https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CLe40BcB66M
Well, the other thing that’s worth thinking about on the television front is that you don’t want to underestimate the degree to which network TV and legacy media as such is really entertainment. And so part of the, well, that’s exactly it. So, you know, so that it’s politics is spectacle and part of what you’re being called upon to act out as a legacy media politician is the, is politician as actor, right? You should be playing the part of a politician. And television, because it’s primarily an entertainment medium, demands that. But that doesn’t mean that that’s what the public wants on the political front. And I think, you know, you talked about this being a 1776 moment, and I know Lincoln wasn’t around in 1776, but, you know, people used to listen to Abraham Lincoln deliver two-hour speeches, right? And they’d be standing there in the hot sun while he was orating. One of the things I’ve also really noticed, Vivek, and this is interesting, you know, very few people buy books. It’s a luxury market or it’s an elite market. But the audiobook industry has exploded and lots and lots of people listen to long-form podcasts. And they’re not necessarily people who read, but it also looks to me, and this could easily be the case, that maybe 10 or 20 times as many people can listen to complex ideas as can read them. And so… I think so. Well, it might be the case. We don’t know, right? Because it’s a technological revolution, these long-form podcasts, and we don’t really know what the significance of it is, although we do know that the most popular journalist in the world, and that’s definitely Joe Rogan, is a long-form podcaster, and his podcasts regularly run three hours. So obviously, people don’t have a short attention span. You know, I think that there’s a couple interesting hypotheses of what’s going on here. One is there might just be a real scientific understanding that this has revealed, which is everyone might have… I think I have, you know, if this is true for everyone, it’s definitely going to be true of me, maybe a low-level dyslexia, right? Dyslexia might not be just like a condition for just a scarce few people, that there’s something about the way that our eyes process information that’s just a little bit behind where most people are on where their ears process information. But I think that there’s something deeper going on in our moment. And I think it’s not a coincidence that we see the rise of this podcasting form. At a moment in our history when there’s a demand for it, and why is there a demand for it? I think there is a deep hunger for human connectivity, direct disintermediated human-to-human connectivity. And the reason I say I think that’s closer to the flame is that I see an excitement, Dr. Petersen, when I’m going to these events. I mean, I was in whatever, a few days ago in Iowa, in a barn, in a small town of just a couple hundred people. There were a couple hundred people in the barn. Literally, it was as though everybody in the town came to the meeting that we were having in that barn. And I think it’s because we live in a moment where people are starved. We talked about this last time for purpose and meaning and identity, but people are also starved for a disintermediated relationship with their fellow citizens and human beings. And so there’s something about hearing the voice, especially if it’s the voice of the person who actually wrote it. So I think that’s why the audiobooks are more successful than the actual author reads it. It’s also the case with the podcasts that they’re unscripted. And so I think there’s a great difference in listening even, and this might be one of the ways that a long-form podcast actually has an advantage over a book. I think it’s easier, I think you can think more deeply in a book, but I also think it’s easier to deceive people because you can craft your lies in a book. But it’s very difficult to craft your lies in a spontaneous conversation, right? You get falseness of tone, you get awkwardness of body posture. You can tell when people are delivering a sound bite. And I think part of the reason that people like Rogan, and Lex Friedman’s a good example too, Friedman, is that the reason that they’re so popular is because they are genuine. The same thing is true with Russell Brand. He’s got more of a trickster schtick and he’s a comedian, but of course Rogan was a comedian too. But that is a form of disintermediated interaction. And I do think that it’s the antithesis of the crafted Hillary Clinton political class message. It’s part of the reason that Donald Trump was also successful. And it is something that makes itself available to people like you, and Kennedy has been doing this very effectively too, who are using the new media. Pierre Pauliev, the conservative leader in Canada, has also done a very good job of that. It’s direct to voter communication. And I think your comments that the time is calling for that because people are tired of being manipulated by large, what gigantic enterprises, corporate or government alike, they want to see the real thing and they want to hear it because they can tell if it’s real then. And Trump definitely capitalized on that. He didn’t use the podcast format, although he used Twitter quite effectively, but he capitalized on that. Certainly in 2016 he did. He did. Certainly in 2016 he did, yes. And I think even large scale rallies of being there in person, in some ways I would say that if I go up the chain, I would say there’s no substitute for being in person, live in a room with even no screens or algorithms in the air between us, with a large group of people who are direct consumers of your message. And that’s the part of this campaign I’m enjoying the most. Next best to that are actual unscripted long form conversations where you’re not reading speeches into a teleprompter. It’s not a three minute hit. You know, context like the conversation we’re having now. And I’ve invested more time in that just because I hope it’s certainly effective as a campaign. We’ll find out that part later. I am rejuvenated as the best version of myself when I’m actually able to speak truth without doing it in some sort of artificially constrained format. Then you go to actually TV hits, which are a true bastardization of reality. And then you get to the ultimate bastardization, which is a 30 second straight to camera TV ad, which is where the most money will actually get spent on this campaign. So one of the things I’ve learned is I don’t yet have a strong view on what the political snakes and ladders will be on mapping a path to victory. But actually, that might just be the path to victory. And I’m going to stick to that. And that’s one of the things I’ve learned in this campaign. I’ve reviewed the empirical literature looking at campaign spending and its relationship to campaign success. And as far as I can tell, there’s no relationship at all. I think part of what happens is that’s especially true for incumbents, by the way, there’s a small effect of advertising spending for challengers, but it’s not very big. And it certainly doesn’t justify the magnitude of spending. And I think part of what’s also happened to the political consultant class is that Democrat and Republican alike, they’ve been in bed with the political advertisers and the big media corporations for like six decades. And so the political consultants tell you to craft your campaign in a manner that will maximize your spending in the legacy media format. But there’s no evidence that that works, by the way. But that’s the pipeline. It’s actually fascinating you say that because maybe you’ve studied that empirical literature more than I have. Here’s what I will tell you in the last election cycle of a Republican primary and then this one as well. So in 2015, around this time, you could look back at the data in the second half of 2015. How much was each candidate spending per percentage point they had in the polls? So for Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and a bunch of these other guys last time around, it was millions of dollars per percentage point in the polls. For Donald Trump, it was in the tens of thousands. The thousands of dollars is what we’re talking about in terms of paid advertising per percentage point. Now we look at it this time around and I find this encouraging, suggesting we’re on the right track where again, you look at the candidates in this race, if you count their super packed dollars that are spending money on ads, millions of dollars per percentage point in the polls. For me, it’s again in the tens of thousands. We’re not spending boatloads of money, barely any money on paid ads on TV or otherwise. And I think at this stage of a race, it does say something about, you’re on the product market fit, regardless of whether or not you’re using the money to prop it up. I do think there will come a point as a realistic matter at some point in this race and it did for Trump last time around as well. It’s just part of the pill you have to swallow is just the sheer scale of reaching still who don’t access YouTube or long form podcasts that still are viewing the linear medium of television. And it is just skewed to be an older voter base that yes, that is going to be, there’s going to be a time and place for that in this campaign. But that’s almost by the time you get there, you’ve already won if you’re going in the right order. And so that’s the way I’m viewing this too, is at some point we’re going to need the mega money to probably pipe this all the way through. And I’m pushing that as far out down the line as we can. And I am more confident than ever that actually an outsider like me, me in particular in this race can absolutely defeat the odds and win an election just as Donald Trump did last time around. And it says as much about the improved pipes that we have thanks to new media that disintermediates television, but it says something even deeper, Dr. Peterson, about the people. The people can tell when they’re being lied to. And I think that we live in this moment where the government, where the media, where the establishment believes that the people can’t handle the truth. It’s like Jack Nicholson at the end of The A Few Good Men, right? You can’t handle the truth. I think the people live in a moment today, and it’s the voice that I’m representing on their behalf, on our behalf, to say that, you know what, we the people can handle the truth about COVID, about the Nashville shooter manifesto, about the Hunter Biden laptop story, about what really happened on January 6th, about what really happened over the course of the last year of vaccine mandate policies. We can handle the truth. Sometimes it’s ugly, but just give us the truth. And I think that that’s something that if a good thing has happened over the last 10 years through the Trump administration and otherwise, I think we have a populace, a population that was trained on knowing that they have been lied to.