Trump, Putin, Biden, You | Matt Taibbi | EP 392

The journalists uh 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 place across the political Spectrum hello everyone watching and listening today I’m speaking with author and journalist Matt taibe we discussed his early career both in journalism and professional basketball his time in the USSR learning Russian and Publishing a successful Gonzo inspired newspaper and is 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 usbeck national baseball team uh that was great actually I uh at

The time I was trying to be a freelance reporter in usbekistan I was really young in my 20s and I walked by a uh a university field and saw a bunch of Cubans playing baseball so uh they were I think Cuban Refrigeration students and

I was the only American on the team U we had a fun time playing against other Central uh Asian teams and um we had one one funny story we had ground rules uh 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 usbekistan and that didn’t work out so you turned to pro

Baseball well at the time I was more interested in being a writer uh just generally than being a reporter I thought um I had been living in St Petersburg which was filled at the time with uh 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 uh so that I could get a by line and a um a wire servers or something like that but I figured while I was there maybe I could do something

Like write a book about you know playing baseball for the USCS and I ended up doing that that kind of thing a lot I moved to Mongolia later played basketball and 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 usbekistan 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 um in Moscow for a an expad paper called the Moscow times which still exists and I played a lot of

Street basketball uh back in those days at uh Moscow State un iversity you’ve probably seen pictures it’s got that beautiful gigantic sort of wedding cake skyscraper building in the background used to go there in the afternoons and play hoops and there was a kid there

From Mongolia uh 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 in the train and

Got on the Trans Siberian Railroad and went to um Mongolia had a try out played for a season in the Mongolian Basketball Association so were you were you big among the Mongolian fan girls a little bit you know it was actually um it was actually quite an

Experience uh Mongolia at the time was very basketball crazy and there’s a long story about why uh but basically every Mongolian kid was playing basketball in the early 90s and you know my friends what um were big celebrities in the country uh there was 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 that’s all completely unexpected and crazy now you also went to the Leningrad poly Technic was it the St Petersburg poly Technic by then or and why did you

End up why did you end up in in the da missiles of the former Soviet Union what what how did that all come about and why did you decide to stay there for well a number of years when I was a kid I was uh fairly lonely and depressed and

Introverted and the thing that I found that became my escap in life is that I fell in love with uh comic fiction and my favorite writers were all Russian writers like gole uh and bulgak and my uh decision as a very young man was to move to

Um 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 Polytech I’m old enough to have gone uh to school in the Soviet Union and um I went there to study

Russian even though it was a poly technical school they they had a Russian language faculty for all the new students and that’s that’s what I did there so did you read the master in margarita in the original Russian I did I did that’s a tough one I’m not going

To lie I bet it’s it’s a tough book man yes some some of the Russian writers are easier than others to read for a foreigner I would say tul stto is easier he’s just very clear uh but there’s a you know there’s a tradition of a different kind of writer unfortunately

Like my favorite gole DKI is another one bulak they use very very know convoluted long sentences um and but they’re beautiful I mean Russian’s a beautiful language yeah well the master Margarita that’s I don’t know maybe is that the most complex dreamlike novel ever written might I think I’ve read it three

Times you know it’s well it’s a crazy book I mean it 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 it’s really it’s really quite the piece of fiction

Um I can understand why you would be motivated to learn Russian although that that’s a hell of a motivation to to read it and so now you also worked um at a newspaper in Moscow was that the Exile was that what it was called originally I

Worked at the moska Times which was sort of the straight news um newspaper for the big burgeoning expat Community um which was quite large in the 9s uh in in Moscow and then I I left that and ended up um co-staring my own newspaper called the Exile which was

Kind of a cross of timeout and screw magazine it’s hard to explain but it was sort of a uh a satirical nightlife guide let’s put it that way and it’s gotten me in some trouble um you know not in my later years but um it was an experiment

In in extreme free speech uh doing everything saying the way a normal newspaper would do it but backwards uh we had Corrections for things that had never appeared in the paper I mean we tried to make an absolute joke of the 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 um brilliantly believe it or not the the the people who are in Moscow in the in the ’90s and especially the late 90s uh

That was a crazy City it was a lot like the wild west um or Chicago in the 1930s this was a place where you know 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 um so a newspaper like ours actually fit right in with the tenor of that whole Community we were quite popular uh just you know we actually made money we were profitable it was a normal small

Business that made money and um it worked out quite well for a while uh but you know eventually there there came a time when Putin came to power where you know the paper was just not tolerated and so what what happened when it when it became not tolerated were you still

Around I had left by that time um I already left in uh 2002 but shortly after that the paper got a visit from the tax police and um you know whereas before we could always pay a bribe and make them go away uh this time they weren’t satisfied with that in the paper

Uh ultimately got closed but um yeah well you know a state is corrupt when you can’t even bribe it right yeah I mean that’s uh what’s an honest person to do in 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 Hinterland where that doesn’t work God only knows what’s up their sleeves so were you a fan of the Gonzo journalists like Hunter S Thompson he’s probably the canonical

Example I was I I was a fan of Hunter Thompson I I read him actually later uh in life than some other uh journalist that was probably more of a fan earlier of HL manin but um I Lov Hunter Thompson in fact at one point I got hired uh by a

Publishing company to try to put together an anthology of Gonzo journalism and that project and ended up failing um when I realized mid project that Gonzo was a term that had no meaning other than Hunter Thompson uh so unless we were going to put together just a whole book full of Hunter’s

Articles it wasn’t going to actually work so uh but I was definitely a fan of his uh his writing well he was he he was definitely a singular creature I mean Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is quite the piece of work and he what he wrote

One on the Hell’s Angels and one about the campaign Trail they’re all great books right really iconic 60s works and um I also really like Tom Wolf especially um the Electric Kool-Aid no U no no no uh like the Kool-Aid Acid Test yep yes exactly and and and candy

Colored Tangerine flake baby that’s also great collection of 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 uh 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 journalist um and that’s kind of been driven out of modern journalism unfortunately I would

Say yes now we just have the pathologically uninteresting um mediocre boring lying journalist type mostly in the Legacy Media yeah it’s so it’s so a pathetic and appalling the New York Times today reported on underground climate change yeah I mean it’s it’s it’s not uh 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 uh that’s for sure that’s for sure yeah that’s right I mean that at 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 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 uh 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 I interviewed gome chsky 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 um 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 um you know so I think unfortunately the the uh lack of attention paid to the factual aspect has taken away uh some important value from those

Institutions so when were you at the poly Technic what what years were that oh that would have been I was in Russia studying in 89 and 90 primarily uh so you really were there during the wild times in in Russia yeah and then I stayed in Russia um I went back after

School and I stayed from 1991 till about 2002 um there were some trips in between so do you think well 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 the with regard to the Russia Ukraine conflict well first of all that situation is extraordinarily complicated uh it’s been frustrating for me to watch the coverage of um you know the Russia Ukraine conflict uh you know people not understanding the history of places like

Crimea uh or how far back some some of these uh conflicts in places like luhansk and Don Basco um I 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 um

But you know there’s a long backstory uh here with the United States support of um Ukraine and some pretty questionable kind of far-right elements in UK in Ukraine as a way to sort of undermine 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 um NATO wasn’t going to expand all the way to Russia’s borders uh I think you know there’s a reason why

A lot of academics in 1997 uh pretty conservative ones were signing an open letter urging the American authorities not to keep pushing NATO towards Russia 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 I I I keep seeing that trying to I think he’s trying to top his net zero idiocy personally maybe that’s 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 uh you know start this uh awesome confrontation risking nuclear Annihilation for the entire planet uh but we think the Russians shouldn’t object if they’re surrounded on all sides by military bases should they re respond by invading another

Country I I don’t agree with that but I certainly understand um knowing this just from talking to Russians while I was there what their feelings are about n NATO they’re very um 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 last month the G20 announced a plan to impose digital currencies and digital IDs on their populations Central Bank digital currencies essentially allow the government to track every purchase you make officials can even prohibit you from purchasing certain products or

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Don’t pay a penny out of pocket text Jordan to 98 9898 claim your free info kit on gold then call them because if digital currency becomes a reality it’ll be nice to have some gold to fall back On well you know I think we had a real opportunity to bring Perman peace um to put to put in place a permanent peace with the Russians and and that could have happened during the ’90s and we pretty much fouled 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 in Russia and Ukraine is going to what the consequence of it 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

Endgame 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 if the West had to spend several tens of billions of dollars although it’s rocket it beyond that now to weaken Russia’s

Conventional military that that might not be S 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 I guess I also think 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 and and the the self-same military-industrial complex andan they don’t have Afghanistan anymore keep things to 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 I 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 there was always going to be some friction there the two countries um both see themselves as superpowers uh there’s some resentment some cultural resentment that’s true in both places um where you know neither of

Them wants to concede that the other is more powerful U so there’s always going to be some difficulty between those two countries but they did agree on things like uh 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 uh contingent within the foreign policy Elite in Washington I think if you ask them deep down what the endgame to all this the answer they would come up with is regime change in Russia I think they I think they really believe that yeah and

So what’s that going to be what’s that going to be he 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’ get some real Democrat in Russia it’s like I don’t think so that seems to me to be preposterously naive CU 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 examp 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 error of vision that we had going into Iraq where we

Imagine that we could roll tanks into Baghdad and establish Switzerland overnight it doesn’t really work that way there’s history and a long uh 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 uh Muslims and you know this War I think is being prosecuted by people who have no conception of Russian history Far Eastern history um 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 um you’re not looking uh honestly I think at the at that country’s past yeah well that’s that’s certainly how it seems to me so I don’t know what the hell we’re playing out 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 backseat 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 manufa es Etc to keep a warlike hawk-like stance at hand and I can understand that you know like if you’re a Munitions

Manufacture 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 when 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 nonprofessional 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 um resentful they would have patted Trump on the back for having accomplished that I always thought you know if they would have given Trump the bloody Nobel Prize or maybe a medal at the White House for his work on the

Abraham Accords he might have just ridden off into the sunset happy 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 and hand to them after insulting them terribly and not noting what they did for example behind the scenes for the abrahamic cords 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 offing 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 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 an anti-war movement that was visible in the United States stes um there was an incredible episode early in this whole situation where I think a handful of uh 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 stop fighting or anything along those lines but even within that Coalition um 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 um 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 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 you’re not a Russian spy by the way um well uh the the Russians would never hire somebody like me to be a spy I think I I’m I’m the wrong type for them uh 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 is the problem but the right right noisy journalists don’t make the best spies exactly exactly um I I had been in you know while I was at the Exile Rolling Stone had actually

Done a 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 um which was modeled out on the Exile but pretty quickly got

A call from uh Rolling Stone from the editor there who remembered me had been keeping an eye on me and uh suggested that I go out and start covering the campaign um that was just starting in 200 3 so really almost as soon as I came back to the United States I started

Working for Rolling Stone uh essentially as a campaign reporter to start and uh eventually as more of a financial SL investigative reporter so what did you learn uh we were talking about hunterz Thompson earlier and famously he wrote a book called uh Fear and Loathing on the campaign Trail if I remember correctly

Which is quite the riotous um 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 postcommunist Russia everything was VIs ible you could

See which mafia interests were supporting which politician you could see the real financial interest behind every contract that was given out by the government uh you 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 um in the United States you know when I I went out in the campaign trail and I going out in the campaign Trail and 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 I I was really um very frustrated by the predictability of the American uh political system the way there was kind

Of a conspiracy of Interest I would say between the donors the campaign journalists and the political parties to really very strictly uh 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 uh you know

Somebody like Dennis cinic would be dismissed as Fringe or Elfin um and Howard Dean would be called pointed uh and angry but John Cary was nuanced and warm right and this this is how we signal to audiences that this was the it’s the climate change making him

Warm by the way right exactly yeah other otherwise he wasn’t terribly warm I I would say um but I think you know and and this is all a preview to the Trump experience because I think what happened was the journalists uh the donors and the parties got so used to being able to

Almost completely control who got to be the nominee um 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 a miss somebody must be cheating somehow and they didn’t

Realized that Trump was just being smart and running against the system I mean I recognized this pretty early in 2016 which was he was running against the journalists he was running against the donors he was running against the the fake two-party system which was really a onep party system and it was

Scoring heavily with people all over the across the political Spectrum but nobody really wanted to admit that they just wanted to make them out to be this very scary villain and um even though some of those things they said about him were true they were kind of missing the point

Of what what that uh 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

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$1 per month trial period at shopify.com jbp go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re at that’s shopify.com Jbp yeah Victor Davis Hansen wrote a great book on Trump called the case for Trump which which is the best thing I’ve read on that on that election cycle and I mean he points out something that seemed relatively obvious to me at the time watching from the outside was that

You know Clinton and her crew first of all I don’t think people trusted Hillary at all because even though she had a lot of experience because when someone aims at power that egregiously for like six decades you really got to wonder what the hell’s going on it’s like is it why

Is it that important to you you know and you might think well of course being president would be that important but you know it’s not that obvious because if you 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 is 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 beine for the presidency certainly even while her husband was president and so and then of course her and her foolish and treacherous advisers 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 CL 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 stabed 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 multi-millionaire would appeal to workingclass people they’re not of the

Same economic class obviously but you know at a wise workingclass guy I once worked for back in the 1970s he was a conservative and 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 Socialist 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 uh Out Of Reach for the

Typical workingclass person I think people could look at Trump and think well there are conceivable universes in which I could be Donald Trump right that or this is what I would do with that money yeah right yeah right right right right and then he also had this capacity

To speak 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 floxed 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 workingclass

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 workingclass people contractors and so forth and I had lots of workingclass 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 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 um you know a worker in a lace Factory and she seemed to really enjoy that role and 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 degree to which they were blind to that was kind of amazing to me and and you

Know you you brought up Hunter Thompson before he actually had a metaphor that really described how that happens he talked about how if you go hunting um 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 it will never let you get near it but when it’s in heat you know you can drive right past it and you know it 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 uh 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 um around you 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 Dennis cinic is somebody who whom I’ve known for a long time going back to the first camp campaign I ever covered he was

Somebody I always respected as a um an original thinker a real in 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 yeah you think he’s an

Impressive character a kusich kusin I do I’ve I’ve do you think he’d be a good podcast guest I think he would be yes 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 B literally going door Todo 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 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 Le um to a lesser degree that there was this ground swell of

Frustration um building in 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 um 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 Independence as well yeah this is going to be some ridiculously surreally 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 work 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 oror 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 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 dealt D into when you worked for Rolling Stone well after the 2008 election you know I had covered um Obama’s win and that was when the um 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 um a lot of the verbiage that uh people used on Wall Street and it 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 you would never expect a

MAG Music Magazine to take on like you know the ratings agencies um you know bidding for municipal Bond Reg um you know foreclosure fraud uh all kinds of stuff like that and I got 7 8,000 words a shot to do this and lots of time so so for an

Investigative reporter I mean at the time there were maybe 10 jobs like that in all journalism and it was uh it was a great period to do it and the only problem was that’s good deal yeah it was a great deal but unfortunately the market has changed quite a lot in the

Last three or four 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 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 uh it’s griftopia okay another one div yep right right so so let me recap for a second or two part of what happened in the runup

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 mortgag as a different risk of default and that seems math aut atically probable you can look at the income and the credit history of the people who have the mortgages and you can calculate actu 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 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 tranch aggregate of mortgages would now become a defi an 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 male feasance on 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 of

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 corrupt it led to a form of corruption but it wasn’t crooked right at from the from get the GetGo that’s how I understood it I mean

You’ve looked into this deeply yeah no that that’s exactly right it it it started off as actually quite a brilliant idea um you know what you were describing with mortgage back Securities this this process called tranching right um where you could pull uh a whole group of mortgages let’s say

A thousand 2,000 of them uh and you could take uh a gigantic group of essentially junk rated mortgages but peel off a portion of it and sell it as triaa so it was a Rumple still stilin story it was you know 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 were um you know they need to have at least a certain amount of AAA rated

Stuff in the portfolio and this was earning a higher rate of return Then traditional AAA 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 uh you started to develop um 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 uh you could make your payments now all of a sudden knew that as soon as you got into the cool 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 um you know were you a citizen uh all that stuff would kind of be little details like that yeah little details like that they would for forget to put that stuff in or

Check it um 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 um and they’re everything that we say they are

And next thing you knew uh 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 uh the particular form of this was that it

Um it it all happened within the confines of this system of mortgage back Securities and there was an additional complicating Factor which was that uh this came alongside the invention of another Financial instrument type of financial instrument the credit the fall swap that allowed Financial companies to bet on the

Success of uh 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 succeed so it it was a way of basically

Punching a black hole into the economy um you know beyond the limits of uh you know how much money there actually was in circulation um it was really it was fascinating to learn about that yeah it’s 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 um 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 uh 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 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 Enron Adelphia Right Aid you

Know that sort of thing um that were designed to send a message to the market like hey you you can’t do this um there were some obvious cases they could have taken up uh 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 triaa that you know um 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 um again in 20 2016 that there was anger um in the population there were an awful lot of people who got thrown out of their homes after 2008 uh you know we 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 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 um it seems to me that you know there’s a fair bit of unrequited and maybe deserving guilt on the part of highflying 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 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 maleant 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 uh yeah I mean so I often you get people who are um confused about uh my take on all this because they think that because I wrote very critically about companies like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and um you know Bank of America that um 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 um was not that they were uh being too Arch capitalist but that rather they were

Subverting capitalism by cheating and relying on bailouts uh and um you know and manipulating markets in ways that were unfair to you know sort of the smaller sized competitor and um I think that was a consistency theme of what happened there were cases they could have made and uh

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 uh you’re not outside the reach of the law and and it would have it would have restored faith in this idea that um you know that the government

Isn’t basically a silent partner of these gigantic Banks uh that was clearly yes that will always back stop them in times of trouble uh and won’t look into you know money laundering and other problems uh and that’s why we’re having this crisis with small Regional Banks now among other things because the

Markets know that uh it’s cheaper for big Banks to borrow money because everybody knows they’ll always get bailed out um you that’s an inherent advantage that they shouldn’t have I don’t think uh in capitalism so all of that is a hangover of 20 8 the ESG thing

Is I think just another version of the same ratings agency scam that um we saw with mortgages it’s just that they’re they’re playing around with different terminology and Insider um you know sort of rigging of the game uh this time it’s more political doesn’t seem to be working out

So well for Disney right exactly uh you know I I I think these schemes always when whenever they try to get uh you know game the system too much that way it it always ends up seeming to backfire um I think yeah well that 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 US because otherwise the US would not be as filthy

Rich as it is and so unbelievably stable and productive right cuz 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 with in their totally 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 Malcolm 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 in 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 Stones about the Trump campaign there we decided after Trump won that there was probably enough of an appetite out there for uh reading about what happened during the campaign that people would buy that book and you know it turned out to be true it was an it was a bestseller

Um 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 um but I think that one uh early on you know I think I called a lot of what happened with the Trump campaign correctly um you know my

Early impressions of his campaign was that he was on to something uh that if um 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 misreporting things about him and um

And then you know there is a SE of that book where I I I was convinced by upholster 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 um but I think there were a lot of things about that book that that captured 2016 correctly and it was um you know it’s a funny book to read too because there were a lot there 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 Plymouth

New Hampshire I was at Plymouth State University I think was the was the local and you know the Press is always on a riser we always look ridiculous standing in the middle of a a political event and Trump started to talk about us he you

Know like he feels the crowds out like a comedian he he looked at us and he said you see these people over here see these blood suckers you know they they’ve never come so far for an event they they hate me they want me to lose so bad they

Want all of you to lose and I 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 ger jals like uh you know just look at us you know and and there were a lot of people you in 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 very specific type of character it that person is always wearing a gingham shirt a tie and khakis and asks you one question and that he already knows the answer that he wants um and then goes back to you know and then writes the story they’ve already

Pre-written people hate that person you know and I recognize 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 that there was this enormous amount of resentment out there about all kinds of issues um 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 was so to what degree to what degree do you think the the 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 was really really

Anxious to implement Trump on the other hand I think you at heart Donald 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 um you know books about fascism and you

Know like you know the 1930s whereas they should have been uh reading books about sales culture because that was the key to understanding Donald Trump and uh I thought Trump basically was selling outrage he was selling um he was selling the experience of feeling uh solidarity with other people

Who’ 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 did you detect a danger in that I mean because look there are times being frustrated and wanting

Justice those two things aren’t that easy to distinguish right 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 you’re intimating that you believe that he capitalized it 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 yeah yeah um you know I I that that’s a difficult question right because it’s the it gets to the question of motivation you 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 didn’t find the you know that 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 cuz 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 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 was complicated he he has a a mischievous streak in him um it was it was clear watching his family early in the campaign that they wanted no part of

Any idea that he might win um but and I wasn’t exactly sure that he wanted to win but right right yeah well I thought it was an exercise in brand awareness expansion at least and quite a brilliant one in some ways if 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 the with the tools that were available to him uh he was a Pioneer in many respects by bypassing the media and going straight to people

Using Twitter and that sort of thing um all that was very interesting and I think that was something that if people had looked honestly at the situation they would have found really compelling uh to study instead I 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 a sort of ongoing one interesting diet tribe from that point forward 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 uh of without the kind of crazy Gonzo journalism style that you know might have added something quite compelling to the to the overall analysis of trump what did you do with um I can’t breathe and hate in

The other two books 2017 and 2019 yeah I I lived very close to where Eric Garner um was killed in Staten Island I was in New Jersey um just a short drive away so I decided to do a book about um what happened there and I

Just 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 an 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 uh to Garner all the different forces that converg to um cause you know that incident and you know left

With an understanding of police brutality that was a lot more um complicated than people made it out after the George George Floyd incident which I think is um was unfortunate well Co 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 uh especially after the implementation of programs like broken windows was that they were uh forced by these new stats based policing regimes to um create artificially uh engender contacts with the population when they weren’t necessary uh you know the the

Court case Ohio V ter which is from 1968 in the United States allowed police to randomly stop and search people on the street and police departments clue it into the idea that if they did enough of those stops they would find people who were who had warrants on them that they would

Probably grab a lot of guns uh that people were carrying Andor 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 with 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 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 us 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 arguably well more minor in some ways acts of of harassment let’s say or 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 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 uh in many cases told the officers to do more of those stops in certain neighborhoods than than in others um one 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 uh you know I’m looking for black males age 18 to 21 you know like he says that openly right um so there was a mass I think and this goes to your point earlier there may not be a discrepancy about deadly force but

There’s a huge discrepancy in terms of the more minor stops right and especially about things like drug arrests are are you really going to get fewer drug arrests if you stop everybody on Wall Street and look through their stuff uh um then you you might if you

You know stop everybody in Bushwick or uh Brownsville or someplace like that I think it would be closer than than most people would think and so that in gender hostility they used it as a way to kind of keep property values high in some places um by basically using police to

Clear out undesirable looking people that was the narrative with Garner Garner was kind of a slovenly dressed uh 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 um 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 that they were also cleaning up and yeah 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 and Canada increasingly Toronto and uh 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 you can’t just you can’t justop stop enforcing the law either I mean that doesn’t work either right right right no penalty for shoplifting under $1,000 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 you want to say a few words about that and then we’ll talk about the debate you had recently with Douglas Murray and and sure so hay ink 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 openening to me even though I’d been around the media my whole life uh because it was about the unspoken pressures that go into um editorial

Decisions before they get to the reporter you know why are some stories uh assigned and not others right um why why do why do people uh 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

Uh instead of uh trying to go for the whole audience which is how uh ABC CBS NBC made their money in the old days now they were using the new model which was what you might call um audience optimization where you pick a demographic and try to dominate it and

That’s how we get this basically stratified fractured 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 that’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 um commercial formula of doing news uh I think has been a major driver of a lot

Of the kind of culture War division in this country you think how much of that do you think’s an inevitable consequence of again of technological transformation because I mean ABC CBS NBC they dominated when television bandwidth was well almost infinitely expensive in 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 embedded 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 uh 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 I interviewed the former publisher of the newspaper in Dallas and he said that up until the80s the news business was a scarcity business there were only there were only so many slots in the newspaper to sell wads 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 um and you have to find a new commercial strategy for making money the it’s evolved to the this place where selling subscriptions is the only way to go but the problem with that is

That uh it doesn’t pay for things like investigative journalism as well um it doesn’t pay for foreign bureaus in 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 that so so all those brands have been irrevocably damaged I think um and you know nothing

Has stepped up to replace it uh 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 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 audiences Toronto Ottawa Montreal glitterati such

As you know such as we produce in Canada um 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 moop 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 impression questions 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 debate should definitely do it uh the the resolution was be it resolved do not trust the mainstream media and so uh Michelle and Malcolm

Were arguing the Nay portion and uh Douglas and I were arguing the yay portion and you said that we moop the with him really Douglas mopped the floor with him and I was kind of there um but the you know he he’s he’s very impressive uh as an orator and as a

Stage performer and he was very Qui as a fighter as a fter 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 that really turned the tide with that debate was um kind of kind of the superior

Attitude I 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 kronite had twice been voted the most trusted person in America in the 70s and 80s and uh

Malcolm wouldn’t let that go he kept implying that um by saying that I was longing for the the days of Jim Crow uh in America and that I had forgotten that when those votes were taken by the way he was wrong about this when those votes

Were taken that you know lots of people didn’t have it so great in America um 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 poor people were doing a hell of a lot better on the marital front

Back then than they are now by a large margin and there were a lot fewer children who were fatherless 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 program or ideology so anyways he he you said he adopted a Meen of superiority on what basis well he he essentially he was calling me a racist for making that OBS 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 mhm yeah that the the

People who I debated at the monk debates they played that same mistake too they played the racial racial card and racist card yeah and Canadian audiences they don’t like that much because that hasn’t really been part of our parland the part of the tenor of our our public discussions not nearly as

Much as in the US 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 did you think that Goldberg and and uh 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 uh are still good procedures you know factchecking that sort of thing and and we countered with yes those are good things un fortunately 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 audience is 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 I think it’s everybody uh 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 the that’s been the fact the they don’t get to be the Legacy Media without maintaining a genuine respectability right exactly exactly yeah yeah yeah so so let me let me close here with um a question about the

Twitter file Revelations 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 Falls 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 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 interesting

What’s interesting about it is that TimeWise 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

Um that I didn’t know the answer to that question uh 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 that was worth publishing but it wasn’t until we started to see this organized system of communication um between the FBI the Department of Homeland Security the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and all these platforms uh that there was this sort of Highway of content moderation requests

That was flowing to all of these companies I 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 we got rid of that the first day

Um and 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 these 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 critic ISM 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 jurries to decide I’m not going to 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 has ordered it 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 Bel 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 whatso or

Training or or competence or moral guidance to be doing so and so I thought you guys did a great service and um oh thank you I thought it was a good bang off beginning to Elon musk’s re revolutionary takeover of Twitter and uh you know he re 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 were

Exposing this high level collusion designed to take out free speech in a manner that was extraordinarily dangerous obviously you know that the way we communicated about everything during the pandemic lockdown which was an outbreak of authoritarianism far greater than the D with a far greater danger than any danger posed by the

Bloody virus I think the fact that that that all came to light was absolutely necessary so well so thank you for that as far as I’m concerned glad hear for coming up also for coming up to Canada and you know delivering a good trouncing to the well yeah yeah yeah any excuse to

Come to Toronto I love that’s one of my favorite cities in the world so my wife yeah well we’re going to we’re going to do something about that real soon now that we’ve elected a very farle mayor so um I’m going to continue talking to Matt on the dailywire 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 day Weare 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 wire plus people for facilitating these conversations and professionalizing them on the production side and to Matt thank you all very much for talking to me today I appreciate everything you said th thank you so much

For having me I appreciate it it’s I’m glad to finally meet you

Video Tags: Jordan Peterson,Jordan B Peterson,psychology,psychoanalysis,existentialism,maps of meaning,free speech,freedom of speech,personality lectures,personality and transformations,Jordan perterson,Dr Peterson

Video Duration: 01:42:00