, you know, and so they vote for that person. And that's that's what's going to happen now, because the same thing is happening, you know, out during the pandemic. Like a lot of, once again, people are kind of struggling, they're being ruined. But the, you know, the 1% is kind of being artificially sustained by this run of, you know, public support.

It's going to make them all rich and it's just going to drive that resentment even further. Well, it's also the collapse of small businesses, which is a big factor in this. The big businesses like Target and Walgreens and Walmart, they expanded and they actually profited from the pandemic. Whereas these other stores that were forced to close down, they were forced to not be open or to have extreme limitations. They suffered greatly. Restaurants in particular, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And again, this is another classic consequence of a bailout. Like after 2008, there was a thing called the implied bailout. So just the fact that the public knows that the government is never going to let

JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America go out of business allows them to borrow money more cheaply than some local bank, right? The government might let a local bank go out of business. So when they go out into the open market to borrow money, it costs more. Like the investors, the people who are lending them money are going to demand more. They're going to demand more from that small bank than they're going to demand from Chase because they know that the government's never going to let them go out of business.

They're not going to lose on that investment. So it creates artificially an advantage for the big company versus the small company. And that's what happened with the CARES Act. Again, the market looks out at this and they say, okay, well, American Airlines is never going to go out of business. Absolutely for sure. The government's going to step in and save them. They've demonstrated that now. But maybe some smaller airline, they might let go out of business. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Spirit or something like that. Yeah, exactly. So it creates this natural tension. And another thing that happened after 2008 was

when they split up, when they took the failing companies like Washington Mutual, rather than break them up into smaller parts so they could become independent small enterprises. What they did is they folded them all into the big companies. They got companies like Chase and Bank of America to buy up these smaller entities. So they took an already concentrated marketplace and they made it more concentrated. They made the big companies that were already too big to fail, they made them even too big to failure. You know what I'm saying?

So that's happening again. And it's, again, it's going to drive resentment. And then you add the fact that kind of small business people tend to be the kind of people who are, you know, Republican Trump supporters who are being vilified, right? And, you know, it's going to drive that resentment even further. And we're only one year into this. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's 2021, almost 2022. What is this going to look like at 2023? Right, right. What kind of a fever pitch is this country going to be in by then? Well, I mean, how long can you put people under pressure and not expect them to go nuts?

I mean, I think if people are going to look out, they're going to see what happened after the pandemic. Well, you know, the banks had their best year ever. The pharmaceutical companies are making ungodly risk free profits, essentially. Right. Like the government is making sure that they will never have to compete or give up, you know, their patent protections on their vaccines. They're going to buy every medicine that they produce at full price. And Moderna made, what, $11 billion last year. They're all having record profit years. The defense contractors got advances on all their contracts at the beginning of the uh of the pandemic so

they're doing great um you know but small businesses aren't like you know it's it's they're rescuing the big enterprises they're and they're letting the the small ones go you know it's capitalism for them and it's kind of socialism for everybody else for the big firms and that's just not going to hold forever. It's also expanding the power that pharmaceutical drug companies have. And the concern with that is like, it's not that pharmaceutical drug companies are inherently 100% evil.

No, they produce drugs that are very beneficial to people. And we all are better off because of them. There's drugs that help people with all sorts of diseases and all sorts of cures and great. But all these corporations operate under the premise that every year is going to be better than the year before. How the fuck do you do that when you have this insane windfall? You have this insane year where you're making untold billions of dollars. Like if somebody pointed out to me what Moderna's first quarter of what, what, what like a quarter of this year looks like the difference between how much

they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off of everything else. And it's a giant percentage of the profit. Like, I mean, maybe you can find it. I think their numbers for this quarter were like 3.4 billion. I'm not sure. It was something like that. Something crazy like that.

But more than three is the vaccine. Right. It's something nutty like that. But the point is, you can't do that if they don't need them anymore. Like, imagine if the vaccine cured everybody. There's no more need for a vaccine. It's a one-shot deal like polio or like the measles. And then all that profit goes away.

Well, you have stakeholders. You have stockholders. You have a responsibility to your company. You're supposed to have growth this year. How come this year we're down 75%? Well, sir, the pandemic's gone. It's over. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We've got to figure out a way to make more money.

This is what corporations do. And I'm not insinuating that they're going to start a pandemic or fake a pandemic or come up with some reason why they should give people medication they don't need. insinuating that they're going to start a pandemic or fake pandemic or come up with some reason why should you give people medication they don't need but this is a quality that corporations have absolutely and forget about the vaccine for a minute just look at other kinds of drugs right look at um you know drugs like adder right? Suddenly we start finding out that every kid in the country needs to be medicated for aid, you know, ADHD. Uh, and you know, that, that, that there are

people trying to pass laws in various States that would, that would mandate that as a treatment, you know, again, there, they have an incentive to try to create that market, right? Or let's just say, you know, there's a drug that if you split it into two generics, it costs, you know, a dollar for people to use. But there's a new drug on the market that combines both of them and costs $80 a dose or something like that, they're going to be incentivized to try to get people to take that drug instead of the two separate generics, even though that's not good for the consumer.

There are so many different ways that these companies sort of prey on people. And this even removes from the equation the fact that a lot of their R&D is publicly funded. They get NIH grants. And in the case of the pandemic, they're specifically given significant amounts of taxpayer money to research into the vaccines. And they're going to make all the profits from that. It doesn't make any sense. Not only that, they have zero risk of ever being sued from side effects. Right. Yeah, exactly. They remove the liability protection.

Which is fucking wild. Right. That is wild. It's going to be fascinating to see just if you were objective, if you were an alien from another planet and you were observing these industries, you'd be fascinated just to watch without any horror how they figure out a way to try to make as much money. Say if the virus goes away and whether it mutates into a form like what happened with the Spanish flu where it's non-lethal and it gets to some new place where it's not what we have to worry about anymore.

Like the Omicron thing. Right, the Omicron thing, which seems to be no one has died from it so far. Right. And this is wild that they're declaring a state of emergency in New York City for something that no one's died from. It was really funny. The headlines, they seem bummed about it. Right.

Isn't that weird? Yeah, they do because, well well they're looking for fear, but the what they're doing with Pharmaceutical companies and advertising I want to play you this because I was watching this last night I was watching some fights and this came up and I had to record it because I'm like This is one of the fucking wackiest things I have ever heard in my life. Listen to what they're saying are the side effects of this shit. It's about insomnia. People that have...

That sounds good, right? Reasonable. Seems reasonable. Do not take Devigo if you have narcolepsy. Don't drink alcohol while taking Devigo. Or drive or operate heavy machinery. Reasonable. Feel fully awake. Seems reasonable. Devigo may lead to doing activities while not fully awake. What? Like walking, driving, and making or eating food without remembering them the next day.

Huh? Devigo may cause sleepiness during the day. It may cause temporary leg weakness or inability to move or talk while falling asleep or waking up. Worsening depression, including suicidal thoughts, may occur. This is like that scene from the airplane. Dabigo is sleepiness. So ask your health care provider about Dabigo. Hey, hey, hey, why would I ask the health care provider? He just told me I might not remember walking around.

I might not be able to move. I might want to kill myself just because I can't sleep. Oh, by the way, yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. But these ads are so crazy. There's no other countries other than New Zealand that allow these ads. They have beautiful music. They have people that are happy.

You watch this video where this person, this ad, this lady's lying there sleeping and plants are growing around her. It's all gorgeous. It looks like the best drug experience ever. Like I want that. It sounds amazing. It sounds like finally I've got a solution to my insomnia. But the, the, the idea that they're allowed to do this manipulative advertising on vulnerable people that are seeking some sort of a, some sort of a solution to whatever health problem they have is goddamn crazy yeah and then and it bleeds into the coverage of everything like during the pandemic okay fine let's let's let's assume just let's stipulate like i'm vaccinated like i

i believe the vaccine works. You know, I got my booster shot and everything. But the lack of curiosity in the press about questions like, do kids really need it? Is it absolutely necessary for somebody who's like under 12 to have a vaccine? What if you've already had the disease like everything was off limits and this goes back to what we were talking about before it's like every story is all or nothing there's no in between anything you can't you can't even consider um any of these questions and it makes it impossible to to get to the bottom of things if you can't even start at step one and look and start looking at any of these questions and it makes it impossible to get to the bottom of things if you can't even start at step one

And look and start looking at any of these questions. Well, there's been a capture right and there's been a Pharmaceutical company capture of the narrative and that is that there are no therapeutics There is the vaccine the vaccine is your only way and they've even been instructed in many places to deny people certain effective therapeutics. What does this say? Okay. Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are making $1,000 profit every second while the world's poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated. And this is the thing because they are not willing to give up their patent to allow poor countries to produce the vaccine. Right. Which incidentally puts the lie to all of the pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Right. Like, if you really believe that, if you really believe that unvaccinated people are the cause of all the suffering and shame on anybody who doesn't get the vaccine, then you would push for a patent waiver so that everybody else in the world with whom you are connected, you know, the world is interconnected. If you really believe that, that is what you would do. You would push for a patent waiver. Instead, they are protecting the profits of these companies very quietly. There's not a whole lot of controversy in the news media about whether or not the Biden administration is going to lean on these companies to give up their cash cow. So they're allowing the companies to just rake in these billions of dollars,

and they villainize the people in this country who voluntarily don't get the vaccine. That's the problem. Well, they've learned their lesson from ivermectin, because ivermectin is now a generic drug, and that's one of the reasons why it's demonized, the fact that you can't – no one owns a patent on it. You can make it. It's very cheap to make. Now, coincidentally, Africa is one of the least vaccinated places on earth and has the lowest numbers of cases.

It's fucking bonkers. And they don't know why. They're trying to figure out why. There's no real understanding of why Africa, I think Africa is like 6% of its population has been vaccinated, but it has some of the lowest instances of COVID infection on earth. Right, right. And why is that? That would be interesting to know, right? Well, there's a widespread use of ivermectin because of river blindness and because of – I think they use it for yellow fever. I think for dengue. I think it's used for other things as well. And there's also a widespread use of hydroxychloroquine. I'm not saying that that's the reason.

I mean maybe it's some of these areas are not coming into contact, regular contact, the people from these countries that have high instances of infection. I don't know what the fucking answer is, but it's kind of crazy. Yeah. And there are countries around the world that have approved it, ivermectin, as a treatment. Japan. Yeah. And I think there are a couple in South America, too, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. They need real studies studies is what they need. There's a lot of messy studies out there apparently.

When you talk to people that really understand the science behind it, there's too many different studies. Some studies where they used it in prophylaxis. There are studies that used it early on. There are studies that used it late term Which is much clearly much less effective where it seems to have some potential is early on and in Prophylaxis, but again, there is no rock-solid data, right? But what I found fascinating

I had no idea when I took it that I when I took it with all those other Things that I took that that one thing would be a big deal. I really had no idea. I thought I would just tell people, hey, I feel good already. It's only been three days. This is what I took. And people would go, oh, well, you should have got vaccinated. I expected that.

But what I didn't expect was this one particular drug to be the thing that was on everybody's radar. Because I read off a laundry list of things. I said monoclonal antibodies. I said Z-Pak. What was the steroid that I took? There was a steroid. Prednisone.

Thank you. Ivermectin. I said all these things. I listed off everything. I said IV vitamin drips. I did all these different things that I took. And I said, I felt pretty good. And a couple of days later I was negative. So it was like, it flew in the face of narrative that the only way to survive this was to be vaccinated. Not only did I survive, but I was better quick, like really quick.

And I was sick. It wasn't like I had like, it was, there was no symptoms. I had symptoms. I mean, I had a fever. I was sweating like a pig in bed. I knew I was sick. And then a couple days later I was better. But all they chose to concentrate on is this one drug that is generic. Yeah.

Which is wild. And they sort of blatantly misreported it yeah you know the horse dewormer thing well the dumb part about it is that did they think i wasn't going to say anything yeah i know like i have bigger audience than you do like what are you stupid yeah significantly like how dumb is that but i don't think they i don't think they've internalized that yet no but and this this is like we were talking before about not being embarrassed about getting stuff wrong like it's it's not that hard to if you if they somebody wanted to criticize you and not get it wrong they could have done it yeah you know what i mean sure

but the the whole thing like oh he's taking horse dewormer. Why is there no – why aren't they ashamed of just being factually incorrect? Like the lack of – any kind of shame about that is a signal to audiences. It gives you credibility and it takes it away from them. I don't think they understood that though I don't think they understood that while they were doing it I think they thought that they were gonna get away with it And I think until Sanjay Gupta came on the podcast they really had no idea right, and then when he came on the podcast and It just didn't go so good for him. That was a turning of the tide.

That was a recognition like, oh, we've fucking played a terrible hand here. Right. This is not good. Right. So therefore, we're never going to let anybody go on your show again. I'm sure. I'm sure there's going to be that. I'm sure.

Which is, well, I think they're probably going to clean house over there anyway. I think what's going to happen at CNN now, now that CNN is being run by different people, I think the Chris Cuomo thing is like one step. I heard they're going to replace the entire cast with The View. They're going to take all the girls from The View. That's going to be the news now. Would it be worse? It would be better. It'd be more entertainingly stupid. Just kidding. I hope they actually recognize that there is a market for objective journalism. Well, yeah. I mean, that's abundantly clear.

I think the Substack experience has been so fascinating for me. I thought it would work, but I had no idea that it's like this. It would work the way it's working yeah like just the the response is unbelievable and um a lot of it is just people are just so tired of being manipulated and talked to in a certain way yes you know they don't like being talked at you know or or lectured or whatever people who they don't even think are superior to them intellectually. Well, they're not superior. That's the whole point.

That's the problem. Journalists used to know that we're not rocket scientists. That's why we're in this business. Most of us flunked out of something real like law or medicine or whatever. We're like professional test crammers. We get an assignment. We try to learn as much as we can about it in 36 hours, and then we tell you about it.

We're not that smart. It's a tough job, but it's not like a hard intellectual discipline, but they pontificate on the air and they pretend that they have this special access to special knowledge and that they're a level above the common run of people. Which is ironically a sure sign that they're not smart. Exactly. Which is funny. Don Lemon's a great example of that. that they're not smart. Exactly.

Which is funny. Like Don Lemon's a great example of that. It's the surest sign that he's not smart is how smart he tries to pretend that he is. And it's so transparent. Yeah. Right? And I think that's one of the things that happens. Like, you know, when Gupta came on your show,

I mean, he's just a guy. Like, he's not a bad guy necessarily. He's a good guy. Yeah. I think he's just a guy. He's not a bad guy necessarily. He's a good guy. I think he's a good guy. Right? But it's just kind of a Wizard of Oz thing where they're trying to project this image of all knowingness and superiority,

moral rectitude, infallibility. But all they're really doing is telling people that they have a lack of humility and a lack of self-knowledge, you know? Exactly. And it's really unfortunate because, you know, it wasn't that long ago that people like Walter Cronkite were the most trusted people in the country precisely because they kind of had this attitude

of, you know, well, we're curious. We don't really know, you know, like that was the way they presented the news back in the day. Like, oh, that's interesting. Let's tell you about this thing. When did it shift? I think it started like my generation. It started with the people after, uh, all the president's men came out. Cause before that, in my father's era, uh, journalism was a, was more like a trade. You know, you were more likely to be, um, the son or the daughter, more likely the son, it was almost all male back then, but, you know, of an electrician or a plumber or something like that. It was not something that upper class Ivy league kids went into once upon a time, like back in the sixties, fifties, sixties, seventies. Then it became a sexy profession. Uh, after all the president's men, after Watergate, everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. Hunter Thompson helped make it a little bit sexy. You know, Rolling Stone and all that, their coverage. And it became a place for sort of upper class white kids to try to make their way.

It became a fashionable profession. make their way. It became a fashionable profession. And I saw, you know, this sort of transformation because when I, when I started covering presidential campaigns on the plane, and this was back when presidential campaigns had planes full of journalists, they don't have that anymore. Like now there's only a couple who follow the people around. Like everybody's doing it by wire service reports now for the most part what did it used to be like so you would have like if you were following john kerry in in 2004 which i did you would have kerry and and the aides would be up in like the equivalent of the first class section and the entire back of the plane would be media right and you And 80, 90, 100 reporters, a couple of... Some of

them would be camera people, some of them would be tech people. But what was so interesting for me is there was a mix on the plane. Some of them were the old hands who had been doing this since the 70s. And they were much more kind of skeptical. They were much more likely to look at politicians like they're all pieces of shit. I don't really care. Like in both parties, I don't believe anything they say, but I'm going to sort of report it. Like that's my job. But this newer generation, the younger generation, they were so excited by – they were jazzed by the proximity to an important person.

And I think it was symbolized by something like Primary Colors. You remember that movie? So that was written by a journalist, Joe Klein. Originally, it was anonymous. But who had a close relationship with somebody on the Clinton campaign. And that became kind of the model of what campaign journalism was all about. Like you were an insider. You were somebody who was in the know behind the rope line with the campaign.

And that was what everybody wanted. They wanted to be like one of those people who got the secret, who knew in advance what the candidate was going to say. Whereas the older grouchy types were the ones who were trying to bust the candidate for something, or trying to catch him in a lie, or trying to figure out who was actually funding the campaign, or that kind of thing. And so that was where I think the difference started. I think it started in the nineties and in the early two thousands. And now it's like a hundred percent, like all, all those old types are gone. Yeah. It's depressing. Wow. Yeah. All of them. I remember, uh, in fear and loathing on the campaign trail hunter s thompson was talking about how he had freedom because he wasn't coming back and so many of these guys were coming back and so

they had to sort of like follow some protocol or follow some rules and you know he did like when he was uh pretending that hubert humphrey was on drugs. Right, in the game. Yeah, making up the fact that a Brazilian doctor had come to work on him. Like he had this freedom to do that that they didn't have. And he had the freedom to look at it honestly, to look at it the way he thought the fucker he was. Yeah, and you should always, as a journalist, you should never expect to retain your friends because you will eventually have to write something negative about somebody who you've become friendly with.

So if you go into this business to be socially successful, you're in the wrong business. You should be comfortable being a loner. Or only have friends with people that follow the sort of morals and ethics that you do. Right, yeah. That is possible, isn't it? It is possible, but for the most part, if you're trying to be friends with people you're covering, it's not going to work. Right, it's not going to work. Right. And so what's regrettable about now is a lot of the people who are in journalism, they're upper class.

They are socially the same people that they're reporting on. Whereas there used to be much more of a class difference. You never had a phenomenon before. Well, it was much more rare before to have a situation, especially in local journalism, where the reporter was somebody who saw himself or herself as being like traveling in the same circles as the mayor or this or a senator or the ceo of a company like you know they just didn't really mix like that so they were outsiders who were who were who were reporting uh and they didn't really they didn't really mind offending people because what the fuck they, they're not my friends. But these people are all friends. Like Rachel Manow and Democratic Party politicians, they're friends. Have you ever seen a video of Chuck Schumer and Stephen Colbert dancing together?

Oh, God, I can't even imagine. You need to see it. Do we have time? You need to see it. You need to see it. Do we have time? You need to see it. You need to see them dancing together. And I feel the same way about comedians that you do about journalists. You know, like, you can't be friends with those people

because there's going to come a time where you have to talk shit about them. Dennis Miller ran into that with George Bush. I remember being incredibly disappointed because I was a Dennis Miller fan. As a comic, he was a very good comic. His HBO special was brilliant. Had some great shit, great jokes, great one-liners.

Absolutely. But then he said he was going to give George Bush a pass because he's his friend and he wouldn't make fun of him. Look at this. Chuck Schumer's got the mask on. And look at Colbert, no mask spreading, spreading pandemic viruses. Look, he's dancing, high-fiving and dancing with Chuck Schumer. What is this?

Well, what, what kind of signaling is this? Can you imagine Bill Hicks fucking dancing with a Senator? Jesus Christ. Well, Colbert was never really a stand-up. So, I mean, I guess he has that. No, but I mean. But he was a comic when the Colbert Report was on. I mean, that was hilarious.

It was really good. He was great. Yeah. He was great. And that show was a great takeoff of a fucking pompous, ridiculous Republican. Exactly. I mean, it was fucking really good and then when you see this you're like wait a minute what the fuck what are you doing right the fuck are

you doing or and why were you doing the other thing before like right was it was it to be to do this well i think what happened was and i'm just gonna guess but i think what happened was he had this brilliant character it was amazing on The Daily Show then he does the Colbert report it's amazing there it's a great show right and then they offer him the fucking carrot what's the carrot the carrots a late-night talk show right and the late-night talk show for I guess kind of my generation was the thing that everybody wanted Kimmel and Fallon and all these guys like you got to host the night show or your Jimmy Kimmel's got his own show you got your own show you got

the Letterman show you got the this show that that show that was the thing man right you could get your own show like that like you were fucking in if they offered it to you took it right took it But then to be that show guy he has to be a different guy. So now he's not Colbert from the show was this genius parody now. He's just Stephen Colbert, right? They see is they destroyed the essence well by giving him something the best example of it was when Jon Stewart came on and Jon Stewart was doing that bit about the lab leak theory, and Colbert is jumping in and stepping all over it. Right.

I'd like to see some evidence of that. He's like fucking up the bit. Clearly, Stewart, who is a great comic, is in the middle of a bit. Right. Yeah, exactly. And Colbert is trying to, he's like, you can see the panic in his eyes. This is not going along with the narrative. So he's like, he's hamstringing the bit.

Right. Which is crazy to see. Yeah, because his whole body is like physically mortified by the idea that he's sending off the wrong signals now. He is the boss of this show and this show is going to allow this wild, reckless talk about the lab leak. You know, it's a great story that's sort of apropos to all this is in Seymour Hersh's book,

it's his memoir, Reporter. There's a story about how in the early 90s, the CIA wanted everybody to know that they had caught, I think it was an Israeli spy. And so they called up Hirsch because Hirsch was the biggest, you know, investigative reporter in the country. And they invited him in and they said, look, we're going to show you all this material, right? And they brought him into a room and they just gave him a whole packet of stuff, right? But he couldn't, like his entire body rebelled. He's like, I had spent my whole life getting the things.

I could not be handed the things, you know what I mean? Because it's just not in his nature, right? Like to be, you know, to mean because it's just not in his nature right like to be you know to be spoon-fed right and like I think that's true with with comics with any kind of journalist like once once you start getting you know handed things then then you're you've lost yeah I mean they have you at that point and you got to get out out of that habit, you know? Or you just never, you can't cross that line. You can't cross that line. But if you want to be on a talk show, you have to cross that line. There's no other way you get on that show. You can't get on that show and have some real counterculture narrative that is not approved and sanctioned and you spit it out there on NBC for the masses. When was the last talk show that had a counterculture?

I mean, Letterman in the 80s, maybe? Maybe Letterman, yeah, Letterman. Well, Letterman was rebellious. I don't know if he was counterculture, but he was certainly rebellious, and certainly the favorite of the people that weren't taking it all seriously, the people that wanted the tongue-in-che The people that wanted the tongue in cheek jabs at the celebrities. And, you know, whereas like Jay Leno was letting everybody on

and, Oh, you're hilarious. Oh, that's great. That's awesome. There was no, no attacking. Letterman would, you know, mock you and you were in on, he was in on the joke. I remember when, you know, my father used to work for NBC. And when the tech workers, NABIT, the union, when they went on strike and NBC brought in a bunch of scabs to cross the picket line and do, you know, do all their work for them. Letterman used to get them to screw up, basically. Like, in other words, the cameras would, like, go back and forth. So he was taking a dig at management, which was kind of cool. Like, you know, I thought that was an interesting thing. Did he do it on purpose and tell them to fuck up?

Yeah, exactly. That is funny. That is funny. Well, he was a very smart guy. Yeah. And, you know, a funny guy. Like, the funniest of all those. If you go back and look at, like, the guys who have hosted shows and we're really funny at it. He's the best. Yeah, I think he's the best

I think he's the best talk show host of all time. I Love that he was a weatherman before he Before the yeah the talk show I think he didn't get in trouble for predicting hailstones the size of canned hams That sounds like a little thing that's a true story, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's um predicting hailstones the size of canned hams. That sounds like a Levin thing to say. I hope that's a true story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's, it's interesting because his Netflix thing didn't,

it wasn't the same. It seemed, it just wasn't, it just didn't feel the same. Well, I mean, you know, apart from, you know, you and Chappelle, like, who's doing sort of, I don't know. I mean, like the comedy scene to me, I don't know. It just seems like sort of network television. There's nothing funny there anymore. On network television, but in the clubs, it's one of the best times ever.

Is it really? Yeah, there's a lot of daring motherfuckers out there. Bill Burr, who's one of the best of all time. He's phenomenal, and he's killing it right now. He's fighting it. He's not giving in to it at all. He's fighting it. And there's a lot of guys like that out there now.

He's fighting it and there's there's a lot of guys like that out there now. There's guys coming up like Tim Dillon Andrew Schultz You know Mark Norman Shane Gillis There's a lot of funny fucking young guys that are coming out that are dedicated to real stand-up the way There's a lot of people out there that are dedicated to being journalists And they're just trying to find their way through and they really respect real journalism They don't want to be a corporate hack right they want to be a real journalist there's a lot of comics like that that's great i mean and they must be real the the the stupider and more restrictive this environment gets them the the better the audience response yes yes oh

it's phenomenal it's really incredible it's incredible to see because you know i work with all these guys we do clubs together and we do shows together and to see the response to this you know risky material material that like like they all dave stuff the stuff that got him canceled air quotes you know like my that my god was he murdering i mean murdering we did a series of shows together and he's fucking he's one of the greatest of all time. Yeah. And also being attacked. But it's, you can't, comedy can't be safe.

It's not possible. Right. I mean, it can be safe with some jokes. But, like, in its entirety, it's not going to be safe. And the comics that are, like, real recognize that. And they also recognize that we got to stay together we got to stay together and we got to help each other because the more we support each other the more we get through this the more the audience realizes like oh this is what they do

this is not like they're not in court giving affidavits on their their viewpoint they're trying to say funny things right and in doing so you're going to cover very controversial topics you're going to say things that are outrageous to say but that's the point and occasionally you're gonna say something that Is a miss right? Oh all the time right time That's the only way you find out if it hits when when you're especially when you're working the clubs The whole idea is like I'll do a joke away and as I'm doing it I'm like I gotta get out of this like this is not the right way to do this as I'm doing it, I'm like, I got to get out of this. Like, this is not the right way to do this. I'm doing it the wrong way.

I'm saying it away. I'm taking a chance, and I'm going down a dark alleyway, and I hit a dead end. Right. I got to figure out, I got to get out of this. And this is part of the process of creation, because you really only create comedy, you write in silence alone, but you create it really with the audience's involvement and you never really know how it's going to go over you don't you don't know you have ideas you know you you kind of get it you know how to do it you know the process you trust in the process but you really don't fucking know until you're there and if someone takes a little

snippet of that and tries to take particularly if they take a snippet of that and they put it in quotes right you know it's like you'reet of that and they put it in quotes. Right. You know, it's like you're, you know, that's not what it is. Like you're pretending that this is a real opinion. This is comedy. You know, just like Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff. Right.

Yeah. This is not real. And that's. And if you take away the ability to screw it up, like it robs of its essence basically. Well, we use yonder bags now for a lot of shows, which helps that because everyone's phones are locked up. Oh, right. Because everyone just wants to film everything now, which is bad for the experience watching it.

Just take it in. Just like you take in everything else. We have to learn how to take things in and enjoy the moment. I mean, I went to see The Stones recently, and I'm guilty of it too because I took a couple pictures and some video, but I'm like, God, I need to just take this in. How many times am I going to get to see

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards alive on stage jamming and have it be really good? Keith Richards hasn't looked alive since like 1972. He's moving though. He's animated. So listen, man, we learned a lot today. We learned that those Patriot fucks might be real.

I think we learned that. Are they? I don't know, man. I think there's some involvement. I think there's some involvement. I'm suspicious. I'm suspicious of their outfits, but we learned they might be real. We learned that your voice sounds like Elizabeth Holmes a little bit.

That is amazing. I can't wait to tell my wife. You know, it's really when you have the microphone in the wrong place. Oh, okay. You have your microphone here. You bring it to your neck. Yeah. Do I sound more like her now?

Yes. You sound more like her now. It was more like when the microphone was... These mics are weird. They have to be right in front of your face. And if they're here, they give you sort of a subtlety to the way you're talking. And then you sound like Elizabeth Holmes. So I sound like a female corporate con artist?

No, you only sound like that one because you can't say that any man sounds like Sam Kinison other than Sam Kinison. You can't say that any female sounds like Elizabeth. She doesn't even sound like her. That's part of the reason why she got busted was that friends from college like what the is that girl talking like that for oh my god so it's like the unabomber thing like somebody who knew her exactly people who knew her from college were like what is going on with her voice what is this what is this thing you're doing um see that's the lesson never have you know

doing um see that's the lesson never have you know if you're going to be going to crime don't have friends in college or like start the shit early right like in high school and may come up with like a lacrosse injury for why you're uh she got hit with a high speed ball to the neck and that's a damage to her vocal cords um listen thank you very much for everything you do thank you i really appreciate that you're out there. It means a lot, not just to me, but to a lot of people that you are a legitimate, objective source of information. And it means a lot. It's so, so important. Likewise, I can't tell you how much it makes me laugh that your viewership is so much more massive than the news stations.

I just get a kick out of that. It's confusing. I have no idea how it happens. I'm really baffled. I'm not kidding. Like every week when it's still number one, I'm like, still? Crazy. I don't know what the fuck happened.

There's no plan behind this. That's what's so bizarre about it. Right. But it's hilarious. Well, thank you. No, no. I mean that in a good way. Oh, I do too's so bizarre about it. Right. But it's hilarious. Wow. Thank you. No, no. I mean that in a good way.

Oh, I do too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I find it hilarious too. Yeah. It is. It's like, okay. Yeah. Your sub stack, tell people how to get to it.

Yeah. Taibbi.substack.com. Spell Taibbi for people who don't know how to spell. T-A-I-B-B-I. And then you are, what is it, M. Taibbi? At M. Taibbi on Twitter. Do you have an Instagram as well? God, I don't even know it.

I'm barely on it. So it's really just those two things. Taibbi.subsec.com. And yeah. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Anytime. Open invitation.

Appreciate you. Appreciate you. Thank you. Bye, everybody.