On this episode of the podcast, we talk about the recent outbreak of a mysterious virus that has been going around the U.S. and how the government is handling it. We also talk about what it means to live in a small town and what it's like to be a real estate agent in a big city like New York City. And of course, there's a little bit of politics at the end of the episode. We're joined by our good friend and former co-worker, Mike Kuchta, who's been a long time friend of the show and has been with us through it all. We talk about how he got into real estate and why he decided to leave the big city to move to the suburbs and start a new life in the small town of Wuhan, China. We also discuss how he's dealing with the aftermath of the viral outbreak and how it's affected him and his family and how he s dealing with it now, and how to deal with the anxiety that comes with living in a city that's not your normal city. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review the podcast on iTunes. We really appreciate the support we've gotten so far. Thank you so much for being a part of this podcast and supporting the podcast! we really appreciate it. Timestamps: 0:00 - What's going on in your life? 5:30 - What are you dealing with? 6:15 - How do you feel about it? 7:00 8:40 - What do you're dealing with anxiety? 9:00- What is it right now? 11:10 - What does it mean to you? 12:00 | What is your favorite part of the job? 15:30 16:30 | How does it feel like? 17:10 What is a normal time? 18:40 | What are your favorite place to live? 19:40 22:30 // 21:00 Is it a normal place to work? 21:20 - What is the worst thing you can do? 26:00 Can you have a normal day? 27: Is it normal? 28:00 What do they like to do in a weird place? 29:00 Do you like it here? 30:00 Are you a normal person?
00:01:47.000They're enjoying telling people what to do, which is just basic human nature.
00:01:51.000To pretend that government agencies, that people who wanted to be mayor, people that wanted to be governor, would somehow or another Avoid all the pitfalls that are just naturally a part of being a person,
00:02:19.000I think that's a big story of modern America, is people just not being able to deal with the idea that there just aren't solutions for some things.
00:02:28.000For some things, you just can't fix it by fiat.
00:02:31.000What's fascinating to me, though, is that people will blame everyone except the people that were actually responsible for the virus.
00:02:40.000This is a virus that most likely, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm about 90% sure, That this thing came from a fucking laboratory.
00:02:50.000And all the stuff that I've read and all the emails from Peter Daszak and Fauci and the NIH, when you look at the way they were looking at it and how they were kind of panicked, and then you look at their absolute Their belief that supposedly they're broadcasting that there's no way it could have come from a lab.
00:03:11.000And then you see their actual emails and you go, oh, you fuckers, you know this probably came from a lab.
00:03:19.000And you're doing your best job to try to obfuscate, to try to confuse people, to try to muddy the water and just get it as far away from you as you can.
00:03:29.000But the reality is this probably came from a fucking lab.
00:04:17.000This is a normal time when people are under heavy anxiety.
00:04:21.000Because most people do not know how to handle extreme stress or scary, unknown situations.
00:04:30.000That's why they like a normal job that starts at 9 and ends at 5 and you have two weeks paid vacation and you have your this and you have your that and everything's laid out and you know what to expect.
00:04:45.000People do not like when you don't know what to expect.
00:04:48.000Yeah, I mean, that was a big thing for me.
00:04:53.000And in Moscow, there were constant terrorist attacks at the time because the Cheshians and the Russians were having these issues.
00:05:01.000But when 9-11 happened in the United States, people were traumatized by that beyond all proportion, it seemed to me, because in America, we're just not used to having to deal with all sorts of things.
00:05:12.000And so they just don't deal well with stress when it's an unusual situation.
00:05:18.000They have to be in the kind of the lane of safety.
00:07:20.000It's very tense, and there's a lot of people that are profiting off of that tension.
00:07:25.000There's a lot of anger merchants out there.
00:07:29.000That are essentially elevating their brand by just getting mad at things and having the least charitable view of people, the least charitable view of situations, the most polarizing arguments of right versus left and vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
00:08:37.000That's what's so crazy about the world that we're living in.
00:08:40.000But what's interesting is I think the positive aspect of this – and let's try to find the silver lining, right?
00:08:46.000I think the positive aspect of this is it's really highlighting the importance of independent media.
00:08:52.000You know, people like Kristalyn Sager from Breaking Points, Kyle Kalinske, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, these independent journalists who I can turn to and go, okay, I know if I'm reading a Matt Taibbi article, you're going to tell me exactly what's going on.
00:09:19.000I think a lot of people, what we're finding, and you're of course familiar with this, is that there's a massive audience out there that is very frustrated with traditional media, the manipulative aspects of it, the predictability of it.
00:09:36.000And so, yeah, they're coming to places like Substack.
00:09:41.000I spent my whole life in the media business.
00:09:43.000I had an editor once who called it managing the decline.
00:09:47.000The expectation in media was always that there was going to be less and less money forever because audiences were dwindling, because they just didn't like the product that we were putting out.
00:09:56.000In independent media now, it's the opposite.
00:10:13.000I don't think it would be possible any other way.
00:10:16.000I think there has to be this massive decline in the believability of CNN and, you know, fill in the blank, like whatever mainstream big time publication.
00:10:49.000So what happens in media is we have this expectation that if something is published in another reputable news organization, we assume that it's been checked and that it's true.
00:11:01.000Somewhere down the line, whoever did the original reporting actually checked it.
00:11:08.000Let's explain what the story was so people can...
00:11:11.000So basically, an ER doc, if I remember correctly, in Oklahoma, in rural Oklahoma, gave an interview to a TV station.
00:11:22.000And essentially, he was saying that there was a problem With people who were taking ivermectin and they were getting so sick that they were lining up outside the ERs and preventing people who had gunshot wounds from being treated,
00:11:43.000Me as a reporter, if I hear that story, the first thing I'm going to think is, are there really that many gunshot victims in rural Oklahoma?
00:11:52.000There's already a little bit of a problem with that.
00:11:57.000You would want to check that right away.
00:11:59.000What actually happened is some wires got crossed.
00:12:02.000The guy was talking about one thing and...
00:12:05.000And somebody who saw the story assumed a correlation that wasn't there.
00:12:10.000And then it got retweeted by Rachel Maddow.
00:12:53.000But the thing about Rachel retweeting that and doubling down, what's so interesting about that, and this is a phenomenon that's completely new in my experience in media, Is that companies now know that their audiences will forgive them for making mistakes as long as the mistakes are in the right direction.
00:13:12.000As long as it's ideologically correct.
00:13:14.000As long as it's ideologically correct.
00:13:16.000So there was a whole generation of reporters who were raised like me.
00:13:20.000Like, our whole thing was the night before we published something, we couldn't sleep because we were afraid of that one thing that would be fucked up in the report that somebody would catch the next day and that might end your career, right?
00:13:35.000Like, if you got something really, really badly wrong, it was potentially a career-ending thing, especially if you made some kind of ethical mistake in forgetting to check something.
00:13:44.000So that terror was common to all reporters until recently.
00:13:50.000Now, all of a sudden, when you make a really, really bad mistake, your audience is probably going to be fine with it.
00:13:57.000They don't punish you for it in the same way.
00:13:59.000And they've basically brought in a whole generation of people who have this ethos of, well, if I make...
00:14:19.000And they don't see that correlation, which is incredible to me.
00:14:22.000It's very strange, but again, it fuels this thing that I think is very good, which is trustworthy, independent media.
00:14:32.000Like, Crystal and Sagar, when they had their old show, Rising on the Hill, They decided to leave, and when they decided to leave, we had a group conversation on the phone, and they were asking me advice, and I was like, I think you guys are going to be gigantic when you leave.
00:14:48.000I think it's going to be bigger than ever.
00:15:14.000And they were raised, they had that hesitation, because we're raised in media, in professional corporate media, to be terrified of leaving the fold.
00:15:25.000Now, I actually came up through alternative media, so I wasn't afraid of leaving it.
00:15:29.000I had my own newspapers when I lived overseas, The idea of being out in the wilderness didn't frighten me so much.
00:15:36.000So when I moved to Substack, I just thought, this is probably going to be cool.
00:16:20.000I never thought of it as a job at all.
00:16:21.000And so when I had gotten it to the point where it started to become valuable, There were a bunch of vultures that tried to buy half of it or take over.
00:16:32.000There was one podcast network that literally wanted to take 50% of the show just to be on the network.
00:16:39.000And I was like, what are you talking about?
00:16:52.000This is a different, like, they didn't even understand, and this was quite a few years ago before it had gotten big, but the point is, I know friends that took that deal, that gave their podcast over to this network and became a part of it, and now they're probably kicking themselves.
00:17:25.000Like, you're going to be connected to this network, they're going to protect you, they're going to bring in the ads, you don't have to do anything, and they just take a percentage of it, but you will always have income, because you'll be connected to us, and we are a big corporation, and you're like, Oh, just like when I was on NBC. This is going to be great.
00:17:44.000And you start thinking about your mortgage, and you start thinking about your kid's college, and all that stuff, and you go, okay, this is a good thing.
00:17:57.000This is the best time ever to be independent.
00:18:00.000Yeah, and that's why it is a very hard decision for people to walk away and go independent and do what I did, what Glenn did, what Crystal and Kyle did.
00:18:11.000But it works, and the other choice, staying with traditional media, is increasingly not a good bargain for you.
00:18:20.000Not only is the piece of the pie there getting smaller and smaller all the time because their ratings are getting worse, Advertising revenue is dropping off, but the ideological conformity in those organizations is getting worse, and that is something that never used to exist before,
00:18:39.000or at least not to this degree, anywhere near this degree.
00:18:42.000So you're going to be miserable doing that.
00:18:45.000You might as well do the job the way you want to do it, do it correctly, and get paid In a commensurate way for doing it.
00:18:52.000I think there's a bunch of people, though, that haven't established a large following that are worried, rightly so, of being lost in this.
00:19:01.000So I don't think this is available to anyone.
00:19:03.000It's obviously available to you and to Glenn and to Jimmy Dore and a lot of these other people.
00:19:07.000They've already gathered up a large, loyal audience because they know that they can trust these people.
00:19:12.000Or the people, rather, know they can trust them to be honest and to just give their take on things.
00:19:18.000But there's a lot of people that are, they're stuck because, you know, they're not really well known and they're kind of in this system and they're realizing while they're in this system that it's pretty fucked and you have two choices.
00:19:31.000Either you try to fight against it and you might get ostracized or you try to conform and then you get lost and then you become what you despise.
00:19:44.000Yeah, I think that's what's happening.
00:19:46.000Either they're moving the people out, which you see at an organization like the New York Times, Where they're just kind of moving the old guard out, the old traditional reporting types.
00:19:57.000And they had a lot of really amazing reporters at the New York Times, people who really knew how to do the job.
00:20:03.000And they're just kind of being pushed out, whether for one reason or another.
00:20:07.000Or, you know, the other thing is you stay in and gradually the mindset takes hold of you and you get lost mentally.
00:20:15.000And I think that's what's happening to a lot of people.
00:20:17.000I mean, I knew Rachel back in her Air America days.
00:20:22.000You know, we were friends once, sort of.
00:20:24.000And it's just, it's amazing to me what's happened.
00:20:30.000I read your book with her and who else on the cover?
00:21:44.000It's this audience optimization method of making money where you identify the audience...
00:21:50.000Then you give them a whole bunch of information that you know is going to, you know, sort of please their sensibilities and tickle their prejudices.
00:21:59.000And you just keep feeding that stuff to them over and over and over again.
00:23:31.000I got in a scrape, like a drugs thing, and so my parents decided that I needed to learn a little bit about real work, so I ended up doing demolition for a long time in Boston.
00:23:43.000Dude, I had a construction job when I was, well, I had many of them because my father was an architect growing up, but when I was 19 years old, my buddy Jimmy, Jimmy Lawless, shout out to Jimmy, he got me a gig working with him.
00:23:59.000We were building a Knights of Columbus Hall somewhere in Massachusetts, and it was during the summer, so it was hot as fuck, muddy, and I was carrying cement and pressure-treated lumber all day.
00:25:05.000The only way to do it was to put it in a rubber bucket and have two guys carry each one up and down the stairs.
00:25:11.000So the guy I was with had just gotten out of jail and he was like, this is what the people who built the pyramids must have felt like, you know, carrying that stuff up the stairs.
00:25:27.000There was a comedy club in that basement called Duck Soup.
00:25:29.000The guys who owned the Comedy Connection, Bill Blumenwright, who eventually took over the Wilbur, he bought it after these guys had kind of failed this one.
00:25:38.000They decided to try this project of a really high-end...
00:25:43.000Comedy club that only did clean comedy for respectable people and they served really nice food and it did not work out.
00:25:52.000Because right across the street was Nick's Comedy Stop, which was wild and they were literally offering you, you can get paid in cash or cocaine.
00:26:18.000No, you know, the idea was like, you know, Duck Soup, the great Groucho Marx, Marx Brothers movies.
00:26:24.000That movie was, you know, they thought it was like one of the great classic movies, and they thought it would be fun to have this classy comedy club.
00:26:32.000And so they had all these other options.
00:26:33.000You know, there were Stitches and the Common Connection, all these other clubs.
00:26:36.000They're like, let's have one club that's very high-end and beautiful, and it didn't work.
00:26:42.000And so then it became an improv after that.
00:26:45.000The improv took it over after that, and then eventually it just went under.
00:26:48.000And then Bill, who's a real businessman, he turned it into the Wilbur.
00:26:54.000They did Faneuil Hall for a while, and I think that's when Bill bought them.
00:27:23.000But the thing that's going on now that's really interesting is watching all these pieces shuffle and move around, like the Substack thing and the podcast thing, and watching the reaction that traditional media has to it.
00:28:01.000Last year, I knew somebody who worked at the Times, and he was basically saying, you know, the op-ed page is really worried about Substack.
00:28:36.000But it speaks to the desperation within The news business that they are convinced that if they are losing audience, it must be because somebody is stealing it from them.
00:28:49.000Whereas what happened, in fact, is that they lost their audience first because – and this goes all the way back to the WMD episode.
00:28:57.000And then after that, I think Russiagate was a big one that turned off a lot of people.
00:29:04.000And they've been steadily losing audience just because of factual issues.
00:29:11.000That audience was already out there, as you know.
00:29:14.000But they're trying to blame it on somebody.
00:29:17.000Whether it's factual or not, I think people are very tired of being lectured to in this sort of very clear ideological bent.
00:29:26.000The angle that they're taking in these papers when they're discussing a real news story when the actual facts are available to people as they start seeing the facts and then seeing the big picture and then they go back to that original article they read they get angry they get annoyed like you guys are bullshitting me like this is a bullshit version of what happened and it's so clear that you keep doing it in the same direction so now every time you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever paper it is you have to go okay
00:29:57.000how much of this is legit well who's writing it you have to think like which guy is writing it and How accurate is his reporting?
00:31:01.000I mean, I was a part of martial arts when, you know, I was a child, and then when the UFC came along, there was all of this rejection of the idea behind it.
00:31:11.000It was barbaric, it was, you know, you only need this, and you don't need to learn all this other stuff, and then eventually, everybody gave up.
00:31:18.000And now it's clearly established, like, that is 100% the best form of martial art for an actual physical confrontation, is a combination of all the things.
00:31:29.000When something new comes along that's superior, there's a rejection of it, there's an attack against it, and then eventually the dust settles and people realize, like, oh, this is what's going on.
00:31:51.000You know, once upon a time, I think the idea within the news business was pretty simple.
00:31:58.000Like, reporters were raised, basically, we'll get all the facts, we'll work really hard on getting it right, we'll give it to you, and then you do what you want with it.
00:32:07.000It's not our job to tell you what decisions to make.
00:32:11.000It's just our job to get it correct, right?
00:32:16.000After that, you know, it's up to you to make your own political decisions.
00:32:21.000But that's why political affiliation didn't necessarily mean so much back in the day.
00:32:25.000It was always true that basically all reporters were Democrats, but it didn't show so much in the news media once upon a time because we had a professional ethos that just said, we're not supposed to care, right?
00:32:39.000We're just going to collect all the facts, get all the quotes, put it out there, make sure everything's been checked, and then it's your deal.
00:32:46.000Now, there's this new ethos that What Wesley Lowery, the reporter, calls the view from nowhere journalism, which is what I just described, that that's not good enough, that they have to compensate for inequities in the system by Basically trying to impact how people behave through coverage.
00:33:07.000And this is what they do all the time.
00:33:09.000They're trying to get you to make political decisions by how they cover things.
00:33:15.000And I saw this early on as a campaign reporter once when I was much younger, you know, in 2004 and 2008. I would sit on the bus with the reporters and they would be discussing which candidates they were going to describe as fringe,
00:33:33.000which ones were going to be described as electable, which ones would be serious, right?
00:33:38.000Because they enjoyed having the power of deciding for people, you know, who got to be taken seriously and who didn't.
00:33:47.000And I think that urge To mold how people act is just ingrained in the business, and it's so off-putting.
00:35:07.000He broke people's, that Trump derangement syndrome, I used to think that was a funny thing that, you know, not even that funny, but a thing that Republicans would say to try to invalidate anything that liberals would say.
00:35:22.000But as time has gone on, and you've seen it over and over again, and the justification for not just bias, but blatant Distortions of the facts in order to impart a narrative,
00:37:16.000Yeah, they had to because – well, actually, I mean, that's still a little bit of a mystery as to why – They suddenly decided to back off.
00:37:27.000Well, Josh Rogin was responsible for quite a bit of it, and he's done amazing stuff.
00:37:32.000I mean, his work in exposing the whole disinformation campaign and the emails and the fact that Fauci was the one that restarted the gain-of-function research and funding gain-of-function research, all that stuff.
00:37:48.000I mean, and he's a Washington Post guy.
00:37:53.000I think there was a bunch of people that kind of, when he started reporting all this stuff and saying all these things, a bunch of people that were like, fuck, he went out there.
00:38:13.0002005. 2005 studies found that chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine, was effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS-CoV.
00:38:23.000The official name for SARS, the research was conducted in cell culture conditions, so in vitro, meaning the drug was not administered to actual SARS patients.
00:38:31.000That's the same thing they found with ivermectin, that it stops viral replication in vitro.
00:38:37.000Yeah, if you look at the announcement for the Oxford study on ivermectin, they use very similar language to say that this is a drug that has had in vitro success.
00:41:04.000But the fact that you're talking about a drug that couldn't have been given to all the horses, even if they gave it to every fucking horse.
00:41:12.000Now, this was amazing when they did that.
00:41:15.000I mean, I had arguments with other people in the business about this because I wrote a couple of stories about ivermectin mainly because some of the internet platforms were shutting down people who were talking about it,
00:41:52.000But reporters were absolutely convinced that this drug was evil, I guess because it wasn't the vaccine.
00:42:06.000And just the whole concept that people would be looking for some other kind of treatment or might welcome it was just deeply and profoundly offensive to them.
00:42:15.000So they came up with this pejorative term, this horse dewormer thing.
00:42:29.000And even that is odd because, again, once upon a time, you're a classic journalist with somebody like Seymour Hersh, and the whole idea of being a journalist was to not think like other people.
00:43:30.000Another thing that's one of my favorite things to watch is the compilation of all of the people on the left talking about how they would never take the vaccine because you never know what's in it if Trump's hands are on it.
00:43:46.000That it's gonna, you know, who knows what the long-term consequences of it are going to be.
00:44:35.000To use a phrase like that, that's clearly cooked up with their consultants in whatever evil political laboratory they sit around and decide how they're going to do their messaging campaigns.
00:44:48.000But then for an anchor person, To get up and repeat it like it's his or her own thinking, that's just embarrassing.
00:44:57.000Since when do we let politicians write our material for us?
00:45:37.000I mean, whatever the fuck they did, when they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise on television, and we're one of only two countries on planet Earth that allows that, they allowed...
00:45:52.000The deepest roots of corruption and of influence to get in the way of all narratives, of everything we say and do, and the fucking sheer amount of money that's being generated by that is almost unstoppable.
00:46:17.000Look at the amount of the profits that companies like Moderna and Pfizer are making right now.
00:46:25.000To buy the ascent of basically all the networks, all you have to do is send a tiny percentage of your quarterly profits to a handful of news networks.
00:46:37.000And to them, that's like manna from heaven.
00:46:39.000I mean, again, the news business is so starved for revenue that they'll bend to anybody, basically.
00:46:46.000Did you see that—I mean, I know Jimmy Dore covered it, but quite a few other people have realized it now—the amount of money that Bill Gates has spent on influencing media?
00:47:15.000And look, once upon a time, we were – I haven't said that many times.
00:47:21.000We were trained to know that, for instance, think tanks, right, like who was funding them because think tanks are who get quoted in the New York Times and the Washington Post, right?
00:47:35.000So they're generating research that goes to journalists and like sort of surreptitiously that ends up becoming – What's covered.
00:47:44.000And so that's how the Gates Foundation, for instance, will work its way into coverage.
00:47:49.000It'll sponsor research in an area like education.
00:47:52.000That's one of the things I'm covering now.
00:47:54.000And its research becomes, it gets into the news that way.
00:48:01.000But we were supposed to once have our ears up And be conscious of who was paying for all this research.
00:48:10.000Where was that information coming from?
00:48:12.000And, you know, people don't really even think about it now.
00:48:14.000See if you can find that story, Jamie.
00:48:43.000It says, I recently examined nearly 20,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation made through the end of June and found that more than $250 million going towards journalism.
00:48:52.000Receipts included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde.
00:49:42.000That Gates commissioned to create a news site to promote the success of aid groups.
00:49:46.000In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations, which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates funding into the fourth estate.
00:49:59.000Yeah, and as a reporter, you may or may not be aware of all the different ways that money will get in, you know, work its way into the business.
00:50:08.000But unconsciously, it just sort of seeps in.
00:51:02.000It works, you know, with foreign policy.
00:51:06.000I mean, when I worked in Russia, if you send the story, if you pitch the story to an American editor about how The US-based, the US-funded reform effort was working and there was a growing middle class in provincial Russia that was prospering and people were now taking vacations to Ibiza and stuff like that.
00:51:29.000You could get anybody to buy that story.
00:51:31.000But if you came to them with a story about how Actually, you know, the transformation of capitalism has been really slow.
00:51:41.000There's an explosion of violent crime and addiction, and people are more and more gravitating towards right-wing politics, you know, in large part because of the rapid changes that they weren't ready for.
00:51:56.000You could not get that story sold, right?
00:51:59.000So what ended up happening when I was in Russia, As they kept sending back all these positive reports about what was happening, this was before Putin, and Americans got this idea that things in Russia were going great, and the company was really prospering.
00:52:17.000In fact, I was doing stories when I was there about how Money didn't even exist in the villages.
00:52:25.000The only people who would actually have cash in most remote Russian villages would be pensioners because they would get it once a month from the mail system.
00:52:35.000I went to places where the people actually bought and sold things with moonshine, like the Russian equivalent of moonshine.
00:52:42.000Because that was like a unit of currency.
00:53:24.000I used to travel the country with this guy who was blooming around a professional clown.
00:53:28.000So we would do these things where we would get jobs in, you know, provincial Russia doing different things, you know, whether it was bricklaying or, you know, working in, you know, agriculture, that kind of stuff.
00:53:41.000And in one place we went to, you know, we would do like a construction job and we'd get paid in what they call Samagon, which is like moonshine.
00:54:25.000It's one of my favorite documentaries.
00:54:26.000It's really fascinating because these people live just hunter-gatherer, fisherman, trapper existences.
00:54:36.000And I believe they sell pelts and they'll use that for snowmobiles and tools and things like that.
00:54:46.000But essentially all of their food, all of their subsistence comes, this is it, comes entirely from hunting and trapping and they have no mental health problems.
00:55:00.000They're really, like, when you, you know, you're getting translations of them, you know, it's all in subtitles, but they're talking about how happy they are, and they talk about all the things they love about this particular way of living, and, you know,
00:55:16.000and this is what a man needs to do, and this is what a trapper does, and this is what a hunter does, and this is what...
00:55:22.000And they're talking about it with this pride and this...
00:55:27.000I don't know, man, this really unusual resolve.
00:55:52.000It makes sense that whatever it is we're doing, that if you can avoid having to have interaction with that, it sounds like it would be a great life.
00:56:49.000The news is kind of split into three parts, right?
00:56:52.000There's right-wing media, there's, you know, hashtag resistance media, and then there's this independent thing where, you know, it's people like you and me and Glenn and Crystal and Kyle and stuff like that.
00:57:04.000It is small and emergent, and it's a lot of attention.
00:57:10.000I think there's a lot of pressure on us to figure things out because we haven't figured things out.
00:57:15.000Like, Substack is really great for getting a couple of us paid a good deal of money, but we haven't figured out how to do, like...
00:59:32.000You could have a GoFundMe or, you know, whatever, Patreon, something along those lines, where people just donate to this fund that goes towards journalism.
00:59:43.000And then at the end of the year, there could be an accounting of it so that everybody knows it's all legit and no one's siphoning money off of it.
01:00:16.000You could have found a fair number of reporters who knew how to do hardcore investigative journalism 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but the current generation has been raised on a different model that's based on Being quick,
01:00:34.000getting a couple of quotes, putting something up fast, and it's brief, and it's more of a take than it is a dig.
01:00:41.000And so that mentality of just investigative work is disappearing.
01:00:48.000So you'd have the problem of finding people who can do it.
01:00:51.000The other problem is audiences don't necessarily love what we call like eat-your-vegetables journalism, right?
01:01:01.000There are people who do good work, but they have difficulty getting people to follow it because people do love the shit that's out there, right?
01:01:48.000It takes a while to develop all those skills and they're not teaching kids in journalism to do that as much anymore.
01:01:55.000Do you think that with the rise of independent journalists, do you think that it's possible that that might open up and people might look at that as a viable career path and they might say, hey, this is actually, it's actually coming back?
01:02:11.000I mean, if the money's there, it's the greatest job in the world.
01:02:14.000I mean, like, you know, this job has taken me all over the planet.
01:02:18.000I've gotten to meet every conceivable kind of person on Earth, everyone from presidential candidates to professional athletes to people in prison to, you know, everywhere.
01:02:29.000And you can go anywhere doing journalism.
01:02:32.000And you get to play detective sometimes, right?
01:03:03.000They're training kids to be like courtiers basically and the people who come out of journalism schools now, they want to be close to power.
01:03:15.000That's the attraction for them is the idea of being the person who gets to sit next to a Hillary Clinton aide at a bar at the end of a day and I know this person or I hang out at a party with this person.
01:03:28.000Instead of going around the world or breaking a big story, that's what it is.
01:03:36.000I think it's unfortunate because it's a cool job.
01:03:44.000Think about how many incredible stories have been broken and Woodward and Bernstein, how people look at these people.
01:03:53.000Yeah, think of the people who've been journalists, who've done such incredible things, you know, everybody from, like, Ida Tarbell to Mark Twain to Hunter Thompson, Evelyn Waugh, like, you know, it's a great place for if you want to be a writer.
01:04:10.000I mean, that's how I got into it, because I wanted to be a writer.
01:04:15.000But if you want to be a great investigator, you know, you can do that's a way into it, too.
01:04:22.000You know, there's the whole tradition of what we call participatory journalism, where you do something and then you write about it.
01:04:31.000You know, George Plumpton was famous for playing professional football, the Paper Lion story.
01:04:39.000But, you know, I've done some of that, you know, like doing, you know, work in Russia or, you know, going undercover.
01:04:46.000I lived in a church in Texas for a while.
01:05:08.000They didn't have a date, but they had all these crazy, like we had a retreat where they taught us to vomit our demons out into a paper bag.
01:05:18.000So we all got together and like we had to do that.
01:05:23.000So I had to pretend to be this like confused, spiritually confused person.
01:05:27.000I feel kind of guilty about it in retrospect.
01:07:25.000I might be speaking out of tune here because they might have changed, but I think they decided somewhere along the line that it's not really a language, that someone just made up a fake language.
01:07:54.0002019, the manuscript was propelled back of the headlines once again when an academic made the explosive claim that he had succeeded where everyone had failed and successfully decoded the mysterious text.
01:08:09.000If somebody 500 years ago made this beautiful thing but made it complete gibberish just to fuck with us in the future, that's kind of amazing.
01:08:24.000I think they think that somebody might have made it to sell to someone.
01:08:30.000Like someone might have made it in the early 1400s to sell as like some ancient text.
01:08:36.000It currently consists of around 240 pages.
01:08:39.000There's evidence that additional pages are missing.
01:08:41.000Some pages are foldable sheets of varying size.
01:08:46.000Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely colored with sections of the manuscript showing people fictitious plants, astrological symbols, etc.
01:08:58.000The text is written from left to right.
01:08:59.000The manuscript was named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. I don't think that anyone has translated it.
01:12:48.000They didn't do conversion therapy exactly, but they definitely counseled people who were in that situation, let's put it that way.
01:12:58.000I thought about doing one of those, but then where I would actually join one of those retreats, And see how they went about trying to convert people.
01:13:37.000That's a weird thing to say, but some people do seem gay.
01:13:43.000It's like you risk being criticized and being called a bigot for saying that, but if someone's talking like this, it's very rare that it's a straight person, right?
01:13:55.000This is in no way a judgment against gay people.
01:13:59.000This guy was doing Pray the Gay Away stuff and someone did some investigative reporting and did something and it was like this guy like clearly has a heart on and he's like behind me hugging me and telling me that you know Jesus does not want him to be gay and that we're all gonna work through this and he's like the whole thing was like uber bizarre.
01:15:15.000The reason why trans is different because there are trans people, right, that start off as biological males and they identify with being a female but they've had children with females and they've had relationships with females and then as they transition they remain attracted to females.
01:15:38.000So I don't think it's quite the same as gay.
01:15:42.000It's very different in that it's whatever it is in the human mind that makes you identify with another gender, it seems to have nothing to do with your sexual preference.
01:16:00.000Well, I knew almost nothing about it until I got attacked for attacking a female MMA fighter.
01:16:10.000Who used to be male for 30 years and then wasn't telling anybody that she used to be male and transitioned and fought two different times against females that thought she was a biological female and beat the fuck out of them.
01:17:34.000What's amazing about this is that, again, it goes back to that same kind of instinct behind the lab leak theory process, which is we've decided something, right?
01:17:47.000We're not going to discuss it anymore.
01:17:50.000So if you discuss it, You are in the bad zone.
01:17:57.000You're not even allowed to bring it up.
01:18:00.000And so there are just so many of these places in the kind of cultural landscape that are just, you know, no fly zones for talking about things.
01:18:10.000Well, Abigail Schreier is experiencing that in the most hateful and aggressive way with her book, I believe it's called Irreversible Damage, which is all about rapid onset gender dysphoria that seems to be happening to a lot of young girls.
01:18:26.000And they're trying to figure out what is going on when the percentage of people who identify as trans that are young girls is up several thousand percent, which is crazy.
01:20:20.000I agree with her, have agreed with some of the things she said, have disagreed with some of the other things that she said, have discussed these things, and realize that there is an issue here where people are malleable.
01:20:36.000Some sort of social acceptance and embracing of people who are trans and that this could be a problem with some people who are easily influenced and are maybe socially awkward or maybe even on the spectrum.
01:20:51.000And then someone comes along and says, you feel weird because you're really trans.
01:20:58.000And if you give that person testosterone, one of the things that happens with the administration of testosterone in people, particularly in girls, is there's a euphoria that comes with it, there's a sense of well-being, you get confidence,
01:21:13.000and they might start thinking, this is what has been wrong with me all this time.
01:21:18.000Now, these are not my words, these are not my opinions.
01:21:20.000This is just explaining what this phenomenon supposedly how you can define it.
01:21:28.000So I just want to be real clear about that.
01:21:29.000I don't know if that's actually what's going on.
01:21:32.000Yeah, so the assertion is that you have people in clusters, you know, social clusters, who are, you know, they call it the social contagion phenomenon.
01:21:46.000And there would be other factors, too, like therapeutic attention is also something that some people may think is a positive, right?
01:21:58.000They might feel better about life because they're getting more attention from clinicians or from teachers, something like that.
01:23:01.000You had to have dialogue and fight for it.
01:23:07.000And what we're doing now, we have this atmosphere where people don't want to – they're just sort of deeply interested in scaring people away from certain topics.
01:23:29.000Not defended their position as being accurate, but defended Nazis' right to speak because they said that if you believe in free speech, you believe in all speech.
01:23:39.000And even if it's wrong, even if it's inaccurate, you have to defend free speech.
01:23:43.000Now, they are like one of the wokest organizations that's out there.
01:23:51.000And their positions on things are entirely ideologically driven.
01:23:56.000Yeah, there was a great documentary called Mighty Ira that's done by FIRE. And they profile Ira Glasser, who was the head of the ACLU for a long time.
01:24:07.000And it goes into the whole mechanics of What the decision was to support the Nazis in Skokie.
01:24:16.000It was specifically based on the idea that all these ACLU people had fought in the civil rights era.
01:24:28.000And their whole argument was, if you let the town of Skokie decide who can and cannot march in their town, then you're going to have some southern town the next day deciding that a black organization or the NAACP can't march there.
01:24:44.000Are we going to make a million different authorities who are going to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't?
01:24:52.000And that's a very compelling argument, right?
01:25:00.000They took it very seriously from an intellectual level.
01:25:06.000We know how offensive this is to people.
01:25:08.000They thought about what it would mean to the residents of Skokie, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, what it would mean for them to see those marchers go past their houses.
01:25:19.000They understood how if anything is harm, if any kind of speech is harm, that is it.
01:26:02.000Like, if someone doesn't know why they're wrong, like maybe someone's uneducated, maybe someone grew up around people that were racists or Nazis, and then they get this compelling explanation of everything.
01:26:16.000Now, you wouldn't have had that if you didn't have the Nazis.
01:26:19.000Like, you kind of need the shitheads and the bad people of the world so that you can say, here's why they're wrong.
01:26:26.000And then, you know, it gets messy, and in the age of social media, that's where it's weird, because These shitheads never really had a platform before where they can get on these whatever platform social media allows them and they can develop massive followings saying crazy shit.
01:26:48.000We have to realize that even though it's new and it's uncomfortable and you're seeing these numbers and people are being indoctrinated into these ideas, what's important is to have a compelling argument against it.
01:27:01.000And to have that and to say, hey, this is why these people are wrong.
01:27:05.000Look, here's the most eloquent, thought-out, articulate argument against that.
01:27:13.000And then where reasonable people are allowed to look at these two things and go, well, clearly these people over here are correct.
01:27:19.000And clearly I see why these people are so fucked up and this is what's wrong.
01:27:26.000Doing it the other way, just saying, okay, we're not going to let you see that idea.
01:27:32.000We're going to make sure that it comes, or it comes affixed with a warning label, or it's, we're going to make sure that person does not appear on this internet platform.
01:27:42.000You know what the Streisand effect is, right?
01:28:34.000And I think internet speech is the classic example of where people think there must be something we can do, some step that we can take to make sure that these kinds of thinkers don't exist anymore.
01:30:55.000The entire account is only a month old.
01:30:59.000And her post on this somehow or another went viral.
01:31:03.000And this is what started the sharing of it.
01:31:06.000But if you look at these people walking down the street with their masks on, all dressed in black, all wearing like essentially a uniform, all holding the same size American flag.
01:31:18.000And then eventually they all jumped into the back of a U-Haul and were carted off at the end of this stupid fucking march.
01:31:26.000But if you watch this, I'm like, what are you guys doing?
01:31:29.000Was this supposed to be some, like, right-wing QAnon hate group?
01:36:28.000And they found out that a high percentage of the people involved were FBI informants.
01:36:33.000Which again, back in the day, would not have been surprising to people on the left because this is part of what we were taught.
01:36:44.000Back when they had COINTELPRO and FBI informants, it was notorious in the 60s and 70s, this idea of having agents provocateurs in the crowd, people who were throwing things at soldiers who were coming back from Vietnam to discredit the anti-war crowd,
01:37:05.000the assassination of Fred Hampton, the infiltration of the Black Panthers.
01:37:12.000It was understood that the FBI did this stuff, or that different law enforcement agencies did this stuff.
01:37:19.000Now, suddenly, people on the left disbelieve instantly that this happens.
01:38:06.000They're all dressed up like Spider-Man and all of them says, fed, fed, fed, another fed, and then one says, some autistic fuck, some poor guy that they trick into doing something.
01:38:17.000You know, that was the suspicion amongst the conspiracy theorists about the Boston bombing.
01:39:06.000So, we were all up in arms about this when the first war on terror happened because we knew shit like this was going on, whether it was informants pushing people to do things they didn't want to do or creating terror watch lists,
01:39:25.000no-fly lists, putting people under illegal surveillance, illegally detaining them.
01:40:25.000He was – One of the most famous people in the world, and we got the heads of the intelligence agencies lying to Congress openly, getting away with it.
01:40:39.000And then all of a sudden, in a heartbeat, those exact same people, the people everybody was so mad at, suddenly became heroes because they were the ones in the front lines battling Donald Trump.
01:42:01.000But people were so worked up about Donald Trump that suddenly they were ready to jump in bed with people like John Brennan and Comey and Clapper and all these guys.
01:42:15.000It's so crazy, but one thing that governments have been, our government in particular, has been really good at is capitalizing on a state of chaos and using it to their advantage.
01:42:25.000And this is something that happened post 9-11 with the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, which I believe the Patriot Act has never been used to arrest a terrorist.
01:43:25.000You know, the FISA Enhancements Act and, you know, the Patriot Act, the no-fly list, the watch list, all this stuff.
01:43:33.000The FBI's national security letters, you know, this thing where they would...
01:43:38.000The FBI sends a letter to a company, tells them that they are barred from telling their customers that they're divulging their information to the FBI. They sent tens of thousands of those letters.
01:44:49.000They don't have to disclose that stuff.
01:44:50.000They don't have to disclose the national security letter stuff.
01:44:53.000And so it became like this separate legal system and Americans just got used to it.
01:44:59.000And then when Trump happened, they were so afraid of him and all the possibilities that came with that that now they're Now they're willing to let all kinds of new tools be used on them.
01:45:12.000It's crazy that nobody's more worried about it.
01:45:16.000Well, when I heard Joe Biden say that the biggest threat to this country is white supremacy, I was like, okay, what's going on here?
01:45:29.000Because, look, Charlottesville was horrific, right?
01:45:32.000And when that guy ran over a bunch of people with his car in Charlottesville, it opened up the door to people saying, like, hey, this is genuinely horrible.
01:46:09.000Like, clearly, clearly, there's a lot of people that were involved in January 6th that were out of their fucking mind and really did think that they were going to take over the government.
01:48:04.000I mean, I think it's interesting that the guy who's doing the investigation into the Russiagate stuff now, John Durham, was also the prosecutor in that case.
01:48:15.000I don't think that's a coincidence because he's...
01:48:18.000But anyway, the thing with Biden talking about how white supremacy is the biggest threat, there's clearly something deeply wrong with this country.
01:48:31.000There clearly is domestic white terrorism.
01:49:55.000They have short memories and they forget how fucking crazy it was.
01:49:59.000Like right after that George Floyd protest, right after George Floyd's murder, when everybody was chaotic, like the country was in a state of chaos.
01:50:30.000I mean, the other thing about that case was that, you know, the protests in Kenosha were about the Jacob Blake case, which was, you know, I wrote a book about the Eric Garner case, which was, you know, unequivocally a brutal police killing where the police were at fault.
01:50:52.000But the Blake incident was much more complicated.
01:50:57.000If you look at the reasons why the DA and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department didn't file charges in that case, it's because there was a lot of stuff about that case that was...
01:51:15.000There's a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the police made there.
01:51:21.000And people naturally assumed, and this is what we do now, we see something on Twitter, we see like a 20 second piece of video, we think we know the whole story, but the reality is most of the time, the initial impression of news is wrong.
01:51:37.000There's usually some kind of error built in, and that's why we need the next two and three days and months to sort out exactly what happened.
01:52:46.000Yeah, literally one of the worst crimes you could imagine.
01:52:54.000But without hesitation, people would do things like say, well, it's clearly a problem that there weren't enough minorities in the jury in this case where everybody involved was white.
01:53:14.000A lot of the news consumers were just sort of led to believe certain things just by the way, by implication.
01:53:23.000They didn't always identify whether the people who got shot were white or black or anything.
01:53:29.000They would just sort of say they were shot.
01:53:31.000Meanwhile, they would say repeatedly that Rittenhouse was white.
01:53:35.000I have friends that are black that didn't know that they were white victims until the trial started.
01:53:58.000And you can see how that can happen if you're just picking up, you know, the newspaper or you're watching CNN and they're just neglecting to leave out certain details, which, you know, it has to be strategic.
01:54:12.000And again, this gets back to what I was saying before.
01:54:15.000It's not like anybody tells you to do this.
01:54:19.000The story is going to sell better or it's going to play better if you highlight certain things.
01:54:25.000I think that's what happens with a lot of the people in this case.
01:54:31.000It's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume that you have Sympathies with somebody like Rittenhouse or all the people who lionized them on Fox News.
01:54:45.000You have a heightened responsibility to get it right when people are amped up and they're mad and they're ready to go out in the streets and fight each other.
01:54:53.000That's when you have to be super careful about what you say, especially in media.
01:54:58.000It really highlights the importance of real journalism because this would have never taken place if real journalism had been Steadfastly followed from the jump if people said this is what we know and this is what happened These are the victims these people were the one of the things about like any kind of protest or any kind of chaos and this is something that is just part of human nature is When people know that there's chaos and there's protest,
01:55:27.000there's a lot of people that join in that really have no...
01:55:37.000And that happened all over the country, by the way, after the Floyd thing, which was one of the reasons why...
01:55:44.000The reporting about that was so disappointing, right?
01:55:49.000Because there were lots and lots of reporters, and I knew a few of them, who were kind of discouraged from talking about some of the ancillary stories, right?
01:56:00.000Like, okay, this neighborhood has been damaged, therefore elderly people can't get their prescriptions because the drugstore has been burned down or whatever it is, right?
01:56:09.000Because the implication is that the protesters Their cause was unjust, so let's not do that story.
01:56:18.000But in many cases, these weren't really even protesters.
01:56:22.000In some places, they were, and in some places they weren't, right?
01:56:53.000The problem with being honest about that when there's a frenzy in the air, which there most certainly was post-George Floyd, is that it's dangerous.
01:57:04.000And, you know, you can get attacked for just stating facts.
01:57:08.000Like, there was a lot of people on the right that were trying to say that he wasn't murdered and that he died of a fentanyl overdose and that he would have died anyway.
01:57:21.000And to those people, I was saying, fuck you.
01:57:24.000Because, like, you have no idea what it's like to have someone lean on your neck for eight and a half minutes.
01:58:21.000But my point is because of that There was a narrative where you weren't allowed to say other things about George Floyd that were true, like the fact that he held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach when he was robbing her.
01:59:17.000Like, I had police sources trying to sell me that off the record all the time.
01:59:21.000That, oh, you know, he would have gone anyway, right?
01:59:26.000And look, A, watch the video, but don't even just do that.
01:59:31.000Like, read the medical examiner's report, which says homicide on it, you know, because they've determined medically the cause of death was and, you know, compression of the chest.
01:59:41.000In other words, you can't just go off what somebody says about something.
01:59:47.000You have to look into it and, like, look into it again and again and again.
01:59:51.000And in, you know, in the case of Garner, like Garner was somebody who had some pretty bad stuff in his past going back a long way, but had kind of turned his life around and was somebody who was known on the block as being a really good dude who broke up fights and He gave all his money to his family members.
02:00:14.000One of the reasons his clothes were in such disrepair is that he wouldn't buy himself new clothes.
02:01:09.000It's fascinating when you think how the times have changed since then because now there's not a chance in hell they would arrest him for doing that.
02:01:51.000Like, if you get a guy who knows how to choke you, and I'm assuming the cop knows how to choke people, he'd seem like a strong guy, you get a hold of your neck like that, that's a fucking chokehold.
02:02:04.000One thing that has changed that I think, I mean, there's a lot of negativity.
02:02:08.000There's a lot of negative shit that's happened from this whole defund the police thing and The fact that, you know, the police officers feel so...
02:02:19.000They don't feel like they can do their job anymore without risking getting in trouble for something.
02:02:37.000And that's another thing that was really disappointing to me after the Floyd thing happened, because nobody wanted to look at the policy issue.
02:02:53.000What's the biggest contributing factor to police brutality cases?
02:02:57.000It's the number of contacts you have between police and people.
02:03:02.000And a lot of that has to do with The heightened number of stops that you have through programs like Stop and Frisk.
02:03:14.000In New York, it was clean halls, right?
02:03:17.000It's what they call the community policing techniques.
02:03:22.000The whole idea is, let's stop a gazillion people.
02:03:27.000We'll search them, or we'll pat them down.
02:03:31.000This is based on a Supreme Court case called Ohio v.
02:04:56.000What do we actually want police to do versus what have they been doing?
02:05:02.000And there was almost no discussion of those policy issues.
02:05:07.000It was just police are bad and therefore let's take their money away, whereas there's so many instantly fixable things they could have done.
02:05:17.000And the most liberal cities have had the most irrational responses to it.
02:05:22.000So like, look, the Garner thing is horrible, right?
02:06:09.000And how do you stop this given the current climate, the way people are viewing the police and the way the cops are viewing the support that they have from the community and from the government?
02:06:22.000Well, and a lot of those ideas probably came from people who live in affluent white communities who don't know what it is To occasionally need to call the police.
02:06:33.000They live in towns where the police are basically there, you know, kind of for show or they get overtime to do traffic stops or to, you know, school parades and stuff like that.
02:06:46.000They're not there for real crime, right?
02:07:22.000And there's another group that thinks the police are inherently bad and cause more problems than they create, than they fix, and they need to go away.
02:07:30.000But that's a legitimate debate that happens in those neighborhoods.
02:07:34.000And if you look at the polls, you'll see that, you know, It's not necessarily coming from the black communities that the defund efforts aren't always coming from there.
02:07:46.000The people who are most in favor of that are the people who have no conception of what the police are for.
02:10:40.000I thought about Charlottesville first.
02:10:43.000That was one of the things I thought about.
02:10:45.000Our job is to tell people what actually happened in these things, and you can't just stop and suddenly have a lack of curiosity once things don't exactly fit.
02:11:02.000It just feels like there was a lack of resolve to get to the bottom of that.
02:11:09.000Well, the difference between the way right-wing media covered it and left-wing media was incredibly stark.
02:11:15.000I mean, left-wing media didn't touch the fact that this guy had posts supporting Hitler and that he had tried to run over his girlfriend in a car, which is why he was in jail, that he got let on on $1,000 bail, which is incredibly low for a guy who tried to commit vehicular homicide.
02:11:34.000This trend of letting people out of jail easy that try to commit violent crimes and letting them off on very low bails and letting them right back out in the street is one of the weirder things that's going on right now.
02:11:48.000One of the weirder things that you see from these progressive district attorneys and in these liberal cities, it's very strange and I don't understand the logic behind it.
02:13:00.000Where you live, whether you have a job, whether you have a telephone in your house, all this stuff, they know roughly what you can afford when they go to ask for bail.
02:13:11.000And it's kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing between the judge and the prosecutors.
02:13:17.000That's why there were calls for bail reform, because what they were really doing was setting bail so high that people couldn't They either had to make a decision to plead early or sit in a place like Rikers Island and lose their jobs while they waited to adjudicate some really minor offense.
02:13:40.000There's a good reason for bail reform.
02:13:44.000But that doesn't mean that bail in all cases needs to be eliminated.
02:14:02.000You can't paint it all with the same brush.
02:14:04.000But I don't understand even the motivation of it.
02:14:07.000It's like if you were a real tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, you would think that someone is trying to destroy this country.
02:14:15.000Someone's trying to destroy these cities and what's the best way to do it?
02:14:18.000Well, the best way to do it is to let violent criminals run loose in the streets and have everybody freak out and then come up with a solution for it.
02:14:29.000A lot of the ideas that are coming out of what I used to consider like the liberal left or the Democratic Party, they almost seem to me like they're designed to lose votes.
02:14:44.000You know, like they're trying to give votes to the Republicans, who are, of course, equally crazy, like in their own way.
02:14:53.000But yeah, stuff like that, I don't even know where a lot of these ideas come from.
02:14:59.000Like, I'm doing a story now about the Loudoun County, Virginia, education mess, and just a lot of the thinking there.
02:15:10.000Yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
02:15:14.000A lot of the sort of intellectual class of this country, a lot of their ideas are just really strange these days.
02:15:22.000They don't make sense, but they're being supported.
02:15:25.000Those ideas are supported by enough people.
02:15:28.000There's enough people that believe in them that I don't think it really is they're trying to get the Republicans elected.
02:15:33.000I think They think that this is progress and I think what you were saying earlier about how the kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood.
02:15:44.000They just have this idea that if they are for defunding the police, what they are for is the right side of criminal justice reform and that to be a progressive you have to recognize there's Systemic racism is the root cause of all these crimes and those need to be addressed and it's not just about locking people up in jail,
02:16:07.000I really do think that there are root causes to all of these crime issues that we have in inner cities, whether it's Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago or whatever, that if they don't address those problems, all the policing in the world is not going to fix it.
02:16:23.000And it's going to take generations because you're dealing with people that have dealt with these crime-ridden, gang-infested communities for decade after decade with no intervention whatsoever, no help.
02:16:37.000I mean, we spend countless amounts of money Going overseas and fixing other countries.
02:16:43.000We don't do a fucking thing about horrendous inner city conditions.
02:16:47.000And then we get confused as to why they continue to put out violent criminals.
02:16:53.000Yeah, it's amazing because the same people who 10 or 15 years ago were trying to fix the cities essentially through brute force, right?
02:17:06.000So these were the people who were doing the stop and frisk programs.
02:17:48.000They caused an incredible amount of resentment, and they resulted in a lot of these police brutality cases.
02:17:53.000And now they're swinging in another direction.
02:17:57.000They're trying to take an opposite but equally irrational approach to dealing with the problem.
02:18:04.000So they try to solve it by shaking down...
02:18:07.000Ten years ago, let's shake down every black person who walks into the wrong neighborhood in New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore.
02:18:15.000Now, somebody came up with a bright idea to, well, let's just completely not have police or defund that and put the money towards some other...
02:18:28.000I think those ideas are, in many cases, equally stupid.
02:18:34.000And it's just an example of just intellectuals sometimes just shouldn't be allowed to make every decision, you know?
02:18:45.000That's sort of an overriding theme in a lot of the stuff that I've covered over the years.
02:18:49.000I just don't know how we bounce back from this.
02:18:51.000It is amazing to me, the impact of one man's death, the George Floyd death.
02:19:00.000It's amazing, because if you go from that point forward, and obviously it's accentuated by the pandemic, and there was a lot of build-up to it.
02:19:08.000There's been many, many cases of police brutality that were egregious, and people were frustrated and furious, but that was the straw.
02:19:16.000That was the straw that broke the camel's back.
02:19:18.000And the difference between the country the day before that happened and now is so stark that if you told me one death of a guy who was, you know, brutalized by the police and murdered in the way we all saw publicly is going to change the entire country.
02:19:37.000I would have said, how is that possible?
02:19:39.000Well, I think at the time, the entire debate was turbocharged by the fact that Donald Trump was in office.
02:19:48.000And this became, as everything did during the period, as hydroxychloroquine and the lab leak origin, everything is a referendum on Trumpism, right?
02:19:58.000So if George Floyd is killed and Joe Biden is president, is the reaction going to be the same?
02:20:25.000Caravan story, it was kids in cages, Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, Russiagate, everything was a full-blown massive panic.
02:20:35.000And that was how everything was covered during the Trump years.
02:20:42.000So I think that was a major factor in what happened with the Floyd story.
02:20:48.000It couldn't just be a police killing and they couldn't just fix the problem.
02:20:53.000They couldn't just deal with that one person.
02:20:55.000And they couldn't just look at sensible policy alternatives.
02:20:59.000It had to be a referendum on the entire United States and whatever it was was wrong with the country that had led to Donald Trump being elected.
02:21:08.000And, you know, sometimes, you know, things aren't always necessarily, you know, symbolic of something larger, you know?
02:22:21.000I'm fascinated by people who pull the wool over incredibly rich people's eyes and hoodwink them.
02:22:29.000She fit this perfect narrative that they were looking for.
02:22:34.000This billionaire genius woman who's the boss lady of this company that's going to do groundbreaking new work on blood testing and it's going to revolutionize the industry and help everyone.
02:23:11.000My favorite book growing up was about a con man.
02:23:14.000It was this book called Dead Souls by a Russian writer named Gogol.
02:23:21.000And it's about a guy who basically buys a bunch of dead serfs and mortgages them because there was a loophole in Russian law back then.
02:23:31.000The census was so slow that if you bought the equivalent of a slave...
02:23:38.000The state bureaucracy wouldn't know that that person was dead yet.
02:23:42.000So you could go to a bank and mortgage your slaves and get cash for them, essentially, right?
02:23:49.000So they got one of them just sort of buying dead slaves.
02:23:51.000But the con men are fascinating, right?
02:23:56.000And especially in the internet age, there's so many different ways To rip people off, to scale, that I think the authorities are just always going to be a couple of steps behind.
02:24:10.000I mean, you look at everything from Bernie Madoff to the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, which was an unbelievable story, like just basically stealing billions of dollars from investors around the world by representing a phony bond scheme.
02:24:44.000So that's what they call a big store con, right?
02:24:47.000Where everybody you see looks like they're sort of a natural part in the environment, but actually they've been put there for a reason to sort of mess with your perceptions of things.
02:24:59.000And that's what happened with Theranos, with 1MDB, with the subprime mortgage scandals.
02:25:09.000Everybody looked like they were on the up and up, but actually they were all in on it.
02:25:14.000And there's just a lot of really interesting ways to rip people off in this environment.
02:25:20.000It's fascinating when someone like Bernie Madoff can get so many people.
02:25:26.000And I always thought, really I always thought before I read your coverage of the banking crisis, I thought there was someone Out there who is really clearly paying attention to all of the pieces that are moving.
02:25:42.000And I thought it was, like, straightforward.
02:25:45.000Like, bad example maybe, but, like, we understand how fast cars are because we know the engineers that have worked to develop the displacement and the engines and how the transmissions work.
02:27:13.000And so there was an investigator, Harry Markopoulos, There was a guy sort of independently kind of figured out that there was something wrong with the situation.
02:27:22.000And all Madoff was doing is this is a classic old-school Ponzi scheme.
02:27:26.000You guarantee a certain amount of returns.
02:27:30.000Some people give you some money up front.
02:28:50.000I can put out a report that says we actually earned 7% or 14% this year, and no one's going to check because there isn't.
02:28:59.000There isn't a body of the checks for that kind of investment.
02:29:03.000So yeah, I think the public doesn't know that there are all these We're good to go.
02:29:30.000We're going to rig it for ourselves and we're going to take some of these people down.
02:29:36.000And that was why there was all this joy at blowing up a couple of hedge funds because the system is – you can manipulate it and they did it.
02:29:48.000And I think it was interesting what happened there.
02:30:16.000The response by the authorities confirmed every suspicion of all these GameStop investors, but it didn't break them.
02:30:25.000They're still holding, you know what I'm saying?
02:30:27.000That whole phenomenon is fascinating, actually.
02:30:33.000That's another story that was massively misreported.
02:30:37.000I talked to a lot of the people who invested in GameStop, A lot of them were people who got ruined after the 2008 crash, whose families got ruined after the 2008 crash.
02:30:50.000And this was their way of kind of getting revenge on the system.
02:31:20.000You know, a gang of sort of upper class people who were trying to, or middle class people who were trying to manipulate the system for gain.
02:31:29.000And they edited out the pain part of it that motivated a lot of these people.
02:31:36.000My next-door neighbor lost everything in 2008, back when I lived in California.
02:31:41.000He had the property right next to mine, and he would show up.
02:31:46.000There was nothing built on it, but he had bought this really nice property with a great view, and his dream was to build this dream home there.
02:32:03.000And one day I just walked up and started talking to him and I said, when are you going to build here?
02:32:09.000And then he gave me the story that he lost everything in 2008 and he had everything all set up and he was getting ready to build and now he would just show up and like trim the grass and he was so fucking sad.
02:32:23.000Yeah, because he probably had his money tied up in mortgage-backed securities.
02:32:37.000And then he stopped showing up, and then I got ahold of someone that I knew that knew him, and he was suffering from some severe health problems and eventually wound up passing away.
02:32:50.000So it's like this guy was just crushed by this.
02:33:14.000Because you should imagine if you put your faith in the system and you grinded your ass off for X amount of years and then you finally think you hit the finish line and then all this fuckery takes all your earnings away.
02:34:06.000Just to take an example, we were talking about Bernie Madoff before.
02:34:10.000Bernie Madoff's banker was JPMorgan Chase.
02:34:13.000So the bank, which should have been monitoring whether or not their client actually had a legitimate business, It doesn't seem too much to ask.
02:34:56.000So all these people see that You know, banks like Chase and Goldman that were selling these mortgage-backed securities to everybody, that were letting people like Bernie Madoff run wild, that were involved in the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia that ripped off that entire country.
02:35:19.000And they see that they're continually bailed out.
02:35:23.000After the pandemic, the banks had their best year in history in 2020. Because why?
02:35:35.000Because when you have the CARES Act...
02:35:39.000You know, which is all that money from the Fed that went to rescue everybody to keep all these companies in business.
02:35:47.000Somebody has to underwrite all that lending, right?
02:35:50.000The Fed is basically buying all these bonds.
02:35:54.000There's all this new lending to companies that's coming from the government.
02:35:58.000Well, some private entity has to do all that underwriting.
02:36:02.000So banks made like $140 or $150 billion in profits just from underwriting in 2020. So they all got rich off the bailouts.
02:36:14.000And so, which is exactly what happened after 2008. Like, not only do they get rescued for the actual crash, but the whole bailout, they got additional money for servicing the bailout.
02:37:00.000And that's what's going to happen now because the same thing is happening during the pandemic.
02:37:07.000Once again, people are kind of They're struggling, they're being ruined, but the 1% is kind of being artificially sustained by this run of public support that's going to make them all rich and it's just going to drive that resentment even further.
02:37:26.000Well, it's also the collapse of small businesses, which is a big factor in this.
02:37:32.000The big businesses like Target and Walgreens and Walmart, they expanded and they actually profited from the pandemic, whereas these other stores that were forced to close down, they were forced to not be open or to have extreme limitations,
02:37:53.000And again, this is another classic consequence of a bailout.
02:37:58.000After 2008, there was a thing called the implied bailout.
02:38:05.000So just the fact that the public knows that the government is never going to let JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America go out of business, It allows them to borrow money more cheaply than some local bank,
02:38:23.000The government might let a local bank go out of business.
02:38:27.000So when they go out into the open market to borrow money, it costs more.
02:38:32.000Like, the investors, the people who are lending them money, are going to demand more from that small bank than they're going to demand from Chase because they know That the government's never going to let them go out of business.
02:38:50.000They're not going to lose on that investment.
02:38:52.000So it creates artificially an advantage for the big company versus the small company.
02:38:58.000And that's what happened with the CARES Act.
02:39:01.000Again, the market looks out at this and they say, okay, well...
02:39:06.000American Airlines is never going to go out of business.
02:39:31.000Another thing that happened after 2008 was when they took the failing companies like Washington Mutual, rather than break them up into smaller parts so they could become independent small enterprises,
02:39:48.000what they did is they folded them all into The big companies.
02:39:51.000They got companies like Chase and Bank of America to buy up these smaller entities.
02:39:58.000So they took an already concentrated marketplace and they made it more concentrated.
02:40:05.000They made the big companies that were already too big to fail, they made them Even too big to failure.
02:40:16.000And it's again, it's going to drive resentment.
02:40:19.000You add the fact that kind of small business people tend to be the kind of people who are, you know, Republican Trump supporters who are being vilified, right?
02:40:30.000And, you know, it's going to drive that resentment even further.
02:41:53.000They're rescuing the big enterprises and they're letting the small ones go.
02:41:58.000It's capitalism for them and it's kind of socialism for everybody else, for the big firms.
02:42:04.000That's just not going to hold forever.
02:42:06.000It's also expanding the power that pharmaceutical drug companies have.
02:42:12.000And the concern with that is like, it's not that pharmaceutical drug companies are inherently 100% evil.
02:42:20.000No, they produce drugs that are very beneficial to people.
02:42:23.000And we all are better off because of them.
02:42:25.000You know, there's drugs that help people with all sorts of diseases and all sorts of cures and Great.
02:42:32.000But all these corporations operate under the premise that every year is going to be better than the year before.
02:42:40.000How the fuck do you do that when you have this insane windfall?
02:42:46.000You have this insane year where you're making untold billions of dollars.
02:42:52.000If somebody pointed out to me what Moderna's first quarter of what a quarter of this year looks like, the difference between how much they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off of everything else,
02:43:07.000and it's A giant percentage of the profit.
02:43:58.000And I'm not insinuating that they're going to start a pandemic or fake pandemic or come up with some reason why they should give people medication they don't need.
02:44:06.000But this is a quality that corporations have.
02:44:24.000Suddenly, we start finding out that every kid in the country needs to be medicated for ADHD and that there are people trying to pass laws in various states that would mandate that as a treatment.
02:44:39.000Again, they have an incentive to try to create that market.
02:44:43.000Or let's just say there's a drug that if you split it into two generics, it costs a dollar for people to use.
02:44:57.000But there's a new drug on the market that combines both of them and It costs $80 a dose or something like that.
02:45:06.000They're going to be incentivized to try to get people to take that drug instead of the two separate generics, even though that's not good for the consumer.
02:45:19.000There's so many different ways that these companies prey on people.
02:45:25.000This even removes from the equation the fact that a lot of their R&D is publicly funded.
02:45:31.000They get NIH grants, and in the case of the pandemic, they're specifically given significant amounts of taxpayer money to research into the vaccines, and they're going to make all the profits from that.
02:45:56.000It's going to be fascinating to see just if you were objective, if you were an alien from another planet and you were observing these industries, you'd be fascinating just to watch without any horror how they figure out a way to try to make as much money.
02:46:17.000And, you know, whether it mutates into a form like what happened with the Spanish flu where it's non-lethal and it gets to some new place where it's not what we have to worry about anymore.
02:46:45.000Yeah, they do because, well, they're looking for fear.
02:46:47.000But what they're doing with pharmaceutical companies and advertising, I want to play you this because I was watching this last night.
02:46:55.000I was watching some fights and this came up and I had to record it because I'm like, this is one of the fucking wackiest things I have ever heard in my life.
02:47:06.000Listen to what they're saying of the side effects of this shit.
02:47:09.000For adults with insomnia, prescription baby go can help.
02:48:27.000It sounds like finally I've got a solution to my insomnia.
02:48:32.000But the idea that they're allowed to do this manipulative advertising on vulnerable people that are seeking some sort of a solution to whatever health problem they have is goddamn crazy.
02:48:47.000Yeah, and it bleeds into the coverage of everything.
02:50:36.000Like, if you really believe that, if you really believe that unvaccinated people are the cause of all the suffering, Shame on anybody who doesn't get the vaccine.
02:50:51.000Then you would push for a patent waiver so that everybody else in the world, with whom you are connected, you know?
02:51:07.000Instead, they are protecting the profits of these companies very quietly.
02:51:13.000There's not a whole lot of controversy in the news media about Whether or not the Biden administration is going to lean on these companies to give up their cash cow.
02:51:28.000So they're allowing the companies to just rake in these billions of dollars, and they villainize the people in this country who voluntarily don't get the vaccine.
02:51:39.000Well, they've learned their lesson from ivermectin, because ivermectin is now a generic drug, and that's one of the reasons why it's demonized, the fact that you can't...
02:52:04.000Real understanding of why Africa, I think Africa has like 6% of its population has been vaccinated, but it has some of the lowest instances of COVID infection on Earth.
02:52:28.000I think it's used for other things as well.
02:52:31.000And there's also a widespread use of hydroxychloroquine.
02:52:33.000I'm not saying that that's the reason.
02:52:36.000I mean, maybe it's some of these areas are not coming into contact, regular contact with people from these countries that have high instances of infection.
02:52:46.000I don't know what the fucking answer is, but it's kind of crazy.
02:52:50.000Yeah, and there are countries around the world that have approved Ivermectin as a treatment.
02:52:59.000Yeah, and I think there are a couple in South America, too, if I'm not mistaken.
02:53:04.000They need real studies, is what they need.
02:53:06.000There's a lot of messy studies out there, apparently.
02:53:09.000When you talk to people that really understand the science behind it, they're sounding like, There's too many different studies.
02:53:18.000Some studies where they used it in prophylaxis.
02:53:20.000There's studies that used it early on.
02:53:23.000There's studies that used it late term, which is clearly much less effective.
02:53:28.000Where it seems to have some potential is early on and in prophylaxis.
02:53:33.000But again, there is no rock-solid data.
02:53:37.000But what I found fascinating, I had no idea when I took it, when I took it with all those other things that I took, that that one thing would be a big deal.
02:56:17.000And then when he came on the podcast and it just didn't go so good for him, that was a recognition like, oh, we've fucking played a terrible hand here.
02:56:37.000Which is, well, I think they're probably going to clean house over there anyway.
02:56:41.000I think what's going to happen at CNN now, you know, now that CNN is being run by different people, I think the Chris Cuomo thing is like one step.
02:56:51.000I heard they're going to replace the entire cast with The View.
02:56:54.000They're going to take all the girls from The View.
02:58:15.000It's a tough job, but it's not like a...
02:58:22.000Hard intellectual discipline, but they pontificate on the air and they pretend that they have this special access to special knowledge and that they're a level above the common run of people.
02:58:38.000Which is ironically a sure sign that they're not smart.
02:59:07.000It's just – it's kind of a Wizard of Oz thing where they're trying to project this image of all-knowingness and superiority, moral rectitude, infallibility.
02:59:26.000But all they're really doing is telling people that they have a lack of humility and a lack of self-knowledge.
02:59:33.000And it's really unfortunate because it wasn't that long ago that people like Walter Cronkite were the most trusted people in the country precisely because they kind of had this attitude of, you know, Well, we're curious.
03:00:24.000But, you know, of an electrician or a plumber or something, like, it was not something that upper-class Ivy League kids went into once upon a time, like, back in the 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
03:00:37.000Then it became a sexy profession after all the president's men.
03:00:41.000After Watergate, everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein.
03:00:44.000Hunter Thompson helped make it a little bit sexy.
03:00:49.000Rolling Stone, all that, their coverage.
03:00:51.000And it became a place for upper-class white kids to try to make their way.
03:01:02.000And I saw this sort of Transformation because when I started covering presidential campaigns on the plane, and this was back when presidential campaigns had planes full of journalists.
03:01:27.000If you were following John Kerry in 2004, which I did, you would have Kerry and the aides would be up in the equivalent of the first class section, and the entire back of the plane would be media, right?
03:01:42.000And You know, 80, 90, 100 reporters, you know, a couple of, you know, some of them would be camera people, some of them would be tech people.
03:01:54.000But what was so interesting for me is there was a mix on the plane.
03:01:59.000Some of them were sort of the old hands who had been doing this since the 70s.
03:02:05.000And they were much more kind of skeptical.
03:02:08.000They were much more likely to look at politicians like They're all pieces of shit.
03:02:21.000But this newer generation, the younger generation, they were so excited by—they were jazzed by the proximity to an important person, you know?
03:02:31.000And I think it was symbolized by something like Primary Colors.
03:03:40.000I remember in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson was talking about how he had freedom because he wasn't coming back.
03:03:51.000And so many of these guys were coming back and so they had to sort of like follow...
03:03:56.000Some protocol or follow some rules and you know he did like when he was Pretending that Hubert Humphrey was on drugs right in the game Yeah, making up fact that a Brazilian doctor had come to work on him like he had this freedom to do that right they didn't have and he Had the freedom to look at it honestly to look at it the way he thought The fucker he was Yeah,
03:04:23.000and you should always, as a journalist, you should never expect to retain your friends because you will eventually have to write something negative about somebody who you've become friendly with.
03:04:35.000So if you go into this business to be socially successful, you're in the wrong business.
03:04:40.000You should be comfortable being a loner.
03:04:44.000Or only have friends with people that, you know, follow the sort of morals and ethics that you do.
03:05:01.000And so what's regrettable about now is a lot of the people who are in journalism, they're upper class.
03:05:13.000They are socially the same people that they're reporting on, whereas there used to be much more of a class difference.
03:05:24.000You never had a phenomenon before—well, it was much more rare before to have a situation, especially in local journalism, where the reporter was somebody who saw himself or herself as being like— Traveling in the same circles as the mayor or a senator or the CEO of a company.
03:05:50.000They just didn't really mix like that.
03:05:53.000So they were outsiders who were reporting and they didn't really mind offending people because, what the fuck, they're not my friends.
03:09:34.000Yeah, because his whole body is physically mortified by the idea that he's sending off the wrong signals now.
03:09:41.000He is the boss of this show, and this show is going to allow this wild, reckless talk about the lab leak.
03:09:49.000You know, it's a great story that's sort of apropos to all this.
03:09:53.000In Seymour Hersh's book, his memoir, Reporter, there's a story about how In the early 90s, the CIA wanted everybody to know that they had caught, I think it was an Israeli spy.
03:10:11.000And so they called up Hirsch because Hirsch was the biggest investigative reporter in the country.
03:11:09.000But if you want to be on a talk show, you have to cross that line.
03:11:13.000There's no other way you get on that show.
03:11:15.000You can't get on that show and have some real counterculture narrative that is not approved and sanctioned and you spit it out there on NBC for the masses.
03:11:26.000When was the last talk show that was, that had like a counterculture I mean, Letterman in the 80s, maybe?
03:11:36.000I don't know if he was counterculture, but he was certainly rebellious and certainly the favorite of the people that weren't taking it all seriously.
03:11:43.000The people that wanted the tongue-in-cheek jabs at the celebrities.
03:11:47.000Whereas Jay Leno was letting everybody on and, oh, you're hilarious.
03:12:01.000I remember when my father used to work for NBC and when the The tech workers, NABIT, the union, when they went on strike, NBC brought in a bunch of scabs to cross the picket line and do all their work for them.
03:12:21.000Letterman used to get them to screw up, basically.
03:12:24.000In other words, the cameras would go back and forth.
03:12:27.000So he was taking a dig at management, which was kind of cool.
03:12:30.000I thought that was an interesting thing.
03:12:31.000Did he do it on purpose and tell them to fuck up?
03:14:02.000There's a lot of guys like that out there now.
03:14:04.000There's guys coming up like Tim Dillon, Andrew Schultz, Mark Norman, Shane Gillis.
03:14:11.000There's a lot of funny fucking young guys that are coming out that are dedicated to real stand-up.
03:14:17.000There's a lot of people out there that are dedicated to being journalists and they're just trying to find their way through and they really respect real journalism.
03:14:23.000They don't want to be a corporate hack.
03:16:37.000But you really don't fucking know until you're there.
03:16:39.000And if someone takes a little snippet of that and tries to take, particularly if they take a snippet of that and they put it in quotes, Right.
03:17:16.000Just like you take in everything else in life.
03:17:18.000We have to learn how to take things in and enjoy the moment.
03:17:21.000I mean, I went to see The Stones recently, and I'm guilty of it too because I took a couple pictures and some video, but I'm like, God, I need to just take this in.
03:17:30.000How many times am I going to get to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards alive on stage jamming and have it be really good?
03:17:37.000Keith Richards hasn't looked alive since like 1972. He's moving though!
03:18:42.000You know, that's part of the reason why she got busted was that friends from college, like, what the fuck is that girl talking like that for?