Elephants in Rooms
Hi, I’m Ken LaCorte. I spent 20 years behind-the-scenes at Fox News and now host “Elephants in Rooms”.
Here, we jump into topics that many people avoid and that the mainstream narrative often vilifies. Even when they’re true.
If you’re looking for true insight into issues – without straw men or sensationalism – you’ve found the right place.
Elephants in Rooms
Zac Kriegman | Reuters data scientist FIRED for exposing BLM
Zac Kriegman, a former data scientist for Thomson Reuters, joined me on the podcast to talk about his firing from one of the most influential new organizations in the US for sharing data that discredited the BLM narrative.
He not only found that the claims that police are more likely to shoot black people are not true but that the movement is actually hurting low-income black communities.
For the video version and to find Ken on the socials, click here: https://linktr.ee/KenLaCorte
They immediately fired me for that, just like they said they would that Kriegman was the director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. When George Floyd was killed, outrage exploded, the nation erupted into scenes of chaos. Violence, oh my god. In widespread destruction, Black Lives Matter rose to power as companies and politicians showed their support. But Zack discovered an uncomfortable truth.
Zac Kriegman:The core claim of the movement that police are biased towards shooting blacks was completely false. And that in turn had led to soaring violent crime, including 1000s
Ken LaCorte:of murders. When he shared that with his colleagues, he was attacked.
Zac Kriegman:That immediately made me the target of this, like intensely angry, and ultimately highly racialized personal attacks.
Ken LaCorte:I talked to Zac about this story, racial profiling, bizarre stats on traffic accidents, and his lawsuit that just got some good news. So first, tell me about about Thomson Reuters. All right. I've been in the news for again, most of my life, everybody's heard of Reuters. I know, it's this multi billion dollar conglomeration of media, but and I know it's got a wide reach. But I don't know exactly what that means. So
Zac Kriegman:I worked there for about six years as a director of data science. And basically what I was doing was leading a team of other scientists applying the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence to Reuters, you know, varied repositories of data. So they're the largest news agency in the world are one of the largest news agencies, it's, it's a little bit hard to gauge the exact top but you know, they have they syndicate to 1000s of newspapers, their articles to 1000s of newspapers, they have reporters all over the world. They, they syndicate their video content to hundreds of broadcasters, and they reached like, over a billion newsreaders every day. So their footprint is just absolutely massive. And they also want to one of the interesting things about that is they also consistently rank is one of the most trusted imbalanced news sources in the world. So even beyond their footprint, I think their influence is a little bit outsized, because people do trust them to be, you know, a fairly factually based reporting agency. And not you know, at this point, I think people understand that, like New York Times has this incredible spin. And, you know, but they look at Reuters, and they think, Oh, this, this is like this. These are the facts. People think that
Ken LaCorte:with AP as well. And and it's, you know, there's it's just it's, it's kind of this massive, underseas behemoth that affects so much of the news content. And literally, I bet there's naught point oh, 1% of people in America who could identify the head of Thomson Reuters. You know, Rupert Murdoch, we know, journalists know who runs the New York Times, but it's just, they're just, it's just incredible the amount of power these companies have. So I, you must have studied more math than I did in college. Did you go to were you a data scientist guy? Or did you come at it from journalism? Or how did that work?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, so actually, my background for data science is very, I'm a data scientist, it's very unusual. So I actually dropped out of college, and I don't know, like 98. And I was a software engineer for a while and worked at a few startups and then decided I wanted to become a lawyer. So I went back to college to finish up my degree, you know, my undergraduate degree, I dropped out halfway through, and actually, they had a really generous policy where I could let I could make up the classes that I was in the middle of when I dropped out. So I ended up, you know, graduating with a really good transcript in economics, and with a degree in economics and econometrics. So very strongly math based, but then I went to got my law degree from Harvard, practiced law for a couple of years. And then sort of moved into this like hybrid field of econometric consulting. So basically, for for litigation, so basically, these large antitrust cases, which ultimately come these battles of the experts, where one expert will say, No, the market works this way and had this antitrust behavior had this impact. And the other expert will say the opposite. And then it's sort of like this. And then they each expert has a team of economists who are, you know, writing up and doing the statistical analysis and all that kind of stuff. So that's what I did for a couple of years after I practice law. And then I realized, whoa, this, this, this kind of metrics that I'm doing is really similar to machine learning. I've been watching I've been reading more and more about you know, self driving cars and, and image recognition. And this was, this was like, seven, eight years ago now. And I started taking Coursera classes in machine learning and of course areas like this on Line educational thing, basically, were at some of the best classes there and other and I sort of like scrounging the internet for other kinds of machine learning related content. And there wasn't as much in the particular area that I was interested in deep learning at the time. But then I realized, wow, this is this, this this particular area, deep learning is very similar to the econometrics that I'm doing. It's basically the same fundamental mathematical principles stacked on top of each other, basically. So ultimately, I, I learned about that, and I got the job at Thomson Reuters.
Ken LaCorte:Okay, I see, you're not very smart. And you had a minor education. Jesus Christ. Okay, so I understood some of that. And I used to think I was smart. So you get a job at Thompson's, like, six years ago?
Zac Kriegman:Yep, that's right. You know, I started as a senior data scientist, and I got a big promotion to Director of data science, whereas like I said, I was leading this team of other scientists applying this particular kind of machine learning called Deep Learning, which is basically building these large neural networks and
Ken LaCorte:explain to me how that works in the news world. Yeah, so
Zac Kriegman:we did, we did a bunch of projects with Reuters news, actually, less so with deep learning. But most of that deep learning stuff was in with our legal division called Westlaw. One of the one of the projects I did with Reuters news was actually just White House run, I don't know if you can see my T shirt in the camera. I can't, but I can't hear. But I don't know. I don't know if that helps. But it's basically, we waiters has all this polling data. Because, you know, as a news agency, they run these polls, and they were interested in creating the simulation, where people could basically play, like, you know, as a candidate for the 2016 election, and depending on which, you know, positions, they chose on different issues, they could sort of simulate how much of the electorate would be voting for them. So they could, you know, they could experiment with, you know, piecing together a coalition of, you know, different electorate kind of interests to come up with a winning platform. So that took a lot of like, statistical analysis of their polling data. So I did, I did that and help them build this like simulation for it. So that's an example of
Ken LaCorte:how to do like regression analysis to see if somebody was pro choice. Did they really vote on that issue? Or not? Versus did they vote on something else and try to merge all that together? Yeah, that
Zac Kriegman:kind of thing. And basically, what we had to do is we had to create like a, you know, a theoretical voter, essentially, or a pool of theoretical voters, because of the way that the data, the the polling data is structured. It made it you know, that we had to do all these statistical tricks in order to sort of associate different positions. And then it's called. Well, basically, it's like, it's not worth getting into the technical details. But so that's an example. I also did a project with Reuters, where they're trying to examine how the small size of the Supreme Court bar because there's just like a handful of lawyers who just arguing from the Supreme Court over and over again, so they're examining how that small number of lawyers influences the Supreme Court and sort of puts them into sort of insular box where they're hearing the same kinds of arguments over and over again, and not hearing from a broader range of lawyers. But to do that, they need to process all this data mental there.
Ken LaCorte:So those are the kinds of things like crazy high level look at Fox News, we didn't have any shit like this. Just like hey, look at that story. Get a camera. Okay, so So you're going in on this, life's pretty good, and then you fall off the wagon, in a spectacular way.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, yeah. So basically, over that time I had started witnessing, as this new kind of racial ideology had been spreading through the company. Primarily, you know, or maybe the most obvious manifestation with people celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement and proclaiming their support, you know, vocally, for the movement, especially in our online forums,
Ken LaCorte:you notice quickly, a or over time, a change in Black Lives Matter kind of inserting itself into Thompson's.
Zac Kriegman:Well, it's more than a racial ideology had spread to sort of new kinds of racial ideology had spread through Thomson Reuters. And one of them one of an example of that kind of racial ideology was how people were proclaiming their support, vociferously for the Black Lives Matter movement, you know, throughout every level of the company from senior executives all the way down to the rank and file. And you know, that concern me because as a data scientist, I had been following the research about Black Lives Matter coming out of academia, top academic institutions, and also from the government. And I discovered that the core claim of the movement that police are biased towards shooting blacks was completely false. But not only that, the research also showed that that false claim had been powering this movement to for towards D policing defunding the police and that in turn had led to soaring violent crime and including 1000s of murders. So as a direct result, often known as the Ferguson Effect, and then when the when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, this, some people call it the Minneapolis effect. But it was exactly the same thing. Huge protests against the police, followed by shortly thereafter soaring violent crime, including 1000s of murders.
Ken LaCorte:Well, look, I live in San Francisco, and I've seen it with my own two eyes. I mean, you see police back off, and literally then, you know, kids are in stores just looting it and not, you know, beating up any clerk that gets in their way. I mean, it is palpable. The the the way that that when the signal is set that you can commit crime, and you're less likely to get caught, crime goes up. Are there any numbers on kind of what the nationwide estimations of what what that means? And what that turned into, like murder wise?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, no, I haven't found a good estimate of the total number of murders, but one of the top so you know, one of the top researchers in the field Roland Fryer. He's actually one of the people who created the the most robust study who did the ran the most robust study about whether or not police were biased in the first place. But after that, he followed up with a study of what was happening with all these protests, and this false rhetoric about police going out and shooting black people. And in just five cities, basically, he discovered that over the course of a year, there were like something in the order of 900 excess deaths. Now, we know that's gone on for many years at this point. And, and infected many, many cities. So it's, you know, I don't know of a single estimate of the total impact across the entire nation, but you can, but just extrapolating from that result in a few other results, you can probably guess, like, well, over 10,000 people have been murdered. Almost all of them, by the way, black. Right now, if you look at the spike in the murder rates, by race, you know, it's completely flat for whites completely flat for Asians. And then it's a little bit of a increase for Latinos, and for blacks just like spikes up. So almost all of the murders are being, you know, are burdening the black community.
Ken LaCorte:And we're there. Were there any other social things going on? Like, like a new drug? Remember, the crack epidemic epidemic of the 80s? Just kind of kind of spiked with some of that? Was there anything on it made sense?
Zac Kriegman:There, I think there was like, there was some people played around with a theory about you know, about, you know, increased heroin and fentanyl, maybe some kind of drug, you know, some kind of turf wars or something. But it didn't didn't really make any sense, with the timing. And then, of course, you know, with Minneapolis, that was right in the middle of COVID. So people tried to blame it. Well, actually, it's really just COVID. But that didn't really make sense. Because actually crime rates were going sort of were flat or going down for the first few months before George Floyd was killed.
Ken LaCorte:Look, I love this shit, they blame on COVID. Every time I turn around, it's like, people are fleeing San Francisco must be COVID people are murdering each other must be COVID. And it is just kind of like a go to if you're an editor at a newspaper, here's some bad thing that we probably know what it's all about. But we can't say it out loud, because it affects our politics. blame, blame COVID on that drives me
Zac Kriegman:exactly. And you can see it in the grass like, like, the crime is going on like this. And then George Floyd is murdered, and right or killed, rather. And it goes up like that. And and
Ken LaCorte:so so if I kind of wrap up so you talked about an incident in something I read. So I remember at Fox back in the day, gay rights groups would come up and they'd come and talk to senior executives once in a while. And at Fox they actually said, you know, we'd like to have a desk in your, in your newsroom, so that we can have one of our people here to make sure that you guys don't use wrong, it wasn't wrong pronouns back there. But but to you know, to kind of give you a fact check to make sure you don't accidentally screw up on things and it was like, fuck yourself
Zac Kriegman:with the executive who said that? No, I'm
Ken LaCorte:saying that gay groups came in and like monitors into our our newsrooms. And so I know that it happened in other places, but you talked about, like BLM events that were coming into writers at this time, so weirdly, BLM, the people who were vociferous about that were able to say, you know, this isn't about politics. This is about civil rights. I mean, every group can say that, right? This is about abortions and saving babies. It's not about politics, but they they got that ability to do that. and bring it into Corporation after Corporation and you said that they actually had events within Thomson Reuters. Yeah. So, so Thomson
Zac Kriegman:Reuters was sponsoring all of this sort of like racial awareness stuff, including at least one event, where they actually brought in BLM activists to sort of educate the the employees about, you know, racial realities, essentially, from their view. But But I think, basically, completely, I mean, from my view, and I think, according to the actual statistics, complete falsehoods, in a lot of cases, but yeah, so Thomson, Reuters was fully on board. And with this whole, like the, from the leadership all the way down, and I think they have a special, I think they have a special connection to Kenya and we have a big office in that in Minneapolis, or I don't know if it's technically in Minneapolis, but so there was a special kind of when, when George Floyd died in police custody, there was a special kind of, you know, emotional impact on Thomson Reuters. And you could see it just it really changed the organization, and you could see it in our reporting, where, you know, at first, we were almost sort of balanced in our reporting about it, but then it became, then, you know, as the sort of racial ideology continued to spread, the reporting became more and more distorted.
Ken LaCorte:Okay, so then you, you decided to commit professional suicide without, without meaning to you, you you push back on some of the narratives that were coming out there, and I read your your, your, your long note and email, it was, I guess, originally an internal, you put it on your internal computer system. And I could, I'm not smart enough to even quibble with it. But the concept that it was offensive in any way, shape, or form is completely obnoxious and false. So So you write this up? Tell me how, why you did it. And what happened right before? And after you hit that send button?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, sure. I mean, well, I like like, I knew that as a white employee, and I actually don't really consider myself white. But as an employee with white skin, saying anything critical about the Black Lives Matter movement would be putting my career in jeopardy. But I felt like Thomson Reuters had a public trust to be reporting truthfully about these, these issues, especially where people's lives were hanging in the balance. So I sort of felt that I had to, at least try to start a conversation. So what what I did was, like you said, I just tried to summarize the academic literature that I had found about Black Lives Matter, its core claims and the impact it was having. And I posted it to this internal collaboration platform we have called the hub where people have a wide range of conversations from technical things all the way to like puppy dogs. And, you know, and to try to start a conversation about how our reporting was so inconsistent with the facts. And just like I was, we, you know, had feared, that immediately made me the target of this, like intensely angry, and ultimately, highly racialized personal attacks, people said, you know, that as a white person, I had no place making any kind of critical examination of the Black Lives Matter movement, they were ashamed and embarrassed that I tried to do that. They said that my summary of the academic literature was white splaining, which is sort of an amazingly racist thing to say, as if black people don't care about facts and research and not and ignoring the fact that the people that I was summarizing, were oftentimes black scholars and researchers,
Ken LaCorte:you know, I've found in my personal experience in this kind of hyper partisan stuff, it's almost like, like, like, when you play bingo, and it just didn't they just pull out a Oh, white splaining? Or they pull out a, you were talking that No, it's not 13% of blacks in America. And that's, that's, it's really 30% Because you're defining them wrong. I mean, it's just kind of random crap that they throw up
Zac Kriegman:people. That's actually a really interesting example here. There was this one, this one commenter, who basically had this like, conspiracy theory about how all Native Americans were actually black Aborigines, he called them, and therefore are all of our statistics. All of our official government stickers were completely wrong. And that wouldn't be so weird. Like, you know, Thomson Reuters, a big company. Of course, we have 1020 like 20,000 employees. So one really weird employee who's got this weird conspiracy theories and willing to talk about isn't so surprising, but then it's fully 13 other employees liked that message as like, Guys, do you not see some kind of issue with this conspiracy theory? Like it's weird fantasy.
Ken LaCorte:Okay, so so your, you hit publish? And look, I'll link on the YouTube on the YouTube page. I'll link to all your stuff here, both your substack which I want people to go to, and and actually what you wrote, so So you hit publish, people are calling you a white boy and all the fun stuff and and your company doesn't come to your defense, they do the opposite.
Zac Kriegman:Exactly. So. So I actually bring it up with the company was, look, I was trying to start this conversation about the veracity of our reporting. And it was, it's completely impossible because people are engaging in this racialized bullying, and no one's going to participate, if they know that they're gonna be attacked for the race. And the company's response to that was to censor everything that I had written about Black Lives Matter, to shut down any kind of critical examination of Black Lives Matter. And then they actually called me and said, Look, if you talk about the racialized bullying you experienced in any company communications channel, you will be subject to discipline including termination. Wow. And that was even to
Ken LaCorte:not like I worked at Fox for someone. Yeah, this is insane. All right. I have never I mean, I mean, nothing like this ever. Nobody ever came. I mean, we had liberals in our place. We had conservatives, we had people who thought this is so like, you're telling me an experience from some weird Asian jungle tribe? I mean, it's making no connection to what I experienced as as, as a senior executive at a big journalism place for decades.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, exactly. It was, it's, I mean, as a news agency, the number one thing you've got to be able to do is, at least internally talk about the facts and the news and be able to examine them and debate them. And I figured, well, okay, so far, I've been dealing with HR, maybe, maybe the senior leadership just doesn't know what's going on. They've got a lot of other things on their plate, maybe they haven't paid attention. So it's like, okay, I'll, I'll try to make them aware. And I sent an email to my colleagues and senior leadership, describe what happened describing how this racialized bullying had completely shut down the conversation how made impossible to examine, you know, the veracity of the recording, and then they immediately fired me for that, just like they had said they would. So that was, that's basically the whole story.
Ken LaCorte:So I know, you threw out a lawsuit and tell me, I don't know. I know, lawyers tell you, you can't talk about lawsuits and whatnot. But give me the rough overview of what you're trying to do there. Is that still ongoing? Or did you What's that status?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah. So before you can actually file an official lawsuit that goes to the courts, and I think at least a message is I'm not sure if it's true everywhere, you have to file a complaint with basically the equivalent the state equivalent of the EEOC, which in Massachusetts called the Massachusetts Commission against discrimination. So we filed that, that sort of like, I guess, sort of like midway through the process, and then after that, sort of, we now have a, I guess, right to sue letter, so we can now remove it and take it to the court, to court to see what happens. But I'm sort of curious to see what happens in this administrative proceeding. So we're letting that play out. And I mean, it's gonna be really interesting, because in so many ways, the facts of this case are so stark, like, they literally called me to tell me that if I complained about this, this racial bullying that they would fire me so
Ken LaCorte:you're lucky. I mean, because you can fire people in America for being a conservative. I mean, that's just not illegal. I mean, you can fire you can be an it's actually illegal to be an asshole as a boss. I mean, I've dealt with this and dealt with employees, but that they popped into the racial element. Now, you're, you've got a protected class to wrap yourself around.
Zac Kriegman:Exactly. So that's, well, that's, that's gonna be one of the interesting things to see. And, you know, my lawyers are saying this is sort of a new, a new issue. This is like, this is not a well explored issue in the courts. Do these laws actually protect people of all races? Or, or are? Or are they not? Can you?
Ken LaCorte:Are they just specifically to a traditionally disadvantaged group?
Zac Kriegman:Exactly, exactly. So the and that's sort of, you know, it's a on it's not a well established area of law. So they, it's an interesting area to explore from their perspective, I think, but they're, they don't know how it's going to unfold. But it's, but I think, regardless of how it unfolds, it either either will turn out that this area of law does protect all people, and it's not, you know, it's not just, you know, for certain racial groups, or will turn out that it doesn't, in which case, the public needs to know that because that's how, you know, that's how the democratic process works. But first, we need to see, you know, before we can decide whether or not we've liked, you know, the how the law is operating, we just didn't know whether you know what the law is.
Ken LaCorte:And I remember his back as far back as the blocky decision, when a white guy didn't get into a into a medical school because of his race that it seems is Though that that was all over the place. So what are your emotions? See you're working in fucking crazy Ville at that point, right? And then you get blown out now you were making bank there. And and you know you had a team and you're in the middle of everything. Are you? Are you just devastated? Are you devastated and kind of happy? Are you still spinning around? I mean, where's your head go when something like that happens?
Zac Kriegman:Oh yeah, so at the time, I was definitely extremely upset. I mean, here I was trying to bring attention to the fact that our false reporting was leading to 1000s of black people being murdered. And I was, you know, called a basically, you know, call the clueless or even malicious white person and a sympathizer to the Klu Klux Klan, essentially. And, you know, and, and ultimately fired, I, I'm doing fine now, you know, I think in most of these cases, like, you know, I, we put away enough money in savings and stuff that get us through till, you know, I find a new job, my wife and I, and, you know, frankly, it feels like a breath of fresh air to actually be able to talk about these things openly and no longer being compromising my own values for my employment. But I think, you know, and I can find a new job I don't, I never make the same kind of money, but it's not like we're going to be on the street or anything. I think the people who are really suffering from these cancel culture cases, are not necessarily the people who are fired, it's the people who need the conversations to happen, that are not allowed to happen. And this case, it's the people it's in, you know, these struggling black neighborhoods who are struggling with violent crime, who, you know, what, you know, and with our media organizations repeating these falsehoods for years at a time without ever acknowledged, you know, without ever issuing any kind of corrections or apologies. And we can never remedy that. Because we can never have these internal conversations. That's
Ken LaCorte:the biggest shame out of the whole of the whole Black Lives Matter kind of reactions. It's just like, I mean, you go into some of these neighborhoods, and crime is so out of control. I, I never knew the disparity between black and white murder rates. And I was literally just goofing around one day. And I was like, let me look at at Texas murder rates, because I was trying to say, trying to find out if states that had concealed carry or or, or shall carry type of permits for guns, were more likely to have two people shoot each other more in the head as they're walking around, if they had a gun. And I was popping out some cities murder rates were sky high, and then it was like, What in the hell is going on. And when you dig down to it, the rate of murder victims and perpetrators are about 600% higher in the black community, that's roughly what it's been over the over the past 10 years, which, you know, scientists get all you know, they get, they get boners, when they find a 12% difference somewhere the contract of 600% higher in one community, when you just use races as a differentiator, and you don't see those numbers in in poor Hispanic or black or other things. It was mind blowing. And I literally told it to a friend of mine who's a black city councilor, and he was like, what? And then he was like, why? And I'm like, Dude, I have no idea about that. Have you ever tried to dig into that number from from a, from a numbers point of view of the of the why, what is it? I mean, obviously, it's historical. It's, it's, you know, you could clearly say its roots out of slavery. I mean, there's there's a lot of theories that make sense. But is there any academics on that?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I think that I'm starting to research this actually, independently for my, for an article that I'm writing, but basically, like you said, like, there's obviously there's hundreds of years of slavery, and then Jim Crow, but the interesting thing that I was, you know, I come I'm a liberal, I come from a liberal background, I grew up I mean, maybe I wouldn't, you're not gonna be for long, but I wouldn't necessarily call myself a liberal right now. My views are all over the place. But you know, I grew up in, you know, a liberal household and a liberal city and liberal state. And it never really, like I always assumed that the these kinds of disparities in terms of like the murder rates, like we've got 10,000 Black people murdered every single year. It's like 33% of American murders, right? Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. And by the way, compare that to the 18 unarmed black people who are shot by police, it's like, it's like 10,000 versus 18. It's like, not even in the same ballpark. But anyways, I'd always assumed that was like, as a result of things like slavery and Jim Crow, and then subsequent racism and so forth. But the more I dig into it, the more it really seems like there were was amazing progress happening after you know, after slavery, okay, That was shut down as a result of well meaning, but highly destructive policies. So we have, you know, I think, you know, I'm gonna get the statistics wrong because I haven't really I haven't really mastered all this material. But the, you know, in the in the 50s, the difference between, like the black and white single mother rate was maybe like 15%, or something like that it was lower 15 percentage points, something like that I can't remember it's like, but the black rate was like, 20%, though, white rate was, I don't know, maybe at like 5% or something like that. And then President Johnson came along. Yeah, exactly. And then we have the Great Society, and this massive expansion of welfare, and now it's near, like 70, or 80%. And, and all of these, you know, all of this social science, work sort of deeply connects this rate of single motherhood to all sorts of ills, including violent crime, and all this kind of stuff. So it's really interesting, and it's not, it's not as simple as, you know, slavery and Jim Crow. There's a lot of stuff that that came after that, that was well intentioned, that had this devastating impact on, on, on a whole bunch of metrics, you know, but
Ken LaCorte:you talked about, and a lot of people, I don't think realize this, and I didn't realize it until the past few years, you know, like, conservative versus liberal values. And it's like, well, what does that mean, I know what the Republican Party stands for, and is that conservative and, and what the Democratic Party stands for, but the concept of well meaning actions with devastating results. And when you think of, of many other ways that that, that the ideology of the parties have have, are and what the word conservative means. And in a real way, conservative means we've got some good stuff here going, let's not fuck it up by changing things around too much. Because it might seem silly to salute the flag in classrooms. But if you change that, let's let's see what we don't know what those consequences will be. And of course, now they can't recruit guys in the military, they're losing all their all their they're missing all of their numbers that they're hitting up on that. And that Democrats because I asked my son the other day, I'm like, What do you like the most out of the democratic ideals. And the thing that he said, that stuck out to me was, they're more willing than conservatives to see a problem and go try to solve it. And that's that, you know, whether it's whether it's the Great Society, and Lyndon Johnson, who was really, he was really doing it to get black votes for the next 30 years. And it worked. And that's kind of an interesting schism, when you think of the two parties, that one is often saying, let's conserve our values. The other saying, let's fix problems. And we, you know, the rubber hits the road in politics, so, so much about that.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, I think and I think the interesting thing about that is like, there's this, there's this movement now, to racialized basically all of our public policy, right. It's like policing, you know, school admissions. Like across the board, it's just like, we want, you know, people are pushing to, you know, to eliminate all racial disparities, any, any way that the outcomes are different, regardless of the regardless of the opportunities. But when you look at who's hurt by that, by those efforts, it's now it's almost never really white people who are hurt. It's an example after example, after example, it's black communities that are hurt. So you can look at it in terms of like the, the most obvious example is like the Black Lives Matter movement, where they're pushing this deep policing, because blacks are shot at a higher rate by police, even though that's not due to police bias. And the result is skyrocketing murders, but you can also look at it in terms of, you know, like school admissions. And you have like these, these academic institutions with very high academic standards, very rigorous programs. And they have a totally different set of standards for admitting black students than they do for white students or Asian students. And that results in very promising black but very unprepared black students getting admitted to two programs that have much higher academic demands than they're prepared for
Ken LaCorte:Tom Thomas Sol got into this one. So when he was he was digging into the numbers of white black dropout rates are so high. And what he was finding is when you put these kids into Harvard and whatnot, the black kids who are getting in, they were smart, you know, they were they were smart. They were smart guys and gals, they were at the top 10% of America. But then everybody else in the in the classroom was at the top 1% of America and things just went you know, it's like, you put me in a data science class with you and guys like you and I'm going to look like a freak In the area, even though I'm pretty smart in life,
Zac Kriegman:yeah. And the interesting thing about that is that it's not as they may be just as smart, but they're not as well prepared. So when they go to colleges that match their preparation level, they end up majoring in these, these lucrative fields like medicine, or, you know, or science and technology fields, at at the rates that they enter in. But when they go to Harvard, they drop out of those fields, because they're surrounded by all these people who have so much more preparation than they do. And then they or they drop out entirely. The dropout rates are much higher, too. So it's just like, basically, we're systematically took the most promising students, demoralize them, and you know, basically decapitated a generation. And we were doing that
Ken LaCorte:and then and then gave yourself an award because you had 13%. Black kids at Harvard.
Zac Kriegman:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So and when you look at these examples, it's the same thing over and over again, you can so you could look at the Oh, so now there's the traffic study. Example. So there in Boston, there's this there's a recent policy paper was published, basically saying, let's have police stop enforcing all of the traffic laws that black drivers violate more often than white drivers. Yeah, this policy is, you know, you're laughing. But this policy paper was published in partnership with the Suffolk district attorney's office. So it's, it's, it's, it's more almost like an official blueprint for how things are moving forward. But the the traffic fatalities, the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities in black communities is drastically higher, because the violation rates are drastically higher,
Ken LaCorte:that they're trying to figure out with these with these red light cameras that kept the get people running red lights. Yeah, because it turns out they're racist to now because they're stopping blacks at a higher and a higher percentage of it. So now, I don't know what you do. But okay, there's an extra problem there.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah. So when you look at like the, the number of pedestrians killed by it with hit and run accidents, the number of pedestrians and black communities is three times higher than my commute. So these are people like three times higher than people, these are people walking in their neighborhoods who are run down by out of control drivers who just drive away Don't even call for help. Don't even try to save this person, just leave them for dead. Right. So and our in our approach to that is to say, well, let's stop, let's stop enforcing traffic laws that black people violate more often than white people, because they do. That's just it's just a fact. And that that was proven in Massachusetts study recently, which is so bad
Ken LaCorte:that when you look into a lot of studies, it kind of feels like you're dumping on blacks a lot. I mean, I'm not saying that you are I'm just saying I look at this, and it's like, well, there's shittier drivers that commit murder at an OH MY GOD, right? I mean, sometimes it just, I don't know, it's like, it makes me makes me sad. Didn't Munch through numbers.
Zac Kriegman:Makes me it makes me it makes me mad. Because this is this is based this has basically been engineered, not by I mean, I think there are bad actors in the black community. But the author cases, the people who are empowered here, like the people who would decide admissions policies are typically, you know, white elite, liberals, right. And they're the ones who were, who are basically destroying these promising young students, the people who are deciding, you know, the people who are pushing the BLM narrative. Were typically, you know, white elite CEOs at major news corporations, or, you know, editors and reporters who don't live in those neighborhoods who don't have to deal with the impact of you know, higher crime rates and
Ken LaCorte:probably have a BLM sticker on their on their Yeah, it's a term is it's accidental racists. Yeah, look, if you had if somebody said those two by the fact that black guy bla bla bla, you know what, he's probably conservative. But if somebody like, you know, I saw one where they said, All right, no more standardized test to get out of high school because it's hurting black kids and other minorities. And I'm like, so you just lowered the bar to basically now assuredly graduate, more kids who shouldn't be graduated, you are doing more to damage Black and Hispanic and whatever lives that were, were ruined by that than anyone else. And you literally patted yourself on the back and everybody said, Oh, look how look how look how non racist she was. It's
Zac Kriegman:like you get to you get to, like demonstrate how non racist you are, while you're making black neighborhoods more dangerous from from drunk drivers and, and more dangerous from criminals. And you're, you know, you're basically channeling the most promising black students into academic environments where they're gonna fail that really high rates, and you get to feel Oh, I'm such a non racist. It's just like,
Ken LaCorte:you know, blacks understand this at the at the at this base level, certainly, like if you went and I've seen holding on, they asked blacks Do you want more or fewer or fewer cops in their neighborhoods? I think, more polite cops. I think that, you know, a certain percentage of cops are just dicks and that you never forget that you never forget when a cop treated you nastily, or called you a name or had the glasses on and just exercised his power like that. But I mean, you can you can eliminate every black cop from my lilywhite neighborhood, crime is not going to get all that affected until other people figure it out and come into the neighborhood. But other neighborhoods, it's like, when that when that leaves and that lessons things go out of control.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think of the neighborhood I grew up in, in Massachusetts, like we have, I think, basically zero murders every year. If we had like, be just like a couple neighborhoods over in, in Boston and Mattapan Dorchester Roxbury, we have dozens of murders every single year, right. We had dozens of murders in my my neighborhood, the residents in that neighborhood would be calling for police on every corner. Right? They wouldn't be calling for the police to pat down anyone under 25 Every time they walk past that corner, right, because they wouldn't want their kids to be killed now. Now, I think that's that's like patently true in in that neighborhood where I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, but they're all like BLM supporters. They're all advocating for less police in black neighborhoods. It's like, and meanwhile, like you said, a lot of black most black people, in fact, I think, want the same or more police and their neighborhoods because especially in these poor neighborhoods that are struggling with land crime, because they see that the impact of that violent crime every day.
Ken LaCorte:I think deep down they know if every cop in America if we passed a federal law that says every police officer in America has to be black. I don't know if murder rates in black America would change all that much. You know, because because again, you're looking at such a such a minority of horrific looking cases, when a cop shoots the black guy running away that that distorts the narrative so much. It's almost like plane crashes versus car crashes, right? We covered playing in a plane crash crashes with 200 people. Now there's what 10 12,000 people who die in a car crash every year and all the new stations stay on it for a week. And then people say I'm not flying anymore. I'm driving to my next thing. And you look at the per mile death rate in driving vs flying, and it's not the same game and you literally scared people into killing themselves more likely.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, well, they're, they've actually done studies of this in terms of our black police officers more likely to shoot, or rather less likely to shoot black suspects and or white police officers more likely to shoot black suspects. And I and I should go back and reread that study. But what I remember is that basically, the race of the police officer wasn't that that important, but there was a slight increased rate of shooting black suspects among black police officers. So it was it was exactly the opposite of effect, you would expect if it was racism driving the shootings.
Ken LaCorte:So, you know, we were talking about causes, there was a recent video that came out of Minneapolis just a couple days ago of a little, like four year old black kid screaming racial epithets. And you fn and you fn that at the COP hitting him calling him it was it was so much hatred coming out of a little child that I'd never seen before. And, you know, my first reaction is to, you know, you want us to slap the shit out of them. But then when your brain kicks in, it's like he was raised before he can even even count to 10 how to how to have that kind of hate towards cops. I don't even know if the cops are white or black on it. But it was I looked at that and I'm like the odds of that kid growing up to be 25 without either being incarcerated, beaten or shot by cops has to be pretty damn close to zero, no matter what else happens in society and I don't know how we turn that.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, that's I mean, yeah, I mean, when you read some of these media accounts that are basically reporting the exact opposite of the truth you got it like there's nothing more poisonous you know, you have these dis fractured relationship between police officers and black people largely due to this a history of misinformation by the media at least in part and and then they keep doing it and like what could possibly be more devastating so now you have these little kids who are like you said growing up with the in this in this sort of propaganda environment where police are out there hunting them and of course if you're told that police are out there hunting you Yeah,
Ken LaCorte:I mean, it was like it was like it was like a rebel looking at a Storm Trooper and Yeah, going off on it. So it's like, I guess if that's what's been pumped into your, into your, you know, and then I hear the same thing from from, you know, from just good people, too. I mean, we had some friends and they were and he had their kids were like, you know, I hope police stop killing black people was kind of their prayer for the day and I was just like, You know, and I know these guys, they're they're loving in their heart. They're just have been so fooled by what you said the whole, the whole world gets twisted down. Some of it is intentional look, a lot of it's just politicians, you know, I've worked in politics for years. There's a good you don't get elected saying, hey, you know what, we're kind of fucking up here, let's let's get better you get elected by saying see those guys over there and whatever those guys aren't Democrats, Republicans, brown people, white people, they're the reasons that you're living in poverty. They're the problems here and we need to fight against them every step of the way. And yeah, that's my vote for that guy.
Zac Kriegman:I think I think, Paul, it's politicians, but it's also politics more broadly. And the problem is that our media institution like the way the way I see the problem is that our media institutions have been fully captured by these political agendas like, like, as an example that I wrote about on my blog recently is there's this big Massachusetts traffic safety study that analyzed, you know, why are Blacks pulled over more often than whites by police officers. And they had this clever way of analyzing it, which was basically to look at the day when When police officer can tell the race of the driver sometimes versus the night when they can basically never tell the race of the driver. And what they discovered was that during the day, when police can tell the race of the driver, least sometimes whites are pulled over more often, and blacks are pulled over less often than at night when they can't. Alright, so that was the conclusion of the paper, the way that was reported by the Boston Globe. So this was a this was a Massachusetts based study. So that sort of one of the main papers that covered with Boston Globe was, you know, study uncovers persistent racial bias against blacks. Right? They literally said the exact opposite of what
Ken LaCorte:what what little hook? Did they change that on? I mean, I mean, they had to find one.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah. So what they what they base that on? So the study actually found persistent racial bias in favor of blacks, right, they were blacks were being pulled over less often when police could identify the race of the driver. So it was the exact opposite. But what they base it on was that once drivers are pulled over, blacks and Hispanics will get more citations or and have their car searched more often, I've seen other groups now the the study was very careful to know that that was not an any evidence of bias, because just like, blacks were more likely to be stopped by an elitist, but it wasn't because of biases, they had just proven. citations and searches. Were very likely affected by other factors. In fact, the Well anyways, so So the Boston you know, I
Ken LaCorte:don't believe in the racial thing. But I do believe that cops pull over shitty cars more often. Right? Well, they just they just do they see they see a beat up clunker coming through there. And they're like, You know what, that's gonna be somebody who's, who's not playing by the rules of life, as much as as a well polished guy. I've even experienced that to my life. As you know, as I was a kid, I drove a piece of crap and I was a good driver wasn't you would just get pulled over more. I don't know if it was the youth. I don't know if it was the car or what it was, once you hit a certain level of, you know, I'm driving a car that shiny and whatnot. The word sir comes out of their mouth a little bit more. So I wouldn't be shocked if that's a factor playing in some of these things.
Zac Kriegman:I think that's a good I mean, I've experienced I've experienced racial profiling myself, like when I was doing a black neighborhood. No, no, when I was a more of a hippie, I had a beard down to here, but, but I looked more like a Muslim, maybe a Muslim fanatic, or something like that. And so every time I bought a plane, I'd be pulled over, I'd be served, like, I would be patted down, they would go they would open my suitcase and go through everything. And this was shortly after 911. So it was things were a little bit more heightened. We didn't have all these fancy new ways of, of, you know, X ray, and people and so forth. But
Ken LaCorte:I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand, I don't like racial profiling. On the other hand, we just had some planes blown up and
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, well, I talked about this with Coleman Hughes a little bit. When I've talked to him it's like, part of like, so the the best studies that looked at like police bias, and lethal force also looked at non lethal force, and while they didn't find any kind of bias in lethal force, in fact, they found the opposite they found police were more likely to shoot white people's is very slightly not statistically statistically significant, but they did find statistically significant bias in non lethal force towards blacks. And we were sort of trying to, you know, toss around ideas about that. Now the person who did that study Roland Fryer, his theory is that basically, you know, we have sort of racist cops who are utility maximizers. And they know if they actually shoot and kill someone, it's gonna ruin their lives basically, but they if they just beat them or hit them or rough them up. They're not gonna get in trouble for it so they go right up. to that line, and then they stop. Now that study falls apart when you when you start looking at the differences between black black cops and white cops in which group is more likely to use force and it turns out that I don't think white cops are much more likely to use non lethal force than then black cop. So I want to go back look at that. But sorry, yeah, I
Ken LaCorte:was gonna I was watching and I forget, I forget the guy's name. He's a professor at one of the one of the Ivy's, his last name was Laurie. And he was doing and he's black. And it was another black I think Professor. And they talked about the bad motherfucker theory. And they were just like, that's an element of black society, Black Male Society is to be tough. And to be a black motherfucker, a tough guy who's not going to take shit off of anybody, even if he's a cop. And the concept of of getting a swing into the cop, before you went down and before he arrested you isn't something that like is oh my gosh, how could that be? It's like, hey, all right, you're a bad motherfucker. And that's celebrated in the community as a sign of resistance against against the society that's keeping them down. And they love that. And so when you look at non lethal force, how do you not put those types of elements in that?
Zac Kriegman:Well, I think that's exactly right. I mean, if you look at the like resisting arrest rates, for instance, they're radically different for different races. Now, this obviously plays into how likely someone is to get shot at the office, but also it plays into how likely someone is to get, you know, manhandled or beaten or something like that. But you know, some of the one of this, this study actually controlled for that kind of thing. So it controlled for if someone was resisting arrest, grabbing for a weapon, those kinds of things. So and it's still found, even after controlling for that, it's still found that black suspects were more likely to have physical non lethal physical force used against them. No, go ahead. Okay.
Ken LaCorte:Yeah, I always kind of wonder when it comes to things like resisting arrest, because one man's resisting arrest is another man's resisting arrest. And I've seen enough cop videos to know that police attitude can actually affect affect that, you know, I've seen guys go down for resisting arrest, when they were just questioning something. To me, the best positive thing to come out of the BLM Movement has been body cameras. Oh, yeah. And almost all cities are fairly immediately when a when a suspect is shot, or when a person is shot by cops releasing that video because they know if you wait three days, somebody's going to say he was he was on his way to church, all of a sudden shifts burning down in your in your city. And there is a webpage, a there's a YouTube channel called police activity, which literally posts every one of those of those fatals and sometimes non fatal cases. And it's kind of depressing to sit and watch. But I've sat and watched over 50, mainly guys, get shot by cops on that. And you learn a lot, a lot of things from that. I mean, you see the racial breakdown, but you never I've never really saw racial things that I could say they shot a person because of their race. You see how male cops act versus a minority of female cops. When the male cop over over does it the female cops often under do it, they just use too little force and that situation blows up on a huge number of people who were shot by the cops wanted to be shot by the cops. And whether they officially class that classify that as suicide by cop. But probably 30 But and I'll run just the statistics on that someday. And in a non study, study, you know, when you're running into cops and kill me, kill me and yet you got a knife in your hand that goes but yeah, so many.
Zac Kriegman:Interestingly, whites are much more likely to commit suicide by cop if I Yeah, and
Ken LaCorte:some of them you can't some of them you can't tell right some of them it's like they either wanted to be killed or their mind just went into a rage. They're beating up their wife, they're slashing her and the cops come and they just come running at them and then get shot and you're just like, I don't know if that guy wanted to do it or if just you know, the red curtain came down over him and he went nuts and came out there. But I would say those to account for it if you take out like people who are actively fighting cops or trying to kill them or people who are rushing at them or holding a gun and pretending to do something like that. It's it's it's the vast, vast, vast it's a crazy majority of it, you know, occasionally and on it. You've seen some where they came there. It was a homeowner with a gun they didn't know that they shot the guy right away and they were like just awful, awful policing. Sometimes cops have a tendency to you know, once they get that second or third shot up, they just have to keep on you know, the guy that has fallen on the ground and they're just in the into kill mode at that point. But you know, as a you look at those and if you spend some time you will see some completely outrageous police activity, behave If you're but it's it's a very, very small minority of actually what's going on most of the guys fucking deserve to get shot one way or another Oh,
Zac Kriegman:yeah. Oh yes. What is the what did you say the
Ken LaCorte:police activity? And all it is is it literally is popping that up nope, not much commentary sometimes they'll put a lot of things in there. I'm shocked that it's still on YouTube and it's a it's an outstanding kind of just just it's like it's like the TV show cops back in the day, but with more of a focus and certainly more raw on that too.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's probably should be required watching for, for our citizens just so they see what cops are up against and the situations they have. I mean, one of the interesting things about some of these videos that have that have, you know, generated quite a bit of outrage is you in some cases, you literally have the person wrestling with a police officer, punching him in the face, grabbing his weapon, firing his weapon at him. And then the police officer ends, like in this case, I forget the name of the guy, but in this case, something he grabbed a stun gun and fired it at the police officer. And the police officer ends up having to shoot him. And then and then there's protests for days and like, you know, buildings burned down and stuff like that.
Ken LaCorte:Because they jump into what what was this case just days ago, were where the BLM showed up. And they were they were doing the tears and writing on the thing and the gal she was like, This guy was an unarmed, he shot at me and my child in my kitchen and up and she went off on them. Yeah. And it was like, Okay, I get it. Do you remember where that was?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, I definitely saw that. But I don't remember. I don't remember her name. Or I'll post that down below. But yeah, but so it's like, you can actually you can have the videos that like this. And this was all on, you know, the one I was describing was all on police cam. Right. And still people were, you know, enraged, because they don't necessarily understand what it means. Like when a police officer is being punched in the face. Someone is grabbing for his weapon. It's no, it's right. That's no longer like, okay. Yeah, it's Yeah, exactly. It's not. It's not like anyone like Biden, at one point said, Well, can't do this, you just be trained to shoot people in the legs like that has nothing to do with how police officers are ever trained, has nothing to do with how you know how you would make sense to behave in a violent situation where life is at stake. You know, it's not like you can easily just aim for someone's leg. And right, so it's just like, people have these totally unrealistic understandings of what police officers do. So even when they do see the videos, they have, you know, a situation that is completely 100% justified can still generate this outrage. But I think I still think it's better to have the videos. And I think we just have to get used to that, oh, it's
Ken LaCorte:always gonna be bad actors who say, all right, zero percentage of the people who are going to protest out here, but you know, Eugen it up, you get people screaming, you get a city councilman comes up. And sometimes what the facts are doesn't mean any difference. So so I don't want to say you're unemployable in the news world right now. But But you've probably zapped off like 80% of companies who would? Who would? Who would want to hire you before, you know, the day before you wrote that? So you may go back into the news world, you I heard you mentioned a book, you've got your substack. How do you so editorially, it seems like you have two paths, not thinking of like some unrelated ish jobs out there. It seems like you can stay in the race world. If and, and become an expert in that and really be the guy who, who tries to tear this, you know, tear some of these misconceptions down? Or do you broaden that up a little bit and you end up the the lie with statistics guy, you know, kind of your own freakanomics book where you look at? And I know you recently did a story on on kids and COVID vaccinations. As you as you look at moving forward over the next five years. What do you think?
Zac Kriegman:Oh, definitely more of the letter. It's more of I mean, the the race stuff is so starkly. The stuff that the our news organizations are reporting about race are so starkly opposed to the facts, that it's actually just an in some ways, it's just an easier place to start. It's a it's a, it's a more toxic place to start, because it'll immediately and your career but but it's a more it's an easier it's an easier place to start because because the case is so overwhelmingly strong. Right? The the idea that, you know, the police are hunting blacks is just completely false. But, but but I'm more but my bigger concern is just how compromised our media institutions have become in general, by our politics by our sort of these political divides and how unaware a lot of people still are about How compromised they are. So, you know, there are some hopeful signs like, you know, more Americans, like, completely distrust the media, according to polls, just me than ever before, basically, right? It's like brands
Ken LaCorte:just came out every time it comes out, it keeps getting the seller.
Zac Kriegman:Right. Right. So it's like, you know, and in some ways that people find that, you know, pessimistic but I find that optimistic because we, you know, we've got to understand the problem before we can resolve it. But there's still a lot of people who just have no who've been reading the New York Times their whole lives, and have no idea what's changed in the newsroom and the New York Times, you know, the New York Times? Yeah, go ahead, keep going. I mean, the New York Times used to have conservative reporters, and, you know, people who, you know, maybe, you know, like, they literally admitted multiple times, that there was not a single person in the organization that they knew who supported President Trump. Right? That's sort of remarkable thing for a organization like that's, that's, I mean, you can have an editorial position that that, you know, dislikes the president, but to not have a single person, the entire organization who can push back a little bit on stories.
Ken LaCorte:Nazis should they have. And I joke about that, but that's what they're thinking. They're like, wait a second, this man equals Nazi because we've now used that as the nomenclature of our day. And, and he is a distinct threat to the United States. And so if, if it was literally Nazis, you'd say we want zero of those, and that's the half of America roughly, is there? So they're, they're probably missing out on something. But the New York Times is the, you know, I bitched about them all the time, because they were so fucking good. I mean, I mean, when you would get to a science story, or even any story, and you got to the New York Times byline, you were like, I'm gonna get an 800 word smart article here that went into research that found the top experts, and I've got a full dinner here, as opposed to, you know, you go to NBC or Fox, or most of the places and I'm going to get 150 word writers rewrite, no offense. And, but now, when it comes to anything regarding culture, or politics, you just have to, they are not just slanting it, and they did a hit piece on me that was, it was like a Master's course, and how to use truthful facts. And paint 180 degree opposite it was it was sophistry. It was, it was evil. It was it was intentional, misusing of facts to prove a point. And it was just, you know, if you do, I mean, I looked at, I read this article still, and I'm like, God, you're a dick. But it's, I mean, I mean, you know, avoiding and I haven't really put up a good response to it, because I was going to sue them. And I had lawyers and this and that, and it's like, okay, it's gonna take you $250,000 to probably lose the first round of a libel lawsuit in America because the laws are so stacked on a publisher side. But so what you said was, was very good thing and because and I've talked to other people who worked at the New York Times and me, it's just like, I've watched a profession that I you know, I loved I mean, the concept of, of being able to assemble facts ferret out the truth, present a balanced picture, I mean, there's something noble and right about that. And it's turned into such a shit show that I'm embarrassed of the profession and it's like whatever watch watch Alex Jones for all I care because he's not lying all that much more than the New York Times anymore. He's just doing it actually. He's just screaming
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, he's just more hysterically
Ken LaCorte:so so what you said though, is like people and conservatives kind of knew this for a long time. So you know, you were out in Brookline Massachusetts and you thought everything was cool but but the guys in other parts of the world were tuning on to Fox News because they because they saw that because it was hitting their you know, they couldn't believe their own lying eyes when they would look at the media and so you know, that hit conservatives first and now I think more people are understanding it. Although if you're a liberal they're still kind of on your side. So it's kinda like how mad you get at the refs when they give your team in extra point right? Yeah, but But what you said like you got to recognize that problems first before you before you solve it. How do you see the ship turning around?
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, well I'm not necessarily that hopeful although I mean I
Ken LaCorte:nice setup like that I was still screwed.
Zac Kriegman:But um, but I mean, I ultimately I think we just have we have to break out of our media bubbles. I think there's there's definitely a bubble on the right to it's it's harder to stay in your bubble all the time because you know, you go any public place and there's the what's playing on TV will be one of these major you know, you'll often be exposed to the outside of your bubble, but it's but but I think for on both sides, like you know, we You've got to, we've got to re embrace this idea, like there's two sides to every story, that doesn't necessarily mean that one side is not totally wrong. But you've got to at least hear the other side, you know, as a former lawyer or technically still a lawyer, I, you know, I think of it in terms of our adversarial, you know, justice system where we have, you know, a prosecutor and a defense and defense counsel, arguing to the jury. It would be absurd for the jury to render a decision, after hearing from just the prosecutor without the defense, they would always would, they would always convict. And it would be absurd to do this the opposite to hear from just a defense and not the prosecutor, they will always exonerate, right, so but that's what we do every single day, when we read, like when we get our news from, like Breitbart, and don't seek out the alternative perspective, or we get our news from the New York Times, and don't seek out like an alternative perspective from Fox. Because then because the news
Ken LaCorte:entities aren't doing it, you know, they, they're bad. Or they'll they'll get both sides, I mean, look. So I produced probably 1000, or edited up 1000 stories, easy for Fox News, maybe maybe multiple times that, and any of those had to be condensed into 90 seconds. And these days, it's even less. So it's like you have very little time. And I would always tell the reporter, look, get both sides in but but give the other give the, each side their best shot, right? Because yeah, you can easily sit and this is what they do, of course, every day, and interview two sides, and then you pick out the golden side that you love, and you take the smart arguments on that. And then you take the side that you don't like, and you find the most aihole thing that they said in that that made them look stupid or put it and you put it there. And you're like I told the truth, he said that and he said that hear back to you at live those people suck. And but but we all and I'm convinced that that the internet and the our ability, you know, the the concept that only crazy headlines get shared and only extreme articles get get Twitter blow up on you know, you do a reason to Article, good luck and getting anybody to, you know, getting more than 10 Facebook lights, you you do an article that says you know, we'd have scientists to proven Trump's just retarded. And, and it's, and it's gonna be all over the internet, you're gonna be on MSNBC that night. And it's just, and I realized this, like I ran foxnews.com for 10 years. And the success of a piece had almost nothing to do unless it was a great investigative piece. But those come down, you know, once a month, the success of how much money we made on an on an article was 100%, the headline, and the click here the headline, the more money you made, once you click on that headline, you go in there, we made our penny from the ads that we cram in all over the place and and my numbers went up and boom, you're successful if you have that. And they literally even now have have a B testing that goes on live. So we would write up an article you put in five headlines. And then the machine behinds it test this test this test, that one's clicking the best serve that up to the rest of the world. So you've got these machines that are I'm convinced that that the destruction of of journalistic monopolies and the rise of the Internet has created this kind of crazy world. And it's similar to what we had in the very early 1900s Yellow journalism. And ironically, the biggest entity in the world to stop yellow journalism and to fix that in around 1920. New York Times eight folks saying all of you, because everybody else was going to the sun. And the, you know, there was there was dozens of newspapers in New York in that region. And the New York Times said, we're gonna go in opposite tact and we're not going to take sides. And I don't think there's enough of an audience for that yet, though. I think it almost needs to denigrate further.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, yeah. But I can imagine people smartening up. I mean, I agree. It doesn't seem like we're quite there. But I think people may get tired and you know, it's Well, it's interesting. And we've got this political backlash against, you know, all of this CRT and racialization. And, and COVID, I guess, coming this this year, and in 2024, it will be interesting to see how that unfolds. But, you know, there are some promising things like, you know, when you look at substack, and the idea of make maybe we can disaggregate, maybe we don't need an entire, you know, news organization imposing a political viewpoint. Because that's what their customers, you know, what they're, you know, the niche that they're targeting. Maybe, maybe we can start having journalists venturing out on their own. I don't know if that's like a large scale model that could ever work. But we, you know, we have like people, like, you know, Joe Rogan, and you know, we've got like, 1000 you know, podcasters like, sort of like what you're doing so it seems like it's working to some extent there's definitely a mass appeal on some So I don't know. I'm curious.
Ken LaCorte:I think you're right that that institutions give you a lot of power right? You know, you're at Reuters you're at you're at Fox and and you have lawyers, you have helicopters, you have, you know, having a massive amount of resources. But I don't trust institutions or distrust institutions, I trust people or distrust people. And you mentioned Rogan, and we'll go into him again. It's like, you know, clearly he's wrong on some things. And he calls himself a meathead, even though he's a really friggin smart guy. But I 100% trust that if he said something out there, and somebody was like, no, no, here's, this is actually not true. He'd be like, Oh, wow, okay, I was wrong. Oh, bla, bla, bla, bla, whereas CNN would just double down on it and call you an idiot and move on on it. So I actually think the rise in, in podcasts, that's why I jumped into this. And this is the last chapter in my career is, you know, you can listen to somebody like me or you talking for a half hour. And you can tell whether they're they're disingenuous and are and are spinning out points just to make points like you usually do on TV. You know, I don't, I don't know if, if, if the hosts on a on a fox, Ron and MSNBC always believe what they're saying, or if they're just really spinning it hard. But when you get a different kind of format, and you and you open it up, and trust to the individual, I think it might be going that way. And what does that mean for large, large, you know, I was gonna say large scale news gathering. But you get some guys who deep dive into numbers like you, I mean, you know, the types of things that you're writing now on your substack site, that's more in depth than you're ever gonna get out of a Reuters article on on, you know, racial disparity, racial disparity and shootings. So because you got a passion for it, and you're in there. So I see some glimmers of hope, you know, as the ship still kinda kind of sinks.
Zac Kriegman:yet. I mean, it's, it's sort of interesting to me, like, I wonder too, like, you can, you can have, you know, obviously, you can have incredibly biased individuals outside of the context of large, you know, media organization who are reporting on substack, or something like that. But I also wonder whether just being outside of that organization will ultimately whether even people who start off really bias will ultimately sort of moderate as they sort of engage in a broader range of dialogue and debate or they could get more it could go the other way, maybe could just make people more extreme.
Ken LaCorte:Now, I think I remember how I discovered you exactly it was Barri Weiss went on to her substack. So there's an instance of the disintegration so she used to be an editorial writer at The New York Times. Yeah. And I fairly liberal but not you know, 1,000% liberal had probably the best resignation letter in the in the in the history of journalism that I read, that which helped build her credibility, she goes out and does her own thing. You're working on her and you find me. So it's like, we can almost see the, the, the nascent beginning of how some of those changes might happen. Literally just looking at the New York Times, destroying its credibility, destroying its ideals, firing or pushing out anybody who didn't think differently, and that's turning into something different. Yeah. Yeah. All right, dude, well, look, I will let you go. This was. Again, I mentioned it before, before the cameras started rolling. When I read your story, it was just depressing as hell because it's like, this shouldn't happen, not only in America, you shouldn't be fired, because you're like, just because of racial stuff like that. I mean, I mean, literally, you know, flip every word black with white in your thing, and writers would have given you a $50 million check. And you would have been buying your yacht and all of that stuff, because it would have been the worst racial discrimination that's come down the pike and while but for the destruction of of, you know, of, of an industry, but sounds like you're doing okay, and punch back look, just just never stopped. I mean, you got balls for continuing to do this stuff, because I can't imagine some of the emails that you get for saying things like cops don't shoot blacks more often than they shoot white people. There's got to be on a personal level. That's gotta I mean, I'd be telling my wife look, sweetie, I might have to get rid of you and marry a black bride just so I can prove. So I wish you all the best in things, and if there's anything I can do for helping get that that message out, please let me know.
Zac Kriegman:Yeah, thanks for having me on.
