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Feb. 13, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:01:40
Sam Anthony joins Mike Adams to talk about Challenges and Opportunities in the New Media Landscape
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Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And as you know, I'm one of the many pioneers in new media.
As the corporate media is collapsing, the new media is rising.
The White House has just announced they're reserving the front row seats for independent media people to be part of the White House press conferences.
How cool is that?
And our guest today, first time guest here, but someone who's the founder of a website you've probably heard of, it's called yournews.com.
It's Sam Anthony, who has a big vision and a big infrastructure for building up the new independent media focused on truth rather than lies and propaganda that characterize the corporate media, which is a dinosaur that's dying at the moment.
So welcome, Sam Anthony, to the show today.
It's an honor to have you on.
Mike, I'm so thrilled to be here.
Thank you for inviting me on.
Well, thank you for coming on.
And I got to say, I've been a fan of your website.
Your news operation, you're doing amazing things.
We index your main site on our censor.news website also.
And I think we reference your news and link to you quite frequently.
So you're doing a great job, but you're doing so much more than what people know.
Can you give us just a little bit of background about what is your news and your role and your vision for moving forward?
Sure.
You know, our platform is a hyper-local news platform operating in every zip code in the United States.
So what we have is mega scale.
We all know the legacy media is not going to survive.
It's certainly not because they're lying.
However, that doesn't help the cause, okay?
It's really because it's an antiquated product, and you have new media which has come in, and basically anybody could be a news reporter.
The marketplace is going to decide who makes it or who doesn't make it, Mike.
I mean, you know what I'm talking about.
YouTube has over 100 million people that have their own channels.
Most of them don't make it, but it gives anybody the ability to be a broadcaster.
If you want to know why the legacy media hates new media, it's because we're taking their jobs.
We're removing them from their jobs, and anybody can do their job.
Well, you're not kidding.
I mean, CNN has just laid off hundreds.
We're seeing a collapse of...
You know, corporate old school media.
Like, what are you observing in that space?
It's all collapsing.
I mean, I've been predicting this for years, but it's now, you know, now I would have been considered a visionary before, but now everybody can see it.
I mean, you're just watching it right before your eyes.
I mean, the numbers have been declining.
They're, you know, I just wonder, I'm going to tell you what the nail in the coffin is.
If they bring in RFK Jr. and he eliminates...
Advertising for pharmaceutical companies.
DTC ads, yep.
It's over.
It's over.
Right there.
It's over.
Give it 12 months, they'll be hemorrhaging, it'll all go away.
And that alone is the reason to support RFK Jr.'s confirmation, in my view.
Yes!
I'm tired of today's health news brought to you by Pfizer.
I mean, come on.
I agree with you.
I mean, RFK... I was listening to him today, and all the people that oppose him all take money from the pharmaceutical companies.
They do.
I don't understand why he doesn't call them out on it.
He's not going to get their vote anyway.
They do not work for the American people.
They work for the people who pay them.
In this case, it's the pharmaceutical company.
So their job is to make sure he doesn't get confirmed.
It's just that simple.
Well, absolutely.
So let me ask you a question that sometimes I'm asked, because people ask me sometimes, like, Are you for sure never going to take money from Big Pharma like on the Brighteon platform?
People ask me, are you never going to take ad money from Big Pharma?
And I say, that's right.
We are never going to take ad money from Big Pharma.
Count on it.
How do you decide, Sam, who to take money from in terms of advertising?
Because you have to have revenues.
Sure, you have to have revenues.
And that's a good question.
And I don't know.
I don't know the legalities of it.
I know with politicians, you can't take money from some and not from others.
What I'm wondering is, because now, you know, you control yours, I control mine, but at some point in time, we're a self-service ad platform.
I'm like Facebook for news.
So, you know, first of all, if RFK Jr. gets in and he removes them from being able to advertise their product, then we don't have to worry about it.
But the question is, can you be sued for discrimination?
No, no, no.
I think you cannot be sued for that.
You have the right to refuse business to any advertiser.
You don't have to give a reason.
I know when it comes to politicians, if you let one side on, you've got to let the other side on.
But you're a private company.
You can say no to anybody for any reason.
Well, good.
Then the answer is no.
I have no interest.
That's easy enough.
I mean, at least that's my legal understanding.
I'm not an attorney, obviously.
But I've never been sued for saying no.
I mean, what are they going to do?
Say, force you to take our money!
No.
Good luck.
What are they going to sue me?
You have to take money from us?
No.
Hell no.
The whole industry is changing right before everybody's eyes, Mike.
And I think it's a beautiful thing to see.
I know if you're on the legacy media side, it's got to be the most painful thing you've ever seen.
And, you know, just for your audience and for you, and I know you know it, there's – throughout history, there's always a product that replaces something else.
Two easy examples would be going from the horse and buggy to the automobile, right?
I mean, when was the last time you jumped at a horse and buggy, Mike?
And then, you know, the telegraph to the telephone.
And, you know, nobody sends telegraphs anymore, okay, because they have this thing called the phone, which has evolved into you can move all over the place with it.
But it's a paradigm shift, and never, the old guard does not participate in the new entity.
It's just how it works.
Sam, what I love about what you're doing is, let's say before the 1990s, most news was hyper-local, right?
Your local news station gave you local news, local interest stories, they interviewed local businesses, local people, whatever, right?
And then there was this consolidation.
Just a few corporate entities bought up everything over the last 30 years.
And then, of course, it ended up being that now all the news you get from those sources, it's all the same.
It's all sanitized.
Half of it's like CIA memos pushing this propaganda, this lie, masks work, you know, all this nonsense, right?
So what you are doing is actually taking us forward, but back to the local level, which is where people live.
It's what's important in your community, Mike.
And you hit it on the head.
In the 80s, there were over 400 independent news outlets.
Today, there are six, okay?
Everybody's seen the videos of St. Clair Broadcasting with 30 or 20 or 40 stations all saying the same thing at the same time.
I know you saw it, Mike, okay?
I'm sure you probably talked about it and played it on your show.
Well, you know damn well that came from one individual.
That was sent to the local markets, and all they're doing is reading off of a teleprompter.
What you're witnessing there is centralized news.
So what our product does, because we're hyper-local, is we completely decentralize and democratize the news business, and the most important piece is we put the power of the press back in the hands of the people where it belongs.
That's it.
Exactly, exactly.
So then the big question, though, and this kind of gets us back to monetization.
What has been really challenging in this information space, just across the board, is monetizing news and information because so much of information is now, of course, free to access.
We've seen some organizations introduce registration walls or paywalls, but my understanding is your news doesn't have Registration walls or paywalls.
How do you assemble your revenue model concept for doing this and staying viable?
Remember, we have mega scale.
Think of the Eddie News website, like the Chicago Tribune or the Miami Herald.
Everybody has sections, sports, business, politics, entertainment.
Let's take the sports page of Eddie News website.
My guess is you could probably put 8 or 10 or 12 ads on that page.
Well, however many ads they can put on that page, we can do it one zip code.
And we have the ability to geotarget, like Facebook, where we can serve an ad where Joe's Pizza or Bob's Ice Cream Parlor can target one specific zip code.
So think of it as advertising inventory, where the Chicago Tribune, you could advertise on their sports page and they could get 10 ads on that page.
We could do it in one zip code.
So it's like having 70,000 different editions, Mike.
So the value of that space to a local business is, of course, much higher than the value to a national brand that's just trying to blanket everything, right?
Yeah, Kevin Sorbo asked me, she goes, Sam, how are you, you know, the big advertisers are not going to spend money with you.
He's talking about the pharmaceuticals, you know, the woke companies.
I said, Mike.
The money's not in the national.
It's in the local.
I get a penny for a national ad.
I get 10, 15, 20 cents for hyperlocal ads.
I mean, it's literally 10 to 20 times the money, but the customer's bill, he doesn't really care if he's spending $20 for the month.
It's petty change for him.
He wants that space, but the national guys are never going to pay it.
So if you do the math on that, if you have 10 ads at a penny, it's worth a dime.
When the page gets clicked.
If you have 10 ads at a time, it's worth a dollar.
Right, right.
So to our audience, this is really critical.
This is so cool what you're doing, Sam.
We used to have the yellow pages, right?
And businesses, local businesses used to advertise in the yellow pages and all the residents would open up the yellow pages if they need an attorney, if they need a dry cleaner, if they need a plumber, whatever.
What you're offering now, as I understand it, is a self-serve ad platform for local businesses.
To advertise to local people through the local news that you are producing with hundreds of writers and editors that focus on hyper-local information.
Is that a fair description?
That is exactly correct.
And here's the cool part.
Let's say you're a financial planner.
Okay, so if you know anything about the investment world...
You get licensed in different states, right?
You pay your fees, whatever they are.
California could be $150 and Florida could be $50.
But you're licensed in specific states to do business.
Well, for those advertisers, they can actually pick zip codes that they want to target.
And then they could run maybe high net worth areas because they don't want to advertise in a non-affluent area because their target customer would be the affluent.
They can target specific zip codes around specific types of content.
So the one in particular would be like the business section or the golf section, because you see, you know, Raymond James ads and stuff like that on the golf channel.
But that's how hyper-targeted this is.
I mean, you could literally buy an ad to one zip code.
And Sam, I think even as an end user, this adds value to the end user experience.
Because if I'm an end user, like, I don't give a crap about national brands, right?
But I am interested in a new restaurant that just opened up in my area, right?
Totally interested in that.
Or whatever.
A new local service.
A new local grocery store that serves organic.
Or whatever the case may be.
It's kind of like you're de-polluting advertising and you're making the advertising relevant geographically without spying on people.
Google has to spy on people and learn your interests.
You're focused on geography, which doesn't require surveillance.
And subject.
So I know you like sports because you want to know why?
Because you're reading.
You're reading a sport.
Exactly.
There you go.
And so who would want to reach that target audience?
You know, if you're reading golf, I know you like golf because you're reading the golf story.
So advertisers...
Can select the golf, the section that's relevant to their product.
If you sell golf clubs, you want to be around golf.
If you sell pots and pans, you want to be in my food and wine section.
It's just that simple.
That makes total sense.
I don't know why.
I mean, it seems so straightforward now that you're describing it.
May I say something here?
Please, please.
Okay, so Mike, the newspaper business model has been around 200 years, okay?
This is not a new model.
There's still a demand for news.
It's just how people consume it has changed.
All we did was replicate that model online and create a more efficient marketplace for the end user.
And then because we have a social component where the public can interact and share in the narrative, we put the power of the press in the hands of the people.
That's it.
That's so cool.
All right.
Let me ask you this.
Where can potential advertisers go to your self-serve ad engine?
Where do they sign up and start?
Running ads.
So at the bottom, like if you go to yournews.com, you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's little tabs down there.
You'll see them.
It says advertise.
It shows you your rate card.
You then decide, yeah, right there.
Okay.
Okay, so you click this.
You're going to see all the rates as soon as it loads.
Okay.
All right.
I guess it's loading.
I don't know.
It should have loaded instantly.
Well, I don't know.
We actually had some bandwidth issues.
My Wi-Fi might not be totally, fully functional.
It's probably on our side.
But go ahead.
Walk us through it.
Yeah, so they just look at the rates, and then they just fill out a form.
So I just went to it.
I clicked advertise, and it is moving a little slow for me, too.
So I don't know what just happened there.
Oh, it just came up here.
Okay, so I see the rate.
Oh, yeah, I got it, too.
Okay.
Here we go.
Yeah, so you just fill that form out.
If you scroll down, you'll see the form.
I see.
Okay, right here.
And you just place your ad.
You can upload it.
If you need us to build one for you, we'll do it.
There's a little fee.
And then, you know, you're off to the races.
People do it all the time.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
So it's not hard to do.
And you see the rates there, right?
It goes national, state, county, city, zip code.
Okay.
So obviously then your algorithm is first going to fill the most local ad, the most local advertiser into the ad spots you have.
And then if that run is done, then your algorithm is going to choose less revenue ads on a national basis.
I'm just guessing as a business owner.
Yeah, no, you're right.
So it'll take the highest bid, which is always the local.
So the county guy is going to spend less money than the city guy is going to spend less money than the zip code guy.
Got it.
So his CPM rate could be...
12 cents for the zip code, whereas it could be 10 cents for the city, whereas it could be 5 or 6 cents for the county.
So if they're all targeting that one spot, I'm in business, right?
I'd rather get 10 cents from somebody than 2 cents, wouldn't you?
Well, absolutely.
And I'm even thinking, we should be using this, like my store, healthrangerstore.com.
So we should be advertising nationwide, but in your cooking and kitchen and food sections.
Not to mention the content side of it.
Because you guys produce a lot of content.
As you know, all you've got to do is go to my multimedia, your news video section.
All your stuff is there.
You don't know this, but you have an author page on our platform.
Everything you've ever posted is on there.
That's so cool.
Wow.
I'm so glad we're having this conversation.
This is actually the first time that we've ever been...
But I would love to integrate more.
I'd love to actually be an advertiser with you.
There's something else that we want to talk about.
We're about to roll out an AI model, Enoch, that is the world's best trained AI model on nutrition and health and so on.
There's probably some really interesting ways to leverage AI technology for your readers and things like that.
Very interesting things to talk about there.
Isn't the news business changing dramatically because of AI tools?
Well, I look at...
You still need boots on the ground.
You need somebody at the high school football game or the city council meeting.
But here's what I love about AI. Somebody like me can't write.
I write the way I speak.
But I can take AI and I can put bullet points in.
So let's say I went to a city council meeting and I can take notes.
And then I could plug in the notes with the bullet points of what I want into AI and it will spit me and tell it to write me a news story.
Right.
And it will spit out something.
So if you don't like paragraph three, you say, please change it to make it look something like this.
And once you've got it down, Mike, anybody can be in the news business.
That's why that guy from Axios that was at that journalism thing saying how much people need it.
I'm like, are you crazy?
We've all seen what you did.
Anybody could do your job better than you.
Good point.
Anybody.
I would have loved to have been there.
What you have, you said it, boots on the ground, right?
So where does news really come from?
Actually, real news comes from people's eyeballs on the ground.
Looking at stuff, talking to people, taking pictures, noticing things.
Like, that's real news.
It's not press releases and CIA memos and all that crap, right?
It's real boots on the ground.
That has to be local.
It has to be.
You need them.
Look, AI is just a tool.
And, you know, people always say, oh, AI is going to replace all the journalists.
No, it's not.
If AI walks into the high school football game, run.
It's called the Terminator.
Yeah, yeah, Skynet's here.
Yeah, Skynet's here.
You need people to watch the game.
You know, last night...
I got an email from a gentleman.
I think he was out of North Carolina.
Guy's a photojournalist, worked for AP, Reuters.
I mean, you know, was part of a lot of big national brands.
And he reached out to me because he signed up to be a citizen journalist.
He's not a reporter.
But then he wanted to understand, like, how he could get involved in this.
And I told them, look, if you want to know what people want, they want the news that matters to them in the community.
I don't care if it's the high school football game or the city council meeting or the school board meeting.
This is the stuff they want.
And my suggestion to you.
Would be to go do a video, because he does video, and you could film it.
You could have it so it streams live on YouTube, and we could take that embed code, and we could run that in the geography it's relevant to around the specific type of content.
So the guy could actually film the whole high school football game, where he could have it live.
He could film the city council meeting or the school board meeting and have it live, and we could air it right on our network.
That is so cool.
Yes!
So, he's not a writer, and I told him, if you want to write, sign up for ChatGPT, and put the bullet points in, and let us bitch out an article, and bam!
That's all it is.
Now, what I love about you and your philosophy, and I'd like to ask you to describe it more, but, I mean, again, this is the first time we've ever talked face-to-face, although we've had a phone conversation before, but my understanding is, you know, you support economic freedom.
You support common sense, reason, rationality.
You love America.
You want America to be great.
You support all these things.
But how would you describe your worldview?
And does that drive the direction of the news?
Or is it more hands-off?
How do you sort of balance that or manage that?
Well, this might take a minute if you don't mind.
Go for it.
Because I was one of those people that didn't believe the legacy media was lying.
And I have a partner in this business that used to tell me that.
She listened to Alex Jones and I'm like, look, why would the media ever lie?
They live here too.
I mean, if you're a journalist and there's a story and they want you to completely fabricate a false narrative.
You're going to look at him like, what are you, crazy?
Why would I do something like that?
So I didn't buy it, but when Trump won the election in 2016, Mike, you'd have to be a moron to not see the lies that were coming out when they attacked him and started calling him a Russian agent and all the different stuff they came after him with.
So look, somebody had to hit me over the head to get me to see it, but now I see it clear as day.
So when that happened, I realized what I'm doing.
Is far more important.
It's bigger than me.
It's bigger than all of us.
Because if you have a media that is basically weaponized against the American people, look, you and I are on the same page, okay?
You've got government influence as well as advertiser influence, right?
This is why you could have gave them absolute facts that COVID is killing people, and they couldn't say it because Pfizer's writing them the checks.
That's the truth.
So we need to dismantle this whole thing.
Now, the good news is they're going away on their own.
But what I do, Mike, is inevitable.
Trust me, the future of news, forget me, will be a hyper-local news platform with a social component where the public can interact and post their own news views, opinions, and classifieds.
It'll have a monetization model like YouTube, where anybody can be a citizen journalist and report news freely without censorship, and a self-service ad platform where people can buy their own ads and target it around the content that's relevant to their product.
And Mike, everything I just said already exists on other platforms.
They just don't do it around hyper-local news.
So for me, this is bigger than all of us.
If we're going to be...
You know, a news organization that's supposed to be for the people, by the people, then, you know, the people need to own the product, not Sam.
This is...
Go ahead.
Well, and I would say, too, that even if Facebook, let's say, did exactly what you're doing, nobody would trust Facebook.
If Google did what you're doing, nobody would trust Google.
It has to be somebody outside that tech ecosystem, the hyper-connected, government-run, CIA-backdoored tech ecosystem.
Frankly, people only trust, I should say informed people, only trust independent media now.
And public trust in mainstream media has absolutely plummeted since COVID, when people realized we were lied to and they actually got a lot of people killed with bad media lies, right?
But you exist outside the tech ecosystem.
You're not the who's who of the Elon Musk and the Sam Altmans and all that.
And thank God.
Otherwise, I wouldn't love what you're doing either.
I mean, it's great that we are independent.
No, I do agree.
And you really need to hear this.
And for the audience, they need to pay attention to it.
Somebody asked me...
How do you fact check all these articles?
And Mike, here's my question to you as a broadcaster, as a journalist.
What is the single thing that you have that is the most important and without it you couldn't function in this business?
I'll answer it for you.
It's your integrity.
It's your honesty, right?
People watch your show because they believe in you.
Now, Mike, what would happen if you started lying to your audience all the time?
Yeah, well, they would figure it out.
You'd be exposed and you'd lose everything.
And you'd lose everything.
So I don't have to be a fact checker.
We don't need Snopes.
You want to know who Snopes is?
It's the people in the local community.
Because what we do is decentralize and democratize the news business.
We're not telling you that that article is accurate.
It's up to the journalists to report the story.
And their job is to be able to put out the information that's truthful to the people in the community.
In the event...
That somebody lies?
Mike, you will get so many emails coming in saying, this is not true, this is fake news, whatever, right?
So we haven't had it happen yet, other than one time with a Little League game in North Palm Beach, Florida, where the kids lied about who won.
But I must have got 50 emails on that one.
But the people will let you know, and then one of us will look into it, and if it's a mistake, somebody can correct it.
But I can see...
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I can see attempts at weaponizing this, but it wouldn't be successful long-term, but I could see somebody signing up as a journalist, let's say a restaurant owner that wants to harm another restaurant across town, and then they do a story that this other restaurant has roaches and rats, right?
That kind of silly thing.
But that could get them sued, not just banned.
That's a big mistake.
You don't want to do stuff like that.
That's petty.
And then guess what?
You're only going to hurt yourself.
Okay, because nobody's going to go to your restaurant afterwards.
No, the best thing they could do is just get reviews.
Like, you know, there's people out there that do restaurant reviews, movie reviews, all that stuff.
Okay, so the best thing to do is just to find somebody who does restaurant reviews.
And, you know, we'll publish those articles in our food and wine section in that market.
That's awesome.
That's great.
So also for a lot of people who are being displaced out of their jobs in corporate media.
This is also a really natural thing for them to pick up, right?
They can become writers for you, correct?
Correct.
And by the way, on LinkedIn Navigator, if you type in freelance journalist, it's 470,000 people.
Now, here's what I know.
Not all of them were part of the...
Some were just freelance to begin with, but not all.
I mean, we're talking probably 90% of them were part of the downsizing.
So, Mike...
This is probably going to answer some of your question the last time about who Sam Anthony is.
So I'm a firm believer that if you were part of the mainstream media, you were part of the problem.
So we do not, and it doesn't mean everybody, but we do not focus on those half a million people.
My focus right now is on student journalists, and here's the reason why.
Number one, I want you to answer this honestly, Mike.
Let's fast forward a year or two or three years.
When they come out of school, where are they going to get a job?
Who's hiring?
Right now, it's pretty dismal at the moment.
It's going to be even worse.
What I'm doing is I'm bringing on student journalists.
You could always tell who's good and who's bad.
Just read their stuff, okay?
But the cream always rises to the top, and not for nothing, but those would be the same people that wouldn't get jobs at other places, and some would.
So that's just how it works.
So we're bringing on student journalists to give them real-life experience, but ultimately what's going to end up happening, Mike, is they're going to be the trusted names in their community.
They're going to be the ones that go, because this is their passion.
What's really critical, because we talked about AI previously, and we've been using AI augmentation in our own company because we're building AI models and so on.
For the record, I did not fire a single writer in our company.
Instead, I taught them how to use AI tools to enhance their work, right?
So we can bring in quotes from books to add to stories, to augment stories.
We can do a lot of things that we couldn't do previously.
AI actually uplifts the roles of people.
You no longer have to be the typist, and you no longer have to be perfect with your punctuation and perfect with your use of articles in the sentence.
Instead, you are...
You and I kind of talked about this.
Instead, you are the observer.
You are the witness of what's happening.
You need to take notes.
You need to understand and bring perspective and a human angle to what's happening.
And then you can tell the AI engine, like you said, bullet points.
Tell the AI, create a story, but here's what I saw.
Here's who I talked to.
Here's what they told me.
The role of the writer is actually being upgraded to being the witness of reality.
Does that make sense?
Oh my God, of course it does.
And this is why I tell people in new media, just like with YouTube, anybody could be a journalist and anybody could report whatever type of content they want.
You could be a golf news guy.
You could be a hard news guy.
You could have a cooking show on YouTube.
Well, what I see is all the people that could have never got a job in the media industry, let's say you wanted to be a reporter.
You wanted to cover these stories.
You could take...
Somebody that's proactive in the community that goes to all the city council meetings and the school board meetings.
That person is passionate about it.
Well, why can't they report it and tell the rest of the community what they just witnessed?
And that's a journalist right there.
And what I love about this is that you are decentralizing news.
You're taking it out of the hands of the central controllers who have been lying to us and deceiving us this entire time.
All these independent journalists that are working with you, nobody is controlling them from one memo.
You're not telling them what to say.
I don't know if you know this, and I learned it like a year ago, because I talk to a lot of journalists.
So a woman called me from Tampa, and here was her thing.
She didn't care about the monetization, nothing.
She goes, I'm a journalist, I'm ethical.
She said, but the way it works is...
I'm an investigative journalist, so I do a lot of work on an article, and everything I do is factual.
You know, there's all whatever it is they got to bring to the editor.
Well, when they bring that story in, it could be something that the community wants to know about, but it goes before a review board.
Okay, now wait.
It could be somebody's brother.
A family member.
An advertiser.
An advertiser.
And all of a sudden it gets nixed.
And then when I ask them why it's nixed, they say, well, we're not going to tell you that.
So here's how my platform works.
You're the investigative journalist.
You're reporting all the facts.
And you're the review board.
It goes no matter what.
And they love that.
That is so cool.
Yeah.
I've known and talked to many journalists over the years who are super frustrated with the fact that they'll pursue a story and then it'll get canned.
And in fact, you know what?
A lot of prominent people in alternative media today used to work for mainstream media, right?
They left and then they started a YouTube channel or they started a newsletter or whatever the case may be.
But let's talk about moving forward too because you've got a project.
And admittedly, I don't fully understand what you've got going, but you've got a project that I think you're doing crowdsourcing funding for.
It's a big vision.
Can you start from the beginning on that and explain it to me and the audience?
Yeah.
Mike, the legacy media is not going to survive.
What's going to replace it most likely will be a hyper-local news platform that's global.
In every country that you can get into, just like Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix, they're all global.
So let's just fast forward.
If you had to place a bet, it's going to be a global media giant by zip code.
By the way, on LinkedIn Navigator, over 2 million people in the media industry call themselves freelance journalists now because they're out of work.
So there's your marketplace, right?
It's all over the world.
All over the world.
So most likely to be a global media giant.
And like any tech giant, it all comes out of Silicon Valley, all the money.
I mean, name one thing they didn't fund, okay?
Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Silicon Valley funds it all.
They bring in big capital.
They bring in the proper management teams.
They scale these things up.
And next thing you know, they're the 10,000-pound gorilla in the space.
You know what I'm talking about because that's reality.
So Silicon Valley is not going to play with me.
Simply because if you look at the front page of my website, it just doesn't go along with their narrative.
So we decided to do something called an equity crowdfund.
And I never knew, like I've heard of them before, but I really didn't know what it is because I've raised capital my whole life.
And, you know, we would do it, you know, when you raise capital on a private placement.
You can only sell to what they call accredited investors, which represents 1% of the population.
And that's why the big investors are the Black Rocks and the Vanguards, because they have all the money.
Not to mention the fact that, because I was in that business...
I have friends of mine that run private equity firms, hedge funds, and they make investments, and they're always looking for opportunities.
They have all the money.
If they don't spend it, they've got to give it back to the people.
They raise it from individuals that say, here's our track record, here's what we do.
Right, and they're overflowing with money.
They can't even find enough good opportunities in many cases.
Exactly, right?
But if you've ever done a deal with a private equity firm or a hedge fund, they own you.
Yeah, that's right.
It's just how it works.
And by the way, coming from that background, I kind of do agree because most entrepreneurs come up with great ideas, but they just can't execute them, right?
Like with me, you know, so to me, if I was giving somebody 10, 20 million dollars and...
You know, I would have some kind of clause that says, look, if you can't pull this off, I got to have you step down and put some people in to protect my investment.
It makes logical sense to me.
So from my standpoint, there is nobody on planet Earth that could do what I do, at least with the United States.
However, you want to scale this across the globe?
I'm not the guy.
Okay, you need lawyers, better people than me, a management team, but what I am is the person who oversees it because this is my baby.
I understand what works, what doesn't work.
But for the United States, which we're doing right now, it's not that difficult.
And as we start expanding and building our team, everything is going to evolve.
We decided not to go the route of traditional, of going to private equity and stuff like that.
When I went to one of the Reawake America tours, Mike, I looked around.
It was in Miami.
And there were 5,000 people that showed up for this event.
And I'm looking around and I'm like, wow.
See, now these are all the people.
These are the people that are in my world, which you know what I'm talking about, that...
I think really should own the product that we have.
I can't go to you, Mike, and I can't tell you that we're a news organization that's by the people for the people, but then tell you that BlackRock owns half my company.
Exactly.
It doesn't sound good.
So we did this thing called an equity crowdfund.
The equity crowdfunds are very interesting because you're allowed to market them and promote them.
You don't actually call an individual and sell them stock.
What you do is you get on shows like this or you can market the equity crowdfund and people can hear what you're doing.
They can go to the equity crowdfund page and then they can read about what you're doing.
If they want to make an investment, they can.
But here's the cool part.
It limits people.
When you fill out the subscription agreement, you have to put in...
What your income is.
Well, a guy making $20,000 a year can only invest so much.
You won't allow a big investment.
And by the way, it happened.
There was one of my journalists out of Arizona had made the initial investment was $250,000.
And a couple of months later, he says, I want to put in $250,000 more.
It wouldn't let him.
$200,000 was the limit.
He could never spend another nickel.
That's it.
Whereas a guy that makes a million a year could spend a lot more.
Make sense?
Yeah.
Okay.
Number one, what is that website where we can look at this?
Go to yournews.com and scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Okay.
And click Invest.
It's the bottom right, I think.
Oh, Invest.
Okay.
Got it.
I see.
Okay.
Invest in Miko Ventures, Inc.
Now, that's the holding company.
That's like News Corp owns Fox News.
And then you'll see if you scroll down a little bit, it'll give you a dollar amount right there that was invested so far in the last couple of months, $167,314.
I can't see it.
Okay.
So this information that's here is everything that we're doing and people can read it.
And it's not owned by Sam.
It's owned by a brokerage firm.
Okay, North Capital Partners.
So whenever you do something with a brokerage firm, the brokerage firm is not going to get behind you unless they do audits, background checks, because they're liable.
Yeah, and their license is at stake, yeah.
Oh, completely.
So for them to participate, you have to pass all the scrutiny that they give you.
It's not like a fly-by-night Kickstarter project where somebody could just take the money and run.
Yeah, no.
Not that.
It's not going to happen, no.
And then it opens up to that brokerage firm as North Capital Partners to all kinds of legal liabilities.
But yeah, this is something that's real.
Here's the main interest that I have is to make sure that the people own the product and not the institution.
So it's much easier to raise capital through institutions, especially with my background, simply because I know them.
But I would rather have...
5,000 people give me 1,000 bucks, then one guy give me 5 million.
Because who am I beholden to, Mike?
Totally.
Yeah, exactly.
So this decentralizes the investment side of it.
And of course, I'm such a big fan of decentralization, of news, of knowledge, of medicine, food.
This makes perfect sense to me in so many ways.
But let me ask you this.
So let's say somebody watching here, they want to invest whatever.
Do you talk about...
Is there an expected return?
Is there a timetable?
Do they get money five years later?
No, no, no.
I hired a guy named Joel Arberman, and Joel is a former hedge fund guy, very bright, good guy.
Mike, how many companies have you taken public?
Have you taken any public?
No, no.
Okay, this guy's taken 17. 17 companies, okay?
I couldn't take one.
He took 17 companies public.
I mean, I can't do what he does, but he can't do what I do.
So he came to me and he said, Sam, he goes, I see what you're doing and the world needs what you have.
He said, now you need to raise some capital, but he said to me, It's going to be easier if we can take this company public, number one.
Number two, if you take it public, you have a currency.
So what is your game plan here?
Well, I've always had the expectations of doing this because what I wanted to do was this is a roll-up model, Mike.
I think you know what that means, where you could acquire other entities.
So you know how with a newspaper you have a sports editor, a business editor, a politics editor, all these different editors?
The plan is to take and start acquiring other verticals, somebody who has a horse racing website, somebody who has a boxing website.
There's no scale to them, Mike.
What you do is you're bringing better content into the system.
Remember, I'm the platform.
We don't consider ourselves a news organization.
We consider ourselves a news content distribution platform.
But what we can do...
Is acquire different verticals and bring them under one umbrella.
And then provide them with more interesting content to drive that vertical.
Here's the thing.
If you like horse racing and I don't have it, you're going to go somewhere else, right?
Right.
That's it.
So these guys already know how to do it.
They're just coming under our umbrella.
Now, the horse racing industry, very niche.
How much revenue could possibly be generated out of the horse racing industry?
I have no idea, but it's not going to be $20 billion.
It's not that big.
It's like golf.
It's not that big.
I think golf, I'm going to guess here, but I play golf every weekend.
I'm a weekend warrior, but what is it?
2%, 3% of the population likes golf?
It's minuscule in the scheme of things.
Acquiring them and bringing them under your umbrella, what does it do?
It drives their traffic to your horse racing or golf section.
It brings their ad revenues in.
It creates a better product for the readers and gives them a bigger exit.
Right.
Absolutely.
Because with a product like this, the marketplace will eat this up, Mike.
But then are you saying the medium-term goal is to take Nico Ventures public?
Yeah.
We'll have that done.
As a matter of fact, he called me five weeks ago to tell me that he's got a brokerage firm that'll do the second round.
I hope he doesn't hear this because I'm just going to tell you something.
Okay, so I said to him, I said, Joel, I said, that's phenomenal.
We need to keep that as an option.
I didn't say anything else, but I'm just going to tell you, you're familiar with Public Square, right?
You know, the Michael Sievert.
Okay, so all you got to do is look it up on Google.
You know what percentage Vanguard owns of Public Square?
I don't.
38%.
Wow.
Okay, so all the things you guys hate, okay, and we hate.
You can't stop them.
You know, when you do a SPAC or you raise money from a broker-dealer, they're not calling Bob Smith to get $500 from him.
They're calling the institutional players.
Totally.
It's how it works.
And then they bring in the money and then they take you public, whatever it is.
That was the same thing that happened.
So what I'm doing is something a little different.
What I want is 5,000 people.
To be investors in this round, I want to do a second one, but I want to bring in some horsepower for that one.
I'm talking about influencers, and I'm already talking to a couple.
I'm not going to say names, but everybody would know who they are.
And the odds on me not getting them are slim to none.
Right, right.
Yeah, so I'm just bringing this up.
Go ahead.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think my audience and everything that you said sounds fantastic.
And what my audience wants to make sure is that you don't one day end up selling out to the Blackrocks or the big tech companies.
If you build something this amazing, you want to keep it in the hand.
Because your vision is awesome.
People want it to stay that way.
So how do you explain to people that it's going to maintain, you know, it's going to be true to that vision even as it gets really big?
First of all, that's a great question.
I'm one of you, okay?
So I want what you want.
I do not want this to be in the hands of a George Soros or somebody that's going to use it for nefarious reasons.
Because remember, information is power, Mike.
Absolutely.
He who controls all the information has all the power.
I'm 60. This is my last hurrah on this, just to finish it off.
But this is my legacy.
So for me, do you think I want my grandkids to grow up in a world where George Soros controls the next mainstream media?
Not a chance in hell.
No way.
So what I'm doing to prevent that is I'm going to put the board of directors in.
And remember, the people, you have the...
The management team, like when we scale this thing and we get it really big, you're going to have a different management team that comes in.
Well, I'm going to be the CEO of that because I'm not letting them do anything without me knowing, number one.
I want to be part of it.
Number two...
I will still keep control after this round, but the next one, there ain't a chance in hell.
I'm going to have control, full control.
But that's where you have a board of directors that shares your vision and your values because they can fire the management team like that.
So they work for the shareholders.
So that's the most important piece.
So I've already got this laid out in my head as to how we're going to play this out because, look, like any...
You know, Bill Gates doesn't own 90% of, you know, Microsoft.
I mean, what does he own?
One or two percent?
I mean, it's going to diminish down.
Right.
But what we have to do is make sure that this remains a free speech platform.
Okay, it remains free speech.
It allows the public to be able to have their own voice.
By the way, I'm just letting people know that means the left.
I'm not here to suppress somebody.
That's right.
Okay, my personal opinion is I think both sides should be heard and the marketplace should decide which way they want to go, what they believe in.
We have the same philosophy on Brighteon.
We don't censor people for viewpoints.
Never have, never will.
That's not what we're into.
But it's supposed to be.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean...
The competition of ideas is what should exist, and the best ideas should win out.
And that's why they wanted to censor all of us all these years, because we have better ideas.
And when I say we, I mean, you know, just reasonable, conservative-minded people.
Our ideas work, actually.
They have no ideas, Mike.
That's why one guy comes up with the dumbest idea, and it's a liberal, and the other ones go, well, that doesn't sound good.
I don't got anything else.
Let's let's join forces and they all back it.
I mean, give me a break.
So, yes, liberals don't have good ideas.
They just jump on one thing and run with it, even if it's going to run them over to Cliff.
It's the conservatives that are always going in their own direction.
And these are the ones that are the entrepreneurs that are that are the movers and shakers in the community that are making things happen.
You know, if we had to hope the liberals are going to do that, they'd just all run us over a cliff and bankrupt everything.
You know, I've been using the term builders.
I would describe you and I as builders.
We build businesses.
We build platforms.
We build solutions.
We are the kind of people who build civilization.
And, of course, we stand on the shoulders of the builders before us, right?
So I don't mean arrogantly that we're the builders.
We are in a long line of builders.
Our parents and grandparents and going back, they built.
Mike, I couldn't agree with you more, and I'm going to tell you something else.
You and I should really kind of align.
We are aligned, but we should figure out how we can integrate with each other because what you do is you're putting out information that's combating the mainstream media, but your focus is not on the...
The bar in Chicago that just went to a Chicago Bears theme.
You could care less about that, right?
Or the museum that just opened in New York or Miami.
That's not your focus.
No, not at all.
But all that hyper-local news and all my content creators, just imagine, there's 20,000 cities in the United States.
If I only have five people a city, that's 100,000 news reporters.
Mike, you're massive at that point.
You haven't even begun.
If you take all that content, right?
And then, Bridie, and remember, I'm just a news distribution.
You know, I have three news outlets reach out to me in the last six weeks to ask if they could put their stuff on my platform.
Oh, wow.
Three!
I'm like, are you committing suicide now?
What are you doing?
You know, but for you, it's synergistic because I'm a platform, right?
Right.
And so, I'm not, I am...
Not competitive to you at all.
I'm like Facebook.
I'm just distribution.
I don't produce anything.
We just distribute other people's stuff.
That's all we do.
So you and I really could combine forces together.
Oh, I think so.
I've actually got some really strong ideas about using, for example, in-house for 15 months, we have built a massive AI data pipeline infrastructure for training AI models and ingesting content and normalizing it and we have built a massive AI data pipeline infrastructure for training AI models and ingesting content And that's why we're about to put out a really amazing model.
If we could tap into the stream of your local news through some of the AI classification prompts, there are some extraordinary things that we could do with your news to determine trends, like sort of early indicators there are some extraordinary things that we could do with your Of things that are about to happen.
Not quite seeing the future, but connecting the dots because of what's happening locally.
No human can think fast enough to do all that based on all the writers you have, but we have a massive data infrastructure that could do that.
I'd love to talk to you about that offline, about maybe we do a little pilot thing and show you what I have in mind.
It could be pretty cool.
I think that, you know, I've always had this vision.
You know what I'm talking about here.
You have all these different conservatives running in their own direction, right?
So you have Newsmax and you have One America News and you have Real America's Voice and everybody's competing for the same eyeballs, right?
Well, what if they all joined forces or what if they were all rolled up under one umbrella?
You're just talking about creating a mega powerhouse, a conservative media powerhouse, if you want to use the word conservative.
But this is what needs to happen.
And I think I could pull that off.
Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned, I think you can too, and I think it transcends conservatism.
That label doesn't even really begin.
We're talking about the future of human civilization.
We're talking about building infrastructure of decentralized human knowledge that allows people to have access to the kinds of ideas and information that empowers them in whatever their ventures are.
Information needs to be Decentralized instead of controlled.
You are, in effect, through your news, you are reversing the years of ignorance that's been forced upon us by big tech censorship and fake corporate news media.
That's essentially what you're doing.
I love talking to people who understand this.
I really do.
Yes, you're exactly correct.
That's exactly what we're doing.
And by the way...
This is what I do is the next mainstream media.
Make no mistake about it.
Totally.
This is where it's all going because all the archaic, outdated infrastructures are never going to survive.
I don't know this to the dollar amount, but I will tell you that I dealt with a lot of broadcast stations.
These people spend seven figures a year to keep these stations afloat.
I'm talking about radio or TV stations where they have big infrastructures of buildings, towers.
Oh, yeah.
All this, Mike, so they could get a radio signal to your freaking car or to your radio.
And then you have YouTube or Spotify, which you could just get on your phone and you could record something and your physical cost in that is, Mike, how much?
Zero?
Compete with that.
That's my point.
And some of these student journalists we're bringing on.
I mean, I showed a friend of mine some of the sports stories that were coming.
I'm like, oh my God, this comes from a student out of New York.
Like, you know, all these different, you know, content creators all over the place.
And you could see the stuff like, you know, my auto racing section.
Most of them are student journalists.
It's the only wire feed I buy is field level media.
That's it.
I promise you in the next 12 to 18 months, I won't even need them.
This is like, what you're doing is as substantial as maybe, let's say, the invention of cold fusion is to the energy ecosystem.
You know what I mean?
It's a disruptor, but in a super positive way that actually has second-order and third-order impacts on society that empowers and enables others to pursue their visions and to be better builders themselves.
It's really extraordinary what you're doing, Sam.
We are having this chance to talk.
There's a lot we can do.
Yes, I can see that.
And so, you know, to me, having this conversation with you has always been important because, you know, I look at you as, you know, one of the leaders in this whole space, right?
And, you know, I think if we can all align and, you know, I'm non-threatening to anybody.
You guys are the producers.
I'm just distribution.
That's all I am.
So I just could have millions of you.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
I always thought of what I'm doing here right now.
I've always known that my role is not to even be the person in this chair.
My role is to build platforms that enable others and empower others to express their ideas, their content, etc.
So I think what you and I are both doing that's more important than anything that our personal voices can do is we are building platforms for freedom and for decentralization.
Clearly.
That's the key.
No question.
Yeah, this is good that we had this conversation, Mike, because you understand the business.
I certainly understand the business.
At the end of the day, I mean, you've seen, you know, a little bit about what I do and I've explained it, but if I actually showed you this in real time with the content coming in, you'd be like, oh my God, this is incredible, right?
You know, hyper-local news coming in all over the United States and all we're doing is empowering people and giving them a voice.
That's all it is.
And if we can figure out a way to accelerate that this is where the capital comes in, because, you know, I always say to people, I don't need anybody's money to figure this out.
It's already been figured out.
The next level is going to create more complications, which you're going to need money to be able to scale it because, you know, you can't have five people running a billion dollar operation.
You're going to have a lot more people.
And so you're going to be running in the red for a while before you get to the black.
But believe me when I tell you, this is the real deal.
And I think that, you know, you and I forming some kind of alignment will.
Be beneficial to humanity, period.
I completely agree with you.
You and I will continue this conversation offline.
For our audience here today, let me mention again, the website is yournews.com.
And what you can do, folks, remember, scroll down to the bottom.
If you want to be an advertiser for their local content, or even national, you can click advertise there.
Citizen journalist.
Citizen journalist right next to it.
Yeah, exactly.
You can be a citizen journalist right here, or you can invest over here.
And what I am interested in, Sam, is, of course, the AI angle.
I think if you could package up as a sample like 50,000 articles from any time period, I could show you some astonishing things with an AI-trained model on that content that would blow your mind.
And that's the first thing I'd like to do is show you that.
But we'll talk about that offline, just in terms of demonstrations.
But this is awesome.
We are the new media, and knowledge is supposed to be decentralized.
And neither one of us, we don't get memos from the CIA of what to say, obviously.
Otherwise, I mean, nobody would pay any attention to us because they can get that from NPR anyway, or the Washington Post, right?
So here we are.
Thank you, Sam, for joining me today.
This has been really exciting.
Mike, thanks for having me on your show, man.
It's a pleasure to actually meet you, and I look forward to working with you.
Same here.
I look forward to working with you, too, Sam.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
We'll talk more offline.
And for all of you watching, again, the website is yournews.com, where you can check all of that out.
Hyperlocalnews.
So be sure to use yournews.com for the news in your area.
Just for disclosure, I am not an investor yet.
Maybe I want to be.
But at the moment, I don't have any financial ties to your news.
We are simply part of the new media.
I am very much interested in working with Sam, as you just heard, in terms of AI augmentation.
Of the knowledge base and decentralization.
So that's the full disclosure right there.
What an awesome interview and an amazing man there that we just heard from.
So thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
And together, the future really can be bright.
If you're plugged in, if you're informed, the future can be really great.
So, you know, keep tuning in.
You're going to learn a lot here.
And on platforms like yournews.com.
Thank you for watching today.
God bless you all and God bless America.
Take care.
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