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Steve Brill

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2018-11-01

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2018-11-01

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1. “And actually, less from the right, if you must know, but we're not focused on that. We are focused on the nine criteria. And the other thing that's different, we might be imperfect and algorithms might be imperfect, but you're going to see our mistakes. And when you complain about our mistakes, you're going to see the complaints on our website. And when we correct our mistakes, we're going to say, you know what? We screwed up on that. You're right. We're wrong. None of that. It's the total opposite of an algorithm. Total transparency, total accountability. And the other thing is we want people to game our system. You know, the tech platforms say, well, if we told you how the algorithm worked, you'd game our system. Well, we want everybody to game our system. We want someone to say, gee, if I had a corrections policy, I could get more points from Newsgard.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Points of view? We check our points of view at the door. We focus on the nine criteria. There is not a liberal or conservative way to have a corrections policy. There is not a liberal or conservative way to reveal who is financing this website. There is not a liberal or conservative way not to repeatedly be publishing stuff that is total BS, you know, the Pizzagate scandal, for example. So we unflinchingly focus on that and we have received scant criticism a little bit from the left because we zing the Daily Cause.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Make you gag on all of our transparency. The bios of everybody who works there, whether they ever worked in a political campaign, everything about them is there. So when you read a label and say, all right, who wrote this? And who edited this? Did you try and pair people?”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Well, it's not Steve Bro, it's Steve Brill and dozens of colleagues, including a partner, Gordon Krovitz. Is a longtime editor.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “They're given greens because they're serious people trying to do a serious thing and the people who have an axe to grind, who are just making stuff up, who are plagiarizing stuff and just throwing a lot of stuff against the wall so they get clicks, they're not going to be given greens. So”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Think yesterday feels that they trust all media less because they don't know what to trust. So to come back to the first part of our conversation, the economic implications of that are terrible. One of the things we hope to do with our green ratings is give advertisers the comfort that there's a list of reliable places where their ads can appear without them supporting propaganda or fake news or being embarrassed. And so the people who wake up in the morning, all of our friends who do legitimate journalism, whether they're conservative or liberal, whether they work for the National Review or work for the Chicago Tribune or work for Vox.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “You're reading, and the analogy is what you have today is if you walked into the Chicago Public Library, the main branch, what if what it used to be is a library has books on a shelf, the shelves are categorized, the books have titles, the publisher's name is there, the author's name is there, you know what you're getting. And there's a librarian who can guide you to what you're getting. What if when you walked into the Chicago library there were 2 trillion pages just flying around the air and you grabbed one and you looked at it and said, do you wonder what this is about? I wonder who wrote it. I wonder how reliable it is. What's this supposed to, you know, who is this? That's what the internet is. You can't tell what you're getting, who is feeding it to you, and the average high school kid or college kid was just a big article about this, I think.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “We've already announced a partnership with Microsoft. And once we actually produced the browser plugin version and we existed as opposed to being an idea that we talked about, our discussions with them, and this was only five or six weeks ago, have intensified dramatically. So we will be announcing some other partnerships soon. I just got back from Europe where the European Union is much more into this than the American government. Sometimes in ways that you and I might be hesitant about, but there is real interest among the platforms in Europe, and we have stepped up our plans to expand there.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Call people for comment. Algorithms are not transparent. They don't admit mistakes. You have no idea how they're doing what they're doing. With NewsGuard, anyone who sees it gets a complete window onto our process. Even the biographies of the people who wrote the ratings and edited the ratings. And we're partnering with libraries all across the country who are installing it on their devices. And it's really starting to take hold.”

   2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Something else appears that is reliable and transparent and trustworthy, you'll see a green icon. It is based on the ridiculous premise, ridiculous in much of Silicon Valley, that every once in a while human intelligence is better than the artificial kind. And we have people reading them. And the way we achieve scale is we rate the websites themselves, not individual articles. And when we rate the websites, it's based on nine very specific standards and criteria that every journalist on the planet would agree are the basic standards of their process and their reliability. all nine you get 100 but even if you get you know six out of nine you still might get a green but guess what on the other three where we give you a red x we do something highly unusual which is we call you for comment and algorithms don't”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Basically, what we're doing is we're hiring journalists. Some with a couple years experience, some, as you know, with a lot of experience at senior levels. To read, rate, and review and rate with a red or a green icon and then a four or five hundred word nutrition label every one of the thousands of websites responsible starting in the US for all the news and information read online in the United States. And we're just about done. We're at about 92%. There is a browser plugin version available if people go to Newsguardtechnologies.com, but the key to our business model is that the platforms, the social media platforms, and the search engines will license our data and license our ratings so that if you have a Twitter news feed and website A appears that is an unreliable news website, you'll see a red icon. You mouse over it, you'll start to read the nutrition label.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, you can have a balance, but I think that. It's not so much having a wall between advertising and news gathering, it's the integrity, the ultimate integrity of the person in charge.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “There isn't a single news gathering agency in the history of the United States. The history of the United States that's ever made a profit just from advertising. The closest thing with the network news operations in the 60s and 70s that had a near monopoly, 91% of all the eyeballs, and the news divisions was still seen as a public service because they lost money. So you have to get some money from your readers, which you and I should think is a good thing. Because that makes us the product instead of the stuff that runs around the edge.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “No, you're not. And you're right. Although I think that I've always thought and have done pretty well thinking this way that the best business model for journalism is good journalism. And it's even more so online where everything is completely fungible except the stuff that stands out. What publishers worldwide have figured out is that simply getting the most page views, the most clicks is a road to disaster. If that's what you focus on, as opposed to getting the most engagement, which is engage readers who will come back and who think you're distinctive because they will buy an online subscription to what you're selling.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Would not allow me to interview anybody, anybody at Medicare. They literally took the position Medicare officials do not give interviews. Said, you spend more money than any agency in the government. How have you been able to get away with that? Fair fall. Fair question. So I finally busted the doors down and got in. And so this remarkably efficient place. So that's my solution is, but it's a 20-year solution, which brings us back to the beginning of the discussion, which is politicians. What politician thinks long term? What politician is going to announce a twenty year program in his last year or his fifth to last year”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “You know, it brings up an irony that I always talk to my kids in the journalism class. Sometimes the hardest stories to get are the positive stories. When I was doing that healthcare piece for Time magazine, there was a sidebar on how well Medicare is run. I had to kill to get that sidebar because a certain communications regime in a certain White House, this is 2013, would not I was gone by then”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “What we need to do is every year lower the availability age of Medicare by two years. And people could buy into it. It would be means tested. And they'd pay more than they're going to pay when they're 65, but they could buy into it. The government and Medicare pay much lower prices across the board, but you can't just dictate that across 100% of the economy, because again, So over twenty years you'd go from age 65 to 25 and you would ease in the kind of single payer system that works. And by the way, Medicare is probably the most efficient government program that there is.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “The healthcare system is responsible for 20. In countries that have good health care systems, it's responsible for anywhere from eight to twelve percent of the economy. So if you huffed and you puffed and you blew the house down and you reformed healthcare in the United States and let's say got it down to 13% of the economy, overnight you would be destroying 7% of the economy and seven percent of the jobs you would be destroying jobs at what is typically the largest single business and employer in every community in the country, the local hospital. It is just it is politically untenable and economically it's just a really bad idea. My notion is you need to get there slowly. You sort of need to reverse what happened to us beginning with World War II when employees.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “My notion of real healthcare reform is I think advocating a single payer system today is just demagoguery or it's just stupid because the healthcare system is a good thing.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Well, the first is money. First is money in politics who make the argument convincingly that if you know if you don't do that nothing else is going to happen because everything flows from that healthcare real healthcare reform flows from you know the dominant money in politics”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I mean, you've been involved in a lot of endeavors where if you look back at it logically, you say, well, you had no business trying to do that.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “If I knew how hard it was going to be. When I started it, and I arguably should have known, I would retroactively have been terrified. When I started Core TV, there were like eight states that even allowed cameras in the courts, and I convinced Steve Ross, who was running Warner Communications. Don't worry, I'll convince a lot of the others. I mean, just think about how stupid that is. But we ended up doing it Yeah. So there's a kind of optimism that often is born out of ignorance of just how, well, Audacity”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “But, you know, the interesting thing about that, and it's odd that you say that way, because the one thing I always think is for all the things I've started, including the Newsguard business that I've gonna talk about that in a second, everything I've ever started.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “The thing you have to keep reminding yourself of is if you don't get better, someone else is going to get better than you. And that doesn't, you know, you just always have to think about that. The business now that I'm running today, the other lesson is you've got to get, especially when you're starting something new, you absolutely positively have to get everybody involved sitting around the table as much as every day contributing to the thing that you're creating because you're making it up as you go along and you need everybody's input.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, actually, you know, it's a little bit of a cliche that you learn more from failure than success. Certainly you would prefer the latter learning process, but you do learn from both. And I mean, I think back to, you know, the first thing you learn if you're doing any kind of a business that is a journalism business, as I have made a habit of, and it's a content business, the first thing you understand is you better keep getting better at it and you can never be satisfied. I remember when we printed the first issue of the American lawyer, I thought it was the best thing since the invention of the printing press. It was so great, so terrific. By the time we got to the second issue, I was going around the office hiding copies of the first issue because I thought it was so terrible.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “There's some evidence to support that. That's true. But I think if Trump University had a second semester and you asked people to enroll, I think enrollment would have gone down.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “I think as President Obama said recently, Trump is a manifestation of this, not the cause of it. And at the end of the book, I actually say pretty much the same thing, that if you tell all these people who are not part of the meritocracy, If you signal to them whether it's with trade policies that don't work or job training programs that don't work or a financial system in a Wall Street system that is stacked against them, a criminal justice system that says that if you're the CEO of a corporation that does tremendous damage, maybe the corporation pleads guilty, but God knows you don't. If you send them all those signals and basically also send them the signal that money is what counts in politics, they're going to be pissed off. And what I say at the end of the book is that 47% of them decided, you know, let's just take a flyer on this.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “They're members of the Tea Party, and they're still going to vote for Trump because, well, he cheated them, it was really smart what he did, and he'll do the same thing for the country. You know, you don't need a shrink to. Because Trump just recently said it when he was explaining how he attacked Dr. Ford, his explanation was, well, Kavanaugh won. Exactly.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Jose on Trump University. Trump University is a Marisotal metaphor for Trump, the president, which is he basically swindled the same people who became his base. In fact, there were two people in the class action suit for Trump University who told me.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Old people and poor people who needed those discounts on drugs. If you think about the rights of listeners, then why worry about who's doing the speaking? You should treat corporations like people because listening is the key. That sounds great.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “That's another important element of the book I trace the weaponization of the First Amendment, which starts ironically with a lawsuit brought by Ralph Nader's group in 1976 to allow discount drugstores that wanted to advertise that they were offering discounts in the state of Virginia on expensive prescription drugs and the incumbent drugstores had lobbied to get a law passed in Virginia that said you can't advertise the price of prescription drugs. So Nader's people said that's anti-competitive and they established the notion, the constitutional notion, that the rights of listeners are just as important to the First Amendment, if not more important than the rights of speakers. And if you're thinking about the rights of listeners, in this case as Nader's lawyers put it,”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Because you're a nice person, but the result of your doing it is you're going to have smarter, better lawyers. So when it comes to defending a mining company against charge of black lung disease or defending an antitrust case that the government brings, you're going to have smarter people who can do that when it comes to slowing down OSHA regulations or challenging them in court. You're going to have batteries of the best and brightest who are going to do that. And when it comes to thinking up ways to enhance the value of stock, often at the expense of employees of companies, you're going to have bankers and lawyers who invent things like stock buybacks and corporate takeovers. They're going to invent these things and they're going to build moats that protect them and their clients because they're just so damn smart.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Into consultancies. Once law firms started to focus on merit, which is a good thing, right? Opportunity for everybody. That's obviously a good idea. Once they start to focus on merit, they realized that they had to get the most talented people and they had to incent the most talented people. So they dramatically raised the starting salaries and people who had let's say gotten loans to go to these places were highly tempted. And I'm a long story short is that the white shoe law firms of the world were suddenly much smarter than they ever were because they were getting the smartest people, not the people who had the connections. If you suddenly decide, well, let's expand the talent pool by 100% by thinking about women instead of just men, you're going to get more talent. I mean, you may be doing it.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Well, we all know what the problem. We all see the ramifications of the problem, which is galloping inequality of opportunity still. And the way it happened with all these smart people like me is let's take the pre-meritocracy days, okay, like the pre-the early 60s when Yale wasn't looking to give scholarships to people like me and others who were really smart but didn't have the money. In those days, if you were a partner at a Wall Street law firm, you were a partner at a Wall Street law firm probably because your parents knew someone or you were on the lacrosse team with someone who was at that firm or you had a connection. Once law firms started, and law firms, and you can say it's about investment banks.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “I'm in Brian Kelly, who is his partner in crime, and it was about a fight At what is still the Kirkland and Ellis Law Firm, where one of its senior partners, Don Rubin, had decided to leave in the other fight. And that was the cover of the preview issue of the American lawyer.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “And the preview issue that we did, which was the one we did in 1978, where we handed it out to shocked people at an American Bar Association. Was written by Jim Warren, who was then at The Sun Times.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “But the business of law, and originally everybody said that it was gossipy. If you wrote about, you know, how is it that Lloyd Cutler's law firm, very prominent lawyer in Washington, how is it that his law firm lost the Delta Airlines account to this other law firm? That was a gossip story. If you wrote about how they lost the banking business, that was a perfectly good story to be in the Wall Street Journal. So nobody was doing this, and I was really curious about it, and I was also curious about some of them must offer better opportunities to women, to non-whites. Some of them must have better litigation departments than others. And some of them must have a lot of internal fighting.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Usually diverse group of unusually important clients, and they had the same grade of stationery, it was like parchment, and they all said the same thing. And I'm thinking to myself, They got to be different. I mean, these are big businesses. There has to be a difference. Nobody knows about them. And I have written one article for New York Magazine about these two law firms that I had predicted were going to be hugely successful, which it turns out they ended up they were. And I was sort of into the idea. And I said, well, what about a magazine that's about the business of law? Not about law, because I didn't know anything about law.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Right. So here's again a big, powerful institution that nobody knows about. In this case, the institution are law firms. So here's how I got the idea. I was going to law school, so I figured, you know, I think about something I write about lawyers and make some use of this somehow. And I'm standing outside the career services office of the Yale Law School. And I was standing outside there not because I wanted to partake of career services, but because that's where the soda machine was. And I put my money and I get the soda machine and I'm looking at the bulletin board. And the bulletin board has letters from 30 different law firms trying to recruit Yale law students. And in each case, whether it's from Siddeley and Austin or Cravat or you name it, in each case the letter says we seek unusually talented students with unusual standards of ethics to represent an unusual.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “I did say I had enrolled in labor law classes at law school. Yeah, that's the way to put it. But I just had a ball doing the book.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Shipwreck. She said, Well, just think of it as an institution. So I'm talking to my friends, and one day I was on the phone with Sandy Berger, whom I just mentioned. He was a young lawyer in Washington at the time. And I said, what's an institution that everybody's interested in and nobody knows about? And it's really good stuff. He said, what about the Teamsters Union? And it was just after Hafa had been disappeared. He was disappeared in 1975, and this was 1976. I said, that's it. I'll do the Teamsters Union. And Alice Mayhew never batted an eyelash. She didn't say, well, what do you know about the Teamsters? Turns out I'd taken some labor law school, although I should say that doesn't prepare.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “She says, and try to figure out how to tell a story. And I remember she sent me, what's the book, a ship of fools where a ship goes down? There are 12 people on the ship, and it's a narrative. She sent me that. She says, here, use this as an example. I said, what are you talking about? This is a novel about.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “So I knew nothing about the Teamsters when what Alice suggested was she said, pick a big institution that's really powerful and figure out. She said try not to get killed in doing it. Did she mention that?”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Because I'm spending the day in a frozen food warehouse I'm in Jersey City talking to teamsters, in this case teamsters who'd been screwed out of their benefits and their pensions by their union which was run by Tony Provanzano, a notorious Tony Pro, yes.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “You got to do that. I mean, you got to go, you know, one of the things I find that I actually have to tell these students I have at Yale who are all people who want to do journalism. They're like the editors of the Yale Daily News and all that stuff is you got to get up and go to places and you got to talk to people. I mean, the abiding memory I have when I wrote that book about the Teamsters was in the middle of August I went on New Jersey transit from Manhattan and I had this bulky ski jacket on. So I must have looked like I was a terrorist although these are pre-terrorism days. So I'm wearing this bulky winter jacket. Why?”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Was 26,000 words basically the first time in essence turned over their issue. For one thing, and usually I was able to write long because I own the publication”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Well, the people, the only people who are not making out in the bonanza that is American healthcare, the unique bonanza that is American healthcare are the doctors and the nurses and the orderlies, are the people actually providing the healthcare. The people, if you sell MRI equipment in New England, you make more money than the average doctor. And by the way, we don't need any MRI equipment. We have too much of it, and we use way too much of it, much too much of the time. So my point is that I like to take things, which I know are big fat topics and that I'm really curious about, and that I think I can figure out if I just spend enough time on it.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “The teachers union, sorry. So my instinct in thinking about well, why is healthcare so expensive and why are the results so subpar compared to the rest of the world? My instinct was, well, maybe it's the hospital workers union or maybe it's the doctors who are making too much money. And it turns out it was exactly the opposite of that. And that was a thrill to learn that stuff, but I just parachuted in and didn't know anything.”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Right. And there's a pattern here. I like to write about stuff that I don't know anything about because it's curiosity that really impels me. And I teach a journalism seminar at Yale now, and that's what I always say to people, which is... The best stories are going to be stories where you're really curious and you don't really know the answer. When I set out to write about healthcare, for example, I had just written a book about the education reform movement. Where the issue was that the teachers were basically controlling the schools and not giving way to the reforms that were necessary. So my instinct”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Bill Clinton you're referring to he was a couple years ahead of me and he was known for never being for rarely being there by his third year”

    2018-11-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 282 — Steve Brill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source