The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 392. This Podcast Will Polarize You – And It Should ｜ Matt Taibbi

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.140 Today I'm speaking with author and journalist Matt Taibbi.

00:01:15.260 We discussed his early career, both in journalism and professional basketball.

00:01:20.360 His time in the USSR learning Russian and publishing a successful Gonzo-inspired newspaper.

00:01:27.740 And his breaking coverage of the subprime mortgage bubble.

00:01:30.940 We also examined the state of the world today with Russia and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

00:01:37.080 The upcoming presidential election.

00:01:39.800 And the dire necessity for alternative news sources.

00:01:44.080 Matt, I have to know, what was it like playing for the Uzbek national baseball team?

00:01:49.440 That was great, actually.

00:01:53.720 At the time I was trying to be a freelance reporter in Uzbekistan.

00:01:57.140 I was really young in my 20s.

00:01:59.360 And I walked by a university field and saw a bunch of Cubans playing baseball.

00:02:04.120 So they were, I think, Cuban refrigeration students.

00:02:08.400 And I was the only American on the team.

00:02:10.740 We had a fun time playing against other Central Asian teams.

00:02:17.260 And we had one funny story.

00:02:19.740 We had ground rules.

00:02:21.400 If you hit a sheep at one field, it was a triple.

00:02:24.520 If you hit a cow, it was a double.

00:02:26.260 And if you knocked the cow out, was that a home run?

00:02:29.680 Or was it a consequence of the degree of damage?

00:02:32.420 I don't think we ever got that far.

00:02:33.960 So your career plan was to be an independent journalist in Uzbekistan.

00:02:38.360 And that didn't work out.

00:02:39.980 So you turned to pro baseball.

00:02:43.100 Well, at the time, I was more interested in being a writer, just generally, than being a reporter.

00:02:49.180 I thought I had been living in St. Petersburg, which was filled at the time with freelance journalists.

00:02:57.060 And I thought, I'm not getting a lot of work.

00:02:59.440 I'll move to a place where there are no reporters.

00:03:01.900 So I moved to the middle of nowhere, basically waited for something to happen so that I could get a byline and a wire service or something like that.

00:03:11.100 But I figured while I was there, maybe I could do something like write a book about playing baseball for the Uzbeks.

00:03:17.740 And I ended up doing that kind of thing a lot.

00:03:20.080 I moved to Mongolia later, played basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association.

00:03:25.140 Well, that was my next question, okay, because that's obviously the logical career progression move for someone who's a journalist in Uzbekistan and then playing baseball, is to go to Mongolia and play pro basketball.

00:03:36.480 So tell me about that.

00:03:38.620 Yeah, that happened because I was working in Moscow for an expat paper called the Moscow Times, which still exists.

00:03:46.320 And I played a lot of street basketball back in those days at Moscow State University.

00:03:52.480 You've probably seen pictures.

00:03:54.000 It's got that beautiful, gigantic sort of wedding cake skyscraper building in the background.

00:03:59.680 I used to go there in the afternoons and play hoops.

00:04:02.580 And there was a kid there from Mongolia who told me they had a league in Mongolia called the NBA, which was the only basketball league in the world that played by NBA rules with a 24-second clock and everything.

00:04:16.320 So I quit my job the next day, got in the train and got on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and went to Mongolia, had a tryout, played for a season in the Mongolian Basketball Association.

00:04:28.480 So were you big among the Mongolian fangirls?

00:04:33.660 A little bit.

00:04:34.720 You know, it was actually quite an experience.

00:04:40.320 Mongolia at the time was very basketball crazy, and there's a long story about why.

00:04:46.120 But basically every Mongolian kid was playing basketball in the early 90s.

00:04:51.620 And, you know, my friends were big celebrities in the country.

00:04:56.920 There was one of my teammates was considered the Mongolian Jordan.

00:05:01.460 So everywhere I went, there were lots of people following us around.

00:05:05.220 It was pretty cool.

00:05:06.300 Well, that's all completely unexpected and crazy.

00:05:09.400 Now, you also went to the Leningrad Polytechnic.

00:05:11.780 Was it the St. Petersburg Polytechnic by then?

00:05:14.420 And why did you end up in the domiciles of the former Soviet Union?

00:05:21.120 How did that all come about?

00:05:22.660 And why did you decide to stay there for, well, a number of years?

00:05:25.220 When I was a kid, I was fairly lonely and depressed and introverted.

00:05:32.180 And the thing that I found that became my escape in life is that I fell in love with comic fiction.

00:05:40.920 And my favorite writers were all Russian writers like Gogol and Bulgakov.

00:05:46.080 And my decision as a very young man was to move to the then Soviet Union and learn Russian so that I could read those books in the original language.

00:05:58.700 So when I studied originally, it was actually still Leningrad Polytech.

00:06:02.660 I'm old enough to have gone to school in the Soviet Union.

00:06:06.360 And I went there to study Russian.

00:06:10.720 Even though it was a polytechnical school, they had a Russian language faculty for all the new students.

00:06:15.940 And that's what I did there.

00:06:17.880 So did you read The Master and Margarita in the original Russian?

00:06:21.820 I did.

00:06:22.740 I did.

00:06:23.160 That's a tough one.

00:06:24.040 I'm not going to lie.

00:06:25.020 I bet.

00:06:25.400 It's a tough book, man.

00:06:28.040 Yes.

00:06:28.660 Some of the Russian writers are easier than others to read.

00:06:32.880 For a foreigner, I would say Tolstoy is easier. 0.99

00:06:35.520 He's just very clear.

00:06:37.100 Yeah.

00:06:37.420 But there's a tradition of a different kind of writer.

00:06:42.160 Unfortunately, like my favorite Gogol, Dostoevsky is another one. 0.52

00:06:46.500 Bulgakov, they use very, very convoluted, long sentences. 1.00

00:06:51.760 But they're beautiful.

00:06:52.920 I mean, Russian is a beautiful language.

00:06:54.160 Yeah, well, The Master and Margarita, that's, I don't know, maybe, is that the most complex, dreamlike novel ever written?

00:07:03.760 It might be.

00:07:04.580 I think I've read it three times, you know.

00:07:06.560 It's a crazy book.

00:07:08.160 I mean, it's got five or six things going on at the same time, all of which are preposterous and surreal.

00:07:13.840 And it's very, very sophisticated, multi-layered work.

00:07:18.460 I mean, it's really quite the piece of fiction.

00:07:22.020 And I can understand why you would be motivated to learn Russian, although that's a hell of a motivation to read it.

00:07:28.980 And so, now you also worked at a newspaper in Moscow.

00:07:33.940 Was that The Exile?

00:07:35.220 Was that what it was called?

00:07:36.600 Originally, I worked at the Moscow Times, which was sort of the straight news newspaper for the big burgeoning expat community, which was quite large in the 90s in Moscow.

00:07:49.840 And then I left that and ended up co-starting my own newspaper called The Exile, which was kind of a cross of Time Out and Screw magazine.

00:08:04.100 It's hard to explain, but it was sort of a satirical nightlife guide, let's put it that way.

00:08:09.780 And it's gotten me in some trouble, you know, not in my later years, but it was an experiment in extreme free speech, doing everything the way a normal newspaper would do it, but backwards.

00:08:26.820 We had corrections for things that had never appeared in the paper.

00:08:30.280 I mean, we tried to make an absolute joke of the whole newspaper format.

00:08:35.640 How did that go over in Moscow?

00:08:38.020 I mean, it's not exactly known as a bastion of free speech.

00:08:41.460 So, how did that work out?

00:08:43.220 It actually worked out brilliantly, believe it or not.

00:08:47.440 The people who are in Moscow in the 90s, and especially the late 90s, that was a crazy city.

00:08:54.480 It was a lot like the Wild West or Chicago in the 1930s.

00:08:59.880 This was a place where, you know, a superpower had just dissolved.

00:09:05.560 The laws had not yet been built back up.

00:09:08.360 People were making fortunes overnight.

00:09:10.760 There was gunfire in the streets.

00:09:12.860 People were being defenestrated left and right.

00:09:15.400 It was not uncommon to see dead bodies.

00:09:19.280 So, a newspaper like ours actually fit right in with the tenor of that whole community.

00:09:25.440 We were quite popular.

00:09:26.360 We actually made money.

00:09:30.000 We were profitable.

00:09:30.840 It was a normal small business that made money.

00:09:33.420 And it worked out quite well for a while.

00:09:37.780 But, you know, eventually there came a time when Putin came to power where, you know, the paper was just not tolerated.

00:09:45.340 And so, what happened when it became not tolerated?

00:09:48.880 Were you still around?

00:09:49.720 I had left by that time.

00:09:52.380 I already left in 2002.

00:09:55.840 But shortly after that, the paper got a visit from the tax police.

00:09:59.920 And, you know, whereas before we could always pay a bribe and make them go away, this time they weren't satisfied with that.

00:10:07.820 And the paper ultimately got closed.

00:10:10.500 But, yeah, well, you know a state is corrupt when you can't even bribe it.

00:10:14.940 Right?

00:10:15.700 Yeah.

00:10:16.100 I mean, that's what's an honest person to do in Russia at that point.

00:10:22.080 Right.

00:10:23.040 Exactly.

00:10:24.100 Well, at least when you're dealing with someone with whom you share a common language of greed, you can understand what they're up to.

00:10:31.080 But once you're out in the moral hinterlands where that doesn't work, God only knows what's up their sleeves.

00:10:37.080 So, were you a fan of the gonzo journalists like Hunter S. Thompson?

00:10:40.520 He's probably the canonical example.

00:10:43.300 I was.

00:10:43.780 I was a fan of Hunter Thompson.

00:10:45.620 I read him actually later in life than some other journalists.

00:10:51.080 I was probably more of a fan earlier of H.L. Mencken.

00:10:54.420 But I loved Hunter Thompson.

00:10:56.440 And, in fact, at one point I got hired by a publishing company to try to put together an anthology of gonzo journalism.

00:11:04.620 And that project ended up failing when I realized mid-project that gonzo was a term that had no meaning other than Hunter Thompson.

00:11:15.220 So, unless we were going to put together just a whole book full of Hunter's articles, it wasn't going to actually work.

00:11:22.100 But I was definitely a fan of his writing.

00:11:24.900 Well, he was definitely a singular creature.

00:11:27.660 I mean, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is quite the piece of work.

00:11:30.800 And he wrote one on the Hells Angels and one about the campaign trail.

00:11:34.600 They're all great books, right?

00:11:35.780 Really iconic 60s works.

00:11:37.640 And I also really like Tom Wolfe, especially the Electric Kool-Aid.

00:11:43.400 No, no, no, no.

00:11:44.960 Yeah, the Electric Kool-Aid Asset Test.

00:11:46.960 Yes, exactly.

00:11:48.180 And Candy Colored Tangerine Flake Baby.

00:11:50.840 That's also a great collection of essays.

00:11:53.280 He wasn't as much of a gonzo journalist as Thompson.

00:11:55.940 But, man, he had an eye for the times and he could sure write.

00:11:59.200 Man, those articles are so brilliantly plotted in books.

00:12:03.900 Yeah, he really nailed it.

00:12:05.300 And Thompson is just, of course, a complete bloody scream.

00:12:08.200 Absolutely, and it's interesting.

00:12:11.860 Up until pretty recently, there was always a very strong tradition in American journalism of the narratively interesting journalists.

00:12:20.480 And that's kind of been driven out of modern journalism, unfortunately, I would say.

00:12:27.320 Yes, now we just have the pathologically uninteresting, mediocre, boring, lying journalist type mostly in the legacy media. 0.99

00:12:35.040 Yeah, it's so pathetic and appalling. 0.99

00:12:37.960 The New York Times today reported on underground climate change. 0.96

00:12:42.320 Yeah, I mean, it's not a good sign when you're writing in the old, boring format of the New York Times, but it doesn't even have the upside of being semi-reliable like the New York Times.

00:12:58.840 So that's kind of a double whammy.

00:13:01.020 That's for sure.

00:13:02.080 That's for sure.

00:13:02.740 Yeah, that's right.

00:13:03.540 I mean, at least when those enterprises were, let's say, more conservative in the traditional sense, you could vaguely assume that some of what they were reporting bore some relationship to the facts.

00:13:16.000 And so that was quite a relief.

00:13:17.780 And it's really quite a catastrophe to see these places fall apart, actually.

00:13:21.200 You know, I mean, there's a satirical part of me, I suppose, and a somewhat cynical part that celebrates the demise of institutions like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, because for all its abysmal Canadian centralist niceness, it was at least a reliable purveyor of information and to some degree culture for, you know, 30 years, something like that.

00:13:43.660 And, you know, in many ways, it did its job.

00:13:47.420 And I think you could say the same thing, although the New York Times, you know, had some pretty bloody egregious sins on its conscience.

00:13:54.300 At least some of the time, what it was producing bore some resemblance to news instead of whatever the hell it is they're doing now, which is, you know, almost impossible to comprehend, either conceptually or metaphysically.

00:14:06.680 It's true, yeah, it's funny.

00:14:09.440 I interviewed Noam Chomsky at one point because I wanted to write a book that was going to be a rethink of manufacturing consent, which is his famous book of media criticism.

00:14:20.980 And that book is full of criticism of the New York Times.

00:14:24.520 But when I asked him about the Times, he said, you know, people got the wrong idea about my book.

00:14:30.960 You know, the New York Times is full of facts.

00:14:32.900 It's just got lots of problems.

00:14:34.480 You have to learn to read it and fight through the biases that are in it.

00:14:38.220 And, you know, so I think, unfortunately, the lack of attention paid to the factual aspect has taken away some important value from those institutions.

00:14:50.860 So when were you at the Polytechnic?

00:14:54.240 What years were that?

00:14:55.880 Oh, that would have been, I was in Russia studying in 89 and 90 primarily.

00:15:01.800 Okay, so you really were there during the wild times in Russia.

00:15:07.040 Yeah, and then I stayed in Russia.

00:15:09.880 I went back after school and I stayed from 1991 until about 2002.

00:15:16.120 There were some trips in between.

00:15:19.640 So what do you think, so you have a real personal connection with that country, obviously, and a pretty detailed knowledge of it.

00:15:28.540 What do you have to say, if anything, and what are your thoughts on what's happening on there with regard to the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

00:15:35.640 Well, first of all, that situation is extraordinarily complicated.

00:15:41.460 It's been frustrating for me to watch the coverage of, you know, the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

00:15:48.820 You know, people not understanding the history of places like Crimea or how far back some of these conflicts in places like Lupansk and Donbass go.

00:16:02.260 So I don't at all agree with the invasion, you know, by Vladimir Putin.

00:16:09.020 And in fact, we were very heavy critics of Putin from the start when he came to power.

00:16:13.780 But, you know, there's a long backstory here with the United States' support of Ukraine and some pretty questionable kind of far-right elements in Ukraine as a way to sort of undermine—

00:16:31.380 Yeah, pretty questionable.

00:16:32.720 Yeah, exactly.

00:16:33.940 Yeah, so this goes back, you know, decades before even the collapse of the Soviet Union.

00:16:39.200 And a lot of that background is left out of all this.

00:16:41.820 It's kind of an open question in my mind whether we ever really entertained a situation where NATO wasn't going to expand all the way to Russia's borders.

00:16:54.520 I think, you know, there's a reason why a lot of academics in 1997, pretty conservative ones, were signing an open letter urging the American authorities not to keep pushing NATO towards Russia.

00:17:07.780 Well, Boris Johnson announced today that the expansion of NATO into Ukraine should be of no concern to the Russians.

00:17:16.600 Yeah, I don't understand that.

00:17:18.020 I mean, I keep seeing that. 0.99

00:17:20.580 I think he's trying to—I think he's trying to top his net-zero idiocy, personally. 0.99

00:17:25.960 Maybe. 0.99

00:17:26.680 That's possible.

00:17:28.060 But, you know, think of the legends in the United States, right?

00:17:30.820 We have movies like 13 Days, where, you know, the arrival of one missile or a couple of missiles in Cuba is grounds to, you know, start this awesome confrontation, risking nuclear annihilation for the entire planet. 0.81

00:17:47.020 But we think the Russians shouldn't object if they're surrounded on all sides by military bases.

00:17:54.100 Should they respond by invading another country? 0.73

00:17:56.980 I don't agree with that.

00:17:58.520 But I certainly understand, knowing this just from talking to Russians while I was there, what their feelings are about NATO.

00:18:07.600 They're very nervous about it.

00:18:10.660 They've always been, since the early 90s.

00:18:12.940 It's a situation they've been conscious of the whole time, and I think Americans don't understand that.

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00:19:53.660 Well, you know, I think we had a real opportunity to bring permanent peace, to put in place a permanent peace with the Russians. 0.92

00:20:07.340 And that could have happened during the 90s.

00:20:09.500 And we pretty much fouled that up as badly as we possibly could have.

00:20:13.900 And now we're paying the price.

00:20:15.740 And God only knows how that pot brewing in Russia and Ukraine is going to, what the consequences of its continued bubbling way in the background are going to be.

00:20:26.120 It's very distressing.

00:20:28.080 And the fact that more attention isn't paid to it, and the fact that there seems to be no real attempts to bring about anything that looks like a serious attempt at peace talks,

00:20:39.520 is really quite the staggering miracle to me.

00:20:41.960 So I don't know what the hell we think we're playing at exactly.

00:20:45.220 And I can't understand for the life of me what the endgame is.

00:20:48.720 You know, I've talked to a lot of hawks in Washington, and these are people whose views I generally respect.

00:20:54.500 And, you know, their sense was that if the West had to spend several tens of billions of dollars, although it's rocketed beyond that now,

00:21:02.880 to weaken Russia's conventional military, that that might not be such a bad investment, you know.

00:21:08.860 And I have some qualms about that theory because it isn't obvious to me that a weak nuclear-armed country is less dangerous than a strong nuclear-armed country.

00:21:20.660 And I think you could have an intelligent discussion about that.

00:21:23.340 But I also don't think that weakening Germany after the First World War turned out to be such a brilliant idea either. 0.65

00:21:28.740 And so, and I guess I also think that, like, wouldn't it be better, all things considered, if Russia and the West were allied, let's say,

00:21:37.400 and presented a stable unitary front in relationship, say, to the Chinese?

00:21:43.240 I mean, just to throw that out there.

00:21:45.300 And I think we could have had that.

00:21:47.300 And it seems to me that it's a lot of leftover Cold War era thinking in some ways.

00:21:54.280 And I suppose some real self-interest on the part of the military-industrial complex that's kept this war brewing.

00:22:01.940 And I don't know, it seems to me that the primary beneficiaries of the current situation in the Ukraine are arms manufacturers and the self-same military-industrial complex.

00:22:17.160 And they don't have Afghanistan anymore to keep things, keep the market hopping. 1.00

00:22:22.220 But they've certainly got a war that could go on forever or expand quite nicely in Russia and the Ukraine.

00:22:28.680 I mean, do you think I'm missing something in that analysis?

00:22:31.880 Undoubtedly, right, because it's a complex situation.

00:22:34.300 But I think that's pretty much right.

00:22:37.380 I think we had an opportunity to genuinely bring in the Russians, at least as a strategic partner.

00:22:45.280 There was always going to be some friction there.

00:22:47.100 The two countries both see themselves as superpowers.

00:22:52.700 There's some resentment, some cultural resentment that's true in both places.

00:22:59.500 Where, you know, neither of them wants to concede that the other is more powerful.

00:23:04.640 So there's always going to be some difficulty between those two countries.

00:23:08.320 But they did agree on things like, you know, facing Islamic terrorism together, right? 0.68

00:23:14.980 I think they demonstrated that that kind of cooperation was possible.

00:23:18.380 But the people you referenced, the kind of hawkish contingent within the foreign policy elite in Washington, I think if you ask them deep down what the endgame to all this, the answer they would come up with is regime change in Russia.

00:23:35.220 I think they really believe that.

00:23:39.240 Yeah.

00:23:39.460 And so what's that going to be?

00:23:40.580 What's that going to be?

00:23:41.420 Hey, man, we're going to get someone better than Putin, are we, given Russia's history?

00:23:45.520 And then maybe we could have instead a fractured state.

00:23:48.320 And so then what would we have?

00:23:49.440 We'd have the control of nuclear weapons in the hands of essentially warlords if the state collapsed.

00:23:54.420 Like, what the hell would be the positive regime change here exactly?

00:23:57.620 We'd get some real Democrat in Russia?

00:24:00.240 It's like, I don't think so.

00:24:01.800 That seems to me to be preposterously naive.

00:24:04.660 Because where in Russian history could you find one example of that that you could point to that's even vaguely credible?

00:24:13.640 And if you want Russian leaders worse than Putin, that's a very, very long list.

00:24:19.140 So I just don't understand that at all.

00:24:21.520 And the danger of the breakup of the country, especially given our dependence on, I mean, the world's dependence on Russia for certain necessities.

00:24:29.380 Energy, for example, for the Europeans, or ammonia for food production, or edible wheat, there'd be another one.

00:24:37.100 You know, it's like, obviously, we're strategically aligned in many ways with Russia.

00:24:41.680 And the idea that there's going to be some magical transformation of regime that's going to make them easier to get along with is like, why would you think that?

00:24:50.120 I mean, dead seriously, I don't understand how anybody could possibly imagine that.

00:24:55.240 Well, it's the same era of vision that we had going into Iraq.

00:24:59.380 Where we imagined that we could roll tanks into Baghdad and establish Switzerland overnight. 0.95

00:25:06.760 It doesn't really work that way.

00:25:08.220 There's history and a long cultural tradition that you have to take into account.

00:25:14.400 But, you know, that war was launched by people who didn't even know there was a difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

00:25:21.740 And, you know, this war, I think, is being prosecuted by people who have no conception of Russian history, Far Eastern history, you know, the inability of democracy to really ever take hold in that part of the world.

00:25:37.920 If you're sincerely hoping that somebody better than Putin is going to come along if you depose that person, you're not looking, honestly, I think, at that country's past.

00:25:50.460 Yeah, well, that's certainly how it seems to me.

00:25:53.600 So I don't know what the hell we're playing at. 0.91

00:25:55.360 And I think that, I really think that what's happening is that, because I've been trying to account for the absolute idiocy of Western foreign policy in relationship to Russia for the last 30 years. 0.97

00:26:08.400 It's criminally negligent, to say the least.

00:26:11.240 And I think, really, what likely happened is that clueless people gave the foreign policy situation kind of a backseat.

00:26:21.380 And so it was never a pressing concern like it might have been in the aftermath of the Cold War.

00:26:26.820 And then there's constant pressure from the munitions manufacturers, et cetera, to keep a warlike, hawk-like stance at hand.

00:26:35.900 And I can understand that, you know, like if you're a munitions manufacturer, obviously, you're going to be somewhat paranoid with regard to the stability of foreign affairs in your public pronouncements and likely your beliefs.

00:26:48.920 And since you have a pecuniary interest in the outcome, your ability to continually foster a pro-hawk, pro-paranoid, anti-Russian view, well, that's always going to be there.

00:27:02.680 Because why wouldn't it be?

00:27:03.760 And if there isn't something to offset that that's continual, like a real effort to make peace, for example, then that's not going to happen.

00:27:12.220 You know, and you think, well, peace with Russia is impossible.

00:27:15.920 And I would say, yeah, that's what people said about the Middle East, too.

00:27:19.620 And then some relatively radical, non-professional diplomats decided they were going to do something about it and hammered together the Abraham Accords in basically no time flat.

00:27:30.620 And so the idea, and they just walked around the State Department to do that, and they did that with a tremendous degree of success.

00:27:36.700 And if the Biden administration hadn't been so juvenile and resentful, they would have patted Trump on the back for having accomplished that.

00:27:46.800 I always thought, you know, if they would have given Trump the bloody Nobel Prize or maybe a medal at the White House for his work on the Abraham Accords, he might have just ridden off into the sunset happy.

00:27:56.760 Right, instead of hanging around.

00:27:59.620 Well, absolutely, absolutely.

00:28:01.360 And then the Saudis would have signed the Abraham Accords because they were basically chomping at the bit to do so. 1.00

00:28:07.020 And then you Americans could have had access to Saudi oil instead of having Biden go cap and hand to them after insulting them terribly and not noting what they did, for example, behind the scenes for the Abraham Accords and walking away empty handed.

00:28:20.160 You know, like, Jesus, you can't make this stuff up.

00:28:23.320 You know, and I've talked to Democrats about this.

00:28:25.220 I said, why the hell don't you celebrate Trump, at least for the bloody Abraham Accords?

00:28:29.440 And their response to me is always, well, you know, they're not as good as they look.

00:28:33.320 It's like, well, yeah, compared to what?

00:28:36.440 Anything you guys managed for like 70 years?

00:28:39.600 They're pretty damn good as a first step.

00:28:41.760 I mean, there's real, there's actually peace breaking out between Israel and a variety of Arab states.

00:28:46.560 And like, who the hell would have ever predicted that?

00:28:49.120 And the idea we couldn't do that with Russia, especially given our mutual apprehension, let's say, of the Chinese and well-warranted apprehension, I think that's utterly preposterous. 0.93

00:29:00.720 So I also know from behind the scenes that, you know, there were peace talks in the offings in March of 2022, and they were scuttled by the U.S. administration.

00:29:11.000 And so, you know, that's pretty damn unforgivable as far as I'm concerned.

00:29:14.420 And we flag wave and hop up and down morally about supporting the Democrats, you know, and this desire for democracy in Ukraine, all the while, you know, conveniently ignoring the fact that Ukraine has just as totalitarian history as the rest of the former Soviet Union,

00:29:32.800 and are hardly paragons of moral virtue by any stretch of the imagination, and are unlikely to overnight, to turn overnight into Switzerland, as was precisely the case in Iraq.

00:29:43.600 So, like, I don't understand it, man.

00:29:45.980 I don't see what's going on at all.

00:29:47.920 And it's a bloody dangerous game that we're playing.

00:29:49.920 Yeah, even more disappointing from my point of view is, at least during the Iraq War, there was an anti-war movement that was visible in the United States.

00:30:01.200 There was an incredible episode early in this whole situation where I think a handful of members of the House put together what they called the Peace Letter,

00:30:11.720 which very generically suggested that maybe opening peace talks might be a good idea at some point.

00:30:18.280 They weren't suggesting that Ukraine surrender or that, you know, they stop fighting or anything along those lines.

00:30:26.020 But even within that coalition, the idea collapsed, and they ended up kind of snitching on each other in the media, and there was no effort along those lines.

00:30:37.280 So, there's no longer an anti-war coalition of any kind anywhere in American politics, you know, that even does symbolic politics.

00:30:48.200 Yeah, left or right, you know, and it's really quite something, it's quite the miracle to see.

00:30:52.840 It's very, it's really incomprehensible in many ways.

00:30:56.280 I can't wrap my head around it.

00:30:58.520 All right, so you were in the former Soviet Union during the insane 90s.

00:31:03.120 When did you come back to the States?

00:31:04.780 And I don't know what happened to you, say, between, say, about the year 2000 and 2004.

00:31:10.860 You started to work for Rolling Stone in 2004.

00:31:14.140 So, what did you do after you had completed whatever it was you were up to in these multiple adventures in the former Soviet Union?

00:31:22.000 And how do we know you're not a Russian spy, by the way?

00:31:24.440 Well, the Russians would never hire somebody like me to be a spy.

00:31:33.080 I think I'm the wrong type for them.

00:31:36.700 But...

00:31:37.140 I see.

00:31:37.520 So, it's on the basis of your self-perceived incompetence that we should trust you.

00:31:42.300 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:43.400 I'd be unable to keep quiet about it, I think, is the problem.

00:31:47.020 Right, right, right, right.

00:31:48.600 Noisy journalists don't make the best spies.

00:31:51.020 Exactly, exactly.

00:31:53.820 I had been in, you know, while I was at the Exile, Rolling Stone had actually done a story about our newspaper in the late 90s.

00:32:01.860 So, I had some contact with the magazine before I came back to the States.

00:32:06.900 I came back in 2002.

00:32:08.880 I briefly tried to start a newspaper in Buffalo called The Beast, which was modeled out on the Exile.

00:32:15.540 But pretty quickly got a call from Rolling Stone, from the editor there, who remembered me, had been keeping an eye on me.

00:32:22.260 And suggested that I go out and start covering the campaign that was just starting in 2003.

00:32:31.000 So, really, almost as soon as I came back to the United States, I started working for Rolling Stone, essentially as a campaign reporter to start.

00:32:38.780 And eventually as more of a financial-slash-investigative reporter.

00:32:45.080 So, what did you learn?

00:32:47.560 We were talking about Hunter S. Thompson earlier, and famously he wrote a book called Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, if I remember correctly, which is quite the riotous account.

00:32:57.220 What did you learn about American?

00:32:59.420 Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

00:33:01.280 And it's a book, I mean, it's a very interesting piece of cultural history now, but it's certainly a book that stands on its own merits as well as being an interesting journalistic account.

00:33:09.440 What did you learn about the American political system that you didn't know and that was surprising serving as a campaign reporter?

00:33:19.480 Well, my first complication in covering American politics, having come from the former Soviet Union, was that in post-communist Russia, everything was visible.

00:33:30.320 You could see which mafia interests were supporting, which politician, you could see the real financial interests behind every contract that was given out by the government.

00:33:43.540 The corruption was as clear as it would have been if you were taking one of those tours with a glass-bottomed boat looking at the bottom of the ocean.

00:33:51.400 In the United States, you know, I went out in the campaign trail, going out in the campaign trail and listening to these people give one speech after another where they said absolutely nothing.

00:34:03.580 For a long time, I was really puzzled by it.

00:34:06.680 I thought there had to be another layer of something to American politics that was more interesting than this.

00:34:12.940 And for a long time, I was really very frustrated by the predictability of the American political system, the way there was kind of a conspiracy of interest, I would say, between the donors, the campaign journalists, and the political parties to really very strictly control who got to be considered a legitimate and serious candidate and who didn't.

00:34:39.560 And they did this through a variety of means.

00:34:42.080 They used sort of code words.

00:34:45.380 You know, somebody like Dennis Kucinich would be dismissed as fringe or elfin.

00:34:51.080 And Howard Dean would be called pointed and angry.

00:34:56.060 But John Kerry was nuanced and warm, right?

00:34:59.880 And this is how we signaled to audiences that this was the political place.

00:35:03.640 It's the climate change making him warm, by the way.

00:35:06.340 Right, exactly.

00:35:07.800 Yeah.

00:35:07.920 Otherwise, he wasn't terribly warm, right, I would say.

00:35:12.060 But I think, you know, and this is all a preview to the Trump experience, because I think what happened was the journalists, the donors, and the parties got so used to being able to almost completely control who got to be the nominee,

00:35:28.340 that when someone came along and disrupted the whole pattern, they didn't know how to respond to it, except with total rage and incomprehension.

00:35:40.220 They thought something must be totally amiss.

00:35:42.980 Somebody must be cheating somehow.

00:35:44.620 And they didn't realize that Trump was just being smart and running against the system.

00:35:50.300 I mean, I recognized this pretty early in 2016, which was, he was running against the journalists, he was running against the donors, he was running against the fake two-party system, which was really a one-party system.

00:36:04.220 And it was scoring heavily with people all over the place, across the political spectrum.

00:36:10.940 But nobody really wanted to admit that.

00:36:12.960 They just wanted to make him out to be this very scary villain.

00:36:16.000 And even though some of those things they said about him were true, they were kind of missing the point of what that campaign was about and why it succeeded.

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00:37:33.300 Yeah, Victor Davis Hanson wrote a great book on Trump called The Case for Trump, which is the best thing I've read on that election cycle.

00:37:44.880 And he points out something that seemed relatively obvious to me at the time watching from the outside was that, you know, Clinton and her crew, first of all, I don't think people trusted Hillary at all because even though she had a lot of experience, because when someone aims at power that egregiously for like six decades, you really got to wonder what the hell's going on.

00:38:07.560 It's like, why is it that important to you, you know, and you might think, well, of course, being president would be that important, but, you know, it's not that obvious because if you associate with people who are highly accomplished, many of them would have to set aside the concerns they're already engaged in, which are often large scale concerns to consider something like a political career.

00:38:30.580 And so if you're someone who has the chops to be president, which should mean that you're good at a lot of things, it isn't obvious that political power per se would dangle as the greatest possible opportunity, right?

00:38:45.800 Maybe you could be coerced or enticed into running for leadership because a lot of people come to you and say, you know, we really need someone like you, which is the best way to become a leader, by the way.

00:38:57.080 But other than that, you know, you're sort of about your own business, whereas Clinton, she was making a beeline for the presidency, certainly even while her husband was president. 0.88

00:39:06.020 And so, and then, of course, her and her foolish and treacherous advisors, I would say, decided that it was a perfectly good thing to sacrifice the American working class on the altar of their purported moral virtue. 0.96

00:39:20.000 And she sunk herself doing that, and it was an act of true hubris and foolishness, right? 0.93

00:39:26.400 Because Trump didn't so much win that election as Clinton lost it, because it was hers for the taking had she not been who she was, I would say, fundamentally.

00:39:37.300 And especially had she not stabbed the American working class in the back. 0.93

00:39:41.700 And, of course, they turned to Trump for odd reasons, you know, because it isn't obvious that this sort of brash, flashy billionaire would, or at least multimillionaire, would appeal to working class people.

00:39:59.060 They're not of the same economic class, obviously.

00:40:01.400 But, you know, I had a wise working class guy I once worked for back in the 1970s.

00:40:08.500 He was a conservative and not a socialist.

00:40:11.820 And I was at that time, I was about 14, I was pretty entranced by socialist ideas.

00:40:16.860 And the Socialist Party in Alberta, my province, had a pretty good small business platform.

00:40:23.200 And I said, why the hell don't you vote for the socialists?

00:40:25.500 They have a lot better platform for your endeavor than the conservatives, who are a party of big business.

00:40:30.720 And he said, small business owners don't want to be small business owners.

00:40:36.080 They want to be big business owners and people vote their dreams, not their reality.

00:40:41.800 And I thought, oh, my God, that's so smart.

00:40:44.100 And, you know, and then I thought, too, with regards to Trump, is that even though his wealth was unimaginably out of reach for the typical working class person,

00:40:54.060 I think people could look at Trump and think, well, there are conceivable universes in which I could be Donald Trump.

00:41:01.160 Right.

00:41:01.580 Or this is what I would do with that money.

00:41:04.420 Yeah.

00:41:05.240 Yeah, right, right, right, right.

00:41:07.200 And then he also had this capacity to speak off the cuff and directly to people.

00:41:13.040 You know, and I heard from people who were around Trump, especially when he was talking to military personnel, that he was actually very good at that.

00:41:19.620 And the same people who made that comment had been around other politicians who were often flummoxed and intimidated when they were talking to real servicemen, you know, because, well, first of all, there was a cultural gap between them.

00:41:32.460 And second, you know, they felt morally intimidated in the face of people who'd actually put themselves on the line.

00:41:37.920 But Trump seemed to have that ability to talk directly to working class people.

00:41:43.580 And, you know, you have to be a certain kind of person to do that.

00:41:47.200 One kind of person you have to be is someone who actually regards the working class and what they're capable of doing, which is working, with the degree of respect that's actually appropriate.

00:42:00.400 You know, I mean, I've worked with lots of working class people, contractors and so forth, and I have lots of working class jobs. 0.82

00:42:07.720 And you're an absolute bloody fool if you don't have respect for, you know, electricians and plumbers and carpenters and people who keep everything going, who are truly competent, because that requires a high level of honesty and expertise and communicative ability and planning and real knowledge. 0.96

00:42:23.860 And so Trump seemed to be able to deal with people like that, maybe because he had so much experience on the construction. 0.99

00:42:30.660 Yeah, the irony of that is that Hillary Clinton tried to run—actually, she quite successfully ran a similar campaign towards the end of her duel with Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary.

00:42:44.880 She ran as the avatar of the white working class. 0.98

00:42:48.340 You might remember she had all these speeches about being the granddaughter of, you know, a worker in a lace factory.

00:42:56.280 And she seemed to really enjoy that role in all the different personas that I've seen her try to play on the stump, and she has many of them.

00:43:06.100 That was the one I thought she did best at.

00:43:08.300 But she reverted in 2016 to trying to sell herself as the most experienced insider, which was a catastrophic strategic error in a year where there was an unprecedented level of distrust towards Washington.

00:43:26.560 The degree to which they were blind to that was kind of amazing to me, and, you know, you brought up Hunter Thompson before.

00:43:36.480 He actually had a metaphor that really described how that happens.

00:43:40.260 He talked about how if you go hunting, in normal times, you can't get within a thousand yards of a bull elk.

00:43:47.580 Like, it's sensitive to the smallest sound in the forest.

00:43:50.680 It will never let you get near it.

00:43:52.200 But when it's in heat, you know, you can drive right past it, and, you know, it won't even know that you're there.

00:43:59.080 It's so focused on its, you know, its goal of mating, right?

00:44:03.380 And that's exactly what politicians who see the presidency are like.

00:44:07.660 They become blind to just about everything but power, and they don't think strategically anymore.

00:44:13.360 And I think that happened to the Democrats in 2016.

00:44:16.640 They just were not paying attention to all the different signs that were so obvious to everybody around them. 0.99

00:44:23.960 Yeah, well, you'd think with all their polling and all their hypothetical reliance on their idiot consultants that they would have been clued in to some degree. 0.99

00:44:30.260 And, of course, Clinton also allied herself with the progressive front of the Democrats. 0.99

00:44:35.940 And that certainly wasn't something in keeping with the basic sentiments of the working class that she also stuck a shiv in. 0.96

00:44:42.160 So she certainly deserved to lose.

00:44:44.720 And whether we deserve to have Trump as president in consequence, well, that's a whole different question.

00:44:49.600 But at least he was a bull in the China shop.

00:44:52.020 Speaking of whom, what do you—I kind of think Robert F. Kennedy is the same sort of force on the Democrat side.

00:44:58.040 I mean, what do you think of Kennedy?

00:44:59.520 Yeah, I like him, you know, and his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, is somebody whom I've known for a long time.

00:45:07.500 Going back to the first campaign I ever covered, he was somebody I always respected as an original thinker, a real intellectual, somebody who read two books a day and really thought about, you know, the future of this country

00:45:24.520 and what possible solutions, you know, might work, might not work.

00:45:29.520 You know, you think he's an impressive character, eh, Kucinich?

00:45:32.600 Kucinich, I do.

00:45:34.180 Kucinich, do you think he'd be a good podcast guest?

00:45:37.020 I think he would be, yes.

00:45:38.620 Dennis is brilliant.

00:45:41.020 You know, his politics are controversial, but he's got an incredibly interesting history.

00:45:45.700 He was, you know, mayor of Cleveland at a ridiculously young age.

00:45:49.520 He was homeless when he was a kid.

00:45:50.980 He lived in a car with his family.

00:45:53.160 You know, he won his first elections, literally going door to door with no financial backing.

00:46:00.380 And so this is the kind of person who's behind RFK's campaign.

00:46:07.080 I mean, obviously, I don't know Robert F. Kennedy as well.

00:46:11.580 You know, I did some of his shows years ago.

00:46:14.000 But I think he recognizes, as Trump did, and as Bernie Sanders also did in 2016 to a lesser degree,

00:46:25.280 that there was this groundswell of frustration building in America toward, I guess you would call it,

00:46:33.960 sort of mainstream political thought, which was increasingly elitist and indifferent to the fate of ordinary Americans on both the left and the right.

00:46:45.060 Kennedy, I think, is going to succeed just because he's not Joe Biden, just because MSNBC doesn't like him and CNN doesn't like him.

00:46:56.060 Those things are actually advertisements in the current day and age.

00:47:02.420 Trump understood this very keenly in 2016.

00:47:06.220 He embraced it, and that was one of the reasons why he did so well.

00:47:10.160 And Kennedy, I think, also understands this.

00:47:12.600 Unlike Bernie Sanders, who I think, you know, deep within his heart had a lot of affection for the Democratic Party,

00:47:19.560 didn't want to see something bad happen to it.

00:47:24.640 RFK, I think, is running a campaign where he's willing to go to the mattresses with, you know,

00:47:31.520 the people within the Democratic Party structure.

00:47:34.380 And that's going to be very appealing to a lot of voters and a lot of independents as well.

00:47:38.280 So, yeah, this is going to be some ridiculously, surreally interesting presidential campaign, man.

00:47:44.080 I don't think we'll have ever seen the likes of it.

00:47:46.800 So, it'll be something to watch.

00:47:49.480 So, what was it like working for Rolling Stone when you worked for them?

00:47:54.540 It was great.

00:47:55.420 When I worked for Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone had a couple of heydays, I would say, in the late 60s and the 70s.

00:48:02.680 Obviously, the magazine did both great music journalism and some groundbreaking journalism of other types, including Hunter Thompson.

00:48:14.260 But they also published, you know, people like Carl Bernstein.

00:48:19.760 They eventually brought in P.G. O'Rourke.

00:48:21.940 They kind of pioneered this formula of, you know, reporting that was serious, but it was also witty and readable.

00:48:32.980 And then, you know, they regressed a little bit in the 90s.

00:48:35.940 But when I came in, in the early 2000s, they had just brought in some new editors and they were fantastic.

00:48:44.800 They let me do work that I know a lot of the senior people didn't agree with, but they were really encouraging.

00:48:53.740 And they let me get into some areas that were really weird and unusual for a mainstream American magazine.

00:49:00.520 And that was great.

00:49:02.260 It was a great time for a long time.

00:49:04.120 And then it got a little strange at the end.

00:49:06.040 What was the most interesting area you delved into when you worked for Rolling Stone?

00:49:11.140 Well, after the 2008 election, you know, I had covered Obama's win.

00:49:16.280 And that was when the financial collapse happened.

00:49:20.460 And they assigned me to do one story basically about what happened at AIG.

00:49:26.140 They wanted me to explain in ordinary terms, you know, what that was.

00:49:33.620 And we had one story that was called, I think, The Big Takeover.

00:49:37.780 And it just attempted to translate for ordinary people a lot of the verbiage that people used on Wall Street.

00:49:47.520 And the response to that was so overwhelming that I ended up doing that for eight years.

00:49:52.760 And so I got to cover all kinds of crazy things that you would never expect a music magazine to take on, like, you know, the ratings agencies, you know, bidding for municipal bond rigging, you know, foreclosure fraud, all kinds of stuff like that.

00:50:14.320 And I got 7,000, 8,000 words a shot to do this and lots of time.

00:50:19.560 So for an investigative reporter, I mean, at the time, there were maybe 10 jobs like that in all of journalism.

00:50:26.100 And it was a great period to do it.

00:50:30.320 And the only problem was—

00:50:31.160 Right, so that's a good deal.

00:50:32.140 Yeah.

00:50:32.620 It was a great deal.

00:50:33.580 But unfortunately, the market has changed quite a lot in the last three or four years—well, five or six years, I would say.

00:50:39.380 Now, did the great derangement come out of that, your book?

00:50:44.260 The great derangement came out of my earlier sort of campaign trail stuff for Rolling Stone and some other places.

00:50:53.260 I did some writing for the nation, too, at that time.

00:50:55.880 Where did you write in book form about the financial collapse?

00:50:59.840 So I wrote a book called Griftopia.

00:51:02.440 It's Griftopia.

00:51:03.440 Okay.

00:51:03.780 Yeah.

00:51:04.500 Another one called The Divide.

00:51:06.380 Yep.

00:51:07.200 Right, right.

00:51:07.780 So let me recap for a second or two part of what happened in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

00:51:15.320 Tell me if you think I've got this right and add anything that you feel would be useful.

00:51:19.960 So my sense was that it was at least in part of a technological—it was a consequence of a rapid technological revolution.

00:51:27.580 I mean, so the idea, as far as I could tell, was that if you—so there's—you can assign mortgages a different risk of default, and that seems mathematically probable.

00:51:39.260 You can look at the income and the credit history of the people who have the mortgages, and you can calculate actuarially the probability of default.

00:51:46.940 And then you can come up with a risk estimate, and then you offset the risk estimate by either not lending to the people who are at high risk or increasing the interest rate.

00:51:56.040 Okay, so that's pretty straightforward, and it strikes me as highly probable that that can be done.

00:52:01.040 And then the idea was, well, if you lumped enough mortgages together of a certain risk category—let's say relatively high risk—that you could average the risk across all the mortgages,

00:52:15.300 that you could calculate exactly what that risk was statistically, and then you could define and offset that so that a large enough tranche—aggregate—of mortgages would now become an asset of definable security, right?

00:52:33.180 Which makes it a secure asset.

00:52:35.100 And, you know, that really is brilliant.

00:52:36.720 That's really, really smart.

00:52:37.680 Now, what happened, though, was that—what often happens when there's a financial revolution of that sort is that the act of producing the instrument produced unexpected changes in the market.

00:52:50.960 So now that you could sell clumps of high-risk mortgages to, like, pension funds because the risk was specified, you produced an almost indefinite market for high-risk mortgages.

00:53:03.180 And so the consequence of that was that financial institutions went out and sold increasingly high-risk mortgages at a mad rate forever.

00:53:13.560 And that was abetted by policies stemming from the Democrats and the Republicans alike designed to foster home ownership among low-income Americans,

00:53:22.740 which, you know, sounds like a fine idea, but I suppose selling people houses they can't actually pay for is not a good idea.

00:53:29.580 And so the consequence of that was a housing boom, a mortgage boom, increased malfeasance on the mortgage risk rating front,

00:53:41.260 and then the eventual construction of correlated housing prices across the entire economy, which is something that never happened before.

00:53:49.060 Because these things had all now been linked together behind the scenes.

00:53:52.740 And so then when housing prices started to collapse in one district, that spread very rapidly, and it collapsed everywhere, and that just took the whole game out.

00:54:01.900 But to me, the initial—the initiator of that was actually a technological revolution on the financial front and not something corrupt in and of itself.

00:54:10.160 Like, it led to a form of corruption.

00:54:12.580 It led to a form of corruption, but it wasn't crooked right from the get-go.

00:54:19.040 That's how I understood it.

00:54:20.300 I mean, you've looked into this deeply.

00:54:23.020 Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

00:54:24.700 It started off as actually quite a brilliant idea.

00:54:28.800 You know, what you were describing with mortgage-backed securities is this process called tranching, right?

00:54:35.240 Where you could pool a whole group of mortgages, let's say 1,000, 2,000 of them, and you could take a gigantic group of essentially junk-rated mortgages,

00:54:49.760 but peel off a portion of it and sell it as AAA.

00:54:54.260 So it was a Rumpelstiltskin story. 0.63

00:54:57.760 It was, you know, you take a whole bunch of straw, but you can get a little bit of gold out of it, right?

00:55:02.840 And you can sell that gold, as you said, to pension funds because they have requirements for, you know,

00:55:09.500 they need to have at least a certain amount of AAA-rated stuff in the portfolio,

00:55:13.820 and this was earning a higher rate of return than traditional AAA investments.

00:55:18.620 So now you had this booming, exploding market for essentially junk-rated mortgages.

00:55:23.740 And that started off as an idea that produced an awful lot of cash and capital that, you know, initially led to a boom in the economy.

00:55:36.100 But it—

00:55:36.560 And it expanded housing ownership, which seemed to be a good thing.

00:55:41.100 Exactly.

00:55:41.720 Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to get houses got houses.

00:55:44.900 But very quickly, you started to develop all kinds of fraud schemes that abetted this,

00:55:55.000 where, you know, the mortgage companies, which were once incentivized to prevent you from getting a mortgage

00:56:01.140 if they didn't think you could make your payments,

00:56:04.340 now all of a sudden knew that as soon as you got into the pool that they were going to be selling your mortgage to the next person.

00:56:10.640 So they overlooked all kinds of things.

00:56:13.100 Did you have ID?

00:56:14.200 Did you have a job?

00:56:15.960 You know, were you a citizen?

00:56:18.560 All that stuff would kind of be—

00:56:20.240 Little details like that.

00:56:21.520 Yeah, little details like that.

00:56:22.720 They would forget to put that stuff in or check it.

00:56:26.240 And, you know, you would have these big banks,

00:56:29.080 which would be representing to their customers, like pension funds, that,

00:56:33.980 oh, yeah, we checked out all these mortgages that are in this pool.

00:56:37.840 They're all great, and they're everything that we say they are.

00:56:41.720 And next thing you knew, people started to default at a high rate and couldn't make their payments anymore.

00:56:49.680 And, you know, the whole house of cards fell.

00:56:52.420 So it's not like a lot of other financial booms in history.

00:56:55.100 It's just the particular form of this was that it all happened within the confines of this system of mortgage-backed securities.

00:57:05.980 And there was an additional complicating factor,

00:57:08.400 which was that this came alongside the invention of another financial instrument,

00:57:14.920 type of financial instrument, the credit default swap,

00:57:17.400 that allowed financial companies to bet on the success of these instruments.

00:57:23.640 So you might have a mortgage, and if it failed,

00:57:29.240 you might have a cascading series of losses that resulted from that

00:57:32.980 because people were essentially trading on whether or not that mortgage was going to succeed.

00:57:39.180 So it was a way of basically punching a black hole into the economy,

00:57:45.380 you know, beyond the limits of, you know,

00:57:49.580 how much money there actually was in circulation.

00:57:52.600 It was fascinating to learn about that, yeah.

00:57:56.100 It's attractive to be cynical about what happened in 2008,

00:57:59.940 and it's also attractive to be conspiratorial and to note that,

00:58:05.480 you know, there was almost no criminal prosecution in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse.

00:58:11.960 But, you know, I'm not unwilling to assume the utility of punishment where it's due.

00:58:20.300 But it's never really been obvious to me that the,

00:58:24.540 except in, you know, a relatively small number of egregious cases,

00:58:29.420 that the criminal case for, that the case for criminal conduct could be easily made,

00:58:36.120 given the complexity of the financial innovations that were also part and parcel of this.

00:58:40.900 Now, you have focused on, you know, the old boys club, so to speak,

00:58:47.720 that governs political conduct in the United States across both parties,

00:58:52.160 and the entrenchment of the power elite, let's say, that keeps that system going.

00:58:57.980 And you could say the same thing on the financial side.

00:59:01.540 And you've looked deeply into financial corruption and the collapse in 2008.

00:59:07.300 What was your sense about what should have been done in the aftermath of that catastrophe?

00:59:14.420 Well, I think just as there were a series of basically symbolic prosecutions

00:59:19.840 after the accounting control scandals of the early 2000s, like, you know, Enron, Adelphia, Rite Aid,

00:59:27.640 you know, that sort of thing, that were designed to send a message to the markets like,

00:59:32.400 hey, you can't do this.

00:59:34.900 There were some obvious cases they could have taken up that would have similarly sent a message

00:59:41.480 that it's not a good idea to, you know, sell gigantic pools of mortgages that you know have problems.

00:59:49.840 with them that you know are in AAA, that you know are likely to default as soon as you sell them.

00:59:56.400 And they could have done that, didn't do that.

00:59:59.600 And I think that engendered a lot of problems.

01:00:02.800 And frankly, that was something that Trump picked up on, again, in 2016,

01:00:08.500 that there was anger in the population.

01:00:12.260 There were an awful lot of people who got thrown out of their homes after 2008.

01:00:16.380 You know, we're talking like 5 million people.

01:00:18.660 Yeah, well, there were a lot of ordinary people who suffered and a lot of extraordinary people who didn't.

01:00:25.640 And there was an awful lot of corporate bailout and socialization of risk and privatization of profit, right?

01:00:32.420 That was really a dismal outcome.

01:00:35.780 Now, you know, I think it is hard to keep enterprises on the hook financially because with a big company,

01:00:42.740 partly because the executive leadership and even the ownership of the company can switch quite dramatically,

01:00:50.000 it's not like you can hold a company to the same standards of responsibility that you can hold an individual to.

01:00:57.540 It's slippery and tricky.

01:00:58.660 And it isn't obviously the case, too, that you should be too punitive with regards to your business class

01:01:05.140 if they engage in ventures that don't work out well because then you suppress innovation and risk-taking.

01:01:12.820 I mean, that's one of the advantages of having bankruptcy laws, right?

01:01:15.600 It means you get to fail without dying.

01:01:18.380 And that's really useful given that you have to fail quite a bit often before you can succeed.

01:01:24.040 But it still did seem to me that, you know, the chickens didn't come home to roost as thoroughly as they might have

01:01:30.800 in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

01:01:33.500 I also wonder, too, tell me what you think about this.

01:01:36.220 You know, we've seen the rise of woke capitalism to a great degree in the last, well, let's say since 2008.

01:01:43.580 It seems to me that, you know, there's a fair bit of unrequited and maybe deserving guilt on the part of high-flying capitalists

01:01:54.880 who made their money in manners that might be a little bit more crooked than necessary.

01:01:59.140 And that one of the ways they can pay the piper, hypothetically,

01:02:02.700 without actually having to go through any serious moral revaluation,

01:02:06.400 is to beat the ESG drum, for example, on the climate side,

01:02:10.200 or to pretend to be in accordance with whatever the newest woke delusion is on the civil rights front.

01:02:18.520 And so it's a false contrition.

01:02:20.900 And I think that's emerged in the aftermath of unpunished malfeasance,

01:02:26.320 let's say, on the corporate front with regard to the financial crisis of 2008.

01:02:31.340 So I don't know what you think about that theory.

01:02:33.980 That's interesting.

01:02:34.560 Yeah, I mean, so I often get people who are confused about my take on all this

01:02:43.460 because they think that because I wrote very critically about companies like Goldman Sachs

01:02:49.340 and JPMorgan Chase and, you know, Bank of America,

01:02:53.860 that I'm, you know, a communist or anti-capitalist.

01:02:57.380 Actually, nearly all of my sources during that time period were people who worked on Wall Street.

01:03:03.380 They were, you know, other rich people, basically.

01:03:06.880 And their complaint about these companies was not that they were being too arch-capitalist,

01:03:15.360 but that rather they were subverting capitalism by cheating and relying on bailouts

01:03:22.060 and, you know, and manipulating markets in ways that were unfair to, you know,

01:03:30.040 sort of the smaller-sized competitor.

01:03:33.640 And I think that was a consistent theme of what happened.

01:03:37.660 There were cases they could have made, and that would have been, you know,

01:03:43.660 I think important to the markets.

01:03:45.240 It would have sent a message that no matter how big you are,

01:03:48.380 you're not outside the reach of the law.

01:03:51.540 And it would have restored faith in this idea that, you know,

01:03:57.380 that the government isn't basically a silent partner of these gigantic banks.

01:04:03.280 Which it was, clearly.

01:04:05.380 Yes.

01:04:05.880 That will always backstop them in times of trouble

01:04:08.440 and won't look into, you know, money laundering and other problems.

01:04:13.740 And that's why we're having this crisis with small regional banks now,

01:04:19.300 among other things, because the markets know that it's cheaper for big banks to borrow money

01:04:26.240 because everybody knows they'll always get bailed out.

01:04:29.500 That's an inherent advantage that they shouldn't have, I don't think, in capitalism.

01:04:34.960 So all of that is a hangover of 2008.

01:04:37.620 The ESG thing is, I think, just another version of the same ratings agency scam

01:04:42.960 that we saw with the mortgages.

01:04:45.620 It's just that they're playing around with different terminology and insider,

01:04:50.880 you know, sort of rigging of the game.

01:04:55.220 This time it's more political.

01:04:56.640 Doesn't seem to be working out so well for Disney.

01:04:59.480 Right, exactly.

01:05:00.380 You know, I think these schemes always, whenever they try to get, you know,

01:05:07.680 game the system too much that way, it always ends up seeming to backfire, I think.

01:05:13.120 Yeah, well, it does backfire if the market, if a well-regulated market actually retains its dominance.

01:05:20.060 Because as you pointed out, too, you know, the people who are playing the capitalist game honestly,

01:05:25.280 and that's the majority of people who are conducting business in the U.S.

01:05:29.400 because otherwise the U.S. would not be as filthy rich as it is,

01:05:32.640 and so unbelievably stable and productive, right?

01:05:35.060 Because things actually get done and they work.

01:05:37.440 And that means that people who actually get things done and work are doing those things.

01:05:42.120 Now, there's a handful of bad actors on the capitalist side,

01:05:45.620 and it's definitely not in the interest of honest capitalists

01:05:48.840 to let the dishonest crooks game the whole system and get away with it

01:05:53.660 on the regulatory capture side, etc., you know?

01:05:56.580 That's really a place where the left and the right could come together,

01:05:59.700 you know, within their insistence that, yeah, okay, okay.

01:06:03.660 So let's talk about your last three books briefly,

01:06:07.740 and then I want to cover the debate you had with Douglas Murray,

01:06:11.320 Michelle Goldberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.

01:06:13.280 It was you and Douglas on the same team,

01:06:15.360 and a little bit on the Twitter files.

01:06:16.820 But let's go through Insane Clown President,

01:06:19.580 I Can't Breathe and Hate, Inc.

01:06:21.220 If you could just say a little bit about each of those books,

01:06:23.880 I think that would be very interesting.

01:06:25.400 Let's start with Insane Clown President. 0.66

01:06:28.420 Yeah, so Insane Clown President is basically just a compilation

01:06:32.020 of all the stuff that I wrote in 2016,

01:06:35.480 mainly for Rolling Stone about the Trump campaign.

01:06:40.440 We decided after Trump won that there was probably enough of an appetite out there

01:06:46.120 for reading about what happened during the campaign

01:06:49.320 that people would buy that book, and, you know, it turned out to be true.

01:06:52.660 It was a bestseller.

01:06:55.020 But the thing that I like about that book,

01:06:57.600 when I go back and look at it, and I don't like all my books,

01:07:01.120 but I think that one, early on, you know,

01:07:05.820 I think I called a lot of what happened with the Trump campaign correctly.

01:07:10.040 You know, my early impressions of his campaign was that he was onto something,

01:07:16.080 that if sort of mainstream American pundits didn't wake up,

01:07:24.460 they were going to find out very quickly that, you know,

01:07:28.380 they were making him stronger by misreporting things about him.

01:07:33.320 And then, you know, there is a section of that book where I was convinced by a pollster

01:07:40.520 that he had absolutely no chance of winning,

01:07:42.840 and so I kind of got the wrong impression that his campaign was really going to result

01:07:48.500 historically just in the destruction of the Republican Party.

01:07:52.240 But I think there were a lot of things about that book that captured 2016 correctly,

01:07:57.820 and it was, you know, it's a funny book to read, too,

01:08:01.560 because there was a lot of odd stuff that happened on the campaign trail, so.

01:08:04.980 Yeah.

01:08:05.400 So what did you come to make of Trump, both in terms of his, like, strengths and weaknesses?

01:08:12.140 What's your assessment of Donald Trump?

01:08:14.720 Well, one of the first times I saw Trump in person was in New Hampshire.

01:08:20.820 I think I was in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

01:08:22.720 I was at Plymouth State University, I think was the locale.

01:08:26.440 And, you know, the press is always on a riser.

01:08:30.000 We always looked ridiculous standing in the middle of a political event.

01:08:35.680 And Trump started to talk about us. 0.82

01:08:37.660 You know, he feels the crowds out like a comedian.

01:08:40.420 He looked at us and he said, you see these people over here, you see these bloodsuckers? 0.99

01:08:45.140 You know, they've never come so far for an event. 0.78

01:08:47.500 They hate me.

01:08:48.620 They want me to lose so bad.

01:08:50.160 They want all of you to lose.

01:08:52.060 And I watched as the crowd kind of turned toward us and started hissing,

01:08:56.400 and they were throwing bits of paper at us and everything.

01:08:59.320 And I immediately recognized, this is going to work, you know.

01:09:03.420 And the reason I knew it was going to work is because who doesn't hate journalists?

01:09:07.420 Like, you know, just look at us, you know.

01:09:10.800 And there were a lot of people who were—

01:09:12.520 No, you and your Mongolian basketball career.

01:09:14.680 Well, yeah, they don't know—the average person probably doesn't know about that.

01:09:18.780 But the ordinary journalist, you know, a political journalist who covers presidential campaigns

01:09:25.560 is a very specific type of character.

01:09:29.780 That person is always wearing a gingham shirt, a tie, and khakis,

01:09:35.300 and asks you one question that he already knows the answer that he wants,

01:09:39.340 and then goes back to, you know, and then writes a story they've already pre-written.

01:09:44.640 People hate that person, you know, and I recognize—

01:09:47.240 Yeah, and for good reason.

01:09:48.640 Right?

01:09:49.080 And so Trump picked up on that, and then he started to move not just from the press,

01:09:55.620 but to other institutions, you know, NATO, the Fed, you know, Congress, obviously.

01:10:02.040 But what he was doing, he was feeling in his crowds that there was this enormous amount of resentment out there

01:10:08.840 about all kinds of issues, and he was feeding it.

01:10:13.360 I think in many cases with very sensible and real criticisms,

01:10:18.520 some of the things he said I totally disagreed with and I thought were outlandish and crazy and unnecessary.

01:10:23.620 But he was—

01:10:27.820 So to what degree do you think—the thing that concerns me, let's say, about figures such as Trump,

01:10:37.080 even though he's singular in many ways, is that when you're attempting to redress populist concerns,

01:10:43.960 you can go in two directions, right?

01:10:45.760 You can listen to the concerns, and you can honestly try to formulate responses and policies

01:10:51.740 that would deal with those concerns, or you can capitalize on that resentment and foster it.

01:10:57.340 And that's a very, very dangerous road to walk down.

01:11:00.780 Now, I'm not making a categorical judgment that Trump did one or the other of those.

01:11:06.900 I'm curious about what you thought.

01:11:08.800 Because, of course, his populist front was what, in principle, terrified his—

01:11:13.860 the people who became incredibly paranoid about him.

01:11:16.640 But what was your sense?

01:11:17.840 You watched him, and you watched his handling of the crowd.

01:11:19.860 You said that he would do things like single out the journalists and turn the crowd against them,

01:11:26.180 you know, for better or for worse.

01:11:28.120 Was your sense that he was—was he manipulating the crowds?

01:11:32.640 Was he manipulating the crowds and himself at the same time?

01:11:36.140 Was he playing a relatively straight game?

01:11:39.040 You know, what do you think he was up to?

01:11:41.740 And you kind of—you also compared him to a comedian, right, that could read the crowd.

01:11:45.520 And a leader can do that, but you can be led astray by the darkest impulses of the crowd, too.

01:11:51.520 Yeah, so it was interesting because I was covering Trump and Bernie Sanders at the same time.

01:11:56.500 And Sanders was picking up on a lot of the same things.

01:11:59.720 But his answer to those grievances, he had a long list of policy solutions that he was really, really anxious to implement.

01:12:08.720 Trump, on the other hand, I think, at heart, Donald Trump was a salesperson.

01:12:14.560 Like, that's who he is.

01:12:15.920 He's always selling something, right?

01:12:18.000 And it was funny to watch the reporters because they were all carrying around, you know, books about fascism and, you know, like, you know, the 1930s.

01:12:26.960 Whereas they should have been reading books about sales culture because that was the key to understanding Donald Trump.

01:12:33.240 Yeah, and I thought Trump basically was selling outrage.

01:12:39.700 He was selling the experience of feeling solidarity with other people who'd been screwed over.

01:12:49.220 And he was—so he was fostering those feelings in people, I think, you know, to answer your question.

01:12:53.440 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:54.480 And did you detect a danger in that?

01:12:56.640 Did you get—did you detect a danger in that?

01:12:58.620 I mean, because, look, there are times being frustrated and wanting justice, those two things aren't that easy to distinguish, right?

01:13:07.060 And being resentful and wanting justice, those two things aren't always that easy to distinguish either, right?

01:13:12.080 I mean, it's a tricky business because, you know, you say, well, you should forgive and forget, and people think that's the highest possible dictum.

01:13:18.740 But justice has its place as well.

01:13:20.820 And if you have been screwed over, and I think the American working class has been screwed over in many ways, although whether that was planned or just incidental is a different question, they had their reasons to be outraged.

01:13:31.920 Now, Trump obviously appealed to that outrage.

01:13:35.160 You're intimating that you believe that he capitalized on it as well, though, in a way that you didn't see characteristic of Bernie Sanders.

01:13:42.680 Now, of course, Bernie also didn't—wasn't burdened with the delusion that he was likely to win.

01:13:47.380 No, and Bernie didn't really—he didn't have the same ability to connect with people that Trump had.

01:13:53.500 Right, right, right.

01:13:54.480 Yes, yeah.

01:13:55.500 Yeah.

01:13:56.360 You know, that's a difficult question, right, because it gets to the question of motivation.

01:14:01.840 I would say I never got the sense that Donald Trump was honestly a reformer, that that was really his motivation was to, you know, change the system and that he was up at night reading policy proposals.

01:14:16.420 That wasn't my impression.

01:14:18.940 I think Donald Trump, you know, over time I got the idea basically, and this was in part from talking to people who knew him, which was that he was insecure but mostly just wanted to be liked.

01:14:31.980 I didn't find that, you know, the core of him was terribly scary.

01:14:38.000 Maybe I was wrong in perceiving it that way.

01:14:40.220 Well, I don't think the evidence is clear that you were wrong.

01:14:46.220 I mean, look, under Trump we had no wars.

01:14:50.040 You know, that wasn't such a bad thing, and we did get the Abraham Accords, and the economy did quite nicely. 0.92

01:14:55.080 And I don't think the culture wars were raging as intently under Trump, even though they raged away quite madly as they are now.

01:15:02.720 So, you know, for all of Trump's purported dangers, he was much less of a threat, certainly on the international stage, than he might have been and that everybody had been afraid he would be.

01:15:13.680 And I do think also that he generated a certain degree of respect and apprehension from, you know, the more authoritarian types around the world.

01:15:24.600 And I certainly don't think that's the case with Biden at all, because I think Biden, like Trudeau, I think is beneath contempt in relationship to people like the president of China.

01:15:33.660 Yeah. So, and I don't think that was true for Trump, because at least he was unpredictable or had that appearance.

01:15:40.200 So I don't think you were out of line in your failure to see anything truly malevolent in Trump.

01:15:46.580 Yeah. I mean, I don't know.

01:15:48.780 I mean, my impression of him was that he was doing this for a lot of reasons, that it was complicated.

01:15:57.560 He has a mischievous streak in him.

01:16:00.040 Um, it was clear watching his family early in the campaign that they wanted no part of any idea that he might win.

01:16:10.140 But, and I wasn't exactly sure that he wanted to win, but.

01:16:14.320 Right, right. Yeah, well, I thought it was an exercise in brand awareness expansion, at least, and quite a brilliant one in some ways, if you're thinking purely from the perspective of sales.

01:16:24.640 Right. And he was selling himself the entire time and he was doing a great job at it.

01:16:29.020 I mean, you know, with the tools that were available to him, he was a pioneer in many respects by bypassing the media and going straight to people using Twitter and that sort of thing.

01:16:39.980 Um, all that was very interesting, and I think that was something that if people had looked honestly at the situation, they would have found really compelling to study.

01:16:50.660 Instead, you know, the establishment press just settled on a narrative about him about halfway through the campaign.

01:16:58.580 And from there, it was just attack, attack, attack, attack, and it became, um, I would say, a sort of ongoing, uninteresting diatribe from that point forward.

01:17:09.080 Yeah, well, it would have been a lot more compelling had there been real journalists covering the Trump phenomena, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

01:17:17.200 Because at minimum, it was insanely interesting and not predictable in the least and, and mysterious.

01:17:23.520 And it would have been good to get to the bottom of it.

01:17:25.580 Like I said, I think Victor Davis Hanson did a nice job in his book, The Case for Trump.

01:17:29.380 I think it's a very even-handed treatment, uh, of, without the kind of crazy gonzo journalism style that, you know, might have added something quite compelling to the, to the overall analysis of Trump.

01:17:43.060 What did you do with, um, I Can't Breathe and Hate, Inc., the other two books, 2017 and 2019?

01:17:50.100 Yeah, I, I lived very close to where Eric Garner, um, was killed in Staten Island.

01:17:56.400 I was in New Jersey, um, just a short drive away.

01:17:59.800 So I decided to do a book about, um, what happened there.

01:18:04.440 Uh, I, just on a lark, I went to the neighborhood, hung out in the street for a little bit, talked to some of his friends, and found that he was, I thought, a very interesting person.

01:18:16.280 So I thought it might be cool to write a book about this, this guy.

01:18:20.460 And, you know, so I spent a couple of years really just talking to drug dealers and hanging out in the street and ended up with a portrait of what happened, uh, to Garner, all the different forces that converged to, um, cause, you know, that incident.

01:18:37.480 And, you know, left with an understanding of police brutality that was a lot more, um, complicated than people made it out after the George, George Floyd incident, which is, I think is, um, was unfortunate.

01:18:53.020 Well, complicated in, in, in what ways?

01:18:55.960 What did you learn?

01:18:56.640 Well, I think a lot of what happened with cops in cities like New York, uh, especially after the implementation of programs like Broken Windows, was that they were, uh, forced by these new stats-based policing regimes to, um, create, artificially, uh, engender contacts with the population when they weren't necessary.

01:19:24.080 Uh, you know, uh, you know, the, the, the, the court case, Ohio v. Terry, which is from 1968 in the United States, allowed police to randomly stop and search people on the street.

01:19:36.380 And police departments clued into the idea that if they did enough of those stops, they would find people who were, who had warrants on them, that they would probably grab a lot of guns, uh, that people were carrying and, or stop people from carrying them in the first place.

01:19:52.600 So they did hundreds of thousands of these stops.

01:19:56.560 And on the surface, that might sound like a good idea, but what ended up happening was a lot of people got frustrated being stopped and searched.

01:20:03.640 Uh, and a lot of those incidents went wrong.

01:20:06.920 And that's how a lot of these police brutality cases happen. 0.96

01:20:10.940 They, they happen because they begin with some really stupid reason for stopping somebody on the street. 0.98

01:20:17.680 Somebody gets mad and it ends up in a melee and somebody dies. 0.95

01:20:22.880 And that's, that unfortunately is, is the backdrop for a lot of these cases.

01:20:27.860 Right.

01:20:28.540 Okay.

01:20:28.960 Okay.

01:20:29.400 Well, I, I read recently that there's no real evidence that the police are more used, likely to use deadly force, for example, on black people compared to white people.

01:20:40.940 In fact, I think the stats show slightly were the reverse, but that that's not true at all when it comes to arguably, well, more minor in some ways, acts of, of harassment, let's say, or, or of, of continual investigation and stopping.

01:20:55.040 And so, you know, it would be nice if we could have a sensible discussion about that and actually get to the bottom of what's going on.

01:21:01.000 Do you think that those more frequent stopping programs promoted by that, say, broken window hypothesis, and that hypothesis is, by the way, for those of you who are watching and listening, is that you have to attend to minor infractions of the law.

01:21:17.440 To set a tenor that stops more major infractions of the law, which is the reverse, for example, of what they seem to be doing now in places like California.

01:21:27.000 Do you think there's any credibility to the claim that the implementation of those policies did, in fact, lead to the radical reductions in crime rate, for example, in places like New York City?

01:21:38.400 What was your sense of that when you looked into it?

01:21:41.800 Well, there's a couple of problems with the way they implemented broken windows in New York.

01:21:46.460 One is that they overtly, in many cases, told the officers to do more of those stops in certain neighborhoods than in others.

01:21:57.400 One of the reasons stop and frisk was overturned in New York is because they had one of the captains on tape basically telling, you know, a whole bunch of patrol cops, you know, I'm looking for black males age 18 to 21.

01:22:12.320 You know, he's like, he says that openly, right?

01:22:14.520 Right. So there was a mass, I think, and this goes to your point earlier, there may not be a discrepancy about deadly force, but there's a huge discrepancy in terms of the more minor stops.

01:22:26.580 Right. And especially about things like drug arrests.

01:22:29.780 Are you really going to get fewer drug arrests if you stop everybody on Wall Street and look through their stuff than you might if you, you know, stop everybody in Bushwick or Brownsville or someplace like that?

01:22:43.440 I think it would be closer than most people would think.

01:22:45.780 And so that engenders hostility.

01:22:48.840 They used it as a way to kind of keep property values high in some places by basically using police to clear out undesirable looking people.

01:22:58.460 That was the narrative with Garner.

01:23:00.300 Garner was kind of a slovenly dressed, obese guy who sat in the corner selling illegal cigarettes.

01:23:08.920 And there was a condo complex across the street that didn't like it.

01:23:14.060 And so he kept getting moved off the corner and got tired of it.

01:23:19.040 And, you know, some of those things that you mentioned, the broken windows theory, it wasn't just minor things that are against the law.

01:23:26.360 It's what they called odor maintenance.

01:23:28.320 So it's things that were the things that were maybe not against the law.

01:23:32.800 Right.

01:23:33.240 That they were also cleaning up.

01:23:35.440 And well, there's always going to be tremendous dispute about exactly where to draw the line in situations like that.

01:23:41.040 I mean, which is why you need a variety of different approaches, I guess, to try to find out what actually works, because it seems to me that places like Portland and Vancouver in Canada, increasingly Toronto and San Francisco, have gone far too far in the opposite direction.

01:23:56.000 And you have just, you know, absolute chaos reigning in places where that shouldn't be happening.

01:24:02.520 But then by the same token.

01:24:03.940 You can't just stop enforcing the law either.

01:24:07.120 I mean, that doesn't work either.

01:24:08.800 Right, right, right.

01:24:09.620 No penalty for shoplifting under $1,000 just doesn't seem like a very good solution, for example.

01:24:14.840 All right.

01:24:15.160 And so let's turn to the last book that you finished.

01:24:18.880 I believe it's the last one.

01:24:19.900 Hate Inc. 2019.

01:24:22.220 Yep.

01:24:22.400 Do you want to say a few words about that?

01:24:23.700 And then we'll talk about the debate you had recently with Douglas Murray.

01:24:27.800 Sure.

01:24:28.400 So Hate Inc.

01:24:30.260 I had always loved when I was a kid the book, as I mentioned before, Manufacturing Consent.

01:24:35.320 I grew up in a family of journalists.

01:24:37.120 My father was a television reporter.

01:24:39.700 And that book was very eye-opening to me, even though I had been around the media my whole life,

01:24:44.980 because it was about the unspoken pressures that go into editorial decisions before they get to the reporter.

01:24:55.240 You know, why are some stories assigned and not others, right?

01:24:58.880 Why do people at ABC or CBS, why do they freak out about the assassination of a Catholic priest in Poland but not in El Salvador?

01:25:10.380 You know, it's that kind of thing.

01:25:11.980 And I always thought that book was interesting, so I wanted to do basically a new version of that for the Internet age and see if anything had changed.

01:25:23.960 And I talked to Chomsky before I started writing the book.

01:25:28.180 I said, are you okay with me doing this project?

01:25:30.520 And he sort of said, okay.

01:25:32.060 And the premise of the book that I came up with is that the Internet had changed the game significantly,

01:25:38.620 and that really for financial reasons, the media business had evolved in this new direction,

01:25:47.480 where instead of trying to go for the whole audience, which is how ABC, CBS, NBC made their money in the old days,

01:25:57.860 now they were using the new model, which was what you might call audience optimization,

01:26:04.120 where you pick a demographic and try to dominate it.

01:26:07.260 And that's how we get this basically stratified, fractured media landscape,

01:26:13.040 where you have some companies that are selling only to blue-leaning audiences,

01:26:19.680 and then some that are only selling to the right.

01:26:22.380 And it's a very successful commercial formula.

01:26:25.380 But as news, it's really bad, because what ends up happening is that you're just giving your audience

01:26:31.420 what they want to hear most of the time, usually about the people on the other side.

01:26:35.940 And that formula, that commercial formula of doing news,

01:26:42.860 I think has been a major driver of a lot of the kind of culture war division in this country.

01:26:48.780 How much of that do you think is an inevitable consequence of, again, of technological transformation?

01:26:54.740 Because, I mean, ABC, CBS, NBC, they dominated when television bandwidth was almost infinitely expensive,

01:27:04.100 and every second that you were speaking on video was unbelievably financially demanding,

01:27:11.520 and the audiences were huge and in some ways homogenous.

01:27:16.580 And now, especially with YouTube, video is basically free.

01:27:21.540 And so, and that means an infinite number of channels, because, of course, there is a virtually infinite number of channels on YouTube.

01:27:28.520 And it isn't obvious to me at all that in a landscape like that, you can have anything other than fracturing.

01:27:35.660 And I think the primary driver of the disintegration of the legacy media isn't so much their transformation into woke ideologues, 0.99

01:27:44.240 although that hasn't helped, and it's been abetted by the idiot universities, 0.99

01:27:47.940 but the fact that there's just no bloody way they can compete. 0.98

01:27:51.740 You know, I mean, you have your own sub-stack, and I believe that's doing quite well.

01:27:55.440 And, like, people who are talented journalists, like, well, and Barry Weiss is a good example,

01:28:00.960 there's just no reason for her not to go out on her own and to start her own newspaper for all intents and purposes. 0.86

01:28:07.480 So, I mean, I don't see any way back from that, essentially.

01:28:13.600 Yeah, you're absolutely right.

01:28:16.120 In fact, you nailed the main thing about it.

01:28:18.840 You know, I remember I interviewed the former publisher of a newspaper in Dallas,

01:28:26.140 and he said that up until the 80s, the news business was a scarcity business.

01:28:31.940 There were only so many slots in the newspaper to sell want ads.

01:28:36.240 There were only so many hours on TV.

01:28:38.580 There were only so many hours on radio.

01:28:41.340 And those slots basically had limitless value because there was no other way to reach audiences for advertising.

01:28:50.340 You put the Internet into the mix, suddenly it goes from scarcity to, you know, infinity.

01:28:58.720 You know, all those things that were immensely valuable before are now essentially worthless,

01:29:05.460 and you have to find a new commercial strategy for making money.

01:29:09.420 You know, it's evolved to this place where selling subscriptions is the only way to go.

01:29:15.640 But the problem with that is that it doesn't pay for things like investigative journalism as well.

01:29:23.140 It doesn't pay for foreign bureaus and, you know, Jakarta and Moscow.

01:29:27.180 It doesn't pay for an awful lot of things.

01:29:29.160 So, you know, the news business has suffered.

01:29:32.500 I think it's lost its way trying to navigate this new terrain where money is so scarce,

01:29:41.320 not knowing whether to chase after clickbait or whether to stick to journalistic principles or what to do exactly.

01:29:51.480 And so all those brands have been irrevocably damaged, I think.

01:29:55.520 And, you know, nothing has stepped up to replace it yet.

01:30:00.820 Well, and speaking of that, you were just in Toronto not so long ago at the increasingly famous Monk debates.

01:30:07.840 They apparently seem to be doing something right.

01:30:09.740 And you and Douglas Murray faced off against Michelle Goldberg and...

01:30:15.740 Malcolm Gladwell.

01:30:17.400 Malcolm Gladwell.

01:30:18.800 Malcolm Gladwell.

01:30:19.500 And I believe that you and Douglas won the debate by the biggest margin that had ever occurred at the Monk debates.

01:30:26.520 And actually speaking to an audience that, in principle, shouldn't have been particularly favorable to your claims, right?

01:30:33.640 Because the Monk debate audience is Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, glitterati, such as, you know, such as we produce in Canada,

01:30:41.560 are equivalent of people who think they're celebrities, let's say.

01:30:45.180 That might be a good way of thinking about it.

01:30:46.720 And the probability that they would be both beholden to and fundamental supporters of the legacy media was extremely high.

01:30:53.820 And yet, by all accounts, you mopped the floor with both Michelle and Malcolm.

01:31:00.000 So do you want to walk through that a little bit?

01:31:01.700 Tell everybody what the debate was about first.

01:31:03.820 And tell me your impressions of the whole enterprise.

01:31:07.960 First of all, I had an amazing time.

01:31:10.500 It was, it's a great event.

01:31:12.760 And I think anybody who has the opportunity to attend the Monk debates should definitely do it.

01:31:20.640 The resolution was, be it resolved, do not trust the mainstream media.

01:31:25.100 And so Michelle and Malcolm were arguing the nay portion, and Douglas and I were arguing the yay portion.

01:31:33.280 And you said that we mopped the floor with them.

01:31:35.180 Really, Douglas mopped the floor with them, and I was kind of there.

01:31:37.620 But the, you know, he's very impressive as an orator and as a stage performer, and he was very quick.

01:31:47.040 Yeah, and as a fighter.

01:31:48.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:31:49.040 As a fighter.

01:31:49.300 He actually enjoys it.

01:31:51.020 And so, yeah, you mess with Douglas at your peril.

01:31:54.400 Exactly, exactly.

01:31:55.620 But another thing I think that really turned the tide with that debate was kind of the superior attitude, I would say, of a couple of the participants, Malcolm in particular.

01:32:10.680 I don't have anything in particular against him, but I made the observation at one point that Walter Cronkite had twice been voted the most trusted person in America in the 70s and 80s.

01:32:25.280 And Malcolm wouldn't let that go.

01:32:28.140 He kept implying that by saying that I was longing for the days of Jim Crow in America, and that I had forgotten that when those votes were taken, by the way, he was wrong about this, when those votes were taken, that, you know, lots of people didn't have it so great in America.

01:32:49.120 You know, implying that this was the 50s or the 40s when, you know, women, gays, and African-Americans had a tough time in the States.

01:32:58.780 I don't know, poor people were doing a hell of a lot better on the marital front back then than they are now by a large margin, and there were a lot fewer children who were fatherless.

01:33:07.900 So, you know, some things have improved, but there's lots of things that haven't improved.

01:33:11.900 So we might not want to be too smug and superior about how well we're doing on the moral front compared to 40 years ago.

01:33:17.740 I mean, lots of things have changed for the better, but it's by no means a universal panacea, let's say.

01:33:24.160 And that's especially true for poor people who are nonetheless on average richer.

01:33:28.680 But I would put that at the feet of capitalism, you know, rather than of any, you know, well-meaning government programs or ideology.

01:33:35.680 So anyways, you said he adopted a mien of superiority on what basis?

01:33:40.880 Well, essentially, he was calling me a racist for making that observation.

01:33:45.160 So, and he went back to it five times, and by the fifth time, there were actually sort of audible gasps in the audience.

01:33:55.400 So I think that had something to do with what happened with the debate.

01:33:59.260 Well, that sort of thing actually doesn't play very well in Canada.

01:34:03.360 You know, yeah, the people who I debated at the monk debates, they played that same mistake too.

01:34:09.500 They played the racial card and racist card.

01:34:12.560 Yeah, and Canadian audiences, they don't like that much because that hasn't really been part of our parlance,

01:34:19.560 part of the tenor of our public discussions, not nearly as much as in the U.S.

01:34:23.960 I mean, we're trying hard to get there, and we might be successful in this country, but generally it's not a good strategy.

01:34:30.040 So, yeah, yeah.

01:34:31.880 So did you learn, did you think that Goldberg and Gladwell made any points in relationship to why the legacy media might still be worthy of support and trust?

01:34:47.120 Well, their basic argument was that the procedures of the legacy media are still good procedures, you know, fact-checking, that sort of thing.

01:34:58.320 And we countered with, yes, those are good things.

01:35:04.220 Unfortunately, they're mostly gone from legacy media organizations, and that's one of the reasons that you have problems like the Russiagate case,

01:35:13.000 where, you know, one story after the other goes sideways and you guys don't catch it.

01:35:19.260 And that's, I think, there's still a failure of vision.

01:35:23.240 I still know a lot of people who work in legacy media.

01:35:26.000 And there's a slowness to recognize that audiences no longer, I think, really believe what they're reading in a lot of these organizations in the New York Times, Washington Post.

01:35:41.400 They see it as politicized, not terribly reliable factually.

01:35:46.220 And I think that's a shame.

01:35:49.460 Even as an independent, I think the mainstream media needs to be good, right?

01:35:55.000 Like, I think it's everybody benefits when it is.

01:36:00.240 But they haven't figured out that in order to have that respect that they think they deserve, that they just can't get this many things wrong.

01:36:08.380 And that's been the pattern.

01:36:11.800 Right, they don't get to be the legacy media without maintaining a genuine respectability.

01:36:17.920 Right, exactly.

01:36:19.020 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:36:20.600 So let me close here with a question about the Twitter file revelation.

01:36:25.580 So, you know, since you were instrumental in the process that led to the release of the so-called Twitter files, the first response from the legacy media was, there's, what would you say?

01:36:43.640 There's nothing to be seen there.

01:36:45.680 And the second response was, well, there was something to be seen, but we knew it all along.

01:36:50.700 And that's really where the story has settled now.

01:36:53.140 You know, I was reading your Wikipedia page, for example, while preparing for this interview.

01:36:56.880 And some of the criticisms about the Twitter files were, well, you know, nothing that we didn't know already was revealed.

01:37:03.820 And so there's nothing to see here, folks.

01:37:05.760 And so what do you think about that?

01:37:07.260 What's your sense of, tell us about participating in the release of the Twitter files and what you think the cultural consequence really was?

01:37:15.220 Well, first of all, interesting, what's interesting about it is that time-wise it happened.

01:37:21.440 I learned that I was going to be doing that right before the monk debate.

01:37:25.700 We actually got asked a question about Elon Musk maybe opening up the Twitter files during the debate.

01:37:33.020 And I had to pretend that I didn't know the answer to that question.

01:37:36.960 And so I flew to San Francisco right from Toronto.

01:37:41.280 And, you know, the first batch of the Twitter files, which was about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, was interesting.

01:37:48.680 But I wouldn't say that it was groundbreaking.

01:37:50.820 There was stuff in there that was worth publishing.

01:37:53.960 But it wasn't until we started to see this organized system of communication between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and all these platforms that there was this sort of highway of content moderation requests that was flowing to all of these companies.

01:38:17.360 I don't know that anybody knew that that was happening.

01:38:20.100 I certainly didn't know that that was happening.

01:38:24.440 And, you know, Twitter itself was denying that it even engaged in shadow banning before the Twitter files.

01:38:30.860 We got rid of that the first day.

01:38:34.000 And, you know, I think what happened was the argument eventually became, well, this is going on, but it's not illegal.

01:38:42.040 It's not technically a First Amendment violation because they're not ordering these companies.

01:38:46.020 It's just behind-the-scenes collusion between government and big media hidden from the public.

01:38:51.740 Nothing to see here, you know.

01:38:53.200 And whether or not something is technically illegal, that's a pretty damn shaky moral argument.

01:38:58.820 It's not a bad legal argument.

01:39:01.020 Yeah, and it's funny because I got a lot of criticism about that.

01:39:04.880 And my response was always, well, I don't care what it is.

01:39:09.520 You know, that's a matter for judges to decide or juries to decide.

01:39:13.220 I'm not going to worry about that.

01:39:15.260 But I can tell you that showing this to audiences, what it looks like in practice, that not only Americans, but a lot of people all over the world thought this was crazy.

01:39:26.400 And they really didn't like it, and it scared them.

01:39:30.300 And I think we can see that with, you know, lawsuits like the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit now, where a judge has ordered it all to stop.

01:39:39.060 You know, it's a big issue in America and around the world, frankly, because you really can't have, you know, a free culture without free speech.

01:39:51.260 And this is a very organized assault on the entire concept.

01:39:56.300 And I think we need to have a big debate about how we're going to go forward on the Internet and not do it in secret the way they were trying to do it.

01:40:08.180 Yeah, yeah. Well, it looked to me, you know, watching that from the outside, that I found the documentation revelatory and the exposure of what I think of as fascist collusion at the highest levels of government and media appalling beyond the belief,

01:40:24.880 especially when allied with the fact that it was really put in the hands of a very tiny number of extremely radical people at Twitter who are making these wide-scale decisions with absolutely no right whatsoever, or training, or competence, or moral guidance to be doing so.

01:40:42.740 And so I thought you guys did a great service, and I thought it was a good bang-off beginning to Elon Musk's revolutionary takeover of Twitter.

01:40:54.220 And, you know, he reinstated me pretty quickly after he purchased the company, and I was happy about that because, well, happy and unhappy, because then I was back on Twitter, and, you know, it's a terrible snake pit, but an attractive one.

01:41:08.480 So anyways, I certainly found that it was useful, and the fact that you were exposing this high-level collusion designed to take out free speech in a manner that was extraordinarily dangerous, obviously.

01:41:21.360 You know, the way we communicated about everything during the pandemic lockdown, which was an outbreak of authoritarianism with a far greater danger than any danger posed by the bloody virus.

01:41:34.600 I think the fact that that all came to light was absolutely necessary.

01:41:40.060 So, well, so thank you for that, as far as I'm concerned.

01:41:43.180 I'm glad to hear it.

01:41:44.620 And also for coming up to Canada and, you know, delivering a good trouncing to the...

01:41:53.840 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:41:55.000 Any excuse to come to Toronto, I love it. It's one of my favorite cities in the world, so my wife...

01:41:59.480 Yeah, well, we're going to do something about that real soon, now that we've elected a very far-left mayor.

01:42:04.080 So, I'm going to continue talking to Matt on the Daily Wire Plus side of these interviews.

01:42:09.440 He said something interesting to me during the YouTube conversation that I want to follow up on.

01:42:14.420 He said that as a kid, he was very introverted, and he's obviously dealt with that problem to a large degree.

01:42:21.180 And I'd like to delve into exactly how and why that transformation occurred,

01:42:25.300 and to track the development of Matt's interest in his career, which are obviously multidimensional, across the span of his life.

01:42:31.980 So, we're going to do that on the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:42:35.300 Join us there if you're inclined to.

01:42:37.580 Otherwise, thank you all for watching and listening.

01:42:41.000 Your attention is much appreciated.

01:42:42.900 And to the film crew here in Northern Ontario,

01:42:44.900 to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating these conversations,

01:42:48.480 and professionalizing them on the production side,

01:42:50.980 and to Matt, thank you all very much for talking to me today.

01:42:54.540 I appreciate everything you said.

01:42:56.020 Thank you so much for having me.

01:42:57.900 I appreciate it.

01:42:59.260 I'm glad to finally meet you.

01:43:00.600 It's time for Tim's.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 30, 2023

392. This Podcast Will Polarize You – And It Should ｜ Matt Taibbi

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