Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1940 - Matt Taibbi
Uploaded: 2023-02-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1940 - Matt Taibbi' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1940 - Matt Taibbi' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1940 - Matt Taibbi

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Matt Ivey.
Hey, Joe, how's it going?
Good to see you.
It's always so hard to get rolling after you've been talking.
I'm always excited to see you, so we're just blabbing, and now we're rolling.
So what's cracking?
A lot, a lot.
It's been a crazy couple of months.
I've enjoyed your work with the Twitter file.
I enjoy all your work, but I really have enjoyed the Twitter files.
That has been some really fascinating views behind the curtain.
It's been one of the weirder, more surreal experiences of my life,
because as a reporter, you're always kind of banging away
to try to get one little piece of reality, right?
Like, you might make 30 or 40 phone calls to get one sentence.
The Twitter files is, oh, by the way, here, you know,
take a laptop and look at 50,000 emails, you know, full of all kinds of stuff.
And so it's, you know, for somebody like me, it's like a dream come true.
We get to see all kinds of things, get answers to questions that we've had for
years,
and it's been really incredible.
Has anything been surprising to you?
A little bit.
I think going into it, I thought that the relationship between the security
agencies
like the FBI and the DHS and companies like Twitter and Facebook,
I thought it was a little bit less formal.
Like, I thought maybe they had kind of an advisory role.
And what we find is that it's not that.
It's very formalized.
They have a really intense structure that they've worked out over a period of
years
where they have regular meetings.
They have a system where the DHS handles, you know,
censorship requests that come up from the states,
and the FBI handles the international ones,
and they all float all these companies.
And it's a big bureaucracy, and I don't think we expected to see that.
It's very bizarre to me that they would just openly call for censorship in
emails
and these private transmissions, but ones that are easily duplicated.
You could send them to other people.
It can easily get out.
Like, that they're so comfortable with the idea that the government should be
involved
in this censorship of what turns out to be true information,
especially in regards to the Hunter Biden laptop,
that they would be so comfortable that they would just send it in emails.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that shows you the mentality, right?
Like, that they really genuinely felt that they were impregnable,
that they don't have anybody to answer to.
I mean, a normal person doesn't put incriminating things in emails
because we all have the expectation that someday it might come out, you know.
But these folks didn't act that way.
I mean, you see, I was especially shocked by an email from a staffer for Adam
Schiff,
the congressperson, the California congressman.
And they're just outright saying,
we would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who
retweets information
about this committee.
You know, I mean, this is a member of Congress.
Yeah.
Right?
Most of these people have legal backgrounds.
They've got lawyers in the office for sure.
And this is the House Intelligence Committee.
You would think they would have better operational security.
Another moment that was shocking to me,
there was an email from an FBI agent named Elvis Chan in San Francisco to
Twitter.
And they're setting up this signal group,
which is going to include all the top sort of censorship executives at all the
big companies.
And it's a Word document that has all the phone numbers of all these important
executives.
And the email just, the subject line reads, phone numbers, right?
And then the word doc is just called secret phone numbers, right?
And I'm thinking, this is how they taught you to do it at Quantico?
Really?
You know?
I mean, like, I mean, even a journalist can't miss that.
You know what I'm saying?
Call it something else.
You know, I don't know.
That part of it was amazing.
So strange.
It's so strange to get such a peak.
Because I don't think anybody ever anticipated that something like this would
happen,
where Twitter would get sold to an eccentric billionaire
who's intent on letting all the information get released.
Yeah.
I mean, I think Elon Musk, essentially,
he spent $44 billion to become a whistleblower of his own company.
Yeah.
And I mean, I don't really fully know his motives in doing that.
I think he's got a pretty developed sense of humor, though.
Yeah.
And that comes through.
I think he gets a kick out of seeing all this stuff come out on Twitter,
which used to be kind of the private stomping ground of all these whiny
journalists.
And now here is all this information that is just horrifying to all of them.
I mean, $44 billion is a lot to spend on that thrill.
But I'm glad he did.
Well, he truly believes that censored social media is a threat to democracy.
He really believes that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I believe it, too.
Yeah.
I just don't have $44 billion.
Right.
Even if I did, I'd be like, I don't want that heat.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't think that's what I would spend it on.
But no, he believes that.
I think he also believes that the credibility of these companies can only be
restored by telling
people what they talk about in private or what they have been talking about
with the government
and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
So he might be right about that.
You know, we'll see, I guess.
I think he is.
I mean, it's going to be interesting.
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
There's an amazing amount of resistance against him.
And, you know, just the publicity campaign against him has been fascinating to
watch.
People go from thinking that Elon Musk is the savior that's bringing us these
amazing electric cars
and engineering new reusable rockets, too.
He's an alt-right piece of shit.
Who wants Donald Trump back in the office?
And it's like, it's very wild.
The speed with which they can sort of shuffle somebody into the Hitler of the
month club routine,
right?
Like, you know, we've always done this with foreigners, you know, whether it's
Noriega
or Saddam Hussein or Milosevic or Assad or whatever it is.
Like, we have a playbook for cranking out negative information about, you know,
foreigners who get in our way for whatever reason.
But now we've kind of refined that technique for domestic people who are
inconvenient, you know?
Yeah.
I think they did it with Trump, obviously.
You know, they try to do it with Tucker Carlson with you, you know?
I mean, you got a taste of that for a few times.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Right?
And then, you know, with Elon, yeah, he went from being the guy who made
electric cars sexy to, like, you know,
something to the right of Victor Orban in, like, 10 seconds.
It's amazing.
It is amazing.
And the narrative is spread through progressive people.
Well, they'll just say it now.
It's like they've reached the memo.
The memos got to them.
And then they just, I hear people in LA.
I hear people that I know, like, oh, Elon's just so crazy.
It's like something happened to him.
He went nuts and he's a right winger now.
Like, how?
What are you saying?
Like, what examples do you have?
Like, they don't have an example.
They just have this narrative that reached them to signal.
Like, Elon bad now.
Oh, Elon bad now.
Elon bad now.
Elon bad now.
And they just start saying it.
And you go, like, what examples are you using of, like, his behavior?
Well, he let Trump back on the platform.
Okay, well, the Taliban's there.
Right, yeah, exactly.
You don't have a problem with the Taliban?
The Taliban just bought blue check marks.
Do you know that?
Did they really?
Yes.
Didn't know that.
Yeah, they're buying blue check marks so they could be verified.
I'm the real terrorist.
The fucking Taliban is on and no one has a problem with it.
The CCP is on Twitter.
Right.
No one has a problem with it.
Right.
But they're like, Trump, they'll let Trump back on.
Look, Trump is hilarious.
He's a ridiculous person.
But don't you think it's better that his tweets get out there and then a bunch
of people get
to attack him in the tweets?
And if those tweets that people attack him with are good, if people are saying
good things,
then those things get retweeted and liked, then they rise up to the top of the
algorithm, it's all good.
Like you need a voice against someone like that.
You can't have that guy howling into the wind on some QAnon forum and all those
wackos just so they're only talking to each other with no pushback at all.
If you really don't like Trump, if you want him on Twitter, you want that guy
to have some pushback.
You want people to be talking against what he's saying.
You want Twitter, the real Twitter now, which will actually fact check
everybody.
They fact check Biden.
They'll fact check him.
So if he says something stupid, they'll go, no, that's not what's true.
Here's what's true.
That would be good.
And that was actually for a while Twitter's official policy.
They had something called the public interest policy, which specifically laid
out exactly what you said.
Like when a world leader, no matter who it is, says anything, we want it to be
out there because we want it to be debated.
We want people to see it.
We want people to talk about it.
We want people to reach conclusions about it.
And one of the things that we found in the Twitter files was after January 6th,
there was this intense debate within the company where they were basically
saying, oh, thank God we're going to repeal the public interest policy or we're
going to poke a hole in it.
Right.
And no longer have that belief system that just because somebody is a world
leader, we need to hear what they have to say.
So they invented a new policy called glorification of violence, or they called
it that.
And essentially what they said was you had to look at Trump not in terms of
each individual tweet, but in terms of what they called the context surrounding.
His whole career, all the people who followed him, whether or not they were
violent, whether or not they said the things that were offensive.
It's like the speech version of stochastic terrorism.
I don't know if you've ever heard that term.
Stochastic terrorism is this idea that you can incite people to violence by
saying things that aren't specifically inciting, but are statistically likely
to create somebody who will do something violent, even if it's not individually
predictable.
And that's what they did with Trump.
They basically invented this concept that, yes, he may not have actually incited
violence, but the whole totality of his persona is inciting.
So we're going to strike him.
And so they sort of massively expanded the purview of things they can censor
just in that one moment.
And it's, you know, you can see it in these dialogues, how they came to that
decision, which is just fascinating.
It's just such an extraordinary amount of power to give people the ability to
censor people on the biggest public forum in the world.
It's so extraordinary.
And the fact that they can come up with these justifications for why this is a
good idea without anyone pushing back, without anyone saying, do you understand
where this goes to?
This eventually leads to government control of all thought and speech.
This is where you're going.
You're allowing the government to influence you based on one specific
problematic individual.
And that could spread out into every one of us.
Right.
All of us.
Easily.
Quickly.
Right.
Right.
I mean, we heard at the World Economic Forum, right?
We heard the...
Brian Stelter was there.
Brian Stelter.
Brian Stelter is now at the World Economic Forum.
What can we do about these problems?
He looked very comfortable there, didn't he?
Of course he does.
He's with evil lizard people that are trying to control the world.
That's his bosses.
He knows how to handle that kind of situation.
I've been around evil lizard people.
He looked as happy as maybe he's ever been.
Well, he's probably very 