The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1745 - Matt Taibbi

00:00:12.000 So you like it down here better?

00:00:13.000 I love it.

00:00:14.000 Yeah?

00:00:14.000 I love it.

00:00:15.000 Yeah, people are so nice.

00:00:17.000 There's less of them, so they're not a burden.

00:00:19.000 We up?

00:00:20.000 Yeah, you know, I think big cities, people just get in your way.

00:00:26.000 No one's in your way here.

00:00:27.000 Everyone's friendly.

00:00:28.000 Yeah.

00:00:28.000 It's like normal.

00:00:29.000 They're normal people.

00:00:30.000 Plus, it's not tainted by show business.

00:00:32.000 As much as people try to pretend that Hollywood doesn't have an effect on their lives, I'm in real estate. 0.99

00:00:38.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:00:39.000 Everyone is tainted by the weirdness of that city. 1.00

00:00:43.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:00:43.000 Because it's a city that's predicated on being full of shit. 1.00

00:00:46.000 Like you have to pretend you're something. 1.00

00:00:48.000 Yeah.

00:00:48.000 Everybody, as soon as they're talking, they start lying basically, right?

00:00:53.000 It's like an angle.

00:00:54.000 For sure, they're selling themselves and promoting an angle.

00:01:00.000 And out here, no one's doing that.

00:01:01.000 It's so refreshing.

00:01:03.000 It's like, this is Mike.

00:01:04.000 He makes barbecue.

00:01:05.000 Oh, hi, Mike.

00:01:07.000 Mike's a normal guy, you know?

00:01:08.000 Must take some time to sort of decompensate and decompress, get back to...

00:01:13.000 It took a few weeks.

00:01:15.000 That's it.

00:01:16.000 And then I was like, yeah, I embraced it right away.

00:01:19.000 Because, you know, when we moved here, I started looking in May of 2020. I was like, I'm getting the fuck out of here. 0.95

00:01:26.000 I see the writing on the wall. 0.94

00:01:28.000 Because there was two weeks to stop the spread and flatten the curve.

00:01:31.000 Like, okay, makes sense.

00:01:33.000 That makes sense.

00:01:33.000 I was all on board.

00:01:34.000 And then as time went on, I'm like, this is not two weeks.

00:01:38.000 And then they were talking about more restrictions, and then they were shutting down outdoor dining and this and that.

00:01:43.000 And I was like, what are they doing?

00:01:46.000 They're enjoying this.

00:01:47.000 They're enjoying telling people what to do, which is just basic human nature.

00:01:51.000 To pretend that government agencies, that people who wanted to be mayor, people that wanted to be governor, would somehow or another Avoid all the pitfalls that are just naturally a part of being a person,

00:02:07.000 when a person has power.

00:02:08.000 Especially power over a bunch of people that are scared.

00:02:11.000 And you're offering solutions, and you're standing there, and we have to keep the safety of our communities in mind. 1.00

00:02:17.000 You know, that kind of shit. 1.00

00:02:18.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:02:19.000 I think that's a big story of modern America, is people just not being able to deal with the idea that there just aren't solutions for some things.

00:02:28.000 For some things, you just can't fix it by fiat.

00:02:31.000 What's fascinating to me, though, is that people will blame everyone except the people that were actually responsible for the virus. 0.99

00:02:40.000 This is a virus that most likely, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm about 90% sure, That this thing came from a fucking laboratory.

00:02:50.000 And all the stuff that I've read and all the emails from Peter Daszak and Fauci and the NIH, when you look at the way they were looking at it and how they were kind of panicked, and then you look at their absolute Their belief that supposedly they're broadcasting that there's no way it could have come from a lab. 0.99

00:03:11.000 And then you see their actual emails and you go, oh, you fuckers, you know this probably came from a lab. 0.96

00:03:19.000 And you're doing your best job to try to obfuscate, to try to confuse people, to try to muddy the water and just get it as far away from you as you can. 1.00

00:03:29.000 But the reality is this probably came from a fucking lab. 0.98

00:03:32.000 That's not what people are mad at. 0.99

00:03:34.000 People are mad at people who take alternative medications.

00:03:38.000 People are mad at people who downplay the severity of it. 0.99

00:03:43.000 People are mad at all kinds of things, but they're not mad at the fucking source. 0.95

00:03:46.000 The actual source, which is most likely that level 4 biolab in Wuhan, China. 0.98

00:03:53.000 Most likely.

00:03:55.000 Yeah, at minimum, those emails show that they thought they had a serious PR problem on their hands.

00:04:00.000 I mean, I think you can look at them in a number of different ways, but at minimum, it shows that.

00:04:05.000 To be charitable.

00:04:06.000 To be totally charitable.

00:04:08.000 And that should have been a big story all by itself, and it wasn't.

00:04:12.000 It wasn't.

00:04:13.000 It's a strange time.

00:04:15.000 But this is normal.

00:04:17.000 This is a normal time when people are under heavy anxiety.

00:04:21.000 Because most people do not know how to handle extreme stress or scary, unknown situations.

00:04:30.000 That's why they like a normal job that starts at 9 and ends at 5 and you have two weeks paid vacation and you have your this and you have your that and everything's laid out and you know what to expect.

00:04:45.000 People do not like when you don't know what to expect.

00:04:48.000 Yeah, I mean, that was a big thing for me.

00:04:51.000 I lived in Russia for so many years.

00:04:53.000 And in Moscow, there were constant terrorist attacks at the time because the Cheshians and the Russians were having these issues.

00:05:01.000 But when 9-11 happened in the United States, people were traumatized by that beyond all proportion, it seemed to me, because in America, we're just not used to having to deal with all sorts of things.

00:05:12.000 And so they just don't deal well with stress when it's an unusual situation.

00:05:18.000 They have to be in the kind of the lane of safety.

00:05:23.000 Yeah, we're not used to it.

00:05:26.000 I mean, it's weird because we start so many wars.

00:05:29.000 Yeah.

00:05:30.000 And we don't have any of them over here.

00:05:32.000 Right, right, exactly. 1.00

00:05:33.000 So fucked. 1.00

00:05:34.000 Exactly. 0.99

00:05:35.000 I have a good buddy of mine who's my former kickboxing trainer.

00:05:38.000 Shout out to Shuki.

00:05:39.000 He lives in Israel, but he lived in America for a little while and then he went back to Israel.

00:05:43.000 But I was hanging out with him and his family over his house one night for dinner.

00:05:48.000 And they're playing the bongo drums and dancing, and they're really festive people.

00:05:53.000 And I go, why are Israelis so happy? 0.99

00:05:56.000 And he goes, because over in Israel, you'll never know. 1.00

00:05:59.000 He goes, at any minute you could die, so fucking party. 1.00

00:06:03.000 Party, party. 1.00

00:06:03.000 He was always happy. 1.00

00:06:05.000 But he had this attitude because of the conditions.

00:06:11.000 Because there's a real fear in the air.

00:06:13.000 Right.

00:06:13.000 The presence of death is all around you, so you're more conscious of living life.

00:06:17.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:06:17.000 In America, it's completely the opposite.

00:06:19.000 Exactly.

00:06:20.000 It's the opposite.

00:06:21.000 We are basically like trust fund kids, you know, in terms of like how we handle The real adversity of the world.

00:06:31.000 And forget about just the stuff that we create.

00:06:33.000 I mean, if anything natural occurred, any real disaster occurred, you'd see mad panic in the streets.

00:06:41.000 There's so many people out there that are prepping, and so many people are preparing.

00:06:45.000 But are you really?

00:06:46.000 Are you really ready?

00:06:48.000 Because I don't think you are. 0.99

00:06:49.000 I think when the shit actually hits the fan, it's the tiniest, smallest percentage of the people. 0.99

00:06:54.000 They're going to be able to gather up their senses and make some sense out of this and regroup. 0.99

00:06:59.000 Yeah, but I think they're not preparing because they're enjoying being miserable right now.

00:07:05.000 I mean, you were talking about that before.

00:07:07.000 But yeah, no, this is like the most unfun period in American history, at least in my lifetime.

00:07:12.000 Yeah.

00:07:12.000 It's unfunny.

00:07:15.000 Entertainment isn't fun.

00:07:17.000 I don't know.

00:07:17.000 It's miserable.

00:07:19.000 Well, it's very tense.

00:07:20.000 Yeah.

00:07:20.000 It's very tense, and there's a lot of people that are profiting off of that tension.

00:07:25.000 There's a lot of anger merchants out there. 1.00

00:07:29.000 That are essentially elevating their brand by just getting mad at things and having the least charitable view of people, the least charitable view of situations, the most polarizing arguments of right versus left and vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

00:07:48.000 Yeah.

00:07:49.000 No, I spent a lot of time on this.

00:07:51.000 The press aspect of it is just horrible because financially, you know, that's the way these businesses work now.

00:07:59.000 They're trying to create an addictive experience of being upset, and they know exactly how to do it.

00:08:06.000 And they've kind of moved all the people in the business who used to do the job of...

00:08:15.000 Moderating and making sure that people saw all the different sides of the issue.

00:08:20.000 They've all been kind of shoved out of the business, and now it's just one gigantic anxiety machine.

00:08:26.000 If you turn on MSNBC or CNN or even Fox, basically their job is to get you worked up about stuff.

00:08:34.000 Well, that's the only way they can make money.

00:08:37.000 Exactly.

00:08:37.000 That's what's so crazy about the world that we're living in.

00:08:40.000 But what's interesting is I think the positive aspect of this – and let's try to find the silver lining, right?

00:08:46.000 I think the positive aspect of this is it's really highlighting the importance of independent media.

00:08:52.000 You know, people like Kristalyn Sager from Breaking Points, Kyle Kalinske, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, these independent journalists who I can turn to and go, okay, I know if I'm reading a Matt Taibbi article, you're going to tell me exactly what's going on.

00:09:07.000 And there's not many of you.

00:09:09.000 There's a small handful of you where I know I can get unbiased, intelligent observations.

00:09:17.000 Yeah, no, it's great.

00:09:19.000 I think a lot of people, what we're finding, and you're of course familiar with this, is that there's a massive audience out there that is very frustrated with traditional media, the manipulative aspects of it, the predictability of it.

00:09:36.000 And so, yeah, they're coming to places like Substack.

00:09:41.000 I spent my whole life in the media business.

00:09:43.000 I had an editor once who called it managing the decline.

00:09:47.000 The expectation in media was always that there was going to be less and less money forever because audiences were dwindling, because they just didn't like the product that we were putting out.

00:09:56.000 In independent media now, it's the opposite.

00:09:59.000 It's skyrocketing.

00:10:00.000 There's incredible growth.

00:10:01.000 You obviously know this.

00:10:03.000 Substack is doing amazingly well.

00:10:05.000 It's a very bizarre experience as a journalist to be part of that.

00:10:10.000 But it's been really, really cool.

00:10:13.000 I don't think it would be possible any other way.

00:10:16.000 I think there has to be this massive decline in the believability of CNN and, you know, fill in the blank, like whatever mainstream big time publication. 0.99

00:10:28.000 The fucking Rolling Stone. 0.95

00:10:30.000 When they printed that horse dewormer story about Oklahoma, I'm like, Jesus Christ, do you guys not have anybody working there? 0.99

00:10:37.000 Look at the photo they used.

00:10:40.000 It's Oklahoma in the summer, and you got people with winter coats on. 1.00

00:10:44.000 Are you guys out of your fucking minds? 0.99

00:10:46.000 What is going on over there? 1.00

00:10:49.000 So what happens in media is we have this expectation that if something is published in another reputable news organization, we assume that it's been checked and that it's true.

00:11:01.000 Somewhere down the line, whoever did the original reporting actually checked it.

00:11:06.000 And what happened in that case is...

00:11:08.000 Let's explain what the story was so people can...

00:11:11.000 So basically, an ER doc, if I remember correctly, in Oklahoma, in rural Oklahoma, gave an interview to a TV station.

00:11:22.000 And essentially, he was saying that there was a problem With people who were taking ivermectin and they were getting so sick that they were lining up outside the ERs and preventing people who had gunshot wounds from being treated,

00:11:42.000 right?

00:11:42.000 Yes.

00:11:43.000 Me as a reporter, if I hear that story, the first thing I'm going to think is, are there really that many gunshot victims in rural Oklahoma?

00:11:52.000 There's already a little bit of a problem with that.

00:11:57.000 You would want to check that right away.

00:11:59.000 What actually happened is some wires got crossed.

00:12:02.000 The guy was talking about one thing and...

00:12:05.000 And somebody who saw the story assumed a correlation that wasn't there.

00:12:10.000 And then it got retweeted by Rachel Maddow.

00:12:14.000 She doubled down on it the next day.

00:12:17.000 Exactly.

00:12:17.000 Which is wild.

00:12:19.000 The fact that the facts were clearly available.

00:12:23.000 And she doubled down on it. 0.99

00:12:24.000 First of all, do you know how many people that have actually ever even gotten sick from ivermectin?

00:12:29.000 Ever?

00:12:29.000 I don't know.

00:12:30.000 Billions of people.

00:12:31.000 What did Peter Atiyah write it off to us?

00:12:34.000 It's less than 100, ever.

00:12:35.000 I mean, it's been used for river blindness for how long, right?

00:12:39.000 It's an incredibly safe medication, right?

00:12:41.000 40 years.

00:12:41.000 Yeah.

00:12:42.000 Now, that's not to say that it necessarily works as a COVID treatment, right?

00:12:47.000 But there's so much disinformation about this whole thing.

00:12:50.000 Yes, it's a different conversation.

00:12:51.000 That's a different conversation.

00:12:53.000 But the thing about Rachel retweeting that and doubling down, what's so interesting about that, and this is a phenomenon that's completely new in my experience in media, Is that companies now know that their audiences will forgive them for making mistakes as long as the mistakes are in the right direction.

00:13:12.000 Right.

00:13:12.000 As long as it's ideologically correct.

00:13:14.000 As long as it's ideologically correct.

00:13:16.000 So there was a whole generation of reporters who were raised like me.

00:13:20.000 Like, our whole thing was the night before we published something, we couldn't sleep because we were afraid of that one thing that would be fucked up in the report that somebody would catch the next day and that might end your career, right?

00:13:35.000 Like, if you got something really, really badly wrong, it was potentially a career-ending thing, especially if you made some kind of ethical mistake in forgetting to check something.

00:13:44.000 So that terror was common to all reporters until recently.

00:13:50.000 Now, all of a sudden, when you make a really, really bad mistake, your audience is probably going to be fine with it.

00:13:57.000 They don't punish you for it in the same way.

00:13:59.000 And they've basically brought in a whole generation of people who have this ethos of, well, if I make...

00:14:05.000 So what if it's wrong?

00:14:07.000 You know, which is why all these people no longer have faith in these companies.

00:14:12.000 And they can't see it.

00:14:14.000 It's amazing that they can't see it.

00:14:15.000 But people are leaving these companies.

00:14:18.000 They're no longer trusting them.

00:14:19.000 And they don't see that correlation, which is incredible to me.

00:14:22.000 It's very strange, but again, it fuels this thing that I think is very good, which is trustworthy, independent media.

00:14:32.000 Like, Crystal and Sagar, when they had their old show, Rising on the Hill, They decided to leave, and when they decided to leave, we had a group conversation on the phone, and they were asking me advice, and I was like, I think you guys are going to be gigantic when you leave.

00:14:48.000 I think it's going to be bigger than ever.

00:14:49.000 You'll be completely free.

00:14:51.000 You won't have to worry about any editorial control, and you don't need anybody.

00:14:55.000 I mean, I'll help you.

00:14:56.000 Everybody else will help you.

00:14:57.000 The show's already excellent, but it's excellent entirely because of you two.

00:15:01.000 It has nothing to do with being attached to any other organization that's going to siphon money off of you.

00:15:06.000 Yeah.

00:15:07.000 And so look at them.

00:15:08.000 They were number one almost instantly, and they've maintained that position the entire time, and they're bigger than ever now.

00:15:13.000 Right, yeah.

00:15:14.000 And they were raised, they had that hesitation, because we're raised in media, in professional corporate media, to be terrified of leaving the fold.

00:15:25.000 Now, I actually came up through alternative media, so I wasn't afraid of leaving it.

00:15:29.000 I had my own newspapers when I lived overseas, The idea of being out in the wilderness didn't frighten me so much.

00:15:36.000 So when I moved to Substack, I just thought, this is probably going to be cool.

00:15:39.000 It's probably going to work, right?

00:15:41.000 But a lot of people who came up, you do think, wow, I'm never going to get back in to the club.

00:15:49.000 And if I don't make enough money, that's it.

00:15:52.000 That's it for me, which is why they're staying.

00:15:54.000 But look at how much success they've had.

00:15:57.000 The audience out there is huge.

00:15:59.000 They're probably making more money than they ever dreamed they would make.

00:16:02.000 And, you know, there's opportunities to do all kinds of amazing things now because of that.

00:16:07.000 Yeah, there really is.

00:16:08.000 And, you know, I was really fortunate that I had other jobs when I first started doing this podcast.

00:16:14.000 And the podcast was never – the beginning of it at first was never for money.

00:16:18.000 It was just for fun.

00:16:20.000 I never thought of it as a job at all.

00:16:21.000 And so when I had gotten it to the point where it started to become valuable, There were a bunch of vultures that tried to buy half of it or take over.

00:16:32.000 There was one podcast network that literally wanted to take 50% of the show just to be on the network.

00:16:39.000 And I was like, what are you talking about?

00:16:41.000 Why would I do that?

00:16:42.000 They go, well, you'll have more ad revenue because you'll be connected to our, whatever, our network. 1.00

00:16:48.000 I go, what fucking network? 0.98

00:16:50.000 Like, this is a podcast, man. 0.99

00:16:52.000 This is a different, like, they didn't even understand, and this was quite a few years ago before it had gotten big, but the point is, I know friends that took that deal, that gave their podcast over to this network and became a part of it, and now they're probably kicking themselves.

00:17:08.000 Right.

00:17:09.000 Because I'm sure it's a permanent deal.

00:17:11.000 I'm sure they own 50% of it forever or whatever percentage.

00:17:15.000 Maybe they started with 50 and negotiated down.

00:17:17.000 I don't know.

00:17:18.000 But the point is, there's so many people that when given the opportunity to have...

00:17:23.000 Like, some real security.

00:17:25.000 Like, you're going to be connected to this network, they're going to protect you, they're going to bring in the ads, you don't have to do anything, and they just take a percentage of it, but you will always have income, because you'll be connected to us, and we are a big corporation, and you're like, Oh, just like when I was on NBC. This is going to be great.

00:17:43.000 Like, it'll give me security.

00:17:44.000 And you start thinking about your mortgage, and you start thinking about your kid's college, and all that stuff, and you go, okay, this is a good thing.

00:17:51.000 And it's hard.

00:17:52.000 It's hard to just say, no.

00:17:54.000 No, I'm going to be independent.

00:17:55.000 But this is the time.

00:17:57.000 This is the best time ever to be independent.

00:18:00.000 Yeah, and that's why it is a very hard decision for people to walk away and go independent and do what I did, what Glenn did, what Crystal and Kyle did.

00:18:11.000 But it works, and the other choice, staying with traditional media, is increasingly not a good bargain for you.

00:18:20.000 Not only is the piece of the pie there getting smaller and smaller all the time because their ratings are getting worse, Advertising revenue is dropping off, but the ideological conformity in those organizations is getting worse, and that is something that never used to exist before,

00:18:39.000 or at least not to this degree, anywhere near this degree.

00:18:42.000 So you're going to be miserable doing that.

00:18:45.000 You might as well do the job the way you want to do it, do it correctly, and get paid In a commensurate way for doing it.

00:18:52.000 I think there's a bunch of people, though, that haven't established a large following that are worried, rightly so, of being lost in this.

00:19:01.000 Sure.

00:19:01.000 So I don't think this is available to anyone.

00:19:03.000 It's obviously available to you and to Glenn and to Jimmy Dore and a lot of these other people.

00:19:07.000 They've already gathered up a large, loyal audience because they know that they can trust these people.

00:19:12.000 Or the people, rather, know they can trust them to be honest and to just give their take on things. 0.97

00:19:18.000 But there's a lot of people that are, they're stuck because, you know, they're not really well known and they're kind of in this system and they're realizing while they're in this system that it's pretty fucked and you have two choices. 0.72

00:19:31.000 Either you try to fight against it and you might get ostracized or you try to conform and then you get lost and then you become what you despise.

00:19:42.000 Which is more common than not, right?

00:19:44.000 Yeah, I think that's what's happening.

00:19:46.000 Either they're moving the people out, which you see at an organization like the New York Times, Where they're just kind of moving the old guard out, the old traditional reporting types.

00:19:57.000 And they had a lot of really amazing reporters at the New York Times, people who really knew how to do the job.

00:20:03.000 And they're just kind of being pushed out, whether for one reason or another.

00:20:07.000 Or, you know, the other thing is you stay in and gradually the mindset takes hold of you and you get lost mentally.

00:20:15.000 And I think that's what's happening to a lot of people.

00:20:17.000 I mean, I knew Rachel back in her Air America days. 0.95

00:20:22.000 You know, we were friends once, sort of.

00:20:24.000 And it's just, it's amazing to me what's happened.

00:20:30.000 I read your book with her and who else on the cover?

00:20:34.000 Hannity's on the cover?

00:20:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:36.000 Hating.

00:20:37.000 Hating, that's right. 0.98

00:20:38.000 I didn't want to fuck it up, so I didn't want to ask. 0.98

00:20:40.000 But when you compared her and you said Rachel Maddow is Bill O'Reilly, you're like, Jesus Christ.

00:20:49.000 But you're like, but wait, I think he's right.

00:20:52.000 It's just ideologically opposite, but the same kind of thing, where there's just blind allegiance to the party doctrine.

00:21:03.000 Right.

00:21:03.000 And not a reporter anymore.

00:21:05.000 No, and what O'Reilly did during the Iraq War era, he was using this sort of hyper-patriotic persona.

00:21:14.000 His whole thing was sort of bullying people who...

00:21:21.000 You know, weren't behind the war effort enough or who, you know, if they...

00:21:26.000 If he didn't like them, he would sort of accuse them of being, you know, in sympathy with the terrorists.

00:21:32.000 And, you know, Rachel's basically doing that same gig with... 1.00

00:21:35.000 But it's Russians this time around, you know? 1.00

00:21:38.000 It's the same act.

00:21:40.000 It's just a different audience.

00:21:42.000 And they're using exactly the same...

00:21:44.000 It's this audience optimization method of making money where you identify the audience...

00:21:50.000 Then you give them a whole bunch of information that you know is going to, you know, sort of please their sensibilities and tickle their prejudices.

00:21:59.000 And you just keep feeding that stuff to them over and over and over again.

00:22:03.000 And yeah, she's playing that game.

00:22:06.000 It works to a degree.

00:22:08.000 She's so rich.

00:22:09.000 Right, yeah.

00:22:10.000 She's balling out of control. 0.89

00:22:12.000 She's balling out of control. 0.89

00:22:13.000 And now she only works, like, way less hours or something?

00:22:16.000 Right, yeah.

00:22:17.000 I don't know exactly what the new deal is, but...

00:22:20.000 But it's like way less broadcast time.

00:22:23.000 Right.

00:22:23.000 Yeah.

00:22:23.000 For more money.

00:22:24.000 Yeah.

00:22:25.000 And I mean, that's a tough job.

00:22:26.000 I mean, you would know, right?

00:22:27.000 I mean, like four hours, however many days a week doing live work like that.

00:22:33.000 Let me stop you right there. 0.98

00:22:33.000 It's not hard. 0.98

00:22:34.000 No, you don't think so?

00:22:35.000 Not this.

00:22:35.000 This is not hard.

00:22:37.000 This is the biggest scam that's ever existed, this job.

00:22:39.000 The fact that people think this is hard.

00:22:41.000 Now, I've had hard jobs.

00:22:42.000 This is not one of them.

00:22:44.000 No.

00:22:44.000 I mean, it requires you to pay attention.

00:22:46.000 Right, that's true. 1.00

00:22:47.000 What the fuck? 0.99

00:22:47.000 I like to pay attention anyway. 0.99

00:22:49.000 Right, right.

00:22:49.000 It's not hard.

00:22:50.000 Yeah.

00:22:51.000 It's not hard.

00:22:52.000 Well, yeah.

00:22:54.000 There's hard jobs out there. 0.98

00:22:55.000 It would be a fucking travesty to call this a hard job. 0.98

00:22:59.000 Compared to a real job. 0.98

00:23:00.000 I keep forgetting, which is something that one should never do.

00:23:03.000 Yeah, we're removed from real jobs by too many years.

00:23:06.000 No, I've had real jobs.

00:23:08.000 In fact, believe it or not, you played the Wilbur Theatre, right?

00:23:12.000 Yes.

00:23:13.000 So, I worked demolition once, and I demolished, my crew demolished that basement. 0.99

00:23:20.000 No shit! 0.99

00:23:20.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:23:21.000 Wow!

00:23:21.000 Yeah, so we did the job that helped turn that into the Wilbur Theatre, that cellar, a million years ago.

00:23:28.000 That's pretty cool.

00:23:28.000 I was being punished for getting...

00:23:31.000 I got in a scrape, like a drugs thing, and so my parents decided that I needed to learn a little bit about real work, so I ended up doing demolition for a long time in Boston.

00:23:43.000 Dude, I had a construction job when I was, well, I had many of them because my father was an architect growing up, but when I was 19 years old, my buddy Jimmy, Jimmy Lawless, shout out to Jimmy, he got me a gig working with him.

00:23:57.000 I think I only lasted like a month. 0.87

00:23:59.000 We were building a Knights of Columbus Hall somewhere in Massachusetts, and it was during the summer, so it was hot as fuck, muddy, and I was carrying cement and pressure-treated lumber all day. 0.87

00:24:12.000 That's all I did.

00:24:13.000 And this was back when I was still competing, so I would go to the gym after work.

00:24:19.000 And I could not do anything.

00:24:20.000 I could barely hit the bag.

00:24:22.000 I was so tired.

00:24:23.000 Right.

00:24:23.000 And I remember thinking to myself, like, this is a very important moment for me because I could just be doing this forever.

00:24:30.000 And you'd want to be doing anything but that.

00:24:33.000 Anything but that.

00:24:33.000 I was 19 and it was a real wake-up call.

00:24:36.000 I was like, okay, we got to figure this out because there's no way this is going to work.

00:24:40.000 I can't do this.

00:24:41.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:24:42.000 I mean, in that first job that I did, you know, the big stairs there at the Wilbur Theater would go down.

00:24:48.000 So we had to basically jackhammer a whole bunch of concrete out of that floor and then figure out a way to get it up into a dumpster.

00:24:54.000 So it was big, big chunks of...

00:24:58.000 Concrete and stone.

00:24:59.000 And we tried all these different ways, like driving a bobcat up the stairs, like all these different things.

00:25:04.000 There was no way to automate it.

00:25:05.000 The only way to do it was to put it in a rubber bucket and have two guys carry each one up and down the stairs.

00:25:11.000 So the guy I was with had just gotten out of jail and he was like, this is what the people who built the pyramids must have felt like, you know, carrying that stuff up the stairs.

00:25:22.000 Yeah, if that's how they did it.

00:25:24.000 I used to work in that basement.

00:25:27.000 There was a comedy club in that basement called Duck Soup.

00:25:29.000 The guys who owned the Comedy Connection, Bill Blumenwright, who eventually took over the Wilbur, he bought it after these guys had kind of failed this one.

00:25:38.000 They decided to try this project of a really high-end...

00:25:43.000 Comedy club that only did clean comedy for respectable people and they served really nice food and it did not work out.

00:25:52.000 Because right across the street was Nick's Comedy Stop, which was wild and they were literally offering you, you can get paid in cash or cocaine.

00:26:01.000 That's real.

00:26:03.000 That sounds like where all the actual comics would want to play.

00:26:06.000 Exactly.

00:26:07.000 So we would work across the street, but you had to do surgery on your act.

00:26:12.000 You had to remove parts of your act to be able to work there.

00:26:15.000 What did they put in the sign?

00:26:16.000 Like, comedy but less funny?

00:26:18.000 No, you know, the idea was like, you know, Duck Soup, the great Groucho Marx, Marx Brothers movies.

00:26:24.000 That movie was, you know, they thought it was like one of the great classic movies, and they thought it would be fun to have this classy comedy club.

00:26:32.000 And so they had all these other options.

00:26:33.000 You know, there were Stitches and the Common Connection, all these other clubs.

00:26:36.000 They're like, let's have one club that's very high-end and beautiful, and it didn't work.

00:26:42.000 And so then it became an improv after that.

00:26:45.000 The improv took it over after that, and then eventually it just went under.

00:26:48.000 And then Bill, who's a real businessman, he turned it into the Wilbur.

00:26:54.000 They did Faneuil Hall for a while, and I think that's when Bill bought them.

00:26:58.000 And then they converted the Wilbur.

00:27:04.000 Yeah, that's the big venue now.

00:27:07.000 Yeah, I did my last Netflix special there.

00:27:09.000 Right, right.

00:27:09.000 Exactly.

00:27:10.000 It's a great place.

00:27:11.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:27:13.000 But those really hard jobs are very important for people.

00:27:16.000 That way you can never say a podcast is hard work.

00:27:21.000 Absolutely.

00:27:22.000 It's not even close.

00:27:23.000 But the thing that's going on now that's really interesting is watching all these pieces shuffle and move around, like the Substack thing and the podcast thing, and watching the reaction that traditional media has to it.

00:27:37.000 That's been unbelievable.

00:27:38.000 Go ahead.

00:27:38.000 Why?

00:27:38.000 It's because it used to be they ignored it, and then they recently just started attacking it.

00:27:43.000 And it's fascinating to watch because their ship keeps sinking. 1.00

00:27:48.000 And as their ship is sinking, they're like, you guys suck. 1.00

00:27:52.000 This is terrible. 1.00

00:27:53.000 What you're doing over there is terrible.

00:27:54.000 And they're going under while they're doing it.

00:27:57.000 It's amazing.

00:27:58.000 I first started hearing about this...

00:28:01.000 Last year, I knew somebody who worked at the Times, and he was basically saying, you know, the op-ed page is really worried about Substack.

00:28:10.000 I'm like, why would you be worried?

00:28:11.000 Like, you're the New York Times.

00:28:12.000 You've got 7 million subscribers.

00:28:14.000 Who cares?

00:28:14.000 But they're really worried about it.

00:28:17.000 And they did, you know, the series of hit pieces have come out over and over and over again.

00:28:22.000 It's one line of attack after another.

00:28:24.000 It's misogynistic.

00:28:26.000 It's anti-trans.

00:28:27.000 It's this or that.

00:28:31.000 It's just a mechanism.

00:28:32.000 It's a cash register.

00:28:34.000 It's not anything.

00:28:35.000 It's not really a company.

00:28:36.000 But it speaks to the desperation within The news business that they are convinced that if they are losing audience, it must be because somebody is stealing it from them.

00:28:49.000 Whereas what happened, in fact, is that they lost their audience first because – and this goes all the way back to the WMD episode.

00:28:57.000 And then after that, I think Russiagate was a big one that turned off a lot of people.

00:29:04.000 And they've been steadily losing audience just because of factual issues.

00:29:09.000 They were already out there.

00:29:11.000 That audience was already out there, as you know.

00:29:14.000 But they're trying to blame it on somebody.

00:29:17.000 Whether it's factual or not, I think people are very tired of being lectured to in this sort of very clear ideological bent.

00:29:26.000 The angle that they're taking in these papers when they're discussing a real news story when the actual facts are available to people as they start seeing the facts and then seeing the big picture and then they go back to that original article they read they get angry they get annoyed like you guys are bullshitting me like this is a bullshit version of what happened and it's so clear that you keep doing it in the same direction so now every time you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever paper it is you have to go okay

00:29:57.000 how much of this is legit well who's writing it you have to think like which guy is writing it and How accurate is his reporting? 1.00

00:30:04.000 How full of shit is he? 0.99

00:30:06.000 Is she a hardcore lefty, or is she a centrist? 1.00

00:30:10.000 What am I getting here?

00:30:12.000 It used to be I could just read the New York Times, and this is the story.

00:30:16.000 Hey, Jamie, I made a little spill.

00:30:18.000 Chuck me something over there. 0.99

00:30:23.000 This stuff, I'm subconsciously trying to pour it out because I know I'll drink the whole goddamn thing. 0.99

00:30:29.000 This is this Black Rifle coffee, sugary... 0.98

00:30:32.000 It's actually...

00:30:34.000 Too good.

00:30:34.000 It's really good, yeah.

00:30:35.000 It's too good.

00:30:35.000 Yeah, this is going to become a new problem in my life.

00:30:37.000 300 fucking milligrams or grams, yeah, milligrams of caffeine. 0.99

00:30:43.000 That's a lot. 0.99

00:30:43.000 It's awesome. 0.99

00:30:45.000 Yeah, so I spelled it.

00:30:47.000 It's strange, but I think this is just what happens when something new comes around.

00:30:53.000 It's always what happens.

00:30:54.000 There's always, like, this attack against it, the denial that there's anything wrong with the original product.

00:30:59.000 I saw it in martial arts.

00:31:01.000 I mean, I was a part of martial arts when, you know, I was a child, and then when the UFC came along, there was all of this rejection of the idea behind it.

00:31:11.000 It was barbaric, it was, you know, you only need this, and you don't need to learn all this other stuff, and then eventually, everybody gave up.

00:31:18.000 Right.

00:31:18.000 And now it's clearly established, like, that is 100% the best form of martial art for an actual physical confrontation, is a combination of all the things.

00:31:27.000 It's with everything.

00:31:29.000 When something new comes along that's superior, there's a rejection of it, there's an attack against it, and then eventually the dust settles and people realize, like, oh, this is what's going on.

00:31:40.000 Yeah.

00:31:40.000 No, there's a total blindness within the media business to...

00:31:46.000 They just can't see how audiences perceive them.

00:31:50.000 Yeah.

00:31:51.000 You know, once upon a time, I think the idea within the news business was pretty simple.

00:31:58.000 Like, reporters were raised, basically, we'll get all the facts, we'll work really hard on getting it right, we'll give it to you, and then you do what you want with it.

00:32:07.000 It's not our job to tell you what decisions to make.

00:32:11.000 It's just our job to get it correct, right?

00:32:14.000 And then that's the news.

00:32:16.000 After that, you know, it's up to you to make your own political decisions.

00:32:21.000 But that's why political affiliation didn't necessarily mean so much back in the day.

00:32:25.000 It was always true that basically all reporters were Democrats, but it didn't show so much in the news media once upon a time because we had a professional ethos that just said, we're not supposed to care, right?

00:32:37.000 We go in to cover whatever.

00:32:39.000 We're just going to collect all the facts, get all the quotes, put it out there, make sure everything's been checked, and then it's your deal.

00:32:46.000 Now, there's this new ethos that What Wesley Lowery, the reporter, calls the view from nowhere journalism, which is what I just described, that that's not good enough, that they have to compensate for inequities in the system by Basically trying to impact how people behave through coverage.

00:33:07.000 And this is what they do all the time.

00:33:09.000 They're trying to get you to make political decisions by how they cover things.

00:33:15.000 And I saw this early on as a campaign reporter once when I was much younger, you know, in 2004 and 2008. I would sit on the bus with the reporters and they would be discussing which candidates they were going to describe as fringe,

00:33:33.000 which ones were going to be described as electable, which ones would be serious, right?

00:33:38.000 Because they enjoyed having the power of deciding for people, you know, who got to be taken seriously and who didn't.

00:33:47.000 And I think that urge To mold how people act is just ingrained in the business, and it's so off-putting.

00:33:58.000 It is.

00:33:59.000 Especially with something like the pandemic, people are desperate.

00:34:03.000 They really, really need just to get the basic information.

00:34:07.000 And instead, you know, when the pandemic happened, we were in the middle of this super intense culture war that was revolved around Trump.

00:34:14.000 So everything was viewed through that lens, you know, like hydroxychloroquine.

00:34:19.000 Trump liked it or Trump said he was taking it.

00:34:22.000 Therefore, it must be bad.

00:34:23.000 Therefore, you know, it must not work.

00:34:27.000 But that's not how it works.

00:34:28.000 It's not the drug's fault that Donald Trump took it.

00:34:31.000 Did you see that Fauci had actually written a paper on the effectiveness of chloroquine on coronaviruses?

00:34:38.000 What did he say?

00:34:39.000 It was from 2000, I want to say 2015 or 2016. But there was, he gave a statement about the effectiveness of chloroquine and coronaviruses.

00:34:55.000 See if you can find that.

00:34:57.000 Because it's really fascinating. 0.99

00:34:59.000 But yeah, it's one of those things that when it came up, when, I mean, Trump fucked so much up just by being Trump. 0.99

00:35:06.000 Exactly. 0.89

00:35:07.000 He broke people's, that Trump derangement syndrome, I used to think that was a funny thing that, you know, not even that funny, but a thing that Republicans would say to try to invalidate anything that liberals would say.

00:35:20.000 Like, oh, they've got Trump derangement syndrome.

00:35:22.000 But as time has gone on, and you've seen it over and over again, and the justification for not just bias, but blatant Distortions of the facts in order to impart a narrative,

00:35:38.000 like clearly doing it on purpose.

00:35:40.000 And they've done it with almost this righteousness because they're combating something, this evil.

00:35:47.000 This evil Trumpster and this evil Trump thing that's happening.

00:35:51.000 Right. 0.95

00:35:53.000 Again, that's new.

00:35:55.000 That's a new thing.

00:35:57.000 Another example of that is what you were talking about before, the lab leak story.

00:36:02.000 Trump believed it, therefore it must not be true. 0.99

00:36:05.000 Whereas, I think the old school reporters would look at it, we wouldn't give a shit. 0.99

00:36:11.000 Whether it came from a lab or whether it came from a cave somewhere, We don't care. 0.99

00:36:18.000 Like, we're not supposed to care.

00:36:19.000 Our job is just to find out, you know?

00:36:22.000 And so they would dig.

00:36:25.000 And there was not a satisfactory explanation, you know, throughout all of last year.

00:36:31.000 We didn't know exactly where it came from.

00:36:34.000 So why did we stop looking?

00:36:37.000 We stopped looking because it had been decided just sort of collectively that, well, Here's the story we're going to have.

00:36:43.000 We're going to stick to it.

00:36:45.000 Anybody who has any other point of view on it is clearly a Trump lover or whatever, and we have to denounce that person.

00:36:53.000 We have to call them a conspiracy theorist.

00:36:56.000 We're going to have this fact-checking that piously declares that this is wrong.

00:37:05.000 And, of course, it turns out that then they backtrack and they think that there's not going to be repercussions for that.

00:37:10.000 Well, you know, that's why people are fleeing traditional media.

00:37:14.000 Don't you think they were forced into it, though?

00:37:15.000 They were forced to backtrack.

00:37:16.000 Yeah, they had to because – well, actually, I mean, that's still a little bit of a mystery as to why – They suddenly decided to back off.

00:37:27.000 Well, Josh Rogin was responsible for quite a bit of it, and he's done amazing stuff.

00:37:32.000 I mean, his work in exposing the whole disinformation campaign and the emails and the fact that Fauci was the one that restarted the gain-of-function research and funding gain-of-function research, all that stuff.

00:37:48.000 I mean, and he's a Washington Post guy.

00:37:50.000 I mean, he's rock solid.

00:37:52.000 Right. 0.99

00:37:53.000 I think there was a bunch of people that kind of, when he started reporting all this stuff and saying all these things, a bunch of people that were like, fuck, he went out there. 0.98

00:38:01.000 Right. 0.98

00:38:01.000 Like, you know, he went out the door and he's like, guys, I can breathe! 0.98

00:38:04.000 And everyone's like, fuck, should we go outside? 0.98

00:38:06.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

00:38:08.000 You know what I mean?

00:38:09.000 Is this the Fauci thing?

00:38:12.000 Sort of.

00:38:13.000 2005. 2005 studies found that chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine, was effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS-CoV.

00:38:23.000 The official name for SARS, the research was conducted in cell culture conditions, so in vitro, meaning the drug was not administered to actual SARS patients.

00:38:31.000 That's the same thing they found with ivermectin, that it stops viral replication in vitro.

00:38:37.000 Yeah, if you look at the announcement for the Oxford study on ivermectin, they use very similar language to say that this is a drug that has had in vitro success.

00:38:49.000 It has some antiviral properties.

00:38:55.000 Not, there isn't a long record of it, but it has some, right?

00:38:59.000 And that contradicted this, again, it was much more of a faith-based thing in the reporting.

00:39:06.000 It's, we believe that this is not true, so therefore, we're just not going to touch it.

00:39:14.000 Well, the horse dewormer narrative is where it got really weird because it was clearly the same language over and over again.

00:39:20.000 Which, by the way, that stuff is in heart dewormer for dogs.

00:39:25.000 I have heart dewormer for my dog.

00:39:27.000 I don't even know who bought it, but it was in my house.

00:39:30.000 And the other day I was like, look at this.

00:39:32.000 What's in this? 0.99

00:39:32.000 And I pick it up and it's fucking ivermectin. 0.99

00:39:35.000 Really? 0.99

00:39:35.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:39:36.000 And it was, you know, like heart, like that company, I think it's called Heart, that makes it.

00:39:42.000 Right.

00:39:43.000 Isn't that what it's called?

00:39:44.000 H-A-R-T or something like that?

00:39:45.000 Heart guard?

00:39:45.000 Yeah, is that what it is?

00:39:46.000 I don't know.

00:39:47.000 But whatever it is, it was four dogs.

00:39:49.000 There's a picture of a dog on it.

00:39:50.000 I didn't even know we had it in my house. 1.00

00:39:53.000 And I open up the package and I look at it and I'm like, motherfucker. 0.99

00:39:56.000 But they didn't say, that's it. 1.00

00:39:59.000 Heart guard.

00:40:00.000 That's it. 1.00

00:40:01.000 That shit. 1.00

00:40:01.000 That shit's ivermectin. 1.00

00:40:04.000 There it is. 1.00

00:40:04.000 So, when they started saying horse dewormer, like, that was the thing that kept getting said over and over and over again. 1.00

00:40:13.000 Horse dewormer.

00:40:14.000 Horse, horse, horse, horse.

00:40:15.000 Right.

00:40:16.000 Like, why?

00:40:17.000 Like, what happened there?

00:40:18.000 Like, how did that narrative get out there when you're talking about a drug that's been administered to...

00:40:23.000 I think it's more than four billion times.

00:40:27.000 Four billion prescriptions have been filled for that stuff.

00:40:30.000 There's only, like...

00:40:31.000 I want to say there's, like...

00:40:34.000 Two billion horses on Earth?

00:40:39.000 Like, how many billion horses are there?

00:40:43.000 I bet there's not even...

00:40:45.000 There's probably not even two billion horses.

00:40:48.000 So there's like, no, why would you confuse that?

00:40:50.000 A drug that's been given to so many people, why would you confuse that as being primarily a horse drug?

00:40:57.000 58 million.

00:40:58.000 There's only 58 million horses.

00:41:00.000 So we far outnumber horses.

00:41:01.000 This is something I never knew.

00:41:03.000 Yeah, I was pretty sure of that. 0.99

00:41:04.000 But the fact that you're talking about a drug that couldn't have been given to all the horses, even if they gave it to every fucking horse. 0.99

00:41:11.000 Right. 0.99

00:41:12.000 Yeah.

00:41:12.000 Now, this was amazing when they did that.

00:41:15.000 I mean, I had arguments with other people in the business about this because I wrote a couple of stories about ivermectin mainly because some of the internet platforms were shutting down people who were talking about it,

00:41:31.000 right?

00:41:32.000 Companies like Facebook and YouTube had eliminated, among other things, congressional testimony about this.

00:41:43.000 That seemed to me just crazy.

00:41:45.000 Even if the person's wrong, you have to leave it up there as a public service.

00:41:49.000 You should be able to find it.

00:41:52.000 But reporters were absolutely convinced that this drug was evil, I guess because it wasn't the vaccine.

00:42:06.000 And just the whole concept that people would be looking for some other kind of treatment or might welcome it was just deeply and profoundly offensive to them.

00:42:15.000 So they came up with this pejorative term, this horse dewormer thing.

00:42:20.000 And it was amazing, the unanimity.

00:42:23.000 As you said, it was in every single story.

00:42:25.000 The language was exactly the same.

00:42:27.000 Yeah, it was really strange.

00:42:29.000 Right?

00:42:29.000 And even that is odd because, again, once upon a time, you're a classic journalist with somebody like Seymour Hersh, and the whole idea of being a journalist was to not think like other people.

00:42:41.000 You were your own person.

00:42:44.000 You thought for yourself.

00:42:45.000 You made your own decisions about things.

00:42:47.000 And that was valuable.

00:42:49.000 The whole point of a job was to be like that.

00:42:52.000 Yeah.

00:42:53.000 Because it required somebody who had the ability to look at every situation completely objectively and not be affected by peer pressure.

00:43:04.000 Like, that was a prerequisite for being able to do this job well.

00:43:08.000 The idea that we're all going to parrot each other's thinking about things Is totally alien to what this job is supposed to be about.

00:43:16.000 And now, all of a sudden, it's become the opposite.

00:43:19.000 It's become, if you even try to opt out of doing that, you know, you're suspect.

00:43:25.000 You're going to be drummed out of the business, which is just nuts.

00:43:29.000 It's very strange.

00:43:30.000 Another thing that's one of my favorite things to watch is the compilation of all of the people on the left talking about how they would never take the vaccine because you never know what's in it if Trump's hands are on it.

00:43:46.000 That it's gonna, you know, who knows what the long-term consequences of it are going to be.

00:43:51.000 This is Biden. 0.99

00:43:53.000 Fucking Biden when he was running for president. 1.00

00:43:54.000 Are you gonna take the shot? 1.00

00:43:56.000 Who knows what it's gonna do to you?

00:43:57.000 There's no long-term test.

00:43:59.000 Kamala saying she wouldn't take the shot. 1.00

00:44:02.000 So many fucking people. 1.00

00:44:03.000 And those same people are the ones that just take the shot, man. 1.00

00:44:07.000 I know.

00:44:07.000 Like the same people.

00:44:09.000 The very same people.

00:44:10.000 The same people made it.

00:44:12.000 The same people, you know, they produced it.

00:44:14.000 They sold it.

00:44:14.000 This is the same people.

00:44:15.000 Yeah, and they came up with this whole phrase, pandemic of the unvaccinated.

00:44:23.000 Exactly the same people who were having vaccine hesitancy the year previously came up with this phrase.

00:44:30.000 And here's the part that's shameful.

00:44:32.000 It's one thing for a politician.

00:44:35.000 To use a phrase like that, that's clearly cooked up with their consultants in whatever evil political laboratory they sit around and decide how they're going to do their messaging campaigns.

00:44:48.000 But then for an anchor person, To get up and repeat it like it's his or her own thinking, that's just embarrassing.

00:44:57.000 Since when do we let politicians write our material for us?

00:45:03.000 I mean, it's just shameful.

00:45:06.000 It is, but I think it's just the last death twitches of that business.

00:45:12.000 I just think this is a sign of the times.

00:45:16.000 If you think about it, a decentralized source of news is really the only way we're going to trust it today.

00:45:23.000 Something that is completely independent of a large corporation where they have a lot of vested interests in pushing a certain narrative.

00:45:34.000 They're never going to be pure.

00:45:36.000 Not anymore. 0.93

00:45:37.000 I mean, whatever the fuck they did, when they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise on television, and we're one of only two countries on planet Earth that allows that, they allowed... 0.98

00:45:52.000 The deepest roots of corruption and of influence to get in the way of all narratives, of everything we say and do, and the fucking sheer amount of money that's being generated by that is almost unstoppable. 0.99

00:46:08.000 You could never cut all those roots. 0.81

00:46:10.000 There's no way.

00:46:12.000 It's at this point- Yeah.

00:46:13.000 And that amount of money is nothing to them.

00:46:16.000 Nothing.

00:46:17.000 Look at the amount of the profits that companies like Moderna and Pfizer are making right now.

00:46:25.000 To buy the ascent of basically all the networks, all you have to do is send a tiny percentage of your quarterly profits to a handful of news networks.

00:46:37.000 And to them, that's like manna from heaven.

00:46:39.000 I mean, again, the news business is so starved for revenue that they'll bend to anybody, basically.

00:46:46.000 Did you see that—I mean, I know Jimmy Dore covered it, but quite a few other people have realized it now—the amount of money that Bill Gates has spent on influencing media?

00:46:59.000 No, I didn't.

00:47:01.000 It's somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million.

00:47:04.000 He's donated to these various media organizations, which for sure has some sort of an impact on how they cover him.

00:47:14.000 Right.

00:47:14.000 Well, of course, yeah.

00:47:15.000 And look, once upon a time, we were – I haven't said that many times.

00:47:21.000 We were trained to know that, for instance, think tanks, right, like who was funding them because think tanks are who get quoted in the New York Times and the Washington Post, right?

00:47:35.000 So they're generating research that goes to journalists and like sort of surreptitiously that ends up becoming – What's covered.

00:47:44.000 And so that's how the Gates Foundation, for instance, will work its way into coverage.

00:47:49.000 It'll sponsor research in an area like education.

00:47:52.000 That's one of the things I'm covering now.

00:47:54.000 And its research becomes, it gets into the news that way.

00:48:01.000 But we were supposed to once have our ears up And be conscious of who was paying for all this research.

00:48:10.000 Where was that information coming from?

00:48:12.000 And, you know, people don't really even think about it now.

00:48:14.000 See if you can find that story, Jamie.

00:48:16.000 I'm looking right now.

00:48:17.000 I'm reading an article about someone last year actually was looking into it.

00:48:23.000 Here, I'll show you.

00:48:25.000 Journalism's gatekeepers is what it's called.

00:48:28.000 Columbia Journalism Review.

00:48:31.000 Is that a respected publication?

00:48:33.000 Yeah.

00:48:33.000 I mean, look, they've had their issues, but that's the top media criticism outlet, right?

00:48:41.000 Okay, so this is last year.

00:48:43.000 It says, I recently examined nearly 20,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation made through the end of June and found that more than $250 million going towards journalism.

00:48:52.000 Receipts included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde.

00:49:04.000 Le Monde, is that how you say it?

00:49:05.000 Yeah, Le Monde.

00:49:06.000 I think?

00:49:33.000 We're good to go.

00:49:42.000 That Gates commissioned to create a news site to promote the success of aid groups.

00:49:46.000 In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations, which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates funding into the fourth estate.

00:49:59.000 Yeah, and as a reporter, you may or may not be aware of all the different ways that money will get in, you know, work its way into the business.

00:50:08.000 But unconsciously, it just sort of seeps in.

00:50:11.000 And that's how it works.

00:50:14.000 Nobody comes and tells you, well, don't cover this.

00:50:17.000 Well, maybe they do now, actually.

00:50:19.000 Or, you know, take this approach to covering education.

00:50:24.000 What ends up happening is that you just kind of get a feel based on the reaction of your editor.

00:50:29.000 To whatever pitch you're giving at the moment.

00:50:34.000 Hey, would you be interested in the story about whether or not this approach to standardized testing worked?

00:50:44.000 And if the editor says, yeah, that's interesting, maybe, then you know just never to broach that again.

00:50:51.000 But if it's in the right ideological Interesting.

00:51:00.000 Yeah.

00:51:00.000 And that's how it works.

00:51:01.000 That's how it works with everything.

00:51:02.000 It works, you know, with foreign policy.

00:51:06.000 I mean, when I worked in Russia, if you send the story, if you pitch the story to an American editor about how The US-based, the US-funded reform effort was working and there was a growing middle class in provincial Russia that was prospering and people were now taking vacations to Ibiza and stuff like that.

00:51:29.000 You could get anybody to buy that story.

00:51:31.000 But if you came to them with a story about how Actually, you know, the transformation of capitalism has been really slow.

00:51:39.000 People have lost their healthcare.

00:51:41.000 There's an explosion of violent crime and addiction, and people are more and more gravitating towards right-wing politics, you know, in large part because of the rapid changes that they weren't ready for.

00:51:56.000 You could not get that story sold, right?

00:51:59.000 So what ended up happening when I was in Russia, As they kept sending back all these positive reports about what was happening, this was before Putin, and Americans got this idea that things in Russia were going great, and the company was really prospering.

00:52:17.000 In fact, I was doing stories when I was there about how Money didn't even exist in the villages.

00:52:25.000 The only people who would actually have cash in most remote Russian villages would be pensioners because they would get it once a month from the mail system.

00:52:35.000 I went to places where the people actually bought and sold things with moonshine, like the Russian equivalent of moonshine.

00:52:42.000 Because that was like a unit of currency.

00:52:45.000 They were doing subsistence farming. 0.99

00:52:47.000 I mean, it was completely fucked, life in rural Russia. 0.98

00:52:51.000 But if you picked up the New York Times, what you read is, you know, the emerging middle class was doing great. 0.98

00:52:56.000 You know, people have VCRs in Samara and stuff like that.

00:53:01.000 And that's how it works.

00:53:02.000 Like, you get a sense of what they want, you give it to them, and, you know, over time, you just stop thinking about it.

00:53:09.000 But it's not a healthy way to do it.

00:53:12.000 The idea that there's no currency at all, and they're just subsistence farming and trading, and trading in moonshine, that's wild.

00:53:20.000 Yeah, I actually did it myself.

00:53:23.000 I did a story about this. 0.92

00:53:24.000 I used to travel the country with this guy who was blooming around a professional clown.

00:53:28.000 So we would do these things where we would get jobs in, you know, provincial Russia doing different things, you know, whether it was bricklaying or, you know, working in, you know, agriculture, that kind of stuff.

00:53:41.000 And in one place we went to, you know, we would do like a construction job and we'd get paid in what they call Samagon, which is like moonshine.

00:53:51.000 Was it nasty?

00:53:53.000 It works. 1.00

00:53:55.000 Megan Murphy gave me some shit from Mexico. 1.00

00:53:58.000 How rough? 1.00

00:54:00.000 I can still...

00:54:01.000 It's like nightmares.

00:54:03.000 It's so rough.

00:54:04.000 She drinks it all the time.

00:54:05.000 I know what's wrong with her.

00:54:07.000 But we open up the bottle and I was like, Jesus.

00:54:09.000 Yeah.

00:54:10.000 It's like getting hit with an oar when you drink this stuff.

00:54:13.000 Have you ever seen Werner Herzog's documentary Happy People?

00:54:17.000 No.

00:54:18.000 Although I love Martin Herzog.

00:54:20.000 What was it about?

00:54:21.000 It's about people living in rural Russia.

00:54:23.000 Oh, really?

00:54:23.000 Life in the Taiga.

00:54:24.000 Happy People.

00:54:25.000 It's one of my favorite documentaries.

00:54:26.000 It's really fascinating because these people live just hunter-gatherer, fisherman, trapper existences.

00:54:36.000 And I believe they sell pelts and they'll use that for snowmobiles and tools and things like that.

00:54:46.000 But essentially all of their food, all of their subsistence comes, this is it, comes entirely from hunting and trapping and they have no mental health problems.

00:54:57.000 They're all unreasonably happy.

00:55:00.000 They're really, like, when you, you know, you're getting translations of them, you know, it's all in subtitles, but they're talking about how happy they are, and they talk about all the things they love about this particular way of living, and, you know,

00:55:16.000 and this is what a man needs to do, and this is what a trapper does, and this is what a hunter does, and this is what...

00:55:22.000 And they're talking about it with this pride and this...

00:55:27.000 I don't know, man, this really unusual resolve.

00:55:31.000 They found their niche.

00:55:33.000 They don't have this desire to escape.

00:55:35.000 They enjoy life.

00:55:37.000 And so he called it Happy People.

00:55:40.000 And he's doing the narration, which makes it interesting, too.

00:55:45.000 No, his narrations are always great.

00:55:47.000 A Year in the Taiga is what it's called. 0.99

00:55:49.000 It's fucking great. 0.99

00:55:50.000 It's really good. 0.99

00:55:51.000 That sounds awesome.

00:55:52.000 It makes sense that whatever it is we're doing, that if you can avoid having to have interaction with that, it sounds like it would be a great life.

00:56:05.000 Do you feel an obligation?

00:56:07.000 Because there's not that many of you. 0.99

00:56:10.000 I mean, I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass, but I will. 0.99

00:56:13.000 There's not that many of you out there. 0.99

00:56:15.000 There's not that many people that I can say, like, I can send an article that you wrote, and I can go, this is legit.

00:56:22.000 You know, I'll send it to my friends, like, read this.

00:56:24.000 This is crazy.

00:56:24.000 Thank you.

00:56:25.000 Yeah.

00:56:35.000 Yeah.

00:56:36.000 Yeah.

00:56:38.000 Yeah.

00:56:49.000 The news is kind of split into three parts, right?

00:56:52.000 There's right-wing media, there's, you know, hashtag resistance media, and then there's this independent thing where, you know, it's people like you and me and Glenn and Crystal and Kyle and stuff like that.

00:57:04.000 It is small and emergent, and it's a lot of attention.

00:57:10.000 I think there's a lot of pressure on us to figure things out because we haven't figured things out.

00:57:15.000 Like, Substack is really great for getting a couple of us paid a good deal of money, but we haven't figured out how to do, like...

00:57:24.000 In-depth investigative reporting.

00:57:26.000 We haven't figured out how to pay for that.

00:57:28.000 Right.

00:57:29.000 Foreign reporting.

00:57:30.000 How would you pay for that without crowdfunding it?

00:57:32.000 And if you crowdfunded it, wouldn't everybody know what you were doing?

00:57:35.000 Yeah.

00:57:36.000 That would be a problem, right?

00:57:38.000 It would be difficult.

00:57:39.000 I think the problem is that this model works because people really, really like the content.

00:57:44.000 So they want a lot of it.

00:57:46.000 But, you know, the job I used to do, you know, I would take eight, ten weeks to write a single story.

00:57:51.000 Let me ask you this.

00:57:52.000 Mm-hmm.

00:57:53.000 Say if you have a story that you would normally get funded for by a large organization, how much money are we talking about?

00:58:00.000 Say if you have a really important story, how much money are we talking about?

00:58:05.000 How much would it cost?

00:58:05.000 Say if you want to do a deep dive into the Steele dossier.

00:58:10.000 So it would depend on what it was.

00:58:13.000 If it was a book-length thing, I think you know how much book deals usually cost, right?

00:58:18.000 But there's profit on the end of that, right?

00:58:20.000 There's millions.

00:58:21.000 There can be.

00:58:22.000 If you're lucky.

00:58:23.000 If you're lucky.

00:58:24.000 I think mostly investigative reporters, they'd be mostly happy with any kind of six-figure advance to do something like that.

00:58:33.000 In the magazine business, if you were going to do a big whack at something like that, 6,000 words, 10,000 words, you'd...

00:58:41.000 Once upon a time you would get $15,000, $20,000 to do that because you needed to take a while to do that work.

00:58:51.000 See, I feel like if there's real stories out there, there could be a fund that's dedicated to real stories.

00:58:58.000 I think?

00:59:15.000 Group chat, where you talk about an issue, like, hey, there's a thing we want to do on this.

00:59:22.000 It's probably going to cost $20,000 to get all the pieces moving.

00:59:27.000 Can we do something like that?

00:59:29.000 And then I think easily...

00:59:32.000 You could have a GoFundMe or, you know, whatever, Patreon, something along those lines, where people just donate to this fund that goes towards journalism.

00:59:43.000 And then at the end of the year, there could be an accounting of it so that everybody knows it's all legit and no one's siphoning money off of it.

00:59:50.000 I don't think that's that hard.

00:59:51.000 I think it would work.

00:59:53.000 It would definitely work financially.

00:59:56.000 You know, ProPublica sort of is based on that model.

01:00:02.000 There's only a couple of problems.

01:00:03.000 One is that there aren't that many people who know how to do the job that well left.

01:00:10.000 That's terrifying.

01:00:11.000 Yeah, no, it is.

01:00:12.000 It's pretty scary.

01:00:13.000 I mean, I think...

01:00:16.000 You could have found a fair number of reporters who knew how to do hardcore investigative journalism 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but the current generation has been raised on a different model that's based on Being quick,

01:00:34.000 getting a couple of quotes, putting something up fast, and it's brief, and it's more of a take than it is a dig.

01:00:41.000 And so that mentality of just investigative work is disappearing.

01:00:48.000 So you'd have the problem of finding people who can do it.

01:00:51.000 The other problem is audiences don't necessarily love what we call like eat-your-vegetables journalism, right?

01:00:59.000 There's some of it out there. 0.99

01:01:01.000 There are people who do good work, but they have difficulty getting people to follow it because people do love the shit that's out there, right? 0.98

01:01:11.000 They eat up the culture war stuff. 0.97

01:01:15.000 So those are two problems.

01:01:16.000 I think...

01:01:18.000 I've always approached it that part of the job is a sales job.

01:01:23.000 You have to get people interested in stuff that's important.

01:01:27.000 You have to find a way to do it, whether you're using humor, whether you're using illustrations.

01:01:33.000 It doesn't matter whether you use fiction writing narrative techniques to get people hooked on something.

01:01:40.000 That's part of the job, I think.

01:01:43.000 And you have to do the investigative stuff.

01:01:46.000 So it's a tough thing.

01:01:48.000 It takes a while to develop all those skills and they're not teaching kids in journalism to do that as much anymore.

01:01:55.000 Do you think that with the rise of independent journalists, do you think that it's possible that that might open up and people might look at that as a viable career path and they might say, hey, this is actually, it's actually coming back?

01:02:10.000 I would hope so.

01:02:11.000 I mean, if the money's there, it's the greatest job in the world.

01:02:14.000 I mean, like, you know, this job has taken me all over the planet.

01:02:18.000 I've gotten to meet every conceivable kind of person on Earth, everyone from presidential candidates to professional athletes to people in prison to, you know, everywhere.

01:02:29.000 And you can go anywhere doing journalism.

01:02:32.000 And you get to play detective sometimes, right?

01:02:36.000 It's a really cool thing.

01:02:37.000 You've got to do the work of...

01:02:39.000 You know, coming to a situation and figuring out who did what, and that's mentally and intellectually stimulating.

01:02:46.000 It's a great, great job.

01:02:49.000 But people have been...

01:02:51.000 I think they've been turned off to it because this new version of the job...

01:02:58.000 It is much more like professional flattery.

01:03:01.000 It's much more political.

01:03:03.000 They're training kids to be like courtiers basically and the people who come out of journalism schools now, they want to be close to power.

01:03:15.000 That's the attraction for them is the idea of being the person who gets to sit next to a Hillary Clinton aide at a bar at the end of a day and I know this person or I hang out at a party with this person.

01:03:28.000 Instead of going around the world or breaking a big story, that's what it is.

01:03:36.000 I think it's unfortunate because it's a cool job.

01:03:39.000 It's not just a cool job.

01:03:41.000 It's a cool job with romantic roots.

01:03:43.000 Absolutely.

01:03:44.000 Think about how many incredible stories have been broken and Woodward and Bernstein, how people look at these people.

01:03:53.000 Yeah, think of the people who've been journalists, who've done such incredible things, you know, everybody from, like, Ida Tarbell to Mark Twain to Hunter Thompson, Evelyn Waugh, like, you know, it's a great place for if you want to be a writer.

01:04:10.000 I mean, that's how I got into it, because I wanted to be a writer.

01:04:15.000 But if you want to be a great investigator, you know, you can do that's a way into it, too.

01:04:22.000 You know, there's the whole tradition of what we call participatory journalism, where you do something and then you write about it.

01:04:31.000 You know, George Plumpton was famous for playing professional football, the Paper Lion story.

01:04:39.000 But, you know, I've done some of that, you know, like doing, you know, work in Russia or, you know, going undercover.

01:04:46.000 I lived in a church in Texas for a while.

01:04:49.000 Did you really?

01:04:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:50.000 Actually, the John Hagee Church in San Antonio, I sort of joined that church and wrote about my experiences there.

01:05:00.000 What were you doing there?

01:05:01.000 So it was like an apocalyptic church.

01:05:03.000 It was one of those churches that sort of believes the end of the world is coming.

01:05:06.000 Did they have a date?

01:05:08.000 They didn't have a date, but they had all these crazy, like we had a retreat where they taught us to vomit our demons out into a paper bag.

01:05:18.000 So we all got together and like we had to do that.

01:05:23.000 So I had to pretend to be this like confused, spiritually confused person.

01:05:27.000 I feel kind of guilty about it in retrospect.

01:05:29.000 It was kind of...

01:05:30.000 I'm not so sure about it.

01:05:31.000 Well, isn't everybody a little spiritually confused?

01:05:33.000 We all are.

01:05:34.000 Yeah, I guess so.

01:05:35.000 But it's, you know, it's a fun job.

01:05:38.000 I mean, it's...

01:05:38.000 And I think it's really, really necessary, too, when done right.

01:05:42.000 I was just reading...

01:05:44.000 They didn't have serpents, did they?

01:05:45.000 Did they use serpents?

01:05:47.000 They didn't.

01:05:47.000 No, that's like the Pentecostal thing, I think.

01:05:49.000 Oh, right, right, right.

01:05:50.000 They're the ones who speak in tongues, too, right?

01:05:52.000 Well, we did do that.

01:05:53.000 Really?

01:05:54.000 Yes.

01:05:54.000 Oh, interesting.

01:05:55.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:05:55.000 I wasn't so good at that.

01:05:58.000 It all sounds the same.

01:06:00.000 It all goes into this...

01:06:01.000 It all sounds like a fake language.

01:06:05.000 No one does it well.

01:06:07.000 No one does it where it sounds like, wow, that sounds like...

01:06:10.000 Do you...

01:06:10.000 What is that?

01:06:13.000 Oh, God.

01:06:14.000 There's a manuscript that they think is fake and it's been around forever.

01:06:19.000 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? 0.55

01:06:21.000 No, no, no, no, no.

01:06:22.000 The Voynich...

01:06:23.000 What is it called?

01:06:30.000 Something, the Voynich manuscript.

01:06:33.000 That's it.

01:06:34.000 Yes.

01:06:35.000 There's this ancient book and they don't know how old it is.

01:06:40.000 How old do they think it is?

01:06:43.000 So they were thinking before it was like a long-lost language.

01:06:46.000 And as time's gone on, now they're kind of thinking it's not a language at all.

01:06:50.000 It's like someone just made up a language.

01:06:52.000 Oh, they made it up?

01:06:53.000 But it's really good.

01:06:54.000 So it's confusing people.

01:06:56.000 See if you can pull up some images of it.

01:07:00.000 So it's got drawings and this language that they thought, yeah, it's really interesting. 0.99

01:07:06.000 It's old as fuck. 0.98

01:07:08.000 But look at how all the letters are written. 0.99

01:07:11.000 It's all beautiful. 0.99

01:07:14.000 No one knows what the fuck it says. 0.96

01:07:16.000 They have no idea. 0.97

01:07:18.000 And there's a lot of theories, but for the longest time, they were trying to decipher it.

01:07:23.000 And I think...

01:07:25.000 I might be speaking out of tune here because they might have changed, but I think they decided somewhere along the line that it's not really a language, that someone just made up a fake language.

01:07:35.000 So I'm assuming that they had like...

01:07:39.000 Linguists and code breakers stick a crack at it and they just couldn't, right?

01:07:42.000 Yeah, they can't.

01:07:43.000 It's early 15th century.

01:07:44.000 So somewhere in the early 1400s, somebody, so clear that, was the manuscript decoded?

01:07:53.000 I don't think it has been, right?

01:07:54.000 2019, the manuscript was propelled back of the headlines once again when an academic made the explosive claim that he had succeeded where everyone had failed and successfully decoded the mysterious text. 0.84

01:08:05.000 I think that's horseshit, though.

01:08:07.000 I don't think that's true. 0.99

01:08:09.000 If somebody 500 years ago made this beautiful thing but made it complete gibberish just to fuck with us in the future, that's kind of amazing. 0.91

01:08:18.000 I really respect that. 0.94

01:08:20.000 Yeah, if that's what they did.

01:08:21.000 I don't know what they did.

01:08:23.000 Yeah, that's funny.

01:08:24.000 I think they think that somebody might have made it to sell to someone.

01:08:30.000 Like someone might have made it in the early 1400s to sell as like some ancient text.

01:08:36.000 It currently consists of around 240 pages.

01:08:39.000 There's evidence that additional pages are missing.

01:08:41.000 Some pages are foldable sheets of varying size.

01:08:46.000 Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely colored with sections of the manuscript showing people fictitious plants, astrological symbols, etc.

01:08:58.000 The text is written from left to right.

01:08:59.000 The manuscript was named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. I don't think that anyone has translated it.

01:09:11.000 There was so much fuckery back then. 0.99

01:09:13.000 Oh yeah. 0.98

01:09:14.000 There was, right?

01:09:15.000 That's hilarious.

01:09:16.000 That reminds me of the...

01:09:17.000 Go ahead.

01:09:17.000 I was going to say, the earliest books, while I was reading something about some of the earliest...

01:09:22.000 Somebody brought it up and then I read something...

01:09:24.000 I think somebody brought it up on this podcast.

01:09:26.000 I remember reading through this and I thought we had come to an answer, but I don't remember it and I'm not finding it.

01:09:32.000 The answer of whether or not it's legit?

01:09:34.000 Yeah, like even I thought they found out what some of the stuff was saying and it was just like nonsense or...

01:09:37.000 Yeah, I don't know if that's true.

01:09:39.000 I think it's really under debate.

01:09:41.000 But the earliest books, the real successful ones, were about, like, how to spot witches.

01:09:47.000 Like, everybody thinks, like, oh, well, once they started printing books, that's when people started learning things.

01:09:53.000 That's kind of like today.

01:09:54.000 Right, yeah, there's a lot of witch hunting going on today.

01:09:57.000 Like, if you think of, like, if YouTube was dominated by QAnon, QAnon theories, that was, like, ancient publishing.

01:10:05.000 Yeah, amazing.

01:10:07.000 When they first started writing books, because I never even thought of that.

01:10:09.000 I forget who brought that up.

01:10:10.000 Someone brought that up on the show, that the earliest books were about witches.

01:10:14.000 And I was like, what?

01:10:16.000 And they go, yeah, that was the most successful books at the time, once they started printing books, like, how to spot witches.

01:10:21.000 Right, right.

01:10:22.000 You talked about it on the ninth episode.

01:10:24.000 But who was it that...

01:10:26.000 The ninth episode ever?

01:10:27.000 Yeah.

01:10:28.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:10:29.000 Wow.

01:10:30.000 With whom?

01:10:31.000 My memory's gone.

01:10:32.000 My memory is like a hard drive that's like a one gigabyte hard drive, but I'm trying to stuff 18 gigs of information in there.

01:10:39.000 It just spills over.

01:10:40.000 Right.

01:10:40.000 And then someone will bring something.

01:10:41.000 I'll go, oh, yeah.

01:10:42.000 Oh, now I remember that.

01:10:43.000 Okay, I found the folder.

01:10:44.000 And then I'll, you know...

01:10:45.000 Yeah, no, for me, I think I'm just actually, it's shrinking in size, that hard drive.

01:10:52.000 Yeah, well, it's definitely not working that good.

01:10:55.000 But this Voynich manuscript, I forget what my point was, it's just...

01:11:01.000 It reminds me of the, remember the amazing story about the Zodiac Code?

01:11:06.000 Yes.

01:11:07.000 When they published it, and like the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, like their cryptographers...

01:11:14.000 Couldn't crack it, but then this couple, Sausalito, were just sitting at their breakfast table, and they were the ones who figured it out.

01:11:23.000 Oh, is that true?

01:11:24.000 Yeah, it is true.

01:11:25.000 Really?

01:11:25.000 Interesting.

01:11:25.000 It's in the original Zodiac books.

01:11:29.000 The cartoon is Robert Graysmith.

01:11:32.000 We were going somewhere with this when I got to the Voynich Manuscript.

01:11:35.000 What the hell were we talking about right before that?

01:11:38.000 Let me just...

01:11:40.000 There was a point.

01:11:42.000 Media business, professional standards.

01:11:44.000 Talking in tongues.

01:11:46.000 Speaking in tongues, yeah.

01:11:47.000 That's right, that's right.

01:11:48.000 So we were just talking about gibberish.

01:11:51.000 That fake languages. 0.99

01:11:52.000 That fake languages all sound the same. 0.99

01:11:56.000 Nobody does it where it sounds like, wow, that sounds like a good fake language.

01:12:00.000 No, it's incredibly unconvincing, but it was very hard for me to do.

01:12:05.000 I found that was the hardest part of the gig.

01:12:09.000 Didn't J.R.R. Tolkien write a whole fake language to go along with The Lord of the Rings?

01:12:14.000 Oh, like Hobbitish or something like that?

01:12:16.000 I think he did.

01:12:17.000 Or Elvish?

01:12:18.000 Yeah.

01:12:18.000 I think he did write some Elvish language.

01:12:21.000 I think he wrote a fake language to go along with his books.

01:12:24.000 So did Anthony Burgess.

01:12:27.000 Well, he just basically took Russian words and made them into slang for Clockwork Orange.

01:12:31.000 Oh, really?

01:12:32.000 Yeah.

01:12:33.000 But yeah, he had his own sort of slang language.

01:12:37.000 It's a cool thing to do.

01:12:38.000 Did this church, were they some of the people that did the Pray the Gay Away stuff? 1.00

01:12:45.000 So there was a little bit of that.

01:12:48.000 They didn't do conversion therapy exactly, but they definitely counseled people who were in that situation, let's put it that way.

01:12:58.000 I thought about doing one of those, but then where I would actually join one of those retreats, And see how they went about trying to convert people.

01:13:11.000 But yeah, that never worked out.

01:13:14.000 There was someone who was a famous politician and their husband was involved in one of those things.

01:13:24.000 I'm trying to remember who it was.

01:13:26.000 Is it Buttigieg?

01:13:27.000 No, no, no.

01:13:28.000 It was a female politician and the husband seemed... 1.00

01:13:34.000 He seemed gay, and he was involved.

01:13:37.000 That's a weird thing to say, but some people do seem gay.

01:13:43.000 It's like you risk being criticized and being called a bigot for saying that, but if someone's talking like this, it's very rare that it's a straight person, right?

01:13:52.000 Right, yeah.

01:13:54.000 Yeah, for whatever reason.

01:13:55.000 This is in no way a judgment against gay people.

01:13:59.000 This guy was doing Pray the Gay Away stuff and someone did some investigative reporting and did something and it was like this guy like clearly has a heart on and he's like behind me hugging me and telling me that you know Jesus does not want him to be gay and that we're all gonna work through this and he's like the whole thing was like uber bizarre. 0.69

01:14:21.000 That's crazy.

01:14:22.000 It's amazing that that whole conversion therapy thing was such a big deal even 10-15 years ago.

01:14:29.000 There have been a lot of changes since then.

01:14:33.000 Well, it changes in acceptance, hopefully, but also changes in an understanding of homosexuality, that this is not a choice.

01:14:42.000 It's like the idea that it is a choice is nonsense.

01:14:45.000 Right, right.

01:14:46.000 Although they're now changing the thinking on that.

01:14:50.000 Really?

01:14:50.000 Well, I mean, that's...

01:14:52.000 Not to wade into an area that's completely radioactive, but...

01:14:56.000 Too late.

01:14:57.000 It's the trans issue. 0.79

01:15:01.000 The whole idea that something like that is determined by biology runs a little bit counter to current thinking.

01:15:11.000 Oh, okay.

01:15:11.000 So trans is very different though, right?

01:15:14.000 Yeah.

01:15:15.000 The reason why trans is different because there are trans people, right, that start off as biological males and they identify with being a female but they've had children with females and they've had relationships with females and then as they transition they remain attracted to females.

01:15:37.000 Right.

01:15:37.000 This is very common.

01:15:38.000 So I don't think it's quite the same as gay. 0.99

01:15:42.000 It's very different in that it's whatever it is in the human mind that makes you identify with another gender, it seems to have nothing to do with your sexual preference.

01:15:54.000 Hmm.

01:15:55.000 Okay.

01:15:55.000 Yeah.

01:15:56.000 I know absolutely nothing about it.

01:15:58.000 I know enough about it.

01:16:00.000 Well, I knew almost nothing about it until I got attacked for attacking a female MMA fighter. 0.98

01:16:10.000 Who used to be male for 30 years and then wasn't telling anybody that she used to be male and transitioned and fought two different times against females that thought she was a biological female and beat the fuck out of them. 1.00

01:16:24.000 Like horrendous beatings. 0.99

01:16:26.000 Broke this lady's skull. 0.99

01:16:27.000 Like literally fractured her face.

01:16:29.000 It was scary stuff.

01:16:32.000 And when you watch the fights, the fights looked like a guy beating up a woman.

01:16:37.000 It wasn't like someone who's particularly skillful.

01:16:40.000 It was just wrong.

01:16:42.000 And it was at a very low level of MMA. Like, if you saw...

01:16:55.000 Right.

01:16:56.000 Right. 0.98

01:17:11.000 And I was fucking furious because I was like, this is crazy. 0.96

01:17:14.000 And in criticizing it and being very vocal about it, then I started having to start doing research on this. 0.98

01:17:24.000 Why are people reacting this way?

01:17:26.000 What is actually going on here?

01:17:28.000 Wasn't that one of the reasons they wanted Bernie to disavow you?

01:17:31.000 Yes.

01:17:34.000 What's amazing about this is that, again, it goes back to that same kind of instinct behind the lab leak theory process, which is we've decided something, right?

01:17:47.000 We're not going to discuss it anymore.

01:17:50.000 So if you discuss it, You are in the bad zone.

01:17:57.000 You're not even allowed to bring it up.

01:17:58.000 Not even allowed to bring it up.

01:18:00.000 And so there are just so many of these places in the kind of cultural landscape that are just, you know, no fly zones for talking about things.

01:18:10.000 Well, Abigail Schreier is experiencing that in the most hateful and aggressive way with her book, I believe it's called Irreversible Damage, which is all about rapid onset gender dysphoria that seems to be happening to a lot of young girls.

01:18:26.000 And they're trying to figure out what is going on when the percentage of people who identify as trans that are young girls is up several thousand percent, which is crazy.

01:18:38.000 What's happening?

01:18:40.000 Obviously, there are people who don't think that's happening and think that that rapid onset gender dysphoria isn't a thing.

01:18:50.000 I interviewed Abigail because she also had a problem with the internet platforms. 1.00

01:18:57.000 I think it was with Amazon, right?

01:19:00.000 Yes.

01:19:02.000 And again, that whole phenomenon of...

01:19:06.000 Okay, it's controversial.

01:19:08.000 Well, that used to be part of what having a First Amendment was all about.

01:19:13.000 You know, we talk about this stuff.

01:19:15.000 The whole point of having it is to protect discussions around things that are difficult, right?

01:19:21.000 Like, we don't have it so that we can have obvious conversations.

01:19:26.000 And so, if you think she's wrong, you know, let's talk about it, right?

01:19:33.000 Right.

01:19:34.000 Don't go to an internet platform and shut it down at the source and make it impossible for somebody to have the discussion.

01:19:42.000 Well, it used to be the right that everybody was terrified of that was going to burn books, and it was based on religion.

01:19:50.000 So now the left is doing it.

01:19:52.000 And it's based on religion also.

01:19:54.000 It's just a non-defined religion.

01:19:57.000 Right.

01:19:57.000 It's a religion of wokeness.

01:19:59.000 Like you have to have these parameters that you operate under.

01:20:03.000 And as soon as you step outside of those parameters, you're supposed to be shut down and de-platformed, which is the term.

01:20:09.000 Right.

01:20:09.000 And it's essentially the same thing.

01:20:11.000 You're calling for a book burning.

01:20:12.000 Right.

01:20:13.000 You're calling for a ban.

01:20:14.000 Yeah.

01:20:20.000 I agree with her, have agreed with some of the things she said, have disagreed with some of the other things that she said, have discussed these things, and realize that there is an issue here where people are malleable.

01:20:31.000 This is the concept, right?

01:20:36.000 Some sort of social acceptance and embracing of people who are trans and that this could be a problem with some people who are easily influenced and are maybe socially awkward or maybe even on the spectrum.

01:20:51.000 And then someone comes along and says, you feel weird because you're really trans.

01:20:58.000 And if you give that person testosterone, one of the things that happens with the administration of testosterone in people, particularly in girls, is there's a euphoria that comes with it, there's a sense of well-being, you get confidence,

01:21:13.000 and they might start thinking, this is what has been wrong with me all this time.

01:21:18.000 Now, these are not my words, these are not my opinions.

01:21:20.000 This is just explaining what this phenomenon supposedly how you can define it.

01:21:26.000 And I've done zero research.

01:21:28.000 So I just want to be real clear about that.

01:21:29.000 I don't know if that's actually what's going on.

01:21:32.000 Yeah, so the assertion is that you have people in clusters, you know, social clusters, who are, you know, they call it the social contagion phenomenon.

01:21:46.000 And there would be other factors, too, like therapeutic attention is also something that some people may think is a positive, right?

01:21:58.000 They might feel better about life because they're getting more attention from clinicians or from teachers, something like that.

01:22:06.000 But you have to test that, right?

01:22:08.000 The whole point is we're not deciding at the outset whether this is right or wrong.

01:22:15.000 The way science works is, well, let's do a study about that, figure out what's actually happening.

01:22:22.000 And instead, it's like having the conversation is now...

01:22:28.000 It's now dangerous, it's perilous, right?

01:22:31.000 Which is crazy to me.

01:22:32.000 One of the reasons I became kind of politically liberal in the first place is because we didn't have those And prohibitions.

01:22:40.000 The comedian said all the forbidden things.

01:22:44.000 The intellectuals weren't afraid to have the scary discussions.

01:22:48.000 I remember the first thing I liked about Noam Chomsky was that he stood up for the speech rights of some crazy Holocaust denier, right?

01:22:58.000 Because the whole idea was...

01:23:01.000 You had to have dialogue and fight for it.

01:23:07.000 And what we're doing now, we have this atmosphere where people don't want to – they're just sort of deeply interested in scaring people away from certain topics.

01:23:18.000 Yeah, which I don't understand.

01:23:21.000 Well, a great example of that is the ACLU. The ACLU, when it first started, they defended Nazis. 0.55

01:23:26.000 They defended Nazis' right to speak. 0.84

01:23:29.000 Not defended their position as being accurate, but defended Nazis' right to speak because they said that if you believe in free speech, you believe in all speech.

01:23:39.000 And even if it's wrong, even if it's inaccurate, you have to defend free speech.

01:23:43.000 Now, they are like one of the wokest organizations that's out there. 0.98

01:23:48.000 They fly by this doctrine.

01:23:51.000 And their positions on things are entirely ideologically driven.

01:23:56.000 Yeah, there was a great documentary called Mighty Ira that's done by FIRE. And they profile Ira Glasser, who was the head of the ACLU for a long time.

01:24:07.000 And it goes into the whole mechanics of What the decision was to support the Nazis in Skokie.

01:24:16.000 It was specifically based on the idea that all these ACLU people had fought in the civil rights era.

01:24:25.000 They had campaigned for civil rights.

01:24:28.000 And their whole argument was, if you let the town of Skokie decide who can and cannot march in their town, then you're going to have some southern town the next day deciding that a black organization or the NAACP can't march there.

01:24:44.000 Are we going to make a million different authorities who are going to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't?

01:24:52.000 And that's a very compelling argument, right?

01:24:55.000 And it was deeply thought out.

01:24:58.000 And they were really, really...

01:25:00.000 They took it very seriously from an intellectual level.

01:25:06.000 We know how offensive this is to people.

01:25:08.000 They thought about what it would mean to the residents of Skokie, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, what it would mean for them to see those marchers go past their houses.

01:25:19.000 They understood how if anything is harm, if any kind of speech is harm, that is it.

01:25:26.000 Right?

01:25:26.000 But still, this is a foundational idea in the United States, is that we defend this because it's part of our identity.

01:25:36.000 And I think we're losing touch with why we have those ideas.

01:25:40.000 Right.

01:25:41.000 And why it's so important to debate these ideas.

01:25:45.000 And that, you know, when people are confused, they can see a better argument.

01:25:52.000 They can see someone who eloquently spells out why these Nazis are wrong. 0.51

01:25:58.000 And then you go, okay, now I have a framework.

01:26:01.000 Now I understand.

01:26:02.000 Like, if someone doesn't know why they're wrong, like maybe someone's uneducated, maybe someone grew up around people that were racists or Nazis, and then they get this compelling explanation of everything.

01:26:16.000 Now, you wouldn't have had that if you didn't have the Nazis. 0.97

01:26:19.000 Like, you kind of need the shitheads and the bad people of the world so that you can say, here's why they're wrong. 0.99

01:26:26.000 And then, you know, it gets messy, and in the age of social media, that's where it's weird, because These shitheads never really had a platform before where they can get on these whatever platform social media allows them and they can develop massive followings saying crazy shit. 0.99

01:26:46.000 But that's still the same. 0.94

01:26:48.000 We have to realize that even though it's new and it's uncomfortable and you're seeing these numbers and people are being indoctrinated into these ideas, what's important is to have a compelling argument against it.

01:27:01.000 And to have that and to say, hey, this is why these people are wrong.

01:27:05.000 Look, here's the most eloquent, thought-out, articulate argument against that.

01:27:13.000 And then where reasonable people are allowed to look at these two things and go, well, clearly these people over here are correct. 0.98

01:27:19.000 And clearly I see why these people are so fucked up and this is what's wrong. 0.98

01:27:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:27:26.000 Doing it the other way, just saying, okay, we're not going to let you see that idea.

01:27:32.000 We're going to make sure that it comes, or it comes affixed with a warning label, or it's, we're going to make sure that person does not appear on this internet platform.

01:27:42.000 You know what the Streisand effect is, right?

01:27:44.000 Yes.

01:27:46.000 Explain that to people, the whole story behind that.

01:27:48.000 Yeah, I don't remember exactly what happened.

01:27:50.000 It's a house.

01:27:50.000 She had a house in Malibu, and it was this big, beautiful house, and they took photos of it from the air.

01:27:56.000 And she got pissed, and she demanded it be taken down off the internet. 0.65

01:28:00.000 And when she did that, everybody was like, what house is that?

01:28:03.000 And then it became way more popular.

01:28:05.000 And then everybody wanted to know where Barbra Streisand's house was, and that became the Streisand effect. 0.57

01:28:12.000 We're good to go.

01:28:19.000 We're good to go.

01:28:33.000 Right.

01:28:34.000 And I think internet speech is the classic example of where people think there must be something we can do, some step that we can take to make sure that these kinds of thinkers don't exist anymore.

01:28:49.000 And there isn't.

01:28:53.000 It's logistically impossible for a company like Facebook or Google or Twitter to scan individually each piece of content.

01:29:02.000 It's being created at too fast a rate.

01:29:04.000 The only way to do it is to have a better argument and win on that level culturally.

01:29:11.000 And they think that there's some kind of...

01:29:14.000 Sorry, mechanical solution to this.

01:29:17.000 And there isn't.

01:29:18.000 There's not.

01:29:19.000 And you have to be comfortable with that.

01:29:21.000 Again, that's part of what being a person is.

01:29:23.000 You have to deal with some things that are just disturbing.

01:29:28.000 And you have to have messy conversations.

01:29:31.000 And you're going to have to explain to your children what's going on here and who these people are.

01:29:36.000 Greg, this is related.

01:29:40.000 Are you aware of this new hate group march that was walking where all these guys were walking with American flags?

01:29:49.000 They made it back in the truck.

01:29:50.000 What's that?

01:29:51.000 Yes, they all jumped in the back of a U-Haul truck together.

01:29:54.000 There has never been a thing that I've ever seen where almost immediately I was like, those are feds.

01:30:03.000 Oh, did this happen?

01:30:05.000 I immediately, like, that's fake.

01:30:08.000 Like, my immediate feeling.

01:30:09.000 I looked at them.

01:30:10.000 First of all, these guys are too slim.

01:30:12.000 I'm looking at these guys.

01:30:13.000 They're all in shape.

01:30:15.000 They're all thin.

01:30:17.000 They're uniformly marching with flags. 1.00

01:30:19.000 There's no way these fucking idiots would be this organized. 1.00

01:30:22.000 Then, someone did a deep dive on Twitter. 1.00

01:30:25.000 I wish I could remember who.

01:30:27.000 But someone did a deep dive on Twitter and found out that the account in which this whole thing went viral is a completely fake account.

01:30:35.000 That has no followers and was started about a month ago with an AI generated face.

01:30:41.000 It's a fake face as like the profile picture.

01:30:44.000 It's one of those pictures they take a bunch of people's faces and they smush it and make this one lady. 0.99

01:30:48.000 And then she had a picture of a dog in like one of her Facebook posts.

01:30:52.000 But there's no engagement.

01:30:53.000 There's no interaction.

01:30:55.000 The entire account is only a month old.

01:30:59.000 And her post on this somehow or another went viral.

01:31:03.000 And this is what started the sharing of it.

01:31:06.000 But if you look at these people walking down the street with their masks on, all dressed in black, all wearing like essentially a uniform, all holding the same size American flag. 1.00

01:31:18.000 And then eventually they all jumped into the back of a U-Haul and were carted off at the end of this stupid fucking march. 0.99

01:31:26.000 But if you watch this, I'm like, what are you guys doing? 1.00

01:31:29.000 Was this supposed to be some, like, right-wing QAnon hate group?

01:31:32.000 Exactly.

01:31:33.000 Exactly.

01:31:34.000 And they call themselves the Patriot something or another?

01:31:37.000 Patriot Front.

01:31:38.000 Patriot Front.

01:31:39.000 You need to see this.

01:31:40.000 Can we see a picture?

01:31:40.000 We need to see the video.

01:31:41.000 We need to see the video because when you see them marching, you look at them marching, you go, why are these guys in such good shape? 1.00

01:31:48.000 Idiots are usually fat. 1.00

01:31:50.000 There's some fatness to them. 1.00

01:31:52.000 They don't have discipline, right?

01:31:54.000 These aren't wise folks that are eating correctly. 0.98

01:31:57.000 I mean, Americans are most usually fat.

01:31:59.000 This is uniformly thin and fit looking, with the same outfits on, the same flags.

01:32:07.000 You're telling me the FBI didn't know about these people?

01:32:09.000 Right. 0.99

01:32:10.000 You're telling me the FBI is not monitoring fringe groups and they were not aware these people are this fucking organized? 0.98

01:32:16.000 Out of nowhere, they pop out with the same size flags and the same outfit on, goose-stepping. 0.99

01:32:23.000 They're walking, not goose-stepping, but, you know, walking at the same pace in a fucking orderly line. 0.98

01:32:29.000 Like, who organized this? 0.98

01:32:32.000 This is them on their bus.

01:32:34.000 I thought this was going to turn into the video of them.

01:32:36.000 See the video of them walking.

01:32:38.000 Is that the video of them walking?

01:32:39.000 These are linking to blog posts.

01:32:44.000 God, there's got to be a video of them walking.

01:32:46.000 I know.

01:32:47.000 I've watched it.

01:32:50.000 Here's it.

01:32:50.000 Uninformed, uniformed, white nationalist group marches on Lincoln Memorial.

01:32:54.000 CNN's all in.

01:32:55.000 They're like, we're all in on this.

01:32:56.000 Come on, show us.

01:32:58.000 Look at these guys!

01:33:00.000 Look at these guys! 0.95

01:33:01.000 Where's the fat people? 0.83

01:33:04.000 How come they're all wearing the same clothes? 0.94

01:33:06.000 Do that again. 1.00

01:33:07.000 What the fuck is this? 1.00

01:33:08.000 Have you ever seen anything that looks more like feds? 1.00

01:33:12.000 Tell me that doesn't look like feds.

01:33:14.000 Right?

01:33:15.000 It's like the 101st Airborne.

01:33:16.000 Bro, look at this.

01:33:17.000 These guys are all runners.

01:33:19.000 These guys, look, they just got out of buds.

01:33:21.000 I mean, look. 1.00

01:33:22.000 The fuck out of here. 0.99

01:33:23.000 They could be real. 1.00

01:33:25.000 Right.

01:33:25.000 They could be real.

01:33:26.000 They could be real.

01:33:27.000 Listen, Matt Taibbi, I'm an unreliable source, and I'm a comedian. 0.99

01:33:30.000 But looking at that, I'm calling bullshit. 0.98

01:33:32.000 Give me that again. 0.99

01:33:33.000 Give me that again.

01:33:34.000 Yeah, okay.

01:33:34.000 Hold on.

01:33:35.000 Well, this gets back to the Oklahoma Ivermectin story.

01:33:39.000 Right, where they're all wearing winter coats.

01:33:42.000 Look at this! 0.99

01:33:43.000 The fuck out of here. 0.99

01:33:44.000 How do they all have uniformed outfits on? 1.00

01:33:48.000 They have the same color pants, for the most part.

01:33:51.000 Very little variation. 1.00

01:33:53.000 They have tan or brown pants, dark blue shirts with a fucking stupid flag on it. 1.00

01:33:58.000 This asshole's got a drum! 1.00

01:34:00.000 Back that up! 1.00

01:34:01.000 Look at the fucking drum! 1.00

01:34:03.000 Bitch, are you Paul Revere? 1.00

01:34:05.000 What the fuck are you doing with that drum? 1.00

01:34:07.000 He's walking around with a band drum. 1.00

01:34:09.000 Like a high school band. 1.00

01:34:11.000 This is so stupid, it hurts my feelings. 1.00

01:34:14.000 They all have flags? 1.00

01:34:15.000 Keep that up there.

01:34:17.000 There's videos from them from like July.

01:34:18.000 But I'd like to see that again.

01:34:20.000 So you know what's so interesting about this, though?

01:34:22.000 Is that, again...

01:34:25.000 Oh, okay.

01:34:26.000 I just need to see it.

01:34:27.000 Go ahead.

01:34:27.000 Tell me.

01:34:29.000 Look at this.

01:34:31.000 I mean, maybe they're real.

01:34:33.000 Maybe they're real.

01:34:34.000 Could be real. 0.99

01:34:35.000 But I'm calling bullshit. 1.00

01:34:36.000 They have the same fucking size flags, the same white coloring on their face, the same tan hats on. 1.00

01:34:43.000 Get the fuck out of here! 1.00

01:34:45.000 And why are they wearing masks, by the way? 1.00

01:34:47.000 Because they're cowards. 0.99

01:34:48.000 Right. 1.00

01:34:48.000 Or they're feds. 1.00

01:34:49.000 Yeah.

01:34:52.000 Right?

01:34:53.000 Your instinct, when you see that.

01:34:56.000 Well, I mean, I'm suspicious of everything.

01:34:58.000 I certainly wouldn't put that up and be like, chilling scene, like, you know, without looking into it a little bit, you know?

01:35:04.000 Yeah.

01:35:05.000 But, again, back in the day, it was the left that...

01:35:12.000 July 4th?

01:35:14.000 So they've been doing this for a while.

01:35:16.000 White supremacist group marches through the heart of Philadelphia.

01:35:19.000 Oh, I remember this from Philadelphia.

01:35:21.000 And look, the same thing.

01:35:23.000 They have the same shields.

01:35:25.000 This is like Irish line dancing.

01:35:27.000 God, it's so weird.

01:35:29.000 You think it's real?

01:35:30.000 If it is real.

01:35:31.000 I think it could be.

01:35:32.000 It's just weird.

01:35:33.000 They seem like feds to me.

01:35:34.000 They're too fit.

01:35:37.000 I know that doesn't mean that racists can't exercise.

01:35:39.000 I know racists exercise, folks.

01:35:40.000 Relax.

01:35:41.000 But I'm just saying, when you're looking at that...

01:35:43.000 They have 42 chapters, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey.

01:35:46.000 They're linked to a group called Vanguard America, which gained infamy after the Charlottesville, Virginia event.

01:35:53.000 They recruit on college campuses with flyers, conduct flash protests, and even commit acts of vandalism.

01:36:00.000 Jesus.

01:36:01.000 Could be.

01:36:02.000 I mean, who knows? 1.00

01:36:03.000 There's enough assholes on America for it to be possible. 0.99

01:36:06.000 I don't know if they would all be thin like that. 0.99

01:36:09.000 What was the thing recently where they found out that a great percentage of the people...

01:36:14.000 The Michigan thing.

01:36:14.000 Yes.

01:36:15.000 Explain that.

01:36:16.000 These are the people that were trying to kidnap the governor.

01:36:18.000 Explain that.

01:36:18.000 I didn't cover the story, but basically it was an attempt to kidnap Governor Whitmer, right?

01:36:27.000 Yeah.

01:36:28.000 And they found out that a high percentage of the people involved were FBI informants.

01:36:33.000 Which again, back in the day, would not have been surprising to people on the left because this is part of what we were taught.

01:36:44.000 Back when they had COINTELPRO and FBI informants, it was notorious in the 60s and 70s, this idea of having agents provocateurs in the crowd, people who were throwing things at soldiers who were coming back from Vietnam to discredit the anti-war crowd,

01:37:05.000 the assassination of Fred Hampton, the infiltration of the Black Panthers.

01:37:12.000 It was understood that the FBI did this stuff, or that different law enforcement agencies did this stuff.

01:37:19.000 Now, suddenly, people on the left disbelieve instantly that this happens.

01:37:25.000 They are reluctant to accept it.

01:37:29.000 Now, again, you have to prove it in each case, right?

01:37:33.000 So you can't just, you know, you can't just assert that this or that person is a federal agent.

01:37:41.000 But you should have some healthy skepticism about each one of these things, you know?

01:37:48.000 With the way media and the internet works in virality...

01:37:53.000 Oops, sorry.

01:37:55.000 Is that you?

01:37:55.000 Yeah, that is me.

01:37:56.000 Sorry.

01:37:57.000 Jamie, please go.

01:37:59.000 I just sent Jamie this.

01:38:04.000 It's the greatest meme. 0.99

01:38:06.000 They're all dressed up like Spider-Man and all of them says, fed, fed, fed, another fed, and then one says, some autistic fuck, some poor guy that they trick into doing something. 0.99

01:38:17.000 You know, that was the suspicion amongst the conspiracy theorists about the Boston bombing. 0.99

01:38:21.000 Right.

01:38:22.000 That they had radicalized those brothers and actually talked them into committing some sort of a terrorist act.

01:38:28.000 Right.

01:38:29.000 Right.

01:38:29.000 Yeah.

01:38:32.000 Again, you have to look at it case by case.

01:38:36.000 But it definitely happens.

01:38:38.000 It definitely happens.

01:38:39.000 It happened in Dallas.

01:38:40.000 That one guy that they got, I believe he's from Egypt.

01:38:43.000 He was 19 years old.

01:38:45.000 And they talked him into using a cell phone to detonate a bomb that they had provided him that was not really a bomb.

01:38:54.000 And when he used that cell phone to detonate the bomb, then they arrested him.

01:38:57.000 So they set him up, radicalized him, brought him in, told him, you know, you're going to do this thing.

01:39:03.000 It's going to be amazing.

01:39:04.000 You're going to be awesome. 0.71

01:39:06.000 So, we were all up in arms about this when the first war on terror happened because we knew shit like this was going on, whether it was informants pushing people to do things they didn't want to do or creating terror watch lists,

01:39:25.000 no-fly lists, putting people under illegal surveillance, illegally detaining them. 0.91

01:39:32.000 We were all concerned about this.

01:39:34.000 At least liberals were.

01:39:37.000 And suddenly now that they're doing this other kind of war on terror, this domestic war on terror, nobody cares.

01:39:47.000 It's as if those concerns no longer exist.

01:39:50.000 Well, they found a loophole.

01:39:51.000 They found a way to sneak it in in a socially acceptable way.

01:39:55.000 Right.

01:39:56.000 Exactly.

01:39:58.000 Kudos to the authorities for coming up with it because it's brilliant.

01:40:02.000 It is.

01:40:03.000 As a marketing – especially Trump is obviously a huge part of this whole thing.

01:40:10.000 Selling to America the idea – because you think about it before Trump.

01:40:14.000 Think about how unpopular the intelligence services were in 2014, 2015 after the Snowden revelations.

01:40:23.000 You talked to Snowden, right?

01:40:25.000 He was – One of the most famous people in the world, and we got the heads of the intelligence agencies lying to Congress openly, getting away with it.

01:40:37.000 People were furious, right?

01:40:39.000 And then all of a sudden, in a heartbeat, those exact same people, the people everybody was so mad at, suddenly became heroes because they were the ones in the front lines battling Donald Trump.

01:40:52.000 And battling him by lying about him.

01:40:55.000 By lying about him, incidentally, right?

01:40:58.000 That was fascinating.

01:41:00.000 Comey became a hero.

01:41:02.000 Comey, John Brennan, Michael Hayden. 0.99

01:41:05.000 But then when you look at what those guys actually did, you're like, holy shit, you're not supposed to do that. 0.98

01:41:10.000 Of course not. 0.91

01:41:12.000 And this is all coming out now.

01:41:14.000 I mean, I was one of the few, like Glenn was another one.

01:41:21.000 There was a small circle of journalists at the time that, you know, in the early years of Trump, We're good to go.

01:41:59.000 And we shouldn't trust them now.

01:42:01.000 But people were so worked up about Donald Trump that suddenly they were ready to jump in bed with people like John Brennan and Comey and Clapper and all these guys. 0.98

01:42:13.000 These are horrible people.

01:42:15.000 It's so crazy, but one thing that governments have been, our government in particular, has been really good at is capitalizing on a state of chaos and using it to their advantage.

01:42:25.000 And this is something that happened post 9-11 with the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, which I believe the Patriot Act has never been used to arrest a terrorist.

01:42:39.000 I wouldn't know that.

01:42:40.000 Find out if that's true.

01:42:42.000 But it has been used to arrest many drug dealers and to use on people who were, you know, air quotes, enemies.

01:42:50.000 But when chaos happens and they realize that there's some opportunity, they take advantage of opportunities.

01:42:57.000 It's always been a part of history.

01:42:58.000 People have always done that.

01:42:59.000 Well, that seems like what's happening now.

01:43:04.000 And that seems like something that we should be concerned about.

01:43:08.000 Absolutely.

01:43:09.000 Look, it was transparently what they were doing after 9-11.

01:43:16.000 Everybody should be scared to death.

01:43:18.000 Therefore, we need additional powers to do A through Z, right?

01:43:23.000 And it was nuts, the stuff they...

01:43:25.000 You know, the FISA Enhancements Act and, you know, the Patriot Act, the no-fly list, the watch list, all this stuff.

01:43:33.000 The FBI's national security letters, you know, this thing where they would...

01:43:38.000 The FBI sends a letter to a company, tells them that they are barred from telling their customers that they're divulging their information to the FBI. They sent tens of thousands of those letters.

01:43:52.000 There was an IG report about that.

01:43:54.000 Actually, there were a bunch of IG reports about that.

01:43:57.000 And this whole regime of surveillance You know, just got approved willy-nilly because the public was scared.

01:44:04.000 People were freaked out.

01:44:05.000 They didn't want it to happen again.

01:44:07.000 So they just said, okay, go ahead.

01:44:10.000 We trust you.

01:44:11.000 And of course, they massively abused these programs.

01:44:16.000 You know, they started to do things that were...

01:44:20.000 That were really crazy.

01:44:23.000 Using the enhanced secret surveillance tools as evidence in criminal cases, but it would be hidden.

01:44:32.000 In other words, you'd be charged with a drug crime, right?

01:44:36.000 And if you ask for discovery, they would give you all the documents that they had to give you.

01:44:42.000 But they wouldn't let you know that maybe you were under surveillance or there was a FISA warrant.

01:44:46.000 You've been caught in some other way.

01:44:49.000 They don't have to disclose that stuff.

01:44:50.000 They don't have to disclose the national security letter stuff.

01:44:53.000 And so it became like this separate legal system and Americans just got used to it.

01:44:59.000 And then when Trump happened, they were so afraid of him and all the possibilities that came with that that now they're Now they're willing to let all kinds of new tools be used on them.

01:45:12.000 It's crazy that nobody's more worried about it.

01:45:16.000 Well, when I heard Joe Biden say that the biggest threat to this country is white supremacy, I was like, okay, what's going on here?

01:45:26.000 Like, what are they doing?

01:45:28.000 Like, what are they doing?

01:45:29.000 Because, look, Charlottesville was horrific, right?

01:45:32.000 And when that guy ran over a bunch of people with his car in Charlottesville, it opened up the door to people saying, like, hey, this is genuinely horrible.

01:45:40.000 It is scary.

01:45:41.000 It is scary.

01:45:42.000 But then they swoop in and say, this is the number one problem in this country.

01:45:46.000 Right.

01:45:46.000 Like, which is crazy to say.

01:45:48.000 Because it's a small percentage of people that are out of their fucking mind that generally don't have much of an impact on our culture. 0.99

01:45:55.000 But when the president says that white supremacy is the biggest problem that we face, I immediately go, who told you to say that? 0.99

01:46:03.000 What are you doing?

01:46:04.000 What are you planning?

01:46:06.000 What's going on here?

01:46:07.000 How many people... 0.96

01:46:09.000 Like, clearly, clearly, there's a lot of people that were involved in January 6th that were out of their fucking mind and really did think that they were going to take over the government. 0.97

01:46:18.000 Right. 0.96

01:46:18.000 They really did think that Donald Trump was truly the president, and they were queuing on all the way, and they really thought that... 0.96

01:46:24.000 But clearly, there were some feds involved in that.

01:46:28.000 They were manipulating those people.

01:46:29.000 Clearly.

01:46:30.000 I don't know if you've seen that one guy.

01:46:32.000 We've highlighted him on the show.

01:46:33.000 There's this one guy that was telling people over and over again, they've got to go in that building.

01:46:37.000 We're telling you right now, we've got to get in there.

01:46:39.000 And that guy's never faced any charges.

01:46:41.000 And they know his name. 0.95

01:46:42.000 And it's like a real fucking shadowy sort of a situation. 0.95

01:46:47.000 Like, what's going on here? 0.94

01:46:49.000 Right.

01:46:49.000 Because you know, if the government knew that something was going on like that, for sure they would infiltrate.

01:46:54.000 For sure they've infiltrated all these wacky groups.

01:46:57.000 That's just part of their job.

01:46:58.000 They have to, to kind of find out how dangerous they are.

01:47:01.000 I mean, it's part of their job.

01:47:02.000 It would be a news story if they weren't, actually.

01:47:04.000 Right.

01:47:04.000 They would be irresponsible.

01:47:06.000 Yeah, they would be incompetent. 0.75

01:47:08.000 So it is their job.

01:47:10.000 Now, once they're in there, the question is, how much manipulation are they allowed to do before it becomes their idea?

01:47:17.000 Right.

01:47:17.000 Which brings us to like the Whitey Bulger type situation, right?

01:47:22.000 Explain that, please.

01:47:23.000 Well, the FBI had an incredibly close relationship with...

01:47:30.000 He was an informant.

01:47:31.000 Yeah, with Whitey Bulger, the Irish gangster in Boston who was an FBI informant.

01:47:37.000 And essentially, they were sort of greenlighting...

01:47:42.000 You know, his activities in order to get to the Italian mafia.

01:47:47.000 And, you know, but there's a line, you know, that they crossed, you know, into actively being involved, right?

01:47:57.000 And the question is, how often do they do that?

01:48:00.000 Right.

01:48:01.000 Is that standard operational procedure?

01:48:02.000 Right.

01:48:03.000 Right.

01:48:03.000 Yeah, we don't know.

01:48:04.000 I mean, I think it's interesting that the guy who's doing the investigation into the Russiagate stuff now, John Durham, was also the prosecutor in that case.

01:48:15.000 I don't think that's a coincidence because he's...

01:48:18.000 But anyway, the thing with Biden talking about how white supremacy is the biggest threat, there's clearly something deeply wrong with this country. 0.97

01:48:31.000 There clearly is domestic white terrorism. 0.95

01:48:33.000 There's no question that it exists.

01:48:35.000 But they've become really, really loose with that term.

01:48:39.000 The Rittenhouse case was a classic example for me of how you have to be more careful about it.

01:48:47.000 They were calling him a white supremacist on the first day.

01:48:49.000 The president called him a white supremacist.

01:48:50.000 The president called him.

01:48:51.000 Just on the level of libel, we used to be afraid to do that.

01:48:56.000 You would have to have something that allowed you to say that...

01:49:01.000 This guy was a white supremacist before you put that on the air or in print because you'd be afraid of being sued.

01:49:06.000 It'd be the end of your career.

01:49:09.000 And all they really had were some vague cultural markers, right?

01:49:12.000 Like, would I tell my kid to pick up an AR-15 and go to a protest?

01:49:17.000 Absolutely not.

01:49:18.000 But, you know, as a journalist, I can't call him that.

01:49:21.000 Unless I have something more.

01:49:23.000 The difference between calling it a protest and the air of fear and chaos that was prevalent when that whole thing went down.

01:49:35.000 This was post the George Floyd riots and everything was crazy.

01:49:40.000 In Los Angeles, they were lighting cop cars on fire.

01:49:43.000 There were pallets of bricks that are mysteriously dropped off at protest sites and windows were smashed through Beverly Hills.

01:49:51.000 They had an early curfew.

01:49:53.000 People have quick memories. 0.99

01:49:55.000 They have short memories and they forget how fucking crazy it was. 0.96

01:49:59.000 Like right after that George Floyd protest, right after George Floyd's murder, when everybody was chaotic, like the country was in a state of chaos. 0.97

01:50:11.000 That's when that happened.

01:50:12.000 So this kid was asked by, I think they had a used car lot.

01:50:16.000 By the way, have you ever seen the guys who he was told to, they're Indian.

01:50:21.000 I think they're Indian.

01:50:23.000 I think if this is accurate, I got another meme for you because I love memes.

01:50:29.000 I'll find it.

01:50:30.000 I mean, the other thing about that case was that, you know, the protests in Kenosha were about the Jacob Blake case, which was, you know, I wrote a book about the Eric Garner case, which was, you know, unequivocally a brutal police killing where the police were at fault.

01:50:50.000 Like, no question about it.

01:50:52.000 But the Blake incident was much more complicated.

01:50:57.000 If you look at the reasons why the DA and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department didn't file charges in that case, it's because there was a lot of stuff about that case that was...

01:51:15.000 There's a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the police made there.

01:51:21.000 And people naturally assumed, and this is what we do now, we see something on Twitter, we see like a 20 second piece of video, we think we know the whole story, but the reality is most of the time, the initial impression of news is wrong.

01:51:36.000 At least somewhere.

01:51:37.000 There's usually some kind of error built in, and that's why we need the next two and three days and months to sort out exactly what happened.

01:51:46.000 And in that case, we just didn't.

01:51:51.000 There were a lot of ambiguities that just got turned instantaneously into a narrative that was really unfortunate.

01:51:59.000 There's also a frantic rush to say that someone was racist or a white supremacist and there was a narrative that was rewarded.

01:52:10.000 This meme that I just sent you.

01:52:12.000 This is why I sent it.

01:52:13.000 I have a whole meme folder on my iPhone that I just can't wait to use.

01:52:19.000 So he wanted to protect a business owned by these guys.

01:52:23.000 I don't know if they're Middle Eastern or Indian or what they were. 0.98

01:52:28.000 It says, shoots these guys and shoots three white guys. 1.00

01:52:33.000 Worst white supremacist ever. 1.00

01:52:35.000 Not only that, but one of the guys that he shot was a repeat offender child rapist. 1.00

01:52:41.000 Right. 0.99

01:52:42.000 The guy in the middle. 0.99

01:52:43.000 He raped multiple children. 1.00

01:52:45.000 Mentally ill. 1.00

01:52:46.000 Yeah, literally one of the worst crimes you could imagine.

01:52:54.000 But without hesitation, people would do things like say, well, it's clearly a problem that there weren't enough minorities in the jury in this case where everybody involved was white.

01:53:14.000 A lot of the news consumers were just sort of led to believe certain things just by the way, by implication.

01:53:23.000 They didn't always identify whether the people who got shot were white or black or anything.

01:53:29.000 They would just sort of say they were shot.

01:53:31.000 Meanwhile, they would say repeatedly that Rittenhouse was white.

01:53:35.000 I have friends that are black that didn't know that they were white victims until the trial started.

01:53:40.000 Right. 0.98

01:53:40.000 And that said, dude, I thought he shot black people. 0.98

01:53:43.000 They literally didn't know. 0.90

01:53:45.000 And so the thing was, it was a Black Lives Matter protest. 0.91

01:53:50.000 He shot people. 0.98

01:53:51.000 They thought he shot black people. 0.99

01:53:53.000 They thought he was a racist. 0.99

01:53:54.000 And then the president calls him a white supremacist. 0.94

01:53:56.000 I got the picture.

01:53:57.000 Right, right.

01:53:58.000 And you can see how that can happen if you're just picking up, you know, the newspaper or you're watching CNN and they're just neglecting to leave out certain details, which, you know, it has to be strategic.

01:54:12.000 And again, this gets back to what I was saying before.

01:54:15.000 It's not like anybody tells you to do this.

01:54:17.000 You just sort of know that...

01:54:19.000 The story is going to sell better or it's going to play better if you highlight certain things.

01:54:25.000 I think that's what happens with a lot of the people in this case.

01:54:31.000 It's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume that you have Sympathies with somebody like Rittenhouse or all the people who lionized them on Fox News.

01:54:43.000 You just got to get this stuff right.

01:54:45.000 You have a heightened responsibility to get it right when people are amped up and they're mad and they're ready to go out in the streets and fight each other.

01:54:53.000 That's when you have to be super careful about what you say, especially in media.

01:54:58.000 It really highlights the importance of real journalism because this would have never taken place if real journalism had been Steadfastly followed from the jump if people said this is what we know and this is what happened These are the victims these people were the one of the things about like any kind of protest or any kind of chaos and this is something that is just part of human nature is When people know that there's chaos and there's protest,

01:55:27.000 there's a lot of people that join in that really have no...

01:55:30.000 Nothing to do with it.

01:55:31.000 Exactly. 0.96

01:55:31.000 And I think that's what was going on here, particularly with that one guy who was the child rapist. 0.96

01:55:37.000 Right.

01:55:37.000 And that happened all over the country, by the way, after the Floyd thing, which was one of the reasons why...

01:55:44.000 The reporting about that was so disappointing, right?

01:55:49.000 Because there were lots and lots of reporters, and I knew a few of them, who were kind of discouraged from talking about some of the ancillary stories, right?

01:56:00.000 Like, okay, this neighborhood has been damaged, therefore elderly people can't get their prescriptions because the drugstore has been burned down or whatever it is, right?

01:56:09.000 Because the implication is that the protesters Their cause was unjust, so let's not do that story.

01:56:18.000 But in many cases, these weren't really even protesters.

01:56:22.000 In some places, they were, and in some places they weren't, right?

01:56:28.000 But that's what the job is for.

01:56:30.000 We have to go out there and ask, you know, was this part of the protest?

01:56:36.000 Was this this opportunistic looting?

01:56:38.000 You know, sorry.

01:56:39.000 You and this phone.

01:56:40.000 I know, I'm sorry.

01:56:40.000 Just put it on silent.

01:56:42.000 How dare you?

01:56:42.000 I know, I know.

01:56:43.000 I love your ringtone, though.

01:56:44.000 It's very festive.

01:56:45.000 It is festive, I'm sorry.

01:56:46.000 It's cute.

01:56:47.000 Don't worry about it.

01:56:48.000 Listen, man, I'm the last person. 0.99

01:56:50.000 I've fucked up. 0.99

01:56:51.000 I've done that. 0.99

01:56:53.000 The problem with being honest about that when there's a frenzy in the air, which there most certainly was post-George Floyd, is that it's dangerous.

01:57:04.000 And, you know, you can get attacked for just stating facts.

01:57:08.000 Like, there was a lot of people on the right that were trying to say that he wasn't murdered and that he died of a fentanyl overdose and that he would have died anyway. 1.00

01:57:21.000 And to those people, I was saying, fuck you. 1.00

01:57:24.000 Because, like, you have no idea what it's like to have someone lean on your neck for eight and a half minutes. 1.00

01:57:29.000 I actually do. 0.99

01:57:30.000 Like, I've had guys do jujitsu and put their fucking knee on my neck for a minute or 30 seconds. 0.98

01:57:36.000 It's horrific to imagine being handcuffed and someone do that on the concrete, not even a jujitsu mat. 0.99

01:57:43.000 It's impossible to overstate that you most likely... 0.99

01:57:49.000 Either you're gonna go unconscious or something really fucked up is gonna happen to you. 0.99

01:57:54.000 It's very, very bad. 0.99

01:57:56.000 It's not as simple as he got a drug over. 0.98

01:57:59.000 We have fucking clear evidence of this guy kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 40-something seconds. 0.98

01:58:05.000 There is no fucking way that didn't have an effect on him. 0.99

01:58:08.000 And I think someone tried to do that. 0.98

01:58:11.000 They tried to make a point that it's not that big of a deal and they had someone do it to him and they tapped out early.

01:58:16.000 Was it Crowder?

01:58:18.000 Did he do that?

01:58:19.000 Someone did that. 0.63

01:58:20.000 I don't know who did that.

01:58:21.000 But my point is because of that There was a narrative where you weren't allowed to say other things about George Floyd that were true, like the fact that he held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach when he was robbing her.

01:58:36.000 He wasn't a good guy.

01:58:39.000 He should not have had that happen to him by any stretch of the imagination.

01:58:42.000 There's no world where what that guy did was okay.

01:58:46.000 But this is not a good guy.

01:58:48.000 To make statues of him and lionize him and make him out to be some sort of a hero, that's not accurate either.

01:58:55.000 Right.

01:58:55.000 But you couldn't say that.

01:58:56.000 Yeah, they made sort of a religious icon out of him.

01:58:59.000 Right.

01:59:01.000 The same kind of misreporting in the other direction happened in the Garner case, which, again, I wrote a book about.

01:59:09.000 There were a lot of people who tried to say that he was killed because he was diabetic and he was overweight.

01:59:15.000 Yeah.

01:59:15.000 And that clearly was not the case.

01:59:17.000 Like, I had police sources trying to sell me that off the record all the time.

01:59:21.000 That, oh, you know, he would have gone anyway, right?

01:59:26.000 And look, A, watch the video, but don't even just do that.

01:59:31.000 Like, read the medical examiner's report, which says homicide on it, you know, because they've determined medically the cause of death was and, you know, compression of the chest.

01:59:41.000 In other words, you can't just go off what somebody says about something.

01:59:47.000 You have to look into it and, like, look into it again and again and again.

01:59:51.000 And in, you know, in the case of Garner, like Garner was somebody who had some pretty bad stuff in his past going back a long way, but had kind of turned his life around and was somebody who was known on the block as being a really good dude who broke up fights and He gave all his money to his family members.

02:00:14.000 One of the reasons his clothes were in such disrepair is that he wouldn't buy himself new clothes.

02:00:19.000 He gave every dollar to his kids.

02:00:21.000 He was a good dude.

02:00:26.000 But these are details you got to tell the truth about the other stuff.

02:00:30.000 I knew his daughter, Erica, and we talked about how she wanted to see the book done.

02:00:38.000 And I said, well, how do you want me to deal with the stuff from his past?

02:00:44.000 And she said...

02:00:45.000 Look, he was just a man, right?

02:00:49.000 You've got to show all that stuff.

02:00:52.000 And I thought that was incredibly cool of her.

02:00:55.000 She really admired her father.

02:00:59.000 She thought he had gotten through a lot of things, but she didn't want him to be a two-dimensional character.

02:01:05.000 And that's what they've done.

02:01:06.000 That is very admirable.

02:01:09.000 It's fascinating when you think how the times have changed since then because now there's not a chance in hell they would arrest him for doing that.

02:01:17.000 Policing has gotten so loose.

02:01:19.000 They're so scared of arresting people.

02:01:21.000 He got arrested for selling loose cigarettes.

02:01:24.000 He wasn't even doing it.

02:01:25.000 That's the hilarious part.

02:01:27.000 He had done it in the past, but he wasn't doing it that day.

02:01:32.000 And they physically manhandled him and they strangled him.

02:01:37.000 And then they tried to say it wasn't a chokehold, which is the same thing that I say about the thing with George Floyd. 1.00

02:01:44.000 Fuck you. 1.00

02:01:44.000 Yeah, anybody who tries to say that. 1.00

02:01:47.000 If you do that to me, I'm gonna tap out.

02:01:48.000 It's a chokehold. 1.00

02:01:49.000 He's fucking strangling the guy. 1.00

02:01:51.000 Like, if you get a guy who knows how to choke you, and I'm assuming the cop knows how to choke people, he'd seem like a strong guy, you get a hold of your neck like that, that's a fucking chokehold. 0.99

02:01:59.000 It's not just a restrain. 0.98

02:02:01.000 And it didn't have to happen.

02:02:04.000 One thing that has changed that I think, I mean, there's a lot of negativity. 0.91

02:02:08.000 There's a lot of negative shit that's happened from this whole defund the police thing and The fact that, you know, the police officers feel so... 0.80

02:02:19.000 They don't feel like they can do their job anymore without risking getting in trouble for something. 0.98

02:02:25.000 Like, they're just a standard job.

02:02:26.000 So they're letting so many more things happen.

02:02:28.000 And if you look at the amount of crimes, like the uptick in crimes post-pandemic, it's irrational.

02:02:36.000 I mean, it's really wild.

02:02:37.000 And that's another thing that was really disappointing to me after the Floyd thing happened, because nobody wanted to look at the policy issue.

02:02:53.000 What's the biggest contributing factor to police brutality cases?

02:02:57.000 It's the number of contacts you have between police and people.

02:03:02.000 And a lot of that has to do with The heightened number of stops that you have through programs like Stop and Frisk.

02:03:14.000 In New York, it was clean halls, right?

02:03:17.000 It's what they call the community policing techniques.

02:03:22.000 The whole idea is, let's stop a gazillion people.

02:03:27.000 We'll search them, or we'll pat them down.

02:03:31.000 This is based on a Supreme Court case called Ohio v.

02:03:36.000 Terry that allows police to do that.

02:03:38.000 If they have articulable suspicion that somebody is committing a crime, they're allowed to pat you down.

02:03:43.000 So they used to not really use that that much.

02:03:47.000 The innovation in the 80s, 90s and going forward was, let's just use that a lot.

02:03:52.000 Let's start stopping people all the time and patting them down, right?

02:03:57.000 And they did it hundreds of thousands of times in New York.

02:04:00.000 They did it in every city in the country.

02:04:03.000 And what happens when you massively increase the number of times that police put their hands on people?

02:04:08.000 A percentage of those contacts are going to go wrong, right?

02:04:12.000 They just will.

02:04:13.000 Somebody's going to get mad.

02:04:14.000 They're not going to want to see their book bag emptied on the ground.

02:04:19.000 They're not going to want to have somebody put their hands down their pants. 0.99

02:04:24.000 And eventually someone's going to say no, like Eric Garner, right?

02:04:28.000 And you're going to have a death on your hands that was totally avoidable, right?

02:04:44.000 Right.

02:04:45.000 Right.

02:04:48.000 Right.

02:04:56.000 What do we actually want police to do versus what have they been doing?

02:05:02.000 And there was almost no discussion of those policy issues.

02:05:07.000 It was just police are bad and therefore let's take their money away, whereas there's so many instantly fixable things they could have done.

02:05:17.000 And the most liberal cities have had the most irrational responses to it.

02:05:22.000 So like, look, the Garner thing is horrible, right?

02:05:26.000 That should have never happened.

02:05:27.000 So here we go, where we are now, in San Francisco you can steal $900 worth of stuff and you can't get arrested.

02:05:35.000 So now you're having mass lootings, where people are just running into stores, throwing stuff in their bag, and then leaving.

02:05:42.000 Right.

02:05:43.000 Which is crazy. 1.00

02:05:44.000 Northern California is fucked. 1.00

02:05:46.000 And now LA. LA is experiencing a rash of these smashing grabs. 1.00

02:05:51.000 They don't have any faith at all that there's law enforcement that's going to take care of these things.

02:05:56.000 So their fear of the cops is non-existent now.

02:06:00.000 They're just stealing things.

02:06:02.000 And it's happening so often that they're literally calling it an epidemic.

02:06:07.000 Like, what do we do about this?

02:06:09.000 How do you stop this?

02:06:09.000 And how do you stop this given the current climate, the way people are viewing the police and the way the cops are viewing the support that they have from the community and from the government?

02:06:20.000 It's kind of crazy.

02:06:22.000 Well, and a lot of those ideas probably came from people who live in affluent white communities who don't know what it is To occasionally need to call the police.

02:06:33.000 Yes.

02:06:33.000 Right?

02:06:33.000 They live in towns where the police are basically there, you know, kind of for show or they get overtime to do traffic stops or to, you know, school parades and stuff like that.

02:06:46.000 They're not there for real crime, right?

02:06:49.000 Yeah.

02:06:49.000 If you go into a tough neighborhood like where Eric Garner lived in Staten Island, there are debates in the street.

02:06:59.000 There'll be one group of people who say, if this was a white neighborhood, they would never allow this much crime.

02:07:07.000 There'd be more police, right?

02:07:09.000 And there are people who are angry that there isn't a legitimate police presence at all times to protect them from violence.

02:07:20.000 Right?

02:07:22.000 And there's another group that thinks the police are inherently bad and cause more problems than they create, than they fix, and they need to go away.

02:07:30.000 But that's a legitimate debate that happens in those neighborhoods.

02:07:34.000 And if you look at the polls, you'll see that, you know, It's not necessarily coming from the black communities that the defund efforts aren't always coming from there.

02:07:46.000 The people who are most in favor of that are the people who have no conception of what the police are for.

02:07:52.000 And that's frustrating, too.

02:07:55.000 And I think that was misrepresented after the Floyd thing.

02:07:59.000 People want better policing.

02:08:01.000 They want smarter policing.

02:08:02.000 They want police who aren't so quick to use force. 0.95

02:08:10.000 They want more non-lethal force.

02:08:12.000 They want it to be less intrusive.

02:08:14.000 They want to be able to walk un-molested down the street without being assumed that they're dealing drugs or something like that.

02:08:20.000 But they don't want there to be no police at all.

02:08:23.000 Right.

02:08:24.000 Well, Minneapolis is experiencing that now.

02:08:26.000 They're trying to fix it because they did kind of defund the police, but now they've experienced more crime than ever.

02:08:31.000 And they're like, okay, we've got to do something.

02:08:33.000 Right.

02:08:34.000 And the expression that I've read recently is like, we're trying to stop the bleeding.

02:08:38.000 Right.

02:08:39.000 You know, the community leaders are talking about this.

02:08:42.000 Like, we've got to do something to stop the current climate of crime because it's actually worse than it was before George Floyd.

02:08:49.000 It didn't make it better when we defunded the police.

02:08:52.000 It made it worse.

02:08:53.000 And then, again, it's such a reversal of...

02:08:57.000 I mean, it's happening now, too.

02:09:00.000 But we used to overplay crime stories in the media because that was how we scared white readers of papers like the New York Post.

02:09:16.000 Welcome to my show!

02:09:40.000 You know, it's a strange phenomenon.

02:09:43.000 It's not easy to see where they're going with that.

02:09:47.000 Well, the Wisconsin SUV, the guy who drove the SUV into the Christmas parade is a great example of that, right?

02:09:55.000 Yeah, it was odd to me that we haven't seen a lot of follow-up reporting on that.

02:10:04.000 How about the way they wrote about it?

02:10:06.000 Just the titles.

02:10:07.000 The accident caused by an SUV. Caused by an SUV, yeah, or a crash or something like that.

02:10:14.000 And yeah, I get back to where's the spirit of...

02:10:20.000 Just curiosity.

02:10:22.000 I want to know what that was.

02:10:26.000 Before I knew anything about who drove the car, what the person looked like, anything, your mind runs through all the scenarios.

02:10:35.000 Is it somebody who's whacked out on drugs?

02:10:37.000 Is it a terrorist attack?

02:10:39.000 Is it a...

02:10:40.000 I thought about Charlottesville first.

02:10:43.000 That was one of the things I thought about.

02:10:45.000 Our job is to tell people what actually happened in these things, and you can't just stop and suddenly have a lack of curiosity once things don't exactly fit.

02:11:01.000 I don't know.

02:11:02.000 It just feels like there was a lack of resolve to get to the bottom of that.

02:11:09.000 Well, the difference between the way right-wing media covered it and left-wing media was incredibly stark.

02:11:15.000 I mean, left-wing media didn't touch the fact that this guy had posts supporting Hitler and that he had tried to run over his girlfriend in a car, which is why he was in jail, that he got let on on $1,000 bail, which is incredibly low for a guy who tried to commit vehicular homicide. 0.97

02:11:31.000 I mean, it's fucking wild. 0.97

02:11:33.000 Yeah. 0.96

02:11:34.000 This trend of letting people out of jail easy that try to commit violent crimes and letting them off on very low bails and letting them right back out in the street is one of the weirder things that's going on right now.

02:11:48.000 One of the weirder things that you see from these progressive district attorneys and in these liberal cities, it's very strange and I don't understand the logic behind it.

02:11:57.000 I mean, I get it a little bit.

02:11:59.000 I mean, I was a strong believer in bail reform.

02:12:03.000 You know, you mentioned the $1,000.

02:12:06.000 Amazingly, Eric Garner got set $1,000 bail once for something that wasn't even a misdemeanor.

02:12:15.000 Like, selling untaxed cigarettes is a violation.

02:12:18.000 It's like something you get a ticket for.

02:12:20.000 But he got $1,000 bail for it.

02:12:22.000 Well, that's outrageous.

02:12:24.000 But somebody who commits a violent crime, so there's this whole galaxy of other people who get what they call like nuisance bail.

02:12:32.000 Like in other words, you know, whether it's solicitation or, you know, disorderly conduct or...

02:12:40.000 I think?

02:13:00.000 Where you live, whether you have a job, whether you have a telephone in your house, all this stuff, they know roughly what you can afford when they go to ask for bail.

02:13:11.000 And it's kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing between the judge and the prosecutors.

02:13:15.000 And that's a really bad system.

02:13:17.000 That's why there were calls for bail reform, because what they were really doing was setting bail so high that people couldn't They either had to make a decision to plead early or sit in a place like Rikers Island and lose their jobs while they waited to adjudicate some really minor offense.

02:13:40.000 There's a good reason for bail reform.

02:13:44.000 But that doesn't mean that bail in all cases needs to be eliminated.

02:13:50.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:13:52.000 In cases where there's a violent crime, that's what it's for.

02:14:00.000 Exactly.

02:14:01.000 That's the primary.

02:14:02.000 You can't paint it all with the same brush.

02:14:04.000 But I don't understand even the motivation of it.

02:14:07.000 It's like if you were a real tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, you would think that someone is trying to destroy this country.

02:14:15.000 Someone's trying to destroy these cities and what's the best way to do it?

02:14:18.000 Well, the best way to do it is to let violent criminals run loose in the streets and have everybody freak out and then come up with a solution for it.

02:14:29.000 A lot of the ideas that are coming out of what I used to consider like the liberal left or the Democratic Party, they almost seem to me like they're designed to lose votes.

02:14:44.000 You know, like they're trying to give votes to the Republicans, who are, of course, equally crazy, like in their own way.

02:14:53.000 But yeah, stuff like that, I don't even know where a lot of these ideas come from.

02:14:59.000 Like, I'm doing a story now about the Loudoun County, Virginia, education mess, and just a lot of the thinking there.

02:15:07.000 It's like...

02:15:10.000 Yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

02:15:14.000 A lot of the sort of intellectual class of this country, a lot of their ideas are just really strange these days.

02:15:22.000 They don't make sense, but they're being supported.

02:15:25.000 Those ideas are supported by enough people.

02:15:28.000 There's enough people that believe in them that I don't think it really is they're trying to get the Republicans elected.

02:15:33.000 I think They think that this is progress and I think what you were saying earlier about how the kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood.

02:15:44.000 They just have this idea that if they are for defunding the police, what they are for is the right side of criminal justice reform and that to be a progressive you have to recognize there's Systemic racism is the root cause of all these crimes and those need to be addressed and it's not just about locking people up in jail,

02:16:05.000 which, you know, makes sense.

02:16:07.000 I really do think that there are root causes to all of these crime issues that we have in inner cities, whether it's Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago or whatever, that if they don't address those problems, all the policing in the world is not going to fix it.

02:16:23.000 And it's going to take generations because you're dealing with people that have dealt with these crime-ridden, gang-infested communities for decade after decade with no intervention whatsoever, no help.

02:16:37.000 I mean, we spend countless amounts of money Going overseas and fixing other countries. 0.97

02:16:43.000 We don't do a fucking thing about horrendous inner city conditions. 0.98

02:16:47.000 And then we get confused as to why they continue to put out violent criminals. 0.97

02:16:53.000 Yeah, it's amazing because the same people who 10 or 15 years ago were trying to fix the cities essentially through brute force, right?

02:17:06.000 So these were the people who were doing the stop and frisk programs.

02:17:11.000 What they were really doing...

02:17:13.000 Mainly, these were Democrats who were running these...

02:17:17.000 They had all the important positions in all the big cities.

02:17:22.000 And their campaigns were funded by wealthy real estate developers, mainly.

02:17:28.000 And they were using the police to imprison and arrest tens of thousands of people.

02:17:39.000 Casting a very wide net and trying to impose order that way.

02:17:43.000 Those programs didn't really work.

02:17:45.000 They caused a lot of instability.

02:17:48.000 They caused an incredible amount of resentment, and they resulted in a lot of these police brutality cases.

02:17:53.000 And now they're swinging in another direction.

02:17:57.000 They're trying to take an opposite but equally irrational approach to dealing with the problem.

02:18:04.000 So they try to solve it by shaking down... 0.90

02:18:07.000 Ten years ago, let's shake down every black person who walks into the wrong neighborhood in New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore. 1.00

02:18:15.000 Now, somebody came up with a bright idea to, well, let's just completely not have police or defund that and put the money towards some other... 1.00

02:18:28.000 I think those ideas are, in many cases, equally stupid. 0.96

02:18:34.000 And it's just an example of just intellectuals sometimes just shouldn't be allowed to make every decision, you know? 0.99

02:18:45.000 That's sort of an overriding theme in a lot of the stuff that I've covered over the years.

02:18:49.000 I just don't know how we bounce back from this.

02:18:51.000 It is amazing to me, the impact of one man's death, the George Floyd death.

02:19:00.000 It's amazing, because if you go from that point forward, and obviously it's accentuated by the pandemic, and there was a lot of build-up to it.

02:19:08.000 There's been many, many cases of police brutality that were egregious, and people were frustrated and furious, but that was the straw.

02:19:16.000 That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

02:19:18.000 And the difference between the country the day before that happened and now is so stark that if you told me one death of a guy who was, you know, brutalized by the police and murdered in the way we all saw publicly is going to change the entire country.

02:19:37.000 I would have said, how is that possible?

02:19:39.000 Well, I think at the time, the entire debate was turbocharged by the fact that Donald Trump was in office.

02:19:48.000 And this became, as everything did during the period, as hydroxychloroquine and the lab leak origin, everything is a referendum on Trumpism, right?

02:19:58.000 So if George Floyd is killed and Joe Biden is president, is the reaction going to be the same?

02:20:04.000 I kind of doubt it.

02:20:05.000 Like, I think...

02:20:08.000 I think at the time, there was an incredible amount of tension in the country.

02:20:12.000 The culture war was just getting hotter and hotter all the time.

02:20:14.000 And we had been moving from kind of mania to mania in the news environment.

02:20:21.000 It was one thing after the other.

02:20:25.000 Caravan story, it was kids in cages, Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, Russiagate, everything was a full-blown massive panic.

02:20:35.000 And that was how everything was covered during the Trump years.

02:20:42.000 So I think that was a major factor in what happened with the Floyd story.

02:20:48.000 It couldn't just be a police killing and they couldn't just fix the problem.

02:20:53.000 They couldn't just deal with that one person.

02:20:55.000 And they couldn't just look at sensible policy alternatives.

02:20:59.000 It had to be a referendum on the entire United States and whatever it was was wrong with the country that had led to Donald Trump being elected.

02:21:08.000 And, you know, sometimes, you know, things aren't always necessarily, you know, symbolic of something larger, you know?

02:21:22.000 I don't know.

02:21:24.000 I think during the Trump years, there was a tendency to try to make panics out of everything.

02:21:29.000 And, you know, that's not always healthy.

02:21:33.000 I'm gonna tell you something you're not gonna like to hear.

02:21:35.000 Sure.

02:21:36.000 You know who your voice sounds like?

02:21:37.000 Uh-oh.

02:21:38.000 Who?

02:21:38.000 Elizabeth Holmes.

02:21:39.000 Oh my god.

02:21:40.000 The Theranos girl.

02:21:44.000 Your voice sounds a little bit like her fake voice.

02:21:46.000 Really?

02:21:47.000 Yes.

02:21:48.000 Wow.

02:21:49.000 I think if you toned it down a little bit, if you high-pitched your voice just a little bit...

02:21:53.000 Can I monetize that in any way?

02:21:54.000 I don't think so.

02:21:55.000 I think it's too late.

02:22:00.000 Sorry, that was a nonsense.

02:22:01.000 No, that's all right.

02:22:01.000 I'm too old to be self-conscious about stuff like that anyway.

02:22:04.000 No, you have a great voice.

02:22:05.000 It's just weird for a woman. 0.98

02:22:11.000 That's really funny.

02:22:12.000 My wife was going to laugh about that. 1.00

02:22:13.000 Have you paid attention to that trial at all?

02:22:15.000 No, I haven't. 0.97

02:22:16.000 I am fucking fascinated by it. 0.99

02:22:18.000 I am fascinated by charlatans. 0.99

02:22:21.000 I'm fascinated by people who pull the wool over incredibly rich people's eyes and hoodwink them.

02:22:29.000 She fit this perfect narrative that they were looking for.

02:22:34.000 This billionaire genius woman who's the boss lady of this company that's going to do groundbreaking new work on blood testing and it's going to revolutionize the industry and help everyone. 0.99

02:22:50.000 And she had this fake voice.

02:22:53.000 I'm so fascinated by her.

02:22:56.000 I'm so fascinated by the story.

02:22:59.000 Yeah, it is a great story.

02:23:01.000 I love con man stories.

02:23:03.000 In fact, that's one of the reasons why I spent so many years covering the financial crisis.

02:23:10.000 Some of your best work.

02:23:11.000 My favorite book growing up was about a con man.

02:23:14.000 It was this book called Dead Souls by a Russian writer named Gogol.

02:23:21.000 And it's about a guy who basically buys a bunch of dead serfs and mortgages them because there was a loophole in Russian law back then.

02:23:31.000 The census was so slow that if you bought the equivalent of a slave...

02:23:38.000 The state bureaucracy wouldn't know that that person was dead yet.

02:23:42.000 So you could go to a bank and mortgage your slaves and get cash for them, essentially, right?

02:23:49.000 So they got one of them just sort of buying dead slaves.

02:23:51.000 But the con men are fascinating, right?

02:23:56.000 And especially in the internet age, there's so many different ways To rip people off, to scale, that I think the authorities are just always going to be a couple of steps behind.

02:24:10.000 I mean, you look at everything from Bernie Madoff to the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, which was an unbelievable story, like just basically stealing billions of dollars from investors around the world by representing a phony bond scheme.

02:24:30.000 It's just incredibly easy to do.

02:24:32.000 All you need to do is have the appearance of respectability.

02:24:36.000 And have a bunch of people who are respectable that have already bought into it.

02:24:39.000 Exactly.

02:24:40.000 That's the Bernie Madoff thing, right?

02:24:42.000 Right, right.

02:24:42.000 You've seen The Sting.

02:24:43.000 Yes.

02:24:44.000 Right?

02:24:44.000 So that's what they call a big store con, right?

02:24:47.000 Where everybody you see looks like they're sort of a natural part in the environment, but actually they've been put there for a reason to sort of mess with your perceptions of things.

02:24:59.000 And that's what happened with Theranos, with 1MDB, with the subprime mortgage scandals.

02:25:09.000 Everybody looked like they were on the up and up, but actually they were all in on it.

02:25:14.000 And there's just a lot of really interesting ways to rip people off in this environment.

02:25:20.000 It's fascinating when someone like Bernie Madoff can get so many people.

02:25:26.000 And I always thought, really I always thought before I read your coverage of the banking crisis, I thought there was someone Out there who is really clearly paying attention to all of the pieces that are moving.

02:25:42.000 And I thought it was, like, straightforward.

02:25:45.000 Like, bad example maybe, but, like, we understand how fast cars are because we know the engineers that have worked to develop the displacement and the engines and how the transmissions work.

02:25:57.000 There's a clear, trackable thing.

02:26:00.000 Like, you can't just come out with a car and say, this car goes zero to 60 in one-tenth of a second, and everyone's like, what?

02:26:07.000 What are you talking about?

02:26:08.000 How is this being made?

02:26:10.000 And this new technology that no one's ever seen before, none of that exists.

02:26:13.000 We have new tires, and it works on gravity propulsion systems.

02:26:17.000 It doesn't even have anything to do with engines.

02:26:20.000 It would be trackable, right?

02:26:22.000 Like, an engine is trackable.

02:26:23.000 I thought finances were trackable.

02:26:26.000 You think it's funny?

02:26:28.000 Well, you think it's funny because you had to do a lot of research.

02:26:30.000 I did, yeah.

02:26:31.000 So...

02:26:31.000 Pull that microphone in front of you a little bit more.

02:26:33.000 Sorry.

02:26:34.000 No worries.

02:26:35.000 So, Madoff was – he was – part of what he was doing was he was operating on people's belief in a non-existent regulatory scheme.

02:26:48.000 We do have visibility into parts.

02:26:50.000 of the financial structure.

02:26:53.000 We have a pretty well-regulated stock exchange, for instance.

02:26:58.000 I mean, there are certainly problems there, too, but you can see every trade, more or less, right?

02:27:04.000 Or you can see most of the trades, actually.

02:27:06.000 I'm going to get in trouble saying that even.

02:27:08.000 But with Bernie Madoff, he didn't even do trades.

02:27:11.000 There's nobody checking.

02:27:12.000 Right, right, right.

02:27:13.000 And so there was an investigator, Harry Markopoulos, There was a guy sort of independently kind of figured out that there was something wrong with the situation.

02:27:22.000 And all Madoff was doing is this is a classic old-school Ponzi scheme.

02:27:26.000 You guarantee a certain amount of returns.

02:27:30.000 Some people give you some money up front.

02:27:32.000 You take all that money.

02:27:35.000 And then as new people come in, you give the early investors a little taste as if those are investment returns.

02:27:43.000 Actually, all it is is just one big fungible pile of money.

02:27:48.000 You know, and there's no investment.

02:27:50.000 There's no nothing.

02:27:51.000 It's just a con, right?

02:27:53.000 He never was doing any trading.

02:27:55.000 He wasn't doing anything.

02:27:55.000 He just had a big pile of money, and he was constantly bringing in new people.

02:27:59.000 But didn't he start off as an actual legitimate trader?

02:28:02.000 You know, that happens a lot, actually.

02:28:03.000 There are a number of people who start off trying to do it right.

02:28:07.000 No, I don't know if he actually...

02:28:16.000 I'm not sure.

02:28:18.000 But there are a number of stories about people who start off like their hedge funds.

02:28:23.000 Hedge funds don't really get checked, right?

02:28:26.000 So if you're running a hedge fund and I think?

02:28:48.000 I don't have to tell them.

02:28:50.000 I can put out a report that says we actually earned 7% or 14% this year, and no one's going to check because there isn't.

02:28:59.000 There isn't a body of the checks for that kind of investment.

02:29:03.000 So yeah, I think the public doesn't know that there are all these We're good to go.

02:29:30.000 We're going to rig it for ourselves and we're going to take some of these people down.

02:29:36.000 And that was why there was all this joy at blowing up a couple of hedge funds because the system is – you can manipulate it and they did it.

02:29:48.000 And I think it was interesting what happened there.

02:29:51.000 Yeah, it is interesting.

02:29:52.000 And it's interesting the steps they took to sort of combat what these people were doing.

02:29:57.000 It's like, no, no, no, you can't use that loophole.

02:29:59.000 You can only use the loopholes that we're using.

02:30:02.000 Right, exactly.

02:30:03.000 But it was such a clearly organized campaign, like publicly organized campaign.

02:30:09.000 That's one of the things that made it so fascinating and that it was successful.

02:30:12.000 Well, yeah.

02:30:16.000 The response by the authorities confirmed every suspicion of all these GameStop investors, but it didn't break them.

02:30:25.000 They're still holding, you know what I'm saying?

02:30:27.000 That whole phenomenon is fascinating, actually.

02:30:33.000 That's another story that was massively misreported.

02:30:37.000 I talked to a lot of the people who invested in GameStop, A lot of them were people who got ruined after the 2008 crash, whose families got ruined after the 2008 crash.

02:30:50.000 And this was their way of kind of getting revenge on the system.

02:30:53.000 It was a form of protest.

02:30:56.000 Now, for some people, it was just a way to make money, right?

02:30:59.000 And they thought they could just profit off this squeeze play.

02:31:05.000 But for a lot of people, this was legitimately a political rage response.

02:31:14.000 And they didn't present it that way in the news media.

02:31:18.000 They presented it as...

02:31:20.000 You know, a gang of sort of upper class people who were trying to, or middle class people who were trying to manipulate the system for gain.

02:31:29.000 And they edited out the pain part of it that motivated a lot of these people.

02:31:36.000 My next-door neighbor lost everything in 2008, back when I lived in California.

02:31:41.000 He had the property right next to mine, and he would show up.

02:31:46.000 There was nothing built on it, but he had bought this really nice property with a great view, and his dream was to build this dream home there.

02:31:58.000 And I would watch him clear it off.

02:32:02.000 All the time.

02:32:03.000 And one day I just walked up and started talking to him and I said, when are you going to build here? 0.95

02:32:09.000 And then he gave me the story that he lost everything in 2008 and he had everything all set up and he was getting ready to build and now he would just show up and like trim the grass and he was so fucking sad.

02:32:23.000 Yeah, because he probably had his money tied up in mortgage-backed securities.

02:32:28.000 He lost everything.

02:32:31.000 He lost all of his life's work, and here he was.

02:32:35.000 I'm guessing he was in his 70s.

02:32:37.000 And then he stopped showing up, and then I got ahold of someone that I knew that knew him, and he was suffering from some severe health problems and eventually wound up passing away.

02:32:50.000 So it's like this guy was just crushed by this.

02:32:55.000 Just crushed.

02:32:56.000 And this is, when I'm talking to this guy, we're talking like right afterwards.

02:33:01.000 It's like 2010-ish, somewhere like there.

02:33:05.000 But I remember the look in his eye when he was talking to me about what happened with the banking crisis and the crash.

02:33:12.000 It was so depressing. 0.98

02:33:14.000 Because you should imagine if you put your faith in the system and you grinded your ass off for X amount of years and then you finally think you hit the finish line and then all this fuckery takes all your earnings away. 0.99

02:33:30.000 Everything. 0.99

02:33:31.000 Gone.

02:33:31.000 Nothing left.

02:33:32.000 So imagine that story replicated like...

02:33:37.000 15 million times or 20 million times or 25 million times.

02:33:41.000 And it's all these people who've lost everything.

02:33:45.000 And not only have they lost everything, they look on TV and they see that the people who did it got bailed out.

02:33:53.000 They got bailed out immediately and were made whole again.

02:34:02.000 The wealth gap expanded after that.

02:34:06.000 Just to take an example, we were talking about Bernie Madoff before.

02:34:10.000 Bernie Madoff's banker was JPMorgan Chase.

02:34:13.000 So the bank, which should have been monitoring whether or not their client actually had a legitimate business, It doesn't seem too much to ask.

02:34:28.000 Especially if it's their business.

02:34:30.000 It's not like a business they don't understand, like complex chemistry or something.

02:34:33.000 Right, exactly.

02:34:34.000 We were talking about the big store con.

02:34:36.000 They're part of the con.

02:34:38.000 This guy banks with JPMorgan Chase.

02:34:40.000 So it's part of the sales pitch.

02:34:44.000 Of course he's legitimate.

02:34:45.000 You know, it's endorsed by the biggest commercial bank in the country.

02:34:50.000 And I'm sure if you go to his office, it's gorgeous, and you look at some beautiful building that he's in.

02:34:55.000 Right.

02:34:56.000 So all these people see that You know, banks like Chase and Goldman that were selling these mortgage-backed securities to everybody, that were letting people like Bernie Madoff run wild, that were involved in the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia that ripped off that entire country.

02:35:19.000 And they see that they're continually bailed out.

02:35:23.000 After the pandemic, the banks had their best year in history in 2020. Because why?

02:35:35.000 Because when you have the CARES Act...

02:35:39.000 You know, which is all that money from the Fed that went to rescue everybody to keep all these companies in business.

02:35:47.000 Somebody has to underwrite all that lending, right?

02:35:50.000 The Fed is basically buying all these bonds.

02:35:54.000 There's all this new lending to companies that's coming from the government.

02:35:58.000 Well, some private entity has to do all that underwriting.

02:36:02.000 So banks made like $140 or $150 billion in profits just from underwriting in 2020. So they all got rich off the bailouts.

02:36:12.000 For the pandemic, you know?

02:36:14.000 And so, which is exactly what happened after 2008. Like, not only do they get rescued for the actual crash, but the whole bailout, they got additional money for servicing the bailout.

02:36:28.000 Do you understand?

02:36:28.000 Yeah.

02:36:29.000 So people, when they ask, well, why does something like Trump happen? 0.98

02:36:34.000 It's because there's millions of people who look out there and say, I got fucked, right? 0.99

02:36:39.000 Yeah. 0.95

02:36:39.000 Those people got rescued and they don't know exactly why or how, but they know something must be wrong. 0.95

02:36:49.000 And then somebody like Trump comes along and gives them an explanation.

02:36:54.000 It makes more sense than what they're being told.

02:36:58.000 And so they vote for that person.

02:37:00.000 And that's what's going to happen now because the same thing is happening during the pandemic.

02:37:07.000 Once again, people are kind of They're struggling, they're being ruined, but the 1% is kind of being artificially sustained by this run of public support that's going to make them all rich and it's just going to drive that resentment even further.

02:37:26.000 Well, it's also the collapse of small businesses, which is a big factor in this.

02:37:32.000 The big businesses like Target and Walgreens and Walmart, they expanded and they actually profited from the pandemic, whereas these other stores that were forced to close down, they were forced to not be open or to have extreme limitations,

02:37:48.000 they suffered greatly.

02:37:50.000 Restaurants in particular, right?

02:37:51.000 Absolutely, yeah.

02:37:53.000 And again, this is another classic consequence of a bailout.

02:37:58.000 After 2008, there was a thing called the implied bailout.

02:38:05.000 So just the fact that the public knows that the government is never going to let JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America go out of business, It allows them to borrow money more cheaply than some local bank,

02:38:22.000 right?

02:38:23.000 The government might let a local bank go out of business.

02:38:27.000 So when they go out into the open market to borrow money, it costs more.

02:38:32.000 Like, the investors, the people who are lending them money, are going to demand more from that small bank than they're going to demand from Chase because they know That the government's never going to let them go out of business.

02:38:50.000 They're not going to lose on that investment.

02:38:52.000 So it creates artificially an advantage for the big company versus the small company.

02:38:58.000 And that's what happened with the CARES Act.

02:39:01.000 Again, the market looks out at this and they say, okay, well...

02:39:06.000 American Airlines is never going to go out of business.

02:39:09.000 Like, absolutely for sure.

02:39:12.000 You know, the government's going to step in and save them.

02:39:17.000 They've demonstrated that now.

02:39:18.000 But maybe some smaller airline, they might let go out of business.

02:39:22.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:39:22.000 Yeah.

02:39:23.000 Spirit or something like that.

02:39:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:39:25.000 So it creates...

02:39:28.000 It creates this natural tension.

02:39:31.000 Another thing that happened after 2008 was when they took the failing companies like Washington Mutual, rather than break them up into smaller parts so they could become independent small enterprises,

02:39:48.000 what they did is they folded them all into The big companies.

02:39:51.000 They got companies like Chase and Bank of America to buy up these smaller entities.

02:39:58.000 So they took an already concentrated marketplace and they made it more concentrated.

02:40:05.000 They made the big companies that were already too big to fail, they made them Even too big to failure.

02:40:11.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:40:12.000 So that's happening again.

02:40:16.000 And it's again, it's going to drive resentment.

02:40:19.000 You add the fact that kind of small business people tend to be the kind of people who are, you know, Republican Trump supporters who are being vilified, right?

02:40:30.000 And, you know, it's going to drive that resentment even further.

02:40:35.000 And we're only one year into this.

02:40:38.000 Right, yeah.

02:40:39.000 I mean, it's 2021, almost 2022. What is this going to look like at 2023?

02:40:45.000 Right, right.

02:40:47.000 What kind of a fever pitch is this country going to be in by then?

02:40:50.000 Well, I mean, how long can you put people under pressure...

02:40:57.000 And not expect them to go nuts.

02:41:00.000 You know, I mean, like, I think if you people are going to look out, they're going to see what happened after the pandemic.

02:41:06.000 Well, you know, the banks had their best year ever, the pharmaceutical companies are making ungodly risk free profits, essentially.

02:41:14.000 The government is making sure that they will never have to compete or give up their patent protections on their vaccines.

02:41:26.000 They're going to buy every medicine that they produce at full price.

02:41:30.000 And Moderna made, what, $11 billion last year.

02:41:35.000 They're all having record...

02:41:38.000 Profit years.

02:41:39.000 The defense contractors got advances on all their contracts at the beginning of the pandemic, so they're doing great.

02:41:50.000 But small businesses aren't.

02:41:53.000 They're rescuing the big enterprises and they're letting the small ones go.

02:41:58.000 It's capitalism for them and it's kind of socialism for everybody else, for the big firms.

02:42:04.000 That's just not going to hold forever.

02:42:06.000 It's also expanding the power that pharmaceutical drug companies have.

02:42:12.000 And the concern with that is like, it's not that pharmaceutical drug companies are inherently 100% evil.

02:42:20.000 No, they produce drugs that are very beneficial to people.

02:42:23.000 And we all are better off because of them.

02:42:25.000 You know, there's drugs that help people with all sorts of diseases and all sorts of cures and Great.

02:42:32.000 But all these corporations operate under the premise that every year is going to be better than the year before. 0.91

02:42:40.000 How the fuck do you do that when you have this insane windfall? 0.89

02:42:46.000 You have this insane year where you're making untold billions of dollars. 0.99

02:42:52.000 If somebody pointed out to me what Moderna's first quarter of what a quarter of this year looks like, the difference between how much they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off of everything else,

02:43:07.000 and it's A giant percentage of the profit.

02:43:11.000 Jamie, maybe you can find it.

02:43:13.000 I think their numbers for this quarter were like 3.4 billion.

02:43:16.000 I'm not sure.

02:43:17.000 It was something like that.

02:43:17.000 Something crazy like that, but more than three is the vaccine.

02:43:22.000 It's something nutty like that.

02:43:25.000 But the point is, you can't do that if they don't need them anymore.

02:43:30.000 Like, imagine if the vaccine cured everybody.

02:43:32.000 There's no more need for a vaccine.

02:43:34.000 It's a one-shot deal like polio or like the measles.

02:43:37.000 And then all that profit goes away.

02:43:39.000 Well, you have stakeholders.

02:43:42.000 You have stockholders.

02:43:43.000 You have a responsibility to your company.

02:43:45.000 You're supposed to have growth this year.

02:43:48.000 How come this year we're down 75%?

02:43:50.000 Well, sir, the pandemic's gone.

02:43:51.000 It's over.

02:43:52.000 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

02:43:54.000 We've got to figure out a way to make more money.

02:43:56.000 This is what corporations do.

02:43:58.000 And I'm not insinuating that they're going to start a pandemic or fake pandemic or come up with some reason why they should give people medication they don't need.

02:44:06.000 But this is a quality that corporations have.

02:44:10.000 Absolutely.

02:44:11.000 And forget about the vaccine for a minute.

02:44:14.000 Just look at other kinds of drugs.

02:44:17.000 Look at drugs like Adderall.

02:44:24.000 Suddenly, we start finding out that every kid in the country needs to be medicated for ADHD and that there are people trying to pass laws in various states that would mandate that as a treatment.

02:44:39.000 Again, they have an incentive to try to create that market.

02:44:43.000 Or let's just say there's a drug that if you split it into two generics, it costs a dollar for people to use.

02:44:57.000 But there's a new drug on the market that combines both of them and It costs $80 a dose or something like that.

02:45:06.000 They're going to be incentivized to try to get people to take that drug instead of the two separate generics, even though that's not good for the consumer.

02:45:19.000 There's so many different ways that these companies prey on people.

02:45:25.000 This even removes from the equation the fact that a lot of their R&D is publicly funded.

02:45:31.000 They get NIH grants, and in the case of the pandemic, they're specifically given significant amounts of taxpayer money to research into the vaccines, and they're going to make all the profits from that.

02:45:47.000 It doesn't make any sense.

02:45:48.000 Not only that, they have zero risk of ever being sued from side effects.

02:45:52.000 Right.

02:45:52.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:45:53.000 They removed the liability protection. 0.96

02:45:54.000 Which is fucking wild. 0.98

02:45:55.000 Right. 0.99

02:45:55.000 That is wild. 0.99

02:45:56.000 It's going to be fascinating to see just if you were objective, if you were an alien from another planet and you were observing these industries, you'd be fascinating just to watch without any horror how they figure out a way to try to make as much money.

02:46:14.000 Say if the virus goes away.

02:46:17.000 And, you know, whether it mutates into a form like what happened with the Spanish flu where it's non-lethal and it gets to some new place where it's not what we have to worry about anymore.

02:46:27.000 Like the Omicron thing.

02:46:28.000 Right.

02:46:29.000 The Omicron thing, which seems to be no one has died from it so far.

02:46:33.000 Right.

02:46:34.000 And this is wild that they're trying to declare a state of emergency in New York City for something that no one's died from.

02:46:40.000 It was really funny.

02:46:40.000 The headlines, they seem bummed about it.

02:46:43.000 Right.

02:46:44.000 Isn't that weird?

02:46:45.000 Yeah, they do because, well, they're looking for fear.

02:46:47.000 But what they're doing with pharmaceutical companies and advertising, I want to play you this because I was watching this last night. 0.95

02:46:55.000 I was watching some fights and this came up and I had to record it because I'm like, this is one of the fucking wackiest things I have ever heard in my life. 0.99

02:47:06.000 Listen to what they're saying of the side effects of this shit. 0.99

02:47:09.000 For adults with insomnia, prescription baby go can help. 0.99

02:47:12.000 It's about insomnia.

02:47:14.000 People that have...

02:47:16.000 That sounds good, right?

02:47:19.000 Do not take DeVigo if you have narcolepsy.

02:47:22.000 Don't drink alcohol while taking DeVigo.

02:47:24.000 Or drive or operate heavy machinery.

02:47:26.000 Reasonable.

02:47:45.000 This is like that scene from the airplane.

02:47:52.000 Hey, hey, hey, why would I ask the healthcare divider?

02:47:55.000 He just told me I might not remember walking around.

02:47:58.000 I might not be able to move.

02:48:00.000 I might want to kill myself just because I can't sleep.

02:48:03.000 Oh, by the way, yeah.

02:48:05.000 Yeah, that's amazing.

02:48:06.000 But these ads are so crazy.

02:48:08.000 There's no other countries other than New Zealand that allow these ads.

02:48:12.000 They have beautiful music.

02:48:13.000 They have people that are happy.

02:48:15.000 You watch this video where this person, this ad, this lady's lying there sleeping and Plants are growing around her.

02:48:23.000 It's all gorgeous.

02:48:24.000 It looks like the best drug experience ever.

02:48:26.000 It sounds amazing.

02:48:27.000 It sounds like finally I've got a solution to my insomnia. 0.96

02:48:32.000 But the idea that they're allowed to do this manipulative advertising on vulnerable people that are seeking some sort of a solution to whatever health problem they have is goddamn crazy. 0.57

02:48:47.000 Yeah, and it bleeds into the coverage of everything. 0.72

02:48:51.000 During the pandemic...

02:48:54.000 Okay, fine.

02:48:56.000 Let's assume...

02:48:58.000 Let's stipulate...

02:48:59.000 I'm vaccinated.

02:49:01.000 I believe the vaccine works.

02:49:06.000 I got my booster shot and everything.

02:49:08.000 But the lack of curiosity in the press about questions like...

02:49:16.000 Do kids really need it?

02:49:18.000 Is it absolutely necessary for somebody who's under 12 to have a vaccine?

02:49:25.000 What if you've already had the disease?

02:49:27.000 Everything was off limits.

02:49:29.000 And this goes back to what we were talking about before.

02:49:31.000 It's like every story is all or nothing.

02:49:34.000 There's no in-between anything.

02:49:36.000 You can't even consider Any of these questions?

02:49:41.000 And it makes it impossible to get to the bottom of things if you can't even start at step one and start looking at any of these questions.

02:49:49.000 Well, there's been a capture, right?

02:49:51.000 And there's been a pharmaceutical company capture of the narrative.

02:49:55.000 And that is that there are no therapeutics.

02:49:57.000 There is the vaccine.

02:49:59.000 The vaccine is your only way.

02:50:00.000 And they've even been instructed in many places to deny people certain effective therapeutics.

02:50:07.000 What does this say?

02:50:08.000 Okay.

02:50:09.000 Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are making $1,000 profit every second while the world's poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated.

02:50:19.000 And this is the thing because they are not willing to give up their patent to allow poor countries to produce the vaccine.

02:50:29.000 Right.

02:50:29.000 So they're...

02:50:30.000 Which incidentally puts the lie to all of the pandemic of the unvaccinated.

02:50:36.000 Right.

02:50:36.000 Like, if you really believe that, if you really believe that unvaccinated people are the cause of all the suffering, Shame on anybody who doesn't get the vaccine.

02:50:51.000 Then you would push for a patent waiver so that everybody else in the world, with whom you are connected, you know?

02:50:59.000 The world is interconnected.

02:51:02.000 If you really believe that, that is what you would do.

02:51:05.000 You would push for a patent waiver.

02:51:07.000 Instead, they are protecting the profits of these companies very quietly.

02:51:13.000 There's not a whole lot of controversy in the news media about Whether or not the Biden administration is going to lean on these companies to give up their cash cow.

02:51:28.000 So they're allowing the companies to just rake in these billions of dollars, and they villainize the people in this country who voluntarily don't get the vaccine.

02:51:38.000 Like, that's the problem.

02:51:39.000 Well, they've learned their lesson from ivermectin, because ivermectin is now a generic drug, and that's one of the reasons why it's demonized, the fact that you can't...

02:51:48.000 No one owns a patent on it.

02:51:49.000 It's very cheap to make.

02:51:51.000 Now, coincidentally, Africa is one of the least vaccinated places on Earth and has the lowest number of cases. 0.99

02:51:58.000 It's fucking bonkers, and they don't know why. 0.99

02:52:01.000 They're trying to figure out why. 0.99

02:52:03.000 There's no...

02:52:04.000 Real understanding of why Africa, I think Africa has like 6% of its population has been vaccinated, but it has some of the lowest instances of COVID infection on Earth.

02:52:15.000 Right, right.

02:52:17.000 And why is it?

02:52:18.000 That would be interesting to know, right?

02:52:20.000 Well, there's a widespread use of ivermectin because of river blindness and because of...

02:52:24.000 I think they use it for yellow fever.

02:52:27.000 I think for dengue.

02:52:28.000 I think it's used for other things as well.

02:52:31.000 And there's also a widespread use of hydroxychloroquine.

02:52:33.000 I'm not saying that that's the reason.

02:52:36.000 I mean, maybe it's some of these areas are not coming into contact, regular contact with people from these countries that have high instances of infection. 0.96

02:52:46.000 I don't know what the fucking answer is, but it's kind of crazy. 0.71

02:52:50.000 Yeah, and there are countries around the world that have approved Ivermectin as a treatment. 0.98

02:52:58.000 Japan.

02:52:59.000 Yeah, and I think there are a couple in South America, too, if I'm not mistaken.

02:53:04.000 They need real studies, is what they need.

02:53:06.000 There's a lot of messy studies out there, apparently.

02:53:09.000 When you talk to people that really understand the science behind it, they're sounding like, There's too many different studies.

02:53:18.000 Some studies where they used it in prophylaxis.

02:53:20.000 There's studies that used it early on.

02:53:23.000 There's studies that used it late term, which is clearly much less effective.

02:53:28.000 Where it seems to have some potential is early on and in prophylaxis.

02:53:33.000 But again, there is no rock-solid data.

02:53:37.000 But what I found fascinating, I had no idea when I took it, when I took it with all those other things that I took, that that one thing would be a big deal.

02:53:45.000 I really had no idea.

02:53:46.000 I thought I would just tell people, hey, I feel good already.

02:53:50.000 It's only been three days.

02:53:52.000 This is what I took.

02:53:54.000 And people would go, oh, well, you should have got vaccinated.

02:53:57.000 I expected that.

02:53:58.000 But what I didn't expect was this one particular drug to be the thing that was on everybody's radar.

02:54:05.000 Because I read off a laundry list of things.

02:54:07.000 I said monoclonal antibodies.

02:54:09.000 I said Z-Pak. 1.00

02:54:14.000 What was the steroid that I took?

02:54:16.000 There was a steroid.

02:54:17.000 Prednisone.

02:54:18.000 Prednisone.

02:54:18.000 Thank you.

02:54:20.000 Ivermectin.

02:54:20.000 I said all these things.

02:54:21.000 I listed off everything.

02:54:22.000 I said IV vitamin drips.

02:54:24.000 I did all these different things that I took.

02:54:25.000 And I said I felt pretty good.

02:54:27.000 And a couple days later I was negative.

02:54:29.000 So it was like it flew in the face a narrative that the only way to survive this was to be vaccinated.

02:54:35.000 Not only did I survive, but I was better quick.

02:54:40.000 Like really quick.

02:54:41.000 And I was sick.

02:54:43.000 It wasn't like there was no symptoms.

02:54:48.000 I had symptoms.

02:54:49.000 I mean, I had a fever. 0.67

02:54:50.000 I was sweating like a pig in bed.

02:54:52.000 I knew I was sick.

02:54:54.000 And then a couple days later, I was better.

02:54:56.000 But all they chose to concentrate on is this one drug that is generic.

02:55:00.000 Yeah.

02:55:01.000 Which is wild.

02:55:02.000 And they sort of blatantly misreported it.

02:55:07.000 Yeah.

02:55:07.000 You know, the horse dewormer thing.

02:55:09.000 Well, the dumb part about it is that they think I wasn't going to say anything. 0.82

02:55:12.000 Yeah, I know. 0.97

02:55:13.000 I have bigger audience than you do. 1.00

02:55:15.000 Like, what are you, stupid? 1.00

02:55:16.000 Yeah, significantly. 1.00

02:55:17.000 Like, how dumb is that? 0.91

02:55:18.000 But I don't think they've internalized that yet. 0.95

02:55:21.000 No, and this is like, we were talking before about not being embarrassed about getting stuff wrong.

02:55:28.000 Right.

02:55:29.000 It's not that hard to, if somebody wanted to criticize you and not Get it wrong?

02:55:37.000 They could have done it.

02:55:38.000 You know what I mean?

02:55:39.000 Sure.

02:55:39.000 But the whole thing, like, oh, he's taking Horstie Wormer.

02:55:45.000 Why aren't they ashamed of just being factually incorrect?

02:55:52.000 Like, the lack of, you know, any kind of shame about that is a signal to audiences.

02:56:02.000 It gives you credibility and it takes it away from them.

02:56:05.000 I don't think they understood that, though.

02:56:07.000 I don't think they understood that while they were doing it.

02:56:10.000 I think they thought that they were going to get away with it.

02:56:12.000 And I think until Sanjay Gupta came on the podcast, they really had no idea.

02:56:17.000 Right. 0.81

02:56:17.000 And then when he came on the podcast and it just didn't go so good for him, that was a recognition like, oh, we've fucking played a terrible hand here. 0.81

02:56:29.000 Right. 0.59

02:56:30.000 This is not good.

02:56:31.000 Right, so therefore we're never going to let anybody go on your show again.

02:56:34.000 I'm sure.

02:56:34.000 I'm sure there's going to be that.

02:56:36.000 I'm sure.

02:56:37.000 Which is, well, I think they're probably going to clean house over there anyway.

02:56:41.000 I think what's going to happen at CNN now, you know, now that CNN is being run by different people, I think the Chris Cuomo thing is like one step.

02:56:51.000 I heard they're going to replace the entire cast with The View.

02:56:54.000 They're going to take all the girls from The View. 1.00

02:56:55.000 That's going to be the news now.

02:56:56.000 Would it be worse?

02:56:58.000 It would be better. 1.00

02:56:59.000 It would be more entertaining and stupid. 1.00

02:57:02.000 Just kidding. 0.99

02:57:03.000 I hope they actually recognize that there is a market for objective journalism.

02:57:08.000 Well, yeah, I mean, that's abundantly clear.

02:57:12.000 I think the Substack experience has been so fascinating for me.

02:57:19.000 I thought it would work, but I had no idea that it's like this.

02:57:24.000 It would work the way it's working.

02:57:25.000 Yeah, like, the response is unbelievable.

02:57:29.000 And a lot of it is just...

02:57:34.000 People are just so tired of being manipulated and talked to in a certain way.

02:57:38.000 Yes.

02:57:39.000 They don't like being talked at or lectured or whatever.

02:57:44.000 By people who they don't even think are superior to them intellectually.

02:57:47.000 Well, they're not superior.

02:57:48.000 That's the whole point.

02:57:49.000 That's the problem.

02:57:52.000 Journalists used to know that we're not rocket scientists.

02:57:57.000 That's why we're in this business.

02:57:59.000 Most of us flunked out of something real, like law or medicine or whatever.

02:58:03.000 We're like professional test crammers.

02:58:05.000 We get an assignment, we try to learn as much as we can about it in 36 hours, and then we tell you about it.

02:58:12.000 We're not that smart.

02:58:15.000 It's a tough job, but it's not like a...

02:58:22.000 Hard intellectual discipline, but they pontificate on the air and they pretend that they have this special access to special knowledge and that they're a level above the common run of people.

02:58:38.000 Which is ironically a sure sign that they're not smart.

02:58:41.000 Exactly.

02:58:42.000 Which is funny.

02:58:43.000 Like, Don Lemon's a great example of that.

02:58:44.000 It's the surest sign that he's not smart is how smart he tries to pretend that he is.

02:58:50.000 And it's so transparent.

02:58:53.000 Yeah.

02:58:53.000 Right?

02:58:54.000 And I think that's one of the things that happens.

02:58:57.000 Like, you know, when Gupta came on your show, he's just a guy.

02:59:02.000 Like, he's not a bad guy, necessarily.

02:59:04.000 He's a good guy.

02:59:05.000 Yeah.

02:59:05.000 I think he's a good guy.

02:59:06.000 Right?

02:59:07.000 It's just – it's kind of a Wizard of Oz thing where they're trying to project this image of all-knowingness and superiority, moral rectitude, infallibility.

02:59:26.000 But all they're really doing is telling people that they have a lack of humility and a lack of self-knowledge.

02:59:32.000 Exactly.

02:59:33.000 And it's really unfortunate because it wasn't that long ago that people like Walter Cronkite were the most trusted people in the country precisely because they kind of had this attitude of, you know, Well, we're curious.

02:59:49.000 We don't really know.

02:59:50.000 That was the way they presented the news back in the day.

02:59:54.000 Like, huh, that's interesting.

02:59:55.000 Let's tell you about this thing.

02:59:56.000 When did it shift?

02:59:58.000 I think it started with my generation.

03:00:03.000 It started with the people after all the president's men came out.

03:00:09.000 Because before that, in my father's era, journalism was more like a trade.

03:00:16.000 You know, you were more likely to be the son or the daughter, more likely the son.

03:00:22.000 It was almost all male back then. 0.94

03:00:24.000 But, you know, of an electrician or a plumber or something, like, it was not something that upper-class Ivy League kids went into once upon a time, like, back in the 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s.

03:00:37.000 Then it became a sexy profession after all the president's men.

03:00:41.000 After Watergate, everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein.

03:00:44.000 Hunter Thompson helped make it a little bit sexy.

03:00:49.000 Rolling Stone, all that, their coverage.

03:00:51.000 And it became a place for upper-class white kids to try to make their way.

03:01:01.000 It became a fashionable profession.

03:01:02.000 And I saw this sort of Transformation because when I started covering presidential campaigns on the plane, and this was back when presidential campaigns had planes full of journalists.

03:01:16.000 They don't have that anymore.

03:01:17.000 Like now there's only a couple who follow the people around.

03:01:20.000 Like everybody's doing it by wire service reports now for the most part.

03:01:25.000 What did it used to be like?

03:01:27.000 If you were following John Kerry in 2004, which I did, you would have Kerry and the aides would be up in the equivalent of the first class section, and the entire back of the plane would be media, right?

03:01:42.000 And You know, 80, 90, 100 reporters, you know, a couple of, you know, some of them would be camera people, some of them would be tech people.

03:01:54.000 But what was so interesting for me is there was a mix on the plane.

03:01:59.000 Some of them were sort of the old hands who had been doing this since the 70s.

03:02:05.000 And they were much more kind of skeptical. 1.00

03:02:08.000 They were much more likely to look at politicians like They're all pieces of shit. 1.00

03:02:13.000 I don't really care. 1.00

03:02:14.000 Like, in both parties, I don't believe anything they say, but I'm gonna sort of report it.

03:02:19.000 Like, that's my job.

03:02:21.000 But this newer generation, the younger generation, they were so excited by—they were jazzed by the proximity to an important person, you know?

03:02:31.000 And I think it was symbolized by something like Primary Colors.

03:02:35.000 You remember that movie?

03:02:35.000 Yes.

03:02:36.000 So, you know, that was written by a journalist, Joe Klein.

03:02:44.000 Originally it was anonymous.

03:02:47.000 But, you know, who had a close relationship with somebody on the Clinton campaign.

03:02:51.000 And that became kind of the model of what campaign journalism was all about.

03:02:55.000 Like, you were an insider.

03:02:56.000 You were somebody who was in the know behind the rope line with the campaign.

03:03:02.000 And that was what everybody wanted.

03:03:03.000 They wanted to be like one of those people who got the secret, who knew in advance what the candidate was going to say.

03:03:11.000 Whereas the older grouchy types were the ones who were trying to bust the candidate for something, you know?

03:03:19.000 Or trying to catch him in a lie or trying to figure out who was actually, you know, funding the campaign or, you know, that kind of thing.

03:03:26.000 And so that was where I think the difference started.

03:03:28.000 I think it started in the 90s and in the early 2000s and now it's like 100%.

03:03:32.000 Like all those old types are gone. 1.00

03:03:36.000 Yeah, it's depressing.

03:03:38.000 Wow.

03:03:39.000 All of them.

03:03:40.000 I remember in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson was talking about how he had freedom because he wasn't coming back.

03:03:51.000 And so many of these guys were coming back and so they had to sort of like follow... 0.99

03:03:56.000 Some protocol or follow some rules and you know he did like when he was Pretending that Hubert Humphrey was on drugs right in the game Yeah, making up fact that a Brazilian doctor had come to work on him like he had this freedom to do that right they didn't have and he Had the freedom to look at it honestly to look at it the way he thought The fucker he was Yeah, 0.79

03:04:23.000 and you should always, as a journalist, you should never expect to retain your friends because you will eventually have to write something negative about somebody who you've become friendly with. 0.87

03:04:35.000 So if you go into this business to be socially successful, you're in the wrong business.

03:04:40.000 You should be comfortable being a loner.

03:04:44.000 Or only have friends with people that, you know, follow the sort of morals and ethics that you do.

03:04:51.000 Right, yeah.

03:04:52.000 That is possible, isn't it?

03:04:53.000 It is possible, but for the most part, if you're trying to be friends with people you're covering, it's not going to work.

03:05:01.000 Right, it's not going to work.

03:05:01.000 And so what's regrettable about now is a lot of the people who are in journalism, they're upper class.

03:05:13.000 They are socially the same people that they're reporting on, whereas there used to be much more of a class difference.

03:05:24.000 You never had a phenomenon before—well, it was much more rare before to have a situation, especially in local journalism, where the reporter was somebody who saw himself or herself as being like— Traveling in the same circles as the mayor or a senator or the CEO of a company.

03:05:50.000 They just didn't really mix like that. 0.91

03:05:53.000 So they were outsiders who were reporting and they didn't really mind offending people because, what the fuck, they're not my friends. 0.92

03:06:05.000 But these people are all friends. 0.89

03:06:07.000 Like Rachel Manow and Democratic Party politicians, they're They're friends.

03:06:14.000 Have you ever seen a video of Chuck Schumer and Stephen Colbert dancing together?

03:06:19.000 Oh God, I can't even imagine.

03:06:21.000 You need to see it.

03:06:22.000 Do we have time?

03:06:24.000 You need to see it.

03:06:24.000 You need to just see them dancing together.

03:06:27.000 And I feel the same way about comedians that you do about journalists. 0.99

03:06:31.000 You know, like, you can't be friends with those people because there's gonna come a time where you have to talk shit about them. 0.98

03:06:37.000 Dennis Miller ran into that with George Bush. 0.98

03:06:40.000 I remember being incredibly disappointed because I was a Dennis Miller fan.

03:06:44.000 I was a comic.

03:06:45.000 He was a very good comic.

03:06:46.000 His HBO special was brilliant. 0.96

03:06:49.000 He had some great shit, great jokes, great one-liners, man. 0.99

03:06:52.000 Absolutely. 1.00

03:06:52.000 But then he said he was going to give George Bush a pass because he's his friend, and he wouldn't make fun of him. 1.00

03:06:58.000 Look at this.

03:06:59.000 Chuck Schumer's got the mask on, and look at Colbert.

03:07:02.000 No mask.

03:07:04.000 Spreading pandemic viruses.

03:07:07.000 Look, he's dancing.

03:07:09.000 High-fiving and dancing with Chuck Schumer.

03:07:15.000 What is this?

03:07:16.000 What kind of signaling is this? 1.00

03:07:19.000 Can you imagine Bill Hicks fucking dancing with a senator? 1.00

03:07:22.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

03:07:23.000 Well, Colbert was never really a stand-up.

03:07:25.000 So, I mean, I guess he has that.

03:07:28.000 But he was a comic when the Colbert Report was on.

03:07:32.000 I mean, that was hilarious.

03:07:33.000 It was really good.

03:07:34.000 He was great.

03:07:35.000 Yeah.

03:07:35.000 He was great.

03:07:36.000 And that show was a great take-off of a fucking pompous, ridiculous Republican. 1.00

03:07:43.000 Exactly. 1.00

03:07:44.000 I mean, it was fucking really good. 0.94

03:07:46.000 And then when you see this, you're like, wait a minute. 0.99

03:07:49.000 What the fuck? 0.99

03:07:50.000 What are you doing? 1.00

03:07:51.000 Right. 1.00

03:07:52.000 The fuck are you doing? 1.00

03:07:53.000 And why were you doing the other thing before? 1.00

03:07:56.000 Right.

03:07:57.000 Was it to do this?

03:07:59.000 Well, I think what happened, and I'm just going to guess, but I think what happened was he had this brilliant character.

03:08:04.000 It was amazing on The Daily Show.

03:08:06.000 Then he does The Colbert Report.

03:08:08.000 It's amazing there.

03:08:09.000 It's a great show, right? 1.00

03:08:11.000 And then they offer him the fucking carrot. 1.00

03:08:13.000 What's the carrot? 1.00

03:08:14.000 The carrot's a late-night talk show.

03:08:15.000 And the late-night talk show for, I guess, kind of my generation, was the thing that everybody wanted.

03:08:24.000 Kimmel and Fallon and all these guys.

03:08:26.000 Like, you got to host the tonight show?

03:08:29.000 Or Jimmy Kimmel's got his own show?

03:08:31.000 You got your own show?

03:08:32.000 You got the Letterman show?

03:08:33.000 You got the this show, the that show?

03:08:35.000 That was the thing, man. 0.99

03:08:37.000 If you could get your own show like that, you were fucking in. 0.98

03:08:41.000 If they offered it to you, you took it. 0.99

03:08:44.000 You took it.

03:08:45.000 But then, to be that show guy, he has to be a different guy.

03:08:49.000 So now he's not...

03:08:51.000 Colbert from the show was this genius parody.

03:08:54.000 Now he's just Stephen Colbert.

03:08:57.000 Right.

03:08:57.000 That's who he is.

03:08:58.000 They destroyed the essence by giving him something.

03:09:02.000 The best example of it was when Jon Stewart came on.

03:09:05.000 And Jon Stewart was doing that bit about the lab leak theory.

03:09:09.000 And Colbert is jumping in and stepping all over it.

03:09:13.000 Right.

03:09:13.000 I'd like to see some evidence of that.

03:09:15.000 He's like, fucking up the bit. 0.80

03:09:18.000 Clearly, Stewart, who's a great comic, is in the middle of a bit. 0.91

03:09:22.000 Right.

03:09:23.000 Yeah, exactly.

03:09:24.000 And Colbert's trying to, he's like, you can see the panic in his eyes that this is not going along with the narrative.

03:09:29.000 So he's like, he's hamstringing the bit.

03:09:32.000 Right.

03:09:33.000 Which is crazy to see.

03:09:34.000 Yeah, because his whole body is physically mortified by the idea that he's sending off the wrong signals now.

03:09:41.000 He is the boss of this show, and this show is going to allow this wild, reckless talk about the lab leak.

03:09:49.000 You know, it's a great story that's sort of apropos to all this.

03:09:53.000 In Seymour Hersh's book, his memoir, Reporter, there's a story about how In the early 90s, the CIA wanted everybody to know that they had caught, I think it was an Israeli spy.

03:10:11.000 And so they called up Hirsch because Hirsch was the biggest investigative reporter in the country.

03:10:19.000 And they invited him in.

03:10:20.000 And they said, look, we're going to show you all this material.

03:10:26.000 They brought him into a room and they just gave him a whole packet of stuff.

03:10:31.000 But his entire body rebelled.

03:10:34.000 He's like, I had spent my whole life Getting the things, I could not be handed the things.

03:10:41.000 You know what I mean?

03:10:41.000 Because it's just not in his nature to be spoon-fed.

03:10:47.000 I think that's true with comics, with any kind of journalist.

03:10:52.000 Once you start getting handed things, then you've lost.

03:10:59.000 You know what I mean?

03:11:00.000 They have you at that point.

03:11:02.000 And you got to get out of that habit, you know?

03:11:04.000 It's like, or you just never, you can't cross that line.

03:11:08.000 You can't cross that line.

03:11:09.000 But if you want to be on a talk show, you have to cross that line.

03:11:13.000 There's no other way you get on that show.

03:11:15.000 You can't get on that show and have some real counterculture narrative that is not approved and sanctioned and you spit it out there on NBC for the masses.

03:11:26.000 When was the last talk show that was, that had like a counterculture I mean, Letterman in the 80s, maybe?

03:11:32.000 Maybe Letterman.

03:11:33.000 Yeah, Letterman.

03:11:34.000 Well, Letterman was rebellious.

03:11:36.000 I don't know if he was counterculture, but he was certainly rebellious and certainly the favorite of the people that weren't taking it all seriously.

03:11:43.000 The people that wanted the tongue-in-cheek jabs at the celebrities.

03:11:47.000 Whereas Jay Leno was letting everybody on and, oh, you're hilarious.

03:11:52.000 Oh, that's great.

03:11:53.000 That's awesome.

03:11:54.000 There was no attacking.

03:11:57.000 Letterman would mock you.

03:11:59.000 He was in on the joke.

03:12:01.000 I remember when my father used to work for NBC and when the The tech workers, NABIT, the union, when they went on strike, NBC brought in a bunch of scabs to cross the picket line and do all their work for them.

03:12:21.000 Letterman used to get them to screw up, basically.

03:12:24.000 In other words, the cameras would go back and forth.

03:12:27.000 So he was taking a dig at management, which was kind of cool.

03:12:30.000 I thought that was an interesting thing. 0.99

03:12:31.000 Did he do it on purpose and tell them to fuck up? 0.99

03:12:33.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

03:12:34.000 That is funny.

03:12:35.000 Well, he was a very smart guy.

03:12:37.000 Yeah.

03:12:38.000 And, you know, a funny guy.

03:12:39.000 Like, the funniest of all those.

03:12:41.000 If you go back and look at, like, the guys who have hosted talk shows and were really funny at it, he's the best.

03:12:48.000 Yeah.

03:12:49.000 I think he's the best.

03:12:50.000 I think he's the best talk show host of all time.

03:12:52.000 I love that he was a weatherman before he did the talk show.

03:12:58.000 Didn't he get in trouble for predicting hailstones the size of canned hams?

03:13:04.000 That sounds like a lovely thing to say.

03:13:06.000 I hope that's a true story.

03:13:07.000 Yeah, it's interesting because his Netflix thing wasn't the same.

03:13:16.000 It just didn't feel the same.

03:13:19.000 Well, I mean...

03:13:22.000 Apart from you and Chappelle, who's doing...

03:13:27.000 I don't know.

03:13:30.000 The comedy scene to me, I don't know.

03:13:34.000 It just seems like network television.

03:13:39.000 There's nothing funny there.

03:13:41.000 On network television, but in the clubs, it's one of the best times ever.

03:13:45.000 Is it really? 1.00

03:13:46.000 Yeah, there's a lot of daring motherfuckers out there. 1.00

03:13:49.000 Bill Burr, who's one of the best of all time. 0.99

03:13:52.000 He's phenomenal.

03:13:54.000 And he's killing it right now.

03:13:56.000 He's fighting it. 0.96

03:13:58.000 He's not giving in to it at all.

03:14:00.000 He's fighting it.

03:14:00.000 And there's...

03:14:02.000 There's a lot of guys like that out there now.

03:14:04.000 There's guys coming up like Tim Dillon, Andrew Schultz, Mark Norman, Shane Gillis. 0.89

03:14:11.000 There's a lot of funny fucking young guys that are coming out that are dedicated to real stand-up.

03:14:17.000 There's a lot of people out there that are dedicated to being journalists and they're just trying to find their way through and they really respect real journalism. 0.96

03:14:23.000 They don't want to be a corporate hack.

03:14:26.000 They want to be a real journalist.

03:14:27.000 There's a lot of comics like that.

03:14:29.000 That's great. 0.95

03:14:29.000 I mean, the stupider and more restrictive this environment gets, the better the audience response must be. 0.95

03:14:38.000 Yes. 0.99

03:14:39.000 Oh, it's phenomenal.

03:14:40.000 It's really incredible.

03:14:41.000 It's incredible to see because, you know, I work with all these guys.

03:14:43.000 We do clubs together and we do shows together and to see the response to this...

03:14:49.000 You know, risky material.

03:14:52.000 Like, all Dave's stuff, the stuff that got him cancelled, air quotes.

03:14:57.000 You know, like, my God, was he murdering?

03:14:59.000 I mean, murdering.

03:15:01.000 We did a series of shows together. 0.99

03:15:03.000 And he's fucking, he's one of the greatest of all time. 0.99

03:15:06.000 And also being attacked. 0.99

03:15:09.000 But it's, you can't, comedy can't be safe.

03:15:12.000 It's not possible.

03:15:14.000 It can be safe with some jokes, but in its entirety, it's not going to be safe.

03:15:20.000 And the comics that are real recognize that.

03:15:23.000 And they also recognize that we've got to stay together.

03:15:25.000 We've got to stay together, and we've got to help each other.

03:15:28.000 Because the more we support each other, the more we get through this, the more the audience realizes, like, oh, this is what they do.

03:15:34.000 They're not in court giving affidavits on their viewpoint.

03:15:38.000 They're trying to say funny things.

03:15:40.000 Right.

03:15:40.000 And in doing so, you're going to cover very controversial topics.

03:15:44.000 You're going to say things that are outrageous to say.

03:15:47.000 But that's the point.

03:15:48.000 And occasionally you're going to say something that is amiss, right?

03:15:52.000 Yes.

03:15:52.000 Oh, all the time.

03:15:53.000 All the time.

03:15:54.000 That's the only way you find out if it hits.

03:15:56.000 Especially when you're working the clubs.

03:15:58.000 The whole idea is, like, I'll do a joke...

03:16:02.000 And as I'm doing it, I'm like, I gotta get out of this.

03:16:05.000 Like, this is not the right way to do this.

03:16:06.000 I'm doing it the wrong way.

03:16:07.000 I'm saying it away, I'm taking a chance, and I'm going down a dark alleyway, and I hit a dead end.

03:16:13.000 I gotta figure out, I gotta get out of this.

03:16:16.000 And this is part of the process of creation, because you really only create comedy.

03:16:21.000 You write in silence, alone, but you create it, really, with the audience's involvement.

03:16:27.000 And you never really know how it's going to go over, right?

03:16:30.000 You don't.

03:16:30.000 You don't know.

03:16:31.000 You have ideas.

03:16:32.000 You kind of get it.

03:16:33.000 You know how to do it.

03:16:34.000 You know the process.

03:16:35.000 You trust in the process. 0.98

03:16:37.000 But you really don't fucking know until you're there.

03:16:39.000 And if someone takes a little snippet of that and tries to take, particularly if they take a snippet of that and they put it in quotes, Right. 0.89

03:16:45.000 It's like, that's not what it is.

03:16:48.000 You're pretending that this is a real opinion.

03:16:50.000 This is comedy.

03:16:52.000 Just like Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff.

03:16:55.000 Yeah, this is not real.

03:16:57.000 And if you take away the ability to screw it up, it robs of its essence, basically.

03:17:04.000 Well, we use yonder bags now for a lot of shows, which helps that.

03:17:07.000 Because everyone's phones are locked up.

03:17:09.000 Oh, right.

03:17:10.000 Because everyone just wants to film everything now, which is bad for the experience watching it.

03:17:15.000 Just take it in.

03:17:16.000 Just like you take in everything else in life.

03:17:18.000 We have to learn how to take things in and enjoy the moment.

03:17:21.000 I mean, I went to see The Stones recently, and I'm guilty of it too because I took a couple pictures and some video, but I'm like, God, I need to just take this in.

03:17:30.000 How many times am I going to get to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards alive on stage jamming and have it be really good?

03:17:37.000 Keith Richards hasn't looked alive since like 1972. He's moving though!

03:17:42.000 He's animated.

03:17:44.000 No, that's great.

03:17:44.000 So listen, man, we learned a lot today.

03:17:46.000 We learned that those Patriot fucks might be real. 1.00

03:17:48.000 I think we learned that. 0.99

03:17:50.000 Are they?

03:17:50.000 I don't know, man.

03:17:51.000 I think there's some involvement.

03:17:54.000 I think there's some involvement.

03:17:56.000 I'm suspicious.

03:17:57.000 I'm suspicious of their outfits, but we learned they might be real.

03:17:59.000 We learned that your voice sounds like Elizabeth Holmes a little bit.

03:18:02.000 That is amazing.

03:18:03.000 I can't wait to tell my wife.

03:18:04.000 You know, it's really when you have the microphone in the wrong place.

03:18:07.000 Oh, okay.

03:18:08.000 You bring it to your neck.

03:18:09.000 Yeah.

03:18:10.000 Do I sound more liquor now?

03:18:11.000 Yes.

03:18:12.000 You sound more liquor now.

03:18:12.000 It was more like when the microphone was...

03:18:14.000 These mics are weird.

03:18:16.000 They have to be right in front of your face.

03:18:17.000 And if they're here, they give you sort of a subtlety to the way you're talking.

03:18:21.000 And then you sound like Elizabeth Holmes.

03:18:22.000 So I sound like a female corporate con artist?

03:18:26.000 No. 0.98

03:18:27.000 No, you only sound like that one.

03:18:28.000 Because you can't say that any man sounds like Sam Kinison other than Sam Kinison.

03:18:37.000 You can't say that any female sounds like Alyssa. 0.93

03:18:40.000 She doesn't even sound like her. 0.99

03:18:42.000 You know, that's part of the reason why she got busted was that friends from college, like, what the fuck is that girl talking like that for? 1.00

03:18:49.000 Oh my god. 0.98

03:18:50.000 So it's like the Unabomber thing, like somebody who knew her.

03:18:53.000 Exactly.

03:18:53.000 People who knew her from college were like, what is going on with her voice?

03:18:57.000 What is this?

03:18:58.000 What is this thing you're doing?

03:19:01.000 See, that's the lesson.

03:19:02.000 Never have, you know, if you're going to be going to crime, don't have friends in college. 0.99

03:19:08.000 Or, like, start the shit early. 0.99

03:19:11.000 Right. 1.00

03:19:11.000 Like, in high school. 1.00

03:19:12.000 And may come up with, like, a lacrosse injury for why you're, uh...

03:19:16.000 She got hit with a high-speed ball to the neck, and that's a damage to her vocal cords. 1.00

03:19:22.000 Listen, thank you very much for everything you do.

03:19:24.000 Joe, thank you.

03:19:24.000 I really appreciate that you're out there.

03:19:26.000 It means a lot, not just to me, but to a lot of people that you are a legitimate, objective source of information, and it means a lot.

03:19:35.000 It's so, so important.

03:19:36.000 Likewise, I can't tell you how much it makes me laugh that your viewership is so much more massive than the news stations.

03:19:46.000 I just get a kick out of that.

03:19:47.000 It's confusing.

03:19:49.000 I have no idea how it happens.

03:19:51.000 I'm really baffled.

03:19:52.000 I'm not kidding.

03:19:53.000 Every week when it's still number one, I'm like, still?

03:19:56.000 Crazy. 0.99

03:19:57.000 I don't know what the fuck happened. 1.00

03:19:59.000 There's no plan behind this. 0.99

03:20:01.000 That's what's so bizarre about it.

03:20:03.000 Right.

03:20:03.000 But it's hilarious.

03:20:05.000 Well, thank you.

03:20:06.000 No, no, I mean that in a good way.

03:20:07.000 Oh, I do too.

03:20:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:20:08.000 Yeah, I find it hilarious too.

03:20:09.000 It is.

03:20:10.000 It's like, okay.

03:20:11.000 Yeah.

03:20:13.000 Your Substack, tell people how to get to it.

03:20:16.000 Yeah, taibi.substack.com.

03:20:20.000 Spell Taibi for people who don't know how to spell it.

03:20:22.000 T-A-I-B-B-I. And then you are, what is it, mtaibi? 0.99

03:20:26.000 At mtaibi on Twitter.

03:20:28.000 Do you have an Instagram as well?

03:20:30.000 Yeah.

03:20:31.000 God, I don't even know it.

03:20:32.000 I'm barely on it.

03:20:34.000 So it's really just those two things.

03:20:35.000 Diab.substack.com.

03:20:38.000 And, yeah.

03:20:41.000 Thanks for having me on.

03:20:43.000 My pleasure.

03:20:43.000 Anytime.

03:20:44.000 Open invitation.

03:20:44.000 Appreciate you.

03:20:45.000 Thank you.

03:20:46.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 07, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1745 - Matt Taibbi

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Transcript