← Zero Hour with James Poulos
Zero Hour with James Poulos
Ep 96 | 'The Circus' Creator: 'I Got to Pull Back the Curtain' on Charlie Kirk | Mark McKinnon
00:52:01
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- [00:01]
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- [00:29]
James Polis
He'S worked for some of the greats. The boldface names, Showtime, George W. Bush, John McCain, even Bono. Mark McKinnon joins us today in the studio. I'm James Polis. Welcome to Zero Hour.
- [01:01]
Mark McKinnon
La la la la la la la la la la.
- [01:08]
James Polis
Mark McKinnon is a political advisor, a reform advocate, and the creator and host of Showtime's Emmy nominated documentary series the Circus. He was the chief media advisor for presidential campaigns and started no Labels, an organization dedicated to bipartisanship. Welcome, Mark.
- [01:23]
Mark McKinnon
Hey, glad to be all right.
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James Polis
I mean, where do we start? I've been tangled up in all this kind of stuff for a long time. You've done it at such a high level for so long. Do you feel like you have a grip right now on what world we are now living in?
- [01:41]
Mark McKinnon
Well, we have some very parallel tracks in life in music and technology and media and marketing. And I'm both bedazzled and baffled by it all. I mean, there's such a, it's such a, you know, it's such an exciting time and scary time sort of to be alive. And yet I'm a prisoner of hope. And I always look at sort of the glass half full version of this. And I think about, well, we were talking about music. You and I have histories in music. And, you know, it's a very tough thing to do now, but it's completely democratized. If you're like a monster talent and you live in the middle of nowhere, you can get on the Internet and blow up overnight, you know, but, but only a couple of people are going to be able to do that. And meanwhile, it's made it impossible to make a living wage for anybody else.
- [02:31]
James Polis
Yeah, I mean, it's wild. You see these videos of these kids on TikTok and they're just shredding on their guitars. Yeah, but where are the bands? You know, where's the A and R? Come on.
- [02:40]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I read these stories now about the most, even the most successful songwriters can't make a living just on songwriters. You have to have 360 touring merch. Yes, all of it. And so it's just, it's, you know, and I think about the campaigns that I did now. I mean, I wouldn't recognize if I walked into a campaign meeting right now and they were asking me my advice about the media that was going on. I mean, I did it, you know, for presidential campaigns in the early 2000s when, you know, I'd make a bunch of broadcast media that 350 million people would see 30 second ads. And even then I thought, you know what? I'm not sure this is a very effective use of money. And now it's a complete waste of money. And because of what's happened with digital technology and the ability to micro target people now, I mean, you can literally in campaigns now develop strategies and you have the tools to execute messages that are literally personalized not to 350 million people all at once, each one of them individually. Of those 350 million people, you can send an individualized message.
- [03:56]
James Polis
Are you cool with that? Do you think we're headed inexorably in like a scary direction where other people know more about you than you know about yourself?
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Mark McKinnon
A little. You know, I actually, again, I am wary and worried about AI and, you know, and disinformation, misinformation and all of that. But then I think of the kind of the flip side. And first of all, I've never been one who's like worried about, oh, Facebook has my information. You know, I'm glad that I, you know, think about your coat. And then the next thing I know, I see an ad for your coat on Facebook. Fantastic. You know, and so I'm not worried about kind of the personal information component of it. And I think again, I think about sort of singularity and the AI of it all. And you're much smarter than I am on this stuff. And I have a friend who's much smarter too, who was literally a rocket scientist. He went to one of the three you can be actually go to a futurist college in America. I didn't know that. There's like three of them.
- [05:07]
James Polis
Anyone I know?
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Mark McKinnon
I don't think so, but I'd be happy to connect you. But this guy ended up being like, Ford hired him to like say, what's the future of cars? And so now he's doing like automated car stuff. And I was talking about my fear of AI and he's like, McKinnon, you know, you're just, you're not smart enough to really understand this stuff. I Said, I agree. And he sent me like an article on. It was like AI for idiots. And it was so compelling. It was a great article. And it just, it said, yeah, there's lots of scary potential stuff, but the opportunity and the things that it can do. Let's just talk about movie making. Think about what you can do. Well, I think about ads that I used to make and stuff and what you can do now with a drone that we would have to spend ridiculous amounts of money to do now. And think about if you're, if you're a really creative kid now in high school or something, you know, maybe right now or pretty damn soon, you're going to be able to, with an iPhone and AI, make movies that like Tom Cruise is making, you know, not too distant future. Just in terms of like creating artificial environments that would have cost a gazillion dollars to do back now or before.
- [06:22]
James Polis
Yeah, you know, I think that's right. I don't worry as much as some of the other folks who I agree with on some things who are sort of critics of tech or whatever. I mean, we all know what can go wrong. We've seen all the movies, all the dystopias, the 1984 and Brazil and Brave New World and the Matrix and terminate. We get it. We know who we are in a dystopia. We don't really know who we are in that utopia that might be around the corner. And to me, if you have the kind of spiritual ballast or anchor in here, then you're not going to get lost in that technological wilderness.
- [07:00]
Mark McKinnon
Well, that's my view. And I also think that there's great examples of it, none of which I'm going to be able to point to, but maybe you can for me. But just the we have. I don't disagree with the notion that we're living in really scary times and there's huge challenges. I think you can argue that just sort of just the global challenges that we face, from national security, which you know a ton about, to all the other things that we face, you could maybe make an argument that just the cluster and number of challenges that we face may be greater and more sort of exponential than ever before. But at the same time, I think with AI and technology, we have a greater ability to solve those things than we ever have before. The sort of things that we just thought, whether it's climate or whatever it might be. Again, the thing that was remarkable to me about that AR article for Dummies that really blew me away was how fast it's happening, it's gonna blow by us so fast we won't recognize the world we live in five years from now.
- [08:17]
James Polis
Well, that's kind of the anxiety of. The menu's too big. How do you know what to order when you've got. You turn it over and there's another. There's infinite choices on the back page, too.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.
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James Polis
Same. Same thing with. I mean, you know, just take something like. Like disinformation. Right. Everyone has in their head a sort of idea of what they wouldn't want millions of people to see and think is true.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
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James Polis
But then you actually have to say, like, okay, well, what. What counts as disinformation or misinformation or under information. And who's going to make those decisions and how are they going to get parsed out? And it goes from something that's sort of very commonsensical to something that's really just, you know, baffling, as you said.
- [08:58]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah. Again, I always try and look at the glass half full view of it. It's just my nature. But on the disinformation side, I do worry. I mean, the thing that probably worries me more than anything is just this notion that there's alternative facts and varying truths. And so, for example, I mean, we had the Cambridge analytica thing in 2016, but also the Macedonian teenagers who were being paid, like, 17 bucks an hour to pump in disinformation through Facebook and everything else in the United States during that campaign. And we'll never know the extent to which that had any. Or maybe a lot of influence on the outcome. We'll never know. But we do know now that it happened, and we didn't know when it was happening that it was happening. And so. But when we learned about it, I think that what happened is, again, this is my optimistic view of things. A lot of us said, oh, wow, well, we were getting a lot of disinformation into our system. Maybe I should be more discerning about what I'm looking at. And I think that. So I think that's the case for a lot of people. So it's like everybody thought that that was gonna happen in this last election, that there'd be this huge sort of September surprise of some artificial intelligence thing that completely duped our entire country in some way and it didn't happen or that we're aware of. But I think people have a higher degree of skepticism and knowledge about what they're looking at now. And I think that that also, again, you know, way more about this than I do, but just a sort of flight to quality in journalism. You know, there's lots we can talk about about the problems in journalism and, you know, but at a time when I don't know what percentage of, you know, local news and has sort of evaporated because of, you know, again, technology, blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, the big branded names like Wall Street Journal and New York Times, I think, are more successful than they've ever been.
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James Polis
Well, they're still around, which is. Which is something. But then you look at the Washington Post newsrooms getting blown up and these legacy brands, they got to figure out what makes them worth people's time.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah, it's a great point. And what's happening with a lot of. What's happening in journalism today in a lot of instances is that there are some of the successful journalism operations now are plucking out big talent out of those organizations and creating just these kind of operations that have just like one vertical, or I mean, like one person per vertical. They have the best politics writer, the best technology writer, best media writer, and they have 10, a staff of 10, and they charge a lot of money, but they're making a lot of money. And so their complete overhead is 10 people, as opposed to the Washington Post newsroom. And I just read a story about a reporter, Tara Palmeri is her name. She's been through, like, dozens of. She was at Politico. She was at this, she was at that.
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James Polis
She was. The person's going on and on, right?
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Mark McKinnon
So now she's going, yeah, she's going to start her own YouTube channel. She's just like, well, I, you know, I'm not particularly happy with the, you know, for whatever reasons at all these places. She's been out of the more recent place, which was Puck, and so she just said, I'm going to go completely solo and start a YouTube channel. And I don't know if it'll be successful or not, but that's kind of. The model increasingly is people are looking to individuals rather than platforms.
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James Polis
Right? Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating that kind of move toward the stars being the model in media. When you look at Hollywood and, you know, it's. I don't know if it's ever been so rough to be a celebrity as it is right now.
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Mark McKinnon
No kidding. I mean, Hollywood's a mess, and that's been completely blown up. And I don't know what's gonna happen with that. And clearly they don't either.
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James Polis
Warner Brothers going to Vegas. I mean, this is A.
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Mark McKinnon
Well, you know, the show that I produced, which was called the Circ, which was a documentary series that ran for eight seasons, 130 episodes and it was the most watched, highest rated show in the history. Unscripted show in the history of Showtime. Paramount took over Showtime, fired everybody at Showtime. So all the people that ran our show were gone. And Paramount, I think it's no secret that their sort of short term strategies to sell the company, which they're kind of in the middle of doing right now. And so they're ordered, all the executives would just go in and cut everything. And ours was a really expensive show for a documentary series. It was almost like a million dollars an episode, which is crazy for a documentary series. But that's why it looks so good. And they spent a lot of money on it, but they didn't care. And so it's just, you know, I think it's going to. People were complaining about, including me about having, you know, 100 apps on their television now to watch different things, but I think five years from now there'll be four.
- [14:28]
James Polis
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, here's one thing where I am actually kind of worried, which is social media comes along. It creates this idea that, hey, you know, if you just put your sluice box in the stream and you just let as much water rush through it as you can, you're going to be able to sift out the gold nuggets and that's what social media is going to be. You sort of get it up to a big enough scale and then you have a command over, you know, you can see under the hood, you get the social graph, you get all the data. You're just harvesting all this data about people and their identities, their behaviors, their connections and everything. You will surface the best of the best talent. And maybe, maybe you did a little bit at the beginning, but now, you know, there are lots of people with talent, but they're not part of a pipeline, they're not part of a system. They're not, they don't have those thick relationships, they're just kind of scattered around. And if you're not providing some sort of cultural, institutional mechanism to take people who have promise and potential and really shape them into something that is sustainable and that works, you're not going to be able to replace what once was. You're going to be eating the seed corn of your culture.
- [15:48]
Mark McKinnon
I think Hollywood's a great example of that because, I mean, this is close to my home just because I have an exceptionally talented screenwriter daughter. In Hollywood right now. And I mean there was an article this last week where James Cameron was complaining that he couldn't get something greenlit. The only thing they're greenlighting anymore is it can't just be a great script. It's gotta be a great script attached to great talent to, you know, you gotta have a package of like such a sure bet and even a sure bet they'll say, well it's got to have IP attached. You know, there has to be some. It has to be Yellowstone 7.
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James Polis
Yeah.
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Mark McKinnon
You know.
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James Polis
Well, which is weird because like I don't believe that's actually true.
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Mark McKinnon
Oh really? Oh good.
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James Polis
I mean that's happening. But what. I don't think the, I think the intuition is off.
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Mark McKinnon
Oh well, I agree with that.
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James Polis
Yeah. You know, you can spend 200 million on red one and it can, I guess it did fine, you know, broke even, made, made a profit or something. But that's a tremendous amount of resources going to like one thing.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
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James Polis
You know, 25 million for the rock and like, I don't know, the, the electric, electric state I think was like 325 million.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
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James Polis
Like. And then the stakes are so high for this thing to perform and where are you going to find the audience and you start to become really dependent on like China, you know.
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Mark McKinnon
Well maybe that's really Hollywood when you.
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James Polis
Have to depend on China for the movies to.
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Mark McKinnon
Well, I agree with you and I think it's. That's, I think that's a failed long term strategy and that pendulum's gonna swing. And maybe that started with Nora, you know, a $2 million film that won most of the.
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James Polis
Well, that's an $18 million marketing budget. You know, that's one thing that Neon understood. They did it with parasite. $20 million marketing budget.
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Mark McKinnon
Interesting.
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James Polis
We're going to pay to play again.
- [17:42]
Mark McKinnon
Interesting.
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James Polis
But I'm glad these AI tools are giving people the ability to kind of make their own stuff. I think that's the real promise there is accelerating and compressing that production timetable between I got the greatest idea ever and now it's on screen. That's a lot of time sort of floating around and things are changing fast. And if it takes the best movie makers, we have too long to turn things around, it's going to be hard to really get its teeth into contemporary life, which is what I think people turn to the movies for. Yeah, you can have your nostalgia trip. Yeah, you can sort of blast off into the future or whatever. Sci fi. But what cinema is really good at doing is Kind of holding a mirror up to the moment that we're living in right now and saying, like, look, you know, there are timeless things about being human that are intersecting and that show up for you in your everyday life. That's. That's where the magic of the cinema is. You know, I think people laugh at that. That AMC Pre Roll where it's Nicole Kidman saying, like, somehow heartache feels good in a place like that. Well, right. I mean, it was not just Nicole Kidman. It's Tarkovsky said the same thing. You know, like, the movies give the audience and the artist a way of experiencing together the joy and suffering of creating an image. This is, like, powerful stuff. And if that isn't showing up for people in cinema, in art, they're going to look for it somewhere else. Especially when it comes to understanding how to make sense of their identity in this technological world. Who are they going to trust? Are they going to trust the people making the technology? I mean, look, even if they have the best of intentions, they might not be the best to ask exactly how we should use this stuff. Are they going to ask the politicians? I don't know. You know, your mileage may vary in times past. You'd ask your priest. Your priest knows you. They sort of knows your strengths and weaknesses, can have a confidential conversation about them. But a lot of churches, you know, they're not prepared for what's going on with people's lives and technology. Well, so this is a place where art can play a big role. And right now it seems like it's just whoever's at that kind of decider level, to use one of those classic W words, you know, in Hollywood, it just seems like they've kind of come disconnected from. From the actual culture that. That most Americans are living in. Americans of all types, you know, the culture of what's going on right now and who am I. And I understand, you know, it's gonna pencil out better for Warner Brothers to can Coyote v Acme or to Can Batgirl or whatever. Okay? It's better for the bottom line. But, gosh, you know, this just. This seems like a strong signal to me that the crown of art, you know, the crown of cinema, is just rolling around in the gutter.
- [20:30]
Mark McKinnon
I think that's a really smart take, you know, And I mean, I'm just remembering when they. When the Paramount Showtime thing happened and they. Again, going back to this IP thing, they said, well, we'll just. We're gonna. You know, we pick two shows that we're gonna keep going and it's. We're gonna have. We're gonna have billions, Miami, billions, London. We're gonna have a show called Millions and a show called Thousands, you know, and it's like, none of those ever got made. I mean, the guy who wrote it, like, he. He read that in a press release, like, I'm not gonna make this shit.
- [21:00]
James Polis
Yes. Well, I'm sure you've been following all this James Bond stuff too, right?
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
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James Polis
Yeah. Oh, we're going to spin off. Moneypenny. We're going to spin off.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah, that's a really good example.
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James Polis
We're going to make TV series a really good example. And it's like, will you, though, couldn't you just really not have the juice to create a new piece of ip?
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah. And I just. I think your notion of it, of art being the kind of mirror of our society is, you know, that demand is going to emerge. And, you know, ultimately, I suppose that they're going to the market. Hopefully, the market will work.
- [21:35]
James Polis
Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad those tools are there for young filmmakers, but are the young filmmakers there? Where do they come from? You know, they don't come from just sort of panning for gold in the slipstream of the Internet at large. We need those people with visions and visions that understand that the tech piece and the politics piece and the art piece and the faith piece, it all fits together. It's all kind of one thing, you know, go all the way back to the ancient Greeks. They would look at you like you were a Martian if you said, oh, no, it's art and tech. These are two different things. It's the same word in ancient Greece.
- [22:10]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah. Very good.
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James Polis
Yeah.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah. Well, again, I'm optimistic about. I think the talent is out there, and I think they'll emerge, and I think they'll figure it out.
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James Polis
Yeah. Well, in the meantime. So you did the circus. It was a huge hit. What do you think is kind of the next huge hit in the making? Where are audiences? What do they want?
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Mark McKinnon
Well, one thing I'll just say about the circus experience, that the reason it worked is because I had a notion. I just. I'd worked in politics a long time, and I thought that there was really interesting stuff happening that most people didn't see. It was behind the scenes, behind closed doors, and that there were characters beyond the principals who were really fascinating characters. You know, it's like, usually the candidates aren't the most interesting people in a campaign. I mean, there's the Steve Bannons and there's just other people who are really interesting and compelling. And I thought that, I thought if there were a way to do it, I mean, good, good drama. You don't know the end. Right. And so the notion of producing a documentary and, and, and rolling it up six months or a year after an election is, you know, to me it's like, we know what happened and I don't need to go see that again. But if I'm in the cockpit while it's happening and we don't know what's happening yet, that, that could be interesting. But the, and also. And you'll. This, I'm sure will go to, to your, your, your guiding star, which is just, you know, the people are so skeptical about anything these days because it's, you know, for all the obvious reasons, it's controlled, it's paid for by somebody else, blah, blah, blah. Especially in politics, right?
- [24:10]
James Polis
Everything's an ad.
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Mark McKinnon
Yeah, yeah. So how do you communicate something that's authentic? And so the power of the circus. And the reason it worked, I think is just because it was real time. I mean, we never, we put a show on Sunday nights that never had anything older than Monday shot. We didn't take stuff off the shelf. We didn't pre shoot it. And so it always. But even then in this environment, you know, wasn't too long before, you know, by Friday, you know, on Friday stuff we shot, Tuesday felt really old and yet we were rolling it up. So it had a real time component of it. And that's, I think that's part of, you know, what you're asking, what's kind of next or what's happening. And I think that it is both real time and authentic. And it's not something, you know, at least in terms of kind of that genre, you know, it just has to have a real time component to it because just anything on the shelf gathers stuff so quickly now.
- [25:13]
James Polis
Yeah, well, this administration has given us lots of real time nuggets here.
- [25:17]
Mark McKinnon
Well, unbelievable. I mean, I'm actually really happy that I'm not making this show now because imagine trying to make this show right.
- [25:28]
James Polis
Now because even the New York Times can't keep up with it.
- [25:31]
Mark McKinnon
I think that's part of the strategy. It's such a blizzard of stuff that, I mean, I'm thinking, I was I literally thinking, God, what if we were producing the show this week and on Sunday we'd say, okay, well, we think the show this week's going to be X and then Monday so much would happen, we'd tear up the Show Monday, we'd tear up the show Tuesday, we'd be starting over every day because so much is happening.
- [25:53]
James Polis
Yeah.
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Mark McKinnon
So I think it's. I'm grateful for the run we had, and I love the sort of time that we got to do it. And it was kind of lightning in a bottle in terms of like a time capsule of American politics. It was a fascinating, interesting time, and great to be in the front row for it. But I just, I'd be going nuts trying to do it right now. Just would put me in the hospital.
- [26:16]
James Polis
You know what the big touchstone for me at least was when it comes to that whole concept of just, you know, moving faster politically than the commentariat can keep up with was Karl Rove. You know, that, that infamous interview where, you know, he's like, we are. We are the actors of history. And, you know, you will interpret judiciously as you do interpret what we do, and then we'll. We'll be on to the next thing, you know, while you're sort of typing up your interpretations of it. Yeah. I mean, it seems like we are potentially facing that model, regardless of which kind of ideological direction it's coming from.
- [26:58]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
- [26:59]
James Polis
Kind of. Until further notice, you know, if you're an. An analyst, a critic, an interpreter, an explainer. Yeah. We got kind of podcast world where that's. That's almost all there is, is just the kind of commentary and the meta commentary. But that's, you know, people consume that like recreationally.
- [27:16]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
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James Polis
They like to have it on in the background.
- [27:19]
Mark McKinnon
Yes.
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James Polis
And it can be influential on votes. You know, you look at the Ovana or whatever and the impact of the kind of podcast people on. On the Trump campaign. Not ruling that out. But that's a lot different than the kind of hard nosed media reportage and criticism that used to be at the heart of the enterprise.
- [27:38]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah. I mean, it's just been thrown into a blender. But I'm curious to ask you about the podcast of it all, just because I remember and you can help me with the timing on this, but it seems like 20 years ago or something, that's when podcasts sort of popped up. And it was like that was gonna be the next new thing, the ipod.
- [27:55]
James Polis
That was where the PODC came from, right?
- [27:58]
Mark McKinnon
Is that right? Yeah.
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James Polis
Okay.
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Mark McKinnon
And then it kind of disappeared. I mean, or it just didn't seem like it was really happening. Now suddenly it's popped again and it's just kind of an interesting arc of podcasting because it, it's very interesting.
- [28:10]
James Polis
I think A lot of it is generational. You know, once upon a time, circa, I think, 2015, I was about to ink a deal with the Daily Beast to do the Daily Beast podcast with Olivia Nuzzi, who at that time was.
- [28:33]
Mark McKinnon
I know Olivia Will, I think, like.
- [28:34]
James Polis
Six months out of Anthony Weiner's office and, you know, we started doing this slide deck and like, oh, this could be cool. And it never happened because it just, you know, the podcast was not kind of well enough established and there wasn't this pattern and it didn't seem to be totally marketable. And, you know, yeah, maybe it would have been a couple, you know, 20, 30 somethings, just kind of rambling about the day's events, but that turned out to be the model. That's it. You know, And I think, ironically, we had to go through a period of time when, you know, the msm, like, did lose some credibility and did start to seem, like, performative and predictable and one dimensional. And where do you go if you want to kind of be aware of the world at large without having to either eat your vegetables on the one hand or kind of. Okay, so they're reading tweets on cable news now, and maybe it'll be my tweet they read. Those seem to be kind of the only options for a little while there. I know that a lot of people felt, on balance, pretty good, at least in Obama's first term, about that kind of like, no drama thing where it's like, we're going to be cat. Like, we're not going to be. We're not going to be doing the Karl Rove thing, or we're going to be sort of taking a distance from world affairs in a certain way. He got sort of scorched by Tahrir Square, and, okay, we're going to be no drama, but it did kind of make things a little bland. And it did, you know, the now we're all drama. The infamous beige suit, right. It was a kind of a beige. A beige time. And. And I think there was a generational response to that, which was. Is. Is that all there is? Like, really, like, we're just going to kind of drift in this direction. That feeling of kind of stagnation, feeling of elites just kind of becoming entrenched and quietly just sort of like moving all of the kind of value out of society, all of the sizzle into this other parallel universe that you don't really get to belong to unless, you know, you. You know the right people or you're in the right secret society? I Think there was a backlash to that, and it was a quiet one that built up over time and moved people into that kind of alt media. Rogan, you know, was a part of that. You know, Alex Jones. And from one standpoint, it's like, whoa, where'd these guys come from? But if you, you know, if you have a memory that, that goes back to the, the 90s and the 80s, I mean, it was Art Bell, you know, his X Files, like this kind of stuff. It's been around for a long time. That kind of, kind of quirky Americana thing.
- [31:36]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah. Well, I think that's interesting, your, your notion of the podcast sort of being the sort of more recreational thought. But what, what's your view of what's happening on the sort of immediate news front? How's that going to manifest itself in the near future?
- [31:53]
James Polis
I mean, I think that Elon Musk's impact on just kind of shaken that logjam loose is undeniable. And as much as you don't want random foreign governments kind of messing with people's minds, especially during an election season, things did get way too censorious. You know, when you've got the intelligence community, people, you don't know their names. You can't vote them in, you can't vote them out. They're poking at Twitter or whoever, saying, like, you gotta take this down. You gotta delete it. That's not America. You don't want that. Yeah, but, you know, where, where is X right now? Well, it's at a place where, if you're not talking about One of these 10 people, your engagement sucks. You know, and it's like, well, I don't want, you know, I don't even WANN about those 10 people, much less have to, like, say their names and have a take about the. It's like, man, you know, like, I want people to have takes about me. I don't want to be obliged to sort of talk about these reality TV show characters in order to, you know, get more than 30 likes on a tweet. And especially for guys who came out of, you know, who were sort of like MAGA at the beginning and did feel like they were, like, hanging on for dear life on the Internet, waiting to be canceled or censored. They felt like dissident journalists, you know, and like independent voices. And I think there was a feeling that among a lot of those guys, you know, okay, Trump is back. We're not going to be clinging on for dear life. We're going to be able to actually, like, say, the things that we've been saying and maybe actually grow our audience and maybe actually have some semblance of like a normal journalist experience and maybe some of them, but a lot of them feel like if, if it's not kind of coming out of that stable of. Of Elon's simps, then there's just no oxygen left for you. And, you know, this is a conversation alternative thing.
- [33:52]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
- [33:52]
James Polis
You know, this is a debate that's going to play out and is going to keep playing out, but that's the vibe that I'm getting. And I think the upshot of it is there's just, there's an appetite on the, on the production side and the consumption side for new ventures, new brands, new voices, new talents. And it's. If you're, if you're approaching social media from that kind of master feed model where it's like there's one feed, it's either going to be the intelligence community running it or Elon Musk is going to be running it, or, you know, it's going to be one feed to rule them all. And in that world, it might be convenient, it might give you information faster than any other model, but it's not super great at performing that function of kind of developing and curating and surfacing new talent, new visions that are authentic and comprehensive.
- [34:48]
Mark McKinnon
I'll tell you one thing that, that I observed in the last election that really caught my attention. I am in the. I'm in the process of. Well, let me back up. In the last election I did another. I did a documentary project on Gen Z. And as part of that, I was kind of looking around at what Gen Z voices were popping and on. What am I TikTok?
- [35:27]
James Polis
Surely this is about TikTok.
- [35:29]
Mark McKinnon
Yes, it is. Okay, let me back it up. We're not live, right?
- [35:33]
James Polis
Live to tape. Snip, snip.
- [35:35]
Mark McKinnon
All right. So in the last election I was working on producing. In the last election, I produced and producing a documentary on Gen Z. And so I was looking around to try and see, you know, what Gen Z voices were popping out there. And suddenly on TikTok, this guy named Charlie Kirk started popping up everywhere. And so I, like many others, had a very conventional notion and wisdom about Gen Z and how they act and how they're likely to act in that election. They're college age and they're college kids and I was a radical lefty in college and just about everybody I knew was.
- [36:14]
James Polis
Yeah, as you do. Right.
- [36:15]
Mark McKinnon
So you assume that that's kind of what the case Will good continue to be in that election. And then I saw these tiktoks of Charlie Kirk showing up on these college campuses with mostly young men, but not all young men, but. But lots of them in red hats, you know, and it was really. It got my attention. So I went down to Athens, Georgia and went to a Charlie Kirk rally. And it was fascinating, it was really interesting, and it really opened my mind about what was happening with that cohort, for one thing. But also Charlie Kirk himself, and he was very diplomatic and very cordial to me and invited me in and I saw, you know, I got to pull back the curtain and saw the whole operation and how it worked. You know, his model's really interesting because he invited these crowds just all through social media and these mass. It was in a plaza. Now, granted, this is Georgia, but this happened all over the country. You couldn't walk through this plaza. It was so packed and kids wearing red hats. But the thing that Kirk did was he sat there for two hours, a long time. I mean, I was ready to go. And he answered every single question that was asked. And not only that, but in the line of people at the microphone, he saw people in red hats. And he'd say, I know what you're just going to confirm what I think. You just move to the back of the line and let this person in this tie dye T shirt with Obama on it or Harris up to the mic, because we're probably going to have a more interesting conversation. And they did. And he would disagree and he'd kind of push back and he'd like. And it was. But again, it was very. It was not confrontational as I had been led to believe. Sure. And it was really. And it was. And then again, I talked to him for half an hour after that, but he went on at great length about just how much X and TikTok we would discover after the election played a role in it.
- [38:21]
James Polis
Yeah, Charlie's a fascinating case. I know him a bit and have over the years coming out of that kind of Ben Shapiro moment where it was like click to watch the. The libtards get destroyed with facts and logic. You know, Charlie went in a different. A slightly different direction. The second issue of our magazine Frontier here sent a guy out to. To Amfest, which out in Phoenix, and it was December. So, you know, in between the. The election and the inauguration, of course, the sea of red hats, he talked to Charlie. And Charlie's one of these guys who's like, culture is upstream of politics. And I think that doesn't just show forth for him as a soundbite. It shows forth for him in his approach to how he thinks about what the heck it is that we're doing. My question is, okay, well, what's upstream of culture? And I think there's a tendency, especially on the right right now, but in a sense the left got there first, you know, the long march through the institutions and sort of like what was the cultural revolution? Well, it was an intellectual revolution.
- [39:34]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
- [39:34]
James Polis
And it started on college campuses because that's where the intellectuals were. Yeah, the right had its kind of wave of intellectualism, you know, after, after the Bush years, after the Obama years. I think you got a lot of guys, a lot of them were guys who just generationally being like, you know, Xers or millennials, felt like what they really wanted to do was culture stuff and there wasn't a seat at the table for them. And this was before wokeness and all that. I mean, you go back to the turn of the millennium and I had just moved to LA at that time and you could not throw a stick without hitting a 20something white guy who wanted to be the next Quentin Tarantino. You just couldn't. And guess what? Like all those guys weren't gonna be that guy. Yeah. And the industry had to find some way of filtering them out. You know, the way that California makes this super hard bar exam because there are just too many people taking the bar exam. You gotta, you gotta filter people out. And so I think a lot of talented guys and women who thought of themselves as sort of, you know, 90s, 90s centrists, sort of Clinton Democrats, you know, maybe no labels, y kind of who were creative and wanted to get into a creative business. And it just didn't shake out. Technology didn't help. Hollywood sort of circling the wagons didn't help. Surplus of talent didn't help. A lot of those folks turned into what are now considered today right wing intellectuals because that's where they, that says as creative as it could get for them was in this huge green field of conservative media or right leaning media. That's great, here I sit. Right. But it doesn't really. A media company, an intellectual driven company, a communications company ultimately just isn't going to be that hotbed of, of creative energy that has that kind of, you know, a spiritual grounding or some kind of soul to it. The kind of thing that makes people write songs even if they're not getting paid, you know, that puts people in that tour bus, in that, you know, on the black ice at 3 in the morning, trying to get to the next gig. You know how it is. That kind of stuff isn't going to spring forth from whether it's right wing media or left wing media. If it is, you know, fundamentally about sort of ideas and communicating ideas. Yes, the ideas are important. Ideas are always going to be important to some degree. But if you're thinking about what's upstream of culture, I think it's tempting for the intellectuals, God bless them, to say, well, it's ideas, it's principles, it's philosophy that's upstream of culture, and that's not the full story.
- [42:25]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah, great thoughts. That's really interesting.
- [42:28]
James Polis
Yeah. So, I mean, you certainly dress the part as someone who straddles that world of. Of being, you know, comfortable around intellectuals, but also comfortable being around artists too.
- [42:41]
Mark McKinnon
Well, I mean, I straddle because I'm not that great at either one, but.
- [42:47]
James Polis
Best of both worlds.
- [42:48]
Mark McKinnon
But you know, what I have been good at is you probably, you've watched a lot of movies. You remember the old Mickey Rooney movies where he was like, you know, he'd be the guy like, hey, let's put on a play. And he just get all the neighborhood kids who were really talented and put on the play. I was just always the guy who's like, let's start a band, you know, and to get a really good band together. I wasn't that good, but the band was great. Or, let's put on a TV show. And you know, I get great talent like Alex Wagner and John Heileman and other people and. But I always, I love, you know, I come from a songwriter background. But the interesting thing, and this is go right the heart of your world, which is I realized that my whole life had been songwriter, journalist, campaign guy, campaign ad guy, TV producer, columnist, tv, all that stuff is all about storytelling. And then I realized that my light bulb went off and said that we think about storytelling traditionally in terms of movies, television, books. The same is true for campaigns. You know, I mean, any successful campaign is just are people or principles involved that understand that you've got to tell a great story. And I'll just give a good example of that. So when I used to do campaigns, I talked to John McCain or George W. Bush or whoever about this notion of, you know, to be a successful campaign, it has to tell a story. And they're like, what are you talking about? I said, well, the traditional filter is that you identify a threat or an opportunity, the victim of that threat, the villain imposing that threat, a solution, and reveal the hero that's kind of the classic arc. And then I'd show him, like, the Reagan bear in the woods ad.
- [44:34]
James Polis
If there is a bear.
- [44:35]
Mark McKinnon
If there is a bear, right? And just chills. I get chills just even thinking about that. But it did that perfectly. In 30 seconds, I said, see? You can do this in 30 seconds. And they say, okay, I kind of get it. But just the best example that I can think of is 2016. You have a woman running who on paper is arguably the most prepared, experienced person to ever run for president, Secretary of state, senator, first lady. I mean, just a resume that was unrivaled in history, not to mention the.
- [45:09]
James Polis
Sea of connections and relationships behind closed doors.
- [45:12]
Mark McKinnon
I mean, at that time, conventional wisdom would say, this is the perfect candidate to be President of the United States. And up pops a guy who has never run for president, a real estate guy from New York. And you'd look at that on paper, and of course, everybody didn't say, well, that's not going to happen.
- [45:28]
James Polis
Reality TV show hosts.
- [45:30]
Mark McKinnon
But what did he do? He fucking told a story and she didn't. And just as an example, just with that filter that I described, he presents, well, an opportunity to make America great again. The threat is all these, you know, immigrants coming across the border, threatening our way of life. Who are the villains? Mexicans, you know, all these immigrants, rapists coming across the border. Who are the victims? Hardworking Americans, you know, who's losing the quality of life and the paycheck that they used to have. What's the, you know, and the media elites are part of the problem. What's the solution? Drain the swamp, build a wall, tear up the trade deals. Who's the hero? Donald Trump.
- [46:10]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [46:10]
Mark McKinnon
You ask anybody on the street sort of what to describe Trump's narrative. They've come up with a pretty close version of that. You say, what was Hillary Clinton's story? Blank? Because she didn't know. And by the way, she admits, she said, my husband campaigned in poetry, I campaigned in prose. She was like talking points. And you have to connect the dots in a way that it becomes meaningful for people. So to that point in media today, and I want to have a great quote. I wanted to tell you, if I can find my phone here, that if you want to be successful today in politics or anything, you better understand media, you better understand how to tell a story, or you're going to fail. And if you do it really well, you'll be successful. But I saw this great quote from a fellow, maybe you know, this guy, his name is Mark D E U Z E. He coined the term media life to argue that who you are, what you do, and what all this means to you does not exist outside of media today. Media are to us as water is to fish.
- [47:20]
James Polis
Yeah, very McLuhan.
- [47:22]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah. Right.
- [47:23]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [47:24]
Mark McKinnon
So anyway, I mean, Trump was a great example of a guy who understood entertainment.
- [47:29]
James Polis
And what's fascinating to me about Trump is for all that he did have going for him in that regard, it got him over the hump, it got him into office, but it did not clear the path for him. And, you know, and he got spanked. And maybe, maybe for okay reasons, maybe for not okay reasons. Politics is never, is never beanbag, as they say. And he found himself in the very magical position of being a character who was forced outside of his narrative. And he found himself in the very dramatic position of being faced with a reckoning and having to make a decision. And that takes you beyond identity. It takes you beyond narrative. It takes you beyond, you know, dreams or escapism or whatever people sometimes think art is really about. No, it's about a character making a decision in the face of a reckoning.
- [48:31]
Mark McKinnon
Yeah.
- [48:31]
James Polis
And he did that.
- [48:32]
Mark McKinnon
Which is classic drama.
- [48:33]
James Polis
It is classic drama. And that comeback, you know, not since Grover Cleveland, not. Not a dramatic figure, but, you know, but these. These kind of comebacks on that level are extremely rare. And I don't think that if. If Trump had, you know, had found himself in the dark woods on that hero's journey, having to make that decision, he could have hung it all up and, yeah, maybe they would have tried to bankrupt him or whatever. He'd be trapped in litigation for the rest of his life. But, you know, Nixon. Nixon was hated, despised more than Trump, and he was allowed to just kind of to sail out to pasture. Were it not for that, you know, I don't think Trump's story would have been enough to bring him back.
- [49:15]
Mark McKinnon
No. And it's an astonishing story, really. I mean, we're not going to appreciate it. I don't think we can until we'll get some distance from it. But I can just imagine pitching that as a scripted series to anybody. That story get out. That's ridiculous. Three, four indictments, two assassination attempts.
- [49:35]
James Polis
I'm still waiting for the circus. But Trump, whoever can get their cameras in there, is going to have their way.
- [49:42]
Mark McKinnon
Here's an interesting story that he'll probably deny it if he hears it, but, Dan, one second. Who's the congressman from Houston? IPatch.
- [49:58]
James Polis
Oh, Crenshaw. Yeah.
- [49:59]
Mark McKinnon
Thank you. So, Dan Crenshaw. Is a friend of mine and congressman from Houston. And I saw him once in Washington. This is back during the Trump years. And. And I said, hey, how you doing? He said, great. He said, I just got back from Camp David. And I said, oh, no kidding. I said, fun place, right? It's a really cool place. It's one of the great perks I got to do with Bush was to get to go up there, and it's really cool. And he said, yeah, man, it's great. He said, but you won't believe what we did after dinner. I said, what? He said, we watched the circus episode of election night 2016. Wow. Apparently, Trump just has it, like, on a loop, right? Because, I mean, obviously he loved the outcome, but Dan said he loved the way your cameras made him look, you know, because we. And I mean, that's classic Trump. I mean, part of the reason our show was, I think, good, too, is because we had the best equipment, the biggest cameras, and they did make people that looked great. Trump looked great. So anyway, that's just, you know, and, you know, listen, we. We were not always kind to Trump, but he didn't care. He just liked that he looked good.
- [51:09]
James Polis
Yeah, that's right. The picture speaking louder than the words. Well, whatever's next for you, Mark, we will be watching, we will be waiting, and we will be enjoying.
- [51:17]
Mark McKinnon
This has been really fun. Kick it hard. Carry on regardless.
- [51:19]
James Polis
Absolutely. Amen to that. Thanks so much.
- [51:21]
Mark McKinnon
Thank you.
- [51:22]
James Polis
All right, that's all the time we got today. If you're on YouTube, give us that, like, crush that subscribe button. Subscribe to BlazeTV. And until next time around, this is Zero Hour. I am James Polis, and may God have mercy on us all.