← Kibbe on Liberty
Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 330 | Nobody Agrees with John Stossel | Guest: John Stossel
00:44:34
At the Young Americans for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C., Matt Kibbe sits down with legendary journalist and educator John Stossel to talk about his long career bringing libertarianism to the masses.
Loading summary
Transcript124 lines
- [00:00]
Matt Kibbe
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. This week I'm talking to the iconic and irascible John Stossel, an OG reporter that grew up in corporate media. We're going to talk about the breakup of corporate media. We're going to talk about the emergence of podcasting and whether or not he's optimistic that we can reach more people with the message of liberty.
- [00:23]
John Stossel
Check it out.
- [00:26]
Matt Kibbe
Foreign.
- [00:42]
John Stossel
Welcome to Kibby of Liberty.
- [01:00]
Matt Kibbe
Well, it's good to see you again.
- [01:03]
Rob Chimentz
And you.
- [01:03]
Matt Kibbe
And I'm trying to think of the last time we met in person. It's been quite a while.
- [01:09]
Rob Chimentz
It was also at some hotel somewhere for Freedom Fest.
- [01:13]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. So we're at Young Americans for Liberty and you are speaking tonight. I've already spoken, so they've. I've set the bar low so your performance will be well received. But this is one of my favorite groups, Students for Liberty, Young Americans for Liberty, because you get a little bit of inspiration and a little bit of encouragement that everything that we've been doing all these years is not for naught. You can meet young people who were turned on by you or turned on by one of your videos or a thousand different entry points into being introduced to the ideas of liberty. And when I was a kid, it was Ayn Rand, and then, you know, 20 years ago it was Ron Paul and now it's all over the place. That's an opportunity, right?
- [02:04]
Rob Chimentz
It is. So from what the people I've met so far, it seems to be a bunch, a lot of conservatives rather than libertarians.
- [02:14]
Matt Kibbe
Both. Both, yeah. Yeah. I was asking, but I just got.
- [02:18]
Rob Chimentz
Here, so I know nothing.
- [02:19]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, it's both. And there's definitely always been crossover between Republican activists and libertarian activists. You have big L Libertarian Party people here?
- [02:32]
Rob Chimentz
No. Democrat activists?
- [02:34]
Matt Kibbe
No, I couldn't find any of those. But that's. I mean, the Democratic Party anymore is pretty authoritarian. Yes. There's not a lot. There's no Blue Dog Democrats anymore as far as I can find.
- [02:48]
Rob Chimentz
Right.
- [02:49]
Matt Kibbe
So why did you haul your butt all the way out here to talk to all these young people?
- [02:58]
Rob Chimentz
Because Rob Chimentz, who runs Stossel in the classroom, where we take my videos and offer them to teachers, asked me to and I thought, oh, it's a quick train to Washington. So I said yes.
- [03:11]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. How is Stossel in the classroom going?
- [03:15]
Rob Chimentz
It's hard to measure. We have more teachers, about 100,000 who show the videos and have discussions in class that open some kids eyes to free markets. It gets hard to measure. I focus on Stossel tv. Rob does the afterworld. You have to ask him how it's doing.
- [03:39]
Matt Kibbe
Well, I was about to go there because Stosselnik Classroom uses the public school infrastructure and finds teachers who are brave enough to show dissident opinions. Have you ever heard stories of teachers getting in trouble for showing Stossel?
- [03:58]
Rob Chimentz
We have heard stories and some very angry letters. How can you even send me this stuff? I started this years ago when I was at abc and ABC would spend a fortune producing the video and teachers would write and say, oh, I wish I'd videotaped that. I wanted to show it to my students. And most of my stuff isn't overtly political. It's like, here's how markets work and it's good for high school kids. And I talk to the ABC people and it took three years to get them to approve it. Andrea Rich was sweet little old lady, helpful in convincing them that we were not a right wing threat. And they finally approved it. And we offered it to teachers for 80 bucks and nobody bought it. 40 bucks, 20 bucks, nobody bought it. So then we started a non profit and we offered free to teachers. And now we're reaching. It's hard to know. If all 100,000 teachers show it to 100 students, that's a million students getting to watch.
- [05:14]
Matt Kibbe
But your videos that are separate from this, your weekly video, and my math.
- [05:19]
Rob Chimentz
Was bad, that would be 10 million students. Sorry, go ahead.
- [05:23]
Matt Kibbe
Do you have a video on math?
- [05:26]
Rob Chimentz
No, no, I should.
- [05:28]
Matt Kibbe
You should, yeah. But that's a big number by the way, the distribution in the classroom.
- [05:36]
Rob Chimentz
Right, but you know, that's how many have signed up and get them. We don't know how many use them, how many classes, how many students.
- [05:44]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, but you do know how many views and how many shares and followers you get with your other video products.
- [05:52]
Rob Chimentz
Right? That's what I focus on most and know most about. We release a video every Tuesday. We have a group of eight of us in New York City. We make a new video like I used to do at 2020. I left Fox because I didn't like all this live stuff they do. I want to spend a week or a month or a year researching things before I put it out there. I know that's not in now, but that's what I like doing. And my son said, hey dad, you don't need a network anymore. There's this thing called social media. And it was rough going at the beginning because I was counting on Charles Koch to keep backing me and he just disappeared with no explanation. From supporting me, I thought I was out of luck, but we got enough viewers to help support us. And with YouTube and TikTok and all that stuff, this summer will reach a billion views.
- [06:56]
Matt Kibbe
How does the production cost? So you have a model for how you develop a script and a story. And I've watched you work and you won't remember this, but you used to scold me for using too many big words when I would come on your show.
- [07:15]
Rob Chimentz
Yup, that sounds like me.
- [07:18]
Matt Kibbe
I have this somewhere. I should frame it. But you have this process. But compared to Fox and certainly compared to abc, your overhead is just a tiny fraction of what it had to be there.
- [07:31]
Rob Chimentz
Right. On the other hand, they're covering the whole world and they have to have people on staff. And we have eight people focused on producing one video a week. But we get together and argue about what would be a good story and then rough it out, figure out who to interview, do a little more research, make sure we have the facts right, do the interview, usually just one per video. Assemble all the other interesting video we might use, and the producer makes a rough cut, 20 minutes, 30 minutes long. And I watch that and write a script based on that. And that's what I did. Doing gimme breaks at 2020 and what I'm good at and happy to go back to that. I write a script and I'm convinced, oh, yeah, this is really gonna work and be fun to watch and explain a concept. And the editor cuts it and it sucks, and it sucks every time. You'd think I would learn that this first draft that seemed so good in my head wasn't going to work, but I get fooled again and again. But it's a good process in that I can see what parts didn't work. We take those out and most of it is just cutting things out, moving things around. We do about eight versions per each video. Before we get one we're comfortable with, I record it in my little New York studio and put it out on all this social media.
- [09:08]
Matt Kibbe
So a fundamentally different process than a typical podcast.
- [09:14]
Rob Chimentz
Sounds like it, but it's hard to say these days what a typical podcast is from Joe Rogan to many other things. I mean, Rogan's a good example of how clueless I was and that my whole career has been shortening things because my attention span is short and nobody wants to hang on for an hour. And yet he does three and gets the most listeners.
- [09:38]
Matt Kibbe
So I wonder. So I'm no expert on Rogan, although I'm a consumer. His logic for Three hours is that his guest probably won't start being honest and open until about an hour in. Take a politician, for example. You're going to get. You're going to get the talking points, and the person's going to be guarded, and the person's going to be ready to tell you the thing that they think you want to hear, the thing that they want to convey to you. But eventually your guest loosens up and starts telling you the truth, is the way he describes it. And then they'll clip that. So there's still, like, I think on YouTube you still get the short, spicy clips when Rogan actually gets the guest.
- [10:24]
Rob Chimentz
To say something interesting and he's actually said this. This is news to me that he.
- [10:29]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. He describes this process, which, I mean.
- [10:32]
Rob Chimentz
I certainly see it when I'm doing interviews that, yeah, the politician's giving you this point and that point, and you just have to let them do that and then start to interrupt and get to it. But Rogan is also just a gregarious guy who likes to talk to people and likes to shoot the shit with friends for hours. And so he was used to. He's good. He remembers what people said at previous interviews. And even I find myself listening for ludicrous lengths of time.
- [11:07]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, it's sort of the counter revolution to where you grew up at abc, where everything was controlled. And I'll use the word propaganda that there was, you know, they call it corporate media for a reason, that it was an attempt to imbue a certain perspective onto the audience that maybe didn't respect.
- [11:32]
Rob Chimentz
I never found anybody at NBC, cbs, abc, and fox, all of where I've worked, who said, I want you to say this. The bias came out in. Oh, you can't say that. What, you're going to criticize rent control? That's just hurting the poor. And I live in a rent control building. Here's something that every economist agrees is harmful, but I was stopped from doing that one, or I finally was pushed out of ABC because I kept trying to do an hour pointing out the problem with Obamacare and they were just in love with Obama.
- [12:12]
Matt Kibbe
Was it ideological?
- [12:14]
Rob Chimentz
Yeah.
- [12:14]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [12:16]
John Stossel
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.
- [12:46]
Matt Kibbe
So it wasn't cynical. It's just they didn't understand your perspective.
- [12:53]
Rob Chimentz
And in their eyes, what they did was objective. And what I was doing was opinion. We don't do opinion journalists. It's all objective. But because in their world, in Manhattan, where we all lived, everyone agreed that more regulation was good and guns should be banned and all abortion should be legal, et cetera, et cetera. They were just on the left and they couldn't believe anybody but cretins thought differently.
- [13:22]
Matt Kibbe
So I'm thinking about the COVID narrative fast forwarding many years later, and it appeared to me that much of the narrative, the unwillingness to cover the dissidents like J. Bhattacharya or mocking Rand Paul for questioning Anthea Fauci, there was so much advertising money coming from the interests that wanted to sell vaccines, for instance, that had to, to change, limit the narrative. Like what you were allowed to say. You weren't allowed to put somebody on that was criticizing vaccine mandates.
- [14:03]
Rob Chimentz
I don't buy that. And maybe I'm naive to be more generous to them than I should be, but, I mean, you sound like a Joe Rogan guest saying it's big pharma and the money. But as a consumer reporter at ABC and cbs, there were a couple instances and I fought back and they caved. Where the advertiser pressure came, but they were very reluctant to use that. I think it was just that they were in the bubble of follow the science, and all they read was the New York Times and other liberal sources, and they thought that people who said, try this other thing or you don't have to put a mask on your kid, that they were killing people by spreading Covid and it was immoral. I don't think it was for money.
- [14:56]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, always ideological.
- [14:58]
Rob Chimentz
I think so.
- [15:00]
Matt Kibbe
So thinking about a conversation I just had with Matt Taibbi, the beautifully grumpy dissident journalist, who says that there's a shift in journalistic culture where they view it as a team sport. You're either part of the team or you're not. And he argues that it used to be that journalists were competitive and they wanted the story first. And it wasn't a team sport. It was competing to the finish line because somebody got the headline, somebody got the scoop, and now he says that they're all sort of falling in line. It's a new sort of ideological bent, which is conformity. Not so much left, right or anything else. Do you buy That I think Matt.
- [15:49]
Rob Chimentz
Is very clever and I can't believe how much he writes and I subscribe to his Free Press stuff. But it's still competitive to get the story first. But even then they were all in the same club. Everybody agreed that gun control was necessary and important. And in what they call corporate media now, that's still the way it is. You want to be liked by the club unless you're an iconoclast like me and it's the water you swim in. So you just think anybody who thinks differently is an idiot. Or in the case of COVID a dangerous idiot.
- [16:37]
Matt Kibbe
What's your take on the evolution from the days when you started where there were three networks and a very closed system and you were the odd man out? You were kind of the unicorn that wanted to tell a different type of story. That cartel doesn't really exist anymore.
- [16:58]
Rob Chimentz
Yippee.
- [16:59]
Matt Kibbe
Yes, and it's being replaced by the Taibbies and the Rogans and thousands of other people. What is that evolution like? Are we going in a better direction just because the cartel has collapsed?
- [17:13]
Rob Chimentz
I mean, yes and no. There's a lot of bad stuff out there with a lot of views. And that's the sad part. But this monopoly of thought stuff was never a very good thought thing. And again, the arrogance at ABC that once I became a libertarian, and remember at first I was popular, I was another garden variety leftist. I had come out of Princeton convinced by my professors that we know what works, we could have programs to solve all these problems until I watched them fail. I believed that. And I forget what point I'm making here now.
- [17:58]
Matt Kibbe
You had that top down cartel and now we have a decentralized system.
- [18:02]
Rob Chimentz
Peter Jennings, when he would see me in the hall of ABC after I became a libertarian, would do one of these. Look, I was an embarrassment to ABC News that I was the only guy in the building who had a point of view, an opinion that it was a left to do it. And that's how he saw it. And I was rip shit about that. It was so unfair. I was just covering economics that he was too ignorant to cover. But in retrospect, I do see that ABC did let me give a point of view in my specials they used to give me.
- [18:34]
Matt Kibbe
But that was unusual.
- [18:37]
Rob Chimentz
Yeah, I didn't realize how unusual. I kind of saw. Well, Jennings is bleeding his leftist opinions all over these pieces. Diane Sawyer did some ridiculous thing on the need to save water, even in states where there was no water shortage. And it was to my mind, biased, but they were Trying to be objective. I was trying to make a point and they let me off them.
- [19:03]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, so we believe in markets and we believe in competition and we believe that consumers can demand a better price and the market will provide it. And yet in that media system there was not more of you. Why?
- [19:19]
Rob Chimentz
Well, there aren't many of us libertarians anywhere, sadly, just some. I don't get it. And it's so obvious to me that these ideas are better. We know what makes life good for people, what makes people prosperous. We saw in Hong Kong when they went from third world to first world in 50 years because the British rulers enforced rule of law, kept people from robbing or killing each other and then they practiced benign neglect. They sat around and drank tea and people in Hong Kong made themselves rich. So I would think everybody would just see that and do it. And yet you see the success of the United States or Singapore and you get idiots in Latin America and Africa preaching socialism. So don't ask me. It's a frickin mystery to me why we're a minority. I'm a minority in my own household because my wife has remained skeptical over 42 years of marriage.
- [20:23]
Matt Kibbe
My cats are very libertarian by the way, so we have very few disputes on that. But I wonder if so like the top down system with its flaws and demand for conformity was not good for libertarians, you being the exception to that.
- [20:43]
Rob Chimentz
The top down system of limiting the number of outlets. And remember people may not know that that was another government action, that cable TV could have come in and created foxes and CNN's much sooner but the government said hey, you can't do that because poor people can't afford cable TV and so we can't allow this. And they delayed it. And of course the lobbying from the broadcasters helped delay it for years, which helped me.
- [21:13]
John Stossel
If you made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Kibion Liberty is just one of the amazing products we created for the people. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty. Independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org make. Now back to the show.
- [21:49]
Matt Kibbe
Hear me out. I'm trying to be more optimistic than you. The market didn't fail per se and perhaps there's more demand for libertarian ish values. I believe so. But you Had a government enforced cartel. Right. They don't want more John Stossels out there. You might start talking about deregulating cable.
- [22:11]
Rob Chimentz
I mean, I think they didn't think about it so consciously. They genuinely felt, this is going to hurt poor people. But the result was that people had three or usually five channels. There was PBS and one independent channel. And so we would do stuff on 2020 and get these huge numbers. I mean, I could travel anywhere in America and I had no privacy and people would come up to me and say, oh my God, you're what's his name? And. And I was a celebrity.
- [22:42]
Matt Kibbe
So why are you so pessimistic then? You were a rock star.
- [22:45]
Rob Chimentz
Maybe because I live on the Upper west side of New York and just nobody in my world agrees with me.
- [22:51]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. Well, I find that, like, I Live in Washington, D.C. so imagine how popular libertarianism is there. It doesn't play. But when I go to the real world, it's a different place.
- [23:05]
Rob Chimentz
Well, they're more conservatives, but there's a lot of support for these tariffs, which are anti liberty, and a lot of support for Trump authoritarianism, which is not libertarian.
- [23:17]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. So, like, I don't know what your opinion is, but I've said that the coalition that elected Trump the second time is a different coalition than the first one. And I was supporting Rand Paul in the. And then I actually did a Gary Johnson super pac. So I was not on the Trump train. But there's different factions in the second coalition that are more libertarian ish elements of the Maha movement. Thomas Massey being one of the original Maha guys, growing his own food and cattle and generating green energy and all that stuff that he does on his farm. The Tech Bros put Elon in his own class because there's all the cryptocurrency bitcoin guys that were getting squashed by the SEC demonization of crypto. So they joined the Trump coalition and then Elon, who's probably his own universe of people. The Doge stuff, the intentions of the Doge stuff looks pretty good.
- [24:24]
Rob Chimentz
Yes, it looks wonderful. I'm getting such satisfaction of somebody. My whole career I've been saying, look at the money we're wasting. And you think this is going to help? It doesn't. And it's going to bankrupt us. And they're going to start printing money to pay my Social Security checks and it won't be there. We'll have a horrible place. Nobody gave a shit. And suddenly, at least now people are paying attention and saying, oh, aid for international development was Spending it on that. I love it. On the other hand, Musk went from being popular to unpopular on the polling. And this is why I'm pessimistic that most people don't get that Liberty works.
- [25:12]
Matt Kibbe
Well, when you become a target, like, you could say this, like when Rand Paul was. Was questioning Anthony Fauci, he became a target. And there's a lot of political baggage that comes along with being challenging the status quo. And I think Elon was very much a target. Like, they're scared to death of this guy because he actually knows how to root out systemic corruption in these programs.
- [25:39]
Rob Chimentz
Right. I mean, one of my videos is Makers versus Takers. Elizabeth Warren and Elon Musk. And she's sanctimoniously preaching all this crap while she's taking money from people. And what did Musk do? He created Starlink, which gives people free Internet. He's helping paralyzed people walk with neuralink. He's sending rockets into space and returning them for half the. Less than half the money because NASA couldn't get it done. All of it's voluntary. Yes, he gets government handouts for Tesla and for SpaceX, but that's only because they offer them to everybody. He just takes what he's offered. He's not using force on anybody. He's socially awkward sometimes and doesn't make his case as well as he might, but he does all these good things, and people hate him.
- [26:35]
Matt Kibbe
They didn't used to until he became a political enemy of the Democrats.
- [26:40]
Rob Chimentz
Right. The idea that any government worker should be fired, I mean, he did it at Twitter. Few people cared. Yeah, fire a bunch of people. Why is it so different? You have a disruption in government. When I was at 2020 and Capital Cities bought ABC, they said you got to fire 10% of the people. No, we can't. I can't get this produced. Turned out we could. And then Disney bought it from Cap City. Same thing happened. And again, no, we can't. But that creative destruction made us better.
- [27:20]
Matt Kibbe
One of the Achilles heels of the Republican Party, you know, they claim to be fiscally conservative, and I. I shouldn't lump them all together because there's a big difference between Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. But the Achilles heel, going all the way back to the Tea Party days, was foreign policy, national defense, and the war on terror. And the two ways of thinking about this are fascinating because when they look at the Department of Labor or hhs, they see the waste, fraud, and be. They see why the government shouldn't be doing so much stuff. But when it comes to foreign policy, they want to fully fund whatever that is. That's a black hole. This is their Achilles heel. And you're seeing this clash right now between the so called neoconservatives and the guys like Rand Paul who are actually saying we should eliminate usaid. Elon's exposed all of this. This is anti American stuff and they can't get the votes from their own party. That's their Achilles heel.
- [28:25]
Rob Chimentz
I think it's upsetting and I mean I think it's fear. And fear makes bad policy. And some people really fear China. And I don't think there's that reason to fear. I think China ultimately wants to prosper in the way to do that is to trade with us, not to fight with us. But that's out of my area of expertise, so I'll shut up.
- [28:54]
Matt Kibbe
Have you done anything on tariffs yet? Because I'm curious. I have ideas, but you are the master. How do we convince people that think that tariffs are a good idea that they will actually hurt American workers and they will kill American jobs and it will destroy American businesses? How do you make that argument?
- [29:17]
Rob Chimentz
I do it just by giving examples and trying to show the miracle of division of labor and how international trade makes our lives better. It is hard. It's true. It's logical to think that we're going to protect American manufacturing. But the Republicans have been spreading this nonsense. This is why American manufacturing has been hollowed out. It's become the cliche phrase. It's not even true. Manufacturing output's at a high and unemployment's low and I don't want my kid to work in a factory. I personally for he work in services and it's just so stupid. I love the emails Don Boudreau sends to newspapers. When people when the conservative Republicans write these ridiculous articles. Conservative isn't the word. They have a name for themselves. The national nationalists.
- [30:30]
John Stossel
At Kibbe on liberty. Freedom is a lifestyle24.7, something you live and breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today. Just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You too can love liberty and look cool.
- [30:54]
Matt Kibbe
America first. But America first I think is more associated with what I would consider a more rational step back from sort of nation building and foreign intervention. Yes, but so there's these conflicting elements within the Trump coalition. But like when I think about trade and I go back to when I was a young economist at the US Chamber of Commerce in early 1990s. We're old guys, so we can tell these old stories. And back then, most Republicans were free trade and a growing number of Democrats, sort of the Bernie Sanders wing was protectionist because it hurt union jobs. And slowly the business community let that evaporate. And now I see both parties as almost equally bad on trade, Although from a partisan position, Elizabeth Warren might be better on trade today than she was a year ago when her guy was doing it.
- [31:58]
Rob Chimentz
Oh, I see. Yeah. Though I haven't heard her speak out for free trade.
- [32:02]
Matt Kibbe
They've complained about the tariffs, including her, I believe.
- [32:07]
Rob Chimentz
Good.
- [32:08]
Matt Kibbe
And I don't think Bernie. Because Bernie called free free trade a Koch brothers conspiracy.
- [32:14]
Rob Chimentz
Oh, God, Bernie is a Koch brothers conspiracy. And poor David Koch, he's been dead for years, but he's still blamed for doing things.
- [32:23]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, it's still the Koch brothers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what video are you most proud of? And maybe this is two different questions, like what one really took off and which one do you think we nailed that one.
- [32:42]
Rob Chimentz
Boy, it's hard to pick. I've done so many. My brain first goes to the fight I had at ABC where I was a consumer reporter and I was doing what consumer reporters do and saying, this is going to kill you and more. Two year old boys are killed in swimming pools. You need a swimming pool fence, and people, oh, you saved my son's life. All that felt good. Years into it, I thought, you know, we're scaring people about everything. Shark attacks, and we don't ever put it in perspective. So I spent a full year compiling lists of what does kill Americans, helped by a book by a guy named Aaron Veldovsky called Searching for Safety, which. Which really broke it down scientifically and raised issues like when you put seatbelts in cars. Obviously, that saved thousands and thousands of people, but it also stopped innovation. So now all the seatbelts are the same. And if there had been competition, maybe there would be ones that would be much more comfortable and more people would wear them and they would save more lives. But it's hard to measure what we lose from the regulation because the regulation makes us a little poorer and nothing kills people like poverty. So I wanted to do a show based on this, and they finally relented. They said, no, no, no. I got another job offer. And then to keep me, ABC agreed to give me three primetime specials. I wanted to call it we're scaring you to death. They forced me to call it are we scaring you to death? And made me have a live show during the Nightline time slot afterward where people could rebut the arguments. And two producers quit rather than work on this show, which is pretty unheard of in television, saying, this isn't journalism, this is conservative advocacy. Because I was saying regulation itself can kill. And abc, to its credit, said, well, we don't agree, but this is an argument that deserves to be heard. And it got good ratings, to their surprise. And that's what got me my specials and sort of made my name as a libertarian. And I kept doing those specialists. Another one I was proud of was I helped start the school choice movement by doing a show called Stupid in America and showing how hard it was to fire even the worst teachers and showing some of the damage the unions do. Randy Weingartner, the head of one of the big unions, held a protest outside ABC's offices after we aired that show. And it took there too. I worried this is not going to get good ratings. It's going to be my last special. This is it. Finally the ratings came in and I thought, we don't have dancing girls or sports, exciting stuff to watch. It's kids in classrooms. But it did really well and that helped keep me going. Anyway, she held this protest screaming at me and how biased it was. Eventually I came out of the building to listen and frankly, to be videotape listening, to do a follow up. At some point the crowd started chanting, you don't know what teaching is like. Teach, John, teach. And okay, I said, you want me to try teaching, I'll try teaching. And so they dragged me to bureaucratic meeting after meeting about what I would have to do to teach, and eventually decided I couldn't teach. Just showed how the education bureaucracy eats. Any new idea. But if I'm going to pick a couple shows, I would pick those.
- [36:50]
Matt Kibbe
She's still at it. And it's funny, I think she's perhaps one of the biggest liabilities of the public school system because she's at this point become a caricature. And today she was such a aggressive advocate for keeping schools closed during COVID Right.
- [37:11]
Rob Chimentz
That hurt them.
- [37:12]
Matt Kibbe
And now everybody realizes that that was a disaster for kids. And it was really about the bureaucracy. It had nothing to do with children and the masking and all that stuff.
- [37:24]
Rob Chimentz
Everybody doesn't realize. Everybody, everybody in your world and my world might realize that, but a lot of people, I mean, most people don't pay attention to this stuff. People have lives. They're caring about food. The dieters are thinking about food. All the time and sex and movies and music and their kids and families and a million things. We who pay attention to public affairs are a minority. And Randy pays herself $500,000 a year. But most people don't know that.
- [37:56]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, the exception to that was when.
- [38:01]
Rob Chimentz
The schools were closed, more parents were paying attention.
- [38:04]
Matt Kibbe
Well, the parents actually saw the curriculum and they saw the crushing nature of regimented schooling. And so many moms opted out and came up with hacks. You know, they had pod schools and thousand different variations of homeschooling, which that shift the numbers in terms of parents not going back to the government prison schools. It's a real shift.
- [38:35]
Rob Chimentz
It is a real shift, but the government prison schools are still the majority for sure.
- [38:42]
Matt Kibbe
The last question, and this is related to the question about, I'll call it safetyism, your most important video. I realized during COVID and this probably goes all the way back to the war on terror, that the real Achilles heel of liberty is fear. And if they can scare us into giving away our liberty during lockdowns, if they can scare us into giving away Our liberty after nine, 11, creating surveillance state, that's the biggest problem. I don't know if it's the biggest, but it's a. Yeah, so many. There's so many big problems.
- [39:25]
Rob Chimentz
Can we pick the biggest?
- [39:27]
Matt Kibbe
Maybe it's that, but it's safetyism, right? It's not like. It's not. It's not socialism, it's not fascism, it's, I'm from the government and I'm going to protect you. Just give me your money and your liberty.
- [39:40]
Rob Chimentz
Well, it's a big part. And fear makes for bad policy. But there's so much more. You look at the welfare state, that's not about fear, that's about love. I want to help poor people. We need handouts. And it's harder to explain to people how, yeah, that helped people for seven years, poverty rate dropped, but then it stopped because we taught people to be dependent. It's not about fear. That's about real thinking and about paying attention more than the first week. It's about looking back seven years later and saying, oh, we've taken away people's natural wish. People were lifting themselves out of poverty until the war in poverty, which improved things for seven years and then stopped progress. It takes time to explain that stuff. And it's not great tv. Most of us don't do it, but.
- [40:39]
Matt Kibbe
You don't need a TV network anymore.
- [40:42]
Rob Chimentz
Well, tv, video, whatever you call it. TikTok, that's interesting too. I'm going to get a billion views by this summer. But the views on social media are not equal. The best, most reliable ones are YouTube because they don't count a view unless you've watched for at least 30 seconds. And most of my viewers to watch 30 watch the whole thing. But Twitter, if you're just scrolling through it counts as a view. And Facebook, I think it's three seconds. I forget what TikTok and rumble and Instagram are, but at least it's all out there. I used to like Facebook, but they killed me off over climate change.
- [41:27]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, my Facebook page used to have a million and a half people and now it's down to 800,000. But I get three likes. They just choked it off.
- [41:39]
Rob Chimentz
They choke it off. I did this piece with the Heartland Institute about how climate change is real. Man probably pays a part. But we can adjust. It's not this Crisis. We got 23 million views on Facebook alone. And that's when the Peabody Institute or whatever it's called brought in their sensors. And now I also get trickles on Facebook.
- [42:03]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. So shamelessly promote your products. If teachers are watching, they can find Stossel in the classroom. And it's free to get this curriculum.
- [42:15]
Rob Chimentz
Right and teacher guides and videos if you want to show it in class and have a discussion. And every Tuesday, if you go to johnstossel.com, as easiest to find it, you can get our new videos. And what's the one we're putting out this week we're doing tariffs. Next week we're doing Yaron Brook this week. And more on climate change myths to come. Boy, am I doing a lousy promotion job. But thank you for giving me the opportunity.
- [42:54]
Matt Kibbe
And I'm going to repeat this because it's a big number. How many views so far?
- [42:59]
Rob Chimentz
Well, not yet, but this summer sometime we'll hit a billion.
- [43:03]
Matt Kibbe
This should be liberating. You're white pilled now because that many libertarians are consuming your content.
- [43:10]
Rob Chimentz
They're not all libertarians.
- [43:12]
Matt Kibbe
Some people just even better.
- [43:13]
Rob Chimentz
Right Algorithm gave it to them and they said this is interesting or I hate you.
- [43:21]
Matt Kibbe
So you get a lot of hate fans.
- [43:24]
Rob Chimentz
Actually, I don't. I guess I have a lot of Trump followers because I get more hate when I criticize terror tariffs or say immigrants. Most of them are actually good for America, but most people are supportive and there's a lot of thoughtful discussion. It's another advantage over the old days that the conversation can continue.
- [43:48]
Matt Kibbe
Well, let's continue this conversation again some other time.
- [43:52]
Rob Chimentz
Thank you, Matt.
- [43:53]
Matt Kibbe
Thank you John.
- [43:55]
John Stossel
Thanks for watching.
- [43:56]
Matt Kibbe
If you liked the conversation, Mitch, make.
- [43:58]
John Stossel
Sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org.