Welcome. Good afternoon, everybody. Steve Schmidt here, joined by Ryan Liza.

Ryan is a veteran journalist who has just departed Politico. He made the announcement yesterday

and debuted on substack telos. News. I'm going to ask Ryan to explain what TELOS is. He can tell us about Aristotle and all the deeper meanings philosophically of the word.

Ryan is one of the very best political reporters of the last 20 years. A brilliant, insightful, was the chief correspondent at Politico, and he has announced

that he will be starting up a new news organization, Tell Us, and I'm just going to read

from the beginning of it, so you have an idea here.

And it says, on waking up, some news,

I recently left Politica, where I've served

as the chief Washington correspondent since 2019.

The main reason, their style of political coverage

is not meeting the unprecedented moment

of democratic peril we are facing.

I know that sounds dramatic, but the gap between what is actually happening in Washington and how it was being framed and reported became much too wide.

This new publication, Tell Us, is my modest attempt to do things better.

I don't mean to pick on my friends in the media.

All the people in institutions on Trump's enemies list are struggling with how to respond.

Frankly, it took me too long to realize how bad things are.

My moment of extreme clarity came during Trump's assault on the law firm Paul Weiss.

It didn't receive much attention at the time, but in his executive order attacking the firm,

the president criticized but did not name a Paul Weiss partner who brought a pro bono suit

against individuals alleged to have participated in and here really pay close attention to the

tortured euphemisms, the events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on

...