The Cost of Truth-Seeking | Ben Swann on Breaking Norms

0:00I don't think I've ever seen a storm that I didn't want to run face-first into. You were praised for that interview in an industry that later came that you clashed with because they didn't like you asking those questions that made everybody uncomfortable. The fact that he had killed Anwar Awolaki and his 16-year-old son, which, I mean, he was so stunned that that question was even asked. The question was so powerful that a week after my interview, Obama went on CNN to talk about the kill list. Do you call that courage or stubbornness? Because your critics would say one word and your supporters would say another.

0:30None of these barriers are going to stop me from getting to where I want to be. Then I can do it. Pizzagate. Caution your chair. Looking back at it, do you regret that segment? As I'm reading this and the words come out of my mouth, I'm like, this is a lie. I don't know what the truth of the story is. It ain't that. I've never regretted the story because I knew the story was right. And I knew the story was true. Determination is about restoration. Being determined to move forward, but not just to move away from what's behind you. but to bring what's behind you into full alignment.

1:14There's an animal that does something almost every other animal refuses to do. When a storm rolls across the open plains, most cattle turn and run with it. They try to outrun the weather, and because they can't, the storm follows them, rides them for miles. The bison does the opposite. The bison turns, lowers its head, and chartes straight into the storm because it knows something the cattle don't. The fastest way out of the storm is through it. My guest today has a bison as his logo, and his entire life motto is four words, run toward the storm. He was one of 10 kids homeschooled at the kitchen table by his mother, and every single one of them had master's degrees before they could legally buy a drink.

1:52He had a college degree at 15. he was preaching revivals as a teenager. And then, almost by accident, he walked into a TV newsroom and found the thing he'd fight for the rest of his life. He sat across from a sitting president of the United States and asked him the question nobody in the national press would ask. He won the biggest awards in his industry, and then he lost it all, the anchor chair, the network, the mainstream stamp of approval, because he refused to stop asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable. Some of those questions made him a hero to millions. Some made him one of the most controversial names in American media.

2:32Loved, hated, censored, banned, rebuilt, but never, ever quiet. This is a man who got fired on a national stage and relaunched his own company the next day. Investigative journalist, founder, and CEO of Truth in Media, Ben Swan. Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. That was way too kind. I know. If I learn how to read it. I'm like, I would love to meet that guy. He sounds amazing. He sounds terrific. He's got a great shirt on too, man. Yeah, there you go. I got to pimp that logo. You got to. I want to start at the beginning. Yeah. You know, take me to El Paso. Yeah. Mom. Yeah. 10 kids.

3:08Kitchen table. There's no classroom. Like, what was a day in the life like? And what did you learn in those early days that you still carry with you? Well, the funny thing about what a day in the life would be like, I can actually tell that pretty easily because it was every day was exactly the same. We had a pretty boring life, right? No offense, mom, but it was a pretty boring life. So what we did was, my parents, first of all, they started homeschooling at a time when virtually no one homeschooled, right? Homeschooling is pretty popular now. I mean, tens of millions of people are homeschooled, which is great.

3:42Homeschool my own kids. I hope my grandkids are going to be homeschooled. but at the time we were doing it, it was pretty weird to do so. In fact, a lot of people don't remember this, but in the 1970s, it was illegal in a lot of states in this country to homeschool. I didn't know that. Yeah. And my mom actually testified in two different court cases to help get it legalized, including in the state of Texas. But the reason we, so we actually grew up in New Mexico. El Paso, if you ever looked at it on a map, it's like that little corner right on the the tip of Texas, um, we lived the first house across the border into New Mexico.

4:17And the reason we ended up living there was because it was illegal to homeschool. And my parents had to actually leave Texas and move into New Mexico where it was legal. Wow. Yeah. And so we grew up, um, you know, doing school and, and living in a house with 10 kids. And, uh, you know, it was, like I said, it wasn't a very exciting life because no, no sports and no, uh, you know, activities like you get now. My kids had a very different homeschool experience than I did. Thank God. Because, you know, they were able to play sports. All of them did. They were in fine arts programs. They were able to do so many different things.

4:52That didn't exist at the time. But what did exist for us was the ability to just kind of put your head down and study. My mom was kind of making it up as she went along. And so it was, she didn't really know how to like create breaks, take breaks. And so we just didn't. Monday through Friday, seven days or five days a week, but 52 weeks a year. Right. We just did school. That was our life. And what it did was it caused a cumulative effect. When you don't have summer breaks and you don't have winter breaks and you don't have holiday breaks, all of a sudden you realize like, okay, I'm 10 years old and I'm about to start high school.

5:33I haven't stopped. so we did high school starting at 10 and then that lasted a whole whopping two years and then it's like okay so now you're 12 years old now you're ready to start college so I actually started college at 12 uh went to BYU um and from 12 to 15 that took three years to do and then when we're done with that got a master's from Cal State in 18 months and then the exciting part of that is you know what you do when you have a master's degree and you're 16 years old what's that you you bag groceries you go find the job that every other 16 year old has because no one's gonna hire you to do anything at 16 did you did you feel like a prodigy in that moment or did you feel like a kid that didn't get to be a kid uh for me personally neither i've never thought of myself as a prodigy um it was just because it was just life i guess if you're on the inside of it like people will hear it and it sounds super impressive right um but in reality it's just about consistency and doing the same thing.

6:30Right. Um, and, and you gotta be dedicated to it. You gotta have consistency and you have to have, you know, an expectation of accomplishing it, but it's not really, I mean, anybody can do it. It wasn't that we were geniuses. We certainly were not. Um, but you know, maybe the genius in life was just being consistent and doing the same thing in a different way than other people do it. There's a lot of genius in that. there is there really is sure is i think i think i think consistency is the most genius thing that that is lacking in our society right now people just aren't consistent in anything so you know your mom had a high school diploma right and um put all 10 of you through homeschooling yeah all successful in school yeah the degrees everything yeah what did she know that nobody else knew at that time so so she tells a great story about it and says she had no idea what she was doing in terms of, you know, especially beyond high school.

7:26But she said, I knew when I started doing this, that I could at least do first grade. So I did first grade. And by the time we got to second grade, I knew I could do second grade. So, and you know what I mean? And so that, and that was really the way, I mean, I think if you look, if you look to the end of it and say, how are you qualified to teach all these things at this, you know, at a certain point, you get overwhelmed and say, who am I to be able to do this? But if you look at it one day at a time, one step at a time and say, well, can I do this? And she knew she could. Yeah. And then by the time we got to college, we had, you know, obviously that's a different setup.

7:58We have professors. We have, it's interesting. We did a program through BYU that was designed for people who were now working. And so this is pre-internet, but they were now working and kind of going back to school part-time. And so it was correspondence and you spend the summers on campus. So in the summertime, we'd be on campus, but in the wintertime, we weren't. And as a result of that, we had to write about 300 essays on average more than the average college student because of that particular program. So I actually think that was pretty empowering in terms of kind of teaching you how to think through what you were doing.

8:33When I'm listening to you explain your mom, I think it's powerful because everybody always talks about things that they want to do. Yeah. But I don't know how. Yep. Your mom figured it out. I think your mom has an extremely high level of intention and knows what she wants and knows what she wanted for you kids. How much of that do you think was because she wanted you guys to be more educated and take it a little bit further than she did? Well, what's interesting is my mom did not, and my mom and dad really together never set out to homeschool because they thought that we would be better educated.

9:08It was the fear of what would happen if we were in a public setting where they believe. My mom tells a story that she had a dream and she heard the phrase, you know don't send your children to a public school lest they be corrupted right and she really studied what that word meant and tried to research like understand what this word meant and a lot of times we think of corruption as just like oh you're going to make someone into like this bad person but it actually literally means to change something from its original intent right and she said i i don't really know exactly what this is going to lead to but i believe that that I'm supposed to protect them from whatever they're going to be changed into.

9:48Uh, and so that was kind of the goal behind it. It was never really about education. It was certainly never about accelerated because that was just all an accident. It was just like you started doing it and they, my parents actually did a pretty good job when they realized like we're getting ahead, we've got to kind of pivot and make this work. That's what they had to do, but it was never, it was never the intent. It's pretty cool though. Right. It just, it just goes to show you that again, and this is just a lesson for people listening and watching is you don't have to have it all figured out.

10:16No, you know, and, and that's, I'm sure it's helped you throughout your whole career. So I would say it's helped and it's hurt. Um, I would say on a personal level, it created a lot of frustration. This is why I did not homeschool my kids the same way. So when, when we homeschooled our kids, I have five kids. Um, we actually gave them summers off. We would follow a typical school year. Um, they had more, um, extracurricular activities. Like I said they played basketball um they played uh they did like fine arts programs and all that kind of stuff so we kept them in line with their peers more the reason we did that was because what i found and it's a positive and it's a negative the the the negative is when you're 16 years old and you have a master's degree you bag groceries right trying to figure out what you're going to do with your life when you've got this degree and no one's going to take you seriously right becomes a little bit frustrating the other thing is there was something that became embedded in me um i think through this process which was the belief that i don't have to do what everyone else is doing the way they do it right that becomes very frustrating at times because the rest of the world does not agree with that the rest of the world will look at you and say yeah you do right there's a line and you're cutting the line, right?

11:38You can't do it this way, this way. Now, that's the negative. The positive of it is it allowed me to jump a lot of lines in my life, right? So my first ever job in television as a reporter came out of necessity. I had two kids at the time. My wife and I had been doing ministry. We had moved to Portland, Oregon. We had come back to Texas where we were both from, El Paso. And she was pretty homesick. And I was looking for a job. And so I went back to this TV station. I had been a news videographer and photographer for them. But I'd never been on air. And I just couldn't make enough money. I had two kids and a wife, and I was supporting them by myself.

12:14And so I went to my boss and I said, listen, I got to make more money. Is there any way I can get on air? It was like, are you kidding? That's not how this works. You're 22. And I was 22, but I'm still relatively young looking. At the time, I looked like a child. I was 22 going on 14 is the way I looked. and so it was like that's just not going to happen you need five years experience you got to go to another market you know that's how you would get started i remember the time i was sitting there watching tv and my son is standing right behind me looking over me and laughing hysterically and i'm thinking what are you laughing at son he goes dad you're balding you have this massive bald spot on the top of your head immediately i was mortified i'm like take a picture of this thing And he did and come to find out he wasn't just joking with me.

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14:21Go to lock lab.co and take the first step with a free consultation. can't do that not in a position to do that so you know i've got to find a way to to do it differently um and found a way to do it differently convince them uh but in order to do that i just had to do twice the work for half the pay uh but it was that was the compromise right but it was the belief that i had a lot of people would get in that position and say well i'm not going to do twice the work for half the pay right i'm just not going to do that right but because i had this belief that if I can just get the opportunity, like none of these, none of these barriers are going to stop me from getting to where I want to be, then I can do it.

15:00So that's, that's what I did. Same thing happened later on in my career when, after I had been a, I got on there and was a reporter and then a bureau chief. And then they, we had a morning anchor position open up at our station. I went to the same boss and I said, Hey, listen, one time I want a shot at that. And we're going to start a morning show. And he said, no, got to have experience to do that. Can't do it. and by the time we launched it I was the anchor of the show so you know it does build in you I think there it builds in you a a belief that I will not be held back right by the constraints that everyone else puts on me and the system that everyone else puts there but you just have to be mentally strong enough and resilient enough and and aggressive enough to chase it um because if you're not then it makes for a very frustrating life i agree i think your background through the monday through friday yeah you know 365 52 weeks no breaks that built a certain amount of resiliency inside of you and your and your siblings like wait a second you're gonna say no but i know what i need to do because i've done all this and so i'm just gonna apply these principles and i'm gonna go after it when you finally convinced them the first time yeah do you remember the moment and what did you say to them to finally get them was it just the pay and double the work or was there something else you said to them to make oh no no no they said oh we'll let you do the job uh and then they they actually didn't do it on their end so they said that they gave me half the pay they gave me twice the work but they never put me on there right so i was actually going around as a news videographer still and i'm making less money now than i was making before i had approached them and I did this for probably nine, 10 months, going out, shooting video, writing for other, other reporters.

16:47I would write their stories for them. It's supposed to be my story, but then they would voice it. They would front it. Right. And just felt like I was getting shafted the whole time. But again, so to your point, when you have lived where it's a Monday through Friday, we just do the same thing because life is boring. Right. I was able to just say I can do it. Right. because it's going to happen it's going to happen so one day we are um i'm doing my usual come in get my stuff there's a uh in west texas el paso new mexico um in that part of the country you get these these wind storms in the springtime right i don't know if you've ever been down there but they call them brownouts okay so the the you know hurricane force winds right we're talking anywhere from 70 to 120 miles an hour wing gusts but it's in the desert so it just picks up all this sand and everything just turns brown you can't see anything right uh and we have one of these storms they're pretty common in the springtime so we had one of these storms um and so i get a call from my producer for the day and she says okay el paso is broken into three sections northeast east and west side she says so you're gonna cover the west side is that great so i've got all my gear and go out shoot interviews get video she calls me again during the day and says okay just making sure you understand this this person's covering northeast this team's covering the northeast this one and you're covering the west side got it finished up get back to the station she says so um you're covering the west side you understand that i said i i i'm done i have it all right why why are you on me and she said no no when i say you're covering i mean you're on air tonight boom covering it I'd never been on air and I was like, Oh, okay.

18:30And you're going live. I hadn't even fronted a package. I hadn't done a standup. I hadn't recorded anything. And, and, and, you know, even now, when you talk about this, people are so like video savvy, um, with phones and everything today, but this is very different at that time. Right. And if you've never done it before, it's pretty intimidating. So they said, no, that you're, you're on tonight. So I called my wife and I was like, Hey, they're going to put me on TV. um so can you bring like a suit do i have one yeah well actually yeah i had like one one black shirt so i get this they give me an old earpiece that looks like howard cosell and oh geez give me this thing and that night i go in and i put my story together and then they send me out to this location where there's some downed tree and you're gonna be live and then they you know count me in and I go live and I was like perfection.

19:19Wow. Absolutely nailed it. Not a stutter, not a stumble. It was perfect. Now throughout my career, there've been lots of times when it wasn't, but that night it was right. The very first time. Uh, and that was very significant because the next day I come in to work, um, you know, pretty, pretty happy that I got this chance, but back to, you know, what I was doing before. And there's a guy who's standing in there with some fancy shoes on who's standing in the middle of our newsroom when I walk in I'd never seen him before he's like an older guy and he is he has like salt and pepper hair and everyone's standing around him so I walk in oh come on over here I go over and it turns out so the station I was working for was owned by this big media group called Cox TV yeah and the CEO was in town oh wow just so happened that he had been in town uh that night before and because they wanted to impress him with all the coverage they had that's why they gave me an opportunity to be on because they wanted to show him how we had all this coverage and all these reporters so what i find out the next day is this guy as he's standing there he says oh wait wait where's that where's that young man who was on last night oh there he is he says uh this guy is great this guy is great he says uh i'm the guy who discovered matt lauer you'll be the next matt lauer wow now i'm looking back on that now hello at the time it sounded great but um he says uh you know this guy's great or whatever so after he's done i find out that the night before when i was going on the ceo of the company is on the phone with the news director they're watching the coverage talking about the coverage and I came on and I did my perfect live shot my story and the CEO sees me and said who's this kid and he says oh he's don't worry he's a photographer that we have we just put him on air tonight so we'd have more people and he says no no he's not a photographer anymore starting tomorrow that guy is a full-time reporter and I completely like the trajectory of everything changed so it was going through the day after day after day of doing the same monotonous thing getting screwed over is what it felt like but if you just keep doing it when the opportunity came you got to make the most of that and and take it take advantage of it what happened let me sit with that for a second they used you for their own gain so they can prove to the ceo of the company that they had it covered and you won because you were ready yeah you know and and that again like you're tell me the story bro that's your mom absolutely yep it's preparation it's it's being able to keep keep on doing the boring part the hard part right because there's some kind of payoff at the end dude too often we quit early yeah i mean that's the thing the monotony nobody likes the monotony no nobody likes to wake up have the protein shake we'll have the water first then the protein shake then go do the workout, then come back and eat another healthy meal.

22:24And then, you know, do your, do your process all day. Nobody likes to do that because it's, it can be very boring. Like I'm, I'm 47. I feel like I lead a very boring life. You know, I do the same things every day, but I've gained so much from it because of that, because I'm willing to do more than anybody else would do. You share that. And I think it's, you know, we're from a generation that doesn't matter if you want to or not. That's right. It's your job. You're going to go do it. That's right. period yeah you know yeah there's no quiet quitting now in our generation oh no there is it is there yeah it's like i'm gonna light this thing like what a crazy concept that is right quiet quitting people who just like i'm not gonna quit i'm just not gonna work when i'm here yeah like what a crazy i'm gonna make you fire me yeah you know and that's just the way it is it's it's really different you know i love the the bison yeah you know the run toward the storm yeah right can you recall the first time you had to turn around put your head down and run through your first storm I mean honestly there have been so many of them career-wise in personal life I mean it's just been a lot I think probably the first time that I really ran through it and was less less passive more active in it so i you know i started this career i from there went on as i mentioned became a morning anchor for the station every station i was ever at too we were like a last place station when i go there we would end up being first place by the time i was gone and super blessed in that respect and again a lot of that came back to being able to grind i tell people if i have a superpower it's that i can just keep picking up heavy things and carry them right go put that one down if you had a room full of stuff and you and somebody said hey you know we got to move stuff out of this room there's different personalities some people will say well we need a plan we're going to take it out where are we putting it there are people who will say well can we organize it like how do we want to stack it when we get there's a lot of different way and they're not saying that there are wrong ways of doing it right i'm the guy who just just says nope i'm just gonna pick something up and take it out of the room and if the goal is that the room has to be empty, then it'll be empty, right?

24:43Because I can just keep going and getting stuff and carrying it back. And that's kind of been the way I've just lived my entire life. And it allowed me to really provide for my family at times when it was very difficult. During that time working in El Paso, you know, supporting by that time, five kids and a wife by myself. I was working at times four and five jobs you know so I was like this anchor on television and then I would get off work and then I would go and do like freelance editing over here and work shooting church services in the evening so I could make money doing that and I had another gig editing for a Christian tv station because they needed because I had a lot of skills as an editor and a photographer so I would do a lot of this other stuff just to try to make make money and and take care of my family.

25:29And it was, you know, it was a hard thing to do. But I stuck with it. In 2010, we finally left El Paso and I took a job in Cincinnati at the Fox station and was there for about two and a half years. It was very successful. It was kind of the first time where my career kind of leapt in terms of notoriety, national notoriety. That's where the interview with Obama happened and confronted him um and about the time that we were really hitting a stride we we ended up becoming the number one station there um there was that whole irs scandal i don't know if you remember the tea party scandal where the irs had targeted the tea party members that one it happened like in 2010 it was a pretty big national story i had actually broken it a year before and then when it came up again like ended up uncovering a lot of stuff so much so that i actually got a lot lot of people um fired from the irs no offense guys uh at a certain point in 2010 and so like everything was just everything was clicking it was just going great but internally within the station that i was working for there was so much conflict like my bosses would just have these they would call me into these these meetings and we would have these yelling exchanges right because they hated the subjects I would talk about, right?

26:49They loved the ratings. They loved how well it was going. I remember we had a consultant who was supposed to be advising us at the time. Every TV station has all these consultants, right, who come in. And the consultant was so amazed by what we've been able to do in terms of the viewership. Like we were being written up in national magazines and national newscasts wanting me to go on to talk about the stories we were doing in Cincinnati, Ohio, right? No offense, Cincinnati. but you know it was just it was that that kind of of like lightning in a bottle and that's what the the um consultant said he said guys you got to understand like you have lightning in the bottle this never happens like moving the needle in a tv station like this moving viewers actually growing the number of people who were watching local news we actually did it it was amazing and that that doesn't happen anymore but no one watches local news right it's just such a just a trash heap of terrible content.

27:45But we were doing something special because we were talking about things that nobody else was talking about. You know, we're talking about things that today a lot of people are talking about, things like the Federal Reserve that at the time, no. And you would never talk about that in the local newscast. You would never talk about things like the Petrodollar in a local newscast, but we did. And we had this massive audience. We had people watching us in over 140 countries. That's insane. Watching the Cincinnati newscast. Because you were disrupting the industry. Absolutely. because they were they were super interested in what was different yes right it's like sore thumb wait a second i'm gonna go check that out yes that's that's crazy man that's a cool story yeah and we was everything was changing it was so positive but the clash that would happen is we have these meetings they come in i'll give you an example the obama interview so i got a chance to interview obama um there's a whole long story i won't go into that of how that happened but got a chance to interview him go in there to interview him they said you get five minutes with him you'll be lucky to get in two questions because obama was kind of a famous filibuster where he just talked and talked and talked i actually ended up getting seven minutes with him because he was so frustrated by the first first four questions that he just started filibustering to talk about what he wanted to talk about but the the uh first question i asked him right was about the constitutionality of a kill list and the fact that he had killed anwar awalaki in his 16 year old son which i mean he was so stunned that that question was even asked and then we talked about al-qaeda in syria why are we supporting al-qaeda in syria today everyone knows that's true 2012 virtually no one would acknowledge that that was happening right and so we have this interview we come back they're they're talking about it all over the country massive online numbers for it and the come we go into a room and the question is who cares why would you ask him about al-qaeda in syria why would you ask him about a kill list you were praised for that interview in an industry that later came that you clashed with because they didn't like you asking those questions that made everybody uncomfortable the question was so powerful that a week after my interview obama went on cnn to talk about the kill list which in my interview he says i've never publicly acknowledged this this even exists a week later he goes on cnn to have a conversation about it because it got so much attention that this this guy would dare to ask him this question and he didn't have an answer for it wow right and so i remember the the the we're standing in this you know conference room and the consultants like lightning in a bottle guys can't we all just get along and then the the uh you know i won't out their names but the guys who were the the managers newsroom managers were like telling me like why can't you just ask about like the bridge in cincinnati that's what people here care about and i'm like why didn't we if that's the case why didn't we put a bengals logo behind him like what are we doing here right we're doing news uh and plus the president has no control over the bridge in cincinnati anyways so we just clashed and we finally got to the point where they were like I had an I was in my contract and by the third year which would have been that December so this was around uh April or May by December I would have had an out in my contract an option and I said okay I'll tell you what I said so that we can stop clashing over this why don't we just agree you guys leave me alone and let me do what I'm doing when that option comes up I'll go I'm out And they said, they said, let us think about it.

31:26They came back and they said, actually, we'll agree and we'll leave you alone. But you have to leave in June. And I was like, that's in 30 days. Wow. Yep. Okay. Because to me, it doesn't make sense, right? They want you to talk about a bridge or it could be a puppy throwing a baseball. The first puppy ever that can throw a 90 mile an hour fastball. Who cares? Right. You gave him so much more.

31:56what would be the hesitation behind that? So the thing about the news industry is there's a lot of pressure that comes from like your other friends who were in the news industry. And it's very political. It's much more political. I think people now recognize how political it is. Maybe at the time they didn't, but it's very political. And so it was just like, well, if you have an anchor who like made Obama look bad, like what are you guys doing over there? You know what I mean? And so it was like these people who would hang out with their friends and, well, why is your guy going rogue and why is he doing this?

32:23Right. And that was kind of the feeling. Instead of them just stepping back and saying, look, this is a business and this is a model that's working for us. We're beating the pants off everybody. So let's just leave this guy alone. Let him do what he does. We have all these shows throughout the day. We have all these newscasts. We have all these other people who are on air. We got one guy who is making noise. And as a result of that, we are, like I said, we're actually growing the number of people who are watching news in this town. And instead of holding on to that, we're saying, you know, let's embrace it.

32:58It just created so much division that they were like, we'd rather you go. We just get out. Yeah. We got 30 days. 30 days. Do you call that courage or stubbornness? Because your critics would say one word and your supporters would say another. Oh, I would say it's both. let me rephrase that i don't call it courage at all i would call it only stubbornness i would say that i was very stubborn about it and i obviously thought i was a big deal and i was like no man like i'm the only reason people are watching and so what are we doing yeah exactly so what are we doing here you weren't worried to lose shirt then no no no yeah definitely not but but i get it though because to me it it's asking the hard things man it's like if you if you're a journalist you have all that responsibility even if it's at a local regional deal yep your your job is to report the news as it is not the slant not what somebody wants you to and when those questions came up you were the first one through the wall right and you're the one that got bloody yep but i mean look man that the problem with being the first bird out of the bush that's the one that gets shot i know right yeah yeah yeah and that's been my career too over and over and over again there's a it's it's a cycle but what I would say is rather than a descending cycle, it's actually an ascending cycle.

34:11So yeah, it keeps coming around, but it all keeps failing forward, failing forward. And so you asked, what was the first time that I actually ran toward a storm? I would say that was the first time when they were like, we want you to go. You have 30 days. Instead of backing down, I was like, okay, I'll go. I have no idea what I'm going to do. My wife was freaking out and what are we going to do? I have no idea. You know what I did? I ran a Kickstarter. Became the first journalist to ever run a Kickstarter to fund journalism. Raised$250 ,000. Did you now? Yeah. Was that like a GoFundMe back then?

34:40Yeah, Kickstarter was like, it was like people would pay into projects or products that they wanted to see created. Indiegogo came along later. But the idea was you would kind of invest in a project without any kind of like investment return. And so I was the first person to say, well, let's fund journalism. Wow. And ran a Kickstarter. And that's how we did it. Yeah. That's really cool. That was how we started it. all right dude pizza gate yeah that one oh yeah that one cost you your chair right looking back at it do you regret that segment no my man no love it yeah share why with the audience because when we okay so let me just back up a little bit and say this so with pizzagate when that story came along in 2015 2016 2016 it was like the number one trending thing on twitter 2016 almost the entire year i didn't touch it i was working in atlanta at the time i had managed to convince someone to hire me again i was now the anchor in atlanta and we were by the way killing it again 150 million video views on facebook i mean we were just dominating everyone and a lot of people were saying you got to cover the story you got to cover the story so i i didn't because i was like yeah it's actually too kooky you know it's just it's crazy and at the time i was actually busy covering the syrian civil war that was what i was kind of focused on remember they had like some six-year-old girl in aleppo who was like tweeting in perfect english like please come save us president obama it's like where's she getting the electricity to do this and how could she speak type in perfect English right so it was like such a such a facade so that's what I was focused on and then um I remember one night I'm sitting there in the anchor chair and we have a story that I'm because we receive stories all newsrooms get stories from the news feed to CNN sends down a feed CBS would send down a feed and so on the news feed they had sent us down a story and the story was about a guy who walked into a pizza place in Washington DC with a rifle and shot it up because of a crazy online conspiracy theory called Pizzagate, right?

36:49So I actually, this was my read, so I read the story. And I was like, okay. So then the next night, we're still covering it. And by the way, everyone's covering it. ABC, CBS, CNN, everybody's covering it. The next night, they put a story in front of me to read, and I read it, and it says that, and you can look this up, this was a CNN story, that the origin and the root of the Pizzagate conspiracy was Macedonian sheep farmers who were attempting to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president. So I read it on air, and I was like, as I'm reading this and the words come out of my mouth, I'm like, this is a lie.

37:25I don't know what the truth of the story is. It ain't that. It is definitely not Macedonian sheep farmers. So at that point, I was like, okay, all right, I'll look at it. Start investigating it because I don't know what is true, but I know that's not true. And so if I'm going to sit here and say something that's not true on air, I'm going to find out what is true. So went and started investigating, investigated for a month, put the story together, took it to the newsroom managers. They saw the story. They approved the story. It was actually a lot of conflict between me and my wife over the story.

37:54Okay. How so? She did not like it. She said, it's too risky. You're going to, you're going to get into trouble. It's too, you're talking about very powerful people. So she didn't like it at all. We kind of went back and forth. I feel like I should do it. She feels like I shouldn't do it. We actually didn't know what to do. And I said, I'll tell you what, we had our pastors former pastors from ohio um who were still very close friends to ours and they've been just dear friends to our family and i said i'll tell you what why don't we do this let's send it to them because he used to be a vp at procter and gamble he was in the executive world for a long long time so let's just send it to them let's let them read it and if they say don't do it i won't do it i'll abide by that okay right compromise yes and she said all right and I said but if they say to do it then we do it she said okay they read it they said give us a couple days they came back and they said we don't know how you don't do it after reading that wow feel like you have to do it the responsibility portion of yeah yeah of what we were talking about right like if if this is true and if this is happening you can't be silent about it wow okay so we put the story together I actually tried to get another be honest with you I tried to get another out which was I took it to my news director and I set it in front of him to read the script because I wasn't going to run this without like the highest approval he reads it and I said listen it's been a couple weeks since all this stuff happened maybe the story's too old right you're sure you still want to do it he said why wouldn't we it's all here this is great okay okay sure yeah he said do it so we did it story obviously like blows up overnight we did millions of views overnight um next day come in and it's like a full-on panic story's been pulled down we got to get rid of this thing oh my gosh they're threatening to fire me you know we're gonna get rid of you um had a long discussion with them and basically what it came down to actually a lot of people thought i got fired over it i did not get fired over it immediately what they did was they said we're gonna give you an option you can we're either gonna fire you even though because they didn't wouldn't really have cause i had done the whole process the way i was supposed to but they can still do it and you can go find it out in court for years or you can take down all of your social media turn it all off and you'll still be able to be the anchor here you still work here won't have any problem but you shut it off you don't talk online anymore and so we just bought a house and listen i had already done the story i'd done my job so i was like all right i'll do it so turned everything off for a year then people thought i was dead oh my gosh no i was still on the news every night still on the billboards in atlanta right um doing the news every single night multiple times a night but i just had no internet presence whatsoever for a year interesting yeah so would i would i do i regret it absolutely not i've actually never regretted it now there were times when i laid in bed at night thinking why did i do it not that i wish i hadn't but why was this the path for me because i knew after this had happened and after i ended up leaving eventually was fired from that station because um they were violating my contract i had the ability to come back and keep doing my independent work which i contractually had the right to do and then they fired me right um but the writing was on the wall i was going to be gone at some point anyways but after that was over it was like very clear like your your corporate career is done yeah right so one thing about growing up we talked about my mom a lot my dad has an interesting story that he was the head of a credit union in El Paso, most successful credit union in America for several years.