Transcript for:
Analyzing the Intersection of Journalism, Politics, and Financial Crises with Matthew Taibbi

you started covering a lot of the Foreclosure crisis yeah and that was my first hint that something like Trump was going to happen that's what this whole you know mem stock thing grew out of I think is just this rage directed towards these Financial professionals who were basically being subsidized and then acting like they they had like this special financial genius that allowed them to make money we actually haven't even opened one of the most important chapters in your journalism career at now which is the Twitter files as someone who's actually like interacted with him and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him where do you think Elon Musk fits into this welcome back to counterpoints for today's Friday show we're going to be joined by longtime veteran journalist uh Matthew taibi want to talk about uh his career which has Spann the pre-internet era basically uh back when you used to actually print things I mean I'm there too so I can say that that's true uh uh up to today and continuing to evolve like we have not seen it's not as if we've gotten some static place we're going to talk about the history of Journalism and the history over the last 30 years but wanted to start with a question though about 2024 this election which we're all trying to cover and I have a theory that I wanted to try on on both of you which is that I think the country is in denial right now like it think of this as the other kind of election denialism like people just I think as I talk to people around the country they just refuse to believe that this is the election that it's Biden against Trump like there was basically no Democratic primary and so that allowed people to kind of say you know what this isn't really happening this there's no competition but it's not going to be him like there's going to be and I I was talking to my dad yesterday he's like they they're going to do something right maybe at the convention Trump goes to prison bid has a medical situation and I think the Nikki Haley we talked a lot about how Nikki Haley got all this mainstream you know news cover that she didn't deserve based on the fact that she never had a shot but I think part of it was psychological that people were like it's got to be something other than Trump like Biden said he was basically going to be a one-term guy country took him at his word now here he is allegedly running again and so I think that I think that the refusal of people to check into the election has to do with them just denying the reality that it's these two guys what do you think that uh yeah well I think a couple things number one I think people are right to be suspicious because we're not treating this like a normal election season I mean at this I've covered five presidential elections at this stage of a race normally every single day would be a campaign story you'd be you see somebody out in the campaign trial we would have constant arguments throughout the back and forth but you know between the candidates and there's none of that like you have staff getting fired like you you know who the staff are right yes like they became celebrities over the five election cycles that you've covered like the Carl Roes the David Axel rods like who's running Biden and Trump's campaigns where was the first publication that you worked on a campaign just like in general The Village Voice v yeah okay so because that sounded to me like such a Politico HuffPost question because but that's actually what sort of new right I mean you guys can correct me if I'm wrong but in the a there was this journalism as almost a sport marville campaigning become became more almost gamified I don't know that the characters popped I think that was really popularized by Halperin and um who's the other guy I've always forget his yeah exactly um you know with game change and all that and this whole idea but that was the first you when I started covering campaigns for Rolling Stone the first thing that I saw as a big story on the campaign was that the journalists thought they were running the whole thing there there was a kind of a cabal inside the campaign where they would get together at the end of the day they would decide which candidates were serious and viable and have discussions about that and I thought that was crazy um now there's really none of that I mean nobody really knows what the campaign is anymore and it doesn't it doesn't there's no script it's not the reality show that was all consuming uh for so long so five elections I do the math what was the first one that you actively covered 04 really right okay I don't know yeah but yeah mhm right so everybody knew Bush even though Bush was the Nom like everybody knew it was going to be the the nominee again call Ro and like here's and he had a strategy he's gonna he's gonna bring out the bigots to for the over marriage equality like that was his like that was the theme of the two plus John John K's quizzing and like you know he's he's weak on the war and you know right you knew you you kind of knew what the election was about right right yeah exactly I mean they they made it about things that should really didn't matter to the population all that much I mean that the war was the dominant uh Topic in in the country at the time and neither candidate really wanted to go there all that much um not you know in terms of and also the larger issues about the war on terror and that sort of thing they they just didn't come up a whole lot it was you know John K's medals versus yeah other Swifts yeah exactly all that stuff so how how did the how did the campaign press handle the Swift boats actually like what was the and then and then I want to go back and how you got into jerem then so two like the Bush campaign they start pushing the Swift booat stuff and for people who are basically weren't even born then which is almost everybody so Swift booat Veterans for truth was a a right-wing group that was kind of formed by by people who had Ser served with John krey in Vietnam and they hated his story of turning his Swift boat toward the Viet Kong and like shooting instead he like sort of like they're throwing the medals they well they really hated that he threw his medals in protest right or his ribbons I think he kept his medals but he threw his ribbons which was a very John Cary thing to do uh but they didn't like his purple heart he wasn't injured enough or whatever it became this like he smoked his ribbons but didn't right yes became this real character attack Democrats just avoided it for a very long time not understanding the way that the internet and the in politics had changed thought that they if they just didn't address it it would go away right it ended up causing immense damage but I'm curious how the Press was thinking about this kind of new well I think campaigning um what I remember about that is that the a lot of people saw it as a continuation of the sort of 9s David Brock you know of which was a new new Ro used to be on the right for he was this also not quote unquote right-wing Hitman back in the day who was the point person behind the scenes in the clarent Clarence Thomas hearings then white wer and all this stuff and that was sort of a new thing in media at the time this this idea of a organized multi- uh pronged media attacks creating new organizations just for the purpose of going out into the public and creating news stories and I think a lot of people saw the Swift booat group as that but you're right there was a massive strien effect in the way you know they covered that so much that it became overwhelmingly the theme of The Campaign and the Democrats I don't think did a great job of pushing back because they their whole campaign was John KY in a army jacket they didn't have an issue to run on and so this whole thing he was a Sitting Duck for that kind of stuff um so I I don't know most of the reporters just thought it was a fun story that they were happy to work on every day there wasn't a whole lot of outrage kind of a fascinating thread though and this might get to your next question um in that Chris lasv who's now running the Trump campaign was like the pioneer of the Swift booat oh was he yeah absolutely People Credit him for the entire Swift booat campaign attack and what's interesting about that is at the time people saw it as the sort of rupture of ethics and now you have the man who finally put an end at least on the presidential scale to this debate about whether it's okay to rupture the ethics it's like the um it's like the filibuster debate but for decorum and presidential campaigns right we can't like once you open that Pandora's Box like what what happens that absolutely happened in 2016 on the presidential level and now Chris levita the Swift boat guy is running the Trump campaign I didn't even know he was running the Trump campaign like I'm in denial too about this election I didn't know that either I'm supposedly supposed to be covering this so am I don't don't tell anybody that that I didn't know that cuz that would be kind of embarrassing but it's a good thing you didn't say it on air yeah so we yeah just keep it between us in the Friday show here if you guys out there watching nobody clip this Halal flow yeah don't priv so uh growing up did you always think you were going to be a journalist cuz your father was a journalist is that right he was like a local TV journalist in New York is that right yeah so um my parents uh were at ruter um and my father um I was born when they were very young uh they were like 20 and so he to support the family he was um working as a uh newspaper reporter at the home news in New Brunswick New Jersey so he started when he was 18 or 19 wow um he's been doing this forever and then um as soon as he graduated we moved to Boston and uh he worked in a local affiliate there so my childhood was like Anchor Man basically movie I were you know I spent a lot of my childhood in the those news rooms with you know the bad facial hair and all that stuff and um I used to play with the the um the weather setup and try to PR pretend with the green screen and everything it was really cool and did your mom get into journalism too no no she ended up being an attorney but um but I spent most of my time uh hanging around my father my father is um he's a journalist journalist like very old school uh incredibly gifted I I was like very fascinated by his work because he's a super gregarious personality who could just show up at any scene and get people trusting him and talking to him uh instantly and you know in journalis in TV journalism especially you have to get you know a good sound bite and then you have to be able to knock out a script like really quickly and he was really good at all that stuff he did his own editing even back in the day when it was film going all that back that far so I I thought that was really cool but I never thought I would be able to do this and I also wanted to be a writer not a TV journalist was it that oh so you wanted to be a writer um of Journalism or novels and novels yeah so I was kind of a depressed kid so um comic novels were my big Escape growing up and I thought that's what I want to do I want to be like Elan W or Nikolai gole or somebody like that you know and um Turned out I don't have talent for reading fiction so but I didn't learn that until later and by the time I figured it out I realized I didn't have any actual skills except the family business so um that's how I got into journalism so how how do you wind up in Russia yeah that was going to be my next question yeah so my favorite writers growing up were all Russian um I mentioned gogul uh bulgakov was another one I I went through this period where I was just reading lots and lots of Russian literature do you think that was from your politics or do you think your politics came from that oh I could I I couldn't stand politics I still I still can't stand it uh I um really the the books I was just really into how well they were written and how beautiful they were and um you know the Russians have this amazing um absurdist uh view on life and uh I was you know when you're depressed you kind of try to lose yourself in that landscape and and you the writing of people like TL so vivid I wanted to go experience it and then I wanted to learn the language so I could read those books in in Russian so I went there um as a student and one of the funny things was you know in the states what year is that probably 8990 so it was still Soviet yeah so I went to a Soviet college and uh but in America you know remember the 80s that was like the time of porkys and everything right like everybody was um you know they spent a lot of time in their appearance and there was this success culture and everything and I thought I I hated that I'm like I'm going to be a failure when I grow up in Russia everybody's a failure right so I felt like I fit right in and um it was it was a cool thing that's so that's why I ended up moving back there I thought this place is Paradise uh it turned out not to be but it it was a a great thing well so you graduated from college and came back to the US what what did you try first before you went back to Russia I didn't um I didn't try anything I immediately started making plans yeah so I I worked uh Demolition and um waited tables saved money and it just went over there and started stringing so and you said it turned out not to be paradise but there's something so interesting about someone growing up immersed in as you said the Landscapes I was a really beautiful way to put it and then having your eyes opened up gradually over time what was that process like what really started to disillusion you well Russia was just it went through a very tough time both when it was still Soviet and then after the revolution um in 91 that's when were you there in ' 91 I missed the actual Thing by a couple of months on either side uh but I saw it coming obviously um my last semester there you could you know there was a um um a ban on food products so you had to use a rationing system just to get vegetables and things like that it was it was a mess uh but then after that Russia immediately transformed this like gangster state which um was kind of horrifying to watch and uh but as a journalist was fascinating you know I mean I I got to go and see incredible things um and it was a a great place to start one's career because um you know you got to cover very highly level things quickly which you don't get to do in America if you're working as an intern and you know a magazine or something yeah I always thought your ability to cover Wall Street corruption later in your career must have been connected to witnessing it in its like most extreme form right oligarchy like up up close was it so and for for people who aren't that familiar with that period of History correct me if I'm wrong I think it the most rapid collapse in life expectancy uh in in world history is Russia in the 1990s that's probably right yeah which is remarkable to consider that they went from rationing food in 1991 and that that was the high point right like they they collapsed you know life expectancy dropping by just years and years and years um because the state you know with us facilitation just gets sold from out from under the people to these oligarchs yeah could you see it happen in real time like are you see like you there's still these famous videos of Jeff Sachs who we should have on the show because his Arc from that to where he is now is AB fting to me by the way incredible Jeff Sachs helped to basically auction off the entire Soviet Union and create all these oligarchs through this Harvard run Harvard Institute for International Development okay I um yeah so the the auctions that you talk about when and you mentioned the financial reporting later these were some of the most complicated thefts maybe in the history of the world um and probably the biggest ones maybe in the history of people so just to take an example they had a thing called loans for shares which was a way of kind of handing out the crown jewels of Soviet industry to basically cronies of the yelson regime and what they did is they took uh people who really had no cash at all uh and they lent them money so in the case of for instance yukos which is a company about the size of Exxon Mobile right um yelton regime lends one of the banks $50 million which turns out to be half their stake that they put up to get a 38 or 37% stake in one of the world's biggest oil companies yeah exactly right so they put up basically nothing to get to become instantly some of the richest people on Earth and they did that with you know seven or eight of these Banker groups and we later learned that there was a kind of a back room deal that was brokered at Davos where there was an agreement that they were going to get these properties in return for massively supporting yelson in the 96 election uh and that's how yelson went from being at 6% in the polls to actually winning uh there were some other things that went on too but um you know it was a us brokered thing we we helped advise in the structure of all those auctions which were totally corrupt and uh that that was an early introduction for me that St what's also playing out in a split screen for you is you're seeing up close what's actually happening in Russia and you're also probably absorbing Western media coverage of what's happening in Russia and you've written one of the best books on contemporary media problems hate ink people should read it if they haven't but watching that uh was that also something because and this is kind of a rambling question but I think about Tucker Carlson going to Russia and realizing a lot of what he has been told about Russia is wrong maybe though sometimes people realize a lot of what they've been told about something is wrong and it pushes them further to the direction of like not being right on a different in a different side of the question like Tucker out of this that's a phenomenon that happens all the time so for you what was it like watching the Western media say you know this place is a corrupt nightmare while not covering the westerners that are creating the corrupt nightmare but then also kind of missing some of the story that you were covering um with like everyday people yeah so a lot of the journalists actually most of them didn't speak Russian that was the first thing that was kind of shocking to me I didn't understand that at all um it turns out that's sort of an intentional strategy both with diplomats and foreign correspondents for the big bureaus they what's the what's the strategy there so for diplomats the there was a bad experience with China with the ma Revolution where the United States felt like the diplomats were too close to the local population and that's why they didn't get the warning that the Revolution was going going to happen um so there's a kind of a strategy of switching people out on a regular basis so they don't get too attenuated to the local population with journalists I'm not really sure why they do it but you you almost never have somebody who is really in tune with you know the local population the language everything and I don't know how you cover a country if you don't you know know that stuff I'm trying to imagine a Russian journalist who comes to Washington DC and only speaks Russian right and is then translating what's happening in Washington back to a Russian audience can you imagine that it would be remotely accurate No it would be a money python routine it right you couldn't it's Borat it's you could it's even dumber than that um so would they just have to talk to the English speakers well so that's that's the problem so what the they got almost all of their input on what was going on in Russia from English-speaking Russian politicians many of whom went to Harvard like anat chebay Yar gar Baris nof right people like that uh but you went you know an hour outside of Moscow or St Petersburg and there was like subsistence farming and like you know complete gangsterism you would go to a place and and uh there would be total barter economy no cash anywhere uh starvation you know um incredible surges and crime all this stuff so I started to do um a lot of like participatory reporting so I would just go from place to Place get a job somewhere and then just write a you know what's it like to work construction in this place or you know work in a you know in a mine over here right and uh in contrast that with what they were telling people back home which was that there's this emerging middle class and everything's awesome and you know it was you know it was really wild for me because I had a lot of Illusions about how good the media was and I that was the first time I saw that they just will lie about stuff when that was kind of amazing to me and who would you uh publish those with so I had my own newspaper over there this Exile at this Exile yeah but I I I did work at the Moscow times over there which is an xot paper but I also I wrote for the nation um and some other papers uh in England like um believe it or not I think I did a couple for the telegram for the Daily Mail I wrote for eurom money believe it or not he's always been a right-wing hack exactly going back that's right that's right you're money um so you know I I contributed I also wrote in Russian I wrote for Russian papers um and uh yeah so that was that was mostly what I did but I the audience mostly wasn't back in the United States so that was you know um kind of the difference but it was interesting how how'd you come about founding the paper and who was it was it was Mark Ames was zek an original Z was later yeah much later yeah so it it was it was really Mark there were there were actually two papers originally you know for a long time there was this paper there called living here which was a club guide um because the Moscow times didn't have a good club guide and so there was everybody realized that's how you make money in an next Pat city right because everybody's clubbing right so uh we put out this sort of trashy Club guide and that was actually doing well and somebody had the idea to why don't we just make it out the paper and you know Mark was the first editor of that um I had actually I during that time I was actually playing basketball in Mongolia when this was all happening I got sick uh came home and they said do you want to come uh help do a competitor to that and it I came back and ended up merging with Mark and that's how the Exile happened that's right I forgot about your Mongolian basketball career how long did that last a season yeah yeah I was I was the Mongolian or what's what you um uh I'm really uh it was really more like a small forward but I can't shoot so um but I was leading league and rebounding when I left that's my that's my point like you were the number one the top rebounder in the Mongolian black I was I was at 6'2 believe it or not um did you have a nickname that the Mongol Mongolian Rodman yeah yeah and I did the whole thing back then I had hair and I used to dye it red with and have a yellow beard and all kinds of crazy stuff the owner wanted to drum up interest so he would ask me to start fights and do all kinds of crazy stuff it's really Kenny Powers in Mexico totally it totally is that's that's why I went I wanted to write a book about this and and you know the whole idea was it was a gag it was supposed to be Charles barley in the Far East right and um I was going to do it but you know I contracted pneumonia in the middle of it and you know never got to finish the project so did you ever write about that not really I wrote like one article for the Boston Globe magazine a long time ago but I never did the full thing and now I wish I I lost all my notes from that time period because it would have been a very funny story actually if I had actually written it another lesson that I'm curious about that I imagine you gleaned from those years is the kind of intersection of Journalism and Intel that I imagine was especially crazy in 1990s early ODS Russia um but also I feel like has just flourished in recent years and this gets so a lot of you reporting with the Twitter files where there's this mundane think tank at Stanford that is looped in to all of these different Pentagon agencies or whatever the all of the alphabet soup uh from the Pentagon but I feel like that must have been a water that you learned to navigate probably in Russia too absolutely yeah so Russia when it um became when stopped being communist it did have a very vigorous Free Press for a while but it wasn't exactly free right like the the system was you had a whole bunch of different newspapers each one was owned by a different gangster and the people who were the investigative journalists at those papers um they would be handed something a packet of something that would come from you know whatever intelligence service was connected to that mob figure and they would write up that report they they had a term for it they called it selling genes over there like somebody just sold me some jeans um because that's what the people on the street used to do in in the Communist time so I knew a lot of these uh investigative reporters and actually they were right away they were incredible like reporters they were really good and very brave a lot of them got killed um or beaten or threatened um and they were just unbelievably brave people who were trying to navigate this very difficult system uh and I learned a lot from them and I didn't learn until later that there was probably something similar going on in the western side yeah um but but certainly on the Russian side that was the first time I understood that whole dynamic um and got to see how it worked uh and and of course by the time Putin came on the scene he sort of all he really did is consolidate uh you know instead of having seven different agencies um he he basically put them all under under the same umbrella and if you didn't you know get in line and publish what he wanted you you know that's when you got in trouble so where where did the Exile fit into this constellation of of papers well so we were in this amazing place where uh we were writing in English um American liable law didn't apply to us uh the Russians didn't read us uh where were you Incorporated like business-wise business-wise we were a Russian business so we were we were a Russian we were a Russian press Outlet hang on a second um and uh so we we basically had to deal with the same authorities that like a Russian newspaper would but um but they weren't paying attention to what we wrote until later and then then they started to um we had some problems with them originally because they would just ask for bribes on tax day uh but then I think there were some content issues um later on and then after I left the paper actually got shut down by the tax police so and what was it that brought it onto the radar when did it start becoming a problem well Putin was much more attentive to the whole press scene there were some other Western reporters who had started to annoy the authorities even before he took control you might remember a guy named Paul kadnikov um who worked for Forbes he got himself machine gunned um towards the end of the 90s and there was a lot of interplay between uh sort of connected Russian government figures and Western reporters increasingly that started to happen the Russians started to pay a lot more of attention to that situation at the end of the 90s and we were um you know writing very critically of Putin I was also pulling all kinds of stunts like I I worked with this Russian paper that actually wire tapped his chief of staff uh so they definitely noticed that um that would wind up on the radar yeah yeah yeah so there were things like that but um I got out of the country and nothing ever happened to me I did know a lot of people that um you know ended up in bad places um after he uh took power like I knew Anna poosa for instance not terribly well but I did know her well I was just going to say what prompted you to come back to the States what was H how did that transpire um you know I I I thought creatively the Exile had kind of run out of ideas um we were starting to repeat ourselves and uh I got a little bit tired writing for a dwindling audience the XA Community was shrinking pretty pretty fast our ad base was no longer uh what it had been is that because of the creeping authoritarianism the the economic collapse all of those together like why well Putin's big idea was that he wanted to keep capital in Russia so that diminishes a lot of opportunities for Western business like there was an immense Capital flight out of Russia in the 90s that was the whole thing um everybody there wanted a piece of all these energy companies they wanted to get under underpriced um you know Commodities and Timber gold whatever it was uh and those opportunities closed up as soon as they started na you know not quite nationalizing things but but funneling all the contracts to Russians specifically and not to Americans like you could steal money but it has to stay here it has to stay here exactly he he literally had a meeting uh uh Putin did like four months after he got elected where he just brought all the guys who had gotten rich in those privatizations and he said look here's the deal you get to keep all that stuff um if you you know Pledge Your Allegiance to me um if not you know consequences straight out of the movie Casino remember like the money or the hammer scene um so you know once once that whole thing happened uh a lot of the Americans just bolted because there just wasn't a way to make cash the the way there had been um and he made good on that threat on to a couple to several of the oligarchs right to yeah to kind of check yeah I mean I was just I was just thinking about this in fact some of my old friends from over there we were just talking about this because you know it's an it's not an exact comparison but let's just talk about for instance the raid on maral Lago right the kness of that with all the the agents and the TV Crews and everything there was something very similar they they raided a television station there with you know guys were repelling through windows and um they dragged people out and uh one of the oligarchs got rung up on a a fraud charge and then there was another famous one named uh mik hovi who was in prison now [Music] hovi people presented him as this sort of uh martyr to good capitalism but he was one of the people who most benefited from those crooked auctions so I and his his my memory was his crime was getting involved in politics yes like because he said like keep your money that you stole MH but you have to support me yeah you got to get off the you got to get he wanted to do both he wanted to keep the money and also be involved in politics yeah Putin said you got to stay on the bench and this guy tried to go onto the court and and that's it you know put him in a cage right right so you know as as you mentioned before when you watch this stuff which is it's like you know going on the ocean and a glass bottom boat I mean everything's Crystal Clear they don't hide the corruption in Russia they just announce what they're doing and oops sorry and um and you know that's an incredible education for a reporter to see that stuff especially as a young person doesn't it feel increasingly like that's what's happening here I mean with your Twitter Twitter follows reporting uh but also just with all of your sensor ship reporting everything it's starting to look like they're almost bragging about censorship opportunities you just mentioned the raid are there other parallels with that period of time that you witnessed in Russia and what's happening now um with creeping authoritarianism censorship I mean there's all it's both left and right too it's not like it's just against trump it go it runs the gamut it's just when the sort of Security State wants to clamp down they put their Machinery in motion what other similarities have you noticed so the first time I noticed real similarities was when so I I had been assigned to the campaign story for Rolling Stone when I got back um you know they they hired me 04 uh yeah 0304 and they they sent me out and um I remember going out in the campaign thinking God this is so boring there has to be some other you know compared to the other thing there has to be some deeper level to all this that I that uh can be covered and it wasn't until 08 financial crisis and they when they assigned you know a story to me like what happened with AIG then you start to see the real mations of American politics like you know we're going to bail out this connected group of oligarchs uh using State money we're going to present it to the public as something uh something Noble and beneficial where everybody wins I mean it was all very very familiar that whole scene and so uh as soon as you know I had a couple of people on Wall Street who kind of walked me through some of the basics but after that I'm like wow this is exactly the same story so that that helped a lot I would say were were you surprised at the reaction to that that long piece you did Goldman yeah yes yeah it was unbelievable like long you know to this to this day we're 15 years later almost maybe getting closer to 20 years um and people still know the vampire squid right y Piggy in on that the right I remember as like a a young conservative at the time the right which was in a populist moment really didn't like you Matt you were you were the subject of eye rolles you were just why didn't they like uh communist why didn't they like going after the Goldman Sachs Wall Street at the time it was really um a taboo on the right even in the midst of this populist moment and there were a lot of people who were opposed to the the bail the Tea Party moment a lot of people who were opposed to that uh there were lot of people who ended up being opposed to tarp and all of that but it didn't matter for you Matt I this is just my impression but correct me if I'm wrong the way the right has reacted to you recently is very different than how they did then yeah um maybe originally uh but I think that that was a Mis little bit of a misunderstanding also I I did get some stuff kind of wrong in that first story like you know I was a complete novice to financial reporting so I was reporting what I was being told and you know as you know when you do these stories you're listen L to 20 people and you think well these three make sense and you know the and so I went with some things and um any corrections what were the no no they weren't like factual errors they were more like sort of interpretive you know sometimes I would over interpret what was going on a little bit um but really those stories were really not anti- capitalist they were actually stories about how uh politically connected companies were getting unfair advantages in the market and that's why all my sources were Wall Street people they they weren't like people were being foreclosed on that came later and so I was getting a lot of people from hedge funds or from smaller Banks who are calling me up and saying this is totally unfair like you know they get bailed out their cost of capital drops they get to borrow more cheaply we lose right like and this is a it's a complicated story but the reason I think that people responded to it is because financial reporting is not done for ordinary people there is no at the time anyway there was no sort of popular way to explain what was going on and just the process of saying okay if you've never been around Finance before here's kind of roughly what happened people really responded to that and it was a shock to us that there was supposed to be only one story and we ended up doing 10 years of them so I mean that that's how that happened yeah I was at the Huffington Post well I went from Politico in 2008 to huffing and post in 2009 and when did that Story come out probably 09 yeah and yeah I remember that was there was a rare moment where there were several years where we could write stories about the financial crisis and what led up to it and also how to fix it the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the fight over Dodd Frank and they would get clicks yeah like people were like intensely focused on that I remember we think it might have been 2010 right around the time the tea parties po off uh we we we wrote a piece saying that it might make sense for you actually to just walk away from your home um because you're so far underwater um you're never you're never going to come back right um You can just mail mail the keys back to the bank and we set up using um like what what's Meetup or whatever it is um say like if if if you guys want to like talk to people in your neighborhood who were in similar situations here's how you can do it and hundreds of meetups happened like around the country of and they were covered in the local local news would do like eight homeowners showed up at this Starbucks to like discuss whether or not they should just mail the keys that well that's amazing right but probably told you something about the extent of the yeah right right it was so it was such a dark Bleak moment absolutely yeah and so then you started covering a lot of the Foreclosure crisis yeah and that was that was when that was sort of my first hint that something like Trump was GNA happen really um they sent me to cover something called the Rocket docket which was down Florida down in Florida in Jacksonville and there were there was a group of Jacksonville lawyers who were the first ones to tun um Clue Into the whole Robo signing problem where the banks were just sort of kind of willy-nilly making up documents or they in place of documents they should have they would just create affidavits um and have machines just sign them yeah exactly or or people they would just you know you sit there with stacks and signing these things so I went down there and they they wanted to show me how people got for foreclosed on and there was a they dragged these half CNL judges out of retirement and not even a real courtroom they just put them in conference rooms and had people come in and the average turnover time had to be like two and a half minutes so they would take two and a half minutes to kick each family out of their home and the the line was like you know from the courtroom all the way around the block right how often were the families there they were all there they were there yeah they had to they and you know it was they were all across the map right they were white black you know young old everything and the level of Rage in that room was like some nothing I'd ever experienced before this is Florida by the way right which has become a hub of right populism well not surprised right I mean that's interesting yeah and you know it's funny cuz occupy happened at the same time and I remember going up to occupy and and thinking you know this is interesting it's great but the other thing is where something's going to blow right right because that's representative of the whole population and you know because five million people or six million people got foure clothed on in those years that's a lot of people you know and they were Ordinary workingclass People a lot of them got screwed they didn't just not pay their bills a lot of them you know got put into uh exotic mortgage uh mortgage products they didn't understand they ended up with $88,000 a month bills and stuff like that and right um it was horrible and and I knew as as soon as anybody figured a way to uh tap into that that there was going to be you know some kind of political movement and this was a really pivotal moment and it was also a policy moment like it was a policy choice and like Larry Summers described it as uh foaming the runway you remember that phrase and I I put I put that in my book because I thought it was almost self-explanatory and an editor was like what what what on Earth does he mean by this I realiz actually kind of you do have to unpa this and so what he was saying is that you could go in and rescue these homeowners uh there's something in bankruptsy law known as cram down where you can say look the the the cost of this home the price the value of this home is this now the mortgage is this uh there was fraud involved here we're going to cram the mortgage down to your home to your home value you're no longer underwater it's like okay cool now my mortgage is less and I'm not just throwing money away every single month and I can afford it I'm not going to get foreclosed on that a policy choice that was available to Democrats a lot of Democrats fought for it in this in the house and the Senate the white house because of its economic team argued against it they said if you do that the banks would too quickly lose capital and the banks would go under and they're too big to fail and we can't allow that and so the banks are crashing so you need to foam the runway with these for the rubble of the forclosed homes human because this way the banks just gradually lose money and their blow is softened as they land on the runway by the bodies of all of these former homeowners unbelievable you stretch it out that you stretch it out then from 2010 all the way through 2016 by it's a rocket docket but it's still people are fighting scraping like making payments fighting their foreclosures trying to get the paperwork in and then they set up these programs called what Hamp and right didn't really work that deliberately did not work um that are supposed to rescue homeowners but what they actually did is they just kind of guarantee that they'll be in foreclosure but only but but years down the road they even told people in Miss payments right they they would they would say what you you need to miss payments in order to get into this program this program will rescue you so these so these homeowners would deliberately Miss payments on the advice of these program officers and then they would be hooked in this program which meant that they were inevitably going to get foreclosed on but that was good for Wall Street because then the banks would all survive right right yeah no that's unbelievable right and you think about how sociopathic that is right and and they used to be able to get away with that because if you it's not on the Evening News who's going to pay attention but I think with the internet this is this this is why these movements can happen now because people can start to do their own research and real when you're getting thrown out of your house you will tend to look into things you know and find out what's happening um you know I know I talk to people who would ask questions like how come they're spending $6 trillion or10 trillion in the bailout when it only would cost a trillion half dollars to pay off every single sub Mortgage in the country um and then you have to get into answers like well then all the people who basically made bets on all all of these uh you know debt instruments um some of them would lose unfairly right and they would have claims and it turns out that there's this colossal uh you know amount of lever money Tron exactly that all depends on this right and and so that's where the moral hazard comes in and um yeah of course people once they started to figure out what was going on with that they they were they were going to get very very upset that's what this whole you know Meme stock thing grew out of I think is just this rage directed towards these Financial professionals who were you know basically being subsidized and then acting like they they had like this special financial genius that allowed them to make money and and that is a very bitter pill to swallow I think that's a perfect uh point about what I wanted to ask and that there's this faux brick wall that we think of between the culture war and economics it's like you sort of have culture in this corner economics in this corner but when you're saying around the time of occupy you're the rocket docket people in Florida you're thinking like wow there might be something coming out of this Donald Trump runs for president um were you thinking of economics and culture in a different sense at that time because I was in college during occupy and one of the things that just drove me crazy was the way you know people talked about the people who grew up like I did like going to church owning guns hunting like all the stupid stuff like Duck Dynasty was super popular at the time and it sounds stupid but there was this cultural backlash that could have presaged Trump in the same way that the economic backlash could have and I just want to ask about how much you like the meme stock a great example it's like both cultural and economic MH what were you reading into that kind of thing that was building under the surface that eventually became Donald Trump coming down the golden escalator yeah um you know I was probably like most kind of liberal left-leaning Cosmopolitan reporters and that I wasn't that in tune with the other part of the country at the time which is I think a real failing going back and and looking on even despite all the Foreclosure work you'd been doing yeah but I mean look I put that off to a little compartment or it's economics yeah I mean it's economics I like most reporters you know I kind of naturally sympathize with you know the ordinary working person and not the you know rich or politicians but at rolling stone look you do a lot of the sort of picking on the yokal humor I mean that's part of what um columnists have been doing since the days of manin in this country right and I was specifically hired to be that kind of person I mean that was my job you know uh I was walking into a very particular gig at Rolling Stone that had been you know the predecessors did that um and now I look back at that stuff and I'm kind of embarrassed by it and and I once Trump ran and I started to talk to people in the crowd I I did realize that there was this convergence of the economic stuff and and the cultural resentment um that was really powerful that I didn't understand all that well um but it was clearly something like there was definitely resentment about uh the way they were talked about in the Press yeah um you know and I remember Trump he he's very clever right he would get up there at his campaign events and he would point at us you know and he would say look at them those blood suckers you know they you know they vampire squids yeah basically you would say you know they they hate me but more than that they hate you right and you know look at us we did look like snobs you know and um it was a very smart move and and then when you get out and you talk to people and and ask well why are they why are you voting for this guy Donald Trump and he's like because he's got he's leading you all by the nose he's getting free coverage you know and and just his triumph over us yeah was important you know and I I saw that and I said wow that's amazing you know and and it was um also incredible to me to me that the other reporters weren't interested in that story um I found that and to me it's particularly if you've lost faith in the ability of government to really do anything positive for you then at least it can make your enemies miserable exactly it's like some satisfaction the sh thing at the misery of my of my adversaries so you going into this campaign you've got uh Jeb and the whole crew against Trump in the Republican primary and then you've got Hillary vers Bernie um I'm still you know no nobody will ever forget Hillary Clinton get you know giving speeches to Goldman Sachs like in the runup like talk about a bubble like strategic bubble like she didn't need that $700,000 I know she was and and I and I would hope that if she could go back and do it again she'd be like you know what that was a mistake politically a mistake not morally a mistake she would not say it was morally mistake no because there is no such thing as morals it's it's all cynical they're Way Beyond that strategizing are the Titans of will of power like and it's like the $700,000 was not worth losing presidency over now not that that did it but it I it symbolized for everybody who the Democratic party was becoming that and that they were willing to do it yeah and and they weren't embarrassed about it right I mean I remember the New York Post did a a story where they listed her speaking schedule and there was one day that was just hilar she had like a speech in the morning that was like 400 Grand and then she had to fly to another country like to to do biotech right yeah exactly I'm like this is like just months before launching the campaign right within months not years earlier or like and then there's Bernie so how much time did you spend on the Democratic campaign trail that that year not much because my editors at Rolling Stone didn't want me anywhere near the Democrats so uh they found him boring or no they they were afraid of what I was going to write uh oh yeah so they much preferred to have me uh crawling up the backsides of Republicans um meaning that you would be vicious to the Clinton campaign yeah absolutely in fact and and then later on when I uh covered the Democrats uh in 2020 you know that whole ridiculous 20 person field or whatever it was um I did a couple of stories that were pretty nasty we still still a rolling stone yeah um I thought they were great stories I'm like like the these are this is sort of classic Rolling Stone stuff and they were like yeah I think we're we' had just about enough of your campaign coverage at that point so somebody's lose an eye now exact used to be fun in games now Trump's here yeah exactly right right but that's I mean that's kind of what you Chronicle and hate Inc is that these uh organs of media become corporate mouthpieces it's not that that didn't always happen I mean there's always some intersection but in a different way in a way that it was like they didn't need to be told by the Clinton campaign to keep taibe away from it they just share the ideological uh sort of hesitation right yeah at some point I think we we probably all experienced the same thing where somebody got the memo like in Spring to Summer of 2016 that this was a new ball game and that we were no longer going to um you know be the detached press core that we had been in the past you know there was no no more of this like writing negative stuff about Democrats when that happened right we were going to just sort of look the other way um meanwhile the cable networks are giving Trump unending air time right but yes the memo went out definitely I mean it's a phrase there was actually no memo that I know right there's no me there may actually have been one um from the like democracy Integrity project or whatever came before that um but no I mean it was unspoken I do I do believe that like so there was from 2003 on um this like robust blogosphere that they used to call it uh which uh allowed all sorts of intra Democratic party fighting like Daily Coast Daily Coast for instance was people were constantly at each other's throats over different candidates and different directions for the party fighting over the war surveillance um how you know what how to take on Bush you know gay marriage marity are you are you for civil unions like all of this robust fight and I I feel like 2016 definitely after he wins but heading into the general the memo went out that's over yeah like we're not we're not doing that I think uh Alternet like was one of those places where this was happening they were very critical of of Democrats their a lot of their high dollar funding just evaporates like a lot of these Dem donors who were Democrats and believed in like just the idea of like a full Thro of debate yeah where all of a sudden like you know you know what not not right now yeah Y and a lot of the NOS that you maybe occasionally at least still went after you know sort of democratic members of Congress um there was none of that anymore now now we had the full-blown like sort of David Brock model of politics where you know we have an NGO that exists for a political purpose only right we're not going to do this institutional um you know Purity thing anymore and there was in the Press you know there was a very influential piece by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times uh who said I think it was called Trump is testing the Norms of objectivity and journalism and the whole idea was um yeah we used to worry just about what's true now we have to be true to history's judgment so you know everybody knew what that meant right and I the way I got it was I I remember I did a story where I interviewed somebody it was right after the Access Hollywood thing and I interviewed somebody um at a speech he was supposed to go to but had been just uninvited to by Wisconsin Republicans so I talked to some Trump supporter who had his whole family had been union workers um they had always voted Democratic and now they said um you know after NAFTA and all that stuff we've been screwed so many times we we can't listen anymore and I'm we're going with this guy and it's just a quote right you know I put that in there and I got all this I got flamed on the on Twitter for using the economic insecurity thing right which is now code for racism or something like that and um I was totally shocked by that I I guess I shouldn't have been in retrospect but that was that was wild like this is a real reason this guy's getting you know he's succeeding why would we not want the audience to know that I I just couldn't what did you think during that time mean I was I'm curious well I mean I was said like Wisconsin I'm from Wisconsin and I didn't really I lived in DC at the time didn't pick up on it until I was in rural Northern Wisconsin uh where my mom grew up I was rollerblading and I was going all around the neighborhood and just giant homemade Trump signs on plywood with spray paint in the this was like July and that's I was like that it was David Obie's district for 40 years you know deep blue District flipped in 2010 and that's when I was like oh my gosh nobody has any IDE what's about to happen the the piece I'm proudest of from that year was in February of 2016 that I co-wrote was Zach Carter MH uh and the headline is something like it's it's in the huffing post headline is something like don't laugh Donald Trump could win and like here's how there you go and it was I remember that what that was you yeah me and Zach me and Zach Carter and we were saying like uh you're going to hear about nothing but NAFTA from here until um the the election and we pointed out some very basic things we said uh Wisconsin has a republican Governor Michigan has a republican Governor Pennsylvania has a republican governor and if he wins these three states then he wins that's right yeah the white house uh it may have been Randell by that time like there may have been a Democratic governor back but Pennsylvania had had Republican Governors you for like a decade plus leading into that um and we're like so we just making this point that like look how how did people respond to see but that was still okay in February February February 2016 yeah it had the narrative hadn't solidified yeah yeah there was there was no like cancellation attempt yeah yeah because I think because I think people didn't see him as a threat yet right yes um yeah and so it's it's okay to say he can win cuz he can't win right so right it's fine to make the argument and then our our polling aggregator by you go November um well we had our own pollster um it was called we bought pollster.com HuffPost tried to hire Nate silver they were in a bidding war with Disney how did that work out not well for us uh and so they went and bought poster.com which was another polling aggregator um uh run by Mark Blumenthal and some other pollsters um and ours was very similar to NES except had it slightly higher certainty that Hillary Clinton was going to win and so by the time the election came came around um all these polling aggregations had had her you know well ahead but what what Nate accurately pointed out is that if if they're off a little bit in one state then they're probably off in all of them so you need to factor that in and he turned out to be right that so his was wrong but he was right that he might be wrong right right yeah I mean it's funny I think he was probably if you go back and look at their coverage they kind of accurately present the percentage chances and all that but it was things like you know Trump will play in the NBA before he's going to be the nominee like that that that stuff is what told uh especially liberal readers yeah don't worry about it you know this is funny right it's not going to nothing's going to happen and they didn't take this the story seriously um you know I got fooled in a different way I I initially did what you did I I said wow this is going to work like Hillary Clinton's the perfect opponent for this guy right just watching the speeches but then I went to the the convention and some pollster sat me down and and walked me through the numbers and said look at the liability numbers right and I thought wellow that that's insurmountable not realizing that there were a lot of people who hated both candidates and you know if among those Trump ended up winning two to one right and that was a key factor in that race that's really interesting because that's where we are now the D press wrote about the double haters this morning or someone wrot about the double haters this morning uh that's a a good point Matt and what do you think how is it playing out in 2024 when you have some like I think they put it at a quarter of the country or a quarter of Voters say uh they hate both candidates is is that the key demographic in 2024 who wins the we hate both people well I I think that's you know they were the key demographic in in 2016 it was a slightly smaller number back then I think it was 19% or 20% so if it I would imagine it to be even higher now um but it's not predictable how th how those folks are going to vote I mean I think there will be more people who won't vote um but having cover campaigns I always feel like people's if they have a strong emotion somewhere um it's going to guide them to make the vote so if they hate somebody more than they uh dislike somebody or more than they like mildly somebody else uh that's going to bring him to the polls and you know there are a lot of people who are very they're very wary of trump but have a lot of negative feelings about the Biden campaign and vice versa but I I just think it's tended to work out in in Trump's favor um you know when it's like that and so a after 2016 then your your your uh when does your Eric Garner book come out there a thought I can't breathe yeah that was like a two years two years later yeah 2018 I and so that that brings us to the like the height of cancellation time period which brings back your Russia time yes how how often had in the culture wars yeah that book How often had the Exile been brought up again like in in your career what like what made it like how did that happen that um so I don't want to be conspiratorial about this but but what I will say is that during it it never come up until 2016 and then I started to notice that whenever I wrote about certain things it would come up um like what kind of when I said negative things about Hillary Clinton when I said positive things about Bernie Sanders they came up um but you know in the context of the Bernie bro yeah meme often right yeah interesting um so there were there was a group of you know sort of internet trolls but it's such an inexact science and I was never able to get a real handle on what happened I mean whether it was coordinated or right you can't say that right so I don't know I mean I do know who some of the original people were who who were trying to make us think about it were they any of the same people that started the berther rumor in 2008 I don't think so I mean you know I didn't really look all that hard at this um you know I I spent much more time just being bummed out and and feeling guilty and then I then I got mad about some of the press coverage that was was uh you know making some you know basically I had written some very offensive things but the there there was a scene in the book that um was Mark fantasizing about something about sort of a sexual harassment scene that wasn't true um and there was no way to talk about it and not it's not not sound like uh there was no way to make sense of it I mean if unless you had been through the whole Russia thing like the disgustingness of the humor of the Exile was never going to make sense two American audiences so I didn't even really try um but uh you know that was really it turned out to mostly just be a blip um in in in my career the much bigger thing was the Russia gate thing um and that was when you know I suddenly was on the outside with everybody in the business um and that started before that so um I don't know how so so uh right after Trump got elected you know I I had experience with Russia I started getting calls to about the the subject um and I I remember looking at some of the early stories and saying man the sourcing on this stuff is really weird right like it's all Anonymous there's no way we can we can replicate any of this in the lab you know and um and I wrote a a piece called something about this russan the story stinks uh like really early like in Rolling Stone in Rolling Stone yeah um and all of a sudden like lots of people sort of froze me out I stopped getting you know my phone calls returned uh people in Congress didn't didn't call me back um and uh yeah that that was the beginning for me of I started to realize that I was not going to be able to stick around um in that Rolling Stone see that's also interesting because again without seeming conspiratorial it just feels conspiracy it feels like a Clinton op it feels like you got on the wrong side of the sort of Steel dossier um what the name of the wallet JN that point it's not an OP it's it's the entire culture it's like but being driven by the external reporters who are feeding it around and like there was a there was a group of people that was you know talking to David Korn and all that stuff people were leaking things and yeah it yeah I wish I had known that back then you know cuz all I had was just this doesn't seem right if I had known about all that you know stuff but um but it was cultural it was this weird thing that that now is normal which is this group think uh culture which one of the reasons I liked journalism early on when I first got into it is that it was not that you know you used to go into a newsroom or um you know a TV uh you know studio and it would be like a comedy club in the back room like everybody was busting each other's chops about everything you could say anything um nobody cared what your politics were as long as you did the job well it I thought that was a really cool feature of reporting and then like overnight it turned into the exact opposite I don't know if you had the same experiences like college campuses yeah yeah yeah I mean turned into a I miss that but yeah yeah but it felt like well I mean I went to college campus after became like thoroughly sanitized and it feels like that in green rooms now it feels like you have to watch what you say it feels like it's very self-serious and it seems like it wasn't super self- serious before that I think my the way I handled that I basically didn't touch the rushia gate stuff I didn't go either way on it I was just covering other things right um so that might have been the way that I just like subconsciously was like you know what like go like if I could break something news there like we I think we broke a good story on Elliot Bry who was doing like uh unregistered lobbying for Russia MH but like somebody hacked his emails and we had the emails and boom here you go right but the and he was like number two on the RNC or something like really it's a big yeah he was a big fundraiser it's big story I think he went to prison um uh but that was not but that was different than the campaign that's just classic right foreign governments influencing uh the the process but that does bring up an interesting issue though I'm curious about this Matt like how you decide what to cover now because having been in conservative media there's this like the entire corporate press is focused on three shiny objects and sometimes they're doing legitimately important reporting like I'm glad that they are you know when there's a hurricane I'm glad they're down there like they're doing there's some reporters who are doing good stuff but conservative media sees its role as saying they're all doing that you know they're getting every stone on un overturned when it comes to Donald Trump we have a limited amount of time and resources we're going to spend them over here um and I feel like maybe that's what you were doing with rushia gate I don't know I don't want to put words in your mouth but like you were doing the reporting that was coming to you how do you decide what to report on now Matt because I'm sure you get a lot of stuff that just comes to you naturally but you also have limited time and resources so it's not like the people who expect you to spend every day this is why Donald Trump is evil in a million different ways this is why I hate Netanyahu this is why the CIA BL like other people are doing some of that reporting you're doing what comes to you how do you decide where to spend your time and resources so I've always had the same attitude about this which is that uh the Press basically exists um more for people who don't have anybody else to press their point of view than for people who have institutional backing um already so um I dating going back all the way to the beginning of my career I always tried to pick stories that nobody else was doing um because you know that's that's who needs those stories right like for instance with the weal we started talking about the how Russia was being reported well everybody at home is getting it's great it's turning into Switzerland um I would I would go out and say you know look it's subsistence farming and you know people getting shot you know in broad daylight so I would do those stories um when Obama got elected um I was a big fan of his when he got elected on on the campaign Trail but then right after that uh you know I had to cover finance and you know he was involved in a pretty shady um series of relationships with City Group I did a big story called Obama's big sellout uh for Rolling Stone that I was heavily criticized for but I think that's what media is for right like we're not supposed to be in the Friends Business um we're supposed to do stuff that is true but unpopular um so but I do now now because so much of corporate media is monomaniacal and in this Trump Direction um and you know I I'm personally very worried about kind of collapse of civil liberties and and things like that the small matter of collapsing civil liberties yeah yeah I mean I've probably lost my sense of humor about this a little bit but I that's kind of how I pick it I every you know people say why don't you criticize Trump more I'm like we don't have enough people doing that already like there's 5 million people doing that already so so and I think the first time you and I met in person was at some a cafe in New York um because you had finished a novel oh I don't know if you remember this and I and I used to run this with a friend um a little little publishing house cuz we were like look you don't need printers anymore you can just if you have a website and you have some books you could just actually print them mhm um and you had written a novel about a drug dealer right uh and we we talked about publishing it and but then eventually you said you know what I'm actually going to try substack this brand new thing at the time MH um that was the first time you guys met I would have thought you knew each other long DC well we' had been on a bunch of list serves yeah exactly we didn't we we digitally cross paths he's in New York I'm on DC I also after I had twins I basically left the house except to go to work Fair makes sense makes sense um and so uh you would ended up doing it through substack kind of serializing uh the novel like what was that experience like and that you were still at Rolling Stone is if I remember yeah how did you decide to make that like how did that evolve into your full thing so that happened because um the only thing I could do legally um with my my existing Rolling Stone contract that wouldn't have violated the terms oh was like a non-compete yeah it it would have been something like fiction on um you know a serialized book they they let me write books so I had to write a book uh and you know substack came to me early um and you know they I got to know those guys um pretty well and it seemed like a really interesting idea and um after the experience of doing that um which I think turned out well I also wrote ha ink um there first and uh I you I thought this is going to work better just in general if I just leave Rolling Stone and do this for a living um so a lot of people ended up on suback because they got forced out of their organizations I'm like one of the only people who left out of greed uh you know I just thought I'm going to make more money doing this over here so uh that's why but a lot of people didn't understand at the time that that was true mhm how are how you liking it yeah yeah I was going to say how you feeling about the substack revolution I I love it I think substack is a great thing and when did you jump out when did you fully launch it 2019 2020 yeah um you know there are some differences you know Rolling Stone they would give me a story and I'd get 10 weeks to work on it right so investigative journalism it's a lot of work and not a lot of content you know uh substack has not solved that problem I don't think the the how do you do investigative journalism and monetize it quickly um it's what it does pay for is like the strong take um and there's actually quite a reward on substack for uh writing people it's people like to um they will pay for something that they enjoy reading just in general even if they don't agree with it uh I found so like as as opposed to doing I do a lot of reporting on substack that stuff tends not to do well financially but uh how do tell how do you tell it doesn't do well financially like people are unsubscribing or it's people aren't converting from the free to the paid you can see how many subscriptions you get I try not to look but you can say uh oh and so if it's a well-written piece I just that converts more people right and you get more I I see yeah yeah so I mean I generally there are like nine different types of things that I do on the site and I know which ones get you know are monetizable and which ones aren't um how do you balance out how often to Fig tips um well I think one pays for the other you know you you you you have to do some of those oped pieces one for the studio one for you right right exactly exactly well it's something we've thought about a lot here with the the whole idea of audience capture yeah um and the way that we've sort of the the way that we solve it here is we've got Emily's wrong takes my right takes exactly and then people get to hear them both and then decide for themselves decide for themselves but it it does uh acculturate the audience to difference of opinion and being okay with like I I say some dumb things sometimes believe it or not but doesn't mean that you have to go running for the Hills right um it means you can just flame me and just say Emily's great and and move on but that's very unusual in the media space well it doesn't need to be though because I'm sure as you've discovered audiences are much smarter and more forgiving than people give them credit opened and open-minded yeah even partisans yeah so I mean like last week I did a piece about a you know a writer for the world socialist website uh you know a trotskyite uh who's in prison in in Ukraine and you know there are some conservatives who who subscribed to my site and they weren't mad about it right they're not going to unsubscribe because of because of stories like that um what they you know what they'll you will occasionally lose people over something that you say but you you know over time I think it it evens out as long as you do good work I've heard from some people I think uh I shouldn't say because I don't remember if I was told this on or off the Record but that people on the left let's go with on let's go with on yeah but people on the left who developed sort of center right audiences or maybe even like populist right audiences during the Trump years um as soon as like Trump was out of office and then there was October 7th they hemorrhaged but then people kind of slowly came back well I know Glenn and Glenn Greenwald and Le Fong have talked I think openly about that that like cuz they picked up right-wing audiences not totally right audience but a significant chunk were rightwing cuz they were they they both agreed on the people that they were attacking yeah but then they realized after October 7th they didn't agree on Israel um Glenn has I think lost a substantial portion of his audience but he has such a massive audience at that it doesn't matter right like how do you worry how do you think about that or do you um you know I try not to think about that um I haven't done a lot of stuff on Israel but I've never have I never liked that story um I never been there uh I I when you did when you did the show with Katie would you how often did that come up because like she's big Katy k used to post post a podcast with yeah so you know Katie Katie obviously cares a lot about that issue we had a lot of guests on who would talk uh about that issue um you know I I have written about it in terms of things like censorship Tik Tok you wrote about it when it came to the Tik Tok bill right right um and so you know we had people like Ali abuna on and you know that was after I believe it was electronic and AATA had been suppressed and I I had written about that even previously um so had Glenn Glenn was one of the first people to write about that uh you know I don't mind uh talking about certain aspects of it but I find the whole thing super complex and you know I don't know how you feel about this but I'm always very nervous about subjects where I just feel like there are gaps in my knowledge you know um I remember being on the one of the first times I was on like CNN they asked me a question about like Lebanon and uh I had I just had to say I don't know I'm not confident to answer that question and you could tell the camera hates that answer right uh so it's you know it's a weird place to be but um but so I stick with what I do know well yeah I think I just think it's interesting because I do find that even hardcore partisans are more open-minded there are some that aren't I feel like the country right now is 30% hardcore P partisan left hardcore partisan right and then everyone else is just like please I just want to believe something just it please just tell me the truth like I don't care if you're left I don't care if you're right just tell me what you think and I can make that decision for myself but like just do the research and be honest about where you're coming from which leads me to think like if tomorrow the New York Times and the Washington Post said we are doing journalism from a clear liberal perspective it would go like Leaps and Bounds towards restoring trust I don't know but I feel like that's why people subscribe yeah to racket right well yeah they they trust me to probably admit when I get stuff wrong or you know tell tell them where I'm coming from but um audiences are much I mean this is my buying experience going back decades people always think that audiences are dumber than they really are um if you go back to the '90s remember that whole lad mag Movement we had in the states where uh everybody thought that you had to do you know stories in 400 word boxes and that people would not read anything longer than that and you know you mean like axios yeah yeah right that's I guess that's the the idea there I'm I'm even going back into the Stone Age when it was still paper yeah but you know Rolling Stone uh I when we started doing those Finance pieces I'm like I'm doing 8,000 word pieces about credit the fault swaps and people love it right like as opposed to you know trying to dumb it down for people um I think audiences like it when you respect them and treat them like adults and uh you know don't make assumptions that they're not you know they're going to run away if you try to be complicated so um I don't know do you have the same thought I was as I'm as I'm listening to you talkinging I'm thinking the the people on the left who think like that you've betrayed them that you've left the left you know what happened to Matt taibe you've sold out it's all for clicks or whatever that do you think your politics have changed or do you think that the you actually haven't been that political to begin with uh or how like how do you think about that like because I'm sure you still get people oh yeah all the time you only it's just like right what happened to you but even like even like I I get that question it's it's the most annoying question on the planet right what happened to you yeah um for people send that to you even to me even me like have I like I haven't changed in 20 years probably soer but but that's because there's within the business even small transgressions now uh are unacceptable I mean I used to all the time do large you know featurelength reports that were critical of De Democratic party in Rolling Stone where they didn't like it um and that was considered a virtue in the business once upon a time like you to you know we're going to criticize Republicans also do this um I I don't think my politics have changed that much I'm probably a little bit more I've probably changed a little bit in um in terms of things that I worry about like carzing audiences um but uh I see this like for instance the censorship story um and even some of the other stuff that's gone on with Trump uh as a continuation of this sort of degradation of uh civil liberties and you know due process that started with 9/11 um which I was very sensitive to because I came into it after watching Putin come to power and seeing you know all that disappear in in overnight there in Russia I I think it's all the same story it's just that the the you know the the people who are now advancing this idea that we have to become more aggressive and how you know in the use of illiberal tools I think it's just a different group of people um if that makes sense is there anything you would say you have learned from the right or you've been like humbled by as you've made because I mean like I'm am in way more left spaces than I ever expected would be in my career I absolutely love it and I feel like I learned so much from it every day is there anything over the last you maybe 10 years you feel like maybe that hasn't changed your principles but that's changed your perspective from spending more time with people on the right for sure I um I'm much more conscious of how uh uniform the messaging is in like pop culture I probably didn't notice that before like even stuff even shows that I like uh and and still like they just hit you over the head with the same messages over and over again repeatedly and now you know I can imagine um as a republican it would be very frustrating to turn on the TV every single time and see myself portrayed as the dumb and wrong one um always right um and I'm maybe a little bit more um in touch with that than I ever have been uh but people you know uh people characterize my audience as right-wing now it's it's really not that most of the people who who um subscribe to my site are like old disappointed liberals like me uh and there's just enough of those people to support my operation I would say um but it's but yes I I think I I think I've learned um quite a lot and you know I go back and look at some of the things that I wrote over the years and I'm I'm a little embarrassed uh by some of the ways that I characterized people in the past I think it's hard to even like overstate how important that was especially to people who are like my age like one of my favorite shows with 30 Rock and 30 Rock was doing this dual tiered like economic satire that was brilliant at the time about like Comcast and cabl town and consolidation and all of that but it was still so it's not the most important issue in the world but for people like me it was just like come on man like like these are good people like they're normal people and it just was really animating and I understand why a lot of people voted for Trump as a result of that or just were able to hold their nose and vote for Trump as a result of that oh the one thing we didn't talk about yet the you and I were almost sort of colleagues with the old racket the racket thing yep so I still work for The Intercept which was set up by the pier midar and when he set it up he he originally was going to do 12 as I as I was told the story 12 magazines mhm then it was two there there was going to be the intercept was was going to be the investigative civil liberties um National Security um and they were going to do Sports they were going to do basically a cond nest but for the internet in in the digital media era um and you you were going to run racket which was that named for the what's the Smedley Butler no no we just like the uh it was Al p and I at the time it was going to be like B like investigative business right yeah um and the stories I heard of The Intercept in its early days are just utterly hilarious and it's it's shocking that it ever got launched yours didn't get launched like how long were you there before like seven everybody gave up that yeah and it never published a thing right yeah no like careers were destroyed like you know people had nervous breakdowns and we never published a word um first look Institute or whatever First Look media whatever it's called Just One of the most ridiculous of organizations ever I mean there's so many things like I I remember walking in there and there was you know there was a person who came into work every day and just sat in an office and never did anything and was like paid this enormous salary and it was like months before I asked what was going on with that and there were so many things like that going on at that organization um was that 2014 yeah it was 2014 and I you left rolling stone for it you went back to Rolling Stone I went back to Rolling Stone like you know on my knees um you know cuz they they had been kind of roll you left as a hero like I'm launching a brand new publication like the New Frontier seven months later you're like hey uh I defied Yan wner right Yan you know Y young can be a difficult person and uh I thought he was me around at Contract time and I was like I'll show you you know like I'm go make it big I'm going to go make it big and I like I I ran off to to you know somebody even richer than you and um and they were going to invest $250 million in media then I get there and it's like we don't have money to buy a pencil right uh The Intercept literally that happened um and there were rumors that Pierre himself was like doing expense reports in the in the very beginning uh that's probably true yeah it's like the eighth richest person on the planet it was he's like you really needed to take a cab you got the get the subway right there it would have been faster actually I I I can tell a story about that they had this idea that we um we should not use phones right um and that we should only uh the only time that we should ever be talking on the phone is in one of those booths that they were you know they now set up right and I said journalists need to have an actual line right because we need to record conversations and he's like yeah but you can do that digitally I'm like it it doesn't really like that doesn't work all the time you know um why don't we just have phones right and and you know it turned out to be like a cost thing but they were like hyper focused on stuff that really didn't matter like I got in trouble with them early because they wanted to do a signed seating um you know uh because they had this theory that there would be increased productivity with an open Newsroom with people and I said this is a Humor Magazine if I went into into the you know the this group and I said you all have to sit in a certain space I would lose face immediately with these people and so that thing went down south South quickly but uh but yeah it was so so you that's right we were almost colleagues that's interesting I didn't get there till 2017 so I missed those uh those early days but I got to hear the stories yeah and we took on some of the people who were at racket John Schwarz yes and some others mhm before we uh wrap here we actually haven't even opened one the most important chapters in your journalism career at Mat which is the Twitter files and there's been I mean you've talked plenty about Elon M publicly you've talked about the process in really interesting ways uh that I think people can go and and listen to I'm curious with all of this context in mind uh Russian oligarchy financial crisis censorship apparatuses from the Pentagon uh to the CIA and all of that where do you think Elon Musk fits into he's such an interesting person like whatever you think of him genuinely an interesting person but obviously as a defense contractor is now the owner of a media company Ryan's reported on how that's gone in different ways with censorship in countries that Americans don't pay much attention to quite frankly as someone who's actually like interacted with him and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him where do you fit him into this that's a great question because as you both know like when you do any story you want to understand your sources and what they're where they're coming from and what they want out of the situation right I even asked them you know straight out I said what is it you're looking for out of this you know I mean and he he sort of said something about trying to restore trust with Twitter's audiences by opening the Vault on you know different censorship practices but this was it was such a big step for I mean no CEO has ever done anything like that before before right so I can't say that I ever understood um where he was coming from or why he was doing anything and then shortly after we started you know there was that incident where he banned a bunch of people for the the jet thing right um and we had conversations back and forth about it and I made the decision right away which I've I've been criticized for but I thought you know it doesn't matter right I'm not writing about that stuff like he's he's G he's giving us access to all this material the story is the material I'll worry about Elon and all of his problems later the private jet you have access to this Trove of information about the Intel apparatus and you're going to throw it away for a private jet story right yeah like I I felt like there I mean I understood that there were people who um who wanted the the project to end um there was all kinds of strange stuff going on inside the that whole scene at Twitter early on where you know from day to day minute to minute we didn't know whether it was going to continue um and so I was the person I was one of the people who was sort of lobbying for no matter what we do let's just keep getting stuff in and until we have a story and um and so yeah I I I can't say that honestly that I understand what elon's motivation was but I have to give him credit because the stuff that we did get was was historic and and interesting and will probably continue to be interesting in different ways even years from now like you know as we keep going through it uh and you don't talk to him anymore right like that that bridge is burned yeah unfortunately you know um I still think he doesn't he misunderstood the whole situation I think that was over the substack Twitter thing right yeah yeah yeah is it is he still uh crushing substack which anyway proves your point about Source man agement which is an important part of doing good journalism is knowing when to push and when to pull and that proves your point that when there's a level of sensitivity with a source and you're going to lose access to information that's in the Public's interest you you have to be smart yeah well there's a line right like you can't you can't um you know soft pedal uh your coverage of somebody in order to get something right right that's like access journalism then there's a word for that right um the Twitter files you know look ethically it was a unique situation I would say like I I consulted with all kinds of people like some some of the old dragons in this business you know uh how do you deal with something like this and um I I don't think we crossed that line I I still think that the idea was that there was stuff in these documents that even Twitter and Elon didn't understand that we were still getting up until the very end and that that was more important than anything else that was happening so MH is there more in there you think or like I think so I mean not not a ton but we do keep finding things and as you still have access to the ones that you got yeah not supposed to but yeah um but uh but yes and you know the there are agencies you know when we started one of the things the problems was we didn't even just know the the names of these different agencies what they did like which acronym sisa yeah exactly like sisa um you know that well that's a long story but um there there's a lot of stuff like that in Twitter especially in attachments that we haven't opened and looked at um that uh you know as we continue to do that every now and then we'll find something like Shel andberg are still looking pretty closely at all that stuff so wow I mean it's I don't andv you for having to parse through all of that but in the other way it's a story of a lifetime no it's awesome are you kidding I mean it's it's it's a dream I mean as soon as we saw like FBI flaged this DHS flag that I knew Jim Baker right yeah yeah I mean this maybe once in a career you'll get something like that and um you know it turned out to be you know a really big story about this um Subterranean relationship with the intelligence agencies and it was very hard to work out and that's always fun as a journalist the the challenge of it so um but I you know I I have some resentments too because um I I do think that some of the other some reporters who dismissed it early on because they can't stand Elon yeah uh you know kind of missed the forest with the trees there that it wasn't really a partisan story and they they they should have been looking at it but you know I think it's a net plus overall so got anything else I mean I could keep going double the time of this it's been so interesting and uh you two are people I've learned a lot from just watching you guys do amazing reporting nice actually I do have a question for you both I mean like the this concept of you know Crystal and Saga obviously did it too part of the whole idea is to go against the the whole thesis of like the hate hate ink thing and and see how it works when audiences aren't just being cheering sections butan how does it how is it working for you I mean does it the I think was working shockingly well right yeah quite pleasantly surprised at how well it's working yeah um what one thing that was very heartening actually um because there one thing I'd wondered about was you know there's this whole you can't on the left there's a whole you can't platform odious views right and here's the platform for Emily and her odious views like fully like fully anti-abortion for example um and so it's not easy for you so I went to the uh GW encampment um the G like the the Gaza encampment a couple weeks ago whenever that was happening back in May and it seemed it felt like everybody there watched the show like every single person there so at least if you're in your teens and 20s at this point like it's fine like people are okay to hear different views because also we you know you're going to hear stuff about the the Israel Palestine on our show that you probably won't find elsewhere um but they're also those people are okay hearing right-wing views that they don't agree with right they want to like I it was I I was it was interesting how um concentrated the audience was there it's like wow everybody here watches the show it's amazing that's great it's really that's great that's heartening yeah so yeah I think I mean uh people can answer in the comment section if they if they agree whether it's working or not but if they're in the comment section that means they're uh that's right they're well I mean not necessarily but I go back not necessar fans that's true right after the do's decision came out you and I were on the show together and I just feel like as someone who grew up at when media was falling apart like you just want the transparency and it's almost efficient to get both perspectives in one sitting you know you can hear the best argument from the left and hopefully the best argument from the right from people that you trust are acting in good faith and it's kind of efficient you don't have to yeah I I've met a decent number of people who say that they watch both CNN and fox or Fox and MSNBC CU they don't trust either of them right but they want to hear both and then sort it through themselves and right just that we just cut out the middleman you can just right get it yeah one stop shopping there you go awesome excellent fascinating Emily Ryan thanks so much I really appreciate it thanks for coming down thanks for watching everyone uh this is this does it for us on today's edition of counter points I finally found the the camera Ryan I was like which camera is but it's right here uh make sure you subscribe breakingpoints so you get this show early and uh all to your inbox right away on Thursday nights there you go hey if you liked that video don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to Breaking points if you want to see the rest of counterpoints go to breakingpoints outcom to become a premium member and get the full uncut show every morning in your inbox and on Spotify