00:01:50.720And obviously, I mean, we were in touch over that time.
00:01:53.040And I think we chatted at the Albany Club whenever that was.
00:01:56.200And everyone was so happy to see you back.
00:01:58.220But let me just first ask you, how blissful has it been to not have CBC as part of your news diet?
00:02:05.160Because on one hand, I'm like flattered.
00:02:06.400OK, Ashley's paying attention to my show.
00:02:08.160But on the other hand, it's like I hear people that get their news only from legacy media sources.
00:02:12.740And I can't imagine their mental health is all that good.
00:02:14.960Yeah, I was definitely one of those people for many years, Andrew.
00:02:18.280But I sort of took a unique opportunity, I guess, during my maternity leave.
00:02:22.020I decided to basically unplug from social media, from the sort of digital landscape that we are so attached to.
00:02:29.660And I mean, it's a little ironic given that I am a, you know, the founder and the owner of this company that is a digital media platform.
00:02:37.080And so much of the way that we reach Canadians is through these new non-traditional distribution channels like social media.
00:02:43.240But for me personally, it was almost just like a mental health break.
00:02:46.320Like I got off of Twitter, off of Facebook, off of Instagram.
00:02:49.340I deleted all those apps from my phone.
00:02:51.740And the only way that I was really getting news was through email.
00:02:54.280So I subscribed to a few different newsletters.
00:02:57.200True North being obviously my favorite, but also just a really good source of news.
00:03:00.620And I think definitely for me during that time, like being, spending time with my kids, spending time face-to-face with them, not always being on a device, grabbing my phone.
00:03:09.820Most of the time I didn't even have my phone like on the same floor of the house with me.
00:03:16.720And, you know, it was almost hard for me to get back into it.
00:03:19.340Like I just finally started downloading these apps back onto my phone and kind of getting sucked back into, you know, the doom strolling, scrolling that sometimes happens when you're on Twitter or X for too long.
00:03:30.340You just have to remember to turn it off.
00:03:31.620I still think it's important, like on the weekends, on Sundays, I put my phone away and give my attention entirely to my kids, my family.
00:03:38.600And so just to answer your question, like not having CBC, obviously that was great.
00:03:43.220I mean, I didn't have to listen to propaganda.
00:03:44.840I didn't have the rising blood pressure that happens when you have to, you know, subject yourself to the misinformation, to use their term, or just a stream of media narrative that they try to ram down your throat.
00:03:59.540I encourage all of your watchers and all of your listeners to just tune out of the legacy media because the more you pay attention to them, really, the more frustrated you will be.
00:04:08.340When you mentioned the Twitter X thing, I was just imagining you trying to reinstall Twitter and not being able to find it.
00:04:14.840You're like looking at your phone, where is this tool?
00:04:18.980I know that you were like living in a cave or anything like that, but I will ask you on that because if we talk about the way media has changed, it used to be that news was an active thing that you had to go out of your way to consume.
00:04:34.520You turned on the TV at 6 o'clock or 11 o'clock, and it was done.
00:04:38.080You are right in that social media has led to a barrage of news throughout the day, and I'm a news junkie, so for me, I've never viewed that as a negative, but it does change the relationship people have with news.
00:04:50.500This is now something that is kind of endured or that you can be bombarded with.
00:04:55.300It's not something that you just can have a sort of a set part of the day that you deal with it in.
00:05:00.560Yeah, and I think it's a negative part of our culture.
00:05:03.460I think that's part of the reason why none of us can really get along anymore, and we were all like at each other's throats, especially if you think about during COVID when we just, you know, people just didn't see eye to eye or didn't agree with the facts coming out.
00:05:14.720It's like, you know, you used to, to your point, you get the newspaper, and that was the news of the day, and then you wouldn't get more news until maybe that evening or the next day.
00:05:22.720And, you know, the introduction of cable news, they called it the 24-hour news cycle because there had to be new news, you know, every, every, every hour to keep the airways filled.
00:05:31.320Well, now with social media, it's like, it's like every second there's something new, and, you know, it could really suck you into this thing that political news is all that matters in the world.
00:05:40.360It's all that matters in your life, and you define yourself in those terms, and it makes it harder to relate to people and, you know, people in your family, people in your friend group, people in your community that might not share the exact same political views as you.
00:06:08.660Don't let politics, you know, dictate every moment of your life.
00:06:12.120Like, enjoy the real things that matter, your family, your friends, your relationship.
00:06:16.340You go outside into nature and appreciate the great outdoors.
00:06:19.400We don't have to be hunched over our laptops or over our phones all the time.
00:06:23.940I think really having that human connection is so much more important than the digital world.
00:06:29.180And, you know, social media is great, and it's really helped us, especially us in the news business, and it helps so many people connect.
00:06:34.720You know, you think of friends from high school, university, that you're able to just really easily keep in touch with because of social media apps.
00:06:41.400But obviously there's also the negative side to that, which is that technology can be very addictive, it can be very isolating, it can make you feel very lonely and very detached from the real world and being human.
00:06:52.080And so it's just important to be aware of that and to make sure that you're not allowing yourself to be, like, sucked into the addiction of technology.
00:06:59.760To go to the news industry side for a moment, the conventional wisdom is that news is in decline, media is dying, and I think in a lot of ways there's reason to think that.
00:07:08.840You see mass layoffs from some of these big players like Bell Media and Post Media, but it's not the full picture because independent media outlets are growing.
00:07:18.320I don't know if I'm – maybe I'm revealing too much, but I don't really care.
00:07:21.000Just yesterday, you and I were chatting with some of our colleagues, and you just said, let's put up a job posting for X.
00:07:26.260I won't tell people what the job posting was yet.
00:07:28.920And that's, I think, an example of where obviously we have to be scrappy and we have to deal with a much smaller budget than our counterparts in the legacy media do, but we are hiring, we're not firing, and they are not experiencing that.
00:07:41.660So I don't think it's fair to say that media is in decline.
00:07:45.220I think it's fair to say that the landscape is shifting, but I'll ask you why you think, and maybe it's content, maybe it's business, maybe it's the business model or something else entirely, but why is that happening?
00:07:56.300Why is independent media able to grow when legacy media is not and has had to rely on bailouts just to even maintain?
00:08:04.520Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely a good comparison, and it's fair.
00:08:07.140I mean, if you think about it, like the very reason that they had to go hat in hand to the Trudeau government is because their business model is stale, and they haven't adapted to the new digital landscape of the new digital world.
00:08:17.500The newspapers and all of these subscription-based platforms really required a captive audience and a monopoly in terms of advertising, and we just don't see that anymore.
00:08:27.920It's way more efficient to advertise on Facebook or on Google.
00:08:31.500You'll actually reach the very specific demographic in the very specific area that you're looking for, as opposed to putting an ad in a newspaper.
00:08:39.680So I think that True North has been able to not go by that sort of, like, we don't rely on advertising at all for our business.
00:08:47.380And I also think that there's something that has gone fundamentally corrupt within the legacy media, whether they realize it or not.
00:08:54.540They are biased. They are beholden to the Trudeau government.
00:08:58.280And I think perhaps their worst crime, Andrew, is that they're boring.
00:09:01.300It's so much of the sameness. It's so much repetitiveness.
00:09:04.640They have very limited way of looking at the world, and the way that they present the world is very static.
00:09:09.320It's very inauthentic. Whereas, you know, when it comes to True North, you get podcasts.
00:09:13.920You get something a little bit more real, a little bit more relaxed.
00:09:17.120You have people talking about politics, but they can also talk about culture and community and family and other things that interest them.
00:09:23.540And so I think that this platform is just more consumable.
00:09:27.660It's more natural. It's more relatable to so much of the audience, which is why we do have that audience.
00:09:33.180You know, it's not just because we're offering the other side of the story, which we do, telling stories that aren't being told.
00:09:37.900We do. But I think that the new platform and these new independent media companies like True North just offer a more entertaining, more interesting platform.
00:09:46.820And, you know, so much of the legacy media is just really stuck in this old dated model.
00:09:52.640And unfortunately for them, they're not. Fortunately for True North, you know, we've found great success.
00:09:59.300We found an audience. We're continuing to grow.
00:10:01.200We've been pretty conservative in our growth just because we didn't want to go out and spend tons of money, you know, not to be able to have something sustainable.
00:10:09.080But we are in a position now where we are growing. We're doing big things. We have exciting things on the horizon for 2024 and beyond.
00:10:15.800I'm really excited about it. I actually think it's a great industry. It's a great time to be in the industry because it's changing.
00:10:20.720And if you're able to, you know, adapt and continue to search for that audience, I think you can be rewarded as we are here at True North.
00:10:26.940I felt bad because I always love hearing feedback from people. We were at True North Nation, which was an event you were at and I was at that True North hosted in Calgary.
00:10:35.080And we had, I think, like 450 people out from our audience, which was fantastic.
00:10:40.460And one guy came up and said, have you considered starting a newspaper? And I thought he was joking and he wasn't.
00:10:46.080And I felt bad about that because I think I may have chuckled instinctively.
00:10:49.160But no, I think that, you know, really the answer is no, is that, you know, the reason that a lot of these companies, as you say, are having such a difficult time adapting is because they are so reliant on things that are very costly, that have very high overhead.
00:11:02.160I mean, I look at Sun News Network, which was a great example. You and I, I mean, you had more of a role there than I did.
00:11:06.780I just appeared every now and then on some of the shows.
00:11:08.660But this was, I think, spending 20 million dollars a year and had a fraction of the audience that True North has cultivated with a fraction of the budget that Sun News had.
00:11:20.360And look, it only lasted a couple of years before that was just unsustainable.
00:11:24.920Yeah, it's a very sad story. I worked at Sun News Network in Toronto.
00:11:28.440And let me tell you, Andrew, it was such an impressive outfit.
00:11:31.380Like you walked into the studios and it was incredibly sophisticated, modern, like the amount of equipment that they had.
00:11:38.700The studios were beautiful, huge staff, big newsroom.
00:12:26.720So I think that the numbers that they believe that they're getting are quite exaggerated.
00:12:30.220But look, you know, I spent the beginning part of the interview talking about how social media can be addictive and it's good to get off of it.
00:12:36.860But at the same time, that's how True North reaches its audience.
00:12:39.800That's how we have been able to build this really incredible media company.
00:12:43.040And it is because of these channels like YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram.
00:12:48.500Unfortunately, the last two, we've basically been blocked from having access to things to the true government's regulations and laws.
00:12:55.800Hopefully that will change and we'll get back onto those audience.
00:12:58.960But it just shows you, again, how important it is to continue to adapt.
00:13:02.280Like for us at True North, we can't rely on that Facebook audience.
00:13:05.420The Facebook audience used to be our biggest audience.
00:13:07.140It isn't anymore and, you know, we've had to look to other places, Rumble and other social media outlets because we can't rely on that one because you never know what the Trudeau government is going to do.
00:13:16.900You never know if that social media company is going to just start banning your opinion because they don't like it, as we did see during COVID.
00:13:22.620So, again, it's a fun, interesting business because you have to constantly adapt, constantly be changing, constantly making sure that you're remaining diversified and you're remaining able to reach the audience that you have cultivated.
00:13:35.660Just for people, let's go back to the basics here because you shared at True North Nation the origin story of True North, which I sort of have heard a few times now just because I was there not at the beginning, but not long after it.
00:13:46.640And I know you've shared it elsewhere, but there's this new wave of audience that we get every, well, I mean, I'd say several times a year, but certainly at points such as the election, the Freedom Convoy, COVID, we bring in new people that haven't been there since the start.
00:14:01.180And I think it's like, you know, the laborers in the vineyard parable in the Bible.
00:14:03.900We welcome you all regardless of when you started.
00:14:05.700But how did True North shift from what was originally envisioned as a think tank and very narrowly focused on immigration into this independent media powerhouse?
00:14:17.220Yeah, no, it's a great question and it's a great point that we need to explain the origin story because not everyone was there from the beginning.
00:14:23.340Many people were and we appreciate those people who have supported us from the beginning.
00:14:27.040But yeah, like my own background, Andrew, prior to getting into media and being a journalist, I had more of an academic background.
00:14:32.720I worked at think tanks in Vancouver, in Washington, D.C.
00:14:36.000And, you know, I wanted to do something sort of more academic, writing papers, writing policy papers, focused on immigration, telling the other side of the immigration story, which is just the need to make sure that people integrate and that they embrace Canada and talking about immigration security and some of the threats that happened there.
00:14:55.080But then I also had a column in the Toronto Sun and been a longtime columnist and writer over there.
00:14:59.560And what I found was that through my research would lead to me writing news reports.
00:15:04.500And every time I would write a news report that would get into the Toronto Sun, my audience, the people who supported True North in those early days, really wanted more of that.
00:15:12.540They were like, you know, these white papers are fine, but nobody reads them and they're not really having an influence because Justin Trude is a prime minister.
00:15:30.660We said, OK, let's let's focus more on telling news stories, doing investigative journalism to do with immigration, to do with terrorism, to do with border security.
00:15:38.640And at some point it was like, you know, this is just too, too, too narrow as well.
00:15:43.760Why are we only talking about one issue when there's all this other stuff happening in Canada?
00:15:47.440And Andrew, you know, as a journalist, as soon as you start telling stories and start researching in one area, you just start getting so many tips and so many leads and so many people pointing you in different directions.
00:15:59.040So I started bringing on other journalists.
00:16:00.620And now, you know, we focus on anything and everything in Canadian politics and Canadian culture and, you know, beyond.
00:16:08.020I think, Andrew, you've gained yourself a very big following by going to Davos and exposing the World Economic Forum.
00:16:14.320So, you know, it's not just limited to Canada, although obviously we're all Canadian and that is our focus.
00:16:19.040But, you know, I think just even that origin story of how we pivoted, how we went from just focusing on research to wanting to do journalism, it shows something that I think every business owner knows to be true, which is that you can't be too firm in your position.
00:16:36.040You have to be amendable to changing, to pivoting, to focusing on something new, depending on what the audience wants and where you're finding success.
00:16:45.660How do you define the editorial position?
00:16:49.880Because one of the challenges is that people in our space tend to get typecast by our critics.
00:16:55.000And, you know, every now and then the Huffington Post or whatever will slip in like a far right.
00:16:58.960And if you call them on it, they scurry away and change it because they know that they really can't defend it.
00:17:03.680But for people that like what is true north in that sense?
00:17:07.560Well, I think that that sort of old dynamic of left versus right doesn't really always apply.
00:17:12.820I mean, if you look at even just COVID and the vaccines, like people who were in favor of it versus people who opposed it, it didn't really fall on left, right, conservative, liberal views.
00:17:22.560So I think that there is a lot of sort of changing landscape when it comes to just political ideology in general.
00:17:28.520But I think as far as what we do at True North, from the perspective of our news, we are independent.
00:17:35.520I think that we just look to tell the other side of the story, look to tell stories that aren't being told.
00:17:51.500And so I think our news division, we try to be just neutral and straight down the middle.
00:17:56.420As far as our podcasts, I would say that we would probably tend to be more center right, conservative, critical, certainly of things like wokeism, you know, critical race theory, the Trudeau liberals, a lot of the sort of gender stuff that they push in.
00:18:12.800We tend to be very opposed to radical Islam and terrorism.
00:18:17.540And so those things, I think, certainly in Canada, would put us more on the center right.
00:18:23.020But, you know, it's really interesting.
00:18:24.200But because of our coverage, for instance, during COVID, when we were just really telling stories of people who got fired from their job because they didn't want to get a COVID vaccine or people who were skeptical for their own reasons, the audience that we're reaching really wasn't center right.
00:18:39.380And I think we brought a lot of people on board, I think a lot of people who would have never thought of themselves as conservatives, but, for instance, supported the Freedom Rally and supported the truckers.
00:18:48.400All of a sudden, they were smeared as far right.
00:18:50.080They started to realize, like, wow, you know, Candace Malcolm and Andrew Lawton are smeared as far right, but they're obviously not.
00:18:55.860So maybe, you know, they're getting smeared as far right.
00:18:58.840I have friends right now who are Jewish, who are pro-Israel, view themselves as liberal.
00:19:04.400But all of a sudden they're asking, you know, why is it only the conservative and right-wing media that is talking about this issue of these sort of crazy pro-Hamas rallies in Canada?
00:19:14.020And it kind of makes them question the entire media narrative, and they say, well, you know, why does it take right-wing media to expose this?
00:19:23.440Maybe you're not right-wing after all.
00:19:24.820Maybe I shouldn't have believed what the legacy media has said about you all these years.
00:19:28.680And, you know, I think everyone has their own moment when they wake up to realize that the things that legacy media say aren't necessarily true.
00:19:36.000And I think that so much of what the legacy media has said about our organization over the years really doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.
00:19:43.320Yeah, and I would also add to that, and it's a distinction I've made elsewhere, that there's a difference between being right-wing media and media that is of interest to people on the right.
00:19:53.560And by that, what I mean is that you can have an approach where you cover things that matter to a subset of the population without pandering to them and without being especially biased.
00:20:03.480And one of the things that I've absolutely loved doing with True North is covering leadership races within the Conservative Party.
00:20:10.520We've had two in the time that I've been at True North, one in 2020 and another in 2022.
00:20:15.960And in both of these, True North really stood out for asking questions of leadership candidates that mattered, whereas whenever any of these went on CBC, for starters,
00:20:24.920they're not speaking to the people that actually make the decisions in those races, which are Conservative Party members,
00:20:30.000but they're speaking about issues that don't even matter to people.
00:20:32.920They're asking questions about climate change and abortion and systemic racism, whereas people want to know how are you going to deal with Quebec,
00:20:40.180and what's your view on supply management, and how are you going to keep caucus together, and are you going to have free votes?
00:20:45.200And I think that's probably a real distinction of where we add value, and it's not that we're being uncritical.
00:20:50.540I think oftentimes we have harsher words for some Conservative politicians than we do for some on the left.
00:20:55.800It's that we are asking those questions in a way that matters to a portion of the population that really seems to be forgotten or denigrated by the legacy media.
00:21:27.520But when you see the legacy media attacking Pierre Polyev, when you see the legacy media overtly attacking Conservatives,
00:21:34.540even Conservative media like myself and you, Andrew, we're really just a stand-in, right?
00:21:39.140We're a stand-in for everyday Canadians that the media doesn't understand and doesn't like.
00:21:43.800And I think a lot of people finally see that.
00:21:46.300They see through the idea that, you know, during a leadership race, why would a Conservative want to sit there and focus entirely on the Liberal agenda
00:21:54.820and Liberal talking points and Liberal issues, when issues that matter to many Canadians and Conservative voters just happen to be very different.
00:22:01.860Like, we don't want to sit here and talk about hypotheticals and talk about, you know, law changes that will never happen.
00:22:07.700We want to talk about the cost of living and we want to talk about, you know, our communities and our culture.
00:22:11.380And I think that giving those people the time of day, trying to understand them, the Trucker Convoy or Freedom Convoy, again, is a great example.
00:22:18.560Rather than just looking at people and writing them off and saying that these are hateful people and we're not going to talk to them,
00:22:23.680you know, go figure out what it's all about and go figure out who these people are.
00:22:26.780And I think that's a lot of what we try to do here at True North.
00:22:29.480When you talk about storytelling, I've always been very keenly aware of the fact that True North is speaking to an audience that often doesn't get covered.
00:22:38.220And I mean, this is a big part of what CBC always says it does, is it wants to tell the stories of people in the rural and remote communities, people in the north, indigenous communities.
00:22:46.600And if CBC stuck to that, I think it would be more defensible as a public broadcaster.
00:22:51.420Instead, they want to, you know, host the Junos and, you know, have hockey, you know, games and play the Oscars and host the Olympics and all that stuff where there is a significant private sector competition.
00:23:01.780What do you think are the underserved communities in this country where True North can really make an impact in telling those stories?
00:23:08.600Well, just to add on to that point, I think the CBC loves to cover sort of very small communities when it comes to, like, I don't know, a First Nations community that believes in transgenderism that does some special ceremony.
00:23:22.580Like, they'll find the most obscure, strange, you know, thing that applies to, like, three people, and they'll focus on that and tell an entire story on it.
00:23:30.920And meanwhile, they'll completely ignore, like, vast numbers of working class First Nations people and Canadians who support industry, who want to see more things getting built, who want more development and more prosperity in the north.
00:24:16.200And I think that a lot of our audience for True North are people in Western Canada, people who feel ignored by the federal government and the legacy media.
00:24:24.180And those are the kind of people we want to stand in for, really, in a lot of ways, Andrew.
00:24:45.100People who were being discriminated against for their choices, people who had very valid medical reasons for not choosing to get vaccinated, they were just demonized.
00:24:56.480And I think that True North provided quite a big service.
00:24:59.300And we grew our audience significantly during that time by simply going out, finding those people, telling their stories, doing real reporting, talking about the things that were happening in those communities.
00:25:08.300I don't know why the legacy media chose to just completely disregard those people and not cover their stories because, first of all, their stories were really interesting.
00:25:16.580And by telling those stories, True North was able to, again, grow our audience, connect with a large number of people, create trust with a bunch of people who might not have otherwise heard of us or trusted us.
00:25:26.180And I think that, again, it was their loss because they just chose not to do their job, which was to report things that were happening in the country.
00:25:44.440We're going to continue to tell those stories.
00:25:46.380And to go back to Sun News for a moment, one of the things Sun News did that I always really respected was make a point of covering any provincial election, regardless of how big or small the province.
00:25:57.240They had a couple of people there when PEI, which is not a powerhouse population-wise in this country, was going to the polls.
00:26:04.160And one of the great assets that we have is that we have a very decentralized team at True North.
00:26:09.160And that doesn't mean we can cover the entire country.
00:26:11.400We don't have a full-time presence in Atlantic Canada right now, but we have in the past.
00:26:15.760And we've got people in BC, Alberta, Ontario, and so on.
00:26:19.140And that, I think, is really helpful because one of the big problems of the media is that you've got certainly local media in these sections.
00:26:24.800But the national media kind of views the country as just being this corridor from Toronto to Montreal and Ottawa, and that's really it.
00:26:33.240And anything that happens outside of that just becomes more and more abstract.
00:26:53.640And, you know, if you want to just find out what's happening locally, it's actually quite hard.
00:26:57.340And it's interesting, Andrew, because, you know, the whole point or part of the point of having these media bailouts and having these subsidies and tax credits to media companies is so that they will provide local journalism.
00:27:09.220And they'll provide storytelling and keeping people informed throughout the country.
00:27:16.180They don't do that clearly, because when you talk to people in Atlantic Canada, you know, I said that we focus on Western Canada as partially my own bias because that's where I'm from.
00:27:23.120And that's what I'm more familiar with.
00:27:24.400But I would love to hire someone on Atlantic Canada.
00:27:26.660And I, too, like that about Sudden News Network, especially for, you know, political junkies like us who actually really care about all these little mini small elections that are happening, municipal or provincial.
00:28:31.400She blabbed to the audience about our secret fun plans.
00:28:34.460Well, it's good that the audience at least thinks that we have a little bit of fun and that our Christmas parties aren't just like sitting in a boardroom at a hotel talking about our business plans for 2024.
00:28:46.140We're going to continue providing the news that people like.
00:28:49.740Some sort of exciting things that we're talking about, which is building more in-person studios somewhere in and around Toronto.
00:28:56.540We're currently looking at real estate and looking to build a proper setup.
00:29:00.660You know, one of the things that has helped True North grow and be successful is that we basically all outfitted ourselves with these great little home studios during COVID.
00:29:09.220And it is great to be able to, you know, record a show for me.
00:29:12.500I'm basically a part-time stay-at-home mom.
00:29:15.000And being able to be close to my kids is really great.
00:29:17.920But at the same time, when we're doing professional interviews, when we're doing shows, we want to, as we grow, we want to basically be able to have an in-person studio.