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But enough with that, let's get to the show. You started covering a lot of the foreclosure crisis.
Yeah, and that was my first hint that something like Trump was going to happen. That's what this whole memestock thinker out of, I think, is just this rage directed towards these financial professionals who were basically being subsidized and then acting like they had like this special financial genius that allowed them to make money.
We actually haven't even opened one of the most important chapters in your journalism career at now, which is the Twitter files. As someone who's actually like interacted with him and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him, where do you think Elon Musk bits into this.
Welcome back to Counterpoints for today's Friday show. We're going to be joined by long time veteran journalist Matthew Tayibi. I want to talk about his career, which has spanned the pre Internet era, basically back when you see actually print things. I mean, I'm there too, so I can say that up to today and continuing to evolve like we have not seen. It's not as if we've gotten some static place. So we're going to talk about the history of journalism and the history over the last thirty years.
But we wanted to start with a question though about twenty twenty four, this election, which we're all trying to cover.
And I have a theory that I wanted to try on both of you, which is that I think the country is in denial right now, like it think of this as the other kind of election denialism, like people just I think as I talk to people around the country that they just refuse to believe that this is the election, that it's Biden against Trump, Like there was basically no Democratic primary, and so that allowed people to kind of so you know what, this isn't really happening.
There's no competition, but it's not going to be him, like there's gonna be And I was talking to my dad. Yes, she's like they're going to do something right. Right maybe at the.
Convention has a medical situation.
And I think the Nicky Haley. We talked a lot about how Nicki Haley got all this mainstream news coverage that she didn't deserve based on the fact that she never had a shot. But I think part of it was psychological that people are like, it's got to be something other than Trump. Like Biden said he was basically going to be a one term guy. Country took him
at his word. Now here he is allegedly running again, and so I think that I think that the refusal of people to check into the election has to do with them just denying the reality that it's these two guys.
What do you think that, Uh yeah, well, I think a couple of things. Number one, I think people are right to be suspicious because we're not treating this like a normal election season. I mean, at this cover five presidential elections. At this stage of a race, normally, every single day it would be a campaign story. You'd be you see somebody out in the campaign till we would have constant arguments about the back and forth. But you know, between the candidates and there's none of that would.
Have staff getting fired, like you know who the staff are, right, Like they became celebrities over the five election cycles that you've covered, like well the Carl Rose, the David Axelrods, like who's running Biden Trump's campaigns?
Where was the first publication that you worked on a campaign? Just like in general the village?
So because that sounded to me like such a Politico Huff Post question, because but that's actually what was sort of new, right. I mean, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, But in the aughts there was this journalism as almost a sport.
Well James Carville.
Campaigning become became more almost gamified. I don't know that the characters popped.
I anything that was really popularized, but a helper in and who's the other guy I've always forget is high, Yeah, exactly, you know, with game change and all that and this whole idea. But that was the first, you know, when I started covering campaigns for Rolling Stone, the first thing that I saw as a big story on the campaign was that the journalists thought they were running the whole thing. There was a kind of a cabal inside the campaign
where they would get together. At the end of the day, they would decide which candidates were serious and viable and have discussions about that. And I thought that was crazy. Now there's really none of that. I mean, nobody really knows what the campaign is anymore. And it doesn't it doesn't there's no script. It's not the reality show that was all consuming for so long.
So five elections I could do. The math was what was the first one? For actively covered?
Oh?
Four? Really?
Right, okay, Carrie Carry, I don't know, yeah, yeah, right, So everybody knew but Bush, even though Bush was the nominate, like everybody knew it was gonna be the dominie again Karl Rove and like here's and he had a strategy. He's gonna he's going to bring out the bigots too
for the over marriage equality. Like that was like that was the theme of the two then plus John John Kerry's quizzling and like, you know, he's weak on the war and you know, right, you knew you kind of knew what the election was.
About, right right, yeah, exactly. I mean they they made it about things that should have really didn't matter to the population all that much. I mean that the war was the dominant topic in the country at the time, and neither candidate really wanted to go there all that much, not you know, in terms of and also the larger issues about the warrant and that sort of thing. They
just didn't come up a whole lot. It was you know, John Carrey's medals versus yeah, other the swift boats boats, yeah, exactly, all that stuff.
So how did the how did the campaign press handle the swift boats? Actually? Like what was the and then and then I want to go back and how he got in juralm the like so to like the Bush campaign, they start pushing this swift boat stuff and for people who are basically weren't even born.
Then, which is almost everybody.
So swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a right wing group that was kind of formed by people who had served with John Kerry in Vietnam, and they hated his story of turning his swift boat toward the Vietcong and like shooting and they said he like sort of like throwing the metals. Well, they really hated that he threw his medals in protests or his ribbons. I think he kept his metals before his ribbons, which is a very John Kerry, but they didn't like his purple heart and
he wasn't injured enough or whatever. It became this like he smoked his ribbons. Yes, became this real character attack. Democrats just avoided it for a very long time, not understanding the way that the internet and politics had changed, thought that if they just didn't address it, it would go away.
Right.
It ended up causing immense damage. But I'm curious how the press was thinking about this kind of new well, I think they campaigning.
What I remember about that is that a lot of people saw it as a continuation of the sort of nineties David Rock, you know, sort.
Of which was a new thing used to be on the right for right. Yeah, he was this also or not.
Quote unquote right wing hit man back in the day who was the point person behind the scenes and the Clarence Thomas hearings, than Whitewater and all this stuff, And that was a sort of a new thing in media at the time, this idea of organized the multi pronged media attacks, creating new organizations just for the purpose of going out into the public and creating news stories. And I think a lot of people saw the Swift Book group as that. But you're right. There was a massive
and effect in the way. You know, they covered that so much that it became overwhelmingly the theme of the campaign. And the Democrats I don't think did a great job of pushing back because they their whole campaign was John Kerry in an army jacket. They didn't have an issue to run on, and so this whole thing. He was a sitting duck for that kind of stuff. So I don't know, most of the reporters just thought it was a fun story that they were happy to work on
every day. There wasn't a whole lot of outrage.
Kind of a fascinating thread though, And this might get to your next question, and that Chris Lasavita, who's now running the Trump campaign, was like the pioneer of the swift boat Oh was he?
Yeah?
Absolutely, People credit him for the entire swift boat campaign attack. And what's interesting about that is at the time people saw it as the sort of rupture of ethics, and now you have the man who finally put an end, at least on the presidential scale, to this debate about whether it's okay to rupture the ethics. It's like the it's like the filibuster debate, but for decorum and presidential campaigns, right, like we can't they like once you open that Pandora's box,
Like what happens? That absolutely happened in twenty sixteen on the presidential level. And now Chris los Avita, the swift boat guy, was running the Trump campaign.
I didn't even know he was running the Trump campaign. Like I'm in denial too about this election.
I didn't know that either. I'm supposedly supposed to be covering.
So don't don't tell anybody that that I didn't know that, because that would be kind of embarrassing.
It's a good thing you didn't say it on air.
Yeah, So well, yeah, just keep it between us in the Friday Show here. If you guys out there.
Watching, nobody cliped this whole all flow.
Yeah, don't keep riving. So h growing up, did you always think you were going to be a journalist because your father was a journalist?
Is that right?
He was like a local TV journalist in New York? Is that right?
Yeah? So my parents were at Rutgers and my father I was born when they were very young, there were like twenty and so he to support the family, he was working as a newspaper reporter at the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey. So he started when he was eighteen or nineteen. Wow, he's been doing this forever. And then as soon as he graduated, we moved to Boston and he worked at a local affiliate there. So
in my childhood was like Anchorman basically. You know, I spent a lot of my childhood in those newsrooms with you know, the bad facial hair and all that stuff. And I used to play with the weather set up and try to print, pretend with the green screen and everything. It was really cool.
And did your mom get an a journalism too? No?
No, she ended up being an attorney. But I spent most of my time hanging around my father. My father is he's a journalist, journalist, like very old school, incredibly gifted. I was very fascinated by his work because he's a super gregarious personality who could just show up at any scene and get people trusting him and talking to him instantly. And you know, in journalism, in TV journalism especially, you have to get you know, a good SoundBite, and then you have to be able to knock out a script
like really quickly. And he was really good at all that stuff. He did his own editing, even back in the days when it was film going all that back that far. So I thought that was really cool. But I never thought I would be able to do this. And I also wanted to be a writer, a TV journalist.
Was it that? Oh, so you wanted to be a writer of journalism or novels and novels. Yeah.
So I was kind of a depressed kid. So comic novels were my big escape growing up, and I thought, that's what I want to do. I want to be like Elin Waugh or Nicolai Gogol or somebody like that. You know. It turned out I don't have talent for writing fiction, but I didn't learn that until later. And by the time I figured it out, I realized I didn't have any actual skills except the family business. So that's how I got into journalism.
So how do you wind up in Russia?
Yeah?
That was gonna be my next question.
Yeah, so my favorite writer is growing up were all Russian? I mentioned go Gol Bulgakov was another one. I went through this period where I was just reading lots and lots of Russian literature.
Do you think that was from your politics or do you think your politics came from that?
Oh? I couldn't. I couldn't stand politics. I still don't. I still can't stand it. I really the books. I was just really into how well they were written and how beautiful they were, And you know, the Russians have this amazing absurdist view on life, and I was, you know, when you're depressed, you kind of try to lose yourself in that landscape and the writing of people like Tolsta
it's so vivid. I wanted to go experience it. And then I wanted to learn the language so I could read those books in russ So I went there as a student. And one of the funny things was, you know, in the States, what years that probably eighty nine nineties, so it was still Soviet. Yeah, so I went to
a Soviet college. But in America, you remember the eighties, that was like the kind of Porky's and everything right, Like everybody was you know, they spent a lot of time in their appearance and there was a success culture and everything, and I thought, I hated that. I'm like, I'm going to be a failure. When I grew up in Russia, everybody's a failure, right, So I felt like I fit right in and it was it was a cool things. So that's why I ended up moving back there.
I thought this place is paradise. It turned out not to be, but it was a great thing.
Well, so you graduate from college and came back to the US, and what'd you try first before you went back to Russia.
I didn't try anything.
I immediately started making plans.
Yeah, so I worked demolition and way the table saved money and it just went over there and started stringing.
So and you said, it turned out not to be paradise, but there's something so interesting about someone growing up immersed and as you said, the landscapes, that was a really beautiful way to put it. And then having your eyes opened up gradually over time. What was that process like? What really started to disillusion you?
Well, Russia was just it went through a very tough time, both when it was still Soviet and then after the revolution in ninety one.
That's when were you there in ninety one.
I missed the actual thing by a couple of months on either side, but I saw it coming obviously my last semester there. You could you know there was a a ban on food products, so you had to use a rationing system just to get vegetables and things like that. It was it was a mess. But then after that, Russia immediately transformed this like gangster state, which was kind of horrifying to watch, but as a journalist was fascinating, you know, I mean I got to go and see
incredible things. It was a great place to start one's career because you know, you got to cover very high level things quickly, which you don't get to do in America if you're working as an intern in you know, a magazine or something. Yeah.
I always thought your ability to cover Wall Street corruption later in your career must have been connected to witnessing it in its like most extreme form, right, like up up close? Was it so? And for people who aren't that familiar with that period of history, correct me if I'm wrong. I think it The most rapid collapse in life expectancy in world history is Russia in the nineteen nineties.
That's probably right, Yeah, which is remarkable.
To consider that they went from rationing food in nineteen ninety one and then that was the high point, right, the collapsed, you know, life expectancy dropping by just years and years and years because the state, you know, with US facilitation, just gets sold from out from under the people to these oligarchs. Could you see it happen in real time? Like are you like you know, there's still these famous videos of Jeff Sachs, who we should have on the show because his arc from that totally to
where he is now. It's absolutely incredible. Jeff Sacks helped to basically auction off the entire Soviet Union and create all these oligarchs through this Harvard run.
Harvard Institute for International Development. Yeah. Yeah, So the auctions that you talk about when you mentioned the financial reporting later, these are some of the most complicated thefts maybe in the history of the world, and probably the biggest ones maybe in the history of people. So just take an example, Well, they had a thing called loans for shares, which was a way of kind of handing out the crown jewels of Soviet industry to basically cronies of the yeltsin regime.
And what they did is they took people who really had no cash at all and they lent them money. So in the case of for instance, Yukos, which is a company about the size of excellon mobile, the yeltsin regime lends one of the banks fifty million dollars, which turns out to be half their steak that they put up to get a thirty eight or thirty seven percent steak and one of the world's biggest oil companies. Yeah,
exactly right. So they put up basically nothing to get to become instantly some of the richest people on earth. And they did that with you know, seven or eight of these banker groups. And we later learned that there was a kind of a backroom deal that was broker to Davos where there was an agreement that they were going to get these properties in return for massively supporting Yelds in the ninety six election, and that's how Yelsen went from being at six percent in the polls to
actually winning. There were some other things that went on too, but you know, it was a US broker thing. We helped advise in the structure of all those auctions, which were totally corrupt, and so that was an early introduction for me.
What's also playing out in a split screen for you is you're seeing up close what's actually happening in Russia. You're also probably absorbing Western media coverage of what's happening in Russia. And you've written one of the best books on contemporary media problems hating people should.
Read it if they haven't.
But watching that was that also something because and this is kind of a rambling question, but I think about Tucker Carlson going to Russia and realizing a lot of what he has been told about Russia is wrong. Maybe though sometimes people realize a lot of what they've been told about something is wrong, and it pushes them further to the direction of like not being right on a different side of the question, like.
Tucker out of this. That's a phenomenon that happens all the time.
So for you, what was it like watching the Western media say this place is a corrupt nightmare while not covering the Westerners that are creating the corrupt nightmare, but then also kind of missing some of the story that you were covering with like everyday people.
Yeah, so a lot of the journalists, actually most of them didn't speak Russian. That was the first thing that was kind of shocking to me. I didn't understand that at all. It turns out that's sort of an intentional strategy, both with diplomats and foreign correspondence for the big bureaus.
They what's the strategy there?
So for diplomats, there was a bad experience with China with the Maoist Revolution, where the United States felt like the diplomats were too close to the local population and that's why they didn't get the warning that the revolution was going to happen. So there's a kind of a strategy of switching people out on a regular basis so
they don't get to attenuated to the low population. With journalists, I'm not really sure why they do it, but you almost never have somebody who is really in tune with you know, the local population, the language, everything, And I don't know how you cover a country if you don't, you know.
That's like I'm trying to imagine a Russian journalist who comes to Washington, d c. And only speaks Russian, right, and is then translating what's happening in Washington back to a Russian audience. Can you imagine that it would be remotely accurate?
No, it would be a money python routine. Yeah right, you couldn't. It's bored, It's you could. It's even dumber than that.
Would they just have to talk to the English speakers.
Well, so that's that's the problem. So what they got almost all of their input on what was going on in Russia from English speaking Russian politicians, many of whom went to Harvard like Anatole Chibias Yegur guide are borising themselves, right, people like that. But you went, you know, an hour outside of Moscow or Saint Petersburgh and there was like
subsistence farming and like, you know, a complete gangsterism. You would go to a place and there would be total barter economy, no cash anywhere, starvation, you know, incredible surges and crime, all this stuff. So I started to do a lot of like participatory reporting. So I would just go from place to place, get a job somewhere, and then just write, you know, what's it like to work construction in this place, or you know, work on a
you know, a mine over here, right. And in contrast that with what they were telling people back home, which was that there's this emerging middle class and everything's awesome, and you know, it was you know, it was really wild for me because I had a lot of illusions about how good the media was, and that was the first time I saw that they just will lie about stuff, and that was kind of amazing to me.
Who would you publish those with?
So I had my own newspaper over there is exility, so yeah. But I did work at the Moscow Times over there, which is an expat paper. But I also I wrote for the Nation and some other papers in England, like believe it or not, I think I did a couple for the Telegraph, for the Daily Mail. I worked for euro Money, believe it or not.
He's always been a right wing.
Hack exactly going back, that's right, that's right, euro Money. So you know, I contributed. I also wrote in Russian. I wrote for Russian papers and uh yeah, so that was that was mostly what I did. But I the audience mostly wasn't back in the United States, so that was, you know, kind of the difference. But it was interesting.
How did you come about founding the paper? And who was it was? It was Mark Ames was Zai Chika much.
Later, Yeah, so it was it was really Mark. There were there were actually two papers originally, you know, for a long time there was this paper they're called Living Here, which was a club guy because the Moscow Times didn't have a good club guide and so there was everybody realized that's how you make money in the next bad city, right,
because everybody's clubbing, right. So we put out the sort of trashy club guide and that was actually doing well, and somebody had the idea to long, when don't we just make it out the paper and Mark was the first editor of that. I had actually I would during that time. I was actually playing basketball in Mongolia when this was all happening. I got sick, came home and they said, do you want to come help do a
competitor to that? And I came back and ended up merging with Mark, and that's how the XLE happened.
And I forgot about your Mongolian basketball career. How long did that last?
A season? Yeah? Yeah, I was. I was the Mongolian I'm really it was really more like a small forward, but I can't shoot, so but I was leaving the league in rebounding when la That's funny, That's my point was like.
You were the number one, the top rebounder in the Mongolian.
Boder was I was it? Six for two? Believed it or not?
Did you have a nickname that the Mongolian Mongolian Rodman?
Yeah? And I did the whole thing. Back then, I had hair and I used to diet red with and have a yellow beard and all kinds of crazy stuff. The owner wanted to drum up interest, so he would ask me to start fights and do all kinds of crazy stuff.
Really, Kenny Powers in Mexico.
Totally, yeah, totally is that's why I went. I wanted to write a book about this, and you know, the whole idea was like it was a gag. It was supposed to be Charles Barkley and the far East Right, and I was going to do it, but you know, I contracted pneumonia in the middle of it, and you know, never got to finish the project.
So did you ever write about that?
Not really. I wrote like one article for the Boston Globe magazine a long time ago, but I never did the full thing. And now I wish I lost all my notes from that time period because it would have been a very funny story actually, if I had actually written it.
Another lesson that I'm curious about that I imagine you gleaned from those years is the kind of intersection of journalism and intel that I imagine was especially crazy in nineteen nineties early aughts Russia, but also I feel like has just flourished in recent years. And this gets to a lot of your reporting with the Twitter files, where there's this mundane think tank at Stanford that is looped into all of these different Pentagon agencies or whatever. The
all of the alphabet soup from the Pentagon. But I feel like that must have been a water that you learned to navigate, probably in Russia too.
Absolutely. Yet so Russia when it became when stopped being communist, it did have a very vigorous free press for a while, but it wasn't exactly free right, like the system was. You had a whole bunch of different newspapers, each one was owned by a different gangster, and the people who were the investigative journalists at those papers, they would be handed something, a packet of something that would come from you know, whatever intelligence service was connected to that mob figure,
and they would write up that report. They had a term for it. They call it selling jeans over there, like somebody just sold me some jeans, because that's what the people on the street used to do in the communist time. So I knew a lot of these investigative reporters, and actually they were right away. They were incredible like reporters,
they were really good and very brave. A lot of them got killed or beaten or threatened, and they were just unbelievably brave people who were trying to navigate this very difficult system. And I learned a lot from them, and I didn't learn until later that there was probably something similar going on in the Western side, but certainly on the Russian side. That was the first time I understood that whole dynamic and got to see how it worked.
And of course, by the time Putin came on the scene, he's sort of all he really did is consolidate, uh, you know, instead of having seven different agencies, he basically put them all under the same umbrella. And if you didn't, you know, get in line and publish what he wanted you. You know, that's when you got in trouble.
So where where did the exile fit into this constellation of papers?
Well, so we were in this amazing place where we were writing in English. American libel law didn't apply to us, The Russians didn't read us.
Where were you incorporated?
Like?
Business wise?
Business wise we were a Russian business, just so were we were a Russian we were a Russian press outlet in a second, and uh so we basically had to deal with this authorities that like a Russian newspaper would, but they weren't paying attention to what we wrote until later,
and then they started to. We had some problems with them originally because they would just ask for bribes on tax day, but then I think there were some content issues later on, and then after I left, the paper actually got shut down by the tax police.
What was it that brought it onto the radar? When did it start becoming a problem?
Well, Putin was much more attentive to the whole press scene. There were some other Western reporters who had started to annoy the authorities even before he took control. He might remember a guy named Paul Kldnikoff who worked for Forbes. He got himself machine gunned towards the end of the nineties, and there was a lot of interplay between sort of connected Russian government figures and Western reporters. Increasingly that started
to happen. The Russians started to pay a lot more of attention to that situation at the end of the nineties, and we were, you know, writing very critically of Putin and I was also pulling all kinds of stunts, like I worked with this Russian paper that actually wire tapped this chief of staff, so they definitely noticed that radar. Yeah, yeah, So there were things like that. But I got out
of the country and nothing ever happened to me. I didn't know a lot of people that, you know, ended up in bad places after he took power, Like I knew and at Polakowska, for instance, not terribly well, but I did know her well.
I was just gonna say, what prompted you come back to the States, What was how did that transpire?
You know? I thought creatively, the exl had kind of run out of ideas. We were starting to repeat ourselves, and h I got a little bit tired of writing for a dwindling audience. The XPAC community was shrinking pretty fast. Our ad base was no longer what it had been.
Is that because of the creeping authoritarianism, the economic collapse, all of those together, like.
Why well, Prutin's big idea was that he wanted to keep capital in Russia, So that diminished a lot of opportunities for Western business, Like there was an immense capital flight out of Russia in the nineties. That was the whole thing. Everybody there wanted a piece of all these energy companies. They wanted to get under underpriced you know,
commodities and timber gold, whatever it was. And those opportunities closed up as soon as they started, you know, not quite nationalizing things, but but funneling all the contracts to Russian specifically, and not to Americans.
Like you could steal money, but it has to stay here.
It has to stay here. Exactly. He literally had a meeting Putin did like four months after he got elected, where he just brought all the guys who had gotten rich in those privatizations, and he said, look, here's the deal. You get to keep all that stuff if you, you know, pledge your allegiance to me. If not, you know, consequences straight out of the movie Casino, remember like the money
or the hammer scenes. So you know, once once that whole thing happened, a lot of the Americans just bolted because there just wasn't a way to make cash the way there had been.
And he made good on that thread on to a cup to several of the oligarchs, right, yeah, to kind of check.
Yeah, I mean, I was just I was just thinking about this. In fact, some of my old friends from over there, we were just talking about this because yeah, it's an it's not an exact comparison, but let's just talk about, for instance, the raid on mar A Lago, right, the showiness of that, with all the agents and the TV crews and everything. There was something very similar. They raided a television station with you know, guys were repelling for windows and they dragged people out and one of
the oligarchs got wrung up on a fraud charge. And then there was another famous one named Mikhail Hardakowski who was in prison. Now Hardakovski people presented him as this sort of martyr to good capitalism, but he was one of the people who most benefited from those crooked auctions. So I his.
My memory was his crime was getting involved in politics. Yes, like because he said, like, keep your money that you stole, but you have to support me. Yeah, you got to get off, you gotta get He wanted to do both. He wanted to keep the money and also be involved in politics.
Yeah. Putin said you got to stay on the bench. And this guy tried to go onto the court and when that's it, you know, put him in a cage. Right, right. So you know, as as you mentioned before, when you watched this stuff, which is it's like you know, going on the ocean and a glass bot boat. I mean, everything's crystal clear. They don't hide their corruption in Russia.
They just announce what they're doing and oops sorry and and you know that's an incredible education for a reporter to see that stuff, especially as a young person.
Doesn't it feel increasingly like that's what's happening here? I mean with your Twitter follows reporting, but also just with all of your censorship reporting everything, it's starting to look like they're almost bragging about censorship opportunities.
You just mentioned the raid. Are there other parallels with that.
Period of time that you witnessed in Russia and what's happening now with creeping authoritarianism censorship? I mean there's it's both left and right too. It's not like it's just against Trump, but it runs the gamut. It's just when the sort of security state wants to clamp down, they put their machinery emotion.
What other similarities have you noticed?
So the first time I noticed real similarities was when so I had been assigned to the campaign story for Rolling Stone. When I got back, you know, they hired me, so yeah, three oh four and they sent me out and I remember going out in the campaign thinking, God, this is so boring. There has to be some other you know, compared to the other thing. There has to be some deeper level to all this that I that
can be covered. And it wasn't until the wait financial crisis, and they when they assigned, you know, a story to me like what happened with aig. Then you start to see the real machinations of American politics, like, you know, we're going to bail out this connected group of oligarchs using state money. We're going to present it to the public as something something noble and beneficial where everybody wins. I mean, it was all very very familiar to that whole scene.
And so.
As soon as you know, I had a couple of people on Wall Street who kind of walked me through some of the basics. But after that, I'm like, wow, this is exactly the same story. So that that helped a lot.
I would say, were you surprised at the reaction to that that long piece you did, Goldwyn?
Yeah, yes, Yeah, it was unbelievable.
It's like long, you know, to this to this day, we're fifteen years later almost maybe I'm getting closer to twenty years and people still know the vampire squid right.
Piggybacking on that.
The right I remember as like a young conservative at the time, the right, which was in a populist moment, really didn't.
Like you, Matt. You were you were the subject of eye rolls. You were just the.
Same they like communists when they like going after the scold Wall Street.
At the time, it was really a taboo on the right, even in the midst of this populist moment. And there are a lot of people who were opposed to the bail the Tea Party moment at posed to that. There a lot of people who ended up being opposed to tarp and all of that. But it didn't matter for you, Matt. I this is just my impression, but correct me if I'm wrong. The way the Right reacted to you recently is very different than how they did then.
Yeah, maybe originally, but I think that was a miss a little bit of a misunderstanding. Also, I did get some stuff kind of wrong in that first story. Like you know, I was a complete novice to financial reporting, so I was reporting what I was being told. And you know, as you know, when you do these stories, you're listening to twenty people and you think, well, these three make sense, and you know they and so I went with some things and any corrections what were they? No, No,
they weren't like factual errors. They were more like a sort of interpretive you know, sometimes I would overinterpret what was going on a little bit. But really those stories were really not anti capitalists. They were actually stories about how politically connected companies were getting unfair advantages in the market. And that's why all my sources were Wall Street people. They weren't like people were being foreclosed on that game.
Later and so I was getting a lot of people from hedge funds or from smaller banks who are calling me up and saying, this is totally unfair, Like, you know, they get bailed out, their cost of capital drops, they get to borrow more cheaply, we lose, right, And this is a it's a complicated story. But the reason I think that people responded to it is because financial reporting
is not done for ordinary people. There is no yeah at the time anyway, there was no sort of popular way to explain what was going on, and just the process of saying, Okay, if you've never been around finance before, here is kind of roughly what happened. People really responded to that, and it was a shock to us. There was supposed to be only one story, and we ended up doing ten years of them. So I mean, that's how that happened.
Yeah, I was at the Huffington Post. Well, I went from Politico in two thousand and eight to Hoffington Post in two thousand and nine. And when did that story come out? Probably own nine, Yeah, and yeah, I remember that was there was a rare moment where or several years where we could write stories about the financial crisis and what led up to it and also how to fix it, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the fight over God Frank, and they would get clicks. Like people
were like intensely focused on that. I remember we it might have been twenty ten, right around the time the tea parties popping off. We wrote a piece saying that it might make sense for you actually to just walk away from your home because you're so far underwater you're never going to come back. You can just mail the
keys back to the bank. And we set up using like what's meetup or whatever it is say like, if you guys want to like talk to people in your neighborhood who were in similar situations, here's how you can do it. And hundreds of meetups happened like around the country and they were covered in the local news. Would do like eight home on or showed up at this Starbucks to like discuss why or not they should just nail the keys.
Well, that's amazing, right, but probably told you something about the extent of the yeah, right right, it was.
It was such a dark bleak moment.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And so then you started covering a lot of the foreclosure crisis.
Yeah, and that was that was when that was sort of my first hint that something like Trump was going to happen. They sent me to cover something called the Rocket Docket, which means in Florida. Then in Florida and Jacksonville, and there there was a group of Jacksonville lawyers were the first ones to tune clue into the whole robo signing problem where the banks were just sort of kind
of willy nilly making up documents. So they're in place of documents they should have, they would just create affidavits and have the machines just sign them, yeah exactly, or or people they would just you know, they sit there with stacks and signing these things. So I went down there and they they wanted to show me how people got before closed on and there was a They dragged these half scene and hell judges out of retirement and
not even a real courtroom. They just put them in conference rooms and had people come in and the average turnover time had to be like two and a half minutes, so they would take two and a half minutes to kick each family out of their home. And the line was like, you know, from the courtroom all the way around.
The block, right were the families there? They were all there.
They were there, yeah, they had to and you know it was they were all across the map right there. They were white, black, you know, young, old, everything. And the level of rage in that room was like nothing I'd ever experienced before.
This is Florida, by the way, right would become a hub of right populism.
Well I'm not surprised, right, that's interesting. Yeah, And you know it's funny because Occupy happened at the same time, and I remember going up to Occupy and thinking, you know, this is interesting, it's great but the other thing is where something's going to blow right, because that's representative of the whole population. And you know, because five million people or six million people got four closed on in those years, that's a lot of people, you know, And there were
ordinary working class people. A lot of them got screwed. They didn't just not pay their bills. A lot of them, you know, got put into exotic mortgage mortgage products they didn't understand. They ended up with eight thousand dollars a month bills and stuff like that, and it was horrible. And I knew as soon as anybody figured a way to tap into that that there was going to be, you know, some kind of political movement.
And this was a really pivotal moment, and it was also a policy moment, like it was a policy choice. And like Larry Summers described it as foaming the runway, you remember that phrase, and I put I put that in my book because I thought it was almost self explanatory. And an editor was like, what on earth does he mean by this? And I realized, actually, kind of you
do have to unpack this. And so what he was saying is that you could go in and rescue these homeowners There's something in bankruptcy law known as cram down, where you can say, look, the cost of this home, the price, the value of this home is this, nown the mortgage is this. There was fraud involved here. We're going to cram the mortgage down to your home, to
your home value. You're no longer underwater. It's like, okay, cool, Now my mortgage is less and I'm not just throwing money away every single month, and I can afford it. I'm not gonna get foe closed on. That's a policy choice, and that was available to Democrats. A lot of Democrats fought for it in the House and the Senate, the White House because his economic team argued against it. They said, if you do that, the banks would too quickly lose capital.
The banks would go under and they're too big to fail, and we can't allow that. And so the banks are crashing. So you need to foam the runway with these for the rubble of the foreclothes. Is this way, the banks just gradually lose money and their blow is softened as they land on the runway by the bodies of all
of these former homeowners. Because you stretch it out that you stretch it out then from twenty ten all the way through twenty sixteen, by it's a rocket docket, but it's still people are fighting, scraping like making payments, fighting their foreclosures, trying to get the paperwork in. And then they set up these programs called what hamp and Right and the Garden Work that deliberately did not work, that
are supposed to rescue homeowners. But what they actually did is they just kind of guarantee that they'll be in foreclosure, but only but years down the road.
They even told people in miss payments.
Right, they would say, I would say, what you need to miss payments in order to get into this program. This program will rescue you. The So these homeowners would deliberately miss payments on the advice of these program officers, and then they would be hooked in this program, which meant that they were inevitably going to get fore clothes on. But that was good for Wall Street because the banks would all.
Survive, right right, Yeah, No, that's unbelievable, right, and you think about how sociopathic that is, right, And they used to be able to get away with that because if it's not in the evening news, who's going to pay attention.
But I think with the Internet, this is this is why these movements can happen now, because people can start to do their own research and realize when you're getting thrown out of your house, you will tend to look into things, you know, and find out what's happening, you know, I know, I talk to people who would ask questions like, how come they're spending six trillion dollars or ten trillion dollars in the bailout when it only would cost a trillion and a half dollars to pay off every single
subprime mortgage in the country. And then you have to get into answers like, well, then all the people who basically made bets on all of these uh, you know, dead instruments, some of them would lose unfairly, right, and they would have claims. And it turns out that there's this colossal, uh you know, amount of leverage money exactly that all depends on this right and and so that's
where the moral hazard comes in. And yeah, of course people once they started to figure out what was going on with that, they they were they were going to get very very upset. That's what this whole you know, memestock thing grew out of. I think is just this rage directed towards these financial professionals who were, you know, basically being subsidized and then acting like they had like this special financial genius that allowed them to make money,
and that is a very bitter pill to swallow. I think.
That's a perfect point about what I wanted to ask, and that there's this faux brick wall that we think of between the culture war and economics. It's like, you sort of have culture in this corner, economics in this corner. But when you're saying around the time of Occupy the rocket docket people in Florida, you're thinking, like, wow, there might be something coming out of this. Donald Trump runs for president. Were you thinking of economics and culture in
a different sense at that time? Because I was in college during Occupy and one of the things that just drove me crazy was the way, you know, people talked about the people who grew up like I did, like going to church, owning guns, hunting, like all the stupid stuff like Duck Dynasty was super popular at the time, and it sounds stupid, but there was this cultural backlash that could have presaged Trump in the same way that
the economic backlash could have. And I just want to ask about how much you like the meme Stocks is a great example. It's like both cultural and economic. What were you reading into that kind of thing that was building under the surface that eventually became Donald Trump coming down the golden escalator.
Yeah, you know, I was probably like most kind of liberal, left leaning cosmopolitan reporters, and then it wasn't that in tune with the other part of the country at the time, which is I think a real failing going back and looking at.
And despite all the foreclosure work you'd been doing.
Yeah, but I mean, look, I.
Want to put that off to a little compartment economics.
Yeah, I mean it's economics. I like most reporters, you know, I kind of naturally sympathize with, you know, the ordinary working person and not the you know, rich or politicians. But at Rolling Stone, look, you do a lot of the sort of picking on the yokal humor. I mean, that's part of what columnists have been doing since the days of Mankin in this country, right, And I was specifically hired to be that kind of person. I mean
that was my job. You know. I was walking into a very particular gig at Rolling Stone that had been you know, the predecessors did that, and now I look back that stuff and I'm kind of embarrassed by it.
And I once Trump ran and I started to talk to people in the crowd, I did realize that there was this convergence of the economic stuff and the cultural resentment that was really powerful that I didn't understand all that well, but it was clearly something like there was definitely resentment about the way they were talked about in the press. Yeah, you know, and I remember Trump, He's
very clever, right. He would get up there at his campaign events and he would point at us, you know, and you would say, look at them, those bloodsuckers, you know, they you know.
They vampire squids.
Yeah. Basically he would say that, you know, they hate me, but more than that, they hate you, right, and you know, look at us, we did look like snobs, you know. And it was a very smart move. And then when you get out and you talk to people and ask, well, why are they why are you winning for this guy Donald Trump? And he's like, because he's got he's leading you all by the nose, he's getting free coverage, you know, and just his triumph over us was important, you know.
And I saw that and I said, wow, that's amazing, you know. And it was also incredible to me to me that the other reporters weren't interested in that story. I found that incredible to me.
It's particularly if you've lost faith in the ability of government to really do anything positive for you, then at least it can make your enemies miserable, exactly, like some satisfaction that the misery of my adversaries. So you go into this campaign, You've got Jeb and the whole crew against Trump and the Republican primary, and then you've got
Hillary versus Barney. I'm still you know, nobody will ever forget Hillary Clinton, get you know, giving speeches to Goldman Sacks like in the run up, like to talk about a bubble, like strategic bubble, like she didn't need that seven hundred thousand dollars. I know she was, And and I would hope that if she would go back and do it again, she'd be like, you know, that.
Was a mistake politically, not morally, a mistake. She would not say it was moral, No, because there is no.
Such thing as morals. It's all set way beyond that. Strategizing the will to power, like and it's like the seven hund thousand dollars was not worth losing the presidency over. Not that that did it, but it's symbolized for everybody who the Democratic Party was becoming, and that they were willing to do it.
Yeah, and they weren't embarrassed about it, right, I mean I remember The New York posted a story where they listed her speaking schedule, and there was one day that was just hilarious. She had like a speech in the morning that was like four hundred grand, and then she had to fly to another country like.
To do a biotag, right, yeah, exactly. I'm like, this is like month, just months before launching the campaign, right, within months, not years earlier or like. And then there's Bernie. So, how much time did you spend on the Democratic campaign trail that year?
Not much because my editors at Rolling Stone didn't want me anywhere near the Democrats so they found them boring or no, they were afraid of what I was going to write. Oh oh so yeah, so they much preferred to have me crawling up the backsides of Republicans.
Meaning that you would be vicious to the Clinton campaign.
Yeah, absolutely, in fact, and then later on, when I covered the Democrats in twenty twenty, you know that whole ridiculous twenty person field or whatever it was. I did a couple of stories that were pretty nicely We're still there, I'm still a rolling Stone. Yeah. I thought there were great stories on like the like these are this is sort of classic Rolling Stone stuff, and they were like, yeah, I think we had it just about enough of your campaign coverage at that point.
So because somebody's gonna lose an eye now, yeah exactly, it used to be fun and games. Now Trump's here, yeah exactly right.
Yeah, right, But that's I mean, that's kind of what you roicle and hate ink, is that these organs of media become corporate mouthpieces.
It's not that that didn't always happen.
I mean there's always some intersection, but in a different way, in a way that it was like they didn't need to be told by the Clinton campaign to keep Tayibi away from it. They just share the ideological sort of hesitation.
Right. Yeah, there was at some point I think we probably all experienced the same thing where somebody got the memo, like in spring to summer of twenty sixteen that this was a new ballgame, and that we were no longer going to, you know, be the detached press corps that we had been in the past. You know, there was no more of this like writing negative stuff about Democrats when that happened, right, we were going to just sort of look the other way.
Meanwhile, the cable networks are giving Trump unending airtime.
Right.
But yes, the memo went out, definitely, I mean it's a phrase. There was actually no memo that I know.
There's no There may actually have been in me from the microcy Integrity Project or whatever came before that, but no, I mean it was unspoken.
I do I do believe that. Like, so there was from two thousand and three on this like robust bloggisphere that they used to call it, which allowed all sorts of intra Democratic party fighting like daily daily, daily Coast for instance, was people were constanty's throats over different candidates and different directions for the party, fighting over the war surveillance, how you know how to take on Bush? You know, gay marriage in marriage prodict? Are you for civil unions?
Like all of this robust fight And I feel like around twenty sixteen, definitely after he wins, but heading into the general the memo went out, let that's over. Yeah, like we're not We're not doing that. I think Alternate Like was one of those places where this was happening. They were very critical of Democrats. There a lot of their high dollar funding just evaporates. I a lot of these donors who were Democrats and believed in like just
the idea of like the full throat of debate. Yeah, we're all of a sudden, like you know what not not right now?
Yeah, And a lot of the n g os that maybe occasionally at least still went after, you know, sort of democratic members of Congress. There was none of that anymore now, and now we had the full blown, like sort of David Brock model of politics, where you know, we have an NGO that exists for a political purpose only. Right, We're not going to do this institutional you know, purity
thing anymore. And there was in the press, you know, there was a very influential piece by Jim Ruttenberg in the New York Times who said, I think it was called Trump is testing the norms of objectivity and journalism, and the whole idea was, yeah, we used to worry just about what's true. Now we have to be true to history's judgment. So you know, everybody knew what that meant, right, And the way I got it was I remember I
did a story where I interviewed somebody. It was right after the Access Hollywood thing, and I interviewed somebody at a speech he was supposed to go to but had been uninvited to by Wisconsin Republicans. So I talked to some Trump supporter who had his whole family had been union workers. They had always voted Democratic, and now they said, you know, after NAFTA and all that stuff, we've been screwed so many times, we can't listen anymore, and we're
going with this guy. And it's just a quote, right, you know, I put that in there, and I got all this. I got flamed on Twitter for using the economic insecurity right, which was now code for racism or something like that, and I was totally shocked by that. I guess I shouldn't have been in retrospect, but that was that was wild, Like, this is a real reason this guy's getting you know, he's succeeding. Why would we not want the audience to know that? I just couldn't.
What did you think during that time? You know I'm curious.
Well, I mean, as I said, like Wisconsin, I'm from Wisconsin. I didn't really I lived in DC at the time. Didn't pick up on it until I was in rural northern Wisconsin where my mom grew up. I was rollerblading and I was going on around the neighborhood and just giant homemade Trump signs on plywood was spray paint.
And then it was like July.
And that's why I was like, it was David Obie's district for forty years, you know, deep blue district flipped in twenty ten, and that's when I was like, oh my gosh, nobody has any idea what's about to happen.
The piece I'm proud of stuff from that year was in February of twenty sixteen that I co opt was Zach Carter and the headline is something like it's in the humping boast. Headline is something like don't laugh, Donald Trump could win, and like here's how there you go.
And it was I remember that that.
Was you, yeah, me and Zach, Me and Zach Carter and we're saying like you're going to hear about nothing but nafta from here until the election, and we pointed out some very basic things. We said, Wisconsin has a Republican governor, Michigan has a Republican governor, Pennsylvania has a Republican governor, and if he wins these three states, then
he wins, right, yeah, the White House. It may have been Rendell by that time, like there may have been a democratic governor back, but Pennsylvania had had Republican governors for like a decade plus leading into that, and we're like, so we just making this point that like.
Look, how did people respond to this? But that was still okay in February February.
February twenty sixteen. Yeah, it had the narrative and solidified.
Yeah, yeah, there was there was no like cancelation attempt because I think because I think people didn't see him as a threat yet. Yes, and so it's okay to say he can win, because he can't win, so fine to make no argument. And then our our polling aggregator. By November, well, we had our own Polster. It was called we bought Polster dot com uff posts tried to
hire Nate Silver. They were in a bidding war with Disney, not well, and so they went and bought polster dot com, which was another polling aggregator run by Mark Blumenthal and some other polsters, and ours was very similar to Nates, except had it slightly higher certainty that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And so by the time the election came up came around, all these polling aggregations had had her,
you know, well ahead. But what Nate actually pointed out is that if they're off a little bit in one state, then they're probably off in all of them, mm hmm, and so you need to factor that in. And he turned out to be right. Yeah, So his was wrong, but he was right that he might be wrong.
Right, right, Yeah, I mean it's funny. I think he was probably if you go back and look at their coverage, they kind of accurately presented the percentage chances and all that, but it was things like, you know, trumple playing the NBA before he's going to be the nominee like that. That stuff is what told especially liberal readers, yeah, don't worry about it. You know, this is funny, right, It's not gonna nothing's going to happen, And they didn't take
the story seriously. You know, I got fooled in a different way. I initially did what you did. I said, Wow, this is going to work, like Hillary Clinton's the perfect opponent for this guy, right, just watching the speeches. But then I went to the convention and some polster sat me down and walked me through the numbers and said, look at likability numbers, right, And I thought, well, that's insurmountable, not realizing that there were a lot of people who
hated both candidates, right. And you know if among those Trump ended up winning two to one, and that was a key factor in that race.
That's really interesting because that's where we are now. Press right about the double haters this morning, or someone wrot about the double haters this morning.
That's a good point, Matt.
And what do you think, how is it playing out in twenty twenty four when you have some like I think they put it out a quarter of the country or quarter of voters say they hate both candidates. Is that the key demographic in twenty twenty four? Who wins the we hate both people?
Well, I think that's you know, they were the key demographic in twenty sixteen. It was a slightly smaller number back then. I think it was nineteen percent or twenty percent. So if it, I would imagine it'd be even higher now. But it's not predictable how those folks are going to vote. I mean, I think there will be more people who won't vote. But having cover campaigns, I always feel like people's if they have a strong emotion somewhere, it's going
to guide them to make the vote. So if they hate somebody more than they dislikes them, or more than they like mildly somebody else, that's going to bring them to the polls. And you know, there are a lot of people who are very they're very wary of Trump, but have a lot of negative feelings about the Biden campaign and vice versa. But I just think it's tended to work out in Trump's favor, you know, when it's like that.
And so after twenty sixteen, then you're when does your Eric Garner book come out? So far I can't breathe.
Yeah that was like two years two years later, Yeah, twenty eighteen.
And so that brings us to the life the height of cancelation time in station period, which brings back your Russia time. How often had in the culture worse that book? How often had that X style been brought up again? Like in your career, like what made it? Like how did that happen? Then?
So I don't want to be conspiratorial about this, but what I will say is that during it had never come up until twenty sixteen, and then I started to notice that whenever I wrote about certain things, it would.
Come up, like what kind of.
When I said negative things about Hillary Clinton? When I said positive things about Bernie Sanders, they came up.
But you know, in the context of the Bernie bro yea often.
Right, Yeah, So there was a group of you know, sort of internet trolls, but it's such an inexact science and I was never able to get a real handle on what happened. I mean, whether it was coordinated, right, you can't say that, right, So I don't know. I mean, I do know who if some of the original people were who were trying to make us think.
About it, were they any of the same people that started the Birther rumor in two thousand and eight.
I don't think so. I mean, you know, I didn't really look at all that hard at this, and you know, I spent much more time just being bummed out and
feeling guilty. And then then I got mad about some of the press coverage that was making some you know, basically I had written some very offensive things, but there was a scene in the book that it was Mark fantasizing about something about sort of a sexual harassment scene that wasn't true, and there was no way to talk about it and not sound like, there was no way
to make sense of it. I mean unless you had been through the whole Russia thing, like the disgustingness of the humor of the exile was never going to make sense of the two American audiences. So I didn't even really try. But you know, that was really it turned out to mostly just be a blip in my career. The much bigger thing was the Russia Gate thing, and that was when, you know, I suddenly was on the
outside with everybody in the business. And that started before that, so I don't know how So so right after Trump got elected, you know, I had experience with Russia, I started getting calls to about the subject, and I remember looking at some of the early stories and saying, Man, the sourcing and this stuff is really weird, right, Like
it's all anonymous. There's no way we can we can replicate any of this in the lab you know, and and I wrote a piece called something about this Russia story stinks like.
Really early, like Rolling Stone, in Rolling.
Stone, Yeah, and all of a sudden, like lots of people just sort of froze me out, and I stopped getting you know, my phone calls returned. People in Congress didn't didn't call me back, and uh, yeah, that was that was the beginning for me. I started to realize that I was not going to be able to stick around in that Rolling Stone.
See that's also interesting because again without seeming conspiratorial.
It just feels it feels like a Clinton op. It feels like you got.
On the wrong side of the sort of steel dossier.
Was the name of the Wall Street back point. It's not an op, it's it's the entire culture. Yeah, yeah, it's like.
But being driven by the external reporters who are feeding and around and like there was a there was a group of people that was, you know, talking to David Horn and all that stuff.
People were leaking things, and yeah.
It just wish I had known that back then, you know, because all I had was just just doesn't seem right if I had known about all that, you know, stuff, But it was cultural. It was this weird thing that that now is normal, which is this group think culture. Which one of the reasons I liked journalism early on when I first got into it is that it was not that you know, you used to go into a newsroom or you know, a TV you know, studio, and it would be like a comedy club in the back room,
like everybody was busting each other's chosa about everything. You could say anything. Nobody cared what your politics were as long as you did the job. Well. I thought that was a really cool feature of reporting, and then like overnight, it turned into the exact opposite. I don't know if you had the same.
Experiences, like college campuses.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I can't miss that, but yeah, but.
It felt like, well, I mean I went to college campus after they became like thoroughly sanitized, and it feels like that in green rooms now it feels like you have to watch what you It feels like it's very self serious, and it seems like it wasn't super self serious before though.
I think my the way I had handled that, I basically didn't touch the Russia against stuff. I didn't go either way on it. I was just covering other things. So that might have been the way that I just like subconsciously was like, you know what, like go like if I could break some new news there, Like I think we broke a good story on Elliott Broydy who was doing like unregistered lobbying for Russia, but like somebody hacked his emails and we had the emails and boom,
here you go. But and he was like number two on the RNC or something like this. Really it's a big fun fundraising. Yeah, it was a big fundraiser, big story. I think he went to prison, but that was not but that was different than the campaign. That's just classic foreign governments influencing the process.
But that does bring up an interesting issue though. I'm curious about this, Matt, like how you decide what to cover now because having been in conservative media, there's this like the entire corporate press is focused on three shiny objects and sometimes they're doing legitimately important reporting, like I'm glad that they are, you know, when there's a hurricane, I'm glad they're down there, like they're doing There's some reporters who are doing good stuff, but conservative media sees
its role as saying they're all doing that you know, they're getting every stone overturned when it comes to Donald Trump. We have a limited amount of time and resources.
We're going to spend them over here. And I feel like maybe that's what you were doing with Russiagate.
I don't know.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like you were doing the reporting that was coming to you, how do you decide what's to report on now, Matt, Because I'm sure you get a lot of stuff that just comes to you naturally, but you also have limited time and resources, so it's not like that people who expect you to spend every day. This is why Donald
Trump is evil in a million different ways. This is why I hate that and Yahoo, this is why the CIA, well like other people are doing some of that reporting. You're doing what comes to you. How you decide where to spend your time and resources.
So I've always had the same attitude about this, which is that the press basically exists more for people who don't have anybody else to press their point of view
than for people who have institutional backing already. So I dating, going back all the way to the beginning of my career, I always tried to pick stories that nobody else was doing, because you know, that's that's who needs those stories, right Like for instance, with the we talked, we started talking about the how Russia was being reported while everybody at
home is getting it's great, it's turning into Switzerland. I would I would go out and say, you know, look, it's subsistence farming and you know, people getting shot, you know, in broad daylight. So I would do those stories when Obama got elected. I was a big fan of his when he got elected on the on the campaign trail. Then after that, you know, I had to cover finance, and you know, he was involved in a pretty shady
series of relationships with City Group. I did a big story called Obama's Big Sellout for Rolling Stone that I was heavily criticized for. But I think that's what media is for, right, Like we're not supposed to be in the friends business. We're supposed to do stuff that is true but unpopular. So but I do now now because so much of corporate media is monomoniacal and in this Trump direction. And you know, I'm personally very worried about kind of collapse of civil liberties and things like.
That small matter of collapsing civil liberties.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I've probably lost my sense of humor about this a little bit, but that's kind of how I pick it. You know, people say, why don't you criticize Trump, where I'm like, we don't have enough people doing that already, Like there's five million people doing that already.
So I think the first time you and I met in person was at a cafe in New York because you had finished a novel. Oh if you remember this, And I used to run this with a friend a little publishing house, little publishing house, because we were like, look, you don't need printers anymore. You can just if you have a website and you have some books, you could
just actually print them. And you had written a novel about a drug dealer, right, and we talked about publishing it, and but then eventually you said, you know what, I'm actually going to try substack this brand new thing. At the time, that was.
The first time you guys met, I would have thought you knew each other one.
Well, we've been on a bunch of listeners.
Yeah, exactly, we didn't we digitally cross paths.
Yeah, he's in New York. I'm on dclso after I had twins, I basically haven't left the house except to go to work.
That makes sense. It makes sense.
And so you ended up doing it through substack, kind of serializing the novel. Like what was that experience like and that you were still at Rolling Stone if I remember, how did you decide to make that? Like how did that evolve into your full thing?
So that happened because the only thing I could do legally with my existing rolling Stone contract that wouldn't have violated the terms noncompete. Yeah, it would have been something like fiction on you know, a serialized book. They let me write books, So I had to write a book, and you know, Substack came to me early, and you know they I got to know those guys pretty well
and it seemed like a really interesting idea. And after the experience of doing that, which I think turned out well, I also wrote hate inc there first, and I thought this is going to work better just in general, if I just leave rolling Stone and do this for a living. So a lot of people ended up on Substack because they got forced out of their organizations. I'm like one of the only people who left out agreed. You know, I just thought I'm going to make more money doing
this over here. So that's why I left.
But a lot of people didn't understand at the time that that was true.
Well, how are you liking it?
Yeah, I was gonna say, how do you feeling about the substack revolution?
I love it? I think substack is a great thing.
And when did you jump out fully launch.
In twenty nineteen? Maybe? Yeah, you know there are some differences. You know, Rolling Stone, they would give me a story and I'd get ten weeks to work on it. Right, So investigative journalism it's a lot of work and not a lot of content. You know. Substack has not solved that problem. I don't think the how do you do investigative journalism and monetize it quickly? It's what it does pay for is like the strong take, And there's actually
quite a reward on substack for writing people. It's people like to They will pay for something that they enjoy reading, just in general, even if they don't agree with it. I found so like as opposed to doing I do a lot of reporting on substack. That stuff tends not to do well financially, But.
How do you tell it doesn't do well financially? Like people are unsubscribing or it's people aren't converting from the free to the paid.
You can see how many subscriptions you get. I try not to look, but you can see.
And so if it's a well written piece, I just that converts more people, right, and you get more I see.
Yeah. So I mean generally they're like nine different types of things that I do on the site, and I know which ones get you know, are monetizable, and which ones aren't.
How do you balance out how often to.
Well, I think one pays for the other. You know, you have to do some of those op ed pieces.
One for the studio, one for you.
Right right, exactly exactly.
Well, it's something we've thought about a lot here with the whole idea of audience capture and the way that we've sort of the way that we solve it here is we've got Emily's wrong takes and then people get to hear them both and then decide for themselves. But it does acculturate the audience to difference of opinion and being okay with like I say, some dumb things sometimes believe it or not. But doesn't mean that you have
to go running for the hills. It means you can just flame me and just saved Emily's great and move on. But that's very unusual in the media space.
Well, it doesn't need to be, though, because I'm sure, as you've discovered, audiences are much smarter and more forgiving than people given credit minded and open minded. Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, like last week I did a piece about a you know, a writer for the World Socialist website, you know, a trotsky I who's in prison in Ukraine. And you know, there are some conservatives who were subscribed
to my site and they weren't mad about it. Right, They're not going to unsubscribe because because the stories like that, what they you know what they'll you will occasionally lose people over something that you say, but you know, over time, I think it evens out as long as you do good work.
I've heard from some people I think I shouldn't say because I don't remember if I was told this on or off the record, but that people on the left.
That's going on.
Let's going on.
Yeah, but people on the left who developed sort of center right audiences or maybe even like populist right audiences during the Trump years. As soon as like Trump was out of office and then there was October seventh. They hemorrhaged, but then people kind of slowly came back.
I know Glenn and Glenn Greenwald and Lefang have talked to I think openly about that. That like, because they picked up right wing audiences, not totally right wing audience, but a significan chunk were right wing because they were they both agreed on the people that they were attacking, but then they realized after October seventh they didn't agree
on Israel. Glenn has I think lost a substantial portion of his audience, but he has such a massive audience that it doesn't matter, Like, how do you work, how do you think about that?
Or do you you know, I try not to think about that. I haven't done a lot of stuff on Israel, but I've never have I never liked that story. I've never been there.
I heard that when you did the show with Katie, would you how often did that come up? Because she's big Katie help. Yeah, yeah, so we had to post post a podcast with Yeah.
So you know Katie, Katie obviously cares a lot about that issue. We had a lot of guests on who would talk about that issue. You know, I have written about it in terms of things like censorship TikTok.
You wrote about it when it came to the TikTok bill.
Right right, And so you know we had people like ahiabunma on and you know that was after I believe it was electronic and a thought I had been suppressed, and I had written about that even previously, so had Glenn. Glenn was one of the first people to write about that. Uh. You know, I don't mind, uh, talking about certain aspects of it, but I find the whole thing super complex. And you know, I don't know how you feel about this, but I'm always very nervous about subjects where I just
feel like there are naps in my knowledge. You know. I remember being on one of the first times I was on like CNN, they asked me a question about like Lebanon, and I just had to say, I don't know, I'm not confident to answer that question. And you could tell the camera hates that answer, right, So you know, it's a weird place to be, But so I stick with what I do know.
Well, yeah, I think I just think it's interesting because I do find that even hardcore partisans are more open minded.
There's some that aren't.
And I feel like the country right now is thirty percent hardcore partisan left, hardcore partisan right, and then everyone else is just like, please, I just want to believe something. Please just tell me the truth. I don't care if you're left, I don't care if you're right. Just tell me what you think and I can make that decision
for myself. But like, just do the research and be honest about where you're coming from, which leads me to think, like if tomorrow the New York Times and the Washington Post said we are doing journalism from a clear liberal perspective, it would go like leaps and bounds towards restoring trust.
I don't know, but I feel like that's why people.
Subscribe, yeah to racket Right, Well, yeah, they they trust me to probably admit when I get stuff wrong, or you know, tell her to tell them where I'm coming from. But audiences are much I mean, this is my blank experience going back decades. People always think that audiences are
dumber than they really are. If you go back to the nineties, remember the whole lad mag movement we had in these states where everybody thought that you had to do you know, stories in four hundred were boxes and that people would not read anything longer than that, and you know.
You mean like axios.
Yeah, yeah, right, that's I guess that's the idea there. I'm even going back into the stone age when it was still paper. Yeah, but you know, a rolling stone. When we started doing those finance pieces, I'm like, I'm doing eight thousand word pieces about credit the fault swaps, and people love it, right, like as opposed to, you know,
trying to dumb it down for people. I think audiences like it when you respect them and treat them like adults and you know it, don't make assumptions that they're not. You know, they're going to run away if you try to be complicated. So, I don't know, do you have the same.
Thought I was as I'm as I'm listening to you talking, I'm thinking that the people on the left who think like that you've betrayed them, that you've left the left, you know what happened to Matt Tybee.
That you've sold out it's all for clicks or whatever.
That.
Do you think your politics have changed or do you think that the you actually haven't been that political to begin with, or how like, how do you think about that? Like because I'm sure you still get people oh yeah, you ran.
It's just like, right, what happened to you?
Like I get that stuff question that it's it's the most annoying question on the planet. What happened to you? Yeah, people send that to you, even me, like, like, I haven't changed in twenty years.
But that's because there's within the business even small transgressions now are unacceptable. I mean I used to all the time do large, you know, feature length reports that were critical of the Democratic Party in Rolling Stone where they didn't like it, and that was considered a virtue in the business once upon a time, like you to you know, we're going to criticize Republicans also do this. I don't think my politics have changed that much, and I'm probably
a little bit more. I've probably changed a little bit in in terms of things that I worry about, like caricaturizing audiences. But I see this, like for instance, the censorship story and even some of the other stuff that's gone on with Trump, as a continuation of this sort of degradation of civil liberties and you know due process that started with nine to eleven, which I was very sensitive to because I came into it after watching Putin come to power and seeing you know, all that disappear
in overnight there in Russia. I think it's all the same story. It's just that the you know, the people who are now advancing this idea that we have to become more aggressive in how you know, in the use of illiberal tools. I think it's just a different group of people, if that makes sense.
Is there anything you would say you have learned from the right or you've been like humbled by as you've made because I mean like I'm in way more left spaces than I ever expected would be in my career. Absolutely love, and I feel like I learned so much from it every day. Is there anything over the last few, maybe ten years you feel like, maybe that hasn't changed your principles, but that's changed your perspective from spending more time with people on the right.
For sure, I'm much more conscious of how uniform the messaging is in like pop culture. I probably didn't notice that before, Like even stuff even shows that I like and still like, they just hit you over the head with the same messages over and over again, repeatedly. And now you know, I can imagine as a Republican it would be very frustrating to turn on the TV every single time and see myself portrayed as the dumb and
wrong one always right. And I'm maybe a little bit more in touch with that than I ever have been. But people, you know, people characterize my audience as right, when now it's really not that. Most of the people who subscribe to my site are like old disappointed liberals
like me. Yeah, and there's just enough of those people to support my operation, I would say, but it's but yes, I think I think I've learned quite a lot, and you know, I go back and look at some of the things that I wrote over the years, and I'm a little embarrassed by some of the ways that I characterized people in the past.
I think it's hard to even like overstate how important that was, especially to people who are like my It's like one of my favorite shows with thirty Rock, and thirty Rock was doing this dual tiered like economic satire that was brilliant at the time about like Comcast and cable town and consolidation and all of that. But it was still so it's not the most important issue in the world, but for people like me, it was just like come on, man like like these are good people,
like they're normal people. And it just was really animating, and I understand why a lot of people voted for Trump as a result of that, or just were able to hold their nose and vote for Trump as.
A result of that. Oh.
The one thing we didn't talk about yet the you and I were almost sort of colleagues with the Racket, the rating. So I still work for the Intercept, which was set up by the Piero Midyard. And when he set it up, he originally was going to do twelve, as I was told the story, twelve magazines. Then there was going to be the Intercept was was going to be the investigative civil liberties, national security, and they were
going to do sports. They were going to do basically a condemnast but for the Internet in the digital media era. And you you were going to run racket which was that named for the what's the Smedley Butler.
No, we just liked the it was Alex Preen and I at the time it.
Was going to be like business like investigative business, right. Yeah. And the stories I heard of the Intercept in its early days are just utterly hilarious and It's just it's shocking that it ever got launched. Yours didn't get launched, Like how long were you there before? Like set everybody gave up that. Yeah, and it never published a thing, right.
Yeah, No, Like careers were destroyed, like you know, people had nervous breakdowns, and we never published a word.
First Look Institute or whatever, first Look Media, whatever it's called. It just one of the most ridiculous organizations ever.
I mean, there's so many things like I remember walking in there and there was you know, there was a person who came into work every day and just sat in an office. It never did anything, and was like paid this enormous salary. And it was like months before I asked what was going on and there were there were so many things like that going on at that organization in twenty fourteen. Yeah, it was twenty fourteen, and you left.
Rolling Stone for it, and then you went back to Rolling Stone.
I went back to Rolling Stone, like Bay, you know, on my knees, you know, because they had been kind of you.
Left as a hero, like I'm launching a brand new publication like the New Frontier.
Yeah.
Seven months later, you're like.
Hey, I defied Yan Winner, right, young. You know, young can be a difficult person. And I thought he was sticking me around at contract time, and I was like, I'll show you.
You know, like I'm gonna make it big.
Oh yeah, I'm going to go and make it big. And I like I went, I ran off to you know, and somebody even richer than you, and and they were going to invest two hundred and fifty million dollars in media. Then I get there and it's like, we don't have money to buy a pencil right intercept. Literally that happened, And there.
Were rumors that Pierre himself was like doing expense reports in the in the very beginning.
That's probably true.
Yeah, it's like the eighth richest person on the planet.
It was.
It's like you really needed to take a cab. You have to get the subway right, there.
Would have been faster.
Actually, I can tell a story about that. They had this idea that we we should not use phones right, and that we should only the only time that we should ever be talking on the phone is in one of those boosts that they were you know, they now set up right, and I said, journalists need to have an actual line, right, because we need to record conversations and he's like, yeah, but you can do that digitally. I'm like, it doesn't really, Like that doesn't work all
the time. You know, why don't we just have phones? Right? And and you know it turned out to be like a cost thing. But they were like hyper focused on stuff that really didn't matter. Like I got in trouble with them early because they wanted to do a sign seating, you know, because they had this theory that there would be increased productivity with an open newsroom with people. And
I said, this is a humor magazine. If I went into into the you know, this group and I said you all have to sit in a certain space, I would lose face immediately with these people. And so that thing went down south south quickly. But yeah, it was so that's right. We were almost colleagues.
That's interesting. I didn't get there untill twenty seventeen, so I missed those those early days, but I got to hear the stories.
Yeah, and we.
Took on some of the people who were at Racket.
Right on towards yes, some others.
Before we wrap here, we actually haven't even opened one of the most important chapters in your journalism career at Matt, which is the Twitter files, and there's been I mean, you've talked plenty about Elon muss publicly. You've talked about the process and really interesting ways that I think people can go and listen to.
I'm curious, with.
All of this context in mind, Russian oligarchy, financial crisis, censorship, apparatuses from the Pentagon to Cia, and all of that, where do you think Elon Musk fits into He's such an interesting person, like whatever you think of him, genuinely an interesting person, but obviously as a defense contractor is now the owner of a media company. Ryan's reported on how that's gone in different ways with censorship and countries
that Americans don't pay much attention to. Quite frankly, as someone who's actually like interacted with him and feuded with him and has had this relationship with him, where do you.
Fit him into this?
That's a great question because, as you both know, like when you do any story, you want to understand your sources and what they're where they're coming from, and what they want out of the situation. I even asked, and you know, straight out, I said, what is it you're looking for out of this? You know? I mean and he he sort of said something about trying to restore trust with Twitter's audiences by opening the vault on different
censorship practices. But this was it was such a big step for I mean, no CEO has ever done anything like that before, right, So I can't say that I ever understood where he was coming from or why he
was doing anything. And then shortly after we started, you know, there was that incident where he banned a bunch of people for the jet thing, right, And we had conversations back and forth about it, and I made the decision right away, which I've been criticized for, but I thought, you know, it doesn't matter, right, I'm not writing about that stuff, Like he's giving us access to all of this material. The story is the material. I'll worry about Elon and all of his problems later.
The private jet.
You have access to this trope of information about the Intel apparatus, and you're going to throw it away for a private jet story.
Right, Yeah? Like I felt like the I mean I understood that there were people who who wanted the project to end. There was all kinds of strange stuff going on inside that whole scene at Twitter early on, where you know, from day to day, minute to minute, we didn't know whether it was going to in you. And so I was the person. I was one of the people who was sort of lobbying for no matter what we do, let's just keep getting stuff in until we have a story. And and so yeah, I can't say
that honestly that I understand what Elon's motivation was. But I have to give him credit because the stuff that we did get was historic and interesting and will probably continue to be interesting in different ways even years from now, like you know, as we keep going.
Through it, and you don't talk to him anymore, right, like that that bridge is burned.
Yeah, unfortunately, you know, I still think he doesn't. He misunderstood the whole situation.
I think that was over the substack Twitter thing, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It is. He still crushing substack, which.
Anyway proves your point about source management, which is an important part of doing good journalism is knowing when to push and when to pull. And that proved your point that when there's a level of sensitivity with a source and you're going to lose access to information that's in the public's interest, you have to be smart.
Yeah.
Well, there's a line, right, like you can't. You can't you know, soft pedal your coverage of somebody in order to get something right. Right. That's like access journalism, and there's a word for that, right the Twitter files. You know, look ethically, it was a unique situation. I would say, like I consulted with all kinds of people, like some some of the old dragons in this business. You know, how do you deal with something like this? And I
don't think we crossed that line. I still think that the idea was that there was stuff in these documents that even Twitter and Elon didn't understand, that we were still getting up until the very end, and that that was more important than anything else that was happening. So is there more in there you think or like I think so, I mean, not not a ton, but we do keep finding things, and as you.
Still have access to the ones that you got.
Yeah, I'm not supposed to do, but yeah, but uh but yes, and you know there are agencies. You know, when we started, one of the things the problems was we didn't even just know that the names of these different agencies what they did, like which an yeah, exactly like sis Sissa, you know that, Well that's a long story. But there there's a lot of stuff like that on Twitter,
especially in attachments that we haven't opened and looked at that. Uh, you know, as we continue to do that, every now and then we'll find something like Schellenberger still looking pretty closely at all that stuff.
So wow, I mean, it's I don't envy you for having to parse through all of that. But in the other way's the story of a lifetime.
No, it's awesome, Are you kidding? I mean, it's it's a dream. I mean, as soon as we saw like FBI flag this DHS flagged that, I knew Jim Baker, right, Yeah, you know, I mean this maybe once in a career you'll get something like that, and you know, it turned out to be, you know, a really big story about this subterranean relationship with the intelligence agencies. And it was very hard to work out and that's always fun as
a journalist, the challenge of it. So but you know, I have some resentments too, because I do think that some of the other some reporters who dismissed it early on because they can't stand elon uh, you know, kind of missed the forest with the trees there that it wasn't really a partisan story and they should have been looking at it. But you know, I think it's a net plus overall.
So something else.
I mean, I could keep going, I could double the time of this.
It's been so interesting, and you two are people I've learned a lot from just watching it, amazing reporting.
Actually, I do have a question for you both. I mean, like this concept of you know, Crystal and Saga obviously did it too. Part of the whole idea is to go against the whole thesis of like the hate ink thing and see how it works when audiences aren't just being cheering sections. But I mean, how does it How is it working for you? I mean does it be?
I think it's working shockingly well, right, Yeah, quite pleasantly surprised at how well it's working. What one thing that was very heartening actually, because the one thing I'd wondered about was, you know, there's this whole you can't on the left, there's a whole you can't platform odious views, right, and here's the platform for Emily and like fully.
Anti abortion for example, And so it's not easy for you.
So I went to the gw encampment, the God like the Gods Encampment a couple weeks ago whenever that was happening back in May, and it felt like everybody there watched the show, like every single person there, So at least if you're in your teens and twenties at this point, like it's fine, Like people are okay to hear different views because also we you know, you're gonna hear stuff about the Israel Palestine on our show that you probably
won't find elsewhere. But they're also those people are okay hearing right wing views that they don't agree with, right they want, Like it was, I was, it was interesting how concentrated the audience was there. It's like, wow, everybody here watches this show. It's amazing. That's great. Really, that's great. That's heartening. Yeah. So yeah, I think, I mean, people can answer in the comments section if they if they
agree with whether it's working or not. But if they're in the comment section, that means they're that's their heads.
Yeah, I mean, not necessarily.
But well not necessarily fans, that's true.
The Dobbs decision gave out.
You and I were on the show together, and I just feel like as someone who grew up when media was falling apart, like you just want the transparency, and it's almost efficient to get both perspectives in one sitting. You know, you can hear the best argument from the left and hopefully the best argument from the right from people that you trust are acting in good faith, and it's kind of efficient.
You don't have to.
Yeah, I've met these number of people who say that they watch both CNN and Fox or Fox and MSNBC because they don't trust either of them, right, but they want to hear both and then sort it through themselves. And right, just that we just cut out the middle man.
You can just yea one stuff shopping.
There you go.
Awesome, excellent, Emily, Ryan, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for coming down, thanks.
For watching everyone. This says it for us.
On today's edition of Counterpoints, I finally found the camera, Ryan, I was like, which camera is it? But it's right here. Make sure you subscribe Breakingpoints dot com so you get this show early and and all tear inbox right away on Thursday nights.
There you go, and so we'll see you next week.
Sounds good to see you then,