Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Matt Taibbi, America's Top Gonzo Journalist, on How the Media Lost Its Mind

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Matt Taibbi, America's Top Gonzo Journalist, on How the Media Lost Its Mind · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas broadcasting live from
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  what you called it, Soho, Matt.
• 0:09
  It's technically Soho. Yeah, I guess it is, friends between Mercer and
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  South of Houston. Yes, South of, South of Houston.
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  Yeah. So, Ho. Right. So, South.
• 0:21
  How's the, why did the Londoners have a Soho?
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  I do not know. Actually, that's a very good question.
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  Yeah. Matt Taibi is with us, ladies and gentlemen, if you're, you're not aware,
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  journalists extraordinaire. I'm a long time fan. First time caller.
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  I'm honored that you came into the city.
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  So, how are things in the United States?
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  So, the visiting foreigner, it seems like maybe the political situation and the media situation
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  could be suboptimal. Should we say, is that the tech for where I'm putting it?
• 0:52
  I think suboptimal is a good starting point.
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  Like, when you were writing hate ink and you were talking about how like the media
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  is basically bicecated between these two historical tribes, each of which is just feeding
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  their, you know, their base, the red meat that they want to hear, would you have believed that
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  today most people would be getting their information, not from neither of those places,
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  or the networks, but from algorithms?
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  So, I did, I never saw it getting to this level of complete insanity and untethered
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  conspiracism and craziness and hatred. I mean, the thing that was interesting about the old
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  model is that they tended to pick true stories to go after one another with.
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  And now, it's impossible to tell who is aligned with whom and what the truth is,
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  but almost any news story at any given time, and it's incredibly frustrating,
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  and the news cycle's gotten progressively shorter by the day.
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  So, I don't know how a normal news consumer makes sense of the world.
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  Well, apparently that don't.
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  Right.
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  The answer, you know, extremist parties are the consequence.
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  I mean, the, yeah, you said that, but at least they used to be based on the news,
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  like on things that were actually happening in the world.
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  You're reminding me of like the Bill O'Reilly endospin.
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  Right.
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  Or whatever.
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  You know, this is the endospin.
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  This is where we take something true and we tell the harsh truth about it,
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  and that harsh truth, his interpretation might be total bullshit,
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  but at least it's based on a thing that happened.
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  Right, and this is what people actually, I grew up in sort of left media, right?
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  And there was always constant criticism of Fox, and I think there were a lot of misperceptions
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  about what Fox was.
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  Fox, the issue with them was their choice of story.
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  It wasn't that they were mangling facts constantly.
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  They were just picking the right kind of story that they knew.
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  Well, and that their opinion shows were highly opinionated in a particular direction.
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  Of course.
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  But yes, people don't, people never understood and still don't, I think, the difference between,
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  all between 5 p.m. and like 10 p.m., where an opinion,
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  where an entertainment network, but then all the other hours of the day,
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  where a news gathering organization, and the news was good.
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  Yeah, they had very good, and they still do actually have very good reporters there.
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  People who, you know, risk their careers to protect their sources,
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  do all the traditional stuff, Fox tended to have a pretty decent record in terms of
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  factuality. With a couple of conspicuous exceptions, they didn't really get in a lot of
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  trouble with litigation. But the issue was always the kinds of stories that people were seeing,
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  and what kind of image of America that people were getting.
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  I think in hindsight, now I look back, and I think there was a little bit of the opposite
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  problem was going on on the other side too. We just never recognized it.
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  Well, you did. You wrote a book about it.
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  Yes, but a little bit late.
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  I mean, it's funny that you say like it's the choice of stories, because that like reminds me
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  of my journalism 101 classes, which were all very kind of post-structuralists, and kind of,
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  20th century continental philosophy and Foucault and everything, and all about relativism and
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  power and all this kind of happy-to-people shit. But they made a valid point, not to sound dismissive.
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  Not to sound dismissive, I have the most respect.
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  That was good dismissive for Mr. Derrida.
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  But no, the point was that they would say, you know, there is no objective truth.
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  I mean, you're always making a selection, right?
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  Of course. You've always got biases that you're bringing to the table about what's important
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  and what's not, because there are far too many things going on in the world for you to cover
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  them all. So you're imposing some sort of set of precepts in your allocation of what stories are
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  worth airing. And it's strange that the outlet that seems to have taken that up and run with it
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  the most the earliest, the fastest was a right-wing outlet, not the kind of outlet that the
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  well-meaning the journalism professors would have admired.
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  Right. Although they did eventually do exactly that. But what do you say that what are you thinking of?
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  Like MSNBC during the Trump era, I mean, they, you know, they took the Fox model and they've
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  they floored it for that, especially that first Trump term, you know, from 2017 to 2021.
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  It was, you know, their, their shorter stories was almost entirely limited to,
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  you know, a handful of things about Trump that they were just hammering over and over again. But
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  Fox did, you know, do that first in the United States. And you know, I fully agree with
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  though your description before. I mean, my father was a intelligent reporter and he came from
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  the old school, just the facts, ma'am, you know, standing in front of the burning tank kind of a
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  reporter. I chose the other path, you know, the kind of new journalism path. But still,
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  they always recognize that everything is an editorial choice, like whether you put the headline,
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  you know, high on the page or low, whether you put the quote in the third paragraph or the
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  eighth paragraph, you're always making some kind of editorial choice. So there's no objective
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  anything in the newspaper. Does that mean that we shouldn't strive? I mean, I'm genuinely
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  personally torn at, you know, being a product myself of a public broadcaster in part where objectivity
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  was the gold standard. The what changed, what shifted over the past decade or so that I saw that
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  sort of ended up terminating my relationship with the public media and the mainstream media
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  was that in an earnest desire to increase diversity, the there was an instinct to air lived
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  experiences and to pick journalists who had, you know, a particular beat that was personal to them,
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  which to me it was obvious would color the quest for objectivity. But if we believe that the
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  quest for objectivity is itself an illusion, well, where do we stand? So I think objectivity as an
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  aspiration is important, right? And a lot of journalists, I know, feel this way. Like you can never
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  actually, it's like Zeno's paradox, you're never going to get all the way to the end, you're not
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  actually going to meet that perfect mean. But if you try as hard as possible to be fair, to
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  present both sides of the story or all sides of the story, that is, I think that's a worthy
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  endeavor. I think you have to try to do that. Or at least somebody has to try to do that.
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  I was raised on a hundred jumps, a hundred jumps, and did not try to do that. But he was very
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  worth reading. But in concert with other kinds of media where you got other, you know, exposure to
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  other approaches. And what was your thinking when you were doing the stuff that first, I guess,
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  made you famous, or where I, where you were first famous in my world, was your dispatches
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  from the Trump, yeah, from rolling started in particular, Trump's first rise to the leadership
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  of the Republican nomination. What were you trying to do? So I thought the Trump story was a
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  fascinating campaign story. I had been on the campaign beat for five cycles already at that point.
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  And I had learned to hate the story because of five presidential elections. Yeah. Starting in 2000
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  or 2004, one of those, so this, this was my like fourth or fifth full shot selling you by saying
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  this was when you really hit the big time. Well, no, but I mean, the Trump thing was certainly
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  got more attention than anything else. But the, but normally it's kind of a boring story because
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  you're sitting there listening to the same speech is over and over and over again. And really,
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  all you're doing is passing along, corporatized messaging by both parties. There isn't a whole
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  lot of wiggle room to learn anything on the plane. With Trump, you know, it was a fascinating
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  story. He was taking on the entire system. He was upending the whole way that the campaign system
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  was constructed. And I thought it was incredibly interesting. And when I initially started writing
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  about it, I think a lot of that enthusiasm came through and there wasn't always a positive reaction
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  to this. Like, I thought this was a really interesting story. You know, I wasn't thinking about
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  the politics of it. I was thinking, this is really neat compared to the other stuff.
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  But then as the campaign progressed, the journalists became more and more openly
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  partisan and politicized. And you know, I understood that. I think there was a lot of thought that
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  Trump was, you know, dangerous going to be the next Hitler. And if you, if you do think that,
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  then it's hard to keep that out of your mind when you're reporting. So I mean, even if you don't
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  think he's going to be the next Hitler, how did you feel about him as a potential president?
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  At the time. You know, I thought there were a lot of glaring issues. He was impulsive. I
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  very particularly remember a speech that he gave in New Hampshire. And I'm sure you've covered
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  campaigns before they will give out the text of the speech to the press sometimes. So we had a
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  copy of his prepared remarks. And he got up there and he read the first word. And then he was off.
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  The whole thing was different from where the guy is scrolling back and forth.
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  Yeah, he's not even on the script anymore. And you know, that added to
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  the fact that he, you know, seemed to like the idea of setting policy through Twitter,
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  that he was up late at night, that he was, you know, making the seemingly unplanned decisions
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  in the heat of the moment on live television. All of that was nothing like we'd ever seen
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  with the president. Do you remember a decision that he made on live television?
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  I mean, he, there are things that he would say on live television that would become instant
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  controversies, right? He's in the middle of the debate and throws out that blood coming out of
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  your whatever, wherever line. And Kelly to me and Kelly. Yeah. And it's, it's possible.
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  He didn't say that in a debate. He said that in an interview about the debate. Remember,
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  because he was, oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. He loves her during the debate.
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  Yeah, that's right. But yes, I'm remembering also just off my head, he was talking to,
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  he was asked about abortion. And he was trying to be as devout as he could muster from being
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  obviously an irreligious person who doesn't give a shit about abortion. Right. And he was asked,
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  he said, I think it should be treated like murder. And the interviewer, I think it might have
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  been Chris Matthews. Someone said, but what about punishments for the woman? And he said, well,
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  yeah, if it's, you know, if it's a crime, then she would have to be punished as well, which has
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  long been a taboo for evangelicals who held that, you know, woman shouldn't be punished for having
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  abortions because they're a victim as well. His point is logical. His point is like, he was just
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  following the logic to its conclusion. I mean, if you're murdering a baby, then the person,
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  then the woman who does the murder has to be convinced as well. And then he had to backtrack
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  the next day. Of course. Yeah. I didn't mean that. But that's the way his mind works. He doesn't,
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  he doesn't do the same political calculation that other politicians do. And on the one hand,
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  that's refreshing. I think that's the reason that he won. And this is another thing that I think
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  almost nobody in the press court at the time really caught on to until it was far too late,
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  which was that the moon in the country was violently anti-politician, violently anti the system.
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  It was after the 2008 financial collapse. People felt like politicians had rewarded their donors
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  and let other people suffer. And we were in two different horrible wars for a long time. And
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  Trump got up there and did everything politicians don't do. And they saw that as something that was
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  huge, positive. And so even though looking at it objectively as a reporter, I thought,
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  I'm not sure I want my president thinking this way. The political wisdom of it was, I thought,
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  pretty clear. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting how his, how that aspect of his stick, the kind of
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  I'm the authentic guy who will tell you who will lie to your face rather than lying behind closed
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  doors and doing deals with K Street and Wall Street and Davos and whatever. You know, you get
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  fucked by Hillary Clinton in one way, but at least I ain't fuck you to your face. That sort of
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  stick has changed, though, because if you do think about his first victory where he lost the
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  popular vote, and he was up against an incredibly poor candidate, really, who she always seemed
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  warned when she was there. People weren't inspired by Hillary Clinton. If Obama had run for a third term,
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  do you think the mood still goes to Trump at that time? Oh, I think Obama was a one. Yeah.
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  And you can see that just in the results of the Biden election, you know, even if you took
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  COVID out of the equation, just the shift in the mail vote alone was decisive by a fair margin.
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  I think Biden gained six points with white men. Right. And Obama had won a lot of the districts
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  that Trump won in 2016. And do you think then if there was a mood for something that wasn't
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  quite as stitched up and establishment as Hillary Clinton, that if Bernie had won the Democratic
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  nomination, people would have had a left-wing option that sort of rhymed with Trump? I do think
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  that Bernie had a good chance of winning. I was pretty close to Bernie at one time. I spent
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  a lot of time with him. I did a story with him once where he just had me tag around for a month
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  while he was in Congress and sort of walked me through everything that a Congress person does.
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  And I was, he had very low expectations for his campaign just to give you an example of how
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  how much of a surprise his success was. They did an early event where they filled, I think,
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  an auditorium in Maine that was a basketball stadium. And they thought this was never going to
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  happen again. They immediately sent all of their volunteers to every Dwayne Reed in the area
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  and tried to copy down the names of every person who came in to the arena because they just didn't
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  think that this was something that was ever going to be repeated. It turned out that Bernie came in
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  and he grabbed hold of a lot of the same zeitgeist that Trump was leaning into. Just that Trump
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  was just much more skilled at grabbing different types of people. Bernie, he did have a speech
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  that he was very comfortable giving. He actually called it or his people called it the Bernie Festo.
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  He had been giving it since the late 80s but impromptu with people who didn't exactly agree with
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  him about things. He was a bit stilted and I think that heard him on the campaign trail.
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  As you say, Hillary was not a great candidate. Despite the enormous amount of money that she raised,
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  she had an incredibly difficult time getting people to come to her events. That was a story that
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  was buried in the middle of the campaign. I vividly remember you making this point,
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  I think. I mean, I read all of you at his batches mostly in Insane Clown president.
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  Is that the Insane Clown president? It's a great book. People should read it. It's just a
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  fascinating series of highly entertaining dispatches from Trump's campaign, which were originally
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  published in Rolling Stone, right? Yeah, you make the point that the Clinton campaign, the Hillary
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  Clinton campaign, that is, they have this big hoo-haar about how she really wants to get to know
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  the people. Right. So she's going to do these small round table things and just little school
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  halls and things because she wants to be so in touch with the common person and you were saying,
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  it's bullshit. She just can't sell it. She can't fill an arena and all of the journalists,
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  the political journalists, who know that she's not filling out arenas, are nonetheless printing
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  that she's doing this really interesting experimental pivot to listen to people.
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  And that was shocking to me because I had seen the conversations the campaign journalists have.
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  I think if most people see the way that the people on the plane or on the bus,
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  Tom seems to call it. If they saw the way that the campaigns were talked about,
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  they would always be nauseous. But during the Clinton campaign, it was particularly bad because,
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  as you said, the real problem was she couldn't fill four and five thousand seat halls.
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  And there was always a problem where a photographer was taking pictures of the empty seats
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  in the back and there was always an argument with an aide who didn't want them to do that.
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  And in the bus, you would hear discussions like, well, maybe we shouldn't spin it that way.
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  Maybe they are doing this on purpose, because the aides were saying, yes, we're looking for a more
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  bespoke approach to campaigning. We want to try to get to know the people a little bit better.
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  But the real thing was she couldn't draw the crowds. Meanwhile, Trump would go to Wilkes-Barry,
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  Pennsylvania. And there'd be some stadium in the middle of nowhere and you couldn't park.
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  There would be no place to park anything for a mile around. It was unbelievable.
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  I mean, as a phenomenon, it was amazing to watch.
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  Did you think that's because it was a good show or because people really liked what he was saying?
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  A little of both. You know, Trump obviously had a background in pro wrestling.
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  The way he staged his events, it was intimate, menacing. There was action that happened.
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  They would always make an announcement at the beginning of the event, if something happens,
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  step aside and let our people come and handle it. He would create some kind of a confrontation
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  with people in the press section that was part of his act. He would mix it up with some
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  person behind the rope line. So it had the feel of a WWE or WWF kind of event, which is exactly
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  the opposite of what traditional politicians do. They sit there and they just read this mechanized
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  dial survey-created script, which is so incredibly boring.
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  No one has ever done that more than Hillary Clinton. Now that I hear you say it, put it that way,
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  it's almost like you had the negative polarity and the positive polarity in one race,
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  like they could not have been. You could not imagine a more automatonic, you know,
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  row to candidate than Hillary Clinton, but sticking all of the checkboxes, the Tracy Flick of
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  politics, highly accomplished. I mean, I don't dislike Hillary Clinton. I'm like Hillary Hader.
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  Just a very wooden personality as a politician.
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  I think she does have a lot of strengths policy-wise. If you listen to Hillary talk about an issue,
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  when she's not in front of a crowd, when she's just arguing, you know, some point of policy,
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  that's her comfort zone. She remembers all the different changes, she's a lawyer,
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  she can recall the sides and the dates and all that stuff. But you're exactly right. The
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  process of getting up and convincing people to vote for her is alien to her personality.
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  Does it just mean that America's presidential system is screwed? Because you should want
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  the country to be run by pretty boring, wonkish policy people who in their spare time love
• 22:39
  pouring over policy documents and making legalistic arguments about things. I mean, shouldn't you?
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  I don't know. I think one of the reasons that we have the campaign and that it's effective,
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  or it has been, is because it's an opportunity for the candidates to show how much they enjoy
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  the company of different types of Americans, right? So you don't have to give a shit about
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  that, I mean, it does matter. I mean, I've seen lots of different politicians fail
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  because they give off a vibe of not liking their audience. No, I don't mean who gives a shit.
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  Obviously, people do give a shit because those people don't get elected. What I mean is one
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  shouldn't give a shit about that when selecting for the person who's going to have an incredibly
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  complicated and strategic job. I don't really matter if you go along with people,
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  though, if you're running pretty well, the president's surrounded by a million policy people,
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  and they're permanent bureaucrats. A huge part of their job is inspirational and emotional
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  and human, and the presidents that we remember the best are the ones who had the ability to connect
• 23:58
  with the whole country, right, or a large segment of the country anyway.
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  You know, in our lifetime, there hasn't been, there hasn't been exactly a wealth of great presidents.
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  I mean, it's been Reagan Clinton and the Obama, right? Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think
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  those three other ones that you would pick out, I remember being impressed by Obama and the
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  campaign trail, and you know, he did seem, he seemed comfortable talking to people,
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  but he was also guarded, and that came off. It was a little bit of a weakness form in the second
• 24:39
  election, but you know, Bill Clinton, that clearly that came through, and that was the big reason
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  that he won, is that he just loved to hang out with people and all those stories about him going
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  to crispy cream, donut shops, and you know, pounding cheeseburgers all of a sudden. He's
• 24:58
  trying to drag him away. Exactly. I just want to keep talking to him.
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  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, but about what Obama had was this incredible ability to galvanize a crowd
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  within the amazing speech. I mean, even you didn't even have to be American to hear his stump speech,
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  you know, that he first debuted at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, where, you know,
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  subsequently became famous where he ends with like, you know, there is no red America or blue
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  America, no black America or white America. They're only the United States of America and the
• 25:28
  crowd rules. I mean, it even gives me a tingle up my spine. I'm not even American. So there was
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  that, you know, but the, I guess what I'm pointing to is, and I'm stealing this from John Dickerson,
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  the former CBS journalist who says like, it is possible that the attributes that are required
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  from a person to win a presidential campaign in the United States. I'm not identical to the
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  attributes required to be a good president. Sure. I mean, I don't dispute that. I just do think it
• 25:58
  it does have some role. I think I think there's some a positive role that the primaries can play.
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  I think the president's also learned something on the campaign trail. So a little bit.
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  Some of them. And by the way, it goes both ways like, you know, Trump, for instance,
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  you know, he a lot of his act was a little bit like a stand-up comics routine. He would go in and
• 26:28
  and just sort of from the hip, he would start talking about things. He had lines and riffs that
• 26:34
  he would descend into, but he was always kind of looking around, seeing who was in the crowd. And
• 26:41
  that was where he would get ideas about new things to pursue. He'd never talked about forever wars,
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  but he started to see people in caliphatex that his speeches and that became part of
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  his addresses, the booing and hissing that went on between people in the press section and people
• 27:02
  in the crowd. That was something that he picked up on. So attentive politicians, you know, that
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  that's one way to do it, but certainly there are a lot of politicians who, for instance,
• 27:14
  expect to go into Iowa and as long as they're for ethanol, they think they're going to get all
• 27:20
  the votes, but that's not true. Iowa voters are extremely well-educated. They're very sensitive to
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  who is pandering and who isn't. And inexperienced politician will go in there and fall on their face
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  doing that kind of thing. So I think it has a positive role. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean,
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  also he would give Trump that is speeches that were three hours long and throw such a barrage of
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  different ideas out that, as you say, like a standard comic, he's basically A, B testing ideas
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  and the ones that get a huge roar, he's like, I'll put that in my back pocket. That one out next
• 27:55
  time will lean into that one. And the ones that fall flat, he's like, maybe that's not something to.
• 27:59
  So he actually has a crucible, essentially, to just keep on testing out what's going to work in
• 28:04
  a presidential campaign, at least for that base, which is clever. I went to school right up the
• 28:09
  street here at NYU and there was a comedy club called The Comedy Cellar. And I used to go
• 28:15
  during the weekdays to do my homework. And that was when the comics would try out their material.
• 28:21
  And a lot of it was pretty subpar, but it was interesting to watch the way they worked.
• 28:28
  And some politicians do exactly the same thing. You might have an event in winter set,
• 28:37
  where there's only 110 people there. And so they'll try out something interesting. And
• 28:45
  that might give them an idea for something bigger to do later, which is the only thing that
• 28:52
  made that beat tolerable until Trump came along and sort of revolutionized the whole process.
• 28:57
  But shout out to The Comedy Cellar, which is still the best comedy club. I think probably in
• 29:03
  the world is so good. I actually just did you know, no, I'm who, oh yes, the cellar. So I did
• 29:07
  his podcast a couple days ago. By the way, if people are just tuning in and then I was happening
• 29:12
  Matt Taibi is a brilliant journalist. And if you're coming from uncomfortable conversations,
• 29:16
  you should subscribe to Rocket News. I'll thank you. Follow Matt. If you're coming from Matt,
• 29:20
  then I'm Josh Seps and uncomfortable conversations. You should subscribe to my conversation as
• 29:25
  well. But and you should also listen to Nome's podcast, which is called Live From The Table,
• 29:30
  the official podcast at The Comedy Cellar. And I'm always likes to root me in your asshole
• 29:36
  account, Israel, because I'm a self-hating Jew apparently for being critical of Israel. But
• 29:41
  God love the guy, absolute best guy in world. What extent are American finances made
• 29:46
  this motivating you to make a deal? I don't think about American financial situation. I don't
• 29:52
  think about anybody. Well, you know who does care about the financial situation of humans?
• 30:00
  Me, this show, all Uncle Zepsi does, which is why we're offering a limited time budget
• 30:06
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• 30:13
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• 30:26
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• 30:34
  Take that, Mr. President. So you got a lot of shit starting around this time because you were
• 30:40
  reporting on things in a way that people felt, well, you're just empowering the bad guys here.
• 30:44
  You know, you're treating even discovering something like the Hillary Clinton card draw crowds
• 30:49
  story. What are you trying to do? Like lead America off a cliff so that orange buffoon is the
• 30:55
  president. Did you feel any culpability?
• 30:58
  Culpability. No, I was shocked, first of all, by that response. I'd never experienced that from
• 31:07
  colleagues before. I had a very odd episode where I covered an event in Wisconsin and I quoted
• 31:16
  some guy who came from a union family who was going to vote for Trump and explained why.
• 31:22
  And it was about NAFTA. And it was a real person really came from maybe he was misguided but
• 31:29
  it happened. So it's perfectly appropriate to put it in the story. And I got a lot of feedback
• 31:36
  from other reporters saying, you're feeding into this narrative that Trump is a working class
• 31:45
  candidate. And I was saying, well, he's really getting this vote. So what do you want me to do?
• 31:51
  Not report it. Then after that was when the whole russian gay thing started and that was when
• 31:57
  it became more pronounced. And I just I don't think it ever benefits a politician to not report
• 32:07
  something. That's true. Because somebody is eventually going to do it. And it's going to make
• 32:15
  that person like that. You might as well just tear the bandaid off and let the reporter do
• 32:23
  call it as they see it. And that way everybody retains some credibility in the end. But that
• 32:29
  wasn't what happened. And even if the story never comes out, it's like everyone's got their
• 32:34
  lane. That's not really the lane of journal. My opinion, it's not really a lane of journalists
• 32:38
  to solve politics for politicians. It's the job of voters and politicians to figure out how to
• 32:43
  run countries in democracies. It's the role of journalists to keep people honest. I mean,
• 32:48
  I'm sure you've known a lot of journalists. How many of them would you trust to make the decision
• 32:53
  about who should or should not be the president, right? All of them. There are supremely wise
• 33:00
  and enlightened group of people. How could you say such a thing? Yeah. No. I mean,
• 33:07
  it is tricky though. So brush a gate for the three people who are watching and don't know
• 33:10
  your involvement with brush a gate or who just hear what exactly is a brush a gate is that the
• 33:14
  just articulate what your, you know, what your journal isn't. How your journal isn't
• 33:20
  they're different from the mainstream? There was a story that came out basically after Trump got
• 33:26
  elected. It started before but most of it started after. Essentially saying that Trump had conspired
• 33:33
  with Vladimir Putin to rig the election process to boost voting in some areas over others by
• 33:46
  having Russia buy ads for Trump. There was an allegation basically that there was a
• 33:51
  conspiratorial relationship and that Trump was the kind of mentoring candidate for Russia.
• 33:57
  And a lot of people were interested in my opinion because I had lived in Russia for 12 years and
• 34:03
  spoke the language and all those things. And I saw it as a story that was not conformable. It was
• 34:12
  very similar to the WMB episode where we had a lot of unnamed intelligence sources telling us
• 34:18
  things. And I said, you know, I didn't say anything too radical at the beginning. I just said,
• 34:24
  these are the kinds of stories that get us in trouble. We should stay away from it until we had
• 34:27
  something better. But it became the biggest story in the world for three years.
• 34:33
  It was an FBI investigation. There was, there was an FBI investigation. But the FBI didn't really tell
• 34:40
  us they never told us really what started the investigation or their original explanation
• 34:49
  for how they got involved in doing something as extreme as conducting surveillance on a
• 34:56
  presidential candidate. I mean, you have to firstly have to think about how extraordinary that is
• 35:01
  to have the FBI invoke Pfizer, which is a America's most powerful electronic surveillance tool.
• 35:11
  It was the foreign intelligence design balance act. Yeah. And they did that with the Trump campaign
• 35:15
  and they were and they were listening basically to everybody. And so they were excused for how
• 35:23
  that happened was a very unconvincing and strange story about an Australian. It was going to get
• 35:29
  to this. Yeah, who's been on. People want to go back and listen to my episode with.
• 35:33
  Oh, without a doubt. You have. Oh, yeah, former foreign minister of Australia, who at the time
• 35:38
  was the was Australia's ambassador. We call them some funny other name when they're between
• 35:43
  commonwealth countries. What do we call them?
• 35:45
  At the shoes or a shark's the fan? No, there's something even more pretentious than that.
• 35:51
  It'll come to me. But anyway, he was the ambassador from Australia to the UK.
• 35:56
  And I had him on to talk about other things like multiculturalism in the UK and how Australia should
• 36:02
  handle sort of aggressive migrant communities and things. But we spent about 20 or 30 minutes talking
• 36:06
  about this. He someone in his office said that they'd just heard that someone from the Trump
• 36:13
  campaign, I think was manifold, right? Or it was no Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had said that the
• 36:20
  Trump people had something that the Russians had given them about Hillary's campaign. So then
• 36:26
  the Australian ambassador to the UK told Canberra who told Washington, apparently, or Washington
• 36:32
  saw it because of the five I security agreement or something. Well, maybe it was WikiLeaks.
• 36:36
  But he walked into the embassy in London. They had a meeting with the CIA officer there.
• 36:44
  Right, yes, that's right. So I mean, it does. It strikes me that what you're
• 36:50
  critiquing is the hard version of the Russia gate sort of lefty conspiracy, which is like
• 36:56
  he's a mentoring candidate who's in goots with Putin. And the election would have gone the other way
• 37:01
  if Putin hadn't been involved. But the soft version is, can they sound supposed to be colluding
• 37:07
  with foreign powers? An allied country, Australia, heard that that was happening.
• 37:14
  Trump, Jr. had met with the Russian, with Russian people or what he was meeting with.
• 37:18
  They didn't have that at the time. So there was
• 37:23
  collusion. And I mean, right, I mean, so what is what is the FBI supposed to do with
• 37:29
  Australian ambassador coming to them saying, hey, I just had a conversation with a guy who says
• 37:32
  that the Trump campaign has dirt that the Russians gave him? So the first of all, they eventually
• 37:39
  changed the story about what actually Papadopoulos said to Downer. The way it was reported everywhere was
• 37:48
  that the Trump campaign has dirt on Hillary that came from Russia. Apparently there was never,
• 37:55
  but the term dirt may ever came up. The timeline was different. Not a term that Alexander
• 38:01
  Downer would use, either anyone who knows how polished he is. I'm sure he was very careful is.
• 38:06
  That's interesting. Yeah. There were a lot of holes in that story. Also,
• 38:12
  Papadopoulos never spoke to an actual Russian. The person that he was having a conversation with
• 38:19
  was a malty's professor named Joseph Miffsord, who has been missing since that episode.
• 38:28
  And so there was an intimation that was all over the American press that Miffsord was actually
• 38:38
  a cutout for Moscow, but this was never established anywhere. It was investigated by Robert Mueller.
• 38:47
  Nobody even knows where Miffsord is. Miffsord actually was interviewed in the United States by the FBI.
• 38:54
  If he was a Russian spy, they had every opportunity to detain him and charge him with espionage.
• 39:02
  That never happened. He just disappeared. That story was always half baked and strange and didn't
• 39:10
  really say what the headlines said it did. As for the rest of the idea that there was some kind
• 39:18
  of collusion, the strongest thing that you could say about what happened that summer was that
• 39:26
  there was some activity where a Russian body was buying some ads and Trump didn't publicly
• 39:36
  object to it. But what about the thing about Don Jr. meeting with? So that didn't come out until
• 39:43
  a year afterward. First of all, second of all, not really. First of all, there's a lot of
• 39:50
  weird things about that part of the story, like the person with whom he had the meeting,
• 39:58
  was this woman named Natalia Viselnitska, who was a client of the same fusion GPS,
• 40:07
  press, press, I don't know what you call that, like a private intel company, that was pushing
• 40:17
  all these investigate stories. She had hired them for litigation support and had met with
• 40:25
  sort of ahead of the whole sort of rush gate project that morning before meeting with Don Jr.
• 40:32
  Oh, you think she was a honeypuff? You know, I don't know, but I do know that I had actually
• 40:38
  in a sort of accidental way run into some of those people beforehand, and I got exactly the same
• 40:45
  speech about essentially the people that Trump Jr. met with were trying to get this stupid,
• 40:57
  but not stupid. This human rights bill that had been passed called the Magnitsky Act,
• 41:01
  were trying to get that undone by reopening the flow of Russian children for adoptions in America.
• 41:14
  And they had a very macabre gross kind of a speech like these kids are going to die unless
• 41:19
  you revoke the human rights act. And I had heard that before, but Trump had the meeting,
• 41:28
  you know, walked out of it, you know, 15 minutes in, like I don't know that that's really
• 41:33
  proof that they had an election fixing conspiracy or anything like that.
• 41:37
  So is the is the claim that there was nothing there or that there might have been something there,
• 41:43
  but it didn't reach the threshold of what journalists were saying it was?
• 41:47
  Well, it was nowhere within the same universe of where the journalist said it was. I mean,
• 41:52
  just to take an example of the kind of things that they didn't report at the same time,
• 41:56
  Bill Clinton had given a speech in Moscow to Renaissance Capital and received $500,000 for it and
• 42:04
  met with Vladimir Putin personally after giving the speech.
• 42:07
  While he was by that other?
• 42:08
  No, while Hillary was Secretary of State. And they had to get a waiver to do that.
• 42:15
  And but somehow, you know, this weird little meeting with this weird little person,
• 42:22
  you know, that he walked out of that became a much bigger story.
• 42:28
  So, but the the allegation was quite serious. I mean, it was that they had this huge investigation
• 42:35
  and the claim was very intricate. It was it was essentially that the Trump campaign was giving
• 42:45
  intelligence to the Russians about where they needed help so that the Russians could could then go
• 42:51
  by Facebook ads in selected areas to help Donald Trump win in those places.
• 42:58
  It makes no sense. The Russians could have walked into New York and hired anybody.
• 43:04
  Anybody and spent $50 million on doing their own polling and nobody would have objected to it.
• 43:10
  So, um, yeah, I know they could have just looked at an electoral map and seen what the,
• 43:15
  you know, the winnable blue states were in traditionally red districts.
• 43:19
  Right, right. And so, but there were loads of stories that came out that were, you know,
• 43:28
  disproven that that fell apart weeks afterwards. Like there was a big front page story in New York
• 43:34
  Times. Trump had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence. That was a story that dominated
• 43:42
  February of 2017. They never established that he had actual contacts with Russian intelligence
• 43:50
  before the campaign. And so, there were lots of things like that where it would say, according to
• 43:57
  four security sources or according to four people familiar with the matter.
• 44:05
  And, you know, from my perspective, I was, I didn't care. Like if it was true, I was happy to do
• 44:10
  the story. But I couldn't check. And, you know, it starts to be a red flag when story after story
• 44:18
  comes out. And there's no way to confirm whether something is true or not.
• 44:24
  I mean, the whole thing of talking to sources who you know are going to reinforce your own
• 44:29
  the point of your story sort of comes back to what we were saying about objectivity as well.
• 44:33
  Like this keeps happening. It happened during New York War where, you know, the New York Times
• 44:37
  would talk to somewhere a source in the White House about WMD, you know, the whole Scooter Libby thing
• 44:43
  where, you know, and they would get two sources for some bullshit story about Uranium in Niger
• 44:49
  or something. And it would turn out that those sources were both people who Dick Cheney had
• 44:53
  personally told to tell them that. Yeah, there's always happens. There were ads to the main source,
• 44:59
  right? So, yeah, that's how you get three sources. It's, you know, they're all the same person,
• 45:03
  basically. So, do you still retain any faith in the, I mean, the legacy media, the part of me
• 45:12
  feels like it's indispensable. Part of me feels like we can't live in a world in which just podcasts
• 45:19
  and like completely individuals publications. So, the only thing, someone has to be out there doing
• 45:24
  the reporting and somebody has to be out there providing a basis on which we can all form a common
• 45:30
  set of beliefs about what's going on in the world. Are people doing that? And is it getting better
• 45:37
  or worse than it was during Russia Gate? I think it got progressively worse because we had,
• 45:45
  we've had a series of stories that have all been kind of reported the same way,
• 45:53
  where there'll be an assertion, there will be a number of unnamed experts or unnamed
• 46:03
  officials who will say something, it will be repeated a million times and then a year later
• 46:09
  the story won't fall apart. So, for instance, they had, they had this thing called Bounty Gate,
• 46:16
  where it was alleged that Russians were giving out money to Afghanis to assassinate Americans
• 46:26
  in Afghanistan. And this turned out to be the opinion of a person, you know, in the intelligence
• 46:36
  complex, but who was overruled by superiors and they never found any backing for it.
• 46:42
  But the story was alive for a year before there was a public statement saying, no, actually,
• 46:46
  we don't have anything on this. And that's happened a lot, it happened with the Nord Stream thing,
• 46:53
  they would come out with different versions of that story. When the gasp hotline mysteriously
• 46:59
  blew up in the North Sea in the Baltic. Right, and you would have a group of people from the FBI,
• 47:09
  national security officials would go on, the cable stations and they would say, well,
• 47:12
  we have indications that this is, that the Russians are behind this, which never made a ton of
• 47:18
  sense, but it could, you know, it's possible, but they didn't have it. But so what level of certainty
• 47:23
  do you need before you go on a cable show and start mounting it? I mean, you know, Malaysia Airlines
• 47:27
  jet disappears and all of a sudden, you know, for the next 72 hours, every cookie theory is on the,
• 47:33
  you know, because we don't know. And I mean, isn't the defense of that that you trust the viewer
• 47:40
  enough that you give them a whole bunch of possible explanations and absolutely figured out?
• 47:46
  Yes. However, with the caveat that the whole idea, a lot of very important stories have been broken
• 47:54
  by unnamed sources, Watergate being a classic one. However, the whole idea of running a story that
• 48:05
  is undersourced is that you have to try as hard as you can, as quick as you can, to get somebody
• 48:11
  on the record so that the cavalry can come. You want the rest of the press to be able to work in
• 48:18
  a story. And this is where we have like a change in a sort of a sea change in the way the media operates.
• 48:27
  We don't, we don't do that anymore. There was a famous Pulitzer Prize winning reporter named Jeff
• 48:34
  Girth who did this huge autopsy of what happened with the Trump Russia story. And one of his big points
• 48:40
  was that they, you would have stories that would have unnamed sources and there would be no effort
• 48:46
  to go back and try to knock those unnamed sources into the status of name sources. There were
• 48:53
  lots of techniques that just sort of got abandoned during this time period. And why is that happening?
• 49:00
  Is that because editorial control over the publications is sloppy? Is it because journalists,
• 49:04
  because ordinarily you would expect that if you come to your editor at a place like the New York Times
• 49:09
  or the Wall Street Journal and you say, I want to run a story based on the fact that our competitor
• 49:15
  has run this other story in which they've got three unnamed sources. So I want to say that they
• 49:19
  said this and then dig a little deeper. You would expect that the editor should say, right, but don't
• 49:25
  just name the unnamed source. Don't just cite it as fact because our competitor named three unnamed
• 49:29
  sources. You have to go and find the sources yourself and we have to base it on fresh reporting.
• 49:34
  Is that not happening? It's not happening as much anymore. There isn't nearly as much original
• 49:43
  reporting. There are a lot of sources who are giving reporters stories that kind of everybody
• 49:51
  with a wink and a nudge know is are not right. But technically nobody's in the wrong because you
• 49:58
  were told something just a taken example there. There was a story in the Russia. I hate to harp on
• 50:06
  the story, but it's the one that I know the best. So there was a story where about a former
• 50:14
  Trump-aid named Carter Page in the Washington Post at a story saying that a court had found
• 50:24
  that he was an agent of a foreign power in granting the warrant to use FISA, that tool that we
• 50:33
  talked about before. Now all that is technically true. The problem being that there were misrepresentations
• 50:41
  to the FISA court. The warrant application was full of false information. And so the Washington
• 50:48
  Post is kind of off the hook because they didn't lie in the story, but the story is wrong.
• 50:54
  And so that's the kind of thing. Well, the story is factually correct in that there was an
• 51:00
  investigation. It just believes out the important bit that the investigation was based on faulty
• 51:04
  information. Yes, but even within the story where you have somebody saying, so and so concludes
• 51:12
  that so and so was an agent of a foreign power, that part's wrong. Right. So as a reporter,
• 51:19
  you never want that to happen. You never want anything to go sideways on you because
• 51:24
  once upon a time that could be your whole career. And now there are so many of these stories that
• 51:32
  kind of have either that are either entirely erroneous or partially erroneous that people
• 51:42
  just kind of shrug and let it go. And unfortunately, this is exacerbated by the reaction
• 51:50
  by certain politicians. You know, you have Trump might sue for, you know, a hundred gazillion dollars
• 51:57
  over something that was relatively small mistake for a public figure when he's the subject of a
• 52:05
  story. But as a result, everything's just a lot sloppier than it used to be. Like, you know,
• 52:13
  there's a reason why all the presidents men was such a cool movie because it represented
• 52:18
  the, you know, the facetious, careful process that used to be used to get you to an important
• 52:25
  story. And now people just kind of throw it out there. Right. I mean, it also reminds me of all
• 52:30
  what we were saying about Fox News and their being opinion and also. And then like the firewall
• 52:35
  between opinion and news has muddied. And I think like this is a problem that we're sort of
• 52:42
  injecting more biases into news coverage. And in some ways, having less freedom in
• 52:52
  non-news coverage, I mean, this was my sort of sense working at a mainstream, you know,
• 52:57
  broadcaster as well, which was that the news seemed to be, the news seemed to have an agenda,
• 53:03
  have an opinion, have a sort of a slant, a point of view about the kind of, it wanted to be on
• 53:08
  the right side of history. And you didn't want to, you know, touch things that were obviously not
• 53:14
  proper. Right. And then on the opinion side of things, there was a great caution about
• 53:21
  airing, you know, points of view that might be regarded as being, I don't know, hate speech or,
• 53:26
  you know, some other things. So both of them become milk toast, you know, the news becomes less
• 53:32
  sharp. Yeah. And the opinion becomes less interesting, less diverse. Yeah, that's a really
• 53:38
  interesting point because there is actually sort of a news mission in the op-ed page. It's not
• 53:46
  just so that people can throw their opinions out there. We used to have it so that your
• 53:55
  ordinary news consumer could look down and be able to see what people are thinking out there.
• 54:03
  So if you decide, really, Nilly, we're just not going to run 30% of the stuff that comes in,
• 54:10
  then now your readers are getting a completely skewed and weird version of what reality looks like.
• 54:16
  You mean in the opinion pages? In the opinion pages. Conversely, in the news section,
• 54:22
  when you're trying to be on the right side of history, you know, that's a big change for people
• 54:30
  who used to work in the news section, used to really not care. Like their primary purpose was to
• 54:37
  not screw up and not get sued. And now, you know, they're trying to kind of mold the story in a certain
• 54:48
  direction. And, you know, you were a little bit of a victim of this too, right? We're trying to
• 54:54
  say something as opposed to just showing up and saying, okay, this is how many people died in the
• 55:00
  fire and this is why the fire happened or this is how, you know, accounting works it easier,
• 55:07
  or I don't know whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's even more pronounced, I think, in broadcast
• 55:13
  than it is in the paper because I don't know. Part of me also just feels like having papers
• 55:17
  always had a slant on the in the in the opinion page, you know, the Wall Street Journal, you know,
• 55:21
  what you're going to get. I think the times is better than it was in 2020 in terms of having a
• 55:27
  range of different voices. I think I think it is. And so there's a you can be forgiven. And some
• 55:35
  part of me also thinks maybe it was just always last that people got their newspapers and they
• 55:38
  they reinforced, you know, the opinions in the news papers reinforced what they wanted to hear.
• 55:42
  But when it comes to, I think public broadcasting, I mean, this is sort of it's a bit of a
• 55:47
  funny conversation in the States because you don't really have public broadcasters that everybody
• 55:51
  watches and listens to like we do in the UK or like we do in most rich countries, like, you know,
• 55:55
  PBS and NPR and these are not the mainstream things like the BBC would be in the in the UK,
• 56:02
  for example. But they are supposed to reflect the range of perspectives of the citizenry. Like
• 56:08
  that's their charter. And as taxpayer funded institutions, like they literally have an obligation
• 56:15
  to air a whole bunch of voices, even if they're the ones, the kinds of ones that the elites who run
• 56:19
  those institutions to test. And it was just infuriating to, you know, you would, you know, just
• 56:25
  you could turn on the BBC panel show in 2022. And if it was about, I mean, pick your your
• 56:32
  culture war topic, but, you know, trans athletes or something like that, you knew exactly what all
• 56:37
  the panelists were going to be saying. Like they wouldn't have the person who's peddling hate speech
• 56:43
  on the panel, even if 60% of the population thought, hang on biological sex is still as a thing,
• 56:48
  right? I don't know. It does make it physically physiological differences, right? But we just had
• 56:52
  to pretend that those people didn't exist and didn't pay taxes and didn't deserve to have a
• 56:54
  public broadcaster that represented them, which was really strange. And, and well, in the UK,
• 57:02
  it still goes on. Here was quite a while before anybody made a big issue of it. You know,
• 57:09
  you could turn on an NPR on almost any subject. And it would be like sticking an ice pick in your
• 57:15
  ear. I mean, I grew up with the NPR. I loved a lot of the shows that they had on. And there was,
• 57:21
  there was just a big change in the way they approached everything in the mid 2000s, I guess. And
• 57:27
  yeah, that is really weird, like, especially when the charter specifically says you have to try
• 57:35
  to represent everybody and they don't make any effort to do that at all. They seem also impervious
• 57:43
  to declining ratings as that was happening. I mean, at a time when the readership of the public
• 57:51
  outlet in Australia was declining, I remember coming back, this must have been about 2022 or 2023,
• 57:56
  coming back to Australia from a trip to the States and opening the Australian Broadcasting
• 58:01
  Corporations app to see what was going on. And one of their lead stories in the news features
• 58:06
  sections are not breaking news, but you know, human interest stories was about how hard it was for
• 58:13
  trends, men in the outback to have menopause properly treated because so few outback Australian
• 58:25
  family doctors were familiar with men going through menopause. And I was like, I mean, how niche,
• 58:34
  like set aside political considerations, how niche do you want to be? And what are you
• 58:40
  catering to? How many people want to read this out? I had like a picture of a trans man fallost
• 58:45
  and I'm, you know, with his sheep in the background. It's like, how many transgender male
• 58:51
  farmers in the outback of Australia are there? I mean, how did the producer find that story?
• 59:00
  But that brings us back to the thing about the diversity hires, right? You know how the producer
• 59:05
  found it? The producer found it because they were given, they were an elk, I mean, I don't know
• 59:11
  this to be true. I absolutely got my house that it's true. They are an LGBTQIA plus person
• 59:16
  who is assigned to the LGBTQIA plus vertical. And they have issues that they find that they pursue,
• 59:26
  right? I mean, my point of view has always been absolutely increasing the diversity and news,
• 59:31
  I mean, I don't have a problem with, you know, having putting a finger on the racial or
• 59:36
  sexuality scale, if you need to do that, if it's all staffed by white, by straight white males,
• 59:41
  by all means, hire diverse people. But don't put them in charge of the beat that
• 59:46
  refers to their own lived experience, put, give them anything, have the transgender
• 59:52
  and journalist reporting on corporate, you know, crime or something like that. Because if you put
• 59:57
  them on the trans beat, you end up with articles that read like, you know, university essays or
• 1:00:04
  something because they're using all the jargon of the in crowd or spoof or like private eye doing
• 1:00:12
  trans recipe hours, something like that. I mean, but they'll use jargon as well. You just
• 1:00:17
  use a lot of jargon as well. They'll talk about the gender assigned at birth and stuff which
• 1:00:22
  the average reader isn't necessarily obeyed with. So I just always felt that it was, I mean,
• 1:00:27
  I thought it would be obvious if you were assigning beats that if you had a journalist who
• 1:00:33
  you know, used to work in the, or say they're a big shareholder in a mining company,
• 1:00:39
  there might be a conflict of interest getting them to cover mining. So you might put them on
• 1:00:43
  something else because they have a dog in that fight. Right. Similarly, why are you getting the
• 1:00:48
  black journalist to cover all the black issues and the gay journalist to cover all the gay issues?
• 1:00:54
  Yeah, well, they're not actually the most objective person necessarily. I've just by dint of
• 1:00:58
  their lived experience. Also, I mean, it sends a little bit of a message to the audiences that
• 1:01:06
  we think that this person is more appropriate to cover this topic because of their racial
• 1:01:14
  identity, which is a little bit insulting. It's more than a little bit insulting. I think it's
• 1:01:19
  a lot insulting. Yeah. And at one time would have been offensive. There's no question that the
• 1:01:26
  news business suffered from being too white and too male for a long time. You know, my father
• 1:01:35
  was, you know, he was a Filipino orphan basically and he was one of the first kind of Asian
• 1:01:41
  Americans who could broken the TV in the States. And, you know, at the time.
• 1:01:46
  It was Hale on Arrow. He was on Arrow. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, in the 60s and 70s, it was almost
• 1:01:54
  impossible for, you know, women to break into those editorial meetings and pitch a story about
• 1:02:03
  something like, let's just say domestic violence, which was, it was an invisible issue for a long
• 1:02:10
  time in the United States because for exactly that reason. But you can't do what you're talking
• 1:02:19
  about, right? You can't just put people on a certain beat and stick them there. Almost as
• 1:02:27
  like a human advertisement for our position on something like that's degrading to the person.
• 1:02:33
  It's degrading to the audience. You know, I do think the performance of newsrooms goes ways up,
• 1:02:40
  goes way up when they're more diverse. Yeah, great. But, but I would add to that that there has
• 1:02:46
  to be a diversity of background of class of all kinds of things of education. You know, there is
• 1:02:53
  there is this weird thing about diversity that, you know, you could have, you would sometimes in
• 1:02:58
  during the peak of, you know, walkness, you would or still in some particularly workout. Let's
• 1:03:03
  you'll turn on a panel show and they'll be talking about, I don't know, whether or not the,
• 1:03:06
  you know, it states is a white supremacist, you know, country or something. And there might be
• 1:03:12
  a Sikh woman, an indigenous woman, a black woman, and a Muslim woman on the panel, all saying the
• 1:03:19
  same thing about it. Like, yeah, that's technically diversity, right? But it's not diverse. Like,
• 1:03:27
  what you should be aiming for is a diversity of perspectives, argument, you know, the bumping
• 1:03:33
  together of different experiences, having everyone come from the same educated university,
• 1:03:38
  sort of class of social justice activism is not diversity, no matter what their wobbly bits
• 1:03:44
  in their skin color are. Yeah, you just get that's just an intellectual model if that you end up
• 1:03:50
  with and who benefits from that, nobody benefits from that. Class of people who prepare to write
• 1:03:54
  the monolith benefit from it. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. So what, how do you feel then about this
• 1:03:59
  fractured media landscape? Like, are you, especially with AI coming? I mean, I don't want to make
• 1:04:05
  a video optimistic or pessimistic that we can, like, just think about the amount of anti-Semitism
• 1:04:11
  and like conspiracy theorizing that happens in huge podcasts. Now, I mean, I would not have believed
• 1:04:19
  it a few years ago. It is wild. You know, I worked on a story called The Twitter Files that was about
• 1:04:29
  how, internally, at big platforms like Twitter or Facebook, the decision-making process,
• 1:04:36
  like, how they came up with the algorithm and the mathematics of pushing certain kinds of
• 1:04:46
  stories to certain kinds of people. It was bad enough when they were making decisions
• 1:04:53
  with human beings behind, you know, the doors of some office and one of these companies.
• 1:05:02
  When you sort of give a general mandate to an AI and just turn on and say, we would like to
• 1:05:09
  have more of these kinds of opinions and fewer of these, you know, that is an extremely powerful
• 1:05:18
  tool and they have a basically limitless supply of little gadgets that they can do to affect
• 1:05:26
  world, you know, opinions about those sorts of things. Just take an example. You can make it so
• 1:05:33
  that if you retweet a person who has had something positive to say about Israel or Russia or Iran
• 1:05:42
  or something like that, that you yourself will be de-amplified a certain percent. And the person
• 1:05:49
  who retweets you will have the same impact and so on and so forth. And almost immediately that
• 1:05:56
  has this incredible, you know, impact on the view of the world that people get because they will
• 1:06:06
  see a lot less of one thing and a lot more of another thing. And I think that's incredibly
• 1:06:11
  dangerous when you start playing around with that kind of stuff. You talk about the conspiratorial
• 1:06:18
  anti-Semitic content. There's a lot of legitimate reporting about Israel, but there's also
• 1:06:26
  a lot of algorithmic encouragement to go with certain kinds of material that adds that little
• 1:06:34
  bit of extra, you know, something or other to, you know, the podcast that comes up with some kind
• 1:06:46
  of a theory about Israel being involved in Charlie Kerch assassination, for instance.
• 1:06:54
  Unbelievably popular here in the United States gets just, you know, more viewers than any of
• 1:07:00
  the major cable stations by far. How does that happen? You know, I think we have to,
• 1:07:08
  we have to worry about a future like that, but I do have confidence in people.
• 1:07:16
  You know, our history is that we've been very good innovators with news in the United States in
• 1:07:21
  terms of getting people to pay attention to different formats and new ways of doing things.
• 1:07:26
  And I think people are going to tune out this kind of mechanized stuff. I don't know, do you?
• 1:07:32
  Well, I'll answer that after just probing a few things that you said. So you're talking about the
• 1:07:36
  mechanized stuff and like, how does it happen that a podcast, for example, that thinks that Israel
• 1:07:42
  with behind Charlie Kerch assassination becomes number one, that assumes that people are finding their
• 1:07:48
  podcasts on social media. I mean, my worry is that they're actually just, they like, I mean,
• 1:07:55
  the dystopian version is they actually do like listening to Candace Owens and, you know,
• 1:08:00
  whoever else we might name check as hoveyes of that. And like, there aren't there two problems here
• 1:08:05
  that one is that algorithm, I mean, there are multiple problems. There are at least three problems.
• 1:08:11
  One is that algorithms are determining what we find out about. So even if there was no
• 1:08:18
  Twitter files, he tinkering with the algorithm, the mere fact that what we know about the world
• 1:08:24
  is dictated by what is going to encourage us to either hover over a video or like it or comment
• 1:08:32
  it or not or share it. By definition means that it's going to be biased towards things that inflame
• 1:08:38
  people, that arouse people in some way, that either reinforce what they already believe or demonize
• 1:08:42
  things that don't believe. So it's harder for nuance to win when an algorithm is an
• 1:08:48
  extremification machine, even if it's neutral. Absolutely. Then you throw on top of that,
• 1:08:52
  the shenanigans that you were looking into in the Twitter files where governments and powerful
• 1:08:56
  agencies and so on or even just well-meaning people who work in social media companies will put
• 1:09:00
  their fingers on the scale and say, well, we don't want to have people saying this or that because
• 1:09:04
  that's against the public interest. And then you've got this other thing, which is maybe there's
• 1:09:11
  maybe we're all losing our minds a little bit and there's a large column of people who actually
• 1:09:17
  like the content and are sharing it with each other and are stumbling across it
• 1:09:23
  neutrally and digging it. Yeah. So I think there's a lot to unpack there. Do they like it organically
• 1:09:34
  or is that at the end of a long process of being trained to consume media in a certain way?
• 1:09:44
  I think I remember talking years ago before I had any idea about any of these issues
• 1:09:52
  talking to somebody who worked at Facebook or who had worked at Facebook and talked about
• 1:10:00
  how they studied intently, how people responded to every part of the process. Like even
• 1:10:07
  something as simple as reaching into your pocket and feeling the waffle pattern, the back of your
• 1:10:12
  phone thing, it triggers a little dopamine receptor in there. That's interesting.
• 1:10:16
  And so they know down to the slightest detail what's going to trigger more of a certain kind of
• 1:10:24
  behavior. And one of the things that's a cardinal rule of the internet is that if a person has
• 1:10:31
  this is their range of interests, you don't give them something over here to look at because
• 1:10:37
  they won't. You want to give them something that's as much in the middle as possible. So you're
• 1:10:42
  continually narrowing their field of view until it's the most extreme, the most hardcore,
• 1:10:50
  the most whatever. Right. And it's like a lolly factory or a candy factory pumping or like
• 1:10:57
  you know a chip factory pumping all of the salt and sugar and fat into the thing. Exactly,
• 1:11:02
  exactly. Let's make the unhealthiest but tastiest thing we can possibly make, which we do very well
• 1:11:08
  here in America, right? I'm actually I've always been proud of that. But I'm married to an American
• 1:11:14
  and he always just he's so disappointed by Australian candy. You know, you go to you're
• 1:11:20
  put up at a gas station on a road trip and he's like, oh, I'm going to go and get some sour gummies.
• 1:11:24
  And he's like, what is this piece of shit? It's genuinely just mildly sour and a bit bland.
• 1:11:31
  The gummy tastes like I'm just chewing on a rubber band or something because I give me that
• 1:11:36
  American hit. So I got chunky. Exactly. A long time ago, I remember doing an interview with
• 1:11:47
  they opened up a Ben and Jerry's factory in Russia. And they were explaining to me the secret
• 1:11:52
  of their business. It's like, oh, yeah, we just have three times as much fat as Hagen Doss.
• 1:11:59
  It works. It makes sense. Yeah. But you know, with information, you can easily see how
• 1:12:06
  that can go wrong really fast because people become, while they become expectant for that big
• 1:12:15
  sugar hit, that big dopamine explosion in their heads, they also become the non receptive to
• 1:12:25
  anything that's outside their, you know, sort of sphere of influence like they they they just
• 1:12:31
  can't even hear it. Right. And that's the part that has changed a lot.
• 1:12:38
  Do you mean that they can't hear opinions that are different from the ones that they want to
• 1:12:43
  or that they can't hear about stories and things that are completely off topic? Well, both.
• 1:12:50
  So people are now trained to consume news as narrative. They're
• 1:13:01
  they're not looking at every day as a different story. They're looking at a continuum
• 1:13:06
  of the same thing. It's a soap opera. Right. It's an ongoing soap opera. And so they become
• 1:13:13
  inculcated in the story. And then anything that's outside the story, it's not like they
• 1:13:22
  intellectually rejected. They just, you know, they instinctively won't listen to it. Right.
• 1:13:28
  And when if you do have an opportunity to force somebody to listen to another point of view,
• 1:13:36
  it will seem unconvincing to them or uninteresting or irrelevant because they're a whole world
• 1:13:42
  as this thing that they've been living in. And I found that to be very difficult. You know,
• 1:13:51
  it's really hard to stay in touch with readers who are off on that trip now. Like once once
• 1:13:58
  they go down that road, you're you're not getting them back. Do you try to do that? I mean, I find
• 1:14:03
  I'm torn in terms of the topics, mainly the topics that I cover. I mean, I think we do a good
• 1:14:09
  job of airing different opinions about the topics that we cover, because that's sort of the point
• 1:14:14
  of my show is to have uncomfortable conversations with people. Well, the conversation doesn't have
• 1:14:19
  to be uncomfortable like this one isn't. But we talk about things that topics that would make a
• 1:14:23
  person uncomfortable if someone would express a stride and opinion about them at a work event
• 1:14:28
  at a bar. But the in terms of the selection of stories and think like I would like to do more
• 1:14:35
  stories about like space and about science and about like, I don't know, it's kind of self-helpy
• 1:14:42
  sort of psychology like what does it mean to be alive kind of stories. And I sometimes, but it's
• 1:14:48
  hard to break through always with because there's such an opportunity cost just civilizationally,
• 1:14:55
  I think first to be spending so much time swabbling over American politics and Donald Trump and
• 1:15:01
  the Democrats and the, I mean, not just that, but yes, at the time it was Russia-Kate or in the UK,
• 1:15:07
  it was Brexit or, you know, it's now whatever it is with the Muslim immigration, you know,
• 1:15:15
  the controversies and all that. I haven't even seen that story. What's that? Oh, Muslims are being
• 1:15:20
  banned and... No, they're not being banned. Well, it's a long story. I'm not, and then I'm not
• 1:15:25
  British, so I don't want to get involved. Oh, in the UK, yes, yes, sorry, I thought you meant here in
• 1:15:29
  the States. Yes, in the UK, there is a whole problem of the integration of Muslim conservative,
• 1:15:36
  Muslim communities who may be prone to particular types of crime or, I mean, yes, I don't,
• 1:15:44
  do you have a theory of how to deal with it? How to deal with it? Yeah, so I did try for a long time
• 1:15:52
  to kind of juggle all those balls and try to, you know, keep audiences interested even though
• 1:16:02
  I wasn't exactly feeding them the exact thing that they wanted, but I've given up.
• 1:16:09
  You've told me what you want. Yeah, I'm gonna feed the beast. Yeah, no, no, I went the other way.
• 1:16:17
  Oh, oh, I see. So, for instance, on Monday, like, I'm doing a show with somebody where we're
• 1:16:25
  going to talk about a play by Aristophanies. Like, so it's just, you know, I talked about that little
• 1:16:31
  space here. We're just going to pick stuff that's way over the outside. Yeah, exactly. And part of
• 1:16:38
  that is a calculation that I'm making, which is that people, I think, are going to get bored
• 1:16:45
  of being relentlessly fed the same thing over and over again. And eventually curiosity has to
• 1:16:51
  kick in. Yes. Yeah. At least that's my hope. No, that's my hope as well. And it's my
• 1:16:56
  answer to your earlier question about what do I think about all that. I think that we are
• 1:17:01
  people are just craving something a bit different. It's like drinking from a cool stream to suddenly
• 1:17:08
  listen to something that's unexpected and surprising instead of something funny and funny if possible.
• 1:17:14
  Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's been, it's been many years now that you could open a particular
• 1:17:20
  newspaper or turn on a particular radio station or watch a particular television news show. And
• 1:17:24
  before you even watch it, I could ask you to jot on the back of a napkin pretty much what they're
• 1:17:29
  going to be saying, what you're thinking about, and you'll be able to do it. But why bother
• 1:17:32
  watching or listening if that's the case? Like, do we something unexpected, baby? Yeah, and now you can
• 1:17:40
  all of the sketch comedy shows in most of the West have turned into just pure political messaging.
• 1:17:48
  I actually became addicted to the show Rake, the Australian show. Oh, really? Yeah. I could not
• 1:17:56
  have loved that show more. I watched it incessively. I like, I read up on Richard Roxberg and all that.
• 1:18:02
  Oh, right. I just saw him in a fight, actually. Did you do in a great show at the Sydney Theatre
• 1:18:06
  Company, which probably just ended with a buddy of mine, who's also in it, which was, did you ever see
• 1:18:14
  Gods of Carnage? Does that ring a bell? It was on Broadway, maybe about 10 or 15 years ago. It's
• 1:18:19
  the same writer of that. It's brilliant. Anyway, we're done with what we're talking about. Oh,
• 1:18:23
  it's the same writer. Same writer. Oh, wow. Yeah, this other play art. It's called it's
• 1:18:30
  some great play, very funny. He's amazing. So this great Australian actor, Richard Roxberg,
• 1:18:36
  had a, would you call them a sitcom, I suppose? It's not a studio sitcom, but it's a small camera
• 1:18:44
  dramedy, I guess. Yeah, it's a dramedy. It's probably the 2000s. Maybe it's the best
• 1:18:49
  15 years old. 15 years old, probably, but it had the same kind of like
• 1:18:57
  naughty, ribo, old comedy that used to be very popular in this country. Yeah, especially,
• 1:19:03
  you know, we had this big thriving stand-up comedy world in the United States. And it's gone.
• 1:19:10
  It just, well, I mean, it's not, it's not here. I'll take you down to the comedy cell tonight.
• 1:19:16
  I'm sure you'll see something. You're right. Yeah, they're still doing it. I'm just saying that
• 1:19:20
  it used to be central to the culture here. Right. Right. Yeah, like everybody knew all the routines
• 1:19:27
  of the Richard Pryor and Sam Kennison and Bill Hicks and all those folks. And now, you know,
• 1:19:35
  humor is so fraught. It's just not done really on TV. Where if it is done, it's done in this,
• 1:19:43
  in this very anodine, watered down kind of way. And so, you know, occasionally you will find
• 1:19:51
  something that's sort of on the online version of Off-Broadway, like somewhere way in a corner
• 1:20:00
  of Netflix that's kind of interesting. But not much, you know. I do miss the old lightnight
• 1:20:07
  shows as well in Atlanta, but in early kind. And I was reminiscing about this with the fifth
• 1:20:11
  Colin guys on their show this week about just how kind of goofy. I guess nowadays it's hard
• 1:20:18
  for younger people to understand how revolutionary those shows were. Now everything has the same
• 1:20:22
  level of kind of absurdist, she's eating self-irony. When Letterman was strapping a camera
• 1:20:31
  to the helmet of a monkey and having it run around the studio and it would say monkey cam flashing
• 1:20:37
  off in giant letters as if it was like a big technological breakthrough. That was incredible.
• 1:20:44
  It was. Whatever it was. Throwing watermelons off a building or whatever, you know, and they had
• 1:20:50
  that show in England Brass Eye, which was another great show or the day-to-day, like they,
• 1:20:56
  you know, like sort of daring comedy. Like what's the West for if we're not going to do stuff like
• 1:21:02
  that, but that's kind of, you know, I went to I'm old enough to have gone to college in the Soviet
• 1:21:07
  Union where, yeah, there was no humor, right? Like people made jokes to each other,
• 1:21:15
  but you couldn't go anywhere to see it. Why did you go to the Soviet Union in the first place?
• 1:21:20
  My favorite writers were Russian, so I wanted to speak Russian. But, you know,
• 1:21:27
  everybody looked to the West because that's where you could see, you know, all the interesting
• 1:21:33
  ideas. You could see cool stuff. You could see, you know, people picking on any politician that
• 1:21:41
  they wanted to. And, you know, do we really do that anymore? Like, what, you know, I'm not sure
• 1:21:46
  that we do. It's, it's all very... We do pick on politicians, but it's just narrow cars, you know.
• 1:21:51
  It's like Colbert just transmitting to his audience of people who want to think that Donald Trump
• 1:21:57
  is an idiot. Right, which is sad because he came from a tradition that was kind of interesting.
• 1:22:02
  Yeah. I had so much hope. I mean, I love the Colbert report. Yeah.
• 1:22:07
  Really, really clever and ridiculous and brilliant. Yeah. Is that because of us or is that because
• 1:22:12
  of them? I mean, it's been sort of not central to American culture for so long. I think we've
• 1:22:24
  just raised media consumers who don't recognize it. Don't miss it. Yeah. And, you know, it was kind
• 1:22:34
  of a big news story in America at the end of the Bush years when the Daily Show started to become
• 1:22:39
  a news source because people didn't trust either, you know, Fox or the other side. And,
• 1:22:46
  and the, you know, the Daily Show and to a lesser extent, the Colbert report was one of the few places
• 1:22:52
  you could go where you could hear both sides being ticked on. Do we have that anywhere? I'm not
• 1:22:59
  really sure. I mean, you know, I mean, that's almost the the ear example that is the Daily Show
• 1:23:05
  because, yeah, I mean, in the early days of the century, you like the Iraq War era, that really
• 1:23:13
  was, I think, I mean, I know about European about it was speaking truth to power was like it was
• 1:23:18
  a genuinely valuable satirical space where talk about not taking any bullshit and, you know,
• 1:23:25
  calling bullshit out when you see it was like, it was incredibly cathartic for those of us who
• 1:23:31
  were against the war and against the Bush administration to have someone making such sophisticated
• 1:23:37
  points really with, with humor and to see that kind of descend into, I guess, what it might be
• 1:23:44
  is like losing that, that early show, John Stuart obviously felt the need to try to convince you
• 1:23:52
  of what he was saying, like, satirically, he needed to earn the gag, he needed to like shove the
• 1:24:00
  knife in deep and like rip out the target of the satire's heart and hold it in his hand in front
• 1:24:06
  of you like, you know, he had to whereas then I feel like in the woke era, it became just sort
• 1:24:14
  of assumed that we're on the right side and so we can we can just make fun of them and you're
• 1:24:19
  automatically on side and so you're going to laugh and applaud because we're taking the piss
• 1:24:25
  out of the baddies and we're all reinforcing each other's virtue and it's a mutual circle jerk
• 1:24:30
  where we all get to just laugh at the people we don't like. That depressing is so depressing,
• 1:24:35
  right? Like that, yeah, that trajectory is just so so sad like you got to you got to earn the satire
• 1:24:42
  like you've got to make the point you've actually got to land that plane it's not good enough to
• 1:24:46
  just say like isn't Trump an idiot. Yeah, we already get that. Yeah, and to have people laugh
• 1:24:52
  exactly the same amount every time I mean Jimmy Carter told the story once about how he gave a
• 1:24:57
  speech in Japan and he started off with a joke and you get the best reaction that he'd ever gotten
• 1:25:03
  so he asked the translator afterward, how did you do, you know, the delivery? Was it something I,
• 1:25:09
  you know, something I could pick up on and he said no, I just said President Carter
• 1:25:14
  has told the funny story everyone must laugh. And that's kind of where we are, you know. Yeah,
• 1:25:20
  that's right. Yeah, Stephen Colby has said something funny about Donald Trump. Yeah, I'll
• 1:25:24
  close, close sign flashes. And when you were in the Soviet Union, I'm still interested in your
• 1:25:30
  experience about journalism there and I mean you saw you were in the building the craft I was
• 1:25:36
  in, is that right? And so you actually saw the journalist's receiving. Yeah, so
• 1:25:43
  the special lines or what? So I was a student during the Soviet days when
• 1:25:50
  after the collapse, I got a job at, you know, the, an expat paper in Moscow that was in the
• 1:25:57
  Provative Building so technically that was post-Soviet. And the Provative still exists. Provative
• 1:26:03
  did still exist. It comes in Moscow, Provative still exists. It just did. That was the biggest
• 1:26:08
  paper in the country. And all the same people were there. It's just that they, you know, technically
• 1:26:15
  were not. They weren't getting sent to a gulag if they said the wrong thing anymore. Right. But
• 1:26:23
  they were still pretty much being briefed every morning about what talking points were about
• 1:26:27
  things. It was in the rest of the media outside of the Provative and his best year at
• 1:26:32
  university. Things were becoming interesting. But, you know, I heard a ton of stories about how it
• 1:26:39
  used to work and it's fascinating to listen to people who are coming into journalism in America
• 1:26:47
  now because it sounds so familiar. It sounds like exactly the same thing. Like everybody knows
• 1:26:54
  without being told explicitly what their take is going to be on everything. You know, instead of
• 1:27:03
  calling around to a dozen people and sifting through the interviews and saying, well, I think this
• 1:27:08
  is the most interesting part. Mostly people decide ahead of time what they're going to say and they
• 1:27:14
  just surf the internet and look for the proof and they link, which is, you know, if they could have
• 1:27:20
  done that in 1985 Moscow, they would have done exactly that thing. Yeah. And so yeah, it's depressing.
• 1:27:28
  I mean, so the problem is not free speech laws. It's a free speech ethos or a free speech culture.
• 1:27:34
  How do you feel about, I mean, I know you're a free speech, but sometimes I go back home
• 1:27:40
  to Australia, which has no First Amendment. And I am usually invited to take the free speech line.
• 1:27:48
  I'm invited on panel shows to be the sort of representative of the extreme free speech wing,
• 1:27:52
  which even though my ideas would place me in an anti-free speech camp in relation to American
• 1:27:58
  libertarians, it's a sliding scale. But, you know, after the Bondi Beach terrorist attacks in
• 1:28:04
  December, you know, the state, and I think the federal government passed laws banning Nazi
• 1:28:10
  salutes and banning yelling, how all Hitler, I don't know if I'm just broken a law in Australia,
• 1:28:15
  but sorry, you can always be for that. We're streaming live. Right. Yeah. I comment free is fine. But,
• 1:28:25
  you know, and I think part of the thinking is, we don't need to pretend that we're so
• 1:28:32
  clueless about right and wrong that we have to have the maximalist possible interpretation
• 1:28:39
  of free speech. It's legitimate for like a multicultural liberal democracy to say these are the
• 1:28:47
  things that we believe are outside of the bounds of reasonable discourse. And it's implausible
• 1:28:54
  that excluding those things from the public square is going to lead to some great atrophying
• 1:28:59
  of intellectual exchange. But then part of me also thinks, well, who will you say that? And then
• 1:29:05
  what's going to happen the next time different people get in and make different rules? But I'm
• 1:29:08
  genuinely talking about it. Yeah. I understand that dilemma. One of the things that I saw covering
• 1:29:18
  the Twitter files was internal dialogues within the company and with their European offices
• 1:29:29
  about this, the particular challenges that the First Amendment posed for staying in compliance
• 1:29:38
  with laws like the Digital Services Act, for instance. What's the digital services act? So Europe
• 1:29:45
  has this sort of gigantic all-encompassing law that requires all of the internet platforms
• 1:29:53
  to abide by the recommendations of these government appointed monitors called trusted flaggers,
• 1:30:01
  which is a great or willy in term. But it essentially mandates that the platforms
• 1:30:13
  stay within certain boundaries that, you know, if it's decided that certain kinds of speeches
• 1:30:19
  inflammatory or incite to violence. Yeah, then we're just not going to do that or we're going
• 1:30:24
  to dial it down. The problem is the First Amendment doesn't allow the government to have any rule
• 1:30:30
  at all in making a decision like that. Well, it doesn't allow the US government, but it's not
• 1:30:36
  impeding the social private media companies from. Right. But the question that they were discussing
• 1:30:44
  internally was among people who liked what was going on in Europe and were talking about why they
• 1:30:52
  couldn't bring it here. So, for instance, there would be a meeting at an NGO in the United States
• 1:31:01
  and they would have a big conference on the committee on information disorder at the Aspen Institute,
• 1:31:10
  and they would talk about all the reasons why you couldn't impose the same kinds of
• 1:31:17
  restrictions that they had already had overseas. And the First Amendment is just a unique concept.
• 1:31:25
  And they'd be like regretful that they've been regretful that they've got this pesky first amendment.
• 1:31:30
  Yeah. Yeah. And every now and then a politician would come out and say something,
• 1:31:36
  openly, John Kerry talked about how the First Amendment is a major block to our ability to hammer out
• 1:31:43
  misinformation or hammering out of existence. And again, the reason for that is that it's a
• 1:31:52
  completely different conception of what where speech rights come from. So, in Europe, the idea is
• 1:32:00
  all rights flow from the government. And yes, you have free speech, but we have a balancing test
• 1:32:08
  against the general good. If it's creating a safety hazard or if it's creating other kinds of
• 1:32:15
  unrest, then we have the right to weigh that balance or to move things around. In the United States,
• 1:32:25
  the government just does not have a role or at least I'm not trying to buy that explanation. I
• 1:32:32
  don't think it's that in Europe, they think that the government that rights flow from the government
• 1:32:36
  to people. I think in both the US and Australia and Western Europe with Australia having more of a
• 1:32:43
  Western European outlook like the government's rights come from the people, but well, in both cases,
• 1:32:53
  I think in all cases, there's a recognition that individuals are both individuals and also
• 1:33:00
  participants in the community and that the community has the ability to enact its own interests
• 1:33:07
  as well and can use government to that end. And that will sometimes infringe the right of the
• 1:33:12
  individual. Like, suppose the individual's free speech is too, is that they're a very, very
• 1:33:18
  powerful person like Donald Trump and they send out a message to districts, to particular
• 1:33:24
  electoral districts, that the election day has changed or that the polling, they send them to the
• 1:33:30
  wrong polling place or something like that. Then probably even in America, there'd be some
• 1:33:34
  the supreme court would be like, okay, well, that's not free speech. So everywhere. And similarly,
• 1:33:39
  if there was something egregious, you know, national security violation, there'd be a recognition
• 1:33:43
  here that Americans, qua Americans, communally have the ability to impede some sort of speech
• 1:33:51
  from an individual and I just think other places just take it a bit further. Yeah, that's
• 1:33:56
  probably true. We just wouldn't call that a speech violation. We would call that something else.
• 1:34:01
  We would call that, you know, disorderly conduct or we would call that incitement or we would call
• 1:34:06
  it assault. You know, if you say to somebody, I'm going to kick your ass or like that's not
• 1:34:14
  free speech, that's a threat, you know. So in that sense, right, there isn't a huge difference.
• 1:34:21
  It's just the way the things are phrased, it is a little different. Like, if you look at the
• 1:34:26
  French declaration of rights and man, like, which is written around the same time as he was
• 1:34:31
  constitution, the phrasing is very, it is different. Yeah, the French, she's might be a slide
• 1:34:36
  except they might be the exception to my rule. I guess I'm thinking more about the anglophone
• 1:34:41
  countries and yeah, but even even compared to England, like, you know, the United States. So
• 1:34:51
  trying to think of it, you know, Jefferson and Madison, like, when Madison was writing the
• 1:34:57
  Virginia declaration of rights and man, he was tinkering with the language and there was an
• 1:35:06
  opportunity to use the phrase toleration of religion, which would have passed easily.
• 1:35:12
  But he insisted on freedom of religion, which is a huge difference because toleration implies
• 1:35:18
  that we are tolerating and freedom of religion just implies the religion, your religious beliefs are
• 1:35:24
  free. Yes. And that is kind of the way the Americans historically have understood speech,
• 1:35:32
  it has to be something that is outside of the purview of government. It's not something.
• 1:35:40
  Yeah, it's true. There's much more individualistic and libertarian strain in American cultural
• 1:35:45
  thought than there is in other places. Yeah, and obviously it's in conflict with other
• 1:35:57
  movements and beliefs in American academia and 20th century thought, 21st century thought,
• 1:36:06
  you know, with the sort of Wilsonian concept of, you've got to have experts looking at
• 1:36:14
  questions and you can't just have a free for all. And, you know, there has to be some kind of
• 1:36:22
  scrutiny of all these different actions, whereas I think the original American idea was we're a young
• 1:36:29
  country. We want to be as energetic as possible. We want to bring as many people here as possible.
• 1:36:35
  I want to give them as much incentive to do with much crazy stuff as possible. And, you know,
• 1:36:40
  we're not that country anymore. So, yeah, it is different. But I still think there's a
• 1:36:45
  kernel or something that is still preserved, I hope, in the American curve. Yeah, no, definitely.
• 1:36:50
  And I certainly hope that we can find a balance in other countries that honors a diversity of ideas
• 1:36:57
  without, you know, I mean, there's even arguments about what incitement is. I got into an argument
• 1:37:00
  with Australian television with the Australian e-safety commissioner, who is a... Really? Yeah, Elon
• 1:37:07
  calls her the Australia's censorship czar or like commissar or something like that. That's ironic.
• 1:37:15
  Yeah, because she was saying that it was an incitement to violence for Elon to have tweeted during.
• 1:37:21
  You remember the London riot? There were UK riots the summer before last, where it was a migrant
• 1:37:25
  riots and Elon tweeted something like civil war is inevitable or something like that at the time.
• 1:37:33
  And the claim was that that should be taken down from Twitter in Australia because it's an
• 1:37:38
  incitement to violence against Muslims or something. And I was saying, it's not an incitement to violence.
• 1:37:44
  An incitement to violence is saying, let's all gather together at outside the comedy seller
• 1:37:50
  and we have some Muslims at 3 p.m. tomorrow. Right. An incitement to violence saying that you're...
• 1:37:55
  I mean, otherwise any prediction that is sufficiently dire becomes an incitement to violence,
• 1:38:01
  you're not allowed to predict anything really bad happening in the future if civil war is inevitable.
• 1:38:05
  Anyway, so obviously there's like this whole slippery slope argument. But weaving that together
• 1:38:11
  to wrap up what you were saying about AI, the media, the decline of news, the splintering of social
• 1:38:22
  media and podcasts and anti-Semitism and whatever. And the political question of like
• 1:38:30
  Trump and authenticity and Hillary Clinton's failings. How do you feel about the next
• 1:38:37
  few decades? Are we going to be okay? Yeah, I was extremely pessimistic last year.
• 1:38:45
  And I obviously have a lot of concerns about how we're going to make it through the next couple of
• 1:38:53
  years. But I'm oddly optimistic about what's going to come after that. I just think there's
• 1:39:02
  this incredible amount of doom saying and doom scrolling about the arrival of everything.
• 1:39:08
  AI to populism around the world. And in the same way that people misjudged the media market
• 1:39:21
  in the early 2000s and there was this moment where everybody thought the election of Barack Obama
• 1:39:28
  meant that we're Democrats were going to be in office for the next 800 years or something like
• 1:39:34
  but it turned out that social media changed everything. Well, I think people are getting
• 1:39:41
  bored with the way things are. They're frustrated. I hear this from readers all the time
• 1:39:48
  that they are going away from news and they're doing things like
• 1:39:55
  reading Shakespeare or reconnecting or going back to church which is something that I personally
• 1:40:05
  don't understand but I hear it a lot. People are used to go to the media for everything. All
• 1:40:16
  of their needs were satisfied. Spiritual information, entertainment, everything. And now I think
• 1:40:23
  they're realizing that it just can't fulfill all those roles and they got to find something else
• 1:40:29
  other things elsewhere. And I think that's healthy. And you know, it just might take a minute
• 1:40:37
  to get there. How do you feel? I know I've become more optimistic. I think it's going to be really
• 1:40:43
  I'm pessimistic about the short term and I'm optimistic about the long term. I think AI is
• 1:40:48
  ultimately going to be an incredible thing already is an incredible thing but it's going to be
• 1:40:52
  really tumultuous and it's going to be incredibly disruptive economically and psychologically.
• 1:40:57
  That's true. Five or ten years but I think in 30 years. I mean, it's small consolation because
• 1:41:05
  like that's the rest of our lives. It's going to be really like really difficult. But I also
• 1:41:10
  think that it's going to I completely agree with you about people's sensibility in terms of
• 1:41:15
  being sick of the slop and being sick of the scrolling and being sick of the extremification and
• 1:41:19
  being sick of the partisanship and the antagonism and the echo chambers. And I think just there's a
• 1:41:24
  desire to go outside and touch the grass and take a deep breath and drink from a cool stream.
• 1:41:28
  So good on you for providing a forum in which people can do that. I try to do that as well.
• 1:41:33
  Likewise. You all should subscribe to racquetnews, follow Matt if you're coming over from Matt's
• 1:41:38
  side of things on your steps and follow and come to the conversations.
• 1:41:42
  Thank you but thank you buddy. Thank you very much.