Navigating Politics and Journalism: Marketing Insights, Media Trust, and Social Media Influence

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0:00:08 - Speaker 1
Hey, welcome everybody to the Salt Grain podcast. I'm your host, holly McNamara, and I'm here today with Joey Dumont, who lives in San Francisco area, and there's a lot. I live in San Francisco, yeah, okay, right in the city. So, yeah, we have a lot to talk about. Joey and I have. We were connected in one particular way, but then we have other things in common and connections that we learned as we got to know each other. And I'm going to kind of give a quick overview. I'm going to explain how we met and you can, you know, we can kind of go back and forth, and then I kind of want you to explain for the listeners a brief summary of your background and what you're doing today. And you know, I really want to get into your podcast and talk about how you know. We talked a lot on your podcast. We talked about Tony Hsieh and people are probably wondering, well, how does that tie into politics and being a public figure? Well, it definitely does and we're going to kind of get to that. And Joey's doing a lot of deep dives and a lot of political related, politically related topics and had some really major interviews, some really great interviews for some folks. 

So so in 2012,. I was living in San Francisco. I had finished. I just moved from Las Vegas living with Tony Hsieh. We finished the book tour for his CEO or for his delivering happiness book, and the book launch was done. The tour was done, everything was kind of wrapped up and I decided that I didn't want to stay in Vegas. I moved to San Francisco, worked for a startup. I was only in San Francisco for a year and at towards the end of that year, a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, david Pritchard, who is hilarious sent us both an email and said something like I need to connect you to and don't make fun of my ass, gas. 

0:02:17 - Speaker 2
Sounds like David yeah. 

0:02:19 - Speaker 1
He was one of the producers, I think, of South Park and family guy Yep and and something about Mary the movie. So, anyway, joey and I met there at his office and Joey is in marketing. So we met in San Francisco at his office, gave me a tour and then we learned that we're both connected to Tony Hsieh and that was not why we were first introduced. I don't think David had that in mind, but he could have. But either way, we learned. 

You know, we both live here and we both were connected to Tony Hsieh in very different ways. And so you know, here we are, 1112 years later. You know, after Tony's passing, learning a lot about Tony through his passing that a lot of people didn't know. Learning a lot from Tony even after his passing as far as like working with people and being in the public eye, and even then that all relates to being in politics and so so, yeah, so, joey. So Joey and I we've kept in touch over the years and he's seen my political craziness and you know everything that I've been through and I've watched his podcast unfold and it's incredible. So I want you to talk about your background and the podcast. Sure. 

0:03:43 - Speaker 2
Yeah, when we met David, David introduced us I was a partner at an agency called Questus and we were a digital marketing agency and that was basically my career for 20 plus years. And when David and I introduced you, we were like you said. We worked with Tony Hsieh. We shot a documentary called the Naked Brand and we launched that in 2012. And part of our thesis was that social media, the super computers that we actually hold in our persons, in our pockets, are going to change how brand communication works, specifically to their subscriber base and their customers. And you were right Because, yeah, we were. 

We thought that was cool and so we interviewed a bunch of icons that we thought were changing the game. And Tony Hsieh was one of those, because of what he was doing with Zappos, obviously, and he did some really cool things. And we interviewed him about all of the culture, specifically kind of the land for misfit toys. When we went to the lobby, there was this beautiful placard. It was like a yield or stop sign and it had a man hugging ahead and it was basically just hey, wherever you come from, when you get here, you will be hugged and loved and taken care of, and that was really what we thought was unique about Tony. 

You know, obviously he was a very smart entrepreneur, had mad success even before Zappos, and once he got there, his big thing was about making people feel comfortable with themselves and being part of something bigger, and I think that was what we wanted to celebrate with Zappos. And so we took our camera crew in there and we interviewed everyone we could get our hands on, including what was the young man's name, who's saying? I can't remember the name of the song. Was it Kevin? I don't know if it was Kevin. He was the guy who actually he ran the company. He ran the brand at the end. I can't remember his name, but we interviewed him because he actually applied for the job by singing a song about the 10. 

0:05:38 - Speaker 1
Oh, tyler, tyler, thank you, yeah, yeah. 

0:05:42 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and so we interviewed Tyler and we interviewed the mayor of hugs and we interviewed a bunch of really cool kids that specifically talked to the customer service aspect of the business. So they didn't really have a lot of money earmarked for advertising back then. They did a lot of in the airports. If you remember, they had the Zappos trays that they went. 

0:06:03 - Speaker 1
When I saw that tray when I was flying to Vegas for work and I happened to see Tony every time he went, but when I the first time those were rolled out, I was at the airport and I was like no fucking way. 

0:06:14 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it's brilliant, very unique. Yeah, it was typical of Tony, and the idea was that we had a customer service person that we interviewed who had the longest call I think was 12 hours, and so, as you know, with customer service, your goal with call centers is to get on and off the phone as fast as possible because it's very expensive. Tony took the opposite approach. He's like let's build a family, let's make customer service our number one priority, and he did, and then he built a billion dollar empire based on that. 

And then the reason I had you on my political podcast was because I really remembered how much I liked my time with Tony, the interviews that we had with him. He actually took us to his theater that he bought in downtown Las Vegas and he showed our documentary he's still there, yeah To about 650 of his employees. And I remember standing next to him on the stage as he introduced us and what we were doing there, and he was genuinely, invisibly nervous. He was not a extrovert, he was not someone who liked to be the center of attention, spotlight was not his friend, and yet he did it. 

0:07:14 - Speaker 1
Till the day he died. 

0:07:15 - Speaker 2
Till the day he died. Yep, he was not an extrovert and I think that that was something that was lost from anybody that didn't know him. Obviously, you were a very close friend of his and you knew he was an introvert. And then so, when I brought you to the show, I wanted to talk specifically about his book, wonder Boy, because it was such a well written book, it was well researched by some journalists that I have a lot of respect for, and when I brought you on the show, it was really to talk about you know him and you and I and our connection there, and, as we talked about, it didn't have a lot to do with politics, but I think everything in this culture today is political, and I think that that's really where you and I kind of connected again after many years of not seeing each other, and that was kind of our thing. 

And then, as you mentioned, I left the ad industry in 2018 to take a couple of years off to write a memoir for my little boys. I have two little boys, currently 10 and 12. And the book was called Joey's Song Body the Life and Times of a Recovery in Douchebag, and it was about my insecurity growing up with the sociopath father and some of the bad stuff that happened to us as kids. And then kind of how I came out of that malaise and I wrote it for my little dudes because they fortunately have grown up in a really quiet home with parents that love each other and a very don't eat uncle and grandparents that adore them and they have a really cool social network of friends and family here in San Francisco. And after I was going to do the book for a couple of years and then go back to corporate America, and then COVID hit, and so it was staying with my little boys at the time I think we're seven and five or eight and six, something like that and so they were home. And for those who follow the news specifically to COVID, san Francisco's school system was shut down for 18 months and so we had our little boys here in the house with us every single day, and my wife is a senior level executive in the advertising world and so she was very busy and I was not, so I took it upon myself to write four or five hours a day while taking my boys out for recess and cooking them grilled cheese sandwiches and having as much fun as we could for that couple of years and then, as I started to get back into the world of business, I decided to launch a political podcast called True 30. And that was launched in 2022 and, excuse me, the summer of 2021. 

And, to your point, I started interviewing folks in academia. I started interviewing political wonks and politicians and journalists and people that were kind of in the zeitgeist specific to politics. And, as I think I just mentioned to you off camera, one of my last guests was a guy named Tom Shanker, who was a former war correspondent for the New York Times for 13 years, previous bureau chief in Moscow during the Soviet Union breakup, and we talked about his new book called Age of Danger, that he co-wrote with a man named Andrew Hone. Both of these guys have credentials that are off the charts Andrew was the former secretary deputy of defense for the Bush administration, and so they wrote this book to kind of warn us, the public, about what's going on. Specific not to the two hot wars we have going on in Israel and Ukraine, because the book actually was published before the attacks the Hamas attacks on Israel. The idea was warning us against or educating us on the warning and action systems of our federal government, specific to our department of public and security, and it was just a really cool interview and typical of what we were trying to get going with True 30. 

And over the last two years and even I've talked about this off camera as well we actually decided to dive into topics like gender identity, race, dei, harm reduction policy, specific to progressives in blue cities like my own, and everything that I think, basically everything that causes the most drama possible between the, let's just say, the divide of our blue and red teams. So you dove right in. Yeah, yeah, and it was tough because I was not used to that level of confrontation, being called a racist and a transphobe and an overall bad person. 

0:11:20 - Speaker 1
You have been called that. 

0:11:21 - Speaker 2
Oh yeah, many times, because we did about 300 hours of reporting on defund the police as one example, and when you push back on the defund the police, you get pushed back from certain folks that think you are going against them. 

0:11:37 - Speaker 1
The liberal agenda. 

0:11:38 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. 

And so it was one of those things where I was like, as an ad guy, I was irritated by the slogan because it just didn't make any sense, right, and what they really needed to do and what we found out through all of our reporting was that it was a reimagining of policing that needs to take place. 

And if you look at and this is a discussion that's still in the zeitgeist today I'm a big fan of the Daily, which is the New York Times podcast. It's a morning podcast, about a half hour, and they interview one of their journalists about a story. And they interviewed one of their journalists this morning about cameras, body cameras that go on police, and it was. You know it was a decent report but you know, considering I did so much homework on it, he missed a lot of major things, and what they talked about during this interview was how body cameras themselves are not a salvo to transparency, because and this is part of my own reporting as well is that the police departments, as a rule, still own the access to the recordings, so if they don't want to release them, they can just say well, we're not going to release it, it's under investigation. So who are not going to release the actual footage. 

0:12:41 - Speaker 1
That's happening to a friend of mine right now. He's trying to get access to these, the body cameras, and they'll get them. 

0:12:45 - Speaker 2
They'll get them, but it takes a long time and it takes a reporter to go after public records and continue to bug them. Chicago is the only police department and this is one of the featured stories this morning in the daily because they do have a kind of a citizens bureau that has access to the software. So when the footage comes in they have access to it. So if there's something that's going to be hidden, then they will have the full footage of the police and the use of force and the things that took place on that. But I mentioned that in the sense that every topic that we dove into politically was contankerous and we offended the 8% minority attorney base on the left every article we wrote and then we offended the 8% minority attorney base on the right with every article. And what we found over a period of a couple of years was that there was a growing group of people I have about 15% of our audiences in Britain and they liked the fact that we produced the whole story. So if we come in and we talk about Defund, we're like, hey, there's some really cool police initiatives that are going on and there's some stuff that has yet to be remedied and it's still problematic, and specifically with large departments. What they didn't mention in the call this morning it's because it's a 25 minute interview was that 80% of police departments in the United States are less than 25 officers and that's something that people don't really understand. Yeah, so when you look at you know big police departments, like the biggest in the country is New York City, obviously, chicago, texas, dallas, san Antonio, houston, san Francisco. I interviewed beat cops here in the city. 

I interviewed beat cops in Northern California. Santa Rosa Police Department has a 250 person force and a great reputation. California as a whole has a pretty good reputation specific to its training and its use of force statistics. But most of the departments are small and because they're small they don't even have body cameras, because body cameras come with it a really big price tag, expensive for the hardware but for the retention and all the repository data. Where does it sit? How do they actually manage it? How do they keep it up out of the? You know there's a lot of questions that dive into that. 

Bigger than that is the training as it relates to de-escalation and understanding how to deal with domestic violence, which is the scariest thing that our police force has to deal with on a daily basis. They like traffic tickets, they like drunken disorderlies, they like those kinds of things because they're much easier. Domestic violence gets a name for it because it really is domestic violence. It's really scary. And so, you know, the neat thing about what we were doing at True30 was trying to dive into these topics and explore them with a holistic approach, and we took we called it slow journalism because a lot of these stories took months for us to actually, you know, to go through and come out of. But it was a great two-year period and I think I share with you off camera. I can't share what we're doing now, but I'm actually working now with a new business partner to launch the next iteration of this with True Investigative Journalists and an editor-in-chief, and we're taking it to the next step, which we're all very excited about. We're hoping to have that launched by May of 2024. 

0:15:58 - Speaker 1
That's so exciting? I, because you know, and you and I have talked about this before but when I first wanted to get involved, I had never been involved in politics and never even paid attention to it, and so when I wanted to help my community and run for office, people told me, like you really need to run, this is what you need to do in order to do what you're trying to do, which is help the community in X, y and Z ways. And I didn't. I don't it's nonpartisan at the local level, but I still, like didn't affiliate myself with either party. I didn't. I had strange questions, like if I believed in abortion when I was campaigning and I'm like I have nothing to do with that, you know but when I was in office, as you know, like it was very there was a lot of controversy and people on both sides, not even related to the party system, but just fighting and infighting and and just people just couldn't come to an agreement. 

And what I really like about what you're doing is, like you just said, you're seeing both sides, you're telling the whole story and that's hard to do. We don't have a lot of that today and you know the major networks. They can attempt to do it, but they have time limitations. They have, you know, a structure that they have to. They have to say certain things, they can't say other things, and I just applaud you for doing this because it's so necessary, you know. Thanks, yeah. 

0:17:19 - Speaker 2
Look ahead. Thank you, no, no, I think that's. The real issue is that if you look at journalism in general and you know this from your background in the business world is it's not a good business. So investigative journalism is very expensive. You know, there's the old issue called the Baghdad Bureau problem and that's do you have a bureau in Baghdad? Because you need one, but it's really expensive, and so you have people and processes and lawyers and researchers and fact-checkers and administrators and people of that, and then you have the journalists, and then you have everything to do with running an actual organization. So, if you look at the history, specifically recent history, with a lot of these companies Vice News filed bankruptcy, buzzfeed News filed bankruptcy. 

Intercept is in trouble. There was a really big launch of a company called the Messenger. That was about I think it was $40 or $50 million in funding and this was in May of 2023, and they're now running out of money already. So well, from the article I read the New York Times, they had $8 million in leases in Miami and New York City and DC, and so they went big. But the problem was these business models don't work. Specifically, if you're gonna go after traffic and Ben Smith, who is the founder of SEMIFOR, which is a brand new media organization funded with approximately 25 million, I think, if my numbers are correct. And Ben was the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed and just a rock star journalist, just an amazing smart guy, a great writer, a prolific writer. But he is trying to reinvent the model as well. 

And then there's a lot of other companies Jake Sherman runs something called Punchbowl News, paul Kuzin, new organization that's doing a really good job of trying to build a new model, and 404 and Detractor. A couple of these companies are trying to reinvent the business model. And if you listen to any of these topics specific to podcasts today, there's a young man. Well, there's a lot of people out there talking about it, but the one thing they're trying to get across to everybody is that the business model itself has to change, and that's, in part, what we're trying to do as well, because the overhead has to be considerably smaller and you can't have these, you know, just warehouses of full-time employees and journalists and researchers and administrators and everyone that I mentioned. It's a very expensive piece. 

0:19:35 - Speaker 1
And even office space. You don't need the office space. 

0:19:38 - Speaker 2
You really don't. And it's also if you look at the idea behind running any business. If you can keep your FTEs down, it's to your benefit. And then what is it? How do you make money? And then the traditional ad revenue models of these businesses they're all based on CPMs, which you understand, which is a cost per thousand on an ad buy. And so if you have 30 million uniques, like Buzzfeed used to have on a monthly basis, you got a certain amount of money based on advertising, because this is how many ads are placed on your site, this is how many people pay for those ads. The problem was algorithms change. Google changes those algorithms, cpms drop. So if you had a $25 or a $50 CPM and then it goes to five, your business model has changed drastically, which means you don't have enough money to pay your employees. And that's kind of what took place with a lot of these journalistic business models, is they? 

0:20:29 - Speaker 1
just didn't have enough revenue, constantly adapting. 

0:20:33 - Speaker 2
Well, not only constantly adapting, they're chasing the audience, and that's where it gets really dangerous. Specific to true whole story journalism is that if you want to tell a story that's going to irritate your audience, you might lose subscribers, right? So if you're at the New York Times and you write a really scathing article about BLM that's one example you will lose your following. And if you're a journalist who actually has been told by your organization, because this is part of public record, there was a memo that went out in 2014 from the New York Times that encourages its journalists to have a social graph, a social following on TikTok and Twitter and all of the likes, because it does bring audience to each article. 

The problem is, if you write an article about BLM and it was critical in some cases, it needed to be you could lose your audience and you would be an as a journalist. You could lose your own individual audience and you could possibly lose your job, depending on what your editor thought of your piece. And so that's happening. The New York Times is doing very well, but the Washington Post is not. They lost $100 billion this year and obviously Jeff Bezos can afford to do that, but the LA Times just laid off 115 employees. Last week they closed their DC bureau, and this is during an election year, so that tells you that they're really hurting, right? 

0:21:54 - Speaker 1
Yeah, cause they have tons of news to report on. 

0:21:57 - Speaker 2
Well they do in Time Magazine is laying people off. So if you look at the business models themselves, it's not good out there, and that's kind of the one funny thing too. When we started this business, my friends are like, why are you starting a business, and the worst business in the world? It's a great question, but we're actually we think we can redo it. Specific to the cost, infrastructure number one and then we also realized that there's certain stories that are just not compelling enough for people to log in and or pay and or subscribe to your platform. Here in California we have water issues, but do I really want to have a reporter go to the Hetch Hetchy Water Bureau and figure out what's going on there or sit through an actual local meeting about our water system? It's relevant to all the people here that live in San Francisco, but is it a piece that we want to publish on our platform that we think people are going to like? No, no, no, that's the answer. 

There's a great piece that we're working on right now about California Community Colleges, specific to DEI, and there's a lawsuit by FIRE, which is Greg Lukianoff's organization. I don't know if you've heard of FIRE, but it's the Foundation of Independence Foundation of Independence. What is it? Yeah, individual Rights and Expression. Sorry is what FIRE stands for. And Greg Lukianoff is a first amendment attorney who his whole job is to go out and fight these tiny things. And there's a big lawsuit now against the California Community Colleges for mandating DEI training in the Sciences and Mathematics departments. And they don't know. These professors are pushing back, they're like I don't know what to do. 

0:23:36 - Speaker 1
Yeah. 

0:23:37 - Speaker 2
Right, I don't know how to do this in science. I don't know how to introduce this ideology, and so that's kind of the meat of the lawsuit. And the reason I mentioned that is because I have had numerous guests on my program over the last year in support of DEI. I've interviewed black scholars and academics and the importance of DEI and some of the good there's a lot of good, by the way with any diversity, equity and inclusion. So I should probably say that that's what DEI stands for. 

And the narrative out there today, if you start to look at what's going on, is that it's all negative and it's kind of like everything in our body politic today. 

It's usually not one or the other, it's usually somewhere in the middle, yeah, and I think that's kind of what's happening, and so those are the kind of stories we think that will be interesting to our readers. And obviously this is kind of piggybacking on the recent disastrous congressional hearings of the three presidents of Harvard, u, penn and MIT. I was just gonna ask yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know, claudine Gay, who was a very controversial figure in all of this as the president of Harvard, mm-hmm, what was going on with some of the calls for Intifadas on Harvard's campus and Elise Stefanik, who was a member of Congress a Republican member of Congress asked her very poignant questions about why is Harvard allowing calls for genocide on their campus, and Claudine Gay's response was something very legal. 

It was well, it didn't. The content itself did not rise to any specific violence on our campus, and if it did, then we would actually investigate these claims, which was not a real bad answer in the legalistic sense, but it was a really bad answer considering that Harvard has well, harvard has removed conservative speakers because they were considered dangerous and or unsafe for their students, and so if you're gonna remove people like that from your campus, that's against academic freedom and that's against free speech in the general, so that you can't have that as your defense in front of a congressional hearing, right. So that story blew up. Everyone on the left thought it was a racist attack on Claudine because she's a black female. 

And they didn't like the people who came after her, which in this case, was there's a scholar from the Manhattan Institute who is a huge I guess he disagrees with DEIs. His name is Christopher Rufo and he is a very bright, highly educated and well researched foe of DEI, and he, and another reporter named Christopher Brunette, actually surfaced I think it was 40 or 50 different examples of plagiarism from Claudine Gay. What and they were true, yeah, and so what Claudine actually had to defend was that she said that she just didn't use the proper citations and that she changed those as fast as she could, but it all came out. It all came out in the story and she was forced to resign. And so those are the kind of things that we believe in our organization, that we wanna report on those things, because is Claudine Gay a bad person? No, she seems to be a very wonderful human being who, once gotten to this specific place in her life, didn't have the words to defend herself, based on an ideology that she touts constantly with, which is the diversity, equity and inclusion side of things, and the ideology actually ended up fighting her specifically. 

And the same thing with the University of Pennsylvania president, who was forced to resign because there was a very big Jewish donor at U Penn who said if she doesn't resign or if she isn't fired, he will withhold his $100 million donation. So obviously, oh, come on. Yeah, no, this is the kind of stuff where, as a reporter, it is mouthwatering, right. You wanna know. You wanna know what's going on Well, and there's so many layers to it. 

0:27:43 - Speaker 1
There's a lot of layers to it and to delve into and to really figure it out, cause even I've only watched some of that on the surface level. There are other things I'm paying more attention to, but I've wanted to know more about it, so it's just fascinating. 

0:27:57 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and those are the kind of stories I think that we're gonna have to deal with. If you look at the Israel and Mos conflict and how much sadness is taking place there, it's the same kind of thing. It's very difficult for a August publisher like the New York Times or the Washington Post to report one way or the other. Yeah, because they get hammered. 

Yeah, no matter what it doesn't matter where you are Right and that's the thing too for us is that if we did a big story on DEI or BLM or defund the police or gender ideology, whatever it may be, we are completely agnostic to the outcome, right. 

And if we actually, as a Democrat, I would actually come out and say, oh man, that was a terrible story. On Gavin Newsom, you know, if we actually did one and we found out that we didn't like it and for those who don't know, gavin Newsom is our governor and during COVID, one of the stories that was terrible. He went to this very expensive whitey-toydy place in Napa and had this ridiculously expensive dinner and didn't wear his mask, and it was called French Laundry, which is one of the most expensive and wonderful Michelin star restaurants in the United States, and he got hammered for that right. And I use that as an example because if we were reporting on that case, I would have enjoyed celebrating the reporter's homework and the story, but as a Democrat I would be like, oh man, he got beat up. 

0:29:18 - Speaker 1
Yeah, come on, gavin. 

0:29:19 - Speaker 2
But you got to do that, and I think that's another thing too is that I've had people from my own party, you know, dm me or send me notes and say how can you do this? You know you're hurting our party and it's like, well, it's what happened. That's what happened Exactly. I'm like that's what happened. So I'm not trying to like report on. If I want to report on what I want to report, that's not reporting. 

0:29:41 - Speaker 1
Yeah, that's storytelling, and you're talking to an echo chamber. 

0:29:44 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and that's another big problem is that you know, can you make a living offending your members? And that's something we have to figure out too, right, because we're going to offend people. I've had a lot of people unsubscribe. We think there's about a 10% churn every month Specific to the stories we decide to report on, and once you actually see those go out, you get the comments back pretty quickly. 

Specifically, with gender, I sat on a panel in June as a reporter on this and when I talked to trans women competing in sports against natal females, I got hammered. I mean just hammered because I disagree with it. Why, yeah, yeah, I disagree with trans women competing, just because the biology itself is I agree, yeah, and it's something you can't argue against, right, if you look at it from a nonpartisan lens, it's there's. You know Leah Thomas is still fighting. She wants to compete in the Olympics this year and you know Leah Thomas, as an example, said that she is now equal to women because she's been on estrogen for three years. And for those of you who don't know Leah Thomas is, she was a former swimmer at U Penn. She's about six two. I'm not sure what her weight is anymore because she's lost some weight after she'd be, you know, transitioned, but physically, a very strong email Just felt differently. 

Trans woman now, yeah, and you know, that's kind of where it got into. If you look at people, I always say, well, do you have a problem with pronouns, do you have a problem recognizing them? And I was like no, I actually have compassion for them. You know, during our time at True30, I interviewed 20 trans women. I interviewed 10 trans men. I interviewed endocrinologists, pediatricians, journalists specifically feminist journalists from the UK and Ireland and Scandinavia countries, and this was a huge discussion. I spent probably six months reporting on this. This is incredible. 

Joey, yeah, and the neat thing about it was that, you know, I came away from it having total compassion for anyone who was transitioning, because that's got to be just harrowing on every front. Yeah, absolutely. But the questions are and this is what was taught to me by the feminist movement specifically was hey, we've been fighting for women's rights for 40 years and part of that is being destroyed by trans women wanting to have access to female-only spaces, which is something I didn't even know existed. Oh, I didn't even think about it. Female-only spaces are female prisons, okay, rape centers and sports. Those are three very powerful examples. 

So if you're a trans woman and you commit a crime and you get put in prison and you identify as a female, then you then go to a female prison and you can still have male genitalia as a self-identified trans woman. And that is where feminists are pushing back hard as I would, by the way. And rape centers are the same thing. So what I found out through the women that I was interviewing is that rape centers have historically been very cautious not to even have men in the building afterward. So if it's in an office building at seven o'clock at night, they don't necessarily want a janitor, who's male, who has a baritone voice or a beard or anything that triggers the women that come in for these very delicate counseling sessions. And so when trans women decided that they wanted to be part of this, that offended a lot of women, specifically in the feminist movement about this situation. And then there's the female sports. 

0:33:27 - Speaker 1
Yeah, well then there's male sports too which is a whole other. 

0:33:30 - Speaker 2
Well, I've always said this, and I mean this not to be flippant, but any trans man, so a woman, a biological woman who is transitioning to a man, wants to compete in male sports. 

0:33:40 - Speaker 1
knock yourself out, yeah go ahead. 

0:33:42 - Speaker 2
All good, no one's gonna complain. I totally agree Ever. It's just never gonna happen. We don't care, it's fine. 

I fought in martial arts for many years and we as a group did not fight against females unless we were sparring and having been fine, and we just kind of went at whatever level was appropriate for the sparring. But you didn't have men and women fight each other on purpose. You can, and there's a reason for that. And this is where, again, this is. The cool thing about reporting is that it's facts versus opinions, and so and these numbers kind of gel, but males on average have 30 to 50% more muscle mass in their lower body than biological females, 50 to 60% more muscle mass in their upper body, 120% more punching power, bigger hands, bigger feet, bigger heart, bigger lungs, more bone density, more spatula muscle. We are basically superior on average, the natal female. 

It's not something that should offend people, no, it's just what it is. It's actually true. And when I say these things out loud, citations please I'm like well, what I just mentioned comes from Dr Carol Hoeven, who's an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, and she published this on a book called Tea and the tea is the, and then I think the sub. The subheader is something like the hormone that divides and conquers us, and it's, you know, it's really about the difference between biological males and biological females, and that is. Those are the kind of things that, when I was doing my reporting, we got unsubscribed. You're a transphobe, you're a bad person, you're a racist, and that for me. I thought I had pretty thick skin, but I actually liked to be liked. 

So, it was one of those things where I was like this is brutal, and my wife hated it and she told me to take down all the pictures of our children that I had on Facebook at some point. Well, yeah, it's because you actually do get threats and you get people that say I'm gonna hurt you, I'm gonna do this now, dare you? And you know, I think that's the weird things about our politics today is that you know, in the 80s, when Ronald Reagan was our president, tip O'Neill was our chief or was our yeah, was our speaker. They had dinner together. Yeah, right, they smoked cigar. 

I don't know if Ronnie smokes cigars, but you know they had their cocktails and they had their steaks and they talked and Ronnie was probably like hey, you know, tip, I know you need to pass this bill and I'll give you my agreement, but I need you to help me with this. Yeah, okay, okay, mr President, I'll help you with this. And you know we've lost that today. We've absolutely lost that. I think, a part of what we're trying to do and this really sounds Paul Ayanna, but I think, as we start to move forward with our reporting, it should bring people closer together in the sense that it's just reporting, so you can get mad, but it's just what we came up with, right. 

0:36:37 - Speaker 1
It's information, yeah, You're the messenger. 

0:36:40 - Speaker 2
Yeah, if you wanna look at. You know, we did a lot of stuff on harm reduction policies and I interviewed street nurses and clinicians and academics, and I live in San Francisco. So people telling me that harm reduction policies are working, and I'm like, well, no, they're not, and they're not working in Portland and they're not working in Seattle, they're not working in LA, seattle don't know anything about that. Yeah, it's just, if you look at, like in LA, they have, you know, something called Skid Row which is analogous to here in San Francisco. We have something called the Tenor Line and these are just very blighted areas of the city geography-wise and they are where we normally house our homeless and our addicted populations and it's really sad. Yeah, it is, it's the board, and the same thing stands true in Portland and Seattle and they have because of our progressive policies. We believe that these folks are victims and we need to treat them as such, which means we need to treat them with respect and dignity and all of that. One of those tenants that comes from that is that it's they, the powers that be in harm reduction, believe that it is a inhumane thing to force therapy on an addict, and I can tell you from personal experience. My little brother was an addict and we lost him to his depression and his drugs in 2008. And so I went in and out of rehab centers with them, I pulled them off the street, I paid off drug dealers. I've been intimately involved with harm reduction policies for about 30 years of my life and I can tell you through my reporting and through my personal experience with my little brother, harm reduction policies do not work, and it's not because parts of it don't work. 

We have two really cool case studies globally Portugal and Amsterdam, where I don't know. If you know, these are called open drug markets. So if you have people out there doing drugs, it's decriminalized. So you can just do drugs in front of the cops. They don't really do much, they're not asked to do much, okay, and it's really difficult to be prosecuted for doing drugs publicly. 

And that was one of the problems that Amsterdam and Portugal did a very good job of remedying. And they did it because it was a very holistic approach. They had the judges involved, they had the police departments, they had business owners, they had the citizens, they had the actual addicts themselves, they had street nurses, paramedics. They got everybody together and said hey, we're going to go out and clean up this drug market, meaning that the police went through nicely and issued citations, said hey, you can't congregate here anymore in groups of more than five, because we know that if you're all together you're going to be doing drugs. Yeah, here's a citation. If you do it again, you have to appear in court. Great, once they got into court, they said hey, here's your choice. You're an addict, so you can either go to a year of therapy or you can go to jail. 

0:39:37 - Speaker 1
OK, yeah, and that was. 

0:39:40 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, and if you've ever been around an addict sadly, as I have you know that they're adult, they're not taking. Clearly, they don't know how to make a good decision for themselves and tell them at least 30 days clean. So it's not inhumane, in my opinion, to force or mandate therapy, because it is the only thing that will save them, and or jail, which is the other decision. We all know this collectively is that our jails and our prisons are broken, and if you put someone in there, they come out more broken than when you put them in. So is it a good thing to put someone in jail for a year based on drug addiction? No, but is it a good thing to leave them on the street and have them OD and or die of disease or dysentery or any other disease that you can, possibly by living on the street? 

Those are the kind of things that we actually ran into as as reporters over the last year and a half or two years now, that were daunting and difficult for us to report on. And then, as I mentioned, the fact that you get criticized from both sides on every story. Yeah, it's very difficult to do your job because you're. You just try not to read too much, and I don't anymore, I mean. 

0:40:55 - Speaker 1
I don't go in forever. It's like reading tabloids and I know you went through this. 

0:40:59 - Speaker 2
Yeah, I know you went through this too. It's just it's you can't. You can't believe it because you want to believe the good stuff. But if you have to believe, if you want to believe the good stuff, you have to believe the bad stuff too. 

0:41:07 - Speaker 1
Yeah, it's really hard, though, and people say, oh, don't read it, don't read it, but it's much easier said than done. And you know you, you're like, oh, I'm getting engagement. And then you're like, oh crap, it's bad engagement, you know, and I don't want to hear these things. And then, oh, there's like one or two good comments, but the rest are bad and it's it ruins your day. And then you know it will ruin my day, and so you know, but it took me a year, it took me a good six years to really understand. You know that I'm okay, like that. I don't need to read the comments and I don't want people sending me screenshots and I don't want to know. And, to your point, way back at the beginning of this podcast, you know you, you mentioned social media at the beginning, in 2012, your companies, you know, said social media is going to change everything, and it did, and it's exactly what you're talking about right now. 

I think reporting has become harder because of social media, because social media that there's no hierarchy, it's flat and everyone's voice is just as loud as the next person and you don't really know who's right, who's wrong, what's fake, what's not, and even in such a small, small scale. In my small town. It's so hard to inform people and everything that you just explained, like, yes, you're being attacked, but these people need to understand. Look at how much research you've done and just remove the lens and remove your bias. I'm talking about them. Remove the bias and and listen to what. Listen to the information. And it's nothing emotional, it's just. You're just providing information. Yes, you're a Democrat, but that you don't have this. It's not this confirmation bias. You know you're not reporting based on your party. 

0:42:54 - Speaker 2
I mean, there's no such thing as an activist professor and there's no such thing as an activist journalist. You're either a professor or a journalist. You can't be. You can't be both, and that's a big problem that we have on campuses today is that, and that's the big problem we have with journalists today is that you want to be on your side. 

Yeah, there really is no side. You're a Democrat, that's cool, but that doesn't mean you can't push back on narratives that go against the ideology of your party, so, blm being one of those examples, hard reduction being one of those examples, defund the police being one of those examples. And gender ideology, you know. So, like every single topic that we reported on was polarized and we were criticized for both by both sides. And that, again, is where I think journalism has an uphill battle. But if they do it correctly, you know they will eventually win their trust back. The problem is if you report on something and you find out that it was biased and no one wants to believe your paper anymore, that's a big problem and that's kind of where you, the industry adage, was. The trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut. So that was one of those things in advertising we used to tell our clients like, hey, we have to make sure that what we put out there, as far as your brand, your mission, your values, align with you. Yeah, you stay true to those values, because as soon as you don't right, your brand goes sideways and it takes five years to build a really good brand, yeah, and I think the same thing with journalists. 

I am a fan of the New York Times, specifically the reporting. Their op-eds are very left leaning, however, so it's one of those things where, for me, as a Democrat, I'm like oh wow, I can understand why my conservative friends will not trust me if I use that as a reference point, and that's actually something we talk about internally with this new company we're looking at launching in the next three or four months. Is that we actually want to be the source? When people are debating each other, it's like where did you get this? Oh, I got that from SoEvansoscom. Oh, all right, shit, there's like that. Yeah, that's a good source and they'll like it because they won't like everything we report on yeah. 

So if you're a good, solid Democrat, you're not going to like our reporting on heart reduction as an example yeah. Or you're not going to like it on gender ideology or defund the police or whatever else we're reporting on. And if you're on the conservative side, you may not like it either, but the idea behind that is that, hey, this is just what the evidence led us to. This is the story. It's not a narrative, it's not an ideology. It's what took place, and that's something we believe we can do. We have to prove it and as I've said to the team internally is that we actually can't say this in our copy, because it sounds really awful that we're going to do it. It's like no, you can't, just you can't tell anyone what you're doing. You have to show what you're doing. 

0:45:48 - Speaker 1
Well, it's like Tony used to say you can't say that you're humble because you're probably not humble. 

0:45:55 - Speaker 2
Right, I'm the most humblest man on earth, which was an old Moses statement from yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. You have to actually be able to do the work and show the work and from that then you'll get your membership and your subscribers. Because we believe my most loyal subscribers get mad at me once in a while, but they're nice about it. I don't know. If you did, you could do some more homework on this and I'm like cool. And then the people that are my biggest detractors. I've had a couple of them. She just kept coming on. She was a trans woman and she's from Britain and every time I posted something she just hammered me and people are like why don't you remove this woman? I'm like, because I don't remove people. She wasn't me and spirited or lying or calling me names. She was just saying I think you're doing this wrong and I think you need to interview more people. It seems like everyone you interview identifies this way and I think you're and I was like all right, that's fair, why don't you come on the show? 

0:46:47 - Speaker 1
Yeah. 

0:46:48 - Speaker 2
That's what I said. Why don't you come on the show and just let's talk it through, did she no? The neat thing about that, by the way, is I've invited probably 20 people on the show who come at me pretty hard. Yep, they won't. I have one person call me a douchebag because you're just a typical douchebag, and I laughed and I said I'm not a douchebag, I'm the douchebag. And then I sent him a link to my book, my memoir. Yeah, and he goes. He sends me back a note. He's like oh my God, I'm a new subscriber. That's the greatest retort ever. He didn't read my book obviously Perfect comeback. 

Yeah, because I was like dude, I don't think. I know I have flaws and I make mistakes and I'm going to do things wrong, but I'll report it and I'll correct it. 

0:47:36 - Speaker 1
And sometimes there's not right and wrong, it's just an opinion, or maybe-. Well, that's what op-eds are about. 

0:47:41 - Speaker 2
Right, yeah, and I think op-eds are good op-ed it's what it is, yeah, but it's not fact, it's not who it is, and we did a lot of op-eds. I wrote a piece called I liked Hillbilly. I liked Hillbilly Vance better, it was about Vance was his name JD Vance? Oh yeah, he was a writer in Ohio and I read his memoir in 2016. You did. It was called Hillbilly Allergy. It was a fantastic book. It actually was part of the reason I wrote my own and JD grew up in this less than optimal situation the Appalachians, poor, white and it was a great book. It kind of explained the plight of this impoverished group of white people across the Appalachian Valley and it was a best seller. 

And he went to Ohio State undergrad when did the Marine Corps? First straighten himself out, then went to Ohio State, then went to Yale Law School, graduated at Thomas Class, became a very powerful VC here in San Francisco with Peter Thiel. He's a very impressive young man. I really liked him and I thought that he would be a wonderful Reagan Republican small C conservative, because that's kind of how he represented himself through his book and through his very polished career here in the Valley. And then soon, you know, fast forward. He was saying that Donald Trump at the time. He was saying Donald Trump was a cancer analogous to Fenton, all running through his community, which he said that. He said that I thought he liked Trump, oh no. Well then he ran for Senate in 2022, I think it was. 

0:49:20 - Speaker 1
Yep. 

0:49:21 - Speaker 2
And he won, and to do that he actually had to Give up. Yeah, because they're doing it. So he said I think Mr President was the and I'm quoting paraphrasing here but he said Mr President was my favorite president in my lifetime. Oh, come on, see that. Yeah, oh yeah. So that's kind of Well. I didn't want anyone, anyone, anyone, and that's the issue right now around. 

0:49:43 - Speaker 1
That's a huge issue and that's something I wrote down. I wrote the words pandering, authenticity, respect, doing what's right, doing things for votes, and I always say pandering is expensive and it depends on the topic or whatever the issue is at hand. But that, see, that's. The issue is that people are doing this to get elected and you don't know what's what you have to. 

0:50:09 - Speaker 2
And that's kind of what we saw. I don't know if you saw the recent midterms or actually not the midterms, but the Republican convention here, where Haley and New Hampshire and Tim Scott backed Trump. Mr Trump, yep, and I read Tim Scott's memoir and I've always kind of supported him as a small-seat conservative. He seems like a really nice man, he seems principled. His finest grandparents were actual sharecroppers, so it's like all right, you are an example of how good America can be. So in two generations you know, I was a United States senator and good for you. And, like I said, he seems like a really good guy. 

And then on camera, mr Trump baits him with hey, you must really hate Haley. Haley, yeah, right, yeah, he endorsed me. And then he takes his time to walk around the podium and even surprise Mr Trump by walking up to him and basing him and he says I don't hate her, I just love you, yep, and I almost threw up. I was like, oh my God, you gotta be kidding me. It was so bad, it was just like. It was just that level of andering, to use your word, was just nausea. And you have to do it in the Republican party today. You just have to. 

0:51:27 - Speaker 1
Well, I think they think they have to do it and, yes, to get where they are. They had to do it to get there, but people are sick of it. I think? 

0:51:34 - Speaker 2
Well, I think, I think. I think that we talked about this earlier 8% minoritarian based on the left, 8% minoritarian based on the right. Then there's the rest of us in the middle. Yeah, we're sick of it. So the military elections are dictated by these minoritarian bases, and that's another problem with our body. It's a huge problem. 

Yeah, if you look at how do you? If you win the primary, you pretty much win the general in almost every congressional race Because of Jeremy Manning and what's going on with our politics. And then if you don't kiss the room, mr Trump, you end up like Liz Cheney and I'm at Adam Kinzinger and anyone else who pushed back I think it was every single Republican who voted to impeach is gone. Yeah Right, it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate. It's a big problem against Trump. And that's another thing too, that, if you look at just the politics in general, is it broken? Yeah, it's broken because the questions Mr Trump was found liable of sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll Yep In the court of law, and every time reporters ask Republicans about one of Trump's disastrous comments or behaviors, they'll say things like I didn't pay attention to that or I haven't read up on that, or I don't understand that. 

And they asked Tim Scott what do you think of this? And he said well, I think that the people that are voting for Donald Trump don't care more, worry about their inflation and what they're paying for milk and eggs and things. So it's just a complete deflection. And then they say, well, I haven't really paid attention to it and at least the phonics, at least the phonics had something in effect of. That's not what we care about, and or I don't really care what media says. 

0:53:13 - Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. 

0:53:15 - Speaker 2
I remember and the reporter could have said something in the effect of what's at the media this was a court of law. This was a jury of her peers who awarded her a defamation win and a sexual assault win and a $5 million judgment. Then Mr Trump doubled down and she pursued him again. 

0:53:34 - Speaker 1
Yeah, he was defying the judge in front of the judge. 

0:53:37 - Speaker 2
Well, right, and then they went to, yeah, and so then he gets an $83 million judgment against him, which then people on the right are saying, well, that's crazy and it's completely over. You're like, yeah, it is crazy, but you know what punitive damages are? Yeah, punitive damages are an actual award for outrageous behavior, for punishment yeah, because he won't shut up. Shut the fuck up, because he can use to defame her Right, exactly. Well, why are we even arguing about this? This is a man who was actually felt liable of sexual assault and defamation in a court of law, and we don't even have a problem with that as a culture anymore. Yeah, right. And then he was like back when they tried to get him in the race and I remember this too it was all of his handlers were panicked about his DUI. Yeah, like I don't know if we can get past that man. 

0:54:21 - Speaker 1
I don't know if we can get past that. 

0:54:23 - Speaker 2
It's like it's a fucking DUI right, it's bad, but it's not like. Okay, I don't know if I can ever have a president. We now have a president running. There's going to be the actual nominee for the GOP, Yep, who was found liable of sexual assault Right. 

0:54:38 - Speaker 1
How many in diameter? No one cares. Nobody cares. 

0:54:41 - Speaker 2
All the other stuff is like that's still in court, so innocent, uprooted guilty, fine, we'll shut the fuck up, but that is done. It's done Exactly and no one cares. They don't. That just tells you where we no, they don't care. Like well, you know, people care more about their groceries. Like no, like that was. He is a yeah, he's just not a good human being. We shouldn't have him. 

0:55:03 - Speaker 1
Oh, it's bad. I went to the Trump rally in New Hampshire. Did I tell you yes? So, um, you didn't tell me about it. 

0:55:10 - Speaker 2
Oh so. 

0:55:11 - Speaker 1
I went. I haven't talked to you since, yeah. So I went, my friend Brett um, he was also a selectman in neighboring town Dytton, um, and so we're both not in office right now. And so he's like, holly, let's go to the rally. I'm like, are you kidding me? He's like, yeah, let's go, we can interview people. And we ended up interviewing a couple afterwards at the bar. But, um, yeah, we went up there and we went there early and the speeches I really where did? Giuliani was there. He didn't speak. There were several speeches at the beginning and then there was a gap with some music and while people filed in, and then Trump came on and he spoke for a long time. I think it was like at least 90 minutes. Um, it was so painful. It was so painful. How big was the turnout? So this is funny. So that's the same arena. 

I went to for a graduation, for my cousin's graduation, and when I went for my cousin's graduation, it was packed. The whole thing was full. It was enormous. But when I got there, I'm like, look so small. Well, it's small because they had a black curtain to cut it in half and the black curtain was behind the stage. So then there was a stage and it was like a horseshoe and I was at the other end of the horseshoe. I was actually sitting with the press, um, with Karen Tamalty from the um, washington Post, which was awesome, but anyway, um. So so he, he got up and he said oh, we're breaking all sorts of records here with the attendance, and I'm like I was just fucking here. You're not breaking any records, it's so obvious. People ate it up and um, and it was pretty tame. It was good Like people were behaved, but at one point the guys behind me they were younger guys, they were. 

They just sounded like the way they were, um, yelling was very like pounding their chest, neanderthal style, like yeah, yeah, I'm blinded, sucks, and like they had said nothing of substance. They just kept yelling louder and louder and for a minute I I started to think about January 6th and I just got a little nervous because I'm in a wheelchair because of my injury and I'm like if I have to get out of here, I'm kind of screwed. So I got a little nervous because I'm like trying to plan if something did happen, if I'd have to like scoop out with Brett, and it ended up being fine, um, and I turned around and tried to make friends with them and we kind of it was fine. But I'm like, oh God, I hope they don't figure out that we just don't support Donald Trump because Karen, the reporter in front of us, we were chatting for a long time and we didn't say anything either way. 

But she she's like, oh, why are you guys here? And we talked about the podcast I'm doing and we talked about she said, oh, what's it about? So we told her the salt green and the snatch. She said, oh, what? So she wrote it down and, um, and we said, yeah, we're actually like we're not really Trump supporters, but we really want to be here and see what it's all about. And she goes, you know what? I knew, you had an ironic look, so like she knew. She just had a vibe and she knew. But that that made me a little nervous because I'm like, well, if other people see that we're not supporting him, like are they going to do something? Like I don't know. 

0:58:14 - Speaker 2
I just got a little nervous, but it was fine, I mean it's the thing, too, with when I go to anything to do with Republicans uh, any, any type of event like that. It's. The neat thing for me is that most of my relatives and most of my friends from high school are Trump fans. Yeah, and we still get along famously Like they rip on me and they call me their you know, their favorite libtard, but he's the best, like my best friends, and I was just home visiting my mom in Minnesota, uh, over the holiday, and my mom, you know, tells people my son's a reporter and this is what he's doing now and it's basically the first job she's ever understood, because immediately, she didn't even know what I did. 

I think, he got something with computers, um, but so when I interviewed my mom's friends, we'd have dinner, lunch, coffee, whatever it was and they'd ask me about Trump. Like, what do you think of him? Like you know, I don't think he's a really good person. Let me just say that, uh, but I don't dislike anyone that likes Trump. I don't think that people that vote for Trump or racist as a group. 

0:59:11 - Speaker 1
I have very good friends that are huge. 

0:59:13 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah and so, and then they, and then it calms them down, cause then they, they they know that I live in San Francisco, they know it's not liberal and I'm always like you know, bob, my mom's friends. I'm like I've known you for 50 years. You're a good man and if you think Trump is the is your choice. That's cool, like no form and he's like well, you don't like him cause he's. You know, he says what he. I said no, no, no, I don't like him cause he's a criminal, yeah, yeah. So there's just that and a liar. But and then there's I worked in New York city for a decade. 

I know what his reputation was like as a businessman. I know people that work for him. I don't like it, yeah, and I think he's a producer, you know. I've been sure he understood that and I think that's where I think our politics has gotten so cancerous, because it doesn't. We shouldn't hate the other person just based on whether they vote team blue or team red, because there's reasons for it, right? I mean many of the the conversations I've had. 

We did a thing. I interviewed a couple of really cool stalwarts from K street, some guys in Washington DC, about how the Democrats have lost the working class and how bad the Democrats aren't messaging yeah. So it's like those two pieces were like, oh, that's interesting. And as we started to dive into it, you know we lost the Democrats pretty much after the eighties. Yeah, 60s, 70s, you look at like, after World War II, the Democrats did a really good job of embracing labor unions and embracing the working man. 

And you know, after Reagan, we really didn't and we still haven't. The last, specifically, the last 20 years, we've almost forgotten the working man. And that's what Donald Trump does a very good job he does Of doing. He reaches out to this group who feels disenfranchised, who feels like, hey, no one's paying attention to me, yeah, and then, as you and I've talked about off camera, the Democratic Party now has a very loud minority voice that believes that capitalism is bad, yeah, that all white people are racists and that gender ideology is something that should be taught to eight year olds, Right. So, and again, it's a very small minority within the Democratic Party, but it's a very loud voice. 

1:01:21 - Speaker 1
Yes. 

1:01:22 - Speaker 2
And so you're losing Democrats, and I don't mean just white, uneducated Democrats, which has typically been the issue. We're losing black voters, we're losing Hispanic voters, we're losing Asian voters across the board. I married to a Chinese woman. I've been in part of that culture for 16 years of my life and they as a group are not fond of these notions. Specifically, the immigrants who come here don't think America is a bad place. They don't think America is inherently racist. They don't think it's the all white people are racist. There's all of these things now that the Democrats are touting that are, at an optics level, hurting the party specific to unity. 

1:02:03 - Speaker 1
Yes. 

1:02:04 - Speaker 2
And if you look at the unity necessary for any party to win, we've made some really big progress specific to the overreach of the Republican parties on abortion, as an example. 

I think it's one of the other reasons we have a chance in 2024 is because the continued overreach of the Republican Party, specific to women's autonomy, around abortion and those are the kind of things where we, as we talk about this in our company all the time it's like what's the remedy? What can Democrats do better to reconnect with these voters? And that's something that no one wants to point to and say well, donald Trump at least asks them their opinion. Right, how does that me cares, we don't care as a group about mostly the working class. If you look at the demographics of most of these people I'm mentioning, they are upper middle class, white and liberal, and that's a very difficult. Well, that's a very bifurcated demographic, because all my friends growing up, specifically my friends who are artisans, electricians, carpenters, construction workers, middle managers, whatever they may be, they feel left out. Yeah, the Democratic party. 

1:03:24 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I think there's other pieces to it too. I think that Trump has always been like a marketing business guru and he knows whether he means what he's saying or not. He knows how to get to the audience that he needs to get to. He's done that his career. He knows how to market himself I mean, you know better than I do about marketing, but that's just what I see and he knows how to drum up the support and get people excited. 

And branding Talk about branding. I mean his followers are, in my opinion, obsessed with his brand and they identify it with it, which I understand. I understand what they identify with, I understand why. But a lot of them become so obsessed with it where it becomes their identity and they refuse to listen to anything else. And so I feel like you know, back to pandering, I feel like if everyone in the Republican Party would stop the bullshit and be more honest and stop the pandering, I think it would become. It would just be a better place and it would be a better party and everyone would be better off for it. But they're not all going to stop at once and that's the difficult part. Good for Liz Cheney, good for Adam Kinzinger for speaking up. I applaud them big time. I respect them so much and that was a hard thing for them to do, but they were raw, honest people and they're still talking about it and even in my small town, you know, it kind of goes back to you being attacked by both sides. I think that shows that you're doing something right. Even in my small town I was. It's similar to what you're doing in your podcast. 

When I was in office, I was just look, I'm an engineer, like I'm not here. I would actually say in meetings, if people were in the meeting yelling at me like not agreeing with whatever I was saying which actually happened I would yell back and say look, this is not the time. I'm not here to get votes from you. If you don't like what I'm saying, don't vote for me. I don't want your vote. I'm here to do what's right and people hated me for that, but people loved me for it too. 

So and there was five years of that and towards the end of the five years, it became so contentious that people would take it personally and you know the whole power plant thing. It became personal to them because, in a similar way to Trump, they were identifying with whatever they were fighting for, which. What they were fighting for. In my opinion, if you look at all the facts, it was mostly fabricated, but they knew, like they just identified with it and they said, oh well, this is my, this was my identity. Like I've never had this feeling before, I've never been elected before, I've never been paid attention to before, I don't have a college degree. I, you know, I've never been involved in town and now I'm involved in. 

1:06:23 - Speaker 2
People are listening to me because I'm loud and nasty and and people listen to them for a long time and that's part of why I resigned, because I'm like this is helpless, but you know it's very tough and I think what you're, what you're pointing to, which is really powerful as identity politics in general, is powerful because and this is not a conversation most people would have it's more difficult to change your spots politically than anything else. 

1:06:46 - Speaker 1
Yes. 

1:06:47 - Speaker 2
So, if you have, there was a scholar. He was on Glenn Lurie's podcast and Glenn Lurie is a professor at Columbia and he has a podcast called the Glenn Show and the name of the professor escapes me but he talked specifically about how he was once conservative and then started to become more liberal. And actually, no, it was the opposite. He was liberal and he became more conservative and as he started to change, he lost his friendships. He lost his wife, lost his job. Oh my God, the worst, well, and this does happen. 

So if you look at and I've said this to anyone that will listen if you're, all your best friends are wearing Trump hats and believe that Donald Trump is the man and a good president in the savior, his policies, yeah, well, yeah, and then you decide he's not a good person. I don't want to be affiliated with him. He's. That's a difficult thing for you. On your friendships, yeah, so one thing could your wife could be a big supporter. So it's really difficult for people to change their spots on anyone, specifically as someone who is as charismatic as Mr Trump, right, yeah, he has charisma, but a lot of, admitted or not, he does. 

I'm not a fan, obviously. I've said that already. But the fact is he's a very charismatic. He's funny, he's. You know he's a marketing genius. That this is another thing no one wants to talk about, but he is, yeah, he actually workshops. See, that means more coming from you. 

1:08:13 - Speaker 1
Yeah. 

1:08:14 - Speaker 2
Well, he workshops and stops. If you watch some of his like older you know town halls, you'll see how he kind of tests things to see how they work and he's like a comedian that way. He's like, oh, this is, oh, that was good. Well, they love that one, they love that one. But he's taking mental notes, uh-huh, oh, it's like, oh, let's, you know, let's put on a Muslim band. 

And when he first did that it was kind of like, did Rook work? But then he went to a different room, you know, at a different presentation, and they loved it and he's like, hey, that worked out, okay, yeah, so let's try it again. And then it got bigger and bigger, and bigger. And that's well, he does that with everything. He does that with nicknames. 

Yes, if you look at the nicknames, you know little little Marco, little Marco Rubio, right, little LID, ron DeSanctimoni, ron DeSanctimoni, this meatball, ron, right, it was like Bird brain. Bird, I mean he's really good at that because, yeah, it's bad. But yeah, bird brain means spirited, he knows he kind of figures out what bothers you. I can tell this is going to be insecure for you and I'm going to poke it and that's what he's good at. And so like you're like, oh, okay, well, he can. He's good at that level of marketing and branding and talking about himself and you know, there's the. The rumor on the campfire with most of our friends in the business in my industry is that Mark Burnett is the person most responsible not much ever winning the presidency because without him he was the producer of the apprentice. Oh, and without, without, without the apprentice, donald would have been unknown by anyone outside of the company. 

1:09:37 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I liked him on the apprentice. I love when he fights. We all did. 

1:09:42 - Speaker 2
We all like. You know, I didn't watch it, but I I kind of like anyone who has worked in New York City I got a kick out of him. I thought he was just a, you know, a harmless buffoon. 

1:09:52 - Speaker 1
Just a hard ass. 

1:09:53 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, I just didn't want to. He's just typical of, you know, the king's idiot son. His father was a wonderful well, I wonder, wonderful? He was a wonderful businessman. He was a ruthless, draconian prick. Turns out to be a racist. Yeah, fred. Fred built the empire right, and Fred handed a half a billion dollars to his idiot son when he died. That's the only reason he had any money. And then he also made 400 plus million off of royalties from the apprentice, so that's how he paid off most of his bills for everything. He started on his own that failed, and so it's. It's one of those things where you're like, all right, well, what is he good at? Why do we even celebrate this man? Well, he's good at certain things, yeah he is. 

He's good at optics, he's good at branding, he's good at marketing, he's good at selling himself as a self-made, because he always talks about it. I just, I bought a million dollars from my dad and everything else was mine. You're like, all right, yeah, and people are going to believe that there's nothing you can do to change their views. Right. 

1:10:48 - Speaker 1
And I think now more than ever, it's harder, like you were saying, to change your political view. Because because Trump especially when you go from Trump to not Trump or Trump, non-trump to Trump, because Trump is such an aggressive, obnoxious, like way over the top identity, once you identify with it, it seems to just take over everything, it's just overbearing. So I think it's hard. Once people own that, like I said before, they identify with it and it's like letting go a piece of themselves and say that they don't want to. They feel like it's part of them almost and that's scary. 

1:11:33 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and you also see that in the new congressional representatives. 

1:11:38 - Speaker 1
Yes. 

1:11:39 - Speaker 2
People like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz and Paul Brooks. They're much more vitriolic. They're much more contankerous. They like the spotlight. You know weak from the industry, the ad industry. 

We always talked about influencers and how important they were for your brand, michael Jordan probably being the biggest example of that. Today, our congressional representative is. A pretty large majority of them are influencers. They're not actually legislators anymore. They're not attempting to get bills passed. We're not doing a lot of things, not getting anything passed. They get things done, but they get their soundbite. They get their mention on YouTube or TikTok or Twitter. Their individual brand rises. 

So if you look at MTG as an example, the reason she's so powerful and the reason that she goes after these soundbites is that she raises money on each and every one of them and because she raises money, she has more money to help additional new candidates in the RNC and she can donate her money to them. So if you want MTG support, you want the RNC support. You need to be this kind of a person. If you look at the differences between old school Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain and Jeff Flake and all these stoic, I think, small seed conservative Republicans who I look up to and, I think, are good men, versus what we see today. That's a big difference. It's a really big difference between a group of politicians that actually wanted to work together on the ballot way, even though they had these fundamental differences fiscally conservative, socially liberal, those kind of things were used to be. 

The topics Now is if you, if we can help you. If I'm on the GOP, I can't actually extend the olive branch, I can't actually vote with you on your policy, even if it's in the best interest of my own constituents in my own congressional district. Because if I'm seeing partying with you and any I'm done, I'm primary. 

1:13:42 - Speaker 1
Yeah, you lose money, you lose support, you're up, yeah, and that's scary. And I think that ties back to social media, because everything has changed. Everything has changed. I think when I first ran for office was when Trump was running for office, and when I got my head out of the clouds after my election was done, I was like, oh shit, there's an actual national election happening right now. I better pay attention. And I started to really pay attention because I had just finished my own campaign and I'm like, oh, this is so interesting. I've never quite paid attention to a presidential election this way and it was kind of stressful because I felt like I was reliving my campaign. 

But you can see how social media impacts the spread of misinformation, the branding, the identity, and you see that with all the folks you just mentioned Lauren Boebert, mtg and they feed off of that and it's just even on the small scale. It's like when you're a kid on the playground and there's a bully, all the kids want to be friends with the bully and I feel like that's what's happening, like they're trying to get in good graces with the big bully because, oh look, he's popular, he controls people, he does things and he's strong and intimidating and I want to be his friend. But if everyone would stand up to the bully like we'd all be better for it. But it's just a matter of getting there and it's so hard to get there and that's why for so long, for so many years, I stood against the bully alone, because no one else wanted to stick their neck out and help me, because it's scary and it is, you know. 

And so for a while, like people were like oh, it's just Holly, because I was by myself. So people were like oh, all these other people can't be wrong, even though they're assholes and they're loud and they're maybe lying. But we want to be friends with them because they're seemingly having more influence right now. And that's what took place. Luckily, now things have changed. People are finally seeing it, but it took a lot of unraveling for people to realize like, oh God, she was right. 

1:15:48 - Speaker 2
Yeah, no, I think that's going to happen with the next 10 months. If you look at the election itself, it's people don't really pay attention to. I mean, if we held the election today, I think Donald Trump could win. Yeah, I think there's a lot of debate around that, but anyone who says they know is going to win this election this far out, I think it's just fooling themselves or trying to plant a flag that will probably get blown over. Yeah, because it's really difficult to say you know what could happen. 

Either one of these older men in Biden and Trump could have a serious health issue which changed the trajectory. Donald Trump's legal woes are just beginning, right, and so you know there's another one coming down by the end of this month his civil fraud trial, which could be anywhere between $2 and $350 million in damages. If that's the case, you know he just had to put up a bond for this $83 million. Yeah, best case scenario is 20% fee on $83 million. He went up to $5 billion originally Because a lot of my friends are saying he won't pay, he won't pay, he won't pay. He's Trump, he doesn't have to pay. I'm like, well see, there's one thing about the court of public opinion and Trump wins there. But then the court of law, it's a whole different thing. 

You know they say, oh, you can pay if you want. To, mr Trump, it's like no, we're going to take this from you. 

1:17:02 - Speaker 1
Yeah. 

1:17:03 - Speaker 2
And so you either give us the money or we come after it. 

1:17:05 - Speaker 1
Yeah, liquidate it, we will. 

1:17:08 - Speaker 2
And you know he can do this during appeal. He can just put a bond up if anyone wants to give him money. That's another thing that people have to figure out. Yeah, and if he does lose the civil fraud trial, he will then also have that money that will have to be put aside. And so you're looking at some real dollars now. Right, yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars. No matter how much you are as a billionaire, how much liquid cash do you have? Right, you bragged about having $400 million a year ago during his deposition. Yeah, is it real? Well, some of that has been, and who knows, because you can't really believe what he says, you have to kind of get what he's doing. But $400 million of liquid cash isn't something anyone carries. I don't care how rich you are. 

1:17:44 - Speaker 1
Yeah. 

1:17:45 - Speaker 2
So it's one of those things where that could affect him. If he loses his business license in New York, which is another possibility of the trial, then he's got Jackson Smith and the election fraud January 6. That's going to be an issue. It's going to be public. So you're going to see the trial, you're going to hear the testimony, all right. So it's going to be a very different thing as far as optics. 

And there's tons of polls out there Gallup and others that say that if Donald Trump is actually convicted of a felony, that it's a 15% move and that 45% of actual Republicans now believe that he's no longer viable as a candidate. So you're looking at different statistics. Maybe I got that last one wrong, but it is about a 10% or 15% swing. But Donald Trump can't take a 10% or 15% swing. No, he can't Because his voters right now his base is that the 30 to 40 million that we'll vote for, no matter what he does, and then the others are kind of in the sense of I don't like the Democrats because they're scary, so I'll just continue to vote for him. But then if he gets convicted of a felony and or he gets convicted of all these other civil trials yeah, now there's these things that could make him look weaker than he wants to look Right. Those are things that could change the landscape of this election in 2024. 

1:19:02 - Speaker 1
But I sure have no idea what's going to happen I am not even going to think, I'm not even going to try to guess. Yeah, one last thing I want to talk about, and this kind of ties everything together. But we talk about Tony Shea, we talk about politics and all of these things. We talk about your podcast and being attacked from both sides and staying true, and the name is in your podcast True30. And so I think what's important I always think back to Tony and I learned so much from Tony and I kind of mentioned this in your podcast when we talked last time is that when you stay true to your values, your core values, you can't really go wrong. You're going to have some hard times, like you're being attacked, but eventually it will balance out. Like for me, I was attacked for a couple years and it was really, really hard. I could have taken the easy way out and just pandered to everyone and told them what they wanted to hear, but I stayed true to my core values and now I'm finally on the other side of it and I'm happy, I'm very proud of that and it's a lot harder to do, but I think if everyone stays true and we could somehow get rid of these and stop everyone from pandering and the bullshit, then we're just going to be in a better place and it goes back to adapting. We have to deal with social media now. It's not going anywhere. So if everyone could just get on board eventually with just being real and stop the nonsense. 

You know we talk about defunding the police. Just a quick anecdote when I was in office, that was a big thing in Massachusetts. It had just come up and they were pushing through very, very, very quickly. I think it's the bill 2800. I can't remember the exact name of it, but they were restructuring everything to do with police in Massachusetts and they formed what's called the Post Commission. I can't remember exactly what it stands for, but they look at all the police records and their personnel files are now public record and they review all the chiefs and all the police to see if there's any record of aggression, things like that, and they can decertify police officers if they feel that they have a bad record. Well, back then, my senator, who is amazing. I get along great with him, he is an incredible man. But the Senate was pushing this bill through With the help of the president of the Senate, and understandable. 

But the police officers in my town were reaching out to me as a select man saying, holly, can you help us? They felt helpless Because no one had approached the chief, no one had approached the police officers in my town or anywhere. None of the other chiefs were approached. It was that fast and they didn't sit down with them to say, ok, what do you think about this? It's kind of ironed things out. So they were like oh my god, what are we going to be forced to do? I don't know where we're going to go with this Like, are we going to lose our jobs? What's our job going to be? Like? You know the body cams, everything. How are we going to act? We're under a microscope. 

And so they reached out to me and said you know, is there any way you can find a way to support us? I said, well, I do support you, I genuinely support you, because I am a huge advocate of talking through things with the right people before you act. And that, in my opinion, hadn't happened. So I made a public statement saying you know, I understand BLM, I understand this movement and things need to change because of what's happened nationally. But let's not cut our nose off to spite our face and let's respect the people that we have there and they're worried rightfully so. So I made this statement and it pissed off my senator, who's really upset with me, which I understand. I'm like look, senator, I know I didn't call you first, but I had to do something fast because they work for me and I do genuinely support them. So that was hard and I took it from both sides Probably that. 

So it's just hard navigating right now with the way things are going and the speed at which they're going and social media in the mix, and I don't know. I'm really excited for your podcast and the direction it's going in and we just need more of that. 

1:23:34 - Speaker 2
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. We're looking forward to doing what we think is as again reporting in the whole story, that's really the issue and being able to suck that up, because we obviously are going to get taken on both sides of the equation. But we're OK with that and I think that's the neat thing about real journalism is that you have to be agnostic to the outcome. 

1:23:55 - Speaker 1
And you're earning people's trust, even though you're getting attacked. You're slowly earning the trust. Like you said, the coconut tree and you're building, and building, and building. It's going to take a long time. 

1:24:07 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and we have patience for that. It's one of those things where, as media folks and political folks that we're now getting together and starting this company together, we know that we have to have patience with it. That's the one thing we've all agreed on. I just had a call with this team this morning and we have to be patient. We know it's going to take us a couple of years just to break even. We know it's going to take us about five years to break the brand. That's OK, it can't be anything quicker. There will be some viral moments where you have a really cool story or a cool interview that may go viral, but that says you don't manufacture virality. It happens on its own, and so there will be stories and things that do take place that will elevate our brand. And then that's where we have to be even more consistent to our values and our mission of just being agnostic to the outcome of our stories. 

1:24:52 - Speaker 1
And that's new. I love it. That's why I'm doing this for free now, thankfully, because I don't know what would happen if it was paid. I'll make it attacked more? Yes, you probably would, but eventually that might hopefully happen, so I can monetize it somehow. 

1:25:08 - Speaker 2
But yes, yes, that's exactly what I appreciate you bringing me on. It was really nice talking. 

1:25:14 - Speaker 1
Thank you so much, Joey. It's been an awesome talk to you and I'm so glad we're still in touch. 

1:25:18 - Speaker 2
Me too. 

1:25:19 - Speaker 1
And good luck with everything and we'll chat soon. 

1:25:22 - Speaker 2
All right, thank you so much. 

1:25:23 - Speaker 1
Thanks, joey, bye, bye. The Salt Green is a podcast where politicians stop pandering and start getting real. This podcast is me, holly McNamara, various co-hosts and guests. Our post-production is done by Fixella Films. For more content and all social media links, you can find us on thesaltgraincom. Thank you for joining us while we take you into our world of public service and be sure, as always, to take everything to the brim of salt. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page