In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the host talks with journalist Matt Tiberi about his work with the committee investigating the use of surveillance technology by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) against journalists and other journalists. They discuss the role of the committee in uncovering the extent of the government's surveillance of journalists and their access to information. They also talk about how the committee is working with companies like Google and other tech companies to make sure they don t get hacked, and how they don't get hacked by the government. And, of course, they talk about the latest in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and why they think it's a good idea to keep them in the loop on what's going on behind the scenes of the House Intelligence Committee investigation into whether or not the government is spying on us. And, as always, there's a little bit of everything else. Check it out! Check out The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast by day, and The Podcast by night, all day, all the time. Enjoy, -Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, All Day. -JOE JORGAN EXPERIENCODE by DAY, by NAKED by NANCY ROGAN PODCAST by NICK CORAKE by BOB SCARLATA by THE JOE JORDAN EPISODE by MICHAEL CRUZELAKEVIN MCCARTELLO by JOEJORDAN by ROBERT MEYER by STEPHEN MEYANCHOR AND JOSHANCHEESE by RYAN KLEIN by KEVIN WELCOMEVERYTHING by JOSH MARTIN and JOSH MILLER BY JOE RODAN EPICINE by MATT TAYLOR by SONGS, JOSEPH PENNELL by PEN PENNY MILLER, JOSH MOORE by STEVE PENNEY AND MUCH MORE, BOB PENNETT AND JOSIE MCDO AND KEVEN MARTINEKETCHTON by GREECE AND KELLY LYNN PENJOYCE BONUS SPEAKING ABOUT THE JORGE MCDARTO & JOSH WALLACE by PAUL MCDERAN AND JAMES ECHTER
00:00:31.000I've enjoyed your work with the Twitter file.
00:00:33.000I enjoy all your work, but I really have enjoyed the Twitter files.
00:00:36.000That has been some really fascinating views behind the curtain.
00:00:41.000It's been one of the weirder, more surreal experiences of my life because, you know, as a reporter, you're always kind of banging away to try to get one little piece of reality,
00:01:31.000I think going into it, I thought that the relationship between the security agencies like the FBI and the DHS and companies like Twitter and Facebook, I thought it was a little bit less formal.
00:01:55.000They have a really intense structure that they've worked out over a period of years where they have regular meetings.
00:02:04.000They have a system where the DHS handles censorship requests that come up from the states and the FBI handles the international ones and they all float all these companies and It's a big bureaucracy and I don't think we expect it to see that.
00:02:20.000It's very bizarre to me that they would just openly call for censorship in emails and these private transmissions but ones that are easily duplicated.
00:02:38.000Like that they're so comfortable with the idea that the government should be involved in this censorship of what turns out to be true information.
00:02:45.000Especially in regards to the Hunter Biden laptop, that they would be so comfortable that they would just send it in emails.
00:03:15.000I mean, you see – I was especially shocked by an email from a staffer for Adam Schiff, the congressperson, the California congressman.
00:03:27.000And they're just outright saying, we would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who retweets information about this committee.
00:03:38.000You know, I mean, this is a member of Congress, right?
00:03:42.000Most of these people have legal backgrounds.
00:03:45.000They've got lawyers in the office for sure.
00:03:47.000And this is the House Intelligence Committee.
00:03:50.000You would think they would have better operational security.
00:03:54.000Another moment that was shocking to me, there was an email from an FBI agent named Elvis Chan in San Francisco to Twitter.
00:04:06.000And they're setting up this signal group, which is going to include all the top We're good to go.
00:04:53.000Because I don't think anybody ever anticipated that something like this would happen, where Twitter would get sold to an eccentric billionaire who's intent on letting all the information get released.
00:05:03.000Yeah, I mean, I think Elon Musk, essentially, he spent $44 billion to become a whistleblower of his own company.
00:05:12.000And, I mean, I don't really fully know his motives in doing that.
00:05:19.000I think he's got a pretty developed sense of humor, though.
00:06:04.000I don't think that's what I would spend it on, but no, he believes that.
00:06:09.000I think he also believes that the credibility of these companies...
00:06:17.000Can only be restored by telling people what they talk about in private or what they have been talking about with the government and that sort of thing.
00:06:35.000It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
00:06:37.000There's an amazing amount of resistance against him and just the publicity campaign against him has been fascinating to watch.
00:06:47.000People go from thinking that Elon Musk is the savior that's bringing us these amazing electric cars and engineering new reusable rockets to he's an alt-right piece of shit who wants Donald Trump back in the office and it's very wild.
00:07:02.000The speed with which they can sort of shuffle somebody into the Hitler of the Month Club routine, right?
00:07:11.000We've always done this with foreigners, whether it's Noriega or Saddam Hussein or Milosevic or Assad or whatever it is.
00:07:50.000And then, you know, with Elon, yeah, he went from being the guy who made electric cars sexy to like, you know, something to the right of Victor Orban in like 10 seconds.
00:09:09.000But don't you think it's better that his tweets get out there and then a bunch of people get to attack him in the tweets?
00:09:16.000And if those tweets that people attack him with are good, if people are saying good things, then those things get retweeted and liked and then they rise up to the top of the algorithm.
00:09:27.000Like you need a voice against someone like that.
00:09:30.000You can't have that guy Howling into the wind on some QAnon forum and all those wackos just so they're only talking to each other with no pushback at all.
00:09:39.000If you really don't like Trump, you want him on Twitter.
00:10:22.000We want people to reach conclusions about it.
00:10:24.000And one of the things that we found in the Twitter files was after January 6th, there was this intense debate within the company where they were basically saying, oh, thank God we're going to repeal the public interest policy or we're going to poke a hole in it,
00:10:48.000So they invented a new policy called glorification of violence, or they called it that.
00:10:58.000And essentially what they said was you had to look at Trump not in terms of each individual tweet, but in terms of what they called the context surrounding, his whole career, all the people who followed him,
00:11:14.000whether or not they were violent, whether or not they said the things that were offensive.
00:11:18.000It's like the speech version of stochastic terrorism.
00:11:22.000I don't know if you've ever heard that term.
00:11:25.000Stochastic terrorism is this idea that you can incite people to violence by saying things that aren't specifically inciting but are statistically likely to create somebody who will do something violent even if it's not individually predictable.
00:12:00.000And so they sort of massively expanded the purview of things they can censor just in that one moment.
00:12:09.000And you can see it in these dialogues, how they came to that decision, which is just fascinating.
00:12:15.000It's just such an extraordinary amount of power to give people, the ability to censor people on the biggest public forum in the world.
00:12:22.000It's so extraordinary in the fact that they can come up with these justifications for why this is a good idea without anyone pushing back, without anyone saying, do you understand where this goes to?
00:12:33.000This eventually leads to government control of all thought and speech.
00:12:37.000You're allowing the government to influence you based on one specific problematic individual, and that could spread out into every one of us.
00:13:23.000He's not a guy that really is supposed to be in front of a camera, right?
00:13:25.000He's supposed to be a journalist, but he's not even good at that.
00:13:28.000So what he's doing now is holding water For the evil leaders of the world who want to institute hate speech policies nationwide and, you know, centralized digital currency and they want everybody to eat bugs and you will own nothing and be happy.
00:13:42.000This is the fucking people he's working for now.
00:13:56.000And for a journalist to sit there, there was that one moment where that woman, Vera Yorova, she's an EU official, and she's talking about hate speech laws.
00:14:08.000And then she touches the knee of somebody sitting next to her and saying, you're going to have that in America soon.
00:14:17.000You know, like, that's not offensive to him.
00:14:20.000Like, a European basically saying, oh, yeah, you're going to have this too soon.
00:14:25.000Like, even though it's completely antithetical to everything that we believe in in this country.
00:14:30.000Well, I think when you're working in a corporate news structure, and you could speak to this better than I could, obviously, but...
00:14:35.000I think when you're working in an environment where you have editors and people in your ear and you have producers and you have narratives that the company is pushing and then you have sponsorships that you're beholden to, it's very difficult to form any sort of Problematic or controversial independent thought and then try to express it publicly.
00:14:59.000So when you're trying to keep that job and here's a guy like Brian Stelter who already lost one of the biggest gigs in all of broadcast news.
00:15:06.000He was on fucking CNN. And then, you know, here he's standing there and they're saying, you're going to have hate speech laws in America, too.
00:16:08.000But there's this person who has like the best version of super liberal, like my children will never eat food from a gas stove, like that kind of shit.
00:16:19.000And there's so many of these, like it's hard to tell who's what and what's real.
00:16:26.000It's just one of those things where it's hard when you're looking things through text because people are sneaky.
00:16:42.000If someone's doing it as a parody, is that hate speech?
00:16:45.000When do you decide that something is hateful?
00:16:48.000And that's exactly why traditionally in this country, judges have always said, well, they haven't always said it, but they eventually came around to the idea that We can't involve ourselves in these questions.
00:17:03.000They're too difficult, and it's not our job.
00:17:07.000We're going to step in in only the most extreme cases, right?
00:17:10.000So the current standard is, you know, a Supreme Court case, Brandenburg v.
00:17:16.000Ohio, which outlaws incitement to imminent lawless action, right?
00:17:23.000So you have to be basically saying, Let's go get them.
00:18:11.000It's just very hard for people to realize, even though this thing that you're talking about wielding, this weapon, will work against your enemies, it can ultimately also be used against you.
00:18:24.000That was the thing with the Patriot Act.
00:18:27.000When the, you know, indefinite detention, when they were talking about just being able to detain people, and Obama was like, don't worry, well, I would never do that, but you're not going to be in the president forever.
00:18:37.000Like, someone else is going to come along.
00:18:39.000And perfect example, that next person was Trump.
00:19:20.000So if you think you're using this to push back against right-wing extremism, they can use that to push back against progressive ideas that would genuinely benefit good people, genuinely benefit families, genuinely benefit people in need, genuinely benefit people in terms of healthcare and education.
00:19:45.000It's the most important thing we have and it's the one thing that separates us from everybody else.
00:19:50.000So when you have liberals and progressives that are screaming against removing people from platforms and stopping this and stopping that, understand what the fuck you're saying.
00:21:19.000It's a very interesting and very nuanced conversation as to what should be allowed and what should not be allowed and why.
00:21:28.000And I think it's complex and it's ever-changing and it depends upon the tools that are involved and depends upon what are you talking about?
00:21:36.000And then it also depends upon, like, here's a big one that drives me nuts about this January 6th.
00:21:42.000Why is it okay for the FBI to have agents that incite people to go into the Capitol?
00:22:05.000So this is another topic that is fascinating because it hasn't gotten a ton of press.
00:22:11.000But if you go back all the way to the early 70s, the CIA and the FBI got in a lot of trouble for various things.
00:22:22.000The CIA for assassination schemes involving people like Castro, the FBI for COINTELPRO and other programs, domestic surveillance.
00:22:33.000And they made changes after congressional hearings, the church committee, that basically said, the FBI, from now on, you have to have some kind of reason to be following somebody or investigating somebody.
00:22:48.000You have to have some kind of criminal predicate.
00:22:50.000And we want you mainly to be investigating cases.
00:22:54.000But after 9-11, they peeled all this back.
00:22:58.000There was a series of attorney general memos that essentially refashioned what the FBI does.
00:23:06.000And now they don't have to be doing crime fighting all the time.
00:23:09.000Now they can be doing basically 100% intelligence gathering all the time.
00:23:15.000They can be infiltrating groups for no reason at all.
00:25:04.000Proud Boys leader was prolific informer for law enforcement.
00:25:08.000Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012. Quoted to a former prosecutor in a transcript of a 2014 14, federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.
00:25:25.000So, the Proud Boys started off as a joke on Anthony Cumia's radio show, where Gavin McGinnis, who was a regular guest, they made a joke about one of the guys who was an intern, and they were doing a joke about him being in a musical,
00:25:42.000and the musical, like, Proud of My Boy.
00:25:45.000And they were singing a song like, we're the Proud Boys, proud of my boy.
00:25:48.000And they're like, we're going to put together a group called the Proud Boys.
00:25:52.000And so they decided to have like this fake group of people.
00:25:55.000And to get into this group, you had to, they had to punch you in the arm and you have to read off, like, remember different breakfast cereals.
00:26:03.000Like, it's all, like, really hilarious, stupid shit.
00:26:07.000But then Gavin, you know, Gavin's one of those guys that just, like, he's a legitimate maniac, which was great when he was running Vice, and not so great when he gets involved in extremist groups.
00:27:38.000But he just was having fun and kept pushing it.
00:27:41.000He's a push the limits, push the envelope guy.
00:27:44.000And then now it's this hate group that people bring up in political speech and the proud boys and the white supremacists and like the proud boys.
00:27:53.000And they have a life of their own now, right?
00:27:55.000Now it's beyond – they don't even like him anymore.
00:29:03.000Two days before a far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, police arrested the leader of the Proud Boys militia group for burning a Black Lives Matter flag at a different protest.
00:30:32.000And complete capture of the media and all of that.
00:30:36.000And that's kind of what we're trying to fight against.
00:30:42.000The one heartening thing is that the quote-unquote mainstream press is now – really, it's in free fall now, right?
00:30:52.000Its influence is more and more limited every day.
00:30:57.000The problem is that Something needs to step up in its place and – but they're just – they don't have any authority at all outside their own little bubble anymore.
00:31:10.000Propaganda is a scary thing and when you have mainstream news organizations going along with what – Appears to be propaganda with no pushback at all like where where's journalism like journalism is such an important part of Any sort of functioning culture where people need to find out what what is the real information?
00:31:34.000And there's people that have a responsibility to try to find that information and then give it to people so they can make informed decisions and they can know what what is the workings behind the machine or What's the wiring?
00:32:25.000We know these things now because of real journalism.
00:32:28.000And it seems like For whatever reason, there's two branches going on with journalism.
00:32:35.000There's people like you and Barry Weiss and Glenn Greenwald and the Substack people that are like, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is not what I fucking signed up for.
00:32:46.000I'm here to do actual real journalism and you people in these gigantic mainstream organizations are losing your fucking minds.
00:32:55.000You're crazy and you're doing it with For so many reasons.
00:33:00.000Because Trump sucks, because you're pushing a woke agenda, because you want...
00:33:22.000Remember when Trump became president and he was making noise about not letting certain people have credentials to get into the White House?
00:33:30.000And there was this big hue and cry like, oh my god, he's not going to let us into the White House.
00:33:35.000And my first reaction to that was, who fucking cares if you're not let into the White House?
00:33:41.000You have an adversarial relationship already.
00:33:44.000You're supposed to, with government, right?
00:33:52.000It's not a big deal, but for the new generation of journalists who've come in, they imagine themselves, because they're socially the same people that they're reporting on, they hang out in the same circles, they go to the same parties.
00:34:07.000The idea of not being let behind the rope line Is an atrocity to them.
00:36:22.000I guess she might make a few people laugh, like, maybe, you know, but if she comes to the green room of the comedy club, we're all gonna look at her and go, hey, what are you doing here?
00:36:51.000They're reading off – You know, aversion of something.
00:36:57.000And then their idea of journalism is sort of digging up facts to defend whatever that is.
00:37:05.000And not looking at things objectively.
00:37:08.000There's a very clear narrative, and you have to push that narrative.
00:37:12.000And when it changes, you don't say a goddamn thing.
00:37:15.000When the science changes, and when new information comes out that refutes everything you've said in the past, you just shut the fuck up and keep moving.
00:37:24.000They do that, and they shouldn't do that because, again, it's another thing that loses you faith with audiences, right?
00:37:36.000And this is another thing that drives me crazy about this propagandistic model of media, is that in addition to being wrong, it doesn't work.
00:38:10.000Which is why, you know, you and I both have had this experience of saying something wrong and then coming out and saying, you know what, I screwed that up.
00:39:31.000No, it's – but that's also why people like it because they feel like you're really hanging out with them having a conversation because that's what it sounds like.
00:39:51.000I always thought that was one of the reasons that your show is so successful is that people don't detect that there's something staged about it.
00:40:03.000But you can see that so clearly in every other kind of It's a dirty business.
00:40:17.000It's a dirty business and it's dirty for them too because if they could be free, they would like to.
00:40:23.000I think almost everybody would like to just be able to be themselves and have their own opinions and be able to express themselves and be able to think about things openly.
00:40:31.000When you are working for a major news organization and you have an enormous paycheck every week that comes to you, if you keep this thing going, you have to keep this charade going, keep this con going, you're going to keep going.
00:41:30.000And the converse of that is that if you work in these organizations, and this is something that, believe it or not, Noam Chomsky wrote about a million years ago in a book called Manufacturing Consent.
00:41:45.000You see coming up in the business that when somebody tries to buck the system and tries to force through an unpopular story or refuses to write a story that's not true or does anything that the editors don't like,
00:42:03.000They see that those people are moved out of the business sooner rather than later, right?
00:42:10.000They just sort of end up being washed out with reputations for being difficult people.
00:42:16.000Chris Hedges is somebody who comes to mind, right?
00:42:22.000There's no particular thing that happens.
00:42:26.000And that just sends signals down the ranks of people in journalism that If you want to get ahead, just keep doing the shit that we want you to do.
00:42:37.000You don't have to be a genius to figure out what that is.
00:42:40.000Just keep doing it, and you'll eventually rise up through the ranks.
00:42:46.000And before you know it, you'll have your own show, or you'll be running a desk.
00:42:53.000But you won't have anything to say because early on, you'll have made the decision to abandon your individuality.
00:43:02.000That's the key to the whole thing is that it's not people who are making these big decisions to sell out when they're 50. They make the decision to sell out when they're 22 or 23. At the very start, when they first see it and they understand how the business works and they start climbing,
00:43:25.000Well, you see it in politics too, right?
00:43:26.000Like you see it like people like AOC who starts out as this like, you know, really kind of inspiring story.
00:43:33.000Girl wore shoes out campaigning, just walking around going door to door and now she's cozying up to the likes of Nancy Pelosi and they're all in this weird sort of group together making decisions.
00:44:10.000You start out this person who's very progressive and really wants, you know, to help lower income families and really wants to help inner city schools, really wants to help.
00:44:19.000And then along the way, you get indoctrinated into the system and you figure out how everything works.
00:44:38.000And you're the Speaker of the House, and you're doing insider trading and making hundreds of millions of dollars because everybody else is doing it.
00:44:45.000Remember when she came in and everybody was – there was a whole clan of sort of senior Democratic Party officials in Congress who were giving her a hard time because she had – she was on Twitter a lot.
00:45:02.000And she was being successful with Twitter.
00:45:04.000And they were like, you know, you have to make the choice between whether you want to be on social media or whether you want to be a politician.
00:45:10.000And I actually admired her at the time.
00:45:12.000I didn't agree with her about everything.
00:45:14.000But I – like you, I thought her story was interesting.
00:45:17.000I thought that she had – I think we're good to go.
00:45:40.000Look, if you ever want to be a committee chair, if you want to get in line for these powerful positions, if you want to get appropriations money sent to whatever district, you got to play ball, right?
00:45:53.000And if you do, then you very quickly start climbing the ladder.
00:45:59.000If you don't, you end up just somebody who...
00:46:03.000Tends to be on the outside and is portrayed as a nut.
00:47:10.000That part of it doesn't make any sense to me.
00:47:12.000Trevor Burrus Do you think that this understanding of this now, because people are talking about it, and then the birth of Substack and the fact that it's become very successful, And that people are flocking towards genuine independent journalists, whether they're on social media like YouTube or Twitter or Substack.
00:47:29.000Do you think that this is in many ways like changing the way young people see the possibilities?
00:47:38.000Because I think young people looking at the two options, like one, you can kind of be a hero.
00:48:16.000It's not this raging bonfire that everybody can go get warmed.
00:48:20.000You know, the information will warm everyone.
00:48:22.000No, it's like these people have like small wooden vessels filled with embers and they're blowing on them as they run through the woods and people are fanning them to try to keep them alive.
00:48:33.000But I think For young people that are considering paths, like what to do with their future, they don't want to be contained.
00:49:51.000Like you derive power from your willingness to say the unpopular true thing, right?
00:49:59.000And that's an attractive idealistic thing for a young person.
00:50:04.000But if they see That path closed, they're not going to go into...
00:50:11.000I mean, why would you go into journalism and try to work at The New Yorker or MSNBC if you know you're never going to get to do that, basically?
00:51:38.000And they have so many people working there.
00:51:40.000You have a whole giant building filled with people, and then your product, no one wants it.
00:51:48.000People are just accidentally watching it.
00:51:52.000Flipping through the channels they're watching.
00:51:54.000There's nothing compelling that they have to offer, yet they are in the business of selling compelling information.
00:52:02.000You're literally the most compelling thing, because the news is supposed to be one of the most compelling things.
00:52:08.000Everybody traditionally would come home and watch the evening news because you need to know what the fuck is going on in the world.
00:52:13.000But now because of social media and because of just websites and phones and just news off your apps, the different apps that people use, Google apps, no one cares anymore.
00:52:47.000And then look what happened with CNN+. I mean...
00:52:50.000You know, they went and they hired Chris Wallace and they were going to launch this big subscription service, CNN Plus, where I guess the idea was they were going to get people to pay to watch the same stuff they were already refusing to watch for free.
00:53:09.000Then they had to cancel the service after three weeks.
00:53:13.000They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
00:53:15.000I mean, how could they have not seen that?
00:53:17.000How could they think that people wanted to pay for something that they don't like for free?
00:53:38.000Well, I think there would be a way out if they started actually doing their jobs, but they just don't know what that is anymore.
00:53:44.000Well, hasn't the new guy said they want to switch away from opinion, editorial-type news stories and public people to people that just disseminate objective views of information?
00:53:56.000Just like this is what's happening in the world.
00:54:13.000They think, you know, that you could just tell people that someone's taking horse dewormer and you could just repeat it over and over again and people believe it.
00:54:21.000I mean, the amount of damage that they did to their own reputation saying things like that, Because most people would look at that and go, is he really doing that?
00:54:30.000And then some people would go, well, that's not even true.
00:54:58.000Bounty Gate was this weird story that came out, I think it was in 2020, when basically they were reporting that Russians were paying bounties in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers.
00:55:51.000There really wasn't this crazy collusion between Russia and Donald Trump.
00:55:56.000And in fact, there was some information that seems to point to that Hillary Clinton had involvement with Russia too, and that they've kind of all had involvement with Russia.
00:56:05.000And this wasn't some grand conspiracy to elect a Russian puppet as the President of the United States.
00:56:13.000It was a three-and-a-half-year sort of mass hysteria experiment, right?
00:56:21.000I mean this is one of the things – it's one of the reasons I got kind of quietly moved out of mainstream journalism, right?
00:56:29.000I didn't have a particular problem at Rolling Stone.
00:56:35.000Early on in the Trump years, I said, there's something wrong with the story.
00:56:41.000I think there are elements of it that aren't provable.
00:56:45.000I don't think we should be running this stuff, you know?
00:56:47.000And then before I knew it, I was working independently.
00:56:52.000But anyway, at the Twitter files, we're finding stuff that now tells you absolutely the truth.
00:57:00.000What actually the truth was during that time.
00:57:03.000Like, for instance, one of the big Russiagate stories was from early 2018 when Devin Nunes – remember, he was the Republican congressman.
00:57:12.000He was the head of the House Intelligence Committee at the time.
00:57:15.000He wrote a memo basically saying, we think they faked FISA applications.
00:57:23.000We think the FBI used – The Steele dossier to try to get surveillance authority against some Trump people like Carter Page.
00:57:33.000And we think they lied and cheated to do that.
00:57:38.000And so he submitted this classified memo and not only was he denounced everywhere as a liar and wrong and all that, but there was this big story that was all over the place that a hashtag Hashtag release the memo had been amplified by Russian bots.
00:57:58.000You probably don't remember this, but this story was everywhere in January and February of 2018. This idea that release the memo was basically a Russian operation and that Nunes was benefiting from it.
00:58:18.000I was looking for something else entirely and then suddenly we come across a string of emails internally at Twitter where the Twitter officials are saying, you know, we're not finding any Russians at all behind this hashtag and we told the members of Congress who asked about this that there are no Russians involved in this because Dianne Feinstein,
00:58:45.000Richard Blumendahl of Connecticut, they all came out with this accusation about it being linked to Russia.
00:58:52.000We told them that there's nothing there and they went and they did it anyway, you know?
00:58:56.000And so there are lots of stories like that now that are kind of falling apart, right?
00:59:02.000Most people I think don't even know that the Russia collusion thing was bullshit.
00:59:06.000I think the general public that heard that Russiagate narrative The people that haven't looked into it past what they've seen on television probably still believe there's some sort of collusion.
00:59:17.000Yeah, because there's never been a reckoning for it.
00:59:21.000After the WMD thing, which went on for a surprisingly long time considering how little evidence there ever was for that, and considering that there were lots of journalists at the time who would have liked to have proved Bush wrong about that,
00:59:42.000it still took years and years and years for the business To admit that they screwed that up.
00:59:48.000They blamed it almost entirely on one person, Judy Miller from New York Times.
01:00:21.000The fact that there really were no weapons of mass destruction and we really did start a war for nothing that really did kill somewhere in the neighborhood of a million innocent people.
01:00:34.000I mean, there should be sorrow within news organizations about a mistake of that magnitude.
01:00:43.000And the fact there's no repercussions and the people were promoted that promoted that very same story that led to that, that led to the public support of it, of the war.
01:00:54.000Yeah, and not only did we promote the people who got that story wrong, except in that one case with Judy Miller who was sort of villainized.
01:01:07.000But people were fired who were questioning it, like Phil Donahue had a show, a very highly rated show on MSNBC at the time.
01:01:28.000Jesse Ventura will tell you the story.
01:01:30.000He lives in a compound in Mexico, Casa MSNBC, he calls it, because they hired him thinking that because he was a former Navy SEAL, he was going to be pro-war.
01:01:44.000When they found out on the phone that he didn't feel that way, that he was very skeptical of the whole thing, they basically bought out his contract.
01:01:55.000They just paid him the balance and said, thanks, but no thanks.
01:02:01.000We're not going to want that show of yours.
01:02:04.000So he was right, but instead of going on the air, he got a mansion in Mexico.
01:02:13.000So, you know, the business has a history of doing stuff like this.
01:02:20.000But at least in the WMD episode, they had the decency to admit now, you know, like a decade later, we screwed that up.
01:02:32.000It has the reputation of being a media mistake.
01:02:35.000They haven't done that yet with the Russia stuff.
01:02:38.000Well, the WMD thing, though, there's no repercussions because over time everybody had kind of either forgotten about it or been overwhelmed by news stories.
01:02:46.000And when the WMD came out, when that sort of thing came out at the beginning of the war, You're also dealing with a very different internet and the news cycle wasn't as extreme and dynamic.
01:02:58.000Like nowadays, things that happen like no one gives a shit that Epstein was murdered and that the cameras were shut off and that there's no list of all the people that went to the island.
01:04:28.000I think he has a hard time concentrating on the nuances of all these different things and balancing out – like when he was talking about the government regulating the internet.
01:04:59.000But then to say you were a fan of that guy, and now you're talking to me.
01:05:08.000About the government censoring the internet.
01:05:11.000And when I was like, you're talking about the same people that gave us bad information about weapons of mass destruction that led to a war.
01:05:19.000And then he's sort of balancing that out.
01:05:41.000Or is he just like completely insulated in those liberal cocktail parties where, you know, you have to wear a mask and you have to say this.
01:05:49.000And if you don't say that, you'll be ostracized from the social group.
01:05:53.000Like what, what kind of narrow bandwidth are you operating on?
01:06:01.000Yeah, I mean, again, I feel bad because, you know, I'm living in a home probably that was paid for by Jan Wenner and all that stuff.
01:06:09.000And he was, like I said, he was always good to me personally, even though we had some pretty intense disagreements and arguments and there was a lot of yelling.
01:06:23.000But I think, you know, what happens is that, yeah, you do end up in a bubble.
01:06:33.000And even people who spent their whole lives in the journalism business, and not just in the journalism business, but rock and roll journalism, right?
01:06:44.000You're supposed to be kind of on the edge, right?
01:07:14.000And this came out in 2016 because he endorsed Hillary...
01:07:20.000I asked permission to write a counter to that and endorse Bernie.
01:07:28.000But his whole reasoning was when we were young and we were supporting McGovern, we were wrong because McGovern It was a bad candidate and Nixon got elected.
01:07:41.000We needed to support somebody else who had a better chance of winning.
01:07:46.000And so his whole idea of youthful idealism is nice and all, but it's not pragmatic, right?
01:07:54.000And this was the place that he had ended up in.
01:07:57.000And that leads you to other things, like internet censorship.
01:08:05.000One of the first signs that I knew that I wasn't going to have a future at the magazine is when he told me I just flat out shouldn't touch the Russia story anymore.
01:10:09.000Yeah, it was sad to me to have that conversation with them.
01:10:13.000Part of it I really enjoyed, talking about Hunter and talking about the early days of the magazine, what it was like to take a chance on a magazine like that in this counterculture environment that they found themselves in.
01:10:25.000But then, you know, sometimes people just get tired, man.
01:10:30.000They just get tired and they get old and they kind of give in to narratives.
01:10:33.000They don't want to explore the subtle nuance of each individual topic because sometimes those are uncomfortable.
01:10:40.000And you have to wrestle with those thoughts.
01:10:42.000And sometimes people would rather just medicate themselves and go to sleep.
01:10:45.000Yeah, and also, you can also get used to not answering difficult questions, which also came through in that interview, I think.
01:11:27.000And I say, how does YouTube decide what gets marked as bad?
01:11:35.000Because there's a conversation between Sam Harris and Douglas Murray, two public intellectuals, that someone put on their YouTube playlist.
01:11:44.000They didn't even make this conversation.
01:11:47.000They just like, this is something that I have on my channel, on my playlist.
01:12:41.000But her saying, because it was hate speech, like this look in my, that's what it is.
01:12:45.000Do you remember that commercial where it's like during the drug war, the height of the drug war propaganda, and during the- The brain on drugs thing?
01:14:33.000And, you know, they were having this conversation about what happens when religious ideology starts to change the environment of these European cities.
01:14:41.000But that fucking attitude that people have, like, because it's true.
01:15:27.000No, but the people, and that was another strange thing about my experience at Rolling Stone.
01:15:36.000Like, early, I guess it was 2017, 2018, when they first started to really aggressively police the internet, I did a story about how they wiped out a bunch of accounts This is after the Alex Jones thing.
01:15:56.000Facebook just sort of zapped a whole bunch of accounts.
01:16:01.000Some of them were just sort of ordinary, hardworking people who had built up these independent media channels.
01:16:08.000The company just sent them notices, you are coordinated in authentic activity and your page is down.
01:16:14.000This is after they'd spent tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads to build up their pages and everything.
01:16:22.000They weren't bots, they were real people.
01:16:24.000And not only could I not convince other people in the business that it was a significant story that these companies were now doing this, but within Rolling Stone, you know,
01:16:40.000the story, the headline had to be refashioned.
01:16:46.000If you look at it now, the story is called, Who Will Fix Facebook?
01:16:51.000Because they wanted to imply that the problem was that Facebook was out of control and needed to be policed more.
01:17:01.000My headline that I submitted was very different.
01:17:04.000It was something like, you know, censorship on Facebook is out of control or whatever it is.
01:17:09.000But this belief that the censorship is a good thing, that we need more of it, I just think it became an upper class kind of New York, Washington, just cocktail party belief,
01:17:46.000I think they're still in that place for the most part.
01:17:53.000This move toward that World Economic Forum version of a more regulated internet, I think we're only in the beginning stages of that.
01:18:06.000I think they're going to make many steps You know, that are going to be much more significant in the future to try to prevent, you know, things like your show from breaking out, right?
01:18:19.000Like, they're not going to want that in the future.
01:18:22.000Well, how does the World Economic Forum actually wield influence?
01:18:56.000Because it used to be a thing that really didn't get much public attention.
01:18:59.000They could go there and they could all have these meetings and decide the fate of the world and try to sort of move the world in general directions.
01:19:08.000And then there was also Michael Schellenberger released a bunch of stuff this week showing that they lie about things that they've said that have become very problematic.
01:19:18.000One of them was you will own nothing, you'll be happy.
01:19:44.000Well, I don't have a problem with eating bugs.
01:19:47.000I do have a problem with people trying to say what is good and is not good for the world when I know that If you say it is good, it's gonna benefit enormous groups economically, and it's gonna lock other people out.
01:20:04.000And I think that's what they're doing with things like plant-based meat.
01:20:07.000When all those people were saying plant-based meat is the future, like, the fuck it is.
01:20:21.000This idea that if one life equals one life, you're way better off buying cows and eating cows Than you are buying corn.
01:20:29.000Because in order to grow a stalk of corn, a lot of shit has to die.
01:20:33.000And if you're using monocrop agriculture and using industrialized farming methods, and you're controlling enormous swaths of land with only one crop, that is totally unnatural, doesn't exist anywhere in nature, and in order to do that, you have to poison everything else.
01:20:52.000You have to use industrialized fertilizer.
01:20:54.000You can't grow things that way normally.
01:20:57.000That's why there's only—using these industrialized methods, there's only like 60 more— Like, more crop circles that they can do or crop cycles they can do.
01:21:09.000Like, there's only a certain amount of topsoil that's even left that's viable to grow food on because they don't use regenerative agriculture anymore.
01:21:19.000The people that like white oak pastures and polyface farms like Joel Salatin and Will Harris, these like grizzled old farmers who use these regenerative methods that are very like almost boutique, they're very rare now.
01:21:35.000But they're more popular than ever because people are aware of them, but most of the stuff that you buy is using industrialized fertilizer.
01:21:43.000What these people are doing is they're letting cows graze, they take the manure, they use the manure as fertilizer, chickens roam the land, chickens peck the bugs and eat the stuff.
01:21:55.000Pigs roam, and then they cycle where these animals are.
01:21:59.000So what they're essentially doing is they're recreating nature in a contained environment, and that is actually carbon neutral.
01:22:06.000It actually sequesters carbon in the soil in a lot of cases.
01:22:10.000But if you want to buy plant-based food and plant-based meat, you're not getting that.
01:22:16.000You're supporting monocrop agriculture, industrialized farming, and you're supporting very unhealthy food.
01:22:24.000And the idea of a small group of people who meet in a ski resort town in Switzerland making the decisions about this for people all around the world.
01:24:05.000That's why I was trying to just clarify.
01:24:08.000Trevor Burrus I mean this is part of this whole infrastructure with Aspen Institute, World Economic Forum.
01:24:16.000Trevor Burrus What kind of influence do they actually have?
01:24:18.000Like how do they – when we have young global leaders, when he talks about like Trudeau being one of our young global leaders and this is what they do.
01:24:27.000They get their young global leaders that are indoctrinated into the World Economic Forum's ideas and they implement them in politics.
01:24:35.000Yeah, it's the same thing as Justin Timberlake being a Mouseketeer and then later on he gets to have a real career in entertainment.
01:24:59.000If you want to be a financial regulatory official, you run a desk at Goldman Sachs for a few years.
01:25:05.000Next thing you know, you'll be running the World Bank in Canada or running the – you'll be the chief economist of the World Bank or you'll be the chief economist of the ECB or the Bank of Canada or whatever it is.
01:25:23.000There's just all these places where politicians come from.
01:25:27.000You do a tour in the military, maybe even in the CIA. Maybe you work for a consulting firm like McKinsey.
01:25:36.000You do a little time working for this or that politician as an aide and then they raise some money for you to become a candidate in Congress and next thing you know, you're running for president.
01:26:08.000This idea that leaders from all over these countries are getting together and setting an agenda that may be completely contrary to what people in the individual nations might want.
01:27:09.000Like, could you be any more obvious that you're fucking insane?
01:27:14.000Like, you're an insane, megalomaniacal, dictator-type character who wants to run the world, and you're literally dressing like a Star Wars character.
01:27:24.000Yeah, there's gotta be some weird sexual fetishism thing going on there, too.
01:27:34.000Because I'm like, what kind of freak shit is that guy into when no one's around?
01:27:38.000Because if you're dressing like that publicly, and you're telling people they're going to eat bugs, and that you're going to own nothing, and then when people catch you on it, you go, those are conspiracy theories, we have nothing to say to those things.
01:30:04.000The foundation, which is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies, typically global enterprises with more than 5 billion US dollars in turnover, as well as public subsidies.
01:30:16.000I'd like to find out what those subsidies are.
01:30:18.000Views its own mission as improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.
01:33:44.000I heard him say, I'm going to paraphrase it because I don't have the exact thing, but he came in sounding quite angry, saying, I'm going to punch him out.
01:33:52.000Paraphrasing there, he's knocked out, punched out, but, you know, he wanted to hit you.
01:33:58.000Yeah, and there's an actual recording of it, but whatever.
01:34:15.000I think he's a guy that got set up and they took a bunch of his words out of context and tried to pretend that he was saying something horrible and he wasn't.
01:34:22.000And he had a recording of the entire event because he recorded on his cell phone knowing that they were going to set him up.
01:34:29.000If it's not that guy, we have to edit this part out.
01:34:34.000Activist exposes Jim Jeffries' deceptive tactics.
01:34:48.000So the first time I got sent to cover the presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, I was in 2004, and I was on the plane with Kerry, you know,
01:35:04.000and it's teaming with journalists, obviously.
01:35:07.000And there was a story that came out, probably everybody's forgotten it, but there was a story that turned out to be fake that Matt Drudge put out about, well, maybe it wasn't fake, but it was at least not proved that Carrie had a secret mistress in Africa,
01:35:24.000And if you look this up, you'll find stories about it that were out there.
01:35:29.000And Kerry came out in the morning and all the journalists were sort of peppering him with questions about the mistress.
01:35:40.000And, you know, I don't care about John Kerry, but I thought it was odd that...
01:35:45.000They went straight from reading something where there's no evidence to posing this question and having it on camera, right?
01:35:54.000So I asked some of the journalists, and I was kind of the new kid, I said, Why were you doing that?
01:36:05.000Like, on the basis of what were you asking that question?
01:36:08.000And the minute they perceived that I was actually trying to ask another journalist a question, like, for a story, this one guy, he sort of steps in front of all the other ones and he says, dude, this is a fucking no-fly zone,
01:36:33.000From that point forward, I was always in the back of the plane with the tech people whenever I covered presidential politics because the press does not like it.
01:36:45.000Even though it is a crucial part of the story, It denies that it has that role and it insists on not being covered.
01:36:54.000And you can see how nervous these guys get when a camera's on them.
01:36:59.000Like, oh my, you're putting a camera on me?
01:37:01.000When I Google John Kerry's Secret Mistress Africa, it brings me down a John Edwards hole.
01:39:00.000Well, I mean, look, they've gotten very sophisticated in their ability to suppress certain things, you know?
01:39:08.000And, you know, this is where you see the influence of, you know, how money works with the content suppression thing.
01:39:20.000I mean, You take something like the Digital Forensic Research Lab for the Atlantic Council.
01:39:26.000It's one of the things that these platforms use to decide whether or not a news story is true.
01:39:35.000But if you look at where they get their money, it's the German Marshall Fund, which is a mishmash of sort of sovereign wealth funds and Fortune 500 companies.
01:39:51.000So it's – you're paying for the fact check essentially, right?
01:39:57.000Like that's how all of these sites that are allegedly deciding what's true and what's not, they're all influenced, you know?
01:40:06.000And that's another thing that drives me crazy is this persistent belief that people have that you can objectively decide what is true and what is not somehow – Yeah.
01:40:36.000Independent fact checkers review certain things and you find them on social media where they have a little warning or a little notification afterwards.
01:40:44.000And you actually go down the rabbit hole and say, well, what have you done?
01:41:21.000It's weird, though, that we don't have – I mean, it used to be Snopes.
01:41:26.000And a lot of people used to go to Snopes, but then I read about Snopes and you find out all the wacky shit about the people that are involved in Snopes and that the guy who's the head of it is like very heavily left-leaning and then he married a prostitute and like all kinds of wild shit.
01:41:42.000It's like Snopes is not like some like rock-solid, independent, purely objective organization that is dedicated to the dissemination of truthful information.
01:41:51.000Like no, they're like fucking heavily left-leaning.
01:42:17.000Let's read all the stuff and then we'll decide.
01:42:21.000But they don't want to do it that way.
01:42:23.000They want to have a hierarchical system that decides what's more...
01:42:29.000You talk about Google's search engine.
01:42:33.000They had a thing called Project OWL that they implemented in, I think it was 2017, where they changed their way of measuring what stories come up first.
01:42:48.000And they shifted to a model that emphasized what they called authority.
01:42:53.000And when I asked them what that meant, they told me that the analogy they gave was, think about If you search for baseball previously, you might have gotten your local little league.
01:43:05.000Now you're going to get MLB.com, right?
01:43:07.000So whatever we consider the more authoritative source, and that's based on surveys of people, what people think is authoritative, that's what's going to come up first.
01:43:19.000So instead of, if you search for, let's just say, Trotskyism, instead of getting the world's leading Trotskyist website, Right?
01:43:48.000And it's away from the spirit of how we would like to ingest information, which is just, let's see all of it and make our own decision.
01:43:57.000And if you did come up with your own search engine or your own fact-checking organization that decided what's true or is not true, the real fear would be that that would eventually get compromised and that someone would come along and they'd pay for your advertising and do this and do that and then slowly but surely get their hooks into you.
01:44:15.000Which is what they've done with Wikipedia.
01:44:40.000It's like a recognized source or something like that.
01:44:43.000So as long as the big newspapers don't cover it, they don't have a site that allows them to put it into Wikipedia, that allows the algorithm to put it in.
01:44:54.000Has no mainstream media source covered the Twitter files?
01:45:22.000I mean, the idea that the FBI and Homeland Security having a system of sending moderation requests to every, you know, internet platform in the country The idea that that's not a news story is insane to me.
01:45:51.000Yeah, and of course, you know, they've done a gazillion stories about, you know, how I've become this evil sellout right-wing character.
01:46:07.000The Washington Post actually humorously described me as a conservative journalist, and they scrubbed it within a day because there was so much blowback on Twitter.
01:46:21.000I don't care about that so much because I'm used to it by now, but it's a message that's sent to other journalists, which is, if you step outside the club, we're just going to dump buckets of shit on you all day long, and that's going to be your life forever,
01:46:46.000Once, when you broke a big story, you got plaudits from your peers.
01:46:52.000And now, you know, it's a very different thing.
01:46:58.000But you still got to do it, definitely.
01:47:01.000You still got to do it, but more importantly...
01:47:04.000When they continue to do that and call someone like you a right-wing journalist or call someone a far-right this or an alt-right that, and then people objectively know that that's not true, then it undermines all of their credibility and slowly but surely dissolves all confidence that people have in every other story they come up with.
01:47:24.000That's why the rel—like, what New York Times is today, to the generation that's coming up today, I used to deliver the New York Times just because it was the New York Times.
01:47:36.000I thought it was cool that I was delivering the New York Times because I delivered the Boston Globe and I delivered the Boston Herald and I got a route for the Times.
01:47:44.000And the Times was a pain in the ass because I had to drive, like, if I was doing the Boston Globe, which was the most popular paper, What town were you in?
01:48:06.000I'd pick up my globes at a different place.
01:48:08.000Then I'd go and get my New York Times at a different place.
01:48:11.000And the New York Times is a nightmare because, like, if I was going to deliver to the Boston Globe, if I'm on one street, I might have ten houses on the street.
01:48:18.000But the fucking Times, I might have one and then might have to go a mile to my next house.
01:48:26.000You've got to carry the bag the whole way, right?
01:48:28.000And I would try to coordinate my routes, right?
01:48:30.000So I would have a route that was all the Globes, and then I would have a route that was the Heralds, and then I would have the Times.
01:48:37.000And the Times was a nightmare, but I delivered the Times just because it was the New York Times.
01:50:15.000These kids have access to all these independent people talking about things, whether they're doing it on YouTube or podcasts or Substack or whatever it is.
01:50:24.000They get access to independent people that are talking about real information.
01:50:29.000And every time the New York Times prints bullshit, every time the Washington Post Prince bullshit.
01:50:34.000It further undermines their credibility and further slides them down this inevitable road that they're on.
01:53:43.000Yeah, and that people were selling blue checkmarks at Twitter.
01:53:47.000That's the other weird thing, where they were selling verified accounts.
01:53:52.000So, like, you could pay someone, and they would get you verified.
01:53:55.000People were spending, like, $5,000, $10,000...
01:53:58.000How little of a life do you have to have for that to matter that much to you?
01:54:02.000I guess if you're, like, an independent journalist or you're some sort of a YouTuber that's trying, like, if you have that check next to your name, that gives you more credibility.
01:54:12.000I love when the fact they were removing check marks, like, we're going to take away your verification.
01:54:17.000Oh, yeah, they did that to Thomas Chattern Williams, remember that, after the Harper's letter?
01:54:44.000Where he organized a bunch of high-profile people basically to say that, like, canceling is bad and we should all respect each other's opinions and, you know, support academic freedom and that sort of thing.
01:54:59.000So we got people like Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky to sign onto it.
01:55:06.000But then there was also Barry Weiss and J.K. Rowling were on the list and it soon became a thing in the media that to be on the Harper's letter It was like membership in a hate society.
01:55:28.000And he was just absolutely dumped upon.
01:55:34.000He denounces a racist even though he's black.
01:57:00.000Like, it ended up being one of the reasons that Matt Iglesias left Vox, which he co-founded, because he signed the letter and there was somebody on staff who felt threatened by that.
01:57:12.000It was a whole kerfuffle within the media industry, which is, you know, endlessly navel-gazing anyway.
01:58:14.000I mean, I hope that's one of the results, right?
01:58:18.000Because the old Twitter was just a grindstone of official messaging where if you said like a thing, like a micrometer outside whatever the narrative was, you could expect to just be descended upon by all these people.
01:58:36.000And nobody – you just ended up not wanting to bother, right?
01:59:03.000But I mean, how much influence does that media really have anymore?
01:59:06.000I mean, just because something's written down, how much different is it than people just having a conversation and putting that conversation on YouTube?
01:59:13.000Like, the actual idea that someone writing an article about someone, like a hit piece on you, for instance, that that actually has an impact anymore.
01:59:24.000It's really no different than two people on some sort of a progressive podcast talking about, oh, Matt Taibbi's now a right-winger now.
01:59:47.000Yeah, and look, I mean, you know this too, right?
01:59:52.000Because when there was that whole movement to try to get Bernie Sanders to denounce you and everything like that, like, after you endorsed him— If you're not afraid of whatever the ultimate consequence is,
02:00:10.000you learn that these cancellation episodes are survivable.
02:00:18.000Once that happens, you lose your fear of it pretty quickly.
02:00:57.000Whereas using those methods before we had independent journalism, before we had the internet, before we had YouTube and all these different ways that you could just get a message out, it was a death sentence.
02:01:09.000If they all came at you in targeted fashion like they did, you're fucked.
02:01:15.000They were going to change the narrative of you.
02:01:16.000And it changed the narrative already with some people.
02:01:18.000Some people still believe certain things about me because they read it on CNN or they heard it on CNN. Sure, sure.
02:01:23.000There's no way you can get around that, but for most people that are actually paying attention, all it does is undermine the credibility of those sources.
02:01:30.000Anybody who's calling you a right-wing journalist, like anybody who knows you, knows that's straight horse shit.
02:01:37.000The amount of damage they're doing to their own reputation by printing that, the individual author and the publication itself, the publication should be terrified of anybody that would be so willing to undermine their credibility by calling you a right-wing journalist for just one point about one thing that they disagree with you on.
02:02:02.000So they're going to make this blanket statement that's so patently untrue.
02:02:31.000Yeah, they haven't figured that out yet.
02:02:34.000But, you know, there's still the collateral damage of, you know, they're able to say nasty things about you that people hear, which is not fun.
02:02:45.000There was a moment before independent media where if they all decided to do it, you were done, you know?
02:02:54.000I mean, I remember the first time that, you know, I knew there was a story coming out about me and my I passed with the Exile and I knew I was in serious trouble.
02:03:06.000At the time, there was no alternative.
02:03:11.000If the club kicked you out, there was nowhere else to go in journalism or in any kind of media job.
02:03:52.000I might not agree with you, but you're talking about things based on your actual interpretation of what's going on and your opinions on these things.
02:04:00.000Yeah, and they had a concept that at the time was forbidden, which was people on the opposite end of the political spectrum trying to have a civilized conversation.
02:04:13.000Remember when they used to have a show like that on Fox, Hannity and Combs?
02:06:45.000Like, why do people not want us to know that it's possible for people on the right and the left to talk in a civilized way and disagree on some things but still get along?
02:06:57.000Well, why doesn't anybody want us to know that?
02:07:00.000I think that's a question that's worth exploring.
02:07:04.000Why does CBS not want us to know that?
02:07:07.000Why does Fox, for that matter, not want us to know that?
02:07:10.000Well, I think the fear is that if you do allow that, like say if you're NBC or CNBC, and you allow this right-left thing to happen on your show, what if the person on the right makes a really good point?
02:07:25.000And what if they swing people more towards the right?
02:07:28.000Like what if this person's on the air multiple times and they're really compelling and maybe they're better at arguing or maybe they're more reasonable or maybe they're more objective or maybe they're more calm.
02:07:39.000Maybe whatever about them is more attractive than the person who's on the left.
02:07:43.000Now all of a sudden you got a problem.
02:07:44.000Because now you have people that are tuning in specifically for this one woman or one man who is right-leaning on a network that has a progressive agenda.
02:08:22.000Yeah, and that's too bad because what ends up happening is we end up in this sort of system of bifurcated media where everybody's in armed camps, like they don't talk to one another because there's no model for that in American society.
02:08:41.000We don't have a place where we can see people of differing political opinions getting along with one another and acting like civilized human beings.
02:08:51.000It doesn't really exist in establishment culture, establishment media.
02:08:58.000But that's why people are rejecting it.
02:09:03.000They're picking up their kids at school and talking to their neighbors who they know have totally different politics and they're getting along fine with them.
02:09:27.000Well, that's why the World Economic Forum and things along those lines are so fascinating because you can see that they're the ones that are holding the strings that dangle the narratives in front of the people that make them attractive and then you realize like, well, this is not our real problem.
02:09:41.000Our problem is not really these narratives.
02:09:43.000Our problem is who's promoting these narratives and what are they doing while they're promoting that and we're distracted.
02:09:48.000Well, they're trying to institute a centralized digital currency.
02:09:51.000They're trying to give people vaccine passports and some sort of a social credit score system.
02:09:56.000They're trying to do all sorts of weird methods of control that you're not going to be able to get out of it if you're on the left or if you're on the right.
02:10:03.000It's going to fuck up everybody's life.
02:10:05.000And in the meantime, we're arguing about who's right, Greta Thornburg or Andrew Tate.
02:10:10.000It's like these distractions that they put in front of us in the media that get us so hyped up while real shit is going down that there's real decisions that could be made that might affect you forever.
02:10:23.000The amount of freedom you have, your ability to travel.
02:10:55.000Will you not be able to use PayPal anymore?
02:11:00.000It's stuff like that, that kind of creeping dystopian systems of control.
02:11:12.000It's a big news story, and I think people recognize that it's a serious thing, but we don't see it talked about very much in the corporate press because, again, they're in favor of it, right?
02:11:31.000When PayPal was saying they were going to fine people for misinformation, I'm like, hey, hey, hey, you guys are just supposed to be a way I can buy things online.
02:12:29.000That can only happen if something has gone wildly wrong in society and somebody feels the need to start using all these different pressure points to control people, like whether or not you can process credit card transactions.
02:12:48.000You know, if you leave a record of, you know, certain kind of web surfing, maybe, you know, that's going to, you know, be a negative that will appear somewhere.
02:13:23.000Some fine that you would get for misinformation.
02:13:26.000So if your grandma posts some crazy shit about Trump really winning the election, you know, you have a crazy QAnon grandma, like, they're gonna steal her money?
02:13:52.000And you don't have to agree with the protests, but you certainly have to be freaked out by their response to it.
02:13:58.000Well, also freaked out that Trudeau is one of the young global leaders of the World Economic Forum and that Trudeau labeled the truckers as misogynists and racists.
02:14:15.000You're not even pointing to a thing they've said.
02:14:17.000You're just saying that in this blanket statement to try to diffuse everything they've said and everything they stand for.
02:14:24.000It's so transparent and such a checkers move in a world of 4D chess.
02:14:30.000Yeah, I mean, I always think back to this moment in the 2016 presidential campaign when Bernie was drawing some blood against Hillary by talking about her, the gigantic speaking fee she was taking from banks.
02:14:47.000And they tried to throw a bunch of stuff back at him.
02:14:50.000None of it worked until one day she came out and she said this thing, if we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?
02:14:59.000And suddenly, this idea sort of popped out into the ether that talking about Hillary Clinton's ties to banks was somehow racist or somehow not progressive,
02:15:18.000And because Sanders, who had grown up his whole life in that ecosystem, There was nothing more terrifying than being accused of racism or misogyny or whatever it was because they came out with the Bernie bro thing right after that.
02:16:19.000I just don't think they're gonna make it.
02:16:20.000I think the only thing that Hollywood will be good for and like these entertainment corporations would be good for is creating things that are exorbitantly expensive, like films with special effects.
02:17:48.000Yeah, and you don't need a big institutional backer anymore.
02:17:52.000And if the only way they can fight back against independent content creators is by calling every single one of them a racist, misogynist, right-winger, or whatever...
02:18:08.000Pretty soon you're going to get to the situation where we're near it now, where all those people are running into one another and every single one of them in a room has already been through episodes like that, right?
02:19:59.000Because there was an army of people after the first Twitter files who all said the same thing.
02:20:04.000Like, imagine doing PR for the richest man on earth, right?
02:20:07.000Like, that was the universal response of all the Mehdi Hassans of the world.
02:20:15.000Look, the story here is about organizations that are vastly more powerful even than the richest man on earth.
02:20:25.000It's about the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DOD, like DHS. And it's about—it's an opportunity to see how these figures operate in the wild.
02:20:40.000When you get a source like that, like, it's not important what their motives are.
02:20:47.000What's important are what your motives are, you know?
02:20:50.000And my motives are I want to know— What was going on and what these – how these organizations operate.
02:20:59.000And you would never turn down that – no real journalist would turn down that opportunity.
02:21:05.000And incidentally, I kind of like Elon Musk.
02:21:11.000I mean he's got a – He's got a sense of humor about this and I think his ideology in terms of...
02:21:27.000You know, the desire for putting this out there, I mean, who would do this?
02:21:32.000Who would spend that much money to do this?
02:21:34.000His sense of humor is an internet sense of humor.
02:21:38.000Like, he posted that meme of the pregnant man next to the photo of Bill Gates and his pot belly, and he said, in case you want to lose a boner real fast, and he put that on Twitter.
02:21:50.000I mean, imagine getting dunked on by the richest man in the world on Twitter.
02:23:24.000And you don't know because you don't want to align yourself with problematic personalities that also embody some of the economic ideas that you agree with.
02:24:04.000There was no way it was not going to land.
02:24:06.000Like, you know, Jeb Bush, you know, saying, my mother is the strongest person in the world, and him, you know, saying she should be running.
02:24:16.000You know, like, that stuff was just, it was designed, it was never not going to work, you know?
02:24:24.000And the fact that none of us, or none of the reporters could see it at the time was kind of amazing.
02:24:31.000Yeah, well, I think people were just so terrified that an asshole like that could actually win and become president.
02:24:54.000And we went back to the Comedian's Bar.
02:24:56.000And I was watching Jake Tapper on TV with this somber look on his face.
02:25:01.000Well, it really does look like Trump is the president.
02:25:05.000Like, the whole thing was so surreal and wild that, I mean, they just did everything they could to stop that from happening and it didn't work.
02:25:25.000And then I was like, holy shit, this is going to happen.
02:25:27.000Like, One of the best things is watching the compilation of the Young Turks watching the election go down and the beginning being super confident and then towards the end they're like, FUCK! And then there's the same people that have to pretend that Biden's okay.
02:25:46.000It's amazing how well this country is running while Biden is literally not there.
02:26:23.000I mean, you saw last week Andrew Weissman, who was one of the lead prosecutors in the Mueller investigation, was tweeting all these things about Biden, right?
02:26:34.000You know, so there's no question that the party and maybe some folks in certain agencies were sending him a message, I think.
02:27:14.000They didn't go looking for that stuff in the Corvette until there was suddenly a decision that, nah, we don't really want him running again.
02:27:24.000But it's just so amazing to watch the hypocrisy play out.
02:27:29.000Like, do you not remember what you said about the documents at Mar-a-Lago?
02:28:38.000Do you think they go with Kamala again, or does she develop a disease?
02:28:44.000Maybe she's like anxiety or maybe she's got restless leg syndrome and she can't do it anymore.
02:28:50.000Yeah, something unfortunate is going to happen to her.
02:28:53.000I mean, look, they have to know that she's not viable as a candidate because they tried twice already to make her the candidate in the last election cycle.
02:29:09.000It wasn't that she wasn't, you know, reaching a contender threshold.
02:29:17.000She was basically flatlining despite massive media attention, you know?
02:29:24.000Do you think that if they have good speechwriters and they get a hold of her and go, listen, this is your last fucking chance at this dance.
02:31:35.000I watched them on the trail in Iowa and voters just – he would sort of tearfully talk about problems at the border and – And they just weren't interested.
02:32:53.000I think polls are, they can be useful over periods of time, right?
02:32:59.000Like, because the polls were clearly wrong about Trump, you know, the polling analyses of, you know, like, for instance, they'll do things like, you know,
02:33:15.000favorability, unfavorability ratings, but that sometimes doesn't take into account other issues like People will still vote for somebody they feel unfavorably toward if they hate the other candidate more, you know?
02:33:28.000And I think they do tell you something.
02:33:32.000I mean, as reporters, you should never get in the habit of being too reliant on them as indicators.
02:33:40.000But if a candidate can't get above 2% or 3% over a year, then you might want to You know, take that seriously.
02:33:52.000And especially if it follows through and is matched by results.
02:33:57.000But to me, it's almost like the heavyweight division when Tyson was a champion and there was no challengers.
02:36:11.000So he was very aggressive toward her in the beginning and that was when he was doing really, really well.
02:36:18.000I think if he had pushed it a little further in that first year, if he had been a little bit more balls out, He might have won that one, you know?
02:36:32.000I mean, he might have won the nomination, at least.
02:36:35.000Well, when you saw the collusion between the Democrats and during the primaries with Bernie that Donna Brazile talked about in her book, it's like there was an effort to try to get rid of him.
02:36:51.000To try to get him out of there, which is really wild.
02:36:55.000It's really wild to see the way these intricate little chess pieces move around behind closed doors, and then someone like Donna Brazile writes a book and comes out with it, and you get to see what they were up to.
02:37:08.000Yeah, I mean, they had a whole system they had worked out.
02:37:11.000The invisible primary, and the endorsements are all lined up ahead of time, and the money's all lined up ahead of time.
02:37:21.000But Bernie did well to fight back against that.
02:37:25.000I mean, I think his big accomplishment, looking back, is going to be The proof of concept that you can be the top fundraiser in a race without taking corporate money,
02:37:41.000which he did do in 2020, that's an important thing that he figured out.
02:39:10.000He survived one of the things that's usually fatal for a Republican politician, which is the approval of pundits in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
02:39:27.000He portrayed him as the more civilized Republican alternative and usually that's a death knell for a Republican candidate in the Trump era.
02:40:26.000I mean, if Twitter did not censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, if that went viral and everyone knew about it and they were forced to cover it on the news and they showed the images and all the talk about 10% to the big guy and the fact that he was getting these contracts with Burisma,
02:40:44.000Where he's making millions of dollars, totally unqualified to get that money, should not have been in that position of power, saying that he could use his influence and saying he could connect people and get people to the dance.
02:41:03.000And then Zuckerberg on this podcast talked about it.
02:41:06.000I remember when you did that interview because, you know, you have moments in this period where media has been so controlled where you think...
02:41:27.000And then, you know, when that interview, when Zuckerberg said it out loud, even though he had testified about it before, when he said it out loud in that setting and he kind of described it, you know, you have this sort of almost feeling of psychological relief, like, okay, all right, I wasn't crazy.
02:42:03.000The FBI contacted Facebook and told you that this smacks of Russian disinformation, but it doesn't, so they lied, and you did something that helped get one guy elected over the other guy, based on lies, and lies that the FBI helped.
02:43:05.000It would be nice to go back to a presidential campaign where maybe we have something more like an organic landscape to judge all this stuff.
02:43:14.000Well, we certainly will on Twitter, unless something radical happens over the next two years, which is a possibility.
02:43:20.000I mean, you know, Elon said that when he bought Twitter, it was on the fast track to bankruptcy.
02:43:25.000And, you know, that was interesting to find out, too, that the reason why they took that deal was like it really wasn't profitable, you know, which is crazy because he bought it for $44 million and it's worth almost nothing.
02:43:36.000But it's very valuable, although it's not profitable.
02:44:04.000See, there's no incentive for people to keep their podcasts only on iTunes.
02:44:09.000One of the things that iTunes has done, it's like a tremendous blunder, in my opinion, is they never figured out a way to monetize podcasts.
02:44:16.000So they act as an aggregator for podcasts, but they never make any money off of it, which is nuts.