Looking at his career thus far, it’s clear that Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi is aware of a change. “I think there’s some ways that I’m maturing, and some ways that I’m regressing, too” says Taibbi, who has already had impressive accomplishments in the field of journalism at the young age of 37. After attending New York’s Bard College for literature, a fresh-faced Taibbi left the Hudson Valley liberal arts college and headed to Leningrad to study Russian. There, Taibbi played for two Russian baseball clubs, and in the mid-‘90s played professional basketball in Mongolia (he was known as the Mongolian Rodman). In the past 15 years Taibbi has co-founded two independent publications—The eXile in Moscow and The BEAST here in Buffalo, and has been well known for what he calls “literary terrorism” (he once threw a “cream pie” of horse semen onto a New York Times reporter he deemed “a hack”). Today, while occasionally conducting an interview in a gorilla suit is not entirely out of the question, Taibbi may be playing it more cool, appearing on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show and becoming a regular guest on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Generation spoke with Taibbi about life in America, H.L. Mencken, and why you should learn a fucking trade (but not in journalism).

Just to get started, I was trying to figure out—how old are you?

Well, I don’t want to tell my birth date, I used to be a private eye…

Really? When?

Eight years ago, for about a year. It was a place called Dataquest Investigations. It didn’t pay very well, plus I don’t have a special talent for it. Originally, they put me out tailing people and I was so bad at that. I had the assignment to follow a guy from a factory in Boston, and I parked my car outside a day care center. The factory security alerted the entire company that there was a potential pedophile outside the day care center, and the guy that I was following took a look at me as soon as I got out, and he made me the moment I got out of there and I almost got my ass kicked. They never sent me out after that.

How many of these interviews usually start off with some sort of Hunter S. Thompson comparison?

I’d say about half of them get around to it at some point or another. I’m a first-person comic campaign reporter with a drug history that writes for Rolling Stone magazine. What am I going to do? Obviously the comparison comes up. We are very different writers. What I do is two-dimensional. He is kind of four-dimensional. I’m just a run-of-the-mill political pundit whereas he was doing something that was closer to fiction. To be fair to me, he had a lot more space and a lot more license to do something really wild and creative, and was also a much better writer than I am; what they tell me to do is pretty much it. His shtick was so subtle that you couldn’t recreate it later in his life. During that one ten year period where he was on, he was so great. He has so many imitators but nobody has come close.

Who did you admire as a fledgling writer?

I didn’t read Rolling Stone or even Thompson until pretty late in high school. I read [H.L.] Mencken before I read Thompson. I think Thompson is brilliant. Mencken, what he does is not nearly as ambitious as what Thompson does. Thompson creates a really wild hallucinatory world. Its not just that he has this amazing argumentative rhetoric in his approach, when he is really, really angry he is able to give us this white-hot anger for page after page after page and really get us going, but at the same time has this crazy wild humor and these characters he’s able to develop and you feel like you’re in this world. It’s so different and so unusual in so many ways.

What role did going to school play in your future?

I didn’t go to journalism school. I don’t think people should go to journalism school, I think it’s a waste of time. I get that question a lot from young journalists, what should I do if I want to be a journalist, the first thing I tell them is not to go to journalism school. If you really want to be a journalist, the best way to do it is to know something concrete. If you go to a medical school, you have a much better chance, because your knowledge base is going to be useful in the field. The other best thing is to know a foreign language or have a local knowledge of a foreign country, anything like that. Anything that you can contribute in terms of actually knowing something is much better in terms of actually going to journalism school. I don’t know what they actually teach there, cause you can learn the whole business in three days.

I’ve read that you miss a lot of things that Russia had to offer and that, in comparison, you think America is rather lax.

I love Russia but I would never say that Russia is a better country than America. If somebody breaks into your house in America you can call the police. You can’t do that in Russia. You don’t want to invite more people to break in. If you are arrested and have to go to trial and are innocent, you might get off in America, that’s how the courts work. All of our governmental functions in this country are more or less functional, we have a fully functioning society and people in America don’t realize how rare that is in the world, where it’s not just pure bribery and pure theft from top to bottom in society. That’s the way 90 percent of the world works, the weak get weaker and the strong get stronger.

You went from Boston to Mongolia to Russia to Buffalo and now New York City. Can’t Rolling Stone afford to finally send you someplace nice?

I hate hot weather. I can’t stand the heat; I made a conscious decision to move to Russia because I love the cold. I lived in Mongolia too. Mongolia is the coldest one of them all. I’m probably the only person in the history of the world to move to Buffalo for the weather. Actually, Moscow got under my skin after a while, just that amount of darkness.

Where did you get the idea for The BEAST?

I was on a book tour, Mark [Ames, co-founder of The eXile] and I were, and we came through Buffalo, and I met Paul [Fallon, publisher of The BEAST]. We corresponded a little bit, and he said, “Why don’t you start a newspaper in America?” and Buffalo seemed like a good place to go. Turns out it was a difficult thing for me financially but it was fun for a while.

Was starting two papers something you always wanted to do?

First of all, I grew up around reporters my whole life and never wanted to be one. A goal of mine was not to become a journalist, growing up, and it was kind of a disappointment to me when I got out of school and I didn’t have any other skills or anything to do. Now that I’m in the business, I think that one advantage that I have is that I don’t take it all that seriously. When I go out on the campaign trail and I see these young people who are out there for the first time and they are sitting a few feet away from Clinton or Obama, and this is a really sexy thing for these people to be in this environment, whereas I grew up around all this stuff and I know it’s all full of shit, and I’m openly not that impressed to be in the crowd. I think that helped me out a little bit.

So what would you rather be doing right now?

I have one skill and that’s [that] I’m a writer. And that’s the only thing I’m bringing to the table anywhere, so if I want to make a living, this is what I have to do. Growing up, if I wanted to do anything it was to be a novelist. My heroes were all novelists, like Gogol, and I’d read Catch 22 and go, “Man, I want to write that novel.” Well, I can’t write that novel. I don’t have that skill set, so what’s left for me to do?

I look back at the career of a guy like Mencken and the greatest thing he did was he wrote for a million years. He wrote us a history of America that went from the 1910s to the 1950s and maybe that’s what I’ll do. I’m not going to write Catch 22 or The Great Gatsby or something like that, that’s who I am. I’m in a different place now in my career than I used to be. At The eXile, if I went to try to cover a topic, and The BEAST too, it was really an exercise in pure absurdism. The idea was to underscore the ridiculous of everything, politics included. If the goal was to, for instance, barge into Goldman Sachs wearing a gorilla suit and cause a big scene and be ridiculous, I can’t really do that anymore. I work for a very big media company and what I would do before was the equivalent of literary terrorism. I know that sounds kind of pretentious, but it was kind of like going someplace and taking a big dump in the middle of it, that was like what we were doing, and that was great, that was a lot of fun, it was valuable, and from a literary standpoint it’s probably more interesting than what I’m doing right now, but now I have a pretty limited range of things I can do to be more creative about an assignment, and really the challenge for me is to correct my weaknesses as a journalist. I look at someone like Seymour Hersh and what he does is penetrate the story and get to the bottom of things by getting the real information, but I’m pretty poor at that. I think if I got better at that that’s the only way I could do the job better.

I’ve read some interviews where you discourage journalism “careerists” and now it seems…

Yea, I’m everything that I criticize.

Do you feel that your career at Rolling Stone has jeopardized your style?

I was broke up until three years ago. When I left The BEAST I didn’t have a dime in my pocket at all. And suddenly I get offered this career from Rolling Stone and it was a big change in my life. I had a moment where I sat down with myself and said, “Is this going to change me? Is this going to change the way I do things?” And I said well they aren’t censoring me, they aren’t telling me what to say. Can one get a lot of money for their job and still stay honest, and I thought the answer was yes. But I think what happens is when you are in an environment for a long time, your point of view starts to change and there are things about you that change, invisibly and perceptually. That’s kind of disappointing, I didn’t do it intentionally, but that’s the only excuse I have there. But all the same, I’m here now and I’m still trying to do this honestly and the best way that I can and I constantly remind myself to not look outside the point of view of my company, the reader.

I think there are some ways that I’m maturing and some ways that I’m regressing. At The eXile and The BEAST there was a lot of energy we all had, and it was radical and fresh and I thought a lot of what we did was really interesting. What I do now is a lot more polished and my point of view is a lot more mature and I have more of a knowledge base of what I’m doing. People aren’t going to be studying what I’m doing in journalism school fifty years from now. I think what The eXile did ten years ago was something that hadn’t been seen before in a newspaper and that was original. What I’m doing now is not original.

I had a hard time getting in touch with some people from The eXile for some information about you…

I’ve been sort of wiped clean from the history of that organization.

How did you end up with Rolling Stone?

I was writing for the New York Press. It was a nerve-wracking time for me. I felt like I hadn’t written for a big magazine before. I had contributed to Playboy and The Nation and a few other companies before that, but writing for a big magazine on a regular basis is a lot different than writing for The BEAST. It’s the fact checking stuff and every time you write an article you have to go through four or five articles. For The BEAST, you write it and it’s in print two seconds later.

Writers usually have a strange epitaph on their tombstone, what would you like yours to say?

Aw, shit, I don’t know. Sorry I fucked up?