Liberal Media Bias, Trump & Taming Big Tech with Cable Impresario John Malone

I outlined the whole damn thing.

Streaming, random access.

Yep, no, you're quite prescient.

Yeah, I mean, so what the hell, you know?

What the hell?

I'm also so stupid.

That's okay.

Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is on with Kara Swisher, and and I'm Kara Swisher.

My guest today is John Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media, a cable industry pioneer and literally one of the smartest people in media.

As the CEO of Telecommunications Inc., or TCI, he turned a struggling Denver outfit into the largest cable company in the country and then carved Liberty Media out of TCI and grew it into one of the most influential and diverse media companies in the world.

Liberty and its spin-off companies have owned major stakes in companies like Discovery, Sirius XM, the Atlanta Braves, and Formula One.

His memoir, Born to Be Wired, just came out, and as he says in the book, he's often been cast as a ruthless villain by the media.

He's been called Genghis Khan, Darth Vader, a monopolist, and a robber baron.

John describes himself as, quote, high-functioning, autistic, and he's mostly avoided the spotlight, but he's never shied from a fight.

And the self-described libertarian has been taking pot shots at CNN for years, so of course I had to ask him about that.

And full disclosure, I'm a CNN contributor.

At 84, he's still hugely influential.

I'm excited to talk to him because he's a complex man.

A lot of people think he's one thing, and a lot of people think he's another.

I think he's just really good at business, and one of his focuses, of course, is making money.

He also thinks a lot more than the regular media executive about the impact all over the place.

And though I don't agree with him about a number of issues, it's always interesting to talk to someone who is clearly incredibly gifted at what he does.

Our expert question comes from Jeff Buchas, another one of my favorites and the former CEO of Time Warner.

Please note: we recorded this interview in two separate sessions.

We ran out of time during the first one, and John was kind enough to come back and do a second taping.

He's a fountain of knowledge and an idiosyncratic one at that.

So stick around.

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It is off.

John, thanks for coming on on.

You're welcome.

Do you like the podcast game?

You know, that's the game these days.

I don't don't know if you.

I know.

I don't play it much.

Why?

Well, I'm sort of antisocial.

Okay.

You don't play it much on it.

Do you listen to podcasts?

Are you interested in the trend of video?

Following it as the collapse of traditional video news, I guess.

Any thoughts on why that is?

Why people are shifting towards them in rather large numbers, actually?

I think people want to listen to their own choir.

Meaning.

It's part of the broad fragmentation, I think, of our culture.

Yeah, I think you kind of started it.

I have to say, cable was starting.

I've been blamed, you know.

Yeah, yes, I know.

Well, we'll talk about that.

Let me start.

Born to be Wild is a memoir, but you also tell a bit of the story of the cable cowboys, the guys who created cable TV by stringing wires from antennas and hilltops to remote towns that otherwise wouldn't have gotten broadcast TV.

My family is a cable family.

I don't know if you know that.

It's from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

We were a coal company and we had the trucks to lay the lines.

So we got the cable franchise, my family.

And I actually worked for the cable company,

basically catching cable thieves who used to string their own wires to the cable wire and shutting them down.

So I know a little bit about this, but explain what they were like and the ethos of how you approached the business in the early days.

Well,

I started my career

as a technology technology guy at Bell Labs,

AT ⁇ T for a while, and then McKinsey.

And from McKinsey, I ended up as a consultant for technology companies, one of which was a company called General Instruments, which had just bought a company called Gerald Electronics.

And the company was a mess.

And I was asked to go straighten it out.

And that got me into the cable business because they were manufacturing,

designing, building, and financing cable systems.

And one of my customers was a company called Telecommunications Inc.

in Denver, TCI, TCI, Bob Magnus.

And

I ended up falling in love with

the concept and getting my family out of the New York Metro.

And we moved to Denver in 72.

So I was here.

I was PhD

from Yale.

Yeah, an IV educated prep school kid.

Yeah.

So when you took the job as CEO of TCI, and this was a pretty struggling Denver cable company,

you were able to stabilize it and grow it actually through the MA process to transform it into one of the biggest cable companies in the country.

Even though you had sort of started with this sort of Silver Spoon kind of background, what was the thing that you wanted to do there?

And then what attracted you to this cable business, this cowboy business?

You weren't a cowboy.

You weren't cable.

Well, first of all, I have to combat the silver spoon.

I worked my whole life.

I had a work scholarship all the way through.

And,

you know, even graduate school was $400 a month.

Yeah, I meant Ivy educated.

Yeah.

No,

I got a great education, I have to admit.

Yeah.

But what was the attraction to taking something like this that had been very troubled and stabilize it and then grow?

Because TCI was well known for the aggressive MA activity.

Yeah, no, TCI was in horrible shape.

It probably had set the Harvard Business School record for debt leverage.

Right.

So it had managed to get itself way over-levered.

What attracted me was the people.

You know, I joined the motley crew out there.

Most of the guys had not gotten a college education.

They were more military, trained,

self-taught.

And this group of entrepreneurs, you know,

didn't know that they were broke.

They didn't know that they were virtually bankrupt.

And it was struggling through in the trenches that group of guys who, many of whom, those are still living, are still involved involved in my various companies.

So I'm partners with a number of them.

So it was the relationships that drove me.

It drove you.

And also the nature of even if you're in kind of a trench or in a difficult situation, you keep pushing through, correct?

There's another huge motivator.

It's called fear of failure.

Of course, I had a young family.

And I really didn't have a choice.

We had to make it work.

Is that a good motivator, fear of failure?

Because

one of the call marks of, say, technologists in general is failure is great.

Like it just moves you to the next thing.

Yeah.

Well, technology failure and getting promoted up in big organizations is not unusual.

Personal financial failure

is what the driver was.

It wasn't

reputational.

It was financial.

And that's because my folks had graduated and married in the heat of the Depression.

And they were afraid of banks.

My mother kept all of her cash, some paychecks going back 30, 40 years, you know, in a coal stove.

And they were just very nervous about financial.

distress which came to you which they imprinted on me big time yeah yeah but you you still had a very risk-taking position.

You recognized early you needed to achieve economies of scale in order to compete.

And you write that the wiring of the country, the largest private construction in America since World War II, was going to take a tremendous amount of debts.

And in order to get Wall Street to go along, you had to have them focus on EBITDA cash flow instead of profit.

You had a risk profile, though.

How did that happen?

No question.

It was a risky business.

And I learned the hard way how to manage risk

and how to isolate risk.

The banks loved it once you were predictable.

And nothing drove economics like scale.

So it was a very simple economic equation.

Build scale, isolate risk.

If you were going to do an acquisition or a big build, finance it separately, you know, have watertight bulkheads, as many and as much as you could.

I had a mentor by the name of Moses Shapiro.

He used to teach me elements of the Talmud, and he said, one of the biggest lessons is ask yourself the question, if not.

You know, if something doesn't work, where are you at?

Are you dead?

Yeah.

You know, can you recover?

How do you lay off some of the risk?

How do you turn failure into success?

Think it through before you act.

And so I became very driven by that kind of a concept of building a business that

no single or multiple torpedoes could take down.

And it was a hell of a fight with a syndicate of banks who thought they were totally upside down for the first six years.

How did you change the way they understood debt and risk, that you weren't taking, you were taking calculated risks is what you're talking about, where you isolated the risk into certain parts so it wouldn't kill the whole, like a boat, for example.

example yeah this is a hard lesson to teach even chief financial officers to get that last fraction of a data point in terms of cheaper interest will tend to cross guarantee will tend to cross collateralize and you really do as as an entrepreneurial manager in a risky enterprise you really do have to fight that and say no i'm i'm willing to uh pay a little more for the protection I get.

I also have a philosophy of always having dry powder.

So pretty typical companies that I've been involved in building will have no debt at the parent

and will be, in fact, will be quite liquid at the parent, but will have leverage at the operating subsidiaries.

Which is where the debt goes.

Which is where the debt is.

And that's to isolate the parent if something occurs that way the the parent can come to the rescue if necessary i used to joke about it that way the bankers buy you lunch you don't have to buy the bankers lunch when something gets in trouble

and that was a lesson learned through struggling i probably spent half of my time traveling in those first years at tci

just negotiating loan extensions with the bankers because everything was tied together.

The debt was all at the parent.

Everything was cross-guaranteed.

And so then you get the banks fighting with each other.

It's miserable.

So it was a lesson that I learned the hard way.

By the early 80s, there were technology opportunities and there were content opportunities

because we did have synergy with those opportunities.

I had also, to some degree mastered the financials of taxes,

how to advantage yourself with the utilization of efficient taxation, let's call it.

And in order to protect Bob Magnus from losing control of his company, I had come up with the alphabet stock concept, which allowed Bob to take out his two co-founders without losing control of the company and allow the co-founders to monetize.

So you are well known for your

tax expertise, essentially, but you're also a libertarian, have a generally dim view of government regulation.

In 1991, you created Liberty Media, for example, by carving out of TCI in order to further avoid further scrutiny by the DOJ as you were creating this scale.

You seem to take advantage of regulation and at the same time decry it.

So talk about the philosophy towards regulation, how you structured liberty so you're able to scale it without attracting too much attention.

Well,

it seems absurd these days that when I got TCI up to 20, 22%

of the nation in terms of our footprint,

the government decided to change the law and literally block us, specifically us, specifically me, from continuing to grow the core cable business in the U.S.

So

obviously they perceived us as having developed a somewhat monopoly position.

Not just me, but the cable industry generally, but we were the leader, so we were the biggest, we were the target.

So they limited us in terms of the percent of the country we could service.

They then limited us also in the number of programming channels that we could have a financial interest in.

And they then essentially passed some legislation as well as regulations.

Retransmission consent represented the broadcast industry fighting back against the cable industry.

It really delivered the content business back into the hands of the large broadcast network owning.

enterprises.

Right.

Just for people who don't know, retransmission consent means cable companies had to pay the broadcast networks for their content.

Right.

But

your view of government regulation, then obviously negative, but explain the philosophy of how you structured liberty to scale it without.

I would say not negative.

I would say they have their job to do to protect the consumer,

I think, ultimately.

And if you're a manager of a company, you have your job of creating as much wealth as you can for your shareholders.

And so

clearly,

running into regulation was just part of the job.

And then figuring out how far you could go around the regulations, what to do

so you're not stonewalled completely, became part of the management job, part of the strategy.

Right.

But in the book, you make clear you feel the regulations are mostly BS.

Well, most of the regulations, unfortunately, the regulators are always looking backwards.

Now, admittedly, they're not clairvoyant, and it's very difficult to predict the rapidity of change in the technology industry.

And if you combine technological change

with

regulation,

it's quite a challenge.

So

I respect the fact that Regulation is there to protect the consumer, not competition, and not any particular competitor.

And my take on it is really that the regulators should focus more on innovation and making sure that people who have too much market power, not necessarily monopolists, just people with overwhelming market power, are not using it to stifle innovation.

Yep.

That's my philosophy.

I mean, this is what happens, though, inevitably, doesn't it?

Isn't that sort of, you know, it's happening in AI.

It's always awkward.

And now that you have global companies, the technology world is now very much global, the economics of it.

And I don't think our regulators are going to be that good at cooperating with the other guys' regulators.

So I don't know how they're going to do it, how they're going to continue to protect innovation and the consumer from excessive market power.

But it's a legitimate tug of war.

And, you know, far from being...

you know, critical of these guys with their big tech companies, I really admire them.

I mean, I don't know how I missed some of the opportunities I missed, but it is incredible what's been built and the entrepreneurship that's driven it.

Hey, listeners, we're taping a How to AI for Business episode soon, and we want your questions like: How does vibe coding work?

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Email your questions to on at Voxmedia.com and you might hear one of our experts answer your burning AI query.

We'll be back in a minute.

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I'm going to fast forward to 2009.

Netflix reported that it streamed more movies than it mailed.

That was the year that it shifted over.

My former partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed you for our conference that we did with the Wall Street Journal at the time, and you said this regarding streaming:

you have this terrible reality of commercial life, which is how do you monetize this thing?

Unquote.

The thinking within the cable industry was streaming wouldn't produce enough ad revenue or is too expensive to produce original content for it, which Netflix just ran into, speaking of taking risks.

Why didn't the cable companies become Netflix before they did it?

I'm curious because that might have been a solution for you.

Keep in mind, by then, the guy you're interviewing here was the chairman of DirecTV.

So I was no longer in the U.S.

cable business at that time.

I was in it internationally, but not U.S.

and I tried to buy Netflix at that point in time when Reed was having a little bit of financial difficulty.

But

I mean, there's no question that they saw the future and they drove hard toward it.

Reed's comment to me at Sun Valley when I tried to buy it was, if I ever sell the company, it's going to be to a big tech guy.

It's not going to be to an old media guy.

Oh, wow.

No offense taken.

No offense.

But you didn't believe in spending money on the content for streaming, right?

Is that correct?

Because it was

the numbers were enormous.

And Netflix at one point was spending four times what Disney was or some cockamame number.

I believed in fact

it was my own outfit, Starz.

Remember Starz?

Yes, I do.

That licensed all the Disney original content to Netflix that gave Netflix

their real boost.

Absolutely.

When it was happening,

I talked to a number of those.

I'm like, do you understand you're arming your enemy?

It was insanity the way it was contracted.

It should have been limited.

But the reality was I saw it.

I wanted to buy it and

they were unwilling to sell it.

I mean, I think the original sin of media companies was to give Netflix that.

that leg up, for example.

But why didn't the content people spend money, including yourself?

Why wasn't that the idea?

Well, it depends where you they say where you stand depends on where you sit, I guess.

Right, yep.

Keep in mind, the cable industry was heavily embedded in the linear contractual relationships.

That was their meat and potatoes.

That was really the only business until internet came along.

And they had tied up the big media companies in exclusive agreements that precluded the media companies, for for the most part, from exploring

these new phenomenon.

So

I would say the industry was kind of tied in a knot.

The industry came up with various versions.

They had a thing called TV Everywhere.

I remember.

When we sold the business to ATT,

the principal asset that ATT got from us was control.

of a startup business called At Home,

which was the first high-speed internet delivery over cable.

And I had been able to unite basically all the major operators in North America, other than Time Warner.

They were blocked by a contractual deal they had with US West.

And the goal was to offer this high-speed internet connectivity and to allocate 20%.

of the revenue to the creation of content to be played on this new

exclusively right that was that was the goal anyway that was the asset ATT bought when they got TCI

and it was very much my thought that it would include the full content package if you could if you interview guys like the guy running Time Warner Buchas He'll tell you the struggle they had in getting the cable industry to cooperate with each other through that period.

So speaking of Jeff Buchas, every episode we get an expert question.

Let's hear yours.

Hi, John.

It's Jeff Buchas.

My question's on tech.

Big tech's network effects on revenue combined with near zero marginal cost for incremental users causes a natural monopoly, winner-take-all dynamic that makes competition much less effective than how things worked in the industrial era.

And so if you take that and you look at the global scale at which these giants operate, which extends well beyond regulatory reaches of either U.S.

or EU governments acting separately or even together without China and the global south.

What do you think would address the challenge of dominance, rent-seeking, the threat to preserving innovation, and probably more important than all of it, the

political plurality and the separation of government from the private sector?

That's a great question.

That's a big, broad regulatory question.

You know, I'd have to say

that

don't rule out competition.

Look at how much money is being spent on data centers now by these big tech guys.

They're competing with each other.

There's a race on, driven by this technology, which may or may not

live up to its promise.

So

technology is going to continue to drive this, and it will create global competition.

We're already seeing a pitched battle between the Chinese and America, and Trump defines it as who can produce the most electric power, because you can't have a super giant set of data centers if you don't have enormous amounts of electrical power to drive it.

I'm not sure technology won't fix that, though.

I think they can probably figure out over time to lower power consumption.

But

that said,

you have the big tech companies now desperately

looking to compete with each other and you have companies or countries, China, U.S.,

looking at it the same way.

It's the whole future is dependent on who can implement these new technologies the quickest and the most efficiently against each other.

And I looked at it and I said, well, the Chinese have an easier challenge.

In America, we're going to have four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten people trying to do this.

In China, they'll just have one.

Right.

So, for the same amount of money, they end up with about ten times the firepower as we will because we're going to divide it amongst competitors.

On the other hand, our competitors will drive innovation much faster against the Chinese.

So,

for Jeff's question,

you have to say these things are moving so fast into areas that we have no experience at that I don't see how regulators

can possibly keep up

with the rate of change.

You almost in America, you almost have to count on competition.

To sort it out.

To sort it out, yes.

And if government has to intervene, it's probably going to be more on a national security basis than it will be on trying to pick winners and losers.

Right.

That said,

you have the cable industry, of course, has transformed itself.

Cable companies are internet service providers.

They often bundle cable streaming, internet, in some cases, voice.

But it's in a decline in many ways.

Silicon Valley is moving into this space.

And you've called for strict regulations on big tech.

You say tech companies should be forced to make their algorithms transparent and consumers should be paid by tech companies when their personal data is harvested.

This is something I have said for 30 years.

But it's kind of a departure from your libertarian ethos.

Explain what

you're saying competition is going to sort this out, but it may be it'll sort it out not in anybody's favor but the tech companies.

Well, first of all, I'm on the side of the consumer.

The consumer should be given choice as much as possible, and regulations should be set up to allow the consumer to have choice.

And in older, more established businesses, they do.

And the regulators have probably done a pretty good job of making sure there's multiplicity of choices and connectivity in various other areas.

Right now, you have a concentration of firepower.

Take, for instance, Google's dominance of search.

How long will that dominance in search last the AI investments that the other guys are making?

Because I notice even personally,

I'm using AI search rather than Google search because

it's handier.

It seems to work better.

So, you know, I think innovation is really ultimately the answer that the regulators have to look to.

Now, when government intervenes, like they did with network neutrality, they created a disaster for the cable industry.

Because all of a sudden, the cable industry had rapidly growing demand for its capacity by tech companies and no way to collect.

So you disconnected the capital requirements on the cable companies from

the revenue source that would normally drive the volume relationship that would normally drive it.

And so cable companies are running around rebuilding their networks to handle this rapidly growing

demand.

At great cost.

At great capital cost, without any connection to the revenue stream.

And this is particular onerous to me from a network configuration point of view when it comes to big tech using sports, streaming sports, because it takes one channel to cover the country with high quality sports, with

a football game.

Okay.

You don't need

50 million simultaneous streams to do it.

But network neutrality has made it possible for big tech to create an advertising vehicle

by turning what could be done with one channel into

50 million streams so that

they can maximize the ad revenue that they can generate

out of the information they had on the consumer.

Right.

In such a sense, they're getting all the juicy bits, right?

And you said we need a new regime of government regulations designed to rein in and monitor gigantic tech companies of big tech.

You've called for algorithmic transparency, privacy, data.

Is there any, and then you're saying, well, I guess we'll rely on innovation and competition.

I think there is a national security element to this.

I think

you got to cut the Chinese off from control of TikTok.

You really have to do it.

You can't just

look the other way because you're playing games with it.

You really have to do it.

There has to be a national security element to all of this stuff if we're going to continue to have a world that doesn't get along with everybody.

Because the ability to manipulate through these technologies is pretty severe.

And

I don't think our system of government can survive too much dominance of that capability, that ability to

understand brain chemistry.

I mean, look,

these guys with their social networks are all brain chemists now.

How do we stimulate certain brain chemicals and make them last?

And

how do we make these things addictive?

And those skill levels are aided by AI now, where they can sort of individualize everybody's brain and see how every individual reacts to certain stimuli.

I mean, this thing

can be a real sci-fi nightmare, you know, pretty quickly.

Gosh, John, you sound like me.

Everyone got mad at me for saying this.

No, it really can.

And so I think the government really...

I don't know if the government

has the ability to attract people who are smart enough.

In fact, I don't know if the people exist who are smart enough to keep an eye on this stuff and call a halt if it starts to get out of control.

And I think, you know, I agree with some of the spokesmen in the industry who say the industry needs to do this.

The industry needs to self-regulate.

They won't.

Okay.

But I don't think they will.

And I don't see how that crosses international.

They've obviously moved into politics in order to continue to preserve their power in that way very significantly.

Now, you supported President Trump the first time around, and you and Liberty Media donated a combined $1 million to his inauguration in 2016.

But by the time- Well,

that was an inaugural contribution,

not a political control.

I know that I was saying, compared to his inauguration.

But by the time the 2020 elections came around, you soured on him, and the Trump White House was chaos, and you were hoping to vote for Michael Bloomberg.

And it seemed like you stopped donating to Trump after January 6th, but you still donate significant sums to Republican causes.

For example, you gave $500,000 to Speaker Mike Johnson's Grow the Majority Pack in March.

As a libertarian, talk about how you feel about the MAGA version of the Republican Party right now and

its impact on business, which has obviously been your focus.

Well, I broadly agree with the Trump Republican agenda, okay?

I have to say that.

Controlling the borders,

trying

to improve the quality of life for people,

for the working poor, let's call them, by limiting illegal labor competition.

You know, I think we should shift the tax code a little bit away from rewarding capital relative to labor.

I think it's had a skew to it for way too long.

So there are some of those agenda items.

Reindustrializing America, at least in areas of national security and technology, I think is important.

I don't know that you need to make shoes in America again,

but I do think in areas that are critical,

long-term, rare earths,

places where we've allowed our supply chain to become extremely vulnerable as a nation, because I don't think it's a peaceful world out there yet.

And so I agree with those kind of things.

I believe that what Trump's even doing on tariffs is a rational response to the VAT tax.

Congress is not going to pay us a consumption tax, but the VAT tax gives foreign manufacturers a real edge over U.S.

manufacturers.

You know, in Ireland, there's a 21, 22% tax on imports, which is waived

for Irish manufacturers on their exports.

So they can,

American stuff going into Ireland has a tax, stuff going from America into the U.S.

does not.

That's not fair.

And so to equalize

from at least a competitive manufacturing perspective, I think a tariff roughly equivalent to that tax is appropriate.

Okay.

I think it's also appropriate for Trump to use it as a lever to get foreign companies that have particularly strong positions in technology or manufacturing, like semiconductors, to come to the U.S.

and supply the U.S.

from U.S.

production.

Okay.

It's going to take a long while.

It's not going to be easy.

Well, it sounds like you like what he's doing now, most of it?

I like a lot of what he's doing.

I don't necessarily care for his style, but...

But I do like what he's trying to achieve, which is a reindustrialization of America, strengthening national defense,

and improving the economic life of the lower middle class, let's call it the working middle class.

What about taking 10% interest in Intel or charging NVIDIA VIG to export chips to chips?

Well, I would not

support

him going out and buying a 10% stake in Intel.

But Under the Biden administration, they had already given Intel the capital.

Via the Chips Act.

I much prefer us either loaning it to the companies if we have to, to get them to do what we want them to do, or taking an equity stake if their balance sheets won't support them borrowing the money and being able to truly pay it back.

So I'm not opposed to on national defense grounds.

I just think as a general matter, but if he needs to get a big injection of capital into Lockheed Martin so they can build drones fast enough, if that's an important thing to national security, I don't mind him buying preferred and equity stake or loaning them the money

to make that happen rather than just giving them the money.

In the book, you say the country was drifting towards socialism because JFK called on U.S.

steel to lower prices.

But when Trump calls on American companies to keep prices low despite tariffs, is that drifting towards socialism?

It's silly in its politics.

It's politics.

It's silly in its politics.

They're going to have to do what they have to do

to produce results or they lose their jobs.

So

calling on people to be nice guys,

it's good public relations, but it's not necessarily

effective.

And I think if you do things, if you single people out or companies out for bad behavior, that's probably okay

if it's not politically motivated.

Well, everything with Trump is politically motivated, it seems.

But so you say repeatedly in the book that CEOs' responsibility is toward their shareholders,

which seems to be your religion, essentially.

You're right, that's how capitalism works.

So when Tim Cook, for example, has to do things with Trump, like give him a golden statue in order to keep the tariffs off his back.

That's what he has to do.

Presumably, you think that.

Does the CEO have any responsibility towards fellow citizens?

If Trump,

do you consider him an authoritarian, especially with these troops in the cities?

Is there any point where business leaders have to put the Constitution before shareholders?

Well, I think the jury's out on this,

National Guard in cities.

You know, I'd rather see the federal government fund a surge of cops

rather than the National Guard.

But how are you assessing what Trump is doing here then?

Because not just going into the cities, but the idea that you have to kowtow to

sort of the central executive idea.

Well, I don't like that solution.

My solution would be much more subtle.

It would be reforming Social Security.

It would be reforming 401k.

You know, I look at these government problems as requiring long-term strategy.

The problem in our culture, the problem in our political system is we have politicians that are elected for two or six years in Congress.

Congress is the most important part of our governmental system.

It's very difficult for them to take long-term strategic views.

But to fix these kind of problems, you must, whether it's national security, you know, when George W.

Bush, who I admired personally,

but when he brought China into the World Trade Organization as a developing country, he said goodbye to American industrial production.

And it's been consistent ever since.

We've shifted more and more.

industrial production out of the country to the point where we have very little ability to build anything in America, anything fundamental in America.

So you're not worried about Trump being an autocrat or trying to stay in office or et cetera, et cetera.

I worry in a couple of ways.

One is he tries to fix everything quick,

and his tactics are, you know, are pretty brutal.

You know, it would be nice if he could have more finesse.

in in approaching these things and do a better job really of explaining.

But when you try and use a tariff for 27 different political reasons like to help bolsonaro and brazil or you know to uh to batter india uh into not buying russian oil you know you kind of lose you lose your uh your perspective so i worry about trump taking on too much too fast

uh do i think he really uh is going to attempt to stay in power and put don jr into the White House after him?

I don't think so.

I don't think that's really where he's coming from.

I do believe that his close call with the assassination attempt really did make him think through

his life, what his legacy can be, and how much time he has to achieve it.

And the little comment he made on the side a few days ago about, I want to go to heaven, and I'm not sure.

I'm not sure I'm doing well.

You know, it was a pretty, pretty strong kind of statement that snuck out there.

Yeah, interesting.

I think it's true.

All right, we'll see.

We'll be back in a minute.

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John, thanks for coming back for a second taping.

We had a great conversation the first time, but I didn't get to ask you about the news business, which I meant to.

It's just the other things that were more interesting to me at the time.

But since then, you've had some controversy around stuff you said about CNN.

And I want to just go over it a little bit.

Let me go backwards for a second, because in November of 2021, in the middle of the Warner Brothers Discovery merger, you criticized CNN and said it should, quote, actually have journalists.

You compared it unfavorably to Fox News.

And now you're criticizing them again.

First, an interview with the New York Times, you said that when it comes to making CNN less biased to the left, Warner Brothers CEO David Zazlov has been, quote, unable to have any meaningful impact.

And in an interview on CNBC, you said you aren't seeing any actual journalism in mainstream media or CNN in particular, and you compared it unfavorably to Fox News again.

Which

I look,

why don't I just let you go on and explain this to me?

Talk about your theories of what's happening here.

Well, let's narrow it way down to television news.

Okay.

I go back, my standard would be Walter Cronkite and Huntley Brinkley,

where

they had massive audiences.

Pretty much their coverage of the news was very similar.

And probably, I haven't done the arithmetic, but probably less than 5% to 10% of the news of the night had anything to do with politics.

When

Ted Turner decided to start CNN,

Ted's theory was that news

should be journalism.

It shouldn't come out of New York or Washington, D.C.

It could come out of Atlanta.

And

Over time, we saw CNN starting to become a little to the left.

And when Rupert Murdoch called me up and said, is there room in America for another television news service?

I thought, yes,

because Rush Limbaugh had demonstrated on his radio side that there was a very large and underserved audience on the right of center.

And so Rupert launched Fox News.

And the deal Rupert explained to me was he was going going to have a true news organization inside Fox News that was going to be

really

neutral politically and focused on factual news.

That would be represented today by Brett Baer, previously by Brett Hume.

And

the rest of the day was going to be entertainment focused on

whatever's going on,

fairly heavily political.

Whereas Ted's approach was zero celebrity, just journalism, just the news.

What happened, of course, was then MSNBC got launched as NBC felt like they needed

a flanker brand for the broadcast news to fill the 24-7.

And in order to compete and gain a share against each other, they started to become increasingly political news because that was something that could really differentiate one from the other.

CNN, in my opinion, had terrific journalists, still does,

very talented people, and spread all around the world.

Now, I also believe that they've been drawn into way too much political focus in their broad coverage

in order to compete with the other two guys who are are almost entirely political.

I mean, that's what one would do if you see success at what Fox was doing.

And we'll get to Fox in a minute because they're not the stellar news organization you speak of all the time.

Yeah, but they don't hold themselves to be all journalism.

They hold themselves to be sometimes journalism, but as Sean Hannity openly admits he's very biased, which he is, and the various,

let's call them quasi-celebrities that have their hour here and the hour there.

I mean, let's face it, when you have a comedian, Greg Gutfeld,

right, is getting a big audience and

his

personal political position is very, it's very right-wing, okay?

You know,

is it entertainment or is it news?

Well, I think it's it's entertainment.

They don't try to be overwhelmingly factual.

They try to be controversial and funny and keep an audience.

So let me ask you, what do you think the public wants here?

I mean, which CNN anchors are biased?

Is it the evening time, which is very similar?

It tracks onto what Fox does.

Look, the trouble with bias is it's almost invisible.

And the person who,

look, these are good people.

These are people who believe they're not biased.

Okay.

They really believe that.

It's just like an awful lot of us white folks say we're not biased about blacks.

Okay.

But it's embedded.

You grew up in a family that didn't see blacks

as we would like to see blacks today.

So you have to go through a little mental exercise to understand where they're coming from.

So you get somebody, a journalist, an anchor, a promoter, a producer who's really behind, you know, what you cover and what you don't cover.

And

that kind of point of view is difficult to suppress.

I mean, if you look at the political affiliations of the journalism industry, who they contribute to, who they register to vote with, okay, you'll find damn few

professional journalists on the right.

Damn few.

There's a lot in Newsmax.

They have more stations than ever before.

Yes, there is a rising group because there is a rising economic

structure

that's willing to support it.

I want a news service that not only serves the public, but makes us.

In a way, you're pining for a time that's gone by, right?

The idea of that we all got along and there are only three networks.

Well, that's you were part of the change in that.

The cable business certainly was.

But I'm curious, you don't really criticize Fox News.

You just think they just are what they are.

The way it's incredibly political, it's divisive.

Let me finish.

And even though you admit it's got a lot of entertainment and not facts-based, mostly the audience probably sees it as news and truthful.

And let me also, as you know, and I'm not giving you some information you don't know, they settled a lawsuit with Dominion for $787 million

because its journalist repeated lies about the 2020 election.

Brett Baer sent emails pressuring the network's decision desk to reverse their 2020 election Arizona call and flip it from Biden to Trump.

So,

how do you square this circle, if you don't mind?

I just, I just,

are they all the same?

I'm not here to defend Fox as a journalism organization.

I think Brett Baer comes the closest

on air,

but know, he's going to be pushed to the right just by the fact that he's so surrounded by people who

have been selected because

they may not even believe it personally.

I mean, I don't know what Greg Guttfeld really believes, but I know he's found an audience for his comedy by approaching it from the right.

So

when I criticize it, I'm just saying, look,

if you want to have a successful global news service, it should really be

the effort should be to make it very factual and less partisan political and more

in-depth coverage so people actually have who are interested actually have the facts in some level of depth.

But no conservative viewers are going to abandon Fox or OAN or Newsmax for CNN's version of Fox News Light, I would assume.

In the book, you write that the news service like CNN is a public trust that, quote, the media have, if not an obligation, then a moral imperative to help unite the country rather than endlessly exposing or exacerbating our differences.

We started talking about how the media fragment and people want to listen to their own choir.

We can argue about whether or not Fox is living up to its obligation to unite the country.

I don't think that's its job, nor do I think it is intending to do it.

But it's clear that on social media, enragement equals engagement, and there's very little incentive to unite, especially financially, just what you're talking about.

So, where does that leave us as a society?

Scared to death about our grandchildren,

scared to death, going through dramatic changes, already having all kinds of psychological, psychiatric problems, suicide rates, people feeling isolated, young men,

couch potatoes, connected to the the rest of the world only through a digital platform that's manipulating their brain chemistry.

I think it's very scary.

And

I'm not sure I can predict in any meaningful way

where it's going to go.

I think,

you know, I'm a huge believer in education,

in the educated citizen being able to

end up keeping

a political system functional.

And I just don't see it.

And there are going to be plenty of people that are really well educated and really understand a lot more than I do.

But

the average, the mass population is currently

subject to great manipulation by

entrepreneurs who really should be brain chemistry scientists and are.

And people get addicted to things without realizing it.

Let me read you something to someone who knows you very well, and they were joking.

They said, John has been out West for too long, which is funny.

He said he doesn't recognize the rotten government, the unprecedented and Putin-esque subservient oligarchic corruption, and isn't frothing at the mouth about the Marxist tariffs the way he would if a Democrat had done it.

The lack of EQ among Republican male business types, augmented by other issues, is an abandonment of what they all previously declared were their conservative principles because MAGA extremists have slapped an R on the whole tyrannical project.

And the last thing they said,

one of the things that's hard to do is you don't have a solution, I guess.

And he jokingly said, one loses brain cells living in the plains or mountains, either because of the emptiness or altitudes.

That was a joke.

Well, you know, look, all I say about myself is I'm really an engineer.

You show me a problem, and I'll try to figure out an approach to solving it.

So I'm very much problem-solution, problem-solution kind of a person,

no matter what comes my way.

And I'm pragmatic about it.

I am not politically biased in one way or another.

I would call myself a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.

I think government needs to stay out of people's lives as much as possible.

And I think the financing of government should be as painless to a market economy as it can be, and as little disruptive to a market economy as it can be.

You know, but I believe we live in a rational world with a lot of bad actors, actors, and we need to be strong as a country and think about our survivability, our sustainability,

which we don't do nearly enough.

I mean, our political system is built around

a three-part federal government in which the Congress was supposed to be the most important and the most active.

And unfortunately, they in recent years have been the least

active.

As a result, the executive has

and the bureaucracy has been filling in for the vacuum created by Congress not being explicit.

Look, there hasn't been a budget coming out of Congress in years.

They can't agree on anything.

So they just kick the ball down the road.

And what that really means is they're transferring power to the executive branch.

It scares me to death that Trump is right at the very edge of presidential power, trying to define

the extent of it.

I hope he doesn't go against the courts, but I do hope that the courts constrain themselves and don't think they're now the ultimate power in the universe.

Congress should be the ultimate power in the universe, but Congress is so divided it's dysfunctional.

This particular Congress has abrogated its power to him.

You know that.

This is a real, real

problem in our form of government all right well we're gonna end there john i really uh appreciate this i wanted to get the clarity and you you you did that and so i appreciate it all right very good

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