Matt Taibbi discusses his early career, both in journalism and professional basketball, his time in the USSR, learning Russian and publishing a successful Gonzo-inspired newspaper, and his breaking coverage of the subprime mortgage bubble. We also examine the state of the world today with Russia and the U.S. military-industrial complex, and the dire necessity for alternative news sources. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Today's guest: Author and Journalist Matt Tiberi. Today s episode features an introduction to his new book, How to Find Your Way Forward: A Guide to Finding Your Place in the World. by Matt and his journey to finding a Bright Future in the Middle East and North America. Subscribe to the Daily Wire Plus Podcast by clicking here. Learn more about Matt s journey to find out more about his journey and more by listening to his story on his podcast, by becoming a supporter of his work on the show, by going to DailyWire Plus. and more on his Insta-media by and on his . , and more in this episode on his blog post on the podcast on his eponymous post on his post on here on Insta on , or s on this post on Instafeed on the podcast on #_ & is at # v_ and a post can be found on . # and his , or , # , etc. on my en ? et + @ )
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening.
00:01:11.140Today I'm speaking with author and journalist Matt Taibbi.
00:01:15.260We discussed his early career, both in journalism and professional basketball.
00:01:20.360His time in the USSR learning Russian and publishing a successful Gonzo-inspired newspaper.
00:01:27.740And his breaking coverage of the subprime mortgage bubble.
00:01:30.940We also examined the state of the world today with Russia and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
00:02:43.100Well, at the time, I was more interested in being a writer, just generally, than being a reporter.
00:02:49.180I thought I had been living in St. Petersburg, which was filled at the time with freelance journalists.
00:02:57.060And I thought, I'm not getting a lot of work.
00:02:59.440I'll move to a place where there are no reporters.
00:03:01.900So 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.
00:03:11.100But I figured while I was there, maybe I could do something like write a book about playing baseball for the Uzbeks.
00:03:17.740And I ended up doing that kind of thing a lot.
00:03:20.080I moved to Mongolia later, played basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association.
00:03:25.140Well, 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.
00:03:54.000It's got that beautiful, gigantic sort of wedding cake skyscraper building in the background.
00:03:59.680I used to go there in the afternoons and play hoops.
00:04:02.580And 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.
00:04:16.320So 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.
00:04:28.480So were you big among the Mongolian fangirls?
00:05:22.660And why did you decide to stay there for, well, a number of years?
00:05:25.220When I was a kid, I was fairly lonely and depressed and introverted.
00:05:32.180And the thing that I found that became my escape in life is that I fell in love with comic fiction.
00:05:40.920And my favorite writers were all Russian writers like Gogol and Bulgakov.
00:05:46.080And 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.
00:05:58.700So when I studied originally, it was actually still Leningrad Polytech.
00:06:02.660I'm old enough to have gone to school in the Soviet Union.
00:07:36.600Originally, 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.
00:07:49.840And 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.
00:08:04.100It's hard to explain, but it was sort of a satirical nightlife guide, let's put it that way.
00:08:09.780And 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.
00:08:26.820We had corrections for things that had never appeared in the paper.
00:08:30.280I mean, we tried to make an absolute joke of the whole newspaper format.
00:12:37.960The New York Times today reported on underground climate change.
00:12:42.320Yeah, 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.
00:13:03.540I 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.
00:13:17.780And it's really quite a catastrophe to see these places fall apart, actually.
00:13:21.200You 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.
00:13:43.660And, you know, in many ways, it did its job.
00:13:47.420And I think you could say the same thing, although the New York Times, you know, had some pretty bloody egregious sins on its conscience.
00:13:54.300At 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.
00:14:09.440I 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.
00:14:20.980And that book is full of criticism of the New York Times.
00:14:24.520But when I asked him about the Times, he said, you know, people got the wrong idea about my book.
00:14:30.960You know, the New York Times is full of facts.
00:14:34.480You have to learn to read it and fight through the biases that are in it.
00:14:38.220And, you know, so I think, unfortunately, the lack of attention paid to the factual aspect has taken away some important value from those institutions.
00:15:19.640So what do you think, so you have a real personal connection with that country, obviously, and a pretty detailed knowledge of it.
00:15:28.540What 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?
00:15:35.640Well, first of all, that situation is extraordinarily complicated.
00:15:41.460It's been frustrating for me to watch the coverage of, you know, the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
00:15:48.820You 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.
00:16:02.260So I don't at all agree with the invasion, you know, by Vladimir Putin.
00:16:09.020And in fact, we were very heavy critics of Putin from the start when he came to power.
00:16:13.780But, 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—
00:16:33.940Yeah, so this goes back, you know, decades before even the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:16:39.200And a lot of that background is left out of all this.
00:16:41.820It'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.
00:16:54.520I 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.
00:17:07.780Well, Boris Johnson announced today that the expansion of NATO into Ukraine should be of no concern to the Russians.
00:17:28.060But, you know, think of the legends in the United States, right?
00:17:30.820We 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.
00:17:47.020But we think the Russians shouldn't object if they're surrounded on all sides by military bases.
00:17:54.100Should they respond by invading another country?
00:18:10.660They've always been, since the early 90s.
00:18:12.940It's a situation they've been conscious of the whole time, and I think Americans don't understand that.
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00:18:56.740Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:20:15.740And 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.
00:20:28.080And 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,
00:20:39.520is really quite the staggering miracle to me.
00:20:41.960So I don't know what the hell we think we're playing at exactly.
00:20:45.220And I can't understand for the life of me what the endgame is.
00:20:48.720You know, I've talked to a lot of hawks in Washington, and these are people whose views I generally respect.
00:20:54.500And, 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,
00:21:02.880to weaken Russia's conventional military, that that might not be such a bad investment, you know.
00:21:08.860And 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.
00:21:20.660And I think you could have an intelligent discussion about that.
00:21:23.340But I also don't think that weakening Germany after the First World War turned out to be such a brilliant idea either.
00:21:28.740And 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,
00:21:37.400and presented a stable unitary front in relationship, say, to the Chinese?
00:21:47.300And it seems to me that it's a lot of leftover Cold War era thinking in some ways.
00:21:54.280And I suppose some real self-interest on the part of the military-industrial complex that's kept this war brewing.
00:22:01.940And 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.
00:22:17.160And they don't have Afghanistan anymore to keep things, keep the market hopping.
00:22:22.220But they've certainly got a war that could go on forever or expand quite nicely in Russia and the Ukraine.
00:22:28.680I mean, do you think I'm missing something in that analysis?
00:22:31.880Undoubtedly, right, because it's a complex situation.
00:22:37.380I think we had an opportunity to genuinely bring in the Russians, at least as a strategic partner.
00:22:45.280There was always going to be some friction there.
00:22:47.100The two countries both see themselves as superpowers.
00:22:52.700There's some resentment, some cultural resentment that's true in both places.
00:22:59.500Where, you know, neither of them wants to concede that the other is more powerful.
00:23:04.640So there's always going to be some difficulty between those two countries.
00:23:08.320But they did agree on things like, you know, facing Islamic terrorism together, right?
00:23:14.980I think they demonstrated that that kind of cooperation was possible.
00:23:18.380But 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.
00:24:01.800That seems to me to be preposterously naive.
00:24:04.660Because where in Russian history could you find one example of that that you could point to that's even vaguely credible?
00:24:13.640And if you want Russian leaders worse than Putin, that's a very, very long list.
00:24:19.140So I just don't understand that at all.
00:24:21.520And the danger of the breakup of the country, especially given our dependence on, I mean, the world's dependence on Russia for certain necessities.
00:24:29.380Energy, for example, for the Europeans, or ammonia for food production, or edible wheat, there'd be another one.
00:24:37.100You know, it's like, obviously, we're strategically aligned in many ways with Russia.
00:24:41.680And 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?
00:24:50.120I mean, dead seriously, I don't understand how anybody could possibly imagine that.
00:24:55.240Well, it's the same era of vision that we had going into Iraq.
00:24:59.380Where we imagined that we could roll tanks into Baghdad and establish Switzerland overnight.
00:25:08.220There's history and a long cultural tradition that you have to take into account.
00:25:14.400But, you know, that war was launched by people who didn't even know there was a difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
00:25:21.740And, 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.
00:25:37.920If 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.
00:25:50.460Yeah, well, that's certainly how it seems to me.
00:25:53.600So I don't know what the hell we're playing at.
00:25:55.360And 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.
00:26:08.400It's criminally negligent, to say the least.
00:26:11.240And I think, really, what likely happened is that clueless people gave the foreign policy situation kind of a backseat.
00:26:21.380And so it was never a pressing concern like it might have been in the aftermath of the Cold War.
00:26:26.820And then there's constant pressure from the munitions manufacturers, et cetera, to keep a warlike, hawk-like stance at hand.
00:26:35.900And 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.
00:26:48.920And 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.
00:27:03.760And 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.
00:27:12.220You know, and you think, well, peace with Russia is impossible.
00:27:15.920And I would say, yeah, that's what people said about the Middle East, too.
00:27:19.620And 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.
00:27:30.620And so the idea, and they just walked around the State Department to do that, and they did that with a tremendous degree of success.
00:27:36.700And if the Biden administration hadn't been so juvenile and resentful, they would have patted Trump on the back for having accomplished that.
00:27:46.800I 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.
00:28:01.360And then the Saudis would have signed the Abraham Accords because they were basically chomping at the bit to do so.
00:28:07.020And 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.
00:28:20.160You know, like, Jesus, you can't make this stuff up.
00:28:23.320You know, and I've talked to Democrats about this.
00:28:25.220I said, why the hell don't you celebrate Trump, at least for the bloody Abraham Accords?
00:28:29.440And their response to me is always, well, you know, they're not as good as they look.
00:28:33.320It's like, well, yeah, compared to what?
00:28:36.440Anything you guys managed for like 70 years?
00:28:39.600They're pretty damn good as a first step.
00:28:41.760I mean, there's real, there's actually peace breaking out between Israel and a variety of Arab states.
00:28:46.560And like, who the hell would have ever predicted that?
00:28:49.120And 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.
00:29:00.720So 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.
00:29:11.000And so, you know, that's pretty damn unforgivable as far as I'm concerned.
00:29:14.420And 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,
00:29:32.800and 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.
00:29:47.920And it's a bloody dangerous game that we're playing.
00:29:49.920Yeah, 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.
00:30:01.200There 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,
00:30:11.720which very generically suggested that maybe opening peace talks might be a good idea at some point.
00:30:18.280They weren't suggesting that Ukraine surrender or that, you know, they stop fighting or anything along those lines.
00:30:26.020But 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.
00:30:37.280So, there's no longer an anti-war coalition of any kind anywhere in American politics, you know, that even does symbolic politics.
00:30:48.200Yeah, left or right, you know, and it's really quite something, it's quite the miracle to see.
00:30:52.840It's very, it's really incomprehensible in many ways.
00:32:08.880I briefly tried to start a newspaper in Buffalo called The Beast, which was modeled out on the Exile.
00:32:15.540But pretty quickly got a call from Rolling Stone, from the editor there, who remembered me, had been keeping an eye on me.
00:32:22.260And suggested that I go out and start covering the campaign that was just starting in 2003.
00:32:31.000So, 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.
00:32:38.780And eventually as more of a financial-slash-investigative reporter.
00:32:47.560We 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.
00:33:01.280And 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.
00:33:09.440What did you learn about the American political system that you didn't know and that was surprising serving as a campaign reporter?
00:33:19.480Well, my first complication in covering American politics, having come from the former Soviet Union, was that in post-communist Russia, everything was visible.
00:33:30.320You 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.
00:33:43.540The 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.
00:33:51.400In 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.
00:34:03.580For a long time, I was really puzzled by it.
00:34:06.680I thought there had to be another layer of something to American politics that was more interesting than this.
00:34:12.940And 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.
00:34:39.560And they did this through a variety of means.
00:35:07.920Otherwise, he wasn't terribly warm, right, I would say.
00:35:12.060But 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,
00:35:28.340that when someone came along and disrupted the whole pattern, they didn't know how to respond to it, except with total rage and incomprehension.
00:35:40.220They thought something must be totally amiss.
00:35:44.620And they didn't realize that Trump was just being smart and running against the system.
00:35:50.300I 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.
00:36:04.220And it was scoring heavily with people all over the place, across the political spectrum.
00:36:10.940But nobody really wanted to admit that.
00:36:12.960They just wanted to make him out to be this very scary villain.
00:36:16.000And 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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00:37:33.300Yeah, 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.
00:37:44.880And 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.
00:38:07.560It'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.
00:38:30.580And 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?
00:38:45.800Maybe 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.
00:38:57.080But 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.
00:39:06.020And 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.
00:39:20.000And she sunk herself doing that, and it was an act of true hubris and foolishness, right?
00:39:26.400Because 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.
00:39:37.300And especially had she not stabbed the American working class in the back.
00:39:41.700And, 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.
00:39:59.060They're not of the same economic class, obviously.
00:40:01.400But, you know, I had a wise working class guy I once worked for back in the 1970s.
00:40:08.500He was a conservative and not a socialist.
00:40:11.820And I was at that time, I was about 14, I was pretty entranced by socialist ideas.
00:40:16.860And the Socialist Party in Alberta, my province, had a pretty good small business platform.
00:40:23.200And I said, why the hell don't you vote for the socialists?
00:40:25.500They have a lot better platform for your endeavor than the conservatives, who are a party of big business.
00:40:30.720And he said, small business owners don't want to be small business owners.
00:40:36.080They want to be big business owners and people vote their dreams, not their reality.
00:40:41.800And I thought, oh, my God, that's so smart.
00:40:44.100And, 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,
00:40:54.060I think people could look at Trump and think, well, there are conceivable universes in which I could be Donald Trump.
00:41:07.200And then he also had this capacity to speak off the cuff and directly to people.
00:41:13.040You 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.
00:41:19.620And 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.
00:41:32.460And second, you know, they felt morally intimidated in the face of people who'd actually put themselves on the line.
00:41:37.920But Trump seemed to have that ability to talk directly to working class people.
00:41:43.580And, you know, you have to be a certain kind of person to do that.
00:41:47.200One 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.
00:42:00.400You know, I mean, I've worked with lots of working class people, contractors and so forth, and I have lots of working class jobs.
00:42:07.720And 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.
00:42:23.860And so Trump seemed to be able to deal with people like that, maybe because he had so much experience on the construction.
00:42:30.660Yeah, 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.
00:42:44.880She ran as the avatar of the white working class.
00:42:48.340You might remember she had all these speeches about being the granddaughter of, you know, a worker in a lace factory.
00:42:56.280And 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.
00:43:06.100That was the one I thought she did best at.
00:43:08.300But 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.
00:43:26.560The degree to which they were blind to that was kind of amazing to me, and, you know, you brought up Hunter Thompson before.
00:43:36.480He actually had a metaphor that really described how that happens.
00:43:40.260He talked about how if you go hunting, in normal times, you can't get within a thousand yards of a bull elk.
00:43:47.580Like, it's sensitive to the smallest sound in the forest.
00:43:52.200But 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.
00:43:59.080It's so focused on its, you know, its goal of mating, right?
00:44:03.380And that's exactly what politicians who see the presidency are like.
00:44:07.660They become blind to just about everything but power, and they don't think strategically anymore.
00:44:13.360And I think that happened to the Democrats in 2016.
00:44:16.640They just were not paying attention to all the different signs that were so obvious to everybody around them.
00:44:23.960Yeah, 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.
00:44:30.260And, of course, Clinton also allied herself with the progressive front of the Democrats.
00:44:35.940And that certainly wasn't something in keeping with the basic sentiments of the working class that she also stuck a shiv in.
00:44:59.520Yeah, I like him, you know, and his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, is somebody whom I've known for a long time.
00:45:07.500Going 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
00:45:24.520and what possible solutions, you know, might work, might not work.
00:45:29.520You know, you think he's an impressive character, eh, Kucinich?
00:45:53.160You know, he won his first elections, literally going door to door with no financial backing.
00:46:00.380And so this is the kind of person who's behind RFK's campaign.
00:46:07.080I mean, obviously, I don't know Robert F. Kennedy as well.
00:46:11.580You know, I did some of his shows years ago.
00:46:14.000But I think he recognizes, as Trump did, and as Bernie Sanders also did in 2016 to a lesser degree,
00:46:25.280that there was this groundswell of frustration building in America toward, I guess you would call it,
00:46:33.960sort of mainstream political thought, which was increasingly elitist and indifferent to the fate of ordinary Americans on both the left and the right.
00:46:45.060Kennedy, 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.
00:46:56.060Those things are actually advertisements in the current day and age.
00:47:02.420Trump understood this very keenly in 2016.
00:47:06.220He embraced it, and that was one of the reasons why he did so well.
00:47:10.160And Kennedy, I think, also understands this.
00:47:12.600Unlike Bernie Sanders, who I think, you know, deep within his heart had a lot of affection for the Democratic Party,
00:47:19.560didn't want to see something bad happen to it.
00:47:24.640RFK, I think, is running a campaign where he's willing to go to the mattresses with, you know,
00:47:31.520the people within the Democratic Party structure.
00:47:34.380And that's going to be very appealing to a lot of voters and a lot of independents as well.
00:47:38.280So, yeah, this is going to be some ridiculously, surreally interesting presidential campaign, man.
00:47:44.080I don't think we'll have ever seen the likes of it.
00:49:04.120And then it got a little strange at the end.
00:49:06.040What was the most interesting area you delved into when you worked for Rolling Stone?
00:49:11.140Well, after the 2008 election, you know, I had covered Obama's win.
00:49:16.280And that was when the financial collapse happened.
00:49:20.460And they assigned me to do one story basically about what happened at AIG.
00:49:26.140They wanted me to explain in ordinary terms, you know, what that was.
00:49:33.620And we had one story that was called, I think, The Big Takeover.
00:49:37.780And it just attempted to translate for ordinary people a lot of the verbiage that people used on Wall Street.
00:49:47.520And the response to that was so overwhelming that I ended up doing that for eight years.
00:49:52.760And 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.
00:50:14.320And I got 7,000, 8,000 words a shot to do this and lots of time.
00:50:19.560So for an investigative reporter, I mean, at the time, there were maybe 10 jobs like that in all of journalism.
00:51:07.780So let me recap for a second or two part of what happened in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
00:51:15.320Tell me if you think I've got this right and add anything that you feel would be useful.
00:51:19.960So my sense was that it was at least in part of a technological—it was a consequence of a rapid technological revolution.
00:51:27.580I 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.
00:51:39.260You 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.
00:51:46.940And 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.
00:51:56.040Okay, so that's pretty straightforward, and it strikes me as highly probable that that can be done.
00:52:01.040And 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,
00:52:15.300that 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?
00:52:37.680Now, 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.
00:52:50.960So 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.
00:53:03.180And so the consequence of that was that financial institutions went out and sold increasingly high-risk mortgages at a mad rate forever.
00:53:13.560And that was abetted by policies stemming from the Democrats and the Republicans alike designed to foster home ownership among low-income Americans,
00:53:22.740which, you know, sounds like a fine idea, but I suppose selling people houses they can't actually pay for is not a good idea.
00:53:29.580And so the consequence of that was a housing boom, a mortgage boom, increased malfeasance on the mortgage risk rating front,
00:53:41.260and then the eventual construction of correlated housing prices across the entire economy, which is something that never happened before.
00:53:49.060Because these things had all now been linked together behind the scenes.
00:53:52.740And 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.
00:54:01.900But 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.
00:54:24.700It started off as actually quite a brilliant idea.
00:54:28.800You know, what you were describing with mortgage-backed securities is this process called tranching, right?
00:54:35.240Where 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,
00:54:49.760but peel off a portion of it and sell it as AAA.
01:12:18.000And 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.
01:12:26.960Whereas they should have been reading books about sales culture because that was the key to understanding Donald Trump.
01:12:33.240Yeah, and I thought Trump basically was selling outrage.
01:12:39.700He was selling the experience of feeling solidarity with other people who'd been screwed over.
01:12:49.220And he was—so he was fostering those feelings in people, I think, you know, to answer your question.
01:12:56.640Did you get—did you detect a danger in that?
01:12:58.620I mean, because, look, there are times being frustrated and wanting justice, those two things aren't that easy to distinguish, right?
01:13:07.060And being resentful and wanting justice, those two things aren't always that easy to distinguish either, right?
01:13:12.080I 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.
01:13:20.820And 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.
01:13:31.920Now, Trump obviously appealed to that outrage.
01:13:35.160You'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.
01:13:42.680Now, of course, Bernie also didn't—wasn't burdened with the delusion that he was likely to win.
01:13:47.380No, and Bernie didn't really—he didn't have the same ability to connect with people that Trump had.
01:13:56.360You know, that's a difficult question, right, because it gets to the question of motivation.
01:14:01.840I 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.
01:14:18.940I 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.
01:14:31.980I didn't find that, you know, the core of him was terribly scary.
01:14:38.000Maybe I was wrong in perceiving it that way.
01:14:40.220Well, I don't think the evidence is clear that you were wrong.
01:14:46.220I mean, look, under Trump we had no wars.
01:14:50.040You know, that wasn't such a bad thing, and we did get the Abraham Accords, and the economy did quite nicely.
01:14:55.080And I don't think the culture wars were raging as intently under Trump, even though they raged away quite madly as they are now.
01:15:02.720So, 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.
01:15:13.680And I do think also that he generated a certain degree of respect and apprehension from, you know, the more authoritarian types around the world.
01:15:24.600And 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.
01:15:33.660Yeah. So, and I don't think that was true for Trump, because at least he was unpredictable or had that appearance.
01:15:40.200So I don't think you were out of line in your failure to see anything truly malevolent in Trump.
01:16:00.040Um, it was clear watching his family early in the campaign that they wanted no part of any idea that he might win.
01:16:10.140But, and I wasn't exactly sure that he wanted to win, but.
01:16:14.320Right, 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.
01:16:24.640Right. And he was selling himself the entire time and he was doing a great job at it.
01:16:29.020I 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.
01:16:39.980Um, 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.
01:16:50.660Instead, you know, the establishment press just settled on a narrative about him about halfway through the campaign.
01:16:58.580And 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.
01:17:09.080Yeah, 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.
01:17:17.200Because at minimum, it was insanely interesting and not predictable in the least and, and mysterious.
01:17:23.520And it would have been good to get to the bottom of it.
01:17:25.580Like I said, I think Victor Davis Hanson did a nice job in his book, The Case for Trump.
01:17:29.380I 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.
01:17:43.060What did you do with, um, I Can't Breathe and Hate, Inc., the other two books, 2017 and 2019?
01:17:50.100Yeah, I, I lived very close to where Eric Garner, um, was killed in Staten Island.
01:17:56.400I was in New Jersey, um, just a short drive away.
01:17:59.800So I decided to do a book about, um, what happened there.
01:18:04.440Uh, 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.
01:18:16.280So I thought it might be cool to write a book about this, this guy.
01:18:20.460And, 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.
01:18:37.480And, 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.
01:18:53.020Well, complicated in, in, in what ways?
01:18:56.640Well, 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.
01:19:24.080Uh, 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.
01:19:36.380And 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.
01:19:52.600So they did hundreds of thousands of these stops.
01:19:56.560And 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.
01:20:03.640Uh, and a lot of those incidents went wrong.
01:20:06.920And that's how a lot of these police brutality cases happen.
01:20:10.940They, they happen because they begin with some really stupid reason for stopping somebody on the street.
01:20:17.680Somebody gets mad and it ends up in a melee and somebody dies.
01:20:22.880And that's, that unfortunately is, is the backdrop for a lot of these cases.
01:20:29.400Well, 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.
01:20:40.940In 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.
01:20:55.040And 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.
01:21:01.000Do 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.
01:21:17.440To 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.
01:21:27.000Do 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?
01:21:38.400What was your sense of that when you looked into it?
01:21:41.800Well, there's a couple of problems with the way they implemented broken windows in New York.
01:21:46.460One is that they overtly, in many cases, told the officers to do more of those stops in certain neighborhoods than in others.
01:21:57.400One 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.
01:22:12.320You know, he's like, he says that openly, right?
01:22:14.520Right. 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.
01:22:26.580Right. And especially about things like drug arrests.
01:22:29.780Are 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?
01:22:43.440I think it would be closer than most people would think.
01:22:48.840They 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.
01:23:35.440And well, there's always going to be tremendous dispute about exactly where to draw the line in situations like that.
01:23:41.040I 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.
01:23:56.000And you have just, you know, absolute chaos reigning in places where that shouldn't be happening.
01:25:11.980And 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.
01:25:23.960And I talked to Chomsky before I started writing the book.
01:25:28.180I said, are you okay with me doing this project?
01:31:55.620But 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.
01:32:10.680I 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.
01:32:28.140He 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.
01:32:49.120You 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.
01:32:58.780I 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.
01:33:07.900So, you know, some things have improved, but there's lots of things that haven't improved.
01:33:11.900So 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.
01:33:17.740I mean, lots of things have changed for the better, but it's by no means a universal panacea, let's say.
01:33:24.160And that's especially true for poor people who are nonetheless on average richer.
01:33:28.680But I would put that at the feet of capitalism, you know, rather than of any, you know, well-meaning government programs or ideology.
01:33:35.680So anyways, you said he adopted a mien of superiority on what basis?
01:33:40.880Well, essentially, he was calling me a racist for making that observation.
01:33:45.160So, and he went back to it five times, and by the fifth time, there were actually sort of audible gasps in the audience.
01:33:55.400So I think that had something to do with what happened with the debate.
01:33:59.260Well, that sort of thing actually doesn't play very well in Canada.
01:34:03.360You know, yeah, the people who I debated at the monk debates, they played that same mistake too.
01:34:09.500They played the racial card and racist card.
01:34:12.560Yeah, and Canadian audiences, they don't like that much because that hasn't really been part of our parlance,
01:34:19.560part of the tenor of our public discussions, not nearly as much as in the U.S.
01:34:23.960I mean, we're trying hard to get there, and we might be successful in this country, but generally it's not a good strategy.
01:34:31.880So 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?
01:34:47.120Well, their basic argument was that the procedures of the legacy media are still good procedures, you know, fact-checking, that sort of thing.
01:34:58.320And we countered with, yes, those are good things.
01:35:04.220Unfortunately, they're mostly gone from legacy media organizations, and that's one of the reasons that you have problems like the Russiagate case,
01:35:13.000where, you know, one story after the other goes sideways and you guys don't catch it.
01:35:19.260And that's, I think, there's still a failure of vision.
01:35:23.240I still know a lot of people who work in legacy media.
01:35:26.000And 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.
01:35:41.400They see it as politicized, not terribly reliable factually.
01:35:49.460Even as an independent, I think the mainstream media needs to be good, right?
01:35:55.000Like, I think it's everybody benefits when it is.
01:36:00.240But 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.
01:36:20.600So let me close here with a question about the Twitter file revelation.
01:36:25.580So, 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?
01:37:07.260What's your sense of, tell us about participating in the release of the Twitter files and what you think the cultural consequence really was?
01:37:15.220Well, first of all, interesting, what's interesting about it is that time-wise it happened.
01:37:21.440I learned that I was going to be doing that right before the monk debate.
01:37:25.700We actually got asked a question about Elon Musk maybe opening up the Twitter files during the debate.
01:37:33.020And I had to pretend that I didn't know the answer to that question.
01:37:36.960And so I flew to San Francisco right from Toronto.
01:37:41.280And, you know, the first batch of the Twitter files, which was about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, was interesting.
01:37:48.680But I wouldn't say that it was groundbreaking.
01:37:50.820There was stuff in there that was worth publishing.
01:37:53.960But 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.
01:38:17.360I don't know that anybody knew that that was happening.
01:38:20.100I certainly didn't know that that was happening.
01:38:24.440And, you know, Twitter itself was denying that it even engaged in shadow banning before the Twitter files.
01:39:15.260But 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.
01:39:26.400And they really didn't like it, and it scared them.
01:39:30.300And 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.
01:39:39.060You 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.
01:39:51.260And this is a very organized assault on the entire concept.
01:39:56.300And 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.
01:40:08.180Yeah, 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,
01:40:24.880especially 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.
01:40:42.740And 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.
01:40:54.220And, 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.
01:41:08.480So 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.
01:41:21.360You 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.
01:41:34.600I think the fact that that all came to light was absolutely necessary.
01:41:40.060So, well, so thank you for that, as far as I'm concerned.