Joe Rogan Experience #1745 — Matt Taibbi Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. We up? Plus, it's not tainted by show business. they start lying basically, right? makes barbecue oh hi mike like mike's a normal guy you know must take some time to sort of That makes sense. avoid all the pitfalls that are just and all the emails from peter dazik and fauci and the nih when you look at the way they were People are mad at people who take alternative medications.

4:09 been a big story all by itself and it wasn't yeah it wasn't it's it's a strange time but it's this people were traumatized by that beyond all proportion, Exactly. I have a good buddy of mine who's my former kickboxing trainer. Uh, shout out to But he had this attitude because of the conditions, because there's a real fear in the air. And forget about just the stuff that we create.

6:50 I think when the shit actually hits the fan, it's the tiniest, smallest percentage of the But yeah, no, this is like the most unfun period in American history, at least in my lifetime. It's very tense. job of, uh, moderating and making sure that people saw all the different sides of the issue. Um, People like Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points, Kyle Kalinsky, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, these independent journalists who I can turn to.

9:30 the manipulative aspects of it, the predictability of it. You obviously know this. and you got people with winter coats on. Yes. Which is wild. It's a different conversation. Like if you got something really, really badly wrong, it was potentially a career ending thing, especially if you made some kind of ethical mistake in forgetting to check something.

14:12 And they can't see it. And when they decided to leave, we had a group conversation on the phone and professional corporate media to be terrified of leaving the fold. And, um, you know, there's opportunities to do They go, well, you'll have more ad revenue because you'll be connected to our whatever, our network. like a permanent deal. Like I'm sure they own 50% of it forever or whatever percentage they,

17:46 and you start thinking about your kid's college and all that stuff, because their ratings are getting worse, the advertising revenue is dropping off, but the that are worried, rightly so, of being lost in this. well known and they're kind of in this system and they're realizing while they're in this system that it's it's pretty fucked and how to do the job.

20:48 christ and that but you're like but wait i think he's right like it's just ideologically opposite if he didn't like them, And they're using exactly the same method. She's balling out of control. And, I mean, that's a tough job. This is not hard. right right it's not hard yeah it's not hard well yeah there's hard jobs out there this it would be Yeah.

23:45 when i was well i had many of them because my father was an architect growing up but um when i And I remember I would – and this was back when I was still competing. Anything but that. I was 19 and it was a real wake up call. I was like, okay, So the guy I was with had just gotten out of jail, and he was like – this is what the people who built the pyramids must have felt like, you know, carrying that stuff up the stairs.

25:53 right across the street was next comedy stop which is like wild and they were they were literally And they thought it would be fun to like have this classy comedy club. And then Bill, he's a real businessman. That's the big, big venue now. Yeah, absolutely. interesting is watching all these pieces shuffle and move around like the substack thing and the

28:07 the op-ed page is really worried about Substack. I'm like, why would you be worried? You're the And people are – they were already out there. They get annoyed. thank you this stuff i'm um um subconsciously trying to pour it out because I know I'll drink the whole goddamn thing. It's awesome. I saw it in martial arts. is a combination of all the things but yes it's with everything when something new comes along

32:09 what decisions to make. It's just our job to get it correct, right? And then that's the news. that that's not good enough, that they have to compensate for inequities in the system by people are desperate. They really, really need just to get the basic information. And instead, you know, when the pandemic happened, we were in the effectiveness of chloroquine and coronaviruses hmm see if we can find

35:22 But as time has gone on and you've seen it over and over again and the the justification for not like it's it's right whether it came from a lab or whether it came from a cave somewhere that person. We have to call them a conspiracy theorist. We're going to have this fact checking I mean, his work in exposing the whole disinformation campaign and the emails and the fact that Fauci was the one that restarted the gain-of-function research and funding gain-of-function research, all that stuff.

38:01 Like, you know, he went out the door and he's like, guys, I can breathe. success as it has some antiviral properties. the same language over and over again. Yeah. But whatever it is, it was for dogs. That shit's ivermectin. dog or two billion um horses on earth like how many how many billion horses are there Yeah, I was pretty sure of that. it's ramps it was YouTube had eliminated among other things like congressional testimony about

42:24 it was in every single story like the the language was exactly the same yeah it was amazing, the unanimity. Like, as you said, it was in every single story. your own decisions about things. And that was valuable. The whole point of a job was to be like one of my favorite things to watch is the compilation of all of the people on the left Who knows what it's going to do to you?

44:09 The very same people. that's shameful. It's one thing for a politician to use a phrase like that. That's clearly cooked really the only way we're going to trust it today. Something that is completely independent of a large corporation where they have a lot of vested interests in pushing a like Moderna and Pfizer are making right now. The amount of money that Bill Gates has spent on influencing media.

47:14 Right. But we were supposed to once have, you know have our ears up and be conscious of who was Is that a respected publication? Yeah. NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, such as The Participant, whose documentary, Waiting for Superman, supports Gates' agenda Nobody comes and tells you, well, don't cover this. works. That's how it works with everything. It works with foreign policy.

51:54 changes that they weren't ready for. You could not get that story sold, right? because they would get it, you know, But if you picked up the New York Times, what you read is the emerging middle class was doing great. which is like moonshine. But we open up the bottle. What was it about? And I believe they sell pelts and they'll use that for snowmobiles and tools and things like that. But essentially

55:27 Don't know man this like really unusual resolve like they found their niche That sounds awesome. This is crazy. As odd as that sounds, there's not that many. Yeah. That would be a problem, right? It would be difficult. I think the problem is that this they'd be mostly happy with any kind of six-figure advance to do something like that. In the a thing we want to do on this.

59:52 I think it would work. It would definitely work financially. journalism 10 years ago, 15 years There's some of it out there. whether you're using illustrations. Do you think that with the rise of independent journalists, do you think that it's possible that that might open up and people might look at that as a viable career path. It's a great, great job. But people have been, I think they've been turned off to it

1:03:39 It's not just a cool job. Like, you know, it's a great place for if you want to be a writer. I lived in a church in Texas for a while. Did they have a date? Did they use serpents? Oh. Do you, what is that? What is it called? How old do they think it is? See if you can pull up some images of it. But for the longest time, they were trying to decipher it.

1:07:53 So somewhere in the early 1400s, somebody, so clear that, was the manuscript decoded? that's kind of amazing. There's evidence that additional pages are missing. a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. I was going to say, the earliest books, while I was reading something about some of the Yeah, like even I thought they found out what some of the stuff

1:09:53 No, it's kind of like today. I forget who brought that up. a hard drive that's like a one gigabyte hard drive but i'm trying to stuff 18 gigs of information in It's just. The cartoon is Robert Graysmith. So we were just talking about gibberish. But it was very hard for me to do. Well, he just basically took Russian words So there was a little bit of that.

1:13:28 It was a female politician and the husband seemed gay. Right, yeah. and telling me that, you know, also changes in an understanding of homosexuality that it's this is not a Oh, okay. it seems to have nothing to do with your sexual preference. the fights looked like a guy beating up a woman. having to like start doing research on this like what like why are people

1:18:19 I believe it's called Irreversible Damage. Yes. and shut it down at the source It's a religion of wokeness. is an issue here where people are malleable. There's a sense of well-being. they call it the social contagion phenomenon. that. But you have to test that, right? Like that's the whole point is like, we're not deciding this atmosphere where people don't want to... They're just sort of deeply interested

1:23:53 Their positions on things are entirely ideologically driven. in the civil rights era. And they were really, really, And now you wouldn't have had that if you didn't have the Nazis. these numbers and you know people are being indoctrinated into these ideas what's important Explain that to people, the whole story behind that. Yeah, I don't remember exactly what happened.

1:28:08 And that became the Streisand effect. kinds of thinkers don't exist anymore. And there isn't. It's logistically impossible for a company Again, that's part of what being a person is, What's that? I'm looking at these guys. It's a fake face as like the profile picture. American flag and then eventually they all jumped into the back of a u-haul and were carted off at the end of this

1:31:38 You need to see this. Right. They're walking, not goose-stepping, but walking at the same pace in goose stepping they're walking not goose but you know i'm walking Uninformed white nationalist group marches on Lincoln Memorial. Is that- have you ever seen anything that looks more like feds? wearing winter coats yeah like you know look at this The fuck out of here. How do they all have, like,

1:33:58 This asshole's got a drum. So, you know, what's so interesting about this though? Is that again? Maybe they're real. Or they're feds. group marches through the heart of Phil oh I remember this from Philadelphia and and even commit acts of vandalism could be I mean who knows? There's enough assholes in America I didn't cover the story, but basically

1:37:05 Like the assassination of Fred Hampton, the infiltration of the Black Panthers, like, you know, all this stuff. But you should have some healthy skepticism about each one of these things. I just sent Jamie this. Right? He was 19 years old. And they or creating terror watch lists, no-fly lists, putting people under Exactly. And we got the heads of the intelligence agencies lying to Congress openly, getting away with it.

1:41:00 Comey became a hero. who were just like, something about this just doesn't smell right. Like, the story just feels wrong. Intelligence sources, especially anonymous ones, are inherently untrustworthy. And yet, clapper and all these guys like these like horrible people it's so crazy but one thing that People have always done that. Enhancements Act and, you know, the Patriot Act, the no-fly list, the watch list, all this stuff,

1:44:05 You know, they didn't want it to happen again. So they just said, okay, go ahead. We trust you. And it's crazy that nobody's more worried about it. Which is crazy to say, because it's a small percentage of people that are out of their What's going on here? There's this one guy that was telling people over and over again, they got to go in that building.

1:47:05 They would be irresponsible. the Whitey Bulger type situation, right? And the question is, how often do they do that? But anyway, but yeah, the thing with Biden talking about white supremacy is the biggest threat, You would have to have something that allowed you to say that this guy was a white supremacist In Los Angeles, they were lighting cop cars on fire. There were pallets of bricks that are mysteriously dropped off at protest sites and windows were smashed through Beverly Hills. They had an early curfew. People have quick memories. They have short memories and they forget how fucking crazy it was. Like right after that George Floyd protest or right after George Floyd's murder when everybody was chaotic, like the country was in a state of chaos, that's when that happened.

1:50:29 I'll find it. is most of the time, the initial impression of news is wrong, at least somewhere, there's usually So he wanted to protect a business owned by these guys. Yeah. Literally one of the, it's just one of the worst crimes you could imagine. black people they didn't They literally didn't know. And you can see how that can happen. if you highlight certain things, right? And I think that's what happens with, you know, with a lot of the people in this case.

1:55:27 there's a lot of people that join in that really have no... which was one of the reasons why the reporting about that was so disappointing, right? Like, we have to go out there and ask, you know, I know, I know. jujitsu and put their fucking knee on my neck for a minute or 30 seconds it's horrific to imagine do that they tried to make a point that it's not that big of a deal and they had someone do it to

1:58:51 him out to be some sort of a hero that's not accurate either right but you couldn't say that which says homicide on it uh you know yeah because they've determined medically the cause of death gave all his money to his family members. daughter erica and we talked about like how we're how she wanted to see the book done and i said past right but he wasn't doing it that day and they they physically manhandled him and they

2:01:50 He's fucking strangling the guy. There's a lot of negative shit that's happened from this whole defund the police thing and the fact that, you know, the police officers feel so, It's the number of contacts you have between police and people and a lot of that has to do with the heightened number of The innovation in the 80s, 90s and going forward was let's just use that a lot.

2:04:21 put their hands down their pants. And eventually someone's going to say no, like Eric Garner. issues that was it was just police are bad and you know therefore let's take their money away where people are just running into stores, So their fear of the cops is like non-existent now. who live in affluent white communities who don't know what it is to occasionally need to call the

2:07:07 There'd be more police. Right. People who are most in favor of that are the people who have no conception of what the They want police who are less, you know, aren't so quick to use force. And they're like, okay, we've got to do something. make it better when we defunded the police. They put mug shots on the front page of every black suspect. How about the way they wrote about it, just the titles?

2:10:55 and suddenly have a lack of curiosity in jail. That he got let on a thousand dollars bail, which is incredibly low for a guy who tried Like selling untaxed cigarettes is a violation. and they will try to get the judge to set bail Like – or sit in a place like Rikers Island and lose their jobs while they waited to adjudicate some really minor offense, right?

2:14:17 and what's the best way to do it? Like I'm doing a story now about the Loudoun County, Virginia education mess and just a lot of the thinking kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood. They just have this idea that if they are for defunding the police, communities for decade after decade with no intervention whatsoever, no help. I mean,

2:17:28 And they were using the police to imprison and arrest tens of thousands of people, intellectuals sometimes just uh shouldn't be allowed to make every decision you know um That was the straw that broke the camel's back. the day before that happened and now is so stark that if you told me one death of a guy who was, you know, brutalized by the police and murdered in the way we all saw publicly, it's going to change the entire country.

2:20:14 The culture war was just getting hotter and hotter all the time. I think during the Trump years, there was a tendency to The Theranos girl. Doesn't it? Your voice sounds a little bit like her fake voice. I think it's too late. Have you paid attention to that trial at all? to revolutionize the industry and help everyone. And she had this fake voice. I'm so fascinated

2:23:37 the state bureaucracy wouldn't know that that person was dead yet. respectability. And have a bunch of people who are respectable that have already bought into it. And there's just a lot of really interesting ways to rip people off in this environment. And and and everyone's like what what are you talking about? Pull that microphone in front of you.

2:27:31 some money up front. You take all that money. And then as new people come in, you give the early When he stopped doing that, I'm not sure. 7% or 14% this year. Uh, and no one's going to check because there isn't, there isn't a body And that was why there was all this joy That's one of the things that made it so fascinating and that it was successful.

2:30:53 It was a form of protest. Now, for some people, it was just a way to make money, There was nothing built on it, but he had bought this really nice property And he was so fucking sad. severe health problems and eventually wound up passing away so it's like this guy was just And it's all these people who've lost everything. Bernie Madoff's banker was JPMorgan Chase.

2:34:31 like complex chemistry or something. It's endorsed by the biggest commercial bank in the country. to, to, to keep all of these companies of business, somebody has to underwrite all that money from the Fed that went to rescue everybody to keep all these companies Yeah. It's going to make them all rich and it's just going to drive that resentment even further. Well, it's also the collapse of small businesses,

2:38:12 JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs They're not going to lose on that investment. when they split up, when they took the failing companies like Washington Mutual, So that's happening again. I mean, I think if people are going to look out, they're going to see what happened after the pandemic. they're doing great um you know but small businesses aren't like you know it's it's

2:42:20 No, they produce drugs that are very beneficial to people. they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off the vaccines But more than three is the vaccine. Well, you have stakeholders. This is what corporations do. people trying to pass laws in various States that would, that would mandate that as a treatment, There are so many different ways that these companies sort of prey on people.

2:45:54 Which is fucking wild. Like the Omicron thing. Isn't that weird? That sounds good, right? Huh? I might not be able to move. You watch this video where this person, this ad, this lady's lying there sleeping and plants are growing around her. i believe the vaccine works. And look and start looking at any of these questions. Well, there's been a capture right and there's been a

2:50:36 Right. and they villainize the people in this country who voluntarily don't get the vaccine. It's fucking bonkers. I mean maybe it's some of these areas are not coming into contact, regular contact, the people from these countries that When you talk to people that really understand the science behind it, I had no idea when I took it that I when I took it with all those other

2:53:58 But what I didn't expect was this one particular drug Thank you. And I was sick. It wasn't like I had like, it was, there was no symptoms. Which is wild. but the the whole thing like oh he's taking horse dewormer. That was a recognition like, oh, we've fucking played a terrible hand here. Which is, well, I think they're probably going to clean house over there anyway.

2:57:12 I think the Substack experience has been so fascinating for me. That's the problem. We're not that smart. Which is funny. I mean, he's just a guy. moral rectitude, infallibility. of, you know, well, we're curious. We don't really know, you know, like that was the way It became a fashionable profession. them would be camera people, some of them would be tech people. But what was so interesting

3:02:35 And I think it was symbolized by something like Primary Colors. And that was what everybody wanted. They wanted to be like one of those people who got the secret, who knew in advance what the candidate was going to say. they had to sort of like follow some protocol or follow some rules and you know he did like when he So if you go into this business to be socially successful,

3:05:14 They are socially the same people that they're reporting on. Oh, God, I can't even imagine. because there's going to come a time Absolutely. Well, what, what kind of signaling is this? It was really good. you doing or and why were you doing the other thing before like right was it was it to be the Letterman show you got the this show that that show that was the thing man right you could get

3:09:13 I'd like to see some evidence of that. Right. it's his memoir, Reporter. I could not be handed the things, you know what I mean? I mean, Letterman in the 80s, maybe? and, Oh, you're hilarious. Oh, that's great. That's awesome. There was no, no attacking. Yeah, exactly. I think he's the best talk show host of all time. I it wasn't the same. Is it really?

3:14:06 He's fighting it and there's there's a lot of guys like that out there now. There's guys coming up like Tim Dillon it's phenomenal it's really incredible it's incredible to see because you know i work with It's not possible. this is not like they're not in court giving affidavits on their their viewpoint they're I'm saying it away. snippet of that and tries to take particularly if they take a snippet of that and they put it in

3:16:55 Yeah. Just take it in. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards alive I think we learned that. That is amazing. Yes. No, you only sound like that one because you can't say that any man sounds like Sam Kinison doing um see that's the lesson never have you know if you're going to be going to crime don't have friends in college or like start the shit early right like in high school and may come up

3:19:46 I just get a kick out of that. There's no plan behind this. Oh, I do too. Yeah. I'm barely on it. Appreciate you. Appreciate you.