#1940 - Matt Taibbi

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Hello, Matt Taibbi. I can't 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?

Matt Taibbi (0:26)

A lot, a lot. It's been a crazy couple of months.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

I've enjoyed your work with the Twitter file. I've enjoyed all your work, but I really have enjoyed the Twitter files. That has been some really fascinating views behind the curtain.

Matt Taibbi (0:41)

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, take a laptop and look at 50,000 emails, full of all kinds of stuff. And so 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.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

Is anything been surprising to you?

Matt Taibbi (1:29)

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 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.

Joe Rogan (2:20)

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.

Matt Taibbi (2:52)

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, 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 gonna 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.

And I'm thinking, this is how they taught you to do it at Quantico? Really? You know? 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.

Joe Rogan (4:49)

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.

Matt Taibbi (5:03)

Yeah, I mean, I think Elon Musk essentially, he spent $44 billion to become a whistleblower of his own company.

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.

Joe Rogan (5:22)

Yeah.

Matt Taibbi (5:23)

And that comes through. I think he gets a kick out of seeing all this stuff come out on Twitter, which used to be the kind of the private stomping ground of all of these whiny journalists. And now here is all this information that is just horrifying to all of them.