Hello, everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with author and journalist

Matt Taibi. We discussed his early career, both in journalism and professional basketball.

His time in the USSR, learning Russian and publishing a successful Gonzo-inspired newspaper

and his breaking coverage of the subprime mortgage bubble. We also examine the state of the

world today with Russia and the US military industrial complex, the upcoming presidential

election, and the dire necessity for alternative news sources. Matt, I have to know, what was

it like playing for the Uzbek national baseball team? That was great, actually. At the time,

I was trying to be a freelance reporter in Uzbekistan. I was really young in my 20s and

I walked by a university field and saw a bunch of Cubans playing baseball. So they were,

I think, Cuban refrigeration students. And I was the only American on the team. We had

fun time playing against other central Asian teams. And we had one funny story. We had ground rules.

If you hit a sheep, it won't field. It was a triple. If you hit a cow, it was a double.

And if you knocked the cow out, was that home run? Or was it a consequence of the degree of damage?

I don't think we ever got that far. So your career plan was to be an independent journalist

in Uzbekistan. And that didn't work out. So you turned to pro baseball.

Well, at the time, I was more interested in being a writer just generally than being a reporter.

I thought I had been living in St. Petersburg, which was filled at the time with freelance

journalists. And I thought, I'm not getting a lot of work. I'll move to a place where there are

no reporters. So I moved to the middle of nowhere, basically waited for something to happen

so that I could get a byline and a wire server or something like that. But I figured,

well, I was there. Maybe I could do something like write a book about playing baseball for the

Uzbeks. And I ended up doing that kind of thing a lot. I moved to Mongolia later, played basketball

...