Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: the absolute world to have your support.
Speaker 1: But enough with that, let's get to the show. You
Speaker 1: started covering a lot of the foreclosure crisis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was my first hint that something like
Speaker 3: Trump was going to happen. That's what this whole memestock
Speaker 3: thinker out of, I think, is just this rage directed
Speaker 3: towards these financial professionals who were basically being subsidized and
Speaker 3: then acting like they had like this special financial genius
Speaker 3: that allowed them to make money.
Speaker 4: We actually haven't even opened one of the most important
Speaker 4: chapters in your journalism career at now, which is the
Speaker 4: Twitter files. As someone who's actually like interacted with him
Speaker 4: and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him,
Speaker 4: where do you think Elon Musk bits into this.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Counterpoints for today's Friday show. We're going
Speaker 1: to be joined by long time veteran journalist Matthew Tayibi.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about his career, which has spanned
Speaker 1: the pre Internet era, basically back when you see actually
Speaker 1: print things. I mean, I'm there too, so I can
Speaker 1: say that up to today and continuing to evolve like
Speaker 1: we have not seen. It's not as if we've gotten
Speaker 1: some static place. So we're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: history of journalism and the history over the last thirty years.
Speaker 1: But we wanted to start with a question though about
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, this election, which we're all trying to cover.
Speaker 1: And I have a theory that I wanted to try
Speaker 1: on both of you, which is that I think the
Speaker 1: country is in denial right now, like it think of
Speaker 1: this as the other kind of election denialism, like people
Speaker 1: just I think as I talk to people around the
Speaker 1: country that they just refuse to believe that this is
Speaker 1: the election, that it's Biden against Trump, Like there was
Speaker 1: basically no Democratic primary, and so that allowed people to
Speaker 1: kind of so you know what, this isn't really happening.
Speaker 1: There's no competition, but it's not going to be him,
Speaker 1: like there's gonna be And I was talking to my dad. Yes,
Speaker 1: she's like they're going to do something right. Right maybe
Speaker 1: at the.
Speaker 5: Convention has a medical situation.
Speaker 1: And I think the Nicky Haley. We talked a lot
Speaker 1: about how Nicki Haley got all this mainstream news coverage
Speaker 1: that she didn't deserve based on the fact that she
Speaker 1: never had a shot. But I think part of it
Speaker 1: was psychological that people are like, it's got to be
Speaker 1: something other than Trump. Like Biden said he was basically
Speaker 1: going to be a one term guy. Country took him
Speaker 1: at his word. Now here he is allegedly running again,
Speaker 1: and so I think that I think that the refusal
Speaker 1: of people to check into the election has to do
Speaker 1: with them just denying the reality that it's these two guys.
Speaker 3: What do you think that, Uh yeah, well, I think
Speaker 3: a couple of things. Number one, I think people are
Speaker 3: right to be suspicious because we're not treating this like
Speaker 3: a normal election season. I mean, at this cover five
Speaker 3: presidential elections. At this stage of a race, normally, every
Speaker 3: single day it would be a campaign story. You'd be
Speaker 3: you see somebody out in the campaign till we would
Speaker 3: have constant arguments about the back and forth. But you know,
Speaker 3: between the candidates and there's none of that would.
Speaker 1: Have staff getting fired, like you know who the staff are, right,
Speaker 1: Like they became celebrities over the five election cycles that
Speaker 1: you've covered, like well the Carl Rose, the David Axelrods,
Speaker 1: like who's running Biden Trump's campaigns?
Speaker 5: Where was the first publication that you worked on a campaign?
Speaker 5: Just like in general the village?
Speaker 4: So because that sounded to me like such a Politico
Speaker 4: Huff Post question, because but that's actually what was sort
Speaker 4: of new, right. I mean, you guys can correct me
Speaker 4: if I'm wrong, But in the aughts there was this
Speaker 4: journalism as almost a sport.
Speaker 1: Well James Carville.
Speaker 5: Campaigning become became more almost gamified. I don't know that
Speaker 5: the characters popped.
Speaker 3: I anything that was really popularized, but a helper in
Speaker 3: and who's the other guy I've always forget is high, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: you know, with game change and all that and this
Speaker 3: whole idea. But that was the first, you know, when
Speaker 3: I started covering campaigns for Rolling Stone, the first thing
Speaker 3: that I saw as a big story on the campaign
Speaker 3: was that the journalists thought they were running the whole thing.
Speaker 3: There was a kind of a cabal inside the campaign
Speaker 3: where they would get together. At the end of the day,
Speaker 3: they would decide which candidates were serious and viable and
Speaker 3: have discussions about that. And I thought that was crazy.
Speaker 3: Now there's really none of that. I mean, nobody really
Speaker 3: knows what the campaign is anymore. And it doesn't it
Speaker 3: doesn't there's no script. It's not the reality show that
Speaker 3: was all consuming for so long.
Speaker 1: So five elections I could do. The math was what
Speaker 1: was the first one? For actively covered?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Four? Really?
Speaker 1: Right, okay, Carrie Carry, I don't know, yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So everybody knew but Bush, even though Bush was the nominate,
Speaker 1: like everybody knew it was gonna be the dominie again
Speaker 1: Karl Rove and like here's and he had a strategy.
Speaker 1: He's gonna he's going to bring out the bigots too
Speaker 1: for the over marriage equality. Like that was like that
Speaker 1: was the theme of the two then plus John John
Speaker 1: Kerry's quizzling and like, you know, he's weak on the
Speaker 1: war and you know, right, you knew you kind of
Speaker 1: knew what the election was.
Speaker 3: About, right right, yeah, exactly. I mean they they made
Speaker 3: it about things that should have really didn't matter to
Speaker 3: the population all that much. I mean that the war
Speaker 3: was the dominant topic in the country at the time,
Speaker 3: and neither candidate really wanted to go there all that much,
Speaker 3: not you know, in terms of and also the larger
Speaker 3: issues about the warrant and that sort of thing. They
Speaker 3: just didn't come up a whole lot. It was you know,
Speaker 3: John Carrey's medals versus yeah, other the swift boats boats, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: all that stuff.
Speaker 1: So how did the how did the campaign press handle
Speaker 1: the swift boats? Actually? Like what was the and then
Speaker 1: and then I want to go back and how he
Speaker 1: got in juralm the like so to like the Bush campaign,
Speaker 1: they start pushing this swift boat stuff and for people
Speaker 1: who are basically weren't even born.
Speaker 3: Then, which is almost everybody.
Speaker 1: So swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a right wing
Speaker 1: group that was kind of formed by people who had
Speaker 1: served with John Kerry in Vietnam, and they hated his
Speaker 1: story of turning his swift boat toward the Vietcong and
Speaker 1: like shooting and they said he like sort of like
Speaker 1: throwing the metals. Well, they really hated that he threw
Speaker 1: his medals in protests or his ribbons. I think he
Speaker 1: kept his metals before his ribbons, which is a very
Speaker 1: John Kerry, but they didn't like his purple heart and
Speaker 1: he wasn't injured enough or whatever. It became this like
Speaker 1: he smoked his ribbons. Yes, became this real character attack.
Speaker 1: Democrats just avoided it for a very long time, not
Speaker 1: understanding the way that the internet and politics had changed,
Speaker 1: thought that if they just didn't address it, it would go away.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It ended up causing immense damage. But I'm curious how
Speaker 1: the press was thinking about this kind of new well,
Speaker 1: I think they campaigning.
Speaker 3: What I remember about that is that a lot of
Speaker 3: people saw it as a continuation of the sort of
Speaker 3: nineties David Rock, you know, sort.
Speaker 1: Of which was a new thing used to be on
Speaker 1: the right for right. Yeah, he was this also or not.
Speaker 3: Quote unquote right wing hit man back in the day
Speaker 3: who was the point person behind the scenes and the
Speaker 3: Clarence Thomas hearings, than Whitewater and all this stuff, And
Speaker 3: that was a sort of a new thing in media
Speaker 3: at the time, this idea of organized the multi pronged
Speaker 3: media attacks, creating new organizations just for the purpose of
Speaker 3: going out into the public and creating news stories. And
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people saw the Swift Book
Speaker 3: group as that. But you're right. There was a massive
Speaker 3: and effect in the way. You know, they covered that
Speaker 3: so much that it became overwhelmingly the theme of the campaign.
Speaker 3: And the Democrats I don't think did a great job
Speaker 3: of pushing back because they their whole campaign was John
Speaker 3: Kerry in an army jacket. They didn't have an issue
Speaker 3: to run on, and so this whole thing. He was
Speaker 3: a sitting duck for that kind of stuff. So I
Speaker 3: don't know, most of the reporters just thought it was
Speaker 3: a fun story that they were happy to work on
Speaker 3: every day. There wasn't a whole lot of outrage.
Speaker 4: Kind of a fascinating thread though, And this might get
Speaker 4: to your next question, and that Chris Lasavita, who's now
Speaker 4: running the Trump campaign, was like the pioneer of the
Speaker 4: swift boat Oh was he?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, People credit him for the entire swift boat campaign attack.
Speaker 4: And what's interesting about that is at the time people
Speaker 4: saw it as the sort of rupture of ethics, and
Speaker 4: now you have the man who finally put an end,
Speaker 4: at least on the presidential scale, to this debate about
Speaker 4: whether it's okay to rupture the ethics. It's like the
Speaker 4: it's like the filibuster debate, but for decorum and presidential campaigns, right,
Speaker 4: like we can't they like once you open that Pandora's box,
Speaker 4: Like what happens? That absolutely happened in twenty sixteen on
Speaker 4: the presidential level. And now Chris los Avita, the swift
Speaker 4: boat guy, was running the Trump campaign.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know he was running the Trump campaign.
Speaker 1: Like I'm in denial too about this election.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that either. I'm supposedly supposed to be covering.
Speaker 1: So don't don't tell anybody that that I didn't know that,
Speaker 1: because that would be kind of embarrassing.
Speaker 5: It's a good thing you didn't say it on air.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So well, yeah, just keep it between us in
Speaker 1: the Friday Show here. If you guys out there.
Speaker 5: Watching, nobody cliped this whole all flow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't keep riving. So h growing up, did you
Speaker 1: always think you were going to be a journalist because
Speaker 1: your father was a journalist?
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: He was like a local TV journalist in New York?
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So my parents were at Rutgers and my father
Speaker 3: I was born when they were very young, there were
Speaker 3: like twenty and so he to support the family, he
Speaker 3: was working as a newspaper reporter at the Home News
Speaker 3: in New Brunswick, New Jersey. So he started when he
Speaker 3: was eighteen or nineteen. Wow, he's been doing this forever.
Speaker 3: And then as soon as he graduated, we moved to
Speaker 3: Boston and he worked at a local affiliate there. So
Speaker 3: in my childhood was like Anchorman basically. You know, I
Speaker 3: spent a lot of my childhood in those newsrooms with
Speaker 3: you know, the bad facial hair and all that stuff.
Speaker 3: And I used to play with the weather set up
Speaker 3: and try to print, pretend with the green screen and everything.
Speaker 3: It was really cool.
Speaker 1: And did your mom get an a journalism too? No?
Speaker 3: No, she ended up being an attorney. But I spent
Speaker 3: most of my time hanging around my father. My father
Speaker 3: is he's a journalist, journalist, like very old school, incredibly gifted.
Speaker 3: I was very fascinated by his work because he's a
Speaker 3: super gregarious personality who could just show up at any
Speaker 3: scene and get people trusting him and talking to him instantly.
Speaker 3: And you know, in journalism, in TV journalism especially, you
Speaker 3: have to get you know, a good SoundBite, and then
Speaker 3: you have to be able to knock out a script
Speaker 3: like really quickly. And he was really good at all
Speaker 3: that stuff. He did his own editing, even back in
Speaker 3: the days when it was film going all that back
Speaker 3: that far. So I thought that was really cool. But
Speaker 3: I never thought I would be able to do this.
Speaker 3: And I also wanted to be a writer, a TV journalist.
Speaker 1: Was it that? Oh, so you wanted to be a
Speaker 1: writer of journalism or novels and novels. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I was kind of a depressed kid. So comic
Speaker 3: novels were my big escape growing up, and I thought,
Speaker 3: that's what I want to do. I want to be
Speaker 3: like Elin Waugh or Nicolai Gogol or somebody like that.
Speaker 3: You know. It turned out I don't have talent for
Speaker 3: writing fiction, but I didn't learn that until later. And
Speaker 3: by the time I figured it out, I realized I
Speaker 3: didn't have any actual skills except the family business. So
Speaker 3: that's how I got into journalism.
Speaker 1: So how do you wind up in Russia?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: That was gonna be my next question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so my favorite writer is growing up were all Russian?
Speaker 3: I mentioned go Gol Bulgakov was another one. I went
Speaker 3: through this period where I was just reading lots and
Speaker 3: lots of Russian literature.
Speaker 5: Do you think that was from your politics or do
Speaker 5: you think your politics came from that?
Speaker 3: Oh? I couldn't. I couldn't stand politics. I still don't.
Speaker 3: I still can't stand it. I really the books. I
Speaker 3: was just really into how well they were written and
Speaker 3: how beautiful they were, And you know, the Russians have
Speaker 3: this amazing absurdist view on life, and I was, you know,
Speaker 3: when you're depressed, you kind of try to lose yourself
Speaker 3: in that landscape and the writing of people like Tolsta
Speaker 3: it's so vivid. I wanted to go experience it. And
Speaker 3: then I wanted to learn the language so I could
Speaker 3: read those books in russ So I went there as
Speaker 3: a student. And one of the funny things was, you know,
Speaker 3: in the States, what years that probably eighty nine nineties,
Speaker 3: so it was still Soviet. Yeah, so I went to
Speaker 3: a Soviet college. But in America, you remember the eighties,
Speaker 3: that was like the kind of Porky's and everything right,
Speaker 3: Like everybody was you know, they spent a lot of
Speaker 3: time in their appearance and there was a success culture
Speaker 3: and everything, and I thought, I hated that. I'm like,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be a failure. When I grew up
Speaker 3: in Russia, everybody's a failure, right, So I felt like
Speaker 3: I fit right in and it was it was a
Speaker 3: cool things. So that's why I ended up moving back there.
Speaker 3: I thought this place is paradise. It turned out not
Speaker 3: to be, but it was a great thing.
Speaker 1: Well, so you graduate from college and came back to
Speaker 1: the US, and what'd you try first before you went
Speaker 1: back to Russia.
Speaker 3: I didn't try anything.
Speaker 1: I immediately started making plans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I worked demolition and way the table saved
Speaker 3: money and it just went over there and started stringing.
Speaker 4: So and you said, it turned out not to be paradise,
Speaker 4: but there's something so interesting about someone growing up immersed
Speaker 4: and as you said, the landscapes, that was a really
Speaker 4: beautiful way to put it. And then having your eyes
Speaker 4: opened up gradually over time. What was that process like?
Speaker 4: What really started to disillusion you?
Speaker 3: Well, Russia was just it went through a very tough time,
Speaker 3: both when it was still Soviet and then after the
Speaker 3: revolution in ninety one.
Speaker 5: That's when were you there in ninety one.
Speaker 3: I missed the actual thing by a couple of months
Speaker 3: on either side, but I saw it coming obviously my
Speaker 3: last semester there. You could you know there was a
Speaker 3: a ban on food products, so you had to use
Speaker 3: a rationing system just to get vegetables and things like that.
Speaker 3: It was it was a mess. But then after that,
Speaker 3: Russia immediately transformed this like gangster state, which was kind
Speaker 3: of horrifying to watch, but as a journalist was fascinating,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean I got to go and see
Speaker 3: incredible things. It was a great place to start one's
Speaker 3: career because you know, you got to cover very high
Speaker 3: level things quickly, which you don't get to do in
Speaker 3: America if you're working as an intern in you know,
Speaker 3: a magazine or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I always thought your ability to cover Wall Street corruption
Speaker 1: later in your career must have been connected to witnessing
Speaker 1: it in its like most extreme form, right, like up
Speaker 1: up close? Was it so? And for people who aren't
Speaker 1: that familiar with that period of history, correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. I think it The most rapid collapse in
Speaker 1: life expectancy in world history is Russia in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3: That's probably right, Yeah, which is remarkable.
Speaker 1: To consider that they went from rationing food in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one and then that was the high point, right,
Speaker 1: the collapsed, you know, life expectancy dropping by just years
Speaker 1: and years and years because the state, you know, with
Speaker 1: US facilitation, just gets sold from out from under the
Speaker 1: people to these oligarchs. Could you see it happen in
Speaker 1: real time? Like are you like you know, there's still
Speaker 1: these famous videos of Jeff Sachs, who we should have
Speaker 1: on the show because his arc from that totally to
Speaker 1: where he is now. It's absolutely incredible. Jeff Sacks helped
Speaker 1: to basically auction off the entire Soviet Union and create
Speaker 1: all these oligarchs through this Harvard run.
Speaker 3: Harvard Institute for International Development. Yeah. Yeah, So the auctions
Speaker 3: that you talk about when you mentioned the financial reporting later,
Speaker 3: these are some of the most complicated thefts maybe in
Speaker 3: the history of the world, and probably the biggest ones
Speaker 3: maybe in the history of people. So just take an example, Well,
Speaker 3: they had a thing called loans for shares, which was
Speaker 3: a way of kind of handing out the crown jewels
Speaker 3: of Soviet industry to basically cronies of the yeltsin regime.
Speaker 3: And what they did is they took people who really
Speaker 3: had no cash at all and they lent them money.
Speaker 3: So in the case of for instance, Yukos, which is
Speaker 3: a company about the size of excellon mobile, the yeltsin
Speaker 3: regime lends one of the banks fifty million dollars, which
Speaker 3: turns out to be half their steak that they put
Speaker 3: up to get a thirty eight or thirty seven percent
Speaker 3: steak and one of the world's biggest oil companies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: exactly right. So they put up basically nothing to get
Speaker 3: to become instantly some of the richest people on earth.
Speaker 3: And they did that with you know, seven or eight
Speaker 3: of these banker groups. And we later learned that there
Speaker 3: was a kind of a backroom deal that was broker
Speaker 3: to Davos where there was an agreement that they were
Speaker 3: going to get these properties in return for massively supporting
Speaker 3: Yelds in the ninety six election, and that's how Yelsen
Speaker 3: went from being at six percent in the polls to
Speaker 3: actually winning. There were some other things that went on too,
Speaker 3: but you know, it was a US broker thing. We
Speaker 3: helped advise in the structure of all those auctions, which
Speaker 3: were totally corrupt, and so that was an early introduction
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 4: What's also playing out in a split screen for you
Speaker 4: is you're seeing up close what's actually happening in Russia.
Speaker 4: You're also probably absorbing Western media coverage of what's happening
Speaker 4: in Russia. And you've written one of the best books
Speaker 4: on contemporary media problems hating people should.
Speaker 5: Read it if they haven't.
Speaker 4: But watching that was that also something because and this
Speaker 4: is kind of a rambling question, but I think about
Speaker 4: Tucker Carlson going to Russia and realizing a lot of
Speaker 4: what he has been told about Russia is wrong. Maybe
Speaker 4: though sometimes people realize a lot of what they've been
Speaker 4: told about something is wrong, and it pushes them further
Speaker 4: to the direction of like not being right on a
Speaker 4: different side of the question, like.
Speaker 5: Tucker out of this. That's a phenomenon that happens all
Speaker 5: the time.
Speaker 4: So for you, what was it like watching the Western
Speaker 4: media say this place is a corrupt nightmare while not
Speaker 4: covering the Westerners that are creating the corrupt nightmare, but
Speaker 4: then also kind of missing some of the story that
Speaker 4: you were covering with like everyday people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a lot of the journalists, actually most of
Speaker 3: them didn't speak Russian. That was the first thing that
Speaker 3: was kind of shocking to me. I didn't understand that
Speaker 3: at all. It turns out that's sort of an intentional strategy,
Speaker 3: both with diplomats and foreign correspondence for the big bureaus.
Speaker 1: They what's the strategy there?
Speaker 3: So for diplomats, there was a bad experience with China
Speaker 3: with the Maoist Revolution, where the United States felt like
Speaker 3: the diplomats were too close to the local population and
Speaker 3: that's why they didn't get the warning that the revolution
Speaker 3: was going to happen. So there's a kind of a
Speaker 3: strategy of switching people out on a regular basis so
Speaker 3: they don't get to attenuated to the low population. With journalists,
Speaker 3: I'm not really sure why they do it, but you
Speaker 3: almost never have somebody who is really in tune with
Speaker 3: you know, the local population, the language, everything, And I
Speaker 3: don't know how you cover a country if you don't,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: That's like I'm trying to imagine a Russian journalist who
Speaker 1: comes to Washington, d c. And only speaks Russian, right,
Speaker 1: and is then translating what's happening in Washington back to
Speaker 1: a Russian audience. Can you imagine that it would be
Speaker 1: remotely accurate?
Speaker 3: No, it would be a money python routine. Yeah right,
Speaker 3: you couldn't. It's bored, It's you could. It's even dumber
Speaker 3: than that.
Speaker 5: Would they just have to talk to the English speakers.
Speaker 3: Well, so that's that's the problem. So what they got
Speaker 3: almost all of their input on what was going on
Speaker 3: in Russia from English speaking Russian politicians, many of whom
Speaker 3: went to Harvard like Anatole Chibias Yegur guide are borising themselves, right,
Speaker 3: people like that. But you went, you know, an hour
Speaker 3: outside of Moscow or Saint Petersburgh and there was like
Speaker 3: subsistence farming and like, you know, a complete gangsterism. You
Speaker 3: would go to a place and there would be total
Speaker 3: barter economy, no cash anywhere, starvation, you know, incredible surges
Speaker 3: and crime, all this stuff. So I started to do
Speaker 3: a lot of like participatory reporting. So I would just
Speaker 3: go from place to place, get a job somewhere, and
Speaker 3: then just write, you know, what's it like to work
Speaker 3: construction in this place, or you know, work on a
Speaker 3: you know, a mine over here, right. And in contrast
Speaker 3: that with what they were telling people back home, which
Speaker 3: was that there's this emerging middle class and everything's awesome,
Speaker 3: and you know, it was you know, it was really
Speaker 3: wild for me because I had a lot of illusions
Speaker 3: about how good the media was, and that was the
Speaker 3: first time I saw that they just will lie about stuff,
Speaker 3: and that was kind of amazing to me.
Speaker 1: Who would you publish those with?
Speaker 3: So I had my own newspaper over there is exility,
Speaker 3: so yeah. But I did work at the Moscow Times
Speaker 3: over there, which is an expat paper. But I also
Speaker 3: I wrote for the Nation and some other papers in England,
Speaker 3: like believe it or not, I think I did a
Speaker 3: couple for the Telegraph, for the Daily Mail. I worked
Speaker 3: for euro Money, believe it or not.
Speaker 5: He's always been a right wing.
Speaker 3: Hack exactly going back, that's right, that's right, euro Money.
Speaker 3: So you know, I contributed. I also wrote in Russian.
Speaker 3: I wrote for Russian papers and uh yeah, so that
Speaker 3: was that was mostly what I did. But I the
Speaker 3: audience mostly wasn't back in the United States, so that was,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of the difference. But it was interesting.
Speaker 1: How did you come about founding the paper? And who
Speaker 1: was it was? It was Mark Ames was Zai Chika much.
Speaker 3: Later, Yeah, so it was it was really Mark. There
Speaker 3: were there were actually two papers originally, you know, for
Speaker 3: a long time there was this paper they're called Living Here,
Speaker 3: which was a club guy because the Moscow Times didn't
Speaker 3: have a good club guide and so there was everybody
Speaker 3: realized that's how you make money in the next bad city, right,
Speaker 3: because everybody's clubbing, right. So we put out the sort
Speaker 3: of trashy club guide and that was actually doing well,
Speaker 3: and somebody had the idea to long, when don't we
Speaker 3: just make it out the paper and Mark was the
Speaker 3: first editor of that. I had actually I would during
Speaker 3: that time. I was actually playing basketball in Mongolia when
Speaker 3: this was all happening. I got sick, came home and
Speaker 3: they said, do you want to come help do a
Speaker 3: competitor to that? And I came back and ended up
Speaker 3: merging with Mark, and that's how the XLE happened.
Speaker 1: And I forgot about your Mongolian basketball career. How long
Speaker 1: did that last?
Speaker 3: A season? Yeah? Yeah, I was. I was the Mongolian
Speaker 3: I'm really it was really more like a small forward,
Speaker 3: but I can't shoot, so but I was leaving the
Speaker 3: league in rebounding when la That's funny, That's my point
Speaker 3: was like.
Speaker 5: You were the number one, the top rebounder in the Mongolian.
Speaker 3: Boder was I was it? Six for two? Believed it
Speaker 3: or not?
Speaker 1: Did you have a nickname that the Mongolian Mongolian Rodman?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And I did the whole thing. Back then, I
Speaker 3: had hair and I used to diet red with and
Speaker 3: have a yellow beard and all kinds of crazy stuff.
Speaker 3: The owner wanted to drum up interest, so he would
Speaker 3: ask me to start fights and do all kinds of
Speaker 3: crazy stuff.
Speaker 5: Really, Kenny Powers in Mexico.
Speaker 3: Totally, yeah, totally is that's why I went. I wanted
Speaker 3: to write a book about this, and you know, the
Speaker 3: whole idea was like it was a gag. It was
Speaker 3: supposed to be Charles Barkley and the far East Right,
Speaker 3: and I was going to do it, but you know,
Speaker 3: I contracted pneumonia in the middle of it, and you know,
Speaker 3: never got to finish the project.
Speaker 1: So did you ever write about that?
Speaker 3: Not really. I wrote like one article for the Boston
Speaker 3: Globe magazine a long time ago, but I never did
Speaker 3: the full thing. And now I wish I lost all
Speaker 3: my notes from that time period because it would have
Speaker 3: been a very funny story actually, if I had actually
Speaker 3: written it.
Speaker 4: Another lesson that I'm curious about that I imagine you
Speaker 4: gleaned from those years is the kind of intersection of
Speaker 4: journalism and intel that I imagine was especially crazy in
Speaker 4: nineteen nineties early aughts Russia, but also I feel like
Speaker 4: has just flourished in recent years. And this gets to
Speaker 4: a lot of your reporting with the Twitter files, where
Speaker 4: there's this mundane think tank at Stanford that is looped
Speaker 4: into all of these different Pentagon agencies or whatever. The
Speaker 4: all of the alphabet soup from the Pentagon. But I
Speaker 4: feel like that must have been a water that you
Speaker 4: learned to navigate, probably in Russia too.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Yet so Russia when it became when stopped being communist,
Speaker 3: it did have a very vigorous free press for a while,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't exactly free right, like the system was.
Speaker 3: You had a whole bunch of different newspapers, each one
Speaker 3: was owned by a different gangster, and the people who
Speaker 3: were the investigative journalists at those papers, they would be
Speaker 3: handed something, a packet of something that would come from
Speaker 3: you know, whatever intelligence service was connected to that mob figure,
Speaker 3: and they would write up that report. They had a
Speaker 3: term for it. They call it selling jeans over there,
Speaker 3: like somebody just sold me some jeans, because that's what
Speaker 3: the people on the street used to do in the
Speaker 3: communist time. So I knew a lot of these investigative reporters,
Speaker 3: and actually they were right away. They were incredible like reporters,
Speaker 3: they were really good and very brave. A lot of
Speaker 3: them got killed or beaten or threatened, and they were
Speaker 3: just unbelievably brave people who were trying to navigate this
Speaker 3: very difficult system. And I learned a lot from them,
Speaker 3: and I didn't learn until later that there was probably
Speaker 3: something similar going on in the Western side, but certainly
Speaker 3: on the Russian side. That was the first time I
Speaker 3: understood that whole dynamic and got to see how it worked.
Speaker 3: And of course, by the time Putin came on the scene,
Speaker 3: he's sort of all he really did is consolidate, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, instead of having seven different agencies, he basically
Speaker 3: put them all under the same umbrella. And if you didn't,
Speaker 3: you know, get in line and publish what he wanted you.
Speaker 3: You know, that's when you got in trouble.
Speaker 1: So where where did the exile fit into this constellation
Speaker 1: of papers?
Speaker 3: Well, so we were in this amazing place where we
Speaker 3: were writing in English. American libel law didn't apply to us,
Speaker 3: The Russians didn't read us.
Speaker 5: Where were you incorporated?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 5: Business wise?
Speaker 3: Business wise we were a Russian business, just so were
Speaker 3: we were a Russian we were a Russian press outlet
Speaker 3: in a second, and uh so we basically had to
Speaker 3: deal with this authorities that like a Russian newspaper would,
Speaker 3: but they weren't paying attention to what we wrote until later,
Speaker 3: and then they started to. We had some problems with
Speaker 3: them originally because they would just ask for bribes on
Speaker 3: tax day, but then I think there were some content
Speaker 3: issues later on, and then after I left, the paper
Speaker 3: actually got shut down by the tax police.
Speaker 1: What was it that brought it onto the radar? When
Speaker 1: did it start becoming a problem?
Speaker 3: Well, Putin was much more attentive to the whole press scene.
Speaker 3: There were some other Western reporters who had started to
Speaker 3: annoy the authorities even before he took control. He might
Speaker 3: remember a guy named Paul Kldnikoff who worked for Forbes.
Speaker 3: He got himself machine gunned towards the end of the nineties,
Speaker 3: and there was a lot of interplay between sort of
Speaker 3: connected Russian government figures and Western reporters. Increasingly that started
Speaker 3: to happen. The Russians started to pay a lot more
Speaker 3: of attention to that situation at the end of the nineties,
Speaker 3: and we were, you know, writing very critically of Putin
Speaker 3: and I was also pulling all kinds of stunts, like
Speaker 3: I worked with this Russian paper that actually wire tapped
Speaker 3: this chief of staff, so they definitely noticed that radar. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: So there were things like that. But I got out
Speaker 3: of the country and nothing ever happened to me. I
Speaker 3: didn't know a lot of people that, you know, ended
Speaker 3: up in bad places after he took power, Like I
Speaker 3: knew and at Polakowska, for instance, not terribly well, but
Speaker 3: I did know her well.
Speaker 4: I was just gonna say, what prompted you come back
Speaker 4: to the States, What was how did that transpire?
Speaker 3: You know? I thought creatively, the exl had kind of
Speaker 3: run out of ideas. We were starting to repeat ourselves,
Speaker 3: and h I got a little bit tired of writing
Speaker 3: for a dwindling audience. The XPAC community was shrinking pretty fast.
Speaker 3: Our ad base was no longer what it had been.
Speaker 1: Is that because of the creeping authoritarianism, the economic collapse,
Speaker 1: all of those together, like.
Speaker 3: Why well, Prutin's big idea was that he wanted to
Speaker 3: keep capital in Russia, So that diminished a lot of
Speaker 3: opportunities for Western business, Like there was an immense capital
Speaker 3: flight out of Russia in the nineties. That was the
Speaker 3: whole thing. Everybody there wanted a piece of all these
Speaker 3: energy companies. They wanted to get under underpriced you know,
Speaker 3: commodities and timber gold, whatever it was. And those opportunities
Speaker 3: closed up as soon as they started, you know, not
Speaker 3: quite nationalizing things, but but funneling all the contracts to
Speaker 3: Russian specifically, and not to Americans.
Speaker 1: Like you could steal money, but it has to stay here.
Speaker 3: It has to stay here. Exactly. He literally had a
Speaker 3: meeting Putin did like four months after he got elected,
Speaker 3: where he just brought all the guys who had gotten
Speaker 3: rich in those privatizations, and he said, look, here's the deal.
Speaker 3: You get to keep all that stuff if you, you know,
Speaker 3: pledge your allegiance to me. If not, you know, consequences
Speaker 3: straight out of the movie Casino, remember like the money
Speaker 3: or the hammer scenes. So you know, once once that
Speaker 3: whole thing happened, a lot of the Americans just bolted
Speaker 3: because there just wasn't a way to make cash the
Speaker 3: way there had been.
Speaker 1: And he made good on that thread on to a
Speaker 1: cup to several of the oligarchs, right, yeah, to kind
Speaker 1: of check.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I was just I was just thinking
Speaker 3: about this. In fact, some of my old friends from
Speaker 3: over there, we were just talking about this because yeah,
Speaker 3: it's an it's not an exact comparison, but let's just
Speaker 3: talk about, for instance, the raid on mar A Lago, right,
Speaker 3: the showiness of that, with all the agents and the
Speaker 3: TV crews and everything. There was something very similar. They
Speaker 3: raided a television station with you know, guys were repelling
Speaker 3: for windows and they dragged people out and one of
Speaker 3: the oligarchs got wrung up on a fraud charge. And
Speaker 3: then there was another famous one named Mikhail Hardakowski who
Speaker 3: was in prison. Now Hardakovski people presented him as this
Speaker 3: sort of martyr to good capitalism, but he was one
Speaker 3: of the people who most benefited from those crooked auctions.
Speaker 3: So I his.
Speaker 1: My memory was his crime was getting involved in politics. Yes,
Speaker 1: like because he said, like, keep your money that you stole,
Speaker 1: but you have to support me. Yeah, you got to
Speaker 1: get off, you gotta get He wanted to do both.
Speaker 1: He wanted to keep the money and also be involved
Speaker 1: in politics.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Putin said you got to stay on the bench.
Speaker 3: And this guy tried to go onto the court and
Speaker 3: when that's it, you know, put him in a cage. Right, right.
Speaker 3: So you know, as as you mentioned before, when you
Speaker 3: watched this stuff, which is it's like you know, going
Speaker 3: on the ocean and a glass bot boat. I mean,
Speaker 3: everything's crystal clear. They don't hide their corruption in Russia.
Speaker 3: They just announce what they're doing and oops sorry and
Speaker 3: and you know that's an incredible education for a reporter
Speaker 3: to see that stuff, especially as a young person.
Speaker 4: Doesn't it feel increasingly like that's what's happening here? I
Speaker 4: mean with your Twitter follows reporting, but also just with
Speaker 4: all of your censorship reporting everything, it's starting to look
Speaker 4: like they're almost bragging about censorship opportunities.
Speaker 5: You just mentioned the raid. Are there other parallels with that.
Speaker 4: Period of time that you witnessed in Russia and what's
Speaker 4: happening now with creeping authoritarianism censorship? I mean there's it's
Speaker 4: both left and right too. It's not like it's just
Speaker 4: against Trump, but it runs the gamut. It's just when
Speaker 4: the sort of security state wants to clamp down, they
Speaker 4: put their machinery emotion.
Speaker 5: What other similarities have you noticed?
Speaker 3: So the first time I noticed real similarities was when
Speaker 3: so I had been assigned to the campaign story for
Speaker 3: Rolling Stone. When I got back, you know, they hired me,
Speaker 3: so yeah, three oh four and they sent me out
Speaker 3: and I remember going out in the campaign thinking, God,
Speaker 3: this is so boring. There has to be some other
Speaker 3: you know, compared to the other thing. There has to
Speaker 3: be some deeper level to all this that I that
Speaker 3: can be covered. And it wasn't until the wait financial crisis,
Speaker 3: and they when they assigned, you know, a story to
Speaker 3: me like what happened with aig. Then you start to
Speaker 3: see the real machinations of American politics, like, you know,
Speaker 3: we're going to bail out this connected group of oligarchs
Speaker 3: using state money. We're going to present it to the
Speaker 3: public as something something noble and beneficial where everybody wins.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was all very very familiar to that
Speaker 3: whole scene.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: As soon as you know, I had a couple of
Speaker 3: people on Wall Street who kind of walked me through
Speaker 3: some of the basics. But after that, I'm like, wow,
Speaker 3: this is exactly the same story. So that that helped
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: I would say, were you surprised at the reaction to
Speaker 1: that that long piece you did, Goldwyn?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, Yeah, it was unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It's like long, you know, to this to this day,
Speaker 1: we're fifteen years later almost maybe I'm getting closer to
Speaker 1: twenty years and people still know the vampire squid right.
Speaker 5: Piggybacking on that.
Speaker 4: The right I remember as like a young conservative at
Speaker 4: the time, the right, which was in a populist moment,
Speaker 4: really didn't.
Speaker 5: Like you, Matt. You were you were the subject of
Speaker 5: eye rolls. You were just the.
Speaker 1: Same they like communists when they like going after the
Speaker 1: scold Wall Street.
Speaker 4: At the time, it was really a taboo on the right,
Speaker 4: even in the midst of this populist moment. And there
Speaker 4: are a lot of people who were opposed to the
Speaker 4: bail the Tea Party moment at posed to that. There
Speaker 4: a lot of people who ended up being opposed to
Speaker 4: tarp and all of that. But it didn't matter for you, Matt.
Speaker 4: I this is just my impression, but correct me if
Speaker 4: I'm wrong. The way the Right reacted to you recently
Speaker 4: is very different than how they did then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe originally, but I think that was a miss
Speaker 3: a little bit of a misunderstanding. Also, I did get
Speaker 3: some stuff kind of wrong in that first story. Like
Speaker 3: you know, I was a complete novice to financial reporting,
Speaker 3: so I was reporting what I was being told. And
Speaker 3: you know, as you know, when you do these stories,
Speaker 3: you're listening to twenty people and you think, well, these
Speaker 3: three make sense, and you know they and so I
Speaker 3: went with some things and any corrections what were they? No, No,
Speaker 3: they weren't like factual errors. They were more like a
Speaker 3: sort of interpretive you know, sometimes I would overinterpret what
Speaker 3: was going on a little bit. But really those stories
Speaker 3: were really not anti capitalists. They were actually stories about
Speaker 3: how politically connected companies were getting unfair advantages in the market.
Speaker 3: And that's why all my sources were Wall Street people.
Speaker 3: They weren't like people were being foreclosed on that game.
Speaker 3: Later and so I was getting a lot of people
Speaker 3: from hedge funds or from smaller banks who are calling
Speaker 3: me up and saying, this is totally unfair, Like, you know,
Speaker 3: they get bailed out, their cost of capital drops, they
Speaker 3: get to borrow more cheaply, we lose, right, And this
Speaker 3: is a it's a complicated story. But the reason I
Speaker 3: think that people responded to it is because financial reporting
Speaker 3: is not done for ordinary people. There is no yeah
Speaker 3: at the time anyway, there was no sort of popular
Speaker 3: way to explain what was going on, and just the
Speaker 3: process of saying, Okay, if you've never been around finance before,
Speaker 3: here is kind of roughly what happened. People really responded
Speaker 3: to that, and it was a shock to us. There
Speaker 3: was supposed to be only one story, and we ended
Speaker 3: up doing ten years of them. So I mean, that's
Speaker 3: how that happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was at the Huffington Post. Well, I went
Speaker 1: from Politico in two thousand and eight to Hoffington Post
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine. And when did that story
Speaker 1: come out? Probably own nine, Yeah, and yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: that was there was a rare moment where or several
Speaker 1: years where we could write stories about the financial crisis
Speaker 1: and what led up to it and also how to
Speaker 1: fix it, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the fight
Speaker 1: over God Frank, and they would get clicks. Like people
Speaker 1: were like intensely focused on that. I remember we it
Speaker 1: might have been twenty ten, right around the time the
Speaker 1: tea parties popping off. We wrote a piece saying that
Speaker 1: it might make sense for you actually to just walk
Speaker 1: away from your home because you're so far underwater you're
Speaker 1: never going to come back. You can just mail the
Speaker 1: keys back to the bank. And we set up using
Speaker 1: like what's meetup or whatever it is say like, if
Speaker 1: you guys want to like talk to people in your
Speaker 1: neighborhood who were in similar situations, here's how you can
Speaker 1: do it. And hundreds of meetups happened like around the
Speaker 1: country and they were covered in the local news. Would
Speaker 1: do like eight home on or showed up at this
Speaker 1: Starbucks to like discuss why or not they should just
Speaker 1: nail the keys.
Speaker 3: Well, that's amazing, right, but probably told you something about
Speaker 3: the extent of the yeah, right right, it was.
Speaker 1: It was such a dark bleak moment.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so then you started covering a lot of the
Speaker 1: foreclosure crisis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was that was when that was sort
Speaker 3: of my first hint that something like Trump was going
Speaker 3: to happen. They sent me to cover something called the
Speaker 3: Rocket Docket, which means in Florida. Then in Florida and Jacksonville,
Speaker 3: and there there was a group of Jacksonville lawyers were
Speaker 3: the first ones to tune clue into the whole robo
Speaker 3: signing problem where the banks were just sort of kind
Speaker 3: of willy nilly making up documents. So they're in place
Speaker 3: of documents they should have, they would just create affidavits
Speaker 3: and have the machines just sign them, yeah exactly, or
Speaker 3: or people they would just you know, they sit there
Speaker 3: with stacks and signing these things. So I went down
Speaker 3: there and they they wanted to show me how people
Speaker 3: got before closed on and there was a They dragged
Speaker 3: these half scene and hell judges out of retirement and
Speaker 3: not even a real courtroom. They just put them in
Speaker 3: conference rooms and had people come in and the average
Speaker 3: turnover time had to be like two and a half minutes,
Speaker 3: so they would take two and a half minutes to
Speaker 3: kick each family out of their home. And the line
Speaker 3: was like, you know, from the courtroom all the way around.
Speaker 1: The block, right were the families there? They were all there.
Speaker 3: They were there, yeah, they had to and you know
Speaker 3: it was they were all across the map right there.
Speaker 3: They were white, black, you know, young, old, everything. And
Speaker 3: the level of rage in that room was like nothing
Speaker 3: I'd ever experienced before.
Speaker 4: This is Florida, by the way, right would become a
Speaker 4: hub of right populism.
Speaker 3: Well I'm not surprised, right, that's interesting. Yeah, And you
Speaker 3: know it's funny because Occupy happened at the same time,
Speaker 3: and I remember going up to Occupy and thinking, you know,
Speaker 3: this is interesting, it's great but the other thing is
Speaker 3: where something's going to blow right, because that's representative of
Speaker 3: the whole population. And you know, because five million people
Speaker 3: or six million people got four closed on in those years,
Speaker 3: that's a lot of people, you know, And there were
Speaker 3: ordinary working class people. A lot of them got screwed.
Speaker 3: They didn't just not pay their bills. A lot of them,
Speaker 3: you know, got put into exotic mortgage mortgage products they
Speaker 3: didn't understand. They ended up with eight thousand dollars a
Speaker 3: month bills and stuff like that, and it was horrible.
Speaker 3: And I knew as soon as anybody figured a way
Speaker 3: to tap into that that there was going to be,
Speaker 3: you know, some kind of political movement.
Speaker 1: And this was a really pivotal moment, and it was
Speaker 1: also a policy moment, like it was a policy choice.
Speaker 1: And like Larry Summers described it as foaming the runway,
Speaker 1: you remember that phrase, and I put I put that
Speaker 1: in my book because I thought it was almost self explanatory.
Speaker 1: And an editor was like, what on earth does he
Speaker 1: mean by this? And I realized, actually, kind of you
Speaker 1: do have to unpack this. And so what he was
Speaker 1: saying is that you could go in and rescue these
Speaker 1: homeowners There's something in bankruptcy law known as cram down,
Speaker 1: where you can say, look, the cost of this home,
Speaker 1: the price, the value of this home is this, nown
Speaker 1: the mortgage is this. There was fraud involved here. We're
Speaker 1: going to cram the mortgage down to your home, to
Speaker 1: your home value. You're no longer underwater. It's like, okay, cool,
Speaker 1: Now my mortgage is less and I'm not just throwing
Speaker 1: money away every single month, and I can afford it.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna get foe closed on. That's a policy choice,
Speaker 1: and that was available to Democrats. A lot of Democrats
Speaker 1: fought for it in the House and the Senate, the
Speaker 1: White House because his economic team argued against it. They said,
Speaker 1: if you do that, the banks would too quickly lose capital.
Speaker 1: The banks would go under and they're too big to fail,
Speaker 1: and we can't allow that. And so the banks are crashing.
Speaker 1: So you need to foam the runway with these for
Speaker 1: the rubble of the foreclothes. Is this way, the banks
Speaker 1: just gradually lose money and their blow is softened as
Speaker 1: they land on the runway by the bodies of all
Speaker 1: of these former homeowners. Because you stretch it out that
Speaker 1: you stretch it out then from twenty ten all the
Speaker 1: way through twenty sixteen, by it's a rocket docket, but
Speaker 1: it's still people are fighting, scraping like making payments, fighting
Speaker 1: their foreclosures, trying to get the paperwork in. And then
Speaker 1: they set up these programs called what hamp and Right
Speaker 1: and the Garden Work that deliberately did not work, that
Speaker 1: are supposed to rescue homeowners. But what they actually did
Speaker 1: is they just kind of guarantee that they'll be in foreclosure,
Speaker 1: but only but years down the road.
Speaker 3: They even told people in miss payments.
Speaker 1: Right, they would say, I would say, what you need
Speaker 1: to miss payments in order to get into this program.
Speaker 1: This program will rescue you. The So these homeowners would
Speaker 1: deliberately miss payments on the advice of these program officers,
Speaker 1: and then they would be hooked in this program, which
Speaker 1: meant that they were inevitably going to get fore clothes on.
Speaker 1: But that was good for Wall Street because the banks
Speaker 1: would all.
Speaker 3: Survive, right right, Yeah, No, that's unbelievable, right, and you
Speaker 3: think about how sociopathic that is, right, And they used
Speaker 3: to be able to get away with that because if
Speaker 3: it's not in the evening news, who's going to pay attention.
Speaker 3: But I think with the Internet, this is this is
Speaker 3: why these movements can happen now, because people can start
Speaker 3: to do their own research and realize when you're getting
Speaker 3: thrown out of your house, you will tend to look
Speaker 3: into things, you know, and find out what's happening, you know,
Speaker 3: I know, I talk to people who would ask questions like,
Speaker 3: how come they're spending six trillion dollars or ten trillion
Speaker 3: dollars in the bailout when it only would cost a
Speaker 3: trillion and a half dollars to pay off every single
Speaker 3: subprime mortgage in the country. And then you have to
Speaker 3: get into answers like, well, then all the people who
Speaker 3: basically made bets on all of these uh, you know,
Speaker 3: dead instruments, some of them would lose unfairly, right, and
Speaker 3: they would have claims. And it turns out that there's
Speaker 3: this colossal, uh you know, amount of leverage money exactly
Speaker 3: that all depends on this right and and so that's
Speaker 3: where the moral hazard comes in. And yeah, of course
Speaker 3: people once they started to figure out what was going
Speaker 3: on with that, they they were they were going to
Speaker 3: get very very upset. That's what this whole you know,
Speaker 3: memestock thing grew out of. I think is just this
Speaker 3: rage directed towards these financial professionals who were, you know,
Speaker 3: basically being subsidized and then acting like they had like
Speaker 3: this special financial genius that allowed them to make money,
Speaker 3: and that is a very bitter pill to swallow. I think.
Speaker 4: That's a perfect point about what I wanted to ask,
Speaker 4: and that there's this faux brick wall that we think
Speaker 4: of between the culture war and economics. It's like, you
Speaker 4: sort of have culture in this corner, economics in this corner.
Speaker 4: But when you're saying around the time of Occupy the
Speaker 4: rocket docket people in Florida, you're thinking, like, wow, there
Speaker 4: might be something coming out of this. Donald Trump runs
Speaker 4: for president. Were you thinking of economics and culture in
Speaker 4: a different sense at that time? Because I was in
Speaker 4: college during Occupy and one of the things that just
Speaker 4: drove me crazy was the way, you know, people talked
Speaker 4: about the people who grew up like I did, like
Speaker 4: going to church, owning guns, hunting, like all the stupid
Speaker 4: stuff like Duck Dynasty was super popular at the time,
Speaker 4: and it sounds stupid, but there was this cultural backlash
Speaker 4: that could have presaged Trump in the same way that
Speaker 4: the economic backlash could have. And I just want to
Speaker 4: ask about how much you like the meme Stocks is
Speaker 4: a great example. It's like both cultural and economic. What
Speaker 4: were you reading into that kind of thing that was
Speaker 4: building under the surface that eventually became Donald Trump coming
Speaker 4: down the golden escalator.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I was probably like most kind of liberal,
Speaker 3: left leaning cosmopolitan reporters, and then it wasn't that in
Speaker 3: tune with the other part of the country at the time,
Speaker 3: which is I think a real failing going back and
Speaker 3: looking at.
Speaker 1: And despite all the foreclosure work you'd been doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I mean, look, I.
Speaker 1: Want to put that off to a little compartment economics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's economics. I like most reporters, you know,
Speaker 3: I kind of naturally sympathize with, you know, the ordinary
Speaker 3: working person and not the you know, rich or politicians.
Speaker 3: But at Rolling Stone, look, you do a lot of
Speaker 3: the sort of picking on the yokal humor. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's part of what columnists have been doing since the
Speaker 3: days of Mankin in this country, right, And I was
Speaker 3: specifically hired to be that kind of person. I mean
Speaker 3: that was my job. You know. I was walking into
Speaker 3: a very particular gig at Rolling Stone that had been
Speaker 3: you know, the predecessors did that, and now I look
Speaker 3: back that stuff and I'm kind of embarrassed by it.
Speaker 3: And I once Trump ran and I started to talk
Speaker 3: to people in the crowd, I did realize that there
Speaker 3: was this convergence of the economic stuff and the cultural
Speaker 3: resentment that was really powerful that I didn't understand all
Speaker 3: that well, but it was clearly something like there was
Speaker 3: definitely resentment about the way they were talked about in
Speaker 3: the press. Yeah, you know, and I remember Trump, He's
Speaker 3: very clever, right. He would get up there at his
Speaker 3: campaign events and he would point at us, you know,
Speaker 3: and you would say, look at them, those bloodsuckers, you know,
Speaker 3: they you know.
Speaker 5: They vampire squids.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Basically he would say that, you know, they hate me,
Speaker 3: but more than that, they hate you, right, and you know,
Speaker 3: look at us, we did look like snobs, you know.
Speaker 3: And it was a very smart move. And then when
Speaker 3: you get out and you talk to people and ask, well,
Speaker 3: why are they why are you winning for this guy
Speaker 3: Donald Trump? And he's like, because he's got he's leading
Speaker 3: you all by the nose, he's getting free coverage, you know,
Speaker 3: and just his triumph over us was important, you know.
Speaker 3: And I saw that and I said, wow, that's amazing,
Speaker 3: you know. And it was also incredible to me to
Speaker 3: me that the other reporters weren't interested in that story.
Speaker 3: I found that incredible to me.
Speaker 1: It's particularly if you've lost faith in the ability of
Speaker 1: government to really do anything positive for you, then at
Speaker 1: least it can make your enemies miserable, exactly, like some
Speaker 1: satisfaction that the misery of my adversaries. So you go
Speaker 1: into this campaign, You've got Jeb and the whole crew
Speaker 1: against Trump and the Republican primary, and then you've got
Speaker 1: Hillary versus Barney. I'm still you know, nobody will ever
Speaker 1: forget Hillary Clinton, get you know, giving speeches to Goldman
Speaker 1: Sacks like in the run up, like to talk about
Speaker 1: a bubble, like strategic bubble, like she didn't need that
Speaker 1: seven hundred thousand dollars. I know she was, And and
Speaker 1: I would hope that if she would go back and
Speaker 1: do it again, she'd be like, you know, that.
Speaker 5: Was a mistake politically, not morally, a mistake. She would
Speaker 5: not say it was moral, No, because there is no.
Speaker 1: Such thing as morals. It's all set way beyond that.
Speaker 1: Strategizing the will to power, like and it's like the
Speaker 1: seven hund thousand dollars was not worth losing the presidency over.
Speaker 1: Not that that did it, but it's symbolized for everybody
Speaker 1: who the Democratic Party was becoming, and that they were
Speaker 1: willing to do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they weren't embarrassed about it, right, I mean
Speaker 3: I remember The New York posted a story where they
Speaker 3: listed her speaking schedule, and there was one day that
Speaker 3: was just hilarious. She had like a speech in the
Speaker 3: morning that was like four hundred grand, and then she
Speaker 3: had to fly to another country like.
Speaker 1: To do a biotag, right, yeah, exactly. I'm like, this
Speaker 1: is like month, just months before launching the campaign, right,
Speaker 1: within months, not years earlier or like. And then there's Bernie. So,
Speaker 1: how much time did you spend on the Democratic campaign
Speaker 1: trail that year?
Speaker 3: Not much because my editors at Rolling Stone didn't want
Speaker 3: me anywhere near the Democrats so they found them boring
Speaker 3: or no, they were afraid of what I was going
Speaker 3: to write. Oh oh so yeah, so they much preferred
Speaker 3: to have me crawling up the backsides of Republicans.
Speaker 5: Meaning that you would be vicious to the Clinton campaign.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, in fact, and then later on, when I
Speaker 3: covered the Democrats in twenty twenty, you know that whole
Speaker 3: ridiculous twenty person field or whatever it was. I did
Speaker 3: a couple of stories that were pretty nicely We're still there,
Speaker 3: I'm still a rolling Stone. Yeah. I thought there were
Speaker 3: great stories on like the like these are this is
Speaker 3: sort of classic Rolling Stone stuff, and they were like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I think we had it just about enough of your
Speaker 3: campaign coverage at that point.
Speaker 1: So because somebody's gonna lose an eye now, yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: it used to be fun and games. Now Trump's here,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, But that's I mean, that's kind of what
Speaker 4: you roicle and hate ink, is that these organs of
Speaker 4: media become corporate mouthpieces.
Speaker 5: It's not that that didn't always happen.
Speaker 4: I mean there's always some intersection, but in a different way,
Speaker 4: in a way that it was like they didn't need
Speaker 4: to be told by the Clinton campaign to keep Tayibi
Speaker 4: away from it. They just share the ideological sort of hesitation.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, there was at some point I think we
Speaker 3: probably all experienced the same thing where somebody got the memo,
Speaker 3: like in spring to summer of twenty sixteen that this
Speaker 3: was a new ballgame, and that we were no longer
Speaker 3: going to, you know, be the detached press corps that
Speaker 3: we had been in the past. You know, there was
Speaker 3: no more of this like writing negative stuff about Democrats
Speaker 3: when that happened, right, we were going to just sort
Speaker 3: of look the other way.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the cable networks are giving Trump unending airtime.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: But yes, the memo went out, definitely, I mean it's
Speaker 1: a phrase. There was actually no memo that I know.
Speaker 3: There's no There may actually have been in me from
Speaker 3: the microcy Integrity Project or whatever came before that, but no,
Speaker 3: I mean it was unspoken.
Speaker 1: I do I do believe that. Like, so there was
Speaker 1: from two thousand and three on this like robust bloggisphere
Speaker 1: that they used to call it, which allowed all sorts
Speaker 1: of intra Democratic party fighting like daily daily, daily Coast
Speaker 1: for instance, was people were constanty's throats over different candidates
Speaker 1: and different directions for the party, fighting over the war surveillance,
Speaker 1: how you know how to take on Bush? You know,
Speaker 1: gay marriage in marriage prodict? Are you for civil unions?
Speaker 1: Like all of this robust fight And I feel like
Speaker 1: around twenty sixteen, definitely after he wins, but heading into
Speaker 1: the general the memo went out, let that's over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like we're not We're not doing that. I think Alternate
Speaker 1: Like was one of those places where this was happening.
Speaker 1: They were very critical of Democrats. There a lot of
Speaker 1: their high dollar funding just evaporates. I a lot of
Speaker 1: these donors who were Democrats and believed in like just
Speaker 1: the idea of like the full throat of debate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're all of a sudden, like you know what not
Speaker 1: not right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And a lot of the n g os that
Speaker 3: maybe occasionally at least still went after, you know, sort
Speaker 3: of democratic members of Congress. There was none of that
Speaker 3: anymore now, and now we had the full blown, like
Speaker 3: sort of David Brock model of politics, where you know,
Speaker 3: we have an NGO that exists for a political purpose only. Right,
Speaker 3: We're not going to do this institutional you know, purity
Speaker 3: thing anymore. And there was in the press, you know,
Speaker 3: there was a very influential piece by Jim Ruttenberg in
Speaker 3: the New York Times who said, I think it was
Speaker 3: called Trump is testing the norms of objectivity and journalism,
Speaker 3: and the whole idea was, yeah, we used to worry
Speaker 3: just about what's true. Now we have to be true
Speaker 3: to history's judgment. So you know, everybody knew what that meant, right,
Speaker 3: And the way I got it was I remember I
Speaker 3: did a story where I interviewed somebody. It was right
Speaker 3: after the Access Hollywood thing, and I interviewed somebody at
Speaker 3: a speech he was supposed to go to but had
Speaker 3: been uninvited to by Wisconsin Republicans. So I talked to
Speaker 3: some Trump supporter who had his whole family had been
Speaker 3: union workers. They had always voted Democratic, and now they said,
Speaker 3: you know, after NAFTA and all that stuff, we've been
Speaker 3: screwed so many times, we can't listen anymore, and we're
Speaker 3: going with this guy. And it's just a quote, right,
Speaker 3: you know, I put that in there, and I got
Speaker 3: all this. I got flamed on Twitter for using the
Speaker 3: economic insecurity right, which was now code for racism or
Speaker 3: something like that, and I was totally shocked by that.
Speaker 3: I guess I shouldn't have been in retrospect, but that
Speaker 3: was that was wild, Like, this is a real reason
Speaker 3: this guy's getting you know, he's succeeding. Why would we
Speaker 3: not want the audience to know that? I just couldn't.
Speaker 3: What did you think during that time? You know I'm curious.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, as I said, like Wisconsin, I'm from Wisconsin.
Speaker 4: I didn't really I lived in DC at the time.
Speaker 4: Didn't pick up on it until I was in rural
Speaker 4: northern Wisconsin where my mom grew up. I was rollerblading
Speaker 4: and I was going on around the neighborhood and just
Speaker 4: giant homemade Trump signs on plywood was spray paint.
Speaker 5: And then it was like July.
Speaker 4: And that's why I was like, it was David Obie's
Speaker 4: district for forty years, you know, deep blue district flipped
Speaker 4: in twenty ten, and that's when I was like, oh
Speaker 4: my gosh, nobody has any idea what's about to happen.
Speaker 1: The piece I'm proud of stuff from that year was
Speaker 1: in February of twenty sixteen that I co opt was
Speaker 1: Zach Carter and the headline is something like it's in
Speaker 1: the humping boast. Headline is something like don't laugh, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump could win, and like here's how there you go.
Speaker 5: And it was I remember that that.
Speaker 1: Was you, yeah, me and Zach, Me and Zach Carter
Speaker 1: and we're saying like you're going to hear about nothing
Speaker 1: but nafta from here until the election, and we pointed
Speaker 1: out some very basic things. We said, Wisconsin has a
Speaker 1: Republican governor, Michigan has a Republican governor, Pennsylvania has a
Speaker 1: Republican governor, and if he wins these three states, then
Speaker 1: he wins, right, yeah, the White House. It may have
Speaker 1: been Rendell by that time, like there may have been
Speaker 1: a democratic governor back, but Pennsylvania had had Republican governors
Speaker 1: for like a decade plus leading into that, and we're like,
Speaker 1: so we just making this point that like.
Speaker 3: Look, how did people respond to this? But that was
Speaker 3: still okay in February February.
Speaker 5: February twenty sixteen. Yeah, it had the narrative and solidified.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there was there was no like cancelation attempt
Speaker 1: because I think because I think people didn't see him
Speaker 1: as a threat yet. Yes, and so it's okay to
Speaker 1: say he can win, because he can't win, so fine
Speaker 1: to make no argument. And then our our polling aggregator.
Speaker 1: By November, well, we had our own Polster. It was
Speaker 1: called we bought Polster dot com uff posts tried to
Speaker 1: hire Nate Silver. They were in a bidding war with Disney,
Speaker 1: not well, and so they went and bought polster dot com,
Speaker 1: which was another polling aggregator run by Mark Blumenthal and
Speaker 1: some other polsters, and ours was very similar to Nates,
Speaker 1: except had it slightly higher certainty that Hillary Clinton was
Speaker 1: going to win. And so by the time the election
Speaker 1: came up came around, all these polling aggregations had had her,
Speaker 1: you know, well ahead. But what Nate actually pointed out
Speaker 1: is that if they're off a little bit in one state,
Speaker 1: then they're probably off in all of them, mm hmm,
Speaker 1: and so you need to factor that in. And he
Speaker 1: turned out to be right. Yeah, So his was wrong,
Speaker 1: but he was right that he might be wrong.
Speaker 3: Right, right, Yeah, I mean it's funny. I think he
Speaker 3: was probably if you go back and look at their coverage,
Speaker 3: they kind of accurately presented the percentage chances and all that,
Speaker 3: but it was things like, you know, trumple playing the
Speaker 3: NBA before he's going to be the nominee like that.
Speaker 3: That stuff is what told especially liberal readers, yeah, don't
Speaker 3: worry about it. You know, this is funny, right, It's
Speaker 3: not gonna nothing's going to happen, And they didn't take
Speaker 3: the story seriously. You know, I got fooled in a
Speaker 3: different way. I initially did what you did. I said, Wow,
Speaker 3: this is going to work, like Hillary Clinton's the perfect
Speaker 3: opponent for this guy, right, just watching the speeches. But
Speaker 3: then I went to the convention and some polster sat
Speaker 3: me down and walked me through the numbers and said,
Speaker 3: look at likability numbers, right, And I thought, well, that's insurmountable,
Speaker 3: not realizing that there were a lot of people who
Speaker 3: hated both candidates, right. And you know if among those
Speaker 3: Trump ended up winning two to one, and that was
Speaker 3: a key factor in that race.
Speaker 4: That's really interesting because that's where we are now. Press
Speaker 4: right about the double haters this morning, or someone wrot
Speaker 4: about the double haters this morning.
Speaker 5: That's a good point, Matt.
Speaker 4: And what do you think, how is it playing out
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four when you have some like I
Speaker 4: think they put it out a quarter of the country
Speaker 4: or quarter of voters say they hate both candidates. Is
Speaker 4: that the key demographic in twenty twenty four? Who wins
Speaker 4: the we hate both people?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's you know, they were the key
Speaker 3: demographic in twenty sixteen. It was a slightly smaller number
Speaker 3: back then. I think it was nineteen percent or twenty percent.
Speaker 3: So if it, I would imagine it'd be even higher now.
Speaker 3: But it's not predictable how those folks are going to vote.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think there will be more people who
Speaker 3: won't vote. But having cover campaigns, I always feel like
Speaker 3: people's if they have a strong emotion somewhere, it's going
Speaker 3: to guide them to make the vote. So if they
Speaker 3: hate somebody more than they dislikes them, or more than
Speaker 3: they like mildly somebody else, that's going to bring them
Speaker 3: to the polls. And you know, there are a lot
Speaker 3: of people who are very they're very wary of Trump,
Speaker 3: but have a lot of negative feelings about the Biden
Speaker 3: campaign and vice versa. But I just think it's tended
Speaker 3: to work out in Trump's favor, you know, when it's
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 1: And so after twenty sixteen, then you're when does your
Speaker 1: Eric Garner book come out? So far I can't breathe.
Speaker 3: Yeah that was like two years two years later, Yeah,
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: And so that brings us to the life the height
Speaker 1: of cancelation time in station period, which brings back your
Speaker 1: Russia time. How often had in the culture worse that book?
Speaker 1: How often had that X style been brought up again?
Speaker 1: Like in your career, like what made it? Like how
Speaker 1: did that happen? Then?
Speaker 3: So I don't want to be conspiratorial about this, but
Speaker 3: what I will say is that during it had never
Speaker 3: come up until twenty sixteen, and then I started to
Speaker 3: notice that whenever I wrote about certain things, it would.
Speaker 1: Come up, like what kind of.
Speaker 3: When I said negative things about Hillary Clinton? When I
Speaker 3: said positive things about Bernie Sanders, they came up.
Speaker 1: But you know, in the context of the Bernie bro
Speaker 1: yea often.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, So there was a group of you know,
Speaker 3: sort of internet trolls, but it's such an inexact science
Speaker 3: and I was never able to get a real handle
Speaker 3: on what happened. I mean, whether it was coordinated, right,
Speaker 3: you can't say that, right, So I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 3: I do know who if some of the original people
Speaker 3: were who were trying to make us think.
Speaker 4: About it, were they any of the same people that
Speaker 4: started the Birther rumor in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: I don't think so. I mean, you know, I didn't
Speaker 3: really look at all that hard at this, and you know,
Speaker 3: I spent much more time just being bummed out and
Speaker 3: feeling guilty. And then then I got mad about some
Speaker 3: of the press coverage that was making some you know,
Speaker 3: basically I had written some very offensive things, but there
Speaker 3: was a scene in the book that it was Mark
Speaker 3: fantasizing about something about sort of a sexual harassment scene
Speaker 3: that wasn't true, and there was no way to talk
Speaker 3: about it and not sound like, there was no way
Speaker 3: to make sense of it. I mean unless you had
Speaker 3: been through the whole Russia thing, like the disgustingness of
Speaker 3: the humor of the exile was never going to make
Speaker 3: sense of the two American audiences. So I didn't even
Speaker 3: really try. But you know, that was really it turned
Speaker 3: out to mostly just be a blip in my career.
Speaker 3: The much bigger thing was the Russia Gate thing, and
Speaker 3: that was when, you know, I suddenly was on the
Speaker 3: outside with everybody in the business. And that started before that,
Speaker 3: so I don't know how So so right after Trump
Speaker 3: got elected, you know, I had experience with Russia, I
Speaker 3: started getting calls to about the subject, and I remember
Speaker 3: looking at some of the early stories and saying, Man,
Speaker 3: the sourcing and this stuff is really weird, right, Like
Speaker 3: it's all anonymous. There's no way we can we can
Speaker 3: replicate any of this in the lab you know, and
Speaker 3: and I wrote a piece called something about this Russia
Speaker 3: story stinks like.
Speaker 1: Really early, like Rolling Stone, in Rolling.
Speaker 3: Stone, Yeah, and all of a sudden, like lots of
Speaker 3: people just sort of froze me out, and I stopped
Speaker 3: getting you know, my phone calls returned. People in Congress
Speaker 3: didn't didn't call me back, and uh, yeah, that was
Speaker 3: that was the beginning for me. I started to realize
Speaker 3: that I was not going to be able to stick
Speaker 3: around in that Rolling Stone.
Speaker 4: See that's also interesting because again without seeming conspiratorial.
Speaker 5: It just feels it feels like a Clinton op. It
Speaker 5: feels like you got.
Speaker 4: On the wrong side of the sort of steel dossier.
Speaker 1: Was the name of the Wall Street back point. It's
Speaker 1: not an op, it's it's the entire culture. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like.
Speaker 4: But being driven by the external reporters who are feeding
Speaker 4: and around and like there was a there was a
Speaker 4: group of people that was, you know, talking to David
Speaker 4: Horn and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: People were leaking things, and yeah.
Speaker 3: It just wish I had known that back then, you know,
Speaker 3: because all I had was just just doesn't seem right
Speaker 3: if I had known about all that, you know, stuff,
Speaker 3: But it was cultural. It was this weird thing that
Speaker 3: that now is normal, which is this group think culture.
Speaker 3: Which one of the reasons I liked journalism early on
Speaker 3: when I first got into it is that it was
Speaker 3: not that you know, you used to go into a
Speaker 3: newsroom or you know, a TV you know, studio, and
Speaker 3: it would be like a comedy club in the back room,
Speaker 3: like everybody was busting each other's chosa about everything. You
Speaker 3: could say anything. Nobody cared what your politics were as
Speaker 3: long as you did the job. Well. I thought that
Speaker 3: was a really cool feature of reporting, and then like overnight,
Speaker 3: it turned into the exact opposite. I don't know if
Speaker 3: you had the same.
Speaker 5: Experiences, like college campuses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean I can't miss that, but yeah, but.
Speaker 4: It felt like, well, I mean I went to college
Speaker 4: campus after they became like thoroughly sanitized, and it feels
Speaker 4: like that in green rooms now it feels like you
Speaker 4: have to watch what you It feels like it's very
Speaker 4: self serious, and it seems like it wasn't super self
Speaker 4: serious before though.
Speaker 1: I think my the way I had handled that, I
Speaker 1: basically didn't touch the Russia against stuff. I didn't go
Speaker 1: either way on it. I was just covering other things.
Speaker 1: So that might have been the way that I just
Speaker 1: like subconsciously was like, you know what, like go like
Speaker 1: if I could break some new news there, Like I
Speaker 1: think we broke a good story on Elliott Broydy who
Speaker 1: was doing like unregistered lobbying for Russia, but like somebody
Speaker 1: hacked his emails and we had the emails and boom,
Speaker 1: here you go. But and he was like number two
Speaker 1: on the RNC or something like this. Really it's a
Speaker 1: big fun fundraising. Yeah, it was a big fundraiser, big story.
Speaker 1: I think he went to prison, but that was not
Speaker 1: but that was different than the campaign. That's just classic
Speaker 1: foreign governments influencing the process.
Speaker 4: But that does bring up an interesting issue though. I'm
Speaker 4: curious about this, Matt, like how you decide what to
Speaker 4: cover now because having been in conservative media, there's this
Speaker 4: like the entire corporate press is focused on three shiny
Speaker 4: objects and sometimes they're doing legitimately important reporting, like I'm
Speaker 4: glad that they are, you know, when there's a hurricane,
Speaker 4: I'm glad they're down there, like they're doing There's some
Speaker 4: reporters who are doing good stuff, but conservative media sees
Speaker 4: its role as saying they're all doing that you know,
Speaker 4: they're getting every stone overturned when it comes to Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: We have a limited amount of time and resources.
Speaker 5: We're going to spend them over here. And I feel
Speaker 5: like maybe that's what you were doing with Russiagate.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't want to put words in your mouth, but
Speaker 4: like you were doing the reporting that was coming to you,
Speaker 4: how do you decide what's to report on now, Matt,
Speaker 4: Because I'm sure you get a lot of stuff that
Speaker 4: just comes to you naturally, but you also have limited
Speaker 4: time and resources, so it's not like that people who
Speaker 4: expect you to spend every day. This is why Donald
Speaker 4: Trump is evil in a million different ways. This is
Speaker 4: why I hate that and Yahoo, this is why the CIA,
Speaker 4: well like other people are doing some of that reporting.
Speaker 4: You're doing what comes to you. How you decide where
Speaker 4: to spend your time and resources.
Speaker 3: So I've always had the same attitude about this, which
Speaker 3: is that the press basically exists more for people who
Speaker 3: don't have anybody else to press their point of view
Speaker 3: than for people who have institutional backing already. So I dating,
Speaker 3: going back all the way to the beginning of my career,
Speaker 3: I always tried to pick stories that nobody else was doing,
Speaker 3: because you know, that's that's who needs those stories, right
Speaker 3: Like for instance, with the we talked, we started talking
Speaker 3: about the how Russia was being reported while everybody at
Speaker 3: home is getting it's great, it's turning into Switzerland. I
Speaker 3: would I would go out and say, you know, look,
Speaker 3: it's subsistence farming and you know, people getting shot, you know,
Speaker 3: in broad daylight. So I would do those stories when
Speaker 3: Obama got elected. I was a big fan of his
Speaker 3: when he got elected on the on the campaign trail.
Speaker 3: Then after that, you know, I had to cover finance,
Speaker 3: and you know, he was involved in a pretty shady
Speaker 3: series of relationships with City Group. I did a big
Speaker 3: story called Obama's Big Sellout for Rolling Stone that I
Speaker 3: was heavily criticized for. But I think that's what media
Speaker 3: is for, right, Like we're not supposed to be in
Speaker 3: the friends business. We're supposed to do stuff that is
Speaker 3: true but unpopular. So but I do now now because
Speaker 3: so much of corporate media is monomoniacal and in this
Speaker 3: Trump direction. And you know, I'm personally very worried about
Speaker 3: kind of collapse of civil liberties and things like.
Speaker 5: That small matter of collapsing civil liberties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean I've probably lost my sense of
Speaker 3: humor about this a little bit, but that's kind of
Speaker 3: how I pick it. You know, people say, why don't
Speaker 3: you criticize Trump, where I'm like, we don't have enough
Speaker 3: people doing that already, Like there's five million people doing
Speaker 3: that already.
Speaker 1: So I think the first time you and I met
Speaker 1: in person was at a cafe in New York because
Speaker 1: you had finished a novel. Oh if you remember this,
Speaker 1: And I used to run this with a friend a
Speaker 1: little publishing house, little publishing house, because we were like, look,
Speaker 1: you don't need printers anymore. You can just if you
Speaker 1: have a website and you have some books, you could
Speaker 1: just actually print them. And you had written a novel
Speaker 1: about a drug dealer, right, and we talked about publishing it,
Speaker 1: and but then eventually you said, you know what, I'm
Speaker 1: actually going to try substack this brand new thing. At
Speaker 1: the time, that was.
Speaker 5: The first time you guys met, I would have thought
Speaker 5: you knew each other one.
Speaker 1: Well, we've been on a bunch of listeners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, we didn't we digitally cross paths.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's in New York. I'm on dclso after I
Speaker 1: had twins, I basically haven't left the house except to
Speaker 1: go to work.
Speaker 3: That makes sense. It makes sense.
Speaker 1: And so you ended up doing it through substack, kind
Speaker 1: of serializing the novel. Like what was that experience like
Speaker 1: and that you were still at Rolling Stone if I remember,
Speaker 1: how did you decide to make that? Like how did
Speaker 1: that evolve into your full thing?
Speaker 3: So that happened because the only thing I could do
Speaker 3: legally with my existing rolling Stone contract that wouldn't have
Speaker 3: violated the terms noncompete. Yeah, it would have been something
Speaker 3: like fiction on you know, a serialized book. They let
Speaker 3: me write books, So I had to write a book,
Speaker 3: and you know, Substack came to me early, and you
Speaker 3: know they I got to know those guys pretty well
Speaker 3: and it seemed like a really interesting idea. And after
Speaker 3: the experience of doing that, which I think turned out well,
Speaker 3: I also wrote hate inc there first, and I thought
Speaker 3: this is going to work better just in general, if
Speaker 3: I just leave rolling Stone and do this for a living.
Speaker 3: So a lot of people ended up on Substack because
Speaker 3: they got forced out of their organizations. I'm like one
Speaker 3: of the only people who left out agreed. You know,
Speaker 3: I just thought I'm going to make more money doing
Speaker 3: this over here. So that's why I left.
Speaker 5: But a lot of people didn't understand at the time
Speaker 5: that that was true.
Speaker 1: Well, how are you liking it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was gonna say, how do you feeling about the
Speaker 5: substack revolution?
Speaker 3: I love it? I think substack is a great thing.
Speaker 1: And when did you jump out fully launch.
Speaker 3: In twenty nineteen? Maybe? Yeah, you know there are some differences.
Speaker 3: You know, Rolling Stone, they would give me a story
Speaker 3: and I'd get ten weeks to work on it. Right,
Speaker 3: So investigative journalism it's a lot of work and not
Speaker 3: a lot of content. You know. Substack has not solved
Speaker 3: that problem. I don't think the how do you do
Speaker 3: investigative journalism and monetize it quickly? It's what it does
Speaker 3: pay for is like the strong take, And there's actually
Speaker 3: quite a reward on substack for writing people. It's people
Speaker 3: like to They will pay for something that they enjoy reading,
Speaker 3: just in general, even if they don't agree with it.
Speaker 3: I found so like as opposed to doing I do
Speaker 3: a lot of reporting on substack. That stuff tends not
Speaker 3: to do well financially, But.
Speaker 1: How do you tell it doesn't do well financially? Like
Speaker 1: people are unsubscribing or it's people aren't converting from the
Speaker 1: free to the paid.
Speaker 3: You can see how many subscriptions you get. I try
Speaker 3: not to look, but you can see.
Speaker 1: And so if it's a well written piece, I just
Speaker 1: that converts more people, right, and you get more I see.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I mean generally they're like nine different types
Speaker 3: of things that I do on the site, and I
Speaker 3: know which ones get you know, are monetizable, and which
Speaker 3: ones aren't.
Speaker 1: How do you balance out how often to.
Speaker 3: Well, I think one pays for the other. You know,
Speaker 3: you have to do some of those op ed pieces.
Speaker 5: One for the studio, one for you.
Speaker 3: Right right, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: Well, it's something we've thought about a lot here with
Speaker 1: the whole idea of audience capture and the way that
Speaker 1: we've sort of the way that we solve it here
Speaker 1: is we've got Emily's wrong takes and then people get
Speaker 1: to hear them both and then decide for themselves. But
Speaker 1: it does acculturate the audience to difference of opinion and
Speaker 1: being okay with like I say, some dumb things sometimes
Speaker 1: believe it or not. But doesn't mean that you have
Speaker 1: to go running for the hills. It means you can
Speaker 1: just flame me and just saved Emily's great and move on.
Speaker 1: But that's very unusual in the media space.
Speaker 3: Well, it doesn't need to be, though, because I'm sure,
Speaker 3: as you've discovered, audiences are much smarter and more forgiving
Speaker 3: than people given credit minded and open minded. Yeah, yeah, so,
Speaker 3: I mean, like last week I did a piece about
Speaker 3: a you know, a writer for the World Socialist website,
Speaker 3: you know, a trotsky I who's in prison in Ukraine.
Speaker 3: And you know, there are some conservatives who were subscribed
Speaker 3: to my site and they weren't mad about it. Right,
Speaker 3: They're not going to unsubscribe because because the stories like that,
Speaker 3: what they you know what they'll you will occasionally lose
Speaker 3: people over something that you say, but you know, over time,
Speaker 3: I think it evens out as long as you do
Speaker 3: good work.
Speaker 4: I've heard from some people I think I shouldn't say
Speaker 4: because I don't remember if I was told this on
Speaker 4: or off the record, but that people on the left.
Speaker 1: That's going on.
Speaker 5: Let's going on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but people on the left who developed sort of
Speaker 4: center right audiences or maybe even like populist right audiences
Speaker 4: during the Trump years. As soon as like Trump was
Speaker 4: out of office and then there was October seventh. They hemorrhaged,
Speaker 4: but then people kind of slowly came back.
Speaker 1: I know Glenn and Glenn Greenwald and Lefang have talked
Speaker 1: to I think openly about that. That like, because they
Speaker 1: picked up right wing audiences, not totally right wing audience,
Speaker 1: but a significan chunk were right wing because they were
Speaker 1: they both agreed on the people that they were attacking,
Speaker 1: but then they realized after October seventh they didn't agree
Speaker 1: on Israel. Glenn has I think lost a substantial portion
Speaker 1: of his audience, but he has such a massive audience
Speaker 1: that it doesn't matter, Like, how do you work, how
Speaker 1: do you think about that?
Speaker 3: Or do you you know, I try not to think
Speaker 3: about that. I haven't done a lot of stuff on Israel,
Speaker 3: but I've never have I never liked that story. I've
Speaker 3: never been there.
Speaker 1: I heard that when you did the show with Katie,
Speaker 1: would you how often did that come up? Because she's
Speaker 1: big Katie help. Yeah, yeah, so we had to post
Speaker 1: post a podcast with Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you know Katie, Katie obviously cares a lot about
Speaker 3: that issue. We had a lot of guests on who
Speaker 3: would talk about that issue. You know, I have written
Speaker 3: about it in terms of things like censorship TikTok.
Speaker 5: You wrote about it when it came to the TikTok bill.
Speaker 3: Right right, And so you know we had people like
Speaker 3: ahiabunma on and you know that was after I believe
Speaker 3: it was electronic and a thought I had been suppressed,
Speaker 3: and I had written about that even previously, so had Glenn.
Speaker 3: Glenn was one of the first people to write about that. Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't mind, uh, talking about certain aspects
Speaker 3: of it, but I find the whole thing super complex.
Speaker 3: And you know, I don't know how you feel about this,
Speaker 3: but I'm always very nervous about subjects where I just
Speaker 3: feel like there are naps in my knowledge. You know.
Speaker 3: I remember being on one of the first times I
Speaker 3: was on like CNN, they asked me a question about
Speaker 3: like Lebanon, and I just had to say, I don't know,
Speaker 3: I'm not confident to answer that question. And you could
Speaker 3: tell the camera hates that answer, right, So you know,
Speaker 3: it's a weird place to be, But so I stick
Speaker 3: with what I do know.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I think I just think it's interesting because
Speaker 4: I do find that even hardcore partisans are more open minded.
Speaker 5: There's some that aren't.
Speaker 4: And I feel like the country right now is thirty
Speaker 4: percent hardcore partisan left, hardcore partisan right, and then everyone
Speaker 4: else is just like, please, I just want to believe something.
Speaker 4: Please just tell me the truth. I don't care if
Speaker 4: you're left, I don't care if you're right. Just tell
Speaker 4: me what you think and I can make that decision
Speaker 4: for myself. But like, just do the research and be
Speaker 4: honest about where you're coming from, which leads me to think,
Speaker 4: like if tomorrow the New York Times and the Washington
Speaker 4: Post said we are doing journalism from a clear liberal perspective,
Speaker 4: it would go like leaps and bounds towards restoring trust.
Speaker 5: I don't know, but I feel like that's why people.
Speaker 3: Subscribe, yeah to racket Right, Well, yeah, they they trust
Speaker 3: me to probably admit when I get stuff wrong, or
Speaker 3: you know, tell her to tell them where I'm coming from.
Speaker 3: But audiences are much I mean, this is my blank
Speaker 3: experience going back decades. People always think that audiences are
Speaker 3: dumber than they really are. If you go back to
Speaker 3: the nineties, remember the whole lad mag movement we had
Speaker 3: in these states where everybody thought that you had to
Speaker 3: do you know, stories in four hundred were boxes and
Speaker 3: that people would not read anything longer than that, and
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 5: You mean like axios.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, right, that's I guess that's the idea there.
Speaker 3: I'm even going back into the stone age when it
Speaker 3: was still paper. Yeah, but you know, a rolling stone.
Speaker 3: When we started doing those finance pieces, I'm like, I'm
Speaker 3: doing eight thousand word pieces about credit the fault swaps,
Speaker 3: and people love it, right, like as opposed to, you know,
Speaker 3: trying to dumb it down for people. I think audiences
Speaker 3: like it when you respect them and treat them like
Speaker 3: adults and you know it, don't make assumptions that they're not.
Speaker 3: You know, they're going to run away if you try
Speaker 3: to be complicated. So, I don't know, do you have
Speaker 3: the same.
Speaker 1: Thought I was as I'm as I'm listening to you talking,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that the people on the left who think
Speaker 1: like that you've betrayed them, that you've left the left,
Speaker 1: you know what happened to Matt Tybee.
Speaker 5: That you've sold out it's all for clicks or whatever.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 1: Do you think your politics have changed or do you
Speaker 1: think that the you actually haven't been that political to
Speaker 1: begin with, or how like, how do you think about that?
Speaker 1: Like because I'm sure you still get people oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you ran.
Speaker 4: It's just like, right, what happened to you?
Speaker 1: Like I get that stuff question that it's it's the
Speaker 1: most annoying question on the planet. What happened to you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: people send that to you, even me, like, like, I
Speaker 1: haven't changed in twenty years.
Speaker 3: But that's because there's within the business even small transgressions
Speaker 3: now are unacceptable. I mean I used to all the
Speaker 3: time do large, you know, feature length reports that were
Speaker 3: critical of the Democratic Party in Rolling Stone where they
Speaker 3: didn't like it, and that was considered a virtue in
Speaker 3: the business once upon a time, like you to you know,
Speaker 3: we're going to criticize Republicans also do this. I don't
Speaker 3: think my politics have changed that much, and I'm probably
Speaker 3: a little bit more. I've probably changed a little bit
Speaker 3: in in terms of things that I worry about, like
Speaker 3: caricaturizing audiences. But I see this, like for instance, the
Speaker 3: censorship story and even some of the other stuff that's
Speaker 3: gone on with Trump, as a continuation of this sort
Speaker 3: of degradation of civil liberties and you know due process
Speaker 3: that started with nine to eleven, which I was very
Speaker 3: sensitive to because I came into it after watching Putin
Speaker 3: come to power and seeing you know, all that disappear
Speaker 3: in overnight there in Russia. I think it's all the
Speaker 3: same story. It's just that the you know, the people
Speaker 3: who are now advancing this idea that we have to
Speaker 3: become more aggressive in how you know, in the use
Speaker 3: of illiberal tools. I think it's just a different group
Speaker 3: of people, if that makes sense.
Speaker 4: Is there anything you would say you have learned from
Speaker 4: the right or you've been like humbled by as you've
Speaker 4: made because I mean like I'm in way more left
Speaker 4: spaces than I ever expected would be in my career.
Speaker 4: Absolutely love, and I feel like I learned so much
Speaker 4: from it every day. Is there anything over the last few,
Speaker 4: maybe ten years you feel like, maybe that hasn't changed
Speaker 4: your principles, but that's changed your perspective from spending more
Speaker 4: time with people on the right.
Speaker 3: For sure, I'm much more conscious of how uniform the
Speaker 3: messaging is in like pop culture. I probably didn't notice
Speaker 3: that before, Like even stuff even shows that I like
Speaker 3: and still like, they just hit you over the head
Speaker 3: with the same messages over and over again, repeatedly. And
Speaker 3: now you know, I can imagine as a Republican it
Speaker 3: would be very frustrating to turn on the TV every
Speaker 3: single time and see myself portrayed as the dumb and
Speaker 3: wrong one always right. And I'm maybe a little bit
Speaker 3: more in touch with that than I ever have been.
Speaker 3: But people, you know, people characterize my audience as right,
Speaker 3: when now it's really not that. Most of the people
Speaker 3: who subscribe to my site are like old disappointed liberals
Speaker 3: like me. Yeah, and there's just enough of those people
Speaker 3: to support my operation, I would say, but it's but yes,
Speaker 3: I think I think I've learned quite a lot, and
Speaker 3: you know, I go back and look at some of
Speaker 3: the things that I wrote over the years, and I'm
Speaker 3: a little embarrassed by some of the ways that I
Speaker 3: characterized people in the past.
Speaker 4: I think it's hard to even like overstate how important
Speaker 4: that was, especially to people who are like my It's
Speaker 4: like one of my favorite shows with thirty Rock, and
Speaker 4: thirty Rock was doing this dual tiered like economic satire
Speaker 4: that was brilliant at the time about like Comcast and
Speaker 4: cable town and consolidation and all of that. But it
Speaker 4: was still so it's not the most important issue in
Speaker 4: the world, but for people like me, it was just
Speaker 4: like come on, man like like these are good people,
Speaker 4: like they're normal people. And it just was really animating,
Speaker 4: and I understand why a lot of people voted for
Speaker 4: Trump as a result of that, or just were able
Speaker 4: to hold their nose and vote for Trump as.
Speaker 3: A result of that. Oh.
Speaker 1: The one thing we didn't talk about yet the you
Speaker 1: and I were almost sort of colleagues with the Racket,
Speaker 1: the rating. So I still work for the Intercept, which
Speaker 1: was set up by the Piero Midyard. And when he
Speaker 1: set it up, he originally was going to do twelve,
Speaker 1: as I was told the story, twelve magazines. Then there
Speaker 1: was going to be the Intercept was was going to
Speaker 1: be the investigative civil liberties, national security, and they were
Speaker 1: going to do sports. They were going to do basically
Speaker 1: a condemnast but for the Internet in the digital media era.
Speaker 1: And you you were going to run racket which was
Speaker 1: that named for the what's the Smedley Butler.
Speaker 3: No, we just liked the it was Alex Preen and
Speaker 3: I at the time it.
Speaker 1: Was going to be like business like investigative business, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the stories I heard of the Intercept in its
Speaker 1: early days are just utterly hilarious and It's just it's
Speaker 1: shocking that it ever got launched. Yours didn't get launched,
Speaker 1: Like how long were you there before? Like set everybody
Speaker 1: gave up that. Yeah, and it never published a thing, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, Like careers were destroyed, like you know, people
Speaker 3: had nervous breakdowns, and we never published a word.
Speaker 1: First Look Institute or whatever, first Look Media, whatever it's called.
Speaker 1: It just one of the most ridiculous organizations ever.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's so many things like I remember walking
Speaker 3: in there and there was you know, there was a
Speaker 3: person who came into work every day and just sat
Speaker 3: in an office. It never did anything, and was like
Speaker 3: paid this enormous salary. And it was like months before
Speaker 3: I asked what was going on and there were there
Speaker 3: were so many things like that going on at that
Speaker 3: organization in twenty fourteen. Yeah, it was twenty fourteen, and
Speaker 3: you left.
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone for it, and then you went back to
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone.
Speaker 3: I went back to Rolling Stone, like Bay, you know,
Speaker 3: on my knees, you know, because they had been kind
Speaker 3: of you.
Speaker 1: Left as a hero, like I'm launching a brand new
Speaker 1: publication like the New Frontier.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Seven months later, you're like.
Speaker 3: Hey, I defied Yan Winner, right, young. You know, young
Speaker 3: can be a difficult person. And I thought he was
Speaker 3: sticking me around at contract time, and I was like,
Speaker 3: I'll show you.
Speaker 1: You know, like I'm gonna make it big.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm going to go and make it big.
Speaker 3: And I like I went, I ran off to you know,
Speaker 3: and somebody even richer than you, and and they were
Speaker 3: going to invest two hundred and fifty million dollars in media.
Speaker 3: Then I get there and it's like, we don't have
Speaker 3: money to buy a pencil right intercept. Literally that happened,
Speaker 3: And there.
Speaker 1: Were rumors that Pierre himself was like doing expense reports
Speaker 1: in the in the very beginning.
Speaker 3: That's probably true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like the eighth richest person on the planet.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 1: It's like you really needed to take a cab. You
Speaker 1: have to get the subway right, there.
Speaker 5: Would have been faster.
Speaker 3: Actually, I can tell a story about that. They had
Speaker 3: this idea that we we should not use phones right,
Speaker 3: and that we should only the only time that we
Speaker 3: should ever be talking on the phone is in one
Speaker 3: of those boosts that they were you know, they now
Speaker 3: set up right, and I said, journalists need to have
Speaker 3: an actual line, right, because we need to record conversations
Speaker 3: and he's like, yeah, but you can do that digitally.
Speaker 3: I'm like, it doesn't really, Like that doesn't work all
Speaker 3: the time. You know, why don't we just have phones? Right?
Speaker 3: And and you know it turned out to be like
Speaker 3: a cost thing. But they were like hyper focused on
Speaker 3: stuff that really didn't matter. Like I got in trouble
Speaker 3: with them early because they wanted to do a sign seating,
Speaker 3: you know, because they had this theory that there would
Speaker 3: be increased productivity with an open newsroom with people. And
Speaker 3: I said, this is a humor magazine. If I went
Speaker 3: into into the you know, this group and I said
Speaker 3: you all have to sit in a certain space, I
Speaker 3: would lose face immediately with these people. And so that
Speaker 3: thing went down south south quickly. But yeah, it was
Speaker 3: so that's right. We were almost colleagues.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I didn't get there untill twenty seventeen, so
Speaker 1: I missed those those early days, but I got to
Speaker 1: hear the stories.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we.
Speaker 1: Took on some of the people who were at Racket.
Speaker 3: Right on towards yes, some others.
Speaker 4: Before we wrap here, we actually haven't even opened one
Speaker 4: of the most important chapters in your journalism career at Matt,
Speaker 4: which is the Twitter files, and there's been I mean,
Speaker 4: you've talked plenty about Elon muss publicly. You've talked about
Speaker 4: the process and really interesting ways that I think people
Speaker 4: can go and listen to.
Speaker 5: I'm curious, with.
Speaker 4: All of this context in mind, Russian oligarchy, financial crisis, censorship,
Speaker 4: apparatuses from the Pentagon to Cia, and all of that,
Speaker 4: where do you think Elon Musk fits into He's such
Speaker 4: an interesting person, like whatever you think of him, genuinely
Speaker 4: an interesting person, but obviously as a defense contractor is
Speaker 4: now the owner of a media company. Ryan's reported on
Speaker 4: how that's gone in different ways with censorship and countries
Speaker 4: that Americans don't pay much attention to. Quite frankly, as
Speaker 4: someone who's actually like interacted with him and feuded with
Speaker 4: him and has had this relationship with him, where do you.
Speaker 5: Fit him into this?
Speaker 3: That's a great question because, as you both know, like
Speaker 3: when you do any story, you want to understand your
Speaker 3: sources and what they're where they're coming from, and what
Speaker 3: they want out of the situation. I even asked, and
Speaker 3: you know, straight out, I said, what is it you're
Speaker 3: looking for out of this? You know? I mean and
Speaker 3: he he sort of said something about trying to restore
Speaker 3: trust with Twitter's audiences by opening the vault on different
Speaker 3: censorship practices. But this was it was such a big
Speaker 3: step for I mean, no CEO has ever done anything
Speaker 3: like that before, right, So I can't say that I
Speaker 3: ever understood where he was coming from or why he
Speaker 3: was doing anything. And then shortly after we started, you know,
Speaker 3: there was that incident where he banned a bunch of
Speaker 3: people for the jet thing, right, And we had conversations
Speaker 3: back and forth about it, and I made the decision
Speaker 3: right away, which I've been criticized for, but I thought,
Speaker 3: you know, it doesn't matter, right, I'm not writing about
Speaker 3: that stuff, Like he's giving us access to all of
Speaker 3: this material. The story is the material. I'll worry about
Speaker 3: Elon and all of his problems later.
Speaker 5: The private jet.
Speaker 4: You have access to this trope of information about the
Speaker 4: Intel apparatus, and you're going to throw it away for
Speaker 4: a private jet story.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah? Like I felt like the I mean I
Speaker 3: understood that there were people who who wanted the project
Speaker 3: to end. There was all kinds of strange stuff going
Speaker 3: on inside that whole scene at Twitter early on, where
Speaker 3: you know, from day to day, minute to minute, we
Speaker 3: didn't know whether it was going to in you. And
Speaker 3: so I was the person. I was one of the
Speaker 3: people who was sort of lobbying for no matter what
Speaker 3: we do, let's just keep getting stuff in until we
Speaker 3: have a story. And and so yeah, I can't say
Speaker 3: that honestly that I understand what Elon's motivation was. But
Speaker 3: I have to give him credit because the stuff that
Speaker 3: we did get was historic and interesting and will probably
Speaker 3: continue to be interesting in different ways even years from now,
Speaker 3: like you know, as we keep going.
Speaker 1: Through it, and you don't talk to him anymore, right,
Speaker 1: like that that bridge is burned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unfortunately, you know, I still think he doesn't. He
Speaker 3: misunderstood the whole situation.
Speaker 4: I think that was over the substack Twitter thing, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It is. He still crushing substack, which.
Speaker 4: Anyway proves your point about source management, which is an
Speaker 4: important part of doing good journalism is knowing when to
Speaker 4: push and when to pull. And that proved your point
Speaker 4: that when there's a level of sensitivity with a source
Speaker 4: and you're going to lose access to information that's in
Speaker 4: the public's interest, you have to be smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a line, right, like you can't. You can't
Speaker 3: you know, soft pedal your coverage of somebody in order
Speaker 3: to get something right. Right. That's like access journalism, and
Speaker 3: there's a word for that, right the Twitter files. You know,
Speaker 3: look ethically, it was a unique situation. I would say,
Speaker 3: like I consulted with all kinds of people, like some
Speaker 3: some of the old dragons in this business. You know,
Speaker 3: how do you deal with something like this? And I
Speaker 3: don't think we crossed that line. I still think that
Speaker 3: the idea was that there was stuff in these documents
Speaker 3: that even Twitter and Elon didn't understand, that we were
Speaker 3: still getting up until the very end, and that that
Speaker 3: was more important than anything else that was happening. So
Speaker 3: is there more in there you think or like I
Speaker 3: think so, I mean, not not a ton, but we
Speaker 3: do keep finding things, and as you.
Speaker 1: Still have access to the ones that you got.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not supposed to do, but yeah, but uh
Speaker 3: but yes, and you know there are agencies. You know,
Speaker 3: when we started, one of the things the problems was
Speaker 3: we didn't even just know that the names of these
Speaker 3: different agencies what they did, like which an yeah, exactly
Speaker 3: like sis Sissa, you know that, Well that's a long story.
Speaker 3: But there there's a lot of stuff like that on Twitter,
Speaker 3: especially in attachments that we haven't opened and looked at that. Uh,
Speaker 3: you know, as we continue to do that, every now
Speaker 3: and then we'll find something like Schellenberger still looking pretty
Speaker 3: closely at all that stuff.
Speaker 4: So wow, I mean, it's I don't envy you for
Speaker 4: having to parse through all of that. But in the
Speaker 4: other way's the story of a lifetime.
Speaker 3: No, it's awesome, Are you kidding? I mean, it's it's
Speaker 3: a dream. I mean, as soon as we saw like
Speaker 3: FBI flag this DHS flagged that, I knew Jim Baker, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean this maybe once in a career
Speaker 3: you'll get something like that, and you know, it turned
Speaker 3: out to be, you know, a really big story about
Speaker 3: this subterranean relationship with the intelligence agencies. And it was
Speaker 3: very hard to work out and that's always fun as
Speaker 3: a journalist, the challenge of it. So but you know,
Speaker 3: I have some resentments too, because I do think that
Speaker 3: some of the other some reporters who dismissed it early
Speaker 3: on because they can't stand elon uh, you know, kind
Speaker 3: of missed the forest with the trees there that it
Speaker 3: wasn't really a partisan story and they should have been
Speaker 3: looking at it. But you know, I think it's a
Speaker 3: net plus overall.
Speaker 1: So something else.
Speaker 5: I mean, I could keep going, I could double the
Speaker 5: time of this.
Speaker 4: It's been so interesting, and you two are people I've
Speaker 4: learned a lot from just watching it, amazing reporting.
Speaker 3: Actually, I do have a question for you both. I mean,
Speaker 3: like this concept of you know, Crystal and Saga obviously
Speaker 3: did it too. Part of the whole idea is to
Speaker 3: go against the whole thesis of like the hate ink
Speaker 3: thing and see how it works when audiences aren't just
Speaker 3: being cheering sections. But I mean, how does it How
Speaker 3: is it working for you? I mean does it be?
Speaker 1: I think it's working shockingly well, right, Yeah, quite pleasantly
Speaker 1: surprised at how well it's working. What one thing that
Speaker 1: was very heartening actually, because the one thing I'd wondered
Speaker 1: about was, you know, there's this whole you can't on
Speaker 1: the left, there's a whole you can't platform odious views, right,
Speaker 1: and here's the platform for Emily and like fully.
Speaker 5: Anti abortion for example, And so it's not easy for you.
Speaker 1: So I went to the gw encampment, the God like
Speaker 1: the Gods Encampment a couple weeks ago whenever that was
Speaker 1: happening back in May, and it felt like everybody there
Speaker 1: watched the show, like every single person there, So at
Speaker 1: least if you're in your teens and twenties at this point,
Speaker 1: like it's fine, Like people are okay to hear different
Speaker 1: views because also we you know, you're gonna hear stuff
Speaker 1: about the Israel Palestine on our show that you probably
Speaker 1: won't find elsewhere. But they're also those people are okay
Speaker 1: hearing right wing views that they don't agree with, right
Speaker 1: they want, Like it was, I was, it was interesting
Speaker 1: how concentrated the audience was there. It's like, wow, everybody
Speaker 1: here watches this show. It's amazing. That's great. Really, that's great.
Speaker 1: That's heartening. Yeah. So yeah, I think, I mean, people
Speaker 1: can answer in the comments section if they if they
Speaker 1: agree with whether it's working or not. But if they're
Speaker 1: in the comment section, that means they're that's their heads.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, not necessarily.
Speaker 1: But well not necessarily fans, that's true.
Speaker 5: The Dobbs decision gave out.
Speaker 4: You and I were on the show together, and I
Speaker 4: just feel like as someone who grew up when media
Speaker 4: was falling apart, like you just want the transparency, and
Speaker 4: it's almost efficient to get both perspectives in one sitting.
Speaker 4: You know, you can hear the best argument from the
Speaker 4: left and hopefully the best argument from the right from
Speaker 4: people that you trust are acting in good faith, and
Speaker 4: it's kind of efficient.
Speaker 5: You don't have to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've met these number of people who say that
Speaker 1: they watch both CNN and Fox or Fox and MSNBC
Speaker 1: because they don't trust either of them, right, but they
Speaker 1: want to hear both and then sort it through themselves.
Speaker 1: And right, just that we just cut out the middle man.
Speaker 3: You can just yea one stuff shopping.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 3: Awesome, excellent, Emily, Ryan, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming down, thanks.
Speaker 5: For watching everyone. This says it for us.
Speaker 4: On today's edition of Counterpoints, I finally found the camera, Ryan,
Speaker 4: I was like, which camera is it? But it's right here.
Speaker 4: Make sure you subscribe Breakingpoints dot com so you get
Speaker 4: this show early and and all tear inbox right away
Speaker 4: on Thursday nights.
Speaker 1: There you go, and so we'll see you next week.
Speaker 3: Sounds good to see you then,