Glenn Greenwald is a journalist living in New York City and reporting from Brazil. In this episode, we talk about his life in Brazil, what it's like to be a journalist there, and why he loves it there. We also talk about what it s like being a journalist in a foreign country like Brazil, and how it s different from the rest of the world. Glenn also talks about his experience covering the Edward Snowden scandal, and what it was like reporting for the Guardian and the New York Times in the early days of the Snowden era, when he first broke the story of the CIA leaker Edward Snowden. And he talks about the moment he thought he d become a spy for the first time, in the wake of the massive Edward Snowden leak. We also discuss the dangers of living in the shadow of the U.S. government, and the work he did breaking the Snowden story in the aftermath of the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast, and we hope you enjoy it! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don t forget to leave us a rating and review! It helps us spread the word to your friends and family about what we're doing! Cheers, Joe, Glenn, and everyone else! - The Besties. - Tom, Jake, Alyssa and Joe Thanks, Tom, Caitie, Alex, Sarah, and Sarah, Sarah and the crew at The Good Fight Podcast. Thank you, Joe and Sarah - Thank you so much for listening and supporting us, and thank you for being a friend of The Good Morning America. We really appreciate it, Thank you all of your support and support us, we really appreciate you, we're grateful for all of the support we've got a lot of good vibes, we appreciate it. <3 - Cheers - Your support is so much, thank you, Sarah Goodness, Good Luck, Good Morning, and Good Luck! - Your Support Us, Good Blessings, Thank You, Your Support us, Good Day, Good Night, Good Life, Good Talk, Good Rest, Good Work, and Much Love, Goodbye, Blessings - Pura Vida, Cheers. - PRAISE YOU, MRS. - Sarah, Jude, Kristy, Amy, ETC.
00:01:38.000So bursting full of vibrancy and energy and potential and uniqueness that I'm always kind of optimistic about it, no matter how grim things seem to be.
00:02:19.000Yeah, you know, it's funny that it is, I mean, it's a culture, as you say, where things are, where the people are super nice.
00:02:25.000And before I lived here, I lived in, you know, Manhattan, where I lived and worked, which is pretty much the exact polar opposite of Brazil in terms of the mentality of the people.
00:02:34.000I remember, you know, I used to come to Rio when I first started coming here, you would go to the grocery store or the supermarket, and there'd be a line of like eight people.
00:02:44.000And the people in line would just stop and chat with the cashier for like three minutes.
00:02:50.000And I would be ready to have an aneurysm because I'd come from Manhattan where if you're behind somebody in the ATM line and they accidentally put a wrong button or the wrong password, you want to murder them for wasting four seconds of your life.
00:03:04.000And then after a while, you know, I started realizing, look, if I'm going to live here, I need to accept that kind of cultural vibe.
00:03:10.000And it really just taught me a lot about the need not to have to maximize the utility of every moment.
00:03:16.000Yeah, I have a friend who moved down there from Los Angeles to do jiu-jitsu, and he said the first thing you have to accept is that you're on Brazil time.
00:03:26.000If you need anything to get done, if you need a plumber and he's supposed to be there at 10, he might not be there until 1. And when he's there, he's going to be real casual about it, and it might not get done for weeks and weeks, something that you can get done in L.A. in a couple of hours.
00:05:15.000You know, of the most sensitive documents possessed by the most powerful government on the planet, the most secretive agency within that government.
00:05:25.000And I would carry them on my person at all times.
00:05:27.000You know, I would go to the supermarket and just start laughing because on my back would be a backpack filled with, you know, top secret CIA and NSA documents.
00:05:35.000And obviously, there were a lot of people who...
00:05:38.000Wanted to get their hands on those documents, not just the US government to take them back, though they realized at some point that that would be impossible, but other governments, non-government actors.
00:05:50.000But then on top of that, you know, every story that we were doing was affecting markets, it was affecting diplomatic relations, so there was obviously a big, big interest in a lot of intelligence agencies around the world and what I was doing.
00:06:02.000And, you know, felt monitored all the time because I was.
00:06:07.000You know, not like the kind of paranoid feeling of monitoring, but the actual being monitored has been confirmed in a lot of different ways.
00:06:15.000But, you know, the biggest concern at the time was that the U.S. government, being the U.S. government, got very bullying and very threatening and was explicitly and implicitly, both in public and private, making clear that if I left Brazil...
00:06:29.000There was a good chance that they would try and arrest me.
00:06:31.000I mean, remember how extreme they were with Snowden?
00:06:34.000They brought down the plane of the president of Bolivia when he was coming back from Moscow on the suspicion that he might have been taking Snowden with them, and of course he wasn't, but that's how extreme they were.
00:06:45.000So I stayed in Brazil for about 10 months and didn't feel safe leaving.
00:06:50.000The Justice Department was telling my lawyers if he leaves and shows up at any airport, We're going to arrest him.
00:06:56.000And the Brazilian government was super protective of us because a lot of that Snowden reporting revealed how the NSA and the UK and Canada were spying on Brazilian institutions, Brazilian oil companies, the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff,
00:07:13.000So in Brazil, this reporting was looked at very favorably.
00:07:16.000And so the government, the Senate, offered a lot of protection.
00:07:19.000So I just felt very safe in Brazil and very unsafe elsewhere.
00:07:23.000Well, it's very nice that you felt safe in Brazil.
00:07:27.000It's very nice that they were protecting you.
00:07:29.000Do they have a history of monitoring their people the same way the United States does?
00:07:36.000Well, as I referenced earlier, the history of Brazil, the recent political history is a really dark one, but relevant to the US. In the 1950s, early 1960s, they were building the first really vibrant democracy in Latin America,
00:07:53.000and they were steadfastly attempting to remain neutral in the endless Soviet Union-US Cold War.
00:08:00.000But in 1963, 1964, they had this kind of center-left president That the US thought was becoming a little too close to Moscow, a little bit too socialist.
00:08:10.000Nothing communist, but just very kind of mild reforms like rent control and land reform and some nationalization of companies to try and assuage the really brutal income inequality that has plagued the country forever.
00:08:26.000And so the U.S. government, first under John Kennedy and then under Lyndon Johnson, worked with right-wing Brazilian generals to overthrow that democratically elected government violently.
00:08:34.000And they imposed a military dictatorship for the next 21 years, of which the current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, was a part as an army captain.
00:08:45.000Dissidents were murdered, journalists were killed and exiled.
00:08:50.000Everybody was spied upon with the help of the CIA and MI5 and MI6 in the UK. And so a lot of that kind of endures, that relationship between the CIA and the Brazilian government.
00:09:01.000But since 1985, when it democratized, it's become once again a model of a liberal democracy.
00:09:08.000So no government in the world is obsessed with spying on the world like the US is.
00:09:13.000But yeah, there's a pretty dark underbelly, like there is in any major country in Brazil, of kind of like a deep state or an intelligence community, whatever you want to call it, that definitely uses the dark arts to maintain control over the population.
00:09:28.000When you hit send, when you finally released, when you put that story out, what was the feeling like?
00:09:35.000Was there ever a, oh shit, what have I done moment?
00:09:58.000I mean, obviously, I knew it was going to be one of the biggest stories of that generation, if not the biggest.
00:10:04.000But And I had spent years, Joe, writing about the NSA and kind of trying to warn people that it seemed like it was being a lot more invasive and a lot more aggressive about monitoring our private communications and our private activities domestically than either the law permitted or anyone knew.
00:10:23.000But it was very difficult to sound that alarm because everything was done behind a wall of secrecy.
00:10:28.000And so when I finally got these documents in my hand, You know, it's like the dream, right?
00:10:34.000It's why you go into journalism, but especially for me to be able to show the world that everything was so much more extreme than even I thought, that I just wanted to get them out in the world as soon as possible.
00:10:45.000Like, any delay at all on the part of The Guardian, which was the newspaper with which I was working at the time, and reporting, you know, drove me into a rage.
00:10:53.000I just felt like the world deserved to see these documents.
00:10:56.000And also, you know, I was so inspired by...
00:11:42.000I thought, you know, if he's willing to go to prison for the rest of his life, and he chose me to work with him, you know, the courage kind of became infectious.
00:11:52.000And we kind of adopted this trench bunker mentality, like we were in this together, and we were going to fight everybody.
00:11:59.000And that became the energy much more, and it kind of drowned out the fears that probably were rational for us to have.
00:12:04.000I felt very honored and very, very fortunate to be able to talk to him.
00:12:11.000And I think he's a very noble person, unusually noble.
00:12:16.000And in long-form conversations, if there was any hint of something different, I really believe it would have leaked out.
00:12:26.000And I think history, when we look upon this case, I mean, the documentary was pretty excellent that showed all the moments leading up to you releasing the story.
00:12:38.000But I think these conversations with him, I just feel very fortunate Have that platform where he's willing to come on and talk for hours at a time and express his thoughts on spying in general, national security issues, and all these situations that he faced up to and now currently because of that.
00:13:04.000It's embarrassing that this is the world that we live in, that this is the country that we live in, that that man, who I really genuinely believe is a hero, is now a Russian citizen forever.
00:13:17.000Yeah, I mean, hopefully there's an opportunity, just because of all the bizarre, vindictive I'm hoping there's an opportunity to persuade Trump after the election,
00:13:45.000particularly if he loses, but even if he doesn't, that he should follow through on what he's now twice bizarrely raised on his own, which was the prospect of pardoning Snowden.
00:13:54.000It's probably my top priority in the world at the moment.
00:13:57.000And the reason is what you just said, which is, you know, we're so accustomed to people doing things for just misguided reasons, corrupted reasons,
00:14:14.000people lying and deceiving about why they're doing things, about presenting a false version of who they are.
00:14:22.000And that's the thing is, you know, you talk to him for those hours.
00:14:25.000When I got to Hong Kong, you know, before becoming a journalist, I was a litigator in Manhattan and I used those skills.
00:14:32.000You know, I kind of created a little mini Guantanamo where I just put him in front of me and just questioned him for eight hours straight, three straight days, without letting him even have a glass of water or go to the bathroom because I really wanted to know what was actually motivating him.
00:14:47.000Who was this person to whom I was about to tie myself in my Reputation and credibility eternally.
00:14:57.000And the thing about it, too, that's so amazing about it is that oftentimes people who leak secrets or who become a source that wants to expose secrets and are willing to go to prison are often kind of fucked up people.
00:16:22.000He's probably the person or one of the people certainly I admire most in this world in all the time I've lived.
00:16:29.000And what's so unbelievable, people always say to me, oh, poor Snowden, he's trapped in Russia, he can't come home, he's facing multiple felony charges, he's been separated from his, all of which is true.
00:16:41.000But, like, I also always say that he's the person who I know in this world who, when he puts his head down on his pillow at night, he falls asleep most easily.
00:16:53.000Because there's something about knowing that you face this dangerous choice and you chose the right thing.
00:17:00.000I mean, in Hong Kong, as I said, I was never sleeping.
00:17:03.000My colleague or Poitras was never sleeping.
00:17:05.000We were sleeping, like, an hour or two with the aid of very strong sleep narcotics.
00:17:10.000And, you know, he would say, like at 9.30, he would yawn.
00:17:14.000He would say, okay, guys, I think I'm going to hit the hay.
00:17:57.000I was always waiting for the door to be kicked in at any moment, you know, and for him, at least, if not the rest of us, you know, me and Laura, to be taken away.
00:18:08.000Like I said, our working assumption the whole time was that as excited as I was, the one thing that was kind of a dark cloud that hovered over it all the time was that this person who I had now become connected with and developed an admiration for,
00:18:23.000I was certain at any moment he was going to be in the hands of the US government.
00:18:28.000And the next time I would see him would be on television in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a courtroom, getting ready to be sentenced to like 50 years in prison in one of those hell holes that the U.S. specializes in where you spend 23 and a half hours a day alone in your cell.
00:18:44.000And you have 30 minutes a day where you get to walk in a little room in the sun to satisfy legal requirements.
00:18:51.000And that was going to be him for the rest of his life.
00:18:54.000I mean, he almost did end up that way.
00:18:56.000So for me, I was concerned for him, stressed for him, but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose.
00:19:05.000I mean, it wasn't like, you know, and that was really important for me to know that he had thought through all the likely consequences.
00:19:12.000I didn't want to feel like I was using somebody's work product who hadn't given full thought to what it is that they had gotten themselves into.
00:19:23.000And it was only once I became very, you know, he could cite the statutes with which they were going to charge him and what the legal defenses that were available were.
00:19:31.000So he had given extreme thought to this.
00:19:34.000He's an adult and he made that choice.
00:19:41.000It's also stunning the lack of anger from the American people, the apathy and the sort of just acceptance that even though it has been deemed illegal, what the NSA was doing, that he exposed illegal activity,
00:19:57.000that they still would punish him if they caught him.
00:20:06.000If government is a group of people that are allowed to do something that has absolutely been deemed illegal by the courts, and if you catch them doing this illegal thing and then report it and everyone agrees that it's wrong, everyone agrees it's unconstitutional,
00:20:23.000but yet if they get you they will still put you in jail.
00:20:31.000Not only is the person who exposes what are crimes, what courts have said are crimes, not only is that person punished as though they've done something wrong, when in reality they're owed the gratitude, right, of The entire country for stopping criminal spying by the government on our population domestically,
00:20:53.000which was one of the primary preoccupations of the American Revolution.
00:20:59.000It was about the king not being able to send his goons into your house and into your neighborhoods and search through your papers unless they had a proven reason to do so approved by a court.
00:22:14.000That's a felony just to lie to the Senate, let alone to do it.
00:22:17.000And not only was James Clapper never prosecuted, he was never fired, he served out his term as President Obama's senior national security official.
00:22:26.000He works at CNN, disseminating the news.
00:22:29.000To the American public after he got caught fucking lying about the most important question he's ever been asked.
00:22:37.000That's how you know that you live in a country that, despite the facade of democracy, has gone very, very off course.
00:22:46.000The one thing that I always think about is, if you kind of start from scratch and think about what a healthy government would be, in a healthy government...
00:22:56.000The population would know everything about what the government is doing, right?
00:23:23.000That's what the basic foundation of a healthy society would be.
00:23:26.000The United States has completely reversed that, not just the US, but the West, generally, since the 9-11 attacks, where everything that they do is presumptively secret.
00:23:38.000We know almost nothing about what they do except what they decide to tell us.
00:23:41.000Most of what they do is marked classified in secret and hidden, whereas because of the spying apparatus that they built, they know everything about what we do.
00:23:48.000They know with whom we communicate, they know what we say, they know where we go.
00:23:51.000It's completely reversed what a free and healthy society ought to be, and that more than anything is what Snowden exposed.
00:24:00.000And what's stunning to me is that he's now a citizen of Russia.
00:24:14.000So he has the equivalent of a green card, but he's very emphatic that he's still a U.S. citizen and intends always to be.
00:24:20.000And it's sort of out of the public consciousness.
00:24:22.000I mean, unless he does an interview with you or with me or with some other publication or something, and then briefly it's in the public's eye for a moment.
00:24:32.000It's a small amount of people that seem to be outraged.
00:24:35.000A small population also that are outraged that Julian Assange, if they do extradite him to America, they plan on putting him in a supermax prison.
00:24:44.000For, again, exposing crime, doing what a journalist is supposed to do.
00:24:49.000I mean, and everyone's apathetic about it.
00:24:52.000It's very bizarre, and it speaks to the lack of trust that we have in mainstream media today.
00:25:01.000Because they're not up in arms about this.
00:25:03.000There's no giant pieces on CNN running on a daily basis.
00:25:06.000This is not something that everybody has got on their news feed on their phone every day.
00:25:25.000And you know what is done to obscure that fact that you just described accurately?
00:25:33.000There's like a pretense of dissent, right?
00:25:36.000So you have CNN or MSNBC or like the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post where people ostensibly express different opinions and have debates and arguments.
00:25:48.000But they're in extremely constrained...
00:26:27.000They don't have the freedom to be dissidents.
00:26:30.000The U.S. government has succeeded in keeping Julian Assange in prison for a year and a half now.
00:26:37.000There's no chance he's going to get out of a British prison, even if he wins every one of his appeals and hearings for at least another two to three years.
00:26:44.000And if he doesn't, he'll be extradited to the U.S. and go to prison for the rest of his life.
00:26:47.000And absent a pardon by Trump, Snowden will be in exile for the rest of his life.
00:26:54.000And if the U.S. government could get their hands on him, They would put him in the same place that they want to put Julian Assange because in reality, actual dissidents, actual activism against the US government and its power centers is barred and prohibited and punished.
00:27:11.000That is just the reality of the United States and it is tyrannical.
00:27:17.000The other thing I just want to say is the worst scumbags on all of this Like, isn't necessarily the population, right?
00:27:25.000Like, I don't really blame people who, you know, have to go to work and work two jobs and have kids and are barely scraping by, which is the majority of the population, especially now, for not thinking much about Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.
00:28:28.000And not only don't journalists care much about what's being done to Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, most of them, if you actually ask them and talk to them about it, will justify and defend the fact that they ought to be in prison.
00:28:39.000Because what they really are are servants of the government and not what they pretend to be.
00:28:43.000So Joe Biden was responsible for blocking his asylum to other countries?
00:28:51.000I mean, you know, it's not like they were uniquely bad.
00:28:54.000I mean, they were carrying out the policy of the Obama administration, but it was Joe Biden who took the lead.
00:29:00.000One of the first things that he did was, when Snowden left Hong Kong, the ticket that he had was Moscow, Havana, and then he was going to go to Ecuador, where he was going to get asylum.
00:29:11.000And Joe Biden called the Cuban government and said, if you allow him safe passage, which they had already granted him...
00:29:17.000You're going to suffer consequences like you've never experienced from the US government before.
00:29:22.000So they withdrew their safe passage guarantee.
00:29:25.000And then he applied to countries that frequently grant asylum to whistleblowers like Sweden, Finland, even Germany and France, where there were also a lot of revelations that were looked upon favorably because he was showing those populations how the NSA was spying on them.
00:30:04.000He talked about, very clearly, protecting whistleblowers.
00:30:09.000And this is a big part of what he was running on.
00:30:13.000What do you think happens when you get in office?
00:30:16.000I mean, I'm a fan of the way Obama communicates.
00:30:20.000I'm a fan of what he represents as a president.
00:30:22.000He was just so eloquent and such a great statesman.
00:30:26.000And everyone had so much hope for what he was going to do once he got into office.
00:30:30.000But his administration was one of the worst for whistleblowers ever.
00:30:34.000What do you think happens when you get in there?
00:30:37.000I mean, do you think it's like the Bill Hicks bit where they show you an angle of the Kennedy assassination that you've never seen before, and then they ask you, are there any questions?
00:30:49.000I mean, I don't want to be too maximalist in the conspiracy theorizing, but...
00:30:59.000I'll just give you a quick vignette, a little anecdote, just to introduce my view of this, which is in January of 2017, days before Trump was inaugurated, Chuck Schumer went on The Rachel Maddow Show.
00:31:20.000And Trump had been posting a bunch of shocking stuff on Twitter, mocking the CIA for having gotten Iraq so wrong, which they did, because he was angry at them because they were essentially leaking against his administration before it even began and were blaming Russia for his election victory,
00:31:40.000So he started criticizing the CIA. And Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow's show, and she asked him about it, and he said...
00:31:48.000Morality and ethics aside of doing that, for a hard-nosed businessman like Trump claims to be, you have to be the biggest imbecile in the world to stand up to and challenge and attack the intelligence community because nobody has more weapons to destroy you if you do that than they do.
00:32:07.000And it was kind of like a throwaway line, but in reality it was one of the most important and candid admissions of how the government actually works that has ever been broadcast, certainly on that shitty network, but really like on TV ever.
00:32:18.000Because he was essentially saying there's this permanent power faction, which Dwight Eisenhower warned about, you know, in 1961 when he was leaving the presidency, called it the military industrial complex.
00:32:29.000But there's this permanent power faction that is much more powerful than the officials we elect.
00:32:35.000And who stay in Washington and exert power, regardless of the outcome of elections, who you can't challenge or impede because they'll destroy you.
00:32:46.000And so, you know, Obama, despite the lofty rhetoric and like the visionary posturing, which I also don't want to say fell for, but was kind of inspired by in 2007, has always been a very We're good to go.
00:33:17.000I have these ambitious agenda items like healthcare and other things, and I only can get them done if I'm not going to be provoking the ire of the CIA, which is why, for example, he also said during the campaign he would consider prosecuting the people in the CIA who tortured helpless detainees and then quickly said,
00:33:36.000I'm going to give them all immunity because he didn't want to be at war with the CIA. So I think that's part of it, right?
00:33:40.000Like when someone like Julian Assange, someone like Edward Snowden leaks these secrets, it's It's not Obama necessarily, but it's the CIA, the Justice Department, the NSA, the FBI demanding, saying, this is our priority.
00:33:51.000You need to punish these people or we're going to have an endless series of leaks.
00:33:56.000So part of it is just that kind of calculation, like a very pragmatic calculation.
00:34:00.000Like, look, I may be president, but I'm not actually the only one who wields a lot of power in this town.
00:34:05.000And then I think the other part of it is...
00:34:08.000When you become president and you're sitting in that chair and you have the unprecedented and incomparable power of the U.S. government at your disposal, if you believe too much in your own righteousness,
00:34:23.000if you believe that you're a benevolent and noble person using that power for benevolent and noble ends, then you start to believe that anyone who stands in your way and is impeding you is somebody who inherently Is ill-intentioned or at least engaged in misconduct that ought to be sanctioned and punished.
00:34:46.000And I think that kind of became part of Obama's worldview too.
00:34:50.000Like it's one thing to champion whistleblowers when they're exposing George Bush and Dick Cheney's secrets.
00:34:55.000But when they're exposing Eric Holder and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton's secrets, it seems a lot less benevolent to somebody from Obama's sitting in his place.
00:35:08.000It is amazing that Schumer would make that statement on television.
00:35:19.000Trump being really dumb to fight with intelligence.
00:35:21.000It just seems like he would know better than to say that publicly, specifically to say that publicly on television.
00:35:29.000Yeah, I mean, I guess when you're Chuck Schumer and you're just like a creature who's lived in that sewer for decades and barely ever emerges, you know, to like breathe human air, like those things that, you know, are just part of your world so embedded in it that everyone knows,
00:35:46.000you forget that it's supposed to be hidden, that it's kind of shocking to other people.
00:36:26.000And he saw Trump doing that because Trump wasn't a creature of Washington and was kind of saying, like, he's being stupid.
00:36:33.000Well, Trump has such a tremendous ego, too.
00:36:36.000It doesn't seem like anybody is out of bounds for him.
00:36:39.000Like, it seems like he feels like he could shit on anyone.
00:36:43.000Like, anyone he's in some sort of conflict with is gonna get the wrath of his ire.
00:36:47.000It just doesn't seem like he feels anyone is above him or beyond reproach.
00:36:53.000Which I think was probably the primary factor in why a lot of people found him appealing in 2016. So if you have a lot of anger, a lot of just ambient rage towards institutions, not Democratic or Republican or left or right,
00:37:12.000just the power elite, and you have somebody who just...
00:37:17.000Dumps on them with such contempt and doesn't have the slightest regard for any of it.
00:37:50.000The more time goes on, and the more you pay attention to the difference between left-wing reporting and right-wing reporting, and you try to find, like, where's the reality in this?
00:38:45.000They're locked out of their Twitter account.
00:38:47.000In the week leading up to the election, the fourth largest newspaper, and I don't know if it's the oldest, but it's one of the oldest for sure.
00:38:56.000It was founded by Alexander Hamilton, is barred by Twitter, like the primary source of information for most people in journalism and politics, from posting information.
00:39:57.000Jamie actually had a really good point.
00:39:59.000I want to bring it up to you to see if this is possible.
00:40:03.000I've heard of people being able to hack into an iCloud account from time to time.
00:40:09.000If you had that ability to have the account hacked, you would need to clone it to a computer to then be able to decipher this material and then turn that into somewhere.
00:40:19.000You can't say you hacked the iCloud account.
00:40:22.000Is that possible that they then put it on a MacBook, turn it in, and say, oh, look what's on this MacBook?
00:40:29.000But they do have emails and signed receipts from Hunter Biden.
00:40:43.000So, you know, when we reported the Snowden archive, you know, like when we hit send that first time, like you asked me earlier, you know, there were millions of documents, right?
00:40:52.000We had a high degree of confidence in their authenticity because we had...
00:41:00.000You examine them from a metadata perspective to see if there's indicia of forgery or alteration.
00:41:07.000But you can never prove the negative that none of the documents has been altered or forged by Snowden or by somebody else.
00:41:14.000You just don't know for sure with 100% certainty until you hit publish.
00:41:20.000And The way that you ultimately find out for sure is if you publish that first report and the people that you're reporting about don't come back and say, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:41:35.000And it was when the NSA didn't say that that we, I mean, I don't think I've ever been so happy in my career and my life because that was proof that the archive was real because of course they would have said it.
00:42:18.000So just the fact alone that Biden has never denied either that the conversations are real or that Hunter actually brought his laptop to that Delaware repair store.
00:42:28.000And, you know, we've submitted questions.
00:42:29.000I've submitted questions to the Biden campaign and to Hunter Biden asking that question specifically.
00:42:34.000And they won't answer because, of course, they're fucking real.
00:42:38.000But it was the journalists, the media outlets like CNN that took the lead first in saying that this was Russian disinformation.
00:42:46.000You know, like the standard way to get rid of information that they don't want the public to believe.
00:42:52.000There was never any evidence that Russia had the slightest thing to do with it.
00:42:58.000You know, and as to your question, the provenance is a little unclear.
00:43:01.000Like, that is kind of a bizarre story, right?
00:43:03.000That, like, Hunter Biden brought in three laptops, never bothered to pick them up.
00:43:06.000The store owner, out of curiosity, looked in them once no one picked them up, saw that there was all this evidence of corruption and gave it to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani.
00:43:14.000I'm kind of skeptical of that story myself, but why isn't the Biden campaign denying that and saying, no, Hunter never has been to that store in his life.
00:44:10.000I don't think I've ever been as disgusted with my colleagues in my profession as I have been the last three weeks because of this story, and I'll tell you why.
00:44:16.000In general, journalists do not care about where material comes from if it's A, authentic and B, newsworthy.
00:44:26.000For example, in 2016, somebody mailed a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns to the New York Times.
00:44:37.000Just dropped it in the mail and sent it to their newsroom.
00:44:55.000But of course, they've reported on the content, as they should, because that's what journalists do.
00:44:59.000And when asked, when the lead reporter who's won two Pulitzers was asked by NPR, How can you report on a document when you don't even know who gave it to you or what their motives were?
00:45:09.000He said what I would say and what all journalists should say, which is I don't give a shit about The sources' motives.
00:45:17.000Sometimes you get great documents from sources who have terrible motives.
00:45:20.000You know, like they want to get vengeance on somebody.
00:45:23.000They feel, you know, like Deep Throat leaked about the Nixon administration to the Washington Post, not because he was a Snowden, not because he was noble, but because he was resentful that Nixon passed him over to be the director of the FBI. So...
00:45:36.000So this idea that journalists are using, like, oh my god, this might have come from Russia, therefore we shouldn't report it, is a complete corruption of the journalistic function.
00:45:46.000But the reality, Joe, why are we even talking about this?
00:46:19.000Everybody, essentially, is anti-Trump and pro-Biden, and they don't want to spend four years being accused of having helped Trump won like they were in 2016 when they reported on those emails that were leaked by the WikiLeaks.
00:46:34.000They don't want to be scorned in their social circles.
00:46:36.000And so they're willing to abdicate their journalistic function, which is reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world, Joe Biden, and In part because they want to manipulate and tinker with the election using journalism, but in much bigger part because they're scared of being yelled at on Twitter.
00:47:10.000They will print things that they have no idea whether or not they're true, if the CIA tells them to, or if they think they can get attention for it, or applause from their colleagues on Twitter.
00:47:22.000And I don't blame, you know, if you have faith in mainstream news institutions, you're really irrational.
00:47:27.000I'm so glad you said that a lot of them are not printing things because they're worried about being yelled at on Twitter.
00:47:36.000And self-censorship is one of the more eerie aspects of knowing that you can get deplatformed off of Twitter for things.
00:47:45.000And knowing that you can get yelled at or you can get Twitter mobbed because of your beliefs, because of standing up for something that may be correct but unpopular.
00:47:55.000What journalism is supposed to be is telling people what the facts are, giving people unbiased perspectives, objective perspectives on what is happening in the news and how this could possibly relate to their real lives.
00:48:54.000After Iowa, when he got his third place finished in Iowa, he was trying to excite his young, disappointed supporters, and he did that weird, primal scream, and they ruined him over it.
00:49:07.000If you've ever talked in front of a live audience, when people scream and cheer, it's so loud, you yell and you can't even hear your voice.
00:49:16.000You don't even realize how crazy it sounds.
00:49:18.000But then when you isolate that sound, and you take it just from the microphone, it sounds crazy.
00:49:35.000And remember, too, the context of that was, he was running for president in 2004, so it was 2003. And then into early 2004, when the primaries were, he was leading in the polls by 30 points all year long.
00:50:25.000All it was was, you know, he was kind of like from the Eugene McCarthy 1968 candidacy that was supported largely by young college kids, excited by an anti-war candidate.
00:50:34.000That was who Dean's supporters were, and they were traveling all over the country, going door to door on his behalf.
00:50:40.000And when he came in third place in Iowa, they were really disappointed he was trying to cheer them up.
00:50:45.000And they basically, just manipulating that footage, turned him overnight into someone who was mentally unstable and he never recovered from that.
00:50:56.000And it's crazy to see the difference between the way they're treating Biden.
00:51:01.000They're treating Biden with the most gentle, caressing hands.
00:51:08.000I've never seen more bias, more complete ignoring of some real problems with the way he communicates, with the things he says, with the lies that he says.
00:51:21.000For instance, during the debate, him saying that he never said that he was going to ban fracking.
00:51:37.000First of all, if you go and watch the very few interviews that he's given, I'm not saying this for a fact or to use hyperbole to make a point.
00:51:48.000I'm saying this because it's literally true.
00:51:49.000I don't think he's been asked a single hard question.
00:51:53.000This is somebody who's been in public life for 50 years.
00:51:57.000He was elected as a senator in 1972. He had to drop out of his first presidential race because of serial lying and plagiarism about his college record and about his academic We're good to go.
00:52:34.000You know that, like, I don't know, you probably have had that experience when you go and, like, you visit an old relative, like, one of your grandparents who's, like, in a nursing home.
00:52:41.000And, you know, you go in and, like, kind of, like, soften your voice so you don't, like, you don't want to be, like, feel, like, scare them or, like, feel abrasive.
00:52:49.000And, like, if they make kind of anything resembling a joke, like, you sort of fake laugh, right?
00:52:53.000Like, you're like, oh, that's what, like, that's how they talk to him, interviewers on television.
00:52:58.000They, like, treat him like an old, ailing grandparent This is the most amazing thing about this whole thing with cognitive decline, which anyone who watches him for 15 minutes knows is true.
00:53:13.000The people who were the first ones to disseminate that storyline We're not supporters of Bernie Sanders once the primary got down to Biden and Bernie.
00:53:26.000It was in 2018 and into 2019 when Biden was by far the leading Democratic candidate because of his name recognition and because of his eight years as vice president standing next to Obama.
00:53:38.000It was Democratic establishment operatives, strategists, consultants, just like that whole DC professional Democratic Party class Which was petrified that he was going to get the nomination because of his name recognition, because of the favorable sentiment within the party toward him because of Obama.
00:54:00.000I actually read an article about it once when I started talking about cognitive decline and people started saying, this is a shitty low blow.
00:54:08.000You're just doing this to sabotage his campaign to help Bernie.
00:54:12.000And I was like, are you fucking crazy?
00:54:14.000You're the ones who have spent the last year and a half on Morning Joe in the Washington Post op-ed pages.
00:54:21.000I don't know if you remember, but there was a CNN debate when all the Democratic candidates were still part of the process when...
00:54:29.000Julian Castro interrupted Biden and accused him of having contradicted what he had said three seconds ago.
00:54:36.000And he was like, Joe, did you just forget what you said 20 seconds ago?
00:54:40.000And then they interviewed Cory Booker and he said, yeah, you know, if you listen to Joe Biden, you really wonder whether he's capable of carrying the football over the...
00:54:48.000They were the ones petrified that he wouldn't be able to withstand the rigors of a campaign.
00:54:52.000The only thing that saved him was the coronavirus pandemic, which let him sit at home.
00:54:57.000But had it not been for that, their fears would have become true.
00:55:02.000And now they've declared what we can all see with our own eyes.
00:55:06.000And what they themselves are saying all this time, it's declared off limits to say it even though they're the ones who recognized first that it was true.
00:55:15.000And that's the kind of stuff that gets really creepy.
00:55:18.000When they have the power to manipulate and control and dictate the discourse to that extent.
00:55:23.000Well, it's like they've accepted the fact that people are putting out information and saving information for a very specific October surprise.
00:55:30.000So they're saying, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to deny this information.
00:55:34.000And when you're talking about the cognitive decline of Joe Biden, to highlight it and to make a series of, you know, a compilation of these gaffes, that would be bad for his campaign and we don't want him to lose.
00:56:58.000If you look at the podcasts that are succeeding and the way they succeed is that they don't just occupy a place on your TV that you accidentally stumble into.
00:57:18.000It is the people who have no interest in being part of that hegemonic media blob Who aren't concerned with affirming their pieties and their orthodoxies and in fact are in a lot of ways hostile to it or at least skeptical of it and eager to explore whether or not what they're saying is true because they don't trust any longer what they're hearing.
00:57:44.000And, you know, it is, like, if you go back to the Snowden story, right, one of the reasons Snowden did what he did, one of the reasons he was so horrified by this, you know, mass indiscriminate secret surveillance is because the idea of the internet, the promise of it,
00:58:00.000if you go back and read what internet enthusiasts were saying in the mid-90s and into the beginning of the century was, this is going to be the most unprecedented tool of liberation in And empowerment of people who don't have voices because it's going to enable people to communicate and disseminate information without having to rely on corporate structures that can afford printing presses or satellites for networks.
00:58:25.000And the problem became if you allow the government To turn it into this kind of tyrannical realm of surveillance, you ruin, you gut what is promising about it.
00:58:37.000And in fact, you degrade it into this threatening weapon.
00:58:41.000That's exactly how I see censorship by Facebook and Twitter.
00:58:45.000And what's amazing about this censorship by Silicon Valley now I've talked to Jack Dorsey quite a bit about this because he's someone who's a really interesting guy.
00:58:56.000He seeks out a lot of voices to hear from and to get input about.
00:59:00.000He cares about trying to make Twitter a positive force in the society, and he's torn in a lot of different directions by people demanding different things of him.
00:59:24.000Like if somebody calls someone on AT&T's telephone lines and plans a neo-Nazi rally or spreads Holocaust denialism, nobody expects AT&T to intervene and terminate that person's service or cut off the call.
00:59:40.000They just say we provide the ability for human beings to communicate and we don't The reason why they ended up censoring It's because mostly liberal activists and journalists demanded that they did so.
01:00:05.000They started saying to Facebook, how can you allow Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos, or then it became, once they were kicked off, you know, kind of more mainstream but still out of the norm kind of people, and increasingly they're just expanding the range of demands that they have for who needs to be silenced,
01:00:24.000and threatening congressional regulation if they don't do it, All kinds of recriminations.
01:00:31.000This responsibility to censor was foisted on these companies, but now that they're doing it, it's only going to grow.
01:00:38.000And I think this attempt by Twitter and Facebook to block this New York Post story is one of the most alarming things that has happened in years from a perspective of free discourse and free dissemination.
01:00:52.000The guy from Facebook who announced that the New York Post story was going to be suppressed, Spent the last 15 or 20 years before going to Facebook working as a Democratic Party operative in Washington.
01:01:04.000He worked for Senator Barbara Boxer and then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
01:01:09.000He's a Democratic operative, and he walks onto Twitter and says, we at Facebook are going to be suppressing this story pending our own investigation to determine it's Who would want Silicon Valley overlords, unaccountable, outside of the democratic process,
01:01:25.000Silicon Valley overlords to control our discourse?
01:01:28.000The answer is liberals do and journalists do and that's why they're doing it.
01:01:32.000It's just so stunning because liberals have always been synonymous with free speech and the First Amendment.
01:01:39.000The ACLU has always been about, I mean, if you think about a liberal organization, the ACLU is probably one of the most liberal organizations, you know, iconic liberal organizations.
01:01:50.000They've always been about supporting free speech, even if it's terrible.
01:01:53.000Support even neo-Nazi's ability to have free speech.
01:01:57.000I mean, it's been highly controversial to some people, but it's always been people on the left understood the value and the importance, the significance of free speech, the ability to accurately tell the truth,
01:02:13.000the ability to express yourself freely, the ability to tell all the facts, And now they're the ones that are suppressing it because they don't like the guy who's in power.
01:02:24.000Because we have this guy who's such a perfect symbol of all that is wrong with power, all that is wrong with someone being the president, with ego and lies and all the various things that people pin on Trump, and a lot of them accurate.
01:02:41.000He's become this enemy and he's such an iconic enemy that they've justified all these ways of combating him using principles that violate everything they supposedly stood for.
01:02:56.000I think Trump has broken the brains of so many people.
01:03:02.000Not in a temporary way, where it's all going to just recover instantly upon his departure, but it's going to endure permanently.
01:03:12.000First of all, when I was growing up, what shaped my political outlook Were a lot of the censorship debates in the 1980s.
01:03:22.000You know, I was growing up as a gay kid in the suburbs in the Reagan years.
01:03:26.000And with the moral majority, and you know, I remember like one big censorship controversy was Sinead O'Connor went on Saturday Night Live and she ripped up a picture of the Pope.
01:03:37.000Which is what the left and growing out of the 60s, it was like that's where the transgressive values were.
01:03:42.000Whatever the institutions of authority decree as being sacred and can't be said, people on the left pushed those limits and said, we're not going to obey your dictates.
01:03:53.000We're going to say exactly that, which is taboo, if for no other reason than just to establish our right to say it.
01:03:59.000And that became the framework for how these freedom of speech and freedom of expression conflicts played out.
01:04:07.000There's a new film out, a new documentary about Ira Glasser, who was the executive director of the ACLU from 1978 until 2001. And his first controversy was when the ACLU, which,
01:04:22.000you know, largely was filled with Jewish lawyers and supported by Jewish donors because it came out of this tradition of Jewish leftism in the United States that believed in free speech and civil liberties because, as a vulnerable minority, they knew that allowing the state to acquire the power of censorship Would eventually be turned on them.
01:04:41.000And so one of the most controversial cases they ever did, as you just alluded to, was they represented the right of neo-Nazis, actual Nazis, wearing swastika armbands, who applied for a permit to have a march in Skokie, Illinois, which was a town filled not just with Jews, but with tons of Holocaust survivors.
01:04:55.000Actual, you know, people who were in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in the camps and had tattoos on their arm, you know, the number of tattoos of survivors.
01:05:03.000And they said, we don't We don't want to be traumatized by watching Nazis march down our street with that uniform that terrorized us for all those years.
01:05:12.000And the ACLU, the Jewish lawyers and directors of the ACLU, defended them.
01:05:16.000And there's a film out, and I just interviewed him actually, where he says that...
01:05:23.000Not only was Jewish leftism supportive of free speech, but a lot of his closest allies at the time defending his decision to defend the right of white supremacists and neo-Nazis to march and to speak freely without government censorship were civil rights leaders, African American civil rights leaders,
01:05:40.000who also knew that if these precedents were permitted to take root against white supremacists first, the government would then turn, you know, the state of Alabama would say, we're not going to allow the NAACP to march through our streets.
01:05:50.000They are rabble-rousers and they incite violence and That was the tradition on the left that is being completely abandoned, not just, you know, in like standard mainstream liberal institutions, but even in the ACLU, which has a slew of new lawyers,
01:06:07.000under 30, under 35, millennials, Gen Z, activists who just don't believe in the core values of free speech in every institution, Joe, like in political activism, In media, for sure, obviously in academia,
01:06:23.000is being riven with this dispute between people who insist on the right to express views without being constrained or prevented or controlled by others.
01:06:37.000And people who believe that free speech is just not even close to the highest value and that when other values are in conflict with it, free speech has to give way.
01:06:46.000It is one of the, if not the most, kind of tumultuous conflicts of our time.
01:06:51.000It's so disturbing how little understanding they have of where this plays out.
01:06:57.000And that censorship in any form, whether you censor someone who you don't like, like Milo Yiannopoulos, It will eventually lead to someone who's less offensive than him, and then less offensive than them, and then less offensive than them, and it'll go to you!
01:07:27.000If we allow this, and we're in this weird place in America where a lot of people are looking at these social media companies, I'm saying this is not as simple as this is a private company and they have the ability to choose who does and who doesn't use their platform.
01:07:42.000These things are like a public square.
01:07:46.000It's like electricity or water and it's something that everyone should have access to because it literally changes the way human beings view the world.
01:07:57.000It changes With people's contributions and with people's ability to express themselves, it changes the information that you gather.
01:08:04.000It changes whether or not someone's perspective resonates with you or not.
01:08:09.000If you don't get access to that perspective, you don't get to see it.
01:08:12.000You don't get to understand their point of view.
01:08:14.000And it changes the overall view of the world.
01:08:19.000We're in this weird place where These groups of people who are largely on the left have decided to abandon those values that you talked about, the original ACLU values, and they've chosen to instead be ideological and completely biased to their own personal position to the point where they're willing to abandon free speech.
01:08:40.000And it's terrifying because I don't think they understand where this leads.
01:09:21.000And then you say, are you in favor of giving those institutions, Facebook, the federal courts, the US government, Greater power to censor ideas and information that you don't like?
01:09:37.000It's critical that hate speech not be circulated.
01:09:40.000And they never fucking think for one second, why are these institutions that I hate and I think are fascist and repressive and authoritarian institutions that I'm willing to vest the power in to control the flow of information?
01:09:54.000And one of the problems is that Everyone, for the most part, thinks in terms of right versus left.
01:10:03.000So this is the only prism through which people can understand at least the political component of the world.
01:10:10.000And it's a very stunted prism because it excludes so much.
01:10:14.000So they think that if you can induce social media companies to start...
01:10:20.000Censoring and excluding right-wing speech and deleting the pages of right-wing ideologues or right-wing activists, that that's a victory.
01:10:35.000They're not censoring it because it's right-wing.
01:10:37.000They're censoring it because it's outside of the mainstream.
01:10:40.000There are always, always, always, always views that adhere to mainstream media Orthodoxies are going to be permitted.
01:10:48.000Censorship is always directed at those who are somehow outside of the realm of what's considered acceptable by power centers.
01:10:55.000That, by definition, is where censorship goes and it's going to go to the right and the left equally.
01:11:00.000It's not going to go to one or the other.
01:11:03.000Aside from the morality and the ethics of wanting people with whom you disagree silenced by tech monopolies, It's just incredibly fucking stupid from a strategic perspective because it is going to be turned on you.
01:11:18.000There's already censorship of left-wing pages.
01:11:21.000If the Israeli government, for example, goes to Facebook and says, that Palestinian media outlet or this Gazan activist is inciting terrorism, Facebook will, in almost every case...
01:11:35.000Accept the request of the Israelis to censor them because the Israelis are much more powerful than the Palestinians and that's how corporations operate.
01:11:42.000This is the model, the framework that the left is empowering without realizing how self destructive it is.
01:11:49.000It's maddening and it is terrifying because All human history, the entire history of human intellect, is nothing but humans believing that they found some absolute truth, and then a subsequent generation realizing that it's not just erroneous,
01:12:08.000And if you preclude the ability of human beings to question and challenge every precept, every principle, including, or especially the ones that have been declared most sacred, the ones that have been declared most unchallengeably true, You've deprived humanity of one of its most important weapons,
01:12:26.000probably its most important one, for fostering progress, for combating despotism, for questioning the pronouncements of institutions of authority, and that's what people who think they're anti-authoritarian are doing.
01:12:45.000Because guys like you are one of the few that are willing to take this chance and speak like this and challenge all of these institutions openly.
01:12:58.000And I think there's so many people out there that, as you said, are worried about being yelled at on Twitter and worried about not being able to get a job.
01:13:07.000There's so many folks that are dependent upon these Large institutions, whether it's newspapers or television shows or whatever it is, and they can't freely express their concern with the way things are going because in many people's eyes,
01:13:24.000that's insignificant compared to get Donald Trump out of office.
01:13:36.000After that we can concentrate on all those other things, but whatever you have to do to get Donald Trump out of office, save democracy.
01:13:42.000Someone actually sent me a message, someone I really like, and they sent me a message saying that they could get me an interview, but they want me to vote for Joe Biden.
01:14:21.000It gives me hope that people are listening to you and people are reading your words and people are paying attention and hopefully it's resonating.
01:14:27.000And hopefully some of these people that are doing this are realizing with shame that they're a part of this really disgraceful act.
01:14:34.000That they're a part of this cowardly way of thinking and of not calling out all this shit.
01:14:40.000And if Joe Biden does get in office and they do see it declining even further and sliding even further down this The disgusting trend that we find ourselves on right now, I hope they realize the error of their ways.
01:14:56.000Here's what's worrying me the most, which is, you know, instinctively that is something that you can kind of put your hope in, right?
01:15:03.000Is to say, well, look, I mean, there's an election in a week or, you know, a few days, and all the polls suggest Biden's likely to win, and once Trump is out of the way, a lot of this insanity is going to disappear and Things are gonna kind of return to some degree of normalcy.
01:15:18.000And here's why I don't think that's true.
01:15:21.000So many institutions are profiting, I don't just mean financially, but in terms of power and control, from elevating fear levels over right-wing fascism, over white supremacists, domestic terrorism,
01:15:38.000And obviously, it doesn't take a lot of insight to observe that historically, the way you consolidate your power is if you can put people in fear.
01:15:45.000During the Cold War, you make everybody fear that the Russians and the Communists are coming to take away your Right to believe in God.
01:15:51.000And everybody says, you know, build up a huge nuclear arsenal and don't use the money for our schools and our communities.
01:15:59.000Use it for, you know, the greatest military in the world and spy on everybody and whatever you need to do to defeat this existential threat, do it.
01:16:06.000Obviously, after 9-11, that was the strategy of the Bush-Cheney administration.
01:16:10.000It's the way they consolidated a lot of power by elevating people's perceptions way beyond what was real of the threat of Islamic terrorism to allow them to do essentially everything they did.
01:16:20.000The same exact thing is happening now, which is...
01:16:24.000People in media have had their careers saved.
01:16:27.000I know cable hosts who are on the verge of being fired because nobody was fucking listening to their dumb shows in 2007 and 2008 when all they were doing is talking about how great Obama was because who wants to listen to that?
01:16:39.000Trump, or 2015 rather, Trump was a godsend to them because Trump enabled them to elevate everybody's fear level and say this man who's coming isn't just another president.
01:16:51.000He's a grave threat to everything that's good in our lives.
01:16:54.000And it's not just him, but his entire movement behind him.
01:16:57.000Hundreds of tens of millions of people who are racist, who are hardcore white supremacist, white supremacy, domestic terrorist.
01:17:04.000It caused MSNBC and the New York Times to explode with money.
01:17:08.000It caused the CIA and the FBI and tons of those neocon scumbags to rehabilitate their reputation and get back within the halls of power.
01:17:17.000Even if Trump loses the election, They're not going to just go back to now talking about Joe Biden because they know people are going to cancel their subscriptions and turn the TV channel again.
01:17:25.000They're going to continue to say not maybe Trump or at least his movement still pose this existential threat.
01:17:32.000They're out there plotting to kill people and impose white supremacy.
01:17:44.000They're going to inflate it wildly so that any questioning of Joe Biden Even with Trump out of the picture, it's still going to be depicted as endangering American liberty, as helping fascism, as serving the agenda of the Kremlin.
01:18:01.000And the need for censorship as a result...
01:18:05.000Is going to be accepted by more and more people because of that fear that these media outlets and government institutions with whom they partner are going to be still instilling in people for their own benefit, for their own aim.
01:18:16.000I think you're 100% accurate, and I'm concerned as well.
01:18:19.000But my real concern is, I don't see a way out of this.
01:18:25.000I don't see a clear, like, oh, we've got to go that way.
01:19:03.000Not explain it to someone like you, but I don't think about it.
01:19:07.000And one of the reasons why is because I feel like if I start thinking about what it does, I'll stop doing it the way I do it, and it won't be the same thing.
01:19:14.000I started doing this podcast with my friend Brian.
01:19:16.000We were smoking weed and talking on a laptop in 2009. Answering questions from like a hundred people on Twitter.
01:21:09.000But it's not actually so bizarre to me.
01:21:14.000I think you know I wrote an article about it and then I did a show.
01:21:19.000I interviewed a former campaign official from the 2008 Obama campaign who's an avid listener of yours and who's written – Yeah.
01:21:45.000But, you know, I think that exactly the way that you began, you know, the way I began my journalism career is I didn't go to Columbia Journalism School and then go and get a job with some local newspaper and then work my way up to the New York Times so I wasn't inculcated with all the institutional code and Regulations of how you can speak and the tone that you use and how you can describe the world.
01:22:07.000I just started my blog one day because I felt like I had things to say.
01:22:10.000Nobody was reading it and I gradually built up a readership.
01:22:13.000And then I just from there have always done it that way, right?
01:22:15.000Like it's kind of like what you were just saying.
01:22:17.000And I think that the reason that you've attracted so many people watching your show who like it And I don't want to analyze it for you if you don't want to hear an analysis because I don't want to infect your ability to just do it organically.
01:22:33.000But you were saying, what is the solution to all this?
01:22:39.000And I think that you can look at your show as kind of a microcosm of what one answer might be, which is exactly that.
01:22:45.000I know a lot of people who listen to your show who don't agree with a lot of what you say or who hate some of the guests that you have on.
01:22:51.000But what they know is that You're doing this because you don't have to say anything that you don't believe.
01:22:59.000And that's a huge asset for people who don't trust people that they're hearing in the media and don't believe anything that they're saying is, look, that guy may not be an expert in things and everything that he's talking about or even much of what he's talking about.
01:23:14.000Maybe sometimes he platforms people who are bad and says some things that are misguided, but at least I believe that he's being honest.
01:23:21.000He's just kind of trying to figure the world out for no reason other than to figure it out.
01:23:27.000And I think that there are huge numbers of people, huge numbers of people, like I think you're just tapping into the kind of tip of it, who crave discourse that is emancipated from these repressive principles of how the media speaks and conducts itself and how people are forced to express themselves.
01:23:55.000I think it gives me a lot of hope as well.
01:23:57.000And I think one of the things we hoped the internet would be would be this place where people had access to information that they would never have had previously and this avenue for free expression that just really never existed before.
01:24:12.000There's never been a time in history where, I mean, we really have a skeleton crew.
01:24:17.000I mean, right now it's me and my friend Jamie, the producer, and it reaches hundreds of millions of people.
01:24:23.000And that's just really never existed before.
01:24:26.000I mean, there's a couple of video editors and some other people that work for the podcast behind the scenes, but that's basically it.
01:24:32.000Which is why journalists hate you, right?
01:24:34.000Like they, you know, they went to all the best journalism schools and they've like sat in their editorial meetings for 20 years.
01:24:41.000And if they go and speak on YouTube, they're going to be watched by 15,000 people and they think it's outrageous that you have this audience to which you're not entitled.
01:24:49.000Well, they're entitled to their own thoughts, but they could have this audience too.
01:24:53.000They just have to be interesting enough to gather it, and they have to grind.
01:24:57.000The thing is, you don't get it right away, and you don't get it right away just because you work for the New York Times.
01:25:02.000People will listen, and they'll go, well, I don't like this, or this is boring, or for whatever reason it resonates or it doesn't resonate.
01:25:15.000And the beauty of it is you don't have to be connected to the Washington Post or the New York Times or any other institution.
01:25:22.000But the people that think that that was the path and they worked all their life thinking that this is the path and then they've been shown that they've kind of maybe spun their wheels, not only spun their wheels, And wasted some time, but gotten on a bad path ideologically,
01:25:37.000where they've thought in these tight grooves that were previously established for them.
01:25:44.000They've been given these conglomeration of opinions to adopt, and they have adopted them faithfully.
01:25:49.000And then all of a sudden they realize, like, well, you know, look at this fucking meathead pot-smoking, you know, UFC commentator has all these people paying attention to him.
01:26:24.000That if you have something interesting and unique to offer that people want to hear, the internet enables you to reach them without having this mediation necessary of big corporations.
01:26:39.000The thing that, though, is discouraging is that...
01:26:43.000One of the problems about why this freedom of expression in the media in particular, where it's more necessary than anywhere for journalists to be able to say things that provoke people's anger, that poke at and prod at consensus rather than just reciting it,
01:27:03.000Is that when you're a young journalist and you get a job and you're not being paid very well, but at least you're getting paid enough income to survive and so many of your friends with whom you went to college, you get out of college and are loaded with tons of debt, don't even have jobs,
01:27:20.000You look around an industry, which is journalism, where you see jobs disappearing by the thousands.
01:27:26.000The last thing you want to do is stick your head up I think?
01:27:45.000The Russiagate bullshit, when Matt Taibbi and I, and maybe a couple of others, were out there saying this is a bullshit scandal, there's no evidence that any of this happened, not that Russia didn't do the hacking, but that Trump and Russia colluded criminally,
01:28:01.000or that Russia was infiltrating the United States, that this is all conspiratorial garbage.
01:28:07.000I was hearing all the time from journalists at the Washington Post and CNN And the Times and cable networks who are saying, thank you guys, I'm so glad you and Matt are doing this.
01:28:17.000I wish I could, but I really don't feel I can.
01:28:20.000I feel like I would lose my job and probably not get another one.
01:28:24.000The lack of a viable economic model in journalism is suffocating whatever little ability there was for journalists to express themselves freely.
01:28:37.000Yeah, it's terrifying for them because they don't have protection.
01:28:40.000And to stick your neck out and to try a podcast and to say something on a podcast that is controversial or is outside the orthodoxy and to get fired for that or canceled for that or to get ostracized or be labeled a this or a that...
01:28:56.000You could lose your ability to make an income, and there's no guarantee that your podcast will be successful, particularly now.
01:29:02.000You know, when I started the podcast in 2009, I don't know how many there were then, but now there's close to a million of them, which is insane.
01:29:11.000I mean, it's like one out of 300 people.
01:29:13.000If it was just in the United States, I'm sure it's worldwide, but if it was just in the United States, a million podcasts is one out of 300 people in the United States?
01:29:26.000Imagine 300 people and one of them has a podcast.
01:29:29.000What is it going to be like five years from now?
01:29:33.000Is it going to be 50% of the people have a podcast?
01:29:36.000The numbers are so insurmountable, it's almost impossible for anybody to break through unless you get help from the other people that are inside the network.
01:29:45.000If you're one of those people that has a popular podcast, one of the beautiful things about it is that you can kind of help other people get seen and get recognized.
01:29:53.000And it's one of the more generous communities.
01:29:56.000The good thing about podcasting is that when you have this We're good to go.
01:30:24.000People tell people, they tell their friends, you have an episode that resonates, and then it could go viral or it can get shared, and you can get to a point where you can have a sustainable business that's completely independent.
01:30:40.000But if you're a person who is also trying to work in journalism, you're also trying to get hired by a major institution, and you say something in this other form of media, this podcast form, that can get you fired from that, it will inhibit your ability to express yourself.
01:30:56.000So in that case, it will also inhibit the ability of the podcast to resonate.
01:31:01.000So it's such a catch-22, because you kind of have to toe the line.
01:31:08.000I'll tell you this experience I had recently that I found horrifying and really eliminated for me how repressive things had become.
01:31:18.000I went to New York, as I often do because the media outlet I founded is based there, and I had dinner with two colleagues who work in journalism and who are actually pretty well-established in their careers.
01:31:30.000They're not Junior-level journalists who are clinging to a job.
01:31:35.000They're people who have climbed up the editorial and journalistic ladder.
01:31:43.000One of them has a 15-year-old daughter whose best friend is a trans boy who has had Top surgery.
01:31:56.000So he has had his breasts removed and poses on Instagram with his shirt off.
01:32:00.000And then my other friend with whom I was dining that night, it was pretty recently, maybe within the last year, has a 17-year-old daughter who's dating a trans boy who's 17, who's also had various gender reassignment surgeries.
01:32:14.000And we were talking just, you know, as friends about how young people these days are who are making this choice to identify as trans and to pursue gender reassignment surgery, have permanent alterations to their body that will never be reversible,
01:32:30.000even if later on in life they decide that they had misdiagnosed themselves or been misdiagnosed.
01:32:36.000And both of them were expressing serious concerns About, as parents of teenagers, about A, how pervasive this was becoming and whether there was kind of something in the culture encouraging or even pressuring kids to reach these conclusions and parents to kind of push them into it for their own reasons.
01:32:56.000Not anything malicious, but just kind of cultural encouragement that might be leading people to be misdiagnosed or misdiagnosing themselves.
01:33:04.000And also secondly, The capacity of someone at the age of 14 or 15 to make decisions about their lives of that magnitude that would be irreversible, biologically or anatomically irreversible.
01:33:17.000It was a really interesting conversation we talked about.
01:33:20.000It was a really interesting discussion we probably talked about in 45 minutes or an hour.
01:33:24.000I got back to Brazil, and I realized that that discussion that we had They would never ever in a million years in their column, on a podcast, on their show admit to having those thoughts.
01:33:39.000They would never be willing to explore publicly Those questions that we were all raising with one another and thinking about in a really interesting way because they're petrified of being scorned for it or being condemned.
01:33:55.000And that is a sickness in our culture that is only going to get worse but that has toxic effects that I don't think can be overstated.
01:34:06.000Whenever there's a subject that you can't talk about, whenever there's a subject that can't be breached, you're in a religion now.
01:35:36.000Many of these people are rightfully looking at it in the way that people who are trans are maligned by society.
01:35:45.000They don't feel like they're accepted.
01:35:49.000They feel like they're discriminated against.
01:35:51.000So these people who are sensitive, kind people, look at them.
01:35:54.000They want to embrace them at all costs.
01:35:56.000But by doing so, you've ignored reality.
01:36:01.000The reality that we know that humans, we're weird creatures.
01:36:07.000We have very strange ideas about things that go left and right.
01:36:11.000How many people do you know that are lifelong Democrats and all of a sudden they become a Republican and they're fucking pro-life and they get crazy?
01:36:19.000We shift our opinions on all sorts of things.
01:36:22.000People like Cat Stevens becomes a Muslim, changes name to Yusuf Islam.
01:36:27.000People change, but the idea that they don't do that with gender, that the only thing they do that with is religion and these other things, that the gender is specifically the one thing that there's no confusion about whatsoever.
01:36:42.000Well, that's crazy, because people are confused all the time about everything.
01:36:46.000The other thing I brought up to a friend, I said, you know that many, especially trans women, if they don't have this reassignment, it's been shown that they become gay men.
01:37:28.000Not only is there a spectrum, but one of the...
01:37:32.000Objectives of modern feminism, of modern day feminism, was to expand the range of how women could express themselves.
01:37:42.000That they didn't have to have long hair and makeup on and wear high heels.
01:37:47.000That they could have a masculine component to them and cut their hair short and wear jeans and play sports.
01:37:54.000And that's why a lot of feminists feel like There's this kind of incursion into womanhood where now the idea is if that's the form of expression that you find as a female that you ought to be encouraged to identify as a trans man instead of just kind of a masculine of center of female.
01:38:19.000But I think one of the things that concerns me about it and that always strikes me so much is As I mentioned, one of the formative political experiences of my life, obviously, was growing up gay in the 80s and into the 90s where there were lots of debates that were raging about what is the role of homosexuality and how should it be viewed by civic society and by government and by law.
01:38:42.000One of the reasons why Gay people largely won that debate and not just won it, but won it so radically and so rapidly is because we were constantly looking for ways to engage that discussion with people who hadn't been persuaded.
01:39:00.000I mean, I remember I would all the time, you know, if I heard someone say, well, how does this work in your relationship?
01:39:07.000Like, who is the man and who's the woman and how do you fuck?
01:39:11.000And instead of saying, like, you're a disgusting bigot and how dare you, And condemn them and denounce them and banish them away, I would be eager to engage in that discussion, as were so many people, and that's what ultimately changed minds, was the more you engage people,
01:39:27.000the more you persuade them, the more you convince them, the more you explain to them why these radical social changes that you advocate are justifiable, the harder it is to demonize you and to feel alienated by you and to feel repelled by you, you break down that Dehumanization through engagement,
01:39:44.000through discourse and dialogue, not through demanding and coercing and trying to force people to accept views that they don't yet hold.
01:39:52.000And so many current social movements are based on that kind of tyranny of either you Affirm these truths as I see them or you're going to be punished and scorned.
01:40:07.000There's no debate or engagement or questioning permitted.
01:40:10.000Yeah, that's a really accurate way of depicting it.
01:40:42.000In some countries in the Middle East, you have no options.
01:40:47.000If you're a homosexual and you want to be with men and you happen to be a man, many of them choose to become women just so that they can have these relationships that they want.
01:41:00.000And I think, ideologically, when you force someone to have an opinion that you hold and punish them for just even questioning things, you create this really weird scenario that we find ourselves in right now.
01:41:17.000And to the point where oftentimes biological women are the ones that, especially when it comes to sports, they're the ones that are the victims of this ideology.
01:41:27.000I mean, you have track and field athletes who are competing as female, who all they have to do is identify in certain high schools as being female.
01:41:36.000They don't even necessarily have to have gender reassignment surgery or even to take estrogen.
01:42:16.000But if you have male versus female sports, as long as the male identifies as a female, we're supposed to go, well, you know, what are you going to do?
01:42:53.000You know, I used to watch her tennis matches against Chris Everett religiously.
01:42:57.000And when I grew up and actually when I started doing the Snowden reporting, she started following me on Twitter.
01:43:04.000And then I remember the first time she ever sent me a tweet, I acted like some 12-year-old whose favorite boy band had touched their skin or something.
01:43:32.000And then right in the middle as we were getting ready to kind of do the project, and the project was going to be, you know, examining why she was so important to me, what it said about her life and mine and how it intersected, and the ability of people and very unpredictable ways to influence others.
01:43:47.000She had this huge controversy where, you know, Martina was like, you know, she was one of the great pioneers of female athletics and Sports Illustrated did a list of the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century.
01:43:57.000She was number 19, you know, like right behind Joe Montana, head of Ty Cobb.
01:44:02.000I mean, she was a huge, important figure in female athletics and professional female sports.
01:44:08.000And she fought for years, along with Billie Jean King and Chris Everett, to ensure that women had massive prize money on par with men and sponsorship opportunities.
01:44:18.000So her life's work has been ensuring that women could make a huge living and be justly rewarded on equal terms with male athletes.
01:44:28.000So she was on Twitter and she saw some photo of a trans woman who had just won a cycling race.
01:44:38.000And she was in the middle, the trans woman was, next to two cis women and she was hovering over them with this huge muscle mass that these two women didn't have with the gold medal smiling with the arms around these two women.
01:44:53.000And Martina learned that the woman who won the gold medal had not had any gender reassignment surgery, meaning she still has a penis and her testicles, and therefore the ability to impregnate a woman.
01:45:03.000And Martina went on Twitter and just very innocently said, wait, I don't understand.
01:45:07.000If a man declares himself to be a woman, they can now compete in professional sports, the professional sports that I worked so hard my whole life to build, and they can win all the prize money and all the...
01:45:22.000The trophies, and then just decide to go back to living as a man, impregnate women, and live a suburban life as the father of children?
01:45:34.000And people were saying, you're ignorant.
01:45:36.000It doesn't matter if you have a penis.
01:45:38.000What matters is if you go through hormonal treatments that render your body anatomically or biologically identical for purposes of athletics.
01:45:48.000To the male body, or the female body, the cis female body, and she said, okay, I'm sorry.
01:46:15.000In the late 1970s, early United States, which is one of the reasons why she was my hero, she also hired a trans coach, Dr. Renee Richards, who she traveled the world with and put on national TV, you know, like BBC and NBC during Wimbledon would have to say, there's Martina Navratilova's box,
01:46:31.000that's her coach, her name used to be Richard Raskin, it's now Dr. Renee Richards, you know, and kind of glide over it, but at least, like, she did more for trans visibility than almost anybody.
01:46:40.000Martina went away, but because she was being so mauled and with no understanding, she came back, she wrote an op-ed in the Sunday Times and she said, I've studied this and what I've concluded is that there is never a way that somebody who's gone through puberty as a male,
01:46:57.000no matter how many hormones that they take, can render their body similar to a female body such that competing with naturally born females can be anything other than cheating.
01:47:08.000And for that opinion, Martina Navratilova, who did more for LGBT visibility, trans visibility, female athletics, got expelled, literally expelled from LGBT athletic, athlete groups.
01:47:22.000And I couldn't, I ended up not being able to make my film because the director that we had was a trans woman who didn't feel comfortable and felt like the whole film had gotten too complicated.
01:47:32.000It's amazing that if the enemy of your movement is Martina Navratilova, if that's somebody that you're declaring to be a hateful bigot, not welcome and decent company, who are your fucking allies?
01:47:44.000Yeah, it's an interesting proving ground for this ideological dilemma, right?
01:48:31.000I never really had opinions on trans people other than do whatever you want to do as long as you're an adult.
01:48:36.000But then once that came up and I was attacked for it, I was like, this is the hill I'll die on because you people are out of your fucking mind.
01:49:17.000Well, it's so obvious that there are complex scientific questions.
01:49:23.000I don't know how I feel about it, in part because I don't understand the science well enough, and I don't believe the science has offered definitive answers.
01:49:55.000Right, but like, or maybe now, I don't know, I mean, I like, you know, women's tennis, you know, if you win the US Open or Wimbledon in women's tennis, you're gonna win, the prize is now $4 million, right?
01:50:08.000Like, the Williams sisters are among the richest athletes on the planet.
01:50:11.000If it were that easy for a male tennis player to just go win that amount of money by declaring himself a female, they would be doing it and we don't really see that.
01:50:19.000So I'm open to the question, Of whether this can be done fairly, but to declare the question itself off limits, Exactly.
01:50:30.000And force everybody to just accept it.
01:50:32.000And like the thing is, it's not just like we're talking about it in this issue because I know you've had issues with it.
01:50:37.000I've had my own experiences with it with that film.
01:50:39.000But this is the mentality that is replicating itself in issue after issue after issue.
01:50:45.000One of the things that I've said is I have no problem with a woman choosing to compete against a trans woman if she knows that it's a trans woman.
01:52:01.000In the UFC, Jermaine Durandamy, she's a multiple world champion in Muay Thai, and she fought a man and knocked him unconscious in a fight, and you can watch it on YouTube.
01:52:13.000She's an amazing athlete, an amazing fighter, but she chose to fight that man knowing that he's a man and knowing that her skills were enough that she had a reasonable chance and actually did win.
01:52:24.000I'm 100% in favor of that, like I'm in favor of everybody doing anything that's dangerous.
01:53:09.000It kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier about human beings oftentimes evolving in ways that are seemingly inexplicable.
01:53:18.000One of the things that makes life interesting, that makes the world worth investigating, are these complexities.
01:53:25.000I mean gender is, and how it relates to biology, and how it shapes our identity, and what Different hormones can do externally injected into our bodies.
01:53:38.000These are fascinating questions that we don't really have clear answers for.
01:53:43.000And that's true regardless of almost any debate that you choose.
01:53:48.000And that's what I was saying earlier, is that if you look at Newtonian physics, people for a long time believed that that was the ultimate truth, and then that becomes something that people realize actually has fundamental errors.
01:54:04.000What always amazes me about not just people who support censorship, but about people who want to close off debate, Or who say that it's immoral to even speak to people who have views that are sufficiently different that they're supposed to be radioactive.
01:54:22.000What always amazes me is the level of hubris needed to believe not just that you're right about something, because I believe I'm right about a lot of things, but to believe that you're so right...
01:54:34.000That your view should not be even permitted to be questioned, let alone rejected or negated or refuted.
01:54:44.000And that people who have different views than you are people that you should never be willing...
01:54:50.000It's such a glum, grim, bleak, depressing view of the world.
01:54:56.000And it's authoritarian and tyrannical as well.
01:55:00.000To just constantly be flattening all of the complexities of life that make things interesting to explore and debate and discuss and think about.
01:55:10.000Yeah, it really is complex and it really is interesting.
01:56:14.000These are very interesting things to discuss and talk about.
01:56:18.000Just because you discuss and talk about them doesn't make you a bigot.
01:56:22.000And I think that we have to make that distinction.
01:56:24.000Because if we don't make that distinction, you're always going to have people that are speaking about it one way publicly, as you were saying with your friends, or privately, excuse me, and then another way publicly, where they're just...
01:56:37.000And that's why I think that if you're somebody who has been fortunate enough...
01:56:43.000To construct a platform that is secure and relatively immune from being canceled or being declared off-limits.
01:56:55.000I mean, people have certainly been trying with me for many years, and I think they're starting to reach the conclusion that it's futile and they're never going to be rid of me.
01:57:04.000So I think if you're able to kind of create an independent platform for yourself, one of the obligations that I do think you have is to create that space and kind of take those arrows so that other people who don't enjoy that same independence,
01:57:20.000that same security, feel at least marginally freer to wander around and asking.
01:57:29.000Yeah, look, discussions are important.
01:57:38.000I need to know how you think to be able to consider it.
01:57:41.000When I talk to someone, whether it's you or anyone, I want to know how you feel about things genuinely.
01:57:48.000And when you're terrified to express your honest opinion because you're worried about the blowback, Then I'd never really know, not only do I never know who you really are and how you really think, I never know that there's people who think the way you think, because you don't express it.
01:58:03.000And then we have a distorted perception of the landscape.
01:58:07.000And it takes too long to work through ideas and problems that we have in our society.
01:58:13.000I understand why people would be protective of trans people, of anybody, any maligned, any marginalized group.
01:58:41.000Yeah, something went really wrong in the Matrix.
01:58:44.000Yeah, the Matrix produced a very erroneous outcome there.
01:58:49.000I think part of the problem, though, is that...
01:58:58.000Whoever does wield this ability to impose orthodoxies has a certain form of power.
01:59:07.000There's a lot of power that comes from that, from forcibly suppressing views that you've declared to be And that is why I think it becomes addictive, especially when it starts to become a form of mob behavior.
01:59:24.000But this ability to engage in dialogue, I go on Fox News a lot, I go on Tucker Carlson specifically quite a bit, and obviously people who are long-term readers of mine who are on the left, a lot of them are I'm befuddled by that,
01:59:44.000And one of the things that has happened because I do that is that I get emails all the time from people saying, well, for a decade I always thought you were this insane leftist.
01:59:58.000I thought you hated the United States.
01:59:59.000I never paid any attention to anything that you said.
02:00:03.000But now that I hear you on the show saying things that I trust, I'm now listening to anything that you say with an open mind because I believe that you're honest.
02:00:12.000And it doesn't mean that I now agree with you on everything you're saying.
02:00:20.000A channel of communication with people who I might have written off before as some kind of a caricature or who have written me off before as some kind of a caricature like I did with you.
02:00:31.000Someone had asked me two years ago before I actually listened to your show, you know, what do you think of Joe Rugman?
02:00:35.000I probably would have said I don't know much about him but I know he talks to like a lot of alt-right assholes and fascists and seems to hate trans people because that's what I had been told, right?
02:00:43.000That was like in the ether and so that's what I absorb.
02:00:46.000And I, you know, I think that Everybody loves to lament polarization and strife and conflict in the world and aggression and war, which are all terrible things, and yet one of the only solutions we have as human beings to any of that is the ability to try and speak to each other as humans past our differences so that we can at least develop a common respect for That enables us to navigate those differences
02:01:34.000I don't really quite know how it can be arrested.
02:01:40.000Well, I'm hoping there'll be a tipping point, and I'm hoping the tide will pull back, and I'm hoping that podcasts and long-form communication and conversations like this will be a part of that.
02:01:48.000But, you know, I agree with you, and when you say you don't agree with everything I say, I'm happy, because I don't agree with everything I say.
02:02:00.000And sometimes I'll say something on a podcast and then I'll think about it, you know, an hour later and I'm like, what the fuck was I saying?
02:02:07.000Why did I even think about it that way?
02:02:08.000Because you're talking, you know, like right now.
02:02:11.000Like, I don't know the next word out of my fucking mouth, right?
02:03:37.000They have an opinion one minute and then they listen to somebody who persuades them to think differently another and then they kind of move in that direction and then maybe they move a little bit back.
02:03:46.000But the problem is that in a climate where if you're not constantly affirming unequivocally What is deemed to be the mandatory opinions, you really can, not if you're a coward,
02:04:03.000but just if you're rational, create a lot of problems for yourself in your work, in your society, in your culture, and that's why people avoid it.
02:04:13.000Yeah, and that's why I've gravitated towards it, ironically.
02:04:17.000I think that you have to talk to people that you disagree with.
02:04:20.000You have to talk to people, and I also, I'm not married to my ideas.
02:04:25.000If you tell me, if I have a specific notion in my mind about the way something works, and I talk to you, I am happy when you can get me to change my mind.
02:05:35.000I mean, I'm sure some of it has some root in reality, but he's a provocateur.
02:05:40.000But I... I want to know why people make these jumps and why they think the way they think.
02:05:47.000And with a lot of them, what they're doing is signaling to this group that they've gotten support from that they're on that side.
02:05:57.000They're doing this thing where they're saying words and expressing themselves in certain ways that they know that certain groups are going to go, oh...
02:06:42.000We have to kind of purposely combat it, right?
02:06:46.000Like we might have an instinct to kill people that we feel angry toward, but we combat that instinct because it produces bad outcomes.
02:06:53.000So the tribalism in us, you know, is probably something that sometimes occasionally is healthy.
02:06:58.000It makes us be part of communities and the like, and that fulfills psychological necessities, but it can lead us really astray too.
02:07:05.000And you have to kind of be willing sometimes if you're feeling embraced too much by a group to kind of Give them something almost to show you that you're not attached to it and to show yourself that you're not attached to it so you don't become captive to it.
02:07:18.000Well, I think we have to be really careful in how we lean into love.
02:07:24.000And what I mean by that is lean into praise, lean into attention, lean into like there's a lot of people that become a victim of their own audience.
02:07:35.000And because if you're a rebellious sort, right, if you've got this idea that goes against the mainstream, the other people that like things that go against the mainstream, they're very vocal about it.
02:08:04.000If you are Milo or one of these people that was becoming very successful being one of these provocateurs in the past, you get a rabid response where people are so excited to see you.
02:08:15.000I've seen it with comedians where they'll tell jokes that a certain group of people like and they'll lean into that.
02:08:24.000Like, you know, they'll become like a right-wing comic because these right-wing people are the ones that have given them attention.
02:08:29.000And they know when they're saying things, even if they don't understand that it's disingenuous or that they're playing a character, they're saying it knowing that it's going to get this disproportionate reaction from that group.
02:09:01.000What about them is what gravity has pulled them in this direction?
02:09:09.000Yeah, I mean, I guess the argument is that as your platform grows and you become more influential, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, by putting someone on your show who advocates ideas that are harmful or toxic or hateful,
02:09:30.000even if you're doing it just to satisfy your curiosity and not because you actually agree with them, that you're nonetheless still...
02:09:55.000And that's one of the reasons why I've avoided a large number of those people that do have very questionable belief systems and do espouse hate.
02:10:05.000There's a lot of fucking assholes that want to be on this show that I haven't had on for that very reason.
02:10:11.000But there's some that I find interesting.
02:10:27.000And I'm over that now, but when I was interviewing a lot of those people in the past, one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to try to hear what they're saying and poke holes in it.
02:10:39.000And I wanted to know why they lean so hard in this direction.
02:10:45.000It's like when you're talking to anyone that's really into anything, you could fill in the blank with whatever the subject is.
02:12:23.000Right, who, you know, I think in retrospect, the reason why she was my childhood hero was precisely because she was always so fucking defiant and transgressive, you know.
02:12:32.000And probably why she was so competitive, too.
02:13:39.000A lot of times people adopt a certain posture, then they show you, you know, as you were saying, that kind of pundit voice, or if they go on a show where they get to speak for nine minutes instead of two and a half hours, they're...
02:14:12.000Yeah, a lot of times they are, and a lot of times they've become that because that's been the way they get the best attention, or the most attention.
02:14:20.000Or, you know, sometimes they'll pretend to not be that way, to sort of weasel their way in.
02:14:26.000And then once they become popular, you find out, oh, you really do have nefarious ideas.
02:15:57.000Until I met him, until I've spent tons of time with him and talked to him, We're good to go.
02:16:26.000And you need to know that there's a guy like that out there.
02:16:29.000Whenever I think about people, about kindness and about generosity, selflessness, I think of that guy because I know he's real, because I know him.
02:16:47.000As a journalist, people expect me to just keep this critical distance from him as the way you're supposed to talk about your source when you're a journalist and I think?
02:17:20.000It is what he did and he shows you a kind of human possibility that you don't previously know exists that then starts opening up your own conception of what's possible in terms of your own choices in life.
02:17:33.000And you only can have that happen if you're willing to connect with people who aren't like you.
02:17:41.000Yeah, and one of the beautiful things about these long-form conversations is that you can allow someone to express themselves without restraint, and you can find out what's really going on.
02:17:54.000And you can expose people this way, in a way that...
02:17:58.000I mean, I think people have been exposed on my podcast in a way where if someone really wants to know who they are, they can go watch a clip, and they'll go, oh, this is what happens when this motherfucker hits the fire.
02:20:01.000It's like if you do a format and you kind of like let yourself free, unconstrained with the knowledge that you're actually in an interview that people are going to be watching, you just end up speaking much more naturally, much more freely and don't monitor every word.
02:20:17.000Yeah, and by the way, this was not by design.
02:20:19.000I can't take credit for the fact that this podcast is that sort of thing.
02:20:50.000But I want to speak about what you were just saying, because there's a great example of that, and that's Michael Hastings, where he was trapped.
02:21:31.000General McChrystal said some disparaging things about Barack Obama and wound up being fired.
02:21:37.000And then Hastings was terrified for his life.
02:21:43.000And wound up in this really weird conspiracy theory scenario where his car goes 100 miles an hour into a tree and the engine winds up flying away from the car and the car explodes and he dies and people are speculating like,
02:22:28.000I'm a little hesitant to talk too much about it because there was privacy issues with him and his wife, but I will say his wife was pretty adamant.
02:22:38.000His wife at first, of course, being a loving wife, was very open to the prospect that it wasn't an accident and that...
02:23:27.000But at the same time, Michael ended up for the last six months or a year of his life being pretty troubled.
02:23:35.000I think in large part because of the trauma he had from spending a lot of time in war zones.
02:23:43.000I know I have a lot of friends who are journalists who have spent time in war zones and almost every single one of them end up fucked up for good reasons.
02:24:07.000So, you know, and I know a lot of people were concerned about that and whether he was kind of engaging in self-destructive behavior.
02:24:15.000I don't know, Joe, to be honest, but I know that his wife reached the conclusion that she thought those more interesting theories about intrigue and murder was a disservice to his memory, for whatever that's worth.
02:24:31.000Well, I respect that, if that's how she felt about it.
02:24:33.000But the real concern that journalists have, and this is what we started off the podcast talking to you about, about your own safety.
02:24:42.000The Jamal Khashoggi story, of course, is like the worst example of what could potentially happen to a journalist.
02:24:49.000And when we're talking about the safety of people who do take the risks to put out information that people want to hear and then they become the target of very powerful people, I mean, it must be one of the most frightening aspects of your job.
02:25:07.000Yeah, I mean, you know, we talked about the Snowden case.
02:25:10.000For me, the much more difficult thing Dangerous case was the reporting it did last year in Brazil starting in June of 2019 going into the beginning of this year where we were publishing the hacked telephone conversations of the most powerful people in Brazil in the Bolsonaro government and revealed really serious corruption.
02:26:15.000He's a socialist member of Congress, the only openly gay member of the Brazilian Congress.
02:26:19.000In a country where Bolsonaro has stimulated a lot of anti-LGBT animists as a powerful political tool, we haven't left our house in about a year and two months without armed guards and armored vehicles because the level of specificity of the threats that we get with people who know our address and send pictures of our The cars with the license plates to be as terrorizing as possible are really severe.
02:26:47.000And for about six months, every day on Twitter, in Brazilian Twitter, my name was at the top of the trending topics.
02:27:05.000And that was what made Michael such a great journalist, was he was fearless when it came to those kinds of things.
02:27:11.000And that's why when I go and give speeches and then, you know, in the Q&A part of the event, some journalist student or someone thinking about going into journalism asks me what my advice is for them.
02:27:26.000I say, first of all, don't go into the profession unless you think you have something unique to offer because if you don't, then it's kind of just worthless.
02:27:34.000You're just going to be a drone in the beehive, you know, like you were saying earlier.
02:27:37.000You're just going to fade into the mainstream.
02:27:40.000If you have a desire to be beloved by powerful people or to be safe, this is definitely the wrong profession for you.
02:27:51.000It's only worthwhile, journalism is, if you're exposing exactly that information which the people who wield the greatest power most desperately want to be concealed.
02:28:05.000If you do that, everyone loves to talk about speaking truth to power and confronting power, but people very rarely talk about what that means.
02:28:14.000What is power and what does it mean for people to be powerful?
02:28:18.000What it means to be powerful is that you have the ability to bestow rewards on people who serve your interests.
02:28:27.000And to inflict punishment and pain on those who impede them or defy them.
02:28:32.000That's really all it means to be powerful.
02:28:35.000And so if you're really a journalist and you're really challenging power or defying it or impeding the agenda of the powerful, you're inherently going to be in danger.
02:29:07.000And I wondered, what does that feel like to you?
02:29:11.000Because there has to be young people that have read your work and seen what you've done, seen the documentary with Snowden and heard you speak, that I want that courage of conviction.
02:29:25.000I want to be that person that does express myself honestly and bravely and expose the world to these truths that the powers that be want hidden.
02:29:37.000I mean, it sounds banal probably, but honestly, there's nothing more gratifying to me than that, because that's how I feel like I'm actually making a mark on the world and changing it in a positive way.
02:29:52.000However limited that might be, it doesn't matter.
02:29:58.000The fact that it's not just that I'm inspiring someone to go into journalism, it's that I'm inspiring them to go into journalism to do the kind of journalism that I've done and shown them by example can be done and have advocated for.
02:30:16.000And so it makes me feel like I'm almost like reproducing, like a little army of When you hear from a 22-year-old who says that you are the one who has shaped what they want to do in life and they kind of want to follow in your example, it's so rewarding.
02:30:33.000You feel like you've touched somebody and shown them something inside of themselves, a power, an ability, or a talent, or a purpose that they might not have discovered, and it's incredibly fulfilling.
02:30:49.000That to me is what's exciting about the future.
02:30:52.000I'm hoping that there are enough young people that do see that you can be one of those people that just drowns into the hive, or you can be like Glenn Greenwald.
02:31:05.000And that you will inspire a bunch of people to communicate and to express themselves the way you do so fearlessly.
02:31:12.000I'm hoping the same can be said about podcasts.
02:31:15.000I'm hoping the same can be said about a lot of independent media.
02:31:19.000That there's enough of us out there that don't want to blend into the hive.
02:31:25.000That the young people coming up recognize the flaws in these patterns and they recognize the traps That they see by becoming a part of these institutions, and by becoming a part of these orthodoxies, by becoming a part of these groups that demand compliance,
02:31:46.000And then there's so many pitfalls and holes in that way of life.
02:31:53.000Yeah, I mean, you asked me before, you, I think, made the observation before, you weren't sure what the solution was to these growing pathologies we had been assessing in the discourse and in the political culture.
02:32:08.000And that was why I pointed to your show, just as an example of what I think is possible.
02:32:14.000But more than that, I think it illustrates this craving That exists that's being unfulfilled by mainstream news outlets, by entertainment products, by really prominent voices.
02:33:18.000I'm glad you clarified that because even I got deceived from that.
02:33:22.000But nonetheless, even that doesn't make sense to people, right?
02:33:25.000But in the real world, there were millions of people, millions, millions, not hundreds or thousands, but millions, who voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted in 2016 for Donald Trump.
02:33:38.000You know, like somebody who's just a political junkie who sits on political and journalist Twitter all day and sees the world in like Fox versus MSNBC or Democrat.
02:33:47.000But like to most of the people out there, that's not the language they're speaking.
02:33:51.000And podcasts like the one you're doing and a lot of other ones too are finally speaking in the language of huge numbers of people who never before identified with anything political.
02:34:01.000And I do think that's exciting because it is breaking that mold.
02:34:05.000That's what's so interesting about it.
02:34:07.000It's kind of just a new, normal, unconstrained, and undogmatic way of trying to understand the world.
02:34:15.000And I do find that hope-inspiring, hope-inducing.
02:34:21.000Yeah, it does come with responsibilities that I never anticipated, and that is a concern.
02:34:26.000I never thought that I would be influential.
02:34:29.000I never anticipated it, and I didn't plan for it.
02:34:35.000All of a sudden, people are like, what are you doing with your influence?
02:34:40.000And it's not just cultural influence, it's political influence, which is probably even more surprising and even more of a burden.
02:34:47.000Well, it's worse because I don't know shit about politics.
02:34:51.000I've said over and over again, if you're taking your opinions on politics from me, you're already fucking up.
02:34:59.000And I try to offer so many different solutions to so many different people to...
02:35:05.000Try to get your information from valid, unbiased political sources like The Hill or Kyle Kalinske or Jimmy Dore or many of the other people that I admire.
02:35:41.000They're so important because they're both on different sides of the fence politically, but they're both honest and objective and they don't agree on things a lot of the time, but they're very respectful, they're friendly, they're not impaired by their ideology.
02:36:08.000So yeah, and obviously Kyle Kolinsky is someone who's built up an amazing...
02:36:14.000I mean, I know Kyle for years, like when he was just a little kid, and he was just kind of screaming into a microphone with, I think, maybe like 3,000 views or something, and now he's become this powerhouse.
02:36:26.000We're doing an election night show, a live election night show.
02:36:29.000He and I. Yeah, he mentioned that to me.
02:36:31.000He said, don't go on and talk about that, because he'll kill me.
02:36:33.000I'm not allowed to talk about it, so I'm glad you were the one who spilled the beans and not me.
02:36:38.000But yeah, he's fantastic, and there's so much new talent that is discoverable that way.
02:36:48.000Problems and kind of bleak scenarios that we spent a lot of time dissecting, it is good to end on a note of figuring out a way out of that.
02:36:57.000Because it's not just some rosy-eyed thing that you say to make yourself and others feel better.
02:37:03.000Obviously, the success of your show, the ridiculous audience size that you have, that grew so organically with no corporate backing, is just proof that by speaking honestly and without dogma and script, you can attract a lot of people.
02:37:19.000Yeah, and I just want people to know that are concerned.
02:37:21.000I do understand that I have an influence now, and I'm aware of it.
02:37:26.000And that's kept me from having a lot of douchebags on the show.
02:37:30.000But unfortunately, I think it's important to have some.
02:37:34.000I think it's important to have some questionable people.
02:37:53.000The minute you start tailoring your guest list to avoid making people angry is the minute you're going to start gutting the thing that has made your show interesting in the first place.
02:38:03.000Which isn't to say that you shouldn't be cognizant of that responsibility that you're now obviously aware of and have described, but there is going in the other direction excessively also, and there's no Joe Rogan podcast if you're not at points making people angry.
02:38:23.000Also, I understand that if I do have someone questionable and I have to challenge them on their ideas, I can't just let people just rant and say anything.
02:38:33.000If it was just me and my friends nine years ago, ten years ago, and we were getting high and sitting around and someone would say some crazy shit, I would just start laughing at it.
02:38:43.000And I didn't think, oh, now they think that I'm agreeing with what this person's saying.
02:38:49.000But just the absurdity of what people were saying would make me laugh.
02:39:24.000But you do, whether you want it or not.
02:39:27.000I thought one really interesting episode that happened recently was that maybe a month ago or six weeks ago, you claimed that left-wing Antifa activists had started some of the fires on the West Coast,
02:39:48.000Instead of doubling down or justifying why you said it, you immediately issued a statement that was self-flagellating in its admission of error.
02:40:03.000You never, ever, ever see major news outlets doing anything of the sort, even when they say something that's much more destructive that's false.
02:40:58.000And so he shows me this thing and I'm like, well, I read and I was thinking about all the different people that I read on Twitter that were pointing it out.
02:41:05.000It turns out there was like one Black Lives Matter protester or activist that was caught lighting fires and most of it was...
02:42:20.000I described it inaccurately and you interjected and said that's not actually what I said.
02:42:24.000It wasn't because I was purposely mischaracterizing it.
02:42:28.000It's just we're human, and we gather information, especially with the amount of information that is surrounding us all the time, in an incomplete way, or we remember it wrong, or we interpret it incorrectly, or we process it wrong.
02:42:39.000I remember Barry Weiss, who I used to be sworn enemies with, and now I'm slowly developing a friendship with her.
02:42:45.000She was on your show once, and I talked to her about this.
02:43:53.000You're not going to ever respect yourself.
02:43:56.000You're not going to appreciate your thoughts.
02:43:58.000You're always going to know you're a phony.
02:44:01.000Yeah, because deep down you're going to know.
02:44:03.000You could have doubled down and said, no, here's someone who said this, fuck all of you, and you would have been fine, but deep down you would have known that you just vomited on your integrity.
02:45:22.000And can you think of a time that you've seen the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, CNN issue an acknowledgment of error even remotely in the same universe like that?
02:45:35.000No, but I also think that's a problem when you have an enormous organization that thinks about the consequences of an apology and the consequences of admitting error and the scrutiny that comes with that of all the other things you said as well.
02:45:49.000I mean, our business meeting, our big sit-down was me literally walking in and talking to my friend Jamie and him showing me this article and I'm going, shit, I gotta say something.
02:46:02.000Alright, let me say something right now.
02:46:03.000And the whole interaction took three minutes.
02:46:06.000And then I pull up my phone and I just make an apology.
02:46:09.000I mean, there's no people to run it by.
02:46:12.000I don't have to have a meeting where the executives sit down and say, listen, this could be very consequential to our ad revenue.
02:46:21.000This could really become a problem with people respecting your opinion on other things.
02:46:30.000But the reality is one derives benefit from doing it.
02:46:36.000I don't think the reason institutions avoid doing it is because they fear the consequences.
02:46:40.000Unless, you know, it's possible if you've defamed somebody, then of course you're going to be lured up and be really constrained in what you can say.
02:46:47.000But absent that, I think the reason is because they're so...
02:47:34.000I am, you know, I'm just a human being and my ideas are some things that I embrace or don't.
02:47:40.000And they come in and out and I have ethics and I have morals and I have values.
02:47:45.000But my ideas, what I believe and don't believe, especially pertaining to events that I'm not even witness of, I'm not married to those.
02:47:54.000I think part of the problem is I think?
02:48:13.000I find it a virtue that if you're having a conversation with a person and they say something that shows you right away that you're not correct, to be able to say, oh, yep, you're right.
02:48:35.000That's exposing yourself in a very public way.
02:48:42.000I'm certainly not the person who does that best.
02:48:45.000I have difficulty myself acknowledging error in that way.
02:48:50.000I think one of the reasons that it's hard is because if you have a public platform, And especially with so much of our politics and discourse being conducted on social media, which is so toxic and brings out the worst and not the best in people,
02:49:09.000almost by design, anything where you show vulnerability...
02:49:18.000Actually, I remember when you did that, I observed it.
02:49:22.000I said, hey, look, for all you journalists who scorn him, when is the last time you've issued a correction this unflinching, this just naked in its acknowledgment of error with no attempt to justify it or bullshit or adorn it with caveats?
02:49:37.000And a lot of people said to me, Oh, fuck him.
02:49:43.000You know, look at the damage he did with disseminating this dangerous slander against the left.
02:50:28.000And I think your great, I mean, I hate to call it work because it's hardly work, but the greater body of what you put out there speaks for itself.
02:50:36.000If someone wants to extract individual things out of context and try to draw a conclusion that that's who you are, or this one individual error, like when you fucked up about the fires, that's you.
02:50:52.000They're playing a game themselves, and that's a lack of accepting of nuance, a lack of appreciation that human beings are these weird, flawed creatures that maintain contradicting ideas all the time and that have fucked up thoughts and express themselves incorrectly and make errors.
02:51:14.000And to deny that, well, you're playing a game now.
02:51:18.000And it's oftentimes people that want to pretend that they're so compassionate.
02:51:23.000Those are the ones that often are the ones that are the most vicious doing that.
02:52:48.000And a lot of times you just become kind of the vessel for them to expel that.
02:52:53.000It's often, very often not about you at all, but about them.
02:52:58.000And it takes a while to internalize that, not to take that personally, because so often it's really those attacks are just kind of a vehicle for them to compensate for the deprivation that they have in life on so many different levels.
02:53:11.000I think that's very accurate and I think Twitter exacerbates that more than any other form of social media.
02:53:18.000Alan Levinowitz had a great way of putting it that it's processed information and it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you.
02:53:26.000It's not the way you're supposed to get information.
02:53:28.000It's not the way you're supposed to communicate.
02:53:29.000You're supposed to communicate looking at people in front of them.
02:53:32.000You're supposed to be seeing each other.
02:53:34.000I mean, that's when we're at our best.
02:53:36.000And I think that the way people communicate on Twitter, it It exacerbates mental illness.
02:53:43.000It exacerbates anxiety and exacerbates depression and certainly being isolated and being trapped because of the pandemic and being stuck at home exacerbates that as well.
02:53:58.000But I just don't think it's healthy to argue with people that way.
02:54:01.000And the way people were willing to argue on Twitter, they would never communicate like that in person unless they're a fucking psychopath, right?
02:54:10.000Joe, do you know, like, anytime I sign onto the internet, at any second of the day, 3.30 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon, whenever it is, I can find thousands of people saying the worst possible shit about me like I was worse than Hitler.
02:54:24.000In the 15 years that I've been doing this work, Except for one old lady who was rich and 85 years old and I was walking down the street after a protest last year in Brazil at the height of the controversial reporting I was doing and she opened her window and started cursing at me and telling me that I deserved to be imprisoned.
02:54:46.000Every single time somebody on the street has walked up to me because they recognize me from my work, it's been to say, I think your work is awesome.
02:55:09.000And that's why I think that so much of it is just that thing that people have inside of them that modern society creates through deprivation that at least being anonymous and spewing hatred online enables them to some extent to expel.
02:55:24.000And also, you being a very high-profile journalist, you become a target in that you're not even a normal person.
02:55:31.000Like, it's easy to take free shots at you.
02:55:34.000Like, it's easy to justify those free shots.
02:55:43.000Yeah, or people read about how much money you make or what success you've had, and then you just become this pixelated target, and your humanity is drained for them.
02:56:57.000I'm one of those fucking idiots who has tried often but failed to avoid that in part because I do like the back and forth, the vibrancy of exchange.
02:57:06.000One of the things I always liked about new media versus old media is that journalists did have to hear from critics and engage with them as opposed to speaking from the mountaintop.
02:57:13.000But like any drug that can start off really good and really pleasurable and open up new experiences for you, when it becomes a kind of addiction, It becomes toxic and destructive, which is what it's become for me.
02:57:28.000But I think the other side of it is the same.
02:57:31.000You can't get attached to the people who hate you, but you also can't...
02:58:02.000My husband and I adopted two kids, two brothers, three years ago.
02:58:06.000Last year, at the height of the Brazil reporting, when the right in Brazil hated me and the left loved me, they had this huge event, which is in defense of my press freedom after Bolsonaro threatened to imprison me.
02:58:17.000It was a hall filled with 6,000 people.
02:58:35.000And my kids, who were 11 and 9 at the time, no, 10 and 8 at the time, Picked up like these little pieces of paper and put them in their mouth and found a straw and just started like spitting spitballs at my head.
02:58:48.000So and then like I would look over at them and they would like just fucking giggle like I was the biggest douchebag on the planet.
02:58:55.000There was like historic in nature, like people chanting my name and carrying my signs.
02:58:58.000And I love, of course, I wanted to fucking strangle my kids because they were like shooting spitballs in my head.
02:59:04.000But at the same time, I was so grateful for them because they were treating me like, you know, just some like dumb, stupid dad who they were mocking.
02:59:12.000And it just reminded me like all that other stuff is so fake.
02:59:16.000You know, it just, that's not the stuff that matters.
02:59:46.000I'm in a text thread with a bunch of comedian friends, and it's horrific shit, but it's funny.
02:59:52.000But it's funny, even if it's pointed towards you.
02:59:56.000It's like we were talking about earlier about these alt-right people that lean towards the attention that they get, and it ultimately becomes toxic.
03:00:04.000And I think they recognize the folly in that when it goes away and they realize where are those people and I lean towards them and maybe express myself in a disingenuous way to try to get their love and now I find myself the victim of that.
03:00:46.000Yeah, I watched two biopics on a row by accident.
03:00:50.000The Michael Jackson one where they just included his accusers, which, believe them or not, Michael Jackson had all kinds of fucked up things in his life and died at 50. And then Freddie Mercury, who had a not entirely identical but still similar trajectory.
03:01:04.000All the fame, all the money, all the adulation that you could possibly want in the world, and all the most fucked up pathologies that ultimately killed them as well that came with it.
03:01:14.000Yeah, my favorite example is Elvis, because Elvis is one of the first.
03:01:17.000I mean, when Elvis became that famous in the 1950s and the 60s, there was really no one like that before him, or very few people that he could mirror.
03:01:28.000Like, he could say, you know, I could call Dave Chappelle, and if I've got some weird shit about being famous as fuck with me, I can call him, and maybe at least we find common ground, and I feel like, okay, I'm not the only one out there that feels weird about all this.
03:02:09.000I don't think anybody can really manage it at that scale.
03:02:11.000I think when you get to that Michael Jackson level, you get to that Elvis level, it's like there is no normal and there is no one you can mirror.
03:02:19.000There's no one who's going to understand what you're going through.
03:02:22.000You are recognizable in every square inch of the planet.
03:02:51.000It's a real thing that you have to have energy and focus and that can ground you and you can use the tools and the mental fortitude that you gather from that and it can help you survive the bullshit from the other things.
03:03:07.000Yoga and meditation have saved my life on multiple occasions precisely for that reason.
03:03:16.000Even independent of whether you're well-known or successful in your career, I think you need some escape from just materiality, from the constant pressures and And this one-dimensional form of evaluating yourself,
03:03:33.000like that spirituality that you can't get if you don't have religion, as most of us these days don't in the West.
03:03:40.000You don't need religion, but you do need spirituality of some kind, like just some purpose, some connection to something beyond just your immediate material desires.
03:03:48.000And I do think if you deny yourself that...
03:03:52.000You're going to get off kilter at best.
03:03:56.000And yeah, I think that's because we crave purpose.
03:04:00.000And making money or being famous or doing well in your career isn't purpose.
03:04:06.000It's something that can enable purpose.
03:04:07.000It's something that can help you fulfill your purpose, but it in itself is not purpose.
03:04:13.000And if that's all you're pursuing to the exclusion of other things or all that's defining you, Yeah, I don't think you're going to end up very good.
03:04:20.000Yeah, because there's something that comes with too much success is a lack of lessons.
03:04:24.000There's too much adulation and love and too many people are holding doors open for you and telling you how great you are.
03:04:30.000And you don't learn from those lessons.