This one's from Justin.

Got this one as an e-mail.

As someone who has been following the way mainstream media has handled the growing right wing conspiratorial nature of our country, it seems that disinformation the the disinformation journalist beat has actually gotten smaller rather than grow as you would expect it to as the issue becomes more pronounced.

Figures like Kosh Patel were obscure Q Anon grifters, but now they have real institutional power.

And yet it seems there is less coverage of the antics of these people than around 2020.

It must be frustrating as someone in your line of work to see how much of the bad faith BS that these people engage in has been normalized as truth and facts fall by the wayside, and perhaps even less average people are hip to just how bad things are.

What is the most frustrating part about covering this sort of beat like you do?

That could be its own podcast episode, probably.

But what you're picking up on, the fact that there's less people doing this work right now, is real.

There are less journalists on this beat.

This beat practically, with some rare exceptions, just does not exist as a full time enterprise.

You know, your people aren't getting freshly hired as disinformation or far right beat reporters anymore.

And even, you know, these research organizations that historically have done a lot of this work, a lot of them are quiet and they're not really publishing a whole lot these days.

Or it's like kind of adjacent, sort of, you know, they're trying to thread some kind of needle there.

But that struggle is real and has been in a literal sense in both my career and Mike's career, us both being guys that were pushed out in one form or another.

Mike's case much more severe.

And you'll hear about it someday from these big nonprofits.

A lot of these places have just kind of rolled over and swallowed the gaslighting that these assholes have directed at their line of work.

And it's really unfortunate.

And I, I think the term that applies to me anyway, is what's the, it's like moral, moral injury.

Moral Injury.

Yeah, yeah.

I feel, I feel let down.

That's just me.

What about you, Mike?

What's the the most frustrating part about covering this beat these days?

Well, I'm going to just tell you one thing and let it be symbolic of everything else, which is watching Jack Pozobic, specifically Jack Pozobic succeed in a profound way, getting everything you could possibly want from life and more.

I, I, I, I don't even have words for that because it is really one of the most fucked up things that my mind can actually probably I can't.

I should say, let me go back.

My mind actually cannot process the fact that he's gotten everything he wants in life.

It's not like all of this shit about him is not readily available, immediately public, the first thing that comes up when you Google his name on his Wikipedia page, etcetera, etcetera.

But he just looks at them and he's like they're lying and that's it.

Well, just I mean for people who have been with us for the whole year, I'm sure there's a lot of people new here.

We grown a lot over the last few months, but we did, if you go back, we did this the first installment of Jack Pozobic story was the first who the hell is episode.

And we were we're going to do follow up on that because we we stopped actually after only a year.

And if you listen to that, I mean, even even his first year of being a public figure, it is so damning.

I, I can't even think of anyone who's more damning, who's a, who's a, who's a well known person than Jack Pozobic.

And your, your, your question was about disinformation.

And it's not just Pizzagate, which he did do.

And it's not just the rape Melania stunt, which he did do.

And it's not just, oh, there's a pipe bomb in, in Washington, DC.

We'll cover that on the future 1.

He said where he claimed that like at the Korean War memorial that left us had left the pipe bomb there went extremely viral in an effort to try to stoke violence against leftist, or at least that's the way I perceived it.

That that is all he did.

That's all Jack did.

He was a disinformation personality.

It's it's not just that he did those things, right?

It's that he only did those things.

Yeah, he's never done anything legitimate.

Yes, he would sometimes post bullshit about like I miss the old Pizza Hut and he would do that, but like, you know, the overwhelming content of his output was surrounded, lying, just lying, outright lying, making things up wholesale and it's just one thing after another.

I don't know if you remember this and we'll cover it in the future.

Who the hell is with him?

He brought microchip onto OANN to claim that he did Q Anon as a way to kind of distract stuff from Trump and try to get the things back on track or whatever.

He he fed the Internet with the idea that Antifa did January 6th.

Yeah.

So seeing this guy, I mean, it's not just that he one thing or another, it's his whole life is this.

And obviously I spent a lot of time reporting on him.

And it is.

Yeah, it is deeply frustrating to see him now going on State Department trips, getting tons of money.

He's going to inherit a lot of what Charlie Kirk's operation was just so, you know, in terms of fame, you can't get rid of this guy.

He's really close with the vice president who, who, who may well be a future president.

I, I mean, yeah, we can reserve our judgement.

But like, I mean, he's, I think the top person on on most betting lines and whatever right now because of obviously his proximity to power already.

Jack Pozobic is, is one of the worst people that we cover.

I really believe, I believe that he has very little compassion for other human beings.

I think he's like, you know, really sociopathic, you know, that's, that's my perception of having studied him for a while.

Yeah, having spent time around him in person, I feel the same way.

You know, I, I would like look in his eyes when I was talking to him and it's just like glass, dude.

There's nothing there.

There's nothing back there.

Scott Yeah, yeah.

So I don't know, I, I, I, I mentioned this as an example, I mentioned Jack.

I mean, there are, there are so many other examples, but let this be a symbolic answer.

It's just to see these people rewarded for it.

That's what bothers me so much.

Their lives are so fucking great.

Like, you know, Jack Pozobic is that he's got everything he wants and he's done it in the most duplicitous, awful, disgusting fashion.

This is a guy who, you know, for all intents and purposes should have been suspended from Twitter and would have had no career at all to speak of, you know, back in 2016.

But instead he has been from Jack Dorsey all the way up to the president rewarded.

And you can you can extend that to Ian Miles Chong.

You can extend that to Mike Sternovich.

You can extend that to every single one of these people who looked at the Internet and decided I'm going to make a splash here based around producing hate and lies.

And that's I'm looking at the I'm looking at the chess board and I'm, these are the moves I'm making, right?

So that's how I feel.

I that, that, that I feel so disgusted when I see these people now.

And I really hope there is a reckoning.