Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred Twenty Six: Lobotomy Or Castration

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Episode One Hundred Twenty Six: Lobotomy Or Castration · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and twenty six of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:05
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. President
• 0:08
  Biden blames an unemployed guy for why the Southern border is a disaster. Trump
• 0:14
  sells out maybe literally on bud Light. Tucker Carlson interviews Vladimir Putin, and
• 0:21
  we do our last segment, an extended one of Ask John Anything. I'm
• 0:27
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• 0:37
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• 0:58
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  Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show once again.
• 1:07
  We begin this episode of the podcast with an update on the future of this
• 1:11
  endeavor and the last episode I told you about our executive producer, Mike Agavino's
• 1:19
  Hail Mary Pass to try to salvage something from this podcast. As I've announced
• 1:25
  for months that it was my intention to end the podcast and effectively drop out
• 1:30
  of public life. In the middle of February, sometime after the Super Bowl,
• 1:34
  Mike came up with this gambit to try to salvage things by changing this
• 1:41
  podcast to a subscription model. I didn't think that was going to work.
• 1:46
  I don't like the idea because I hate the subscription model, but I understand
• 1:49
  that it is really the only theoretical path forward for this, and I pledged
• 1:56
  to Mike that I would not try to interfere, kind of do an offensive
• 2:00
  pass interference on his Hail Mary pass, thinking that we just wouldn't be able
• 2:07
  to get the numbers of people to pledge to make this even remotely close to
• 2:14
  a potentially worthwhile endeavor. Well, I apparently have been wrong about that,
• 2:21
  and Mike appears to have been right from what he tells me. We are
• 2:25
  now very very close, maybe even theoretically exceeded the number of people that it
• 2:31
  would require to transition this podcast to a subscription model. Now, some of
• 2:38
  you may think that's great news. I'm not quite sure that I do.
• 2:43
  I am flattered that there is at least that level of support for us continuing
• 2:50
  this in some way, shape or form. I want to make clear that
• 2:53
  there is no scenario under which this podcast remains free based on advertising, which
• 3:02
  is a completely broken model, especially for this type of podcast, into the
• 3:07
  foreseeable future, after the next week or two, or you know, maybe
• 3:12
  at most at the end of February, depending on how this all shakes out.
• 3:15
  And I also want to emphasize that no decision has been made as of
• 3:21
  yet, but we are getting close to being able to say, okay,
• 3:27
  let's give the subscription model a shot. Now, this still depends on a
• 3:32
  couple of different things. I'm always hesitant. I'm hesitent about this idea from
• 3:38
  so many different perspectives, one of which is that, as I told my
• 3:43
  wife, this feels like I'm becoming an only fans model. She asked me
• 3:46
  if I'm going to be doing the subscription version of the podcast make and I
• 3:50
  said, no, trust me, nobody you know this, Nobody wants that,
• 3:54
  and we're all I'm only half joking because a lot of this goes against
• 3:59
  everything that I am, but I also see the theoretical merit as really,
• 4:05
  right now the only viable option. And I did kind of leave it up
• 4:11
  to the listeners to respond to Mike's Mike asking for pledges. And I'm also,
• 4:18
  by the way, with regard to pledges, one of the things that
• 4:20
  still hasn't been determined yet is okay, are these pledges? Are they theoretical
• 4:28
  or are they real? I mean, I mocked the DeSantis campaign for counting
• 4:33
  on pledge cards in the Iowa cocks Is knowing that the vast majority of those
• 4:39
  pledges weren't going to mean anything once it came time to actually showing up on
• 4:44
  a very cold January night to vote for DeSantis and against Donald Trump. And
• 4:50
  so that's a part of this equation that is not yet know and we have
• 4:55
  no reason to believe that these pledges are illegitimate. But here's the bottom line.
• 5:00
  If pledges continue to go as they currently are, it looks like and
• 5:06
  again we haven't made a final decision, but we're getting close. It looks
• 5:11
  like we will be able to transition this podcast in the next few weeks into
• 5:16
  a subscription only model, and you would get a notification of how and when
• 5:24
  to participate in that subscription service if you send an email to our executive producer,
• 5:30
  Mike Agavino his email address one more time. And by the way,
• 5:35
  I rightfully got mocked by both Mike and some listeners for not understanding the nature
• 5:41
  of the email address, which I've now been told what it was. I
• 5:45
  was confused as to why the email address is spelled AGOTDJ, which I've perceived
• 5:54
  as a GOT DOJ for death of journalism. That is a got DOJ at
• 6:01
  gmail dot com. So that's the email address. I got the email dress
• 6:05
  correct, but it wasn't a got It was a GO as an Agavino and
• 6:12
  then the T is for the death of journalism. See I always think of
• 6:15
  this podcast as DOJ and not t DOJ. But regardless, a go TDJ
• 6:25
  at gmail dot com is how you respond to Mike let him know that you
• 6:29
  are interested in becoming a subscriber. Should we a one hundred percent officially decide
• 6:34
  to go in that direction, which it appears on the line, appears we're
• 6:40
  going to have the numbers to do that, which has me very conflicted.
• 6:45
  I'm somewhat flattered, I guess appreciative, but also I had kind of set
• 6:50
  my mind on the idea that I was going to stop doing this and at
• 6:55
  least I was going to be able to avoid the punishment of what promises to
• 6:59
  be a very very very bad year in twenty twenty four. Now, to
• 7:03
  be clear, for most people, nothing's going to change, because the vast
• 7:08
  majority of people who listen to this podcast on a regular basis are not,
• 7:12
  for better or for worse, going to prescribe to the podcast. So if
• 7:15
  you're in that category, very little has changed. There might be a couple
• 7:19
  of extra free episodes before we go to subscription, but that's about the only
• 7:26
  thing that's going to really change. And my plan to drop off of Twitter
• 7:30
  really isn't going to change very much. It may change slightly in that,
• 7:34
  you know, I would post things related to the podcast and maybe you know
• 7:40
  from time to time on major news events, but you know, my normal
• 7:45
  mo is to spend a ridiculous amount of time on a daily basis on Twitter,
• 7:48
  and I think if in fact we go to the subscription model, that
• 7:54
  will change so to the vast majority of people who consume my content. Really,
• 8:03
  the plan has not changed very much at all, only very very slightly
• 8:07
  with regard to timing and you know how much I may end up posting on
• 8:11
  Twitter. But we are essentially contemplating, very strongly at this point, providing
• 8:18
  another option for people who are in the category of no, I really really
• 8:22
  like this podcast. I don't want it to go away, and I'm willing
• 8:26
  to be a subscriber to keep it going. So if you're in that category,
• 8:30
  great, thank you. I guess email Mike and we'll go on from
• 8:35
  there. It's possible we may have a final decision by the next episode of
• 8:39
  the podcast. So enough of that for now, and for one hundred percent,
• 8:45
  we are doing our last version of Ask John Anything later on in this
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  episode, under this current version of the podcast being free and accessible to anybody,
• 8:56
  regardless of whether or not they are a subscriber to the podcas cast itself.
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  Right. So, news of the day, The big news, I
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  guess the last couple of days is that the so called compromise border bill is
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  effectively essentially dead. And I honestly don't know whether or not that's a good
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  thing or a bad thing. When you have a bill this large and this
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  complex, especially in this day and age where people are always stuffing things in
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  there that don't belong, And I'm always inherently suspicious of anything that deals with
• 9:35
  a compromise in the US Senate because you know, the reality. The reality
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  is I don't trust anybody, but politically in the US Senate. You know,
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  if Mitch McConnell's involved and Chuck Schumer is involved, and if they're touting
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  this, then I'm inherently suspicious. And there are people who I think are
• 9:56
  good on the border who have said good things about this bill. There are
• 10:01
  things that are bad. There are people who are not great on the border
• 10:05
  that have said the good things about this bill, both of which makes me
• 10:07
  suspicious. There are also people that are really good on the border who have
• 10:11
  condemned this bill in no uncertain term. So I don't pretend to know for
• 10:16
  sure whether or not the bill itself would make things better or worse. My
• 10:22
  sense is if it passed, it probably in the short run would make things
• 10:26
  better, but in the long run it would prevent or make it basically impossible
• 10:31
  for things to ever get really significantly better on the border, because it would
• 10:37
  effectively institutionalize a lot of the insanity that's currently going on. And then,
• 10:43
  of course there's the issue which a lot of conservatives have latched onto and I
• 10:46
  think makes some sense that why are we even having this debate Because we have
• 10:52
  laws on the books. The president of the United States has all sorts of
• 10:56
  things that they can do to try to get control of the border. And
• 11:00
  you don't need a comprehensive immigration bill to pass the Senate in the House to
• 11:05
  be signed by the president in order to get the southern border under control.
• 11:11
  I mean, it's never been, never been close to this much of a
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  disaster, and it's very much correlated to Joe Biden taking over as president.
• 11:20
  I mean, the statistics couldn't be more clear. We're talking about four or
• 11:24
  five or six times as many crossings under Joe Biden as there was under Donald
• 11:33
  Trump. I mean, everybody acknowledges this. Now the media, of course
• 11:37
  doesn't amplify it and they try to ignore it, but this is accepted as
• 11:43
  the reality of the situation. And you know, I trust very few people
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  in the media. Dan Abrams, my former boss at Media Eye, whose
• 11:52
  News Nation TV show I go on on occasion. In fact, I went
• 11:54
  on just the other night to talk about Biden dodging CBS on the Super Bowl
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  interview. You can check that out at YouTube or on my Twitter feed.
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  And you know, he did a segment on this exact issue in the same
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  show that I appeared on rather extensive segment on Okay, is this true that
• 12:16
  the president really does have the authority to close down the border? Now,
• 12:22
  the definition of terms here is obviously very, very significant, and Dan's a
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  fair guy, and the takeaway from the segment, at least for me,
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  was, as is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in between,
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  somewhere in between what hardcore conservatives are saying and what the liberals are trying to
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  claim. But I think it's obvious and I think most people understand this that
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  the president United States has a lot more leeway to do things to get the
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  border under control than what is currently being done, and that it is an
• 12:56
  excuse to say, well, we just don't have the laws to be able
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  to do this. No, Democrats want something in return for actually getting the
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  border under control in an election year, And of course it's incredibly important to
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  never forget you can't do something this significant on this much of a hot button
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  issue that's this complex in an election year, because inherently both sides are going
• 13:24
  to try to use the issue to their advantage, and they're both calculating,
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  Okay, is it better for us to actually pass something and maybe improve the
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  situation, or is it better for us to do nothing and let the situation
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  remain out of control. And many Republicans, especially those who are fans of
• 13:43
  Donald Trump, have seemingly sided with the idea that you know what, we're
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  not going to make this bad deal. Trump's going to be president soon,
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  so we can make a much better deal with Trump as president, and having
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  the border out of control is not bad for us at all when it comes
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  to the election year, because we think we can use this as a wedge
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  issue now. Conversely, Democrats are banking on the idea that they can claim
• 14:11
  that the Congress is not doing what their job is, that the Biden administration
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  did everything they possibly could to try to fix the border, but they were
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  just not allowed to do so, and they were not allowed to do so
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  not just by an incompetent do nothing Congress, but because that incompetent House of
• 14:30
  Representatives is essentially being run by Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump sabotaged this
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  deal, and that that's the reason why we have an out of control border.
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  That's going to be the democratic narrative that will be carried at least in
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  part by most, if not all, of the liberal media and the most
• 14:50
  of the mainstream news media. However, I'm not sure that's going to work.
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  If this was done by Barack Obama, I think it would work,
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  but I don't think it can work coming from Joe Biden for a couple of
• 15:05
  good reasons. Now, before I explain why, I want to play for
• 15:09
  you the clip of President Biden blaming Donald Trump, blaming Donald Trump for why
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  this deal collapsed. And I want you to think about one just how lacking
• 15:24
  an authority Biden is in the way he speaks now, with his declining mental
• 15:30
  acuity. I mean, after all, this is a guy who just a
• 15:33
  few days ago claimed that he had a conversation with French President Mitran, who
• 15:39
  died in nineteen ninety six. This is a guy who clearly is not all
• 15:45
  with it, and he's not creating a strong persona. And here he is
• 15:50
  blaming an unemployed guy for why he can't fix the border. And here's what
• 15:56
  that sounded like. Comediately, But if the bill fait, I want to
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  be absolutely clear about something, the American people are going to know why it
• 16:03
  failed. I'll be taking this issue to the country and the voters are going
• 16:08
  to know that it's not just the moment, just at the moment, we're
• 16:12
  going to secure the border and fund these other programs. Trump and the Maga
• 16:17
  Republicans said no because they're afraid of Donald Trump. Afraid of Donald Trump every
• 16:26
  day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the
• 16:30
  only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and as Maga Republican friends.
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  It's time for Republicans in the Congress to show a little courage, to
• 16:40
  show a little spine, to make it clear to the American people that you
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  work for them, not for anyone else. I know who I work for.
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  I work for the American people. Now, as I said, if
• 16:55
  Barack Obama played that card, I think it would at least be a wash.
• 17:00
  It might even be a positive for Democrats. Why well, because first
• 17:06
  of all, Obama is popular. Obama would be winning in the polls.
• 17:11
  Obama would be seen at least as somewhat of a strong leader. He would
• 17:15
  be able to make this case in a charismatic way, a way that doesn't
• 17:22
  automatically question whether you should have any confidence in this guy. And I think
• 17:30
  by the way that this play by the Biden team is probably being made through
• 17:34
  the prism of what would happen if Barack Obama did this. The media would
• 17:40
  be much more willing and able to carry Obama's water on this. But Biden
• 17:45
  is doing this not from a position of strength. He's doing this from a
• 17:51
  position of weakness. If you're in a position of strength, it's okay to
• 17:56
  say, you know what, this meddler, Donald Trump and his maga Republicans
• 18:00
  are screwing everything up, and we're the ones who want to be the adults
• 18:04
  in the room and we want to fix the problem. That's a narrative that
• 18:08
  could work. However, when you're eighty one years old and on the verge
• 18:14
  of dementia and you look weak, you sound weak, and you're losing in
• 18:19
  the polls, and in perception Biden is losing in the polls. Effectively,
• 18:25
  the message that goes out there is I'm so weak. This unemployed guy who's
• 18:33
  facing ninety one felony indictments is more powerful than me because I can't do anything
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  about this. That to me, is not a narrative that's going to help
• 18:48
  Democrats or is not going to help Joe Biden. See this is one of
• 18:52
  those subtle ways where his lack of mental acuity really hurts him. It kind
• 19:00
  of reminded me a little bit of what happened in twenty sixteen, where even
• 19:04
  though I was one of you know, a thousand different commentators who got it
• 19:10
  wrong and publicly said Trump wasn't going to beat Hillary, behind the scenes,
• 19:14
  and I know this sounds like an excuse, It's not as an excuse at
• 19:18
  all. I was wrong, but I think from a context standpoint, it's
• 19:21
  important to point out that I was constantly via text, chiding my then very
• 19:27
  good friend, Democratic Congressman John Yarmouth, who was close to the to the
• 19:32
  Hillary campaign, that they were doing this all wrong, that they were turning
• 19:37
  Trump into a bully and a strong man. Instead of mocking him as a
• 19:45
  fraud and a joke. They went with the bully strong man, which I'm
• 19:52
  sorry to a lot of people. They want a strong leader. And when
• 19:56
  you are as weak sounding and looking as Joe Biden is and you say,
• 20:03
  ugh, I just can't do anything about the border because Donald Trump is more
• 20:07
  powerful than me, it feels very reminiscent. You are making Donald Trump the
• 20:15
  strong guy. You're the weak guy. And you know, look, there's
• 20:22
  no question that there will be people who will blame Trump and Republicans for the
• 20:26
  fact that the border is still out of control, that they didn't want to
• 20:30
  do anything to fix it. I just don't think that's going to win the
• 20:33
  day when you're Joe Biden for the reasons that I just stated. I think
• 20:37
  it might have worked if it was Barack Obama, It's not going to work
• 20:41
  if it's Joe Biden. But that being said, Republicans still deserve all sorts
• 20:48
  of blames blamed for being totally incompetent. Because simultaneous to this, the effort
• 20:55
  to impeach the Department of Homeland Security secretary failed by essentially in the House of
• 21:02
  Representatives by essentially one vote. Now, you know, it gets weird because
• 21:07
  there was one vote that voted no. So that they might be able to
• 21:11
  bring it back up, Democrats had to bring in somebody literally from the hospital
• 21:15
  to cast the deciding vote against impeachment of the Department of Homeland Security secretary.
• 21:22
  But the reason why this vote failed was basically because of three you know,
• 21:26
  personnel situations in the House of Representatives, well, two personnel situations and one
• 21:33
  vote that really baffled me. You know, Kevin McCarthy is no longer in
• 21:37
  Congress, former House Speaker, he would have voted in favor of impeachment,
• 21:42
  so they lost that vote. George Santos got kicked out because he's a complete
• 21:47
  fraud, and so they lost that vote. And Tom McClintock a guy who
• 21:52
  became famous here in California during the recall election of two thousand and three when
• 22:00
  he ran against Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Republican and really became almost a cult figure
• 22:07
  back when there still was a conservative movement in California, and then later became
• 22:11
  a congressman. A guy who I had on my old radio show many times,
• 22:15
  I met in person multiple times. I mean, I think he and
• 22:18
  I were I considered Tom to be a friend at one point. I mean,
• 22:22
  he and I had a lot of respect for each other. And Tom
• 22:26
  McClintock was one of those who voted against the impeachment of the Department of Homeland
• 22:32
  Security secretary. And I have absolutely no idea why Tom would do that.
• 22:37
  I mean, I've got to believe he had some principled reason, because he
• 22:41
  is as strong on the border as anybody could possibly be. Now he's no
• 22:47
  longer in southern California, he's in northern California, and he went to a
• 22:51
  congressional district where he could win. But that vote really shocked me. But
• 22:56
  it was those three situations that caused this in effort to impeach the Department of
• 23:02
  Homeland Security secretary to fail. And I think it goes to the narrative that
• 23:07
  Republicans can't govern. There's a bunch of nut jobs in the House. They
• 23:10
  can't get anything done, they can't even you know, pick and stick with
• 23:14
  a leader. And also consistent with that narrative is that it now appears as
• 23:19
  if Rona McDaniel is going to be ousted as the Republican chairperson nationwide, and
• 23:27
  we don't know who she's going to be replaced by. But hilariously, and
• 23:32
  I don't know if this was a joke, if this was partly sarcastic,
• 23:36
  if it was just looking for attention, but Matt Gates, Congressman Matt Gates,
• 23:41
  who led the charge, was the sole reason why Kevin McCarthy was ousted
• 23:47
  as Speaker of the House, and you could argue, because you know,
• 23:49
  it's the domino effect from that movement to als McCarthy is why they could not.
• 23:56
  It's literally why they could not impeach the Department of Homeland Securities secretary,
• 24:00
  something Gates was very much in favor of. So Gates causes this domino effect
• 24:07
  that results in the failed impeachment effort. And then he goes on Twitter and
• 24:11
  he endorses guess who to replace Rona McDaniel, Kevin McCarthy. You cannot make
• 24:18
  this up again. I can't be sure if it was serious, half serious,
• 24:23
  or what because there were a couple of digs in the endorsement, but
• 24:29
  that's what he did. I mean, they say, may you live in
• 24:33
  interesting times. We live in interesting times. There's no doubt about that.
• 24:36
  And it's just chaos and confusion and incompetence on the Republican side in the House.
• 24:42
  And I think that there's a very good chance that Democrats are going to
• 24:48
  retake the House in November, which brings up the nightmare scenario that I am
• 24:56
  one of the very few people, at least on the right that is talking
• 25:00
  about it. In fact, I'm probably the only person on the planet that's
• 25:02
  talking about it because I'm the only one that has the incentive to see how
• 25:04
  dangerous this could be, and that is a Democratic House and maybe a tide
• 25:11
  or Democratic Senate and Donald Trump as president, because I truly believe under that
• 25:17
  scenario Democrats get more of what they want than almost any other possible scenario because
• 25:26
  at his core, Donald Trump is a liberal, He's a lifelong Manhattan Democrat,
• 25:30
  and he would have no guardrails at all. He wouldn't care about the
• 25:36
  Republican Party at all under that scenario, especially with no re election concerns.
• 25:41
  It would be basically a redo of what happened here in California when Arnold Schwarzenegger
• 25:48
  gave up on the Republican Party and got reelected and then became a full on
• 25:55
  liberal Democrat, taking the Republican Party down the toilet with him. The Republican
• 26:00
  Party has never recovered in California from Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is a story that
• 26:07
  the rest of the nation needs to understand because we're very close to repeating it.
• 26:12
  I mean, I'm telling you a second Trump term with a Democratic House
• 26:15
  and a Democratic Senate would be Arnold Schwarzenegger two point zero that's exactly what would
• 26:22
  happen here, and we're getting pretty darn close to that. And we got
• 26:26
  more evidence, as if we needed any, that Donald Trump is not to
• 26:33
  be trusted on some core issues for conservatives. Donald Trump in the midst of
• 26:38
  facing all these indictments, and he's about to face a judgment in a massive
• 26:45
  civil financial fraud case, and he's just coming off to EG and Carol judgment
• 26:51
  and technically is still running for the Republican presidential nomination. He's got a lot
• 26:56
  going on in his life. He posted, he posted essentially that the bud
• 27:03
  Light boycott by conservatives should be ended. He did this on True Social,
• 27:11
  and he did this in a way that to me, to me was fishy
• 27:17
  as hell, because he basically said, look, bud Light made a big
• 27:22
  mistake, they paid for it. They're a great company, they do great
• 27:26
  things, they're not woke. They help conservatives, they help farmers, they
• 27:30
  help veterans, and we really ought to knock this off. That's a pretty
• 27:36
  good paraphrase of what Trump posted on True Social And to me, the specificity
• 27:45
  and the detail in that post was not by mistake. It was not coincidental.
• 27:52
  This was not Donald Trump going off on the toilet on some rant that
• 28:00
  just entered his head and decided, you know what, I just had to
• 28:03
  You know, he doesn't drink, so you know, he doesn't have to
• 28:06
  drink bud Light. But you know, for some reason I decided that,
• 28:10
  you know, I saw the Peyton Manning commercial. I like bud Light.
• 28:12
  Again, let's knock this off. That's not what happened here. This was
• 28:17
  a long, detailed post that parts of it were not written by him.
• 28:22
  I believe, I believe, and I can't even believe I'm saying this about
• 28:27
  the presumptive Republican presidential nominee that I can be this confident saying this and this
• 28:33
  circumstance. But I would bet a lot of money that in some way,
• 28:37
  shape or form, Trump was paid for that post. I'm not necessarily suggesting
• 28:42
  it's a direct payment like live Golf, you know, under the table essentially
• 28:48
  or without transparency, for the use of his golf courses for the live Golf
• 28:53
  tour being paid by the side at Saudi Royal family, which is that stinks
• 28:57
  even worse maybe than the bud Light situation. But when you consider what Trump's
• 29:03
  morals are or lack thereof, the way he viewsed the world, the fact
• 29:07
  that his campaign needs money, the fact that he needs money. They are
• 29:11
  all sorts of ways that Anheuser Busch or bud Light can reimburse Donald Trump for
• 29:17
  getting them out of a jam. They just showed in paying Peyton Manning a
• 29:22
  ridiculous amount of money, that they are in need of a fix here and
• 29:26
  that they're willing to pay for it in a very very significant way. And
• 29:33
  so just like Peyton Manning sold out and did a bud Light commercial in order
• 29:37
  to provide cover among a very key demographic, basically straight white Southern males.
• 29:44
  And that's you know, what Peyton Manning represents, and that's obviously right in
• 29:48
  Donald Trump's wheelhouse. I have absolutely no doubt that in some way, shape
• 29:53
  or form, Donald Trump and or his campaign is going to be reimbursed for
• 30:00
  that post. He is essentially now pay for play the presumptive Republican presidential nominee
• 30:07
  and fifty to fifty shot the next president of the United States. That's how
• 30:11
  far we have fallen that you must presume, if you're a rational person,
• 30:15
  that Donald Trump got paid by a beer company effectively to do a commercial via
• 30:22
  a truth social post and of course it was hilarious to watch Matt Walsh of
• 30:26
  The Daily Wire, who I've talked about in recent episodes of the podcast,
• 30:32
  get all agitated about this because Walsh is very much in favor of the bud
• 30:37
  Light boycott, because he's very much against the entire normalization of transgenderism. And
• 30:45
  that's what bud Light, that's what the whole bud Light boycott was about,
• 30:48
  the fact that bud Light embraced transgenderism in a very bizarre and almost idiotic fashion,
• 30:56
  and it very much led to a curtailing of use of bud Light,
• 31:02
  and by all intentsive purposes, this was one of the very few examples of
• 31:07
  a conservative boycott working. And that's Walsh's main argument, How can we be
• 31:11
  doing this? This was one of the very few few times, maybe first
• 31:17
  times, that a real conservative nationwide boycott had actual impact. And here bud
• 31:22
  Light has never really apologized, they've never done any contrition, they really haven't
• 31:27
  changed their ways. How can Donald Trump do this? Well, that's hilarious
• 31:33
  because it was Matt Walsh who just a couple of weeks ago tweeted out that
• 31:37
  he was so relieved that the Republican nominating process was over. It was unfortunate
• 31:44
  that the Desanda's campaign didn't work out, but thank goodness, we can all
• 31:48
  work together now and fight the real enemy. And I said at that time,
• 31:52
  and mocking Matt, I said, you just said, you're glad that
• 31:57
  the guy who's terrible on your number one and number two issues transgenderism and COVID
• 32:04
  tyranny slash panic, he's terrible on your number two, well, number one
• 32:07
  and number two issues, and you're gonna regret this. And it didn't take
• 32:13
  very long for that to actually become exactly what happened. So it's pretty hilarious
• 32:17
  that I'll see Matt Walsh and I mocked him on Twitter. Other people mocked
• 32:22
  him on Twitter as well, for Okay, how does it feel now,
• 32:25
  Matt, because this is what you asked for. You were relieved about this
• 32:30
  like a week and a half ago. So it was more than just unfortunate
• 32:34
  that the de Sandus campaign didn't work out, because with DeSantis, you wouldn't
• 32:37
  have to worry about these kind of sellouts, one from an economic standpoint,
• 32:42
  because he actually has principles and beliefs and he wouldn't do something like that from
• 32:46
  a right and wrong perspective, but also because he would realize that this would
• 32:51
  be bad for the conservative cause. This is terrible. How can any future
• 32:57
  conservative boycott against wokedom ever taken seriously when even when it's successful, eventually it's
• 33:04
  gonna be called off. If you simply buy off Peyton Manning and you buy
• 33:07
  off Donald Trump, it can't work. And this was this shocked even me
• 33:14
  how successful the bud Light boycott was, and now it's being called off by
• 33:20
  the conservative warrior, the guy who this is the people, This is the
• 33:25
  person who is cult thinks, you know, only cares about America and will
• 33:30
  do what's right, and you know, is a man of God and could
• 33:35
  really be trusted to fight my fights for me. He's my retribution against my
• 33:39
  enemies. It's all bullshit. And this episode, while it's not that significant,
• 33:45
  proves that once again. And it also shows I'm just gonna say this
• 33:50
  one more time today because I'm I'm sure it's not gonna be the last time
• 33:52
  I say it, is that the worst possible scenario here is Trump wins the
• 33:58
  presidency, the Democrats win the House, and somehow win the Senate because Republican
• 34:04
  candidates are weighed down too much by the Trump stink, and you're probably wondering,
• 34:08
  well, how could that possibly happen if Trump wins the presidency. Well,
• 34:13
  it is possible, one because of the electoral College, but two because
• 34:15
  there are a certain number of voters who will vote for Donald Trump but will
• 34:22
  not necessarily vote for a Republican Senate candidate or a Republican House candidate. And
• 34:28
  so that scenario, well, far far far from certain, is very much
• 34:34
  in play and very much, in my view, the worst case scenario for
• 34:39
  November of twenty twenty four. Now I have to mention that the person I've
• 34:45
  been referring to as the Trump campaign MVP, Tucker Carlson, is making news
• 34:51
  yet again because it appears as if he has interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• 34:58
  He went over to Russia with great fanfare, and he's announced on Twitter that
• 35:04
  he did interview Putin and has explained why he's interviewed Putin. Interestingly, a
• 35:08
  Putin spokesperson or or someone that I guess you would describe as a Putin spokesperson,
• 35:17
  has already corrected Tucker Carlson's announcement video, saying that one of the things
• 35:24
  he said there was not accurate, and I found it interesting that Twitter Community
• 35:30
  notes actually made that statement underneath Tucker Carlson's tweet, which, considering you know,
• 35:37
  you got to hand it to Elon Musk for allowing that to happen,
• 35:39
  because Musk is I've said that that Tucker Carlson is Trump's MVP. Well,
• 35:45
  Musk is Tucker Carlson's rebirth MVP. Because without Musk giving his seal approval and
• 35:52
  platform and lots and lots of retweets, I'm not sure that Tucker Carlson's new
• 35:57
  venture on Twitter would be getting nearly as much traction and certainly not nearly as
• 36:01
  many views as it is. But handed to Elon Musk, he stayed out
• 36:07
  of it, and the Twitter Community notes did correct Tucker Carlson for what he
• 36:12
  claimed about the nature of his interview, specifically with regard to whether or not
• 36:15
  any other Western journalists have tried to interview Vladimir Putin. Now. Look as
• 36:23
  somebody who has interviewed Jerry Sandusky in prison, you know, to great fanfare
• 36:30
  and gone on the Today Show to discuss the interview and the recordings that I
• 36:36
  got from that interview, I'm in no position to be condemning Tucker Carlson for
• 36:40
  doing an interview with anybody, no matter how notorious they are. I have
• 36:44
  no problem with this at all, regardless of whether or not I ever interviewed
• 36:47
  Jerry Sandusky in prison. I'm all for legitimate interviews. However, I am
• 36:53
  very suspicious that this is not going to be a legitimate interview. So,
• 36:59
  you know, those that are automatically criticizing Tucker Carlson, I think they are
• 37:05
  wrong from the standpoint of, Okay, well, why is it all right
• 37:08
  for Barbara Walters to interview Vladimir Putin but it's not okay for Tucker Carlson.
• 37:15
  However, I gotta wait for the content because it's my belief, and I
• 37:22
  don't think it's irrational at all that this is going to be a joke of
• 37:25
  an interview, that this is going to be a softball, that this is
• 37:30
  motivated by the fact that Tucker for some reason, and I don't think it's
• 37:34
  totally irrational, but I think the lens to which he's going are suspicious.
• 37:38
  That Tucker has something up as butt about our support for Ukraine. He's very
• 37:44
  much against our support for Ukraine, and therefore I think he has a conflict
• 37:49
  of interest when it comes to interviewing Vladimir Putin, And let's make no mistake,
• 37:54
  there's no question that the reason why, in the logical world, Putin
• 37:59
  agreed to do this interview is that he and his people at the Kremlin know
• 38:05
  that Tucker Carlson is very much against the Ukrainian effort and very much against this
• 38:10
  conflict, and has been very soft on Russia and Putin as a result.
• 38:15
  So that's why he's getting the interview. Now, Look, is it possible
• 38:21
  that Carlson's going to shock me in the rest of the world by really nailing
• 38:24
  Putin on, for instance, the fact that there are American hostages, at
• 38:29
  least two of them currently being held by Putin and Russia. Is he going
• 38:35
  to press him on how it is that his political opponents keep dying in highly,
• 38:39
  extremely suspicious fashion that appeared very much to be assassinations. I mean,
• 38:45
  that will be the tell, right, If those two subjects are prominently in
• 38:50
  the interview, then I'll say, Okay, all right, that was interesting,
• 38:53
  Good job, Tucker. My guess is it's not going to be the
• 38:57
  case. My guess is that this is going to be effectively propaganda. That
• 39:02
  is going to be coming straight from Putin to a very core segment of Donald
• 39:08
  Trump's audience to try to influence them and indirectly Trump when it comes to their
• 39:15
  views of Russia in general and the Ukraine Russia war in particular. And I
• 39:21
  have not I've totally talked at all about the Ukraine situation, mainly because I
• 39:25
  don't like talking about things I'm not an expert on, and I also don't
• 39:30
  have a strong passion on it. I don't like anybody in this situation.
• 39:34
  I don't like Putin, I don't like Russia. I don't like Zelinsky,
• 39:37
  I don't like Ukraine. I don't like Biden, I don't like Trump.
• 39:39
  I don't trust any of them. So I don't know what side to be
• 39:43
  on. I think we're spending too much goddamn money on it, especially considering
• 39:46
  the economics situation in this country, that's for sure. So I'm open minded
• 39:52
  on it. But from a purely journalistic standpoint, I have no problem with
• 39:57
  Carlson doing the interview. I'm just highly skeptical that it's going to be a
• 40:02
  legitimate interview and not mostly a propaganda piece. Now, speaking of Elon Musk
• 40:10
  Boy, it must be great to be Elon Musk. You know, I
• 40:14
  am so conflicted about him. There's so many things about him that I love.
• 40:17
  There's so many things about him I do not trust, but in the
• 40:21
  category of things that you got to love. So yesterday, as of this
• 40:25
  taping on Wednesday, Musk got a hold of an internal Disney Corporation document that
• 40:34
  basically outlines their DEI requirements. And this is really something. So he took
• 40:43
  the DEI requirements at the Disney Corporation and he posted them on Twitter, and
• 40:51
  then he offered anybody who believes that they have been subject to reverse discrimination at
• 40:59
  Disney essentially free legal counsel. That's the way I interpreted it, if they
• 41:06
  want to sue Disney for reverse discrimination. I mean, I mean, it's
• 41:12
  just amazing that he's willing and able to do this kind of thing. I
• 41:14
  mean, I guess if you're the richest man in the world and you actually
• 41:16
  believe in things, these are the kinds of situations that you can make happen.
• 41:21
  And it's just awesome. And this document I found to be rather amazing.
• 41:28
  I send it to a friend in the movie business and they weren't quite
• 41:31
  as surprised, although they were outraged by it, but basically summarizing the document,
• 41:37
  essentially, in all these different categories, Disney was requiring that fifty percent
• 41:45
  of people who would be interviewed or hired in any particular group come from quote
• 41:51
  unquote under represented groups. Fifty percent from quote unquote under represented groups. Essentially,
• 42:01
  that means anybody but a white male. That's the way I interpreted it,
• 42:07
  But when you read the details, it's even more startling than that,
• 42:13
  because they say at the bottom of the document that you have to be very
• 42:19
  sensitive in determining what it means to be part of a quote unquote underrepresented group.
• 42:28
  And then effectively, the way I interpreted it, you have to let
• 42:31
  the person who's being evaluated define for themselves whether or not they are part of
• 42:37
  an underrepresented group. So in other words, essentially you can identify as anything
• 42:44
  you want and yo to me, the best way around this would be if
• 42:50
  everybody who applied for a job at Disney identified as a black lesbian or a
• 42:57
  black gay person or what ever. I mean, no matter what your actual
• 43:02
  race or gender were, because at that point the whole system would collapse because
• 43:07
  there would be no way to identify what an underrepresented person is I mean underrepresented.
• 43:16
  What the fuck does that even mean, especially in an era where you
• 43:22
  know, straight white males are almost an endangered species, at least in the
• 43:27
  younger generation. I mean, still a few older guys who have made it
• 43:31
  in the world that are hanging on for dear life who are straight white males.
• 43:36
  But those that are in power, they're more than willing in order to
• 43:39
  give themselves protection to make sure that nobody they hire and no one under them
• 43:45
  is also a straight white male, because that's how they keep their chops.
• 43:49
  That's part of the scam here. Any straight white male that's still in a
• 43:52
  position of power authority is going to be the worst person on DEI within these
• 43:58
  these woke corporations because they're the most vulnerable. So, I mean, this
• 44:02
  document is really quite something. You should check it out yourself. If you're
• 44:07
  on Twitter, you go to Elon Musk's Twitter account. But kudos to Elon
• 44:12
  Musk won for posting that and then for putting his money where his mouth is
• 44:15
  and saying, look, if you are somebody who thinks you have a case
• 44:19
  against Disney, just to let me know and I'll help you with legal representation.
• 44:25
  Now, speaking of Disney. There's a proposed new development in the sports
• 44:32
  media world that could be extremely significant, and that is the announcement of a
• 44:39
  new app that is being I guess planned by ESPN, Fox, Warner,
• 44:51
  and indirectly Disney, which obviously owns ESPN. So basically the three major players
• 44:59
  are esp Fox, and Warner, and this is creating quite a bit of
• 45:05
  hubbub in the sports media world. Steve Cortes, my friend who's been on
• 45:09
  this program twice before, he tweeted that he thinks that this will is clearly
• 45:14
  illegal under government regulations. I don't know if that's the case or not,
• 45:19
  especially you know, we're living in a new world with streaming and apps and
• 45:23
  what's technically under the government's jurisdiction with regard to the SCC and over the air
• 45:29
  and cable. I mean, it's getting extremely complex, but that's certainly an
• 45:34
  issue that's going to need to be dealt with. But from a purely sports
• 45:37
  media perspective, I can see why people are saying, oh my god,
• 45:43
  this is going to be terrible for sports. I mean, if you combine
• 45:47
  all of these outlets to have one app for sports, I can certainly see
• 45:54
  that that's going to create, theoretically a mountain of further problems in an area
• 45:59
  that already ask a lot of them. And obviously you got to know what
• 46:04
  the details are. I don't know what this is gonna look like. Is
• 46:07
  it gonna be I guess my major question is is this gonna be more fragmentation?
• 46:14
  In other words, will this app have like one hundred different options on
• 46:19
  it at any given time, which my guess is that seems to be where
• 46:22
  we're going. It probably will be, or will be something actually in the
• 46:28
  opposite direction, where there will be one primary choice and any given moment for
• 46:37
  whatever is chosen by the app to be the most important thing going on in
• 46:42
  the sporting world that is being put out there by ESPN, Fox or Warner.
• 46:49
  And again, I'd like to see what the details are. But maybe
• 46:53
  this is just me always being naive and hopeful and then getting disappointed. I
• 46:58
  actually think in theory, in theory, if it's more the latter scenario than
• 47:05
  the former, this could be a good thing for sports in some ways.
• 47:12
  I have talked for years years. In fact, I wrote a book that
• 47:15
  was largely based upon this whole idea called The Death of Free Speech, about
• 47:22
  the impact that fragmentation was going to have on news and sports fragmentation in the
• 47:29
  media, and that those communal events that used to be brought to us by
• 47:34
  television are now except for maybe the super Bowl this coming weekend, are going
• 47:38
  to be gone, and that that's going to have a massive impact on all
• 47:44
  sorts of different elements of our culture, but specifically in sports, because you
• 47:49
  know, in sports, it used to be a situation where, hey,
• 47:52
  did you watch the game last night? Back in the olden days, well,
• 47:54
  there was only one game on, Like college football was a perfect example,
• 47:59
  is there was literally only two college football games on nationally on any given
• 48:04
  Saturday, and so it was a huge deal and everybody watched it. Everybody
• 48:09
  was a college sports fan watch it. And back then you had very few
• 48:13
  entertainment options. So the percentage of the population that actually was exposed to that
• 48:17
  and experienced that that communal experience was very, very significant. Well, now
• 48:22
  everything's been so diluted, so watered down, that there's no communal experience except
• 48:28
  for very rare, huge events, and I think something has been really lost
• 48:35
  in our culture, and specifically when it comes to sports. Well, it's
• 48:39
  possible, depending on how they do this app, and I could be completely
• 48:44
  off of this because there's no details that have been released. But if they
• 48:46
  go with the scenario where Okay, we're gonna this is going to basically be
• 48:52
  one channel, this app, and we're going to provide to you whatever it
• 48:58
  is, is the premiere moment, a premier event at that moment, I
• 49:01
  think there could be some positive to that. Now, again, that could
• 49:05
  very well not be the case, that could be in the exact opposite direction.
• 49:09
  I can't I think one of the worst things ESPN did was splinter into
• 49:14
  like six or seven or eight different networks, because then even being on ESPN
• 49:19
  wasn't a big deal even within the small element of society that's the so called
• 49:24
  sports world. I can't stand fragmentation. I think fragmentation is incredibly divisive,
• 49:32
  especially when it comes to news. But I do think that the fragmentation in
• 49:37
  sports also has significance. We are the United States of America. I do
• 49:44
  not think it's a coincidence. I frankly think it's one of the most prescient
• 49:46
  things I've ever written when I wrote about and wrote about it in that book
• 49:50
  The Death of Free Speech, where we are far more divided now almost twenty
• 49:54
  years after I wrote that book largely and you know, correlations not causation,
• 50:01
  but here I think we have causation. There's a lot of reasons why we're
• 50:05
  greatly divided, but I think one of the most underrated, and maybe one
• 50:08
  of the most significant, is media fragmentation. We all now live in our
• 50:14
  own silos, our own bubbles, our own realities. We share almost nothing
• 50:17
  in common, and television, which used to be the greatest uniting force in
• 50:23
  the history of this country, is now probably the greatest divisive force in the
• 50:29
  history of this country, at least from a media perspective, because there's a
• 50:32
  thousand different channels, and now you add the Internet and all these apps and
• 50:37
  social media. I mean, we could not possibly be more fragmented, and
• 50:43
  it's causing all sorts of destruction within the news media business because audiences are now
• 50:51
  just too small for major news operations to even survive, especially with the business
• 50:55
  model of advertising being broken. So I don't know what this new app is
• 51:01
  going to mean. I'm curious. I'm as concerned as other people are,
• 51:07
  but I do think there's at least a slipper of hope because I do think
• 51:13
  that, you know, I've often said when people said, zig, what's
• 51:15
  the solution to all these media problems? And I've always said, economic catastrophe
• 51:20
  is really the only possible solution to all this. So where we can get
• 51:25
  somewhat back to the media environment of the eighties and the nineties, which wasn't
• 51:31
  so fragmented, and in a weird way, we are kind of getting back
• 51:37
  to that. We're nowhere near it, and social media will prevent that from
• 51:40
  ever happening in its totality, but at least I think there's a possible side
• 51:46
  of hope. I get very nervous when I have any optimism at all,
• 51:51
  but I just wanted to mention that because I know that a lot of people
• 51:53
  have been very, very concerned about that news story. By the way,
• 51:57
  one other note when it comes to sports and the media, I talk a
• 52:01
  lot about football, a lot about the NFL. In the last episode,
• 52:06
  I talked a lot about the Pro Bowl and my concerns about what the Pro
• 52:10
  Bowl means, and I really I didn't emphasize this enough in the last segment
• 52:15
  of vast episode of the podcast. The Pro Bowl really the destruction, the
• 52:21
  disintegration, the slippery slope involving The Pro Bowl really is the perfect proof that
• 52:25
  socialism doesn't work. That when you disincentivize people, they're not going to work,
• 52:31
  they're not going to take risk, they're not going to put out effort.
• 52:36
  You can't rely just on pride and memory, especially in this day and
• 52:38
  age. And when I say that, a lot of especially liberals, respond
• 52:44
  by saying, Zake, what are you talking about. The Pro Bowl is
• 52:45
  the perfect example of capitalism not working, because at the root of all this
• 52:51
  is they made too much money thanks to the capitalist system, and therefore you
• 52:55
  can't have the Pro Ball anymore because no players will put in the effort or
• 53:00
  put any risk of getting injured for a game that doesn't inherently mean very much
• 53:06
  of anything. And I say, no, you're misunderstanding. It's not the
• 53:10
  amount of money involved. It's the value of money and the incentive to try
• 53:19
  to put in effort and to take risk. It's effectively the same thing as
• 53:24
  socialism and socialism. You're paying people basically to do either nothing or regardless of
• 53:31
  whether or not their their work is any good. So when you pay people
• 53:35
  in a socialist situation like we did during COVID, you literally pay people to
• 53:39
  stay home and do nothing. Guess what's gonna happen. They're gonna stay home
• 53:45
  and do nothing because there's nothing in it for them. Well, in a
• 53:50
  weird way, that's exactly what happened with the National Football League. The players
• 53:53
  got paid so much, especially the star players, got paid so much that
• 53:58
  money no longer has any value. You know. The meager amounts of money
• 54:02
  that were put on the table for the winner of the Pro Bowl had no
• 54:06
  value to them. So it's essentially the same thing. You're just talking about
• 54:09
  different numbers. That's it. So I wanted to reemphasize that point because I
• 54:15
  think socially that's maybe the greatest significance of the demise of the Pro Bowl.
• 54:21
  But there's another important thing that happened, and that is this flag football version
• 54:25
  of the Pro Bowl, sanctioned by Peyton Manning. Any Linemanning, which drives
• 54:30
  me crazy, is clearly now viewed as a success. The television ratings on
• 54:37
  ABC and ESPN for these Pro Bowl games and the flag football game were over
• 54:44
  five million viewers. Now that's not much for a major NFL football game,
• 54:49
  but this wasn't a football game. This was flag football with a bunch of
• 54:53
  other crazy field day activities that ended up in some sort of faux competition that
• 55:01
  only seemingly Peyton and Eli Manning really cared about. But that got over five
• 55:07
  million viewers, that beat every other sporting event over the entire weekend by far
• 55:15
  one. That shows you the dominance of the National Football League. But it
• 55:19
  also shows you, I think the danger in the long term. In the
• 55:23
  long term ten to fifteen years from now, especially as flag football gets more
• 55:29
  and more embraced, it gets played in the Olympics, and more and more
• 55:34
  younger people get older, they start to be the people who are in the
• 55:37
  National Football League. I mean kids you know in high school today, five,
• 55:42
  ten, fifteen years from now, they're going to be the stars in
• 55:44
  the National Football League and to them, flag football is going to be a
• 55:47
  huge part of what football is. And so the wussification of the sport is
• 55:52
  just going to continue, regardless of what they call it, regardless of how
• 55:57
  much flag really is involved, whether that's just the quarterback or what have you.
• 56:00
  I don't know. I've never said I know exactly how it's going to
• 56:04
  all turn out. I just know it's not going to be good, and
• 56:07
  that the game of football as we knew it is on life support at best,
• 56:12
  and the ratings for the Pro Bowl games and Flag Football game are not
• 56:15
  going to help that. All right, I want to move now to Ask
• 56:19
  John Anything. We started this final version of Ask John Anything in the last
• 56:23
  episode of the podcast, but I was not able to get to as many
• 56:29
  questions as I wanted to. This seems to happen every time I do Ask
• 56:31
  John Anything, so this time, in order to try to get to as
• 56:36
  many questions as I possibly can, I'm abbreviating most of these questions. So
• 56:40
  if you're somebody who asked these questions, I apologize. I'm going to basically
• 56:45
  just paraphrase the question so that I can save time. There's a lot of
• 56:51
  interesting questions. I hope I get to all of them. If I can't,
• 56:54
  I don't know. Maybe I'll extend this into the next episode, but
• 56:58
  let's just see how this goes, and we'll probably do at least an hour
• 57:01
  on this, and I look forward to this segment here because I have nothing
• 57:05
  prepared. I'm going to read the questions and almost respond off the cuff to
• 57:09
  most of these questions, and they are very diverse, and some of them
• 57:15
  are quite fascinating. So the first question is this is from Corey. Of
• 57:20
  all the jobs you've had, which one have you enjoyed the most? Can
• 57:24
  be the most fun, enjoyment or satisfaction you've gotten from it. Also very
• 57:29
  much appreciate your thoughts perspective, so please consider not leaving public life. Okay,
• 57:34
  thanks Corey. All Right, So I have had a lot of jobs
• 57:37
  in a lot of different areas. I've had a very bizarre, fascinating,
• 57:44
  diverse career. I have been a television sportscaster. I have been a television
• 57:52
  commentator. I have been a radio talk show host, a sports radio talk
• 57:55
  show host. I've been a political polling consultant for Quinnipiac University very briefly.
• 58:05
  I have been a high school football coach. I've been a substitute teacher.
• 58:14
  I have. I mean, my gosh, I've done so many things,
• 58:16
  most of which not particularly well obviously. I've been a podcaster, a documentary
• 58:21
  filmmaker. I mean, so all these different things I have done, and
• 58:27
  I've been fired from a lot of jobs. I work for the PG Tour
• 58:30
  briefly in their production department. So I've been a television producer as well as
• 58:37
  a commentator and a writer. I've been a columnist for Media Eyed, I've
• 58:43
  written a couple of books, so I've done a lot of things in a
• 58:45
  very mediocre fashion. But to answer the question, the job that when I
• 58:52
  look back on and I say I really loved, there's really no question.
• 58:57
  When I was a television sports caster in Little Steubenville, Ohio, Wheeling,
• 59:04
  West Virginia market like one hundred and thirty five at that time in the country,
• 59:08
  with a starting salary of twelve eight hundred dollars a year. This would
• 59:14
  have been in starting in nineteen ninety one. And I think I got some
• 59:20
  overtime on top of that because I worked my ass off. That was my
• 59:24
  favorite job, and it was my favorite job for a couple different reasons.
• 59:30
  One that was still an era where you know, this was an NBC affiliate
• 59:36
  and there were only two television stations in the market and so and we were
• 59:39
  actually the number two station, but the audience level was enormous, the percentage
• 59:46
  of the local population who turned into that television station. And this was a
• 59:52
  television station where I met Lizabebe. I was the weekend sports anchor and Lizabebe
• 59:58
  was the weekend News Ang. That's how we got to know each other,
• 1:00:01
  and that's how it's so strange that, you know, thirty years later we
• 1:00:06
  did the podcast with the benefit of hindsight. But I loved that job and
• 1:00:13
  I put, I mean everything I had into that I worked ridiculous hours,
• 1:00:19
  especially during football season. This was an area of the country where, especially
• 1:00:24
  back then, high school football really was king and part of my job each
• 1:00:31
  summer. I was only there for two years, but you learn a lot,
• 1:00:37
  you know, those two summers, I would go with a photographer to
• 1:00:40
  every single little town up and down the Ohio River on the Ohio side and
• 1:00:45
  the West Virginia side, and I would do preview pieces on every single high
• 1:00:52
  school football team in the entire Ohio Valley. And there were a lot of
• 1:00:58
  them, because back then before consolidation, had all these little towns that had
• 1:01:02
  their own little high schools, and they all cared very much about their high
• 1:01:06
  school football teams. And it was a great sports market because we were right
• 1:01:13
  across the river from Pittsburgh, and you know, the Steelers were still good.
• 1:01:15
  The Penguins were winning Stanley Cups. I drank from the Stanley Cup after
• 1:01:20
  the first Pittsburgh Penguin Stanley Cup win with maryo Lemieux. The Pirates had Bury
• 1:01:27
  Bonds that were going to the playoffs. Back then, I was covering the
• 1:01:30
  playoffs. I mean, so this was as a young kid, and I
• 1:01:34
  was way way too I should never have gotten this job. I mean I
• 1:01:37
  was twenty four years old and I looked like I was eighteen and had no
• 1:01:43
  real idea what I was doing. But I loved it. I mean it
• 1:01:47
  was new, it was exciting, and it mattered. It mattered to the
• 1:01:52
  people, it mattered to our audience what we did. I remember, you
• 1:02:00
  know, going back to the high school football angle on this when I would
• 1:02:02
  do those previews for all those little towns and their high school football teams.
• 1:02:10
  I have a pretty good eye for talent, and I was pretty good at
• 1:02:15
  being able to pinpoint, Okay, what's a surprise team that's going to have
• 1:02:20
  a really good year, And is there is there a little town out here
• 1:02:24
  that we could focus on that you know, would really change the attitude of
• 1:02:30
  the town itself, because this is again, this is something that really matters
• 1:02:36
  to these people. And you know, high school football it's not just a
• 1:02:40
  way of life back then in this area of the country. It's a way
• 1:02:44
  of getting through half the winter. I mean, if your team gets through
• 1:02:47
  the playoffs, you almost get all the way to Christmas with something to look
• 1:02:51
  forward to. I mean, it really matters. And I remember there was
• 1:02:55
  I think it was the second year I was there. I had this feeling
• 1:02:58
  about this little town called called Woodsfield, Ohio, and they had a team
• 1:03:01
  called the Woodsfield Redskins. They're not the Redskins anymore because that's illegal, and
• 1:03:06
  I think the school folded into consolidation. But I was right, and Woodsfield
• 1:03:13
  Redskins went undefeated that year. They had never had any TV coverage of any
• 1:03:16
  kind. Remember this is the early nineties. Even being videotape back then was
• 1:03:21
  a huge deal to these kids and these fans, and to be put on
• 1:03:24
  a network television program an NBC affiliate, really meant a lot to these people.
• 1:03:30
  And so you know, going to Woodsfield, and I mean when we
• 1:03:36
  went there, people would give us standing frickin' ovations just for showing up at
• 1:03:40
  the game. I mean, it was that crazy, how much people really
• 1:03:45
  cared about this. So nothing I do or did in the rest of my
• 1:03:52
  career it ever really meant as much to as many people as our coverage of
• 1:03:58
  high school football back in the early nineties and a little NBC affiliate in Steubenville,
• 1:04:02
  Ohio Wheeling, West Virginia. I loved that job so much I probably
• 1:04:08
  worked myself out of the job because I was so exhausted by the end of
• 1:04:14
  high school football season that I got myself in a stupid situation and I ended
• 1:04:20
  up getting fired there, not because I wasn't doing a good job, but
• 1:04:24
  because I basically became such a pain in the ass for management I almost forced
• 1:04:29
  them to fire me. And then I stayed in the town and wrote a
• 1:04:32
  book the next year, staying with the Stubenville High school football team for the
• 1:04:38
  entire calendar year, not just for the season, but for the entire calendar
• 1:04:42
  year, and wrote a book about it called Dynasty at the Crossroads, which
• 1:04:45
  was an extraordinary experience, and I think gave me a lot of insight into
• 1:04:50
  you know, football and where it was, where it's heading, and you
• 1:04:55
  know our culture, it's importance in our culture. I'm a guy who's never
• 1:04:59
  played a down of organized football in my life. I was a scrawny little
• 1:05:01
  kid growing up. My high school didn't have a football team. My college
• 1:05:05
  Georgetown barely had a football team, with all due respect to Steve Cortets who
• 1:05:10
  played on that football team, but Division III at the time at Georgetown.
• 1:05:15
  But you know that that was an extraordinary experience, and well it wasn't perfect.
• 1:05:20
  That was probably the job almost surely, that was the job that I
• 1:05:25
  loved the most and where I may have even had the most positive impact,
• 1:05:30
  not because of me, but because of the nature of the circumstances, the
• 1:05:35
  nature of the media at that time. Again going back to lack of fragmentation.
• 1:05:41
  You know, in a fragmented world, you can't have that experience.
• 1:05:44
  You can't have you can't galvanize the entire town of Woodsfield because you know,
• 1:05:49
  a cameraman from the NBC affiliate in Steubenville, which is a long way from
• 1:05:54
  Woodsfield, happens to show up. They're not today, I'm sure they wouldn't
• 1:05:58
  even give a damn well, because there's a bunch of people videotaping their games
• 1:06:02
  to put it on TikTok or YouTube and then probably have larger audiences. I
• 1:06:06
  mean, so it's just a completely different world now. But that is the
• 1:06:13
  job that I definitely had the most passion for and enjoyed the most. Malcolm
• 1:06:18
  writes, apologies if you've answered this before, but if you could hand pick
• 1:06:23
  the next president and your only options were Trump or Biden, who would you
• 1:06:28
  pick and why, ideally giving pros and cons for each and weighing those on
• 1:06:31
  value to the country. Secondly, do you plan on returning to Louisville this
• 1:06:35
  year for the PGA Championship. Ironically, I first discovered you ten years ago
• 1:06:40
  when I read the Tiger Woods obituary you wrote in the Leo newspaper where they
• 1:06:46
  were hosting the PGA Championship in Louisville. And I did attend that because at
• 1:06:51
  the time I was still very good friends with the Congressman from Louisville, John
• 1:06:55
  Yarmouth, who's a member at Valhalla where they host these events in louis Villa,
• 1:07:00
  where the pg Championship will take place. The short answer is no,
• 1:07:02
  because I haven't talked to John Yarmouth in years. I don't even know why.
• 1:07:05
  The last I heard from him was that he would tell me more about
• 1:07:11
  his decision to resign from office and not seek re election, and I said
• 1:07:15
  great, and then he never called me, never talked to me, and
• 1:07:18
  I haven't spoken to him since that he's now retired, and I have no
• 1:07:23
  idea why we we haven't spoken. I was irritated to telling him over his
• 1:07:27
  lack of courage publicly on COVID, and maybe that got back to him.
• 1:07:30
  I don't know, but I'm totally baffled by that. But very little chance
• 1:07:34
  I'll be at the PG Championship in Louisville. And as far as picking between
• 1:07:39
  Trump and Biden, luck, I have said on national television that this is
• 1:07:45
  essentially like trying to choose between a lobotomy and castration. You know, Trump
• 1:07:51
  is more like the lobotomy and Biden is more like the castration. I mean,
• 1:07:56
  how do you choose between those two things? There's there's no good choice
• 1:08:00
  here. I kind of already implied it earlier in this podcast episode. A
• 1:08:05
  lot of it, to me, depends on what the nature of the House
• 1:08:10
  and the Senate are. Right, If you're gonna, if you're gonna put
• 1:08:13
  a gun to my head and ask me to choose between Trump and Biden,
• 1:08:16
  I gotta know, all right, are Republicans controlling the House and or the
• 1:08:21
  Senate? If Republicans are controlling the House and the Senate. Even though that
• 1:08:27
  would really curtail a Biden slash Harris second term, so that, you know,
• 1:08:33
  would would diminish the potential negative impact of a Biden Harris second term.
• 1:08:41
  I might go with Trump simply because at least then I wouldn't be as fearful
• 1:08:48
  of Trump turning completely into Arnold Schwarzenegger two point zero. But there there's so
• 1:08:56
  many problems with both of them, so I really hesitate. I'm not dodging
• 1:09:01
  the question. I just don't know the answer. There's too many unknowns.
• 1:09:05
  And of course then there's also the issue of Okay, what's Trump's legal situation
• 1:09:11
  at that time, and it really I really go back to it's lobotomy versus
• 1:09:17
  castration. There's there is no good choice. I don't know which choice would
• 1:09:23
  be least bad. It depends on other circumstances, and you know, and
• 1:09:28
  so at this moment, I don't know what those circumstances are going to be,
• 1:09:31
  So I can't give a definitive answer, but I, you know,
• 1:09:35
  maybe maybe, like by just the smallest the margins. Okay, I agree
• 1:09:42
  with Trump at least seemingly on more things than I agree with Biden. But
• 1:09:45
  there's also other dangers with regard to a second Trump presidency, all right,
• 1:09:53
  some person who refers to themselves as regular guy. Any thoughts on the RNC
• 1:09:57
  and Trump's packs being nearly broke. Haley has reportedly outraised Trump lately, which
• 1:10:01
  tells you how divided Republicans are. With a conviction likely out of reach by
• 1:10:05
  November, the new strategy might just be to bankrupt Trump with legal expenses.
• 1:10:12
  Look, I think it's a big deal that the Repulican Party is basically bankrupt.
• 1:10:15
  I think that's probably why Ronald McDaniel is going to be the fall person
• 1:10:18
  for this at the GOP. I think it absolutely influences Donald Trump. I
• 1:10:25
  think it influences him in all sorts of ways. It's if not for all
• 1:10:29
  of his legal troubles and financial concerns, I wouldn't be so quick to presume
• 1:10:33
  that he's in some way selling out to bud Light, either for direct or
• 1:10:38
  indirect payment. So you have to see everything through that prism. Now.
• 1:10:44
  Normally, I would say that this puts Republicans at a huge disadvantage, not
• 1:10:48
  having nearly as much money as Democrats, and that's partially why I believe Democrats
• 1:10:54
  will win the House of Representatives and why I'm not convinced that Republicans are going
• 1:10:59
  to win the Senate, even though the map is very much in their favor.
• 1:11:02
  Money matters there. I don't think it matters as much on the presidential
• 1:11:08
  level because obviously Trump is known by one hundred percent of the population for better
• 1:11:13
  or for worse, and I you know, nationally, it's not like Trump's
• 1:11:17
  going to be hurting for coverage. It's not like he's not gonna be able
• 1:11:21
  to get his message out. Obviously he had more money that would help,
• 1:11:26
  and turning out the vote operations to cost money that does matter to a certain
• 1:11:30
  degree, but because Trump has a cult, I think that's mitigated. So
• 1:11:33
  Trump might be one of the very few candidates that doesn't really need that much
• 1:11:41
  money on a presidential level. But money's still going to matter when it comes
• 1:11:45
  to the House and the Senate, which then, of course leads me to
• 1:11:48
  the nightmare scenario where Trump ends up winning with a Democratic House and or a
• 1:11:54
  Democratic Senate. James asks by like James thinks I'm a racist. I cannot
• 1:12:00
  tell whether that I'm getting emails from one or two people with the same theme
• 1:12:05
  or these are people that have created other email addresses but I get a lot
• 1:12:10
  of email from people who think I'm a racist, but who seemingly listen to
• 1:12:13
  this podcast quite a bit. But James asks, both you and Donald Trump
• 1:12:18
  have stated that you're the least racist person that you know of what makes you
• 1:12:23
  say that and why do you think he says it? Now, it's an
• 1:12:26
  interesting tactic by James to lump me in with Donald Trump as if because and
• 1:12:32
  I'm just going to take his word for it that I have said that it
• 1:12:35
  sounds like something I might say because I think it's true, and I don't
• 1:12:39
  remember Trump saying it, but it does sound like something he might say as
• 1:12:43
  well. But we may have said it for very very different reasons. By
• 1:12:45
  the way, I don't think there's any evidence that Donald Trump is a racist.
• 1:12:49
  I mean, I've been very clear that I don't like Donald Trump,
• 1:12:54
  I low him, I don't trust him. But I've never seen any sign
• 1:12:58
  that Donald Trump is a racist. But I'm not to speak for him on
• 1:13:00
  that. And answering the question, Okay, you know, why do you
• 1:13:04
  think you're not racist? I mean, it's kind of like, you know,
• 1:13:08
  when did you stop beating your wife? There's no possible good answer to
• 1:13:13
  that, because and this is one of the many problems we have with race
• 1:13:15
  in this country. We've made it in an impossible question to answer without stepping
• 1:13:21
  in it because we've taken away all of the ways that a white guy like
• 1:13:28
  me could possibly prove that you're not racist. But I'll try to answer it
• 1:13:33
  anyway because I don't care, because I know I'm not a racist. But
• 1:13:36
  I'll just lay out some facts. First of all, my belief is here's
• 1:13:41
  what racism is. Racism is that you either believe and or treat people differently.
• 1:13:46
  Believe that they're different, you know, from from a fundamental value standpoint,
• 1:13:50
  or you treat them differently based upon their race. That's to me the
• 1:13:56
  definition of racism. So I treat it everybody equally. I believe everyone to
• 1:14:02
  be equal regardless of their race. Now does that mean we're the same?
• 1:14:08
  No, I think there are all sorts of different differences between the races,
• 1:14:12
  which most of which are fantastic. I think it's great. I mean,
• 1:14:16
  this would be an incredibly boring country if we were all white people. I
• 1:14:23
  mean so so, diversity when it comes to racial divisions, especially when it
• 1:14:29
  comes to cultures, is actually a good thing. It provides different perspectives,
• 1:14:35
  and a lot of it is very fun, a lot of it's very interesting.
• 1:14:41
  I mean, black people bring an incredible amount to American culture. We
• 1:14:45
  would be a far worse country if we did not have black people from all
• 1:14:50
  different different perspectives. I mean, I'll give you one example that's gonna I'm
• 1:14:56
  sure it's going to sound bad to some people, but for various res I
• 1:15:00
  have been to I think four different quote unquote black funerals in my life,
• 1:15:06
  including Johnny Cochran's, by the way, which was rather strange considering my view
• 1:15:11
  of the OJ Simpson case. In my view of Johnny Cochrane, if you've
• 1:15:15
  never been to a black funeral, I cannot recommend it more highly. Now
• 1:15:19
  obviously you don't want to go. Somebody close to you died. And these
• 1:15:24
  were all very different circumstances why I was at these different Black funerals. But
• 1:15:29
  a black funeral is completely different from, for instance, a white Catholic,
• 1:15:33
  which is my tradition, a white Catholic funeral, completely different event, and
• 1:15:40
  I think that's great. I think in that way, diversity is fantastic.
• 1:15:45
  And I treat everybody equally. I want everyone to be treated equally under the
• 1:15:51
  law and by society. I'm huge into equal opportunity. I hate equity of
• 1:15:58
  outcome because it's unfair too, because it puts every single person of color under
• 1:16:04
  inherent suspicion for everything that they have accomplished, which I cannot stand. I
• 1:16:11
  think it is insulting to black people, or minorities, or people of color,
• 1:16:15
  whatever you want to call it, that they can't compete on an even
• 1:16:18
  playing field. Just because we do not live in a perfect society does not
• 1:16:23
  mean that we need to embrace fake equity in an effort to try to pretend
• 1:16:30
  that we have made all this progress when it comes to race. I've said
• 1:16:33
  many many times, we were actually on a pretty decent path towards true equality
• 1:16:40
  of opportunity, and then liberals panicked and decide to blow up the entire system
• 1:16:46
  in order to get contrived equity, which now has broken the entire the entire
• 1:16:53
  machinery. The entire system is now broken permanently. We can never get to
• 1:17:00
  a colored blind society even close to it, because liberals panicked, and they
• 1:17:05
  panicked I believe out of their racism. I believe it was their racism that
• 1:17:11
  caused them to panic. As oh my god, look at this. Black
• 1:17:15
  people aren't achieving total equality. We need to institute equity because apparently they're not
• 1:17:21
  capable. This is in the liberal mind, they're not capable of competing on
• 1:17:28
  an equal playing field. No, my response that would be, it's just
• 1:17:31
  going to take some time. You can't do this overnight. And there are
• 1:17:38
  differences in all sorts of ways between the cultures and all different aspects of every
• 1:17:46
  racial ethnicity, including economics, which plays a huge role in achievement. The
• 1:17:53
  idea that somehow, you know, we're now somehow getting to this idea where
• 1:17:57
  if you come from a well to do family, that that's a negative,
• 1:18:00
  especially when it comes to college admissions. Well, no, I'm sorry.
• 1:18:04
  There's a reason why that family, in most cases is well to do.
• 1:18:09
  Very few people just hit the lottery. A lot of it's achievement. A
• 1:18:14
  lot of it is an indication that there's something good going on in that family,
• 1:18:18
  whether it's in the genes or the work ethic or whatever it is,
• 1:18:23
  and that is going to be passed down to their kids. So this idea
• 1:18:28
  that somehow economics is completely taken out of this equation is just absurd. In
• 1:18:33
  fact, it's not just been taken out of the equation, it's been turned
• 1:18:38
  on its head. It's exactly opposite of reality. So it infuriates me that
• 1:18:44
  we are now treating black people almost as infants, that they're not able to
• 1:18:48
  compete on an equal playing field, and that we have to do this contrived
• 1:18:53
  equity. But you know, look, there's no way to answer that question
• 1:18:57
  are you a racist without doing things that been deemed to be saying things that
• 1:19:00
  are deemed to be racist. You know, I could tell you that my
• 1:19:02
  best friend, you know, when as I was a kid, got kid
• 1:19:06
  by the guy the name of James Sewing. Jimmy Sewing happened to be a
• 1:19:11
  black kid, and I think I helped his life quite a bit. When
• 1:19:15
  I was part of the Big Brothers, Big Sisters programming in Louisville, Kentucky,
• 1:19:19
  my kid was a black kid. MIKEL. Wilson spent a day with
• 1:19:23
  me at the beginning as a radio talk show host in Louisville, and he
• 1:19:28
  told me almost broke my heart, said this was the best day of my
• 1:19:30
  life. Mister Ziggler. I talked about it that moment at my trial in
• 1:19:35
  Louisville, Kentucky my defamation trial because I'd gotten a very strong relationship with mikel
• 1:19:42
  By the way, Mike cal fifteen years later contacted me on Facebook and we
• 1:19:45
  did an interview together on the uh you Know the World according to Zig podcast.
• 1:19:51
  You can probably find it if you're if you're interested. You know,
• 1:19:55
  I've been friends with Frank o'harris, friends with Larry Wilmore, gl buddies with
• 1:20:00
  him, comedian and television actor and host. You know, if you look
• 1:20:04
  at my wall in my office, I think I have pictures of seventeen or
• 1:20:11
  eighteen athletes with their autographs. I think five of them are black. You
• 1:20:17
  know, two or three of those pictures are Tiger Woods. I had a
• 1:20:20
  freaking Tiger Woods is God dot com website many many years ago. Probably the
• 1:20:27
  biggest influence of any celebrity in my life was was Tiger Woods. Some for
• 1:20:31
  the negative, but mostly for the positive. So I don't know how you
• 1:20:36
  possibly answer that question, but I know I'm not a racist, and I
• 1:20:43
  understand that the left has created rules to try to make people like me sound
• 1:20:47
  racist because that's the only way they win is if people like me are afraid
• 1:20:55
  to speak the truth about what's going on in this country with the guard to
• 1:20:58
  race, and it's negative towards white people, and it's negative towards black people.
• 1:21:02
  And my god, I can't believe Asian people aren't in the streets rioting
• 1:21:06
  over or at least demonstrating it's not really like them to riot, but at
• 1:21:12
  least demonstrating over some of the treatment Asian people get, especially when it comes
• 1:21:15
  to college admissions. And so I just can't stand what's happened in this country
• 1:21:20
  with regard to race. And I, yeah, it does it bother me
• 1:21:25
  that people like me get misinterpreted and somehow races, especially because you know,
• 1:21:29
  I'm a white male. I'm fully aware that as a white male I have
• 1:21:32
  no credibility on this issue. I think I should because I think my experience
• 1:21:38
  is pretty diverse. There's not that many people. I know. This is
• 1:21:42
  not consistent with my image to whatever extent that image exists, you know,
• 1:21:46
  as a guy who's a golfer and you know, has lived a pretty well
• 1:21:51
  to do life that somehow I'm connected to the black community. I'm not pretending
• 1:21:56
  I am, but I have spent a lot more time in the black community
• 1:22:00
  various different cities in which I've lived and spending time with black people than probably
• 1:22:04
  anybody else I know from my demographic. That's just a fact, and I've
• 1:22:11
  enjoyed it. I think it's fantastic. I think black people bring an enormous
• 1:22:15
  amount to our culture, as I've already said. So that's probably longer than
• 1:22:18
  I needed to go. But that issue particularly bothers me, Brian, I
• 1:22:24
  didn't figure out until recently people are paid to be on news programs. How
• 1:22:28
  lucrative is it to be an expert that appears on CNN, MSNBC, News
• 1:22:32
  Nation, etc. Are you paid for your News Nation appearances? Okay,
• 1:22:38
  no, I am not paid for my News Nation appearances. Some people are,
• 1:22:43
  and yes, a lot of guests on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News
• 1:22:47
  Channel are paid, but they are generally called contributors, and contributors are basically
• 1:22:56
  people like me, except they are either celebrities and or not straight white males.
• 1:23:03
  And I mean that mostly seriously. You know, if I was a
• 1:23:08
  hot female, I'm quite sure that you know, either would be News Nation
• 1:23:14
  or somebody else would pay me to come on and do commentary. But someply
• 1:23:20
  and demand. There's plenty of other straight white males who are more famous than
• 1:23:27
  I am that are willing and able to do this. So it's all a
• 1:23:30
  supply and demand situation, and some of these contributor gigs are ridiculously lucrative,
• 1:23:38
  especially given the changing nature of cable news. I don't know if that's going
• 1:23:42
  to finally go by the wayside or not, but some people get those contributors
• 1:23:46
  can make certainly into the six figures and maybe even significantly six figures if you're
• 1:23:53
  a celebrity. Celebrity really is the most important thing, and then equity diversity
• 1:24:00
  is probably secondary to that. But no, I don't get paid whenever I
• 1:24:02
  go on News Nation, and generally what happens there is they will contact me.
• 1:24:10
  They'll say, you know, Dan is doing this particular topic. He
• 1:24:15
  or one of the producers thinks that you might have an interesting take on it.
• 1:24:17
  What is your take? And I'll give them my take, and I'll
• 1:24:21
  give them my availability. And sometimes if it's a topic that I don't like,
• 1:24:28
  I won't do it, although that rarely happens because Dan knows me so
• 1:24:31
  well. I think Dan pretty much knows with like ninety five percent certitude that
• 1:24:38
  this is a subject on which Zig's going to have an interesting take, so
• 1:24:44
  that doesn't happen that often, and it's pretty much like clockwork. About every
• 1:24:47
  other week they'll ask me on and I do it mainly out of loyalty to
• 1:24:53
  Dan. It doesn't really provide me much other value. I mean, heck,
• 1:24:58
  it's actually a pain in the ass for my kids because when I have
• 1:25:02
  this makeshift studio in our playroom, and in order for the internet connection to
• 1:25:10
  be reliable, the kids have to stay off the streaming services and stay off
• 1:25:14
  their computers, so they hate that. They couldn't care less than I'm on
• 1:25:18
  television. In fact, they usually mock me for for whatever reason, or
• 1:25:23
  how I looked, or how I had the earbuds in or whatever. So
• 1:25:27
  there's there's no benefit at all to me actually doing it other than you know,
• 1:25:33
  sometimes it's fun depending on the subject matter. And I enjoy going on
• 1:25:40
  with Dan because Dan and I just have this weird ability to know where each
• 1:25:45
  other is coming from. It's just a we have a very good chemistry.
• 1:25:48
  So it's very much like a dance whenever I'm on there. I mean,
• 1:25:53
  you know, we don't even have to to outline what we're going to do.
• 1:25:58
  There's no conversation at all before the interview. None. Zero, there's
• 1:26:02
  zero communication between host and interviewee. But we know each other. We know
• 1:26:09
  the subject well enough to know we know exactly where the other person's gonna go.
• 1:26:13
  And I've done that show I think about thirty times, and we've never
• 1:26:18
  had an awkward moment that I really can remember, which is pretty extraordinary given
• 1:26:24
  the fact that there's no rehearsal, no preparation. You know, it's done
• 1:26:28
  live, there's no retakes or anything like that. It's pretty pretty interesting.
• 1:26:33
  But there's no payment involved, at least not for me, because again,
• 1:26:38
  I'm not a celebrity and I'm not a hot white female. Tom Asks,
• 1:26:44
  was Ben Shapiro coming out with a rap song a deciding factor in you going
• 1:26:48
  quote off the grid? I think it is for me. Not a real
• 1:26:56
  question there, but I laughed enough to think that that was worthy of share
• 1:27:00
  on the podcast. Hey, kudos to Ben Shapiro forraving the number one rap
• 1:27:03
  song in the country. That was pretty extraordinary. He put out a very
• 1:27:09
  funny post on Twitter retiring from his rap career after I think ten days at
• 1:27:15
  number one or something like that, you know, good for him. I
• 1:27:18
  think I thought that was great. You know, I like Ben in some
• 1:27:25
  ways, but he frustrates the hell out of me because I wish he was
• 1:27:29
  Certainly when it comes to Desanta's versus Trump, I wish he had been a
• 1:27:32
  bit more outspoken. I'm you know, I'm grading on a curve because he
• 1:27:38
  was more outspoken than anybody else with a lot to lose, so he gets
• 1:27:42
  some credit for that. He's very, very smart. I think sometimes he
• 1:27:46
  has some blind spots in the culture, like he had a complete blind spot
• 1:27:50
  when it came to the Barbie movie. But by and large, you know,
• 1:27:56
  on many issues, especially legal issues, I do tend to try Ben,
• 1:28:00
  and you could do a lot worse than Ben Shapiro. And if you're
• 1:28:02
  not going to become a subscriber to this podcast, if and when we go
• 1:28:06
  to the subscriber model, you know, if you no longer have access to
• 1:28:11
  this podcast in the next couple of weeks, I would say Ben would probably
• 1:28:15
  be the person to go to because he and I have similar views on a
• 1:28:18
  lot of things, and he's very, very smart and has a lot more
• 1:28:23
  resources to do his show with than I do. That's for sure. Blake
• 1:28:28
  says, when I got red pilled ten years ago. These four people most
• 1:28:33
  shaped my thinking Andrew Breitbart and Coulter, David Horowitz, and Thomas Sole.
• 1:28:39
  And when I got my second red pill, it was solely from you.
• 1:28:43
  I was heartbroken by what you said about Breitbart and Coulter in a previous episode.
• 1:28:48
  Since he was a married man, I indicated that I believe that they
• 1:28:54
  had had an affair together. A two part question, Number one, are
• 1:28:59
  you one hundred percent certain that Breitbart and Culture had a sexual affair? To
• 1:29:03
  what's your take on David Horowitz? To me, he provided the most direct
• 1:29:08
  way to understanding the left. All right, Look, as far as the
• 1:29:13
  first part of that question, do I know with one hundred percent certainty that
• 1:29:19
  Andrew Breitbart and and Culter had an affair? No, but I'm as close
• 1:29:26
  as you can get to one hundred percent with actually without actually having witnessed it.
• 1:29:30
  Look, the facts are this as I know them, and the timeline
• 1:29:33
  here is kind of important. But as I've said many times before, Andrew
• 1:29:38
  Breitbart and I were very very close before we had a falling out about a
• 1:29:43
  year or so before his unfortunate, untimely, tragic death, And when we
• 1:29:49
  were very close on multiple occasions we hung out with a Culter together and Culture
• 1:29:58
  obviously extremely well known Conserve commentator. Now, one of the times that we
• 1:30:03
  hung out together was at Sea Pack and we were all out with a bunch
• 1:30:10
  of people, and we were all packed into this very small booth in a
• 1:30:14
  diner, and I'm not exaggerating literally, and Culter spent most of the night
• 1:30:20
  on my lap, not because of any sort of sexual situation, although I
• 1:30:26
  was kind of wondering what was going on, but mainly because there was just
• 1:30:30
  no room, and you know, she really had no inhibitions at all about
• 1:30:35
  sitting on my lap, and she weighed almost nothing, so it really wasn't
• 1:30:39
  a problem, and it was obvious that she and Andrew were very close to
• 1:30:45
  each other, but I had no suspicions at the time that something was going
• 1:30:49
  on there, and nothing ever happened between me and Ann Coulter, although there
• 1:30:54
  was another time when Anne was brought into my makeshift studio at KFI by Andrew
• 1:31:02
  Breitbart. So Andrew Breitbart was kind of hosting and Culter on a trip to
• 1:31:06
  Los Angeles, and they both came in to the studio that I had had
• 1:31:12
  been sent off into exile as KFI was trying to get rid of me on
• 1:31:17
  the other side of town in a really small room. It was hell.
• 1:31:20
  They purposely tried to get me to quit, and I wouldn't do it until
• 1:31:24
  my contract was out. Anyway, Andrew brought and Culter into the studio,
• 1:31:29
  which was embarrassing as hell, but she handled it well and we did an
• 1:31:32
  interview together, and my now wife was listed to that interview and got extremely
• 1:31:40
  jealous. Now, my wife at the time was a very jealous, insecure
• 1:31:44
  person, and she trust me. She's no longer jealous of anything that happens
• 1:31:48
  with me, but she became convinced, much to my shock, that there
• 1:31:53
  was something going on between and Culter and me, which there was not.
• 1:32:00
  After that studio interview, the three of us went out to get something to
• 1:32:06
  drink or something to eat, and I left early and I left the two
• 1:32:15
  of them together alone, and I remember feeling at the time like it was
• 1:32:23
  a bit odd, like is there something going on there just the way that
• 1:32:29
  they decided to stay together after I left, But I didn't think that much
• 1:32:33
  of it. And then after Andrew died, a person that was very close
• 1:32:41
  to me and very close to Andrew Breitbart, maybe even closer to Andrew Breitbart
• 1:32:46
  than I was, and the two of us got into a conversation, and
• 1:32:54
  this person made it very clear that Andrew had confessed to them that he had
• 1:33:01
  had an affair with Ann Culter. And this was not This is a person
• 1:33:05
  that's very reliable. The nature of the story was not bragging at all.
• 1:33:10
  In fact, it was in part because this person had also had an affair
• 1:33:15
  and that they were sharing their stories together. This person is not a public
• 1:33:20
  well, not a very public person. They're not a famous person, and
• 1:33:27
  the nature of the story felt very credible to me. And when I looked
• 1:33:32
  back on my experiences with Andrew and and together, it kind of all clicked,
• 1:33:39
  like, oh, okay, this this makes a lot more sense.
• 1:33:44
  So I don't have one hundred percent knowledge of this, but it's somewhere in
• 1:33:49
  the nineties. And look, Andrew's been dead now for quite a long time,
• 1:33:57
  you know. I think the conservative movement misses him. I really wish
• 1:34:00
  that he and I had been able to have a reconciliation before he died.
• 1:34:05
  I think both of us anticipated that there would always be time for that,
• 1:34:11
  That's my guess, and it just never happened because he just up and died
• 1:34:16
  suddenly. And there may be people who think that this is wrong for me
• 1:34:21
  to divulge this information. It's not out of any sort of vindictiveness. It's
• 1:34:30
  just the truth. And I think it's an important truth because I think it
• 1:34:32
  reveals a lot about the incestuous nature of the conservative media and how the conservative
• 1:34:41
  media is broken in a lot of ways. And I have no idea what
• 1:34:45
  was going on in Andrew Breitbart's marriage. I do think Andrew was under an
• 1:34:50
  awful lot of pressure, a lot of economic pressure. I mean, I
• 1:34:55
  know that Matt Drudge had Andrew under his thought and scared the crap out of
• 1:35:00
  Andrew on multiple occasions by cutting off traffic to Breitbart dot com. And Andrew
• 1:35:06
  was running the Drudge Report. That's what made Andrew famous, gave him power.
• 1:35:11
  And you know, Andrew was living in a very big house in a
• 1:35:14
  very expensive area with a wife whose father was a Hollywood star. And Andrew
• 1:35:20
  needed to make sure that the money kept coming in and that had a major
• 1:35:26
  impact on a lot of the things that Andrew did publicly. And look,
• 1:35:31
  you know, everyone has their own issues in their marriage. I don't know,
• 1:35:34
  you know, I have no idea whether that was morally wrong in Andrew's
• 1:35:40
  situation to do that, But I do think it happened, and I'm not
• 1:35:45
  just making stuff up or you know, wildly speculating as far as David Horowitz
• 1:35:50
  is concerned. I was very close to David Horowitz and had a lot of
• 1:35:55
  respect for David Horowitz for several years. But stop me if you've heard this
• 1:35:59
  before. He and I had a falling out and I can't even remember what
• 1:36:03
  the falling out was about. It must have had to do with Trump,
• 1:36:06
  because in my memory, that was one of those relationships that went sideways when
• 1:36:13
  Trump became the Republican nominee in twenty sixteen. But David had, you know,
• 1:36:17
  invited me to some of his at the time very prestigious events, including
• 1:36:24
  one in Palm Beach, Florida, which was a very high profile deal for
• 1:36:30
  conservative commentators. And I had spoken at his events in Los Angeles on a
• 1:36:36
  couple of different occasions. I'd introduced him at events, I've had him on
• 1:36:41
  my radio show before. You know, I liked him, smart guy,
• 1:36:45
  ballsy guy, a bit of an egomaniac. But that's kind of part for
• 1:36:49
  the course in this kind of business that this is. But it just felt
• 1:36:56
  to me like when he sold out like everybody else did to Trump, that
• 1:37:00
  this was very much against what he claimed to stand for. And so we
• 1:37:04
  haven't had any contact in many years, and I can't again remember exactly when
• 1:37:11
  or exactly how or why that falling out happened. But you know, look,
• 1:37:15
  I don't have any huge ill will towards David Horowitz. My biggest takeaway
• 1:37:23
  from him though, is that very much an ego maniac, and while he
• 1:37:30
  was somewhat of a cause guy, not as much of a cause guy as
• 1:37:33
  he pretended to be. But you know, look, if you like David
• 1:37:36
  Horowitz, that's fine. And and but it's also fine that you like Ann
• 1:37:42
  Culter and think good things about Andrew Breitbart, because both of them have you
• 1:37:45
  know, Andrew did and and Ann still does a lot of good things.
• 1:37:48
  I mean, Anne is now one of Trump's biggest critics. She probably deserves
• 1:37:55
  more credit than anybody for being a former Trump sick of finn essent. I
• 1:38:00
  mean, she wrote a book called in Trump We Trust, and now you
• 1:38:02
  know, she tweeted the other day that about the best thing that Trump can
• 1:38:04
  do for the conservative movement is to die that's almost a direct quote from something
• 1:38:10
  that she tweeted. So anyway, the situation is that I have no problem
• 1:38:15
  and I love Thomas Soul too, so I have no problem blake with you
• 1:38:19
  having trust in those particular people. Tony asks, what do you think is
• 1:38:25
  the best path for DeSantis to become president in twenty twenty eight? Would you
• 1:38:30
  advise him being Trump's running mate if offered, Well, it's kind of funny.
• 1:38:36
  I don't know if I did this on purpose or subconsciously to put this
• 1:38:40
  question after what I just said about and Culture. But and Culture probably has
• 1:38:45
  the only path for DeSantis to become president in twenty twenty eight, and that
• 1:38:49
  is for him to die, and he has to die out of office,
• 1:38:55
  and I mean that almost literally for DeSantis to have a clear path. That's
• 1:39:00
  the There are a lot of problems, a lot of hurdles for a potential
• 1:39:04
  DeSantis presidency in twenty twenty eight, And the first is you got to get
• 1:39:10
  rid of the Trump problem. And if Trump becomes president again, then DeSantis
• 1:39:16
  is essentially blocked because whoever Trump's vice presidential nominee is would then then become vice
• 1:39:25
  president. And unless they had a massive falling out, and even then,
• 1:39:30
  you know, there wouldn't be a clear path. It would be pretty obvious
• 1:39:34
  that that vice presidential nominee, depending on who they are, would be the
• 1:39:39
  heir apparent. They would be the nominee in twenty twenty eight. And if
• 1:39:44
  Trump doesn't win the presidency, then you know, one you might have a
• 1:39:49
  problem with whoever he picked as his VP, like if he picked you know,
• 1:39:54
  a rock star, Like he's not going to do this, But let's
• 1:39:56
  pretend he picked the vag a fake Obama Swami as his VP, which he's
• 1:40:01
  not going to do because he's too smart to do that, and he understands
• 1:40:04
  that the fake is a snake and that he may take over MAGA, Inc.
• 1:40:09
  But let's pretend that it was a fake Obama Swamy. And let's say
• 1:40:15
  Obama Swamy did a great job on the campaign trail and they ran a good
• 1:40:19
  race and they almost low. They almost won, but they lost in a
• 1:40:23
  contested, rigged election. Right, the fake Obama Swamy would be very formidable
• 1:40:30
  in twenty twenty eight because of that blessing of being Trump's VP pick. So
• 1:40:38
  that would be a problem. But there would also be the problem of Trump
• 1:40:42
  running again in twenty twenty eight. Now, he'd probably have to stay out
• 1:40:45
  of prison. He'd obviously have to stay alive. But both of those two
• 1:40:48
  things are quite possible. And I know this sounds crazy, but if Trump
• 1:40:55
  runs again in twenty twenty eight, assuming he's reasonably healthy and out of prison,
• 1:41:01
  then I don't see how DeSantis can run against him again, at least
• 1:41:06
  not successfully. In a rational world, this would be preposterous. But I
• 1:41:12
  really think that that is a very likely scenario. It's part of why I
• 1:41:16
  have said it is so devastating that Trump not only won the nomination, but
• 1:41:21
  he won it without breaking a sweat because there's no off ramp here. The
• 1:41:27
  only off ramp, as Megan Kelly has said, is essentially for Trump to
• 1:41:32
  die, and he has to die out of office for there to be a
• 1:41:36
  path that is clear cut for DeSantis to be the twenty twenty eight Republican nominee
• 1:41:45
  and win, because those are two very different things. So is it possible.
• 1:41:50
  Yeah, but there's a lot of things that have to happen or not
• 1:41:54
  happen that are out of DeSantis's control. It's also important to point out that
• 1:41:59
  by twenty twenty eight, you know DeSantis will be unemployed, no longer the
• 1:42:02
  governor Florida. Now. Probably my worst prediction or analysis of the Republican primary
• 1:42:12
  process was I thought that incumbency would be an advantage for DeSantis because it would
• 1:42:18
  be he would be seen as powerful and having influence and be able to get
• 1:42:24
  things done while Trump is playing golf in mar A Lago and doing nothing.
• 1:42:29
  That turned out to be totally wrong, and I actually think incumbency was a
• 1:42:32
  great hindrance to the DeSantis campaign. Was it determinative, Probably not, but
• 1:42:39
  it was an absolute hindrance And he won't have to worry about that in twenty
• 1:42:44
  twenty eight, so that might be an advantage. And you know, he's
• 1:42:46
  clearly created enough celebrity for himself where he would be taken seriously. Would he
• 1:42:51
  be able to raise nearly as much money in twenty twenty eight, Well that
• 1:42:56
  would depend on a lot of the circumstances. But look, I think there
• 1:43:00
  is a theoretical path. I think that getting out after Iowa and saving some
• 1:43:04
  face and not being humiliated and you know, checking the box and his endorsement
• 1:43:10
  to Trump. I think he has maintained as much viability for twenty twenty eight
• 1:43:15
  as he could have under the circumstances that he faced, all right, but
• 1:43:21
  it's still very much uphill with a lot of hurdles. And the biggest hurdle
• 1:43:28
  is what do you do about Donald Trump? How do you solve a problem
• 1:43:30
  like Maria? As they said in the Sound of Music, And the only
• 1:43:35
  real way for this to be solved is to Trump. Is for Trump to
• 1:43:40
  die out of office. You know, I don't know when that has to
• 1:43:44
  be, but it has to be when he's not in office, so there's
• 1:43:46
  not a vice presidential pick to take over. And then obviously they're the nominee
• 1:43:53
  in twenty twenty eight. As far as the running made situation, Trump is
• 1:43:57
  not going to offer the Santas the vice presidential nomination. There's just no world
• 1:44:03
  in which that makes any sense. He's never even come close to himplying he
• 1:44:06
  would do that. There's no sign in the polling now that the Santas is
• 1:44:12
  out of the race that a significant number of the Santa supporters are holding back
• 1:44:17
  in saying that they'll vote for Trump. So there's no there's nothing to be
• 1:44:21
  gained there. The polling indicates that there's been no change at all. If
• 1:44:27
  anything, Trump has gained a little bit in most of the polls, except
• 1:44:31
  for the one Quinnipiac poll. But Trump's standing in national polls against Biden has
• 1:44:35
  only improved now that he's essentially won the race and the Santas is gone.
• 1:44:41
  So there's no political imperative. And from an ego standpoint, Trump would never
• 1:44:45
  do that. He doesn't care that the Santas would be the best person to
• 1:44:48
  do the job. That's not how Trump looks at this. This is about
• 1:44:51
  through his own self interest, and he's terrified of DeSantis. The Santas would
• 1:44:58
  outshine him, and you know, would would create a whole series of problems
• 1:45:04
  for Trump, at least in the prison through which he sees the world.
• 1:45:11
  And so there's no way that's going to be offered. If it was offered,
• 1:45:14
  I don't think I would take it if I was DeSantis, unless I
• 1:45:19
  was positive that Trump was going to win. That's the only scenario that makes
• 1:45:25
  any sense. And I don't know how you could possibly get to that point.
• 1:45:29
  I mean, maybe, you know, Biden's numbers collapse further if if
• 1:45:31
  his health continues to decline as it seems to. But I think this is
• 1:45:36
  an academic discussion because I don't think there's any real chance that Donald Trump is
• 1:45:43
  going to ask Ron De Santis to be his running mate. Someone who is
• 1:45:48
  anonymous, one of those anonymous Twitter accounts asks any thoughts on the validity of
• 1:45:56
  Nicky Haley having reported affairs. I have no knowledge of any Nikki Hally affairs,
• 1:46:04
  and my inclination is that they're not true. These rumors to the extent
• 1:46:10
  that they exist, which I haven't really heard them from any reputable source.
• 1:46:14
  I think that this is an area where I think this happens on both sides
• 1:46:19
  of the gender divide, but probably more for women in politics than men.
• 1:46:25
  I mean, good looking men I think are kind of presumed to have affairs.
• 1:46:30
  Oftentimes that's true in politics, but I think that women who women politicians
• 1:46:35
  who are attractive are almost always hit with these kind of rumors, and it's
• 1:46:43
  mainly because they're physically attractive enough to have affairs. I don't think that's fair.
• 1:46:49
  I don't think that's right. I don't think it's based in anything real.
• 1:46:54
  I think ugly people can have affairs just as much as attractive people can
• 1:46:58
  have them. Maybe they have fewer options, but they might have the same
• 1:47:00
  desire. In fact, in some ways they might have more desire for the
• 1:47:03
  validation of having an affair. So I have no reason to believe any of
• 1:47:10
  this is true. I haven't seen it from any kind of even remotely reputable
• 1:47:14
  source. Unlike the rumors or reported affair between the governor Noam in South Dakota
• 1:47:23
  and Corey Lewandowski, the former twenty sixteen Trump campaign manager, that's kind of
• 1:47:29
  been substantiated. That's been reported. It's more than a rumor, And I
• 1:47:33
  tend to believe Christy Nome and Corey Lewandowski affair, which is why I'm a
• 1:47:40
  bit confused as to why Nome is still being mentioned by Trump as a top
• 1:47:44
  potential VP pick. But I have no reason to believe that that's the case
• 1:47:48
  surrounding Nicki Haley, and I think it's probably just because she's pretty attractive.
• 1:47:53
  Susan asks, you don't talk much about RFK Junior. What are your thoughts
• 1:47:58
  on him and his role in the campaign. I did actually talk a bit
• 1:48:00
  about him in the last episode. I think this question was asked before that
• 1:48:05
  episode was released. Look, I like o RFK Junior on very limited topics,
• 1:48:13
  very limited. I get the desire as a COVID contrarian to support somebody
• 1:48:18
  who is in that camp that wants COVID accountability. But that's about it.
• 1:48:24
  Other than that, I can't stand RFK Junior. He is a nut job.
• 1:48:29
  He's a socialist. He's an environmental extremist to the extreme. He was
• 1:48:35
  not nearly as good on COVID as is now perceived in many conservative circles.
• 1:48:41
  He tweeted in March to twenty twenty that lockdowns were working and seemed to be
• 1:48:45
  supporting climate related lockdowns. You know, he was a heroin addict for a
• 1:48:50
  long time in his life that may have either directly or indirectly caused the suicide
• 1:48:56
  of his first wife. He is more of a philanderer than apparently even Bill
• 1:49:00
  Clinton was, if you care about that, I don't know if anyone still
• 1:49:03
  does care about that. If his name wasn't Kennedy, no one would even
• 1:49:08
  consider him to be a presidential option. And I think as far as his
• 1:49:14
  role in the campaign is concerned, I think, as I referenced in the
• 1:49:16
  last episode, the Trump people are in a little bit of a pickle here.
• 1:49:21
  They need to separate themselves from RFK Junior because they cannot have any segment
• 1:49:28
  of their voting populace think that RFK Junior is a viable other option. There
• 1:49:36
  is a lot of crossover, especially among the anti vax people, between people
• 1:49:42
  who would be naturally Trump voters or potentially are of K Junior voters. I'm
• 1:49:49
  very certain about that, not just from the polling data, but from anecdotal
• 1:49:54
  evidence as well. And I think that these rumors that RFK Junior was approached,
• 1:49:59
  which I don't believe, about a potential vice presidential slot in the on
• 1:50:03
  the Trump ticket are very dangerous to the Trump team and I think they need
• 1:50:08
  to quash that at all costs. I think they need to attack r Okay
• 1:50:13
  Junior to a certain degree and paint him as a far left socialist environmental whack
• 1:50:19
  job so that he doesn't peel more votes from them than he peals from Joe
• 1:50:26
  Biden. As far as his overall impact, you know, I've seen pulling
• 1:50:30
  down in both directions. I think marginally right now, he probably hurts Biden
• 1:50:36
  more than he hurts Trump. But for the reasons I just stated, that
• 1:50:40
  could change, and that's something that the Trump people need to be careful about
• 1:50:45
  and concerned about. Justin asks, can you elaborate on the content of Barbara
• 1:50:53
  McQuary. That's Mike McQuary's ex wife, Barbara McQuary's alleged note. Pat All
• 1:51:00
  right, now this gets really deep into the with the benefit of Hindsight podcast,
• 1:51:05
  and so I hesitate to talk about this a lot. I did address
• 1:51:11
  this in the with the benefit of Hindsight podcast to really quickly bring people into
• 1:51:16
  some semblance of being up to date on what this is. So one of
• 1:51:21
  the stranger moments, and there have been so many incredibly bizarre things that happened
• 1:51:27
  with regard to the whole Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky scandal, is that
• 1:51:32
  the mcqueries, Mike mcquery, the main witness in the case, and his
• 1:51:35
  wife got divorced. When they got divorced, they sold the house. And
• 1:51:41
  when the house was purchased, it was purchased by a Penn State fan.
• 1:51:45
  And when they walked in, this is my understanding of the story, when
• 1:51:49
  they walked in to the new house, there was I guess you would call
• 1:51:54
  it a notepad on what seemed to be either the kitchen table or some someplace
• 1:52:00
  pretty prominently within the kitchen. Now, who knows why it was left there,
• 1:52:06
  you know, was it left there on purpose. Was it by accident?
• 1:52:10
  Who knows. But on this notepad are a lot of thoughts about Mike
• 1:52:16
  mcquery, and they're extremely negative. This is not surprising given that they're in
• 1:52:24
  the middle of a divorce and Mike clearly was cheating on her, And you
• 1:52:30
  know, there's all sorts of reasons why people get divorced, and I've listened,
• 1:52:33
  the divorce causes a lot of anger. A lot of what's on that
• 1:52:38
  notepad deals with Mike's lack of credibility as a human and the fact that he's
• 1:52:44
  a liar and nothing he says should be trusted to my recollection. There's nothing
• 1:52:49
  on the notepad specifically saying that she thinks Mike lied about Sandusky. But we
• 1:52:58
  were never able to one hundred percent prove, at least not to my satisfaction,
• 1:53:03
  that this came from Barbara mcquery. There's no other logical way this could
• 1:53:13
  have happened. And I have to say the notepad is not written in a
• 1:53:17
  way first of all, that could have been faked' that's not it's not fake,
• 1:53:24
  but it's very weird. I mean, it is extremely extreme of consciousness.
• 1:53:29
  It you know, Barbara mcquery is a doctor, I believe uh and
• 1:53:33
  and I mean the writing is all over the notepad. It almost looks like
• 1:53:38
  something that a child might do, but it's not written by a child.
• 1:53:44
  And so because of the fact that you can't prove it's from Barbara McQuary and
• 1:53:48
  you can't really prove what it really means, nobody in the you know,
• 1:53:55
  among the group of people that have investigated this, have made a huge de
• 1:53:59
  deal out of the notepad. I mentioned it on the podcast simply because it's
• 1:54:02
  such a weird story and it's certainly I would love to have a conversation with
• 1:54:09
  the ex missus mcquerie, but I've never been able to get any good contact
• 1:54:13
  information for her, and I doubt she would talk with me, but I
• 1:54:15
  would certainly be willing to do so because I'm I'm quite sure she has a
• 1:54:19
  very good story to tell, regardless of whether or not it relates directly to
• 1:54:25
  Jerry Sandusky's innocence. Julie asks a somewhat similar question, but in a different
• 1:54:30
  direction. You once mentioned the Lindbergh baby kidnapping story. What is your take
• 1:54:38
  on that? When I was trying to figure out what I was going to
• 1:54:44
  do after ending the death of journalism podcast. I did propose to our executive
• 1:54:49
  producer, Mike gag Gavino, the possibility of doing a podcast, a true
• 1:54:56
  crime podcast on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, that it would kind of be like,
• 1:55:02
  you know, with the benefit of hindsight. Now, the obvious number
• 1:55:05
  one problem with the Limber big Bee kidnapping is that it happened, you know,
• 1:55:12
  an extremely long time ago. It happened in the early nineteen thirty so
• 1:55:15
  you're talking about basically over ninety years ago, and so everybody involved is dead,
• 1:55:24
  and you know, there's not inherent interest in the case. But to
• 1:55:28
  my knowledge, no one's ever done a full podcast about it, and I
• 1:55:33
  have always been fascinated by the case. I think I was particularly interested in
• 1:55:40
  it one because I grew up not far from where it happened in New Jersey,
• 1:55:45
  and you know, I lived in My bedroom was on the second floor
• 1:55:49
  of a house that wasn't nearly as big as the Limberg House, but it
• 1:55:53
  was at least somewhat similar in design to the Limberg House. And so I
• 1:55:58
  remember having nightmares about ladders coming up to the second floor of our house.
• 1:56:02
  This is a little young kid, and you know, being kidnapped, and
• 1:56:08
  Lindberg has always been an incredibly important figure to me in history. My grandfather
• 1:56:14
  on my mother's side revered Lindbergh as a hero. I've always considered Lindberg's fly
• 1:56:20
  across flight across the Atlantic Ocean to be one of the greatest achievements in human
• 1:56:26
  history, one of the most significant things that's ever happened. But from the
• 1:56:29
  standpoint of one person achieving a change in the world, it's hard to beat
• 1:56:35
  Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic alone in nineteen twenty seven, and that caused him to
• 1:56:42
  be probably the most famous person in the world when his child was apparently kidnapped
• 1:56:48
  and killed in a case that was probably bigger than OJ Simpson. I've said,
• 1:56:56
  you know many times that in the twentieth century you basically had three huge
• 1:57:03
  crimes in the public consciousness, the liber baby kidnapping, the jfk assassination,
• 1:57:10
  and the OJ Simpson murders. And this was probably bigger than OJ given the
• 1:57:15
  nature of the times in the nineteen thirties, especially given what the country was
• 1:57:19
  going through at that time. So long story short. One of the reasons
• 1:57:25
  why Mike and I never got real serious about doing a podcast one, I
• 1:57:30
  perceived that Mike was interested, but not really super interested. I could be
• 1:57:32
  wrong about that, but you know, he did some due diligence on it,
• 1:57:38
  but we never really talked seriously about it. But from my perspective,
• 1:57:42
  one of the major problems in doing a podcast about it is I don't know
• 1:57:47
  what the hell happened, So part of what makes me fascinated by this story
• 1:57:54
  also makes it probably not that great of a true crime podcast. With Regardless,
• 1:57:59
  Sam, I strongly felt like I knew what happened, and I could
• 1:58:02
  tell an alternative narrative and I could break down the conventional wisdom as being false.
• 1:58:11
  I am pretty sure that what we were told happened did not happen.
• 1:58:15
  I am pretty confident that the man who was executed for that crime, Bruno
• 1:58:20
  Houtman, at the very least, could not possibly have done this alone.
• 1:58:26
  And if he didn't do this alone, that kind of raises questions about the
• 1:58:31
  whole narrative because I have never been able to make sense of that whole story.
• 1:58:38
  I don't have a narrative that fits the entire fact pattern, which drives
• 1:58:45
  me crazy because I think I'm pretty good at being able to come up with
• 1:58:48
  with narratives that fit all the known facts, and I think there are a
• 1:58:53
  couple of different possible scenarios, but none of which I'm more confident in than
• 1:58:59
  any. I am open to the idea that Hautman was innocent. I'm open
• 1:59:03
  to the idea that Houtman was guilty. I'm open to the idea that Heutman
• 1:59:08
  was partially guilty may have played a role in it. I'm even open.
• 1:59:13
  And this blows my mind. But there have been a couple of very credible
• 1:59:16
  books written in modern times based upon the theory that Lindberg himself was behind the
• 1:59:26
  kidnapping. And that sounds crazy and bonkers, but I've spoken to at least
• 1:59:31
  one of the authors of these books, and this person is not crazy,
• 1:59:35
  and they firmly believe this. They're actually a retired judge, this particular author,
• 1:59:42
  and there they are very confident that that's the only scenario that makes sense.
• 1:59:46
  And there's actually some significant I guess you would call it evidence, but
• 1:59:51
  they're you know, like, for instance, one of the things, one
• 1:59:55
  of the many things most people don't know is that just before the kidnapping happened,
• 2:00:00
  like a week or two before Lindberg pretended that the baby had been kidnapped
• 2:00:05
  and played like a practical joke on his house that the baby had been kidnapped,
• 2:00:12
  which is awfully weird. That doesn't prove anything, but they're awful.
• 2:00:16
  There's a whole lot of other uh, you know, there's a whole lot
• 2:00:21
  of other pieces of evidence that make you go hmm. And there is a
• 2:00:26
  narrative that makes a little bit of sense. You'd have to read those books
• 2:00:30
  on your own, uh to understand them. But Lindberg harshly because of his
• 2:00:34
  massive celebrity. I'm a big believer that celebrity is a mental illness, and
• 2:00:41
  nobody was more famous than Charles Lindberg in this time period, and that I
• 2:00:46
  think that it is possible that that level of celebrity can basically make a person
• 2:00:53
  lose their minds. And Lindberg, it should be pointed out, after he
• 2:00:57
  died, we found out that he had this entire, huge family that no
• 2:01:00
  one even knew about. I mean, and he's buried at the very tip
• 2:01:06
  of the end of an island in Hawaii. My wife and I actually tried
• 2:01:11
  to find his grave, which is almost unmarked. It's on a map somewhere,
• 2:01:17
  but it was we were in a torrential monsoon downpour and we couldn't quite
• 2:01:21
  get there when we visited Hawaii. My wife wasn't really into it. But
• 2:01:27
  anyway, I think it's the maybe more fascinating than even the Sandusky case,
• 2:01:33
  because the Sandusky case you got to deal with so much ick, or at
• 2:01:36
  least theoretical ick to get to the truth. But I don't think we're ever
• 2:01:42
  gonna know what happened really when it came to the Limberg baby kidnapping. But
• 2:01:45
  I'm very interested in the subject, and I've done a pretty significant deep dive
• 2:01:53
  on it. And part of the reason why I don't think it'll necessarily work
• 2:01:56
  as a podcast is I don't think one I know, I don't know what
• 2:02:00
  happened right now, and I don't think I can figure out what happened,
• 2:02:03
  partially because it's obviously so old now, over ninety years ago when that happened.
• 2:02:11
  Burle asks. You mentioned once that you had looked into the John Bene
• 2:02:15
  Ramsey case. You mentioned that the Burke did it Burke was her brother or
• 2:02:19
  older brother. The Burke did it theory was wrong, but did not go
• 2:02:24
  into details. What was your theory of that case. And this is a
• 2:02:29
  case I've done a pretty good deep dive on, and you know, interestingly,
• 2:02:34
  at one point I was pretty good friends with Burke Ramsey's lawyer, and
• 2:02:42
  I had a lot of respect for him until he completely literally lost his mind
• 2:02:46
  with Donald Trump. And I mean literally lost his mind. I think he
• 2:02:53
  went insane and I don't know why. And we've not been in contact ever
• 2:02:58
  since that happened. You know, he's basically made national news for essentially losing
• 2:03:03
  his mind when it comes to Donald Trump. But before he lost his mind,
• 2:03:10
  he and I had some really I thought, very cogent and significant conversations
• 2:03:16
  about the case. Long story short, there's a lot of reasons why the
• 2:03:21
  brother could not possibly have killed his sister. There's there's evidence regarding the timeline,
• 2:03:30
  evidence regarding the pineapple in her stomach. But to me, here's here's
• 2:03:36
  how I can explain, in very simple terms, why the brother did not
• 2:03:42
  kill John Boney Ramsey. So the next morning, the parents are, you
• 2:03:48
  know, if you're a cynical person, are at least pretending that they don't
• 2:03:53
  know where Jean Benet is, and the authorities come and eventually the dad finds
• 2:04:01
  John Bennet in the basement right Well, in the course of the authorities investigating
• 2:04:09
  the case, they ask the parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. They ask
• 2:04:15
  the parents, can we talk to Burke. Now, Burke is very young
• 2:04:21
  and he's extremely socially awkward. Okay, So by this point, if Burke
• 2:04:30
  had killed their daughter, there's a massive cover up going on, and they
• 2:04:35
  know Burke did it. The last thing in the world they're gonna do is
• 2:04:43
  allow Burke to be interviewed by a detective alone. But that's what happened.
• 2:04:51
  A detective interviewed Burke alone, and the detective was positive that not only did
• 2:05:00
  Burke not kill Jean Benet, he didn't even know that his sister was dead
• 2:05:08
  or missing at that time. He was completely confused by the whole situation and
• 2:05:13
  had total ignorance. So there is no world where Burke can kill Joan Beinnet.
• 2:05:20
  The parents get involved in this massive cover of to protect their son,
• 2:05:26
  and then they allow him to be interviewed by a detective who's positive that Burke
• 2:05:31
  has no idea what the hell's going on. So, and there's a whole
• 2:05:34
  and it's not just that, but that's the real world. Occam's raisor answer
• 2:05:41
  as far as what actually did happen. I was in the category for years
• 2:05:45
  of people who thought it's got to be related to the mom, an accident
• 2:05:51
  of some sort. She got angry. That ransom note is suspicious as hell,
• 2:05:56
  and I have flipped. I now think that this is the perfect crime
• 2:06:00
  by an intruder, because I don't believe that that ransom note actually was written
• 2:06:06
  by Patsy Ramsey. I don't think that the Ramsey marriage could have survived until
• 2:06:12
  her death. If this had happened, somebody would have broken, and the
• 2:06:16
  Ramseys did not break. I mean, most marriages break apart when a child
• 2:06:20
  gets killed, anyway, But under this kind of pressure, the only way
• 2:06:26
  this possibly maintains itself is that they both have leverage over each other. And
• 2:06:31
  I just don't know how that maintains itself till death and even post death,
• 2:06:36
  now that Patsy is dead. But more importantly than that, the ransom note
• 2:06:42
  I don't think is written by her. It is strange, and it's written
• 2:06:46
  in a way that clearly is why I call it the perfect crime. I
• 2:06:50
  think an intruder who probably had knowledge of that house because they had been giving
• 2:06:57
  Christmas tours of that house to see the house all decorated. I think somebody
• 2:07:02
  got an obsession with John Beney. I think they knew the insides of the
• 2:07:06
  house, and I think while the Ramseys were out that night, they were
• 2:07:11
  able to basically create a ransom note that made it look like it was from
• 2:07:18
  the parents because it had information about John's bonus, and it was written on
• 2:07:24
  notepad paper that was right there. There has appeared to be even a practice.
• 2:07:29
  They took their time writing it. It's an incredibly long ransom note.
• 2:07:32
  But I think that there is evidence of an invasion through the basement window.
• 2:07:42
  I think, you know, there's evidence that there's even a way for that
• 2:07:45
  person to have gotten out by stepping on a piece of luggage. And I
• 2:07:50
  guess maybe the main reason why I now believe it's the perfect crime and that
• 2:07:57
  this was an intruder whose DNA was in fact found on John Benay's underwear.
• 2:08:03
  It's been unidentified, but there is a male, not the Dad, not
• 2:08:07
  the brothers DNA that's on John Benay's underwear, is that the person who most
• 2:08:13
  promoted the Burke theory, the brother did it theory, is Jim Clemente,
• 2:08:20
  who became one of my primary nemesiss from the Sandusky case, who has been
• 2:08:24
  wrong about almost every case he's ever been involved with, and I have no
• 2:08:30
  respect for at all, and so almost ipso facto the fact that he thinks
• 2:08:35
  that Burke did it, and in fact, you know, there was a
• 2:08:37
  settlement he did that a special for CBS, and CBS actually had to settle
• 2:08:43
  with Burke Ramsey because of a defamation claim that was put forward by the lawyer
• 2:08:50
  to which I referred earlier as as a former friend of mine, and he
• 2:08:54
  got Burke a lot of money from CBS because of that Jim Clemente special.
• 2:08:58
  But I really do believe in the intruder theory, and I think it was
• 2:09:03
  really the perfect crime because that ransom note stalled everything. It stalled everything because
• 2:09:09
  everyone stopped and waited for more information, so there was no attempt to try
• 2:09:15
  to find who did this. And then it also inherently cast suspicion on the
• 2:09:20
  parents, and so it was almost brilliant and whoever pulled this off, and
• 2:09:26
  then there's all sorts of issues with regard to the forensics involving Jean Benet herself,
• 2:09:31
  and it just doesn't fit with either the accident theory or the idea that
• 2:09:37
  somehow the parents or the brother had anything to do with it. So that's
• 2:09:41
  my view of the Jean Bonnet Ramsey case. Tommy asks, my question is
• 2:09:46
  whatever happened between you and Leah Brandon. Leah Brandon and I were very very
• 2:09:50
  close. She was my newsperson slash co host at KFI Radio, and then
• 2:09:56
  several years later, after maintaining close contact, we did a nationally syndicated Sunday
• 2:10:03
  night radio show together, and we ended that syndicated Sunday night radio show after
• 2:10:09
  Trump won the election. And we were very close for a long period of
• 2:10:15
  time. You know, when we were at CAFI together, actually bought her
• 2:10:18
  a rescue horse. She's huge into horses, and I bought her a horse
• 2:10:22
  to rescue, and I helped fund the horse, and the horse was named
• 2:10:26
  Lucky and lived for a very long time. She did an amazing job bringing
• 2:10:30
  the horse back to health, and we had a lot of great chemistry on
• 2:10:35
  the air. I think the short answer is that Trump broke us up,
• 2:10:41
  and I deserve at least fifty percent of the blame for this. I actually
• 2:10:45
  think our breakup over Trump is emblematic of a lot of the Trump phenomenon.
• 2:10:50
  Because here's the short version of what I think happened. So I was very
• 2:10:56
  confident during twenty sixteen that Trump was not going to win. Lee was becoming
• 2:11:00
  a Trump cult member without really telling me that she was becoming a cult Trump
• 2:11:05
  member. She was trying to hide it. I could see the signs.
• 2:11:09
  But when Trump won and Leah said that he would win, and I said
• 2:11:13
  he would lose, and I think, to my credit, when that originally
• 2:11:18
  happened, I did a total mea culpa, I'm wrong, you were right,
• 2:11:24
  And I think I handled that pretty well. But I think at the
• 2:11:31
  heart of a lot of what drives the Trump cult is a lot of the
• 2:11:35
  Trump cult members are people like Leah. Leah who's had a very tough life,
• 2:11:41
  is not particularly well educated, not formally educated, and here, you
• 2:11:46
  know, I am seen as an elitist who went to Georgetown University and think
• 2:11:50
  I know what the real world is about, and I'm very confident I'm right
• 2:11:56
  that Trump's going to lose, and I'm looking down on the masses of people
• 2:12:03
  who are saying no, no, Trump's going to win, and then they
• 2:12:05
  turn out to be right. That's part of why twenty sixteen is such an
• 2:12:11
  incredibly significant moment for the Trump fan. It's validation for them that they're smarter
• 2:12:20
  than what they perceived to be the elites are. And that's kind of what
• 2:12:26
  happened. I think, at least subconsciously between me and Leah. I was
• 2:12:31
  more than willing to admit you were right. I was wrong. But then
• 2:12:35
  Leah didn't let it go, and that agitated me, and then we had
• 2:12:41
  some technical problems on the show. We were always battling technical problems because she
• 2:12:45
  was doing it from Alabama and I was doing it from southern California, and
• 2:12:50
  you know, we were trying to do it on the cheap, and you
• 2:12:54
  know, they were all sorts of problems. And then one particular night,
• 2:12:58
  I had asked her to come in early to make sure that there wasn't going
• 2:13:03
  to be a particular technical problem on her end because I anticipated a technical problem,
• 2:13:09
  and she didn't do that, and sure enough, there was a technical
• 2:13:15
  problem and she wasn't able to join the show. And then eventually she say
• 2:13:20
  she joined the show, and I was just so pissed off. I couldn't
• 2:13:24
  take it anymore. And so we had to blow up actually on the air,
• 2:13:28
  and that was the end of it. I don't think we ever spoke
• 2:13:31
  again after that. I think we had some communication. I know we communicated
• 2:13:35
  when Lucky eventually passed away. And I don't have any ill will towards Leah,
• 2:13:41
  and I fully take at least fifty percent of the blame for what happened.
• 2:13:45
  But I think the significant part of the breakup of John Sigler and Leah
• 2:13:50
  Brandon is that it really does show a lot about the Trump phenomenon. And
• 2:13:56
  I've lost a lot of relationships over Trump, but that's probably the most significant
• 2:14:01
  relationship that I've lost, and I fully acknowledged that I deserve at least half
• 2:14:05
  the blame for that. Another anonymous question, will you still be going on
• 2:14:09
  the Terry Miners show from time to time? I haven't been on Terry's show
• 2:14:13
  in a long time. Terry is, you know, very difficult to predict.
• 2:14:20
  It's kind of top of mind with him, and so there's nothing happening
• 2:14:24
  that really has made him think of me. I guess. Terry is the
• 2:14:28
  legendary radio show host in Louisville, Kentucky, with whom I was once very
• 2:14:31
  close. I believe he then betrayed me when I got fired in Louisville,
• 2:14:37
  and then, very strangely years later, even though he tried to betray me
• 2:14:41
  at my defamation trial and essentially failed with his very drama queen esque testimony where
• 2:14:48
  he was saying, I love Zig, but you know, I have to
• 2:14:50
  admit that how wrong what he did was, and blah blah blah. It
• 2:14:54
  was just so ridiculous. Somehow he and I, you know, let be
• 2:15:00
  by guns. I've done his show many times in recent years, and the
• 2:15:03
  fact that he and I still have more of a relationship that I have with
• 2:15:07
  John Yarmin of Louisville, former Democratic congressman, is just impossible for me to
• 2:15:13
  believe. But that's the way life turns out. But look, if Terry
• 2:15:16
  asked me on a show, normally I'll go on. But there's really no
• 2:15:20
  reason for that, and especially, you know, is if I'm fading away
• 2:15:24
  from public life, there'll be less and less reason for that, and so
• 2:15:28
  I don't anticipate it. But I'm always willing to go on Terry's show because
• 2:15:33
  it's usually fun and Terry usually enjoys it as well. Joe asks, what
• 2:15:37
  did you make of your former guest Bill Mitchell endorsing Trump again. I thought
• 2:15:43
  it was hilarious for fans of this podcast. You may know that we had
• 2:15:48
  on Bill Mitchell, who in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty was a huge Trump
• 2:15:52
  influencer, one of the first big social media Trump influencers. I remember in
• 2:15:58
  interviewing him back in twenty sixteen, and I think he hung up on me
• 2:16:01
  during that particular interview because he was such a Trump sycophant. And then he
• 2:16:07
  turned into a massive Desanta supporter. And we had him on this podcast back
• 2:16:11
  in twenty twenty three and we had a debate Bill and I did and I
• 2:16:16
  basically told him he was wrong that the Santis was going to win the nomination,
• 2:16:18
  there was no path for DeSantis. He told me I was crazy.
• 2:16:24
  Of course, he has never admitted I was right. I kind of chided
• 2:16:28
  him via direct message after DeSantis dropped out, saying, I guess I'm not
• 2:16:33
  going to get an apology from you, and he was very belligerent, not
• 2:16:37
  apologetic or classy at all, which didn't surprise me. And now most recently,
• 2:16:43
  this guy who was all in for DeSantis saying I will never support Trump.
• 2:16:48
  I'm leaving social media if Trump's the nominee, No way, no,
• 2:16:52
  how am I supporting Trump? DeSantis all the way is now saying, you
• 2:16:56
  know, actually feels good to be back in the Trump get. Essentially,
• 2:17:00
  that's what he's been saying on Twitter, and it's just so classic. It's
• 2:17:03
  just so typical. I mean, I think Bill's nuts, but he's also
• 2:17:07
  obviously a grifter, and he's representative of a lot of what's wrong with the
• 2:17:13
  right wing grift machine and the social media era. Next question, Horning asks
• 2:17:20
  where are you going? What will you do? What will we do without
• 2:17:24
  you? This was a question based upon the presumption that I'm ending the podcast
• 2:17:28
  on February fifteenth and then dropping out of public life. That may or may
• 2:17:33
  not be the case right now. Again, I have not yet decided one
• 2:17:37
  hundred percent, but there may be an option for you, Horning, you
• 2:17:41
  can subscribe. It looks like, assuming we actually do this, to a
• 2:17:46
  new version of the podcast, that will be essentially a subscription only. I
• 2:17:50
  do anticipate essentially dropping off of social media, maybe not totally, but far
• 2:17:56
  more than I currently am. I'll probably tweet about ninety five percent less,
• 2:18:01
  even under the scenario where we go to the subscription based podcast in the future,
• 2:18:07
  but you know, so that's at least an option. That's part of
• 2:18:11
  why I'm strongly considering doing this is giving people like Horning, and apparently there
• 2:18:15
  are more of them than I realized, an option for getting their fix of
• 2:18:20
  commentary for me. And as far as what I would be doing without this
• 2:18:26
  podcast, that was one of the big problems. I don't have a plan
• 2:18:30
  B. You know, I'll probably try to play some golf, but I'm
• 2:18:33
  getting old at almost fifty seven. It's difficult for me to be super competitive.
• 2:18:39
  At fifty seven, even on the senior level, I'm starting to become
• 2:18:43
  old. Even for a senior golfer. Occasionally I can put it all together
• 2:18:48
  and shoot a square a par or maybe a little bit better than that under
• 2:18:50
  competitive circumstances, but that's not on a consistent basis. Plus, golf is
• 2:18:56
  very expensive, and you know, our buddy is tight already, and so
• 2:19:03
  I don't have a good answer for that. That's part of why I'm considering
• 2:19:05
  the subscription model, which I hate, which is I don't have a plan
• 2:19:09
  B right now, assuming no Black Swan event, and so that's the answer
• 2:19:15
  to that I hate now constantly talking about this, especially now that there's some
• 2:19:18
  ambiguity about what the next steps are. But I'm trying to be as transparent
• 2:19:22
  about this as possible. Derek asks, you describe yourself as a conservative libertarian,
• 2:19:28
  but what would you say is your most liberal or left leaning policy opinion
• 2:19:33
  or belief Now I understand this question because there's a lot of confusion now about
• 2:19:41
  what the hell it means to be a libertarian, I mean, or even
• 2:19:43
  a liberal. I don't know that from a classical standpoint, that there are
• 2:19:48
  any liberals left in the Democratic Party. We kind of learned that during COVID.
• 2:19:56
  To me, libertarian is more about the strength of belief in freedom than
• 2:20:03
  it is about any particular policy positions, especially since everything's gotten so convoluted post
• 2:20:11
  COVID. I don't know what liberal beliefs are anymore. When I grew up,
• 2:20:16
  liberals believe strongly in free speech and freedom of thought and expression, and
• 2:20:22
  academia was a fashion of free speech and freedom of expression. But that's all
• 2:20:28
  gone now. Akademia has become very and liberalism has become very fascist, especially
• 2:20:33
  as we saw during COVID. So I don't even know what liberal beliefs are
• 2:20:39
  anymore so for me to be able to tell you, Okay, Zig,
• 2:20:41
  since you call yourself a conservative libertarian, what beliefs or positions do you have
• 2:20:46
  that would be considered liberal? I guess freedom of speech. I don't think
• 2:20:52
  I believe that anymore, and I don't even believe that liberals, democratic liberals
• 2:20:58
  even believe in freedom or that. To me, I guess my belief in
• 2:21:03
  libertarianism is freedom and liberty above all else. That's where you begin. And
• 2:21:09
  so yeah, I believe that, for instance, the vast majority of recreational
• 2:21:13
  drugs ought to be legal and regulated and taxed. I think done, if
• 2:21:20
  done properly, that can actually benefit everybody. There's some downsides to that,
• 2:21:26
  but I think it's better in the overall picture, especially if you could get
• 2:21:31
  rid of the black market for drugs, and if you could make you know,
• 2:21:35
  the government some money out of the whole thing. You have the issue
• 2:21:37
  of destigmatizing drugs, but we've lost that already. I'm also, by the
• 2:21:45
  way, one of my more unusual libertarian beliefs, and again I think the
• 2:21:50
  definition of libertarian has gotten all out of whack. There are a lot of
• 2:21:52
  libertarians that are open borders. I believe that a country has the right to
• 2:21:58
  have its own borders, and then with if you are a citizen of that
• 2:22:01
  country, then you get your rights of freedom and liberty. The idea that
• 2:22:07
  somehow libertarianism is representative of open borders, like the Cato Institute believes, to
• 2:22:15
  me is just crazy. But one of my more unusual beliefs that I think
• 2:22:20
  is libertarian is I am extremely against debt, and because to me, when
• 2:22:28
  the government creates debt, especially to the degree that we currently are, we
• 2:22:33
  are effectively making every citizen and even people that aren't even born yet, saddled
• 2:22:41
  with a debt and with having to eventually pay back in some way, shape
• 2:22:46
  or form, money over which they had absolutely no say in the way that
• 2:22:52
  it was going to be spent, or that it was even going to be
• 2:22:54
  spent to begin with. So to me, that's a liberty and freedom issue.
• 2:23:00
  I mean, you know what we did with COVID. I've said this
• 2:23:03
  before. COVID, in its biggest picture, was essentially other people, the
• 2:23:09
  government of the United States, forcing all of us to take the most expensive
• 2:23:15
  and worst vacation in possible history, in the in the worst imagination, the
• 2:23:22
  worst and most expensive vacation you could possibly take. We were all forced against
• 2:23:28
  our will to take that crappy, very expensive vacation, and we're going to
• 2:23:35
  be paying for it in all sorts of ways, not just monetarily, but
• 2:23:37
  socially and culturally forever. But we're really going to be paying for it directly
• 2:23:43
  financially because of the debt it created. And that, to me is a
• 2:23:48
  freedom and liberty issue because I didn't have the freedom to say yes or no
• 2:23:52
  to that in any way, shape or form, and so that that bothers
• 2:23:58
  me. But I think that the question is almost mute at this point.
• 2:24:03
  Mute at this point because the definition of liberal has been so lost in this
• 2:24:09
  modern era, especially post COVID. Steve asks, what will you do to
• 2:24:16
  earn money? Do you plan to leave California? Is California as bad as
• 2:24:20
  the right wing media portrays? Do you still have dream goals in the media?
• 2:24:26
  Is your boldness an asset in your marriage or would your wife prefer you
• 2:24:31
  are an anonymous accountant great at grilling with the neighbors. There's a lot of
• 2:24:35
  questions there, some of which are a little too personal. I'll quickly address
• 2:24:41
  most of them. We're not gonna leave California because my wife is definitely invested
• 2:24:46
  here more than I realized. Her parents are still alive, but even after
• 2:24:50
  they pass, I think we're probably bound here in California. I'm in the
• 2:24:56
  market to try to find another house for us to live in, potentially creating
• 2:25:03
  a rental property. I thought I was going to try to buy one in
• 2:25:05
  Florida if the market ever cooled off, but that idea has basically been vetoed
• 2:25:11
  by my wife. So I think I'm if I want to stay married,
• 2:25:15
  I think I'm probably here. You know, I've given up on dream goals
• 2:25:20
  pretty much in the media, barring a black Swan event. It's kind of,
• 2:25:26
  you know, the resignation with which I have made these decisions to either
• 2:25:30
  transition or end or end the podcast and leave public life. As far as
• 2:25:35
  my boldness in my marriage, my wife is very conflicted about that. She
• 2:25:39
  likes a lot of the good aspects of my personality and creating public chaos or
• 2:25:48
  controversy or standing up for the right thing, but she also doesn't like the
• 2:25:52
  negative parts of it. I have a theory about my wife that I don't
• 2:25:56
  even think I've ever really fully discussed with her, that she kind of likes
• 2:26:01
  it when I'm not very much in the public eye, and that when and
• 2:26:07
  and you know, consequently, when things are not going that well for me
• 2:26:13
  career wise. That might sound crazy, and it's partially because those two things
• 2:26:16
  are equated. Right when things are going well for me in my media career,
• 2:26:20
  I'm inherently more in the public eye, and I think subconsciously at least
• 2:26:26
  that makes my wife nervous because she's a very at times jealous and insecure person,
• 2:26:33
  not always, but at times, and she's been getting over that over
• 2:26:35
  the years, especially as our marriage has gotten to be rather extended. So
• 2:26:41
  I don't think she really cares that much or is that concerned about me leaving
• 2:26:45
  her anymore. She shouldn't be, but I do think, especially early on,
• 2:26:50
  that made her nervous. I think she's more comfortable when she is certain
• 2:26:54
  I'm not going to be leaving her, as if somehow, if I became
• 2:26:58
  a celebrity, this might be a concern for her. I guess this is
• 2:27:01
  my interpretation, but I do think that that part of her is at least
• 2:27:07
  a part of her. Even though she would like the money that would be
• 2:27:09
  involved with success in my career, part of her is probably more comfortable in
• 2:27:16
  this direction, which is part a small part of why I have thought about
• 2:27:20
  just dropping all of this, because in a weird way, you know,
• 2:27:26
  she might not dislike it. She dislikes the money aspect, the fact that
• 2:27:30
  we're on a pretty tight budget from month to month, but in other ways
• 2:27:35
  it's not the worst scenario for her. That opens up a whole can of
• 2:27:39
  worms that, like I said, I haven't even discussed with her, and
• 2:27:41
  so I'm not going to get into further detail on the podcast. But this
• 2:27:45
  is ask John anything, and I promise that no BS transparent answer. Boss
• 2:27:50
  Man asks why didn't you delve into details regarding your COVID diagnosis As a leading
• 2:27:58
  voice on the virus, I'd like to hear your experience. I don't know
• 2:28:01
  whether or not they're being sarcastic or passive aggressive, or what have you,
• 2:28:07
  but I believe I've had COVID at least twice. I know I tested positive
• 2:28:11
  once and I'm pretty sure I had COVID a few months ago, and to
• 2:28:18
  me, both experiences were pretty much indistinguishable from a bad flu. I mean,
• 2:28:24
  that's pretty similar to what most people have had, you know, I'm
• 2:28:30
  of decent health and in my fifties, so I was not in a danger
• 2:28:35
  zone demographic with regard to the virus, even if I had gotten it right
• 2:28:39
  at the beginning when it was at its most dangerous. But getting COVID in
• 2:28:45
  no way, shape or form changed my view about what we did in the
• 2:28:48
  COVID panic. And I guess the number one thing that I want to get
• 2:28:52
  across with my strongly contrarian view when it came to how we responded to COVID.
• 2:29:00
  I have never said that COVID wasn't real or that it wasn't serious.
• 2:29:05
  What I said was what we were doing was causing more harm than it was
• 2:29:11
  preventing. And I don't even think that's close. That was obvious even back
• 2:29:18
  then. A lot of people try to say, and Trump tries to say,
• 2:29:20
  no one knew then, bullshit. It was obvious that what we were
• 2:29:24
  doing was going to cause more harm than it prevented. And the facts are
• 2:29:31
  now clear cut in so many different areas of life. I mean, the
• 2:29:35
  number one economic issue in the country over the last couple of years has been
• 2:29:39
  the massive inflation that happened as a direct result of the COVID panic. Everything's
• 2:29:45
  going to happen in education for a generation can be blamed at least indirectly,
• 2:29:50
  if not directly, on the COVID panic. I don't think we saved any
• 2:29:54
  real lives When people say, well, John, over a million people died
• 2:29:58
  with or of COVID, And by the way, I buy that number because
• 2:30:01
  the excess death numbers pretty much mirror something close to that. So a lot
• 2:30:07
  of people died with or of COVID. Now they were average age seventy nine
• 2:30:11
  in this country, which the media never told you about, and it should
• 2:30:15
  have been the banner headline. So you know how many years at least good
• 2:30:20
  years did they have left? Anyway, wasn't like young, healthy people were
• 2:30:24
  dying and you had to make that calculation. But to me, when you
• 2:30:30
  say, okay, over a million people died with her of COVID, my
• 2:30:33
  response is, well, thank you for acknowledging that everything we did didn't work.
• 2:30:41
  How can you claim that what we did worked when we have more death
• 2:30:45
  than anybody else in the world, not by a percentage basis, but by
• 2:30:48
  a numbered bases. But our percentage of death is pretty high. Why is
• 2:30:52
  it? I Well, I think partially because of our method of counting partially
• 2:30:56
  because of our obesity. Obesity was a huge factor in this. Asian countries
• 2:31:01
  did much better. Is it possible because they had some inherent immunity because of
• 2:31:07
  the nature of the virus? Yeah, it's also possible because they have less
• 2:31:09
  obesity. So, I mean everything about it I thought was crazy the way
• 2:31:16
  that we did it, and it was obviously political, and no one wants
• 2:31:20
  to admit they were wrong, and there's no accountability. And now that the
• 2:31:24
  the Santa's campaign is over, there's never going to be any accountability and we're
• 2:31:26
  going to pay a huge price for that for a very very long time to
• 2:31:31
  come, probably at least the rest of my life and the life of most
• 2:31:33
  of the people listening to this podcast. Raoul asks, have you ever been
• 2:31:41
  approached to be part of a political campaign as a consultant? If she has
• 2:31:46
  two questions, I'll deal with them separate because they're very, very different.
• 2:31:50
  The first question about being a campaign consultant, Actually, I have been at
• 2:31:56
  various times in my life being I guess spoken to about this possibility. There
• 2:32:01
  was a local congressional campaign about twenty twenty five years ago that someone asked me
• 2:32:07
  to be their campaign manager, and I kind of dabbled in that a little
• 2:32:11
  bit. We even had a meeting with the Club for Growth that was fascinating.
• 2:32:16
  It was an older guy who wanted to run for Congress locally in the
• 2:32:20
  suburbs of Philadelphia, and he and I had a meeting with the guy who
• 2:32:26
  runs the Club for Growth, very well known conservative group that gives money to
• 2:32:30
  candidates, and by the end of the meeting, in all seriousness, the
• 2:32:35
  guy asked me if I would be the candidate instead of the guy who was
• 2:32:41
  supposed to be the candidate. And I was not interested, and he didn't
• 2:32:43
  know nothing about me to know that that would never fly because I'd be the
• 2:32:46
  easiest political candidate to defeat in history because of my history. And that was
• 2:32:50
  even before I supported Jerry Siedoski in a very public way. So that was
• 2:32:56
  never going to happen. But that was kind of an interesting situation. There
• 2:33:01
  have been other times when it's been talked about. I knew it would never
• 2:33:05
  happen because I'm just too publicly toxic. I do think that, for instance,
• 2:33:11
  I think I could have been a very important and productive voice within the
• 2:33:16
  Desantus campaign. Whether that would have made a difference or not. I'm not
• 2:33:18
  pretending I could have made a major difference in what turned out to be the
• 2:33:22
  result, but I do think if I had been listened to, at least
• 2:33:26
  there would have been the possibility of things turning out somewhat different. But I'm
• 2:33:33
  just not a political person. The political world is not made for me.
• 2:33:37
  I am a square peg in a round whole world to begin with, but
• 2:33:41
  especially when it comes to politics, and you know, so that's never a
• 2:33:48
  really feasible situation, at least not publicly, even though in a rational world
• 2:33:52
  it probably should be, given my track record and my general experiences and expertise
• 2:33:58
  in this area. Rau also asks who are your top three golfers of all
• 2:34:03
  time? As a Spaniard. I'm also curious to know where Sevi Biasteros would
• 2:34:09
  sit in your ranking. Well, that's interesting that Raoul would ask this question.
• 2:34:16
  By the way, he says he's hoping for a black Swan event.
• 2:34:18
  I appreciate that, Raoul, you know, the top three golfers To me,
• 2:34:24
  again, it depends on how you define this, and you're talking about
• 2:34:26
  different eras and the game has changed so much, but to me, it's
• 2:34:31
  got to be in some order. Tiger Woods Jack Nicholas and Ben Hogan are
• 2:34:37
  probably the three golfers that have reached the highest level of the game. Hogan,
• 2:34:43
  partially because of his car accident, wasn't able to sustain it, and
• 2:34:46
  partially because he got off to a rather late start, didn't have his long
• 2:34:52
  a period of domination. But as far as reaching the pinnacle of the game
• 2:34:56
  that's its highest level it's ever been played, those are to me, at
• 2:35:00
  least in the modern ish era, and I consider the modern era this would
• 2:35:03
  have been a very very end of Hogan's career. To me, golf doesn't
• 2:35:07
  really start in the modern era till nineteen sixty. Maybe you can actually mark
• 2:35:13
  the nineteen sixty US Open. It's kind of the beginning of the modern era
• 2:35:18
  of golf. But those would be my top three now. Seve would be
• 2:35:24
  real close. And it's funny to me that Raoul asked about Sev because I
• 2:35:28
  have done a lot of high profile interviews in my career, more than I
• 2:35:33
  probably deserved, way more than average by far. The most underrated high profile
• 2:35:39
  interview I ever did was with Sevi by Asteros at the height of his stature
• 2:35:48
  in the game of golf. This would have been in nineteen ninety he was
• 2:35:52
  the number one player in the world, and he was rarely played in the
• 2:35:58
  United States at this time, and I was working at a place called the
• 2:36:01
  Sports News Network as a lowly production assistant. I doubt anyone was making less
• 2:36:07
  money than me in this entire effort. Now, this was a network that
• 2:36:11
  was probably ahead of its time. It was trying to be basically ESPN News
• 2:36:15
  before there was an ESPN News, and it crapped out after a year.
• 2:36:20
  But it was a fascinating experience and I had a lot of fun there.
• 2:36:24
  It was almost like a college situation where they had us all bunked in dorms
• 2:36:30
  at first. You know, a bunch of very ambitious young people. Some
• 2:36:35
  high profile sportscasters were involved in this, but hardly anybody watched it because we
• 2:36:41
  weren't on very many cable systems. Again, this was a situation where the
• 2:36:46
  Misloo company. Some sports fans may remember Mislou because they used to sponsor or
• 2:36:50
  produce college football bowl games minor bowl games back when the minor bowl games actually
• 2:36:56
  mattered, and they were a chance for people to get on television for one
• 2:37:01
  time in a year. And that's when the Bulls actually still had significance.
• 2:37:05
  But anyways, it was the Mislou Sports News Network, and obviously I had
• 2:37:09
  just graduated from Georgetown and the offices were in northern Virginia, and so I
• 2:37:16
  moved back from New Jersey where I had moved after graduation to be part of
• 2:37:22
  the sports news network. And you know, there were a bunch of us
• 2:37:24
  that were really into golf, and I was. I had played golf at
• 2:37:28
  Georgetown. Anyway, long story short, Seve was coming to the Kemper Open,
• 2:37:33
  which was played in Washington, d C. Actually at a golf course
• 2:37:37
  where that was our home course when I played golf at Georgetown, and Seve,
• 2:37:41
  the number one player in the world, had at this time very rarely
• 2:37:46
  played in regular PGA Tour events. So he was number one player and there
• 2:37:50
  was a lot of mystique around him. He rarely played in America except for
• 2:37:56
  majors, and he almost never did in Used, partially because he didn't speak
• 2:38:01
  a lot of English. Well, I anticipated, I knew that he was
• 2:38:07
  coming to the Kemper Open in DC, and I really wanted to try to
• 2:38:11
  get an interview with him. And as it happens, and I've mentioned this,
• 2:38:15
  so many times on the podcast previously that there's a connection to my father,
• 2:38:20
  but this is I'm telling you this story kind of just to show you
• 2:38:22
  how these things tend to work or not work. So my father had a
• 2:38:28
  connection to the guy, ironically enough, who owned DROW in Miami at the
• 2:38:33
  time, a god by the name of Howard Caskell. It's not owned by
• 2:38:37
  Donald Trump. And Howard Caskell had hired Seve to kind of be the name
• 2:38:43
  pro for Darral. I'm sure he didn't actually do anything. I'm sure he
• 2:38:46
  was just being used for his name, image and likeness, and so there
• 2:38:50
  was a connection there between Durral and Seve. And my father used to take
• 2:38:56
  us to the Durrau tournament because his bank sponsored the event. And so that
• 2:39:01
  was one of the happiest moments of my childhood. Was for about three or
• 2:39:05
  four years in a row, we would go down to Miami in the middle
• 2:39:07
  of winter and attend the PGA Tour event at Throughout long story short, I
• 2:39:13
  went through all these hurdles to try to get some sort of contact with Sevi
• 2:39:18
  Biasteros before he came to Washington, DC to try to get an interview.
• 2:39:22
  And you gotta remember this is nineteen ninety. There's no email, there's no
• 2:39:26
  cell phones. You know, cross continental communications is very difficult, especially when
• 2:39:33
  there's a language barrier. I was given a phone number, you know,
• 2:39:39
  and I tried, but I got absolutely nowhere. I got nowhere in trying
• 2:39:43
  to get a hold of Sevey's representatives and try to get a formal interview scheduled.
• 2:39:50
  But I didn't give up. So, like the day before the tournament
• 2:39:54
  began, or maybe it was the Tuesday before the tournament began, it's pouring
• 2:40:00
  rain, pouring rain, and there's no play on the course. There's not
• 2:40:05
  even the ability to go out on the driving range. And this is a
• 2:40:09
  different time and era, right, this is not nearly as sophisticated a PGA
• 2:40:16
  tour as there is today. Back then, a lot of these guys,
• 2:40:20
  even though they were super famous, they were hanging out alone. And I
• 2:40:26
  knew the layout of the place pretty well because that was our home course when
• 2:40:30
  I played at Georgetown. So I went trying to look for Sebby because I
• 2:40:33
  thought, Okay, Seb's either stuck here or he's at his hotel room.
• 2:40:39
  But he's you know, he's got nothing to do because he's from Spain,
• 2:40:43
  and this is a different era, and it's possible he's just hanging out with
• 2:40:48
  nothing better to do than do an interview with me and the Sports News Network,
• 2:40:52
  which I'm sure he's never heard of. So I go into the locker
• 2:40:56
  room and the locker room is empty, and I turn a corner and they're
• 2:41:01
  all alone on the ground doing back exercises. Is Seve frickin' Biasteros, number
• 2:41:09
  one player in the world, all the mystique you could possibly imagine, And
• 2:41:13
  I'm like, Okay, this is interesting. So I don't disturb him.
• 2:41:18
  I wait for him to finish doing his back exercises, and when he gets
• 2:41:24
  up, I go up to him and I introduced myself and I had a
• 2:41:28
  plan. I said, Seve, I worked for the Sports News Network,
• 2:41:33
  and we have decided that you are the golfer of the decade for the nineteen
• 2:41:39
  eighties, and we're doing a feature on every sports figure that we have named
• 2:41:46
  as And I made this was totally made up. I completely made this up.
• 2:41:48
  There there was no award. No one would have cared if there was
• 2:41:52
  an award, but I made up this idea that we were awarding. Since
• 2:41:54
  this was nineteen ninety we were awarding whoever the best fits year, and each
• 2:42:00
  sport was kind of like the SP's do now, only for the entire decade
• 2:42:03
  of the eighties. And I said to him that he had been named the
• 2:42:07
  golfer of the decades, a decade of the nineteen eighties, which he fully
• 2:42:11
  agreed with. He was in total agreement that he was the golfer of the
• 2:42:16
  decade of the nineteen eighties. And I said, as part of this,
• 2:42:20
  we'd like you to do a sit down interview with us, and he said,
• 2:42:24
  sure. So I had our other production assistant and our camera person set
• 2:42:31
  up this whole one on one situation with an interview with Sevi Biasteros, and
• 2:42:39
  sure enough, he comes out and he sits down one on one, and
• 2:42:41
  by god, you should have seen the rest of the news media, and
• 2:42:43
  then the rest of the news media with nothing to do, they were completely
• 2:42:48
  stunned because they know they're all waiting for man and from heaven, they're all
• 2:42:52
  lazy morons, and Sev's who they want to talk to, and here he
• 2:42:58
  is doing a one on one interview with a twenty three year old production assistant
• 2:43:05
  from a network no one's ever heard before. And so I did a one
• 2:43:09
  on one, very extensive interview on camera with Sevi Biastero's which turned out to
• 2:43:15
  be fantastic. Interestingly, I actually think I got in trouble. This is
• 2:43:22
  so typical of my career. I think I got in trouble at the Sports
• 2:43:26
  News Network because of this interview, because the higher ups could not understand how
• 2:43:31
  it is that the most high profile interview the network has ever gotten was done
• 2:43:37
  by a lowly production assistant making I think nineteen thousand dollars a year. Now,
• 2:43:43
  you would think that this would have been like a feather in my cap,
• 2:43:46
  like, oh my gosh, wow, great job getting the interview.
• 2:43:48
  Instead, the higher ups felt like this should have been a situation that one
• 2:43:52
  of our on air talent should have been doing the interview. For well,
• 2:43:56
  I mean, that's just the backwards, upside down world of media and how
• 2:44:01
  EGO is involved in everything. You know, the on air talent didn't do
• 2:44:07
  the work to get the frickin' interview, and they weren't on site. And
• 2:44:09
  by the way, way, the interview is fantastic. I still have the
• 2:44:13
  piece that resulted from that particular interview, but with regard to Seve in particular,
• 2:44:20
  I have a special place in my heart for Seve not because of that
• 2:44:24
  interview, which was, you know, a fun moment and something to look
• 2:44:28
  back on my career, and I go, that was pretty amazing, especially
• 2:44:33
  in retrospect. But Sevi Biastero's was a human movie character. I mean,
• 2:44:41
  if you made him into a movie, you wouldn't have believed it. And
• 2:44:46
  when people talk about charisma or mystique, there are very few people that really
• 2:44:52
  have it. Sev bias Stero's had it. He was Michael Jackson as a
• 2:45:01
  golfer. Now it's funny because you know, Tiger Woods's life and career kind
• 2:45:05
  of mirrors Michael Jackson pretty well as far as fame and fame as a kid,
• 2:45:11
  and then when they hit their peak and then the downward slide with health
• 2:45:16
  issues and hopefully Tiger's not going to die early because some crazy doctor gives him
• 2:45:20
  propothoal. But you know, there's some similarities between Tiger Woods and Michael Jackson.
• 2:45:28
  And Tiger has charisma and Tiger has mystique. And I've been in his
• 2:45:31
  presence many times and ask him a few questions at a press conference. I've
• 2:45:35
  never done a one on one interview with tiger Woods as much as I would
• 2:45:37
  like to, I'm sure that's never going to happen. That would be a
• 2:45:39
  fascinating interview. But Sevy had more, in my opinion, more mistique and
• 2:45:48
  more charisma than even Tiger Woods, and probably more magic. There was magic.
• 2:45:56
  Tiger Woods is a machine on the golf course. Semi Biasteros was an
• 2:46:01
  artist. I don't believe this is the way that it works. But if
• 2:46:07
  there is a God that influences these things, God touched Sevi Biasteros. Now
• 2:46:13
  a lot of it's become mythologized when someone dies early, especially that's generally what
• 2:46:20
  happens. But I'm telling you, having witnessed it firsthand, Sevi Biastero's had
• 2:46:28
  it. He had the mystique, he had the charisma, he had the
• 2:46:33
  magic, and he was an artist both on and off the golf course.
• 2:46:39
  Imperfect and probably underachieved in some ways on the golf course. But there's never
• 2:46:46
  going to be another Seve, never going to be another Sevi Biasteros. So
• 2:46:50
  I have a picture of him on my wall of my office, autographed,
• 2:46:56
  and I have a picture book that was just out recently of all these photos
• 2:47:03
  of Seve's career, so I'm a huge Sevy fan. I would put Seve.
• 2:47:07
  As far as his talent, I'd put him probably right up there with
• 2:47:13
  Tiger. As far as his achievement, I would put him probably I don't
• 2:47:16
  know, seven, eight, nine tenths of all time in the history of
• 2:47:20
  golf. So that's a very long story about Sebi Biasteros. But I was
• 2:47:26
  glad that Raoul asked about him, because I've never spoken about that moment before,
• 2:47:30
  and to me, it was so typical of the way the media works.
• 2:47:35
  And I really do think that happened mainly because of my experience at Georgetown
• 2:47:39
  with John Thompson. In retrospect, I now believe that I am. I
• 2:47:43
  was completely unintimidated by any situation because I had already caught through the gauntlet that
• 2:47:48
  was dealing with John Thompson, the legendary basketball coach at Georgetown for three years,
• 2:47:54
  and having had numerous dust ups and confrontations with him. And so if
• 2:47:58
  I could deal with John Thomas and lying to Sevy bias Steros to get him
• 2:48:01
  to do an interview with me wasn't very difficult. Speaking of Michael Jackson,
• 2:48:09
  someone wants to know about my Michael Jackson experience in that case, and whether
• 2:48:15
  or not I can explain why I'm positive that he is innocent. I'm trying
• 2:48:20
  to figure out the name here. Okay, this is from Gary and Gary.
• 2:48:28
  Look, I've talked a lot about the Michael Jackson case, especially on
• 2:48:31
  the World. According to Zig podcast, the shortest, the shortest answer I
• 2:48:35
  can give. This is kind of like how I know John Benet Ramsey's brother
• 2:48:41
  didn't kill her. This is the human answer, the human answer for why
• 2:48:45
  Tiger for not Tiger Woods. Michael Jackson is innocent and not a child molester,
• 2:48:50
  not a pedophile, which at one point I presumed he was until I
• 2:48:54
  covered his Santa Barbara trial at KFI Radio in Los Angeles and said, where
• 2:48:58
  the hell the evidence? And then slowly but surely, as I got more
• 2:49:01
  educated, I realized that he's not guilty. Well, now that he's been
• 2:49:07
  dead for an extended period of time, and now that that bogus hbock you
• 2:49:11
  know, mock you drama or you know fake documentary that came out a few
• 2:49:16
  years ago called Leaving Neverland. Once that's come out, and even after all
• 2:49:22
  that publicity, after a trial, after all the money on the table,
• 2:49:26
  after a very stupid settlement by him and his business people to try to make
• 2:49:31
  a case go away while he was still alive. Despite all of that,
• 2:49:37
  there are only about four remotely, even seemingly theoretically credible accusers against Michael Jackson.
• 2:49:46
  That's not possible given the fact pattern here. If Michael Jackson was a
• 2:49:52
  pedophile, he had unlimited supply of victims, and that he's been dead for
• 2:50:01
  a long time, and we've got, you know, these two frauds suing
• 2:50:05
  for over a billion dollars and using HBO as a PR firm for their lawsuit.
• 2:50:09
  Once that has happened, there would be people coming out of the woodwork.
• 2:50:16
  Every kid who was ever photographed with Michael Jackson at Neverland Ranch would have
• 2:50:22
  a lawsuit. But that hasn't happened, hasn't come close to happening. And
• 2:50:28
  leaving Neverland actually proved Michael Jackson's innocence because it was based on the notion that
• 2:50:33
  somehow, much like the Jerry Sunusky case, that if we just broke the
• 2:50:37
  dam and we told the stories of these two frauds, that lots of other
• 2:50:43
  people would come forward. The director of that film was a nut job,
• 2:50:46
  and I think he's actually pro pedophilia. Literally, I think he's he's pro
• 2:50:50
  pedophilia. Large part of Leaving Neverland is based in the idea that pedophilia is
• 2:50:56
  enjoyable and good watching. If you don't believe me, it's astonishing, but
• 2:51:01
  that's true, and it's incredible that Oprah Winfrey put her stamp of approval on
• 2:51:07
  that piece of garbage. But based in that entire effort that fake documentary was
• 2:51:15
  the idea that they were going to get so many new accusers that they would
• 2:51:18
  be able to do a sequel. Well, they haven't gotten any new accusers
• 2:51:22
  because there are no new accusers, despite massive financial interest to do so.
• 2:51:28
  So if Michael Jackson was guilty, you would have way more accusers and they
• 2:51:33
  would be far more credible than these guys. The four accusers all have massive
• 2:51:39
  catastrophic problems, and there's just no way that Wade Robson or James Safchuck have
• 2:51:46
  stories that are remotely credible. They were not abused by Michael Jackson, and
• 2:51:52
  if Michael Jackson had been a pedophile, the case against him by this point
• 2:51:56
  would be incredibly strong. Instead, it's unbelievably weak as far as what really
• 2:52:03
  did happen with Michael Jackson. I think it kind of goes to what I
• 2:52:07
  said about Charles Limberg. Celebrity is an illness, and nobody had more celebrity
• 2:52:13
  at a younger age and for an extended period of time than Michael Jackson.
• 2:52:18
  Michael Jackson was a perfect storm of ridiculous levels of celebrity, ridiculous levels of
• 2:52:26
  money, and a ridiculous level of genius. Michael Jackson was a genius,
• 2:52:33
  a true genius in so many different ways, at least musically. And so
• 2:52:39
  when you take enormous celebrity, enormous wealth, and enormous genius, that is
• 2:52:46
  a combustible combination and it's going to create weirdness. And that weirdness was misinterpreted
• 2:52:56
  by people who had an agenda to destroy him and take his money. And
• 2:53:01
  then you have all sorts of people jumping on that narrative and the media being
• 2:53:05
  a bunch of fricking morons. And I bought into it to a certain degree
• 2:53:09
  when I was at KFI Radio in Los Angeles and we were covering that criminal
• 2:53:13
  trial, I actually bought into it. And I was wrong to do that,
• 2:53:20
  and so you know, I apologize for that, but I've done a
• 2:53:24
  lot of work on the Michael Jackson case in recent years, and even had
• 2:53:28
  lunch with two of his estate lawyers. And I've gotten to know the Jackson
• 2:53:33
  family pretty darn well and been to the Jackson estate a couple times for Halloween
• 2:53:39
  parties. By the way, I guess I should have mentioned that, I
• 2:53:41
  guess my answer about how I'm not a racist. You know, while I'm
• 2:53:46
  defending Michael Jackson, that sounds like a real racist thing to do, But
• 2:53:52
  I'm you know, I might I defend Michael Jackson because I'm convinced that he's
• 2:53:56
  innocent, and it's somewhat similar to the Sandusky case. It's not even close.
• 2:54:01
  Now. The big difference is you do have Michael Jackson paying millions of
• 2:54:05
  dollars to an accuser, which is a very difficult thing to get over,
• 2:54:11
  and that took me a long time to fully understand. But the way I
• 2:54:16
  explain that is you cannot interpret that amount of money through the prism of your
• 2:54:22
  own experience. That was a decision. It was a stupid decision that was
• 2:54:26
  made based upon the idea that it would be worth more money to Michael Jackson,
• 2:54:31
  who was making an insane amount of money at the time to have this
• 2:54:35
  go away than for it to be public. So they paid whatever that amount
• 2:54:41
  of moneys has been reported as all different amounts, but up to fifteen to
• 2:54:45
  twenty million dollars whatever it was that they paid to this accuser, to them,
• 2:54:50
  to Michael Jackson, that was nothing. That was literally nothing. And
• 2:54:54
  to his business people, they thought, this will be quiet, we won't
• 2:55:00
  have to deal with this publicly. The damage that it would cause would be
• 2:55:03
  much greater than twenty million dollars or whatever it was. So from their standpoint,
• 2:55:07
  this was a good financial decision. It turned out to be incredibly stupid
• 2:55:13
  because it may have ended up killing Michael Jackson, if not directly, at
• 2:55:16
  least indirectly because the stress of all this absolutely changed his life. It changed
• 2:55:22
  the dynamics of his life, and it may have resulted in one ended up
• 2:55:26
  killing him. So it was a very, very stupid decision. But I
• 2:55:31
  don't think it was an indication that Michael Jackson was a pedophile. All Right,
• 2:55:37
  We've gotten pretty far along here in what I intended to do, so
• 2:55:41
  I don't want to go too much further. You know, we kind of
• 2:55:45
  limit the podcast to about two and a half hours and we're at that point
• 2:55:48
  now, so I'm going to stop ask Johnnning for today. I still have
• 2:55:54
  a few more questions, some good ones that people asked. I will reserve
• 2:55:58
  the right to continue you answering those in the remaining episodes of the podcast.
• 2:56:03
  As we remain a free and open podcast. I'm still trying to decide what
• 2:56:07
  we do about the subscription model and having people pay on a month month basis
• 2:56:15
  to maintain a podcast that's behind a paywall. I'm still not one hundred percent
• 2:56:20
  there yet, but we're getting close to that decision, and if you want
• 2:56:24
  to be part of that, I'll just one more time mention that you should
• 2:56:28
  contact our executive producer, Mike got Gavino through the email address which is a
• 2:56:35
  goo ago as for Agavino Ago and then the Death of Journalism t DJ so
• 2:56:43
  ago TDOJ at gmail dot com if you want to let it be known to
• 2:56:50
  our executive producer that you would be interested in participating in a subscription form.
• 2:56:56
  I paid prescription subscription, not prescription. I won't be giving any drugs,
• 2:57:00
  but I paid subscription form of the Death of Journalism podcasts. As we decide
• 2:57:05
  in the next week what we're going to do with the future of this endeavor
• 2:57:07
  if it maintains itself at all. So, as I've been saying, I'm
• 2:57:11
  fully committed to doing at least two more episodes of the podcast next week at
• 2:57:16
  to the super Bowl. It's looking like there will be at least a couple
• 2:57:20
  more free ones after that, depending on which direction we go, but it's
• 2:57:24
  possible we may still only have two more to go. I'm sorry to be
• 2:57:26
  so vague and lacking transparency about this. I hope by our next episode I'll
• 2:57:31
  have more information. As far as the super Bowl is concerned. I will
• 2:57:35
  make my prediction. I think the most important prediction actually doesn't have to do
• 2:57:41
  with the score of the game or who will win. But I'm I'm going
• 2:57:45
  to guess that the Chiefs are going to win. I predicted many months ago
• 2:57:48
  that they would make the Super Bowl partially because of the Tailor Swift momentum,
• 2:57:52
  and I'm going to predict that that comes to fruition. I don't think it's
• 2:57:56
  going to be fixed. I don't think that it might not even be that
• 2:57:58
  close, depending on how Brock Purdy does as quarterback of the San Francisco forty
• 2:58:03
  nine ers. But I think the Chiefs will win. I hope it's a
• 2:58:07
  close game. I actually think that Rock Party is by far the most important
• 2:58:13
  person in this game. This game will be determined by how Brock Purdy does,
• 2:58:16
  and he could if he pulls off a victory, he would completely usurp
• 2:58:22
  the Taylor Swift Travis Kelcey narrative, the narrative of the dynasty for the Kansas
• 2:58:26
  City Chiefs. The fact that he was mister Irrelevant in the draft a couple
• 2:58:31
  of years ago, the fact that he's making much less than a million dollars
• 2:58:35
  on his salary this year, the fact that he's a very devout Christian.
• 2:58:39
  I mean, if Brock Purty leads the San Francisco forty nine ers to a
• 2:58:43
  win over Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs, that's going to be a
• 2:58:48
  huge media narrative, and it's going to be a right left thing again,
• 2:58:52
  So look out for that. The right is going to completely embrace Brock Purty,
• 2:58:56
  especially as the Taylor Swift slayer. I have no idea what Brock Purdy's
• 2:59:01
  political beliefs are, but he's clearly very very Christian, and he looks like
• 2:59:05
  a choir boy. And my guess is he's not a liberal, and so
• 2:59:11
  that's something to look forward to or look as a possibility for what will come
• 2:59:16
  out of this game. I am not that confident that Brock party is going
• 2:59:20
  to be able to pull this off. To me, he hasn't looked that
• 2:59:22
  great. He's had flashes of brilliance in the playoffs, but he's also had
• 2:59:26
  flashes to tell me he may throw a couple of interceptions and that this game
• 2:59:31
  could get out of hand and the Chiefs end up winning. I like Brock
• 2:59:35
  Purdy. I'm kind of rooting for him. I guess if I have a
• 2:59:39
  rooting interest in this game, I want Brock Perdy to do well, but
• 2:59:43
  I'm concerned that he might not be up to this challenge at this point because
• 2:59:46
  it would be a remarkable story for the last pick in the draft from a
• 2:59:50
  couple of years ago to beat the dynasty of the Kansas City Chiefs. Regardless,
• 2:59:54
  you're going to have great storylines, and with the Taylor Swift angle,
• 2:59:58
  I believe you're going to see the largest audience for a football game in history.
• 3:00:03
  Now they've changed the way that they determined what the numbers are for ratings
• 3:00:09
  and for audience you know, total audience and total eyeballs. And interestingly,
• 3:00:15
  the Super Bowl until a couple of years ago, really until last year,
• 3:00:20
  was starting to diminish. It was starting to show signs of weakness when it
• 3:00:24
  came to both ratings as well as total viewership, and last year changed that.
• 3:00:30
  Now that was partially because they've altered the way that they determined viewership.
• 3:00:33
  Determining viewership for the Super Bowl is an exceedingly difficult thing to do because most
• 3:00:39
  people are watching it with a group of people, whether it's at a bar,
• 3:00:43
  at a party, or what have you. So I've never quite understood
• 3:00:46
  how they can get an accurate number on the total number of viewers for the
• 3:00:50
  Super Bowl. But last year it was supposedly one hundred and fourteen million people,
• 3:00:56
  which was a record number for total viewership, not for ratings, because
• 3:01:00
  obviously the population has increased and the total rating, which is the percentage of
• 3:01:05
  actual televisions that are watching that particular event, is never going to reach what
• 3:01:11
  it once was back in the eighties. But from a standpoint of total viewership,
• 3:01:16
  I think they will break the one hundred and fourteen million mark, and
• 3:01:20
  they might break it pretty easily. It wouldn't surprise me if they broke the
• 3:01:22
  one hundred and twenty million mark, which would really be an extraordinary number.
• 3:01:28
  But I think they'll break one hundred and twenty million. It'll be interesting to
• 3:01:31
  be able to judge, you know, what the tailor swift effect really is.
• 3:01:35
  But I'm guessing over one hundred and twenty million total viewers, maybe even
• 3:01:39
  more than that, and I'm guessing the Chiefs win and whether that results in
• 3:01:46
  a Taylor swift in Travis Kelcey engagement. Who knows that would be the dream
• 3:01:50
  scenario for the NFL. I doubt that, but I do think it'll be
• 3:01:54
  entertaining, it'll be interesting, and we will talk about it for sure in
• 3:01:58
  the next episode of the podcast. So until then, thanks so much for
• 3:02:01
  listening. My name is John Ziggler. This has been the Death of Journalism podcast.