6/21/24: Matt Taibbi On Trump, Elon, and Russia
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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, meme 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 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 yet, Matt, 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 Matthew Taibbi. I want to talk about his career, which has spanned the pre-internet era, basically, back when you used to actually print things. I mean, I'm there too, so I can say that. That's true. Up to today and continuing to evolve. 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 I 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 both of you, which is that I think the country is in denial right now. Like, 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. There's no competition, but it's not going to be him. Like there's going to be, and I was talking to my dad yesterday, he's like, they're going to do something, right? Maybe at the convention. Trump goes to prison, Biden has a medical situation. And I think the Nikki Haley, we talked a lot about how Nikki Haley got all this mainstream news coverage 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 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, Matt? Yeah, well, I think a couple of things. Number one,

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 see somebody out in the campaign trail We would have constant arguments about the back and forth about you know between the candidates and there's none of that We have staff getting fired

Like, you know who the staff are. Right. Like they became celebrities over the five election cycles that you've covered. Like the Karl Roves, the David Axelrods. Like who's running Biden and Trump's campaigns? Matt, where was the first publication that you worked?

On a campaign? Just like in general. The village voice. The village voice. Yeah, okay. So because that sounded to me like such a politico HuffPost question because, but that's actually what's sort of new, right? I mean, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but in the aughts, there was this journalism as almost a sport. Well, James Carville.

campaigning became more, almost gamified, I don't know, the characters popped. - I think that was really popularized by Halperin and who's the other guy, I always forget his name. - Heilman. - Heilman, yeah, exactly. With game change and all that and this whole idea. But that was the first, 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 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.

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 For so long so five elections I do the math. What was the first one for actively covered? Oh for really right? Okay, Carrie Carrie six. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm Right. So everybody knew but Bush even though Bush was the nominee like everybody knew was gonna be the nominee again Karl Rove

And he had a strategy. He's going to bring out the bigots for the over-marriage equality. That was the theme of the 2000 plus John Kerry's quizling and he's weak on the war. Right. You kind of knew what the election was about. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they made it about things that

Should have really didn't matter to the population all that much. I mean that with the war was the dominant Topic in the country at the time and neither candidate really wanted to go there all that much not in you know in terms of when also the larger issues about the war on terror and that sort of thing and

They just didn't come up a whole lot. It was, you know, John Kerry's medals versus, you know, other. The Swift boats. Swift boats. Yeah, exactly. All that stuff. How did the campaign press handle the Swift boats, actually? Like, what was the, and then I want to go back in how you got into journalism. Sure. So, like, the.

the Bush campaign, they start pushing the Swift Boat stuff. And for people who basically weren't even born then. - Which is almost everybody. - So Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a right-wing group that was kind of formed by people who had served with John Kerry in Vietnam. And they hated his story of turning his Swift Boat toward the Viet Cong and like shooting. And they said he like,

Sort of like. Throwing the medals. 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 Kerry thing to do. But they didn't like his Purple Heart. I think he wasn't injured enough or whatever. It became this like. He smoked his ribbons, but didn't inhale them. Yes. Became this real character attack. Democrats just avoided it for a very long time, not understanding the way that the internet and the.

and politics had changed, thought that if they just didn't address it, it would go away. It ended up causing immense damage. But I'm curious how the press was thinking about this kind of new way of campaigning.

What I remember about that is that a lot of people saw it as a continuation of the sort of 90s David Brock, you know, sort of, which was a new thing. Brock used to be on the right for people who also were not. Right, yeah, he was this quote-unquote right-wing hitman back in the day who was the point person behind the scenes in the Clarence Thomas hearings, then Whitewater and all this stuff. And that was sort of a new thing in media at the time, this idea of a

organized, multi-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 Swiftbook group as that.

But you're right, there was a massive Streisand effect in the way 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 their whole campaign was John Kerry in an 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. 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, in that Chris Lasavita, who's now running the Trump campaign, was like the pioneer of the Swift boat. Oh, was he? Yeah, absolutely. People credit him for the entire Swift boat campaign attack. And

What's interesting about that is at the time people saw it as this 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 filibuster debate but for decorum and presidential campaigns. Right, right, exactly. Like once you open that Pandora's box, like what happens? Yeah.

That absolutely happened in 2016 on the presidential level. And now Chris LaCivita, 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. Don't tell anybody that, that I didn't know that, because that would be kind of embarrassing. It's a good thing you didn't say it on air. Yeah. Well, yeah. Just keep it between us and the Friday show here, if you guys are out there watching. Nobody clip this. Halal flow. Yeah, don't clip this. Keep this one private. So, yeah.

Growing up, did you always think you were going to be a journalist? Because your father was a journalist, is that right? He was like a local TV journalist in New York, is that right? Yeah, so my parents were at Rutgers. And my father, I was born when they were very young, they were like 20. And so he, to support the family, he was working as a

newspaper reporter at the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey. So he started when he was 18 or 19. He's been doing this forever. And then as soon as he graduated, we moved to Boston and he worked at a local affiliate there. So my childhood was like Anchorman, basically. I spent a lot of my childhood in those newsrooms with

you know, the bad facial hair and all that stuff. And I used to play with the weather setup and try to 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 I spent most of my time hanging around my father. My father is, he's a journalist, journalist, like very old school,

incredibly gifted. I was 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 instantly. And, you know, in journalism, in TV journalism especially, you have to get

you know, a good soundbite. 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 days when it was film, uh, going all that, uh, 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. Mm-hmm.

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 Elon Wah or Nikolai Gogol or somebody like that, you know, and, um, and,

It turned out I don't have talent for writing fiction, 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 that's how I got into journalism. So 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 writers.

I mentioned Gogol, Bulgakov was another one. 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 couldn't stand politics. I still can't stand it. Yeah.

really the books I was just really into how well they were written and how beautiful they were and the you know the Russians have this amazing absurdist view on life and I was you know when you're depressed you kind of try to lose yourself in that landscape and the writing of people like Tolstoy it's 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 as a student and

And one of the funny things was, you know, in the States... What year is that? Probably 89, 90. So it was still Soviet. Yeah. So I went to a Soviet college. And... But in America, you know, remember the 80s? That was like the time of porkies and everything, right? Like everybody was... You know, they...

Spent a lot of time in their appearance and there was a success culture and everything and I thought I hated that I'm like I'm gonna be a failure when I grow up in Russia. Everybody's a failure, right? So I felt like I fit right in and It was it was a cool thing that so that's why I ended up moving back there. I thought this place is paradise It turned out not to be but it was a great thing. Well, so you graduated from college and came back to the US and

What would you try first before you went back to Russia? I didn't I didn't try anything. I immediately started making plans. Yes, I worked demolition and Weighted tables save money and just went over there and started stringing so and you said it

It turned out not to be paradise, but there's something so interesting about someone growing up immersed in, as you said, the landscapes. That 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 in 91. That's when... Were you there in 91? I missed the actual thing by a couple of months on either side, but I saw it coming, obviously. My last semester there, you could, you know, there was a...

a ban on food products. So you had to use a rationing system just to get vegetables and things like that. It was a mess. But then after that,

Russia immediately transformed this like gangster state, which was kind of horrifying to watch. And but as a journalist, it was fascinating. You know, I mean, I got to go and see incredible things. It was a great place to start one's career because.

You got to cover very high level things quickly, which you don't get to do in America if you're working as an intern in a magazine or something. - I always thought your ability to cover Wall Street corruption later in your career must have been connected to witnessing it in its most extreme form. - Right. - Oligarchy. - Up close. Was it, so, and for people who aren't that familiar with that period of history, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the most rapid collapse in life expectancy

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 then that was the high point. Right. They collapsed, you know, life expectancy dropping by just years and years and years because the state didn't

with U.S. facilitation, just gets sold from under the people to these oligarchs. Could you see it happen in real time? 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 absolutely incredible. Jeff Sachs helped to basically auction off the entire Soviet Union and create all these oligarchs through this Harvard-run

The Harvard Institute for International Development. Yeah. Yeah. So the auctions that you talk about, and you mentioned the financial reporting later, these were some of the most complicated thefts maybe in the history of the world, 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 Yeltsin regime. And what they did is they took people who really had no cash at all and they lent them money. So in the case of, for instance, Yukos, which is a company about the size of Exxon Mobil,

Yeltsin 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 seven or eight of these banker groups

And we later learned there was a kind of a backroom deal that was brokered at Davos, where there was an agreement that they were going to get these properties in return for massively supporting Yeltsin in the '96 election.

And that's how Yeltsin went from being at 6% in the polls to actually winning. There were some other things that went on, too. But, you know, it was a U.S. brokered thing. We helped advise in the structure of all those auctions, which were totally corrupt. And that's it. So that was an early introduction for me.

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What's also playing out in a split screen for you is you're seeing up close what's actually happening in Russia. 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, Hating. People should read it if they haven't. But watching that,

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 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,

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 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. It turns out that's sort of an intentional strategy, both with diplomats

and foreign correspondents for the big bureaus. - What's the strategy there? - So for diplomats, there was a bad experience with China with the Maoist 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 to happen. So there's 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 almost never have somebody who is really in tune with the local population, the language, everything. And I don't know how you cover a country if you don't know that stuff. I'm trying to imagine a Russian journalist who comes to Washington, D.C. and only speaks Russian. Right. And is then translating what's happening in Washington back to a Russian audience. Right.

Can you imagine that it would be remotely accurate? No, it would be a Monty Python routine. Right? It's Borat. It's even dumber than that. So would they just have to talk to the English speakers? Well, so that's the problem. So 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 Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov, right? People like that.

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 there would be total barter economy, no cash anywhere, starvation, you know, incredible surges in crime, all this stuff.

So I started to do a lot of like participatory reporting. So I would just go from place to place, get a job somewhere and then just write, 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, and 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 lied.

lie about stuff and that was kind of amazing to me. - And who would you publish those with? - So I had my own newspaper over there. - So this is Exile at this point? - The Exile, yeah. But I did work at the Moscow Times over there which is an expat paper but I also, I wrote for The Nation and some other papers.

in England, like, believe it or not, I think I did a couple for the Telegraph, for the Daily Mail, I worked for Euromoney, believe it or not. - He's always been a right-wing hack. - Exactly. - He's like, he's telling you. - Going back, that's right, that's right, Euromoney. So, you know, I contributed, I also wrote in Russian, I wrote for Russian papers.

And, yeah, so that was mostly what I did. But the audience mostly wasn't back in the United States. So that was, you know, kind of the difference. But it was interesting. How did you come about founding the paper? And who was it? It was...

It was Mark Ames, was Zajic an original? Zajic was later, yeah, much later, yeah. So it was really Mark, there were actually two papers originally, you know, for a long time there was this paper, they were called Living Here, which was a club guide 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 expat city, right? Because everybody's clubbing, right? So...

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 that the paper? And Mark was the first editor of that. I had actually, 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 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. Um, uh,

I'm really, it was really more like a small forward, but I can't shoot. So, but I was leading the league in rebounding when I left. That's my point. Like you were the number one, the top rebounder in the Mongolian basketball league? I was. I was at six foot two, believe it or not. Did you have a nickname? The Mongolian? Mongolian Rodman. Mongolian Rodman.

- Yeah, and I did the whole thing back then. I had hair and I used to dye it red 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 like Kenny Powers in Mexico. Totally, yeah. It totally is. That's why I went. I wanted to write a book about this. And, you know, the whole idea was it was a gag. It was supposed to be Charles Barkley in the Far East, right? And 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. 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 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 aughts Russia. But also I feel like has just flourished in recent years, and this gets to a lot of your 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, all of the alphabet soup from the Pentagon.

But I feel like that must have been a water that you learned to navigate probably in Russia too.

Absolutely. So Russia, when it became, when it stopped being communist, it did have a very vigorous free press for a while, but it wasn't exactly free, right? Like 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 were

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 had a term for it. They call it selling jeans over there. Like somebody just sold me some jeans because that's what the people on the street used to do in communist time.

So I knew a lot of these 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 or beaten or threatened. And they were just unbelievably brave people who were trying to navigate this very difficult system.

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. But certainly on the Russian side, that was the first time I understood that whole dynamic and got to see how it worked. And of course, by the time Putin came on the scene, he sort of, all he really did is consolidate, you know, instead of having seven different

He basically put them all under the same umbrella and if he didn't you know get in line and publish what he wanted you You know, that's when you got in trouble. So where did the exile fit into this constellation of papers? Well, so we were in this amazing place where We're writing in English

American libel law didn't apply to us. The Russians didn't read us. Where were you incorporated, like business-wise? Business-wise, we were a Russian business. Interesting. So we were a Russian press outlet. Hang on a second. Yeah.

And so we basically had to deal with the same authorities that like a Russian newspaper would. But they weren't paying attention to what we wrote until later. And then they started to. We had some problems with them originally because they would just ask for bribes on tax day. But then I think there were some content issues later on. And then after I left, the paper actually got shut down by the tax police. Yeah.

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 Khabnikov who worked for Forbes. He got himself machine gunned towards the end of the 90s. And there was a lot of interplay between Khabnikov

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,

you know, writing very critically of Putin. I was also pulling all kinds of stunts. Like I worked with this Russian paper that actually wiretapped his chief of staff. So they definitely noticed that. That would wind up on the radar. Yeah. Yeah. So there were things like that. But I got out of the country and nothing ever happened to me. I didn't know a lot of people that, you know, ended up in bad places after he took power.

took power, like I knew Anna Polakovska for instance, not terribly well, but I did know her. - Well, I was just gonna say, what prompted you to come back to the States? What was, how did that transpire?

You know, I thought creatively the Excel had kind of run out of ideas. We were starting to repeat ourselves. And I got a little bit tired writing for a dwindling audience. The expat community was shrinking pretty fast. Our ad base was no longer what it had been. Is that because of the creeping authoritarianism, 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 diminished a lot of opportunities for Western business. There was an immense capital flight out of Russia in the 90s. That was the whole thing. Everybody there wanted a piece of all these energy companies. They wanted to get underpriced commodities in timber, gold, whatever it was. And those opportunities closed up.

as soon as they started, not quite nationalizing things, but funneling all the contracts to Russians specifically and not to Americans. - But you could steal money, but it has to stay here. - It has to stay here, exactly. He literally had a meeting, 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 if you pledge your allegiance to me. If not, you know, consequences straight out of the movie Casino. Remember the money or the hammer scene? So, you know, once once that whole thing happened, a lot of the Americans just bolted because there just wasn't a way to make cash the way there had been. And he.

made good on that thread to several of the oligarchs, right? Yeah. To kind of check. I mean, 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 not an exact comparison, but let's just...

talk about, for instance, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, right? The showiness of that with all the agents and the TV crews and everything. There was something very similar. They raided a television station there with, you know, guys were rappelling through windows and they dragged people out. And one of the oligarchs got rung up on a fraud charge. And then there was another famous one named

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was in prison. Now, Khodorkovsky, people presented him as this sort of martyr to good capitalism, but he was one of the people who most benefited from those crooked auctions. So I

And his, my memory was his crime was getting involved in politics. Yes. Because he said, like, keep your money that you stole, but you have to support me. Yeah. You got to get off. 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 that's it. Put him in a cage. Right. Right. So, you know, as you mentioned before, when you watch this stuff, which is, it's like

you know, going on the ocean in 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, 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 follows reporting, but also just with all of your censorship 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 with creeping authoritarianism, censorship? I mean, it's both left and right too. It's not like it's just against Trump. 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 I had been assigned to the campaign story for Rolling Stone when I got back. You know, they hired me. It's 04? Yeah, 03, 04. And they sent me out. And

I remember going out in the campaign thinking, "God, this is so boring. There has to be some other..." Compared to the other thing, there has to be some deeper level to all this that can be covered. And it wasn't until the '08 financial crisis when they assigned a story to me like what happened with AIG

Then you start to see the real machinations of American politics like, you know, we're gonna bail out this connected group of oligarchs using state money. We're gonna present it to the public as something noble and beneficial where everybody wins. I mean, it was all very, very familiar, that whole scene. And so 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 helped a lot, I would say. Were you surprised at the reaction to that long piece you did? Goldman? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it was unbelievable. It's like long...

To this day, we're 15 years later, almost. Maybe I'm getting closer to 20 years, and people still know the vampire squid. Right. Piggybacking on that, the right, I remember as a young conservative at the time, the right, which was in a populist moment,

I really didn't like you Matt. You were the subject of eye rolls, you were just this like- Why didn't they like- Communist. Why didn't they like going after the Goldman Sachs, Wall Street? At the time it was really 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 Tea Party moment. The Tea Party, yeah, yeah. There were a lot of people who ended up being opposed to TARP and all of that, but it didn't matter for you Matt. 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, maybe originally. But I think that was a little bit of a misunderstanding. Also, 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

listening to 20 people and you think well these three make sense and then you know the and so I went with some things and Any corrections? What were they? No, no, they weren't like factual errors They were more like a sort of interpretive, you know, sometimes I would over interpret what was going on a little bit But really those stories were really not anti-capitalist. They were actually stories about

how politically connected companies were getting unfair advantages in the market. And that's why all my sources were Wall Street people. They weren't like people who were being foreclosed on, that came later. And so I was getting a lot of people from hedge funds or from smaller banks who were 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?"

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. Yeah. At the time. Anyway, there was no sort of popular way to explain what was going on.

And just the process of saying, OK, 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's how that happened. Yeah, I was at the Huffington Post. Well, I went from Politico in 2008 to Huffington Post in 2009. And when did that story come out?

Probably oh nine. 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 Mm-hmm 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, I think it might've been 2010, right around the time the tea party's popping 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. Um, you can just mail, mail the keys back to the bank. And we set up using, um,

Like what's meetup or whatever it is? Say like 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 Wow 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 then

probably told you something about the extent of the... Yeah. Right? Right. 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 sort of my first hint that something like Trump was going to happen. Really? They sent me to cover something called the Rocket Docket, which was... Down in Florida? Down in Florida in Jacksonville. And there was a group of Jacksonville lawyers who were the first...

ones to clue into the whole robo-signing problem, where the banks were just sort of kind of willy-nilly making up documents. In place of documents they should have, they would just create affidavits. And have machines just sign them. Yeah, exactly. Or people, they would just sit there with stacks and sign in these things.

So I went down there and they wanted to show me how people got foreclosed on. And they dragged these half-seen-in-hell 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 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. And they were all across the map, right? They were white, black, young, old, everything.

And the level of rage in that room was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. This is Florida, by the way, right? Right. Which has become a hub of right populism. Well, I'm not surprised, right? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny because Occupy happened at the same time. And I remember going up to Occupy 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 foreclosed on in those years that's a lot of people you know and there were ordinary working-class people a lot of them got screwed they didn't just not pay their bills a lot of them you know got put into exotic mortgage products they didn't understand they ended up with

$8,000 a month bills and stuff like that. And it was horrible. And I knew as soon as anybody figured a way to tap into that, that there was gonna be 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 foaming the runway. You remember that phrase?

And I put that in my book because I thought it was almost self-explanatory. And an editor was like, what on earth does he mean by this? And I realized, actually, you do have to unpack this. And so what he was saying is that you could go in and rescue these homeowners. There's something in bankruptcy law known as cram down where you can say, look, the cost of this home, the value of this home is this now. The mortgage is this.

There was fraud involved here. We're gonna 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 gonna get foreclosed on. That's a policy choice that was available to Democrats. A lot of Democrats fought for it 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, the rubble of the foreclosed homes. 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. Because 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, but they didn't really work. - That deliberately did not work, that are supposed to rescue homeowners, but what they actually did is they just kind of guaranteed that they'll be in foreclosure, but years down the road. - They even told people in missed payments. - Right, they would say, they would say, "You need to miss payments in order to get into this program, and this program will rescue you." 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 the banks would all survive. Right, right. Yeah, no, that's unbelievable, right? And you think about how sociopathic that is, right? And they used to be able to get away with that because if it's not on the evening news, who's going to pay attention? But I think with the internet...

This is why these movements can happen now, because people can start to do their own research and realize when you're getting thrown out of your house, you will tend to look into things, you know, and find out what's happening. You know, I know I talk to people who would ask questions like, how come they're spending six trillion dollars or ten trillion dollars in the bailout when it only would cost a

a trillion and a half dollars to pay off every single subprime mortgage in the country. And then you have to get into answers like, well, then all the people who basically made bets on all of these, you know, debt instruments, some of them would lose unfairly, right? And they would have claims. And it turns out that there's this colossal, you know,

you know, amount of leverage money. Yeah, exactly. That all depends on this, right? And so that's where the moral hazard comes in. And yeah, of course, people, once they started to figure out what was going on with that, 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 of,

directed towards these financial professionals who were basically being subsidized and then acting like they had this special financial genius that allowed them to make money. And that is a very bitter pill to swallow, I think.

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That's a perfect point about what I wanted to ask, in 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, the Rocket Docket people in Florida, you're thinking like, wow, there might be something coming out of this. Donald Trump runs for president.

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 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 stocks. Great example. It's like both cultural and economic. 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. You know, I was probably like most kind of liberal left leaning cosmopolitan reporters and that it 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 looking at it. - Even despite all the foreclosure work you'd been doing? - Yeah, but I mean, look, I worked at-- - You kind of put that off to a little compartment? - It's economics. - Yeah, I mean, it's economics. Like most reporters, I kind of naturally sympathize with the ordinary working person and not the rich or the poor.

politicians. But at Rolling Stone, look, you do a lot of the sort of picking on the yokel humor. I mean, that's part of what columnists have been doing since the days of Mencken in this country, right? And I was specifically hired to be that kind of person. I mean, that was my job, you know? I was walking into a very particular gig at Rolling Stone that had been, you know, the predecessors did that.

And now I look back at that stuff and I'm kind of embarrassed by it. And once Trump ran and I started to talk to people in the crowd, I did realize that there was this convergence of the economic stuff and the cultural resentment that was really powerful that I didn't understand all that well. But it was clearly something, like there was definitely resentment about

the way they were talked about in the press. And I remember Trump

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 bloodsuckers, you know, they, you know, they vampire squids. Yeah. Basically, he 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 then when you get out and you talk to people and ask, well, why are you voting for this guy, Donald Trump? And he's like,

because he's leading you all by the nose, he's getting free coverage, and just his triumph over us was important. And I saw that and I said, wow, that's amazing. And it was also incredible to me that the other reporters weren't interested in that story. I found that incredible. And to me, 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. Yeah.

- Exactly. - It's like, some satisfaction. - The shot and throw the thing. - At the misery of my adversaries. So you're going into this campaign, you've got Jeb and the whole crew against Trump in the Republican primary, and then you've got Hillary versus Bernie. Still, nobody will ever forget Hillary Clinton giving speeches to Goldman Sachs.

like in the run-up, like talk about a bubble, like strategic bubble. Like she didn't need that $700,000. I know. She was, and I would hope that if she'd 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 a mistake. No, because there is no such thing as morals. It's all cynical. They're way beyond that. Strategizing. These are the titans of industry. Will to power. And it's like the $700,000 was not worth losing the presidency over. Not that that did it, but...

It symbolized for everybody who the Democratic Party was becoming and that they were willing to do it. Yeah. And they weren't embarrassed about it. Right. I mean, I remember the New York Post did a story where they listed her speaking schedule. And there was one day that was just hilarious. She had like a speech in the morning when it was like 400 grand. And then she had to fly to another country like to do biotech. Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, this is like a month, just months before launching the campaign. Right. Within months, not months.

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 they found him boring or well, no, they were afraid of what I was gonna write Yeah, so they much preferred to have me crawling up the backsides of Republicans

Meaning that you would be vicious to the Clinton campaign. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, and then later on when I covered the Democrats in 2020, you know, that whole ridiculous thing.

20 person field or whatever it was. I did a couple of stories that were pretty nasty. I thought they were great stories. I'm like, this is sort of classic Rolling Stone stuff. And they were like, yeah, I think we've had just about enough of your campaign coverage at that point. So

Right, because somebody's going to lose an eye now. Yeah, exactly. It used to be fun and games, now Trump's here. Yeah, exactly. Right, right. But that's, I mean, that's kind of what you chronicle in Hate, Inc., is that these 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 Taibbi away from it. They just shared the ideological sort of,

hesitation, right? Yeah, there was at some point, I think 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

be the detached press corps that we had been in the past. There was no more of this writing negative stuff about Democrats when that happened, right? We were gonna just sort of look the other way. - Meanwhile, the cable networks are giving Trump unending airtime. - Right. - But yes, the memo went out, definitely.

It's a phrase. There was actually no memo that I know of. Right, there's no memo. There may actually have been one. There may have been a memo. From the Democracy Integrity Project or whatever came before that. But...

No, I mean, it was unspoken. I do believe that like, so there was from 2003 on this like robust blogosphere that they used to call it, which allowed all sorts of intra-democratic party movements

Daily Kos, 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, how to take on Bush, gay marriage, marriage equality, are you for civil unions? All of this robust fight

And I feel like around 2016, definitely after he wins, but heading into the general, the memo went out, that's over. Like we're not doing that. I think Alternet was one of those places where this was happening. They were very critical of Democrats. A lot of their high dollar funding just evaporates. A lot of these donors who were Democrats and believed in like, just the idea of like,

a full-throated debate yeah we're all of a sudden like you know what not not right now yeah yep and a lot of the ngos 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, 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, who said, I think it was called Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism. And then the whole idea was, 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 the way I got it was I remember I did a story where I interviewed somebody. It was right after the Access Hollywood thing. And I interviewed somebody at a speech he was supposed to go to but had been uninvited to by Wisconsin Republicans. So I talked to some Trump supporter who...

who had, his whole family had been union workers. They had always voted Democratic and now they said, you know, after NAFTA and all that stuff, we've been screwed so many times, we can't listen anymore and we're going with this guy.

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 I was totally shocked by that. 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 just couldn't, I mean, what did you think during that time? I mean, I was...

I'm curious. Well, I mean, I was just like, Wisconsin, I'm from Wisconsin. I didn't really, I lived in D.C. at the time, didn't pick up on it until I was in rural northern Wisconsin 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. And this was like July. And that's when I was like, it was like

David Obie's district for 40 years, deep blue district, flipped in 2010 and that's when I was like, oh my gosh, nobody has any idea what's about to happen.

The piece I'm proudest of from that year was in February of 2016 that I co-wrote with Zach Carter. And the headline is something like, it's in the Huffington Post headline, it's something like, don't laugh, Donald Trump could win. And like, here's how. There you go. And it was. I remember that. That was you. Yeah, me and Zach, me and Zach Carter. And we're saying like, you're going to hear about nothing but NAFTA from here until tomorrow.

the election and we pointed out some very basic things. We said, 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 the White House. It might have been Rendell by that time. Like there may have been a Democratic governor back, but Pennsylvania had had Republican governors for like a decade plus leading into that. Um,

And we're like, so we're just making this point that like look how did people respond to the scene? But that was still okay in February February February 2016. Yeah, the narrative hadn't solidified. Yeah. Yeah, there was there was no like cancellation attempt Yeah, because I think because I think people didn't see him as a threat yet, right?

Yes. Yeah. And so it's okay to say he can win because he can't win. Right. So it's fine to make an argument. And then our polling aggregator by November, well, we had our own pollster. It was called, we bought pollster.com. Oh, HuffPost. HuffPost tried to hire Nate Silver. Really? They were in a bidding war with Disney. Yeah.

How did that work out? Not well for us both. And so they went and bought Pollster.com, which was another polling aggregator run by Mark Blumenthal and some other pollsters. And ours was very similar to Nate's except had a slightly higher certainty that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And so by the time the election came up, 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. And so you need to factor that in. And he turned out to be right. Yeah. 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

presented 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 stuff is what told especially liberal readers, 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 the story seriously. You know, I got fooled

in a different way. I initially did what you did. 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 convention and some pollster sat me down and walked me through the numbers and said, look at the likability numbers, right? And I thought, well, that's insurmountable. Not realizing that there were a lot of people who hated both candidates. And, you know, if

But 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 double haters. The double haters this morning or someone wrote about the double haters this morning. That's 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 out a quarter of the country or a quarter of voters say they hate both candidates?

Is that the key demographic in 2024? Who wins the we hate both people? Well, I think that's, you know, they were the key demographic in 2016. It was a slightly smaller number back then. I think it was 19% or 20%. So I would imagine it would be even higher now. But it's not predictable how those folks are going to vote. I mean, I think there will be more people who won't vote, but...

Having covered campaigns, I always feel like people's, if they have a strong emotion somewhere, it's going to guide them to make the vote. So if they hate somebody more than they dislike somebody or more than they like mildly somebody else, that's going to bring them 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 just think it's tended to work out in Trump's favor, you know, when it's like that.

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And so after 2016, when does your Eric Garner book...

There's a call I can't breathe. Yeah, that was like two years later, 2018. And so that brings us to the height of cancellation time, cancellation period, which brings back your Russia time. Yes. How often had... In the culture wars, that book. How often had the exile been brought up again in your career? What made it... How did that happen then?

So I don't want to be conspiratorial about this, but what I will say is that during... It had never come up until 2016. And then I started to notice that whenever I wrote about certain things, it would come up. Like what kind of... When I said...

Negative things about Hillary Clinton, when I said positive things about Bernie Sanders, they came up. But, you know... In the context of the Bernie bro meme? Yeah, often, right? Oh, interesting. So 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. 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 birther rumor in 2008? I don't,

I think so. I mean, you know, I didn't really look all that hard at this. And, you know, I spent much more time just being bummed out and feeling guilty. And then I then I got mad about some of the press coverage that was making some.

Basically, I had written some very offensive things, but there was a scene in the book that was Mark fantasizing about something, about sort of a sexual harassment scene that wasn't true. And there was no way to talk about it and not sound like it.

There was no way to make sense of it. I mean, unless you had been through the whole Russia thing, like the disgustingness of the humor of the exile was never going to make sense to American audiences. So I didn't even really try. But, you know, that was really it turned out to mostly just be a blip. And in my career, the much bigger thing was the Russia gate thing. And that was when.

I suddenly was on the outside with everybody in the business. And that started before that. So, I don't know. - How so? - So right after Trump got elected, I had experience with Russia. I started getting calls about the subject. And 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 replicate any of this in the lab, you know? And I wrote a piece called Something About This Russia Story Stinks like really early. In Rolling Stone?

And all of a sudden, lots of people sort of froze me out. I stopped getting my phone calls returned. People in Congress didn't call me back. And yeah, that was the beginning for me. I started to realize that I was not going to be able to stick around in Congress.

That Rolling Stone see that's also interesting because again without seeming conspiratorial it just feels like a conspiracy it feels like a Clinton op it feels like you got on the wrong side of the sort of steel dossier Was the name of the Wall Street that point it's not an op. It's it's the entire culture. Yeah. Yeah, it's like but

But being driven by the external reporters who are feeding it around. And, like, there was a group of people that was, you know, talking to David Korn and all that stuff. People were leaking things. Yeah. I wish I had known that back then, you know? Because 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 now is normal, which is this groupthink culture, which one of the reasons I liked journalism early on when I first got into it is that it was not that

You used to go into a newsroom or a TV studio and it would be like a comedy club in the back room. Everybody was busting each other's chops about everything. You could say anything. Nobody cared what your politics were as long as you did the job well. I thought that was a really cool feature of politics.

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. I mean, I missed that. But it felt like, well, I mean, I went to college campus after they 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, though.

I think my, the way I handled it, I basically didn't touch the Russiagate stuff. I didn't go either way on it. I was just covering other things. Right. So that might have been the way that I just like subconsciously was like, you know what? Like, go, like,

If I could break some news there, like we broke a good story on Elliot Broidy who was doing like unregistered lobbying for Russia. But like somebody hacked his emails and we had the emails and boom, here you go. And he was like number two on the RNC or something. Really? It was a big fundraiser. Yeah, it was a big fundraiser. Big story. I think he went to prison. Yeah.

But that was not, but that was different than the campaign. That's just classic foreign governments influencing 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

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 overturned when it comes to Donald Trump. We have a limited amount of time and resources. We're going to spend them over here.

And I feel like maybe that's what you were doing with Russiagate. 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, well, 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 the press basically exists...

more for people who don't have anybody else to press their point of view than for people who have institutional backing already. So going back all the way to the beginning of my career, I always tried to pick stories that nobody else was doing because that's who needs those stories, right? Like for instance, we started talking about the

how Russia was being reported well everybody at home is getting it's great it's turning at the 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 I was a big fan of his when he got elected on on the campaign trail then right after that

You know, I had to cover finance and you know, he was involved in a pretty shady series of relationships with Citigroup. I did a big story called Obama's Big Sellout 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. We're supposed to do stuff that

is true but unpopular. So, but I do now, now because so much of corporate media is monomaniacal and in this Trump direction,

And, you know, I'm personally very worried about kind of collapse of civil liberties 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 that's kind of how I pick it. You know, people say, why don't you criticize Trump? Well, I'm like, we

we don't have enough people doing that already. Like there's five million people doing that already. So I think the first time you and I met in person was at a cafe in New York because you had finished a novel.

Oh, God. I don't know if you remember this. And I used to run this with a friend, a little publishing house. Because 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. And you had written a novel about a drug dealer, right? And 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. That was the first time you guys met. I would have thought you knew each other. Well, we've been on a bunch of listservs. Yeah, exactly. We didn't we digitally cross paths. Yeah. He's in New York. I'm in D.C. Also, after I had twins, I basically haven't left the house except to go to work. Also fair. That makes sense. Makes sense. And so, yeah.

you ended up doing it through Substack, kind of serializing the novel. What was that experience like? You were still at Rolling Stone, if I remember. How did you decide to make that, how did that evolve into your full thing? So that happened because the only thing I could do

with my existing Rolling Stone contract that wouldn't have violated the terms. Oh, it was like a non-compete. Yeah, it would have been something like fiction on, you know, a serialized book. They let me write books, so I had to write a book. And, you know, Substack came to me early, early,

And, you know, I got to know those guys pretty well. And it seemed like a really interesting idea. And after the experience of doing that, which I think turned out well, I also wrote Hate Inc. there first. And I thought...

this is going to work better just in general if I just leave Rolling Stone and do this for a living. So a lot of people ended up on Substack because they got forced out of their organizations. I'm like one of the only people who left out of greed. You know, I just thought I'm going to make more money doing this over here. So that's why I left. But a lot of people didn't understand at the time that that was true. How are you liking it? Yeah, I was going to say, how are you feeling about the Substack revolution?

I love it. I think Substack is a great thing. And when did you jump out? When did you fully launch it? 2019, maybe? 2020? Yeah. 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. Substack has not solved that problem, I don't think. How do you do investigative journalism and monetize it quickly? What it does pay for is the strong take, and there's actually quite a reward on Substack for

People, it's, you know, people like to, they will pay for something that they enjoy reading just in general, even if they don't agree with it, I've found. So, like, as opposed to doing,

I do a lot of reporting on Substack. That stuff tends not to do well financially, but the well-written essay does. - 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 see. - Oh, and so if it's a well-written piece,

I just, yeah. That converts more people. Right. And you get more, I see, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, 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. How do you balance out how often to do one or the other? I feel like Ryan's trying to get tips. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think one pays for the other. You know, you have to do some of those op-ed 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 whole idea of audience capture and the way that we've sort of, the way that we solve it here is

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. But it does acculturate the audience to difference of opinion and being okay with, like, I say some dumb things sometimes, believe it or not. But it doesn't mean that you have to go running for the hills. Right. It means you can just flame me and just say Emily's great 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 for. And open-minded. And open-minded, yeah. Even partisans. Yeah. So, I mean, like last week I did a piece about a writer for the World Socialist website, you know, a Trotskyite who's...

in prison in Ukraine. And, you know, there are some conservatives who subscribed to my site and they weren't mad about it, right? They're not going to unsubscribe because of stories like that. But they, you know, you will occasionally lose people over something that you say, but, you know, over time, I think it evens out as long as you do good work. I've heard from some people, I think a

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, 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 Greenwald and Lee Fong have talked, I think, openly about that, that like

'cause they picked up right wing audiences, not totally right wing audience, but a significant chunk were right wing 'cause they both agreed on the people that they were attacking. But then they realized after October 7th, they didn't agree on Israel. Glenn has, I think, lost a substantial portion of his audience, but he has such a massive audience that it doesn't matter. How do you think about that? Or do you?

You know, I try not to think about that.

I haven't done a lot of stuff on Israel, but I've never have. I never liked that story. I've never been there. When you did the show with Katie, how often did that come up? Because she's big into it. It's like Katie's biggest show. Katie Halper, yeah. Yeah, Katie Halper. You used to post a podcast with. Yeah, so Katie obviously cares a lot about that issue. We had a lot of guests on who would talk about that issue. I have written about it in terms of things like

- TikTok, you wrote about it when it came to the TikTok bill. - Right, right. And so we had people like Ali Abunimah on and that was after, I believe it was electronic and Ifada had been suppressed. And I had written about that even previously. So had Glenn. Glenn was one of the first people to write about that. I don't mind 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, I remember being on one of the first times I was on like CNN. They asked me a question about like Lebanon. And 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. So it's a weird place to be. But but so I stick with what I do know.

Well, yeah, 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 partisan left, hardcore partisan right, and then everyone else is just like, please, I just want to believe something. Please just tell me the truth. 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 just do the research and be honest about where you're coming from, which leads me to think if tomorrow the New York Times and the Washington Post said, we are doing journalism from a clear liberal perspective, it would go leaps and bounds towards restoring trust. I don't know. But I feel like that's why people subscribe. Yeah. To rack it. Right. Well, yeah.

They trust me to probably admit when I get stuff wrong or tell them where I'm coming from. Audiences are much... I mean, this is my buying experience going back decades. People always...

think that audiences are dumber than they really are. If you go back to the 90s, remember the whole Lad Mag movement we had in the States where everybody thought that you had to do stories in 400-word boxes and that people would not read anything longer than that. You mean like Axios? Yeah, right. I guess that's the idea there. I'm even going back into the Stone Age when it was still paper. But, you know, Rolling Stone...

When we started doing those finance pieces, I'm like, I'm doing 8,000 word pieces about credit default swaps and people love it, right? Like, as opposed to, you know, trying to dumb it down for people. I think audiences like it when you respect them and treat them like adults and, 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, yeah.

I don't know. Do you have the same thought? As I'm listening to you talk, I'm thinking the people on the left who think that you've betrayed them, that you've left the left, what happened to Matt Taibbi. That you've sold out. It's all for clicks or whatever. Do you think your politics have changed or do you think that you actually haven't been that political to begin with? How do you think about that? Because I'm sure you still get

people oh yeah all the time you can only block so many it's just like what happened to you like i i get that question it's it's the most annoying question on the planet right what happened to you yeah um people send that to you even me even made like have i i'm like i haven't changed in 20 years probably but but that's because there's within the business

Even small transgressions now are unacceptable. I mean I used to all the time do large, you know feature-length reports that were critical of the Democratic Party in Rolling Stone where they didn't like it and That was considered a virtue in the business once upon a time like you to you know We're gonna criticize Republicans also do this and

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 terms of things that I worry about, like characterizing audiences. But I see this, like, for instance, the censorship story and even some of the other stuff that's gone on with Trump as a continuation of this sort of degradation of...

civil liberties and due process that started with 9/11, which I was very sensitive to because I came into it after watching Putin come to power and seeing all of that disappear overnight there in Russia.

I think it's all the same story. It's just that the, you know, 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, 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

Because I mean, like, I'm in way more left spaces than I ever expected would be in my career. I absolutely love it. And I feel like I learn so much from it every day. Is there anything over the last, you know, 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'm much more conscious of how...

uniform the messaging is in like pop culture. I probably didn't notice that before. Like even stuff, even shows that I like 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 people

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 always right and Maybe a little bit more in touch with that than I ever have been but people you know People would characterize my audience as right-wing now. It's really not that most of the people who I

subscribed to my site are like old disappointed liberals like me. And there's just enough of those people to support my operation, I would say. But yes, I think I've learned quite a lot. And I go back and look at some of the things that I wrote over the years and I'm a little embarrassed.

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 was 30 Rock. And 30 Rock was doing this dual-tiered, like, economic satire that was brilliant at the time about, like, Comcast and Cable 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, these are good people, 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. - The one thing we didn't talk about yet, you and I were almost sort of colleagues

With the old racket. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. The racket thing. Yep. So I still work for The Intercept, which was set up by the. Pierre. Pierre Omidyar. And when he set it up, he originally was going to do 12, as I was told the story, 12 magazines. Then it was two. Two.

There was going to be the intercept, was going to be the investigative, civil liberties, national security. They were going to do sports. They were going to do basically a Conde Nast, but for the internet in the digital media era. And you were going to run Racket.

Which was that named for the what's the Smedley Butler? No, we just like the it was Alex Perrine and I at the time was gonna be like this like investigative business, right? Yeah and The stories I heard of the intercept in its early days are just utterly hilarious and it's just it's shocking that it ever got launched Yeah, yours didn't get launched. Yeah, like how long were you there before?

Like seven months. 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. First Look Institute or whatever, First Look Media, whatever it's called, just one of the most ridiculous...

organizations ever. I mean, there's so many things like I remember walking in there and there were, 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. 2014? Yeah, it was 2014. And you left Rolling Stone for it? I did. And then you went back to Rolling Stone? I went back to Rolling Stone on my knees.

You left as a hero, like I'm launching a brand new publication. The new frontier. Seven months later, you're like, hey. I defied Jan Wenner. Jan can be a difficult person. And I thought he was dicking me around at contract time. And I was like, I'll show you. I'm going to go make it big. I'm going to go make it big. And I ran off to somebody even richer than you. Yeah.

And they were going to invest 250 million dollars in media then I get there and it's like we don't have money to buy a pencil right Intercept literally that happened And there were rumors that Pierre himself was like doing expense reports in the in the very beginning 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 and

You got the subway right there. It would have been faster. Actually, I can tell a story about that. They had this idea that we should not use phones, right? And that we should only, the only time that we should ever be talking on the phone is in one of those booths that 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 doesn't really, like, that doesn't work all the time, you know? Why don't we just have phones, right?" 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 'cause they wanted to do assigned seating.

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 this group and I said, you all have to sit in a certain space, I would lose face immediately with these people. So that thing went down south quickly. But yeah, it was so. That's right, we were almost colleagues. That's interesting. I didn't get there until 2017. Yeah.

So I missed those early days, but I got to hear the stories. Yeah. And we took on some of the people who were at Racket. Right. John Schwartz. Schwartz, yes. And some others.

Before we wrap here, we actually haven't even opened one of the most important chapters in your journalism career yet, Matt, which is the Twitter files. And there's been, I mean, you've talked plenty about Elon Musk publicly. You've talked about the process in really interesting ways that I think people can go and listen to. I'm curious, with all of this context in mind, Matt,

Russian oligarchy, financial crisis, censorship apparatuses from the Pentagon 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 com where they're coming from and what they want out of the situation right i even asked him you know straight out i said what is it you're looking for out of this you know i i mean and he

He sort of said something about trying to restore trust with Twitter's audiences by opening the vault on different censorship practices. But this was it was such a big step for I mean, no CEO has ever done anything like that before. Right. So I can't say that I ever understood where he was coming from or why he was doing anything. And then.

Shortly after we started, there was that incident where he banned a bunch of people for the jet thing, right? And we had conversations back and forth about it. And I made the decision right away, which 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 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. Right. 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 felt like though, I mean, I understood that there were people who, um,

who wanted 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 until we have a story. And, um,

And so, yeah, I can't say honestly that I understand what Elon's motivation was, but I have to give him credit because the stuff that we did get was historic 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. You don't talk to him anymore, right? Like that bridge is burned. Yeah, unfortunately, you know.

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? Crushing substack. Oh, which anyway proves your point about source management 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 gonna lose access to information that's in the public's interest you have to be smart and

Yeah, well, there's a line, right? Like you can't, you know, soft pedal your coverage of somebody in order to get something, right? Right.

That's like access journalism. There's a word for that, right? The Twitter files, you know, look, ethically, it was a unique situation, I would say. I consulted with all kinds of people, like some of the old dragons in this business, you know, how do you deal with something like this? And I don't think we crossed that line. 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 is there more in there, you think? 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. But yes. And, you know, there are agencies, you know, when we started, one of the things, the problems was we didn't even just know the names of these different agencies, what they did, like which acronyms... CISA. CISA, yeah, exactly. Like CISISA. Yeah.

you know, that, well, that's a long story, but there's a lot of stuff like that on Twitter, especially in attachments that we haven't opened and looked at. Oh, interesting. That, you know, as we continue to do that every now and then, we'll find something. Like, Schellenberger's still looking pretty closely at all that stuff, so. Wow. I mean, it's,

I don't envy 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 a dream. I mean, as soon as we saw, like, FBI flag this, DHS flag that, I knew. Jim Baker. Right, yeah. I mean, maybe once in a career, you'll get something like that. And...

It turned out to be a really big story about this subterranean relationship with the intelligence agencies and it was very hard to work out. That's always fun as a journalist, the challenge of it.

But, you know, I have some resentments, too, because I do think that some of the other some reporters who dismissed it early on because they can't stand Elon, you know, kind of missed the forest with the trees there that it wasn't really a partisan story and they should have been looking at it. But, you know, I think it's a net plus overall. Yeah.

Got anything else? I mean, I could keep going. I could double the time of this. It's been so interesting. And you two are people I've learned a lot from just watching you guys do amazing reporting. Oh, that's nice of you. Actually, I do have a question for you both. I mean, like this concept of, you know, Crystal and Sagar obviously did it too.

Part of the whole idea is to go against the whole thesis of like the hate hate Inc thing and See how it works when audiences aren't just being cheering sections, but how is it working for you? I mean does it be I think was working shockingly well, right? Yeah. Yeah quite pleasantly surprised at how well it's working. Yeah What one thing that was very heartening actually is

Because 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. It's like fully anti-abortion, for example. Yeah. It's not easy for you. So I went to the GW encampment, the Gaza encampment, a couple weeks ago, whenever that was happening back in May.

And 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 OK to hear different views because also we you know, you're going to hear stuff about the Israel-Palestine on our show that you probably won't find elsewhere. Yeah.

But they're also, those people are okay hearing right-wing views that they don't agree with. Right. They want to. It was interesting how concentrated the audience was there. It's like, wow, everybody here watches this show. It's amazing. That's great. That's great. That's heartening. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, I mean, people can answer in the comments section if they agree whether it's working or not. But if they're in the comments section, that means they're...

That's right. Their heads. Yeah. Well, I mean, not necessarily, but I will go back to... Well, not necessarily fans. That's true. Right after the Dobbs decision came out, you and I were on the show together. And I just feel like as someone who grew up when media was falling apart, like you just want the transparency and it's almost efficient to get both perspectives. Mm-hmm.

in one sitting. 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've met a decent number of people who say that they watch both CNN and Fox or Fox and MSNBC because they don't trust either of them. Right. But they want to hear both and then sort it through themselves. And right, we just cut out the middleman. You can just...

Right. Yeah. One stop shopping. There you go. Awesome. Excellent. Emily, Ryan, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming down. Thanks for watching, everyone. This is this does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints. I finally found the camera, Ryan. I was like, which camera is it? But it's right here. Make sure you subscribe BreakingPoints.com so you get this show early and all to your inbox right away on Thursday nights.

There you go. And so we'll see you next week. Sounds good. See you then.