On this episode of the podcast, Alex Blumbergbergberg and co-hosts Will and Kate discuss the theory that Jeffrey Epstein may have been murdered by a member of the press. They also discuss the possibility that Epstein was murdered by his own press secretary. And they talk about how the media handled the story of Epstein's disappearance and what it means for the rest of the investigation into his death. And they discuss why the media seems to have done nothing about it. Guests: Rep. Paul Gosser (D-Massachusetts) and journalist Jamie Grisham (R-Michigan). Thanks to caller Jamie. Thanks also to our sponsor and our sponsor, for sponsoring this episode. Thank you for supporting the podcast! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Jeff Kaale. The theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Skandalous. and the album art is by Build Buildings. Please rate and review our ad-libbed version of this song, "Goodbye Outer Space" by Fountains of Paradise. We'll see you next Tuesday, November 19th! - The Good, The Bad, the Good, the Bad, The Beautiful, the Beautiful, and the Beautiful (feat. by Blame It On Us, by Dweck_ and (featuring & -- The Good Goodbye featuring . , The Good Bad, Goodbye, Good Morning by , and , Good Morning America, and by Mr. Goodbye. -- Thank You, Good Luck - Thank You Thank You. - by The Good Morning Folks (feat , Bad, Thank You & Good Morning, Good Life, and Thank You! by Shadydave, , by Thanks To You, My Brother & , My Brother, & Thank You ( ) in honor of , Will & Kate ( ) and Kate ( ), and Good Morning ( ) , by Ms. , Kaitlyn ( ) & Will ( ) . ( ) ( ) - Thank you, Kate ( , & ) & Will & Katelyn ( ) (
00:00:03.000So, Jamie pointed out, this congressman, is that who it is?
00:00:11.000Jamie pointed this out, that there's a congressman, and he released a series of tweets, and the first letter of all these tweets, if you put them all together, it says, Epstein didn't kill himself.
00:00:50.000I got a tweet from someone about 35 minutes ago that I don't know if there's a bunch of people online paying attention to it or what, but someone alerted me and a few other people.
00:00:58.000Does he have an image of that fucking crazy mask?
00:01:51.000Well, this Epstein case is probably the most blatant example of a public murder of a crucial witness I've ever seen in my entire life, or anybody's ever seen.
00:02:02.000And the minimal amount of outrage about this, the minimal amount of coverage, it's fucking fascinating.
00:02:09.000I mean, what's amazing to me, just as somebody who works in the media, is that this was shaping up to be the biggest news story in history.
00:02:33.000I mean, I get it, why that's happening, but it's just amazing.
00:02:38.000Well, when the woman from ABC, what was her name?
00:02:41.000ABC. Amy, that lady, the one who had the frustrated moment that she called it, a frustrating private moment, when she was talking about having the scoop and having that story and them squashing it.
00:03:23.000Well, there's a couple of things going on because there are many different ways this can play out.
00:03:27.000I mean, you could have a news director who just sort of instinctively decides, well, we can't do that story because I might want to have Will and Kate on later or I might want to have this politician on later.
00:03:38.000And it's not like anybody tells them necessarily that we can't do this.
00:03:43.000If you grow up in this system and you've been in the business for a long time, you have all these things that are drilled into you At almost like the cellular level about what you can and cannot get into.
00:03:57.000But there were some explicit things that happened with Epstein, too.
00:04:00.000I mean, there were a lot of news agencies that killed stories about him.
00:04:04.000And we're hearing about some of them, Vanity Fair, this thing.
00:04:12.000When I found out that Clinton flew no less than 26 times on a plane with Epstein, I was like, dude, I haven't flown that many times with my mom.
00:04:37.000Is Clinton that much of a hound that he would go that deep into the well that many times, 26 times?
00:04:44.000Well, that's the thing about the Epstein story that makes no sense to me.
00:04:47.000Like, I thought that the percentage of people who were out-and-out, like perverts, who had a serious problem, like with pedophilia or whatever, was pretty small, you know?
00:06:09.000And this is like the mother of all stories, you know, in terms of that.
00:06:14.000And they're just little breadcrumbs here and there.
00:06:17.000That whole thing about Acosta, you know, the Vanity Fair quote from him is that when he said that when he looked at the case, he didn't do it because I was told he belonged to intelligence.
00:06:46.000I mean, if you think about it, a hedge fund's a perfect way to do blackmail, because you can just have people putting money in and out all the time, and it would look like...
00:08:13.000It's like, it gets to a point where you're like, okay, even Michael Shermer, who runs Skeptic Magazine, he's like, wait a minute, the cameras were not working?
00:09:13.000This is something I've written about before.
00:09:14.000The press does not like to do stories where the problem is bipartisan.
00:09:20.000So when you have an institutional problem, when Democrats and Republicans...
00:09:24.000Both share responsibility for it when, you know, or if it's an institution that kind of exists in perpetuity, no matter what the administration is.
00:09:32.000We don't really like to do those stories.
00:09:34.000Fox likes to do stories about Democrats.
00:09:38.000MSNBC likes to do stories about Republicans.
00:09:39.000But the thing that's kind of, you know, all over the place, they don't like to do that story.
00:09:44.000Epstein is, you know, he's friends with Trump and with Clinton.
00:09:48.000I mean, it looks like he has more friends on the Clinton side, but still...
00:09:51.000And I think this is one of the reasons why this story doesn't have a lot of traction in the media, because neither side really likes the idea of going too deeply on it, feels like to me.
00:10:02.000Well, but the blatant aspect of it, I mean, the closest that we have to that is the absolute murder, the Jamal Khashoggi murder.
00:10:12.000That's the closest thing we have to it, or it's absolute murder.
00:10:15.000This one, but it's also so insanely blatant, but now you have foreign actors that are involved in it and they all disperse and then left with this confusion of who's responsible for it.
00:10:25.000Well, Saudi Arabia, that's another example where you can't really say it's, you know, one side of the...
00:10:31.000Both parties have been incredibly complicit in their cooperation with the Saudi regime and in, you know, the massacres that are going on in Yemen.
00:10:41.000It's a classic example of what Noam Chomsky used to talk about with worthy and unworthy victims, right?
00:10:46.000Like if the Soviet communists did it, that was bad.
00:10:50.000But if death squads in El Salvador killed a priest or a Catholic priest, you know, then that was something we didn't write about because they were our client state.
00:10:59.000Yemen is a story we don't write about.
00:11:01.000Syria is a story we do write about, but they're really equivalent stories.
00:11:06.000But you're absolutely right, the Khashoggi thing, I don't think either party or either side's media really wants to get into that all that deeply.
00:11:33.000And it's really about how the press, the business model of the press has changed.
00:11:39.000I mean, it's something that you talk about a lot.
00:11:41.000I hear you on your show all the time talking about how news agencies are always trying to push narratives on people, trying to get people wound up and upset.
00:11:52.000And that is a conscious business strategy that we didn't have maybe 30 years ago.
00:11:57.000You know, you think about Walter Cronkite or what the news was like back in the day, you had the whole family sitting around the table and everybody watching, sort of a unifying experience to watch the news.
00:12:08.000Now you have news for the crazy right-wing uncle, and then you have news for the kid in the Shay t-shirt, and they're different channels, and they're trying to wind these people up, you know, to get them upset constantly and stay there.
00:12:22.000And a lot of that has to do with the internet, because...
00:12:26.000Before the internet, news companies had a basically free way of making money.
00:12:32.000The newspaper was the only thing in town that had a...
00:12:35.000If you wanted to get a WAN ad, it had to be through the local newspaper.
00:12:39.000Now with the internet, the internet is the distribution system.
00:12:42.000Anybody has access to it, not just the local newspaper.
00:12:45.000And so the easy money is gone and we have to chase clicks more than we ever had to before.
00:12:52.000We have to chase eyeballs more than we have to.
00:12:53.000So we've had to build new money-making strategies and a lot of it has to do with just sort of monetizing anger and division and all these things.
00:13:01.000We just didn't do that before and it's had a profound difference on the media.
00:13:06.000As a writer, have you personally experienced this sort of the influence where people have tried to lean you in the direction of clickbait or perhaps maybe alter titles that make them a little bit disingenuous in order to get people excited about the story?
00:13:21.000I mean, you know, my editors at Rolling Stone are pretty good and they give me a lot of leeway to kind of explore whatever I want to explore, but I definitely feel a lot of pressure that I didn't feel before.
00:13:32.000In the business because, especially in the Trump era, and I've written a lot about the Russia story, right?
00:13:39.000But that's an example of one side's media has one take on it and another side's media has another take on it.
00:13:46.000And if you are just a journalist and you want to just sort of report the facts, you feel a lot of pressure to fit the facts into a narrative that your audience is going to like.
00:13:56.000And I had a lot of problem with the Russia story because I thought, you know, I don't like Donald Trump, but I'm like, I don't think this guy's James Bond consorting with Russian spies.
00:14:08.000And there was a lot of blowback on my side of the business because, you know, people in sort of liberal, quote unquote, liberal media, you just have, there's a lot of pressure to have everybody fit into a certain narrative.
00:14:20.000And I think that's really unhealthy for the business.
00:14:57.000In the summer of 2016, I was covering the campaign, I started to hear reporters talking about how they didn't want to report poll numbers that showed the race was close.
00:15:09.000They thought that that was going to hurt Hillary.
00:15:12.000In other words, we had information that the race was close.
00:15:15.000And we're not telling this to audiences because they wanted to hear that it was going to be a blowout for Hillary, right?
00:15:24.000It didn't help the Democrats to not warn people about this, right?
00:15:28.000But it was just because if you turned on MSNBC or CNN and you heard that Trump was within five points or whatever it was, that was going to be a bummer for that audience.
00:16:15.000You can predict exactly what each news organization, what their take is going to be on any issue.
00:16:24.000Just to take an example, when the business about the ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, being killed hit the news, Instantaneously, you knew that the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post,
00:16:39.000that they were going to write a whole bunch of stories about how Trump was overplaying the significance of it, that he was telling lies about it.
00:16:50.000You knew they were going to make the entire thing about Trump.
00:16:53.000And then, meanwhile, Fox had a completely different spin on about how heroic it was.
00:16:57.000But news audiences didn't have anywhere to go to just simply hear, who was this person?
00:17:49.000So where do we go where I see both sides?
00:17:52.000Where's the middle ground where someone goes, well, this is true, but you've got to say this is honest too, and this is what's going on over on this side, and the Republicans have a point here, and there's no mainstream media place where you can go for that right now.
00:18:08.000No, there isn't, and this is one of the things I write about.
00:18:11.000This is one of the reasons why shows like yours are so popular.
00:19:40.000After each story you report, you're supposed to kind of wipe your memory clean and start over.
00:19:45.000So just because somebody was banned the last time you covered them, Doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to be the bad guy this time you cover them.
00:19:52.000You have to continually test your assumptions and ask yourself, is this true?
00:20:10.000And you can see why audiences are fleeing from this stuff.
00:20:14.000They just don't have the impact they used to.
00:20:16.000Well, it's really interesting that a lot of this is this unpredicted consequence of having these open platforms like Facebook where people are getting their news and then the algorithm sort of directs them towards things that are going to piss them off, which I don't even think necessarily was initially the plan.
00:20:34.000I think the plan is to accelerate engagement, right?
00:20:39.000What you're engaging with, what stories you're engaging with, and then they give you more of that.
00:20:44.000Like Ari, my friend Ari Shafir, actually tried this out.
00:20:48.000And what he did was, he went on YouTube and only looked up puppy videos.
00:20:54.000And that's all he looked at for, like, weeks.
00:20:56.000And then YouTube only started recommending puppy videos to him.
00:21:01.000So it's not necessarily that Facebook wants you to be outraged, but that when you are outraged, whether it's over abortion or war or whatever the subject is, you're going to engage more, and their algorithm favors you engaging more.
00:21:13.000So if you're engaging more about something very positive, you know, if you're all about yoga and meditation, your algorithm would probably favor yoga and meditation because those are the things you engage with.
00:21:24.000But it's natural for people to be pissed off and to look for things that are annoying, especially if you're done working and you're like, God, this world sucks.
00:23:21.000Yeah, but that seems to be what it is.
00:23:23.000It's like they figured out that your data is worth a tremendous amount of money.
00:23:28.000And the way they can utilize that money is to sell advertising.
00:23:32.000Yeah, no, they get it coming and going because they're not only selling you ads, but they're also collecting the information about your habits, which they can then sell again.
00:23:48.000Basically, they're just consumer businesses where they're trading attention for ad space, right?
00:23:53.000So if they can get you to watch four hours of television a day, they have that many ad slots that they can show you and they know how much money they're going to make.
00:24:01.000But the social media companies get it two ways.
00:24:06.000You know, attracting your eyeballs and then also selling your habits to the next set of advertisers, which, you know, is very insidious.
00:24:13.000But what's interesting about this is that most people don't think about this as a consumer business, right?
00:24:18.000Like, Americans, these days, are very conscious of, like, what they put in their bodies.
00:24:22.000You know, they won't eat too many candy.
00:24:23.000Well, depending on who they are, right?
00:24:25.000But people at least look at what the calories are, but they don't think about the news that way or social media, what they put in their brains.
00:25:28.000I mean, I think some people in the tech business probably saw early on the potential for this.
00:25:37.000But, you know, in terms of other businesses like the news media and also politics, I mean, you have to think about the impact of this on politics.
00:26:24.000I mean, Facebook is generating billions of dollars and now potentially shifting global politics.
00:26:31.000Yeah, and the whole issue of a couple of companies like Facebook having control over what you do and do not see is an enormous problem that nobody really cares about.
00:26:44.000I've tried to write about it a few times.
00:26:46.000I've written a couple of features about it and about how What a serious problem this is.
00:26:51.000If you look at other countries like Israel, China, there are a number of companies where you've seen this pattern of internet platforms liaising with the government to decide what people can and cannot see.
00:27:07.000And they'll say, well, we don't want to see, you know, Palestinian protest movements, or we don't want to see, you know, the Venezuelan channel, Telesaur, like, we want to take that off.
00:27:17.000You think about how that could end up happening in the United States, and it is already a little bit happening.
00:27:23.000It's a little bit, but it seems to be happening only in the terms of, like, leaning towards the progressive side, which people are okay with.
00:27:28.000Because I think, especially in the light of Donald Trump being in office, this is acceptable censorship.
00:28:55.000Catastrophe, tragedy, attack, something that really gets people fired up, and they vote in someone who takes it up to another level.
00:29:02.000And then he has these tools, and then he uses these tools on his political enemies, which is entirely possible.
00:29:07.000Well, I mean, we've already seen that a little bit.
00:29:09.000I mean, people don't want to bring this up, but...
00:29:13.000A lot of the stories that have come out about Trump, they're coming from leaks of classified information that are coming from those war on terror programs that were instituted after 9-11.
00:29:22.000The FISA Amendments Act, the NSA programs to collect data, they're unmasking people.
00:29:31.000There was a lawsuit a couple that came out about a month ago that showed that the FBI was doing something like 60,000 searches a month At one point, they were asking the NSA for the ability to unmask names and that sort of thing.
00:30:02.000It always ends up being used by somebody in the wrong way.
00:30:07.000And I think we're starting to see that that's going to be a problem.
00:30:10.000Yeah, I'm real concerned about places like Google and Facebook altering the path of free speech and leaning people in certain directions and silencing people that have opposing viewpoints and the fact that they think that they're doing this for good because this is how they see the world and they don't understand that you have to let these ideas play out In the marketplace of free speech and free ideas.
00:30:36.000If you don't do that, if you don't do that, if you don't let people debate the merits, the pros, the cons, what's wrong, what's right, if you don't do that, then you don't get real discourse.
00:30:45.000If you don't get real discourse, you're essentially, you've got some sort of intellectual dictatorship going on.
00:30:50.000And because it's a progressive dictatorship, you think it's okay.
00:30:53.000Because it's people who want everybody to be inclusive and, you know, I mean, this is a weird time for that.
00:30:59.000It's a really weird time for that because, as you said, people are so short-sighted.
00:31:04.000They don't understand that these, like, the First Amendment's in place for a very good reason and set up a long fucking time ago because they did the math.
00:31:11.000They saw where it was going, and they were like, look, we have to have the ability to express ourselves.
00:31:15.000We have to have the ability to freely express thoughts and ideas and challenge people that are in a position of power, because if we don't, we wind up exactly where we came from.
00:31:24.000Yeah, no, and courts continually reaffirmed that idea that the way to deal with bad speech was with more speech.
00:31:34.000And they did it over and over and over again.
00:31:38.000The legal standard for speech still, I think, remains that unless it's directly inciting violence, you can have speech that incites violence generally, and the Supreme Court even upheld that.
00:31:52.000You can have speech that comes from material that was stolen illegally.
00:31:58.000But we had a very, very high bar for prohibiting speech always.
00:32:02.000And the libel cases, the cases for defamation, You know, that also established a very, very high standard for punishing speech.
00:32:11.000But now, all of a sudden, people have a completely different idea about it.
00:32:14.000It's like, you know, forget about the fact that this was a fundamental concept in American society for, you know, 230 years or whatever, but they just want to change it, you know, without thinking about the consequences.
00:32:25.000Well, that's where a guy like Trump could be almost like...
00:32:30.000It's almost like a Trojan horse, in a way.
00:32:33.000Like, if you wanted to play 3D chess, what you would do, you'd get a guy who's just so egregious and so outrageous, and then so many people oppose him.
00:32:41.000Get that guy, let him get into a position of power, and then sit back.
00:33:05.000And that way people just, a rational, intelligent person is never going to side with him.
00:33:11.000So they're going to side with the people that oppose him and then you could sneak a lot of shit in that maybe they wouldn't agree with in any other circumstance.
00:33:17.000Yeah, Trump's election is sort of like another 9-11, right?
00:33:22.000All of a sudden, people who weren't in favor of the government being able to go through your library records or listen to your phone calls, and all of a sudden, they were like, oh, Jesus, I'm so freaked out.
00:33:32.000When Trump got elected, all of a sudden, people suddenly had very different ideas about speech.
00:33:37.000Like, you know, hey, that guy's so bad.
00:33:41.000Maybe we should consider banning X, Y, and Z. If he was conceived as a way to discredit the First Amendment and some other ideas, that would be a brilliant 3D chess move.
00:34:10.000It seems like this is, I mean, obviously you just wrote a book about it, but it seems like this is accelerating.
00:34:16.000And it doesn't seem like anyone's taking a step back and hitting the brakes or opting out.
00:34:22.000It seems like people are just ramping up the rhetoric.
00:34:25.000Yeah, I mean, I think the divisiveness problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
00:34:32.000The business model of the media now is so entrenched that until some of these companies start going out of business because they're doing You know, they're losing audience because people don't trust them anymore.
00:34:48.000The news is going to keep doing what it's doing.
00:34:51.000The Hannity model is going to become normal for news companies.
00:34:56.000I think it already basically is, you know, on both the left and the right.
00:35:01.000And in terms of, you know, the internet companies...
00:35:06.000They're getting more and more power all the time.
00:35:08.000And I think we've already seen that people have, I think, too much tolerance for letting them make decisions about what we can and cannot see.
00:35:17.000And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
00:37:15.000How do I get on that Wild West Twitter?
00:37:16.000Because the problem with things like Gab, And I've gone there a few times and watched it, and even Milo Yiannopoulos has criticized it for being this, is that it's just so hate-filled because it's the place where you can go and fucking say anything.
00:37:30.000So the only people that it's attracting are people that just want to go there and just fucking shoot off cannons of N-bombs and call everybody a kike.
00:37:45.000But the sheer number of people that go there just to blow off steam because they can't say those things on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media platform without being banned, because of that, it becomes a channel for it.
00:37:59.000And it's like, it doesn't get a chance.
00:38:31.000So even if you have controversial ideas that maybe some people would agree with and some won't, you can get banned for life for just controversial ideas.
00:38:38.000Even controversial ideas that are scientifically and biologically factual, like the transgender issue.
00:39:40.000No, and it's crazy, and obviously people see that, and they just get madder, and it makes people very, very resentful in ways that they wouldn't be otherwise.
00:40:58.000You're suddenly like the kid with lice, and people don't want that to happen to them, so they stop saying X, Y, and Z, and they just go with the flow, go with the crowd.
00:41:09.000And it causes this sort of, you know, uniform, conformist discourse that isn't really about anything, right?
00:41:19.000Because people are just afraid to talk, which is crazy.
00:41:36.000Wouldn't it be better if I just talked to him and find out what his ideas are and ask him about those ideas?
00:41:41.000We had a very bizarre conversation about gay people, where he's basically full-on biblical, religious interpretation of gay people, which to me...
00:43:34.000I thought that piece was really interesting because that whole idea that there are people who have forfeited the right to communicate forever.
00:43:45.000Again, there's this intellectual snobbism that goes on in You know, frankly, on my side of the media aisle, where, well, let's say what an appropriate thought is, what's right-thinking, what's wrong-thinking, you know,
00:44:01.000who gets to have a platform, who doesn't get to have a platform, who we're going to call a monster, who we're not going to call.
00:44:08.000I just don't understand the arrogance, where that comes from to decide that some people, you know, I totally disagree with people like, you know, Alex Jones or Shapiro or, you know, most things.
00:44:19.000But I don't think that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.
00:44:53.000They're wrong about things and they're right about things.
00:44:55.000And the only way you can discern that is you communicate with them.
00:44:58.000But as soon as you de-platform people like forever, you're just going to make a bunch of angry people.
00:45:03.000You're just going to make a bunch of people that are completely distrusting and you're going to absolutely empower the opponents of your ideas.
00:45:32.000And 100%, if you lived in Soviet Russia and something was published by an official publisher, people thought it was basically full of shit.
00:45:42.000But if it was in the samizdat, if it was in the privately circled stuff that had been repressed and censored, people thought that was the coolest thing in the world.
00:46:33.000It's very hard to hear him talk anymore.
00:46:37.000He's not in the public conversation the way he used to be, because they kicked him off of all these different platforms.
00:46:43.000And if you go into why they kicked him off these different platforms, even if you don't agree with him, and I don't on a lot of things, like, boy, I don't agree with kicking him off those platforms.
00:46:52.000If you listen to what he got kicked off for, it's like, man, I don't know.
00:46:56.000This doesn't seem like this makes a lot of sense.
00:47:00.000Yeah, no, I mean, same thing with Alex Jones.
00:47:02.000Alex Jones has said, you know, he's gone after me a couple of times in ways that were pretty funny, actually.
00:47:09.000But when he was, you know, kicked off all these platforms, you know, I wrote a piece saying I think people are kind of doing an end zone dance a little early on this one, you know, because Jones is a classic example of how the system, the way the system used to work,
00:47:26.000they would have punished him for being, you know, We're good to go.
00:47:52.000Right, because the goalposts keep getting moved.
00:48:02.000Or ban, because what I said about Bruce Jenner, ban this for that.
00:48:06.000I mean, you get further and further down the line, you keep moving these goalposts, and next thing you know, you're in a very rigid situation.
00:48:12.000Tightly controlled area where you can communicate, and you're suppressed.
00:48:17.000And that just accelerates your desire to step out of that boundary.
00:48:22.000And it makes you want to say things that maybe you wouldn't even have thought of before.
00:48:26.000And also, logistically, it's an insane thing to even think about asking platforms To rationally go through all this content.
00:48:36.000I talked to somebody who was a pretty high-ranking Facebook executive after the Alex Jones thing.
00:48:40.000And he said, think about what we used to do just to keep porn off Facebook.
00:48:46.000And we're dealing with, what, a couple of billion items of content every single day.
00:48:50.000We had these really high-tech algorithms that we designed to look for flesh tones.
00:48:54.000And that's how the Vietnamese running girl photo got taken off Facebook, because they automatically spotted a naked...
00:49:19.000If it's that hard and that expensive for us to go through and just to keep child porn off of Facebook, think about how crazy it's going to be when we start having entry-level people deciding what is and is not appropriate political content.
00:49:44.000Well, that's why Twitter is so weird, because you can get away with shit on Facebook.
00:49:50.000You can say things on Facebook, like Facebook doesn't have a policy about deadnaming, or Facebook doesn't have a policy about misgendering people, but they do have a porn policy.
00:50:04.000I have to be very careful when I give my phone to my kids to make sure they don't open up the fucking Twitter app because I follow a lot of dirty girls and some of them, I mean, it's just right there.
00:51:38.000And when I talked to Jack and he was explaining to me the problems with trying to manage things at scale, you really kind of get a sense of it.
00:51:46.000Like, oh, you guys are dealing with billions and billions of humans using these things.
00:51:52.000Yeah, but they're already, you know, in many countries around the world, they have armies of thousands of people who go through content to try to flag this or that kind of political content.
00:52:20.000I did a story about Facebook and how it was Teaming up with groups like the Atlantic Council here in the United States.
00:52:28.000Remember a couple of years ago, the Senate called in Twitter, Facebook, and Google to Washington and asked them to devise strategies for preventing the sowing of discord.
00:52:41.000Basically, it was asking them to come up with strategies for filtering out fake news and then also certain kinds of offensive content.
00:52:51.000But, you know, that is a stepping stone to what we've seen in other countries, I think.
00:52:56.000And I think it's really worrisome, but nobody seems to care on our side of the aisle, which is very strange.
00:53:14.000There's people that do pretty egregious things from the left, like the Covington School thing, when people were saying, we've got to dox these kids and give me their names, release their names.
00:53:24.000These people are still on Twitter to this day.
00:53:27.000We're talking about kids that just happen to have these Make America Great Again hats.
00:53:31.000And I have a friend who used to live in that area said, like, no, you don't get it.
00:54:28.000And, you know, for me, in the news business, a lot of people that I know went into journalism precisely because we didn't want to talk about our political views.
00:54:39.000Like, the whole point of the job is like...
00:55:04.000It's exactly what you're talking about.
00:55:05.000People used to go to the news because they wanted to find out what happened in the world, and they can't do it anymore because everything that you turn on, every kind of content, is just editorialized content where people are sort of telling you where they stand on things.
00:55:52.000There was an editorial, and I wrote about this in the book, that in the summer of 2016, this guy, Jim Rutenberg, wrote this piece, said, Trump is testing the norms of objectivity.
00:56:43.000I don't know, because unless the financial incentives change, they're not going to change.
00:56:51.000You know, the business used to be, back when you were talking about it, the New York Times, and then there were three networks, and they were all trying to get the whole audience, right?
00:56:59.000So they were doing that kind of neutral fact-finding mission, and it was working for them financially.
00:57:05.000Now they can't do that because of the internet.
00:57:07.000You're hunting for audience in little groups, and they're just giving you hyper-politicized stuff because that's the only way they can make money.
00:57:19.000It's so interesting, though, because, I mean, if you looked at human interactions, and if you looked at, you know, dispensing news and information, and you followed trends from, like, the 30s to the 40s to the 50s to the 60s to the 70s,
00:57:37.000you'd be like, oh, well, people are getting better at this.
00:59:09.000Not only do they not get bounced out of the business, they all got promoted.
00:59:12.000They're editors of major magazines now.
00:59:15.000And so what does that tell people in the business?
00:59:18.000Well, it tells you if you screw up, as long as you screw up with a whole bunch of other people, it's okay, which is not good.
00:59:24.000And we used to have a lot of pride about that stuff in this business, and now we don't anymore.
00:59:30.000You know, there isn't the shame connected with screwing something up that there used to be.
00:59:36.000I think there's a real danger in terms of social media especially in not complying to the Constitution, not complying to the First Amendment.
00:59:45.000I think there's a real danger in that.
00:59:47.000And I don't think we recognize that danger because I don't think we saw what social media was until it was too late.
00:59:53.000And then by the time it was too late, we had already had these sort of standards in place and the people that run it were already getting away with enforcing their own personal bias, their ideological bias.
01:00:06.000And this is when you're at this position where you go, well, how does that ever get resolved?
01:00:12.000They're not going to resolve it on their own.
01:00:13.000They're still making ass loads of money.
01:00:17.000Well, if Trump steps in and resolves it, it looks like he's trying to resolve it to save his own political career or to help his supporters.
01:00:26.000Yeah, no, and no matter what, if Trump does anything about it, automatically everyone's going to be against it.
01:00:33.000Even if there's some sense in there somewhere, people won't get behind it.
01:00:40.000And if they do anything about it, there's going to be a correction time.
01:00:43.000There's going to be a gab time where it's going to be like that, where it's just going to flood with people that are just, like, with this newfound freedom that's just going to go...
01:00:58.000That's the thing, because it's not only about rules, it's also about culture.
01:01:01.000People have already, they're in this pattern of, you know, not saying the wrong thing, and they don't, I think there's, we're in a culture that doesn't even really know how to deal with free speech if we actually had it in the same way we used to, you know?
01:01:29.000But historically, the tendency is once you have a tool that kind of can be used to keep people in line and enforce compliance of ideas, then it always ends up worsening and becoming more and more dictatorial and authoritarian.
01:02:17.000Yeah, and there's no cross-dialogue of any kind anymore.
01:02:23.000And even now, I mean, it's interesting.
01:02:27.000You had Bernie Sanders on your show, and Sanders is one of the few politicians left who has this idea that we should talk to everybody.
01:02:37.000Like, there are no illegitimate audiences out there.
01:02:40.000And, like, you know, that's my job as a politician, is to try to convince you of things that But that's not normal in the Democratic Party anymore.
01:02:47.000I mean, Elizabeth Warren has made a big thing about not going on Fox and about having certain people taken off Twitter.
01:02:56.000And I think that's increasingly the sort of line of thought...
01:03:03.000In mainstream Democratic Party thought now is that we're just going to rule out whatever that is, 47% of the electorate, we're just not going to talk to them anymore.
01:03:59.000You know, you're fucking with the reality of life and you're saying it in these sentences.
01:04:05.000You're printing it out in these paragraphs as fact and you're sending it out there irresponsibly.
01:04:10.000And it's just really strange that people don't understand the repercussions of that.
01:04:14.000Yeah, this is something we talk about on our podcast, Usefully It's All the Time, is that it's a catch-22, right?
01:04:21.000Like, you don't invite somebody like Tulsi Gabbard on to CNN, MSNBC, or they're kind of excluded from the same platforms the other politicians get.
01:07:59.000Social media gives you the illusion that you're having an impact in the world by Maybe getting somebody deplatformed or taken off Twitter or something like that.
01:08:08.000It feels like it's political action to people, but it's not.
01:08:12.000It's something that is open to people to do, but it's not the same as getting 60 members of the Senate to raise taxes on a corporation that's been evading them for 20 years.
01:08:30.000This, you know, getting some random person taken off the internet is just not change, you know, but people feel like it is and they want to do the right thing.
01:08:38.000So I get it, but no, it's not, you know, real political action, I don't think.
01:09:21.000And part of the reason why they go fucking bonkers is because they know that this guy doesn't give a fuck.
01:09:26.000And he's one of the rare ones who doesn't give a fuck.
01:09:28.000So when he goes up there, you know if he thinks something crazy about whatever it is, whatever protected group or whatever idea that he's not supposed to explore, that's not going to stop him at all.
01:09:40.000He's going to tell you exactly what he thinks about those things, regardless of all this woke blowback.
01:11:29.000But after the jerking off in front of women and all that stuff and him coming out and admitting it and then taking a bunch of time off, now he's a target.
01:11:38.000So now he does something like that and they're like, oh, he's alt-right now.
01:11:41.000Like, no, this is what he's always done.
01:12:33.000He just, the way he said it was easy to take and put in, you know, out of context, put it in quotes and turn him into an asshole.
01:12:42.000Yeah, but that's what comedy is, right?
01:12:44.000It's taking with people the thoughts that everybody has and vocalizing that thing, that forbidden thing, in a way that people can kind of come together over, right?
01:12:55.000I mean, I think that was a lot of what Richard Pryor's humor was about.
01:12:58.000He took a lot of the sort of uncomfortable race problems, right?
01:13:13.000But if you can't, if people are afraid to vocalize those things, if they think it's gonna, you know, ruin their career, I mean, I guess, you know, that makes it more interesting, right?
01:14:24.000And he said, you know, people say that we don't have as much freedom as we used to, but actually, all that, you know, the Communist Party has done is prevented us from writing badly.
01:14:35.000The only thing that's outlawed now is writing badly, right?
01:14:38.000And everybody laughed, but he was actually saying something pretty serious, which is that you can't write well unless you can, you know, screw up, too.
01:16:59.000And so they're, you know, a thousand percent less interesting because they're, I mean, I remember covering campaign in 2004 and I saw Dennis Kucinich give a speech somewhere and he was going from, I think,
01:17:32.000And they're afraid to be around people and just behave like people, which is not good, I don't think.
01:17:39.000It's the weirdest time ever to be a politician because it's basically you've got this one guy who made it through being hugely flawed and just going, ah, fucking locker room talk.
01:17:52.000And everyone's like, well, yeah, it is locker room talk, I guess.
01:18:09.000And you can't replicate the way Trump does this.
01:18:13.000You know, Trump is – he was born this way.
01:18:15.000There's like a thing going on in his head.
01:18:16.000Like he is – You know, pathologically driven to behave in a certain way, and he's not going to be cowed by the way, you know, people are of a social media, because he just doesn't think that way.
01:18:50.000We're not supposed to draw conclusions about what might be going on pharmaceutically with somebody, but I would say just watch Donald Trump's performance after the results of the Super Tuesday rolled in in 2016. Let's hear some of that.
01:19:06.000First of all, the Chris Christie is hilarious.
01:19:07.000...watch Hillary's speech and she's talking about wages have been poor and everything's poor and everything's doing badly but we're going to make it.
01:20:42.000I think people who – it's not good for a writer because writing is one of these things where one of the most important things is being able to step back and – And ask, am I full of shit here?
01:20:54.000Are my jokes as funny as I think they are?
01:20:56.000Once that mechanism starts to go wrong, you're really lost as a writer, right?
01:21:03.000Because you're not in front of an audience.
01:21:05.000You're with yourself in front of a computer.
01:21:07.000So I don't think speed is a great drug.
01:21:37.000Trump was sitting in his office eating a...
01:21:39.000It was that famous photo where he's like, I love Hispanics, where he's eating a taco bowl at Trump Tower, and behind him there's an open drawer, and in that open drawer is boxes of Sudafed.
01:21:50.000And Sudafed gives you a low-level buzz.
01:21:58.000This is why you used to have to go to CVS to buy this stuff.
01:22:03.000You used to have to give your driver's license because they want to make sure you're not cooking meth.
01:22:08.000You're not buying 10 boxes of it at a time and cooking up a batch.
01:22:12.000Yeah, if you're in a hall or in Kentucky and you go in and get 20 boxes of Sudafed, I think pretty much people know what you're doing there.
01:22:37.000He wrote a series of tweets that there was a very specific Dwayne Reed Pharmacy where Trump got amphetamines for something that was in quotes called metabolic disorder.
01:24:39.000Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing I will say is that when you're covering stories, sometimes you hear things and you know they're pretty solid, but it's not quite reportable because the person won't put their name on it, or, you know, you're not 100% sure that the document is a real document,
01:24:57.000maybe it's a photocopy, and that can be very, very tough for reporters, because they know something's true, but they can't And social media has eliminated a barrier that we used to have.
01:25:08.000We used to have to go through editors and fact checkers.
01:25:11.000And now, you know, you're on Twitter, you can just kind of, you know, or you can hint at something, you know, and I think that's something you don't want to get into as a reporter too much.
01:25:22.000Yeah, that's a weird use of social media, right?
01:25:24.000It's like sort of a slippery escape from journalistic rules.
01:25:31.000Or you can insinuate that somebody did X, Y, and Z, or you can use terms that are a little bit sloppy.
01:25:40.000But it seems like they did admit that he took that stuff for diet.
01:25:44.000Yeah, so if you have the White House spokesperson saying that he took it for a short time for a diet, then you find that's a reportable story.
01:26:25.000Maybe you can go a lot longer on speed than people think.
01:26:29.000Maybe if you just do it the right way.
01:26:30.000But isn't that kind of the way history always works?
01:26:33.000It's like, again, not to go back to the Russian thing, but all the various terrible leaders of Russia, they all died of natural causes when they were 85, right?
01:26:41.000Whereas in a country where people get murdered and die of industrial accidents and bad health when they're 30 all the time.
01:27:20.000Yeah, and he doesn't have the stress impact, right?
01:27:23.000And that's the thing about speed, apparently, because of the fact that it makes you feel delusional, and it makes you feel like you're the fucking man.
01:27:30.000Like, you don't worry about what other people think.
01:27:53.000The fucking tweet that he made when he put the Trump Tower, I promise not to do this, and have a giant Trump Tower in the middle of Greenland, I was laughing my ass off.
01:28:00.000I'm like, love or hate, that is hilarious.
01:28:52.000He has these moments on the campaign trail where he'll be speaking, and these guys do the same speech over and over again, so they can kind of do it on cruise control.
01:29:02.000But every now and then, he'll stop in the middle of it, and this look of terror comes over, like, where am I? What town am I in?
01:34:02.000Like, it's like it's this chance to, like, shut off any possibility of getting over, like, 70 RPM. Like, we're gonna cut this bitch off at 70. There's no high function here.
01:34:12.000We're gonna cut it off at 70 and just let it rip.
01:34:19.000It's funny, the way you say that, everybody knows it's a dumb thing to say, right?
01:34:25.000I would talk to people at the crowds, and I'll talk to a 65-year-old grandmother, and you say, do you agree with everything that Trump says?
01:34:34.000Almost to the last, they all say, well, I wish he hadn't said this particular thing, but they're all there chanting, you know what I mean?
01:34:45.000I was in Cincinnati, and And I was late to one of his events, and I made the mistake that I couldn't drive in because they blocked off all the bridges, if you've ever been there, right?
01:35:30.000You know, Bernie and Warren have had big crowds.
01:35:34.000Bernie had a 25,000-person crowd in Queens a couple of weeks ago.
01:35:40.000You'll see crowds that big, but Trump's crowds are just...
01:35:44.000Dating back to 2016, they're just consistently huge everywhere.
01:35:48.000And again, this gets back to what I was saying before, all the reporters saw this and they all saw that Hillary was having real trouble getting four and five thousand people into her events.
01:35:59.000And so we all, you know, we were all talking to each other like, that's got to be a thing that's going to, you know, play a role in the election eventually.
01:36:07.000But nobody kind of brought it up or they explained it away.
01:36:09.000Well, I think they felt like if you discussed it and brought it up, that somehow or another you were contributing to Trump winning.
01:36:20.000Right, but that's a fallacious way to look at it.
01:36:23.000Because covering up the reality of the situation, I think, created a false sense of security for Democrats.
01:36:29.000They thought they were going to win by a landslide, right?
01:36:31.000That's what everybody was saying, but it wasn't true.
01:36:34.000I mean, there were serious red flags throughout the campaign for Hillary, and people, I think, were too afraid to bring up a lot of this stuff because they didn't want to be seen as helping Trump.
01:36:44.000But that's not what the business is about.
01:37:33.000Like, if some canny entrepreneur were to do that and that were to bring back the business, that or, you know, journalism has always been kind of quasi-subsidized in this country.
01:37:42.000You know, going back to the Pony Express, newspapers were carried free across to the West, right?
01:38:08.000There's no subsidy really for news anymore.
01:38:10.000I'm not necessarily sure I agree with that being the way to go, but there has to be something, because right now the financial pressure to be bad is just too great.
01:38:23.000Sorry to go on this, but when I came from the business, when the money started getting tighter, the first thing they got rid of were the long-form investigative reporters.
01:38:33.000You couldn't just hire somebody to work on a story for three months anymore because you needed them to do content all the time.
01:38:38.000Then they got rid of the fact checkers, which had another serious problem.
01:38:43.000And so now the money's so tight that they just have these people doing clickbait all the time and they're not doing real reporting.
01:38:50.000And so they have to fix the money problem.
01:38:55.000Because the stuff that you wrote about the banking crisis was my favorite coverage of it, and the most relatable and understandable, and the way you spelled everything out.
01:41:07.000I probably would have abandoned it earlier.
01:41:08.000But listening to it in podcast form, listening to actual conversations from these people, listening to people's interpretations of these conversations, Listening to people that were there at the time, telling stories about when they knew things were weird, when they started noticing there's tests that were incorrect,
01:41:28.000that they were covering up, that kind of shit.
01:41:31.000You can do that now with something like this, and I think that one of the good things about podcasts, too, is you don't need anybody to tell you that you could publish this.
01:42:42.000But the flip side of that is that they're not investing in stuff like international news in the way they used to.
01:42:50.000When I came up in the business, every bureau, every big network had bureaus in every major city around the world, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, whatever it is, right?
01:43:48.000Or Making a Murderer was another one I think was really good.
01:43:52.000That's something that happens all over the place.
01:43:54.000You have these criminal justice cases and terrible injustices happen.
01:43:59.000And if you really tell the whole story and make characters out of people and invest the time and energy to tell it well, people still like really good storytelling.
01:44:12.000But I think within the news business, they have this belief, their hard-headed belief, that people can't handle difficult material, and I don't know why that is.
01:44:25.000I mean, I think there's a large number of people that aren't satisfied intellectually by a lot of the stuff they're being spoon-fed.
01:44:32.000And they think that because the vast majority of things that are commercially viable are short attention span things, I think it's like this real sloppy way of thinking, non-risk-taking way of thinking.
01:44:45.000They're like, listen, this is how people consume things.
01:44:47.000You've got to give them like a music video style editing or they just tune out.
01:45:17.000And you're absolutely right about the thirst for something else.
01:45:23.000And again, I think when people turn on most news products, they're getting this predictable set of things and that doesn't quench that thirst for them.
01:45:34.000They're not being challenged in any way.
01:45:36.000They're not seeing different sides of a topic.
01:45:39.000You're not approaching covering a subject honestly by genuinely exploring the idea that people you may have thought were bad are right or people you may have thought are good or wrong.
01:47:03.000And it wasn't until much later that it became this hot thing that everybody was watching.
01:47:08.000And you wouldn't, so that wouldn't happen now, right?
01:47:10.000Like if reporters were on a story, if it didn't catch fire within the first couple of passes, your editor's probably going to take you off it now.
01:47:20.000What was that story that the New York Times worked on about Trump and they worked on it for a long time and it was released and went in and out of the news cycle in a matter of days and nobody gave a fuck?
01:48:45.000It's such a strange trap to fall into.
01:48:48.000And there's also the other thing, which is the litigation problem.
01:48:54.000And this is another thing I wrote about in the book, is that there was a series of cases in the 80s and 90s where reporters kind of took on big companies.
01:49:01.000The Chiquita Banana thing that the Cincinnati Enquirer did.
01:49:05.000Remember the movie The Insider about Brian and Williamson, the tobacco company, CBS, right?
01:49:12.000There was another one with Monsanto in Florida where some Fox reporters went after Monsanto.
01:49:36.000We're not going to get more audience from that, you know?
01:49:38.000So, now if you watch consumer reporting, like a small TV station, usually they're gonna bang on some little Chinese restaurant that has roaches or something like that.
01:49:49.000They're not gonna go after Monsanto or Chiquita Banana because there's no point.
01:49:57.000It's too much of a risk, so they just don't do it.
01:50:00.000And that's another thing that's gone wrong with reporting.
01:50:04.000The economic benefit of going after a powerful adversary isn't there anymore.
01:52:15.000And, you know, I think there are a lot of journalists who kind of say the same thing.
01:52:19.000We all kind of talk amongst ourselves, which is, you know, the job as we knew it is kind of being phased out and changed into something else.
01:52:28.000And that's not a good thing, you know, because people do need, in tough times, people need the press, you know, as ridiculous as that sounds now.
01:54:08.000You see that kind of personality who just wants to take the truth and rub it in somebody's face.
01:54:13.000But then after all the president's men, it became this sexy thing to be a journalist.
01:54:19.000And you saw a lot of people from my generation who...
01:54:22.000I went into journalism because they wanted to be close to politicians and hang out with them It's kind of like the primary colors thing, right?
01:54:29.000Where you see people who they just want to have a beer with the presidential candidate.
01:54:34.000And that's totally different from what it used to be.
01:54:37.000So now we're on the wrong side of the rope line.
01:55:17.000And it's a great example of someone who knew that they weren't a part of that system so they could talk about it as an outsider.
01:55:25.000He knew he was only going to be covering it for a year, so he just went in, guns blazing, got everybody fucked up, drinking on the bus, making everybody do acid.
01:55:37.000I don't have any friends I have to keep, you know?
01:55:40.000So I'm going to tell you everything that I see, and fuck it.
01:55:44.000And that's a real problem in reporting.
01:55:46.000When you're in a beat for too long, you end up developing unhealthy relationships with sources, and you end up in a position where you're not going to burn the people who you're dependent on to get your information out.
01:55:58.000And when that happens to reporters, I think that's one of the reasons it's good to kind of cycle through different topics over the course of your career.
01:56:07.000If you get stuck in the same beat too long, eventually you fall into that trap.
01:56:12.000And Thompson, of course, never did that.
01:56:14.000Every story that he covered was, he let it all hang out and just said whatever the hell he thought and he let the chips fall where they may.
01:56:23.000And that's kind of the way, I mean, you can't do that all the time probably, but I think that's the thing.
01:56:35.000I mean, that book was so great on so many levels.
01:56:38.000I always thought of it as being also kind of like a novel, because it's this story about this person who's obsessed with finding meaning and truth, but he goes to the most fake place on earth, which is the campaign trail, to look for it.
01:56:54.000And so all these depictions of all these terrible lying people, They're just so hilarious.
01:56:59.000And so it's kind of, you know, it's almost like a Franz Kafka novel.
01:57:23.000When he was on the Dick Cavett show, and Dick Cavett asked him about it, he goes, well, there's a rumor that he was on Ibogaine, and I started that rumor.
01:57:37.000I mean, it's just, he, like, literally, that he got in that guy's head.
01:58:21.000Yeah, but also he had this very, very sort of aggressively caricaturizing way of looking at politics and politicians, and that wouldn't go over that well now either.
01:58:36.000Like, people don't want you to rip on the process as much as he did in that book, so it was great.
02:00:35.000Especially because I'm writing for the same magazine and covering a lot of the same topics, you have to immediately realize that you can't do what he did.
02:00:45.000Thompson's writing was incredibly ambitious and unique.
02:00:48.000He was using a lot of the same techniques that the great fiction writers use.
02:01:58.000I mean, oddly enough, I think shows like yours and the kind of proliferation of what you're talking about with podcasts The great thing about the internet, there are lots of bad things, but the great thing about it is that it's provided a way for people to just have an audience if they're good,
02:02:26.000And so that's what I think is going to happen, is that people are going to crack the code of what kind of journalism people want.
02:02:33.000And they're going to create something that people are going to flock to.
02:02:37.000And I don't have a lot of faith that CBS, MSNBC, ABC, CNN, that they're going to figure it out.
02:02:46.000Like, I think it's going to be some independent kind of voice that is going to come up with something, a new formula.
02:02:52.000And people are, that is going to rise up, you know?
02:02:55.000I mean, you've seen it a little bit with things like the Young Turks, you know, although they've changed a little bit.
02:03:04.000But they figured out that if you provide something that's an alternative from the usual thing, that you can get a viable functioning business a lot faster than you used to be able to.
02:03:17.000You know, I think they've kind of become a little bit more in the direction of a traditional news organization than they were originally, maybe.
02:03:30.000I don't watch it as much as I used to, so maybe I shouldn't say that.
02:03:34.000But, you know, again, the ability to do that is a lot different than it used to be.
02:03:40.000In order to have an independent journalism outlet, you used to have to, for instance, put out your own newspaper, do your own distribution, do your own printing, do your own design.
02:03:49.000All that stuff cost a ton of money, and it was very, very hard to do it without big corporate sponsors.
02:03:56.000Now anybody with a good idea can pretty much do something, so I have a lot of hope that somebody's going to figure it out.