Trump, Putin, Biden, You ｜ Matt Taibbi ｜ EP 392 (WG5klNmzKlU)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WG5klNmzKlU

the journalists, the donors, and the parties got so used to being able to almost completely control who got to be the nominee that when someone came along and disrupted the whole pattern, they didn’t know how to respond to it except with total rage and incomprehension. And they didn’t realize that Trump was just being smart and running against the system. And it was scoring heavily with people all over the play across the political spectrum. Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I’m speaking with author and journalist Matt Taibbi. We discuss his early career both in journalism and professional basketball, his time in the USSR learning Russian and publishing a successful gonzo-inspired newspaper, and his breaking coverage of the subprime mortgage bubble. We also examine the state of the world today with Russia and the US military-industrial complex, the upcoming presidential election, and the dire necessity for alternative news sources. Matt, I have to know, what was it like playing for the Uzbek national baseball team? That was great actually. At the time I was trying to be a freelance reporter in Uzbekistan. I was really young in my 20s and I walked by a university field and saw a bunch of Cubans playing baseball. So they were I think Cuban refrigeration students and I was the only American on the team. We had a fun time playing against other Central Asian teams. And we had one funny story, we had ground rules. If you hit a sheep at one field it was a triple, if you hit a cow it was a double. And if you knocked the cow out, was that a home run or was it a consequence of the degree of damage? I don’t think we ever got that far. So your career plan was to be an independent journalist in Uzbekistan and that didn’t work out. So you turned to pro baseball. Well at the time I was more interested in being a writer just generally than being a reporter. I thought I had been living in St. Petersburg which was filled at the time with freelance journalists and I thought I’m not getting a lot of work. I’ll move to a place where there are no reporters. So I moved to the middle of nowhere, basically waited for something to happen so that I could get a byline and a wire service or something like that. But I figured while I was there maybe I could do something like write a book about playing baseball for the Uzbeks. And I ended up doing that kind of thing a lot. I moved to Mongolia later, played basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association. Well that was my next question, okay, because that’s obviously the logical career progression move for someone who’s a journalist in Uzbekistan and then playing baseball is to go to Mongolia and play pro basketball. So tell me about that. Yeah that happened because I was working in Moscow for an expat paper called the Moscow Times which still exists. And I played a lot of street basketball back in those days at Moscow State University. You’ve probably seen pictures. It’s got that beautiful gigantic sort of wedding cake skyscraper building in the background. I used to go there in the afternoons and play hoops. And there was a kid there from Mongolia who told me they had a league in Mongolia called the NBA which was the only basketball league in the world that played by NBA rules with a 24 second clock and everything. So I quit my job the next day, got on the train and got on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and went to Mongolia, had a tryout, played for a season in the Mongolian Basketball Association. So were you big among the Mongolian fangirls? A little bit, you know. It was actually quite an experience. Mongolia at the time was very basketball crazy and there’s a long story about why. But basically every Mongolian kid was playing basketball in the early 90s. And my friends were big celebrities in the country. One of my teammates was considered the Mongolian Jordan. So everywhere I went there were lots of people following us around. It was pretty cool. Well that’s all completely unexpected and crazy. Now you also went to the Leningrad Polytechnic. Was it the St. Petersburg Polytechnic by then? And why did you end up in the domiciles of the former Soviet Union? How did that all come about? And why did you decide to stay there for a number of years? When I was a kid I was fairly lonely and depressed and introverted. And the thing that I found that became my escape in life is that I fell in love with comic fiction and my favorite writers were all Russian writers like Gogol and Bulgakov. And my decision as a very young man was to move to the then Soviet Union and learn Russian so that I could read those books in the original language. So when I studied originally it was actually still Leningrad Polytechnic. I’m old enough to have gone to school in the Soviet Union and I went there to study Russian even though it was a polytechnical school. They had a Russian language faculty for all the new students and that’s what I did there. So did you read The Master and Margarita in the original Russian? I did. That’s a tough one. I’m not going to lie. It’s a tough book man. Yes some of the Russian writers are easier than others to read for a foreigner. I would say Tolstoy is easier. He’s just very clear. But there’s a tradition of a different kind of writer. Unfortunately like my favorite Gogol, Dostoevsky is another one. Bulgakov they use very very convoluted long sentences. But they’re beautiful. I mean Russian is a beautiful language. Yeah well The Master and Margarita that’s I don’t know maybe is that the most complex dreamlike novel ever written? It might be. I think I’ve read it three times. You know it’s a crazy book. I mean it’s got five or six things going on at the same time all of which are preposterous and surreal and it’s very very sophisticated multi-layered work. I mean it’s really quite the piece of fiction. I can understand why you would be motivated to learn Russian although that’s a hell of a motivation to read it. Now you also worked at a newspaper in Moscow. Was that The Exile? Was that what it was called? Originally I worked at the Moscow Times which was sort of the straight news newspaper for the big burgeoning expat community which was quite large in the 90s in Moscow. And then I left that and ended up co-starting my own newspaper called The Exile which was kind of a cross of Time Out and Screw magazine. It’s hard to explain but it was sort of a satirical nightlife guide let’s put it that way and it’s gotten me in some trouble you know in my later years. But it was an experiment in extreme free speech doing everything the way a normal newspaper would do it but backwards. We had corrections for things that had never appeared in the paper. I mean we tried to make an absolute joke of the whole newspaper format. How did that go over in Moscow? I mean it’s not exactly known as a bastion of free speech. So how did that work out? It actually worked out brilliantly believe it or not. The people who are in Moscow in the 90s and especially the late 90s that was a crazy city. It was a lot like the Wild West or Chicago in the 1930s. This was a place where you know a superpower had just dissolved. The laws had not yet been built back up. People were making fortunes overnight. There was gunfire in the streets. People were being defenestrated left and right. It was not uncommon to see dead bodies. So a newspaper like ours actually fit right in with the tenor of that whole community. We were quite popular. We actually made money. We were profitable. It was a normal small business that made money and it worked out quite well for a while but you know eventually there came a time when Putin came to power where you know the paper was just not tolerated. And so what happened when it became not tolerated? Were you still around? I had left by that time. I already left in 2002 but shortly after that the paper got a visit from the tax police and you know whereas before we could always pay a bribe and make them go away this time they weren’t satisfied with that and the paper ultimately got closed. Yeah well you know a state is corrupt when you can’t even bribe it. Right? Yeah I mean that’s what’s an honest person to do in Russia at that point. So right exactly well at least when you’re dealing with someone with whom you share a common language of greed you can understand what they’re up to but once you’re out in the moral hinterlands where that doesn’t work God only knows what’s up their sleeves. So were you a fan of the guns of journalists like Hunter S Thompson? He’s probably the canonical example. I was. I was a fan of Hunter Thompson. I read him actually later in life than some other journalists. I was probably more of a fan earlier of H.L. Mencken but I loved Hunter Thompson. In fact at one point I got hired by a publishing company to try to put together an anthology of gonzo journalism and that project ended up failing when I realized mid-project that gonzo was a term that had no meaning other than Hunter Thompson. So unless we were going to put together just a whole book full of Hunter’s articles it wasn’t going to actually work. But I was definitely a fan of his writing. Yeah well he was definitely a singular creature. I mean fear and loathing in Las Vegas is quite the piece of work and he wrote one on the Hells Angels and one about the campaign trail. They’re all great books right really iconic 60s works and I also really liked Tom Wolf especially the electric Kool-Aid no no no no yeah the electric Kool-Aid acid test. Yes exactly and candy-colored tangerine flake baby that’s also a great collection of essays. He wasn’t as much of a gonzo journalist as Thompson but man he had an eye for the times and he could sure write man those those articles are so brilliantly plotted in books. Yeah he really nailed it so and Thompson is just of course a complete bloody scream. So absolutely and it’s interesting up until pretty recently there was always a very strong tradition in American journalism of the narratively interesting journalists and that’s kind of been driven out of modern journalism unfortunately I would say. Yes now we just have the pathologically uninteresting mediocre boring lying journalist type mostly in the legacy media. Yeah it’s so pathetic and appalling. The New York Times today reported on underground climate change. Yeah I mean it’s not a good sign when you’re writing in the old boring format of the New York Times but it doesn’t even have the upside of being semi-reliable like the New York Times so that’s that’s kind of a double whammy. That’s for sure that’s for sure yeah that’s right I mean at least when those enterprises were let’s say more conservative in the traditional sense you could vaguely assume that some of what they were reporting bore some relationship to the facts and so that that was quite a relief and it’s really quite a catastrophe to see these places fall apart actually you know I mean there’s a satirical part of me I suppose and a somewhat cynical part that celebrates the demise of institutions like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because for all its abysmal Canadian centralist niceness it was at least a reliable purveyor of information and to some degree culture for you know 30 years something like that and you know in many ways it did its job and I think you could say the same thing although the New York Times you know had some pretty bloody egregious sins on its conscience at least some of the time what it was producing bore some resemblance to news instead of whatever the hell it is they’re doing now which is you know almost impossible to comprehend either conceptually or or metaphysically. It’s it’s true yeah it’s funny I interviewed Noam Chomsky at one point because I wanted to write a book that was going to be a rethink of manufacturing consent which is his famous book of media criticism and that book is actually is full of criticism of the New York Times but when I asked him about the Times he said you know people got the wrong idea about my book you know the New York Times is full of facts it’s just got lots of problems you have to learn to read it and fight through the biases that are in it and you know so I think unfortunately the the lack of attention paid to the factual aspect has taken away some important value from those institutions. So when were you at the Polytechnic what what years were that? Oh that would have been I was in Russia studying in 89 and 90 primarily and then I you really were there during the wild times in in Russia. Yeah and then I stayed in Russia I went back after school and I stayed from 1991 till about 2002 there were some trips in between. So what do you think so you you have a real personal connection with that country obviously and a pretty detailed knowledge of it what do you have to say if anything and what are your thoughts on what’s happening on there with regard to the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Well first of all that situation is extraordinarily complicated it’s been frustrating for me to watch the coverage of you know the Russia-Ukraine conflict you know people not understanding the history of places like Crimea or how far back some some of these conflicts in places like Lupansk and Donbass go. I don’t at all agree with the invasion you know by Vladimir Putin in fact we were very heavy critics of Putin from the start when he came to power but you know there’s a long backstory here with the United States support of Ukraine and some pretty questionable kind of far-right elements in Ukraine as a way to sort of undermine. Yeah pretty questionable. Yeah exactly yeah so this goes back you know decades before even the collapse of the Soviet Union and a lot of that background is left out of all this it’s kind of an open question in my mind whether we ever really entertained a situation where NATO wasn’t going to expand all the way to Russia’s borders. I think you know there’s a reason why a lot of academics in 1997 pretty conservative ones were signing an open letter urging the American authorities not to keep pushing NATO towards Russia. Well Boris Johnson announced today that the expansion of NATO into Ukraine should be of no concern to the Russians. Yeah I don’t understand that I mean I keep seeing that. Well I think he’s trying to I think he’s trying to top his net zero idiocy personally. Maybe that’s possible but you know think of the legends in the United States right we have movies like 13 Days where you know the the arrival of one missile or a couple of missiles in Cuba is grounds to you know start this awesome confrontation risking nuclear annihilation for the entire planet but we think the Russians shouldn’t object if they’re surrounded on all sides by military bases. Should they respond by invading another country? I don’t agree with that but I certainly understand knowing this just from talking to Russians while I was there what their feelings are about NATO. They’re very nervous about it they’ve always been since the early 90s it’s a situation they’ve been conscious of the whole time and I think Americans don’t understand that. 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Well you know I think we had a real opportunity to bring permanent peace, to put in place a permanent peace with the Russians and that could have happened during the 90s and we pretty much followed that up as badly as we possibly could have and now we’re paying the price and God only knows how that pot brewing in Russia and Ukraine is gonna, what the consequence of its continued bubbling way in the background are going to be. It’s very distressing and the fact that more attention isn’t paid to it and the fact that there seems to be no real attempts to bring about anything that looks like a serious attempt at peace talks is really quite the staggering miracle to me. So I don’t know what the hell we think we’re playing at exactly and I can’t understand for the life of me what the end game is. You know I’ve talked to a lot of hawks in Washington and these are people whose views I generally respect and you know their sense was that if the West had to spend several tens of billions of dollars, although it’s rocketed beyond that now, to weaken Russia’s conventional military that that might not be such a bad investment you know and I have some qualms about that theory because it isn’t obvious to me that a weak nuclear armed country is less dangerous than a strong nuclear armed country and I think you could have an intelligent discussion about that but I also don’t think that weakening Germany after the first world war turned out to be such a brilliant idea either and so and I guess I also think that like wouldn’t it be better all things considered if Russia and the West were allied let’s say and presented a stable unitary front in relationship say to the Chinese I mean just to throw that out there and I think we could have had that and it seems to me that it’s a lot of leftover Cold War era thinking in some ways and I suppose some real self-interest on the part of the military industrial complex that’s kept this war brewing and I don’t know it seems to me that the primary beneficiaries of the current situation in the Ukraine are arms manufacturers and the self-same military industrial complex and they don’t have Afghanistan anymore keep things keep the market hopping but they’ve certainly got a war that could go on forever or expand quite nicely in Russia and the Ukraine I mean do you think I’m missing something in that analysis undoubtedly right because it’s a complex situation but I think that’s that’s pretty much right I think we had an opportunity to genuinely bring in the Russians at least as a strategic partner you know there was always going to be some friction there the two countries both see themselves as superpowers there’s some resentment some cultural resentment that’s true in both places where you know neither of them wants to concede that the other is more powerful so there’s always going to be some difficulty between those two countries but they did agree on things like you know facing Islamic terrorism together right I think you I think they demonstrated that kind of cooperation was possible but the people you reference the kind of hawkish contingent within the foreign policy elite in Washington I think if you ask them deep down what the end game to all this the answer they would come up with is regime change in Russia I think they were I think they really believe that yeah and so what’s that going to be what’s that going to be a man we’re going to get someone better than Putin are we given Russia’s history and then maybe we could have instead a fractured state and so then what would we have we’d have the control of nuclear weapons in the hands of essentially warlords if the state collapsed like what the hell would be the positive regime change here exactly we’d get some real democrat in Russia it’s like I don’t think so that seems to me to be preposterously naive because where in Russia his in his where in Russian history could you find one example of that that you could point to that’s even vaguely credible and if you want Russian leaders worse than Putin that’s a very very long list so I just don’t understand that at all and the danger of the breakup of the country especially given our dependence on I mean the world’s dependence on Russia for certain necessities energy for example for the Europeans or ammonia for food production or edible wheat there’d be another one you know it’s like for obviously we’re strategically aligned in many ways with Russia and the idea that there’s going to be some magical transformation of regime that’s going to make them easier to get along with is like why would you think that I mean dead seriously I don’t understand how anybody could possibly imagine that well it’s the same an era of vision that we had going into Iraq where we imagined that we could roll tanks into Baghdad and establish Switzerland overnight it doesn’t really work that way there’s history and a long cultural tradition that you have to take into account but you know that war was launched by people who didn’t even know there was a difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims and you know this war I think is being prosecuted by people who have no conception of Russian history Far Eastern history you know the inability of democracy to really ever take hold in that part of the world if you’re sincerely hoping that somebody better than Putin is going to come along if you depose that person that you’re not looking honestly I think at that country’s past yeah well that that’s certainly how it seems to me so I don’t know what the hell we’re playing at and I think that I really think that what’s happening is that because I’ve been trying to account for the absolute idiocy of Western foreign policy in relationship to Russia for the last 30 years criminally negligent to say the least and I think really what likely happened is that clueless people gave the foreign policy situation kind of a back seat and so it was never a pressing concern like it might have been in the aftermath of the cold war and then there’s constant pressure from the munitions manufacturers etc to keep a warlike hawk-like stance at hand and I can understand that you know like if you’re a munitions manufacturer obviously you’re going to be somewhat paranoid with regard to the stability of foreign affairs in your public pronouncements and likely your beliefs and since you have a pecuniary interest in the outcome the your ability to continually foster a pro-hawk pro-paranoid anti-Russian view well that’s always going to be there because why wouldn’t it be and if there isn’t something to offset that that’s continual like a real effort to make peace for example then that’s not going to happen you know and you think well peace with Russia is impossible I would say yeah that’s what people said about the Middle East too and then some some relatively radical non-professional diplomats decided they were going to do something about it and hammered together the Abraham Accords in basically no time flat and so the idea and they just walked around the State Department to do that and they did that with a tremendous degree of success and if the Biden administration hadn’t been so juvenile and resentful they would have patted Trump on the back for having accomplished that I always thought you know they would have given Trump the bloody Nobel Prize or maybe a medal at the White House for his work on the Abraham Accords he might have just ridden off into the sunset happy right instead of hanging around well absolutely absolutely and then the Saudis would have signed the Abraham Accords because they were basically chomping at the bit to do so and then you Americans could have had access to Saudi oil instead of having Biden go cap in hand to them after insulting them terribly and not noting what they did for example behind the scenes for the Abraham Accords and walking away empty-handed you know like Jesus you can’t make this stuff up you know and I’ve talked to Democrats about this I said why the hell don’t you celebrate Trump at least for the bloody Abraham Accords and their response to me is always well you know they’re not as good as they look it’s like well yeah compared to what anything you guys managed for like 70 years they’re pretty damn good as a first step I mean there’s real there’s actually peace breaking out between Israel and a variety of Arab states and like who the hell would have ever predicted that the idea we couldn’t do that with Russia especially given our mutual apprehension let’s say of the Chinese and well warranted apprehension I think that’s utterly preposterous so I also know from behind the scenes that you know there were peace talks in the offings in March of 2022 and they were scuttled by the US administration and so you know that’s pretty damn unforgivable as far as I’m concerned and we flag wave and hop up and down morally about supporting the Democrats you know the and this desire for democracy in Ukraine all the while you know conveniently ignoring the fact that Ukraine has just as totalitarian history as the rest of the former Soviet Union and are hardly paragons of moral virtue by any stretch of the imagination and are unlikely to overnight to turn overnight into Switzerland as was precisely the case in Iraq so like I don’t understand it man I don’t see what’s going on at all and it’s a bloody dangerous game that we’re playing yeah even even more disappointing from my point of view is at least during the Iraq war there was an anti-war movement that was visible in the United States there was an incredible episode early in this whole situation where I think a handful of members of the house put together what they called the peace letter which very generically suggested that maybe opening peace talks might be a good idea at some point they weren’t suggesting that Ukraine surrender or that you know they stopped fighting or anything along those lines but even within that coalition the idea collapsed and they ended up kind of snitching on each other in the media and there was no effort along those lines so there’s there’s no longer an anti-war coalition of any kind anywhere in American politics you know that even even does symbolic politics yeah left or right you know and it’s really it’s really quite something it’s quite the miracle to see it’s very it’s really incomprehensible in many ways I can’t I can’t wrap my head around it all right so you were in the former Soviet Union during the insane 90s when did you come back to the states like and I don’t know what happened to you say between say about the year 2000 and 2004 you started to work for Rolling Stone in 2004 so what did you do after you had completed whatever it was you were up to in these multiple adventures in the former Soviet Union and how do we know where you’re not a Russian spy by the way? Well the Russians would never hire somebody like me to be a spy I think I’m the wrong type for them but I see so it’s in it’s in it’s on the basis of your self-perceived incompetence that we should trust you yeah exactly I’d be unable to keep quiet about it I think is the problem right right right noisy journalists don’t make the best spies exactly exactly um I had been in you know while I was at the exile Rolling Stone had actually done a story about our newspaper in the late 90s so I had some contact with the magazine before I came back to the states I came back in 2002 I briefly tried to start a newspaper in Buffalo called The Beast which was modeled out on the exile but pretty quickly got a call from Rolling Stone from the editor there who remembered me had been keeping an eye on me and suggested that I go out and start covering the campaign that was just starting in 2003 so really almost as soon as I came back to the United States I started working for Rolling Stone essentially as a campaign reporter to start and eventually as more of a financial investigative reporter so what did you learn we were talking about Hunter S Thompson earlier and famously he wrote a book called Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail if I remember correctly which is quite the riotous account what did you learn about American yeah yeah absolutely absolutely and and it’s a book I mean it’s a very interesting piece of cultural history now but it’s certainly a book that stands on its own merits as well as being an interesting journalistic account what did you learn about the American political system that that that you didn’t know and that was surprising serving as a campaign reporter well my first complication in covering American politics having come from the former Soviet Union was that in post-communist Russia everything was visible you could see which mafia interests were supporting which politician you could see the real financial interests behind every contract that was given out by the government the corruption was as clear as it would have been if you were taking one of those tours with a glass bottom boat looking at the bottom of the ocean in the United States you know I know I went out in the campaign trail I’m going out in the campaign trail listening to these people give one speech after another where they said absolutely nothing for a long time I was really puzzled by it I thought there had to be another layer of something to American politics that was more interesting than this and for a long time I was really very frustrated by the predictability of the American political system the way there was kind of a conspiracy of interests I would say between the donors the campaign journalists and the political parties to really very strictly control who got to be considered a legitimate and serious candidate and who didn’t and they did this through a variety of means they use sort of code words you know somebody like Dennis Kucinich would be dismissed as fringe or elfin and Howard Dean would be called pointed and angry but John Kerry was nuanced and warm right and this is how we signaled to audiences that this was the climate change making him warm by the way right exactly yeah otherwise he wasn’t terribly warm I would say but I think you know and this is all a preview to the Trump experience because I think what happened was the journalists the donors and the parties got so used to being able to almost completely control who got to be the nominee that when someone came along and disrupted the whole pattern they didn’t know how to respond to it except with total rage and incomprehension they thought something must be totally amiss somebody must be cheating somehow and they didn’t realize that Trump was just being smart and running against the system I mean I recognize this pretty early in 2016 which was he was running against the journalists he was running against the donors he was running against the fake two-party system which was really a one-party system and it was scoring heavily with people all over the play across the political spectrum but nobody really wanted to admit that they just wanted to make him out to be this very scary villain and even though some of those things they said about him were true they were kind of missing the point of what what that campaign was about and why it succeeded starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to Shopify it’s easier than ever Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout up to 36 percent better compared to 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you know it’s not that obvious because if you if you associate with people who are highly accomplished many of them would have to set aside the concerns they’re already engaged in which are often large-scale concerns to consider something like a political career and so if you’re someone who has the chops to be president which should mean that you’re good at a lot of things it isn’t obvious that political power per se would dangle as the greatest possible opportunity right maybe you could be coerced or enticed into running for leadership because a lot of people come to you and say you know we really need someone like you which is the best way to to become a leader by the way but other than that you know you’re sort of about your own business whereas clinton was she was making a beeline for the presidency certainly even while her husband was president and so and then of course her and her foolish and treacherous advisors i would say decided that it was perfectly good thing to sacrifice the american working class on the altar of their purported moral virtue and she sunk herself doing that and it was it was an act of true hubris and foolishness right because clint trump didn’t so much win that election as clinton lost it because it was hers for the taking had she not been who she was i would say fundamentally and especially had she not stabbed the american working class in the back and of course they turned to trump for odd reasons you know because it isn’t obvious that this sort of brash flashy billionaire would or at least multimillionaire would appeal to working class people they’re not of the same economic class obviously but you know i had a wise working class guy i once worked for back in the 1970s he was a conservative not a socialist and i was at that time i was about 14 i was pretty entranced by socialist ideas and the socialist party in alberta by province had a pretty good small business platform and i said why the hell don’t you vote for the socialists they have a lot better platform for your endeavor than the conservatives who are a party of big business and he said small business owners don’t want to be small business owners they want to be big business owners and people vote their dreams not their reality and i thought oh my god that’s so smart and you know and then i thought too with regards to trump is that even though his wealth was unimaginably out of reach for the typical working-class person i think people could look at trump and think well there are conceivable universes in which i could be donald trump right or this is what i would do with that money yeah yeah right right right right and then he also had this capacity to speak off the cuff and directly to people you know and i heard from people who were around trump especially when he was talking to military personnel that he was actually very good at that and the same people who made that comment had been around other politicians who were often flummoxed and intimidated when they were talking to real servicemen you know because well first of all there was a cultural gap between them and second you know they felt morally intimidated in the face of people who’d actually put themselves on the line but trump seemed to have that ability to talk directly to working-class people and you know you have to be a certain kind of person to do that what one kind of person you have to be is someone who actually regards the working class and what they’re capable of doing which is working with the degree of respect that’s actually appropriate you know and i mean i’ve worked with lots of working-class people contractors and so forth and i have lots of working-class jobs and you’re an absolute bloody fool if you don’t have respect for you know electricians and plumbers and carpenters and and people who keep everything going who are truly competent because that requires a high level of honesty and expertise and communicative ability and planning and and real knowledge and so trump seemed to be able to deal with people like that maybe because he had so much experience on the on the construction yeah the irony of that is is that uh hillary clinton tried to run actually she quite successfully ran a similar campaign towards the end of her duel with barack obama um in the pennsylvania primary she ran as the avatar of the white working class you might remember she had all these speeches about being the granddaughter of you know a worker in a lace factory and she seemed to really enjoy that role and in all the different personas that i’ve seen her try to play on the stump and she has many of them um that was the one i thought she did best at uh but she reverted in 2016 to trying to sell herself as the most experienced insider which was a catastrophic strategic error in a year where there was an unprecedented level of distrust towards washington um the the degree to which they were blind to that was kind of amazing to me and you know you you brought up honor thompson before he actually had a metaphor that really described how that happens he talked about how if you go hunting in normal times you can’t get within a thousand yards of a bull elk like it’s sensitive to the smallest sound in the forest that will never let you get near it but when it’s in heat you know you you can drive right past it and you know it won’t even know that you’re there it’s so focused on it’s you know its goal of mating right and that’s exactly what politicians who see the presidency are like um they become blind to just about everything but power and they don’t think strategically anymore and i think that happened to the democrats in 2016 they they just were not paying attention to all the different signs that were so obvious to everybody you’d think with all their polling and all their hypothetical reliance on their idiot consultants that they would have been clued in to some degree and of course clinton always also allied herself with the progressive front of the democrats and that certainly wasn’t something in keeping with the basic sentiments of the working class that she also stuck a shiv in so she certainly deserved to lose and um whether we deserve to have trump as president in consequence well that’s a whole different question but at least he was a bull in the china shop speaking of whom what do you i kind of think robert f kennedy is the same sort of force on the democrat side i mean what do you think of kennedy yeah i like him um you know and his campaign manager denis kucinich is somebody who whom i’ve known for a long time going back to the first campaign i ever covered he was somebody i always respected as a an original thinker or real intellectual somebody who read two books a day um and uh and really thought about you know the future of this country and what possible solutions um you know might work might not work you think he’s an impressive character right kucinich kucinich i do i’ve i’ve kucinich do you think he’d be a good podcast guest i think he would be yes dennis is is brilliant uh you know his his politics are controversial but he’s got an incredibly interesting history he was you know mayor of cleveland at a ridiculously young age he was homeless when he was a kid he lived in a in a car with his family uh you know he won his first elections literally going door to door with no financial backing and um and so this is the kind of person who’s behind uh rfk’s campaign i mean obviously i don’t know robert f kennedy as well i you know i did some of his shows years ago uh but i think he recognizes as trump did and as bernie sanders also did in 2016 to a lesser degree that there was this groundswell of frustration um building an america toward i guess you would call it some sort of mainstream political thought uh which was increasingly elitist and indifferent to the fate of ordinary americans on both the left and the right um kennedy uh i think is going to succeed just because he’s not joe biden just because msnbc doesn’t like him and cnn doesn’t like him those things are actually advertisements in the current day and age uh trump understood this very keenly in in 2016 he embraced it and that was one of the reasons why he did so well and kennedy i think also understands this unlike bernie sanders who i think in you know deep within his heart had a lot of affection for the democratic party didn’t want to see um something bad happen to it uh rfk i i think is running a campaign where he’s willing to go to the mattresses with uh you know the people within the democratic party structure and that’s going to be very appealing to a lot of voters and a lot of independents as well yeah this is going to be some ridiculously serially interesting presidential campaign man i don’t i don’t think we’ll have ever seen the likes of it so it’ll be something to watch so so um what was it like working for rolling stone when you were for them it was great when i worked for rolling stone rolling stone had a couple of heydays i would say in the late 60s and and the 70s obviously the the magazine did both great music journalism and some groundbreaking um journalism of other types including hunter thompson but they also published you know people like um carl bernstein uh they eventually brought in pg or work they kind of pioneered this this formula of you know reporting that was serious but it was also witty uh and and readable and then you know they they regressed a little bit in the 90s but when i came in in the early 2000s they had just brought in some new editors and um and they were fantastic they let me do work uh that i know a lot of the senior people didn’t agree with but they were really encouraging um and they let me get into some areas that were really weird and unusual for a mainstream american news at mainstream american magazine and that was great it was a great time for a long time and then it got a little strange at the end what was the most interesting area you delved into when you worked for rolling stone well after the 2008 election you know i had covered obama’s win and that was when the financial collapse happened and they assigned me to do one story uh basically about what happened at aig they wanted me to explain in ordinary terms you know what what that was um and we did one story that was called i think the big takeover and it it just attempted to translate for ordinary people a lot of the verbiage that uh people used on wall street and the response to that was so overwhelming that i ended up doing that for eight years and so i got to cover all kinds of crazy things that you would never expect a magazine music magazine to take on like you know the ratings agencies um you know bidding for municipal bond rigging um you know foreclosure fraud all kinds of stuff like that and i got seven eight thousand words a shot to do this and lots of time as though so for an investigative reporter i mean at the time there were maybe 10 jobs like that in all of journalism and it was uh it was a great period to do it and the only problem was a good deal yeah it was a great deal but unfortunately the market has changed quite a lot in the last three or four years well five or six years i would say now did the great derangement come out of that your book the great derangement came out of the my earlier um sort of campaign trail stuff for rolling stone and some other places i did some writing for the nation too at that time where did you write in book form about the financial collapse so i wrote a book called griftopia it’s griftopia okay yeah another one called the divide yep right right so so let me recap for a second or two part of what happened in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis tell me if if you think i’ve got this right and add anything that you feel would be useful so my sense was that it was at least in part of a technological it was a consequence of a rapid technological revolution i mean so the idea as far as i could tell was that if you so there’s you can you can assign mortgages a different risk of default and that seems mathematically probable you can look at the income and the credit history of the people who have the mortgages and you can calculate actuarially the probability of default and then you can come up with a risk estimate and then you offset the risk estimate by either not lending to the people who are at high risk or increasing the interest rate okay so that’s pretty straightforward and strikes me as highly probable that that can be done and then the idea was well if you lumped enough mortgages together of a certain risk category let’s say relatively high risk that you could average the risk across all the mortgages that you could calculate exactly what that risk was statistically and then you could define and offset that so that a large enough trench aggregate of mortgages would now become a define an asset of definable security right which makes it a secure asset and you know that really is brilliant that’s really really smart now what happened though was that what often happens when there’s a financial revolution of that sort is that the act of producing the instrument produced unexpected changes in the market so now that you could sell clumps of low of high risk mortgages to like pension funds because the risk was specified you produced an almost indefinite market for high risk mortgages and so the consequence of that was that financial institutions went out and sold increasingly high risk mortgages at a mad rate forever and that was abetted by policies stemming from the democrats and the republicans alike designed to foster home ownership among low-income americans which you know sounds like a fine idea but i suppose selling people houses they can’t actually pay for is not a good idea and so the consequence of that was a housing boom a mortgage boom increased malfeasance on the mortgage risk rating front and then the eventual construction of correlated housing prices across the entire economy which is something that never happened before because these things had all now been linked together behind the scenes and so then when housing prices started to collapse in one district that spread very rapidly and it collapsed everywhere and that just took the whole game out but to me the initial the initiator that was actually a technological revolution on the financial front and not something corrupt in and of itself like it led to a form of corruption it led to a form of corruption but it wasn’t crooked right at from the from get the get go that’s how i understood it i mean you’ve looked into this deeply yeah no that’s exactly right it it started off as actually quite a brilliant idea you know what you were describing with mortgage backed securities this process called tranching right where you could pull a whole group of mortgages let’s say a thousand two thousand of them and you could take a gigantic group of essentially junk rated mortgages but peel off a portion of it and sell it as triple a so it was a rumple stoltzkin story it was you take a whole bunch of straw but you can get a little bit of gold out of it right and you can sell that gold as you said to pension funds because they have requirements for you know they need to have at least a certain amount of triple a rated stuff and in the portfolio and this was earning a higher rate of return than traditional triple a investments so now you had this booming exploding market for essentially junk rated mortgages and that started off as an idea that produced an awful lot of cash and capital that you know initially led to a boom in the economy but it and it expanded housing ownership which seemed to be a good thing exactly lots of people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get houses got houses but very quickly you started to develop all kinds of fraud schemes that abetted this where you know the the mortgage companies which were once incentivized to prevent you from getting a mortgage if they didn’t think you could make your payments now all of a sudden knew that as soon as you got into the pool that they were going to be selling your mortgage to the next person so they overlooked all kinds of things did you have id did you have a job you know were you a citizen all that stuff would kind of be little details like that yeah little details like that they would forget forget to put that stuff in or check it and you know you would have these big banks which would be representing to their customers like pension funds that oh yeah we checked all out all these mortgages that are in this pool they’re all great and they’re everything that we say they are and next thing you knew people started to default at a high rate and couldn’t make their payments anymore and you know the whole house of cards fell so it’s not like a lot of other financial booms in history it’s just the particular form of this was that it all happened within the confines of this system of mortgage-backed securities and there was an additional complicating factor which was that this came alongside the invention of another financial instrument type of financial instrument the credit default swap that allowed financial companies to bet on the success of these instruments so you might have a mortgage and if it failed you might have a cascading series of losses that resulted from that because people were essentially trading on whether or not that that mortgage was going to succeed so it was a way of basically punching a black hole into the economy you know beyond the limits of you know how much money there actually was in circulation it was real it was fascinating to learn about that yeah it’s attractive to be cynical about what happened in 2008 and it’s also attractive to be conspiratorial and to note that you know there were very there was almost no criminal prosecution in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse but you know i’m not unwilling to assume the utility of punishment where it’s due but it it’s never really been obvious to me that the except in you know a relatively small number of egregious cases that the that the criminal case for that the case for criminal conduct could be easily made given the complexity of the financial innovations that were also part and parcel of this now you have focused on you know the old boys club so to speak that governs political conduct in the united states across both parties and the entrenchment of the power elite let’s say that keeps that system going and you could say the same thing on the financial side and you’ve looked deeply into financial corruption and the collapse in 2008 what was your sense about what should have been done in the aftermath of that catastrophe well i think just as there were a series of basically symbolic prosecutions after the accounting control scandals of the early 2000s like you know and ron adelphia right aid you know that sort of thing that were designed to send a message to the markets like hey you can’t do this there were some obvious cases they could have taken up that would have similarly sent a message that it’s not a good idea to you know sell gigantic pools of mortgages that you know have problems with them that you know are in triple a that you know are likely to default as soon as you sell them and they could have done that didn’t do that and i think that engendered a lot of problems and frankly that was something that trump picked up on again in 2016 that there was anger in the population there were an awful lot of people who got thrown out of their homes after 2008 you know you’re talking like five million people yeah well there were a lot of ordinary people who suffered and a lot of extraordinary people who didn’t and then there was an awful lot of corporate bailout and socialization of risk and privatization of profit right that was really that was really a dismal outcome now you know i think it is hard to keep enterprises on the hook financially because with a big company partly because the executive leadership and even the ownership of the company can switch quite dramatically it’s not like you can hold a company to the same standards of responsibility that you can hold an individual to it’s slippery and tricky and it isn’t obviously the case too that you should be too punitive with regards to your business class if they engage in ventures that don’t work out well because then you suppress innovation and risk taking i mean that’s one of the advantages of having bankruptcy laws right this means you get to fail without dying and that’s really useful given that you have to fail quite a bit often before you can succeed but it still did seem to me that you know the chickens didn’t come home to roost as thoroughly as they might have in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis i also wonder too tell me what you think about this you know we’ve seen the rise of woke capitalism to a great degree in the last well let’s say since 2008 it seems to me that you know there’s a fair bit of unrequited and maybe deserving guilt on the part of high-flying capitalists who made their money in manners that might be a little bit more crooked than necessary and that one of the ways they can pay the piper hypothetically without actually having to go through any serious moral revaluation is to beat the esg drum for example on the climate side or to pretend to be in accordance with that what what with whatever the newest woke delusion is on the civil rights front and so it’s a false contrition and i think that’s emerged in the aftermath of unpunished malfeasance let’s say on the corporate front with regard to the financial crisis of 2008 so i don’t know what you think about that theory that’s interesting yeah i mean so i often get get people who are confused about my take on all this because they think that because i wrote very critically about companies like goldman sax and jp morgan chase and you know bank of america that you know a communist or anti-capitalist actually nearly all of my sources during that time period were people who worked on wall street they were you know other rich people basically and their complaint about these companies was not that they were being too arch capitalist but that rather they were subverting capitalism by cheating and relying on bailouts and you know and manipulating markets in ways that were unfair to you know sort of the smaller sized competitor and i think that was a consistency theme of what happened there were cases they could have made and that would have been you know i think important to the markets it would have sent a message that no matter how big you are you’re not outside the reach of the law and it would have would have restored faith in this idea that you know that the government isn’t basically a silent partner of these gigantic banks which it was clearly yes that will always backstop them in times of trouble and won’t look into you know money laundering and other problems and that’s why we’re having this crisis with small regional banks now among other things because the markets know that it’s cheaper for big banks to borrow money because everybody knows they’ll always get bailed out that’s an inherent advantage that they shouldn’t have i don’t think in capitalism so all of that is a hangover of 2008 the esg thing is i think just another version of the same ratings agency scam that we saw with mortgages it’s just that they’re they’re playing around with different terminology and insider you know sort of rigging of the game this time it’s more political doesn’t seem to be working out so well for disney right exactly you know i i think these schemes always whenever they try to get you know game the system too much that way it always ends up seeming to backfire i think yeah well that that it does backfire if the market if a well-regulated market actually retains its dominance and because as you pointed out too you know the people who are playing the capitalist game honestly and that’s the majority of people who are conducting business in the u.s because otherwise the u.s would not be as filthy rich as it is and so unbelievably stable and productive right because things actually get done and they work and that means that people who actually get things done and work are doing those things now there’s a handful of bad actors on the capitalist side and it’s definitely not in the interest of honest capitalists to let the dishonest crooks game the whole system and get away with it on the regulatory capture side etc you know that’s really a place where the left and the right could come together you know within their existence that yeah okay okay so let’s talk about your last three books briefly and then i want to cover the debate you had with douglas murray michelle goldberg and melcum gladwell it was you and douglas on the same team and a little bit on the twitter files but let’s go through insane clown president i can’t breathe and hate ink if you could just say a little bit about each of those books i think that would be very interesting let’s start with insane clown president yeah so insane clown president is is basically just a compilation of all the stuff that i wrote in 2016 mainly for rolling stone about the trump campaign there we decided after trump won that there was probably enough of an appetite out there for reading about what happened during the campaign that people would buy that book and you know it turned out to be true it was a it was a best seller but the thing that i like about that book when i go back and look at it and i don’t like all my books but i think that one early on you know i think i called a lot of what happened with the trump campaign correctly you know my early impressions of his campaign was that he was on to something that if sort of mainstream american pundits didn’t wake up they were going to find out very quickly that uh you know they were making him stronger by mis-reporting things about him and and then you know there is a section of that book where i was convinced by a pollster that he had absolutely no chance of winning and so i i kind of got the wrong impression that his campaign was really going to result historically just in the destruction of the republican party but i think there were a lot of things about that book that that captured 2016 correctly and it was you know it’s a funny book to read too because there were a lot it was a lot of odd stuff that happened on the campaign trail so yeah so what did you what did you come to make of trump both in terms of his like strengths and weaknesses what’s your assessment of donald trump well one of the first times i saw trump in person was in new hampshire um i think i was in plimoth new hampshire i was at plimoth state university i think was the was the locale and you know the press is always on a riser we always look ridiculous standing in the middle of a political event and trump started to talk about us he you know like he feels the crowds out like a comedian he looked at us and he said you see these people over here see these bloodsuckers you know they they’ve never come so far for an event they hate they hate me they want me to lose so bad they want all you to lose and i watched as the crowd kind of turned toward us and started hissing and they were throwing bits of paper at us and everything and i immediately recognized this is going to work you know um and the reason i knew it was going to work is because who doesn’t hate journalists like uh you know just look at us you know and and there were a lot of no you and your mongolian basketball career well yeah they don’t know the average person probably doesn’t know about that but the the ordinary journalist uh you know a political journalist who covers presidential campaigns is a very specific type of character that person is always wearing a gingham shirt a tie and khakis and asks you one question that he already knows the answer that he wants and then goes back to you know and then writes a story they’ve already pre-written people hate that person you know and i recognize yeah and for good reason right and and so trump picked up on that and then he started to move not just from the press but to other institutions you know nato the fed um you know congress obviously but what he was doing he he was feeling in his crowds that there was this enormous amount of resentment out there about all kinds of issues and he was feeding it i think in many cases with very sensible and real criticisms some of the things he said i totally disagreed with and i thought were outlandish and crazy and unnecessary um but he so was so to what degree to what degree do you think that the the thing that concerns me let’s say about figures such as trump even though he’s singular in many ways is that when you’re attempting to redress populist concerns you can go in two directions right you can listen to the concerns and you can honestly try to formulate responses and policies that would deal with those concerns or you can capitalize on that resentment and foster it and that’s a very very dangerous road to walk down now i’m not making a categorical judgment that trump did one or the other of those i’m curious about what you thought because of course his populist front was what in principle terrified his though the people who became incredibly paranoid about him but what was your sense you watched him and you watched his handling of the crowd you said that he would do things like single out the journalists and turn the crowd against them you know for better or for worse was your sense that he was was he manipulating in the crowds was he manipulating the crowds and himself at the same time was he playing a relatively straight game you know what what what what do you think he was up to and you you kind of you also compared him to a comedian right that could read the crowd and a leader can do that but you can be led astray by the darkest impulses of the crowd too yeah so it was interesting because i was covering trump and bernie sanders at the same time and sanders was picking up on a lot of the same things but his answer to those grievances he had a long list of policy solutions that he was really really anxious to implement trump on the other hand i think at heart thomas trump is a salesperson like that’s who he is he’s always selling something right and it was funny to watch the reporters because they were all carrying around you know books about fascism and you know like you know the 1930s whereas they should have been reading books about sales culture because that was the key to understanding donald trump and i thought trump basically was selling outrage he was selling he was selling the experience of feeling uh solidarity with other people who’d been screwed over and he was so he was fostering those feelings and people i think you know to answer your question yeah yeah and did you detect a danger in that did you get it did you detect a danger in that i mean because look there are times being frustrated in wanting justice those two things aren’t that easy to distinguish right and being resentful and wanting justice those two things aren’t always that easy to distinguish either right i mean it’s a tricky business because you know you say well you should forgive and forget and people think that’s the highest possible dictum but justice has its place as well and if you have been screwed over and i think the american working class has been screwed over in many ways although whether that was planned or just incidental is a different question they had their reasons to be outraged now trump obviously appealed to that outrage you’re intimating that you believe that he capitalized on it as well though in a way that you didn’t see characteristic of bernie sanders now of course bernie also didn’t wasn’t burdened with the delusion that he was likely to win no and and bernie didn’t really he didn’t have the same ability to connect with people that trump had right right right yes yeah um you know i that that’s a difficult question right because it’s it gets to the question of motivation you know i would say i never got the sense that donald trump was honestly a reformer that that was really his motivation was to uh you know change the system and that he was up at night reading policy proposals that wasn’t my impression i think donald trump you know over the over time i got the idea basically and this was in part from talking to people who knew him which was that he was insecure but mostly just wanted to be liked um i i didn’t find that you know the the core of him was terribly scary maybe i was wrong in perceiving it that way um but well i don’t i don’t think the evidence is clear that you were wrong i mean look under trump we had no wars you know that wasn’t such a bad thing and we did get the abraham accords and the economy did quite nicely and i don’t think the culture wars were raging as intently under trump even though they raged away quite madly as they are now so you know for all of trump’s purported dangers he was much less of a threat certainly on the international stage than he might have been and that everybody had been afraid he would be and i do think also that he generated a certain degree of respect and apprehension from you know the more authoritarian types around the world and i certainly don’t think that’s the case with biden at all because i think biden like trudeau i think is beneath contempt in relationship to people like the president of china so and i don’t think that was true for trump because at least he was unpredictable or had that appearance so i don’t i don’t think you were out of line in your failure to see anything truly malevolent in trump yeah i mean i i don’t i don’t know i mean i i my impression of him was that he he was doing this for a lot of reasons that it was complicated he has a mischievous streak in him it was clear watching his family early in the campaign that they wanted no part of any idea that he might win but and i wasn’t exactly sure that he wanted to win but right yeah well i thought it was an exercise in brand awareness expansion at least and quite a brilliant one in some ways if if you’re thinking purely from the perspective of sales right and and he was selling himself the entire time and he was doing a great job at it i mean you know with the tools that were available to him he was a pioneer in many respects by bypassing the media and going straight to people using twitter and that sort of thing all that was very interesting and i think that was something that if people had looked honestly at the situation they would have found really compelling to study instead you know the establishment press just settled on a narrative about him about halfway through the campaign and from there it was just attack attack attack and it became um i would say on it a sort of ongoing uninteresting diatribe yeah yeah yeah well it would have been a lot more compelling had there been real journalists covering the trump phenomena trying to figure out what the hell was going on because at minimum it was insanely interesting and not predictable in the least and and mysterious and it would have been good to get to the bottom of it like i said i think victor davis hansen did a nice job in his book the case for trump i i think it’s a very even-handed treatment of without the kind of crazy gonzo journalism style that you know might have added something quite compelling to the to the overall analysis of trump what did you do with um i can’t breathe and hate ink the other two books 2017 and 2019 yeah i i lived very close to where eric garner um was killed in statin island i was in new jersey just a short drive away so i decided to do a book about um what happened there uh i just on a lark i went to the neighborhood hung out in the street for a little bit talked to some of his friends and found that he was i thought a very interesting person so i thought it might be cool to write a book about this this guy and you know so i spent a couple of years really just talking to drug dealers and hanging out in the street and ended up with a portrait of what happened to garner all the different forces that converged to um cause you know that incident and you know left with an understanding of police brutality that was a lot more complicated than people made it out after george floyd incident which is i think is um was unfortunate well complicated in in in what ways what did you learn well i think a lot of what happened with cops in cities like new york especially after the implementation of programs like broken windows was that they were uh forced by these new stats-based policing regimes to um create artificially uh engender contacts with the population when they weren’t necessary you know the the court case ohio v terry which is from 1968 in the united states allowed police to randomly stop and search people on the street and police departments clued into the idea that if they did enough of those stops they would find people who were who had warrants on them that they would probably grab a lot of guns that people were carrying and or stop people from carrying them in the first place so they did hundreds of thousands of these stops and on the surface that might sound like a good idea but what ended up happening was a lot of people got frustrated being stopped and searched uh and a lot of those incidents went wrong and that’s how a lot of these police brutality cases happen they happen because they begin with some really stupid reason for stopping somebody on the street somebody gets mad and it ends up in a melee and somebody dies and that’s that unfortunately is is the backdrop for a lot of these cases right okay okay well i i read recently that there’s no real evidence that the police are more used likely to use deadly force for example on black people compared to white people in fact i think the stats show slightly the reverse but that that’s not true at all when it comes to argue well more minor in some ways acts of of harassment let’s say or of of continual investigation and stopping and so you know it would be nice if we could have a sensible discussion about that and actually get to the bottom of what’s going on do you think that those more frequent stopping programs promoted by that say broken window hypothesis and that hypothesis is by the way for those of you who are watching and listening is that you have to attend to minor infractions of the law to set a tenor that stops more major infractions of the law which is the reverse for example of what they seem to be doing now in places like california do you think there’s any credibility to the claim that the implementation of those policies did in fact lead to the radical reductions in crime rate for example in places like new york city what was your sense of that when you looked into it well there’s a couple of problems with the way they implemented broken windows in new york one is that they overtly in many cases told the officer is to do more of those stops in certain neighborhoods than than in others one of the reasons stop and frisk was overturned in new york is because they had one of the captains on tape basically telling you know a whole bunch of patrol cops you know i’m looking for black males aged 18 to 21 you know he’s like he says that openly right so there was a mess i think and this goes to your point earlier there may not be a discrepancy about deadly force but there’s a huge discrepancy in terms of the more minor stops right and especially about things like drug arrests are you really going to get fewer drug arrests if you stop everybody on wall street and look through their stuff then you might if you you know stop everybody in bushwick or brownsville or someplace like that i think it’d be closer than than most people would think and so that engenders hostility they used it as a way to kind of keep property values high in some places by basically using police to clear out undesirable looking people that was the narrative with garner garner was kind of a slovenly dressed obese guy who sat in a corner selling illegal cigarettes and there was a condo complex across the street that didn’t like it and and so he kept getting moved off the corner and got tired of it and you know some of those things that you mentioned the broken windows theory it wasn’t just minor things that are against the law it’s what they called order maintenance so it’s things that were the things that were maybe not against the law right but they were also cleaning up and well there’s always going to be tremendous dispute about exactly where to draw the line in situations like that i mean which is why you need a variety of different approaches i guess to try to find out what actually works because it seems to me that places like portland and vancouver in canada increasingly toronto and san francisco have gone far too far in the opposite direction and you have just you know absolute chaos reigning in in places where that shouldn’t be happening but then by the same token you can’t just you can’t just stop enforcing the law either i mean that doesn’t work either right right right no penalty for shoplifting under a thousand dollars just doesn’t seem like a very good solution for example all right and so let’s turn to the last book that you that you finished i believe it’s the last one hate inc 2019 yep when i say a few words about that and then we’ll talk about the debate you had recently with douglas murray and and sure so hate inc um i had always loved when i was a kid the the book as i mentioned before manufacturing consent i grew up in a family of journalists my father was a television reporter and that book was very eye-opening to me even though i had been around the media my whole life because it was about the unspoken pressures that go into editorial decisions before they get to the reporter you know why are some stories were assigned and not others right why why do why do people at abc or cbs why do they freak out about the assassination of a catholic priest in poland but not in el salvador um you know it’s that kind of thing i always thought that book was interesting so i wanted to do basically a um a new version of that uh for the internet age and see if anything had changed and i i talked to chomsky before i started writing the book i said are you okay with me doing this project and he sort of said okay and um and the premise of the book that i came up with is that the internet had changed the game significantly and that uh really for financial reasons um the media business had evolved in this new direction where instead of trying to go for the whole audience which is how abc cbs nbc made their money in the old days now they were using the new model which was what you might call audience optimization where you pick a demographic and try to dominate it and that’s how we get this basically stratified fracture media landscape where you have some companies that are selling only to blue-leaning audiences and then some that are only selling to the right and it’s a very successful commercial formula but as news it’s really bad because what ends up happening is that you’re just giving your audience what they want to hear most of the time usually about the people on the other side and that’s that formula that that commercial formula of doing news i think has been a major driver a lot of the kind of culture war division in this country you think how much of that do you think is inevitable consequence of again of technological transformation because i mean abc cbs nbc they dominated when television bandwidth was well almost infinitely expensive and every second that you were speaking on video was unbelievably uh uh financially demanding and the audiences were huge and and in some ways homogeneous now especially with youtube video is basically free and so and that means an infinite number of channels because of course there is a virtually infinite number of channels on youtube and it isn’t obvious to me at all that in a landscape like that you can have anything other than fracturing and i think the primary driver of the disintegration of the legacy media isn’t so much their transformation into woke ideologues although that hasn’t helped and it’s been abetted by the idiot universities but the fact that there’s just no bloody way they can compete you know i mean you have your own substack and i i believe that’s doing quite well and like people who are talented journalists like well and barry weiss is a good example there’s just no reason for her not to go out on her own and to start her own newspaper for for all intents and purposes so i mean do i don’t see i don’t see any way back from that essentially yeah you’re absolutely right um in fact you you nailed the main thing about it you know i remember i interviewed the former publisher of the newspaper in dallas and he said that up until the 80s the news business was a scarcity business there were only there were only so many slots in the newspaper to sell want ads there were there were only so many hours on tv there were only so many um hours on radio and those slots basically had limitless value um because there was no other way to reach audiences for advertising you put the internet into the into the mix suddenly it goes from scarcity to you know infinity there you know all those things that you that were immensely valuable before are now essentially worthless and you have to find a new commercial strategy for making money the it’s evolved to the this place for selling subscriptions is the only way to go but the problem with that is that it doesn’t pay for things like investigative journalism as well it doesn’t pay for foreign bureaus and you know jakarta and moscow it doesn’t pay for an awful lot of things so um you know the the news business has suffered i think it’s lost its way um trying to navigate this new terrain where money is so scarce um not knowing whether to chase after clickbait or whether to stick to journalistic principles or to or what to do exactly and so this so all those brands have been irrevocably damaged i think um and you know nothing has stepped up to replace it yet well and speaking of that you were just in toronto not so long ago at the increasingly famous monk debates they apparently seem to be doing something right and you and douglas murray faced off against michelle goldberg and um malcolm gladwell malcolm gladwell malcolm gladwell and i believe that you and douglas won the debate by the biggest margin that had ever occurred at the monk debates and actually speaking to an audience that in principle shouldn’t have been particularly favorable to your claims right because the monk debate audience is toronto ottawa montreal glitterati such as you know such as we produce in canada are equivalent of people who think they’re celebrities let’s say that might be a good way of thinking about it and the probability that they would be both beholden to and fundamental supporters of the legacy media was extremely high and yet by all accounts you mopped the floor with um both michelle and um malcolm so do you want to walk through that a little bit tell everybody what the debate was about first and and tell me your impressions of the whole of the whole enterprise first of all i had an amazing time it was um it’s a great event um i i think anybody who has the opportunity to attend the monk debates should definitely do it the the resolution was be it resolved do not trust the mainstream media and so michelle and malcolm were arguing the nay portion and douglas and i were arguing the a portion and you said that we mopped the floor with them really douglas mopped the floor with them and i was kind of there but the you know he’s he’s very impressive as an orator and as a stage performer and he was very yeah and as a fighter yeah yeah he actually enjoys it and so yeah you you you mess with douglas at your peril exactly exactly uh but another thing i think that that really turned the tide with that debate was um kind of the superior attitude i would say of a couple of the participants malcolm in particular i i don’t have anything in particular against him but i i made the observation at one point that walter cronkite had twice been voted the most trusted person in america in the 70s and 80s and malcolm wouldn’t let that go he kept implying that by saying that i was longing for the days of jim crow in america and that i had forgotten that when those votes were taken by the way he was wrong about this when those votes were taken that you know lots of people didn’t have it so bright in america you know implying that this was the 50s or the 40s when you know women gays and african americans had a tough time in the states again actually people were doing a hell of a lot better on the marital front back then than they are now by a large margin and there were a lot fewer children who were fatherless so you know some things have improved but there’s lots of things that haven’t improved so we might not want to be too smug and superior about how well we’re doing on the moral front compared to 40 years ago i mean lots of things have changed for the better but it’s by no means a universal panacea let’s say and and that’s especially true for poor people who are nonetheless on average richer but i would put that at the feet of capitalism you know rather than of any you know well-meaning government programs or ideologies so anyways he you said he adopted a mien of superiority on what basis well he essentially he was calling me a racist for making that observation so um and he went back to it five times and by the fifth time there were actually sort of audible gasps in the in the audience so i think that had something to do with what happened with with the debate well that sort of thing actually doesn’t play very well in canada you know um yeah the the the people who i debated at the monk debates they played that same mistake too they played the racial card and racist card yeah and canadian audiences they don’t like that much because that hasn’t really been part of our parlance the part of the tenor of our our public discussions not nearly as much as in the u.s i mean we’re trying hard to get there and we might be successful in this country but generally it’s not a good strategy so yeah yeah so did you learn did you think that goldberg and and gladwell made any points in relationship to why the legacy media might still be worthy of support and trust well their basic argument was that the procedures of the legacy media are still good procedures you know fact checking that sort of thing and and we countered with yes those are good things unfortunately they’re mostly gone from legacy media organizations and that’s one of the reasons that you have problems like the russia gate case where you know one story after the other goes sideways and you you guys don’t catch it um and that’s i think there’s still a failure of vision i still know a lot of people who work in in legacy media and there’s a a slowness to recognize that audiences no longer i think um really believe what they’re reading uh in a lot of these organizations in the new york times washington post they see it as politicized uh not terribly reliable factually and i think that’s a shame even as an independent i i think the mainstream media needs to be good right like i think it’s everybody everybody benefits when it is um but but they haven’t figured out that in order in order to have that respect that they think they deserve that they just can’t get this many things wrong and um that’s been that’s been the fact they don’t get to be the legacy media without maintaining a genuine respectability right exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so so let me let me close here with um a question about the twitter file revelation so you know since you were instrumental in the process that lead led to the release of the so-called twitter files the first response from the legacy media was um there’s uh what would you say there’s nothing to be seen there and the second response was well there was something to be seen but we knew it all along and that’s really where the story has settled now you know i was reading your wikipedia page for example while preparing for this interview and some of the criticisms about the twitter files were well you know nothing that we didn’t know already was revealed and so there’s nothing to see here folks and so what do you what do you think about that what’s your sense of of tell us about participating in the release of the twitter files and what you think the cultural consequence really was well first of all it interesting what’s interesting about it is that time wise it happened um i i learned that i was going to be doing that right before the monk debate um we actually got asked a question about about elon musk maybe opening up the twitter files during the debate and i had to pretend that the twitter debate and i had to pretend that i didn’t know the answer to that question so i flew to san francisco right from toronto and you know the first batch of the twitter files which was about the suppression of the hunter biden story was interesting but i wouldn’t say that it was groundbreaking there was there was stuff in there that was worth publishing but it wasn’t until we started to see this organized system of communication between the fbi the department of homeland security the office of the director of national intelligence and all these platforms that there was this sort of highway of content moderation requests that was flowing to all of these companies i don’t know that anybody knew that that was happening um i certainly didn’t know that that was happening and you know the twitter itself was denying that it even engaged in shadow banning before the twitter files and we got rid of that the first day um and you know i think what happened was the argument eventually became well this is going on but it’s not illegal it’s not technically a first amendment violation because they’re not ordering no it’s just it’s just behind the scenes collusion between government and big media hidden from the public nothing to see here you know and whether or not something is technically illegal that’s a pretty damn shaky moral argument it’s not a bad legal argument yeah and it’s funny because i i got a lot of criticism about that and my response was always well i don’t care what it is you know that’s that’s a matter for judges to decide or juries to decide i’m not gonna i’m not going to worry about that but i i can tell you that showing this to audiences um what it looks like in practice that not only americans but a lot of people all over the world thought this was crazy and they really didn’t like it and they and it scared them and i think we can see that with you know lawsuits like the missouri v biden lawsuit now where a judge is ordered at all to stop uh you know this it’s a big issue in america and around the world frankly because you really can’t have you know a free culture without free speech and this is a very organized assault on the entire concept and um i i think we need to have a big debate about uh how we’re going to go forward on the internet and not do it in secret the way they were trying to do it yeah yeah well it looks to it looked to me you know watching that from the outside that i found the documentation revelatory and the exposure of what i think of as fascist collusion at the highest levels of government and media appalling beyond the belief belief especially when allied with the fact that it was really put in the hands of a very tiny number of extremely radical people at twitter who are making these wide-scale decisions with absolutely no right whatsoever or training or or uh competence or moral guidance to be doing so and so i thought you guys did a great service and um no thank you i thought it was a good bang off beginning to elon musk’s revolutionary takeover of twitter and uh you know he reinstated me pretty quickly after he purchased the company and i was happy about that because well happy and unhappy because then i was back on twitter and you know it’s a terrible snake pit but but an attractive one so anyways i certainly found that it was useful and the the fact that you are exposing this high-level collusion designed to take out free speech in a manner that was extraordinarily dangerous obviously you know the the way we communicated about everything during the pandemic lockdown which was an outbreak of authoritarianism far greater than the dean with a far greater danger than any danger posed by the bloody virus i think the fact that that all came to light was absolutely necessary so well so thank you for that as far as i’m concerned also for coming up to canada you know you know delivering a good trouncing to the yeah yeah yeah any excuse to come to to toronto i love that’s one of my favorite cities in the world so my wife yeah well we’re gonna we’re gonna do something about that real soon now that we’ve elected a very far left mayor so um i’m gonna continue talking to matt on the daily wire plus side of these interviews he said something interesting to me during the youtube conversation that i want to follow up on he said that as a kid he was very introverted and he’s obviously dealt with that problem to a large degree and i’d like to delve into exactly how and why that transformation occurred and to track the development of matt’s interest in his career which are obviously multi-dimensional across the span of his life so we’re going to do that on the daily wear plus side join us there if you’re inclined to otherwise thank you all for watching and listening your attention is much appreciated and to the film crew here in northern ontario to the daily wear plus people for facilitating these conversations and professionalizing them on the production side and to matt thank you all very much for talking me today i appreciate everything you said thank you so much for having me i appreciate it i’m glad to finally meet you you