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Episode One Hundred Eleven: Money Changes Everything · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and eleven of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:05
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. Conservatives celebrate
• 0:09
  a victory over woke elite college presidents, but is it really a win.
• 0:14
  Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have a new best friend, and it's Alex Jones.
• 0:20
  Republicans hold another presidential debate for no apparent reason, and it appears the
• 0:25
  golf world really is going to be destroyed by the live threat. I'm known
• 0:29
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• 0:39
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• 1:00
  want to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman
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  dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. So we are
• 1:08
  now just two months away from the planned end to this podcast, which I
• 1:14
  detailed and explain an episode number one hundred with the plan for me to permanently
• 1:19
  drop out of public life, and news events in multiple areas of life are
• 1:23
  in every possible way justifying that decision, because folks, we're just so incredibly
• 1:30
  screwed. I'm sorry to tell you, but this podcast is about the truth.
• 1:36
  And you know, I'm tired of a lot of things, but nothing
• 1:40
  more so than almost always being on the losing side of everything that happens in
• 1:46
  public life. It's like I'm on the old Washington General's basketball team, which
• 1:49
  used to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters every night, and even when it seems
• 1:56
  like my side wins, we actually probably lose. And there's no better example
• 2:01
  of that than what's going on currently with the controversy involving three elite university presidents,
• 2:08
  those of the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Harvard, and in
• 2:13
  the last episode of the podcast, I played the now mega viral clip of
• 2:17
  a congressional hearing where those three all female college presidents were unwilling or unable to
• 2:25
  answer what seemed like a very simple question from Elsie Stephanic, Republican Congress win
• 2:32
  from New York about whether or not calling for genocide against Jewish people would be
• 2:39
  a violation of code of conduct at their schools and therefore be subjected to punishment,
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  and this created an awful lot of controversy, understandably, so I totally
• 2:53
  get why the clip went as viral as it did, although I have to
• 2:57
  say I was a little surprised it went mega megaviral, but I think that's
• 3:01
  because of the combustible situation obviously involving Israel and Hamas right now. But in
• 3:08
  the aftermath of the initial controversy, the then president of the University of Pennsylvania,
• 3:15
  Liz McGill, put out what looked like a hostage video where she basically
• 3:21
  tried to backtrack and explain her original testimony, and she said that in fact,
• 3:28
  it would be a violation of the code of conduct at the University of
• 3:32
  Pennsylvania. And that didn't work because the University of Pennsylvania was threatened with all
• 3:39
  sorts of donors pulling their financial support for the university, and the board decided
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  that she was no longer the right person for the job, it seems like,
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  and she was forced to resign, and conservatives everywhere have rejoiced, and
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  I get it. I get it, especially as someone who despises what has
• 4:04
  become of elite academia as much or more so than anybody on the planet.
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  And that's not an exaggeration. I mean no. I allegedly went to an
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  elite academic school, Georgetown University in Washington, d C. Which has become
• 4:19
  as woke as it gets, and it's disgusting to me. I cannot stand
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  what has happened to elite academia, and to see any of these people be
• 4:29
  punished. I get why it's theoretically a reason to rejoice, but I don't
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  see what has happened here as a reason to rejoice, because I think the
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  entire point of this has been lost. I actually don't have a huge problem.
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  Although it was very and artfully done with the original answers at that congressional
• 4:51
  hearing by the three university presidents, the problem with what they said, in
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  my view so was the hypocrisy. It was the hypocrisy that they are unwilling
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  to at that time punish calls for genocide against Jewish people, yet they punish
• 5:13
  people all the time for other realms of speech that would not be seemingly nearly
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  as outrageous, and sometimes are even based in truth and justice, specifically in
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  the realm of transgenderism and female sports and that whole area of controversy that we've
• 5:34
  talked about previously on the podcast. That to me is the most clear cut
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  example of the hypocrisy here, and so to me, that was what should
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  have been the focus that look at these university presidents. They're willing to stand
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  on the principle of free speech. And I get, as someone who wrote
• 5:55
  a book called the Death of Free Speech, I get that this is not
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  technically a First an issue. However, I actually think there are more First
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  Amendment elements of this issue then some give it credit. For one, because
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  while these are not state schools, they do take funding from the state and
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  from the federal government, and so there's that connection there, But also because
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  their codes of conduct regarding speech are supposed to be inspired by and consistent with,
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  in their own words, the United States Constitution. Also, there's a
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  concept of academic freedom, which is not based in the Constitution intrinsically, but
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  it's just as important. If you can't have academic freedom at a place like
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  University of Pennsylvania or MIT or Harvard. You can't have it anywhere. That
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  has always been the foundational basis for higher education, that you have the freedom
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  to say and think things that people may vehemently disagree with, because there's some
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  intrinsic value to that in the bigger picture, that we had to put up
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  with sometimes crazy speech in order to one not curtail speech and also to have
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  the ability to have freedom of thought, so that sometimes great ideas come out
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  of crazy concepts or things that seem out of this world totally contrarian, turn
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  out to be true. We saw that during the COVID pandemic, the things
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  that were considered to be forbidden to be said actually turned out to be true.
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  Will you have to have the academic freedom to be able to let those
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  contrarian ideas have a foundation and not be destroyed and not be punished, And
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  you have to put up with a lot of crap in order to be able
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  to support that concept. In order for that to occur, you have to
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  be able to put up with people saying a lot of nutty things. And
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  you know, calling for the genocide of a group of people is obviously one
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  of those naughty things. I'm not in favor of that. Obviously, anyone
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  should condemn somebody who's calling for the genocide of any ethnic group. But here
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  is where things get complicated again, because oftentimes there's a saying in the law
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  that great cases make for bad law, and I think that that's apropos here
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  because when it comes to Judaism and it comes to Israel, we're dealing with
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  unique circumstances that, in my opinion, makes this a more dangerous situation when
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  it comes to speech, because, as I've said consistently, one, we've
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  got the very unique situation of the Holocaust where because understandably, because of the
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  Holocaust, Jews are far more vulnerable to this kind of hate speech and far
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  more sensitive to it, and understandably so I get that. I get that
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  one hundred percent. I have no problem with that. But that puts Judaism
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  in a bit of a different category when it comes to sensitivity. And so
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  we're making rules based upon a unique group of people. And it's not just
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  a Holocaust that makes Judaism unique, it's Judaism itself. Because Judaism is a
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  lot of things. Judaism is a religion Judaism is an ethnicity, you could
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  argue it's a race, it's a state when it comes to Israel, and
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  that means that all of a sudden, you are creating rules that if someone,
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  let's say, how do you define genocide? Is at the end of
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  Israel? Is that genocide? In these speech rules that we're creating. You
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  know, there's a lot of talk about the phrase from the River to the
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  Sea, which is a pro Palestinian chant that some people interpret as calling for
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  genocide against Jews, or is that just calling for the end of Israel?
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  And I'm not supporting either of those things in any way, shape or form.
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  But this is where you get into very dangerous territory when it comes to
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  speech. How do you define these terms? And you know, I was
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  in a very strange position of actually kind of supporting these very woke university presidents
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  when they said that it depends on the context of the statement, and especially
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  when it comes to Judaism, the context matters because it's not just a religion
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  or an ethnicity or a race or a state. It can be all of
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  those things, and the meaning can change. And as a free speech absolutist,
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  I am always very concerned about the slippery slope that's being created here.
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  And yes, this is not a state of institution, but it still matters.
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  It still matters that free speech be protected at elite institutions of higher learning.
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  And for these people to be crucified over this issue I found to be
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  incredibly frustrating, especially when it should have been the issue of hypocrisy. It's
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  the issue of hypocrisy that should have mattered here. Why are you so hesitant
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  when it comes to the issue of anti semitism in comparison to other issues like,
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  for instance, transgenderism. And my side, well, my side hasn't
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  been completely silent, and there are a lot of people, based upon what
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  I've seen online who agree with me. It has not won the day in
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  any way, shape or form, And I knew it wasn't going to win
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  the day. And when Liz McGill, the University of Pennsylvania president, was
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  forced to resign, conservatives almost universally cheered. And I just think that that
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  is a very dangerous precedent. And let's flip it. Let's not even take
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  it, you know, let's take it out of the realm of whether or
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  not people could say something about Jewish people. What about Jewish people saying something
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  about Hamas? So are we now now create are we now creating a rule
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  on college campuses where if a Jewish person or anybody else doesn't have to be
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  Jewish calls for the end of Hamas or death to Hamas, even after a
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  massive terrorist attack against Israel? Is that hate speech? Bullying? Harassment?
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  And I can't stand Now this is where I really get the hebe Gbis this
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  this word bullying? I mean, my god, anything can be considered bullying.
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  And if we're now going to allow leftists and that's that's the bottom line
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  here, leftists get to use these new rules that we're creating to punish whoever
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  they want. And so now this precedent is going to make things, in
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  my view even worse, because now the definition of bullying and harassment has just
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  been widened, and the rule has been created where if you don't come down
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  against any form of bullying any group, and you're protected by being part of
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  a group, even if it's fricking Hamas somehow, then you know you have
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  to be punished. Otherwise people are going to lose their jobs, like what
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  happened at the University of Pennsylvania. And you know obviously that you know,
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  whatever replaces McGill at the University of Pennsylvania, it's going to be just as
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  woke as she is. It's possible that by the time you hear this,
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  and as of this taping, the University of or Harvard University president is still
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  in charge there. Claudine Gay is her name, a black female, but
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  there are calls for her to be forced to resign, just like McGill,
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  and she's being now hit with all sorts of other allegations, including plagiarism in
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  her thesis. I think actually the worst charge than plagiarism is there was a
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  memo that she wrote before she became the president of Harvard. I think this
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  was just before she became president of Harvard. This was in the wake of
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  George Floyd, where she outlines in great detail, great detail, more clearcut
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  than I've ever seen before, how the George Floyd situation should be taken advantage
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  of for the purposes of instituting equity across all societal lines. I mean,
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  I'm not even exaggerating here, just an absolutely ridiculousness level of wokeness from clouding
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  Gay. And I was outraged by that that should have prevented her from ever
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  getting the job, but it's certainly in the firestorm should contribute to her being
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  forced to resign. And look, if she loses her job, I'm not
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  going to lose any sleep over it. But I just have a problem with
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  why this is happening. The issue should be there bocracy, and yes,
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  I get that an anti Semitism is part of this equation. I have been
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  shocked, like a lot of people have been, at the level of anti
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  Semitism on certain college campuses. I don't get it. I didn't realize it
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  existed until we saw this, and that's an important problem to take a look
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  at. But I don't like the idea that we're going to punish people in
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  ways that are very serious for theoretical speech. Now, if you say I'm
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  going to go kill Joey Goldstein because he's a Jew, then that's obviously bullying.
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  Harassment should be punishable, it might even be illegal. But that's different
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  than the theoretical idea, which I don't agree with in any way, shape
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  or form of I want Israel to be wiped off the planet or not exist.
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  If it's theoretical, then that to me, is still in the realm
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  of speech, and it's a very slippery slope from there. But I get
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  that very few people are going to understand this and agree with me on it.
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  And to be fair, it's not just the right or conservatives that have
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  blown it on this. My God, Saturday Night Live did a sketch a
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  live open on this whole situation where they somehow decided that it was a good
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  idea when they see the woke female college administrator's presidents being attacked, they instinctively
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  decided that the real villain here were not the university presidents, but at least
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  Stefanic, the Republican congresswoman. I mean, that's just unbelievable. Talk about
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  a bubble. I mean, I don't even understand how that happened. I
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  got at least a little bit that they were trying to kind of make the
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  same point I'm making, although in a very in art more than an artful
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  and not funny way. It is supposed to be a comedy show, obviously,
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  Saturday Night Live, and they decided that Stephonic was the bad guy here.
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  Stephanic was not the bad guy. It was a legitimate question. I
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  think it was kind of a gotcha grand standing situation, because that's what the
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  Republican Party, especially in the era of Trump, has become. And she's
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  a big Trumper and it's certainly worked for her very well, but she was
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  not the bad guy. If you wanted to do a funny sketch about this,
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  they should have done what I've been suggesting, which is to attack the
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  hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of what is punishable at an elite college campus when it
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  comes to the realm of speech. That would have been funny, and that
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  would have been on a firm foundation regarding what actually happened here. But it's
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  I just want to make the point that it's not just the right that's missing
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  the bow here, it's the left as well. And so I guess get
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  very frustrated by this whole situation. And I understand that people want their pound
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  of flesh. It's all about tribes now, it's all about getting a scalp,
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  and conservatives feel as if they've gotten a scalp. But I think this
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  scalp has come at a very high price, and that there will be repercussions
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  for this, that we are expanding this this realm of thought crimes, speech
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  crimes, hate speech, bullying to the point where it's never going to end.
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  And the people that are going to be making the decisions about what can
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  be said and what can be thought and what can't be are not going to
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  be conservatives when it comes to elade academia. It's going to be leftists,
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  and they're going to use these new weapons to their best benefit, and it's
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  not going to help conservatives in any way, shape or form. Now,
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  I will say that there has been at least one significantly truly positive thing that
• 19:00
  came out of this whole situation, at least so far, and it came
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  from an unlikely source, and that is CNN's Fared Zakaria did about a five
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  or six minute monologue that was largely inspired by this whole situation on what I
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  would call the death of elite academia. And a lot of people, including
• 19:25
  myself, have been completely stunned by the content of what Fared Zakaria said on
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  CNN over the weekend. Now, I'm not going to play the whole clip
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  at all. I'm not gonna play any of the clip because I can't play
• 19:36
  a short bit of it. It won't do a justice and it's too long
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  to play the whole thing. So I would urge you, if you haven't
• 19:45
  already seen it, to go search for it online. It shouldn't be difficult
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  if you're on Twitter, just go to Elon Musk's thread, because he was
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  one of those that reposted it and complimented for Reed Zakaria on what he said.
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  Frankly, it sounded to me like Zacharia was trying out for a position
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  on the Blaze. I mean, that's how unbelievably conservative this was. I
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  mean it was scorched earth on the entire realm of the lad academia and how
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  much they have lost their way. And as of this taping, thanks largely
• 20:21
  to Elon Musk promoting this, the actual tweet, the original post from CNN
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  and Zakaria has about twenty five million views and may have many more than that
• 20:36
  by the time you actually hear this podcast. But that's a huge success.
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  I mean, the important point of that is that both Zakaria and CNN are
• 20:48
  going to get a very very positive message from what they did there. I
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  mean that was remarkable that especially coming from CNN, and I think it shows
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  them, hopefully the potential benefit of not staying in their ultra woke liberal bubble.
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  And when you just speak rationally about this kind of stuff, that you're
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  gonna get rewarded. And I've talked a lot of times about how conflicted I
• 21:15
  am about Elon Musk, and frankly, I've never been more conflicted about Musk
• 21:19
  than I am this week and for this episode, for reasons I'll get to
• 21:23
  in a moment. But this is one of the benefits of Elon Musk.
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  Now, the Zakaria monologue was already going viral to begin with, but Musk
• 21:33
  put it at a new level. And this is the power of Musk.
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  I've said many times that in buying Twitter, he has created a market for
• 21:41
  positive Elon Musk stories, and he's benefited from that because anybody that does a
• 21:48
  positive Musk story knows that if Musk shares it on Twitter or x that it's
• 21:52
  gonna be a huge success and you're gonna hit your quota for likes and views
• 21:59
  and clicks, you know, for your week or your month or maybe even
• 22:02
  longer than that, just like Matt Drudge used to do on the Drudge Report.
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  Well, the other thing Musk does is when he highlights the work of
• 22:10
  somebody else. He effectively does the same thing. He just gave CNN a
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  treat, a dessert. He gave them motivation to continue down this path.
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  This is the right way to go, CNN. See what you did here.
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  This will be the most successful post that CNN probably puts on Twitter for
• 22:33
  weeks or months. And you know, logically, that ought to have an
• 22:37
  impact, because people, generally, even liberals, sometimes respond to incentives and
• 22:44
  disincentives. So good for Musk and good for Zecharia for doing this, because
• 22:49
  it's a remarkable monologue that was dead on and it was about the most conservative
• 22:55
  thing I've ever heard from a liberal on CNN, And it is indication that
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  one our side is right, but two that maybe the tide is changing,
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  that maybe, you know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm looking at this
• 23:08
  too specifically to the issue of free speech, and that may be in the
• 23:12
  bigger picture. I always hate to be optimistic, because it's about the only
• 23:15
  time I'm ever wrong. But maybe in the bigger picture, these elite academic
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  presidents stepping in it has sent a different message, one that may be even
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  bigger than the free speech issue, which is that elite academia is out of
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  touch and that there's a crisis and that something has to be done, something
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  has to be changed. I'm suspicious as to whether or not that message carries
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  the day, given the nature of academia, but at least I can see
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  a path there, so you know, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic. I
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  doubt it, because in general, it's it's hard for me to be overly
• 23:55
  pessimistic because I'm always right when I'm pessimistic and I'm often wrong when I'm optimistic.
• 24:00
  But I was happy with what happened with Faried Zakaria, and I urge
• 24:03
  you to check that out for yourself if you can. Now I mentioned what's
• 24:08
  going on with Elon Musk, and there's a lot going as there always is.
• 24:11
  There's a lot going on with Elon Musk, and my almost comical back
• 24:19
  and forth between loving Elon Musk and hating Elon Musk and how conflicted I am
• 24:25
  about him, and I would say the biggest thing that he has done in
• 24:29
  the last few days is that he has reinstated I don't even know what to
• 24:34
  call Alex Jones, but commentator Alex Jones to Twitter or x and Jones has
• 24:41
  been off of ex or Twitter for several years, and you know, it's
• 24:47
  kind of weird how he got bounced from Twitter or x. It was actually
• 24:52
  because of a confrontation with a CNN reporter, which I didn't understand how that
• 24:57
  was the reason that Jones got bounced. There's all sorts of reasons why,
• 25:02
  in my opinion, if you were going to bounce Jones, especially during the
• 25:06
  previous regime that owned Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, that didn't make any
• 25:11
  sense to me. But for those of you who may not know who Alex
• 25:15
  Jones is, Alex Jones is the ultimate conspiracy theorist, and I guess you
• 25:21
  would call it the right wing. I very much even hesitate to call Jones
• 25:25
  anything politically. I don't think he's certainly not conservative. He's been associated with
• 25:30
  Donald Trump as a Trump supporter, but he's mostly a conspiracy theorist, and
• 25:37
  he's also an asshole, and he's also a fraud and the worst thing that
• 25:42
  he ever did, although it's difficult to sometimes choose the worst thing that Jones
• 25:48
  has ever did done, but you know, the one where he at least
• 25:52
  suffered the most consequences for it was when he claimed that the Sandy Hook attack
• 25:57
  that killed twenty six children in Newtown, Connecticut didn't actually happen, that it
• 26:04
  was a false flag, and that the parents of those children who were slaughtered,
• 26:12
  that that they were faking it somehow, that they didn't really lose their
• 26:18
  children, that there, I guess their children just disappeared. I don't even
• 26:21
  understand what the hell Jones's argument was. And those parents took Musk, they
• 26:30
  didn't take Musk Boy. If they had taken Musk to court, that would
• 26:32
  have been something. They took Jones to court, and they won, and
• 26:37
  they won big time in a defamation case. And the judgment against Jones was
• 26:42
  astronomical and almost like a billion dollars or something, which of course he's never
• 26:47
  going to be able to pay, and I'm sure he hasn't paid any of
• 26:49
  it. But in the course of that court case, Jones admitted under oath
• 26:57
  that he's a fraud, that he's a carnival barker, that he doesn't really
• 27:02
  even mean most of what he says, that he makes stuff up to be
• 27:07
  an entertainer. This was all in a desperate attempt to try to avoid this
• 27:12
  judgment against him in a civil court because of what he had said about the
• 27:18
  parents of the children that were killed at Sandy Hook. And look, I
• 27:23
  mean anybody should be outraged by that. I mean, that should be the
• 27:27
  end of you as a remotely credible public commentator when you claim that a massacre
• 27:37
  of children did not happen and that their parents are part of the deep state
• 27:44
  for some bizarrow world reason I can't even understand or even begin to understand.
• 27:51
  And you are found by a court to be libel there, which is very
• 27:57
  very difficult to do. I've been gone through it myself and won in a
• 28:02
  trial where I was accused of defamation, and I won unanimously because I didn't
• 28:07
  I didn't say anything that was untruthful at all. But you have to have
• 28:11
  as a very high standard, you have to know what you're saying is false,
• 28:17
  you have to have bad intent, and there has to be real damage
• 28:22
  done by what you have said. And then of course a jury has to
• 28:26
  find that you are libel with the preponderance of the evidence and all that happened
• 28:32
  when it came to Sandy Hook, And you know it just really it should
• 28:37
  piss anybody off. I hesitate to even say it pisses me off. I
• 28:41
  have a kind of an odd connection to Sandy Hook because one of the spokespeople
• 28:45
  for the parents of the Sandy Hook children was a woman by name of fran
• 28:51
  Lobis, with whom I played her boyfriend in our school play at Counts the
• 28:56
  Rock, New Town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And then she beat me
• 29:02
  in the student council race for class president for eighth grade. You know,
• 29:08
  I liked her a lot. She was great, and you know, she
• 29:11
  lost her son at Sandy Hook, and she became the spokesperson for one of
• 29:17
  them, for the parents of the children who died. And you know,
• 29:23
  I mean, I've even been asked, well, how do I know that
• 29:26
  those children actually died? Well, I know those children died because I saw
• 29:30
  Frank Loebis singing at her son's funeral. You fucking asshole. I mean,
• 29:36
  Jesus Christ, we're just such a loss society that an Alex Jones can do
• 29:42
  this, be found libel in a civil court for hundreds and hundreds of millions
• 29:48
  of dollars and now here. Just a few years later, he's reinstated by
• 29:55
  the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who put out a pole.
• 30:00
  He put out a poll on Twitter over the weekend, so that you
• 30:03
  know, he could at least claim that it was the people. It was
• 30:07
  the people that decided that Jones should be reinstated to Twitter, and it won
• 30:14
  Jones one, as I knew he would, by a seventy to thirty margin,
• 30:18
  by the way, you know, like two million votes in a Twitter
• 30:22
  poll where you can only vote once. And you know, one of the
• 30:26
  things I got out of that was for those of you who are DeSantis fans,
• 30:30
  and there are many out there that are convinced that the polls are completely
• 30:34
  totally wrong, that there's going to be this miracle when the Iowa caucus has
• 30:40
  happened and we're going to see that these polls are catastrophically off, and by
• 30:44
  the way, they could be off. But for those that believe that,
• 30:48
  how do you explain Alex Jones winning a Twitter poll seventy to thirty put out
• 30:56
  there by Elon Musk, the great hero of the right wing right now?
• 31:00
  Now, that's just not possible. It's just not possible. Because the entire
• 31:04
  premise of the DeSantis campaign doing better than the polling is that there's a silent
• 31:11
  majority of rational people within the Republican Party that are going to carry the day
• 31:18
  bullshit, and I realized Twitter isn't real life. But Twitter is becoming more
• 31:22
  and more popular, especially among right wingers. And two million people's two million
• 31:27
  people? Now, are they all registered Republicans? You know? Are we're
• 31:33
  going to vote in the primary? No? But I'm telling you, Alex
• 31:36
  Jones wouldn't be getting seventy percent in a Elon Musk poll if there was really
• 31:42
  a silent majority of rational people out there that are going to suddenly change the
• 31:48
  world. And I get you could argue that this is a free speech issue,
• 31:51
  and you're probably saying, John, aren't you being a hypocrite on free
• 31:53
  speech? No, because to post on Twitter is a privilege, it is
• 31:57
  not a right, and there was no rationale for restoring it. And when
• 32:04
  it comes to the issue of free speech, Musk himself is all over the
• 32:07
  place. Musk came down against the university presidents, saying that it clearly was
• 32:15
  a violation of the code of conduct to call for theoretical genocide against Jewish people.
• 32:21
  Okay, fine, I guess. I mean, if that's your opinion,
• 32:23
  that's your opinion. I think that's a dangerous precedent or rule to be
• 32:28
  setting for the reasons I've already stated. But so he comes down against free
• 32:34
  speech, there against theoretical genocide, and now here he's rewarding for rewarding somebody
• 32:42
  in a huge way, Alex Jones, who got sued and lost in civil
• 32:46
  court for denying a real genocide of children. So, in my opinion,
• 32:54
  Musk is all over the map. And there are other examples I could give
• 33:00
  you where Musk is all over the map and rather inconsistent and even hypocritical when
• 33:06
  it comes to the issue of free speech. And I don't even understand Musk's
• 33:09
  motivation from a financial standpoint. Here he is facing this advertiser boycott. Reinstating
• 33:17
  Alex Jones is not going to suddenly cause any of these big corporations to change
• 33:23
  their mind and go, you know what, we really we miss judge Elon
• 33:27
  Musk and Twitter. We're going to go back to advertising on Twitter or x.
• 33:31
  That's not going to happen. So the timing of it doesn't even make
• 33:35
  any sense to me from it just a purely business perspective, Because there's been
• 33:39
  understandably a lot of very negative press regarding the reinstatement of Alex Jones, and
• 33:47
  then there's the reason why Musk even decided to do this, now why this
• 33:52
  even became an issue, And this is where you know, we get this
• 33:54
  perfect storm of of elements to the story. I think there's almost a a
• 34:00
  I mean this facetiously intended to drive John Zigler insane because if I'm not there
• 34:06
  already, because the whole reason why Musk even address the Alex Jones issue is
• 34:12
  because just previously to that, a few days ago, Tucker Carlson decided to
• 34:19
  make Alex Jones the focus of his most recent Twitter show. And it wasn't
• 34:27
  just the fact that Tucker Carlson decided to interview Alex Jones even though he had
• 34:31
  been banned from social media platforms. It was that Tucker Carlson gave Alex Jones
• 34:40
  effectively a Monica Lewinsky. I mean it was a love fest. I mean
• 34:46
  he was slobbering all over him. He didn't address any really any of the
• 34:53
  negatives or why Jones shouldn't be taken seriously. By the way, to be
• 34:58
  clear, I think an honest interview between Tiger Carlson and Alex Jones might have
• 35:04
  been interesting. If Tucker Carlson took on Jones and said so you in the
• 35:09
  Sandy Hook lawsuit acknowledge that you're just an entertainer. Tell us the opinions you've
• 35:17
  provided that you were most surprised people actually bought were real. Which are the
• 35:22
  ones that are most fake? Is there anything you actually do believe? How'd
• 35:28
  you come up with the Sandy Hook thing? I mean, you know,
• 35:30
  I would have destroyed Alex Jones on the Sandy Hook situation, but there was
• 35:36
  none of that. It wasn't a real interview. So because I had people
• 35:39
  responding to my outrage over this occurring, saying, well, John, are
• 35:44
  you against Jones being interviewed? Not necessarily it could have been a fascinating interview,
• 35:49
  but that's not what this was. This was a rehabilitation for reasons that
• 35:54
  I don't even fully understand from a political standpoint, except becoming convinced that Tucker
• 36:01
  Carlson, who may be losing his mind, I don't know, but he
• 36:06
  is just so determined to stick it to the establishment or what he considers to
• 36:09
  be the establishment, that he'll take any position that he thinks is going to
• 36:15
  piss the establishment off, that the irritating the establishment, regardless of the truth
• 36:22
  or the untruth of the statement of the subject matter is inherently good in Tucker's
• 36:28
  mind, and that's just ridiculous. You know, I hate the establishment as
• 36:32
  much as anybody, but sometimes the establishment actually is mostly or totally right,
• 36:38
  and they are right when it comes to Alex Jones. Alex Jones is the
• 36:43
  worst of the worst of the worst. He gives right wing media a bad
• 36:47
  name. He discredits anything that he touches or any organization he's a part of,
• 36:55
  and so it makes it far easier for national people to dismiss not just
• 37:02
  what he's saying, but what people associated with him are saying. In other
• 37:07
  words, the entire right wing media establishment loses even more credibility. The lost
• 37:14
  credibility because they're attached to Trump, they lose even more credibility when it comes
• 37:20
  to being attached to Alex Jones. And sometimes that matters a lot, like
• 37:24
  when COVID hit and our side had no fucking credibility because our alleged leader was
• 37:32
  a guy who supposedly, although not technically, was calling for bleach to be
• 37:37
  injected into people's bodies to fight COVID, And therefore, nothing the right wing
• 37:45
  said about masks, even though we were right about masks was given any credibility
• 37:52
  by the mainstream, and so these things matter. It's not just theoretical,
• 37:59
  and there's a huge price to be paid for embracing Alex Jones. And it
• 38:06
  was the way that Tucker did it that really really pissed me off, because
• 38:09
  again, this was an attempted and largely successful rehabilitation, a remarkably successful rehabilitation
• 38:19
  of Alex Jones by Tucker Carlson. But the basis, the basis for Tucker's
• 38:25
  rehabilitation of Alex Jones was so farcical, so absurd, that I was forced
• 38:32
  to once again text Tucker Carlson directly, and here's the history behind it.
• 38:38
  Tucker promoted his quote unquote interview with Alex Jones with the following tweet. Alex
• 38:45
  Jones predicted nine to eleven in detail and on camera months before it happened.
• 38:54
  How did he do that? And why did the government decide to destroy him
• 39:00
  after he did? And when I saw that, I'm like, oh my
• 39:07
  god, I cannot I cannot believe this is happening. I cannot believe this
• 39:10
  is happening. First of all, there's a lot being said there. Tucker
• 39:15
  Carlson is justifying the entire interview, and he starts that interview off slabbering all
• 39:22
  over Jones because allegedly he predicted nine to eleven, and then he connects the
• 39:29
  prediction of nine to eleven to all the bad things that happened to Jones after
• 39:34
  that that the government destroyed decided to destroy him because somehow Jones knew about nine
• 39:40
  to eleven before it happened. That is a fairy tale, that is a
• 39:45
  dark fantasy, that is bullshit in the extreme. And even the clip that
• 39:53
  Tucker Carlson uses to try to justify this absurdity is obviously ridiculous, absurd,
• 40:06
  false, bull crap. And I want to try to explain in very short
• 40:14
  order exactly why this is the case. So first I want to play for
• 40:19
  you the clip that Tucker posted when he promoted the interview and then when he
• 40:23
  did the interview itself. Now, this clip is heavily edited. Heavily I
• 40:30
  don't know if you're gonna be able to tell that just from the audio,
• 40:32
  but in the video you can see because the obviously the video changes with each
• 40:38
  edit, but when you hear the pauses or the change in the cadence,
• 40:45
  there's at least two or three edits in here. I don't know what was
• 40:50
  said outside of the edits or within the part that got edited out. I'm
• 40:55
  highly suspicious that it's not good for Joe, but I'm just I'm going to
• 41:00
  be as I often do. I will take you know, my critics or
• 41:07
  my opponent's version of events, and I will still destroy them with it.
• 41:10
  So I'm going to accept. I'm going to accept the premise, which I
• 41:15
  believe to be false, that what you're hearing here is the essence of what
• 41:20
  Jones said a couple of months before nine to eleven. I'm just going to
• 41:22
  accept that because this is what Tucker Carlson used to justify the entire rehabilitation of
• 41:30
  Alex Jones, which resulted a couple of days later in him being reinstated by
• 41:34
  Elon Musk on to Twitter or x and being become once again another major member
• 41:42
  of the right wing media in very good standing. Got him worse than that
• 41:45
  for reasons I'll explain shortly, But it's this clip heavily edited that is the
• 41:52
  basis of the whole thing, Supposedly that Alex Jones predicted nine to eleven before
• 41:58
  it happened, and the government decided to destroy him because of that. Now
• 42:04
  I want you to listen very carefully to what the basis of this fraudulent narrative
• 42:08
  is. And here's that clip that Tucker played to promote the interview and to
• 42:14
  start his interview with Alex Jones. We know the joints. He's a staff
• 42:16
  wanted to blow up airliners, Baltimore's son, or if you let some terrorist
• 42:20
  group drew it like the World Trade Center, we know who to blame.
• 42:22
  And if there was an outside threat like a beIN Lawden, who was a
• 42:25
  known CIA ashet in the eighties, he's the boogeyman they need. Now.
• 42:29
  When I saw that clip, my first reaction was, that's not a prediction.
• 42:34
  That's not even close to a prediction. That's a bunch of words that
• 42:38
  sound to a dumb person who's not listening like it might have been a prediction.
• 42:45
  He says something about planes, says something about the World Trade Center,
• 42:47
  and says something about Osama bin Laden. Okay, that's understandably, that's a
• 42:52
  little weird coming in the months before at nine to eleven, But what does
• 42:57
  he actually say about those three things that you know he puts together in this
• 43:02
  mashup of words that is heavily edited by Tucker Carlson. In my very strong
• 43:08
  opinion, that's the not even close to a prediction. In fact, Jones
• 43:14
  is wrong about almost everything he says there. And the best way for me
• 43:20
  to explain this is to simply read to you what I texted Tucker Carlson after
• 43:27
  this came out. Now, you may recall, if you're an avid listening
• 43:30
  to this podcast, that you know, back in the spring, when I
• 43:35
  realized that Tucker was going to pave the way for Donald Trump to be the
• 43:37
  nominee after his first interview with Trump on Fox News Channel, after the first
• 43:43
  indictment, and I've been vindicated one hundred percent. And then, by the
• 43:46
  way, we're going to talk about predictions, no one's ever going to give
• 43:51
  me anywhere near the credit for that very very very prescient and real prediction of
• 43:59
  how t Trump was gonna win the nomination based upon the way Tucker was framing
• 44:04
  the first indictment. No one's ever gonna give me that kind of anywhere close
• 44:08
  to Alex Jones kind of respect or admiration that Tucker gave him for this bogus
• 44:15
  nine to eleven prediction. I mean, it's not even close. My prediction
• 44:20
  on what Tucker was doing with Trump has been vindicated a thousand percent, and
• 44:23
  it was a real prediction made not just on this podcast, but on News
• 44:29
  Nation television with Dan Abrams. I'll get no credit for that at all.
• 44:32
  In fact, I've only gotten derision from the DeSantis fans. But we now
• 44:37
  live in a world where Alex Jones can pretend, or Tucker Carlson can pretend
• 44:43
  for him to predict nine to eleven, and all these many years later,
• 44:47
  he can be deemed a hero and get reinstated and rehabilitated because of this fairytale,
• 44:55
  bogus narrative. And so anyway, I previously texted Tucker. He stopped
• 45:01
  responding to me shortly after that initial interaction about how I was chiding him for
• 45:08
  what he was going to do with Trump, and he denied that he had
• 45:12
  the power to do that, which was ridiculous. But you know, I
• 45:17
  think on one or two other occasions I've texted Tucker to chide him about something
• 45:22
  that he's done. I have not done so in many months, but this
• 45:25
  situation I thought called for it. I have no idea whether or not he's
• 45:29
  even still receiving my texts, but I haven't gotten anything, you know,
• 45:32
  rejecting it or saying that I've been blocked. So here's what I texted Tucker
• 45:37
  Carlson. Tucker, I am pretty sure you no longer care about factual accuracy,
• 45:43
  especially after butting up with the likes of Alex Jones. But you should
• 45:46
  at least know that Jones did not quote unquote predict nine to eleven, as
• 45:52
  if it would really matter if he did, especially given all the other insane
• 45:55
  predictions he routinely makes. Contrary to the very edited clip, you fell into
• 46:01
  rapture over one, no planes were quote unquote blown up on nine to eleven.
• 46:10
  That's what Jones says there. He's by the way, he's citing somebody
• 46:15
  else. I don't even understand, you know, what he's basing it on,
• 46:19
  But he's citing somebody else saying that, you know, planes are going
• 46:22
  to be blown up. There were no planes that were blown up. Planes
• 46:27
  were used as missiles. So that's a significant difference. So saying that planes
• 46:32
  will be blown up is not a prediction of nine to eleven. Number two.
• 46:37
  More importantly, I believe his World Trade Center reference is clearly citing the
• 46:44
  nineteen ninety three attack on the World Trade Center and not a prediction of the
• 46:51
  twin towers being hit with planes. That's number two. Number three, this
• 46:55
  is my back to my text with Tucker. He claims Lawden could be used
• 47:00
  as a fall guy for some sort of attack. But bin Laden actually did
• 47:07
  plan sponsor the nine to eleven attack, just as he admitted to and I
• 47:13
  had mentioned this in the text, but also for which he was assassinated by
• 47:17
  US military forces eventually. And that's the last part. That's maybe the most
• 47:23
  important part of this whole thing, because inherent in the idea that Tucker is
• 47:29
  giving Jones credit for this prediction is that he was right that bin Laden was
• 47:35
  a fall guy, which means one Bin Laden didn't do it, So that's
• 47:40
  all a lie. And this goes to the entire bogus concept of nine to
• 47:45
  eleven being an inside job, which it wasn't. But that's the implication of
• 47:52
  all of this. So when Tucker, Tucker's not just giving credit for Jones
• 47:57
  to Jones for a prediction he didn't actually make, he's using it to substantiate
• 48:01
  the entire concept that nine to eleven was an inside job because my god,
• 48:07
  Jones knew that this was gonna happen, that they were gonna pin it on
• 48:10
  Bin Laden. They didn't pint it on Bin Laden. Bin Laden did it.
• 48:15
  He admitted it. That's why he got killed. The evidence of this
• 48:20
  is overwhelming. And these are two of the biggest fires in the right wing
• 48:24
  media now, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, and they're being cradled and embraced
• 48:32
  by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the most powerful right
• 48:37
  wing media figure in the world, so much so that Musk, after Jones's
• 48:44
  reinstatement, did a Twitter event with Alex Jones. I don't even know if
• 48:52
  you would call it an interview, but it was basically a similar situation to
• 48:55
  the Botch DeSantis campaign launch, which Musk was responsible for. But Musk was
• 49:01
  there and Alex Jones was there. By the way, the fake Obama Swami
• 49:07
  was there. Obama Swami had to go to the bathroom and forgot to turn
• 49:10
  off his microphone and you could hear him taking a piss. I'm not making
• 49:14
  any of this up. The richest man in the world, the newest minted
• 49:20
  right wing media star, and a guy who is one of the top candidates
• 49:24
  to be the Republican nominee for president. We're all doing a Twitter space as
• 49:29
  a heead and Obama Swami had to go to the bathroom and forgot to take
• 49:32
  his microphone turn his microphone off. I mean, this is the fucked up
• 49:37
  world we're now living in. Elon Musk, Alex Jones and the fake Obama
• 49:43
  Swamy And this is the greatest thing that's happened to Jones and years, certainly
• 49:49
  since the Sandy Hook judgment where he was supposed to be done and buried.
• 49:54
  That should that should be the death penalty for being taken seriously as a commentator
• 50:01
  of news events the Sandy Hook situation. But it's not isolated. Some people
• 50:07
  like to think, oh, well, that was just one mistake he made.
• 50:09
  Bullshit, This is the his entire stick is this kind of crap.
• 50:14
  And even the thing you're gonna give him credit for, the nine to eleven
• 50:16
  prediction, was not in any way, shape or form a prediction, and
• 50:21
  he was wrong about what he said. And that's the best you got.
• 50:24
  That's the entire justification and foundation of the Tucker Carlson interview and the rehabilitation of
• 50:31
  Alex Jones, And this is how broken things are. It's not just the
• 50:37
  left wing media, it's the right wing media, completely and totally broken.
• 50:43
  And it's in that context that the Republican candidates held their fourth debate for no
• 50:51
  apparent reason. And I, you know, I've been right about a lot,
• 50:53
  I've been wrong about some things. I've been absolutely correct in my prediction
• 50:59
  that each of these debates we're going to get a smaller and smaller audience,
• 51:04
  They're going to be less and less relevant, and this one certainly fit that
• 51:09
  description. Now, part of the reason for the ratings decline was that it
• 51:14
  was on the CW network, and I think it got very little publicity.
• 51:21
  And I have to also say that, you know, for an event like
• 51:22
  this, ratings may not matter quite as much as they used to, because
• 51:30
  while you know, three or four million people watched it live on the CW,
• 51:35
  many millions more were exposed to it on social media, specifically Twitter when
• 51:39
  it comes to highlights of what happened. But even that creates dysfunction because everyone
• 51:46
  knows, especially if a fake Obama Swami, he was very good at these
• 51:50
  type of things. Everyone knows that your highlight clip is going to be seen
• 51:54
  more than the entire debate will be seen. So if you can we ate
• 52:00
  a viral moment online, that's worth way more in audience views than whatever happens
• 52:06
  during the full hour and a half or two hour debate or whatever it is.
• 52:10
  And that's pretty much what creates the shit show that was the fourth debate.
• 52:15
  Now, some people liked this fourth debate because the primary questioner was Megan
• 52:22
  Kelly, who was questioning the candidates from the right as opposed from the left.
• 52:25
  Although you know, to me, I think Megan Kelly is a classic,
• 52:30
  a classic situation here where she doesn't like Trump. You know, you
• 52:36
  can tell she at least has some like for DeSantis. But everything that she's
• 52:42
  done, much like Glenn Beck, has been in keeping with a narrative that
• 52:46
  is going to allow or foster or enable Trump to be the nominee. And
• 52:52
  she did exactly that in this debate, where she's being very hard on all
• 52:57
  the candidates. I get it, I'm all in favor of hard questioning,
• 53:00
  but they're the ones that are actually there. Trump's not there, and he's
• 53:07
  benefiting from that. And I have predicted from the very beginning Trump will never
• 53:12
  go to any of these debates. I've been vindicated in that prediction, and
• 53:15
  I predicted he will receive no blowback for those for being a coward. And
• 53:20
  I've been vindicated in that prediction, and in fact, most of the commentary
• 53:24
  I see when it comes to the issue of Trump dodging these debates, which
• 53:30
  frankly gets nowhere near as much attention as it should. I mean, what
• 53:34
  else matters other than the fact that Trump is not there? I mean,
• 53:37
  the whole concept of holding four debates without your prohibitive front runner is ridiculous.
• 53:45
  It's absurd, it's comical, it's playing pretend, and all it does is
• 53:51
  play right into Trump's hands, just like I told you it would, because
• 53:53
  everyone starts attacking each other. Everyone looks small. It looks like the JVET.
• 54:00
  By the way, Trump has started calling it the JV team, And
• 54:05
  he gets called smart for dodging these events. Politically smart. That's that's by
• 54:10
  far the most overwhelmingly common response that I have seen when it comes to commentary
• 54:19
  in the media on Trump dodging these debates. Oh, it's a politically smart
• 54:23
  move. Well, why is it a politically smart move because he hasn't been
• 54:28
  forced to pay a price. Well, why hasn't he been forced to pay
• 54:30
  a price? Because the conservative media is afraid of taking him on on this
• 54:37
  because they don't want to piss off the Trump cult, which is at the
• 54:40
  core of their customer base. So it's it's this never ending cycle, which
• 54:47
  was very easily predicted, and that's why I predicted it. It's still frustrating
• 54:52
  to see it come to fruition in real life, but it's just, you
• 54:58
  know, it's infuriating because Trump, I guess, has made a politically smart
• 55:02
  decision. But it wasn't out of political smarts that he made it. It
• 55:07
  was out of cowardice. It was out of being afraid to defend his own
• 55:14
  record. It was out of fear of facing Ron DeSantis. That's really what
• 55:20
  this was all about. And I mean, he's still to this day flat
• 55:24
  out lying Trump is in hilarious terms about rond de Santis's record. And so
• 55:32
  instead of the debates, you know, there were some people who fantasize that
• 55:37
  the debates would be the time when DeSantis could go up against Trump Mono Amano
• 55:44
  and take him down over his COVID response. Right, That was the great
• 55:47
  hope of many DeSantis fans, and I always said, that's not going to
• 55:52
  happen because Trump. Trump is not going to allow himself to be vulnerable to
• 55:58
  that. He's never gonna do that. He's not gonna be forced to do
• 56:01
  that, because that's why the polling matters. The polling will allow him to
• 56:06
  dodge this, and the right wing media will not hold him accountable. And
• 56:10
  it's gonna be a self fulfilling prophecy. It's gonna be a death spiral because
• 56:15
  each of these debates is gonna be less popular than the other. The other
• 56:21
  candidates are gonna look diminished, and Trump's polling advantage will only increase. So
• 56:27
  instead of getting this manoamano, the Santus finally waits for the right time to
• 56:32
  take Trump down over COVID, we get the bizarre spectacle of Trump posting multiple
• 56:39
  times in one day on True Social attacking ron Desantas for You're not gonna believe
• 56:45
  this, being too close to doctor Fauci and being a lockdown governor during COVID.
• 56:53
  I'm not making this up. This is one of the posts from Donald
• 56:57
  Trump on True Social Desanctus was Anthony Fauci's biggest fan. He was praising him
• 57:06
  all the time. He made the statement, quote, I don't do anything
• 57:10
  without doctor Fauci unquote and by the way he locked down Florida exclamation point put
• 57:22
  a bullet straight through my head. You have to laugh at this point.
• 57:29
  Yeah, I guess it was Bobby Night who gets credited for saying, when
• 57:32
  rape is another inevitable, to sit back and enjoy it. Because that's basically
• 57:37
  where I am on this. I mean, what Trump is basically saying there
• 57:42
  is DeSantis is so stupid that he believed me. That's what Trump is saying
• 57:50
  here because the only reason why Ron desandis for the first two months basically of
• 57:57
  this two year plus ordeal, he did go along with what Fauci was selling
• 58:04
  because Trump was vouching for Fauci. Trump was standing right next to Fauci,
• 58:09
  he was putting him on television, praising the hell out of Fauci. But
• 58:14
  the big difference was that after two months of data, DeSantis realized this is
• 58:22
  all bullshit and we have to go another direction. Trump didn't do that.
• 58:29
  Trump never did that. I mean, he did on you know, every
• 58:32
  other day he would change his tune so that his cult could believe whatever the
• 58:37
  hell they wanted. But he never broke from Fauci. He gave Fauci an
• 58:42
  award on his last day in office, even though Fauci was probably the number
• 58:45
  one reason other than maybe Gavin Newsom, for why Trump lost the election,
• 58:52
  and Trump was too stupid or naive to see it or understand it, and
• 58:59
  he never he never realized how he was being duped by Fauci and how Fauci
• 59:05
  was essentially causing a coup to occur, that he abdicated his presidency to doctor
• 59:10
  Fauci. But for Donald Trump to, with a seemingly straight face and with
• 59:17
  no major right wing media criticism, attack run DeSantis, the guy who saved
• 59:25
  America by turning the ship around and using Florida as the ultimate example of how
• 59:32
  the you know, the Fauci's of the world and the media and everybody else
• 59:36
  had gotten this wrong and that there was a better path to take. It
• 59:40
  was it was DeSantis that did this in the face of Trump, who was
• 59:45
  attacking Brian Kemp for opening up Georgia quote unquote too soon, Republican governor.
• 59:52
  It was Trump that was a hindrance to this, and for Trump to now
• 59:59
  try to use this as a political weapon against the Santas it's just to me,
• 1:00:04
  it's so absurd, so infuriating, you have to laugh at it.
• 1:00:08
  You have to laugh at it because this is where we are now, folks.
• 1:00:13
  Not only does truth mean nothing, but we're living in an upside down
• 1:00:16
  world where the bad guys are the good guys and the good guys are the
• 1:00:21
  bad guys, and that you can get away with gaslighting in the extreme if
• 1:00:27
  you are popular enough with the base of the media that you care about,
• 1:00:31
  which is exactly the situation involving Donald Trump. He's a lying sack of crap.
• 1:00:38
  It was all on Trump. If De Santa's made any mistakes at the
• 1:00:44
  beginning of COVID, it was having too much faith in Donald Trump. And
• 1:00:50
  that's not an exaggeration. What Trump is really saying there is boy that the
• 1:00:53
  Sanctus as he calls him, is so dumb. He actually believed me because
• 1:00:59
  I gave my endorsement. And to be clear, this was only for a
• 1:01:04
  couple of months. Everybody understandably got it wrong at first because we were in
• 1:01:09
  the middle of a panic and we didn't have all the facts at our disposal.
• 1:01:14
  But a real leader looks at new information that comes in and isn't afraid
• 1:01:19
  to admit that they were originally wrong, and changes course, that's what the
• 1:01:22
  Sandus did. Trump didn't, and the country suffered because of it and still
• 1:01:28
  suffering because of it in many many ways that the right wing media never talks
• 1:01:32
  about because it's not in their self interest to do so. And so the
• 1:01:37
  fourth debate, you know, I didn't think was very significant. It seems
• 1:01:43
  rather pointless of fake Obama Swami was going after Nikki Haley in a huge way.
• 1:01:49
  I think that might have been the only significant thing in the long run
• 1:01:52
  to happen, because I do think that going after Haley as much as Obama
• 1:01:58
  Swamy did, and his popular as Obama Swamy is with Trump fans, I
• 1:02:02
  think it's going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for Trump
• 1:02:07
  to choose Nikki Haley as his vice presidential nominee. Now I have no way
• 1:02:12
  of knowing whether or not that was even in the cards, but from a
• 1:02:15
  purely electoral standpoint, if your view is, okay, what's the best decision
• 1:02:22
  for Trump to make to win the election, then Haley, in my view,
• 1:02:27
  would be the safest choice. I'm not sure that's viable anymore now that
• 1:02:31
  she's come under attack by both DeSantis, but most dramatically from Obama Swamy,
• 1:02:38
  and so I think that would be difficult for Trump, given the way he
• 1:02:43
  looks at things, to do so, because he'll think, well, my
• 1:02:46
  MAGA base doesn't really like Haley, even though I made her un ambassador.
• 1:02:52
  Of course, with Trump, you never know, and who the hell knows
• 1:02:54
  who he would pick. I mean, there's rumors he might pick Tucker Carlson,
• 1:02:59
  which was would basically be you know, the the ultimate, the more
• 1:03:02
  ultimate insanity, but nothing. I wouldn't put anything past him. I think
• 1:03:06
  that's possible, but it should be Haley if he wants to win, and
• 1:03:12
  I do think the fourth debate probably made that even less likely than it was
• 1:03:16
  beforehand. Now, you know, DeSantis allegedly, based on polling, did
• 1:03:21
  quite well and other solid performance, but there's no indication whatsoever that it's helping
• 1:03:27
  DeSantis in the polls, no indication at all that beating Newsome in that debate
• 1:03:32
  is helping DeSantis in the polls at all. And even I am a bit
• 1:03:37
  stunned by that. I mean, more people watch the Newsom DeSantis debate than
• 1:03:43
  watch the fourth debate, and yet here we have a situation where in Iowa,
• 1:03:47
  the state where DeSantis has thrown everything in into it that he possibly can,
• 1:03:52
  supposedly, you know, has this great ground game and all these endorsements,
• 1:03:57
  including the Governor of Iowa, Kim rend and this is the place where
• 1:04:00
  he's putting everything, which I get. I mean, it's better to put
• 1:04:03
  it there than to put it in New Hampshire or South Carolina where the major,
• 1:04:09
  major, major, major problems, And obviously in Iowa is a bit
• 1:04:14
  a position on abortion isn't going to hurt him nearly as much as it will,
• 1:04:16
  for instance, in New Hampshire. But there's no indication at all than
• 1:04:21
  any of this is helping DeSantis. The most reason Paul by the Des Moines
• 1:04:26
  Register, which is, you know, the major newspaper in the state,
• 1:04:30
  well respected Paul Trump is up by thirty two points in Iowa, and Haley
• 1:04:35
  is on De Santis's heels. So you know, I have predicted many times
• 1:04:43
  that it is quite likely that by the time both candidates get out that Nikki
• 1:04:46
  Haley will have more votes than Ron De Santis, and maybe significantly more votes
• 1:04:54
  than Ron de Sandis. I'm still not predicting that Haley finish his second in
• 1:04:58
  Iowa because that would really be embarrassing for DeSantis. But there is zero chance
• 1:05:06
  unless there is massive catastrophic polling era for reasons that don't seem to exist.
• 1:05:14
  I get why poles are not nearly as accurate as they could be or should
• 1:05:17
  be, or maybe have been, for a lot of different technological reasons.
• 1:05:20
  But I just don't understand how in the world anybody could look at that Des
• 1:05:26
  Moines Register poll and say a month out from Iowa that Trump is somehow going
• 1:05:30
  to blow a thirty two point lead, especially when there's another candidate who's gaining
• 1:05:36
  traction. Because even if somehow Trump loses that support, why he would at
• 1:05:42
  this point I have no idea, especially when he's beating Biden in general election
• 1:05:46
  polls. But even if that theoretically happened, not all the support would go
• 1:05:51
  to desandis some of it might go to Nicky Haley because she's now got traction.
• 1:05:57
  And there's going to be people that love Obamas because of his his you
• 1:06:01
  know, bomb throwing nature, in his in his debate performances, so that
• 1:06:05
  doesn't play all that great in Iowa. But the point is DeSantis is barely
• 1:06:12
  hanging on to second place where a month out, actually it's less than a
• 1:06:15
  month, because you obviously have Christmas in the New Year's holiday where nothing happens,
• 1:06:20
  and you know by the middle of January this is going to happen.
• 1:06:24
  And to me, as of this moment, the best scenario I can think
• 1:06:30
  of for Ron DeSantis is that he finishes a relatively strong, respectable second place
• 1:06:38
  in Iowa and gets the hell out of the race. Now, I do
• 1:06:42
  not anticipate that happening for a number of reasons, but that's the best I
• 1:06:47
  can hope for, because you know, getting a strong second place in Iowa
• 1:06:51
  at this point is the best scenario you can possibly hope for. And that's
• 1:06:57
  not going to be followed up by a great performance in New Hampshire or in
• 1:07:02
  South Carolina or Nevada, and it's only going to get more and more embarrassing
• 1:07:06
  for DeSantis. Based upon the current situation, my guess is he's not gonna
• 1:07:13
  get out because they'll still have the money to continue on and because Trump's legal
• 1:07:18
  problems create the circumstance where everyone's gonna say, well, you never know,
• 1:07:24
  you might as well stay in there, and so you're just gonna get pummeled
• 1:07:28
  until his first trial comes around and see what happens then, which I think
• 1:07:31
  is a very very bad strategy, although I understand it because it's a very
• 1:07:38
  dangerous situation regarding Trump and his four felony indictments that he's going to face theoretically
• 1:07:45
  in twenty twenty four. But all of this is in the context of the
• 1:07:48
  fact that the argument that Trump is favored to beat Biden should they be the
• 1:07:55
  two nominees, is increasing on a seemingly daily base. CNN is out with
• 1:08:01
  a poll where Trump not just beats Biden, but beats Biden handily nationwide and
• 1:08:10
  in Michigan and in Georgia. And I'm sorry, I just I do not
• 1:08:15
  understand how this is possible. I don't understand how this is possible. I
• 1:08:20
  mean, by very significant margins. How does Trump win Michigan and Georgia.
• 1:08:27
  When let's take Georgia. He's gotten his ass kicked in Georgia in the last
• 1:08:32
  three Senate elections there. It couldn't be more clear. And the numbers that
• 1:08:38
  have been very, very consistent, and there's been no sign of Republicans doing
• 1:08:43
  anything in Michigan since Trump pulled off the upset in twenty sixteen, and the
• 1:08:47
  democratic governor there is bizarrely popular, and she was a real lockdown governor,
• 1:08:55
  not a fake one like the Trump claims desandis to have been. So I
• 1:09:00
  don't get it. I don't believe it. The only thing that makes any
• 1:09:03
  sense is that Biden's standing is so incredibly weak and that Trump has basically become
• 1:09:12
  a martyr. But to me, that doesn't explain the dramatic shift in these
• 1:09:17
  polls. I really do. I don't get it. I mean, is
• 1:09:21
  it possible that the Hunter Biden's story is also having more of an impact?
• 1:09:26
  I mean, it should be noted that he was just in charged with felony
• 1:09:33
  tax of asion charges on a federal level, by the way, showing that
• 1:09:39
  what a sham. The busted plea bargain deal that Hunter Biden was close to
• 1:09:45
  ceiling earlier this year really was. But that, you know, the Biden
• 1:09:48
  Hunter Biden scandal has really kind of vindicated a lot of the right wing media,
• 1:09:55
  at least in perception and a lot of Republicans in Congress. Is that
• 1:10:00
  resonating with the public. I don't know. I think Joe Biden's age is
• 1:10:04
  a bigger deal than Hunter Biden. But you know, it's it's pretty clear
• 1:10:09
  that the Hunter Biden's story is at least starting to resonate a little bit.
• 1:10:15
  I don't know when that people are convinced yet that it's proof of Joe Biden's
• 1:10:17
  corruption. I have not been one hundred percent convinced of that. I agree
• 1:10:20
  that there's a lot of smoke on that front, but I don't know that
• 1:10:25
  we've seen actual proof of that yet. But there's a lot of things that
• 1:10:29
  are going in the wrong direction for Joe Biden. And I personally believe,
• 1:10:32
  you know, keep it simple, stupid. It's his age, you know,
• 1:10:36
  you know it used to be it's the economy stupid. Well, it's
• 1:10:41
  Joe Biden's age stupid. And and I think that's really the big problem here
• 1:10:46
  for Democrats. But the perception has been created that Donald Trump would beat Joe
• 1:10:55
  Biden in a general election, especially among Republican voters. Republican voters are now
• 1:11:00
  extremely confident that Trump would beat Biden, which makes Trump basically unbeatable in a
• 1:11:06
  Republican race because that's the ultimate goal is to beat Biden. And you know,
• 1:11:12
  Trump provides the most exciting option to do that. Plus he only can
• 1:11:17
  serve one term, despite what Liz Cheney might try to tell you, And
• 1:11:23
  so you know, the price for this in theory isn't that great. I
• 1:11:27
  mean, they're sure there are a lot of former DeSantis supporters who have rationalized,
• 1:11:31
  well, I can I can get Trump in for one term and then
• 1:11:34
  DeSantis can take over in twenty twenty eight, which is never ever going to
• 1:11:39
  happen for one hundred different reasons. But I'm sure that that's very tempting to
• 1:11:44
  a lot of people. And the way I'm seeing this general election right now,
• 1:11:48
  this is the scary part, is this is a movie that if you
• 1:11:54
  put out this plot line, no one would ever believe, no matter how
• 1:11:58
  fictional it was supposed to be. Even a fictional movie, I don't think
• 1:12:01
  people would buy into the idea that what I'm about to tell you could really
• 1:12:05
  actually happen in the United States of America. But it sure seems to me
• 1:12:11
  is if this is where we're headed, that the twenty twenty four presidential election
• 1:12:16
  is going to be decided by the twelve people on Trump's first jury, which
• 1:12:23
  is most likely going to be that DC case involving election interference, the federal
• 1:12:30
  case, and that is a really scary scenario for America and for the Republican
• 1:12:36
  Party because the polls are very, very very clear that if Trump is convicted
• 1:12:42
  of a felony that his poll numbers collapse. And it should also be pointed
• 1:12:47
  out that if he's convicted in that particular case, that's going to open up
• 1:12:54
  a can of worms when it comes to ballot access, because depending on what
• 1:12:58
  he's convicted of, should he be convicted of anything in that case, they're
• 1:13:01
  going to be people who will make the argument that that violates the Constitution when
• 1:13:06
  it comes to insurrection and may make him ineligible to be on the ballot.
• 1:13:13
  Now, right now, I don't think he's vulnerable to that because he's not
• 1:13:15
  being convicted of anything related to insurrection. But if he gets convicted by a
• 1:13:21
  DC court, there's going to be some blue state Secretary of States, places
• 1:13:28
  like Arizona and other places that are key states that they may use that conviction
• 1:13:33
  and they might be successful in being able to keep Trump off the ballot,
• 1:13:39
  which would be obviously devastating to his chances of beating Biden depending on which states
• 1:13:45
  that happened. In not to mention it would create enormous civil unrest in this
• 1:13:49
  country if you took the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump off the ballot in certain
• 1:13:57
  states, and so twelve people are very likely going to determine who our next
• 1:14:03
  president is if Trump gets a hung jury or an acquittal. And to me,
• 1:14:10
  those are basically the same things if you're Trump, and because if you
• 1:14:14
  get a hung jury, that means there's no chance that they're going to be
• 1:14:17
  able to retry you before the election, so that'll be seen as a victory.
• 1:14:23
  So hung jury or acquittal are basically the same thing when it comes to
• 1:14:28
  Trump's election chances. So you know, in my view, if Trump can
• 1:14:32
  just get two, maybe three jurors on his side, which might be difficult
• 1:14:38
  to do in a place like DC, then he's probably in a very very
• 1:14:43
  good position. But if he's convicted, then I think he loses. So
• 1:14:48
  I really, as absurd and as obscene as it sounds, I really think
• 1:14:53
  this election is going to come down to which trial goes first, and what
• 1:14:58
  those twelve jurors do, and whether or not the Trump team, the Trump
• 1:15:01
  legal team, can get at least one or two Trump friendly government hating jurors
• 1:15:10
  on that panel. If you get two or three Trump friendly government hating jurors
• 1:15:15
  on that panel. I think Trump's probably in the clear because he's not going
• 1:15:19
  to get convicted, and if he doesn't get convicted, I think that that
• 1:15:24
  will be seen as a victory for him, a vindication for him, and
• 1:15:28
  that these polling numbers that currently exist will largely hold up because they're based in
• 1:15:34
  Joe Biden's age and incompetence and maybe his corruption, and there's nothing they can
• 1:15:43
  do about that. I don't know what you're supposed to do. If you're
• 1:15:45
  the Democratic Party right now, you can't go to Kamala Harris, you can't
• 1:15:47
  go to Gavin Newsom, especially when Joe Biden doesn't want to step down.
• 1:15:53
  But these numbers are horrific for Joe Biden as an incumbent president against a four
• 1:15:58
  time indicted challenge in Donald Trump. And I mentioned Liz Cheney, former Republican
• 1:16:04
  congressman who now written a book. She's thinking about running as a third party
• 1:16:10
  candidate, which would be ridiculous. It wouldn't help her cause at all.
• 1:16:14
  No one wants to vote for Liz Cheney for president. You know, she's
• 1:16:17
  trying to make the argument that Trump is going to be a dictator that if
• 1:16:20
  he gets back in office, he'll never leave, which I disagree with strongly
• 1:16:26
  because I don't know if Liz Cheney doesn't understand this, But we don't have
• 1:16:30
  federal elections in this country. We have state elections, so the incumbent president
• 1:16:35
  has no power over, for instance, who is on the ballot, and
• 1:16:41
  there's not a state in the country. I don't even think Red States would
• 1:16:45
  allow Trump to put himself on the ballot in twenty twenty eight because it's very
• 1:16:50
  clear in the constitution that he's ineligible, so he couldn't possibly win another election.
• 1:16:58
  He couldn't cancel the elections because he doesn't have power over that. And
• 1:17:01
  we've already seen a situation where while he went kicking and screaming and highly inappropriately,
• 1:17:08
  he did leave office after losing. So I think this whole concept of
• 1:17:12
  turning Trump into a want to be dictator is not just wrong, and it
• 1:17:15
  isn't going to happen, especially since we're all going to be on guard for
• 1:17:18
  it. Anyway. We've already seen what he is capable of doing, so
• 1:17:23
  it's not like we're going to be taken by surprise. I mean, the
• 1:17:25
  system did hold barely in twenty twenty when he did try to take us all
• 1:17:30
  by surprise by not really wanting to leave office and by contesting the results in
• 1:17:35
  a way that was highly inappropriate. But the system did hold, it did
• 1:17:41
  survive, it did win the day, and I think it would even more
• 1:17:44
  easily in twenty twenty eight, because he wouldn't even be on the ballot in
• 1:17:48
  twenty twenty eight for the reasons that I already said. So it's not just
• 1:17:53
  wrong and it's a falsehood, but it's also counterproductive because I think it actually
• 1:18:00
  makes Trump seem stronger. It makes Trump seem stronger. When you say someone's
• 1:18:05
  going to be a dictator, right, he's gonna be. He's so strong
• 1:18:10
  that he's gonna be able to overwhelm our entire system of government. That means
• 1:18:15
  he's strong and Biden is clearly very weak. And I realize this sounds very
• 1:18:23
  simplistic, but I think that plays into Trump's favor. And it's interesting that
• 1:18:30
  I think there was a voice that was that was heard in the mainstream news
• 1:18:33
  media that came from an odd source that kind of speaks to indirectly why this
• 1:18:42
  whole idea that is being forwarded by Liz Cheney and a lot of left wing
• 1:18:45
  media members is wrong. And when I'm and I'm referring here to Bill Burr.
• 1:18:51
  Bill Burr is a white male comedian who I would consider to be anti
• 1:18:56
  woke, but he's certainly not a conservative. He's actually married to an African
• 1:19:00
  American woman who gave Trump the finger at a public event fairly recently. And
• 1:19:06
  I'm not sure this is this might have been why he decided to do what
• 1:19:10
  he did. I don't know. But Bill Burr is a funny guy.
• 1:19:13
  He seems to be a pretty smart guy. And he was on Jimmy Kimmel's
• 1:19:17
  late night talk show on ABC and he chided Kimmel, called him a liberal,
• 1:19:24
  said you liberals. He chided Kimmel for the mistakes that the left are
• 1:19:30
  making when it comes to dealing with Donald Trump. And I think he's largely
• 1:19:36
  right. And I think it was significant that this is coming from Bill Burr.
• 1:19:41
  I think Burr is one of those people that kind of has a good
• 1:19:44
  finger on the pulse of the country, and he's a pretty good he has
• 1:19:48
  a pretty good BS detector. And so I want to play this clip because
• 1:19:55
  I think it relates to how liberals are missing the boat on Trump and where
• 1:20:00
  the mood of the country may actually be when it comes to Trump. But
• 1:20:05
  Burr's argument here is that you should have ignored him and not made him into
• 1:20:12
  a martyr. Uh. And here's what that sounded like when Bill Burr was
• 1:20:15
  on with Jimmy Kimmel, like you want to see a great case thing on
• 1:20:18
  like narcissism. Liberals are so stupid the way that they handled Trump. What
• 1:20:24
  do you mean you should shut up? He's a narcissist, neutral energy.
• 1:20:30
  Yeah, you know Trump. You think he'd go away? You know what
• 1:20:32
  I think he was. I think he was a one hit wonder. H
• 1:20:35
  Right, He wrote the Twist and then that was it. He was on
• 1:20:39
  the casino circuit and then you idiot liberals wrote him twist again when you indicted
• 1:20:43
  him, and now he's a martyr and now coming back Jimmy, it's gonna
• 1:20:48
  be great for comedy. I can't believe like these are honestly gonna be a
• 1:20:55
  two choices because I really tried it with each thing to try to be like
• 1:20:59
  figure out who I'm gonna put. I mean, it's gotta be I want
• 1:21:01
  somebody in their forties somebody that's gonna have to live with their decisions. I
• 1:21:05
  don't want life, you know, with any luck, With any luck,
• 1:21:12
  they'll both die of natural constancens before the election, and maybe you could get
• 1:21:17
  somebody that still has something to live for. Well. Now, obviously,
• 1:21:21
  Burr's first goal is to be funny, and that was funny. I did
• 1:21:25
  find it interesting that he went after Kimmel a bit, and I wondered how
• 1:21:30
  kim O responded to that off off the air. But I think the bigger
• 1:21:35
  point here he is that Burr is right about ignoring Trump, although I would
• 1:21:40
  have gone one step further, and that is that if the left really wanted
• 1:21:45
  to get rid of Donald Trump, which they don't, they might now because
• 1:21:48
  they it's looking like Trump may actually win. But when this all began and
• 1:21:54
  it looked like Trump was a sure loser in the general election, it was
• 1:21:59
  clear that the left really didn't want to get rid of Donald Trump. The
• 1:22:00
  left wing media loves him for the purpose of ratings and content, as well
• 1:22:05
  as potentially an easy victory for the Democrats in twenty twenty four. But to
• 1:22:11
  me, if Democrats and the left really wanted to get rid of Donald Trump,
• 1:22:15
  they should have embraced him as a leftist. That's really what they should
• 1:22:20
  have done. You want to get rid of Trump, embrace him, Praise
• 1:22:25
  him for his handling of COVID and how he embraced Fauci and was very left
• 1:22:31
  wing and you know, praised Cuomo and praised Newsome, and that he did
• 1:22:39
  basically everything that the left wanted on COVID, and he fell right into their
• 1:22:44
  trap. And he allowed, you know, massive spending and gave away checks
• 1:22:50
  to people for doing nothing, and gave people the incentive to stay home and
• 1:22:56
  not go to work. And he allowed all the voting rules to be changed
• 1:23:00
  in a way that helped democrats. This is all done under Donald Trump's watch.
• 1:23:06
  And he's you know, pro transgenderism and weak on that issue from a
• 1:23:12
  conservative standpoint. So we like him on that, and we like him on
• 1:23:15
  spending, and you know, there's all sorts of other issues. He didn't
• 1:23:18
  build the wall, he didn't get rid of Obamacare. That's how you get
• 1:23:24
  rid of Donald Trump if the left had embraced him in that way and not
• 1:23:29
  turned him into a martyr with bogus indictments, or at least the perception of
• 1:23:33
  bogus indictments. Then I think this entire Republican race would have been very,
• 1:23:39
  very different. And I don't know whether not the left is smart enough to
• 1:23:43
  understand that. I'm an anti conspiracy person. I'm not someone who believes that
• 1:23:46
  all these indictments were part of some sort of massive plan to make sure that
• 1:23:50
  Trump was the nominee because they thought he was the most easily defeated. I
• 1:23:55
  don't think that's the way the world works, but I'm just talking about the
• 1:23:58
  real world. If you really wanted to get rid of Trump, that's the
• 1:24:01
  way you would have done it. Although Bill Burr is I think closer to
• 1:24:04
  this than anybody else I've seen in the mainstream news media when it comes to
• 1:24:10
  Trump. There's a lot of things I have problems with that I have documented
• 1:24:14
  on this podcast. The most underrated story involving Trump this year has been his
• 1:24:18
  involvement with live golf and how he has been receiving probably millions and millions of
• 1:24:25
  dollars from the Saudi royal family for renting his golf courses four times to be
• 1:24:32
  played on the so called Live Golf Tour. And it's just astonishing to me
• 1:24:36
  that this has become really a non existent news story. I mean, where
• 1:24:43
  a foreign at least somewhat adversarial government is directly, directly, in an underground
• 1:24:51
  fashion, paying the presumptive Republican presidential nominee millions and millions of dollars. Who
• 1:24:59
  knows how much. I'm sure it's way way over market price, because that's
• 1:25:01
  the way the Saudis do things with live golf. That he's being paid this
• 1:25:08
  without any criticism, without any scrutiny, without any transparency, without this even
• 1:25:15
  being a news story, because to me, that's an inherent conflict of interest.
• 1:25:20
  As our presidential candidate, you should not be taking money, especially a
• 1:25:25
  lot of money, directly from a foreign government. But that's what's happening here.
• 1:25:31
  And I'm really the only person I'm aware of that's even been screaming bloody
• 1:25:35
  murder about it. Now I'm in a position to do that one because I
• 1:25:40
  don't like Trumpet, because I hate live golf, and so I'm able to
• 1:25:45
  see the reality of this. Plus I know the way golf works, and
• 1:25:48
  I know the way live works, and I know why trump works. And
• 1:25:51
  I'm mentioning all this because there's been a major development when it comes to live
• 1:25:57
  golf, and this goes under the realm of things, where about the only
• 1:26:01
  time I'm ever really wrong is when I'm overly optimistic. And when the entire
• 1:26:09
  so called Live Golf PGA Tour merger was suddenly announced back in June of this
• 1:26:13
  year, I was as shocked as anybody, but I expressed some optimism that,
• 1:26:20
  you know what, maybe this is gonna work out. Okay, maybe
• 1:26:26
  this was a surrender for all intents and purposes by Live Golf because they realized
• 1:26:31
  that what they were doing was not working economically, and that the PGA Tour
• 1:26:35
  realized they could end Live Golf by giving the Saudis what they wanted, which
• 1:26:41
  is the respect of being part of an elite institution, the PGA Tour,
• 1:26:46
  and being part of the American sports scene and being attached to Tiger Woods.
• 1:26:54
  And it was that narrative that I bought into, although it was so hesitancy,
• 1:27:00
  because I also understood in my defense that making that deal was inherently going
• 1:27:11
  to make your bargaining position in the future more vulnerable. It was a very
• 1:27:18
  unique situation because when the PGA Tour went into this tentative deal, this framework
• 1:27:28
  agreement with Live Golf in the Saudis, which was basically an agreement to make
• 1:27:32
  an agreement. I made the point of the time, Well, the PGA
• 1:27:40
  Tour has created a ceasefire, but they may have actually essentially weakened themselves when
• 1:27:47
  it comes to fighting the final battle, because by engaging in a very high
• 1:27:55
  profile agreement with live you have taken away a couple of important things. Your
• 1:28:01
  moral argument is god. I never understood the nine to eleven argument that the
• 1:28:08
  PGA Tour tried to make against Live Golf. Our own government doesn't directly blame
• 1:28:13
  the Saudi royal family for nine to eleven, even though most of the hijackers
• 1:28:16
  were from Saudi Arabia and so and obviously nine to eleven was a huge deal,
• 1:28:23
  but it's it's old news now, it's been over twenty years since that
• 1:28:28
  happened, and so to me, it was not the best argument to be
• 1:28:31
  made against Live golf, but that's the argument they choose to make. If,
• 1:28:35
  by the way, for the record, if I was going to make
• 1:28:38
  the PGA Tour argument at the beginning, I would have been saying, we
• 1:28:42
  are a charity. There are many American charities that rely on us for their
• 1:28:49
  resources. We can't compete in this financial arms race, and if we die,
• 1:28:58
  there's a lot of charities they're going to suffer because of it. That's
• 1:29:00
  what we are in our essence, we are a charity. For some reason,
• 1:29:04
  they decided to go on the nine to eleven track. But when you
• 1:29:09
  engage in a framework agreement, you're giving up the moral argument because you're saying,
• 1:29:14
  well, actually, it's okay to engage in business with these people,
• 1:29:17
  and because we're in the process of doing so, and we're going to negotiate
• 1:29:21
  a final deal that will come to fruition by the end of the year,
• 1:29:27
  and also provides no backup plan. So what happens if this doesn't work out?
• 1:29:33
  Now, Yes, the BG Tour got us a concession that the lawsuits
• 1:29:39
  would go away, which is something the PGA Tour desperately wanted, but it
• 1:29:44
  also did not provide a backup plan for if the negotiations fall through. Live
• 1:29:50
  is still going to go ahead with their tour. There's still have the ability
• 1:29:57
  to pay ridiculous amounts of money to owe pay top players to participate in their
• 1:30:02
  joke team golf league, and that there could still be players who would be
• 1:30:09
  poached away from the PGA Tour and go to Live So those were my concerns,
• 1:30:16
  but I was generally optimistic. I thought, maybe the Saudis are conceding
• 1:30:20
  here, maybe this happened at the right time. I had faith, at
• 1:30:27
  least some faith in PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, although that faith started to
• 1:30:31
  fade when he took a leave of absence because of an unspecified physical ailment that
• 1:30:39
  seemed to be related to stress. That was not a good sign when your
• 1:30:42
  leader is so stressed out by what's happening that he has to take a leave
• 1:30:45
  of absence from the job. But I also had faith in Rory McElroy and
• 1:30:50
  faith in Tiger Woods and other people that were related to this deal, that
• 1:30:55
  I thought they would be able to figure this out in a way that allowed
• 1:30:59
  golf to survive, allow the PGA Tour to at least be able to get
• 1:31:03
  through this crisis, and that golf itself might be saved. Well, that
• 1:31:09
  optimism is now gone, because what's happened in the last few days is that
• 1:31:15
  Masters Champion former US Open champion John Rahm from Spain has decided to sign with
• 1:31:21
  Live Golf for a reported five to six hundred million dollars. Now, who
• 1:31:30
  knows what the real numbers are. But I mean, this is ridiculous,
• 1:31:34
  completely absurd, and it is a classic example of how the Saudis do business.
• 1:31:42
  This is not based in any form of capitalism. This is not based
• 1:31:46
  in any semblance of reality. John Ram is being paid simply because it provides
• 1:31:56
  live leverage in the final weeks of the negotiations with the PGA Tour. The
• 1:32:02
  only rational way to interpret what John Rahm did, and John Ram had been
• 1:32:08
  critical of the live format previously. I really liked John Ram before he did
• 1:32:13
  this. He's a guy who respects and understands the history of the game.
• 1:32:16
  He loves seb Biastero's you know, who was a Spanish legend before John Rohm
• 1:32:23
  was even born. And you know he says a lot of the right things.
• 1:32:27
  He's a great golfer. And so for them to get John Rahm at
• 1:32:31
  this time, it's clear that this is more than a shot across the bow.
• 1:32:38
  This is a warning to the PGA Tour. Hey, look, if
• 1:32:43
  you don't decide to do the final agreement here and we don't merge on our
• 1:32:50
  terms, there will be blood. We will destroy you. Because there had
• 1:32:57
  been a cease fire since the frame agreement had been reached back in June.
• 1:33:02
  There have been no major defections, and in fact, I think, you
• 1:33:06
  know, the golf world made a bit of a mistake, got a little
• 1:33:10
  over confident and let Brooks Koepka, who is a major star from live play
• 1:33:15
  in the Ryder Cup, even though that's not a PGA Tour event, that's
• 1:33:18
  a PG of America situation. But it's still the same golf establishment. I
• 1:33:25
  think in doing that it showed a little bit. It was a good faith
• 1:33:30
  effort to say, Okay, we're kind of in a cease fire here,
• 1:33:34
  and so maybe we can come to some sort of agreement that will work for
• 1:33:38
  everybody. And it's obvious that the PGA Tour had a view of this final
• 1:33:45
  agreement that was different than lives, and I did express concerns about that because
• 1:33:49
  one of the things that happened was that the live demands became public. And
• 1:33:55
  once the live demands became public, I said on this podcast, how can
• 1:34:01
  they ever do a deal now, especially when one of those demands was for
• 1:34:06
  the head of the Public Investment Fund this fund, the so called PIFF,
• 1:34:12
  to be a member at Augusta National. There's no way augusta national who's not
• 1:34:15
  even part of the PGA Tour is going to, under the threat of litigation
• 1:34:21
  or negotiation, allows somebody to be a member at their club. That's just
• 1:34:28
  not possible. And so now you have a situation where that's a demand that
• 1:34:30
  cannot be met, and the fact that the demand is now public is going
• 1:34:34
  to embarrass the Saudis because not only was it not met, but now it's
• 1:34:41
  known that it was not met. And so to me, at that moment,
• 1:34:45
  it became impossible to believe that there was ever going to be a real
• 1:34:51
  deal done, at least not a deal that was done in the best interest
• 1:34:56
  of golf or the PGA Tour. And now this John rom signing has one
• 1:35:01
  hundred percent, in my view, made it impossible for there to be a
• 1:35:06
  legitimate deal that is done in any way, shape or form in the best
• 1:35:11
  interest of the PGA Tour or in golf in general. Live has essentially won.
• 1:35:15
  Now what does that mean. I don't think anybody knows what exactly it
• 1:35:20
  means. But it's not going to be good. This is all shades of
• 1:35:25
  bad. I don't even see a path out of the wreckage of this set
• 1:35:30
  of circumstances, I really don't. I wish I could, but I have
• 1:35:36
  given up, basically all hope on anything positive coming out of this. The
• 1:35:42
  PGA Tour is trying to claim that they have other equity partners that they're now
• 1:35:46
  negotiating with that seems like desperation to me and basically trying to save face here.
• 1:35:55
  But I don't believe that there's going to be a deal by the end
• 1:35:58
  of the year between the PGA Tour and Live Golf that is in any way,
• 1:36:01
  shape or form good for golf or good for the PGA Tour. And
• 1:36:06
  from a media standpoint, the part of this that pisces me off the most
• 1:36:11
  is the absolute ignorance and the bankrupt nature of the sports media and how they
• 1:36:18
  have handled this John Rohm situation. I have to say, from a media
• 1:36:24
  perspective, the way the rom story broke was incredibly strange and maybe very telling.
• 1:36:30
  Rom broke the news bizarrely on Fox News Channel, which I find to
• 1:36:35
  be very interesting because it's the conservative media that has really given live golf a
• 1:36:42
  lot of traction in this country, largely because of Donald Trump. It was
• 1:36:45
  Donald Trump who brought Tucker Carlson to his club for a live event to interview
• 1:36:51
  a bunch of live personalities and put them on Fox News Channel back before Tucker
• 1:36:58
  was fired from News Channel. I believe that without Trump and the right wing
• 1:37:02
  media, and I think this is part of what Trump's being paid for.
• 1:37:06
  Without the right wing media embracing live golf, they would not have the leverage
• 1:37:13
  in the negotiations with the PGA tour that they currently do. I got to
• 1:37:16
  tell you online almost all of these pro live Twitter accounts, which almost all
• 1:37:24
  of them are anonymous, which I think is very telling, are also very
• 1:37:29
  pro Trump accounts. There is one hundred percent correlation and maybe causation between those
• 1:37:35
  in the media who have been pro lived and being pro Trump. Now,
• 1:37:42
  obviously Fox News Channels had a complicated relationship with Trump, and it was on
• 1:37:46
  Brett Bear's show that John Rahm made this announcement, which is probably the least
• 1:37:53
  trumpy show on Fox News Channel. So that was weird right off the bat.
• 1:37:58
  It was weird that it was Fox News Channel, although potentially telling.
• 1:38:00
  Had he done it on Hannity's show, I would have said, Aha,
• 1:38:04
  we have the smoking gun that this is a conspiracy. But he did it
• 1:38:09
  on Brett Bear's show, which was weird, not just because Bear is not
• 1:38:14
  really a Trumper, although he has to toe the line on Trump, but
• 1:38:16
  also Brett Behar has quite a connection to the PGA Tour. He plays in
• 1:38:24
  the PGA Tour Pebble Beach Pro Am on a yearly basis, so he had
• 1:38:29
  something to lose in a bit of a conflict of interest, which he did
• 1:38:31
  not state in the interview. And his interview of Rom was so literally soft.
• 1:38:38
  I've called a lot of interviews softball interviews. But the weirdest part about
• 1:38:43
  this was his voice was very soft. It was almost like he was afraid
• 1:38:50
  that he was going to get too agitated or something. I mean, it
• 1:38:55
  was weird. He was almost whispering in this interview. You he was trying
• 1:39:00
  to be soft. It felt to me like he was, as someone who's
• 1:39:04
  done, you know, hundreds of interviews myself, like he was upset about
• 1:39:10
  what was happening, but knew he couldn't express that he was upset, so
• 1:39:14
  he was doing everything he could to keep himself under wraps. That was just
• 1:39:17
  my theory as someone who has been in similar situations. But the interview was
• 1:39:23
  soft, not just in its tone, but in its substance. But that
• 1:39:27
  interview, even though it didn't address a lot of issues that it should have,
• 1:39:32
  it didn't upset me nearly as much as what happened when John Rahm went
• 1:39:36
  on ESPN and was interviewed by Pat McAfee. And Pat McAfee is ESPN's new
• 1:39:43
  star. He's making gazillions of dollars to be the everyman, the middle class
• 1:39:47
  guy. You know, he does his show with a wife beater t shirt
• 1:39:53
  most of the time, and he's a talented guy. But he really pissed
• 1:39:58
  me off because he had John Rahm on and for the first minute or two
• 1:40:04
  minutes of the interview slobbered all over John Rahm for having made such a great
• 1:40:12
  financial decision and having put himself in a position where he could make so much
• 1:40:17
  money from his golfing ability that he has generational wealth and more power to you,
• 1:40:24
  buddy, and it's just awesome that we've now gotten golf into a situation
• 1:40:30
  where people can make so much money from their talent. And I'm like,
• 1:40:33
  you fucking moron, you fucking moron. That's not what this is about.
• 1:40:41
  There is nothing capitalistic about what is happening here. Nothing. This is a
• 1:40:47
  contrived market. It's a lot like college football with nil money. It's not
• 1:40:55
  an actual capitalistic market. No one cares about return hearn on their investment.
• 1:41:01
  It's a political agenda. It's different in college football. It's about, you
• 1:41:05
  know, being part of your team winning, which may not be the worst
• 1:41:10
  thing in the world. But it's not capitalism. It's not people paying players
• 1:41:14
  because they're gonna get money back because they've secured their endorsement. In the vast
• 1:41:19
  majority of cases, it has nothing to do with that. It's not capitalism.
• 1:41:25
  Well, in the live situation, it's even a more contrived market.
• 1:41:30
  John Rahm was not being paid or is not being paid five or six hundred
• 1:41:33
  million dollars because of the value he brings on the golf course. It's ridiculous.
• 1:41:40
  It's not even close to that kind of value. He's being paid that
• 1:41:45
  money because it's part of a Kamikazi attack on an American fucking charity, Pat
• 1:41:50
  McAfee, and you don't seem to understand that that there were gonna be real
• 1:41:56
  people, real Americans, they're gonna suffer because of that charities. Well,
• 1:42:01
  because John Rahm decided to sell the fuck out, sell out the sport sell
• 1:42:08
  out the PGA tour that made him who he is, and pretend to do
• 1:42:13
  so because you know, he's excited about some bullshit team format. That is
• 1:42:18
  the worst thing I've ever seen in golf. I mean, it's just in
• 1:42:23
  the bigger picture here. This is why we can't have nice things in America
• 1:42:29
  anymore. Because even when people do bad things, they make bad decisions,
• 1:42:33
  they make selfish decisions, They make decisions based purely on selling out. They
• 1:42:40
  don't get criticized anymore. In fact, they get slabbered all over and praised
• 1:42:45
  for making such a wise decision for generational wealth. It's a bit like Trump
• 1:42:51
  getting praised for dodging the fucking debates. It's such a smart political decision.
• 1:42:58
  Oh, you're so wonderful for whimping out and not engaging in any of these
• 1:43:03
  Republican debates. Oh, John Rahm, it's so awesome that you did this
• 1:43:09
  for your family. What the hell difference does it make whether that John Rahm
• 1:43:14
  is worth a hundred million dollars or five hundred million dollars. Does that change
• 1:43:17
  his life at all? Does that change his family at all? In fact,
• 1:43:21
  you could argue it actually makes his children and his grandchildren in a worse
• 1:43:25
  situation because now they're never gonna have to work at all in their entire lives.
• 1:43:29
  They're gonna be spoiled beyond all comprehension. The history on that is not
• 1:43:33
  good. But that's, you know, that's getting too far afield. The
• 1:43:38
  reality of this is when people make wrong, immoral, unprincipled decisions, they
• 1:43:46
  no longer suffer any consequences. There's there is no sense of shame anymore.
• 1:43:54
  Shame used to play an important role in this. Oh, I can't do
• 1:43:59
  that. People will lose respect for me. I will be shamed, my
• 1:44:06
  fans will turn on me, I'll think less of myself. If I sell
• 1:44:12
  out. That's all gone. And it's gone largely because we got people like
• 1:44:17
  Pat McAfee at ESPN willing to slobber all over you simply because you won.
• 1:44:25
  Selling out is now winning. There's no downside to that. And I don't
• 1:44:30
  know when and how this happened, but I gotta tell you in the very
• 1:44:33
  very big picture, and I think this relates to what's happened in college athletics
• 1:44:38
  and specifically college football. Something happened not just about principles and the lack of
• 1:44:45
  value in principles and an increased value on money, which I believe is the
• 1:44:49
  root of all evil. Look, we all need money to a certain degree,
• 1:44:53
  but you know there's a reason why that's been an adage forever. Money
• 1:44:59
  is in fact the root of all evil, and the root of this issue,
• 1:45:02
  I think has a lot to do with the diminishment of the value of
• 1:45:09
  tradition and history in our country, in our society, in our culture.
• 1:45:14
  Because if history and tradition still had value, John Rahm wouldn't torpedo the PGA
• 1:45:21
  tour to go play for the Saudis and live. But it doesn't matter anymore,
• 1:45:27
  at least not as much as money matters. And I think that this
• 1:45:30
  is pervading all elements of our culture and society. We have now taught our
• 1:45:35
  younger generation that our history is a country is actually bad or racist. This
• 1:45:44
  is happening society wide. Academia is pushing this in a huge way. It's
• 1:45:50
  also related to our lack of respect for elders. And I hate to do
• 1:45:55
  that when I was a kid thing, but it's true. When I was
• 1:45:59
  a kid, we looked at our elders, the people that were our grandparents,
• 1:46:05
  with some at least some level of respect because they had lived and lived
• 1:46:10
  an amazing life and done a lot of great things, and they had knowledge
• 1:46:14
  we didn't have, and they deserved it. They earned it, They earned
• 1:46:18
  that respect, and that was an that was honoring them and the history that
• 1:46:25
  they created, the tradition that they created. Well, now it's all been
• 1:46:29
  flipped on his head. We mock old people. We mocked parents. I'm
• 1:46:32
  mocked as a parent all the time. There's no respect for people who are
• 1:46:36
  older. It's only disdain. And it goes to this whole issue of what
• 1:46:42
  made us great. Our traditions, our histories are no longer valued, and
• 1:46:46
  it's no longer valued in sports. In fact, if you can sell out
• 1:46:50
  those traditions and histories and make enough money, you're to be praised, even
• 1:46:57
  on ESPN by Pat McAfee. There's no price to pay. So guess what
• 1:47:00
  happens When there's no price to pay. People are gonna do it again and
• 1:47:03
  again because I guess it's all about money. It's all the matters now.
• 1:47:11
  It's all about money. I mean, money matters, but it shouldn't be
• 1:47:15
  everything, and it is everything now, and it's sad. And when it
• 1:47:21
  comes to golf. They're gonna be devastating consequences to this. I don't know
• 1:47:26
  exactly what those consequences are gonna be or how it's all gonna go down,
• 1:47:31
  No one does. I just know it's gonna be bad, and it might
• 1:47:35
  be really, really bad. And so fuck you John Brown, and fuck
• 1:47:40
  you Brooks Koepka, and fuck you Phil Michelson. Fuck all of you assholes.
• 1:47:45
  You're all gonna win. You're all making tons of money, more than
• 1:47:48
  you deserve to be making. It has nothing to do with capitalism, all
• 1:47:51
  because you found a group of people with unlimited oil money who, for their
• 1:47:58
  own selfish purposes, wanted to do a Kamikazi attack on an American fucking charity,
• 1:48:03
  on a charity, and all that that stood for is going to be
• 1:48:09
  lost, and all the good that that did is going to be lost as
• 1:48:15
  well. But I hope you're happy, guys. I hope you're happy as
• 1:48:17
  you destroy the sport you claim to love and claim that you're going to try
• 1:48:20
  and to grow, which is the biggest bunch of bullshit that's ever been said
• 1:48:25
  in the history of sport. Now, a couple of other real quick stories,
• 1:48:30
  also somewhat involving sports, but not really. Before I end this episode
• 1:48:33
  of the podcast, sixty Minutes did a feature on Novak Djokovic, who is
• 1:48:41
  the most underrated sports story of the year, just by virtue of the fact
• 1:48:46
  that he's the all time winner when it comes to majors in tennis and having
• 1:48:53
  done so despite the fact that he was banned from major tournaments for basically two
• 1:48:58
  years because of his decision not to take the COVID vaccine. And I watched
• 1:49:04
  the sixty Minutes feature on Novak Djokovic on Sunday night because I was very,
• 1:49:10
  very curious, how were they going to handle the vaccine issue. They couldn't
• 1:49:14
  possibly just ignore it, and I had very low expectations for what they were
• 1:49:18
  going to do. But even I was a bit stunned. But what they
• 1:49:23
  decided to do and how they handled the circumstances involving the vaccine and Novak Djokovic
• 1:49:30
  number one. It was basically done in about a minute in the middle of
• 1:49:35
  this feature, so they by far the biggest political issue that Novak Djokovic is
• 1:49:42
  related to they only dealt with for a minute, but they dealt with it.
• 1:49:46
  Here's an American news organization sixty minutes, and if you knew nothing else
• 1:49:54
  of this story, you would have thought that the only situation where the vaccine
• 1:49:59
  mapped in Novak Djokovic's career was when in twenty twenty two, he was originally
• 1:50:06
  cleared to play in the Australian Open, got an exemption firm for not having
• 1:50:14
  to take the COVID vaccine, and then got deported because of the political backlash
• 1:50:19
  that was involved when he got the exemption and was theoretically allowed to play in
• 1:50:25
  the tournament, and so he got literally deported from Australia and did not play
• 1:50:30
  in the Australian Open, a tournament that he has dominated throughout his career.
• 1:50:33
  Now, that was outrageous enough and absolutely worthy of mentioning the story. However,
• 1:50:41
  how do you go down this path and never even mention that he's the
• 1:50:46
  defending US Open champion after having been prevented from playing in the United States Open
• 1:50:57
  twice because the UA government would not allow him into the country because he refused
• 1:51:04
  to take a COVID vaccine that he did not need and that was not worth
• 1:51:10
  the risk for him. And Djokovic says he's not pro vaccine or anti vaccine
• 1:51:15
  he's just pro choice, which I agree with, especially in this situation.
• 1:51:20
  He's an elite athlete with no vulnerability to COVID. The vaccine comes with at
• 1:51:28
  least some risk. How much we don't know for sure yet, but clearly
• 1:51:31
  there's at least some risk despite what the media will tell you, involving the
• 1:51:35
  COVID vaccine. And he made a proper decision and sixty Minutes made no mention
• 1:51:45
  of this. It's just stunning, like if we just pretend it didn't happen,
• 1:51:50
  it didn't really happen. That's the way they're gonna deal with the COVID
• 1:51:55
  history. Now. Novak Djokovic can withstand this kind of a scene, absurd,
• 1:52:02
  unprecedented banishment from the United States, to not be able to play in
• 1:52:10
  the US Open, come back win the tournament this year, and sixty Minutes
• 1:52:16
  literally says nothing crickets, nothing at all. It's beyond outrageous. It would
• 1:52:25
  be beyond outrageous for any media outlet, but this is sixty Minutes, allegedly
• 1:52:30
  the most prestigious news organization left in America. They don't even mention what happened
• 1:52:36
  with the United States government and the US Open. Absolutely an abomination. I
• 1:52:44
  have been very, very willing to admit when I am wrong about certain things,
• 1:52:49
  and it appears as if I had been very wrong in a prediction about
• 1:52:55
  sports, and specifically football. When the entire Travis Kelcey Taylor Swift phenomenon started,
• 1:53:02
  I made the prediction that this was going to create so much momentum for
• 1:53:08
  the Kansas City Chiefs that they were sure to make the Super Bowl because it
• 1:53:12
  was so much in the interest of the National Football League and the TV networks
• 1:53:16
  for the Chiefs and Taylor Swift to be part of the Super Bowl that there's
• 1:53:19
  just no way to stop this momentum. I did not say it was a
• 1:53:24
  conspiracy. It's not going to be a memo about it. It's just human
• 1:53:27
  nature. And part of what I based that on were two things that the
• 1:53:30
  Kansas City Chiefs, once they got that kind of momentum, that this was
• 1:53:35
  going to help the way that they actually played the game. In other words,
• 1:53:41
  they were going to consider themselves to be a team of destiny. Everything's
• 1:53:45
  on their side. They're getting all sorts of great media coverage. You know,
• 1:53:48
  all their girlfriends and wives are super excited because Taylor Swift is coming to
• 1:53:53
  the games. This is all just going to create a lot of positive momentum
• 1:53:58
  for them. Plus they're the defending champions, so you would think that they
• 1:54:00
  would have a very good chance of making it back anyway based upon the merit
• 1:54:05
  of their play. And then I also thought that it was going to be
• 1:54:09
  very difficult for the referees to make critical calls against the Chiefs because human nature
• 1:54:15
  being what it is, everybody knows what people want, and whether it's the
• 1:54:21
  fans or what's the networks or what have you, you know, subconsciously,
• 1:54:27
  subconsciously at least, it was going to be very, very difficult for referees
• 1:54:31
  to take a game away from the Chiefs or to even play a negative influence
• 1:54:36
  for the Chiefs because of all of this hysteria surrounding Travis Kelcey and Taylor Swift.
• 1:54:45
  So that was my basic prediction, and as of this taping, that
• 1:54:48
  prediction could not be more wrong because the Chiefs are in a free fall after
• 1:54:54
  they lost to the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, and there were both elements of
• 1:55:00
  my prediction have shown to be very flawed. Now, Taylor Swift was at
• 1:55:03
  the game and she got a lot of attention from the television cameras as she
• 1:55:08
  always does, understandably so, especially after she was the Time Person of the
• 1:55:14
  Year last week and made a lot of statements about her relationship with Travis Kelcey.
• 1:55:20
  But it's clear from the loss that there's a lot of dissension and frustration
• 1:55:26
  on the Chiefs team. Patrick Mahomes, their quarterback, went bananas after the
• 1:55:30
  loss, had to be restrained going after a referee. There was a coach
• 1:55:34
  and a player that got in a fight in the sidelines, and who knows
• 1:55:41
  whether any of this has anything directly to do with what's going on with Travis
• 1:55:45
  Kelcey and Taylor Swift, but it's clear that there's no psychological momentum on the
• 1:55:49
  Chiefs side. They are no longer in the prime position to have home field
• 1:55:56
  advantage throughout the playoffs, and they lost the game because of a penalty that
• 1:56:00
  was correctly called, and it was called before the play actually came to fruition.
• 1:56:06
  So I'm not suggesting that this was the opposite of my prediction where the
• 1:56:11
  officials are deciding to screw Travis Kelcey. But Travis Kelcey was involved in what
• 1:56:15
  would have been the play of the Year when the Chiefs were trying to drive
• 1:56:20
  for a go ahead touchdown at the end of the game, and Kelsey decided
• 1:56:25
  to do this maneuver which no one's ever really seen before, where after catching
• 1:56:30
  a ball in the middle of the field, he turns and throws a very
• 1:56:32
  long lateral to a wide receiver and they go in for the touchdown. Except
• 1:56:38
  it was all called back because that receiver had been off sides when the play
• 1:56:44
  actually was initiated, and that was the correct call. The wide receiver absolutely
• 1:56:48
  was off sides. The Chiefs, weirdly, including their coach Andy Reid,
• 1:56:53
  who never does this, all criticized the officiating Mahon I think because he was
• 1:56:58
  trying to support his quarterback, Mahone Holmes. The Chiefs are totally wrong about
• 1:57:01
  the officiating. That the call was correct, it was a dumb move by
• 1:57:05
  their wide receiver. But to me, it just shows that there's something wrong
• 1:57:11
  psychologically within the Chiefs, that maybe they're cracking under all the pressure. Maybe
• 1:57:15
  the Taylor Swift thing is working in a negative direction because of all the attention
• 1:57:19
  and all the expectations and all the pressure that it creates. Who knows,
• 1:57:26
  but there's no doubt that the Chiefs are in trouble right now. Now.
• 1:57:30
  They're still going to make the playoffs unless they completely collapse, but you know,
• 1:57:33
  they're not going to be able to have the home field advantage it looks
• 1:57:36
  like that they're used to, and therefore they're no longer a locke to get
• 1:57:41
  to the super Bowl. Could they still get to the Super Bowl? Yes?
• 1:57:45
  Would the NFL still like them to be in the super Bowl? One
• 1:57:47
  thousand percent. There's no question that would be the best story for everyone involved,
• 1:57:55
  for the Chiefs and Taylor Swift to make it to the super Bowl,
• 1:57:58
  But that does not look right now. It is the most likely scenario,
• 1:58:01
  although it's still certainly possible. By the way, it should be pointed out,
• 1:58:05
  Taylor Swift in that Time Magazine Person of the Year article got away with
• 1:58:10
  what I think is basically a racist statement. At the very least, it's
• 1:58:15
  a statement that, if we lived in a rational world, would have created
• 1:58:18
  a lot of controversy and backlash among NFL fans. But she was asked about
• 1:58:26
  this idea, of whether or not, I don't know if she was asked
• 1:58:28
  directly about it, but she was addressing this idea that she's shown too much
• 1:58:33
  during the NFL broadcast of Kansas City Chiefs games when she is in attendance,
• 1:58:39
  and she basically said, I may have pissed off the dads, the brads,
• 1:58:43
  and the chads, but I don't care. I mean, I'm paraphrasing
• 1:58:46
  her quote, but she said dads, brads and chads, So okay,
• 1:58:53
  really really, I mean, I mean to me, under different circumstances,
• 1:58:59
  that kind of quote would cause a major problem, but for Taylor Swift it
• 1:59:02
  did not. So she's attacking the dads, brads and chads who have the
• 1:59:06
  audacity to complain that Taylor Swift gets too much attention during Kansas City Chiefs television
• 1:59:14
  broadcasts. But that's the world we're now living in. One last story that
• 1:59:19
  is kind of a classic Zigglar story. I'm not going to give it the
• 1:59:23
  full treatment because I don't think I'm allowed to yet, but this will give
• 1:59:27
  you an indication one of the nature of the news media and how things really
• 1:59:30
  work and the weirdness of my life. So a few weeks ago, I
• 1:59:36
  referenced that Sports Illustrated, the formerly Great Sports Illustrated, was in a controversy
• 1:59:43
  involving the use of AI artificial intelligence, and I told you two things at
• 1:59:48
  that time. One that I thought that the controversy was largely overblown and had
• 1:59:55
  been misreported a bit, and that too, I had a little bit of
• 1:59:59
  a conflict interest on the story because, weirdly, one of the top executives
• 2:00:04
  at Sports Illustrated was someone I had spoken to because their wife had become a
• 2:00:12
  huge fan of our previous podcast with the benefit of hindsight, and I had
• 2:00:15
  spoken to his wife, and I'd spoken to him. I'd even spoken to
• 2:00:21
  him in somewhat great detail about whether or not Sports Illustrated might ever do a
• 2:00:28
  story on the other side of the Joe Paterno Penn State arrysin Dusky scandal.
• 2:00:32
  Because his wife had been convinced that we were right, and because he trusted
• 2:00:38
  his wife, and because of my conversation I had with him, he became
• 2:00:43
  pretty convinced it seemed that I was right now. During the course of that
• 2:00:46
  conversation, it should be pointed out, I was about a forty five minute
• 2:00:49
  conversation. I would say about a half hour through, it was clear that
• 2:00:55
  he started to sense in me that I was becoming despondent. At least that's
• 2:01:02
  what I think he told his wife and he was right that there was a
• 2:01:06
  change in my demeanor because this was not my first rodeo. I've spoken to
• 2:01:13
  a lot of very high profile and powerful media about the Penn State Paterno Sandusky
• 2:01:18
  story, and so I now have a very finely tuned I don't know what
• 2:01:25
  you would call it, a BS detector or a woosy detector, whatever you
• 2:01:30
  want to call it, but I know immediately now, instantaneously, like you
• 2:01:35
  know, a dog sniffing someone's ass for to use a terrible metaphor, I
• 2:01:43
  know immediately whether or not someone's the real deal or not. And I knew
• 2:01:48
  before this guy knew he was never going to do anything at Sports Illustrated about
• 2:01:54
  the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky story. Now, to be clear,
• 2:01:58
  that's not what he was telling me. He was telling me that, you
• 2:02:00
  know, I really want to do this. I'm going to try to figure
• 2:02:03
  out the right writer to do it, blah blah blah. And I knew
• 2:02:10
  that was not going to happen because I I could smell it. My detector
• 2:02:15
  was going off immediately, and that's when he sensed that I had become despondent
• 2:02:20
  during the conversation, and I even told his wife, this isn't going to
• 2:02:24
  happen. I basically told his wife that her husband was a wuss and that
• 2:02:30
  that was it made it impossible for this to ever happen, which is quite
• 2:02:33
  a thing to tell, you know, somebody's wife, but that's what I
• 2:02:36
  did, and it's turned out, shockingly stopped me having heard this before.
• 2:02:41
  I was right. There was never any signed Sports Illustrated was going to do
• 2:02:45
  anything on this story, and I didn't even pursue it because I knew.
• 2:02:48
  I knew before they knew, all right, So I basically stopped even thinking
• 2:02:55
  about Sports Illustrated until this AI situation occurred. And as it turns out,
• 2:03:01
  this executive ended up getting fired in the aftermath of the Sports Illustrated AI issue.
• 2:03:10
  They were not the only one ones to be fired from Sports Illustrated,
• 2:03:15
  but they were one of them. Now, this person, this the Sports
• 2:03:19
  Illustrated former executive, called me, and they happened to call me. Well,
• 2:03:26
  I was with my family at Disneyland, which is a whole another story
• 2:03:30
  as to why we were there. But I take the call and he tells
• 2:03:35
  me what happened and that this really had nothing to do with AI and that
• 2:03:40
  this was an internal situation involving power dynamics or something like that, and that
• 2:03:45
  he that the story is being misreported, and he asks me for my advice
• 2:03:50
  on what to do. Of course, is which is a classic John Ziegler
• 2:03:55
  situation, right, I mean, you did me no favors at all,
• 2:03:58
  but now here you are in a crisis, and who do you call but
• 2:04:00
  John Ziggler. But I'm a nice guy, much nicer than people perceive me
• 2:04:05
  to be. So I'm trying to help him. And I feel some obligation
• 2:04:09
  to the guy's wife because she's been a big fan of our podcast. With
• 2:04:13
  the benefit of hindsight, so I said, well, let me look into
• 2:04:15
  this and see what I can come up with. So I look at the
• 2:04:19
  reporting on his firing and what's happening at Sports Illustrated, and as fate would
• 2:04:26
  have it, one of the primary reporters on the story happens to be a
• 2:04:30
  guy I know, and I know him, ironically enough, because of our
• 2:04:35
  interaction on you Guessed It the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sinowsky story, which
• 2:04:42
  was that this reporter had done an enormous amount of work on the story because
• 2:04:46
  I had been feeding him for well over a year and was on the verge
• 2:04:51
  of allegedly doing a significant story for USA Today from a contrarian perspective on the
• 2:04:59
  whole Penn State Paterno Sandusky story, and then he suddenly up and quits his
• 2:05:05
  job at USA Today. So this guy, I felt like he really screwed
• 2:05:11
  me over, although to his credit, he did a full interview with me
• 2:05:15
  for a different podcast I was doing at the time called The World according to
• 2:05:19
  Zig, and so, you know, he was actually very transparent about the
• 2:05:25
  whole thing, admitted to the whole thing, admitted that, you know,
• 2:05:29
  he believed me on the Penn State story, and that he quit his job
• 2:05:32
  the day before this was supposed to to start to actually happen at USA Today.
• 2:05:39
  And so I thought, Wow, here I'm in this weird position where
• 2:05:44
  I know the reporter on the story from the Penn State situation where I was
• 2:05:46
  let down, and this guy is asking for my help who similarly let me
• 2:05:53
  down on the Penn State story. And so I really don't feel like I
• 2:05:57
  have, you know, anything to owe either of these guys. But I
• 2:06:00
  decided, you know what, I'll put the two of them together so I
• 2:06:03
  spoke to the Sports Illustrated executive former Sports Illustrated executive, and I spoke to
• 2:06:10
  the reporter, and I got the two of them together. Now I know
• 2:06:13
  what's going to happen after that. But I did my duty, I paid
• 2:06:16
  my debt, I did my good deed. Both seemed to be, at
• 2:06:20
  least initially happy about it. But that's the crazy nature of my life and
• 2:06:27
  my weird role in the media, where I'm putting together two people who have
• 2:06:30
  to different degrees basically screwed me over on the Penn State Joe Paternal Jerry Sandusky
• 2:06:35
  story, all because one of them is in crisis, and it just so
• 2:06:39
  happens that the other one was reporting on it having no knowledge that I had
• 2:06:43
  any interaction on the story whatsoever. So that kind of encapsulates my very weird
• 2:06:47
  life and my very very small role in what actually happens in the way the
• 2:06:53
  media works or does not work. That'll do it for this episode of the
• 2:06:57
  podcast. Thanks so much for putting up with my obviously very impaired voice as
• 2:07:01
  I am overcoming a cold. Hopefully by the next episode I'll be in much
• 2:07:06
  better shape. But there was too much important stuff to get to in this
• 2:07:10
  episode for me to give it a pass. I hope you enjoyed it,
• 2:07:14
  Share it with others if you did. Until next time. This has been
• 2:07:16
  episode number one hundred and eleven of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 2:07:20
  is John Zigler. Thanks so much for listening.