In a biographical interview, Matt tells the story of how he became a left-fielder for the Uzbek and Russian baseball teams and wound up as a journalist for Rolling Stone and a best selling author. Matt Taibbi on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, and this is a segment I call Reality Asserts Itself. That's where the focus is more on why our guest thinks what they think and how their world-views are formed, and we'll be back in a few seconds with Matt Taibbi.

Bernie Sanders said that Matt Taibbi is "one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power". Matt's the author of four New York Times bestsellers, an award-winning columnist for Rolling Stone, and his reporting and commentary on TK News is among the top five for numbers of subscribers on Substack, sometimes I think it's at the top. His podcast, Useful Idiots, cohosted by Katie Halper, is widely popular. His YouTube videos often recieve hundreds of thousands of views.

So what is Matt's backstory and what shaped the thinking of this former left fielder for the Uzbek national baseball team? Now joining us is Matt Taibbi.

You are, at least for Reality Asserts Itself, the first professional athlete.

Matt Taibbi

That's pretty funny.

Paul Jay

I used to do sports in the past. I used to interview all kinds of athletes. It was a great challenge, actually, to get past the media training they've had. They've all been taught how to say nothing.

Matt Taibbi

Yeah, one day at a time, just got to go out there and do the best you can, and hopefully things will work out.

Paul Jay

Get more aggressive.

Matt Taibbi

That's right. Yeah. Gotta be more aggressive.

Paul Jay

And what's your strategy? Oh, I'm going to get more aggressive. The only ones that don't do that are those guys on the basketball show. Shaq and Charles Barkley.

Matt Taibbi

Shaq and Barkley are a little different. Just trying to help my team out in any way I can, and do the best we can and hopefully things work out.

Paul Jay

All right. So like I said, this is more biographical, although in the course of things we'll get into some of the contemporary stuff, but to begin with, your story is rather unique, and right from the beginning, your lineage is kind of unique. So you're born in Boston. Talk a little bit about your parents and so on.

Matt Taibbi

I was actually born in New Jersey and then I moved to Boston when I was little. My father was a student at Rutgers and my parents were 20 years old when I was born. He was a reporter while he was a student for the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and he started when he was 18 years old. So my father was in the news business even a couple of years before I was born. So I grew up around the industry. He's adopted. He was born in Hawaii. He's of Filipino and Hawaiian descent. He grew up in an Italian family that has a Sicilian name of Arabic descent. That's why I have the name Taibbi. My mother is Irish. So it's very odd, the ethnic portion of it.

Paul Jay

Well, did you grow up thinking of yourself as what? In terms of ethnic identity, Italian or Filipino, Hawaiian? What was your sense of that?

Matt Taibbi

Well,