The Joe Rogan Experience - October 28, 2020


Joe Rogan Experience #1556 - Glenn Greenwald


Episode Stats

Length

3 hours and 4 minutes

Words per Minute

160.0973

Word Count

29,610

Sentence Count

1,857

Misogynist Sentences

34


Summary

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.


Transcript

00:00:12.000 Hello, Glenn.
00:00:14.000 Hello, Joe Rogan.
00:00:15.000 How are you?
00:00:15.000 I'm great, man.
00:00:16.000 It's great to finally make your acquaintance digitally at least.
00:00:21.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:00:21.000 We've been trying for a while before the pandemic, so I'm glad we're at least finally able to do this version of it.
00:00:28.000 Yeah, I hope we do it in person eventually.
00:00:30.000 That would be nice.
00:00:31.000 For sure.
00:00:32.000 What is it like down in Brazil?
00:00:35.000 In general or?
00:00:37.000 No, I've been to Brazil.
00:00:38.000 Everything that's going on.
00:00:39.000 Like right now.
00:00:40.000 I've been to Brazil multiple times.
00:00:41.000 I love it down there.
00:00:44.000 Obviously, it's a fraught situation politically because the country in 2018 elected a genuine fanatic, someone who explicitly I think?
00:01:16.000 We're good to go.
00:01:25.000 We're good to go.
00:01:38.000 So bursting full of vibrancy and energy and potential and uniqueness that I'm always kind of optimistic about it, no matter how grim things seem to be.
00:01:47.000 They're very, very friendly people.
00:01:49.000 I really love it down there.
00:01:51.000 I first went there in 2003 for the Abu Dhabi World Jiu-Jitsu Championships.
00:01:59.000 Right, yeah, because I guess the fighting that you like is super popular here, right?
00:02:03.000 There are a lot of Brazilian...
00:02:04.000 MMA fighters.
00:02:05.000 The original UFC fighter was Hoist Gracie, who's a member of the famous Gracie clan that came out of Rio.
00:02:14.000 I've been going there for 17 years.
00:02:16.000 I really do love it down there.
00:02:19.000 Yeah, 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.
00:02:25.000 And before I lived here, I lived in, you know, Manhattan, where I lived and worked, which is pretty much the exact polar opposite of Brazil in terms of the mentality of the people.
00:02:34.000 I remember, you know, I used to come to Rio when I first started coming here, you would go to the grocery store or the supermarket, and there'd be a line of like eight people.
00:02:44.000 And the people in line would just stop and chat with the cashier for like three minutes.
00:02:50.000 And 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.
00:03:04.000 And 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.
00:03:10.000 And it really just taught me a lot about the need not to have to maximize the utility of every moment.
00:03:16.000 Yeah, I have a friend who moved down there from Los Angeles to do jiu-jitsu, and he said the first thing you have to accept is that you're on Brazil time.
00:03:25.000 They are just so laid back.
00:03:26.000 If you need anything to get done, if you need a plumber and he's supposed to be there at 10, he might not be there 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.
00:03:39.000 It is what it is.
00:03:41.000 You just got to accept it.
00:03:42.000 They're just more laid back.
00:03:44.000 They're not in a rush.
00:03:46.000 Yeah, I've asked many people, many Brazilians here, why do you bother having the word for fast in Portuguese since it applies to nothing?
00:03:54.000 And yeah, it's true.
00:03:56.000 And you can decide that that's what you hate about it.
00:03:59.000 For me, just the complete lack of organization or urgency in terms of time is one of the things I love about it.
00:04:06.000 So being there, and you were there living there when you broke the Snowden interview?
00:04:14.000 Yeah, I've been living here since 2005, so the Snowden story was 2013. This is what I've always wanted to ask you about this.
00:04:24.000 Did you feel physically in danger when that was happening?
00:04:28.000 Because that was such a gigantic moment.
00:04:32.000 And so...
00:04:34.000 I think?
00:04:51.000 Yeah, for sure.
00:04:53.000 I mean, for one thing, at the time we were living in a part of Rio that was very isolated.
00:04:57.000 We were living literally on a mountain in the middle of the woods.
00:05:01.000 And I had with me at all times, physically on my person, 14 or 15 thumb drives that contained...
00:05:10.000 Hundreds of thousands, if not more.
00:05:12.000 I've never quantified it on purpose.
00:05:15.000 You know, of the most sensitive documents possessed by the most powerful government on the planet, the most secretive agency within that government.
00:05:25.000 And I would carry them on my person at all times.
00:05:27.000 You 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.
00:05:35.000 And obviously, there were a lot of people who...
00:05:38.000 Wanted to get their hands on those documents, not just the US government to take them back, though they realized at some point that that would be impossible, but other governments, non-government actors.
00:05:50.000 But then on top of that, you know, every story that we were doing was affecting markets, it was affecting diplomatic relations, so there was obviously a big, big interest in a lot of intelligence agencies around the world and what I was doing.
00:06:02.000 And, you know, felt monitored all the time because I was.
00:06:07.000 You know, not like the kind of paranoid feeling of monitoring, but the actual being monitored has been confirmed in a lot of different ways.
00:06:15.000 But, you know, the biggest concern at the time was that the U.S. government, being the U.S. government, got very bullying and very threatening and was explicitly and implicitly, both in public and private, making clear that if I left Brazil...
00:06:29.000 There was a good chance that they would try and arrest me.
00:06:31.000 I mean, remember how extreme they were with Snowden?
00:06:34.000 They brought down the plane of the president of Bolivia when he was coming back from Moscow on the suspicion that he might have been taking Snowden with them, and of course he wasn't, but that's how extreme they were.
00:06:45.000 So I stayed in Brazil for about 10 months and didn't feel safe leaving.
00:06:50.000 The Justice Department was telling my lawyers if he leaves and shows up at any airport, We're going to arrest him.
00:06:56.000 And the Brazilian government was super protective of us because a lot of that Snowden reporting revealed how the NSA and the UK and Canada were spying on Brazilian institutions, Brazilian oil companies, the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff,
00:07:12.000 the population.
00:07:13.000 So in Brazil, this reporting was looked at very favorably.
00:07:16.000 And so the government, the Senate, offered a lot of protection.
00:07:19.000 So I just felt very safe in Brazil and very unsafe elsewhere.
00:07:23.000 Well, it's very nice that you felt safe in Brazil.
00:07:27.000 It's very nice that they were protecting you.
00:07:29.000 Do they have a history of monitoring their people the same way the United States does?
00:07:36.000 Well, 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,
00:07:53.000 and they were steadfastly attempting to remain neutral in the endless Soviet Union-US Cold War.
00:08:00.000 But 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.
00:08:10.000 Nothing communist, but just very kind of mild reforms like rent control and land reform and some nationalization of companies to try and assuage the really brutal income inequality that has plagued the country forever.
00:08:26.000 And so the U.S. government, first under John Kennedy and then under Lyndon Johnson, worked with right-wing Brazilian generals to overthrow that democratically elected government violently.
00:08:34.000 And they imposed a military dictatorship for the next 21 years, of which the current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, was a part as an army captain.
00:08:42.000 And those are really dark days.
00:08:45.000 Dissidents were murdered, journalists were killed and exiled.
00:08:50.000 Everybody was spied upon with the help of the CIA and MI5 and MI6 in the UK. And so a lot of that kind of endures, that relationship between the CIA and the Brazilian government.
00:09:01.000 But since 1985, when it democratized, it's become once again a model of a liberal democracy.
00:09:08.000 So no government in the world is obsessed with spying on the world like the US is.
00:09:13.000 But yeah, there's a pretty dark underbelly, like there is in any major country in Brazil, of kind of like a deep state or an intelligence community, whatever you want to call it, that definitely uses the dark arts to maintain control over the population.
00:09:28.000 When you hit send, when you finally released, when you put that story out, what was the feeling like?
00:09:35.000 Was there ever a, oh shit, what have I done moment?
00:09:39.000 No, there probably should have been.
00:09:41.000 And if I were healthier from a mental health perspective, there would have been a bigger one of those.
00:09:47.000 But I was in Hong Kong, first of all.
00:09:51.000 We had flown there to meet Snowden.
00:09:55.000 And I wasn't sleeping at all.
00:09:58.000 I mean, obviously, I knew it was going to be one of the biggest stories of that generation, if not the biggest.
00:10:04.000 But 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.
00:10:23.000 But it was very difficult to sound that alarm because everything was done behind a wall of secrecy.
00:10:28.000 And so when I finally got these documents in my hand, You know, it's like the dream, right?
00:10:34.000 It's why you go into journalism, but especially for me to be able to show the world that everything was so much more extreme than even I thought, that I just wanted to get them out in the world as soon as possible.
00:10:45.000 Like, any delay at all on the part of The Guardian, which was the newspaper with which I was working at the time, and reporting, you know, drove me into a rage.
00:10:53.000 I just felt like the world deserved to see these documents.
00:10:56.000 And also, you know, I was so inspired by...
00:11:01.000 By Snowden.
00:11:02.000 I mean, you've talked to him, I think, twice now.
00:11:04.000 So you know, like, you know, he's this 29-year-old kid at the time who pretty much gambled.
00:11:10.000 We thought 95% likelihood he was going to end up in prison, not for a few years, but for the rest of his life.
00:11:16.000 And like, not in a nice prison, but in the kind of prison that you go in when they accuse you of jeopardizing American national security.
00:11:24.000 Yeah.
00:11:42.000 I thought, you know, if he's willing to go to prison for the rest of his life, and he chose me to work with him, you know, the courage kind of became infectious.
00:11:52.000 And we kind of adopted this trench bunker mentality, like we were in this together, and we were going to fight everybody.
00:11:59.000 And that became the energy much more, and it kind of drowned out the fears that probably were rational for us to have.
00:12:04.000 I felt very honored and very, very fortunate to be able to talk to him.
00:12:11.000 And I think he's a very noble person, unusually noble.
00:12:16.000 And in long-form conversations, if there was any hint of something different, I really believe it would have leaked out.
00:12:24.000 He really is that guy.
00:12:26.000 And I think history, when we look upon this case, I mean, the documentary was pretty excellent that showed all the moments leading up to you releasing the story.
00:12:38.000 But 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.
00:13:04.000 It'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.
00:13:17.000 Yeah, 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,
00:13:45.000 particularly if he loses, but even if he doesn't, that he should follow through on what he's now twice bizarrely raised on his own, which was the prospect of pardoning Snowden.
00:13:54.000 It's probably my top priority in the world at the moment.
00:13:57.000 And 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,
00:14:14.000 people lying and deceiving about why they're doing things, about presenting a false version of who they are.
00:14:22.000 And that's the thing is, you know, you talk to him for those hours.
00:14:25.000 When I got to Hong Kong, you know, before becoming a journalist, I was a litigator in Manhattan and I used those skills.
00:14:32.000 You 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.
00:14:47.000 Who was this person to whom I was about to tie myself in my Reputation and credibility eternally.
00:14:54.000 And he really is somebody who...
00:14:57.000 And 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.
00:15:12.000 They're alienated from society.
00:15:16.000 They feel persecuted and mistreated.
00:15:22.000 We're good to go.
00:15:50.000 He had a great job.
00:15:51.000 He was making a lot of money.
00:15:52.000 He was a high school dropout, but had taught himself these really coveted skills.
00:15:59.000 So he had a great career ahead of him.
00:16:00.000 A mother and a father who both love him.
00:16:02.000 Very stable home life.
00:16:04.000 We're good to go.
00:16:22.000 He's probably the person or one of the people certainly I admire most in this world in all the time I've lived.
00:16:29.000 And 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.
00:16:41.000 But, like, I also always say that he's the person who I know in this world who, when he puts his head down on his pillow at night, he falls asleep most easily.
00:16:53.000 Because there's something about knowing that you face this dangerous choice and you chose the right thing.
00:17:00.000 I mean, in Hong Kong, as I said, I was never sleeping.
00:17:03.000 My colleague or Poitras was never sleeping.
00:17:05.000 We were sleeping, like, an hour or two with the aid of very strong sleep narcotics.
00:17:10.000 And, you know, he would say, like at 9.30, he would yawn.
00:17:14.000 He would say, okay, guys, I think I'm going to hit the hay.
00:17:16.000 Like, he had no care in the world.
00:17:19.000 And that was, I was like, what the fuck?
00:17:21.000 And he would, like, sleep for eight hours, you know?
00:17:23.000 And he would wake up, have a little coffee.
00:17:26.000 But that's what that, you know, clean conscience does to a person.
00:17:31.000 Even with a clean conscience, I just don't understand the weight of the stress that he was under.
00:17:36.000 I don't understand how he could be so calm.
00:17:41.000 I mean, he didn't have stress.
00:17:43.000 That's what's so bizarre.
00:17:44.000 I mean, you saw in the film, right, in the documentary, Citizen Four, where like, you know, because we had no idea what the CIA knew.
00:17:52.000 We had no idea what the Chinese government knew.
00:17:53.000 We had no idea what Hong Kong authorities knew.
00:17:56.000 We were waiting.
00:17:57.000 I 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.
00:18:08.000 Like 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,
00:18:23.000 I was certain at any moment he was going to be in the hands of the US government.
00:18:28.000 And the next time I would see him would be on television in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a courtroom, getting ready to be sentenced to like 50 years in prison in one of those hell holes that the U.S. specializes in where you spend 23 and a half hours a day alone in your cell.
00:18:44.000 And you have 30 minutes a day where you get to walk in a little room in the sun to satisfy legal requirements.
00:18:51.000 And that was going to be him for the rest of his life.
00:18:53.000 He got very lucky.
00:18:54.000 I mean, he almost did end up that way.
00:18:56.000 So for me, I was concerned for him, stressed for him, but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose.
00:19:05.000 I mean, it wasn't like, you know, and that was really important for me to know that he had thought through all the likely consequences.
00:19:12.000 I didn't want to feel like I was using somebody's work product who hadn't given full thought to what it is that they had gotten themselves into.
00:19:23.000 And it was only once I became very, you know, he could cite the statutes with which they were going to charge him and what the legal defenses that were available were.
00:19:31.000 So he had given extreme thought to this.
00:19:34.000 He's an adult and he made that choice.
00:19:36.000 And it was amazing.
00:19:37.000 To this very day, he's completely at peace with it.
00:19:40.000 It's stunning.
00:19:41.000 It'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,
00:19:57.000 that they still would punish him if they caught him.
00:20:01.000 And everybody's like, huh, you know.
00:20:04.000 So what is government then?
00:20:06.000 If government is a group of people that are allowed to do something that has absolutely been deemed illegal by the courts, and if you catch them doing this illegal thing and then report it and everyone agrees that it's wrong, everyone agrees it's unconstitutional,
00:20:23.000 but yet if they get you they will still put you in jail.
00:20:26.000 What the fuck is government?
00:20:28.000 What is government?
00:20:30.000 Not only that, right?
00:20:31.000 Not only is the person who exposes what are crimes, what courts have said are crimes, not only is that person punished as though they've done something wrong, when in reality they're owed the gratitude, right, of The entire country for stopping criminal spying by the government on our population domestically,
00:20:53.000 which was one of the primary preoccupations of the American Revolution.
00:20:57.000 That was what the founding was about.
00:20:59.000 It 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.
00:21:12.000 Yeah.
00:21:17.000 Yeah.
00:21:20.000 Yeah.
00:21:33.000 They don't have charges against them.
00:21:35.000 Nothing.
00:22:01.000 Explicitly.
00:22:01.000 Does the U.S. government, does the NSA collect dossiers and tons of information on millions of Americans?
00:22:08.000 And he looked at the senator who asked him that and said, no, sir, not wittingly.
00:22:13.000 That's a crime.
00:22:14.000 That's a felony just to lie to the Senate, let alone to do it.
00:22:17.000 And not only was James Clapper never prosecuted, he was never fired, he served out his term as President Obama's senior national security official.
00:22:25.000 And you know where he works now?
00:22:26.000 He works at CNN, disseminating the news.
00:22:29.000 To the American public after he got caught fucking lying about the most important question he's ever been asked.
00:22:37.000 That's how you know that you live in a country that, despite the facade of democracy, has gone very, very off course.
00:22:46.000 The 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...
00:22:56.000 The population would know everything about what the government is doing, right?
00:23:00.000 That's just basic transparency.
00:23:02.000 We need to know what the government is doing with the power, the public power we place in their hands, with very rare exceptions, right?
00:23:08.000 Like we should know what movements they're planning, if they're in a war with troops.
00:23:12.000 They have a right to something secret, but the overwhelming amount of things they do should be public and transparent.
00:23:17.000 And they should know nothing about us, right?
00:23:20.000 That's why we have a right to privacy.
00:23:21.000 We're private citizens.
00:23:22.000 They're the public sector.
00:23:23.000 That's what the basic foundation of a healthy society would be.
00:23:26.000 The United States has completely reversed that, not just the US, but the West, generally, since the 9-11 attacks, where everything that they do is presumptively secret.
00:23:38.000 We know almost nothing about what they do except what they decide to tell us.
00:23:41.000 Most 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.
00:23:48.000 They know with whom we communicate, they know what we say, they know where we go.
00:23:51.000 It's completely reversed what a free and healthy society ought to be, and that more than anything is what Snowden exposed.
00:24:00.000 And what's stunning to me is that he's now a citizen of Russia.
00:24:07.000 He lives over there.
00:24:08.000 They've accepted him and they've given him...
00:24:10.000 Well, he's still a U.S. citizen, but he has permanent residence.
00:24:13.000 Permanent residence.
00:24:14.000 So 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.
00:24:20.000 And it's sort of out of the public consciousness.
00:24:22.000 I mean, unless he does an interview with you or with me or with some other publication or something, and then briefly it's in the public's eye for a moment.
00:24:30.000 But no one seems to be outraged.
00:24:32.000 It's a small amount of people that seem to be outraged.
00:24:35.000 A 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.
00:24:44.000 For, again, exposing crime, doing what a journalist is supposed to do.
00:24:49.000 I mean, and everyone's apathetic about it.
00:24:52.000 It's very bizarre, and it speaks to the lack of trust that we have in mainstream media today.
00:25:01.000 Because they're not up in arms about this.
00:25:03.000 There's no giant pieces on CNN running on a daily basis.
00:25:06.000 This is not something that everybody has got on their news feed on their phone every day.
00:25:12.000 And it should be.
00:25:13.000 It really should be.
00:25:14.000 Because if you can't expose crime in the government, you don't really have a government.
00:25:20.000 You have a dictatorship that's dressed up like a government.
00:25:25.000 Exactly.
00:25:25.000 And you know what is done to obscure that fact that you just described accurately?
00:25:33.000 There's like a pretense of dissent, right?
00:25:36.000 So you have CNN or MSNBC or like the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post where people ostensibly express different opinions and have debates and arguments.
00:25:48.000 But they're in extremely constrained...
00:25:52.000 We're good to go.
00:26:13.000 We're good to go.
00:26:27.000 They don't have the freedom to be dissidents.
00:26:30.000 The U.S. government has succeeded in keeping Julian Assange in prison for a year and a half now.
00:26:37.000 There's no chance he's going to get out of a British prison, even if he wins every one of his appeals and hearings for at least another two to three years.
00:26:44.000 And if he doesn't, he'll be extradited to the U.S. and go to prison for the rest of his life.
00:26:47.000 And absent a pardon by Trump, Snowden will be in exile for the rest of his life.
00:26:54.000 And 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.
00:27:11.000 That is just the reality of the United States and it is tyrannical.
00:27:17.000 The other thing I just want to say is the worst scumbags on all of this Like, isn't necessarily the population, right?
00:27:25.000 Like, 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.
00:27:39.000 The cases are complicated.
00:27:40.000 There are legal issues involved, and there's huge...
00:27:42.000 Huge globs of propaganda to which they're subjected.
00:28:00.000 That he applied for asylum with.
00:28:02.000 They trapped him in Russia.
00:28:03.000 He never chose to be there.
00:28:05.000 He was planning on transiting through.
00:28:06.000 And then they used the fact that he's in Russia to say, oh, look, he's a traitor.
00:28:10.000 Otherwise, why would he be in Russia?
00:28:12.000 So there's really effective propaganda.
00:28:14.000 So I don't blame the population.
00:28:16.000 The people I blame are journalists.
00:28:18.000 It is the job of journalists to defend the people who expose the truth.
00:28:23.000 If you don't do that as a journalist, what is your fucking purpose?
00:28:26.000 Why are you a journalist?
00:28:28.000 And 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.
00:28:39.000 Because what they really are are servants of the government and not what they pretend to be.
00:28:43.000 So Joe Biden was responsible for blocking his asylum to other countries?
00:28:49.000 Yeah, Joe Biden and John Kerry.
00:28:51.000 I mean, you know, it's not like they were uniquely bad.
00:28:54.000 I mean, they were carrying out the policy of the Obama administration, but it was Joe Biden who took the lead.
00:29:00.000 One of the first things that he did was, when Snowden left Hong Kong, the ticket that he had was Moscow, Havana, and then he was going to go to Ecuador, where he was going to get asylum.
00:29:11.000 And Joe Biden called the Cuban government and said, if you allow him safe passage, which they had already granted him...
00:29:17.000 You're going to suffer consequences like you've never experienced from the US government before.
00:29:22.000 So they withdrew their safe passage guarantee.
00:29:25.000 And then he applied to countries that frequently grant asylum to whistleblowers like Sweden, Finland, even Germany and France, where there were also a lot of revelations that were looked upon favorably because he was showing those populations how the NSA was spying on them.
00:29:42.000 And then at the last minute...
00:29:57.000 When Obama was running, remember the Hope and Change website?
00:30:01.000 I do.
00:30:02.000 It expressly...
00:30:04.000 He talked about, very clearly, protecting whistleblowers.
00:30:09.000 And this is a big part of what he was running on.
00:30:13.000 What do you think happens when you get in office?
00:30:16.000 I mean, I'm a fan of the way Obama communicates.
00:30:20.000 I'm a fan of what he represents as a president.
00:30:22.000 He was just so eloquent and such a great statesman.
00:30:26.000 And everyone had so much hope for what he was going to do once he got into office.
00:30:30.000 But his administration was one of the worst for whistleblowers ever.
00:30:34.000 What do you think happens when you get in there?
00:30:37.000 I mean, do you think it's like the Bill Hicks bit where they show you an angle of the Kennedy assassination that you've never seen before, and then they ask you, are there any questions?
00:30:49.000 I mean, I don't want to be too maximalist in the conspiracy theorizing, but...
00:30:59.000 I'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.
00:31:16.000 You can find this clip.
00:31:18.000 It's online.
00:31:18.000 It's amazing.
00:31:20.000 And Trump had been posting a bunch of shocking stuff on Twitter, mocking the CIA for having gotten Iraq so wrong, which they did, because he was angry at them because they were essentially leaking against his administration before it even began and were blaming Russia for his election victory,
00:31:38.000 which he felt was delegitimizing him.
00:31:40.000 So he started criticizing the CIA. And Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow's show, and she asked him about it, and he said...
00:31:48.000 Morality and ethics aside of doing that, for a hard-nosed businessman like Trump claims to be, you have to be the biggest imbecile in the world to stand up to and challenge and attack the intelligence community because nobody has more weapons to destroy you if you do that than they do.
00:32:07.000 And it was kind of like a throwaway line, but in reality it was one of the most important and candid admissions of how the government actually works that has ever been broadcast, certainly on that shitty network, but really like on TV ever.
00:32:18.000 Because he was essentially saying there's this permanent power faction, which Dwight Eisenhower warned about, you know, in 1961 when he was leaving the presidency, called it the military industrial complex.
00:32:29.000 But there's this permanent power faction that is much more powerful than the officials we elect.
00:32:35.000 And who stay in Washington and exert power, regardless of the outcome of elections, who you can't challenge or impede because they'll destroy you.
00:32:46.000 And so, you know, Obama, despite the lofty rhetoric and like the visionary posturing, which I also don't want to say fell for, but was kind of inspired by in 2007, has always been a very We're good to go.
00:33:17.000 I 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,
00:33:36.000 I'm going to give them all immunity because he didn't want to be at war with the CIA. So I think that's part of it, right?
00:33:40.000 Like 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.
00:33:51.000 You need to punish these people or we're going to have an endless series of leaks.
00:33:56.000 So part of it is just that kind of calculation, like a very pragmatic calculation.
00:34:00.000 Like, look, I may be president, but I'm not actually the only one who wields a lot of power in this town.
00:34:05.000 And then I think the other part of it is...
00:34:08.000 When 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,
00:34:23.000 if you believe that you're a benevolent and noble person using that power for benevolent and noble ends, then you start to believe that anyone who stands in your way and is impeding you is somebody who inherently Is ill-intentioned or at least engaged in misconduct that ought to be sanctioned and punished.
00:34:46.000 And I think that kind of became part of Obama's worldview too.
00:34:50.000 Like it's one thing to champion whistleblowers when they're exposing George Bush and Dick Cheney's secrets.
00:34:55.000 But when they're exposing Eric Holder and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton's secrets, it seems a lot less benevolent to somebody from Obama's sitting in his place.
00:35:08.000 It is amazing that Schumer would make that statement on television.
00:35:12.000 It really is.
00:35:13.000 Have you seen it?
00:35:13.000 No, I haven't.
00:35:15.000 You should see it and show it.
00:35:17.000 It's amazing.
00:35:17.000 Jamie just pulled it up right here.
00:35:19.000 Trump being really dumb to fight with intelligence.
00:35:21.000 It just seems like he would know better than to say that publicly, specifically to say that publicly on television.
00:35:29.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess when you're Chuck Schumer and you're just like a creature who's lived in that sewer for decades and barely ever emerges, you know, to like breathe human air, like those things that, you know, are just part of your world so embedded in it that everyone knows,
00:35:46.000 you forget that it's supposed to be hidden, that it's kind of shocking to other people.
00:35:53.000 I'll give you an example.
00:35:54.000 My husband and I, we rescue dogs.
00:35:55.000 So we have 25 dogs in our house.
00:35:57.000 So we go out to dinner.
00:35:59.000 I know, exactly.
00:35:59.000 So we go out to dinner, and someone will say, hey, I know you guys love dogs.
00:36:03.000 How many dogs do you have?
00:36:04.000 Oh, 25. It's the most natural thing in the world.
00:36:07.000 And of course, every person we say that to thinks we're fucking crazy.
00:36:11.000 They think we're those kids.
00:36:12.000 Right.
00:36:26.000 And he saw Trump doing that because Trump wasn't a creature of Washington and was kind of saying, like, he's being stupid.
00:36:33.000 Well, Trump has such a tremendous ego, too.
00:36:36.000 It doesn't seem like anybody is out of bounds for him.
00:36:39.000 Like, it seems like he feels like he could shit on anyone.
00:36:43.000 Like, anyone he's in some sort of conflict with is gonna get the wrath of his ire.
00:36:47.000 It just doesn't seem like he feels anyone is above him or beyond reproach.
00:36:53.000 Which 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,
00:37:12.000 just the power elite, and you have somebody who just...
00:37:17.000 Dumps on them with such contempt and doesn't have the slightest regard for any of it.
00:37:24.000 It's kind of cathartic.
00:37:26.000 You want to side with that person because he hates the same things you hate.
00:37:29.000 Well, I remember when he started using the term fake news, and I really thought it was a cop-out.
00:37:34.000 I thought, well, this is just a really sad way to...
00:37:40.000 We're good to go.
00:37:43.000 We're good to go.
00:37:46.000 We're good to go.
00:37:50.000 The 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?
00:38:01.000 Someone's biased.
00:38:02.000 There's something going wrong here.
00:38:04.000 Particularly when you see the coverage that we're currently dealing with Biden.
00:38:09.000 And, you know, you rightly have been extremely critical of Twitter and Facebook and these...
00:38:28.000 Yeah, the fourth largest.
00:38:41.000 The fourth largest.
00:38:42.000 It's insanity.
00:38:44.000 It literally is insane.
00:38:45.000 They're locked out of their Twitter account.
00:38:47.000 In the week leading up to the election, the fourth largest newspaper, and I don't know if it's the oldest, but it's one of the oldest for sure.
00:38:56.000 It was founded by Alexander Hamilton, is barred by Twitter, like the primary source of information for most people in journalism and politics, from posting information.
00:39:08.000 It's so bizarre.
00:39:10.000 It's madness.
00:39:11.000 It's so bizarre.
00:39:12.000 It's madness.
00:39:13.000 Go ahead.
00:39:15.000 I was going to say, the coverage that you hear about, if you pay attention to CNN, which I read CNN online pretty much every day.
00:39:23.000 I just want to see what they're saying, at least.
00:39:26.000 I used to read it for the news.
00:39:28.000 And now I go, what's their take?
00:39:31.000 It's like the Hunter Biden story is completely illegitimate.
00:39:34.000 It's not worth our time.
00:39:35.000 But Ellen's mean.
00:39:36.000 Did you know Ellen's mean?
00:39:37.000 She's still mean.
00:39:39.000 Here's another story about Ellen being mean.
00:39:41.000 It's fucking straight.
00:39:42.000 This person broke up.
00:39:44.000 This rapper broke up with his girlfriend.
00:39:46.000 Well, these two are getting back together.
00:39:48.000 Front page of CNN. You don't hear a fucking peep about the revelations that are coming out of...
00:39:55.000 This laptop, wherever it came from.
00:39:57.000 Jamie actually had a really good point.
00:39:59.000 I want to bring it up to you to see if this is possible.
00:40:03.000 I've heard of people being able to hack into an iCloud account from time to time.
00:40:09.000 If you had that ability to have the account hacked, you would need to clone it to a computer to then be able to decipher this material and then turn that into somewhere.
00:40:19.000 You can't say you hacked the iCloud account.
00:40:22.000 Is that possible that they then put it on a MacBook, turn it in, and say, oh, look what's on this MacBook?
00:40:29.000 But they do have emails and signed receipts from Hunter Biden.
00:40:34.000 Supposedly.
00:40:35.000 But they haven't denied that this is his laptop, which would be the first thing you would do.
00:40:41.000 This is the key point.
00:40:43.000 So, you know, when we reported the Snowden archive, you know, like when we hit send that first time, like you asked me earlier, you know, there were millions of documents, right?
00:40:52.000 We had a high degree of confidence in their authenticity because we had...
00:40:56.000 Verified a lot of them.
00:40:58.000 You use your intuition.
00:41:00.000 You examine them from a metadata perspective to see if there's indicia of forgery or alteration.
00:41:07.000 But you can never prove the negative that none of the documents has been altered or forged by Snowden or by somebody else.
00:41:14.000 You just don't know for sure with 100% certainty until you hit publish.
00:41:20.000 And The way that you ultimately find out for sure is if you publish that first report and the people that you're reporting about don't come back and say, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:41:31.000 That's not a real document.
00:41:32.000 We didn't ever do that.
00:41:34.000 That's not our document.
00:41:35.000 That's forged.
00:41:35.000 And it was when the NSA didn't say that that we, I mean, I don't think I've ever been so happy in my career and my life because that was proof that the archive was real because of course they would have said it.
00:41:46.000 Same thing, you know, last year in Brazil we reported this series of exposés Where my source had hacked the telephones of the highest and most powerful officials in Brazil and the Bolsonaro government and gave me the text conversations that they were having that revealed a lot of corruption.
00:42:04.000 Same thing.
00:42:05.000 Of course those people wouldn't verify or confirm to me that they were real before I published.
00:42:09.000 They wanted me to be in doubt and then once we published and they didn't say Those aren't my conversations.
00:42:15.000 Those are fabricated.
00:42:16.000 We knew they were real.
00:42:18.000 So just the fact alone that Biden has never denied either that the conversations are real or that Hunter actually brought his laptop to that Delaware repair store.
00:42:28.000 And, you know, we've submitted questions.
00:42:29.000 I've submitted questions to the Biden campaign and to Hunter Biden asking that question specifically.
00:42:34.000 And they won't answer because, of course, they're fucking real.
00:42:38.000 But it was the journalists, the media outlets like CNN that took the lead first in saying that this was Russian disinformation.
00:42:46.000 You know, like the standard way to get rid of information that they don't want the public to believe.
00:42:50.000 They just lied about that.
00:42:51.000 They just made that up.
00:42:52.000 There was never any evidence that Russia had the slightest thing to do with it.
00:42:58.000 You know, and as to your question, the provenance is a little unclear.
00:43:01.000 Like, that is kind of a bizarre story, right?
00:43:03.000 That, like, Hunter Biden brought in three laptops, never bothered to pick them up.
00:43:06.000 The store owner, out of curiosity, looked in them once no one picked them up, saw that there was all this evidence of corruption and gave it to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani.
00:43:14.000 I'm kind of skeptical of that story myself, but why isn't the Biden campaign denying that and saying, no, Hunter never has been to that store in his life.
00:43:21.000 That's a complete lie.
00:43:23.000 It's because it's probably true, but it's definitely true that these documents Sorry, authentic.
00:43:28.000 It sounds like a crazy thing to do until you factor in smoke and crack.
00:43:36.000 That is a factor.
00:43:37.000 That's a factor!
00:43:39.000 Once you factor in smoke and crack, you're like, hey, you probably leave shit all over the place.
00:43:43.000 Like, you're out of your mind.
00:43:44.000 And I don't blame him for that.
00:43:46.000 I mean, he's obviously had a drug problem.
00:43:49.000 And when you're smoking crack, you leave laptops at repair shops and you don't pay for them.
00:43:55.000 It seems normal.
00:43:58.000 Right?
00:43:58.000 Right.
00:43:59.000 I mean, that's the least of what you do, right?
00:44:01.000 Like, if you're struggling with substance abuse, that does make it a lot more credible.
00:44:06.000 But here's the thing.
00:44:07.000 Like, this is why...
00:44:10.000 I don't think I've ever been as disgusted with my colleagues in my profession as I have been the last three weeks because of this story, and I'll tell you why.
00:44:16.000 In general, journalists do not care about where material comes from if it's A, authentic and B, newsworthy.
00:44:26.000 For example, in 2016, somebody mailed a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns to the New York Times.
00:44:37.000 Just dropped it in the mail and sent it to their newsroom.
00:44:40.000 They got it.
00:44:41.000 To this day, they have no idea who sent it to them, let alone what the motives of that person were or what they had to do to get them.
00:44:48.000 Did they break in, commit crimes?
00:44:50.000 Did they hack?
00:44:51.000 Was it the Russians?
00:44:52.000 Was it Iran?
00:44:53.000 The New York Times has no idea.
00:44:55.000 But of course, they've reported on the content, as they should, because that's what journalists do.
00:44:59.000 And when asked, when the lead reporter who's won two Pulitzers was asked by NPR, How can you report on a document when you don't even know who gave it to you or what their motives were?
00:45:09.000 He said what I would say and what all journalists should say, which is I don't give a shit about The sources' motives.
00:45:17.000 Sometimes you get great documents from sources who have terrible motives.
00:45:20.000 You know, like they want to get vengeance on somebody.
00:45:23.000 They feel, you know, like Deep Throat leaked about the Nixon administration to the Washington Post, not because he was a Snowden, not because he was noble, but because he was resentful that Nixon passed him over to be the director of the FBI. So...
00:45:36.000 So 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.
00:45:46.000 But the reality, Joe, why are we even talking about this?
00:45:49.000 Everyone knows the reality.
00:45:50.000 I work in journalism.
00:45:52.000 I have lots of colleagues that I work with.
00:45:55.000 I have tons of friends in every news outlet.
00:46:01.000 We're good to go.
00:46:19.000 Everybody, essentially, is anti-Trump and pro-Biden, and they don't want to spend four years being accused of having helped Trump won like they were in 2016 when they reported on those emails that were leaked by the WikiLeaks.
00:46:31.000 And it's just fear.
00:46:32.000 They don't want to be yelled at.
00:46:34.000 They don't want to be scorned in their social circles.
00:46:36.000 And 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.
00:46:51.000 It's fucking pathetic.
00:46:52.000 And it's going to ruin people's faith in journalism for a long time, even more so than it already is ruined, for good reason.
00:47:00.000 I now defend people who say fake news, as you were saying, even though in 2016 I didn't like it either, because it's just true.
00:47:08.000 It's just true.
00:47:09.000 They will lie.
00:47:10.000 They will print things that they have no idea whether or not they're true, if the CIA tells them to, or if they think they can get attention for it, or applause from their colleagues on Twitter.
00:47:22.000 And I don't blame, you know, if you have faith in mainstream news institutions, you're really irrational.
00:47:27.000 I'm so glad you said that a lot of them are not printing things because they're worried about being yelled at on Twitter.
00:47:34.000 Because it really is the case.
00:47:36.000 And self-censorship is one of the more eerie aspects of knowing that you can get deplatformed off of Twitter for things.
00:47:45.000 And knowing that you can get yelled at or you can get Twitter mobbed because of your beliefs, because of standing up for something that may be correct but unpopular.
00:47:55.000 What journalism is supposed to be is telling people what the facts are, giving people unbiased perspectives, objective perspectives on what is happening in the news and how this could possibly relate to their real lives.
00:48:09.000 This is what it's supposed to be.
00:48:11.000 It doesn't seem like it's supposed to be that at all right now during these elections.
00:48:15.000 It's scary.
00:48:17.000 You're supposed to not pay any attention to all the crazy gaffes.
00:48:21.000 You're not supposed to pay any attention to the very real concerns that Joe Biden is losing his mind.
00:48:27.000 And if you say that, you're an asshole and people will attack you.
00:48:31.000 They'll say, you don't understand.
00:48:32.000 He stutters.
00:48:34.000 And this is all because...
00:48:35.000 He called Trump Bush yesterday.
00:48:37.000 He called him George.
00:48:39.000 Did you see that?
00:48:40.000 He said, we don't want another four more years of George.
00:48:43.000 This is standard.
00:48:45.000 Like, this is...
00:48:45.000 Do you remember when...
00:48:49.000 When...
00:48:49.000 What was his name?
00:48:50.000 Howard Dean yelled that...
00:48:53.000 Remember that yell?
00:48:54.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:48:54.000 After 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.
00:49:04.000 It was a yell, though, that he did.
00:49:07.000 If you've ever talked in front of a live audience, when people scream and cheer, it's so loud, you yell and you can't even hear your voice.
00:49:16.000 You don't even realize how crazy it sounds.
00:49:18.000 But then when you isolate that sound, and you take it just from the microphone, it sounds crazy.
00:49:23.000 And that's what it sounded.
00:49:24.000 To him in the moment, probably didn't sound crazy at all, but that was enough.
00:49:28.000 And I remember it being all over all these newspapers and every television show I was talking about.
00:49:33.000 Oh, that ruined him.
00:49:33.000 That ruined him.
00:49:34.000 That destroyed his candidate.
00:49:35.000 And 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.
00:49:51.000 And he was the only one at the time.
00:49:54.000 Howard Dean has turned into a complete sleazy lobbyist piece of garbage.
00:49:59.000 But at the time, he was one of the only people willing to stand up and say...
00:50:05.000 You know, George Bush and Dick Cheney have lied us into a murderous war.
00:50:10.000 We're on endless war posture.
00:50:12.000 The government is constantly lying.
00:50:14.000 So he was so off the track from what the bipartisan consensus was that they were out to destroy him.
00:50:22.000 And you're absolutely right.
00:50:22.000 Look what they were willing to do.
00:50:24.000 That scream!
00:50:25.000 All 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.
00:50:34.000 That was who Dean's supporters were, and they were traveling all over the country, going door to door on his behalf.
00:50:40.000 And when he came in third place in Iowa, they were really disappointed he was trying to cheer them up.
00:50:44.000 That was it.
00:50:45.000 Yeah.
00:50:45.000 And they basically, just manipulating that footage, turned him overnight into someone who was mentally unstable and he never recovered from that.
00:50:55.000 It's crazy to see.
00:50:56.000 And it's crazy to see the difference between the way they're treating Biden.
00:51:01.000 They're treating Biden with the most gentle, caressing hands.
00:51:08.000 I'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.
00:51:21.000 For instance, during the debate, him saying that he never said that he was going to ban fracking.
00:51:28.000 Like, that's just not true.
00:51:31.000 And you don't see it anywhere.
00:51:33.000 You don't see it in any of these liberal media pages.
00:51:36.000 No, you know what?
00:51:37.000 First 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.
00:51:48.000 I'm saying this because it's literally true.
00:51:49.000 I don't think he's been asked a single hard question.
00:51:53.000 This is somebody who's been in public life for 50 years.
00:51:57.000 He was elected as a senator in 1972. He had to drop out of his first presidential race because of serial lying and plagiarism about his college record and about his academic We're good to go.
00:52:34.000 You know that, like, I don't know, you probably have had that experience when you go and, like, you visit an old relative, like, one of your grandparents who's, like, in a nursing home.
00:52:41.000 And, 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.
00:52:49.000 And, like, if they make kind of anything resembling a joke, like, you sort of fake laugh, right?
00:52:53.000 Like, you're like, oh, that's what, like, that's how they talk to him, interviewers on television.
00:52:58.000 They, 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.
00:53:13.000 The 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.
00:53:26.000 It was in 2018 and into 2019 when Biden was by far the leading Democratic candidate because of his name recognition and because of his eight years as vice president standing next to Obama.
00:53:38.000 It was Democratic establishment operatives, strategists, consultants, just like that whole DC professional Democratic Party class Which was petrified that he was going to get the nomination because of his name recognition, because of the favorable sentiment within the party toward him because of Obama.
00:53:57.000 And they were the ones.
00:53:58.000 And you can go find these clips.
00:54:00.000 I actually read an article about it once when I started talking about cognitive decline and people started saying, this is a shitty low blow.
00:54:08.000 You're just doing this to sabotage his campaign to help Bernie.
00:54:12.000 And I was like, are you fucking crazy?
00:54:14.000 You're the ones who have spent the last year and a half on Morning Joe in the Washington Post op-ed pages.
00:54:21.000 I don't know if you remember, but there was a CNN debate when all the Democratic candidates were still part of the process when...
00:54:29.000 Julian Castro interrupted Biden and accused him of having contradicted what he had said three seconds ago.
00:54:36.000 And he was like, Joe, did you just forget what you said 20 seconds ago?
00:54:40.000 And then they interviewed Cory Booker and he said, yeah, you know, if you listen to Joe Biden, you really wonder whether he's capable of carrying the football over the...
00:54:48.000 They were the ones petrified that he wouldn't be able to withstand the rigors of a campaign.
00:54:52.000 The only thing that saved him was the coronavirus pandemic, which let him sit at home.
00:54:57.000 But had it not been for that, their fears would have become true.
00:55:02.000 And now they've declared what we can all see with our own eyes.
00:55:06.000 And 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.
00:55:15.000 And that's the kind of stuff that gets really creepy.
00:55:18.000 When they have the power to manipulate and control and dictate the discourse to that extent.
00:55:23.000 Well, it's like they've accepted the fact that people are putting out information and saving information for a very specific October surprise.
00:55:30.000 So they're saying, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to deny this information.
00:55:34.000 And 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.
00:55:46.000 We want Trump to win.
00:55:47.000 So we're just going to ignore it.
00:55:48.000 Even though it's news, we're just going to ignore it.
00:55:50.000 So then, fake news is fake news.
00:55:53.000 So then, it really is fake.
00:55:55.000 And this is where we're finding ourselves in 2020. We're like...
00:56:00.000 We're a person without a country.
00:56:01.000 We don't know who to trust.
00:56:18.000 No one could stop them from putting it on Twitter.
00:56:20.000 At least they didn't have to have the blessing of the Washington Post or the New York Times or anything else.
00:56:25.000 They could just put something out there and if it was verified, that story could spread.
00:56:30.000 Well, now it can't even be the case.
00:56:32.000 Because if Twitter decides that that is dangerous to the person that they want to win for president, they'll just pull the story.
00:56:38.000 And this is where we're at.
00:56:41.000 It's terrifying.
00:56:43.000 It's really weird.
00:56:45.000 I talk to people about the kind of independent media that's thriving.
00:56:52.000 Your success drives a lot of journalists really crazy.
00:56:56.000 It's not just you, though.
00:56:58.000 If you look at the podcasts that are succeeding and the way they succeed is that they don't just occupy a place on your TV that you accidentally stumble into.
00:57:07.000 You have to actually go and find it.
00:57:09.000 Decide you're going to listen to it and a lot of times, most of the time, pay for it.
00:57:12.000 That's what makes it successful.
00:57:15.000 What is it that's thriving?
00:57:16.000 What is it that's succeeding?
00:57:18.000 It is the people who have no interest in being part of that hegemonic media blob Who aren't concerned with affirming their pieties and their orthodoxies and in fact are in a lot of ways hostile to it or at least skeptical of it and eager to explore whether or not what they're saying is true because they don't trust any longer what they're hearing.
00:57:44.000 And, you know, it is, like, if you go back to the Snowden story, right, one of the reasons Snowden did what he did, one of the reasons he was so horrified by this, you know, mass indiscriminate secret surveillance is because the idea of the internet, the promise of it,
00:58:00.000 if you go back and read what internet enthusiasts were saying in the mid-90s and into the beginning of the century was, this is going to be the most unprecedented tool of liberation 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.
00:58:24.000 And that was true.
00:58:25.000 And the problem became if you allow the government To turn it into this kind of tyrannical realm of surveillance, you ruin, you gut what is promising about it.
00:58:37.000 And in fact, you degrade it into this threatening weapon.
00:58:41.000 That's exactly how I see censorship by Facebook and Twitter.
00:58:45.000 And 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.
00:58:56.000 He seeks out a lot of voices to hear from and to get input about.
00:59:00.000 He cares about trying to make Twitter a positive force in the society, and he's torn in a lot of different directions by people demanding different things of him.
00:59:08.000 But it's true of Twitter.
00:59:09.000 It's true of Facebook.
00:59:10.000 It's true of Google.
00:59:11.000 They never wanted this censorship role.
00:59:15.000 Not for noble reasons, but because it's better for their business if they get to say, You know what?
00:59:21.000 We don't regulate content.
00:59:23.000 We're like AT&T, right?
00:59:24.000 Like if somebody calls someone on AT&T's telephone lines and plans a neo-Nazi rally or spreads Holocaust denialism, nobody expects AT&T to intervene and terminate that person's service or cut off the call.
00:59:38.000 AT&T is a content neutral platform.
00:59:40.000 They 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.
01:00:05.000 They 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,
01:00:24.000 and threatening congressional regulation if they don't do it, All kinds of recriminations.
01:00:31.000 This responsibility to censor was foisted on these companies, but now that they're doing it, it's only going to grow.
01:00:38.000 And I think this attempt by Twitter and Facebook to block this New York Post story is one of the most alarming things that has happened in years from a perspective of free discourse and free dissemination.
01:00:52.000 The 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.
01:01:04.000 He worked for Senator Barbara Boxer and then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
01:01:09.000 He's a Democratic operative, and he walks onto Twitter and says, we at Facebook are going to be suppressing this story pending our own investigation to determine it's Who would want Silicon Valley overlords, unaccountable, outside of the democratic process,
01:01:25.000 Silicon Valley overlords to control our discourse?
01:01:28.000 The answer is liberals do and journalists do and that's why they're doing it.
01:01:32.000 It's just so stunning because liberals have always been synonymous with free speech and the First Amendment.
01:01:39.000 The ACLU has always been about, I mean, if you think about a liberal organization, the ACLU is probably one of the most liberal organizations, you know, iconic liberal organizations.
01:01:50.000 They've always been about supporting free speech, even if it's terrible.
01:01:53.000 Support even neo-Nazi's ability to have free speech.
01:01:57.000 I 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,
01:02:13.000 the 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.
01:02:24.000 Because we have this guy who's such a perfect symbol of all that is wrong with power, all that is wrong with someone being the president, with ego and lies and all the various things that people pin on Trump, and a lot of them accurate.
01:02:41.000 He'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.
01:02:56.000 I think Trump has broken the brains of so many people.
01:03:02.000 Not in a temporary way, where it's all going to just recover instantly upon his departure, but it's going to endure permanently.
01:03:12.000 First of all, when I was growing up, what shaped my political outlook Were a lot of the censorship debates in the 1980s.
01:03:22.000 You know, I was growing up as a gay kid in the suburbs in the Reagan years.
01:03:26.000 And 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.
01:03:37.000 Which is what the left and growing out of the 60s, it was like that's where the transgressive values were.
01:03:42.000 Whatever 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.
01:03:53.000 We're going to say exactly that, which is taboo, if for no other reason than just to establish our right to say it.
01:03:59.000 And that became the framework for how these freedom of speech and freedom of expression conflicts played out.
01:04:07.000 There'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,
01:04:22.000 you 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.
01:04:41.000 And so one of the most controversial cases they ever did, as you just alluded to, was they represented the right of neo-Nazis, actual Nazis, wearing swastika armbands, who applied for a permit to have a march in Skokie, Illinois, which was a town filled not just with Jews, but with tons of Holocaust survivors.
01:04:55.000 Actual, 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.
01:05:03.000 And 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.
01:05:12.000 And the ACLU, the Jewish lawyers and directors of the ACLU, defended them.
01:05:16.000 And there's a film out, and I just interviewed him actually, where he says that...
01:05:23.000 Not only was Jewish leftism supportive of free speech, but a lot of his closest allies at the time defending his decision to defend the right of white supremacists and neo-Nazis to march and to speak freely without government censorship were civil rights leaders, African American civil rights leaders,
01:05:40.000 who also knew that if these precedents were permitted to take root against white supremacists first, the government would then turn, you know, the state of Alabama would say, we're not going to allow the NAACP to march through our streets.
01:05:50.000 They 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,
01:06:07.000 under 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,
01:06:23.000 is being riven with this dispute between people who insist on the right to express views without being constrained or prevented or controlled by others.
01:06:37.000 And people who believe that free speech is just not even close to the highest value and that when other values are in conflict with it, free speech has to give way.
01:06:46.000 It is one of the, if not the most, kind of tumultuous conflicts of our time.
01:06:51.000 It's so disturbing how little understanding they have of where this plays out.
01:06:57.000 And that censorship in any form, whether you censor someone who you don't like, like Milo Yiannopoulos, It will eventually lead to someone who's less offensive than him, and then less offensive than them, and then less offensive than them, and it'll go to you!
01:07:13.000 It will come for you!
01:07:14.000 It will eventually come for you.
01:07:16.000 You will say something wrong.
01:07:18.000 You will support something that they don't agree with, and whoever has the power to censor will deplatform you.
01:07:26.000 They will remove you.
01:07:27.000 If we allow this, and we're in this weird place in America where a lot of people are looking at these social media companies, 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.
01:07:42.000 These things are like a public square.
01:07:45.000 These things are like a utility.
01:07:46.000 It's like electricity or water and it's something that everyone should have access to because it literally changes the way human beings view the world.
01:07:57.000 It changes With people's contributions and with people's ability to express themselves, it changes the information that you gather.
01:08:04.000 It changes whether or not someone's perspective resonates with you or not.
01:08:09.000 If you don't get access to that perspective, you don't get to see it.
01:08:12.000 You don't get to understand their point of view.
01:08:14.000 And it changes the overall view of the world.
01:08:17.000 And this is where we are.
01:08:19.000 We're in this weird place where These groups of people who are largely on the left have decided to abandon those values that you talked about, the original ACLU values, and they've chosen to instead be ideological and completely biased to their own personal position to the point where they're willing to abandon free speech.
01:08:40.000 And it's terrifying because I don't think they understand where this leads.
01:08:44.000 I don't think they've done the math.
01:08:47.000 I don't think they've extrapolated.
01:08:50.000 They can't think two seconds in front of their faces.
01:08:55.000 One of the things that's so bizarre is if you asked a random leftist, what do you think of Facebook?
01:09:01.000 They'll say, oh, I think Mark Zuckerberg is a fascist piece of shit.
01:09:06.000 And then you say, what do you think of the federal courts in the United States?
01:09:09.000 And they'll say, oh, it's completely oppressive.
01:09:12.000 They're filled with right-wing judges, which is true.
01:09:15.000 And you say, what do you think of the U.S. government?
01:09:17.000 Oh, the U.S. government is...
01:09:19.000 Basically a fascist dictatorship.
01:09:20.000 It's run by Donald Trump.
01:09:21.000 And then you say, are you in favor of giving those institutions, Facebook, the federal courts, the US government, Greater power to censor ideas and information that you don't like?
01:09:36.000 And they'll say, yeah, absolutely.
01:09:37.000 It's critical that hate speech not be circulated.
01:09:40.000 And they never fucking think for one second, why are these institutions that I hate and I think are fascist and repressive and authoritarian institutions that I'm willing to vest the power in to control the flow of information?
01:09:54.000 And one of the problems is that Everyone, for the most part, thinks in terms of right versus left.
01:10:03.000 So this is the only prism through which people can understand at least the political component of the world.
01:10:10.000 And it's a very stunted prism because it excludes so much.
01:10:14.000 So they think that if you can induce social media companies to start...
01:10:20.000 Censoring and excluding right-wing speech and deleting the pages of right-wing ideologues or right-wing activists, that that's a victory.
01:10:33.000 But that isn't how it works.
01:10:35.000 They're not censoring it because it's right-wing.
01:10:37.000 They're censoring it because it's outside of the mainstream.
01:10:40.000 There are always, always, always, always views that adhere to mainstream media Orthodoxies are going to be permitted.
01:10:48.000 Censorship is always directed at those who are somehow outside of the realm of what's considered acceptable by power centers.
01:10:55.000 That, by definition, is where censorship goes and it's going to go to the right and the left equally.
01:11:00.000 It's not going to go to one or the other.
01:11:03.000 Aside from the morality and the ethics of wanting people with whom you disagree silenced by tech monopolies, It's just incredibly fucking stupid from a strategic perspective because it is going to be turned on you.
01:11:16.000 Without doubt, it already is.
01:11:18.000 There's already censorship of left-wing pages.
01:11:21.000 If the Israeli government, for example, goes to Facebook and says, that Palestinian media outlet or this Gazan activist is inciting terrorism, Facebook will, in almost every case...
01:11:35.000 Accept the request of the Israelis to censor them because the Israelis are much more powerful than the Palestinians and that's how corporations operate.
01:11:42.000 This is the model, the framework that the left is empowering without realizing how self destructive it is.
01:11:49.000 It's maddening and it is terrifying because All human history, the entire history of human intellect, is nothing but humans believing that they found some absolute truth, and then a subsequent generation realizing that it's not just erroneous,
01:12:06.000 but morally rotten.
01:12:08.000 And if you preclude the ability of human beings to question and challenge every precept, every principle, including, or especially the ones that have been declared most sacred, the ones that have been declared most unchallengeably true, You've deprived humanity of one of its most important weapons,
01:12:26.000 probably its most important one, for fostering progress, for combating despotism, for questioning the pronouncements of institutions of authority, and that's what people who think they're anti-authoritarian are doing.
01:12:43.000 I'm so glad you're out there.
01:12:45.000 Because guys like you are one of the few that are willing to take this chance and speak like this and challenge all of these institutions openly.
01:12:58.000 And I think there's so many people out there that, as you said, are worried about being yelled at on Twitter and worried about not being able to get a job.
01:13:07.000 There'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,
01:13:24.000 that's insignificant compared to get Donald Trump out of office.
01:13:29.000 So everything goes by the wayside.
01:13:31.000 Get Donald Trump out of office.
01:13:34.000 That's number one.
01:13:36.000 After that we can concentrate on all those other things, but whatever you have to do to get Donald Trump out of office, save democracy.
01:13:42.000 Someone actually sent me a message, someone I really like, and they sent me a message saying that they could get me an interview, but they want me to vote for Joe Biden.
01:13:52.000 Come on, save democracy.
01:13:53.000 This was the message that I got.
01:13:57.000 And I was looking at this message.
01:13:58.000 I'm like, what the fuck is happening?
01:14:00.000 Is there a virus going on besides the coronavirus?
01:14:04.000 Is there something that's infecting people's minds and snipping wires and disconnecting trains of thought?
01:14:11.000 What the fuck is happening?
01:14:12.000 But guys like you, guys like Matt Taibbi, there's a few people out there that are sticking their neck out.
01:14:20.000 And it gives me hope.
01:14:21.000 It 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.
01:14:27.000 And hopefully some of these people that are doing this are realizing with shame that they're a part of this really disgraceful act.
01:14:34.000 That they're a part of this cowardly way of thinking and of not calling out all this shit.
01:14:40.000 And 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.
01:14:52.000 But by then it might be too late.
01:14:54.000 But here's the problem.
01:14:56.000 Here's what's worrying me the most, which is, you know, instinctively that is something that you can kind of put your hope in, right?
01:15:03.000 Is to say, well, look, I mean, there's an election in a week or, you know, a few days, and all the polls suggest Biden's likely to win, and once Trump is out of the way, a lot of this insanity is going to disappear and Things are gonna kind of return to some degree of normalcy.
01:15:18.000 And here's why I don't think that's true.
01:15:21.000 So many institutions are profiting, I don't just mean financially, but in terms of power and control, from elevating fear levels over right-wing fascism, over white supremacists, domestic terrorism,
01:15:36.000 whatever you want to call it.
01:15:38.000 And 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.
01:15:45.000 During the Cold War, you make everybody fear that the Russians and the Communists are coming to take away your Right to believe in God.
01:15:51.000 And everybody says, you know, build up a huge nuclear arsenal and don't use the money for our schools and our communities.
01:15:59.000 Use it for, you know, the greatest military in the world and spy on everybody and whatever you need to do to defeat this existential threat, do it.
01:16:06.000 Obviously, after 9-11, that was the strategy of the Bush-Cheney administration.
01:16:10.000 It's the way they consolidated a lot of power by elevating people's perceptions way beyond what was real of the threat of Islamic terrorism to allow them to do essentially everything they did.
01:16:20.000 The same exact thing is happening now, which is...
01:16:24.000 People in media have had their careers saved.
01:16:27.000 I know cable hosts who are on the verge of being fired because nobody was fucking listening to their dumb shows in 2007 and 2008 when all they were doing is talking about how great Obama was because who wants to listen to that?
01:16:39.000 Trump, or 2015 rather, Trump was a godsend to them because Trump enabled them to elevate everybody's fear level and say this man who's coming isn't just another president.
01:16:51.000 He's a grave threat to everything that's good in our lives.
01:16:54.000 And it's not just him, but his entire movement behind him.
01:16:57.000 Hundreds of tens of millions of people who are racist, who are hardcore white supremacist, white supremacy, domestic terrorist.
01:17:04.000 It caused MSNBC and the New York Times to explode with money.
01:17:08.000 It caused the CIA and the FBI and tons of those neocon scumbags to rehabilitate their reputation and get back within the halls of power.
01:17:17.000 Even if Trump loses the election, They're not going to just go back to now talking about Joe Biden because they know people are going to cancel their subscriptions and turn the TV channel again.
01:17:25.000 They're going to continue to say not maybe Trump or at least his movement still pose this existential threat.
01:17:32.000 They're out there plotting to kill people and impose white supremacy.
01:17:39.000 And it's not that it's not true.
01:17:41.000 It's not like there's not a kernel of truth to it.
01:17:43.000 There are people doing that.
01:17:44.000 They'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.
01:18:01.000 And the need for censorship as a result...
01:18:05.000 Is going to be accepted by more and more people because of that fear that these media outlets and government institutions with whom they partner are going to be still instilling in people for their own benefit, for their own aim.
01:18:16.000 I think you're 100% accurate, and I'm concerned as well.
01:18:19.000 But my real concern is, I don't see a way out of this.
01:18:25.000 I don't see a clear, like, oh, we've got to go that way.
01:18:28.000 I don't see a path.
01:18:31.000 I don't see it.
01:18:32.000 I'm worried.
01:18:33.000 I'm worried that we already have the brakes off of this truck and we're headed downhill.
01:18:38.000 Well, what meaning do you derive from the fact that you've built this massive audience?
01:18:43.000 I mean, I don't think that's bereft of meaning or significance.
01:18:48.000 I think there's a reason for it.
01:18:50.000 What reason do you think explains that?
01:18:54.000 That's a very good question, and I specifically go out of my way to not answer it.
01:19:00.000 Personally, me, myself.
01:19:01.000 I mean, to myself.
01:19:03.000 Not explain it to someone like you, but I don't think about it.
01:19:07.000 And one of the reasons why is because I feel like if I start thinking about what it does, I'll stop doing it the way I do it, and it won't be the same thing.
01:19:14.000 I started doing this podcast with my friend Brian.
01:19:16.000 We were smoking weed and talking on a laptop in 2009. Answering questions from like a hundred people on Twitter.
01:19:23.000 Just having fun.
01:19:25.000 You look at the early ones on Ustream.
01:19:26.000 To this day, they have like a thousand views.
01:19:29.000 Two thousand views.
01:19:30.000 Nobody gave a shit.
01:19:31.000 I never promoted this podcast.
01:19:33.000 I never took out an ad for it.
01:19:35.000 I never went on a television show or anything else saying, please watch my podcast.
01:19:39.000 Please listen to my podcast.
01:19:41.000 It organically became what it is.
01:19:44.000 I have no idea how it happened.
01:19:46.000 I never planned it.
01:19:48.000 I did it just for fun, forever.
01:19:52.000 And then all of a sudden it became this giant business.
01:19:54.000 So I'm like, well, I still have to do it the same way.
01:19:56.000 Because if I don't do it the same way, then it becomes something different.
01:19:58.000 And I can't think about what it is.
01:20:01.000 When I meet people and they say they love it, I go, thanks.
01:20:04.000 Hi!
01:20:05.000 That's it.
01:20:05.000 Just keep going.
01:20:07.000 Just keep moving.
01:20:08.000 And I've developed these ways of compartmentalizing my life and compartmentalizing what the podcast is, and I keep it what it is.
01:20:17.000 And what it is is just a place where I go in to talk to people.
01:20:20.000 The people that I talk to, I only talk to who I'm interested in talking to.
01:20:24.000 I have zero agenda.
01:20:25.000 I go, oh, I want to talk to Glenn Greenwald.
01:20:28.000 He seems cool.
01:20:29.000 Oh, I want to talk to Graham Hancock.
01:20:32.000 Oh, that scientist that just came back from the space station.
01:20:35.000 Let's see if we can talk to him.
01:20:36.000 What the fuck is that like?
01:20:37.000 Oh, this guy just got back from trekking across Europe.
01:20:42.000 With snowshoes.
01:20:42.000 Let's talk to that guy.
01:20:43.000 That's all it is.
01:20:45.000 And until the day I say I don't want to do this anymore, it's going to remain that.
01:20:50.000 Because it's the only way I can keep doing it the way it is.
01:20:53.000 So the fact that it's become insanely influential is beyond bizarre to me.
01:20:57.000 Because I feel like as much as I'm the host of this thing, I'm like an antenna.
01:21:03.000 I just sort of plug in and then it's got a life of its own.
01:21:07.000 And it sort of does its own work.
01:21:09.000 But it's not actually so bizarre to me.
01:21:14.000 I think you know I wrote an article about it and then I did a show.
01:21:19.000 I interviewed a former campaign official from the 2008 Obama campaign who's an avid listener of yours and who's written – Yeah.
01:21:45.000 But, 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.
01:22:07.000 I just started my blog one day because I felt like I had things to say.
01:22:10.000 Nobody was reading it and I gradually built up a readership.
01:22:13.000 And then I just from there have always done it that way, right?
01:22:15.000 Like it's kind of like what you were just saying.
01:22:17.000 And 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.
01:22:33.000 But you were saying, what is the solution to all this?
01:22:37.000 What's the way out?
01:22:39.000 And I think that you can look at your show as kind of a microcosm of what one answer might be, which is exactly that.
01:22:45.000 I know a lot of people who listen to your show who don't agree with a lot of what you say or who hate some of the guests that you have on.
01:22:51.000 But what they know is that You're doing this because you don't have to say anything that you don't believe.
01:22:59.000 And that's a huge asset for people who don't trust people that they're hearing in the media and don't believe anything that they're saying is, look, that guy may not be an expert in things and everything that he's talking about or even much of what he's talking about.
01:23:14.000 Maybe sometimes he platforms people who are bad and says some things that are misguided, but at least I believe that he's being honest.
01:23:21.000 He's just kind of trying to figure the world out for no reason other than to figure it out.
01:23:27.000 And I think that there are huge numbers of people, huge numbers of people, like I think you're just tapping into the kind of tip of it, who crave discourse that is emancipated from these repressive principles of how the media speaks and conducts itself and how people are forced to express themselves.
01:23:52.000 And that does give me a lot of hope.
01:23:55.000 I think it gives me a lot of hope as well.
01:23:57.000 And 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.
01:24:12.000 There's never been a time in history where, I mean, we really have a skeleton crew.
01:24:17.000 I mean, right now it's me and my friend Jamie, the producer, and it reaches hundreds of millions of people.
01:24:23.000 And that's just really never existed before.
01:24:26.000 I mean, there's a couple of video editors and some other people that work for the podcast behind the scenes, but that's basically it.
01:24:32.000 Which is why journalists hate you, right?
01:24:34.000 Like they, you know, they went to all the best journalism schools and they've like sat in their editorial meetings for 20 years.
01:24:41.000 And if they go and speak on YouTube, they're going to be watched by 15,000 people and they think it's outrageous that you have this audience to which you're not entitled.
01:24:49.000 Well, they're entitled to their own thoughts, but they could have this audience too.
01:24:53.000 They just have to be interesting enough to gather it, and they have to grind.
01:24:57.000 The 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.
01:25:02.000 People will listen, and they'll go, well, I don't like this, or this is boring, or for whatever reason it resonates or it doesn't resonate.
01:25:10.000 And it's a free path for everybody.
01:25:15.000 And the beauty of it is you don't have to be connected to the Washington Post or the New York Times or any other institution.
01:25:22.000 But the people that think that that was the path and they worked all their life thinking that this is the path and then they've been shown that they've kind of maybe spun their wheels, not only spun their wheels, And wasted some time, but gotten on a bad path ideologically,
01:25:37.000 where they've thought in these tight grooves that were previously established for them.
01:25:44.000 They've been given these conglomeration of opinions to adopt, and they have adopted them faithfully.
01:25:49.000 And 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.
01:25:59.000 What the fuck is going on?
01:26:01.000 Why is Bernie Sanders on his show?
01:26:03.000 Why are all these other people on his show?
01:26:05.000 You could do that too.
01:26:06.000 Anybody could do this.
01:26:08.000 It's just putting in the time.
01:26:11.000 It's just having this perspective where you want to look at things for what they really are.
01:26:16.000 Don't be beholden to ideologies and put in the time.
01:26:20.000 That should be encouraging to people.
01:26:24.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:26:24.000 That if you have something interesting and unique to offer that people want to hear, the internet enables you to reach them without having this mediation necessary of big corporations.
01:26:36.000 I think that is encouraging.
01:26:39.000 The thing that, though, is discouraging is that...
01:26:43.000 One 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,
01:27:03.000 Is that when you're a young journalist and you get a job and you're not being paid very well, but at least you're getting paid enough income to survive and so many of your friends with whom you went to college, you get out of college and are loaded with tons of debt, don't even have jobs,
01:27:19.000 and you at least got one.
01:27:20.000 You look around an industry, which is journalism, where you see jobs disappearing by the thousands.
01:27:26.000 The last thing you want to do is stick your head up I think?
01:27:45.000 The 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,
01:28:01.000 or that Russia was infiltrating the United States, that this is all conspiratorial garbage.
01:28:07.000 I 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.
01:28:17.000 I wish I could, but I really don't feel I can.
01:28:20.000 I feel like I would lose my job and probably not get another one.
01:28:24.000 The lack of a viable economic model in journalism is suffocating whatever little ability there was for journalists to express themselves freely.
01:28:37.000 Yeah, it's terrifying for them because they don't have protection.
01:28:40.000 And to stick your neck out and to try a podcast and to say something on a podcast that is controversial or is outside the orthodoxy and to get fired for that or canceled for that or to get ostracized or be labeled a this or a that...
01:28:55.000 It's terrifying.
01:28:56.000 You could lose your ability to make an income, and there's no guarantee that your podcast will be successful, particularly now.
01:29:02.000 You know, when I started the podcast in 2009, I don't know how many there were then, but now there's close to a million of them, which is insane.
01:29:11.000 I mean, it's like one out of 300 people.
01:29:13.000 If 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?
01:29:26.000 Imagine 300 people and one of them has a podcast.
01:29:29.000 What is it going to be like five years from now?
01:29:33.000 Is it going to be 50% of the people have a podcast?
01:29:36.000 The numbers are so insurmountable, it's almost impossible for anybody to break through unless you get help from the other people that are inside the network.
01:29:45.000 If you're one of those people that has a popular podcast, one of the beautiful things about it is that you can kind of help other people get seen and get recognized.
01:29:53.000 And it's one of the more generous communities.
01:29:56.000 The good thing about podcasting is that when you have this We're good to go.
01:30:07.000 We're good to go.
01:30:24.000 People 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.
01:30:37.000 And it's possible.
01:30:38.000 It is possible to do.
01:30:40.000 But if you're a person who is also trying to work in journalism, you're also trying to get hired by a major institution, and you say something in this other form of media, this podcast form, that can get you fired from that, it will inhibit your ability to express yourself.
01:30:56.000 So in that case, it will also inhibit the ability of the podcast to resonate.
01:31:01.000 So it's such a catch-22, because you kind of have to toe the line.
01:31:06.000 You kind of have to be full of shit.
01:31:07.000 Yeah.
01:31:08.000 I'll tell you this experience I had recently that I found horrifying and really eliminated for me how repressive things had become.
01:31:18.000 I went to New York, as I often do because the media outlet I founded is based there, and I had dinner with two colleagues who work in journalism and who are actually pretty well-established in their careers.
01:31:30.000 They're not Junior-level journalists who are clinging to a job.
01:31:35.000 They're people who have climbed up the editorial and journalistic ladder.
01:31:40.000 They both live in Brooklyn.
01:31:43.000 One of them has a 15-year-old daughter whose best friend is a trans boy who has had Top surgery.
01:31:56.000 So he has had his breasts removed and poses on Instagram with his shirt off.
01:32:00.000 And 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.
01:32:14.000 And we were talking just, you know, as friends about how young people these days are who are making this choice to identify as trans and to pursue gender reassignment surgery, have permanent alterations to their body that will never be reversible,
01:32:30.000 even if later on in life they decide that they had misdiagnosed themselves or been misdiagnosed.
01:32:36.000 And both of them were expressing serious concerns About, as parents of teenagers, about A, how pervasive this was becoming and whether there was kind of something in the culture encouraging or even pressuring kids to reach these conclusions and parents to kind of push them into it for their own reasons.
01:32:56.000 Not anything malicious, but just kind of cultural encouragement that might be leading people to be misdiagnosed or misdiagnosing themselves.
01:33:04.000 And also secondly, The capacity of someone at the age of 14 or 15 to make decisions about their lives of that magnitude that would be irreversible, biologically or anatomically irreversible.
01:33:17.000 It was a really interesting conversation we talked about.
01:33:19.000 We explored the issue.
01:33:20.000 It was a really interesting discussion we probably talked about in 45 minutes or an hour.
01:33:24.000 I got back to Brazil, and I realized that that discussion that we had They would never ever in a million years in their column, on a podcast, on their show admit to having those thoughts.
01:33:39.000 They would never be willing to explore publicly Those questions that we were all raising with one another and thinking about in a really interesting way because they're petrified of being scorned for it or being condemned.
01:33:55.000 And that is a sickness in our culture that is only going to get worse but that has toxic effects that I don't think can be overstated.
01:34:06.000 Whenever 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.
01:34:17.000 You're in a cult.
01:34:18.000 You can't discuss things.
01:34:20.000 You must adhere to the rigid ideology that's been established.
01:34:25.000 You have to say...
01:34:27.000 If someone decides that they're trans at 3 or 5 or 19 or whatever it is, there can be no questions.
01:34:34.000 My question has always been, have there been people who have had gender reassignment who regret it?
01:34:41.000 The answer is yes.
01:34:43.000 Yeah, of course, of course.
01:34:44.000 And are there people who have had gender reassignment who are happy?
01:34:47.000 The answer is yes.
01:34:49.000 Obviously.
01:34:50.000 Human beings are insanely malleable.
01:34:53.000 That's why cults exist.
01:34:54.000 That's why evangelists are able to gather so much money.
01:34:59.000 That's why people decide to be typically unique.
01:35:02.000 How many people are rebels, but they're rebels in a mold?
01:35:07.000 Human beings love to fit into forms that they find to be appealing, That they find to resonate with the current zeitgeist, whatever it is.
01:35:19.000 And this is one area where we've decided, no, that's not the case.
01:35:25.000 No, when it comes to children recognizing as trans, there is no way.
01:35:32.000 There can be no errors.
01:35:33.000 It is all in.
01:35:36.000 Many of these people are rightfully looking at it in the way that people who are trans are maligned by society.
01:35:45.000 They don't feel like they're accepted.
01:35:49.000 They feel like they're discriminated against.
01:35:51.000 So these people who are sensitive, kind people, look at them.
01:35:54.000 They want to embrace them at all costs.
01:35:56.000 But by doing so, you've ignored reality.
01:36:01.000 The reality that we know that humans, we're weird creatures.
01:36:07.000 We have very strange ideas about things that go left and right.
01:36:11.000 How 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?
01:36:18.000 People are weird.
01:36:19.000 We shift our opinions on all sorts of things.
01:36:22.000 People like Cat Stevens becomes a Muslim, changes name to Yusuf Islam.
01:36:27.000 People 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.
01:36:42.000 Well, that's crazy, because people are confused all the time about everything.
01:36:46.000 The 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.
01:36:59.000 So is it homophobic?
01:37:03.000 To want that person to only be trans.
01:37:06.000 To have a rigid idea of what a trans person is.
01:37:12.000 And to say that this rigid idea applies to all people who have issues with who they are.
01:37:20.000 Or issues with their sexuality.
01:37:22.000 Or issues with gender identity.
01:37:24.000 There's clearly a spectrum here.
01:37:26.000 And the spectrum varies.
01:37:28.000 Not only is there a spectrum, but one of the...
01:37:32.000 Objectives of modern feminism, of modern day feminism, was to expand the range of how women could express themselves.
01:37:42.000 That they didn't have to have long hair and makeup on and wear high heels.
01:37:47.000 That they could have a masculine component to them and cut their hair short and wear jeans and play sports.
01:37:54.000 And 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.
01:38:19.000 But 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.
01:38:42.000 One of the reasons why Gay people largely won that debate and not just won it, but won it so radically and so rapidly is because we were constantly looking for ways to engage that discussion with people who hadn't been persuaded.
01:39:00.000 I mean, I remember I would all the time, you know, if I heard someone say, well, how does this work in your relationship?
01:39:07.000 Like, who is the man and who's the woman and how do you fuck?
01:39:11.000 And instead of saying, like, you're a disgusting bigot and how dare you, And condemn them and denounce them and banish them away, I would be eager to engage in that discussion, as were so many people, and that's what ultimately changed minds, was the more you engage people,
01:39:27.000 the more you persuade them, the more you convince them, the more you explain to them why these radical social changes that you advocate are justifiable, the harder it is to demonize you and to feel alienated by you and to feel repelled by you, you break down that Dehumanization through engagement,
01:39:44.000 through discourse and dialogue, not through demanding and coercing and trying to force people to accept views that they don't yet hold.
01:39:52.000 And so many current social movements are based on that kind of tyranny of either you Affirm these truths as I see them or you're going to be punished and scorned.
01:40:07.000 There's no debate or engagement or questioning permitted.
01:40:10.000 Yeah, that's a really accurate way of depicting it.
01:40:13.000 And it's confusing.
01:40:15.000 I mean, it's confusing for people that don't want to be punished and so they adhere to these opinions too.
01:40:21.000 They just jump on board.
01:40:25.000 I had a conversation with a friend where he was talking about how being trans is more accepted in other countries.
01:40:32.000 And he brought up Iran.
01:40:34.000 And I said, do you know why there's so many trans people in Iran?
01:40:38.000 It's because if you're gay, they'll put you in jail.
01:40:40.000 Do you understand that?
01:40:42.000 In some countries in the Middle East, you have no options.
01:40:47.000 If you're a homosexual and you want to be with men and you happen to be a man, many of them choose to become women just so that they can have these relationships that they want.
01:40:57.000 It's a real weird box.
01:41:00.000 And I think, ideologically, when you force someone to have an opinion that you hold and punish them for just even questioning things, you create this really weird scenario that we find ourselves in right now.
01:41:17.000 And to the point where oftentimes biological women are the ones that, especially when it comes to sports, they're the ones that are the victims of this ideology.
01:41:27.000 I 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.
01:41:36.000 They don't even necessarily have to have gender reassignment surgery or even to take estrogen.
01:41:41.000 And it's...
01:41:42.000 It's crazy, but if you question it, you're a bigot.
01:41:47.000 There's a reason why we've had male and female sports, that men and women don't compete against each other.
01:41:55.000 It's because we've agreed, okay, there are obviously huge differences between men.
01:42:00.000 There's a spectrum of very athletic men, non-athletic men, and a huge spectrum of women, very athletic women and non-athletic women.
01:42:08.000 But We agree that it seems to be a big advantage to be male when it comes to physical sports.
01:42:14.000 So we're going to separate them.
01:42:16.000 But if you have male versus female sports, as long as the male identifies as a female, we're supposed to go, well, you know, what are you going to do?
01:42:27.000 It's okay.
01:42:28.000 You know what's amazing?
01:42:28.000 You know what's amazing?
01:42:29.000 One of my childhood heroes growing up was the tennis player Martina Navratilova.
01:42:36.000 And I... Which is a weird childhood hero for me to have for a lot of different reasons.
01:42:43.000 It's just not an obvious childhood hero for me to have.
01:42:45.000 Like Dan Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, is a much more obvious one who was mine.
01:42:49.000 But she was a weird one.
01:42:51.000 But I was obsessed with her.
01:42:53.000 You know, I used to watch her tennis matches against Chris Everett religiously.
01:42:57.000 And when I grew up and actually when I started doing the Snowden reporting, she started following me on Twitter.
01:43:04.000 And 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.
01:43:12.000 I called my friends all giddy.
01:43:14.000 I talk to famous people all the time.
01:43:15.000 I don't give the slightest shit.
01:43:16.000 But with her, I was just overwhelmed.
01:43:18.000 And so one of my friends said, you know, that's so fascinating how important she is to you.
01:43:22.000 Why is that?
01:43:23.000 And I started thinking about it.
01:43:24.000 And so I was going to do a film about it.
01:43:26.000 And I partnered with Reese Witherspoon.
01:43:28.000 She was going to produce it.
01:43:29.000 She was very into it.
01:43:30.000 And we had a big budget for it.
01:43:32.000 And then right in the middle as we were getting ready to kind of do the project, and the project was going to be, you know, examining why she was so important to me, what it said about her life and mine and how it intersected, and the ability of people and very unpredictable ways to influence others.
01:43:47.000 She had this huge controversy where, you know, Martina was like, you know, she was one of the great pioneers of female athletics and Sports Illustrated did a list of the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century.
01:43:57.000 She was number 19, you know, like right behind Joe Montana, head of Ty Cobb.
01:44:02.000 I mean, she was a huge, important figure in female athletics and professional female sports.
01:44:08.000 And 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.
01:44:18.000 So her life's work has been ensuring that women could make a huge living and be justly rewarded on equal terms with male athletes.
01:44:28.000 So she was on Twitter and she saw some photo of a trans woman who had just won a cycling race.
01:44:38.000 And 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.
01:44:53.000 And Martina learned that the woman who won the gold medal had not had any gender reassignment surgery, meaning she still has a penis and her testicles, and therefore the ability to impregnate a woman.
01:45:03.000 And Martina went on Twitter and just very innocently said, wait, I don't understand.
01:45:07.000 If a man declares himself to be a woman, they can now compete in professional sports, the professional sports that I worked so hard my whole life to build, and they can win all the prize money and all the...
01:45:22.000 The trophies, and then just decide to go back to living as a man, impregnate women, and live a suburban life as the father of children?
01:45:30.000 That doesn't seem fair.
01:45:31.000 And she was fucking mauled for it.
01:45:34.000 And people were saying, you're ignorant.
01:45:36.000 It doesn't matter if you have a penis.
01:45:38.000 What matters is if you go through hormonal treatments that render your body anatomically or biologically identical for purposes of athletics.
01:45:48.000 To the male body, or the female body, the cis female body, and she said, okay, I'm sorry.
01:45:55.000 I'm going to delete my tweet.
01:45:57.000 I'm going to go and research this.
01:45:58.000 I shouldn't have spoken about it without first studying it.
01:46:01.000 And that didn't stop them.
01:46:03.000 For three weeks, four weeks, they were, Martina Navratilova's a bigot.
01:46:06.000 She's hateful.
01:46:07.000 And not only was she a pioneer in women's athletics, she was one of the only openly gay celebrities on the planet.
01:46:15.000 Yeah.
01:46:15.000 In 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,
01:46:31.000 that's her coach, her name used to be Richard Raskin, it's now Dr. Renee Richards, you know, and kind of glide over it, but at least, like, she did more for trans visibility than almost anybody.
01:46:40.000 Martina went away, but because she was being so mauled and with no understanding, she came back, she wrote an op-ed in the Sunday Times and she said, I've studied this and what I've concluded is that there is never a way that somebody who's gone through puberty as a male,
01:46:57.000 no matter how many hormones that they take, can render their body similar to a female body such that competing with naturally born females can be anything other than cheating.
01:47:08.000 And for that opinion, Martina Navratilova, who did more for LGBT visibility, trans visibility, female athletics, got expelled, literally expelled from LGBT athletic, athlete groups.
01:47:22.000 And I couldn't, I ended up not being able to make my film because the director that we had was a trans woman who didn't feel comfortable and felt like the whole film had gotten too complicated.
01:47:32.000 It'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?
01:47:44.000 Yeah, it's an interesting proving ground for this ideological dilemma, right?
01:47:51.000 Female sports.
01:47:52.000 Because my friend Tony Hinchcliffe actually has a comedy bit about this.
01:47:57.000 He's like, you don't see a whole lot of women declaring themselves to be biologically male and then competing against men.
01:48:04.000 It's trans women that are competing in these sports and dominating them.
01:48:09.000 I got into the fray unwittingly because there was a female MMA fighter that didn't tell her opponents that she was male for 30 years.
01:48:21.000 And started competing two years after transitioning.
01:48:24.000 And I was like, this is fucking crazy.
01:48:26.000 Because now you're in my wheelhouse.
01:48:29.000 And I didn't mean to get into Fran.
01:48:31.000 I never really had opinions on trans people other than do whatever you want to do as long as you're an adult.
01:48:36.000 But 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.
01:48:45.000 I'm a martial arts expert.
01:48:46.000 I know what I'm talking about.
01:48:48.000 The difference between the way a man can generate power and a woman is really significant.
01:48:53.000 It's a big difference.
01:48:55.000 The ability to be violent...
01:48:58.000 Reaction time, coordination, shape of the hips, shape of the shoulders, size of the hands.
01:49:05.000 There's so many big differences.
01:49:07.000 And people were unwilling to budge.
01:49:10.000 They wanted to look at this in terms of, you must be a bigot if you feel this way.
01:49:15.000 And I'm like, no, I'm not a...
01:49:17.000 Well, it's so obvious that there are complex scientific questions.
01:49:23.000 I don't know how I feel about it, in part because I don't understand the science well enough, and I don't believe the science has offered definitive answers.
01:49:29.000 Maybe there are hormonal protocols.
01:49:50.000 Yeah, maybe someday.
01:49:55.000 Right, but like, or maybe now, I don't know, I mean, I like, you know, women's tennis, you know, if you win the US Open or Wimbledon in women's tennis, you're gonna win, the prize is now $4 million, right?
01:50:08.000 Like, the Williams sisters are among the richest athletes on the planet.
01:50:11.000 If it were that easy for a male tennis player to just go win that amount of money by declaring himself a female, they would be doing it and we don't really see that.
01:50:19.000 So I'm open to the question, Of whether this can be done fairly, but to declare the question itself off limits, Exactly.
01:50:30.000 And force everybody to just accept it.
01:50:32.000 And like the thing is, it's not just like we're talking about it in this issue because I know you've had issues with it.
01:50:37.000 I've had my own experiences with it with that film.
01:50:39.000 But this is the mentality that is replicating itself in issue after issue after issue.
01:50:44.000 Yes.
01:50:44.000 And I want to be really clear.
01:50:45.000 One of the things that I've said is I have no problem with a woman choosing to compete against a trans woman if she knows that it's a trans woman.
01:51:03.000 Right.
01:51:05.000 Right.
01:51:17.000 For 30 years took the equivalent of a male body's steroids and worked out constantly.
01:51:23.000 Lifted weights and did so to the point where it changed their anatomy.
01:51:27.000 And then choose to get off the steroids and then compete.
01:51:30.000 I guarantee you.
01:51:32.000 Everyone would be saying, that person's a cheater.
01:51:35.000 They shouldn't be allowed to compete.
01:51:37.000 Because that person changed their body through illegal means.
01:51:41.000 That's just a fact.
01:51:42.000 I'm in favor of anybody doing anything as long as all the information is on the table.
01:51:47.000 If a woman chooses to compete against a trans woman in mixed martial arts and knows in advance, I'm 100% in favor of that.
01:51:55.000 No problem with it.
01:51:55.000 Look, women have fought men before.
01:51:57.000 Some really talented women.
01:51:59.000 There's a woman who competes in...
01:52:01.000 In the UFC, Jermaine Durandamy, she's a multiple world champion in Muay Thai, and she fought a man and knocked him unconscious in a fight, and you can watch it on YouTube.
01:52:13.000 She's an amazing athlete, an amazing fighter, but she chose to fight that man knowing that he's a man and knowing that her skills were enough that she had a reasonable chance and actually did win.
01:52:24.000 I'm 100% in favor of that, like I'm in favor of everybody doing anything that's dangerous.
01:52:28.000 Do whatever you want.
01:52:29.000 I'm in favor of people riding motorcycles without a helmet.
01:52:32.000 I'm in favor of you bungee jumping.
01:52:34.000 You choose whatever you want.
01:52:35.000 You're an adult.
01:52:36.000 But the idea that this person didn't have to disclose that she was a man for 30 years was very offensive to me.
01:52:45.000 That was your entree into this controversy?
01:52:48.000 That's how I got into it.
01:52:49.000 That's how I got into it.
01:52:50.000 I'm like, this is crazy.
01:52:50.000 Well, not only that, the damages to her opponents were really significant.
01:52:55.000 Fractured skull.
01:52:56.000 She broke the bones in her face.
01:53:00.000 It's real big stuff.
01:53:02.000 It wasn't a small deal.
01:53:04.000 And if you watch the fight, it's horrific.
01:53:06.000 I think ultimately...
01:53:09.000 It kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier about human beings oftentimes evolving in ways that are seemingly inexplicable.
01:53:18.000 One of the things that makes life interesting, that makes the world worth investigating, are these complexities.
01:53:25.000 I mean gender is, and how it relates to biology, and how it shapes our identity, and what Different hormones can do externally injected into our bodies.
01:53:38.000 These are fascinating questions that we don't really have clear answers for.
01:53:43.000 And that's true regardless of almost any debate that you choose.
01:53:48.000 And 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.
01:54:04.000 What always amazes me about not just people who support censorship, but about people who want to close off debate, Or who say that it's immoral to even speak to people who have views that are sufficiently different that they're supposed to be radioactive.
01:54:22.000 What always amazes me is the level of hubris needed to believe not just that you're right about something, because I believe I'm right about a lot of things, but to believe that you're so right...
01:54:34.000 That your view should not be even permitted to be questioned, let alone rejected or negated or refuted.
01:54:44.000 And that people who have different views than you are people that you should never be willing...
01:54:50.000 It's such a glum, grim, bleak, depressing view of the world.
01:54:56.000 And it's authoritarian and tyrannical as well.
01:55:00.000 To just constantly be flattening all of the complexities of life that make things interesting to explore and debate and discuss and think about.
01:55:10.000 Yeah, it really is complex and it really is interesting.
01:55:13.000 And I agree with you.
01:55:15.000 And I hope that one day we can get past all this stuff.
01:55:18.000 And I think because it's such...
01:55:19.000 It's really weird that it's so fresh in our culture.
01:55:24.000 That, I mean, being trans has been around for a long, long time.
01:55:30.000 But for whatever reason, it's dominated the zeitgeist over the last decade or so.
01:55:37.000 I don't really know what's happening.
01:55:40.000 Douglas Murray has a very interesting take on it.
01:55:43.000 I was talking to him and he was saying that towards the end of civilizations...
01:55:48.000 When civilizations are starting to collapse, one of the things that happens is blurring the lines of genders.
01:55:55.000 And he's like, I don't know what that is or why that exists, but he said it existed in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome.
01:56:01.000 And I wonder.
01:56:01.000 I wonder if that's just...
01:56:03.000 It's just a natural course of progression that civilizations go through when the wheels are falling off.
01:56:09.000 That they get obsessed with these subjects.
01:56:12.000 But obviously...
01:56:14.000 These are very interesting things to discuss and talk about.
01:56:18.000 Just because you discuss and talk about them doesn't make you a bigot.
01:56:22.000 And I think that we have to make that distinction.
01:56:24.000 Because if we don't make that distinction, you're always going to have people that are speaking about it one way publicly, as you were saying with your friends, or privately, excuse me, and then another way publicly, where they're just...
01:56:37.000 And that's why I think that if you're somebody who has been fortunate enough...
01:56:43.000 To construct a platform that is secure and relatively immune from being canceled or being declared off-limits.
01:56:55.000 I mean, people have certainly been trying with me for many years, and I think they're starting to reach the conclusion that it's futile and they're never going to be rid of me.
01:57:04.000 So I think if you're able to kind of create an independent platform for yourself, one of the obligations that I do think you have is to create that space and kind of take those arrows so that other people who don't enjoy that same independence,
01:57:20.000 that same security, feel at least marginally freer to wander around and asking.
01:57:29.000 Yeah, look, discussions are important.
01:57:33.000 It's how we figure things out.
01:57:36.000 Talking about things is important.
01:57:38.000 I need to know how you think to be able to consider it.
01:57:41.000 When I talk to someone, whether it's you or anyone, I want to know how you feel about things genuinely.
01:57:48.000 And when you're terrified to express your honest opinion because you're worried about the blowback, Then I'd never really know, not only do I never know who you really are and how you really think, I never know that there's people who think the way you think, because you don't express it.
01:58:03.000 And then we have a distorted perception of the landscape.
01:58:07.000 And it takes too long to work through ideas and problems that we have in our society.
01:58:13.000 I understand why people would be protective of trans people, of anybody, any maligned, any marginalized group.
01:58:22.000 I understand it.
01:58:22.000 I totally do.
01:58:24.000 But to discuss it does not mean bigotry.
01:58:28.000 It just doesn't.
01:58:29.000 And when you're talking about sports, whether it's...
01:58:32.000 When you decide that Martina Navratilova is a bigot, you've got a real problem.
01:58:38.000 You fucked up.
01:58:39.000 There's something wrong.
01:58:41.000 Yeah, something went really wrong in the Matrix.
01:58:44.000 Yeah, the Matrix produced a very erroneous outcome there.
01:58:49.000 I think part of the problem, though, is that...
01:58:58.000 Whoever does wield this ability to impose orthodoxies has a certain form of power.
01:59:07.000 There'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.
01:59:24.000 But this ability to engage in dialogue, I go on Fox News a lot, I go on Tucker Carlson specifically quite a bit, and obviously people who are long-term readers of mine who are on the left, a lot of them are I'm befuddled by that,
01:59:41.000 if not enraged by it.
01:59:44.000 And 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.
01:59:56.000 I thought you were a communist.
01:59:58.000 I thought you hated the United States.
01:59:59.000 I never paid any attention to anything that you said.
02:00:03.000 But now that I hear you on the show saying things that I trust, I'm now listening to anything that you say with an open mind because I believe that you're honest.
02:00:12.000 And it doesn't mean that I now agree with you on everything you're saying.
02:00:16.000 I don't.
02:00:16.000 I still disagree with it.
02:00:17.000 But at least I've forged...
02:00:20.000 A 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.
02:00:31.000 Someone had asked me two years ago before I actually listened to your show, you know, what do you think of Joe Rugman?
02:00:35.000 I probably would have said I don't know much about him but I know he talks to like a lot of alt-right assholes and fascists and seems to hate trans people because that's what I had been told, right?
02:00:43.000 That was like in the ether and so that's what I absorb.
02:00:46.000 And 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
02:01:16.000 without resorting to force.
02:01:19.000 This is more and more what is being written off.
02:01:22.000 This climate of censorship and repression is doing damage to every single one of our institutions.
02:01:31.000 I don't see it ending at all.
02:01:33.000 I see it growing.
02:01:34.000 I don't really quite know how it can be arrested.
02:01:40.000 Well, I'm hoping there'll be a tipping point, and I'm hoping the tide will pull back, and I'm hoping that podcasts and long-form communication and conversations like this will be a part of that.
02:01:48.000 But, 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.
02:01:57.000 There's a lot of shit.
02:01:58.000 We're thinking in real time.
02:02:00.000 And 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?
02:02:07.000 Why did I even think about it that way?
02:02:08.000 Because you're talking, you know, like right now.
02:02:11.000 Like, I don't know the next word out of my fucking mouth, right?
02:02:14.000 This is what podcasts are.
02:02:17.000 This is what these things are.
02:02:18.000 And sometimes you're going down roads or you express an opinion and it's not that thought out.
02:02:24.000 And that's the danger of these weird, long-form communications, these unstructured podcasts are.
02:02:30.000 But that's also why it's interesting to people, because it's so raw.
02:02:36.000 Because, you know, there's no strategy here.
02:02:41.000 This hasn't been planned out.
02:02:43.000 There's no adherence to a script.
02:02:46.000 And...
02:02:47.000 Through that, you get a sense of humans.
02:02:51.000 Because this is how people think and talk in real life.
02:02:55.000 You talk in uncertainties, right?
02:03:00.000 I think the big difference is, if you go on cable, if I go on cable, any show, or even some Sunday news show...
02:03:09.000 Here in Brazil or in the US, everyone knows in advance what's going to be said.
02:03:13.000 I know what I'm going to be asked.
02:03:15.000 They know what I'm going to answer.
02:03:17.000 And they're inviting me on specifically because they know I'm going to say something with certainty.
02:03:23.000 I'm not going to go on and say, I don't really know the answer to that.
02:03:26.000 Because if you do that, you're not fulfilling your function.
02:03:30.000 That is not the normal way that people navigate through the world with certainties.
02:03:35.000 They navigate it with uncertainties.
02:03:37.000 They have an opinion one minute and then they listen to somebody who persuades them to think differently another and then they kind of move in that direction and then maybe they move a little bit back.
02:03:46.000 But 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,
02:04:03.000 but just if you're rational, create a lot of problems for yourself in your work, in your society, in your culture, and that's why people avoid it.
02:04:13.000 Yeah, and that's why I've gravitated towards it, ironically.
02:04:17.000 I think that you have to talk to people that you disagree with.
02:04:20.000 You have to talk to people, and I also, I'm not married to my ideas.
02:04:25.000 If you tell me, if I have a specific notion in my mind about the way something works, and I talk to you, I am happy when you can get me to change my mind.
02:04:36.000 I enjoy it.
02:04:37.000 I don't believe any of the things that I espouse or that I'm locked into that these are chiseled in stone.
02:04:46.000 I mean, there's a few I believe in where I'm a legitimate expert in, but very few.
02:04:51.000 Most of the things, I'm open to someone correcting me.
02:04:55.000 I like that.
02:04:57.000 I'm also interested in how people think incorrectly.
02:05:01.000 I don't have as many alt-right assholes as you say on the podcast anymore.
02:05:08.000 I kind of grew tired of it.
02:05:10.000 But I had a lot in the earlier days.
02:05:13.000 Maybe even before I understood what the podcast really was becoming.
02:05:17.000 I just wanted to talk to them, like see how they feel about things.
02:05:20.000 And some of them, like Milo, I always found humorous.
02:05:23.000 I think he's kind of a character.
02:05:25.000 And if you talk to him off-air, he's a very different human being that you talk to him on-air.
02:05:30.000 He's very easy to communicate with.
02:05:32.000 Yeah, it's a character.
02:05:32.000 He's playing a character.
02:05:33.000 He created a character that did well.
02:05:35.000 I mean, I'm sure some of it has some root in reality, but he's a provocateur.
02:05:40.000 But I... I want to know why people make these jumps and why they think the way they think.
02:05:47.000 And 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.
02:05:57.000 They'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...
02:06:09.000 He's on board.
02:06:11.000 He's on this team.
02:06:12.000 He's saying all the things that I want to hear.
02:06:15.000 Which is a very natural...
02:06:20.000 Yes, it is.
02:06:42.000 We have to kind of purposely combat it, right?
02:06:46.000 Like we might have an instinct to kill people that we feel angry toward, but we combat that instinct because it produces bad outcomes.
02:06:53.000 So the tribalism in us, you know, is probably something that sometimes occasionally is healthy.
02:06:58.000 It makes us be part of communities and the like, and that fulfills psychological necessities, but it can lead us really astray too.
02:07:05.000 And you have to kind of be willing sometimes if you're feeling embraced too much by a group to kind of Give them something almost to show you that you're not attached to it and to show yourself that you're not attached to it so you don't become captive to it.
02:07:18.000 Well, I think we have to be really careful in how we lean into love.
02:07:24.000 And 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.
02:07:35.000 And 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.
02:07:47.000 They're very excited by it.
02:07:48.000 And their attention to you is magnified.
02:07:51.000 It's much different than the attention that you get if you sort of support the mainstream.
02:07:56.000 You support the mainstream, it's a very, eh, it's a lukewarm reception.
02:08:00.000 Yeah, you just blend in.
02:08:00.000 You blend in.
02:08:01.000 Yeah, you blend in.
02:08:02.000 You're like a CNN correspondent.
02:08:04.000 If 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.
02:08:15.000 I've seen it with comedians where they'll tell jokes that a certain group of people like and they'll lean into that.
02:08:24.000 Like, you know, they'll become like a right-wing comic because these right-wing people are the ones that have given them attention.
02:08:29.000 And they know when they're saying things, even if they don't understand that it's disingenuous or that they're playing a character, they're saying it knowing that it's going to get this disproportionate reaction from that group.
02:08:43.000 And they lean into it.
02:08:44.000 And one of the reasons why I... I like talking to people like that because I wanted to see that thing in them.
02:08:52.000 I wanted to hear what they're saying.
02:08:55.000 Even if I disagree with it, I want to know what makes them think that way.
02:08:59.000 Why do they go this way?
02:09:01.000 What about them is what gravity has pulled them in this direction?
02:09:09.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess the argument is that as your platform grows and you become more influential, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, by putting someone on your show who advocates ideas that are harmful or toxic or hateful,
02:09:30.000 even if you're doing it just to satisfy your curiosity and not because you actually agree with them, that you're nonetheless still...
02:09:52.000 I agree with that criticism.
02:09:54.000 I really do.
02:09:55.000 And that's one of the reasons why I've avoided a large number of those people that do have very questionable belief systems and do espouse hate.
02:10:05.000 There's a lot of fucking assholes that want to be on this show that I haven't had on for that very reason.
02:10:11.000 But there's some that I find interesting.
02:10:14.000 And it's not because of hate.
02:10:18.000 It's because some of them have ideas that are at least...
02:10:25.000 Mildly intriguing.
02:10:27.000 And 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.
02:10:39.000 And I wanted to know why they lean so hard in this direction.
02:10:45.000 It's like when you're talking to anyone that's really into anything, you could fill in the blank with whatever the subject is.
02:11:01.000 Right.
02:11:29.000 It's intriguing to me.
02:11:31.000 As a person, as a comic, you always have to be sort of a student of human beings and behavior and thoughts.
02:11:38.000 That's what comedy's all about.
02:11:39.000 It's analyzing those things and poking holes in them.
02:11:42.000 And when I see someone that is really into We're good to go.
02:12:01.000 If we wrote down, if we had a column, what do you agree with and disagree with?
02:12:04.000 I would have way more on the agree with column with them than I do on the disagree with.
02:12:09.000 But the disagree ones are so, they're so blatant sometimes.
02:12:13.000 Where I'm like, you haven't thought about this shit at all.
02:12:15.000 You just don't want to oppose it.
02:12:17.000 Because if you know if you oppose it, you'll be out of the club.
02:12:20.000 Like Martina Navatrolova.
02:12:23.000 Right, who, you know, I think in retrospect, the reason why she was my childhood hero was precisely because she was always so fucking defiant and transgressive, you know.
02:12:32.000 And probably why she was so competitive, too.
02:12:36.000 Oh, for sure.
02:12:37.000 I mean, she just, like, was constantly...
02:12:39.000 And, you know, like, she didn't give a shit about what she was told about how females were supposed to look.
02:12:44.000 She spent hours in the gym building this huge muscle mass, which made her physically dominant.
02:12:49.000 You know, whatever categories you tried to impose on her...
02:12:52.000 We're ones that she just disregarded.
02:12:54.000 That was just the nature of her personality.
02:12:57.000 And in that lies a lot of power and a lot of freedom.
02:13:00.000 And in reality, that's the same thing that led her, even though it converted a lot of her former fans into enemies.
02:13:18.000 I think that,
02:13:35.000 you know, It's so easy to...
02:13:39.000 A lot of times people adopt a certain posture, then they show you, you know, as you were saying, that kind of pundit voice, or if they go on a show where they get to speak for nine minutes instead of two and a half hours, they're...
02:13:54.000 Yeah.
02:14:12.000 Yeah, 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.
02:14:20.000 Or, you know, sometimes they'll pretend to not be that way, to sort of weasel their way in.
02:14:26.000 And then once they become popular, you find out, oh, you really do have nefarious ideas.
02:14:30.000 You really are a shithead.
02:14:33.000 Right.
02:14:33.000 But the only way you know is if you talk to them, right?
02:14:36.000 If you just ignore them, they don't disappear.
02:14:39.000 Yeah.
02:14:39.000 And I understand people's concern with platforming those people.
02:14:43.000 But I really do think that you have to talk to a wide group of people to get an understanding of humans.
02:14:52.000 And, uh, if you don't know any hateful people, you won't be able to recognize hateful behavior.
02:14:58.000 Like, really recognize it.
02:14:59.000 I think you have to see it.
02:15:01.000 You have to talk to them.
02:15:02.000 And, you know, if you don't know, I mean, you have to really understand loving, compassionate Generous people.
02:15:11.000 You have to be around them.
02:15:12.000 You have to hear them talk.
02:15:14.000 And when you are around them and you do hear them talk, it changes your perspective on what's possible with people.
02:15:21.000 You recognize, like, oh, that's the kind of person too.
02:15:24.000 One of my friends is Justin Wren.
02:15:27.000 It's a very unlikely story, but he's a guy who was bullied when he was a child, like horribly, to the point where he was suicidal.
02:15:32.000 He became a UFC fighter.
02:15:35.000 And now he runs a charity called Fight for the Forgotten, where he builds wells for the pygmies in the Congo.
02:15:41.000 He is the nicest, most charitable human being I've ever met in my life.
02:15:46.000 He's so kind and so gentle and so sweet.
02:15:49.000 And goes to the Congo and spends months out of the year there.
02:15:52.000 He's gotten malaria three times.
02:15:54.000 I mean, it's crazy.
02:15:57.000 Until I met him, until I've spent tons of time with him and talked to him, We're good to go.
02:16:26.000 And you need to know that there's a guy like that out there.
02:16:29.000 Whenever I think about people, about kindness and about generosity, selflessness, I think of that guy because I know he's real, because I know him.
02:16:38.000 He's changed my spectrum.
02:16:41.000 The spectrum of what's possible in people.
02:16:42.000 We started off talking about Snowden.
02:16:47.000 As a journalist, people expect me to just keep this critical distance from him as the way you're supposed to talk about your source when you're a journalist and I think?
02:17:20.000 It 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.
02:17:33.000 And you only can have that happen if you're willing to connect with people who aren't like you.
02:17:41.000 Yeah, 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.
02:17:54.000 And you can expose people this way, in a way that...
02:17:58.000 I 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.
02:18:11.000 Like, they fall apart.
02:18:12.000 Like, this is what happens when their ideas are challenged.
02:18:14.000 This is what happens when someone says, why do you think that?
02:18:17.000 And what makes you, why do you say that?
02:18:19.000 Why are you saying it that way?
02:18:20.000 And you let them, give them all the rope in the world, and then you see them hanging.
02:18:25.000 Yeah.
02:18:27.000 Because you can't control yourself for three hours.
02:18:31.000 It's kind of like I've had this experience before.
02:18:33.000 I don't know if you've had this where if a magazine wants to profile you, they'll send a reporter to follow you around for a week.
02:18:41.000 Because if you just sit down for a 40-minute interview or an hour interview, you can be very...
02:18:50.000 Yeah.
02:19:08.000 Most shows are at most 45 minutes, at most, right?
02:19:11.000 Where you can just get through it and be very conscious of every word.
02:19:14.000 Here, when you have no...
02:19:14.000 Your producer doesn't say what you want to talk about ahead of time.
02:19:19.000 I had no idea what we were going to talk about ahead of time.
02:19:22.000 It just kind of meanders into this natural space, and you do forget that you're being recorded.
02:19:27.000 You do forget that a lot of people are going to see it, which is a very...
02:19:34.000 Yeah.
02:19:47.000 Alters your behavior, right?
02:19:48.000 If you know that you're being watched and are conscious of it, your range of choices that you're willing to engage in diminishes greatly.
02:19:55.000 That's why privacy and having a private realm is so important.
02:19:58.000 That's where creativity and dissent reside.
02:20:00.000 It's the same thing here.
02:20:01.000 It's like if you do a format and you kind of like let yourself free, unconstrained with the knowledge that you're actually in an interview that people are going to be watching, you just end up speaking much more naturally, much more freely and don't monitor every word.
02:20:17.000 Yeah, and by the way, this was not by design.
02:20:19.000 I can't take credit for the fact that this podcast is that sort of thing.
02:20:26.000 I just didn't want to edit it.
02:20:29.000 One of my good friends, and I enjoy talking to people.
02:20:33.000 One of my good friends, Ari Shaffir, is one of his worst and most famous pieces of advice to me.
02:20:38.000 He's like, you've got to edit your podcast.
02:20:40.000 I go, why?
02:20:41.000 He goes, no one wants to listen to it for that long.
02:20:42.000 I go, well, then they don't have to listen.
02:20:44.000 I'm like, I don't give a fuck.
02:20:45.000 Yeah, your sloth produced some really positive...
02:20:49.000 That's literally what it is.
02:20:50.000 But 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.
02:20:59.000 Was it Iraq or Afghanistan?
02:21:01.000 Afghanistan.
02:21:02.000 He was trapped over there because of the volcano in Iceland?
02:21:08.000 Is that where it was?
02:21:09.000 I think so.
02:21:10.000 I don't remember the details.
02:21:11.000 It's been a long time.
02:21:12.000 Well, there was a volcano erupted, and it prohibited air travel.
02:21:16.000 And during that time, he was embedded with the troops, and they were communicating in a way that they got way too comfortable with him.
02:21:29.000 With General McChrystal.
02:21:31.000 General McChrystal said some disparaging things about Barack Obama and wound up being fired.
02:21:37.000 And then Hastings was terrified for his life.
02:21:43.000 And wound up in this really weird conspiracy theory scenario where his car goes 100 miles an hour into a tree and the engine winds up flying away from the car and the car explodes and he dies and people are speculating like,
02:22:01.000 was he killed?
02:22:02.000 Did they use some sort of software to manipulate his vehicle and have him do that?
02:22:09.000 Or was this suicide?
02:22:11.000 And First of all, what are your thoughts on that?
02:22:18.000 Are you fully aware of that story?
02:22:22.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:22:23.000 Michael was a pretty good friend of mine.
02:22:27.000 Um...
02:22:28.000 I'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.
02:22:38.000 His wife at first, of course, being a loving wife, was very open to the prospect that it wasn't an accident and that...
02:22:46.000 Yeah.
02:23:08.000 Other journalists who said, you're ruining the ability of journalists to get generals to speak freely with you in a war zone.
02:23:15.000 That's not how it works.
02:23:16.000 And he said, General McChrystal wasn't my fucking friend.
02:23:18.000 He was someone really powerful in the military.
02:23:21.000 And my job was to tell the public what he was saying that they had a right to know, which is what he did.
02:23:25.000 That was Michael's personality.
02:23:27.000 But at the same time, Michael ended up for the last six months or a year of his life being pretty troubled.
02:23:35.000 I think in large part because of the trauma he had from spending a lot of time in war zones.
02:23:43.000 I know I have a lot of friends who are journalists who have spent time in war zones and almost every single one of them end up fucked up for good reasons.
02:23:50.000 It's a really fucked up thing to see.
02:23:52.000 Yeah.
02:23:53.000 And he had substance abuse issues that he was struggling with.
02:23:56.000 I think the last time I saw Michael actually was in LA, just like a week or two before he died.
02:24:01.000 I think it was at Oliver Stone's house or something.
02:24:03.000 And he was definitely inebriated.
02:24:07.000 So, you know, and I know a lot of people were concerned about that and whether he was kind of engaging in self-destructive behavior.
02:24:15.000 I don't know, Joe, to be honest, but I know that his wife reached the conclusion that she thought those more interesting theories about intrigue and murder was a disservice to his memory, for whatever that's worth.
02:24:31.000 Well, I respect that, if that's how she felt about it.
02:24:33.000 But the real concern that journalists have, and this is what we started off the podcast talking to you about, about your own safety.
02:24:42.000 The Jamal Khashoggi story, of course, is like the worst example of what could potentially happen to a journalist.
02:24:49.000 And when we're talking about the safety of people who do take the risks to put out information that people want to hear and then they become the target of very powerful people, I mean, it must be one of the most frightening aspects of your job.
02:25:07.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, we talked about the Snowden case.
02:25:10.000 For 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.
02:25:35.000 I think?
02:25:54.000 There's a huge right-wing movement in Brazil that elected Bolsonaro.
02:25:59.000 They're all armed.
02:26:02.000 They believe in the military dictatorship.
02:26:05.000 They have the police and the intelligence agencies on their side.
02:26:09.000 And the type of threats that we were getting, and it also related a lot as well to my husband.
02:26:14.000 My husband is a member of Congress.
02:26:15.000 He's a socialist member of Congress, the only openly gay member of the Brazilian Congress.
02:26:19.000 In 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.
02:26:47.000 And for about six months, every day on Twitter, in Brazilian Twitter, my name was at the top of the trending topics.
02:26:54.000 Glenn is a traitor.
02:26:55.000 Deport Glenn.
02:26:56.000 Glenn belongs in prison.
02:26:57.000 And they did try, actually, at the beginning of this year.
02:26:59.000 They indicted me criminally, and a judge threw it out on free press grounds.
02:27:03.000 But that's just part of the job.
02:27:05.000 And that was what made Michael such a great journalist, was he was fearless when it came to those kinds of things.
02:27:11.000 And 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.
02:27:25.000 That's what I tell them.
02:27:26.000 I say, first of all, don't go into the profession unless you think you have something unique to offer because if you don't, then it's kind of just worthless.
02:27:34.000 You're just going to be a drone in the beehive, you know, like you were saying earlier.
02:27:37.000 You're just going to fade into the mainstream.
02:27:38.000 But the other thing I say is...
02:27:40.000 If you have a desire to be beloved by powerful people or to be safe, this is definitely the wrong profession for you.
02:27:51.000 It's only worthwhile, journalism is, if you're exposing exactly that information which the people who wield the greatest power most desperately want to be concealed.
02:28:03.000 That's your job.
02:28:05.000 If you do that, everyone loves to talk about speaking truth to power and confronting power, but people very rarely talk about what that means.
02:28:14.000 What is power and what does it mean for people to be powerful?
02:28:17.000 It's really simple, ultimately.
02:28:18.000 What it means to be powerful is that you have the ability to bestow rewards on people who serve your interests.
02:28:27.000 And to inflict punishment and pain on those who impede them or defy them.
02:28:32.000 That's really all it means to be powerful.
02:28:35.000 And 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.
02:28:43.000 That's just intrinsic to the job.
02:28:46.000 And I think that you pretty much need to have either the kind of personality that I'm certain that through your work,
02:29:03.000 you've inspired other people to get into journalism.
02:29:06.000 I'm certain.
02:29:07.000 And I wondered, what does that feel like to you?
02:29:11.000 Because there has to be young people that have read your work and seen what you've done, seen the documentary with Snowden and heard you speak, that I want that courage of conviction.
02:29:23.000 I want to be that person.
02:29:25.000 I want to be that person that does express myself honestly and bravely and expose the world to these truths that the powers that be want hidden.
02:29:37.000 I mean, it sounds banal probably, but honestly, there's nothing more gratifying to me than that, because that's how I feel like I'm actually making a mark on the world and changing it in a positive way.
02:29:52.000 However limited that might be, it doesn't matter.
02:29:55.000 I do hear that a lot.
02:29:58.000 The 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.
02:30:16.000 And 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.
02:30:33.000 You 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.
02:30:46.000 It's a huge responsibility, too.
02:30:48.000 Yeah.
02:30:49.000 That to me is what's exciting about the future.
02:30:52.000 I'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.
02:31:03.000 It is possible.
02:31:05.000 And that you will inspire a bunch of people to communicate and to express themselves the way you do so fearlessly.
02:31:12.000 I'm hoping the same can be said about podcasts.
02:31:15.000 I'm hoping the same can be said about a lot of independent media.
02:31:19.000 That there's enough of us out there that don't want to blend into the hive.
02:31:25.000 That 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,
02:31:41.000 100% compliance to their ideology.
02:31:44.000 And they realize, well, that's crazy.
02:31:45.000 That's not how people are.
02:31:46.000 And then there's so many pitfalls and holes in that way of life.
02:31:53.000 Yeah, I mean, you asked me before, you, I think, made the observation before, you weren't sure what the solution was to these growing pathologies we had been assessing in the discourse and in the political culture.
02:32:08.000 And that was why I pointed to your show, just as an example of what I think is possible.
02:32:14.000 But more than that, I think it illustrates this craving That exists that's being unfulfilled by mainstream news outlets, by entertainment products, by really prominent voices.
02:32:30.000 There's an unfulfilled craving.
02:32:33.000 And what excites me the most about it is that it's not definable by either right or left.
02:32:39.000 I love the people who get confused by the fact that you said that you love Bernie and Tulsi and that are gonna vote for Trump.
02:32:45.000 And if you're like a political junkie, that makes no fucking sense.
02:32:49.000 It's like saying two plus two equals five.
02:32:50.000 That's not what I said.
02:32:52.000 That's not what I said.
02:32:53.000 Well, you said you love Bernie and you love Tulsi.
02:32:56.000 And then when it was Biden and Trump, I think you said you prefer Trump because you felt like Biden was cognitively incapable.
02:33:03.000 But I never said I'd vote for Trump.
02:33:06.000 What I said was I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.
02:33:09.000 I never said I'd vote for Trump.
02:33:11.000 But everybody said it in the way that, oh, you're a Trump supporter now.
02:33:15.000 I'm like, that is not what I said.
02:33:17.000 It's not what I said.
02:33:18.000 Okay, good.
02:33:18.000 I'm glad you clarified that because even I got deceived from that.
02:33:22.000 But nonetheless, even that doesn't make sense to people, right?
02:33:25.000 But in the real world, there were millions of people, millions, millions, not hundreds or thousands, but millions, who voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted in 2016 for Donald Trump.
02:33:37.000 And if you're...
02:33:38.000 You 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.
02:33:46.000 It doesn't make any sense.
02:33:47.000 But like to most of the people out there, that's not the language they're speaking.
02:33:51.000 And podcasts like the one you're doing and a lot of other ones too are finally speaking in the language of huge numbers of people who never before identified with anything political.
02:34:01.000 And I do think that's exciting because it is breaking that mold.
02:34:05.000 That's what's so interesting about it.
02:34:07.000 It's kind of just a new, normal, unconstrained, and undogmatic way of trying to understand the world.
02:34:15.000 And I do find that hope-inspiring, hope-inducing.
02:34:21.000 Yeah, it does come with responsibilities that I never anticipated, and that is a concern.
02:34:26.000 I never thought that I would be influential.
02:34:29.000 I never anticipated it, and I didn't plan for it.
02:34:35.000 All of a sudden, people are like, what are you doing with your influence?
02:34:37.000 I'm like, ah, fuck.
02:34:39.000 I've got influence.
02:34:40.000 And it's not just cultural influence, it's political influence, which is probably even more surprising and even more of a burden.
02:34:47.000 Well, it's worse because I don't know shit about politics.
02:34:51.000 I've said over and over again, if you're taking your opinions on politics from me, you're already fucking up.
02:34:59.000 And I try to offer so many different solutions to so many different people to...
02:35:05.000 Try 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.
02:35:15.000 I'm like, go to them.
02:35:17.000 Don't go to me.
02:35:18.000 I'm not the guy.
02:35:37.000 I love them.
02:35:41.000 They'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.
02:36:00.000 They communicate.
02:36:01.000 Yeah.
02:36:02.000 Yeah, and they're both kind of the best of their respective sides.
02:36:07.000 I agree, yes.
02:36:08.000 So yeah, and obviously Kyle Kolinsky is someone who's built up an amazing...
02:36:14.000 I 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.
02:36:26.000 We're doing an election night show, a live election night show.
02:36:29.000 He and I. Yeah, he mentioned that to me.
02:36:31.000 He said, don't go on and talk about that, because he'll kill me.
02:36:33.000 I'm not allowed to talk about it, so I'm glad you were the one who spilled the beans and not me.
02:36:38.000 But yeah, he's fantastic, and there's so much new talent that is discoverable that way.
02:36:46.000 For all the...
02:36:48.000 Problems 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.
02:36:57.000 Because it's not just some rosy-eyed thing that you say to make yourself and others feel better.
02:37:01.000 It's real.
02:37:03.000 Obviously, 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.
02:37:19.000 Yeah, and I just want people to know that are concerned.
02:37:21.000 I do understand that I have an influence now, and I'm aware of it.
02:37:26.000 And that's kept me from having a lot of douchebags on the show.
02:37:30.000 But unfortunately, I think it's important to have some.
02:37:34.000 I think it's important to have some questionable people.
02:37:36.000 I think it is.
02:37:37.000 I think...
02:37:38.000 What made the show great is that it's kind of wild and that I talk to people that I want to talk to.
02:37:44.000 And I'm going to continue to do that even if people get mad at who the guests are.
02:37:48.000 There's no way I can...
02:37:49.000 I mean, if I want to talk to somebody, I'm going to talk to them.
02:37:51.000 But I am aware...
02:37:53.000 The minute you start tailoring your guest list to avoid making people angry is the minute you're going to start gutting the thing that has made your show interesting in the first place.
02:38:03.000 Exactly.
02:38:03.000 Which isn't to say that you shouldn't be cognizant of that responsibility that you're now obviously aware of and have described, but 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.
02:38:23.000 Exactly.
02:38:23.000 Also, I understand that if I do have someone questionable and I have to challenge them on their ideas, I can't just let people just rant and say anything.
02:38:33.000 If 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.
02:38:43.000 And I didn't think, oh, now they think that I'm agreeing with what this person's saying.
02:38:49.000 But just the absurdity of what people were saying would make me laugh.
02:38:53.000 Now I go, oh, Jesus Christ.
02:38:55.000 All these people are listening.
02:38:56.000 I can't just laugh.
02:38:58.000 I can't assume people know that I think this is preposterous.
02:39:04.000 I have to jump in now.
02:39:05.000 And I go, okay, what are you saying?
02:39:07.000 There's a giant audience.
02:39:08.000 Why are you saying this?
02:39:10.000 And what do you really believe?
02:39:12.000 Why do you believe that?
02:39:13.000 And that's not true.
02:39:14.000 And this is why it's not true.
02:39:16.000 That's where I understand that I have a responsibility.
02:39:19.000 That I wish sometimes I didn't have.
02:39:24.000 But you do, whether you want it or not.
02:39:27.000 I 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,
02:39:44.000 which wasn't true.
02:39:46.000 It was an inflammatory claim.
02:39:48.000 Instead of doubling down or justifying why you said it, you immediately issued a statement that was self-flagellating in its admission of error.
02:39:56.000 It was like, I completely fucked up.
02:39:57.000 I said something reckless.
02:39:59.000 It was so stunning to see because...
02:40:03.000 You never, ever, ever see major news outlets doing anything of the sort, even when they say something that's much more destructive that's false.
02:40:12.000 They'll stealth edit their errors.
02:40:15.000 They'll add what they call a clarification.
02:40:18.000 Everything is just wormy and designed to avoid just saying, like, I fucked up.
02:40:23.000 And ironically, nothing builds confidence in somebody more than acknowledging that in that way, that kind of unflinching way.
02:40:31.000 Like, yeah, I not only fucked up, but I was really reckless in what I did, and I'm going to try and avoid doing that again.
02:40:36.000 Well, there was no...
02:40:40.000 No one telling me to do that.
02:40:42.000 This is one important thing.
02:40:43.000 A lot of people think Spotify told me to do that.
02:40:46.000 They didn't even know about it.
02:40:48.000 I came in and Jamie told me, you know, that thing you said about the left-wing people starting forest fires turns out to not be true.
02:40:56.000 And I'm like, fuck, really?
02:40:58.000 And so he shows me this thing and I'm like, well, I read and I was thinking about all the different people that I read on Twitter that were pointing it out.
02:41:05.000 It turns out there was like one Black Lives Matter protester or activist that was caught lighting fires and most of it was...
02:41:15.000 Crazy people.
02:41:16.000 And there was a lot of arson.
02:41:18.000 But it's hard to attribute that to any particular ideology.
02:41:24.000 Yes, exactly.
02:41:24.000 So I said, okay, I fucked up.
02:41:26.000 And I knew also that I was going to go on vacation.
02:41:28.000 I couldn't just let it sit.
02:41:29.000 So there was no consideration at all.
02:41:32.000 I said, well, what do I do?
02:41:33.000 And Jamie and I were talking about it.
02:41:35.000 I said, I should just make a video.
02:41:36.000 Or I'm just going to make a video and put it on Instagram.
02:41:38.000 So I just grabbed my phone.
02:41:40.000 I put it in front of my face.
02:41:41.000 I said how I felt.
02:41:43.000 And then I uploaded it.
02:41:44.000 And then I did the podcast.
02:41:45.000 That was it.
02:41:46.000 And I said, that's the only way I can do.
02:41:48.000 If I make a mistake, I have to correct it.
02:41:51.000 And I'm not, again, I'm not, look, I'm going to make mistakes.
02:41:54.000 I'm not married to my mistakes.
02:41:56.000 I'm not married to anything I've already said.
02:41:58.000 If I made a mistake and I know it's not true, I know I'm incorrect, I must say that I made a mistake.
02:42:05.000 We all do that like 10 minutes ago, right?
02:42:08.000 I was purporting to describe your perspective about the 2020 election based on what I've heard around, right?
02:42:18.000 And I misstated it.
02:42:20.000 I described it inaccurately and you interjected and said that's not actually what I said.
02:42:24.000 It wasn't because I was purposely mischaracterizing it.
02:42:28.000 It'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.
02:42:39.000 I remember Barry Weiss, who I used to be sworn enemies with, and now I'm slowly developing a friendship with her.
02:42:45.000 She was on your show once, and I talked to her about this.
02:42:50.000 She said...
02:42:51.000 Tulsi, for some reason, was brought up and she said, oh, I don't really like Tulsi.
02:42:55.000 And you said, why not?
02:42:56.000 And she said, because she's a toady of Assad.
02:42:59.000 And you said, what?
02:43:00.000 She is?
02:43:01.000 What's your basis for that?
02:43:03.000 And she couldn't give you one.
02:43:04.000 She was like, what do you mean?
02:43:06.000 That's what people say.
02:43:07.000 Everybody knows that.
02:43:08.000 And it's complete bullshit.
02:43:10.000 That is something a lot of people say about Tulsi, but there's no basis for that.
02:43:14.000 You know, Barry's a very smart person.
02:43:16.000 She's reading constantly.
02:43:18.000 I love her.
02:43:18.000 She has a lot of expertise in those areas.
02:43:21.000 But, you know, she just said something derogatory about someone that was untrue.
02:43:26.000 Not because she was deliberate, but because our brains are imperfect.
02:43:30.000 And if we don't recognize that, you know, I don't think we can have any value.
02:43:35.000 No, and that's one of the fears.
02:43:36.000 We're just like blowhards.
02:43:38.000 Yeah, yeah, for sure.
02:43:40.000 I mean, if you know you fucked up and then you deny that you know you fucked up, you won't have any self-respect.
02:43:48.000 You won't appreciate.
02:43:53.000 You're not going to ever respect yourself.
02:43:56.000 You're not going to appreciate your thoughts.
02:43:58.000 You're always going to know you're a phony.
02:44:01.000 Yeah, because deep down you're going to know.
02:44:03.000 You 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.
02:44:15.000 Never.
02:44:16.000 I would never do that.
02:44:17.000 I don't have that idea.
02:44:18.000 I just don't.
02:44:19.000 If I make mistakes, I'm sorry.
02:44:21.000 And if I'm sorry, I say I'm sorry.
02:44:22.000 It's just how it is.
02:44:23.000 I don't think there's any other way.
02:44:25.000 But this is the only way you get good at things.
02:44:29.000 This comes from my martial arts background.
02:44:32.000 To get good at martial arts, you can't pretend you're good at things.
02:44:35.000 We're good to go.
02:44:51.000 That's that way of looking at the world because I learned it at such a young age because I grew up doing martial arts.
02:44:58.000 So as I've become an adult, that's what I apply to everything.
02:45:01.000 I don't ever allow myself to bullshit myself.
02:45:04.000 And I won't bullshit other people.
02:45:06.000 I'm not interested in it.
02:45:07.000 I don't want anybody to think of me in any way other than who I am.
02:45:11.000 I'm not interested in publicity.
02:45:13.000 I'm not interested in an image.
02:45:17.000 I am who I am.
02:45:18.000 That's it.
02:45:18.000 And if I fuck up, I tell you, I'm sorry.
02:45:22.000 Right.
02:45:22.000 And 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?
02:45:35.000 No, but I also think that's a problem when you have an enormous organization that thinks about the consequences of an apology and the consequences of admitting error and the scrutiny that comes with that of all the other things you said as well.
02:45:47.000 Like, we don't have an organization.
02:45:49.000 I 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.
02:46:02.000 Alright, let me say something right now.
02:46:03.000 And the whole interaction took three minutes.
02:46:06.000 And then I pull up my phone and I just make an apology.
02:46:09.000 I mean, there's no people to run it by.
02:46:12.000 I don't have to have a meeting where the executives sit down and say, listen, this could be very consequential to our ad revenue.
02:46:21.000 This could really become a problem with people respecting your opinion on other things.
02:46:26.000 Just let it go.
02:46:27.000 It'll go away.
02:46:28.000 Don't talk about it.
02:46:29.000 It'll go away.
02:46:30.000 But the reality is one derives benefit from doing it.
02:46:36.000 I don't think the reason institutions avoid doing it is because they fear the consequences.
02:46:40.000 Unless, 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.
02:46:47.000 But absent that, I think the reason is because they're so...
02:47:02.000 Yeah.
02:47:04.000 Yeah.
02:47:18.000 Yeah, I think what you're talking about is the issue with their thought process.
02:47:23.000 That's really critical.
02:47:24.000 Because, like I said before, I have gone out of my way to make sure that I'm not married to my thoughts.
02:47:31.000 And I don't equate me with my ideas.
02:47:34.000 I am, you know, I'm just a human being and my ideas are some things that I embrace or don't.
02:47:40.000 And they come in and out and I have ethics and I have morals and I have values.
02:47:45.000 But my ideas, what I believe and don't believe, especially pertaining to events that I'm not even witness of, I'm not married to those.
02:47:54.000 I think part of the problem is I think?
02:48:13.000 I find it a virtue that if you're having a conversation with a person and they say something that shows you right away that you're not correct, to be able to say, oh, yep, you're right.
02:48:26.000 Because that's a painful moment.
02:48:28.000 People don't like doing that.
02:48:29.000 It's hard.
02:48:30.000 No, it takes courage.
02:48:31.000 You have to be vulnerable to do that, right?
02:48:33.000 To say, I fucked up, I was reckless.
02:48:35.000 That's exposing yourself in a very public way.
02:48:42.000 I'm certainly not the person who does that best.
02:48:45.000 I have difficulty myself acknowledging error in that way.
02:48:50.000 I think one of the reasons that it's hard is because if you have a public platform, And especially with so much of our politics and discourse being conducted on social media, which is so toxic and brings out the worst and not the best in people,
02:49:09.000 almost by design, anything where you show vulnerability...
02:49:15.000 It's going to be used against you.
02:49:16.000 It's going to be used to attack you.
02:49:18.000 Actually, I remember when you did that, I observed it.
02:49:22.000 I 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?
02:49:37.000 And a lot of people said to me, Oh, fuck him.
02:49:43.000 You know, look at the damage he did with disseminating this dangerous slander against the left.
02:49:49.000 You know how dangerous that is.
02:49:51.000 He did it on purpose.
02:49:52.000 No one heard his correction.
02:50:02.000 We're good to go.
02:50:22.000 Well, sometimes you have to tap out.
02:50:24.000 You have to take the L, you know, when you fuck up.
02:50:26.000 And that's one of those moments.
02:50:28.000 And I think your great, I mean, I hate to call it work because it's hardly work, but the greater body of what you put out there speaks for itself.
02:50:36.000 If someone wants to extract individual things out of context and try to draw a conclusion that that's who you are, or this one individual error, like when you fucked up about the fires, that's you.
02:50:48.000 That's you.
02:50:49.000 That's you forever.
02:50:50.000 Fuck you.
02:50:51.000 Yeah.
02:50:52.000 They'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.
02:51:14.000 And to deny that, well, you're playing a game now.
02:51:18.000 And it's oftentimes people that want to pretend that they're so compassionate.
02:51:23.000 Those are the ones that often are the ones that are the most vicious doing that.
02:51:27.000 And it's kind of weird.
02:51:28.000 It's one of the things that I find about a lot of people that are a part of the ideological left.
02:51:34.000 A lot of them were bullied.
02:51:36.000 And now they've become bullies.
02:51:38.000 But they've become bullies in a non-physical way.
02:51:40.000 They've become bullies in a cyber way.
02:51:42.000 And they love the pile-on.
02:51:45.000 They love the gang-up.
02:51:46.000 And they become a part of it.
02:51:48.000 And they find comfort in it.
02:51:50.000 Oh, for sure.
02:51:51.000 I mean, I think, though, one of the things that I think we always have to be mindful of is if you look at...
02:51:58.000 Mental health data, if you look at things like depression and anxiety disorders and suicide rates, they're sky high, right?
02:52:07.000 Which is a paradox because the internet was supposed to be this instrument of connectivity.
02:52:11.000 It was supposed to connect us to one another more than we've ever been before.
02:52:25.000 We're good to go.
02:52:44.000 In life for pretty valid reasons.
02:52:48.000 And a lot of times you just become kind of the vessel for them to expel that.
02:52:53.000 It's often, very often not about you at all, but about them.
02:52:58.000 And it takes a while to internalize that, not to take that personally, because so often it's really those attacks are just kind of a vehicle for them to compensate for the deprivation that they have in life on so many different levels.
02:53:11.000 I think that's very accurate and I think Twitter exacerbates that more than any other form of social media.
02:53:18.000 Alan Levinowitz had a great way of putting it that it's processed information and it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you.
02:53:26.000 It's not the way you're supposed to get information.
02:53:28.000 It's not the way you're supposed to communicate.
02:53:29.000 You're supposed to communicate looking at people in front of them.
02:53:32.000 You're supposed to be seeing each other.
02:53:34.000 I mean, that's when we're at our best.
02:53:36.000 And I think that the way people communicate on Twitter, it It exacerbates mental illness.
02:53:43.000 It 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.
02:53:57.000 For sure.
02:53:58.000 But I just don't think it's healthy to argue with people that way.
02:54:01.000 And the way people were willing to argue on Twitter, they would never communicate like that in person unless they're a fucking psychopath, right?
02:54:08.000 Never, never.
02:54:10.000 Joe, 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.
02:54:24.000 In 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.
02:54:43.000 Other than that crazy old lady.
02:54:46.000 Every 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.
02:54:53.000 Congratulations on what you've done.
02:54:54.000 It inspires me.
02:54:55.000 I really am a fan of yours.
02:54:57.000 Where are all the people who are saying I'm a white supremacist, that I'm sick and evil, that...
02:55:05.000 Where are they?
02:55:07.000 In real life, they don't materialize.
02:55:09.000 And 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.
02:55:24.000 And also, you being a very high-profile journalist, you become a target in that you're not even a normal person.
02:55:31.000 Like, it's easy to take free shots at you.
02:55:34.000 Like, it's easy to justify those free shots.
02:55:36.000 Like, he's Glenn Green.
02:55:38.000 Well, fuck him.
02:55:39.000 That guy, you know what the fuck, that guy.
02:55:41.000 Like, they don't even know you, right?
02:55:42.000 Yeah.
02:55:43.000 Yeah, 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.
02:55:53.000 They don't see you as a human.
02:55:55.000 They see you as this kind of object.
02:55:56.000 Well, I felt it ramp up considerably.
02:55:58.000 There was a Forbes article a year ago about how much I made, and that ramped it up, and then the Spotify deal ramped it way up.
02:56:06.000 Of course.
02:56:07.000 It's free shots.
02:56:08.000 It's just like you're at the carnival dunk tank, and people want to- But I get it.
02:56:14.000 I understand.
02:56:15.000 Nothing is fucking free in life.
02:56:18.000 Anything that you get that is a benefit will come with a cause.
02:56:21.000 I don't know why the universe works that way, but it absolutely does.
02:56:24.000 Everything stays in balance.
02:56:26.000 It does, but it's also a challenge for you personally to sort of immunize yourself from that kind of hate and also to...
02:56:38.000 Yeah.
02:56:55.000 It's an addiction.
02:56:56.000 It's built to be an addiction.
02:56:57.000 I'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.
02:57:06.000 One of the things I always liked about new media versus old media is that journalists did have to hear from critics and engage with them as opposed to speaking from the mountaintop.
02:57:13.000 But 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.
02:57:28.000 But I think the other side of it is the same.
02:57:31.000 You can't get attached to the people who hate you, but you also can't...
02:57:35.000 We're good to go.
02:58:00.000 I never wanted to be a father.
02:58:02.000 My husband and I adopted two kids, two brothers, three years ago.
02:58:06.000 Last 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.
02:58:17.000 It was a hall filled with 6,000 people.
02:58:20.000 People had signs with my name on it.
02:58:23.000 It was just too much.
02:58:25.000 It was like all the press was there.
02:58:26.000 I did a press conference first.
02:58:27.000 And before I went into that event, I was sitting in this kind of room that they put me in with my two kids.
02:58:33.000 My husband had already gone on stage.
02:58:35.000 And 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.
02:58:48.000 So and then like I would look over at them and they would like just fucking giggle like I was the biggest douchebag on the planet.
02:58:53.000 So like I was in this event.
02:58:55.000 There was like historic in nature, like people chanting my name and carrying my signs.
02:58:58.000 And I love, of course, I wanted to fucking strangle my kids because they were like shooting spitballs in my head.
02:59:04.000 But at the same time, I was so grateful for them because they were treating me like, you know, just some like dumb, stupid dad who they were mocking.
02:59:12.000 And it just reminded me like all that other stuff is so fake.
02:59:16.000 You know, it just, that's not the stuff that matters.
02:59:19.000 It doesn't.
02:59:21.000 Ultimately, it doesn't really touch who you are.
02:59:24.000 That's one of the beautiful things about having comedian friends.
02:59:26.000 They never let you slide.
02:59:29.000 They're always fucking with you.
02:59:30.000 No reverence.
02:59:31.000 No reverence, I'm sure.
02:59:33.000 They just fucking torture you.
02:59:34.000 We torture each other all the time.
02:59:36.000 But there's love in it.
02:59:38.000 If one of my friends roasts me and they send something to me on Twitter, I just start laughing.
02:59:43.000 Or on my text message, rather.
02:59:45.000 I just start laughing.
02:59:46.000 I'm in a text thread with a bunch of comedian friends, and it's horrific shit, but it's funny.
02:59:52.000 But it's funny, even if it's pointed towards you.
02:59:56.000 It's like we were talking about earlier about these alt-right people that lean towards the attention that they get, and it ultimately becomes toxic.
03:00:04.000 And 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.
03:00:19.000 Yeah, yeah.
03:00:21.000 It's like anything.
03:00:22.000 Anything in excess can destroy you, including success or admiration or hatred or anything.
03:00:29.000 It's really important to keep that balance.
03:00:32.000 Well, you look at how many celebrities lose their fucking minds.
03:00:36.000 I mean, it's almost commonplace.
03:00:38.000 We expect it.
03:00:39.000 We expect them, people that gain massive amounts of fame and adulation, to lose their minds.
03:00:44.000 It's normal.
03:00:46.000 Yeah, I watched two biopics on a row by accident.
03:00:50.000 The 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.
03:01:04.000 All 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.
03:01:13.000 They were completely intertwined.
03:01:14.000 Yeah, my favorite example is Elvis, because Elvis is one of the first.
03:01:17.000 I 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.
03:01:28.000 Like, 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.
03:01:42.000 Who the fuck was Elvis going to call?
03:01:44.000 You know?
03:01:45.000 Elvis wasn't going to call anyway.
03:01:46.000 There was no Elvis before Elvis.
03:01:47.000 And look how Elvis wound up.
03:01:49.000 All pilled up and fat and fucked up and confused.
03:01:52.000 He pretty much ruined himself, right?
03:01:55.000 He took what made him famous, his good looks, his hot body, his ability to dance, and he just...
03:02:01.000 He got fat and bloated.
03:02:03.000 And then he killed himself, right?
03:02:05.000 Like he was at war with it.
03:02:06.000 Yeah, he was at war with it.
03:02:07.000 Yeah, and I don't think it's tenable.
03:02:09.000 I don't think anybody can really manage it at that scale.
03:02:11.000 I think when you get to that Michael Jackson level, you get to that Elvis level, it's like there is no normal and there is no one you can mirror.
03:02:19.000 There's no one who's going to understand what you're going through.
03:02:22.000 You are recognizable in every square inch of the planet.
03:02:28.000 And it's madness.
03:02:30.000 You become mad.
03:02:31.000 And Elvis is one of the best examples of that.
03:02:34.000 But I think there's a little bit that anybody that's in the public eye can learn from those examples.
03:02:39.000 And you need something that grounds you.
03:02:42.000 You've got to find something, whether it's meditation or yoga or marathon running.
03:02:47.000 You've got to have something that's a real thing.
03:02:50.000 It's a real struggle.
03:02:51.000 It'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.
03:03:07.000 Yeah.
03:03:07.000 Yoga and meditation have saved my life on multiple occasions precisely for that reason.
03:03:16.000 Even 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,
03:03:33.000 like that spirituality that you can't get if you don't have religion, as most of us these days don't in the West.
03:03:40.000 You don't need religion, but you do need spirituality of some kind, like just some purpose, some connection to something beyond just your immediate material desires.
03:03:48.000 And I do think if you deny yourself that...
03:03:52.000 You're going to get off kilter at best.
03:03:56.000 And yeah, I think that's because we crave purpose.
03:04:00.000 And making money or being famous or doing well in your career isn't purpose.
03:04:06.000 It's something that can enable purpose.
03:04:07.000 It's something that can help you fulfill your purpose, but it in itself is not purpose.
03:04:13.000 And if that's all you're pursuing to the exclusion of other things or all that's defining you, Yeah, I don't think you're going to end up very good.
03:04:20.000 Yeah, because there's something that comes with too much success is a lack of lessons.
03:04:24.000 There's too much adulation and love and too many people are holding doors open for you and telling you how great you are.
03:04:30.000 And you don't learn from those lessons.
03:04:32.000 There's no lessons there.
03:04:33.000 The lessons come from failure and from struggle.
03:04:36.000 And without that, it's very hard to define yourself.
03:04:41.000 I couldn't agree more.
03:04:43.000 Glenn!
03:04:44.000 I'm glad we did this.
03:04:46.000 Next time I'm going to be in that cool little red studio they built for you there.
03:04:49.000 All right, man.
03:04:50.000 Beautiful.
03:04:51.000 I hope that soon.
03:04:52.000 Thank you very much.
03:04:53.000 I really appreciate you.
03:04:54.000 Great talking to you, Joe.
03:04:55.000 I really appreciate it, too.
03:04:56.000 All right.
03:04:56.000 Take care.
03:04:57.000 Bye.
03:04:57.000 Bye.