Matt Taibbi joins Joe Rogan to dissect Jeffrey Epstein’s death, exposing inconsistencies like broken cameras and strangulation signs while questioning media silence on a bipartisan scandal—Clinton took 26 flights on his plane, yet reporters avoided scrutiny. They critique the "outrage economy," where platforms suppress free speech (e.g., deadnaming policies) but tolerate pornography, citing Noam Chomsky’s "worthy victim" bias and Soviet-style labeling tactics against figures like Tulsi Gabbard. Taibbi’s Hate Inc. and Rogan’s podcasts emerge as rare models of fearless, independent journalism amid legacy media’s profit-driven decline. [Automatically generated summary]
So, Jamie pointed out, this congressman, is that who it is?
Jamie pointed this out, that there's a congressman, and he released a series of tweets, and the first letter of all these tweets, if you put them all together, it says, Epstein didn't kill himself.
I got a tweet from someone about 35 minutes ago that I don't know if there's a bunch of people online paying attention to it or what, but someone alerted me and a few other people.
Well, this Epstein case is probably the most blatant example of a public murder of a crucial witness I've ever seen in my entire life, or anybody's ever seen.
And the minimal amount of outrage about this, the minimal amount of coverage, it's fucking fascinating.
ABC. Amy, that lady, the one who had the frustrated moment that she called it, a frustrating private moment, when she was talking about having the scoop and having that story and them squashing it.
Right.
This is all stuff that everybody used to think was conspiracy.
Everybody used to think this was stoner talk.
This is stuff where people are just delusional.
They believe all kinds of wacky conspiracies, but the reality is much less complicated.
Well, there's a couple of things going on because there are many different ways this can play out.
I mean, you could have a news director who just sort of instinctively decides, well, we can't do that story because I might want to have Will and Kate on later or I might want to have this politician on later.
And it's not like anybody tells them necessarily that we can't do this.
If you grow up in this system and you've been in the business for a long time, you have all these things that are drilled into you At almost like the cellular level about what you can and cannot get into.
But there were some explicit things that happened with Epstein, too.
I mean, there were a lot of news agencies that killed stories about him.
And we're hearing about some of them, Vanity Fair, this thing.
Well, that's the thing about the Epstein story that makes no sense to me.
Like, I thought that the percentage of people who were out-and-out, like perverts, who had a serious problem, like with pedophilia or whatever, was pretty small, you know?
But they had a lot of people coming in and out of this compound.
And this is like the mother of all stories, you know, in terms of that.
And they're just little breadcrumbs here and there.
That whole thing about Acosta, you know, the Vanity Fair quote from him is that when he said that when he looked at the case, he didn't do it because I was told he belonged to intelligence.
What does that mean?
Who's intelligence?
You know what I mean?
Like, what agency?
What for?
And then you pair that with things like, you know, I have friends on Wall Street.
You tell me, I've never heard a single instance of this guy actually having a trade.
So what was this hedge fund doing?
I mean, if you think about it, a hedge fund's a perfect way to do blackmail, because you can just have people putting money in and out all the time, and it would look like...
It's like, it gets to a point where you're like, okay, even Michael Shermer, who runs Skeptic Magazine, he's like, wait a minute, the cameras were not working?
The Epstein story is interesting because it's about villains on both sides of the aisle.
This is a classic.
This is something I've written about before.
The press does not like to do stories where the problem is bipartisan.
So when you have an institutional problem, when Democrats and Republicans...
Both share responsibility for it when, you know, or if it's an institution that kind of exists in perpetuity, no matter what the administration is.
We don't really like to do those stories.
Fox likes to do stories about Democrats.
MSNBC likes to do stories about Republicans.
But the thing that's kind of, you know, all over the place, they don't like to do that story.
Epstein is, you know, he's friends with Trump and with Clinton.
I mean, it looks like he has more friends on the Clinton side, but still...
And I think this is one of the reasons why this story doesn't have a lot of traction in the media, because neither side really likes the idea of going too deeply on it, feels like to me.
This one, but it's also so insanely blatant, but now you have foreign actors that are involved in it and they all disperse and then left with this confusion of who's responsible for it.
Well, Saudi Arabia, that's another example where you can't really say it's, you know, one side of the...
Both parties have been incredibly complicit in their cooperation with the Saudi regime and in, you know, the massacres that are going on in Yemen.
It's a classic example of what Noam Chomsky used to talk about with worthy and unworthy victims, right?
Like if the Soviet communists did it, that was bad.
But if death squads in El Salvador killed a priest or a Catholic priest, you know, then that was something we didn't write about because they were our client state.
Yemen is a story we don't write about.
Syria is a story we do write about, but they're really equivalent stories.
But you're absolutely right, the Khashoggi thing, I don't think either party or either side's media really wants to get into that all that deeply.
And it's really about how the press, the business model of the press has changed.
I mean, it's something that you talk about a lot.
I hear you on your show all the time talking about how news agencies are always trying to push narratives on people, trying to get people wound up and upset.
And that is a conscious business strategy that we didn't have maybe 30 years ago.
You know, you think about Walter Cronkite or what the news was like back in the day, you had the whole family sitting around the table and everybody watching, sort of a unifying experience to watch the news.
Now you have news for the crazy right-wing uncle, and then you have news for the kid in the Shay t-shirt, and they're different channels, and they're trying to wind these people up, you know, to get them upset constantly and stay there.
And a lot of that has to do with the internet, because...
Before the internet, news companies had a basically free way of making money.
They dominated distribution.
The newspaper was the only thing in town that had a...
If you wanted to get a WAN ad, it had to be through the local newspaper.
Now with the internet, the internet is the distribution system.
Anybody has access to it, not just the local newspaper.
And so the easy money is gone and we have to chase clicks more than we ever had to before.
We have to chase eyeballs more than we have to.
So we've had to build new money-making strategies and a lot of it has to do with just sort of monetizing anger and division and all these things.
We just didn't do that before and it's had a profound difference on the media.
As a writer, have you personally experienced this sort of the influence where people have tried to lean you in the direction of clickbait or perhaps maybe alter titles that make them a little bit disingenuous in order to get people excited about the story?
I mean, you know, my editors at Rolling Stone are pretty good and they give me a lot of leeway to kind of explore whatever I want to explore, but I definitely feel a lot of pressure that I didn't feel before.
In the business because, especially in the Trump era, and I've written a lot about the Russia story, right?
But that's an example of one side's media has one take on it and another side's media has another take on it.
And if you are just a journalist and you want to just sort of report the facts, you feel a lot of pressure to fit the facts into a narrative that your audience is going to like.
And I had a lot of problem with the Russia story because I thought, you know, I don't like Donald Trump, but I'm like, I don't think this guy's James Bond consorting with Russian spies.
I think he's corrupt in other ways.
And there was a lot of blowback on my side of the business because, you know, people in sort of liberal, quote unquote, liberal media, you just have, there's a lot of pressure to have everybody fit into a certain narrative.
And I think that's really unhealthy for the business.
And the job used to be about challenging your audience every now and then, right?
Like, if you think a certain thing is true, well, it's our job to give you the bad news and say that you're wrong about that.
That used to be what the job was, to be a journalist.
Now it's the opposite.
Now we have an audience.
We're going to tell you exactly what you want to hear and we're going to reinforce what you think.
And that's very unhealthy.
A great example of this was...
In the summer of 2016, I was covering the campaign, I started to hear reporters talking about how they didn't want to report poll numbers that showed the race was close.
They thought that that was going to hurt Hillary.
In other words, we had information that the race was close.
And we're not telling this to audiences because they wanted to hear that it was going to be a blowout for Hillary, right?
And that didn't help Hillary.
It didn't help the Democrats to not warn people about this, right?
But it was just because if you turned on MSNBC or CNN and you heard that Trump was within five points or whatever it was, that was going to be a bummer for that audience.
So we stayed away from it.
And, you know, this is the kind of thing that it's not politically beneficial to anybody.
It's just, we're just trying to keep people glued to the set by telling them what they want to hear.
You can predict exactly what each news organization, what their take is going to be on any issue.
Just to take an example, when the business about the ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, being killed hit the news, Instantaneously, you knew that the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, that they were going to write a whole bunch of stories about how Trump was overplaying the significance of it, that he was telling lies about it.
You knew they were going to make the entire thing about Trump.
And then, meanwhile, Fox had a completely different spin on about how heroic it was.
But news audiences didn't have anywhere to go to just simply hear, who was this person?
Why was he important?
What do the people in the region think?
What is this going to mean going forward?
Is it actually going to have any...
Are we going to have to continually...
Is there going to be a new person like this every time?
Are we actually accomplishing it?
You don't get that anywhere.
All you get is Trump is a shithead on one side and Trump is a hero on the other side.
But the thing is, it's like the business aspect of it is so weird.
Like you have your guys like Hannity where you can absolutely predict what that guy's going to say every single time.
You know what side he's on and he's blatant about it.
And when you see someone like that, you go, okay, well, this is peak bullshit, right?
So where do we go where I see both sides?
Where's the middle ground where someone goes, well, this is true, but you've got to say this is honest too, and this is what's going on over on this side, and the Republicans have a point here, and there's no mainstream media place where you can go for that right now.
So, she said something about how, you know, oh, she's an Assad toady, and you said, what does that mean?
You just ask the simple, basic questions, right?
What does that mean?
Where is that coming from?
How do you know that?
You know?
Like, journalism isn't brain surgery.
That's all it is.
It's just asking the simple questions that sort of pop to mind when you When you're in a situation, like where did this happen?
How do we know that?
That's true.
But there's a whole generation of people in the press now who just simply do not go through the process of just asking simple questions.
How do I know that's true?
After each story you report, you're supposed to kind of wipe your memory clean and start over.
So just because somebody was banned the last time you covered them, Doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to be the bad guy this time you cover them.
You have to continually test your assumptions and ask yourself, is this true?
Is that true?
Is this true?
How do we know this?
And we've just stopped doing that.
It's just a morass of pre-written takes on things.
And it's really, really bad.
And you can see why audiences are fleeing from this stuff.
Well, it's really interesting that a lot of this is this unpredicted consequence of having these open platforms like Facebook where people are getting their news and then the algorithm sort of directs them towards things that are going to piss them off, which I don't even think necessarily was initially the plan.
I think the plan is to accelerate engagement, right?
So they find out what...
What you're engaging with, what stories you're engaging with, and then they give you more of that.
Like Ari, my friend Ari Shafir, actually tried this out.
And what he did was, he went on YouTube and only looked up puppy videos.
And that's all he looked at for, like, weeks.
And then YouTube only started recommending puppy videos to him.
So it's not necessarily that Facebook wants you to be outraged, but that when you are outraged, whether it's over abortion or war or whatever the subject is, you're going to engage more, and their algorithm favors you engaging more.
So if you're engaging more about something very positive, you know, if you're all about yoga and meditation, your algorithm would probably favor yoga and meditation because those are the things you engage with.
But it's natural for people to be pissed off and to look for things that are annoying, especially if you're done working and you're like, God, this world sucks.
What's going on that sucks worse?
And then you go to your Facebook and, oh, Jesus, look at this goddamn border crisis.
Oh, Jesus, look at this.
Well, fucking, here's the problem with these goddamn liberals.
They don't know.
And you engage, and then that's your life.
And then it's saying, oh, I know how to get Matt all fired up.
I'm going to fucking send him some abortion stories.
But there's so many economic incentives that go in there, right?
They know that the more that you engage, the longer that you're on, the more ads that you're going to see, right?
So that same dynamic that Facebook and the social media companies figured out, which is that if you keep feeding somebody something that has been proven to spin that person up and get them wound up, that they're going to come back for more of it and they're going to keep coming back.
And actually, you can expand their desire to see that stuff by making them sort of more angry overall.
And they will come back and they will spend more and more and more time.
Well, the news companies figured out the same thing.
And they're just funneling stuff at you.
That they know you're going to just be in an endless cycle of sort of impotent, mute rage all the time.
But it's kind of addicting, you know?
And they know that.
And it's sort of like the tobacco companies.
They know it's a product that's bad for you.
And they just keep giving it to you because, you know, it makes money for them.
Yeah, no, they get it coming and going because they're not only selling you ads, but they're also collecting the information about your habits, which they can then sell again.
So it's a dual revenue stream.
The media companies...
Basically, they're just consumer businesses where they're trading attention for ad space, right?
So if they can get you to watch four hours of television a day, they have that many ad slots that they can show you and they know how much money they're going to make.
But the social media companies get it two ways.
They get it by...
You know, attracting your eyeballs and then also selling your habits to the next set of advertisers, which, you know, is very insidious.
But what's interesting about this is that most people don't think about this as a consumer business, right?
Like, Americans, these days, are very conscious of, like, what they put in their bodies.
You know, they won't eat too many candy.
Well, depending on who they are, right?
But people at least look at what the calories are, but they don't think about the news that way or social media, what they put in their brains.
Yeah, and the whole issue of a couple of companies like Facebook having control over what you do and do not see is an enormous problem that nobody really cares about.
I've tried to write about it a few times.
I've written a couple of features about it and about how What a serious problem this is.
If you look at other countries like Israel, China, there are a number of companies where you've seen this pattern of internet platforms liaising with the government to decide what people can and cannot see.
And they'll say, well, we don't want to see, you know, Palestinian protest movements, or we don't want to see, you know, the Venezuelan channel, Telesaur, like, we want to take that off.
You think about how that could end up happening in the United States, and it is already a little bit happening.
Well, I mean, we've already seen that a little bit.
I mean, people don't want to bring this up, but...
A lot of the stories that have come out about Trump, they're coming from leaks of classified information that are coming from those war on terror programs that were instituted after 9-11.
The FISA Amendments Act, the NSA programs to collect data, they're unmasking people.
We have a lot of evidence now.
There was a lawsuit a couple that came out about a month ago that showed that the FBI was doing something like 60,000 searches a month At one point, they were asking the NSA for the ability to unmask names and that sort of thing.
These tools are incredibly powerful.
They're incredibly dangerous.
But people thought after 9-11, they were scared.
So we want to protect ourselves.
So that's okay for now.
We'll pull it back later.
But you never do pull it back.
It always ends up being used by somebody in the wrong way.
And I think we're starting to see that that's going to be a problem.
Yeah, I'm real concerned about places like Google and Facebook altering the path of free speech and leaning people in certain directions and silencing people that have opposing viewpoints and the fact that they think that they're doing this for good because this is how they see the world and they don't understand that you have to let these ideas play out In the marketplace of free speech and free ideas.
If you don't do that, if you don't do that, if you don't let people debate the merits, the pros, the cons, what's wrong, what's right, if you don't do that, then you don't get real discourse.
If you don't get real discourse, you're essentially, you've got some sort of intellectual dictatorship going on.
And because it's a progressive dictatorship, you think it's okay.
Because it's people who want everybody to be inclusive and, you know, I mean, this is a weird time for that.
It's a really weird time for that because, as you said, people are so short-sighted.
They don't understand that these, like, the First Amendment's in place for a very good reason and set up a long fucking time ago because they did the math.
They saw where it was going, and they were like, look, we have to have the ability to express ourselves.
We have to have the ability to freely express thoughts and ideas and challenge people that are in a position of power, because if we don't, we wind up exactly where we came from.
Yeah, no, and courts continually reaffirmed that idea that the way to deal with bad speech was with more speech.
And they did it over and over and over again.
The legal standard for speech still, I think, remains that unless it's directly inciting violence, you can have speech that incites violence generally, and the Supreme Court even upheld that.
You can have speech that comes from material that was stolen illegally.
That's okay.
But we had a very, very high bar for prohibiting speech always.
And the libel cases, the cases for defamation, You know, that also established a very, very high standard for punishing speech.
But now, all of a sudden, people have a completely different idea about it.
It's like, you know, forget about the fact that this was a fundamental concept in American society for, you know, 230 years or whatever, but they just want to change it, you know, without thinking about the consequences.
Well, that's where a guy like Trump could be almost like...
It's almost like a Trojan horse, in a way.
Like, if you wanted to play 3D chess, what you would do, you'd get a guy who's just so egregious and so outrageous, and then so many people oppose him.
Get that guy, let him get into a position of power, and then sit back.
Watch the outrage bubble.
I mean, I don't think that's what's happening.
But if I was super fucking tinfoil hattie, that's how I would go about it.
I would say, this is what you want.
If you really want to change things for your direction, put someone that opposes it.
That's disgusting.
And that way people just, a rational, intelligent person is never going to side with him.
So they're going to side with the people that oppose him and then you could sneak a lot of shit in that maybe they wouldn't agree with in any other circumstance.
Yeah, Trump's election is sort of like another 9-11, right?
Like, you know, 9-11 happened.
All of a sudden, people who weren't in favor of the government being able to go through your library records or listen to your phone calls, and all of a sudden, they were like, oh, Jesus, I'm so freaked out.
Like, yeah, fine.
When Trump got elected, all of a sudden, people suddenly had very different ideas about speech.
Like, you know, hey, that guy's so bad.
Maybe we should consider banning X, Y, and Z. If he was conceived as a way to discredit the First Amendment and some other ideas, that would be a brilliant 3D chess move.
Yeah, I mean, I think the divisiveness problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
The business model of the media now is so entrenched that until some of these companies start going out of business because they're doing You know, they're losing audience because people don't trust them anymore.
The news is going to keep doing what it's doing.
The Hannity model is going to become normal for news companies.
I think it already basically is, you know, on both the left and the right.
And in terms of, you know, the internet companies...
They're consolidating.
They're getting more and more power all the time.
And I think we've already seen that people have, I think, too much tolerance for letting them make decisions about what we can and cannot see.
And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
And even Jack Dorsey from Twitter admitted as much on the podcast, and he wishes that we would view it that way.
He's actually proposed two versions of Twitter.
A Twitter with their standard censorship in place, and then a Wild West Twitter.
And I'm like, sign me up.
How do I get on that Wild West Twitter?
Because the problem with things like Gab, And I've gone there a few times and watched it, and even Milo Yiannopoulos has criticized it for being this, is that it's just so hate-filled because it's the place where you can go and fucking say anything.
So the only people that it's attracting are people that just want to go there and just fucking shoot off cannons of N-bombs and call everybody a kike.
It's crazy.
And there's real communication there as well.
There's plenty of that, too.
But the sheer number of people that go there just to blow off steam because they can't say those things on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media platform without being banned, because of that, it becomes a channel for it.
And it's like, it doesn't get a chance.
It doesn't get a chance to...
The concept is great.
The concept is, if you're not doing anything illegal, we're not going to stop you.
You're not doxing anybody.
You're not threatening anybody's life.
We're not going to stop you.
Go ahead.
But if you...
who wants to just say fucked up shit.
And you get a disproportionate amount of fucked up shit.
And it's directly because of the fact that these places like Twitter or Facebook have censored.
And they make it so you are scared to say whatever you want to say.
And so you can't.
So even if you have controversial ideas that maybe some people would agree with and some won't, you can get banned for life for just controversial ideas.
Even controversial ideas that are scientifically and biologically factual, like the transgender issue.
Like if you say...
There's a woman, I brought her up a million times, Megan Murphy.
Murphy, yes.
A man is never a woman, she says.
They tell her to take it down.
She takes a screenshot of it, puts that up, takes it down, but takes a screenshot of the initial tweet.
No, and it's crazy, and obviously people see that, and they just get madder, and it makes people very, very resentful in ways that they wouldn't be otherwise.
And we're seeing this a lot also with political ideas, too.
I have a podcast, Useful Idiots, it's called.
We try to talk to people who are kind of...
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
Nobody wants to associate you with you.
No one wants to defend you.
You're suddenly like the kid with lice, and people don't want that to happen to them, so they stop saying X, Y, and Z, and they just go with the flow, go with the crowd.
And it causes this sort of, you know, uniform, conformist discourse that isn't really about anything, right?
Because people are just afraid to talk, which is crazy.
I thought that piece was really interesting because that whole idea that there are people who have forfeited the right to communicate forever.
Well, who decides that?
Again, there's this intellectual snobbism that goes on in You know, frankly, on my side of the media aisle, where, well, let's say what an appropriate thought is, what's right-thinking, what's wrong-thinking, you know, who gets to have a platform, who doesn't get to have a platform, who we're going to call a monster, who we're not going to call.
I just don't understand the arrogance, where that comes from to decide that some people, you know, I totally disagree with people like, you know, Alex Jones or Shapiro or, you know, most things.
But I don't think that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.
Yeah, I mean, I lived in the former Soviet Union, you know, for...
11 years.
And 100%, if you lived in Soviet Russia and something was published by an official publisher, people thought it was basically full of shit.
But if it was in the samizdat, if it was in the privately circled stuff that had been repressed and censored, people thought that was the coolest thing in the world.
That was the hot ticket.
And you're automatically giving something cachet and And added weight by censoring it.
I mean, this is just the way it works.
It's human nature.
If people think that you don't want them to see something, they're going to run through it twice as hard, you know?
So I just don't understand a lot of that instinct.
I think people have this idea that it works, that, you know, that de-platforming works, but you can't de-platform an idea, you know?
You may be able to do it to a person or two, but eventually you have to confront the idea.
You can do it to a few people, and it has been successful, which is one of the reasons why people are so emboldened.
Like, they have a successfully deplatformed Milo.
I mean, they really have.
It's very hard to hear him talk anymore.
He's not in the public conversation the way he used to be, because they kicked him off of all these different platforms.
And if you go into why they kicked him off these different platforms, even if you don't agree with him, and I don't on a lot of things, like, boy, I don't agree with kicking him off those platforms.
If you listen to what he got kicked off for, it's like, man, I don't know.
Alex Jones has said, you know, he's gone after me a couple of times in ways that were pretty funny, actually.
But when he was, you know, kicked off all these platforms, you know, I wrote a piece saying I think people are kind of doing an end zone dance a little early on this one, you know, because Jones is a classic example of how the system, the way the system used to work, they would have punished him for being libelous about the Sandy Hook thing, right?
Because that would sort of fit the classic definition of what prohibited speech was before.
But we wouldn't – he would have lost probably a lot and he still might in those court cases.
But to remove him forever, I think, you know, it just sets – it creates a new way of dealing with speech that I think is very dangerous.
And also, logistically, it's an insane thing to even think about asking platforms To rationally go through all this content.
I talked to somebody who was a pretty high-ranking Facebook executive after the Alex Jones thing.
And he said, think about what we used to do just to keep porn off Facebook.
And we're dealing with, what, a couple of billion items of content every single day.
We had these really high-tech algorithms that we designed to look for flesh tones.
And that's how the Vietnamese running girl photo got taken off Facebook because they like automatically spotted a naked girl, you know, and they took that down.
Like, you know, he's like the Facebook algo, it doesn't know that's an icon of fucking journalism, right?
Like it just knows it's a naked girl.
So you say you take that and now you're going to ask Facebook to make decisions about ideas, If it's that hard and that expensive for us to go through and just to keep child porn off of Facebook, think about how crazy it's going to be when we start having entry-level people deciding what is and is not appropriate political content.
it's not only going to be impossible to enforce they're going to make a mess of it and they will and they already are and I think that's what we're seeing well that's why Twitter is so weird because you can get away with shit on Facebook You can say things on Facebook, like Facebook doesn't have a policy about deadnaming, or Facebook doesn't have a policy about misgendering people, but they do have a porn policy.
I have to be very careful when I give my phone to my kids to make sure they don't open up the fucking Twitter app because I follow a lot of dirty girls and some of them, I mean, it's just right there.
But yeah, no, the policies are completely inconsistent too with Twitter.
I've talked to people who've been removed from Twitter for saying pretty borderline things.
They're basically pretty mild insults or something that would be threatening only if you really squinted hard.
There was a guy from the Ron Paul Institute who got taken down, for instance, because he was having a fight with some guy who was, I think, a Clinton fan.
I forget what it was exactly.
But you'll see behavior that's much worse from people who have another political ilk and they will not be removed.
Or they might be a smaller profile person, they won't be removed.
So then what is that all about, right?
Like if it's only a person who has 20,000 followers or higher, we're going to, I mean, it's just so, you just can't do it.
There's just too many layers.
I mean, I'm against it just generally, but just in terms of the logistics, it doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, but they're already, you know, in many countries around the world, they have armies of thousands of people who go through content to try to flag this or that kind of political content.
They had some really scary sort of authoritarian word for filtration centers or something like that.
The Chinese have armies of people.
I did a story about Facebook and how it was Teaming up with groups like the Atlantic Council here in the United States.
Remember a couple of years ago, the Senate called in Twitter, Facebook, and Google to Washington and asked them to devise strategies for preventing the sowing of discord.
Basically, it was asking them to come up with strategies for filtering out fake news and then also certain kinds of offensive content.
But, you know, that is a stepping stone to what we've seen in other countries, I think.
And I think it's really worrisome, but nobody seems to care on our side of the aisle, which is very strange.
There's people that do pretty egregious things from the left, like the Covington School thing, when people were saying, we've got to dox these kids and give me their names, release their names.
These people are still on Twitter to this day.
We're talking about kids that just happen to have these Make America Great Again hats.
And I have a friend who used to live in that area said, like, no, you don't get it.
Like, there's these stands.
These kids are on a high school, like, field trip.
There's these stands where you can buy these hats everywhere.
These kids bought the hats there.
They think they're being funny.
These guys play the music and then get in their face.
You take a photo of it, it looks like this guy's standing in this Native American guy's face.
But then you see the whole video.
It's, no, no, no.
The Native American guy was playing his drum, walking towards him.
And, you know, for me, in the news business, a lot of people that I know went into journalism precisely because we didn't want to talk about our political views.
Like the whole point of the job is like, you know, we're just going to tell you what the facts are, like not going to tell you what I'm all about.
You're telling people what your stance is on things.
And that's the opposite of what the job used to be.
And this is, again, one of the things I've been trying to focus on is that, you know, what's exactly what you're talking about.
People used to go to the news because they wanted to find out what happened in the world, and they can't do it anymore because everything that you turn on, every kind of content, is just editorialized content where people are sort of telling you where they stand on things.
There was an editorial, and I wrote about this in the book, that in the summer of 2016, this guy, Jim Rutenberg, wrote this piece, said, Trump is testing the norms of objectivity.
That was the name of the piece.
And basically what he said is Trump is so bad that we have to rethink What objectivity means.
We have to not only be true, but true to history's judgment, he said.
And we have to have copious coverage and aggressive coverage.
So we're going to cover Trump a lot.
We're going to cover him aggressively.
And we're going to show you, we're going to take a stand on this issue rather than just tell you what happened.
So rather than doing the traditional New York Times thing of just the facts, we'll tell you, you sort it out.
We're going to tell you what your stance should be.
Where do we go from here?
How does it get resolved?
I don't know, because unless the financial incentives change, they're not going to change.
You know, the business used to be, back when you were talking about it, the New York Times, and then there were three networks, and they were all trying to get the whole audience, right?
So they were doing that kind of neutral fact-finding mission, and it was working for them financially.
Now they can't do that because of the internet.
You're hunting for audience in little groups, and they're just giving you hyper-politicized stuff because that's the only way they can make money.
It's so interesting, though, because, I mean, if you looked at human interactions, and if you looked at, you know, dispensing news and information, and you followed trends from, like, the 30s to the 40s to the 50s to the 60s to the 70s, you'd be like, oh, well, people are getting better at this.
I think there's a real danger in terms of social media especially in not complying to the Constitution, not complying to the First Amendment.
I think there's a real danger in that.
And I don't think we recognize that danger because I don't think we saw what social media was until it was too late.
And then by the time it was too late, we had already had these sort of standards in place and the people that run it were already getting away with enforcing their own personal bias, their ideological bias.
And this is when you're at this position where you go, well, how does that ever get resolved?
They're not going to resolve it on their own.
They're still making ass loads of money.
What do you do?
Does the government resolve it?
Well, if Trump steps in and resolves it, it looks like he's trying to resolve it to save his own political career or to help his supporters.
And if they do anything about it, there's going to be a correction time.
There's going to be a gab time where it's going to be like that, where it's just going to flood with people that are just, like, with this newfound freedom that's just going to go...
That's the thing, because it's not only about rules, it's also about culture.
People have already, they're in this pattern of, you know, not saying the wrong thing, and they don't, I think there's, we're in a culture that doesn't even really know how to deal with free speech if we actually had it in the same way we used to, you know?
But historically, the tendency is once you have a tool that kind of can be used to keep people in line and enforce compliance of ideas, then it always ends up worsening and becoming more and more dictatorial and authoritarian.
Yeah, and there's no cross-dialogue of any kind anymore.
And even now, I mean, it's interesting.
You had Bernie Sanders on your show, and Sanders is one of the few politicians left who has this idea that we should talk to everybody.
Like, there are no illegitimate audiences out there.
And, like, you know, that's my job as a politician, is to try to convince you of things that But that's not normal in the Democratic Party anymore.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren has made a big thing about not going on Fox and about having certain people taken off Twitter.
And I think that's increasingly the sort of line of thought...
In mainstream Democratic Party thought now is that we're just going to rule out whatever that is, 47% of the electorate, we're just not going to talk to them anymore.
You don't have any way to make something into legislation.
So what do you do?
Social media gives you the illusion that you're having an impact in the world by Maybe getting somebody deplatformed or taken off Twitter or something like that.
It feels like it's political action to people, but it's not.
It's something that is open to people to do, but it's not the same as getting 60 members of the Senate to raise taxes on a corporation that's been evading them for 20 years.
You know what I mean?
That's real action.
This, you know, getting some random person taken off the internet is just not change, you know, but people feel like it is and they want to do the right thing.
So I get it, but no, it's not, you know, real political action, I don't think.
And part of the reason why they go fucking bonkers is because they know that this guy doesn't give a fuck.
And he's one of the rare ones who doesn't give a fuck.
So when he goes up there, you know if he thinks something crazy about whatever it is, whatever protected group or whatever idea that he's not supposed to explore, that's not going to stop him at all.
He's going to tell you exactly what he thinks about those things, regardless of all this woke blowback.
He doesn't care.
And so because of that, he's rewarded even more.
And same thing with Bill Burr.
Same thing with a lot of comics.
I experience it with my own jokes.
More controversial bits get people more fired up now.
They love it.
Because everyone's smothered.
You're smothered by human resources And smothered by office politics And you're smothered by social Discourse Restrictions and you just don't feel like You can express yourself anymore That's true and a lot of people also don't have a They feel like they're being watched all the time Because of other things They feel like they can't let it all hang out anywhere And so that's They do feel incredibly Repressed and under the gun I think that's true
The joke was, why am I listening to these Parkland survivors?
Why are you interesting?
Because you push some fat kid in the way?
See, you're laughing.
Right.
That is a Louis C.K. joke.
He's saying something fucked up that you're not supposed to say.
Throughout his goddamn career, he's done that.
That's He's always done.
But after the jerking off in front of women and all that stuff and him coming out and admitting it and then taking a bunch of time off, now he's a target.
So now he does something like that and they're like, oh, he's alt-right now.
Like, no, this is what he's always done.
He's always taking this...
Sort of contrarian, outside the box, fucked up, but hilarious take on things.
And that bit, unfortunately, because it was released by someone who made a YouTube video of it, he didn't get a chance to...
He was gone for 10 months, and he had only done a couple sets when he was fleshing these ideas out.
I guarantee you he would have turned that idea into a brilliant bit, but he never got the chance.
Because it was set out there in the wild when it was a baby and it was mauled down by wolves.
It needed to grow.
These bits, they grow and they develop.
And that was a controversial idea that we're supposed to think that someone's interesting just because they survived a tragedy.
And his take is like, no, no, no, no, you're not interesting.
You're fucking boring.
You're annoying.
Get off my TV. And a lot of us have felt that way.
It's taking with people the thoughts that everybody has and vocalizing that thing, that forbidden thing, in a way that people can kind of come together over, right?
I mean, I think that was a lot of what Richard Pryor's humor was about.
He took a lot of the sort of uncomfortable race problems, right?
Yeah.
And he just kind of put them out there, and both white people and black people laughed at it, right?
Like, together, you know?
And that was what was good about it.
But if you can't, if people are afraid to vocalize those things, if they think it's gonna, you know, ruin their career, I mean, I guess, you know, that makes it more interesting, right?
But you can't have a situation where it's fatal to be off by a little bit.
You know, like, there was a writer that I loved growing up, a Soviet writer named Isaac Babel.
Stalin ended up shooting him.
But he gave a speech about, I think it was in 1936, you know, to...
To a Soviet writers' collective.
And he said, you know, people say that we don't have as much freedom as we used to, but actually, all that, you know, the Communist Party has done is prevented us from writing badly.
The only thing that's outlawed now is writing badly, right?
And everybody laughed, but he was actually saying something pretty serious, which is that you can't write well unless you can, you know, screw up, too.
You know what I mean?
Like, on the way to being creative in a good way, You have to miss.
And if missing is not allowed, and there's high punishment for missing, you're not going to get art.
And politicians are aware of that now and they're constantly aware that they're on film everywhere.
Right.
And so they're, you know, a thousand percent less interesting because they're, I mean, I remember covering campaign in 2004 and I saw Dennis Kucinich give a speech somewhere and he was going from, I think, Maine to New Hampshire.
And I said, well, can I get a ride back to New Hampshire?
He's like, yeah, sure.
So he, you know, takes me on the van.
He like takes his shoes off.
He's like cracking jokes and everything and like eating udon noodles or something.
It's the weirdest time ever to be a politician because it's basically you've got this one guy who made it through being hugely flawed and just going, ah, fucking locker room talk.
And everyone's like, well, yeah, it is locker room talk, I guess.
And then it works.
And he gets through and he wins.
And so you've got him who seems like he's so greasy, like nothing sticks to him.
And then you have everyone else who's terrified of any slight misstep.
Like he is – You know, pathologically driven to behave in a certain way, and he's not going to be cowed by the way, you know, people are of a social media, because he just doesn't think that way.
We're not supposed to draw conclusions about what might be going on pharmaceutically with somebody, but I would say just watch Donald Trump's performance after the results of the Super Tuesday rolled in in 2016. Let's hear some of that.
I mean, you know, all those drugs are, yeah, they're like baby speed, basically.
And you're absolutely right.
I think people who – it's not good for a writer because writing is one of these things where one of the most important things is being able to step back and – And ask, am I full of shit here?
Are my jokes as funny as I think they are?
Once that mechanism starts to go wrong, you're really lost as a writer, right?
Because you're not in front of an audience.
You're with yourself in front of a computer.
So I don't think speed is a great drug.
I mean, you get a lot of stuff done.
So that's good.
But yeah, no, I think there's a lot of people who are on it now.
And also a lot of this because Kids come up through school, and they're on it, too.
And they get used to it.
I have kids.
I wouldn't dream of giving them any of those drugs.
It was that famous photo where he's like, I love Hispanics, where he's eating a taco bowl at Trump Tower, and behind him there's an open drawer, and in that open drawer is boxes of Sudafed.
And Sudafed gives you a low-level buzz.
This is why you used to have to go to CVS to buy this stuff.
You used to have to give your driver's license because they want to make sure you're not cooking meth.
You're not buying 10 boxes of it at a time and cooking up a batch.
He wrote a series of tweets, which he eventually wound up taking down, by the way, Jamie.
I can't find those fucking tweets.
He wrote a series of tweets that there was a very specific Dwayne Reed Pharmacy where Trump got amphetamines for something that was in quotes called metabolic disorder.
Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing I will say is that when you're covering stories, sometimes you hear things and you know they're pretty solid, but it's not quite reportable because the person won't put their name on it, or, you know, you're not 100% sure that the document is a real document, maybe it's a photocopy, and that can be very, very tough for reporters, because they know something's true, but they can't And social media has eliminated a barrier that we used to have.
We used to have to go through editors and fact checkers.
And now, you know, you're on Twitter, you can just kind of, you know, or you can hint at something, you know, and I think that's something you don't want to get into as a reporter too much.
But isn't that kind of the way history always works?
It's like, again, not to go back to the Russian thing, but all the various terrible leaders of Russia, they all died of natural causes when they were 85, right?
Whereas in a country where people get murdered and die of industrial accidents and bad health when they're 30 all the time.
And that's the thing about speed, apparently, because of the fact that it makes you feel delusional, and it makes you feel like you're the fucking man.
Like, you don't worry about what other people think.
The fucking tweet that he made when he put the Trump Tower, I promise not to do this, and have a giant Trump Tower in the middle of Greenland, I was laughing my ass off.
He has these moments on the campaign trail where he'll be speaking, and these guys do the same speech over and over again, so they can kind of do it on cruise control.
But every now and then, he'll stop in the middle of it, and this look of terror comes over, like, where am I? What town am I in?
He confused.
He thought he was in Vermont when he was in New Hampshire.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, he got those states confused.
He was like, what's not to love about Vermont?
He was in New Hampshire.
You know, that can happen, obviously, but it happens to him a lot.
What they get off on is how freaked out, you know, quote-unquote liberal audiences are by their appearance, their attitude and everything.
And they lean into it, you know what I mean?
Which is interesting because, you know, that kind of like group camaraderie thing, you don't really find that on the campaign trail on the Democratic side.
Like, it's like it's this chance to, like, shut off any possibility of getting over, like, 70 RPM. Like, we're gonna cut this bitch off at 70. There's no high function here.
It's funny, the way you say that, everybody knows it's a dumb thing to say, right?
I would talk to people at the crowds, and I'll talk to a 65-year-old grandmother, and you say, do you agree with everything that Trump says?
Almost to the last, they all say, well, I wish he hadn't said this particular thing, but they're all there chanting, you know what I mean?
They're all into it.
And the crowds are so huge.
I was in Cincinnati, and And I was late to one of his events, and I made the mistake that I couldn't drive in because they blocked off all the bridges, if you've ever been there, right?
I was on the Kentucky side.
So I had to walk, like, three miles away and, like, walk over a bridge, and I thought I was going to be the only person there.
And it was like something out of a sci-fi movie.
It was just like a line of MAGA hats, like, extending over a bridge all the way into Kentucky, like a mile down a road.
I mean, they had to turn away thousands of people to get into this event.
Bernie had a 25,000-person crowd in Queens a couple of weeks ago.
You'll see crowds that big, but Trump's crowds are just...
Dating back to 2016, they're just consistently huge everywhere.
And again, this gets back to what I was saying before, all the reporters saw this and they all saw that Hillary was having real trouble getting four and five thousand people into her events.
And so we all, you know, we were all talking to each other like, that's got to be a thing that's going to, you know, play a role in the election eventually.
But nobody kind of brought it up or they explained it away.
Because covering up the reality of the situation, I think, created a false sense of security for Democrats.
Sure.
They thought they were going to win by a landslide, right?
That's what everybody was saying, but it wasn't true.
I mean, there were serious red flags throughout the campaign for Hillary, and people, I think, were too afraid to bring up a lot of this stuff because they didn't want to be seen as helping Trump.
One is that if you created something like Neither Side News right now.
That's a great name.
Yeah, like a network where it was a bunch of people who just kind of did the job without the editorializing.
I think it would probably have a lot of followers right away.
It would make money.
And nobody has clued into that yet.
Like, if some canny entrepreneur were to do that and that were to bring back the business, that or, you know, journalism has always been kind of quasi-subsidized in this country.
You know, going back to the Pony Express, newspapers were carried free across to the West, right?
The U.S. Postal Service did that.
The Communications Act in 1934, the idea was you could lease the public airways, but you had to do something in the public interest.
So you could make money doing sports and entertainment, but you could take a loss on news.
And so it was kind of quasi-subsidized in that way.
But that doesn't exist anymore.
There's no subsidy really for news anymore.
I'm not necessarily sure I agree with that being the way to go, but there has to be something, because right now the financial pressure to be bad is just too great.
Sorry to go on this, but when I came from the business, when the money started getting tighter, the first thing they got rid of were the long-form investigative reporters.
You couldn't just hire somebody to work on a story for three months anymore because you needed them to do content all the time.
Then they got rid of the fact checkers, which had another serious problem.
And so now the money's so tight that they just have these people doing clickbait all the time and they're not doing real reporting.
Because the stuff that you wrote about the banking crisis was my favorite coverage of it, and the most relatable and understandable, and the way you spelled everything out.
But the big difference is social media has had a huge impact on attention span.
So I was writing like 7,000 word articles about credit default swaps and stuff like that.
And I was trying really hard to make it interesting for people.
You use jokes and humor and stuff like that.
But now, people would not have the energy to really fight through that.
that you'd have to make it shorter even TV you know they people you don't see that kind of reporting that in-depth you know kind of process reporting where you're teaching people something because people just tune out right away that They need just a quick hit, a headline, and a couple of facts.
So, yeah, there's a big problem with audience, right?
We've trained audiences to consume the news differently, and all they really want to get is a take now.
Everything's like an ESPN hot take on things, you know?
But listening to it in podcast form, listening to actual conversations from these people, listening to people's interpretations of these conversations, Listening to people that were there at the time, telling stories about when they knew things were weird, when they started noticing there's tests that were incorrect, that they were covering up, that kind of shit.
You can do that now with something like this, and I think that one of the good things about podcasts, too, is you don't need anybody to tell you that you could publish this.
Formats like this reveal that the news companies are wrong about some things, about audiences.
They think that people can't handle an in-depth discussion about things.
They think that audiences only want to watch 30 seconds of something.
They don't.
They're interested.
They do have curiosity about things.
Uh, it's very difficult to convince people in the news business, especially to take chances on that kind of content.
You know, they'll, they'll do it for a podcast.
They'll do it for a documentary.
But, um, but for, for the news, they just, they're making things shorter and shorter and shorter.
You know, I was really lucky to have an editor who I, you know, understood the idea that we have to get into this in depth or else it's going to be meaningless to people, right?
Um, that's pretty rare.
You know, for the most part, they, you don't see them taking that kind of bet anymore, but maybe podcasts will help people puncture that.
But the flip side of that is that they're not investing in stuff like international news in the way they used to.
When I came up in the business, every bureau, every big network had bureaus in every major city around the world, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, whatever it is, right?
And they had newsrooms full of people who were out there gathering news.
Now there's none of that because they figured out they can make the money just as easily by having somebody sit in an office in Washington or New York and just link to something and have a take on something.
So I think the news is getting worse.
Podcasts are getting more interesting.
Maybe there's a happy medium they can find in between.
Or Making a Murderer was another one I think was really good.
That's something that happens all over the place.
You have these criminal justice cases and terrible injustices happen.
And if you really tell the whole story and make characters out of people and invest the time and energy to tell it well, people still like really good storytelling.
But I think within the news business, they have this belief, their hard-headed belief, that people can't handle difficult material, and I don't know why that is.
I mean, I think there's a large number of people that aren't satisfied intellectually by a lot of the stuff they're being spoon-fed.
And they think that because the vast majority of things that are commercially viable are short attention span things, I think it's like this real sloppy way of thinking, non-risk-taking way of thinking.
They're like, listen, this is how people consume things.
You've got to give them like a music video style editing or they just tune out.
long-form conversations.
Yeah.
You don't – an actual real in-depth exploration of something in a very digestible way.
Like one of the good things about doing your podcast or this podcast, any podcast really, is that you can listen to it while you're commuting.
You listen to it and it'll actually give you something that occupies your mind and interests you during what would normally be dead time.
And you're absolutely right about the thirst for something else.
And again, I think when people turn on most news products, they're getting this predictable set of things and that doesn't quench that thirst for them.
They're not being challenged in any way.
They're not seeing different sides of a topic.
You're not approaching covering a subject honestly by genuinely exploring the idea that people you may have thought were bad are right or people you may have thought are good or wrong.
It's just all predictable.
So I think people are fleeing to other things now.
They want to just get the story.
They don't want to have a whole lot of editorializing on top of it.
Yeah, and I think also there's a lot of underestimating of audiences going out there.
We just think that they can't handle stuff, and they can.
They're interested, but we just take it for granted that they can't do it.
Maybe I'm guilty of that too, because I've been doing this for so long, but yeah, it does happen.
What was that story that the New York Times worked on about Trump and they worked on it for a long time and it was released and went in and out of the news cycle in a matter of days and nobody gave a fuck?
And there's also the other thing, which is the litigation problem.
And this is another thing I wrote about in the book, is that there was a series of cases in the 80s and 90s where reporters kind of took on big companies.
The Chiquita Banana thing that the Cincinnati Enquirer did.
Remember the movie The Insider about Brian and Williamson, the tobacco company, CBS, right?
There was another one with Monsanto in Florida where some Fox reporters went after Monsanto.
So they all got sued.
And it costs their companies a ton of money and reputational risk.
And so after that, what news companies said is, why take on a big company that can fight back and throw a lawsuit at us?
And what do we win by that?
We're not going to get more audience from that, you know?
So, now if you watch consumer reporting, like a small TV station, usually they're gonna bang on some little Chinese restaurant that has roaches or something like that.
They're not gonna go after Monsanto or Chiquita Banana because there's no point.
It's too much of a risk, so they just don't do it.
And that's another thing that's gone wrong with reporting.
The economic benefit of going after a powerful adversary isn't there anymore.
And it's a great example of someone who knew that they weren't a part of that system so they could talk about it as an outsider.
He knew he was only going to be covering it for a year, so he just went in, guns blazing, got everybody fucked up, drinking on the bus, making everybody do acid.
I don't have any friends I have to keep, you know?
So I'm going to tell you everything that I see, and fuck it.
And that's a real problem in reporting.
When you're in a beat for too long, you end up developing unhealthy relationships with sources, and you end up in a position where you're not going to burn the people who you're dependent on to get your information out.
And when that happens to reporters, I think that's one of the reasons it's good to kind of cycle through different topics over the course of your career.
If you get stuck in the same beat too long, eventually you fall into that trap.
And Thompson, of course, never did that.
Every story that he covered was, he let it all hang out and just said whatever the hell he thought and he let the chips fall where they may.
And that's kind of the way, I mean, you can't do that all the time probably, but I think that's the thing.
I always thought of it as being also kind of like a novel, because it's this story about this person who's obsessed with finding meaning and truth, but he goes to the most fake place on earth, which is the campaign trail, to look for it.
And so all these depictions of all these terrible lying people, They're just so hilarious.
And so it's kind of, you know, it's almost like a Franz Kafka novel.
It's amazing.
And then it's great journalism at the same time.
Like, he's telling you how the system works and how elections work, and it's really valuable for that.
When he was on the Dick Cavett show, and Dick Cavett asked him about it, he goes, well, there's a rumor that he was on Ibogaine, and I started that rumor.
I mean, it's just, he, like, literally, that he got in that guy's head.
Yeah, but also he had this very, very sort of aggressively caricaturizing way of looking at politics and politicians, and that wouldn't go over that well now either.
Like, people don't want you to rip on the process as much as he did in that book, so it was great.
Especially because I'm writing for the same magazine and covering a lot of the same topics, you have to immediately realize that you can't do what he did.
Thompson's writing was incredibly ambitious and unique.
He was using a lot of the same techniques that the great fiction writers use.
He was creating...
Almost like this four-dimensional story, but at the same time it was also journalism.
Most people couldn't get away with that.
You have to be a great, great writer.
I'm talking like a rare Mark Twain-level talent to do what he did, which is to kind of mix the ambition of great fiction with journalism.
So if you try to do that stuff, it's going to be terrible.
And I've certainly...
If you go back and look at my writing, you'll find a lot of shitty Thompson imitations.
And so I learned to not do that pretty early.
But yeah, it's one of those don't try this at home things for young writers, if you can avoid that, for sure.
I mean, oddly enough, I think shows like yours and the kind of proliferation of what you're talking about with podcasts The great thing about the internet, there are lots of bad things, but the great thing about it is that it's provided a way for people to just have an audience if they're good, right?
And if people have a demand for it, if there's a demand for it, you can exist.
You can have a platform.
And so that's what I think is going to happen, is that people are going to crack the code of what kind of journalism people want.
And they're going to create something that people are going to flock to.
And I don't have a lot of faith that CBS, MSNBC, ABC, CNN, that they're going to figure it out.
Like, I think it's going to be some independent kind of voice that is going to come up with something, a new formula.
And people are, that is going to rise up, you know?
I mean, you've seen it a little bit with things like the Young Turks, you know, although they've changed a little bit.
But they figured out that if you provide something that's an alternative from the usual thing, that you can get a viable functioning business a lot faster than you used to be able to.
You know, I think they've kind of become a little bit more in the direction of a traditional news organization than they were originally, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't watch it as much as I used to, so maybe I shouldn't say that.
But, you know, again, the ability to do that is a lot different than it used to be.
In order to have an independent journalism outlet, you used to have to, for instance, put out your own newspaper, do your own distribution, do your own printing, do your own design.
All that stuff cost a ton of money, and it was very, very hard to do it without big corporate sponsors.
Now anybody with a good idea can pretty much do something, so I have a lot of hope that somebody's going to figure it out.