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On the Triggernometry podcast, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman reflected on a pivotal moment that reshaped his perception of media trustworthiness, explaining how he and many others were misled by the media concocting the “Very Fine People” hoax against then-President Donald Trump.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You thought very carefully about who to support in this election, and you have spoken a number of times about some of the things that you believed about Donald Trump, for example, that you were misled about by the mainstream media. That’s the kind of environment you’re really talking about. Where somebody runs and they immediately become the sort of demon monkey, and they’re completely misrepresented. It doesn’t mean they don’t have flaws, but they’re misrepresented about the things that they say. Is there a way to change that, first and foremost?

BILL ACKMAN: You need neutral spaces in media, by the way—neutral spaces where you can counteract the—I hate to use the word misinformation because that itself has problems. Look, I don’t want to sit here and just be an advertisement for X, but what’s interesting is that when someone writes a profile of me in some media form, I can, within an hour of that article coming out, very specifically fact-check or address the issue, as could obviously any candidate for office. Prior to X being this sort of neutral platform, you had to send the Times a beg them for a correction, and in a few weeks, on quote-unquote page 4 or 3, in a place no one would read, the correction would appear. I think the more the public has lost confidence in conventional media, the more they’re going to look to empirical voices in podcasting and citizen journalism on X. I do think that’s a powerful counterpoint.

One of the most powerful moments for many people, actually one of them for me, is I truly believed that Trump had said the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists were among the very fine people protesting. It takes about two minutes to actually watch what he said to realize he said precisely the opposite—that he condemned them. He said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists” when he was talking about very fine people. That’s the moment when you realize, “Oh my God, I really have been misled by the media.” You look at the 60 Minutes excerpting that was done with Kamala, and you realize how much you can be manipulated, particularly by taped and excerpted media. So, if I’m trying to get to the truth, I want to hear the voice of the candidate—untaped, unscripted, without the teleprompter.