In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Chris Cuomo, Adam Sosnick, and Tom Ellsworth. They discuss mainstream media, the 2024 election, and Cuomo's weightlifting controversy.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet David?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to haters.
How they run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, so, you know, a lot of times when you're doing podcasts and you have a show, you know, you'll warm up the guests and you'll say stuff.
And you're like, people will say things here, like, I don't know if this guy really means it or not.
I am a fan of today's guest.
So I invited him because I liked listening to him.
I don't agree with everything he says, but I like listening to him.
I like the history of his family, his father, what they've done.
Again, this doesn't mean we have to agree politically, but I like how united the family is.
So I said, we got to get this guy on the podcast.
We went back and forth.
I don't know how long the team's been going back and forth with Chris.
There's certain people that don't need an introduction because when you think of last names that are prominent last names, prominent families, Cuomo is one of those last names.
You don't have to explain who it is.
You just say Cuomo.
You're either going to go to a place you like, respect.
You know, these are great people.
You're going to go and say, well, I can't believe they did this.
I can't believe.
But you can't say you don't know who they are.
Chris has, Adam was joking with him earlier saying, hey, you know, Chris, are you getting nervous with the light?
You know, I know it's not the first time.
They say, yeah, I'm totally getting nervous.
Chris has been in front of camera for a long, long time, and he shines.
He's a star.
And his latest show right now, Cuomo, airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on News Nation.
He's got a YouTube channel.
My favorite video on the YouTube channel was when you got your $100,000, the plague.
That was sick.
That's cool.
The Chris Cuomo Project.
And we're going to put all his accounts below.
Go subscribe.
Go follow his show.
But with that being said, we have the one and only Chris Cuomo in the house.
How you doing, man?
Thank you.
Appreciate the opportunity.
Of course.
Thank you.
Of course.
Chris, let's get after it.
Let's get after it.
So, Chris, you know, we got a lot of things to cover, man.
I want to talk to you about your pops.
I want to talk to you about, you know, when he announced he's running.
I did the math.
I think you were 23, 24.
Your brother was like 36, 37, and what that conversation was like behind closed doors.
I'm like, dad, do it.
Don't do it.
I'm not going to do it.
I don't want to do it.
You know, it's not my job.
It's somebody else's job.
You know, all this stuff.
We'll talk about that.
We'll talk about some of the stuff that went on with the media and then we'll talk current politics.
But I think it's important because, Rob, the most controversial thing that we just have to get knocked out of the way.
And I think there's nothing more controversial than this.
Can you pull up the clip where, you know, it was a very disturbing video.
If you can play this clip, I want to get your reaction to it.
And I got a couple props I want to bring out.
Adam has no clue what it is.
Tom has no clue what it is.
Do you know which video?
The video I texted to you, Rob, if you have that.
If you can just pull that up, because we have to get to the bottom here, buddy.
Rick Flair?
No, no, no.
We're not doing a Ric Flair video.
I think Rob accidentally opened up other windows that I texted him.
But this is a video of you with your 100-pound dumbbells.
Okay.
And you're doing these dumbbell presses.
You know, you're doing this stuff and you're doing the curls.
You're doing the shoulders.
Rogan's talking about it.
All these podcasters are talking about it.
It'd be a lot better visually, Rob, if we can show it.
Okay, there you go.
Kyle originally responds to Kulinsky.
We've had him on the podcast before.
Go ahead.
Cuomo is releasing videos of himself working out.
He was a photo sitting at his desk.
100-pound dumbbells, shoulder presses.
Is that real?
Yeah.
I watched this first of all, and then you got him doing hundreds.
And then Joe's like, listen to this.
People were analyzing that like Building Seven.
We've fallen every day.
Talk to Robert Oberst, a legitimate giant.
He's at 300-plus pounds, and he's like, he would have to be one of the strongest men I've ever seen in my life.
Dude, you're a news guy.
What are you doing?
Chris Corn.
You got to show us what you got.
I got you 250s.
And I got 260s.
I want to see if you can stand up and curl those.
Okay.
If you can do 50s, I didn't go to 60s.
No problem, Cuomo Fields.
No, no, I think he's got it.
But this is real weights, by the way.
I'm having a hard time picking it up.
Yeah, don't hurt yourself.
Do not hurt yourself, man.
Okay.
Chris, what you got?
I will do this, but there's a bigger point, right?
Which is clearly it's not a hundred-pound dumbbell, right?
And in the video, I then hand it to one of my staffers, and he falls on the ground.
And it was a gift from a friend of mine when we were starting the show.
And what was interesting to me about it, I never said anything about it, is the lust for gotchas and to make something out of nothing, which this is a joke.
This is fine.
Although I will do this because I back from no challenge.
But I think the point is.
This is the family name.
The point is, as easy as this is.
I am Chris.
Yeah.
This is nothing all day.
All day.
By the way, 50s.
That's pretty impressive.
Yeah.
Look at 60s curl.
There you go.
Okay.
That's not the point.
The point is not that I'm the strongest man in news.
It's that kind of is Chris.
No, our lust for coming after people for gotchas, I think is a problem.
I think it's a real problem.
This was a joke, but the desire to link it to, and that's why you can't believe this, this, this.
I think it's gotten to be too much of a contagion.
But I'm happy to dispel that.
Yeah.
Well, that was pretty much it.
Thank you for not having hundreds.
Yeah, that is not a problem.
Otherwise, my shoulder would be down here right now.
What can you actually curl?
What can you actually like?
What's the most you ever curled dumbbells like 10 times?
Probably that.
I don't do arms.
Got it.
I don't believe, not that I don't believe.
I'm old, right?
I'm going to be 53.
I'm not a practitioner of bodybuilding.
I think it's great.
If it works for you, enjoy yourself.
Be careful.
But I'm all functional strength and self-defense.
So I don't do a lot of body shaping.
20, 30 years ago, our 17-year-old now, who I call Tarzan, he's all about gains and bodybuilding.
You know, you have the core power protein drink, seven a day.
He's bankrupting me on core power.
How big is he now?
He is beautiful.
Mario, 17, my height.
You know, he's like our size.
He's still coming into himself.
You know, he's still light.
So he's always like, I want to gain weight.
How do I gain?
Believe me.
I was like, life will be.
He's 17, dude.
Life will put weight on you that you'll never get off.
But he is in full flower.
He's a gorgeous kid, strong, strong, strong.
But that's what I found interesting about it.
I can't tell you how many people center right would say to me, especially where I live.
It's a big offshore fishing community.
I'm a Coast Guard captain.
I fish a ton.
Say, what was up with the dumbbell?
What was up with the dumbbell?
And the, you know, these like almost, they become conspiratorial.
And it's, it's sad to me because it shows how fragile we are in terms of how much we want to trust one another.
But anyway, thank you for that.
It's always good to get a little bit.
You could go for both sides.
I mean, both.
What I am impressed with.
Not the dumbbell thing.
Well, you know, we were going to next time if we have Tucker on, we'll bring some dumbbells out as well to see what he does.
It would be the dumbbell if you had him here.
I don't think Tucker's curling 50s, man.
Yeah, no, but the point is.
If you notice, your boy PBD didn't do it either.
Oh, he can knock those things out.
I'm not saying he can't 60.
No, I don't.
I'm not lying.
You took that as a challenge.
PBD, Don't be Rondy Robinson.
He called you out.
No, I'm just saying.
PBD, that's a call out right now.
I don't think you know how this guy operates.
You call this guy out, he goes for it.
That's what PHP is all about.
PBD, please do not pull a muscle right now.
The show's over.
If it does.
Oh, by the way, he's one-upping you, Cuomo.
He's going 60s.
I did the 60s.
Oh, you did that?
Okay, my bad.
Jesus, PBD.
That was good.
It was all right.
I can even do negatives for you.
Yeah, I got this.
That was impressive.
I haven't done this for a long time.
I thought we were talking news, politics.
It's like a brodown right now.
Well, I like it.
I notice you're staying in the chair also.
Yeah, I'm just going to kind of keep it moving.
I could do one.
I'll do one.
Don't hurt yourself, though.
That's what she said.
Okay.
That's not bad.
Yeah.
Tom, are you going to skip this one?
No, when we do the mental weightlifting, I'm not.
When we do the mental weightlifting, I get out of the bathroom now.
Respect to you.
Respect to you, Chris.
How are things?
How are you doing?
How are things with you?
Obviously, you know, we follow the story.
You know, when you make comments, you know, you're going through one day, you're the guy every day.
We're listening to you, and the next day, boom announcement comes out.
But how are you doing right now?
I appreciate you asking.
The things that matter most are good, right?
Family's healthy.
Everything's stable.
Very traumatic, period.
Everybody goes through something in life, and people have gone through a lot worse than the Cuomos.
But, you know, sudden, disruptive, negative forces in life have to be dealt with.
And they take time.
And you just have to make sure that you protect what matters most.
I lost a little control of that.
I've never seen the media chase after someone in the media the way they were with me in the aftermath of that.
My brother, I guess, was like better at hiding.
You know, like they couldn't find him the way.
So they were.
But like six, seven, eight cars of paparazzi following my house, following my kids, harassing my wife, harassing my kids.
You know, all the tabloid junk and lies.
I just wasn't used to it being put on me.
You know, we don't usually care about people in the media that much, but I guess there was something a little transcendent about the family.
And, you know, you deal with it.
We have the benefit of perspective.
You know, being in this business, I've seen so many people come through so many horrible things that this was really nothing.
And that perspective helped.
I then had a real issue with what to do because my concern was, well, what job would I get that to me would be growth in the business?
You know, I had a very good run of doing different things.
So then I came down to the point of purpose about why I do it, which is why the podcast is a lot more about what I think is a very relatable sense of how we very rarely talk about the most transferable experience in our lives, which is struggle.
Everybody struggles.
You struggle with your health.
You struggle with your finances.
You're going to struggle.
And we don't talk about it a lot because we see it as weakness.
We don't talk about emotional struggle because we see it as weakness, especially men.
So I just made a decision that if I'm going to do this and deal with all that comes with it, I should do something that I believe is truly going to help in a way that at least matters to me.
So you imagine the dumbbell BS times a million, and that's what you get when you talk about feelings of depression or insecurity or how to struggle.
People immediately in the media, if you are sensitive or vulnerable, you get attacked for your vulnerability, which is why so many people stay quiet, especially when they're having struggles.
They stay quiet because they don't want the stigma.
They don't want to be seen as less than.
They don't want to attack.
My feeling was: what else are they going to say at this point?
If I think it's going to be helpful to people, I want to talk about things.
You know, people in my life said, well, you know, careful on the you talk to a therapist thing because people are going to think you're crazy.
And I said, all right, well, maybe they're right.
I said, but the point is, that's exactly why you do it.
You do it because it's such a great tool in my life.
This guy's become like a life coach for me.
Funny story for you guys.
My therapist started out as a couples therapist.
And after that first wave of couples therapy where the husband traditionally takes the beating, they both decided, because you know, they both decided.
I'm talking about couples retreat is what I think.
I don't know if you've seen the movie Couples Retreat.
Both of them decided that my wife didn't have to be there anymore.
Honey, I'm going to be a while.
So he became my therapist, and he's been my therapist for a long time.
He's like a life coach, best tool I have in the world.
He won you over.
He won you over as a one-on-one.
You want to spend time with him.
I believed him.
I do believe him that he said, look, if you want things to work in your life, you have to do everything you can to work on yourself and make accommodations everywhere that you can.
And that is a skill set.
And, you know, it's great to be a natural fighter and to be great with confrontation.
It has limited applications in your personal life.
You know, you don't want to take on every argument.
If you want to stay married or you want to be a good parent, you got to learn how to shut your mouth and listen and let things play out.
And I was never really good at that before I started that process.
And then when I went through the down, he said to me, you know, it seems to me that we keep coming back to a similar cycle of emotions for you.
And I think that you're having a hard time regulating how you feel about these things.
And I would like to try, after we've talked this out for a while, I'd like to try you on an antidepressant and see if it helps you with your kind of balance of how you're feeling.
Because I would have like big lows, like, you know, I'll never be what I was.
Look what I did to the family.
I'm getting attacked for helping my brother.
I didn't even really help him.
You know what I mean?
Because look at the situation he's in.
So it's like, I failed, I failed, they failed, I failed.
And so then I was like, okay, you know, let's take it.
Give me all of it.
I want, you know, I want all the smoke.
And he was like, no, that's not how these works.
We start with a small dose.
I was like, no, no, no.
I'll take the big dose.
Whatever the big dose is, I want the big dose.
And obviously I learned about how it really works.
And I was like, you know, I should talk about this because he said, you know, a lot of people won't go on medication because of the stigma.
And then I'm in this training course for this Coast Guard certification.
And they're talking about how you're going to have a p-test, you know, in a drug test and all that stuff, all the protocol.
And I say, hey, what about if you're on like medication?
Do we have to list that stuff?
And the guy's a great guy who did the course.
And he was like, what do you mean?
Like crazy pills or something like that?
And I was like, yeah, like crazy pills.
What if you're on that?
And I was laughing when I said it because there's no shame.
I have no shame in my game.
I know who I am.
I know who I'm not.
Did you know?
We talked before the show, because I saw your Kanye West interview.
Yeah.
And you kept reverting back.
Number one, you called him Kanye West multiple times.
It's yay.
It's yay.
I didn't even know he had changed his name.
Right.
And with no disrespect.
You kept addressing not only the anti-semitism stuff.
You're like, are you addressing your mental health?
And you were very open.
And you're like, listen, I take my depression meds every day.
You leaned into it.
Well, but I think it's like, you know, we're living a lie here that it's an exception.
You know, depression is, by most people's calculus, a leading illness and diagnosis in our country.
My concern with Ye, and he called into the show, I didn't know that was going to happen.
I don't like putting people in distress on television.
One of the biggest opportunities I missed in my career was when Charlie Sheen was all the rage about the tiger's blood and winning.
I had common friends with him and there was no question and again, no disrespect to him because I don't think talking about somebody's health is really anyone's business, but there were clearly stability issues there that had to be.
So I wasn't going to put that on TV because I felt it was fanning the flames of seeing that as less than seeing that as a carnival act.
And I didn't want to do that.
And that's my concern with Ye also is that people take what he's saying as if it was coming from a sober mind.
And that's dangerous in terms of discounting somebody's illness.
And it creates a baseline for what's okay to scrutinize that I don't agree with.
Anyway, the short answer is everything that matters is okay.
And I'm excited about building something at News Nation.
I've never done that before.
You look like you're having fun, which is very good.
I mean, when I see your podcast stuff, it looks like you're having fun with your YouTube channel.
The YouTube channel podcast is new for me.
It's the only thing I've ever done professionally that is only what I want it to be.
You know, I pay for all of it.
I just started doing ads, which happened to be my favorite part of it.
You know, I've never done an ad in my life.
Like live reads.
Yeah, well, yeah.
I mean, it's not the performance of it.
That's all easy.
But it's, if I like it, I say, yeah.
Like, you know, the AG1.
These are the living green things.
AG1 stuff.
I mean, it really, it works for me.
I'm a huge supplement guy, and it's really hard to get the mixes right and what your body's actually going to absorb and not and what makes a difference.
You know, like gut health, inflammation, all these things that like beset ethnic bloodlines.
I'm into it.
So it works for me, so I'll say it.
So I get a lot of offers for advertisers where I'm just like, well, this sounds like a bullshit thing, you know?
So I'm not going to use it.
I'm not going to say it.
So have you done Manscaped yet?
Have they reached out to you yet?
Because they're going to reach out if they have to.
They're not going to, first of all, no.
This is a very important question.
My son has a manscaping kit that I got him.
So there you go.
The 17 years.
He is, his game is strong.
I am like a drop gene Italian.
I am one of the most hairless.
I'm like, you know the Mexican hairless Chihuahua?
I am that version of an Italian.
Yeah, you don't have any arm hair going on?
My grandmother.
My father had more of a mustache than I have.
Nice.
By the way, real quick, shout out to our sponsor today, Manscaped.
I'm just kidding.
No, no, no.
We're not doing no Manscaped.
No, no, no.
Well, by the way, you've done it before.
You've done Manscaped before.
I want to follow up on some of the questions here with you.
So you're saying, you know, I'm going through this.
You know how sometimes you talk to people like, look, 38 years old, I've never had any allergies.
And then all of a sudden I got this allergic.
I never thought I had a allergy to this, allergy to that.
The other day, Vinny is having shrimp.
His lip becomes like this ridiculous lip, and everybody thought it was a prop.
And it was his lip.
It was really easy.
But he's 44 years old.
He's got this lip.
And so did you have a track record in the past of being depressed or going through this before?
Or was this like, what's this all about?
I'm a tough guy.
I can handle something like this.
Or was it like, man, I'm tough on the outside, but man, deep down inside, I got some insecurities and I've been hiding it very well.
And people don't know about the fact that I'm afraid of this or shadow this or that.
Can I be the man that I want to be?
What was it for you?
I think that it's a great question, by the way.
And I think that there is a tendency to confuse personality with your chemical balance, right?
And one, there's certainly correlation.
But my obvious, and you know, I'm very blessed with a lot of very longtime friends who will say to you, oh no, this guy's had problems ever since I met him.
But personality flaws aside, I had never, this is really the truth.
Here's what really knocked me sideways.
I did not see this coming.
I knew the moment that I had my brother on during the pandemic, I was going to pay a price.
And anyone who's around me remembers me saying it, remembers me saying it to my brother when he was, you know, capping COVID and the love gov and all this stuff.
I said, enjoy this because there is an immutable reality in media.
You told him this.
Oh, yeah.
If you are going this way, you are going to go this way.
And I said it to him.
My brother is friendly and more than collegial with Governor Christie.
And when Governor Christie was having his first love up, you know, you remember that when he was like the new Giuliani and he was tough and all this?
Yeah, before the bridge.
I would say to Andrew, listen, it's an immutable truth in media.
If they're looking for reasons to bring you up, they're going to look for reasons to bring you down.
And if circumstances allow, it's going to happen.
We saw it happen there.
Happened with Andrew.
I did not anticipate how it happened with Andrew, but I knew I would pay a price for having him on because it was an obvious conflict.
Now, the reason that I was okay with it was one, my bosses really wanted it.
Jeff Zucker?
Yeah.
And I don't think he made the wrong call, by the way.
But I knew that the media would say, well, you're having your family on.
The interesting thing was always the disconnect between the PBDs of the world and the journalists of the world.
I have been in the business a long time.
I've won almost every piece of loose sight they give out in television journalism.
I've never had people thank me for anything in terms of the value of work as they did for the work with my brother and when I was sick.
It's not even a close contest.
The number one thing that people say to me when they see me is, thank you for how you helped my family during COVID.
Thank you.
Nothing else even comes close.
So because I knew that that was the feedback of people saying, you know, I'm so afraid of so-and-so getting sick.
I got this old person.
I got this immune compromised person.
Thanks for letting us know what it's like to have it.
I was okay with it, but I knew I'd pay a price.
I just couldn't have anticipated what took my brother down and the opportunity the media would have to scrutinize me.
I didn't see it coming.
And as a result, when it came, something I had always defined myself as, which is really good at anticipating what's going to come and how within media and politics, I was kind of blindsided by it.
And everything that was said about me didn't make sense.
It seemed like this is, I don't know how you could believe this.
This can't be true.
You may not like that I helped my brother.
You may not like that I had him on TV.
You may think it was a sin of journalism, but obviously it was what my boss was okay with.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have been on TV.
And I never lied about helping my brother.
I told the audience, the audience got it.
Nobody expected me to objectively cover my brother.
I never did.
My interviews with him weren't accountability interviews.
Nobody would accept that.
My mom loves more and who's this?
Yeah, I mean, you know, he was just wrong about all of that, but that's okay.
But that's, look, it was what people I felt were really benefiting from in that moment of the familiarity of it.
I just didn't see it coming.
So, you know, Patrick, when you don't see something coming, it is much more damaging.
You know what I mean?
So, like, the hook can be half as powerful as what your jaw can take.
But if you didn't see the hook coming, it's destabilizing as much as it is injurious.
So, that's what it was for me.
I didn't see it.
And it gave me an opportunity that I don't wish on anybody, but it was really helpful.
I got a good chance to go back to zero of everything that you had that you may have valued is gone.
So, now what do you really value?
What do you really want to do?
What do you really want to be about?
Because you're starting over at 50-something, whatever I was at the time, 51, whatever.
And that's not easy.
I don't wish that on somebody, but I believe very much that there are no problems in life.
There are opportunities.
They can suck.
They can be great.
They're still about what you make out of them.
I want to go back to the question.
I want to go because this is a question I want to ask.
So in this setting, your dad is a beloved, admired, respected.
Even when he called out his opponents, he would say, well, you know, Mr. such-and-such has these views, but my views are this.
It wasn't what politics is today.
It was a very classic.
He was the Reagan of the other side, is the way I would put it.
He would be lost in politics today.
Yeah, he would be lost in a positive way or in.
No, in a negative way.
He'd be lost.
Oh, he individually.
He wouldn't understand how you can say, not PBD, but that how an opponent, all right, I disagree with your tax policy.
I disagree with your immigration policy.
Let's get something a little bit more visceral, okay?
But I get it.
You know, you're a first-generation American, so I'll give you a little bit of a break.
But you're a bad guy who wants to see my daughters be raped.
And my father wouldn't have known how to, he would have had to fight.
You know what?
He would have been like, oh, you just said I want your daughter to get raped.
We have to fight.
Because he wouldn't have understood that level of insult that is just divorced and devoid from any sense of reason.
So wait, you don't want to argue my position.
You just told me that I don't care about your child.
That's not who he was.
That's all our politics is now, which is, you know, it can't be that Bobby Kennedy Jr., whom, look, I haven't been interviewing him.
People say I'm afraid of.
My brother was married to his sister for a long time.
They got three beautiful kids.
Harry Kennedy.
Yeah, I care about her.
I care about him.
I've known Bobby most of my life.
And I wish him well.
But the last thing I need is to get hit in the head with another stick of conflict.
So that's all it is.
I've talked to Bobby about what he's doing in his campaign.
It's not that Bobby Jr. should be called crazy, unstable.
It's the vestiges of addiction.
He's this.
He's a major candidate.
It's judge his positions.
All right.
If you don't like what he says on this, tell me why.
I don't want to hear your character analysis of everybody that you disagree with.
That's where we are now.
And we're there because it works better.
That's why.
By the way, when you describe your dad, you know, to Armenians, when I first came to America, I'm Armenian Assyrian.
You know, when they say, hey, you're such a motherfucking, you say that to an Armenian, they're thinking you're saying you want to screw their moms.
Like, wait a minute, what did you just say?
So you have to fight them, right?
It's a literal mindset.
Like, it's, we take it literally.
You don't talk to me like that, so I can see what you're talking about with your dad being old school.
And yeah, it's old school, but also that's how it was.
I remember a situation.
So he is in a budget battle that was like existential, okay?
With the head of the New York State Senate, who was another Italian guy.
He has him over to the governor's mansion, right?
They open a bottle of wine.
And I know it sounds, you know, stereotypical, but whatever, this is what happened.
And they, Ralph Marino, they are going at it, okay?
But it is no, your mother, this, you know, you know, you're a pedophile or anything crazy like that.
It's Marino wanted to make a deal.
My father, in truth, my father was a gifted speaker, orator.
He could capture people's imagination.
He was not a great politician.
He was not a great deal maker.
You know, he was a no, what I want to do is right.
What you want to do is wrong.
So, you know, I think my brother actually has much better political skills of understanding where a midpoint will be sooner than my father did.
But they made an accommodation for each other.
They saw each other as both coming from a good place of what they wanted.
They did not agree on how, but they would figure something out.
That does not happen now because it is enough for you to say, you have to stop Cuomo.
Forget about what I'm going to do.
Forget about what you're going to do.
Forget about your position.
Forget about whether it works.
Forget about whether it's reasonable.
Forget about any of that.
I have to stop this guy because he's a danger.
He should frighten you.
And you wonder why.
It's a battle to the bottom.
That's why.
When did this change, Chris?
Because what you're talking about, this is the 80s.
Okay, let me do this before we go interchange.
This question I still haven't got an answer.
I really want to understand this part as a father of two sons.
So for me, this is what I want to understand.
I asked the question depression-wise.
Had you in the past had a trend of...
Okay, so that's a no.
No.
So this all of a sudden happened like I was caught off guard.
So okay, so then the question would be on this topic before we move on to the next, because you said so much, man.
You talked about this.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to say that.
No, I love this.
This is a long-form podcast, which produces more content.
You talk about COVID, how you've never had anybody come to you the way they do in the COVID situation.
Your brother, when he was limelight, every day, we thought he's going to be the next president.
I got questions there, and I got a couple other things you talked about, podcast TV.
But the question I want to ask is, your dad is Mario Cuomo, gives a speech, I want to say, 84, and he has a moment like Obama has an 0-4, 20 years apart, give or take.
And then all of a sudden, it's like, this is the guy, and not only the guy that's going to be a governor, he's going to be the first Italian president, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
He's got the swagger.
He's got confidence.
He can negotiate behind closed doors.
Then it doesn't happen.
Was there ever from your father's style of leading you and your brother and raising you guys, did you ever feel there was a shadow there of him as well as your brother?
Because your father became a two-term.
Your brother became a two-term, three-term, I'm sorry, he also ran for fourth.
My apologies.
He was a three-term.
Your brother was a two-term.
You're the guy that's a star on TV.
Everyone knows the last name Cuomo.
Was there any element of a shadow from Pops?
Or if not, what did he do to not create a shadow type of an environment?
The answer is going to be very different based on the brother, right?
Andrew is in political life.
He believes in the marrow of his bones that whatever comes with public service is worth it.
I would not be surprised if he decides to get back into elected office.
I do not, I worry about that as his brother and someone who loves him and someone who feels that he's given enough and dealt with enough.
I've actually felt like that for a long time.
But he just believes that this is the best way to help.
And that's all Pop was about.
Is there a shadow?
I would reverse the metaphor and say, I think that there's a glow.
You know, you don't have to agree with my father's politics.
I didn't agree with some of my father's politics.
That's okay.
But he was a good man who did things for the right reasons.
And I love that.
I am privileged by that.
I'm very proud of my family name.
I'm proud of what my mother has done and my sisters.
I mean, they're the really talented people in the family.
We just talk.
Andrew actually does public service.
Proud of him.
Proud of how he's handled this situation.
But so it wasn't shadow.
It was shine.
And it compelled Andrew to want to do the same kind of work.
It caused reaction formation in me where I would never do that kind of work.
You would never do.
I would never go into elected office.
Why is that?
Too hard on me and my family as kids.
Too much exposure to things that you don't control, that you don't deserve, that you're not responsible for.
Too much ugly compromise.
Too much having to smile and shake hands with someone that you know doesn't deserve it because you believe in a greater good.
Too much money and the need for money, even what we're seeing with Biden right now.
The best thing he has going for him is that the DNC has fundraised competition out of the picture.
So they know they can't match the ads.
And ads are what, five, seven to one, negative to positive, which means I'm constantly burying PBD under something that may or may not be true, but it's getting a lot of time.
That's the best thing he has going for him.
My father hated it.
The worst thing you could do is give money to my father and then ever want to meet with him again.
You know, because he was like, no, no, no, no, I can't.
If you hadn't donated, Peeby, I would have talked to you about what you're doing with Value Taint.
I think we could help you here in New York.
Now I can't talk to you.
So he was different.
But it was shine, not shadow.
And Andrew and I came to very different conclusions.
I respect his.
It's stronger.
There's more grit and goodness in the decisions he's made than I have.
But I'm okay with that.
And that is another reason that I got knocked so sideways.
So that here I am saying I made a decision that, of course, I'm public facing.
Of course.
But I didn't think I had set my kids up to pay the price that they wound up paying because of me.
And it killed me.
It killed me.
The reason, you know, this stupid video that is out there of me, of Shelter Island, where these three guys, they make it look like it won, but it was three, coming at me about calling me Fredo.
Here's what bothered me about that.
One, and I'm sure you can agree with this.
In front of your nine-year-old daughter, somebody calls you something that is offensive to you as an Assyrian Armenian.
Okay?
They say it to your daughter.
Okay?
Now you tell me if all that follows is a conversation.
So first of all, they leave that part out.
The media left it out.
Why?
Didn't serve their purpose.
They wanted me to be a big Italian hothead, you know, muscle man who wanted to beat up this one little guy.
It was three good-sized guys who stopped a nine-year-old girl and said, hey, you think Fredo will take a picture with us?
Now she didn't know what they were saying.
Yeah, the edited narrative strikes again.
But I then talked to them.
Yeah, I was cursing.
And I knew he had the camera out.
I'm not a fool, you know.
But I didn't care because I thought the point mattered.
And I'll tell you something.
A couple years later.
Rob, can you pull up the video just so some people can see what it was?
A couple years later.
I'm at a restaurant and I see this young woman looking at me kind of weird.
I kind of look over and look back.
I'm with a buddy of mine.
And all of a sudden, I see this guy standing next to her, which is one of these guys.
One of the three.
And he comes over and he's like, hey, I just want to say I'm really sorry about that.
I didn't know it was going to go that way.
I didn't know that.
I didn't really recognize him at the time, but then I did.
And I shook his hand.
I said, you know what?
You don't have to apologize.
The situation was ultimately on me.
I'm the adult.
I'm the TV guy.
I should have known what was going to happen, but I just didn't give a shit because at some point, there has to be decency.
And people will say, You're talking about decency.
You were threatened about, you know, the difference between me saying I'm going to do something to you and me doing it.
That is a grace, okay?
That I'm going to tell you what I should do to you, but I'm not doing it.
That is a grace, okay?
And I thought it was an accommodation.
I was actually proud of myself.
I actually called CNN and told him that this happened right after it because I was like, but I didn't touch anybody.
I didn't touch anybody.
One of the guys put his hand on me and I said, I'm telling you, take your hand off me.
And I gave him the warning.
He took the warning.
But I understand why it blew up in my face, especially when the former president decided to weaponize it and use it against me as if I was the threat, not him.
But in context, the kid saying it to the kid is just too much.
You're saying this, Rob.
If you can go, just show five seconds of it.
Just show five seconds of it, whatever, with a little bit of audio, Yelan, if we can go through it.
You don't see my daughter.
Yeah.
You don't hear the part where I say you say that to a nine-year-old.
I thought that's who you were.
No, bunk-ass pictures from the right call me Fredo.
Yeah, my name is Chris Boyd.
And he said, I thought that's who you are.
You thought my name was Fredo?
Yeah.
So we're in the back.
Let me tell you what's going on in the back.
So we're going through all the stories.
Are we bringing this up?
Are we bringing that up?
What's the last thing I said?
What do we talk about at the end?
You're like, yeah, I don't want to bring it up.
I don't care about bringing this up.
Okay.
So you brought it up, but let me tell you what I did say.
I say, you know, somebody, and you asked the question, I think, so, Peter, if somebody comes and says to you, what would you say?
I said, dude, probably a very similar reaction if you're going to try to do something with my family.
But believe it or not, this did nothing for me.
I think Trump's just an opportunist.
He saw it, boom, capitalized, run with it.
And what Trump wasn't my problem.
Look, I have known the former president most of my adult life.
Sure.
My mother and his mother went to the same beauty parlor.
Okay.
Wow.
Matilda.
Your mom.
Yeah.
And it's the idea that I have a personal animus towards a former president is just simply untrue.
I don't like that he made me a personal target because it affected my kids and I live in a Trumpy place.
So I didn't need that.
He could just judge the work.
I always had him on.
I always offered him interviews.
People would hate me for giving him the opportunity.
He would come to you.
He did for a while.
And then he did.
And that's okay also.
He would continue to contact me after that, complaining about CNN or whatever it was.
And I would be a fair broker to him to tell him why it was and who it was.
I would have his supporters on.
I was the only show at CNN, or certainly the show at CNN the most, who had on Trump supporters.
Always.
And I've done it at News Nation also because I believe in more dialogue, not less.
I believe that if you have an idea that I don't like, I don't censor your idea.
Make the case.
Let me test the case.
Try to disagree with decency.
Don't let it get personal.
And if you make it personal, call out that you're making it.
Now you're making it personal.
And that's a sign of a weak argument.
And I've always done that.
So I don't have a personal animus against him.
I'm not surprised he did that.
That was the right play.
They're saying that you're a tough guy and that you're making people angry.
Look at your boy.
I get the play.
What I didn't like was that my brothers and sisters in the media ignored the context and allowed me to be displayed as something that I'm really not.
But look, that's the price.
You want to be in the media.
This is the price.
Don't complain.
So I didn't complain.
As a kid, when you were a kid, because you said something you do, I don't want to get into politically sometimes.
You know how a family of like General McChrystal is a four-star, but his dad was a two-star.
This other person was a two-star.
Like you're like, oh, okay, I kind of got to do it.
And there's typically that one kid's like, dude, I want to have nothing to do with you, put me out of that shit.
I don't want to go in the military.
I don't want to go into Hollywood.
I don't want to go into this.
I don't want to go into that.
So, was it how they treated your dad?
You're like, I don't want to do this part.
Was it the element of, hey, Chris, in school, when they ask you this, you can't say that?
You know, in school, they would come up.
I can't believe your dad is a this.
Your dad is a dad.
Is it that element where you're like, I just don't want to deal with this?
A little bit.
Okay.
You know, as you, you, and you can identify, I don't know your guys' backgrounds the same way, but my father and his family had such immense pride that he could be in the position that he was.
You know, his parents were illiterate.
And I don't say that insulting.
They just didn't have the opportunity.
So for him to be this and to serve and to be able to be a voice, let alone such an eloquent voice.
You know, I mean, your mother and father are struggling to put together a phrase in English, and you are one of the best wordsmiths of your generation.
The pride and the service, there was no shame.
There was nothing but what an amazing opportunity.
What a privilege.
And so I always took whatever came with it that way.
One funny story.
My father, so we're in Hollis, right?
My father becomes governor, whatever that means, because I didn't really know what he did.
You know, I'm 12 years old, you know.
So, I mean, I knew he was lieutenant governor.
I don't know what that means.
This guy in a car and he leaves, and he was away a lot.
My father worked.
My father worked first, second, and third.
His priority was the gig because he felt that was the service to get back because of what his family, the opportunity his family had been given here.
And very ethnically diverse place, very tough place, not like the hood or anything, but it was a place where any of the things that our kids exist in today didn't exist where I was there.
Somebody came up to you and talked shit to you where you had to defend yourself, or it was never going to end.
So when my father became governor, all of a sudden, I got hit with like one of the worst things that could be said about you where I grew up, which was this guy thinks who he is now.
And I didn't even know what, you know, what I was, what does that mean?
Who am I?
Exactly.
But that's not how it worked.
So one day I'm getting chased from the bus stop back to my grandmother's house.
I spent a lot of time with my father's parents once he got into politics because nobody was home.
So I, you know, I stayed with my grandparents around the corner.
And my grandmother is sitting at the front door of her house and I'm running away from like three kids, four kids, man.
I don't know.
And I run up the stairs to her house and she sees the kids chasing me and goes, kick on the screen door.
Lock you out?
Yeah.
And she goes, you're kidding me.
So I turned.
And wanted you to fight them?
Yeah.
She's like, you know, she just went like this and pointed at them.
And then like on the front lawn, right in front of there, it was like me and these three guys, like kind of rolling around for a little bit.
And then.
And you remember this vividly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I always tend to remember an ass beating.
And she was like, you don't run away from your problems.
And she was right.
You don't run away from your problems.
You may lose.
You may lose.
They're going to respect the fact that you face them.
Yeah, whether they do or they don't.
Do you respect yourself?
100%.
Absolutely.
Question here before we move on.
Mom and dad married 60 plus years.
And, you know, I asked Robert, RFK, years ago when we did the first interview, tell me about the values at night, you know, what it was like at dinner table, et cetera, et cetera.
I asked President Bush when we had him once, I'm like, hey, what was it like?
You know, what was family like?
What was your grandfather?
You know, whether it's, you know, did you guys have certain rituals, traditions, you know, what you guys did?
What was, you know, you're at dinner, mom, dad sitting there at the dinners at dad was at least home because he's always away working.
But when you guys were at dinner, what were some values your dad or your mom passed down to you?
What was conversation like?
Did he bring up politics?
Did he bring up real issues?
Hey, Chris, what do you think about this?
Hey, what do you think about that?
I know you and your brother's age difference is 13, so I don't know if that would happen a lot.
But what values and principles did he pass down to you?
The picture tells you everything, although every one of my siblings will hate that you're using that picture.
Family.
Family.
It was all the typical travails of family.
I was the only one in that family that had parents who had the ability to pay for any of my education.
Andrew worked his way through college and law school.
Margaret, the oldest, all scholarships.
They were all amazing students.
You know, money for school, loans for school, local colleges.
I was the only one went away from school.
So I had a better family setting than they did.
It was much more middle class for them.
And family.
You don't have to like each other all the time.
You're not going to like each other all the time.
You are there.
And if there's trouble, you're there.
There is no why.
There is no go.
And my siblings have always been there for me, no matter what it is.
There's never discussion until after.
And then you'll have a discussion about what they helped you with or out of.
But it was a very traditional Italian Catholic Queens, you know, life where what my father worried about were the simple things.
There was no high-minded, you know, do you think we should be a democratic republic or do you think that there should have been somebody?
It was not lofty stuff.
He certainly thought and read and wrote about that stuff himself.
But it was simple.
How you doing in school, you know, him taking an assessment of whether you're talking back to anybody around, which wasn't going to happen in my family, too.
It was, you know, it was just a different time.
Did he joke with you guys or was he always?
My father was hilarious.
Okay.
My father was very funny.
He could get hot very fast.
So, but again, it was a different time.
You know, I wasn't trashed.
I wasn't talking back to my father anyway.
You know, I mean, the way our kids are today, you know, the upside is they feel a safety and a security around me where they can say whatever it is about me and not worry about it.
I'm going to say hot.
Would he ever hit you?
No, he would get upset about what it was.
This picture right here, is that your brother all the way to the right?
Yeah, he's not going to like this.
He looks like, I mean, he looks like a guy, a Sopranos character right there.
Andrew, by the way.
So I am, as my mother used to say, now she's 90, you know, something.
Although I don't know why she's sensitive about that.
I was like, once you're 90, why do you want people not to know you're real age?
Anyway, she's in her 90s.
And now she just says, oh, yeah, he was a complete surprise.
She used to say, I was a blessing back in the day.
I'm 16 years from my oldest sibling, 13 from Andrew.
And you're three years old in that picture?
I am probably like eight or something, seven, eight.
And I'm much younger than my other siblings.
Andrew was like a father to me, which is another important thing to understand about my level of dedication.
Loyalty.
He is, you know, especially with Pop gone.
I never looked outside my own family for a male role model.
So, you know, You know, my, whatever it is that I know and that I do was either taught by or figured out in reaction to what I saw in those two guys.
So the idea of any kind of subjective process as to whether or not I'm there for them misunderstands the nature of my family and my upbringing, you know?
So let's go to that.
Let's go to that with, you know, well, you're saying while you're working at, you know, the pressure and then all of a sudden I'm thinking I'm helping my brother out, but I failed, actually didn't end up helping him out.
I thought I was doing good.
I done all of a sudden I get fired and I don't know what's going on.
So the stories we read about, you know, that's public, you know, behind closed doors, he was helping him with, you know, what to say and what not to say, how to handle the media, but then you, you know, knew what was going on here.
Some of that stuff went from the outside we see.
And I think about if my sons are going through it, I think we had this debate in our prep meeting yesterday.
Was it yesterday or Thursday?
I don't know where the, we were doing it yesterday?
Yeah.
And I said, so let me get this straight.
So if my son doesn't protect the other son, they would have a problem with me if you didn't back each other up, right?
So that part of it.
Now, gamesmanship, there's another thing where if I know Chris's brother is going through what he's going through, I'm not a fool to know your loyalty is going to be to your brother.
That's the loyalty to your brother, because in your mind, you're like, my father's watching me right now.
You better XYZ.
Okay, so that's that part.
Then the other part is, as a person running CNN, I can't set you up for failure where you can't be communicating with certain people.
So I have to have a clear set of meetings to say, guys, if you do this, you're also going to get fired.
So don't set him up for failure where he can get in trouble, but you also can't do anything because you could get fired.
So this is my optics from the outside.
I don't know what happened on the inside.
If you want to kind of walk us through how some of this stuff takes place, what they said and what you said, and maybe we'll go from there.
Well, look, as you guys know, I'm in the middle of an arbitration process.
I know.
$125 million and all that, yeah.
And I don't want them, look, it's not about the money, okay?
It really isn't.
There's no question I was damaged by the situation.
I am not going to give anybody the opportunity to say that I was trying to prejudice that process, but I will say this.
There was complete transparency and understanding of everything that was going on because it was all obvious.
The only thing I take exception to is the idea that I was acting in bad faith or that I was lying or anything like that.
I told the audience, I'm helping my brother.
I'm not reporting on my brother.
If they had asked me to not be on air, I wouldn't have been on air.
I offered.
They CNN.
Yeah, I offered twice to resign.
When things started to get hot, I was like, I don't want to hurt you guys.
I didn't know.
You know, the reason I apologized, if you listen to my apology, wasn't I shouldn't have helped my brother.
It was, hey, if what I was doing compromised you guys and your ability to do what you do, I'm sorry.
I never meant for that to happen.
And I didn't see it happening because it seemed pretty obvious that, you know, CNN isn't helping, you know, isn't what we're talking about here.
It's Chris Cuomo who told the audience.
I never went to journalists and tried to manipulate their coverage of my brother or use my contacts.
And I think the best evidence of that is, where are they?
What do you think?
They're protecting me.
This is the same people who have gone out of their way to say as much negative things as they could.
They're not going to stand up and say, yes, you did.
You called me.
They wouldn't do that?
Come on.
And the idea of, you know, well, you were going after his accusers.
No, I was saying you can't.
Now, by the way, I understand why some people criticize and say, hey, that was bad advice you gave your brother.
He didn't fight back enough.
He should have fought back.
Maybe you're right.
Maybe you're wrong.
But the idea that I was some master of the dark arts, ask the people involved.
So if they had said you can't be on TV, I wouldn't have been on TV.
They're my boss, not me.
If they had said you can't interview your brother, I wouldn't have.
I didn't want to in the first place.
You know, that was something that they just thought was worth whatever risk there was with it.
But I don't want to jaundice the case.
I want this to be settled fairly.
It's not about the money.
I never lied.
I didn't act in bad faith.
I didn't manipulate media for my brother.
I didn't go after his accusers.
I didn't suggest he go after them in any way other than just by trying to say what his side of the story was and say it early and say it often.
And it's just all terrible.
What happened to him was terrible and painful for a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons.
You know, it took time for me to sink in exactly how big a hit I had taken.
I'll never get that back.
I love being at News Nation.
I love building something.
I have so much loyalty and appreciation for them giving me an opportunity.
I'm very glad that it's going well and there's been great acceptance by the audience as it grows.
But I was the number one show on the number one platform in the world.
I was relevant, if not resonant, on everything that was happening in the dialogue in this country.
And just like that, it was gone.
And it was gone on the basis of things that were already known.
That's what was boggling my mind.
I was like, wait, I don't understand.
What do you mean there was more going on?
I was helping my brother.
I was listening to his team about what they wanted to do.
They were running things by me.
I was giving them my take.
They almost always didn't take my advice.
And maybe they were right.
Maybe they were wrong.
But that's what it was.
And everybody knew it.
And I told it to the audience.
That's the part that boggled my mind.
And that all of a sudden, you know, people that I knew and I trusted and I thought and everything changed.
So look, I don't talk about it on the show other than what I've just said, which is to keep it general, because I'll deal with it there.
It's not your concern.
It's not about the audience.
This is about me and my former bosses.
And I'll leave it at that.
I'll never trash CNN.
I have tremendous respect for the outlet and the people there.
I think they do great work.
I have tremendous respect for my boss.
Jeff Zucker, he and I do not agree about what happened here.
He is the best mind of television I've ever been around.
He gave me tremendous opportunities that allowed me to be who I became at CNN.
I cannot take that away from him.
Have you guys had any interaction, dinner, since you left?
No.
If you had to go back again, would you have Andrew Cole Andrew on, or would that have been something you would have changed?
Here's really the best answer.
I would do it again.
And I'll tell you why.
Is it an obvious do you fail the journalism conflict?
Of course.
But you know, conflicts can be cured by transparency, okay?
I don't believe anyone in the audience was ever deceived into thinking I was giving my brother a pass journalistically.
I don't believe that.
I've never heard that from someone who doesn't work in the media.
I think it helped people.
I think it comforted people.
I think it gave them a sense of normalcy and relatability in a time that was completely unnatural and frightening.
And if it helped people, even though I knew I was going to pay a price, I just didn't think it was that price.
I just think there would be, I thought there was just going to be a series of articles saying how I shouldn't have done it.
You know, and I even said, you know, if you go back and look, I even said on TV, there's going to come a time when this has to end because there will be a period of accountability.
There always is, right?
Mistakes are going to be made.
And I can't interview my brother about the mistakes because I'm not objective.
I said it on TV and people always got it.
So for that part, if I could do it again, how could I not do something that I know was of tremendous value to the audience?
Chris, I got to tell you, when I moved to Dallas from Miami to Dallas right during COVID to work with PBD, Amazing Opportunity, Value Attainment.
We started the PBD podcast with zero subscribers and it was at the height of COVID.
And I can't tell you, I mean, PBD started the entire podcast off with, hey, look, I'm a fan.
I like what you did.
We would watch you and your brother.
And this guy right here who just said at the beginning, listen, we might not agree politically on some issues.
I love these guys, man.
To watch these guys go at it.
It's so awesome.
It's so raw.
It's so real.
And it's interesting how it worked out.
So there's a saying that people say, oh, he's a real one, man.
That guy's a real one, dude.
He's a real guy, right?
There's even a podcast, John Bernthal, Real Ones, right?
You know, you seem and you give off, you're just like a dude.
You're just a sharp, smart, real guy.
You talked about Trump earlier, and then your mom went to the same beauty parlor as his mom.
You grew up with him.
So with someone that's so real and so raw and so truthful, and now Trump labels you and all your people that essentially you've defended as fake news.
The fake news.
How do you process something like that?
Professionally, it's good tactic.
It's good tactic.
Playing on people's misgivings about the media.
You know, you said something earlier.
When did this start?
Always.
If you go back and read about the Lincoln Douglas debates, that was some ugly stuff.
There were suggestions of sexuality.
It was ugly.
And there wasn't even any media.
The thing that has changed for better and worse, and my needle goes a little bit in the negative direction, is more magnification.
There's so much more media.
There's so much more ability for platform.
And again, I'm in favor of more speech, not less.
I'm very concerned by what some are seeing as censorship.
That's a very heavy word for me.
But I believe in more ideas, not less ideas.
Beat the idea with a better idea.
Test the idea.
Just do it the right way.
But we have so many outlets now that can seem as significant as this one.
Like, you know, any podcast can seem, until you do the research and see the reach, the link looks the same as the PBD podcast.
You know, it must be the same, even though it's some bag of donuts, you know, sitting around with no basis of no intelligence or any of the things you guys bring to bear.
And in that way, we've magnified fringe voices.
So you now see your two political parties, and full disclosure, and I know journalists don't say this very often.
The two-party system is a game that is killing us.
And our leaders have said it from the beginning.
The results have shown it from the beginning.
The two-party system is toxic.
It is a battle to the bottom, and it is zero-sum.
And it is not what our system was set up to be.
It is not an animal of our Constitution or any of the formative documents.
It's not even a creature of law.
It's culture.
And they should not be in control.
And the Democrats are upset about a potential third-party bid right now.
The blame is on them.
If you do not give people the best choice, how can you criticize their desire for more choice?
Oh, but it's existential.
It can't be Trump.
That's on you.
And the process has put us in this position.
And I'm against it.
I want people to be free agents, critical thinkers, and be independent.
And that's the plurality of this country.
It's the fastest-growing partisan denomination, which is non-partisan.
So that's what's changed, is the more factor.
Okay?
You have fringe ideas that get magnified so much so that in a reductive process, a battle of attrition, a battle to the bottom, zero sum, I must lose for you to win, both parties are dominated by their fringe elements.
And people like you guys sit around and say, I don't get it.
I run a business.
I run a business.
I do this.
Where's the accommodation?
Why would I work with you when it is easier for me to just demonize you?
Why would I do the work?
Why would I talk about how the chip factory in Arizona is going to bring in Taiwanese labor because we don't have enough skilled laborers here in this country?
Why would I take that on when I can say, you know, you want my kid to be gender fluid?
I mean, one is so much easier.
It plays to people's fears and prejudice and concerns.
Culture wars are almost entirely bullshit because they fly in the face of the bedrock principle of this country: you do you and I'll do me.
Okay?
You ever hear the expression, your ability to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.
You know what I mean?
And we've gotten way away from that.
For good reason and bad reason.
You know, it's hard to argue: do you want a guy who looks like him running against your 15-year-old daughter in a race or in a wrestling match?
No.
But is that really happening enough where we have to make it higher on the agenda than what the right move is and for how long and in what way in Ukraine?
The only reason you would, you would never do that with one of your companies.
You would never do that with one of your companies because your bottom line would suffer.
You'd never grow.
You would fail at the first of your five-move analysis.
You would be failing to know yourself and understand yourself.
So that's the problem.
My problem is I can't effectively combat the problem.
It's suffused in our culture.
We cover the game.
These UFO hearings, okay?
People are making fun of us at News Nation.
They completely misunderstand the import.
I don't know if they're little green men.
I choose to believe there is a higher intelligence that is actually paying attention to what's happening here right now.
And that he sent his son here to literally die for the sins of people like me because I'm so flawed and so weak.
And that is the basis of my faith.
That's why you never hear me proselytize, put it on anybody.
I don't care what you believe, as long as it's not actively hurting somebody else.
I need it because I'm so flawed and I'm so desperate for any way I can use to get better.
But I choose to believe that.
But I'm going to be close to the idea that there's life beyond this planet.
This is the only one that figured out when Neil deGrasse Tyson tells me every five minutes that the place is bigger every time we measure it.
No, I'm open.
But that's not what the hearings are about.
UFO for me stands for unable to find out.
Why the F does the government get to make unilateral decisions about what we get to know and not, so that now you're going to have a congressional hearing and NASA gets to say, I'm not coming.
And the Pentagon gets to say to its people, you better stay here.
What?
Where is that?
How is that okay?
They should have to come and account to the American people, or at least the Congress, and say why you don't get to know what they know.
And if it's because it will lead to a huge competitive disadvantage with China, okay, put some meat on the bones for me.
The Kennedy assassination files.
Why?
Why can't you release them?
I'll tell you why.
Because each administration, some guy comes to them and says, you're new.
So you're probably a little intimidated by me right now.
Let me seize upon that to tell you this: you do not want to release these files.
You will have a problem that you will own.
Sources and methods, things that people will know.
You think that happens?
I think it happens every administration.
How else would you explain of all guys, Captain Chaos, former President Trump, doesn't release those files?
When he is, if a former president has one kind of policy agenda, it's I want people to feel comfortable thinking that the institutions of government are not serving their interests.
So somebody had the conversation with him and he said, I shouldn't release this information to the president.
I think somebody had a conversation with somebody who had a conversation with him.
It probably protecting themselves.
And again, look, I don't believe.
I don't believe in the deep state.
I don't believe in any of that, okay?
It's much more nuanced than that.
You sound like that.
By the way, your last five minutes, you sound like an anti-establishment guy, though.
What you just said, that five-minute clip.
I just think that label is cheap.
Look, nobody gets the benefit of context, right?
You can cut everything up any way you want.
You can make me seem anything you want.
I would trust you more, by the way.
Don't take that as a shot.
What I'm saying to you is be an anti-establishment.
I'm not anti-establishment.
Journalists question power.
I never defended the FBI one day in my life before the Trump administration because there became this threat to the institution overall.
I don't like it.
I hate the I can neither confirm nor deny.
I hate that answer.
Either you're trying to make a case against PBD or you're not.
Just give the answer.
I've been chasing after the FBI for 20 years.
That doesn't mean I don't think they should exist.
You know what I mean?
I don't want the IRS looking into me any more than they need to either.
It's not that I don't think they should exist.
So I felt forced into that position because of this power being brought to undo a system with no better solution after that.
So I'm not anti-establishment.
My job, look, to your ears, but to me, it's I test power.
I test power.
The dossier, okay?
The dossier has become a buzzword.
What is a dossier?
It's a French word for file.
This was raw intelligence from a single guy who was working a situation for hire for a pocket that was connected to Clinton.
They should have told us that right away.
They did say it was raw.
The entire investigation was not all based on the dossier.
But, but, and I say this all the time, and I know why people get upset.
You can't have politicians investigating their opposition.
You can't do it.
And you can say Mueller, but we had Mueller do it.
It doesn't work.
And it is a complete distraction from our interests.
The Hunter Biden stuff, the Trump stuff.
Look, you break a law and you can prove it.
Make the case.
Make the case.
But I'm telling you, these investigations that reek of politics are destroying us.
They're destroying us.
Do I like the payments to the different members of the Bidens?
Nope.
Do I like that they haven't been out in front of it and explaining it?
Nope.
I understand the adage that if you're explaining, you're losing in politics, but let me tell you something.
If you don't tell me your story, somebody else is, and you're not going to like the ending.
So I don't like those things.
Do I want them to be the sum total of our existence?
No.
I don't feel like that about the classified documents.
I didn't feel like that about the impeachment things.
I was on the record saying, one, don't talk about you may impeach.
Impeach or don't impeach, but don't play with it.
And once they went down the road of impeachment, I said, why are you doing this?
You'll never remove them.
Well, they told them that.
I said it on TV all the time.
The historicity of it.
No one is above the law.
First of all, that's not true.
Okay.
Yes, no one is above the law.
No one is above the law, okay, conceptually.
But there is prosecutorial discretion, okay?
And that's why you don't find a lot of tax cases, like the one they're even making against Hunter Biden.
Oh, but it was 17 million.
How many people do you know who have gotten sideways with the IRS in the millions of dollars and went to prison?
It's very, very rare.
They fine the hell out of you.
If you fight it, you wind up in a civil judgment situation, which you're probably going to lose, okay?
And then there are more fines, but they're going to jail.
The criminal, I mean, just look at it.
The numbers are very small.
So they don't want you to go to jail.
They want the payment plan.
That's right.
But it's all, but I'm just saying people know so much more about this than things that actually matter.
And I cover those things more than what actually matters.
Why?
Ratings.
Resonance.
People don't care about these other things because culturally, we're into this fight of what makes one side go down and what makes one side go up, which is at the cost of the other side all the time.
So Biden is the best choice.
Why?
Better than Trump.
You don't make that analysis anywhere else in your life.
I'm going to buy a Yugo or I'm going to buy a Fiat.
Well, I guess I'm going with the Fiat.
Why?
Well, not a Hugo.
No, I want to drive what he's driving.
Why?
Because that's the best, not the least worst.
That's what we've allowed in our politics to get there.
And it kills me because I'm not able to correct it.
That's why I do the free agent stuff.
You know, that's why I'm selling merch with free agent on it.
I haven't taken a dime of it.
I want the kitty to get big and then I want to crowdsource contributions with it.
I'm not making money off it.
I'm not making money off any of this shit.
I'm making half what I used to make.
You know, those days are over.
That was taken from me.
So I have to go in a different direction.
And I'm figuring that out as I go.
But I do know the challenge.
The challenge is the system.
The two-party system is killing us.
Primaries should be open.
Ranked choice voting should be considered and figured out.
Voting should be streamlined and understood and transparent.
We've got to be able to do better than this.
All my money, I don't even know where it is.
I don't even know what it is.
All my information is online.
I paid my mortgage, my maintenance payment, and a couple of utility bills on my phone on the way over here.
But we can't figure out a way to automate voting so that we know who people are in the world.
You know, that wouldn't favor Democrats if they did that.
Look, I understand the argument that there is an imbalance of enfranchisement as you go down the socioeconomic scale.
So, and again, sometimes it's not the better political argument.
The better political argument is show your ID when you vote.
It's a no-brainer political argument until you get into the weeds of, well, what kinds of people tend to not have driver's licenses?
What kinds of people tend to be less likely to want to have a government ID?
And you get into socioeconomic levels that do play to Democrats.
I get that, but that goes back to, you know, when you said, you know, the trans thing.
Do I want a guy this path size to compete against my 11-year-old daughter and say, is it trans?
No.
But is that really the top 10 issues in America?
No, that's a small little thing, right?
What you just said right now is a very, very small percentage of Americans that don't have an ID.
But the other side will then use it and will say, well, that's why Republicans are racist.
No, it's just, let's get an ID.
If we have the technology right now with crypto, where you and I, if I'm going to like, you know, November 2001, what came out in November of 2001?
Something called TSA, okay?
And why was TSA, you know, prior to that, you go to the airport, you know what would happen.
You just go and hey, hey, what's up?
Come to the gate.
See me at the gate.
Okay, I'll come to the gate.
I don't need to go through security.
9-11 happens, TSA.
Give me your ID.
Now, what do they do when you give the ID?
They put it in there.
They don't even need to see your, what do you call it?
Order.
Put your ID.
Okay, you're good.
All right, so if we have that technology there, do you realize how ludicrous and how dumb it sounds to say it's racist to ask for my ID?
Going back to what you said, why I said you sound anti-establishment.
So your dad, would you say your dad was an anti-establishment candidate?
Or what would you say your pops was?
I don't like the term anti-establishment.
And I'll tell you why.
Because I think that there is currency, but I think that it is reductive.
I think that it takes us in the wrong direction of wanting to be anti-establishment.
Can you define what establishment means to you?
To me, anti-establishment is code for tear it down, destroy the government, get rid of everything.
Everybody's dirty.
Everything's corrupt.
Everyone cheats.
There is no justice.
And I don't believe that.
I believe that you have problems in all of these things.
But I don't need to say this to you or really any of you guys.
But I mean, you know, it's just so, it's just so intimate for his family's last two generations of experience.
Go live somewhere else and see if you think that our justice system sucks, that our imbalances here are unforgivable.
If our government is so dirty, go live somewhere else and see how well, oh, well, you can go to Sweden.
Yeah, okay, go to Sweden.
You know, so I'm worried about being just negative to feed some sense of demagoguery.
Do I think that all of these different things have buckets of concern that should be addressed?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I just don't think we get there by just seeing who can shit on it more.
My father described his politics as progressive pragmatism, which is you go, you have a set of principles and you go case by case.
Now, in fairness to the analysis, he was a lefty, okay?
He was a new first-generation immigrant in this country who believed in helping the have-nots.
He believed that guys like you and guys like me should shut up and pay because we got to help these people so that we can have more people like you and more people like me.
He believed in speaking for the people who are the underclass.
He was a true anti-elitist.
When I got into Yale, my father was so upset.
He was like, really?
That's where you want to go with them?
He was an us and them guys.
I finished first in college.
They made me split it with the Irish guy.
I finished first in law school.
They made me finish it, split it with the Irish guy.
I couldn't get a job on Wall Street.
I had to work in Brooklyn.
They call me the swarthy ethnic, the gap tooth grin, the circles under my eyes, Mercurial Mario.
And now you want to go with them with the Biffs?
He said.
Why?
Because they had put him down his whole life.
One of the last jokes my father told, may he rest in peace.
And the pain is fresh because Tony Bennett, one of his remaining close friends, just passed.
And he was reading something about me and where I was and white privilege.
And he went, hot damn, we made it.
Christopher's white privilege.
Because, you know, the joke was he wasn't treated that way.
He was still considered an ethnic, you know, and now with assimilation and everything, you know, now Italian Americans are basically just more white people here, depending on how they want to keep their own traditions.
So that's why I'm shy about being anti anything.
And it's not just a semantic thing for me, but I'm absolutely anti-the two-party system.
I'm absolutely anti-the parties being in charge of the primary process in the States.
I think it's a huge mistake.
I think it's tearing us apart.
And that's why, thank God for the American people seeing it and wanting to be independent more than they want to be anything else.
Here's what I've taken away from you, Kay, so far.
And we got obviously a lot more things to go through.
I've taken that indirectly you're not a fan of Joe Biden.
You don't think he's the best candidate?
Indirectly, that's my interpretation.
Because what you said is that.
I'm not a fan of Joe Biden.
It's not a personal thing.
I just think that it is.
There are better candidates out there than him.
Well, I think the fact that we don't have more, better, robot.
Look, the fact that there aren't more guys with your kind of background, and there's a group out now that's trying to get more veterans into leadership positions in communities and using those skills and get them into politics.
I think we can do better than the people that we have in the ruling class right now.
And I don't mean class us them.
I get why guys like you would want to stay away from it.
I get that the level of scrutiny and stuff like that is absurd.
It's like almost, it's just, it's not about if, it's about when they find something that you can't explain to everybody else's satisfaction.
I think we can do better.
It's not a knock on him.
Look, Joe Biden is not Bo Biden, okay?
May he rest in peace.
Bo Biden would have checked a lot of boxes for guys like you.
And I just think we can do better in this country, but we have a system that discourages people from getting involved.
And so I'm not anti-I'm that's not the kind of guy I am.
But what I was saying is you didn't come here to support Joe Biden.
To be in Joe Biden's the greatest.
You didn't do that.
No, I'm not a Democrat.
Number two, you were.
I'm not a Democrat.
No, I'm not a Democrat.
Even though your father was a Democrat.
If your name is Cuomo, I'll vote for you.
You can be a giraffe party.
I'm going to vote for you.
I mean, that's what I am.
First of all, this isn't my father's party.
This is not my father's party.
This is not Reagan's party.
I agree.
I fully agree.
100%.
So that's what we're on.
So what would you say you are?
You're a registered independent or would you say Republican?
Yeah, look, it's even gotten hard for me to vote.
You know, you show up at the place to vote.
Everybody's like talking to you, looking at you.
It's become difficult for me.
I don't do party.
I am anti-party.
If you want to, if that prefix on something, they are a problem.
And then people will say to me, even, you know, the big brains and people I respect, yeah, but Chris, but that's the system.
Yeah, but then what changes?
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
You know, if I say to you, hey, listen, you got to cut out the Diet Cokes, man.
You know, it's spiking your glycemic index, even though you think it has a.
Yeah, yeah, but you know, that's what I drink.
Yeah, I know.
But if what we're trying to do is get your blood sugar down, we got to get rid of this shit.
That's what we have to do.
Yeah, but you can't change the party.
Not now, at least.
Not now.
Right now, it matters too much.
When does it not matter?
When have we ever had an election cycle where I didn't say where I didn't hear someone say, because I won't say it, this is probably the most important election of our time.
You know, it's like that every freaking time.
So when is something going to change?
People wonder how Trump became popular.
I saw it the first rally I went to, you know, where we were covering it, and I was like, oh, yeah.
I saw that he was an agent for legitimate grievance.
You can argue with him as the appropriate agent.
That's fine.
That's politics.
But the mistake I believe the media made and a lot of people on the left made was discounting the people's feelings of disaffection, of social engineering, of imbalanced workplace, of a sliding values scale, of fears for their kids and the ability to succeed.
Those are real fears, a mistrust of government, that now there are ruling classes, political classes.
Those are all real.
So when you say you're stupid to support Trump, you're saying that you don't believe that I have legitimate reasons to feel the way I do.
You're telling me I'm wrong to feel the way I do.
That is not only dangerous politically, that is bad psychology and bad human interaction.
And I understand that that's what Trump is for people.
I understand that that's why there's such forgiveness for his obvious shortcomings as a candidate.
Because in their minds, yes, yes, but this is also true about all these other guys.
You just don't go after them the same way.
Now, I happen to not agree with that, but that doesn't matter.
The analysis stays the same, which is he is a guy with a lot of money who they believe can't be compromised by what compromises everybody else, which is money, true or not.
He knows the system.
He's worked the system, okay?
And he's got tremendous cachet as a celebrity, which we discounted, how much celebrities matter in this country.
And he hates who they fear and worry about.
And he hates them.
And that is very powerful.
And that's why DeSantis can't get the same traction.
DeSantis has an amazing pedigree.
I mean, on paper, strong, strong.
But he's trying to play Trump's game, but he's not Trump.
He's not Trump.
He's an inside guy.
And you are not going to check the same boxes the same way.
And also, the sequel is never as good as the first movie, you know?
Other than the Godfather.
I guess.
Although, the reason that the second one and even the third one built the way it did is because what was set with that first one.
But of course, you can't have a second if you don't have a first, so it's not a fair analysis.
But you're right.
Most people agree with you.
It's a platform to build on.
You know, you talked about the system.
And what's very interesting to me that I've been watching over the last year is the phrase uniparty.
And there are disaffected people that are on both sides.
You're nodding.
You know what I'm talking about.
They say it's such a rigged uniparty game.
It's really a uniparty and it's rigged.
There's little differences on both sides.
And I'm going to say a name here, but I'm not picking on one party.
But Nancy Pelosi made a comment when W was president.
Listen, we only have to manage him for eight years.
And I sat back and I thought on that.
And in that statement, by the way, I think that statement gets made on both sides of the aisle quite a bit, where they're really looking at, hey, the game is us.
Congress, we're going to be here forever.
I said, but we just have to manage this cap for eight years.
And I sat back and I said, that's terrible.
You know, that is just this most wonderful system of government that we had, it's basically you have found a way to cripple it, both sides.
And then you hear about the uniparty side and the comments that are making on that.
You sound like, you sound like you're very carefully articulated, but it sounds like you're kind of feeling that down the middle as well.
Look, you have, you know, I don't like the word middle because middle is always weak.
You never want to be in the middle of anything, right?
If you're in the middle of any fight, all that's going to happen is you're going to get punched in the face.
There is reasonable.
There is left and right, and then there is the rest of your life, okay?
How you get along with your neighbors, how you deal with your kids' education, how you deal with conflicts at work and within your own business and in your own relationships and friendships.
We don't behave the way we behave in our politics anywhere else.
I guarantee each of you guys and everybody here has someone in their life whom they love, the family they choose, that they have a huge disagreement with about something.
It could be anything.
It could be the type of tackle you use when you go to a certain place or where you should, and where you're like, this is just the dumbest thing.
I would never do what you do.
I can't believe you did this with your house, with your business, what you allow with your kids, whatever it is.
But I love you.
And we have so much more that holds us together than this.
The only place where we don't allow that to predominate is politics.
And why?
Because it works better.
Because you only have two choices.
And if you can make one seem more scary than the other, that's enough.
But that doesn't work anywhere else in our life.
What I'm saying is there's such a big space of common concern and understanding and shared belief that we are harping on left and right who necessarily want to keep us apart because that's how they keep advantage.
The answer to the Pelosi's premise is very simple: term limits.
Yep.
Term limits.
But you can't get them.
Why?
You most likely need a constitutional amendment.
And I don't think we could get a constitutional amendment on the name of this country being America.
Other than some people who believe it had nothing to do with Amerigo Vespucci.
Okay, you can believe that.
But I'm of the school that it did.
You don't think if we dig into that cat enough, we're going to find things about him that we don't like in today's set of mores, and that you're not going to have a bunch of blue states who get enough energy to say, no, we can't name it America.
So I don't think we can get a constitutional amendment on anything for good reason or bad reason.
So you're not going to have that.
You're not going to have that happen.
But that's very, very sad to me because you can't be in there forever.
That's never what it was supposed to be.
You know, on this topic that we're on, so you're not here promoting Joe Biden as the GOAT.
You're not for censorship.
You want to know what the hell happened with JFK.
I know what happened with JFK.
I want you to be able to know and judge it for yourself.
And first of all, everybody who could be really hurt by what's in there is dead, right?
I mean, we're talking about something that happened 60 years ago, 60 plus years ago.
But you don't know what happened to JFK.
Look, you can Google it right now, and you'll see that there are huge holes in the idea of single shooter.
And look, I'm not happy to have this be an analysis of the mob, right?
Because that is the stain on my people.
And I hate the mob.
You know, you ask people, now we're getting a little old, but you ask people why Mario Cuomo didn't run for governor.
And I bet you one in four of them.
I'm sorry, president is going to say something to do with the mafia.
Yeah.
George H.W. Bush, may rest in peace, said to my father at a dinner one night, you know, we had an FBI file open on you about mafia associations.
We never really found anything.
And my father always mused that he was like surprised by, he sounded surprised when he said it to my father, which was, of course, my father didn't think he meant it to be insulting at all.
He thought he was a very genteel man.
But just imagine if like somebody said to you, yeah, you know, PBD, you know, the whole Bet David thing, you know, House of David, we started looking to see if you had any, I didn't find anything.
Isn't that weird?
He'd be like, what do you mean you didn't find anything?
Of course you didn't find it.
Pay respect over here.
Yeah, the link to it.
So I don't like that.
But if you look, it's all over the place.
Well, can you just clarify?
You sound very convinced.
What do you actually think happened with JFK?
I believe that there is, well, clearly he was assassinated, but the idea of it was just Lee Harvey Oswald, who was just some whack job who was the single shooter thing.
So, you know, so then why can't we know?
So let's say we're wrong.
Let's say it is exactly that.
It's Lee Harvey Oswald, a single shooter.
Everything else is bullshit propaganda for some agenda of disassociative thinking.
Okay, show me.
Well, I can't prove the non-existence of a fact.
Yes, you can.
You can tell me why you know it was just him.
You can tell me why the FBI, the CIA, nobody around who was supposed to be in the business of protecting the president had any reason to worry about anything.
Because we know that wasn't true about 9-11.
And not that there was a bunch of Israelis dancing around happy about 9-11.
That is ugly, fake talk.
But why did we change everything after 9-11?
Because we knew we could do better.
Why don't they want to release these files?
Because it's going to show that there was compromise around the president of the United States in terms of what was known, what was suspected, and what was done.
And they don't want to make themselves look bad.
And I get that.
You say they mean the FBI and the CIA?
Yeah, and just, you know, those people.
The establishment.
Those people, the people in the intelligence business, sources and methods, look, I don't have to tell you.
Of course, you have to protect that.
But the idea that, look, when you trust is based on transparency.
And when you don't tell me things, you are begging me to come up with another solution, right?
It's the root of all conspiracies.
You know, if you're not going to tell me, that's why I love when Trump plays with the anonymous sources.
There's no question.
I'll tell you, I haven't done this for a long time.
If we didn't have anonymous sources, you would know nothing.
Because people are afraid of what it's going to cost them.
I want to give you this information, but I want to lose my job, you know, over it.
Oh, there's whistleblower protection.
Yeah, great.
Show me a successful whistleblower.
So you need anonymous sources, but you just need to trust the outlets and make sure that they're doing the rigorous work that goes along with it.
But then he wants to use anonymous sources when they work for him because that's how it works both ways.
And he's not the only one to do that, of course.
But release it.
Let people decide for themselves.
What do you think?
Do you think it's LBJ?
Do you think it's CIA?
Do you think it's...
Look, I haven't seen the files.
But in the discussions that I've had with people who know a lot more than I do, it's just more complicated than that.
And there was mob involvement.
And that's embarrassing.
Look, I don't have shit to do with the mob, you know, just because I'm an Italian-American.
But it is embarrassing to me.
I don't like that the largest cultural understanding of my ethnicity is these scumbags.
But look, the truth is the truth.
And it helps to know.
And I'll tell you why.
It's healing.
It's healing.
When you say, I screwed up, we screwed up here.
We shouldn't do it this way anymore.
So we changed after this.
It gives people a reason to believe.
It gives people a reason.
Now, why don't we do it?
I'll tell you why we don't do it.
And I'll tell you why I understand why people don't want to apologize.
In normal life, okay, you were supposed to show up last night.
You didn't.
You know I needed you there.
It would have meant something to me.
You had a good reason, bad reason, no reason.
Your relationship with me matters.
You're going to apologize.
And I'm going to say, all right, I get it.
Or maybe I don't get it, but I love you.
Thank you.
I believe you're not going to do it again.
That's how relationships work, okay?
It is not how politics in the media works.
If you apologize, you are weak, and I will beat you over the head with the apology.
And I will probably use it to extend your exposure.
So you can't apologize.
You can't say you did things wrong.
Nobody gives you the benefit for the way they do in the world.
But there comes, so again, you're not supporting Jay Joe Biden.
Censorship, JFK, two-vote party system, military runner for office, all this stuff.
This is all a message of somebody who is anti-establishment, because if somebody in the last three years were to say, well, the left is the one that censored, God knows.
I can't tell you how many of my clips from RFK were taken down.
I can't tell you how many of my videos that we did during COVID got strikes.
And then later on, they're like, well, now you can talk about it.
That's not the right that was doing it during this period.
JFK, fine.
I mean, that's both left and the right that are hiding it.
Trump could have brought it out.
It's not just the left when it comes down to JFK.
Voting, the left doesn't want that to happen with the, you know, SAT.
And by the way, if you can pull up the chart right now, the trust in a government.
So this is public trust in the U.S. government from 58 to 22.
We know when it dropped in the 60s.
If you see right when it's at the peak, 76, 77, boom.
LBJ brings it all the way down.
Then we come up a little bit.
Then we go all the way down again.
Then we come up a little bit.
Then we go all the way down.
This is the lowest it's ever been.
The American people, this right here says, I don't trust.
But you have so much more media attacking trust.
Look, I mean, there's a lot more negativity in the space of information now than we've ever had before.
And look, I don't know a lot of things.
Absolutely.
Look, people have always had low levels of trust ever since you got into the 60s and the trust no one over 30 and the war and they started to know about the reality that the government can push for situations that are disingenuous.
And that became known and understood culturally.
And it's been up and down, but on a downward trend.
Go back to the number, Rob.
But you're a guy.
Go back to the, yeah, even pre-social this is down.
I mean, social, you can say whatever.
I mean, that started really happening.
Thank you.
Since the 60s, you know, since the 60s, you're going to see attrition.
And you're going to see certain things that change that.
9-11 obviously changed it until it didn't, right?
And now it's going to keep trending down.
But now we have a lot more energy invested in negativity than we do of anything reasonable or positive.
I mean, that's how you make money today.
You want to get involved in the media, you got to be joining some kind of hate parade or an agenda of some kind of discord.
And that's where you're going to make your money.
You know, I know one guy who's doing well in social media being a pure positive.
It's that MD motivator guy who goes, you know, the guy who is standing outside and say, hug me if you've ever been depressed.
Or he goes up to people and be like, oh, I forgot my wallet.
Can you give me a couple of bucks to get gas or something?
And when the lady or the guy gives it to them, he's like, here's a thousand bucks.
Thank you for him.
And they cry.
You know, he's like the only guy who I know who's spiking that way.
Everything else is playing to a conspiracy or a reductive agenda.
And not that it's untrue, but it's certainly more often than not unhelpful.
So I understand why that's going down.
You'd see a similar trend with media.
You'd see a similar trend with religion.
You'd see a similar trend with corporate, you know, brand trust and goodwill.
We're in a reductive period.
And my concern is: well, how do you address it and what can you do about it?
My biggest concern is the only thing that I see getting us to a better place is catastrophe.
And the pandemic didn't work.
The 9-11 worked for a little bit.
But even that I didn't like because it made people come together in unified fear and hatred toward a group that we then blew out of proportion.
Again, I get why people were frustrated with Obama not wanting to say Islamic terror.
It would make sense, given that you got a billion Muslims, that you don't want to throw them all in the same bucket.
And I get why Trump's early salvo was, Islam hates us.
And then he said, but I got a lot of Muslim friends who I love.
You know, I get it.
I get that it works, but that doesn't make it right.
And I get that you may have a right to say something, but it doesn't make it right.
That we've gotten confused.
And I know people beat me up about this all the time.
Deplatforming.
No, that's censoring.
But don't have people on who are just there to lie.
Let the audience decide how to judge the lies.
Don't put me in the position of saying I'm not going to have somebody on because I think they have no value unless you're talking about somebody who is in rarefied air.
You do not get to come onto any platform I control and talk about anti-Semitism or about how one race is better than another race.
You know, you do not have a hood on and come on my show.
Why?
Zero value of making anything better.
Well, that's a subjective judgment.
Yeah, it is.
But we're talking about an extreme category.
You want to come on and talk about the vaccine?
Let's talk about the vaccine.
You want to come on and talk about COVID, what was done right, what was wrong?
You want to come and talk about the Wuhan lab?
I want to know where the pandemic started.
Come on.
Now, but that was not a conversation that was allowed to be a good idea.
It was one of our first conversations.
And then we got confused with the whole China good, China, bad, right?
During the Trump administration, right?
China was good.
China's been great.
They've been so extraordinary and cooperative.
And then all of a sudden, COVID started to become a problem for Trump, blamed it on China.
Now, China bad.
Where did it come?
Where did it start from?
China virus.
I don't know if he can say that, but he was a guy that was putting tariffs on those guys left and right.
And he was doing the negotiation side where he had.
That was on the trade side.
Two things can be true at once, Peter.
I get that.
But let me tell you, Chris, if you're putting tariffs on it, what's shittier than a tariff?
Oh, you want to do this?
Huawei, his daughter's in Canada.
You're doing stuff with Iran?
No problem.
Here's another tariff.
Here's another tariff.
Here's another.
Hey, Mexico, here's another tariff.
He wasn't being the friendliest guy.
I'm not saying that he was.
I'm saying he was with the pandemic.
Look, I mean, all you can do is.
You call the China virus.
They kept saying you can't type China.
Type in Trump, China Cooperative, COVID.
And you'll see it come up that, you know, whatever the right search phrase is.
That in the beginning, he was saying they'd been great with us, right?
15 times, Trump praised China.
Now, again, I'm not blaming him.
See, blaming is cheap and easy.
It's not my point.
It was a fluid, dynamic situation that we had never handled before.
And for all the misgivings about the vaccine, our outcomes are better because of vaccine versus places that didn't have it.
And we would have not gotten it if he hadn't made it happen the way he did, which I thought was without question the most unassailable judgment of leadership he made during his term, which was, look, I know there are a lot of hang-ups in getting this done.
Get it done.
I'm telling you, get it done, or I'm going to get yeah.
It's going to hurt him with Republicans.
Republicans are going to, you know, the vaccine, you know, the people who are going to be able to do it.
I know, but that's the thing.
But look, look, they are weaponizing the vaccine for good, bad, and no reason.
And that's politics.
I just believe that there's a hyperemphasis on it, and there's so many more mouthpieces now in digital media able to echo these messages that it becomes more persuasive.
All I'm saying is two things can be true at once, okay?
He had tough trade policy.
He had guys who were trying to nail it down there with China.
The deal kind of fell apart, you know.
But, and that wasn't really his fault.
He overpromised a little bit, but that's politics.
That's politics.
I'm okay with that.
But the lab thing, in the beginning, we were like, yeah, and we had to back off because China was being helpful and we needed it for PPE.
So we went soft on it.
And then by the time we came back to it, there was too much at risk.
So we still don't know where it started.
And now they blame Tony Fauci.
You know, listening to you now and watching Tucker no longer at Fox.
Okay, so you were number one at CNN.
Tucker was number one, and Tucker's obviously right now crushing it on fire.
You know, he's doing what he's doing on Twitter.
His show is growing.
Independently wants to raise a few, you know, $100 million with Neil Patel to do what he's doing.
You sound more reasonable now listening to you, and almost like the handcuffs and the shackles are off versus what it was listening to you three years ago.
Tucker sounds more freer today, where he's kind of like almost a kid in a candy store.
I'm free.
I can say whatever I want.
I'm no longer under the, you know, and there's an element of that no matter where you're working at, whether you're at CNN or Fox.
You guys don't have to agree on political ideology, but you can still be like, okay, I am freer because when I'm listening to you, I'm like, okay, this guy sounds reasonable and reasonable and reasonable, fair.
I don't have to agree with that, but reasonable, but reasonable, but reasonable.
Brother, when COVID happened, when 9-11 happened, it was us against the folks in the Middle East, right?
And then later on, we realized there was no weapons of mass destruction.
We're like, whoa, shit, what was that all about, right?
And this time around, it's the company.
So while we should have been against the administration back then with Bush, this time around, the media did the complete opposite.
Everybody I asked, I said, if there was no COVID, does Trump get re-elected?
95% of people I ask in politics, they'll say, Pat, not even a question.
Trump gets re-elected.
And these are people on the left that say Trump's going to get re-elected.
So, but COVID happens.
It almost seems like there was a conference call done.
Rob, can you pull up the video?
I don't know if you can pull this up.
You know, the criticism media gets where everybody is using the same line.
Like, if you go on YouTube, just type in media bias saying the same thing on YouTube.
You'll see it.
I'm sure you've seen this clip before where it's like same talking point.
Yeah, same talking point, whatever, if you pull that up.
So it almost seemed like we had a shot at, that's the one right there, if you can play that.
Yeah, we had a shot.
Is it this one or no?
No, go to the bottom one.
Go to the bottom one right there.
See if it's that one right there.
Yeah, it almost seemed like there was a conference call or Zoom.
Well, maybe conference call would have been better for Tubin, but there was a conference call where you guys, and they said from the top, hey, this is our shot.
This is Trump's fault.
This is not China's fault.
This is Trump's fault.
And then rather than saying, where else would this thing come from?
We don't know it came from China.
You can't say that.
You know, you can't say this.
We're in Chinatown, Nancy Pelosi going out there and saying, well, look, this is offensive.
You can't do this.
You can't do that.
You can't do this.
Rob, you can't even find us on Twitter.
It's a lot easier if you just go find us on Twitter.
You'll find us like a 30-second clip.
And suddenly, everybody's like, no, it's irresponsible.
You should have closed sooner.
You should have closed this and you should have done that.
Wait a minute.
You were just in Chinatown saying, don't close.
Now you're saying, I should have done this.
It's as if everybody teamed up against this guy.
And then that caused the American people, some of them, to say, look, we united during 9-11.
What are we doing being divided here?
And then two years later, we look at it and say he was right about China virus, about coronavirus.
Oh, they were right.
The New York Times comes out this week talking about a third of the COVID deaths was an exaggeration by the CDC.
Nobody covers it.
So the American people, wait a minute.
Well, you should have taken a vaccine with the kids.
No, you shouldn't have.
Well, because the experts are saying this.
Well, because science is saying this.
Well, because military, 14 years, if you don't take the vaccine, you got to come out.
Dude, you've only had a few months to test this thing out.
No, you got to do it.
So now all of that pendulum goes back to saying, listen, say what you want.
You guys were wrong about Russia.
You were wrong about China.
You were wrong about COVID.
You were wrong about the vaccine.
You were wrong about this stuff.
What are you going to say now to this guy?
And now you want 37 indictments.
You want to do all this other stuff to the guy.
So, what level of, for somebody that was on these, I don't expect to get the, you know, 100% on what you would say to this, but what do you say to the people that said, dude, you guys all teamed up against this guy?
And everybody was like, sounded like a broken record.
It's Trump's fault.
What do you say to that?
I have a different analysis.
There was no conference call.
There was no groupthink.
I don't know how many people had more access to people making major decisions during the pandemic than I did.
And I was certainly never told what to say or what not to say.
Trump got what he asked for with the media.
You antagonize the media and call them fake and say a lot of things that are demonstrably false.
You're going to get the teeth.
He was antagonistic.
These are all human beings.
They're going to take it personally at some point and they're going to come for you.
And look, I think that's true in my case, in my brother's case, for sure.
It was absolutely true in the president's case.
The idea that people were against saying China virus is more complicated.
We know it started in China.
Now, what made us sick was actually the virus flying through Europe, right?
The cases that came into the U.S., you had a few on the West Coast, but it was really these people coming in from Europe into New York, et cetera, making people sick here.
Does that mean it didn't start in China?
No, it means that that's not the only question.
It's not the dispositive factor.
Yes, it started in China, but it went flying through all of Europe also.
So it's not as simple as just busting on China.
Trump had it both ways with China, and he used China to deflect accountability for himself as president of the United States.
I do not believe that if there was no COVID, Trump wins necessarily.
I think it's hard to say that.
I think if Trump had just stuck with his original take on COVID.
You don't think if there's no COVID, Trump doesn't win?
I don't know because there are too many things.
There are too many things that could happen.
But if you're playing an odds game and nothing else happens, listen.
Chris, the guy had economy was good.
Everything he did.
Too much shit happens that I didn't expect for me to say I know what would have happened.
Okay.
You know, do I think you're 100% wrong?
Of course not.
Was COVID a problem for him?
Absolutely.
But if he had stuck with, I'm now a wartime president, this is my war, I'm doing PBE like nobody's business.
I can't believe there's only one place in Maine that can make these swabs.
I'm going to make them.
That mentality and brought the vaccine and right and wrong, which plays into my real frustration about COVID, other than people thinking I didn't have it, is here's the problem, okay?
Trump did this wrong.
Biden did this wrong.
No one in a white coat should be doing political messaging for America.
Fauci, any of the other white coats that they had up there from time to time should not have been talking directly to America about where we are, how we are, what we are, what we're not.
Science changes, okay?
Science changes.
Scientists change their opinions all the time on the basis of information.
We believe you get this by doing this.
Clean everything a million times.
Oh, turns out it's aerosolized.
Forget about this.
Don't worry about it.
Remember what I said about don't wear a mask.
You'll probably make yourself sick because you're touching?
No, it's aerosolized.
You need the masks.
And science makes perfect sense.
When, God forbid, you have somebody who's sick in your family and they start and they think, oh, we think it's pneumonia.
Ooh, turns out it's pleurisy.
You don't say, the hell is wrong with you?
I'm going to a new doctor.
It's, oh, so you found new information, changed it.
Okay.
That doesn't work in politics.
In politics, you change your position, you're losing.
You're weak.
You're a flip-flopper.
That's why they stick with things even when it doesn't make sense anymore.
I had a very, I remember a conversation, I'll never forget with Roger Ailes.
He's thinking about hiring me.
He's beating me over the head about what he called pro-life.
And I called, you know, even back then, reproductive rights.
And I was like, I don't get it.
You're pro-life, but you're pro-death penalty.
So like once you're out of the womb, it's like all bets are off.
He changed.
Why?
Because it's logically inconsistent.
That's very rare in politics.
So what happened during the pandemic was you had these people who were changing information scientifically, but they were living in a political environment where you can't do that.
So they started to get quiet about things when they should have been loud.
The biggest example is when they went from the touch, touch, touch to aerosolized, they did not tell us the way they should have because they didn't want to own a mistake because they knew it would affect people's trust in their credibility.
But I argued at the time, it'll be just the opposite.
You're not politicians.
And every problem after that was about guesswork at the best scenario in a new situation that they had never handled before.
Separation, no separation.
When, when not.
When?
It was all, well, we don't really know.
I don't know.
I know that it's better that if we're all sick, we should probably be too close to each other if we don't want to spread it.
But how and when and why and for how long, those were political determinations that should have been all Trump or his people, all Biden or his people.
I don't want to see any white coat.
You can tell me that you based it off what they just told you about this new thing.
Okay.
But what are you telling me?
I elected you.
I didn't elect these people.
And political things are going to be held to political tests and standards.
And we got the two mixed here.
So you'll see tons of clips.
Oh, they told you this and then they told you that.
That's because they're looking at, look, it used to be the world is flat.
Then it's round.
You know, it used to be that, you know, a lot of Christians believe that the earth is like, you know, a fraction as old as it really is and that humanity is only a fraction.
You know, it depends.
What do you want to base it off?
Feel a fact.
And that was the confusion that happened during that.
And I told Dr. Fauci personally and publicly multiple times, you got to get yourself out of that position.
Tony, you do not belong making political.
And he would say, I'm not making political.
But that's how it's playing.
It seemed like he loved the language.
That's how it's being used.
Look, I've known him most of my adult life.
Okay.
Yeah, he was close to my father and very helpful to my father during the AIDS.
And look, I tell you, we lived it then too.
Oh, it's a gay disease.
This is what you get for being gay.
They used to call AIDS an HIV grid because they wanted to tie it to gay people.
And Tony Fauci was one of the early ones saying this is not sexuality-based.
It's transmission-based that is, you know, fluid and fluid, but also this.
Right.
So I know him.
Tony Fauci is a good man who does things for the right reason.
Is he fallible?
Of course.
He felt that he was doing the right thing.
And he had a lot of people in power from two administrations trying to push him to the front because it was better for them.
He gave them cover.
And I don't believe that our leaders should take cover when it's time to lead.
And I think Biden did it wrong.
And I think Trump did it wrong.
Did you read RFK's book on Fauci?
I did.
What'd you think about it?
I think that he is not giving the doctor the benefit of context and nuance when it comes to funding and what was known and what was hidden versus overlooked.
And I don't think you can make a compelling case that Fauci was hiding things because he was funding weaponized viruses in places.
I think that that is a selective read of it.
Now, can you blame Tony Fauci a little bit for the narrative?
Yeah, but he's not a politician.
Do I think that it is wrong to question the use of vaccines?
No.
Do I think it is wrong to question what they knew about this vaccine and what they learned over time?
No.
But base it off the data.
Do I think that it's simple enough to say we should have never had the vaccine?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Oh, but they exaggerate the deaths.
Well, no, it's about what they were learning about deaths over time and comorbidity.
And that is not a new dynamic, by the way, in scientific understanding.
For instance, I'll give you a great example of this.
There has nothing to do with COVID, okay?
High LDL cholesterol, heart disease, right?
Not anymore.
Science is different now.
Turns out that there are a lot of other coefficients that you've got to take into concern.
And that high LDL and animal fat and a meat-based diet isn't an automatic heart attack coming your way, that you got to look at other things.
You got to look at insulin absorption tolerance and all these different coefficients of all these different little numbers and formulas and algorithms.
Well, what happened?
I thought it was that simple.
Not anymore.
Why?
The facts change.
If I was a food paradigm guy, am I going to change my position now when I've been telling you the pyramid goes this way the whole time?
Am I going to flip it?
No, I'm a dead man.
I am a dead man.
You guys kill me here.
They kill me on Meet the Press.
They kill me in the Washington Post.
My opponents say he's a flip-flopper.
That's the difference.
And we play to advantage more than we do to what is right for the most people in the moment.
And I see it again and again and again.
Okay, so I've got two clips I want to show you, Kay, on what you're saying.
I think Fauci was in a rather, he was very divisive when you read the book.
The first thing I looked at when I read his book, it was such a technical book to read, but the thing's got 30,000 reviews on Amazon and it sold a lot of copies.
And nobody from the other side came to really analyze or tear it apart and saying these are not credible sources, what he did with AIDS back in the days with the drug that was making more money and how it was involved and what things he did, all these other things.
We can set that aside on what Fauci did.
Play these two clips.
One of them is from the media side and then go to the Chuck Schumer one.
The first one is a clip I was talking about, Rob.
Play this one here.
So this is where I'm kind of glad you're now on your own doing your own stuff.
Play this if you can.
Go for it.
Hi, I'm Fox San Antonio's Jessica Headley.
And I'm Ryan Wolfe.
Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Treasure Valley communities.
The El Paso Las Cruces communities, Eastern Iowa communities, mid-Michigan communities.
We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that CDS Horror News produces.
But we are concerned about so much irresponsible one-sided news stories.
Plaguing our country.
The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.
More alarming outlets publish the same fake stories without checking facts first.
The sharing of biased and false news.
False news has become all too common on social media.
More alarming means they aren't true without checking facts first.
Unfortunately, some members of the easy platform and agenda control.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
Okay, you can pause it at this point.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy, right?
For example, I run a sales company, right?
For the last 23 years, I've run a sales organization.
So for us, everything, I'll never forget one time we're at an event in Palm Springs and we're competing with other agencies.
And I get up and I said, look, look at my sales guys on how scripted they are.
I had 250 guys stand up and I gave objections.
Verbatim, they overcame it.
Next objection, verbatim, 10 minutes we're doing this.
I'm like, oh my God, I don't have my guys scripted that well.
When I saw this, the first thing I thought about is the only way you can be this scripted is for somebody to feed it to you in a collective effort.
And it's not like it's just Fox or it's just NBC.
It's everybody.
So you said something.
I want to kind of go through the full question and I'll give it back to you.
I see this and then you said, well, you can't call out the media and call them fake news.
They're going to come after you.
You're 100% right.
You're 100% right.
You do that, they're going to come after you.
But for the longest time, they have been coming after the other people.
So it's kind of like, look, guys, you can get away with murder.
I'm going to give you a little bit of a taste of your own medicine.
Then, Schumer, in an interview with Rachel Maddow, I think this is in 2017.
If you can play this clip, opportunity.
So I am, I was distraught right after the election, but I'm now actually invigorated by the challenge and our ability to succeed in this challenge.
Let me ask you, I don't know if you have seen this.
I don't want to blindside you with this.
This is the latest statement, latest tweet, as you were just saying.
The president-elect's latest unsolicited pronouncement on the intelligence community.
This was his tweet just a little while ago tonight.
You see the scare quotes there.
The intelligence briefing on so-called Russian hacking was delayed until Friday.
Perhaps more time needed to build a case.
Very strange.
We're actually told, intelligence sources tell NBC News since this tweet has been posted that actually this intelligence briefing for the president-elect was always planned for Friday.
It hasn't been delayed.
But he's taking these shots, this antagonism, it's taunting to the intelligence community.
You take on the intelligence community.
They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed business community.
Brother, I got to tell you.
What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were motivated?
I don't know, but from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.
And we need the intelligence community.
We don't know what's going on.
Look at the Russian hacking.
Without the intelligence community, we wouldn't have discovered it.
Do you think he can positive?
Let me actually see what he says at the end.
I want to hear what she's saying.
I mean, this form of whether you're a super liberal Democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence.
Okay, so I watch this as a guy who is a business guy, and I've never been through a pandemic before.
I lived in Iran 10 years.
I've been through war before.
I know what the war is and bullshit stuff that you can do to cause work.
Innocent people die.
I've lived in a refugee camp a couple years, came out.
I wasn't a U.S. Army hunter first.
I kind of seen it from the other side when I was kind of having to take the vaccine.
Anthrax was coming out.
And they're like, you guys kind of have to take it.
And I don't want to take it.
And we kind of got away from not taking it.
And then I'm hearing my friends who had to take it or else they have to get out.
So we interviewed some people that got out after being there 14 years, six years away from retirement.
Dude, I didn't want to take the vaccine.
They kicked me out.
I'm kind of like going through this.
I'm like, look, I don't really know what's going on.
I got the COVID myself and I lost 21 pounds in a span of two weeks.
So it was not good for me.
So it's not like I'm sitting here and said, COVID didn't do shit for me.
And how some people are like, it was tough on me.
I was in a, we were moving everything from there to you and I had COVID.
We're getting tested on the same day.
We run into each other.
I came up to you in the car.
You looked so skinny and pale.
It was very weird.
My wife doesn't see me for a few days.
They keep putting food.
I can't eat anything.
And I'm in a corner room throwing up.
And I'm like, dude, this shit is, you know, this is kind of legit.
And then Tom went into, you were in COVID.
You were in IC.
You were in.
Yeah, I did in seven days at ICU.
Seven days in ICU.
Because oxygen levels kept dropping.
And I don't smoke.
Obviously, no comorbidities, no lupus or anything like that.
And there I was.
Oxygen levels couldn't stay up.
It's like.
So the reason why I'm saying all this stuff to you is this is not a, you know, a place of, no, it's this.
No.
I saw people get it.
Boom.
I saw 600 of our sales guys get it after a conference.
So Sebastian Manoscalco gets on stage and he's got a mask in the back and he doesn't want to shake hands.
I'm like, Sebastian, you got COVID.
No, I'm just not feeling.
I'm like, shit, you kind of look like you got COVID.
But he's like, well, I'm going to do it anyways because you're paying a guy to perform.
So he kept his ward, which I loved.
He comes up, he says, comes up.
He says, hey, okay, so welcome to the super spreader events, you know, in Las Vegas.
So the reason why I'm sharing this with you, and I also had a board meeting one day where all my board members are telling me, you got to get everybody in the company vaccinated.
And I said, I can't do that.
So for me, I'm not vaccinated.
I didn't take the vaccine.
I didn't take the booster.
My wife didn't, but my dad did.
My nanny did.
A lot of people in my life did, but I also didn't take ivermectin or hydroxyl chloroquine.
So it's not like it's, we're part of a camp.
When I watched all this stuff that was going on, I sat there and I said, no wonder America doesn't trust the media.
No wonder we don't trust Fauci.
No wonder whatever Chuck Schumer said there, he was right.
We learned how much power the DOJ has.
How do you get up and say the DOJ can ruin your life?
This guy's been indicted 50 million times.
All this stuff that they're doing to him.
So one sister says, Chris, you were on the inside, bro.
This is the kind of stuff that causes to not trust anybody.
Now that you're somewhat on the outside, you're still with News Nation, but you got your own show.
Now you see the reason why American people lost trust in media?
Well, no, I don't see it differently now.
Look, I can't say this strongly enough.
I do not believe, and I have never experienced, and look, people can like what I do, don't like what I do.
You know, the answer to your question is why I sound different is we've never had a conversation before, is that most exposure to what I do is things taken in clips and put out into a context that people want it to be in.
I don't believe in the First Amendment.
You know, you can't download things.
All this bullshit that people say about me is just playing to an agenda and advantage.
And that's okay.
That's the price of entry.
But that's why I sound different, is that we've never spoken before.
I'm not different.
Nobody ever told me what to say or not say at CNN.
And I would have told them to take a walk if they did.
And I don't know about any conspiracy to go after anybody other than what's obvious.
And Chuck Schumer saying that about the intelligence committee, he needs to explain his context on it.
I don't disagree with his assessment.
I mean, I feel the same way when I tell people what's going to happen if they start messing with a cop during a stop.
I mean, which way do you think this is going to go?
Not that cops are evil, but do you think it's going to go well for you if you start shit talking a cop during a traffic stop?
Do you think good things are going to happen?
So I just think when you mess with people with power, you got to be careful.
What was he alluding to?
I don't know.
Did he create an article of convenience for people who want to defend Trump?
Absolutely.
That's politics.
You got to be careful what you say.
One of the reasons we haven't spoken before is, and I come here in good faith and I believe that PBD podcast, I've watched about 14 of them, 15 of them.
You come from a good place.
You're a straight shooter about what you believe and why.
I think you can get carried away with things, but that's within the realm of choice.
I don't do a lot of this because people clip it up and use it to promote crazy things that I don't believe and I don't say and I can't correct.
So I just never really spoke about it and I never really defended myself because what is true, what is groupthink, and not just at CNN, but at ABC and at Fox before that, is they're very careful about having you defend a proposition when really you'll probably just give it more oxygen.
And that, and things go away, especially now with all this media, there's also less attention span.
So we move from one thing to the next.
So the best advice in a crisis is always just if there's no process attached, shut up and it'll move on.
And I have borne that burden many times.
I mean, you could play a list of clips of things that people weaponize about me.
I could defend every single one, and I have no problem doing it.
Whether it's the Shelter Island thing, I have answers for all of them.
Anything I've ever said that's wrong, I've corrected.
And you're going to say things that are wrong, by the way.
You know what I mean?
You're on live TV.
That's totally fine.
But anything where Cuomo says the protests are not meant to be, where does it say protests are supposed to be peaceful?
It has millions of views on the internet.
Like, I don't know what the, you know, what the First Amendment is.
Well, what's the context?
Some of the early George Floyd protests.
You got black people, their allies, angry, yelling in the face of cops, you know, either spit coming out of them or flying out of their mouths because they're so angry.
And people are disgusted, wanting them to go home.
And I say, hey, protests will be angry.
People are going to say things that you don't want to hear.
It's going to be mean.
There's going to be hateful speech.
The cops are going to take, you know, a verbal beating.
But here's the part you never heard.
The moment you touch person or property, you become a criminal, you become what you oppose, and it's a riot.
Now, I know Dr. King had a different explanation of a riot being, you know, sometimes the desperation of the voiceless.
But in the law, it's a crime.
I don't get that.
I get that I said, who said protests are supposed to be peaceful?
Why?
Because it makes me look like an idiot and advance a cause that I am defending the BLM people in a way that I don't defend, I don't know, some other group.
Is that true?
No, it's not even close to true.
Well, then how come I never said this?
Because who would have given a shit?
The people who want to believe that?
If they want to believe it, they're going to believe it.
Cuomo said we can't download WikiLeaks.
I never said that.
It is unclear under the Espionage Act what happens when a citizen downloads a cache of classified information.
We don't know.
Within the reading of the law, it could be a problem.
The media, because of the Pentagon papers, has gotten more leeway.
I say you're probably going to wind up, you got to be careful with this stuff.
You're probably going to wind up hearing a lot about it from us.
So it played as this deep state media control over your mind thing.
I published or whatever, broadcasts, communicated everything that came out that they gave us.
I didn't censor anything.
I didn't keep anything from you.
So why does that clip have a gazillion views?
Because it feeds a narrative that works for people.
And that's the price of entry.
I get it.
I don't like it.
I think it's irresponsible, but it works.
It works really well.
You will not find a compendium of genius statements from Chris Cuomo that has millions of hits on it.
But you will find millions of hits of bullshit things that are taken out of context.
I'm guaranteeing you that Chuck Schumer is not the passkey to an understanding that the deep state decided to take down Donald Trump.
And you have to be.
You don't believe that at all.
I do not believe.
Are you saying you're zero?
Like, there's no way in the world there is a deep state that went after a guy that was challenging the establishment and saying he's going to come here, try to drain the swamp.
You know, this is not a guy that's a typical guy that gets elected.
The last guy that we had, like Trump as a president, one would say was probably Kennedy.
We've never had a lot of people.
I don't mean from the standpoint.
I don't mean from the standpoint of personality.
Take personality out.
I don't mean from the standpoint.
No, the guy was a senator and a member of Congress who was a veteran who came from a storage family.
His family was a pretty anti-establishment family.
I don't know if I would put Kennedy's family.
Notice I didn't even say Reagan.
This is not a Republican thing I'm doing here to say, well, the last anti-establishment, he was a two-term governor.
I'm saying the last person we had.
I don't think Kennedy is a good analog for Trump.
You don't think Kennedy was an anti-establishment family?
Where they went up to say what they're going to do to the Fed, to CIA, what they were going to do to stop an award.
You don't think any of that was anti-establishment reasons?
No, I don't see it as anti-establishment.
I see it as him making what he believed to be reasoned choices.
He did what few leaders can do, which is learn from a mistake with the Bay of Pigs.
So maybe let me ask this question.
Why do you think he got assassinated?
Do you think it was just the mob was not happy, the fact that they didn't give him because a mob helped him with Dewey and Chicago and he thought he needed it.
Eventually, he didn't need it.
And that's why they're getting back to him.
I think that there were elements that certainly included mob influence that were unhappy with what they thought was an arrangement.
I think that a lot of the animus was towards Bobby Kennedy.
I believe the idea until proven otherwise.
I mean, remember, Bobby Kennedy, you're not only embarrassed, which I would say it's not embarrassed when you're a felon, but the way one of the mob guys was treated was seen as insult, but they have a perverse sense of insult because they're criminals.
You know, he said Italians are predisposed to criminality, Bobby Kennedy.
You know, that's, you know, it's not a nice thing to say about Italian Americans.
But I believe they had animus towards him, and I believe the theory until proven otherwise.
Release the file, and then I'll say I'm wrong, that the decision was made that, look, if you're going to go after somebody, you better go after the president because he's going to come after us if we go after his brother.
So you don't believe anything with LBJ, the CIA, I don't have reason to believe.
We could speculate, though, that I couldn't believe that.
I don't have a basis for it.
I got to see the data.
Release the file, and then I'll give you an answer.
See what I'm saying?
Let transparency build the trust.
No, no, I get that.
I mean, for us to talk about.
But I'm telling you, I don't know.
First of all, I don't know that that clip with all the local stations saying that.
I want to reserve some skepticism of editing and to make sure that somebody didn't just make it sound like they're all saying the same thing.
But I never saw a new script like that.
I definitely have concerns about fake news and people who are telling you things that are untrue, but weaponizing the idea that you can't trust the media, you can only trust them.
And the idea that the former president tells the truth more often than I do is demonstrably false.
But that's politics.
That's fine.
I have a different standard.
I'm not running for anything.
I'm not asking for anybody's vote.
But I think it's dangerous and I think it's untrue.
I think the media you take like you take any other business.
Outlet by outlet, platform by platform, person by person.
I am not Leland Vitter, is not Dan Abrams, is not Ashley Banfield.
If you like me, it doesn't mean, or you dislike me, it doesn't mean you should dislike them.
Those are your colleagues on News Station.
Yeah, News Nation.
So that's.
Which probably one of the best town halls was done.
News Nation RFK, my favorite one so far.
I thought Elizabeth did a great job.
She did phenomenal.
I thought it was good for News Nation to do it.
I think the idea that you don't do it because Bobby says things that can be untrue or that can be seen as disruptive is a mistake.
What you do is you let him say it, you ask him for his basis of it, you test his basis.
And what did you see in the town hall?
Bobby did a lot of backpedaling.
Why?
Because he's making positions through a different lens now, which is not just to push an extreme reckoning of something that has a basis of marginal justification, but now he's trying to form consensus.
I thought he crushed it.
See, I thought he cried.
I thought when she asked the question about, you know, drug addiction, all this stuff, and he just went straight up.
When I was 28 years old after my father died, I had a 14-year addiction with this, and he just kind of opened it up.
And then when she said, hey, what do you think about Trump?
This is, look, I like the fact that, you know, I don't want to go directly after Biden.
I don't want to insult anybody.
I want to have a relationship.
I just disagree.
I thought the way he handled this.
Yeah, I agree.
Now, it reads his weakness and of being a tool for the right, you know, and being, but that's where we are in our politics now.
And the media will allow that to be said also.
Look, again, I don't cover Bobby Kennedy Jr. as closely and in person because I have a conflict.
Okay.
Now, I believe that it's a BS conflict.
I can absolutely be fair to Bobby, positive and negative.
But I'm sensitive to the perception now because of what I lived through with my brother.
So that's why, I mean, also, you know, you got a, they leveled up with Elizabeth Vargas.
I mean, you know, she's the top of the food chain, so it was better to have.
She had before, by the way, ABC News.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha.
But I've worked with it for years.
I mean, top-notch.
So, you know, they benefited from her doing it instead of me, that's for sure.
But Bobby is saying things differently now.
You know, he's used by people who are anti-vaxxers.
What's the first thing he says?
I'm not anti-vaccine.
Now, did he used to say that as loud and proud?
No.
Why?
But he was coming from a different place.
That's politics.
I'm not saying he's lying.
Do you think it's an act or do you think that's really who he is?
No, it's about messaging.
It's about consensus.
You know how I know it's real?
One night my wife and I were in Dallas and our kids are going to this Christian school, private school.
And all of a sudden, the school's like, we need their vaccination cards updated.
And our first two kids took everything.
Anything they need to take, they've taken it, you know.
And then after having a meeting with Robert, he said, look, just you may want to not do this.
You may want to not do this.
You may want to not.
He says, look, here's how many vaccines you took.
And I'm like, dude, I was in the army first.
I took 11 shots.
I don't even know what I've taken, right?
When you join the army, they do the gunshots on your, you know.
So he says, well, yeah, when I took it, it was only three, then they went to 12, then they went to this, and today's 70, 20.
It's just kind of giving me the history of it.
And I'm looking, I'm like, yeah, that's kind of true.
Why do we need so many vaccines?
No problem.
It's 11 o'clock at night.
Jennifer says, babe, what do we do with this?
They need this car tomorrow.
I said, babe, we're not going to give it to them tomorrow.
They can send us home if they want to.
We're not going to do that.
So I send a text to Bobby at 11 o'clock, Central Standard Time, which is midnight his time.
I'm like, he's not going to respond, but he'll call me first thing in the morning.
30 seconds, he texts back.
Then he gets on the phone with me.
For 45 minutes, he's finding people to do a conference call with us on how the kids don't have to take all the vaccines.
An hour later, this guy could be with his family doing a bunch of different things.
I got off the phone.
I'm looking at Jen.
I'm like, this is when you know this guy's a 100% true believer in this.
Absolutely.
There's personal act with this.
There is no questioning the basis of his advocacy.
Okay?
The accuracy of the positions is subject to testing like anything else.
I'm not questioning the guy's heart.
I'm not questioning his head.
But he has to make the case as to a matter of degree on the positions.
And that's fine.
But look, people who want to write him off as something, look, I thought what the member of Congress said the other day, and look, you know, he's got the right to his own opinion, but him going after the guy's family and you're mocking the Kennedy name, you know, I think that's way out of bounds.
It's way out of bounds.
And I think that, you know, one, you don't get to judge somebody standing in their own family.
And two, you know, all the pain that this guy's lived through.
You're not.
His father and his uncle.
And you're not going to talk to him, his wife, you know, his personal pain, his siblings, and you're going to talk to him about his family.
So look, everybody can feel any way they want.
I'm saying something else.
And this is really the only thing that matters.
You have to get back to disagreeing with decency, and not because it's nice to be nice.
It's that nothing else works.
Nothing else works in a democracy except a marketplace of ideas where the best ideas win.
That's all that works.
And the only place you get is where we're flying toward, which is where there's all kinds of shit in the ether that people believe very passionately, but without any basis because you don't even know who they are or what they're saying.
Or they're taking things out of context or they're taking a little thing over here or they're pretending that this person is that person.
And it works for a campaign.
It just works well for a two-party system.
It just does.
What's going to happen with Bobby?
Like, what's the outcome with him?
Like, you were very clear that everything that's happened with Biden, the fundraising.
He's going to lose.
He's capped at about 20%.
We've seen some fall off from that because of the increased level of scrutiny.
I don't think that he can get a constituency within the Democrats that would want him to replace Biden.
I think that they have trouble.
They're raising a ton of money.
They have polls, the Monmouth poll, other polls, but polls are just a snapshot in time.
You don't know who the sample is.
You don't know what it is.
It's helpful over a course of multiple data points for a suggestive trend.
But there's only one poll that matters, trite but true, and that's on Election Day.
But Biden's numbers are still strong enough, and the money raising is still strong enough for them to sit down on the point that he is not projecting what you would want from somebody who is going to be in as big a fight as what they anticipate.
And I think that the lack of build out of the staff, I think the lack of rah-rah should just, to me, justifies what I hear about concern from deep pocket donors.
And if you he's going to lose, so that means Biden's going to be just sauntering into the look.
I don't mean to condemn Bobby's fates.
I'm not an oracle.
I'm just saying that on the Democrat side, if the party doesn't want you, you got a big problem.
We learned that with Bernie.
Why would he run as a Democrat?
I don't even understand.
He can't now switch parody.
No, he says he's a Democrat.
I totally get that, but you're not going to, like, you're not going to be able to do that.
Why would you not run it?
For the exact reason that you like him.
Because that's what he believes.
That's why he's doing it.
This is what I believe.
So if Biden's the guy and Trump's the guy, again, we saw this movie.
You said quite poignantly, the sequel is never good as the first time around.
How ugly is 2024 election going to be when it's Biden, Trump, round two?
I mean, you know, as ugly as it can get because that's what works.
And, you know, look, it's much harder.
You know, if you think about it, the Greeks gave us the word demagogue, right?
Somebody who plays on anger, outrage, and prejudice to gather support.
Very old word.
No positive opposite.
Why?
Because it's easier to go that way.
It works.
You play to what somebody's scared.
Look, look, look at the vaccine stuff.
You play to what's something afraid.
You don't know what they're shooting into you.
People believe that there's nanotechnology in the vaccine that is allowing Big Brother to control you.
Not a shred of evidence of that.
But it goes to my fear.
The Kahneman Dversky, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, they distilled this principle that if you offer somebody $100 right now or give them a coin toss on $1,000, they take the $100.
There's no statistical analysis that would support that, unless you're $100 from death, you know what I mean?
And then you just take what you have.
People play scared.
They play to self-protection.
They play it safe.
So if you can trigger that, this is a threat to you, especially if it goes to family or your kids, the health, it is powerful.
Way more than give me a hug.
Way more than, I know you guys don't share everything, but you share a lot more than you think.
Don't be afraid of him.
Get past your fear.
That's hard.
And sure, they can show your kids, my kids, all the kids of different colors in the beginning, they all like each other.
Why?
Yeah, that's nature versus nurture.
It's not what our world is.
It's what our world could be, right?
It's what all the great religions are trying to teach us in terms of an ecumenical standard of self-respect and respect of others.
But that's not where we are.
We were talking about Schumer earlier.
So talking about your, I think your brother's got a few million dollars in a pack.
I think I read it like a couple weeks ago.
I may be wrong.
But so meaning he can still do something and run again, and I don't know what he's going to run for.
But, you know, when COVID happened and you're seeing him talk and you're seeing him do what he's doing, and I think him and AOC and de Blasio had an issue, I don't know what it was over Amazon.
Bezos was going to move and we was going to $125,000, $25,000 jobs at $150,000 salary.
And AOC's like, this is not fair.
It's going to increase rent.
And then your brother's like, what are you talking about?
We need these jobs here.
And de Blasio and AOC were united.
So it's not like your brother's a de Blasio AOC.
No farther.
He's not that guy.
And then I'm like, okay, so he understands capitalism for him to say, yes, bring the good jobs here.
And then you're seeing the way he's handling it.
He would also poke back at Trump.
That's probably the benefit of being raised in a family that probably talks a lot of shit to each other.
And you've been in the limelight where you can have a thicker skin that you can handle.
You're like, I can handle Trump.
And then you're like, this guy could actually do something.
In my mind, the book comes out, makes the money.
He gets the criticism for the book.
And then the 13,000, 14,000 people that, you know, the old folks' homes, that he gets criticism for that.
But the part that was weird for me, Chris, and I'm curious what you'll say to this, it wasn't like the Republicans or even New Yorkers turn on the guy.
My feeling was, I could be wrong, I felt like the Pelosi's and Schumer's turned against him.
And they're like, this guy's getting a little bit.
So then I'm going in my own mind against speculation.
I don't know.
You and I don't communicate.
This is the first time you and I have talked face to face.
It's important for the audience to know this.
We've exchanged texts.
We've never had a phone call together.
This is actually the first time.
I'm sitting there saying, dude, this shit about anti-establishment doesn't exist.
Okay?
And Cuomo Andrew seems like a guy that could actually do what his father didn't want to do.
Maybe this guy actually wants to do it.
Did these guys flip on him because behind closed doors, he told them, hey, screw you, leave me alone.
I'm going to run my state.
I'm a Democrat.
I'm going to be loyal publicly to you guys, but don't come and tell me what to do and threaten me, all this other stuff.
I'm going to do what I do because maybe in the next couple of years he's going to run.
Is there any speculation to maybe the Pelosis and Schumer's fault they couldn't control him, so they threw him under the bus?
I mean, is there speculation about it, I suppose, but it's not my opinion.
And obviously, Andrew makes his own case, answers for himself.
He's in a party.
Party has rules, okay?
And the allegations against him broke the party's rules.
Did he have a basis of love and wanting to protect him within the party?
Certainly not a sufficient one.
Was that because of jealousy or was it because of principle?
I don't know.
You're going to have to ask the people that decided to support him or not support him.
But I don't see any conspiracy behind it.
I just see a lot of pain.
And look, my brother is a mechanic.
Okay.
That's what he is.
Andrew is a master mechanic.
Engines.
Like literally.
He is a master mechanic.
And he fixes.
That's what Andrew does.
He is always trying.
Yes, he's my brother.
Yes, I love him to death.
Yes, I'll defend him to death.
But if there is a defense that is merit-based, it's he thinks he's trying to fix.
And that's all he sees.
And that's his perspective.
So the, oh, yeah, but you know, this guy doesn't really like you, and you got to spread the love and you got it.
He's not the guy.
And he's not going to be the most popular.
The media did not like him.
People will put that on likability.
But you talk to his family, you talk to his friends.
He's plenty likable if he wants you to like him.
He's not looking to get buddy-buddy with people that he doesn't respect and he doesn't appreciate in terms of what his own goals are.
During the pandemic, and you know, you don't have to believe me, but I don't know what my motivation would be to lie.
I never talked to him about running for president.
Never.
I never saw that.
The only thing I would say is, because remember, I'm his brother, okay?
Few people understand the media better than I do, just as a matter of experience, not intelligence.
You know, how can you do something 25 plus you and not know much about it?
No question about it.
So I was worried about exposure.
I was worried about, you know, the president of the United States getting sideways with you.
You know, it's not that Andrew is a trash talker.
It's that Andrew hates trash talk.
You know, like when we would play basketball, me, pop, love trash talk.
I love talking trash.
I love it.
I somehow don't get that vibe from Andrew.
I'm being sarcastic.
I hope you take that as a compliment.
Yeah, go ahead.
Andrew is not a trash talker.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
In fact, the only person I've ever seen him really take the piss out of on a regular basis is me.
But, you know, I'm his brother, and that's our relationship.
But Andrew's a do not say guy.
You know, like I always say, you know, when we do self-defense, when I do self-defense training, I always say, you know, if someone's talking, we're in good shape.
We're in good shape.
You know, PBD can be saying, I'm about to knock your head off.
As long as he's saying it, I still got a chance here to get out of it.
Andrew is not going to say shit.
Okay.
It's like, you know, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen.
So for him, it's not a banter of the war of words.
He doesn't want that.
He wants to get things done.
He wants to figure out if there's a deal to be made.
And if you want to fight, then you're going to get a fight.
So that's his disposition.
That has not changed.
He has not been changed by this.
He's been forged by this experience.
He is more him than ever.
He protected his kids.
He protected his family.
He did what he could.
I do believe public service is in his bones.
That gives me concern as a brother and someone who loves him.
I think he's done enough.
I think he's given enough.
But he's going to.
He's a player, though.
He's going to make his own choices.
Look, I think it is hard for somebody who believes that the mandate is from the people, not the powerful, to have anything end in service without it coming from them.
Lose an election, lose an election.
Like my pop, 1994.
All the polls have him personal, pretty good.
Performance, the economy's in the tank, the predominance social issue, culture war at the time is a death penalty.
He would not shut up about being against the death penalty as vehemently as he was.
That was not the popular position.
He was going to lose.
He knew he was going to lose.
Andrew said you're going to lose.
Andrew said you're going to lose.
Yeah, well, he was good.
I mean, that was not a genius stroke.
You know what I mean?
It's like he was losing the whole time.
And he said, but I got to run.
And he said, well, you're going to lose.
He said, then I lose.
But I don't not fight.
I do not not fight.
I do not believe that what Al Domato and George Pataki want for this state is the right thing.
I'm going to fight.
And if I lose, I lose.
And he lost.
And it hurt him, but it came from the people.
He accepted it.
Andrew's the same way.
And look.
I would much rather have him than who we have today.
And I think a lot of people feel the same way.
And if he was on the other side going up against Trump, it would have been very natural and quite frankly, purely out of a guy that loves competition.
You know, Messi yesterday scored a goal.
Down the street, two miles away from here, he scored a goal.
The place went insane.
Game winner with 94 minutes.
And take the backstep.
See, and this is such an interesting instruction in our culture.
Messi wasn't feeling well or something like that, or he's injured.
He is getting dressed.
So I'm down here, South Florida, right?
This is like a huge thing for you guys.
He is getting dragged.
What a money play.
What bullshit.
He's not going to play.
All the ticket prices popped and he's not even going to be in.
The guy levels up, goes in, game-winning goal.
Now he's a hero.
Show the goal.
If you can.
This was so silly.
But this is our culture right now.
Hate him, Boom, he's a hero.
And look, it's fine in sports.
It's why we love sports.
But, man, oh man, this, you know, I get a call from Mario.
By the way, I get a call from Mario.
I'm so upset I didn't go to the game.
Everybody's like, how crazy was it?
Were you at the end of the day?
It's one mile away.
I totally had no idea he wasn't playing last night.
They thought he wasn't playing.
I had no idea he didn't play last night.
I don't think he even started the game.
No.
But look, that's the point is that we have become so reactionary.
Hate him, hate him, hate him.
Love him, love him, love him.
And does the media play into it?
Sure.
Look, it's a big part of what the mission of News Nation is.
And I know that that can be confusing and confounding.
Pick a side.
There is a side.
It's your side.
Wherever your interests lay, that's the way you cover whatever it is that's going on.
You are the voice box for the people.
You are their proxy with the powerful.
Let's stay on this with Andrew.
So December of last year, he has a meeting in New York with Kellyanne Conway.
Okay.
They've been friends for a long time.
Of course.
And, you know, that's.
I've been friends with her for 30 years.
She's a beast.
She's a beast, by the way.
I mean, she's an absolute.
So there was a lot of that.
That is not the word that I would use.
Well, I would say on TV, she's a beast.
Formidable.
So she to us is a compliment.
So that's a very much of a compliment.
No no, she's, first of all, very attractive.
What I mean is she's a, she's a super competitor.
And then story comes out, she's smiling, he's smiling.
Then three months later she's getting a divorce.
It's very march of 2023.
She's you go down the rabbit hole.
I'm just asking you questions, so so.
So then i'm sitting there saying okay, there's a friendship.
Kellyan is smart enough to know this is going to be.
Pictures are going to be taken.
Andrew knows pictures are going to be taken.
If you're doing this, you don't give a shit.
If these pictures are going to be taken publicly, so that's fine, that's right.
But then, three months later, that happens.
Now, George Conway, to be fair uh, he's part of the Lincoln Project Group, which is kind of like not the most uh friendly of who she is.
And then we've seen, you know Conway, the daughter, the the snapchat videos are very weird dynamics there.
Yeah, so is there?
Is there a?
Uh, do you want to know if my brother's with Kellyann Conway is that what you're asking is woman on play?
Is that what you want to know?
No, by the way, they look very good together for what it's for.
I saw them.
I'm like they look like a couple, do they not look like a couple coming up?
Well, there are, there are a couple of people coming out at the same time.
That looks like a nice couple looking, you know people coming out.
But uh, you know, if he runs again, would it be something more for New York or would it be more something national?
Oh, I don't know, that's for him.
Okay uh, that's for him.
I mean look, it's hard to take a Cuomo out of New York.
Uh it's it's uh, it's so deep again in the marrow.
Um, but that's that's for him to decide.
Uh, to do nothing, do anything else.
The man is incredibly capable.
Is he loved still in New York?
Uh look, I would have to believe it depends on the moment that you have.
So, if he goes to restaurants, are they making pay for it?
Yeah yeah no, they still make him pay for it.
Well, he better pay, really.
Yeah uh you, there's nothing for free brother, nothing for free because you know you're, you're like uh uh, you know uh no no, he gets a lot of love.
In fact, i'll tell you how it is.
When when uh, we were going through what I call the troubles.
And I would say to him, I came out more right because I look, i'm not gonna hide, all right, that's not how I am.
I had to hide a little bit in the beginning because I they were killing my family, um.
So anyway, I say to him, you know, you should come out on the boat with me a little bit.
He, he got me into boating, he got me into fishing, you know, I mean he's, he's the big brother, he.
Everything I know about cars and old hot rods, which we're both very uh, active with I I learned from him.
So I said, you know, let's go.
And he's like I don't want to cause any trouble, I don't want any trouble.
I said there's not going to be trouble.
Even the reddest of the red Trump Hat wearer, when they see Andrew, would come up to him.
And again, Andrew's a big, you know, he's like Pbd's size.
So it's like you know, I don't know what you were expecting, but he's not the guy you're gonna run up to six four, how big is he?
And start talking a lot of trash?
Um no he's, he's like his side.
So they would come up to him and say, I don't agree with your politics.
I don't like what happened to you.
I think you believed in what you were doing.
I appreciate what you did during the pandemic.
I'm sorry about what happened.
It's wrong what they did to you.
Now, some of them, it's just, I hate Democrats, so I'm going to say that, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
But I'm telling you, it's an overwhelming response.
Now, I'm not saying that they won't show a poll and that Democrats aren't upset at him or that he's lost approval or his numbers are down.
I'm sure all of that's true.
But politics is about a moment in time and what you present in that moment, what your message is, and whether it resonates or not in the vessel of you as a messenger.
And I think the future is wide open for him.
He's incredibly talented.
I personally, okay, I got his back 100%.
Whatever he wants to do, I'm there.
He's my brother.
Just make sure at News Nation, if he runs, don't interview him.
I don't think that's a good idea.
I don't think that that would be in the cards.
Although, I'll tell you what, though.
On the podcast, different stories.
I'll tell you what.
Look, to me, I'm just, you know, I don't want any more.
You know what I mean?
Like, I can't.
I don't want any more smoke.
I don't want any more smoke.
I mean, I can take the smoke.
I'm built for the smoke, but I'm pretty smoky.
So quit smoking.
People ask me all the time for those interviews.
I would love that again.
I'd love to see you guys talking and you razzing him about what it is that he does and being a politician and all that.
I really liked it.
Great TV, man.
But here's the problem that takes us back to the big problem, which is why I'm at News Nation.
There is groupthink and there is cultural bias within media and every system.
There is a disconnect between the people watching this.
This is different because podcasts are more curated to their audience.
And the media itself.
There are different standards.
I've never had a regular person say to me, I can't believe you interviewed your brother.
You know, you should have been asking him the hard questions.
Never.
Because that makes no sense, okay, to a regular person.
I get why people in the media feel differently about it, okay?
But that disconnect, you know, the media would go crazy if I was in the same media setting with my brother.
People would probably love it.
So, what do you do?
From his perspective, you do it.
From my perspective, you don't.
Because the media will kill me.
And I got to exist in the media.
And I'm not PBD.
You guys have your, you're in the media writ large, but you're not journalists and you are not subject to journalists' appraisals.
And you can say, oh, but people don't care.
Listen, when they say whenever they want, Chris Cuomo, fired for lying to CNN, it hurts.
And it doesn't just hurt because it's untrue.
It hurts because it echoes.
And that's what it is for me.
You can say whatever you want about me helping my brother.
You can say what you want about me helping my brother while I was working at CNN.
You're free to have your opinion.
I didn't lie.
And that matters.
That matters.
So I think his future is wide open.
He's going to have to determine it.
I know he'll talk to me about it.
You know, we don't always agree on everything.
I hate the two-party system.
I think it is the problem.
I don't even think it's part of the problem.
I think it is the problem.
I get that people say, yeah, but third party, all you're going to do is be a spoiler.
Nothing changes if nothing changes.
So if that's not the best change, then what is it?
And why isn't part of the analysis from the Democrat side?
Well, let's say Biden doesn't muster the entire time.
Don't you want someone out there who's generating some type of basis of support to become a counterpoint to Trump if he is the candidate there that you're so worried about?
Or do you really just want to be one or none?
Quick question on brotherhood.
Since you're talking about your brother, again, Pat and I loved everything you guys were doing.
It was amazing, amazing TV.
We talk about brotherhood a lot.
We've had two podcasts with Andrew Tate talk about masculinity, brotherhood, everything with that.
Pat's an Army guy.
I was a football guy.
Brotherhood, we understand that.
You know, on CNN, it seemed as if your brother, you were as closest brothers, was your buddy Don Lemon, or as Pat calls him, Don Lamont.
But it's because of my English.
He has got English language, so don't forget my English.
He's a tucker file.
That's why he's here.
Since you're firing from CNN, he's also been fired.
What happened with that situation and how close are you guys these days?
Look, what happened to me at CNN hurt a lot of my relationships.
What I control is what I say and do and how I feel.
I was very upset that Don lost his position at CNN.
I want all good things for him.
Our situation is now complicated because I was fired, explained as having been a negative force on CNN, a deceptive force to a place he cares about.
And there was a narrative put out about why our boss was fired that was set up to blame me for something I had nothing to do with.
It doesn't even make sense.
But this takes time.
It takes time to process, you know, and this isn't a hedge.
I mean, relationships are complicated.
I care a lot about him.
I want good things for him.
He's ridiculously talented.
But what they did to me there hurt me and hurt relationships and created an environment where a lot of the people who were close to me aren't now out of, you know, what they were instructed, you know, what they sensed, what they were told, what they decided to believe.
And life is long.
And what I know is I want good things for him.
And I have never faked the funk on TV.
If I care about somebody, I care about him.
If I don't, I don't say anything.
I call a lot of people brother because I believe in fraternity.
I believe that we have to do everything we can to reinforce our connections to each other.
And some people say that's not the job of a journalist.
I don't agree.
I think advocacy is a component of things that are right and righteous.
There is good and bad.
There is right and wrong.
Sometimes it's great, and you have to pursue the different aspects of it.
That's why I love crime.
And that's why at News Nation we do so much crime.
But the idea that I don't like or are now enemies with, that's all bullshit.
It's not true.
Last question.
When you had COVID, did you ever take ivermectin or a hydroxychloroquine?
Did you take any of those things?
No.
But only because my doctors told me that they didn't know.
Remdesivir also.
They didn't know what it would do, that there was concern about side effects.
Remember, I got it very early on.
And also, hydroxychloroquine as one drug in particular, with people who had the pneumonia aspect of it, remdesivir, there are pneumonia applications for those drugs.
That wasn't my thing, although I did have a scare where I started to get a shadow in one lung where they became worried and they gave me this spirometer thing.
And you had to work on your lung capacity, and I was doing it all the time.
I was really sick.
It really bothers me when people play with that.
I get why they play with it, but it bothers me, the idea that I was making shit up or anything like that.
I was doing just fine.
I didn't need to make up something to do well on television.
And I got that long COVID stuff afterwards.
And now I don't know: is it that I'm 53?
Is it that I've gotten tackled and hit so much in my life, you know, or that I've been clanging and banging for so long?
I don't know.
And they don't know enough about long COVID, but I'm telling you, my resting breathing rate has never been the same.
My VO2 Max, the RPMs that my engine can get to are still good, but my idling is not what it was.
My ability to like walk and talk, my breathing is not what it used to be.
My soft tissue, now again, is it age?
You know, is it going to be a lot of different things?
Is not what it was.
My blood levels and my inflammation markers are not what they were.
And I kept getting it.
I think, you know, I think I've had it three times.
COVID.
Yeah.
Damn.
Which one was the worst?
Was it the first one that was not?
I never felt anything like that.
I never felt anything like that.
I had fever, freaky.
I don't remember a lot of doing the shows.
I had no idea how the work was resonating.
I had no idea.
I had no idea how many people were watching it or anything like that.
My day was like, you know, I'm sure you can identify this.
My day was like a haze of fever, meds, my wife giving me all of these homeopathic.
I would take anything.
So it wasn't that I was never anti-this or anti-that.
It was don't tell people this is what you take to beat something when we don't even know what the hell it is and it's and it's not even its primary application.
You know, I didn't spend a lot of time going after your boy Rogan.
And I understand why guys like him or even Tucker, there's a currency in going after me because there was a perception of what I represented on the left.
It was never fair as an assessment.
And if they spoke to me directly, I guarantee you, they wouldn't have said the same things that they say about me.
But that's the price.
That's the price of entry.
And do I like it?
No.
Do I accept it?
Yes.
That's why I'm at News Nation.
I believe that it's worth what comes with it to try to do something that helps.
And that's the best feedback I've ever gotten in my life, is what we do there.
Yes, News Nation's not weaponized the way CNN was for the purposes of one political agenda or another.
But people say, I've been looking for this.
I've been looking for this.
Because the idea of all I want is the facts, look, then get this.
If all you want the facts, do your homework.
Media is who, what, where, and when, but why is an all-consuming question.
Perspective matters.
Context matters.
Testing matters.
That is the most important part of the job to me.
It's the part that matters most.
I'll go back to Ukraine.
I'll go to an area of conflict.
I'll do news coverage of disasters.
I'd rather not do hurricanes.
I think it's stupid to stand out in weather that you're telling people not to be in.
But you guys love it.
So there's that.
But testing power.
You know, going at McDonald's.
Hey, what's the truth and not truth with the black minority franchisees?
Going at the government.
These hearings next week.
Look, I like Congressman Burchett.
I like where his head's at.
If this is the same stuff that we've heard already and the guys who know more aren't there, that's a problem, man.
And that's a problem for Congress.
The Kennedy assassination stuff.
Oh, we got bigger problems.
It is the root.
The dossier, the Mueller probe, these hearings where they tell us they believe they're going to be able to show things, but they don't show us things.
It's feeding the problem.
We need a lot more transparency.
We need a lot more.
Let the ideas come out.
My problem with the Twitter file, I'm a big fan of Michael Schellenberger and Taibbi.
I don't know Barry Weiss.
I've heard and read some of her stuff.
I get why she has a good reputation, but I know them.
I didn't like that Musk picked who to give the information to.
It breeds distrust.
And I was worried for Schoenberger specifically because I know him better, that you're going to become a target now because people are going to say, well, what choices were you making with the data?
Who would have been better?
Everyone.
Put it all out.
Create a file of what you think the universe of valid information.
But don't tie it to a face or a name.
That's what you're saying.
Just put it all out.
Don't give it to you and then you decide what I know.
Decentralization.
Look, if Elon's, if Elon Musk's goal was to expose, then expose.
Say what you want about WikiLeaks.
I don't know why I became an enemy of theirs.
I really don't get it.
I really don't get it.
But be that as it may, put it out and let people decide.
The media will do their job.
But take away the weapon of saying, well, I haven't seen it for myself.
Well, that's not everything.
Take it out of the equation.
Look, if I'm the Biden team, I'm telling you about the payments.
Now, I get why the experts will say, don't give air to that.
There's nothing there.
Let the prosecutors force you to have to discuss it.
That is absolutely the sage advice.
And if I'm your lawyer and I'm a lawyer, that's what I'm telling you.
Shut up.
Let them make us have to do something, right?
The burden's not on us.
That's not politics.
That's not the court of public opinion.
If you want to be seen as better than Trump, then show that you're better than Trump.
Otherwise, you're not going to be able to make the case.
As convincingly as you could otherwise, I think, ultimately, is Cuomo, Cuomo, 2024.
It wouldn't be me.
Maybe one of my sisters.
I run from office, not for office.
It's not for me, bro.
You have my vote, brother.
If you and Andrew do better.
If you can do better.
Thank you.
Cuomo Sausag 2024.
If you and Andrew, if we did a podcast together, we'd have a couple hundred people here wanting to watch.
And we'd have cigars in the back.
I think it would be very entertaining on doing that podcast.
But, Chris, this has been, it's interesting because when we did the Anthony Weiner interview, I said the following afterwards, Rob, you remember what I said?
I said, let me tell you, over under, there's a chance Chris's camp is going to tell him, dude, you do not want to go there because you don't know what Pat's going to be saying, and he's going to do this and he's going to do that.
And I said, yeah, we'll see.
You know, and some people said, Chris, he's still going to show up.
I'm telling you, Chris is still going to show up.
I said, I don't know.
I think he may or may not because Anthony, the interview that we had was very much of a combat from the beginning when he came in.
It was a different interview.
You're not Anthony Wiener.
I was looking forward to doing this interview.
By the way, I'm also looking forward to doing the Anthony Wiener interview, but I actually like what you, your brother, how you guys are, the family, the Cuomo, when you think about last names.
And by the way, here's the weirdest thing about our show, which I freaking love.
I'm doing business with this guy.
We're about to sign a multi-year contract with an OTT company, and we're launching Vitamin OTT.
The owner of the company, one of these days I'll release it, he's a multi-billionaire, very well-known name.
He sees my interview with Alex Jones, comes back, he says, We can't have Vitamins OTT be with us.
His salesperson, who's a die-hard valutainer, follows our contact saying, Pat, this is why they don't want to have the OTT because you had Alex on.
Okay, couple weeks later, we have Anthony Wiener on.
I'm getting text messages from people saying, Pat, you've sold out.
You this, you that.
I said, Listen, guys, if there is a place for all of us to be able to talk together and have the conversations, you be the judge of it.
You know, you could say, you know what?
He made a good point.
I totally disagree with him.
I can't even believe what Patrick said.
That makes no sense.
No problem.
My conversation is here.
You get to say whatever you say.
You're the audience.
You're the people.
But the idea is, my favorite types of conversations are these.
And I have a lot of respect for you for saying yes.
I have a lot of respect for you for coming out here.
I asked you, said that.
This is the only reason I'm coming out.
You're not out here with family for vacation.
You're here to do the podcast and go back.
So if you're watching this, you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Rob, let's put the link again below to go and subscribe to Chris's YouTube channel.
The Cuomo, the Chris Cuomo project, as well as his show.
