Matt Taibbi

00:01five four three two that count don't gives me anxiety I got to stop doing the countdown see look I spilled my alpha brain what is alpha brain it's brain juice it's like a cognitive enhancing supplement really yeah you ever with nootropics you know what nootropics are no you have an extra one can I score for sure nootropics are essentially the building blocks for human neurotransmitters they improve your memory not too radically not like your with modafinil or any of that stuff no no no modafinil is like provigil it's they give it a fighter pilot yeah helps keep them awake I was a doctor so yeah you have a doctor my what my wife is a doctor Oh your wife's a doctor yeah oh that's perfect so she knows about all that job yeah but there was just an article recently about it improving cognitive performance you're gonna probably have to bite into that you got it yeah

01:01it's good to meet you man I'm gonna been a fan forever so thank you me too looking forward I've enjoyed your writing for sure and did you get that you got there I don't have to buy this here we go we got scissors got it Jamie's got scissors for you if you don't want to with that I got it um so let's talk about what we were just talking about you were you wrote a book with a guy about drug dealing and he was gonna come on wearing a mask yeah he wanted to come on wearing a Barack Obama mask actually it's it's actually really funny the whole story is really funny I'm writing this book I spelled it too it's called the business secrets of drug dealing you can find it at business secrets of drug dealing calm and I'm serializing it but basically somebody I knew for ages in a completely different capacity I sort of came out to me last year and said um you know I've been a high-level drug dealer

02:09for for a long time basically my whole life and wanted to tell his story about you know sort of the the whole progression of his life what kind of drugs only things that grow out of the ground so he started off this is a is an african-american guy he started off bleed or not selling mushrooms he he sort of grew up half in the projects and half and in an upscale suburb and he in the upscale suburb he sold mushrooms which he basically got through mail order at a time early in the sort of history the internet when there were some loopholes about things get spores right yeah well actually you could get the actual really yeah yeah Wow so he ends up having this whole career and he wanted to sort of explain to me what the rules of the game were and do sort of a book version of the ten crack commandments and so we sat down and we couldn't quite figure out how to do it

03:24at first but we ended up essentially doing a sort of fictionalized version of of his life and the progression is amazing because he he goes from being a dealer and all these different parts of the country and different social spheres he's in college he deals to rich white kids he deals on the street and in Tut in you know tougher urban neighborhoods and then ends up sort of in the legal business in this state as a lawyer no no no no no he legal marijuana oh yeah yeah and so he's describing that world which is not there are a lot of misconceptions about it there are there are some things about it that are not known terribly well like you know what do you do when you work you know at a farm and your crop test dirty you know with with a contaminant well you know not everybody just throws it away you know a lot of that stuff ends up shipped across country goes to

04:36other markets and he sort of describes a lot of this like what contaminants would that be like fungal or yeah like a fungus something like that you know there are labs that basically have to clear you know from what I understand that have to clear each of the crops and and there are situations where you know there's a whole bunch of crop and you got workers that have to be paid and what do you do with it and the legal market isn't big enough to accommodate all the stuff that's grown and so there's sort of still you know kind of a black market that goes on and he describes this and but even before that it's just a fascinating book about you know all the different things that he learned in the course of his career about how to get it you know do the job and not get caught had it had a rig a load to drive cross-country how do you do a dummy car you know he tells the

05:38story about how basically you want four cars you want the guy in the front seat to be to be to look like a drug dealer have a terrible record drive badly basically to attract the police and the you know the third car is the load car the second car is sort of watching to see if there's there's cops in either direction and then the fourth car is basically driving up behind the load car to sort of prevent anybody from seeing the license plate and that sort of thing and so he just talks about all this stuff and it's it's it's fascinating and it was a new kind of writing for me because I've never really done anything except straight journalism and we sort of had to do it narrative form and so we're putting it out serially online right now which is really cool so you did one of those to change the names to protect the innocent exactly yeah yeah or the guilty yeah yeah

06:31but for the most part based on facts mmm yes yes the situations were left to say realistic you know right yeah yeah and and his you know the observations were that that he describes are all you know things that he actually learned the situations were you know relatively close to things that actually happened so yeah that's interesting so that's available now mm-hmm yep yep again it's business secrets of drug-dealing calm it's it's kind of a new thing I grew up a huge fan of serialized detective stories I was a big fan of like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and I loved black mask magazine which was the big pulp noir magazine in the 20s and 30s and you know I grew up reading all those stories and I always it was in the back of my mind always that I wanted to try this and write a book on a deadline so I'm doing this now it's a it's basically co-written with this anonymous character

07:42who can't appear with me on shows like this anywhere because he asked he's still not captured and so are there warrants out for this guy no he's never been picked up been arrested never been arrested no oh yeah like a smart dude he is a smart dude he is a smart dude and some of his employers would be very surprised to know that he's got a hobby like this it's funny you know I knew him again I knew him for years and didn't have the faintest clue that that this was this was going on so you keep a job in order to avoid suspicion so the book is actually structured with all these rules each chapter has has rules in it one of his his most important rules is always have a job and it's for a number of reasons number one he talks about how when he was young he worked at places like you know Marriott or Applebee's and he's like you know if you can serve have the patience to serve people at an

08:52Applebee's and not blow up and scream at people then you won't screw up a package like in other words if if you can have the self-discipline to actually get through one of these jobs and not blow up and be crazy then you're gonna handle or hand it yourself well at a car stop that's fascinating so he used it almost like as a discipline exercise he used it as a discipline exercise he learned and among other things like another one of his rules is dressed like an off-duty Applebee's waiter like do not dress he talks about this about how most dealers they learn their their profession by watching movies you know there's no there's no book out there I mean they it's not like this generation is growing up reading like me the old iceberg slim or Donald Goines novels or whatever it is they're watching you know the wire or blow or ozark now or whatever it is but

09:52dealers very often dress like dealers you can you can kind of spot them you know and he says that's exactly the opposite of what you have to do you know where Sperry shoes wear boring clothes look like you know youth you're on your way to to you know your freshman English class or whatever it is and you know sound like a nerdy college kid when when the cops pull you over and all this stuff is sort of central to his his whole worldview about how to avoid getting caught Wow that would be a great book it I mean it is it's it's it's really fun and you know the the fact that that the you know the co-author is actually a person who's pulling this off makes it makes it really interesting and it makes it a real challenge to write it too because you know I had to kind of simulate his voice and kind of communicates people what what the situations were like and what

10:59things look like from his point of view and obviously I'm white and he's african-american and that's that's tough and but you know I think it works it's kind of a cool story but it must have been a juice eat like when you found the subject like oh boy we got something here oh yeah super juicy ya know it's it's it's so much fun I haven't had this much fun like fun fun writing anything for a long time because you know most most criminal memoirs and again I grew up a junkie in terms of reading this stuff I love I love books that are written after the fact by people who were in crime you know like Papillon was one of my favorite books growing up I mean it's it's an amazing story about not not just crime but about prison and what's that like but they're always written by people after they got caught right and so there's never that book by the person who's still out there and and talking

11:54about what outlaw life is like successfully still on the other side of the law and that that part of it is fascinating it's just uh it's a completely new thing and and he has all these insights that I that I would never have thought about like he talks about how there's the thing he calls the hood price like if you when you're dealing selling to in black neighborhoods even he charges a higher price because there's more there are more problems that you inevitably run into when you're dealing in those neighborhoods because there's more cops which means more lawyers which means more security which means more attention to detail when you deal to rich white kids there's nobody's paying attention so you just there's less overhead you know in the business which is which is fascinating it's it's and you know he talks all about this and and he has he spent a lifetime kind of

12:57just keeping all this stuff in his head always wanting to put it down and he just got to be too much and he just sort of tapped me on the shoulder one day and said can we have lunches when I talk to you about something I would say three years was four years yeah yes that's very easy yeah we had to trust you well I'm glad we decided to not have him on because he would get busted yeah exactly yeah yeah like you can't like if you were on something and you had a mask on people go that's Matt Taibbi somebody listening to him he that maybe he doesn't understand that there's millions of people listening I totally agree hundreds of those people would go that's whatever right it's Mike that's John whatever his name is they would get it even the even the Unabomber got caught and he only talked to like two people especially today with this Jeff Sessions and oh my god please he's

13:56scary you just see the that he was saying now that they're going to actively separate parents from their children if they catch illegals coming over with their families I mean that's just vindictive and he's evil ya know and it's funny I covered Trump obviously one on the campaign trail and I watched sort of the progression of his thought or non thought as it is on things like immigration and it seemed to me that he he concluded very quickly that people just want to be mean to in work immigrants yeah he just it's not so much about the policy right he was very nonspecific about that whenever he could be he just wanted to say things that that that feel vindictive and cruel and nasty and so good doing something to children it's just it's just monstrous you know but sessions is a real creep oh he's horrible he's a scary guy yeah like one of the things that he said is

14:59good people don't smoke marijuana like just saying that alone do you know how many grandmas out there with cancer smoking marijuana of course you know you right lazy the fact that someone could be in such a position of influence and say something like that right like this isn't just your dad saying that good people don't smoke marijuana he goes out in the yard and smokes a cigarette this is this is generally yeah exactly fine yeah and and you know when you take ignorant sand then the full weight of the executive branch you know especially the anti-drug apparatus yeah you know that's that's a terrible terrible combination which it's too bad because I think I think even the law enforcement community was kind of coming around on this yes you know they they don't want to be picking up people for dealing weed I mean I talked to for my last book talking about the Eric garner case I

15:54talked to lots of cops and they they just hate having to do that you know those those busts are not fun for them well they Eric Gardner cases the guy got choked in New York yeah exactly cigarettes which is even even more even dumber yeah yeah and that's and you know cops having to do that that's not even a misdemeanor in New York and you know if you gotta if you got to drag somebody in for selling a 50 cent cigarette like you know that's not exactly Serpico you know what anything like cops don't you know join the force dreaming of doing that so but yeah I mean the sessions thing is terrible yeah having that guy in in that kind of a position and saying things like good people don't smoke marijuana or you know when families come across the border illegally we're gonna separate the parents from the children like the is wrong with you and then you throw in a good dose of the Jesus

16:42right him yeah exactly scary time at least Trump has said that he's gonna he's not going to support sessions on going after marijuana in states where it's legal he's gonna leave the states to take care of it themselves that's encouraging the the the problem with Donald Trump and and this is something that I didn't clue into until I'd spent a lot of time watching the guy and following him around is that he can sound like you believe something very deeply and you can be absolutely convinced that he even logically thinks it thinks a thing but he'll have a meeting with somebody and five minutes later he'll have a completely the opposite opinion so I have no confidence that Donald Trump will anything that he says that he'll did it will stay his opinion on anything yeah he can be convinced to go to a complete 180 on basically any issue which is scary isn't he in some ways the

17:41perfect representative of America because of that absolutely he has no attention span and and and I talked about this when I was covering him because people said Oh what is this billionaire in New York or have in common with with ordinary Americans he has a lot in common with him he has exactly the same media habits that they have he reads the same dumb on the internet he has the same total inability to separate fact and fiction he's completely credulous when he reads a news item about something that he personally agrees with and he'll he'll tweet it out five seconds later before he checks it out which is like what every other American does you know they get something on Facebook and they immediately share it with you know all their friends and this is this is an American thing now just the total inability to to logically look at things yeah and the short attention span to a

18:37short attention span drifting in and out of conversations not being able to pay attention to memos unless his name is in there people I know it sounds like American right right and and you know it's it's funny because if you if you watch Trump's speeches are actually better or better yet if you read Trump speeches it's they would pass out the text of what Trump was supposed to say before his events and so I'd be sitting there I'd be looking at the the remarks and they would be cogent from one end to the other then he would get up there and the first line would be like oh it's so great to be back in Manchester New Hampshire I always loved you know being here and that would be right and then he would veer off and he would he would start saying one thing and then the other thing and his thoughts would drift in all these different directions and then when

19:30you looked at the actual transcript of what Donald Trump had said he not only wasn't completing thoughts he wasn't completing sentences he talks in these sort of strange fragments and he'll he'll drift from one idea to another and they won't have any logical connection to each other and people still responded to it which tells you something both about him and about his audience right because they're on the same weird mental wavelength where we're just sort of disconnected bits of of emotion and thought is enough yeah right isn't that weird I mean that is weird it's really strange well people don't know that someone's not smart if they're dumber than the person right right yeah I think what it's revealing is what a small amount of time most people spend actually thinking thinking about ideas thinking about themselves thinking about behavior thinking about the impact that

20:31someone who's in the position of president can have very few people are out there actually thinking yeah not I mean relative pretty large number overall but very few in terms of percentages in terms of the people you can reach and the people that'll show up at his press rallies that's a big thing too right mm-hmm who the is gonna go to a campaign speech for anybody unless you're a journalist well that's that's interesting because I've I've been to a million campaign rallies right and and my opinion on them is you know I would rather basically stick a railroad spike in my ear than then voluntarily go to one of these things right and not you know not be paid to do it because normally a campaign speech is like the supernaturally boring experience where a guy or you know a woman stands up there and reads out a pre-selected a market-tested list of political cliches

21:27that have no meaning whatsoever and that you know don't represent what they're actually going to do and when there are in office anyway so and if you have to listen to that 40 or 50 times in a row which is what happens when you're covering campaigns like you want to kill yourself so why anyone would go voluntarily to see that as entertainment is sort of beyond me but that happened in in 2015 and 2016 Trump's events were a little different they were they were a little bit and I think he got a little bit of this from his WWE experience like he turned them into these kind of menacing weird audience-participation things where he would have the audience turn on the press and shout at us and throw things and you know we because we're always standing up on those risers and we have ropes around us we look like you know zoo animals or something and and we were the representatives they

22:32hated elite you know and and hilarious and he turned it into this sort of like physical menacing intimate thing and people would come from all over they'd come from down in the hills you know and drive 50 miles to see the spectacle it was cut it was fascinating to watch but kind of terrifying - well the peope yeah the people that are going to those things like boy that is an odd group of humans that have decided this is how you're gonna spend your day you're gonna go and watch this guy rabble about fake news right he's gonna ramble about this your fake news and point the CNN guy your fake news oh yeah yeah fake News CNN terrible terrible ratings keep going say things and make you feel good say things that excite me absolutely absolutely and yeah look look at these bloodsuckers that was a line that he that he used to pull out a lot look at these bloodsuckers these people

23:29reporting information yeah we again we'd be sitting there and a whole bunch of reporters and we're a bunch of geeks and arrow shirts you know and we got we got pads and we're kind of looking we're surrounded by you know in some cases 15,000 people who you know are kind of turning in our direction and you know in a couple of cases it it you know there were it was definitely up in the air whether this was gonna turn ugly or and in a few places it did turn ugly and and but he was very clued in the one thing I will say about Trump is that he has a keen instinct for audience he knows where they are he knows what their mood is he knows what he has to do to get them you know to wake them up to stir them up he can tell when he's losing them I mean that that is that is one talent that he does have but it's it's a negative talent for sure well he uses it certainly in a negative way yeah absolutely

24:30how much attention have you paid it all to his use of diet pills they've been following that at all no that's fascinating what is he using a lot of diet pills the reporter was at Washington Post that first talked about it they found the Duane Reade pharmacy where he was first prescribed diet pills by this doctor who described it for a non-existent condition like a metabolic deficiency or some like a metabolic disorder I think he called it and it allowed him to prescribe and this guy was like a known prescriber of these things uh-huh I don't like a dr. feelgood type epi all day and he's supposed to be on these for a very short amount of time he's on them for a long period of time and this guy this reporter to print it out tweeted out the actual Duane Reade pharmacy where Trump was filling this prescription and then now they they're saying that he's on

25:38some other diet pill which is one of the ingredients that was in phen-fen do you remember fen phen yeah absolutely unfortunately I know yeah yeah phen-fen was something for people don't know that the young folks out there there was a pill that people were taking in the 1990s and I knew a gal who was a very pretty girl she was large and she got on the fen-phen and I hadn't seen her and like I don't know like six months or something and I saw her and all sudden she was like a hundred and twenty pounds so it's like what you look amazing like what are you doing like you exercising or something did you go crazy and join a gym and it's like no I started taking this stuff called fen-phen and she was like run along I couldn't stop talking and grinding his teeth a little bit non speed and she started having weird feelings with her heart so she stopped it it turns out

26:29people were just dropping dead left and right off of this stuff you heart attacks and all kinds of because hardcore stuff but they recognize that the combination of these two things was the issue but one of these things by themselves is okay so there's one thing by itself is what they think he's on now which makes sense that a guy who's in his 70s has so much energy right I mean they say he's up at five o'clock in the morning watching Fox News and then he starts tweeting like a 5:30 in the morning he's tweeting right gets very little sleep he drinks like 12 diet cokes a day I mean the guy's just he's got boundless energy like when he was campaigning that was the thing that was so stunning to me I was like I know what it's like to go on the road and just do stand-up just do stand-up well you have your act you around it's fun you have a good time it's wears you out after a

27:18couple days oh yeah one town to the next town by the time the third day rolls around you're beat down this guy was doing day after day and day after day like it's all great to see all you wonderful people we're gonna make America great again the wall got 10 feet higher and everything is with energy yeah and and this is the speculation the speculation is he like I mean I'm sure you're aware many many journalists are on adderall right he's on something sure yeah no of course this is in my like the way I look at it it's like this is indicative of where America stands today it's not just that he's a good representative of mayor because he has the same meaty consumption habits and the same inability to read books and all these different variables but also because he's peeled up right which is everybody in America everybody in America right yeah I mean that's like

28:09there's a little bit of a precedent there because you know Kennedy had so many physical problems that I not sure if you remember there was a book that dark sat a Camelot that Ken came out by sy Hersh where it talked about how Kennedy in the morning used to have an as a Secret Service agent give him a shot of basically I'm feta means every every morning and he would sort of pace around the Oval Office talking about who he wanted to whack today you know and that this this was like the background for Bay of Pigs and you know all these other things so it's very dangerous when a president is is you know pharmaceutically altered yeah when a person who is you know if he's if he's on speed and he's tweeting threats to a nuclear power or like I mean that would be a very ironic and but terrible way for all of that all of us to end did you find the tweet I've been

29:08looking for it was hard to find the first time I know who wrote it but you know you gotta you gotta save that and put in your favorites cuz we talked about it so many times you gotta figure out a way to save that and put it in a bookmark because it was a in like he had the Duane Reade pharmacy and then there's a speculation about what the most recent stuff is that he's on which is again one ingredient in phen-fen but one of the things that they were saying is that when you look at the side effects of this stuff one of the side effects is delusional perception of reality delusions of grandeur of course aggression impulsiveness like all these things that we associate with Donald Trump mm-hm like we we don't even know who he is we know we know who he is pilled up if this guy's right right which is fascinating right they might be dealing with essentially a

30:00pharmaceutical intervention into not just American lives in terms of individuals but in terms of the way policy is driven right and the way the country moves forth it might literally be pharmaceutically enhanced that's very philip k dick but it could easily be true right it easily be true it all seems true right it seems like like I'm not saying anything that's Outland its first of all not we're talk about something that's real pills are these pills are real we're talking about sometimes widely consumed everybody knows this and we're talking about a guy who is an extraordinary extraordinary amount of energy for someone who doesn't work right dirt work out rather doesn't eat healthy right and like what where's he getting all this energy yeah no I mean I remember talking about this with some of the other reporters because as you say the campaign trail is incredibly

30:48grueling there's a reason why some candidates can't do it or they opt to do lots of legacy media appearances or ad buys they travel less and appear more the people who tend to succeed are the ones who can do three or four appearances a day fly to three different cities a day and they most of those people are either health freaks people who are you know in good physical condition Obama was was definitely one of those people who you know had to have a run at some point or else he couldn't do that schedule but Donald Trump you know you look at him and it's kind of a mystery there it is there it is fun fact in 1982 Trump started taking amphetamine derivatives abused them only supposed to take two for 25 days stayed on for eight years really and this is Kurt Ike Wald right white house submit admitted it to me said only a short time for diet in quotes when he was not overweight I

31:50countered with medical records they cut me off people miss reading drug was diethyl propane 75 milligrams a day prescription filled that duane reade on 57th Street in Manhattan oh I don't know I know things yeah doctor who wrote prescription dr. Joseph greenberg diagnosed him with metabolic imbalance which we have never heard about again Greenberg was later publicly slammed as someone who provided upper history rich people in Manhattan a metabolic imbalance in quotes if true could be electrolyte insufficiencies anaerobic imbalances acid imbalances and an assortment of related disorders that can have serious health consequences yet his other doctor dr. Harold Bornstein said he had been Trump's doctor since 1980 and had never mentioned the met Balch and balance found by Greenberg yeah right right so save that save that in book market now find out what the the

32:52other stuff cuz he was in just just Google Trump is on one of the ingredients in fen phen so I googled that that came up and like a Gawker article excuse me got Gawker from 2016 that said he was on Fincher without the actual name of him yeah Fincher Manor yeah um so this is what they think he's on now venture mean yes which is also a stimulant but just make sense if that guy is telling the truth at Kurt Michel mall is telling the truth that means that he was on pills amphetamines for eight years which means he was having good results so if he was a rumor a doctor prescribes Donald Trump cheap speed and this is Ashley what is her name Ashley Feinberg Ashley Feinberg who is a really good reporter well I'm sure she's right yeah it makes like makes and absolutely it makes sense absolutely I mean everybody buildup and you know I I don't know how a person whose diet is

33:52cheeseburgers and that coke could run for president without stress right chicken with a fork and knife on the Trump jet eaten fried chicken with a fork and knife who are you Trump suit so I wouldn't know that because they keep the press in a separate plane oh yeah there you go that is oh my god look at the bucket yeah eaten fried chicken with a fork and knife see that's bad I mean I think I would think ordinary America would would ding him for that because let's use your fingers use your fingers just put your face in it if you have to yeah you doing man yeah fork and knife amazing fen-phen was actually the was the name of the very cheap speed that used to be imported when I lived in Russia there was there was a type of speed that used to come from the Baltics that allegedly you know the the urban legend was was that the Nazis had all their soldiers on

35:01a cheap speed for the long marches going into into Russia and they set up these these pharmaceutical plants and theory and again the street legend was that that was what this drug was but they called it Fenn so wasn't that the origin the origins of methamphetamines wasn't methamphetamines created by the Nazis I believe it was and I think this is one of the speculations as to why they could get suicide bombers the kamikazes to slam their jets into aircraft carriers left up right well we have those go pills right that's what they're called well that's also yeah there's definitely some speed that gets prescribed and steroids or also to soldiers I mean we talk to people that have been in you know they'll tell you about what different things that they allowed them to take and gave them to take em but that modafinil stuff is that's really common mm-hmm and then I know I know a

36:03lot of fighter pilots will take that keeps you from getting sleepy hmm keeps you alert and awake and that was also something Hillary Clinton was supposed to be on really yeah she was supposed to be on modafinil that was one of the things that she admitted to and it's legal it's it's a weird if you've tried that now it's a weird one it doesn't speed you up in terms of like heart rate it's not like like drinking five cups of coffee all right it does give you this weird sense of alertness huh really awake that sounds kind of good it's kind of good yeah I have a buddy of mine who's a writer who he's got some health issues and he's on it all the time and he said if I don't take it I'm a mess really yeah well slim it sounds sounds perfect for writers so um look at that ad and slim by by taking now they should have the next day picture oh she's dead she's been dead for decades she died a

37:04day after they took that picture with this one tons of them more Dean she can now she can cook breakfast again when you prescribe new morn Dean morn morning Dean war Nadine what is morn a date it's a you take it in the morning he wakes you up well she can make breakfast again thanks honey bouncing off the world yeah she's gonna put a line on that on that spatula after uh after she's done and just yeah that's great yeah there was I think there was a time where people didn't understand how bad that stuff was for you and this is probably a lot of people on it right well we're probably going through a similar period now where all kinds of stuff is being prescribed that we're gonna find out fifty years from now like oh really like we've prescribed adderall to fifty million children or whatever it was so sure like it's gonna see monsters I think sure some some day prozac

38:00adderall yeah and then the numbers of SSRIs that are prescribed Nero like who knows how many people actually need those things versus how many people are just having a bad day and went to the doctor and they give you something numbs you up right right and how many how many schools are are mandated to you know to put you know a bunch of kids on these drugs I think probably in hindsight some of that it's gonna look really bad oh for sure means we're experimenting experimenting on people's brains and absolutely these pharmaceutical companies have billions of dollars in massive influence and they're making it so this stuff is okay mm-hmm maybe just had a look at the number of people that are dying just dying from opiate pills well if those were illegal drugs we'd be saying there's a there's a goddamn epidemic absolutely yeah yeah but they there's no question that

38:51it's a conscious strategy to get people hooked and and get them taking those pills for in every conceivable scenario so that they will seek them out in other areas you know and not legally you know I think but some some prosecutor is gonna have to figure out some way to get to hold some of those companies accountable because they're definitely doing that on purpose but even if they do it seems like they just it's like the tobacco thing they get paid right you know they pay off a few billion dollars it's barely scratches a dent in them they write it all off jack up the price of everything a little bit over the course of ten years it balances itself out to zero right right right a couple of movies will be made but the same thing will happen yeah exactly like that Russell Crowe movie The Insider yeah that was great yeah it was a good movie it was a good movie it was

39:41actually kind of more movie about about the death of the press as it turned out than it was a movie about the death of the tobacco industry but yeah it was it was really interesting what is it like being a reporter and being a journalist rather today with all this fake news talk like this this is a new thing this whole calling something fake news writers there certainly is manufactured stories and things that just aren't true websites that are just designed to get people to click on them and they have crazy stories didn't really happen right but they're pretty obvious right yeah and I think a lot of what people call fake news is just news that is very heavily slanted in one direction yeah and you know people people talk a lot about how Fox is fakes fake news well most of the time when you want watch Fox what they're just doing is they're selectively picking out stories that

40:36they know are gonna rile up their elderly freaked out terrified audience you know and so they they pick out the four or five things that are that actually happened around the world they can do that without lying you know they don't they don't have to make this stuff up they can find the lineup of facts that they want but you know we're working as a journalist now is is very very different the business is undergoing extremely rapid change and it's not something that we really have reckoned with we haven't sat down and had a discussion about where this is all going and how we can fix it because the business is changing in a way that is extremely negative and no one's talking about how to how to reverse that like long-form investigative reporting is it started to disappear in the 80s but it's accelerate to the point where there's almost none of that now almost everybody who works

41:36in the business is doing quick hits and there's almost no time left to do you know kind of real real hardcore investigative work and we've trained our audiences also to be unable to consume that kind of stuff so you know we're all we're all basically doing clickbait now and and yeah I think it's a really big dark time in our business well it's it's also this weird time transitioning between paper and digital and trying to get people to pay for digital I mean I subscribed to a few of them online Washington Post New York Times where you pay but I don't think very many people are doing that yeah it's probably a small amount of people that are paying right you know I think the New York Times gives you like 10 articles a month or something like that for free right and like come on man you're here everyday right time to pay up right you know they give you like a

42:32little countdown then you're like ah this is a good art all right I'm gonna pay ya and this is this is a fascinating sort of subplot to what happened to the media business because a lot of that is because of something that Google did a long time ago they had this thing called the first click rule which is sort of mandated that all all news sites have at least some free content or else the algorithm would would push the the news story far down on the search results right so if you if you didn't have free content on your site if you didn't meet Google's first click rule when you search for a news story you just wouldn't find it so all of these in the early days of sort of digital journalism all the news companies offered their content basically for free and that trained audiences to not pay for journalism basically and it's it's pretty hard to put the genie back in the

43:36bottle and tell everybody to go back and and pay for everything it just doesn't work that way so we're it we're in this place where everybody's sort of consuming free meat and not only that there's this additional problem of the you know the internet platforms like Facebook and Google pushing news that they already know people are going to agree with to users so there's there's there's sort of less news that challenges people they're just not gonna see it you know because that's not the way the algorithms work the algorithms are really confusing so the algorithms like will actively pick out things they think you'll be interested in yeah so if you're someone who has got a particular set of interests it it becomes sort of an echo chamber right your Google search becomes an echo chamber you're gooe I have that Google News app on my phone won't check it every morning see what's going on but

44:31it's all that I'm interested in right right it's it's probably a little bit worse on Facebook than it is on Google but cuz it's Google you at least have some some control over what you search for right but even Google will will prompt you with things right like so but with with both of them yeah they're they're accumulating lots and lots of information about your not only about what you read but about the things that you buy the movies that you watch what your predilections probably are what your opinions your political stances and so they pick out news stories that they think are you know you're likely to endorse or spend a lot of time reading which likely means that you're never gonna see a news story that says you personally are responsible for something bad right that's like thing one you will see a lot of news stories that say your neighbor is responsible

45:27for something bad and that's one of the reasons why I like device stiffness is a conscious commercial strategy it's just it's it's a natural result of a lot of this a lot of these behaviors what is the mean age of people that are watching Fox News you're talking about the house it's like people 68 yeah really yeah it's it's something ridiculously old and that's true of all the all the cable networks they're on MSNBC yeah even MSNBC the you know it's it's worse with Fox and and and CNN and I don't want to I don't want to misquote it but I know they're all like above 65 so TV 68 you're right look at that median age of primetime of Fox News do we do we have MSNBC 65 the youngins CNN 60 oh they're little kids Wow yeah and so a lot of that has to do with the fact that young people just don't watch television right like right Dave they're done yeah they're done so

46:36they're getting their news some other way they're not getting it in YouTube videos almost no news right right exactly I mean it's it's supposed to like when I was a kid I mean would have been I should deliver newspapers read newspapers quite a bit did you yeah you do the globe yeah where was your route let's see I had one in Hingham I had one in Norwell yeah yeah I did mostly Newton Newton yeah yeah I did the globe I did the The Herald Boston Herald and I delivered the New York Times for a while but just so I didn't like the New York Times was interesting because it wasn't didn't pay as well and there were larger routes like you had to go much further huh because there was very few houses that would get the times right but you felt like you were doing something special the prestige yeah and they had clear blue plastic bags oh wow I'm set a blue bag like the Boston Globe at clear bags

47:40yeah and deliver those in clear bags but The Times The Herald should have been in a brown paper bag do they deliver like The Daily News in the post in New York does that get delivered yeah I mean they they must yeah they have to have subscriptions and they and and the Times is the Daily News definitely does have delivery for sure yeah I would think so yeah but but that and I just spent a lot of time writing about the the the that model where newspapers had this direct relationship with their readers right like they not only owned it the content and created the content but they also could completely control the distribution right they they had the trucks they had the paper kids like us right that was all part of what gave the press its power is that we were we had the unique ability to reach all these people well you know once the internet came along they cut that in half right

48:46so now the distribution is all Google and Facebook and the content is all being made by somebody else so it's it makes it very difficult to make money a and then B you just don't have that that personal relationship with the with the the consumer anymore which is which is a completely different sort of paradigm I do you think there's a connection now to ponder this myself it seems like in the early days of the internet one a big factor with the music industry for sure was Napster mm-hm Napster came along and then people got this initial taste of getting a bunch of stuff that you normally paid for for free mm-hm get just get tons of it and then so the internet sort of got associated with being a free thing and then there was BitTorrent and through BitTorrent you can get films and all kinds of different stuff you could download movies and and people just started filling up hard

49:42drives with this stuff they would get off a BitTorrent and in my mind at least it became this connection with the internet stuffs free there's so much stuff free like why did I pay for this right and that's free and I've tried to say this to friends who get involved with podcasting who have come over from radio like just friends that have been fired from radio jobs like you know what I'm just gonna start a podcast and charge people five bucks a month but as soon as you do that people like why the would I pay alright Adam Carolla for free read Joey Diaz for free why would I pay five dollars for you right yeah absolutely know that you the audience expectations now or that they're gonna get free content everything's free yeah everything's free and obviously that has huge consequences because that forces people who create the content to get the money from

50:33somewhere else they either have to be sponsored by an advertiser who might have you know certain expectations but you know it's certainly not good for people who make content that it's like that yeah and and it creates I think a lot of bad habits with with with the readers too I mean they they just you know rather than rather than look for the best stuff they just look for what's available and what they can read for free also I think it opens up the door to all this wacky advertising we're pop-up ads and and scroll down ads like you try to scroll down the screen and the ad follows with you know god it's so annoying right it's weird yeah just it's they're so invasive and they're everywhere even on really good websites like like say if you go to CNN you get the real stories and then below you get this stuff that looks like stories but there's a very faint print that says

51:26paid content right and then you look at it like you're not gonna believe what she looks like now can't even find out what she looks like now cuz you got to go through 40 other people that look like now too and then finally you get sometimes you don't even get to the original one so you're confused like I think it's better if they don't satisfy you cuz then you just go back to the rest of say well what does he look like all these different there was like one of those pages that you go to where there's just dozens and dozens of windows and boxes that you can click on for a different individual like click Ebates stories where you go to each one of them and they'll take you to 40 pages right of different people that have gained weight or lost weight or a poor now or right whatever it is but that's I mean I think it's one of the things that's really bad about that is that if

52:24you spend enough time doing that your brain stops being able to do other things you know like when you're reading books books require you to sit there and construct in your head all the visuals for everything that you're reading you have to imagine what the people look like you have to you know do all this mental work to construct the scene right so your brain is actively engaged in this in this really highly specific and creative way right but the internet now just has it moving from place to place clicking from place to place go going from sensation to sensation you don't have to ponder anything you don't have to have an opinion about anything you don't have to look at both sides of anything you just have to move from one thing to another to the next thing which is what you're talking about with trunk that's the way his brain works right like and it's it's

53:16a I think it's a bad thing you know it's not only bad in itself but it makes it impossible for us to do the other thing you know which is which is more constructive ya know it's almost like mental range of motion like if you are somehow another your joints were restricted where you could only like move a certain amount after a while you would lose your full range of motion absolutely it gets atrophy yeah I have a harder time reading books now than I did when I was you know probably 11 years old and and that's just from and you're a writer right I'm a writer I mean I love it yeah you know I I still I find that I have a harder time doing the work you know yeah and that's difficult or yeah like when I was when I was younger I read more fiction which which is harder because it requires you to do more you know sort of mental construction work now it's much if I'm

54:11gonna read a book it's typically nonfiction which is linear which is an argument right it's it's it's it's less it requires less work of the reader right yeah it may be just as interesting but it just requires less work so the hardest thing to read is you know Anna Karenina or something like that right yes yeah you you have to not only think but you have to construct but with your if you're just reading you know the diary of Kim Kardashian or something like that you're just you're just kind of listening to somebody you know going like that so I I think it's bad I think all this stuff is negative but I don't know maybe I'm an old fogy about it well I definitely think it's not the most ideal in terms of constructing a healthy mind right alright but but it's what we got yeah and it's it's weird it's a weird time absolutely and it's and you know there's there's lots of positive things

55:02the positive things are like that anybody can have a voice now and anybody who has something interesting to say can be instantly elevated and have a audience overnight and that's great right like you know the the in the old days if you you had to penetrate this ridiculous oligarchy of entertainment people who really owned tightly controlled who got access to what who got to be you know have an audience yeah and now you get to bypass that entirely and sort of directly appeal to people which is great I mean that's an amazing thing but then you get YouTube stars right yeah a little tape and hold the other day you Jamie told me about little today so I went down this crazy rabbit hole then I read this Jezebel article about another writer who went down a little tail rabbit hall and so I went down that rabbit hole oh my god wait who's a little taya Whittle say

56:01is a nine-year-old girl who is famous now on the internet for talking and showing all the money she has another thing she buys if you don't know about no no this is the death of society okay little tase the death of society lil little tag can we can we see you now yes for sure Oh me little toy the youngest flexor of the flexor of the century who makes cash me outside girl look like a scholar she's nine dude okay I have a nine year old all right this is crazy play it played this video Jamie so he can understand what little days all about that's her revving up her Lamborghini she gets out Tom Jake just throw money around lay this ladies and gentlemen the next president of the United States he's bowing in the background I mean this is what we're doing this makes honey boo boo it's like Marie Curie let's get three hundred thirty seven thousand likes god dammit Jamie what have you done we

57:36are here stuntin on all y'all broke ass haters 500k in cash and this Lambo cost more than your college tuition I'm nine and I ain't got no license apparently all our shits rented okay you know I'm embarrassed to admit this but I would watch this over reading my own articles give up now what to do what to do where's little Tay in 40 years that's what I want to know where's white house where else after Kanye's children she's good she's gonna be next I mean that's an interesting thought exercise though like where do you go down from Donald Trump I mean because the progression has to go down right wait we all ducked it because I remember when Bush was president and like I was talking to reporters Bush used to do this thing where he would carry around a biography of Dean a jusen for weeks and weeks and weeks just to prove to reporters that he could read we all used to joke with each

58:44other like nobody-nobody stupider than this is ever gonna be president and now you know you look back and and bushes you know he's like Einstein compared to Trump I had a joke that I did back in my Netflix special from 2005 when when Bush was in office where it was a bunch of people we're trying to figure out how dumb people are and they're like the only way they like there's speculation like let's get a smart guy to act on like no no you got to get a real dumb guy otherwise we'll never know you gotta have a real dumb guy and then so they get the real dumb guy and they put up do a bunch of things you know they they vote them in the second time and then someone in the back of the room goes I think we can go dumber right this is a bit from 2005 but you know it's for 13 years later life imitates art we went way dumber that's right right well to allow seems super

59:43reasonable in comparison to some of the that Trump says in terms of like Supreme Court rulings and like there was a Supreme Court ruling that went against Bush's way while he was in office and he had a really reasonable response he was like of course we're disappointed but we have to abide by the court in their ruling and you know I was like something you would never hear Trump say yeah never hear him say something like that no absolutely I mean I look back and Bush seems to me almost like a Scandinavian Statesman compared she would go to the White House to you know a lot of people did want to go to the White House for the inauguration uh-huh okay we'll go she'll go I mean the White House is good it's gonna look like the White House and idiocracy when she's when she's in there right I mean it's it's it's it's gonna be terrible but well that was a weird time to write

60:35like during the inauguration when know celebrities wanted to go they dig out like really weird like real on the outskirts celebrities oh yeah and there's the same thing with the RNC I cover I remember I covered the RNC and and and they had to have Scott Baio do one of the first day speeches yeah it was a huge supporter right but I mean I know Scott know personally yeah it's very nice guy I'm sure he is I'm sure it is guy yeah yeah but that was there a that was there a list for the Republican National Convention and outside of you know like Hannity's right those type fellows right right exactly yeah yeah it's fascinating yeah it is it's just it's just weird it's it just seems like everything's off like we we we skipped dimensions we like jolted over there's a parallel world where things just don't seem like at least things used to make set like you'd be

61:39disappointed to this guy one or you'd be disappointed that the country was doing this or that we were invading Iraq or whatever it was but it would kind of seem like the world right well this is it's kind of like what we're talking about we were talking about before I mean previously like the entertainment industry politics was tightly controlled by a small group of cigar-chomping people who sat in the back room and in both parties they they had a they carefully outlined a sort of narrow range of acceptable political opinions and in one party you could be all the way up to you know somebody like Ron Paul but they tended to put somebody like George Bush as the candidate but you know there was no directly appealing to the electorate and asking them who they wanted to be the candidate I mean Donald Trump is really the first internet president he completely

62:40bypassed that entire oligarchy he didn't have to go through you know the priesthood to get to be president which on the one hand is evidence of a good thing because it's actually more democratic than the the system was before where it was pretty much closed to everybody except for a few people who paid their dues through the system but Trump directly you know just by being famous and just by attracting media attention he was able to bypass all the usual tests and bypass the parties you know decision making process and he got to be President but he's like little pay right I mean he just represents the dummer side of us as opposed to the more light inside of us so it's hard to know what to think about it I mean I that you when I was covering and I thought on the one hand this is evidence that you know the electorate is breaking away from being told who to vote for on the other

63:38hand the first time they take at that freedom out for a test drive this is what they pick I mean I don't know well at least it throws a giant monkey wrench into the gears right yeah absolutely it certainly done that yeah but you know what what the result of that will be is yet to be determined yet to be determined yeah I mean it could be the end of this before that you know when I was covering the the Trump run part of me wanted to write it as a comedy like all the early stories were like highly comic I was trying to write about the funny aspect of it and then after he became president it's like well this is either the funniest thing that's ever happened in America or it's the end of civilization right does that make it funnier that it's the end of civilization I don't know I mean you're the ear a comic so I should I should ask you I don't know either it's well it's

64:31it's all depending upon how it plays out right I mean civilizations have absolutely fallen in the price we this idea that civilization won't fall in my opinion is akin to the people that live on the Big Island thinking that the volcano won't erupt again right right yeah exactly yeah and it's going to happen again yeah like so our ideas about maintaining civilization are an attempt to prolong this state or mitigate any possible disastrous effects of collapse right but it's going to fall apart of course yeah it's an old system that was constructed on Scrolls by people writing with feathers really had no idea what the future had install right just we didn't they didn't know what the future had in store they had no idea they would have been terrified by a toothbrush yes right yeah well certainly by a airplane and cellular communication and in this we live in a

65:27world that requires a completely new set of rules and guidelines and you know this has always been the article against the Second Amendment like okay they had muskets when they wrote they didn't have ar-15 thing right they didn't have 50 caliber guns that can kill things one they missed them right playing a video yesterday of a guy shooting a deer and with a 50 caliber rifle and he misses the deer and it still kills the deer the bullet going past the deer's head just the sheer force of it blows the deers brains out and does that actually happen oh yeah yeah I want to watch it yeah absolutely pull it up that one on favorites to make a folder for we repetitively talked about I when I was embedded in Iraq they they took me out and the guys apparently for recreation they cut cars in half with 50 Cal calibers yeah here's that here's the gun now watch this he misses boom and watch it

66:32just falls down dead from the bullet passing it this is like Jesus it just whizzed by it and the force of the bullet passing by he's psyched right yeah oh yeah but watch this slow-mo it just falls down he's like thank god this guy's got camo on literally sitting on a bench he's on a bench shooting something in the distance it picks this deer up and the deers brains are just completely scrambled no no bullet wound at all nothing no hole dead that's a horror movie waiting to happen that deers gonna wake up in the middle of the night and and reanimate and Oh what happened the brains coming out of the ears coming out of the ears yeah just from the sheer force of the bullet passing it Jesus this is not all I'm saying is it would be a good time to reconsider how we run things right and I think one of the good things about having a guy like Trump in office is maybe we should sit down and

67:42say hey we probably shouldn't have a popularity contest see who controls the nukes right yeah see who's the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the the planet has ever known right far the most destructive force the planet has ever known shouldn't we at least find out if he's on diet pills rushing me at least shouldn't be saved mr. president we'd like a urine sample from you exactly they test your pee if you work at ups right you know right Yeah right yeah yeah no I think there should be more than a pee test for launching a nuclear strike definitely should be a lot a lot of changes yeah and one thing I'm hoping is that this this presidency and this the whole idea of like having a popularity contest mm-hmm will allow people to realize like first of all we shouldn't have one alpha champ running things mm-hm that's that's an antiquated idea that was really great a tribe of

68:36fifty nomads right get them together and you have the wisest strongest one with the most battle experience that guy should be running things he knows more than I do right get it let's vote for orc orc orc is worse the guy with the knowledge you know it makes sense but when there's 350 million people and you have the ability to manipulate things and you have tweets and Facebook posts and write and make wacky little toy videos we're not designed for this now and we have some structures that rely on the popularity contest and some that have the public has no control over whatsoever like my Federal Reserve like it doesn't a lot of it makes no sense at all and or how net neutrality got passed with five different people or how it got rescinded right right yeah exactly yeah yeah no I mean it's the the system doesn't really make a whole lot of sense the the the Congress you know I'm

69:33covering congressional races now on the run-up to to 2018 and you know the process is almost 100% about money it's just like you know I talked to a guy who was who jumped in the ring to run for a seat in the in the 19th district and he told me he calls up the National Party and they rip they basically had to two questions for him like can you raise $300,000 within the next three months and can you raise a million dollars by Election Day and you know that was the whole of the conversation and and it has to be based on more than something more than how much money can you raise we have to do that there has to be another variable for picking leaders beyond you know how much cash can you get your hands on the next three months do you see that Rosie O'Donnell got in trouble for raising money under various names and and donating too much money it's like Roy Roy Moore's opponents and

70:29Wow yeah what exactly happened I read that she had used a website that she thought should have like stopped her from donating the extra amount because it was being divvied amongst many people and that it should have been returned to her mm-hmm which I don't know enough about it that candidates are supposed to return extra funds once they've crossed over at the amount that individual is supposed to give these cases oh and it should have happened and I don't know doesn't she know how much you're supposed to donate isn't there's free that's what she was saying she's $2,700 right she used a website and she just gave him mother shitload of money I think oh I see but I thought she used different names I don't know about that part in here about that mmm we should probably look that up yeah they were that was one of the sort of stories that wasn't followed up after

71:172016 but it was who is one of the things that came out in the in those hacked DNC things was that there was a little bit of a scam going on in terms of you know that as you see the individual donation limit is pretty small it's like $2,700 for an individual so a couple it's fifty four hundred dollars so what they would do is they would host these these dinners with celebrities like you know George Clooney and a bunch of his friends and they would raise all this money and theoretically the money was supposed to go only a tiny portion of it to the presidential campaign the rest of its supposed to go to the original parties but what was actually happening according to Politico anyway was that the money was basically going to the parties and then going immediately back to the presidential campaign and and they a lot of the people who gave the money didn't even know that that was

72:13happening and and they were upset about it and but that was a story that wasn't followed up after after 2016 yeah there's just entirely too much money yeah totally too much money in politics but how would you ever do it without the money now once the money's in how do you pull it out how do you say no no no more influence no more special interest groups lobbyists are illegal yeah I mean I I think they should they should probably have very brief publicly funded elections where there's no in you know the the course of time is maybe five weeks and whoa is this is this the O'Donnell thing yeah says O'Donnell donated 47 hundred dollars to a bomb Alabama senator Doug Jones and his special election against Roy Moore thirty-six hundred dollars to Pennsylvania Rep Connard Lam for the special general election he won in March two thousand nine hundred and fifty two

73:08California Rep Adam Schiff for his primary forty two hundred dollars to Illinois congressional candidate Lauren Underwood for her primary run and thirty four hundred four fifty two all more evade a congressional candidate in Staten Island in Brooklyn nothing nefarious she's Rosie O'Donnell says I was choosing to over donate the $2,700 cut off candidates should prefer to fund the money she wrote I don't look to see who I can donate most to I just donate assuming they do not accept what is over the limit hmm right yeah I don't know how convinced I am by that explanation but it doesn't really matter because the reality is there are million ways that you can legally give money to campaigns now that don't involve just the individual donation like you can you know you can give money to a foundation or you know a 501c3 or whatever it is that buys an ad that will help the candidate just as

74:10much as the you know as it would if you don't donate it directly so you know in the post citizens united universe this is this this is a it's a story but you know the bigger story is that you can basically very rich people and companies can basically spend unlimited amounts of money on on campaigns yeah this is this whole story's over like what was that all told four or five thousand dollars most yeah not a lot no I don't that doesn't I mean you know I don't have feelings one way or another about Rosie O'Donnell but not that doesn't make me outraged terribly well Trump hates her right what's fascinating about at all yeah well he he got a big bump from talking about her in the debate and you know he that was another thing that he did very early on is he he clued in to the fact that people hate people hate journalists and they Hollywood actors and so he made he made sure as much as

75:03possible to talk about all the all the groups the major food groups of hate in America right like immigrants Hillary Clinton Hollywood actors and reporters and those were the staples of his routine and it worked I mean it was it was smart on his part you know I think particularly the targeting of journalists was brilliant because he was able to portray us as the wealthy elite and you know he's the billionaire but he's pointing the finger at us as I looked at you know they're the guardians of rich America which which worked and what was a brilliant thing it's just uh it's unprecedented yeah what was last time any presidential maybe Nixon complained about them at the time but I believe it was privately yeah well he he hated the press pretty openly I mean he had the 1962 press conference where he's like you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore and he from all accounts he was an

76:08incredibly profane nasty person in private and he only talked to a few reporters I mean I think all politicians hate reporters if they if they don't there's probably something wrong with them because you know the press corps in most cases is really is out to get them or at least is is dangerous you know but with Trump and Nixon it was it went to a whole new level and went to a paranoid place and you know but on the other hand and I'm gonna bore you with this but but the the whining about being kicked out of the White House and not being able to fly with with Trump and and the sort of separation between the president and the press corps and the fact he doesn't show up at the White House Correspondents Dinner or like as a reporter my response to that is so what we should be on the outside you know like I don't shed a tear about that I think it's very strange the response in our business

77:06that oh you know we're not we don't get to be hanging around with the president and and you know pal around behind the rope line with them anymore like we should be adversarial I think yeah well if long as you are honest and accurate yeah yeah I mean I mean not even adversarial but not connected right right yeah it's it's it's a kind of a separation of church and state thing for me like I had an experience when I when I covered the Obama campaign and I liked Barack Obama as a candidate in 2008 I was really impressed by him but I remember going into the plane the first time going back into the press section and I see that there's photos all over the walls above the campaign plane and apparently there's a tradition where each of the reporters had like a little sort of high school yearbook photo taken with the candidate where you know they got their arm around Obama and

78:00they're posing and it was a tradition to kind of put the the photo up on the wall and I'm like you know this is not a good look for for the press corps even if you like the guy you got a you know at least pretend to have a little bit of that the mode is supposed to be there you know what I mean what's the scent is certainly influential yes certainly gonna have some sort of an influence on you yeah yeah it's just a bad look like what happens if you do a story about the guy that's complementary and it comes out that you know you're you're you've put a picture of yourself with your arm around the guy you know what I mean you know that it's just that reporters are kind of supposed to be these unpleasant you know kind of grumpy people who instantly deface the posters of you know powerful people you know whenever they get a chance and throw darts at pictures

78:51of them and stuff like that like that that's who they kind of used to be and you see there's people that are jockey in a position to potentially run in you know the next election obviously the 2018 elections but in 2020 for president you seen people that are moving into position you see these congressional candidates that are showing promise like what what is that when you're covering this like what's that what's the feeling of like the future from these races so like what is it from the standpoint of reporters like went but yeah well first first of all like the the holy grail of reporting is to latch on to a politician before they become famous and before they become president and follow them all the way and that way you get to be the insider who gets invited into the Oval Office so it's it's like a it's a big thing that a lot of reporters kind of dream of is to is to latch on early

79:50to somebody like Bill Clinton and become the the sort of favorite reporter on that beat that's why it at the outset of presidential elections you'll often see a lot of jockeying within newsroom's to see who gets to cover which campaign because people always want to pick the winner because they think they're gonna write get a book deal out of it at the end and you're gonna end up having their own show on MSNBC or whatever but the but yeah I mean the what's the feeling right now like who are people coalescing around is that what you're asking that - yeah well I think there's the expectation is that some of the same people are gonna be involved as individual there's a lot of belief that Bernie's gonna run again but then there's also Kamala Harris there's Cory Booker you know people believe that those folks are going to run but oddly enough the the press corps is less

80:53focused on that than they would be normally I think they're they're the only story that matters to political reporters right now is the Russia gate Trump thing and they're following that and kind of hoping that will be something that happens instead of the 2020 election you know that they're they're the big the big sort of trial of Donald Trump is what everybody's kind of waiting for well the recent take on that is that there is some sort of a connection between Russian oligarchs and Michael Cohen right there's right that's move the vector Vekselberg payment I just heard about that this morning so I can't say that I know a whole lot about that what would that payment before when was it you know it was allegedly after the election so that would be a story I mean I I've gotten a lot of criticism because I've been a little bit of a skeptic on the Russia gate front not so

81:46much that I don't believe it but I just kind of think the press should be a little careful about it but if that's true yes that's a big story if if Cohen really was in Prague that's also a really big story you know but we'll have to see what those what really comes out of that it's just such an unusual moment in history yo yeah it's crazy it's crazy I mean it's it's the as unstable as American history's been in our lifetime certainly right I would think you know maybe ever yeah or close to it right a civil war on yeah yeah I mean do you add in the fact that we've had concerns about nuclear conflict with two different nations right and since since Trump has been elected I mean there's there's the North Korea thing and then there's the fact that we've had military exchanges where Russian mercenaries may you know reportedly have died you know they that's certainly unnerving you know the

82:49the the nuclear clock which was established the Doomsday Clock which was established way back in the 50s has us at the the most dangerous point since 1953 yeah yeah and at a at a time in their estimation this sort of I forget what the the organization is actually called but I think it's physicians for Social Responsibility but the you know that this right now is more dangerous than you know that the ka7 shooting the Cuban Missile Crisis like where we're at a moment that's incredibly tense between these two countries and more so than the Cuban Missile Crisis in their estimation yeah who's estimating this this it's called the Doomsday Clock you can you can find it it's using as a metric just the the you know I guess they're just reading the news like everybody else but you know they know it it's off derided by my people in Washington has been Washington is being too hysterical but

83:58you know it is an indicator and the people who who do it I think are the same people who wanna win Nobel Prize last year for the sort of anti-nuclear the the UN ban on nuclear weapons so remember after 9/11 we used to have terrorist threat colors yeah yeah Robert Mueller was on the board the everyday they used to have a meeting of a group of people in the various intelligence agencies to decide what the color would be and as a yellow yeah exactly and what what's fascinating about this and I only heard about this because I wrote about this a few months ago and I made a mistake by saying that it the the the color used to toggle between red which was the highest and green which was the lowest but apparently not once in its entire history was it ever green like the they never had threat level low even once in its history so we were oh we were always at some level of anxiety but those those

85:10are weird times to remember that one yes and kind of tell us how scared we were supposed to be about about stuff and with a real simple distinction like colors right yeah today's orange holy it's orange dude be careful you're gonna fly today are you gonna go to an airport today it's orange I'm not going to the Superbowl right today's orange yeah crazy red oh yeah I think so and had to have and then they just stopped right well so the the program it took a huge hit when one of the guys who was involved who was the former head of Homeland Security if I'm not mistaken came out with a story that he had been told by some of the bush people to jack up the the color in advance of an election and it was shortly after that story came out that they discontinued the program it came out in a book by by the former head of the homeland secure so right before an election there yeah

86:19time to go horns yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah because they wanted the robot right I mean it was this you get people scared and they'll vote a certain way and yeah so yeah amazing times though yeah as a journalist do you look at these times and say this is great this is great for business or do you do more so look at it as a human being and go this is just a mess and I wish we weren't so ridiculous so when when I first started covering the Trump campaign I thought this is the most awesome thing ever because that dynamic I was talking about before but about reporters wanting to be on the ground floor with with the future winner nobody wanted to be on the Trump campaign because nobody thought he was gonna win I was stoked to the assigned to cover Trump because I thought this is the most insane thing ever and he you know even for your style of journalists yeah

87:18exactly I thought this is this is the black comedy that I was then I was sort of born to cover and worn born to write and for the first I don't know five or six things that I wrote about it about Trump I thought it was the most amazing crazy interesting story of my lifetime and then it took this incredibly dark turn where he actually won and I think it was a dark turn for him to yeah there's no question about it no there's no I mean I knew some of the people in his campaign I can't say this definitively but I but I I have a very good educated guess that they had absolutely no expectation of it ever even came close let alone winning and that and that day that they did this as a publicity stunt in the beginning probably with the aim of either creating a media network or just bolstering Trump's overall Q rating or whatever it was I think NBC might have pushed him

88:19towards the presidency by firing him from The Apprentice yeah because he was still the host of that show while he was running for president they fire him and then Arnold takes over people forgot already Arnold Schwarzenegger was for a very short time good fire little fired he was the guy for a while yeah they had that flame war remember it's really weird yeah strange yeah NBC might have given him the final you know you might have taken an extra diet pill that day that's worth says he's done with The Apprentice blames poor ratings on Trump involvement that's right yeah they had that hole back in October who was to blame for the ratings but listen as a host of that show Donald Trump was great oh yeah who's the perfect guys the host that true Arnold's too nice it's not the right guy he's not a billionaire yeah no you need a total jackass and and get it done where those guys you need one of

89:29those guys you're fired and the the same thing that made Trump perfect for that show made him perfect as the main protagonist in campaign coverage which is it actually really just a really long super boring reality show or at least it used to be until Trump came along Trump completely changed the dynamic of it you know if you're if you're thinking of it in terms of how it looks to a network what were the network's thinking before if they if they were gonna have people like Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham be the stars of their lead reality show like let's get a real performer in there right and and when they did when they when then when Trump entered the fray and became a real candidate and started getting votes suddenly news started making money like for like real money for the first time and there's a there's an amazing data point right now which is that the public trusts the press less

90:24than ever right they believe the things that we say less than ever all the polls show this that there's been a dramatic downturn and how much people will put stock in things that people like me say right but they're watching television new television news more than they ever have buy a lot so what are those two data points say together put together that people are consuming news not as news but as entertainment they're they're they're watching it more right so we're we've you know CNN made over a billion dollars last year they're just eating into the entertainment but that's that's all they're doing and it's it's all Trump which is is fascinating and kind of horrifying but but really interesting isn't that also what he played upon when he was running like he would say outrageous so they would cover him and that essentially gave him free press oh absolutely yeah and he

91:13there was no doubt in my mind that that he was doing that intentionally I remember watching him and in New Hampshire where he's giving a speech and you probably remember this this woman stood up and said Ted Cruz's a right and Trump looks over at her and he says oh that's terrible that's terrible she just said a terrible thing about Ted Cruz right and I remember I remember at the at the rise where all the cameras are and you could see him thinking he's thinking it's it's a story for six hours if she says it it's a story for three days that's why I say it right and he he thinks and he goes she just said that Ted Cruz is a right and next thing you know it like completely dominated the news and and he he completely understood the dynamic of how the news works better than even the people in the news understood it well certainly better than Ted Cruz yeah that's for sure

92:13Ted Cruz that the the recent praise of Trump and then they go back to like what he said during the campaign oh my god it's no one should ever listen to him ever again about anything oh yeah no it was it was it's hilarious Ted Cruz you know first of all my favorite part of that whole campaign was the thing that he couldn't shake about being the Zodiac killer like and and reporters would give him about it like like we would talked with amongst each other like who's gonna ask him about it next you know and and and everybody knew that it was it was you know that he was born after the killing started and everything all that stuff but somebody would always make it a point to say so what do you think about the you know the rumors about and you could see that it just threw it completely drove him to distraction he didn't know how to how to make a joke out of it or yeah well I

93:04know you're a hunter as Thompson fan so you probably aware of what hunter did to Edmund oh yeah the e-book game yeah oh yeah absolutely he went crazy yeah yeah literally went crazy no a hunter it was what was it on the Dick Cavett show that he talked about it well there was a rumor yeah he had taken ibogaine and I knew about that rumor because I started it he would drove that guy crazy to the point where you see I think it was in New Hampshire he was giving a political campaign speech and he broke down yeah oh yeah he cried yeah yeah yeah well he so hundreds of this great thing he he he wrote about it it was it was kind of a spoof of campaign coverage because he he did this whole campaign diary and then he just kind of went into this deadpan recitation of what sounded like a breaking news story about him discovering Muskies secret relationship with a witch doctor who was providing

94:09him with evil again and then he dug up some file photo of muskie that looked like this it was like and he they put you know must ed muskie in the grips of a nibble gained frenzy was the caption and it was completely deadpan he ever said he was kidding never said it was you know not like that was fiction and and muskie couldn't handle it I mean he was though that was probably the first real political trolling that went on but and a brilliant one too because ibogaine is not even in that kind of a drug it's a drug that helps people get off drugs right yeah it's like yes oddly enough illegal right yeah yeah in America in America it's legal in a lot of places but it's really great for people getting off opiates huh it's just a ferociously introspective drug that rewires the way your brain deals with addictions it literally rewires the connections alleviates addictions on a physical and

95:07psychological level what's the what does it feel like I don't know I know quite a few people that have that have had pill problems and have gone to Mexico and taking my friend ed clay who has an actual Center down there now he started it after he had gone down there for treatment he had a back injury I believe it was and got hooked on pills and I was like Jesus I gotta figure out a way to get off these things and did ibogaine and then clearing it right up Wow and he realized like wow like this is this is crazy that this is illegal yeah so the one drug that hunter chose right was actually a drug that gets people off drugs so just even more ironic it just had a great name yeah that really was the original political troll yeah yeah and might have had a giant effect in the election probably did oh yeah absolutely and I don't think it was an accident that hunters coverage

96:14was you know that that he chose that year to do these Diaries and I remember my father telling me about how every reporter would would wait for Rolling Stone to come out that week so they could you know read the coverage of the election but you know hunter kind of took this unknown government you know unknown senator from the Dakotas George McGovern and made him into this because this like Christ figure basically I don't I don't think that McGovern would have won the nomination without without that sort of relentless hyping that he gave him because they probably would have won the presidency if it wasn't for the vice president having that issue was right he had gone through electroshock therapy eagleton right yeah yeah yeah that was that was terrible but but fascinating you know I mean I got to write the the introduction to the last last version of that book and that's one

97:12of my favorite books of all time great book yeah I mean it's just like it's it's such a crazy comic epic you know yeah it was a big influence of yours uh yeah you know I definitely I think the the great thing about Hunter Thompson first of all he just he was so incredibly funny in a way that was completely rare I mean you can't just train to be that way yet you either are born with that ability verbally or not and he just had this completely strange four-dimensional way of looking at things and you know he would he would watch completely boring a campaign speech and when he got done writing it up it was like you know a psychedelic wrestling match or something like that I mean it was it was so much more interesting and bizarre and weird and he saw these great details and and he was just I I think it was a great approach to journalism but you know sadly there

98:23aren't that many people who can pull it off because it just required you know a surpassing literary talent and that's that's not that's incredibly rare what was a unique combination of fiction writing along with like an actual understanding analysis yeah that was that was his great because he because you're right he he would bring you in and the the reader would would have surf along this incredibly charged fast-paced narrative that read like you know the the fastest most engrossing fiction all right but he would intersperse it with any and stop and pull back and do what we call it a rolling stone we call them wisdoms right where you know you just sort of stop and say here's my take on this and those were amazing I mean he just he just had this ability to sort of cut through the and see see things from an angle that nobody else saw and that was a rare technique back

99:31then the idea of the kind of individualized take on things nobody was doing that and reporting back then I mean it was nobody even thought of it as a form as a form that you could really experiment with I mean there were a few people back then like Terry southern and Tom Wolfe who were who were doing some things like that but but Thompson was completely unique and there hasn't been anybody like him you know since since then I think I think it's it's not an accident that nobody's been able to pull that off again no well maguet compared to him a lot and one in one way I really saw that comparison was your brilliant coverage of the financial crisis and what was the the mechanisms behind the scene of the financial crisis and that I became a really big fan of your work reading that because the that I I think you covered that as well if not better than anybody no thanks yeah I mean so I

100:33I knew nothing about any I couldn't even balance my checkbook when they assigned me to that story and and I had to start basically from square one and I was calling people and saying things like can you tell me something about something that I'll understand you know I was cold calling investment banks and literally saying that and I finally got a guy to have lunch with me and he said your problem is that you're trying to understand this as an economic story once you look at it as a crime story you'll get it and and from that point forward I I totally I felt like like I started to understand the whole mechanism in the subprime mortgage scam it really was a scam it's really it's really just a massive corporatized version of like selling oregano as weed basically they took stuff that these is incredibly worthless highly risky mortgage loans right you know they would

101:40give out loans to everybody with a pulse you know whether you had a job or not whether you were a citizen or not didn't matter poor thing was to get the loan immediately sell it off chop it up turn it into securities and then they used this highly-advanced sort of mathematical trick to turn all that sort of mortgage hamburger into triple-a rated securities so you'd have like a you know a junk rated mortgage like the riskiest loan in existence something that was so toxic that country companies like country ride wouldn't want to hold on to it for more than a week because they were afraid it would that the stuff would blow up and then they would sell it off to like a pension fund or you know an insurance company in the form of a triple-a rated security which you know is as safe as a US Treasury bond so it was a scam McGann and the the the the metaphor of you know

102:43baby power taking baby powder and selling it as coke or whatever that that's exactly what it was they just took worthless and sold it as something that was that was gold and they got they did it for years and years and years and years and they they knew that this gigantic huge bubble of risk and disaster was just accumulating and that someday it was going to all explode and cascade and and and ruin the economy but everybody was trying to time it right and and bet on when that would happen and make their money before that that Judgment Day came and it was it was fascinating once it once I started to learn about it it was just such a an amazingly disgusting fascinating story that it was just hard not to not to get into it a crime story yeah think of it as a crime story yeah no absolutely I even got a what one guy gave me a book it was called famous famous con artists in history right it

103:49was like this little tome it's smaller than like the smallest paperback and it was the biography of this guy Victor Lustig was his name he was famous because he sold the Eiffel Tower twice all right and he he had this the scam that he called I think it was called the the the Hungarian box I'll have to go back and look but basically what he would do is he would get on a boat in New York and he had this sort of beautiful mahogany box with a crank on it that had two holes in it and he would show all the guests that he would put a blank piece of paper in one and turn a crank and $100 bill would come out the other end and he convinced them all that it was a machine that made money and everybody would offer him an increasing amount of money for this invention and he wouldn't sell it until the last day when he would sell it for a you know 40 or 50 thousand

104:58dollars and then he would disappear and jump off the boat and in France never be seen again people would yeah there it is what's it called yeah but but that's exactly what the Morrises picture let me see his face look at that creep Wow let me see that box again wow that is crazy so there yes so it was obviously fake and and and but that's what the mortgage scam was they they they were taking basically blank paper these these subprime loans that belong to janitors who were gonna foreclose within 10 minutes all right and they were telling people that oh we have this new mathematical process that allows that actually makes this stuff really safe and you can put it in your in your College endowment you can put in your pension fund and so all these people you know whose retirement monies were based on securities were buying all this that they thought was was

106:13triple-a rated and that's that's how they woke up and you know and in 2008-2009 their 401ks were were you know wiped out by 40% or whatever it was my neighbor really did I happen to him my neighbor bought this plot of land and had this dream to build his dream house and he would go buy the plot of land and he was always cleaning it up and getting ready and I would talk to him and then boom 2008 happened he lost everything and he would still go buy that plot of land and clean it up and he and I would talk about it and they just told me he lost everything yeah so it's never gonna happen huh yeah no I think he I think he died he eventually got really sick and they took him out of his house and brought him somewhere but I think he's dead now but yeah his his story was awful awful to hear this guy who was in his 60s who had got this piece of land with a nice view and it's like this is

107:10where I'm gonna dream build my dream house and he had all this money prepared for it all this money saved away and he was ready to rock and roll and then BOOM mmm it all went out they just drained out somebody put a hole in the bottom of the boat and everything everything went to the bottom of the ocean yeah and then he probably got ripped off twice because his tax dollars went to go bail out the guys who you know you know because some of the some of the banks got stuck holding some of this and rather than eat the losses like you're your friend did they got the Federal Reserve to buy it from them yeah no and and you know or or the Treasury so how the did they get away with giving the CEOs bonuses during that time yeah a giant bonuses during the time where they had to be bailed out by the taxpayers yeah that was another scam like so they were if you looked at the fine print of all

108:05the bailouts it's basically said that you had to repay the money by us by x time before you could start paying people exorbitant amounts of money again but a lot of those a lot of those conditions were never really followed and you know the the conditions of repayment were kind of glossed over and the the the companies that they were supposed to be able to pass these things called stress tests which demonstrated that they were back on solid footing again before they paid people bonuses but the stress tests were all fudged and you know I mean the there were there was crime and corruption a legality basically in every direction during that whole period and and not just in the government but in in all these companies as well geez yeah but fascinating to follow yeah what was it like covering that I mean how long did you spend working on that seven years probably yeah yeah well because

109:09one of the things that I thought no that was really interesting was I did my first story about this and I got this incredible reaction because it turns out that the financial press there is nobody in the financial press who writes for ordinary people like it's basically what I was doing was a translation job I was trying to basically take what had happened and explain it in a way that a person who knew nothing about finance would be able to understand and it turns out that nobody's doing that so all these people who had questions about it who who wanted to know what had happened to their money or why don't why did my house get foreclosed on or what it you know what's what's a subprime mortgage or anything you know there was nobody else doing that work so I had lots of it to do and it was really interesting and I just kept doing it that had to be depressing yeah oh yeah of course

110:10of course I mean most most investigative reporting is depressing particularly that because he mean a lot of it was old people that oh my god old people minorities I mean I did one story about a bank in Maryland well it's a National Bank it's it's a bank that you know I wouldn't be surprised that of a lot of people listening how have their accounts at this Bank they had to pay a settlement to the government because they were intentionally targeting elderly black people to sell subprime mortgages - and they called the mud people and there were all these these like toxic emails going back and forth about how stupid they were and how they'll buy anything at cetera et cetera the emails they call the mud people yeah yeah and so they had to pay a settlement to the government and but you know the racial component of the of that crash was something that I didn't really clue into until late but

111:14that was a big part of it - it was you know a lot of it involved these mortgage lenders going into particularly like lower middle-class black neighborhoods and knocking on doors where there be like an elderly person at home and saying hey would you like to refi your mortgage and you'll have a little bit of extra spending money this month right and the person won't know anything about finance and they'll still sign this refinance deal that allows them to save a little bit of money at each month not knowing that they had just converted their fixed mortgage into a floating mortgage and that is seeing the interest rates changed you know you'd have people who went from paying $900 a month to paying $7,000 a month right and suddenly they're out in the street and and you know the the company that sold them the loan is long gone by then they they're not holding it they as soon as they got

112:17her name on the dotted line they sold it off to a bank in New York who in turn again chopped it up into hamburger and sold it probably to you our pension fund or who or whatever so there's nobody she could complain to and you know yeah that stuff was really depressing what was a feeling like of having very little understanding about finance and then immersing yourself in it and I was fantasizing that this is the underlying structure that our society is wrong that our money is established through this is this is how we we sell houses and loans and this is what we're doing yes yeah no it was it was fascinating I because before that I was mostly covering like elections right and again if you cover elections it's incredibly boring and you never hear anything of substance and it's not terribly complicated and you know one one the the Democrat says that you know we want to

113:11help the middle class and the Republican says we want to protect America Family Values and that's pretty much the extent of the intellectual challenge in terms of covering that stuff and I always thought to myself you know politics in America must be a lot more complicated than this right there must be some other hidden thing where it's incredibly complex and diabolical and and you know the the real machination of the power must be visible somewhere and I think that you find that when you when you start looking into how Wall Street works how money works how central banking works how you know how the concentration of wealth works I mean basically the subprime scheme was an effort to pull the remaining savings out of the population right it just wasn't you know in the old days investment banks made their money by lending money to companies who would build factories and they would make

114:13stuff and sell it around the world and everybody would make money and never you know even even the population would would would benefit from it but that manufacturing economy it's all gone it's so foresees so you have this financialized economy and they have no normal beneficial way to make money and all they're all they can really do is look to see where is their money and how can we get it and most people had money in their houses right like the the accumulated savings of most people whatever was left after the internet crash in the 90s was in real estate and that this was the scam by which they took the wealth that was left in the that's of ordinary people and transferred it to you know nine people in Manhattan basically I mean that's why you have you know we told them when we talk about wealth inequality now right being a huge factor that you know the

115:16top ninety-five I'm sorry the top 1% of the population owns ninety percent of the wealth in the country or whatever it is that's a consequence of schemes like this where they're just they're finding out where people have a little bit of money and they're systematically coming up with scams to move it from there to here with no consequence no with no consequence and that was the other part of the story that I ended up having to cover later which was you know the the last time they tried something like this like during the SNL crisis which was also sort of a giant fraud scheme also that involved real estate lending and you know but that the government after that actually you know indicted eighteen hundred people they put eight hundred people in jail they put a lot of you know serious influential people on the dock after that nobody nobody went to jail after this stuff and there was and

116:16people think that well they didn't do anything that was technically illegal no there there was lots of stuff that was that was brazenly criminally illegal I mean they committed fraud on a broad scale but some of these companies were into the things that were even worse than that I mean you take HSBC HSBC admitted to laundering 850 million dollars for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels including the Sinaloa cartel right which is suspected in thousands of murders like and you know they they admitted to this activity they agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement with the government where nobody did a day in jail no individual had to pull out a dime out of their own pockets to pay the shareholders pointed up 1.9 million dollars but some of that was tax-deductible which means we paid some of that fine and and the only real punishment with

117:17any teeth is that some of the executives had to partially defer their bonuses for five years so laundering 850 million dollars for narco terrorists gets you a total walk you know that tells you basically everything you need to know about do we prosecute white-collar crime in this country basically no you know I mean that's the answer ultimately that you find out and there was paperwork that showed they knew it was from the cartels oh yeah they if you if you look at the the agreement and you can watch the thirst there's there's a video of of Loretta Lynch and Lanny Breuer because this is before Laura Loretta Lynch was Attorney General but she was she was basically the head of this deal they talked about the fact that the HSBC branches because most of this was done in Mexico hmx which was the subsidiary company they had special teller windows built to fit cash boxes

118:27that the drug cartels were bringing into the bank so basically you've seen the scene the scene in Scarface where the guys come in with duffel bags with cash to the bank yeah right and you know that's like a montage you know there's that that song I forget what song it is in the background same thing these guys would come into the bank they would slide in these boxes of cash one after the other and that's admitted activity the bank's signed off on this they you know it's not like they're contesting it they're not saying we neither admit nor deny it's it's part of the deal so and in they agreed to the amount everything so yeah it was a 1.9 billion dollar settlement but you know it's not like it came out of the pockets of the people who did it and it's not like any of the people who did it are in jail it's just you know a thing that happened and you know that's five weeks of profit

119:19for the bank so what what the they don't care did you see the documentary an inside job yeah yep we've covered a lot of the same territory yeah yeah that was a sobering documentary where they're talking to the very people that caused the financial crisis mm-hm and and realizing that these people were economics professors that eventually got these jobs really lucrative jobs with banks and how they finagled this system and made it so it looked like these things were appropriate ya know I talked to some of the some of the things that they invented that made this the crash possible sounded like good ideas like they they came up with this thing called the credit default swap alright and I won't bore you with what that is exactly but basically it's a kind of insurance where it's it's basically a bet it's hard to explain but a it's a way of quasi insuring a product without having

120:24to pony up a lot of money and the it's it's called a derivative right and these instruments are completely unregulated can I put the secret default swap is like you and I betting on whether or not a third person's house is going to burn in a fire right like the old-school insurance said that it had to be your house in order for you to get insurance on it this new form of quasi insurance said that two totally disinterested parties could have an interest in a third thing that happens so it's basically gambling and on the one hand it allowed people to create a whole lot of capital which allowed them to lend more money which theoretically allowed people to buy more houses but in reality it just created the system where all these people had bets that were back and forth on on all these properties that's one of the reasons why the when the crash happened when when all

121:33those mortgages started to fail it wasn't just the failures of those properties it was all these people who were betting on whether or not these people could could pay their mortgages they started to lose money and there were people who had bets on that who started to lose money and it's like this cascading whirlpool of that happened and again it just started out as an idea to just create more money to lend to lend and it turned into this nightmare mechanical scenario that just that created losses you know in this almost apocalyptic fashion and a lot of them had no idea but that that was going to be the eventualities it's great it's definitely crazy stuff as a person who didn't really follow finance before how much does that affected your life down like the way you look at things I definitely pay a lot more attention to the fine print when I enter into any

122:33financial contract I think about where I do my banking but the reality is you just don't have a whole lot of choice in this country anyway I mean it's like everything else there's only a few companies left so almost every bank that's out there where you can have a bank account in a mortgage is is a bank that I've written about some massive scandal before so that that's that's a problem but yeah I worry about it all the time I mean I have friends in finance who call me and they they tell me that you know that the things that are incredibly unsafe and that this that and the other could could could happen and so I have an anxiety level about things that I never had before but apart from that yeah I mean that's a natural consequence of having to spend seven years looking at all these horror stories that's great it's crazy you spent their lunch time on it do you see

123:36any other bubbles coming up yeah people talk about that all the time there's a lot of a lot of negative press about subprime auto loans for instance which is it's not exactly the same but it's it's a similar thing I mean the same basic scam of taking loans chopping them up and then repackaging them as something that's more valuable than the original loan you can do that with anything any kind of credit you can do it with credit cards you can do it with aircraft loans you can do it with with car loans you can do it with with home mortgages and so the the mechanism of taking things that are are toxic and risky and making them look like triple-a is still is still part of the economy and it's everywhere the plus side of that is that there's more credit available you know almost anybody can get a credit card or even if you've had screwed up credit you can get a car you

124:43know I mean there's this put us on this like endless cycle of build-up bubble collapse build-up bubble collapse rebounding collapse again absolutely I mean I think that's that's that's why I can't you have to be nervous about the you know the skyrocketing stock exchange yeah we verified yeah I mean you should be right do you are you heavily invested and I've got some in there I just didn't when the whole you know when Trump was saying the economy's never been better look at the stock market stock market's killing it I always do and then it'll have a bad day and you're okay well I thought we're doing great like what's going on with this bad day can you not control these bad days right like what's happening here right if you're if you're in control the good days you're also in control the bad days right yeah of course of course it just it seems it seems super suspicious yeah and and in

125:34the old days you'd have a lot of confidence that well the stock market always eventually goes up so yeah there's gonna be bad days but it'll go back right but the problem is the underlying economy in America it just isn't all that hot you know like we're like what do we really make in this country what what we're where's the floor right like we have we have some industries that sort of perform well but if you know periodically we go through these bubbles that are based on nothing more than enthusiasm you know in the 90s it was the the tech bubble right where people like Alan Greenspan would say things like well we have a new paradigm in economics right so it doesn't matter whether a company hasn't shown any ability to make money or you know has no reasonable profit and loss statements it's just if it's a good idea that the stock is sound and everybody should

126:32invest in it and the stock market is going to continually go up go up so don't worry about it of course that doesn't happen everybody but it blows up everybody loses their shirt but what what do they do the Fed lowers interest rates basically allows Wall Street to recapitalize drink itself sober and they plunge into the next the next madness which is mortgages and once again you have Alan Greenspan saying hey you know real estate is a great bet it's you know it's going to continually ascend people should use their homes as ATM machines you know you should you should consider refinancing your house so that you can get a little bit of extra cash and and this is this was actually the message they sent to America and again it creates this artificial mania where the economy is stoked artificially to gigantic dimensions but it's not based on anything and so when

127:31when it crashes when you finally get like any Ponzi scheme it you know it depends it depends on more new investors coming in than old investors leaving right so there's always going to be that moment when suddenly we don't have as many new ones as old ones and the instant that happens it all goes kaboom right and that's what happened with with the subprime market there was a moment in time where they they just couldn't keep it going anymore they couldn't find any more new suckers the to get to to sell mortgages to and the mania ended and all went splat and then it was amplified by the fact that we have this system now of people betting on credit that is legal which creates more losses out of thin air so yeah I'm terrified every time I see this the stock market go up what's it based on is it based on our economy actually doing well I don't know I don't think so

128:32you know I'm sorry I'm look like I'm scaring you a little bit you're definitely scary but I think that's good I think I need to be scared I tend to take these things and just you know I have Financial Advisors I like let them handle money right when I hear things like this I just got Jesus well I I get terrified when I hear about really smart people getting scammed like yesterday we were talking about theranos you know that a blood-testing company that turned out to be total horseshit no I didn't hear about this oh it's great story it's it's a story of one of those things where you you find someone who you hope exists and you build them up there was this woman she looked like Steve Jobs she wore a black turtleneck in every photo and she was the the the richest ever self-made woman she was worth four billion dollars she had built this company called theranos right out of

129:27college she was like nineteen when she started the company it was a blood-testing company that just required a small prick of your blood to do complicated blood analysis for diseases and things along those lines turns out it didn't work at all mmm and they faked a bunch of I'd spread fraud a lot of people got their blood tested it turned out to be you know they were at risk for all these diseases and warren buffett invested a hundred million dollars I think 125 Betsy DeVos more than a hundred million dollars like all these super wealthy people got scammed Wow yeah when you find out that really wealthy people right that do this for a living yeah Buffett does that for a living right that he can get scammed out of a hundred and twenty five million dollars right right yeah and and Warren Buffett is his mantras supposed to be picking the the absolute long term investment right

130:27so it's not he's not like a stevie : type who just looks at the tape and tries to time it just right so you know you can you can make an investment for 10 seconds and come out with it with a you know if he if he's investing in a company and and even he can be fooled that's that's pretty terrible but look at Enron I mean Enron was was another example of the world's best financial analysts we're looking at this company for a decade and the the results were completely ridiculous like it should have been obvious to any layperson that that these profit numbers couldn't possibly be real and it wasn't until one of those guys I think it was Jim Chanos it was sort of a famous short seller I mean I sort of said hey wait a minute that there's something up here but people continually invested in these companies and there's just not a whole lot of oversight that goes on with with

131:28Wall Street and I think that's that's a major lesson of you know the last 20 years is that is that there's just not a lot of eyes on on crime and in this area another example is I'm sorry the the who's the guy scammed all the rich people really made Bernie Madoff yeah I was gonna bring him up yes the most egregious example right yeah yeah I mean there are other there are other people who did similar things but this guy didn't even make investments right you know what I mean like he he was literally just sort of taking money and you know when someone cashed out he would yeah it was like girls like throwing he had a big you know pile of cash and you know he would who take some man and throw some out but if the SEC it had at any time just looked at his books and said what are you invested in it all would have you know that whole house of cards would have fallen and invest in

132:28anything no and he wasn't he wasn't making trades he wasn't doing anything you know and and there are a bunch of stories like this there's a great book called the octopus which is about as somebody who did a Madoff like scam another hedge fund where same thing they weren't really making trades they were just sort of creating phony profit and loss statements and and and creating records that look like trades they could they could tell their investors about but they weren't actually doing anything so if anybody any expert at any time had just poke their nose and into this person's books that would have seen it in ten seconds that's the mean that's the amazing thing about this you know not not to get back to you know my my drug-dealing book but this is one of the things that he says which is that you know you can be in a you know in a poor black neighborhood and a couple of kids

133:25will be on a cell phone talking about selling ten dollars worth of weed and they'll be picked up by cops you know within 20 minutes or something like that meanwhile you know somebody like you know Bernie Madoff can commit 100 million dollar frauds year after year after year and not even do any take any effort to try to cover it up all that well and get away with it well Bernie's big crime was that he ripped off rich people yeah absolutely if he had done the exact same thing to poor people but he did was just it was just too easy to call what he did a crime versus what you were talking about with these financial institutions right yeah Owens yeah if he if he had long if he had laundered it through a a slightly more legitimate process he he would have gotten out flattened but the one of the things that a lot of these guys these scam artists get into it thinking that

134:19they're actually gonna be real hedge funds and that they they have some stock picking system that's actually gonna make all their clients money and one of the things they find out is that a they suck they they they're not outperforming the market and they're not that smart but be that their clients can't tell if they just make up the numbers so there there are a number of cases of people who start out trying to be legitimate and trying to be really real investment advisors but they just end up turning it to Bernie Madoff types because it's just easy there's no there aren't that many people watching for it and you know that that's kind of scary too well it seems like there's so many people doing it how could there be enough people watching it right about how many investment firms there are and how many different people that are involved in trading how could

135:13anybody be watching all of it right ya know there but even even so even if you take that into consideration than the number of eyes that are that are on this world is is ridiculously low electic take AIG alright AIG was one of the world's largest companies that you know before before it crashed it had like a hundred eighty thousand employees it was it took advantage of this weird loophole that allows financial companies to essentially choose their own regulator so because because AIG had a thrift or Savings and Loan that's basically the same thing they chose to be regulated by the OTS which is the office of Thrift Supervision which is this tiny tiny little you know office in Washington that oversees basically savings and loan operations and in in the OTS this is this is actually true the they had exactly one insurance expert on staff so essentially with the world's largest

136:24insurance company was being regulated by a government office that only had one person who really understood insurance and and even and even that person wouldn't have understood the the part of the company that blew up which was essentially an investment bank within the insurance company that was creating these sort of highly advanced sort of derivative operations that know that they just would not have been able to understand that stuff so there the government just does not place a lot of resources into you know keeping an eye on even the most basic things and when you compare that to law enforcement in other areas you know is how many how many people do we have you know worrying about bank bank robberies in this country or or drugs right or you know how many people are being watched because they're marijuana dealers in other states I mean it dwarfs the number of people who are watching

137:26for economic crimes yeah one person yeah I just love the the name of it office of Thrift Supervision yeah exactly sure it exists anymore I think it was it was merged into some other because there used to be the OCC officer of the Comptroller of the currency and I think they created a new regulator ad out of all that after the crash but but yeah and I just shows it's regulator and it's regulator you know was totally overmatched didn't couldn't understand and that's one of the reasons why the company blew up the company also blew up because it was run by insurance people who didn't understand they idea was basically Wall Street's bookie all these people were betting all these investment banks were betting on whether or not mortgages were gonna fail or not and AIG was selling the product that they could use to make those bets essentially or they were taking on

138:26insurance on packets of mortgages so if they exploded you would get a payout right it's like it's like buying an insurance policy on your neighbor's house if it goes up in flames you get paid on it you get paid AIG was selling a product that allowed banks essentially to buy insurance on on houses on mortgages and if the if people foreclosed if the mortgages failed or pools of mortgages failed if you if you bought that kind of insurance you got these huge payouts so people were betting against mortgages basically and AIG was taking all this book and but the the heads of the company were old-school insurance executives who just didn't understand this newfangled complicated form of insurance and so they would look at the numbers they were being given and even they didn't get it didn't they didn't understand how how exposed they were and so when all the bets started going the

139:29wrong way suddenly they're being asked to pay out billions of dollars and they're like wait where is this coming from so so even the companies were kind of clueless about the that was going on it turns out listen man if it wasn't for you dummies like me would not understand why we should be scared like everybody was scared but reading your your articles about it maybe understand why and I think that's a the way you describe it is great that you translated this stuff you actually worked as Trant as a translator and I appreciate your work man oh well thank you so much for having a huge fan forever I'm looking forward to seeing your special I think that yeah it's gonna come out sometime around September I think that's when they're gonna release it excellent Thank You Man really appreciate thinking about it thanks for coming on man thanks very much Matt Taibbi ladies and gentlemen