Sharyl Attkisson - The War on Truth: My Fight for Honest Reporting

Full transcript: Sharyl Attkisson on London Real

3:45 This is London Real, I’m Brian Rose. My guest today is Cheryl Aakison, the investigative journalist, news reporter, and author. You spent over 30 years working as a news correspondent and anchor for PBS, CBS, and CNN, winning five Emmy’s and the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. You are also the New York Times bestselling author of the book Slanted, The Smear, and Stonewalled. Your latest book, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails, exposes the corruption that has ruled the pharmaceutical industry and mainstream news media for decades. Your weekly show, Full Measure, with Cheryl Aakison, reaches over 43 million US households and focuses on the real stories behind the headlines.

4:35 You describe yourself as nonpartisan, dedicated to factual accuracy, and believe that now more than ever it is vital to support independent journalism and uphold integrity in an age of pervasive censorship and media distrust. Cheryl, welcome to London Real. Well, thank you. You got it all down there. There you go. It’s quite a CV, as we say here in Britain. You’re very interesting to me because you used to be in the mainstream and now you’re really independent. And I don’t talk to many people that have seen both sides and experienced maybe the ups and downs of both sides. You left, I think, CBS in 2014. So that was 10 years ago. What can you tell people about the difference between those two worlds? I think back in 14, nobody had any idea that maybe the mainstream media wasn’t 100% factual. I might argue that in the last four years, some people might believe that. But I would still say a lot of people, including people in this country, they turn on the BBC and it is gospel, especially if you’re over 50. It just is. Tell me, what was it like on both sides and what can you tell people about that mainstream?

5:45 Well, I think as an investigative reporter at CBS, I was on the leading edge of discovering a big shift in trends in mainstream media. The shift in trends had to do, I’ve written books that you named on all of this stuff. There’s a lot that goes into it, but had to do with it becoming the animal that it is today from what we thought of the news media for many decades as being. And I think I noticed the conflicts of interest, the editorial issues, the lack of honesty, maybe ahead of everybody else, although my colleagues were complaining about the same things. But as an investigative reporter, my work tended to be work that saw the most impact from this editorial interference early on. And I think I got out at a great time. When I left CBS, I quit ahead of my contract because I had tried to operate in this, I felt like it was a dishonest environment for a couple of years. Had a great career for many, many years at CBS. But there were key figures inside the network that started to have editorial control over matters that they shouldn’t in inappropriate ways, dishonest ways. And this was happening at the other networks too. So I thought I was going to get out of the business.

6:52 I’m leaving CBS, who’s going to hire me? I’m speaking out about what’s wrong with the industry and then this independent opportunity came up. I didn’t really want to jump into another job, but within a year I was ready to take on this weekly show. And I’ve enjoyed a great deal of independence that I used to have at CBS and CNN and PBS. In fact, my colleagues, when they see what we report on full measure, I often hear, how do they let you report that? And it’s just ordinary reporting, factual reporting and in-depth reporting on issues that everybody would have done 15, 20 years ago that people aren’t doing anymore. And my answer is they allow us to do it here. They don’t have that top down editorial interference. So the difference is drastic and in a good way. And I haven’t experienced, I don’t think I’ve experienced any downsides I can think of offhand about being on an independent show.

7:50 Did you feel that coming on, like you go back to like 94, 2004, up to 2014, did it slowly become more and more pervasive that control? And do you think that correlated with advertising dollars or specific companies with advertising dollars on the network? Yes, it started to bleed in in the early 2000s. The first impact I noticed was with the pharmaceutical industry interfering in the news industry. I later learned only with the benefit of hindsight that the media outlets in America were lobbying side by side with the pharmaceutical industry, lobbying Congress to make direct to consumer ads more common and acceptable.

8:32 This is prescription drug advertising on TV. A lot of people watching may not remember or know it was illegal in the U.S. as it is in most every other country until a certain time period. And once it became where the drug companies were able to sponsor newscasts and buy network television programming and so on, I think that was sort of the key moment where we began to change and they were invited to have undue influence on our reporting. At the time, all the networks and the major publications were reporting on prescription drug dangers and inappropriate things that almost came to a halt.

9:09 And again, looking back, I can see the timeline, which is clear, but when I was in the middle of it, I was being assigned to cover these stories on the one hand. And at some point, I began feeling pressure only from certain corners of the network to not do those stories while I was encouraged by my direct supervisors to do them. So it was sort of a confusing time. Looking back, I now see what was happening in the timeline with the financial conflicts.

9:33 It’s interesting because if you run a big organization like that, you must have to kind of massage it because you can’t come tell your editors that they can’t cover the news because then your editors will revolt, right? Proper news people won’t be told what to do. So they probably had to find ways of discouraging it, trying to get you to not do those things. And that must have been a weird conflicted organization. You portray it very accurately. I was never told that the stories weren’t awesome.

10:02 I broke a lot of news like that Viagra can cause blindness. That was one big international story that I broke or stories about the dangers of statin drug, cholesterol lowering drugs that were being hidden by the drug makers and so on. But the stories were always got a lot of accolades in terms of industry recognition and my direct supervisors who asked for the stories and appreciated when I would break these stories. But yes, there came a point in time when I would start to feel what I called the big chill.

10:32 And it’s hard to describe because again, no one ever said the stories weren’t terrific. They said quite the opposite. But it came to be toward the end of my time there the last couple of years, a lot of stories still aired. But many stories, I would say more good stories were left on the cutting room floor as they say. And it was never because they weren’t good.

10:51 They were approved by our legal department and all the people up the chain. But I was told things like this story is so good. We’re going to save it for next week. And then next week would come and it’s like maybe tomorrow we have breaking news that has to air today. And I called it death by a thousand cuts. I could tell the story was at some point you can tell the story is never going to air and they’re never going to say why they’re going to just tell you it’s such a great story but it never airs. Wow. And then are you also not getting promoted or you weren’t even thinking about promoted. You just wanted to keep doing the work or were they slowing your career trajectory a little too in that chill. In terms of my career goals. I think I was at the pinnacle. I was the investigative reporter for CBS News. I think at some point the only one they had doing full time investigative reporting loved that job. It was just a plum awesome job spent almost my full time doing that. So I was where I wanted to be.

11:45 I was getting big contracts and salary increases. So on the one hand I was encouraged or being encouraged. And then on the other hand I would feel this big chill with a lot of my stories that were very important. I felt not making air and that was discouraging. I mean to convince a whistleblower on a very important issue who works for example inside a federal agency to tell a story that’s probably going to destroy his career and to some extent his personal life and then when the story doesn’t air to have to go back to that person and say nobody cares after all. It’s just it chips away at your heart you know to have to do that time and time again and I didn’t feel like I could just keep doing it. Wow. Well we look back in history at the moment when we allowed these advertisements on mainstream television as one of the worst moments in human history that it empowered so many bad things to happen. And when did that actually happen? What was the year that that kind of turned on? I’d say around the 2004-2005 time period and I’m not sure the advertising in itself is at fault. It’s the failure on our part as an industry to create a firewall on the front end where it couldn’t interfere. I always argued if we were to go back to these advertising interests and in some cases political interests that try to influence our reporting and instead of when they call responding to them if we had a policy where we were to say

13:09 We can’t talk to you about this. If you have a complaint put it in writing and there’s a process to follow but we can’t engage with you and this kind of push me pull you over you’ll get an exclusive interview if you don’t air this investigation. We should never have engaged in the conversation and very early on I go to these investigative seminars and meetings and conferences and I started saying years ago when I recognized this and that it was happening industry-wide not just at CBS I said we need to have sessions on this topic and how to protect ourselves as an industry or we’re going to lose our credibility and the people who were organizing these conferences were apparently not interested and never held this discussion. Interestingly during the same time period I went to a journalism conference in Moscow where this stuff was discussed oddly enough and was happening around the world similarly as to what was happening in the United States and they were trying to address this trend not just advertising trends but political problems with people anyone who’s going off the establishment narrative rather whether it was right or left journalists suffering personal attacks and career hits and so on it was addressed in that Moscow journalism conference in a way I never heard it discussed in the United States and to this day I don’t think it’s taken well now it’s too late I just feel like those who are influencing us on

14:29 The outside now have been invited into our newsrooms and they work within the news organizations and there’s really no way to sever those interests anymore. Wow you know I worked in banking for a long time and they have something called the Chinese wall in banking so if you work at Goldman Sachs you know you’ve got the analyst department that decides to cover that stock and to be critical of whether it’s a good or bad stock to buy and then you get the other department that’s involved with the CEO and the CFO to help them raise money and sell bonds and sell stock and there’s supposedly a wall where they don’t talk to each other and there’s no influence and no one says hey can you give them a good review because we’re about to but they’re always a little looked upon with suspicion because in the long enough timeline a lot of times those conflicts they don’t get resolved in the right way yeah do you think that in a long enough timeline did that happens as well or you think you really could have set up like that Chinese wall equivalent there could have been there just wasn’t the desire because ultimately the interest of the corporation that runs the news division is different than the interest of the news division and there came a time since I’ve been in the news business for 40 plus years news was not expected to earn a big profit it was it was taken on as something that was a public responsibility

15:46 Hopefully it made some money but that was not the primary goal and it became where news and more had to be a money-making venture and once that happened there was an expectation on the corporate level that news was not something that they were going to lift up and hold if it didn’t make a lot of money the news had to start catering more to sponsors so let’s say a friend of mine told me in a today show meeting for NBC in the morning meeting there was a discussion by the head of news at the time how to make a fingernail polish that they would promote on a show that was linked to a sponsor that they hoped to get for the today show so they’re doing things to cater to sponsors rather than to cover the news and once you do that what are your news topics going to be well they’re not going to be a lot of things and your news topics will be a lot of sort of promotional related things and I think that’s where full measure what we try to do is cover the stories that people aren’t covering because they’re not looking for ground-level news anymore they’re covering what other people are wanting them to cover to push a certain agenda or narrative or advertiser or whatnot okay wow that’s scary now that’s corporate interest did you ever feel the government was coming in to tell people what to do and what not to do when it comes to that media absolutely so the government has a big role to play and how it lobbies the networks and I’m sure the print organizations as well and a lot of it has to

17:09 Do with just pressure I remember getting calls after I would do stories I was not a political reporter but I can see how political interest thought they had political implications because some of this stuff reflected poorly on one government or another and they would have a lobby effort that would include calling after a story of mine aired one person from the White House would call the bureau chief in Washington where I worked another person would complain to the White House correspondent assigned from CBS News to the White House because if you make the beat reporter uncomfortable look Cheryl’s kind of encroaching on your territory we don’t like her reporting maybe we’re not going to play ball with you and then someone else would call the evening news editorial folks up in New York and it becomes a drum beat where the bosses they don’t like getting those calls even if the my boss once said to me when he called me after a great story he kind of chuckled and said oh so and so from the White House called and I said well what was their complaint and he said well nothing really they just didn’t like the story and I said I wish you wouldn’t take the calls I wish you would tell them if they have something to complain about put it in writing because and he said I kind of do that but he didn’t like getting the calls at night at his house from someone from the White House complaining about a story even if

18:25 The story was defensible so there is that and then I had three network executives when I was an investigative reporting conference tell me the same thing that I know happens at CBS or was happening that if they would rerun a story of mine investigative report let’s say the White House didn’t like on the morning show then the morning show would be told by White House folks you’re not going to get the next Michelle Obama interview and you won’t be in line for this or that and so they were not rerunning my pieces after evening news would run them I didn’t learn this until later and again my answer to that is if all the networks would say to the White House well we don’t really care about the Michelle Obama interview it’s not newsy you should be happy if we want to interview Michelle Obama but you’re putting her out on a topic we’re not we didn’t ask you for and we don’t care if we’re next in line if they all did that we would all be on even playing ground wouldn’t have to capitulate to the lobbying that they do but they play ball okay well we want the next Michelle Obama interview so therefore we won’t run this story and once you start letting the advertisers or political interests have the influence and they realize that there’s a whole industry there are law firms and PR firms who advertise the fact that they can shape news or kill a story on a network wow that’s pretty fascinating all right so that’s mainstream

19:45 Now you leave to go independent in 14 very early by the way I mean there weren’t a lot of podcasts then there wasn’t a lot of independent media going on I mean we started in 11 and nobody in London ever heard of a podcast and in America it was still coming along obviously you were doing not a podcast but independent media did you ever think that those same pressures would be exerted on social media because later we kind of saw that happening I guess evidenced by the Twitter files I’m guessing those didn’t surprise you because you saw that happening in mainstream media and it was starting to happen in social media social media was given likewise to the advertisers and the political interests an outsized say so in what the news covered if the news had early on said just because bots and PR firms who have lots of accounts on Twitter are able to make a topic controversial or trend doesn’t mean that we should pay attention to it as if that’s real but they started paying attention to it as if it’s real very early on which opened the door to a whole industry that shaped social media so that news will be covered a certain way there’s an anecdote with an acquaintance of mine from NBC who is a correspondent who reported on something and I don’t remember being particularly controversial some breaking news story and had to fly in an airplane from the east coast to the west coast and he said Cheryl by the time I landed on the west coast

21:04 The president of NBC and the head of all kinds of people in the news division the legal department were on a phone call for me because something I had said had gone viral or had been made to go viral on Twitter and he goes that got more attention from the network than any reporting I’d ever done on important topics but they were so worried about this thing that had gone viral on Twitter in the space of a couple of hours and he was just amazed that again social media was given the power to move editorial content on the network like that and you think too much power yeah I think so I think it was the illusion of interest not interest yes so I think social media is all about there is of course real sentiment there but I like to say any method of controlling the public information that can be co-opted has been co-opted and social media made this very easy way for the powerful interest as we’ve seen I think to come in and control the beginning of the spigot that of the water that comes out so on the front end if they can skew and control what people see and think and what what they believe is important or that people are talking about and the way that they think people feel it creates this false impression you can’t speak up about something if you feel differently because look everybody feels this way well that’s on purpose they’re designing an environment to make an artificial environment to make it appear as though everybody agrees about something that’s not necessarily the case

22:30 So that everybody else who doesn’t agree maybe shuts their mouth or feels like they can’t speak about it and if they continue to speak about it then they may be censored or excluded from the conversation I keep thinking Twitter, Twitter, Twitter in my head because it felt like for a long time you know this small little you know one one mile square area out of San Francisco was projecting its values to the world and making the world feel weird that you didn’t share all of their values and I think Elon calls it the the mind virus but it was interesting to see the way he looked at it later and he said yeah there was a small area of downtown that by the way is now the zombie apocalypse but it was projecting all these California values whatever it was to the world and consciously or subconsciously you did feel a little weird when you weren’t agreeing with these things even if you lived in the middle of you know Turkey or if you lived in all these other places that had their own values is that what you think of too is that kind of one of the extreme examples of social media I think it’s a well studied phenomenon I think our intelligence agencies use this and have used this strategy when they’ve tried to influence thought and behavior in foreign countries and I think they act in some respects also on US soil doing it that it’s it’s very well studied how to shape public opinion how to make people feel like

23:46 They are an outlier when they’re not and to exert the kind of pressure that we understand just from psychology and so on makes other people not want to speak out and want to join the club or join the bandwagon as they say and I think that’s a huge phenomenon on social media part of my goal on my social media I sometimes retweet I guess Twitter is the one I use the most controversial things or things that aren’t seen as much or things that maybe aren’t even necessarily true or opinions that could be off the mainstream I put that out there on purpose because I think that stuff should circulate I like to say when when the self proclaimed fact checkers who usually are there on an assigned mission to make sure certain facts aren’t heard I think people now kind of understand that but when they’re on a mission to hide certain facts even those which occasionally might not be true a lot of times are true facts but even when they are trying to hide true facts facts that really aren’t true I will as a journalist want to access those sometimes when I do research that leads me down a trail of information that doesn’t mean I’m reporting the misinformation but I want to see what people are saying who’s saying it why it might be is there a grain of truth and the misinformation what’s the sentiment behind it and I resent the fact that when I do a Google search I can’t find the stories and the studies and the information that I’m looking

25:05 For unless I really figure out clever ways to get around what they’re going to show you yeah it should be a big alarm bell if you can’t find something or something’s being suppressed um you know and it is new technology so it’s different than the news that when you covered it people would watch on a television now it’s in your pocket and now it can be created by anyone anywhere anytime and it’s a completely different medium I think Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message and so now you have people interacting with something 24 seven created by anyone and you’ve got a new phenomenon you know I’ve had Mike Benz on the show who’s writing a book I think called weapons of mass deletion and he was explaining to me that in the beginning the internet was like the perfect weapon for say the CIA because you could put it into all of these countries and you could use it to force your democratic agenda and to put information out to the people that would normally be a harder thing to do and that worked really well until it started coming back into America and now it was challenging the American government’s you know narratives and all of a sudden they realized uh-oh we’ve got a problem here and I had never really thought of it that way and here I was you know just this totally naive podcaster here in London who quit my job as a banker because I was miserable and I just started having conversations with my buddies from jujitsu and then all of a sudden I had

26:27 Those conversations with members of parliament and then you know champion boxers and then activists and I was just walking along and I bought this YouTube dream that we’re here for creators and we want to support you and that was all great until 2020 when I got a lesson in government-sponsored censorship now at the time I didn’t realize that probably the government was telling YouTube what to do and we know thanks to the Twitter files that they were telling Twitter what to do but I was so shocked it really shook my foundation and everything I believed in and maybe it’s because I’m born in America I just freedom of speech seemed to me to be such a given and I’d been broadcasting for nine years and I had never had a single piece of content censored until this fateful day when I had a conversation about Covid on April 6th and then I got introduced to this censorship complex that I still never fully understood till this year maybe what was going on and I still don’t know all the details well the censorship complex I see had its beginnings around the 2015 time period and I actually traced part of this is the concept of fake news in its modern form that phrase was invented by a group called first draft in the 2015 time period and I called first draft at the time because it’s a non-profit that it just started the beginning of the election cycle you know when Donald Trump was coming on the scene and I asked them where they got their funding one from because their charity forms tax

27:56 Forms hadn’t been filed yet and they acknowledged it was from Google which is a driver behind a lot of this I think it’s misinformation they say it’s fighting misinformation but they’re putting out their own and Google at the time was owned by alphabet which at the time was run by Eric Schmidt who was a big Hillary Clinton supporter so therefore it suddenly seemed to make sense that all of the fake news that first draft was flagging was conservative fake news and I because I remember thinking at the time before I knew the financial ties why does this website that proclaims itself the arbiter of fake news and it’s it’s offers itself as a resource to journalism colleges and journalists around the world who are referring to it why is there never an example of any liberal media outlets that are putting out fake news because certainly there were those and this all began to make sense fairly soon after first draft came on the scene and introduced the concept of fake news in its modern context Barack Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon he was president at the time and said something like we have to figure out a way in this wild wild west media environment to curate the news and to start sorting through four people that concept is so is so familiar to us today but it was foreign at the time and when I heard him say that I was just taken aback as a journalist that someone would be curating news that the government would be talking about figuring out what news we should and shouldn’t see

29:24 And I realized since the government since the president was making this speech it wasn’t an off-handed comment this was something that had been planned and distributed and put out there from that moment on you can see the headlines in the New York Times and other papers and the networks picking it up fake news this fake news that and it was typically conservative examples never liberal examples and then pretty soon Donald Trump took up the term a master at marketing he flipped the phrase into something that benefited him he started calling the mainstream news media fake news and I call it a hostile takeover of the term now most people attribute that phrase to Donald Trump but it was not invented by Donald Trump in a modern context this was a liberal invention during a campaign at the beginning of an election cycle intended I believe the evidence shows to use on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democrats in order to censor news that this was the beginning of the curation the media literacy efforts these well-funded billionaire foundations that are behind all these efforts to start these resources that we’re all supposed to refer to to find out what’s real they’re actually doing the opposite you know I like to say one a producer said this to me years ago when a nonprofit or a group is named one thing it frequently does the opposite of what it says so when you hear not in every case but I would say in most cases when you hear there’s a media

30:47 Literacy group or a fact-checking group you can suspect it’s doing the opposite it’s trying to shape news keep you from seeing certain facts and so on wow so you saw all that happening 15 16 17 and then you can kind of trace it yes then we all of a sudden have this covid event which kind of maybe dials it up significantly because now they’re maybe more actively enforcing certain things how did you see things change then and then how would you say it’s evolved to even today well I’m not surprised considering the trends that we’ve discussed that what happened during covid happened during covid but I think it opened the eyes of a lot of people that really weren’t seeing it and that respect that’s probably a good thing it became so audacious and so in your face to logical thinking people on all sides of the political spectrum that things that were happening weren’t rational that fact checks or rational questions were being asked that were being then censored or discredited as debunked when they weren’t ordinary people saw this and their health was at stake so they started doing some of their own digging and finding resources as hard as it may be finding other resources that they could turn to and then learning in retrospect who is correct so I think it’s been very eye-opening the disappointing part is even as it’s been revealed that the government was I think the the major purveyor of misinformation

32:09 And disinformation as was the media and the fact checking groups nothing’s changed you know CDC was one of the biggest offenders and the only thing that’s happened even in the face of promised accountability hearings and so on is that CDC’s budget has been increased there’s been no accountability no changes in the systems the media with the exception of twitter is conducting the same censoring and fake fact checking and fake health fact checks that they were doing during covid so that that part’s disappointing one more positive spin-off is though a lot of mainstream medical doctors that were esteemed in their field and I talk about some of these and follow the science that highly published and respected doctors broke away from mainstream medicine when they saw they weren’t allowed to treat their patients with viable therapies or that they were threatened with being fired from their jobs for doing normal medical and advisable medical behavior they’re forming their own coalitions where they’re thinking up new answers to solutions that mainstream medicine haven’t hasn’t even addressed our chronic illness is why we’re dying sooner and becoming sicker even though we’re spending more than ever on health care everybody’s got insurance why are we so sick and unhealthy they’re actually looking at root cause problems beyond covid in a way that I hope and think will benefit society that the ball was dropped on in terms of mainstream medicine and politics

33:31 Well um and I really want to get into the book um you know we we see now that the big mainstream social media companies obviously Elon bought x and it seems that that platform has changed significantly it seems to be more open um for free speech some people argue about that then we see I guess Facebook and YouTube maybe unchanged um yeah do you think those will change do you think there will ever be real hearings and anybody diving into those organizations I mean Trump recently came out and was quite critical of Google because they seem to be not allowing people to search for him and things like that the Twitter files kind of came and went were ignored by mainstream media I don’t think anybody was prosecuted do you think that will change I think instead there may be different platforms born that are outside the sphere of influence born and created because a lot of people are trying to do that I think the reason that the ills and the potential crimes we’ve seen haven’t been punished and there’s been no accountability has to do with the corrupt political system in the United States political media system whereby there are people in congress on both sides and I’ve spoken to many of them that want to do real accountability but they’re not permitted to by the party leaders because in all instances democrats and republicans have an organized system under which they rely on the same people in many instances for their financial donations and to get reelection and to stay in power

35:04 And even if an interest contributes more to one party than than the other the members will tell you the members who want to do true accountability that behind the scenes there’s a lot of collusion between democrats and republicans a lot of agreement on maybe they will make a big splash and a fuss by holding a hearing but nothing will come of it there will never be a law that passes that does anything meaningful because there is sort of an implicit agreement between them to go hands off of these organizations that they’re supposed to oversee and regulate in large part because they rely on financial support from these very companies I feel like the committees in congress that are supposed to oversee let’s say transportation the transportation industry armed services the defense industry those members that get on the committees are funded by those industries that’s where they get their donations from so they end up serving the interests of the very people they’re supposed to oversee and make sure there aren’t hearings on certain topics and there isn’t legislation unless it reads a particular way they don’t respond to our interests and needs anymore they’re working basically for these special interests so this in this corrupt environment I don’t think there can be accountability so I do think there will be platforms and different methods of delivering information to us that will be invented and I do think a politician as president could make a difference

36:27 I don’t know four years is enough but someone who comes in and shakes the tree a Robert F. Kennedy or a Donald Trump that understands the things that we’re talking about and didn’t get to where they are by those same money systems as everybody else they do have the power to come in and maybe change things but obviously that’s difficult with the establishment press and social media and everything else being so entrenched in the federal bureaucracy that’s a hard thing to upend in four years yeah it is so these companies are more powerful than the governments and also you don’t want to get on their bad side or you might find that when you search Donald Trump rally you get a Harris rally coming up and they fund them and like a lot of these instances you’re talking about they later employ these people sometimes in the industry that’s right um that’s really scary but like you said if anyone could do it it could be Trump or Bobby who could just go in there and and take a look at things otherwise I guess it probably won’t change but that’s why at all costs the establishment whoever you want to say they are cannot have a Trump or a Bobby Kennedy and that’s why I think you see the kind of shenanigans that we see going on now to make sure to try to make sure that nobody like that gets in office because it’s in no one’s interest in that I don’t know if you like the word deep state or all of the people involved in making

37:44 Money from the government whatever that is they don’t want them in there to shake the branches I like to call it the persistent bureaucracy because they can wait out anybody who’s elected who you know Donald Trump toward the end of his presidency issued some executive orders that I followed up on one or two of them whatever happened they were just simply ignored I don’t know if that’s an act of treason I don’t know if it’s illegal I don’t know if it’s unconstitutional but they they whoever they are can just simply ignore something they don’t like or stall and they in effect can usurp a president scary also you talk about these other organizations but these these these current ones are really monopolies I mean I love the rumbles of the world and the true socials but the truth is it’s very hard to usurp someone that has really monopolistic control and that’s what Google has and YouTube has right now it’s very hard to pull that aside and now you’re adding in artificial intelligence into that which is going to dominate us in a way that we won’t even be perceiving of that and these companies are spending a lot of money right now to win that compute war and it’s got me definitely concerned yeah artificial intelligence is information control on steroids there’s one example in my book of a scientist who conducted some studies regarding hydroxychloroquine and its effectiveness during covid and then went through the exercise of asking an artificial intelligence model about the studies

39:10 And kept getting documented factually incorrect information one after the next about the studies and the status of what hydroxychloroquine studies showed and every time he called the artificial intelligence on the false information the AI would apologize and give him a slightly different answer but not explain why it came up with the wrong information in the first place and one stunning example was in in one study that the AI was two studies the AI was trying to disparage about the positive aspects of hydroxychloroquine it claimed the studies were very small and had it cited like 112 test subjects in one and a couple hundred in another in fact it had over 10 000 test subjects in one of the ones it said had just very few those mistakes seems to me can only be made if someone is directing the artificial intelligence to the bad information ultimately when the AI was then directed to its misinformation it found the correct information which is baffling so it had access to it initially but only when corrected did it find the truth and I think about how many people will rely on this sort of thing much like google as if it is the end all and be all well you know I did a AI search or I did a google search and this is what they said so I think our main job is to make sure people are skeptical of what they hear and find out other ways to get information besides the monopolized sources so that they can they can reach truth

40:35 Now skepticism in itself is a problem because I reported some years ago on people inside who work for a living on trying to confuse people and shape information a certain way and they said their job is accomplished if they simply do nothing more than confuse people if you don’t want people to know the truth and you end up confusing them enough that they don’t believe anything in some respects the mission is accomplished and so I think a lot of people are on that end of the spectrum now they don’t believe anything even when you tell them something that is true because they don’t know how to sort through the truth and we’re in this weird you know weird information age it’s like a fifth generation psychological operation right yeah AI is definitely of a concern one of the things that that we like about the blockchain is that with that you can at least kind of prove the provenance of the data that a conclusion was based on and you can track it you can also own your own AI agents so they won’t be owned by a corporation and that gives me a little bit of a ray of hope where some of this up is also decentralized and the hardware is decentralized but it does feel like very david and goliath but i’d rather do that than just in open AI we trust or microsoft we trust or in meta we trust because i already know how that works in a web two world you know in a youtube example let alone the AI and i was on a call the other

41:49 Day with like a hundred kind of members a very well accomplished group and one of them uh did a an AI search on something and he just parroted back to me as gospel i think i mentioned i was on the alex jones show when i was in austin he said oh this is what they told me about alex jones and i i said are you seriously trusting a google synopsis about someone like and this was a fairly intelligent person and i thought wow people are really just outsourcing their brains and this is going to happen more and more it’s true it’s shocking that today people still do that they’ll point to wikipedia which i’ve reported on is such a managed resource in terms of information flow and they’ll point to wikipedia still knowing better i would think and and cite something as if it’s the truth on some controversy i think it comes down to maybe that confusion lack of bandwidth and most people are stressed about their own problems you know they’re in they’re in some type of a you know economic you know controls prison cycle they’ve got lots to deal with they’ve got outside stressors sometimes intentional some not and they just optimize yeah so they do that that’s right wikipedia is just the worst so many people believe it’s like legit in fact and i hear intelligent people saying oh it overall it’s correct but i’ve gone deep on wikipedia and people i’ve had i have people that don’t like me because of the content we produced in 2020 they just don’t like me for some reason and they their mission

43:19 Is to constantly rewrite and yes find ways to slander the wikipedia and and i so i know it’s co-opted just as bad if not worse than any kind of media outlet i’ve documented that in great detail and sometimes it’s not just guys that don’t like you they’re organized interests pr firms and crisis management firms that learned very early on in that understood how any any form of information that can be co-opted has been the wikipedia was going to be very powerful and they developed anonymous accounts because the editing accounts are anonymous under pseudonyms where they can edit for clients and make sure negative stuff isn’t said or is said about certain people and things and the power in wikipedia editing comes from how long you’ve been an editor and how many edits you’ve made so there’s no way to beat these people that saw 15 years ago or more that this power existed so if you join in now gosh i need to correct this article that’s wrong and add a foot noted study they can erase that and revert it within seconds even though their edits are disallowed by the supposed policy because they’re not supported by the right kind of sources they hold the power because they’re the guys that have the most longevity and most edits and it goes on it goes very deep so wikipedia is great if you’re looking for what tv what season four said of a certain tv series and we all know certain pop culture things it’s fine for that and sports records maybe but on controversies

44:47 Pharmaceutical industry stuff covid stuff personalities of people that they don’t want to be that they want to debunk or discredit and they don’t want to be have any sort of truth of veracity behind them those are so highly managed and manipulated and there’s no way honest people as i’ve documented can change to put truth into those pages yeah i can concur 100 and unfortunately they’re probably number one search result and probably one of the first things to feed into an ai yeah that’s right there you go get some if i google your name right now it’ll probably take a lot of that right from your wikipedia page well so wikipedia and media matters which is a smear group in smear group that supports the farm the pharmaceutical industry supports and it has certain political interests used to be a top result for me if anybody searched for a little while they got it where everything made me look controversial for the reasons that they claimed and now it doesn’t show up people tell me because someone say oh i google searched you and i used to say well don’t believe everything you see on the google search and then someone recently said well it’s not bad stuff so i don’t know if eventually the momentum of other things that you do can outweigh the the stuff that they try to put in there but that’s the goal yeah so i just ran to be mayor of london again and during that six weeks there was so much press yeah that it all just popped

46:09 To the top yeah and changed things a little bit temporarily so but i’m sure they’ll be back tell me about the book and why write this now um you know it’s it’s you really going deep follow the science how big pharma misleads obscures and prevails um why now and why write this book well my editors my editor harper collins asked me to write this book it’ll be my fourth for them or it is my fourth and they initially envisioned a book dissecting in an investigative journalism way all the misinformation and about covid but by the time they came to me that was being done i mean bobby kennedy’s got you know definitive writings about that other people have done great work and i thought there is more a little bit more to be said but what about a broader book that addresses the health crisis in america i mean i my eyes have been opened so much in the past five or six years to the poison in our food and water and i’m not an environmental so i’m not an anti-environmental it’s just never been something that’s on my plate but i’ve become convinced based on the studies that are that i know to believe that are credible and the research that our food is so has become so adulterated in our water and our medicine and our vaccine situation that we’re we’re suffering from chronic illness chronic illnesses in a way that this country has never seen and no one is addressing it because i believe there’s a lot of distraction by the industries that cause these problems so that we focus on other things

47:34 Including treatments to the exclusion of figuring out what’s wrong in the first place and i said what about a broader book that looks at the impact covid had on the national psyche and in wanting to examine these other things and some anecdotes and and really doc well-documented stories about how we got here so part of the purpose of the book i think if people know me they think cheryl’s a skeptic and maybe she’s been right about stuff but suspicious about everything and the truth is i didn’t start out that way and i wanted people in the book to understand that i started out probably like most people there’s two doctors in my family i thought doctors always told the truth always knew the most i thought studies were always true i couldn’t imagine that a researcher would do anything nefarious or bad i thought drug companies had to have proper research behind all their products and that by the time something reached the market it was proven safe and effective all that is where i started from and as i began being assigned stories as an investigative reporter for cbs to dig into this it turned out to be the medical industry much like other scandals i’d covered with corruption involving government media and politics with payoffs and follow the money and whistleblowers telling horrible truths on the inside of things where researchers have intentionally or with willful disregard hurt babies and children and

48:58 Patients in ways that i think would just incense people the lack of rigor behind vaccine studies i mean i’m fully vaccinated my kids fully vaccinated i didn’t know any of this when my child was young but i would people will be outraged to hear about the science that was known about these sorts of things at the time they were vaccinating their children wow um what are you expecting to be the response to this book i think it’ll sell well i think people are thirsty for this information they’re seeking truth that they can’t get when they’re watching the if they watch evening news or they’re searching around on social media people are thirsty for this information it may come under attack although i will say things that i’ve written and reported on that you might think would draw attacks from the pharmaceutical industry i’m sure they’re not going to be happy in many respects about what i’ve written what i’ve exposed they don’t seem to come at me head-on and sometimes privately behind the scenes when i run into individual people they complement the work so i don’t suspect there’s going to be a huge backlash to what i write but i think it will be very eye-opening to a lot of people will certain booksellers not stock it will certain media companies not cover it or is that something maybe happened a couple years ago and is that changing that now a few books have come out well i think people won’t cover there will be media

50:20 That won’t cover it because the pharmaceutical edge because they get their they’ll be afraid let’s say abc and bc cbs won’t put it on their main shows because this is something that they really don’t want discussed or their sponsors don’t want discussed and it’s critical in some respects of the media so that’s uncomfortable if they don’t if if they’re not capable of self-reflection and self-criticism but as bobby kennedy likes to say there are enough other outlets now that even if mainstream some of those big outlets don’t take a book or want to talk about there are certainly plenty of other places that will and people i like to say the truth finds a way to be told people ultimately seek the truth even if they like to hear what they agree with part of the time they still like to have information where they can read or go to and feel like they’re really getting an unbiased dose of truth as well so i think i think it’ll be popular book i think bobby’s the real anthony fauci was like the best-selling book in america but it wasn’t on the new york times list yeah that happened right that was a couple years ago i think so yeah i had a really interesting experience with bobby because you know in in the movie our final piece was the broadcast we did on our own independent platform and that was on may 3rd of 2020 i actually had bobby on the show on may 4th the day after and for me i was like oh i get to

51:39 Talk to a kennedy you know i didn’t know much about bobby and i i’m a i can i’m an mit trained engineer and so in some ways i think i was a little bit blinded by the science the science of a vaccine is such an amazing fascinating thing that it makes you believe that that’s the way they’re executed by the science and i never thought about what do the humans do to co-op that science for all these different ways and so bobby broke it down for me on that very early broadcast before he ever had was talking about running for president or even writing the book i think about fauci and he probably single hand convinced me to not take that vaccine or to be skeptical well it’s a compelling story yeah and for me um i don’t talk about my current vaccine status because i cover these issues but i will tell you that very early on i reported for the us army medical institute of infectious diseases us amrid um a couple months into the covid pandemic and these are some of the guys who worked on the vaccine they’re the top military folks who do this work for us very credible awesome people gave me a lot of good information put them on full measure but one of the chief virologists there said to me early on that rna vaccines this was not out yet the vaccines were talking about the future they don’t work very well and they don’t last very long and that was known going into it so that was that stayed in my head and he said you know

53:03 If rna vaccines worked we’d have a vaccine for aids and we’ve been trying for 50 years we don’t have a vaccine for aids and then he also said um this was interesting people were starting to mask the government was not the public had not shut down yet we were headed in that direction schools had not shut down yet but they were masking and social distancing but not at us amrid so we’re getting a tour and we’re talking about all this and um my producer said to the lead virologist off camera later well i notice you’re not masking or social distancing you know we’re all close and why is that and he said well i assume i’ve already had covid first of all and i’m not worried about it and secondly i’m i’m young and healthy my wife is healthy my kids are healthy i’m not worried about them he said now my father’s elderly and in a retirement scenario would be concerned if he got covid but short of that he implied you should get covid and be done with it and lead your life rather than isolate yourself and i said at that point so would it be bad to shut down shouldn’t you get a little bit of the germs like this is just my logic talking and he’s like absolutely you know people at the time were washing their groceries and i said to him don’t you want to get a little bit of that and so some of those early conversations really stuck in my mind and it was interesting to me that common sense turned out to be factually accurate in the terms of at least this virologist who ended up proving

54:23 Right on many many counts he said back then that when the vaccine came out and he didn’t anticipate at the time being used on children he said you would need boosters pretty quickly because it would not last very long and yet when this became the real world reality and people started talking about boosters public health officials some of them were acting shocked well this was known in the in the start but we were played i think we’re led down this road of some kind of a novel where we were convinced on the front end that something would be effective and would happen that they knew would not be but by the time we all got the first shots it’d be easy to convince us to get the next one and you know i look back at the manipulation of how we were sold on all of this stuff and it’s it’s pretty um eye-opening and some of that is also in follow the science yeah looking forward to it that’s going to be excellent yeah for me behind the scenes i was speaking to like the great barrington declaration people and all these scientists on the show and so i got to have a similar experience i was watching this train wreck happen in slow motion and i was so privy to all these really intelligent people saying what are we doing here and then just to see it all kind of happened okay but you and i so i also identified dr j bhattacharya from stanford part of the great barrington declaration that said early on shutdowns were not advisable we were able to being non-experts in the field

55:45 Identify sources and resources that we could turn to that had information that seemed credible to put out there on the table even at a time when maybe we didn’t know how things would turn out but that’s the information the public was kept from hearing and that’s where the big crime occurred in my view that they were given one view only and not told or heard about these alternate viewpoints that turned out to be accurate and then in retrospect that teaches us at least me as a journalist you don’t know who to trust on the front end of something new but looking back now you can see which scientists were accurate and correct on their information now those are the ones i turn to or i give more credence and weight to what they say on future topics because of their track record yeah for me it just tells me like this solution there’s always more information and there’s a real this whole freedom of speech thing is maybe there’s something there and the right to be able to listen to someone and i used to joke like on youtube there are these people that put these big big long videos up that believe that the earth is flat and god bless and they leave those videos up there but when i was having a conversation with a 67 year old man that was asking questions about the pcr test you know that got pulled down and when i had dr martin coldorf of the barrington great great barrington declaration on we couldn’t publish that i couldn’t publish bobby on youtube we couldn’t use the v word

57:02 So yeah i mean you always want more discussion i really believe the best idea always wins well that’s the tell when something is censored it probably deserves greater attention by the public because there’s a very strong likelihood that some of that information at least is true if they’ve bothered to censor it because it means a powerful interest the question that you should ask yourself who wants that censored and why um the flat earth stuff is like you say a perfect example they’re not worried that that will take on a life of its own and affect politics and someone’s bottom line and you know financial interest so they leave that up when they’re censoring information that’s true or not they’re they’re worried and concerned that that’s going to affect some powerful interest yes we’re three months away from the election in america what’s going on in that country from your perspective what do we need to think about there’s obviously these battleground states many of which were the accused of election interference and these same states are going to matter these same counties are going to matter i just had rudy julian in here who was one of the first person people here that ever credibly talked in detail about what actually happened on the ground i never heard this before of course because he can’t say it on any mainstream media outlets and all you hear is someone bringing it up and then it being dismissed as these crazy misinformation people

58:23 Of course that’s not true but when you hear the details it’s um shocking worrying and quite credible um what concerns you well i’m shocked and worried too and whether you want to believe or accept that there was some there was election cheating i think every election has cheating no one would deny there’s some cheating and malfeasance going on in every election we’ve ever had but if you want to think or not there was massive cheating in 2020 ask yourself this question let’s presume there is some in the next election and it’s against your candidate whoever that may be i think one troubling thing we learned is there’s no way for the aggrieved party to get justice in court because the courts um even if they’re not skewed against the particular candidate they seem to be geared toward expecting some sort of burden of proof that’s impossible to produce in a short time period as someone pointed out i think it was one of the i try to watch some of the hearings and so on in the trump cases that were early on one of the attorneys for trump told a judge the judge was asking them to have some certified signatures of people who knew that there had been some problems and there was some evidence and the attorney had missed the deadline by a day very quick deadline to produce these and the attorney simply said please can you not extend this deadline for a day or two because we have more work to do and he pointed out the attorney for trump

59:52 That when election fraud is prosecuted it takes years to prove and gather evidence and find information and how were they expected to do this in a matter of days and you know hours and days and the judge nonetheless dismissed his chances to have a one-day extension or so to get more evidence if you figure that the trump people they didn’t have or whoever the aggrieved party would be they don’t have subpoena power so they may suspect that there is documentation to be found but they can’t get their hands on it there’s no way for them to do so they may have witnesses that they’d like to examine who wouldn’t want to come forward on their own but they have no subpoena power to conduct depositions and yet the courts are there and the public is then saying well there’s no evidence you have no evidence um i think that should be disturbing to us that whoever the aggrieved party supposedly is there’s no way for them to have redress after an election and by the time they might develop it let’s say three years down the road well whoever was wrongly theoretically wrongly elected is not going to be thrown out of office it’s simply too late that tells a potentially cheating party all they need to do is get through the election and those hours afterwards declare victory and there’s really no going back i think that should and could be addressed in a comprehensive way but there’s been no um i don’t see anybody

1:01:12 Trying to do such a thing or any pressure to do it and i think they they meaning in this case the democrats so successfully controversialized the asking of the question that even republicans fear being affiliated in many instances with asking rational questions about how we would navigate such a thing you know trump goes out of his way now to mention it every single speech that wasn’t really happening six months ago and he was being called out and that was potentially you know illegal or what he was saying but now he’s really saying it in every single speech well i think if that’s what he believes he should he has the right to say it that should be something that he talks about and draws attention to and i do wonder we’ll be covering this story um on full measure you know what changes have been made to give more public confidence because it’s not just the trump supporters polls show that a majority of people whatever side they come up on believe that there was cheating in the last election of some kind you don’t hear that on the news much but that’s those are independent polls and so what has been done to try to ensure on the front end because that’s where it has to happen that it doesn’t happen in the first place to avoid putting people an alleged aggrieved party in the position of after the fact trying to come up with evidence this should be done right along the way and i don’t know what changes specifically been made to try to get more public confidence in the 2024 elections but we’ll be

1:02:32 Looking into that and hopefully unearthing some information it’s also tricky because there’s only so much the federal government can do because it’s a state issue well it’s up to the parties you know and in some respects it’s up to so this is another issue but i feel like in this country we are now kind of governed by an extra constitutional system of two political parties that determine a lot of the stuff outside of what we want or what we vote on but a lot of these processes are left up to the political parties in terms of how they monitor and how aggressive they are at making sure that you know things are done the proper way and that everybody gets a chance to vote the votes are counted the right way so it’s sort of up to them in some respects to figure out how to crack this nut yeah and like you said even the party itself is another layer i mean bobby really tried to be part of the democratic party and they boxed them out and then you know i don’t know if biden decided to drop out or they pushed them out and there’s all these real big question marks around you know democracy when it comes to these two parties it’s shocking you know if you look at so i don’t know if most people know that new hampshire and iowa primaries or caucuses which are the first two in the united states were thrown out this year by the democrats they didn’t count them you know they basically said you don’t count one of them was the results were held for months because they were not likely to look

1:03:49 Good for joe biden so they made sure to blend the results in with south carolina and states where he would do better they didn’t even i believe it was iowa they just decided not to count for the first time in history this didn’t get much publicity and then in the end everyone who voted for the in the democrat side their vote didn’t count because the party stepped in and decided who they wanted their candidate to be regardless of the voter wishes now maybe voters don’t care if they voted democrat because they in the end regretted having biden as a choice that’s possible but the fact is if the party can step in regardless of an election and a primary and just name their own candidate who got no votes from anybody and declare them to be you know the new nominee why hold a primary my question is why should the democrat party waste time and energy if they’re going to say bobby kennedy can’t run which is basically what they did no democrat can run against our incumbent we’re not going to count the first two primaries and then we’re going to pick an entirely different candidate that nobody voted for why hold a primary at all it’s shocking to talk about and the republicans would like to do this now so i’m not saying that republicans are pure and democrats aren’t when when donald trump came on the scene believe me the republicans would love have loved nothing more than to do this to donald trump so he

1:05:04 Couldn’t have been the nominee but they were just not as good or as effective at whatever they tried to you know put in there to keep donald trump out yeah no i agree you know both of them are are powerful entities that it’s end up corrupting themselves by what they’re doing talk to me about the assassination attempt um it was still it’s hard for me to process what actually happened what could have happened that day for me it’s proof that we’re clearly living in a simulation um the fact that he was that close yes and the potential ramifications if that bullet hit his head i just i don’t even know um what are your thoughts on what happened the aftermath and maybe even what this means over the next 10 years for the country well i always start out trying to argue against myself like when something looks conspiratorial as this does like how could the secret service put him in a position where he could be shot out like that and then i make all the arguments against it and so far the arguments are arguing against a conspiracy not i’m saying there wasn’t one but right now i don’t see the evidence for these you know third shooters or secret service shot them or those sorts of things on the other hand it’s hard to reconcile the lapses insecurity a lot of people say well how did the guy get on the roof it wasn’t just that there were almost no processes followed at that rally that should have been followed in terms

1:06:20 Of security for a some of the secret services covering my husband is a former SWAT team commander i have some experience looking at these sorts of things as a journalist i know the basic uh steps that go into before a public figure like that appears at a rally the checks that are done beforehand the walkthroughs the meetings that happen there are dozens of things that weren’t done that are that are standard operating procedure that i just can’t explain you know why they weren’t done and i don’t know the answer as to why they weren’t yet i think there’ll be a lot more that comes out about this but this is really it’s unforgivable and it’s shocking that donald trump could have been killed and that he was shot in the way with all the lapses they had i’ll give you just a couple examples you don’t turn over something so close into what should be the perimeter around you know former president you don’t turn that over to the locals if you turn that over to the locals you have to be sure you know the qualifications of their SWAT teams these are small local um you know police agencies not to say they don’t have great SWAT teams but it may not be in some instances what you would expect the quality you would expect like at the secret service how good are their snipers how much experience do they have guarding somebody like this for example um you absolutely have to have real-time communication i’ve said an eighth grader

1:07:40 Could have an hour long sort of summary of good security and come up with a better plan than what was instituted that day you have to have real-time communication between the locals if you’ve assigned them responsibility or not have to have real-time communication with them and top level secret service folks doing the security that makes no sense um i think i was the one who isolated the clip of the three secret service ladies kind of milling around at the at the car where donald trump was whisked away and all three of them clearly did not appear to be as though they were on job one they would seem confused they weren’t really looking at the crowd and providing security at that point they were confused and maybe a little bit panicked one of them drawing a weapon which i think usually has to be investigated if you draw a weapon when you’re not really there’s no reason to and she’s the only one who did and then couldn’t holster it quickly which made it seem like she hadn’t done it a thousand times and anyone guarding you know former president trump should have been very experienced at this i isolated a 36 second clip that i posted on twitter that a lot of people picked up and started scrutinizing why why were these people assigned you know if they weren’t super experienced and adept at what they do clearly the plan hadn’t been run through how we would get the president you know out safely if something happened so anyway i could go on and on but

1:09:00 There’s just it makes no sense from the very start as to all of these lapses even if all this stuff had been misplanned the secret service agents on site and some of them did a very good job so i’m not trying to paint a broad brush and criticize everybody all of them should have noticed the gaps in real time so there’s nothing to stop them is they’re at the rally in real time saying huh i see a a rooftop that isn’t secured or if if no one noticed before for some weird reason there’s no reason that they shouldn’t have noticed on site that day as they’re doing their job that there was there was lack security which means you could halt the rally all these things that you could do yeah have you seen that that video compiled it’s like three minutes that puts all the videos together where someone sees the shooter on the roof and trump’s giving the speech the whole time and you get to see like because it’s like maybe seven different videos but with the same audio track and you can literally see someone saying hey there’s somebody on the roof and trump talks for like a good two minutes that’s a great idea yeah i put together a timeline but i think seeing that visually is just that’s a long people don’t maybe realize till you sit down through two minutes or 30 seconds what a long period of time that is in this context yeah it was really scary and again like i haven’t spent my life studying the jfk assassination but from what i do know of it you know the lack security

1:10:21 On the day or the missing extra police officers you can just see how that can be a component of something like that happening and that over a long enough timeline with that kind of security probably something’s going to happen and whether it was intentional or not it was still a pretty shocking result what do you think would have happened if that bullet hit his head what would have happened to america wow that’s a really good question what do you think would have happened i think that trump would have been a martyr for the next 1000 years and i think that could embody so many dangerous behaviors because i think he would just become such a symbol of the resistance that when any time anybody wanted to justify you know a terrible act it could always be in his name and i feel like that just could empower so many behaviors and that’s all i can think of part of me thinks that the country would move on it would find a way but it feels to me there would be a group of people the loyalists that will never let this go not in a year not in 10 years not in 50 years and it’ll always be the ammunition of the bone to pick with the party you don’t agree with and that’s that’s i don’t know i don’t know why i think that’s not like logical and you know i think the narrative would have been we would have heard the media in a short period of time say that the shooter was a trump supporter who so trump was shot by a trump supporter would be the narrative so don’t be mad at the other side and that it was trump who

1:11:52 Said something incendiary the narrative would be that incited you know almost like he deserved it because he incited through his rhetoric there would be this big effort to try to make it out to be you know trump’s fault or this is what happens when you’re a divisive politician that would be coming from one side but i i agree with you there’s a huge you know subculture maybe not 51 percent of america but a a large minority of americans who would have the view as you stated and it would be hard for them to stay silent about that and then like who would have gone on to run i mean would the republican party got a major boost from that probably maybe and then who would the candidate have been the convention hadn’t happened that’s a really good question and then would they be elected or not uh i mean i don’t know there’s so many fascinating questions about what happens and then even if you have a a political structure in place what happens to the rest of the people does it blow over and but for a turn of the head right little turn of the head it’s again just it’s i can’t even i still can’t believe it actually happened well i’m surprised at how little people are talking about it now i mean obviously they know he was shot but it’s not every time i see him i’m amazed because i think i’m younger than him if i’ve been shot in the ear or anywhere or even if wiz by me i’d probably still be in the hospital shaking and traumatized and he was like

1:13:15 He didn’t even stay in the hospital that night it’s just stunning to me that the energy and the fortitude he has or the motivation he has to get out there every day despite that and i i would be scared the next time i was scared for him the next time he spoke i just kept having these you know horrible thoughts of what if someone tried to shoot him again you know he’s a very strong person and uh you like i know a lot of people can vilify him but you know i think a lot of people could see consciously and subconsciously what it takes and he was clearly emotional at the convention when he gave that speech that was four or five days out but then a few days later he’s back at it and you know i was listening to a speech yesterday jadey Vance he’s like his vp said this man took a bullet for you and didn’t miss a day of work and it’s like it’s true you know that’s right it’s it’s just the whole thing and he while his rallies i try to watch all the candidates rallies if i can and um his are very funny you know when when reporters report as they have the trump rallies are dark and people are angry it shows me that they haven’t watched you know they’re just reporting like many reporters do based on other reporters and summaries because his rallies are pretty funny and people are usually happy and laughing and i noticed that trump was joking pretty quickly he said something like um he was complimenting the secret service and he said the sniper shot the guy and did a great job and then he said

1:14:37 Could have done a little sooner yeah so yeah and then at this at the convention he said he told talked about what happened and he said i’m never going to tell the story again yeah and then the next rally he was telling the story again he was like back and he once said he said everyone thought he said i was going to be a nicer person afterwards and he says then i was and then i realized what they did and they were mean to me and so i’m not going to be nice but uh i i one of my guilty pleasures is listening to most of his speeches yeah and i find him extremely entertaining he is and the fascinating thing i think with trump and i would say bobby kennedy as well they don’t say the expected stuff with the cadence and the platitudes almost every other politician to me as a journalist is a little boring and when someone doesn’t speak that way it’s interesting trump is unexpected but in the same respect i noticed that his rally since 2015 or after he started getting into a groove he says a lot of the same stuff if you’ve watched at every rally but instead of being bored by it the people love it they want him to tell the story about the snake they want him to end the same way when he goes into that recitation of we’ll make we’ll make this great again we’ll do that again they wait for it they mow the words behind it so it’s really is a phenomenon and i think that’s that says something for political figures that are not just again saying the platitudes that i met joe the mechanic and his

1:16:02 Mother was an immigrant who did this thing you know they’re tired of hearing things that don’t sound real and genuine and they like hearing these other sorts of politicians yeah that’s a brilliant observation when i did my ted talk 10 years ago i kind of modeled myself on obama because i was just watching the way that he spoke and he spoke slowly and i always thought someone important speaks slowly because they don’t have to rush and so and i used to teach public speaking to some of my students i think that what most people do is they rattle through it because they think maybe no one wants to listen to them so i kind of went for the obama model but now we see the evolution of public speaking and presidential public speaking that’s right and i but trump’s fascinating he’ll just spin off topic he’ll have the prompter and then go off prompter and then make reference to the fact he’s going off prompter that’s right um he does say a lot of the same things and i know because i listen to a lot of the same speeches but um it’s funny somehow and it’s it is it’s what the public wants maybe they want that because they’re consuming more independent media you know maybe it’s because we’re used to podcasts and things like that and we don’t want to hear that that obama type presidential speak the state of the union address right where you please stand up and right and people are just tired of that and they want something fun and he is funny he’s actually really funny he’s hilarious his

1:17:22 Timing is quite good you know from a humorous standpoint and as a journalist covering things one thing about the trump presidency that i found interesting all the other presidencies i had worked under even though i didn’t do political coverage i was you know working and watching politics and they would always have a way of getting out information there’s never a surprise because before an obama clinton bush would have some initiative or announcement they’d leak it to the new york times so that you’d read about it first and then we’d do a piece on it and then the speech would come so there was never you knew who was going to be appointed you knew everything in advance with trump there were surprises like people would say he’s going to hold a news conference on this but we don’t know who he’s going to name or we don’t know what he’s going to do and in some respects just as a journalist watching things that’s a lot more entertaining and interesting to not have all the advance you know notice of you’re being told what’s going to happen before the actual newsmaker makes the news because they want to introduce it a certain way and that didn’t happen with trump i love how he turned that entire relationship with the media like on its head and banged everybody and like i’m not going to do a press conference today are you not allowed on the plane and i’m not going to do it and then determine what do you mean and yet was the most accessible president of my time

1:18:34 In terms of how much access he gave the press how much time he spoke in public those covid daily briefings i don’t think he got enough credit for that whether you agreed or not with how covid was handled he appeared at the news conference for weeks day after day and sat there for not just minutes but sometimes for an hour or more and answered questions with a level of detail that was pretty impressive now i will say clinton had that ability as well you know you can tell some presidents are top line presidents they’re briefed and then but they don’t have an in-depth knowledge of something trump had by my estimation a really good in-depth knowledge of an amazing he had just a grasp on so many different topics down to a detail level the way he expresses them and some people if you don’t watch him a lot it’s by design sometimes when he says stuff so people chris plant who’s a guy i listen to former colleague of cnn who has a talk show says the press likes to take trump literally but doesn’t take him seriously he makes generalizations like i’m the youngest president that ever was and you know he means i act young i’m fit you know i’m healthy but then the press will fact check him and say he’s not really the youngest president that ever was he talks a lot in sort of generalities that may not express with the precision some of what he knows or wants to express but the level of detail he nonetheless demonstrates when he’s discussing things is i think pretty impressive the whole

1:20:00 Bleach thing remember when people accused him of saying inject bleach which he never said but he was referring to studies that actually did and do exist that talk about using a bleach chemical or component that could be used to cure cure or clean the blood these are my paraphrases having read the studies there was evidence out there at the time and there remains evidence that these sorts of treatments can be used and they were looking at that at the time what could be done in terms of it wasn’t injecting bleach and again he didn’t say that but he was trying to refer to research that i believe he had read or been briefed on and did it in a way that the media lampooned and didn’t i think accurately factually represent yeah i remember listening to those briefings every day and they were the the only voice of common reason and it really meant a lot to me and they were long and it was just nice to have him there and talking and reassuring you and answering all the questions and you know all the answers but it was important and he did those for months on end so people might be interested in in the book i tell the story there were a lot of behind the scenes battles of those who are obviously you would imagine trying to influence policy and whether it’s vaccines or other treatments on covid or the shutdowns there was this push me pull you between the fauci factions and other scientists and authorities that were really trying to fight the dr fauci factor which turned out to be

1:21:24 Overwhelming but i have some of the i was meeting with a source for example in a parking lot of a closed restaurant during the shutdown who was a white house advisor trying really hard to break the juggernaut of the fauci you know group that was doing things that a lot of other folks thought were not prudent and i report on some of that battle going on in the follow the science book very cool looking forward to it what’s the best way people can get a hold of that book well you can order it anywhere pre-order i hope you do to to send the numbers through the roof to send a message that people want this sort of reporting follow the science available anywhere i i will give you a signed copy at no extra charge it if you go to sherrill axon.com and click the store tab you can order it there and i think i have a little discount on there and then i’ll sign it you know personalize it as well fantastic um last question what’s the future of independent journalism what’s your biggest challenge right now when it comes to doing what you do on a weekly basis and how will that play out do you think over the next five years ten years that’s a really good question um we’ve been lucky i don’t think there’s a model that a lot of shows like mine exist right now and part of it has to do with we’re owned by a company that owns its own stations so we’re seeing on abc cbs fox nbc telemundo cw depending on where you live

1:22:45 Which makes us i think the most diverse news program out there because you’re seeing a wide view of audience not just the fox audience sees you or not just the abc audience sees you um there’s not a model for that really there’s not a lot of shows like that but i think there isn’t there aren’t pressures and challenges other than at the corporate level if they want you to make money um i think we make some money like i don’t fortunately they don’t put me into the i don’t want to know a lot about that but we don’t have a regular advertising model in a good respect that means when a pharmaceutical company wants to complain or influence the news they know who to call at cbs they don’t know who to call in in my you know diffuse relationship with this company there isn’t a single source they can call they could call the company and i don’t know what would happen but it’s not so easy as to you can’t call every local station that’s airing you know they can do some local lobbying against the show or a story but it’s not as effective so that’s a great model i think um but i guess there would be money making pressure ultimately if how many corporations want to do news that doesn’t earn a lot of money or want to have a product if they could make money doing something else especially if it generates controversy or pushback if they know that there’s not a big reward coming from you know corporate america i guess that could be a pressure but i think the we’re in a paradigm shift we’re

1:24:08 Not at the end of where this all will be there are smart minds like jeffrey warnek and the the co-founder of wikipedia larry sanger they i’ve spoken with them personally they’re looking for blockchain technology and ways to start platforms that people can refer to that will be honest and widespread and and not subject to censorship and i think some of these things will will be created and will become popular maybe no single one like google but maybe that’s okay you know maybe google becomes less popular as people understand i may not be getting the full truth i’ll use google for all the stuff like wikipedia and google for the you know the stuff that doesn’t matter as much but when i want real research i go to this place where there’s a fair search engine and i i think maybe we’ll have some kind of model diffused model that’ll be more effective yeah i’m really optimistic on that as well um c more hersh who wrote for the new york times for decades now swears by sub-stack and now he can just write his articles he makes an income he doesn’t have to get censored or answered anybody and he just doesn’t want to come on the show anymore because he’s like i’m just doing my own thing that he came on a couple times and talked about the nordstring pipeline and stuff and i love listening to his stuff because he’s he’s almost like that uncuffed classic newsroom journalist that says it like it is and he’s like 70 something in his house and uh and he just continues to report thanks

1:25:31 To this new tech and so yeah i’m really bullish well i just started a sub-stack for that very reason i don’t charge for it but um it’s a lot of people like sub-stack and so i do publish on my own website and fullmeasure.news but i find some people really like the sub-stack model i i’ve been reading a lot of sub-stack i like the disinformation chronicle with paul facker who used to be a senate investigator who reports on a lot of stuff we’ve talked about today fantastic you know we all find our favorites but i do think that’s one alternate model that’s not the where we all end up but i just think that’s one good example of an alternative that’s grown yeah and more super bullish on blockchain uh in the future it’s just good because it’s a it’s a transparent ledger and you know it’s something that really can’t be censored to a certain extent like you know the bitcoin chain can’t be censored if somebody from north korea wanted to inscribe something on one of the blocks like it can’t be undone and to actually have a piece of information like that is amazing i mean the way back machine typically was a way to see what was printed on the internet in the past but that can actually be manipulated so well i think i don’t understand blockchain i’ve researched it i’ve done some stories on it best i can interviewing experts but it sounds like the way to answer the question the government’s including i hear

1:26:45 Them discuss here in the uk it’s almost like they’re begging for more opportunity to be able to censor and and the under the auspices of the foreign governments that will come in and try to interfere with us but if you can solve that foreign government problem with something like blockchain and yet then not use that as the excuse to censor your citizens that’s the perfect scenario yeah i hope we can do that we just got to wrestle ourselves away from these current monopolies and that’s hard to do very hard to do so onwards i’m show it’s been fantastic getting to know you really appreciate your work also i appreciate the fact that you you know you remain objective i think it’s really important because these days i think a lot of people tend to just go ahead and turn left and turn right and kind of rally their side but i really like the fact that you’re down the middle and saying yeah okay the democrats are doing that but the republicans would try and these are power structures at the end of the day and we need to be suspicious of all of them and again ultimately i do believe that free speech is the way forward so thank you so much hope you’ll grab a copy follow the science how big pharma misleads obscures and prevails they can go to your website uh cheryl ackison and get that signed copy so thanks and uh let’s do this again sometime all right thanks all right thanks much the investment club gives us a chance to think about what wealth really is and having the resources to