Determined Society with Shawn French | Adversity & Mindset - The Cost of Asking Hard Questions Ft. Ben Swann

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

The Determined Society is hosted by Shawn French — a show for people who refuse to quit. Every episode goes beyond the highlight reel to explore the real stories behind resilience, reinvention, and the relentless pursuit of a life built on your own terms. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all others.. If this episode moved you, share it with someone who needs to hear it — and leave a review. It helps more than you know. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I don't think I've ever seen a storm that I didn't want to run face versa into. You were praised for that interview in an industry that later came that you clashed with because they didn't like you asking those questions that made everybody uncomfortable. The fact that he had killed Anwar Aulalaki and his 16-year-old son, which, I mean, he was so stunned that that question was even asked. The question was so powerful that a week after my interview, Obama went on CNN to talk about the kill list. Do you call that courage or stubbornness? Because your critics would say one word and your supporters would say another. None of these barriers are going to stop me from getting to where I want to be.

Then I can do it. Pizza gate. Caution of your chair. Looking back at it, do you regret that segment? As I'm reading this and the words coming out of mouth, I'm like, this is a lie. I don't know what the truth of the story is. It ain't that. I've never regretted the story because I knew the story was right.

And I knew the story was true. Determination is about restoration. Being determined to move forward, but not just to move away from what's behind you. but to bring what's behind you into four alignment. There's an animal that does something almost every other animal refuses to do. When a storm rolls across the open plains, most cattle turn and run with it. They try to outrun the weather, and because they can't, the storm follows them, rides them for miles. The bison does the opposite.

The bison turns, lowers its head, and chartes straight into the storm because it knows something the cattle don't. The fastest way out of the storm is through it. My guest today has a bison as his logo, and his entire life motto is four words, run toward the storm. He was one of ten kids homeschooled at the kitchen table by his mother, and every single one of them had master's degrees before they could legally buy a drink. He had a college degree at 15. He was preaching revivals as a teenager, and then, almost by accident, he walked into a TV

newsroom and found the thing he'd fight for the rest of his life. He sat across from a sitting president of the United States and asked him, him the question nobody in the national press would ask. He won the biggest awards in his industry, and then he lost it all, the anchor chair, the network, the mainstream stamp of approval, because he refused to stop asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable. Some of those questions made him a hero to millions. Some made him one of the most controversial names in American media, loved, hated, censored, banned, rebuilt, but never, ever quiet. This is a lot of the is a man who got fired on a national stage and relaunched his own company the next day.

Investigative journalist, founder, and CEO of Truth in Media, Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. That was way too kind. I know. If I learned how to read, I'm like, I would love to meet that guy. He sounds amazing. He sounds terrific. He's got a great shirt on too, man. Fantastic. I got to pimp that logo. You got to. I want to start at the beginning. Yeah. You know, take me to El Paso. Yeah. Mom. Yeah. Ten kids. Yep. kitchen table is no classroom like what was a day in the life like and what did you learn in those early days that you still carry with you well the funny thing about what a day in the life would be like I can actually tell that pretty easily because it was every day was exactly the same we had a pretty boring life right no offense mom but it was pretty boring life so what we did was my parents first of all you know they they started homeschooling at a time when virtually no one homeschooled right homeschooling

It's pretty popular now. I mean, tens of millions of people are homeschooled, which is great. Homeschooled my own kids. I hope my grandkids are going to be homeschooled. But at the time we were doing it, it was pretty weird to do so. In fact, a lot of people don't remember this, but in the 1970s, it was illegal in a lot of states in this country to homeschool. I didn't know that. Yeah.

And my mom actually testified in two different court cases to help get it legalized, including in the state of Texas. But the reason we, so we actually grew up in New Mexico. El Paso, if you ever looked at it on a map, it's like that little corner right on the tip of Texas. We lived the first house across the border into New Mexico. And the reason we ended up living there was because it was illegal to homeschool. And my parents had to actually leave Texas and move into New Mexico where it was legal. Wow. Yeah.

And so we grew up doing school and living in a house with 10 kids. And like I said, it wasn't a very exciting life because no sports. No, you know, activities like you get now. My kids had a very different homeschool experience than I did. Thank God. Because, you know, they were able to play sports. All of them did. They were in fine arts programs.

They were to do so many different things. That didn't exist at the time. But what did exist for us was the ability to just kind of put your head down in the study. My mom was kind of making it up as she went along. And so it was she didn't really know how to like create breaks, take breaks. And so we just didn't. Money through Friday, like seven days or five days a week, but 52 weeks a year, right? We just did school.

That was our life. And what it did was it caused a cumulative effect. When you don't have summer breaks and you don't have winter breaks and you don't have holiday breaks, all of a sudden you realize like, okay, I'm 10 years old and I'm about to start high school. I haven't stopped. So we did high school. school starting at 10 and then that lasted a whole whopping two years. And then it's like, okay, so now you're 12 years old. Now you're ready to start college. So I actually started college

at 12. Went to BYU. And from 12 to 15, that took three years to do. And then when we're done with that, got a master's from Cal State in 18 months. And then the exciting part of that is, you know what you do when you have a master's degree in your 16 years old? What's that? You bag groceries. You back groceries. You go find the job than every other 16 year old has because no one's going to hire you to do anything at 16. Did you feel like a prodigy in that moment, or did you feel like a kid that didn't get to be a kid? For me personally, neither.

I've never thought of myself as a prodigy. It was just because it was just life. I guess if you're on the inside of it, people will hear it and it sounds super impressive, right? But in reality, it's just about consistency and doing the same thing, right? And you've got to be dedicated to it. You got to have consistency and you have to have, you know, an expectation of accomplishing it.

But it's not really, I mean, anybody can do it. It wasn't that we were geniuses. We certainly were not. But, you know, maybe the genius in life was just being consistent in doing the same thing in a different way than other people do it. There's a lot of genius in that. There is. There really is. Sure is.

I think consistency is the most genius thing that is lacking in our society right now. People just aren't consistent in anything. So, you know, your mom had a high school diploma, right? And put all 10 of you through homeschooling. All successful in school. Yeah. The degree is everything. Yeah.

What did she know that nobody else knew at that time? So, so she tells a great story about it and says she had no idea what she was doing in terms of, you know, especially beyond high school. But she said, I knew when I started doing this, that I could at least do first grade. Mm-hmm. So I did first grade. And by the time we got to second grade, I knew I could do second grade. So, and you know what I mean?

And so that, and that was really the way. I mean, I think if you look to the end of it and say, how are you qualified to teach all these things at this, you know, at a certain point? Yeah, you get overwhelmed and say, who am I to be able to do this? But if you look at it one day at a time, one step at a time and say, well, can I do this? And she knew she could. Yeah. And then by the time we got to college, we had, you know, obviously that's a different setup. We have professors.

We have, it's interesting. we did a program through BYU that was designed for people who were now working. And so this is pre-internet, but they were now working and kind of going back to school part-time. And so it was correspondence and you'd spend the summers on campus. So in the summertime, we'd be on campus, but in the wintertime, we weren't. And as a result of that, we had to write about 300 essays on average more than the average college student because of that particular program. So I actually think that was pretty empowering in terms of kind of teaching you how to think through what you were doing.

When I'm listening to you, explain your mom. I think it's powerful because everybody always talks about things that they want to do. Yeah. But I don't know how. Yep. Your mom figured it out. I think your mom has an extremely high level of intention and knows what she wants and knows what she wanted for you kids.

How much of that do you think was because she wanted you guys to be more educated and take it a little bit further than she did? Well, what's interesting is my mom did not. and my mom and dad really together never set out to homeschool because they thought that we would be better educated. It was the fear of what would happen

if we were in a public setting where they believe. My mom tells a story that she had a dream and she heard the phrase, you know, don't send your children to a public school, lest they be corrupted, right? And she really studied what that word meant

and tried to research, like, understand what this word meant. And a lot of times we think of corruption is just like, oh, you're going to make someone into like this bad person, but it actually literally means to change something from its original intent, right? And she said, I don't really know exactly what this is going to lead to, but I believe that I'm supposed to protect them from whatever they're going to be changed into. And so that was kind of the goal behind it. It was never really about education. It was certainly

never about accelerated because that was just all an accident. It was just like you started doing it and they, My parents actually did a pretty good job when they realized like we're getting ahead. We've got to kind of pivot and make this work. That's what they had to do. But it was never was never the intent. It's pretty cool though. Yeah. It just goes to show you that again, this is just a lesson for people listening and watching.

You don't have to have it all figured out. No. You know, and I'm sure it's helped you throughout your whole career. So I would say it's helped and it's hurt. I would say on a personal level, it created a lot of, of frustration. This is why I did not homeschool my kids the same way. So when we homeschooled our kids, I have five kids, we actually gave them summers off. We would follow a typical school year. They had more extracurricular activities. Like I said, they played basketball.

They played, they did like fine arts programs and all that kind of stuff. So we kept them in line with their peers more. The reason we did that was because what I found, and it's a positive and it's a negative. The negative is when you're 16 years old and you have a master's degree, you bag groceries. Right? Trying to figure out what you're going to do with your life when you've got this degree

and no one's going to take you seriously. It becomes a little bit frustrating. The other thing is there was something that became embedded in me, I think through this process, which was the belief that I don't have to do what everyone else is doing the way they do it.

That becomes very frustrating at times because the rest of the world does not agree with that. The rest of the world will look at you and say, yeah, you do. There's a line and you're cutting the line, right? You can't do it this way, this way. Now, that's the negative. The positive of it is it allowed me to jump a lot of lines in my life.

So my first ever job in television as a reporter came out of necessity, I had two kids at the time. My wife and I had been doing ministry. We had moved to Portland, Oregon. We had come back to Texas where we were both from, El Paso, and she was pretty homesick. And I was looking for a job.

And so I went back to this TV station. I had been a news videographer and photographer for them. But I'd never been on there. And I just couldn't make enough money. I had two kids and wife, and I was supporting them by myself. And so I went to my boss and I said, listen, I got to make more money. Is there any way I can get on there? It was like, are you kidding?

that's not how this works you're 22 and I was 22 but you know I'm still relatively young looking at the time I looked like a child right I was 22 going on 14 is the way I looked and so it was like that's just not going to happen you need five years experience you got to go to another market you know

that's how you get started can't do that not in the position to do that so you know I've got to find a way to to do it differently and found a way to do it differently convince them but in order to do that,

I just had to do twice the work for half the pay. But that was the compromise, right? But it was the belief that I had, a lot of people would get in that position and say, well, I'm not going to do twice the work for half the pay, right? I'm just not going to do that. Right. But because I had this belief that if I can just get the opportunity,

like none of these, none of these barriers are going to stop me from getting to where I want to be, then I can do it. So that's what I did. Same thing happened later on in my career when after I had been a, I got on there and was, reporter and then a bureau chief and then they we had a morning anchor position opened up at our station that went to the same boss and I said hey listen one that I want a shot at that yeah and we're going to

start a morning show and he said got to have experience to do that can't do it and by the time we launched it that was the anchor of the show so you know it does build in you I think there it builds in you a belief that I will not be held back right by the constraints that everyone else puts on me and the system that everyone else puts there. But you just have to be mentally strong enough and resilience enough and aggressive enough to chase it because if you're not, then it makes for a very frustrating life.

I agree. I think your background through the Monday through Friday, you have 365, 52 weeks, no breaks, that built a certain amount of resiliency inside of you and your siblings. Like, wait a second. You're going to say no, but I know what I can.

need to do because I've done all this. And so I'm just going to apply these principles and I'm going to go after it. When you finally convinced them the first time, do you remember the moment and what did you say to them to finally get them? Was it just the pay and double the work? Or was there something else you said to them to make them? Oh, no, no, no. They said, we'll let you do the job. And then they actually didn't do it on their end. So they said that. They gave me half the pay. They gave me twice work, but they never put me on there. Right. So I was actually going around as a news videographer still. And I'm making less. money now than I was making before I had approached them. And I did this for probably nine,

10 months, going out, shooting video, writing for other reporters. I would write their stories for them. It's supposed to be my story, but then they would voice it. They would front it, right? And just felt like I was getting shafted the whole time. Yeah. But again, so to your point, when you have lived where it's a money through Friday, we just do the same thing because life is boring, right? I was able to just say, I can do it, right? Because it's going to happen. It's going to happen. So one day, we are doing my usual, come in, get my stuff. There's a, uh, in West Texas, El Paso, New Mexico, um, in that part of the country, you get these, these windstorms in the springtime, right? I don't know if you've ever been down there, but they call them brownouts. Okay. So the,

you know, hurricane force winds, right? We're talking anywhere from 70 to 120 miles an hour wing us. But it's in the desert. But it's in the desert. so it just picks up all this sand and everything just turns brown and you can't see anything. And we have one of these storms. They're pretty common in the springtime. So we had one of these storms.

And so I get a call from my producer for the day and she says, okay, El Paso's broken into three sections, Northeast, East and West Side, she says. So you're going to cover the West Side. It's great. So I've got all my gear and go out, shoot interviews, get video. She calls me again during the day and says,

okay, just making sure you understand this person's covering North This team's covering the Northeast, this one, and you're covering the west side. Got it. Finished up, get back to the station, she says. So you're covering the west side. You understand that. I said, I'm done.

I have it all, right? Why are you on me? And she said, no, no, when I say you're covering it, I mean, you're on air tonight. Boom. Covering it. I'd never been on air. And I was like, oh, okay, and you're going live. I hadn't even fronted a package.

I hadn't done a stand up. I hadn't recorded anything. And, you know, even now, when you talk about this, people are so, like, video savvy with phones and everything today, but this is very different at that time, right? And if you've never done it before, it's pretty intimidating. So they said, no, you're on tonight. So I called my wife and I was like, hey, they're going to put me on TV. So can you bring, like, a suit?

Do I have one? Actually, yeah, I had like one black shirt. So I get this. They give me an old earpiece that looks like Howard Cosell. and, you know, give me this thing. And that night I go in and I put my story together and then they send me out to this location where there's some down tree and you're going to be live. And then they, you know, count me in and I go live and I was like perfection. Wow.

Absolutely nailed it. Not a stutter, not a stumble. It was perfect. Now, throughout my career, there have been lots of times when it wasn't. But that night it was, right? The very first time. And that was very significant because the next day I come in to work, you know, pretty happy that I got this chance,

but back to, you know, what I was doing before. And there's a guy who's standing in there with some fancy shoes on who's standing in the middle of our newsroom when I walk in. I'd never seen him before. He's like an older guy and he has like salt and pepper hair. And everyone's standing around him. So I walk in, oh, come on over here.

I go over and turns out, so the station I was working for was owned by this big media group called Cox TV. Yeah. And the CEO was in town. Wow. It just so happened that he had been in town that night before. And because they wanted to impress him with all the coverage they had,

that's why they gave me an opportunity to be on. Because they wanted to show him how we had all this coverage and all these reporters. So what I find out the next day is this guy, as he's standing there, he says, oh, wait, wait, where's that young man who was on last night? Oh, there he is. He says, this guy's great. This guy is great. He says, I'm the guy who does.

I'm the guy who discovered Matt Lauer. You'll be the next Matt Lauer. Wow. Now, I'm looking back on that now. Hello. At the time, at the time it sounded great. But he says, you know, this guy's great or whatever. So after he's done, I find out that the night before when I was going on,

the CEO of the company is on the phone with the news director. They're watching the coverage, talking about the coverage. And I came on and I did my perfect live shot in my story. and the CEO sees me. He said, who's this kid? And he says, oh, don't worry, he's a photographer that we have. We just put him on air tonight so we'd have more people. And he says, no, no, he's not a photographer anymore.

Starting tomorrow, that guy is a full-time reporter. And I completely, like the trajectory of everything changed. So it was going through the day after day after day of doing the same monotonous thing, getting screwed over. It's what it felt like. But if you just keep doing it, when the opportunity came, you got to make the most of that. and take advantage of it.

What happened? Let me sit with that for a second. They used you for their own gain. So they can prove to the CEO of the company that they had it covered. And you won because you were ready. Yeah. You know, and that again, like you're telling me the story.

Bro, that's your mom. Absolutely. Yep. It's preparation. It's being able to keep keep on doing the boring part, the hard part, right? Because there's some kind of payoff at the end. Too often we quit early.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, the monotony. Nobody likes the monotony. No. Nobody likes to wake up, have the protein shake. We'll have the water first, then the protein shake, then go to the workout, then come back and eat another healthy meal, and then, you know, do your process all day. Nobody likes to do that.

Yeah. Because it can be very boring. Like, I'm 47. I feel like I lead a very boring life. You know, I do the same things every day. Yeah. But I've gained so much from it because of that. Because I'm willing to do more than anybody else would do.

You share that. And I think it's, you know, we're from a generation that doesn't matter if you want to or not. That's right. It's your job. You're going to go do it. That's right. Period. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. There's no quiet quitting. No. In our generation. Oh. No. There is.

Yeah. It's like, I'm going to like this thing on fire. Like what a crazy concept that is, right? Quiet quitting. People who just like, I'm not going to. quit, I'm just not going to work when I'm here. Yeah. Like what a crazy...

I'm going to make you fire me. Yeah. You know, and that's just the way it is. It's really different. You know, I love the bison. Yeah. You know, the run toward the storm, right? Can you recall the first time you had to turn around, put your head down,

and run through your first storm? Mm. I mean, honestly, there have been so many of them. Career-wise, in personal life, I mean, they've just been. a lot. I think probably the first time that I really ran through it and was less passive, more active in it. So I started this career. I from there went on, as I mentioned, became a morning anchor for the station. Every station I was ever at, too, we were like a last place station. When I go there, we would end up being first place by the time I was gone. And super blessed

in that respect. And again, a lot of that came back to being able to grind. I tell people, if I have a superpower, it's that I can just keep picking up heavy things and carrying them, right? Go put that one down. If you had a room full of stuff and somebody said, hey, you know, we got to move stuff out of this room. There's different personalities. Some people will say, well, we need a plan. We're going to take it out. Where are we putting it? There are people who will say, well, can we organize it? How do we want to stack it when we get? There's a lot of different way. And they're not saying that they're wrong ways of doing it, right? I'm the guy who just says, nope, I'm just going to pick something up and take it out of the room. And if the goal is that the

room has to be empty, then it'll be empty, right? Because I can just keep going and getting stuff and carrying it back. And that's kind of been the way I've just lived my entire life. And it allowed me to really provide for my family at times when it was very difficult. During that time, working in El Paso. You know, I was supporting by that time five kids and a wife by myself. I was working at times four and five jobs, you know. So I was like this anchor on television and then I would get off work and then I would go and do like freelance editing over here and at work shooting church services in the evening so I could make money doing that. And I had another gig editing for a Christian TV station because they needed, because I had a lot of skills as an editor and a photographer. So I would do

a lot of this other stuff just to try to make, make money and take care of my family. And it was, you know, it was a hard thing to do. But I stuck with it. In 2010, we finally left El Paso, and I took a job in Cincinnati at the Fox Station, and was there for about two and a half years. It was very successful. It was, it was kind of the first time where my career kind of leapt in terms of notoriety, national notoriety. That's where the interview with Obama happened and confronted him. And about the time that we were really hitting a stride, we ended up becoming the number one station there. There was that whole IRS scandal. I don't know if you remember the Tea Party scandal where the IRS had targeted the Tea Party members. I don't think I remember that one. It happened

like in 2010. It was a pretty big national story. I had actually broken it a year before. And then when it came up again, like ended up uncovering a lot of stuff so much so that I actually got a lot of people fired from the IRS. No offense, guys, at a certain point in 2010. And so, like, everything was just, everything was clicking. It was just going great. But internally, within the station that I was working for, there was so much conflict. Like, my bosses would just have these, they would call me into these meetings, and we would have these yelling exchanges, right? Because they hated the subjects I would talk about. Right. They loved the ratings. I loved how well it was going.

I remember we had a consultant who was supposed to be advising us at the time. Every TV station has all these consultants, right, come in. And the consultant was so amazed by what we've been able to do in terms of the viewership. Like we were being written up in national magazines and national newscasts were wanting me to go on to talk about the stories we were doing at Cincinnati, Ohio. No offense, Cincinnati. But, you know, it was just that it was that kind of like lightning in a bottle. And that's what the consultant said.

He said, guys, you got to understand. Like, you have lightning in a bottle. This never happens. Like moving the needle in a TV station like this. Moving viewers, actually growing the number of people who were watching local news, we actually did it. It was amazing. And that doesn't happen anymore.

No one watches local news anymore, right? It's just such a trash heap of terrible content. But we were doing something special because we were talking about things that nobody else was talking about. You know, we're talking about things that today, lot of people are talking about things like the Federal Reserve at the time no and you would never talk about that in the local newscast you would never talk about things like the petro dollar in a local newscast but we did and we had this massive audience we had people watching us in over 140 countries that's insane watching the Cincinnati newscast is because you were disrupting the

industry absolutely because they were they were super interested in what was different yes right it's like sore thumb wait a second I'm gonna go check that out yes that that's That's crazy, man. That's a cool story, dude. Yeah. And everything was changing. It was so positive. But the clash that would happen is we have these meetings.

They come in. I'll give you an example, the Obama interview. So I got a chance to interview Obama. There's a whole long story. I won't go into that of how that happened. But got a chance to interview him. Go in there to interview him. They said you get five minutes with him.

You'll be lucky to get in two questions. Because Obama was kind of a famous filibuster where he just talked and talk and talk. I actually ended up getting seven. minutes with him because he was so frustrated by the first four questions that he just started Philopustering to talk about what he wanted to talk about. But the first question I asked him, right, was about the constitutionality of a kill list and the fact that he had killed Anwar Al-Aulaliki and his 16-year-old son, which, I mean, he was so stunned that that question was even asked. And then we talked about al-Qaeda in Syria. Why are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria? Today,

everyone knows that's true. 2012, virtually no one would acknowledge that that was happening, right? And so we have this interview. We come back. They're talking about it all over the country, massive online numbers for it. And we go into a room and the question is, who cares? Why would you ask him about Al-Qaeda in Syria? Why would you ask him about a kill list? You were praised for that interview in an industry that later came that you clashed with because they didn't like you asking those questions that made everybody uncomfortable. Yeah.

The question was so powerful that a week after my interview, Obama went on CNN to talk about the kill list, which in my interview, he says, I've never publicly acknowledged this even exists. A week later, he goes on CNN to have a conversation about it because it got so much attention

that this guy would dare to ask him this question, and he didn't have an answer for it. Wow. Right? And so I remember the, the, we're standing in this, you know, conference room and the consultants like lightning in a bottle guys can't we all just get along and then the you know i won't out their names but the guys who were the managers newsroom managers were like telling me

like why can't you just ask about like the bridge in cincinnati that's what people here care about and i'm like why didn't we if that's the case why don't we put a bengal's logo behind him like what are we doing here right we're doing news uh and plus the president has no control over the bridge in cincinnati anyways. So we just clashed and we finally got to the point where they were like, I had an, I was in my contract and by the third year, which would have been that December. So this was around April or May. By December, I would have had an out in my contract, an option. And I said, okay, I'd say you what. I said, so that we can stop clashing over this. Why don't we just agree. you guys leave me alone

and let me do what I'm doing and when that option comes up I'll go I'm out and they said let us think about it they came back and they said actually we'll agree and we'll leave you alone

but you have to leave in June and I was like that's in 30 days wow yep okay because to me it doesn't make sense right they want you to talk about a bridge

or it could be A puppy throwing a baseball. The first puppy ever that can throw a 90 mile an hour fastball. Who cares? Right. You gave him so much more. What would be the hesitation behind that? So the thing about the news industry is there's a lot of pressure that comes from like your other friends who are in the news industry.

And it's very political. It's much more political. I think people now recognize how political it is maybe at the time they didn't. But it's very political. And so it was just like, well, if you have an anchor who like made Obama look bad, like, what do you guys doing over there? You know what I mean? And so it's like these people who would hang out with their friends and why is your guy going rogue and why is he doing this? Right.

And that was kind of the feeling. Instead of them just stepping back and saying, look, this is a business and this is a model that's working for us. Right. We're beating the pants off everybody. So let's just leave this guy alone. Let him do what he does. We have all these shows throughout the day. We have all these newscasts.

We have all these other people who are on air. We got one guy who is making noise. And as a result of that, we are, like I said, we're actually growing the number of people who are watching news in this town. And instead of holding on to that, we're saying, you know, let's embrace it. It just created so much division

that they were like, we'd rather you go. We just get out. You got 30 days. 30 days. Do you call that courage or stubbornness? Because your critics would say one word and your supporters would say another. Oh, I would say it's both.

I don't call it courage at all. I would call it only stubbornness. I would say that I was very stubborn about it and I obviously thought I was a big deal and I was like, no, man, I'm the only reason people are watching and so what are we doing here? Yeah, exactly. So what are we doing here? You weren't wearing a loose shirt then? No. No, no. Definitely not. But I get it though because to me, it's asking the hard things, man. It's like if you're a journalist, you have all that responsibility. Even if it's at a local regional deal,

your your job is to report the news as it is not the slant not what somebody wants you to and when those questions came up you were the first one through the wall right and you're the one that got bloody yep but i mean look man that the problem with being the first bird out of the bush that's the one they get shot i know right yeah yeah yeah and that's been my career too over and over and over again there's a it's a it's a cycle but what i would say it's rather than a descending cycle it's actually an ascending cycle. So yeah, it keeps coming around, but it all keeps failing forward, failing forward.

And so you asked, what was the first time that I actually ran toward a storm? I would say that was the first time when they were like, we want you to go, you have 30 days. Instead of backing down,

I was like, okay. Head down. I'll go. I have no idea what I'm going to do. Yeah. My wife was freaking out and what are we going to do? I have no idea.

You know what I did? I ran a Kickstarter. I became the first journalist to ever run a Kickstarter to fund journalism. Raised $250,000. Did you know? Yeah.

Was that like a go fund me back then? Yeah, Kickstarter was like, it was like people would pay into projects or products that they wanted to see created. Indiegogo came along later. But the idea was you would kind of invest in a project without any kind of like investment return. And so I was the first person to say, well, that's fun journalism. Wow. And ran it ran a Kickstarter. And that's how we did it.

Yeah. That's really cool. That was how we started it. All right, dude. Pizza Gate. Yep. That one. Oh, yeah.

That one. Cost you your chair. looking back at it do you regret that segment no my man no love it share why with the audience because when we

okay so let me just back up a little bit and say this so with Pizza Gate when that story came along in 2015 2016 2016 it was like the number one trending thing on Twitter 2016 almost the entire year I didn't touch it I was working in Atlanta at the time

I had managed to convince someone to hire me again. I was now the anchor in Atlanta, and we were, by the way, killing it again. 150 million video views on Facebook. I mean, we were just dominating everyone. And a lot of people were saying, you got to cover the story, you got to cover the story.

So I didn't because I was like, yeah, it's actually too kooky, you know, it's crazy. And at the time, I was actually busy covering the Syrian Civil War. That was what I was kind of focused on. Remember they had like some six-year-old girl in Aleppo who was like tweeting in perfect English like please come save us president Obama and it's like where are she getting the electricity to do this and how can she speak type in perfect English right so it was like such a such a facade so that's what I was

focused on and then I remember one night I'm sitting there in the anchor chair and we have a story that I'm because we receive stories all newsrooms get stories from the news feed CNN sends down a feed CBS would send down a feed and so on the news feed they had sent us down the story and the story was about a guy who walked into a pizza place in Washington, D.C. with a rifle and shut it up because of a crazy online conspiracy theory called PizzaGate. Right?

So I actually, this was my read, so I read the story. I was like, okay. So then the next night, we're still covering it. And by the way, everyone's covering it. A.B.C. CBS. CNN, everyone's covering it. The next night, they put a story in front of me to read, and I read it. And it says that

and you can look this up. This was a CNN story. That the origin and the root of the Pizza Gate conspiracy was Macedonian sheep farmers who were attempting to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president. So I read it on air and I was like, as I'm reading this

and the words coming my mouth, I'm like, this is a lie. I don't know what the truth of the story is. It ain't that. It is definitely not Macedonian sheep farmers. So at that point, I was like, okay, all right, I'll look at it. Start investigating it because I don't know what is true.

But I know that's not true. Right. And so if I want to sit here and say something that's not true on air, I want to find out what is true. So went and started investigating for a month, put the story together, took it to the newsroom managers. They saw the story. They approved the story. It was actually a lot of conflict between me and my wife over the story. Okay.

How so? She did not like it. She said it's too risky. You're going to get into trouble. It's too. You're talking about very powerful people. So she didn't like it at all. we kind of went back and forth.

I feel like I should do it. She feels like I shouldn't do it. We actually didn't know what to do. And I said, I'll tell you what. We had our pastors, former pastors from Ohio, who were still very close friends to ours. And they have been just dear friends to our family. And I said, I say, I say what, why don't we do this?

Let's send it to them. Because he used to be a VP, a Procter & Gamble. He was in the executive world for a long, long time. So let's just send it to them. Let's let them read it. And if they say, don't do it, I won't do it. I'll abide by that. Okay. Right. Compromise. Yes. And she said, all right. And I said, but if they say to do it, then we do it. She said, okay. They read it. They said, give us a couple

of days. They came back and they said, we don't know how you don't do it after reading that. Wow. I feel like you have to do it. The responsibility portion of what we were talking about. Right. Like if this is true and if this is happening, you can't be silent about it. Wow. Okay. So we put the story together. I actually try to get another, I'd be honest with you, I try to get another out,

which was I took it to my news director and I said it in front of them to read the script because I wasn't going to run this without like the highest approval. He reads it and I said, listen, it's been a couple weeks since all this stuff happened.

Maybe the story's too old now, right? Sure you still want to do it. He said, why wouldn't we? So I'll hear, this is great. Okay. Okay, sure. Yeah. He said, do it.

So he did it. Story obviously blows up overnight. We did millions of views overnight, next day come in, and it's like a full-on panic. Story's been pulled down. We got to get rid of this thing. Oh, my gosh, they're threatening to fire me. You know, we're going to get rid of you.

Had the long discussion with them. And basically what it came down to. Actually, a lot of people thought I got fired over it. I did not get fired over it immediately. What they did was they said, we're going to give you an option. You can, we're either going to fire you, even though, because they wouldn't really have cause. I had done the whole process the way I was supposed to.

but they can still do it and you can go find it out in court for years or you can take down all of your social media turn it all off and you'll still be able to be the anchor here you still work here won't have any problem

but you shut it off and you don't talk online anymore and so we just bought a house and listen I had already done the story I'd done my job so I was like all right I'll do it so turned everything off for a year then people thought I was dead

oh my gosh no I was still on the news every night still on the billboards in Atlanta right doing the news every single night multiple times a night but I just had no internet presence whatsoever for a year interesting

yeah so would I would I do I regret it absolutely not I've actually never regretted it now there were times when I laid in bed at night thinking why did I do it not that I wish I hadn't

but why was this the path for me because I knew after this had happened and after I ended up leaving eventually was fired from that station because they were violating my contract. I had the ability to come back and keep doing my independent work

which I contractually had the right to do and then they fired me. But the writing was on the wall. I was going to be gone at some point anyways. But after that was over, it was like very clear like your corporate career is done. Yeah. Right.

So one thing about growing up, we talked about my mom a lot. My dad has an interesting story that he was the head of a credit union in El Paso, most successful credit union in America. for several years. And then in the 80s, he gets fired in a kind of a scandalous, shocking way.

FBI came into his office, walked him out in handcuffs out of the building, never charged with anything. But they made sure newspapers were outside to take pictures when they walked him out. Lost his career. Everything kind of at that point financially fell apart for us. And it never recovered. And he was roughly the same age that I was when this was all happened. Yeah. And so I was sitting there just thinking to myself like, I don't know what I'm going to do. And I'm never going to be able to be back in corporate. They're never going to take me back again. Right. So I have no idea what to do. So I've never regretted the story because I knew the story was right. And I knew the story was true. Right. I think sometimes I wondered why was I the one who did it and what is ultimately the price that would be paid for having done it?

Do you ever come up with the reason you think you were the one that had to do it? I don't think I was the one who had to do it. I think I was the one who was willing to do it. I think there were probably others who had the opportunity. Never did. Ten years later, I'm like, oh, yeah. Well, boom, there it is. It was all true.

And I think people are finally recognizing it, finally seeing that it is. It's so funny because 10 years ago, you know, you talk about like, you know, creepy petal elites that are out there and people are like, oh, you're nuts. Now if you say there are not creepy petal elites, people think you're nuts. Yeah. You're nuts if you don't believe that. Flip-flop, right? It's more talked about now.

Like everything is out there. Yeah. It's crazy to me. You know, when you look at all of these storms, right, do you ever sit there and think, like, you know, that's a storm I should run toward, but is there ever a storm that you should not run into. Well, I think that you can, I don't know that there's a storm you shouldn't run into.

I think you better watch out for flying debris. You better recognize it's just running with your eyes close. It's probably a bad idea. Plan for it. Know what the speed bumps are. You know what the shrapnel is going to be so you can work around it before it happens. Correct. Correct.

And not every storm moves at the same speed, right? So I don't know that you have to run full, force into them. You can be a little more strategic. Yeah. But you got to face it, especially when a storm is coming. So the whole analogy, and you laid it out perfectly in the beginning, but the analogy is the storm's coming regardless.

Yeah. Right? You can't outrun it. And so when it's coming, you've got to face it and you've got to deal with it. And I think there's... So for me, too, the other thing was, you know, on a professional level, I've never, I don't think I've ever seen a storm that I didn't want to run. face-vers into. I just, I love it. I'm not afraid of it. Like I said, at a certain point,

you know, my wife was like, what have you done to us? I wasn't to ask you, is there a price that your family is paid? Not you, them, right? No. Actually, no. What's so interesting is, like, God's, God's been so good to me because, again, he gives me the ability to pick things up, right? when I left Cincinnati back in 2012, we talked about that. When I told my wife, this was the option they were giving me, and I'm going to leave. She said, okay, I'm going to start my own company, truth and media, start this thing. I believe that I can do it. She said, I'm going to give you two conditions.

Okay? You're going to love these. This is good. You're going to love these. I'm already thinking, oh boy. Yeah, be careful if she hears this. Exactly. So the two conditions were, number one, you cannot spend $1 of our money to launch your business.

Oh, geez. She said, we're not going to all do without or struggle here, struggle there, because you're moving money into this business, not doing it. So you cannot spend $1 on the business. Okay. No idea how that's going to work, but okay. And then the second thing was, our current lifestyle. lifestyle cannot drop by $1.

Basically gave you two knockout shots right there. Yes, but wait, there's more. It's just like serving you an infomercial. No shot. Yeah. Like, how do you even do this? That's impossible. Like, this is the, I need you to make bricks without straw, right?

How are you supposed to do this? So I'm supposed to start a company. Our lifestyle cannot go down $1. And I can't use any of money that we have. That's what we went to Kickstarter. Wow. And went out and said, okay, so I'll go raise the money. So I raised the money.

I've actually started six different businesses since that time. I've never used a single dollar of our money for every single business. What I would do is I would go find a client and build a business around that client. Move to the next one, find a client who has a need, build a business around it. We started a company with our kids. It was called Jib Interactive, the J, the I, and the B, the first names of everybody in our family. also a piece of, you know, I like that,

equipment that's used for production. And we were doing music videos for kids. And we had this client, we came on, we found them, made it, and literally built the entire company around that contract. Did it multiple times.

And we never, never dropped by a dollar. So one thing I can very proudly say is that I think the life for the family of the entrepreneur can sometimes be very, very challenging because it takes a lot of time and takes a lot of energy to do that. And a lot of times you do have to suffer because we're having to do less over here

because that wasn't the case for my family. Dude, I unfortunately, my wife does listen to the show and she's gonna be like, sorry about that. Why can't she be like Ben Swann? Because I left corporate America. I was in sales. I was making a lot of money.

You know, and also, So at the very beginning, we did pour money into this business so that we could, so I could even do it. Right. Right. So, oh, boy, I'm in trouble. Yeah. She's going to be like, you should have known about Kickstarter.

Yeah. One of my, one of my best friends is a lawyer, and he has these ideas for businesses he wants to start a couple years ago. You know, he's really like pushing. He wants to put some money into what he wants to do this, wants to do this. And then we're all having dinner together with our wives and, you know, his wife and my wife super close friends he and i are super close friends so it's like really great dynamic but we're sitting there and they're kind of back and forth on it and my wife's like let me tell

you about what i did let me insert myself right here yep and she's like so this is what i what i told him and so you can do it but you have to do these things and he was just like he looks so like down wow and i was like listen you can do it though i know that sounds it sounds like she's actually putting a wall in front of you that's going to make it impossible but actually what ended up happening was she made me think very differently about how to build a business and why that business should exist. So that was why I was saying, you know, if you, we literally had to create businesses from the opposite point of view of what most people do. Most people will say, I have an idea. Now I need to go find money to make this idea. And then I have to convince

people that this idea is good enough to get a return. Right? Would you say that's probably accurate? Absolutely. Okay. What I would do is say, I need to go find somebody who has a problem. I need to go to them and pitch how I can fix that problem. And then they need to hire me to fix it. And I do a contract with them. So whether that problem is a production deal, whether it's creating content, whatever it might be,

I was able to find people who had these needs and then build a company around their specific contract. And then when those contracts would go away, that company would go away. Wow. Move to the next one. Unbelievable. Like you said, she taught you to think,

She also tested how bad you really wanted it and what you were going to do in response, not in a reaction to what just happened. That's a real gift, man. Yeah. Women can do that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, man. That's, you know, it's crazy because in leading up to this conversation, it's like, man,

the tough conversations just seem to find this guy, you know, like even like, I mean, respectfully, you know, the Sandy Hook and the Aurora, you know, talk about possible, you know, additional shooters and you know evidence showed that there was none i mean it's just you you have a way to talk about the things that are so triggering uh to to to the public yep but do it in respectful way right like i mean you know i just started following you the other day and i'm like i'm i'm i watched your charlie kirkwin i watched it 17 times last night literally i counted because i kept going i'm like dude like i just can't stop watching this thing so it a lot of of people that are interested in that case and that's a great example of it right yeah i mean that

right there like because i think it was the the casings that they never found that you were talking about right what's your take on all this i know you're reporting but like i think this is something that i unfortunately i don't know if we'll ever know the truth i don't know that we'll ever know the truth i think if the justice system works the way it's supposed to it is not supposed to prejudge someone based upon you know whatever you've read about them online and decide that that person is either innocent or guilty. I think the evidence has to be there. And again, what we're seeing right now

with Tyler Robinson is a preliminary hearing. It's not the trial. It's just whether or not what evidence will be allowed in and what evidence will not be allowed in. And what I would say is just from a layman's perspective but also a journalist perspective, the case that's being made against him is so weak. There is not a single piece of video

of Tyler Robinson firing a gun. There is not a single piece of video of Tyler Robinson with a gun. There is not a single eyewitness who saw Tyler Robinson with a gun or firing a gun. And so again, does that mean Tyler Robinson's innocent? It does not mean he's innocent.

It means that so far the evidence is not there. The roof, you mentioned about the roof. The roof that he's on, there's not a single shell casing on the roof that he was supposedly on. But there's a bullet found on another rooftop. Why? How did that get there? Why is it

there, right? Why? Why is it that the officer who found the screwdriver that had his DNA on it that was used to disassemble this gun, that he stuffed down his pants? That's why no one ever saw the gun. His body cam goes out moments before he finds the screwdriver, right? And then it never turns back on again. It's like, oh, but take my word for it. This is what I found.

And then when you look at the DNA evidence on the screwdriver and on the towel that he supposedly wrapped the gun in, it's 98% in one case and then 88% in one case on the screwdriver. It's his roommate's DNA, his boyfriend's DNA, right? Not his. So there's just a lot of questions that surround it. And it doesn't fit, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't feel right. And it does not fit a case that's certainly not an open and shut case.

It feels like the case that's being made is, but everyone knows it's true. Everyone knows he did this. We don't know he did this. We don't know. And the evidence so far does not show that he did this. Why are they letting the video in all of a sudden? Because in evidence, in a trial, right, it cannot be an edited or altered video.

Correct. And the judge ruled on that. But then he came back and said, all right, we're going to let it in. Yeah. Very suss. I have no idea. Yeah, suss. That was a good word.

It is. Yeah. Why would you allow in a video compilation? They've marked everything. They've zoomed in. They've edited this. And then when they were asked to provide the raw original video, else. Oh, we don't have them. You don't have them. Like, where, where are they? Where did they go? Also, the fact that the

site where Charlie Kirk was killed was paved over. Like days. Days after. That's crazy. Before the defense ever had a chance to look at anything. So there's just a lot wrong with it. And I think when, you know, what's so different now, 10 years ago, I would have been 12 years ago, I would have been doing this story. Right. And everybody would have said, it's crazy. They'd be writing about me on Wikipedia for it. He's a Tyler Robinson truther. But now you have legions of people, right? Millions of people who are like, no, actually,

so I'll take a little bit of credit. It's not just me, but I will take some credit for having helped to move the public view of stories like that to say, question more. Yeah. Challenge the way that this is. And there's a lot of people who have done it.

I'm not saying I'm the only one. But I was one of the early ones to help to do that, to say there's, there is more to this story. And I think now you see that like millions of people have just adopted this, that they recognize that. They believe that that's true and they act differently. Yeah. I mean, it's not about being a Tyler Robinson truth or it's not finding the truth, right? If it's him, okay. Absolutely.

Then I'll believe it. But it's just been interesting to me to see this all unfold because it's like, wait a second. Like, I mean, there's a bunch of different conspiracies going around. sure i mean a ton of them but you know it's so current because i saw it yesterday on your it's on a couple different platforms but you know when i when i when it came through my feed from you i was like okay well let me really dive into this here because it's such an interesting take and it just doesn't make sense to me that all of a sudden we're just going to break a rule in a court of law like right because you don't have the videos and never explained it either and the judge

did not even explain why he changed the rule the other the other thing i would say about Tyler Robinson, I know you don't spend too much time on it, but the other thing that I think is important about Tyler is that to me, the most compelling piece of evidence that the defense has is his confession. And the fact that his confession in that discord group where he goes in there, hey guys, it's me, Tyler, I'm the one who did it. I killed Charlie Kurt. That his confession came an hour after he was in custody. So that discord message was sent an hour after Tyler Robinson had turned himself in. Interesting. Yeah. To me, that, That's the single strongest piece of evidence that there's a setup happening.

Who had access to that phone? Who was able to log into it? Because I know this. If he turned himself in and he's not sitting with the phone. No. And you're not going to go turn yourself in. Say, I didn't do it to the cops and then turn around and say, send this message out to my five people in Discord.

It's just not happening. Can I ask a really dumb question? Why can't they just look at the timestamps and just say, well, if he's in here, then how could he have sent that message? To me, that's very cut in. I think that's what the defense is doing. Yeah. That's the case.

I'm even saying before you even got there, right? Right. You know, it's just... Well, remember, because before we even got here, they said that this was... The timeline was different. It was not until the defense attorneys actually got in and started looking at everything,

that they were the ones who found this discrepancy and said, hey, this doesn't make sense. How could it... Because remember, we were also told that he confessed to his parents. Right. His parents turned to him in. His parents have said, that's not true either. So his parents did not turn him in.

They did not turn him in. Wow. No, he saw that they were looking for him. He called a guy who was a sheriff's deputy who at one time had been his Boy Scout leader. And so he went and turned himself in to them because they were searching for him. Right? He didn't turn himself in confessing that he did it. His parents did not turn him in.

And his parents said he never confessed to them that he did. So I think the thing that was sold when Tyler Robinson was first arrested was that this is open to shut case because the guy said he didn't. His own family said he did. And then you find out that if that's a lie, how much else is a lie? That's hard to sit with that that we live in a world like that. Because then there's no justice. Well, we're living literally in an information war.

And the war is, Alex Jones would take you that, right? It's an info war. Yeah. But it is an information war. And the war is between who is going to be able to control narratives. And there's a lot of testing going on. It's been going on for well over a decade. But there's a lot of testing, like what narratives get through and what narratives don't.

And why do some succeed and why do some not? I think we're watching that happen in real time in front of us. It's like a gigantic social experiment taking place. What is the first one that you saw when you recognized that years ago that they were testing narratives? That's a good question. There's probably many of them. I think just one that would just pop it in my own. I mentioned it earlier was like the Syria stuff.

Right? Like can you actually drum up support for a war because you're claiming that people in other countries are begging for us to help? And so we've got to rescue them. And are you able to do that? Well, they were trying to do that with Syria. But maybe you could go back even further.

Maybe I'm now more aware maybe one of the biggest tested narratives was how we got into the Iraq war. Weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. chemical weapons that we actually sold to Saddam Hussein, that Donald Rumsfeld sold to Saddam Hussein. I did not know that. I don't know how I missed that. Yeah. In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq War,

we were on the side of Iraq against Iran, because obviously we were against Iran, we still are. And so the way we were going to cause problems for them was through Saddam Hussein. And so we gave him chemical weapons to use against the Iranians. And then you flash forward, you know, 20 years. And it's Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons

and he's used them on his own people. And had he ever used it on his own. Maybe, maybe he had. But what we never talked about was the fact that he got them from us. That is wild stuff, dude. It's crazy. That's wild.

And here's the thing, too. None of what I'm saying is even like, even a hint of a conspiracy. This is all like, even ABC and CBS now to this point. Like, no one even denies that any of this happened. Right? Or to get into the Iraq war, I don't know if you remember, there was a young girl who had testified that she had seen babies and incubators where Saddam Hussein's henchmen had gone in and disconnected all these incubators and killed all these babies.

Wow. Right? And she had testified about this. That girl turned out was actually not just some random Iraqi girl. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. And it turned out the whole thing was a lie. but she testified in front of Congress about this, right? And so you go back to the early 2000s, pre-Internet age,

it was a lot easier at that time to dupe the public because you're just going to put out a little something. People hear it, and then they've run it back. And so now we're watching, the internet came along, it messed a lot of things up for a lot of people. That's why it's been co-opted so much, and it's why social media has been co-opted so much. And so now we're living in, I think,

this is the next phase of it, where there's a fight go, on to say, well, we can't really control the way the public views things because the internet gives them so much power. So then how do algorithms come into that? How does AI come into that? How do we shift narratives? How do we use it against them? We put out some bad information or disinformation and people latch on to it and now it becomes a fact in their mind. How does one know what to believe? The only thing I do is I have to find sources, source documentation of everything. That's you though.

That's for me. I mean, highly skilled at this, right? Right. Late people like me, right? We just don't know. No. Well, I think part of it is that there needs to be greater expectation from the people who are influencers, journalists, whatever it is

online. When they put information out, it should be fact checked. It should be source. You should be able to provide sources. I try to provide sources in everything that I do. We try to provide sources about where did this come from and what do we know, right? But a lot of people don't.

They just, you make a statement. So I have, you know, my kids are all adults now and they'll find something online. Hey, dad, have you seen this? And I'm like, okay, where's it coming from? First of all, who's saying it? And then what are they, where are they saying they got it from? If they're not saying where they got it from, you got to really step back from it and find out for yourself.

In your, in your professional opinion, is there somebody like you in mainstream media now that we can lean on if they say something, okay, we know the reporting that. actual news. In mainstream news, I don't know that there is. No. Wow. Can you think of one? Hell no.

I just wanted to know your opinion because I don't know shit about shit, right? I mean, I'm not in the business. You know, so I was just curious to see, is there someone? And that's probably one of the more scarier things that we've touched on. Yeah. I mean, I can't think of, I can't think of anyone. in particular. But I also think it's not even just a person problem, right?

It's that the institutions are so corrupt. They're not going to allow certain things. No, absolutely. Remember Amy Robach, I think it was Amy Robach from ABC. She had an open mic and it was kind of released with all the upscene stuff where she had the Epstein stuff years before. Remember? And she says on her thing after it all started to come out that she had actually gotten a bunch

of this information. Okay, yes, yes, yes. From victims. She says, I had it for years before, but they just wouldn't let me run it. but it's like so there are people out there who were trying to do work I believe and trying to do good work but they're going to get shut down and then you have to decide is it worth it I'm gonna really blow everything up for well that's my one of my questions is say I'm you know communications degree yeah I'm I'm in college now and and I want to be an anchor don't do it why would I but why would that

why would that young man or young woman even want to get into mainstream media at this point Yeah. Well, it's a wasteland. I don't think they should. I think if you go into local TV, I think it's a huge mistake because people go into that thinking they're going to make a lot of money. There's no money left in it. It's terrible schedules and you're talking about like the worst stuff. If you are a talented communicator, you were much better off building an online brand. Oh, absolutely. And doing something yourself. And, you know, I think everyone kind of knows that. But what I would say to people is don't do it thinking, but I have to make money doing it. the goal is to make money, you're going to suck at it because there's too many temptations along the way to sell out. Yeah. Right?

So you have to do it saying, I want to do it because it's the right thing to do or I'm going to tell the truth because it's true. And then if I, if I'm able to make money doing that, great. And if I can't, then I can't. Well, do the other thing is too, when you get into it thinking, I have to make money. Yeah. I mean, it's a long haul. Mm-hmm.

I mean, we're almost six years in and it just started happening. Yeah. Like at a level that. it's acceptable. Right. Right. So not where we want to be, but like,

dude, it was five years. Yeah. It's a long time. It's not a flip of the switch. That's what people don't understand. So you better be willing to do it for free for a long ass time. Yes.

I mean, I mean, straight up. Yes. And even for guys who want to be streamers and they want to do, you know, they want to do video games where they're sitting there playing Madden, you know,

online against somebody. Even those guys, it takes a long time to make money doing that, right? The guys who were successful, they'll look at like speed and, you know, some of these guys who are,

really successful now, those guys were grinding, doing hours and hours a day for years before they hit it, right? So it's not something where you're going to pop up and say, I can do this for two, three weeks and I'm going to see some money starting to come. It just not, doesn't work that. No, it doesn't. It never works that way. I mean, even look at your career. You know, you were in New Mexico, El Paso for, for years before people knew your name. And you stuck in it. Yeah. And I don't think, and I, and I, I want to say I blame social media, but I think people, have a choice to believe what they want to believe, right? And they can have a little bit more discernment and some wisdom. But, you know, it doesn't work like that. You have to be able to do something for an extended period of time. It's not going to happen overnight. No. It never will.

No. It's a long haul, man. It is. It's a long haul. It's, um, I laugh at it. But the long haul also makes, it refines you to be worthy of what you're doing, right? you have to be able, guys who say,

I want to do this, right? I want to be a journalist. I want to talk about Tyler Robinson. I want to get the truth out to people. Okay, great. Why should anyone believe you? Right? And what are you doing to build a consistent resume

of investigation, of fact finding, of truth telling, right? And you do it because you should want to be good at this thing. I want to be good at what I'm doing. Right. And that's also the long grind too, right? the long grind of becoming excellent and being refined in that excellence. Yeah.

It was funny. Look back at my old stuff and Sam was, we were on a call the other day and the good friend of mine because I don't even know how to, I'm not comfortable on the camera. He's like,

well, let me make you feel a little more comfortable. Go back, go on YouTube and look back at Shanzal's stuff. He was terrible. There you go. I'm like, damn. But I knew I was. Cold.

But I was like, damn. Like someone confirmed it. I thought it was just me being hard on myself. But no, no, terrible. Talk about speech patterns. Yep. how you're looking when you're actually talking or you're looking up at the ceiling.

I was doing all these different things and I thought I was great. You know, it takes a long time to become good at something. And then it takes a longer time to be great at something. That's right. People are not taking the time to do that.

No, no. It's a, there's a lot of fear associated with time. Right? Life is long. And there's a lot of time to do it. Something that takes you five or six years to build in the past was taking people 30, 40 years to build.

100%. So it is faster now than it used to be. But enjoy that process. I love Jimmy Carr when he talks about the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit is the happiness, right? That's where you actually get it. The process you're in of becoming great at something is actually the best part. Not the end where, okay, now I'm great at this.

No, it was the process that you went through. Those long days and long nights and the times when you doubted yourself and didn't know if I'm going to be able to make it and I don't know if I could do this. That's what has value in the end. And that's the stuff you actually look back on. I will say, and I'm sure you have the same experience.

I'll look back at my life and I'll remember the difficult things with much more fondness than the fun things or the great things. You know, people will bring up when we talk the Obama interview. They'll bring up Pizza Gate thing. They'll bring up those things.

I'll think about the times when it just sucked. And I actually look back more fondly on those memories of the days where it was like, I don't even want to get out of bed and do this again. Because that's who you are. Like that gives a peak behind. Like that's what I came through. You know, and I've said it a million times.

You can look at your starting line. And then you can look at the peak of the mountain. And everybody has a goal. It can be to lose five pounds. Oh, now you're at the peak of the mountain. How do you feel? Unfulfilled? Right.

I don't care how high the mountain is. Yeah. That is not, that is not, it should not be the focus. Right. And it should not be the goal. Yeah. Because if the goal is happiness, then every step along the way, all the trip-ups, all the blood, the sweat, the tears, that's what made you. That's what the gift is.

And that's the present. Oh, absolutely. Wherever it is you right now, that's your gift. Yeah. Because you get to build to something bigger and bigger and bigger. And you know what? It's just like retirement, right? Retirement means to be put out of use.

Right. So that's why when you see people retire, they wither away, they get sick, and some of them die. Yeah. Many of them. Many of them. But the old hats that stay in it, they're still using their brain. They still have a purpose because they understand something that not a lot of people understand. Those moments, man.

It is. It is. And the thing is, you can be retired age. You're still making those moments. Yeah. If you're still in it, you're still in that fight? 100%. You know.

The one thing about you is you're a certain. man. You're always so certain. Has there ever been a point where your certainty is cracked and you were wrong on a single story and that you had to sit with that? Well, I would say that you mentioned the Aurora and the Sandy Hook ones, right? And I wouldn't say necessarily, because the thing was, it wasn't definitive. It was just, look, we're just reporting on the fact that there are a lot of witnesses saying there was more than one shooter. Is that true?

Right. That got conflated into. something else. Something else. It got conflated into the Alex Jones crisis actor. Yeah. Which is not. Yeah.

And never was. But I would say what I've had to sit with is, was, were those stories worth doing because I loaded someone else's gun? Mm. You know what I mean? I gave them the ability to take a shot at me when I shouldn't have. So because those questions weren't worth asking. Right.

Right. Right. That makes sense, though. Yeah. That's a good reflection right there. Yeah, for sure. When you built truth and media, right? You built it on censorship proof, right, on blockchain.

Was that more of a kind of a payback for you getting deplatformed or is that a business decision? Well, so truth of media is actually not blockchain. There was another platform we built called Sovereign. Oh, okay. Yes. But most of the content on there was truth of media content. Okay. But yeah, so the concept there was to build something that would be blockchain-based.

Well, the reason we started working on that was because it was right at the time that YouTube was throwing everybody off. Facebook was throwing everyone off. They had all the fact checkers on Facebook, right, where they were banning people. This was all kind of around the COVID era. And by the way, I credit COVID with awakening the masses. Like, that's the turning point. That's the difference between where we were 10 years ago and now it was five years ago when COVID happened. and what people saw.

But we created this platform and the idea was, you know, how do you create something where you can't be taken down? You can be free of that censorship. And so we had very, very basic rules for it. The rules were no pornography, no child pornography. And I know people will, oh, child pornography is obviously illegal.

But just pornography in general, people will say, well, like, free speech absolutists are like, well, that's free speech. And so you're not really free speech. and my position was very simple, which is rather than having this argument with you about free speech, I'll just accept that it's not fully free speech. Then our side is not.

What our side is here, because the fact is if that is something that you're looking for, there's a million places you can find it, right? So we don't need to be a house for that. What's kind of the position on it? But those were the terms of service. other than that, you put up what you want to put up. It's your content. You do with it what you want.

It's no longer active anymore. And the reason for that was because of a guy named Elon Musk, who bought X, which, listen, at the time, Twitter was not owned by him. Somebody had to create it. So that's what we were working to create. When Elon took over X and bought it and turned it into what he's turning it into, he kind of eliminated the need for it in the moment. So it's not fully gone, but we don't have it up right now because there isn't really a need. So we're trying to, again, respond to what are needs in the market? And that need isn't really there because he resolved that issue. Much more successfully than I ever could have.

Interesting. Well, you know, he's a little out there. He's a trillionaire. There's that, right? Look, man, thank you so much for coming on today. Absolutely. And having such an open conversation and sharing so much about your career, your family. and just a peak, you know, behind who you are as a human being.

I do have one more question for you know. After everything you've been through, all the adversity, everything that came at you with your career, what does true determination mean to you? So I think for me, determination is about restoration, being determined to move forward, but not just to move away from what's behind you.

but to bring what's behind you into full alignment. And so I'm kind of midway, I think, through my journey in life, have a lot behind me. I got a lot in front of me. But what I want to make sure that I'm doing every day is that the steps that I'm taking forward, honor the past and bring the past full circle and everything I'm doing. That's what I'm determined to do. That is a very, very original answer. I loved it.

It's awesome, man. You can't move forward in the future. you can't be that next version of yourself unless you honor the past. Yeah. Can't run from it, right? Can't hide it. Just own it. Own it.

So thanks again, man. I really appreciate you, buddy. For you guys listening, share this episode with someone you know, love and trust, and get out there today, be courageous, and stand on what you believe in because we need more people like Ben that do that. And I need you to do that as well. So until next time, guys, stay determined.