Joe Rogan Experience #1556 - Glenn Greenwald

hello glenn hello joe rogan how are you i'm great man it's great to finally make your quentin acquaintance digitally at least yeah yeah we've been trying for a while i like before the pandemic um so i'm glad we're at least finally able to do this version of it yeah i hope we do it in person eventually that would be nice for sure what is it like down in brazil in general or no i've been to brazil what's going on yeah like right now i've been to brazil multiple times i love it down there yeah i mean so obviously it's a fraught situation politically because the country in 2018 elected you know a genuine fanatic someone who explicitly um prefers the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985 as opposed to democracy which succeeded it jair bolsonaro um and then beyond that uh the coroner virus has hit this country almost harder than any other probably just right after the united states but because of extreme poverty here and income inequality um you could probably make the case that it's hit this country harder than any other um so politically in terms of the pandemic and then of course economically things are pretty bleak but at the same time brazil which is what made me fall in love with it in the first place is always this country as you know if you visited so bursting full of vibrancy and energy and potential and uniqueness that i'm always kind of optimistic about it no matter how grim things seem to be they're very very friendly people i really love it down there it's i first went there in 2003 for the uh abu dhabi uh world jiu jitsu championships and so uh right yeah because i guess you're the fighting that you like is super popular here right there are a lot of brazilian oh yeah fighters and oh yeah and the original ufc fighter was uh hois gracie who's a member of the famous gracie clan that came out of rio so uh i've yeah i've been going there for 17 years i really do love it down there yeah you know it's funny the it is i mean it's a culture as you say where things are where the people are super nice and before i lived here i lived in you know manhattan where i lived and worked which is pretty much the exact polar opposite of brazil in terms of the mentality of the people i remember you know i used to come to rio when i first started coming here you would go to the grocery store or the supermarket and there'd be a line of like eight people and the people online would just stop and chat with the cashier you know for like three minutes and i would like be ready to have an aneurysm because i'd come from manhattan where you know if like you're behind somebody in the atm line and they like accidentally put a wrong button or the wrong password you want to murder them for wasting four seconds of your life and then after a while you know i started realizing look if i'm gonna live here i need to accept that kind of cultural vibe and it really just taught me a lot about the need not to have to maximize the utility of every moment yeah i have a friend who moved down there from los angeles uh to do jiu jitsu and he said the first thing you have to accept is that you're on brazil time they are just so laid back if you need anything to get done if you need a plumber and he's supposed to be there at 10 he might not be there until one and when he's there he's going to be real casual about it and it might not get done for weeks and weeks something that you get done in la in a couple of hours it's just it is what it is you just got to accept it they're just more laid back they're not in a rush yeah i i've asked many people many brazilians here why do you bother having the word for fast in portuguese since it applies to nothing and yeah it's true um and you can you know decide that that's what you hate about it for me just the complete lack of organization or urgency in terms of time is one of the things i love about it um so being there and you were there living there when you broke the snowden interview the snowden yeah i've been living here right since 2005 so the snowden story was 2013. did that did you feel this is what i've always wanted to ask you about this did you feel physically in danger when that was happening because that was such a gigantic moment and so terrifying for most americans that were now sure that the government had access to our emails and our phone records and and it was all broken by by you and snowden and i wondered like were you worried for your your safety yeah for sure i mean for one thing you know at the time we were living in a part of rio that was very isolated we were living literally on a mountain in the middle of the woods and you know i had with me at all times physically on my person 14 or 15 thumb drives that contained hundreds of thousands if not more i've never quantified it on purpose you know of the most sensitive documents possessed by the most powerful government on the planet the most secretive agency within that government and i would carry them on my person at all times you know i would go to the supermarket and just start laughing because on my back would be a backpack filled with you know top secret cia and as nsa documents and obviously there were a lot of people who wanted to get their hands on those documents not just the us government to take them back though they realized at some point that that would be impossible but other governments non-government actors but then on top of that you know every story that we were doing was affecting markets it was affecting diplomatic relations so there was obviously a big big interest in a lot of intelligence agencies around the world and what i was doing and you know felt monitored all the time um because i was you know not like the kind of paranoid feeling of monitoring but the actual being monitored is has been confirmed by in a lot of different ways but you know the biggest concern at the time was that the us government being the us government got very bullying and very threatening and was explicitly and implicitly both in public and private making clear that if i left brazil there was a good chance that they would try and arrest me i mean remember how extreme they were with snowden they brought down the plane of the president of bolivia when he was coming back from moscow on the suspicion that he might have been taking snowden with them and he of course he wasn't but that's how extreme they were so i had to i stayed in brazil for about 10 months and didn't feel safe leaving the justice department was telling my lawyers if he leaves and shows up at any airport we're going to arrest him and the brazilian government was super protective of us because a lot of that snowden reporting revealed how the nsa and the uk and canada were spying on brazilian institutions brazilian oil companies the president of brazil delmarusa the population so in brazil this reporting was looked at very favorably and so the government the senate offered a lot of protection so i just felt very safe in brazil and very unsafe elsewhere well it's very nice that you felt safe in brazil it's very nice that they were protecting you um do they have a history of monitoring their people the same way the united states does well so you know as i referenced earlier um the history of brazil the recent political history is a really dark one but relevant to the us in 19 for the 1950s early 1960s they were building the first really vibrant democracy in latin america and they were steadfastly attempting to remain neutral and the endless soviet union u.s cold war but in 1963 and 1864 they had this kind of center-left president that the u.s thought was becoming a little too close to moscow a little bit too socialist you know nothing communist but just very kind of mild reforms like rent control and uh land reform and some nationalization of companies to try and assuage the really brutal income inequality that has plagued the country forever and so the us government first under john kennedy and then under london johnson worked with right-wing brazilian generals to overthrow that democratically elected government violently and they imposed a military dictatorship for the next 21 years of which the current brazilian president jair bolsonaro was apart as an army captain and those are really dark days you know dissidents were murdered journalists were killed and exiled everybody was spied upon with the help of the cia and mi5 and mi6 in the uk and so a lot of that kind of endures that relationship between the cia and and the brazilian government but since 1985 when it democratized it's kind of reap it's become once again a model of a liberal democracy so no i don't no government in the world is obsessed with spying on the world like the us's um but yeah there's a pretty dark underbelly like there is in any major country in brazil of kind of like a deep state or an intelligence community whatever you want to call it that definitely you know uses the dark arts to maintain control over the population when you hit send when you finally released when you when you put that story out what was the feeling like was there ever a oh [ __ ] what have i done moment no there's probably should have been and if i were like healthier from a mental health perspective there would have been a bigger one of those but you know it was we were i was in hong kong first of all you know we had flown there to meet to meet snowden um and i wasn't sleeping at all i mean obviously i knew it was you know gonna be one of the biggest stories of of that generation if not the biggest um and i had spent years joe you know like writing about the nsa and you know kind of trying to warn people that it seemed like it was being a lot more invasive and a lot more aggressive about monitoring our private communications and our private activities domestically than either the law permitted or anyone knew but it was very difficult to sell that alarm because everything was done behind a wall of secrecy and so when i finally got these documents in my hand you know it's like the dream right it's why you go into journalism but especially for me to be able to show the world that everything was so much more extreme than even i thought that i just wanted to get them out in the world as soon as possible like any delay at all on the part of the guardian which was the newspaper with which i was working at the time and reporting you know drove me into a rage um i just felt like the world deserved to see these documents and also you know i was so inspired by by by snowden i mean you've talked to him i think twice now so you know like you know he's this 29 year old kid at the time who pretty much gambled we thought 95 likelihood he was going to end up in prison not for a few years but for the rest of his life and like not in a nice prison but in the kind of person that you go and when they accuse you of jeopardizing american national security but he did it because he believed in the cause like that was not the [ __ ] reason like not the movie script reason like that was his genuine which shocked me right i kept was this jaded reporter who kept looking for the real motive but that was it there was no other motive and so i just felt like i owed him such a duty and kind of inspired by his example i thought you know if he's willing to go to prison for the rest of his life um and he chose me to work with him you know i kind of courage kind of became infectious um and we kind of adopted this trench bunker mentality like we were in this together and we were gonna fight everybody um and that became the energy much more and it kind of drowned out the fears that probably were rational for us to have i i felt very honored and very very fortunate to be able to talk to him and i i think he's a very noble person unusually noble and you in long-form conversations if if there was any hint of something different i really believe it would have leaked out he really is that guy and i think history when we look upon this case i mean the documentary was pretty excellent that showed all the the moments leading up to you releasing the story but i think these conversations with him i just feel very fortunate to have that platform where he's willing to come on and talk for hours at a time and express his thoughts on just on spying in general national security issues and all these situations that he faced uh up to and now currently because of that he's it's it's a it's a very it's embarrassing that this is the world that we live in this is the country that we live in that that man who i really genuinely believe is a hero is now a russian citizen forever yeah i mean hopefully there's an opportunity um just because of all the bizarre vindictive impulses that trump has and the fact that by complete coincidence the people who want snowden to be in russia forever or to rot in prison happen to be trump's enemies as well that i'm hoping there's an opportunity to persuade trump after the election particularly if he loses but even if he doesn't that he should follow through on what he's now twice bizarrely raised on his own which was the prospect of pardoning snowden it's something i'm probably my top priority in the world at the moment and the reason is is what you just said which is you know we we we're so accustomed to people doing things for uh just misguided reasons corrupted reasons um people lying deceiving about why they're doing things about presenting a false version of who they are and that's the thing is you know you talk to him for those hours when i got to hong kong you know before becoming a journalist i was a litigator in manhattan and i used those skills you know i i mean i kind of created a little mini guantanamo where i just like put them in front of me and just question them for eight hours straight three different you know three straight days without letting them even have a glass of water or go to the bathroom because i really wanted to know what was actually motivating him who was this person to whom i was about to time myself and my reputation and credibility eternally and he really is somebody who you know and like the thing about it too is like that's so amazing about it is that oftentimes people who leak secrets or who become a source that you know wants to expose secrets and are willing to go to prison are often kind of [ __ ] up people right they're like alienated from society um they feel persecuted and mistreated they don't have much going on in their lives and therefore don't feel like they have a lot to risk snowden was exactly the opposite you know he had at the time this incredibly beautiful and brilliant girlfriend who today is his wife they had been together for years and in order to do what he did he had to deceive her he had to leave the country and not tell her what he was doing because he wanted to make certain that when the government knocked on her door she could truthfully say she knew nothing about it because he knew they would go after her if if they could tire to it he had a great job he was making a lot of money you know he was a high school dropout but had taught himself these really coveted skills um so he had a great career ahead of him a mother and a father who both loved him very stable home life he had none of those traits you know that typically are used to demonize people who do this which is why i knew he was going to be gold from a media perspective and to be able to prevent the government from demonizing him in the way they like to do but more importantly that like leaving aside all the perception stuff and all the pr and media stuff you know he's probably the person or one of the people certainly i admire most in this world in all the time i've lived and what's so unbelievable you know people always say to me oh poor snowden you know he's trapped in russia he can't come home he's facing multiple felony charges he's been separated from his all of which is true but like i also always say that he's the person who i know in this world who when he puts his head down on his pillow at night he falls asleep most easily um because there's something about knowing that you you faced this dangerous choice and you chose the right thing i mean in hong kong as i said we were never i was never sleeping my colleague or portrait was never sleeping we were sleeping like an hour or two with the aid of very strong sleep narcotics and you know he would say like at 9 30 he would yawn he would say okay guys i think i'm going to hit the hay like he had no care in the world um and that was i was like what the [ __ ] and he would like to sleep for eight hours you know he would wake up have a little coffee um but that's what that you know clean conscience does to a person even with a clean conscience i just don't understand the weight of the stress that he was under how i don't understand how he could be so calm he i mean he he didn't have stress that's what's so bizarre i mean you saw in the film right in the documentary citizen floor where like you know if because we were we had no idea what the cia knew we had no idea what the chinese government we knew we had no idea what hong kong authorities knew we were waiting i was always waiting for the door to be kicked in at any moment you know and and for him at least if not the rest of us you know me and laura to be taken away um and like i said i mean our working assumption the whole time was that there was you know as excited as i was the one thing that was kind of a dark cloud that hovered over all the time was that this person who i had now become connected with and developed an admiration for i was certain at any moment he was going to be in the hands of the us government and the next time i would see him would be on television in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a courtroom getting ready to be sentenced to like 50 years in prison in one of those hell holes that the u.s specializes in where you spend 23 and a half hours a day alone in your cell um and you have 30 day 30 minutes a day where you you know get to walk in a little room and in the sun to satisfy legal requirements and that was going to be him for the rest of his life he got very lucky i mean he almost did end up that way so for me i was you know concerned for him stress for him and but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose i mean it wasn't like you know and that was really important for me to know that he had thought through all the likely consequences i didn't want to feel like i was using somebody's work product who hadn't given full thought to what it is that they had gotten themselves into and it was only once i became very you know he he could cite the statutes with which they were going to charge him and what the legal defenses that were available were so he had given extreme thought to this he's an adult and he made that choice and it was amazing to this very day he's completely at peace with it it's stunning uh it's al it's also stunning the lack of anger from the american people that the apathy and the sort of just acceptance that even though it has been deemed illegal what the nsa was doing that he exposed illegal activity that they still would punish him if they caught him and everybody's like huh you know so like what is government then if government is a group of people that are allowed to do something that has absolutely been deemed illegal by the courts and if you catch them doing this illegal thing and then report it and everyone agrees that it's wrong everyone agrees it's unconstitutional but yet if they get you they will still put you in jail like what the [ __ ] is government what is government right not only that right not only is the person who exposes what are crimes what courts have set our crimes not only is that person punished as though they've done something wrong when in reality they're owed the gratitude right of the entire country for stopping criminal spying by the government on our population domestically which was one of the primary preoccupations of the american revolution that was what the founding was about it was about you know the king not being able to send his goons into your house and into your neighborhoods and search through your papers unless they had a proven reason to do so approved by a court that's what snowden demonstrated told all of us the government was doing to us not to the terrorists not to have it to all of us not only is it that he's been punished for having blown the whistle on criminality when he deserves a parade down fifth avenue what's so much worse is that the people who broke the law haven't paid any price they're not they don't have charges against them nothing in fact they remain in government the the thing that made snowden finally commit the last kind of the straw that broke his his his back as as it as as it were was when james clapper president obama's senior national security official he ran the entire national security apparatus as the director of uh national intelligence went before the senate and was asked explicitly does the u.s government does the nsa collect dossiers and tons of information on millions of americans and he looked at the senator who asked him that and said no sir not wittingly that's a crime that's a felony just the light of the senate let alone to do it and not only was james clapper never prosecuted he was never fired he served out his term as president obama's senior national security official and you know where he works now he works at cnn disseminating the news to the american public after he got caught [ __ ] lying about the most important question he's ever been asked um that's you know that's how you know that you live in a country that despite the facade of democracy has gone very very of course you know like the one thing that i always think about is like if you if you kind of start from scratch think about what a healthy government would be in a healthy government um the the population would know everything about what the government is doing right that's just basic transparency we would we need to know what the government is doing with the power the public power we place in their hands with very rare exceptions right like we should know what movements they're planning if they're in a war with troops they have a right to something secret but the overwhelming amount of things they do should be public and transparent and they should know nothing about us right that's why we have a right to privacy we're private citizens they're the public sector that's what the basic foundation of a healthy society would be the united states has completely reversed that not just the us but the west generally since world since the 9 11 attacks where everything that they do is presumptively secret we know almost nothing about what they do except what they decide to tell us most of what they do is mark classified and secret and hidden whereas because of the spying apparatus that they've built they know everything about what we do they know with whom we communicate they know what we say they know where we go it's completely reversed what a free and healthy society ought to be and that more than anything is what snowden exposed and what's stunning to me is that he's now a citizen of russia he he lives over there they've accepted him and they've given him well he's not he's still he's he's still a u.s citizen but he has permanent residence permanent right so he is like the equivalent of a green card but he's still he's very emphatic that he's still a us citizen and intends always to be and it's sort of out of the public consciousness i mean unless he does an interview with you or with me or some other publication or something and then briefly it's in in the public's eye for a moment but no one seems to be outraged it's a small amount of people that seem to be outraged a small population also that are outraged that julian assange if they do extradite him to america they plan on putting him in a super max prison for again exposing crime doing what a journalist is supposed to do i mean and everyone's apathetic about it it's it's it's very bizarre and it speaks to the lack of trust that we have in mainstream media today because they're not up in arms about this there's no giant pieces on cnn running on a daily basis this is not something that everybody has got on their news feed on their phone every day and it should be it really should be because if you can't expose crime in the government you don't really have a government you have a dictatorship that's dressed up like a government exactly and you know what you know what you know what is done to to obscure that fact that you just described accurately there's like a pretense of descent right so you have cnn or msnbc or like the op-ed pages of the new york times and the washington post where people ostensibly express different opinions and have debates and arguments but they're in extremely constrained ranges of opinion that are permitted right like you're allowed to say the democrats are good or you're allowed to say the republicans are bad or vice versa and that's pretty much it actual dissidents people who expose what the government is doing in reality right like not the [ __ ] daily kind of trivial chatter that creates this illusion of the elites fighting with one another but the actual underbelly of what the us government does in the world people who criticize that and especially people who expose to people like edward snowden and julian assange they're not they don't have the freedom to be dissidents they're the the us government has succeeded in keeping julian assange in prison for a year and a half now there's no chance he's going to get out of a british prison even if he wins every one of his appeals and and hearings for at least another two to three years and if he doesn't he'll be extradited to the us and go to prison for the rest of his life and absent a pardon by by trump snowden will be in exile for the rest of his life and if the us government could get their hands on him they would put him in the same place that they want to put julian assange because in reality actual dissidence actual activism against the us government and its power centers is barred and prohibited and punished that i mean that is just the reality of the united states and it is tyrannical um but so many people and like the other thing i just want to say is the worst scumbags on all of this like isn't necessarily the population right like i don't really blame people who you know have to go to work and work two jobs and have kids and are barely scraping by which is the majority of the population especially now for not thinking much about edward snowden or julian assange the cases are complicated there are legal issues involved and there's huge globs of propaganda to which they're subjected um you know like one example is you know snowden's in russia you know why he's in russia because the us government forced him to be there by invalidating his passport when he tried to leave and by joe biden bullying every other country that he applied for asylum with they trapped him in russia he never chose to be there he was planning on transiting through and then they use the fact that he's in russia to say oh look he's a traitor otherwise why would he be in russia so there's really effective propaganda so i don't blame the population the people i blame are journalists it is the job of journalists to defend the people who expose the truth if you don't do that as a journalist what is your [ __ ] purpose why are you a journalist and not only don't journalists care much about what's being done to julian assange or edward snowden most of them if you actually ask them and talk to them about it will justify and defend the fact that they ought to be in prison because what they really are servants of the government and not what they pretend to be so joe biden was responsible for blocking his asylum to other countries yeah joe biden and john kerry i mean you know i'm not it's not like they were uniquely bad i mean they were carrying out the the policy of the obama administration but it was joe biden who took the lead he the one of the first things that he did was when snowden left hong kong he the ticket that he had was moscow havana and then he was going to go to ecuador where he was going to get asylum and joe biden called the cuban government and said if you allow him safe passage which they had already granted him you're going to suffer consequences like you've never experienced from the u.s government before so they withdrew their safe passage guarantee um and then he applied you know to countries like the gear that frequently grant asylum to to whistleblowers like sweden finland even germany and france where there were also a lot of revelations that were looked favorable upon favorably because he was showing that those populations how the nsa was spying on them and then at the last minute um his lawyers would get a call from the consulate of those countries and say joe biden called and said that they'll start a trade war with us or they'll withdraw from this treaty or they'll do this or that um if we grant asylum and i'm sorry we just can't when obama was running you remember the hope and change website and it i do it expressly talked about very very clearly talked about protecting whistleblowers and this is a big part of what he was running on what do you think happens when you get in office you have i mean i'm a fan of the way obama communicates i'm a fan of what he represents as a president he was just so so eloquent and such a great statesman and everyone had so much hope for what he was going to do once he got into office but his administration was one of the worst for whistleblowers ever what do you think happens when you get in there i mean do you think it's like the bill hicks bit where they show you uh an angle of the kennedy assassination that you've never seen before and then they ask you are there any questions you know like i mean i don't wanna you know i i don't wanna be like too i don't wanna be too maximalist in that in like the conspiracy theorizing but i'll just give you a quick uh vignette like a little anecdote a little antidote just to like introduce my view of this which is in january of 2017 days before trump was inaugurated chuck schumer went on the rachel maddow show you can find this clip it's online it's amazing and trump had been posting a bunch of shocking stuff on twitter mocking the cia for having gotten iraq so wrong which they did because he was angry at them because they were essentially leaking against his administration before it even began and were blaming russia for his election victory which he felt was delegitimizing him so he started criticizing the cia and rachel and chuck schumer went on rachel maddow's show and she asked him about it he said morality and ethics aside of doing that for a hard-nosed businessman like trump claims to be you have to be the biggest imbecile in the world to stand up to and challenge and attack the intelligence community because nobody has more weapons to destroy you if you do that than they do and it was kind of like a throwaway line but in reality it was one of the most important and candid admissions of how the government actually works that has ever been broadcast certainly on that shitty network but really like on tv ever because he was essentially saying there's this permanent power faction which dwight eisenhower warned about you know in 1961 when he was leaving the presidency called it the military industrial complex but there's this power this permanent power faction that is much power more powerful than the officials we elect and who stay in washington in exert power regardless of the outcome of elections who you can't challenge or impede because they'll destroy you um and so you know obama despite the lofty rhetoric and like the visionary posturing which i also don't want to say fell for but was kind of inspired by in 2007 um has always been a very shrewd pragmatist you know he's always known how from his time at harvard when he became the the editor-in-chief of the larvae how to appease institutional authority and so i think when he got into washington he he he thought to himself i have these ambitious agenda items like healthcare and other things and i only can get them done if i'm not going to be provoking the ire of the cia which is why for example he also said during the campaign he would consider prosecuting the people on the cia who tortured deep helpless detainees and then quickly said i'm going to give them all immunity because she didn't want to be at war with the cia so i think that's part of it right like when someone like julian assange someone like edward snowden leaks these secrets it's not obama necessarily but it's the cia the just department the nsa the fbi demanding saying this is our priority you need to punish these people or we're going to have an endless series of leagues so part of it is just that kind of calculation like a very pragmatic calculation like look i may be president but i'm not actually the only one who wields a lot of power in this town and then i think the other part of it is when you become president you're sitting in that chair and you have like kind of the unprecedented and incomparable power of the u.s government at your disposal if you think if you believe too much in your own righteousness if you believe that you're a benevolent and noble person using that power for benevolent and noble ends then you start to believe that anyone who stands in your way and is impeding you is somebody who inherently is ill-intentioned or at least engaged in misconduct that ought to be sanctioned and punished and i think that kind of became part of obama's worldview too like it's one thing to champion whistleblowers when they're exposing george bush and dick cheney's secrets but when they're exposing eric halder and barack obama and joe biden and john kerry and hillary clinton's secrets it seems a lot less benevolent to somebody from obama's pers you know sitting in his place it is amazing that schumer would make that statement on on television it really have you seen it no i haven't you shouldn't see it and show it it's amazing jamie just pulled it up right here trump being really dumb to fight with intelligence ages it just seems like he would know better than to say that publicly specifically to say that publicly on television yeah i mean i guess when you're chuck schumer and you're just like a creature who's lived in that sewer for decades and barely ever emerges you know to like breathe human error like those things that you know are just part of your world so embedded in it that everyone knows you forget that it's supposed to be hidden that it's kind of shocking to other people um you know i'll give you an example like my husband and i we rescue dogs so we have 25 dogs at our house so we go out to dinner and i know exactly so we go out to dinner and someone will say like hey you know you guys love dogs how many dogs you have one big oh 25 like it's the most natural thing in the world and of course like every person we say that to thinks we're [ __ ] crazy right like they think we're those like cat lady order people because we forget that what's so normal to us is actually insane to other people we have to remind ourselves like we have to ease them into that i think that's what happened like if you work in washington you just for decades you just know you don't [ __ ] with the cia and he saw trump doing that because trump wasn't a creature of washington and was kind of saying like he's being stupid well trump has such a tremendous ego too it doesn't seem like anybody is out of bounds for him like it seems like he he feels like he could [ __ ] on anyone like anyone he's in some sort of conflict with is is going to get the wrath of his ire it just doesn't seem like he feels anyone is above him or beyond reproach i think was probably the primary factor in why a lot of people found him appealing in 2016 yeah right so if you have a lot of anger you know a lot of just ambient rage towards institutions not democratic or republican or left and right or right just the power elite and you have somebody who just you know dumps on them with such contempt and doesn't have the slightest regard for any of it it's kind of cathartic you know you want to side with that person because he hates the same things you hate well i remember when he started using the term fake news and i really thought it was a cop-out i thought well this is just a a really a sad way to delegitimize all these criticisms against him and all of the things that they were bringing up that at least seemingly were factual but now the more time goes on and the more time if the more you pay attention to the difference between left-wing reporting and right-wing reporting and you try to find like well where what's where's the reality in this someone's biased there's something going wrong here when you particularly see the coverage that we're currently dealing with with with biden and you know you rightly have been extremely critical of uh twitter and facebook and these uh social media giants that have chosen to censor the new york post article and that they've they've literally blocked the white house press secretary from twitter because she posted a link to a story from a newspaper that's you know it's a 200 year old plus newspaper i believe it's the oldest newspaper currently running in america this is that yeah the fourth largest the fourth largest it's insanity i mean it literally they're they're locked out of their twitter account they're locked out of their they can't in the week leading up to the election the fourth largest newspaper and i don't know if it's the oldest but it's one of the oldest for sure it was founded by alexander hamilton is barred by twitter like the primary source of information for most people in journalism and politics from posting information it's it's so bizarre it's madness it's so bizarre it's it's madness yeah and i think you know go ahead i was gonna say you don't the the the coverage that you you hear about like if you pay attention to cnn which i i read cnn online pretty much every day i just i want to see what they're saying at least i used to read it for the news and now i go what is what's their take you don't see it oh god it's like the hunter biden story is completely illegitimate it's not worth our time but ellen's mean did you know ellen's mean she's still mean here's another story about ellen being mean it's [ __ ] straight this person broke up you know this rapper broke up with his girlfriend well these two are getting back together front page of cnn you don't hear a [ __ ] peep about the revelations that are coming out of this laptop where it ever came from jamie actually had a really good point i want to bring it up to you to see if this is possible uh so i've heard of people being able to hack into like an icloud account from time to time and if you had that ability to have the account hacked you would need to clone it to a computer to then be able to decipher this material and then turn that into somewhere because you need to you can't say you hacked the icloud account is that possible that then they then put it on a a macbook turn it in and oh look what's on this macbook but they do have emails and signed receipts from hunter biden supposedly supposedly but they haven't denied that this is his laptop which would be the first thing that's this is the key point so you know when we reported the snowden archive you know like when we hit send that first time like you asked me earlier you know there were millions of documents right there was we had a high degree of confidence in their authenticity because we had verified a lot of them you use your intuition you examine them from a kind of metadata perspective to see if there's uh indicia of forgery or alteration but you can never prove the negative that none of the documents has been altered or forged by snowden or by somebody else right like you just don't know for sure with 100 certainty until you hit publish and the way that you ultimately find out for sure is if you publish that first report and the people that you're reporting about don't come back and say what the [ __ ] are you talking about that's not a real document we didn't ever do that that's not our duck that's forged and it was when the nsa didn't say that that we i i mean i don't think i've ever been so happy in my career in my life because that was proof that the archive was real because of course they would have said it same thing you know last year in brazil we reported this series of exposes where my source had hacked the telephones of the highest and most powerful officials in brazil in the bolsonaro government and gave me the text conversations that they were having that revealed a lot of corruption same thing of course those people wouldn't verify or confirm to me that they were real before i published they wanted me to be in doubt and then once we published and they didn't say those those aren't my conversations those are fabricated we knew they were real and we pursue so the just the fact alone that biden has never denied either that the conversations are real or that hunter actually brought his laptop to that delaware repair store and you know we've submitted questions i've submitted questions to the binding campaign and to hunter biden asking that question specifically and they won't answer because of course they're [ __ ] real um but the it was the the journalists the media outlets like cnn that took the lead first in saying that this was russian disinformation yeah you know like the standard way to get rid of information that they don't want the public to believe they just lied about that they just made that up there was never any evidence that russia had the slightest thing to do with it um you know and as to your question the provenance is a little unclear like that is kind of a bizarre story right that like hunter biden brought in three laptops never bothered to pick them up the store owner out of curiosity looked in them once no one picked them up saw that there was all this evidence of corruption and gave it to the fbi and rudy giuliani i'm kind of skeptical skeptical of that story myself but why isn't the dividing campaign denying that and saying no hunter never has been to that store in his life that's called complete lions in cast it's because it's probably true but it's definitely true that these documents are authentic it sounds like a crazy thing to do until you factor in smoke and crack once you factor in that is a factor that's a factor once you factor in smoke and crack you're like hey probably leave [ __ ] all over the place like you're out of your mind like and i don't blame him for that you know i mean he's i obviously had a drug problem and when you're smoking crack you leave laptops at repair shops and you don't pay for them that's it seems normal right right i mean that's the least of what you do right like if you're struggling with substance abuse that does make it a lot more credible but here's the thing like this is why i don't think i've ever been as disgusted with my colleagues in my profession as i have been the last three weeks because of this story and i'll tell you why in general journalists do not care about where material comes from if it's a authentic and be newsworthy for example in 2016 somebody mailed a copy of donald trump's tax tax a copy of donald trump's tax returns to the new york times just dropped it in the mail and sent it to their newsroom they got it to this day they have no idea who sent it to them let alone what the motives of that person was were or what they had to do to get them did they break in commit crimes did they hack was it the russians was it iran the new york times has no idea but then of course they've reported on the contents as they should because that's what journalists do and when asked when the lead reporter who's won two pulitzers was asked by npr how can you report on a document when you don't even know who gave it to you or what their motives were he said what i would say and what all journalists should say which is i don't give a [ __ ] about the source's motives sometimes you get great documents from sources who have terrible motives you know like they want to get vengeance on somebody they feel you know like deep throat leaked about the nixon administration to the washington post not because he was a snowden not because he was noble but because he was resentful that nixon passed him over to be the director of the fbi so that's so this idea that journalists are using like oh my god this might have come from russia therefore we shouldn't report it there's a complete corruption of the journalistic uh function but the reality joe like why are we even talking about this like everyone knows the reality i work in journalism i have you know lots of colleagues that i work with i have tons of friends in every news outlet up the east and up and down the east coast from new york to washington and then on the west coast the reason is is because they're all desperate for trump to lose that's the reality they all want biden to win so they don't want to report any information or any stories that might help biden lose in part because they want biden to win but also because in their social circles everybody essentially is anti-trump and pro-biden and they don't want to spend four years being accused of having helped trump won like they were in 2016 when they reported on those emails that were leaked by the wikileaks and it's just fear they don't want to be yelled at they don't want to be scorned in their social circles and so they're willing to abdicate their journalistic function which is reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world and joe biden in part because they want to manipulate and tinker with the election using journalism but in much bigger part because they're scared of being yelled out on twitter it's [ __ ] pathetic and it's going to ruin people's faith in journalism for a long time even more so than it already it already is ruined for good reason i now defend people who say fake news as you were saying even though in 2016 i didn't like it either because it's just true it's just true they will lie they will print things that they have no idea whether or not they're true if the cia tells them to or if they think they can get attention from it about front for it or a pause from their colleagues on twitter um and i don't blame you know if you have faith in mainstream news institutions you're really irrational i'm so glad you said that a lot of them are not printing things because they're worried about being yelled at on twitter because it really is the case and self-censorship is one of the more eerie aspects of knowing that you can get d-platformed off of twitter for things and knowing that you can get yelled at you can get twitter-mobbed because of your beliefs because of standing up for something that may be correct but unpopular this is i mean what journalism is supposed to be is telling people what the facts are giving people unbiased perspectives objective perspectives on what is happening in the news and how this could possibly relate to their real lives this is what it's supposed to be it doesn't seem like it's supposed to be that at all right now during these elections it's scary no one is p you're supposed to not pay any attention to all the crazy gaffes you're not supposed to pay any attention to the very real concerns that joe biden is losing his mind and if you say that you're an [ __ ] and people will attack you they'll say you don't understand he stutters and this is all because he called trump bush yesterday he called him george did you see that he said we don't want another four more years of george this is standard like this is we what do you remember when um when uh what was his name howard dean yelled that remember that yo yeah yeah after iowa when he got his third place finished in iowa he was trying to like excite his young you know disappointed supporters and he did that like weird primal scream and they ruined him over it it was it was a yell though that he did if you've ever talked in front of a live audience when people scream and cheer it's so loud you yell and you can't even hear your voice because it's so like you don't even realize how crazy it sounds but then when you isolate that sound and you take it just from the microphone it sounds crazy and that's what it sounded yeah to him in the moment probably didn't sound crazy at all but that was enough and i remember it being all over all these newspapers and every every television show that ruined him that ruined him that destroyed his candidate and like remember too the context of that was he was running for president in 2004 so it was 2003 you know the and then into early 2004 that when the primaries were he was leading in the polls by like 30 points all year long and he was the only one at the time you know howard dean has turned into like a complete sleazy lobbyist piece of garbage but like at the time he was one of the only people willing to stand up and say um you know george bush and dick cheney have lied us into a murderous war we're on endless war posture the government is constantly lying um so he he he was so off the track from what the bipartisan consensus was that they were out to destroy him and you're absolutely right look what they were willing to do that scream all it was was you know at the he was kind of like from the eugene mccarthy 1968 candidacy that was supported largely by young college kids excited by an anti-war candidate that was who dean supporters were and they were traveling all over the country going door-to-door on his behalf and when he came in third place in iowa they were really disappointed he was trying to cheer them up that was it yeah um and they basically just manipulating that footage you know turned him overnight into someone who was mentally unstable and he never recovered from that it's crazy to see and it's it's crazy to see the difference between the way they're treating biden they're treating biden with the most gentle caressing hands they're cheat treating him with the the like i've never seen more bias like more complete ignoring of some real problems with the way he communicates with the things he says with the lies that he says like for instance like during the debate him saying that he never said that he was gonna ban fracking like that's just not true and you don't see it anywhere you don't see it in any of these liberal media pages no you know what you know it's so first of all if you go and watch like the inter the very few interviews that he's given i i'm not saying this for a factor like to to to use hyperbole to make a point i'm saying this because it's literally true i don't think he's been asked a single hard question this is somebody who's been in public life for 50 years he was elected as a senator in 1972 he had to drop out of his first presidential race because of serial lying and plagiarism about his you know college record and about his academic accomplishments um he's somebody who has sponsored the worst most destructive policies over the last 20 years from the iraq war to the crime bill that has made the us the biggest prison state in the world he was part of an administration as you were alluding to earlier that has you know persecuted whistleblowers more than any other there's a ton of things to ask them about but in the interviews they adopt you know that like i don't know you probably have had that experience when you go and like you visit an old relative like one of your grandparents who's like in a nursing home and you know you go in and like kind of like soften your voice so you don't like you don't want to be like you feel like scare them or like feel abrasive and like if they make kind of anything resembling a joke like you start a fake laugh right like you're like oh that that's like that's how they talk to him interviewers on television they like treat him like an old ailing grandparent but one who is beloved and like this is the thing about this is the most amazing thing about this whole thing with cognitive decline which anyone who watches him for 15 minutes knows is true the people who were the first ones to disseminate that storyline were not supporters of bernie sanders once the primary got down to biden and and bernie it was in 2018 and into 2019 when biden was by far the leading democratic candidate because of his name recognition and because of his eight years as vice president standing next to obama it was democratic establishment operative consultants just like that whole dc professional democratic party class which was petrified that he was going to get the nomination because of his name recognition because of the favorable sentiment within the party toward him because of obama and they were the ones and you can go find these clips i actually wrote an article about it once when i started um talking about cognitive decline and people started saying this is a shitty low blow you're just doing this to sabotage his campaign to help bernie and i was like are you [ __ ] crazy like you're the ones who have spent the last year and a half on morning joe in the washington post op-ed pages you got it was i don't know if you remember but there was a cnn debate when all the democratic candidates were still part of the process when julian castro interrupted biden and accused him of having contradicted what he had said three seconds ago and he was like joe did you just forget what you said 20 seconds ago and then they interviewed cory booker and he said yeah you know if you listen to joe biden you really wonder whether he's capable of carrying the football over the they were the ones petrified that he wouldn't be able to withstand the rigors of a campaign the only thing that saved him was the corona pandemic coronavirus pandemic which let him sit at home but had it not been for that their fears would have become true and now they've like declared what we can all see with our own eyes and what they themselves are saying all this time it's declared off limits to say it even though they're the ones who recognize first that it was true and that's the kind of stuff that gets really creepy when they have the power to manipulate and control and dictate the discourse to that extent well it's like they've accepted the fact that people are putting out information and saving information for a very specific october surprise so they're saying okay what we're going to do is we're going to deny this information and when you're talking about the cognitive decline of joe bodnin to highlight it and to make a series of you know a compilation of these gaffes that would be bad for his campaign and we don't want him to lose we want trump to win so we're just going to ignore it even though it's news we're just going to ignore it but so then fake news is fake news so then it really is fake and this is where we're finding ourselves in 2020 where like we're a person without a country we do we don't know who to trust we don't know when we're look trying to find the news we can't go to twitter because twitter's blocking things now well twitter was the only thing that we trusted before because twitter was if an independent journalist was able to leak a story and put something out at least no one could stop them from putting it on twitter at least they didn't have to have the blessing of the washington post or the new york times or anything else they could just put something out there and if it was verified that that story could spread well now it can't even be the case because if twitter decides that that is dangerous to the person that they want to win for president they'll just pull the story and this is where we're at and it's terrifying it's just it's really yeah you know well i mean you know i i talk to people about the kind of independent media that's thriving right um your success drives a lot of journalists really crazy and it's not just you though it's if you look at the podcasts that are succeeding and the way they succeed is that you know they don't just occupy a place on your tv that you accidentally stumble into you have to actually go and find it decide you're going to listen to it and a lot of times most of the time pay for it that's what makes it successful why what is it that's thriving what is it that's succeeding it is the people who have no interest in being part of that hegemonic media blob who aren't concerned with affirming their pieties and their orthodoxies and in fact are in a lot of ways hostile to it or at least skeptical of it and eager to explore whether or not what they're saying is true because they don't trust any longer what they're hearing and you know it is like if you go back to the snowden story right one of the reasons snowden did what he did one of the reasons he was so horrified by this you know mass indiscriminate secret surveillance is because the idea of the internet the promise of it if you go back and read what internet enthusiasts were saying in the mid 90s and into the beginning of the century was this is going to be the most unprecedented tool of liberation and empowerment of people who don't have voices because it's going to enable people to communicate and disseminate information without having to rely on corporate structures that can afford printing presses or satellites for networks and that was true and the problem became if you allow the government to turn it into you know this kind of um tyrannical realm of surveillance you ruin you gut what is promising about it and in fact you degrade it into this threatening weapon that's exactly how i see censorship by facebook and twitter and what's amazing about um the censorship by silicon valley now um i've talked to jack dorsey quite a bit about this because he's someone who's a really interesting guy he seeks out a lot of voices to hear from and to get input about he cares about you know trying to make twitter a positive force in the society and he's torn in a lot of different directions by people demanding different things of him but it's true of twitter it's true of facebook it's true of google they never wanted this censorship role um not for noble reasons but because it was just it's better for their business if they get to say you know what we don't regulate content we're like at t right like if somebody calls someone on att's telephone lines and plans a neo-nazi rally or spreads holocaust denialism nobody expects att to intervene and terminate that person's service or cut off the call at t is a content neutral platform they just say we provide the ability for human beings to communicate and we don't control or censor a monitor and that's better for at t they don't have to spend the money to monitor a sensor they don't have to get yelled at about doing it well or doing it poorly and they make more money because more people that's the model that silicon valley wanted the reason why they ended up censoring is because mostly liberal activists and journalists demanded that they did so they started saying to facebook how can you allow alex jones or milo yiannopoulos or then it became once they were kicked off you know kind of more mainstream but still out of the norm kind of people and increasingly they're just expanding the range of demands that they have for who needs to be silenced and threatening congressional regulation if they don't do it threatening um all kinds of recriminations that this responsibility the sensor was foisted on these companies but now that they're doing it it's only going to grow um and i think this you know attempt by twitter and facebook to block this new york post story is one of the most alarming things that has happened in years from a perspective of free discourse and free dissemination the guy from facebook who announced that the new york post story was going to be suppressed spent the last 15 or 20 years before going to facebook working as a democratic party operative in washington he worked for senator barbara boxer and then the democratic congressional campaign committee he was a he's a democratic operative and he walks onto twitter and says we at facebook are going to be suppressing this story pending our own investigation to determine it's who would want silicon valley overlords unaccountable outside of the democratic process silicon valley overlords to control our discourse the answer is liberals do and journalists do and that's why they're doing it it's just so stunning because liberals have always been synonymous with free speech in the first amendment the aclu has always been about i mean if you think about a liberal organization the aclu is probably one of the most liberal organizat you know iconic liberal organizations they've always been about supporting free speech even if it's terrible support even neo-nazis ability to have free speech i mean this and it's been something that it's been highly controversial to some people but it's always been people on the left understood the value and the importance the significance of free speech the ability to accurately tell the truth to the the ability to express yourself freely the ability to tell all the facts and now they're the ones that are suppressing it because they don't like the guy who's in power because we have this guy who's such a perfect symbol of all that is wrong with power all that is wrong with someone being the president with ego and you know lies and all the various things that people pin on trump and a lot of them accurate but he's become this enemy and it's he's such an iconic enemy that they've justified all these ways of combating him using principles that violate everything they supposedly stood for yeah you know he really he i think trump has broken the brains of so many people yes not in a temporary way where it's all going to just you know recover instantly upon his departure but it's going to endure permanently and there's first of all you know when i was growing up um kind of what shaped my political outlook were a lot of the censorship debates in the 1980s you know i was growing up as a gay kid in the suburbs and the reagan years and with the moral majority and you know i remember like one big censorship controversy with sinead o'connor went on saturday night live and she ripped up a picture of the pope um which is what the left and you know growing out of the 60s it was like that's where the transgressive values were like whatever the institutions of authority decree is being sacred and can't be said people on the left push those those those limits and said we're not going to obey your dictates we're going to say exactly that which is taboo if for no other reason than just to establish our right to say it and that became the framework for how these freedom of speech and freedom of expression conflicts played out um there's a new film out by a new documentary about ira glasser who was the executive director of the aclu from 1978 until 2001 and his first controversy was when the aclu which you know largely was filled with jewish lawyers and supported by jewish donors because it came out of this tradition of jewish leftism in the united states that believed in free speech and civil liberties because as of that vulnerable minority they knew that allowing state the state to acquire the power of censorship would eventually be turned on them and so one of the most controversial cases they ever did is you just alluded to was they represented the right of neo-nazis actual nazis wearing swastika armbands who applied for a permit to have a march in skokie illinois which was a town filled not just with jews but with tons of holocaust survivors actual you know people who were in auschwitz and book involved in the camps and the tattoos on their arm you know the number tattoos of of survivors and they said we don't we don't want to be traumatized by watching nazis march down our street with that uniform that terrorized us for all those years and the aclu the jewish lawyers and directors of the aclu defended them and there's a film out and i just interviewed him actually where he says that you know not only was jewish leftism supportive of free speech but a lot of his closest allies at the time defending his decision to defend the right of white supremacists and neo-nazis to march and to speak freely without government censorship for civil rights leaders african-american civil rights leaders who also knew that if these precedents were permitted to take root against white supremacists first the government would then turn you know the state of alabama would say we're not going to allow the naacp to march through our streets they're rabble rousers and they incite violence and um that was the tradition on the left that is being completely abandoned not just you know in like standard mainstream liberal institutions but even in the aclu which has a slew of new lawyers under 30 under 35 millennials gen z uh activists who just don't believe in the core values of free speech in every institution joe like in political activism in media for sure obviously in academia is being riven with this dispute between people who insist on the right to express views without being constrained or prevented or controlled by others and people who believe that free speech is just not even close to the highest value and that when other values are in conflict with it free speech has to give way it is one of the if not the most kind of tumultuous conflicts of our time it's so disturbing how little understanding they have of where this plays out and that censorship in any form whether you censor someone who you don't like like milo you and not yiannopoulos it will eventually lead to someone who's less offensive than him and then less offensive than them and then less offensive than that and it'll go to you it will come for you it will eventually come for you you will say something wrong you will you will you will support something that they don't agree with and whoever has the power to censor will de-platform you they will remove you if we allow this and we're in this weird place in america where a lot of people are looking at these social media companies and saying this is not as simple as this is a private company and they have the ability to choose who does and who doesn't use their platform these things are like a public square these things are like a utility there it's like electricity or water and it's something that everyone should have access to because it literally changes the way human beings view the world it changes with people's contributions and with people's ability to express themselves it changes the information that you gather it changes whether whether not someone's perspective resonates with you or not if you don't get access to that perspective you don't get to see it you don't get to understand their point of view and it changes the overall view of the world and this is where we are we're we're in this weird place where these groups of people who are largely on the left have decided to abandon those values that you talked about the original aclu values and they've chosen to instead be ideological and and completely biased to their own personal position to the point where they're willing to abandon free speech and it's terrifying because i don't think they understand where this leads i don't think they've done the math i don't think they've extrapolated they can't think two seconds in front of their faces um you know one of the things that's so bizarre is if you if you ask you know like a random leftist what do you think of facebook they'll say oh i think mark zuckerberg is a fascist piece of [ __ ] and then you say like what do you think of the federal courts in the united states and they'll say oh it's completely repressive they're like filled with right-wing judges which is true and you say like what do you think of the us government oh the us government is basically a fascist dictatorship it's run by donald trump and then you say are you in favor of giving those institutions facebook the federal courts the u.s government greater power to censor ideas and information that you don't like and they'll say yeah absolutely it's critical that hate speech not be circulated and they never [ __ ] think for one second why are these institutions that i hate and i think are fascist and repressive and authoritarian institutions that i'm willing to vest the power in to control the flow of information and the one of the problems is that everyone you know for the most part thinks in terms of right versus left so this is the only prism through which people can understand at least the political component of the world and it's a very stunted prism because it excludes so much so they think that if you can induce social media companies to start censoring and excluding right-wing speech and and deleting the pages of right-wing ideologues or right-wing um activists that that's a victory but that isn't how it works they're not censoring it because it's right-wing they're censoring it because it's outside of the mainstream they're always always always always views that adhere to mainstream orthodoxies are going to be permitted censorship is always directed at those who are somehow outside of the realm of what's considered acceptable by power centers that by definition is where censorship goes and it's going to go to the right and the left equally it's not going to go to one or the other it's the most aside from the morality and the ethics of wanting people with whom you disagree silence by tech monopolies it's it's just incredibly [ __ ] stupid from a strategic perspective because it is going to be turned on you without doubt it already is there's already um censorship of left lane pages if if the israeli government for example goes to facebook and says that palestinian media outlet or this gazan activist is inciting terrorism facebook will in almost every case accept the request of the israelis to censor them because the israelis are much more powerful than the palestinians and that's how corporations operate this is the model the framework that the left is empowering without realizing how self-destructive it is it's maddening and it is terrifying because all human history the entire history of human intellect is nothing but humans believing that they found some absolute truth and then a subsequent generation realizing that it's not just erroneous but morally rotten and if you preclude the ability of human beings to question and challenge every precept every principle including or especially the ones that have been declared most sacred the ones that have been declared most unchallengeably true you've deprived humanity of one of its most important weapons probably its most important one for fostering progress for combating despotism for questioning the pronouncements of institutions of authority and that's what people who think they're anti-authoritarian are doing i'm so glad you're out there because guys like you are one of the few that are willing to take this chance and speak like this and challenge all all of these institutions openly and um i think there's so many people out there that as you said are worried about being yelled at on twitter and worried about not being able to get a job worried about you know you're there's so many folks that are dependent upon these large institutions whether it's newspapers or television shows or whatever it is and they can't freely express their concern with the way things are going because in many people's eyes that's insignificant compared to get donald trump out of office so everything everything goes by the wayside get donald trump out of office that's that that's that's number one after that we can concentrate on all those other things but whatever you have to do to get donald trump out of office save democracy someone someone actually sent me a message someone i i really like and they sent me a message saying that they could get me an interview but they want me to vote for joe biden come on save democracy this was the the the the message that i got and i was looking at this message on my computer what the [ __ ] is there a virus going on like not uh besides the coronavirus is there something that's like infecting people's minds and like snipping wires and disconnecting trains of thought like what the [ __ ] is happening it's but guys like you guys like matt taibi there's there's a few people out there that are sticking their neck out and it gives me hope it gives me hope that people are listening to you and people are reading your words and people are paying attention and and hopefully it's resonating and hopefully some of these people that are doing this are realizing with shame that they're part of this really disgraceful act that they're a part of this cowardly way of thinking and of not calling out all this [ __ ] and if joe biden does get in office and they do see it declining even further and sliding even further down this disgusting trend that we find ourselves on right now i hope they realize the error of their ways but by then it might be yeah but but here's here's the problem here's what's worrying me the most which is you know you instinctively that is something that you can kind of put your hope in right is to say well look i mean there's an election in a week or you know a few days and all the polls suggest biden's likely to win and once trump is out of the way a lot of this insanity is going to disappear and things are going to kind of return to some degree of normalcy and here's why i don't think that's true so many institutions are profiting i don't just mean financially but in terms of power and control from elevating fear levels over right-wing fascism over white supremacists domestic terrorism whatever you want to call it and obviously i mean it's not doesn't take a lot of insight to observe that historically the way you consolidate your powers if you can put people in fear you know during the cold war you make everybody fear that the russians and the communists are coming to take away your right to believe in god and everybody says you know build up a huge nuclear arsenal and don't use the money for our schools and our communities use it for you know the greatest military in the world and spy on everybody and whatever you need to do to defeat this existential threat to do it obviously after 9 11 that was the strategy of the bush cheney administration it's the way they consolidated a lot of power by elevating people's perceptions way beyond what it was real of the threat of islamic terrorism to allow them to do essentially everything they did the same exact thing is happening now which is people in media have had their careers saved i know cable hosts who are on the verge of being fired because nobody was [ __ ] listening to their dumb shows in 2007 and 2008 when all they were doing is talking about how great obama was because who wants to listen to that trump or 2015 rather trump was a godsend to them because trump enabled them to elevate everybody's fear level and say this man who's coming isn't just another president he's a grave threat to everything that's good in our lives and it's not just him but his entire movement behind him hundreds and tens of millions of people who are racist who are hardcore white supremacist white supremacy domestic terrorist it caused msnbc in the new york times to explode with money it caused the cia and the fbi and tons of those neocon scumbags to rehabilitate their reputation and get back in within the the halls of power even if trump loses the election they're not going to just go back to now talking about joe biden because they know people are going to cancel their subscriptions and turn the tv channel again they're going to continue to say not maybe trump or at least his movement still pose this existential threat you know they're out there plotting to um kill people and impose white supremacy and it's not that it's not true there's no it's not like there's not a criminal truth to it there are people doing that but they're going to inflate it wildly so that any questioning of joe biden even with trump out of the picture is still going to be depicted as you know endangering american liberty is helping fascism um as serving the agenda of the kremlin and the need for censorship as a result is going to be accepted by more and more people because of that fear that these media outlets and government institutions with whom they partner are going to be still instilling in people for their own benefit for their own aim i think you're a hundred percent accurate and i'm concerned as well but i my my real concern is i don't see a way out of this i don't see like a clear like oh we got to go that way i don't i don't see a a path i don't see it i'm worried i'm worried that we already have the brakes off of this truck and we're headed downhill well what what meaning do you derive from the fact that you've built this massive audience i mean just i don't think that's bereft of meaning or significance i think there's a reason for it what what reason do you think explains that that's a very good question and i specifically go out of my way to not answer it personally yeah me myself i mean to myself not not not explain it to someone like you but i don't think about it and one of the reasons why is because i feel like if i start thinking about what it does i'll stop doing it the way i do it and it won't be the same thing i started doing this podcast with my friend brian we were smoking weed and talking on a laptop in 2009 answering questions from like 100 people on twitter just having fun you look at the early ones on ustream to this day they have like a thousand views 2 000 views nobody gave a [ __ ] i never promoted this podcast i never took out an ad for it i never went on a television show or anything else saying please watch my podcast please listen to my podcast it organically became what it is i have no idea how it happened i never planned it it was all i i did it at just for fun forever and then all of a sudden it became this giant business so i'm like well i still have to do it the same way because if i don't do it the same way then it becomes something different and i can't think about what it is i just uh when when i meet people and they say they love it i go thanks not hi that's it just keep going just keep moving and i've i've developed these ways of compartmentalizing my life and compartmentalizing what the podcast is and i keep it what it is what it is is just a place where i'm going to talk to people the people that i talk to i only talk to who i'm interested in talking to i have zero agenda i go oh i want to talk to glenn greenwald he seems cool oh i want to talk to graham hancock oh that scientist that just came back from the space station let's see if we can talk to him what the [ __ ] is that like you know oh this guy just got back from uh you know trekking across europe uh with snowshoes let's talk to that guy like that's all it is and until i to the day i say i don't want to do this anymore it's going to remain that because it's the only way i can keep doing it the way it is so the fact that it's become insanely influential is beyond bizarre to me because i feel like as much as i'm the host of this thing i'm uh like an antenna i just sort of plug in and then it's got a life of its own and it sort of does its own work but i i it's not actually so bizarre to me um you know when i actually you know i i think you know i wrote an article about it and then i i did a show i interviewed a former uh campaign official from from the 2008 obama campaign who's an avid listener of yours and who's written um about your show and he's actually the one who encouraged me to start listening because before i started listening you know i just kind of heard in the ether things about your show that you know i didn't necessarily believe adamantly but assumed we were basically true and then i started watching and saw how untrue it was um but you know i think that exactly the way that you began you know when i the way i began my journalism career is i didn't go like to columbia journalism school and then go and you know get a job with like some local newspaper and then work my way up to the new york times so i wasn't inculcated with all the institutional code and um regulations of how you can speak and the tone that you use and how you can describe the world i just started my blog one day because i felt like i had things to say and nobody was reading it and i gradually built up a readership and then i just from there have always done it that way right like it's kind of like what you were just saying and i think that the reason that you've attracted so many people watching your show who like it and i don't want to analyze it for you if you don't want to hear an analysis because i don't want to like infect your ability to just do it organically but you were saying like what is the solution to all this what's like the uh way out and i think that you can look at your show as kind of a microcosm of what one answer might be which is exactly that like i think i know a lot of people who listen to your show who don't agree with a lot of what you say or don't know or who hate some of the guests that you have on but what they know is that you're doing this because you don't have to say anything that you don't believe and that's a huge uh asset for people who don't trust people that they're hearing in the media and don't believe anything that they're saying is look that guy may not be an expert in things in everything that he's talking about or even much of what he's talking about and maybe sometimes he platforms people who are bad and says some things that are misguided but at least i believe that he's being honest like he's just kind of like trying to figure the world out for no reason other than to figure it out and i think that there are huge numbers of people huge numbers of people like you i think you're just tapping into the kind of tip of it um who crave discourse that is emancipated from these repressive you know principles of how the media speaks and conducts itself and how people are forced to express themselves and that is what that does give me a lot of hope i think it gives me a lot of help as well and i think um one of the things we hope the internet would be would be this place where people had access to information that they would never have had previously and this uh this avenue for free expression that just really never existed before there's never been a time in history where i mean we really have a skeleton crew i mean right now it's it's me and my friend jamie the producer and it reaches hundreds of millions of people and that's just really never existed before i mean there's a couple video editors and some other people that work for the the podcast behind the scenes but that's basically it which is why journalists hate you right like they you know they went to all the best journalism schools and they've like sat in their editorial meetings for 20 years and if they go and speak on youtube they're going to be watched by 15 000 people and they think it's outrageous that you have this audience to which you're not entitled well they're they're entitled to their own thoughts but they could have this audience too they just have to be interesting enough to gather it and they have to grind the thing is like you don't get it right away and you don't get it right away just because you work for the new york times people will listen and they'll go well i don't like this or this is boring or you know for whatever reason it resonates or it doesn't resonate and it's it's a free path for everybody and the beauty of it is you don't have to be connected to the washington post or the new york times or any other institution but the people that think that that was the path and they worked all their life thinking that this is the path and then they've been shown that they've kind of maybe spun their wheels not not only spun their wheels and wasted some time but gotten on a bad path ideologically where they've thought in these these tight grooves that were previously previously established for them they've been given these conglomeration of opinions to adopt and they have adopted them faithfully and then all of a sudden they realize like well you know look at this [ __ ] meat head pot smoking you know ufc commentator has all these people paying attention to him what the [ __ ] is going on and why is bernie sanders on his show and why are all these other people on the show like well you could do that too like anybody could do this it's just putting in the time it's just having this perspective where you're you want to look at things for what they really are don't be beholden to ideologies and put in the time that's that should be encouraging to people yeah yeah that if you have something interesting and unique to offer that people want to hear the internet enables you to reach them without having this mediation necessary of big corporations i think that is in that is encouraging um the thing that though is discouraging is that one of the problems about why this freedom of expression in the media in particular where it's more necessary than anywhere right for journalists to be able to say things that provoke people's anger that poke it and product consensus rather than just reciting it is that when you're a young journalist and you get a job and you're not being paid very well but at least you're getting paid enough income to survive and so many of your friends with whom you went to college you get out of college and are loaded with tons of debt don't even have jobs and you at least got one you look around in industry which is journalism where you see jobs disappearing by the thousands the last thing you want to do is stick your head up and say something that makes people in your newsroom or your editors angry because you've questioned or dissented from one of their sacred convictions and i've seen how that works that really is fostering a huge amount of conformity i remember all the time you know during the russia gate [ __ ] when matt taibi and i and maybe a couple of others were you know out there saying this is a [ __ ] scandal there's no evidence that any of this happened not that russia didn't do the hacking but that trump and russia colluded criminally to or that russia was infiltrating the united states in control you know that this is all conspiratorial garbage i was hearing all the time from journalists at the washington post and cnn and the times and cable networks who are saying thank you guys i'm so glad you and matt are doing this um i wish i could but i really don't feel i can i feel like i would lose my job and probably not get another one that is really that that the the lack of a viable economic model in journalism is suffocating whatever little ability there was for journalists to kind of um express themselves freely yeah it's terrifying for them because they don't have protection and to to to stick your neck out to try a podcast and to say something on a podcast that is controversial or is outside the orthodoxy and to get fired for that or canceled for that or to get ostracized or be labeled of this or that it's terrifying you could lose your ability to make an income and there's no guarantee that your podcast will be successful particularly now you know when i started the podcast in 2009 i don't know how many there were then but now there's close to a million of them which is insane that means like one out of 300 people if it was just in the united states i'm sure it's worldwide but if it was just in the united states one out of one out of like a million podcasts is one out of 300 people in the united states imagine 300 people and one of them has a podcast i mean what is it going to be like uh five years from now is it going to be 50 of the people have a podcast i mean it's the numbers are so insurmountable it's almost impossible for anybody to break through unless you get help from the other people that are inside the network so like if you're one of those people that has a popular podcast one of the beautiful things about it is that you can kind of help other people get seen and get recognized and it's one of the more generous communities the the good thing about podcasting is that when you have this group of people that have gotten through in this uh sort of unorthodox way a lot of them encourage other people to do it as well and a lot of them are i'm very encouraging of it maybe to a fault i'm constantly telling people they should do a podcast because i really think it doesn't take that much of your time and if you just invest enough time in it you develop a fan base and it it exponentially increases people tell people they tell their friends you have an episode that resonates and and then it could go viral or you know it can get shared and you can get to a point where you can have a sustainable business that's completely independent and it's possible it is possible to do but if you're a person who is also trying to work in journalism you're also trying to get hired by a major institution and you say something in this other form of media this podcast form that can get you fired from that it will inhibit your ability to express yourself so in that case it also inhibits the ability of the podcast to resonate so it's such a catch-22 because you kind of have to you kind of have to toe the line you kind of have to be full yeah i'll tell you like what this this this experience i had recently that i found horrifying and like really eliminated for me how repressive things had become i went to new york um as i often do because the media outlet i founded is based there and i had dinner with two colleagues who work in journalism and who are actually pretty well established in their careers they're not you know junior level journalists who are clinging to a job they're people who have climbed up the editorial and journalistic ladder and one of them they both live in brooklyn and one of them has a 15 year old daughter whose best friend is a trans boy who has had top surgery so he has had his breasts removed and poses on instagram with his shirt off and then the my other friend with whom i was dining that night it was pretty recently like maybe within the last year um has a 17 year old daughter who's dating a trans boy who's 17 who's also had various gender reassignment surgeries and we were talking just you know as friends about how young people these days are who are making this choice to identify as trans and to pursue gender reassignment surgery have permanent alterations to their body that will never be reversible even if later on in life they decide that they had misdiagnosed themselves or been misdiagnosed and both of them were expressing serious concerns about as as parents of teenagers about a how pervasive this was becoming and whether there was kind of something in the culture encouraging or even pressuring kids to reach these conclusions and parents to kind of push them into it for their own reasons not anything malicious but just kind of cultural encouragement that might be leading people to be misdiagnosed or misdiagnosing themselves and also secondly the capacity of someone at the age of 14 or 15 to make decisions about their lives of that magnitude that would be irreversible biologically or anatomically irreversible and it was a really interesting conversation we talked about we explored the issue it was you know a really interesting discussion we probably talked about 45 minutes or an hour i got back to brazil and i realized that that discussion that we had they would never ever in a million years in their column on a podcast on their show admit to having those thoughts they would never be willing to explore publicly those questions that we were all raising with one another and thinking about in a really interesting way because they're petrified of being scorned for it or being condemned and that is a sickness in our culture that is only going to get worse but that has toxic effects that i don't think can be overstated it's whenever there's a subject that you can't talk about whenever there's a when there's a subject that can't be breached that's you've you've you're in a religion now you're in a cult like you can't discuss things like you must adhere to the rigid ideology that's been established that you you you have to say this if someone decides they're trans at three or five or 19 or whatever it is that there can be no questions my question has always been have there been people who have had gender reassignment who regret it the answer is yes yeah of course of course and are there people who have had gender reassignment who are happy the answer is yes obviously human beings are insanely malleable that's why cults exist that's why evangelists are able to gather so much money that's why people decide to be typically unique right like how many people are uh they're rebels but they're rebels in a mold right it's human beings love to fit into forms that they find to be appealing that they find to resonate with the current uh zeitgeist whatever it is and this is one area where we've decided no that's not the case no in when it comes to uh children be recognizing as trans there is no way there can be no errors it is it is all in and i mean many many of these people are rightfully looking at it in the way that people who are trans are maligned by society they they they don't feel like they're accepted they feel like they're discriminated against so these people who are sensitive kind people look at them they want to embrace them at all costs but by doing so you've you've ignored reality the the reality that we know that humans we're weird creatures we're weird creatures we we have very strange ideas about things that go left and right how many people do you know that are they're lifelong democrats and all sudden they become a republican and they're [ __ ] pro-life and they get crazy like people are weird we shift our opinions on all sorts of things people like cat stevens becomes a muslim change his name to yusuf islam goes like people change but the idea that they don't do that with gender that the only thing they do that with is is is religion and these other things that the gender is specifically the one thing that there's no confusion about whatsoever well that's crazy because people are confused all the time about everything the other thing i brought up to a friend i said do you know that many especially trans uh women if they don't have this reassignment it's been shown that they become gay men so is it homophobic to want that person to only be trans like is it to have a rigid idea of what a trans person is like and to say that that this rigid idea applies to all people who who have issues with who they are or issues with their sexuality or issues with gender identity like there's there's clearly a spectrum here and the spectrum not only not only is there a spectrum but you know one of the objectives of modern feminism of modern day feminism was to expand the range of how women could express themselves that they didn't have to have long hair and makeup on and wear high heels that they could have a masculine component to them and cut their hair short and wear jeans and play sports and that's why a lot of feminists feel like this there's this kind of incursion into womanhood where now the idea is if you're if that's the form of expression that you find as a female that you ought to be encouraged to identify as a trans man instead of just kind of a center you know masculine of center of female but i think you know one of the things that that concerns me about it and that always strikes me so much is you know as i mentioned like one of the formative political experiences of my life obviously was growing up gay in the 80s and into the 90s where there were lots of debates about they were raging about what is the role of homosexuality and how should it be viewed by civic society and by government and by law and one of the reasons why gay people largely won that that debate and not just won it but won it so radically and so rapidly is because we were constantly looking for ways to engage that discussion with people who hadn't been persuaded i mean i remember i would all the time you know if i heard someone say well how does this work in your relationship like who is the man and who's the woman and how do you [ __ ] instead of saying like you're a disgusting bigot and how dare you and condemn them and denounce them and banish them away i would be eager to engage in that discussion as were so many people and that's what ultimately changed minds was the more you engage people the more you persuade them the more you convince them the more you explain to them why these radical social changes that you advocate are justifiable the harder it is to demonize you and to feel alienated by you and to be feel repelled by you you break down that dehumanization through engagement through discourse and dialogue not through demanding and coercing and trying to force people to accept views that they don't yet hold and so many current social movements are based on that kind of tyranny of either you affirm these truths as i see them or you're going to be punished and scorned there's no debate or engagement or questioning permitted yeah that's that's a really accurate way of depicting it and it's uh it's confusing i mean it's it's confusing for people that don't want to be punished and so they they adhere to these opinions too they just they just jump on board you know uh and and i had a conversation with a friend we were talking about how uh being trans is more accepted in other countries and he brought up iran and i said do you know why there's so many trans people in iran it's because if you're gay they'll put you in jail like do you understand that like in in some countries in the middle east they literally you have no options like if you're a homosexual and you want to be with men and you happen to be a man many of them choose to become women just so that they can have these relationships that they want like it's it's a real weird box and i think ideologically when you force someone to have an opinion that you hold and punish them for just even questioning things you create this really weird scenario that we find ourselves in right now and to the point where oftentimes biological women are the ones that especially when it comes to sports they're the ones that are the victims of this ideology when you have track and field athletes who are competing as female who all they have to do is identify in in certain high schools as being female they don't even necessarily have to have gender reassignment surgery or or even to take estrogen and it's it's crazy but if you if you question it you're a bigot and these there's a reason why we've had male and female sports that men and women don't compete against each other it's because we've agreed okay uh there are obviously huge differences between men uh there's a spectrum of you know there's this very athletic men non-athletic men in a huge spectrum of women very athletic women and non-athletic women but we agree that it seems to be a big advantage to be male when it comes to physical sports so we're gonna separate them but if you have male versus female sports as long as the male identifies as a female we're supposed to go well you know what are you gonna do it's okay you know what's amazing you know what's amazing um one of my childhood heroes growing up uh was the tennis player martina and i which is a weird childhood hero for me to have for a lot of different reasons it's just not an obvious childhood here for me to have like dan ellsberg the pentagon papers leaker is a much more obvious one who was mine but she was a weird one in and but i was obsessed with her you know i used to watch her tennis matches against chris everett religiously and when i grew up and and and and actually when i started doing the snowden reporting she started following me on twitter and then i remember like the first time she ever sent me a tweet i acted like some you know 12 year old whose favorite boy band had you know like touched their skin or something i called my friends oh giddy i talk to famous people all the time i don't give the slightest [ __ ] but with her i was just like overwhelmed and so one of my friends said you know that's so fascinating how important she is to you why is that i started thinking about it and so i was going to do a film about it and i like partnered with with reese witherspoon she was going to produce it she was very into it and we had a big budget for it and then right in the middle as we were getting ready to kind of do the project and the project was going to be you know examining why she was so important to me what it said about her life and mine and how it intersected and the ability of people and very unpredictable ways to influence others she had this huge controversy where you know martina was like you know she was one of the great pioneers of female athletics and sports illustrated did a list of 100 greatest athlete athletes of the 20th century she was number 19. you know like right behind joe montana ahead of ty cobb i mean she was a huge important figure in female athletics and female professional female sports and she fought you know for years along with like billie jean king and chris everett to ensure that women had massive prize money on the us on par with men and sponsorship opportunities so her life's work has been ensuring that women could make a huge living and be justly rewarded on equal terms of male athletes so she was on twitter and she saw some photo of a trans woman who had just won a cycling race and she was in the middle the trans woman was next to two cis women and she was hovering over them with like this huge muscle mass that these two women didn't have with the gold medal smiling with the arms around these two women and martina learned that the woman who won the gold medal has not had any gender reassignment surgery meaning she still has a penis and her testicles and therefore the ability to impregnate a woman and martina went on twitter and just very innocently said wait i don't understand if a woman if a man declares themselves to be a woman they can now compete in professional sports the professional sports that i work so hard my whole life to build and they can win all the prize money and all the the the the the the trophies and then just decide to go back to living as a man impregnate women and live as a suburban life as the father of children that doesn't seem fair and she was [ __ ] mauled for it and people were saying you're ignorant you have it doesn't matter if you have a penis what matters is if you go through hormonal treatments that render your body uh anatomically or biologically identical for purposes of athletics to the male body um or the female body the this is female body and she said okay i'm sorry um i'm going to delete my tweet i'm going to go and research this i shouldn't have spoken about it without first studying it and that didn't stop them for three weeks four weeks they were martina navratilova is a bigot she's hateful and not only was she you know a pioneer woman's athletics she was one of the only openly gay celebrities on the planet in the late 1970s early 90s was one of one of the reasons why she was my hero she also hired a trans coach dr renee richards who she traveled the world with and put on national tv you know like bbc and nbc during wimbledon would have to say uh there's martina now to lova's box that's her coat her name used to be richard raskin it's now dr renee richards you know and kind of glide over it but at least like she did more for trans visibility than almost anybody martino went away but because she was being so mauled and with no understanding she came back she wrote an op-ed in the sunday times and she said i've studied this and what i've concluded is that there is never a way that somebody who's gone through puberty as a male no matter how many hormones that they take can render their body similar to a female body such that competing with naturally born females can be anything other than cheating and for that opinion martina navratilova who did more for lgbt visibility trans visibility female athletics got expelled literally expelled from lgbt athletic athlete groups um and i couldn't i ended up not being able to make my film because the director that we had was a trans woman who didn't feel comfortable and felt like the whole film had gotten too complicated um it's amazing that if you're i mean if if the enemy of your movement is martina navratilova if that's somebody that you're declaring to be a hateful bigot not welcome and decent company who are your [ __ ] allies yeah it's it's an interesting proving ground for this ideological dilemma right female sports because uh you know my friend tony hinchcliffe actually has a comedy bit about this he's like you don't see a whole lot of women declaring themselves to be biologically male and then competing against men it's it's trans women that are competing in these sports and dominating them um i got into the fray uh unwittingly because there was a a female mma fighter that didn't tell her opponents that she was male for 30 years and uh started competing two years after transitioning and i was like this is [ __ ] crazy because now you're you're in my wheelhouse and i didn't mean to get in the friend i'd never really had opinions on trans people other than do whatever you want to do as long as you're an adult um but then once that came up and i was uh attacked for it i was like this is the hill i'll die on because you people are out of your [ __ ] mind i'm a martial arts expert i know what i'm talking about like the difference between the way a man can generate power in a woman is really significant it's a big difference all the the ability to be violent reaction time uh coordination shape of the hips shape of the shoulders size of the hands there's so many big differences and people were unwilling to budge they they wanted to look at this in terms of this uh you you must be a bigot if you feel this way and i'm like no i'm not well and like it's it's it's so it's so it's so obvious that there are complex scientific questions like i don't know how i feel about it in part because i don't understand the science well enough and i don't believe the science has offered definitive answers like maybe there are hormonal protocols that you can take for a long enough period of time maybe there are new hormonal treatments that are being developed that can actually make it roughly fair and can turn a body that was born biologically male into the equivalent of a female body sufficient to make it a fair competition i don't know the answer to that yeah maybe something right but like or maybe now i don't know i mean i like you know women's tennis um you know if you win the us open or wimbledon in women's tennis you're gonna win the prize is now four million dollars right like the the williams sisters are among the richest athletes on the planet if it were that easy for a male tennis player to just go win that amount of money by declaring himself a female they would be doing it and we don't really see that so i'm open to the question of whether this can be done fairly but to declare the question itself off limits and force everybody to just accept it that's that and and like the thing is it's not just like we're talking about it in this issue because i know you've had issues with it i've had my own experiences with it with that film but this is the mentality that is replicating itself in issue after issue after issue yes and i want to be really clear one of the things that i've said is i have no problem with a woman choosing to compete against a trans woman if she knows that it's a trans woman my my issue is entirely that this person decided that it was a a medical issue and that she did not have to disclose that she was a male for 30 years and it just recently transitioned to being a woman and i'm i that's where i stepped in i said this is [ __ ] because there's rules on taking steroids right it's it's illegal they test so if someone took steroids for 30 years for 30 years took the equivalent of a male bodies steroids and worked out constantly lifted weights and did so to the point where it changed their anatomy and then choose to get off the steroids and then compete i get run [ __ ] tu everyone would be saying that person is a cheater they shouldn't be allowed to compete because that person changed their body through illegal means that's just a fact i'm i'm in favor of anybody doing anything as long as all the information is on the table if a woman chooses to compete against a trans woman in mixed martial arts and and knows in advance i'm 100 in favor of that no problem look women have fought men before some really talented there's a woman who competes in um in the ufc jermaine durandemy she's a multiple uh world champion in muay thai and she fought a man and knocked him unconscious in a fight and you could watch it on youtube she's an amazing athlete an amazing fighter but she chose to fight that man knowing that he's a man and knowing that her skills were enough that she had a reasonable chance and actually did win i'm 100 in favor of that like i'm in favor of everybody doing anything that's dangerous do whatever you want in favor of people riding motorcycles without a helmet i'm in favor of you bungee jumping you choose whatever you want you're an adult but yeah but the idea that this person didn't have to disclose that she was a man for 30 years was very offensive to me and that was your entree into this controversy that's how i got into it that's how i got into it i'm like this is crazy well not only that the the damages to her opponents were really significant fractured skull like she she broke the bones in her face like it was it's like real big stuff it's not it wasn't a small deal and if you watch the fight right it's horrific i mean i think i think like ultimately it kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier about human beings oftentimes evolving in ways that are seemingly inexplicable one of the things that makes life interesting that makes the world worth investigating are these complexities i mean gender is and how it relates to biology and how it shapes our identity and what different hormones can do externally injected into our bodies these are fascinating questions that we don't really have clear answers for and that's true regardless of almost any debate that you choose and that's what i was saying earlier is that you know if you look at newtonian physics people for a long time believe that that was the ultimate truth and then that becomes something that people realize actually has fundamental errors i mean you have to like what always amazes me about not just people who support censorship but about people who want to close off debate or who say that it's immoral to even speak to people who have views that are sufficiently different that they're supposed to be radioactive is what always amazes me is the level of hubris needed to believe not just that you're right about something because i believe i'm right about a lot of things but to believe that you're so right that your view should never should not be even permitted to be questioned let alone rejected or negated or refuted and that people who have different views than you are people that you should never be willing it's such a glum grim bleak depressing view of the world and it's authoritarian and tyrannical as well to just constantly be flattening all of the complexities of life that make things interesting to explore and debate and discuss and think about yeah it really is complex and it really is interesting and and i agree with you and i hope that one day we can get past all this stuff and i think because it's such it's really weird that it's so fresh in our culture that i mean being trans has been around for a long long time but for whatever reason it's dominated the zeitgeist over the last you know decade or so um and i i don't i don't really know what's happening you know douglas murray has a very interesting take on it he you know i was talking to him and he was saying that towards the end of uh civilizations when civilization's starting to collapse one of the things that happens is it's blurring the lines of of genders and he's like i don't know what that is or why that exists but he said it existed in ancient greece in ancient rome and i wonder i wonder if that's uh just it's just a a natural course of progression that civilizations go through when the wheels are falling off um that they get obsessed with these uh subjects but obviously these are very interesting things to discuss and talk about it just because you discuss and talk about them doesn't make you a bigot and i think that we have to make that distinction because if we don't make that distinction you're always going to have people that are speaking about it one way publicly as you were saying with your friends uh or or privately excuse me and then another way publicly where they're just there and that's why i think i think that if you if you're somebody who has been fortunate enough to construct a platform that is secure and relatively immune from being cancelled or being you know declared um i mean people have certainly been trying with me for many years and and i think they're starting to reach the conclusion that it's futile and they're never going to be rid of me so i think if you're able to kind of create an independent platform for yourself one of the obligations that i do think you have is to create that space and kind of take those arrows so that other people who don't enjoy that same independence that same security feel at least marginally freer to you know wander around than asking yeah um look discussions are important it's how we figure things out talking about things is important i need to know how you think to be able to consider it when when i talk to someone whether it's you or anyone i want to know how you feel about things genuinely and when you're terrified to express your honest opinion because you're worried about the blowback then i'd never really know not only do i never know who you really are and how you really think i never know that there's people who think the way you think because you don't express it and then we have a distorted perception of the landscape and it's it it takes too long to work through ideas and problems that we have in our society i i understand why people would be protective of trans people of anybody in any any maligned any any marginalized group i understand it i totally do but to discuss it does not mean bigotry it just doesn't and when you're talking about sports whether it's when when you discuss decide that martina navitrolova is a bigot you've got a real problem you [ __ ] up like there's there's something yeah yeah what if something went really wrong in the matrix yeah the matrix produced a very erroneous outcome there um and i you know i i i i really you know i think part of the the problem though is that there whoever does wield this ability to impose orthodoxies has a certain form of power there's a lot of power that comes from that from forcibly suppressing views that you've declared to be erroneous and that is why i think it becomes addictive especially when it starts to become a form of mob behavior um but you know this this ability to to to engage in dialogue you know i go on fox news a lot i go on tucker carlson specifically quite a bit and obviously people who are long-term readers of mine who are on the left a lot of them are befuddled by that if not enraged by it and one of the things that has happened because i do that is that i get emails all the time for people saying um well for a decade i always thought you were this insane leftist i thought you were you know a communist i thought you hated the united states i never paid any attention to anything that you said but now that i hear you on the show saying things that i trust i'm now listening to anything that you say with an open mind because i believe that you're honest and it doesn't mean that i now agree with you on everything you're saying i don't i still disagree with that but at least i've like forged a channel of communication with people who i might have written off before as some kind of a caricature or who've written me off before as some kind of a character like i did with you but someone had asked me two years ago before i actually listened to your show you know what do you think of joe rogan i probably would have said i don't know much about him but i know he talks to like a lot of alt-right [ __ ] and fascists and seems to hate trans people because that's what i had been told right that was like in the ether and so that's what i absorb and i you know i think that you know everybody loves to lament you know polarization and strife and conflict in the world and aggression and war which are all terrible things and yet one of the only solutions we have as human beings to any of that is the ability to try and speak to each other as humans past our differences so that we can at least develop a common respect that enables us to navigate those differences without resorting to force and this is more and more what is being written off this this climate of censorship and repression is doing damage to every single one of our institutions and um i don't see it ending at all i see it growing and i i don't really quite know um how it can be arrested well i'm hoping there'll be a tipping point and i'm hoping the title pull back and i'm hoping that podcasts and long-form communication and conversations like this will be a part of that but uh you know i agree with you and when you say you don't agree with everything i say i i'm happy because i don't agree with everything i say there's a lot of [ __ ] we're thinking in real time and sometimes i'll say something on a podcast and then i'll think about it you know an hour later and i'm like what the [ __ ] was i saying why didn't even think about it that way because you're talking you know like right now like i don't know the next word out of my [ __ ] mouth right this is what podcasts are this is what these things are and sometimes you're going down roads or you express an opinion it's not that thought out and that's the danger of these weird long-form communications these unstructured podcasts are but that's also why it's interesting to people because it's so it's so raw because you know this isn't there's no strategy here there's no this isn't this hasn't been planned out there's no there's no adherence to a script and through that you get a sense of humans you get a because this is how people think and talk in real life you know and most of the process you're talking you you talk in uncertainties right like that and that i think is a big difference is you know if you go on cable if i go on cable some any show or even like some sunday news show here in brazil or in the us everyone knows in advance what's gonna be said i know when i'm going to be asked they know what i'm going to answer and they're inviting me on specifically because they know i'm going to say something with certainty yeah right i'm not going to go on and say i don't really know the answer to that because if you do that you're not fulfilling your function that is not the normal way that people navigate through the world with certainties they navigate it with uncertainties they have an opinion one minute and then they listen to somebody who persuades them to think differently another and then they kind of move in that direction and then maybe they move a little bit back but the problem is that in a climate where if you're not constantly affirming unequivocally what has deemed to be what is deemed to be the mandatory opinions you really can not if you're a coward but just if you're irrational create a lot of problems for yourself and your work and your society in your culture um and that's why people avoid it yeah and that's why i've gravitated towards it ironically um i i think that you have to talk to people that you disagree with you have to talk to people and i also i'm not married to my ideas if you tell me if i have a specific notion in my mind about the way something works and i talk to you i i am happy when you can get me to change my mind i enjoy it i don't believe any of the things that i i espouse or that i i'm locked into that these are chiseled in stone i mean there's a few i believe in that i'll that where i'm a legitimate expert in but very few most of the things i'm open to someone correcting me i like that i'm also interested in how people think incorrectly um if i'm talking to like i don't have as many alt-right [ __ ] as you say on the podcast anymore i mean i got kind of grew tired of it you know like but yeah but i had a lot but in the earlier days maybe even before i understood what the podcast really was becoming i just wanted to talk to them like see how they feel about things and some of them i mean i've like milo i always found humorous i think he's he's kind of a character and if you talk to him uh off air he's a very different human being they talk to him on here he's very easy to communicate with yeah it's a character he's playing a character he created a character that that did well i mean i'm sure some of it has uh some root in reality but he's a provocateur but yeah i i want to know why people make these jumps and why they think the way they think and with a lot of them uh what they're doing is signaling to this group that they've gotten support from that they're on that that side they're uh they're doing this thing where they're uh they're they're saying words and expressing themselves in certain ways that they know that certain groups are going to go oh he's on board he's on this team he's saying all the things that i want to hear and then which is which is a very which is a very natural human desire right we are social animals and we evolved in tribes right and being scorned by a group or not belonging to a group right wasn't just unpleasant and didn't just produce unhappiness it could actually jeopardize your survival right you know thousands and thousands of years ago but even now we still need to belong yeah but like with any instinct we have to kind of purposely combat it right like we might have an instinct to kill people that we feel angry toward but we combat that instinct because it produces bad outcomes so the tribalism in us you know is probably something that sometimes occasionally is healthy it makes us be part of communities and the like and that fulfills psychological necessities but it can lead us really astray too and you have to kind of be willing sometimes if you're feeling embraced too much by a group to kind of give them something almost to show you that you're not attached to it to show yourself that you're not attached to it so you don't become captive to it well i think we have to be really careful in how we lean into love and what i mean by that is lean into uh praise lean into uh attention lean into like there's a lot of people that become uh a victim of their own audience and because if you're if you're a rebellious sort right if you've got this idea that goes against the mainstream the other people that like things that go against the mainstream they're very vocal about it they're very excited by it and their attention to you is magnified it's much different than the attention that you get if you sort of support the mainstream you support the mainstream it's a very ah it's a lukewarm way you just blend in you blend in yeah you blend in like a cnn correspondent if you are milo or one of these people that was becoming very successful being one of these provocateurs in the past you get a rabid response where people are so excited to see you and then you see i've seen it with comedians where they'll they'll tell jokes that like a certain group of people like and they'll lean into that like you know they'll become like a right-wing comic because these right-wing people are the ones that have given them attention and they they know when they're saying things even if they don't understand that it's disingenuous or that they're playing a character they're they're saying it knowing that it's gonna get this disproportionate reaction from that group and they lean into it and uh one of the reasons why i i like talking to people like that's i wanted to see that thing in them i wanted to i wanted to hear what they're saying that even if i disagree with it i want to know what what makes them think that way why do they go this way what what it what about them is is is is is what what gravity has pulled him in this direction it's weird yeah i mean i guess i guess the argument is that as your platform grows and you become more influential just to play devil's advocate for a moment by putting someone on your show who advocates ideas that are harmful or toxic or hateful even if you're doing it just to satisfy your curiosity and not because you actually agree with them that you're nonetheless still letting millions of people be exposed to hearing them speak for two or three hours in a way that kind of signals that at the very least their ideas are worth listening to whether that's your intention or not with the message that you're conveying i agree with that criticism i really do and that's one of the reasons why i've avoided a large number of those people that do have very questionable belief systems and and and do espouse hate there's a lot of [ __ ] [ __ ] that want to be on the show that i haven't had on for that very reason but there's some that i find interesting you know and uh i it's not because of hate it's because some of them have ideas that are at least mildly intriguing and i i'm over that now but when i was interviewing a lot of those people in the past the one of the things that i wanted to do is i wanted to try to hear what they're saying and poke holes in it and i wanted to i wanted to know why they lean so hard in this direction and what is about and uh it's like when you're talking to anyone that's really into anything but you could fill in the blank with whatever the subject is there there's certain aspects of them where you're talking to them and you go oh i've seen you before i know what i i know a lot of people like you i know i know what you're doing you've found like this real you know some songs sound real similar like oh you were a fan of stone temple pilots and you guys sort of built like you get that with them they have this sort of way of well you know the left has this view of things and the left and they start talking like a pundit they start talking like someone who they've seen be successful with these ideas and it's it's intriguing to me so as a as a person like as a comic you always have to be sort of a student of of human beings and behavior and thoughts that's that's what comedy's all about it's analyzing those things and poking holes in them and when i see someone that is really into any weird or or any any any like real clear ideology with like i feel that way about like super duper lefties like i've had some like blind ideological lefties on my show before too where if we wrote down if we had a column what do you agree with and disagree with i would have way more on the agree with column with them than i do on the disagree with but the disagree ones are so they're so blatant sometimes where i'm like you haven't thought about this [ __ ] at all you just don't want to oppose it because if you know if you oppose it you'll be out of the club like martina navitrolova right who we know i think in retrospect the reason why she was my childhood hero was precisely because she was always so [ __ ] defiant transgressive you know um probably why she was so competitive too oh for sure i mean that she just like was constantly and you know like she didn't give a [ __ ] about what she was told about how females were supposed to look she spent hours in the gym building this huge muscle mass which made her physically dominant you know whatever categories he tried to impose on her were ones that she just disregarded that was just the nature of her personality and in that lies a lot of power and a lot of freedom and in reality that's the same thing that led her even though it made a lot of it converted a lot of her former fans into enemies into challenging these pieties about trans issues right is if you tell martina you're not allowed to do this and you're not allowed to think this and you're not allowed to say that she's going to make a beeline exactly toward those things that's why she [ __ ] fled communist czechoslovakia right was because they were telling her just don't do anything to draw attention to yourself and she knew that was going to limit her greatness as an athlete and her greatness as a human being um and you know that's like that ultimately i think that you know it's so easy to a lot of times people adopt a certain posture then they show you we know as you were saying that kind of pundit voice or if they go on a show where they get to speak for nine minutes instead of two and a half hours they're manipulating their image on purpose and the more that you dig into it the deeper you dig into it the more you kind of try and excavate what really is underneath it a lot of times you uncover truths that you wouldn't have previously seen about who they really are and what they really think and someone who seems like they're hateful really isn't a lot of times though they are yeah um a lot of times they are and a lot of times they've become that because that's uh that's been the way they get the best attention or the most attention or you know sometimes they'll pretend to not be that way to sort of weasel their way in and then once they become popular you find out oh you really do have nefarious ideas you really are a [ __ ] you know and right i and i understand the only way you know is if you talk to them right like if you just ignore them they don't disappear yeah and i i understand people's concern with platforming those people but i really i do think that you have to talk to a wide group of people to get an understanding of humans and if you don't know any hateful people you won't be able to recognize hateful behavior like really recognize it i think you have to see it you have to talk to them and you know if you don't know i mean you have to really understand loving compassionate generous people you have to be around them you have to hear them talk and and when you are around them and you do hear them talk you it changes your perspective on what's possible with people you you you recognize like oh that's a kind of person too like one of my friends is justin wren he's a it's a very unlikely story but he's a guy who was bullied when he was a child like horribly to the point where he was suicidal became a ufc fighter and now he runs a charity called fight for the forgotten where he builds uh wells for the pygmies in the congo he is the nicest most charitable human being i've ever met in my life he is so kind and so gentle and so sweet and it goes to the congo and spends months out of the year there's got malaria three times i mean it's just it's it's it's crazy until i met him until i've spent tons of time with him and talked to him i didn't know that someone was that selfless that someone could be that kind and gentle but yet also being an elite mixed martial arts fighter and an enormous an enormous man me such a contradiction but he's so kind he's so nice i mean to everyone i've been around him he's just so sweet to everyone and you need to know that there's a guy like that out that when i whenever i think about people about kindness and about about generosity selflessness i think of that guy because i know he's real because i know him he's changed my spectrum like the spectrum of what's responsible in people well you know we started off talking about about snowden right and yeah um you know as a journalist people expect me to just keep this critical distance of him from him as you know the way you're supposed to talk about your source when you're a journalist and and almost in every speech that i give and you know obviously stone is not just a source to me he's a very close friend and someone they care a huge amount about we went through something really intense and extraordinary together that will bond us you know for life and and after even um but it's i feel this exactly the same way you know we were talking about how exceptional of an example it is what he did and he shows you a kind of human possibility that you don't previously know exist then starts opening up your own conception of what's possible in terms of your own choices in life and you only can have that happen if you're willing to connect with people who aren't like you yeah and you i mean one of the beautiful things about these long-form conversations is that you can allow someone to express themselves without restraint and you can find out what's really going on and you you know you can expose people this way in a way that i mean i i think people have been exposed on my podcast in a way where if someone really wants to know who they are they can go watch clip and they'll go oh this is what happens when this [ __ ] hits the fire like they fall apart like this is what happens when their ideas are challenged this is what happens when someone says why do you think that and what makes you what why do you say that why are you saying it that way and you let him give him all the rope in the world and then you see them hanging because you can't you can't you can't control yourself for three hours you know it's kind of like i've had this experience before i don't know if you've had this where you know if a magazine wants to profile you they'll send a reporter to follow you around for a week because if you just sit down for a 40-minute interview or an hour interview you can be very controlling about what it is that you present and what you let them see but if they start riding in the car with you when you're driving your kids to school or going out to dinner with you you start forgetting that it's an interview and you start thinking about this person as just someone who's in your life that you're talking to and you end up saying things that if you are being completely controlled you never would have said the same just experiencing this now doing your show you know most shows are at most 45 minutes at most right where you can just get through it and be very conscious of every word here when you have no you know why there's your producer doesn't say what you want to talk about ahead of time i had no idea what we were going to talk about ahead of time it just kind of meanders into this natural space and you do forget that you're being recorded you do forget that a lot of people are going to see it which is a very liberating feeling to have right because you don't have to use that voice that public voice that you feel compelled to use if you're being too self-conscious about the fact that you're being watched and listened to it's sort of like how being surveilled and monitored alters your behavior right if you know that you're being watched and are conscious of it your range of choices that you're willing to engage in diminishes greatly that's why privacy and having a private realm is so important that's where creativity and dissent reside the same thing here it's like if you do a format and you kind of like let yourself free unconstrained with the knowledge that you're actually in an interview that people are going to be watching you just end up speaking much more naturally much more freely and don't monitor every word yeah and by the way this was not by design i can't take credit for the fact that uh this podcast is that sort of thing uh i just didn't want to edit it like this is one of my good friends one of my good friends and i enjoy talking to people one of my good friend ari shafir is one of his uh worst and most famous pieces of advice to me he's like you gotta edit your podcast i go why he goes no one wants to listen to it for that long i go well then they don't have to listen i'm like i don't give a [ __ ] yeah you're you're sloth produced um some really positive that's literally what it is but i i want to speak about what you were just saying because there's a great example that and that's michael hastings where he was trapped uh was it iraq or afghanistan where he was trapped in afghanistan afghanistan afghanistan he was trapped over there because of the volcano in iceland is that where it was i think so i i don't remember the details there's been a long time well there was a volcano erupted and it prohibited air travel and during that time he was embedded with the troops and um they were communicating in a way that was uh he got they got way too comfortable with him and he they i guess they thought with general mcchrystal with general mcchrystal yeah and general crystal said some disparaging things about barack obama and wind up being fired and then uh you know hastings was terrified for his life and wound up in this really weird conspiracy theory scenario where his car goes a hundred miles an hour into a tree and the engine winds up flying away from the car and the car explodes and he dies and uh people are speculating like was he killed did they did they use some sort of software to manipulate his vehicle and have him do that or was this suicide and that was i mean it was a that's a i don't first of all what are your thoughts on that did you you know are you like fully aware of that story or yeah yeah yeah michael was a pretty good was a pretty good friend of mine um i'm a little hesitant to talk too much about it because there's like privacy issues with him and his wife but i will say like his wife was pretty adamant his wife at first of course you know being a loving wife was very open to the prospect that it wasn't an accident and that somebody had caused his car to crash because he was a great investigative journalist who didn't give the slightest [ __ ] who he was angering um as evidenced by the fact that he he ended general mcchrystal's career by publishing the things that he said that were newsworthy and not off the record which is what a good journalist would do and he was mauled by other journalists who said this is uh you know you're ruining the ability of journalists to get generals to speak freely with you in a war zone that's not how it works and he said general mcchrystal wasn't my [ __ ] friend he was someone really powerful in the military and my job was to tell the public what he was saying that they had a right to know which is what he did that was michael's personality but at the same time michael ended up for the last six months or a year of his life being pretty troubled i think in large part because of the trauma he had from spending a lot of time in war zones i i know i have a lot of friends who are journalists who have spent time in war zones and almost every single one of them end up [ __ ] up for good reasons it's a really [ __ ] up thing to see um and he had substance abuse issues that he was struggling with i think the last time i saw michael actually was in la just like a week or two before he died i think it was at oliver stone's house or something and he was definitely um inebriated so you know and i know a lot of people are concerned about that um and whether he was kind of engaging in self-destructive behavior i don't know joe to be honest but i know that his wife reached the conclusion that um she thought those more interesting theories about intrigue and murder was a disservice to his memory for whatever that's worth well i respect that if that's how she felt about it but the the real concern that journalists have and this is what we started off the podcast uh talking to you about about your own safety the jamal khashoggi uh story of course is like the worst example of uh what could potentially happen to a journalist and when we're talking about the safety of people who do take the risks to put out information that people want to hear and then they become the target of very powerful people um it's it's i mean it must be one of the most frightening aspects of your job yeah i mean i you know we we talked about the snowden case for me the much more difficult and dangerous case was the reporting i did last year in brazil starting in june of 2019 going into the beginning of this year where we were publishing the hacked telephone conversations of the most powerful people in brazil and the baltimore government and revealed really serious corruption and um it led to the release from prison of the former brazilian president lula da silva because we were able to show that his prosecution was corrupt um and a lot of other pretty destabilizing events and as a result of that um you know there was a huge right there's a huge right-wing movement in in brazil that electable scenario and that is really kind of you know they're all armed um they believe in the military dictatorship they have the police and the intelligence agencies on their side um and the type of threats that we were getting and it also had related a lot as well to my husband my husband is a member of congress he's a socialist member of congress the only openly gay member of the brazilian congress in a country where bolsonaro has stimulated a lot of anti-lgbt animus as a powerful political tool we haven't left our house in about a year and two months without armed guards and armored vehicles because the level of specificity of the threats that we get with people who know our address and send pictures of our cars with the license plates to be as terrorizing as possible are really severe um and you know for about six months every day on twitter in brazilian twitter my name is at the top of the trending topics glenn is a traitor deport glenn glenn belongs in prison and they did try actually at the beginning of this year they indicted me criminally and a judge threw it out on free press grounds but that's just part of the job you know and that was what made michael such a great journalist was he was fearless when it came to those kinds of things um and that's why when i go and give speeches and then you know some in the q a part of the event some journalist student or someone thinking about going to journalism ask me what my advice is for them that's what i tell them i say first of all don't go into the profession unless you think you have something unique to offer because if you don't then it's kind of just worthless you're just going to be a drone in the beehive you know like you were saying earlier it's going to fade into the mainstream but the other thing i say is if this is if you have a desire to be beloved by powerful people or to be safe this is definitely the wrong profession for you it's only worthwhile journalism is if you're exposing exactly that information which the people who wield the greatest power most desperately want to be concealed that's your job and if you do that like you know everyone loves to talk about speaking truth to power and confronting power but we like people very rarely talk about what that means what is power and what does it mean for people to be powerful it's really simple ultimately like what it means to be powerful is that you have the ability to bestow rewards on people who serve your interests and to inflict punishment and pain on those who impede them or defy them that's all really that's really all it means to be powerful and so if you're really a journalist and you're really challenging power defying it or impeding the agenda of the powerful you're inherently going to be in danger that's just intrinsic to the job and i think that you pretty much need to have either the kind of personality that in some way seeks that for whatever reasons or at least feels like the cause is just enough and righteous enough that you're willing to subject yourself to it i'm certain that through your work you've inspired other people to get into journalism i'm certain and and i i wondered what what does that feel like to you because there has to be young people that have read your work and seen what you've done and seen the documentary with snowden and and heard you speak that say i want that courage of conviction i want to be that person i want to be that person that does express myself honestly and bravely and and expose the world to these truths that uh the powers that be want hidden i mean it sounds you know banal probably but honestly there's nothing more gratifying to me than that because that's how i feel like i'm actually making a mark on the world and changing it in a positive way however limited that might be it doesn't matter you know it's it's i do hear that a lot and um the fact that it's not just that i'm inspiring just some someone to go into journalism it's that i'm inspiring them to go into journalism to do the kind of journalism that i've done and shown them by example can be done and have advocated for and so it makes me feel like i'm almost like reproducing you know like a little army of you know when you hear from like a 22 year old who says that you are the one who has shaped what they want to do in life and they kind of want to follow in your example it's so rewarding you know you feel like you've touched somebody and and and and shown them something inside of themselves a power and ability or a talent or a purpose that they might not have discovered and it's incredibly fulfilling it's a huge responsibility too but yeah that to me is what's exciting about the future i'm hoping that there are enough young people that do see that like you can be one of those people that just drowns into the hive or you could be like glenn greenwald it is possible and that you will inspire a bunch of people to to communicate and to express themselves the way you do so fearlessly i'm hoping the same can be said about podcasts i'm hoping the same can be said about a lot of independent media that there's enough of us out there that that don't want to blend into the hive that the young people coming up recognize the flaws in these patterns and they recognize the traps that they they see by becoming a part of these institutions and by becoming a part of these orthodoxies by becoming a part of these groups that demand compliance 100 compliance to their ideology and they realize well that's crazy that's not how people are and then there there's so many pitfalls and and holes in that that way of life yeah i mean that you know you you asked me before you i think made the observation before you weren't sure what the solution was to these growing pathologies we had been assessing in the discourse and in the political culture and that was why i pointed to your show um just as an example of what i think is possible but more than that i think it illustrates this craving that exists that's being unfulfilled by mainstream news outlets by entertainment products by really prominent voices there's an unfulfilled craving and what excites me the most about it is that it's not definable by either right or left um i love the people who get confused by the fact that you said that you love bernie and tulsi and then are gonna vote for trump and if you're like a political junkie that makes no [ __ ] sense it's like saying two plus two equals five that's not what i said yeah that's not what i said well you said you you said you love bernie and you love tulsi and then when it was biden then trump i think you said you were gonna you prefer trump because you felt like biden was cognitively incapable yeah but i never said i never said i'd vote for trump what i said was i would vote for trump before i'd vote for biden i never said i'd vote for you okay so yeah but everybody said it in the way that oh you're a trump supporter now i'm like that is not what i said it's not working okay good i'm glad you clarified that because i i even i got to see from that yeah um but nonetheless like even that doesn't make sense to people right like but in the real world there were millions of people millions millions not hundreds or thousands but millions who voted twice for barack obama and then voted in 2016 for donald trump and if you're you know like somebody who's just a political junkie who sits on political and journalists twitter all day and sees the world first in like fox versus msnbc or democrat it doesn't make any sense but like to most of the people out there that's not the language they're speaking and podcasts like the one you're doing and a lot of other ones too are finally speaking in the language of huge numbers of people who never before identified with anything and i do think that's exciting because it is breaking that mold that's what's so interesting about it is it's kind of just a new normal unconstrained and undogmatic way of trying to understand the world and i i do find that it's you know hope inspiring hope inducing yeah it does come with responsibilities that i never anticipated and that that is a concern you know i never thought that i would be influential i never never anticipated it and i never uh i didn't plan for it you know just like all of a sudden people were like what are you doing with your influence i'm like ah [ __ ] i've got influence and it's not just cultural influence it's political influence which is like probably even more surprising and like even more of a burden well it's worse because i don't know [ __ ] about politics i mean i've said over and over again if you're taking your opinions on politics from me you're already [ __ ] up and i try to offer so many different solutions so many different people to uh try to get your information from valid unbiased political sources like the hill or kyle kolinsky or jimmy dore many other people that i admire i'm like go to them don't don't don't go to me i'm not the guy yeah um those are all great people to listen to um you know you can find oh you know there's like there are great podcasts now where people are just trying to figure things out really smart interesting funny people um i love the hill i'm on there all the time with with sagar and crystal i know you i love you they're so important they're so important because they're both they're they're both on different sides of the fence politically but they're both honest and objective and they don't agree on things a lot of the time but they're very respectful they're friendly they're they're they're not impaired by their ideology they communicate yeah and they're both kind of the best of their respective sides you know like so yeah and and and obviously kyle kolinsky is is you know someone who's built up an amazing i mean i know kyle for years like when he was just a little kid you know and he was just like kind of screaming into a microphone with i think maybe like 3 000 views or something and now he's become this powerhouse we're doing a election night show a live election night show he and i yeah he mentioned that to me he said don't go on and talk about that because he'll kill me i'm not allowed to talk about it so i'm glad you were the one who spilled the beans and not me but yeah he's fantastic and there's so much new talent like that is discoverable that way and so um you know i i like for all the problems and kind of bleak scenarios that we spent a lot of time dissecting um it is good to end on a note of figuring out a way out of that um because it's not just some rosy-eyed thing that you say to make yourself and others feel better it's really it's real um and obviously the success of your show the ridiculous audience size that you have um that grew so organically with no corporate backing is just proof that you know by speaking honestly and without dogma and script you can attract a lot of people yeah and i just want people to know that our concern i i do understand that i have an influence now and i i am i'm aware of it you know and that's kept me from having a lot of douche bags on the show and you know but unfortunately i i think it's important to have some i think it's important to have some questionable people i think it is i think uh what made the show great is that it's kind of wild and that uh i talk to people that i wanna talk to and i'm going to continue to do that even if people get mad at who the guests are there's no way i can i mean if i want to talk to somebody i'm going to talk to them but i am the minute you start the minute you start tailoring your guest list to avoid making people angry is the minute you're going to start gutting the thing that has made your show interesting in the first place exactly right which isn't to say that you shouldn't be cognizant of that responsibility that you're now obviously aware of and have described but um you know there is going in the other direction excessively also and and you know there's no joe rogan podcast if you're not at points making people angry it was also i understand that if i do have someone questionable and i have to challenge them on their ideas i can't just let people just rant and say about anything if i was it was just me and my friends like nine years ago 10 years ago and we were getting high and sit around and and someone would say some crazy [ __ ] i would just start laughing at it and i didn't think oh this now they think that i'm agreeing with this what this person's saying but just the absurdity of what people were saying would make me laugh now i go oh jesus christ all these people are listening i can't just laugh i can't because i i can't assume people know that i think this is preposterous i have to jump in now and i go okay what are you saying there's a giant audience what what why are you saying this and what do you really believe why do you believe that and that's not true and this is why it's not true like there that's where i understand that i have a responsibility that i wish right i wish sometimes i didn't have but yeah but but but you do whether you want it or not no and i thought i thought like i thought one really interesting episode that happened recently was that time you was you know maybe like a month ago or six weeks i remember exactly when you claimed that what was it that left-wing antifa activists had started some of the fires in the west coast which wasn't true it was an inflammatory claim instead of doubling down or justifying why you said it you immediately issued a statement that was you know self-flagellating in its admission of error it was like i completely [ __ ] up i said something reckless it's it was so stunning to see because you never ever ever see major news outlets doing anything of the sort even when they say something that's much more destructive that's false you know they'll like stealth edit their errors they'll add what they call a clarification everything is just like wormy and designed to avoid just saying like i [ __ ] up and ironically nothing builds confidence in somebody more than acknowledging that in that way that kind of unflinching way like yeah i not only [ __ ] up but i was really reckless in what i did and i'm gonna try and avoid doing that again well there was no um there was no no one telling me to do that this is one important thing a lot of people think of spotify told me to do that they didn't even know about it no yeah i came in and jamie told me you know that thing you said about uh the left-wing people starting forest fires turns out to not be true and i'm like [ __ ] really and so he shows me this thing and i'm like well i read and i i was thinking about all the different people that i read on twitter that were pointing it out it turns out there was like one black lives matter uh protester or activist that was caught lighting fires and most of it was crazy people and there was a lot of arson but the you it's hard to attribute that to any particular ideology ideology yes exactly so yeah i said okay i [ __ ] up and i knew also that i was going to go on vacation i couldn't just let it sit so there was no consideration at all i said well what do i do and jamie and i were talking about i go i i should just make a video or i'm just gonna make a video and put it on instagram so i just grabbed my phone i put it in front of my face i said how i felt and then i uploaded it and then i did the podcast that was it and i said that's the only way i can do if i make a mistake i have to correct it and i'm not again i'm not look i'm gonna make mistakes i'm not married to my mistakes i'm not married to anything i've already said if i made a mistake and i know it's not true i know i'm incorrect i must say that i made a mistake we all do that we all do that like 10 minutes ago right i like was purporting to describe your perspective about the 2020 election based on what i've heard and right you know around right and i misstated it i described it inaccurately and you interjected and said that's not actually what i said i wasn't because i was you know purposely mischaracterizing it it's just we're human and we like gather information especially with the amount of information that that is surrounding us all the time in an incomplete way or we remember it wrong or we interpret it incorrectly or it through i remember barry weiss who i used to be sworn enemies with and now i'm like slowly developing kind of a friendship with her when she was on your show once and she said um and i talked to her about this and she said tulsi for some reason was brought up and she said oh i don't really like tulsi and you said why not she said because she's a toady of assad yeah and you said what she is what like what's your basis for that and she couldn't give you one she was like what do you mean every that's what people say everybody knows that and it's complete [ __ ] right like that is something a lot of people say about tulsi but there's no basis for that no matter and you know barry is a very smart person she's reading constantly i love her she has a lot of expertise and those yeah in those areas um but you know she just said something derogatory about someone that was untrue we all not because she was deliberate because our brains are imperfect and if we don't recognize that um you know i don't think we can have any value no and that's one of those we're just like blowhards yeah yeah for sure i mean you can if you know you [ __ ] up and then you deny that you know you [ __ ] up you won't have any self-respect you you won't you you won't appreciate you you're you're not going to ever respect yourself you're not going to appreciate your thoughts you're always going to know you're a phony like maybe yeah deep down you're going to know deep down you could have doubled down you could have doubled down and said no here's someone who said this [ __ ] all you and you would have been fine but like deep down you would have known that you just like vomited on your integrity never i would never do that i don't have that yeah i just don't if i if i make mistakes i'm sorry and if i'm sorry i say i'm sorry it's just how it is i i don't think there's any other way but this is uh that's the only way you get good at things um you know this comes from my martial arts background to get good at martial arts you can't pretend you're good at things you have to find out what you're doing wrong and you have to correct it if you don't correct it you leave vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities they they equal pain like you get hurt like you you right you lose you know you get hit you get strangled whatever it is um that applies that's that that way of looking at the world because i learned it at such a young age because i grew up doing martial arts so as i've become an adult that's what i apply to everything i don't ever allow myself to [ __ ] myself and i won't [ __ ] other people i'm not interested in it i don't want anybody to think of me in any way other than who i am i'm not interested in publicity i'm not interested in in an image i don't i don't i i am who i am that's it and if i [ __ ] up i tell you i'm sorry right and do you see have you can you think of a time that you've seen the new york times the washington post nbc news cnn issue an acknowledgment of error even remotely in the same universe like that no but i also think that's a problem when you have an enormous organization that thinks about the consequences of an apology and the consequences of admitting error and that uh you know the scrutiny that comes with that of all the other things you've said as well like we don't have an organ i mean our business meeting our big sit-down was me literally walking in and talking to my friend jamie and him showing me this article and i'm going [ __ ] i gotta say something all right let me say something right now and the whole interaction took three minutes and then i pull up my phone and i just make an apology i mean i there's no people to run it by i don't have to have a a meeting where you know the executives sit down and say listen this could be very consequential to our ad revenue this could really become a problem with people respecting your opinion on other things just let it go it'll go away don't talk about it it'll go away but the reality is but the reality is one derives benefit from doing it i don't think the reason institutions avoid doing it is because they fear the consequences unless you know it's possible you if you've defamed somebody then of course you're going to be layered up and and be really constrained in what you could say but absent that i think the reason is is because they're so uh convinced of their own infallibility and they want to always make sure that they're constantly affirming the fact that they are an institution of authority because they know people are listening less and less to them they constantly want to defend their own expertise and saying hey i [ __ ] up yeah in the in their warped you know thought process is something that's credibility eroding when in fact it's credibility enhancing yeah i think what you're talking about is the but the the issue with their thought process that's really critical because um like i said before i i have gone out of my way to make sure that i'm not married to my thoughts uh and i don't equate me with my ideas i am you know i'm just a human being and my ideas are some things that i embrace or don't and they come in and out and i i i have ethics and i have morals and i have values but my ideas what i believe and don't believe especially pertaining to events that i'm not even witness of i'm not married to those i think part of the problem is with many people being right or being wrong becomes a game and they're trying to win that game it's one of the the real problems with people when it comes to conversations where they're not when they're arguing with things they become married to their ideas and they're not willing to concede that you have good points i i find it a virtue that if you're having a conversation with a person and they say something that shows you right away that you're not correct to be able to say oh yep you're right just to be able to say because that's a painful moment yeah people don't like doing that it's hard no it takes courage it's it's you have to be vulnerable yeah right to say i [ __ ] up i was reckless that's that's that's exposing yourself in a very public way but i but i think that you know because i'm not i'm certainly not the person who does that best i have difficulty myself you know acknowledging error in that way and i think one of the reasons that it's hard is because if you have a public platform and especially with so much of our politics and discourse being conducted on social media which is so toxic and brings out the worst and not the best in people almost by design anything where you show vulnerability um is going to be used against you it's going to be used to attack you i actually i remember when you when you did that i observed it i said hey look for all you journalists who scorn him when is the last time you've issued a correction this unflinching right this like just naked in its acknowledgement of error with no attempt to justify or [ __ ] or adorn it with caveats and a lot of people said to me oh [ __ ] him um you know look at the damage he did with disseminating this dangerous slander against the left you know how dangerous that is he did it on purpose no one heard his correction you put yourself in a position where you're going to be mauled and the incentive is all the time to kind of protect yourself right like to be involved it's like it's an incentive that we learn from the time we're children yeah is the way you protect yourself in life is by always being the strongest by conveying strength and not vulnerability and especially when you're in like the you know pit of political and journalistic war um doing that is difficult for a good reason well sometimes you have to tap out you got to take the l you know when you [ __ ] up yeah and that's that's one of those moments and i think you're uh great i mean i hate to call it work because hardly work but the greater body of uh what you put out there speaks for itself if someone wants to extract individual things out of context and try to draw a conclusion that that's who you are or this one individual error like when you [ __ ] up about the fires like that's you that's you that's you forever [ __ ] you like uh yeah they're they're playing a game themselves and you know that's it's a a lack of accepting of nuance a lack of appreciation of uh that human beings are these weird flawed creatures that that maintain contradicting ideas all the time and that have [ __ ] up thoughts and and express themselves incorrectly and make errors and to deny that well you're playing a game now you know or you're b and it's oftentimes people that want to be uh want to pretend that they're so compassionate those are the ones that often are the ones that are the most vicious doing that and it's kind of weird it's one of the things that i find about a lot of people that are a part of the ideological left a lot of them were bullied and now they've become bullies but they've become bullies in a non-physical way they've become bullies in a cyber way and they're they love the pylon they love the gang up and they become a part of it and they they find comfort in it oh for sure i mean i think though you know one of the things that i think we always have to be mindful though of is if you look at mental health data if you look at things like depression and anxiety disorders and suicide rates they're sky high right which is a paradox because the internet was supposed to be this instrument of connectivity it was supposed to connect us to one another more than we've ever been connected before and in a lot of ways it's actually isolated us because now it's kind of kept us in our house always looking at each other through the screen it's separated and then the pandemic obviously has made it way worse and so what you have a lot of times people who are attacking you online so viciously trying to you know show their moral superiority to you part of it is definitely what you've been saying which is like this desire to feel power and strength because they felt like they lacked it as children and got picked on and so now they're going to get back to the world but part of it is just people are really frustrated and unhappy and angry in life for pretty valid reasons yes and a lot of times you just become kind of the vessel for them to expel that it's often more very very often not about you at all but about them um and it takes a while to internalize that not to take that personally because so often it's really those attacks are just kind of a vehicle for them to compensate for the deprivation that they have in life on so many different levels i think that's very accurate and i think twitter exacerbates that more than any other form of social media this very qui allen levinovitz had a great way of putting it that um it's processed information and it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you it's not the way you're supposed to get information it's not the way you're supposed to communicate you're supposed to communicate looking at people in front of them you're supposed to be seeing each other i mean that's that's when we're at our best and i think that the the way people communicate on twitter it it exacerbates mental illness it exacerbates anxiety and exacerbates depression and certainly being isolated and being trapped because of the pandemic and being stuck at home exacerbates that as well but i just don't think i don't think it's healthy to argue with people that way and the the way people were willing to argue on twitter they would never communicate like that in person unless they're a [ __ ] psychopath right never never joe do you know like any time i sign on to the internet at any second of any of the day 3 30 in the morning two in the afternoon whenever it is i can find thousands of people saying the worst possible [ __ ] about me like i was worse than hitler in the 15 years that i've been doing this work except for one old lady who was like rich and 85 years old and i was walking down the street after a protest yet last year in brazil at the height of the controversial reporting i was doing and she opened her window and started cursing at me and telling me that i deserved to be imprisoned other than that crazy old lady every single time somebody on the street has walked up to me because they recognize me from my work it's been to say i think your work is awesome congratulations on what you've done it inspires me i really am a fan of yours where are all the people who you know are saying i am a white supremacist that i'm sick and evil that you know where are they that you don't they're in real life they don't materialize um and that's why i think that so much of it is just that that thing that people have inside of them that modern society creates through deprivation that at least being anonymous and spewing hatred online enables them to some extent to expel and also you being a very high profile journalist you become a target in that you're not even a normal person like it's it's easy to take free shots at you like it's easy to justify those free shots like he's glenn green well [ __ ] him that guy you know what the [ __ ] that guy like they don't even know you right and yeah or like yeah people read about how much money you make or you know what success you've had and then you just become this like pixelated target and your humanity is is is drained for them they don't see you at that as a human they see you as this kind of object well i felt it ramp up considerably there was a forbes article uh like a year ago about how much i made and that ramped it up and then the spotify deal ramped it way up it's like it's of course free shots it's just like you're at the carnival dunk tank and people want to totally but i get it nothing nothing is [ __ ] nothing is [ __ ] free in life yeah like anything that you get that is a benefit will come what they cause i don't know why the universe works that way but it absolutely does like everything stays in balance it does but it's also a challenge for you personally to uh sort of immunize yourself from that kind of hate and to uh also to to structure your life in a way that you're not bathing in it you're not on twitter reading comments and going back and forth with people like i see some celebrities do and i've had conversations with friends that have like real mental health problems because of that and i've called them up and i go hey man stop doing that stop reading comments like it's an addiction it's built to be an addiction i mean i'm one of those [ __ ] idiots who has tried often but fail to avoid that in part because i do like the back and forth like the vibrancy of exchange like one of the things i always liked about new media versus old media is that journalists did have to hear from critics and engage with them as opposed to speaking from the mountaintop but like any drug that can start off really good and really pleasurable and open up like new experiences for you it becomes when it becomes a kind of addiction um it becomes toxic and and and destructive which is what it's become for me but you know i think the other side of it is the same like you can't get attached to the people who hate you but you also can't seek too much and place too much importance on the admiration yes yes right because that it's kind of just the the opposite side of the same coin it's you know just like those people who who are expressing hate toward you don't really hate you because they don't know you the people who say they love you don't love you right like they love your work and that's a big big difference um and just like this also sounds spinal but like one of the things that i realized um but you know i never wanted to be a father my husband and i adopted kids two kids two brothers three years ago and last year at the height of the brazil reporting when the right in brazil hated me and the left you know loved me they had this huge event um which is in defense of my press freedom after bolsonaro threatened to imprison me it was like a hall filled with like 6 000 people people had my you know signs like my name on it it was just too much it was like all the press was there i did a press conference first and before i went into that event i was sitting in this kind of room that they put me in with my two kids my husband had already gone on stage and my kids who were 11 and 9 at the no 10 and 8 of the time picked up like these little pieces of paper and put them in their mouth and found a straw and just started like spitting spit balls at my head so and then like i would look over at them and they would like just [ __ ] giggle like i was the biggest douche bag on the planet so like i was in this event that was like historic in nature like people chanting my name and carrying my signs and i love and of course i wanted to [ __ ] strangle my kids because they were like shooting spit balls in my head but at the same time i was so grateful for them because they were treating me like you know just some like dumb stupid dad who they were mocking and it just reminded me like all that other stuff is so fake you know it just it that's not the stuff that matters it doesn't ultimately it's it doesn't really touch who you are it's one of the beautiful things about having comedian friends that they never let you slide they're always [ __ ] with no reverence no there's nothing no reference i'm sure they just [ __ ] torture you we torture each other all the time but it keeps us saying but there's love in it like if one of my friends roasts me and you know they send something to me on twitter i start laughing or on my text message rather i just start laughing like i'm in a text thread with a bunch of comedian friends and it's horrific [ __ ] but it's funny but it's funny you know even if it's pointed towards you it's it's what we were talking about earlier about these alt-right people that lean towards the attention that they get and it ultimately becomes toxic and i think they recognize the folly in that when when it goes away and they realize where where are those people and i i lean towards them and maybe express myself in a disingenuous way to try to get their love and now i find myself the victim of that yeah yeah you mean it's like you know it's like anything anything in excess can can destroy you including success or admiration or hatred or anything it's really important to keep that balance well you look at how many celebrities lose their [ __ ] minds and what i mean it's almost commonplace we expect it we expect them people that that gain massive amounts of fame and adulation to lose their minds it's normal like we do yeah i mean i yeah i watch like two biopics in a row by accident like the michael jackson one where they just included his accusers which believe them or not like michael jackson had all kinds of [ __ ] up things in his life and died at 50 and then freddie mercury who had a not entirely identical but still similar trajectory all the fame all the money all the adulation that you could possibly want in the world and all the like most [ __ ] up pathologies that ultimately killed them as well that came with it they were completely intertwined yeah my favorite example is elvis because elvis is one of the first i mean when when elvis became that famous in the 1950s and the 60s there was really no one like that before him or very few people that he could mirror like he could say you know like i could call you know dave chappelle and uh you know if i've got of some weird [ __ ] about being famous is [ __ ] with me i can call him and maybe at least we find common ground and i feel like okay i'm not the only one out there that feels weird about all this who the [ __ ] was elvis gonna call you know elvis wasn't gonna call anybody there's no elvis before elvis yeah look how elvis wound up all peeled up and fat and [ __ ] up and confused and he pretty much he probably he pretty much like ruined himself right like he took what made him famous his his good looks his like hot body his like ability to dance and he just he got fat and bloated and then he killed himself right like he was at war with it yeah he was at war with it yeah and i don't i don't think it's tenable i don't think anybody could really manage it at that scale i think when you get to that michael jackson level you get to that elvis level it's like there is no normal and there is no one you can mirror there's no one who's going to understand what you're going through you're you are you're recognizable in every square inch of the planet and it's it's madness and you become mad and you know elvis is one of the best examples of that but i think there's a little bit that we can all anybody that's in the public eye can learn from those examples and you need something that grounds you you need you got to find something whether it's meditation or yoga or or marathon running you got to have something that's a real thing it's a real struggle that's a real thing that you have to have energy and focus and and that can ground you and it can you can you can use the tools and the the the the mental fortitude that you gather from that and it can help you survive the [ __ ] from the other things yeah i mean i you know i i i'm yoga meditation that saved my life on multiple occasions um precisely for that reason that that you you know you even independent of like whether you're well known or or successful in your career i think like you need some escape from just materiality from like the constant pressures and and in this like one-dimensional form of evaluating yourself like that spirituality that you can't get if you don't have religion as most of us these days don't in the west um you don't need religion but you do need spirituality of some kind like just some purpose some connection to something beyond just your immediate material desires and i do think if you deny yourself that you're gonna get off kilter at best um and and yeah i think i think that's because we crave purpose and making money or being famous or doing well in your career isn't purpose um it's something that can enable purpose it's something that can help you fulfill your purpose but it in itself is not purpose and if that's all you're pursuing to the exclusion of other things or all that's defining you yeah i don't think you're going to end up very good yeah because there's something that comes with too much success there's a lack of lessons you know there's there's too much adulation and love and too many people are holding doors open for you and tell you how great you are and you don't you don't learn from those lessons there's no lessons there the the lessons come from failure and from struggle and without that it's very hard to define yourself i couldn't agree more glenn i'm glad we did this next time i'm gonna be in that cool little red studio they built for you there all right man beautiful well i hope that's great thank you very much i really appreciate you great talking to you joe i really appreciate it too all right take care you

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 62,896

Rating: 4.6843309 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, JRE #1556, comedian, The Intercept

Id: t0rcLsoIKgA

Length: 185min 13sec (11113 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MrPushkin]

Very happy to see this. More people need to hear Glenn Greenwald talk. He's always able to explain the whole spying operation in very plain terms.

Also the first time in a while I've seen Joe get legit angry.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

Good to see Glenn Greenwald get this kind of exposure.

[u/RANDYFLOSS]

He has like a classical jewish face that is a combination of Adam Sandler and Leonard Cohen

[u/sdparquinn]

Based

[u/dudesstayrockin2020]

Back when I was a New Atheist Rationality bro I hated this dude because Sam Harris didn’t like him. Now I’ve done a complete 180 and believe the complete opposite. Greenwald is the man.