Matt Taibbi and Joe Rogan expose media manipulation during COVID-19, from Peter Daszak’s lab-leak emails to Rolling Stone’s debunked ivermectin smear, while questioning corporate-funded narratives like Bill Gates’ $300M media influence. They critique bail reform’s unintended consequences—like Rikers’ financial exploitation of inmates—and contrast it with police defunding’s failure amid rising crime, citing Wisconsin’s SUV attacker case. Taibbi links systemic bailouts for banks (JPMorgan, Goldman) and pharma (Moderna’s $11B profits) to public distrust, fueling movements like Trumpism as people reject official explanations for economic devastation, especially when treatments like ivermectin are suppressed while vaccine monopolies persist. [Automatically generated summary]
And then I was like, yeah, I embraced it right away.
Because, you know, when we moved here, I started looking in May of 2020. I was like, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
I see the writing on the wall.
Because there was two weeks to stop the spread and flatten the curve.
Like, okay, makes sense.
That makes sense.
I was all on board.
And then as time went on, I'm like, this is not two weeks.
And then they were talking about more restrictions, and then they were shutting down outdoor dining and this and that.
And I was like, what are they doing?
They're enjoying this.
They're enjoying telling people what to do, which is just basic human nature.
To pretend that government agencies, that people who wanted to be mayor, people that wanted to be governor, would somehow or another Avoid all the pitfalls that are just naturally a part of being a person, when a person has power.
Especially power over a bunch of people that are scared.
And you're offering solutions, and you're standing there, and we have to keep the safety of our communities in mind.
What's fascinating to me, though, is that people will blame everyone except the people that were actually responsible for the virus.
This is a virus that most likely, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm about 90% sure, That this thing came from a fucking laboratory.
And all the stuff that I've read and all the emails from Peter Daszak and Fauci and the NIH, when you look at the way they were looking at it and how they were kind of panicked, and then you look at their absolute Their belief that supposedly they're broadcasting that there's no way it could have come from a lab.
And then you see their actual emails and you go, oh, you fuckers, you know this probably came from a lab.
And you're doing your best job to try to obfuscate, to try to confuse people, to try to muddy the water and just get it as far away from you as you can.
But the reality is this probably came from a fucking lab.
That's not what people are mad at.
People are mad at people who take alternative medications.
People are mad at people who downplay the severity of it.
People are mad at all kinds of things, but they're not mad at the fucking source.
The actual source, which is most likely that level 4 biolab in Wuhan, China.
This is a normal time when people are under heavy anxiety.
Because most people do not know how to handle extreme stress or scary, unknown situations.
That's why they like a normal job that starts at 9 and ends at 5 and you have two weeks paid vacation and you have your this and you have your that and everything's laid out and you know what to expect.
People do not like when you don't know what to expect.
And in Moscow, there were constant terrorist attacks at the time because the Cheshians and the Russians were having these issues.
But when 9-11 happened in the United States, people were traumatized by that beyond all proportion, it seemed to me, because in America, we're just not used to having to deal with all sorts of things.
And so they just don't deal well with stress when it's an unusual situation.
They have to be in the kind of the lane of safety.
It's very tense, and there's a lot of people that are profiting off of that tension.
There's a lot of anger merchants out there.
That are essentially elevating their brand by just getting mad at things and having the least charitable view of people, the least charitable view of situations, the most polarizing arguments of right versus left and vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
That's what's so crazy about the world that we're living in.
But what's interesting is I think the positive aspect of this – and let's try to find the silver lining, right?
I think the positive aspect of this is it's really highlighting the importance of independent media.
You know, people like Kristalyn Sager from Breaking Points, Kyle Kalinske, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, these independent journalists who I can turn to and go, okay, I know if I'm reading a Matt Taibbi article, you're going to tell me exactly what's going on.
And there's not many of you.
There's a small handful of you where I know I can get unbiased, intelligent observations.
I think a lot of people, what we're finding, and you're of course familiar with this, is that there's a massive audience out there that is very frustrated with traditional media, the manipulative aspects of it, the predictability of it.
And so, yeah, they're coming to places like Substack.
I spent my whole life in the media business.
I had an editor once who called it managing the decline.
The expectation in media was always that there was going to be less and less money forever because audiences were dwindling, because they just didn't like the product that we were putting out.
In independent media now, it's the opposite.
It's skyrocketing.
There's incredible growth.
You obviously know this.
Substack is doing amazingly well.
It's a very bizarre experience as a journalist to be part of that.
I think there has to be this massive decline in the believability of CNN and, you know, fill in the blank, like whatever mainstream big time publication.
The fucking Rolling Stone.
When they printed that horse dewormer story about Oklahoma, I'm like, Jesus Christ, do you guys not have anybody working there?
Look at the photo they used.
It's Oklahoma in the summer, and you got people with winter coats on.
So what happens in media is we have this expectation that if something is published in another reputable news organization, we assume that it's been checked and that it's true.
Somewhere down the line, whoever did the original reporting actually checked it.
So basically, an ER doc, if I remember correctly, in Oklahoma, in rural Oklahoma, gave an interview to a TV station.
And essentially, he was saying that there was a problem With people who were taking ivermectin and they were getting so sick that they were lining up outside the ERs and preventing people who had gunshot wounds from being treated, right?
Yes.
Me as a reporter, if I hear that story, the first thing I'm going to think is, are there really that many gunshot victims in rural Oklahoma?
There's already a little bit of a problem with that.
You would want to check that right away.
What actually happened is some wires got crossed.
The guy was talking about one thing and...
And somebody who saw the story assumed a correlation that wasn't there.
But the thing about Rachel retweeting that and doubling down, what's so interesting about that, and this is a phenomenon that's completely new in my experience in media, Is that companies now know that their audiences will forgive them for making mistakes as long as the mistakes are in the right direction.
So there was a whole generation of reporters who were raised like me.
Like, our whole thing was the night before we published something, we couldn't sleep because we were afraid of that one thing that would be fucked up in the report that somebody would catch the next day and that might end your career, right?
Like, if you got something really, really badly wrong, it was potentially a career-ending thing, especially if you made some kind of ethical mistake in forgetting to check something.
So that terror was common to all reporters until recently.
Now, all of a sudden, when you make a really, really bad mistake, your audience is probably going to be fine with it.
They don't punish you for it in the same way.
And they've basically brought in a whole generation of people who have this ethos of, well, if I make...
So what if it's wrong?
You know, which is why all these people no longer have faith in these companies.
And they can't see it.
It's amazing that they can't see it.
But people are leaving these companies.
They're no longer trusting them.
And they don't see that correlation, which is incredible to me.
It's very strange, but again, it fuels this thing that I think is very good, which is trustworthy, independent media.
Like, Crystal and Sagar, when they had their old show, Rising on the Hill, They decided to leave, and when they decided to leave, we had a group conversation on the phone, and they were asking me advice, and I was like, I think you guys are going to be gigantic when you leave.
I think it's going to be bigger than ever.
You'll be completely free.
You won't have to worry about any editorial control, and you don't need anybody.
I mean, I'll help you.
Everybody else will help you.
The show's already excellent, but it's excellent entirely because of you two.
It has nothing to do with being attached to any other organization that's going to siphon money off of you.
And, you know, I was really fortunate that I had other jobs when I first started doing this podcast.
And the podcast was never – the beginning of it at first was never for money.
It was just for fun.
I never thought of it as a job at all.
And so when I had gotten it to the point where it started to become valuable, There were a bunch of vultures that tried to buy half of it or take over.
There was one podcast network that literally wanted to take 50% of the show just to be on the network.
They go, well, you'll have more ad revenue because you'll be connected to our, whatever, our network.
I go, what fucking network?
Like, this is a podcast, man.
This is a different, like, they didn't even understand, and this was quite a few years ago before it had gotten big, but the point is, I know friends that took that deal, that gave their podcast over to this network and became a part of it, and now they're probably kicking themselves.
I'm sure they own 50% of it forever or whatever percentage.
Maybe they started with 50 and negotiated down.
I don't know.
But the point is, there's so many people that when given the opportunity to have...
Like, some real security.
Like, you're going to be connected to this network, they're going to protect you, they're going to bring in the ads, you don't have to do anything, and they just take a percentage of it, but you will always have income, because you'll be connected to us, and we are a big corporation, and you're like, Oh, just like when I was on NBC. This is going to be great.
Like, it'll give me security.
And you start thinking about your mortgage, and you start thinking about your kid's college, and all that stuff, and you go, okay, this is a good thing.
Yeah, and that's why it is a very hard decision for people to walk away and go independent and do what I did, what Glenn did, what Crystal and Kyle did.
But it works, and the other choice, staying with traditional media, is increasingly not a good bargain for you.
Not only is the piece of the pie there getting smaller and smaller all the time because their ratings are getting worse, Advertising revenue is dropping off, but the ideological conformity in those organizations is getting worse, and that is something that never used to exist before, or at least not to this degree, anywhere near this degree.
So you're going to be miserable doing that.
You might as well do the job the way you want to do it, do it correctly, and get paid In a commensurate way for doing it.
It's obviously available to you and to Glenn and to Jimmy Dore and a lot of these other people.
They've already gathered up a large, loyal audience because they know that they can trust these people.
Or the people, rather, know they can trust them to be honest and to just give their take on things.
But there's a lot of people that are, they're stuck because, you know, they're not really well known and they're kind of in this system and they're realizing while they're in this system that it's pretty fucked and you have two choices.
Either you try to fight against it and you might get ostracized or you try to conform and then you get lost and then you become what you despise.
Either they're moving the people out, which you see at an organization like the New York Times, Where they're just kind of moving the old guard out, the old traditional reporting types.
And they had a lot of really amazing reporters at the New York Times, people who really knew how to do the job.
And they're just kind of being pushed out, whether for one reason or another.
Or, you know, the other thing is you stay in and gradually the mindset takes hold of you and you get lost mentally.
And I think that's what's happening to a lot of people.
I mean, I knew Rachel back in her Air America days.
You know, we were friends once, sort of.
And it's just, it's amazing to me what's happened.
I got in a scrape, like a drugs thing, and so my parents decided that I needed to learn a little bit about real work, so I ended up doing demolition for a long time in Boston.
Dude, I had a construction job when I was, well, I had many of them because my father was an architect growing up, but when I was 19 years old, my buddy Jimmy, Jimmy Lawless, shout out to Jimmy, he got me a gig working with him.
I think I only lasted like a month.
We were building a Knights of Columbus Hall somewhere in Massachusetts, and it was during the summer, so it was hot as fuck, muddy, and I was carrying cement and pressure-treated lumber all day.
That's all I did.
And this was back when I was still competing, so I would go to the gym after work.
I mean, in that first job that I did, you know, the big stairs there at the Wilbur Theater would go down.
So we had to basically jackhammer a whole bunch of concrete out of that floor and then figure out a way to get it up into a dumpster.
So it was big, big chunks of...
Concrete and stone.
And we tried all these different ways, like driving a bobcat up the stairs, like all these different things.
There was no way to automate it.
The only way to do it was to put it in a rubber bucket and have two guys carry each one up and down the stairs.
So the guy I was with had just gotten out of jail and he was like, this is what the people who built the pyramids must have felt like, you know, carrying that stuff up the stairs.
There was a comedy club in that basement called Duck Soup.
The guys who owned the Comedy Connection, Bill Blumenwright, who eventually took over the Wilbur, he bought it after these guys had kind of failed this one.
They decided to try this project of a really high-end...
Comedy club that only did clean comedy for respectable people and they served really nice food and it did not work out.
Because right across the street was Nick's Comedy Stop, which was wild and they were literally offering you, you can get paid in cash or cocaine.
But the thing that's going on now that's really interesting is watching all these pieces shuffle and move around, like the Substack thing and the podcast thing, and watching the reaction that traditional media has to it.
Last year, I knew somebody who worked at the Times, and he was basically saying, you know, the op-ed page is really worried about Substack.
I'm like, why would you be worried?
Like, you're the New York Times.
You've got 7 million subscribers.
Who cares?
But they're really worried about it.
And they did, you know, the series of hit pieces have come out over and over and over again.
It's one line of attack after another.
It's misogynistic.
It's anti-trans.
It's this or that.
It's just a mechanism.
It's a cash register.
It's not anything.
It's not really a company.
But it speaks to the desperation within The news business that they are convinced that if they are losing audience, it must be because somebody is stealing it from them.
Whereas what happened, in fact, is that they lost their audience first because – and this goes all the way back to the WMD episode.
And then after that, I think Russiagate was a big one that turned off a lot of people.
And they've been steadily losing audience just because of factual issues.
Whether it's factual or not, I think people are very tired of being lectured to in this sort of very clear ideological bent.
The angle that they're taking in these papers when they're discussing a real news story when the actual facts are available to people as they start seeing the facts and then seeing the big picture and then they go back to that original article they read they get angry they get annoyed like you guys are bullshitting me like this is a bullshit version of what happened and it's so clear that you keep doing it in the same direction so now every time you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever paper it is you have to go okay
how much of this is legit well who's writing it you have to think like which guy is writing it and How accurate is his reporting?
How full of shit is he?
Is she a hardcore lefty, or is she a centrist?
What am I getting here?
It used to be I could just read the New York Times, and this is the story.
Hey, Jamie, I made a little spill.
Chuck me something over there.
This stuff, I'm subconsciously trying to pour it out because I know I'll drink the whole goddamn thing.
It's strange, but I think this is just what happens when something new comes around.
It's always what happens.
There's always, like, this attack against it, the denial that there's anything wrong with the original product.
I saw it in martial arts.
I mean, I was a part of martial arts when, you know, I was a child, and then when the UFC came along, there was all of this rejection of the idea behind it.
It was barbaric, it was, you know, you only need this, and you don't need to learn all this other stuff, and then eventually, everybody gave up.
And now it's clearly established, like, that is 100% the best form of martial art for an actual physical confrontation, is a combination of all the things.
It's with everything.
When something new comes along that's superior, there's a rejection of it, there's an attack against it, and then eventually the dust settles and people realize, like, oh, this is what's going on.
No, there's a total blindness within the media business to...
They just can't see how audiences perceive them.
Yeah.
You know, once upon a time, I think the idea within the news business was pretty simple.
Like, reporters were raised, basically, we'll get all the facts, we'll work really hard on getting it right, we'll give it to you, and then you do what you want with it.
It's not our job to tell you what decisions to make.
It's just our job to get it correct, right?
And then that's the news.
After that, you know, it's up to you to make your own political decisions.
But that's why political affiliation didn't necessarily mean so much back in the day.
It was always true that basically all reporters were Democrats, but it didn't show so much in the news media once upon a time because we had a professional ethos that just said, we're not supposed to care, right?
We go in to cover whatever.
We're just going to collect all the facts, get all the quotes, put it out there, make sure everything's been checked, and then it's your deal.
Now, there's this new ethos that What Wesley Lowery, the reporter, calls the view from nowhere journalism, which is what I just described, that that's not good enough, that they have to compensate for inequities in the system by Basically trying to impact how people behave through coverage.
And this is what they do all the time.
They're trying to get you to make political decisions by how they cover things.
And I saw this early on as a campaign reporter once when I was much younger, you know, in 2004 and 2008. I would sit on the bus with the reporters and they would be discussing which candidates they were going to describe as fringe, which ones were going to be described as electable, which ones would be serious, right?
Because they enjoyed having the power of deciding for people, you know, who got to be taken seriously and who didn't.
And I think that urge To mold how people act is just ingrained in the business, and it's so off-putting.
It is.
Especially with something like the pandemic, people are desperate.
They really, really need just to get the basic information.
And instead, you know, when the pandemic happened, we were in the middle of this super intense culture war that was revolved around Trump.
So everything was viewed through that lens, you know, like hydroxychloroquine.
Trump liked it or Trump said he was taking it.
Therefore, it must be bad.
Therefore, you know, it must not work.
But that's not how it works.
It's not the drug's fault that Donald Trump took it.
He broke people's, that Trump derangement syndrome, I used to think that was a funny thing that, you know, not even that funny, but a thing that Republicans would say to try to invalidate anything that liberals would say.
Like, oh, they've got Trump derangement syndrome.
But as time has gone on, and you've seen it over and over again, and the justification for not just bias, but blatant Distortions of the facts in order to impart a narrative, like clearly doing it on purpose.
And they've done it with almost this righteousness because they're combating something, this evil.
This evil Trumpster and this evil Trump thing that's happening.
Well, Josh Rogin was responsible for quite a bit of it, and he's done amazing stuff.
I mean, his work in exposing the whole disinformation campaign and the emails and the fact that Fauci was the one that restarted the gain-of-function research and funding gain-of-function research, all that stuff.
I mean, and he's a Washington Post guy.
I mean, he's rock solid.
Right.
I think there was a bunch of people that kind of, when he started reporting all this stuff and saying all these things, a bunch of people that were like, fuck, he went out there.
Like, you know, he went out the door and he's like, guys, I can breathe!
And everyone's like, fuck, should we go outside?
You know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
Is this the Fauci thing?
Sort of.
2005. 2005 studies found that chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine, was effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS-CoV.
The official name for SARS, the research was conducted in cell culture conditions, so in vitro, meaning the drug was not administered to actual SARS patients.
That's the same thing they found with ivermectin, that it stops viral replication in vitro.
Yeah, if you look at the announcement for the Oxford study on ivermectin, they use very similar language to say that this is a drug that has had in vitro success.
It has some antiviral properties.
Not, there isn't a long record of it, but it has some, right?
And that contradicted this, again, it was much more of a faith-based thing in the reporting.
It's, we believe that this is not true, so therefore, we're just not going to touch it.
I mean, I had arguments with other people in the business about this because I wrote a couple of stories about ivermectin mainly because some of the internet platforms were shutting down people who were talking about it, right?
Companies like Facebook and YouTube had eliminated, among other things, congressional testimony about this.
That seemed to me just crazy.
Even if the person's wrong, you have to leave it up there as a public service.
You should be able to find it.
But reporters were absolutely convinced that this drug was evil, I guess because it wasn't the vaccine.
And just the whole concept that people would be looking for some other kind of treatment or might welcome it was just deeply and profoundly offensive to them.
So they came up with this pejorative term, this horse dewormer thing.
And even that is odd because, again, once upon a time, you're a classic journalist with somebody like Seymour Hersh, and the whole idea of being a journalist was to not think like other people.
Another thing that's one of my favorite things to watch is the compilation of all of the people on the left talking about how they would never take the vaccine because you never know what's in it if Trump's hands are on it.
That it's gonna, you know, who knows what the long-term consequences of it are going to be.
This is Biden.
Fucking Biden when he was running for president.
Are you gonna take the shot?
Who knows what it's gonna do to you?
There's no long-term test.
Kamala saying she wouldn't take the shot.
So many fucking people.
And those same people are the ones that just take the shot, man.
Yeah, and they came up with this whole phrase, pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Exactly the same people who were having vaccine hesitancy the year previously came up with this phrase.
And here's the part that's shameful.
It's one thing for a politician.
To use a phrase like that, that's clearly cooked up with their consultants in whatever evil political laboratory they sit around and decide how they're going to do their messaging campaigns.
But then for an anchor person, To get up and repeat it like it's his or her own thinking, that's just embarrassing.
Since when do we let politicians write our material for us?
It is, but I think it's just the last death twitches of that business.
I just think this is a sign of the times.
If you think about it, a decentralized source of news is really the only way we're going to trust it today.
Something that is completely independent of a large corporation where they have a lot of vested interests in pushing a certain narrative.
They're never going to be pure.
Not anymore.
I mean, whatever the fuck they did, when they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise on television, and we're one of only two countries on planet Earth that allows that, they allowed...
The deepest roots of corruption and of influence to get in the way of all narratives, of everything we say and do, and the fucking sheer amount of money that's being generated by that is almost unstoppable.
Did you see that—I mean, I know Jimmy Dore covered it, but quite a few other people have realized it now—the amount of money that Bill Gates has spent on influencing media?
And look, once upon a time, we were – I haven't said that many times.
We were trained to know that, for instance, think tanks, right, like who was funding them because think tanks are who get quoted in the New York Times and the Washington Post, right?
So they're generating research that goes to journalists and like sort of surreptitiously that ends up becoming – What's covered.
And so that's how the Gates Foundation, for instance, will work its way into coverage.
It'll sponsor research in an area like education.
That's one of the things I'm covering now.
And its research becomes, it gets into the news that way.
But we were supposed to once have our ears up And be conscious of who was paying for all this research.
Where was that information coming from?
And, you know, people don't really even think about it now.
It says, I recently examined nearly 20,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation made through the end of June and found that more than $250 million going towards journalism.
Receipts included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde.
And the Center for Investigative Reporting, charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets like BBC Media Action, The New York Times, Neediest Cases Fund, media companies such as The Participant, whose documentary, Waiting for Superman, supports Gates' agenda on charter Waiting for Superman, supports Gates' agenda on charter schools, journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists, and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism such as the Leo
and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a news site to promote the success of aid groups.
In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations, which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates funding into the fourth estate.
Yeah, and as a reporter, you may or may not be aware of all the different ways that money will get in, you know, work its way into the business.
But unconsciously, it just sort of seeps in.
And that's how it works.
Nobody comes and tells you, well, don't cover this.
Well, maybe they do now, actually.
Or, you know, take this approach to covering education.
What ends up happening is that you just kind of get a feel based on the reaction of your editor.
To whatever pitch you're giving at the moment.
Hey, would you be interested in the story about whether or not this approach to standardized testing worked?
And if the editor says, yeah, that's interesting, maybe, then you know just never to broach that again.
But if it's in the right ideological Interesting.
Yeah.
And that's how it works.
That's how it works with everything.
It works, you know, with foreign policy.
I mean, when I worked in Russia, if you send the story, if you pitch the story to an American editor about how The US-based, the US-funded reform effort was working and there was a growing middle class in provincial Russia that was prospering and people were now taking vacations to Ibiza and stuff like that.
You could get anybody to buy that story.
But if you came to them with a story about how Actually, you know, the transformation of capitalism has been really slow.
People have lost their healthcare.
There's an explosion of violent crime and addiction, and people are more and more gravitating towards right-wing politics, you know, in large part because of the rapid changes that they weren't ready for.
You could not get that story sold, right?
So what ended up happening when I was in Russia, As they kept sending back all these positive reports about what was happening, this was before Putin, and Americans got this idea that things in Russia were going great, and the company was really prospering.
In fact, I was doing stories when I was there about how Money didn't even exist in the villages.
The only people who would actually have cash in most remote Russian villages would be pensioners because they would get it once a month from the mail system.
I went to places where the people actually bought and sold things with moonshine, like the Russian equivalent of moonshine.
Because that was like a unit of currency.
They were doing subsistence farming.
I mean, it was completely fucked, life in rural Russia.
But if you picked up the New York Times, what you read is, you know, the emerging middle class was doing great.
You know, people have VCRs in Samara and stuff like that.
And that's how it works.
Like, you get a sense of what they want, you give it to them, and, you know, over time, you just stop thinking about it.
I used to travel the country with this guy who was blooming around a professional clown.
So we would do these things where we would get jobs in, you know, provincial Russia doing different things, you know, whether it was bricklaying or, you know, working in, you know, agriculture, that kind of stuff.
And in one place we went to, you know, we would do like a construction job and we'd get paid in what they call Samagon, which is like moonshine.
It's really fascinating because these people live just hunter-gatherer, fisherman, trapper existences.
And I believe they sell pelts and they'll use that for snowmobiles and tools and things like that.
But essentially all of their food, all of their subsistence comes, this is it, comes entirely from hunting and trapping and they have no mental health problems.
They're all unreasonably happy.
They're really, like, when you, you know, you're getting translations of them, you know, it's all in subtitles, but they're talking about how happy they are, and they talk about all the things they love about this particular way of living, and, you know, and this is what a man needs to do, and this is what a trapper does, and this is what a hunter does, and this is what...
And they're talking about it with this pride and this...
I don't know, man, this really unusual resolve.
They found their niche.
They don't have this desire to escape.
They enjoy life.
And so he called it Happy People.
And he's doing the narration, which makes it interesting, too.
Like, if the government wanted to change the news, they'd just have to whack you and Glenn Greenwald and a couple other people, and it would be a lot different out there.
You know, obviously, I've been doing this for a long time, but this current situation where...
The news is kind of split into three parts, right?
There's right-wing media, there's, you know, hashtag resistance media, and then there's this independent thing where, you know, it's people like you and me and Glenn and Crystal and Kyle and stuff like that.
It is small and emergent, and it's a lot of attention.
I think there's a lot of pressure on us to figure things out because we haven't figured things out.
Like, Substack is really great for getting a couple of us paid a good deal of money, but we haven't figured out how to do, like...
like if there's like real stories out there there could be a fund that's dedicated to real stories and in place of an editor but who would have control over the narrative you could have a committee of people like yourself and Kyle and crystal and soccer and in where you would have like a signal group chat
mm-hmm where you talk about an issue like hey there's a thing we want to do on this It's probably going to cost $20,000 to get all the pieces moving.
Can we do something like that?
And then I think easily...
You could have a GoFundMe or, you know, whatever, Patreon, something along those lines, where people just donate to this fund that goes towards journalism.
And then at the end of the year, there could be an accounting of it so that everybody knows it's all legit and no one's siphoning money off of it.
You could have found a fair number of reporters who knew how to do hardcore investigative journalism 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but the current generation has been raised on a different model that's based on Being quick, getting a couple of quotes, putting something up fast, and it's brief, and it's more of a take than it is a dig.
And so that mentality of just investigative work is disappearing.
So you'd have the problem of finding people who can do it.
The other problem is audiences don't necessarily love what we call like eat-your-vegetables journalism, right?
There's some of it out there.
There are people who do good work, but they have difficulty getting people to follow it because people do love the shit that's out there, right?
They eat up the culture war stuff.
So those are two problems.
I think...
I've always approached it that part of the job is a sales job.
You have to get people interested in stuff that's important.
You have to find a way to do it, whether you're using humor, whether you're using illustrations.
It doesn't matter whether you use fiction writing narrative techniques to get people hooked on something.
That's part of the job, I think.
And you have to do the investigative stuff.
So it's a tough thing.
It takes a while to develop all those skills and they're not teaching kids in journalism to do that as much anymore.
Do you think that with the rise of independent journalists, do you think that it's possible that that might open up and people might look at that as a viable career path and they might say, hey, this is actually, it's actually coming back?
I mean, if the money's there, it's the greatest job in the world.
I mean, like, you know, this job has taken me all over the planet.
I've gotten to meet every conceivable kind of person on Earth, everyone from presidential candidates to professional athletes to people in prison to, you know, everywhere.
And you can go anywhere doing journalism.
And you get to play detective sometimes, right?
It's a really cool thing.
You've got to do the work of...
You know, coming to a situation and figuring out who did what, and that's mentally and intellectually stimulating.
It's a great, great job.
But people have been...
I think they've been turned off to it because this new version of the job...
It is much more like professional flattery.
It's much more political.
They're training kids to be like courtiers basically and the people who come out of journalism schools now, they want to be close to power.
That's the attraction for them is the idea of being the person who gets to sit next to a Hillary Clinton aide at a bar at the end of a day and I know this person or I hang out at a party with this person.
Instead of going around the world or breaking a big story, that's what it is.
Yeah, think of the people who've been journalists, who've done such incredible things, you know, everybody from, like, Ida Tarbell to Mark Twain to Hunter Thompson, Evelyn Waugh, like, you know, it's a great place for if you want to be a writer.
I mean, that's how I got into it, because I wanted to be a writer.
But if you want to be a great investigator, you know, you can do that's a way into it, too.
You know, there's the whole tradition of what we call participatory journalism, where you do something and then you write about it.
You know, George Plumpton was famous for playing professional football, the Paper Lion story.
But, you know, I've done some of that, you know, like doing, you know, work in Russia or, you know, going undercover.
So it's got drawings and this language that they thought, yeah, it's really interesting.
It's old as fuck.
But look at how all the letters are written.
It's all beautiful.
No one knows what the fuck it says.
They have no idea.
And there's a lot of theories, but for the longest time, they were trying to decipher it.
And I think...
I might be speaking out of tune here because they might have changed, but I think they decided somewhere along the line that it's not really a language, that someone just made up a fake language.
So somewhere in the early 1400s, somebody, so clear that, was the manuscript decoded?
I don't think it has been, right?
2019, the manuscript was propelled back of the headlines once again when an academic made the explosive claim that he had succeeded where everyone had failed and successfully decoded the mysterious text.
I think they think that somebody might have made it to sell to someone.
Like someone might have made it in the early 1400s to sell as like some ancient text.
It currently consists of around 240 pages.
There's evidence that additional pages are missing.
Some pages are foldable sheets of varying size.
Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely colored with sections of the manuscript showing people fictitious plants, astrological symbols, etc.
The text is written from left to right.
The manuscript was named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. I don't think that anyone has translated it.
There was someone who was a famous politician and their husband was involved in one of those things.
I'm trying to remember who it was.
Is it Buttigieg?
No, no, no.
It was a female politician and the husband seemed...
He seemed gay, and he was involved.
That's a weird thing to say, but some people do seem gay.
It's like you risk being criticized and being called a bigot for saying that, but if someone's talking like this, it's very rare that it's a straight person, right?
This guy was doing Pray the Gay Away stuff and someone did some investigative reporting and did something and it was like this guy like clearly has a heart on and he's like behind me hugging me and telling me that you know Jesus does not want him to be gay and that we're all gonna work through this and he's like the whole thing was like uber bizarre.
The reason why trans is different because there are trans people, right, that start off as biological males and they identify with being a female but they've had children with females and they've had relationships with females and then as they transition they remain attracted to females.
It's very different in that it's whatever it is in the human mind that makes you identify with another gender, it seems to have nothing to do with your sexual preference.
Well, I knew almost nothing about it until I got attacked for attacking a female MMA fighter.
Who used to be male for 30 years and then wasn't telling anybody that she used to be male and transitioned and fought two different times against females that thought she was a biological female and beat the fuck out of them.
Like horrendous beatings.
Broke this lady's skull.
Like literally fractured her face.
It was scary stuff.
And when you watch the fights, the fights looked like a guy beating up a woman.
It wasn't like someone who's particularly skillful.
It was just wrong.
And it was at a very low level of MMA.
Like, if you saw at high levels when someone has the skills to protect themselves from someone who's the same size as them, But physically superior then you would have less consequences because they just know how to protect themselves better But these these women weren't that skillful.
So the strength and the physical power was a huge factor, right?
And I was fucking furious because it's like this is crazy and And in criticizing it and being very vocal about it, then I started having to start doing research on this.
What's amazing about this is that, again, it goes back to that same kind of instinct behind the lab leak theory process, which is we've decided something, right?
Well, Abigail Schreier is experiencing that in the most hateful and aggressive way with her book, I believe it's called Irreversible Damage, which is all about rapid onset gender dysphoria that seems to be happening to a lot of young girls.
And they're trying to figure out what is going on when the percentage of people who identify as trans that are young girls is up several thousand percent, which is crazy.
And you're calling for a ban on someone who some respected, intelligent people agree with her, have agreed with some of the things she said, have disagreed with some of the other things that she said, have discussed these things and realized that there is an issue here where people are malleable.
This is the concept, right?
Some sort of social acceptance and embracing of people who are trans and that this could be a problem with some people who are easily influenced and are maybe socially awkward or maybe even on the spectrum.
And then someone comes along and says, you feel weird because you're really trans.
And if you give that person testosterone, one of the things that happens with the administration of testosterone in people, particularly in girls, is there's a euphoria that comes with it, there's a sense of well-being, you get confidence, and they might start thinking, this is what has been wrong with me all this time.
Now, these are not my words, these are not my opinions.
This is just explaining what this phenomenon supposedly how you can define it.
Yeah, so the assertion is that you have people in clusters, you know, social clusters, who are, you know, they call it the social contagion phenomenon.
And there would be other factors, too, like therapeutic attention is also something that some people may think is a positive, right?
They might feel better about life because they're getting more attention from clinicians or from teachers, something like that.
But you have to test that, right?
The whole point is we're not deciding at the outset whether this is right or wrong.
The way science works is, well, let's do a study about that, figure out what's actually happening.
And instead, it's like having the conversation is now...
It's now dangerous, it's perilous, right?
Which is crazy to me.
One of the reasons I became kind of politically liberal in the first place is because we didn't have those And prohibitions.
The comedian said all the forbidden things.
The intellectuals weren't afraid to have the scary discussions.
I remember the first thing I liked about Noam Chomsky was that he stood up for the speech rights of some crazy Holocaust denier, right?
Because the whole idea was...
You had to have dialogue and fight for it.
And what we're doing now, we have this atmosphere where people don't want to – they're just sort of deeply interested in scaring people away from certain topics.
Well, a great example of that is the ACLU. The ACLU, when it first started, they defended Nazis.
They defended Nazis' right to speak.
Not defended their position as being accurate, but defended Nazis' right to speak because they said that if you believe in free speech, you believe in all speech.
And even if it's wrong, even if it's inaccurate, you have to defend free speech.
Now, they are like one of the wokest organizations that's out there.
They fly by this doctrine.
And their positions on things are entirely ideologically driven.
Yeah, there was a great documentary called Mighty Ira that's done by FIRE. And they profile Ira Glasser, who was the head of the ACLU for a long time.
And it goes into the whole mechanics of What the decision was to support the Nazis in Skokie.
It was specifically based on the idea that all these ACLU people had fought in the civil rights era.
They had campaigned for civil rights.
And their whole argument was, if you let the town of Skokie decide who can and cannot march in their town, then you're going to have some southern town the next day deciding that a black organization or the NAACP can't march there.
Are we going to make a million different authorities who are going to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't?
And that's a very compelling argument, right?
And it was deeply thought out.
And they were really, really...
They took it very seriously from an intellectual level.
We know how offensive this is to people.
They thought about what it would mean to the residents of Skokie, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, what it would mean for them to see those marchers go past their houses.
They understood how if anything is harm, if any kind of speech is harm, that is it.
Right?
But still, this is a foundational idea in the United States, is that we defend this because it's part of our identity.
And I think we're losing touch with why we have those ideas.
And that, you know, when people are confused, they can see a better argument.
They can see someone who eloquently spells out why these Nazis are wrong.
And then you go, okay, now I have a framework.
Now I understand.
Like, if someone doesn't know why they're wrong, like maybe someone's uneducated, maybe someone grew up around people that were racists or Nazis, and then they get this compelling explanation of everything.
Now, you wouldn't have had that if you didn't have the Nazis.
Like, you kind of need the shitheads and the bad people of the world so that you can say, here's why they're wrong.
And then, you know, it gets messy, and in the age of social media, that's where it's weird, because These shitheads never really had a platform before where they can get on these whatever platform social media allows them and they can develop massive followings saying crazy shit.
But that's still the same.
We have to realize that even though it's new and it's uncomfortable and you're seeing these numbers and people are being indoctrinated into these ideas, what's important is to have a compelling argument against it.
And to have that and to say, hey, this is why these people are wrong.
Look, here's the most eloquent, thought-out, articulate argument against that.
And then where reasonable people are allowed to look at these two things and go, well, clearly these people over here are correct.
And clearly I see why these people are so fucked up and this is what's wrong.
Doing it the other way, just saying, okay, we're not going to let you see that idea.
We're going to make sure that it comes, or it comes affixed with a warning label, or it's, we're going to make sure that person does not appear on this internet platform.
And this gets back to what we were saying at the very beginning, like this idea that people have to understand that there isn't a solution to everything.
And I think internet speech is the classic example of where people think there must be something we can do, some step that we can take to make sure that these kinds of thinkers don't exist anymore.
And there isn't.
It's logistically impossible for a company like Facebook or Google or Twitter to scan individually each piece of content.
It's being created at too fast a rate.
The only way to do it is to have a better argument and win on that level culturally.
There's no way these fucking idiots would be this organized.
Then, someone did a deep dive on Twitter.
I wish I could remember who.
But someone did a deep dive on Twitter and found out that the account in which this whole thing went viral is a completely fake account.
That has no followers and was started about a month ago with an AI generated face.
It's a fake face as like the profile picture.
It's one of those pictures they take a bunch of people's faces and they smush it and make this one lady.
And then she had a picture of a dog in like one of her Facebook posts.
But there's no engagement.
There's no interaction.
The entire account is only a month old.
And her post on this somehow or another went viral.
And this is what started the sharing of it.
But if you look at these people walking down the street with their masks on, all dressed in black, all wearing like essentially a uniform, all holding the same size American flag.
And then eventually they all jumped into the back of a U-Haul and were carted off at the end of this stupid fucking march.
But if you watch this, I'm like, what are you guys doing?
I didn't cover the story, but basically it was an attempt to kidnap Governor Whitmer, right?
Yeah.
And they found out that a high percentage of the people involved were FBI informants.
Which again, back in the day, would not have been surprising to people on the left because this is part of what we were taught.
Back when they had COINTELPRO and FBI informants, it was notorious in the 60s and 70s, this idea of having agents provocateurs in the crowd, people who were throwing things at soldiers who were coming back from Vietnam to discredit the anti-war crowd, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the infiltration of the Black Panthers.
It was understood that the FBI did this stuff, or that different law enforcement agencies did this stuff.
Now, suddenly, people on the left disbelieve instantly that this happens.
They are reluctant to accept it.
Now, again, you have to prove it in each case, right?
So you can't just, you know, you can't just assert that this or that person is a federal agent.
But you should have some healthy skepticism about each one of these things, you know?
With the way media and the internet works in virality...
They're all dressed up like Spider-Man and all of them says, fed, fed, fed, another fed, and then one says, some autistic fuck, some poor guy that they trick into doing something.
You know, that was the suspicion amongst the conspiracy theorists about the Boston bombing.
So, we were all up in arms about this when the first war on terror happened because we knew shit like this was going on, whether it was informants pushing people to do things they didn't want to do or creating terror watch lists, no-fly lists, putting people under illegal surveillance, illegally detaining them.
We were all concerned about this.
At least liberals were.
And suddenly now that they're doing this other kind of war on terror, this domestic war on terror, nobody cares.
As a marketing – especially Trump is obviously a huge part of this whole thing.
Selling to America the idea – because you think about it before Trump.
Think about how unpopular the intelligence services were in 2014, 2015 after the Snowden revelations.
You talked to Snowden, right?
He was – One of the most famous people in the world, and we got the heads of the intelligence agencies lying to Congress openly, getting away with it.
People were furious, right?
And then all of a sudden, in a heartbeat, those exact same people, the people everybody was so mad at, suddenly became heroes because they were the ones in the front lines battling Donald Trump.
I mean, I was one of the few, like Glenn was another one.
There was a small circle of journalists at the time that in the early years of Trump who were just like, something about this just doesn't smell right.
Like the story just feels wrong.
Intelligence sources, especially anonymous ones, are inherently untrustworthy.
And yet suddenly American audiences are trusting them en masse and they shouldn't.
And that's no different from it's ever been.
We shouldn't have trusted them when the WMD thing happened.
And people like Glenn and myself pointed that out then.
And we shouldn't trust them now.
But people were so worked up about Donald Trump that suddenly they were ready to jump in bed with people like John Brennan and Comey and Clapper and all these guys.
It's so crazy, but one thing that governments have been, our government in particular, has been really good at is capitalizing on a state of chaos and using it to their advantage.
And this is something that happened post 9-11 with the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, which I believe the Patriot Act has never been used to arrest a terrorist.
I wouldn't know that.
Find out if that's true.
But it has been used to arrest many drug dealers and to use on people who were, you know, air quotes, enemies.
But when chaos happens and they realize that there's some opportunity, they take advantage of opportunities.
It's always been a part of history.
People have always done that.
Well, that seems like what's happening now.
And that seems like something that we should be concerned about.
Look, it was transparently what they were doing after 9-11.
Everybody should be scared to death.
Therefore, we need additional powers to do A through Z, right?
And it was nuts, the stuff they...
You know, the FISA Enhancements Act and, you know, the Patriot Act, the no-fly list, the watch list, all this stuff.
The FBI's national security letters, you know, this thing where they would...
The FBI sends a letter to a company, tells them that they are barred from telling their customers that they're divulging their information to the FBI. They sent tens of thousands of those letters.
There was an IG report about that.
Actually, there were a bunch of IG reports about that.
And this whole regime of surveillance You know, just got approved willy-nilly because the public was scared.
People were freaked out.
They didn't want it to happen again.
So they just said, okay, go ahead.
We trust you.
And of course, they massively abused these programs.
You know, they started to do things that were...
That were really crazy.
Using the enhanced secret surveillance tools as evidence in criminal cases, but it would be hidden.
In other words, you'd be charged with a drug crime, right?
And if you ask for discovery, they would give you all the documents that they had to give you.
But they wouldn't let you know that maybe you were under surveillance or there was a FISA warrant.
You've been caught in some other way.
They don't have to disclose that stuff.
They don't have to disclose the national security letter stuff.
And so it became like this separate legal system and Americans just got used to it.
And then when Trump happened, they were so afraid of him and all the possibilities that came with that that now they're Now they're willing to let all kinds of new tools be used on them.
Well, when I heard Joe Biden say that the biggest threat to this country is white supremacy, I was like, okay, what's going on here?
Like, what are they doing?
Like, what are they doing?
Because, look, Charlottesville was horrific, right?
And when that guy ran over a bunch of people with his car in Charlottesville, it opened up the door to people saying, like, hey, this is genuinely horrible.
Because it's a small percentage of people that are out of their fucking mind that generally don't have much of an impact on our culture.
But when the president says that white supremacy is the biggest problem that we face, I immediately go, who told you to say that?
What are you doing?
What are you planning?
What's going on here?
How many people...
Like, clearly, clearly, there's a lot of people that were involved in January 6th that were out of their fucking mind and really did think that they were going to take over the government.
I mean, I think it's interesting that the guy who's doing the investigation into the Russiagate stuff now, John Durham, was also the prosecutor in that case.
I don't think that's a coincidence because he's...
But anyway, the thing with Biden talking about how white supremacy is the biggest threat, there's clearly something deeply wrong with this country.
There clearly is domestic white terrorism.
There's no question that it exists.
But they've become really, really loose with that term.
The Rittenhouse case was a classic example for me of how you have to be more careful about it.
They were calling him a white supremacist on the first day.
I mean, the other thing about that case was that, you know, the protests in Kenosha were about the Jacob Blake case, which was, you know, I wrote a book about the Eric Garner case, which was, you know, unequivocally a brutal police killing where the police were at fault.
Like, no question about it.
But the Blake incident was much more complicated.
If you look at the reasons why the DA and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department didn't file charges in that case, it's because there was a lot of stuff about that case that was...
There's a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the police made there.
And people naturally assumed, and this is what we do now, we see something on Twitter, we see like a 20 second piece of video, we think we know the whole story, but the reality is most of the time, the initial impression of news is wrong.
At least somewhere.
There's usually some kind of error built in, and that's why we need the next two and three days and months to sort out exactly what happened.
And in that case, we just didn't.
There were a lot of ambiguities that just got turned instantaneously into a narrative that was really unfortunate.
But without hesitation, people would do things like say, well, it's clearly a problem that there weren't enough minorities in the jury in this case where everybody involved was white.
A lot of the news consumers were just sort of led to believe certain things just by the way, by implication.
They didn't always identify whether the people who got shot were white or black or anything.
They would just sort of say they were shot.
Meanwhile, they would say repeatedly that Rittenhouse was white.
And you can see how that can happen if you're just picking up, you know, the newspaper or you're watching CNN and they're just neglecting to leave out certain details, which, you know, it has to be strategic.
And again, this gets back to what I was saying before.
It's not like anybody tells you to do this.
You just sort of know that...
The story is going to sell better or it's going to play better if you highlight certain things.
I think that's what happens with a lot of the people in this case.
It's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume that you have Sympathies with somebody like Rittenhouse or all the people who lionized them on Fox News.
You just got to get this stuff right.
You have a heightened responsibility to get it right when people are amped up and they're mad and they're ready to go out in the streets and fight each other.
That's when you have to be super careful about what you say, especially in media.
It really highlights the importance of real journalism because this would have never taken place if real journalism had been Steadfastly followed from the jump if people said this is what we know and this is what happened These are the victims these people were the one of the things about like any kind of protest or any kind of chaos and this is something that is just part of human nature is When people know that there's chaos and there's protest,
there's a lot of people that join in that really have no...
And that happened all over the country, by the way, after the Floyd thing, which was one of the reasons why...
The reporting about that was so disappointing, right?
Because there were lots and lots of reporters, and I knew a few of them, who were kind of discouraged from talking about some of the ancillary stories, right?
Like, okay, this neighborhood has been damaged, therefore elderly people can't get their prescriptions because the drugstore has been burned down or whatever it is, right?
Because the implication is that the protesters Their cause was unjust, so let's not do that story.
But in many cases, these weren't really even protesters.
In some places, they were, and in some places they weren't, right?
But that's what the job is for.
We have to go out there and ask, you know, was this part of the protest?
The problem with being honest about that when there's a frenzy in the air, which there most certainly was post-George Floyd, is that it's dangerous.
And, you know, you can get attacked for just stating facts.
Like, there was a lot of people on the right that were trying to say that he wasn't murdered and that he died of a fentanyl overdose and that he would have died anyway.
And to those people, I was saying, fuck you.
Because, like, you have no idea what it's like to have someone lean on your neck for eight and a half minutes.
I actually do.
Like, I've had guys do jujitsu and put their fucking knee on my neck for a minute or 30 seconds.
It's horrific to imagine being handcuffed and someone do that on the concrete, not even a jujitsu mat.
It's impossible to overstate that you most likely...
Either you're gonna go unconscious or something really fucked up is gonna happen to you.
It's very, very bad.
It's not as simple as he got a drug over.
We have fucking clear evidence of this guy kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 40-something seconds.
There is no fucking way that didn't have an effect on him.
And I think someone tried to do that.
They tried to make a point that it's not that big of a deal and they had someone do it to him and they tapped out early.
Was it Crowder?
Did he do that?
Someone did that.
I don't know who did that.
But my point is because of that There was a narrative where you weren't allowed to say other things about George Floyd that were true, like the fact that he held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach when he was robbing her.
He wasn't a good guy.
He should not have had that happen to him by any stretch of the imagination.
There's no world where what that guy did was okay.
But this is not a good guy.
To make statues of him and lionize him and make him out to be some sort of a hero, that's not accurate either.
Like, I had police sources trying to sell me that off the record all the time.
That, oh, you know, he would have gone anyway, right?
And look, A, watch the video, but don't even just do that.
Like, read the medical examiner's report, which says homicide on it, you know, because they've determined medically the cause of death was and, you know, compression of the chest.
In other words, you can't just go off what somebody says about something.
You have to look into it and, like, look into it again and again and again.
And in, you know, in the case of Garner, like Garner was somebody who had some pretty bad stuff in his past going back a long way, but had kind of turned his life around and was somebody who was known on the block as being a really good dude who broke up fights and He gave all his money to his family members.
One of the reasons his clothes were in such disrepair is that he wouldn't buy himself new clothes.
He gave every dollar to his kids.
He was a good dude.
But these are details you got to tell the truth about the other stuff.
I knew his daughter, Erica, and we talked about how she wanted to see the book done.
And I said, well, how do you want me to deal with the stuff from his past?
And she said...
Look, he was just a man, right?
You've got to show all that stuff.
And I thought that was incredibly cool of her.
She really admired her father.
She thought he had gotten through a lot of things, but she didn't want him to be a two-dimensional character.
Like, if you get a guy who knows how to choke you, and I'm assuming the cop knows how to choke people, he'd seem like a strong guy, you get a hold of your neck like that, that's a fucking chokehold.
It's not just a restrain.
And it didn't have to happen.
One thing that has changed that I think, I mean, there's a lot of negativity.
There's a lot of negative shit that's happened from this whole defund the police thing and The fact that, you know, the police officers feel so...
They don't feel like they can do their job anymore without risking getting in trouble for something.
Like, they're just a standard job.
So they're letting so many more things happen.
And if you look at the amount of crimes, like the uptick in crimes post-pandemic, it's irrational.
And that's another thing that was really disappointing to me after the Floyd thing happened, because nobody wanted to look at the policy issue.
What's the biggest contributing factor to police brutality cases?
It's the number of contacts you have between police and people.
And a lot of that has to do with The heightened number of stops that you have through programs like Stop and Frisk.
In New York, it was clean halls, right?
It's what they call the community policing techniques.
The whole idea is, let's stop a gazillion people.
We'll search them, or we'll pat them down.
This is based on a Supreme Court case called Ohio v.
Terry that allows police to do that.
If they have articulable suspicion that somebody is committing a crime, they're allowed to pat you down.
So they used to not really use that that much.
The innovation in the 80s, 90s and going forward was, let's just use that a lot.
Let's start stopping people all the time and patting them down, right?
And they did it hundreds of thousands of times in New York.
They did it in every city in the country.
And what happens when you massively increase the number of times that police put their hands on people?
A percentage of those contacts are going to go wrong, right?
They just will.
Somebody's going to get mad.
They're not going to want to see their book bag emptied on the ground.
They're not going to want to have somebody put their hands down their pants.
And eventually someone's going to say no, like Eric Garner, right?
and you're going to have a death in your hands that was totally avoidable, right?
And so, but you do need police for the real stuff.
Like, in other words, if somebody shows up at his ex-girlfriend's house and starts waving a gun or a knife around and picks up a kid and runs for a car, like, that's when you actually do need the police to intervene.
And that's what got lost in this whole debate was, What do we actually want police to do versus what have they been doing?
And there was almost no discussion of those policy issues.
It was just police are bad and therefore let's take their money away, whereas there's so many instantly fixable things they could have done.
And now LA. LA is experiencing a rash of these smashing grabs.
They don't have any faith at all that there's law enforcement that's going to take care of these things.
So their fear of the cops is non-existent now.
They're just stealing things.
And it's happening so often that they're literally calling it an epidemic.
Like, what do we do about this?
How do you stop this?
And how do you stop this given the current climate, the way people are viewing the police and the way the cops are viewing the support that they have from the community and from the government?
Well, and a lot of those ideas probably came from people who live in affluent white communities who don't know what it is To occasionally need to call the police.
They live in towns where the police are basically there, you know, kind of for show or they get overtime to do traffic stops or to, you know, school parades and stuff like that.
If you go into a tough neighborhood like where Eric Garner lived in Staten Island, there are debates in the street.
There'll be one group of people who say, if this was a white neighborhood, they would never allow this much crime.
There'd be more police, right?
And there are people who are angry that there isn't a legitimate police presence at all times to protect them from violence.
Right?
And there's another group that thinks the police are inherently bad and cause more problems than they create, than they fix, and they need to go away.
But that's a legitimate debate that happens in those neighborhoods.
And if you look at the polls, you'll see that, you know, It's not necessarily coming from the black communities that the defund efforts aren't always coming from there.
The people who are most in favor of that are the people who have no conception of what the police are for.
And that's frustrating, too.
And I think that was misrepresented after the Floyd thing.
People want better policing.
They want smarter policing.
They want police who aren't so quick to use force.
They want more non-lethal force.
They want it to be less intrusive.
They want to be able to walk un-molested down the street without being assumed that they're dealing drugs or something like that.
The accident caused by an SUV. Caused by an SUV, yeah, or a crash or something like that.
And yeah, I get back to where's the spirit of...
Just curiosity.
I want to know what that was.
Before I knew anything about who drove the car, what the person looked like, anything, your mind runs through all the scenarios.
Is it somebody who's whacked out on drugs?
Is it a terrorist attack?
Is it a...
I thought about Charlottesville first.
That was one of the things I thought about.
Our job is to tell people what actually happened in these things, and you can't just stop and suddenly have a lack of curiosity once things don't exactly fit.
I don't know.
It just feels like there was a lack of resolve to get to the bottom of that.
Well, the difference between the way right-wing media covered it and left-wing media was incredibly stark.
I mean, left-wing media didn't touch the fact that this guy had posts supporting Hitler and that he had tried to run over his girlfriend in a car, which is why he was in jail, that he got let on on $1,000 bail, which is incredibly low for a guy who tried to commit vehicular homicide.
This trend of letting people out of jail easy that try to commit violent crimes and letting them off on very low bails and letting them right back out in the street is one of the weirder things that's going on right now.
One of the weirder things that you see from these progressive district attorneys and in these liberal cities, it's very strange and I don't understand the logic behind it.
But somebody who commits a violent crime, so there's this whole galaxy of other people who get what they call like nuisance bail.
Like, in other words, you know, whether it's solicitation or, you know, disorderly conduct or vandalism or something like that.
Prosecutors have been, they have this whole thing where they play games and they will try to get the judge to set bail just outside of the person's ability to pay.
Right.
Like, and, you know, they do an assessment of, you know, where you live, whether you have a job, whether you have a telephone in your house, all this stuff.
They know roughly what you can afford when they go to ask for bail.
And it's kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing between the judge and the prosecutors.
And that's a really bad system.
That's why there were calls for bail reform, because what they were really doing was setting bail so high that people couldn't They either had to make a decision to plead early or sit in a place like Rikers Island and lose their jobs while they waited to adjudicate some really minor offense.
There's a good reason for bail reform.
But that doesn't mean that bail in all cases needs to be eliminated.
You know what I'm saying?
In cases where there's a violent crime, that's what it's for.
A lot of the ideas that are coming out of what I used to consider like the liberal left or the Democratic Party, they almost seem to me like they're designed to lose votes.
You know, like they're trying to give votes to the Republicans, who are, of course, equally crazy, like in their own way.
But yeah, stuff like that, I don't even know where a lot of these ideas come from.
Like, I'm doing a story now about the Loudoun County, Virginia, education mess, and just a lot of the thinking there.
It's like...
Yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
A lot of the sort of intellectual class of this country, a lot of their ideas are just really strange these days.
They don't make sense, but they're being supported.
Those ideas are supported by enough people.
There's enough people that believe in them that I don't think it really is they're trying to get the Republicans elected.
I think They think that this is progress and I think what you were saying earlier about how the kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood.
They just have this idea that if they are for defunding the police, what they are for is the right side of criminal justice reform and that to be a progressive you have to recognize there's Systemic racism is the root cause of all these crimes and those need to be addressed and it's not just about locking people up in jail, which, you know, makes sense.
I really do think that there are root causes to all of these crime issues that we have in inner cities, whether it's Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago or whatever, that if they don't address those problems, all the policing in the world is not going to fix it.
And it's going to take generations because you're dealing with people that have dealt with these crime-ridden, gang-infested communities for decade after decade with no intervention whatsoever, no help.
I mean, we spend countless amounts of money Going overseas and fixing other countries.
We don't do a fucking thing about horrendous inner city conditions.
And then we get confused as to why they continue to put out violent criminals.
It is amazing to me, the impact of one man's death, the George Floyd death.
It's amazing, because if you go from that point forward, and obviously it's accentuated by the pandemic, and there was a lot of build-up to it.
There's been many, many cases of police brutality that were egregious, and people were frustrated and furious, but that was the straw.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back.
And the difference between the country the day before that happened and now is so stark that if you told me one death of a guy who was, you know, brutalized by the police and murdered in the way we all saw publicly is going to change the entire country.
I'm fascinated by people who pull the wool over incredibly rich people's eyes and hoodwink them.
She fit this perfect narrative that they were looking for.
This billionaire genius woman who's the boss lady of this company that's going to do groundbreaking new work on blood testing and it's going to revolutionize the industry and help everyone.
It was this book called Dead Souls by a Russian writer named Gogol.
And it's about a guy who basically buys a bunch of dead serfs and mortgages them because there was a loophole in Russian law back then.
The census was so slow that if you bought the equivalent of a slave...
The state bureaucracy wouldn't know that that person was dead yet.
So you could go to a bank and mortgage your slaves and get cash for them, essentially, right?
So they got one of them just sort of buying dead slaves.
But the con men are fascinating, right?
And especially in the internet age, there's so many different ways To rip people off, to scale, that I think the authorities are just always going to be a couple of steps behind.
I mean, you look at everything from Bernie Madoff to the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, which was an unbelievable story, like just basically stealing billions of dollars from investors around the world by representing a phony bond scheme.
It's just incredibly easy to do.
All you need to do is have the appearance of respectability.
Where everybody you see looks like they're sort of a natural part in the environment, but actually they've been put there for a reason to sort of mess with your perceptions of things.
And that's what happened with Theranos, with 1MDB, with the subprime mortgage scandals.
Everybody looked like they were on the up and up, but actually they were all in on it.
And there's just a lot of really interesting ways to rip people off in this environment.
It's fascinating when someone like Bernie Madoff can get so many people.
And I always thought, really I always thought before I read your coverage of the banking crisis, I thought there was someone Out there who is really clearly paying attention to all of the pieces that are moving.
And I thought it was, like, straightforward.
Like, bad example maybe, but, like, we understand how fast cars are because we know the engineers that have worked to develop the displacement and the engines and how the transmissions work.
There's a clear, trackable thing.
Like, you can't just come out with a car and say, this car goes zero to 60 in one-tenth of a second, and everyone's like, what?
What are you talking about?
How is this being made?
And this new technology that no one's ever seen before, none of that exists.
We have new tires, and it works on gravity propulsion systems.
It doesn't even have anything to do with engines.
It would be trackable, right?
Like, an engine is trackable.
I thought finances were trackable.
You think it's funny?
Well, you think it's funny because you had to do a lot of research.
And so there was an investigator, Harry Markopoulos, There was a guy sort of independently kind of figured out that there was something wrong with the situation.
And all Madoff was doing is this is a classic old-school Ponzi scheme.
You guarantee a certain amount of returns.
Some people give you some money up front.
You take all that money.
And then as new people come in, you give the early investors a little taste as if those are investment returns.
Actually, all it is is just one big fungible pile of money.
You know, and there's no investment.
There's no nothing.
It's just a con, right?
He never was doing any trading.
He wasn't doing anything.
He just had a big pile of money, and he was constantly bringing in new people.
There are a number of people who start off trying to do it right.
No, I don't know if he actually was doing trades when he stopped doing that.
But there are a number of stories about people who start off like their hedge funds.
Hedge funds don't really get checked, right?
So, if you're running a hedge fund and you want to do it right, you have some kind of investment strategy you think is going to work, so you get a whole bunch of high net worth people and you say, "Can you give me $500,000?" They all throw money in and you start investing and it doesn't work and then suddenly there's this temptation, "Well, I don't have to tell them."
I can put out a report that says we actually earned 7% or 14% this year, and no one's going to check because there isn't.
There isn't a body of the checks for that kind of investment.
So, yeah, I think the public doesn't know that there are all these sort of blank spots in the financial universe.
And that's why these sort of cons proliferate.
And it's part of what I think is motivating things like GameStop.
There's this whole crew of people who are like, you know what?
This system is so corrupt.
We're going to rig it for ourselves.
and we're going to take some of these people down And that was why there was all this joy at blowing up a couple of hedge funds because the system is – you can manipulate it and they did it.
And I think it was interesting what happened there.
The response by the authorities confirmed every suspicion of all these GameStop investors, but it didn't break them.
They're still holding, you know what I'm saying?
That whole phenomenon is fascinating, actually.
That's another story that was massively misreported.
I talked to a lot of the people who invested in GameStop, A lot of them were people who got ruined after the 2008 crash, whose families got ruined after the 2008 crash.
And this was their way of kind of getting revenge on the system.
It was a form of protest.
Now, for some people, it was just a way to make money, right?
And they thought they could just profit off this squeeze play.
But for a lot of people, this was legitimately a political rage response.
And they didn't present it that way in the news media.
They presented it as...
You know, a gang of sort of upper class people who were trying to, or middle class people who were trying to manipulate the system for gain.
And they edited out the pain part of it that motivated a lot of these people.
My next-door neighbor lost everything in 2008, back when I lived in California.
He had the property right next to mine, and he would show up.
There was nothing built on it, but he had bought this really nice property with a great view, and his dream was to build this dream home there.
And I would watch him clear it off.
All the time.
And one day I just walked up and started talking to him and I said, when are you going to build here?
And then he gave me the story that he lost everything in 2008 and he had everything all set up and he was getting ready to build and now he would just show up and like trim the grass and he was so fucking sad.
And then he stopped showing up, and then I got ahold of someone that I knew that knew him, and he was suffering from some severe health problems and eventually wound up passing away.
So it's like this guy was just crushed by this.
Just crushed.
And this is, when I'm talking to this guy, we're talking like right afterwards.
It's like 2010-ish, somewhere like there.
But I remember the look in his eye when he was talking to me about what happened with the banking crisis and the crash.
It was so depressing.
Because you should imagine if you put your faith in the system and you grinded your ass off for X amount of years and then you finally think you hit the finish line and then all this fuckery takes all your earnings away.
So all these people see that You know, banks like Chase and Goldman that were selling these mortgage-backed securities to everybody, that were letting people like Bernie Madoff run wild, that were involved in the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia that ripped off that entire country.
And they see that they're continually bailed out.
After the pandemic, the banks had their best year in history in 2020. Because why?
Because when you have the CARES Act...
You know, which is all that money from the Fed that went to rescue everybody to keep all these companies in business.
Somebody has to underwrite all that lending, right?
The Fed is basically buying all these bonds.
There's all this new lending to companies that's coming from the government.
Well, some private entity has to do all that underwriting.
So banks made like $140 or $150 billion in profits just from underwriting in 2020. So they all got rich off the bailouts.
For the pandemic, you know?
And so, which is exactly what happened after 2008. Like, not only do they get rescued for the actual crash, but the whole bailout, they got additional money for servicing the bailout.
Do you understand?
Yeah.
So people, when they ask, well, why does something like Trump happen?
It's because there's millions of people who look out there and say, I got fucked, right?
Yeah.
Those people got rescued and they don't know exactly why or how, but they know something must be wrong.
And then somebody like Trump comes along and gives them an explanation.
It makes more sense than what they're being told.
And so they vote for that person.
And that's what's going to happen now because the same thing is happening during the pandemic.
Once again, people are kind of They're struggling, they're being ruined, but the 1% is kind of being artificially sustained by this run of public support that's going to make them all rich and it's just going to drive that resentment even further.
Well, it's also the collapse of small businesses, which is a big factor in this.
The big businesses like Target and Walgreens and Walmart, they expanded and they actually profited from the pandemic, whereas these other stores that were forced to close down, they were forced to not be open or to have extreme limitations, they suffered greatly.
And again, this is another classic consequence of a bailout.
After 2008, there was a thing called the implied bailout.
So just the fact that the public knows that the government is never going to let JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America go out of business, It allows them to borrow money more cheaply than some local bank, right?
The government might let a local bank go out of business.
So when they go out into the open market to borrow money, it costs more.
Like, the investors, the people who are lending them money, are going to demand more from that small bank than they're going to demand from Chase because they know That the government's never going to let them go out of business.
They're not going to lose on that investment.
So it creates artificially an advantage for the big company versus the small company.
And that's what happened with the CARES Act.
Again, the market looks out at this and they say, okay, well...
American Airlines is never going to go out of business.
Like, absolutely for sure.
You know, the government's going to step in and save them.
They've demonstrated that now.
But maybe some smaller airline, they might let go out of business.
Another thing that happened after 2008 was when they took the failing companies like Washington Mutual, rather than break them up into smaller parts so they could become independent small enterprises, what they did is they folded them all into The big companies.
They got companies like Chase and Bank of America to buy up these smaller entities.
So they took an already concentrated marketplace and they made it more concentrated.
They made the big companies that were already too big to fail, they made them Even too big to failure.
You know what I'm saying?
So that's happening again.
And it's again, it's going to drive resentment.
You add the fact that kind of small business people tend to be the kind of people who are, you know, Republican Trump supporters who are being vilified, right?
And, you know, it's going to drive that resentment even further.
It's also expanding the power that pharmaceutical drug companies have.
And the concern with that is like, it's not that pharmaceutical drug companies are inherently 100% evil.
No, they produce drugs that are very beneficial to people.
And we all are better off because of them.
You know, there's drugs that help people with all sorts of diseases and all sorts of cures and Great.
But all these corporations operate under the premise that every year is going to be better than the year before.
How the fuck do you do that when you have this insane windfall?
You have this insane year where you're making untold billions of dollars.
If somebody pointed out to me what Moderna's first quarter of what a quarter of this year looks like, the difference between how much they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off of everything else, and it's A giant percentage of the profit.
Something crazy like that, but more than three is the vaccine.
It's something nutty like that.
But the point is, you can't do that if they don't need them anymore.
Like, imagine if the vaccine cured everybody.
There's no more need for a vaccine.
It's a one-shot deal like polio or like the measles.
And then all that profit goes away.
Well, you have stakeholders.
You have stockholders.
You have a responsibility to your company.
You're supposed to have growth this year.
How come this year we're down 75%?
Well, sir, the pandemic's gone.
It's over.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We've got to figure out a way to make more money.
This is what corporations do.
And I'm not insinuating that they're going to start a pandemic or fake pandemic or come up with some reason why they should give people medication they don't need.
Suddenly, we start finding out that every kid in the country needs to be medicated for ADHD and that there are people trying to pass laws in various states that would mandate that as a treatment.
Again, they have an incentive to try to create that market.
Or let's just say there's a drug that if you split it into two generics, it costs a dollar for people to use.
But there's a new drug on the market that combines both of them and It costs $80 a dose or something like that.
They're going to be incentivized to try to get people to take that drug instead of the two separate generics, even though that's not good for the consumer.
There's so many different ways that these companies prey on people.
This even removes from the equation the fact that a lot of their R&D is publicly funded.
They get NIH grants, and in the case of the pandemic, they're specifically given significant amounts of taxpayer money to research into the vaccines, and they're going to make all the profits from that.
It's going to be fascinating to see just if you were objective, if you were an alien from another planet and you were observing these industries, you'd be fascinating just to watch without any horror how they figure out a way to try to make as much money.
Say if the virus goes away.
And, you know, whether it mutates into a form like what happened with the Spanish flu where it's non-lethal and it gets to some new place where it's not what we have to worry about anymore.
Yeah, they do because, well, they're looking for fear.
But what they're doing with pharmaceutical companies and advertising, I want to play you this because I was watching this last night.
I was watching some fights and this came up and I had to record it because I'm like, this is one of the fucking wackiest things I have ever heard in my life.
Listen to what they're saying of the side effects of this shit.
unidentified
For adults with insomnia, prescription baby go can help.
It sounds like finally I've got a solution to my insomnia.
But the idea that they're allowed to do this manipulative advertising on vulnerable people that are seeking some sort of a solution to whatever health problem they have is goddamn crazy.
Like, if you really believe that, if you really believe that unvaccinated people are the cause of all the suffering, Shame on anybody who doesn't get the vaccine.
Then you would push for a patent waiver so that everybody else in the world, with whom you are connected, you know?
The world is interconnected.
If you really believe that, that is what you would do.
You would push for a patent waiver.
Instead, they are protecting the profits of these companies very quietly.
There's not a whole lot of controversy in the news media about Whether or not the Biden administration is going to lean on these companies to give up their cash cow.
So they're allowing the companies to just rake in these billions of dollars, and they villainize the people in this country who voluntarily don't get the vaccine.
Well, they've learned their lesson from ivermectin, because ivermectin is now a generic drug, and that's one of the reasons why it's demonized, the fact that you can't...
No one owns a patent on it.
It's very cheap to make.
Now, coincidentally, Africa is one of the least vaccinated places on Earth and has the lowest number of cases.
It's fucking bonkers, and they don't know why.
They're trying to figure out why.
There's no...
Real understanding of why Africa, I think Africa has like 6% of its population has been vaccinated, but it has some of the lowest instances of COVID infection on Earth.
Well, there's a widespread use of ivermectin because of river blindness and because of...
I think they use it for yellow fever.
I think for dengue.
I think it's used for other things as well.
And there's also a widespread use of hydroxychloroquine.
I'm not saying that that's the reason.
I mean, maybe it's some of these areas are not coming into contact, regular contact with people from these countries that have high instances of infection.
I don't know what the fucking answer is, but it's kind of crazy.
There's a lot of messy studies out there, apparently.
When you talk to people that really understand the science behind it, they're sounding like, There's too many different studies.
Some studies where they used it in prophylaxis.
There's studies that used it early on.
There's studies that used it late term, which is clearly much less effective.
Where it seems to have some potential is early on and in prophylaxis.
But again, there is no rock-solid data.
But what I found fascinating, I had no idea when I took it, when I took it with all those other things that I took, that that one thing would be a big deal.
I really had no idea.
I thought I would just tell people, hey, I feel good already.
It's only been three days.
This is what I took.
And people would go, oh, well, you should have got vaccinated.
I expected that.
But what I didn't expect was this one particular drug to be the thing that was on everybody's radar.
And then when he came on the podcast and it just didn't go so good for him, that was a recognition like, oh, we've fucking played a terrible hand here.
Journalists used to know that we're not rocket scientists.
That's why we're in this business.
Most of us flunked out of something real, like law or medicine or whatever.
We're like professional test crammers.
We get an assignment, we try to learn as much as we can about it in 36 hours, and then we tell you about it.
We're not that smart.
It's a tough job, but it's not like a...
Hard intellectual discipline, but they pontificate on the air and they pretend that they have this special access to special knowledge and that they're a level above the common run of people.
It's just – it's kind of a Wizard of Oz thing where they're trying to project this image of all-knowingness and superiority, moral rectitude, infallibility.
But all they're really doing is telling people that they have a lack of humility and a lack of self-knowledge.
Exactly.
And it's really unfortunate because it wasn't that long ago that people like Walter Cronkite were the most trusted people in the country precisely because they kind of had this attitude of, you know, Well, we're curious.
We don't really know.
That was the way they presented the news back in the day.
It started with the people after all the president's men came out.
Because before that, in my father's era, journalism was more like a trade.
You know, you were more likely to be the son or the daughter, more likely the son.
It was almost all male back then.
But, you know, of an electrician or a plumber or something, like, it was not something that upper-class Ivy League kids went into once upon a time, like, back in the 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
Then it became a sexy profession after all the president's men.
After Watergate, everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein.
Hunter Thompson helped make it a little bit sexy.
Rolling Stone, all that, their coverage.
And it became a place for upper-class white kids to try to make their way.
It became a fashionable profession.
And I saw this sort of Transformation because when I started covering presidential campaigns on the plane, and this was back when presidential campaigns had planes full of journalists.
They don't have that anymore.
Like now there's only a couple who follow the people around.
Like everybody's doing it by wire service reports now for the most part.
If you were following John Kerry in 2004, which I did, you would have Kerry and the aides would be up in the equivalent of the first class section, and the entire back of the plane would be media, right?
And You know, 80, 90, 100 reporters, you know, a couple of, you know, some of them would be camera people, some of them would be tech people.
But what was so interesting for me is there was a mix on the plane.
Some of them were sort of the old hands who had been doing this since the 70s.
And they were much more kind of skeptical.
They were much more likely to look at politicians like They're all pieces of shit.
I don't really care.
Like, in both parties, I don't believe anything they say, but I'm gonna sort of report it.
Like, that's my job.
But this newer generation, the younger generation, they were so excited by—they were jazzed by the proximity to an important person, you know?
And I think it was symbolized by something like Primary Colors.
I remember in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson was talking about how he had freedom because he wasn't coming back.
And so many of these guys were coming back and so they had to sort of like follow...
Some protocol or follow some rules and you know he did like when he was Pretending that Hubert Humphrey was on drugs right in the game Yeah, making up fact that a Brazilian doctor had come to work on him like he had this freedom to do that right they didn't have and he Had the freedom to look at it honestly to look at it the way he thought The fucker he was Yeah,
and you should always, as a journalist, you should never expect to retain your friends because you will eventually have to write something negative about somebody who you've become friendly with.
So if you go into this business to be socially successful, you're in the wrong business.
It is possible, but for the most part, if you're trying to be friends with people you're covering, it's not going to work.
Right, it's not going to work.
And so what's regrettable about now is a lot of the people who are in journalism, they're upper class.
They are socially the same people that they're reporting on, whereas there used to be much more of a class difference.
You never had a phenomenon before—well, it was much more rare before to have a situation, especially in local journalism, where the reporter was somebody who saw himself or herself as being like— Traveling in the same circles as the mayor or a senator or the CEO of a company.
They just didn't really mix like that.
So they were outsiders who were reporting and they didn't really mind offending people because, what the fuck, they're not my friends.
But these people are all friends.
Like Rachel Manow and Democratic Party politicians, they're They're friends.
You know, it's a great story that's sort of apropos to all this.
In Seymour Hersh's book, his memoir, Reporter, there's a story about how In the early 90s, the CIA wanted everybody to know that they had caught, I think it was an Israeli spy.
And so they called up Hirsch because Hirsch was the biggest investigative reporter in the country.
And they invited him in.
And they said, look, we're going to show you all this material.
They brought him into a room and they just gave him a whole packet of stuff.
But his entire body rebelled.
He's like, I had spent my whole life Getting the things, I could not be handed the things.
You know what I mean?
Because it's just not in his nature to be spoon-fed.
I think that's true with comics, with any kind of journalist.
Once you start getting handed things, then you've lost.
You know what I mean?
They have you at that point.
And you got to get out of that habit, you know?
It's like, or you just never, you can't cross that line.
But if you want to be on a talk show, you have to cross that line.
There's no other way you get on that show.
You can't get on that show and have some real counterculture narrative that is not approved and sanctioned and you spit it out there on NBC for the masses.
I remember when my father used to work for NBC and when the The tech workers, NABIT, the union, when they went on strike, NBC brought in a bunch of scabs to cross the picket line and do all their work for them.
Letterman used to get them to screw up, basically.
In other words, the cameras would go back and forth.
So he was taking a dig at management, which was kind of cool.
Yeah, there's a lot of daring motherfuckers out there.
Bill Burr, who's one of the best of all time.
He's phenomenal.
And he's killing it right now.
He's fighting it.
He's not giving in to it at all.
He's fighting it.
And there's...
There's a lot of guys like that out there now.
There's guys coming up like Tim Dillon, Andrew Schultz, Mark Norman, Shane Gillis.
There's a lot of funny fucking young guys that are coming out that are dedicated to real stand-up.
There's a lot of people out there that are dedicated to being journalists and they're just trying to find their way through and they really respect real journalism.
Well, we use yonder bags now for a lot of shows, which helps that.
Because everyone's phones are locked up.
Oh, right.
Because everyone just wants to film everything now, which is bad for the experience watching it.
Just take it in.
Just like you take in everything else in life.
We have to learn how to take things in and enjoy the moment.
I mean, I went to see The Stones recently, and I'm guilty of it too because I took a couple pictures and some video, but I'm like, God, I need to just take this in.
How many times am I going to get to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards alive on stage jamming and have it be really good?