Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Ben Smith on Buzzfeed, Assange, and Bias Ahead of the Trump-Biden Debate | The TRUTH Podcast #53

00:00:00.000 I've often said that it feels like we're in a 1776 moment right now in the United States of America.

00:00:13.000 The political boundaries between the two political parties aren't exactly what they used to be, and they're changing in gradual ways.

00:00:20.000 But sometimes I worry it's less of a 1776 moment and more of an 1860 moment in this country.

00:00:26.000 There's now two kinds of coffee, two places where you get your pillows, two places where you get your news, depending on what kind of American you are.

00:00:34.000 I worry that there'll pretty soon be two kinds of America, depending on what kind of American you are.

00:00:41.000 And that worries me.

00:00:42.000 One of the things that's gotten us there, I believe, is the politicization of what were previously supposed to be nonpolitical or apolitical institutions.

00:00:50.000 Alexis de Tocqueville, he traveled this country a little over a century and a half ago, and he made the observation that a country this vast, this expansive geographically, this ethnically and religiously diverse isn't supposed to stand, actually.

00:01:04.000 It isn't supposed to last.

00:01:06.000 Unless there are certain apolitical institutions outside of the realm of partisan politics that hold us together, the sports stadiums of this country, the labs, the manufacturing facilities in this country, where you don't know whether the person next to you is a Democrat or Republican, nor does it matter because you're united in common purpose.

00:01:24.000 And that provides a common sense of shared identity and purpose that allows us to disagree like hell in the political sphere while still knowing that we're one nation left at the end of it.

00:01:35.000 Yet today we live in a different America, one where that toxicity—and I wouldn't even call it toxicity, it might even be a healthy thing—of vigorous debate in partisan politics spills over into spheres like our workplaces, like the sports that we play, certainly the media ecosystems in which we operate as well.

00:01:53.000 And I think that is the quiet danger to the future existence of the country.

00:01:56.000 We are skating on thin ice.

00:01:59.000 We're in the middle of a kind of cold war in this country, a cold cultural civil war.

00:02:04.000 Not of the kind that we had in 1860, and I hope we don't get there.

00:02:08.000 But part of the way we're going to be sure not to get there is if we revive those apolitical spaces outside of the realm of American politics.

00:02:17.000 And that's what we're missing today.

00:02:18.000 The reality is, I don't think that the political spectrum necessarily is two poles at one end of the left and one end of the right.

00:02:25.000 And I don't think national unity comes from showing up in the 50-yard line and saying, hey, let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

00:02:31.000 That only gets the people who are in the 30-yard line on either side of the 50 anyway.

00:02:35.000 I think the way we're going to unite this country, if at all, we're even going to.

00:02:38.000 I think that's an open question today, but I hope and expect that we can and will.

00:02:43.000 If we're going to unite this country, I think it's going to be by rediscovering those common threads that unite all Americans despite the more superficial differences in identity or partisan affiliation.

00:02:54.000 Do those ideals still exist?

00:02:57.000 And what's it going to take to awaken a culture that celebrates them again?

00:03:02.000 I don't mean to sound like a kumbaya fantasy, talking about national unity wonderland sort of positivity here.

00:03:09.000 That's not the goal.

00:03:10.000 The goal is actually to confront the hard truth that we're far from there today, but it may take more open conversations between people who vehemently disagree on certain things, but still are grounded in shared principles like free expression and free speech that in some ways we've forgotten in the face of that division.

00:03:27.000 So in the spirit of that, I've actually invited on today's podcast a guy who I had a recent conversation with in a very different context.

00:03:32.000 He's actually a member of the media, which I often rail against.

00:03:36.000 He was the news chief at BuzzFeed, a company that I've taken an activist stake in, as many of you are probably aware, and we had a conversation about that in the future of media.

00:03:45.000 I don't expect to talk to him about that today, though we may touch on it a little bit, but to have a conversation more as two citizens who might have different views from one another on a number of things, but talking about what the future of national unity in this country really looks like, if we are to achieve it, is it achievable?

00:03:59.000 And if so, what's our path to get there?

00:04:02.000 So with pleasure, I'm welcoming on my podcast now, after having gone on his, Ben Smith.

00:04:06.000 He's some senior post or other at Semaphore.

00:04:09.000 What's exactly your title there, Ben?

00:04:11.000 Editor-in-Chief?

00:04:13.000 I'm looking forward to this conversation because I actually enjoyed that one quite a bit.

00:04:16.000 I did end up having, by the way, a chat with Jonah Peretti, the CEO of Buzzfeed, and so I told you we were going to circle up after that.

00:04:23.000 We can reserve that for the end of this conversation.

00:04:25.000 It's actually not what I'm most interested in talking about today, though we can get back to discussions about the media towards the end.

00:04:32.000 But the thing I wanted to start out with was two events that I experienced in the last week, which fascinated me.

00:04:37.000 Two comments that I made and the reactions that I got in response to them.

00:04:41.000 One was a reiteration of one of the positions that I adopted during the presidential campaign.

00:04:47.000 I personally believe, and you can disagree with this, it's fair, a lot of people do, but it's my view that it's perfectly reasonable for every high school senior to have to pass the same civics test and to take the same oath of loyalty to the United States of America As every legal immigrant to this country does before they become a voting citizen. 0.63

00:05:08.000 To say that for the same reasons that we require a legal immigrant to this country to pass the civics test and to be able to swear an oath of allegiance to the country, we shouldn't expect any less of our own citizens and let's start with a clean fresh slate with high school graduates and the next generation.

00:05:24.000 And I bring that up not to talk about the policy merits of that, though you're free to comment on it, but I bring it up because a guy by the name of Matty Glazes, you know, posts, you probably know him, posts on social media saying that, wait, wait, wait a minute, wouldn't this actually advantage Democrats given the realignments that we're seeing in both parties?

00:05:40.000 To which my response is, I don't particularly care which party it advantages.

00:05:44.000 I think it's going to advantage the United States of America and our civic identity.

00:05:47.000 So that happened a few days ago.

00:05:49.000 Then just in more recent days, I think it was just yesterday, right?

00:05:52.000 Julian Assange reaches a pardon deal and he is, not a pardon deal, but a plea deal to be able to go free.

00:05:58.000 He's ultimately going to be free and able to even potentially travel in the United States by pleading guilty to some charges.

00:06:03.000 And I shared my view that I think he deserves a full pardon because he was held to a different standard than many members of the press.

00:06:09.000 It just happens to be an independent view that I have on the merits of the matter.

00:06:12.000 You could disagree or agree.

00:06:14.000 And again, in this case, another member of the media, actually, I think in this case was this David Wiegel, your colleague, if I'm not mistaken, Semaphore, posted, but isn't it Donald Trump and Bill Barr's DOJ that actually indicted him?

00:06:29.000 And I think that there's a consistent pattern across those two incidents which leaves me deeply concerned that it's impossible to adopt policy positions or have a principled policy debate on the merits in this country if your policy positions are imprisoned by being a projection of what your partisan affiliation was deemed to be.

00:06:50.000 I think it becomes impossible to have a foreign policy.

00:06:52.000 I think it becomes impossible for the United States to have a domestic policy.

00:06:56.000 If every policy discussion becomes a projection of what the partisan prediction of somebody's position was supposed to be, and that worries me deeply as it relates to this theme of national unity.

00:07:06.000 And for somebody who sits in this seated vantage point of the media that you do, I just thought it would be an interesting place to open up our conversation and hear your reaction to that.

00:07:14.000 Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's so much in what you just said.

00:07:17.000 And I think, in some sense, I think you yourself obviously feel these polls.

00:07:22.000 I mean, everything you said, I think, about people wanting to feel American and to feel united across parties, like, just, I think that's...

00:07:32.000 Those are 90% of people would probably agree.

00:07:35.000 And to want institutions that are not polarized and that are not partisan, although I would say the history of the United States, of the media and of other institutions, often is of this deep polarization.

00:07:48.000 But I mean, but I guess I feel like watching you, I see both sides of this.

00:07:53.000 I mean, you tried to start a kind of politicized investment vehicle, which is a non-political space, because there's a big opportunity there and a lot of demand, I think, for politics.

00:08:03.000 And And so I guess I'm curious, and maybe this is to sort of put aside for a moment, but I am curious how you navigate these two different polls, which you must feel when you run for office, you obviously feel them.

00:08:14.000 And when you go on Twitter, you also inevitably find somebody who will troll you and disagree with you and take a very partisan view of what are not necessarily partisan issues.

00:08:25.000 I mean, on the specific Assange issue, I totally agree with you that it was incredibly...

00:08:31.000 I think it's a very dangerous prosecution for the media, because when you sort of write it charge by charge, a lot of what Assange was doing looks a lot like journalism, and I think whatever the good reason they may have had to charge him kind of wasn't worth the threat to journalism.

00:08:44.000 I do think more broadly, the way this bleeds into and kind of melts reporters' brains is that there's a sense of that you want to evaluate facts or claims or Or, you know, or things happening in the world, through a lens that is, who will this help in a partisan way?

00:09:05.000 Or, do I trust this person because they have a partisan agenda?

00:09:10.000 And, you know, often people who have insane partisan agendas that you think are totally nuts are right on the facts, and people who you think are great people...

00:09:19.000 For all the right reasons and in good faith, which is this elusive thing people on the internet like to talk about who's in good faith and who's in bad faith, sometimes they're wrong.

00:09:26.000 And I think it's really hard but important as reporters to kind of suspend your judgments of the source in favor of trying to figure out what's actually going on.

00:09:38.000 Yeah, look, that's in a way the narrow journalistic version of the same thing.

00:09:42.000 Yeah, I mean, that gets into your certain profession, which I think is super fascinating and I'd love to come back to.

00:09:47.000 I think this is not necessarily where I'm asking you to engage in sort of a self-flogging of your profession.

00:09:52.000 No, I was trying to.

00:09:53.000 That was more of Vivek flogging.

00:09:55.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:09:56.000 You're beating me to the punch.

00:09:58.000 I've done plenty of that.

00:09:59.000 That's actually not...

00:10:00.000 You know, my main goal of this conversation, but to just sort of surface a deeper question outside of any particular vertical media or otherwise.

00:10:08.000 So I say this in the spirit of not being defensive, but you asked a question.

00:10:11.000 I think it's an interesting conversation to have because I think it's an instructive example, right?

00:10:16.000 So you say I started a politicized investment vehicle, and so how do I navigate this tension?

00:10:22.000 Actually, the reality is that was indeed, no doubt, and so I don't blame you for saying it, the media's characterization of what I started, a firm called Strive.

00:10:29.000 I was a co-founder of this before I ran for U.S. president.

00:10:33.000 But actually, the purpose of Strive was to start an apolitical investment vehicle, right?

00:10:38.000 And not an investment vehicle, but an investment firm that offered the kinds of index funds offered by the likes of BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, but without any ESG considerations in how the proxies were voted or in how the capital was allocated or spoken for.

00:10:55.000 And this is at a time where the ground has actually shifted, I think, in part due to the existence of Strive even in the last couple of years.

00:11:01.000 But if you rewind the clock even a couple of years, every major institution was allocating their capital and, more importantly, voting their shares in corporate America, in part based on whether or not those votes would help stave off global climate change or establish a more just order of global equity.

00:11:19.000 Say what you will on the underlying merits.

00:11:21.000 It had nothing to do with the merits of Chevron as a business to say they had to adopt scope 3 emissions caps or for Apple to adopt racial equity audits, but that these were deemed to be independently worthy things for those companies to do as voted for by BlackRock and State Street, which were real world examples.

00:11:37.000 And so the firm that I started was Strive, whose whole premise was to say, in contrast to an ecosystem of conservative investments, which said that we would vote for conservative values or Second Amendment rights or pro-life views in the boardroom.

00:11:48.000 That does exist.

00:11:50.000 Strive's actual purpose was to be completely neutral and say, we're not going to advance anybody's political views in the boardroom.

00:11:56.000 And yet, the existence of that alternative, which actually crossed over a billion dollars in assets under management in its first year, showing, I think, the demand that everyday Americans had for such alternatives, Was characterized so much so that your understanding of it as not being in that world, but perhaps consuming the descriptions of it, was that that actually was a politicized investment.

00:12:15.000 No, I understand what you're saying, but I think that the opportunity you took there was people who were upset for political reasons at As you say, what I guess these giant investment funds considered sort of values-based choices or considered the obvious right thing to do, but that were in fact, as you say, contested policy positions.

00:12:36.000 I just always find that, because I'm in these conversations a lot also, that it's so easy to talk about, well, look, we should all find spaces where everyone can agree on certain values and be together as Americans.

00:12:49.000 And then you get to a space where you see, wow, everybody agrees on these values, and I don't agree with that.

00:12:55.000 And I think that these people are out of line, and I'm going to, in your case, start an alternative and carve out a space that is separate and is confrontational.

00:13:05.000 I don't mean that in a bad way, but just there's an aiming to have a political confrontation and argument that Over these choices that the big establishment institutions that everybody was investing in were making, like, that's politics.

00:13:15.000 And there's confrontation there.

00:13:17.000 And that is, and it's very hard to sort of both want, you know, harmony and an establishment that is totally unified, and reserve the right to object really vociferously to the establishment's values.

00:13:28.000 And I think, I don't know, I just feel like that's the line you're walking.

00:13:30.000 It's not as, and it's just easy, it's easy to say both things, but hard to do them at the same time.

00:13:35.000 Well, look, I think one of the things that's actually harder than even that enterprise, and I think it's difficult to sort of play with this 50-yard line, meet in the middle, kumbaya vision of national unity, which is not the one that I advance.

00:13:48.000 I think a lot of people adopt that view.

00:13:50.000 I think a lot of so-called centrists in the Republican primary, as distinguished from myself, might have adopted that view of national unity.

00:13:56.000 I reject that because I think it's basically impossible and even incoherent to get there because it presumes there's two polls in the first place.

00:14:03.000 But what I do think is possible but missing is a lot harder work that we have cut out for us, which is reviving Institutional purpose, right?

00:14:12.000 And here, this could span the media, could span financial institutions, could span universities, just whatever your institution is.

00:14:19.000 I think a big part of what we've lost in the country, and might be a deeper root cause of some of the division, which may just be a symptom of that, is that loss of actual, what is the purpose of this institution, right?

00:14:30.000 Why does said financial institution exist?

00:14:33.000 Why does Harvard University exist?

00:14:35.000 Why does Semaphore exist?

00:14:37.000 And the same question I asked in my letter of BuzzFeed.

00:14:39.000 Why does BuzzFeed exist?

00:14:42.000 I think a lot of institutions today have trouble answering that essential question, the raison d'etre for why your own institution, your company, your nonprofit, your university exists.

00:14:53.000 And into that vacuum then seeps, I think, the otherwise ever expansive force like light, like air, of other views that one might have on questions that are orthogonal to that institution.

00:15:06.000 And so I guess my response to you, and I'd love to hear your reaction to it, is What happens when you join an institution and you say, well, no, no, I disagree with X? If X goes to the core of what that institution is about, then you shouldn't be there.

00:15:22.000 But if X goes to the range of a million other questions that have nothing to do with the purpose of that institution, then your disagreement with somebody else who works at that institution on that matter is literally irrelevant, right?

00:15:33.000 So let's say that you disagree on, just think about, let's say you work at a steakhouse, right?

00:15:38.000 And you disagree, as I would, on principle of, you know, my own moral perspective is that I don't kill animals for culinary pleasure in my own life.

00:15:48.000 That's why I'm a vegetarian.

00:15:50.000 I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse, right?

00:15:52.000 They shouldn't want me even if that makes them more diverse, even ideologically diverse, right?

00:15:57.000 It just doesn't make sense.

00:15:58.000 And they're free to do what they do, and I wouldn't make a good employee there.

00:16:01.000 But suppose another guy works there and has a different view on, I don't know, Gun control or taxation.

00:16:08.000 That has nothing to do with whether or not that steakhouse is going to actually be the best possible institution.

00:16:13.000 And I think that that institutional purpose is part of what so many American institutions are missing today, that that might actually be a path back to national unity, not of a kumbaya variety, but of an actual variety that includes some element of healthy confrontation, but still a deeper unity that underlies it, if that makes sense.

00:16:32.000 Yeah, sure.

00:16:32.000 And that to some degree, we should stay in our lands.

00:16:35.000 I mean, I do think there's, again, I don't mean to keep going back to media.

00:16:38.000 It's all I know.

00:16:40.000 But I do think that what you're saying is like the steakhouse should stay in its land and be a steakhouse and think about things that are relevant to being a steakhouse.

00:16:47.000 I think it's true of, I mean, I think from my perspective, it's true of journalism organizations.

00:16:51.000 It's true of Other organizations.

00:16:53.000 But I think there's always in the United States been a real diversity and range of institutions that are deeply connected to movement politics left and right, which is the force.

00:17:02.000 I mean, that's the force that I think you're describing it as light.

00:17:05.000 But in some sense, we're in this moment of populism and movement politics that are sweeping through these institutions back and forth.

00:17:11.000 And yeah, I think you're right, often in a way that's orthogonal to what they To the focus of the institutions.

00:17:19.000 I mean, I think, you know, you see it, I mean, the place I see it most right now is in progressive nonprofits, which, you know, have been often totally paralyzed by fights over things that, you Juvenile justice, but are paralyzed by fights over Gaza, for instance.

00:17:38.000 Yeah, look, I think that it could be intra-left or intra-right, but it's a deeper point of what's the purpose of the institution.

00:17:44.000 I mean, let's actually, since it's your own...

00:17:46.000 Yeah, but have people see politics in their lives, in a way.

00:17:48.000 Like, is it all-encompassing?

00:17:50.000 Is it all-encompassing or isn't it?

00:17:52.000 I think that that's the question.

00:17:54.000 And, you know, let's talk about journalism, since it is your home turf for a second, right?

00:17:58.000 What...

00:17:59.000 What do you think could be, and not to say that every journalistic institution has to have the same purpose, but let's take Let's take your own institution, right?

00:18:09.000 Yeah.

00:18:09.000 In first personal terms.

00:18:11.000 What do you view as Semaphore's purpose as an institution?

00:18:17.000 What is your role there?

00:18:18.000 And how is that or isn't that separate from politics?

00:18:22.000 And is politics all-encompassing in certain circumstances?

00:18:26.000 Or is it something that is apart from an independent journalistic mission of the place where you work?

00:18:32.000 Just to take that as an example.

00:18:33.000 Yeah, no, it's a great question.

00:18:34.000 And I guess just to sort of set the stage a little, I do think there's a sort of false memory of American history that, and in most of American history, most journalistic outlets were wildly partisan and deeply connected to political parties or run by them.

00:18:45.000 Fair enough.

00:18:46.000 And often totally insane.

00:18:48.000 And the thing that we remember as the Golden Age was a pretty narrow post-war period of giant corporate media dominating the landscape and adhering to a certain set of legal and social agreements that there was sort of a I mean, I enjoyed it, but it's not the true history of American media.

00:19:10.000 We certainly see, and I see our mission as trying to provide a bit of an antidote to the hyperpolarized media.

00:19:19.000 And there are different ways you can do that, I think.

00:19:22.000 That's part of the mission.

00:19:25.000 Absolutely.

00:19:25.000 And the way we see it is that journalists and people in the public sphere always have views and that they used to be a convention, and I think it kind of worked, that journalists pretended not to.

00:19:42.000 And that you would write an article and you would remain silent on your view or you would smuggle it in through like a quote here or there, but that the news article was itself just a set of factual statements.

00:19:52.000 I think that was never really true.

00:19:54.000 It always had a set of inherent biases in it.

00:19:57.000 And, and, Now nobody really buys that that's true.

00:20:00.000 And I think the way around that is we've literally, in the form of how we write stories, we say, here are the facts, here is the journalist's view.

00:20:08.000 And then where we can find a kind of robust dissenting view, here's somebody who disagrees with us.

00:20:12.000 Because I think if you're just trying to consume news in this chaotic, crazy landscape that...

00:20:18.000 You know, you want to figure out what are the agreed upon facts, but then you want to hear what smart people from different ideologies and different parts of the world, by the way, are saying about those same things.

00:20:28.000 And I think one of the nice things about running this particular newsroom, because we're global at birth.

00:20:34.000 We launched in the U.S. and in sub-Saharan Africa.

00:20:36.000 We're launching in the Gulf soon.

00:20:38.000 We have people from all sorts of different political and personal backgrounds and geographical backgrounds.

00:20:43.000 And you just have to know that internally people are going to have really deep disagreements on Gaza.

00:20:48.000 On the presidential politics, on really important stuff.

00:20:52.000 And I think from our DNA from the start is sort of an internal agreement that look like we're not aimed at building an internal or external consensus.

00:21:02.000 We're trying to sort of figure out what's happening and share different points of view.

00:21:07.000 And look, I think that that's an interesting mission.

00:21:10.000 I think it's an admirable mission.

00:21:12.000 It's bold and you'll find out whether or not customers want it.

00:21:15.000 And also whether or not you stay, as many organizations across sectors have failed to do, actually stay true to that mission, which I think is one, it's a hard enough thing to articulate a worthy mission.

00:21:25.000 It's harder still to stay true to that.

00:21:27.000 For sure.

00:21:28.000 And we'll definitely make our mistakes along the way.

00:21:31.000 Yeah, I mean, every organization does, but this is not specifically, I say that because it's home turf for you to use as an example.

00:21:38.000 Where I actually have no problem with media organizations adopting a particular bias, so long as that's actually true to their stated purpose.

00:21:46.000 It's perfectly legitimate for there to exist progressive opinion outlets of a variety of shades, just as there are conservative opinion outlets of a variety of shades.

00:21:58.000 But I think where we sometimes run into a tripwire is, as you pointed out, the pretense of claiming that this is actually a neutral Report the facts, journalistic endeavor, when in fact it is something other than that.

00:22:12.000 And that dishonesty, I think, is part of what creates distrust, which in turn is the substrate for division.

00:22:18.000 And that, by the way, is the same principle that applies to asset management, right?

00:22:21.000 The way you end up in this spiral is if the supposedly largest neutral asset management institutions say our sole objective is to make you money and maximize your bottom dollar, And yet, because certain of their clients are state pension funds that have demanded that they adopt political values for all of their clients, are actually voting their shares in ways that do advance some political values, even though it's co-mingled with the goal of maximizing financial value.

00:22:47.000 It creates any alternative to that, even if it was a particularly neutral one, like the one I aspired it ended up starting, to itself be framed in the context of a political reactionary response.

00:22:57.000 Can I push you on that a little though?

00:23:01.000 From my perspective, a fund manager who doesn't care about governance is in the long term hurting my investments.

00:23:09.000 And that you're moved to undermine pressure across the board on companies to improve their governance.

00:23:14.000 I don't know.

00:23:15.000 That kind of makes me nervous.

00:23:16.000 Yeah, well, of course.

00:23:17.000 Of course.

00:23:17.000 And this becomes home turf for me.

00:23:19.000 And so we could kind of go for a while on this.

00:23:21.000 So now you can smoke me.

00:23:22.000 But yes.

00:23:23.000 Well, I think that was, of course, the...

00:23:26.000 I'm going for the G in ESG, which is obviously the soft spot here.

00:23:30.000 And just as you would appreciate on the other side, I would be surprised if there's a version of this debate that I have not had in the last couple of years.

00:23:37.000 But that's the one that always comes up, right?

00:23:40.000 Is, oh, no, no, what about the governance aspect?

00:23:42.000 And actually, that is internal to maximization of long-run value, so you wouldn't need a three-letter acronym for it.

00:23:48.000 So then you move to sustainability.

00:23:50.000 They use the G, but the S actually was social, by the way, in the original version, in the original instantiation.

00:23:55.000 Environmental, social, and governance factors.

00:23:57.000 So the G was used as a Trojan horse to smuggle in the E and the S, which, you know, again, I prefer to discuss in the specifics.

00:24:03.000 Is it in the best interest of Apple to adopt racial equity audits or not?

00:24:08.000 And so I'll just give you the two examples here that might, you know, color your thinking on the facts of it, right?

00:24:14.000 Because the public reporting of it, you know, BlackRock's own, so to speak, yeah.

00:24:20.000 You know, BlackRock's own characterization of it is exactly what they've clearly done a great job of perpetuating because you, you know, smart folks like you've imbibed it.

00:24:27.000 It's just about governance and long-run investment value.

00:24:29.000 You keep thinking, Ivan, but you're always accusing people of imbibing things.

00:24:32.000 Well, I'm sure I do too.

00:24:33.000 I'm sure I do too, right?

00:24:34.000 We're all human beings, especially when we're outside of our own, you know, respective domains.

00:24:38.000 But when you go into the specifics, the views change a little bit, right?

00:24:42.000 Where, in the case of Apple, right?

00:24:44.000 So Apple...

00:24:45.000 Not some sort of conservative talking point spewing company or something like this, right?

00:24:50.000 It's Apple, at the time the world's largest company by market cap.

00:24:53.000 Today it's Nvidia, Apple's closed.

00:24:56.000 Apple did not want to adopt a racial equity audit.

00:24:58.000 There was some group, activist group, owned a tiny number of shares that put up a proposal that said they have to conduct a racial equity audit.

00:25:05.000 Their board laughed it off, said this is ridiculous.

00:25:08.000 But then BlackRock and State Street vote for Apple having to adopt a racial equity audit over the objection of its management and board.

00:25:14.000 It then carries 51% or over 50% shareholder support.

00:25:18.000 Apple then has to implement those racial equity audits because of this.

00:25:21.000 It doesn't have to because of an advisory shareholder vote, but they open themselves up to litigation if they don't, so they do.

00:25:26.000 Was that really in the best long-run interests of Apple, or was that in part motivated, at least in part, by some orthogonal social goal independent of value maximization?

00:25:35.000 Of course it was the latter.

00:25:36.000 Then you go to Chevron, right, which is an oil company.

00:25:39.000 That's what an oil company is as it produces and sells oil, was demanded by an activist group.

00:25:44.000 It was a Dutch nonprofit in this case that happened to hold some shares that said, hey, we have to adopt scope three emissions caps, which are not scope one, reducing your own emissions, but scope three that says all your vendors and suppliers, you have to actually take responsibility for those emissions as well.

00:25:57.000 Obviously not in the business interest of an oil company.

00:26:00.000 Some people may think it's in the business interest of society, but it's not in the business interest of a specific oil company.

00:26:06.000 And yet, the management team and the board didn't want to do it.

00:26:09.000 And in 2022, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, nonetheless, vote for it.

00:26:13.000 It has nothing to do with long-run value maximization.

00:26:15.000 And by the way, BlackRock, which held shares in PetroChina, did not vote for the same thing in PetroChina, because if they did, they would have lost their ability to sell mutual funds in China.

00:26:22.000 So I think it strains credulity, and I think it's a disservice to the discourse, because it goes back to this point as the slate of hand, which I do think is the source of the division, to claim to people that this has to do with long-run value maximization, which sounds like a colourable enough, like a credible enough explanation, but when you double-click and go into the details, obviously there's at least a commingled objective.

00:26:44.000 Just admit it in the open.

00:26:46.000 As I would say in the same thing in the media profession, which is to say that if you're The New York Times or The Washington Post, just say that there are certain limits Of certain viewpoints that we think it's our role to preserve the future of American democracy or whatever that we're not going to treat in the same way in the marketplace of ideas.

00:27:00.000 We're not going to pretend to be neutral.

00:27:01.000 We're just going to be honest about that.

00:27:03.000 And so whether it's financial institutions or media, I actually think we'd be a lot more united as a country if the leaders of those institutions were simply more honest about where their commitments were.

00:27:12.000 And I think that as a response to that, when that's my response, I think folks like me are sometimes mistaken as saying, I have an objection to what your mission is, when in fact, all I have an objection to is actually the dishonesty about it, which I think is the source of the debate.

00:27:26.000 Yeah.

00:27:26.000 I mean, without, I think I could probably argue with you about ESG for a while and probably lose because you've obviously been having these debates much longer than I have.

00:27:35.000 But I think that when you talk about wanting honesty from the leaders of the institution, say, in the period 2015 to 2020, this is just my own experience in talking to some of these people.

00:27:46.000 I think if you really push them and said, be honest, they would honestly come across as extremely confused and that this was a moment of real...

00:27:56.000 social movements that for, I think better and that I think produced a lot of good outcomes and a lot of bad outcomes and complicated period that historians will look back on with a lot of interest.

00:28:06.000 But I think that, you know, you'll find people who, and I think this is true in journalism, I don't know investing as well, but who feel that they got pulled away from their mission and are trying to get back to it.

00:28:17.000 You'll find people who, who, who would, you know, I think, I think what you're saying is that if they were honest, they would say, we're honestly trying to advance the In a lot of these mainstream media institutions, they'd say, look, we're honestly trying to advance a progressive social agenda.

00:28:28.000 I think that's not so true.

00:28:30.000 I think that if you put them on truth serum, some people might say that, but a lot of people wouldn't, and that it's a pretty confused landscape of these institutions that we're kind of Roiled by a moment of social change.

00:28:42.000 Some of them are pulling back.

00:28:43.000 Some of them are moving forward.

00:28:45.000 But I guess I think there's something about the way in which media and communication is shifting where people can kind of come across as hiding the ball and these old forms aren't suited for a more transparent world.

00:28:57.000 But I'm not sure it was a conspiracy.

00:28:59.000 Like, I'm not sure people were saying, like, we got to hide from Vivek what we really think as opposed to we're sort of being born along by the tide and not sure if we should be fighting it or resisting it in any given moment.

00:29:08.000 We're in a moment of kind of reorientation again, I think.

00:29:11.000 Yeah, look, I think that the question is what responsibilities does a leader bear in that, right?

00:29:17.000 I think it's not easy to be a leader of an institution in time of change and any time of the time of change, but especially in periods of Yeah, sure.

00:29:32.000 that are parallel lanes of the financial institution, the universe and media, because I think there are some deep parallels there.

00:29:36.000 I don't think the thing that I claimed that they should say, if they were being honest at the time, was that we're agents of progressive change.

00:29:42.000 But I think it would be an intellectual current that actually was true, that the business, whatever it is, a media institution, a financial institution, has to, and this is, I'm borrowing the intellectual parlance of said movement, has to earn its social license to operate, right?

00:30:00.000 That it has certain social responsibilities.

00:30:02.000 You didn't think it was more that we are the most trusted, most powerful people in society.

00:30:08.000 We're rich beyond measure.

00:30:10.000 And we are gods and it is on us to lead.

00:30:12.000 I feel like it was a bit more of that.

00:30:14.000 Well, I think that's a...

00:30:15.000 Yes, is the answer.

00:30:17.000 And I think that it is a certain magnanimity at its core.

00:30:21.000 Yeah, no less oblige, right?

00:30:23.000 Yeah, which I think is actually...

00:30:25.000 I find dangerous, but I think is at least very different than a cynical plot to exploit and deceive.

00:30:31.000 Yeah, it's an old American tradition, right?

00:30:34.000 It's a pre-American tradition.

00:30:35.000 I think it's King George.

00:30:37.000 It goes back to King George.

00:30:38.000 It's an ancient tradition.

00:30:39.000 That America actually, if anything, was an exception that stood out to the- No, but American business in the 20th century always felt a sort of social responsibility.

00:30:47.000 I think even more so through even much of human history, when you look at like the Dutch East India Company, right?

00:30:55.000 I mean, there was a sort of a commercial operation, but that had all kinds of other non-commercial commitments, right?

00:31:00.000 So this is- This is another podcast.

00:31:03.000 It's called Empire.

00:31:04.000 You should listen to it.

00:31:04.000 It's great.

00:31:06.000 But the themes are linked, right?

00:31:08.000 I think the reality is America, if anything, was at least a departure from an old European view that said that, you know what, we reject The idea of institutional elites that span the public and private sector that together decide what we the people are or aren't able to do, but that we the people, for better or worse, make our own decisions, regardless of what the managerial elite, you know, may impose upon us.

00:31:34.000 Versus the noblesse oblige.

00:31:35.000 I think that's actually straight from the declaration.

00:31:38.000 Maybe more eloquently written by DJ, but, you know, I think it's the basic idea in a modern- He hated managerial elites.

00:31:45.000 He did.

00:31:45.000 And I think Burnham was maybe a resuscitation of Jefferson in modern clothing.

00:31:51.000 And I think these were probably the central ideas that motivated my own presidential campaign.

00:31:55.000 But put that to one side, I think it is a kind of, you're right, benevolence.

00:31:59.000 A kind of benevolence and lack of clarity in the moments of leadership about what exactly you're supposed to do with your position of privilege as a leader in making the world a better place.

00:32:13.000 I think one of the things that would have gone a long way at the time would be to have a sense of honesty about even the confusion.

00:32:21.000 I think that alone would have gone a long way.

00:32:24.000 For business leaders not to change at the Business Roundtable in October of 2020 or for Larry Fink atop the mountaintops of Davos to make declarations on one side of this, because I think it may have been a symptom in certain cases of confusion of what an elite is supposed to do.

00:32:38.000 But he said, hey, we're not really sure what we're supposed to do right now.

00:32:41.000 And at the very least, and I think this is where we are today and relates to even some of my exchanges with BuzzFeed and some of the conversations you and I have had.

00:32:49.000 At the very least today, To just say as much, in retrospect, is that we were confused.

00:32:56.000 We're human beings.

00:32:57.000 We're fallen human beings.

00:32:59.000 And we made some mistakes.

00:33:01.000 But we made the mistakes with at least what we thought were the best of intentions at the time.

00:33:06.000 I think that alone would go a long way, both on the ESG front with respect to institutions, not retro, not backpedaling quietly and, hey, ESG, don't say it anymore.

00:33:16.000 That's what's going on in Wall Street right now.

00:33:18.000 Don't say the words anymore.

00:33:19.000 It's kind of this toxic thing now.

00:33:21.000 Sweep it under the rug and pretend that it never happened, but instead to confront and say, you know, we made some mistakes.

00:33:25.000 We probably shouldn't have voted this way in Exxon's or Apple's boardrooms, and we're not going to pretend that it didn't happen.

00:33:30.000 And the same thing with respect to the media, right?

00:33:32.000 Like there were certain things we suppressed on the eve of the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop or the origin of COVID or whatever it is.

00:33:37.000 And you might think it was some grand conspiracy, and maybe in certain cases it was, but in many cases it was just we weren't sure what to do and we were wrong and we're sorry about that.

00:33:47.000 I think that step alone, it's really hard to do it in the moment, though I think that'd be the best thing to do is say we're not sure.

00:33:53.000 But even in retrospect, I think that's an opportunity available to said leaders of such institutions that I think would have such a therapeutic effect on this country, which is why I've made it this kind of, you know, I don't mean to sound like a sanctimonious high horse rider, but I do think it's an available option that actually could be a down payment on a more unified future.

00:34:12.000 I mean, it's gracious of you to suggest that the people you're criticizing You know, conduct investigations of themselves.

00:34:21.000 And actually, just to be non-sarcastic there, I totally agree. 0.98

00:34:25.000 And I wrote about specifically the Hunter Biden laptop at the time.

00:34:30.000 And I would say when I was at BuzzFeed News, you should congratulate Jonah on this.

00:34:34.000 We were the first to write about Hunter Biden's position at Burisma.

00:34:37.000 But I think...

00:34:40.000 And it would be, I think, I do totally with media institutions in particular.

00:34:43.000 And I think that part of the reason they don't is that they operate in this hyper-politicized landscape or think of themselves operating in which they feel that their enemies will jump on them.

00:34:52.000 That basically there is not a, that they, I don't think people running media institutions, I'm like sort of who are, and I'm like, it's kind of a relief for me to have started from scratch in a new moment.

00:35:01.000 And so I don't have to have a chip on my shoulder about it.

00:35:03.000 Can I give you a reason why I think why?

00:35:05.000 But I think that people running these institutions do feel, rightly, by the way, that Donald Trump would not say, you know what, I totally accept that.

00:35:13.000 There are times that make sense to me, that they were really paranoid about Russian interference because of the WikiLeaks, DNC stuff, and there had been Russian interference.

00:35:21.000 So when they saw Hunter Biden's laptop, which came out in this totally bizarre Rudy Giuliani centric way, they thought it was Russian interference in good faith.

00:35:29.000 They were totally wrong.

00:35:30.000 They reversed themselves too slowly.

00:35:32.000 They've written about it.

00:35:34.000 You know what?

00:35:34.000 Apology accepted.

00:35:35.000 Like that's not the environment in which they operate.

00:35:38.000 By the way, they should do it anyway.

00:35:39.000 They should do a big investigation of what went wrong there.

00:35:42.000 But I do think that that is easier for you to say that The New York Times should reinvestigate itself than it is for you politically to say, hey, guys, calm down about The New York Times.

00:35:53.000 They're trying to do a good job, but they're basically being honest.

00:35:56.000 They're just a little confused.

00:35:57.000 Like good luck getting up on stage at the next Trump rally and saying that.

00:36:01.000 I'll tell you where I'm at on this.

00:36:02.000 I'm not sure that that explanation is yet true, but I think of being just confused and trying to do a good job.

00:36:09.000 But I think the best, I think it would be, my mind on that would change decisively if you did have leadership that was willing to take that risk.

00:36:16.000 Because then for me, It changes the perspective completely, right?

00:36:19.000 Like, what am I going to do?

00:36:20.000 Keep railing on you because you've admitted your own- You'd have to.

00:36:22.000 Can you imagine getting up at one of those rallies?

00:36:24.000 Well, no, no, no.

00:36:25.000 Ex-post, I don't think so.

00:36:27.000 And I think a big part of the reason why Ben is- I actually think there's something else going on that we haven't talked about, and I think it's true in the financial sphere, and I think it's true in media as well, is actually the law.

00:36:38.000 I think that it becomes very difficult once you've then made said admission.

00:36:43.000 I think, unfortunately, like for the Black Rocks or for the other institutions of the world, that means they for years have admitted to fiduciary violations.

00:36:51.000 With respect to the media, I think there's a lot of exposure too.

00:36:57.000 We're much freer.

00:36:58.000 Honestly, you're talking about highly regulated industries.

00:37:01.000 The media does investigate itself.

00:37:02.000 The Times investigated itself after Jason Blair.

00:37:04.000 The Times investigated itself after the Iraq War.

00:37:07.000 There's no reason that institutions and media can't do that.

00:37:09.000 The First Amendment is free.

00:37:10.000 You would know whether or not whether, you know, I mean, the legal obstacles there, you're right, are probably lighter.

00:37:14.000 But I just think there's a concept, for example, in medicine, right?

00:37:17.000 There's these laws that...

00:37:21.000 Effectively permit, right?

00:37:22.000 One of the things you see in medical malpractice is to go to a total third-party area so we're not in the heated proximity of our respective past fields.

00:37:32.000 One thing that's really interesting is a patient is much less likely to want to sue a physician for malpractice when something bad happens, say in the OR, if the physician simply tells them, hey, the mistake was made, we were trying our best, and here's what happened.

00:37:53.000 And they cannot do that.

00:37:55.000 Their lawyers will not let them do that.

00:37:57.000 There are certain states actually that permit that, and there are certain states that don't.

00:38:01.000 And so one of the beauties of the United States is you kind of have a laboratory with Stan Baugh's.

00:38:05.000 That's interesting.

00:38:05.000 And it's just so much better in the states where actually you provide the latitude for the physician to be able to make that mistake without that being used against them.

00:38:13.000 Because it just reduces the net incidence of a thing that we actually think is just bad, which is like an apology.

00:38:19.000 A human apology and an acknowledgement of the truth with an apology that accompanies it actually avoids so much more of the medical malpractice litigation that you otherwise suffer in a space where you've actually crowded that out.

00:38:32.000 And so this isn't some sort of It can sound, I think, with a campaign and things like this, like a political high horse I'm riding, but it is, I think, a deep-seated...

00:38:40.000 I think the space for an apology, a human apology, I think, is something that we have crowded out for the worse.

00:38:46.000 And as we think about national unity, which is at least the theme I opened up with, and I'm interested, and it's on my mind a lot these days, is...

00:38:54.000 I think creating the space for that is something that both culturally, as you put out in the media, but even legally, I wonder how we are able to create the spaces for people to come out of the boxes that they've otherwise been put in.

00:39:06.000 They're not even the ones who often put themselves there, but even if they were the ones who put themselves there to provide some space for that, and I think that that's part of the oxygen that we could re-infuse in the room.

00:39:17.000 Oh yeah, and I think, again, there was a period on the internet, particularly internet journalism, when corrections were sort of like, you could actually fix things and you could correct in this very fulsome way that hadn't been true in print.

00:39:28.000 And I always found that very, very positive.

00:39:29.000 And one of my sort of formative experiences as a journalist at Politico in 2007, I reported, I had a source who was not lying to me, was just confused, who was high up on the John Edwards campaign and told me John Edwards would drop out.

00:39:43.000 This was a big moment at the time.

00:39:45.000 And I reported that totally wrongly.

00:39:47.000 And I can still like feel like how embarrassing that was when he, and just painful when I, like when I immediately proved to be wrong.

00:39:53.000 And then I wrote, because I had been kind of a blogger and I wrote like in a way that was, I think, unusual for that time.

00:39:58.000 I just quickly deleted the thing and apologized and explained how I'd gotten it wrong and got this wave of goodwill for that because that was so unusual.

00:40:05.000 And that was a real, like, learning experience for me.

00:40:07.000 And I think in my career, I've always sort of Yes, when you get things wrong, you shouldn't be defensive.

00:40:14.000 When people even quite obnoxiously on the internet tell you you're wrong, the right reaction is to say, thank you, appreciate it, you're trying to make us better.

00:40:21.000 I don't know, what do you think when it comes to politics?

00:40:24.000 Because I think that there's no legal liability on public figures, but I think people change positions without acknowledging it most of the time.

00:40:35.000 It's not, I think, considered a particularly good move in politics to apologize.

00:40:41.000 Yeah, I think that's definitely the approach, you know, in the modern era.

00:40:52.000 I mean, have you ever sort of come out and said, hey, I was sorry if I was wrong about that?

00:40:55.000 You know, look, I think that one of the things I... I don't think it worked out super well for me.

00:41:01.000 I think it was an instance where...

00:41:05.000 That was wrong, but I think that...

00:41:07.000 So here's the incidents that happened.

00:41:08.000 It was less on a policy position and more on...

00:41:12.000 On an approach that I took, right?

00:41:13.000 So one of the things I was really surprised by, I was actually not surprised, I was shocked at the first presidential debate.

00:41:20.000 This was in Milwaukee last August.

00:41:23.000 I think I had had a surge heading right into it, so that put me in the middle of the stage.

00:41:29.000 That was not what anybody had foreseen even as recently as a couple months earlier.

00:41:33.000 And we're three minutes into the debate before I ended up being the center of attention.

00:41:38.000 And not good attention, but attacks from Pence, Haley.

00:41:44.000 They came to the debate with prepared Zingers at me, right? 1.00

00:41:50.000 Because I think I was the surging one.

00:41:51.000 And I didn't expect that.

00:41:52.000 And so that threw off my hole in the week of a general election presidential debate, which is an interesting time to have this conversation.

00:41:59.000 But I had a rough thesis of the things I wanted to say completely.

00:42:03.000 It was fluid, totally out the window.

00:42:06.000 And that brought the fighter out of me, right?

00:42:09.000 And I had a lot of fun that night, but I did not hold any punches back.

00:42:14.000 I don't know if you watched it at the time or whatever.

00:42:16.000 So that was interesting.

00:42:18.000 And then I think that something interesting happened.

00:42:20.000 So I went back to places where I had been spending a lot of time in Iowa, New Hampshire, etc.

00:42:25.000 And I did more events than anybody else.

00:42:28.000 I loved that part of the campaign.

00:42:30.000 I don't think it was particularly helpful in garnering votes, by the way.

00:42:32.000 It's one of my learnings from the campaign is the in-person stuff is all about the imagery that that projects into the rest of the world.

00:42:39.000 It's not actually about capturing the votes of the people who are there.

00:42:42.000 And the other campaigns understood that deeply, and I, as this first-timer, did not.

00:42:46.000 But one of the things I loved about it anyway, and I wouldn't have done it differently, is I loved having actually those interactions just because they enriched me as a person and as a human being.

00:42:55.000 And so many of my fans on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, they were...

00:43:02.000 They were kind of disappointed, actually.

00:43:04.000 They were just like, I didn't like that.

00:43:05.000 I didn't like that debate performance.

00:43:08.000 There's one guy in New Hampshire in particular.

00:43:10.000 I remember his face.

00:43:10.000 I can't remember his name.

00:43:11.000 He was such an ardent debate guy.

00:43:14.000 He came up afterwards.

00:43:15.000 He was just like, I don't know.

00:43:16.000 You lost me at that debate.

00:43:19.000 At that debate.

00:43:19.000 I was like, that kind of hurt.

00:43:21.000 And then he came back about a month later and was just like, you got me back.

00:43:25.000 He came back even at the end of that event and said, okay, this is the one, this is the you that I remember.

00:43:30.000 Then he came back a month later and was back with vigor.

00:43:32.000 So I think at some point in the second debate, I think I said something to the effect of...

00:43:40.000 Look, I think that...

00:43:41.000 I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was to the effect of acknowledging that, look, the fighter approach of the first debate is...

00:43:49.000 It's not the whole me, right?

00:43:51.000 And the reality is, I am the new person here, and I've got to earn your trust.

00:43:55.000 And I understand that.

00:43:56.000 And looked at the camera and said it.

00:43:58.000 And I meant it.

00:43:59.000 Because I think that there takes a fighter to lead this country, but you also have to be strong enough to protect what you're fighting for, your inner kindness.

00:44:07.000 And I don't think that came across in that first debate, and I said so.

00:44:12.000 And I think that it came across in the short formats that you're presented as some kind of, not even a policy flip-flop, but an approach flip-flop, which I don't think landed particularly well.

00:44:25.000 No, we're not in an environment that, I mean, I think if you look at Donald Trump as sort of the master of this media environment and other things, I don't think we're in a political environment that particularly rewards humility.

00:44:38.000 I think there's one thing about fake humility, right?

00:44:40.000 Because fake humility is just disgusting.

00:44:42.000 But I'm talking about even a world in which- A reflection or apology or any of that stuff.

00:44:49.000 Your enemies just pocket it and keep attacking you, right?

00:44:51.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:53.000 It's one of the things I learned about writing books in politics, too.

00:44:55.000 The only people who read the books through and through were Opposition Research.

00:44:59.000 Of course.

00:44:59.000 A lot of people bought the books.

00:45:00.000 A good number of them read the first chapter in the introduction, maybe.

00:45:03.000 But if you're going deep into the book, literally the only people who read it as thoroughly as I would have wanted someone to read the whole book are people in Opposition Research, which then lift out one thing that you said and used it against you.

00:45:17.000 A piece of advice to politicians is if you are going to write a book, at least either write it or know what it says.

00:45:21.000 That's a separate issue.

00:45:22.000 But if you know what it says and it's actually your book through and through, yeah, I think it doesn't reward the total honesty of saying that it takes 400 pages worth of context for any one of those statements to be evaluated in the context of the rest.

00:45:38.000 And so you're right.

00:45:39.000 We live in a world that doesn't reward that.

00:45:40.000 But what is leadership if it's not to buck The trend of your time, right?

00:45:46.000 Leaders create error.

00:45:48.000 I would say what you go about Donald Trump.

00:45:49.000 You have a different view than I do, probably.

00:45:52.000 I don't know for sure.

00:45:53.000 But I think one of the things I admire about him is he did change the game, you know, from what it was.

00:45:58.000 It wasn't played the way that it was post-2016 in the Republican Party as it was before, both on policy positions and on style.

00:46:07.000 But he's not a guy who does a lot of admitting that he's wrong.

00:46:10.000 But he has his style, right?

00:46:12.000 And I respect that when you get to the question of leadership- That's not really a question of style, right?

00:46:17.000 I think aren't we sort of agreeing that that would be- Well, where you put your emphasis.

00:46:20.000 Well, I think that, look, my question, my point is as a leader today, right?

00:46:25.000 Do you say that we're in an environment that doesn't reward that type of- In a political environment.

00:46:30.000 I think actually in many places outside politics, it really does.

00:46:33.000 I think people do want to see that.

00:46:34.000 So like where would you say, even in business leadership or- Yeah, and internal, if you're running, you know, if you're running a company, if you're, I mean, I find in journalism it does, but you have to put up with a certain amount of people yelling at you on social media, but that you shouldn't.

00:46:48.000 Yeah, you shouldn't cater to that.

00:46:50.000 Yeah, I just think that, I guess I would say for me, it's like that's not an excuse or an out.

00:46:55.000 In fact, the politics doesn't reward that in the sense that if you want to be really, if you really want to lead the country, and you're cut out to lead it, and that's the way you want to do it, then you know what, like you can't complain that maybe I didn't do a good enough job of it would be my self assessment.

00:47:09.000 Are you apologizing here for not apologizing?

00:47:14.000 No, that's a little too meta.

00:47:15.000 I have to track that.

00:47:16.000 What I'm saying is somebody who wants to really change the game ought to step up and change the game rather than complaining about it.

00:47:23.000 And I think in some ways that may be what the future holds in store.

00:47:28.000 That's my view of it.

00:47:29.000 Yeah, and I do think there's something about this shift in...

00:47:32.000 In power and in relevance from institutions to individuals, that it comes with a whole set of, you know, you used to have political parties used to be really important, and now really it's just the leader of the party.

00:47:43.000 Journalists used to sort of hide or be sheltered inside institutions, and now I think people We have much more direct relationships, true across all sorts of different fields, sports.

00:47:51.000 People relate to athletes as much as they do to teams.

00:47:54.000 But it does mean that these decisions like around, you know, where are you transparent, where are you apologists, that used to sort of be these corporate institutional decisions are now these very individual ones.

00:48:04.000 And I think that's another confusing thing.

00:48:09.000 Well, I think it's liberating in some sense, too.

00:48:12.000 It's not somebody else's job.

00:48:14.000 It's in some ways your own job.

00:48:16.000 And I think that that's how the positive side of a modern internet-informed, internet-influenced economy is that anybody can become a leader, I think, by actually bucking that trend.

00:48:26.000 Not when it's easy, because then you wouldn't actually be doing it, but the person who maybe defects when it's hard.

00:48:33.000 And, you know, I'm very intrigued to see what becomes of your company's own stated mission in the direction you take, because it is a little bit contrarian at the time.

00:48:44.000 Maybe not to say it, but to actually do it, to be able to actually, you know, when it's hard, I guess maybe give you an opportunity.

00:48:51.000 You could do some, you know, advertising here.

00:48:53.000 But in a serious sense, It's easy to say that in the easy case of some sort of neutral, sort of off-the-beaten-track topic that nobody else is paying attention to.

00:49:05.000 That's easy.

00:49:06.000 Maybe it's space travel or talk about AI or something like this.

00:49:10.000 You know, the partisan divides haven't really ossified on such questions yet.

00:49:18.000 You know, I think Gaza in some ways sounds like it's hard, but it's not actually because there's enough sort of dissent that defies, you know, sort of traditional boundaries.

00:49:29.000 But like, what's an example of like a hard case, right?

00:49:33.000 Like a hard instance.

00:49:34.000 I mean, I would say Gaza's pretty hard because I think you have these, you know, you have two sets of narratives that don't touch and haven't for 75 years in some cases.

00:49:43.000 And so when you talk to intelligent, passionate people, each of whom thinks the other really authentically wants to kill them, right?

00:49:52.000 I mean, and I find that it's pretty challenging.

00:49:56.000 I think keeping, you know, and then you have people who work for you who are smart and informed and know varying degrees about it and disagree really, really deeply with each other.

00:50:05.000 And you've got to find a way to produce journalism that isn't, you know, that knows what the facts are.

00:50:11.000 And then the other thing is that tries to keep hold of what the facts are at a moment when You know, a bomb goes off, governments react to reports of who dropped the bomb, but you don't actually know for 24, 48 hours what happened.

00:50:25.000 And in the meantime, the world has moved on and people have reacted.

00:50:28.000 People make claims.

00:50:30.000 Don't go back and revise those claims because they're fighting a war.

00:50:34.000 And so it's challenging.

00:50:36.000 There's a level of just trying to sort of stick to what you know and be pretty humble about what you know and think and not imagine that your job is to change people's minds.

00:50:44.000 Yeah.

00:50:45.000 You know, is challenging around there.

00:50:47.000 I mean, presidential politics inevitably in the U.S. is going to be the one where, you know, people in October, in particular, I haven't covered a lot of presidential campaigns in my life, people make just, you know, come late October, both candidates will be making claims that are really, really shocking and massive about the other that will not be possible to get to the bottom of in the week between now and the election.

00:51:10.000 And then their partisans will be demanding, why aren't you leading your website with this shocking bombshell about the arms depot in 2004, if you remember that George Bush had left unguarded in Iraq, which was John Kerry's closing argument and then evaporated the day after the election.

00:51:29.000 But there's always stuff that becomes disproportionate in those final days and partisans Yeah, I don't know.

00:51:38.000 One question in closing.

00:51:41.000 I'm actually fascinated by this, but I'd love your prediction based on what you see in the ecosystem where you are at vantage point where you reside.

00:51:51.000 Do you already see a difference and do you expect to see a difference this fall?

00:51:59.000 In the media's decision of how it covers this election and Trump in particular, in light of, right?

00:52:07.000 It's so hard to sort of, for a lot of reasons, take stock of apologizing for what one did in the past.

00:52:12.000 But I think if most people were to do it again, I think the treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop or the COVID origin, some of the 2020 questions- Those two in particular, yeah.

00:52:20.000 Right?

00:52:20.000 I think most people would Honest journalists today who may have been on the wrong side of that would quietly at least admit that they were wrong and badly wrong and humbled by it, even though public forces may make it difficult for them to feel like they can say that in public in so many words.

00:52:35.000 Do you think that that's going to have an effect nonetheless on changing the way that they approach coverage of the candidates this fall versus the way they might have approached it in 2020?

00:52:50.000 Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think different institutions are different and in different places.

00:52:54.000 I do think that there was a sense, I think, among Democrats and a lot, and the Trump coalition was like newsrooms were less democratic than they were anti-Trump in a certain and the Trump coalition was like newsrooms were less democratic than If you look at the coalition of people who supported President Trump, it was non-college educated, not in the big cities.

00:53:18.000 And so it like newsrooms were very much, even if the reporters themselves, whatever it is they had in a culture that was pretty uncomprehending of Trump.

00:53:28.000 And there was a sense that like there must have been when he won in particular, that there just must have been some trick, like maybe it was the Russians.

00:53:35.000 Maybe it was Facebook.

00:53:36.000 They didn't get it.

00:53:37.000 It's just something, something happened.

00:53:39.000 Yeah, and that led to a kind of attempt to explain that, like, produced, like, the Cambridge Analytica thing, if you remember that, like, Facebook conspiracy.

00:53:49.000 You know, that...

00:53:50.000 And I think there is more of a...

00:53:53.000 Realization of the politics that, no, he's very popular and that's why he might win, which produces a more straightforward kind of coverage.

00:53:59.000 I mean, I think they also feel, I feel, that when people who feel like the media was too hard on President Trump, for instance, his, like, what I would say, I think, myself, I could be wrong, was his pretty messy mishandling of COVID at various times.

00:54:19.000 And that the...

00:54:22.000 That the only acceptable party line on the right is that Donald Trump is without blame.

00:54:29.000 The media was horribly biased against him.

00:54:31.000 I have two examples, the Hunter Biden laptop and The coverage of the COVID origin story and any criticism of Donald Trump can be dismissed or any coverage that we don't like can be dismissed as part of this broader theory I have about the media, which is why they got the Hunter laptop thing wrong.

00:54:49.000 I feel like it's sort of a defense mechanism and a way to avoid reckoning with things that actually happen in the world and get written about.

00:54:57.000 This is less about the retrospective re-litigation, but you and I have shared our views on that.

00:55:01.000 But I just wanted to...

00:55:03.000 I was just curious, like, even...

00:55:05.000 Going forward, it'll be messy.

00:55:07.000 That is going to have an impact on this time being covered differently than it was in 2020, which I know I'm different than you a little bit, but I think it was completely botched in 2020. But do you think it's going to be different this time around?

00:55:18.000 So I think newsrooms are going to try to be more restrained, basically, stay in their lane, as we were talking about before, a bit more.

00:55:25.000 You do think so.

00:55:26.000 I think they will try to be...

00:55:27.000 The environment's changed.

00:55:28.000 But it will wind up being sort of imperceptible, because I think people in politics experience media through what is the dumbest headline that anybody wrote that went viral on Twitter.

00:55:39.000 And they're not going to be...

00:55:41.000 These big institutions aren't going to be like...

00:55:44.000 I don't think they've really decided where they are.

00:55:47.000 They're going to be messy.

00:55:48.000 They're going to be all over the map.

00:55:49.000 They're going to make mistakes in all sorts of directions and do stuff that winds up.

00:55:52.000 I don't think a sort of normal person observing it is going to say, oh, wow, they pivoted.

00:55:58.000 And a normal person observing it is going to find a lot of stuff to object to.

00:56:01.000 I think no matter who wins the election, I think if that direction is a perceptible difference, I think it will have a...

00:56:11.000 Not a small, but a major positive impact on the country.

00:56:14.000 I think the media landscape is so diverse that part of what you say is if you're going to the lowest common denominator and people make their assessments of the media based on that, then I think that'll be what it is.

00:56:28.000 But if there is a perceptible difference, and I think the public is...

00:56:32.000 I think the public generally is pretty smart, actually.

00:56:35.000 It doesn't collectively get it right every time, but I think the American way is predicated on a pretty well-founded trust in the public over the course of time.

00:56:43.000 I think if the public has the right sniff test to say, hey, this was a little bit different in terms of the way what we were served up than feeling like there were bans on what...

00:56:54.000 Remember back in 2020, it wasn't just those two stories.

00:56:56.000 It was against an environment where you were banned from even saying certain things.

00:56:59.000 In the lead-up to that, right?

00:57:00.000 Your social media accounts were locked.

00:57:02.000 Then the media stories you got were the opposite headlines of what you weren't allowed to say in contravention.

00:57:06.000 That this time around, it feels just like categorically different.

00:57:09.000 Not imperceptibly, but actually perceptibly different.

00:57:12.000 A lot of what you're talking about is Twitter.

00:57:14.000 It's going to be a major positive.

00:57:15.000 You're a guy who spends a lot of time on Twitter, and the thing you're talking about is not putting your Twitter account locked or not locked.

00:57:21.000 It was not a common American experience.

00:57:24.000 It applied to YouTube and Facebook in 2020 as well, to be sure.

00:57:28.000 Yeah, but I think you're talking about the experience of a participant in the political sort of space.

00:57:34.000 And I think Musk really has moved, really had a huge impact on this election by buying Twitter and changing that.

00:57:40.000 You believe for the better?

00:57:43.000 I don't know.

00:57:44.000 I mean, I think Twitter, I think it's complicated.

00:57:47.000 Yeah.

00:57:48.000 I think it's certainly been a difference.

00:57:51.000 I think on that we agree.

00:57:54.000 I think it's been unambiguously a net positive in moving not only the Overton window of what can be discussed, but more importantly, the culture of journalism that I wouldn't say leaves me optimistic, but I think leaves me hopeful about the possibility that the character of that coverage this time around,

00:58:13.000 I'm saying this in a hopeful way, can be different than in 2020. And that could be a different way of There's many ways to apologize, and it doesn't have to be an overt self-flogging and admission, but I think a learning and a constant iterative learning, I think, is something that itself can have its own positive effects.

00:58:33.000 I think Twitter actually found the best way to apologize, which is to force the richest man in the world to buy your company for $45 billion against his will.

00:58:42.000 Now, that's a real apology.

00:58:43.000 And it comes in and slashes about 75% of the Not that the shareholders were fine, though.

00:58:50.000 We'll pick up that conversation in the media, actually, in the construction of a media company.

00:58:55.000 Yeah, I'd love to.

00:58:56.000 Yeah, so how'd your conversation with Jonah go?

00:58:58.000 Oh, yeah, it was good.

00:58:59.000 It was actually a constructive conversation.

00:59:04.000 It went longer than planned in a good way, I think, because we had more to say and cover than we had budgeted for.

00:59:13.000 It was initially scheduled for a half hour.

00:59:14.000 We expanded to an hour.

00:59:16.000 We went well over an hour.

00:59:18.000 You know, I introduced him to two of the three directors that I want to put on the board and shared with him the idea of the third director.

00:59:28.000 I can't speak for him, but I'd like to think that they had...

00:59:30.000 I'd like to believe that it was a positive exchange where people left with, I think, a different impression than what some of the initial characterizations of my activism there was all about, which is about making this a better company and a better institution.

00:59:44.000 And I shared with him in candor No, what I said in the letter, which is that BuzzFeed lacks brand today.

00:59:50.000 And I think that we were able to have a constructive discussion about, okay, can that both be true, irrespective of what that new brand should be?

00:59:57.000 And I think those can be two separate conversations.

00:59:59.000 And I think we ended up having a productive business discussion about how to revive a company that may have not really reached its full potential.

01:00:11.000 I'm curious because, like, just knowing him very well and that company very well, knowing you a bit, like, I think that you came to it with a, to my mind, misapprehension that a lot of people who spend their lives in politics have about media, which is that it's mostly about politics, and that that company's DNA is so little about politics.

01:00:27.000 It's about fun stuff on the internet and, you know, hot ones.

01:00:30.000 Certainly anymore.

01:00:30.000 I mean, they got rid of their news division.

01:00:32.000 Yeah, but when I was there, we were like, I wish we had, you know, I wish we had succeeded in making that company mostly about politics, but honestly, we were a...

01:00:40.000 We built a very clear brand.

01:00:41.000 We did work I'm very proud of, but the DNA of that company is about 41 animals who are disappointed in you.

01:00:50.000 There was this internet culture that has faded, but I'm curious how you would think about...

01:00:58.000 That's the part of BuzzFeed that is its core brand that I find so far from what you think about, is Hot Ones and lists of cats.

01:01:06.000 Hot Ones is one of the things I've pointed out to in my letter as an- No, but I'm curious.

01:01:10.000 It just seems like the answer to that is politics.

01:01:15.000 Politics is a funny answer to that question.

01:01:16.000 Here's my view on that.

01:01:18.000 Regardless of what the answer to the question is, it actually goes back to that earlier theme that you and I discussed in this conversation.

01:01:25.000 Which is every institution needs an unambiguous, worthy purpose, right?

01:01:31.000 Is there a version of the world where that worthy purpose could be?

01:01:33.000 Is that true?

01:01:34.000 What's NBC Universal's unambiguous, worthy purpose?

01:01:37.000 I don't know that NBC Universal- I think big companies, mostly their purpose is to make money, right?

01:01:42.000 I think most big companies are not great emblems of what- Smaller companies should aspire to be, but I do think that Nvidia, or I think that Apple at its best, have had unambiguous corporate purposes.

01:01:54.000 And so the reality is, I think that BuzzFeed lacks one.

01:01:57.000 And so if there was a clearly articulated alternative thesis, such as, just peating off what you just said there, The internet deserves a sanctuary, a place where people feel joy rather than toxicity and have fun in an unconstrained and unifying way.

01:02:17.000 And that we own that.

01:02:18.000 Anybody who knows when they're coming to a BuzzFeed property, that's what they get.

01:02:21.000 That would be a coherent brand.

01:02:22.000 That sounds like something Jonah might have said to you.

01:02:24.000 That sounds much closer to the DNA of the thing.

01:02:26.000 But the reality is today, if you go to their audience base or their investor base or anything else, you ask somebody, have you heard of BuzzFeed?

01:02:32.000 Yes.

01:02:32.000 What does it stand for?

01:02:33.000 They have no idea.

01:02:34.000 And I think that that's not a unique indictment of BuzzFeed.

01:02:37.000 I think it could be an indictment of many organizations for a nonprofit out there.

01:02:41.000 But I do think we live in a moment where institutions that define for themselves and for the outside world and for the people who work there and for the Audiences and customers they serve, here's who we are and why we exist and what we actually stand for,

01:02:58.000 are at such a competitive advantage, and especially in a challenging media environment when, to the extent you're going to have a corporate brand in the context of a creator economy you're competing with anyway, where anybody could come from scratch and do this through the advent of modern social media, if a parent umbrella means anything, it has to offer the coherence of that brand.

01:03:18.000 Did he change your mind on anything?

01:03:20.000 Well, look, what I said in that conversation, and I stayed true to it, I said at the beginning of the conversation, my goal was, first of all, we'd never had a conversation.

01:03:27.000 And he knows a lot more about the company than I do sitting from the outside, and so do the other people from the company who joined the call.

01:03:33.000 And so my goal was to listen, actually, to share my views when asked.

01:03:37.000 But also, it's my view that you've got to try on The analogy I use is a set of clothes, and you got to try it on and see if it fits.

01:03:45.000 And maybe you discover that it fits.

01:03:48.000 And sometimes you discover why, when it doesn't fit, why exactly it doesn't.

01:03:52.000 But I think you have to put yourself in a position to do that.

01:03:55.000 So you tried on the dress?

01:03:56.000 Was it black and blue or white and gold?

01:03:58.000 It wasn't quite tailored.

01:04:01.000 It wasn't quite tailored.

01:04:02.000 But I think there are some rooms for tailoring the fit.

01:04:05.000 But I think that That's the same thing that would make a business and an enterprise more successful.

01:04:11.000 I think having businesses taking the journey they have, I think it should be a boon to be able to have somebody from the outside who pressure tests and comes with an alternative possibility of what that vision could be at a moment where their own stated vision, if they have one, isn't at all clear to their stakeholders.

01:04:29.000 Maybe the positive Upshot of that is at least they're stating what their actual vision is, which I don't think they've actually done sufficiently clearly.

01:04:37.000 I think there's a lot of positives that could come out of it in ways that I think are going to be yet to be defined in the coming months.

01:04:44.000 We're going to see where that actually all shakes out from a business perspective.

01:04:47.000 But I think it was a productive first conversation of a kind that I didn't get the sense had happened not only in the boardroom of that company, but in the boardroom of so many companies that in many ways, you know, I think operate in their own insular sense of believing that they actually stand for something.

01:05:04.000 And yet fail the test of my old 11th grade English teacher, Ms. Smith, who once told me, if you can't write it down, you probably don't know what you actually have to say.

01:05:14.000 And I do think that every organization, BuzzFeed is not an exception, owes itself an answer to the question of why you uniquely exist in the world and what the world would miss if you didn't exist.

01:05:23.000 And I think that somewhere down there, they probably are closer to having a better answer to that question than most out there in media.

01:05:30.000 But I think that they haven't yet defined that.

01:05:33.000 And I do think that part of my campaign as an activist is to make sure that that company does come out with a clear definition of who it is and what it stands for and seizes a worthy opportunity and probably cuts a lot of cost along the way that avoids a lot of expenditures that were probably made.

01:05:51.000 That did not have that North Star question in mind.

01:05:54.000 And are they in a troubled spot right now as a consequence with more debt than cash on their balance sheet, twice as much debt as cash approximately and losing revenue?

01:06:02.000 Yes.

01:06:03.000 But is that still salvageable?

01:06:04.000 I believe it can be.

01:06:06.000 But it starts with defining what exactly is your North Star purpose and reason for existence.

01:06:11.000 And then everything you do, your structure follows that strategy and your expenditures follow that structure.

01:06:16.000 And I think for a first conversation, it was certainly a pretty productive one.

01:06:21.000 Well, the most entertaining possible outcome of this to me is if your intervention pushes it back to its roots as like a silly and apolitical space that you probably were not a consumer of as a young man.

01:06:35.000 But thanks for having me on.

01:06:38.000 It's good to have you on.

01:06:38.000 And I would say this in closing, too, is one of my learnings about the media landscape has been how challenging it has been to get Guests like yourself to show up and have a conversation like the one we've had.

01:06:54.000 I don't think there was anything too...

01:06:55.000 Hopefully this...

01:06:57.000 It's just because I have a podcast to promote Vivint.

01:07:00.000 I didn't even let you do it.

01:07:02.000 Oh my god, I totally didn't.

01:07:03.000 Mixed signals from some of our media.

01:07:05.000 Please listen.

01:07:06.000 That's right, you did say it.

01:07:08.000 Never again.

01:07:10.000 But the reality is, I think it's a...

01:07:12.000 Is that really true?

01:07:14.000 That honestly surprises me.

01:07:15.000 Yeah, it surprised me too.

01:07:17.000 And I think it's interesting because a lot of people want to come on here, but they'll either be people who have shared sort of viewpoints to me, which...

01:07:24.000 I love talking to people who have all kinds of views, but I spend a lot of time talking to people who have shared views.

01:07:29.000 I don't need to spend an hour a week additionally broadcasting myself in an agreement fest.

01:07:33.000 So what we end up doing actually is talking to a lot of people who are off the political grid where I'm learning interesting subject matter about physics to theology to philosophy, which is a lot of fun.

01:07:43.000 But the reality is when we're talking about actually topical matters of the day, If you're in that territory, it's actually very difficult to find people who are willing to engage in even the kind of conversation that you and I had today.

01:07:58.000 And so I hope that this is a...

01:08:00.000 It's certainly something I'm on record now right here saying I would love to do more of that.

01:08:04.000 But I think it takes at least two to tango.

01:08:08.000 And thank you for coming on.

01:08:09.000 I appreciated our tango today.

01:08:10.000 Thanks for having me.

01:08:11.000 It was fun.

01:08:12.000 Yeah.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - June 26, 2024

Ben Smith on Buzzfeed, Assange, and Bias Ahead of the Trump-Biden Debate | The TRUTH Podcast #53

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