May 15, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
56:14
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unidentified
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Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to David and Tara to talk about free speech and big ideas. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So where do we start? | ||
| What made you decide to go into the new media space, Dave? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I'm going to turn 49 next month, which doesn't seem that old to me. | ||
| But when I show up at college campuses, I suddenly realize I'm not a teenager in my 20s anymore. | ||
| And, you know, I grew up. | ||
| In the way that I'm sure many of you who are roughly my age grew up. | ||
| We had normal cable television and three channels, CBS, ABC, NBC, and we had Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, and you kind of watched the same news at 6.30 and all of those things, and the Overton window was kind of narrow, but we all sort of believed roughly the same things. | ||
| Then, of course, cable news comes along, the internet comes along. | ||
| True crime. | ||
| Yeah, all of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It all came. | ||
| And I started realizing, boy, you know, I'm watching all of these shows. | ||
| I was always interested in politics. | ||
| I studied poli-sci in college. | ||
| And I was watching CNN and I would watch MSNBC and I'd watch all these things. | ||
| I thought, man, everything is making everyone dumber. | ||
| Like, it just struck me that nothing was elevating the conversation. | ||
| It seemed hyper-controlled. | ||
| There was nothing sort of... | ||
| Clever. | ||
| It was also a time when online stuff, when I started the show back in 2013, when everything was getting shorter also. | ||
| So it was the time of Snapchat and Vine and a lot of things where suddenly we were doing six-second videos, ten-second things. | ||
| And I started realizing, boy, there are so many important things that we need to talk about. | ||
| I just want to... | ||
| Interview people. | ||
| I want to sit down with someone and look them in the eye and have a conversation for an hour and maybe I'll agree and maybe I won't agree and that'll be just fine. | ||
| And really, it was at the beginning of that, it was just kind of me and Rogan doing it. | ||
| Now, you know, basically everybody has a podcast. | ||
| I'm pretty sure there are more podcasts than people at this point. | ||
| That's a fact, I believe. | ||
| But we needed this sort of revolution to happen. | ||
| I mean, you can look at this last election. | ||
| It was clearly driven by so much of what's happening online. | ||
| We needed to widen the conversations. | ||
| We needed to widen that Overton window I was talking about. | ||
| So really, I started the show really just because it was what... | ||
| I just felt, let me do something that I want to watch, and I want to watch something that's a little more thoughtful, a little more interesting, and the fact that everyone's walking around with a phone in their pocket and would be able to access it. | ||
| So it was like the technology and the ideas kind of all came together at once. | ||
| The great thing about what we do now is there are no bigger personalities. | ||
| There are no dealings with the politics. | ||
| You are the politics of your company. | ||
| I am the politics of my company. | ||
| I report what I get. | ||
| I don't ask anyone about it. | ||
| No producers go in my ear and tell me what to say. | ||
| They don't rewrite my copy. | ||
| I don't have to go to an editor and say this is what I'm writing today. | ||
| I do what I want and I've got to say it's only been six weeks and it's been amazing. | ||
| It really has. | ||
| And now that I'm on the other side, I'm exhausted, but it's like a thrilling type of exhaustion. | ||
| Wow, you are six weeks in. | ||
| The things that I could teach. | ||
| The wars that I have survived. | ||
| Well, you know, one interesting distinction that Tara and I have is that Tara is an actual journalist. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of people think I'm a journalist or they'll write about me and say I'm a journalist. | ||
| And I have never said that I am a journalist. | ||
| I tell people what I believe. | ||
| You can call me a... | ||
| Whatever that... | ||
| You can call me an asshole. | ||
| You can call me a commentator. | ||
| You can call me whatever you want. | ||
| But I tell people what I believe. | ||
| And that's what I'm doing with my daily news show. | ||
| And when I interview people, I try to basically extract the most truthful information through whoever I happen to be interviewing. | ||
| But we spent a few minutes discussing what we wanted to talk about here tonight. | ||
| And one of the things that I'm most interested in at the moment is, as the podcast space and YouTube and Rumble and all of these places that you guys all get... | ||
| As they're ascendant and clearly, clearly ascendant, again, I think you can really connect the results of the last election to what has happened to the media. | ||
| So as this side of it is kind of ascendant and the mainstream media, cable news, is descendant, I mean, their numbers are just unbelievably terrible. | ||
| And whatever numbers we do see from it, I think it's a very good thing. | ||
| I think there's an interesting moment now where it puts more responsibility on people like us and people that are independent to do better. | ||
| Journalism, to tell the truth better. | ||
| Because, you know, we're all going off into our little, you know, corridors of information. | ||
| If I was to look at literally every one of your ex-feeds, it would probably look like we all live on a different planet. | ||
| And the question is, how long can a society of about 350 million people, which is what we have here in America, how long can we function properly when our information is so catered to us on top of the fact that the algorithms are obviously very out of control and we're just... | ||
| So we're really at a super interesting place right now with a completely new way of getting information, sharing information, and what that will do with our relationship to the truth. | ||
| So that's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, the internet is basically a world full of red meat. | ||
| And blue meat, essentially. | ||
| And the question is, where is the actual center? | ||
| Where is the meat? | ||
| Where is the truth in it all? | ||
| And that is the space where I want to exist, where that is my goal every single day, is to get to the closest version of the truth. | ||
| It's very difficult because you have guests on, right? | ||
| You have people on your show. | ||
| You have to hold them to account. | ||
| You have sources. | ||
| And investigative journalism, it takes a lot of time. | ||
| It takes a lot of resources. | ||
| And it's hard to do that as an independent journalist, as I've seen. | ||
| But I will say... | ||
| It's a lot easier when you don't have as many voices sort of weighing in. | ||
| You can really rely on your gut and you can go where you know the story is going, where you feel the story is going, not necessarily how someone thinks it's going to sell. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| I mean, listen, it's scary out there, the way that everything is twisted. | ||
| And you know, if you work on something for months and months and months and you publish it... | ||
| And no one clicks on it. | ||
| Did it ever happen? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So in some ways, I understand the packaging. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| I worked at the New York Post. | ||
| It was all about packaging and headlines and getting people to click and look. | ||
| And there is something to be said about it. | ||
| It's just like it has become so divisive sometimes when you're on any of these apps and you're scrolling through. | ||
| My suggestion would be that people from opposite sides just sit down and like, And really talk openly and honestly. | ||
| And it doesn't really happen that frequently. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Well, it's tricky. | ||
| I think there's a little bit of an asymmetry there because it for years, you know, for those of you that are a bit familiar with my own political evolution, I was a lefty. | ||
| I was a progressive. | ||
| I worked for the Young Turks network, very far left network for years, started waking up when. | ||
| Really, before it was called wokeness, but what we now all know as wokeness, I was waking up to what identity politics was and what was happening to the Democrat Party. | ||
| And the people that I thought were liberal were really kind of acting the most illiberally. | ||
| And I started interviewing people. | ||
| I tried originally to interview people from all over the political map. | ||
| And to your point, what I found very quickly was I could sit down, even though I was definitely on the more liberal side of things, I could sit down with people on the right. | ||
| That I was told were racist and they, you know... | ||
| Republicans only care about war, all these crazy notions. | ||
| They hate women, they hate gays, all this stuff. | ||
| And I could suddenly sit down with Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager or Larry Elder or Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, all of these people that were thought of as really hardcore right. | ||
| And what I found was they were always willing to sit there and smile and have a conversation as long as I was. | ||
| And if I treated them with respect, they would treat me with respect. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| Most of them. | ||
| I would say most of them. | ||
| Not everybody. | ||
| Some of it has shifted. | ||
| I mean, that was about ten years ago. | ||
| But what happened, unfortunately, was the more I started talking to some of those guys, even though I had disagreements with them on the death penalty, on abortion, on a series of issues, the less the so-called liberals were willing to talk to me, even though in many ways I had a lot more in common with them. | ||
| And that's directly connected to, I think, the sort of hysteria around free speech, around all of the issues that I think we now have seen sort of burst. | ||
| Fourth in college campuses. | ||
| And so that has become a problem. | ||
| It's getting harder and harder, I think, to... | ||
| Talk to people across the aisle, because in many cases, it's your own people who will come after you. | ||
| It's a very delicate balance. | ||
| I hope we can get to it. | ||
| I had Ro Khanna, Democrat from Silicon Valley, Cali, last week on my show, Congressman, and he is the first Democrat I've had on basically in four years, and that's not for lack of trying. | ||
| Actually, the last Democrat I had on before him was... | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he was running as a Democrat, and I said to him, I said to him, listen, by the end of this thing, I don't know if you're going to be a Republican, but I know you won't be a Democrat. | ||
| And if you watch that video, you can see his eyes light up. | ||
| And this is somebody who now is in, you know, in the administration. | ||
| Somebody like Tulsi Gabbard was the previous Democrat before that. | ||
| She's no longer a Democrat. | ||
| So there is a bit of an imbalance between which side will talk to who. | ||
| It's changing, though. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I'm telling you, it's changing. | ||
| With Trump back in office, the media is back pushing fear and hiding the full story. | ||
| That's why I partnered with Ground News. | ||
| They don't tell you what to think. | ||
| They show how stories are reported across the political spectrum with bias and ownership tags. | ||
| For example, when the Treasury Secretary pushed back on recession fears, only 17 outlets covered it, and all were on the right. | ||
| If you're not seeing that, you're in trouble. | ||
| Ground News' Blindspot feed exposes what each side is ignoring, helping you see the full picture. | ||
| They're fully independent, reader-funded, and I got you 40% off the Vantage plan that I use. | ||
| Just go to ground.news slash Rubin or click the link in the description below. | ||
| Stay informed. | ||
| Okay, so you are right that the right was super willing. | ||
| to talk when they were the anti-establishment. | ||
| Charlie Kirk used to call me. | ||
| He wanted to be in my column. | ||
| He wanted me to write about his books. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| They were the anti-establishment. | ||
| They were ignored. | ||
| They were retro. | ||
| And the establishment was the mainstream media, was the Democrats. | ||
| But things have shifted now. | ||
| I say this in the collective, you guys, but the pod bros, the MAGA right, they're the establishment now. | ||
| They have access to the White House. | ||
| Jack Posobiec has better access to the White House than I do. | ||
| I said it, okay? | ||
| This group, and frankly, the Republican Party right now, they don't want to anger President Trump, and so they are less likely to go on podcasts. | ||
| I know this because I had a podcast during the Biden administration, and I had a podcast during the Trump years. | ||
| During the Biden years, I could get any Republican on my show to get on there, and they'll talk their book, and I'll drill into them. | ||
| But now that Trump's in power, people are afraid to go on shows and say the wrong things, okay? | ||
| And it's less, and if you push them on what's going on, they're less interested. | ||
| Now, Democrats are very happy to go on my show, and I'll tell you, in the last administration, it was not easy to book Democrats. | ||
| It was really hard. | ||
| Now they're, like, knocking down my door, and I'm like, listen, I'm kind of less interested in talking to Democrats. | ||
| I'm frankly more interested in talking to people from the right right now, because having a conversation with them is more interesting. | ||
| They're the ones who have to take the hard questions because they're the ones in power. | ||
| They're the people that we need to be hearing from. | ||
| And I don't see them on TV as frequently anymore. | ||
| I don't see them trying to do that. | ||
| I mean, I just launched my podcast last week. | ||
| You guys should all subscribe, the Tara Palmieri show. | ||
| It was the Somebody's Gotta Win show before. | ||
| But, you know, my first few guests were two Democrats. | ||
| It was David Carville. | ||
| Sorry, James Carville and David Hogg. | ||
| They're going to morph into one person. | ||
| They will become one person. | ||
| It's like a Benjamin Button situation. | ||
| And they duked it out, and it was a great debate, right? | ||
| And then I had Laura Loomer on my show, which people were very angry about that I had her on the show, but I had to constantly remind them she has the president's ear. | ||
| She convinced him to fire his national security apparatus, including his national security advisor, so I think she is definitely... | ||
| I'm definitely someone worthy of an interview, even if she is a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| But for me, I'm like, I keep telling my team, we need to get more Republicans on the show. | ||
| We need to get more Republicans on the show. | ||
| And like I said, last time I could get Trump's closest aides. | ||
| They all came on. | ||
| His deputy campaign advisor, now deputy chief of staff, was on my show. | ||
| I got his pollster on my show. | ||
| I mean, literally, any Republican on my show. | ||
| Now that Trump's in power? | ||
| No. | ||
| They're the establishment. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It's interesting because I didn't know that, and we're having sort of an opposite problem there. | ||
| So that actually speaks to something that I think is quite good. | ||
| That's why Ro Khanna's on your show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why he's on. | ||
| Well, I've debated him before, and... | ||
| I think he's come off looking not particularly good in the debates. | ||
| You know, he, in this last week when I had him on, I asked him about affirmative action at colleges. | ||
| And he basically, which the Supreme Court, of course, reversed about two years ago, and he's still for it. | ||
| And I was asking him if he thinks, he happens to be Indian American, if he thinks his own children should be discriminated against in admissions. | ||
| And he, in a very sort of mealy-mouthed way, basically said yes. | ||
| And I thought that was rather extraordinary. | ||
| But I give the guy... | ||
| So the point of that is, I don't think he came off looking great, but I give anyone credit that is willing to go up against someone that is at odds with them ideologically. | ||
| You know, interestingly to your point also, is that... | ||
| One of the memes that came out of the last election was that the right has this ecosystem online right now, right? | ||
| So there's Rogan and there's me and Shapiro and whoever else is, and Tucker and whoever else is out there. | ||
| And the right has this ecosystem and the left sort of doesn't. | ||
| And what happened there? | ||
| And it's like, man, you guys had everybody. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| You guys had Rogan. | ||
| Rogan is a pot-smoking, mushroom-eating, MMA-fighting, like... | ||
| The guy is definitely not a traditional conservative by any stretch. | ||
| But the hysteria, I think, particularly around COVID and a few other things, and the inability for people to speak freely and honestly about things, it basically drove all of these people who would, I think, in normal times be moderate to a little bit left. | ||
| It all drove them to the, if you want to call it the right wing. | ||
| I think that the Conservatives had to create an ecosystem, if you want to call it that. | ||
| Oh, we had to. | ||
| Yeah, they had to do this many, many years ago because they just weren't represented in the mainstream media. | ||
| And frankly, as a reporter, I mean, up until now... | ||
| Republicans were always more than happy to sit for interviews. | ||
| They just wanted to be out there. | ||
| They liked sparring. | ||
| They were just happy to have... | ||
| And even off the record, on background, I found them to be much less touchy and much less pushy. | ||
| Whereas... | ||
| Especially like Democratic administrations, you would get the nastiest phone calls from the press secretaries or the deputy press secretaries like, I didn't like that word you used. | ||
| I would never get a call like that from a Republican. | ||
| They'd just be happy to be covered because they felt like they had this grip on the Democratic part, I mean, on the mainstream media, like as if the mainstream media was an extension of them. | ||
| And I think right now Democrats are sitting on their heels and they're like, whoa, the world has changed so much. | ||
| And they've been told from upon high, Ken Martin, the DNC chair, get out there, get your gloves on, start fighting the right, start getting out there and creating content. | ||
| The problem is their content doesn't feel great. | ||
| But I will say this, and don't take this the wrong way, and this doesn't reflect you, but I'm starting to think that... | ||
| It's really hard to defend an administration. | ||
| It's really hard to be a part of the establishment. | ||
| And I think that the right wing's content is starting to get lamer because they are no longer anti-establishment. | ||
| They are alt-establishment or whatever. | ||
| It's like, how can Joe Rogan be cool if he's going to be up there being like, yeah, that was a good idea by Trump? | ||
| Nobody wants to hear that all day long. | ||
| People want a little bit of flavor. | ||
| They want some rage. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So there's a distinction, I think, between what's cool and then what's true. | ||
| And provocative, though, too. | ||
| Right, sure. | ||
| So what's cool, yeah. | ||
| If you just think about COVID, when people started waking up and started questioning that masks don't work or that we were promised if you get the Including the Trump administration, who told us to wear masks. | ||
| Sure, everybody. | ||
| It was across. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They did warp speed, of course. | ||
| So it was across the board. | ||
| But suddenly you could go on shows and talk about these subversive things, right? | ||
| You could talk about the fact that maybe you weren't vaxxed or that it didn't make sense about masks or this or that or that thing. | ||
| It was just an easy example of it, but there's many examples of this. | ||
| Very fine people on both sides, which the entire machine told us Donald Trump said after Charlottesville, and the next sentence out of his mouth was, no, I'm not talking about the white supremacists or the neo-Nazis, and they ran with that for years. | ||
| We can do many examples of this. | ||
| So you could go on these shows and talk about these things, and you're right, it felt subversive, because it was like, oh, that's the reverse of what CNN or MSNBC or ABC is doing. | ||
| It was what everyone was thinking. | ||
| And it was what everyone was thinking. | ||
| What has flipped now, and it is a challenge, I would say, is that it's not necessarily cool to be cool if cool is what you're going for. | ||
| It's not necessarily cool to be like, oh, the administration is redoing trade deals. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| No, it's not that it's cool. | ||
| But I have no problem defending. | ||
| Most of what I would say the administration is doing, because I think it's the right thing to do. | ||
| It may not be the cool thing to do, but I think it's the right thing to do. | ||
| Okay, having a bunch of right-leaning influencers showing up at the White House, taking Epstein binders that say classified on them, and when you open them up, I know this because I've covered this. | ||
| They were literal props, these right-leaning influencers, on the White House steps. | ||
| Holding on to binders that say classified Epstein, they were Virginia Giuffre's court documents. | ||
| They are public for everyone to see. | ||
| There was nothing in there that was classified. | ||
| And they looked to me like props. | ||
| If the Biden administration did that, I mean, they did meet with influencers on the left. | ||
| I'm not going to lie. | ||
| But that just seemed so staged. | ||
| And it was just like, how do you have any credibility at that point? | ||
| You can't carry water for the administration. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Any administration. | ||
| Well, I don't know if you're asking me or those people. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, optically, it was terrible. | ||
| I mean, it looked ridiculous. | ||
| They're standing there smiling outside of the White House, and it was like, well, what is in these documents? | ||
| And even if there was some smoking gun in there, it's a pretty horrible thing that they're covering. | ||
| So the idea of these people standing up there and smiling is kind of ridiculous. | ||
| But look, like any administration, they're going to have some wins and some losses. | ||
| And some are going to hit and some aren't. | ||
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| I don't think it's a winner. | ||
| I'm not talking about the Trump administration win or loss. | ||
| Like, I have a lot of thoughts on the Epstein thing, which are totally separate. | ||
| I just think it's the whole idea of that media ecosystem. | ||
| How do they live in a world where, like, they are getting invited to the White House for their separate media briefing? | ||
| Which, listen, I think that the White House briefing room needs to be blown up completely. | ||
| It should, like, turn into a stadium or something. | ||
| And people should be, you should have representatives from the Rubin Report there. | ||
| You have a bigger audience than the cable shows, like you said. | ||
| We've been invited, I just haven't made it over there yet. | ||
| And I frankly, as a reporter, well, first of all, I'm not even going to go there right now because I've had enough headaches, but as a reporter... | ||
| I found it to be not that useful to be in the White House briefing room asking questions because it was highly performative. | ||
| As an investigative reporter, I would be on the outside calling people who have information who are actually willing to talk and give me information. | ||
| But inside the White House, it's a moment for the people who are being filmed to ask a question, seem tough, joust with the press secretary, and maybe get it into their news package, right? | ||
| If you have a really big scoop, you're not going to... | ||
| Announce in the middle of the press office, like, uh, can you please comment on this amazing scoop I'm about to break later? | ||
| No. | ||
| You go into the White House press secretary's office and you drop it on them like a bomb or you call them later. | ||
| It's just not how it works. | ||
| So this whole, like, fight for the, I need to be in the press briefing room, it's really about performative. | ||
| It's performative. | ||
| It's about optics. | ||
| But I do think that, like, it's time to, like, we need to change how it works. | ||
| Podcasts are huge. | ||
| This is bigger than, you know, the media. | ||
| I don't even like to call it new media because it's not new media anymore. | ||
| It's old media. | ||
| And I just think that this whole idea of, like, okay, we're going to have two different briefings. | ||
| Like, this is the good people briefing and this is the bad people briefing. | ||
| Are they having two or literal two different briefings? | ||
| They have, yeah. | ||
| And Sean Spicer sat at the front row of one of them, which was kind of trippy. | ||
| That's a strange hero's arc, I guess, for him. | ||
| Yeah, and his question to Caroline Levitt was, or Levitt was, how can you let these other reporters in your briefing room? | ||
| It was something along those lines. | ||
| Like, how can you take questions from the mainstream media? | ||
| Well, I guess really what you're getting down to is we're in an incredible transition phase right now. | ||
| Again, it gets to watching an old machine that is sort of at its end. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I mean, the only time that I ever really watch... | ||
| Any mainstream media is when I'm on the plane, and it's usually, I can barely deal with it for more than a minute, but sometimes, you know, somebody's TV will be on next to you, and, you know, your eye just kind of goes there the whole time, and you don't even have to have the audio, but just reading the chyrons on the bottom, you just realize how nonsensical it all is, and there's a machine that I think is basically dying. | ||
| It's sort of like a dinosaur slowly, you know, sinking into the La Brea tar pits, and then you have these new media, or whatever phrase we want to use, people jumping over them, but some of them will... | ||
| They end up being as swampy as those guys, for sure. | ||
| Most of them already are, by this chance. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And again, that partly also is why I've been invited several times, including last week, and I haven't gone, and again, why I don't consider myself a journalist. | ||
| I would rather have a little distance with all of these things. | ||
| I think one of the challenges, for sure, that I've come up against is that when you interview all of these people all the time, and you break bread with them, and you go out with them, and you meet their kids, or my show, I've been running my show. | ||
| I'd go out of my house for 10 years. | ||
| I was doing it, or 15 years almost, way before everyone at home studios. | ||
| And these people would come in and they'd play with my dog and all these things. | ||
| And then suddenly, two weeks later, I'd see them saying something completely insane and there'd be a little part of me like... | ||
| Ah, you know, I kind of, I like them. | ||
| I don't want to go and just wreck them. | ||
| So I think it starts creating all of these competing interests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, totally. | |
| And that's partly why, it's why they call it the swamp. | ||
| It's why they call it the swamp. | ||
| The sponsorships, the advertising, a lot of it comes from public affairs firms. | ||
| They're all connected. | ||
| It is a swamp. | ||
| And the kids go to the same schools, and the sourcing, and yeah, I mean, the salon. | ||
| I mean, I used to always write about the Cafe Milano scene, and how really every... | ||
| I also don't live in Washington. | ||
| I find that it's better for my reporting in a weird way. | ||
| I drop in and then I leave and people don't even know that I live in New York. | ||
| But the truth is, it's better. | ||
| I don't want to have to think about, I don't want my friendship circles to revolve around my work. | ||
| I don't want to feel in any way encumbered by it. | ||
| I'd rather do my work and drop in, take my source meetings. | ||
| And frankly, I will tell you this, a really good source never wants to be seen with you. | ||
| They don't want to see you at lunch. | ||
| They don't want to see you anywhere. | ||
| Because if they're really going to tell you something, it's like they're going to call you. | ||
| They're going to go on signal. | ||
| It's going to be something like that. | ||
| So I do think that it's worth it to go there and meet people and do that. | ||
| And I'll go to events. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| I mean, I'll go there to network and to get people's cards. | ||
| But I think if you are truly a swamp creature, it's hard to not be one, right? | ||
| No, it's very hard. | ||
| Look, I mean, you can see the media now running cover for so many things that it was complicit in. | ||
| That's part of what the swamp is. | ||
| I mean, one of them, I suppose it's slightly uncomfortable to talk about here, but if you were to look at the media's... | ||
| Coverage or I would say lack thereof of the former president's mental state for at least four years while he was president and really before that They ran cover for it and pretended it wasn't happening and again that drove All of these people who were awake, who could see what was going on, that drove them to shows like mine where we were showing these clips. | ||
| So, you know, CNN would say, they're showing cheap fakes or deep fakes of the president, you know. | ||
| And then we'd show the entire thing, and then people would share that. | ||
| And then that disconnect would get wider and wider. | ||
| And I think now you see somebody like Jake Tapper, who is completely... | ||
| Part of, and Jen Psaki just in the last two or three days said she never saw the president have any sort of mental problem until the night of the debate. | ||
| And it's like, that simply cannot be true. | ||
| And now Jake's writing a book about it, and she's got a show on MSNBC. | ||
| And that's kind of how the swamp recalibrates in a media sense. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they know they have to do some sort of atonement. | ||
| And I think it's not so much this whole idea of, like, the former president's mental state. | ||
| It was more about the age thing. | ||
| No one was allowed to talk about how old the former president was. | ||
| And it was just like that. | ||
| And it was uncomfortable. | ||
| It was impolite. | ||
| It was not polite society. | ||
| And that trickled down from the top, you know, the top editors, because editors-in-chief and the bureau chiefs down. | ||
| And if you brought it up, it was like, you're right, you were like a right-wing dweller. | ||
| You know, you were a troll. | ||
| And it really should have been a question that came up frequently. | ||
| Especially when, just, you could, listen, you're never going to know from the doctor's reports exactly what type of... | ||
| Condition a person truly is in but when a person is 80 years old and this is not to be an ageist either you You have the right to ask questions about them in the same way like President Trump is getting older. | ||
| And as he gets older, I hope that they do the same thing to him, too. | ||
| But yeah, it was impolite. | ||
| And if you asked about it, and also the White House was extremely aggressive if you went there. | ||
| They would punish you. | ||
| They had an extremely sophisticated communications apparatus because they knew how to control the town. | ||
| And here's the other thing that happens when you're in a White House press corps. | ||
| I used to be an ABC White House correspondent. | ||
| I was the one at Politico as well. | ||
| And even at Puck. | ||
| And I'm covering Playbook, which is like the pretty big newsletter in Washington. | ||
| They know how to isolate you within the press corps. | ||
| And they know how to make your life very difficult and how to cut off your access. | ||
| And because there was such limited access already to Joe Biden, they could really, really control the story by keeping... | ||
| All of the reporters away from the president. | ||
| And so that was a way to control this story, too. | ||
| And then also isolating that reporter from stories. | ||
| The way that they controlled the press was incredible. | ||
| And by the way, what we've barely touched on there, I mean, then there was, especially as it relates to COVID, was then the big tech element of it, where we now know. | ||
| I mean, there have been dozens of reports on this. | ||
| Jim Jordan released a huge report on this. | ||
| The government was colluding with big tech for sure, 100%, with YouTube, with Facebook, with former ex-Twitter, to silence people based on free speech. | ||
| Jim Jordan showed me the documents. | ||
| I had a tweet that came out in the summer of, I think it was 2021, saying that mandates were coming and the vaccines were not working as promised. | ||
| I was suspended from Twitter and Jim Jordan showed me that there were communications going back and forth with the administration. | ||
| Saki admitted that when she was press secretary that I think... | ||
| We have backdoor communications with the big tech companies, something to that effect. | ||
| So what all of that did to connect it to what we're talking about here with New Media, what all of that did was it just drove all of you guys To find other people that were having decent conversations about things. | ||
| One of the reasons that I didn't go crazy during COVID and I was never demanding that my employees be vaxxed or masked or whatever. | ||
| I'm very proud of my COVID record because they said two weeks to slow the spread and on day 15 I was like, I'm done with this. | ||
| I knew something was wrong. | ||
| But one of the real reasons that I didn't go crazy was the first guy that I put on my show to discuss COVID was a little-known Stanford professor known as Jay Bhattacharya. | ||
| And he's now the head of NIH. | ||
| And he just kept saying, calm down, and we have to see where this all pans out. | ||
| But he was the type of person that couldn't get on mainstream media at all. | ||
| They were putting on a lot of people that were off in lobbyists. | ||
| And then you'd watch Meet the Press, and Chuck Todd would throw to commercial, and then they would show you the brought to you by Pfizer. | ||
| And it was like people started waking up, and that kind of leads us. | ||
| Yeah, I think at this point the institutions have lost all credibility and people are looking towards human beings who are, you know, that can draw an audience, that have trust, that have credibility, that have a community based on trust. | ||
| A lot of us are trying to eat healthier, so we reach for protein bars that look good for us. | ||
| But have you actually read the ingredients? | ||
| It's mostly junk. | ||
| In fact, one study showed a fast food burger was actually healthier than a typical protein bar. | ||
| That's why I'm all in on Bear Bar, a real protein bar done right. | ||
| Each bar packs 20 grams of clean, grass-fed beef protein. | ||
| And no, it doesn't taste like beef. | ||
| The texture is light and fluffy, not one of those dense gut bombs. | ||
| It's naturally sweet, easy on your stomach, and tastes amazing. | ||
| Bear Bar nailed it. | ||
| No junk, just real quality fuel. | ||
| You got to try it, and I've got a 15% off plus free shipping deal for you. | ||
| Use code Ruben at GetBearBars.com. | ||
| B-A-R-E bars dot com. | ||
| There's just so much mystery behind how news is actually derived and where it comes from. | ||
| And I think it's caused a lot of distrust. | ||
| And like you said, the institutions have done nothing to help themselves. | ||
| But maybe this is a way to build it back up. | ||
| Well, the other part of that, of course, is that people have just become smarter. | ||
| I mean, it seems like we're in a time where everyone's getting dumber, and that's probably true to some extent. | ||
| But people that pay attention to the news, I think, have become much more savvy. | ||
| So if you look at any New York Times... | ||
| Literally take the New York Times from today. | ||
| I didn't look at it, but I'm sure that I'm right about this. | ||
| If you look at the cover stories on the New York Times, there will be multiple anonymously sourced articles. | ||
| Multiple. | ||
| And if you watch CNN, there is no doubt that Dana Bash today said, a source on Capitol Hill told me. | ||
| These are often completely fictitious, made-up people. | ||
| I don't think that. | ||
| Oh, I absolutely... | ||
| Well, that would be an interesting thing to... | ||
| No, because I know Dana, and that's not true. | ||
| Like, I know that she would not make up a source. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of Dana Bash. | ||
| All right, so forget Dana Bash. | ||
| You may not like her, but I know her, and she would not make up a source. | ||
| All right, so forget Dana Bash, then. | ||
| No, no, no, and I don't think you can say that about these journalists. | ||
| Like, I know these people. | ||
| I have been in scrums with them. | ||
| I don't consider Dana Bash a journalist. | ||
| She's a Democrat activist who works at CNN. | ||
| You can have your opinions about where you think she leans, but if you say to me she's making something up, I will stand my ground and say no to that. | ||
| I see these people in those scrums. | ||
| I see them talking to the same people that I talk to. | ||
| I know they know them. | ||
| I see their phones. | ||
| I know who they're talking to. | ||
| I don't want to get lost in that. | ||
| She literally made up a story about me. | ||
| But it doesn't mean it's not a source. | ||
| Let's punt the Dana Bash thing. | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| Anonymous sources, for any of you that are going to school here at the University of Delaware, I'm fairly certain for your political science class or your history class, you wouldn't be allowed to say, oh, a source at the commissary told me. | ||
| So we have asked so little out of these people. | ||
| And the thing is, I can accept anonymous sourcing at some level, of course. | ||
| You need whistleblowers, you need people that can expose the truth. | ||
| Of course, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be. | ||
| But at some point when the institutions that clearly you believe, and I think most people here believe, have failed us so terribly, at some point when they fail, I did not say I believe in the institutions, but I believe in the people. | ||
| I know these people. | ||
| Now, do I believe as a collective? | ||
| There are individual people within an institution, but they are not the full institution themselves. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Some people are worse than others, of course. | ||
| And often, individual people who are trying to do the right thing, they get the stain of the institution on them. | ||
| And that's a fact. | ||
| And you said when you worked at Young Turks you weren't happy about it. | ||
| Am I supposed to think forever? | ||
| Oh, can't believe anything he says. | ||
| You know? | ||
| No, but again, I'm punting Dana Bash. | ||
| Dana Bash, it seems fairly obvious to me, is a Democrat. | ||
| Like Jake Tapper is a Democrat. | ||
| Like Wolf Blitzer is a Democrat. | ||
| I mean, there's nobody on CNN that's not a Democrat except for Scott Jennings, which is why he goes on every show. | ||
| He's not a journalist either. | ||
| He works for Mitch McConnell. | ||
| But I don't think he's purporting to be a journalist. | ||
| The difference is Dana's purporting to be a journalist. | ||
| But Scott also isn't saying, hey, I'm doing reporting. | ||
| I'm calling people. | ||
| I just got the flag, though. | ||
| Scott is a pundit. | ||
| Scott says inflammatory things on TV to... | ||
| Well, I don't know if they're inflammatory. | ||
| He says true things to people that seem unable to debate him. | ||
| He makes some really great faces, though. | ||
| You've got to give it to him. | ||
| Oh, I think he's doing great. | ||
| I mean, they put him up against people that don't know how to debate, and he just says some pretty obvious stuff, and it's fantastic. | ||
| We have to do Q&A, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Guys, anyone have any questions? | ||
| What are your thoughts on Dana Bash, everybody? | ||
| Let us know. | ||
| No bashing right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good evening. | |
| Thank you for joining us and for a spirited conversation. | ||
| As someone who works in communications, it's often the times when the interview is over that you hear the real truth. | ||
| People are willing to divulge information about what you were discussing that they might not have said on camera. | ||
| Do you find that to still be true in your work? | ||
| And if so, are there lessons that you can share with the students here about how to handle those pieces? | ||
| Keep the cameras rolling and always keep rolling. | ||
| No, but that's really true, and it kind of goes back to the whole idea of anonymous sources, because it's true. | ||
| What people often say publicly, It's the farthest thing from the truth. | ||
| And that's what really bothers me. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why I do rely on anonymous sources, because I fear that if we take everything that people say on the record, especially politicians, come on, we're lost. | ||
| And I wish everyone had the guts and the courage to be honest and to speak truly on the record, but they don't. | ||
| And sometimes you need information. | ||
| And the only way you're going to get it is from someone who is on background or off the record giving you a tip to follow something. | ||
| And I can't, like... | ||
| I can't tell someone who's, you know, working in an agency where there's some sort of corruption going on to like, okay, you have to speak out as a whistleblower and quit your job. | ||
| They've got, you know, three kids, single mom. | ||
| You know, it's just like, but then they're just cowards. | ||
| Cowards, usually politicians, that just won't say what they really think on the record. | ||
| They'd rather just say their talking points and project whoever they are. | ||
| And for that, I think we need to be tougher on those people. | ||
| I think we should keep rolling. | ||
| I think, you know, you don't want to stop that conversation from happening. | ||
| And those people, they should be pressed on the record. | ||
| And that would be my advice for that. | ||
| I would say as an interviewer, I mean, my general philosophy is you catch more flies with honey. | ||
| So if you know, if you want to, if there's something that somebody says, you know, off camera that they won't say on camera, or you see a real disconnect between their public and private parts of themselves, or you just know there's some topic they don't want you to touch or something. | ||
| I mean, I find if you actually start letting them speak and you just kind of massage the conversation in a pleasant way without attacking them, that eventually you might just get there. | ||
| You kind of won't always get there, but I can tell you some of the best moments of my show over the last 15 years have been when I've had someone on who I was a little suspect of what they thought or I didn't really think they knew what they were saying or maybe there was that public-private cat And you can kind of slowly watch them wrap the rope around their neck. | ||
| And then you have to hope that your audience is wise enough to catch it. | ||
| And I will tell you that in a time of X where everything gets clipped and shared, if they screw up something, if there's some daylight there between what they're thinking and what they're saying, people do catch on to it. | ||
| So I don't know that there's a perfect methodology there, but I think that's probably the best way to do it. | ||
| I agree with you on that. | ||
| There is a each person that you interview should be handled differently. | ||
| Some people, if you give them enough rope, they will hang them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So with belief, I think authenticity is really important, as well as non-commitment, being open to changing your mind. | |
| And you all are building, in some ways, a brand as an influencer. | ||
| If those values are important to you, how do you go about maintaining your authenticity and being uncommitted while sort of... | ||
| Building a fan base? | ||
| And how do you instill those values in your fans so that they become sort of engaged Americans, not just engaged to your show? | ||
| So that's a great question. | ||
| I mean, as I said before, I don't consider myself a journalist. | ||
| I tell people what I think, and I think that that now, what I've learned after cultivating an audience for so many years, is that that is now shown back to me by my audience. | ||
| If you look at my comment section, for example, it's really thoughtful. | ||
| There are trolls in there, for sure, and there's fighting and all that stuff. | ||
| But relative to what goes on in the political space, I think because I've cultivated and nurtured an audience that is willing to agree to disagree and... | ||
| And actually my audience, and I'm very proud of this, most people in our space aren't proud of this, my audience skews a little bit older and a little bit more female than most political shows, because politics is very young and very male. | ||
| Mine happens to be a little more the other way. | ||
| And I love that, for whatever reason that that presented itself. | ||
| So I think if you are authentic, your audience... | ||
| We'll be authentic back to you, and they will spread it to other people looking for that. | ||
| You know, there's a million, I don't need to throw anybody under the bus here, but there's a million YouTubers or podcasters or whatever that are just literally waking up every day, like, what is the story that I can burn everything down with and whatever? | ||
| And by the way, we're all subjected to some of that, the YouTube algorithm. | ||
| You have to play a certain game, or your views, you know, I have three million subscribers on YouTube. | ||
| I still have to play a stupid game with titles and thumbnails and things, because otherwise your video... | ||
| Just don't get out there. | ||
| So there's no perfect way to do this if you want to be seen, actually. | ||
| But I think the best thing that you can do, I mean, the question I get more than anything else is basically from people about your age. | ||
| Like, I want to do what you do. | ||
| And it's like, just start doing it. | ||
| Just start doing it. | ||
| And if you have something in you, there's something in you that is unique to you. | ||
| And if you do that honestly and forthrightly... | ||
| And don't pay attention to the numbers, but two weeks from now, you'll do one video, it'll have 50 views, and then maybe the next one has 100, then the next one's got 30, but then something's going to have 2,000, and then it starts snowballing, and then the audience will expect a certain something from you. | ||
| So I think it actually starts becoming a very symbiotic relationship with you and your audience, and that's why I'm so... | ||
| When I meet my audience, when I meet people out and about, when people say hi to me, I'm not afraid that they're like... | ||
| Crazy lunatics. | ||
| I'm like always, almost without fail, I'm like, oh, these people would be my friends in real life. | ||
| And some of them have become my friends. | ||
| So I think it's just be who you are, put it out there, and let the chips fall where they may. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm still new to the fan base world because I've mainly been writing. | ||
| And yeah, I have a podcast, but I haven't really been thinking about nurturing an audience. | ||
| But now that I do have a YouTube page and I'm out on my own as an independent journalist, I do have to have followers. | ||
| I have to have people who are like, I want to go to you, Tara Palmieri, over a number of other people, maybe even the New York Times or various other places. | ||
| And I think it's really important, and you've done this too in your career and your life, is to evolve, to accept responsibility when you get something wrong. | ||
| You know, Alex Thompson, he's a journalist from Axios. | ||
| He accepted an award at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. | ||
| And he actually said, like, you know, the best thing that we can do as journalists is to admit when we are wrong. | ||
| And I think, like, that was really profound. | ||
| And I think, like... | ||
| Having that authenticity, that vulnerability, too, and honesty. | ||
| And explain, like, you know what? | ||
| I thought this was the right thing at the time. | ||
| Maybe my sources were wrong, or I interpreted it the wrong way, or it evolved. | ||
| And just being open with people. | ||
| I think if they understand, like, you're a human being like they are, and you're just trying to do the best. | ||
| Version of your job that you can do for them. | ||
| I think that there's a way to do it. | ||
| Now, I'm still new to this. | ||
| Maybe people are less forgiving than that. | ||
| I seem to have some followers that like my work. | ||
| I think they appreciate that I try to get people on from both sides of the aisle, and that I'm not really kind of interested in talking to people that have the same ideas that I do or the same thoughts that I do. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| We'll see how it works out. | ||
| If it doesn't work out, I guess I'll have to do something else with my life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the attention economy, do you see any room or hope for moderation, or do you feel like it's the type of ecosystem that drives us further apart? | |
| This is tricky. | ||
| I think that's been a little bit of the subtext of what we've been talking about up here. | ||
| It's really tricky. | ||
| I can tell you that... | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| One thing that's very obvious. | ||
| If you go out there and you just throw bombs at everybody and you're trying to destroy everybody and conservative destroys libtard and you put it all in capitals, of course they're going to click on that. | ||
| All the pressures with the algorithm and everything else are designed to separate us and make us angrier and all of those things. | ||
| And I don't even know that that's an inherently... | ||
| Coordinated assault. | ||
| I think it's actually mapping behaviors that we all have in our own life, and now the algorithm is just showing us a part of ourselves that we didn't necessarily see before. | ||
| I would say part of the problem also is that there's a, and this has been a big discussion online over the last couple weeks, Jordan Peterson brought it up a couple weeks ago on Joe Rogan's show, you know, anonymity online has created some problems too, because again, I'm for anonymous sources, I'm for, with good reason. | ||
| And everyone, you can have burner accounts and all of those things. | ||
| But what happens is we have a huge amount of people, especially young people that are gaming the system, that are creating multiple accounts that the second you tweet something, if you tweet something sort of benign or thoughtful, immediately get in there and say horrible things on top of the countries, the foreign countries that are doing it, the bots that are doing it and all these things. | ||
| So the conversation has just become so dysregulating. | ||
| So one of the things I've really been trying, of figure out, I talk to my team about this all the time lately, is I know if I get into a little spat with someone on Twitter, my audience, as I mentioned a moment ago, my audience isn't that ready to just like burn the world down and fight with everybody and everything else. | ||
| They kind of want to think it through. | ||
| But if I'm arguing with somebody that is in more of that space than There's no win there. | ||
| This thing is just going to burn down everybody and it's going to turn off. | ||
| All of my people, too. | ||
| So I don't know exactly how you arbitrage those things. | ||
| Again, I do think over time there is something, I mean this sort of literally and spiritually, I suppose, I think there is something in humans that orient us towards the truth over time. | ||
| And we may just be in a time as these institutions crumble and new media rises. | ||
| That's partly why everything feels kind of crazy right now. | ||
| Social media, we're all walking around the world in our pocket for 20 years. | ||
| What that has done to our brains and endless doom scrolling and all of these things. | ||
| It is just, The world is so fundamentally different in 2025 than it was 30 years ago. | ||
| It's literally unimaginable. | ||
| I mean, 30 years ago was 1995. | ||
| It's unimaginably different, the world. | ||
| And how we're going to do all of this and then get it to a place, I forget the phrase you used, but how do we get it to a place where there's sort of some comfortable middle that gets us all like, oh, America's pretty good, and yeah, you're allowed to be crazy that way and crazy this way. | ||
| I don't know what ties that together, but I think that really is, I would say it's the great challenge for people like us, but it's the great challenge for everybody, really, because we all have to live in this. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to break through in the attention economy without having provocative content, essentially, right? | ||
| I personally don't like to watch people fighting as much. | ||
| It's just not my style, and I think that there are other humans out there like me. | ||
| I like debate, but I don't like nasty fighting. | ||
| Name-calling just for the sake of it. | ||
| Actually, kind of like resolution sometimes, if there is debate. | ||
| I want people to feel like they came out of it, understanding the other person a little bit more. | ||
| Maybe there isn't a market for that. | ||
| Maybe everyone wants to watch a wrestling match. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm still new to this. | ||
| But I believe that of the 800 million people on YouTube, there have got to be at least a slice of them that are like me and that are like-minded. | ||
| And I think that's the cool thing about this space, too. | ||
| Maybe I'm not going to crush it with 20 million followers or this and that. | ||
| I go to silent retreats. | ||
| I put my phone away for a month. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| That's how I think. | ||
| I'm a pacifist. | ||
| Even though I'm obviously a sassy Jersey girl at the same time, I still... | ||
| I'm not the type of person that would just do it just to foment anger in people. | ||
| I actually hope that even if there is anger in entertainment, you ended up walking away with understanding and a little bit more peace and liking other people a little bit more. | ||
| I would highly recommend, if you haven't seen it, Jordan on Rogan's podcast from like two weeks ago, because Jordan, who's a clinical psychologist first, before he became... | ||
| I would say a modern prophet, basically. | ||
| He really got into the psychological elements that are driving so much of this. | ||
| We think so much of the fighting is about politics, like it's Democrats versus Republicans and conservatives versus liberals, but there's really a psychological condition that has gripped us, and it's amplified online, again, because of anonymity, because of virality and all of those things, and it's really, really worth watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm worried about the lack of accountability that exists in the alternative media space. | ||
| I think it's a good thing, that random example, when Tucker Carlson knowingly and maliciously lies about details of the Dominion Voting System case, as what happened in 2021, he gets fired. | ||
| Because I think that in this country we should value transparency and fairness and accuracy in our media. | ||
| If somebody like Dana Bash unknowingly received a large sum of money from a foreign, Democrat-aligned, state-funded media... | ||
| I would trust that CNN, even if she did it unknowingly, would fire her. | ||
| Traditional media has professional standards that are followed. | ||
| To frame traditional media as this cabal of liars who are knowingly hiding things about the previous administration, well, we don't have evidence of that. | ||
| I mean, people in the alternative media space can be biased. | ||
| They often are, and they get away with it. | ||
| How many times does Joe Rogan have to apologize for spreading misinformation on his podcast before the alternative media space reckons with the fact that there's a real accountability problem in it? | ||
| Well, you're asking five different questions, but I would say, well, I don't know that Rogan has ever apologized for having any conversation. | ||
| I would say that this is a great challenge, actually, that now that, as I said earlier, that we are ascendant and they are descendant, there is a new responsibility. | ||
| I... | ||
| I tell the truth to the best extent that I can on my show, period. | ||
| I don't lie to my audience. | ||
| I may get things wrong. | ||
| I love making corrections on my show. | ||
| My producer's back there. | ||
| He knows, like, if I get to correct myself in the middle of the show, it's like a joke to us. | ||
| It's become, oh, I got a number wrong or I mentioned the wrong name or the wrong date. | ||
| And it's kind of fun to do that. | ||
| I think it shows some accountability. | ||
| But not everyone is going to do that. | ||
| And if the answer that you're looking for is, oh, we should take out Rogan. | ||
| Or Tucker shouldn't be allowed to be on YouTube, or I shouldn't be allowed to be on Spotify or something like that. | ||
| I mean, I'm not for censorship at that level. | ||
| So again, a lot of this, it relies, it falls on you as the viewer to have some discernment over who you're watching and who you're trusting, and that puts more of a responsibility on us to tell the truth. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty hard for the viewer. | ||
| For the viewer to know that, especially when they're just getting fed things all day long. | ||
| I mean, are they really going and seeing like, okay, let me Google this YouTube channel and then find out, you know, I agree with you. | ||
| I personally, you know, a lot of people who are independent content creators, they accept money from political packs. | ||
| They don't tell anyone that. | ||
| They take money from the Republicans or they take money from the Democrats and they say they're journalists, but they're not. | ||
| You can't take money from a political pack. | ||
| I mean, right now my company is being funded by my sub stack. | ||
| So it does not have very much money. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And even, even I feel uncomfortable with taking money to advertise on my sub stack because like, and it's going to be really, really, really, really hard to do this. | ||
| And I don't even know that it will necessarily work. | ||
| I shouldn't say that, but you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like if I really want to do this, like properly, I cannot take money. | ||
| And if I do, I'll have advertisers eventually on my podcast, I'm sure. | ||
| And I'll probably have to read some stuff. | ||
| But I have some boundaries. | ||
| I'm not going to read from... | ||
| I'm not going to read from pharmaceuticals. | ||
| I'm not going to read from big oil. | ||
| I'm not going to read from people that I just do not, well, they don't align with me and what I stand for. | ||
| But I absolutely am not going to read for a political pack. | ||
| I'm not going to be funded by anyone political. | ||
| In fact, as people have come to me and said, I want to invest in your company. | ||
| And I've been very particular about that. | ||
| I'm not even taking investment money right now. | ||
| But if I do, there's going to be a Republican on the board. | ||
| There's going to be a Democrat on the board. | ||
| Because, like... | ||
| I don't want anyone to say that my news agency is in some way, you know, biased by who I report to. | ||
| And that's why, frankly, I'd love for it to truly be independent and never have an investor. | ||
| And it's just harder. | ||
| It's slower. | ||
| Not going to make any money for a while. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I would also add one thing, which is that I think there seems to be a little confusion in general. | ||
| People seem to think that if you get institutional money, that somehow if you work for MSNBC or CNN or New York Times, Washington Post, that somehow that money is somehow cleaner. | ||
| Rachel Maddow, when the vaccine came out, went on her show and gave one of her very fake, I would say it's half written on the screen, but... | ||
| Basically crying monologues saying that if you get the vaccine, you will not get nor transmit COVID. | ||
| Now, she was either a liar or had no idea what she was saying or was paid to say that. | ||
| I can't speak to what's going on in her mind, so I don't know what the answer to that is, but I know that I didn't do that. | ||
| Now, Rachel Maddow's paid $20 million a year. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's what her contract is. | ||
| Her production company paid $20 million. | ||
| I guarantee you that's more than the Rubin Report budget. | ||
| I wish my budget was $20 million a year, but I would put my track record in terms of getting stories straight and telling them right against every one of these people, and I would come out looking like an absolute all-star every single time. | ||
| Somehow I didn't tweet out that Jesse Smollett was hung and that proved that America was a white supremacist country. | ||
| Somehow I didn't get very fine people wrong. | ||
| Somehow I didn't get COVID wrong. | ||
| Somehow I didn't get COVID wrong. | ||
| And again, I'm not even saying, I'm not even patting myself on the back to say it. | ||
| I'm just saying I was watching things as they came by and analyzing them to the best of my ability. | ||
| Where someone like Rachel Maddow clearly at that time, at the height of the craziness of COVID, Pfizer, which is literally funding Meet the Press on NBC. | ||
| I've worked at those networks, so they don't tell you what to talk about based on your corporation. | ||
| It doesn't mean that they sit you down and tell you, but Rachel had no... | ||
| I think she was just pro-vaccine. | ||
| I think she's just pro-vaccine. | ||
| Is she a journalist? | ||
| She's a commentator, frankly. | ||
| But I think if Rachel Maddow was up here, she would say she's a journalist. | ||
| I don't know that she would, actually. | ||
| She's a liberal commentator. | ||
| I don't think she would say she's a journalist. | ||
| Well, either way, I don't think she's particularly good at her job. | ||
| She's like if Scott Jennings got his own show. | ||
| That's what she is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But Scott, I think, would say it. | ||
| I don't know if she would. |
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