Cenk Uygur

So why am I in favor of Kamala Harris? I'm going to live to fight another day. I'm worried that Trump's going to end the whole thing and then we're not going to have an opportunity to actually get a populist win, right? So, and I'm encouraged by some of the things she's doing, and maybe she does even 25% of her agenda, but I'm not going to give you false hope that she's your savior, right?

But I believe massively in hope. And number one, because it's true to the point that we were talking about earlier, Alex, and how last 200 years have been choppy, but overall fantastic. Terrible things have happened in that time period. Some of the worst things that have ever happened in history, but overall life expectancy is higher.

Everything is, you know, incomes are higher, health is better, et cetera. Right? So hope is not misplaced. It's real. It's empirical. Okay. So now we talked about how you could get money out of politics and that's a legitimate hope. But media is another place where we have huge hope. So of all the corporate robots, the most important robot is media.

So when mainstream media has you hooked in at the back of your neck, you're going to believe all these fairy tales about how politicians are nice people and they're trying to do the right thing and donor money doesn't have any influence on them. Right? So once you unplug from the matrix, um, Well, then you begin to see, oh yeah, hey look, he took the donor money, did what the donors wanted.

He took the donor money, did what the donors want, 98% of the time, right? So then you see clearly. So now what's happening at large? Mainstream media is losing their power. And now online media is swarming, swarming, swarming, swarming. And so this goes back to why I started The Young Turks. So let me touch on that here, and then we can come back to it if you want.

In 1998, I write an email to my friends and I say, online video is going to be television. And unsurprisingly, and they say, you're nuts. That's never going to happen. At that point, we're still doing AOL dial-ups like online video barely exists and television's mammoth. Um, I say, guys, it's just a matter of logic. For me, there's so many ironies.

I'm known for yelling online sometimes, but in reality, I'm obsessed with logic. So when you have gatekeepers, gatekeepers pick based on what they want, what the powerful want, in that case, advertisers, politicians, et cetera, they are never going to design programming as good as wisdom of the crowd. When people start doing online video, I'm like, boom, there's no gatekeepers.

This is democratized. Wisdom of the crowd is going to win. So if you start with no money, and let's pick a different example, not the Young Turks. Let's say Phil DeFranco. He's been around forever, okay? And he also does news. And so Phil starts doing a show. And he doesn't have any money, just like us. And so what does he have to do to get an audience? He has to do a show that is really popular.

He's got to figure out a way, how do I get their attention? How do I keep their attention? And he starts doing a great show, right? And so every year it's us and Phil for best news show for like a decade, right? And Meanwhile, I'm back over at CNN, Wolf Blitzer still droning on from a teleprompter. You put Wolf Blitzer online without the force of CNN with him, he gets negative seven views.

No one's interested in what Wolf Blitzer has to say. It's not personal. I don't know the brother, right? I'm just saying institutionally, logically, et cetera. So I'm like, these guys are going to win. So When YouTube starts, we go on YouTube right away. We're the first YouTube partner. So I am literally the original YouTuber. Okay. Nice.

Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of the late Susan Wojcicki, a wonderful woman. And if that triggers you again on the right, you're wrong. She was a terrific person. And when she started her own YouTube channel, she Uh, I was the first interview cause we were the first YouTube partner. So, so I love that. So we're in that, but let me connect it back to the hope.

When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don't have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing, you don't have real news. When you're in the online world, it's chaotic. And don't get me wrong, it's got plenty of downsides, right? But within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge.

And so, for example, Young Turks has had dozens of fights with different creators throughout history. Why? When you're number one in news online, The algorithm rewards anyone attacking you because then you get into their algorithmic loop. It's not an accident that we've been attacked dozens of times. One, we're independent thinkers.

So anyone, if we don't match their ideology, they're going to attack us. But number two, they get in our algorithm loop. It's too hard to resist, right? So all of a sudden they think that we're being funded by Nancy Pelosi or the CIA and, oh, we're off to the races. There's another fight, right? But our competition is a graveyard. And so we've, We won almost all of those fights. Why?

Because we try really hard to stick with the truth, with logic, and we don't do audience capture. Even if our audience is going in one direction, we don't think it's right. Anna and I will come out and go, no, sorry guys, love you, but rent control is not a good idea. Okay. Et cetera. So in that world.

The people it's going to take a while guys, but people who are telling the truth are eventually going to rise up. And when they do now we're free. And now the second part is even more devastating for mainstream media because I'm a businessman, right? I keep looking at the revenue for CNN, et cetera, and they have a massive problem and people don't realize how big the problem is.

That thing's going to capsize. I don't talk about it often because I don't want more competition. Okay. Um, I also have a company right in the, in the online world, et cetera, but, but, but I'm too honest. I gotta say it. I gotta say it. So there, they have two revenue streams. One is ads. That's why they serve advertisers and politicians are huge advertisers.

As we mentioned, the second revenue stream, depending on the company is arguably more important, which is subscribers. So now what happens in a business normally is, so they started out low and then they got high and now they got a ton of subscribers. At its peak, cable has 100 million households, right? So they're raking in unbelievable money from subscriber fees and they got advertising on top.

So when you're all the way up here, your costs start to rise. Why do they rise? Because then the on-air talent has leverage, right? And as an example, there's many others. And so the on-air talent, like Sean Hannity says, I do a program that brings in X amount of maybe a hundred million, maybe 200 million. So give me 40 million a year. And they do. Sean is making 40 million a year last I checked.

Okay. So I don't know if he's still getting that kind of money and I'm just basing it on reporting, right? But that's a monster. So they have all these giant costs, but the minute you lose, you're go from a hundred million. Now we're at, I think around 70 million. You just lost a giant chunk of your revenue.