Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 28, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

01:49:30

Sidebar with Richard Baris - Viva & Barnes LIVE

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, hell or high water, we could be in the middle of a province that has shoddy cell reception at best, and we will be live.
	We are live from New Brunswick.
	There's people behind me, they have no idea what is going on right now.
	Bonsoir.
	Ça va?
	Okay, we are going live tonight, people.
	We're in New Brunswick.
	I've got...
	Some car lighting.
	I've got my mic.
	I've got the dog.
	We've been camping now.
	This is going to be the fourth night tenting it.
	And when we go camping, we like to be as torturous as possible.
	Like, we like to spend one night in every location.
	So that it means one or two nights.
	If we're really living the life of luxury, three nights in one location.
	Because that way you don't have to unpack, pack up your tent.
	Which, when it was just my wife and I...
	It was easy, quick.
	It was like a North Face Roadrunner.
	Two poles, standalone tent.
	Five kids.
	Five people, three kids, one dog.
	When you unpack the car, it's a decision of your life that you're making.
	It's not just a whim.
	And so it gets a little harder, longer, more tedious.
	You have to Jenga the back of the car or Tetris the back of the car, whichever one you play.
	It's tough.
	Okay, so with that said, I'm in New Brunswick.
	Hopefully the cell reception is going to be good enough to maintain this live stream.
	We might have to keep it to 90 minutes just because it's going to be tougher to do.
	I was given a strict 90 minute time limit by my daughter who wants to go looking for starfish in the ocean afterwards.
	So I'm going to do it.
	But we have Richard Barris on tonight with Robert.
	Now for those of you who don't know...
	First of all, is my audio good?
	I should see this.
	Oh, hold on.
	Let's bring up some chat.
	The memories are great, but I don't like posting anything on Twitter that could lend to the suggestion of negativity.
	But parenting literally is about the one minute of beauty for the one hour of whining and crying.
	And anyone who has a kid, I guess, will know this.
	And anyone who has nephews or nieces might be able to relate.
	Through osmosis.
	But you capture that one moment of pure beauty.
	And it took you...
	Yesterday, I drove across an entire province.
	And it was so sparsely populated where we drove.
	It was like 150 kilometers of nothing.
	It's beautiful.
	Okay.
	So I haven't seen any Pudge in months.
	She's fine.
	Pudge, when I say that I'm fortunate, my mother-in-law is watching our dog.
	And watching Pudge...
	It's a tough thing.
	Okay, so audio's great.
	Video's great.
	So we have Richard Barris on tonight.
	By the way, standard disclaimers, YouTube takes 30% of super chats.
	If that bothers you, don't do it.
	I'm not going to get to all the super chats, and I might have greater difficulty bringing them up tonight, just given circumstances.
	If you want to support us, Robert Barnes and I are on vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	My sidelight just went out.
	We're going to have to open the door to trigger the battery again.
	Richard Barris, and you guys know him.
	Because Barnes goes live with Barris.
	Thank you very much, Philip De Silva.
	Barnes goes live with Barris every Monday at 2 o 'clock, and it's People's Pundit.
	And it's amazing.
	And I guarantee you, some of you know who Richard Barris is, if not by name, by his work.
	Because he's a meticulous, thorough, thoughtful analyst.
	And because of all that, he's on the number one enemy list of YouTube and all social medias.
	And we're going to get into some of this.
	Robert might be a few minutes late, so I'm going to bring in Richard right now.
	How many minutes are we in here?
	Three minutes, 50 seconds.
	Richard, how you doing?
	Living the dream as always.
	Thanks for having me.
	I'm happy to be here tonight.
	Thank you very much.
	Now, am I allowed to spoil that you have a green screen behind you?
	You are.
	So, I think the sluice of the internet could probably determine that.
	My green screen is one of those like...
	Donuts that you win at a circus when you get the big prize and a car.
	Winston is sleeping.
	Richard, we've never met in person.
	We've never spoken before, but I know you work and I've watched you and I've gotten involved in some of your live streams in terms of chats.
	Elevator pitch before I get into the childhood questions of how you became who you are, who are you, and what do you do in life?
	Yeah, so I guess, you know, once upon a time, I guess I called myself a data journalist, because we've always done data analytics on different levels, but everybody knows me from the work I do in polling.
	So we do political polling, we do market research.
	You know, the idea is, like, people always ask me, what do you do?
	And I guess pollster is the one word that sums it up, but we do a lot more than just poll political races, you know, just...
	Look at data from all angles and on many different topics.
	So that does, like you said, though, in the intro, heck of an intro.
	You know, I've always come at this from a very different point of view, and some people don't tolerate it very well, especially when you amass a record that's better.
	Well, so that's the thing.
	Now, we've gotten to know you in the presidential elections, but you're not, am I wrong?
	You're not new to this from 2020, 2016.
	You've been doing this, if I may ask, it's been driving me nuts.
	How old are you?
	This has been bothering me.
	I don't even mind other people knowing, but it's bothering me because I'm coming up on 40 in October and I'm struggling.
	I'm struggling to deal with it.
	I was going to say 42 because you are wise in a way that lends itself to believing in life experience, but you look younger than...
	I have nephews who are 20 and you look a little younger than them.
	Thank you.
	Now we're going to back it up all the way to your childhood.
	Where are you from?
	Siblings?
	Parents?
	What did they do?
	What was your childhood like before we get into education?
	I've had a heck of a life.
	I've had an interesting life, I guess, but a heck of one.
	You know, sometimes hard, sometimes blessed, all the times blessed, or at least I like to think.
	But yeah, I was born in New York.
	I live in, you know, I'm a southerner now, but I was born in New York and, you know, I was part of that old Italian.
	Kind of working class exodus out of New York City, out of the five boroughs when Italians started going through political maturation in the 80s.
	And a lot of us picked it up, took the whole neighborhood it seemed, and just went to a subdivision in New Jersey.
	Maybe an hour away.
	But that is the way it was.
	We brought the block parties with us.
	And it was good.
	But I think it's fair to call it working class.
	You know, struggling, at least not back then.
	You know, and then when we moved in, we had little vulcanized neighborhoods back in the day.
	It's the way it was.
	Italians over here, Jewish people over here, Polish people over here.
	And in New Jersey, what was interesting about my upbringing is that everybody moved to the same subdivisions.
	And I think that is what was so interesting, you know, about the time.
	The time that I was raised, which I went and traded for the world.
	But yeah, I mean, New York, New Jersey area.
	And I did join the Army.
	I was doing all right, living the dream.
	But I did join the Army after 9-11.
	Got hurt before my time, which is a whole other story.
	But that put me out.
	So I went back to doing what I loved.
	I always did love politics.
	And even when I was a kid, Everybody used to call me the mayor because I cared about all this stuff.
	I'd run around the neighborhood.
	Did you know they're building a Walmart?
	You know what that's going to do to this street.
	That's what kind of person I was.
	And we actually, you know, the whole town did get Walmart to delay.
	But they have these tactics where they say they back off.
	And then two years later, they sneak right back in when no one's paying attention again.
	And that's what happened to us.
	Because, you know, I think it's pretty fair to say leaving an urban area.
	We didn't want to urbanize the place we went.
	And everybody had nice, tight-knit Italian, Polish, Catholic communities.
	Everyone got along.
	We just didn't want the big city life to follow us where we were.
	Unfortunately, we lost that battle.
	I think that's pretty clear.
	But yeah, I mean, the short of it is...
	I always did have a math mind.
	I went to school for what I do, although I went to school for a lot of different things because I was bored, especially after I got out of the Army.
	And then I said I wanted to go back to school because I didn't like the financial services sector.
	Because I've worked for different, you'd know them too.
	Everything from IPO companies like Paulson to community investment houses like Edward Jones.
	I'd fly out to St. Louis.
	I was a stock picker.
	As a seller, I would teach people how to do that.
	They'd teach me.
	It was good, but this was before the financial crisis, and we did see that happening, and I just didn't want any part of it.
	So I decided I'm going back to the political world.
	And then that's just one thing led to another, and here I am.
	So ancestry-wise, if you're filling out one of your own polls, what would be the ancestral checkmarks for the family tree?
	Yeah, so first, of course, I'd have to say white, Robert, but you know then, in my poll, I'm going to get funneled off.
	Which best describes your national origin?
	And I would check Italian.
	I would, because my last name isn't Italian.
	It's kind of a family debate.
	But when my great-grandfather came through Ellis Island, from what I found, I know there's a lot of stories.
	All families have their stories.
	From what I found.
	Is it looked like?
	What happened to him?
	Happened to many other Italians.
	What's your name?
	Donato something I can't pronounce.
	So they just chopped off a couple vowels.
	And he went with it trying to make himself look more American.
	And so I was raised...
	My mother was Greek.
	Which is...
	I mean, I'm proud of that.
	But I'm 50-50.
	But I act like I'm 100% Italian.
	And I do...
	I do remember things from my Greek culture, but I was predominantly raised Italian.
	I mean, we have the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve.
	We're Italian.
	That's it.
	Well, it's an interesting thing.
	When I grew up in Canada and we were often asked, what nationality are you?
	And my parents always said, you say you're Canadian.
	And I never understood what people were asking when they said, what nationality are you?
	It was identity politics.
	40 years ago, 35 years ago, it just went by a different name.
	It was a little more subtle.
	And they said, you know, when they ask you what nationality you are, they're not asking if you're Canadian.
	They want to know what religion, what ethnic heritage you are, for whatever reason is up to them and it's up to you.
	And they said, always answer Canadian and be proud to say it.
	But it's interesting to say, like, I thought your last name was of Polish descent just because Barris, I was never going to guess Italian or Greek for that matter.
	Yeah.
	And I had a professor in college, and she was Turkish.
	And she came up to me, and we got along very well.
	Just one of those people.
	We could talk for hours about international relations.
	And anyway, she was Turkish.
	And she said, did you know in Turkish, your name means peace?
	Did you know that?
	It's barish is how you say it.
	And it means peace.
	And do you have any Turkish in you?
	I'm like, well, maybe.
	I mean, I'm sure we have a lot of things if we take those DNA tests that I will never take.
	Being a data guy, there's no way I'm doing that.
	But if I did, I bet you there would be at least some other Eastern European, if not Middle Eastern descent.
	I mean, that's just how, especially from where my family is in Italy.
	Grandfather was Sicilian.
	My grandmother was Napoli Don.
	I wouldn't be surprised at all.
	I have a friend.
	He's 100% Italian.
	He got Ancestry.com.
	He came back 10% or 15% African-American.
	Or black, actually.
	African.
	He had no idea.
	It wouldn't surprise me if I did.
	What your parents said, I heard that from my grandfather constantly.
	He served in World War II.
	He was very proud to be Italian.
	People wanted to know what he was.
	I mean, he pushed the same, you tell them you are American and you are proud to be American.
	Otherwise, we can go back with Mussolini if you don't like it kind of thing.
	And he fought against his own brethren in that war on the American side.
	So it was a big deal for him, just like with your parents.
	Now, occupationally, what did your parents do and what did some of your other ancestors do originally when they came in?
	Yeah, my grandfather was a, you know, this was, so Donato, my great-grandfather.
	I mean, Robert, he was an Italian and...
	The garment business.
	Okay.
	What am I going to say?
	It sounds familiar already, Richard.
	It is.
	Yeah.
	And when I heard that growing up, everyone's grandfather seemed to be either in the garment business.
	And my grandfather took a job when he got back from the war.
	He took a job as a...
	Overseer on the docks, whatever that is.
	He was the boss of this company called Carr Ellison Company, and they took imports, and they made sure exports went out as well in New York.
	My dad was just...
	Where I get my work ethic, because I never stop working.
	I mean, I'm sure my grandfather worked to the bone, too, because I don't know where else my father would have gotten it from.
	But the work ethic that I have comes from my dad, hands down.
	My dad, you know, throughout the 80s, he was basically a headhunter.
	And then, you know, after the 80s, things changed.
	The economy, you had to change with the economy.
	And he did everything and anything he had to.
	To make sure we didn't, and there's some thunder, to make sure we didn't go without.
	And I'm telling you, the man was, he was inspirational.
	He was.
	How many siblings did you have?
	Or do you have?
	Yeah, I have a brother, an older brother, and I do have a half-sister, but I don't really speak to her anymore.
	So, yeah, I just, you know, it was from my mother's first marriage.
	And I remember when we were young, things just kind of went different ways.
	You know, it was from my mother's first husband.
	And, you know, probably 12 or 13. She was much older.
	But I do have a brother who just turned.
	He's three years older than me.
	You know, with the exception of me, my father.
	Many people are gone.
	So, you know, the family now centers around mine, I would say, because my wife and I are going to put things back together, you know, and rebuild.
	And this will be, or at least the goal is, you know, our house will be the Christmas house.
	Our house will be the Easter house.
	You know, things just happen.
	You know, marriages don't work.
	You know, people pass on.
	I think in any Italian household, grandparents are the backbone of that family, and they make sure you get together every year.
	They're the ones who do that, and when they go, somebody's got to make sure they step forward and do that.
	Now, do you go to public schools or private schools growing up?
	Public.
	So, but I did have friends who went to private.
	So where I was from, it was St. Veronica's.
	So you either went to the public schools, you know, and I was raised Roman Catholic, but my dad didn't want me to go to Catholic school, at which he did for, I think, one or two years before he begged to get taken out of it.
	So, you know, they were rough.
	But I went to public.
	In a weird time, too, Robert, we had...
	We were a social experiment.
	My generation is the generation where they built an entirely new middle school just to mix everybody together by sixth grade.
	And then we were also part of that generation of whatever you want to call it.
	They called it health, right?
	But it was very much an introduction into things that, you know, conservative Italian household, which I wouldn't even say my grandfather was a diehard Democrat.
	I mean, he was.
	Richard, if I may, on the high school business, I'm from Montreal.
	Canada has a different demographic spread than the U.S., but similar, just much more extreme on the ends.
	We have much fewer of certain minorities than others, and so when you go to public school...
	We don't have the types of things that I understand exist in the U.S. schools.
	What does that mean when you go to a public school in the U.S. and they try to mix everyone together?
	What's the breakdown?
	And what's the culture?
	What's the environment?
	What's the social life of a high school like that?
	It's bad.
	It ends bad.
	It ends in balkanization.
	It ends in mini gangs.
	It's bad.
	So I would say...
	By the time I got to high school, you better have already built your reputation.
	That's the school system I went through.
	We fought a lot.
	It was a rough school.
	It was overpopulated.
	Kids were outside.
	I mean, my school was a school where every time the bell rang, somebody ran outside to do drugs for three minutes in between class.
	The teachers were doing everything they could to keep people from going outside and even just smoking.
	You'd get suspended for smoking cigarettes.
	But everybody did it.
	So unfortunately, these experiments really, they did not work.
	Maybe in the long term, there was something that they have to show for it.
	But it was culture shock.
	It was literally an attempt to get less advantaged kids in the same environment with people I wouldn't even call, some were privileged.
	Some were.
	But it was a hodgepodge.
	And that's what was interesting about where I grew up.
	It was a hodgepodge.
	So normally in the old neighborhood in New York, you would go to school and you would go to, if you're in a certain precinct, certain area, you're going to go to that one.
	So SD or HS, whatever it is.
	And they're numbered based on your neighborhood.
	When I grew up and everybody left those areas, it was...
	Everybody now is going to go to the same middle school.
	Everyone's going to go to the same high school.
	So it was tough.
	I mean, there was a chance if you put your head down and did what you were supposed to do, I suppose you could get a decent education and prep you for college.
	But there were a lot of distractions.
	There really were.
	I mean, we had scans.
	We had gun scans in our school.
	Now, did you go straight to the Army out of high school?
	No.
	No, I went to college first.
	I was going to college.
	And I did start, this is a one-off, but I'd always been an entrepreneur kind of guy.
	I don't think I'd ever really want to work for anybody in my life.
	So I did have a business back then, and it was doing all right, but the goal was just put me through college.
	And then 9-11 happened.
	And 9-11 happened, and it impacted our communities.
	So we had...
	Everyone from working class to upper class, if you lived in, you know, maybe Howell or Freehold, you had a father who was a lineman or a union electrical worker and they were in a tower or they were headed to a tower and something horrible happened.
	Or maybe three miles away, in Colts Neck, there's a trader who works on Wall Street, right?
	And so it was very, very, very, like I said, you really have to get a feel for the neighborhood, but everybody was impacted.
	My wife, who I've known for years, her cousin died in Tower 2. So everybody had some kind of an impact after 9-11.
	And I put everything on hold.
	I went in the Army.
	Simple question.
	What were you studying before you went into the Army?
	Political science.
	Political science.
	Okay, now...
	This is going to be the broader, and I don't want to get into any sort of, I'm not asking for conspiratorial thoughts or musings.
	When you went into the Army, and knowing what you know now, when you reflect back on 9-11, what are your reflections today, knowing what you know now, knowing what you've lived through since, about the event and about the official narrative?
	You know, I think that was one of the...
	Even as a soldier, you have your opinion.
	So you have to follow orders, but you definitely have an opinion.
	And what I did in the Army, we were not traditional grunts, like an 11 Bravo or Charlie, and all power to them.
	I'm not trying to take away from them.
	I'm just saying, we were a little bit more involved with certain planning, so there were more opinions that were able to be aired.
	And there was a lot of dissent over the pivot to Iraq.
	However, you know what overtakes it?
	The desire to want to engage in a conventional war.
	Just so people who have never served understand, these guys, these generals, these captains, lieutenants, the people running ODA, your officer runs your ODA, which is an Operation Detachment Alpha, they want to run you.
	into a fight because you'll get promoted more.
	I mean, it's about glory.
	It's about promotion.
	It's about getting to know different people who are in the system, setting yourself up.
	Robert, are you still live?
	I am.
	Did we lose him?
	I don't know if we lost him, but at the very least, it's not my connection right now.
	No, it's not yours.
	Okay.
	You know what's funny?
	There I am.
	Did I disappear or did you guys disappear?
	No, you disappeared.
	And the funny thing is, I'm in the middle of nowhere tethering off my cell phone.
	I think you're getting screwed by a thunderstorm.
	Can you hear that?
	Can you hear it?
	We can hear the thunder, but we lost you about two seconds ago after the ODA.
	Okay, so basically what I was saying is there's no career advancement for anyone who's in a combat MOS.
	There is no advancement during peacetime.
	It's a boring existence.
	You listen to everybody else who does have a war story.
	You want to go and you want to prove yourself.
	You want hazardous duty pay.
	you want to be able to advance through the ranks.
	So any...
	...
	Who would have thought it's going to be your internet connection, not mine?
	Sorry, go ahead, please.
	Yeah, let me just make sure my Ethernet stays on.
	Yeah, what I was saying is any dissent is quickly squashed by really the desire to get placed, to move forward.
	Because the more you're in combat, the quicker you're going to get promoted.
	And even with myself, I wasn't done with college yet.
	But because of what I chose and because of the pipeline, they call it a pipeline, that I had to go through to actually get to serve, we got to skip rules.
	We jumped over E-ratings.
	It was nothing.
	You got in three ranks above where you should have.
	It was a cowboy environment back then.
	I didn't agree with the war in Iraq back then.
	I don't think I ever really did.
	But I definitely don't now.
	I think that was a tremendous mistake.
	Probably the worst foreign policy mistake we've made.
	I mean, really, it may be worse than the World War, some of the World Wars, how we handled them.
	This is my recollection.
	I remember thinking what I thought, knowing what I thought I knew, and feeling what I felt back then.
	After 9-11, I remember the moments.
	I remember...
	Then, you know, the war in Afghanistan.
	Then pivoting to the war in Iraq.
	But the pretext was never that Iraq was responsible for 9-11.
	It was that Iraq has the WMDs.
	They're not providing proof of destruction.
	We have intelligence reports from CIA, MI6, saying that they did not destroy that which is arguable that they might have never had in the first place.
	And I remember supporting it.
	I remember thinking, well, you know, all the intelligence agencies across the world are saying the same thing.
	So it must be true.
	And now I'm living through a world where all the intelligence agencies, or intelligence with quotes, are saying the same thing, and I know what I think having lived it through in real time, and I now go and retroactively revisit my understanding of the time.
	When you have the intelligence agencies saying, this is the case we need to invade, what is your knowledge at the time personally, and then what's your opinion at the time personally, and retrospectively?
	Yeah, I think everybody had the general feeling that Rumsfeld and company had been wanting this war for a while.
	So even before they announced the invasion, it's fair, it's accurate to say that everybody in the army was gearing up to go to Iraq anyway, because they understood.
	You know, Poppy Bush didn't get it done.
	And now we're getting another chance.
	They'll figure this one out and we're going to be able to go back to Iraq.
	So that was the general consensus with the guys I served with.
	That was going to happen.
	The sad part is, I think it really took the eye off the ball.
	A lot of the things that people don't hear about that went on in the early years of this war, not even, in the early 6 to 9 months, 12 months, those guys were getting things done.
	And, you know, Osama bin Laden escaped.
	He became an afterthought for many, many years until Obama finally found him, right?
	I don't know.
	I got my own views on that.
	But, you know, generally speaking, I think we took our eye off the ball.
	The WMDs were a bit of a distraction from what really happened on 9-11.
	And I think I'm not alone in that when as a pollster now all these years later.
	We talk to people who, you know, in the New Jersey, New York area, this is a solidly liberal area.
	They're anti-war to the T now.
	So they may be, because of what had happened to them, I think they feel like their trust was abused.
	You know, so this was personal to them.
	This is the time you don't want or expect your government to try to take advantage of you.
	And they feel like they did.
	And I think they're right to feel that way because they did take advantage of it.
	Now, what was basic training like?
	For me, it was a lot different.
	So I went in as a, what was called back then, the 18 X-ray program, which George W. Bush reopened us, from what I understand, hadn't been in place since Vietnam, which is, if you have an aptitude for it, if you study for all the testings, and you want to go...
	To selection, which is the process of trying to get selected to be on a Special Forces unit, then you can do it.
	If you fail, you'll end up in the 82nd Airborne.
	It really depends on how far you get.
	With what they did with us, the first cycle of this new 18 X-ray program, the very first cycle that went through was a complete and total disaster.
	Guys dropped out and quit left and right.
	They just didn't have it.
	And I was the second one.
	So instead of trying to do things the way they initially thought, Treat him like a normal soldier.
	He's been in a few years.
	They did things different and they isolated us.
	So for me, basic training and my one-station unit training and later you have to go to jump school, that all blended together.
	They never separated that.
	Sure, after 14 weeks, you got a day and a half to say hello to your family.
	You're getting the blue cord, which is the infantry cord.
	But after that, it's gone with you again.
	You're three weeks at jump school.
	And I honestly think that was the right way to do it.
	Because if you give people a taste, Robert, you know, most soldiers go in, they get nine weeks, and then they go on to their MOS training.
	If you give a soldier a taste of the civilian life again, or they finally have their brain used to trying to mentally condition yourself to deal with the challenges that you know are coming, if you interrupt that and say, okay, take a breather.
	Then the attrition rate for something like what I went through is going to be much higher.
	When you know there is no light at the end of the tunnel, you have to go through.
	There's no way around.
	There's not going to be a break.
	If you want it, you have to get through it.
	That is the way in your mind, at least the people who are supposed to be on these teams, your mind will make sure you get into that mentality.
	And if you interrupt it, it'll throw you off your game.
	That's the way mine works anyway.
	It's the way I know a lot of other guys felt as well.
	Let's just get this done.
	Now, what skill sets did you add from being in the Army?
	You mean, what did they teach me, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It was like jumps, everything.
	Can you kill a man with your bare hands, Richard?
	That's what I want to know.
	Yeah, probably.
	Yeah, of course.
	But I would say some of the demolition stuff is always cool, guys.
	Even to this day, Robert, you know the 4th of July celebration we put on with PPD is crazy.
	I did that as a way to tame my...
	When you come out of the military...
	You're searching for a couple of things that you really don't find in the civilian world.
	Every day is something new in that lifestyle, and it's high excitement, it's high energy.
	You need a place to put that when you get out.
	There has to be somewhere where you can funnel that energy.
	And for a while, I didn't know how to do it, which was a problem.
	For me.
	So, you know, nowadays that manifests into, well, what did I learn from the army?
	What do I miss, especially?
	You know, what I did, what I wanted to do was dealing with, it was engineering, but it's not engineering.
	I mean, it's explosives.
	I mean, I'm sure you can.
	You know, go build a school for a bunch of school children in Afghanistan.
	That's how they sell it, but that's in practice, not how it's mostly used.
	So when I come out, what am I going to do with this?
	I think I'll, you know, for four weeks before the 4th of July, plan out an elaborate firework display that we put off, which we've seen.
	It's on our YouTube.
	For people who follow us, they can see some, especially that last one, which is phenomenal.
	But yeah, I mean, that's it, Robert.
	I wish it was tough, Robert, because when I did get out...
	You know, I knew what I wanted to go back into.
	The Army taught me nothing to prepare me for that.
	I had to start over.
	Two questions.
	First of all, where can we see that video?
	Is that on People's Pundit on YouTube?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It is on YouTube.
	It's on the People's Pundit YouTube channel.
	Go check it out.
	I think I actually just retweeted it and re-shared it on Locals just because we just got past the holiday.
	They're fantastic.
	They're a lot of fun.
	And where we in Florida, you can do that.
	You know, the police aren't going to get you in trouble.
	As a matter of fact, they pull over on 39th Avenue and they're waiting for it.
	They know it's coming every year.
	And they're like, Rich's show!
	Let's get the show on the road!
	Let's do it!
	You said something interesting about the mentality of coming out of the army.
	When you come out having not seen action, you're maybe looking for action in civilian life and how do you channel that energy into something productive?
	The flip side, when you've come out of action...
	And you come up with trauma in addition to the desire for more action and you have to come back to civilian life.
	How do you channel that?
	You have, I guess, a closer relationship to this.
	What's the current status of vets coming out of the military, coming out of action or non-action, having to reintegrate into civilian life and the trauma and the problems that that causes?
	What's the situation with that now?
	And what are the solutions to those problems?
	Yeah, so I will tell you, everyone's a little bit different.
	And with me, my main problem was leaving people behind.
	So that's the way I felt.
	So I had, I guess it's a little bit of guilt.
	So you're going, they're staying, so you feel a little guilty about that.
	And there's not a whole lot you can do.
	A support network at home is incredibly important.
	I've always had a woman around who was very supportive of me through highs, through lows.
	From when we were kids, we've known each other.
	That is incredibly important.
	It was a mess for a while.
	This is not to get into politics from a partisan point of view because it's not partisan at all.
	Under Barack Obama and even under George Bush, the VA was a total mess.
	So people came out.
	They had no way to deal with physical pain, let alone mental pain.
	They pumped everybody with pills.
	They sent them on their way.
	Then they gave them a hard time about getting claims.
	They need time to sort things out.
	They need time to figure out where they belong in the world again.
	And they could not get any help from the Veterans Administration.
	And a big, big part of that was the inability to clean house.
	These people forgot they were there to serve the veterans.
	And I have to tell you, four years under Donald Trump, we do poll this and ask vets.
	We did the annual Malcolm Randall survey because we lived in Gainesville for a while, and we would just do the old George Gallup model, which is go talk to people and gather a couple hundred responses over a couple of weeks just by shaking hands.
	And under Donald Trump, things did get better.
	At the VA.
	Significantly better.
	But we can already see those change in the attitude.
	It really does.
	It's toned from the top.
	If they know that they're not going to be held accountable, then they don't put the effort behind it.
	It really is that simple.
	And that's a shame.
	There are a lot.
	It depends how much support a veteran has too, not just about their own family life, but it really does depend on where they are in the country.
	When I got out, I immediately went back to New Jersey.
	That was a complete and total mistake.
	My dad had already moved by then.
	And that's how I ended up in Florida.
	So Florida was a much better system.
	I wanted to go back to school.
	I needed some time to just kind of veg and hit the books and figure out which way I wanted to go again.
	And in New Jersey, there's just no infrastructure.
	There's no desire.
	It's not a priority.
	So I moved to Florida to get into a better system.
	And it worked.
	And it was very responsive.
	And you got to use your GI Bill from there.
	But yeah, it really does depend on where people are and what their experiences were.
	Everybody's a little different.
	And you mentioned early on, how did you meet your wife, Laura?
	Depends who's telling this story.
	All right.
	So, you know, my dad had moved us to a house on the other side of town where he kind of wanted us away a little bit.
	My dad was going to ask about what he did, too.
	He was always an animal lover and always loved horses.
	So it was always too urban where we were for him.
	So eventually he finds this place and he's like, it's three acres.
	We're going.
	So I'm like, oh, it's a shock to me.
	And there's not many houses there.
	There is one house, Robert.
	I mean, one house in a stone's throw.
	And I see, you know, it's out there.
	And I see this girl getting on a bicycle.
	There was a reservoir they had just built there.
	Manasquan Reservoir, for those who are wondering about location.
	And I see this gorgeous, young little angel get on this bike.
	Maybe she's 12, 11. I don't even, young.
	And just pedaling.
	And I just, I will never forget it.
	And I was stunned.
	I mean, stunned and caught me in my tracks.
	What do I do?
	Catcall like an idiot, right?
	So I just, I didn't know any better.
	I mean, remember who we are here, right?
	I mean, I'm an Italian guy.
	I was raised around that.
	That's who I was.
	You know, so it didn't work.
	And after repeated attempts of it not working, I changed course.
	And it took a very long time.
	You know, first we became friends.
	She'll tell you no, but I'll tell you.
	That she always liked me.
	She just didn't want to go out with a bad boy.
	She'll tell you no.
	She'll say, no, you were annoying.
	You were obnoxious.
	You were arrogant.
	But eventually you grew on me like a fungus.
	But we were young, Robert.
	And my dad moved us to the other side of town.
	And that's when I found her.
	And incredibly, this is a girl who came from the Bronx.
	So very much a part of that exodus as well.
	It's amazing how that can happen.
	You're not that far away from each other.
	Your parents take you to the same pizzeria every Friday or Saturday night in one of the boroughs, or at least maybe you can't recall running into each other.
	And then both your families pick up, move to Jersey, and you meet each other.
	Laura and I have had a lot of what people call Godwinks.
	A lot of Godwinks.
	Be a mess together.
	Two young kids just trying to figure out how to deal with those kinds of feelings.
	Me, usually, screwing it up.
	And then the universe putting us back together.
	It's incredible.
	The day I got sent home from the army was Thanksgiving.
	And I went to go have an after Thanksgiving drink with my buddy who I had trying to find her.
	And she walked in this diner.
	I just came 3,000 miles.
	It was just incredible.
	I mean, it's a really in-depth story, but after a while, you hear the universe, you know, hello, you know, kind of, hello, this is it.
	Last chance for happiness.
	Take it or leave it, buddy.
	And so that's an interesting story in and of itself.
	It really is.
	Very blessed.
	Now, okay, I mean, that's amazing.
	And yes, cosmic in a sense.
	It is.
	How do you get into what you're doing right now?
	And for those of us who have just met you in the last year or so, you're not new to this game.
	You've been doing this for a while.
	When did you get into it?
	How did it start?
	How did you get into it?
	And how did it evolve since you got into it?
	Especially, I guess, getting into 2016 and even more so 2020.
	Yeah, you know, going back...
	Years.
	I was always interested in politics.
	The very first presidential election that I was able to vote in, I volunteered for George W. Bush.
	I beat the ground for him.
	So I've always wanted to be active in politics.
	But when I went to college, I started doing what everyone else does, which is a mistake.
	Well, at least I would argue it's a mistake.
	Studying political science.
	Maybe I did love international relations.
	So I did do that later anyway.
	I wanted to.
	I felt like it.
	I was out of the army.
	I had some breathing time.
	I wanted to do it.
	But I had a professor who said, what do you want to do?
	Are you trying to be a politician here?
	Or do you want to actually be involved and be in the game?
	And he turned me on to statistics.
	So at first, I didn't even want to be bothered.
	I always liked math, but I didn't want to go in that direction.
	And he introduced me to it through, I think the course was called, Math for the Liberal Arts or something.
	And he said, just take this course and talk to me after the semester and tell me whether or not you think this is a waste of time.
	And I always did like economics, but I had done a lot of that before too in the financial industry.
	So I didn't want to do that.
	I guess maybe I was trying to shy away from it.
	But he was right.
	And that is when I really started to fall in love with polling, the idea of polling.
	He introduced me to polling, what it was, and explained to me not that there's money to be made here.
	It's just that if you really want to get into the political game and be a political mind that's worth anything, you have to open your mind up, use that gift you have with numbers, and embrace it.
	So I don't know what it was about the concept of polling, but I just fell in love with it.
	The idea that it's a public service, or it was, we looked at it like this back then.
	It's a public service to tell lawmakers what the people they govern think.
	And you have to do that accurately.
	You have to do that.
	When you say right then, what year are you in right now where this is your perspective of polling?
	That, you know, started in 2001, a little bit before, after 2001, maybe 2000.
	So I first started to go to college before I even went into the Army.
	He turned me on to polling back then.
	And that's when the seed was planted.
	Okay.
	And so then you come back.
	Where did you go to school in Florida?
	UF.
	I'm a Gator.
	I'm a Gator.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	That's why I stayed there so long, Robert.
	I really did have an attachment to the Gator Nation.
	You work for your own lifestyle and where you are in life.
	But that's where you go.
	I do have an affinity towards UF.
	And I was always proud of going to that school.
	When you're in the Army, you come out of the Army, you want to go back to school.
	You can't just use your money wherever you want.
	You have to pick certain areas.
	And UF actually was solid for what I wanted to go to school to go do.
	There were other things, too, because I had...
	Other schooling from prior, I wasn't starting a degree from scratch again.
	So I wanted to add different things to it.
	I took Chinese business and language culture, just a bunch of stuff to fill the time.
	But I guess it was around 2010 when I started to put it toward politics.
	So the math brain worked in the financial industry for a while, not a long time, but maybe two years or so.
	And there was nothing gratifying about picking winners and losers in the stock market.
	It is about predicting human behavior.
	But then I got involved at UF with different survey research and started.
	Started from there, constructing models, which was always interesting.
	We were the kind of dorks who played games.
	Back then, I think there was Crystal Ball.
	There wasn't much, but there was Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball.
	Instead of predicting elections, we would try to predict how wrong he would be and basically what kind of a slanter.
	Is there a pattern in how often these people are wrong?
	That's when I built the very first model I ever built, which was going back and looking at the record that I could with him and saying, Moving forward, this is the kind of lean he's had in the past.
	Moving forward, I bet you he's going to be off this much this year.
	From that point on, I guess it was about four years in the making from that point to the point that I released the election projection model.
	I pretty much figured out that we had something better.
	We built something better.
	It was working for other clients.
	It was working in other races.
	And I don't know what made me eventually say here it is publicly.
	I could have just done this privately and lived fine without scrutiny.
	As Robert knows, you can make money and just be under the radar.
	There's a ton of people who do this for a living you'll never see on Fox News.
	You'll never see on a podcast.
	I don't know what made me do it.
	Frustration.
	Actually, back up.
	I guess it was earlier than that because it was the 2010 election that made my...
	That was the line in the sand for me.
	That was it.
	Because we knew they were going to be that wrong.
	Which 2010 election?
	The midterm elections in 2010.
	It was Barack Obama's first term incumbent midterm.
	And we were...
	He doesn't work in Rasmussen anymore, but he used to years ago.
	And he's got the polling that he's doing.
	He's taking fire from it because he's basically projecting a 60-seat route.
	And everyone in the media is just piling on him.
	And in the end, to make a very long story short, he was right.
	The history and the modeling suggested that he would be right.
	He was a local guy.
	Well, Asbury Park's local for me, but it's not local now for many other people, but they were in Asbury Park.
	And I think they still are, in fact.
	But they were taking all of this national abuse.
	The history, the empirical evidence all showed that it was absolutely possible.
	The Democrats had an incredible year in 08. They were what is referred to as overextended.
	They won seats.
	They really should not have won.
	So that fight, because I knew that Mike was not really in the club, that fight is what I really just, I think it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
	Now, he was really all alone publicly.
	Even though all of these guys who have been in this business for two, three times the lifetime I've been so far know better.
	And yet they still took that position because they had a, whatever you want to call it, it was for narrative's sake.
	Maybe they're becoming so blinded by their partisanship.
	They don't really care what the data has to say anymore.
	And that was it for me.
	So after 2010, that's when I decided, you know what, I'm not going to...
	I'm not going to stick in the shadows anymore.
	We're going to do this publicly eventually.
	And then at 14 is when we did it.
	When did you meet Robert?
	People are asking, like, when have you met Robert or how long have you guys known each other?
	I didn't even think to ask the question.
	I thought it was a new relationship.
	Have you known each other for years?
	He followed me before.
	Well, Robert, maybe you could do this better, but he was watching a lot of this, as apparently.
	I know from the AP article, Robert.
	That's how I first found out.
	So they were like, how are you doing this?
	How are you winning these bets?
	A reporter asked Robert.
	And Robert said, because you follow who you want to follow.
	I'm following the guys who get it right every year.
	And that is something I read that first alerted me to Robert.
	And then eventually, in 16, That's when my, I mean, when you decide to pull a presidential election publicly, you're going to take it.
	So, yeah, I mean, and I knew we were right in 14. I knew we were going to be right in 14, but I knew 16, that wasn't even, I didn't even bat an eye with that.
	I was very confident there.
	In 16, I was confident, but the industry was so against me.
	You can't help but to ask yourself, Is there something I'm missing?
	So I'm always trying to be critical of my own work and what I'm doing.
	I don't just come out with something and not challenge it because maybe I have a better record than the next guy.
	It was so unanimous in 16 that I was not doubting, but just wondering if there was somewhere I missed along the way, which, you know, hindsight's 20-20.
	I didn't.
	You know, the rest is history.
	But from that point on, Robert and I started to talk because, you know, Robert was steadfast, too.
	This guy's going to win.
	You know, we would exchange, you know, talks here and there about what we saw and the numbers.
	But once you, I guess, you know, maybe stop me if I'm wrong, Robert.
	Everybody.
	Claims they knew Donald Trump was going to win in 2016.
	But it was pretty damn lonely, wasn't it, Robert?
	Everyone now is the Nostradamus of 2016.
	And I don't remember any of these people, Robert, outside of you, myself, Greg who was helping me, was working with us at the time.
	I mean, it was tough.
	It was a daily assault.
	Yes.
	You know, Scott Adams, Mike Cernovich, there are a couple of people, but very, very few.
	Right.
	And almost none who are willing to put money behind it.
	Now, in bridging into those sort of polling, data analysis, modeling business, how did you go about doing that?
	What gave you confidence that you could make it an economically sustainable business, enterprise?
	You know, I didn't.
	The truth is, I took a big...
	Big leap.
	And Laura, you know, this is what the one thing that does bother me about the faux critics out there, the amount of money that we spent to put these numbers out there publicly.
	In 16, Robert, it was a Hail Mary.
	So here's the exclusive right here, guys.
	In 14, we were right, and I did really think, okay, I have a superior model.
	It's eventually, there's just no way you can ignore it at this point.
	I mean, the performance was so much better.
	I'm obviously doing something right any day now.
	So I knew I was going to have to take a really big shot to get people's attention.
	So I spent a ton of money.
	We could have built this house a lot sooner, Robert.
	But we spent a ton of money to put that polling out there.
	As you know, we had PPD, but subscriptions from PPD didn't pay for a tenth of what it cost to poll that election.
	Thirteen battleground states, a national tracker since July 3rd, July 2nd, actually.
	We skipped the holiday weekend.
	It was an enormous amount of money.
	And to tell you the truth, I didn't know it was going to work.
	I just had confidence in my ability and this truth that if people believe that you're doing the best job that you can do and being truthful with them, then they'll appreciate that and they'll reward you for it because there's so much dishonesty in this industry now.
	We had methodological problems before and we knew we did.
	That's not the point.
	From 16 and on, We're now into the area of ethical problems.
	So some of my business model really did hinge on people still valuing somebody being straightforward with them or saying, look, I'll do the best I can.
	Life is going to work itself out.
	Richard, first of all, is my mic still working?
	Yes.
	Okay, good.
	I unplugged myself because I'm an idiot and I forgot which button was which.
	The costs.
	This is where I want to get into because I know nothing about what you do.
	The costs, the method, the protocol, the structure.
	How do you go about doing what you do?
	What method do you adopt?
	I need to get to push-pulls because somebody's asking multiple times, but I don't know what push-pulls are.
	But what are the costs in court?
	The hard costs to do what you do to get the data you get.
	What does that involve?
	So this is a big...
	The cost is a big part of why they can't stand me.
	So from the very beginning...
	When I came into this industry and became public, I was like a whisper for a while telling candidates, this guy is charging you too much.
	This is archaic polling.
	You cannot reach this group of people anymore.
	This group of people won't even pick up the phone.
	So I came at this from a very unconventional angle, which didn't make a lot of people happy.
	The difference between just rough costs, it is not...
	And this is another reason I'm going to actually say a number.
	They can't stand it when somebody does this publicly.
	But it is not uncommon for a phone poll, a live call interview phone poll, to run a major candidate at $20,000, $30,000.
	And I am telling people that the cost of those interviews are ridiculous and they don't produce accurate results.
	It can be done cheaper and it can be more accurate.
	But how many people in a phone poll type thing, how many people are they calling?
	To justify that cost.
	Yeah, so it used to be $400 or $500 for a national poll.
	I'd like to think I had a pretty big hand in the industry now using larger samples.
	Because you do see them now using larger sample sizes in polls, whether they're national or state-level polls.
	And I'd like to think I had a hand in that because I did hammer that for so many years.
	A state like Florida, for instance, our state, Big polling errors.
	You simply, not in this day and age, you simply cannot call 400 people and maybe get a small subsample of Hispanics, Hispanics in and of themselves being so diverse.
	You cannot do that and get an accurate result because they're not reaching something called representation.
	So in order to do that, you need a larger sample size and relying on the laws of randomization now are out because some groups are just not answering the phone anymore.
	So how do they justify it?
	I'll tell you, they call a call center.
	There's a ton of people that work at that call center, and they're telling you from the point I pull a list from the voter file, which is mostly voter file based now, they did not do it like that when I first started.
	They were random digital dial folks, which means they chose a number, an auto dialer, randomly chose a number, and the computer decided it made that call, and a person with a headset waited and spoke to the first person in the household that that phone line reached.
	The problem is we're living in a new world now, but they still want to charge that amount.
	Actually, in many cases, they want to charge more.
	And I'm ballparking it here because it can be a lot more.
	Average cost for a phone interview, one.
	One response for a live call or interview is about four or five times the cost of an online interview.
	So it can be $20 to $25 just to call and speak with one person.
	And get an interview.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	You never think about it.
	You never think about it.
	But $25 times $400 adds up real fast.
	And what do you get?
	You get the 400 people who were answering their phone at 4 in the afternoon.
	400 people who still have a phone in today's day and age.
	That's right.
	Compared to the digital where you can reach $10,000 in an hour and have a broader, wider sample field.
	Okay, so people are still using this model.
	If you're allowed to go into your own...
	You know, system.
	What model do you use?
	How do you go about doing what you do in order to get the data that you get that has proven to be more reliable than others?
	Yeah, so, you know, without giving away the secret sauce, you know, generally speaking, we do do mixed modes still, which is, and the reason is we have this philosophy.
	Different groups of people respond to different modes of collection, whether it's phone, online, cell, text, whatever, at different rates.
	And you can't rely on one to reach every group equally.
	It's generally that practice.
	But there is now, in this last election, every year we get closer and closer to some modes just being completely ineffective.
	So eventually, I do believe the digital age will take care of that, and I think it has almost now.
	But generally, we're online collection.
	You have to make sure that you're not talking...
	You know, I hate to name people and shame them, but it's true.
	So YouGov is a consumer panel.
	It is not a voter file deduped online panel where they know that the person who is picking up their email, opening their email, clicking on their link is actually a voter.
	They have no idea.
	Now, there are questions you can ask these people to screen them.
	Robert, you still there?
	Yeah, I'm still here.
	I think he just briefly went out.
	Questions you can ask to screen them.
	Just remind me when he comes back.
	When Richard unfreezes, that's where we left off.
	He's probably watching us right now.
	Yeah, that's probably right.
	I mean, essentially it comes down to a combination of what's called mode, for those that don't know, is that's the method by which the pollster reaches the individual.
	Is it by landline phone?
	Is it by cell phone?
	Is it by text?
	Is it by...
	Verbal call?
	Is it by an email?
	Is it by someone participating in an online panel?
	All of which, of course, have revolutionized the polling game.
	Because back in the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, polling was done by...
	Precinct chairman, democratic political machines, done by local newspaper reporters who knew the local community, talking to the bartenders and the churches and the factory folks and whomever else to get a sense of things.
	And they would do a broad sample, talk to thousands of people to get a sense of what was going on.
	It was actually pretty accurate.
	Cincinnati, Chicago, some other places.
	You can go back and look at it.
	And then in the 1930s, 1920s, some people came up with a postcard poll.
	But the postcard poll turned out to be highly untrustworthy and unreliable.
	Postcard poll sounds like what it sounds like.
	They mail out a card, fill it out, send it back.
	Exactly.
	So it was accurate in 1928, but a disaster in 1932 because, of course, they got a very different group.
	Again, the method by which you choose, the mode, impacts whether you get a sample that's going to accurately represent.
	Because the art and science of polling is, I'm going to talk to 1,000 people and predict the behavior of 100 million people.
	Or, you know, it depends on the district.
	Maybe it's 10 million in a state.
	Maybe it's a million in a house district.
	Whatever.
	Maybe it's $100,000 for a mayor's race, etc.
	But it's all, does that $1,000 accurately represent the opinions of that broader group?
	And how you poll and then how you count is what matters.
	So how you poll is the moment.
	Aha, there you go.
	A brief history on...
	Going from in-person to postcards to then-George Gallup returning to knocking on doors up until from 1936, really, until 1968.
	Then they went to landline phones where you had half the people would actually answer in the 1970s.
	The golden age.
	The two big problems, the two big revolutions were, one, you could reach people in easier ways, text and online.
	So that made a cheap, affordable alternative available.
	But that became more important because of different groups having different modes by which they were reached.
	Some people only available by landline.
	Some people only by cell.
	Some people only by text.
	Some people only by online panel.
	Some people only by email.
	Some people only in person.
	In-person polling is very rare these days.
	But the biggest problem actually was response rate.
	The introduction of do not call phone lists so that over half the country, I think, maybe more now are on do not call lists.
	So you can't call them as a pollster.
	And then the second problem is people started to hate pollsters for whatever the reason.
	Maybe they hated people calling them in general that they didn't know.
	But we went from a response rate to where half the people would answer a poll.
	To go back to Viva's earlier question, the expensive live phone polling, which the bogus people call the gold standard.
	It's a standard, but the first letter is S and it doesn't lead to silver.
	But the big reason is how many people they have to call.
	You have to hire a call center that's going to talk to 50 people to get one person.
	The response rate went from 50% to as low as 2%.
	You have to talk to 50 people to get one that will actually answer the poll.
	You're often paying for all those people who didn't fill out the poll because you still have to pay that call center employee.
	Then the quality of the call center, as Richard can go into, and maybe it's a good transition.
	Could you explain to people that the quality of polling was if you had really high-end control centers, like you did really for the 70s and 80s, but when all of a sudden you shifted to the people that were on their third drug rehab doing the call center or people in other nations who struggled to speak English doing it, could you explain some of that?
	That became a problem that pollsters refused to acknowledge existed but clearly was showing up in the data because a lot of people had no interest in talking to that person.
	Yeah, so one of the things that pollsters tried to do immediately to reduce costs because of the other problems that were arising, response biases that were coming up, was basically outsource to call centers.
	So it's very rare where a pollster has their own call center where they train these people, even at the university level, which used to be great because these were students doing it.
	They were learning how to, you know, maybe it was for their graduate degree, you know, but they were learning the gold standard at the time.
	How to conduct an interview, how to do it correctly.
	But in order to dump some of the costs, they outsource them.
	We're not even kidding.
	India, a lot of other places in Asia.
	And then even now with some of the more domestic call centers, again, they're just not being run.
	The interviews themselves, we're forgetting basic impact, how we ask a certain question, how is a question posed to somebody, which is a big reason, too, where anonymity comes into play.
	You cannot provide that with live caller interviews.
	We did for a while.
	We would simply call them.
	It would be somebody who was alive, who would speak with them.
	And then if they agreed to participate, we funneled them off anyway to a program that really is sourced by Amazon Polly.
	I have to give a shout out to Amazon.
	They were always very good with us.
	They had the text-to-speech program called Polly, which was far and away, far and away superior to anything else you would hear from a robo-pollster.
	We did that for a while, but in truth, it really wasn't reducing the cost that much because in the end, it goes back to what Robert was saying, which is now we're looking at response rates 1, 1.5%, and we simply can't reach everyone.
	And it's not just the response rate.
	It's that certain people...
	Have just quit.
	So that 1.5% skews a certain way, folks.
	There are certain kinds of people who want to take a poll.
	They're dying to take a poll.
	And there's others who are going to vote the way they're going to vote, who just won't.
	And you have to nudge them repeatedly.
	You have to hit them through different avenues, their online activity, until eventually they get annoyed and they want to take it.
	Or in some cases, we use very different tactics, you know, again, without giving away the secret sauce, but we may know somebody leans a certain way.
	We need to talk to that person.
	We need to speak to the person in this geographical area.
	So we'll maybe, for instance, if it's a Trumper, we know he's a Trumper.
	Maybe he's watching Breitbart.
	Maybe he's reading a story on Breitbart.
	I need to talk to that guy.
	I know he's in Rusk County.
	In Wisconsin, I need to speak to him.
	So I'm going to intercept his article.
	And an online thing is going to pop up.
	And please ask him to take the survey.
	And what we do is try to appeal to people's civic duty.
	And we acknowledge that some people are uncomfortable.
	Some people have no trust in this process.
	But we very much would appreciate it.
	It's vital.
	Your participation.
	We use this word all the time.
	It's vital.
	It's amazing what you're saying because the idea of paying $25 per person, aggregate, to get 400 people pulled over the phone versus a targeted ad on Google or Facebook or whatever, which might cost you $2 to get someone who you know is going to answer because they want to answer and they want to answer truthfully.
	I don't know what your secret sauce is, so I'm not even able to spill it.
	But the different methodology to be relevant and, above all else, accurate for the times.
	It requires being involved in those times and being sensitive to them.
	And it's an amazing thing.
	$20,000 to pull 400 people?
	I would demand my money back and then maybe even contemplate suing you for having charged me in the first place.
	Sorry, before I forget, what's a push-pull?
	Because if I don't answer the question, I'm going to get in trouble with someone in the chat.
	What's a push-pull?
	Yeah, so a push-pull is you want a certain result.
	So, for instance, I've actually seen public polls start to weigh into this.
	So, a push-pull, folks, is if you want somebody to say they're going to vote for your candidate...
	You may tell somebody something horrible about the other guy.
	So, for instance, you know, God love him, but Dana Rohrabacher, all right, he had some people who, you know, were trying to help him out in 2018.
	And they constantly wanted to tell the voter first, who picked up the phone or answered online, that Harley Ruda, you know, supports Medicare for All.
	Now, who do you want to vote for?
	That's a push-pull.
	If you say...
	Donald Trump said this horrible thing on Twitter, do you approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing, which YouGov did constantly, and not to whack YouGov again, but they did it all the time.
	That's a push-pull.
	That's why the ordering of questions matters so much.
	You can ask people sensitive stuff, but there are certain things that must come first.
	Approval ratings, vote preference, these things cannot be tainted by the topic of the questionnaire.
	Later you can say something along the lines of, maybe give the respondent a prompt, but later you can say, listen, we'd very much like to know about this issue.
	There's positive and negative messaging that we would like to test.
	Please be as honest as possible with the next few questions or whatever.
	But you've got to let people know that we are now trying to get your reaction to positive and negative messaging.
	But you can't do that before you ask a valid question or before you raise approval ratings.
	And we are seeing this now.
	It's something that when I was in college, if I did as a sophomore for a project, I'd flunk.
	So my professor would say, this is tainting the survey.
	You damn well know it's tainting the survey.
	You'll never work in this industry if you continue to do this.
	This is an F. Or an E in my era.
	All right?
	This is an F. They wouldn't let you go into the field with the concept that that's okay.
	And that is how much we've changed over the years.
	Because now, not only is it happening, but there are data aggregators who are, you know, just randomly asking their panels all of these questions every week.
	And major media outlets are buying them.
	And not even bothering.
	Some of them have polling editors.
	They definitely have political editors.
	But many of them do have people who know about polling that work hand in hand with the pollster.
	The Epoch Times did when they hired me.
	They should know that.
	So if the pollster himself is unethical, the media outlet who's buying the poll, they should know it.
	There are multiple chains that should have flagged this stuff and it doesn't get flagged.
	So a push poll is when you're attempting.
	To elicit a certain response out of the respondents, you want a certain result overall.
	So you are tainting the survey with information beforehand that is going to move somebody in that direction.
	The other thing that occasionally happens, people hear of the word push-pull also in the context where someone is pretending to poll and they're actually just spreading negative information.
	So they actually, to give an example, they did this to Trump in 2016 in the South Carolina primary, where people probably associated with a certain Texas senator were calling in South Carolina and saying, OK, we would like your opinions.
	And really, they weren't actually gathering information.
	It was just a mass robocall operation to say, did you know that Donald Trump wants to take down the Confederate flag and wants to?
	Yeah, right.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	Now, speaking of what, I mean, there's problems with the way mainstream pollsters do, the mode that they use, the method, who they use to contact people, how they gather the information, the sequencing of the questions, the phraseology of the questions, which is always a big one.
	I mean, it's amazing how they try to get, even with manipulated numbers, they can only get 50% support frequently for some of these radical social positions that if you use...
	Neutral terminology and language, you get very different.
	You get three to one.
	People are not interested in men participating in women's sports, despite what's happening in the Olympics right now, and things like that.
	But one other aspect of the whole polling is how there's a lot of confusion around, which is waiting versus a screen.
	Could you explain to people that there is actually an appropriate...
	And these are all the questions that people are asking, or all the reasons why these people don't like me, because I come at this from a different point of view.
	I am of the school that it's not that waiting for a party is wrong.
	It's that waiting for party is unnecessary if you did your job correctly the first time.
	And waiting is an attempt, if you're using by party, it's an attempt to clean up a bad job.
	That's the way I feel about it.
	And that's been my experience.
	But waiting is just when you want to make sure that you have each group of people represented as their share of the poll that they should be.
	So there's a big...
	Misnomer, misconception.
	I see it all the time.
	I hear it on TV all the time.
	Oversampling is not the same thing as being overrepresented.
	So if you see a poll that says D plus 11, meaning there are 11% more Democrats being represented in the poll than there are Republicans or Independents or whatever the closest one is, that doesn't mean that Democrats were oversampled.
	It means they were...
	Overrepresented.
	Oversampling is a good thing.
	It means that you're making sure you have enough of a certain group of people.
	But if I speak to three times the number of Hispanics in Florida, then we'll be their share of the electorate.
	I'm not going to put them in the poll as representing three times more than they should.
	I will weight it to make sure that they represent and reflect their accurate share of the electorate.
	It just means...
	That I oversampled them so that my result for them is likely to have a much smaller sampling error than somebody who did not oversample that group.
	And I know that there's a lot of, you know, it can get in the weeds and it can be pretty confusing.
	But it doesn't help when we see people on TV say, well, this poll isn't accurate because they oversampled Democrats.
	It doesn't mean they oversampled them.
	It means they're overrepresented in the poll.
	And somewhere along the line, the pollster did not wait properly or maybe just didn't speak to enough people from other sides of the aisle, from other groups of people, because they really wouldn't touch party if they did.
	Oversampling wouldn't be a problem unless you then overvalued the amount of the sample.
	If you oversample...
	That's exactly right.
	Okay.
	I mean, it's fascinating.
	Now, how often do these errors...
	All the time now.
	More times than not now, which is the saddest part about it.
	That APOR report came out, and it's sad because they whitewash all the time, or it's really, their answer was, it's Donald Trump's fault.
	But the truth is, this was a problem far before Donald Trump, someone who's been betting on elections for as long as he has, like Robert, knows that George W. Bush in 2004 was a great bet, because the exit poll show, he had no chance.
	He was done.
	He was going to lose Virginia.
	He was going to lose Florida.
	He was going to lose Ohio.
	He was going to lose Iowa.
	These problems have been going on for a very long time.
	It's just we're at the point now where averages don't make sense and they don't account for the problems anymore.
	And the reason why they don't make sense is you cannot include my poll or somebody else's phone poll in an average with my polling.
	We have very different methodologies.
	We have very different...
	Sampling errors.
	And in fact, the terms are not even the same.
	I give a sampling error, sometimes a confidence interval.
	They still use margins of errors.
	They're very different and without getting into the weeds, but it's not even accurate to say margin of error anymore.
	It's a sampling error because everybody is using different modes to try to account for their failures with certain data collection modes.
	So they're trying to mix it up.
	They just want to give one number to simplify it for everybody.
	And that's just not how it works.
	It's not possible to do that.
	So the answer is more times than not.
	And I'll just say this, just to make it easier for everybody to understand what we were talking about.
	In Florida, you have Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Venezuelans, all different kinds of Hispanics.
	You cannot call 40 to 100 Hispanics in Florida and think you know with a certainty how those Hispanic groups are going to vote.
	So we will oversample Hispanics.
	We're going to talk to many, many more than is necessarily going to be in the polls.
	And the reason why we're going to do that is because we want to make sure Cubans are represented.
	We want to make sure Puerto Ricans are represented.
	And that's why our number in Miami showed Trump was going to almost overtake Miami for the first time in 40 years because we were right about the South Florida shift in Hispanic folk.
	We saw it.
	Other people were polling Puerto Ricans in the I-4 corridor.
	It's true.
	Can you explain the economic incentives and the press incentives have shifted?
	I mean, George Gallup himself wrote about this, and there was always an aspect of public opinion polling that was manipulative, but not anywhere near the degree it's been over the last decade.
	That now polling is almost entirely about narrative shaping.
	And not about accurate detection of public opinion.
	Gallup was actually philosophically committed to the idea that democracy will function better if political officials, public officials had better knowledge of what people were really thinking.
	That's where he really aimed for accuracy, much more so than his predecessors or, frankly, his successors have.
	The guy was like a hero to me for years.
	Absolutely.
	Whereas now, can you explain?
	If you're a Quinnipiac, if you're a university pollster, if you're anybody else, your incentives are to satisfy the press and the people that hire you and how they're not interested in accuracy.
	Can you explain what they're really interested in?
	Yeah, the sad part about this, Robert, Over the years, it really used to be that pollsters, they may play around a little bit.
	There was always an element, and you're right about that.
	But in the end, when it was crunch time, they didn't want to be too erratic, and they didn't want to be too out in left field because ultimately their reputation did matter.
	And in the private industry, they wouldn't get hired if they were publicly polling and they looked ridiculous.
	Nowadays, it's completely backward to the point where I didn't even want to poll for a media company.
	But I was assured by the Epoch Times that we were going to do it the old way, which is that you are the pollster.
	We're going to give you topics we think our readers want to know about, but you're going to tell us how to present them the right way, an ethical way.
	And they didn't get involved.
	Meanwhile, I have colleagues who poll for a certain university that partnered with a certain newspaper, and they were running roughshod all over him.
	So they were telling him, no, this is what we wanted to say.
	And he would try to...
	Make the case, an everyday pollster from the 1980s would have told NBC News, would have told ABC News.
	You cannot order a question like that.
	You can't even word, maybe.
	Maybe it's the wording of the question itself.
	But in the end, their incentive is not to be accurate because they won't get the contract again.
	They won't.
	Look, the bottom line is...
	Unless you're completely embarrassed, they're still going to rehire someone who also did a bad job.
	They were just a little bit more convincing with their narrative.
	So ABC was completely embarrassed by Langer Research because it was so bad, Biden plus 17 in Wisconsin.
	But who did they hire?
	They hired Ipsos, who still was just maybe six, seven-point errors, not big ones, just enough for a narrative.
	And the truth is, this is a very incestuous relationship.
	And every time Monmouth University or Quinnipiac comes out with these numbers that's more pro-Democrat, guess what happens?
	Their fundraising goes up.
	This is about driving fundraising.
	It's about driving narrative and the attempt to suppress the other guy or girl's vote.
	Look, you mentioned Quinnipiac, so I'm just going to ride with it.
	In 2014, I watched them up on Capitol Hill pitching their polls to Republicans.
	Oh, you can definitely use these results in Iowa.
	Make sure Joni Ernst, that girl over there, I think she's got a good shot.
	Make sure she mentions the Quinnipiac poll in our next fundraising letter.
	This is what they were up there doing.
	Then Republicans didn't give them any attention two years later, and you saw them shift wildly into the Democratic direction.
	So there have been years, for instance, when they were trying to get on the good list of Joni Ernst in Iowa, Chuck Grassley and other Republicans in the Senate.
	So they put out polls that were ridiculous.
	Earns plus eight.
	Earns plus ten.
	So they go in both directions.
	And the truth is they just want to remain relevant.
	They want to be a player.
	I was going to say, do you think...
	I'm answering a question.
	You're asking the question.
	Do you think most...
	Public polls are influence campaigns in disguise.
	Are they trying to influence the campaigns or are they trying to influence the general public who still has some form of reliance or, you know, lends credibility to these polls?
	Yeah, I mean, I think it can.
	I can foresee a scenario where it can be both.
	They want to get a campaign's attention, so maybe they take a little dig out of it.
	Hey, you've slipped three points in a couple of weeks, you know, but in the end...
	This is about human behavior, pushing human behavior.
	And sometimes that can backfire, by the way.
	They haven't learned that yet.
	But generally speaking, this is so the fundraising can go out.
	This is so the narratives can be built.
	And I didn't always believe that.
	I just believe that for the most part, people, it's difficult.
	It's hard.
	Polling is essentially trying to predict human behavior.
	And that's difficult in any science or art form, not just social but physical and biological.
	It's incredibly difficult to predict what we're going to do.
	So I gave them a lot of leeway, but there's no explaining these mistakes now.
	If it was a scientifically, what's the word I'm looking for?
	If it was a legitimate mistake every year, year after year, year after year, then we would see these mistakes in two directions.
	But we don't see that.
	So that is what this year completely convinced me that this is not an accident anymore.
	And what do I mean by that?
	Guys, there are sampling errors in these polls.
	There should be an outlier every 20 to 25 polls.
	When I was coming up in the industry, that's what all the old timers said.
	Look, if you come out with a crazy one, it's alright because there's always a crazy one every 20 to 25 because that is generally the law.
	That's the rule of thumb.
	Now we don't even see them.
	So if there were legitimate mistakes, and these were mistakes but they're not just ethical issues or methodological issues, sometimes there's just statistical noise, then we would have seen the Trump plus 18s in Ohio since he carried it by damn near 10 points.
	We would have saw the Trump plus 13 in Florida.
	We would have saw the Trump plus 10 in North Carolina.
	We would have saw all of these crazy outside the sampling era mistakes.
	That we saw with Joe Biden's lead in these battleground states, but that's not what happened because there's no explaining that through any of the laws that go into this art form we call polling.
	There's just no explaining it.
	There should be legitimate mistakes.
	They go both ways.
	Well, there is explaining it.
	It's that these polls are intended to manipulate and not advise, manipulate, not represent, which I guess leads us into the next subject of this entire thing.
	When in your career path did you notice the backlash taking a form of, let's just say, censorship on YouTube or social media backlash?
	When did you find yourself in the crosshairs of the mainstream media backlash to what you are bringing out now in terms of criticizing and critiquing the pollsters?
	Yeah, so when I came onto the scene, I was criticizing the pollsters.
	I did foolishly think, though, that we still had room for professional debate.
	And then if I outperformed them, then we would get into a good faith discussion.
	That was very idealistic and naive.
	I'd rather be that guy, though, than that scumbag that smears people without rhyme or reason.
	So I've always had those attacks and those smears.
	I did think that it would at least rise to a level of professional discussion once I outperformed.
	That didn't happen.
	This year...
	I think because I didn't hide and go away.
	This is what I really believe.
	Because I didn't run away.
	And I didn't put my tail between my legs, go under a rock or something.
	I stuck around.
	And I did it again.
	And I think after that, they said this guy has to go.
	So that's when I really drew the ire of the Twitters, the YouTubes, and the media.
	The mainstream media.
	And I think that's why, because they just don't know what to do with guys like me.
	I'm not the only one out there just beating a dead horse, you know, time day after day, hour after hour.
	And I think they're getting to a level where they're just frustrated with people like us.
	But generally, they already were angry.
	I know a lot of people who couldn't stand that.
	That interview with the New York Post.
	So that ticked people off already.
	But then when I agreed to look into some of the allegations of voting irregularities, I think they kind of used that as an excuse to try to remove me.
	Yeah, I want to get into two other components.
	One is a story many people still don't know, which is how the gold standard of polling, Gallup, Exited polling, presidential polling entirely after 2012, and how that really wasn't because of their so-called error, because they just had a very close race, and that's exactly what it was.
	The reality is if we would have had 2020-level turnout in 2012, Obama would have lost.
	He won from the disparate turnout edge that W benefited from 2004, that they took away from Trump with the unique election rules, the fortifying of the election that took place in 2020.
	If you want more details about that, You can go to vivabarneslaw.locals.com or peoplesundit.locals.com because we can't get into any further detail here on the good YouTube.
	But could you tell the story about Gallup?
	And also, then I want to bridge into the story of the gatekeepers.
	At the same time, they took out the gold standards.
	And once they took out Gallup...
	Pew, which was the up-and-coming gold standard, suddenly said, we're not going to be polling presidential elections anymore either, because they didn't want to offend and upset their donors, and they didn't want the Gallup treatment that the Obama administration was willing to weaponize against Gallup, and then instead elevate some folks like the Nate Silvers of the world and others who are completely fraudulent, but we'll get into that next.
	But first, can you tell people, what happened to Gallup after 2012?
	Yeah, and this actually goes back to some of my own experience and maybe part of what nudged me into the public space.
	Behind the scenes, like you said, Gallup was showing a very close race, and that's what it was.
	It was difficult to pull.
	Everybody at this point did know about response biases and participation issues.
	But in truth, behind the scenes, Gallup was getting bullied by the Obama administration.
	There were talks of, you know, that this could be...
	Because they're not waiting properly for minorities, you know what?
	Wink, wink.
	This may actually be a civil rights issue.
	This is what they were doing to that company.
	I may have to refer this to the civil rights division at DOJ.
	I don't know yet.
	I'm just saying it may rise to the level of a bunch of rich white people trying to put the brown and black man down.
	Instead of it just being a professional difference of opinion...
	About what the electorate would look like.
	Gallup said, no, I think it's going to be 70% white.
	And Barack Obama's team thought it was going to be 67% white.
	And this fight turned into threats.
	And people should know that.
	So basically, in a nutshell, Gallup, it was, it is, I at least imagine.
	That part of their thinking, Robert, was it's just so damn hard now.
	I don't want to put out a horse race if I don't have to.
	But there was more than that behind the scenes, which was they were literally threatening to pull the levers of government on Gallup for pulling a race differently.
	And I don't believe in the company's multi-decade long history they have ever dealt with something like that before.
	And once you start...
	To worry about, you know, a pollster starts to worry about government intervention or threats or who knows?
	Maybe they don't go after him through that way.
	Maybe they just decide to, you know, have the FBI do its second job, which is the secret police nowadays, and they go after somebody at the firm.
	I mean, it's just crazy.
	Is it worth it to Gallup, right?
	And so they just pulled back.
	The other aspect of all that is, could you explain to people that all of these polling companies make their real money from corporate private clients?
	And just the announcement of a criminal investigation would kill Gallup's business.
	So who's going to do, what company is going to hire Gallup if the Obama Justice Department is looking at whether or not Gallup is institutionally racist?
	Gallup analytics?
	Yeah, Gallup Analytics to corporations, and I know because we had it.
	We're talking about thousands upon thousands of dollars here, folks.
	This is a lot.
	So Gallup, if your company can benefit from it, I'm not over here doing a pitch for Gallup, but it was a very interesting product.
	It was a lot bigger than you see on the public facing of their website.
	There's a lot more granular data, not just consumers.
	Corporations can use.
	Healthcare providers can use.
	Even Wall Street could use.
	I mean, honestly, pharmaceutical companies could definitely use it.
	And the questions data asked over a 12-month period are so broad and so honestly, so well-defined.
	Gallup's product was that they really appealed to everybody.
	And for a modest monthly fee, modest to a corporation, you could just get it all.
	It's not just the threat of the indictment, Robert.
	As you know, they've really ramped it up with cancel culture.
	It's the stigma.
	So, oh, that white firm who doesn't like it that whites aren't 72% of the population must be because they resent the growing minority bloc in this country, that they refuse to weight down their samples.
	I mean, folks, I'm not kidding.
	When I tell you the crazy...
	Stuff that is inferred by a business decision.
	A business decision, because that's what it was.
	We didn't have a clear and cut new census yet.
	We'll get that new big one coming, hopefully, before I die.
	We'll get the new census.
	I've been dying to see it.
	But that is what people like George Gallup and other pollsters, those who preceded him at that firm, myself, this is what we rely on.
	To tell us what the country looks like.
	So it was not out of the realm of plausible that they were looking at 71, 72. Other people thought it would be less.
	I mean, this is a debate that should have been professional.
	But they threatened to take it and put it into the realm of shame, cancel, and even criminal.
	Robert, I mean, I didn't know anything about that.
	And it's actually, you'll have to forgive the lighting now, by the way.
	Now we're in full darkness and I've got some...
	Light on the side of the car just casting a very eerie...
	It's cool looking.
	Almost dirty light.
	And I have to keep starting the engine to get that light going again.
	What ended up happening with Gallup and Obama?
	Any investigation?
	Or is the mere threat enough to influence results?
	It's enough to influence those to them and others.
	Because, right, Robert?
	Shortly after Gallup said, you know what, we're not doing this anymore.
	We're still going to offer the Gallup World Poll.
	We're going to do this.
	We're going to do that.
	We are no longer going to pull head-to-head races.
	Pew Research also said, you know what?
	As a matter of fact, I think we're going to scale back ours a little bit too.
	So it really does have, I guess, what some people would refer to as a chilling effect in media.
	That can happen to pollsters.
	I mean, Gallup was the gold standard that established his credibility by accurately pulling the presidential election.
	And then suddenly after 2012 said, well, we will never pull a presidential election ever again.
	Not only that, they shifted to a lot of all adult polling to where even though they knew that that, you know, in 1980, polling all adults didn't have a massive demographic gap between that and the registered voter profile.
	It's a dick.
	Today it does.
	You're getting about 10% of the population, not even citizens, or you know are never going to vote.
	There may be the other components of it.
	So you're getting a very democratically-hued electorate.
	They know it, but they knew that was where the pressure point was.
	As long as they kept Democrats happy, then the media, the Justice Department, nobody else would be harassing them, and they could keep their corporate clientele without controversy.
	At the same time they effectively took out Gallup and really kind of took out Pew, Pew became second tier, not as many people paid attention to it, is the same time they decided to elevate Nate Silver and this whole new group of polling experts.
	And of course, what's extraordinary about these people, 538 Politics, Dave Wasserman, Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, I'm forgetting all their other names.
	But you can just go through the litany.
	What they all have in common is, to my knowledge, none of them have been successful pollsters in their lives.
	They have no idea.
	Polling experts.
	Could you describe?
	What was it like to witness that?
	You're on the front lines.
	You're discovering the methodological flaws, discovering some of the political biases, discovering some of the corrupt corporate influences that, if corrected, you could still do very accurate polling in the historical tradition of what the science is supposed to be about, educating the political class and educating the academics about what the public really believes and thinks.
	And not only do you see the gold standard, the original gold standard, taken out and removed and terrified of interacting, even doing the polling, but you see the elevation of people who are completely corrupt, completely incompetent, and they're held up as if they're demigods.
	What was that experience having to witness that like?
	It's inherently sad to watch a titan.
	I mean, a man who literally...
	Made the polling industry credible.
	It's sad to watch somebody like him and his namesake be replaced by a complete and total fraud.
	And that was the same time, by the way, that they went after and really started to denigrate Rasmussen, even though they had a very similar result.
	And they did what every pollster should do when they have a miss, which is retool.
	And that's valid.
	That's what we all should do.
	It's called introspection.
	In the normal world, we retool when we get something wrong in the political world.
	But, I mean, honestly, that set our industry on a collision course with the public.
	Because now here come these fake gurus.
	There's no other way to put them.
	Here come these fake gurus who really have no experience.
	They're not from the industry.
	Robert, the first thing people said when this guy came out and others came out.
	Who are these people?
	Nobody knew who they were.
	Folks, understand.
	He's not a pollster.
	None of them are.
	They've never pulled a day in their life.
	If they walked into my office and I just gave them my chair and told them, go ahead, go to town.
	Let's see you do a better job.
	They wouldn't know what equipment does what.
	I don't know how much better to explain it.
	These guys are not even shadows of the people who came before them.
	That's probably for a reason, Robert, because they're not there to be professionals.
	They're there to be narrative providers.
	There was this initial shocker, who are these guys, to something that was worse, which turned into, after a while, A fear.
	So university pollsters who I know and respect, everyone understood what time it was.
	Let me put it like that.
	Everyone knew what time it was.
	And you're not going to stand up with me over here.
	And I give people like Jim credit, Susquehanna, he has.
	But a lot of other colleagues that I have, they rely on funding that goes to their school, Robert.
	And they're deadly afraid of that D or that F or that ban.
	They're deadly.
	With me, I don't care.
	I just say, smear me all you want.
	I put my little middle finger emoji on Twitter on election night like I did last time again.
	Who's stupid now, sucker?
	And I get 10 more clients.
	These guys are ruined.
	If he comes after them at certain Northeastern universities, then they're done.
	They're finished.
	They'll be replaced as the director of the polling outfit at that university.
	They'll be replaced.
	They'll put out a press release saying that the faculty is going to completely revamp who is and who isn't in charge.
	You know how it'll go.
	The kids will get, sadly, caught up in that whole swoop.
	There was a university, and I can't say it, but because of him, they canceled me coming to speak to the kids who were dying to have someone come there who actually polled the election correctly.
	And they're deathly afraid that he'll write an article about him or something.
	So they canceled it.
	So it went from everybody just trying to do the best job they could do, maybe little games here and there because it is the game of politics, right?
	And generally just trying to do the best job they can do, following the footsteps of people like George Gallup, to this.
	And this is what the few of us are fighting against right now because there is a way for this industry to move forward.
	And regain the public trust.
	We can do it.
	It's possible.
	We're trying to do it with the public polling project right now.
	So it's not good enough to say Biden plus four headline because we want to show you everything.
	This is who we spoke to.
	This is where we spoke to them.
	Here's a map with little dots in rooftop view so you can see what household on what street on Google Earth we just spoke with.
	You know, that is what we're trying to do because, you know, it's just my own experience.
	What is the cure for this kind of distrust?
	Sunlight, transparency.
	No, it's a full discrediting of the industry, which I think we've come to now.
	I don't trust pollsters for anything other than knowing that what they're saying is what they want people to believe and not what people actually do believe.
	That's just my starting point now.
	Now, Robert, Richard, I have to, I may be...
	I have to cut it short in a few minutes, because I might get locked out of the campground if I don't get back in.
	Robert, before I get into the Joe Kent question, because I do want to know if you have any role with Joe Kent, I know Robert had a second half of the question, which I know that he wants people to answer, or that you would ask for the people.
	Sure, and for people, it's what integrates, you know, what do Rotten Tomatoes and 538 have in common?
	They're intended to promote...
	Fake critics, fake experts to be gatekeepers for permissible opinion.
	So, you know, Rotten Tomatoes is going to put up 90% favorable critics ratings for The Last Skywalker, for the She-Man disguised as He-Man, for all of these kind of things.
	They're doing it in order to try to get access to your kids, to re-educate them, re-acculturate them in a leftist, wokest ideology that's contrary to what the canon of that.
	The same thing is what Nate Silver and Nate Cohn and Dave Wasserman Dimwit over at Harry Enten over at CNN.
	All these people, they're designed to say...
	I mean, they've spent the last four years telling people, here are the people who got 2010 completely wrong, 2014 completely wrong, 2016 completely wrong, Brexit completely wrong, the UK elections in 2015 completely wrong, the 2020 elections completely wrong, many of the key 2018 Senate and gubernatorial races completely wrong.
	In fact, if you dig in, they actually got a lot of House races wrong, but they played games there.
	They had three different...
	They had the old scam.
	People that promote sports picks do.
	They guarantee you success.
	They give half of their list one side of the game and they give their other half of their list the other side of the game.
	They're guaranteed that half of their list won the bet.
	It's one of the oldest scams in the book.
	It is a bookie scam.
	It's exactly what it is, man.
	Completely.
	But could you tell people about one of the ways to push back that you were just talking about in terms of one is ignoring all of these fake critics and these fake people and exposing them for who they are, but the other is promoting just as like your nerdrotics, your doomcocks, your countinculas, all those people that are pushing back.
	You know, your geeks and gamers pushing back in the cultural arena to say, you know what, you can find trustworthy criticism again.
	Just because you've got all these fake critics isn't a reason to no longer trust a critic, is to distrust those critics.
	In the same way...
	The fact that you have a lot of manipulative pollsters is not a reason to disbelieve in polling itself.
	It's like right now we have a lot of interesting doctors giving out advice that isn't necessarily medical.
	That doesn't mean all of a sudden science and medicine itself are no longer trustworthy.
	It just means those people making their claims and that name are.
	Can you talk about why you did the public polling project and what it is to try to restore confidence in the fact that there's still an important little democratic role for polling?
	What do people really think?
	Because decision makers are looking to it and why it's still relevant, still pertinent, still possible.
	Yeah, that's why I won't give this up and I don't want to let the industry succumb to what they'd like to turn it into because I do believe in George Gallup's old vision, which is that it would benefit our democracy, benefit any self-governing society if our leaders had faith.
	In tools like public polling to tell them what people really think about their actions that they have taken or intend to take.
	Public policy, where people sit on these issues, it matters.
	But do your due diligence, because there will be others who follow what we have done.
	There already are some.
	But in the end, what I did was decide that the best medicine for this is sunlight, is transparency.
	Then we started the public polling project.
	We let viewers of the podcast choose what states they wanted to poll, which they generally would take polls of themselves.
	It was pretty neat.
	And then based on that, they would tell me by funding those states.
	And then we would go ahead and poll those battleground states and put up a level of information that you just will not get from Fox News, from CNN, or from any of those people.
	Who are those critics?
	So some of the twisting of data that you'll see is hard to decipher.
	So sometimes the best way to know whether someone is being honest with you is really by showing you their hand.
	So that's where I'm trying to force this industry.
	I'm trying to put it, because I know we can't beat them on that narrative, like punch for punch.
	The only way we can beat them...
	And restore trust.
	Is if we make it, bring this to the level that they just look dumb, Robert.
	Like, they look like they're hiding something from not doing what I do.
	Have transparency at that kind of level.
	But I think they already do.
	To anybody who's looking, the only problem is to the CNN viewer, to the MSNBC viewer, they don't because they just don't know and they're not looking for that.
	So people look at the Nate Silvers, and my light just went out, but they look at the Nate Silvers and they think there's credibility to the name because they know the name, they know the brand, and it's big and it must be good.
	Results matter, I'd say that.
	You know what I mean?
	Because I do understand that point of view.
	And I would say results matter.
	Sometimes you just have to keep beating the pavement.
	And after a while, like I said, after a while, every two or four years of that little middle finger emoji on Twitter, it's going to get annoying.
	Let's see who can outlast who.
	After a while, you have to look at yourself in the mirror.
	Nate Silver is predictable.
	If you bet against whatever he recommends, you will make money.
	And a broken clock.
	No greater insult than that, Robert, for a pollster, I imagine.
	Okay, now, I think this has to be the last question.
	I'm already 50 minutes late with my kid who's going to kill me.
	Richard, are you helping with Joe Kent?
	I know there was some discussion.
	People are interested.
	Are you allowed to discuss it?
	You know, I'm not.
	You know, we interviewed him on Inside the Numbers last week, and I'll tell you what, I got off.
	Between us and the 100,000 people who might see this, I got off, I turned right to Laura, and I said, I love this guy.
	Because he just seemed so real to me.
	First of all, Joe, I didn't ask him.
	I think he was an 18x-ray too.
	I think he started as an 18x-ray in the Army too.
	But Joe is not somebody I would think would have run had it not been for...
	The events over Donald Trump's administration.
	And I think he's real.
	I believe him.
	So if he did, because I won't work for anyone, I don't believe it.
	So if he did ask me, I probably would say yes.
	But we haven't gotten into that.
	All right.
	Everybody, with that said, Robert, is there one last question you want to ask?
	And Richard, I guess we should end it on some optimism if Robert has no question.
	You need to instill some optimism in the rest of us who feel defeated by what we are seeing coming out of mainstream media and the polls, which are an extension of mainstream media.
	Robert, any last question?
	Or do we let Richard close us off with some optimism for the future?
	Sure.
	No pressure, Richard.
	Go ahead.
	You got that last question?
	Because I think I could rise to this occasion.
	No question.
	Optimism.
	Give it to those who need it.
	Look, guys, I think in the end...
	People see this.
	I know that you look on Twitter and it looks like just a cesspool of groupthink and we call it the hive mind.
	But in the real world, it doesn't look like that.
	And when you do conduct as scientific as you can conduct it, people do see what you're seeing.
	And there is always a swing of the pendulum.
	So in American politics, I would say, you know, in any politics, there's always a swing of the pendulum.
	And what I'm seeing right now is eventually they are going to not, they may not take the industry down.
	They may not take their, you know, whether it's media or polling, but eventually people do begin to just tune them out.
	That's how, even with the polling we did, we got much closer.
	There was still that sliver who just didn't want to tell us who they were going to vote for and how that could make up for two to six points.
	And that was before 2020.
	What I'm saying is I think that sometimes the powers that be overreached, and I think they overreach this time, and eventually it comes back to bite them.
	And I really do believe that in my heart of hearts.
	That's where we are now.
	Because I see people in our polling demographically.
	By party, by age, by gender, by race, by whatever.
	You would think would tell you they believe a certain thing or they're buying into a certain thing, but they're not.
	They're not.
	Not anymore.
	And I mean, probably very liberal districts in California, I see blowback starting to rise.
	And it's bubbling.
	And when you do this, like I have done this all of these years, it's like the judge said about pornography, it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
	And believe me, I see it.
	It's there.
	It's common.
	You can make them regret this.
	As Bob Dylan warned the generals in the early 1960s, it's blowing in the wind.
	It's blowing in the wind.
	Yeah, that's it.
	That's a good way to put it.
	This is amazing.
	I think above and beyond the bad lighting and the pixelated screen, people have gotten a tremendous amount of this.
	I know I knew nothing of what you did for...
	I mean, I knew it...
	By and large from 2020, but I love the details are amazing.
	It's going to be enlightening for people.
	Richard, thank you very much.
	Robert, thank you very much.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Thank you for putting up with the bad lighting, but we'll be back to the normal schedule when I'm back in civilization sooner than later.
	But with that said, everyone, thank you very much.
	Share this around.
	Highlights, cut them, share them.
	Let everyone know what Richard Barris is up to.
	And Richard, where can everyone find you?
	peoplespundit.locals.com taking a cue from Robert.
	And of course, people can still follow me on Twitter at peoples underscore pundit.
	I'm still there.
	Thanks to Tucker Carlson.
	Awesome.
	And with that said, everyone, thank you very much.
	And we will, Robert, Richard, stick around for our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you for the support.
	Thank you for tuning in.
	See you Sunday.
	All the best.
	All right.

▲