 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Chris Leiden, who is in India. And one of the first to start podcasts, if not the first. We say the first. Is it the first? With another guy who is doing the thinking. And the technology of it. You know, podcast seems to be something quite simple to do. How is it that you people were the first to get this idea? And what made you come to podcast? We had to find something. I had actually been fired from my last job doing public radio because we wanted an ownership piece of what we had invented, what we were doing. And they said, no way, you're fired. So I said I'd better study the web, the new technology. So radio means that you were doing actual proper radio shows? Yeah, regular show. And I'd done a television show before that. I'd done New York Times political reporting before that. Local Boston political reporting before that. But I had done a number of media and I thought, wow, I'd better figure this thing out. And then a guy came who really understood it, a programmer, Dave Weiner. And he came to this Berkman Center at Harvard where I was trying to learn the game. And he said, I wrote to him and I said, yesterday I couldn't spell blog. Tomorrow I want to be one, you know? And he said we'll do it. And he said, you understand radio? I understand syndication, programming. What the world needs, he said, is an MP3 file that can be circulated on the web and to a subscription list. And it took a month or two and we figured it out. And I said, now what do we do? And he said, you're going to interview me. That's the first thing. So I did. And then I started interviewing all sorts of people, especially the people who were remaking media. So basically an MP3 player being able to be downloaded and put into a website. And mailed. Mailed to be. Like you'd mail a document. But there was a funny, important other piece of this, Praveer. The political connection. For me it was all about the Iraq War. The end of 2002, 2003, we knew a war was coming and we knew it was going to be crazy and we knew that all the established legacy media were going to be for it. I don't know why. But the New York Times considered it to be experienced, enlightened papers. The Washington Post, the New Yorker magazine, our own Boston Globe. And they just jumped on the bandwagon of this idiotic war. And I said, no, God gave us the internet to fight back and to try to stop it. And we couldn't stop it as it turned out. But, you know, there was worldwide demonstrations in February, February 15, 2003. And I went to New York and we discovered that, you know, Mayor Bloomberg had blocked off all the streets of the East Side so the demonstrators could not get, like me, ordinary bourgeois Americans couldn't get to the United Nations to protest. And the New York Times barely covered the story. But we realized that suddenly, no, there is an old order of things including media that wants this war. And we're going to have to remake media. And along comes the web. And that's the process that we're still working on, I think, is to reinvent a modern media that lets... Democratizes communication in some way. You know, it's interesting you say that because I was in the U.S. at that time just before the Iraq war was being declared. Probably three to five months before that. And I came back and told my friends, U.S. is going to attack Iraq. They said, why are you saying that? Because there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Everybody knows it. Why would they do it? I said, because not any media house in the United States is willing to carry the story that fundamentally there may not be any WMDs in Iraq. All of them are saying, the WMDs in Iraq, the only question is when will Saddam Hussein own up to it and if they don't then we have to take it out. So you know, this whole discourse has been set when is Saddam going to declare and if he doesn't, when, how do we take the WMDs out of Iraq? So this media discourse, as you were saying, convinced me that Iraq war is coming in spite of the fact that most people in India, including the elite, including media observers, did not believe it. Well, and then Tony Blair signed on. That was, for me, he's the one person in the world who could have said to George Bush, we have been to Iraq in the 20s, we made a mess of it. The imperial order is broken, is over, we're not going with you and we'll fight against it. If he had said that, I think the war could have been stopped. But in fact, it became this great moment when the United States took on the grand role of what was the tattered memory of the British Empire. You know, we go places and on it went. But the strange part for me, and we could get into this, is that American media, the legacy media, the old media, conventional print, but also the old owners, still have not realized that they're responsible for that war. The people understand it. And that's part of the reason why Donald Trump can say the failing New York Times. He doesn't go on, but people know that they were wrong on the disaster of our modern place in the world, including the torture, including, you know, now the drone war. We were good guys in World War II. We're now the monsters with these air attacks, killing vast numbers of civilians. And we don't care. We don't know the people. And we don't even get our facts straight. Colin Powell goes to the United Nations and says, this is what we're doing in Hawaii. They all cooked up bad evidence. I mean, it's become a nightmare. And the old media, to a great degree, has not said, you know, I'm so sorry. You know, Chris, that's the other part which surprises me sitting in India. That a media which disgraced itself during the Iraq war by supporting something which they knew was wrong. And now when it says the same thing again and again, that you have Syria, chemical weapons, you have X, you have Russia, Ukraine, you name it, the story goes on. And they seem to have remade the consensus which might have broken during the Iraq war or post Iraq war that there was something wrong with what the Iraq war evidence was. But they seem to have remade it in a way that, A, the media is today completely convinced that they need a war with Russia, both sides nuclear weapons. They believe they need to have regime changes all over the world. You have huge number of now commandos in Africa which comes out occasionally when there is a disaster and some people get killed, some of the commandos get killed. So how is it that the old media which should have said at least confessed to their complicity in the war, how did they still have become not only, shall we say, carrying the government propaganda, but actually wanting a war and a nuclear weapon... I don't know, some people think the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton, that generation wants a war with Russia. I can't imagine why, but they have not renounced... We don't talk peace in the United States anymore. That is not a goal. And it mystifies me. I think at a popular level, I think there's a tremendous anger about this. You know, those so-called red states and particularly the counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, places like that that for economic reasons, party reasons, should vote Democratic, they voted for Trump. And it's been very carefully documented that the counties that lost most men to those wars, Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East wars, those are the ones that turned for Trump. I mean, like, get us out of this war, this kind of what they call the forever war, the eternal war, endless war. I think the people know better, and I think sooner or later, it'll break through. But meantime, we have the story. I just want to say I am amazed, Prabir, at what is going on in India with new media. Not only the digitization of popular media, but specifically podcasting. I mean, I'm talking about news click, but also the wire, also scroll, also what the BBC is doing with podcasts, also what our friend, I've been undone, is doing at the news laundry. You are putting together sort of assorted independent voices on these new platforms. So it's not just one voice, like mine, but it's a whole magazine full of interesting, independent, non-commercial, non-sponsored, not imperial voices. I think they're going to transform your world, and I want to get in on it. I want to figure out what you're doing and how we can do it in America. We have some. Huffington Post looked like a site for independent writers, but then it became very commercial, and it was a lot of money. There were tons of money, and it got sold. There are things like Jacobin Magazine, others that do good reporting. It's alternate. It's good. There's a lot of... There's black agenda report. Truth dig. I mean, there are goodly numbers of them, but to put... My dream would be to put together a portfolio of conversation commentary on not an infinite number, but say start with... For example, people love to talk about music. It's something I've learned in doing radio. When people talk about music, they're really talking their religion. It's a sort of religion one step removed. It's indeed football as well. Or cricket. Exactly. And sometimes food. But literature, books, science. We live in really a world capital of medical science, computer science, genetic editing in Boston, Harvard, MIT, some of the most advanced workers. And nobody covers it. Nobody knows how to cover it. Artificial intelligence which may... Absolutely. ...change or destroy our world. Exactly. Exactly. And we've done some of that. We're now putting artificial intelligence into weapon systems, which I think is a big danger. To get a podcast conversation going on that with people who know something and make it intelligible for people who don't know it, this is my new ambition. I'd like to have a sort of a whole grab bag of subjects in which the best conversation is on our site. And it would be interesting, I think, to you. I want to get Indian voices, Indian thinking. The next time we even think of going to war, we've got to talk to India. You guys won't get a vote. But as you said, maybe you get a veto. I have always argued since U.S. President effectively becomes the most important or the powerful person in the world, you guys can elect the president, but the rest of the world should have a veto. Otherwise, we are all endangered by your president. We can work it out sometime later. As long as the United States recognises that its exceptionalism is actually endangering the whole world, not just the United States. If you continue with climate change, it endangers all of us. If you continue with the kind of nuclear brinkpanship that the U.S. is doing right now with Russia, you are really endangering the world in ways which you end humanity. And it's also interesting, the first time the media, by and large, has said there should have been no summit at all. Now this is that you don't want to even talk to another nuclear armed state is amazing to me. Of course, India and Pakistan are not behaving much better on that, but that apart. The question is that this tone of the media, that no talk, and we should take out Russians with what is it, cyber weapons. This is the kind of madness that is being talked about. But coming back to other issues. Israel and the Saudis should take out Iran with, you know, hacking, super hacking. Super hacking and with U.S. troops. Let's be also clear. U.S. missiles and God knows where the troops will come from, but the United States won't send troops for that. Saudis like to fight with mercenary troops. That's what they're doing in Yemen. And again, it's a huge, shall we say, blot on us, civilizational ethos that you have a country today in which one million people are affected with cholera. You have destroyed their complete water and sewage systems. And there is no voice in the world against it. Because the world media doesn't see it as an issue. The 20 million people at the risk of starvation and death. So I think there's something wrong with the world that we are in and the voices that we are able to raise.