Joe Rogan Experience #1556 - Glenn Greenwald

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drum music plays) Joe Rogan Podcast,…

   1. GGGlenn Greenwald0:02

      (drum music plays) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) Hello, Glenn.

   3. GGGlenn Greenwald0:14

      Hello, Joe Rogan. How are you?

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      I'm great, man. It's great to finally make your acquaintant- acquaintance, digitally at least.

   5. GGGlenn Greenwald0:21

      Yeah, yeah, we've been trying for a while. I've ... Like before the pandemic, um, so I'm glad we're at least finally able to do this version of it.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:29

      Yeah, I hope we do it in person eventually. That would be nice.

   7. GGGlenn Greenwald0:31

      For sure, yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:32

      What's it like down in Brazil?

   9. GGGlenn Greenwald0:36

      In general or with-

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:37

       No, I've, I've been to Brazil-

   11. GGGlenn Greenwald0:38

       ... everything that's going on?

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:39

       Yeah, in g-

   13. GGGlenn Greenwald0:39

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:39

       Like right now. I've been to Brazil multiple times. I love it down there.

   15. GGGlenn Greenwald0:44

       Yeah, I mean, so obviously it's a, a fraught situation politically because the country in 2018 elected, you know, a genuine fanatic, someone who explicitly, um, prefers the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985 as opposed to democracy which succeeded it, Jair Bolsonaro. Um, and then beyond that, uh, the coronavirus has hit this country almost harder than any other, probably just right after the United States, but because of extreme poverty here and income inequality, um, you could probably make the case that it's hit this country harder than any other. Um, so politically, in terms of the pandemic and then of course economically, things are pretty bleak. But at the same time, Brazil, which is what made me fall in love with it in the first place, is always this country, as you know if you've visited, so bursting full of vibrancy and energy and potential and uniqueness, that I'm always kind of optimistic about it, no matter how grim things seem to be.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:47

       They're very, very friendly people. I really love it down there. It's a ... I've, I've ... I've first went there in 2003 for the, uh, Abu Dhabi, uh, World Jiu-Jitsu Championships, and so, uh ...

   17. GGGlenn Greenwald1:59

       Right. Yeah, 'cause I guess you're ... The fighting that you like is super popular here, right? There are a lot of Brazilian-

   18. JRJoe Rogan2:04

       Oh, yeah.

   19. GGGlenn Greenwald2:05

       ... MMA fighters and-

   20. JRJoe Rogan2:05

       Oh, yeah.

   21. GGGlenn Greenwald2:06

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan2:06

       I mean, the original UFC fighter was, uh, Royce Gracie who's a m- member of the famous Gracie clan that came out of Rio. So, uh, I've ... Yeah. I've been going there for 17 years, so I, I really do love it down there.

   23. GGGlenn Greenwald2:20

       Yeah, you know, it's funny that it is ... I mean, it's a culture, as you say, where things are ... where the people are super nice. And before I lived here, I lived in, you know, Manhattan, where I lived and worked, which is pretty much the exact polar opposite of Brazil in terms of mentality of the people. And I remember, you know, I used to come to Rio. When I first started coming here, you would go to the grocery store or the supermarket and there'd be a line of, like, eight people, and the people in line would just stop and chat with the cashier, you know, for like three minutes. And I would, like, be ready to have an aneurysm because I had come from Manhattan-

   24. JRJoe Rogan2:55

       (laughs)

   25. GGGlenn Greenwald2:55

       ... where, you know, if like you're behind somebody in the ATM line and they like accidentally put a wrong button or their wrong password, you wanna murder them for wasting four seconds of your life. And then after a while, you know, I started realizing, look, if I'm gonna live here, I need to accept that kind of cultural vibe, and it really just taught me a lot about the need not to have to maximize the utility of every moment.

   26. JRJoe Rogan3:16

       Yeah, I have a friend who moved down there from Los Angeles, uh, to do Jiu-Jitsu, and he said, "The first thing you have to accept is that you're on Brazil time." They are just so laid back. If you need anything to get done, if you need a plumber and he's supposed to be there at 10:00, he might not be there till 1:00. And when he's there, he's gonna be-

   27. GGGlenn Greenwald3:33

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan3:33

       ... real casual about it, and it might not get done for weeks and weeks, something that you could get done in LA in a couple of hours. It's just it is what it is. You just gotta accept it. They're just more laid back. They're, they're, they're not in a rush.

   29. GGGlenn Greenwald3:46

       Yeah, I, I've asked many people, many Brazilians here, "Why do you bother having the word for fast in Portuguese since it applies-

   30. JRJoe Rogan3:53

       (laughs)
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   (laughs) …

   1. GGGlenn Greenwald15:00

      it is that oftentimes people who leak secrets or who become a source that, you know, wants to expose secrets and are willing to go to prison are often kind of fucked up people, right? They're, like, alienated from society, um, they feel persecuted and mistreated. They don't have much going on in their lives and therefore don't feel like they have a lot to risk. Snowden was exactly the opposite. You know, he had, at the time, this incredibly beautiful and brilliant girlfriend who today is his wife. They had been together for years. And in order to do what he did, he had to deceive her. He had to leave the country and not tell her what he was doing because he wanted to make certain that when the government knocked on her door, she could truthfully say she knew nothing about it because he knew they would go after her if, if, if they could tie her to it. Um, he had a great job. He was making a lot of money, you know, he was a high school dropout but had taught himself these really coveted skills. Um, so he had a great career ahead of him, he had a mother and a father who both love him, very stable home life. He had none of those traits, you know, that typically are used to demonize people who do this, which is why I knew he was gonna be gold from a media perspective and to be able to prevent the government from, uh, demonizing him in the way they like to do. But more importantly than that, like, leaving aside all the perception stuff and all the PR and media stuff, you know, he's probably the person or one of the people certainly I admire most in this world, uh, in all the time I've lived. And what's so unbelievable, you know, people always say to me, "Oh, poor Snowden. You know, he's trapped in Russia. He can't come home. He's facing multiple felony charges. He's been separated from his ..." All of which is true, but, like, I also always say that he's the person who I know in this world who when he puts his head down on his pillow at night, he falls asleep most easily. Mm-hmm. Um, because there's something about knowing that you s- you faced this dangerous choice and you chose the right thing. I mean, in Hong Kong, as I said, we were never ... I was never sleeping. My colleague, Orin Poythress, was never sleeping. We were sleeping, like, an hour or two with the aid of very strong sleep narcotics. And, you know, he would say, like, at 9:30, he would yawn, he would say, "Okay, guys. I think I'm gonna hit the hay," like he had no care in the world.

   2. JRJoe Rogan17:18

      (laughs)

   3. GGGlenn Greenwald17:19

      Um, a- and that was ... I was like, "What the fuck?" And he would, like, sleep for eight hours, you know? And he would wake up, have a little coffee. Um, but that's what that, you know, clean conscience does to a person.

   4. JRJoe Rogan17:31

      J- even with a clean conscience, I just don't understand the weight of the stress that he was under, how ... I, I don't understand how he could be so calm.

   5. GGGlenn Greenwald17:41

      He, he, I mean, he, he didn't have stress. That's what's so bizarre. I mean, you saw in the film, right? In the documentary-

   6. JRJoe Rogan17:47

      Yeah.

   7. GGGlenn Greenwald17:47

      ... CitizenFour, where, like, you know, if ... W- wait, because we were, we had no idea what the CIA knew. We had no idea what the Chinese government we knew. We had no idea what Hong Kong authorities knew. We were waiting, I was always waiting for the door to be kicked in at any moment, you know? And, and for him at least, if not the rest of us, you know, me and Laura, to be taken away. Um, and, like I said, I mean, our working assumption the whole time was that there was ... You know, as excited as I was, the one thing that was kind of a dark cloud that hovered over it all the time was that this person who I had now become connected with and developed an admiration for, I was certain at any moment he was gonna be in the hands of the US government.And the next time they would see him would be on television in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a courtroom, getting ready to be sentenced to, like, 50 years in prison in one of those hellholes that the US specializes in where you spend 23 and a half hours a day alone in your cell, um, and you have 30 day, 30 minutes a day where you, you know, get to walk in a little room in, in the sun to satisfy legal requirements. And that was gonna be him for the rest of his life. He got very lucky. I mean, he almost did end up that way. So for me, I was, you know, concerned for him, stressed for him, and... but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose. I mean, it wasn't like, you know... and that was really important for me to know that he had thought through all the likely consequences. I didn't want to feel like I was using somebody's work product who hadn't given full thought to what it is that they had gotten themselves into, and it was only once I became very... you know, he, he could cite the statutes with which they were gonna charge him and what the legal defenses that were available were. So, he had given extreme thought to this, he's an adult, and he made that choice, and it was amazing. To this very day, he's completely at peace with it.

   8. JRJoe Rogan19:40

      It's stunning. Uh, it's al- it's also stunning the lack of anger from the American people, the, the apathy and the sort of just acceptance that even though it has been deemed illegal, what the NSA was doing, that he exposed illegal activity, that they still would punish him if they caught him, and everybody's like, "Huh, you know." So, like, what is government then if government is a group of people that are allowed to do something that has absolutely been deemed illegal by the courts, and if you catch them doing this illegal thing and then report it and everyone agrees that it's wrong, everyone agrees it's unconstitutional, but yet if they get you, they will still put you in jail. Like, what the fuck-

   9. GGGlenn Greenwald20:27

      No-

   10. JRJoe Rogan20:27

       ... is government? What is government then?

   11. GGGlenn Greenwald20:29

       Right. Not only that, right, not only is the person who exposes what are crimes, what courts have said are crimes, not only is that person punished as though they've done something wrong when in reality they're owed the gratitude, right, of the entire country for stopping criminal spying by the government on our population domestically, which was one of the primary preoccupations of the American Revolution.

   12. JRJoe Rogan20:57

       Yes.

   13. GGGlenn Greenwald20:57

       That was what the founding was about. It was about, you know, the king not being able to send his goons into your house and into your neighborhoods and search through your papers unless they had a, a, a proven reason to do so approved by a court. That's what Snowden demonstrated, told all of us the government was doing to us, not to the terrorists, not to- to all of us.

   14. JRJoe Rogan21:16

       Yeah.

   15. GGGlenn Greenwald21:17

       Not only is it that he's been punished for having blown the whistle on criminality when he deserves a parade down Fifth Avenue, what's so much worse is that the people who broke the law haven't paid any price. They're not... they don't have charges against them.

   16. JRJoe Rogan21:35

       Nothing.

   17. GGGlenn Greenwald21:35

       In fact, they remain in government. The, the thing that made Snowden finally commit the last kind of a straw that broke his, his, his back as, as it, as, as it were was when James Clapper, President Obama's senior national security official, he ran the entire national security apparatus as Director of, uh, National Intelligence, went before the Senate and was asked explicitly, "Does the US government, does the NSA collect dossiers and tons of information on millions of Americans?" And he looked at the senator who asked him that and said, "No, sir, not wittingly." That's a crime. That's a felony just to lie to the Senate, let alone to do it. And not only was James Clapper never prosecuted, he was never fired. He served out his term as President Obama's senior national security official. And you know where he works now? He works at CNN disseminating the news-

   18. JRJoe Rogan22:30

       (laughs)

   19. GGGlenn Greenwald22:30

       ... to the American public after he got caught fucking lying about the most important question he's ever been asked. Um, that's, you know, that's how you know that you live in a country that despite the facade of democracy, has gone very, very off course. You know, like the, the one thing that I always think about is, like, if you, if you kinda start from scratch and think about what a healthy government would be, in a healthy government, um, the, the population would know everything about what the government is doing, right? That's just basic transparency. We would, we need to know what the government is doing with the power, the public power we place in their hands, with very rare exceptions, right? Like, we should know what movements they're planning. If they're in a war with troops, they have a right to something secret. But the overwhelming amount of things they do should be public and transparent, and they should know nothing about us, right? That's why we have a right to privacy. We're private citizens. They're the public sector. That's what the basic foundation of a healthy society would be. The United States has completely reversed that, not just the US but the West generally since world... uh, since ni- the 9/11 attacks, where everything that they do is presumptively secret. We know almost nothing about what they do except what they decide to tell us. Most of what they do is marked classified and secret and hidden. Whereas because of the spying apparatus that they've built, they know everything about what we do. They know with whom we communicate. They know what we say. They know where we go. It's completely reversed what a free and healthy society ought to be, and that more than anything is what Snowden exposed.

   20. JRJoe Rogan24:00

       And what's stunning to me is that he's now, uh, a citizen of Russia. He, he lives over there. They've accepted him, and they've give him, they've given him-

   21. GGGlenn Greenwald24:10

       Well, he's not a cit- he's still a, he's, he's still a US citizen, but he has permanent residence.

   22. JRJoe Rogan24:13

       Permanent residence.

   23. GGGlenn Greenwald24:14

       So he has like a, the equivalent of a green card, but he's still... he's very emphatic that he's still a US citizen and intends always to be.

   24. JRJoe Rogan24:20

       And it's sort of out of the public consciousness. I mean, unless he does an interview with you or with me or with some other publication or something, and then briefly it's in, uh, in the public's eye for a moment, but no one seems to be outraged. It's a small amount of people that seem to be outl- outraged, a small population also that are outraged that Julian Assange, if they do extradite him to America, they plan on putting him in a supermax prison for, again, exposing crime.... doing what a journalist is supposed to do. I mean, and everyone's apathetic about it. It's, it's so- it's very bizarre and it speaks to the lack of trust that we have in mainstream media today, because they're not up in arms about this. There's, there's no giant pieces on CNN running on a daily basis. This is not something that everybody has got, uh, uh, on their news feed on their phone every day. And it, it should be. It really should be, because if you can't expose crime in the government, you don't really have a government. You have a dictatorship that's dressed up like a government.

   25. GGGlenn Greenwald25:25

       Exactly. And you know what, you know what, th- th- you know what is done to, to obscure that fact that you just described accurately? There's like a pretense of dissent, right? So, you have CNN or MSNBC or like, the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post where people ostensibly express different opinions and have debates and arguments. But they're in extremely constrained ranges of opinion that are permitted, right? Like you're allowed to say the Democrats are good or you're allowed to say the Republicans are bad or vice versa, and that's pretty much it. Actual dissidents, people who expose what the government is doing in reality, right? Like not the bullshit, daily, kind of trivial chatter that creates this illusion of the elites fighting with one another, but the actual underbelly of what the US government does in the world. People who criticize that and especially people who expose the people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, they're not ... they don't have the freedom to be dissidents. They're, th- th- the, the US government has succeeded in keeping Julian A- Assange in prison for a year and a half now. There's no chance he's gonna get out of a British prison even if he wins every one of his appeals and, and hearings for at least another two to three years, and if he doesn't, he'll be extradited to the US and go to prison for the rest of his life. And absent a pardon by h- by, by Trump, Snowden will be in exile for the rest of his life, and if the US government could get their hands on him, they would put him in the same place that they wanna put Julian Assange because in reality, actual dissidents, actual activism against the US government and its power centers is barred and prohibited and punished. That, I mean, that is just the reality of the United States and it is tyrannical. Um, but so many people ... And, and like, th- the other thing I just wanna say is, the worst scumbags in all of this, like isn't necessarily the population, right? Like, I don't really blame people who, you know, have to go to work and work two jobs and have kids and are barely scraping by which is the majority of the population especially now, for not thinking much about Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. The cut cases are complicated, there are legal issues involved, and there's huge globs of propaganda to which they're subjected. Um, you know, like one example is, you know Snowden's in Russia. You know why he's in Russia? Because the US government forced him to be there by invalidating his passport when he tried to leave and by Joe Biden bullying every other country that he applied for asylum with. They trapped him in Russia, he never chose to be there, he was planning on transiting through and then they use the fact that he's in Russia to say, "Oh, look! He's a traitor, otherwise why would he be in Russia?" So there's really effective propaganda. So I don't blame the population. The people I blame are journalists. It is the job of journalists to defend the people who expose the truth. If you don't do that as a journalist, what is your fucking purpose? Why are you a journalist? And not only don't journalists care much about what's being done to Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, most of them if you actually ask them and talk to them about it, will justify and defend the fact that they ought to be in prison, because what they really are are servants of the government and not what they pretend to be.

   26. JRJoe Rogan28:44

       So Joe Biden was responsible for blocking his asylum to other countries?

   27. GGGlenn Greenwald28:49

       Yeah. Joe Biden and John Kerry. I mean, you know, I'm not ... It's not like they were uniquely bad. I mean, they were carrying out the, uh, pol- the, the policy of the Obama administration but it was Joe Biden who took the lead. He, th- one of the first things that he did was, when Snowden left Hong Kong, he, the ticket that he had was Moscow, Havana, and then he was gonna go to Ecuador where he was gonna get asylum. And Joe Biden called the Cuban government and said, "If you allow him safe passage," which they had already granted him, "You're gonna suffer consequences like you've never experienced from the US government before." So they withdrew their safe passage guarantee. Um, and then he applied, you know, to countries like, that gi- that frequently grant asylum to, to whistleblowers like Sweden, Finland, even Germany and France where there were also a lot of revelations that were looked favor- upon favorably because he was showing tha- those populations how the NSA was spying on them. And then at the last minute, um, his lawyers would get a call from the consulate of those countries and say, "Joe Biden called and said that they'll start a trade war with us or they'll withdraw from this treaty or they'll do this or that, um, if we grant asylum and I'm sorry, we just can't."

   28. JRJoe Rogan29:57

       When Obama was running, you remember the Hope and Change website?

3. 30:00 – 45:00

   I do. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      And it, it, it, th-

   2. GGGlenn Greenwald30:01

      I do.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:01

      ... it expressly talked about very, very clearly talked about, uh, protecting whistleblowers and this is, uh, a big part of what he was running on. What do you think happens when you get in office? You ha- I mean, I'm a fan of the way Obama communicates. I'm a, I'm a fan of what he represents as a president. He was just so, so eloquent and such a great statesman and everyone had so much hope for what he was going to do once he got into office. But, his administration was one of the worst for whistleblowers ever. What do you think happens when you get in there? I mean, do you think it's like the Bill Hicks bit where th- they show you, uh, an angle of the Kennedy assassination that you've never seen before and then they ask you, "Are there any questions?" (laughs) You know, like ... Right. (laughs)

   4. GGGlenn Greenwald30:49

      (laughs) .

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:50

      Th- th- let me, I don't wanna, you know, I-

   6. GGGlenn Greenwald30:52

      I don't wanna be, like, too... I don't wanna be too maximalist in the, in, like, the conspiracy theorizing, but I'll just give you a quick, uh, vignette, like a little anecdote, uh, a little antidote just to, like, introduce my view of this, which is in January of 2017, days before Trump was inaugurated, Chuck Schumer went on the Rachel Maddow Show. You can find this clip. It's online. It's amazing. And Trump had been posting a bunch of shocking stuff on Twitter, mocking the CIA for having gotten Iraq so wrong, which they did, because he was angry at them because they were essentially leaking against his administration before it even began and were blaming Russia for his election victory, which he felt was de-legitimizing him. So he started criticizing the CIA, and Rachel- and Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow Show and she asked him about it, and he said, "Morality and ethics aside of doing that, for a hard-nosed businessman like Trump claims to be, you have to be the biggest imbecile in the world to stand up to and challenge and attack the intelligence community because nobody has more weapons to destroy you if you do that than they do." And it was kind of like a throwaway line, but in reality it was one of the most important and candid admissions of how the government actually works that has ever been broadcast, certainly, on that shitty network, but really, like, on TV, ever, because he was essentially saying there's this permanent power faction, which Dwight Eisenhower warned about, you know, in 1961 when he was leaving the presidency, called it the military-industrial complex, but there's this power, this permanent power faction that is much power more powerful than the officials we elect and who stay in Washington and exert power regardless of the outcome of elections, who you can't challenge or impede because they'll destroy you. Um, and so, you know, Obama, despite the lofty rhetoric and, like, the visionary posturing, which I also don't wanna say fell for, but was kind of inspired by in 2007, um, has always been a very shrewd pragmatist. You know, he's always known how, from his time at Harvard when he became the, the editor in chief of The Law Review, how to appease institutional authority. And so I think when he got into Washington, he, he, he thought to himself, "I have these ambitious agenda items, like healthcare and other things, and I only can get them done if I'm not gonna be provoking the ire of the CIA." Which is why, for example, he also said during the campaign he would consider prosecuting the, the people in the CIA who tortured de- helpless detainees and then quickly said, "I'm gonna give them all immunity," because he didn't wanna be at war with the CIA. So I think that's part of it, right? Like when someone like Julian Assange, someone like Edward Snowden leaks these secrets, it's not Obama necessarily, but it's the CIA, the Justice Department, the NSA, the FBI demanding, saying, "This is our priority. You need to punish these people or we're gonna have an endless series of leaks." So part of it is just that kind of calculation, like a very pragmatic calculation, like, "Look, I'm, I may be president, but I'm not actually the only one who wields a lot of power in this town." And then I think the other part of it is when you become president, you're sitting in that chair and you have, like, kind of the un- unprecedented, incomparable power of the US government at your disposal, if you think... if you believe too much in your own righteousness, if you believe that you're a benevolent and noble person using that power for benevolent and noble ends, then you start to believe that anyone who stands in your way and is impeding you is somebody who inherently is ill-intentioned or at least engaged in beh- misconduct that oughta be sanctioned and punished. And I think that kinda became part of Obama's worldview too. Like, it's one thing to champion whistleblowers when they're exposing George Bush and Dick Cheney's secrets, but when they're exposing Eric Holder and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton's secrets, it seems a lot less benevolent to somebody from Obama's pers- you know, sitting in his place.

   7. JRJoe Rogan35:08

      It is amazing that Schumer would make that statement on, on television. It, it really is.

   8. GGGlenn Greenwald35:13

      Have you seen it?

   9. JRJoe Rogan35:14

      No, I haven't. Uh, Jamie-

   10. GGGlenn Greenwald35:15

       You should see it and show it. It's amazing.

   11. JRJoe Rogan35:17

       Jamie just pulled it up right here. "Trump being really dumb to fight with intelligence agents." It just seems like he would know better than to say that publicly, specifically to say that publicly on television.

   12. GGGlenn Greenwald35:30

       Yeah, I mean, I guess when you're Chuck Schumer and you're just, like, a creature who's lived in that sewer for decades-

   13. JRJoe Rogan35:36

       (laughs)

   14. GGGlenn Greenwald35:36

       ... and barely ever emerges, you know, to, like, breathe human air, like, tho- those things that, you know, are just part of your world, so embedded in it that everyone knows, you forget that it's supposed to be hidden, that it's kinda shocking to other people. Um, you know, I'll give you an example. Like, my husband and I, we rescue dogs, so we have 25 dogs at our house.

   15. JRJoe Rogan35:57

       Whoa.

   16. GGGlenn Greenwald35:57

       So we go out to dinner... Yeah, I know, exactly. So we go out to dinner and someone'll say, like, "Hey, I know you guys love dogs. How many dogs do you have?" And we'll be like, "Oh, 25," like it's the most natural thing in the world. And of course, like, every person we say that to thinks we're fucking crazy, right?

   17. JRJoe Rogan36:11

       (laughs)

   18. GGGlenn Greenwald36:11

       Like, they think we're those, like, cat lady hoarder people-

   19. JRJoe Rogan36:13

       Right.

   20. GGGlenn Greenwald36:14

       ... because we forget that what's so normal to us is actually insane to other people. We have to remind ourselves. Like, we have to ease them into that. I think that's what happened. Like, if you work in Washington, you just, for decades you just know you don't fuck with the CIA, and he saw Trump doing that because Trump wasn't a creature of Washington and was kinda saying, like, "He's being stupid."

   21. JRJoe Rogan36:33

       Well, Trump has such a tremendous ego too, it doesn't seem like anybody is out of bounds for him. Like, it seems like he c- he feels like he could shit on anyone. Like, anyone he's in some sort of conflict with is, is gonna get the wrath of his ire. It just doesn't seem like he feels anyone is above him or beyond reproach.

   22. GGGlenn Greenwald36:53

       ... which I think was probably the primary factor in why a lot of people found him appealing in 2016.

   23. JRJoe Rogan37:01

       Yeah.

   24. GGGlenn Greenwald37:01

       Right? So if you have a lot of anger, you know, a lot of just ambient rage towards institutions, not Democratic or Republican or left from right, or right, just the power elite, and you have somebody who just, you know, dumps on them-

   25. JRJoe Rogan37:18

       Yeah.

   26. GGGlenn Greenwald37:18

       ... with such contempt-

   27. JRJoe Rogan37:21

       Yeah.

   28. GGGlenn Greenwald37:21

       ... and doesn't have the slightest regard for any of it, it's kind of cathartic. You know, you want to side with that person 'cause he hates the same things you hate.

   29. JRJoe Rogan37:29

       Well, I remember when he started using the term fake news, and I really thought it was a cop-out. I thought, "Well, this is just a, a r- a really, a sad way to de-legitimized all these criticisms against him." And all, all of the things that they were bringing up that's, uh, at least seemingly were factual. But n- now, the more time goes on, and the more ti- uh, if, uh, the more you pay attention to the difference between left-wing reporting and right-wing reporting, and you try to find, like, well, where, where, what's, where's the reality in this? Someone's biased. There's something going wrong here. When you, particularly when you see the coverage that we're currently dealing with, with, with Biden, and, you know, you rightly have, uh, been extremely critical of, uh, Twitter and Facebook and these, uh, social media giants that have chosen to censor the New York Post article. And that they, they've, uh, they've literally blocked the White House Press Secretary from Twitter because she posted a link to a story from a newspaper that's, you know, it's a 200-year-old plus newspaper. I believe it's the oldest newspaper currently running in America. This is, that-

   30. GGGlenn Greenwald38:40

       Yeah, the fourth-largest, the fourth-largest.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   I'm so glad you…

   1. GGGlenn Greenwald45:00

      asked, when the lead reporter who's won two Pulitzers was asked by NPR, "How can you report on a document when you don't even know who gave it to you or what their motives were?" He said what I would say and what all journalists should say, which is, "I don't give a shit about the source's motives." Sometimes you get great documents from sources who have terrible motives, you know, like they wanna get vengeance on somebody, they feel... You know, like Deep Throat leaked about the Nixon administration to the Washington Post not because he was a Snowden, not because he was noble, but because he was resentful that Nixon passed him over to be the director of the FBI. So, that's... So, this idea that journalists are using like, "Oh my God, this might have come from Russia, therefore we shouldn't report it," is a complete corruption of the journalistic, uh, function. But the reality, Joe, like, why are we even talking about this? Like, everyone knows the reality. I work in journalism. I have, you know, lots of colleagues that I work with, I have tons of friends in every news outlet up the east and, up and down the East Coast from New York to Washington and then on the West Coast. The reason is, is because they're all desperate for Trump to lose. That's the reality. They all want Biden to win and so they don't wanna report any information or any stories that might help Biden lose, in part because they want Biden to win, but also because, in their social circles, everybody essentially is anti-Trump and pro-Biden, and they don't wanna spend four years being accused of having helped Trump won like they were in 2016 when they reported on those emails that were leaked by the WikiLeaks, and it's just fear. They don't wanna be yelled at, they don't wanna be scorned in their social circles, and so they're willing to abdicate their journalistic function, which is reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world in Joe Biden, in part because they wanna manipulate and tinker with the election using journalism, but in much bigger part because they're scared of being yelled at on Twitter. It's fucking pathetic and it's gonna ruin people's faith in journalism for a long time, even more so than it alre- there, it already is ruined for good reason. I now defend people who say, "Fake news," as you were saying, even though in 2016 I didn't like it either, because it's just true. It's just true. They will lie, they will print things that they have no idea whether or not they're true if the CIA tells them to or if they think they can get attention from it about, from, for it or applause, uh, uh, uh, from their colleagues on Twitter. Um, and I don't blame... You know, if you have faith in mainstream news institutions, you're really irrational.

   2. JRJoe Rogan47:28

      I'm so glad you said that a lot of them are not printing things because they're worried about being yelled at on Twitter, 'cause it really is the case. And self-censorship is one of the more eerie aspects of knowing that you can get deplatformed off of Twitter for things, and knowing that you can get yelled at or you can get Twitter mobbed because of your beliefs, because of standing up for something that may be correct but unpopular. This is, uh, I mean, w- what journalism is supposed to be is telling people what the facts are, giving people unbiased perspectives, objective perspectives on what is happening in the news and how this could possibly relate to their real lives. This is what it's supposed to be. It doesn't seem like it's supposed to be that at all right now during these elections. It's scary. No one is pay-... You're supposed to not pay any attention to all the crazy gaffes. You're not supposed to pay any attention to the very real concerns that Joe Biden is losing his mind. And if you say that, you're an asshole and people will attack you. They'll say, "You don't understand. He stutters." And this is all because of the... He called Trump Bush yesterday. He called him George. Did you see that? He said, "We don't want another-"

   3. GGGlenn Greenwald48:41

      I did.

   4. JRJoe Rogan48:41

      "... four more years of George." This is standard. Like, this is... We, we, what... Do you remember when, um, when, uh, what was his name? Howard Dean yelled that, "Wah!" You remember that yell?

   5. GGGlenn Greenwald48:54

      Yeah, yeah. After Iowa when he got his third place finish in Iowa, he was trying to like, excite his young, you know, disappointed supporters and he did that like weird primal scream and they ruined him over it.

   6. JRJoe Rogan49:04

      It was, it was a yell, though, that he did w-... If you've ever talked in front of a live audience, when people scream and cheer, it's so loud, you yell and you can't even hear your voice because it's so... Like, you don't even realize how crazy it sounds. But then when you isolate that sound and you take it just from the microphone, it sounds crazy, and that's what it sounded like.

   7. GGGlenn Greenwald49:24

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan49:25

      To him in the moment, probably didn't sound crazy at all, but that was enough, and I remember it being all over all these newspapers and every, every television show was talking about it.

   9. GGGlenn Greenwald49:32

      Oh, that ruined him. That ruined him. That re- that destroyed his candid... And like remember too, the context of that was he was running for president in 2004, so it was 2003.... you know, the, and then into early 2004 that w- when the primaries were, he was leading in the polls by, like, 30 points all year long. And h- he was the only one at the time, you know, here Howard Dean has turned into, like, a complete sleazy lobbyist piece of garbage. But, like, at the time, he was one of the only people willing to stand up and say, um, you know, George Bush and Dick Cheney have lied us into a murderous war. Um, we're on endless war posture. The government is constantly lying. Um, so he l- he, he was so off the track from what the bipartisan consensus was, that they were out to destroy him. And you're absolutely right. Look what they were willing to do. That scream, all it was was, you know, at the... He was kind of like from the Eugene McCarthy 1968 candidacy that was supported largely by young college kids excited by an antiwar candidate. That was who Dean's supporters were and they were traveling all over the country, going door to door on his behalf. And when he came in third place in Iowa, they were really disappointed. He was trying to cheer them up. That was it.

   10. JRJoe Rogan50:45

       Yeah.

   11. GGGlenn Greenwald50:45

       Um, and they basically just manipulating that footage, you know, turned him overnight into someone who was mentally unstable and he never recovered from that.

   12. JRJoe Rogan50:55

       It's crazy to see and it's, it's crazy to see the difference between the way they're treating Biden. They're treating Biden with the most gentle, caressing hands. They're ch- treating him with the b- the be- like, I've never seen more bias, like, more complete ig- ignoring of some real problems with the way he communicates, with the things he says, with the lies that he says. Like, w- for instance, like, during the debate, him saying that he never said that he was gonna ban fracking. Like, that's just not true and you don't see it anywhere. You don't see it in any of these liberal media pages.

   13. GGGlenn Greenwald51:36

       No. You know what? You know what? It's so... First of all, if you go and watch, like, the inter- the very few interviews that he's given, I- I'm not saying this for a fact or, like, to, to, to use hyperbole to make a point. I'm saying this because it's literally true. I don't think he's been asked a single hard question. This is somebody who's been in public life for 50 years. He was elected as a senator in 1972. He had to drop out of his first presidential race because of serial lying and plagiarism about his, you know, college record and about his academic accomplishments. Um, he's somebody who has sponsored the worst, most destructive policies over the last 20 years, from the Iraq War to the Crime Bill that has made the US the biggest prison state in the world. He was part of an administration, as you were alluding to earlier, that has, you know, persecuted whistleblowers more than any other. There's a ton of things to ask him about, but in the interviews, they ad- you know that, like, I don't know, you probably have had that experience when you go and, like, you visit an old relative, like one of your grandparents is, like, in a nursing home and, you know, you go in and, like, kind of, like, soften your voice so you don't, like, you don't want to be, like, feel, like scare them or, like, feel abrasive and, like, if they make kind of anything resembling a joke, like, you sort of fake laugh?

   14. JRJoe Rogan52:52

       Yes.

   15. GGGlenn Greenwald52:52

       Right? Like, you're like, (laughs) oh, that... That's what, like, that's how they talk to him. Interviewers on television, they, like, treat him like an old ailing grandparent, but one who is beloved. And, like, this is the thing about, this is the most amazing thing about this whole thing with cognitive decline, which anyone who watches him for 15 minutes knows is true. The people who were the first ones to disseminate that storyline were not supporters of Bernie Sanders once the primary got down to Biden and, and, and Bernie. It was in 2018 and into 2019 when Biden was by far the leading Democratic candidate because of his name recognition and because of his eight years as vice president standing next to Obama, it was Democratic establishment operatives, strategists, consultants, just like that whole DC professional Democratic Party class which was petrified that he was gonna get the nomination because of his name recognition, because of the favorable sentiment within the party toward him because of Obama and they were the ones, and you can go find this, these clips. I actually read an article about it once when I started, um, talking about cognitive decline and people started saying, "This is a shitty low blow. You're just doing this to sabotage his campaign to help Bernie." And I was like, "Are you fucking crazy? Like, you're the ones who have spent the last year and a half on Morning Joe, in the Washington Post op-ed pages." You got... It was... I don't know if you remember, but there was a CNN debate when all the Democratic candidates were still part of the process when Julian Castro interrupted Biden and accused him of having contradicted what he had said three seconds ago and he was like, "Joe, did you just forget what you said 20 seconds ago?" And then they interviewed Cory Booker and he said, "Yeah, you know, if you listen to Joe Biden, you really wonder whether he's capable of carrying the football over the f-" They were the ones petrified that he wouldn't be able to withstand the rigors of a campaign. The only thing that saved him was the corona pandemic, coronavirus pandemic which let him sit at home. But had it not been for that, their fears would have become true and now they've, like, declared what we can all see with our own eyes and what they themselves were saying all this time, it's declared off limits to say it even though they're the ones who recognized first that it was true and that's the kind of stuff that gets really creepy when they have the power to manipulate and control and dictate the discourse to that extent.

   16. JRJoe Rogan55:23

       Well, it's like they've accepted the fact that people are putting out information and saving information for a very specific October surprise. So they're saying, "Okay, well, we're- what we're gonna do is we're gonna deny this information." And when you're talking about the cognitive decline of Joe Biden and to highlight it and to make a series of, you know, a compilation of these gaffes, that would be bad for his campaign and we don't want him to lose, we want Trump to win so we're just gonna ignore it. Even though it's news, we're just gonna ignore it. But, so then...Fake news is fake news. So then it really is fake and this is where we're finding ourselves in 2020, where, like, w- we're a person without a country. We d- we don't know who to trust. We don't know... When we're l- looking, trying to find the news, we can't go to Twitter because Twitter's blocking things now. Well, Twitter was the only thing that we trusted before because Twitter was... If an independent journalist was able to leak a story and put something out, at least no one could stop them from putting it on Twitter. At least they didn't have to have the blessing of The Washington Post or The New York Times or anything else. They could just put something out there and if was verified, that- that story could spread. Well, now it can't even be the case because if Twitter decides that that is dangerous to the person that they want to win for president, they'll just pull the story. And this is where we're at and it's terrifying. It's just... It's really weird.

   17. GGGlenn Greenwald56:44

       Yeah. You know... Well, I mean, you know, I- I talk to people about the kind of independent media that's thriving, right? Um, your success drives a lot of journalists really crazy. And it's not just you, though. It's... If you look at the podcasts that are succeeding and the way they succeed is that, you know, they don't just occupy a place on your TV that you accidentally stumble into. You have to actually go and find it, decide you're gonna listen to it, and a lot of times, most of the time, pay for it. That's what makes it successful. Why? What is it that's thriving? What is it that's succeeding? It is the people who have no interest in being part of that hegemonic media blob, who aren't concerned with affirming their pieties and their orthodoxies, and in fact, are, in a lot of ways, hostile to it, or at least skeptical of it, and eager to explore whether or not what they're saying is true because they don't trust any longer what they're hearing. And, you know, it is... Like, if you go back to the Snowden story, right? One of the reasons Snowden did what he did, one of the reasons he was so horrified by this, you know, mass indiscriminate secret surveillance is because the idea of the internet, the promise of it, if you go back and read what internet enthusiasts were saying in the mid-'90s and into the beginning of this century was, this is gonna be the most unprecedented tool of liberation and empowerment of people who don't have voices because it's gonna enable people to communicate and disseminate information without having to rely on corporate structures that can afford printing presses or satellites for networks, and that was true. And the problem became, if you allow the government to turn it into, you know, this kind of, um, tyrannical realm of surveillance, you ruin, you gut what is promising about it, and in fact, you degrade it into this threatening weapon. That's exactly how I see censorship by Facebook and Twitter. And what's amazing about, um, this censorship by Silicon Valley now, um, I've talked to Jack Dorsey quite a bit about this because he's someone who's a really interesting guy. He seeks out a lot of voices to hear from and to get input about. He cares about. You know, trying to make Twitter a positive force in the society and he's torn in a lot of different directions by people demanding different things of him. But it's true of Twitter, it's true of- of Facebook, it's true of Google. They never wanted this censorship role, um, not for noble reasons, but because it was just... It's better for their business if they get to say, "You know what? We don't regulate content." We're like AT&T, right? Like, if somebody calls someone on AT&T's telephone lines and plans a neo-Nazi rally or spreads Holocaust denialism, nobody expects AT&T to intervene and terminate that person's service or cut off the call. AT&T is a content-neutral platform. They just say, "We provide the ability for human beings to communicate and we don't control or censor or monitor." And that's better for AT&T. They don't have to spend the money to monitor or censor. They don't have to get yelled at about doing it well or doing it poorly. And they make more money because more people... That's the model that Silicon Valley wanted. The reason why they ended up censoring is because

5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   It's just so stunning…

   1. GGGlenn Greenwald1:00:00

      mostly liberal activists and journalists demanded that they did so. They started saying to Facebook, "How can you allow Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos?" Or then it became, once they were kicked off, you know, kind of more mainstream but still out of the norm kind of people. And increasingly, they're just expanding the range of demands that they have for who needs to be silenced and threatening congressional regulation if they don't do it, threatening, um, all kinds of recriminations. That's... It was... This responsibility to censor was foisted on these companies, but now that they're doing it, it's only gonna grow. Um, and I think this, you know, attempt by Twitter and Facebook to block this New York Post story is one of the most alarming things that has happened in years from a perspective of free discourse and free dissemination. The guy from Facebook who announced that the New York Post story was gonna be suppressed spent the last 15 or 20 years before going to Facebook working as a Democratic Party operative in Washington. He worked for Senator Barbara Boxer and then the Democratic, uh, Congressional Campaign Committee. He was a... He's a Democratic operative and he walks onto Twitter and says, "We, at Facebook, are gonna be suppressing the story pending our own investigation to determine if it's..." Who would want Silicon Valley overlords, unaccountable, outside of the democratic process, Silicon Valley overlords to control our discourse? The answer is, liberals do and journalists do, and that's why they're doing it.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:01:32

      It's just so stunning because liberals have always been synonymous with free speech and the First Amendment. The ACLU has always been about... I mean, if you- if you think about it, a liberal organization, the ACLU is probably one of the most liberal organiza- you know, like iconic liberal organizations. They've always been about supporting free speech, even if it's terrible. Support even neo-Nazis' ability to have free speech. I mean, this... And it- it's been something that pe- It's been highly controversial to some people, but it's always been people on the left understood the value and the importance, the significance of free speech, the ability to accurately tell the truth, the- the ability to express yourself freely, the ability to tell all the facts-And now they're the ones that are suppressing it because they don't like the guy who's in power. Because we have this guy who's such a perfect symbol of all that is wrong with power, all that is wrong with someone being the president, with ego and, uh, um, eh, you know, lies and all, all the, the various things that people pin on Trump, and m- a lot of them accurate. But he's become this enemy and it's, he's such an iconic enemy that they've justified all these ways of combating him using principles that violate everything they supposedly stood for.

   3. GGGlenn Greenwald1:02:56

      Yeah. You know, he really, he, I think Trump has broken the brains of so many people.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:03:02

      Yes.

   5. GGGlenn Greenwald1:03:03

      Not in a temporary way where it's all gonna just, you know, recover instantly upon his departure, but it's going to endure permanently. And e- there's, first of all, you know, when I was growing up, um, kind of what shaped my political outlook were a lot of the censorship debates in the 1980s. You know, I was growing up as a gay kid in the s- suburbs in the Reagan years and with the moral majority, and, you know, I remember like one big censorship controversy when Sinead O'Connor went on Saturday Night Live and she ripped up a picture of the Pope, um, which is what the left and, you know, growing out of the '60s, it was like that's where the transgressive values were. Like, whatever the institutions of authority decree as being sacred and can't be said, people on the left pushed those, those, those limits and said, "We're not gonna obey your dictates. We're gonna say exactly that which is taboo if for no other reason than just to establish our right to say it." And that became the framework for how these freedom of speech and freedom of expression conflicts played out. Um, there's a new film out by, uh, a new documentary about Ira Glasser who was the executive director of the ACLU from 1978 until 2001, and his first controversy was when the ACLU, which, you know, largely was filled with Jewish lawyers and supported by Jewish donors because it came out of this tradition of Jewish leftism in the United States that believed in free speech and civil liberties because as a vul- vulnerable minority, they knew that allowing state, the state to a- acquire the power of censorship would eventually be turned on them. And so one of the most controversial cases they ever did, as you just alluded to, was they represented the right of neo-Nazis, actual Nazis wearing swastika armbands who applied for a permit to have a march in Skokie, Illinois which was a town filled not just with Jews but with tons of Holocaust survivors, actual, you know, people who were in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the camps and had tattoos on their arm, you know, the number tattoos of, of survivors. And they said, "We don't, we don't wanna be traumatized by watching Nazis march down our street with that uniform that terrorized us for all those years." And the ACLU, the Jewish lawyers and directors of the ACLU defended them. And there's a film out, and I just interviewed him actually, um, where he says that, you know, not only was Jewish leftism supportive of free speech, but a lot of his closest allies at the time defending his decision to defend the right of white supremacists and neo-Nazis to march and to speak freely without government censorship were civil rights leaders, African American civil rights leaders who also knew that if these precedents were permitted to take root against white supremacists first, the government would then turn, you know, the state of Alabama would say, "We're not gonna allow the NAACP to march through our streets. They are rabble-rousers and they incite violence." And, um, that was the tradition on the left that is being completely abandoned not just, you know, in like standard mainstream liberal institutions but even in the ACLU which has a slew of new lawyers under 30, under 35, Millennials, Gen Z, uh, activists who just don't believe in the core values of free speech. And every institution, Joe, like, in political activism, in media for sure, obviously in academia, is being riven with this dispute between people who insist on the right to express views without being constrained or prevented or controlled by others and people who believe that free speech is just not even close to the highest value and that when other values are in conflict with it, free speech has to give way. It is one of the, if not the most kind of tumultuous conflicts of our time.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:06:51

      It's so disturbing how little understanding they have of where this plays out and that censorship in any form, whether you censor someone who you don't like, like Milo Yiano- Yiannopoulos, it will eventually lead to someone who's less offensive than him and then less offensive than them and then less offensive than them, and it'll go to you. It will come for you. It will eventually come for you. You will say something wrong. You will, you will, y- you will support something that they don't agree with and whoever has the power to censor will deplatform you. They will remove you if we allow this. And we're in this weird place in America where a lot of people are looking at these social media companies and saying this is not as simple as this is a private company and they have the ability to choose who does and who doesn't use their platform. These things are like a public square. These things are like a utility. They're, it's like electricity or water and it's something that everyone should have access to because it literally changes the way human beings view the world. It changes, with people's contributions and with people's ability to express themselves, it changes the information that you gather. It changes the whe- whether or not someone's perspective resonates with you or not. If you don't get access to that perspective, you don't get to see it, you don't get to s- to understand their point of view, and it changes the overall view of the world. And this is where we are. We're, we're in this weird place where-... these groups of people, who are largely on the left, have decided to abandon those values that you talked about, the original ACLU values, and they've ch- chosen to instead be ideological and- a- a- and c- completely biased to their own personal position to the point where they're willing to abandon free speech. And it's terrifying because, uh, I don't think they understand where this leads. I don't think they've done the math. I don't think they've extrapolated.

   7. GGGlenn Greenwald1:08:50

      They, they can't think two seconds in front of their faces. Um, you know, one of the things that's so bizarre is if you, if you asked, you know, like, a random leftist, "What do you think of Facebook?" They'll say, "Oh, I think Mark Zuckerberg is a fascist piece of shit." And then you say, like, "What do you think of the federal courts in the United States?" And they'll say, "Oh, it's completely repressive. They're, like, filled with right-wing judges," which is true. And then you say, like, "What do you think of the US government?" "Oh, the US government is basically a fascist dictatorship. It's run by Donald Trump." And then you say, "Are you in favor of giving those institutions, Facebook, the federal courts, the US government, greater power to censor ideas and information that you don't like?" And they'll say, "Yeah, absolutely. It's critical that hate speech not be circulated." And they never fucking think for one second, "Why are these institutions that I hate and I think are fascist and repressive and authoritarian institutions that I'm willing to vest the power in to control the flow of information?" And the, th- one of the problems is that everyone, you know, for the most part, thinks in terms of right versus left, so this is the only prism through which people can understand at least the political component of the world. And it's a very stunted prism because it excludes so much. So, they think that if you can induce social media companies to start, uh, censoring and excluding right-wing s- uh, speech and- and deleting the pages of right-wing ideologues or right-wing, um, activists, that that's a victory. But that isn't how it works. They're not censoring it because it's right-wing, they're censoring it because it's outside of the mainstream. There are always, always, always, always views that adhere to mainstream orthodoxies are going to be permitted. Censorship is always directed at those who are somehow outside of the realm of what's considered acceptable by power centers. That, by definition, is where censorship goes and it's gonna go to the right and the left equally. It's not gonna go to one or the other. It's the most ... A- aside from the morality and the ethics of wanting people with whom you disagree silenced by tech monopolies, it's- it's just incredibly fucking stupid from a strategic perspective because it is gonna be turned on you. Without doubt. It already is. There's already, um, censorship of left-wing pages. If- if the Israeli government, for example, goes to Facebook and says, "That Palestinian media outlet or this Gazan activist is inciting terrorism," Facebook will, in almost every case, accept the request of the Israelis to censor them because the Israelis are much more powerful than the Palestinians and that's how corporations operate. This is the model, the framework, that the left is empowering without realizing how self-destructive it is. It's maddening and it is terrifying because i- all human history, the entire history of human intellect is nothing but humans believing that they've found some absolute truth and then a subsequent generation realizing that it's not just erroneous, but morally rotten. And if you preclude the ability of human beings to question and challenge every precept, every principle, including or especially the ones that have been declared most sacred, the cl- the ones that have been declared most unchallengeably true, you've deprived humanity of one of its most important weapons, probably its most important one, for fostering progress, for combating despotism, for questioning the pronouncements of institutions of authority. And that's what people who think they're anti-authoritarian are doing.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:12:43

      I'm so glad you're out there (laughs) 'cause y- guys like you are one of the few that are willing to take this chance and speak like this and challenge all- all of these institutions openly. And, um, I- I think there's so many people out there that, as you said, are worried about being yelled at on Twitter and worried about not being able to get a job, worried about, you know, y- your ... There's so many folks that are dependent upon these large institutions, whether it's newspapers or television shows or whatever it is, and they- they can't freely express their concern with the way things are going because, in many people's eyes, that's insignificant compared to get Donald Trump out of office. So, everything- everything goes by the wayside. Get Donald Trump out of office. That's- th- th- that's the- that's number one. After that, we can concentrate on all those other things, but whatever you have to do to get Donald Trump out of office. Save democracy. Someone- someone actually sent me a message, someone I- I really like, and they- they sent me a message saying that they could get me an interview, but they want me to vote for Joe Biden. "Come on, save democracy." This was the- the- the- the message that I got. And I was looking at this message on my computer going, "What the fuck is ha- is there a virus going on? Like, uh, not, uh, uh, besides the coronavirus?" Is there something that's, like, infecting people's minds and, like, uh, snipping wires and disconnecting trains of thought? Like, what the fuck is happening? It's ... But guys like you, guys like Matt Taibbi, there's- there's a few people out there that are sticking their neck out and it gives me hope. It gives me hope that people are listening to you and people are reading your words and people are paying attention. And- and hopefully it's resonating.... and ho- and hopefully some of these people that are doing this are realizing with shame that they're a part of this really disgraceful act, that they're a part of this cowardly way of thinking and of not calling out all this shit. And if Joe Biden does get in office, and they do see a declining even further and sliding even further down this d- disgusting trend that w- we find ourselves on right now, I hope they realize the error of their ways. But by then, it might be too late.

   9. GGGlenn Greenwald1:14:53

      Yeah. But- but- but the- but- but- but here's- here's the problem. Here's what's worrying me the most, which is, you know, you- instinctively,

6. 1:15:00 – 1:21:09

   I think you're 100%…

   1. GGGlenn Greenwald1:15:01

      that is something that you can kind of put your hope in, right? Is to say, "Well, look, I mean, there's an election in a week or, you know, few days, and all the polls suggest Biden's likely to win. And once Trump is out of the way, a lot of this insanity is gonna disappear and things are gonna kind of return to some degree of normalcy." And here's why I don't think that's true. So many institutions are profiting, I don't just mean financially, but in terms of power and control, from elevating fear levels over right-wing fascism, over white supremacists, domestic terrorism, whatever you wanna call it. And obviously, I mean, it's not- doesn't take a lot of insight to observe that historically, the way you consolidate your power is if you can put people in fear. You know, during the Cold War, you make everybody fear that the Russians and the communists are coming to take away your right to believe in God. And everybody says, you know, "Build up a huge nuclear arsenal and don't use the money for our schools and our communities. Use it for, you know, the greatest military in the world and spy on everybody. And whatever you need to do to defeat this existential threat to do it." Obviously, after 9/11, that was the strategy of the Bush-Cheney administration. It's the way they consolidated a lot of power by elevating people's perceptions way beyond what it was real of the threat of Islamic terrorism to allow them to do essentially everything they did. The same exact thing is happening now, which is people in media have had their careers saved. I know cable hosts who are on the verge of being fired because nobody was fucking listening to their dumb shows in 2007 and 2008 when all they were doing is talking about how great Obama was 'cause who wants to listen to that? Trump- or- or 2015 rather. Trump was a godsend to them because Trump enabled them to elevate everybody's fear level and say, "This man who's coming isn't just another president. He's a grave threat to everything that's good in our lives." And it's not just him, but his entire movement behind him. Hundreds and tens of millions of people who are racist, who are hardcore white supremacists, white supremacy domestic terrorists that caused MSNBC and The New York Times to explode with money. It caused the CIA and the FBI and tons of those neocon scumbags to rehabilitate their reputation and get back, uh, within the re- the halls of power. Even if Trump loses the election, they're not gonna just go back to s- now talking about Joe Biden 'cause they know people are gonna cancel their subscriptions and turn the TV channel again. They're gonna continue to say not maybe Trump, or at least his movement still pose this existential threat. You know, they're out there plotting to, um, kill people and in- impose white supremacy. And it's not that it's not true. There's no- it's not like there's not a kernel of truth to it. There are people doing that. But they're gonna inflate it wildly so that any questioning of Joe Biden, even with Trump out of the picture, is still gonna be depicted as, um, you know, endangering American liberty, as helping fascism, um, as serving the agenda of the Kremlin. And the need for censorship as a result is going to be accepted by more and more people because of that fear that these media outlets and government institutions with whom they partner are gonna be still instilling in people for their own benefit, for their own aim.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:18:16

      I think you're 100% accurate, and I'm- I'm concerned as well. But I- I- my- my real concern is I don't see a way out of this. I don't see like a clear, like, "Oh, we gotta go that way." I don't- I don't see a- a- a path. I don't see it. I'm worried. I'm worried that we already have the brakes off of this truck and we're headed downhill.

   3. GGGlenn Greenwald1:18:39

      Well, what- what meaning do you derive from the fact that you've built this massive audience? I mean, does- I don't think that's bereft of meaning or significance. I think there's a reason for it. What- what reason do you think explains that?

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:18:54

      That's a very good question, and I specifically go out of my way to not answer it. Personally-

   5. GGGlenn Greenwald1:19:00

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:19:00

      ... me, myself, I mean, to myself, not- not- not explain it to someone like you, but I don't think about it. And one of the reasons why is because I feel like if I start thinking about what it does, I'll stop doing it the way I do it and it won't be the same thing.

   7. GGGlenn Greenwald1:19:14

      Right.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:19:14

      I started doing this podcast with my friend, Brian. We were smoking weed and talking on a laptop in 2009-

   9. GGGlenn Greenwald1:19:21

      Uh-huh.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:19:21

       ... answering questions from like 100 people on Twitter, just having fun. You look at the early ones on Ustream. To this day, they have like 1,000 views, 2,000 views. Nobody gave a shit. I never promoted this podcast. I never took out an ad for it. I never went on a television show or anything else saying, "Please watch my podcast. Please listen to my podcast." It- it organically became what it is. I have no idea how it happened. I never planned it. It was a- I- I did it at- just for fun forever, and then all of a sudden, it became this giant business. So I'm like, "Well, I still have to do it the same way, because if I don't do it the same way, then it becomes something different." And I can't think about what it is. I just, uh, when I- when I meet people and they say they love it, I go, "Thanks." Not, "Hi." That's it. Just keep going. Just keep moving. And I've- I've- I've developed these ways of compartmentalizing my life and compartmentalizing what the podcast is, and I keep it what it is. And what it is is just a place where I go and I talk to people. The people that I talk to, I only talk to who I'm interested in talking to. I have zero agenda. I go, "Oh, I wanna talk to G- Glenn Greenwald. He seems cool. Oh, I wanna talk to, um..."... uh, Graham Hancock. "Oh, that scientist that just came back from the Space Station. Let's see if we can talk to him. What the fuck is that like?" You know, "Oh, this guy just got back from, uh, you know, trekking across Europe, uh, with, with snow shoes. Let's talk to that guy." Like, that's all it is. And until I, to the day I say, "I don't wanna do this anymore," it's gonna remain that, 'cause it's the only way I can keep doing it the way it is. So the fact that it's become insanely influential is beyond bizarre to me, 'cause I feel like as much as I'm the host of this thing, I'm, uh, like an antenna. I just sort of plug in and then it's got a life of its own and it sort of does its own work.

Episode duration: 3:05:12