‘He’s Not The Same’: MSNBC’s Ari Melber On Trump’s Debate and How He’ll Cover The 2024 Election

“He’s not the same as he was in 2016,” said Ari Melber , host of The Beat on MSNBC and the network’s chief legal analyst. He was speaking of Donald Trump , having watched his 90-minute debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday widely seen as a disaster for the former president and a victory for the sitting vice president.

On this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club, Melber told host Aidan McLaughlin the event was more significant than some pundits assume. “Debates matter. The first debate dislodged a sitting president who already had the nomination,” he said. “This debate certainly impacted and blunted whatever momentum might have been left for a former president.”

“With signs that there may not be another one, I think this was a signal event in the introduction of Kamala Harris and the reintroduction or reminder of how Donald Trump is now,” he added.

Melber also discussed Trump’s criminal cases, which he has covered extensively on his show, as well as the attempt to overturn the last election — which he sees as a serious threat to the upcoming race. “How the credentialed media treats actual real litigatable issues versus fake BS coup-adjacent tricks matters a lot,” he said.

Melber, who has hosted the 6 p.m. hour of MSNBC since 2017, has established The Beat as one of the most popular shows on the network thanks to a sharp blend of political, legal and media analysis and reporting. The show has also been an enormous success on YouTube (earlier this year it crossed 1.5 billion views), reaching a younger audience than the aging cable news demo.

Melber discussed that success and whether the audience online is a promising sign for the future of the cable news business as it faces headwinds. He also reflected on how the media covered President Joe Biden’s mental decline, why he invites Trump allies onto his show, and MSNBC’s push into live events.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube , Apple Podcasts , or Spotify . Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: I want to talk about the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Kamala Harris, who has not been very impressive in her live appearances, was formidable. And Donald Trump was unhinged, and just could not keep it together. What were your impressions of the debate?

Ari Melber: Debates matter. The first debate dislodged a sitting president who already had the nomination.

Ended a decades-long career in politics.

This debate certainly impacted and blunted whatever momentum might have been left for a former president and introduced many people who don’t watch politics regularly to Kamala Harris. And so if this was her introduction, great news for her campaign. We’ve seen years where we say someone won a debate, politically, more people thought they won, substantively, all the commentators think they won, and they still lose the election. So that’s the important thing to keep in mind. But if you talk to anyone on any campaign who’s telling the truth, they don’t say, yeah, because of that, we’re fine losing debates. Everyone’s trying to win debates. And with signs that there may not be another one, I think this was a signal event in the introduction of Kamala Harris and the reintroduction or reminder of how Donald Trump is now. And he’s not the same as he was in 2016.

Could not have possibly gone better for Kamala Harris. That doesn’t mean it’s going to win her the election.

Yeah, the only way it would have gone even better is if Trump had a gaffe that wasn’t consistent with Trump. His gaffes lying about abortion, running from his own policies, and saying completely deranged, false things about pet eating were still consistent with his reputation. And when you study politics, the gaffes that usually hurt candidates the most are a departure rather than a reinforcement of what you already know about them.

That’s a good point because in the 2016 campaign, everything that Trump did was new. When he slandered John McCain, said he wasn’t a war hero, that was a new thing. And that prompted the New York Post to declare his candidacy over. But we really haven’t had from Trump in a while are things that are different from what he established himself as in 2016. He didn’t show that on the debate stage. It was a particularly bad performance. But it wasn’t anything new, as you note. Do you think undecided voters — it’s hard to imagine that there are undecided voters at this point, but there are a lot of them, and that’s who Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are trying to get — do you think the debate will have any effect on them?

It’s really hard to say because if you know this much about both candidates and you’re still undecided. Kamala Harris, while new, is a known figure and the vice president, it’s not like Jimmy Carter coming out of the woodwork and people say, wait, could this farmer actually win? And then he does. She’s the vice president. So those people have their reasons. Whether the debate is what moves them is almost an unanswerable question. But elections are simple. Life has gotten more complicated. Technology has gotten more complicated. Elections are still simple. Who has more people? How do you get your people? You turn out the people that already support you. In politics, they call those ones, when you actually write that down if you’re in a small enough race. If you’re in a city council race, you actually code by name. Ones, twos, threes, three is persuadable. Turn out your ones and win people over. And so the debate can do both because so many people saying Harris won is also mobilizing for her supporters, some of whom are young new voters. And you have to keep them going to get them out.

It’s worth remembering that it’s still very early right now. The Access Hollywood tape in 2016 dropped in early October, and Trump still won that election. I want to ask you about the moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir, because they got some criticism, mostly from conservatives, that they were too tough on Donald Trump and that the fact-checking favored Kamala Harris. What did you make of that criticism? Megyn Kelly said she was ashamed and outraged by their performance.

I’ve never been asked to moderate a presidential debate, I’ve never done it. And it’s a very hard thing. So I’m not sitting here bringing experience to that. These moderators did a great job and it’s challenging. So that’s first. And we all talk, and then there are headlines. My headline is not that I have some special view or critique of them. I do think it is challenging in general to depart from running a conversation between these two people, which is the goal and the traditional way debates work, and the audience watches that and makes up its mind, to deciding what’s bad enough to fact-check or not, I think that’s very challenging. So they tried to do that and a lot of experts and people involved in it said that was better than the alternative of letting one or both candidates get away with endless lies that are reaching more people than every other thing in politics that year.

Which is what CNN did in the first debate.

So I get that challenge. Having said that, if you’re going to be really honest and open-minded, we’ve seen politicians in both parties say things that require a response, a fact-check, or some context. That’s why journalism exists. And so I think it is very tricky to figure that out. And if the sum result is that the audience comes away thinking that only one side does something because of that night, I think any host, the journalist, and the network organization care about that because they don’t want to be the story, and you don’t want it to be at the end that, well, both candidates clashed, but boy, one got fact-checked a lot by your star anchor. I think that’s a challenge. Whether the only right-wing criticism of that is good faith is a whole separate thing. But I do think that’s a challenge. And I think that, again, some falsehoods are so egregious or dangerous to the audience that you want to deal with it as a news organization. But there are other things that someone could say that are policy where you might want to criticize it, if you think somebody’s health care or Covid policy is dangerous. But we’ve never said that the moderator should get in and say, by the way, this is how many lives will be lost if we enact that policy, everyone should know that. So as you go down that road, I think it’s difficult. And I think that Donald Trump poses unique challenges and we’ve all covered them. But if I’m trying to be as honest as possible, I don’t think your rule can be something special for stopping him and not trying to be thorough and fair overall.

I agree with you. I think if you should focus on the big ones. You shouldn’t try and nitpick every single potentially false claim or misleading claim that the candidates are making. And there is a difference between false statements that Kamala Harris made at the debate, there were a few that got fact-checked afterwards, and the false statements that Trump was making, which were the Haitian pet-eating conspiracy theory and stuff like that.

And we got the Nielsen household rating, so we know roughly how many people watched. We don’t have good numbers on how many dogs and cats watched and how afraid were they.

Terrified, probably. He was really yelling about it on the stage.

A lot of dogs tend to listen to humans. We do know that.

You mentioned Kamala Harris’s approach to the press on your show this week. And you said that “mostly Republicans” are criticizing her for not sitting down with the press enough. Don’t you think that’s a real issue though, and a real concern for her campaign, that all that she’s done is the CNN interview with Tim Walz? Do you think she should be more open to doing media interviews or do you think she’s playing it right?

For her campaign in order to win or for civics and what’s good?

From your perspective as a journalist.

My perspective as a journalist is substantive. I think she should do more interviews. And we’ve invited her on, she could go on any hour of MSNBC. She could go on with Rachel. And I think that would be a good thing for civics and journalism. That’s what we think. But we live in the real world, and it is understandable why they’ve adopted this strategy. We went and checked. Plouffe is helping her and had a big role in Obama, and that was a longer campaign but in Obama’s first campaign, the tradition was you got to do Meet the Press right away to show that you’re serious. And he was a challenger. And I think they went over eight months without doing Meet the Press. We in the journalist community and many viewers, I think would say, of course, you want to see that. I’ve interviewed Kamala Harris several times in person, remote, and in the 2020 cycle at a former prison. We did a whole forum that was like half an hour. So of course, we’d like to have her back. But politically, if you’re looking at reality, things are shifting. We talk about the debates. This is the first cycle in decades where the formal commission for the presidential debates has been dethroned. Some people say that’s great, it’s time for a change. I get that. Other people say that what you end up with in this model is CNN does one thing, ABC does another thing, NBC has a bit in there. So now it’s all much more split up and fragmented by company without standardized rules. Look, the world is changing. The commission, if you read the coverage of it this year, this is very inside baseball. but here we are with Aidan in a Mediaite discussion, the commission really thought they would hold on to this, and they didn’t realize that it was the Biden campaign that actually looked at their rules and broke the commission to get an early debate, because they thought that’s what they needed to tighten the race, and the law of unintended consequences, because it was so early and then went so poorly, you had to switch. It’s always interesting, we talk about a couple of topics and everybody focuses on them, but actually underneath the superstructure of politics are all these other things. Some are arbitrary. Had they not dethroned the commission, and they kept the normal election timeline, and the first Biden/Trump debate was in mid to late September. There might have been ballots out too late to make the switch, legal issues, whole different race.

I want to look forward to the race. 2024. The 2020 race was a bit of a mess after the election. Thank God the real dangers and threats to the election happened after Election Day, when Trump tried to have the election overturned and we had the riot at the Capitol. Now, the effort is starting far earlier. Both Republicans and Democrats have built up these big legal efforts to challenge the way the vote is going to take place, to monitor it, to handle challenges. No doubt Trump’s going to start questioning the results of the election any day now. What do you think the next few months are going to look like?

It’s a really great question, and the media plays an outsized role in this because most people aren’t election experts. And while judges claim to react only to the evidence before them, they also live in the real world. I don’t know if you guys have noticed here at Mediaite and Law & Crime, but when cases involve really prominent people, they tend to go really differently. But judges will swear up and down to you, in private as well, that it makes no difference. I think there are judges who would pass a lie detector on that, meaning they really believe it.

Are they on Twitter? Are they watching the news? Is the problem that they’re just soaking in the same news cycle that we all do?

People involved in civics and educated life tend to be higher news consumers. People who live in reality are going to have a reaction to certain people. So you could bring Bad Bunny, who’s one of the biggest global stars into a courtroom, and if the judge doesn’t at all know who he is, then it’s only the media side, not the Bad Bunny side. It might only be the next day or two when the judge realizes it. But if you bring Michael Jordan into a courtroom. Yeah, I think most judges who were 25 back when Jordan was at the peak are going to be affected by that. And if they tell you they’re not, that’s the first problem. That’s why we talk about unconscious race bias, because you have to have some ability to say, oh, there could be something here, let me be aware of it, not tell yourself you’re perfect and you could never be swayed by anything, unconscious gender bias, etc. So back to your question on the election law, how the media treats these things and whether the mainstream media, to use the term, or the credentialed media is what I call it, treats actual real ligateable issues versus fake BS coup-adjacent tricks matters a lot. And if it’s a close race with eligible recounts, you do them. We already have under law what is close enough to do a recount, what is close enough to check things. But if it’s not, then there should be very little that judges or politicians should be doing afterward to change your vote.

How are you going to approach covering that as a reporter?

Coffee. With a lot of coffee.

But election claims from Trump and potentially from outlets promoting those claims. I think we’re going to get a lot of baseless claims of fraud.

You’re saying if he loses. Because if he wins, I don’t see him challenging it.

He starts challenging it before the election. That’s the crazy part.

Yeah, but that’s just laying the groundwork. It’s like when people say, what are they going to say next? Well, if they’re inconsistent, it doesn’t matter. They’re playing a different game. Whoever they are, that could be anyone. It could be Bob Menendez, the Democrat, when he’s attacking the judicial system. Once he beats the case, he did beat one of his early corruption cases, then he’ll say it worked.

Are you going to be keeping an eye on, let’s say, Fox News and the way that they’re covering this? Because obviously Fox is under a microscope now after how they covered 2020. In 2020, we were almost lucky because it was Trump making these claims, and the only people that were supporting them were Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, people that were not taken seriously at all. Now, a couple of months out, Elon Musk, one of the most influential people in the world, is promoting baseless fraud claims on his Twitter account. I saw a video, Venezuela, obviously not an election that we should be looking fondly upon, but Elon Musk was posting videos of guys stealing air conditioner units, and he said they were ballot boxes, and it was very clear that they were air conditioner units. But there’s just a massive flood of lies about elections happening. And they’re being promoted by very powerful people.

Well, first of all, stealing air conditioning units. Not cool. Get it?

We’re gonna have to cut that out.

It should have been cut before I said it. So we will definitely keep an eye on all of this. And I think as a show that we try to be a very evidence-driven show and a fair show, and we have people on from both sides. We’ve had more discussions with people involved in Trump’s coup journalistically than I think most hours of CNN or Fox. And on Fox, they don’t really press them. So I’ve had Peter Navarro on, and we talked about it, and he was subpoenaed over that interview. I had Corey Lewandowski on and he was, years ago, talking about obstruction of justice. And that interview from “The Beat” was later submitted as evidence in a House proceeding. And then we talked about it again when he came back. Bannon and I have talked about these issues. So we talk to the people, but also get information, and some of that information becomes evidence, which to me is an interesting example of how the press is sometimes that fourth estate. And so we try to deal with it on the evidence, but we don’t try to overreact to bad faith lies because that’s how they work. And I agree and would add to your premise of what’s different this time. These things have been so much more mainlined that things that were considered fringe even among Republicans in December 2020 are now embraced by a large part of their voters, which creates a political problem for them, as you just alluded to. On the other hand, the accountability mechanisms have kicked in harder. So let’s say Trump wins, I just want to say that because we’re not assuming any outcome, then you go forward with that. If Trump loses by two states, which feels relatively close to people, we already went through this last time. Fox has a lot of reporting you can criticize. The reporting where they broke the law, and had to face one of the largest lying defamation punishments in history was over this very issue post-election. Think about that. Everything that happened over the four years of Trump is not what got them there. It was that. So they and other entities that are publicly-traded companies, that have budgets, that have lawyers, more so than a random person on the internet, have to really think about whether they want to take another multi-hundred million dollar, half a billion dollar settlement regardless of who wins. And then on the criminal side, I want to be very careful to say, there were people who lied about this election and didn’t commit a crime. And like it or not, under law, you have a wide right under the First Amendment to be wrong and lie. There are exceptions, but I want to be very clear. You’re allowed to do that. It’s not my job to just say you shouldn’t do that. But there were other people who committed crimes, crimes of lies to the government, of submitting fraud to state and federal officials. And, of course, the storming of the Capitol, where hundreds of people, including MAGA allies and militias, are in jail. So even if it’s close, if Trump loses, you have a bunch of people in the real world who are going to say half a billion dollars for a media company, years in jail for a person, I think those are disincentives.

You mentioned your interviews with Peter Navarro and Corey Lewandowski. I wanted to ask about that because The Beat , your show on MSNBC at 6 p.m., has been very successful. The ratings are strong. And I think one thing that makes it stand out as a show is that a lot of cable news programs opt to keep viewers insulated from opposing viewpoints. There’s a lot of preaching to the choir. You regularly have people on the show that might offend the sensibilities of some of your viewers. Why do you think it’s important, aside from the obvious fact that it’s compelling television, to have on people that you disagree with, that your viewers might disagree with?

I think you really have to look at the evidence, and what people actually believe. And the more that is filtered or only second-hand, the more you risk misunderstanding it. Now, that doesn’t mean in print that everyone is quoted in every article, or every official is invited on. But that’s our North Star. And it’s become harder to do that for all the reasons I think everybody knows. And it’s harder to book. We’ve had weeks where we’ve had requests to many members of Congress in both parties, and only a handful of Republicans are responsive. That’s ultimately their choice.

Because they don’t need to anymore, because they can just go on OAN or Newsmax?

You’d have to ask them, they don’t always write out a reason. I want to be as fair as possible. Here we’re doing inside baseball, but on the show I’m not always telling my viewers, here’s the people who said no. Everyone nowadays is a media critic and has access to information, and everyone makes up their own minds. But there are all these ways that it’s affected not only by who the host or the show invites, but also who is responsive. But that’s our view. And I think you’re right, and I think the data bears this out that there’s a lot of places that aren’t having the full perspective on, and there may be different reasons for that. There’s more than one way to do it, by the way. Certain shows don’t focus on interviews, let’s be clear. There are shows that are panel shows and a panel show like “The View” might have someone on and they all interview them. And that other panel shows that’s not the model. They’re not doing that, and that’s fine. So there’s many different ways to do this. But you asked why we do it this way. I think people benefit from that. I think sometimes it is adversarial and combative in an important way where you get farther towards the truth. And that’s why, again, forget our opinions or views, when the government comes in and says, we didn’t know that, we need to subpoena that person because of what they said on “The Beat”. Clearly, that’s valuable new information in a sea of opinion. Other times, though, you might have a breakthrough. You might learn something. When we had RFK Jr. on, that seemed to be a thing that people noticed at the time. We were very factual and clear. We taped it.

He’s tricky. When he cites a study that WiFi melts your brain and you don’t know the study, it’s hard.

We went back and forth on many things. I also pressed him on how it seemed that while he was running as an independent against everybody, he seemed warmer to Trump. He opposed that. He said that was unfair. He said I was wrong about that. And over time, people have that interview and then they have him endorsing Trump. But I also asked him in another part of the interview, if you’re comfortable talking about it, and I understand if it’s difficult, but you are running for president, how did these tragic assassinations in your family affect you? How does that affect your worldview now? And he kind of leaned back and said, I know I should have an answer for that personally, and because now I’m a candidate, but I really don’t. And then he started talking about his battles with drug addiction, which are difficult, many people battle that, and I don’t think that has to disqualify someone for anything if you can get to a good place. And he said, I definitely think that was my problem, and not because of those things. Who knows? I don’t know. But that’s a very interesting thing that he was willing to share. There are people in the psychiatric field who would say that childhood trauma can create addiction. So I thought it was interesting that as a grown man, he says it’s not that. So all of that is something that, again, you’re hearing directly from him as a human being rather than just soundbites or caricatures of him.

And if these people only spend their time in non-adversarial press, you’re not going to get to the truth any further than if they come on a show where they’re being questioned about things.

Yeah, and ideology tends to be making up your mind before you have the facts. And so we’ve talked a lot on air, and a little bit today, about the Trump MAGA ideology of lies that would literally destroy democracy because you say you’re going to lie to hold power instead of respecting democracy. We can see why that’s bad. The Democratic Party had that problem in that the ideology of stopping Trump and supporting the Democratic ticket in Biden pre-cooked any facts about Biden’s condition and whether it had changed over the years. So that was an ideological thing, that in public, many Democrats who are involved in this had that problem. And so anything about that was they were saying it was ageism, they were saying was deep fakes, they were saying all these things. And then you had this sudden shift. Let me be clear. That’s not the same as attacking democracy in elections itself, but it is a problem of being so ideological and saying, well, to discuss this candidate’s weakness is to endanger this political project. So you’re not allowed to do that in public. Ironically, not only is that wrong factually, which is what we’re involved in, it’s wrong if you want to win.

We were fairly tough on Biden at Mediaite before the debate, and I’d say very tough on him after the debate. And we got criticism for “ageism”, for being in the tank for Trump, all this crazy stuff. Do you think that the media was too deferential to Biden when it was clear that he was too old to run a campaign, much less be president for another four years? Do you think the media wasn’t inquisitive enough in asking those questions?

That’s a complicated question, because you said “the media.”

I know, forgive me. It’s a big pet peeve of mine as well.

So if we’re talking about print reporters who do investigative pieces on the White House, our hardworking colleagues, we rely on their stories, they would say we were trying to do this story, but they would say they don’t just write stories saying, look at him, he looks a little shaky. That’s not reporting. And so I don’t want to speak for them, but I want to be as respectful as possible. And again, what we do in TV news, I wrote for a long time, I’m a published writer, but a lot of what we do is pull from print, do our storytelling, bring print reporters and other reporters on. A lot of them, I think, would tell you they’re working on those stories, but there’s doctor/patient confidentiality, armchair distanced medical diagnoses are highly disfavored. So you call three doctors, and then the White House was very tough and not transparent. And that’s a criticism of the Biden White House, but one that most White Houses, especially on medical issues, you could ding for. Look at Reagan’s second term, and on from there. Now, if you talk about it as a political story, political stories are over-indexed on their sources. So what do the politicians say? What do the political staff say? Sometimes it’s what do the ex-staff say? What does the person who worked for that politician and now criticizes them say? That feels like diversity, but it’s not very diverse because now it’s just, can you believe this former Obama official disagrees with him on the Middle East policy and vice versa Trump. So if you’re over-indexed on sources, and what we just discussed prior, that the Democratic sources are all locked out on this, even Biden’s critics, for the most part within the party would say, I’ll criticize him on this, but I’m not saying he can’t do the job. And then the only other sourcing you have are people who, and this is their problem, right-wing MAGA people who are posting fake videos, which is not cool.

Not cool.

Not cool. They had extinguished their own credibility. And they’ve been accusing Hillary Clinton, the Enquirer was falsely claiming Hillary Clinton was terminally ill in 2016.

Right, when she had the fall outside of the SUV.

So you’ve got a whole group of people that have been playing with people’s lives. It’s not kind to falsely accuse people of being demented or dying. And these people have families. This is not how politics has to be. We could resolve politics without claiming people are all these things. So they don’t have any credibility. Well, that’s their problem. Because they burnt their credibility ten times over from the Enquirer to Twitter. So, no, we’re not taking Elon Musk’s word on this. And so my answer to you is not a defense of the problem, I think we have to think harder about how to try to be better at journalism because we should still be able to puncture through these things, but yeah, my answer to you would be look at those different spaces, look at those issues, and medical is different than if, for example, you said a candidate went up there and at the debate, Rick Perry in public said, I’ll name you three departments I’m going to eliminate. And then he couldn’t name the three, so not finishing his own sentence. People said, this isn’t about whether you’re too old. Are you competent for this? And people responded to those facts in both parties and the media, and said this is a problem for his candidacy. I don’t know that he ever recovered from that. Talk about how a debate gaffe can matter. This isn’t that. This is technical, legally protected medical stuff.

I want to talk about YouTube because your show, The Beat , is massively popular there. MSNBC is as well, I should note. Which is important because, to put it bluntly, the cable news model is hurtling towards a cliff, and networks have to figure out where they’re going to build out an audience. What do you think the key to success has been on YouTube for you guys? Because I don’t think it’s easy to have a show that works well on cable and on YouTube.

So I’ll tell you the great news for MSNBC first and then I’ll give you the numbers. This might sound like, oh, I just love where I work and my colleagues, but this is the true part. And then I’ll do the numbers to back it up. The true part is over the years, MSNBC with Rachel as our leader and a lot of other great hosts up and down the channel, day and night, has become the main credible national cable news source. We talked about Fox’s problems, not my views. You can go to court and look at why they have a problem with facts, so they’re not competing with other fact-driven outlets. They’re doing that thing. And CNN, which I have great respect for, and we all know, it’s no secret to the Mediaite audience, there’s people who’ve worked at both places, we know people. They’re great. I look at their national reporting, they’re great. But it is also the fact that CNN used to be that, and they have been displaced by MSNBC. And you see that on TV and you see it on YouTube, that MSNBC is the place for credible national cable news. And that includes perspective, it includes people who have strong takes and it includes diversity. You have Morning Joe and other shows at night. And this is a great breadth that I don’t see at some of the other places. So that’s great. Underneath that is how do people get their information. And a lot more people are getting news and information online, everybody knows that. Our prime offering is video. We do other things, but video is what TV is. And so while you have all these other places and we have people who write great pieces, MSNBC’s video from Rachel on through the whole lineup is doing great online where people are finding it. You asked about what we’re doing specifically at “The Beat”, and I’ll answer you. This year, MSNBC writ large online, on YouTube, is doing better than CNN, and is in a position to potentially tie or beat Fox, which hasn’t happened historically and there are reasons for that. So that just shows you that surge. What we’re doing at “The Beat” is really on a daily basis thinking through what in the show makes sense for online. And sometimes they are very different. Breaking news is huge on TV. It’s not breaking if you look at it three days later. So we have some of our interviews that have that clocked millions of views, and they’ve done that months or years after we first posted them. So now that’s something closer to an interesting doc on Netflix. We’re doing, just on “The Beat” numbers, which I have because that’s what I’m involved in, we’re doing over 200 million views a year for “The Beat”, which are reaching people who are younger than the television audience, shareable. So they say, this was good. Let me share with someone else. Global, which I think is interesting. Lifetime, we’re over 1.6 billion views. And again, you can compare that to CNN. I don’t think they’ve given us our numbers. But you’re Mediaite, go ask CNN what their numbers are. And so that’s great because it’s the audience coming to us. But it also means that when I’m booking people or we’re having people on the program, they’re going to get live TV and they’re going to get this whole other bite of the apple, and it’s a whole different audience. So one final example. We have the Summit Series, which is something that we air on TV, where we talk to people at the summit of their field. We had Bill Gates. The next summit, which we haven’t announced yet, but I will announce it here for those who are interested, next week, Steve Ballmer, who’s worth over $100 billion from Microsoft, owns the Clippers, is the sixth richest person in the world right now. So we sit down and we have a deep interview not unlike this, where we’re having a longer thing. It’s not just news of the day. We air it on TV and then the summit piece goes on YouTube. Those pieces are then reaching millions live, millions more online. And they live in a way that a two-year-old TV interview sometimes does not. Look, what I said about the judges and truth serum, put me on it. Whatever. We’re all humans. I could be wrong. I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be in TV news, where you can reach not only so many people, but such a broader audience. We absolutely reach a broader and more diverse audience with young people, people who aren’t having to pay for cable, now than ten years ago when I was in this business and 30 years ago when I wasn’t.

MSNBC is doing live events now. And you guys had a live event in New York last weekend. 4,000 people showed up, apparently. It’s airing on the network on Saturday at 9 p.m. What’s the point of doing these events, why are you guys doing them?

This is a new thing. This comes out of our great team of Rashida [Jones], the president, Rebecca Kutler in digital, and a bunch of other people. It’s like an Oscar speech, I could name ten people. So it’s their idea and they put it together and said to a lot of us, hey, can you come be part of it? We said, yeah. They did it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Just about everybody you could think of was there. The Rachel/Lawrence session was insane. People were just going crazy and they were talking and they opened up in a way that we probably wouldn’t in a show because it’s about the news. But this was a forum to do that. And then it will air on the weekend, like you said, on Saturday night. People can watch it. They talked about where their offices were, running in the hallway, the toss. You don’t talk about the toss on air that much. And Lawrence read mean tweets of people saying he holds Rachel too long and that he holds her, quote, hostage. He was being jokingly self-critical about that, and then Rachel was like, I didn’t know people were giving you a hard time about that. And he goes, oh, they’re giving me a hard time. It’s just fun, that part. And then the substantive part is MSNBC, for the reasons I said earlier, has built this community. So Rachel has started this conversation. I’m going to say this, it sounds like whatever, but I looked up to Rachel before I ever met her, so this is just how I feel. She changed how the news is done and she started a conversation with the country. At the time, who knew whether it would work or not? She violated form by going long. She violated the guest rules because she has sometimes a whole show with only two guests, because she’s doing reporting and storytelling and video. And the country talks back and there’s a community around it. So getting them together in person is really interesting. And I think it speaks to something that I’ve noticed anecdotally. But doing it with all the people in one room, if you care about this stuff, then being together and seeing it back and forth with the people is interesting and different than one-way TV.

Where do you get your news from?

I have a research packet daily that is tilted towards what we’re covering that night. So with a team, we put together a packet, because we have Yuval Noah Harari, the historian on, that’s very different than reading today’s news. So we’re looking at that. I read print, the Times, the Journal.

Big Kim Strassel fan?

I don’t know if big fan is the term, but we quote the opinion pages and we look at that for those reasons. Politico, newsletters, some Substacks because you get a less corporate media version of that. [Matt] Yglesias has an interesting Substack, although sometimes I’m like, what is he saying, you’re reading into it. But that’s a good thing.

Yeah, he’s polarizing.

And then my catch-all, shout out, is Memeorandum. It’s an algorithmic news site. But it’s just links.

I follow them somewhere. It’s sort of like an old-school page, right?

It’s old school. I look at that several times a day. And the reason is while, again, you can find anything anywhere, most of the Internet has a clickbait ratings problem. Memeorandum says they use, I haven’t inspected the algo, but they use incoming journalistic credibility rather than clickbait. Example. The top story could be New York Times, Biden drops out, and it’s the top story because all of the journalists are pointing to it. And you can see under it, there’ll be the Times link and then ten or fifteen links that are citing it. But sometimes if there’s, say an FEC filing that says something interesting, that top link is that primary source. Governmentfec.gov, this thing. And then you see the Times, the Journal, whatever is pointing to it. And if some non-credible BS random places point to it, that’s not counted in. So when you go to Memeorandum, you’ll tend to see that, and I find that valuable. So I check that several times a day. That’s a little secret sauce, although is it a secret if no one cares?

You do an enormous amount of stuff. You’re on air all the time. What do you do to shut your brain off? Are you a sauna guy?

Thursday night I saw Jeezy at Irving Plaza.

How is Jeezy?

Great. Still rocks the crowd.

I read his book, his autobiography. Really good.

Irving Plaza is a good venue. It’s pretty small in New York, for people outside of New York, it’s like 3000 people. So in the front, everyone knew every word. I read part of that book because I interviewed him for it, I don’t think I finished it, but it was interesting.

The early stuff is fascinating.

I run, I like to hike. I read a lot and there’s other stuff I read that’s not work-related, so I’m accessing a different part of my brain. For me going to concerts is something I’ve always enjoyed, but I realized over time and getting older that it taps into an earlier feeling. So it might take an hour to turn off your brain with all the stress of life after a day, but only five minutes when you go to a show and you’re back in that mode.

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