Matt Taibbi is the author of four New York Times bestsellers and award-winning columnists for Rolling Stone. His recent book, Hate Inc., is a turbocharged take on how the media twists the truth to pit us against each other. In this episode, we catch up with Matt to talk about how he got started in journalism, how he became one of the most influential journalists in the country, and why he thinks Elon Musk would be a real hero if he were to take over the world. And, of course, we talk about The Twitter Files, which is a series of documents uncovered by a group of journalists that was given access to the government s internal files and made public by the government in order to expose the rampant corruption and cover-up that goes on in Washington, D.C. and around the globe. We also talk about why Elon Musk should be a hero, and how he should be remembered as a hero in the eyes of the world, not just by the people who see him on the outside looking in. And, yes, it's a good thing he doesn't have a Twitter account because if he did, everyone would know who he really is and what he's really up to . And we also discuss why he's a great guy, and what it means to be a good guy in the real world. Thank you, Matt, for coming on the show, and for taking the time to do what he does best, no matter where he s at his career and how much he s got to do it, and doing it in the best he s doing it on the most authentically, and in the most authentic way he can do the most important thing he can have the most meaningful thing he s possible the most importantly, he s a real thing he does the most he s going to do, and he s good at it, no one s gonna know how he s gonna do it we can do it in this episode of the podcast, right here, right there, right in the words we can help the most of it, right on the internet, and we re talking about it. This episode is out there, and here, and it s so we can all get to the bottom of it. Thank you for coming here, Matt is amazing, thank you, I love you, and I appreciate it, I really do, I m so much, I hope you like it, really really do.
00:00:02.000I have a guy that I've admired for many, many years, Matt Taibbi.
00:00:06.000All of you know, if you've ever been part of any kind of insurgency in the last 22 years, he's played such a useful role in explaining To Americans and the rest of the world, beginning on Wall Street, in layman's terms,
00:00:22.000with beautiful poetic language and a lot of humor and just a knack for these killer phrases that you come up with, explaining to people how power is In the American political and financial landscapes and who's in charge and sort of how the sausage making takes place and the gruesome inhumanity of some of these people and childishness
00:00:52.000of some of the people who are in charge of everything, you know, how inept and how sort of inexplicable and inappropriate it is to put these people in charge of the world.
00:01:03.000The masters of the universe actually, you know, do not have any clue what they And you've shown that better than anybody.
00:01:09.000Let me read a little of your official bio.
00:01:13.000Matt Taibbi is the author of four New York Times bestsellers and award-winning columnists for Rolling Stones.
00:01:19.000His recent book, Hate Inc., is a turbocharged take on how the media twists the truth to pit us against each other.
00:01:26.000And let me read a little of your Wikipedia.
00:03:21.000I wanted to learn Russian so I could read those books.
00:03:25.000So it's very funny because what we were talking about at the beginning, a lot of what I wanted to do with my life, you know, sort of writing...
00:03:34.000I wanted to write novels like The Master of Margarita or Dead Souls, and it turned out I didn't have any talent for that.
00:03:40.000But the world actually is as absurd as those books are now, and so it's all kind of come full circle.
00:03:48.000But my background is really as I grew up in a family of journalists, came back to the States in the early 2000s, started working for Rolling Stone, and then I switched on to Wall Street in that beat after the 2008 campaign and spent a lot of time on that.
00:04:04.000Then I became an independent journalist once, you know, the media world started changing, as you know, in 2016 or 2017 or so.
00:04:12.000And so tell us about, you know, because you reemerged after the pandemic with the Twitter files.
00:04:22.000When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I had sort of mused online that he would be a real hero if he were to open up the internal documentation of what was going on at that company.
00:04:36.000But I think he already had that idea, frankly.
00:04:39.000I was contacted and went out to San Francisco and I was one of a small group of journalists who was given access to the internal documentation of Twitter.
00:04:53.000And from a reporting standpoint, it was a very, very difficult task because we were just sort of fishing through large amounts of files and had to build a coherent...
00:05:01.000Or a series of coherent stories out of it, which was very challenging.
00:05:05.000But we found much more rampant, I would say, corruption and contact with the government and the enforcement agencies than we had expected.
00:05:17.000And it became a very difficult reporting task.
00:05:21.000And it was you, Paul Thacker, Paul was one of the journalists.
00:05:25.000Did you actually see each other out there?
00:05:28.000Yeah, Paul wasn't there in the beginning.
00:05:30.000In the beginning, it was me, Barry Weiss, Michael Schellenberger.
00:06:04.000I would say, you know, it's obviously a small fraction of what the overall traffic was at the company, but we were probably looking at somewhere between 100 and 150,000 emails at least.
00:06:15.000And then that doesn't count the attachments and other stuff.
00:06:20.000So we were trying to build Stories out of things like what happened with the Hunter Biden story, what happened when they took Donald Trump off the platform.
00:06:31.000And then we found this whole thing about the communication with the FBI, the Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and some other agencies, and all of the platforms.
00:06:42.000And that became the dominant story for us that we were trying to track down.
00:07:02.000I don't think we ever talked about this.
00:07:05.000Any of us really talked about this, but I think we found early on that that was not the best way to do it.
00:07:11.000Really, the smartest way was just to take a bunch of documents and try to read them chronologically and not look for anything in particular because we would find all sorts of things by accident that way.
00:07:23.000And that became a much more, I would say...
00:07:28.000You know, less targeted form of journalism.
00:07:36.000I'll have to say, we ran across your name quite a bit.
00:07:40.000And that was a story that we haven't actually put all those documents together, but there was a lot of stuff in there.
00:07:47.000But I'm sure you heard the disinformation dozen, the letters from the CCDH. And, you know, that was one of the things that clued us into this whole system of, it was sort of like quiet censorship, where they wouldn't tell you what was going on, but everybody was clamping down sort of universally behind the scenes.
00:08:09.000Did you actually find involvement of the CIA? I know there was a portal that the FBI was using, and there were some stories that indicated the CIA also had access to that portal.
00:08:22.000So we know the CIA attended meetings with what they call the industry meeting.
00:08:29.000There was a whole group of companies, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and there were probably two dozen that came in and out, but the big ones showed up every single time.
00:08:37.000We have documents where the CIA requests Permission to come and sit at some of these meetings.
00:08:45.000And then we have a stack of reports that came through what they call the Foreign Influence Task Force, which is managed by the FBI. But we have a whole lot of documents that look like they came from the CIA. Some of them are marked OGA for other government agencies.
00:09:01.000And I showed some of them to other, you know, to ex-CIA agents.
00:09:05.000And they told me that it looks like CIA reports because there's like a terror line that's the same, the format.
00:09:12.000And there were a number of ex-CIA people who we know, we could tell, worked at Twitter.
00:09:18.000We looked into their backgrounds and they were pretty senior people in the Trust and Safety Department.
00:09:23.000What do you think their objective was?
00:09:26.000Their objective was to just quiet any kind of dissent about the government policies.
00:09:33.000Yeah, I think in the beginning, it started out as they had a very particular objective about establishing a narrative about Russian disinformation, the influence of Russian, quote unquote, Russian bots on the platforms.
00:09:49.000And when Twitter, you know, they initially asked in 2017, they asked Facebook and Twitter to give them a report about how many Russian bots were on the platform, how many were linked to the Internet Research Agency in St.
00:10:03.000And when Twitter didn't give them a number that was big enough, there was all this negative feedback from the Hill, from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
00:10:12.000And I think initially they were just trying to get a foot in the door about that issue.
00:10:17.000But over time, it seems like they had a lot of opinions about a lot of things.
00:10:22.000And they were sort of quietly recommending that Twitter take action on accounts about all sorts of things.
00:10:30.000Promodoro accounts in Venezuela, to the Yellow Vest movement, to leftist movements in Africa, to populist movements involving Brexit, or the Catalan independence movement, that really spanned the entire spectrum.
00:10:47.000Now, they weren't demanding that the platforms take this down, but when you get a spreadsheet with You know, a thousand names on it or account names on it.
00:10:55.000And we were looking and seeing that most of them, a lot of them weren't active.
00:11:00.000You can draw your own conclusions from that.
00:11:02.000At the beginning of the pandemic, before they de-platformed me at Instagram, which is my major kind of vector for talking to the public, there were a lot of articles that suggested that the things that I was posting at that time were coming from Russia and that they were part of a big Russian disinformation campaign.
00:11:26.000And that was puzzling to me because I had no information from Russia.
00:11:31.000But do you think that was just a prescribed narrative that somebody decided this is how we're going to attack this, we're going to blame everything on Russia?
00:11:39.000Yeah, in fact, we found internal documents about the construction of what they call a denialist at Twitter, which is when they have these tools called visibility filtering, where they can basically amplify you all the way down to not visible at all, and they can have everybody see you if they want.
00:11:59.000If they want to de-amplify you, they put you on what they call a denialist.
00:12:03.000And we found a denialist called is underscore Russian.
00:12:06.000And basically, that just meant you had opinions that coincided with what they called sort of Russian propaganda.
00:12:14.000So people like Jill Stein were marked is Russian.
00:12:21.000And over time, we found that this was a habit, that when they wanted to...
00:12:27.000Mark something as sort of unseeable or wrong or foreign disinformation.
00:12:34.000There would always be an implication of Russianness sort of layered on top of it.
00:12:40.000And yeah, so I think that was the way they got in the door.
00:12:43.000They started with Russian disinformation, but they slowly moved that target to the domestic arena and not very subtly, I don't think.
00:12:52.000What was your feeling about Elon throughout this?
00:12:55.000I mean, he, you know, you originally said that he was a hero.
00:12:59.000And, you know, that's kind of how I feel about him, too.
00:13:02.000And I really started admiring him at one point when I saw an interview that he did about AI. And he said, AI, the first thing it's going to do is going to take our jobs and then it's going to kill us.
00:13:14.000And, you know, coming from the tech industry, I think it was really important that one of these Silicon Valley giants talked about the danger of it, because the only thing that we hear from them is that it's going to, you know, create this Eden, this utopia on Earth when we have all this technology.
00:13:31.000And if you look through history, technology mainly is used to do good things, but it's almost always abused.
00:13:39.000And the capacity to abuse AI and these surveillance technologies and digital IDs and digital currencies is so monumental these days that, you know, it's very suspicious to see somebody have a conversation about it where they don't mention that, because that should be foremost on our mind.
00:13:58.000But then, you know, you see him today, he tweeted about Neuralink, and Neuralink looks kind of sinister if, you know, it's It definitely would have a sinister application to control people's brains.
00:14:30.000In this case, this is one of the rare cases in my career where I really didn't fully understand what the motives were behind the story, but the documents were so explosive on their face that it didn't really matter.
00:14:43.000However, I can give you my impressions.
00:14:45.000I think he's sincere about trying to shake some things up.
00:14:51.000I do get a sense that he's patriotic in a way.
00:15:48.000And when Elon took over, the attorneys who are working with me on this, Jeff Rubinfeld from Yale, said, maybe we should go to Elon and propose to drop Twitter from this lawsuit if he makes this stuff public voluntarily.
00:16:04.000And, you know, to me, it didn't seem like a good idea to approach him in that way.
00:19:18.000Yeah, I mean, I still have material that I just never reported, and there's a lot of it.
00:19:24.000You know, these stories take a lot of time, and we've got to try to confirm things and make sure that what we're looking at is real, and so there's a lot of stuff that's still coming down the pipe.
00:19:36.000There are some other journalists who are working on some stories, I think, that are going to come out pretty soon, actually.
00:19:42.000There's one about Ukraine that's really interesting.
00:19:44.000You know, that I'm hoping will come out in the next couple of weeks.
00:19:49.000Speaking of Ukraine, you wrote a very interesting story this week.
00:19:53.000It was a conversation you had with Kern about the Ukraine, about the digital passport in the Ukraine, basically putting your entire life into a cell phone.
00:20:04.000It was a brilliant conversation that you had with them.
00:20:08.000And, you know, you talk about Samantha Powers at USAID, who is, and, you know, as everybody knows, USAID is a CIA front and played a big role in overthrowing the government of the Ukraine in 2014 with the National Endowment for Democracy.
00:20:28.000You know, the U.S. government funneled $5 billion through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to support these Protests that later morphed into an overthrow, a violent overthrow of Viktor Yakovych's government.
00:20:45.000And with the neocons in the White House then putting in place a handpicked government of their own choosing that they chose before, you know, months before the...
00:21:00.000And then, you know, one of the things that's happened in Ukraine, and I talk a lot about You know, the war on here, but we haven't really talked about how the war is being exploited by U.S. financial interests.
00:21:14.000I've written a little bit about it on Twitter, about the land grab that's going on now in the Ukraine, where, you know, Blackstone Group and the U.S. These other, you know, U.S. multinationals are going in there and purchasing all the farmland to control the food supply.
00:21:30.000But you talk about this interesting meeting with Visa, which is...
00:21:36.000Visa is one of the companies that's been working with the Gates Foundation and MasterCard to develop digital IDs for the entire global population.
00:21:44.000And they're now rolling one of these things out.
00:21:52.000Can you just talk a little bit about that?
00:21:54.000Yeah, they have this thing called DIA. It's the Ukrainian word for sort of doing or being.
00:22:02.000And they call it a U.S. government supported everything app is the term that I saw on USAID. And...
00:22:11.000It's basically a single portal where your whole life is on there.
00:22:16.000Your identification, you can do your banking, your mortgage applications.
00:22:20.000But in the war environment, they added basically a snitching app.
00:22:24.000So if you want to rat out collaborators in the next building You know, in the Sasyedny Dom, as they would say in Russia, right?
00:22:32.000Like, you can just punch in a button and give information about the people who, you know, they have an app called e-Enemy, and you rat people out.
00:22:44.000Now, this is an application that they're trying to bring to other countries.
00:22:48.000There's several countries in Africa that are already trying to do this kind of thing.
00:22:52.000And what's really worrying, I don't know, did you ever see the movie Starship Troopers?
00:23:14.000It's an absurdist parody of this fascistic autocracy that has this relentless messaging machine, and everybody is just wired into this single...
00:23:29.000I mean, I've talked to some people who worked at some other tech companies who said they're not doing that exactly in the United States yet.
00:23:36.000But if we were ever to go to war, that would be the idea, I think, is that instead of having Facebook, Google, and Twitter, we would have basically a single informational landscape of some sort.
00:23:47.000What we saw in the Twitter files is under the surface, they're doing a lot of these things.
00:23:51.000They're doing what they call sort of Unorthodoxy mapping, or they're basically looking to see what your opinions are.
00:23:59.000And if you have kind of unorthodox or wrong opinions, you're deamplified, you're pushed down, you're seen less.
00:24:05.000In some cases, you're just moved off the platform entirely.
00:24:09.000They're doing that informally in the States, but they're doing it overtly already in the war arena in Ukraine.
00:24:15.000And I think for having lived in the former Soviet Union, Russia, where we saw kind of modern gangster capitalism unrolled before it came to the U.S., you know, I worry that the Ukrainian version is what may be in store for us.
00:24:31.000Yeah, and you can also, under this app, you can report riot movements of Russian troops or Or what have you.
00:24:38.000But, you know, clearly the most sinister and useful part of it for people is that you get to report your enemies.
00:24:44.000And it's not very clear, you know, what happens to the people that you report.
00:25:10.000And what's so scary about the, and yes, there does need to be some reporting about what exactly happens between, you know, step one and step three or whatever it is, but you can imagine it's probably not pleasant no matter what.
00:25:24.000But the scary thing is I think they've already kind of tested this out in the West.
00:25:30.000Like, you know, with the virus, for instance, with the coronavirus, the idea of people reporting other people on the platform and that this becomes a way to accumulate demerits for a certain account.
00:25:44.000Within Twitter, they had a system where if you were reported by what they call a trusted partner, you would get, you know, a certain amount of negative attention that may move you toward a denialist.
00:25:54.000So again, informally, they're kind of doing the same thing already here in the States.
00:25:59.000And I think you were probably a victim of that, honestly.
00:26:02.000But, you know, again, over there it's overt and it's just very scary.
00:26:06.000You know, I remember when, during the Bush administration, I think it was during the Bush administration, Admiral Poindexter came up with this total information system that he was going to put together that would collect all the data on every human being in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
00:26:26.000And people were so offended by that and indignant, Republicans and Democrats.
00:26:31.000And, you know, it seemed like this paranoid, fascistic...
00:26:37.000It should have been obviously wrong to everybody.
00:26:44.000And I remember then also when I was a kid, Most Republicans didn't want the Social Security system because they thought it meant a universal ID. And they said any government that wants a universal ID is the beginning of a totalitarian government.
00:27:03.000You know, they're going to try to keep track of us all and try to surveil us.
00:27:07.000But nowadays, everybody just accepts it.
00:27:11.000And it's this, you know, one of the things that you write about a lot is The capacity that people have to forget things, this built-in forgetter, and that that is being amplified by technological forces and the media and the collaborative nature of media and government today that, you know, we're being kind of constantly hypnotized to forget the past.
00:27:36.000You know, one of the times that struck me was when we went into the Iraq War in 2001.
00:27:42.000Back then, everybody said, you know, we learned a lesson from Vietnam.
00:28:54.000This country clearly has nothing to do with 9-11.
00:28:58.000How can they possibly put this past the entire country and get Congress to agree to it?
00:29:05.000And the fact that they were able to do that and have this propaganda triumph where they got a majority of the country...
00:29:11.000At least superficially behind this effort.
00:29:14.000And they were able to drum up so much anger, like real vitriolic, you know, anger about toward Iraq.
00:29:21.000And, you know, when we didn't find WMDs there, this was the beginning of this process that's now kind of automatic in the United States where, oh, wow, well, that turned out not to be true.
00:29:32.000Let's move on, you know, and This gigantic moral panic evaporates.
00:29:37.000At that time, it took a little while for that to be processed.
00:30:06.000Then when they roll that back, they don't say, I'm sorry.
00:30:10.000They don't go back and fix any of the stories.
00:30:12.000And I think this is a real problem for media because this idea of getting something wrong and not telling your readers that announcing that to your readers, it creates an audience that just has no capacity for learning or retaining information or anything.
00:30:27.000They're just confused and reacting to sort of emotional stimuli.
00:30:32.000I know you must be frustrated by this, but I think it's very off-putting.
00:30:36.000And the thing you referenced, Total Information Awareness, that program that was created under Bush, there was a DARPA-created program.
00:30:42.000It sounded like an insane fantasy that could never possibly happen.
00:31:38.000The New York Times You know, which was telling people, which was rebuking people and gaslighting people for not getting vaccinated because you were going to save grandma.
00:31:49.000And then when they say, oh, it doesn't prevent transmission, everybody recognized that.
00:31:54.000But there's still no broad scale recognition.
00:31:57.000There's still people all over this country.
00:31:59.000I was at a dinner the other night with Boris Johnson in which he said, you know, we saved Britain with the vaccine.
00:32:07.000And you're like, okay, But are you not paying attention to all the information that's come?
00:32:13.000And to look at the U.S. experience as a success story, when we had the highest death count, body count, COVID body count of any country in the world, we have 16% of the COVID deaths globally and only 4.2% of the population.
00:32:28.000And, you know, how is nobody looking at this and saying, this doesn't make sense?
00:32:33.000And, you know, we got to learn from mistakes, but you never have to admit the mistake.
00:32:40.000I think they're just assuming that people are not processing information on their own.
00:32:45.000But clearly, when you tell people and you scare people, you could go out of your way to terrify people into taking action because if you don't do this, you will die.
00:33:14.000The reaction, I think, for audiences, they either just sort of blindly accept or they don't.
00:33:21.000They recoil and there's this rage that builds up in the population that they're just not acknowledging.
00:33:27.000And then there was the other problem that we found in the Twitter files of this thing, the Stanford Virality Project, which was like a single processing platform for all for the major Tech platforms like Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.
00:33:43.000This is where they sort of reported all their vaccine information and their data.
00:33:48.000And they were telling all these platforms that you should consider as standard misinformation on your platform.
00:33:54.000Even true stories of vaccine injury or true stories that may promote hesitancy.
00:34:01.000So they're openly telling these platforms that true things may be something that has to be suppressed.
00:34:08.000I think the public sees that and that's very confusing.
00:34:12.000I don't know how you logically respond to that when you see it and you don't see anybody making a course correction for that.
00:35:11.000I'd be curious to hear what your thoughts are about this because it's a huge mystery.
00:35:15.000I mean, again, I grew up in a family of journalists.
00:35:17.000Every journalist I knew growing up had a copy of Catch-22 not far from, you know, from wherever their nightstand was.
00:35:26.000And, you know, the whole thing about the great loyalty of the crusade and the censorship, I mean...
00:35:32.000The censors have always been the bad guys for reporters, and all reporters that I know, even ones who just were basic beat reporters, were all trained to kind of physically recoil from being wrong.
00:35:44.000Like, getting something wrong is the big...
00:36:39.000Even Woodward is now kind of an apostate because he gave, I mean, look, people have different opinions about Bob Woodward, but again, this was the basic standard Discipline within the business is, you know, check your facts, get things right.
00:36:54.000And he was sort of the approved establishment vision of what an investigative reporter is.
00:36:59.000He's the one who said that he told Jeff Gerth at the Columbia Journalism Review that I warned everybody in the newsroom about the Russiagate story to be worried about the Steele dossier.
00:37:10.000I mean, that is a galactic error falling for a paid opposition research document that is totally unsourced and wrong.
00:37:19.000And to carry that for three years is that it's an error as big, I think, or bigger than the WMD mistake and just no recognition of it whatsoever.
00:37:30.000And anybody who did worry about it is out.
00:37:33.000There's none of us working left working in major journalism anymore.
00:37:37.000Yeah, I mean, people get mad at me in the Democratic Party for saying, hey, wait a minute.
00:37:42.000Those things were we now have the proof that they were made up.
00:37:46.000They were invented by not, you know, and invented by, and then Fortified by CIA agents, 50 CIA agents who sign a letter publicly, which turns out to be a propaganda trope, and FBI agents who are involved in essentially fixing an election by inventing a lie.
00:38:39.000I mean, I wasn't a fan of Donald Trump.
00:38:41.000I wrote a book about him called Insane Clown President.
00:38:43.000But you can't just accuse somebody of something and have it turn out not to be true and not say you're sorry and just keep going as if it didn't happen.
00:38:53.000It's a total breach of the public trust.
00:38:55.000And I just don't understand how they make that fit psychologically.
00:39:01.000Again, I'd be curious to hear what you think about that.
00:39:03.000I'm baffled, but I saw it not just with journalists, but I saw it with people who I respected, people who were, you know, human rights activists, who should know better, who should know that censorship is never, should be tolerated, you know, who were First Amendment absolutists five years ago and now are applauding censorship, Democrats who have completely fallen for the war narrative, you know, the whole...
00:39:32.000The very, very powerful gravities of orthodoxies, which, you know, I think were biologically hardwired for orthodoxy, you know, because it gave us unit cohesion during the, you know, 20,000 generations.
00:39:45.000Human beings were wandering the African savannah in these small warring groups, and you had to, you know, you had to follow.
00:39:57.000You had to have a kind of cohesion with your group so that they became the in-group and everybody else was the out-group.
00:40:05.000I think those are the biological underpinnings of orthodoxy that hardwires it.
00:40:11.000But journalists are supposed to have an immunity for that.
00:40:18.000They're supposed to be a fierce Posture of skepticism, as Louis Brandeis put it, toward any kind of aggregations of power or anybody telling you, you know, here's what's what, without saying, well, you know, give me the evidentiary basis.
00:40:33.000You know, that's what a journalist is trained to do.
00:40:37.000I mean, I grew up in the 70s, too, and American liberalism was sort of founded on, I mean, the image for me is the VW bus with the question authority sticker in the front.
00:40:47.000And the Nazis were, you know, walking in Skokie and through a Jewish neighborhood and having, you know, liberals and the ACLU say, yeah, we hate what they're saying, but, you know, you got to defend their right to say it.
00:41:03.000And the reasoning behind that is so obvious.
00:41:07.000I mean, it's not an extraordinarily difficult thing to figure out.
00:41:11.000If you don't stand up and let this happen in Skokie, the next thing that's going to happen is that throughout Mississippi, Alabama and the Panhandle, every little southern town is not going to let the NAACP march, right?
00:41:24.000That was the justification for the Skokie case.
00:42:39.000All of us, what the heck was going on and how bad it was.
00:42:43.000Yeah, I mean, well, that's another topic.
00:42:46.000But the mortgage-backed securities were part of the reason they worked is because they were designed to be so complicated that journalists couldn't figure them out and regulators.
00:42:56.000And, you know, this is a little bit like that.
00:43:00.000And in journalism, there's always this problem.
00:43:04.000Where when something is beyond the ability of sort of an ordinary beat journalist to figure out themselves, they have to rely on experts and authority figures in the first initial blush of a story.
00:43:17.000And so they gave us early on a direction to go in with this.
00:43:43.000You know, the least conspiratorial explanation, but you have to at least allow for the possibility that, you know, there was some kind of human culpability there.
00:43:57.000You know, as an investigator, there was no possible way they could know if they haven't discovered the link.
00:44:03.000If they haven't found that, you know, patient zero of COVID yet, then you can't close the door yet.
00:44:09.000But they did it, which I think, again, it was just another one of those stories where, journalistically, from the beginning, it was compromised.
00:44:19.000And I think now, over the years, I've just seen so many of these stories go wrong that now we're starting to see, I think, there are more people coming out of the woodwork who are pointing us in a direction of You know, this not having zoonotic origin and that sort of thing.
00:44:35.000The story is not uncovered yet, but I don't trust anything they tell me about this story anymore.