The Chris Cuomo Project - David Pakman Breaks Down How the Right Built a Media Machine That Works

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

David Pakman (host, “The David Pakman Show,” and author, “The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America”) joins Chris Cuomo to discuss how right-wing media built a post-truth movement that helped propel Trump’s political dominance. They explore why conservative digital platforms are outperforming liberal ones, how the left’s messaging failures have contributed to election losses, and what needs to change. Pakman and Cuomo also examine the appeal of the manosphere, the role of masculinity in modern politics, and how perception has overtaken reality in the public discourse. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Support our sponsors: AG1 AG1 is offering new subscribers a FREE $76 gift when you sign up. You’ll get a Welcome Kit, a bottle of D3K2 AND 5 free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out DrinkAG1.com/ccp to get this offer! iRestore Reverse hair loss with @iRestorelaser and get $625 off with the code chris at https://www.irestorelaser.com/chris #irestorepod Factor Eat smart with Factor. Get started at FACTORMEALS.COM/FACTORPODCAST and use code FACTORPODCAST to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. Shopify Upgrade your business and get the same checkout AllBirds or Aviator Nation uses. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at SHOPIFY.COM/chrisc to upgrade your selling today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I have a difference maker for you today. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. David Packman, by all metrics, is killing it on digital media. He is a leading generational thought leader on the left. Why? That's why I wanted to talk to him. He has a book coming out, The Echo Machine, and it is a look at how the right wing built up resonance and how it has created a post-truth America.

What does that mean to David? How does he think it happened? What does that mean for the left? Why aren't they equally culpable? How are they different? How are they better? Is there such a thing anymore? I wanted to try to scratch the surface of why he believes what he believes.

I think that's the most fertile space in understanding the opinion world that is digital media. These aren't guys who are wowing you with their reporting or even really their perspective on their experiences because most of them don't come from politics or journalism. But their ideas are rooted in a sense of identity and a sense of purpose, and David Pakman is head of field for a reason. So let's hear what he thinks his role is in the echo machine. David Pakman, pleasure to have you here on The Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for spending time with me. My pleasure.

I like your book, The Echo Machine. I think it's directionally the right kind of conversation to have. The subtitle is How Right- extremism created a post truth America. My beef is that I think you're ignoring half the fringe and the amplification of fringe on social media. And I believe that you don't have the right wing advantage without the left wing counterbalance

and what they have been trying to do. Why do you focus on one and not the other? Well, some of that is in the book. And I talk in the book, in fact, I've heard from some of my friends on the left where they say, why are you even bringing up some of these other issues about how the left has addressed cultural issues, how the left has addressed gender?

So I do bring that up in the book. Yes, chapters five and seven, I direct people to by the way, chapters five and seven in my perusal of the book are a nice little progression for the progressives to look at the state of play. You mentioned them all throughout the book, but those two chapters are salient on this issue. Are you just about to say you didn't pick the title?

Well, so, you know, the publisher has a big role in picking the title, and we did not include the left and the right in the title, that's true. No, but I'm sort of kidding around about the fact that although obviously I consider myself someone who's on the left and I rarely vote for Republicans, I also take heat from the left because on some of these issues, I just think that

the Democratic Party, of which I'm not a member, but I have voted for many Democrats, I think has failed. And I'm sure we'll get an opportunity to talk about it in relation to the election from a few months ago. Are the parties done? Is the uniparty the reality and is the independent movement the salvation for our political dynamic? Yes, and it's impossible unless something changes with regard to how we do elections, right? I mean, to some degree, if we don't have a proportional representation, multi-party system,

or some kind of single transferable vote or rank choice voting system, I think ideologically what the two parties provide and offer is quite bankrupt in terms of new ideas or an ability to really affect any kind of change. At the same time, people rarely want to change the system under which they got elected. And this is why it's always, you know, I roll my eyes when elected officials talk about all the change that they're going to make, some of it, which would make it harder for them to get reelected.

It's very hard to imagine them biting the hand that feeds them. So I would be, I can't think of a better change to the system we have than allowing serious third parties, right? It doesn't, I'm not talking about pro barbarring in some third party movement that has no support or that only offers fringe ideas. But I'm talking about something more practical, the likes of which I talk about in the book, had succeeded in places like Denmark and Sweden and Germany and Uruguay and South America and parts of India.

Yeah, I would love to see that. I don't see those in power allowing it to happen. Well, that's the problem though, right? Isn't it the most flagrant abuse of populism is the party dynamic, which is not a creature of law, as it is where you were born in Argentina. It is a creature of culture as established by the Supreme Court in the 1970s, which means it's just a choice.

We don't have to have party control of our elections. And maybe the most straight line remedy is ranked choice voting. I think ranked choice voting as opposed to first past the post would be a super important reform. And this doesn't ignore a whole bunch of other reforms when it comes to the voting systems that I talk about in the book. But the number one reason, you know, when I speak to my friends on the left,

I don't talk to anybody who says, I just love the Democratic Party. It's awesome. It offers me everything that I like. It's the policies I like. It's the people that I like. It's often none of that. It's a much less scary option than the Republican party.

But the number one thing that prevents them from voting third party, and it's like a race to the bottom, is I don't want to accidentally help the candidate that I really dislike. And you know the math of it as well as anybody else. In a close state that can make a difference, If you really don't want Trump, and you'd rather someone other than Kamala Harris and you vote third party, you're effectively making it likely that Trump is actually the one who wins that state.

That's what keeps most people from voting third party. Now, one other thing I'll say, Chris, is the risk of that doesn't exist at the local level, where many municipalities have put in place ranked choice voting, or it's less of a concern because you're not gonna end up in that super tight scenario. So a lot of this stuff has to kind of start at the local level before it goes

to the presidential election. Post-truth America. Are we post-truth or do we just have this new injection of opinion in the podcast form? I find most podcasters are opinion makers. There's almost no reporting that's broken on podcasts and when it is it's spoon-fed from like Elon Musk to these guys with the ski hats on the right. So is it that it's post-truth or are we just kind of like in some kind of hyper-opinion mode? Well, post-truth means like three different things. So there's three parts of it. One, Kellyanne Conway's Alternative Facts more recently, Trump's press secretary went on Fox and said, we believe there's tens of millions of dead people

getting social security payments, tens of millions. At its peak, it was probably 10 or 15,000, most of which were like a month or two before the SSA caught up with death certificates, right? So 15,000, tens of millions. It's just not true, but that's been blurred by a party, the MAGA party, that has said, you're going to hear diametrically opposed things from others. We have the monopoly on truth. Trump's saying, I alone can fix it. I know more than the generals and the

scientists and the teachers and the engineers. And so that's one part of it, which is they have, they have said we are the ultimate source of truth. I would never tell my audience that. I say, fact check me, I could get it wrong. I'm not the ultimate source of truth. That's one difference. The second thing is I talk about in the book is

where are the critical thinking classes, the epistemology classes, the media literacy classes. And the way that this manifests is if you put a chiron on the screen and it says live in the corner and there's nice makeup and you've got your raincoat pinned so it fits well, right? You know what I'm talking about? People look at that and it looks like the news so they go, this is a news report, even if it's not a news report. So it's like an

all of the above thing. And that's what I mean. Post-truth isn't one thing. It's all of this stuff. And of course it's like the podcast opinion, algorithmic industrial complex too. What I think is interesting in terms of the shift, and it could just be optics and you may dismiss it as that, the right seems to be more accommodative of dissent than the left. The left is the home of the cancel culture. And they'll say,

no, no, the right is. I'm not feeling it. And not just because of what happened to my brother. That was about rules of a political party. The irony is nobody understood what was happening better than we did. In his party, there's a rule. An allegation is enough. And he was well past that standard. So it was clear his party was going to come after him. But you guys seem intolerant. If we don't agree, I'm bad. If I don't want to accept everything you want me to accept about trans life, I'm a bigot. And I feel like this has really hurt you guys with reasonable people who want this kind of range of agreement and a range of acceptance. And you guys through, let's say the spirit animal of an AOC seem like scolds and very rigid.

And if you don't agree with everything I say, you're a bigot, probably a white man, and you should be canceled. What do you do with that? Well, I don't disagree with you that that is a problem. And in fact, when I did my kind of post-mortem of why Kamala Harris lost, I included that. I think that that's a fair criticism of a part of the left.

The way I would modify it a little bit is to say, the right is much more about big tent, all views are welcome, when it comes to winning the election. Once they're in power, it's different, right? So, you know, some of my friends on the left were saying, MAGA's different this time, they're going to cut military spending, and it's a new MAGA, and it's a new Trump. And I said, yeah, that's what you think

from watching everything up to November and a little bit between November and January. Does anyone think Trump's going to cut the military budget now? Of course not, right? So I think that there is a more welcoming environment leading up to the election, and good for them, right? I mean, they're using that to win.

They figured out, come on in, you used to not like Trump and now you do, or it's not even that you like him, but you're skeptical about something on the left, come on in. The left employs the purity tests, the left employs some of these, you're either with us or against us things, and as a result, it's a disaster for elections.

Now, I think it's also important to mention at the same time that part of what I think the left struggles with is not that that stuff you described is so prevalent. Like if you go and you just talk to working Democrats in Michigan, they're not keyed in on a lot of this stuff. It's the economic issues. But the left takes the bait very often and ends up dying on some of these hills for things that actually should never become as big of an issue as they are. And again, congratulations to the Republican Party for being able to trigger that sort of response.

I think that's very intelligent and I think it's very mindful of a very big delineation that is not easy to draw all the time, especially as an exclusively digital media guy, which is what people worry about is not what's on social media. For me, the kind of flashpoint, I guess, was the Harvard study where they had like some ridiculously large sample size. And it was that 80% of people who are democratic consider themselves center left.

And I was like, well, then they're not on fucking Twitter because these people are rabid. And it made me realize that they can say they're 170 million users of Twitter, not active. They're not. And it's a small fraction of that. And it's all the intensity. And you guys lost the election because you owned the status quo, and people didn't like the status quo. That's really the end of the analysis. There are all these other things that happened that were ancillary or

really straight up externalities that wound up mattering only in the narrative structure, not in the demography. Where you lost, you lost because of the election and to the extent that they needed a substitute issue, it was immigration because it was proof of perfidy. That you know you guys just you guys just didn't do what you were supposed to do on your watch. That's what immigration mattered to them. They didn't have feelings about throwing everybody out or letting everybody in. It was just you guys pretended this wasn't a problem.

It got worse on your watch. And that's the thing that cements my feelings about the economy under Biden and Harris. And that was it. Everything else was just noise. The question is, do you believe that you're seeing on the left right now an acceptance or an acknowledgement of what went wrong and doing things differently.

You know, I'm seeing it amongst some people who may not have a say, and I'll tell you specifically what I mean. I was invited to meet with top Biden staff and even the former president himself in, when was this? I guess it would have been December, okay? Not before the election. This was a few weeks after.

It was either December. I've completely lost track of time. I think it was December. And everybody was listening. It was me and nine other online content creators. And I explained, you know, you can't start calling us for interviews in October. We need to build an ecosystem.

It needs to be cool to hang out on the shows. We've got to include non-political shows. The way that the right has built this, you know, Theo Vaughn and the Nelk boys and PBD and all, right? You can't just say, can we do a 12 minute interview about these three things October 15th and expect that to be a way to build an ecosystem. So they listened, but this was like a few days before Biden left office and Trump was sworn an ecosystem. So they listened, but this was like a few days before Biden left office and Trump was sworn in again. So now the question is like, what's going to happen with Democrats in the House and Senate going into 26 and eventually into 28? I'm kind of cautiously optimistic because it went so haywire in 24 that they're actually

going to do something different this time. But honestly, when the handlers get in the way, you know, when I look at the Trump-Nelk Boys thing or with Lex Friedman or whatever, he's lying out of his ass and misstating facts and figures and nobody's fact-checking it, but it doesn't matter. He hung out. It was primarily unscripted, and it just seems like a better group to be a part of

than the one that Kamala Harris was offering. Yeah. Look, it's the new who would you have a beer with measure. But remember, that's all secondary to economic realities. Where the Democrats have lost traction, and this is a really interesting challenge for your generation of, let's say, of thought leaders, okay, is you guys don't come from the campaign experience. Most of you don't even come from the reporting experience.

So you are in the ideas business. And the reality of politics is persuasion based on practicality. So people don't give a shit how good Trump is with Theovon if they can't pay their rent. And if he's on the right side of their rent, then they don't, again, care how he is. Biden's problem was he owned the status quo and the status quo was lacking from a price economy perspective. Now there were plenty of reasons.

Let me ask about that though, Chris. Go ahead. I think I agreed that the perception of the economy hurt Biden. Yes. But let's start not with the perception, let's start with the reality. Which economic metrics would you point to

to say that under Biden, things were not good? Rate of inflation. That became the metric. Okay, which was down to 2.9% by the end of Biden's presidency. Right, but what does that mean? That the rate of increase in prices had slowed. I want prices to go down, not to go up more slowly. You lose on that analysis.

But let's dig into that. This really is my background, economics. If you start to see prices going down, what would be the rational consumer decision with regard to purchases? If you say prices went down, what are you going to do now? Buy more. Why? Because prices are lower and I'm a consumer.

But if you expect prices to continue down, the rational economic actor would say, I'll wait till things are even cheaper. Not in America, but I agree with you. In terms of an indifference curve, yes, but in terms of what we do, remember, nobody, there's something you have to build into this that isn't semantics, and I'm not just playing

one finance background to another, is Americans overspend more than any other developed culture. Our reliance on credit is crazy. So most people, you're right, David Pakman's right. When prices go down, you stay on the sidelines and you wait and the trend is your friend. But in America, they buy themselves all the way down

and they buy themselves all the way up because they're borrowing most of the time that they're doing it. And that's why they're so price sensitive. Well, I think the point I'm trying to make, Chris, is in a country like the United States, with an economy as mature as ours, to see raw price reductions, in a country like the United States, with an economy as mature as ours,

to see raw price reductions, you only really see it when the economy is in disaster shape. And so I think that again, it's perception. When we would go and ask Trump voters at a rally, what do you wanna see with prices? And they go, I want nominal prices lower than before the pandemic. They don't realize if that happened, we would be in an economic collapse, right, likes

of which you can't imagine 100%. But you are. This is your post truth point. But it's always been true in politics, which is perception beats reality. I agree. And when you are the insurgent, you attack the status quo. And Trump, what's his name? Reagan's guy came up with the, are the best deceptive metric in history. Are you better off than you were four years ago?

How? How could you be better off than four years ago when everything keeps getting more expensive? It was always a really convenient metric, but it works in politics. And the real reason that Biden lost was he couldn't explain it away. And that's a big thing in politics.

My point is, I agree with you that the perception of the economy killed Kamala Harris's campaign. I challenged the notion that it was the reality of the economy, but I agree that it was the perception. And it was also the perception that there was not a serious handling of crime and immigration. Reality, crime rate continues to decline in the United States. On average, Oklahoma City is more dangerous than New York City. The state of Oklahoma is more dangerous than the state of New York. So those are the facts. Doesn't matter. When it seemed as though Harris was not taking it seriously.

It hurt her and it perception is greater than reality. As you point out, support comes from a G one. We're starting to get into the nice time of the year. We're going to get outside. You're going to get that natural vitamin D, but you're gonna start focusing on yourself a little bit differently with bikini season coming up, aren't you?

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["The Echo Machine"] Perception is greater than reality, especially when you have this, again, to the title of David Pakman's book, The Echo Machine, that's a great fucking title, because that's what digital media is, is an echo. There are very few original thinkers. I don't mean that as an insult. I'm saying that there's a zeitgeist, there's a vibe, there's what people are talking about,

and then all you guys riff on it. And whether it's you or Brian Tyler Cohen on the left or Ezra Klein, you know, there's, there are a group of, I think you guys are like the new Cognacenti and you are up against guys who are all raw masculinity, even if they don't personify it. Like you know, these guys, the big names on the right, whether it's Benny Johnson or Tim Poole or Tucker Carlson, I don't look at those guys and think alpha male. I do believe that they're right to fight for the alpha male.

There's nothing wrong with that. It should be an inclusive thing. You can be any kind of man you want. There's no kind of man that's good. There's no kind of man that's bad, unless you are bad to others. And then no matter what you are, you're bad. But you guys are brain versus brawn on some nominal level

that I think is a false comparison, but that's what it is, and it's who can amplify message more. How do you see yourself within that space, which I guess is an echo machine? Well, I've talked about a lot of this isn't in the book now, but in the last couple of months, I've explored how it has become that this sort of manosphere has become coded with messages that overlap with Republican

ideology. And it doesn't make a lot of sense the way you're pointing out. A lot of it is traits that we didn't use to consider masculine, and now we do, and it's gotten all wrapped up. But part of it is, you've got to give them credit, they've seized on, there hasn't been a super coherent and attractive model of masculinity put forward by what we might call the left.

Now what the left is, I don't know, it's loosely defined, but I think the point that I made is people like a Barack Obama or a Scott Galloway, I think are very interesting models of masculinity from what we would call the left. But that is not really the way that it has been presented in media. And so if you're online looking for either workout content or I want to start wholesaling real estate or whatever, all this stuff that's big on social media, next thing you know, it's all coded with pull yourself up by your bootstraps and then it's only one more step until anti-abortion and then Trump sitting there hanging out for two

hours. That's the funnel and it works really well, partially because the right is organized, but partially because the left hasn't put forward a good alternative model. The right dominates alternative media spaces. It always has. It did with pamphlets, newsletters, radio, social media, digital media. Why? Magnified minorities. That's always been the sweet spot for people on the right.

The question is, what is the counter for people on the left? Well, you're forgetting one major reason why they've succeeded. I mean, if you go back to the start of talk radio and religious broadcasters, a lot of right-wing radio started with church stations. Those were funded by super rich national organizations that just said start a local one, get a license. It's very similar to what's going on right now. We don't have Turning Point USA on the left. We don't have the Daily Wire on the left. The Midas Touch guys are growing very quickly so maybe they could

become that, right? But we just don't have that and part of the reason is no matter how many times they talk about George Soros, Soros is mostly funding outside of the US in places where we need democracy and media. Like, Soros is not doing in the United States what they say that he is doing. It's actually the right wingers that are doing it. We just don't have it. And I've talked about this extensively. I talked about it to the New York Times a couple months ago.

Yeah, but that's what they say. That's what you're missing. They say you have the New York Times. You have CBS. You see what Margaret Brennan was trying to pass for a gotcha question with JD Vance? You have the real media organizations are on your side. That's what they say. Yeah, that's what they say. But the reality is that any one of those has a comparatively tiny audience to the totality of the independent media ecosystem.

If you look at, I mean, how many people watch Face the Nation? One, a million, 800,000, I don't know, right? These compared to the totality of the algorithmic-based media, it's like a drop in the bucket. I don't know how to feel about digital reach. I was just talking, I believe one of the best scams going in our society, good thing I'm not on News Nation when I say this, is Nielsen ratings.

No way Nielsen ratings are accurate. No fucking way. All they do is keep costs down for advertisers. And every time you get a demographic, they change it to another one. So, and as you know, as somebody with an MBA, there's no way you argue that your generation beats mine in terms of who you want to target as a consumer? A Gen X guy versus a Gen Y or millennial, whatever you are, you can't compete with us. You do not have the money. You do not have the anchor positions in industry.

You do not have the family structures that we do. We are the earners and the people with money right now. That's who you should want, people in their 50s. But no, what do you want? 25 to 54, and it's even better if now they then go with like redheaded women, they just keep changing it. So I don't believe in the model.

On digital media, I have a similar problem. I do not believe Joe Rogan's numbers. I do not believe them. There are too many people I know who have never even contemplated listening to him or watching any of these. You hear he gets 40 million or 100 million. I think there's something happening with the algorithms. I just can't believe them. What do you think? What. I just, I can't believe them.

What do you think? What's your sense? I can't speak to those numbers. I mean, what I can tell you that our advertisers like is that the data is basically public, right? I mean, podcast downloads aren't, but you can look at charts and if you're seventh in a category,

you can kind of ballpark it, right? But if you look on YouTube, we get 80 million views a month. Okay, that's just, that's the number. And we price our ads based on that. And we promise a certain amount of impressions and the advertisers mostly renew because they get the return. If they don't get the return, they wouldn't renew.

So 80 million is how long each one of the 80 million a month, how many of them do you think are recidivists, like the same person downloading more than once, and how long do you think they watch? I can tell you, so here's the numbers. In an average month, those 80 million views are made up from roughly 2.8 million subscribers and roughly four and a half million non-subscribers. So obviously, there5 million non-subscribers. So obviously there's more non-subscribers,

but the subscribers watch more videos. That's the breakdown. It's like you get all that data, which in a way is way more transparent than Nielsen. So much better. I'm a hundred percent. I believe digital media, look, everything is form and function, okay?

So digital media is better because you will know exactly how many people. Now, is there manipulation within that? Sure, I'm running a platform, I'm pushing Pacman all day. Why? He's a known quantity, I know that people want his stuff, I'm pushing them. I don't know these other guys,

I'm not gonna advantage them in my algorithms until somebody gives me reason to, I'm running a business here So I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. It's like why am I at eight o'clock? That's that's when the flagship program is on cable. That's why it's not at seven. It's not at nine I know Matt I was at nine. I know I was at nine at CNN eight eight eight o'clock is where you want to be And Matt I was on at nine o'clock because Chris Matthews had a different position earlier on. And if they were going to redo it right now, she would be on at eight

o'clock. My point is that you always make preferences within media. My question is, what you do with it in terms of a value proposition to people. I honestly believe the party system is dying, that uniparty is one of the only conspiracies that's true. These cats know that they're just fucking with one another for advantage. And I've known it my whole life, David, because even when I was younger than you are, I'd have these people on who wanted to kill each other on television. And in the commercial, they would be fucking around. And I knew then, like my father, when he went at it with these guys who you've never heard of, whether it's Gabe Pressman or Ted Koppel or Sam Donaldson, he wouldn't even look at him when he would leave these interviews. They were lucky that

he didn't hit them. You know what I mean? It was real then, and it is all contrived. Now, these guys who come after me on social media, when they meet me in person, it's not just that I'm a vanilla gorilla. When they meet me, they're nice, and they're nice because it's an act. People don't get that. Oh, right. Yeah, I know. I agree.

Because when we're face to face, and it's not just, I don't mean to be barbaric about it. I'm not saying they're nice because they think I'm going to hurt them. That's not what it is. It's a gimmick. It's like when Howard Stern used to try to get everybody to fight with each other in New York City. It was an act.

He was a shock jock. I believe most podcasters are in the shock business. There's another layer to this also, which is like if you looked at my inbox and you saw, how is every third email some anti-Semitic attack? There's a reality with social media, which is people are disinhibited. I get emails sometimes from people where I say,

would you ever behave like this in person? Would you ever, and even if you think this, you would never speak to, it would be such a degree of antisocial behavior. And there are people capable of that. But for the most part, I had an Uber driver in Vegas recently who does not like my politics.

We got along fine. Why did we get along fine? Well, we got along fine because we were in person and we're two people and you can just relate to someone else. And he goes, I don't like the communist stuff. And I go, perfect, I'm not a communist. And he goes, oh, you're not? And then we solve the problem, right?

We solve the problem and we move on. The disinhibiting effect of social media encourages this stuff. Whereas people met in person, you wouldn't see it the same way. Yes, and it was supposed to do the opposite. The whole point of having a podcast is to create more connectivity. And it just seems that what we haven't figured out, again, form and function,

is that we have new modalities, but we have the same old game, which is divide and conquer. And that's what you see. And the right is crying about censorship, but they dominate the space. So the censorship must not be working that well when Tim Pool can be a four-foot tough guy with a ski hat on and big cans

that I don't know why they still wear. I don't know why they're still wearing the cans. We all have great technology now. There's no reason to have cans on your head. Technology has improved so much. But you know, Chris, the one thing that I think does make sense to distinguish is, it's very easy for me to get along with people with a lot of different views. And whenever I'm in DC,

I know that DC votes very democratic, but in the city in terms of the people working, people come in from the suburbs and it's very, very mixed in terms of the people you run into. I have no issue with people who have dramatically different views about taxation or who believe that we should be living in a libertarian utopia where everything is just for sales. It's like, okay, I don't think the effects would be good, but I don't, we can get along. When it's, I don't believe that all groups of people should be given sort of like the same level of humanity and consideration.

I think based on your genetics, you're a bad person or you should be treated differently or whatever. That's where I start to struggle. I don't have friends where the disagreements are like that, right? But I've plenty of friends who almost exclusively vote Republican and we disagree on these issues. That seems to be not a big deal to me. It seems to be a very big deal on social media.

There are certain lines though, where it's like, I'm gonna have a tough time having dinner with a certain person. Right, do you go on the podcast of the righty guys? I go on them when they invite me. Yeah, they don't really invite me that much. You know, there are a couple that I stopped doing. Like I used to do Michael Noles show regularly.

The seriousness of the death threats I got after doing that and the limited benefit of doing it made me say I'm not going to do the Noles show anymore. But yeah, like I did PBD and I think those conversations are great. I think that they're fundamental. I'm surprised they have you on. Now Patrick's different. Patrick's different. He has everybody on and you just don't change his, you know, he is in control of his views, but he is very open in terms of the decency of discussion,

in my experience anyway. I would- That was my experience as well. I wouldn't- Could not have disagreed more with almost everything he said. Right. And it happened very cordially. Right, and now look, you know, most of the time

he has people on where there's a sameness, but I think that he's trying. I think value attainment is actually gonna be a very big deal. I think that he's trying. I think value tainment is actually gonna be a very big deal. I think that that's the model that you're gonna see of taking over, he's gonna have a real media thing. Like there's a really good chance that a Pacman will have a show on value tainment and so will Dan Bongino, which is where you would say-

Can you imagine me becoming a Florida guy? That would be wild. Well, look, I mean, you know, it's about where the opportunity is because I believe that the silo effect, what you call the echo machine, is this kind of syndicate of silos. And they are the problem, is that people,

I was just talking to Rick Wilson and he was saying, you know, I don't know about the independent movement because there aren't any real independents because everybody's getting siloed. Wilson and he was saying, you know, I don't know about the independent movement because there aren't any real independence because everybody's getting siloed. I don't know that I accept that because of two things. One, I think we're greatly exaggerating how many people are part of this digital sphere and their ability to be critical thinkers. I think independents are kind of de facto open.

And I think that you're not giving the consumer enough credit for their ability to differentiate among products. And I don't think they're listening to Tim Pool and David Pakman. I think that they're, I think there are gonna be entries into the space on the right. Like my big prediction, Joe Rogan does not own the spot 18 months from now, a year from now,

the way he did a year ago, no way. Bigger, better talents will come in on the right that can do the same thing. Louis CK, Bill Burr, you know, guys like that are gonna come in, Dave Chappelle, guys are gonna come into the space wanting to have these kind of iconoclastic, unorthodox conversations,

and they're gonna blow him away just as talent. And on the left, you know, you guys are just kind of ramping up to speed. The problem is the left has become the establishment. You guys have become perceived as elitists who are protecting the status quo. Do you accept that? And what do you do with it? Which is wild, given Trump and his billionaire cabinet. I know.

And again, it's about, like we were talking about perception and reality. I think there's another aspect to it though that you hit on, which is a lot of people in this country, they're never even, it's not about David Pakman versus Brian Tyler Cohen or Tim Pool. They just, they're not going to watch any of this stuff. Where they will see this stuff is on the non-overtly political shows. That's why I think that the Alex Cooper, Kamala Harris thing was kind of such a disaster where they built this studio specifically for the interview.

It wasn't her actual studio. And then the time was limited and it was focused on certain issues and it was so stiff. Those are the environments. A lot of people don't care about news and politics. They will never watch my show. They just don't care. But when it crosses over into the entertainment space, it's got to feel different. It can't be the 17 minute interview with a handler standing behind you, you know, one minute left, one minute left. And I think that that's

where the left really needs to improve. Yeah. Like the smartness factor of having those guys and how do you come off in that kind of situation? I definitely think that's there, but again, the wanna have a beer metric has always been a real thing. I think it's that the challenge is that, you now have all these people cooking ideas and spinning things. I mean, look, look at Elon.

I've never seen anything like that before. The disconnect between him and the Oval Office and on Twitter is radical. Radical. The guy does nothing but push propaganda. I mean, he was so dead wrong about the Social Security stuff, about the USAID stuff. I mean, it's crazy to have a guy who's being prized for his proficiency to be so wrong. I mean, we've never seen anything like it before but it's all Pac mentality No, no pun intended in terms of Pac-Man

but I Don't know what to do with it. I entered it for a reason. I'm at News Nation for a reason because they'll let me Attack the game all the time. I don't attack the media. You know, you talk about corporate media rot. I believe that, I don't know when this is gonna happen or when it's gonna click in, but I don't think that the legacy media, as you guys call it, has ever been more valuable than right now because podcasts don't report on shit.

Their basis of information is stuff that they grab opportunistically. The idea of why is 1875 used in the social security COBOL code? Fucking, Tim Poole ain't gonna tell me that. Patrick Bette David's not gonna tell me that. News Nation is gonna tell you that. Or somebody with reporters and staff

that can dig and has accountability mechanisms and fact-checkers, you need them more than ever. What do you mean when you say rot? Well, I think that there's a distinction between AP and Reuters and sort of primary news gathering and then the incentives of the 24-hour news structure. It just happens to be that a lot of days there really isn't 24 hours of news. Now put aside for a second that 16 of those hours are overtly commentary and then four more are commentary framed as news.

And right, like put that aside for a second. But you have incentives that prioritize salaciousness and maintaining access. And it's really hard to, over the long term, do something that those who just wanna be more informed are going to feel really good about. And so I'm kinda trying to carefully say what it is that I believe.

So it's not that there isn't good stuff on all of those platforms sometimes, but it's that the incentive structures create an environment where you've got to generate 24 hours of news no matter what or 150 new articles no matter what. And it ends up recycling a lot of stuff, lowest common denominator stuff. Listen, we have someone at the White House every day. I guess that's where the news will come from today, even if the news really is, you know,

at some union negotiation or on the border between two countries in Europe or whatever the case may be. So I think that that is kind of like a structural rot that I would point out. And then, you know, the relationships with advertisers, it depends on where you look. Like, I have advertisers, okay? I had to look today for a segment to see what are the advertisers today on the first day of the month?

I record a bunch of ads. I never hear from them. I never talk to them. They never talk to me fine when you had the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and you would go from Anderson Cooper reporting on it and then into a commercial from BP With blue skies and rolling meadows and the entire thing. Most people can look at that and go, even if I can't identify exactly why I'm not getting the full story here, that appears to be a conflict, right? And so that's kind of what I refer to.

You're also right that a lot of the smaller media can't do investigative stuff because it is more expensive. It's way cheaper to have someone rewriting articles. It's the sad reality. So I do think there is a role for legacy in corporate media because they are the ones that have the budgets to carry out some of these bigger investigations.

So I don't wanna act like it's all bad, but I think where there is rot, it's important to point it out. And what do you do about it? Because look, I'm reading ads here. I'm certainly more tied to my performance on the podcast than I am at News Nation or at CNN or at ABC News. I never knew our advertisers.

Never. I never ever had anyone tell me that I had to do anything. I've been doing this 25 years. I've won every piece of Lucite they give out except the RFK award, cause I never submitted for it. And I had never did anything because an advertiser told me to or not to. It's something people can use.

But if it's true anywhere, it's true in podcasts because all I'm tied to is clicks. I Have to get clicks. There is no goodwill for the Chris Cuomo project it's just know how many views can I get and I'll do whatever you know the pressure is there. Go ahead if you get the views It'll be interesting to advertisers regardless of which ones they are. I think that sometimes there's a perception that the advertisers on podcasts are dictating content in a way that doesn't really happen.

And I think that we have a lot of stories on legacy and corporate media, some big institution, some major advertiser doesn't even want a certain topic touched, right? Like certain types of reporting on Big Pharma. We just would rather not even see that. It's not about we wanna have you change the script. Just like, don't even kind of talk about this general thing. I've never experienced that.

And I'm hearing you saying you've never experienced it either. I mean, we bash Big Pharma and then they advertise all over the place. Now, look, you could have an argument, and I'd certainly be OK with it. I'm sure my my bosses at News Nation wouldn't, where I don't think that they should be able to market drugs to people when I know you don't know what the fuck you're talking about when you in those countries, you can't. You're going to go and ask your doctor for this drug.

And they're talking super fast at the end about all the side effects. I mean, I think it's, I think it's pretty toxic. Ben MGM is an official sports betting partner of the national hockey league and has your back all season long from puck drop to the final shot. You're always taken care of with a sports book born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Ben MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite skater, or your style, there's something every NHL fan is going to love about Bet MGM.

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maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, I get that digital media to me is all opinion. That's what it is. And I'm not saying that is a criticism. I'm okay with it. I'm part of it, although I really do believe I got to figure out a segment to do about this.

People have no idea where I stand on things, none. Like I know where you stand on things, you do it repetitively and you do it well as far as I'm concerned. But, and that doesn't mean I have to agree with you. I fuck with positions all the time on purpose about what's good, what's bad, what works, what doesn't, because that's the part of value that I see.

I don't believe that legacy media is losing ground to digital media because it's not as good. I think it's not as satisfying. I think that even though they all have a lefty perspective, like when Anderson called Governor Sununu a dick the other night, to me, that was a really big moment because of how Anderson explained it.

Anderson Cooper, in my opinion, is the best male in the news business. I think he could get any job that comes up. I think he does the job for the right reasons. I know him. I know his work ethic. And I know what he's about and why he does the job. I believe all of those things. I don't care if people agree with me, that's my opinion.

When he said, I don't know why I called you a dick, it told me exactly where we are in the media. I believe him, he doesn't know. He does not understand how, in a medium that he's been in for 30 years, he just said something that he has never said to anyone before. Why?

Because that's where we are in our level of dialogue. It's like, Pacman, you're like coming after me when I'm supposed to be asking you a question. You're being a fucking dick. You would never think to say that until you just got influenced by a fact question, you know, you're being a fucking dick. You would never think to say that until you just got influenced by a fact that that's all we say to each other now. Nobody has a real debate over ideas about what we should do with Medicaid. It's, Pacman, you can't

spend enough of my money. You fucking commie. I don't know if it's the Argentine. I don't know what it is, but man, you can't spend enough of my fucking money, man. You big government pain in my ass. Versus you wanna take the net out from the most vulnerable people in our society, you piece of shit, faux Christian. You know, that is the level of dialogue that we have. That's the problem for me,

is that there's no money in synthesis. There's no money in synthesis. There's no money in middle. There's no money in compromise or progressive pragmatism. It's all polarization. It's all advantage. Listen, I mean, I can't argue with that in some general level, but you know, I do pretty well. And I'm at least making the effort to call out the left when

I see the left is doing the wrong thing. I mean, listen, none of us are perfect. We all have bias. It's impossible not to. I think the key is identify where you have that bias. I know that I am going to be more favorable to certain ideas depending on who they come from. Strictly speaking, that's fallacious, right? I should be evaluating every idea. It's almost like we shouldn't know the names or physical appearances or parties of the candidates. We should vote based on a written thing

of what they stand for. And then we could say, we're not being influenced by the party or particulars. I would love to tell you, I'm not influenced by the source. Of course I am influenced by the source to a degree. You should be. And I think that in a certain way, it does make sense because expertise exists, but at the same time,

we all have to be aware that we have these biases. I think that's a big part of what's missing right now. Yeah, I also think that you're a very fair broker. See, when I am, you know, I've spent a lot of time absorbing your content because that's what I do. But you are stating propositions, and I'm trying to, I wanna see how far I'm gonna take this.

I believe that this is more true about you lefties than it is the righties when I think about it, which is, I think there's more intellectual honesty. I do not feel that you guys are saying shit that you don't really believe when you say it to me. And when I listen to righties, I'm talking about, you know, first of all, your main problem on the left is that you're not extreme.

You're not extreme enough. You get called extreme as part of the extremism of the right fringe and it works for them, but it's just not accurate about you guys. You're much more self-critical. You're much more incremental. And as a result, less effective perversely because if you were a righty,

you would have 10 million followers, you know, instead of 5 million, you know, whatever. Why? Because they're a much more coalescing group than you guys are on the left. But I believe that Pacman believes what he's telling me. Whereas these guys on the right, I believe are just in anti-mode

and they're ready to hate on anything. Everything's part of this big energetic black hole that has vaccines, has government spending, has gender, has all of these things in it that they are anti. And there's a mindlessness to it of rejection. But I also think it works in their favor. And how do you deal with that? How do you deal with what is winning is anathema to what you are about? Well, it's interesting how you talk about it works in their favor

because on the one hand, part of what we criticize about the right is that they put forward what we see as completely intractable, could-never-work ideas, things that to us seem crazy and to many Americans seem crazy. The way it works to their advantage is when you confront them, right? When you take the words of Trump to some Republican Senator, they go, I'm not worried about that. Listen, he says a lot of stuff. He's not even going to try to do that. Doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference whatsoever, he's better than Kamala Harris. The conversation's kind of over in his head, right?

And so that's the way in which they both benefit from the extremism and they benefit from the fact that by saying this stuff all the time, they can just, eh, who cares, just what he says, he's not really gonna do any of this stuff. So where is the opportunity, do you believe, for anything better than Trump? You're saying electorally? Yeah, and just rhetorically also, just in terms of how we're moving.

Like right now there's stasis, right? Almost an inertia on the Democratic side. They can't get past everything Trump does that sucks, and he's a Nazi, and Elon may be a Nazi also because he's got this funky family from South Africa. And to me, that's kind of like the, you know, you're approaching inertia of where you're still slowing down from your loss, and you're still doing what made you lose.

And what do you think comes next for you guys? Optimistically, okay, there's a couple different things that maybe will come together. One is the way these elections go, you would expect 26 at least and maybe 28 to be not so good for Republicans. Okay, so you've got like the historical, the first midterm after a change of party tends to be good for the other party. So you start there, I don't think that's enough. That's just like wait around to have something good happen. I don't think that's enough, but maybe the timing is okay.

Second, the Democratic party needs to find some candidates that by being authentically who they are, are good enough to appeal to the base. And here's what I mean by that. Last March, I went to DC and met with the then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The Kamala Harris I met with was irrecognizable based on the media portrayals.

She was not cold and calculated. She was extremely warm, knowledgeable, spoke about everything from AI to, you know, fill in the blanks. And I said, this is someone who could easily be president. And then the campaign started and it was like, okay, for a few weeks. And then all of a sudden, all the speeches were the same.

The interviews were extraordinarily controlled. They got away from the, their weird stuff, which seemed to be working and replaced it with, I don't know, focus group stuff. And part of it was like, okay, here's what Kamala Harris is. Here's what we think she needs to be in order for people to vote for her. It was wrong, just completely wrong. So it's not just about like getting the right focus group people to mold the candidate. You just got to find some of the right people who by being authentically them are good enough.

I don't know who those people are. I'm just not sure. And then number three, and this is sort of like the quick thing. Even if we say, look at the facts, crime is going down. Look at the facts. The economy is doing okay. You can't be perceived as brushing off the concerns of people if they've come, even if it's because of Fox News that they've come to believe immigration is a problem. If they believe it, you're not going to win by just saying it's not a problem. You've got to have something better than that. I think that the key. The reason podcasts are working, the reason someone like you gets traction is, and look, there's a plus minus to everything,

but you're outside the system. You're an educated guy, but you don't come from politics. You don't come from media. You're outside. Your candidates have to be outside. Not easy. They can be inside, but media. You're outside. Your candidates have to be outside. Not easy. And they can be inside, but they gotta feel outside. And they can't have been inside too long.

So like Westmore in Maryland, to me, has a big target on his back for you guys and soon for the other side, although they're gonna have a problem tearing him down. But he doesn't feel like the system. You guys have been cast as and now feel like the system. AOC feels like a defender of the establishment. It's like there's no government waste,

there's nothing that you can get rid of that she's happy doing without a big congressional process attached to it, which is like anathema to an insurgent idea of disruption of a model. And that's the space. That's what Trump has, Musk has, Rameswamy had. These guys seem like they are outside of the thing that everybody agrees is bad. Now, I don't agree that is bad.

I was raised believing that government was like fucking amazing. That like, you know, my family came here two generations ago for government, for law and order, for resources, for an opportunity, you know, that they could then succeed or fail on their own merits. And, you know, now we see it very differently. It's hard, you know, you say, the problem is that these, nothing happens organically, David. Nothing happens organically anymore.

And so it's like, I don't know where they're gonna come from. Yeah, well then they're not gonna come because they only come because you bring them up. Yeah, and I think that for all the criticisms I have of Donald Trump, one of the things that was interesting about the 16 campaign was he kind of started winning by attrition. Like when there were the 18 candidates and the ones and twos started dropping out and he would pick up two thirds to 80% of that one or two. It happened in a way that I don't

want to use the term organically because it's like when you've got a billionaire pouring money into something, is anything really organic? But it happened without the blessing of the Republican Party insiders initially. It was extraordinarily interesting to see that they realized we've lost control of the monster we built.

And I talk about that in the book as the culmination, right? Which started with the civil rights era. That was genuinely interesting, and I don't know how you recreate that on the left. You can't. Look, here's the good news. I'll leave you with this. Also, the invitation. Anytime you want to come on anywhere where I am,

it's a big reason that I do the podcast is really just to create relationships. And, you know, we're gonna be coming into cycles where there's gonna be a lot of discussion about what's happening. And you really wanna be as many places as you can. So when we're done, I'll give you my number, you use it whenever you want, I'll come on your show,

whatever you want me to do, I'll do. Love it. Here's the good news. It's always bottom up. It's always bottom up. We're living under an illusion right now that it's top down. It's always about the people. And there's always going to be an underlying kind of benthic,

from the bottom of the sea floor of people, it will reverberate up and get louder and louder, which Trump grabbed onto was that vibe. And it frustrated the hell out of everybody because they're like, he doesn't believe these things. This isn't who he is. He wouldn't even touch people like this five minutes ago, and now he's their spirit animal. Yeah, that's right, because he grabbed onto something that worked for them, and they don't believe that anybody is genuine. So at least he is talking their talk and

doing it for them. He's their monster, and you guys are all just monsters for other people. And that's the good news is that that's going to be coming again. You're going to have real realities that are affecting a lot of people in this country coming into the midterms. The question is, are you speaking to them? Are you matching their concerns with your priorities? Are you sounding in a way that seems to resonate with what they want to hear? This is the alchemy of politics

that makes messenger matter 100%, 100%. But as you point out yourself with Harris, messenger is not dispositive. It must be a melding of what they're talking about and who they are. And the good news is it's coming because especially now this budget battle, they cut the safety net and people don't understand. They think that's a term.

It's a real, you have one in five Americans need Medicaid. You play with that. you are cutting bone. And Musk doesn't understand that, Trump doesn't understand that. You know, their whack job people they have around them don't understand that, but people do. And there's gonna be opportunity and you're gonna be part of the conversation.

And not every voice is equal in an echo machine, and not everything that echoes is of equal value. David Pakman, I think you deserve your success and your reach. I appreciate what you're putting out. I think there's value to it, and I appreciate you having a conversation with me on my own platform.

I appreciate it so much. Thank you for having me. Smart guy and I get why he is successful. And I get why and how he is different from his main competition on the right. I also understand why he's got his work cut out for him. But that's the interesting part for me, is to understand the motivations, the why of the people who are making way, who are gaining advantage

in this ever evolving social ecosphere of media. What did you think? Let me know. I'm Chris Cuomo, thank you for subscribing and following. Thank you for checking me out on News Nation at 8P and 11P every weekday night.

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