Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1745 - Matt Taibbi
Uploaded: 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1745 - Matt Taibbi' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1745 - Matt Taibbi' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1745 - Matt Taibbi

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
So you like it down here better?
I love it.
Yeah?
I love it.
Yeah, people are so nice.
There's less of them, so they're not a burden.
We up?
Yeah, you know, I think big cities, you just, people just become in your, they
get in your
way.
Right.
And no one's in your way here.
Everyone's friendly.
Yeah.
It's like normal.
They're normal people.
Plus, it's not tainted by show business.
As much as people try to pretend that Hollywood, you know, doesn't have an
effect on their lives,
I'm in real estate.
Get the fuck out of here.
Like, everyone is tainted by that, the weirdness of that city.
Yeah.
Because it's a city that's predicated on being full of shit.
Like, you have to pretend you're something.
Yeah, like, everybody, as soon as they're talking, they start lying, basically.
Right?
Well, they're, for sure, like, they're selling themselves.
Right.
Promoting an angle.
And out here, no one's doing that.
Right.
It's so refreshing.
It's like, this is Mike.
He does, he makes barbecue.
Oh, hi, Mike.
Like, Mike's a normal guy, you know?
Must take some time to sort of decompensate and decompress, get back to.
It took a few weeks.
That's it.
And then I was like, yeah, I embraced it right away.
Because, you know, when we moved here, I started looking in May of 2020.
I was like, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
I see the writing on the wall.
Because there was two weeks to stop the spread and flatten the curve.
Like, okay, makes sense.
That makes sense.
I was all on board.
And then as time went on, I'm like, this is not two weeks.
And then they were talking about more restrictions.
And then they were shutting down outdoor dining and this and that.
And I was like, what are they doing?
Oh, they're enjoying this.
They're enjoying telling people what to do.
Which is just basic human nature.
To pretend that government agencies, that people who wanted to be mayor, people
that wanted to be governor,
would somehow or another avoid all the pitfalls that are just naturally a part
of being a person.
When a person has power, especially power over a bunch of people that are
scared.
And you're offering solutions.
And you're standing there.
We have to keep the safety of our communities in mind.
Right.
Like, you know, that kind of shit.
Yeah.
I think that's a big story of modern America is people just not being able to
deal with the idea that there just aren't solutions for some things.
Yeah.
For some things, you just can't fix it by fiat.
What's fascinating to me, though, is that people will blame everyone except the
people that were actually responsible for the virus.
Right.
Like, this is a virus that most likely, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm
about 90% sure that this thing came from a fucking laboratory.
And all the stuff that I've read and all the emails from Peter Daszak and Fauci
and the NIH, when you look at the way they were looking at it and how they were
kind of panicked, and then you look at their absolute belief that supposedly
they're broadcasting that there's no way it could have come from a lab.
And then you see their actual emails, and you go, oh, you fuckers, like, you
know, you know this probably came from a lab, and you're doing your best job to
try to obfuscate, to try to confuse people, to try to muddy the water, and make
it, like, just get it as far away from you as you can.
But the reality is this probably came from a fucking lab.
But that's not what people are mad at.
People are mad at people who take alternative medications.
People are mad at people who downplay the severity of it.
People are mad at – they're mad at all kinds of things.
But they're not mad at the fucking source, the actual source, which is most
likely that level four biolab in Wuhan, China.
Most likely.
Yeah, at minimum, those emails show that they thought they had a serious PR
problem on their hands.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you can look at them in a number of different ways.
But at minimum, it shows that.
To be charitable.
To be totally charitable.
And that should have been a big story all by itself.
And it wasn't.
Yeah.
It wasn't.
It's a strange time.
But this is normal.
This is a normal time when people are under heavy anxiety.
Because most people do not know how to handle, like, extreme stress or scary,
unknown situations.
That's why they like a normal job that starts at nine, it ends at five, and you
have two weeks paid vacation, and you have your this and you have your that,
and everything's laid out.
And you know what to expect.
People do not like when you don't know what to expect.
Yeah, I mean, that was a big thing for me.
I lived in Russia for so many years.
And, you know, in Moscow, there were constant terrorist attacks at the time
because the Chessians and the Russians were having these issues.
But when 9-11 happened in the United States, people were traumatized by that
beyond all proportion, it seemed to me.
Because in America, we're just not used to having to deal with all sorts of
things.
Yeah.
And so they just don't deal well with stress when it's an unusual situation.
They have to be in the kind of the lane of safety.
Yeah, it's, um, we're not used to it.
I mean, it's weird because we start so many wars.
Yeah.
And we don't have any of them over here.
Right, right, exactly.
So fucked.
Exactly.
I have a good buddy of mine who's my former kickboxing trainer.
Shout out to Shuki.
He lives in Israel, but he lived in America for a little while, and he went
back to Israel.
But I was hanging out with him and his family over his house one night for
dinner, and they're playing the bongo drums and dancing, and, like, they're
really, like, festive people.
And I go, why are Israelis, like, so happy?
And he goes, because over in Israel, you'll never know.
Right.
He goes, at any minute, you could die, so fucking party.
Party, party.
Like, you know, just, he was always happy.
Right.
But he had this attitude because of the conditions, because there's a real fear
in the air.
Right.
The presence of death is all around you, so you're more conscious of living
life.
Yeah, absolutely.
In America, it's completely the opposite.
Exactly.
It's the opposite.
We are basically, like, trust fund kids, you know, in terms of, like, how we
handle the real adversity of the world.
And forget about just the stuff that we create.
I mean, if anything natural occurred, any, like, real disaster occurred, you'd
see mad panic in the streets.
Like, all these, there's so many people out there that are prepping and so many
people that prepare.
But are you really?
Are you really ready?
Right.
Because I don't think you are.
Right.
I think when the shit actually hits the fan, it's the tiniest, smallest
percentage of the people.
They're going to be able to, like, gather up their senses and make some sense
out of this and regroup.
Yeah, but I think they're not preparing because they're enjoying being
miserable right now.
I mean, you were talking about that before.
But, yeah, no, this is, like, the most unfun period in American history, at
least in my lifetime.
Yeah.
It's unfunny.
Entertainment isn't fun.
I don't know.
It's miserable.
Well, it's very tense.
Yeah.
It's very tense.
And there's a lot of people that are profiting off of that tension.
There's a lot of anger merchants out there, you know, that are essentially elevating
their brand by just getting mad at things and having the least charitable view
of people, the least charitable view of situations,
the most polarizing arguments of right versus left and vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
Yeah.
No, I spent a lot of time on this.
The press aspect of it is just horrible because financially, you know, that's
the way these businesses work now.
They're trying to create an addictive experience of being upset.
Yeah.
And they know exactly how to do it.
And they've kind of moved all the people in the business who used to do the job
of moderating and making sure that people saw all the different sides of the
issue.
They've all been kind of shoved out of the business.
And now it's just one gigantic anxiety machine.
You know, if you turn on MSNBC or CNN or, you know, or even Fox, you know,
basically their job is to get you worked up about stuff.
Well, that's the only way they can make money.
Exactly.
That's what's so crazy about the world that we're living in.
But what's interesting is, I think, the positive aspect of this, and let's try
to find the silver lining, right?
I think the positive aspect of this is it's really highlighting the importance
of independent media.
You know, people like Kristalyn Sager from Breaking Points, Kyle Kalinske,
Glenn Greenwald, yourself, these independent journalists who I can turn to.
I go, okay, I know if I'm reading a Matt Taibbi article, you're going to tell
me exactly what's going on.
And there's not many of you.
Right.
There's a small handful of you where I know I can get unbiased, intelligent
observations.
Yeah, no, it's great.
And this, I think a lot of people in what we're finding, and you're, of course,
familiar with this, is that there's a massive audience out there that is very
frustrated with traditional media,
the manipulative aspects of it, the predictability of it.
You know, and so, yeah, they're coming to places like Substack.
And I spent my whole life in the media business, I had an editor once who
called it, managing the decline.
Like, the expectation in media was always that there was going to be less and
less money forever because audiences were dwindling,
because they just didn't like the product that we were putting out.
In independent media now, it's the opposite.
It's skyrocketing.
There's incredible growth.
You obviously know this.
Substack is doing amazingly well.
It's a very bizarre experience as a journalist to be part of that.
But it's been really, really cool.
I don't think it would be possible any other way.
I think there has to be this massive decline in the believability of CNN and,
you know, fill in the blank, like whatever mainstream, big time publication.
The fucking Rolling Stone.
When they printed that horse dewormer story about Oklahoma, I'm like, Jesus
Christ, do you guys not have anybody working there that can fact, look at the
photo they used.
It's Oklahoma in the summer.
You got people with winter coats on.
Right.
Are you guys out of your fucking minds?
Like, what is going on over there?
So what happens in media is we have this expectation that if something is
published in another reputable news organization, we assume that it's been
checked and that it's true.
Somewhere down the line, whoever did the original reporting actually checked it.
And what happened in that case is, you know.
Let's explain what the story was so people can follow us.
So basically, an ER doc, if I remember correctly, in Oklahoma, in rural
Oklahoma, gave an interview to a TV station.
And essentially, he was saying that there was a problem with people who were
taking ivermectin and they were getting so sick that they were lining up
outside the ERs and preventing people who had gunshot wounds from being treated.
Right.
Yes.
Now, me as a reporter, if I hear that story, the first thing I'm going to think
is, are there really that many gunshot victims in rural Oklahoma?
Like, there's already a, you know, a little bit of a problem with that.
Right.
You would want to check that right away.
What actually happened is some wires got crossed.
Like, the guy was talking about one thing and somebody who saw the story
assumed a correlation that wasn't there.
And then it got retweeted by Rachel Maddow.
She doubled down on it the next day.
Exactly.
Which is wild.
The fact that the facts were clearly available and she doubled down on it.
First of all, do you know how many people that have actually ever even gotten
sick from ivermectin?
Ever?
I don't know.
Billions of people.
What did Peter, Peter Atiyah read it off to us?
It's less than a hundred.
Ever.
I mean,